Reason and Imagination in Chaucer, the Perle-poet, and the Cloud-author: Seeing from the Center (New Middle Ages)

T H E N E W M I DDL E AG E S BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.

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Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350–1500 by Kathleen Kamerick

Charlemagne’s Mustache: And Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age by Paul Edward Dutton

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Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: New Essays edited by Lawrence Besserman

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Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages by Erin L. Jordan

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Medieval Go-betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus by Gretchen Mieszkowski The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature by Jeremy J. Citrome Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in the Canterbury Tales by Lee Patterson

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Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance by Seeta Chaganti The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages: Power, Faith, and Crusade edited by Matthew Gabriele and Jace Stuckey The Poems of Oswald von Wolkenstein: An English Translation of the Complete Works (1376/77-1445) by Albrecht Classen Women and Experience in Later Medieval Writing: Reading the Book of Life edited by Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker and Liz Herbert McAvoy Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature: Singular Fortunes by J. Allan Mitchell Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature by Kathleen E. Kennedy The Post-Historical Middle Ages edited by Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico Constructing Chaucer: Author and Autofiction in the Critical Tradition by Geoffrey W. Gust Queens in Stone and Silver:The Creation of a Visual Imagery of Queenship in Capetian France by Kathleen Nolan Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art edited by Cynthia Ho, Beth A. Mulvaney, and John K. Downey Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape by Alfred K. Siewers Berenguela of Castile (1180-1246) and Political Women in the High Middle Ages by Miriam Shadis

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Julian of Norwich’s Legacy: Medieval Mysticism and Post-Medieval Reception edited by Sarah Salih and Denise N. Baker Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer by Mary Catherine Davidson The Letters of Heloise and Abelard: A Translation of Their Complete Correspondence and Related Writings translated and edited by Mary Martin McLaughlin with Bonnie Wheeler Women and Wealth in Late Medieval Europe edited by Theresa Earenfight Visual Power and Fame in René d’Anjou, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Black Prince by SunHee Kim Gertz Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog: Medieval Studies and New Media by Brantley L. Bryant Margaret Paston’s Piety by Joel T. Rosenthal Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis by Theresa Tinkle Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature by Roger A. Ladd Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music edited by C. Stephen Jaeger Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Objects in Global Perspective:Translations of the Sacred edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Jennifer Jahner Late Medieval Jewish Identities: Iberia and Beyond edited by Carmen Caballero-Navas and Esperanza Alfonso Outlawry in Medieval Literature by Timothy S. Jones Women and Disability in Medieval Literature by Tory Vandeventer Pearman The Lesbian Premodern edited by Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer, and Diane Watt

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Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent,Virtually Present by Miriamne Ara Krummel Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance by Sharon Aronson-Lehavi Women and Economic Activities in Late Medieval Ghent by Shennan Hutton Palimpsests and the Literary Imagination of Medieval England: Collected Essays edited by Leo Carruthers, Raeleen Chai-Elsholz, and Tatjana Silec Divine Ventriloquism in Medieval English Literature: Power,

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Anxiety, Subversion by Mary Hayes Vernacular and Latin Literary Discourses of the Muslim Other in Medieval Germany by Jerold C. Frakes Fairies in Medieval Romance by James Wade Reason and Imagination in Chaucer, the Perle-poet, and the Cloud-author: Seeing from the Center by Linda Tarte Holley Heloise and the Paraclete: A Twelfth-Century Quest (forthcoming) by Mary Martin McLaughlin

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REASON AND IMAGINATION IN CHAUCER, THE PERLE-POET, AND THE CLOUD-AUTHOR SEEING FROM THE CENTER

Linda Tarte Holley

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REASON AND IMAGINATION IN CHAUCER , THE PERLE-POET, AND THE CLOUD -AUTHOR

Copyright © Linda Tarte Holley, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10510–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Holley, Linda Tarte, 1940– Reason and imagination in Chaucer, the perle-poet, and the cloudauthor : seeing from the center / Linda Tarte Holley. p. cm.—(The new Middle Ages) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–10510–2 (hardback) 1. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400—Philosophy. 2. Author of The cloud of unknowing. 3. Reason in literature. 4. English literature—Middle English, 1100–1500—History and criticism. 5. Philosophy, Medieval, in literature. 6. Mysticism—History—Middle Ages, 600–1500. I. Title. PR1933.P46H65 2011 8219.1—dc22

2011005467

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: September 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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In grateful memory: Benjamin Granade Koonce, teacher and guide

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CONTENTS

Preface Introduction

xiii 1

1

The Nun’s Priest’s Tale: Bookspace as Public Plaza

35

2

The House of Fame: “I wot myself best how y stonde.”

55

3

The Book of the Duchess: The Space of Self

71

4

Perle: The Pedagogy of Soul and Self

91

5

Patience: The Space of Play

115

6

The Cloud of Unknowing: The Dimensionless Space of the Seeking Spirit

135

Epilogue

151

Notes

155

Bibliography

171

Index

179

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PREFACE

J

ohn Burrow’s argument that “there are many things in medieval texts which do not call on historical explanation” ref lects a growing uneasiness with reading Middle English writings largely as archives without the balance of reading them as the products of willing minds—minds that would be interested in us and in showing us, even now, how one might stand to see. Andrew Taylor cites Edward Said and Michael Camille in order to present a similar idea with this plainspoken—and heartening— passage: “More humbly, curiositas might be defended as a persistent desire to move beyond books and find out about people, a desire that all our learning cannot entirely kill.”1 Most recently, as I was revising this manuscript, I found the 2006 Studies in the Age of Chaucer, which features a remarkable set of arguments in the New Chaucer Society’s energizing “Colloquium: The Afterlife of Origins.”2 Arlyn Diamond’s introduction marks out the points of discussion: Those of us who find value in these romances [of the Auchinleck manuscript] would like to think of a source as a point of connection between our text and the world it inhabits. In this light, what seems to offer a way out of the dilemma, at least for a number of contributors, is a turn to culture itself as the object of inquiry, a turn to a map of communicative practices understood synchronically [my emphasis] rather than a linear history that progresses from simple beginnings to achieved genius. In this willingness to look beyond written exemplars, we are following what Chaucer does, rather than what he says.

We would be pleased, Diamond implies, to consider where Chaucer stands and, I would add, how he and his contemporaries allow us to see from here to there. Another prompt for my work here came from a restorative book—The Everyday and Prophetic 3 —written by one of my colleagues. Nick Halpern presents poets writing out of their common culture—primarily Robert Lowell, A.R. Ammons, James Merrill, and Adrienne Rich. Significantly

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for me, his readings argue for the rather natural observations of these poets’ experiences in the world. Their living practices take shape and gain force by means of gestures, looks, stations of the body—features that tell us a great deal about the speaker’s place in the world, where he or she chooses to stand to look. For a plain example, Halpern quotes Adrienne Rich: “Where do we see from is the question” (218). “Conversations are useful to her,” Halpern says, “because they give her—momentarily—a space to stand” (221). These poets of Halpern’s book do not necessarily stand in the same space or correspond with each other or read the same books or each other’s books to know and give attention to similar daily practices, pressures, and impulses. The natural gestures (as John Burrow might say4), assemble the real and defined spaces of their lives and show up in their writings. So it is with these fourteenth-century writers who make conversation about what they might see and know; they offer procedures for knowing; they proffer a space from which or by means of which the audience may see and thereby understand. They are teachers. Though one writer may be more pointedly, more openly, or more conventionally pedagogical than another, there is a common desire to have the audience—even now in this twenty-first century—know where we stand and how. In important ways, the thesis of James Simpson’s book—Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry5 —furnishes ground for observations on these writers as teachers. Teachers like John Gower and Alan of Lille—by way of images that carry “a mental form across into matter” (240)—enforme the reader (of visual or verbal images). That is, “Because the poem aims at human fulfillment through an educative process, so too is the poem’s shape controlled by that end” (7). Significantly, then, enformacioun (as opposed to information) “designates not so much a body of knowledge, that is, as its instructive effect—it denotes not a thing, but an action” (4), giving shape to the knowing mind—to “enform.” Therefore, the enforming pedagogy “is not simply to teach, but to teach according to an ideal pattern, with the aim of forming the recipient of the teaching” (5). Both Alan and Gower mean “to activate the powers of the reader’s own soul” (153). The instructive text, then, may very well “map communicative practices” so that we might see from here to there—and back again. Chaucer’s guide to the use of the astrolabe serves as a remarkable example of method. Three twentieth-century thinkers offer vocabularies that I find especially useful in reconsidering how the work of these fourteenth-century writers provide the terms of their conversations according to how we might learn to acknowledge the reality of what we see as well as the reality of how we see.

