Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts

Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts

 edited by

Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price

Florida A&M University, Tallahassee Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers Florida International University, Miami Florida State University, Tallahassee University of Central Florida, Orlando University of Florida, Gainesville University of North Florida, Jacksonville University of South Florida, Tampa University of West Florida, Pensacola

Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts  edited by

Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price

University Press of Florida Gainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca Raton Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers

Copyright 2002 by Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price Printed in the U.S.A. on acid-free, TCF (totally chlorine-free) paper All rights reserved 07 06 05 04 03 02

6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Domestic violence in medieval texts / edited by Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8130-2442-0 (alk. paper) 1. Family violence in literature. 2. Literature, Medieval—History and criticism. I. Salisbury, Eve. II. Donavin, Georgiana. III. Price, Merrall Llewelyn, 1965–. PN682.F34 D66 2002 809'.93355—dc21 2001034779 The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida. University Press of Florida 15 Northwest 15th Street Gainesville, FL 32611–2079 http://www.upf.com

Contents

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price 1 Part One. Domestic Violence and the Law 1. Interpreting Silence: Domestic Violence in the King’s Courts in East Anglia, 1422–1442 Philippa Maddern 31 2. The “Reasonable” Laws of Domestic Violence in Late Medieval England Emma Hawkes 57 Part Two. Fictional Histories: Domestic Violence and Literary/Legal Texts 3. Chaucer’s “Wife,” the Law, and the Middle English Breton Lays Eve Salisbury 73 4. Taboo and Transgression in Gower’s “Apollonius of Tyre” Georgiana Donavin 94 5. Reframing the Violence of the Father: Reverse Oedipal Fantasies in Chaucer’s Clerk’s, Man of Law’s, and Prioress’s Tales Barrie Ruth Straus 122 6. Not Safe Even in Their Own Castles: Reading Domestic Violence Against Children in Four Middle English Romances Graham N. Drake 139 7. Domestic Violence in the Decameron Marilyn Migiel 164 8. Reading Riannon: The Problematics of Motherhood in Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet Christopher G. Nugent 180

Part Three. Historical Fictions: Domestic Violence in Chronicle, Drama, Hagiography, and Illuminations 9. The “Homicidal Women” Stories in the Roman de Thèbes, the Brut Chronicles, and Deschamps’s “Ballade 285” Anna Roberts 205 10. Noah’s Wife: The Shaming of the “Trew” Garrett P. J. Epp 223 11. Marriage, Socialization, and Domestic Violence in the Life of Christina of Markyate Robert Stanton 242 12. Imperial Violence and the Monstrous Mother: Cannibalism at the Siege of Jerusalem Merrall Llewelyn Price 272 13. The Feminized World and Divine Violence: Texts and Images of the Apocalypse Anne Laskaya 299 Contributors 343 Index 345

Illustrations

12.1. 12.2. 12.3. 12.4. 12.5. 13.1. 13.2. 13.3. 13.4. 13.5. 13.6. 13.7. 13.8. 13.9–10. 13.11–12. 13.13. 13.14. 13.15. 13.16. 13.17. 13.18. 13.19–20. 13.21–22. 13.23–24.

Sacra Parallela. 277 Jerusalem under siege. 282 La Guerre des Juifs. 283 Des Cas des Nobles Hommes et Femmes. 284 Des Cas des Nobles Hommes et Femmes. 285 St. John’s first vision of Christ. 305 The Army of Heaven follows Christ, who brings judgment on the earth. 305 The Second Seal. 306 The Lamb opens the Fourth Seal. 307 The Fall of Babylon depicted beneath the words of Revelation. 307 The Lamb opens the Fifth Seal. 308 The horseman from the First Seal. 309 The Second Horseman. 310 The Third Seal; the Fourth Seal. 311 The Fifth Seal; the Sixth Seal. 312 John worships Christ in his first vision. 314 John adores Christ. 315 Angelic trumpeter sends the sun to earth. 316 The Lamb opens the Sixth Seal, unleashing cosmic violence. 317 St. John receiving his vision on the island of Patmos. 318 The beast of Hell unleashed. 318 A monster wars against children who obeyed God’s commandments; John’s vision of the sea beast. 319 Satan cast into Hell’s mouth; the Last Judgment. 320 The Whore of Babylon sits on the waters of the earth; she rides the seven-headed beast. 321

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13.25. Heaven rejoices as God destroys the Harlot. 322 13.26–27. Woman of the Sun hands her blessed children to an angel to protect them from the beast; St. Michael battles the beast. 323 13.28. St. John watches an angel send birds to feed on human flesh. 329 13.29. Angels pour vials on the earth’s rivers and seas, turning them to blood and drowning humanity. 329 13.30. John protects himself as an angel unleashes the Fourth Vial, turning the sun into fire that rains on the earth. 330 13.31. The Seventh Vial creates earthquakes and storms that topple cities and mountains and that swallow islands whole. 330 13.32–33. Christ reaps the earth; angels harvest the earth’s grapes, throwing them into the wine press of God’s anger. 331 13.34. Christ leads an army against the beast. 332 13.35. The New Jerusalem. 333 13.36. The Lamb of God on Mount Sion with 144,000 faithful. 334 13.37. An angel measures New Jerusalem with a gold rod, showing John its absolute perfection. 335

Acknowledgments

As with many collaborative projects, this one began shortly after a stimulating session on the subject of domestic violence in medieval texts at the International Conference on Medieval Studies in Leeds. As we talked about many of the responses of our audience over excellent treacle pudding, it soon became apparent to us that we had a potentially publishable project on our hands. Excited about the ideas we had discussed, we also shared a new sense of camaraderie and common purpose for a project that we thought would contribute to scholarly knowledge, perhaps even beyond, on an important issue. With an eye toward bringing together scholars from various parts of the world—the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the United States—as well as differing perspectives on the subject, we began to assemble our contributors. These are the scholars whose provocative and original readings of medieval texts have made this collection possible, and we thank them first and foremost. We also wish to thank our initial outside readers, whose illuminating comments on individual essays and the project as a whole kept us focused on completion and striving for the most comprehensive treatment of the subject possible. Included among these commentators are our intrepid editor, Amy Gorelick, and the entire editorial staff at the University Press of Florida, without whom a manuscript remains just a manuscript. We are also grateful to the many European and American libraries whose illustrations are reproduced in these pages: the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Trinity College Library at Cambridge, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the British Library in London, the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, and the Bibliothèque publique et universitaire in Geneva. What we hope to have accomplished with this essay collection is to open doors and provoke dialogues among scholars and nonscholars alike on a complex and long-neglected issue. To facilitate such dialogues we have normalized many Middle English spellings and provided translations of Italian, Welsh, French, and Latin passages.

Introduction I trowe I loved hym best, for that he Was of his love daungerous to me. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Wife of Bath’s Prologue

This collection of essays is intended to contribute to current discussions of violence in the Middle Ages by exploring ways in which domestic violence is portrayed in literary, iconographic, legal, religious, and dramatic texts. The late medieval period provides an important context for the diverse perspectives offered by our contributors. Traumatic events of the time— civil uprisings, the Hundred Years’ War, the Crusades, the bubonic plague, the Great Schism, to name a few—contributed to heightened public consciousness about the precarious nature of human society. Add to this the collective expectation of imminent apocalyptic demise, and there emerges with greater clarity a cultural milieu filled with anxiety about how individuals or groups could or should conduct their lives. At the same time, decapitated heads of criminals, bloody images of tortured, martyred saints, and the ubiquitous presence of the Crucifixion illustrated that immense and prolonged physical pain, even death, could affirm social and spiritual hierarchies, signifying not dissolution and disorder but adhesion and unity. Contending with this paradox and the plethora of political and ecclesiastical struggles, recent discussions of late medieval violence focus on its public manifestations—executions, tortures, wartime practices, criminal activity—and interrogate the processes of adjudication, the shortcomings of the legal system, even the means by which historical events are documented.1 In this collection we wish to shift critical attention from manifest public violence to violence that occurs beneath the surface of public life, in the household, in the private zone between spouses, between parents and children, between those in positions of authority and their charges. When Chaucer’s Wife of Bath described her apparently obsessive attraction to her fifth husband, Jankyn, as “daungerous love,” she was alluding to both

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the elusiveness and the incipient harmfulness of domestic intimacy. The phrase captures the potential conflict in these private relations, drawing attention to their inherent volatility, and providing a rallying cry for disclosing the tensions within the medieval household. Through the first half of the twentieth century, many scholars preferred to discuss political or criminal conflict rather than domestic disputes because of the various and compelling evidence for the former and also the lingering belief in the sanctity of the family and the impenetrable zone of privacy surrounding it.2 The shift in the 1960s toward increasingly open consideration of gender roles, however, has allowed for more analysis of domestic violence. Since then, the subject has been addressed tangentially in books engaged in broader studies: Shulamith Shahar’s Childhood in the Middle Ages, John Boswell’s Kindness of Strangers, much of Barbara A. Hanawalt’s estimable oeuvre, Judith Bennett’s Women in the Medieval English Countryside, and many other recent books on medieval women.3 Important studies of feudal marriage, the medieval household, private life, and canon law have also been done by scholars such as Michael M. Sheehan, Christopher Brooke, Frances and Joseph Gies, David Herlihy, Philippe Ariès, Georges Duby, James A. Brundage, Richard Helmholz, Alan MacFarlane, and Lawrence Stone.4 Moreover, there are books that speak to singular aspects of our topic such as Elizabeth Archibald’s Apollonius of Tyre and Kathryn Gravdal’s Ravishing Maidens, as well as a multitude of articles, narrower in scope, in a wide range of scholarly journals.5 Books such as Frances Dolan’s Dangerous Familiars, Elizabeth Pleck’s Domestic Tyranny, and Anthony Fletcher’s Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 explore the topic from early modern England to the present.6 These studies have contributed significantly to a better understanding of kinship structures and the dynamics of household violence. Yet none of these works focuses exclusively on domestic violence within the time frame that we propose—the late Middle Ages—nor engages the topic from the range of source materials gathered together in this volume.

Defining Medieval Domestic Violence Defining the phrase “domestic violence” is complex for both the contemporary and the late medieval period. As it is now understood, domestic violence is limited neither to physical harm nor to a particular kind of behavior or action. Rather, it takes a variety of forms—social, psychological, economic, spiritual, physical, verbal, sexual—all of which are intended

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to injure another person in some way. Researchers in medical, legal, and social service agencies generally agree that an offender’s controlling behaviors—preventing access to friends and family, making accusations of infidelity sometimes accompanied by jealous rages, controlling all household financial resources, prohibiting outside work, charging incompetence or insanity, damaging household goods and furniture, killing pets, denying basic human needs like sleep or food, as well as imposing any kind of sexual conduct without consent—are now subject to legal scrutiny and response.7 The study of domestic violence has developed enough over the past few decades, in fact, that many early formulations are currently being challenged: references to battered-woman or battered-child syndromes, which imply disease, or debilitating illness, no less than the term “battered” itself, shift the focus away from abusers and causes of abuse by stigmatizing the victims.8 Also included in the recent challenges to earlier terminology is the term “domestic.” Since not all abusive relations take place in the home or among members of the traditionally defined nuclear family, many argue for more broadly defined alternatives—“intimate” or “gendered” or “private”—to revoke inaccurate and biased preconceptions about exactly what domestic violence is and in which scholarly discipline it should fall. Despite this current controversy over nomenclature, however, we have chosen to present our collection under the rubric of domestic violence because it signals a recognizable contemporary issue to our immediate audience. Moreover, it provides a starting point from which to chart the shaping forces of the so-called family values that many Western societies have presupposed and protected for so long. We recognize, though, that the Middle Ages lacked a semantic category for domestic violence. Instead, the actions we now understand to be in this category often signified normative behavior in a medieval context, disciplinary practices prescribed by custom and endorsed by prevailing notions of appropriate domestic governance. Discipline and the notion of obedience, underwritten by scriptural archetypes, edicts, and proverbial wisdom, rendered the meting out of household justice by the reigning household authority an accepted feature of maintaining social order. To characterize domestic violence in the late medieval period, then, we must consider the two words separately. “Domestic” in the Middle Ages often described relations that could include household servants, apprentices, and extended kin; it could also define a specific space in which a group of people, not necessarily biologically related, cohabited. On the one hand,

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the plasticity of the medieval domestic unit compares to the variety of living arrangements for the contemporary family, which includes the traditional two-parent household as well as those for blended families, single parents, same-sex couples, unmarried couples, and others. However, the medieval household differs from the modern idea of home in part because its parameters are not as clearly defined. Oftentimes the rigid boundaries that we see between public and private spheres of activity were flexible in the Middle Ages: the medieval court could be as private as it could be public; medieval public institutions—social, ecclesiastical, political—could mimic the family. Yet, however flexible the boundaries between the public and the private were in the Middle Ages, there remained a distinct recognition of where and under what circumstances transgressions occurred. As a substitute for walls or literally defined space, there stood a distinct social hierarchy that functioned as a silent regulator of social order. This hierarchy was partly built upon the pre-Christian Roman customs concerning the domus, a household arrangement equating the ownership of people with the ownership of property, since both were similarly located. This meant that the members of a Roman household were subject to the authority of the paterfamilias, whose legal right—patria potestas— permitted him to do with them whatever he desired; children and wives were in the same category as slaves and domestic animals, all being subject to sale, barter, the most cruel abuse, and even death. The Justinian Code (Corpus Iuris Civilis), written and implemented in the sixth century a.d., made an effort to attenuate patria potestas when it imposed a monetary penalty on cruel husbands: “If a man should beat his wife with a whip or a rod, without having been induced to do so for one of the reasons which we have stated to be sufficient, where the woman is at fault, to cause dissolution of the marriage, we do not wish it to be dissolved on this account; but the husband who has been convicted of having, without such a reason, struck his wife with a whip or a rod, shall give her by way of compensation for an injury of this kind (even during the existence of the marriage) a sum equal in value to the amount of the ante-nuptial donation to be taken out of his other property.”9 Despite this judicial move toward modifying the legal rights of the paterfamilias, he retained considerable authority well into the Middle Ages. In conjunction with that fact, or perhaps in consequence of it, the concept of family also retained its connotations of property ownership: familia in Latin refers to those who are subject to patria potestas, i.e., wives, children, slaves, and other subordinate members of the household.10

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The medieval family, like the Roman family, remained a hierarchically constructed social unit in which the paterfamilias ruled as lord and master of his domain. Although his position at the head of the household was exalted, his authority was not conferred without some measure of reciprocal responsibility. Rather, it was understood to be the patriarch’s duty to protect his property, or as Georges Duby puts it, “to ward off violence, to drive it away from the place where people were most vulnerable” and “to threaten with severe punishment anyone who dared to violate the taboo and cross the threshold.”11 As guardian and protector of the household, he had the authority to use violence to protect his domain from intrusion from any outside agency, official or otherwise. Likewise, customary law, which recognized and respected his status as guardian and protector, shielded his domain from outside intrusion. Even when it became public knowledge that a violator lived within the walls of the domus, a public official could not intervene “unless invited by the head of the household.”12 This rendered the threshold of the domestic environment a boundary not to be crossed without express permission from the presiding household authority, thus nullifying whatever legal prohibition against violence was in place. When marriage became a sacrament in the twelfth century, it seemed to bring with it a reaffirmation of the authority of the paterfamilias and a renewed interest in the medieval family as a microcosm of society. For writers like the Italian humanist Leonardo Bruni, for instance, the married man represented the center of social life, and his marriage the primary means by which stable communities could be established: “Man is a social animal, as all philosophers agree; the fundamental union, which by its multiplication creates the city, is that of husband and wife. Nothing can be accomplished where this union does not exist.”13 For the modern French historian Philippe Ariès, the patriarchal family “became the social cell, the basis of the State, the foundation of the monarchy.”14 The family formed the nucleus of social and political order, which emanated in concentric rings from its center, making it difficult to distinguish the public institutions from the private. Michel Foucault takes the formulation one step further when he suggests that the family was the cornerstone of patriarchal society, the model upon which other social institutions were based, whose order became a moral order and whose hierarchy became sacred.15 The sacrosanct nature of the hierarchy was grounded, many scholars believe, in traditions that model human paternal authority on the authority of God. These paradigms of patriarchy that conflated the public with the

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private functioned as validation for all paternal authority. Duby writes: “God the Father slowly came to be perceived as a father himself, invested with a power analogous to that of the fathers who governed in every household. Furthermore, his kingly powers came to be seen more and more as his private, personal, and hereditary property.”16 Biblical passages defended a gendered inheritance of sacred authority. Supplementing Roman and Hebrew conceptions of the father as supreme proprietor, the recommendations made by St. Paul in his epistle to the Ephesians gave heavenly sanction to the domestic rule: “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. . . . Children, obey your parents in the Lord. . . . Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters . . . with fear and trembling . . . With good will doing service, as to the Lord” (Eph. 5:22, 6:1–7). Paul’s notions of family hierarchy and the responsibilities of subordinate members are quite clear; each subordinate family member is reminded that obedience and discipline are Christian values residing at the center of domestic life. The idea of patria potestas inheres in the private appropriation of God’s power; kings, heads of household, and various other authoritative males could rule with divine approbation. Even widows or communities of religious women who lived without men on their premises were considered under the authority of a male relative or church official who served as a surrogate patriarch. According to his authority, the father had the right to castigate household members, to inflict pain upon their bodies in order to improve their ethics and morals. Therefore, to define our second term “violence” as applied to the late Middle Ages, we must reimagine a word now implying aberrational physical conflict to include the concept of approved corporal punishment. Several medieval commentators devoted their thinking to the distinction between normative and outrageous punishments, between necessary chastisement and unwarranted beatings, in an attempt to define acceptable and unacceptable levels of violence within the home. The distinction was crucial to determining the difference between violence that maintained order and violence that destroyed it. Master Gratian, in his influential Decretum, dealt with the matter of household governance at length, upholding the teachings of Paul and patristic writers such as Augustine, Jerome, and Ambrose when he concluded that women were in general subject to men and that husbands in particular had charge over their wives. Moreover, James A. Brundage points out that Gratian suggested that a husband’s authority bequeathed him “the legal right to enforce his commands and that he could do so, when necessary, by force.”17 Other canonists attempted to demarcate the

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boundary between discipline and injury that would allow a husband to “chastise” or “correct” his wife without inflicting obvious physical harm such as that caused by scourging or beating. In the Glossa Ordinaria Johannes Teutonicus writes, “A husband may judge his wife by correcting her, not by beating her [verberando] . . . but he may chastise her [castigare] temperately, since she is of his household.”18 In theory, such restrictions allowed serious domestic misconduct to be relegated to the judgment of the ecclesiastical courts, where a legally sanctioned punishment could be rendered. The problem that arises in later interpretations by canon lawyers and other ecclesiastics is in the ambiguous meaning of “chastisement.” Not only does castigare imply correction by word, it implies correction by deed, which could include a form of corporal punishment—one not as harsh as might be reserved for household servants, perhaps, but corporal punishment nonetheless. If medieval canonists complicated the interpretive possibilities of corporal punishment for canon lawyers following them, other interpretations are less ambiguous. Such is the case of a fifteenth-century Italian friar, Cherubino of Siena, who offers a straightforward explication of how he thinks husbands should treat their wives: When you see your wife commit an offense, do not rush at her with insults and violent blows: rather, first correct the wrong lovingly and pleasantly, and sweetly teach her not to do it again so as not to offend God, injure her soul, or bring shame upon herself or you. . . . But if your wife is of a servile disposition and has a crude and shifty spirit so that pleasant words have no effect, scold her sharply, bully and terrify her. And if this still does not work, take up a stick and beat her soundly, for it is better to punish the body and correct the soul than to damage the soul and spare the body. But notice, I say, that you should not beat her just because she does not get things ready exactly as you would like them, or for some other unimportant reason or minor failing. You should beat her, I say, only when she commits a serious wrong: for example, if she blasphemes against God or a saint, if she mutters the devil’s name, . . . if she has taken to bad habits or bad company, or commits some other wrong that is a mortal sin. Then readily beat her, not in rage, but out of charity and concern for her soul, so that the beating will redound to your merit and do her good.19 The system of justice rendered here, vaguely reminiscent of that found in Dante’s Commedia, makes connections between the severity of the act committed by a wife and the punishment it deserves. The method of disci-

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pline is left to the discretion of the husband, who is given license to punish his spouse for perceived defects of character—for a “servile disposition” or a peasant mentality. But the friar is careful to caution husbands about fitting the punishment to the “crime” in their judicious determinations. Thus the justification for a beating can be neatly construed as “charity and concern for her soul.” The husband is not guilty of anger, a sin itself; rather, by promoting the perfection of his wife’s inner being, he is acting out of Christian love. This anthology employs the term “violence” for both sanctioned and unsanctioned beatings, not only of the wife, but also of the children. The medieval concept of family values that we are suggesting throughout this introduction would not be complete without including a discussion of a proverb widely quoted in the Middle Ages. Allegedly uttered by Solomon, “Spare the rod and spoil the child” rather unambiguously asserts that to withhold physical chastisement is to damage or impair a child’s character in some way. John Trevisa’s translation of a passage in Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De Proprietatibus Rerum renders the point striking indeed: “The more the fadir loveth his child, the more busiliche [busily] he teacheth and chastiseth him and holdith him the more streit undir chastisinge and lore. And thegh the father love him most hit semeth that he loveth him not, for he runtith [reprove] and betith [beat] him ofte lest a [he] draw to evel manners and tacchis [habits].”20 Child-rearing practices that withheld the rod were imagined to be excessively indulgent and, therefore, less effective than a harsh instructive approach might be. Preached from the pulpit, reiterated in didactic works and moral treatises, Solomon’s wisdom was also expressed in literary works such as William Langland’s Piers Plowman. In this influential poem, Reason becomes the proverbial purveyor of wisdom when he says: “qui parcit virge odit filium: Whoso spareth the spryng spilleth hise children” (B text, Passus V, lines 39–41). Reason encourages the use of the rod, not on a willful young son, but rather on a lazy daughter: “He [Reason] bad Bette kutte a bough outher tweye / And bete Beton therwith but if she wolde werche” (B text, Passus V, lines 32–33).21 Physical discipline is practiced ostensibly for the purpose of the child’s moral edification, i.e., little Betty learns the importance of the work ethic at an early age. Spoken by Reason, the wisdom of Solomon acquires additional moral authority; corporal punishment as a form of discipline is rendered for the welfare of a child’s soul. Concerning themselves with the distinction between charitable and sinful beatings of both women and children, many medieval writers as-

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sume the necessity of “moderate” and “controlled” violence in maintaining social and familial structures. In contrast, modern scholars, often horrified by physical conflict, are more interested in constructing theories aimed at exposing and dismantling mechanisms that produce violence by questioning assumptions about what violence is. Does violence consist in illegal acts, or in all physical harm, whether or not punishable by law? Is all violence an ultimate act of self-assertion, done to create a border between self and Other?22 Is it a jealous demand for allegiance to a single authority or a competition over scarce goods?23 Is it the inevitable response to mimetic desire and rivalry, or an act of sacrifice done for the purpose of restoring social order? Is violence always a struggle for power by masculine forces at the expense of the feminized Other?24 Or is violence an inherent feature of the very institutions and value systems designed to protect individuals and communities, as many medieval writers imply? The essays in this collection consider late medieval domestic violence from different standpoints on the assumption that we can never fully discern the complex ways in which any collective perception is shaped without looking at a network of corroborative discourses and specific cultural practices.

On the Evidence for Domestic Violence in the English Middle Ages English civil law did not censure wife and child beating during the Middle Ages, nor did it even mention infanticide of illegitimate children until 1623. In other words, because certain kinds of domestic physical conflict were not defined as wrongdoing, we have scant legal records of their occurrence. The few lurid examples that surface illustrate how the very beatings intended to preserve domestic hierarchies razed them. In some cases, records of domestic violence exist because extended families complained about the mistreatment of female kin. For instance, in 1332 in Wakefield, Thomas Assholff sued his son-in-law John de Scoles for not providing sustenance for his daughter Ellen; beaten viciously by John, Ellen was afraid to stay in the marital home where she might have received food and clothing.25 Besides a family’s suits over the material neglect of a daughter, Judith M. Bennett suggests that we might also find evidence of domestic violence by inspecting the number of cases in which women were accused of raising a wrongful hue and cry. Bennett finds that in Brigstock before the plague, fifteen alerts were raised by women and twelve of them were against men. Some of these may have been episodes of domestic violence in which the victim was finally silenced by the law.26 For other in-

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stances of domestic disharmony, we might consult sentences to the cucking stool—a chair situated in a public place upon which a woman held to be a nag would sit in shame with feet bare and hair down.27 However, English civil law made little mention of domestic trouble that merely drove a woman from her home, terrorized or humiliated her. It was mainly interested in the most extreme category of intrafamilial violence— homicide. If a man killed his wife, he committed murder; if a woman killed her husband, she committed petty treason. In the legal statutes of 1325 (25 Edward 3), a homicidal wife was destined for the stake, just as a traitor to the crown would be, because she had turned on the lord of the household.28 Such crimes are the most documentable instances of domestic violence. Even so, compared to the number of late medieval homicides of neighbors or strangers, killing a spouse was apparently rare. In The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England, Barbara Hanawalt observes that felony indictments of one family member for a crime against another constituted less than one percent of the cases studied, with husbands predominantly murdering wives.29 Similarly, Carl Hammer finds only one case of spousal homicide in fourteenth-century Oxford.30 He argues that the paucity of evidence is not the result of lack of interest in reporting domestic crimes and cites one Mathilda Pouk, whose death from natural causes was nevertheless investigated because her husband was known to be abusive.31 The difficulty of obtaining a “divorce,” which in the Middle Ages meant separation or annulment, probably contributed to what few cases of marital discord, ending in homicide, are recorded. Several records even show that couples coming to murderous blows lived in separate quarters. For instance, one murder case from 1271 clearly concerned the couple’s difficulties over arranging child support during their estrangement. Walter le Bedel of Renhold appeared at his wife’s door one night to discuss the obtainment of a bushel of wheat for their children’s food. When the wife went to help him bring home the bushel, Walter struck her in the head with a knife and tossed her body into a stream.32 Social historians disagree about how to interpret the paucity and extremity of the legal evidence for domestic violence. Based on the few records available from civil courts, on the one hand, Hanawalt concludes that compared to modern families, “the medieval family is free of violence—even in the close quarters of working class households.”33 Stone concurs that up until the sixteenth century few cases of domestic violence were reported, but he stops short of comparing medieval court data with modern statistics.34 On the other hand, historians such as P. J. P. Goldberg

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read the dearth of court evidence not as an indication of absence but rather as evidence of widespread abuse.35 With spouse abuse as with other sorts of medieval violence, the challenge for the cultural interpreter is to explain how such a marked contrast between the violent preoccupations of medieval literature and the relative scantiness of legal records arises. Similarly, unproven generalizations about the prevalence of medieval infanticide exist. David Herlihy concludes that medieval people disposed of children because of the shame of illegitimacy and poverty, yet so few cases of infanticide are recorded that they seem not to represent widespread practices. Nonetheless, some historians suspect that infanticide and child murder were common practices simply interpreted by certain courts as misdemeanors rather than felonies.36 Four cases recorded in England demonstrate the presuppositions of jurists regarding children and women in what appear to be suspect judgments. One woman was brought before a secular court for murdering her two-year-old daughter and forcing her four-year-old son to sit in hot hearth coals.37 Another woman beat her tenyear-old son to death, but was judged to be insane. In another case, the mother tried to commit suicide, but changed her mind and killed her children instead.38 In a fourth case, a woman killed her two-year-old son and daughter with an axe, but was released on bail and placed under the supervision of twelve of her kin.39 Women were often presumed to be guilty in cases of child death—even when the death could more likely have occurred accidentally—but assigned only the mildest of penances because of their own status as intellectually inferior creatures. And when they were not treated like children, or considered insane or possessed by demons, the death was determined to be accidental. Clearly, crime statistics and legal codes, compelling documentation though they are, reveal only a small number of domestic violence cases. Legal treatises provide their own sort of representation: they offer temporally fixed premises for a just society. Like all modes of discourse, legal documents construct boundaries between the speakable and the unspeakable. Court reports, for instance, select legally relevant information about events surrounding a spousal homicide, but delete details about the private and public causes for the fatal domestic conflict. Therefore, further analysis of late medieval domestic violence must proclaim what the law speaks about family conflict while mining other modes of discourse. Other sorts of textual representations will not answer our questions about the extent of domestic violence, but they can express prevailing cultural attitudes. If current medieval legal scholarship cannot prove that domestic violence

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was a widespread occurrence for the Middle Ages, then other modes of discourse reveal that it was a widespread preoccupation.

Writing in the Gap Drawing from court records, sermons, drama, moral treatises, vernacular literature, hagiography, scripture, romance, and exempla, our contributors provide provocative readings with implications well beyond the texts they interpret, teaching us how and why divergent discourses read in conjunction with one another present a more comprehensive view of the medieval past. This myriad of materials on medieval domestic violence both fills in the gap left by legal discourse and suggests why this silence is pervasive. An important reason for the lack of civic recriminations against domestic violence is undoubtedly the association between victims of violence and Christian virtue as prescribed in a panoply of medieval texts. Christine de Pizan, for instance, in The Book of the City of Ladies equates virtue with physical suffering. She cries out against “harsh beatings” and “injuries” endured by “so many upright women” “without cause and without reason,” yet in the end confirms a husband’s domestic rights. She encourages married women to be patient with fierce husbands because such patience is a sign of a Christian woman’s fortitude, a means by which every abused wife might achieve redemption for her soul. To women she says: “And you ladies who are married, do not scorn being subject to your husbands, for sometimes it is not the best thing for a creature to be independent. . . . And those women who have husbands who are cruel, mean, and savage should strive to endure them while trying to overcome their vices and lead them back, if they can, to a reasonable and seemly life.”40 At first glance, this seems like a betrayal of married women, something more akin to what medieval misogynists might say, but Christine does not condone cruelty and violence against married women by their husbands. Rather, she accepts a reality of married life for many of the women of her immediate and/or imagined audience and urges a viable means by which they might be empowered through peaceful resistance, essentially by turning the other cheek. Humility, patience, and constancy are promoted as Christian virtues that will reward in the afterlife the women who have the courage to cultivate them. The hope for married women here, as elsewhere in medieval culture, is to civilize unruly husbands by becoming active agents in their return to the religious fold. By such perseverance and fortitude, a married woman could be rendered eli-

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gible for divine grace; she could acquire passage into heaven, or at least into the protective folios of a manuscript. The ability to endure violence was the hallmark not merely of the virtuous wife but of the Christlike soul. In imitation of Christ—a Savior whose humiliation, mutilation, and agony on the cross actually authorized his salvific power—the faithful were encouraged to desire bodily wounding which would ensure an eternity of grace and bliss. Late medieval piety, especially, focused on Christ’s Passion as the most significant moment in salvation history.41 Interest in Christ’s suffering and martyrdom—his blood, his wounds, his heart, his broken body—spread with the popularity of Latin and vernacular meditations on the Passion. For instance, Thomas à Kempis’s fifteenth-century Orationes et meditationes de vita Christi laments every detail of Christ’s Crucifixion.42 Wracked upon the cross, Jesus enjoins his disciple in this text to endure complaints that must be mild in comparison to those of the Passion and later martyrdoms: “Consider My sufferings and those of My saints, and cease to complain. You have not yet shed your blood in resistance; your troubles are but small in comparison with those who have suffered so much, whose temptations were so strong, whose trials so severe, and who were proved and tested in so many ways. Remember the heavier sufferings of others, that you may more easily bear your own small troubles. . . . The better you prepare yourself to meet suffering, the more wisely will you act, and the greater will be your merit.”43 In these lines, Christ presents himself as a model for surviving horrific abuse, a lesson that probably both silenced and comforted victims in domestically violent families. Furthermore, mystics, and especially women mystics who experienced visions as the result of meditating on the Passion, showed the common sufferer how to transcend quotidian pain and how to rely on pain for transcendence. Caroline Bynum has demonstrated that the overlapping themes of asceticism and devotion to Christ’s suffering humanity operated more forcefully and prominently in the personal piety of women than of men.44 According to Rudolph Bell, the archetypal rebellious female mystic is figured as deeply internalizing the link between catechism and masochism: “Her catechism, the stories she heard, the painting she gazed at—all these told her that suffering was the way to salvation, to eternal love. And she believed the message fully. Cruel, inhuman, undeserved martyrdoms long past—whether Sebastian’s arrows, Lucy’s eyes, Agatha’s breasts, or Christ’s crucifixion—became real and present, truly a way to transcend the test of her father.”45 In fact, two of the most celebrated English women

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mystics of the later Middle Ages practiced an affective piety in which the recollection of Christ’s death-agony triggered their own suffering. Julian of Norwich prayed for and received three special graces: memory of Christ’s Passion, bodily sickness, and raw corporeal wounds; the first is a necessary step to the second and third.46 Similarly, Margery Kempe was almost continually conscious of Christ’s agony, and the smallest reminder was enough for her to be overwhelmed with conspicuous physical sorrow. She would weep for Jesus: “er yf a man bett a childe be-for hir er smet an hors er an-other best wyth a whippe.”47 For Julian and Margery, meditation on Christ’s pain both invoked suffering like their Savior’s and provided relief from earthly troubles since it ushered in mystical union with the divine and the ultimate promise of glory in heaven. Marguerite Porete, a thirteenth-century Beguine, called this paradoxical mingling of vicarious agony and religious ecstasy “annihilation.”48 Margery Kempe’s strongly held commitment to the life of an independent woman rather than that of a wife and mother meant that the recollection of holy suffering did not function to reconcile her to a subordinate role within marriage, but Margery’s life is exceptional. Karen A. Winstead suggests that one purpose of medieval English female hagiography, with its emphasis on torture and cruelty, may have been to provide models outside the church for women who would have been expected to fulfill the role of Christian matron: “Beginning in the early 1400’s, numerous Middle English hagiographers were focusing less on the saints’ hostility toward men than on their suffering. . . . many fifteenth-century hagiographers were eager to emphasize ‘transferable’ qualities . . . which would make the saints suitable models for laywomen as well as for consecrated virgins.”49 The judicious encouragement of married or soon-to-be-married women toward a suitably limited imitatio Christi would obviously reap social advantage within a patriarchal society, promoting humanity, submission, and long-suffering in a domestic life within which, as we have seen, vocal and assertive women were distinct social threats. Another model for submission whom married women, particularly mothers, might emulate in relation to their children was the Virgin Mary. In the variously written scenes of Stabat Mater, the Virgin’s grief at the Crucifixion became a metonym for a mother’s sorrow. With the prevalence of the Mater Dolorosa, as Barbara Newman comments, “[t]he pain of loss was written inexorably into the script of motherhood.”50 Chronicling the development of the Latin meditative tradition, Thomas Bestul notes that in the twelfth century, when theological interest in Mary as co-redemptrix

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began to build, Mary’s loss predominated in some Passion literature.51 For instance, in the Planctus beatae Mariae, now believed to be written by Ogier of Locedio (1136–1214), the Virgin unleashes her emotions over Christ’s suffering in a series of apostrophes.52 She fondles the Savior’s dead body, drinks his blood, and refuses to allow his burial. Margery Kempe knew this work and even included a paraphrase of it in her Book. Perhaps identifying with the distraught Mary and wishing for the Matron’s comfort, Margery interpolates an ending in which the Virgin, finally calmed, permits her son’s body to be prepared for the tomb.53 Margery’s possible sympathy with the Virgin in this passage illustrates how actual medieval women could relate to Mary’s sorrows. Like Mary, medieval women were forced to witness the blows given to their children in the name of a greater good. If the equation between suffering and virtue kept domestic violence hidden inside household walls and out of the law courts, it nevertheless provided a catalyst for other discourses. The table of contents for this anthology demonstrates the stunning array of medieval genres that were concerned with domestic violence, its ethics and morals. These texts often challenge the assumption that household violence reinforces the familial hierarchy and thereby contributes to a charitable society. By relating domestic events sometimes as horrific as those in the few legal cases we have cited, the texts analyzed for this collection reveal a cultural anxiety about the conflicting purposes and results of domestic violence. In organizing an interdisciplinary volume that fills the gaps in legal discourse with sources as diverse as possible, we have been faced with a choice between treating each of these sources as texts, with all of the accompanying issues of interpretation or decidability this entails, or of valorizing the historical and the “true” over the literary and the textual. We have chosen, instead, to consider our sources on the same representative ground, to apply a strategy akin to that of medieval “imaginative” histories such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, the Brut Chronicles, or the centuries-long Arthurian tradition, all of which deny definitive generic boundaries between historical and fictional discourses. Indeed, our section titles point to this peculiarly medieval generic interconnectedness. For us, as for Nancy Partner, “the mimetic abilities of prose are common to fiction and history without distinction.”54 We, like her, see the central purpose of history as an affirmation of “our consciousness of a shared experience over generations of one external and real world.”55 Similarly, historians such as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg advocate

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a close reading of a wide range of interrelated documents, “to deduce the relations not only of words to words within a literary text but of words in one genre and one social group to the words of quite different genres and social groups . . . of words to specific social relations within the ebb and flow of a particular culture.”56 This is the kind of interpretive methodology we are engaged in when we consider historical documents and literary texts on an equal footing, subject to cultural, social, historical, and literary analysis.

Reading for the Subject: The Essays Part One of our collection presents pertinent historical, legal, and social backgrounds for the study of late medieval domestic violence; essays in this section examine court records and show links to a number of literary and didactic works, including The Book of the Knight of the Tower, Dives and Pauper, Robert Brunne’s Handlyng Synne, John Mirk’s Festial, “How the Goodwife Taught Her Daughter,” and Philippe of Navarre’s thirteenthcentury moral treatise. By linking legal narrative and fictional representation we may corroborate social and historical contexts. In the first essay, Philippa Maddern explains that court records are often silent on the subject of domestic violence, at least as it is defined in contemporary terms. After a careful discussion of historical and cultural differences, Maddern looks at evidence in cases of homicide between family or household members and at documented cases of suspicious death in East Anglia between 1422 and 1442. She then locates her findings within patterns of legal process and punishment rates for other homicide cases in East Anglia at this period to determine what became of the perpetrators and their victims. She examines the kinds of tales that were told about domestic homicide in the king’s courts and compares them to stories told in other genres; she reminds us that diverse texts need to be read in conjunction in order to get a complete picture of how pervasive domestic violence was in late medieval England: “the absence of cases of domestic violence in the common-law records cannot be read to signify a low level of domestic violence in the community. Rather, it may reasonably be taken as an indication that, as the literature suggests, ordinary people did not consider domestic violence to be an actionable social problem. It was, apparently, viewed as normatively justifiable.” Emma Hawkes grounds the issue in a specific case study by looking closely at the well-documented dispute between Margaret Neffield and

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Thomas Neffield of York in 1395–96. Hawkes argues that the concept of reason and the ideal of the “constant man” govern perceptions of a husband’s right to administer discipline in any way he might deem appropriate. Both common law and ecclesiastical law have embedded in them not only the masculine ideal of the constant man but an antifeminist stereotype of women as defective creatures, incapable of making rational judgments. The legal delivery system also assumes the socially normative marital hierarchy and a woman’s subordination to her husband. The extraordinary Neffield case is recorded in court documents because Margaret had the perseverance to bring her grievance to court and present witnesses who testified to her husband’s cruelty. Nonetheless, because of the biases of the judicial system, her suit for “divorce” was denied and she was sent back into the domicile from which she fled in terror. Part Two takes as its topic the emerging literary tradition; the essays in this section examine a range of genres that signify beyond the explicitly fictional textual environment. When there is little public recourse for resolving violence within the household in actual life, literary works become significant repositories for the expression of private frustrations. Medieval authors often crossed boundaries between social reality and the imaginative world, making it difficult at times to discern distinctions between the two. This is one reason that it is important to read historical, legal, and other social documents in conjunction with the imaginative and didactic works that form the core of the literary tradition we have inherited from the Middle Ages. To broaden a contemporary understanding of the predominantly English canonical tradition studied in the classroom today, we have included influential authors and texts from adjacent cultures, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Welsh Mabinogion. The presence of domestic violence in these as well as in the English social and literary texts we present indicates the pervasiveness of this mode of violence in medieval European culture at large. Beginning with the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, Eve Salisbury reads thirteenth- and fourteenth-century English rape statutes against the Wife of Bath’s Tale as well as several of the Middle English Breton lays—Sir Degaré, Sir Orfeo, Sir Gowther, Sir Launfal—to map out correspondences between English literary constructions of domestic violence and English laws governing rape and abduction. The thirteenth-century Statutes of Westminster recognized rape as a crime against the peace of the king, making it punishable by death or mutilation. Over time, however, these laws were rewritten to address the problem of abduction, a legal maneuver that

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effectively shifted the legal focus away from the violation of a woman’s body to other matters of concern. Alisoun exposes the gray areas between the two components of the medieval legal system—ecclesiastical and secular—as well as the inadequacies in the prosecution of sexual crime. At the same time, she discloses the nature of “legitimate” violence within the home by providing her bruised and battered body as evidence. Georgiana Donavin continues with a close reading of Gower’s “Apollonius of Tyre” and the anxieties over domestic taboos surfacing in this final tale of the Confessio Amantis. Injunctions against incest and domestic violence are explicitly stated only to be transgressed in narrative exempla. Specifically, Genius, Gower’s narrator, prefaces “Apollonius of Tyre” with an extended history of incest law and reminds readers of divine commandments against wrath. However, rather than impeding these domestic crimes, Genius’s sermonizing encourages them. Showing the interdependence between taboo and transgression with a Foucauldian analysis, Donavin argues that “Apollonius of Tyre,” ostensibly a family romance with a happy ending, underscores the ever-present potentiality of domestic abuse. This reading contradicts much traditional scholarship by illuminating Gower’s pessimism about the efficacy of moral rules undergirding the family. Overall, “Apollonius of Tyre” illustrates that the “laws intended to preserve family create the desires precipitating its destruction.” Chaucer’s depictions of reverse Oedipal fantasies in three of the Canterbury Tales are the subject of Barrie Ruth Straus’s discussion. Straus examines the parent-child relation in the Clerk’s, Man of Law’s, and Prioress’s Tales to explore what she calls narrative reframing in order to reveal an underlying paternal motive for infanticide. Cross-generational relations are “necessarily conflictual, for the notion of fatherhood implies not only the extension of the father’s lineage but also the necessity of the father’s death and replacement by the child.” Such recognition inspires a murderous paternal rage at both child and mother which these Chaucerian tales address by employing narrative strategies that veil, repress, and deny the very violence they expose. Straus explores a larger pattern of behavior in problematic cross-generational relations and conflicts between parents and children later recognized and popularized by Freud. Graham N. Drake extends the focus on adults and children, this time in King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, and Athelston, where he looks closely at vivid scenes of cruelty, such as the brutal slaying of Havelok’s young sisters by a guardian, the murderous impulses of Bevis’s mother, King Athelston’s kicking of his pregnant wife, and the exile of a

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youthful Horn and his twelve companions from their homeland. Drake offers a theory of pathos to explain the means by which romance authors elicit sympathy both for the hero and for supporting characters and bystanders, those innocents harmed by what seem to be random acts of violence. Romance pathos speaks to the values of an upwardly mobile, increasingly literate late medieval English audience eager to bequeath those values to the next generation via popular stories contained within diversified literary anthologies such as the Auchinleck manuscript. Marilyn Migiel looks to Boccaccio’s Italy at the time of the plague and addresses the reluctance of contemporary readers to identify the Decameron as a misogynistic work. The gendered violence in the Decameron is deferred at first; women begin to die on the fourth day, when the subject of the storytelling turns to “unhappy love.” The delimiting of women’s power, which is an underlying issue in medieval society as a whole, is portrayed as “just” retaliation for a challenge to male authority. Migiel looks closely at Emilia’s story wherein Giosefo and Melisso at the Goose Bridge witness a mule-beating scene that Giosefo interprets as justification for beating his wife. What appears to be straightforward authorial misogyny is read against the grain by Migiel when she makes a subtle distinction between “offensive” and “defensive” rhetoric. Emilia’s rhetorical strategy subverts the authority of anyone who might disagree with her. Migiel ends by advocating the efficacy of the resisting reader. Christopher G. Nugent looks at the story of Riannon in the First Branch of the Welsh Mabinogion to address the tensions brought about by the presence of an alien woman in a patriarchal and patrilocal community. Nugent argues that Riannon’s body becomes a text on which “public politics and domestic intimacies” are inscribed. As a quasi-divine being, a euhemerized horse goddess, Riannon is the cause of social anxiety; like the Virgin Mary she is an otherworldly creature whose pregnant body, if not adequately rationalized, threatens the status quo. Riannon is recognized as an alien when she enters the very public and politically charged court of Pwyll. When she bears the prince a son, who then mysteriously disappears, she is falsely accused of murder and punished in a humiliatingly violent, yet socially sanctioned, manner: “The violence in Riannon’s story is extreme, but it adheres to Welsh laws governing the proper relationship between husbands and wives, including the parameters of acceptable corporal punishment.” Part Three represents a third position between the traditionally historical essays of Part One and the essays examining explicitly fictional works

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in Part Two. These essays focus on texts that in their time would have been considered historical accounts but, from a twentieth-century point of view, are works of didactic fiction. They include narratives of biblical history, hagiographies, and fantasies of historical nationalism. In her tracing of a women-murderers motif, for instance, Anna Roberts discusses the normalization of violence within the process of the formation of a national consciousness. Two twelfth-century French texts popularize the motif of homicidal women, specifically represented by the story of Albina and her murderous sisters, but in so doing eradicate agency from the women murderers themselves. Even when women’s crimes are the subject of narration, the nature of women’s transgressions emphasizes the “gender gap between subjects and objects, agents and passive figures,” reducing women to pretexts for masculine narrators of punishment and expurgation as the “seemingly gratuitous acts of sexual violence are in fact the basis of national identification.” The consequence for actual women, particularly those who reject conformity to social norms, is erasure. The dramatic representation of biblical narrative in the pageant plays, the subject of Garrett P. J. Epp’s essay, examines “carefully and differently scripted” depictions of domestic violence in the Wakefield version of Noah and the Flood and its counterpart in York. While violence in the former is a “presumed part of the marital relationship,” in the latter we find that violence against others, including Noah’s beating of his recalcitrant and shrewish wife, is deplored. But rather than implicate medieval society in the normalization of domestic violence, Epp instead implicates modern critics. By overlooking the nuances of dramatic representation that comparative study reveals, “they—not the anonymous York playwrights— normalize that violence.” His critique of contemporary critics implicates us all in a collective reification of medieval texts in an effort to express our own anxieties. In his study of domestic violence in the twelfth-century Life of Christina of Markyate, Robert Stanton argues that Christina’s “struggle to maintain her virginity against extreme pressure from her family represents a convergence of a spiritual ideal and a rich social criticism” on the part of the hagiographer. Violence directed against Christina originates within her own family and “powerfully exposes the larger social violence necessary to uphold the aristocracy in twelfth-century England.” Both parents become involved in an attempt to coerce their daughter into an advantageous marriage. Her father orders her to be stripped in public

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while her mother pulls her hair, beats her, and, as if she were a criminal, makes her into a public spectacle. Stanton addresses Gratian’s comments on marital consent, since Christina thwarts the conditions of the marriage contract by refusing to cooperate in an unwanted consummation. He also challenges Christopher Brooke’s characterization of the Life as autobiography driven by Christina as a desiring subject. In his critique of Brooke, Stanton objects strongly to a masculinist understanding of domestic violence as something its victims invite. Merrall Llewelyn Price examines the opposition between the virtues represented by the Virgin and the “monstrous mother” depicted in retellings of the siege of Jerusalem and links them to socially sanctioned imperialist practices. Her essay analyzes a specifically and peculiarly medieval contribution to the discourse of mother-child cannibalism, a discourse which is more informative about the prejudices and projections of the period than about the eating habits of those accused. Price examines the projections of this horrifically violent act onto already disempowered and marginalized social groups, who were in reality much more frequently the recipients of in-group violence, both domestic and systematic, than they were the perpetrators. Constructed as the ultimate Other, Mary of Jerusalem not only stands in opposition to the icon of “good” motherhood and positive Christian values, but in her unnatural act implicates her opposite, the Blessed Virgin Mary. The cosmic realm of domestic violence as it is depicted in the English Apocalypse Book illuminations is Anne Laskaya’s focus. By recounting Aristotle’s alignment of “soul” and “form” with the male principle and “body” or “matter” with the female principle, she shows how biblical myths are translated from written texts to visual texts. Graphic visual representations in these widely disseminated books delineate two competitive worlds: a celestial order of virginal and masculinized ranks of angels and a feminized, domestic sphere of sexual humanity. In the context of the powerful Book of Revelation, archetypal familial and salvific violence is enacted—Father against child, virginal Christ against the Whore, Creator against creation. Laskaya’s essay also points to the larger ideological conflict between Christian values advocating pacifism on the one hand and militancy on the other. She sounds an appropriate apocalyptic note for the end of a volume whose interpretations of the past offer visions for the future.

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Toward a Conclusion If medieval literature’s outspokenness on domestic violence gives voice to those silenced in civil and ecclesiastical courts, then it is a literature of transgression, challenging the institutionalized repression of common concern. Like the Bakhtinian carnival, medieval representations of domestic violence often usurp the expected hierarchy, either through magnification and distortion or through inversion. As a magnifying glass, medieval representations of domestic conflict explore the limits of patriarchy. However, violent patriarchs in the literature discussed here sometimes suffer the wrath of God, proving that the most vicious abusers lose their hierarchical status in common opinion. As an inverted picture rather than a magnifying glass, literature and art often depict the wife as the violent spouse in a comic reversal. The transgressive literature of domestic violence magnifies or inverts the social order, promoting interpersonal conflict in order to critique this hegemony, yet at the same time it perpetuates the status quo. The inordinately violent patriarch in literature who suffers God’s punishments makes the occasional wife-beater look more acceptable. The joke about a wife gaining physical mastery over her husband defuses tensions over contested hierarchies within the home and allows the domination to continue. Although patently rebellious, carnivalesque literature, dealing with not only the fairs but also the sewers of popular culture, can be insidiously traditional. In Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s estimation, the “uncritical populism” of such a literature “often violently abuses and demonizes weaker, not stronger, social groups, women, ethnic and religious minorities, those who ‘don’t belong’—in a process of displaced abjection.” The result is that these works ironically participate in a “licensed complicity” with the prevalent hierarchy.57 Not only ideologically but also structurally, many domestic violence narratives support the status quo. The closure of these stories satisfies vicarious impulses for solutions to legally unsolvable problems. When Noah’s wife finally acquiesces and enters the ark, when Jankyn and Alisoun lay down the book and achieve domestic harmony, then domestic discord is—if only in fantasy—at an end. Most violent medieval homes never experienced such closure because both civil and ecclesiastical courts worked to reunite couples who separated over domestic conflict. The result must have been the continuation of a cycle of abuse. If a woman, coerced into an abusive situation, killed her husband as a last resort, she would still be burned at the stake. Although the husband was considered lord of the house, he was not made legally responsible for the quality of his gover-

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nance, and the abused wife suffered the punishments of domestic unhappiness—whether on the ribs or in the fire. Lack of legal options, fearful threats of punishment, and theological teachings no doubt encouraged women to remain in abusive settings, but popular literature squelched domestic discord by the last line on the last page. Perhaps the maintenance of fantastical and vicarious solutions to cyclical family problems perpetuated the cycle still further. Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts addresses a topic that is important to our understanding of the medieval past, its notions of childhood and marital relations, its attitudes toward corporal punishment, and its contribution to the shaping of contemporary family values. It is intended to encourage a dialogue about a topic that is urgent in today’s reconsideration of social politics. We may rethink how and why cycles of violence can be perpetuated from generation to generation, from century to century. The essays we present proceed from medieval texts, but domestic violence, as an immediate concern, helps us to understand these old texts in new ways.

Notes 1. See, for instance, Richard W. Kaeuper, War, Justice, and Public Order: England and France in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). A full session at the Thirty-first International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo in 1996 was devoted to various methods of public execution. 2. Richard J. Gelles, The Violent Home: A Study of Physical Aggression Between Husbands and Wives (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1974). 3. Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Routledge, 1990); John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon, 1988); Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Of Good and Ill Repute”: Gender and Social Control in Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300–1348 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); Judith Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock Before the Plague (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). See also Jennifer Kermode and Garthine Walker, eds., Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 4. See, for instance, Michael M. Sheehan, “Formation and Stability of Marriage in Fourteenth-Century England: Evidence of an Ely Register,” Mediaeval Studies 33 (1971): 228–63, and Marriage, Family and Law in Medieval Europe: Collected Stud-

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ies, ed. James K. Farge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); Christopher N. L. Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Frances and Joseph Gies, Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages (New York: Harper & Row, 1987); David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962); Georges Duby, ed., Revelations of the Medieval World, vol. 2 of A History of Private Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London: Longman, 1995), Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), and “Domestic Violence in Classical Canon Law,” in Violence in Medieval Society, ed. Richard W. Kaeuper (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 2000); Richard H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Alan MacFarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction, 1300–1840 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Lawrence Stone, “Interpersonal Violence in English Society 1300–1800,” Past and Present, no. 101 (November 1983): 22–33, and The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1979). 5. Elizabeth Archibald, Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations of Incest (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell & Brewer, 1991); Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); Anna Roberts, ed., Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998); J. A. Sharpe, “Domestic Homicide in Early Modern England,” Historical Journal 24 (1981): 29–48; Barbara A. Kellum, “Infanticide in England in the Later Middle Ages,” History of Childhood Quarterly 1 (1974): 367–88; Richard H. Helmholz, “Infanticide in the Province of Canterbury During the Fifteenth Century,” History of Childhood Quarterly 2 (3) (1975): 379–90. 6. Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy Against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 7. Laura L. O’Toole and Jessica R. Schiffman, eds., Gender Violence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 1997). 8. Demie Kurz, “Violence Against Women or Family Violence? Current Debates and Future Directions,” in O’Toole and Schiffman, Gender Violence, pp. 435–53. In the same volume, see Christine Adler, “Violence, Gender, and Social Change,” pp. 435–42, and bell hooks, “Violence in Intimate Relationships,” pp. 279–84. See also Pleck, Domestic Tyranny; Suzanne K. Steinmetz and Murray A. Straus, eds., Violence in the Family (New York: Dodd Mead, 1974); Martha Albertson Fineman and Roxanne Mykitiuk, eds., The Public Nature of Private Violence: The Discovery of Domestic Abuse (New York: Routledge, 1994).

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9. Justinian, Corpus Iuris Civilis, trans. S. P. Scott (New York: AMS Press, 1973), p. 59. 10. Herlihy, Medieval Households, p. 2. 11. Duby, Revelations, p. 13. 12. Ibid. 13. As quoted in Herlihy, Medieval Households, p. 116. 14. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, p. 356. 15. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (London: Social Science Paperbacks, 1967). 16. Duby, Revelations, p. 14. 17. Brundage, “Domestic Violence”; see also Gratian C.33 q.2 d.p.c.9 and c.10. 18. Johannes Teutonicus, Glossa Ordinaria. C.7 q.1 c.39 v. iudicari: “Respond. Iudicare potest maritus uxorem corrigendo eam, 23 q.4 duo ista [C.23 q.4 c.35], sed non verberando eam, ut C. de repu. Consensu [Cod.5.17.8] quia illa aliena sit ab ingenuis, ut ibi dicitur, sed tempore potest eam castigare, quia est de familia sua, 33 quaestio 5 haec imago [C.33 q.5 c.13] sicut dominus seruum, Institut.” 19. Cherubino da Siena, Regole della vita matrimoniale (Bologna, 1888), pp. 12–24: Cosi ancora, quando tu vedi la tua moglie fare alcuno delitto, non cosi subitamente debbi correre a ingiurie e percussioni e bastonate; ma prima amorosamente e con piacevolezze debbi dolcemente insegnarle quel delitt, che non lo facci più per non offendere Iddio, e per non dannare l’anima, e per non fare cosa che sia vergogna a te e a sè. . . . Ma se la tua moglie haczxv, la condizione servile, l’animo rustico e villano, che con queste parole piacevoli non si ammenda, riprendila con parole brusche e aspre, con minaccie e con terrori e con altre paure. E se ancora questo non bastasse, e . . . piglia il bastone, e battila molto bene; chè meglio è essere flagellata nel corpo e sanare l’anima, che perdonare al corpo e dannare l’anima. Ma nota che io ti dico che non la debbi battere, perchè forse non aparecchia cosi bene come tu vorresti, o per altra cosa leggieri, e difetto piccolo e minimo; ma dico che tu debbi battere tua moglie, quando facessi gran difetto; veri gratia come, se bestemiassi Iddio o alcuno Santo, se nominassi lo demonio, se si dilettassi . . . o avessi aleuna mala pratica, conversazione e compagnia, o vero facessi alcuno altro difetto notabile, che fussi peccato mortale. Frankamente allora battila, non con animo irato, ma per zelo e carita dell’anima sua; chè la farai sarà mentoria, e lei che la sosterrà sarà utile e fruttifera. Quoted in English in Not in God’s Image: Women in History from the Greeks to the Victorians, ed. Julia O’Faolain and Lauro Martines (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). 20. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 311. 21. A. V. C. Schmidt, ed., William Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions (London: Longman, 1995), vol. 1, p. 179.

26

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22. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 23. Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 24. Carolyn Dinshaw, “Rivalry, Rape, and Manhood: Gower and Chaucer,” in Roberts, Violence Against Women, 137–60. 25. Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound, p. 208. 26. Bennett, Women, p. 26. 27. John Bellamy, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 185. 28. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 33. 29. Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound, p. 208. 30. Carl I. Hammer Jr. “Patterns of Homicide in a Medieval University Town: Fourteenth-Century Oxford,” Past and Present 78 (1978): 3–23. 31. Ibid., p. 14. 32. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict, p. 155. 33. Ibid., p. 167. 34. Stone, “Interpersonal Violence,” p. 32. 35. P.J.P. Goldberg, “Marriage, Migration and Servanthood: The York Cause Paper Evidence,” in Woman Is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society, c. 1200– 1500 (Stroud, Glos.: Alan Sutton, 1992). 36. Hanawalt, “The Female Felon in Fourteenth-Century England,” in Women in Medieval Society, ed. Susan Mosher Stuard (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), pp. 125–40. 37. Ibid., p. 131. 38. Ibid. 39. Naomi D. Hurnard, The King’s Pardon for Homicide Before a.d. 1307 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 162. 40. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982), p. 255. 41. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), p. 252. 42. Thomas H. Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 61–62. 43. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, trans. Leo Sherley-Price (London: Penguin, 1952), p. 117. 44. Bynum, Holy Feast, p. 173. 45. Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 57. 46. Julian of Norwich, Showings, ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), chaps. 2–4. 47. Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. S. B. Meech and H. E.

Introduction

27

Allen, EETS 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 69. Lynn Staley’s comment on this scene in Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994) is illuminating: “The sentence briefly opens up a window upon the sort of casual domestic violence that must have been a common feature of life in a late medieval community” (p. 68). 48. Marguerite Porete, Le Mirouer de simples ames, ed. Romana Guarnieri and Paul Verdeyen (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1986). 49. Karen A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 112–13. 50. Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), p. 83. 51. Bestul, Passion, p. 113. 52. Ibid., p. 53. 53. Ibid., pp. 139–40. 54. Nancy Partner, “Making Up Lost Time: Writing on the Writing of History,” Speculum 61:1 (1986): 97. 55. Ibid. 56. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Writing History: Language, Class, and Gender,” in Feminist Studies, Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 32–54. 57. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 19.