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PR E FAC E

xv

Michel Foucault’s study points out the shifting emphasis between the Renaissance and the seventeenth century from “misty analogies” to “the science of order.”6 We recall that Thomas Spratt, writing the history of the Royal Society (1667, first edition), offers a clear example of this shift when he argues for exactitude rather than metaphor and therefore defines a daisy as a five-sided configuration in space rather than the day’s eye. But to put the matter in pre-Renaissance terms, Foucault writes, “the circular world of converging signs [recalling the long history of images like Bradwardine’s circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere] is replaced by an infinite progression [calculus?]” (6)—the table or index. The writings of Chaucer, the Perle-poet, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing will acknowledge such responsibilities—as teachers. Second, Karl M. Morrison’s book, “I am You”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art,7 charts the recurring acknowledgment of the exchange between the understanding self and the other—an exchange that often expresses itself as desiring lover or artist or friend or teacher. A third set of suggestive and overarching implications comes from Thomas Nagel’s book The View from Nowhere.8 Nagel brings into clarity the long struggle—without solution—to the accommodation of objective reality by way of subjective perception and practice. Nagel as philosopher and Nagel as TN (the bundle of experiences and subjective accommodations of those experiences) argue(s) that “we must decide what our relation to the world actually [my emphasis] is and how it can be changed,” for he wishes to “affirm the [rather dangerous] gap between the grounds of our belief about the world and the contents of those beliefs under a realist interpretation” so that “We are then outside ourselves in the sense that we appear inside a conception of the world that we ourselves possess, but that is not tied to our particular point of view” (69–70). While we stand within the margins of these books, we may well acknowledge the gap and thereby gauge how we stand. So it is with these three Middle English writers who openly charge their audiences with the responsibility of knowing where they stand. We can assume that each of three Middle English writers—Chaucer, the Perle–poet, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing—is writing pretty close to the same time and place in fourteenth-century England. Each assuredly sits in some reasonably ordered or quiet place to think and write. We have the sense—in these seven works specifically—that each is aware of himself in the midst of complexities. Moreover, sitting for a time at some formal, material distance from the complexities, even imagining himself so engaged, would prompt speculation about how he

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stands to know. What is more, he must call up real or imagined conversations about how one might give an account of whatever it is he may ask his reader to understand. Consequently, each of these writings has a powerful didactic tow, moving between speaker and listener to define a place of understanding—more directly and therefore more obviously in The Cloud of Unknowing and Patience but equally pressing in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale (though propelled by way of parody), in The House of Fame (rather self-consciously), theatrically in Perle, and ceremoniously in The Book of the Duchess (memory as public expression). Gaston Bachelard acknowledges this pressure—both as teacher and writer—as he introduces his poetics of space: But shall I have the strength to write this book? For there is a great distance between the words we speak uninhibitedly to a friendly audience and the discipline needed to write a book. When we are lecturing, we become animated by the joy of teaching and, at times, our words think for us. But to write a book requires really serious ref lection.9

It is important to note that this assertion is written by a man who established his career as a scientist before he came to acknowledge the limits of science: he writes, “scientific thought . . . is always related thought [my emphasis]. The image [on the other hand], in its simplicity, has no need for scholarship” (xv). This observation is particularly important for my argument. Bachelard’s animation from the “joy of teaching” reminds us of Augustine’s argument that students and teacher “dwell in one another” so that “we learn after some fashion what we teach.” It is Karl Morrison’s hermeneutical “I am you.” In fact, it is necessary for us to acknowledge that, as we read, we choose to stand in the pedagogical gap between text and response. For all Bachelard’s distinction between “related thought” (science) and the “simplicity” of the image (poetry), these fourteenth-century writers construct for us a place where we may begin to understand ourselves as standing to see simultaneously both here and there, between reason and the imagination.

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INTRODUCTION

D

etails of the measurable world of the late medieval period drew the attention of the military strategist, clockmaker, stonemason, rhetorician, woodcarver, engineer, clothmaker, politician, ecclesiast, shipbuilder, chronicler, architect, weaver, embroiderer, scribe, glazier, city planner, roofer, notary, carpenter, chemist, illuminator, farmer, cartographer, sailor, even poet and storyteller. All contributed to the development of systems of measure and logic that made craft possible, marketable, delightful. England’s fourteenth-century age of reason is characterized by the now generally acknowledged perception that numbers and accounting shaped the national enterprise.1 This assertion is not surprising, given what we know about the inf luence of mathematics from the East and, moreover, what the Catholic church taught as fundamental to God’s illuminating power as the designer/craftsman of the universe. However, these two epistemological urges appear to be at odds with each other: one arguing for knowledge by accounting for what we can see and measure, the other claiming knowledge in the unaccountable light of faith in what we can neither see nor measure. For all these productive and practical applications, then, medieval mathematics and the sciences also furnished the pedagogical index for charting the course of the imagination beyond material strictures and structures. Chaucer, the Perle-poet, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing celebrate and exploit this gap as a platform for seeing from the center—in the light of what we might know from where we stand. *

*

*

David Lindberg’s opening chapter of Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science sets out the arguments and some subtleties of these counter claims of faith and science, immediately marking out the issue by quoting Augustine’s pedagogical assessment of the encounter: For when I begin . . . to lead you to an understanding of so great a mystery . . . I will simply be giving you reasons insofar as I am able. But if it is

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2

R E A SON A N D I M AGI N AT ION

not unreasonable for you to beg me or some other teacher to help you to understand what you believe, then you ought to correct your rule—not to the point of overturning faith but of permitting you to discern in the light of reason what you already firmly hold by faith.2

Steven Marrone’s argument in The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century3 develops the field of this exchange by demonstrating both application and appropriation of language—possibilities and inevitabilities that may define a science of divine illumination as it explains the light of God’s countenance in a time when scientific process and prospect gained support and force. In an earlier essay (1988), Marrone points to “specifics of this scholarly discussion” and “the currents of thought among Scholastics” in the later thirteenth century by means of Henry of Ghent’s and John Duns Scotus’s developing arguments: A primary philosophical marker of the Augustinian current, it is often asserted, was the traditional doctrine of divine illumination, by which the most certain form of human knowledge short of that provided by special revelation or beatitude—that is, science itself—was made possible by an infusion of light directly from God into the human mind (22).4

This “infusion of light” has the powerful force of imagination trained by or, we might argue, constrained by scientific reasoning. The important point here is the distinction between metaphor (imputed connection) and analogue (calculated model). Marrone’s argument shows us the developing realization of a “unitary doctrine of divine illumination” that becomes, by the end of the thirteenth century and into the beginning of the fourteenth century, a “suddenly self-aware Augustinianism” (24) defined by “the contradictions between Augustinian illumination and Aristotelian ideal of science.”5 Fundamental to Marrone’s study of that scholastic energy is the argument that the language of both Augustinians and Aristotelians developed toward a “shared disposition to evoke an intellectual attitude,” “using a language and images in ways reminiscent of [the work of each].” Therefore, Marrone argues that “medieval theory of analogy was rooted in Augustinian illuminationism” (332) while Duns Scotus and his fellow Scholastics opposed the notion that “divine illumination” is available to all—including sinners who might, in some erroneous way, think they “know” God by making connections between what they know of the material world and divine presence. As Marrone writes: Following the trace of an analogy from created to divine being might not yield a perfect idea of God, they [the Scholastics] conceded, but then that

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3

I N T RO DU C T ION

was not what one was after, and it was reasonable to presume that analogical thinking generated a concept of divinity adequate to the less stringent demands of theology as actually practiced by the wayfarer.6

Duns Scotus disagrees. For Scotus the theory of divine illumination suggests firsthand experience of divine truth. This urgency for understanding beyond the available and material evidence sharpens. Consequently, the possibilities of logical analysis of, say, love or sorrow or hope may take the compelling shape of hearty adventure or game or poem. In any case, Marrone presents the developing drive of these apparently opposing views and turns our attention to the seeking mind—the wayfarer who draws simultaneously on faith and science for knowledge and understanding. First [in the argument for divine illumination], and surely most obviously, the doctrine of divine illumination explained what guaranteed certitude in human cognition. God’s light shone on the mind, thereby bringing the cognitive acts of error-prone humans into line with the divine exemplar and raising knowledge to a level of reliability impossible without divine aid. In this sense the process of divine illumination was normative, insuring that the mind conformed to the absolute truth. Second, the doctrine of divine illumination justified the conviction that there were some true assertions known by the human mind that were immutable or, in language more common in the thirteenth century, eternal . . . Third, the doctrine of divine illumination served to describe the mind’s road to God. (24)

It is important to note that Charles Cochrane, in his Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine 7, pointedly demonstrates Augustine’s system of understanding his place— like that of any reasoning human being—in the world: [Augustine] discovered a principle capable of saving the reason as well as the will [and] affirmed the existence of an order of truth and value which being in the world as well as beyond it, was within the power of man to apprehend. And, in saving the reason, at the same time it saved the will, by imparting to it that element of rationality without which it must degenerate into mere subjective willfulness. (425)

Even in the early Confessions, then, Augustine “exhibits to a marked degree those qualities of detachment, of close and accurate observation” we see in his later work. And Cochrane reminds us of the important point here: “with Augustine each individual human being is envisaged as a center of radiant energy” (429). As Marrone has argued, this “universal

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carrier of intelligibility might be taken as ‘divine light, mind or simply truth itself.” In any case, Augustine assures us of this “center of radiant energy.” Clearly faith becomes a condition of understanding, then, and reason contains “within itself the power to transcend the limitation of mere subjectivity and to apprehend ‘objective’ truth” (447–48). This centered energy earns our attention in these writers of the fourteenth century and defines the energy we might acknowledge in this twentyfirst century. In his discussion of Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy, A.H. Armstrong argues that an important shift from “cosmic to inward and spiritual religion” has “important consequences for the Christian attitude to natural science.” In fact, he goes on to argue, “We still use, and probably always will use, much of the admirable symbolism which derives from the ancient religious picture of the world, especially the symbolism of light.” However, as Armstrong points out, St. Leo offers a way to think about this divide: “Feel bodily light with your bodily senses and clasp with all the strength of your mind that true light . . . what every one of the Faithful has in his soul is more than what he admires in the sky . . . Let us not devote ourselves to temporal good but be set on eternal ones.8

Marrone’s argument about the conf lict between Aristotelian and Augustinian epistemologies directs particular attention to theories of light or illumination. Katherine Tachau takes up the rich discussions of ‘perspectivists,’ or practitioners of perspective (the science of optics), including Roger Bacon, John Pecham, and Witelo, so that her argument calls attention to the “overwhelming concentration upon vision to the exclusion of other senses.”9 Writers like Chaucer, the Perle-poet, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing make similar cases for “the mind’s road” to such unaccountable and invisible things as sorrow or memory or fame or possibilities, as well as to some sensibility directed to the divine. Mary Carruthers argues for the “craft of thought” guided by images that define a path for understanding.10 She writes that “more is at work than simple heuristic, the mapping of a prescribed route for the faithful always to follow” (262). Significantly, “That journey is not only psychological and interior, but one made with feet and eyes through physical spaces, and colored by bodily sensation and emotion.” Carruthers goes on to make the striking point about early iconoclasts (and Elizabeth Clark’s summary of their dilemma) by saying that their longing for some comforting image of God is not images standing for “truth content” but standing for “their

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cognitive utility, their necessity as sites upon which and by means of which the human mind can build its compositions” (72). This argument for place—“the essential here of human thinking, determines the kind of ‘things’ one will see in the way of one’s meditation on God, as the beginning of a journey sets the length and direction of one’s subsequent route” (73–74).11 The point is—quite plainly—that images are useful but not truth. As we will see, the essential “here” directs attention to Duns Scotus’s argument against the idea that analogy can satisfy our drive to know. One other suggestive point from Carruthers’s study of the craft of thought proves useful for a set of terms that mark the mind’s way to understanding. She argues that mapping the mind’s travel requires our attention to ordered motion from one place to another. We now are so accustomed to thinking of diagrams as the static and abstracted forms of already-rationalized subject-matter, that it is difficult for us even to think of a “picture” as requiring movement on the part of the viewer.12 Yet in exegetical traditions the “place of the Tabernacle” (as Augustine called it) was not static. The varying perspectives [my emphasis] used to picture it, both in words and in paint, suggest this. Indeed, the invention trope of “the place of the Tabernacle” requires movement through and within its structure [my emphasis] as though within a material building. (251)

One part of this journey—as Carruthers explains—is especially significant to these medieval writers who figure in my argument—the ductus. The ductus is the linking motion of the mind’s journey and “insists on movement, the conduct of a thinking mind on its way through a composition” (77). Carruthers’ title for Chapter 2 is “Remember Heaven”: the aesthetics of mneme.”. The title for section 6 of Chapter 2 is “The Concept of Rhetorical Ductus” (77–81). It is the ductus that defines the orderly progress from here to there: And the rhetorical concept of ductus emphasizes way-finding by organizing the structure of any composition as a journey through a linked series of states, each of which has its own characteristic f low. (80–81)

This instructing motion through material space—Carruthers’ ductus— maps out the mind’s travel. As Carruthers concludes, “The medieval monastery church is not itself a cryptogram, but rather a tool, a machine for thinking, whose structure and decoration together serve as its functioning parts” (276). This “machine for thinking” is, then, a way of describing an analogue. For the orderly conduct of the attentive mind—by

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means—toward understanding. The meanwhile and the means accumulate, and the aggregation, as we can see, instructs the “wayfarer” as index. Andrzej Piotrowski’s important essay on “Architecture and the Iconic Controversy” directly addresses this link between analogy (or “icon” or “depicted space”) and the rich expression of light as metaphor for the yearning mind.13 Piotrowski uses the architecture of Byzantine churches to demonstrate the powerful, affective sources of light to replace icons. These churches “reached their highest development not when they resolved but rather when they gave a material form to contradictory but coexistent ideas.” The result of this argument is to describe a “medieval practice of space” demonstrating this idea. The iconoclastic argument against figurative depiction of the divine “shifted away from [asking] what it meant [my emphasis] to represent and instead [argued about] whether or not to represent the divine” at all (105). Specifically, Piotrowski looks toward non-figurative representation— architectural space “that establishes the relationships between given material forms or visual phenomena and symbolic reality without resorting to specific figures and familiar appearances” (107). The non-figurative example Piotrowski offers is particularly useful for my argument about the writings of Chaucer and two of his contemporaries. By way of the architectural features Piotrowski shows us, we may “see how physical space symbolically interacts with a depicted space.” He chooses the architectural feature of the squinch to demonstrate the nonfigurative representation of a holy site where only light is available for the “traveler’s” vision. while remaining empty and amorphous, the physical void space of a squinch acquires a degree of concreteness, materiality and tactility. And this very process of solidifying the physical void space allows this space to represent a holy site in a nonfigurative manner[, for the believer becomes a part of this spatial reality]. (109)

This transformation of void space has to do with “the unusual quality of the daylight” in Hosios Loukas, the religious site of Piotrowski’s observations and a favorite architectural site for showing the affective emanation of light: We can see in the center of the picture Piotrowski provides—in the spot where material form of the building would seem to be deepest— that bright light unexpectedly emanates from the small arched opening of the squinch located in the corner on the second level. Maronne, reading Duns Scotus, sees that “in divine illumination the mind seized the truth only as its cognitive object was suffused in an eternal light. It was thus aggregation alone [my emphasis] that worked