Part One

Domestic Violence and the Law Another world has come into being, one filled with terrors, where it is difficult to distinguish between a safe situation and a dangerous one, a gesture of love and a violent, uncaring gesture. bell hooks, “Violence in Intimate Relationships”

1

Interpreting Silence Domestic Violence in the King’s Courts in East Anglia, 1422–1442 Philippa Maddern

Researchers seeking to analyze domestic violence from the records of medieval secular courts are likely to incur frustration and bafflement. The incidence of cases in the king’s courts that fall within modern definitions of domestic violence is remarkably small; some categories of offense seem to have been systematically excluded, and the remaining examples are so few, so scattered, and so scantily reported as to be, at first glance, of dubious significance. Goldberg rightly observes: “The woman who sought legal separation from her husband on grounds of cruelty may or may not have hidden a hundred similar battered wives. The woman dragged lifeless from the well or the baby incinerated in her cradle may or may not have been the victims of accident.”1 All these problems apply to the reading of East Anglian King’s Bench and Gaol Delivery records for the second quarter of the fifteenth century. Among the records of assaults, either in these courts or in more local forums, there are almost none that can be certainly categorized as domestic violence.2 A typically baffling case is that of Alice Body/ Shepperd, whose death in March 1438 led to the trial of William Mylys because (said the coroner’s jury) in the preceding August he had broken into her house and beaten her so severely on her arms and body that she never recovered.3 Nobody disputed that Alice had been attacked in her own home, but the court was not concerned to clarify either the nature of the assault or the relationship between Alice and William. Was he a disenchanted partner or lover? Or a resentful servant or master? Or a stranger who had attempted rape or robbery? The records are dumb on these matters; they tell us only that the jury finally acquitted Mylys, on the grounds

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that Alice’s injuries had not caused her death. He was apparently never tried for assaulting her. Infanticide never appears in the common-law records, a lacuna which agrees with Kellum’s and Helmholz’s findings that the killing of a child of under seven years of age by its parents was thought to be a misdemeanor in the province of church courts, subject to penance rather than punishment.4 In neither of the two cases where the felonious killing of a child is recorded in the East Anglian Gaol Delivery or King’s Bench records for 1422–42 was the killer said to be a member of the domestic circle. In January 1439, William Smyth, alias Joye, was convicted at Gaol Delivery for having broken into John Miller’s house and killed Joan Warrok, aged nine. Joan may have been a servant of Miller’s, but Smyth’s relationship to either Miller or Joan’s family remains a mystery.5 Similarly, the death of the infant John Bocher (“super mammas . . . matris sue . . . lactantem”) was allegedly the result not of familial violence but of an assault on his father by external agents.6 What, then, can be done with such scanty and reticent records? I argue that historians’ difficulties derive largely from the fact that both “domestic” and “violence” are heavily culturally conditioned terms. Until we examine what range of relationships characterized the medieval domus, we are likely to overlook cases of violence which were “domestic” in a medieval but not a modern sense. Furthermore, unless we comprehend the conceptual structures which linked late medieval understandings of violence to the household, we will find it difficult to make sense of the silences in the records. To take the concept “domestic” first: modern dictionaries define the word as “of or belonging to the home, house, or household.”7 Despite the many extant varieties of households in modern Western society, it is generally assumed that “domestic violence” means violence exercised between members of a nuclear or quasi-nuclear family, most notably between married couples, between de facto partners, and between parents and their children or stepchildren. Two criteria of “home” or “household” are implied here—coresidence, and a narrowly defined set of blood or conjugal relationships. The medieval household, however, is by no means so easily described. Indeed its composition has been subject to intense and long-lasting academic debate.8 On a theoretical level, Laslett rightly observes that we must be clear whether we identify the household just as a coresidence group (perhaps more accurately called a “houseful”) or include criteria such as

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connections by blood relationship or the extent to which coresidents formed a unit of economic production and consumption.9 In practice, researchers have generally taken the late medieval household to signify the coresidence of a group of people normatively related by blood or marriage, but questions of the extent of these relationships and the importance of the household as a production/consumption unit have continually unsettled simplistic definitions. The problem is compounded by the fact that late medieval writers rarely, if at all, explicitly described what relationships they understood to comprise a household. Instead, the domestic grouping tends to appear as an implied entity in a range of discourses, none of which were intended to illuminate the composition and processes of real households. I shall discuss the political and moral meanings of “household” later in this essay.10 Actual physical households most often emerge tangentially in late medieval English archives—as a sidelong comment in church or manor court records, a format tacitly adopted by tax collectors, or (as in Coventry in 1520–23) a unit in the measure of a city’s prosperity.11 In the last two cases, the “household” tended to be identified as its male head, whose dependents were specified more or less completely and accurately in relation to him—a paradigm which, even if it had been more frequently recorded, is clearly insufficient to describe household structure.12 Historians have thus been forced to reconstruct familial processes and household groupings by painstaking analysis of the flood of manor and church court records, accounts, wills, and urban documents, in which information about families and households appears haphazardly, but relatively frequently. The broad consensus gained from this labor is that, at least for late medieval England, Hajnal was probably right to propose four typical characteristics of the family/household and its formation. Hajnal posited that the premodern northwest European household was distinguished by a relatively late age of marriage for both men and women (and consequently a small age gap between spouses); a high proportion of unmarried people; neolocality (that is, the system whereby newly married couples formed new households); and the prevalence of servants, mainly young unmarried people, moving freely among other households.13 Households formed under these circumstances could obviously vary greatly in size and composition. From the viewpoint of students of domestic violence, the medieval home probably differed from the modern one in three crucial ways. First, late medieval households may frequently have included stepchildren; secondly, a constant, though possibly low, propor-

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tion housed older people, both related and unrelated to the household head; thirdly, servants were a common and normative element in the household. The first distinction is perhaps the least significant. Late medieval homes must often have included the stepparent/stepchild/half-sibling sets of relationship resulting from shortened marriages and relatively frequent remarriage, yet the difference in this respect between modern and medieval households may be small, and diminishing. Whereas medieval marriages were shortened by death, in modern European-style societies marriages increasingly either succumb to divorce or never take place.14 Perhaps all we can safely assume is that stepfamilies, in late medieval as in early modern England, were relatively common. Thus Laslett, in a survey of 6,668 resident children in nineteen English communities at various dates from 1599 to 1811, found that 20.7 percent had lost at least one parent, and 4.3 percent were living with a stepparent. The levels of parental loss surpassed rates of parental desertion or death in 1970s England.15 Though allocating children accurately to parents in the absence of marriage and birth registers before 1500 is next to impossible,16 the preconditions for formation of stepfamilies in fifteenth-century East Anglia were undoubtedly fairly widespread. In Norfolk in 1422–42, for instance, of 605 gentlemen and 581 gentlewomen whose marriages are known, at least 9.4 percent of the men and 18.4 percent of the women were married more than once.17 Perhaps more significantly, late medieval households persistently included members of a generation older than the household head, a phenomenon deriving from retirement practices. The elderly or infirm ceded land or money to representatives of the younger generation, in return for an agreed standard of board, housing, and care for life. Historians studying formal records of old-age maintenance contracts, mainly from manorial records, have found that, though numbers apparently declined somewhat after 1350, the practice flourished up to 1500.18 In a sample of thirty-five court rolls series from East Anglia, southeastern England, and the southeast Midlands, Smith found 570 registered retirements from before 1350 and 397 after. Three-quarters of Clark’s 159 East Anglian cases fell in the postplague years.19 Though Poos remarks that some of these arrangements presupposed separate living quarters, Clark found that coresidence was the norm in smallholder households.20 Interestingly, the members of the resulting household were not necessarily related by blood. Indeed, Smith detected a major change between contracts made before 1350, 64 percent of

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which were between kin (mostly parents and children, especially sons), and after 1350, 70 percent of which concerned apparently unrelated people.21 Clark even found an Essex case of 1415 in which a smallholder died, transferring his cottage and an acre of arable land to his wife’s use on condition that she house and support his invalid sister for life. The widow did so for six months, then transferred both land and obligation to another local man, who in turn sold the land and cottage (presumably still with the attached invalid) a year later to a third villager.22 Researchers into domestic violence must therefore take into account the possibility of violence occurring either between grandparents and grandchildren or between the aged and infirm and their perhaps unrelated and reluctant caretakers. Ill feeling between sons and fathers in this situation, and the ill treatment of parents who had foolishly surrendered control of their children by ceding all property to them, was a topos of late medieval advice literature, though the relationship of literary scaremongering to family practice is problematic. For example, the author of the tract Dives and Pauper, written in the early 1400s, moralized at length on the perils of retirement to parents who might find themselves “servyd wol evele, both in at bedde & at bord.” Yet his harrowing tale of a case which (he claimed) occurred “Nout longe is gon . . . in Colcester” of an elderly father put out to sleep at the hall door and reduced to begging his uncaring son for rags to cover him, may arouse less sympathy when we realise that it derives exactly from Robert Brunne’s Handlyng Synne, written almost a century earlier.23 What proportion of late medieval English households included retirees at any one time is unknown. Existing figures must underrepresent the scale of the practice, since they comprise only cases where a formal contract survives and have been gleaned only from manorial records. We know that comparable agreements were made in gentry families. In 1492 Richard Methwold of Langford, Norfolk, and his widowed mother, Joan, drew up an agreement with William Berdewell, Esquire, for Richard’s marriage to William’s daughter Amy. One of its provisions was that Richard was to “borde” Joan and “her ij maydens” for “as longe as it shall please the same Joan.” In return, Joan granted the couple a cash annuity and the gift of eight hundred sheep, six hundred to be delivered on the marriage day and the remainder in three years time “if [the] same Rychard & Amy be of good demeanyng & lovyng disposission unto the same Johanne.”24 Since the survival of age-care contracts among the gentry is haphazard, an unknown number of other such arrangements may have been recorded. We

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cannot tell in how many further cases an unwritten understanding was reached between older and younger generations. The casual mention of Joan’s two “maydens” highlights the third, and most significant, characteristic of late medieval households: the common presence of servants unrelated by blood to other household members. Surveying Poll Tax records from 170 places in Lincolnshire, Northumberland, Oxfordshire, Rutland, and Shropshire led Smith to conclude that something over 8 percent of recorded taxpayers were servants, and that “it was normal for a fifth to one third of urban households to contain servants; and this from Poll Tax records which may have under-represented servants drastically.”25 It is true that not all servants lived under their employer’s roof; Caroline Barron found one wealthy Worcester householder who had three live-in “famuli,” but also another “famulus” living in a separate household in the neighborhood.26 Yet the evidence clearly suggests the prevalence of live-in servants, generally young and unmarried.27 Wealthy households could include a great number of dependents. Sir John Fastolf’s domestic account roll for the year 1431–32 specifically records the expenses of the “famulie d[omini] . . . continue exist. in hospiciis,” listing at least twenty-three names of attendants and servants at three social levels—“generosi,” “vadletti,” and “garcii,” both male and female.28 Such large aggregations cannot have been common, but they existed also in the upper echelons of urban society. The household enumeration at Coventry in 1523 noted two households containing fourteen and sixteen servants respectively.29 At slightly lower social levels, households of urban guild families were consistently swelled by teenage apprentices (mostly boys), learning their trade in the house of the master or mistress, as well as by household servants (mainly female). In London, for instance, 457 master goldsmiths in 1349–1410 took in a minimum of 1,120 apprentices. Though half housed only one, more than one-fifth took four or more. One master accepted sixteen apprentices during his working life. Since the average length of apprenticeship was about ten years, conglomerations of four to five apprentices per household were not impossible.30 Resident servants totaled almost a quarter of the recorded population of Coventry in 1523; 39.4 percent of the 1,302 households contained servants, of whom 60.7 percent lived in groups of more than two servants.31 Servants were employed even by the rural peasantry, though predictably in the village elite. In Kibworth Harcourt manor court rolls, references to “servants” appeared from 1358 onwards, generally attached to the most prosperous families.32 Ages of late medieval English servants apparently clustered from the

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mid-teens to the mid-twenties.33 Many late medieval English households, therefore, must have seen their own teenagers depart the home for service elsewhere, while simultaneously they and many others included at least one young man or woman as a resident, though transitory, member.34 As a corollary, in some towns the ratio of dependent children to servants was extremely small; the Worcester Poll Tax list of 1377 records 159 servants, but only seven children over the age of fourteen, among its household residents.35 Yet not all live-in servants were young transients on their way to a marriage and household of their own. The Poll Tax returns for Kibworth Harcourt specify a different class of servants—apparently adult dependents, including the aged parents, siblings, and married or unmarried children of the household heads.36 Some of these cases may represent unrecorded instances of retirement contracts where the elderly poor pledged their labor in return for board.37 These three factors greatly expand the range of relationships within which domestic violence might occur, and hence the range of people among whom violence should alert the attention of researchers. Close affective bonds sometimes tied masters and mistresses and their servants together (it was relatively common for gentry and urban wills to record grateful bequests to their attendants),38 yet the power of the household head over live-in servants and apprentices could easily be misused. Hanawalt found several records of apparently oppressive and violent behavior toward apprentices.39 But servants might also be related, or might form relationships, friendly or otherwise, with other members of the household.40 The cautionary tale in The Book of the Knight of the Tower against a maidservant who counseled and aided her mistress to commit adultery may witness more to male fears than to realities, but collusion of servants and other household members against the male head was clearly possible.41 Furthermore, fellow servants might form relationships among themselves, either antagonistic or affectionate, for which, nevertheless, the master of the household was responsible.42 Indeed the legal term “mainpast” categorized the servant for whose behavior the household head was answerable.43 In the multiplex web of relationships between household heads, conjugal partners, children, stepchildren, elderly parents or dependents, servants (either related or not), and other non-kin, outbreaks of “domestic” violence are not likely to be easily recovered or unproblematically categorized, especially since the term “violence” is itself uncommonly slippery. As I have argued at length elsewhere, not only do different cultures produce radically differing categories of “violent” and “nonviolent” actions, but within

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each culture the terms are heavily value laden.44 Since bringing a case to court necessitated some value judgment on the part of plaintiffs or jurors as to what sorts of behavior constituted actionable trespass or felony, the meanings attributed to violence (and particularly violence within the household) have a direct bearing on the numbers and types of cases which will appear in the central court records. What then were the distinguishing features of violence as it was conceptualized in fifteenth-century England, especially in relation to the household? The short answer is that late medieval English people perceived violence as both an instrument and a sign of good social order. From the highest hierarchy of heaven to the smallest independent sociopolitical unit (the household), violence was normatively thought to be rightly exercised in the maintenance of divinely instituted order. Conversely, the right (or wrong) exercise of violence might display to onlookers whether social order was being rightly maintained. As regards the divine exercise of violence, the juxtaposition of God’s mercy and his instant and terrible justice clearly caused no conceptual discomfort in fifteenth-century minds. Sermons, moral literature, vernacular poetry, and personal reflections assumed that God’s care for humankind involved the use of direct and effective violence, to punish the wicked, protect the righteous, and inform and persuade the wavering. Such exemplary chastisement could take place in any sociopolitical context, but was regularly represented as occurring within a domestic circle. John Mirk, recycling stories from the Legenda Aurea in his festial sermons, encouraged priests to edify their congregations with the tale of the son who, about to be executed on a false charge of rape forwarded by his own mother, appealed to St. Andrew. The saint laid the matter before the Almighty, whose promptly administered thunderbolt “brant the modyr to colys yn syght of all men . . . savet the man fro . . . deth, and turnet the justyce and all the pepull to the faythe of Crist.”45 In Mirk’s sermons and miracle plays, audiences could hear the story of the doubting midwife Salome, who tested Mary’s physical virginity after the birth of Jesus. Her investigating hand was instantly withered, a summary lesson which produced her conversion and subsequent miraculous restoration by the infant Christ.46 Mirk’s near contemporary the chevalier de La Tour Landry, in two particularly distressing exempla, recorded God’s casual slaughter of whole families of children, merely to bring their parents to repentance.47 Divine power to exercise a just violence was delegated to earthly rulers. Kings and knights, for example, were not merely allowed but obliged to

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use their swords in the cause of public order. As the 1401 poem called “What Profits a Kingdom” put it: “Eche kyng is sworn to governaunce, / To governe goddis puple in right / Eche kyng bereth swerd of goddis vengeaunce / To felle goddis foon in fight / And so doth everons honest knyght / To bereth the ordre as it wes.”48 Violence, then, was an inevitable concomitant of good governance, a power carefully provided by a God who knew, only too well, the limits of human response to less drastic persuasion. As the author of Dives and Pauper explained, “mychil folc is worthi to deyyn & wil nout stondyn to the lawe of pes, therfor God hat ordeynyd . . . the lawe of swerd & of chivalrye to bryngn hem to pes with the swerd that wil nout obeyyn to the pes by the lawe of charite & of resoun.”49 Kings and knights and judges, therefore, were acting only for the good of the community when they slaughtered rebels, arrested wrongdoers, and condemned felons to death.50 Subjects, on the other hand, were less likely to be justified in taking violent action, particularly against their superiors. The author of Dives and Pauper, so sure that knights, princes, and judges could kill with impunity in support of social order, anathematized the unjust violence of rebellious subjects thus: “they sparyn neyther here owyn kyng ne her buschopys, no dignyte, non ordre, no stat, no degre, but indifferently slen as hem lykyth.”51 Women, too, were in general barred from performing right violence; Joan of Arc, compared to Hector and Achilles for her knightly prowess by Christine de Pisan,52 was condemned as a “wicche” and heretic not only by English but by some French writers, partly on the basis of her unnatural military prowess.53 Violence, then, functioned not only as a mechanism for maintaining order but also as a means by which superiors demarcated their place in the social hierarchy, partly by demonstrating their right to exercise force against those subordinate to them by either social class or gender. This nexus between violence and sociopolitical order is crucial to an understanding of domestic violence, because the household was seen as a microcosm and exemplar of social organization. Late medieval political thinkers repeated Aristotle’s theory that the most fundamental form of independent political association was the heterosexual union (to produce offspring) in the context of the household (where master, wife, and servants formed a unit of government and labor to help sustain the good life).54 The household, to medieval Aristotelians, was the starting point for an ascending hierarchy of political associations, each in turn self-sufficiently providing more and more aspects of the good life. A group of

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households became a village, while villages united to form the highest and best kind of polity, the city or kingdom.55 The household, though not identical to the higher forms of polity, nevertheless retained its essential political characteristics. As a microcosm of the state, it comprised a group of people teleologically united (for the good of the whole group), but divided as to their tasks and functions. The duty of the male household head was to govern, ensuring that other members carried out their various duties in respectful obedience to their leader. This construct was not confined to the works of learned political theorists. John Paston I may never have read Aristotle when in 1464–65 his adult son John left home without parental permission. Nevertheless, his formal letter of censure to his wife and principal servants conveyed his paternal disapproval in uncannily Aristotelian fashion, directly invoking the links between governance, household, and the disciplined activity of different members for the common good: “remembir yow in any howsold, felaship, or company that will be of good rewle, purvyauns must be had that every persone of it be helpyng and fortheryng aftir his discrecion and powyre.”56 Augustinian thinkers in late medieval England reached similar conclusions by a different route, positing the existence of an eternal and universal hierarchy, created by God from the beginning and disturbed only by humanity’s disobedience at the Fall. Within this scheme, the proper gender order of the primal conjugal pair, Adam and Eve, was symbolic—and indeed productive—of the whole. The harmonious prelapsarian state of benevolent leadership by the husband and loving submission of the wife turned into (potentially) domestic tyranny and rebellious subjection after the Fall, both reflecting and producing a similar disobedience and disturbance of order at all levels of the cosmos.57 The object of earthly rulers and households, therefore, became to recreate, as far as possible, the likeness of Edenic ordering. Sir John Fortescue’s Just Judge eloquently evokes the “chain of . . . order” which “binds in most harmonious concord” all created beings from angels to worms in nicely calculated gradations. Within the household, this organizing principle ensured that women were “created for the help of man” and should accept their domestic subordination. Women’s proper conjugal obedience, however, could produce a semblance of the prelapsarian domestic group, where wives would exercise benevolent authority over other dependents. “[A] mother governs her son, a matron her house, and an industrious wife the household of her husband,” wrote Fortescue.58 Not surprisingly, in view of these assumptions, households at all levels of society appear in fifteenth-century literature as sites for the mainte-

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nance and enacting of social and quasi-political order. Heal argues that the ritualized gift-giving in great households realized and reinforced ideal (and apparently Augustinian) concepts of household relationships—noble largesse matching grateful obedience.59 Riddy shows how the fifteenthcentury poem “How the Goodwife Taught Her Daughter” constructed an image of domesticity as a particularly well-ordered bourgeois space, within which a respectable urban woman might distinguish herself from both upper-class ladies and immoral strumpets. The text itself, though written in the voice of a home-centered mother, is, she argues convincingly, the product of a paternalistic clerical discourse seeking to impose, from outside the household, a notional order on the many adolescent females who left their homes to work as servants in the relatively unsupervised urban environment.60 Hanawalt detects, in the advice literature of the fifteenth century, anxieties about misruled adolescents which surfaced in sets of instructions and moral tales on how servants and apprentices were to behave in the well-governed household. The two versions of the “Childe of Bristowe” narrative enjoined apprentices to perfect filial obedience both to their real fathers and to the masters in whose households they lived like sons.61 In Hugh Rhodes’s and John Russell’s books of nurture, the household was literally where young men learned their place, in relation to a father/master who closely resembled the ruler of a polity. As Hanawalt remarks, Russell’s introduction explicitly contrasts the ungoverned forest (where the author-figure meets a young man in need of both instruction and a master) and the household, where the youth may learn to become a productive member of society.62 In the ideal household, children or servants were taught proper social behavior, such as to avoid dressing above their status, to seek good company, to practice acceptable table manners, to eschew sin (sexual license, swearing, lying, and fighting), and to be diligent for the greater good of the household.63 At all times, children and servants were to practice deference to their superiors. “When that the parents come in syght, / doe to them reverence” and “if the mayster speake to thee / take thy cap in thy hand” were two of Rhodes’s admonitions.64 Significantly, the terms of political office were often applied to the relationships of household head and dependents. According to Rhodes, heads of households should “teache and governe children in learning and good manners.”65 “Stans Puer ad Mensam” and John Russell’s “The Boke of Nurture” both enjoin their readers to seemly behavior before their “soverayne” (i.e., master).66 In regard to parents, the author of Dives and Pauper urges everyone to “servyn hem that begetyn hym as his lordis.”67 Subverting the interests and marital authority of the household head was

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hence tantamount to treason against one’s ruler: “ye . . . have be to me traitresse” says the lord in The Book of the Knight of the Tower to his maidservant who encourages her mistress to commit adultery, while Chaucer sums up the squire in the Merchant’s Tale who plans to seduce his master’s young wife as “servant traytour.”68 Here, literary conceit exactly matched legal fact. In late medieval English law a wife who slew her husband, or a servant his or her master, was subject to the punishment for treason.69 Since households were viewed as microcosms of greater polities, and since violence (rightly exercised) was both the guarantee and the marker of political and social order, it is hardly surprising that to fifteenth-century thinkers violence was not merely incidental to domestic life. On the contrary, it appeared integral to the well-governed household. As God delegated to kings and knights power in the state to exercise salutary violence, so in the household responsibility devolved to the (male) household head, who was obliged, as the ruling superior, to administer any necessary correction to his subordinates. Dives and Pauper explicitly voiced this integration of households into the cosmic system of rule and punishment: “the offys of teching & chastysyng longyth . . . to every governour aftir his name & his degre, to the pore man governynge his pore houshold, to the riche man governynge his mene, to the housebond governynge his wif, to the fadir & the moodir governynge her childryn, to the iustice governynge his contre, to the kyng governynge his peple.”70 Children were to be beaten, at school and at home, to impress on their malleable natures the ways of reason and rectitude.71 “Better hit were to bete an honderd tyme . . . children than to curse them ones,” advised de La Tour Landry.72 The master of an apprentice, Hanawalt concluded, “had a duty, as did a father, to chastise his apprentice for wrongdoing.”73 In The Book of the Knight of the Tower a series of cases of adulterous, disobedient, or quarrelsome wives are resolved by violent punishments, the mere hearing of which was supposed to produce in female readers submission and good behavior to their household heads. One husband, justly (the author implies) exasperated because his wife would “stryve” with him in public, “smote [his wife] with his fyste to the Erthe and smote her with his foote on the vysage so that he brake her nose by whiche she was ever after disfygured.” Other husbands dealt out “a buffet,” broken legs, immurement, and death by stabbing.74 In the tale of the knight whose adulterous wife was encouraged by her maidservant, the knight acts explicitly as just judge toward the “traitresse” servant—“therefore I juge and gyve sentence that the hood and the neck be

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bothe cutte to geder.” The maid’s punishment—decapitation—mimicked the execution of noble traitors to the king.75 Nor was the perceived obligation of the household head to judge and chastise his dependents confined to literature. In 1478 Richard Cely, a wool merchant, was confronted with an allegation that his wife had insulted one Thomas Blakham. Cely evidently felt that the accusation jeopardized his appearance of household authority. Like a justice with a suspected felon, he submitted his wife to “sharp examynacion,” subsequently assuring his correspondent that he had found no evidence of the alleged insult, but that had the accusation proved true, “Y wold have corrected her that she shuld have remembred it duryng her lyf.”76 According to contemporary views, not only the character of household dependents but the status of the household head, the maintenance of the household, and the foundations of public order and civil society could depend on the ability of the household head to exercise right violence when necessary. John Heywood’s “A Mery Play Betwene Johan Johan the Husbande, Tib His Wife, and Sir Johan the Preest” opens with the husband vacillating as to whether to beat his errant wife. He cannot make up his mind to do so, whereupon the audience in quick succession is shown that his wife cuckolds him with the priest, orders him around, deprives him of his dinner, exacts his deference both to her and to his sexual rival, and finally, in direct contravention of household order, proposes to usurp his office of chastisement: “Re[a]ch me my distaf, or my clipping-she[a]rys! I shall make the blood ronne about his e[a]rys.”77 The corrupting effects of missing, or misapplied, corporal punishment were portrayed as spreading beyond the domestic sphere to the whole political system of which the household was an exemplar. De La Tour Landry recounts the story of a king’s daughter whose unlicensed love for one of his subjects initiated disastrous civil war. The kingdom was apparently saved from destruction only when the king successfully reasserted his paternal authority and had his disturbing daughter “hewen in smal pyeces.”78 Similarly, the author of Dives and Pauper glossed the Deuteronomic injunction to parents to deliver rebellious sons for communal stoning thus: “For whan yong folc waxyn rebel to fadir & moodir . . . but they ben chastysyd & withstondyn in the begynnynge, thei schul schendyn the comounte of the peple be roberye & morde & manslaute, be colligaciouns & wyckyd companyys & makyn rebellion & rysyge ayens her souereyns & so ben cause of distruccion of the lond, of the cite & of the comounte.”79 This picture of the intertwined discourses of violence, political order,

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and household relationships is derived largely from literature, rather than from any evidence of social practice. How can we tell the extent to which surviving writings of moralists and tale-tellers actually represented community sentiment or behavior? It is at this point that even the silence of the legal records may have some value. If the dominant discursive constructions of domesticity and violence were as I have represented them, how often, and in what ways, would domestic violence appear in the law? In the first place, as Emma Hawkes explains in the next essay in this collection, in common law there was, predictably, no category of domestic violence as such. A society that regarded many forms of domestic violence, such as the chastisement of subordinates by their superiors, as essentially beneficial, both for the recipients and for society in general, would be hardly likely to encode legal remedies for it. The inevitable result was that if victims of domestic violence, failing to internalize the values which allowed their punishment, attempted to seek redress or resolution, they would have had either to put their complaints in a form suitable for the courts’ determination or to pursue extralegal options. Within the common law, the most likely avenues would be a writ of trespass vi et armis alleging assault, in King’s Bench, or a jury indictment, or arrest on suspicion of felony, in Gaol Delivery.80 But in neither of these procedures was it the business of the court to determine the relationships between victims and perpetrators of violence, and juries were not asked to decide whether domestic violence had occurred, but only whether the action complained of had taken place and, if so, whether it was a trespass (punishable by fine) or a felony (punishable by death). In other words, unless those involved in legal action—the plaintiffs, defendants, juries, and justices—were particularly concerned to elucidate some feature of domestic violence, such violence is unlikely to be recorded in the common-law courts. In the circumstances, it was hardly likely that common-law officials would be keen to pursue reported cases of domestic violence—or, if such a case ever reached a verdict, that juries would be ready to convict. Such considerations probably also deterred victims of domestic violence from undertaking the lengthy and expensive process of taking an action in the common-law courts.81 Certainly in the few recorded cases where some domestic violence may have occurred, the main motive for bringing the charges seems to have been neither protection of dependents nor punishment of violence. Such objectives were not in fact achieved by bringing the case to law. In 1450, for instance, a letter to John Paston reported that Henry Halman, a yeoman supporter of the Pastons, had been fined at a

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sitting of the court of the provost of Eton, apparently presided over by another Norfolk yeoman called Francis Costard, because Halman “chasticed a servante of hes . . . and drow blod on hym.” But other letters suggest that Costard’s judgment was part of a preexisting dispute with Halman. Furthermore, the ruling was overturned by the provost himself, who “gaf Frances a mocke and asked hym if a man myth not betyn hes owyn wyfe,” thus neatly restating the concept that domestic punishment was not actionable.82 Had there been no quarrel between the masters, the assault on the servant—which no one denied—would, it seems, have gone unchallenged and unrecorded. In such circumstances, the fact that any reference at all exists to it suggests the likelihood that heavy domestic punishment was relatively common. A more straightforward example is that of John Hothom, who in Michaelmas term 1438 sued out a writ of trespass (assault) against John Lyoun, a Suffolk dyer. Hothom claimed that the “assault” consisted in the fact that, while he was an apprentice, Lyoun had forced him to carry such heavy loads that his back had become permanently bent, and his life was despaired of.83 This sounds, at least, like a serious instance of abuse of an apprentice by his master. Yet of more than 4,700 cases appearing in King’s Bench and Gaol Delivery in 1422–42, it is the only one to allege ill treatment of an apprentice, which hardly suggests that many of the population regarded the common-law courts as an appropriate forum to debate domestic violence.84 Indeed, we may question whether even the plaintiff’s main objective was to achieve the punishment of a domestic abuser. In common with some 93.4 percent of trespass cases alleging violence in King’s Bench in this period, the Hothom case never produced either a defendant or a verdict, let alone a legal remedy for the plaintiff.85 Either Hothom and his father were astoundingly naive in supposing that the common-law courts could help them, or they never supposed that going to law would produce a settlement of their case, and used the King’s Bench case only to put pressure on their opponent to achieve an out-of-court settlement.86 In short, I argue, the absence of cases of domestic violence in the common-law records cannot be read to signify a low level of domestic violence in the community. Rather, it may reasonably be taken as an indication that, as the literature suggests, ordinary people did not consider domestic violence to be an actionable social problem. It was, apparently, viewed as normatively justifiable. Contemporaries evidently thought that in instances where justified punishment had got out of hand, either no remedy was

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appropriate, or a remedy should be sought through more informal means of negotiation. The existence of the latter assumption derives some support from the fortuitous survival of a Norwich tale of extralegal settlement in a case of wife beating. In 1439, it seems, Joan Mayster could no longer stand the long-term violence to which her husband Henry, a prominent merchant, had subjected her. He was said to have beaten her on arms, back, and sides so severely that the blood flowed “to her ankles.” Henry’s ill treatment of his wife—or possibly the continual “dissension and discord” between them—was evidently of concern to his fellow merchants. Perhaps they, like the writers of plays and moral tracts, feared that an unstable household might presage universal social disruption. The mayor, the coroner, and one of the sheriffs took it upon themselves to intercede between the warring couple, and achieved (they said) an interim settlement whereby Joan was to be permitted to take her goods and go to the household of Richard Ayfeld, apparently her son by a previous marriage. The arbitrators were hoping ultimately to achieve a “maturionem concordiam” between the couple. The important feature of the case, from our point of view, is that no one acted as if they considered domestic violence itself actionable. We know of the events not because Henry was accused of assault but because in 1440 he himself launched a case in King’s Bench accusing Ayfeld of abducting his wife and stealing his goods. Henry’s violence was thus never presented as wrong per se. It emerged only in Ayfeld’s lawyer’s defense, which described Henry’s actions as excessive rather than intrinsically reprehensible—he had “enormiter” beaten his wife. The leaders of the Norwich merchant community, though they may have wished to protect Joan from lasting injury, clearly had no doubt that the correct action in such cases was to produce, without recourse to the common law, a household with an acceptably moderate level of discipline.87 Only one major form of domestic violence was unequivocally unacceptable, in both canon and common law. Household superiors who killed their subordinates in the course of disciplining them were, according to tradition, guilty of felony, since it was their responsibility to keep their discipline within reasonable bounds.88 It follows, then, that the only cases in which we might reasonably expect domestic violence to be normatively subject to inspection in the common-law courts are those of homicide. Here the legal procedures could test whether household superiors were really guilty of the felony of exercising excessive violence, or, in certain cases, could punish those household subordinates who had so far forgotten their due obedience as to kill their household superiors.

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In scanning the records for such cases, we should certainly extend our investigations to include violence within stepfamilies or among three coresident generations or between servants and their masters and mistresses, since all these relationships could normatively be found within the late medieval household. A search for homicides among these relationships produces thirteen indisputable cases. While these hardly constitute a statistically significant data set, they do at least witness to the clear distinction that contemporaries saw between nonactionable and actionable cases of domestic violence. A study of the characteristics and outcomes of the cases may throw some light on what sorts of domestic violence were thought most questionable and punishable in fifteenth-century England. The figure of thirteen cases of domestic homicide represents 7.9 percent of the 165 homicides tried in King’s Bench and Gaol Delivery in 1422–42. Yet two characteristics of these cases immediately attract attention. First, a glance at the relationships involved suggests that in the law courts, conjugal and service relationships that led to homicide were of prime concern. In seven of the cases the victim’s spouse was named as either the murderer or accessory to the murder.89 In four others the murder took place between servants and masters/mistresses.90 In two of these eleven instances, conjugal and service relationships were alleged to have intertwined, producing homicide. Walter Andrewe, it was said, had been murdered at the urging of his wife by his former servant Thomas Tatenell; similarly, Katherine Jones was accused of conniving with a servant in another household to procure the murder of her husband William. The anxieties of the hierarchical/patriarchal household infusing late medieval political and moral literature seem equally patent in these comparatively taciturn legal narratives. Yet this is not the whole story; the remaining two allegations hint at the variety of domestic relationships which could give rise to lethal tension. In one, a son and daughter-in-law were accused of killing the father’s wife; in the other, a maidservant was accused of conniving at the killing of a man who may have been her fellow servant, or merely a visitor to her master’s household.91 The other intriguing feature of these cases is their astonishingly high adverse verdict rate compared to all homicide cases from the same period. Of the 61 homicide cases tried in King’s Bench in 1422–42, only two resulted in the death sentence—one of which was for Margery Andrewe’s collusion in the murder of her husband Walter.92 Gaol Delivery was clearly seen to be the more appropriate forum for punishing murderers: in 36.5 percent of the 104 cases tried there a guilty verdict was brought. But even

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this brisk disposal of the guilty pales before the fact that of the thirteen cases of domestic violence arising in these two courts, at least seven—a good half, and maybe more—resulted in a death sentence or outlawry for at least one of the accused.93 Apparently paradoxically, domestic homicides were rarely brought to court, but once there, they were pursued with extreme rigor. The reasons for this anomalous severity are not entirely clear. Though it is possible that the perpetrators of domestic murders were more easily detected or arrested than in cases where the victim and the murderer were strangers, leading to a high rate of appearance, it is also true that the state of late medieval forensic medicine easily allowed possible domestic homicide to be ascribed to accident or illness. For example, both John Joket and John and Joan Richer were acquitted of murder because, said the juries, their alleged victims had actually died of long-standing illnesses.94 It might be thought that fifteenth-century juries were overanxious to convict household subordinates who had murdered their superiors. Yet juries were apparently almost equally willing to convict in cases where a superior killed a subordinate as in cases where a servant or wife killed a husband/master. The husbands (domestic lords) of Alice Attehall, Alice Clerk, and Isabella Aleyn were all convicted of wife-murder and ordered to be hanged, as were the guilty wives and servants of Walter Andrewe, William Jones, and Richer Lound. Though John Joket was freed on a charge of wife-murder, so were John and Joan Richer on the charge of murdering their (step)mother/mother-in-law. And in the case of the death of William Jones, though the parson’s servant John London was hanged for his murder, his wife Katherine was later acquitted of any complicity in the deed.95 Mere status difference between the victim and the killer did not, therefore, necessarily predispose the court to one verdict or another. The courts were not lenient to domestic killers, whatever their status relative to the slain. Perhaps it is truer to say that the court cases on domestic homicide speak to us more subtly of the significance of violence within the late medieval household. As I have tried to suggest above, the fact that right violence was held to be a necessary component of cosmic, political, social, and household order inevitably led fifteenth-century people to examine almost obsessively the order of justice and violence in their own households—setting out its paradigms in sermons, political tracts, and letters, and multiplying exempla of good and bad household governance in genres as diverse as conduct literature, moral tracts, and plays. Was correct discipline being observed? Even more important, was violence not just being

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exercised but being exercised rightly? The direct rebellion of subordinate members—that reversal of order in which wife beat husband, or servant attacked master or mistress—was an open and unacceptable challenge to good domestic rule. Yet undue or unjust violence by the household head had a more subtle, and perhaps therefore more horrifying, power to destabilize the system. For if household “governors” acted beyond reason and without justice, as arbitrary, self-willed, and homicidal tyrants, neither they nor their form of rule could be legitimated. The maintenance of the legitimacy of domestic authority demanded that not only rebellious subordinates but overtyrannical masters be brought to justice, examined, and if necessary punished. In no other way could the system maintain its moral authority. Thus, while excessive household violence was not often recognized as a subject for legal examination, sheriffs, court officials, and juries seem to have been unanimous that, when brought to their attention, it demanded the closest scrutiny, and often the utmost rigor, of the law. This is not to say that the cases in King’s Bench and Gaol Delivery in East Anglia in 1422–42 never speak directly of the values with which contemporaries surrounded domestic violence. Gaol Delivery records narrate every piteous detail of Richer Lound’s death—how his servant Martin Budde accepted twenty shillings from his master’s enemy to “treacherously betray” (proditorie tradidisset) him; how Lound heard the plotters in his hall at night and got up, barefoot, and came out calling for Martin, whom he believed to be his faithful servant; how he was viciously struck down, Martin standing by waiting only to help Fayrcok bury the body secretly, six feet deep in Lound’s own garden; and how, finally, he would never have been killed had Martin acted “ut fidelis serviens.”96 Clearly the verdict was meant to censure, in the strongest terms, the treacherous disobedience of homicidal servants. Obviously, too, this is the sort of evidence with which we, as historians, are most comfortable—explicit, evocative, eloquent, and difficult to misread. Argument from absence of evidence is most often treated, rightly, with great caution. Yet in the case of late medieval domestic violence, I suggest, the silences and lacunae of the common-law courts, when read in conjunction with other discourses of the period, can be as revealing as vivid narrative. We may never be able to reckon, with absolute accuracy, the actual incidence in late medieval England of domestic violence that stopped short of murder (that is, whether it was quantitatively normal or not), but the combination of its absence in the common-law courts with its pervasive presence in other discourses tells us plainly that it was thought to be

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justifiable and normative. The superficially puzzling assumption that infanticide was for the church, rather than the state, to punish makes more logical sense once we recognize that the justification for domestic violence depended on articulations of political and social order which were of little relevance to young children. The unusual severity of the courts in punishing domestic homicide (whoever committed the crime) is never, to my knowledge, explained in fifteenth-century texts. It seems comprehensible only if we view it as part of a wider, unstated project—to protect the rights and justification of household heads to rule their domestic polities with well-moderated and just violence. In this context, the law courts themselves formed a stage in the hierarchy of just polities. As household heads examined and disciplined their domestic subjects, so the main role of the king’s courts in the field of domestic violence was to examine those cases where right household order had radically broken down, either through the murderous rebellion of inferiors or through the excessive and unjust violence of superiors, and themselves to inflict, if necessary, exemplary punishment on the disturbers of domestic, and hence political and cosmic, order.

Notes 1. P.J.P. Goldberg, “Marriage, Migration and Servanthood: The York Cause Paper Evidence,” in Woman Is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society, c. 1200–1500 (Stroud, Glos.: Alan Sutton, 1992), p. 1. 2. See the three cases below, nn. 82, 83, and 87. 3. PRO JUST 3 212 m 11 (Gaol Delivery records). All archival references are from the Public Record Office unless otherwise stated, such as in note 24. 4. Barbara A. Kellum, “Infanticide in England in the Later Middle Ages,” History of Childhood Quarterly 1 (1973–74): 367–88; Richard H. Helmholz, “Infanticide in the Province of Canterbury During the Fifteenth Century,” History of Childhood Quarterly 2 (1974–75): 379–90. 5. PRO JUST 3 210 m 19d. 6. PRO KB 27 676 Rm 4r. 7. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “domestic” 2. 8. Some of the most significant contributions to this wide-ranging debate are J. Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,” in Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography, ed. D. V. Glass and D.E.C. Eversley (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), pp. 101–43; Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations: Essays in Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Richard M. Smith, “Kin and Neighbours in a Thirteenth-Century Suffolk

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Community,” Journal of Family History 4 (1979): 219–56; Michael Verdon, “The Stem Family: Toward a General Theory,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10 (1979): 87–105; Zvi Razi, Life, Marriage, and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society, and Demography in Halesowen, 1270–1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); J. Hajnal, “Two Kinds of Preindustrial Household Formation System,” Population and Development Review 8 (1982): 449–94; Richard Wall, Jean Robin, and Peter Laslett, eds., Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Lloyd Bonfield, Richard M. Smith, and Keith Wrightson, eds., The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Goldberg, Woman Is a Worthy Wight; L. R. Poos, A Rural Society After the Black Death: Essex, 1350–1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 9. Peter Laslett, “Family and Household as Work Group and Kin Group: Areas of Traditional Europe Compared,” in Wall, Robin, and Laslett, Family Forms, pp. 513– 63, esp. pp. 513–16; Poos, A Rural Society, p. 86. 10. See nn. 54–79 below. 11. See Poos, A Rural Society, pt. 4, for some useful comments on clues to household formation gained from these records, and app. A, for an analysis of Poll Tax methods in 1377–81; Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 12. See the examples of Poll Tax enumeration given in Poos, A Rural Society, p. 295, and E. Powell, The Rising in East Anglia in 1381 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896), app. 1. 13. Hajnal, “Preindustrial Household Formation,” conveniently summed up in Richard M. Smith, “Geographical Diversity in the Resort to Marriage in Late Medieval Europe: Work, Reputation and Unmarried Females in the Household Formation Systems of Northern and Southern Europe,” in Goldberg, Woman Is a Worthy Wight, pp. 16–59, esp. p. 26. Debates about the relevance of Hajnal’s findings to late medieval England are systematically handled in Poos, A Rural Society, pp. 145–58 and chap. 9. 14. In Western Australia, for instance, following legislation in 1975 which made irretrievable marriage breakdown the only grounds for divorce, the crude divorce rate per thousand persons rose from 1.0 in 1971 to a steady 2.7 to 3.0 in the period 1985–95. Simultaneously, the marriage rate per thousand dropped from 8.9 in 1971 to 6.0 in 1995. In 1995 nearly half as many divorces were registered as marriages— 5,040 against 10,404. Western Australian Year Book 1997, no. 33 (Perth: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Western Australian Office, 1997). 15. Laslett, Family Life, chap. 4, esp. pp. 162, 166. See also Vivien Brodsky, “Widows in Late Elizabethan London: Remarriage, Economic Opportunity and Family Orientations,” in Bonfield, Smith, and Wrightson, The World We Have Gained, esp.

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pp. 129–40; in 45 percent of all marriages by licence in 1598–1619, at least one partner had been previously married. Case studies show several instances of complex stepfamilies. 16. Marjorie K. McIntosh notes that, even for an Elizabethan village where both marriage and birth registers and a full parish communicant list were available, not all stepchildren could be certainly identified. “Servants in the Household Unit in an Elizabethan English Community,” Journal of Family History 9 (1984): 3–23, esp. p. 13. 17. A larger percentage of women probably appears because married women rarely appear in business records (such as lawsuits, enfeoffments, or deeds) without their husbands, whereas married men are often named alone. It was thus possible for a man to leave no record of his marriage. See also Carole Rawcliffe, Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (Stroud, Glos.: Alan Sutton, 1995), p. 5, which gives figures on 1,992 members of the House of Commons, 1386–1421: nearly 24 percent married more than once, and 27 percent of their wives had been widowed once or more. 18. G. C. Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941), esp. pp. 144–48, 152–55; Richard M. Smith, “The Manorial Court and the Elderly Tenant in Late Medieval England,” in Life, Death, and the Elderly: Historical Perspectives, ed. Margaret Pelling and Richard M. Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 39–61; Elaine Clark, “Some Aspects of Social Security in Medieval England,” Journal of Family History 7 (1982): 307–20. 19. Smith, “Manorial Court,” p. 52; Clark, “Some Aspects of Social Security,” p. 314. 20. Poos, A Rural Society, pp. 86–88; Clark, “Some Aspects of Social Security,” p. 310. 21. Smith, “Manorial Court,” p. 48. Of the later kin-contracts, those with daughters and sons-in-law had become marginally the majority. Clark’s figures agree: after 1350, fewer than one-quarter of contracts involved parents and children (“Some Aspects of Social Security,” p. 315). 22. Clark, “Some Aspects of Social Security,” pp. 313–14. The unfortunate dependent had apparently died by 1418, when the land was sold yet again. 23. Dives and Pauper, ed. Priscilla Heath Barnum, 2 vols. (vol. 1 in two parts), EETS 1.1 and 1.2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1976, 1980), vol. 1, pp. 310–12. See also F. J. Furnivall, ed., Robert of Brunne’s “Handlyng Synne,” EETS (London: Kegan Paul, 1901), pp. 40–42. Since Handlyng Synne was itself a translation of an Anglo-French Manuel des Pechiez, the story had a long literary pedigree. 24. Norwich and Norfolk Record Office, Petre Estate Box 12, no. 15. 25. Richard M. Smith, “Geographical Diversity,” pp. 16–59, esp. pp. 35–36; Poos, A Rural Society, app. A. See also P.J.P. Goldberg, “‘For Better, For Worse’: Marriage and Economic Opportunity for Women in Town and Country,” in Woman Is a Worthy Wight, pp. 108–25, and “Female Labour, Service and Marriage in Northern Towns During the Later Middle Ages,” Northern History 22 (1986): 21.

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26. C. M. Barron, “The Fourteenth-Century Poll Tax Returns for Worcester,” Midland History 16 (1989): 14. 27. Poos, A Rural Society, chap. 9. 28. Magdalen College Archives, Fastolf Papers, no. 8. Some names may have disappeared in holes in the manuscript. I owe thanks to Gerald Harriss, who allowed me access to these papers. 29. Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City, p. 205; see also app. 3b, table 37. 30. T. F. Reddaway, The Early History of the Goldsmith’s Company, 1327–1509 (London: Edward Arnold, 1975), pp. 90–91, 80. See also Barbara A. Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 137. 31. Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City, pp. 204–5; see also app. 3, tables 36, 37. 32. Cicely Howell, Land, Family and Inheritance in Transition: Kibworth Harcourt, 1280–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 176–77. 33. Goldberg, “Marriage, Migration, and Servanthood,” pp. 4–5; Poos, A Rural Society, pp. 188–95. 34. One to two years seems to have been the commonly accepted length of any one period of service; a minimum of one year’s contract was laid down in the Statute of Labourers of 1351; see Goldberg, “Marriage, Migration, and Servanthood,” p. 6; Statutes of the Realm, vol. 1, p. 311. 35. Barron, “Poll Tax Returns,” p. 14; see also Goldberg, “‘For Better, For Worse,’” p. 109. 36. Howell, Land, Family and Inheritance, p. 177, and table 22, pp. 217–22. 37. At least one example of such an arrangement has been found by Clark in late medieval Norfolk; see “Some Aspects of Social Security,” p. 312. 38. In a sample of 306 gentlemen’s wills from fifteenth-century Norfolk, more than 27 percent left bequests to male servants and more than 15 percent to female servants. In a corresponding set of 63 gentlewomen’s wills, 6.7 percent left bequests to male servants, and 18.3 percent to female servants. Philippa Maddern, “Friends of the Dead: Executors, Wills and Family Strategy in Fifteenth-Century Norfolk,” in Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England: Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss, ed. Rowena Archer and Simon Walker (London: Hambledon Press, 1995), pp. 166–67. 39. Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London, pp. 160–61; see her chapter 10 for the various relationships of servants and their masters or mistresses. 40. Goldberg, “Female Labour, Service and Marriage,” p. 22, notes a pair of sisters serving in a fifteenth-century urban household and surveys other kin and friendship connections between servants and householders. 41. Geoffroy de La Tour Landry, The Book of the Knight of the Tower: Translated by William Caxton, ed. M. Y. Offord, EETS (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 81. 42. Goldberg found instances in the York cause papers of employers either sanctioning or enforcing marriages between servants; see “‘For Better, For Worse,’” p. 118.

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43. Poos, A Rural Society, p. 201 and, for an excellent survey of terms relating to servanthood, pp. 184–87. 44. Philippa Maddern, Violence and Social Order: East Anglia, 1422–1442 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 9–14 and chap. 3. 45. John Mirk, Festial, pt. 1, ed. Theodor Erbe, EETS extra series 96 (London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1905), p. 7; see also Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), vol. 1, p. 15. 46. “The Nativity,” from the Ludus Coventriae, in English Mystery Plays: A Selection, ed. Peter Happé (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), pp. 239–42. Cf. de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, p. 38; Mirk, Festial, p. 23. 47. de La Tour Landry, Knight of the Tower, pp. 109, 113. 48. MS Digby 102, in Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. Rossell Hope Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 43. 49. Dives and Pauper, 1.2, p. 54. 50. Maddern, Violence and Social Order, pp. 79–89; the quote comes from Dives and Pauper, 1.2, pp. 36–37. 51. Dives and Pauper, 1.1, pp. 208–9. 52. Angus Kennedy and Kenneth Varty, eds., “Christine de Pisan’s ‘Ditie de Jehanne D’Arc,’” Nottingham Medieval Studies 19 (1975): 53–76, esp. p. 70. 53. Stephanie Tarbin, “‘Pucelle de Dieu’ or ‘Wicche of Fraunce’: Fifteenth-Century Perceptions of Joan of Arc,” in Venus and Mars: Engendering Love and War in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Andrew Lynch and Philippa Maddern (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 1993), pp. 119–46. 54. Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair, rev. T. J. Saunders (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), bk. 1, chap. 2. 55. See, e.g., St. Thomas Aquinas, “On Kingship,” in St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics, ed. and trans. Paul E. Sigmund (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), pp. 16–17. 56. Norman Davis, ed., Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971–76), vol. 1, pp. 127–28. 57. See esp. St. Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, vol. 4, bk. 13; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Latin Text and English Translation, ed. Thomas Gilby et al., 61 vols. (London: Blackfriars in conjunction with Eyre and Spottiswood, 1964–81), vol. 13, Man Made to God’s Image, pp. 122–35. 58. Sir John Fortescue, De Natura Legis Naturae, trans. C. Fortescue (1869; rpt. New York: Garland, 1980), pp. 322–23, 251–52, 257, 259, 277–78. 59. Felicity Heal, “Reciprocity and Exchange in the Late Medieval Household,” in Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), passim. 60. Felicity Riddy, “Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text,” Speculum 71 (1996): 66–86.

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61. Barbara A. Hanawalt, “‘The Childe of Bristowe’ and the Making of MiddleClass Adolescence,” in Hanawalt and Wallace, Bodies and Disciplines. 62. Ibid., 164–65; John Russell, “The Boke of Nurture,” in The Babees Book, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS (1908; rpt. New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), pp. 118–19. 63. E.g., Furnivall, The Babees Book, pp. 19–25, 26–30, 64–65, 78–79; for specific advice on working for the master’s business (i.e., the common good), see pp. 31, 74, 82, 85. 64. Ibid., pp. 73, 75; in the same section Rhodes also says that one should stand if addressed by one’s master while at the table. 65. Hugh Rhodes, “The Boke of Nurture,” in Furnivall, The Babees Book, p. 63 (emphasis mine). 66. Furnivall, The Babees Book, pp. 27, 135; see also a similar usage by Rhodes, pp. 79, 81. 67. Dives and Pauper, 1.1, p. 322. 68. de La Tour Landry, Knight of the Tower, p. 81; Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, ed. A. C. Cawley (London: Everyman, 1975), p. 272. 69. Maddern, Violence and Social Order, p. 104. 70. Dives and Pauper, 1.1, p. 328. 71. See Maddern, Violence and Social Order, pp. 105–6; see esp. Dives and Pauper, 1.1., pp. 325–26. 72. de La Tour Landry, Knight of the Tower, p. 114; his reasoning is that beating will produce amendment of life, whereas cursing may simply deliver children to the devil. 73. Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London, p. 135; in “The Childe of Bristowe,” p. 167, she quotes an early-fourteenth-century case in which an apprentice goldsmith who had attacked his mistress was condemned by the “worshipful men” of the goldsmiths’ company to a severe beating in the Goldsmiths’ Hall. 74. de La Tour Landry, Knight of the Tower, pp. 35, 36, 90, 93, 94. 75. Ibid., p. 81. 76. Alison Hanham, ed., The Cely Letters, 1472–1488, EETS 273 (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 15. 77. David Bevington, ed., Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), pp. 970–89, quote from p. 988. The play was printed in 1533. 78. Knight of the Tower, p. 82. 79. Dives and Pauper, 1.1, p. 308; cf. Deut. 21:18–21. 80. In 1422–42, 94.6 percent of East Anglian cases on the plea side, King’s Bench, came by way of writ, the overwhelming majority of which were writs of trespass vi et armis. On the Rex side, 77.4 percent of cases came by writ or by indictment before JPs in the peace session. In East Anglian gaol deliveries, 88.7 percent of cases came either by indictment before justices of the peace or by arrest on suspicion. See Maddern, Violence and Social Order, pp. 31, 50. 81. Ibid., pp. 31–53, 67–69, on the procedures of getting a case either to King’s Bench or to Gaol Delivery.

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82. Paston Letters, vol. 2, p. 59; see also pp. 33 and 40 for traces of the preexisting dispute. 83. KB 27 710m 7d. 84. See Maddern, Violence and Social Order, tables on pp. 28 and 50, for number of cases. 85. Ibid., table 4.1 (p. 112), for the percentage of cases alleging violence but producing no result. 86. Ibid., pp. 36–38, for the apparently frequent use of this technique. 87. KB 27 717 m 78d; KB 27 718 m 87d. 88. See Maddern, Violence and Social Order, pp. 99–100. 89. The alleged murders were Alice Attehall by her husband William, 1439 (JUST 3 220/2 m <6> S1; JUST 3 210 m 31r); Beatrice Mogyll by her husband William, 1441 (JUST 3 212 m 5d); Emma Joket by her husband John, 1436 (KB 9 227/1 m 37; KB 27 698 Rm 7r; JUST 3 209 m 15r); Alice Clerk by her husband William, 1426 (JUST 3 219/3 <26> S; JUST 3 219/3 <28> /S1); Walter Andrewe by Thomas Tatenell with the assent of his wife Margery, 1431 (KB 9 1048 m 3r; KB 27 690 Rm 3r); Isabella Aleyn by her husband Robert, 1425 (JUST 3 206 m 3r; JUST 3 50/12 m 31d); William Jones with the assent of his wife Katherine, 1427 (JUST 3 219/3 <3> S1; JUST 3 206 m 26r; JUST 3 207 m 23). 90. The alleged murders were Katherine Stevynton by her master and mistress Thomas and Cristiana Ordewey, 1441 (KB 9 237 m 47; KB 9 238 m 46); Richer Lound by Richard Fayrcok in conspiracy with Lound’s servant Martin Budde, 1429 (JUST 3 220/1 pt ii <77> S7; JUST 3 209 m 3r); John Medelyn by his servant Emma Mollyng, 1438 (JUST 3 210 m 19d); William Clerk by his master Richard Underwood, 1440 (JUST 3 212 m 9r). 91. Juliana, wife of John Richer the elder, allegedly killed in her house in 1422 by John Richer the son (there is no evidence to show whether Juliana was John’s mother or stepmother) and his wife Joan (JUST 3 201 m 13d; JUST 3 218/6 m 19); John Skotte, allegedly slain by John Sclaterer at the house of John Bold of Stony Stratford with the assent of Alice Ward, servant of John Bold, 1426 (JUST 3 219/3 m <3> S1; JUST 3 206 m 26r). 92. See n. 89 above and Maddern, Violence and Social Order, p. 46n.43. 93. The figure is a minimum because in three cases (the alleged murders of Stevynton, Mogyll, and Clerk) no record of a verdict survives. 94. JUST 3 201 m 13d; KB 27 698 Rm 7r. 95. JUST 3 206 m 26r; JUST 3 207 m 23. 96. JUST 3 220/1, part ii <77> S7.