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to restrict the referential domain to divinity, not the addition of a specifically divine signifier” (522). This aggregation, I believe, is part of John of Salisbury’s pedagogy as he develops his argument in The Metalogicon, what Thomas Nagel looks toward in The View from Nowhere (1988), what Gaston Bachelard sees in medieval miniatures (1967), just as Augustine argues the case for his students who can “discern in the light of reason what [they] already firmly hold by faith.” In fact, Duns Scotus argues that “constructs which [the] intellect might end up with,” like “highest being” or “highest good” come “by the same operation as that by which mind contrived fictions like ‘golden mountain’ [we should carefully note the following] the difference being that in the case of the divinity there was a real referent, though one that had not been directly perceived.”14 The argument serves as a guide for the operation of mind—mind’s motion toward understanding. In fact, the operation serves both reason and imagination—as we begin to see. We might name it “aggregation” or “univocity” or “radiant energy.” Cochrane, citing Augustine, clarifies the struggle: “Press on toward the source from which the light of reason itself is kindled” (Cochrane, 453, n. De Vera Relig. 39.72). Arguing in Contra Faustum for an “intellectual light,” Augustine looks for that light that “gives us a clear perception of the distinction between itself and other things, as well as of the distinction between those things themselves” (Contra Faustum, xx.7, Cochrane, 456). As we watch the developing attention to “views” in the fourteenth century, it is useful to consider Nagel’s argument in The View from Nowhere, particularly when we consider Augustine’s argument, as Cochrane poses it: “The knowledge in question is elsewhere described as that of the ‘spiritual man’; that is to say, of the man who sees his universe, not ‘through the eye of the f lesh’ but in the light of a principle whereby he is enabled “to judge everything, without himself being judged by any man—born and developed more in living and sympathetic contacts than in the detachments of technical study” (Cochrane, 459). As Cochrane explains: “the appeal from Augustine is from the ratio scientiae to the ratio sapientiae, from what [Augustine] calls the method of science to that of insight, wisdom, understanding . . . born and developed more in living and sympathetic contacts than in the detachments of technical study”(457). To sapientia, Augustine declares, “belongs the intellectual apprehension of the eternal” as distinguished from ‘the rational apprehension of the temporal’ which is the work of science” (458). For science, argues Augustine, does not create; it constructs, using for this purpose the material of sense-perception. Thus the ratio scientiae, as he calls it, comes into play only when the mind directs its attention “outwards,”

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addressing itself to the task of organizing this material. Its working is therefore contingent upon the assumption that the material in question will present itself in ‘patterns’ capable of apprehension by the mind; and this assumption it can by no means verify. Furthermore, the patterns as they emerge are in all cases relative to the capacities of the observer [my emphasis]. (457)

The extraordinary force of this argument furnishes urgent possibilities for the imagination. Of course, “purer Aristotelianizers could simply assert that intellect devised a concept of divinity by spinning out an analogy with whatever it knew from the sensible world.”15 The effect is the shift from analogue (model) to metaphor (similitude). The distinction is crucial since analogy offers duplicative systems. But metaphors connect by way of similarity: we organize what we see in terms of what we already know. However, Duns Scotus apparently has little patience with the formalities of analogy in the way of figurative depiction: univocity is the way we, as creatures, may naturally understand the connection [ductus?] between divine illumination and our material understanding, but not by means of analogy, some mediating object of our attention.16 The way of understanding is open to the wayfaring mind. While the synthesis continues, the argument against analogy becomes an argument for the imagination as a link between what we may understand even without calculated proof. The pedagogical drive of “the knowing mind” (Marrone, Light, 207) and its desire for “organization of knowledge” (Marrone, Light, 566) define the work of the wayfarer. As a consequence, “intellect was not left to cross the analogical gap between created and divine ‘being’ on its own, since God’s luminous presence was there to lead the way” from where the seeking spirit stands (Marrone, Light, 337). At issue will be all the theoretical focal points where the question of the nature of science and the multivalent notion of “divine illumination” converged: the matter of the character of scientific knowledge and the criteria for speculative certitude, the nature of mind’s object and the noetics by which that object is seized, the explanation for immutability of scientific truth, and the account of how God can be known by intellect working in the world . . . the wayfarer’s knowledge of God. (Marrone, 531)

Cochrane summarizes the state of mind from Augustine’s point of view: Philosophy woke up to discover that she had on her hands no less than three archae or first principles, each of which meant in fact an independent problem; she had to offer an account of being, of movement, and of the order or relationship between them. (467)

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When Cochrane says what Augustine has offered is a “new physics, a new ethic, and a new logic” (462), he has, then, outlined the generative activities of Chaucer and two of his contemporaries. For my argument, I direct attention to the sensible energies filling all available space for understanding. Whatever audience these three fourteenth-century writers—Chaucer and two of his contemporaries—had in mind, what each offers us in the twenty-first century is their clear sense of the centrality of the mind for mapping Thomas Nagel’s argument: “In the conduct of life of all places, the rivalry between the view from within and the view from without must be taken seriously.”17 The light of the wayfaring mind—by way of dream or pedagogical reasoning—might, then, gather up the centered energies in order to define and understand how or where we might fruitfully stand to see and know. My argument about Chaucer and some of his contemporaries is that the Aristotelian insistence on reason is employed as a proof model for works of the imagination with the effect that—by way of Augustine’s own recommendation—we may risk the exercise of applying the strictures and structures of reason to what is unaccountable, vast, and open to the imagination. We can watch such effects in Chaucer’s exploitation of fable as index in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale (chapter 1), in The House of Fame as a mapping of space and time (chapter 2), in The Book of the Duchess, where we watch the dubious application of either analogue or metaphor for explaining sorrow (chapter 3), in Perle, where we must consider f irst the poet’s appropriation of simple human observation (chapter 4), and then follow the poet’s gamelogic as he gains sharper visions and keener conceptions of how one might see and know (chapter 5). We may follow, in The Cloud of Unknowing (chapter 6), an exercise of unknowing that relieves the contemplative of the obligation to devise an index for measuring the wideness of God’s grace. Even so, f inally it is the material vastness of the cosmos measured by the astrolabe that instructs little Lewis as he/ we stand with Chaucer simultaneously on the edge and at the center. Summarizing Duns Scotus’ inf luence, Marrone writes: More than any of his fellow Augustinians, Duns thus succeeded in laying out a fully naturalizing explanation for simple knowledge of God, on the basis of which could be established the framework for a natural theology open to rational examination even outside Christian circles [my emphasis].

Though his opponents argue that knowledge of God is “rooted in analogy,” Duns Scotus presses for univocity—the “attachment to generous

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assumptions about God’s intimate presence to mind” [my emphasis] (570)— that insures “natural knowledge of God for intellect [even] in the world of sin.” In fact, “It was unity and commonness that allowed ‘being,’ discovered in the business of knowing creation, to serve as foundation for knowledge of a reality so elevated as God” (520–21). In short, analogues do not serve. Both metaphor and analogy fall short, to be plain, because the metaphysical makes itself present in the natural world by means of the seeking imagination. Even so, the analogy or metaphor or index offers what Carruthers might call a “cognitive utility.” Pointedly, however, “Composition begins with clearly and deliberately locating oneself in a place, which may be an actual location but is most importantly conceived as a mental position, both a habitation for the mind and a direction” [my emphasis] (73). The problem caused John of Salisbury to teach his students quite plainly that we learn first by our senses—a “naturalizing explanation” if there ever was one. In their essays on “the encounter between Christianity and science,” Lindberg and Numbers set out the quite serviceable pedagogical practice of holding reason and faith together—even holding each responsible to the other—a practice that drives much of the intellectual energy of the Middle Ages.18 Edward Grant writes that, by the time of William of Conches (ca. 1080–1154), “A newfound confidence in human reason and sensory experience had emerged.”19 William, “for whom physical laws took precedence over ecclesiastical authority,” “denounced those who ‘ignorant themselves of the forces of nature and wanting to have company in their ignorance . . . don’t want people to look into anything; they want us to believe like peasants and not to ask the reason behind things’ ”(51). What Marrone shows us clearly is Duns Scotus’ dilemma—an abiding one: “the dilemma of an Augustinian who had lost his moorings.” If “there was nothing really common between the being of God and that of creatures and if the concept of God’s being was only analogous [my emphasis] to the concept of the being of creatures, then how did the mind actually [my emphasis] come up with the concept of God’s being without any direct avenue to the divine?” (Henry of Ghent and Duns Sotus, 52).20 Suzanne Akbari’s concluding chapter (“Division and Darkness”) in Seeing through the Veil offers a clear and useful review of her work toward answering such a question: Vision is a powerful metaphor for the act of knowing . . . Yet this exuberantly positive view of the accessibility of knowledge, whether mediated through vision or through language, had already by the mid-thirteenth century come to be regarded with a more jaundiced eye ( 234).21