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2

The “Reasonable” Laws of Domestic Violence in Late Medieval England Emma Hawkes God hath given to the man greater wit, bigger strength, and more courage to compell the woman to obey by reason or force, and to the woman bewtie, faire countenaunce, and sweete wordes to make the man to obey her againe for love. Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, circa 1560

Any understanding of the experience of domestic violence in the Middle Ages must be grounded in a legal framework, but it is not enough to reiterate legal theory on wife beating, because such violence was not expressly prohibited at common law or canon law. Instead, the beliefs that underpinned the laws and the practices of the courts must be examined, so that the assumptions behind the legal limitation—rather than prohibition—of domestic violence may be understood. Throughout this work I will consider the beliefs that supported the law, the what-goes-without-saying of late medieval domestic violence laws.1 In particular, I am concerned with the ways in which the legal concept of reason supported acts of wife beating and excluded women from the successful prosecution of such acts in the courts. Domestic violence was not actionable at common or canon law in the Middle Ages, but that is not to say that cases of violence within the home never appeared in the courts. Wife beating was “dispunishable” at common law, but not entirely unregulated.2 The concept of reason was called on to proscribe excessive violence; legal theorists and judges argued that men were supposed to beat their wives only to a moderate and reasonable degree. In this way, the concept of reason was central to legal understandings of domestic violence. The links between reason, violence, and the law were articulated even more explicitly in the ecclesiastical courts. Wife

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beating was not prohibited in itself, but marriages forced on women through violence could be annulled, and women attacked by their husbands could petition for separations on the grounds of cruelty. The records of these cases highlight the connections between gender, reason, domestic violence, and the law in the medieval period. Reason worked in the laws of late medieval domestic violence on three levels: common and canon law used a rhetoric of rationality; in both jurisdictions husbands could legally discipline their wives so long as they did it “reasonably” to correct their faults; and men were seen as inherently reasonable, while women were seen as unreasonable and easily swayed. I begin by examining the ways reason was defined in common law and used to justify violence between men and women, and then address the importance of rationality in the ecclesiastical courts and consider the limited legal options open to women beaten by their husbands. After these laws governing domestic violence are set in the context of late medieval beliefs about male rationality and female irrationality, I conclude by indicating some of the links among these categories. Reason, the quality of mental power, was celebrated in medieval moral and legal thought as the “largist book of authorite that ever god made” and the “grettist doctour that is [except] god him silf,”3 and in everyday common-law decisions judges consciously used the language of reason.4 In the Year Books judges claimed that “ley est resoun” [the law is reason], “ley est fond’ de reason, et ceo que est reason est ley” [the law is founded of reason, and that which is reason is law], and “[d]onq comon reason, qui est comon ley” [common reason . . . is common law].5 With some accuracy Chief Justice Fineux commented in 1507, “riens deins le monde parle si reasonablement come le ley parle” [nothing in the world speaks as reasonably as the law speaks].6 Reason, which was associated with large and general ideas of moral rightness, was used “as a source of authority in argument and as the justifying basis for judicial decisions.”7 For late medieval legal theorists, ratio was the means by which natural law, and therefore justice, was known.8 “The fyrste grounde of the lawe of Englande is the lawe of reason” [primum fundamentum legis anglie est lex rationis], declared Christopher St. Germain in 1523.9 Lex humana sive positiva est lex rationem ex lege rationis et divina deducta in consequentiis probabilibus necessariisque ad finem debitum humane nature. . . . Lex quoque humana sic describitur lex humana est signum verum humana traditione & auctoritate immediate constitutum notificatiuum recte rationis volentis rationalem

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creaturam ad aliquid agendum vel non agendum propter finem aliquem rationi consonum spiritulem vel temporalem obligare.10 [The law of man the whiche sometyme is called the lawe posityve is deryvyed by reason as a thinge whiche is necessaryly & probably folowyng of the lawe of reason & the lawe of god, for the due end of human nature. . . . Human law is defined as a true sign constituted immediately by human tradition and authority, shewing that right reason wills to bind a rational creature to do (or not to do) something, with a view to some spiritual or temporal end consonant with reason.] That is to say, St. Germain claimed that positive law, or enacted law, was derived from the laws of nature by the application of reason, an argument that called on mainstream late medieval scholastic definitions of law and reason. Some acts of domestic violence smoothly fitted into this framework of rationality. Under common law, husbands could beat their wives as long as they did so in order to correct the faults of the women and without excessive violence,11 and acts of violence that stopped before murder were rarely prosecuted.12 A late Elizabethan legal treatise that was sympathetic to English women’s poor legal position nevertheless noted that part of the “office” of husbands was to correct their wives in a “reasonable” manner:13 “But it seemeth to be very true, that there is some kind of castigation which Law permits a husband to use . . . and that he shall neither doe nor procure to be done to her . . . any bodily damage, otherwise than appertaines to the office of a husband for lawful and reasonable correction.”14 This idea of just chastisement was based on the belief that disobedience resulted from a lack of reason or discipline15 and that patriarchs were uniquely endowed with reason which allowed them to perceive and to correct appropriately the errors of those under their power.16 Although the common-law tradition assumed that wives, like children, were deficient in reason and sometimes required chastising, the authority of husbands was subject to some restraints. While husbands could correct the behavior of their subordinates, they were supposed to do so within the limits of reason. Exactly what the boundaries of such acceptable behavior were varied over time, but certainly they included those instances when women were killed or seriously injured.17 As the following medieval writ noted, men were expected to act “lawfully” and “reasonably” when beating their wives: “He shall treat and govern the aforesaid A well and de-

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cently, and shall not inflict nor cause to be inflicted any injury upon the aforesaid A except in so far as he may lawfully and reasonably do so in accordance with the right of a husband to correct and chastise his wife.”18 The theoretical limits to male authority were derived from the same principal of reason that established the right of men to beat their wives. These assumptions about reason underpinned both the legal acceptance of wife beating and the definition of the admissible limits of this power. The common-law regulation of acts of violence within marriages derived, at least in part, from medieval constructions of masculinity, femininity, and reason. Reason was conceived of as an essentially male characteristic. In De Natura Legis Naturae, John Fortescue, the fifteenth-century legal theorist, pointed out that “the first man, who was a rational mind” was put in dominion over creation and over women.19 In the course of the debate around which De Natura Legis Naturae was structured, Fortescue consistently argued that women were inherently irrational creatures. He cited two authorities on this issue, both of whom argued that women lacked rationality or had, at most, an inferior form of rationality to that of men: “St. Augustine also . . . says, that the woman ought to be subject to the man, as the flesh is to the spirit; . . . in which sentences the pre-eminence of the man over the woman seems to be compared to the pre-eminence of the reasoning faculties over the sensual appetites, or of the soul over the flesh. But the Master himself, not only in the said Book, but also on St. Paul’s 1st Epistle to the Corinthians, chap. xi., when treating of this subject, seems to compare the higher part of the reason to man, and the lower part to woman.”20 Fortescue seems to have accepted that woman was a “mulcted male” [mas occasionatus], as “deficient in her physical framework” as “in her reason.”21 These ideas about the differing abilities of men and women supported the hierarchical model of marriage, in which husbands ruled and wives, children, and servants were subordinates. St. Thomas Aquinas concluded that women’s innate inferior ability to reason meant that they inevitably should be subordinated to men:22 Est autem alia subjectio oeconomica vel civilis, secundum quam praesidens utitur subjectis ad eorum utilitatem et bonum. Et est a subjectio fuisset etiam ante peccatum. Defuisset enim bonum ordinis in humana multitudine si quidam per alios sapientiores gubernati non fuissent. Et sic ex tali subjectione naturaliter femina subjecta est viro, quia naturaliter in homine magis abundat discretio rationis.23

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[But the other kind of subjection is domestic or civil, in which the ruler manages his subjects for their advantage and benefit. And this sort of subjection would have obtained even before sin. For the human group would have lacked the benefit of order had some of its members not been governed by others who were wiser. Such is the subjection in which woman is by nature subordinate to man, because the power of rational discernment is by nature stronger in man.] This conception of the rational nature of men and the less rational and inferior nature of women legitimated acts of violence within families. Husbands were given the authority to correct their inherently frivolous and injudicious wives. Wife beating was, unless excessive, accepted in late medieval common law. Reason, an implicitly masculine quality, was similarly central to the practices of ecclesiastical courts and to canon laws concerned with acts of violence within families. St. Thomas Aquinas cautioned that law was distinct from reason but nonetheless noted that true law was derived through reason:24 Quod ad legem pertinet praecipere et prohibere. Sed imperare est rationis, ut supra habitum est. Ergo lex est aliquid rationis. . . . Dicendum quod lex quaedam regula est et mensura actuum, secundum quam inducitur aliquis ad agendum vel ab agendo retrahitur. . . . Regula autem et mensura humanorum actuum est ratio. [The burden of law is to prescribe or prohibit. Such executive commanding issues from the reason. . . . Consequently law is a function of reason. . . . Law is a kind of direction or measure to human activity through which a person is led to do something or held back. . . . Now direction and measure come to human acts from reason.]25 Medieval writers accepted that valid laws were deduced through the use of reason and that reason was, or ought to be, the foundation of ecclesiastical law. When these beliefs were applied to violence within families, it followed that the heads of the families ought to have the authority to beat their subordinates and that, as in the common-law courts, domestic violence was not a recognized category of actionable behavior in itself.26 But because the ecclesiastical courts had jurisdiction over marital matters, accusations of domestic violence could be brought indirectly to ecclesiastical courts in two ways: some women petitioned for annulments on the

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grounds that they had been coerced into the marriage, while other women asked for separations (divorces a mensa et thoro) because their husbands treated them with cruelty. Late medieval ecclesiastical courts were sometimes presented with bills that asked for annulments on the grounds that the partners had been coerced into marriage through “force and fear.”27 In these circumstances the judges made explicit comments on the degree of force that a man might impose on his prospective wife, or a parent on a daughter, before her marriage. The comparative rarity of these cases may have stemmed from the medieval assumption that the degree of violence needed to make people acquiesce to unwanted marriages was quite high. In a 1422 case in York an annulment was granted when the woman claimed she had been beaten with staves to get her consent to the marriage, whereas in 1373 an annulment was refused at Canterbury when the woman’s family merely brought staves to the ceremony marking the making of the marriage contract. The court accepted the family’s contention that the staves were to be used simply to get over ditches along the way, suggesting that actual physical violence had to be proved if petitions of this sort were to succeed.28 Reason was used to define whether excessive force had been applied.29 The standard of the “constant man” was invoked to make judicial decisions in cases where it was argued that force and fear had been used to coerce people into marriage. An Elizabethan treatise concerned with female legal statuses noted that “also Matrimonie holdeth not when it is extorted by force, or by such a feare as may cadere in constantem virum, quia matrimonia debent esse libera.”30 The hypothetical constant man was taken to be the ideal legal agent, a reasonable man who would not be moved by frivolous concerns. In cases where force and fear were alleged, if the constant man would have been swayed by the degree of force used to arrange the marriage, then it was accepted that the marriage was invalid. The constant man concept illustrates the centrality of reason to the workings of canon law, and it is not entirely incidental that the constant man, able to make fine distinctions about degrees of violence, was conceptualized as a man. Similar assumptions underpinned the petitions for divorces a mensa et thoro that argued that excessive abuse was taking place in established marriages. These arrangements were separations that did not technically end the marriages; the couple was allowed to live separately, but neither could remarry. From around 1300 saevitia, or cruelty, had been accepted as

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grounds for separation under canon law, and, despite the difficulties some petitioners had in convincing the judges that they should be separated, this was a fairly common means of gaining divorces a mensa et thoro.31 Unsurprisingly, such petitions were more likely to be brought by women than men, and late medieval beliefs about the authority of husbands and the irrationality of wives were used to assess these accusations. One such petition for a divorce a mensa et thoro on the grounds of saevitia was lodged in the archiepiscopal court at York in 1395–96 by Margaret Neffield.32 This dispute centered on attempts to define cruelty and “reasonable” chastisement, with Margaret alleging that her husband, Thomas, had behaved immoderately and Thomas maintaining that he had acted licitly and honestly. The case predates the predominantly fifteenthand sixteenth-century legal treatises I have called on, but I have nonetheless decided to use it, partly because cases so well documented were rare and partly because the range of legal treatises that I have examined covered several centuries yet showed remarkably similar assumptions. Margaret claimed that her husband beat her and that on one occasion he had broken her arm. She further claimed that he had once attacked her with a knife and that she had been forced to run into the street to escape him. While this seems excessive to modern readers, Thomas did not deny these incidents, but instead argued that what he had done was justified by the need to castigate Margaret. He asserted that he had acted reasonably, honestly (“honesta”), and licitly (“licite”) for the limiting (“informando”) of Margaret’s faults. Margaret produced female witnesses to substantiate her claims, while Thomas had male witnesses to support him in court. Thomas’s witnesses agreed that he had beaten Margaret, but viewed his behavior as justified. For instance, John Soner of the parish of the Blessed Virgin Mary in York said that he saw Thomas hit Margaret because of her rebellion (“evisa rebellione”) and guilt and offense (“culpa et offensa”). Thomas’s stance was upheld by the ecclesiastical court, which decided that there was no cause for divorce. The court put the couple under a cautio to guarantee fair treatment and instructed them to live together as man and wife (“ad vir et uxor in thoro et mensa”). Further, the court offered explicit instructions on the nature of their continuing relationship, authorizing Thomas to beat his wife to correct her faults but not to do so immoderately or cruelly: “Thomas moderate debit Marg[aret]am rebelliem rationabilite ex cause licita et honesta debit castigando” [Thomas ought to chastise Margaret’s rebellions moderately, on reasonable ground, licitly and honestly]. He should not be cruel (“crudelis”) or commit excessive

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acts (“excessimi”), and Margaret was to behave submissively and modestly (“humilite modeste”). The 1395–96 decision in the Neffield case drew on the concept of reason. Thomas’s actions were held to be intended for reasonable chastisement; the court accepted that Thomas had acted to reduce Margaret’s errors (“ad erroribus reducendo”). Thomas was further seen to have acted in accordance with the ideal of the constant man (“rationabilite”). The rhetoric of reason was used to assess the behavior of the participants in this dispute and to support the judicial decision that minimized the harm done within the household and denied Margaret Neffield a divorce a mensa et thoro. This judicial decision can be set in the context of medieval beliefs about men, women, and reason. So, for instance, the decision in the Neffield case relied on similar beliefs to those outlined by Philippe of Navarre in the early thirteenth century. His work was one of the few medieval descriptions of the ages of man to differentiate between male and female life cycles, and he noted that men became more “resonables . . . fermes et estables . . . [e]n moyen age” [reasonable . . . firm and stable . . . in middle age],33 while women were not “si estable . . . comme . . . li home” [as stable as men].34 Likewise, Ptolemy of Lucca wrote that “just as women are deficient in their physical constitution, so also are they deficient in reason.”35 Again, John Trevisa’s translation of De Proprietatibus Rerum argued that “a man passith a womman in resoun, in scharpnes of wit and understondinge” and that consequently “a man passith a womman in auctorite and myght of sovereinte.”36 Such reasonable men were implicitly suitable for participation in legal activities. Women, being less intellectual and easily moved by unimportant concerns, were less likely to be seen to belong in the courts. The Mirror of Justice, a legal tract written under Edward II which circulated until the fifteenth century, stated that those who lacked the authority (“garant”) to act as judges included open lepers, idiots, lunatics, deafmutes, and women.37 Conspicuously absent from this list were healthy adult (rational) gentlemen. These men were implicitly held as the standard against which other (defective or irrational) legal subjects were to be compared. These beliefs about the inferiority and irrationality of women partly explained the weak legal position of medieval women, particularly married women. In common law, the married couple was but one legal person and that one person was the husband.38 Because married women were “femes

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couvertes,” they could not own any chattels during the period of coverture.39 As soon as they married, their personal property became the absolute property of their husbands, who could dispose of it as they willed during their lives. The wives’ lands were also under the control of the husbands for the time of the marriage, although the wives nominally had the power of veto over the sale of lands they brought to the marriage. More important, in terms of domestic violence, women had only limited rights in the courts. The Mirror of Justice noted that in most cases a woman could not defend herself in court “like a man.”40 As a rule, “femes couvertes” could neither bring nor defend cases in common law without their “barons.” Married women were liable for criminal prosecution, but all other legal action had to include their husbands as colitigants. And married women could not sue their husbands at common law. As an anonymous Tudor legal authority wrote in The Lawes Resolution of Women’s Rights, “Every Feme Couvert is a sort of infant. . . . it is seldom, almost never that a married woman can have any action to use her wit only in her name: her husband is her stern, her prime mover, without whom she cannot do much at home, and less abroad. . . . It is a miracle that a wife should commit any suit without her husband.”41 It was, for the author of this legal treatise, unnatural and almost inconceivable that women should be independent legal actors. Women were alienated from the courts. Very few women petitioned the courts about marital abuse, but, of course, very few women were present in the courts of late medieval England in any capacity. Barbara Hanawalt suggests that between 1300 and 1348 only 10 percent of defendants at common law were women.42 That is to say, for every nine times a man defended a case in the courts, one woman did. They made up around 5 percent of litigants in King’s Bench and Common Pleas in 1479 and 1480, 6 percent in 1560.43 On the whole women were rarely considered legal agents. When John Aylmer was defending Elizabeth I against charges that she could not rule because she could not give criminal justice44—an argument first articulated by John Fortescue in the fifteenth century45—he qualified his defense by agreeing that she could not act “because a woma[n] is not learned in the law.”46 If even Elizabeth I, the most atypical of all Tudor women, was not exempt from these ideas about the biological inability of women to engage fruitfully with the law, it is not to be expected that there were many women bringing the particularly feminine charge of excessive violence within their marriages. Without seeking to impose modern conceptions of domestic violence, it is nevertheless reasonable to assume at a minimum that in late medieval

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times, as now, the accusations of wife beating brought to the courts did not represent the full amount of violence in the society. Consequently, estimates of domestic violence made from the legal records are underestimates.47 Indeed, the atypicality of the cases that did make it to the courts is indicated in research suggesting that such petitions about marital cruelty were fairly likely to succeed.48 It has been argued that, while wife beating was rarely prosecuted, the cases that did go to court were likely to be won by the plaintiffs, the injured women.49 It seems likely that these accusations of domestic violence registered in legal documents represent the most extreme sorts of violence and were thus more likely to be accepted in the courts (although this was not, of course, the experience of Margaret Neffield). Women were considered to be less rational, were rarely able to act in the courts, and were unlikely to bring accusations of domestic violence to either common-law or ecclesiastical courts. I have so far been distinguishing between the three strands of reason in the late medieval laws of domestic violence and exploring them separately; at this point I would like to examine the nexus among these systems of belief. I have considered the use of rationality in the common-law and ecclesiastical courts and argued that wife beating was supposed to be kept within the limits of reason. These beliefs, combined with the assumption that men were inherently rational and that women were naturally less rational, acted to disadvantage women seeking legal relief from violent husbands. I have suggested that these beliefs contributed to the alienation of women from the courts and that women had particular difficulty in presenting cases of domestic violence. These interactions of reason, the law, and domestic violence were linked parts of late medieval understandings of wife beating. The paired beliefs that men were “rational mind[s]” and that women were naturally not “sagacious like men” underwrote medieval legal thought.50 These constructions of masculinity and femininity were particularly important in accusations of excessive violence within marriages, since men were perceived as more able to judge degrees of violence and women as less able to discern the boundaries of reasonable chastisement. The belief that women were less reasonable than men meant that they were less able to call on the standard of the constant man. These assumptions worked in the law and in the courts to legitimate the chastising of women, to quiet women’s voices, and to devalue their ability to describe the limits of acceptable violence in late medieval society.

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On the other hand, men were systematically advantaged by these beliefs. The legal system prioritized men’s undertakings in the courts and supported their definitions of domestic violence. The idea of the constant man was a precursor of the reasonable man, a legal construct that is currently being critiqued by feminist legal scholars.51 The contemporary reasonable man is held to embody a moderate, mainstream person, but can be viewed as an essentially male identity. The medieval constant man was the embodiment of reason, was capable of fully engaging with the law, and was conceptualized as male. Men were likely to be viewed as credible and appropriate legal agents, whose rationality allowed them to govern and correct their subordinates and whose judgments about degrees of acceptable violence could be defended in the courts. The constant man was a gendered construct; he was undoubtedly male. Significantly, this legal fiction was used in the very nexus of violence and the law. The concept of the constant man came into play at the point where it was necessary to decide the boundaries of legitimate violence before the law. The assumptions that male perspectives on violence should be privileged and that men were able to judge the degree of violence necessary to chastise their wives were, in this sense, embedded in both common and canon law. Medieval laws covering domestic violence were underpinned by the idea of reason. The concept of reason was one of the central myths of the late medieval English legal system and, as Helena Kennedy has pointed out in her feminist analysis of contemporary British law, such myths tend to support the existing social order: “Myths are tent pegs which secure the status quo. In the law mythology operates almost as powerfully as legal precedent in inhibiting change.”52 The idea of reason constantly intersected with the laws covering domestic violence in the late medieval period. The belief that both common and canon law functioned rationally and that men were inherently more reasonable than women meant that men were more likely to be able to present themselves credibly in the courts. The belief that “constant” men were the most appropriate legal participants alienated women from the courts and reduced the probability that they would successfully petition for separations on grounds of cruelty. The assumption that men were more reasonable than women justified wife beating as a form of correction. The laws revealing domestic violence in late medieval England were, then, eminently “reasonable.”

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Notes 1. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), p. 11. 2. T. E., The Lawes Resolution of Womens Rights (1632; rpt., Amsterdam: Walter J. Johnson, 1979), p. 128. 3. Reginald Pecock, The Folower to the Donet, ed. Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock, EETS (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 9–10. 4. Norman Doe, Fundamental Authority in the Late Medieval English Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 108–31. 5. 18 and 19 Edward III (RS) 379; T 14 Henry VI, 19, 60 at 21; H 35 Henry VI, 52, 17 at 53, cited by Doe, Fundamental Authority, p. 112. 6. P 13 Henry VII, 22, 9 at 23, cited ibid. 7. Doe, Fundamental Authority, p. 108. 8. Ibid., pp. 108–31. 9. T.F.T. Plucknett and J. L. Barton, eds., St. German’s Doctor and Student (London: Selden Society 1974), p. 31. 10. Ibid., p. 27. 11. R. Emerson Dobash and Russell Dobash, Violence Against Wives: A Case Against the Patriarchy (New York: Free Press, 1979), p. 60; Susan Dwyer Amussen, “‘Being stirred to much unquietness’: Violence and Domestic Violence in Early Modern England,” Journal of Women’s History 6 (1994): 70. 12. The few common-law records that detail domestic violence usually describe the murder of a woman by her husband. In 1389 Nicholas Ryngeshale was indicted for having tied up his wife Agnes, suspended her over firewood by her feet, shoved a bundle of burning straw into her private parts, and burnt her, before wounding her with a knife so that she died. At the same session of the peace, John Brand, a turner, was accused of murdering his wife Katherine. Three years later Thomas Pullore was indicted for strangling his wife Agnes and was accused of hiding her body in a ditch (“corpus ipius Agn’ in quodam fossato et illud submersit”). Public Record Office, KB 9/5 (Michaelmas 1389), f. 22; KB 9/5 (Michaelmas 1389), f. 22; KB 9/44 (Michaelmas 1392), f. 58. 13. T. E.’s Lawes Resolution was probably written in the late Elizabethan era though not published until 1632. 14. T. E., Lawes Resolution, p. 128. 15. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth, 1988), p. 181. 16. Dobash and Dobash, Violence Against Wives, p. 46. 17. Amussen, “‘Being stirred,’” p. 78; A. McRae-Spenser, “Putting Women in Their Place: Social and Legal Attitudes Towards Violence in Marriage in Late Medieval England,” Ricardian: Journal of the Richard III Society 10 (1995): 191–92. 18. Reg. Brev. Orig., f. 89, cited by Eugene A. Hecker, A Short History of Women’s

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Rights from the Days of Augustus to the Present Time (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1910), pp. 124–25. 19. John Fortescue, De Natura Legis Naturae (New York: Garland Press, 1980), p. 270. 20. Ibid., p. 326. 21. Ibid., p. 257. 22. For a discussion of Aquinas’s association of reason with men, note the work of Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1984), pp. 33–37. 23. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. 13 (London: Blackfriars in association with Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), pp. 38–39 (1a 92.1). 24. The complexity of Aquinas’s conception of reason is addressed by R. J. Henle, ed. and trans., Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Treatise on Law (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), pp. 3–93. 25. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. 28 (London: Blackfriars in association with Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1966), pp. 4–7 (1a2ae, 90.1). 26. Cynthia Ho, “Spare the Rod, Spoil the Bride,” Medieval Feminist Newsletter 21 (1996): 19. 27. Richard H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 90–94; Andrew Finch, “Repulsa uxore sua: Marital Difficulties and Separation in the Later Middle Ages,” Continuity and Change 8 (1993): 11–17. 28. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation, pp. 92–93. 29. Ibid., p. 91. 30. T. E., Lawes Resolution, p. 59. 31. John M. Briggs, The Concept of Marital Cruelty (London: Athlone Press, 1962), p. 10; James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 455; Shannon McSheffrey, ed. and trans., Love and Marriage in Late Medieval London, (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1995), pp. 82– 83. 32. Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York, C. P. E 221 (1395–1396). 33. Philippe of Navarre, Les quatre âges de l’homme: traité moral de Philippe de Navarre, ed. Marcel de Fréville (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1888), p. 52. 34. Ibid., p. 49. 35. James M. Blythe, trans., On the Government of Rulers: De Regimine Principum: Ptolemy of Lucca, with portions attributed to Thomas Aquinas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 231. 36. John Trevisa, On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 307. 37. William Joseph Whittaker, ed., The Mirror of Justice (London: Selden Society, 1895), p. 44.

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38. William Holdsworth, A History of English Law, vol. 3 (1908; London: Methuen, 1942), pp. 520–33; J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History (London: Butterworths, 1971), pp. 258–62. 39. Ann J. Kettle, “‘My Wife Shall Have It’: Marriage and Property in the Wills and Testaments of Later Medieval England,” in Marriage and Property: Women and Marital Customs in History, ed. Elizabeth M. Craik (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1991), pp. 89–98; Caroline M. Barron, “The ‘Golden Age’ of Women in Medieval London,” in Medieval Women in Southern England (Reading, Berks.: University of Reading, 1989), pp. 35–38; Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 24–28. 40. Whittaker, Mirror of Justice, pp. 139–40. 41. T. E., Lawes Resolution, pp. 204–5. 42. Barbara A. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300– 1348 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 115–25. 43. Emma Hawkes, “Honour, Family and the Law in Late-Medieval Yorkshire” (Ph.D. diss., University of Western Australia, 1998); Erickson, Women and Property, p. 115. 44. S. B. Chrimes, English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), pp. 62–64. 45. “[N]ature has not made them sagacious like men. And for this reason they cannot act as judges, since of all things human the judicial function requires the most discernment. From a consideration of these things lawmakers have not suffered women to be judges, nor to hold a public magisterial office” (Fortescue, De Natura Legis Naturae, p. 259). 46. John Aylmer, An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trew Subiectes, agaynst the late blowne blast, concerninge the gouernmet of wemen . . . (1559; rpt., Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; New York: Da Capo Press, 1972). 47. Bernadette Dunn Sewell, “History of Abuse, Judicial and Legislative Responses to the Problem of Wife Beating,” Suffolk University Law Review 23 (1989): 983–88; Andrew Finch, “Women and Violence in the Later Middle Ages: The Evidence of the Officiality of Cerisy,” Continuity and Change 7 (1992): 31. 48. McRae-Spenser, “Putting Women in Their Place,” pp. 185–93. 49. Finch, “Women and Violence,” pp. 31–32. 50. Fortescue, De Natura Legis Naturae, pp. 259, 270. 51. Hilary Allen, “One Law for All Reasonable Persons?” International Journal of the Sociology of Law 16 (1988): 419–32; Ngaire Naffine, Law and the Sexes: Explorations in Feminist Jurisprudence (London: Allen and Unwin, 1990), pp. 100– 23. 52. Helena Kennedy, Eve Was Framed: Women and British Justice (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), p. 32.

The “Reasonable” Laws of Domestic Violence

Part Two

Fictional Histories Domestic Violence and Literary/Legal Texts

These violent delights have violent ends, And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, Which as they kiss consume. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

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Chaucer’s “Wife,” the Law, and the Middle English Breton Lays Eve Salisbury Now of my fifthe housbonde wol I telle. God lete his soule nevere come in helle! And yet was he to me the mooste shrewe; That feele I on my ribbes al by rewe, And evere shal unto myn endyng day. But in oure bed he was so fressh and gay, And therwithal so wel koude he me glose, Whan that he wolde han my bele chose; That thogh he hadde me bete on every bon, He koude wynne agayn my love anon. I trowe I loved hym best, for that he Was of his love daungerous to me. Wife of Bath’s Prologue

In what is perhaps the locus classicus of domestic violence in late medieval English literature, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath angrily rips three leaves out of her fifth husband’s Book of Wicked Wives and propels him into the hearth with a blow from her fist. In retaliation Jankyn hits her in the head, knocking her to the floor, where she subsequently feigns death. The domestic dispute is settled only when Jankyn promises Alisoun that it will never happen again and she “lovingly” acknowledges his apology with another blow to the cheek. In order to justify the interpersonal violence, and so keep him in her bed, Alisoun claims to be willing to ignore his frequent beatings “that feele I on my ribbes al by rewe . . . unto myn endyng day” (III (D), lines 506–7).1 In spite of—or perhaps because of—his “love daungerous,” she “loved hym best” of all her husbands. Were this a contemporary tale, Alisoun and Jankyn’s pattern of behavior might be considered symptomatic of a battering relationship legally defined in the

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United States as “battered women’s syndrome,” though here Alisoun is written to be as much the abuser as the abused. Domestic violence, as it is now recognized by U.S. family law, is the intentional physical, emotional, or sexual abuse of spouse, lover/partner, elderly parent, or child. Family law recognizes battered women’s syndrome (so named because women are more likely to be abused than men) as a three-stage cycle of violence and reconciliation in which the abuser grows tense and angry, explodes into violent aggression, and then becomes tender and apologetic.2 Both the abuser and the abused convince themselves that the abuse will never happen again, as Alisoun and Jankyn do in Chaucer’s account. Domestic violence was not legally defined in the Middle Ages because spouse abuse and the corporal punishment of children were accepted disciplinary practices reflecting “natural” social relations and normative behavior.3 The traditional nuclear family—a kinship formation emerging with clearer definition in the late medieval period—conferred upon the father-husband a domestic authority similar to that held by authoritative males in the public sphere, both ecclesiastical and secular. In what Philippa Maddern calls a “moral hierarchy of violence,” those at the top were authorized to render “just” punishment to subordinate members.4 Just as a king or an abbot or even a schoolmaster might authorize disciplinary measures for those under his aegis, a paterfamilias, because he legally governed his wife and children, could render discipline in any way he deemed fit. This would suggest that in crimes governed by secular law, such as homicide, the perpetrator would most likely be male.5 However, as documented cases of infanticide, abandonment, and orphanage indicate, women were as often blameworthy as men—or, as some cases suggest, simply presumed guilty.6 Whoever was to blame, or whatever were the social and economic anxieties contributing to familial violence, many children in the Middle Ages suffered the consequences and passed on what they learned to their own children.7 Contributing to the normalization of domestic violence was a body of literature endorsed by authors and poets conversant with the laws of late medieval England.8 That medieval poets often employed the language of the law in their poetry has long been recognized.9 In Chaucer’s work, legal discourses and fiction are often intertwined. Although probably not formally trained as a lawyer, Chaucer nonetheless acquired considerable knowledge of legal principles and terminology, which was subsequently enhanced by experience both in his official positions as customs officer and justice of the peace and in the course of personal litigation—including a charge of rape from

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which he was eventually released.10 Such engagements with the legal world brought some of the most notable lawyers of the time into his already wide-ranging social circle.11 The poet also had the opportunity to observe how legal cases were debated by students.12 According to Donald R. Howard, “the cases students tried or debated were often imaginary ones, and the way laws were understood was by applying them to hypothetical or fictional cases. . . . Such cases didn’t have to be true stories, they only had to present a problem, raise a question about the law, ultimately about justice and right.”13 Legal cases were imaginary constructs, in other words, to test how the laws might be applied and to sharpen the rhetorical skills of fledgling lawyers. In a similar way, many of the Canterbury Tales raise questions about the ambiguities and conflicts in a complicated legal justice system divided between and often contested by two primary spheres of jurisdiction—ecclesiastical and secular. Two of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are significant here not only for their relation to medieval jurisprudence but also for their relation to a group of poems sharing similar legal and marital themes. The Wife of Bath’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, two of the tales forming what G. L. Kittredge labeled the “marriage group” more than ninety years ago, belong to a group of English romances—Sir Orfeo, Sir Degaré, Emaré, Lay le Freine, Sir Gowther, Sir Launfal, and the Erle of Tolous—that claim kinship to Breton lay, a genre codified by Marie de France late in the twelfth century. Often considered a “sub-genre” of romance, Breton lays construct an otherworldly dimension of reality that could be entered at particular moments or under certain circumstances, enhancing their fairy-tale qualities.14 Despite the generic kinship to Marie’s renderings, however, many of the English lays differ in their emphasis. They are not courtly love fantasies—stories of arranged marriages and subsequent longing for happiness and fulfillment outside its bounds; rather, they are stories of lovers whose happy ending resides in marriage. But for all their terminal optimism, these poems contain stunning episodes of both domestic and public violence against women that raise questions about the late medieval concept of family values. More disturbing even than the presence of these violent acts is their implicit justification. Necessary to shape the hero’s or heroine’s moral character, to reclaim a lost heritage, to bring about the reunion of estranged family members, this species of violence seems an integral feature of domestic life, a prerequisite for family stability and social order. The violent episodes contained in these narratives—some of which bear an uncanny resemblance to narratives told in law courts—ad-

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dress legal issues current in late medieval England.15 Alisoun’s prologue, which describes a violent domestic scene, along with her tale, which deals with the adjudication of a rape case, renders her something of an authority on legal matters. In this sense Carolyn Dinshaw’s assertion that Alisoun is a literal text “that wants to disclose its hidden meaning”16 accrues additional significance. By verbally unveiling her bruised and battered body Alisoun discloses a heretofore hidden body of evidence; she indicts legislation that in theory claims to protect women while in practice it more often brutalizes them. Although domestic life is the subject addressed by the Wife of Bath, neither family stability nor social order are anywhere to be found in her prologue. We are encouraged to acknowledge this aggressive and forceful woman’s scandalous desire to be on top both socially and sexually; she rides her horse astride and wears the spurs of a knight on her shoes. Reminiscent of the widely circulated depiction of the young Phyllis mounted on the back of Aristotle, which was read as ridicule of the philosopher, Alisoun ridicules ecclesiastical authority with her frequent scriptural misprisions, citing the Samaritan woman, Solomon, and Abraham as precedents for multiple marriages and excerpts of Pauline doctrine as examples of how spouses should conduct a “proper” marriage. Her interpretation of how to succeed in negotiations of conjugal debt leads inevitably to the subject of her own brand of aggressive sexuality; she implies that she has previously “swinked” three elderly husbands to death, effectively using her body as the weapon by which she acquires her wealth. This implication, coupled with the intense interpersonal violence in her prologue, has alerted even scholars more inclined toward exegetical readings to suspect that an economic and social reading is in order. D. W. Robertson Jr. argues, for example, that the “mordre” that Alisoun accuses Jankyn of trying to commit when he hits her is linked to his desire for her property: “And for my land thus hastow mordred me?” (line 801).17 Other scholars have found her so aggressive and “realistic” a character in this way that she stands accused of murdering her fourth husband (as Jankyn’s accomplice), and possibly Jankyn himself.18 But if the Wife of Bath assaults her spouses, so too does she assault the very institution she claims to support by turning scriptural and canonical doctrines upside down. For some scholars, she usurps the position of the paterfamilias; her sexual practices—“recreation rather than procreation”—stand as an affront to a primary purpose of marriage in the eyes of the church.19 For others, she takes the position of preacher, preaching

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against domestic abuse. Andrew Galloway, for example, argues that Alisoun assumes the role that Januensis (Jacobus de Voragine) urged women to assume in order to quell the violent behavior of their husbands: “the Wife can be seen encouraging women to attack their husbands in precisely the manner that Januensis declares wives should.”20 If this is the position that Alisoun takes, then she provides an exemplum for the married women in Chaucer’s audience. Yet this is precisely the action that provokes a violent response from Jankyn; he is willing neither to listen to her homily on appropriate reading materials for husbands nor to tolerate her spontaneous editing of the book she finds so reprehensible. Are we to infer from Jankyn’s violent response that Alisoun “asked for it”? And what are we to make of the fairy tale this domineering and outspoken female character tells? Alisoun’s choice of story does not demonstrate a willful and pugnacious wife; it does not provide a challenge to the ecclesiastical model of marriage. Rather, it endorses that model and promotes the traditional medieval view of marital relations. As Elaine Tuttle Hansen suggests, the tale reveals “that underneath the tough skin of this savvy, satirical, pushy woman beats the heart of a good girl, a proper wife who not only enjoys being beaten up but who is also an incurable romantic.”21 Alisoun’s tale begins with the rape of a maiden and ends with the transformation of a loathly old hag into a nubile beauty who gains sovereignty in marriage with the rapist knight. Many scholars acknowledge the psychology of the tale and its fulfillment of the Wife’s romantic desires to be young, beautiful, and happily married to an acquiescent and obedient husband.22 But it is important to point out that at the end of the tale the nubile wife’s sovereignty is withdrawn immediately after the transformation: “And she obeyed him in everything / That might do him plesance or liking” (lines 1255–56). Just as the domestic violence of Alisoun’s prologue ends in a truce and a declaration of love, her tale ends in an affirmation of the ecclesiastical model of marriage. If the ambiguities of language are at issue in the testing of legal cases, then the term with which Alisoun describes Jankyn’s love—“daungerous”—addresses an equally ambiguous relation between courtly love and marriage. When found in medieval narratives, the term “daunger” is most often linked to the allegorical character in the Roman de la Rose by scholars who understand it as a representation of the concept of resistance, a principle of courtly love. As Danger this character opposes the attempts of the lover to attain the rose at the center of the heavily guarded hortus conclusus. In the performance of his assigned duties he is neither passive

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nor coy, neither civil nor disciplined. Described as “crude and wild in appearance,” Danger carries a thorny mace with which he “aim[s] such dangerous blows all around him that no shield could have held together without being smashed to bits . . . blows so dangerous that anyone who stood up against him within range of the mace would have surrendered.”23 There is no question about the injury that Danger causes to those who oppose his aggressive mode of resistance. As John V. Fleming reminds us, “‘danger’ is connected with the Latin word dominium meaning ‘power’ or ‘control’ and Danger does, up to a point, exercise control over the rose.”24 Chaucer’s description of Danger in his translation of the Roman de la Rose also underscores the character’s contentious and cruel nature, threatening enough to frighten the zealous Lover: “he was hidous, / And to meward contrarious, / That which thrugh his cruelte / Was in poynt to meygned [have maimed] me” (lines 3353–56). Nonetheless, “daunger” is so strongly associated with courtly love and deliberate game playing by the coy beloved that The Riverside Chaucer glosses the word as “hard to get.” Despite some resistance among scholars to considering alternate meanings for “daunger,” however, Alisoun’s use of the term in her prologue is consistent with fourteenth-century usage. As Hansen points out, “daungerous” appears in the Middle English Dictionary as “domineering,” “overbearing,” “fraught with danger,” “hazardous,” “risky.” Alisoun’s ascription of an aggressive, threatening, and ultimately injurious behavior to Jankyn is thus in keeping with what might be described as a surprisingly active mode of resistance. However it is construed, the term “daunger” with all it represents provides the locus of contention between courtly love and marriage, the point of Alisoun’s disputation. As if she were participating in one of the legal debates witnessed by Chaucer, Alisoun argues a case that demonstrates just how risky marital relations could be, particularly when negotiations of the conjugal debt might be at stake. The games of courtly love cannot be played successfully in marriage. Marriage in the late Middle Ages was understood to be a consensual union between two people who promised to fulfill the obligations such union entailed.25 To render a marriage “legal” required a simple vow in either the present or the future tense which was usually, but not always, followed by consummation; sanctification by a priest was also desirable but not necessary.26 Central to the obligations of this marital arrangement was payment of the conjugal debt, which required each spouse to fulfill the other’s sexual demands even when the other was unwilling or disinclined. Because canon law supported traditional views of the subordinate status of

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women in relation to men and endorsed placing women “sub virga et potestate,” literally “under the rod and in the power” of their husbands, husbands had authority over their wives in domestic matters. Chaucer’s Parson agrees: “for mariage is figured bitwixe Crist and holy chirche. And that oother is for a man is heved of a womman; algate, by ordinaunce it sholde be so” (X(I), lines 921–22). Just as Christ is head of the church, so too, in the institution of marriage, is the man head and master of the woman. Theologians like Thomas Aquinas helped set the precedent for this marital hierarchy: “husband and wife are not equal in marriage, since the nobler role in the conjugal act is due to the man and he rules his wife in domestic matters.”27 Because man is legally designated the superior being, the husband is accorded dominion over his wife; the nobler role in the conjugal act, which also implied the dominant position in sexual intercourse, referred to the man’s lack of modesty in asking for sex. But Aquinas makes an important distinction in discussions of conjugal debt by describing how those rights were to be negotiated: “the wife is not bound to pay the debitum unless asked; the husband, however, must render it at any sign from his wife.”28 Like the canonists of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Aquinas maintained that husbands and wives had equal rights to marital sex, but wives should be extended the courtesy of being asked first. Furthermore, the edict for a husband to render the debt “at any sign from his wife” suggests that she could gain some measure of control over the relationship if she so desired. Thus, as James F. Cotter suggests, Alisoun “is scrupulously law-abiding” when she makes sexual demands on her husbands.29 To all appearances, then, Alisoun applies canon law legitimately when she uses ecclesiastical interpretations of conjugal debt to gain sovereignty in her marriages. The fact of the matter is, according to the canonists, women were less likely than men to demand their sexual rights in marriage.30 Neither were canonists willing to accept marital rape as a legitimate claim against a spouse, since the couple’s sexual relation was already validated by law. According to James A. Brundage, “If the couple were legally married to each other, then consent to intercourse had already been given and a wife could not refuse to have relations with her husband (or the husband with his wife) [even if] he took her away from home and was forceful in his approach.”31 The dilemma of an actual medieval wife was to find some measure of virtue in paying the conjugal debt against her will.32 As Chaucer’s Parson so aptly puts it: “She hath merite of chastite that

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yeldeth to hire housbonde the dette of hir body, ye, though it be agayn hir likynge and the lust of hire herte” (X(I), line 940). The ecclesiastical courts of the late Middle Ages exercised enormous influence over marriage largely because it was rendered a sacrament in the twelfth century. But ecclesiastical courts also claimed to regulate many types of sexual conduct—fornication, adultery, bigamy, rape, incest, prostitution, and sodomy.33 Needless to say, such broad jurisdiction effectively brought many medieval people unwillingly into contact with church authorities and the disciplinary mechanisms of canon law. Designed primarily to rehabilitate the sinner as well as deter future criminal action, however, ecclesiastical retribution was often less harsh than its counterpart in the secular courts; the church was less willing to spill blood than were secular authorities.34 Penalties, divided into three primary categories—coercive, retributive, and purgative—were determined by the severity of the transgression.35 Except for heresy and other heinous crimes, which were transferred to secular authorities, all penalties—excommunication, interdict, fines, imprisonment, public humiliation, deprivation, reparation—afforded the possibility of rehabilitation.36 Given the extent of ecclesiastical authority particularly regarding sexual practices, it is surprising that only occasionally did ecclesiastical judges deal with questions of marital conduct, notably complaints about physical abuse. Rather, they more often acted as marriage counselors, advising couples to remain together despite the risks involved. Only when the marital situation threatened the life of a spouse did they approve “divorce” as a last resort, available when plenty of evidence such as eyewitness accounts had been supplied.37 The overlapping jurisdictions of civil and ecclesiastical law as they applied to criminal matters including rape are significant for connecting the marital themes of the Wife’s prologue to the tale she tells. The tale begins with the rape of a maiden by a “lusty bachelor” of King Arthur’s court: And so bifel that this kyng Arthour Hadde in his hous a lusty bacheler, That on a day cam ridynge fro ryver, And happed that, allone as he was born, He saugh a mayde walkynge hym beforn, Of which mayde anon, maugree hir heed, By verray force, he rafte hire maydenhed; For which oppressioun was swich clamour And swich pursute unto the kyng Arthour That dampned was this knyght for to be deed,

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By cours of lawe, and sholde han lost his heed— Paraventure swich was the statut tho. (III (D), lines 882–93) The errant knight is almost instantly condemned for his act of “oppressioun” and sentenced to death “by cours of lawe.” But rather than the usual penalty for convicted rapists as the statutes dictate—death or mutilation—there is a transfer of jurisdiction and an attenuation of sentence when the knight is handed over to the authority of the queen and her ladies. In a court resembling the fictional court of love found in Andreas Capellanus’s satirical De Amore, these female jurists render a judgment that allows a stay of execution, for a year and a day, and the possibility of rehabilitation if the knight is able to discover what women most desire. However reasonable this sentence appears to be, such judgment cannot be rendered in a court of love since the system of courtship it underwrites resides in the realm of fiction and satire. Rather, this is a merciful sentence disguised to be a judgment of the ladies when in fact it duplicates the kinds of penalties recommended by ecclesiastical law. Indeed, as Brundage tells us, the ecclesiastical courts “refrained in principle from imposing sentences that involved death or mutilation. The punishment for rape at canon law then involved excommunication, public penance, imprisonment, whipping, money fines, and possibly even enslavement, or some combination of these, depending upon the circumstances of the case.”38 Chaucer’s Parson eloquently corroborates the ecclesiastical view of rape as a species of lechery—“Another synne of Leccherie is to bireve a mayden of hir maydenhede” (X(I), line 867)—punishable by penance. The penance assigned by the jurists in the Wife’s tale is for the knight to undertake a year’s worth of anxious quest, listen to a stern “bedtime” homily on gentilesse, endure public humiliation, and relinquish sovereignty in marriage—that is, be a thral (slave) to his comely wife. By contrast, secular laws on rape were harsh. In the Treatise called Glanvill (c. 1187–89), secular law defined rape as a violation of a woman against her will and against the peace of the king, making it essentially a crime against the crown punishable by death or mutilation.39 Subsequently the influential lawmaker Henry Bracton confirmed the gravity of the crime, and introduced categories of victims—virgins and nonvirgins— along with corresponding degrees of punishment. For the rape of a virgin, the worst possible offense, Bracton expanded the punishments already on the books to include blinding, since in Bracton’s view the rapist’s eyes were also culpable. Both Glanvill and Bracton allowed for the possibility of “out

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of court” settlement of a rape dispute, however, by the victim’s consent to marriage with her assailant. In 1275, seven years after Bracton’s death, the first Statute of Westminster made some changes. It leveled the two categories of victims to include “any woman,” established a time limit of forty days in which the appeal had to be made, and, perhaps most significantly, reduced rape from a felony to a trespass incurring only monetary compensation and/or two years’ imprisonment.40 The change, as one social historian suggests, may have evolved in recognition of the possibility of false appeal: a young woman could preempt a parentally arranged match by conniving with a lover in the staging of a rape-abduction and settlement through marriage. As J. B. Post explains, “It was certainly clear from the terms of the second Statute of Westminster . . . that the consent of the supposedly wronged woman was proving awkward to those who wished her abductor to be prosecuted.”41 The second Statute of Westminster, ten years after the first, attempted to put the teeth back into the law by upgrading rape to a felony again, punishable by castration or execution. But a subtle shift in focus had occurred in the rewriting of the statutes, conflating rape with abduction, and placing the emphasis less on a violation of a woman against her will than on a crime against the peace of her family. The Statute of Rapes of 1382, initiated by Sir Thomas West’s petition to John of Gaunt, reinscribed the focus of the Westminster statutes in order to counter the possibility of elopement.42 It seems that some young women had discovered that a parentally arranged marriage could be balked by an arranged abduction, just as earlier jurists suspected. The Statute of 1382 was intended to thwart such activities and facilitate the recovery of damages despite the victim’s assent to marriage after the fact. Sir Thomas sought such restitution for the abduction of his daughter Eleanor by one Nicholas Clifton, who “with drawn swords, bows and arrow drawn back to the ear” abducted her from under the nose of her mother.43 Eleanor married Nicholas Clifton shortly thereafter and bore him a son. But whether Eleanor and Nicholas arranged the abduction or whether she was actually raped by Nicholas, who was apparently no stranger to criminal activity, and coerced into marriage either by force or by the pregnancy, we will probably never know. What we do know is that rape and marriage were more closely aligned in the late Middle Ages than we might have imagined. The interconnection between the two is represented not only in legal fictions but in literary fictions such as the English Breton lays. A scenario of events resonant with the Clifton case occurs in another of the Breton lays known to Chaucer, Sir Orfeo, when Heurodis (the Eury-

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dice figure) is abducted by the Celtic fairy king as she sleeps under a tree at noon one day. Terrorized to the point of madness by a threat of dismemberment that occurs the day before, Heurodis claws her face, weeps hysterically, and begs her husband’s protection the very next day. But even an army of knights cannot preclude the abduction as Heurodis is taken from under their noses into the Otherworld against her will. For ten years Orfeo grieves over the loss of his bride as the story shifts the emphasis to his dilemma rather than hers, rendering her the object of dispute between two competing males (not unlike Eleanor West, who is caught between father and husband). Apparently traumatized by her experience, Heurodis never speaks after her abduction and subsequent rescue and return to Orfeo’s kingdom as his queen. Despite her evident suffering, and her futile attempts to procure protection, there are scholars who assign blame to her. For Penelope Doob, Heurodis is “morally suspect”; in the wrong place at the wrong time, her spiritual sin is sloth.44 The abduction is then construed as punishment for her wrongdoing. Heurodis’s initial responses to the threat of abduction, her hysterical weeping and bloodstained face and clothes, find strange correspondence in the law. According to Bracton the rape victim “must go at once and while the deed is newly done, with the hue and cry, to the neighboring townships and there show the injury done to her to men of good repute, the blood and her clothing stained with blood, and her torn garments.”45 She then had to explain the crime to several minor male officials, submit to a crude physical examination by responsible matrons, state her case so that it could be copied verbatim on the legal rolls, and then restate it at the general eyre. As social historians have pointed out, the process was embarrassing, timeconsuming, very public, and potentially dangerous. An ordeal in itself, it victimized the victim by implicitly placing her on trial. Given the indignity of the legal procedure, it is not surprising that rape victims often refrained from making public appeal. The process was further complicated by class biases, particularly biases against the lower classes, which eventually expanded the gap between legal theory and its practice. As Barbara Hanawalt explains, “In practice, indictments depended upon the condition in society of the victimized woman. If the woman involved was a young girl, a virgin, or a noble or very high status woman, indictment was likely. But if she was of low status or some slur could be put upon her, the jury would not indict or the case would end in acquittal. There seems to be strong sentiment that men should not even be indicted for rape unless the victim was a virgin and even then the low

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incidence of indictment indicates that opinion was not strong about punishing rapists.”46 According to John Marshall Carter, class bias was particularly strong against peasant women, those who most often experienced rape in real life.47 Judicial misconceptions of female sexuality also interfered with the indictment and prosecution of rape cases. Where a pregnancy occurred, for instance, the act was not considered a crime because prevailing belief held that conception could not occur if the woman were forced to have intercourse against her will. Sir Degaré contains a rape scene so reminiscent of that in the Wife of Bath’s Tale that it is considered to be its probable source. Like Sir Orfeo and other Breton lays, Sir Degaré incorporates legal issues still in flux in late medieval England. In this narrative, the hero’s mother is raped by a mysterious stranger when she wanders away from the protection of her father into the woods. Finding herself lost and alone, she is approached by a scarlet-cloaked stranger, who claims that he has loved her from afar for a long time and that she will be his “lemman” whether she likes it or not: Thou best mi lemman or thou go Wether the liketh wel or wo Tho nothing ne coude do she But wep and criede and wolde fle And he anon gan here at holde And dide his wille, what he wolde He binam hire here maidenhod (lines 107–13)48

be my lover

held her there took away her

The stranger subsequently disappears, leaving the weeping maiden pregnant and confronted with a dilemma. Rather than face the shame of rumors that would surely implicate her father (the only man in her life), she abandons the infant to a hermit in the woods. The initiation of narrative action by the rape of the hero’s mother in Degaré is also evident in Sir Gowther. Pronounced barren by her husband and threatened with annulment, Gowther’s mother prays for a child, only to have her prayer intercepted by a “feltered fiend.” Disguised as her husband, he rapes her in a matter-of-fact manner, predicts the birth of a son she names Gowther, and disappears. The infant son of the fiend immediately begins a felonious career by suckling nine wet nurses to death and biting the nipple off his mother’s breast. The domestic violence perpetrated on the maternal body, both surrogate and biological, escalates into a fullblown sexual attack on other women when the “misbegotten” Gowther

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later participates in a gang rape of a convent of nuns—an act that could be understood in the late Middle Ages, according to Hanawalt, as a “proof of manhood.” Such crimes, Hanawalt explains, “were seldom prosecuted.”49 Here art imitates life: never during the course of the narrative is Gowther brought before a secular court to answer for his crimes. Rather, he is advised to seek an appropriate penance from the pope—life with the dogs— until redemption is brought about by signs from God. Gowther’s violation of women, including the mutilation of his mother’s body, seems implicitly excused by his demonic paternity, which is fully eradicated by the miraculous ending. Gowther restores the convent he destroyed and orders that prayers be said for the dead nuns. But the rape of his mother is constructed in such a way that she becomes complicit in her own victimization. As one modern folklorist puts it, “Gowther [or Robert the Devil as he’s known in other analogues] was not to blame for his demonic association, since the fault lay entirely with his mother.”50 In Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law, Kathryn Gravdal argues that texts as diverse as Chrétien’s Arthurian romances, female saints’ lives, and pastoral poetry skillfully draw the audience’s attention away from the female victim and toward the dilemmas of the male characters.51 Gravdal notes a corresponding emphasis in rape law, shifting attention away from the violation of the female victim to the protection of a father’s rights over his daughter. Certainly much of what Gravdal says about French literature can be applied to the Middle English Breton lays and their correspondences in the law: there is a shift in emphasis from the female to the male dilemma, for instance, and in some way female suffering is presented as erotically appealing. But the aestheticization of rape and the emphasis on male lovesickness that Gravdal sees as a means by which violence is romanticized in French literature is written in the English lays to suggest the victim’s unwitting complicity in the crime committed against her. Alone, unprotected, and therefore available for the taking by the first knight to come along, she tacitly “asks for it.” This misconception of female desire—the issue at stake in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale—informed actual judicial processes where male judges often suspected the credibility of a woman’s claim of rape. As Brundage puts it, “men tended to be skeptical about rape complaints, and defendants often claimed that the woman had invited the attack.”52 In Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal Guenevere’s false accusation against Launfal, though of a lesser offense than rape, is judged libelous by the king’s barons despite Arthur’s eagerness to prosecute solely on the basis of

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his wife’s testimony. By the late fourteenth century, Arthurian romance traditions had successfully impugned Guenevere’s reputation, rendering her a lascivious daughter of Eve and the primary cause of the fall of Camelot. Chestre contributes to the tradition by staging an elaborate trial wherein Launfal is proved to be telling the truth by the appearance of his beautiful fairy lover, Tryamour. Meanwhile Guenevere, the false accuser, not only is shamed by the denigration of her beauty and integrity—she pales in comparison to Launfal’s lady—but is literally blinded, a punishment found exclusively in the English version of the story. Like the aggressively sexual Wife of Bath, Guenevere exhibits a threatening female libido that challenges not only the legal parameters of marriage but the entire social order. Guenevere’s actions extend beyond the world of domestic privacy and into the realm of public politics. Courtly lover, wife, and subject, her “love” is threatening to the welfare of Arthur’s kingdom. Perhaps just as damaging as physical abuse to a spouse or partner is psychological abuse such as that experienced by Dorigen in Chaucer’s other Breton lay, the Franklin’s Tale. What at first appears to be a tale of mutuality and “trouthe” in marriage, even the “ideal” marriage, turns out to be a test of a wife’s fidelity to her husband. The tale begins with a negotiation of sovereignty between Dorigen and her new husband, Arveragus. Both partners consent to the shaping of what appears to be an equitable marital relation. Arveragus swears to “take no maistrie agayn hir wyl,” which suggests that he will not demand payment of the conjugal debt without her consent and that he will not master her in any way. Medieval marriage is predicated upon the consent of both parties, though usually neither would be required to articulate a pledge of obedience as in some modern Christian marriage ceremonies.53 Rather, their promise is simply to marry; the requirement for a wife to obey is implicit; the nature of sovereignty imposed by the husband is discretionary. As Chaucer’s Parson puts it, the husband should be generous and bear with his wife “in suffraunce and reverence” (X(I), line 924), but not to the detriment of his sovereignty. “For ther as the womman hath the maistrie, she maketh to muche desray” (X(I), line 926). The relation established from the outset has Arveragus claiming the “name” of sovereignty in marriage for the sake of appearances. Moreover, he promises Dorigen that he will be a “servant in love,” implying that the courtly relation prior to her acceptance of his marriage proposal is still in effect. But while the system of courtly love approves the power of a lady to direct her knight, it does not approve the same actions in a wife; such continuance would imply instead the husband’s uxoriousness and effeminacy.

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Arveragus presumes that his wife will agree to be discreet in this matter, as the relation between them is domestic and therefore private. When he leaves for a year or two, a decision made without consent from Dorigen, she is left abandoned and unprotected. Subsequently she becomes the target of a courtly lover, Aurelius.54 Were Chrétien de Troyes the author of this story, Arveragus would have been punished for his negligence, as Yvain is when he fails to return to Laudine in a year’s time as agreed. Though ecclesiastical courts did not concern themselves with absent husbands as they did with absent fathers, Brundage tells us, “preachers and moralists did, on the no doubt sensible ground that such disruptions created strains in the marital relationship and exposed the parties to sexual temptations. One such moralist is not concerned with brief absences—a week or two, or even a month at a time—but with absences of two or three years, which he said were displeasing to God.”55 Perhaps Chaucer, like other writers of the time, is pointing to courtly love in order to comment upon its threat to marriage. Certainly the presence of “love daungerous” in the Wife of Bath’s violent prologue signals its destructive potential. As it turns out, because of Arveragus’s abandonment, Dorigen falls unwittingly into a courtly relation when she makes a rash promise to become Aurelius’s lover should he succeed in fulfilling the requirements of their agreement—to remove the treacherous coastal rocks she imagines will impede her husband’s safe return. Promises governing marriage were taken seriously by canon law, but, as Joseph Hornsby makes clear in Chaucer and the Law, there is a distinction to be made between Dorigen’s first pledge of “trouthe,” made to Arveragus, and the second “trouthe,” the rash promise made to Aurelius: “The first pledge of ‘trouthe’ was a true sign carrying legal force, conveying Dorigen’s ‘entente’ to be bound by the terms of her marriage agreement. The second ‘trouthe’ is a false sign rendered legally impotent as a means to secure a promise. . . . Not only is the ‘trouthe’ functionally void because pledged in jest, but also it is rendered legally invalid.”56 The rash promise, in other words, is made meaningless by Dorigen’s lack of intent. For Mary R. Bowman, this represents not only a lack of intent but an alternate understanding of the world—for Dorigen “to have shame of her body is to be false to Arveragus and to lose the one name that she values, the name of ‘trewe wyf.’”57 Aurelius, when he succeeds in fulfilling his promise, expects Dorigen’s reciprocation—acquiescence to his indecent proposal— which throws her into suicidal despair. When she confesses her plight to Arveragus, rather surprisingly he instructs her to keep her promise even

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against her will. In so doing, he invalidates his pledge never to take maistrie over her. He also instructs her to keep silent about the matter and threatens to kill her if she fails to obey: “I yow forbede, up peyne of deeth, / That nevere, whil thee lasteth lyf ne breeth, / To no wight telle thou of this aventure” (V(F), lines 1481–83). Dorigen’s silence is necessitated not by Arveragus’s concern for her welfare but by his concern for his own reputation. A knight who is humiliated by his beloved is living up neither to codes of chivalry nor to the precepts of courtly love. The Franklin is so self-conscious about the implications of Arveragus’s actions that he interrupts his telling to assure his audience that the knight should not be judged too harshly before his tale is done and the happy ending firmly in place. Aurelius takes pity on Dorigen and in the legal language of quitclaim mercifully releases her from her promise. The fact that she has been driven to contemplate suicide, virtually pimped, and threatened with homicide by her husband is eradicated by a subtle shift in focus at the end of the tale. The question the Franklin asks is not why Dorigen was so mistreated but, rather, who among the men—squire, knight, philosopher—might be considered “mooste fre.” When marriage was made a sacrament in the twelfth century, canonists followed many of the precepts set forth by St. Paul, including his notions of domestic obligation and behavior. Gratian, in his influential Decretum, for instance, prescribed a theory of marriage designed to protect both the sanctity of marital union and the integrity of those who engaged in it. In a similarly well-intentioned way, jurists responsible for writing secular and ecclesiastical legislation addressing rape and abduction attempted to protect those who could be harmed by such actions. However, what is written with apparent good intention does not always play out well in the actual world. Instead, disparities between theory and practice create disorder and confusion where there should be order and certainty. These are the ambiguities that Chaucer’s Wife makes so public in her prologue and tale, the loopholes that the Franklin inadvertently continues to address in his tale, and the legal questions on the relation between rape and marriage raised by the other Breton lays. Neither Chaucer’s Breton lays nor those written by anonymous or lesser-known authors function merely as innocuous literary entertainment. Rather, they demonstrate how literature could and often did underwrite and reinforce the laws of the land.

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Notes 1. All Chaucer quotations are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 2. For a number of different perspectives on contemporary domestic violence, see Laura L. O’Toole and Jessica R. Schiffman, eds., Gender Violence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 1997); R. Emerson Dobash and Russell Dobash, Violence Against Wives: A Case Against the Patriarchy (New York: Free Press, 1979). In many states in the United States, domestic violence is considered a crime. 3. See Lawrence Stone, “Interpersonal Violence in English Society 1300–1800,” Past and Present 101 (November 1983): 22–33. 4. Philippa Maddern, Violence and Social Order: East Anglia, 1422–1442 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), chap. 2. 5. J. A. Sharpe, “Domestic Homicide in Early Modern England,” Historical Journal 24 (1981): 29–48. 6. See Barbara A. Kellum, “Infanticide in England in the Later Middle Ages,” History of Childhood Quarterly 1 (1974): 367–88. 7. Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 111. 8. See John A. Alford, “Literature and Law in Medieval England,” PMLA 92 (1977): 941–51. 9. See Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). See also Christopher Brooke, The Medieval Ideal of Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), and Henry Ansgar Kelly, Love and Marriage in the Age of Chaucer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975). 10. Chaucer’s litigation experience included an alleged dispute with a Franciscan friar, at least two robberies (as victim), two real estate transactions, participation in the Scrope-Grosvenor inquisition, and a rape charge brought against him by Cecily de Champagne. For an explanation of the release and accompanying documents, see Christopher Cannon, “Raptus in the Chaumpaigne Release and a Newly Discovered Document Concerning the Life of Geoffrey Chaucer,” Speculum 68:1 (1993): 74–94, and more recently his “Chaucer and Rape: Uncertainty’s Certainties,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 67–92. 11. Some of his social circle included William Rickhill, Walter de Clopton, John Wadham, Robert Charlton, William Brenchley, Robert Belknap, and Thomas Pinchbeck. See W. F. Bolton, “Pinchbeck and the Chaucer Circle in the Law Reports and Records of 11–13 Richard II,” Modern Philology (1987): 401–7. Bolton’s comment is useful here: “Chaucer may even have been among those many men of his class who had part of their education at one of the inns of court in which lawyers were trained, not because they set out to follow the law but because the inns of court made an appropriate alternative to the universities for men who wanted a further education

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in the liberal arts, courtly conduct, and law but who did not want a career in the church.” See also Edith Rickert, “Was Chaucer a Student at the Inner Temple?” in The Manly Anniversary Studies in Language and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), pp. 20–31; D. S. Bland, “Chaucer and the Inns of Court: A Reexamination,” English Studies 33 (1952): 145–55; Joseph Allen Hornsby, Chaucer and the Law (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1988); Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). 12. Derek Pearsall in his book The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) mentions that Chaucer took part in a commission investigating a case of abduction in 1387. The case was similar to that of Chaucer’s father, who “was abducted by his aunt in 1324 when she was trying to force him into marriage with her daughter” (p. 135). 13. Donald R. Howard, Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World (New York: Dutton, 1987), p. 77. 14. The question of genre revolves around the relation between Breton lays and the longer romances. John Finlayson solves the problem by assigning “sub-genre” status to the lays. See John Finlayson, “The Form of the Middle English Breton Lay,” Chaucer Review 19 (1984): 352–68. 15. For an excellent discussion of the literary qualities of rape narratives, see Barbara A. Hanawalt, ‘Of Good and Ill Repute’: Gender and Social Control in Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), esp. chap. 8. 16. Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 126. 17. D. W. Robertson, Jr., “‘And for my land thus hastow mordred me?’: Land Tenure, the Cloth Industry, and the Wife of Bath,” Chaucer Review 14 (1980): 403– 20. 18. This series of articles includes Beryl Rowland, “On the Timely Death of the Wife of Bath’s Fourth Husband,” Archi 209 (1972): 273–82, and “Chaucer’s Dame Alys: Critics in Blunderland?” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 73 (1972): 381–95; Dolores Palomo, “The Fate of the Wife of Bath’s ‘Bad Husbands,’” Chaucer Review 9 (1975): 303–19; Donald B. Sands, “The Non-Comic, Non-Tragic Wife: Chaucer’s Dame Alys as Sociopath,” Chaucer Review 12 (1977): 171–82; T. L. Burton, “The Wife of Bath’s Fourth and Fifth Husbands and Her Ideal Sixth: The Growth of a Marital Philosophy,” Chaucer Review 13 (1978): 34–50; D. J. Wurtele, “Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and the Problem of the Fifth Husband,” Chaucer Review 23 (1988): 117–28; Susan Crane, “Alison of Bath Accused of Murder: Case Dismissed,” English Language Notes 25:3 (1988): 10–15. 19. Katharina M. Wilson and Elizabeth M. Makowski, Wykked Wyves and the Woes of Marriage: Misogamous Literature from Juvenal to Chaucer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 153. 20. Andrew Galloway, “Marriage Sermons, Polemical Sermons, and The Wife of Bath’s Prologue: A Generic Excursus,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 14 (1992): 3–30.

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21. Elaine Tuttle Hansen, “‘Of his love daungerous to me’: Liberation, Subversion, and Domestic Violence in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” in The Wife of Bath: Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Peter G. Beidler (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, Bedford Books, 1996), pp. 273–89. 22. Louise O. Fradenburg, “‘Fulfild of fairye’: The Social Meaning of Fantasy in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,”in Beidler, Wife of Bath, pp. 205–20. See also Lee Patterson, “Experience woot well it is noght so’: Marriage and the Pursuit of Happiness in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” in Beidler, Wife of Bath, pp. 133– 54. 23. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 260. 24. John V. Fleming, The Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 188. 25. For a good discussion of the points of contention among decretists on conjugal debt, see Elizabeth M. Makowski, “The Conjugal Debt and Medieval Canon Law,” Journal of Medieval History 3 (1977): 99–114. 26. Charles Donahue, Jr., “The Canon Law on the Formation of Marriage and Social Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Family History (1983): 144–58. 27. As quoted in James Cotter, “The Wife of Bath and the Conjugal Debt,” English Language Notes 6 (1969): 171. The Latin passage reads: “Loquendo ergo de prima aequalitate, vir et uxor non sunt aequales in matrimonio, neque quantum ad actum coniugalem, in quo id quod nobilius est viro debetur; neque quantum ad dispensationem domus, in qua uxor regitur et vir regit. Sed quantum ad secundam aequalitatem sunt aequales in utroque, quia sicut tenetur vir uxori in actu coniugali et dispensatione domus ad id quod viri est, ita uxor viro ad id quod uxoris est” (Summa Theologiae, Supplementum Tertiae Partis, 64, a 3 corpus). 28. Ibid. The Latin passage reads: “Ad secundum. Dicendum quod hoc est per accidens. Vir enim, quia nobiliorem partem habet in actu coniugali, naturaliter habet quod non ita erubescat petere debitum sicut uxor. Et inde est quod non ita uxor tenetur reddere debitum non petenti viro sicut vir uxori” (Summa Theologiae, Supplementum Tertiae Partis, 64, a 3, ad 2). 29. Ibid., p. 170. 30. See James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 358–59. 31. James A. Brundage, “Rape and Seduction in the Medieval Canon Law,” in Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1982), p. 144. 32. An interesting case of negotiation of the conjugal debt is found in The Book of Margery Kempe. Margery persuades her husband to desist from taking payment of the marriage debt forcibly and against her will. See also Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). 33. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, p. 420.

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34. James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London: Longman, 1995), chap. 4. 35. Ibid., p. 151. 36. Ibid., p. 152. “The list included coercive penalties such as excommunication, interdict, or suspension from office. These were designed primarily to bring pressure on the miscreant to comply with the law and make his peace with church authorities. Retributive penalties, such as fines, restitution of ill-gotten gains, deposition from office, degradation from clerical status, confinement in a monastery, or other types of imprisonment deprived the guilty party of status, income, or freedom as punishment for his misdeeds. Purgative penalties, such as pilgrimages, the donning of penitent’s garb, participation in processions, the public offering of gifts to repair damages, ritual flogging, fasts, and abstinence from meat, wine, or sex for prescribed periods served to humiliate the penitent while at the same time they purified him of the guilt he had incurred.” 37. Divorce in the Middle Ages did not mean the same as it does in modern practice. It did not allow the couple to erase the relationship. Rather, it merely allowed them to live separately. The couple were not usually free to marry again. 38. Brundage, “Rape and Seduction,” p. 146. 39. John Marshall Carter, Rape in Medieval England: An Historical and Sociological Study (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985), p. 38. 40. J. B. Post, “Sir Thomas West and the Statute of Rapes, 1382,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 53 (1980): 24–30. 41. J. B. Post, “Ravishment of Women and the Statutes of Westminster,” in Legal Records and the Historian: Papers Presented to the Cambridge Legal History Conference, 7–10 July 1975, and in Lincoln’s Inn Old Hall on 3 July 1974 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978), pp. 150–60. 42. J. B. Post, “Sir Thomas West,” pp. 24–30. 43. Ibid., p. 25. 44. Penelope Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 177. 45. Carter, Rape in Medieval England, p. 94. 46. Barbara A. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300– 1348 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 105. 47. Carter, Rape in Medieval England, p. 156. 48. All quotes from the lays derive from Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, eds., The Middle English Breton Lays (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1995). 49. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict, p. 109. 50. Stith Thompson, The Folktale (New York: Dryden Press, 1946), p. 269. 51. Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens. 52. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, p. 470. 53. One of the exceptions to this is in the Sarum Missal, which directs the wife to utter words of obedience, but not the husband. I am grateful to Ann Dobyns for pointing this out to me in an earlier draft.

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54. See Russell A. Peck, “Sovereignty and the Two Worlds of the Franklin’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 1 (1967): 253–71, for the problem this absence presents. Arveragus has abdicated his role as sovereign. There is also the matter of the conjugal debt: see Wolfgang E. H. Rudat, “Aurelius’ Quest for Grace: Sexuality and the Marriage Debate in the Franklin’s Tale,” CEA Critic: An Official Journal of the College English Association 45:1 (1982): 16–21. 55. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, p. 506. 56. Hornsby, Chaucer and the Law, p. 53. 57. See Mary R. Bowman, “‘Half As She Were Mad’: Dorigen in the Male World of the Franklin’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 27 (1993): 246.

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4

Taboo and Transgression in Gower’s “Apollonius of Tyre” Georgiana Donavin

The Confessio Amantis has often been characterized as a poem about the family.1 Many readers have pointed to the chaste marriages and nurturing parents in such narratives as the “Tale of the Three Questions” (I.3067– 446), the “Tale of Constance” (II.587–1612), and the main subject of this essay, “Apollonius of Tyre” (VIII.271–2008). However, no one so far has demonstrated that the Confessio’s representations of domestic abuse challenge and render ambiguous the text’s depictions of thriving families. As Larry Scanlon notes, Gower’s “taste for the lurid” manifests itself chiefly through the family in stories that “might make Stephen King squeamish . . . [including] not only incest, but adultery, rape, infanticide, parricide, beheadings, mutilations, and all other manner of violence and brutality.”2 In the Confessio Amantis violence is a family matter. An assault on a family member occurs in every book: Rosemund devises her husband’s murder (I); Constance’s sultan is killed by his mother (II); Orestes rips off Clytemnestra’s breasts (III); Jephthah sacrifices his daughter (IV); Tereus rapes and maims Philomena (V); Alexander casually pushes his father Nectanabus to his death (VI); Virginius stabs Virginia in order to preserve her chastity (VII); Antiochus rapes his daughter (VIII).3 Tales of familial conflict menace the Confessio’s alternative narratives of domestic harmony. Furthermore, the tales of domestic harmony question the prevalence and permanency of their own representations by showing the difficulties of achieving and maintaining a happy family. Domestic violence in the Confessio Amantis hovers like an imposing shadow, threatening to darken the ecstatic conjugal endings of the tales of familial romance. “Apollonius of Tyre,” a romance from antiquity and the final tale in the Confessio Amantis, concludes with just such a blissful marriage and fam-

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ily reunion.4 After shipwrecks and separations and erroneously reported deaths, Apollonius is reunited with his wife and his daughter Thaise, and Thaise joyfully weds Athenagoras, lord of Mitelene. Apollonius’s and his family’s happiness is predicated upon the misfortunes that drive them apart and thus increase their desire and appreciation for togetherness. Domestic unity in this tale is not only difficult and elusive but forcefully offset by depictions of domestic abuse. Overshadowing Apollonius and his wife and daughter are representations of father-daughter incest and a guardian’s premeditation of murder: Antiochus forces his daughter into an incestuous affair, and Dionise plots the assassination of Thaise when the girl is her ward. Evaluating both the positive and negative family portraits in “Apollonius of Tyre,” R. F. Yeager remarks that this tale is “the capstone” to Gower’s great Middle English work because it summarizes the Confessio’s presentation of family and other issues.5 The preservation and perpetuation of Apollonius’s family is in Yeager’s and other critics’ estimation a triumph for characters who have avoided the sins destroying other clans in the same tale.6 In their reading, the faithfulness of Apollonius and his wife and the chastity of Thaise during extreme hardships constitute a sermon on domestic conduct. However, these illuminating virtues cannot completely dispel the darkest scenes from the text—the princess of Antioch’s tortured revelation of her father’s misdeed or Thaise’s imprisonment in a foreign brothel. Such sinister moments imply the ephemerality of Apollonius’s and his family’s bliss. Moreover, the conclusion to “Apollonius of Tyre” is not Gower’s final message on “family values,” largely because the Confessio Amantis does not end there. Hoary, impotent Amans, the immediate audience for the tale, cannot apply the icon of the righteous family to his own life, and Venus and Cupid, who are still cavorting in an incestuous liaison, certainly ignore it. Gower seems more ambivalent about the possible stabilization of the hearth than he is credited with in the conservative modern dream, breaking through in traditionalist readings of the Confessio. It is important to note that the Confessio’s happy families must perpetually overcome not only misfortune without, but also the threat of violence within: Apollonius, for instance, must conquer his impulse to lash out at others during times of mourning (VIII.1693–94). For Gower the potential for domestic abuse is always present. This essay focuses on the way in which “Apollonius of Tyre” illustrates the potentiality of domestic abuse. Overtly stating taboos against incest

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and family violence and also demonstrating the transgression of those taboos, “Apollonius of Tyre” shows how the laws intended to preserve family create the desires precipitating its destruction. The interdependency between taboo and transgression in “Apollonius of Tyre” results in an ambiguous presentation of the possibilities for domestic harmony. Gower seems to know what Georges Bataille later theorizes: “The transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it.”7 Gower’s postmodern prescience partly derives from the fact that Bataille’s dictum is implicit in the doctrine of felix culpa. A commonplace in fourteenth-century Roman Catholicism, the notion of felix culpa, or Adam’s “fortunate fall,” offers hope for human redemption but, more problematically, declares the transgression of a taboo necessary to the manifestation of providence. In other words, the transgression of the original taboo transcends God’s law in that it evokes Christ’s incarnation and the mercy that reigns over commandment and justice; in addition, Adam’s transgression completes God’s law in that it paves the way for the Second Coming and the eternal heavenly rule on earth. While the infraction against the original taboo in Eden provides the foundation for Christianity, violations of domestic taboos in the Confessio Amantis provide the basis for heterosexual socialization. In order to understand the significance of domestic taboos to the Confessio Amantis, let us first study closely the injunctions against incest and violence that are stated overtly in the text.

The Confessor’s Taboos and the Destabilization of Natural Law In Book VIII of the Confessio Amantis, which includes “Apollonius of Tyre,” Genius stipulates taboos against incest and violence. He provides not only the history of and some exempla for these injunctions but also theoretical premises. While attempting to ground rules against incest and violence in Natural Law, however, Genius contradicts himself with references to their social construction. Presenting a reader’s puzzle in Genius’s contradictions, Gower invites us to investigate the bases for and the ultimate consequences of taboos. The taboo against incest is explicitly stated and neatly packaged at the beginning of the Confessio’s Book VIII. Here, as an introduction to “Apollonius of Tyre,” Genius relates part of the biblical foundation for ecclesiastical incest law (67–163).8 Like Books I–VI of the Confessio Amantis, Book VIII focuses on one of the seven deadly sins (lechery) so that Genius the priest might confess Amans, the unrequited lover, of in-

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fractions against his lady and Venus’s court.9 By concentrating on a single, extreme sort of lechery (incest),10 Book VIII underscores the forbidden nature of sexuality.11 Genius’s main point in his history of incest law is the contingency of sexual prohibitions. He relates how in the beginning Cain and Abel had to marry their sisters in order to populate the world. Similarly, in the Second Age after the decimation of the Great Flood, siblings were allowed to marry. With the onset of the Third Age, however, and Abraham’s leadership, the population was growing, and sibling marriage was banned, although choosing a first cousin as spouse was permitted. When the Roman Catholic Church was established, Genius continues, the pope extended the incest prohibition to the fourth degree—in other words, to marriage with second and third cousins. In this latter, “Christian” portion of his history, Genius jumps ahead to 1215.12 He passes over the Church’s early disagreements about what constitutes incest, as well as its struggles to enforce a variety of incest injunctions before marriage came under the jurisdiction of canon law. He skips the eleventh-century reform period during which the prohibition against incest was extended to the sixth degree and emphasizes the decree of Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council, which still held in Gower’s time.13 Genius’s explanation that incest law changes to accommodate population growth accords with Thomas Aquinas’s theories.14 In the Summa Theologiae Aquinas justifies the mandate of the Fourth Lateran Council by arguing that the prohibition to the fourth degree perfectly suits medieval demographics. According to Aquinas, it encourages sufficient exogamy for social bonding outside the kin group and provides for the infusion of new blood into the family line. Aquinas’s interpretation of the incest prohibition as a catalyst for cooperation among different families compares to the much later argument of Claude Lévi-Strauss that the incest taboo forces the exchange of women, which knits clans and communities.15 Nevertheless, Aquinas believed, the taboo against incest rests not only upon contingencies of population and social cohesion but also upon human disinclination. Explaining the current injunction against incest as a “positive” human law that manifests and particularizes divine “Natural Law,” Aquinas declares incest—the transgression of God’s law realized for humankind—unnatural. When altering its positive rules on incest, the Church determines what is natural, or what behavior best evokes God’s image in humankind, for that immediate period in human society—and the incestuous person, disobeying the rule, denigrates his own creation. As Aquinas sees it, humans develop a disinclination for what is unnatural;

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however, that aversion seems to arise from socially validated dictates (ecclesiastical decrees) rather than from instinct. Similarly, Genius licenses conflicting points of view: he tries to explain the incest taboo according to both social demands and human composition. After he relates the history of a socially adaptive incest law, he describes this sexual crime as a “lust mistimed” (VIII.196), placing the perpetrator out of sync with the human rhythm in the cosmos. The incestuous person errs from the path God made for him and walks some way toward the barnyard: he is “Bot as a cock among the Hennes, / Or as a Stalon in the Fennes, / Which goth amonges al the Stod” (VIII.159–61). Incestuousness, in Genius’s description, is synonymous with bestiality. As Aquinas and, in suit, Genius declare incest unnatural, they predate the conclusion of Edward Westermarck and his followers that the taboo against incest develops from an innate aversion.16 However, admitting that the aversion vacillates according to population and ecclesiastical decrees, Genius in his Thomist position puts “the natural” on very unstable ground.17 Similarly, the taboo against violence, as it is characterized by Genius, adapts to social realities, specifically to the requirements of law enforcement and property ownership. Before he launches a dissertation, based on the Sixth Commandment, on the evils of assault, Genius defines the exceptions to the rule: “a judge may order the execution of a traitor, murderer or robber; a king may kill to protect his country; anyone may defend the king’s law with the sword; and a property owner may fight for his holdings during a time of war” (III.2210–40). Genius’s exceptions seem to parallel Philippa Maddern’s conclusions on what constituted just violence by the fifteenth century: “First, just violence was to be carried out by someone in a right relationship with authority. . . . Secondly, just violence must be done for a good motive. . . . [Third,] just violence could be undertaken only against certain people.”18 As with the revisions in incest law, rules about physical assault and killing must shift to continue to provide support for the social order.19 The Confessio’s explicitly stated rules on violence occur largely in Book III, in which Genius confesses Amans of the sin of wrath. Many of these warnings compare to those in Gower’s “In Praise of Peace,” noted as the poet’s most extensive and coherent argument against physical force.20 Although in Book VIII of the Confessio Amantis and its major narrative “Apollonius of Tyre” the injunction against assault is not defined and emphasized in the same way as the incest taboo (since the explicit purpose is a treatment of lechery), Genius harks back to his earlier disapproval of

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physical force in Book III with adjectives describing the violent. Particularly, his depiction in “Apollonius of Tyre” of the “wroth” murderer Dionise summons the destructive behaviors constituting wrath in the forerunning narratives (VIII.1345). Not only verbally but also structurally, “Apollonius of Tyre” recalls Book III. Its opening scene of fatherdaughter incest reminds the reader of the only other explicit tale of incest in the Confessio, Book III’s “Tale of Canace and Machaire” (143–336). In the latter case of a sibling affair, violence and incest collide, the raging father Eolus against his disobedient daughter Canace. Eolus’s command that Canace slay herself over her sin with her brother Machaire compares to Antiochus’s determination to destroy his daughter for his own pleasure. Both tales locate the genesis of community violence in domestic struggles over sexuality—a scene consistently set in Book III, where Genius supplies early examples of murder, all of them resulting from intrafamilial conflict. Peleüs slays his brother Phocus; Medea, her two sons; Almeüs, his mother Eriphile (2497–598). Besides these examples of domestic violence, Genius also narrates—among his many lessons for Amans on wrath—the story of Socrates’ abusive wife (639–98) and the tale of Orestes’ revenge upon his murderous mother (1885–2195). Given the familiar collusion between lust and mayhem in Book III’s exempla of domestic conflict and also in “Apollonius of Tyre,” we might say that the latter tale not only refers to Book III but also assumes the taboo against violence so well laid out there.21 At first glance, the law against violence seems to rest upon stronger premises than that against incest, which, as we have seen, alters according to population growth. In Genius’s explanation, the injunction against physical harm is a minor premise to the eternal law of charity, not, as in the dictate against incest, a rule contingent on social expansion. However, just as Genius attempts to ground the incest taboo in both cultural requirements and innate aversion, so he supplies divergent foundations for the violence taboo. He would have Amans believe that the desire for peace derives from civil and ecclesiastical law and from “nature.” In Genius’s narrative, both secular and religious law spring from Jesus’ reading of the Sixth Commandment, while an inner repulsion arises from the unhealthy conditions accompanying war: After the lawe of charite, Ther schal no dedly werre be: And ek nature it hath defended

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And in hir lawe pes comended, Which is the chief of mannes welthe, Of mannes lif, of mannes helthe. Bot dedly werre hath his covine Of pestilence and of famine. (III.2261–68) Against homicide, repulsion arises from the prospect of slaying a soul constructed in the likeness of God (2516–23). Depicting what he considers natural attitudes toward homicide, Genius invokes the beasts that do not prey upon their own kind. He also tells the story of the Strange Bird of Solinus which, having a human face, shrivels up in remorse after preying upon a man it thinks too much like itself (2586–89). On the subject of homicide, beasts must illustrate Natural Law to Amans, whereas on incest, ironically, their unbridled sexuality warns about that to which he should not stoop. Nevertheless Genius contradicts himself by insinuating that social dictates provide the rules for whether or not to imitate the beasts. Considering the exceptions of “just violence” that Genius has given, Amans would not shrivel up in shame should he have to, for instance, slay a man while apprehending him in a crime. If the legal and instinctual grounds for the violence taboo were consistent and mutually supportive, such a double foundation would not be problematic, but, according to Genius, law alters and thus destabilizes “natural” reactions, making it possible to kill, for instance, over property in wartime. Once again aversions, claimed to undergird taboos and constantly reflect the divine character in humanity, are unsettled by and subservient to cultural contingencies.

A Postmodern Substitute for Genius’s Theories on Taboos Following Aquinas, Genius presents us with contradictory origins for the incest and violence taboos. Because these injunctions are essential to the organization of family and society, Gower invites his readers to investigate Genius’s contradictions through an independent inquiry into taboos and transgressions in the Confessio Amantis. For the contemporary reader, postmodern psychological and anthropological theories may provide the best methodologies for such an inquiry. Because Genius provides conflicting reports about the derivation of taboos, we must speculate further than the Confessio’s narrator about their primary cause and effect in Gower’s great Middle English poem. Genius’s

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mandates against incest and violence communicate nothing unless his audience can identify and poison the root of these domestic and social ills. By now it is a commonplace in Gower criticism to seek the Confessio Amantis’s significance beyond Genius’s conclusions, since many have documented the contradictions and mistimed moralizing of Venus’s priest.22 Perhaps Genius’s confused deductions arise, as Theresa Tinkle speculates, from his role as a mythographer who compiles rather than synthesizes interpretations.23 Refusing coherence if not omniscience to Genius, then, we ask: What perspectives might ground a consistent interpretation of his discourse on taboos and his tales illustrating their transgression? How might we draw sound conclusions about the connections between Genius’s statement of taboos and the family structures in the Confessio’s narrative? One suggestion would be the consultation of contemporary anthropological and psychoanalytic theory, since Gower struggled with the articulation of taboos and the consequences of family relations as intensely and profoundly as these disciplines. Just as modern feminisms have highlighted gender issues before unnoticed in medieval texts, so postmodern theories of social and familial structures can provide helpful paradigms for Gower’s domestic narratives. These theories indicate that the root of incest and violence is the taboo itself and that continual sermonizing, such as Genius’s, only exacerbates a problem better mitigated through the unblinking exposure of violations. One of the most useful ideas from postmodern psychoanalysis for this essay’s purposes is that the taboo both prohibits and perpetuates activity. In other words, it induces in rebellious personalities the very behavior it condemns. Repudiating incest or violence, the taboo casts the allure of impossibility over the forbidden behavior and instigates a yearning for what cannot be.24 According to Jacques Lacan, desire is always created by such a yearning, or by the substitution of something else for the originally forbidden Object.25 Lacan’s Law of the Father, which checks the primal but false sense of cathexis a child experiences with the mother and propels the child from the cradle into the public sphere, mandates perpetual forbiddenness and therefore unending desire. Noted theorists such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler contend that the Law not only throws a luster over taboo activities, but that it actually expresses in the first place the behavior to be desired because denied. Foucault criticizes the Freudian concept of originary proclivities repressed by civilization; instead, he argues, civilized law draws the boundaries around common yearnings.26 Applied to the Confessio Amantis’s examples of taboos and transgressions,

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Foucault’s criticism would show that neither incest nor violence surfaces in the text until the rules are drawn against them. In imitation of the penitentials and their articulation of the seven deadly sins, Gower, beginning in Book I with pride and continuing to Book VIII on lechery, first articulates the law and then illustrates its rupture.27 The chronological order of the Confessio Amantis, then, gives the impression that ecclesiastical interdictions require a trespass to complete and realize their meaning. Even Genius’s confused dissertations on the partially social construction of taboos hint at the discursive genesis of prohibited desires. In Genius’s history of incest law, for instance, the pope must mandate the injunction against marriage to the fourth degree before such a relationship is fascinatingly repulsive and thus wished for. As Judith Butler declares, “[T]he law which prohibits . . . is the selfsame law that invites . . . and it is no longer possible to isolate the repressive from the productive function of the juridical . . . taboo.”28

Invitations to Incest in “Apollonius of Tyre” The narrative order of Book VIII makes Butler’s point. Following Genius’s long history of incest law are examples of transgression, first by Caligula (199–212), then by the biblical figures Ammon and Lot (213–46), and finally by Antiochus in the beginning of “Apollonius of Tyre.” After the death of his queen, Antiochus becomes obsessed with his daughter, keeping her in his chamber and concentrating on the means of having his will. One day when the maiden’s women are gone, Antiochus forces himself upon her. The incestuous rape is motivated first by the need to fill his wife’s absence and second by the incitement of the taboo. For Antiochus, the dead queen is the phallus, or the fantasy of physical and psychic integrity in fulfillment; his daughter, “piereles / Of beaute” (288–89), provides a substitute for her mother and represents such fulfillment. Finding his daughter the more attractive because outlawed, Antiochus burns with delayed gratification and sets the goal to “spille” or undo her (297). Thus, his primary aim is to commit a crime because it is a crime—and to guarantee that there are no witnesses. However, Genius clouds the performativity of the incest taboo by declaring Antiochus’s treatment of his daughter “unkinde fare” (312) and thus underscoring its divergence from Natural Law as Aquinas explains it. Through his description of Antiochus’s brutality as unnatural, Genius gives the impression that it operates outside of rather than proceeds from the incest taboo. The

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narrative’s most damning depiction of Antiochus is as the “wylde fader [who] thus devoureth / His oghne fleissh,” connecting incest with cannibalism and the activities of “wylde” beasts (309–10). As in the introduction to this tale, incest is synonymous with bestiality, and Antiochus’s self-debasement into a brute disrupts the providential order. Although Genius’s moral repudiation of Antiochus provides no clue to the productivity of the incest taboo in “Apollonius of Tyre,” the opaque statements used to describe Antiochus’s crime do. Like early-twentiethcentury anthropological scholarship which privileges the study of the taboo over the transgression,29 Genius’s statements delineating the law against incest are plain and explicit while, ironically, those actually describing the act are enigmatic and elliptical.30 For scientists and tale-tellers alike, it has been easier to codify injunctions than to relate offenses. As Russell Peck remarks, Genius does not use the word “incest” to describe the rape in Antioch, but rather refers to Antiochus’s “burning” (295) and “unkinde” (312) lust: “his generalizations seem designated to encourage the reader to look on this sin as the epitome of selfish, unnatural qualities of cupidinous love in general.”31 While the oblique vocabulary surrounding incest produces an overarching moral against self-serving relationships, as Peck concludes, it also, paradoxically, euphemizes the incident and thus enables its recurrence. Such euphemisms compel two divergent responses. The first belongs to Chaucer’s voyeuristic Man of Law, who fills in Genius’s blank scene and draws his own picture of Antiochus throwing his daughter upon the pavement (Prologue, 80); the second belongs to the reader in the grip of the incest taboo who uncomfortably turns away. Deflecting a hard look at Antiochus’s actual misdeed, Genius avoids representing the very practice that requires community notification and action. Avoidance, the tacit perpetrator summoned by the declaration of taboo, clears the stage for a repetition of the crime. In Judith Butler’s analysis, the speakable law encourages an unspeakable infraction.32 The most shrouded statement concerning father-daughter incest in “Apollonius of Tyre” is the riddle. Antiochus, like a troll at a bridge, presents his daughter’s suitors with a riddle which they must solve in order to win the princess. It reads: “With felonie I am upbore, / I ete and have it noght forbore / Mi modres fleissh, whos housebonde / Mi fader forto seche I fonde, / Which is the Sone ek of my wif” (VIII.405–9).33 By the time Apollonius arrives to seek the princess as his bride, many have lost their heads in failed attempts to solve the riddle. In contrast, Apollonius

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cons it immediately, but says merely that it touches upon private matters between Antiochus and his daughter (423–26). For a closer analysis of the riddle’s allusions, let us look at my modern English adaptation: “With crime I am upborne. / I eat my mother’s flesh, and have it not forborn. / When seeking mother’s husband, my father, / My search ended / In the child of my wife, also—my daughter.”34 The first line of the riddle refers in general to Antiochus’s wrongdoing, but the final four more specifically reveal an Oedipal desire for the mother which is finally satiated in the daughter. The queen of Antioch had formerly provided a substitute for the maternal Object, and after the queen’s death, her daughter acts as replacement. In the third line of the riddle, Antiochus seeks his father because the latter is the masculine model that will please mother. Saying that he finds his mother’s flesh during the quest to become like his father, Antiochus identifies the main purpose of this quest—attainment of the mother’s body—and at the same time puns on the idea that his daughter is his mother’s “flesh and blood.” Since the word “Sone” in the riddle’s final line can refer to either a male or a female descendent, it must denote his daughter, the only descendent of him and his wife. Finding his mother’s flesh in the flesh and blood of her granddaughter, Antiochus violently releases a sexual yearning sublimated for a generation and frustrated further by the death of his wife. Since the father is a tyrant demanding this long-term repression and possessing the mother absolutely, Antiochus becomes a tyrant himself—to his daughter’s horror—in an attempt to imitate the father and thus attract the mother.35 Like Genius’s elliptical references to the incestuous rape, Antiochus’s own enigmatic statement about his domestic affairs ensures continued transgression of the taboo. Couching the misdeed in indirect terms which elude an army of suitors, Antiochus avoids the recognition of its hurtfulness and therefore walks a smooth path into domestic crime. Although the forbidden nature of the act spurs Antiochus’s lust in the beginning, the vague language in which he represents it sedates his consciousness of prohibition. As Genius remarks, “Him thoghte that it was no Sinne” (346), and therefore he continued. While the explicitly mandated taboo creates a desire for the prohibited and thus lures the sinner, the implicit descriptions of the transgression render acceptable the unacceptable. Thus, the incest taboo is profoundly ironic in that it compels the opposite of what it states, and the polite description of transgression is abysmally aporiac in that it escapes dramatization. Such slippage causes Derrida to declare the incest prohibition the beginning of language, the event that insists upon supple-

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mentation of desire and meaning. Derrida ruminates: “The displacing of the relationship with the mother, with nature, with being as the fundamental signified, such indeed is the origin of society and languages. But can one speak of origins after that? Is the concept of origin, or of the fundamental signified, anything but a function, indispensable but situated, inscribed, within the system of signification inaugurated by the interdict?”36 The linguistic properties of the interdict and of its infraction’s description mirror in their supplementarity the psychological displacement of desire in the incestuous act. Prohibition taken for incitement, mother for daughter, the reprehensible signified is scattered among the signifiers, endlessly linked by grammar and kinship.

Incest: A Condition of Heterosexual Societies Antiochus’s riddle shatters not only the reflection of his horrifying relations with the princess but also that of his sexualized mother. Significantly, while Gower’s characters cast shadows around transgressions, the poet propels them into the light through the antics of Venus, the ultimate sexualized mother, and her darling boy, Cupid.37 Before Genius’s appearance in the Confessio Amantis, Amans desires entry into the Court of Love and therefore seeks acceptance and assistance of its queen, Venus. To this extent, Venus symbolizes the Object of desire and the end of the lover’s confession, and she will even be the final arbiter of the lover’s cause. She is, then, the disruptive fulfillment of the Law set down in Genius’s warnings against the seven deadly sins. Amans must sue Venus for mercy toward his plight: “O Venus, queene of loves cure, / Thou lif, thou lust, thou mannes hele, / Behold my cause and my querele, / And yif me som part of thi grace” ( I.132–35). In her reply Venus, not knowing the lover’s name, calls him “Sone” (154), intimating that all initiates into Love’s Court are her children. In the stylized language of love, Amans has addressed the Court’s “mother” in the same way that he would beg satisfaction from his lady. This initial exchange in which Venus and Amans violate expectations of moral conversation between mother and son prefigures Genius’s later admission that Venus’s entire family heritage depends upon infractions against the Law of the Father.38 According to Genius’s history of religions in the Confessio’s Book V, when Jupiter usurps his father’s throne, he cuts off Saturn’s genitals and casts them into the sea. Born of this Oedipal struggle, Venus arises from the foam (835–59). Usually circumspect, Genius does not continue in a revelation of Venus’s incestuous practices until

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Amans insists. Laboring under the “schame” of the taboo (1382), Genius relates that after Jupiter has established himself as the chief of the gods, Venus commits incest with him in order to add to the new pantheon. Cupid is the product of their sibling affair (835–59), and later Venus and Cupid strike up a liaison: [Cupid] hadde a wonder fair visage, and fond his Moder amourous, And he was also lecherous: So whan thei weren bothe al one, As he which yhen hadde none To se reson, his Moder kiste; And sche also, that nothing wiste Bot that which unto lust belongeth, To ben hire love him underfongeth. Thus was he blind, and sche unwys: Bot natheles this cause it is, Why Cupide is the god of love, For he his moder dorste love. (V.1407–19) Venus’s consanguineous affairs and the power struggles among the gods clearly reveal how taboos are violated and how entire societies—those of Love’s Court or Olympus—depend upon such violation. Finally, civilization rests upon not only suppressions mandated by the taboo but also the infractions compelled by forbidden allure. Venus’s libertinism blares amidst the confusion of Genius’s statements about taboos; it depicts what is absent in his and Antiochus’s vague references to incest and it voices the reality of transgression. Through Venus’s character Gower insists that his readers confront the inevitable effect of mere moralizing. Since the rebellious sort will interpret a moral interdict as a tantalizing challenge, the community must take further steps to mitigate the personal and social harm caused in the violation of taboos, beginning with the bold admission that infringements often occur. However, many escape this realization because not even the victims of such infractions can convey their pain.39 The character in “Apollonius of Tyre” who experiences the most difficulty in voicing her experience of transgression is Antiochus’s daughter. After the rape, the princess haltingly confides in her nurse. Like both Genius and her father, she cannot name the crime Antiochus has committed,

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but instead wails that the one who brought her into this world has now bereft her of “worldes worschipe” (VIII.331). The nurse, horribly fatalistic, advises her to suffer what might not be changed (339–40), and so the princess remains completely silent in response to her father’s continued abuse: “sche dorste him nothing withseie” (347). Apollonius’s retainers consider the daughter’s silence an assent to the father’s mischief; when the princess dies by the same thunderbolt that strikes her licentious father, a messenger remarks, “So be thei bothe in o balance” (1002). This conclusion is painful for modern readers with our knowledge about domestic victims and the parental oppression that often makes it seem there is no alternative to quiet acquiescence to abuse.40 In contradistinction to the messenger’s analysis of the princess, we see that Antiochus has projected his desire onto her, her nurse thoughtlessly supports this projection, and the daughter unjustly takes the blame.41 Gower more closely approaches our feelings than the messenger’s in other statements that refuse to convict a domestic victim by association with impurity. Already in Book VII he has made it clear that Lucretia, “wofully” suicidal (5076), and Virginia, slain by Virginius “in his rage” (5240), were blameless in the attacks on their chastity and suffered unnecessary deaths. Furthermore, as Masayoshi Itô has noted, Genius—in a marked contrast to Gower’s sources—conveys sympathy for Antiochus’s daughter during the rape scene as she weeps pitifully.42 The princess of Antioch’s silence might contribute to the perpetuation of an abusive relationship, but Gower makes it clear that responsibility lies with the father. In contrast, the messenger’s attitude reveals a common anxiety toward those who circumvent and thus prove the reverse-commandment of taboos. Such anxiety and resultant scapegoating produce a culture in denial of infractions. Into such a culture gavottes Venus, Gower’s insistent sign of omnipresent rebellion against the Law of the Father. Gower presents us with the ineluctable reversal implied in the incest taboo, not only through Venus’s stunning infractions, but also through the seeming compliance of the chaste fathers and daughters of “Apollonius of Tyre.” The princess of Pentapolim, whom Apollonius marries, and Thaise, Apollonius’s own daughter, both seem to obey the incest taboo with assertiveness. The princess of Pentapolim writes a letter to her father, insisting upon taking Apollonius for her husband, and Thaise, who is separated in infancy from Apollonius and cannot recognize him when they coincidentally meet in Mitelene, eludes sexual misconduct with her unwitting father by vociferously protesting against Apollonius’s roughness. In

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both cases, the daughters seem to maintain their integrity and thus the Law of the Father through the loud expression of socially acceptable wishes. However, they both obtain these approved inclinations through their attempts to please the Father, and although much Gower scholarship delineates the differences between these daughters and the princess of Antioch, the motivation of all three girls is the same.43 The princess of Pentapolim falls in love with Apollonius while doing “as hire fader bad” (VIII.736); at Artestrathes’ request she cheers the shipwrecked prince with music and comforting words. As Lynda Zwinger observes, a daughter often begins her sexual journey at the father’s prompting, as in the Beauty and the Beast myth in which the daughter’s mission is to answer the father’s question “Will you love the Beast for me?”44 Like Beauty, the princess of Pentapolim shows the extent to which she would please a mate through her compliance with her father. Although Thaise does not have the opportunity to subordinate herself so obviously to Apollonius’s desires, she has internalized the paternal rule of chastity so perfectly that when she is kidnapped and placed in a brothel, she manages to deter all of her customers and eventually turn a house of ill repute into a school for young ladies. As Jane Gallop might say of such a paragon, she has been seduced by the “phallic uprightness” of the Father.45 Sexual tension between Apollonius and Thaise is evident before they recognize each other. In the dark hold of a ship where they first meet, Thaise reaches out to touch the grieving Apollonius, and he slaps her as if she were a whore. To protect herself, Thaise must identify her virgin state: “Avoi, my lord, I am a Maide” (1696). After the danger has passed, Thaise reveals her willingness to please Apollonius by marrying Athenagoras, lord of Mitelene, so that they all might be “of on acord” (1776). Both Thaise and her mother serve an apprenticeship for marriage while they are obedient daughters, illustrating that a ritualized violation of the incest taboo provides the “cornerstone . . . of heterosexual desire.”46 In “Apollonius of Tyre” the reversal of the incest taboo occurs through both violation and compliance.

Codependent Incest and Violence Taboos Moreover, the reversal of the incest taboo depends upon the reversal of the violence taboo. In the case of Antiochus, physical force provides the only means of perpetrating incest. In the case of Apollonius, the slap warns of the potential for unwitting incest. In both instances, incest can be forestalled only if physical assault can be prevented. Even when both father

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and daughter uphold the patriarchal code of chastity, as with the princess of Pentapolim and Artestrathes, Thaise and Apollonius, the sentimentalized attraction between father and daughter always plays out in the shadow of rape. According to Lynda E. Boose, the father’s choice of daughter as companion is a figuratively if not literally incestuous choice; therefore, the daughter’s presence sexualizes the domestic space and represents possible abuse.47 The princess of Pentapolim’s fear of her father’s reprisals causes her to write a letter to him rather than approach him directly about her love for Apollonius. She calls this fear “[t]he schame which is in a Maide” (894), recalling Genius’s choice of the word “schame” to describe his mortification at Venus’s incestuous liaisons. Both the princess and Genius experience discomfort over having to allude to prohibited desire, in the former case to the ritualized coupling of the father and daughter about to be unlocked through a marriage to Apollonius. Although Artestrathes has the legal right to choose his daughter’s consort, she has usurped this power, taken charge of her own sexuality, and denied her father the main consolation for losing her—the generous reputation of giving her away.48 While subserviently pleasing her father, the princess walks the balance between inappropriate expression of affection and the painful withdrawal of it. On either side threatens the father’s superior physical strength. Apollonius actually displays that strength, showing Thaise what he could do, should he feel like it. After each of his shipwrecks, Apollonius has exhibited an excessive and sometimes destructive grief, which looms over future family sorrows and over Thaise’s interactions with him. The daughters can act in their own interest only if they first placate either the desire or the anger of the father. The patriarch’s ire can arise, as Antiochus demonstrates and his riddle suggests, from the loss of gratification imposed by the Law of the Father. Violent impulses accompany the process of human identification, Julia Kristeva explains, when the child is disillusioned with the imaginary phase.49 Failing to experience the strong integrity promised in the mirror’s image and shattered by the self-alienation initiated by the mirror, the child directs violence toward an absence. According to Martha Reineke, the conflictual child in Kristeva is a “child in exile from the psychic space promised by the imaginary.”50 In his dogged quest for satisfaction with his mother through his daughter, Antiochus reveals his inability to proceed healthily from the imaginary to the symbolic, as the Law of the Father mandates. Instead, rebelling against the incest taboo, he falls back into the mother, now an abyss, and since he wars against the boundaries of his own

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selfhood, he cannot respect those in others. Gower overshadows Artestrathes and Apollonius with the example of Antiochus, showing in a psychologically sophisticated manner why violence begins in the home. The intimate connection between the incest and violence taboos, illustrated by fathers and daughters of “Apollonius of Tyre,” rests, according to Georges Bataille, in their similar purpose—to protect the everyday world of work.51 Since sex, physical conflict, and death interrupt the performance of duties and economic transactions, sanctions against incest and violence in the home help establish a reasonable hearth from which to proceed to a rational and productive community.52 However, as we have seen, the very declaration of taboo creates a desire for the forbidden, resulting, in Bataille’s conclusions, in aggressive and erotic fantasy if not indulgence.53 Since the emotional response to the taboo may be shame and compliance, as Genius illustrates, or rebellion and defiance, as Venus proves, the social foundation cracks open at the fault line. In the Confessio Amantis the family, enacting and reproducing society in miniature, is hardly earthquakeproof.54 One example of family violence in “Apollonius of Tyre” stands apart since it is dissociated from the incest taboo. This is the plot by Dionise, Thaise’s guardian, to have the girl murdered (1324–409). When Apollonius believes his wife to be dead, he entrusts the infant Thaise to indebted friends Strangulio and Dionise, rulers of Tharsis. The couple raise their ward so well that she becomes renowned for her learning. However, Dionise becomes jealous of the attention that the beautiful and talented Thaise draws away from her natural daughter Philotenne, so she persuades her servant Theophilus to maneuver Apollonius’s daughter onto an isolated beach and there slay her. When pirates rescue the girl, the plot fails; nevertheless, Theophilus falsely reports to Dionise that he has completed his mission. To cover up her crime, Dionise publicly proclaims that Thaise suddenly developed an illness and died by night; then she and her husband dress in mourning and erect an elaborate tomb. The plans to perpetrate the deed in seclusion and the pageantry afterwards recognize the violence taboo. Noting twice that Dionise’s motive in subverting the violence taboo is “envie” (1334, 1356), Genius compares this foster mother to the envious mothers-in-law in the Constance tale (II.587–1612). In the “Tale of Constance” Genius concentrates on backbiting as a subset of envy. The sultan’s mother-in-law commits detraction when she plans the fatal wedding feast

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behind her son’s back, and Domilde when she forges the false letter to demonize Constance. Through covert speech intended to exaggerate the faults of another and thus further one’s own plans, the mothers-in-law violate communication and life. The sultan’s mother actually has her son killed; Domilde arranges for Constance to be in imminent danger of death. While the mothers-in-law illustrate a particular kind of envy, Dionise, on the other hand, manifests all of the second sin’s forms mentioned in the Confessio’s Book II—sorrow for another man’s joy (20–77), joy for another man’s grief (221–34), detraction (383–586), false-semblant (1879– 957), and supplantation (2327–450). Dionise sorrows over Thaise’s accomplishments, rejoices at her reported demise, detracts from Thaise’s character in her private meeting with Theophilus, presents a false semblance of mourning to her subjects, and supplants Thaise with Philotenne. Dionise’s complete embodiment of envy reveals her personal emptiness and her need to appropriate the goods and qualities of others. Even worse, she projects her feelings of absence onto her daughter, who must, in her view, suffer from comparison to Thaise. Although the jealousy of Constance’s mothers-in-law arises from an incestuous wish to keep their sons to themselves and is therefore differentiated from Dionise’s, all of these mothers share a desire for inappropriate control over their children’s lives. While the mothers-in-law wish to keep their sons bachelors in order to maintain a high social status, Dionise wishes to impose a criterion for excellence upon her daughter. Specifically, Dionise imagines Apollonius’s daughter to be the model for Philotenne’s achievements, even though Philotenne does not seek Thaise’s ideals. In Philotenne’s behalf, Dionise boils over in frustration. Although Philotenne does not actively imitate Thaise, Dionise assumes that her daughter must be as abject as she herself is in the presence of others. Experiencing the anger that Philotenne would feel if she considered herself a mere copyist of Thaise, Dionise takes revenge for her daughter. This psychic process of imitation degenerating into annihilation is theorized by René Girard and succinctly described by Martha Reineke: “Veneration and rejection, mimesis and difference structure the subject’s experience of the world, until, in a shocking denouement of the dynamics of rivalry that sees the difference between the subject and its model obliterated by their common desire, the model becomes the monstrous double by whom the subject is repulsed and from whom she or he seeks distance. Desire has become death.”55 In Dionise’s base misinterpretation, Philotenne’s desire must be

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the ultimate scapegoating and punishment of the unattainable model. Therefore, the mother misappropriates and attempts to realize the daughter’s ends. Since this episode of “Apollonius of Tyre” begins by pointing out the importance of family in forming character—Thaise is so remarkable in part because of Strangulio and Dionise’s nurturing—the incipiently violent outcome is a devastating comment on relations developed through imitation of those in the home. By her foster family in Tharsis, Thaise “was wel kept, sche was wel loked, / Sche was wel tawht, sche was wel boked” (1327–28), and presumably Philotenne was raised in the same way. Yet a parent’s rigid control over her child’s goals confines the maturation process to the unattainable pursuit of the Other. Dissatisfaction, anger, violence ensue. The very process intended to reproduce good mothers and daughters destroys the family. As in the case of the incest taboo, which ushers the child from imaginary to symbolic phases, domestic role-modeling sets up a mirror reflecting a coherent but fatally intangible image.

Conclusion Whether in response to the incest taboo or in frustration with the modeling process, family dysfunction in “Apollonius of Tyre” reveals that domestic harm precipitates from the same social principles intended to produce domestic harmony. This revelation helps to explain why family dysfunction is so prevalent in the Confessio Amantis and in the world. At the end of “Apollonius of Tyre,” when the hero and his wife and daughter are joyfully reunited, Gower subverts closure and silences definitive statements about the possibility for lasting conjugal bliss. The representation of Apollonius’s family does not board up Love’s Court, where Venus and Cupid still flirt incestuously, nor does it persuade the primary audience of the tale—the lover Amans—to seek a nubile partner. Instead Amans, too old to struggle with the contradictory impulses compelled by taboos, reaches for his prayer beads and escapes the constant vigilance domestic abuse requires. Although Genius has stated the impediments to incest and violence in order to provide guidelines for Amans, Nature, the very ground for these rules, shifts beneath the lover’s feet, and it seems much safer to kneel. Since Genius’s preaching seems to have evoked the very crimes against which he preaches, Amans retires, defeated. For the younger, undaunted world, prohibitions continue to both impede and incite, and the households responding to their dictates survive between restraint and tears.

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Notes 1. I am ever grateful to Elree Harris, Michael Markowski, Russell A. Peck, Merrall Llewelyn Price, and Eve Salisbury, who commented on earlier versions of this essay. All citations of the Confessio Amantis refer to George Campbell Macaulay, ed., The Complete Works of John Gower, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899–1901), hereafter cited by the book and lines of the respective text. The commonplace on family values in the Confessio Amantis is that the poem valorizes chaste marriage and nurturing parenthood. This view was first popularized in J.A.W. Bennett, “Gower’s ‘Honeste Love,’” in Patterns of Love and Courtesy: Essays in Memory of C. S. Lewis, ed. John Lawlor (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), pp. 108–20. In the 1990s, interpretations of the Confessio continued to show how Gower upholds the family. For instance, R. F. Yeager states that “[m]atrimony provides Gower with the ideal image of sanctified harmony” (John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion [Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990], p. 249). According to these readings, Gower’s depictions of violent or incestuous families are negative examples and foils to the illustrations of good families. See also Kate A. Bauer, “The Portrayal of Parents and Children in the Works of Chaucer, Gower and the Pearl-Poet” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1995), pp. 128–207. Recently, some criticism regards the abusive family as a disruptive element in the Confessio. See, for instance, Georgiana Donavin, Incest Narratives and the Structure of Gower’s Confessio Amantis, ELS Monograph Series 56 (Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria Press, 1993) and María Bullón-Fernández, “Fathers and Daughters in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Authority, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval England” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1995). An earlier version of the latter’s discussion of the “Tale of Canace and Machaire” was published as “Confining the Daughter: Gower’s ‘Tale of Canace and Machaire’ and the Politics of the Body,” Essays in Medieval Studies 11 (1994): 75–85. All have stopped short, however, of declaring that the violent or incestuous families counterbalance or outweigh the model families in the Confessio. Although this essay was largely completed and submitted before the publication of Larry Scanlon’s “The Riddle of Incest: John Gower and the Problem of Medieval Sexuality” (in Re-visioning Gower, ed. R. F. Yeager [Asheville, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 1998]: pp. 93–128), it shares Scanlon’s Foucauldian view that sexual repression has diverted attention from Gower’s manifest interest in and concern with the problems of the incestuous family. 2. Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 247. 3. These examples and others are described in Bauer, “Portrayal,” pp. 128–207. 4. For ancient and medieval sources of the Historia Apollonii, see Elizabeth Archibald, Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations, Including the Text of the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri with an English Translation (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991). 5. Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic, p. 229.

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6. Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic, pp. 216–29. See also Bennett, “Gower’s ‘Honeste Love,’” pp. 117–18; Henry Ansgar Kelly, Love and Marriage in the Age of Chaucer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 145–46, 160, 279; Kurt O. Olsson, “Natural Law and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s. 11 (1982): 229–61. 7. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986). 8. Genius’s account does not cover all of the biblical backdrop to medieval incest law, for instance the well-known injunctions in Leviticus 18. 9. Throughout the twentieth century, critics struggled to explain why Book VIII does not inveigh against other forms of luxuria. Macaulay thought that since Books V and VII treat sinful passion, only incest is left to discuss in Book VIII (“John Gower,” The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. 2 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908], pp. 153–78). C. S. Lewis argued that Gower avoids a general treatment of lechery in the Confessio in deference to his character Venus (The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936], p. 214). Bennett differed with Lewis, contending that Gower’s concern is not the contradiction of Venus but the full discussion of issues of “kinde” (“Gower’s ‘Honeste Love,’” p. 112). More recently, Yeager has demonstrated that “exceptions”—surprising, though purposeful, topics of discussion between Genius and Amans—“prove the rule” to the Confessio’s structure (John Gower’s Poetic, pp. 158–229). Finally, the thesis of my 1993 monograph is that Book VIII provides a climax to the incest motif that occurs throughout the Confessio. 10. In the Mirour de l’Omme (lines 9085–192), Gower lists incest as the fourth sin out of the five subsets of lechery. See Macaulay, Complete Works, vol. 1. For a modern English translation, see John Gower, Mirour de l’Omme, trans. William Burton Wilson (East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1992). 11. Scanlon suggests that Gower emphasizes the forbidden nature of courtly love by comparing it to incest in the “Tale of Canace and Machaire” (Narrative, Authority, and Power, p. 269). 12. For a quick survey of Church thinking about incest before 1215, see Georgiana Donavin, “The Meaning of ‘Incest’ in the Confessio Amantis” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 1992), pp. 15–19. Also, a more recent and eminently readable survey of canon law and modern scholarship on incest occurs in Scanlon, “The Riddle of Incest,” pp. 100–106. 13. The classic summation of medieval incest law is still James A. Brundage’s Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Innocent III’s decree was a practical corrective to the previously elaborate incest law, in which relatives in the sixth degree could not marry. Probably the Fourth Lateran Council’s more lenient incest law stood in Gower’s time because the Black Death had destroyed between one-third and one-half of England’s population and made exogamy improbable. The problem for the nobility in the late fourteenth century was not impeding cousin marriage, but finding living cousins with whom

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one might preserve the patrimony. According to Colin Platt (King Death: The Black Death and Its Aftermath in Late-Medieval England [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996], p. 50), noble families died out in crisis proportions during the 1370s and 1380s. As a result of extinctions in the male line, intrafamilial marriages greatly increased. 14. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 5, suppl. 3.54.3 (Ottawa: Ottawa Institute of Medieval Studies, 1945). Some scholars doubt that Gower had access to Thomas’s Summa. For instance, Kurt Olsson offers several other sources from which Gower might have obtained his ideas on Natural Law (and consequently on incest as an infraction thereof); see “Natural Law.” However, Gower might have obtained knowledge of Aquinas during formal legal training. In his Life of Chaucer Thomas Speght writes: “It seemeth that both [Chaucer and Gower] were of the inner Temple; for not many yeeres since, Master Buckley did see a Record in the same house, where Geoffrey Chaucer was fined two shillings for beating a Franciscane fryer in Fleetstreete” (London: William Camden, 1587), p. 12n.5. Since Buckley kept the Inner Temple’s records, he probably had reliable evidence of Gower’s residence there. More recently, John H. Fisher has offered sumptuary evidence for the possibility of Gower’s legal training. Fisher observes that the Mirour de l’Omme (line 21772) describes Gower wearing “a garment with striped sleeves”—the garb of court officials (John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer [New York: New York University Press, 1964], p. 55). Furthermore, considering the large number of Dominicans in London and Oxford during the fourteenth century, it would not be surprising if Gower had obtained a manuscript of the Summa Theologiae. On the Dominican population, see Bede Jarrett, The English Dominicans (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1921), p. 65. 15. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 69. 16. Edward Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1921). 17. Bullón-Fernández includes an illuminating discussion on the instability of Genius’s concept of “Nature” and “kynde” passions. She observes that by historicizing the incest taboo, “Gower’s narrator reveals the very constructedness and instability of the concept of nature and indirectly (as well as unwittingly) questions the notion of desire as prediscursive” (“Fathers and Daughters,” p. 15). 18. Philippa Maddern, Violence and Social Order: East Anglia, 1422–1444 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 84–85. 19. R. F. Yeager argues (in “Pax Poetica: On the Pacifism of Chaucer and Gower,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 [1987]: 97–121) that in the Mirour de l’Omme Gower advances political justifications for violence, while in the Confessio he urges instead an Augustinian pacifism. Augustine’s philosophy that the ultimate end of any conflict should be peace appears, according to Yeager, in Amans’s critique of the Crusades (III.2490–93), in the rewards for “pite” in the “Tale of Telaphus and

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Teucer” (III.2639–717), and in the Epilogue. While Yeager is accurate in characterizing Gower’s hopes for pacification, he indulges in biographical supposition when referring to Gower’s “optimism” for its achievement (107). Genius’s rehearsal of the cases in which violence is legal or permissible demonstrates that Gower knew the many obstacles in the way of universal peace. 20. Frank Grady (“The Lancastrian Gower and the Limits of Exemplarity,” Speculum 70 [1995]: 558) argues that “In Praise of Peace” and the Confessio Amantis exist in “hypotactic relation” to one another because of Gower’s political addresses in both to Henry IV. Macaulay provides the edition to “In Praise of Peace” in volume 3 of the Complete Works, pp. 481–92. Although, as Macaulay notes, “In Praise of Peace” occurs in the Trentham Hall MS, which does not include the Confessio Amantis but rather the Cinkante Balades, Grady contends that the designation of the same language and narratives for both the Confessio and “In Praise of Peace” and the similar dedications to Henry IV compel us to analyze these two poems together. 21. Genius’s exempla of Greek familial savagery illustrate Book III’s overt statements of the violence taboo: lines 2251–362 contain the Confessio’s most explicit injunctions against war; lines 2517–99 express the prohibition against homicide. Genius’s telling of the “Tale of Orestes” has compelled Amans to inquire whether slaying is always a sin (2206–9). After listing the exceptions, Genius gives his overarching answer to Amans’s question: the Sixth Commandment. Genius explains how Christ expanded the prohibition against killing to a positive mandate for a wholly peaceable life, and he insists that Christ’s charitable example countermands war. War yields no good, Genius claims, but instead destroys all around: “For alle thing which god hath wroght / In Erthe, werre it bringth to noght: / The cherche is brent, the priest is slain, / The wif, the maide is ek forlain, / The lawe is lore and god unserved” (2273–77). War must arise, then, from the antithesis of charity, or covetousness, Genius concludes. He employs Alexander the Great as an exemplum of the greedy warrior, comparing him to a pirate and declaring his horrible death fit profit for the destruction he had wrought (2363–489). Genius wonders why the church imitates Alexander’s imperialism in its Crusades, since Christ never offered a violent example of conversion (2490–515). According to Genius, homicide is likewise sinful because it “werreth ayein charite” (2584), offering vengeance instead of mercy. Genius presents the “Tale of Telaphus and Teucer” as an example of human mercy amidst mortal conflict (2639–718), and finally enjoins Amans always to show “pite and compassioun” (2722). 22. Anthony Farnham (“The Art of High Prosaic Seriousness: John Gower as Didactic Raconteur,” in The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature, ed. Larry D. Benson [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974], p. 165) declares Genius a “false priest.” Michael Cherniss (“The Allegorical Figures in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Res Publica Litterarum 1 [1978]: 7–20) calls him incoherent. Many have sought in Gower’s sources an explanation for the fact that a priest of Venus is in a position to deliver Christian moralizing. The first of such

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studies was C. S. Lewis’s Allegory of Love. Notable followers include George Economou (“The Two Venuses of Courtly Love,” in In Pursuit of Perfection: Courtly Love in Medieval Literature, ed. Joan M. Ferrante and George D. Economou [Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1975], pp. 20–32) and Denise N. Baker (“The Priesthood of Genius: A Study in Medieval Tradition,” Speculum 51 [1976]: 277– 91). In Incest Narratives and the Structure of Gower’s Confessio Amantis, I argue that the character of Genius develops, improving much in wisdom and morality by the telling of “Apollonius of Tyre” (20–32). Even his development, however, does not solicit confidence in his omniscience or status as a substitute for Gower. 23. Theresa Lynn Tinkle, Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics, and English Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 181. 24. Luce Irigaray, “The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry,” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 38. 25. Juliet Mitchell, introduction to Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 5–6. 26. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990). 27. William George Dodd first made the point that the Confessio’s structure imitates the penitentials in their rehearsals of the seven deadly sins (Courtly Love in Chaucer and Gower [Boston: Ginn, 1913; rpt., Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959], pp. 44–46). Later Morton Bloomfield showed how widespread such imitation was and, again, used the Confessio Amantis as an example (The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature [East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1952], pp. 193– 94). Many have speculated about the effects of Gower’s imitation. Derek Pearsall points out that the confessional frame disallows a sense of organic progression to the Confessio Amantis (“Gower’s Narrative Art,” PMLA 81 [1966]: 477). In contrast, Kurt Olsson contends that the confessional frame provides unity for the whole work and a means of development for the central character (John Gower and the Structures of Conversion: A Reading of the Confessio Amantis [Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992]). 28. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 76. 29. W. Arens complains that while modern anthropological scholarship has documented the incest taboos of various cultures, we know little about the many transgressions that occur. Arens urges, “Rather than these oblique confrontations with incest as psychological abnormality or historical oddity, what is required is the same sort of perspective of incest itself as has been applied so readily to its opposite. This means agreeing to the fact that incest exists as both a theoretical and practical problem, deserving of explanation” (The Original Sin: Incest and Its Meaning [New York: Oxford University Press, 1986], pp. 4–5).