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By 1159, with the completion of The Metalogicon,22 John of Salisbury explains his plan—a defense of logic—in what Charles Sears Baldwin describes as the “cardinal treatise of mediaeval pedagogy”: This treatise, which I have taken care to divide into four books for the reader’s refreshment, is entitled The Metalogicon.23 For, in it, I undertake to defend logic. (5)

As John writes with earnest pedagogical purpose, we are moved by his logic: Prudence, according to Cicero, is a virtue of the conscious soul, a virtue whose object is the investigation, perception, and skillful utilization of the truth. Whereas the other virtues relate to certain requirements of everyday life, the subject matter of this virtue [prudence]24 is truth. Taking care to avoid deception from any and every quarter, prudence looks to the future, and forms providence; recalls what has happened in the past, accumulates a treasury of memories; shrewdly appraises what is present, and begets astuteness or discernment; or takes full cognizance of everything [whether past, present, or future], and constitutes circumspection. And when it [prudence] has ascertained the truth, prudence develops into a form of scientific knowledge. Since sensation gives birth to imagination, and these two to opinion, and opinion to prudence, which grows to the maturity of scientific knowledge, it is evident that sensation is the progenitor of science [my emphasis]. Or, as we put it above,many sensations, or sometimes even only one, result in a memory, many memories in an experimental proof, many experimental proofs in a rule, and many rules in an art, which provides scientific skill. (IV, 12, 222)

It is important to bear in mind that his work of understanding begins with sensation. Memories draw from the past, and prudence links past and future in order to appraise the present by circumspection: John’s assertion that “sensation is the progenitor of science” is an opener for his next section (IV, 13) on “The difference between ‘science’ and ‘wisdom,’ and what is ‘faith.’ ” This pedagogical space stages these meaningful and abiding edges to understanding and furnishes a place to stand to see—from what we do know relative to what we might seek to know. I want to admit here a pedagogical gap in order to take advantage of some late twentieth- century guides that organize a similar prudent—and charitable—circumspection for gaining a sense of one’s place in the world. First, such a desire to find where one might stand to know—one’s perspective—nourishes the pedagogy of the fourteenth century, and Karl Morrison’s suggestive language in “I Am You”: The

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Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art ref lects the Augustinian insistence on reception between seeker and teacher: “For Augustine, love—holy or perverse—encompassed the individual in a wider society: ‘Charity [Augustine wrote], which holds men together in a bond of unity, would not have means of infusing souls and virtually mixing them together if men could teach nothing to men.’ ” Moreover, “As for those who heard in charity, Augustine portrayed Christ saying, ‘When one of the least of mine learns, I learn.’ ” 25 In The Trinity, Augustine writes: For so great is the power of a sympathetic disposition of mind, that, as they are affected while we are speaking, and we are affected while we are learning, we have our dwelling in each other; and thus, at one and the same time, they as it were in us speak what they hear, and we in turn learn after a certain fashion what we teach.26

Second, Gaston Bachelard’s argument in The Poetics of Space comes close to Augustine’s own sense of empathetic exchange of self and other: “When we are lecturing, we become animated by the joy of teaching and, at times, our words think for us.”27 This pedagogical ref lection anticipates what we will see in Bachelard’s demonstration of a synoptical or an aesthetic circumspection in medieval miniatures. Third, Thomas Nagel’s “view” presses on us a pedagogical obligation on us as contemporary readers to render ourselves available among all objective possibilities—while we are conscious of ourselves. In fact, Nagel’s confidence in our perceptual capacities reminds us of Albert of Saxony’s millet seed and Wisdom’s careful and thoroughgoing illustration for her student Aristotle—models we will see at the conclusion to this introduction. A fourth approach comes from Bruno Latour’s synchronic templates— for example, index and graph—which serve as abstractions by means of which we view, with studied detachment, the realities at a distance from where we stand.28 Nagel explains a drive to reposition his readers in a pedagogical context like John of Salisbury’s: The existence of our objective capacity . . . does not seem reducible to simpler, more reactive, less creative mental operations. It turns out that the human mind is much larger than it needs to be merely to accommodate the perspective of an individual human perceiver and agent within the world. (70)

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We can sense here another way of thinking about John of Salisbury’s “circumspection.” In fact, says Nagel, the “recognition that this is so creates pressure on the imagination to recast our picture of the world so that it is no longer the view from here”(70). Nagel’s observation is that “indexicals in general are untranslatable into objective terms, because they are used to refer to persons, things, places, and times from a particular position within the world [my emphasis], without depending on the user’s objective knowledge of that position.” The problem is elementary: “One can’t translate a statement whose truth depends on its context of utterance [my emphasis] into one whose truth does not.” Nagel summarizes this part of his argument: “The crucial question is whether the elimination of this particular first-person thought in favor of its impersonal truthconditions leaves a significant gap in our conception of the world. I think it does” (59). These observations from Nagel remind us of Augustine’s point that we might well train ourselves “to discern in the light of reason what [we] already firmly hold by faith”; it is John of Salisbury’s argument that we might exercise the kind of prudence that “takes full cognizance of everything, and constitutes circumspection.” From these everyday “sensations,” then, “grows the maturity of scientific knowledge” (IV, 12, 222). As Nagel writes, “Not only can we form the pure idea of a world that contains us and of which our impressions are a part, but we can give this idea a content which takes us very far from our original impressions” (70). Considering the art of writing, Henry James makes a similar point about writing good fiction—that a young lady living in a village may very well make a go of writing about the military if she is one of those “upon whom nothing is lost.”29 Such a thriving consciousness may very well move us toward understanding. Our sense of where we stand comes from a willingness to acknowledge our relative position. It is not that we can or must desire to move materially but that we place ourselves here and there by memory, imagination, map, or metaphor. By this motion of mind—this pedagogical exercise—we begin to understand. We might recall Samuel Johnson’s argument that if we asked him to tell whether a building were large or small, he would take quite a while to explain the buildings he himself had seen and then to learn which buildings his questioner knew. If, however, the questioner wanted to know the geometric design of a particular building, his answer would be brief: the distinction lies in the collective imagination on the one hand and a model on the other. We can make use of Bruno Latour’s definition of synoptic exercises and models for knowing by means of relative place. At the outset, Latour

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clarifies the need for a measurable, readable world by explaining how the skill of making tables and graphs gives science mastery over material reality. In brief, his point is that providing scale models—f lat- surface images of complex problems—brings distant and complex realities to hand as analogues. In considering such ways of controlling information for practical uses, Latour, as an anthropological philosopher, approaches the measurable, readable world from the angle of “visualization and cognition.”30 I am particularly interested in his way of thinking about grids and indices, especially since he begins with William Ivins and Samuel Edgerton’s discussions of early perspectivist paintings. Both Ivins and Edgerton consider the science of linear perspective in the Renaissance as it develops out of the Middle Ages, 31 and Latour makes use of their arguments: Ivins argues, as Latour reads him, that “perspective . . . is an essential determinant of science and technology because it creates ‘optical consistency,’ or, in simpler terms, a regular avenue through space” (8). Edgerton establishes an important point for Latour: “The unexpected advantage [of linear perspective] is revealed as soon as religious or mythological themes and utopias are drawn with the same perspective as that which is used for rendering nature.”32 In other words, the application of mathematical logic to spiritual motive supplies ground for phenomenological argument. At this point in his essay, Latour might have gone on to explain the “advantage” as “metaphor,” but he emphasizes “optical consistency” first and then moves on to metaphor. The important point here is that perspectivist theory successfully and practically “collects” the forces of the imagination and science (geometry). Aids to instruction, Latour argues—such as “indexes, bibliographies, dictionaries, papers with references, tables, columns, photographs, peaks, spots, bands”—provide a two-way exchange of information and ideas. The exchange, he says, enables us to “present absent things.” (He might now say “by means of metaphor.”) I argue, of course, against the easy interchange between analogue and metaphor, but Latour turns our attention to distinctions we can make. Fiction—even the wildest or the most sacred—and things of nature— even the lowliest—have a meeting ground, a common place, because they all benefit from the same “optical consistency.” Not only can you displace cities, landscapes, or natives and go back and forth to and from them along avenues through space, but you can reach saints, gods, heavens, palaces, or dreams . . . and look at them with the same two-dimensional surface. (8)