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30. Popular religious manuals, especially penitentials, educated the medieval audience in plain terms such as Gower’s on the definition and consequences of incest. For instance, the Ancrene Riwle (1225) states, “Incest . . . is betwhwe sibbe, vleshliche oðer gostliche” (204). The Ancrene Riwle explains to a specific audience that “incest” constitutes sex between either blood or spiritual kin, “spiritual” relationships meaning those contracted through sponsorship at baptism (J.R.R. Tolkien, ed., Ancrene Wisse: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle, EETS o.s. 249 [London: Oxford University Press, 1962]). The Cursor Mundi (1300), which popularized Bible stories, defines “incest” for a wide readership: “Incest, þat es for to ly bi þat þi sibman has line bi, or if þou has don þat sin wit ani of þin aun kin” (line 27942); it reminds its readers that incest occurs not only with blood relations but also with relations connected by marriage. Thus, sexual intercourse with a brother-in-law would carry the same stigma as that with a brother (R. Morris, ed., Cursor Mundi, EETS o.s. 57, 59, 62, 66, 68, 99, 101 [London: Oxford University Press, 1874–93]), vol. 101 (1893). After providing full instruction in the prohibited degrees of consanguinity, Handlyng Synne (1303) explains which relationships of affinity and spirituality are incestuous: Ne þou shalt never wedde ne synne Wyþ any þat þy kyn haþ weddyd ynne. Or yf a man have hove a chyld, God hyt ever forbede and shyld þat þat chyld sulde any have Of hys godfadrys, maydyn or knave Hys breþren or sustren may at here pay Wedde; but he þat he hoff never may. Ne þou shalt nat by þy lyff Wedde þy godfadrys wyff. Also shal þe womman wonde To take here godmodrys husbonde Twey godmodrys shul nat wede þe toun to aske þe touþer to bede. (lines 1683–96) See Robert Mannyng of Brunne, Handlyng Synne, ed. Idelle Sullens, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 14 (Binghamton: State University of New York Press, 1983). 31. Russell A. Peck, Kingship and Common Profit in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), pp. 165–66. 32. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 65. 33. In 1694 C. F. Menestrier observed that such a riddle marks the walls of various cities; see La Philosophie des images énigmatiques (Lyons, 1694), pp. 187–90. Similarly, Archer Taylor documented the appearance of incest riddles on medieval head-

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stones; see “Riddles Dealing with Family Relationships,” Journal of American Folklore 51 (1938): 25–37. 34. Scholars disagree about the details and the interpretation of Antiochus’s riddle. Patrick Gallacher claims that the references to mother, father, wife, and children in enmeshed relationships touch upon all taboo contact between kin (Love, the Word, and Mercury: A Reading of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis [Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975], p. 30.) Dealing more precisely with the riddle’s phrasing, Peter Goolden contends that it refers to affines. Antiochus, according to Goolden, seeks a son-in-law but does not find him because he occupies the position himself (“Antiochus’s Riddle in Gower and Shakespeare,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 6 [1955], p. 251). More persuasively, I think, Michel Zink argues that the riddle is Oedipal, describing the son’s consumption of the mother’s flesh. See Michel Zink, ed. and trans., Le Roman d’Apollonius de Tyr (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1982), pp. 23–24. 35. Bullón-Fernández provides a Lacanian interpretation of the riddle. She argues that in spouting enigmas, Antiochus attempts to revive a prelinguistic world before the Law of the Father and its incest prohibition (347). On the subject of the incestuous father as tyrant, there is much documentation, both historical and modern. For Gower studies, Peck’s chapter on the Confessio’s Book VIII, connecting Antiochus’s cruelty at home to his savage kingship, is still the classic (Kingship and Common Profit, pp. 357–67). For the English Renaissance, Bruce Thomas Boehrer’s Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England: Literature, Culture, Kinship, and Kingship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992) has illustrated how the nobility used incest narratives for their further empowerment and incest thus became associated with tyranny in English Renaissance culture. On contemporary incestuous families, Judith Lewis Herman in FatherDaughter Incest (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981) shows that most often the incestuous father is an extremely traditional man who demands that his authority be primary in the home and uses this authority to sanction domestic abuse. 36. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 266. 37. Interpretations of the Confessio’s Venus span from considerations of her perfidious nature to allegorizations of her complementarity to the Virgin Mary. Bennett notes that Gower’s contemporaries would have regarded the characters Venus and Cupid as signs of foolish lust (“Gower’s ‘Honeste Love,’” pp. 108–10, 119–20). T. E. Pickford (“‘Fortune’ in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Parergon 7 [1973]: 24) argues that Venus, a symbol for divine love, is a type of Mary. George Economou’s seminal article “Two Venuses” explains how these antithetical concepts of Venus function in Middle English literature, and Theresa Tinkle’s recent Medieval Venuses and Cupids contextualizes these antitheses in traditional mythographic interpretations. Seeking more coherence in his reading of Venus, Larry

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Scanlon has contended that Gower seeks authorization through the retelling of established stories about Venus (Narrative, Authority, and Power, p. 250). My own view, developed at length in chapter 2 of the cited monograph, is that the Confessio’s Venus is a parody of the Virgin Mary. 38. In Tinkle’s view, Genius’s history of religions aids Amans in his progress toward self-awareness. By historicizing Venus and Cupid, she argues, Genius discourages Amans from deifying base desires (Medieval Venuses and Cupids, pp. 178– 97). 39. Giving voice to domestic abuse is a modern problem as well. Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, in The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), conclude that today one in three girls and one in seven boys experience incest, yet few cases are reported (p. 24). Arens explains that more cases of father-daughter incest are reported than any other sort because the father is still the authority figure in most Western households and the family would more likely seek a higher authority (the government) to help solve the problem (Original Sin, p. 12). 40. Because of the silence induced by the domestic victim’s urge for self-preservation, Bass and Davis have created writing assignments to catalyze painful, personal revelations (The Courage to Heal). 41. Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 75. 42. Masayoshi Itô, John Gower, the Medieval Poet (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1976), p. 61. 43. Much has been made of the juxtaposition of different father-daughter relationships in “Apollonius of Tyre.” The traditional conclusion has been that Gower counteracts the impression of the incestuous father and daughter in Antioch with later descriptions of chaste, respectful fathers and daughters. See Peck, Kingship and Common Profit, pp. 906–51; Götz Schmitz, The Middel Weie: Stil- und Aufbauformen in John Gower’s “Confessio Amantis” (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974), pp. 152–53; Patrick J. Gallacher, Love, the Word, and Mercury, pp. 130, 134–35; Peter Goodall, “John Gower’s Apollonius of Tyre: Confessio Amantis, Book VIII,” Southern Review (Australia) 15 (1982): 244; Kurt Olsson, Structures, p. 222. Against this massive consensus about the primacy of chaste fathers and daughters in the Confessio, the purpose of Búllon-Fernández’s dissertation is to show how Gower’s narratives of familial anxiety complicate the traditional picture. According to her study, Gower tells stories about fatherly misuse of authority in order to comment subtly on absolutism in the English monarchy. 44. Lynda Zwinger, Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel: The Sentimental Romance of Heterosexuality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 3. 45. Gallop, Daughter’s Seduction, p. 75. 46. Zwinger, Daughters, Fathers, p. 9. 47. Lynda E. Boose, “The Father’s House and the Daughter in It: The Structures of Western Culture’s Daughter-Father Relationship,” in Daughters and Fathers, ed.

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Lynda E. Boose and Betty S. Flowers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 64. 48. Ibid., p. 31. 49. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 50. Martha Reineke, “The Mother in Mimesis: Kristeva and Girard on Violence and the Sacred,” Body/Text in Julia Kristeva: Religion, Women, and Psychoanalysis, ed. David Crownfield (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 74. 51. Bataille, Erotism, p. 16. 52. Ibid., p. 53. 53. Ibid., p. 127. 54. Much has been written about how family in the Confessio Amantis functions as a microcosm of the society. See especially Russell A. Peck, Kingship and Common Profit, and Elizabeth Porter, “Gower’s Ethical Microcosm and Political Macrocosm,” in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983), pp. 135–62. 55. Reineke, “The Mother in Mimesis,” p. 70. The theory of René Girard being summarized is amplified in Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).

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5

Reframing the Violence of the Father Reverse Oedipal Fantasies in Chaucer’s Clerk’s, Man of Law’s, and Prioress’s Tales Barrie Ruth Straus

Modern readers of medieval saints’ lives are often surprised by the amount of physical violence those stories contain. My focus in this essay1 is not on the physical but on the psychic violence inherent in the symbolic structure of the family, the unit on which Western culture claims to be based.2 Freud articulates the notion of the family romance—idealization of the father and of a “happy” family unit—created for the good of all as a reaction to, and defense against, the violent actuality that necessarily constitutes the family. Inherent in the child’s experience of the family are such sexual and generational conflicts as the child’s incestuous feelings for Oedipal parents, as well as hostility from and disappointment in them. Freud explains how the child attempts to alleviate these feelings by means of a fantasy formation that represses the mutual hostility through selfaggrandizing idealizations of an Oedipal parent, especially the father— whose paternity Freud reminds us is always uncertain.3 According to psychoanalytic theory, cross-generational relations are necessarily conflictual, for the notion of fatherhood implies not only the extension of the father’s lineage but also the necessity of the father’s death and replacement by the child—a situation that arouses murderous paternal rage against the child as replacement, and an equal rage against the necessity of the mother, without whose ability to give birth that replacement cannot take place.4 Motherhood from this point of view entails the violence of sacrifice in the name of the father of all other aspects of womanhood. The concept of the family romance, then, provides us with a structure of defense against psychic realities whose violence seems too difficult for us

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to face directly in our lives. From the way the violence of the structure of the family is presented in three of Chaucer’s saints’ lives, the Clerk’s, Man of Law’s, and Prioress’s Prologues and Tales, these truths seem too difficult to face directly in some literature as well. In each tale the transmission of culture from one generation to another is problematic in a way that can be understood behaviorally and symbolically in terms of the violence of the father, and psychodynamically in terms of the father’s reverse Oedipal fantasies. I am especially concerned to articulate the way the tales’ presentation of the violence of the family re-creates the structure of the fantasy formation of the family romance. In each tale the violence of the father is revealed during the unfolding of the plot, only to be denied, repressed, and concealed. The process is effected by structural and narrative devices that present the father’s desires as fictions, by “happy endings” in which families are reunited without harm, and by a series of fictional frames that defend the characters in the drama and its readers/listeners from having to confront the violence of the family. The pattern is clearly outlined in the Clerk’s Prologue and Tale. The prologue frames the violence of the family that Walter enacts in the tale with the violent masculine rivalry between the Host and the Clerk. The Host’s opening attack on the Clerk’s manhood—“Ye ryde as coy and stille as dooth a mayde / Were newe spoused, sittynge at the bord” (IV.2–3)— announces an anxiety about masculinity inherent in the violence of the father.5 The Host strives for recognition as “more of a man” (a plea for greater recognition from the symbolic father, the idealized father identified with the phallus)6 by asserting that the Clerk is not just a lesser man but a castrated man, that is, a woman. Rhetorically, then, the tale that follows can be seen as the Clerk’s witty, multileveled exploration of what it is to be a man. The Host enacts his model of manhood, the denigrating bully. He follows his opening aspersions with taunts about the scholar’s (maidenly) silence and his studies: “This day ne herde I of youre tonge a word. / I trowe ye studie aboute som sophyme” (IV.4–5). He asserts his control over the Clerk’s attitude and his story by commanding the Clerk to change to a more pleasant mood— “beth of bettre cheere” (IV.7)—and by insisting twice that the Clerk tell a “myrie tale” (IV.9, 15). When he chides that the Clerk must necessarily submit to him since the Clerk has already entered into his “pley,” saying, “For what man that is entred in a pley, / He nedes moot unto the pley assente” (IV.10–11), the Host turns the Clerk’s act of assent into a sexual and denigrating act of submission. The Clerk’s response to being placed in

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the submissive position traditionally ascribed to woman, on the other hand, enacts the scholar’s different model of manhood, one that only ostensibly assumes that submissive position.7 In the prologue, the Clerk deflects the Host’s attempts to control both the kind of tale the Clerk should tell—“Telle us som myrie tale, by youre fey! . . . / But precheth nat, as freres doon in Lente, / To make us for oure olde synnes wepe, / Ne that thy tale make us nat to slepe. / Telle us som murie thyng of aventures” (IV.9–15)—and the way he should tell it: “Youre termes, youre colours, and youre figures, / Keepe hem in stoor til so be ye endite / Heigh style, as whan that men to kynges write. / Speketh so pleyn at this tyme, we yow preye / That we may understonde what ye seye” (IV.16–20). Even as the Clerk “graciously” agrees to obey the Host, however, the Clerk adds the caveat “as fer as resoun axeth” [as far as reason demands] (IV.25). Adhering to a spirit of play different from what the Host might understand, the Clerk’s caveat immediately undoes the obedience he has averred, by opening up a space for disobeying any demands that could be considered unreasonable. At the same time, the Clerk violates the Host’s command to “speak plainly” without the rhetorical terms of a high style.8 As the Clerk continues, he also violates the Host’s command to tell some “myrie tale.” Tracing the lineage of the story of domestic violence he is about to tell—to the poet Petrarch, who wrote in the high style in another time and language and place, and who is dead—the Clerk dwells on the brevity of life and the inevitability of death: “But Deeth, that wol nat suffre us dwellen heer, / But as it were a twynklyng of an ye, / Hem bothe hath slayn, and alle shul we dye” (IV.36–38). The double imperative of death that is part of the violence of the family—the recognition that since men must die, they must replace themselves by heirs to continue their lineage—is both asserted and denied when the Clerk refers to it in terms of the transmission of fictions, a history of writing that the Host specifically told him not to tell. Moreover, the Clerk’s excessive zeal in declaring Petrarch, the father of his story, “nayled in his cheste” (IV.29), and then in simultaneously proclaiming Petrarch’s proheme irrelevant while covertly inserting its crucial details into his own prologue, enacts the violence of parricide against the text and the Host.9 The prologue then marks as “literary,” that is, as fictional, highfaluting, irrelevant, and irreverent, the relationship between, on the one hand, cross-generational transmission and translation of fictions and, on the other, the fictions of lineage that mark cross-generational transmission of

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culture and the violence of the family. In these ways the prologue establishes a concern with the violence of the father—with issues about masculinity, sexuality, domination and submission, death, and transmission of culture. Yet at the same time it allows and encourages members of its audience(s)—both the characters in the drama and its listeners/readers— to distance themselves from that violence by attributing it to the dynamics of a fiction told in the context of sexual and class rivalry between two men, and of stories of the transmission of literature. The Clerk’s Tale, however, by extending this discourse through time and space, establishes it as more widespread and enduring than the mere rivalry of two middle-class English men. The tale quickly relates the transmission of fictions with human lineage through its setting, characterization, and plot. The landscape contains fertile plains with towers and towns still standing though built “in tyme of fadres olde” (IV.61). The Clerk emphasizes Walter’s lordship and lineage, describing him as “lord . . . of that lond, / As were his worthy eldres hym bifore” (IV.64–65) and, “to speke as of lynage, / The gentilleste yborn of Lumbardye” (IV.71–72). Walter’s subjects enjoin their reluctant lord to give up his freedom and marry, because the spectre of death is a constant—“deeth manaceth every age, and smyt / In ech estaat, for ther escapeth noon; / And al so certein as we knowe echoon / That we shul deye, as uncerteyn we alle / Been of that day whan deeth shal on us falle” (IV.122–26)—and necessitates ensuring heirs: “Delivere us out of al this bisy drede, / And taak a wyf, for hye Goddes sake! / For if it so bifelle, as God forbede, / That thurgh youre deeth youre lyne sholde slake, / And that a straunge successour sholde take / Youre heritage, O wo were us alyve! (IV.134–39). Walter accedes to his subjects’ plea; he agrees to marry, to give up his freedom of his own free will, in order to protect his lineage—but with a condition: that he and not his subjects will choose his wife. Walter acknowledges that his paternity, and the way his lineage will turn out, is not in his control: “For God it woot, that children ofte been / Unlyk hir worthy eldres hem bifore” (IV.155–56). For this reason, he states, he will trust in God’s bounty. In other words, in agreeing to take on the role of paterfamilias by establishing a social family, Walter acknowledges something that patriarchal culture often keeps confused and suppressed: that the actual father is not the symbolic father. By acknowledging that he is not the symbolic father (named God in this case), he submits to the symbolic father. This acknowledgment that the phallus is in place allows Walter to act as paterfamilias as if he really were the symbolic father.

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Walter’s assertion of control, in stipulating that he must choose his wife, is an assertion of and reaction to his acknowledgment of his lack of control over his paternity, lineage, and death. As Walter sets up his marriage, the narrative allows us to see the violence of the father on which patriarchal marriage is based.10 This violence entails a double mythology inscribed and perpetuated by the structure of the family. The first myth, as Walter’s proviso points up, is that an actual father can indeed operate in the place of the symbolic father, the position of the phallus in a world of discourse that is phallocentric. The second myth is that the family reflects a coincidence of the interests of the father and those of “his” wife and children and other family members: that is, that the best interests of a woman or of children are served in a family under the governance of a man/father/phallus. This mythology establishes ideologically the positionality of the father qua symbolic father, qua phallus, by providing a subjugated/ subordinate “other” that confirms his positionality, at the expense and repression of any noncongruent needs the woman and children might have. The Clerk’s description of Walter’s marital arrangement exposes the defensive function of these mythologies, showing how patriarchal marriage is based on the necessary generational conflicts seen in the suppression of the woman who functions as peaceweaver and childbearer, an object of exchange between men. The Clerk’s description of Walter’s interest in Griselda focuses on her exemplary femininity or “wommanhede” (IV.239), which according to the Clerk consists in being pretty enough to look at—“fair ynogh to sighte” (IV.209)—and beautiful in virtue and most especially a dutiful daughter who, we are repeatedly told, nourishes and sustains her aged father. The Clerk asserts that Walter’s attraction to Griselda is not based on sexual desire: “He noght with wantown lookyng of folye / His eyen caste on hire,” (IV.236–37). And young, virginal Griselda is without sexual desire as well: “no likerous lust was thurgh hire herte yronne” (IV.214). But the Clerk’s expression of the lack of desire through negative propositions evokes the very possibility that the desire he denies is part of Walter’s attraction. Someone is desiring something, if the absence of desire is important enough to claim. Walter’s requests to Griselda’s father, Janicula, for her hand and to Griselda to become his wife point to marriage as an arrangement based on a desire for power. They also suggest the limits of the social father’s power, attributable to the fact that the actual father is not the symbolic father, and that all social fathers are not equal in their ability to act in the place of the symbolic father. Walter, the lord of the land, re-

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minds Janicula of the latter’s inherited subordinate status as his liege man with the words “Thou lovest me, I woot it wel certeyn, / And art my feithful lige man ybore” (IV.309–10) as he asks him to agree that what is in Walter’s best interest is also in his own: “And al that liketh me, I dar wel seyn / It liketh thee” (IV.311–12). Janicula’s powerlessness to do other than acquiesce is highlighted by his reaction to Walter’s assertions—“This sodeyn cas this man astonyed so / That reed he wax; abayst and al quakynge / He stood; unnethes seyde he wordes mo” (IV.316–18)—which adds to the Clerk’s Tale an emotionality beyond that of its fourteenth-century analogues.11 Similarly, when Walter asks Griselda to assent to or dissent from an agreement already made between two men to whom she is subordinate, her father and his liege lord, saying, “It liketh to youre fader and to me / That I yow wedde,” (IV.345–46), he expects her to concur: “and eek it may so stonde, / As I suppose, ye wol that it so be” (IV.346–47). Marriage as an agreement between men is further underscored in Walter’s ability to return Griselda to her father’s house under the pretense of his desire to exchange her for a younger wife. This second “exchange” of Griselda also emphasizes the social father’s unequal access to the symbolic father: Janicula is powerless to do other than accept his lord’s decision. The Clerk describes Janicula as even more upset at having to take Griselda back than he was to allow Walter to marry her. His earlier unstated fear and embarrassment are replaced in the second exchange by cursing and public tears (IV.901–3). The Clerk explains Janicula’s intensified rage at having Griselda returned as attributable to Janicula’s suspicions about Walter’s character, his defects as a man and ruler that Janicula is politically powerless to do anything about. Janicula, we are told, always suspected that when Walter had done what he wanted, he would be disparaged by being bound to Griselda’s lowly origins and get rid of her as soon as he could: “whan the lord fulfild hadde his corage, / Hym wolde thynke it were a disparage / To his estaat so lowe for t’alighte, / And voyden hire as soone as ever he myghte” (IV.907–10). But by this explanation the Clerk deflects attention away from further sources of powerlessness and rage for Janicula, the masculine rivalry inherent in the violence of the father. In obtaining Janicula’s reluctant agreement, first to hand over and then to take back his daughter, Walter confirms his own position as father at the expense of Janicula. As he does so he points to the fact that the actual father is not the symbolic father, and so is powerless to protect his daughter; he marks Janicula as a lesser “man,” owing to Walter’s greater proximity to

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the symbolic father; and he places him in a position even below that of a lesser man, the position of castrated man, that is, the position of woman in which the Host had placed the Clerk. In addition, Janicula’s rage marks the inherent generational conflict involved in the reluctance of any father to hand over his daughter and so acknowledge the younger man who must replace him as object of the daughter’s desire, a necessary means for continuing his lineage after death. Walter’s request to Griselda to assent to a marriage agreement that (he says) pleases her father and him includes a reminder to Griselda of the prerogatives of the patriarchal husband at the woman’s expense. The position of husband gives him complete freedom to make his wife conform to his desires, whether to her happiness or harm, while her position disallows any sign of complaint or disagreement: “I seye this: be ye redy with good herte / To al my lust, and that I frely may, / As me best thynketh, do yow laughe or smerte, / And nevere ye to grucche it, nyght ne day? / And eek whan I sey ‘ye,’ ne say nat ‘nay,’ / Neither by word ne frownyng contenance?” (IV.351–56). Like her father, in an emotional state of amazement, dazed and “quakynge for drede” (IV.358), Griselda too acquiesces to what she is powerless to control, acknowledging that Walter’s wishes will be her wishes: “But as ye wole youreself, right so wol I” (IV.361). However, she indicates that the coincidence of her interests with those of Walter can exist only at the expense of her extinction when she adds—in an intensification not found in other versions of the story—that she will not “willyngly” disobey him, on pain of death, although she does not wish to die: “And heere I swere that nevere willyngly, / In werk ne thoght, I nyl yow disobeye, / For to be deed, though me were looth to deye” (IV.362– 64).12 The marriage Walter proposes makes the death of any separate desire or will of a woman from that of her husband a condition for becoming a wife, a condition Griselda has already fulfilled by her subordination of her needs to those of her father, the virtuous basis for her selection as Walter’s wife. In Walter’s proposal, it is important to note, the woman never wills of her own; she is therefore “nevere willyngly.” She is the negation of her will, and hence of herself. The negative predicate “kills” her in advance of the physical death she does not wish. Once Walter becomes an actual father through the birth of a daughter—whose significance, as the Clerk relates, marking the gender hierarchy of patriarchal culture, is to establish that Griselda is fertile and thus potentially able to deliver a preferable male heir—Walter enacts the violence of the family laid out in his marriage agreement. In so doing, he

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reveals that the nature of social fatherhood consists in the prerogative of the father to use and abuse women and children, treating both as his property, with which he can do anything he likes. The Clerk does all that he can to distance himself and his audiences from Walter’s behavior when Walter tests Griselda four times. The Clerk insists that the first test, taking away their daughter, is excessive, needlessly frightening, and, though praised by some (men) as clever, entirely inappropriate: Nedelees, God woot, he thoghte hire for t’affraye. He hadde assayed hire ynogh bifore, And foond hire evere good; what neded it Hire for to tempte, and alwey moore and moore, Though som men preise it for a subtil wit? But as for me, I seye that yvele it sit To assaye a wyf whan that it is no nede, And putten hire in angwyssh and in drede. (IV.455–62) The unmarried Clerk further separates himself from Walter’s second test, the private removal of their son, by classifying it as standard marital behavior, the way husbands act: “O nedelees was she tempted in assay! / But wedded men ne knowe no mesure, / Whan that they fynde a pacient creature” (IV.621–23), and, seemingly taking the wives’ position, appealing to women to judge Walter’s behavior as excessive, cruel, and unwarranted testing of wives’ constancy: “But now of wommen wolde I axen fayn / If thise assayes myghte nat suffise? / What koude a sturdy housbonde moore devyse / To preeve hir wyfhod and hir stedefastnesse, / And he continuynge evere in sturdinesse?” (IV.696–700). At the same time, he distances Walter’s behavior from that of other married men, and that of his audiences, by labeling it an example of compulsive pathology: “But ther been folk of swich condicion / That whan they have a certein purpos take, / They kan nat stynte of hire entencion, / But, right as they were bounden to that stake, / They wol nat of that firste purpos slake. / Right so this markys fulliche hath purposed / To tempte his wyf as he was first disposed” (IV.701–7). In short, Walter is described as an example of a man out of control, driven by aberrant impulses to compulsive behavior that is unnecessary, cruel, and destructive of his family, his reputation, his subjects, and so himself. Rather than being abnormal behavior, however, Walter’s tests reveal the inherent violence of the structure of the family in patriarchal culture.

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Walter’s first two tests consist in removing both children from their mother and allowing her to think that they will be killed, while the last two tests consist in making his wife think that she will be exchanged for a younger woman of higher lineage, who she is unaware is actually her daughter. The removal of children presumed slain reveals the right of the patriarchal father—acting in the place of the symbolic father—by virtue of his ability to create life, to take that life away. The tests, that is, reveal the right of the father to commit infanticide, the desire for which is inherent in the birth of any child, since knowledge of the father’s death is implicit in that birth. Walter’s infanticidal desires made public are doubly condemned within the narrative. When word of the “murders” gets out and Walter is defamed, his subjects’ love for him changes. And the Clerk, who condemns the people’s lack of constancy elsewhere, justifies this instance of change on the grounds of the heinous nature, not of infanticide, but of murder: “Ther cam no word, but that they mordred were. / For which, where as his peple therbifore / Hadde loved hym wel, the sclaundre of his diffame / Made hem that they hym hatede therfore. / To been a mordrere is an hateful name” (IV.728–32). Thus the desires are revealed and concealed by being presented as “pretense” rather than actual deed, and by being condemned not under the name of the violence of the family but as a different, less fraught, albeit heinous act. The desire of the father to marry his daughter repeats and makes blatant the desire of the father to commit incest, the taboo the family is structured to defend against, implicit in Janicula’s rage against his daughter’s marriage. But even when the desire to commit incest is made explicit, it is revealed only to be concealed by being presented as Walter’s fiction. The desire of the father to exchange his wife for their daughter is also the final revelation of the motif of the father’s murderous rage against the necessity of the mother’s powers of procreation to produce his lineage, a rage that has repeatedly surfaced through the tale. This rage at dependence on the mother to perpetuate the father’s line is expressed in each test through Walter’s repeated excuse to his wife that his deeds must be committed because of his subjects’ disparagement of the mother’s lineage. It surfaces again through Janicula’s fears of Walter’s repudiation of Griselda’s lineage, and is made explicit when Walter brings his children back and commands his brother-in-law to tell no one their real parentage: “That he to no wight, though men wolde enquere, / Sholde nat telle whos children that they were” (IV.769–70). Through his pretense of doing away

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with his children, then, Walter also obliterates their actual origins, and especially the acknowledgment of his reliance for their birth on his wife. The need for Griselda to create and give birth to these children is also curiously revealed and concealed in Griselda’s focus on the physicality of becoming a wife and mother during her plea to Walter before returning to her father’s house, a plea that is expanded in the Clerk’s version of the tale, making Griselda more assertive than in other versions.13 Giving back all the clothes and jewels Walter has given her, she requests in return only a modest dress like the one she originally wore: “swich a smok as I was wont to were” (IV.886). During the fifty lines of her request, Griselda refers to her virginity or “maydenhede” three times, insisting that a smock to cover her on her return to her father is a peculiarly fitting recompense for the virginity she brought to the marriage. Describing that virginity in pointedly physical terms as the gift she brought to the marriage but cannot take away from it—“Which that I broghte, and noght agayn I bere” (IV.884)— she points to the ruptured hymen, the irrecoverable physical mark of becoming a wife. Similarly, she directs attention to her physical procreative function as she asks Walter’s help to prevent his subjects from being able to see the very womb “in which [his] children leye” (IV. 877). In doing so, she simultaneously forces Walter to acknowledge the bodily function he requires of her and agrees to keep that necessity hidden. Through his pretense of destroying the children and their origins, Walter in effect destroys and brings his children back to life, symbolically enacting the prerogative of the father to do as he will with his children, and eliminating the need for his wife’s assistance through giving birth. The Clerk’s Tale thus presents an experience of the dangerous actual violence of the fantasy structure of the family. At the same time, however, the violence is denied by attributing the experience to the unnecessary long-suffering of a wife at the hands of her aberrantly abusive husband. The reality of the suffering that the violence of the family entails is removed by being framed as the “unreal”/fictional tests of a lord, husband, and father who only pretends to sacrifice the interests of his family to his own desires. Throughout the tale, the Clerk reveals that Walter is only allowing others to think that he has denied his wife and committed incest and infanticide. He “really” never does those things. The tale’s “happy ending” further denies the father’s desires to extinguish/replace his wife and commit infanticide and incest, as it shows Walter ritualistically undoing his initial violence: he acknowledges Griselda as his one and only wife and restores the children, whom he acknowledges as both his and hers.

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Moreover, he asserts to his subjects that he did not act out of malice or cruelty, that he never intended to kill his children (infanticide here is most specifically named, only to be denied), but merely to test his wife’s “wommanheede” in the best interests of all. And when Griselda responds by (repeatedly) fainting, Walter attempts to soothe and nurture her, bringing back to life what he formerly extinguished. Thus Walter becomes the progenitor of the mother, reframing his dependence upon her reproductivity as prior dependence on his own life-giving maleness. As Walter restores their children to Griselda, his acknowledgment that she “bare” their son “in thy body trewely” (IV.1068) equates “wommanheede” with maternity: his acknowledgment, then, rebegets Griselda as a mother, as if to be a woman without being a mother is to be dead. Walter’s tests not only denied Griselda’s maternity—denied the fact that a woman’s maternity is always certain, while a father’s paternity is not—they also raised questions about her maternality. Griselda’s seeming lack of emotion when her children are taken away triggers in the audience primal anxieties about a mother being cold, unloving, and unable to protect her children. Though the Clerk condemns Walter’s tests and has only sympathy and praise for Griselda’s humility and constancy, his account of her behavior intensifies anxieties about Griselda’s maternality. When her daughter is taken away, the Clerk describes Griselda’s impassivity and comments: “I trowe that to a norice in this cas / It had been hard this reuthe for to se; / Wel myghte a mooder thanne han cryd ‘allas!’” (IV.561–63). Similarly, when Griselda’s son is removed, the Clerk seems to protest too much: he states that if Walter had not truly known how perfectly Griselda loved her children, Walter would have thought that she endured what ensued out of treachery, malice, or cruelty. But since Walter’s love for his children is entirely unproved, this averred confidence in Walter is undermined when the Clerk adds that Walter knew very well that next to himself, certainly she loved her children best in every way (IV.689–95). Griselda’s response to Walter’s announcement that he needs to kill their son, as well as their daughter, sums up the experience of maternality Walter has previously allowed her to attain: “I have noght had no part of children tweyne / But first siknesse, and after, wo and peyne” (IV.650–51). Thus Griselda’s emotional reunion with her children, her tearful and fierce embraces and thankfulness for their safety, reasserts Griselda’s maternality as well. It is important to note that Walter enacts the violence of the father both when he denies his wife and has the children taken away at the beginning of the tale and when he acknowledges Griselda and has the children

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brought back in the end. For if it is the prerogative of the father to use his wife and children as he pleases, social fatherhood also depends on the restraint of the father from enacting that prerogative, which belongs only to the symbolic father. In exercising restraint, Walter acknowledges the phallus, keeping the symbolic father and the law in place, and establishing his right as a social father to act in the place of the symbolic father. Walter’s acknowledgment of the symbolic father at the beginning of the tale, when he stipulates to his subjects that he must choose his wife, is reasserted at the tale’s end, when Walter is reported honoring Janicula as the father of his wife, through whom Walter’s own line will continue, rather than disparaging him as his subordinate. The end of the tale, then, with its magical restoration of the family intact and not only unharmed but prospering, places the violence of the family in the frame of the family romance, a fiction constructed to deny the violence, which is the only way that violence can be revealed. The threat that human mortality entails is effaced with the prospect of a long line of succession that looks back and honors rather than denigrates its origins. During Walter’s tests, one basis for the father’s infanticidal and incestuous desires—the threat of the children’s surpassing their parents—was presented when Griselda’s daughter was acknowledged as surpassing her mother in youth, beauty, and breeding. At the tale’s happy ending, however, the son’s surpassing of his father in wealth and marital felicity, not needing to test his wife, is presented not as a threat but as proof of the success of Walter’s line. The overdetermination of the fictionality of the context in which the story of domestic violence is told in the Clerk’s Tale is immediately confirmed when the fictional frame of the happy ending is followed without break by the Clerk’s authoritative reassertion of the story as literary, and of the authority of its author Petrarch to establish how the fiction should be read. Pointing to his defiance of the Host, the Clerk declares that Petrarch wrote in the high style and intended his writing to be read not as a literal or “real” story but as an allegorical fiction. The Clerk thereby connects the rivalry between him and the Host over what it is to be a man to questions of how to discern what is fictional from what is “real” and how to read the relationship between them. When Walter “undoes” his tests, he acts as if he knows with certitude what is imagination and what is real. But that power belongs only to the phallus, as enacted in the envoi’s dizzying and necessarily indeterminate play with attempts to distinguish the fictional from the actual and the way they relate. There is space here only to briefly sketch the different ways the vio-

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lence of the father is revealed and concealed in the Man of Law’s and Prioress’s Tales. The Man of Law’s Tale shifts the focus from the violence of the father against his wife and children to the double violence of father against daughter and of mothers against sons. In the introduction to his tale, as has been noted,14 the Man of Law raises the motif of incest only to deny it, condemning it as an “unkynde abhomynacion” (II.88) that he emphatically will not relate: “Ne I wol noon reherce, if that I may” (II.89)—that is, if it is under his control. He distances himself and his audience(s) from the story of incest further by placing incest in the completely literary context of his bombastically poetic opening and his catalogue of poetry written by Chaucer and Ovid. Ultimately, however, his tale reveals that the Man of Law cannot not tell a story about incest. My concern is with the way his tale attempts to deflect attention away from the incestuous and infanticidal nature of the story of domestic violence it tells: a story of a daughter’s expulsion by, return to, and acceptance by the father who initiated her exile from her home and country and religion by selling her in marriage against her will. The violence of the father is obvious in his initial act of expulsion of his daughter. But the basis of that violence in the inherently violent internal fantasy structure of the family is also denied by the persistent way in which the plot and the narrator do not attribute the ensuing difficulties with which Constance is faced to her father’s actions, but instead project the causes of those difficulties onto external forces. The Man of Law neither condemns Constance’s father nor attributes her trials to her father’s initial behavior. He insistently and emotionally blames fate. When he describes fate as God’s providence, written in the stars for those who can understand, however, he establishes a distinction between the actual and the symbolic father. The plot points to the father’s motivation in external religious disputes that must be kept in check by sacrificing his virginal daughter to maintain peace. But the difference between the actual and the symbolic father points to the Christian emperor of Rome’s sacrifice of his daughter as an infanticide, by which he establishes a relationship of close proximity to God the symbolic father. Similarly, no mention is made of the father’s sexual desire for his daughter as a motivating force for his behavior, as occurs in some analogues;15 rather that sexual desire is projected and portrayed as the lust for his daughter expressed by a series of “lesser” men: the Muslim sultan of Syria who “needs” to buy her as a wife, the scorned Northumbrian knight who frames her for murder when she refuses to return his love, and her pagan husband Alla, for whom, the Man of Law

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salaciously reports, Constance had to lay aside her holiness and respond sexually as a wife: “They goon to bedde, as it was skile and right; / For thogh that wyves be ful hooly thynges, / They moste take in pacience at nyght / Swiche manere necessaries as been plesynges / To folk that han ywedded hem with rynges, / And leye a lite hir hoolynesse aside, / As for the tyme,—it may no bet bitide” (II.708–14).16 What the daughter experiences from the father’s initial act is a world out of control. The father’s betrayal of his child initiates the daughter’s further repeated experiences of parental betrayal. Twice marrying into “new” families, she twice experiences hostility and betrayal by her mothers-in-law. Each time the nature of the violence is deflected and projected onto external forces: the sultaness of Syria’s religious conflicts and political ambitions, Donegild of Northumbria’s xenophobia. But the incestuous implications of the sultaness of Syria’s kiss to her son, and of Donegild’s “insult” at her son marrying anyone outside the family, also point to the internal violence of the family. And the betrayal by the father who cannot protect his daughter from harm is repeated when Constance finds substitute parents in King Alla’s constable and his wife Hermengyld, whose love cannot protect her from being lusted after and framed for murder. The fantasy of the father’s desire for infanticide is explicitly raised in the Man of Law’s Tale in terms of Constance’s maternal concern for her son when she and the child are set adrift in a boat by Alla’s mother. Comforting his cries with a promise that she will not harm him (rather than that she will keep him from harm), she finds comfort, while praying to Mary for help, in the fact that no sorrow could compare to the pain that Mary endured when she saw the torment of her child “yrent” (II.844), torn and stretched on the cross. And she goes on to ask why her child’s harsh father would want to have his small, innocent child, who has not yet committed any sin, killed: “O litel child, allas! what is thy gilt, / That nevere wroghtest synne as yet, pardee? / Why wil thyn harde fader han thee spilt?” (II.855–57). Again, this is an infanticide intended not by the father but by the father’s mother, and one that does not take place. But the question further distances the audience from the actuality of the father’s infanticidal desires by an identification of the child’s suffering with that of Christ, which exalts the sacrifice of the child as the necessary act by which actual fathers are connected to the symbolic father as god the phallus—the sacrifice that equates the actual with the symbolic father.17 Finally, as in the Clerk’s Tale, the tale of incest and infanticide is deflected in the Man of Law’s Tale by being framed by its “happy ending.”

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Neither the father’s daughter nor his grandson are killed. His daughter is reconciled with her husband, who recognizes her face in that of their son. And her husband grants her desire to be reunited with her father. All the families are reconciled intact without any visible harm. All the men who desired Constance are dead. And at the end she submits to her father’s will and she and her father live together happily “In vertu and in hooly almusdede” (II.1156) until they die. The law of the father is reasserted. The world of the Prioress’s Tale seems far removed from the violence of the father in the family in the Clerk’s and Man of Law’s Tales. Indeed, critical focus has been on the feminine and maternal rather than paternal aspects of the Prioress’s Prologue and Tale. But as in the Man of Law’s Tale, the violence of the father is repressed and infanticide not named. In this case the gruesome murder of an innocent and devotedly Christian child is projected onto external religious and ethnic forces—the animosity of the cursed Jews, seemingly divorced from familial sexual conflict. As in the Man of Law’s Tale, however, the presentation of the innocent Christian child with his throat slit identifies that child with the sacrifice of Jesus as son of the symbolic father. In doing so, it reveals the paradigm of the family repressed in the notion that through the sacrifice of the child access to the symbolic father is gained. In this case the frame of the “happy ending” by which the story can be told is the family romance in which the murdered child is translated into symbolic idealization in religious terms. In addition, by setting up an infanticide called murder in a world of helpless mothers in which the father is dead, the tale reinforces the ideological notion of the father as the idealized good and protective parent whose presence would have prevented the murder of the child. In these ways, three of Chaucer’s saints’ lives—the Clerk’s, Man of Law’s, and Prioress’s Prologues and Tales—articulate a profound cultural anxiety about paternity, a fiction whose violence can be revealed only by being concealed as a fiction constructed to defend against knowledge of that very violence.

Notes 1. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the session (Ab)Uses of Enchantment: Domestic Violence in Medieval Romance at the Thirty-first International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in May 1996. My thanks to Eve Salisbury for her graciousness throughout that session and the preparation of this volume. My thanks to Sam Kimball as well for his insights and support through several versions.

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2. See Robert Con Davis, The Paternal Romance: Reading God-the-Father in Early Western Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 2. My thinking has been stimulated and enriched generally by this work. See also Patricia Yaeger and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, eds., Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989). 3. See Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances” (1909), in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), vol. 9, pp. 237–41. 4. See also Sam Kimball, “Banning the Infant: Oedipus, Anti-Oedipus, and Reproduction—The Problematics of Autochthonous Desire,” Subjects/Objects 4 (1986): 34–50, 89–91, and Barnaby B. Barratt and Barrie Ruth Straus, “Toward Postmodern Masculinities,” American Imago 51, no. 1 (1994): 37–67. 5. All citations of Chaucer in this essay are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), by fragment and line numbers. 6. For notions of the symbolic father and phallus, see Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” Standard Edition, vol. 13, pp. 1–62, and Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). 7. For excellent but differing accounts of the Clerk’s position as and toward woman, see Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 132–55, and Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 188–207. 8. For an extended account of the problematics of speaking plainly in the Canterbury Tales see Barrie Ruth Straus, “‘Truth’ and ‘Woman’ in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale,” Exemplaria 4, no. 1 (1992): 135–70. 9. For an excellent account of the relationship between the Clerk’s text and Petrarch’s, see David Wallace, “‘Whan She Translated Was,’” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 156–215. 10. For a discussion of the Clerk’s Tale that also focuses on the depiction of marriage as a patriarchal institution and on Walter’s struggle to succeed as a son in a competition for recognition among men, emphasizing the relationship between Walter and Griselda, without my concern for the way these issues are revealed and concealed, see Patricia Cramer, “Lordship, Bondage, and the Erotic: The Psychological Bases of Chaucer’s ‘Clerk’s Tale,’” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 89 (1990): 491–511. 11. For a detailed account of the intensifications in emotionality in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale from that of the Latin and French versions he might have used, see J. Burke Severs, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942), esp. pp. 229–50. 12. For the way this emphasis on Griselda’s death is an addition of the Clerk’s Tale to earlier versions by Boccaccio and Petrarch, see Severs, Literary Relationships, and

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the annotated translation of Petrarch’s letter to Boccaccio in Robert P. Miller, ed., Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 136–52. 13. For the idea of women’s speech acts as acts of assertion belying their passive role, see my essay “Women’s Words as Weapons: Speech as Action in ‘The Wife’s Lament,’” in Old English Shorter Poems, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (New York: Garland, 1994), pp. 335–56. See also Severs, Literary Relationships, Miller, Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds, and Judith Ferster, Chaucer on Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 94–121. 14. See, for example, the excellent articles by Carolyn Dinshaw, “The Law of Man and Its ‘Abhomynacions,’” Exemplaria 1, no. 1 (1989): 117–48, and Elizabeth Scala, “Canacee and the Chaucer Canon: Incest and Other Unnarratables,” Chaucer Review 30 (1995): 15–39. 15. For the sources and analogues of the Man of Law’s Tale, see Margaret Schlauch in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), pp. 155– 206, and her Chaucer’s Constance and Accused Queens (New York: New York University Press, 1927), pp. 12–20. 16. For commentary on the tone of these and other passages in the Man of Law’s Tale, see Sheila Delany, Writing Woman: Women Writers and Women in Literature, Medieval to Modern (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), pp. 36–46. 17. On infanticide as sacrifice, see Davis, Paternal Romance, pp. 11–102, and Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 53–81.

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6

Not Safe Even in Their Own Castles Reading Domestic Violence Against Children in Four Middle English Romances Graham N. Drake

Modern critics have long approached King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, and Athelston as examples of the bildungsroman.1 The protagonists in each narrative begin as little children—or, in the case of Athelston, as relatively young men about to ascend the social ladder—and work their way through adversity and self-improvement to a position of national prominence, riches, and sovereign rule. The violence that these children experience, the pathetic responses that such violence elicits, and the attainment of restored or higher status reveal the interests and anxieties of the primary readers of these romances: the upwardly mobile middle class and the landed gentry. With the exception of Havelok the Dane, these fanciful romance narratives of peril and adventure would not seem prima facie to mirror the lives and culture of the haute bourgeoisie or the gentry.2 Indeed, Susan Crane has analyzed these romances as a collective narrative of aristocratic selfjustification which “comments on the English barony’s feudal strength and vulnerability by weighting the class convictions that sustained baronial claims.”3 Yet late medieval romance readership spanned a social spectrum marked by class anxiety.4 Crane notes an increased convergence of economic and cultural interests for the baronial stratum that had traditionally been French-speaking and the upwardly mobile, non-noble, English-speaking classes, so that toward the late 1200s “many nobles were not at ease with French, while the mercantile sector began to share some baronial interests. The two groups were in significant contact and competition during the fourteenth century, but the English descendants of Anglo-

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Norman romances continued primarily to examine baronial preoccupations and ideas about the world.”5 While the central characters and situations in many Middle English romances are aristocratic, by the close of the fourteenth century their readership was drawn in increasing numbers from the non-noble rural gentry and the urban middle classes. Most surviving romance manuscripts from the fifteenth century, in fact, seem to have belonged to members of these social strata, especially from, though by no means limited to, the gentry. Romances were most often included in manuscript anthologies that also contained saints’ lives and other devotional materials along with treatises on advice and manners.6 The appearance of such anthologies points to increased private reading in a domestic setting, and their transfer from one generation to the next helped to pass on the values that these works validated: duty, piety, love, honor, and, as we shall see, pity. Given what is known of the social station of book owners, an interesting asymmetry exists between the original “target” audience, which was aristocratic like the characters that the romances portray, and their late medieval readership, which included many subaristocratic households. What could entice these non-noble upper-class groups to the reading of aristocratic romances from the end of the fourteenth century to the end of the fifteenth? The desire for social mobility is one obvious and overarching answer. The gentry in particular were frustrated by a nobility that had developed sharp distinctions from them by the mid-fifteenth century.7 The bourgeoisie, meanwhile, was expanding in profit and self-importance, witnessed by the prosperity of guild members in London and other cities, their increased capacity for luxurious items in the home and for leisure (including leisure for reading), and the self-important civic pageantry and complex requirements for membership in the hierarchy of the guilds and professions.8 Yet economic mobility has an intimate connection with the emotional life and physical welfare of families and their continued genealogy. Genuine love, delight, concern, and parental sacrifice for children may become overshadowed by the ambition for advanced economic and social prestige through a child’s successful marriage alliance. Such conflicted motivations among the gentry and upper-middle-class readers resonate with specific narrative scenes in the four romances under consideration. Scenes of the little Havelok narrowly escaping a horrible death, or Josian, the heroine of Bevis of Hampton, nearly forced into an unwanted marriage, can constitute projections of all-too-familiar experiences of pity and fear about the

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actual children of the readers, their affections being stirred through the calculated use of the popular mode of pathos. The nature and popularity of pathos in late medieval England first needs to be grasped in order to appreciate its workings in the romances. This pathos is best illustrated in Havelok the Dane, yet the other three romances contain similar evocations. Such pathos may have attracted a subaristocratic readership in four particular ways: in the tender desperation that marks the portrayal of violent physical attacks against children; in the concept of home as a place carefully arranged for intimacy and safety but now violated; in the perils of mistreatment under fosterage; and in the horror of forced marriages. The ages of the children in these romances range from the very young to chronological adulthood (in the case of forced marriage), but the point here is that the violence occurs while they maintain their unemancipated status. Even though an ecclesiastically valid marriage rested principally upon the consent of the two parties involved, young adults in the romances find consent abrogated by parents or guardians. The level of pathetic response varies according to gender as well; female agency, especially in the matter of marital coercion, differs from that of males. But agency also points up a particular irony in this genre: How can pathos be situated at all within romance? And pathos, in its turn, contrasts ironically with the actual experiences of the readers of aristocratic romances. In considering the kind of pathos evoked for children in literary texts, it is important to remember that the evidence of violent abuse of children, especially as it is understood by late-twentieth-century readers, is difficult to verify with medieval eyewitness testimony. Shulamith Shahar argues that frequent references to children crying at night in sources roughly contemporary to the four romances imply that parents sometimes responded with physical violence.9 Moreover, hagiographic tales make more explicit claims of violence; in one, a man takes revenge on his estranged wife by strangling their three-year-old child.10 Such accounts, along with the literary sources discussed below, suggest an inescapable awareness of violence against children in medieval culture. As cultural documents with a particular readership, these romances extend, through fictional means, the voices of violated children and the fears of their parents.11 Shahar and other historians of medieval childhood also emphasize that medieval parents were often capable of enormous love and sacrifice for their children. The untimely death of children is one window into this level of sentiment. The high mortality rate of children did not, as Ariès and

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other scholars of childhood have assumed, make parents callous in order to cope with such frequent tragedy.12 In one case, a London woman went insane because of the loss of her child.13 Barbara Hanawalt recounts the story of a mother who had fled from her burning shop only to remember that she had left her baby in its cradle. The mother ran back to find the child but was overcome by smoke inhalation.14 Moral treatises and sermons actually caution bereaved parents against excessive grieving for dead children; the frequent appearance of such treatises, Shahar argues, can only be explained by a widespread sense of parental concern.15 John Boswell concurs that “there was no general absence of tender feeling for children as special beings among any pre-modern European peoples.”16 Affective piety influences and reflects such feelings. By the twelfth century, devotion to the Virgin Mary as the tenderly humanized Mother of God was on the rise: as David Herlihy observes, “in art and in sermons aimed at the wider strata of society, the Holy Mother was depicted as the archetypal devoted mother” to Jesus. “She was pictured in pregnancy, suckling her son, playing with him, and caressing him—as an example to all mothers.”17 In the later Middle Ages, the portrayal of Mary with Jesus became quite popular. In one of her spiritual meditations, the late-thirteenth-century mystic Ida of Louvain imagines Jesus as a sweet baby whom she bathes with the help of Saint Elizabeth; like any other baby, Jesus splashes and plays and gets everyone quite soaked.18 Some female saints imagine feeding or nursing the baby Jesus, while Margery Kempe sees the infant Jesus in practically every infant boy on the streets of Lynn.19 One thirteenth-century Franciscan devotional work in wide circulation, the Meditations on the Life of Christ, asks the reader to contemplate the shared domestic life of Mary and Jesus (drawn from extrabiblical legend). “We learn how the infant cried in pain at the circumcision and how Mary wept to hear him cry. We are told that during the years in Egypt the Virgin sewed and spun to earn money, and the five-year-old Jesus went about in search of work for his mother.”20 Jesus and Mary exist together in a literature of suffering: Marian laments—the genre known as planctus Mariae—often link an outpouring of the Virgin’s suffering at the Crucifixion with her memories of Jesus as a baby.21 Sentimentality for children in general and a deliberate identification of the Christ child with suffering formed part of a general rise in pathetic stories toward the close of the Middle Ages. In fact, Harriet Hudson observes an increased appearance of the pathetic in manuscript compilations of the fifteenth century.22 These stories of outrage against helpless victims

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were meant to evoke elaborate, sometimes excessive, emotional responses that would lead to states of pious reverence or perhaps even conversion of life in the reader or spectator, as in the more specifically religious meditations or vernacular sacred drama. In the Monk’s Tale, Chaucer reproduces Dante’s famous story of Count Ugolino shut up in a tower with his sons to face death by slow starvation, following Dante by turning Ugolino’s young sons into toddlers who weep miserably for food: “Is ther no morsel breed that ye do kepe? / I am so hungry that I may nat slepe” (VII.2433– 34).23 Chaucer also fashions exquisite evocations of pathos in the story of Custance and her little child, drifting in a boat from one life-threatening injustice to the next, and in the Prioress’s dark blood-libel story of the “litel scoler” who continued to sing praises to the Virgin even after his murder by envious Jews, and in the Physician’s Tale where the young Roman woman Virginia induces her father to kill her in order to maintain her sexual purity.24 Even if this kind of emotive representation may have appealed to aristocratic readers, pathos fits comfortably into subaristocratic sensibilities as well; several critics, for instance, have singled out the Man of Law, the narrator of Custance’s adventures, for his “intellectual pretentiousness, middle-class materialism, [and] bourgeois morality.”25 The bourgeois author known as the Ménagier de Paris included a French translation of what would be reshaped by Chaucer into the Clerk’s Tale to encourage obedience in his young bride.26 The focus of pathos turns inward, to the inner heart and easy emotion, and to the concerns of domestic life. Indeed, as Northrop Frye explains, pathos is domestic tragedy; it partakes of the lowmimetic world that may embrace the nonaristocratic, rather than the larger-than-life figures traditionally associated with tragedy and chanson de geste: “Pathos presents its hero as isolated by a weakness which appeals to our sympathy because it is on our own level of experience. I speak of a hero, but the central figure of pathos is often a woman or a child. . . . We notice that while tragedy may massacre a whole cast, pathos is usually concentrated on a single character, partly because low mimetic society is more strongly individualized. . . . pathos is increased by the inarticulateness of the victim. . . . Highly articulate pathos is apt to become a factitious appeal to self-pity, or tear-jerking.”27 The domestic nature of pathos in medieval romance is remarkably similar to the “chamber pathos” Bakhtin finds characteristic of the sentimental novel. Chamber pathos is “spoken within the privacy of one’s own room, and associated with a new conception of small space.” Of course, as the narratives develop, pathos is replaced

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by greater agency of at least some of the characters; here “chamber pathos” is gradually replaced with the “heroizing pathos,” which Bakhtin specifically sees as characteristic of the early baroque novel, “where it is linked to the basic plot of testing the hero’s irreproachability. Its overtones are exalted, grand, and public; this is high heroizing pathos, the ‘pathos of heroism and terror.’”28 In the romances one finds a similar movement; the break away from home (as in Horn’s or Bevis’s exile), confinement to home (in Rymenhild’s case), or violation of home (demonstrated in Havelok’s murderous guardian) is a wrenching removal from goodness, innocence, and security toward peril, testing, and heroic triumphs. Such a conception of pathos suggests its movement toward greater agency, inevitable for the heroes in an essentially comic genre, and a greater value than the mere production of sentimental, helpless emotion. Thus George R. Keiser’s study of pathos in the planctus Mariae has no quarrel with the domestic aspect of pathos as Bakhtin conceives of it but offers two important correctives to Frye’s formulation. In the first place, when viewed from the perspective of the Resurrection, “the sensational reflex of tears” (pace Frye) is not the point of the planctus, but a means to prepare for a union with Christ and concomitant virtuous living.29 More significant for the connection with pathos in the romances, the medieval Mary speaks; she has ample occasion to articulate her sufferings in agonizing detail—much the same way that the romance narrators dwell on little Havelok’s pleading for his life, or the way the passionate outbursts of the unemancipated Rymenhild reveal her desire for Horn.30 Whatever its level of sophistication might be, pathos is to some extent an ironic swerve from the central concerns of tragedy; its use in these romances is also ironic in a number of senses. A modern reader might see the point of this in Aristotle’s Poetics, which considers tragedy the highest form of art, one that produces, in Aristotle’s famous formulation, “the imitation of an action that is serious . . . with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.”31 Yet late medieval pathos seems a pastiche of Aristotle’s definition. It is low, intimate, and domestic, while tragedy appears to be public, highborn, and active. Though tragedy may include the domestic, it retains national and even cosmological implications. The cosmology of pathos seems, at best, twodimensional, as if a stylized deity were only a few yards above the actors, much like the spectacle of medieval mystery plays with God the Father or angels sitting on top of the pageant wagon. In fact, to the extent that Aristotle’s definition of tragic emotion was even known, it appeared in

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modified form through the translation of Averroës’s commentary on the Poetics, which called for “a representation . . . which arouses in souls certain passions which moderate themselves [or which moderate the souls] to feel pity or be fearful or to other similar passions which the representation induces and stimulates by what it images in the form of virtuous men concerning decency and corruption.”32 Pathos, as it appears in late medieval pious writings or romance, might stimulate the reader to virtue but can hardly be called a moderated passion. Moreover, the pathos of the romances is situated in an aristocratic context that may seem similarly stylized and streamlined in its fast-moving depiction. In romances such as King Horn or Havelok, there is no languid digression on the richness of a court or the refined manners of its denizens as one might find in, say, the well-known story of Aeneas. These English romances express, in a sense, the frustration and impatience of a more fluid society, as if its rising members were in too much of a hurry to acquire nobility and status or, in the case of the landed gentry, found themselves turned back at the frontier of the highest nobility. Pathos is also ironic, as suggested above, because it is being introduced into romances which are essentially comic in nature. Comedy often presents to its protagonists significant obstacles and brutality, though not always the same level of violence as medieval pathos. The introduction of the violent, terrifying suffering of pathos seems inconsistent with the comic. Of course, romance itself includes violent acts—combat between knights, wars against the Saracens, giants, or dragons—yet they are not always calculated to produce feelings of pity and outrage over a victim’s plight. The excessive, outrageous nature of crimes committed against children seems to be a tragedy manqué, one uneasily planted in the comic/romance trajectory. In fact, the victimizing character of pathos eventually becomes diminished in these romances because of ultimate agency and revenge; again, this may reflect the frustration and anxiety of gentry and urban bourgeois to see some of their great fears not only enacted but redressed. Pathos, in the comic context of the romance mode, becomes unstable, threatening to be replaced by what Aristotle termed its opposite, indignation.33 By the end of the narrative, indignation gives way to retribution and resolution. Grownup children exact revenge, often in a manner as violent and coarse as they themselves have experienced. Pathos expresses itself throughout romances such as Bevis or Havelok with a calculated particularity and familiarity of children’s physical suffering. Such representations would resonate significantly with a readership

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that knew its own children’s sufferings and experienced pathos in a multitude of devotional arts and practices. They would see this, for example, at the beginning of Bevis of Hampton. The seven-year-old boy’s father has just been killed in an ambush plotted by Bevis’s mother and her lover, the emperor of Almayne. The narrator invites his audience to join with Bevis in his heart-wrenching response to his father’s death: “Now scholle we of him mone, / Of Beves, that was Guis sone, / How wo he him was: / Yerne a wep, is hondes wrong, / For his fader a seide among: / ‘Allas! Allas!’” (lines 295–300). Bevis is nevertheless a bold child who calls for revenge, curses his mother, and strikes out at her lover. Bevis’s actions remind readers that, though he may be seven, he has already reached the dawn of the age of reason. Yet he is not powerful enough to withstand his mother completely at this point. She responds to his reproaches by beating him and turning her thoughts to murder. When she fails to get Saber, his tutor, to kill him, she sells him off to a passing group of pagan merchants. In Athelston the teenage children of the earl of Stone have far less courage than little Bevis. When their father is falsely accused of treason, the whole family, including the children, must undergo a trial by ordeal to determine the truth. The description, however, reads as if the children were much younger than they have been previously described. The emotional effect of the passage is calculated to produce pathos with the fire “bothe hydous and rede” that causes the children to faint: The chyldryn swownyd as they were ded; The bysschop tyl hem yede: With careful herte on hem gan look Be hys hand he hem up took: “Chyldryn, have ye no drede.” Thanne the chyldryn stood and lowgh: “Sere, the fyr is cold inowgh.” Thorwghout they wente apase. They weren unblemeschyd foot and hand. (lines 603–11) The bishop’s heartfelt reassurance leads them to pass the test successfully. Even more pervasive is the pathos of Havelok the Dane. The story takes place in both England and Denmark; the young princess Goldeboru of England and the child prince Havelok of Denmark are both placed in the care of trusted advisors who turn out to be evil men. In England, Goldeboru is a helpless child whose dying father cries in anguish over her future: “Hw

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shal now my doughter fare? / Of hire have ich michel kare; / Sho is mikel in my thouth—/ Of meself is me rith nowt. / No selcouth is thou me be wo: / Sho ne can speke ne sho kan go” (lines 120–25). If she cannot “speke” or “go,” and her father can no longer answer for her, at least her designated guardian, the earl Godrich, ought to be able to speak for her. But without her living father to answer to, and without a conscience, Godrich (“wicke traytur Judas”) places her in Dover Castle, where he “ded hire fede / Pourelike in feble wede” (lines 322–23). The narrator does not dwell long on her suffering, however, choosing instead to focus on Goldeboru’s future husband, Havelok of Denmark. No sooner has King Birkabeyn of Denmark been laid in his grave than Godard, the appointed protector of the Danish royal children, shuts them up in a castle without food or proper clothing. The narrator dwells on the details of the children’s frequent crying due to hunger and cold, in contrast with the unfeeling indifference of their guardian. The narrator responds to the pitiful plight of these children with outrage almost as measureless as the evil committed against them: Have he the malisum today Of alle that evre speken may— Of patriarck and of pope, And of prest with loken kope, Of monkes and hermites bothe, And of the leve holi rode That God himselve ran on blode! Crist warie him with his mouth! Waried he of north and suth, Of all men that speken kunne, Of Crist that made mone and sunne! (lines 426–36) Michael Stugrin has called this kind of apostrophe the “sostenuto aria” of the pathetic voice.34 The function of the pathetic voice is keyed carefully to the audience’s emotions through its change of tempo and modulation of tone. In this case, the narrator curses Godard, “the wicke Judas,” with the help of the entire masculine hierarchy of Christian holy orders, the whole of creation, and Christ himself. Calling Godard “Judas” links him to Christ’s betrayal, as in devotional meditations on the Passion of the adult Christ—who is also linked in devotional literature with a Christ child who suffers pain and deprivation, foreshadowing the Crucifixion.

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But Godard’s outrageous perfidy only intensifies. He scornfully questions why the children are crying; Havelok replies that they do so out of sheer hunger. At this point Godard, caring “nouth a stra” (line 466) for their crying, nevertheless makes a gesture of partial kindness toward little Swanborow and Helfled, Havelok’s sisters—before he slits their throats. The abusive mixture of playfulness and coldheartedness toward the children’s hunger builds for several lines here, climaxing in a swift and horrible dispatch in the very next line: “Of bothen he karf on two here throates, / And sithen hem al togrotes” (lines 471–72). The only witness of this merciless crime is Havelok; the little boy finds himself pleading for his life by offering his kingdom to the false fosterer and murderer of his sisters, kneeling “bifor that Judas.” Havelok’s only agency here is to give up something huge—Denmark, repeatedly described as full of towns and towers and subjects. Denmark is Havelok’s birthright, yet his guardian has effectively taken it away from him already. Havelok’s surer agency will come at the end of the romance when he is able to bring Godard to justice in an ignominious execution. For now, the spectacle of the young prince’s plea to a Judas—the last person in the world with whom to strike a bargain—leads into Godard’s partial change of heart, and he does not kill the boy. If this gives the reader a bit of relief, it is short-lived. Godard’s pity only turns him into a cowardly schemer; he finds an expendable underling to attempt Havelok’s murder.35

The Idea of Home and Its Violation The pathetic violation of Havelok and Goldeboru is situated within the supposedly secure confines of the home. Home is often a castle, and while medieval readers did not precisely live in castles described in the romances, their residences were reminiscent of such dwellings figuratively as well as literally. The fortresslike security of the English home of any status was grounded in the legal doctrines against trespass as expounded by the medieval jurists Glanville and Bracton.36 Indeed, the well-worn phrase “an Englishman’s home is his castle,” though not appearing in English before 1588, is a doctrine that English legal theorists have found rooted in classical doctrines of “home” that range from Cicero to the legal codes of Justinian.37 Whatever one’s station in the social hierarchy, at home one is lord or lady of the manor. Even the poor old widow of Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale has a hovel described ironically as “hall” and “bower,” mocked even

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more microcosmically in the aristocratic chicken coop of Chauntecleer and Dame Pertelote (VII.2832). The homes of more prosperous, though nonaristocratic, families looked even more like fortresses in some elements such as gables and soaring structures; during the same era, the urban patriciate of cities—Genoa and Bologna, for example—lived in homes with castle-like towers.38 The interiors of well-to-do homes in London reflected on a somewhat reduced scale the aristocratic arrangement of space, what Sylvia Thrupp describes as “the urban equivalent of the manor house.”39 Behind the imposing facade of such homes one might find the basic manorial setup of courtyard, public hall with “high end” table and hearth—along with oaken furnishings, colorful tapestries, and sometimes sumptuous displays of silver plate—and separate sleeping quarters.40 Meanwhile, the inner chambers of the house, whether in urban settings or in country manors, became the focus of the most intimate and private moments of family life, the most closed off from public access. These chambers became the focus of private desire and control, particularly for the women of the household, and often became the site of reading romances.41 Medieval romance readers would find ample cause for outrage in the depiction of violated homes. For instance, many romance characters find themselves imprisoned in towers that are part of their own homes. Though intended to provide security against outside attack, towers become places of confinement and suffering for their permanent residents.42 Rymenhild in King Horn is at first accustomed to the comforts of her own bower, where she can conduct amorous assignations with Horn. But when Horn leaves, her home becomes the scene of anxious waiting and two forced marriages. In the case of the second marriage, Rymenhild’s bower is transferred to a tower in a castle built by Fikenild, the false accuser of Horn who attempts to force Rymenhild into marriage with him. In Havelok the eponymous hero and his sisters are shut up in a tower where, as we have seen, “he greten for hunger and cold.” The tower becomes the site where Havelok’s sisters are murdered before his eyes, and where he himself pleads for his life. In Bevis, Josian is not confined in a tower when an unwanted marriage to King Yvor of Mombraunt takes place in her own castle. But at just that moment Bevis, her erstwhile rescuer, is languishing in a sort of mirror opposite of a tower: a prison two fathoms below ground, full of “snakes and evetes and oades fale” (line 1539). In their places of confinement, Bevis and Josian are both captive to the desires of others. There is a gender difference here, of course: Bevis has the prowess to devise an es-

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cape, but Josian is being held as a sexual prize (much as Rymenhild is); men are not confined in these romances for such purposes. Home’s castle has been exchanged for a prison controlled by false trustees. Horn, Bevis, and Havelok are also thrown out of their homes as children: invading Saracens set Horn adrift with his companions; Bevis, as we have seen, receives appalling treatment from his mother; and once again the pathetic treatment of Havelok receives even more extensive attention from the narrator. Havelok is bruised and mistreated in his own home, then taken from his castle to the home of a low-class stranger, Grim, whom Godard has ordered to murder the young prince. In Grim’s cottage Havelok has filthy rags stuffed down his throat, and Grim’s wife, Leve, knocks the boy down, bruising his head on the floor. Havelok wishes that he could die right then, or that some animal could put an end to his misery. He is saved—as he is several times—only by his kinemerk, a proof of true aristocratic origin. This marking may well have been impressive to a middleclass culture that was already beginning to deploy its own kinemerks in the form of heraldic devices on their own possessions. Such an appreciation is appropriate to their class level: authentic noble origin supposedly could not be bought or traded—only appropriated, at best, through advantageous marriage—but the material goods of a private home could be.43 Grim’s tiny, intimate home turns into a place of refuge and nurture almost immediately for Havelok. While it may seem to modern readers a disturbing wish fulfillment that Havelok never again undergoes physical abuse from Grim and Leve, Grim in particular is demonstratively penitent.44 Neither Grim nor Leve harms Havelok again, and they look after his welfare as much as that of any of their own children. Grim, in fact, saves the lives of himself and his whole family by selling his modest possessions and fleeing with the family to England. Of course, Grim and Leve are recognizing Havelok at first as their rightful king, yet Havelok’s royal status fades into the background until his foster parents have died and Havelok returns from Lincoln with his new bride, the princess Goldeboru.

Violent Fosterage This stage of Havelok’s narrative exemplifies a kind of fosterage that turns out well, unlike the occasional horrors that the readers of these romances might know from their own fosterage experiences or those of their children. It was the common experience for middle-class, gentry, and aristocratic children alike to enter into a period of apprenticeship or service in

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another household. The gentry and upper middle classes sought opportunities for education and service in a noble household or one of the more prestigious London guilds (though the number of gentry entering guilds declined through the fifteenth century, and comprised only seven percent of apprenticeships by the mid-sixteenth century).45 Such children would leave home later than their aristocratic counterparts: the average age of being sent to another family was seven for aristocratic boys, eleven or twelve for males of the urban bourgeoisie.46 Girls usually married between the ages of twelve and seventeen, an average of ten years earlier than boys. Meanwhile, only some girls entered apprenticeships.47 Chaucer, it should be remembered, came from a prosperous family in the Vintry Ward of London; after his primary education, he was approximately twelve when he entered the household of Prince Lionel and his wife, the countess of Ulster.48 Such a placement allowed a son of prosperous bourgeois to move in a higher echelon, as Chaucer’s later public career demonstrates.49 But the hope of advancement could dissipate in the hands of unscrupulous masters who took enormous advantage of their charges. Barbara Hanawalt documents breaches and transfers of contract, dismissal without cause, imprisonment, beatings, rape, and starvation.50 Witness this case of a London apprentice: One father told a harrowing tale about the treatment of his son and himself at the hands of a master. John Bartlet had apprenticed his tenyear-old son to a glover, John Parker, for a term of ten years. Parker sold the term to a tailor for 4s to earn needed money. The tailor, in turn, sold the contract to a weaver, Robert Hobbok, for 3s.4d. In this household, the apprentice was so badly looked after and ill-fed during the winter that he almost lost the use of his limbs and his body was covered with vermin. So severely was he beaten by his master’s servants that he could not help himself. When John Bartlet went to see how his son was doing, the servants attacked him.51 Variants of unfortunate fosterage taint the childhoods and initial advancement of children in the romances. Since Horn loses his father to death and his mother to a convent at the beginning of his story, he is cast upon the whims of fortune to find fosterage. He arrives barely grown up and not yet a knight at the court of Almayre, king of Westernesse, where he and his companions are given refuge and knighted in short order. But the evil influence of Fikenild, the romance’s villain, deceives the king into thinking Horn has acted unscrupulously with Rymenhild, and he loses

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this security. Likewise, London court documents record men who married widows and then took advantage of their stepchildren’s patrimony.52 If Bevis’s mother arranges fosterage for her son, it is little better than slavery. She permits a pagan king, Ermin, to purchase him. Fortunately for the child, the situation begins to turn into a benevolent fosterage that provides mutual benefits and admiration. Ermin is impressed by Bevis’s beauty; as he grows into a youth, Bevis manages to endear himself not only to Ermin but also to his daughter, Josian, who falls in love with him. Bevis performs feats of martial prowess, and for these deeds Ermin makes Bevis a knight. Soon afterwards Brademond, king of Damascus, arrives to take Josian as his wife—by force, if necessary. Bevis returns the favors of his good fosterage by defeating Brademond. Just as his fosterage seems to be transforming itself into the happy conclusion of a well-made marriage with Josian, however, two of Brademond’s knights convince Ermin that Bevis has robbed Josian of her virginity. So Ermin sends Bevis off to Brademond with a sealed letter that asks Brademond to kill Bevis. Bevis has unknowingly left his fosterage behind him for good, carrying “death with is owene honde” (line 1388). Havelok is transferred from one bad fosterage to another, from Godard to Grim and Leve, but the pair make up for their sins and become a source of comfort and protection for Havelok. Almost immediately after they discover Havelok’s true identity, Leve bustles about frantically to feed the boy she has just so violently mistreated. In an outcome similar to Bevis’s, though on a very different social stratum, Grim and Leve transfer to themselves the promise made to Havelok’s father to watch over his son in a way that the greedy and violent Godard never intended.

The Horror of Forced Marriage Forced marriage could also be a real fear for parents who sent away their children into fosterage for training or service. A forced marriage meant that the bride’s family might suffer the usurpation of the considerable dowry that they had built up painfully over the years, or, in the case of boys, the dower portion.53 Dowry money was significant for London guildsmen and merchants because it often helped pay for inventory needed to begin a career.54 Brides depended on dower money to sustain them through eventual widowhood, and despite the gradual inequality between dower and dowry contributions in the later Middle Ages, young men needed to be able to present an attractive dower, often in the form of

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real property and other chattels, to attract a woman from a prosperous family.55 Whether members of the urban elite or the landed gentry, these young people were subject to the will of negotiations between their family members or their proxies. Like Rymenhild in her bower, they are grown children with sexual and romantic desires of their own, but not yet fully emancipated from parental control—or the control of their fosterers. In situations of apprenticeship that involved complex economic interdependence over a period of many years—and apprenticeships typically did not end until a man’s mid-to-late twenties—a master might try to take advantage of an apprentice through unwanted marriage. Hanawalt records the case of William Gerardson, a Dutch-born brewer who “had left the employment of his former master a year earlier, but was now being exhorted by his former master to marry a woman who was a servant in the house. To force the issue, the master was suing him for £20 in damages for having corrupted the servant. The brewer had to either pay or marry her.”56 Hanawalt also notes that in the short treatise of advice “How the Goodwife Taught Her Daughter” the mother warns her child against speaking to strange men on the street, lest such fraternizing lead to a marriage without a contract properly negotiated with the groom’s parents.57 In light of such real familial pressures, the stories of forced marriage in romances can become the guilty conscience of middle-class readers. The stories also remind us that even though the children in the romances are youths or older by the time the attempted marriages occur, they are still not emancipated. The pathetic response to marital coercion is not meant to raise the same level of tender emotion as such mistreatment of younger children would. Instead, readers of the romances could easily have read scenarios such as the forced marriage of Josian as amplified versions of their own sometimes precarious conflicts of marriage, family, property, and desire. Josian’s predicament reminds us that actual women in late medieval England had far less say in marriage negotiations than any of the other parties involved. A marriage, as we have seen already, might be forced upon a woman by her own family.58 In Havelok the Dane the original marriage plans for Goldeboru depend on her father’s granting her permission to choose. Thus it is not only Goldeboru’s wishes that are thwarted when Godrich marries her off to the supposed “thrall” Havelok; her dying father’s last wishes are also violated. Godrich manipulates the technicalities of the king of England’s charge to him. Goldeboru’s father requested that she marry “the beste, fayreste, the strangest ok” (line 200). Havelok is strong,

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beautiful, and “hey”—not high in social rank, as far as Godrich knows, but certainly tall. Goldeboru repeats what was in all likelihood the implicit intent of her father’s charge: that she marry only a king’s son. She swears that she will marry no other, no matter how good-looking he may be, and Godrich is enraged she should swear such an oath, telling her the wedding will go ahead as scheduled. Goldeboru becomes desperate; weeping, she realizes “She wode ben ded bi hire wille” (line 1130). He offers either exile or a combination of hanging and burning if she does not comply. Her prospective husband, meanwhile, does not wish to marry at all because he is too poor. But Godrich attacks Havelok physically and threatens him further with hanging. The savage double mistreatment of Goldeboru and Havelok, united in a forced marriage, produces unexpected results—happiness, love, sovereignty, and plenty of real estate. But these results also constitute a happy return to the original parental intentions for their children’s marriage; here the reading public would likely experience a similar relief over a situation rather close to home. Given the parallel mistreatment of Havelok and Goldeboru, gender difference is not a key ingredient of the pathetic response intended for them. In other romances, however, gender does seem to make a difference. The matter is surprisingly complex in the seemingly straightforward romance King Horn, in which Rymenhild’s own desire is more prominent; it is she who waxes “wild” over Horn, woos him, sits him down in her bower, plies him with wine, and in effect proposes. Yet in the house of her father, King Aylmare, she must conduct her meetings with Horn in secret, and she finds less permission to marry as she wishes than Goldeboru receives from her father in Havelok. As an unemancipated young woman, Rymenhild is at the mercy of her father or the guardians he designates. After Horn has gone into exile, Rymenhild is given in marriage to King Modi of Reynes, much against her will. Upon his return, Horn, dressed as a beggar, produces a ring and tells her the dying Horn gave it to him. Now Rymenhild waxes very wild indeed: “‘Herte, nu thu berste, / For Horn nastu namore, / That the hath pined so sore.’ / Heo feol on hire bedde, / Ther heo knif hudde, / To sle with king lothe / And hureselve bothe / In that ulke nighte, / If Horn come ne mighte” (lines 1204–12). While Horn’s agency includes his ability to fight and to move about the countryside unaccompanied, Rymenhild has to stay put in a home that denies her passions and endangers her. The condition of forced marriage in her own home has led her to a desperate plan for a murder-suicide as her only solution.

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Later, with Horn abroad a second time, Fikenild places Rymenhild in a castle surrounded by the sea and tries to woo her. So Horn returns, dressed as a harper this time, kills Fikenild, and finally, with his patrimony secure, marries Rymenhild; she then becomes queen of Horn’s natal land. Until this time she has been at home, but most of the men in her life—her father, Fikenild, and even Horn—have not protected her well from the threat of forced marriage. Such circumstances, combined with her own volatile personality, could easily have ended tragically and violently. The fact that they do not reflects once more the irony and transformation of pathos embedded within the essentially comic movement of romances. Of course, the emancipation of Rymenhild’s own sexual desires depends on Horn’s triumph against her unscrupulous guardians; in this light, female agency is limited by the male’s more extensive power. But once Horn has overcome the obstacles to their desires, their mutual happiness is assured, and pathos no longer serves a purpose in the narrative. Bevis of Hampton likewise features several forced marriages and, just as in King Horn, they are not consummated. We have already touched on Brademond’s attempt to take Josian by force and the events that move Ermin to send Bevis back to Brademond for execution. After Bevis has departed for Brademond’s court, Ermin feeds Josian a fabricated story about Bevis’s marrying the princess of England. Her father then attempts to marry her to Yvor, the king of Mombraunt. Only after escaping his dungeon and wandering for seven years does Bevis return to Mombraunt—dressed, as it seems always in these reunions, as a beggar. He reveals his identity to Josian but hesitates to marry her: even if Yvor were out of the picture, the patriarch of Jerusalem has admonished Bevis to marry a virgin. Luckily, Josian has managed to remain chaste since her wedding. Unlike Rymenhild, Josian is no longer under her father’s care at this point. Yet the next attempt at forced marriage occurs when Josian is left in the care of the emperor in Cologne. While Bevis has returned to England to reclaim his heritage—as in King Horn—the earl Miles plots to marry Josian, and she escapes the loss of her all-important virginity only by strangling Miles with a towel. The threats to Josian’s true desires result from her unemancipated state and lead to acts of violence; she is nearly burned at the stake before Bevis saves her. There is no forced marriage in Athelston, yet the violence against the queen of England and her unborn child in this romance results in the loss of one of the key motivations that sometimes led to forced marriages—

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succession in Athelston’s direct line. This privation springs from King Athelston’s own rash willingness to believe false accusations of treason against Egeland, the earl of Stone. In turn, the king’s response affects his own sister, Edyff, who is Egeland’s wife, and also their children. When the queen intercedes for Egeland “on here bare knees” (line 277), Athelston responds by kicking her in the womb. She delivers a stillborn male child, and the succession eventually transfers to the son of the vindicated Dame Edyff. This boy turns out to be none other than Saint Edmund himself. While the false accuser, Wymound, earl of Dover, is exposed and ignominiously executed, the romance does not end with complete justice. Elizabeth Ashton Rowe notes that, among all the people who receive justice or compensation in Athelston, the queen is the only one who receives none: With one significant exception, every wrong or injury in Athelston is compensated for: Alryk loses and regains his archbishopric; the messenger, whose mount is ridden to death because of Wymound’s accusation, tricks Wymound into giving him one of his best horses; the traitor Wymound suffers the fate he intended for the innocent Egeland; Egeland’s infant son is named heir to the kingdom in compensation for the injury done to him; and Athelston is punished for his injustice to his sworn brother by the loss of his own heir, which he openly mourns. However, the injury to the queen and the killing of their unborn is not compensated for in any way. This gap in the otherwise perfect working out of the lex talionis calls into question the textual invocation of divine justice as the necessary supplement of human justice.59 Rowe also sees the queen as a metaphor for the body politic of England, which receives no just hearing under the tyrannical rule of Richard II, to whose reign she assigns the romance. But her observation serves well even without the political allegory; it leaves the uneasy suggestion that the loss of a child and potential successor is worse than the violation against the queen’s own person. Spousal abuse in this case is practically ignored, receiving only a measure of pathetic attention—not quite the sostenuto aria of the pathetic voice—and pathos does not transform itself into agency. Violence against the queen’s body becomes a secondary consideration to the perpetuation of the family line, a matter of enormous concern to gentry and urban bourgeois alike.

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Despite the violence against children in romances, the sufferings inevitably cease.60 This is the final irony of pathos in these romances: it seems to disappear. The characters who have suffered outrage are, with the exception of lost relatives such as Havelok’s sisters, strong and happy and powerful. All four of these romances have happy endings, successful marriages, and appropriate meting out of rewards and punishments. Tenderness and love in marriage share the stage with the concern for properly arranged marriages and preservation of property, and there is no hint that the violations these children have experienced create difficulties in the conduct of their adult relationships. It is doubtful that the readership among the urban middle classes and the gentry ever experienced such tranquil outcomes; it is, of course, easy to see the appeal of the fantasy of permanent happiness after struggle, as well as the redemption of fearful childhood trauma into prosperity and domestic tranquility. This is not to say, however, that the readership necessarily felt resolution and relief even after a happy ending. The experience of having read about physical abuse, violation of the home, abusive fosterage, and forced marriage might very well have a darker side. Reinhard Kuhn has examined the high mortality rate of children in Western literature and observes how the “destruction of innocence is an event that has a universal if somewhat perverse appeal and this is sure to evoke sympathy, even if of a rather tainted kind, in the soul of every sensitive reader.”61 There may also be lingering guilt involved; as noted, historians have documented how some medieval families abused their own children. If these impulses were operative among the subaristocratic readership of late medieval England, then perhaps pathos does not relieve the readers with the completing wish fulfillment they may have been seeking. The lingering appeal of pathos may leave a troubling aftertaste in the minds of readers. Whatever the level of satisfaction that such reading may afford, the hyperbolic sufferings of romance children form one strand of the pathetic style woven pervasively through the text of late medieval culture.

Notes All quotations derive from Four Romances of England: King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston, ed. Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1999).

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1. See, for example, Georgianna Ziegler, “Structural Repetition in King Horn,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 81 (1980): 403–8. W.R.J. Barron in English Medieval Romance (London: Longman, 1987) sees King Horn’s theme as the maturation of the individual, and both King Horn and Havelok the Dane are structured by the motif of exile and return. Havelok, Barron contends, is a “male Cinderella who accepts the ashes” (pp. 66–69). See also Lee C. Ramsey, Chivalric Romances: Popular Literature in Medieval England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). 2. Roy Michael Liuzza has analyzed the uniquely bourgeois representation in Havelok, which certainly distinguishes this romance from the other romances considered in this essay; see “Representation and Readership in the Middle English Havelok,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 93 (1994): 504–19. But Havelok does belong to this group of romances not only because bourgeois readers saw middle-class realism in Havelok—they read aristocratic romances too—but because of the representation of violence and pathos that bourgeois readers would have responded to in all four of the romances. 3. Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), p. 13. 4. Sylvia Thrupp’s The Merchant Class of Medieval London, 1300–1500 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) gives many details of living standards among prosperous bourgeois that duplicated the comforts and cultural interests of the landed gentry. Thrupp notes, for example, that “London citizens were in the market for landed property of many kinds from an early date. Enrollments made in the husting court enable one to trace transfers of city property back to 1258, and surviving deeds in other series, going back into the twelfth century, show the great citizen families accumulating houses, shops, and quays in London and country property also in the home counties, East Anglia, and in Northamptonshire” (p. 118). See also p. 247 ff. 5. Crane, Insular Romance, p. 217. 6. One example of a diverse romance anthology is MS Harley 273, which contains religious materials (a French Psalter, the Manuel des Péchés, a version of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory) and a prose Charlemagne romance. According to Derek Pearsall, such books “would have provided a whole library of reading matter for the household of a city burgess or a member of the country gentry” (“Middle English Romance and Its Audiences,” in Historical and Editorial Studies in Medieval and Early Modern English: For Johan Gerritsen, ed. Mary-Jo Arn, Hanneke Wirtjes, and Hans Jansen [Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1985], p. 42). Harriet Hudson, however, contends that “most of them seem to have belonged to the gentry class” (“Middle English Popular Romances: The Manuscript Evidence,” Manuscripta 28 [July 1984]: 67–78). 7. Hudson (ibid., p. 77) quotes K. B. McFarlane: “By the second half of the fifteenth century the lords were sharply distinguished from those without the fold. Nobility had parted company with gentility, the quality with which those rejected

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were still permitted to be endowed. The gentry, that is to say, did not so much rise (though some did) during the later Middle Ages as fall from the nobility which their antecessors had enjoyed in common with all landowners from a great earl to a lord of an estate worth £20 a year.” 8. See, for example, Thrupp, Merchant Class; Robert Gray, A History of London (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1978), esp. chap. 4. 9. “It is difficult to locate direct testimony on the beating of small children, since, as long as it did not cause death or severe bodily injury, it was considered a private matter, like wife-beating. In light of all we know about medieval society, on the one hand, and about child-battering in later time on the other, it is highly implausible to assume that small children were never beaten, despite their ‘positive’ image and the fact that the dominant educational theories prescribed the commencement of strict education only at the age of seven. The abundant advice and numerous references to the crying of children at night indicate that some parents acted violently toward their crying children” (Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages [London and New York: Routledge, 1990], p. 111). 10. Ibid., p. 109. 11. See also Joseph Berrigan, “Prehumanist Views of Domestic Violence in the Early Trecento,” Studies in Medieval Culture 5 (1975): 159–63. 12. Several historians have developed a body of evidence to refute Philippe Ariès’s thesis that premodern parents did not care for their children. See Philippe Ariès, L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime, 2d ed. (Paris: Plon, 1960); for refutation of Ariès’s position, see Shahar, Childhood; Barbara A. Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); James Schultz, The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages, 1100–1350 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). 13. Noted by Shahar, Childhood, p. 144. 14. Hanawalt, Growing Up, p. 61. 15. Shahar, Childhood, p. 152. 16. John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon, 1988), p. 37. 17. David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 127. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., p. 120. 20. Robert Worth Frank, Jr., “The Canterbury Tales III: Pathos,” in The Cambridge Chaucer Companion, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 145. 21. George R. Keiser, “The Middle English Planctus Mariae,” in The Popular Literature of Medieval England, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), pp. 167–93. 22. Hudson, “Middle English Popular Romances,” p. 75.

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23. All references to Chaucer may be found in The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 24. Hope Phyllis Weissman, “Latin Gothic Pathos in the Man of Law’s Tale,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 9 (1979): 133–53, takes a dim view of the pathetic mode and through comparison of the Man of Law’s Tale with its sources in Trevet and Gower sees Chaucer deliberately parodying its excesses. F. Xavier Baron, meanwhile, argues for Chaucer’s careful evocation of a “dark and pessimistic view of the terrible reality of human suffering . . . in these tales so devoid of humor and comedy” and suggests Chaucer chose to “evoke and stress the importance of human compassion as probably our only consolation when faced with the terrible realities of human suffering,” though Baron’s formalist approach does not really take into account the culture of affective piety in late medieval England (“Children and Violence in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” Journal of Psychohistory 7 [1979]: 78–79). Keiser, “Planctus Mariae,” deals more specifically with the apparent insincerity modern readers tend to assume in these texts and helpfully examines the traditional rhetorical structures that pathetic laments naturally appropriated. 25. Weissman, “Latin Gothic Pathos,” p. 133. 26. Frank, “Canterbury Tales III,” p. 155. 27. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 38–39. For pathos as a cultural and literary development in the Middle Ages, see Frank, “Canterbury Tales III.” 28. Quoted in Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 355 ff. 29. Keiser, “Planctus Mariae,” pp. 174–75. 30. Keiser cautions against modern assumptions that such pathos automatically equals melodramatic excess, offering instead an incisive observation on the intersection of medieval rhetoric, poetics, and bourgeois culture: “in an age of sumptuary excess, the idea of clothing the words of the Virgin in the best rhetorical finery must have seemed wholly appropriate and decorous to the authors of the planctus. The audience for whom they wrote was, owing to the increased literacy among the middle and upper classes and to the pious devotionalism widespread among these classes, large and enthusiastic, as well as given to sumptuary excess” (ibid., p. 175). 31. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Ingram Bywater, and The Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (New York: Random House, 1954), p. 230. 32. Quoted in A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, eds., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–c. 1375: The Commentary Tradition, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 285. 33. Aristotle wrote that “most directly opposed to pity is the feeling called Indignation. Pain at unmerited good fortune is, in one sense, opposite to pain at unmerited bad fortune, and is due to the same moral qualities. Both feelings are associated with good moral character; it is our duty both to feel sympathy and pity for unmerited distress, and to feel indignation at unmerited prosperity; for whatever is undeserved is unjust, and that is why we ascribe indignation even to the gods” (Rhetoric, p. 115).

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34. Michael Stugrin, “Ricardian Poetics and Late Medieval Cultural Pluriformity: The Significance of Pathos in the Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer Review 15 (1980–81): 156 ff. 35. It is interesting that this extended narrative of pathos from a medieval culture correlates closely with twentieth-century delineations of children’s basic needs; for instance, as defined by Britain’s Royal College of Psychiatrists, children require “1.) Physical care and protection. 2.) Affection and approval. 3.) Stimulation and teaching. 4.) Discipline and control which are consistent and age-appropriate. 5.) Opportunity and encouragement to gradually acquire autonomy” (quoted in Peter Maher, ed., Child Abuse: The Educational Perspective [Oxford: Blackwell, 1987], p. 112). 36. Ranulf de Glanville, The treatise on the laws and customs of the realm of England commonly called Glanvill, ed. and trans. G.D.G. Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Henry de Bracton, De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae, ed. G. E. Woodbine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915), p. 42. 37. The Oxford English Dictionary actually lists a French-language source from 1567 first: “Staunforde, Plees del Coron 14b, Ma meason est a moy come mon castel hors de quel le ley ne moy arta a fuer.” Immediately following is the example from 1588: “Lambard Eiren II, vii, 257 Our law calleth a man’s house, his castle, meaning that he may defend himselfe therein.” See also Sir Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, 4th ed. (London: A. Crooke et al., 1669): “For a man’s house is his castle, et domus sua cuique tutissimum refugium”—a quotation from the Pandects of Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Vocando, lib. II, tit. IV, De in Ius Vocando. While Coke is quoting the civil law tradition, medieval commentators such as Henry de Bracton demonstrated knowledge of Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis (Brittanica Online, http://www.eb.com, s.v. “Bracton, Henry de”). 38. See illustrations to Dominique Barthélemy and Philippe Contamine, “The Use of Private Space,” in A History of Private Life, vol. 2, Revelations of the Medieval World, ed. Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). See also Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee: “I shal warnestoore myn hous with toures, swiche as han castelles” (VII.1332). 39. Thrupp, Merchant Class, p. 131. 40. See Jane Grenville, Medieval Housing (London: Leicester University Press, 1997), esp. pp. 157–93. 41. Deborah Sue Ellis, “The Image of the Home in Early English and Spanish Literature” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, 1981). Ellis argues for a medieval house that is gendered and to varying degrees polarized between hall and chamber, especially in town houses. 42. Duby, Revelations, p. 321. “Symbolizing the power coveted by the conqueror, the tower is simultaneously a defensive edifice, a habitable space, and a place of pleasure.” 43. Duby (ibid., p. 538) includes a photograph of the urban Palazzo Pretorio. A crenellated urban tower is studded with coats of arms indicating the household’s prestigious marriage alliances.

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44. “Thuse seide Grim and sore gret, / And sone fel him to the fet, / And seide, ‘Louerd, have mercy / Of me and Leve, that is me bi! / Louerd, we aren bothe thine— / Thine cherles, thine hine. / Louerd, we sholen the wel fede / Til that thu cone riden on stede, / Til that thu cone ful wel bere / Helm on heved, sheld and spere’” (lines 616–25). 45. Hanawalt, Growing Up, p. 127. 46. Shahar, Childhood, p. 232. 47. Ibid., p. 231. 48. Riverside Chaucer, xvii. 49. Donald R. Howard, Chaucer: His Life, His World, His Works (New York: Dutton, 1987). 50. Hanawalt, Growing Up, pp. 157–63. 51. Ibid., p. 149. 52. Ibid., p. 208: “one form of abuse of wardship was for a man with a child to marry off to look for a recently widowed mother with an orphan of the opposite sex. He would then marry the mother and arrange a marriage between his offspring and hers, thereby acquiring the use of both the mother’s inheritance and the child’s until the child came of age. The arrangement was illegal because only the mayor could consent to the marriage of citizens’ orphans, and it was morally and religiously repugnant because the marriages often occurred between very young children who, since their parents were married, were related by a close bond of affinity that precluded marriage.” 53. See, for example, Hanawalt’s discussion of “How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter” in Growing Up, p. 212. See also David Herlihy, Medieval Households, and Christopher Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Jack Goody elaborates on the evolution of dowry in Northern Europe in a trajectory that begins with bridal capture, moving successively to “bride price,” “indirect dowry,” and finally “direct dowry” (The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983]). 54. Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages, trans. Chaya Galai (London and New York: Methuen, 1983), p. 178. 55. On dower and dowry in fifteenth-century London, see Hanawalt, Growing Up, p. 199 ff. 56. Ibid., p. 210. 57. Ibid., p. 212. The gentry shared the same concerns: Margaret Paston locked her daughter Elizabeth out of the house when she announced she had become engaged to a bailiff, Richard Calle (Ellis, “Image of the Home,” 143). Marriages required only the consent of the two principals to be considered valid, and a clandestine marriage brought to light could cause shame, embarrassment, and ruin to a family’s prospects and reputation (Herlihy, Medieval Households, pp. 80–81). 58. Anne Clark Bartlett observes: “Although a prospective bride’s consent was required by canon law, marriage often involved intense negotiations among family members, advisers, and associates. . . . Medieval women were generally regarded as

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marriageable objects rather than marrying agents, even when a woman’s dowry or family connections invested her with some authority in her own right”; see Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 72. 59. Elizabeth Ashton Rowe, “The Female Body Politic and the Miscarriage of Justice in Athelston,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 17 (1995): 79–98. 60. For a discussion of this correlation, see Maher, Child Abuse, p. 15. 61. Reinhard Kuhn, Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for Brown University Press, 1982), p. 177.

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Domestic Violence in the Decameron Marilyn Migiel

To speak of domestic violence in a fourteenth-century Italian text like Boccaccio’s Decameron1 (1349–51) is to position oneself on uncertain terrain. In our cultural imagination, domestic violence in the Middle Ages may seem like medieval misogyny, everywhere rampant. But the fact is that readers hesitate to consider the Decameron misogynistic and, in keeping with this, they have rarely chosen to see individual instances of violence against women in the Decameron as very significant to the reading of the work as a whole. Furthermore, readers have tended to imagine domestic violence in the Decameron as very many people imagine domestic violence today: as instances of direct physical assault that remain for the most part confined to the lower classes.2 Three examples immediately come to mind: Calandrino’s merciless beating of his wife Tessa in Decameron VIII.3, Tessa’s violent retaliation against Calandrino in IX.5, and the wife beating by Giosefo in IX.9.3 If we expand our notion of domestic violence—to include violence directed at an intimate partner rather than just a spouse, physical abuse that is not effected “directly,” and severe psychological abuse—we find a few more examples in the Decameron. Now we have moved beyond the circle of the less educated and less wealthy to witness a scholar’s cruelty toward a widow in VIII.7,4 a merchant’s attempt to murder the wife he believes to be unfaithful to him in II.9, and a lord’s mistreatment of his humble and patient wife Griselda in X.10. And if we include actual or implied threats of violence, we acquire more examples: a father threatens his parturient daughter with death if she does not reveal the name of her lover (V.7), and Nastagio degli Onesti, in order to get his beloved to marry him, invites her to witness a scene of nightmarish cruelty against another woman (V.8).

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These examples, all derived from Boccaccio’s “human comedy,” reveal a spectrum of violent behavior that is more elaborate than the one presented by feminist scholars of medieval and early modern Italy, since these scholars have tended to focus on women as the objects of male voyeurism, women who are raped, women who are silenced.5 In studying the Decameron, a text that powerfully embodies medieval and early modern sensibilities and values, we gain further insight into the discourse about violence against women in Western culture. The Decameron allows us to reflect on our implicitly constructed narratives about domestic violence; it also illustrates the challenges that beset readers who are committed to political and ethical change. As the Decameron begins, it seems hard to imagine a place for domestic violence. For the ten Florentines who flee to the countryside, the principal “violence” is occasioned by the plague of 1348: this mysterious ill transforms bodies, brings death. The ten members of the group do not easily recall anything that would provoke memories of their own tragic experience. As a result, in the first third of their storytelling—much of which must conform to the conditions of a “happy ending”—they avoid grim descriptions of violence and death.6 Women begin to die only on Day IV, when the topic is unhappy love. Unlike men, who meet death mainly because of their own crimes or because of political and sexual strife, the women of Day IV tend to die of natural causes (the wife of Filippo Balducci in the author’s novella) or by their own doing (Ghismunda in Decameron IV.1, Lisabetta da Messina in IV.5, Simona in IV.7, the wife of Guglielmo Rossiglione in IV.9). The violence that threatens men, actors in the world, does not threaten women directly. Rather, Day IV represents women as the secondary victims of violence unleashed by sexual love. Tancredi does not kill his daughter Ghismunda—he kills her lover, and then Ghismunda takes her own life. The brothers of Lisabetta da Messina, having discovered their sister’s relation with an employee of theirs, kill the employee; Lisabetta then allows herself to waste away. Simona dies only because she imitates her lover’s fatal movements as he rubbed sage leaves against his teeth. Guglielmo Rossiglione, having discovered his wife’s adulterous affair, does not kill her. Rather, he kills her lover, who was his own best friend; then his wife lets herself fall out of a window. Only on Day V, where the stories are dedicated to “happy love,” does the threat of violence against women really begin to emerge. Men begin to

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use force or threatened force to get what they want from women. Despite resistance from the woman he wants and opposition from other men, Cimone claims Ifigenia as his own in Decameron V.1. A father draws his sword against his own daughter in Decameron V.7. Nastagio degli Onesti threatens his beloved more shrewdly, with a strange and terrifying dramatic representation, wherein a woman who refused her lover’s advances is destined to suffer terrible mutilation at his hands (Decameron V.8). Whereas earlier stories downplayed the actual or threatened violence that women experienced at the hands of men,7 on Day V violence against women comes to be foregrounded more insistently, and it turns more graphic. In the wake of a series of novellas where women seem empowered to speak out and exercise control over their lives (Decameron VI and VII), many of the stories of Days VIII and IX try to delimit the power that women might wield.8 Not surprisingly, a number of these stories describe “just retaliations” against women who have mistreated men, placed limits on them, or called their authority into question. The most striking examples of violence against women in the Decameron, all found in the final third of this work, are the responses of male characters who perceive themselves as slighted (whether justifiably or not): Calandrino is certain that his wife is responsible for his having lost his invisibility (VIII.3); the scholar is determined to make the widow suffer in extreme weather just as he suffered for her (VIII.7); Talano d’Imole can count on fate to punish his wife’s insubordinations (IX.7); Giosefo responds with violence when his claim to absolute authority over his wife is in question (IX.9); likewise, Gualtieri has to resort to extreme measures, since there is almost no humanly conceivable way for Griselda to prove her absolute submission to him (X.10). It seems hardly coincidental that violence against women emerges when the very possibility of women’s empowerment does. The stories of the Decameron imply that if women gain power, their power must remain limited, by violent means if need be. I would like to turn my attention now to the novella that strikes me as the most disturbingly violent and misogynistic in the Decameron: the story told on the Ninth Day by the queen for that day, Emilia. I have chosen Decameron IX.9 because I believe that the difficulties we encounter in reading it are representative of larger difficulties we have in reading accounts of domestic violence in medieval texts. Prefacing her tale with a long, sermonlike diatribe on women’s imper-

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fection and their necessary subservience to men, Emilia introduces Giosefo and Melisso who journey to ask Solomon for advice. To Melisso, who is unlucky in love, Solomon says quite simply, “Ama” [Love] (IX.9.14; p. 593). Melisso is dismissed, and Giosefo brought in. To Giosefo, who complains of having a recalcitrant and difficult wife, Solomon says, “Va al Ponte all’Oca” [Go to the Goose Bridge] (IX.9.15; p. 593). As the two men journey homeward, they happen upon a mule driver beating his animal in order to make it cross a bridge; although the men object, the mule driver insists that this is the only way to make the mule obey. Learning that this was the Goose Bridge, Giosefo then “understands” that Solomon intended him to read the incident as an exemplum. Upon his return home, Giosefo stages a repetition of the scene for his friend Melisso: he asks his wife to prepare Melisso a dinner, which she prepares badly, and in response he beats her violently. She capitulates, becoming properly subservient and obedient, and both Melisso and Giosefo remain convinced that Solomon’s advice, which they understood so badly at first, in fact worked wonders. The story ends here with Melisso returning to his homeland, where he tells a wise man what he learned from Solomon, and the wise man agrees that in fact Melisso, for all his prodigality, did not really love anyone and would be much better off if he applied Solomon’s advice to love. Emilia ends cursorily: “Così fu gastigata la ritrosa, e il giovane amando fu amato” [And so in such fashion was the shrew punished and the young man by loving was loved in return] (IX.9.35; p. 596). Readers of this novella have found themselves at an impasse. Some, shocked at its misogyny, condemn both the novella and its author. Others, attempting to preserve the view of Boccaccio as a pro-woman writer, claim flatly that the resolution of the novella is so unsatisfactory that Boccaccio must want us to accept the resolution as ironic.9 This suggests to me that the scene of violence has been considered fundamentally unreadable. It has elicited outrage or apology rather than analysis. Granted, it is not at all easy for readers of this novella to gain critical distance, since they never get grounded in a consistent point of view. The story begins as if it were about Melisso, but is dedicated mainly to Giosefo, only to return, in an unexpected way, to Melisso at the very end. Solomon himself is a strangely inconsistent advisor, speaking both in biblical language that seems straightforward (“Love”) and oracular pronouncements that invite contrary interpretations (“Go to the Goose Bridge”). Giosefo’s wife seems to be the typical recalcitrant and obstinate wife of exemplum and fabliau, a wife who will not submit even after she is subjected to beat-

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ings and mutilation,10 but unlike those precedents, Giosefo’s wife submits immediately to her husband after he beats her. Partly because the story binds together disparate and possibly contradictory subject positions, it is hard to know whether readers can legitimately use one character’s perspective in order to critique that of another. Can we align ourselves with Solomon or Melisso in this novella in order to distance ourselves from Giosefo? It would appear not. Giosefo has aligned himself with Solomon, first of all, and Emilia takes care to end her story with a wise man who independently approves of Solomon’s advice about love. Throughout her novella, as in her introduction to it, Emilia’s strategy is to provide universalizing statements no matter how partial or questionable the evidence. Strangely enough, the protagonists of her story use the evidence that violence is successful in order to reaffirm the wisdom of Solomon; it does not occur to them to question their interpretations of his pronouncements. Emilia offers her novella as an exemplum, but since she tells about a woman of the lower class—a woman who must prepare dinner, unlike the women of the upper and artisan classes who have servants—one wonders whether she means this novella as an exemplum for the upper-class woman as well.11 Then, at the end of the novella, Melisso tells a wise man what he has learned from Solomon, but he appears to relate only the part of Solomon’s advice that regards him specifically, since the wise man in his response repeats nothing about what Melisso might have learned from observing Giosefo and his wife. The wise man reaffirms the overall efficacy of Solomon’s applied advice, but he seems to base his judgment on partial information. These gaps and inconsistencies are no barrier to Emilia’s universalizing statements. Hers is a layering of different texts apparently to be read differently by different readers, each of whom derives a partial lesson that, according to the narrator, reaffirms the coherence of the entire system. Part of the project of any narrative, of course, is to construct a relation between the whole and its parts, to account for both unity and multiplicity. As Susan Lanser, author of “Toward a Feminist Narratology,” phrases it, following Bakhtin, “in narrative there is no single voice.”12 Showing how multilayered texts address themselves simultaneously to different readers who hear quite different messages, Lanser argues for a more subtle and varied concept of voice and tone. She cites a nineteenth-century English letter in which a woman tells of her great happiness in marriage—then she invites us to read every other line. Embedded into this paean to domestic harmony is a story of terrible mistreatment in marriage. The letter is a

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quite remarkable example of how, though a surface text may appear straightforward, further investigation can show how it is rendered problematic by other voices. Lanser shows first that the audience is split in two: there are those who (like the husband) wish to hear the praise of marriage, and others who (like the narrator’s secret correspondent) hear of her grim reality. But because Lanser does not see the world simply, she reminds us also that there is an audience that tries to make sense of both voices in the poem. Lanser’s feminist narratological approach can provide the first impulse for a rereading of Emilia’s novella. Beginning with a narrative of apparent simplicity, Lanser locates at least one oppositional voice in it. Having recognized two mutually exclusive voices, she encourages the reader to find a third voice that could comprehend both the simple assertion and its oppositional counterpart. In the end, Lanser makes a crucial point: Surface simplicity can hide a profound complexity, which requires discriminating judgment. Of course, we should apply Lanser’s theoretical model with judicious modifications, because Emilia is struggling to present a unified point of view at all costs, even when there are multiple voices, even when the voices are partial. Already at the surface level of Emilia’s story, there is an organization of narrative material that requires discriminating judgment. What should we do when two or more voices are bound together in ways that resist being dismantled? The answer—which sounds all too deceptively simple—is that we would have to exercise discrimination. Boccaccio was himself well aware of the imperative to articulate difference. Whether or not he saw this as a problem of gender difference, he would have acknowledged the importance of identifying differences and basing judgments on careful distinctions. Readers in the late Middle Ages prized the ability to make such distinctions. When Dante has Thomas Aquinas, himself a master of discerning thought, identify Solomon as the brightest light among the wise souls in the Heaven of the Sun, it is because of Solomon’s ability to distinguish true wisdom from arid abstractions. As Aquinas notes here, Solomon asks not for quantifiable scientific or philosophical information but rather for the wisdom to rule well:13 Ma perché paia ben ciò che non pare, pensa chi era, e la cagion che ‘l mosse, quando fu detto “Chiedi,” a dimandare.

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Non ho parlato sì, che tu non posse ben veder ch’el fu re, che chiese senno acciò che re sufficïente fosse; non per sapere il numero in che enno li motor di qua su, o se necesse con contingente mai necesse fenno; non si est dare primum motum esse, o se del mezzo cerchio far si puote trïangol sì ch’un retto non avesse. (Paradiso XIII.91–102, emphasis mine) [But, in order to make evident that which is still concealed, think about who he was, and what motivated him when he was told “Ask.” I have not spoken in such a way that you would not be able to see plainly that he was a king, who asked for wisdom so that he might be a king worthy to the task—not to know the number of mover spirits here above, or if necesse with a contingent ever made necesse; or si est dare primum motum esse; or if, in a semicircle, a triangle can be drawn so that it has no right angle.]14 This exemplary figure should inspire earthly beings to greater caution and prudence: E questo ti sia sempre piombo a’ piedi, per farti mover lento com’ uom lasso e al sì e al no che tu non vedi: Ché quelli è tra li stolti bene a basso, che sanza distinzione afferma e nega ne l’un così come ne l’altro passo; perch’ elli ‘ncontra che più volte piega l’oppinïon corrente in falsa parte, e poi l’affetto l’intelletto lega. Vie più che ‘ndarno da riva si parte, perché non torna tal qual e’ si move, chi pesca per lo vero e non ha l’arte. E di ciò sono al mondo aperte prove Parmenide, Melisso e Brisso e molti, li quali andaro e non sapëan dove. (Paradiso XIII.112–26)

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[And let this be like lead on your feet, so that you would move slowly, like a weary man, to the pros and the cons that you do not understand. Right down low among the fools is anyone who, indiscriminately, affirms and denies, whatever the case may be. Such a person finds that often the precipitous opinion inclines to the wrong side, and then emotion hinders the intellect. People who fish for the truth but don’t know what they are doing leave the shore worse than in vain, since they do not return the same as when they set out. Parmenides, Melissus, and Bryson, and many others stand as open proofs of this to the world: they started out, but they had no idea where they were going.] Dante is reshaping for his own audience the biblical passage in III Kings in which God recognizes Solomon’s great wisdom. In verse 3:5, God appears to Solomon in a nighttime dream and states that he will give Solomon whatever he asks for (“postula quod vis ut dem tibi”). After a long and courteous introduction, in which he humbly acknowledges his own limitations, Solomon asks in verse 3:9 for the wisdom to rule properly: “dabis ergo servo tuo cor docile / ut iudicare possit populum tuum et discernere inter malum et bonum. / quis enim potest iudicare populum istum, populum tuum hunc multum” [Give your servant an understanding heart / so that he can judge your people, and distinguish between evil and good. / For who can judge these people, your people who are so many?]. God, highly pleased with Solomon, responds in 3:11–12: “quia postulasti verbum hoc et non petisti tibi dies multos / nec divitias aut animam inimicorum tuorum / sed postulasti tibi sapientiam ad discernendum iudicium / ecce feci tibi secundum sermones tuos / et dedi tibi cor sapiens et intellegens / in tantum ut nullus ante te similis tui fuerit / nec post te surrecturus sit” [Because you asked for this, and you did not ask for long life, / or riches, or the lives of your enemies, / but you asked for the wisdom to exercise discerning judgment, / I have done as you have requested, / and I have given you a wise and understanding heart. / Before you there has never been anyone like you, / nor after you will anyone like you come forth]. If we look again at Emilia’s novella about Solomon’s advice with the biblical and Dantesque passages in mind,15 we must read Giosefo’s request for knowledge as absolutely preposterous. Giosefo can in no way compare to the biblical Solomon, who thought of the larger good, nor is he in any way like the Dantesque Solomon, who put forth a commendable request

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for what we might call a “methodology” over “mere facts.” Giosefo is blatantly self-serving as he asks for information directed at a very isolated and specific concern, how to control his obstinate wife. Even Melisso’s request should strike us as questionable. Melisso requests a benefit to himself (“How may I be loved?”) and receives a generic answer, which, as it happens, he applies to his own advantage. Lest I be misunderstood, I hasten to clarify. I find fault in Giosefo and Melisso not because they focus on the personal rather than the political, not because they fail to consider what the Bible calls “these people, your people who are so many,” but rather because they do not focus on anything but themselves and the immediate benefits they could derive from Solomon. Swept up by their own egotistical desires, Giosefo and Melisso can provide only a sad distortion of a larger question: How might we best recognize virtuous love and strive to make it a reality in our lives? By the end of the story, one has the distinct impression that Giosefo and Melisso have learned nothing more than they knew before. Unable to make important distinctions, they uncritically embrace the “lesson” of Goose Bridge and treat a woman as if she were a creature who deserved to be beaten.16 Women are not animals, of course, but the lesson that Giosefo and Melisso should have learned (and that we should learn) goes beyond this. Violence is not morally or ethically acceptable simply because it helps one to achieve one’s stated goal. In reflecting on the prudential wisdom of authority figures, what the Bible, Dante, and Boccaccio all reaffirm is that not all forms of knowledge, not all attempts to better one’s human condition, are equally valid. Both the Bible and Dante exhort us very explicitly to strive for the practical wisdom that leads to improved social and political communities. Boccaccio is not an author to engage in any sort of explicit persuasion, but this does not mean that we cannot derive a lesson from the story that he chooses to put in the mouth of Emilia on Day IX. This is a story about a misguided interpretation of Solomon’s advice; it reveals the perpetrators of violence against women to be indiscriminate readers and thinkers. The recalls of biblical and Dantesque passages invite us to distance ourselves both from the logic of the abusive man (Giosefo) and from the logic of the narrator who accepts and justifies violence against women (Emilia). Furthermore, whether or not this was his intent, Boccaccio encourages us to be as concerned about the life of the couple, the smallest unit of community, as we are about the life of entire peoples.

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In my discussion of Decameron IX.9 thus far, I have focused on something we could call “reading misogyny against the grain.” This is the approach that Millicent Marcus adopted in her reading of misogyny in Decameron VIII.7. It requires that we place misogynist discourse into a larger context where its claims can be evaluated more carefully and seen to be insufficient. As a reading strategy, it owes a great deal to Dantean narrative techniques and to the kinds of ironic readings Dante encourages us to adopt, especially when we listen to the stories of the characters who populate his Inferno. Such a reading has tremendous merit, and I see it as the crucial first step in a feminist reading of the story about the Goose Bridge. But in order to gain more insight into the workings of misogynistic narratives, we need to move our line of inquiry to another plane. By what rhetorical means do misogynists try to disable any critique from their opponents? In other words, after we characterize the “offensive rhetoric” of misogynistic discourse, what can we say about its “defensive rhetoric”?17 To answer this, we would have to think about how the narrators construct their stories in favor of, or in objection to, women’s increasing freedom. On Day IX of the Decameron, as Emilia and another narrator, Pampinea, argue against the more liberal view of women that Filomena has asserted, they marshal narrative language from Filomena’s story on Day V, about Nastagio degli Onesti. This is particularly evident in Pampinea’s story, where Margherita is disfigured by a wolf because she refuses to acknowledge the authority of her husband, Talano d’Imole, who has told her that according to a dream he had, she would be disfigured by a beast if she entered the woods. Recalcitrant being that she is, she defies him, only to be attacked and mutilated. The prophetic nature of Talano’s “vision” has been tested and reaffirmed. The message would appear to be: Remember, Filomena, that if Nastagio’s “vision” had been tested, it too would have been reaffirmed. In order to avoid violence, women must comply with male desire. Emilia attempts an even more daring use of Filomena’s narrative. First, in the description of the scene at Goose Bridge, Emilia produces a calque of the scene that Filomena described in Decameron V.8, the story of Nastagio degli Onesti. In a forest outside Ravenna, Nastagio has seen a knight who is violent and cruel to a naked and disheveled woman; he feels sorry for her and attempts to intervene, but the knight stops him, explaining that he and the lady must enact this scene of violence every Friday. Nastagio then

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changes his mind about this scene, and decides to use it in order to frighten his lady love into capitulating to his desires and accepting his offer of marriage. Likewise, in the encounter at the Goose Bridge, Giosefo and Melisso try to intervene when they see the mule driver beating his mule, and the mule driver stops them, explaining that violence is the only solution. Thus far, Emilia is treating Filomena’s narrative material much as Pampinea did earlier. Once again, the message is: Violence works. But Emilia does not stop here. As she concludes her story, she recalls Nastagio once again, this time more obliquely. Emilia has Melisso learn a lesson that the prodigal Nastagio never learned—namely, to find love not through expenditure of material goods but by dint of expressions of love. What is the logic behind Emilia’s two references to Filomena’s tale of Nastagio degli Onesti? In order to shore up her own narrative authority, Emilia carries out a preemptive strike. She tries to occupy positions that Filomena cannot attack; she tries to ensure that Filomena has no way to respond. If Filomena does so, she will look incoherent: she will inevitably be arguing against a position that she herself took earlier. If she attacks Giosefo, she must acknowledge that she is attacking Nastagio. If she attacks Melisso, she must acknowledge that she should have ended her own story about Nastagio differently. Previously, when we examined Emilia’s claim that violence is authorized and effective, we saw the fault lines in her “offensive rhetoric.” Now, as we consider Emilia’s “defensive rhetoric,” we can see it is directed at subverting the authority of anyone who might disagree with her (specifically Filomena). In effect, Emilia implies that the opponents of female inferiority and subservience have no ground to stand on—or, rather, that the ground on which they stand is no different from the ground on which she stands. In Emilia’s introduction, this becomes most evident as she argues for violence as a sweeping solution. She admits in advance that not all women will agree with the remedy that she proposes for female willfulness, but then she lumps all women together as she quotes the proverb “Buon cavallo e mal cavallo vuole sprone, e buona femina e mala femina vuol bastone” [Both good and bad horses require the spur, just as both good and bad women require the stick] (IX.9.7; p. 592). Then again, she appears momentarily to concede, just before she tries to consolidate her own position: “Le quali parole chi volesse sollazzevolemente interpretare, di leggier si / concederebbe da tutte così esser vero; ma pur vogliendole moralmente / intendere, dico che è da concedere” [Anyone who sees the humor in these

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words will readily agree that they are true; but I say that they are also admissible if they are considered in their moral sense] (IX.9.8; p. 592). Whether we think about the issue in the joking sexual terms to which Emilia alludes or in the serious “moral” terms that she herself espouses, we remain stuck in a system that limits the choices women can make: women have the right to choose between the kinds of sticks that would maintain social order. Were we to read this through the lens offered us by radical thinkers such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, we might think that Emilia’s statement proves that sex is but another form of violent control. But Emilia’s formulation is a bit more complicated. Women might be willing to entertain the idea of figurative “rods,” even if they don’t like the literal instruments of painful control for which Emilia argues. And once they have accepted any sticks at all, how could they deny the admissibility of sticks in the “moral” sense? Emilia does, however, offer us the very means by which to undo the oppressive logic she argues for: reading and interpretation. She does not merely maintain the moral validity of her solution; she allows that the proverb might have a contested interpretation, and she argues for her interpretation as an interpretation. What she means by a moral interpretation might be less than clear. In context, it seems that Emilia offers her moral reading as a more serious enterprise than the jocular sexual reading. But the moral reading was, in the Middle Ages, one of the kinds of reading demanded by the fourfold interpretation of Scripture, according to literal, allegorical, moral (tropological), and anagogical significance.18 To find the moral or tropological sense of the text was to find its proper application to one’s life as a Christian. Precisely because Emilia is a narrator who remains unaware of the gaps in her thinking, we must exercise great care when we try to find the moral sense of her story, when we think about its application to our own lives. I have argued that a judicious reading of Emilia’s story can offer us insight into the rhetorical justifications for violence against women, and into the kinds of defensive mystifications that make it difficult for us to perceive the issues clearly. Having recognized some of the strategies that reinforce the “legitimacy” of violence against women, we may well wish to reflect on some of the strategies that could displace the discourse of violence. The strategies of resistance are multiple, and they are always dependent on context, but principal among them would be these: Refuse the notion of women’s essential inferiority and necessary subservience, even when it is asserted by women. Refuse universalizing claims that are based

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on incomplete information. Unravel and complicate the notion of women’s “complicity” in violence. Recognize perpetrators as accountable. And, above all, reframe the choices that women have. It is women’s choices about their own lives, after all, that the perpetrators of domestic violence try to limit, and it is women’s choices that the process of reading and rethinking can put into play again.

Notes 1. Textual references to the Decameron will be taken from Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: Mondadori, 1985); for the English translation, I have relied on Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella (New York: New American Library, 1982). 2. The force of this misperception is widely acknowledged by scholars and researchers who study domestic violence; for one such critique, see Richard J. Gelles and Murray A. Straus, Intimate Violence (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), chap. 2, “People Other Than Us: Public Perceptions of Family Violence.” 3. We might also include Arriguccio’s beating of a woman he believes to be his wife in Decameron VII.8, but because the woman is a servant whom the wife has substituted for herself, readers seem not to register this episode as domestic violence. 4. Readers might well ask why I speak here of the scholar’s cruelty toward the widow and do not mention in the same breath the widow’s cruelty toward the scholar, which, in his mind at least, justifies his cruel treatment of her. It is not insignificant to me that the novella of the scholar and the widow, which details cruelty on both their parts, has been widely considered the most misogynistic novella of the Decameron, garnering far more attention than novellas in which women are openly beaten (VII.8, VIII.3, IX.9). What is curious, and worthy of note here and elsewhere, is that women’s violence against men proves not to have the same narratological and ideological weight as men’s violence against women. I grant, however, that the issue of women’s violence against men in the Decameron would merit a lengthier discussion. 5. See Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 94–109; Stephanie H Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Ann Rosalind Jones, “New Songs for the Swallow: Ovid’s Philomela in Tullia D’Aragona and Gaspara Stampa,” in Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, ed. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 263–77; Barbara Zecchi, “Rape,” in The Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature, ed. Rinaldina Russell (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 280–83. In the study of medieval and Renaissance English texts, there is rather more

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attention to discourses of domestic violence, on account of the fact that in both Chaucer and Shakespeare we find frank references to and representations of such violence (cf. Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, The Taming of the Shrew, Othello). But rape is the principal figure for violence against women in the study of medieval and early modern French scholarship. See Carla Freccero, “Rape’s Disfiguring Figure: Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, Day 1:10,” in Rape and Representation, ed. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 227–47; Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); Patricia Francis Cholakian, Rape and Writing in the Heptaméron of Marguerite de Navarre (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991). In general, sexual violence has been the filter through which we see violence against women in our study of the classical, medieval, and early modern worlds. Tellingly, the five-volume A History of Women in the West, under the general editorship of Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992–94), treats rape throughout the centuries but addresses the issue of domestic violence only in the final volume, Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century, ed. Françoise Thébaud. 6. To be sure, Ser Cepparello dies in the very first story of the First Day, but his is an account of unexpected salvation: by means of a false confession, he gains sainthood. In the first story of Day II, Martellino is beaten by the crowd and threatened with torture on the rack, but he is soon liberated by a powerful lord. When people begin to die—an inevitability in storytelling that deals with fortune and misfortune—it tends to be only the minor characters and the villains who merit death. The highway robbers in Decameron II.2 are hanged, but they are, after all, guilty of assault on the novella’s hero, Rinaldo d’Asti; likewise, Ambrogiuolo, guilty of fraud perpetrated against the heroine Zinevra in Decameron II.9, is sentenced to an ugly punishment and death. Various men fall victim to violence in Decameron II.6 and II.7, the stories of Beritola and Alatiel, but like other men who have died violent deaths on Day II, they are characters to whom we have relatively little attachment. 7. In Decameron I.9 a woman of Gascony is raped as she travels to the Holy Land, but we are told nothing more about her rape experience; the story focuses not on her rape but on her struggle to bring her predicament before the cowardly king of Cyprus. And when Zinevra is directly threatened with death in Decameron II.9, the threat quickly dissolves; she pleads for mercy and is soon released because the servant “Malvolentieri l’uccidea” [was by no means eager to kill her] (II.9.41; p. 147). 8. I have explored this “backlash” in Day VIII of the Decameron in my essay “The Untidy Business of Gender Studies: Or, Why It’s Almost Useless to Ask If the Decameron Is Feminist,” in Boccaccio and Feminist Criticism, ed. F. Regina Psaki and Thomas C. Stillinger (forthcoming). 9. Shirley Allen believes that the unsatisfactory ending to the story indicates that Boccaccio must want us to read it ironically; see “The Griselda Tale and the Portrayal of Women in the Decameron,” Philological Quarterly 56 (1977): 1–13, esp. p. 9.

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Allen, like Millicent Marcus, is of the camp that sees “misogynists” as “misreaders”; see Marcus’s “Misogyny as Misreading: A Gloss on Decameron VIII, 7,” Stanford Italian Review 4 (1984): 23–40. But this mode of reading has hardly laid the question of textual misogyny to rest. Mihoko Suzuki, for example, protests that readers of the Decameron have been far too blind to its misogyny, and that this misogyny continues to be reproduced on the grounds that it is “merely” a literary trope; see “Gender, Power, and the Female Reader: Boccaccio’s Decameron and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron,” Comparative Literature Studies 30 (1993): 231–52. I am sympathetic to both of these intellectual positions: I think that misogyny can be exposed as misreading, but I also think it is a mistake to claim that misogynist discourse is so ironic (or so allegorical or so figurative or so textual) that it cancels itself out entirely. It does not exist within an exclusively textual context. To allow misogyny to exist as a narrative alongside any other, and of equal value to others, is a political mistake and ethically wrong. 10. See, for example, the pages dedicated to Marie de France, “The Man Who Had a Quarrelsome Wife,” in Fabliaux: Ribald Tales from the Old French, trans. Robert Hellman and Richard O’Gorman (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1965), pp. 97–99. 11. I would like to thank Irene Eibenstein-Alvisi for bringing this to my attention. 12. Susan S. Lanser, “Toward a Feminist Narratology,” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 610–29, esp. p. 617. Lanser’s essay first appeared in Style 20:3 (1986): 341–63. 13. As Umberto Cosmo shows in his essay on Paradiso XIII, Dante, in the Heaven of the Wise, lauds not only the love and the doctrinal wisdom of Saints Francis and Dominic but also the prudent judgment of a king; see “La prudenza regale,” in L’ultima ascesa: Introduzione alla lettura del “Paradiso,” 2d ed., ed. Bruno Maier (1965; rpt., Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1968). 14. The Italian text is taken from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. with a commentary by Charles S. Singleton, 6 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). The English translation is my own. The Latin text (i.e., the version that would have been known to Dante and his contemporaries) is taken from Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatum versionem, ed. Robert Webber et al., 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1969). The English translation is my own. 15. There can be no doubt that Boccaccio knew the biblical passage, and he would almost certainly have known the passage from Dante’s Paradiso, which already links Solomon with practical wisdom (and Melissus with the lack of it). According to G. H. McWilliam, Boccaccio may have chosen Melisso’s name in order to try to convey that the story took place in a distant past; I would say that Melisso’s name is meant to trigger a memory of the Dantesque passage; see McWilliam’s note to Decameron IX.9 in Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam, 2d ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1995).