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In fact, Latour might see connections between his point and that point of the Scholastics who argued for contrived fictions like “the golden mountain.” As we will see, this “miniaturizing” becomes significant in Albert of Saxony and Guillaume Deguileville’s fourteenth- century examples of “optical consistency” and its pedagogical advantages. One detail of Latour’s argument supports my point that metaphor— an activity of the browsing imagination—drives these Middle English teachings in promising and problematic ways. Latour argues that these inscriptions are powerful because they are (1) mobile, (2) immutable, (3) f lat, (4) of modifiable scale, (5) are (in general) easily reproduced, (6) can be re-combined, (7) can be superimposed one on another, (8) may become part of a written text, and (9) (“the last advantage is the greatest”) “the two- dimensional character of inscriptions allows them to merge with geometry—space on paper can be made continuous with three- dimensional space” (20–22). In listing these nine important advantages of inscriptions, Latour is explaining how they serve us—have always served us—in the sciences. I have kept advantage #6 to consider separately, for he argues that, because inscriptions have these other eight advantages, they can be reshuff led and recombined (advantage #6). “Most of what we impute to connections in the mind may be explained by this reshuff ling of inscriptions that all have the same ‘optical consistency’ ”—and here is the advantage of Latour’s presentation that is important for a point of my argument: “The same is true of what we call ‘metaphor.’ ” Small- scale inscriptions, Latour suggests, define “the act of seeing,” and Svetlana Alpers’s book, he argues, explains “ ‘visual culture’ changing over time.”33 In fact, she “provides [the old expression “world view”] with material meaning: how a culture sees the world and makes it visible. A new visual culture redefines both what it is to see, and what there is to see” [my emphasis (9–10). By means of inscription, then, with its work as collection and connection, Latour brings attention to metaphor in a way that yokes science and imagination, and Alpers argues that we learn “to secretly see and without suspicion what is done far off in other places.”34 Latour draws his conclusions by indexing the physical world while Nagel comes to a similar synoptical program of instruction by recommending that we acknowledge ourselves as relative to all else we can consider. We recall that C.S. Lewis once observed that one of the “discoveries” of the modern world that people of the Middle Ages would have valued is the index card—a tool Latour would see useful for inscribing “the f lat surface that . . . enables mastery” (21). Now, of course, our computers offer what Latour could see as the opportunity to watch “domains which are far apart become literally inches apart; domains which are convoluted

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and hidden, become f lat; thousands of occurrences can be looked at synoptically” (28). While Latour goes on to apply these inscriptive ways of understanding the world power—political and economic—it is William Ivins who provides the satisfying answer to Latour’s basic question: “Why is perspective such an important invention?” Ivins’s answer: “Because of its logical recognition of internal invariances through all the transformations produced by changes in spatial location.”35 Plainly, we come again to the idea of univocity and the question of where one might be present to see and know. Nagel’s proposal requires us to exploit the consciousness of ourselves among all possibilities we may discern—with tools provided by what Duns Scotus’ calls univocity. What indices were available, reliable, desirable as a platform for instruction in fourteenth-century England? Bachelard has pointed to a kind of index produced by the medieval miniaturist who, with his audience, would have enjoyed the sense of mastery over measurable and, perhaps most satisfying, measureless, imaginative space.36 What is persuasive about Bachelard’s poetic language—imagistic, metaphysical, imaginative, and sometimes lyrical—is that he comes at the “poetics of space” from a life’s work in physics—research and teaching. As a foreword to Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, Etienne Gilson writes, “Bachelard distinguished between two forms of imagination, the formal imagination and the material imagination, and the main point was that he found them both at work in nature as well as in the mind” (viii). Perhaps this next important sentence (one is tempted to say “line”) from Bachelard’s introduction (xvii) deftly disassembles, sorts, and reorganizes the spatial considerations: “In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for” (8). But we must pay attention to how he refines his thesis to say that “miniature can accumulate size. It is vast in its way” (215). Having made these assertions, his meditative tone is no surprise when he writes: May all matter be given its individual place, all sub-stances their ex- stance. And may all matter achieve conquest of its space, its power of expansion over and beyond the surfaces by means of which a geometrician would like to define it. (202)37

Bachelard calls our attention, in his own way, to issues we have considered in Nagel and Latour when he recalls a specific image in Henry-Louis Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics (La Pensée et le mouvant, 221)—the drawer in a filing cabinet “as an example of a metaphor that hardens and loses even the spontaneousness of the image and effectively stands for ‘dry’ rationalism” (76).

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But aside from this idea of a dull rationalism, Bachelard wishes to make an important distinction between image (like the miniature he admires) and metaphor: “Metaphor is related to a psychic being from which it differs [my emphasis]. An image, on the contrary, product of absolute imagination, owes its entire being to the imagination.” Metaphor he says “cannot be studied phenomenologically, and . . . in fact, it is not worth the trouble, since it has no phenomenological value.” Though Bachelard uses the “drawer” as metaphor, his argument suggests that the drawer image operates as index. In any case, his point is clear: In opposition to a philosophy that seeks to discover the conceptualistic features in contemporary science, the “drawer” metaphor remains a crude instrument for polemical discussion. (76)38

The result, Bachelard says, is “a ready-made garment [that] suffices to clothe a poor rationalist” (75). There is another suggestive observation from Bachelard—as a phenomenologist—ref lecting on Baudelaire’s “metaphysical argument by means of which the vast world and vast thoughts are united” (192). For Bachelard, the passage “designates the phenomenological direction I [Bachelard] myself pursue: The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold” (192). In fact, he seems close to Nagel’s conception when he says, “The word vast reconciles contraries” (192). But, perhaps, even more thoroughly pointed for my work here is Bachelard’s assertion that “profound metaphysics is rooted in an implicit geometry which—whether we will or no—confers spatiality upon thought” (212). Through the “immensity” where two kinds of space blend—“the space of intimacy and world space”—Bachelard argues for a kind of “coexistentialism [where] every object invested with intimate space becomes the center of all space.” The effect is that “everything takes form, even infinity” (212). There is a pleasure, it seems, in anticipating Geffrey’s own amazing report of what he sees at Fame’s house: Y saugh him carien a wynd-melle [a windmill] Under a walsh-note shale [a walnut shell]. The House of Fame (1280–81)

In fact, Geffrey says, it would take “Fro hennes into domes day” (1284) to tell about all the people he saw there.” Bachelard makes a similar point in his chapter on “house and universe”: a house that has been experienced is not an inert box. “Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.” Bachelard is arguing for the “dynamic rivalry between house and universe” so that “we are far removed from any reference to simple geometrical forms” (47).