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16. By this I do not mean to suggest that it is permissible to beat animals. As Carol Adams has noted, “In a patriarchy, animal victims, too, become feminized. A hierarchy in which men have power over women and humans have power over animals is actually more appropriately understood as a hierarchy in which men have power over women, (feminized) men, and (feminized) animals. Recognizing harm to animals as interconnected to controlling behavior by violent men is one aspect of recognizing the interrelatedness of all violence in a gender hierarchical world.” See Carol J. Adams, “Woman-Battering and Harm to Animals,” in Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, ed. Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 80. 17. I draw the terms “offensive rhetoric” and “defensive rhetoric” from Jonathan Potter, Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction (London: Sage, 1996). 18. On the moral or tropological sense, see Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale (1959; rpt., Paris: Aubier, 1993), vol. 2, chap. 9, “La Tropologie mystique.”

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Reading Riannon The Problematics of Motherhood in Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet Christopher G. Nugent

It seems odd, even anachronistic, to speak of domestic violence in medieval literature. Twentieth-century norms of privacy and domesticity stem from an epistemological system grounded in a material reality of nuclear families living in separate homes amid the washing machines and microwave ovens that so define postmodern America.1 Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet, the First Branch of the Mabinogion, reflects the vastly different material reality of medieval Wales.2 There is, strictly speaking, no domestic space in the court at Arberth, as servants or courtiers have access to every room at all times. There is, though, violence—or the threat of violence—directed against Riannon. After her son, the heir to the throne, is found to be missing the morning after his birth, Riannon is framed by her serving women for his murder, and is punished by being made to carry visitors to the court on her back like a pack horse or a beast of burden; nonetheless, she retains her place at her husband’s side for official court functions. Eventually the child is returned to his parents by his foster father, Teirnon, and Riannon’s punishment is lifted. In this strange tale, the female body is made to negotiate personal and public spaces under the specter of violence. The violence in Riannon’s story is extreme, but it adheres to Welsh laws governing the proper relationship between husbands and wives, including the parameters of acceptable corporal punishment. If one may speak of domestic violence in medieval Wales, it often takes place, as in contemporary America, at the point where a woman crosses from the role of wife or mother to roles that are not defined by the marriage bed.3 Domestic violence in either era attempts to define and enforce shifting and ambiguous boundaries around women’s lives and experience.

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In literature, as in life, this attempt is met with limited success. Representations of such boundaries around women’s roles become increasingly problematic to writers in Britain and the Continent around the dawn of the fifteenth century. Near contemporaries of the earliest extant manuscript of the Four Branches—the Man of Law’s Tale, the Clerk’s Tale, Lady Rectitude’s speech on wife beating in the Book of the City of Ladies, and Gower’s “Tale of Florent,” for instance—explore the complex legal, cultural, and social status of women in often contradictory detail. As J. K. Bollard reminds us, “the role of women in the Four Branches of the Mabinogion has not so far been adequately defined or examined.”4 Nonetheless, one may note that the redactor of the Four Branches interrogates, as much as Chaucer or Christine de Pizan, the tradition of “Woman as sign, as myth, as Other.”5 And, like these poets, he6 finds that legacy ambiguous, needing constant reinterpretation. Indeed, processes of reading and interpretation dominate the First Branch of the Mabinogion. Many of these acts center on the body. Most strikingly, the story of Riannon’s false accusation and bizarre corporal punishment focuses almost exclusively on her body, who is allowed to write on it, and the uses to which such writing can be put. This emphasis on the materiality of the female body calls into question cultural norms regarding gender, sexuality, and the exercise of power. Like Chaucer’s narrator in the Troilus, the redactor of Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet cannot rationalize the demands of his plot with his representation of the pivotal female character. Here the medieval antifeminist tradition collides with the emerging revalorization of women in high literary productions throughout Europe, coinciding with increased Marian devotion.7 Riannon, like Mary, is an ambiguous figure in late medieval imagination. Both are women with a special connection to divinity, Mary as the Mother of God, and Riannon as an Otherworld figure, if not a euhemerized horse deity. As women, though—especially as embodied maternal figures—neither may easily maintain such a transcendent position. In each case, the traditional association of women with materiality intervenes. Motherhood and the pregnant body must be rationalized, although the attempt cannot wholly succeed. Theresa Coletti, for instance, offers a compelling rereading of the scandal of Christ’s miraculous birth in the mystery cycles. She argues that the cycles “placed the reverent cultic image in a refashioned biblical story that exploits highly charged topics such as age and sexuality in marriage, adultery, cuckoldry, and illegitimacy, and that explores the interaction of domestic and economic relationships.”8 Coletti offers a useful

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corrective to the view that Mary’s sexuality is denied in her perpetual virginity. From this perspective, Mary, like Riannon, remains a contested material signifier until her generativity is safely contained within socially sanctioned parameters. In this, both the Virgin and Riannon resemble many other women in medieval literature, from patient Griselda to the unfortunate mother of the romance hero Gowther who bites off her nipple. One recent critic of Pwyll sees Riannon as a representative “calumniated wife” of medieval tradition.9 Riannon, as is typical in these narratives, serves as a scapegoat, removing any suggestion that her husband may be less than fully potent.10 The unfortunate women in calumniated-wife narratives usually suffer brute violence from their husbands or other men in the community in ways that evoke pity but seldom violate law or custom. The woman’s mistreatment may be as public as Riannon’s punishment or as unseen as Walter’s testing of Griselda’s fealty or Joseph’s initial response to Mary’s miraculous pregnancy. Always, though, the threat of physical violence demarcates the line between two roles that women must play, by choice or compulsion. Much like Griselda’s or Mary’s, Riannon’s body is seen as intrinsically foreign and must be domesticated in the various interpretations to which it is subjected, both metaphorically and by force, in written words and in lived experience. This paradigm highlights the complications of female otherness played out upon Riannon herself as a physical being. Not allowed a socially sanctioned meaning in her own right, Riannon poses a threat to the community of Pwyll’s court and the realm more generally until she can be made to mean within established signifying systems. Although her aristocratic status complicates this paradigm, Riannon still participates in the usual pattern for women in medieval Welsh law, which implicitly establishes a series of dichotomies around the inner and the outer, the public and the private.11 These dichotomies also permeate myth criticism, which has long dominated response to Celtic literature. From that critical perspective, Riannon, as an Otherworld figure, again highlights the foreignness of her sex; indeed, W. J. Gruffydd, in an influential monograph, identifies her with “the Horse-Goddess, the Great Queen.”12 Catherine McKenna offers a useful caution against the excesses of relying exclusively on myth criticism, noting that “as much as such scholarship contributes to our understanding of the Four Branches, it does not in and of itself define the nature of the text for us at all.”13 Myth criticism obscures the materiality of women’s actual lived experience by removing them from the sphere of human life. The

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binarisms upon which it is founded do not leave scope for domestic violence, which resists facile categorization. Juliette Wood notes that Kenneth Jackson’s groundbreaking critique of myth criticism “enables us to see the female figures, not as the accoutrements of a heroic world or the focus of a lost goddess culture, but as figures carrying layers of meaning whose functions within the narrative structures carry a significance comprehensible to audiences contemporary with the tales and to those of today.”14 Nonetheless, Gruffydd’s reading rightly emphasizes the extent to which Riannon does not fit comfortably or naturally into the society of Pwyll’s court. The people do not welcome her, do not integrate her into the community, and this rejection lies at the heart of her predicament. The Welsh Law of Women sheds further light on this rejection. According to T. M. CharlesEdwards, “since, for the purposes of galanas [wergeld], a married woman belongs to her natal kindred, the marriage links together distinct kindreds, which remain alliances of kindred, not a fusion into a single bilateral web of kinship.”15 Riannon has no kindred to protect her and to demand galanas should she be killed, or sarhaed (reparations) should she be insulted.16 This position leaves her vulnerable, outside the usual categories of family and kinship that would normally regulate the public and private reception of her body. This social and legal network provides an important context for the causes and the consequences of the violence inflicted upon Riannon.17 Judith Butler explores the sexual politics of such a rejection based on a woman’s physicality, asserting that “if it can be shown that in its constitutive history, this ‘irreducible’ materiality is constituted through a problematic gendered matrix, then the discursive practice by which matter is rendered irreducible simultaneously ontologizes and fixes that gendered matrix in place.”18 A gendered body does not assert its own materiality; rather, patterns of language and power create the experience of materiality even as they efface signs of that creation. Riannon, then, is stripped of reminders of her Otherworld origins, which has the effect of making her a vulnerable foreigner without the protection of a kinship group.19 According to Butler’s logic, the community does not arbitrarily exclude Riannon; instead, her otherness is necessary for that community’s very self-identification.20 This process, though, creates an unstable epistemological base in a discursively construed material reality that requires a constant negotiation between the materiality of words and the materiality of bodies. Riannon’s serving women exploit this instability in writing their narrative on and around her body using the blood of a slaughtered bitch and her

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brood. As a consequence, the prince’s consort finds herself subject to legally sanctioned violence. Thus, Riannon’s body functions at one and the same time as the manifestation of her own subjectivity and as a blank slate awaiting its societal imposition of meaning, as the Welsh Law of Women consistently demonstrates. This context provides a more historically grounded means of examining Riannon as a “calumniated wife.” As Juliette Wood notes of such illtreated individuals, “ultimately their persecution stems from the fact that these women are foreigners, intruders, as it were, into a world which will not readily accept them.”21 Closer to her own element in the Otherworld, though, Riannon clearly possesses unusual power. In her initial appearance, she is by no means a figure from the everyday world of the court at Arberth; Pwyll, for instance, first encounters her as a “wonder,” evincing the strong connection to horses that Gruffydd sees as euhemerization. At the least, she possesses impressive personal authority in pursuing Pwyll. At the same time, she conforms to the model of the calumniated wife who usually escapes an unwanted or incestuous union. Thus, she introduces herself to Pwyll: “‘Dywedaf, arglwyd,’ heb hi, ‘Riannon verch Hevyd Hen wyf i, a’m rodi y wr o’ m hanwod yd ydys’” [“I will tell you, Lord,” she said, “I am Riannon, daughter of Hevyd Hen, and I am being given to a man against my will”] (lines 284–85).22 Riannon’s forced engagement to Gwawl introduces the idea that her body will become a site of interpretive trials. Although one man has an existing claim on her, Riannon wishes to give herself to another. This tug-of-war over her body represents the peak of Riannon’s personal autonomy. Legally, any union without the woman’s consent—whether rape, abduction, or an unwelcome marriage—carried less weight than a union in which the woman consented; after any union, regardless of its basis, a woman’s rights were generally limited.23 Welsh law offered women an illusory choice in marriage even as social pressures demanded that women marry and bear children. Riannon, then, is most free when she takes the responsibility for deciding to whom to yield such control of herself, despite the difficulties that will follow this choice. Wood notes that “once she and Pwyll return to his world, Riannon seems to become more vulnerable. She becomes a foreigner, in effect, and the initial roles are reversed.”24 The ability to establish and maintain her own identity and meaning is transferred to Pwyll after their marriage. In this, she participates in what Butler terms “a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter.”25 Matter is never simply matter; it must become matter.

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Riannon’s body becomes coded as a body only over time. As a putative Otherworld figure, she need not take part in mortal signification. Once she is united with Pwyll in the wedding bed, though, the picture starts to change. Her sexuality, like Mary’s, defines her, yet must be kept scrupulously private. Her extraordinary public persona, which once embraced a more proactive experience of female sexuality, must be assimilated into a system that does not validate such an emphasis on complete openness but, rather, requires a balance, a tension between the inner and the outer. In the conjugal relationship in this paradigm, Butler’s “effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter” comes into play, as the body of the female Other becomes a border crossing where legitimate traffic is carefully circumscribed. In this, Riannon’s experience is like that of any medieval Welsh woman, whose changes in legal status are “tied up with her sexuality and child-bearing.”26 Especially after a woman bears a son, her relationship to her natal kin group becomes complicated, as her child will be expected to support his paternal grandparents in their old age. In effect, a woman’s body transfers rights and obligations from one kinship group to another, although the economic disadvantages to her are erased if the union lasts seven years.27 Riannon’s vulnerability centers at first on the marriage bed with Pwyll and on her fertility. After Riannon and Pwyll have been married three years without issue, the nobles threaten their monarch: “‘Arglwyd,’ heb wynt, ‘ni a wdom na bydy gyvoet ti a rei o wyr y wlat honn, ac yn ovyn ni yw na byd it etived o’ r wreic yssyd gennyt. Ac wrth hynny, kymmer wreic arall y bo ettived yt ohonei. Nyt byth,’ heb wynt, ‘y perhey di, a chyt kerych di vot y velly, nis diodefwn y gennyt’” [“Lord,” they said, “we know that you are not of the same age as some of the men of this land, and our fear is that you are heirless by the wife you have. And for that reason, take another wife so that by her you might have an heir. You will not,” they said, “last forever, though you desire it thus, and we will not allow this with you”] (452–57). The nobles focus on Pwyll’s age not so much to comment on his virility as to remind him of his mortality. The prospect of his death disturbs the men, especially because he has not produced an heir. As prince, he is presumed to carry the weight of signification within his person. His death, then, will create a crisis in meaning. His contract to govern depends upon his ability to assure stability and continuity in the form of legitimate dynastic succession. Pwyll serves as the head of the body politic.28 This position, as much as his status as Riannon’s lawful husband, defines the punishment that will be meted out on her body. Because

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he himself, as the representative of his line, signifies the realm’s political cohesion, it is Riannon who bears the brunt of popular opposition. Jack George Thompson reminds us that “the value the Celts placed upon high rates of fertility should not be underestimated.”29 Especially given her status as an unknown foreigner, then, Riannon’s apparent barrenness poses a challenge to the system into which she has intruded. She cannot enforce boundaries for these roles because those borders are ill-defined and serve the interests of a community she has not truly entered. Likewise, she cannot—as Elizabeth I later will—manipulate her childlessness to maximize her public position, because that public position itself depends upon the private experience of motherhood.30 Riannon’s own meaning-making capabilities have been exhausted in her exchange from the unknown or the fairy realm to the mortal world and marriage to Pwyll. Now her public and political role lies precisely in validating and continuing the significance that her husband is thought to embody. A child will integrate her into the semiotic structure of the society she has entered as a threatening stranger in marriage. Without a child, she cannot be made to signify as society requires of her. Sons were expected to care for their parents, or at least their fathers, in old age, and they helped support the economic, political, and social position of the kinship group. “In such patrilineal systems wives who did not produce male offspring threatened the very survival of the extended family.”31 The extended family here might metaphorically be extended to the realm as a whole, with Pwyll the head of the body politic. Marriage gives Riannon a provisional identity within the social framework, but a woman does not really belong to her husband’s community. Riannon’s physical relationship with Pwyll is entirely too intimate, too personal. She herself is made a material focus for the construction of meaning when she, like Mary, enters the symbolic order as an ambiguous pregnant body. Her marriage to Pwyll does not and cannot fully participate in the public sphere until she produces an heir, whose meaning affects everyone in the realm. Potentially complicating this situation is the indeterminacy of Welsh laws of succession. The edling, the heir to the throne, may be the king’s son or nephew.32 The text, though, makes no mention of Pwyll’s having a brother or nephew to carry on the line. The finer points of Welsh law are not allowed to deflect attention away from the drama played out on Riannon’s body. Even the birth of a male heir immediately turns back to the mother’s body once the infant is found to be missing the next morning. Exposure of the meaninglessness lurking behind the laws of succession invites the pos-

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sibility of public rebellion, so the loss of the child poses a tremendous challenge to the community: “A phan deffroyssant, edrych a orugant y lle y dodyssynt y mab, ac nyt oed ohonaw yno. ‘Och,’ heb un o’ r gwaraged, ‘neur golles y mab.’ ‘Ie,’ heb erall, ‘bychan a dial oed yn lloski ni, neu yn dienydyaw am y mab’” [And when they awoke, they searched the place where they had placed the boy, but he was not there. “Alas,” said one of the women, “the boy is lost.” “Yea,” said another, “it were small revenge to burn us or put us to death on account of the boy”] (467–70). The serving women who are most responsible for the loss are the first to recognize it. Although Riannon’s body has brought forth this social and political meaning, her servants are set in charge of watching the boy. They place the child in a certain spot, and in the morning he is not there. Therefore, the possibilities of signifying for the boy, his mother, and the women themselves are radically altered. The potential meaning that the child contains within himself exists within an intensely social context. This is not simply another child who has disappeared. As heir to the throne, the boy contains the hopes and expectations of the whole realm. He not only embodies this governmental significance, he also acts as a marker of social and class relations. The heir to the head of the body politic may, in an analogous symbolic realm, be equated with Jacques Derrida’s “filial inscription.” According to Derrida, Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing, precisely as a son, “cannot be assigned a fixed spot in the play of differences. Sly, slippery, and masked, an intriguer and a card, like Hermes, he is neither king nor jack, but rather a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play.”33 Any son in such an overdetermined position is bound to be a source of trouble and confusion to the mother, who remains conspicuously absent in Derrida’s own account. There is no way to prevent the son who validates Riannon’s place in Arberth from invalidating that position. The absence of the child, who mediates between his mother’s public and private roles, will inevitably lead to a violent reaction. The serving women suspect, probably with reason, that the punishment for the disappearance of the child of Riannon’s body will fall upon their own bodies. They fear burning or being put to death. Michel Foucault, taking a more essentialist view of the material body than Butler, notes that “with feudalism, at a time when money and production were still at an early stage of development, we find a sudden increase in corporal punishments—the body being in most cases the only property accessible.”34 To Foucault, it appears to be a question of placing a stably construed body in a preexisting signifying sys-

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tem. The loss of the prince’s heir by the negligence of his consort’s serving women will have important and visible consequences. The women must forfeit their significance for the child’s. Brynley F. Roberts notes of the redactor: “The outward appearances of actors and scenes interest him only so far as they contribute to his exploration of human relationships as they are played out in society and by people.”35 The women, in effect, would be rendered invisible textually and socially. Clothing within the text is conventionalized, and thus demarcates little meaning. These punishments, on the other hand, would publicly write guilt upon the serving women for the whole community to read. This inscription would simultaneously erase their old identities as unknown and innocent persons. In this way, they would lose their ability to signify anything other than guilt, no matter how merited. Life itself contributes the chance to determine or at least comment on the narrative that is written upon the body. When Riannon is convicted of killing the boy, though, her punishment, while extraordinary and public, is seemingly incommensurate with the deed. According to the Law of Hywel Dda, “If it happens that a woman kills a person, let her be a homicide like a man.”36 One of the few times where Welsh law recognizes equality between men and women, this does nothing to improve material conditions for the convicted murderer. Riannon’s supposed crime tests the limits of this law: “Sef penyt a dodet erni, bot yn y llys honno yn Arberth hyt ym penn y seith mlyned—ac yskynaen a oed odieithyr y porth—eisted ohonei gurllaw hwnnw bevnyd, a dywedut y pawb a delei o’ r a debyckei nas gwyppei, y gyffranc honno oll; ac o’ r a attei idi y dwyn, kynnic y westei a phellynic y dwyn ar y chevyn y’ r llys. A damwein y gadei yr un y dwyn” [This is the penance given to her: to be in that Court of Arberth until the end of seven years—near a mounting block that was outside the gate—and, sitting beside that daily, to say to each one of those who came and who she might suppose not to know it, the whole of her story; and to offer to bear on her back to the court any stranger or guest who should allow her to do so. And it was a misfortune if anyone permitted himself to be carried] (502–7). This crime involves a very public sacrifice of a meaning important to the whole community. For this reason, Riannon must remain constantly within sight of that community. Foucault examines a similar phenomenon in “the spectacle of the scaffold,” of which he writes: “The tortured body is first inscribed in the legal ceremonial that must produce, open for all to see, the truth of the crime.”37 By staying near the walls and bearing strangers on her back to her husband’s court, Riannon effectively rewrites the untrue story of her guilt upon her

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own body. Here twentieth-century ideas of domestic violence appear most out of place, given the public nature of Riannon’s fully legal punishment. That very publicness, though, reinforces the extent to which violence is necessary to maintain arbitrary boundaries around women’s lived experience. It simultaneously points to the complicated status of the court as a physical space that is both a domicile and the seat of government. In this sense, Riannon’s punishment resembles that which the serving women envision for themselves. The women, for their part, will not have the power to speak for themselves; rather, their bodies will bear the message, and their own experience will be redefined for them and the community. From the perspective of the people of Pwyll’s realm, it is not enough for Riannon simply to remain mute about her status as the killer of her child. Ostensibly guilty of a heinous crime, she is obliged to tell her own story, even if it is one that she knows to be false. Her position as the prince’s wife, however, complicates the nature of both her crime and punishment. Much of her punishment consists in the delicate negotiation of her private and public roles within the political world of Pwyll’s realm. She is compelled to adopt the posture of a beast of burden, and defines herself in both words and works as the murderer of her son. The legal status of the lost child adds another dimension to Pwyll’s actions. Until the child is baptized, it has the sexless identity of a fetus.38 The child, as much as his mother, occupies a liminal position as a result of his disappearance. It is questionable whether Riannon’s supposed actions are murder or whether the infant can really be considered the heir to the throne before his gender is publicly validated. Given this ambiguity, it becomes unclear whether Pwyll has the right to divorce his wife without economic consequences to himself and his principality. Riannon’s body, which has been the site of constant negotiation between public politics and domestic intimacies, continues to blur these distinctions. The loss of such distinctions almost automatically triggers physical violence, which exposes the limitations of the system that creates them just as that system attempts to enforce them. Perversely, Riannon is required to participate in the process of reinscribing false guilt upon her own body. Foucault comments on such acts of inscription: “If torture was so strongly embedded in legal practice, it was because it revealed the truth, and showed the operation of power. It assured the articulation of the written on the oral, the secret on the public, the procedure of investigation on the operation of the confession; it made it possible to reproduce the crime on the visible body of the criminal; in the same horror, the crime had to be mani-

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fested and annulled.”39 The impersonal operation of power takes place on the uniquely personal body of the prince’s consort. Riannon’s punishment is not exactly torture in Foucault’s understanding; still, it brings into play the same power-knowledge nexus. Pwyll, though, is not implicated to the same extent as his wife’s servants. He never explicitly accepts the story written upon his wife in apparently irreducible truth, just as Joseph refuses to accept the apparently incontrovertible evidence of Mary’s infidelity. Elizabeth Hanson-Smith notes that Pwyll “refuses again to put her aside when she is unjustly accused of murder, yet he maintains order by allowing her to perform a penance: the claims on him as a private person must bow to the claim of public law.”40 The privileging of the written over the oral and the public over the secret are all at issue.41 A crime that never actually occurs is written upon the body of the accused in such a way that it must be believed. A secret act of writing necessitates a public act of interpretation because the encoding of the body of the accused as material renders that same body available to the complex, gendered power-knowledge relations of Pwyll’s court. Violence, especially directed against the prince’s consort, must take its proper place in the symbolic economy of the realm. Riannon does not retain sole control over her own body as she did when deciding to give herself to Pwyll rather than Gwawl. Now her body becomes part of the public landscape, open to strangers’ interpretations. As Wood notes, “Welsh and Irish laws dealing with foreigners, with kinship, and with marriage reflect the tension between the integrated social unit and external, but tangential, elements.”42 Riannon, though, is not simply any foreigner, any wife; she is the prince’s wife. Her integration into the community has heightened the perception of these tensions and the ways in which they may be acted out. The negotiation between Riannon’s public and private roles in Pwyll’s dominion is inevitably played out on her body. The sexualized action of mounting Pwyll’s consort in the midst of daily commercial transactions in the square would represent a horrible breach of decorum,43 as her body is under his custody. It is not surprising, then, that few strangers or guests allow themselves to be carried, and the redactor tactfully omits any names or details. The audience for such a text would presumably approve of the conservative impulse to maintain legitimate descent in a Welsh princely line, but their respect for that line might render the perversity of Riannon’s punishment more fathomable. The nature of Riannon’s supposed crime straddles her public and private roles, so her punishment should do the same. Trying to enforce one role at the expense of the other, though, reveals the underlying anxiety about retaining such

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distinctions at all. Riannon’s body has entered Butler’s realm of the gendered and the material. The process of rendering the body “irreducibly material” leaves it open to the forcible integration into a hostile signifying system that Foucault envisions in Discipline and Punish. This integration, though, is strangely incomplete. The materiality of Riannon’s body participates sequentially, if not simultaneously, in two seemingly irreconcilable public displays, in addition to whatever private significance it encodes or enables. Although she undergoes public humiliation every day, Riannon apparently retains at least the ceremonial aspects of her role as the consort sitting at her husband’s table. Wood notes that “the correct terms for a woman of her status are used and this further underlies the impression that the relationship between the husband and wife remains intact.”44 Two distinct discursive practices compete over and around Riannon’s body. The court is the home of Pwyll and his consort, but it is a contested space. There are two separate ceremonial worlds in Dyuet. The marketplace is the people’s space, where Riannon is cast in a socially inverted Bakhtinian carnivalesque performance.45 Within the walls of his court, on the other hand, Pwyll is able to maintain both his wife’s public and private roles. As paterfamilias of both the realm and his own household, he must balance competing sets of expectations and responsibilities. Thus, when Teirnon arrives in Arberth with the boy, but before the child is announced as Pwyll’s heir, Riannon attends the feast: “A llawen vu Pwyll wrth Teirnon, ac y eisted yd aethont. Sef val yd eistedyssont—Teirnon y rwg Pwyll a Riannon, a deu gedymdeith Teirnon uch law Pwyll, a’ r mab y ryngthunt” [And Pwyll was glad toward Teirnon, and they went to sit. This is how they sat—Teirnon between Pwyll and Riannon, and two of Teirnon’s companions at Pwyll’s side, and the boy between them] (601–4). It seems that Pwyll responds to Teirnon so favorably because the latter has served as his man. The feast, then, is an official celebration. Riannon’s presence is inexplicable without reference to Pwyll’s refusal to divorce her. Whatever public, social stigma attends her as the ostensible killer of her child, the private relationship she maintains with her husband continues to inscribe at least a muted counternarrative on her. It is, after all, still possible that she will produce another legitimate heir. While associated with Pwyll as his wife, Riannon enjoys some measure of public recognition of this private bond. The prince and his consort preserve the form of their union, although the reality they mask challenges the existing political order within the larger society. J. K. Bollard notes that references to seating “provide clues as to the

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status of the characters concerned [and] . . . such outward manifestations of status were important so that the Red Book version of Brut y Tywyssogyon records a ruckus between the Archbishops of York and Canterbury over seating at a council in 1176.”46 Riannon’s punishment, then, contrasts strongly with her role within a more narrowly circumscribed court society. Etiquette and decorum must be maintained as long as Riannon remains at table, but elsewhere within the court her position is less certain. The serving women, in writing their counternarrative upon Riannon, disregarded this tension. They invaded the private space that Riannon embodies and inscribed a purely public interpretation on her, taking advantage of their access to the very room whose space defines Riannon’s public identity: “‘Gellast yssyd yma,’ heb hi, ‘a chanawon genti. Lladwn rei o’ r canawon, ac irwn y hwyneb hitheu Riannon a’ r gwaet, a’ y dwylaw, a byrwn yr eskyrn gyr y bron, a thaerwn arnei e hun divetha y mab’” [“There is a staghound bitch here,” she said, “that has pups. Let us kill some of the whelps, and smear Riannon’s face and her two hands with the blood, and cast the bones before her, and assert that she herself has destroyed the boy”] (473–75). Here the analogy to Mary becomes most attenuated. The Virgin’s miraculous pregnancy may be an affront to purely human reason, but she is the very apotheosis of maternal love. The serving women, on the other hand, create a strange equivalence between the mother hound and Riannon. Both are mothers whose offspring are lost. The bitch, though, is used as a writing implement whereas Riannon herself is overwritten. The parody thus established points to the process of domesticating the female Other through a series of inscriptions and interpretations on and of her flesh. The servants use the whelps’ blood as ink with which to inscribe a public narrative upon their lady’s private person. The threat of violence always present at the interstices of Riannon’s competing roles is here symbolically realized. The signs that the serving women place upon her will be legible only as emblems of her culpability in the murder of her son. If the child is lost and its mother is found the next morning covered with blood, the people will believe that she has killed him. Riannon’s body then becomes a site for the contestation of narrative credibility. It matters less whether the story she exhibits is true or false than whether that narrative is a plausible response to the crisis of the disappearance of Pwyll’s heir. Indeed, as females and social inferiors, the serving women cannot legally testify against Riannon,47 but here it is much more

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a question of the social anxiety underlying such laws, which permits Riannon’s predicament. The question of plausibility explains Riannon’s response to the accusation when Pwyll confronts her with the seemingly irrefutable “evidence” of her guilt: “Hitheu Riannon a dyvynnwys atteiathrawon a doethon, a gwedy bot yn degach genthi kymryt y phenyt nog ymdaeru a’ r gwraged, y phenyt a gymerth” [Riannon, for her part, summoned scholars to come to her, and since it pleased her more to accept the punishment than to wrangle with the women, she accepted the punishment] (499–502). She recognizes that the important issue is the narrative that has been imposed upon her rather than the actual facts of the case, which remain, at this time, unknown and unprovable. The author or redactor of the text does not specify what Riannon’s advisors told her, but the final decision is clearly hers. In the end, she respects the private meaning she carries within herself. By remaining silent and allowing a public interpretation to be placed upon her, she holds open the possibility that her private story will be vindicated as she cannot do by exposing it and herself to public scrutiny at a time when both lack the narrative “truth” betokened by the dogs’ blood on her face and hands. She cannot wrangle with the women either physically or verbally. The conflation they have effected of her actions and words leaves silence as her only effective strategy. This is a socially sanctioned position for a woman in Riannon’s circumstances, recalling Mary’s willful silence over the paternity of her child. Given Riannon’s social standing, the serving women fill an important textual need. Without them, there is no reason to invoke law and punishment. The redactor places his readers in the usually privileged insider position, but leaves it unstable. The audience witnesses a strange ritual, which depends upon the very boundary between political and domestic space that it transgresses, the boundary that defines Riannon’s position in Arberth.48 The serving women first recite their narrative to Riannon herself, as though the inscription on her flesh will erase not only their own guilt but the truth that Riannon knows: “‘Arglwydes,’ heb wy, ‘na ovyn di y ni y mab. Nyt oes ohonam ni namyn cleisseu a dyrnodeu yn ymdaraw a thi; a diamheu yw gennym na welsam eiroet vilwraeth yn un wreic kymeint ac ynot ti, ac ny thygyawd ynni ymdaraw a thi. Neur diffetheeist du hun dy vab, ac na hawl ef ynni’” [“Lady,” they said, “do not ask us about the boy. We have nothing except wounds which you struck in our struggle with you; and we are sure that we have never seen such strength in any woman

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as in you, but it did not avail us to struggle with you. You have destroyed your own son, and do not demand him of us”] (479–84). In order to justify the narrative they have written upon Riannon, the women must posit superhuman strength in their mistress. The unseen demonstration of her physical prowess must be accompanied by equally invisible marks on the women themselves. They assert that their lady has wounded them in their defense of the child, but they adduce no concrete evidence of this struggle. They will write their story literally on Riannon’s person, but they do not need to inscribe themselves. Because Riannon, as the outsider, must prove herself, the narrative imposed upon her is sufficient evidence to convict her in the public mind. Her public role is to produce an heir to the throne who will reconfirm his father’s mandate to rule and assure the stability of political meaning within the community in his own person. The loss of this child, then, is a public issue of tremendous significance. If the women are to exculpate themselves convincingly in this semiotic breakdown, they must exploit their status as cultural insiders as opposed to foreign Riannon. As the mother whose child ratifies her right to participate in the public life of her adopted home, the prince’s consort is more open to suspicion than her serving women when the child disappears, taking with him a homegrown significance. Riannon immediately sees that her best hope of convincing others of her innocence lies in erasing the narrative that the serving women have placed upon her: “‘A druein,’ heb y Riannon, ‘yr yr Arglwyd Duw a wyr pob peth, na yrrwch geu arnaf. Duw a wyr pob peth a wyr bot yn eu hynny arnaf i. Ac os ovyn yssyd arnawch, i ym kyffes y Duw, mi a’ ch differaf’” [“Ah, poor dears,” said Riannon, “by the Lord God who knows all things, do not falsely accuse me. God who knows all things knows that you place a lie upon me. And if there is fear upon you of me, by my confession to God I will protect you”] (484–87). Riannon’s language is densely coded. She looks upon her serving women as “poor things.” They do not belong to her aristocratic social class. The references to God and his omnipotence reinforce this class dynamic because they imply a divinely sanctioned interpretation of their proper relationship. At the same time, it is a desperate ploy in that the absolute knowledge of God will appear less credible than the all-too-human story that Riannon’s own eyes can construct from the blood that covers her. The question of the relative credibility of the narratives places Riannon at a distinct disadvantage, as she well recognizes. Thus she attempts to shift the terms of the argument, and promises to use her position in the court to prevent the imposition of a damning narrative on

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the serving women, despite their false inscription on her. The narrative she hopes to construct is as pragmatic as that which has been placed on her. The women, though, will not budge from either the reading they have placed on Riannon or the interpretation they believe will be placed upon themselves for their complicity in the child’s disappearance: “‘Dioer,’ heb wy, ‘ny adwn ni dwrc arnam ny hunein yr dyn yn y byt.’ . . . Yr a dywettei hi yn dec acyn druan, ny chaffei namyn yr un atteb gan y gwraged” [“God knows,” they said, “we will not bring evil upon ourselves for any man in the world” . . . For all she spoke with them, speaking fairly or piteously, she obtained only the one answer from the women] (487–90). The women, like their mistress, call upon God. They do not look to him as an absolute authority, though; rather, they use the deity to justify their very relative and human narrativizing. Although they will gladly counterfeit physical pain in the story of their fight with Riannon to save themselves the experience of it, they will not actually bring it upon themselves for any person in the world. Riannon does not have the authority in their estimation to use her words to erase the blame they should bear for their responsibility in the breakdown of the court and the princedom’s symbolic structure. Once a woman is brought into that structure through marriage, she must maintain her position by whatever means necessary, and Riannon’s means are limited. She is not so integral to the system that she can manipulate slippages between her public and private roles. The serving women, unlike Riannon herself, habitually stand at the boundary between Riannon’s two roles. This site gives them unique power in assigning the meaning given to the prince’s consort. Therefore, it does not matter what rhetorical strategy she adopts; her servants can ignore her pleas. Riannon does not have the rhetorical standing to maintain the language surrounding her own border crossings. Thus, the people automatically presume her guilt when news of the child’s disappearance circulates: “Pwyll Penn Annwn ar hynny a gyvodes, a’ r teulu a’ r yniveroed, a chelu y damwein hwnnw ny allwyt. Y’ r wlat yd aeth y chwedyl, a phawb o’ r guyrda a’ e kigleu. A’ r guyrda a doethant y gyt y wneuthur kynnhadeu at Pwyll y erchi idaw yscar a’ e wreic am gyflavan mor anwedus ac a ry wnaethoed” [Pwyll, Chief of Annwn, then arose, with his troops and retinues, and it was not possible to conceal that mischance. And the news went out to the land, and each of the chief nobles heard it. And the chief nobles went together to make an embassy to Pwyll, to convince him to divorce his wife on account of the so dreadful outrage she had done] (491–95). As soon as Pwyll hears the news, it enters into

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public discourse. It is, of course, impossible to hide from the prince the loss of his son and only heir. This loss represents a fundamental challenge to the symbolic and political order of which Pwyll is head. The nobles earlier threatened his rule when it appeared that Riannon was barren.49 When it appears that Riannon has committed a crime against the state, they ask Pwyll to separate himself from her, create physical distance between himself and the taint that attaches to her. The nobles accept the meaning imposed upon Riannon. They view her only within the matrix of the social and political forces governing the realm. As such, they see the loss she has supposedly inflicted on them as a powerful threat to the stability of socially constructed meaning. The “outrage” that is written so plainly upon her is written equally on the body politic, and both nobles and commoners respond vehemently against her. In the calumniated wife tradition, the husband typically defends his wife when she is first accused of some wrongdoing, often the murder of her child.50 Pwyll’s behavior represents a modification of this paradigm; he says to his nobles, “Nyt oed achaws ganthunt wy y erchi y mi yscar a’ m gwreic namyn na bydei plant idi. Plant a wnn i y vot idi hi, ac nyt yscaraf a hi. Or gwnaeth hitheu gam, kymeret y phenyt amdanaw” [They have no cause who ask me to divorce my wife except that she had no child. A child I know her to have, and I will not divorce her. If she has done any injury, let there be punishment upon her] (496–99). Pwyll reminds the nobles of the agreement they have made regarding his mandate to rule. So long as he and Riannon have produced an heir to the throne, the agreement still stands. The assumption of Pwyll’s ability to embody and generate new and continued meaning for his realm continues. As head of the body politic, Pwyll embodies the law. Thus in a Derridean sense “the law would not be an exterior constraint; it grants a liberty to literality.”51 The law validates the obvious, literal reading. In this sense, Riannon too has fulfilled her obligation. Pwyll knows that she has delivered a child, an heir. The sacrifice of the potential for meaning that the boy contains before his baptism represents a separate, and apparently less serious, offense. The personal relationship Riannon enjoys with Pwyll as his wife seems to hold greater weight with Pwyll than the purely political and social aspects of her position as his consort. Therefore, the punishment for her ostensible crime takes its peculiar form, which holds in tension the public and private dimensions of her role. A divorce would sever all ties between Pwyll and Riannon, leaving her open to the possibility of a worse punishment. They

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are both implicated in the system which insists on legitimate dynastic succession. Riannon, who has apparently maintained her position in Pwyll’s household at night, is vindicated. The mysterious and unexplained return of the lost child restores the proper balance to the court. Not only is Riannon fully rehabilitated, but the boy himself is as well. Teirnon, the child’s foster father and Pwyll’s onetime retainer, says: “A phwy bynnac a dywot geu arnat, cam a wnaeth. A minnheu pann gigleu y govut a oed arnat, trwm vu gennyf, a doluryaw a wnaethum. Ac ny thebygaf vot neb o’ r yniver hwnn oll nit adnappo vot y mab yn vab y Pwyll” [And whoever put lies on you did wrong. And I myself, when I heard the grief that was upon you, was sorry and lamented. And I do not imagine that there be any of this whole troop who will not recognize the boy as the son of Pwyll] (609–13). Teirnon addresses the question of credible storytelling strategies. He does not acknowledge the superior narrative force of the serving women’s tale. They have obviously placed a falsehood upon her. The “best man in the world” for his part laments the wrong done to an innocent victim. He reads the signs of her punishment, rather than her crime, and finds them inappropriate to a woman of her status. At the same time, though, the fact of Pwyll’s paternity seems much more germane to the relief felt in Arberth than the exculpation of the prince’s wife. It is relevant to note in this regard that “the basis of inheritance is solely paternity.”52 It is the boy’s resemblance to his father that clears his mother’s reputation. The public, political meaning that the realm requires has been ratified. As long as the boy remains hidden from scrutiny, though, he is associated with his mother. His real significance cannot be fixed until he is firmly identified physically with his father. The romance ends with the reintegration of the son into his father’s household and the spread of that significance through the realm in the form of the returned heir Pryderi’s foster parentage. The threat posed by Riannon, the unincorporated foreign woman, has been averted. The manner in which she names the child highlights this incorporation. She speaks in the joy of reunion, and another man, Pendaran Dyuet, appears from nowhere to announce that her speech has unwittingly named the child. Riannon, though, replies to the news, “Edrychwch . . . na bo goreu y guedo arnaw y enwe hun” [Look . . . that it not be that his own name suit him best] (617–19). The statement is ambiguous in that no one has yet mentioned the name given to the boy by Teirnon and his wife. The child

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apparently has no name yet, at least in the eyes of the court. Welsh law did not recognize the name or gender of a child until baptism, so, like the mute parallels between Riannon and Mary, the ending of the tale subtly reintegrates the pagan story into a specifically Christian context, even as it maintains its focus on the preservation of patriarchal privilege. It might seem that Riannon wants to protect the child from the meaning she has unwittingly placed on him, giving him the name that means Loss.53 Pwyll, though, asserts his masculine prerogative to control meaning within the realm, especially to reassert authority over his own child: “‘Yawnhaf yw hynny,’ heb y Pwyll, ‘kymryt enw y mab y wrth y geir a dywot y vam pann gavas llawenchwedyl y wrthaw’” [“That is most proper,” said Pwyll, “that the boy take his name from the word which his mother spoke when she obtained good news of him”] (621–23). Now Riannon’s word is inscribed upon her son. This inscription, though, is not literally written on his body; rather, the symbolic meaning it carries is confirmed by his father’s affirmation. Riannon’s statement is not even meaningful until interpreted by Pendaran and Pwyll. She at last takes her place within the symbolic order when her unordered generative powers are channeled appropriately back on her son, through the mediation of her husband. At this point, her body ceases to be a locus for public reading and interpretation, as her punishment ends and she resumes her proper role as wife and mother. In the end, the secular baptism of the son by the father recalls Derrida’s sense of the power of naming. He writes of the naming of Babel: “God, the God, would have marked with his patronym a communal space, that city where understanding is no longer possible. And understanding is no longer possible when there are only proper names, and understanding is no longer possible when there are no longer proper names.”54 The court and principality of Arberth are also communal spaces marked by the father’s ambiguous naming. The son who carries on his father’s significance is accidentally named by his mother Loss. The mother, absent from Derrida’s genealogy, reemerges, but only to add to the confusion. Despite the structural unity that prevails at the conclusion of the First Branch, an important linguistic trace remains. How is meaning to exist in a realm that must inevitably be ruled by absence or loss? The referentiality of proper names falls into question in this strange baptism which seems not to name as much as it names. And the materiality of the mother’s problematic body remains merely a trace in the ambiguous name that she inadvertently places upon her son. Ultimately the text itself must retreat from the mater-

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nal if order is to be reasserted. Within the world of the Mabinogion there is no transcendent sphere where maternity may be sacralized, so it is pointedly excluded from the text at just the point where, socially and legally in medieval Wales, it would be most at issue.

Notes 1. Sara Munson Deats, for instance, articulates a distinctly twentieth-century American viewpoint toward domestic life, writing that “when we become adults most of us wish to have our own hearths.” Such an attitude presupposes that one does not share sleeping quarters with an extended family. See her introduction to The Aching Hearth: Family Violence in Life and Literature, ed. Sara Munson Deats and Lagretta Tallent Lenker (New York: Plenum Press, 1991). 2. Although the Four Branches of the Mabinogion doubtless have a far older prehistory (most scholars date the composition no later than c. 1125), the earliest extant manuscripts, the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hengest, date from approximately the last quarter of the fourteenth century. For a useful discussion of the vexed issue of the dating of the tales, see T. M. Charles-Edwards, “The Date of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi,” in The Mabinogi: A Book of Essays, ed. C. W. Sullivan III (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 19–58. For a discussion of the manuscripts, see Proinsias MacCana, Studies in Middle Welsh Literature (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992). 3. For a classic discussion of the problematics of marriage and reproduction, see Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5 (1980): 631–60. 4. J. K. Bollard, “The Structure of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi,” in The Mabinogi: A Book of Essays, ed. Sullivan, p. 179. 5. Sheila Delany, “Rewriting Woman Good: Gender and the Anxiety of Influence in Two Late-Medieval Texts,” in Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 85. 6. I assume a male redactor, but Andrew Breeze, in Medieval Welsh Literature (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), argues for a female author of the Four Branches: “what kind of author wrote the Four Branches? Here we first say that our writer was almost certainly a woman. A woman writer of fiction can usually be detected in the way she presents male and female characters, fighting, weapons, jewelry, clothes, love and (above all) babies and children” (p. 74). Having made his case for a female writer, he proposes Gwenllian (c. 1098–1136), daughter of Gruffudd ap Cynan and wife of Gruffydd ap Rhys, as the authoress (p. 75). 7. The antifeminist tradition is, of course, a medieval response to a wide variety of literary and nonliterary texts that denigrate women and uphold patriarchal social standards. Medieval texts that draw upon this tradition include the Querelle de la Rose, the English chroniclers’ responses to the possibility of female Lollard preach-

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ers, and the “marriage group” of the Canterbury Tales. The authorities cited by the Wife of Bath—notably Jerome’s Epistola adversus Jovinianum—are widely considered the traditional foundation texts and leading exponents. 8. Theresa Coletti, “Purity and Danger: The Paradox of Mary’s Body and the Engendering of the Infancy Narrative in the English Mystery Cycles,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 67. 9. Juliette Wood, “The Calumniated Wife in Medieval Welsh Literature,” Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 10 (1985): 20–76. Wood’s study provides an excellent introduction to this vast topic. The calumniated wife tradition offers an enlightening counterpart to the antifeminist tradition in that it tends to be less self-conscious in its representation of the danger of female otherness, usually played out on actual bodies. Modern readers have usually placed stories of abuse in the “calumniated wife” tradition while placing more theoretical discussions of the role of women under the antifeminist umbrella. Even in twentieth-century criticism there is a tendency to separate material and ideological expressions of violence against women. 10. For a discussion of the question of scapegoating, see René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986). 11. Many critics have examined the binarisms that governed women in medieval Wales. See, for instance, Wood, “Calumniated Wife”; T. M. Charles-Edwards, “Nau Kynywedi Teithiauc,” in The Welsh Law of Women, ed. Dafydd Jenkins and Morfydd E. Owen (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1980); Jack George Thompson, Women in Celtic Law and Culture (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996). 12. W. J. Gruffydd, Rhiannon (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1953), p. 13. Gruffydd’s viewpoint has, with only slight variations, been almost unanimously accepted by Celticists since its publication. See, for instance, Patrick K. Ford, “Prolegomena to a Reading of the Mabinogi: Pwyll and Manawydan,” in The Mabinogi: A Book of Essays, ed. Sullivan. The first serious challenge to this theory came from Kenneth Hurlsone Jackson in The International Popular Tale and Early Welsh Tradition (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1961), p. 92. It has taken some time for Jackson’s theory to gain currency. Contemporary critical support for his view includes Juliette Wood, “The Horse in Welsh Folklore: A Boundary Image in Custom and Narrative,” in The Horse in Celtic Culture, ed. Sioned Davies and Nerys Ann Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), p. 168 ff.; Breeze, Medieval Welsh Literature, p. 79; Catherine A. McKenna, “The Theme of Sovereignty in Pwyll,” in The Mabinogi: A Book of Essays, ed. Sullivan, p. 306. 13. McKenna, “Theme of Sovereignty,” p. 306. 14. Wood, “Horse,” p. 170. 15. T. M. Charles-Edwards, Early Irish and Welsh Kinship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 194. 16. Thompson, Women, p. 148. 17. Breeze notes that the Four Branches display extensive knowledge of Welsh

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law, especially insult and honor price (Medieval Welsh Literature, p. 76). This is his most compelling argument for Gwenllian’s authorship, given Dafydd Jenkins’s argument for the place and time of the composition of the law code, for which see the introduction to The Law of Hywel Dda: Law Texts from Medieval Wales, trans. and ed. Dafydd Jenkins (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1986). 18. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 29. 19. For a discussion of how marriage as an institution deauthorizes and isolates women, see Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy of Sex,’” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975). 20. For an introduction to the related question of the relationship between sexuality and the construction of communal identity, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 171–80. 21. Wood, “Calumniated Wife,” p. 26. 22. All translations are my own, based on Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet, ed. R. L. Thompson (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1986). 23. Charles-Edwards, “Nau Kynywedi Teithiauc,” p. 34. 24. Wood, “Calumniated Wife,” p. 35. 25. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 9. 26. Charles-Edwards, Kinship, p. 177. 27. T. M. Charles-Edwards, The Welsh Laws (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1989), p. 239. 28. The definitive commentary on this phenomenon remains Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). 29. Thompson, Women, p. 302. 30. For a discussion of maternity and political power, see Peggy McCracken, “The Body Politic and the Queen’s Adulterous Body in French Romance,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 38–64. 31. Thompson, Women, p. 134. 32. Jenkins, Law of Hywel Dda, p. 6. 33. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 93. 34. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977), p. 25. 35. Brynley F. Roberts, Studies on Middle Welsh Literature (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), p. 108. 36. Jenkins, Law of Hywel Dda, p. 152. 37. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 35. 38. Charles-Edwards, Kinship, pp. 175–76.

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39. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 55. 40. Elizabeth Hanson-Smith, “Pwyll Prince of Dyfed: The Narrative Structure,” in The Mabinogi: A Book of Essays, ed. Sullivan, pp. 159–60. 41. See, for instance, Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, pp. 63–171. 42. Wood, “Calumniated Wife,” p. 68. 43. For a useful discussion of how medieval readers and texts interact to create and uphold a system of decorum, see Scott D. Troyan, Textual Decorum: A Rhetoric of Attitudes in Medieval Literature (New York: Garland, 1994). 44. Wood, “Calumniated Wife,” p. 71. 45. For a full discussion of the carnivalesque, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 46. J. K. Bollard, “The Role of Myth and Tradition in the Four Branches of the Mabinogi,” in The Mabinogi: A Book of Essays, ed. Sullivan, p. 288. 47. Christopher MacAll, “The Normal Paradigms of a Woman’s Life in the Irish and Welsh Texts,” in The Welsh Law of Women, ed. Dafydd Jenkins and Morfydd E. Owen (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1980), p. 19. 48. Charivari is a better-known analogue. For a discussion of the relationship between domestic and social concerns in charivari, see Coletti, “Purity and Danger,” passim. 49. The calumniated wife is often accused of barrenness. 50. Wood, “Calumniated Wife,” p. 29. 51. Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” trans. Joseph F. Graham, in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 204. 52. Charles-Edwards, Kinship, p. 173. 53. Pwyll, notes, p. 41. Another possible translation, relevant to a Derridean reading, is Absence. 54. Derrida, “Babel,” p. 167.

Reading Riannon: Motherhood in Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet

Part Three

Historical Fictions Domestic Violence in Chronicle, Drama, Hagiography, and Illuminations

Violence is not to be denied, but it can be diverted to another object, something it can sink its teeth into. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred

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The “Homicidal Women” Stories in the Roman de Thèbes, the Brut Chronicles, and Deschamps’s “Ballade 285” Anna Roberts

The retellings of the “homicidal women” motif in the three groups of texts to which I refer in this essay,1 while distinct chronologically and in their narrow ideological purposes, share a common core. They tell us about women who conspire to murder all their male relatives in order to seize power. I would like, first, to focus on the similarities of the narratives that carry this plot and, second, to discuss the different uses made of the episode in each of the three texts. The earliest of these texts containing the story of homicidal women is the twelfth-century Roman de Thèbes.2 Like other early romances, it is a story of foundation—here the foundation and fall of Thebes. And like the better-known Roman de’ Enéas which follows Virgil’s Aeneid, Thèbes is a free translation of a Latin epic—here Statius’s Thebaid (second half of the first century a.d.). The medieval poet adds to this material in order to explain to his audience some of the allusions of his Latin source which for them are obscure. For instance, at the beginning he adds the story of Oedipus, which thus appears for the first time in the vernacular. Thèbes was widely read in the Middle Ages, and its summaries were often included in universal histories, a popular genre that drew indiscriminately from the biblical, romance, and chronicle traditions. The story of Oedipus and the fall of Thebes was frequently inserted in the biblical Book of Kings, so that the Bible and the romances would form a seamless historical narrative, a prologue to the more recent medieval history described in greater detail. The story of homicidal women, which is present in the Latin Thebaid, constitutes only a short fragment (about forty lines) of Thèbes, which is more than fourteen thousand lines long.

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The second text, which emerged about a century later than Thèbes, constitutes a prologue to the Brut Chronicles. These chronicles also have their roots in the romance tradition, which in turn derives from the medieval historiographic tradition in Latin. Like Thèbes, Wace’s Roman de Brut was written in the twelfth century, and it also represents a versified account of a legendary foundation, this time of England. It is well known as the first vernacular work that tells the story of King Arthur. Like Thèbes, Brut was abbreviated into numerous prose versions, and like Thèbes it functioned as a chronicle—hence the editorial title of these later versions, the Brut Chronicles. Sometime in the thirteenth century, a prologue was added to the Brut Chronicles, containing an explanation for the existence of giants in Britain, and why the island was named Albion before Brutus arrived and renamed it Britain after himself. The longest version of the prologue is a poem of more than five hundred lines, Des Grantz Geanz,3 which will be the object of my discussion.4 The most likely of the many sources of Brut’s prologue is the myth of the Danaides (Horace, Odes 3.11, Ovid, Heroides 14). The vernacular poem explains that the giants present in England at the time of Brutus’s arrival were the progeny of homicidal sisters exiled there. The eldest of the sisters, Albina, gave her name to Albion. The story of homicidal women serves here a specific purpose, contextualizing a historical tradition and explaining the information about Albion and the giants contained in earlier medieval Latin works—much as the story of Oedipus in the prologue to Thèbes explained the allusions to Oedipus in the classical Latin source of Thèbes. As a part of Brut, the story of homicidal women participates in the intense fascination with origins and legitimacy that accompanied the establishment of reigning dynasties at that time, both in France and in England; we could say that both Thèbes and Brut are dynastic propaganda. The similarity of purpose is strengthened by the similarity of expression. While the most recent editor of Geanz rejects the relationship with Thèbes, I would like to resurrect the hypothesis that they are in fact related. The third text dates from the fourteenth century. It is a poem by Eustache Deschamps, addressed to Chaucer and supposed to accompany a gift of works by Deschamps. In this thirty-seven-line text, “Ballade 285,” Deschamps praises Chaucer as a translator of French literature.5 As in the early romances, Thèbes and Brut, the issues of dynastic prestige are here indissociable from the issue of translation, for the fourteenth century was the time of the military conquest of France by England and of the literary

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conquest of England by France. I suggest that in this poem Deschamps repeatedly alludes to the Brut prologue. In my consideration of these three texts, I intend to demonstrate what an unusual literary history the story of homicidal women has. Though it is a well-known story, embedded in the two early and widely popular texts Thèbes and Brut Chronicles, it has no analogues; that is, no other romances use a similar motif. I believe that this is due to the presence of women as violent and powerful subjects in this narrative. To be sure, the motif survived within the bounds of its two-text tradition, and participated in the popularity of the narratives that contained it. In attempting to understand this phenomenon—the survival of the motif in this isolated condition—I advance a hypothesis based on the tendencies shown by Jean Blacker in the comparison of Latin and vernacular chronicles. I argue that the appearance of women in the legendary foundation stories compensated for the erasure of historical figures of powerful and violent women, erasure that occurred in the translatio of the historiographical content from Latin to the vernacular chronicles. The topos of women-on-top and its traditional (Bakhtinian) and feminist (Natalie Davis’s) implications for the homicidal-women episode in Brut have been rehearsed by Lesley Johnson in “Return to Albion.”6 I relate my hypothesis to this discussion, but I draw a different conclusion from Johnson’s. For me, enshrining women-on-top in the myth allowed the exercise of power by women to be linked to such fundamental transgressions as murder and incest. Further, I speculate that homicidal women were doomed to appear exclusively in the foundation legends in the economy of a medieval literary tradition, because in those legends they functioned safely as a case of primordial transgression, removed from the present by a series of erasures—legendary and historical conquests of women’s realms by men. Finally, I show these stories to be pawns in the game of literary allusions between Deschamps and Chaucer. In this part of my demonstration, I build on Laura Kendrick’s discussion of Deschamps’s misogynous Miroir de Mariage and Carolyn Dinshaw’s essay establishing a link between the creation of literary hierarchy and the author’s use of sexual violence. These three phenomena concerning the homicidal-women stories—their participation in the narrow yet strong narrative tradition of women-on-top, their framing in the inaccessible sphere of myth, and their use as a currency of literary prestige—were all coherent with the dominant male ideology and, perhaps more unexpectedly, useful in shaping na-

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tional politics. Even though our conclusions differ, I respond to Johnson’s plea for the examination of the purpose of “homicidal women” (among other stories of gender reversal) in their varied contexts by paying close attention to the political and ideological circumstances of each textual occurrence.