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In fact, as Bachelard argues, “A house that is as dynamic as this [those of the medieval miniatures] allows the poet [or miniaturist or magician] to inhabit the universe” (51). And later: “This coexistence of things in a space to which we add consciousness of our existence, is a very concrete thing” (203). In Albert of Saxony’s image of the millet seed and in Guillaume de Guileville’s conversation between Wisdom and Aristotle, we will see how these very arguments for spatial use work for the fourteenth century. When Edgerton argues that the artist is a quantifier, he reminds us of how we might stand to view the world, with the effect that the gaping divide between now and then—or between here and metaphor—seems to shrink. In Nagel’s words we are taken “very far from our original impressions”; for Augustine, we begin “to discern in the light of reason what [we] already firmly hold by faith”; for John of Salisbury, prudence takes “care to avoid deception from any and every quarter,” “looks to the future, and forms providence,” then “takes full cognizance of everything and constitutes circumspection.” The word circumspection bears out a driving obligation for these teachers—including St. Augustine, John of Salisbury and, I think, for Chaucer and some of his contemporaries who insist, so early, on an acknowledgment of where or how we might stand to understand. Stephen G. Nichols, considering the medieval argument that “there was a world of material reality whose boundaries (from our viewpoint) seem amazingly f luid,” cites Chaucer’s treatise on the astrolabe as an example of “a device for confirming the rational proportions of the universe” and as confirmation that the astrolabe was not only an observing instrument but also was crafted as an artwork reproducing the form of the universe that it was meant to observe.39

The astrolabe clearly is not the convenient and f lexible f lat surface Latour values, but it is a hand-held model that connects the earthbound observer and the heavens—no minor event for Chaucer and his little Lewis, as we will see. Nichols goes on to say that Chaucer’s “showing the connection of the parts of the human body with the heavenly divisions or signs of the zodiac . . . also reinforced the idea of a continuum between the individual human being and the visible world” so that “to perceive the universe scientifically was to know the boundaries of one’s own being” (4), making claims, then, for observing the space between here and there. I return to Chaucer’s pedagogical device in chapter 7. For the moment, it seems useful to consider how Latour’s schemata may serve practical ways of mathematically or geometrically ordering the world

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on a scale we can use. However, Michel Foucault, in his consideration of “world order,” laments the development of such aids and senses a deep divide: Resemblance [connection, then? metaphor?] which had for long been the fundamental category of knowledge—both the form and content of what we know—became dissociated in an analysis based on terms of identity and difference; moreover, whether indirectly by the intermediary of measurement, or directly and, as it were, on the same footing, comparison became a function of order; and, lastly, comparison ceased to fulfill the function of revealing how the world is ordered (54).40

In Foucault’s judgment, the daisy has (unfortunately?) become a five- sided configuration in space—presented to us in language that is transparent, neutral, and measurable by particularized design (56), as opposed to language that fashions analogue: the daisy as the sun’s eye. Metaphor, contrary to analogue, can never attain perfect certainty: “the old system of similitudes, never complete and always open to fresh possibilities, could, it is true, through successive confirmations, achieve steadily increasing probability; but it was never certain [my emphasis] (55). This achieved uncertainty, I argue, is the generative space of pedagogical inquiry we see in Chaucer and two of his contemporaries. Katherine Tachau makes clear—in her argument in Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham—that “there will be no attempt to see how an Augustinian tradition somehow managed to absorb an Aristotelian one, for to focus on those two will force us to miss the shapes in the tapestry” [my emphasis] (xvii).41 And she cites a passage from Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale”: And somme of hem wondred on the mirour, That born was up into the maister-tour, Hou men myghte in it swich thynges se. Another answered, and seyde it myghte wel be Naturelly, by composiciouns Of angles and of slye ref lexiouns, And seyde that in Rome was swich oon That speken of Alocen, and Vitulon, And Aristotle, that written in hir lyves Of queynte mirours and of perspectives, As knowen they that han hir bookes herd. “Squire’s Tale,” The Canterbury Tales, [ed. Robinson, ll. 225–35]

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The questions seem to come from our own age, but such inquiry is cultivated by a long, rich progress. The daunting effect of such measured particularity, says Foucault, is that “The activity of the mind [as it compares] . . . will therefore no longer consist in drawing things together, in setting out on a quest for everything that might reveal some sort of kinship, attraction, or secretly shared nature within them, but, on the contrary, [will consist] in discrimination, that is, in establishing their identities, then the inevitability of the connections with all the successive degrees of a series [my emphasis]” (55). What is more, for Foucault, the exercise suggests, we might say, a triumph of calculus over metaphor: “From now on, every resemblance must be subjected to proof by comparison, that is, it will not be accepted until its identity and the series of its differences [my emphasis] have been discovered by means of measurement with a common unit, or, more radically, by its position in an order” (55). Metaphor gives way to analysis, and “The circular world of converging signs is replaced by an infinite progression” [but not, we should note, to “connection”] (60). Foucault argues Dun Scotus’ point—as Marrone explains it: “the ‘being’ [which] mind grasped at every stage of cognition was the same concept, undivided and indivisible . . . It was unity and commonness that allowed ‘being,’ discovered in the business of knowing creation, to serve as foundation for knowledge of a reality so elevated as God” (Light, 522–23). Language such as “undivided and indivisible” from Duns Scotus reminds us of that gathering of created things—aggregation—that Nagel has also argued for if we are to take advantage of a view from nowhere. As another way of thinking about this space where we might stand to see or understand, we may recall that Marjorie Nicholson, in her Studies in the Effect of the “New Science” on Seventeenth-Century Poetry, brought into focus what she saw as a quite different conclusion in the breaking of such an orderly circle in Renaissance England.42 While Foucault argues that metaphors—we might say, God as a circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere—promised infinite possibilities, Nicholson makes a case for the idea that the “breaking” of that circle—that “just circumference” (as Nicholson cites Milton) (7)—resulted in disorder and a frenzied searching after clarity: “Only since the seventeenth century has the poet felt the necessity of bringing together what the shears of a scientific philosophy cut apart.” However, Nicholson writes, “Historians are indulgent with the poets, if they mention them at all, for poets may be allowed to lag behind the times and repeat inherited metaphor” [my emphasis] (125). Her point is that “the language of poetry and of science was one when the world was one” (124). It is true that the pleasures of indexing were not lost on seventeenth- century

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poets: “Changes upon the ‘epitome’ or ‘small copy’ could be rung indefinitely by wits who felt the same ingenuous pleasure in the decreasing smallness of things as does a student learning for the first time about progress ad infinitum” (58). There was, it seems, a rather intense fervor in the seventeenth- century poets as they celebrated our sturdy sense of self in the world. As Nicholson writes: If it was true that man was not only a copy of God but a “Mappe” of the world and an “Epitome” of the universe—and there were few who did not so believe at the beginning of the seventeenth century—it was no wonder that men studied that “Mappe” as closely as they pored upon geographical globes in their studies, and followed new discoveries in anatomy as in astronomy, seeking in themselves a clue to the riddles of the universe. (35)

One could know the world by its mirroring miniature—man himself— as index or, we might say, “analogue.” One other affective observation from Nicholson shows the charged disposition of the seventeenth century, energized by the possibilities of precision and shaped by a framing certitude. The mark of this motion comes from Henry More—what Nicholson calls More’s “conversion to infinity”: Such a Deity could not have created one world, one universe, once and once only; His world, His universe, His cosmos must reach to infinity, without limitation of time or space, must be as diverse, as full, as varied as its limitations would permit . . . Important though his ideas of space were in the history of metaphysics, More’s response to the vastness, grandeur, and magnificence of the universe was more often that of a poet than of a metaphysician. Space afforded him not only logical satisfaction but emotional gratification [p. 163, my emphasis].

There is a poignancy in Nicholson’s conclusion to this important chapter (its title also the title of the volume—“The Breaking of the Circle”): Henry More had always loved beauty, but beauty had been associated in his mind with the finite, the limited, the proportioned. Beauty satisfied the emotions; it did not confound them. Infinity overwhelmed. In his conversion to infinity Henry More had had an experience he was never to forget. If he could not write as a poet, he felt as a poet, and felt something no poet before him had attempted to express. He was the first English poet who attempted to put into language man’s feeling for what was not yet called Sublime—a Sublime that . . . released human imagination to a spaciousness of thought man had not known before. (165)

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Nagel, writing toward the conclusion to his argument about the view from nowhere, makes a point similar to Nicholson’s review of More’s sense of himself: Finally, there is an attitude which cuts through the opposition between transcendent universality and parochial self-absorption , and that is the attitude of nonegocentric respect for the particular. [Nagel cites Jacob Adler here—“for making me see this.”] It is conspicuous as an element in aesthetic response, but it can be directed to all kinds of things, including aspects of one’s own life . . . Particular things can have a noncompetitive completeness which is transparent to all aspects of the self. This also helps explain why the experience of great beauty tends to unify the self: the object engages us immediately and totally in a way that makes distinctions among points of view irrelevant [my emphasis].