Roman de Thèbes and Brut Chronicles In the classical version, Danaus incites his fifty daughters to murder their husbands. The youngest, Hypermnestra, reveals the plot to her husband in order to save him. In Thèbes, this plot is altered, and the narrative framing diminishes the impact of this episode. The homicidal-women episode is embedded in the narrative as a life story of one of the minor characters. The narrator is Hypsipyle, an exiled daughter of the king of Lemnos. When the women of Lemnos conspire to murder all their male relatives and grasp power, she refuses to kill her father. In this variant of the story, the women are successful. Hypsipyle is forced to flee from her land. Stripped of her royal status, she becomes a noble nurse, a role firmly entrenched in the epic tradition. However, perhaps as a measure of patriarchal poetic justice, obedient Hypsipyle retains a greater narrative importance than is customary for a noble nurse figure. In the traditional paradigm, a nurse consecrates by her nobility the beginnings of the hero’s career, her lineage functioning as one mark among many of his exceptional status. The narrative role of the nurse figure is limited to this function. However, Hypsipyle’s ward dies in his childhood. The sleeping boy is bitten by a snake as Hypsipyle leaves him to lead a thirsty army to water. There is a distinct irony in the plot of this death, an act of mercy transformed into infanticidal negligence, as if a woman’s independent and public actions always resulted in the death of a male. Even Hypsipyle, whose loyalty to her father is so strong that she pays for it by a lifetime of enslavement, becomes unwittingly a homicidal woman when she acts autonomously and politically. In narrative terms, however, the outcome of Hypsipyle’s actions is undeniably positive. Unlike a noble nurse, she is much more than an appendage to the story of the hero whom she nursed: her story competes with his. Unsurprisingly, Hypsipyle’s short story of the Lemnos women’s rebellion (Thèbes 2292–334) was proposed by Hans Matter in 1922 as one of the sources of the much more substantial Geanz.7 The 1937 editor of Geanz, Georgine Brereton, rejects Matter’s suggestion (Geanz xxxiii, n. 4). None-

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theless, Hypsipyle’s story and Geanz are interestingly close in the formulation of three elements: the excessive-pride topos, the description of women’s disobedience and their bid for power, and the reference to women’s conspiracy as treason. In spite of their different voices—firstperson narrative for Hypsipyle, third-person for the narrator of Geanz— Hypsipyle and the Geanz narrator occupy the same ideological ground: they condemn women’s homicidal conspiracy. The passages both speak of treason (“trayson” in Geanz 102, “traison” in Thèbes 2301) and share the rhyme “grant rage” [great rage] with “outrage” (Geanz 37–38; Thèbes 2299–300). The enumeration of male victims also lends strong similarity to the two passages.8 Because of their close formulation, I assume that the author of the later text, Geanz, was familiar with some form of the earlier Thèbes.9 As is the case with Thèbes, Geanz alters the basic plot of the Danaides’ story. In the classical version, Danaus initiates the plot. In Geanz, women conspire together to murder all their male relatives. Still, part of the blame is indirectly apportioned to their father. As Johnson points out, their status as daughters of an overlord conflicts with their status as wives of vassals, and the murder attempt is a violent means to overcome this dichotomy. There are two different outcomes present. In the prose versions of the story, the homicidal women are successful and are exiled as widows. In the other group, represented by the octosyllabic versions and their prose summaries, the conspiracy fails because of the youngest sister’s indiscretion. The husbands and father decide to abandon the women at sea in a rudderless boat, so as to avoid the shame of a public execution at home. Set adrift, the women survive and arrive at an island, which they name Albion after the eldest sister, Albina. There, raped by incubi, they give birth to a race of giants who commit incest with their mothers and siblings. When Brutus lands on the island in his turn, he exterminates the monstrous race and renames the isle Britain after himself. As Brereton reminds us, both Geoffrey of Monmouth in chapter 12 of his Historia Regum Britanniae and Wace in line 1207 of Brut mention the name Albion; indeed, the association between Britain and the giants is older than Herodotus, who mentions stories of giants mining tin in the Northern Isles, protesting that he is not one to believe in giants.10 In the Historia as in Brut, Brutus arrives on the island, discovers the giants, and kills them all except Gogmagog, who is kept for a wrestling match with Corineus.11 Along with Brut, Geanz participates in the elaboration of the Anglo-

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Norman dynastic legend. Geanz was composed during the period marked by escalating dynastic wars between the Plantagenets and the Capetians, after the Magna Carta but before the Hundred Years’ War. Complementing the vernacular Brut, it served as a vehicle of prestige, a literary artifact at the service of political needs. It seems that the importance of homicidal women in this context did not lie in the fictional reversal of gender rules, but rather in the punishment that attended this reversal: the murderous women are exiled, raped, and seduced into incestuous relations, and their monstrous progeny killed. Johnson argues the other side of the dispute in “Return to Albion.” She sets the stage by reminding us of the positive traditions of recognizing women as founders of communities, for instance in the case of Wales in the Historia Regum Britanniae and “Scocia” (Ireland) in the Historia Brittonum.12 She then emphasizes the elevated status, inventiveness, and “command of technical, legal terms”13 exhibited by the sisters, calling the reader to “recognize their qualitative difference and, indeed, not to conflate the women and the giants into the single category of ‘otherness.’”14 I follow the spirit of Johnson’s article, if not its conclusions, in analyzing the different social repercussions of each manifestation of the homicidal-women motif. In this instance, the narrative framing casts the story as an example of women justly punished, though the women are, as Johnson indicates, granted dignity and autonomy within the frame of the episode. As Davis has shown in general terms and Johnson in terms specific to Geanz, women-on-top stories serve not only as escape valves of a constrictive patriarchal society—a theory proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin to explain the functioning of carnivalesque reversals in repressive societies— but as effective models of female agency. Thus, instead of “homicidal women,” this paper could refer to “victorious women”; instead of “women’s conspiracy,” “women’s solidarity.” The issue of the legitimacy of violence, and indeed of the legitimacy of women’s communities (solidarity or conspiracy?), has been shown by Johnson to be far from unambiguous. Of special importance is her demonstration concerning the correctness of legal forms and formulae used by Albina in the founding of Albion. As Johnson argues, Albion becomes an orderly society, a fief, because its foundation is legitimate, fieflike.15 Johnson’s proposition is of such importance that it should be further verified in the context of contemporary institutions of power. A historian’s perspective is necessary to determine the intended value of Albina’s gestures for the community of Geanz’s readers. The unanswered questions

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fall into two categories. First, is Albina’s accession to power regular or irregular? Is the ceremony where Albina constitutes the land into her fief a parody of the legal procedure by the lawless invaders? Is it on the contrary a canonical gesture, long accepted, emotively empty? Second, what is the meaning of “fief” to the audience of Geanz: a humiliating stricture imposed by the Frankish invaders, or a legitimate society-building structure? The thirteenth century, the assumed date of the composition of the Brut’s prologue, places the text well past what earlier generations of historians called the classical feudal age. It is a period where the identification of the value of feudal institutions represented in Geanz is at the same time possible and especially interesting. The question of the legitimacy of violence also opens the possibility of the interpretation of Geanz in the light of other episodes of sexual violence. As Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman show in their study of another episode of Brut,16 sexual violence is “constitutive of historical writing as a whole,” because sexual violence articulates the three principal objects of the narrative: military prowess, social hierarchy, and political hegemony. In the case of the Brut prologue, homicidal women function as a pretext for the narrative of punishment and expurgation carried out by men. The sequence—homicidal plot, punishment (women set adrift), rape and incest (on Albion), annihilation (Brutus wipes out the giants)—explores the extremes of freedom and coercion. The taboo of freedom is represented by the homicidal plot and the setting adrift. The plot to kill male relatives has for its express goal the annihilation of the social stricture: “de estre en autrui danger mise / Ne de seignur, ne de veisin, / Ne de frere, ne de cosin, / Ne nomement de sun barun” [(not) to be in the power of the other / neither lord nor neighbor / brother nor cousin / and especially not of her husband] (Geanz 48–51). The retribution is the parody of freedom, as the women are delivered into the vast solitude of the sea in an unmaneuverable shell of a boat. The taboo of confinement is figured by the arrival on the island (a spatially limited opposite of the sea) and the cycle of sexual violence and transgressive endogamy (rape and incest), culminating in the most drastic form of repression, Brutus’s massacre. As Finke and Shichtman show, violence must be present because it justifies the fictional purification: the homicidal plot justifies the setting adrift; the rape and incest justify the massacre. Violence—murder and rape—is necessary as “a particular, ‘pathological’ feature, signifying formation, a binding enjoyment, an inert stain resisting communication and interpretation, a stain which cannot be included in the circuit of discourse,

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of social bond network, but is at the same time a positive condition of it . . . a terrifying bodily mark which is merely a mute attestation bearing witness to a disgusting enjoyment.”17 The functional value of violence and its nonfunctional “surplus” identified by Slavoj Zˇizˇek are combined in the narrative of nation foundation. The seemingly gratuitous acts of sexual violence are in fact the basis of national identification, as the vengeful “self” (Brutus) is opposed to the sexually transgressive “other” (the homicidal women’s progeny). The homicidal-women motif is contained in two major works that establish French (and English) national and literary identity, Thèbes in the mid-twelfth century and the prologue to the Brut Chronicles in the thirteenth century. Thèbes is one of the first examples of the romance genre, and Brut reformulates, for the vernacular audience, the history and legend of the Anglo-Norman regnum. Embedded in these widely popular works, the motif of homicidal women survives in a plethora of versions well into the Renaissance. The popularity of the two fictions that carry the story implies the notoriety of the homicidal women. Moreover, a direct testimony of the specific interest of the story is provided by its increasing relative importance in the rewritings of the two chronicles Thèbes and Brut throughout the centuries. In later, prose versions of Thèbes, where episodes of armed combat and other by-then-archaic motifs are trimmed off, the story of Hypsipyle remains and therefore assumes more prominence. The restructuring that lends more narrative weight to the homicidal-women motif is particularly obvious in the abridged prose versions of Thèbes, usually entitled Edipe, that persist in the age of print. The story of homicidal women in Brut responds even more obviously to the needs of the readers, since it was added in the later stages of Brut’s dissemination and persisted in many forms: octosyllabic poem, prose, summary. It is useful to analyze the peculiar link between this and other Anglo-Norman national legends. One of the interesting features of the elaboration of the national Anglo-Norman historiography is the relegation of negative portraits of women to the legendary past. While some Latin chronicles portray female political foes as strong-willed, active, and evil, the Old French sources erase these references. Jean Blacker notes that in the Historia Ecclesiastica of Orderic Vitalis, for instance, Mabel of Belleme is characterized as “forceful and worldly . . . cunning, garrulous, and extremely cruel.”18 Yet, as Blacker points out, “[t]here are no notably evil women in Benoît de Saint-Maure’s Chronique des Ducs de Normandie. Orderic’s infamous Mabel of Belleme figures in neither

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[Wace’s] Roman de Rou nor the Chronique.”19 The erasure of evil heroines from the recent past is, in the following century, compensated by inventing them in the legendary, and therefore more remote, past. While Mabel of Belleme disappears from the Roman de Rou (mid-twelfth century), the story of homicidal women is added in the later Brut Chronicles (mid-thirteenth to mid-fourteenth century). Why were violent women banished from history and displaced into legend? I will attempt to answer this question by using an analogy from recent criticism of poetry by Eustache Deschamps. In her assessment of Deschamps, Laura Kendrick makes an argument for the rejection of women as a “regulatory obsession.”20 While Kendrick mentions two forms of this rejection, “invective against wives” and “the poetry of ‘courtly love’ addressed to ladies who were definitely not in circulation, but walled around with powerful interdictions,”21 I want to suggest a third form of expulsion, the relegation of violent women to the legendary past, offset by a series of erasures: the invasions and renamings of Albion by Brutus, the Saxons, and the Normans. This triple “fencing out” of women founders resembles a phenomenon described by Kendrick, “the process of splitting and separation, of building fences to be gradually interiorized.”22 The construction of internal boundaries “regulate[s] the relationship with the women upon whom [the male authors] have projected—[or] expelled—their own disorderly tendencies” and effects “a pleasurable release as it turns the force of violence to ‘good’ in punishing ‘feminine evil,’”23 although Kendrick argues that the pleasure principle is not recognized, but rather is “masked as the enforcement of order.”24 The corollary of Kendrick’s theory is that a more repressive society would produce a more nominal (or formal) rejection; in view of the atrocities of the Hundred Years’ War, the Crusades, and the anti-Semitism of the late Middle Ages, it is hard to prove that the rise of national spirit has been accompanied by any visible formalization of violence. However, I would suggest that its influence might be seen in the formalization of the description of one special category of violence, where the perpetrators are the usual victims: domestic violence by women. Powerful and violent women became unbearable as part of the historical present and were relegated to the legendary past. This past was offset by narrative framing and successive historical reappropriations and expurgations. Considering their strong narrative tradition, why did the homicidalwomen stories not produce analogues in later medieval romances? Before I present my own hypothesis, I must mention that a possible factor is the

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limited scope for individualization implicit in the large number of women in the story, and the sweeping coverage of their murderous attempts. As the narrative interest in the later romances centered on individual motivation, episodes involving large groups of people were discarded. The only other popular story involving large numbers of women seems to have been the legend of St. Ursula and the eleven hundred virgins. This plot was confined to the hagiographic genre where stories of massacres have a status of their own. The obvious way to individualize the rebel sisters’ story is to focus on one of the women, either the obdurate conspiratrix or the repentant betrayer. Indeed, both possibilities are realized in the original French versions: the Brut prologue puts forward Albina, the eldest sister; Thèbes portrays the youngest, Hypsipyle. Yet these models did not produce analogues, implying that the tendency to individualization in the later romances was not the most significant obstacle to the transmission of the motif. While it may seem that stories of murderous women would be grist for the mill of medieval misogyny, the lack of interest in representing women as heroes closed that particular avenue of dissemination. René Girard’s schema of male individualization through rivalry over women may be of help as a theoretical model of this phenomenon.25 According to Girard, western love myths and marriage rituals follow a triangular model, where the relationships of rivalry or friendship between men are mediated by the desire for or exchange of women. This also explains the necessity of violence in love myths. Girard proposes that violence against rivals, violence outside the group, cements bonds within the group of men. In the Girardian triangle, relationships between men are the focus of narration, while women constitute its pretext. Similarly, medieval literary practice creates a gender gap between subjects and objects, agents and passive figures: women as murderers are rare, women as pretexts are the narrative rule in medieval French literary tradition. Through a fascinating transposition, the stories erase women’s agency and names even when women are to blame. In innumerable instances, women as agents of their crimes seem forgotten even as the crimes are recounted, while the men who are cuckolded, ridiculed, or killed by women—or on account of them—are held in vivid memory. Thus, authors with clerical schooling such as Deschamps and Chaucer refer to biblical figures (Samson, David, Solomon), Greeks (Hercules, Agamemnon, Philip and Alexander, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus), and Romans (Cato, Catullus, Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, Juvenal,

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Aurelian). It seems that the narrative representation of evil women is prohibited by the overriding rule that women cannot be agents or subjects. In the case of the homicidal-women story, then, it is the women’s autonomy that causes the isolated status of the narrative. The innovation (portrayal of women as agents, as subjects) was not resolved by negative characterization (women as murderers). This resulted in a strong yet narrow narrative tradition.

“Ballade 285” Unlike most of Deschamps’s extensive and unjustly forgotten oeuvre, “Ballade 285,” praising Chaucer as a translator of French romances, is not only remembered but frequently discussed. Interestingly, the only direct references to French material in this much-studied text are one mention of the Roman de la Rose, arguably the most popular French romance of all time, one reference to the Roman de’ Enéas, and four allusions to the Roman de Brut, of which two may refer to homicidal women. The relative weight of references to this particular section of Brut makes them worth investigating. In most poems by Deschamps that broach the subject, only one of England’s names appears—the notable exception being “On the different names of England.” England is frequently referred to as Albie or Albion, for instance in “Contre l’Angleterre” [Against England] (1:106), in “Il n’y a rien de stable dans le monde” [There is nothing stable in the world] (3:109–110), in “Sur les divers noms de l’Angleterre” [On the different names of England] (6:87–88), and in the poems on the anti-English prophecy of Merlin, for instance “Prediction contre l’Angleterre” [Prediction against England] (1:317) or “De la prophecie de Merlin . . .” [On Merlin’s Prophecy . . .”] (2:33–34). “Ballade 285” (2:138–9) is therefore very unusual in that it provides five different circumlocutions for England. In the first strophe, immediately after the reference to England as “le regne d’Eneas” [the reign of Eneas] (line 6), Deschamps mentions “L’Isle aux Geans, ceuls de Bruth” [the Island of the Giants, those of Brut] (line 7). Then, in line 9, he refers to Pandarus—“Aux ignorans de la langue pandras” [to those who ignore the language of Pandras]—if we take Pandras to be the Greek king whose daughter, Ignoge, was Brutus’s wife.26 The reference to giants is pursued at the beginning of the second strophe: “Tu es d’amours mondains Dieux en Albie” [You are the God of worldly love in Albion] (line 12). The list of names—the reign of Eneas, the Isle of the

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Giants, connection with Pandarus, Albion—is concluded by “Le derrenier en l’ethimologique” [the last one in etymology] (line 16), deriving Anglia from Angela (“d’Angela saxonne,” line 14), attributed to the Germanic invaders who replaced the name Britain with England.27 In this poem, the references to Albion and Brutus’s Isle of the Giants constitute two out of five names for England, their legendary etymologies clear to Deschamps, Chaucer, and any learned reader of the widely popular Brut Chronicles or their avatars. In “Ballade 285” Brut is twice metonymically reduced to the particular fragment onto which the homicidal-women story was grafted. While all references to England as Albion do not necessarily imply Albina’s legend, that legend fulfilled the need for contextualizing the toponymy. At first glance, it is not the scandal of women’s revolt but the naming that is of import to Deschamps. Yet the reference goes beyond etymology and does evoke the narrative in an oblique way. The first line of the second strophe, “Tu es d’amours mondains Dieux en Albie,” is commonly and accurately interpreted as a reference to Chaucer (“You are the God of earthly love in Albion”), recalling the vocative “Great Ovid in your poetry” from the first strophe (“Ovides grans en ta poeterie,” line 3). However, I would like to suggest that it can also be read as an allusion to the homicidal-women story. The proliferation of giants in Albion, offspring of murderous women and the incubi inhabiting the island, draws on the biblical version of giant lore (in Genesis 6:4, the giants are the offspring of the sons of God and earthly women). The Brut prologue is proof that the tradition of “earthly love of gods” survived in literature as it did in the church in spite of the protests of some authorities.28 This scandal may have been designed to retain the attention of the reader in line 12, otherwise yet another smooth, adulatory reference to Chaucer. The phrase “Tu es d’amours mondains Dieux en Albie” could thus be taken to read “You are of earthly loves of Gods in Albion.”29 While the proposed double meaning is elaborate, it is by no means unlikely in the context of Deschamps’s poetical practice. How do we reconcile the dual status of homicidal women as a sort of literary hapax and as a cliché, which was apparently Deschamps’s view? If the reference to homicidal women were safely relegated to the “prehistory,” or prologue, of the Brut Chronicles, what pathological attraction, diffused by Deschamps through forceful repetition in “Ballade 285,” did this reference exercise? Here again Kendrick’s analysis of Deschamps’s Miroir de mariage may help shed some light, as some of her most acute

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observations appear in the discussion of his wordiness. Perhaps somewhat overemphasizing the difference between Deschamps and his literary context, Kendrick notes that in his wordiness and repetitiveness Deschamps stands in contrast to his predecessor Jean de Meun and his contemporary Froissart, who instead tended to “visualize, measure and control emotion” through “tightly controlled allegory,”30 and she states: “Deschamps may seem to have lost control of his endless Miroir de mariage.” She asks: “need he have gone to such superlative lengths?”31 by rejecting women in 12,103 resolute lines. Kendrick further observes that in this ritual of purification Deschamps “amplifies to outrageous lengths in a randomly listing style” the very appetites he sets out to castigate.32 While amplification is the most frequent (as well as the most slippery) instrument of satire, Kendrick proposes a paradoxical solution to the paradox: “The very strength of his need for control and closure . . . keeps [Deschamps] writing. Instead of classifying the Miroir de Mariage as an unfinished work, we might more accurately consider it to be a finished work that does not end.”33 Staggering difference of scale aside, the two phenomena—the length of the Miroir and the repetition of Brut’s one episode in “Ballade 285”—are linked by the same inherent paradox, which can also explain the popularity of homicidal-women stories: unless they are described, the rebellious women cannot be properly expelled.

Conclusion As shown in the discussion of Thèbes, Geanz, and “Ballade 285,” the literary tradition of homicidal women is rather unusual. It is a strong yet isolated presence throughout the centuries. This anomaly prompted my initial question: What made the story of women’s revolt popular within a dominant male society in this specific manner? My hypothesis was that the lack of analogues was the price of the bold, unprecedented, conflicted portrayal of women as agents of domestic violence. This story was present on the “horizon of expectations” of the medieval audience—I pinpointed the importance of the motif in the literary evolution of Thèbes and the Brut Chronicles. On the other hand, the motif functioned as a citation. Having tracked down a possible reference to it in “Ballade 285” by Deschamps, I have examined the necessity of this reference. Why were homicidal women a learned citation? My answer is that, in this form, the scandal of women’s revolt was visible yet neutralized by the

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context of etymology and toponymy predating the current usage, removed from the present by a number of military conquests, both legendary and historical. Thus, I have shown the strong presence of the homicidal-women stories, their multiple variations within the constrictive bounds of their contexts, their survival capacity, and their attraction as evidenced by reference and repetition. The combination of scandalous matter and isolating context accounts for the popularity as well as for the stasis that prevented the creation of analogues, resulting in a singularly narrow narrative tradition. Homicidal-women narratives functioned very productively within the isolated, circumscribed space of the roman d’antiquité and Anglo-Norman “prehistory.” Their relevance as stories of violence inflicted by women on men, as narratives of the reversal of gender roles, can be shown only in an oblique way. Yet such an oblique approach is not only good deconstructionist practice, it is justified by what it teaches us about women and violence in medieval literature. The last point of my argument concerns the presence of women as subjects and objects of violence, and the obliterating force of the literary tradition. In an article on Chaucer, Gower, and the literary canon, Carolyn Dinshaw shows how sexual violence becomes “normalized” as a scorekeeping device in that fiction authored by generations of critics that we call literary history.34 In an attempt to identify “structural connections between minor habits of thinking . . . and sexual violence,”35 she extends Girard’s schema of male rivalry to the narrative, using it instead as a model of the formation of the English literary canon. She shows how the literary critics from the fifteenth century onwards have forged a legend of rivalry between Chaucer and Gower, a rivalry whose putative object is the portrayal of sexual violence in their texts. As narratives of rape, incest, and mutilation formed the basis for distinction between Chaucer and Gower in the literary legend, violence became a vehicle of canon formation. If we turn our attention to the use the later authors made of the homicidal-women motif, we observe in the learned exchange between Deschamps and Chaucer a mechanism similar to that denounced by Dinshaw, which powers the historical tradition between Chaucer and Gower over the issues of sexual violence. Just as in Dinshaw’s example sexual violence is a scorekeeping device in the match between Chaucer and Gower, in my example homicidal women are ciphers in the literary contest between Deschamps and Chaucer. Dinshaw takes as her subject the violence itself, restoring its significance. Her approach can be seen as an archaeology of violence. The mean-

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ing, obscured when violence functioned as a measuring rod of literary values, now becomes clear. The banality of gendered violence now becomes horrifying. Analyzing her main example, the story of Philomela, Dinshaw denounces the process in which “the crisis of metamorphosis ironically grants to all three [main figures: Philomela, Procne, and Tereus] an immortality of an unexpected kind, and the horrors of violation and mutilation are recast as sweet amorous suffering,”36 with Philomela/nightingale as a stock figure of the courtly love tradition. Dinshaw’s approach allows one to “reveal and resist the violent obliteration of the feminine,”37 deflecting the “socializing and re-integrative glare” of literary canonization and narrative detachment.38 My study, although dealing with a lesser-known example than that of Philomela, follows in Dinshaw’s footsteps by tracking down the reintegrative mechanisms of the literary tradition in the case of the homicidal-women motif. I propose that there is another form of narrative detachment beyond this suggested by Dinshaw, visible in the literary tradition of homicidal women. This story of women-on-top was already dissociated from models of proper behavior through its narrative framing: the episode of women’s self-rule is flanked by murder on the one side and rape and incest on the other, and concludes with annihilation, renaming, and the installation of a male ruler, Brutus. Moreover, since homicidal women appear in a prologue to foundation myths, they are dissociated from historical examples of violent women or women in power—they constitute a pre-text, a prehistory to the literary-historical plot of the Anglo-Norman dynasty. By linking women’s bid for power with murder, incest, and rape, by granting homicidal women a place among the legends of origin and legitimacy, the prologues sacralize the seizure of power by women, much as incest is sacralized as the birth myth of gods and heroes. Women in power are legendary and taboo to those who would want to imitate them in the historical present. In those cases, as we clearly see in the exchange between Deschamps and Chaucer, the use to which these narratives are put deflects the reader’s gaze from women as victims and victors to the question of national identity, and the rivalry between men.

Notes 1. This essay benefited from comments by readers Jean Blacker and Clara Roman-Odio at Kenyon College and the volume editors, Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price. Shorter versions have been presented to and commented upon by faculty and students in the Department of French and Italian

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and the Committee for Medieval Studies at Miami University. To all these generous contributors, my heartfelt thanks. 2. Le Roman de Thèbes, ed. Léopold Constans (Paris: Didot, 1890); Le Roman de Thèbes, ed. Guy Raynaud de Lage (Paris: H. Champion, 1969–71), hereafter Thèbes. 3. Des Grantz Geanz, an Anglo-Norman Poem, ed. Georgine E. Brereton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1937), hereafter Geanz. Previous nineteenth-century French editions are by A. Jubinal (1842) and Francisque Michel (1862). 4. Lesley Johnson’s “Return to Albion,” in Arthurian Literature 13, ed. Felicity Riddy and James Carley (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1995), provides useful tools for the discussion of the versions, including a summary of main variants and their differences, a list of editorial references to them, and an outlining of present research by Caroline Eckhardt and Lisa Ruch. She concludes her article with an appendix discussing the manuscript context of Des Grantz Geanz. I am grateful to Jean Blacker for bringing Johnson’s article to my attention. 5. Deschamps 2:138–39. All quotes of Deschamps are from Eustache Deschamps, Oeuvres poétiques complètes, vols. 1–5, ed. de Queux de Saint-Hilaire, and vols. 6– 11, ed. Gaston Reynaud (Paris: Didot, 1878–1903). 6. Johnson quotes the canonical texts on the issue, including Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953); Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 124–51; Peter Stallybrass, “The World Turned Upside Down: Inversion, Gender and the State,” in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 201–20; and Monique Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” in Feminist Studies/ Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 213–29. 7. H. Matter, Englische Gründungssagen von Geoffrey of Monmouth bis zur Renaissance (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1922), p. 309 ff. 8. For parallel quotes of the two passages, see Anna Walecka, “Incest and Death as Indices of the Female Hero in Romance,” Romance Languages Annual 3 (1992): 159–65, esp. pp. 164–65. 9. Some readers have argued that the similarity of expression springs from the similarity of situation and legal responses to it, not from some form of shared textuality. A comparative study of the rhyme “grant rage / . . . outrage” might help shed some light on the question: if it is an infrequent rhyme, it would serve as an argument in favor of my hypothesis. 10. Geanz 49 n. lines 345–50. I thank Carson Roberts, whose erudite comments enliven this paper. 11. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae, chap. 21; Wace, Brut Cronicles, lines 1090–101. For sources of Geanz, see Brereton’s edition, xxxiii–xxxv. Gogmagog of Genesis 6:4 is Goemagog in Geoffrey and Goemagot in Wace (Geanz 54 n. lines 520–23, 526).

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12. Johnson, “Return to Albion,” pp. 24–25. 13. Ibid., p. 34. 14. Ibid., p. 36. 15. Ibid., pp. 31–35. 16. Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman, “The Mont St. Michel Giant: Sexual Violence and Imperialism in the Chronicles of Wace and Layamon,” in Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts, ed. Anna Roberts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 56–74. 17. Slavoj Zˇizˇek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 75– 76, as quoted by Finke and Shichtman. 18. “[M]ultum . . . potens et saecularis, callida et loquax nimiumque crudelis.” Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969–80), quoted by Jean Blacker, The Faces of Time: Portrayal of the Past in Old French and Latin Historical Narrative of the Anglo-Norman Regnum (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), p. 70. 19. Blacker, Faces of Time, p. 218 n. 105. 20. Laura Kendrick, “Transgression, Contamination, and Woman in Eustache Deschamps’ Miroir de Mariage,” Stanford French Review 14:1–2 (1990): 211–30. Among the sources of her study on the relationship between medieval rejection of women and the adoption of social constraints, Kendrick quotes Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966); René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Jean Delumeau, La Peur en Occident, XIVe–XVIIIe siècles: Une cité assiégée (Paris: Fayard, 1978); and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). 21. Kendrick, “Transgression,” p. 229. 22. Ibid., p. 216. 23. Ibid., pp. 217–18. 24. Ibid., p. 218. 25. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965). See also Patricia Klindienst Joplin, “The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours,” Stanford Literature Review 1 (1984): 25–53. Joplin argues that not only does the Western love tradition ignore women, so does Girard’s theory. Other studies have since tried to counteract this bias, as does mine, through the analysis of female subjectivity, autonomy, and their constraints. 26. There exist three articles discussing this difficult passage in the poem: Eugen Lerch, “Zu einer Stelle bei Eustache Deschamps,” Romanische Forschungen 62 (1950): 67–68; Gretchen Mieszkowski, “‘Pandras’ in Deschamps’s Ballade for Chaucer,” Chaucer Review 9 (1975): 326–36; and a response by Roy Pearcy, “Chaucer, Deschamps and Le Roman de Brut,” Arts: Journal of the Sydney University 12 (1984): 35–59.

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27. “[L]es Saxon vindrent de Germanie en cest terre et la conquistrent, et en getterent les Breton, et ousterent le noun de Bretaigne, et l’appellerent Engistlonde aprés le noun Engist, qe feust le mestre et le dustre des Saissons” [The Saxons came from Germany into this land and conquered it, and threw the Britons out of it, and took away the name Britain, and called it Engistland after the name Engist, who was the master and the duke of the Saxons]. From the introduction to Des Grantz Geanz and the Brut Chronicle, Brereton’s MS J, Inner Temple Library 511, 19, f7v, quoted by Brereton, Geanz ix. 28. As Brereton points out, Augustine interprets “the sons of God” as the sons of Seth, not angels or incubi, in De Civitate Dei, 15 and 23. The Glossa Ordinaria, however, ignores Augustine on this point. 29. French mondain means both “worldly” (as opposed to “spiritual”) and “earthly” (as opposed to “heavenly”). 30. Kendrick, “Transgression,” p. 229. 31. Ibid., p. 214. 32. Ibid., p. 224. 33. Ibid., p. 229. 34. Carolyn Dinshaw, “Rivalry, Rape and Manhood: Gower and Chaucer,” in Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, ed. R. F. Yeager (Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria Press, 1991), pp. 130–52. 35. Ibid., p. 134. 36. Ibid., p. 139. 37. Ibid., p. 142. 38. Ibid., p. 139.

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10

Noah’s Wife The Shaming of the “Trew” Garrett P. J. Epp “Hastow nat herd,” quod Nicholas . . . “The sorwe of Noe with his felaweshipe, Er that he myghte gete his wyf to shipe?” Chaucer, Miller’s Tale

What is this cruelty, then, she wondered. . . . The thought of Noah’s rages and of Japeth armed gave her the answer. Cruelty was fear in disguise and nothing more. And hadn’t one of Japeth’s holy strangers said that fear itself was nothing more than a failure of the imagination? Timothy Findley, Not Wanted on the Voyage

To change the nature of sexual relations in our society, it is necessary to think them differently. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body

In most early English dramatizations, the story of Noah is as much about a domestic dispute as it is about human salvation and general destruction. Even God is generally upstaged, both in the plays and in modern critical discussion of them, by a character unnamed and hardly mentioned in the biblical account: Uxor Noe, Noah’s wife. In the N-town pageant of the flood, the patriarch’s wife obediently and happily boards the ark with her family, but in each of the other versions, she resists. In the York and Chester cycles, she does not want to leave her friends; her counterpart in Towneley sits alone on a hill with her distaff, resisting for the sake of resistance; and in the Newcastle play, the devil makes her do it.1 However, even critics who note these and other important differences between the plays tend to refer to Noah’s wife as a single, predictable character type: the stub-

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born and violent shrew. This reductive approach—a remnant, perhaps, of an earlier critical tendency to see all medieval English biblical plays as slight variations of some archetypal Corpus Christi play—does violence both to the carefully and differently scripted domestic relationships within the various plays and to our perception of differences in social scripts involving domestic violence. The dramatic scripts can vary drastically in their characterization of Noah’s wife and of her relationship with Noah. In the Newcastle play—the only version dramatizing the diabolic association with the wife, the supposed basis of the tradition of her recalcitrance2—she is apparently not even a shrew. The devil goes to her not because she is vindictive, or even merely gullible like Eve in most versions of the temptation in Eden, but because she is clever and sly (“whunt and slee,” line 112) and thus able to do the devil’s work. He tells her that Noah is secretly doing something that will ultimately kill them all, and gives her a potion that will make him tell his secret; concerned, she manages to give Noah the potion, and he tells her about the ark. She responds, “Who the devil made thee a wright” (line 172), and, with understandable distrust of his workmanship but without inflicting or suffering any apparent physical violence, indicates that she has no intention of boarding: “The devil of hell thee take / To ship when thou shalt go” (lines 184–85). An angel then announces to Noah that his hammering, which has so far been miraculously silent in order to keep secret the building of the ark, will henceforth be audible. In Chester, on the other hand, there is no secret. The entire family is present when God speaks. No one other than Noah shows any definite signs of having heard God speak, or not, but Noah responds prayerfully both times God speaks, then reiterates what God has just bidden them to do. Whether or not they have heard God directly, they all know his will. The wife of Chester’s Noah even helps to build the ark and load it with animals, but then, “ever frowarde” according to her husband (3.194), refuses to board without her “gossips” (line 201). Her refusal leads to violence on both sides; however, this recalcitrance dissolves suddenly into absolute compliance and silence on board the ark, “a projection of idealized domestic space in which all the women are wives absolutely enclosed and controlled.”3 In both York and Towneley, which will occupy most of my attention here, that same domestic ideology is questioned, but in radically different ways. The most celebrated and studied of the Noah plays, the Processus Noe cum filiis in the Towneley manuscript, also known as the Wakefield Noah,4

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is also the most violent. The collection’s most recent editors, Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley, write, “The Wakefield Noah play undoubtedly contains the most expanded, vigorous, and farcical of all the medieval scenes between Noah and his recalcitrant wife. Its language, particularly in the episodes of domestic combat, is reminiscent of the scenes between Cain and his Garcio, with its use of Yorkshire dialect, its home-spun proverbs and earthy diction. These qualities, however, should not obscure the fact that the play enacts the allegorical meaning of the flood as a type of Baptism and the Ark as a type of the Church, which symbolically brings sinners like Noah’s Uxor to redemption.”5 Still, the representation of domestic violence does pose a problem here. God explicitly spares Noah and his wife because “thay wold never stryfe / With me” (3.155–56), yet they certainly “stryfe” with each other. As Richard J. Daniels has pointed out, “their strife seems simply the common state of affairs in their marriage. In Towneley, Noah deals with nothing unusual when his wife chides or fights with him; it is part of their daily life together.”6 Nor is this strife merely an exchange of “earthy diction”: the couple’s verbal arguments degenerate more than once into physical violence, both before and after the ark is built. As in other versions, the couple does end up cooperating on board the ark, but not without a further tussle. The wife finally boards when she realizes that the flood is indeed rising: “Yei, water nyghys so nere / That I sit not dry; / Into ship with a byr, / Therfor, will I hy / For drede that I drone here (3.534–38). After this last line, according to a stage direction in A. C. Cawley’s edition of The Wakefield Pageants, the wife “Rushes into the ship.”7 Rosemary Woolf, like several critics since, has protested that this cannot be, since the playwright could not possibly have “missed the significance of the sharp change that Noah’s wife should undergo on entering the ark.”8 Yet the script is clear even without Cawley’s stage direction. Immediately after the quoted lines, Noah welcomes her aboard with a complaint about the trouble her delay has caused, and she responds that her will is still her own: “I will not, for thi bydyng, / Go from doore to mydyng” (3.543–44).9 Soon thereafter, well aboard the ark that symbolizes the church, they fight, wrestling each other to the deck. Nor are they alone in this apparent offense against typological correctness: the Chester Noah does not wrestle with his wife, but sends his sons to carry their recalcitrant mother forcibly onto the ark where, immediately after he welcomes her aboard, she greets him with a blow. Only after this violence does she lapse into silence and apparent compliance. Woolf also complains that the playwright has “developed the character

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of Noah’s wife at the cost of obscuring the allegorical significance of Noah.”10 However, the problem lies more in the violent characterization of Noah himself.11 According to Stevens and Cawley, “The Wakefield Noah, while portrayed as a type of Christ . . . is also unusually boisterous and belligerent. In other cycle plays, particularly those of York and Chester, Noah is portrayed as the henpecked and relatively passive victim of a shrewish wife. The Wakefield Noah, in contrast, not only beats his wife but also offers the first blow.”12 Cawley and Stevens downplay the violence of forcible removal and confinement, as portrayed in Chester, and valorize the more directly physical violence of the Towneley play. By having Noah beat his wife, they continue, “The playwright thus humanizes the patriarch and provides dramatic contrast between the discord of everyday life and the harmony in a divinely ordered world. Typologically, Noah can be seen not only as a Christ figure but also as fallen man (reminding us of Adam) who must be cleansed by the water of baptism before he can be saved.”13 I am deeply troubled by the implication here, however unintentional, that a “henpecked” husband, or any man who does not beat his wife, is somehow less human than one who is willing to land the first blow in a domestic dispute. But the typology, too, is problematic. Even the Towneley version of the Buffeting—likewise attributed to the Wakefield Master— includes a Christ who, far from offering the first blow, passively accepts a violent and wholly unjustified beating, making any typological connection between the two figures seem tenuous at best. Jeffrey Hirschberg has argued that there is no particular reason to suggest “that Noah should be a type of Christ.”14 Rather, he states, this play’s “focus is upon Noah’s continuing to work for his own salvation, aloof from the cares of the world” and so exemplifying “the postlapsarian humility of Adam.”15 Yet Hirschberg’s insistence upon the essential goodness, humility, and obedience of the postlapsarian Adam—notably Christlike qualities that Eve apparently lacks at any stage—effectively reinforces and specifically genders a typological connection to Christ, even as Hirschberg disputes the relevance of any such connection. Noah’s wife, distaff in hand, is certainly a type of Eve, as Hirschberg and others have amply demonstrated.16 However, if Noah’s typological connection to Adam depends upon an “aloof” attitude toward the mundane and petty, or conversely upon his humility in relation to anyone other than God, he strikes out here, in more than one sense. Where Cawley and Stevens praise Noah’s violence, Hirschberg simply ignores it, but the effect is similar. He normalizes and even essentializes

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violence by making it a silent, assumed constituent of what makes Noah an exemplar of “humble obedience to God” and, conversely, of “Uxor’s lack of humility,”17 and of their typological resemblance to the primordial couple. Yet the often rancorous postlapsarian bickering of Adam and Eve, absent from the Towneley manuscript itself owing to missing leaves,18 never turns to physical violence in any of the extant versions, but ends in a leveling rebuke from God. In York, Adam’s attempt to blame Eve for the fall even earns him a rebuke from the angel who drives them from Eden (6.30– 40). Yet modern critics of the Towneley Noah play continue to blame woman, overlooking God’s positive estimation of the wife while just as perversely endorsing his evaluation of Noah as “trew as stele” (3.175), presumably because they already expect Noah to be a good man married to a shrew. As Marjorie K. McIntosh has pointed out, the Towneley collection itself does, as a whole, provide a certain level of gender parity: “The most colorful abuser of the tongue in fifteenth-century drama, Noah’s wife in the mystery cycles, who is cross, argumentative, and disobedient to her husband (going as far as to strike him in several of the versions), is counterbalanced by the portrayal of Cain in the Towneley plays, who complains, argues, speaks crudely, and curses his horse, his boy servant, and Abel before finally killing his brother.”19 The violent and verbally abusive Herod and Caiphas and torturers of Christ, likewise creations attributed to the Wakefield Master, are, of course, male as well.20 McIntosh goes on to note that, in fifteenth-century literature generally, the widely presumed association of wives and verbal abuse is not especially common: “Even when the image of bridling the tongue was used, it was not applied particularly to women. This gender neutrality contrasts with the predominance of women among those actually reported for the offense in local courts and with the exclusively female images of scolding produced in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”21 Even in the sixteenth century, though, violence was not necessarily considered the proper response to a wife’s scolding. “The Sermon of the State of Matrimony,” in the homily collection authorized by Queen Elizabeth and widely available before the demise of biblical cycle plays, explicitly denounces wife beating. The sermon writer notes, however: “The common sort of men doth judge that such moderation should not become a man; for they say, that it is a token of womanish cowardess, and therefore they think that it is a man’s part to fume in anger, to fight with fist and staff.”22 This passage could well describe the Towneley Noah. Against such

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masculinist belligerence the sermon cites 1 Peter 3:7: “Ye husbands, deal with your wives according to knowledge, giving honour to the wife, as unto the weaker vessel.”23 According to this text the sermon argues: “The woman ought to have a certain honour attributed to her; that is to say, she must be spared and borne with, the rather for that she is the weaker vessel; of a frail heart, inconstant; and with a word soon stirred to wrath. And therefore, considering these her frailties, she is to be the rather spared. By this means thou shalt not only nourish concord, but shalt have her heart in thy power and will. For honest natures will sooner be retained to do their duty rather by gentle words than by stripes.”24 Misogynist stereotypes are left intact, apart from the suggestion that women might indeed have “honest natures,” but verbal as well as physical violence is denounced, if only because it is deemed an ineffective means of control. Domestic control and misogyny are issues in more than one of the Wakefield Master plays: Noah and his wife closely resemble the feuding Mak and Gill of the second and better-known of the collection’s two shepherd plays. As Diana Henderson notes, Mak’s explicit misogyny is at least partly undermined by Gill’s subsequent display of ingenuity in disguising a stolen sheep as their baby; her action “deflates his rhetoric and (temporarily) saves his skin.”25 On the other hand, Henderson continues, “she is thereby outdoing the comic villain and confirming stereotypes about women’s deceitfulness and treachery, endorsed by the Church Fathers’ interpretations of her biblical precedent, Eve. Moreover, the opening speech of the good second shepherd, Gyb, laments his loss of “will” in marriage and concludes with a litany of complaints about his conventionally sour, sharp-tongued, loud, huge wife.”26 The problem is perhaps exacerbated both by the absence onstage of Gyb’s wife and by the presence at the end of the play of the Virgin Mary, whose husband—and thus her role as wife— is conspicuously absent.27 Gill and Mak do cooperate, but only after Gill gains the upper hand. First, she comes up with the disguise. Later, when Mak accuses her of idleness, Gill vehemently points out that she, like other wives, does all the household labor, concluding ,“Full wofull is the householde / That wantys a woman” (13.606–7). Mak’s only response is to follow her bidding; she likewise follows his.28 A surprising degree of concord also rules the play as a whole. After the deception is discovered, Mak is merely “cast . . . in canvas” (13.906)—light punishment for a capital offense—and then generously released by the shepherds, while Gill seems to escape punishment altogether. The angelic visitation follows almost immediately, suggesting

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that, whatever his (or God’s) opinion of wives, the Wakefield Master considers violence—domestic and otherwise—to be incompatible with grace. In the Noah play, both skirmishes immediately follow misogamist speeches, from husband and wife alike. First, the wife’s taunt regarding her husband’s supposed cowardice becomes a more general complaint against “All ill husbandys” (3.301); for this, he threatens and then strikes her, and she retaliates. Later, having at last entered the ark, she reiterates her complaint, adding that she like other “wifys that ar here” (3.568) wishes she were a widow. Noah responds by advising husbands in the audience to avoid strife by keeping their wives in line—“If ye luf youre lifys, / Chastice thare tong” (3.575–76)—and resolves to do the same. A few lines and threats later, the mostly extratextual brawl begins, and swiftly ends with Noah’s defeat: the wife cries, “Out, alas I am gone! I am gone! / Oute apon the mans wonder!” but her husband responds, “Se how she can grone / And I lig [lie] under” (3.591–92). Their sons then reproach them for being “so spitus” (3.601), but no further argument ensues. As Josie P. Campbell long ago pointed out, the brawl does result in peace, but not in confirmation of “what may be the ‘standard’ medieval idea that a wife owes submission to her husband, analogous to the Church’s submission to her Head.”29 Rather, as Campbell asserts, “it is the absolute physical exhaustion of both that forces them to relinquish the battle for authority. Both husband and wife are chastised, and order is restored through a physical experience that makes them consider looking at their relationship in a different light.”30 Much like the flood itself, which in this play specifically sweeps away “Many castels,” “Grete towns of aray,” and persons who are “Prowdist of pryde” (3.778, 779, 786), domestic violence is portrayed as a potential leveling force, toppling hierarchies. However, and however inconsistently, it is also portrayed as something to be avoided wherever possible. Domestic concord here is explicitly not the result of Noah’s violent attempt to follow his own advice and take the upper hand, exercising what he deems a proper patriarchal authority. This is no taming of a shrew, but a leveling of the playing field, and a condemnation of the violent game played there. On the other hand, the choice of players sent onto this field by the playwright remains questionable. Where the angelic visitation in the shepherd play seems an appropriate if surprising reward for good behavior, God’s initial singling out of Noah and his wife as exemplars of goodness seems surprisingly inappropriate. Indeed, they seem to exemplify the pride and lack of “luf” (3.118) that are God’s explicit reasons for sending

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the flood in the first place. The flood itself seems an almost incidental parallel to their domestic battle—a bout of leveling violence that allows violence to end. Even divine providence seems to dwindle into relative insignificance: the play ends without the usual sign of the rainbow (see York 9.282–94; Chester 3.309–24), and without the reappearance or blessing of God. This is perhaps a good thing, since any reminder of absolute divine authority and power would sit uneasily within this picture of toppled hierarchies and defeated patriarchy. In his closing lines Noah does refer to his hope that his family will eventually find a place in the community of saints and angels in heaven, but the play as a whole seems more concerned with the building of community on earth. Community, particularly as epitomized by domestic relationships, is also a major concern of the York play. In York, however, the flood remains the chief focus, and neither Noah nor his wife is characterized as being innately or essentially disagreeable, although both are more interesting than their insipidly agreeable counterparts in the N-town play. Nor does the conflict between them rely, as in the Newcastle play, on a diabolus ex machina. Yet critics again tend to read this play through others, rather than as an entity in itself. In the introduction to their modern-spelling edition of the play, Richard Beadle and Pamela M. King briefly refer to the legend of diabolical influence by way of explaining the wife’s supposed “violation of the nature order,” and then state, “The celebrated scene of her domestic fisticuffs with Noah and the others is quickly followed by her complete quiescence upon entering the Ark, the entire episode being figurally interpreted as the reluctance of the sinner to enter the Church until the moment of death.”31 Almost immediately, though, they disavow “her complete quiescence”: “Her muted contributions in the latter half of the play, first a brief lamentation for her lost friends, then a qualm lest the universal destruction of fire is about to follow immediately, are touchingly set off against the unwavering zeal of Noah.”32 Muted she may be, but hardly silent, nor completely acquiescent: unlike her counterpart in Chester, who does not mourn her beloved gossips once she has been forced to leave them behind, the York wife remains to the end of the play deeply disturbed by the damage wrought by the flood. But neither does she qualify as a shrew. That “celebrated scene of her domestic fisticuffs with Noah and the others” is an editorial fabrication, supported by critical tradition but not by the evidence of the script itself. The York Noah is threatened at one point with “a clowte” (9.120) from his wife; however, it is doubtful that she actually carries out her threat—or can—and there is no evidence that Noah or any of “the others” ever raises a violent hand against her.

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Some close reading is necessary here. The play begins with a lengthy prologue in which Noah grieves for the impending destruction and then tells the story of his birth, altering and adding to the slim biblical account (Genesis 5:28–29) such that this particular version of Noah does indeed appear as a type of Christ: God sends Lamech a long-awaited son “That shalle be comforte to mankynne” (York 9.32). Noah then tells his children, already present, to call their mother, referring again to the impending disaster (9.53–54). The children dutifully tell her that she should come quickly, and that their father “thynkis to flitte full ferre” (9.58; see also 9.68), but do not explain further. She briefly demurs, then goes with them. She boards the ark, searching for her husband, who is apparently on a higher level; he calls her to him, but she refuses: “Trowes thou that I wol leue the harde lande / And tourne up here on toure deraye [in this utter confusion]?” (9.77–78). Instead, she suggests to her children that they “trusse to town,” but Noah warns her “certis, sothly than mon ye drowne” (9.81–82). This is an obvious enough statement to the audience, as to Noah and his children, but it is also reasonable cause for his wife to deem him “nere woode [mad]” (9.91); only now is she even informed of the rain outside. Unlike her counterparts both in Chester and in Towneley, she is never told why she must board the ark, or what is about to happen, until after she has safely boarded and the world is already drowning.33 She is then justifiably upset, and dangerously tries to leave the boat. Noah attempts to detain her, but not physically; instead, he throws her charge of madness back at her: “O woman, arte thou woode? / Of my werkis thou not wotte; / All that has ban or bloode / Salle be ouere flowed with the floode” (9.93–96). She responds, “In faithe, the were als goode / To late me go my gatte”; then, apparently looking down at the water, she cries out, “We! Oute! Herrow!” (9.97–99) but again attempts to leave, if only to gather her household tools (9.110). Husband and wife are presumably still some distance apart on the ark, she at the door with her sons, he above. She tells him she will come “no nare for no-kynnes nede” immediately before he calls out “Helpe, my sonnes, to hold her here” (9.100–101). Neither Noah nor anyone else has as yet laid a hand on her, and if the sons now do so, it is only to keep her from drowning. Still, Noah’s wife feels violated, and rightly so: her husband has been working “A hundereth wyntyr” (9.133) on a secret project that in an instant and without warning has changed her entire life. She has not even been given a chance to pack. The Newcastle play, as noted earlier, revolves around this same secret, but in that version the project is revealed to Noah’s wife and to the world through the devil’s intervention, well before its completion. A need for

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secrecy is not mentioned in the biblical account, nor in the previous play in York, in which God explains the reasons for drowning the earth, and for building the ark, both to Noah and to the audience. We cannot assume that the York audience would have thought secrecy a requirement simply on the basis of the Newcastle play. In York the wife speaks of Noah’s secrecy as a personal betrayal, saying, “Noye, thou myght haue leteyn me wete [know],” and “thou shuld haue tolde me for oure seele / Whan we were to slyke bargane broght” (9.113, 129–30). As in Chester, she threatens retaliatory violence, but only when her husband refuses to take responsibility for the deception. Noah tells her, “It was Goddis wille withowten doutte” (9.117). Where “it” could refer either to the deception or to the flood, this is, notably, the first time Noah has mentioned God to her. She asks whether he really thinks he can get away with such an evasion—“What, wenys thou so for to go qwitte?”—then answers her own question: “Nay, be my trouthe, thou getis a clowte” (9.118–19). This threat, as noted, is likely an empty one. After all, Noah is apparently still somewhere above her on the ark, and remains so for three long stanzas more, at which point he tells those below, “Wendes and spers youre dores bedene” [Go and close your doors immediately] (9.161).34 The others then join him, above, finally at peace with one another. Noah himself remains fairly peaceful throughout the exchange, certain of what he is doing and why, although he neglects to inform his wife. At the height of his wife’s attempts to leave the ark, he himself does get angry, even cursing at one point: “Thou spilles vs alle, ill myght thou speede” (9.106). However, he responds mildly to her physical threat: “I pray the dame, be still. / Thus God wolde have it wrought” (9.121–22). In contrast, the Chester Noah comments directly upon his own wife’s retaliatory violence—“Aha, marye, this ys hotte”—before adding that “yt is good to be still” (3.247– 48). Clearly he has suffered a blow; I think it just as clear that the York Noah has suffered no such thing. And again, where the wife in Chester is indeed “still” hereafter, apart from singing along with the rest of her family a moment later (3.252 stage direction), in York she speaks. To Noah’s reassertion of his necessary compliance with God’s will, she responds, “Thow shulde have witte my wille, / Yf I wolde sente thertille” (9.123–24). This opposition of her will to God’s may seem dangerously close to blasphemy, even if the lines are taken to refer only to her being deceived into boarding the ark, and not to the whole project of salvation. However, she has not yet had the situation explained to her, and so has no reason to believe her husband’s assertion. Moreover, her protest has more than a

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little in common with Noah’s own protest to God, in the previous play, concerning the building of the ark. There he complains that he is too old and infirm to undertake what God has asked: “A, worthy lorde, wolde thou take heede, / I am full olde and oute of qwarte, / That me liste do no daies dede / But yf gret mystir me garte [great need forces me] (York 8.49–52). When God insists, and reiterates his offer to help in the building, Noah still argues that “of shippe-craft can I right noght; / Of ther makyng haue I no merke” (8.67–68). In contrast, Towneley’s “always wel-wirkand” Noah (3.174) obediently gets to work—that is, after his abortive attempt to inform his wife of the situation—expressing only amazement at his being able to carry out the request despite his being “Sich an old dote. . . / To begyn such a wark” (3.385, 387). In York, even as he instructs Noah, God must tell him, “do furthe, and leue thy dyne [noise]” (8.80). That line is later echoed in Noah’s own curt response to his wife’s lament for “all oure kynne / And company we knowe before”: “Dame,” he says, “all ar drowned, late be thy dyne / And sone thei boughte ther synnes sore” (9.269–70, 271–72). This echo, of course, reflects the standard parallel between marriage and God’s relationship to the church, as represented by Noah, but also undermines the standard misogynist implication of that parallel by placing both complaints in relation to the will of God and to what is known regarding that will. Husband and wife alike protest the situation God has placed them in, but only Noah objects directly to God, expressing disbelief in what God has just told him, and only Noah’s complaint is presented as being groundless; his wife has deliberately been left ignorant and thereby disempowered, and only she laments on behalf of others. Given that this particular pageant is presented by the York Shipwrights’ guild, Noah’s objection to God is obviously and humorously ironic. His wife’s resistance, too, is certainly intended as humorous, and was conceivably seen by medieval audiences as confirmation of the “natural” obstinacy of women. Certainly, she is less immediately or fully obedient than her sons; she is also less obedient than their wives. Confirmation requires prior belief: a reading of this play as necessarily misogynist would require an audience—medieval or modern—already and uniformly convinced that a wife, any wife, at least on the medieval stage, is necessarily obstinate, perhaps even violently so, and that she cannot be trusted with secrets. The script itself allows, and encourages, other readings. We cannot know in any absolute sense how the play was staged, and we must remain aware that, in virtually any play, even obvious textual meanings can be undermined or

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reversed by such means as ironic intonation and extratextual action. However, we must also remain aware of the textual indications of this play, specifically, and that even the most generalized of ideologies may be subject to challenge in specific texts. Most modern critics would seem to have no particular ideological investment in conflating this play with others, or in celebrating the comic potential of domestic violence and misogyny, but they do both. And in doing so, they—not the anonymous York playwrights—normalize that violence, and the inherent violence of enforced gender hierarchy. Another of the York plays more explicitly and positively reverses gender hierarchy, and connects back to the Noah plays. Like Noah, Joseph is regularly portrayed as an old man who complains that he has been saddled with unwanted responsibility—in this case, marriage to a young wife who, in his absence, has become unaccountably pregnant. In York, Noah is clearly an antitype of Joseph, but so is Noah’s wife. Like her, Joseph has not been told of God’s plan, or of his spouse’s part in it; when he attempts to find out who has gotten Mary pregnant, to his increasing frustration and rage, she repeatedly tells him that the child is both his and God’s (13.159, 168, 178, 189). She never does tell him how this might be possible; that task is left to an angel, after Joseph has left his wife and wandered alone into the wilderness. And even this explanation is initially met with disbelief: “And is this soth, aungell, thou saise?” (13.277).35 On the other hand, Joseph’s piety is never left open to question although, much like Noah’s wife, he disbelieves his spouse’s assertion that God’s will is involved in the apparent madness that confronts him. The gap between his knowledge and hers—and the audience’s—allows both characters to remain obviously good, and godly, while creating dramatic conflict and humor. However, neither the Noah play nor the character of Noah’s wife is entirely comical. Diana Henderson has noted that, even in the more farcical Chester play, “slapstick comedy does not undo a certain pathos for the drowned.”36 Nor does the ultimate silence of the Chester wife undo her solidarity with the gossips she is forced to leave behind. As Henderson adds, “the wife is located on lowly earth and associated with ‘natural’ human bonds that are placed in dramatic opposition to the harsh, necessary Word of God the Father.”37 In York both pathos and opposition are further emphasized: Noah’s wife continues to mourn the loss of friends and family through to the end of the play, even as she rejoices in her immediate family’s salvation as the good, the chosen ones, on the ark. Very nearly at the end of the play Noah tells his son, looking at the rainbow, that its

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promise is not eternal, and that the earth “sall ones be waste with fyre” (9.302); in what proves her last onstage utterance, his wife responds, “A, syre, owre hertis are soore / For thes sawes that ye saye here, / That myscheffe mon be more” (9.303–5). Her final line echoes Noah’s earlier comment that her attempts to leave the ark threaten “more myscheue” for them all (9.112). The earlier line could be read as an indication that she has a history of troublemaking, but this echo suggests, rather, that the “myscheue”—meaning “misfortune” or “harm”—is the flood then engulfing them. It also suggests that God’s own violent “myscheffe” is indeed serious troublemaking, and a cause more for lamentation than for celebration. God’s explicit reason here for destroying the earth is not “lechory” as it is in N-town (4.218), nor pride, nor even human sin in general, but specifically “striffe” and “ire emonge mankynde” (York 8.12, 56); however, the only strife actually demonstrated within the play is caused by God, who has sent the flood and who, according to Noah, is responsible for the deception involved in the salvation of Noah’s wife. Far from endorsing or exploiting violence, the play suggests that even violence deemed necessary by God is at best regrettable, perhaps shameful. Much as in the Towneley play, despite its very different characterizations, goodness is tied to the avoidance of violence, and of gender hierarchies. I prefaced this essay with a quotation from Timothy Findley’s retelling of the story of Noah and the flood, Not Wanted on the Voyage, to which I would like to return. Findley’s novel shows the marked influence of these same Noah plays; unlike all too many critics of the plays, Findley foregrounds and critiques both domestic tensions and violence.38 Mrs. Noyes, the gin-swilling heroine, eventually boards the ark only to be locked in its lower holds, with the animals and a few members of her family,39 by the tyrannical and misogynist Noah Noyes, who remains above with the others, brutally in control; God is an absence, having “consented to His own death”40 even before the flood. There in the darkness, comforting animals that once would have frightened her, and wondering why she feels both so safe and so sad, Mrs. Noyes suddenly realizes that she and all these creatures with her shared their captivity in a way they could never have shared the wood. That when you are caught together in the same trap, you share the same fear of darkness and of walls and you also have the same enemy. . . . What is this cruelty, then, she wondered; that battens those doors up there and locks us in, as if we were dragons—and fearsome? The thought of

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Noah’s rages and of Japeth armed gave her the answer. Cruelty was fear in disguise and nothing more. And hadn’t one of Japeth’s holy strangers said that fear itself was nothing more than a failure of the imagination?41 This notion of equality and solidarity gained through loss and oppression reminds me of the Towneley couple, learning to cooperate—learning to imagine another, more peaceful means of existence—only through and after mutual battering. However, here the battering is mostly one-sided, and Findley’s version of Noah never does learn much of anything. Near the end of the novel, having successfully rebelled and gained access to the open deck, Mrs. Noyes stands by a railing and looks down into the depths of the flood: There below her was all the world: its valleys, hills and woods as she had never dreamed they could be seen . . . everything equal—valleys and mountains drowned in the same viridian deep. . . . There were the farms—and all the white stone buildings—all the winding ribbons of the cowpath geography that had defined where she had lived her life. . . . And there were the altars—put down forever. ‘No more fires,’ she whispered. No more bloodied falls. It was the world she had always dreamed of. Real.42 Here the mourning of Noah’s wife, as dramatized in the York play, becomes something akin to hope for a new start. Yet that new start is dependent upon things remaining equal, which to Mrs. Noyes seems possible only upon the ark, as they are, and as they are under the already receding flood. She fears that the moment she and the others—human and animal alike—step off the crowded vessel, the old hierarchies will be reestablished, and the violence will begin again. Judging by the critics of medieval English drama, her fears are warranted. It seems all too easy to allow presumptions regarding how things have been to rule perception of how things are, and of how things should be. As Steven Shaviro has argued, in connection with contemporary film theory and psychoanalysis, “To build a model is to proclaim a necessity. . . . To change the nature of sexual relations in our society, it is necessary to think them differently.”43 To assume that a violent patriarchal structure necessarily exists, for better or for worse, is to ensure and perpetuate its existence. The Noah plays, like Findley’s novel, suggest that while violence—like other forms of sin—may be or may once have been prevalent,

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it is in no way desirable; domestic violence in particular is condemned. In Towneley violence is comic, and a presumed part of the marital relationship, but it is not valorized; it is portrayed as a potential leveling force, but ultimately incompatible with divine grace. Even the Chester play ends with a repeated condemnation by God of “vengeance” (3.298, 303, 312, 316, 327) both human and divine—God’s retribution shall now cease, but so should that of human beings. This suggests that the explicitly retaliatory domestic violence in that play is to be condemned, even if, as in Towneley, it has just been exploited for its comic potential. And in York all violence against others, even when perpetrated or deemed necessary by God, is cause for mourning, not laughter. In Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale a devious clerk uses a story of Noah’s shrewish and recalcitrant wife in order to gain sexual access to the willing young wife of an ignorant old carpenter. Divine providence plays no part in this particular scheme, however, or in any subsequent revelations. The carpenter is easily duped, in part because he puts too great a trust in scholarly authority, and because he fully expects wives, generally, to be disobedient. Modern scholars should themselves be inclined more to a skeptical testing of assertions—including their own, and mine—than to simple assent and obedience. But we must all learn, like Findley’s Mrs. Noyes, to imagine things otherwise, or in Shaviro’s words “to think them differently,” before we can see what is, or what can be, true.

Notes 1. Unless otherwise noted, the editions used, and cited hereafter by pageant and line number, are The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D.8, ed. Stephen Spector (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974–86); The York Plays, ed. Richard Beadle (London: Edward Arnold, 1982); The Towneley Plays, ed. Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); “The Newcastle Play,” in Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. Norman Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 25–31. 2. Anna Jean Mill, in “Noah’s Wife Again,” PMLA 56 (1941): 615, long ago pointed out that this widespread tradition is at least as old as the thirteenth century, and argues “that the temptation of Uxor by the devil, so far from being an individual aberration or stroke of genius on the part of the Newcastle dramatist, was an integral part of a persistent legend regarding the recalcitrance of this very individual character.” For a further account of this tradition in English art and in the Newcastle play, see V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury

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Tales (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), pp. 203–5. On the Newcastle play itself, see Davis, Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, xl–xlviii. The existing text, a poor transcription of a manuscript now lost, ends with the ark’s completion, leading many scholars to assume that this is the first of two plays, the second of which, as in York, would have dealt with the boarding of the ark and with the flood itself. 3. Diana E. Henderson, “The Theatre and Domestic Culture,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 176. 4. The Towneley Noah play is one of two plays—the other being the Creation pageant—preceded by rubrics containing the name Wakefeld, and one of six plays and various passages normally attributed to a single author called the Wakefield Master. On the problems of the Towneley manuscript as a collection, and its common identification as “the Wakefield cycle,” see Barbara Palmer, “‘Towneley Plays’ or ‘Wakefield Cycle’ Revisited,” Comparative Drama 21 (1987): 313–48, and “Corpus Christi ‘Cycles’ in Yorkshire: The Surviving Evidence,” Comparative Drama 27 (1993): 218–31; see also Garrett P. J. Epp, “The Towneley Plays and the Hazards of Cycling,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 23 (1993): 121–50. 5. Towneley Plays, p. 447. 6. Richard J. Daniels, “Uxor Noah: A Raven or a Dove?” Chaucer Review 14:1 (1979): 26. 7. A. C. Cawley, ed., The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), p. 23, line 372. 8. Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), p. 143. 9. Woolf argues that the latter lines are “just an abusive way of saying that she will not go one step beyond the entrance” (ibid., p. 143), but doesn’t explain where the subsequent fight takes place; I sincerely doubt that anyone would attempt to stage a very physical brawl on a movable gangplank between the supposedly flooded ground and the entrance to the ark itself, where these lines are clearly spoken. 10. Ibid., p. 143. 11. Woolf herself implies as much in her very next sentence, when she refers to Noah’s lack of Christlike “patience” (ibid.), yet she does not directly counter her statement that the characterization of Noah’s wife is the problem. 12. Towneley Plays, p. 447. 13. Ibid. 14. Jeffrey Alan Hirschberg, “Noah’s Wife on the Medieval English Stage: Iconographic and Dramatic Values of Her Distaff and Choice of the Raven,” Studies in Iconography 2 (1976): 32. 15. Ibid. 16. The distaff is, of course, a common medieval symbol