Nagel admits that “even if we achieve a measure of subjective- objective integration by bringing the two standpoints closer together, . . . [t]he gap is too wide to be closed entirely, for anyone who is fully human” (222– 23). The conclusion to Nagel’s book celebrates, I think, what Chaucer and some of his contemporaries were willing to look toward: “Our problem [the observing self ] has in this sense no solution, but to recognize that [my emphasis] is to come as near as we can to living in the light of truth” (231). By the end of the thirteenth century, Marrone argues, that developing realization of a “unitary doctrine of divine illumination” becomes a “selfaware Augustinianism” defined by “contradictions between Augustinian illumination and Aristotelian ideal of science” (Light, 24–25). Here is, then, a defining gap. What organizing indices—or urgencies for designing such indices—were available in fourteenth- century England for defining the space between perception (what we can see) and conception (what we might see)? We may fruitfully begin by considering practical matters of space, like those set out by Nicholas Howe, who makes the following observations about the spaces of medieval landscapes and posits a most suggestive shift in medieval ways of thinking about material space and place: In the charters [of land in Anglo- Saxon England], landscape is not a vista to be enjoyed but a sequence of signs to be walked. The course around the boundaries matters; the periphery is indeed, in this case, more central than what fills the center [my emphasis]. These documents speak of landscape as bounded, as contained by human- defined purposes. Indeed, within most such parcels, the terrain would self- evidently determine its use.43

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Howe has demonstrated the practical indexing of community, most pointedly for my purposes, by observing that these documents designed to “chart” the landscape “never describe in any detail the parcel itself but only track its edges or boundaries” and thereby abstractly define potential uses (102)—certainly a practice of useful indexing. On the other hand, however, early records indicate that the unit of measure was deeds, acts— like those, for example, on the pilgrim’s way that marked the pilgrim’s “progress.” Such “marking” was not mere numbering of days on the journey but an account of the traveler’s use of places along the way or the assessment of work accomplished. Chaucer’s Pardoner, working toward his own profit and Harry Bailey’s putative credit, offered to assess the measure of Harry’s soul mile per mile in case he fell from his horse, broke his neck, and must, unexpectedly, make soulful assessment before God. In quotidian ways, the “measure of reality,” as Crosby puts it, or the “practice of everyday,” as de Certeau argues,44 applies: the value of a plot of land—the fruitful space—was calculated by how much land a yoke of oxen could plow in a day.45 At day’s end, the attentive farmer knew where he stood in terms of potential and calculable productivity. But J.A. Raftis makes an interesting observation based on the records of Godmanchester, “a small town in late medieval England—1278–1400”: when the inquisitors for the Hundred Rolls (specifically of the year 1279) documented properties and farm payments, they did not organize their information on the basis of value but, rather, in order of their walking itinerary through the town. The material exercise of this paced mapping presents all the material reality of this English town while it offers an index for convenient study and satisfied the practical urge to define and order—however finite—the materials at hand.46 With certain satisfaction, then, such maps, it seems, became the index. However, M.-D. Chenu has argued persuasively that as early as the twelfth century, the “new attitude largely ignored the symbolic for the concrete, unmediating [my emphasis] ‘bare facts’ and passed over the animist for the inert, invariable regularities.” What is more, Chenu points out that It was not only the great elements of the revealed mystery that entered into a sequence at once historical and prophetic; the least details, individual words themselves, were lifted to the level of a persistent allegory. Peter of Celle classified and interpreted allegorically all the biblical texts that mention bread; and if this author seems to us an eccentric who pushed allegorization too far, we are compelled to recognize that his contemporaries did not regard him as such. John of Salisbury, a man of judgment and a balanced humanist, asked him for a treatise of the same sort on wine, vine, and vineyard.”47

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Such were the pleasures of enumeration. Given what we know about John of Salisbury and his interest in bringing to light information for logical circumspection—especially as material for his students—the interest in such cataloging would suit him. In the face of Platonic idealism, Chenu writes, “masters on the pedagogical value of images and figures show that, even without being acquainted with Aristotelian noetic and even while subject to the inf luences of the reigning Platonism, they were aware that realism was requisite to the operation of symbolism [my emphasis]” (135). In fact, Chenu will go on to argue, “Faith was being fashioned into science” (279–80). The model quantifier, of course, is God, Whose creative practice (meotodes maehte) has none of the human craftsman’s limitations or pressures since He knows everything and, moreover, has eternity to devise and carry out His plan. If God is the master measurer, then those scientific spiritualists, like Thomas Bradwardine, were naturally compelled toward some irritable reaching after fact. It is important to note the fine work of Edith Wilks Dolnikowski on Thomas Bradwardine in her A View of Time and a Vision of Eternity in Fourteenth-Century Thought.48 Her title sets out the issue: “view” and “vision”/”time” and “eternity”—what is countable and what is not. She closes her introduction by writing that “the ideas of these thinkers [the “Ockhamists” and “hence Bradwardine’s adversaries”] provide the best possible context for evaluating Bradwardine’s attempt to promote his geometrical synthesis of Aristotle and Augustine at a time of substantial reevaluation of all ancient authorities” (12). Moreover, we can see how these discussions about space, time, and motion “ref lect the wide range of debate in the first half of the fourteenth century over the most effective way to relate natural philosophy and logic to theology in an age of expanding scientific knowledge” (13). We may also watch the range of discussion about mathematical mastery of the physical world or material space broaden now to consider one of the fretted questions of the fourteenth century: Where did God stand when he created the world? Perhaps it is the clarity of Alexandre Koyré’s discussion of void and infinite space in the fourteenth century that most usefully focuses our attention on these early concepts and perceptions of space—and one’s place in it.49 Koyré reminds us of Galileo’s boldness—in the sixteenth century— when he claims that “the book of nature is written in geometrical character” and, moreover, in first setting out his recommendation “to treat mechanics as mathematics, that is to substitute for the real, experienced world a world of geometry made real, and to explain the real by the impossible.”50 “Aristotelian physics,” Koyré writes, “is a very thoroughly thought out, and a very coherent, body of theoretical knowledge [that

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is] in pretty good accordance—a much better one, indeed, than the Galilean—with the experience, at least with the commonsense experience, of our everyday life” (Metaphysics, 5). More important, Aristotelian physics does not admit the right, or even the possibility, of identifying the concrete world- space of its well ordered and finite Cosmos with the “space” of geometry, any more than it admits the possibility of isolating a given body from its physical (and cosmical) environment. In dealing with a concrete physical problem, it is, therefore, always necessary to take into account the world order, to consider the realm of being (the “natural place”) to which a given body belongs by its nature. (Metaphysics, 6).51

Questions of movement and motion were urgent and critical for practical work in the material world of form and dimension, of course. Moreover, that practical urgency—and energy—were employed in equally pressing metaphysical investigations by the Church. After all, the awkward situation stood: theologians had access to work in the sciences and could read the texts. Bradwardine clearly articulated the metaphor of God as artist or craftsman and, to develop the image, we recall that Bradwardine took up the metaphor of God as a circle, which came from the theologians who understood the mathematical implications of a choice that linked the earthbound craftsman to the orderly practices and to the calculated effects within the material world where—in all of his daily work, even writing poetry—he could think of himself as contributing to a universal order—whether perceived or conceived. His finite energies might mirror, however dimly, God’s eternal power. It is no wonder, then, that the metaphor of the circle to explain God furnished a steadying principle in the face of scientific questions about the earth’s motion. All the while, the finite imagination might gain or posit a place to consider here (everyday material practice) and there (possibilities of the imaginative spirit) and so gain some relative ground—whether poet, craftsman, scientist, theologian, teacher, parent—or prescient human being. The conclusion to Koyré’s essay on void and infinite space brings to our attention (by way of Bradwardine’s impressive contributions) the contending elements of the (necessarily) imagined and these (imposing) scientific puzzles of the fourteenth century.52 Bradwardine writes (in Koyré’s translation): Par consequent, Dieu est nécessairement, éternellement, infiniment partout dans le site imaginaire infini; ce pourquoi aussi en vérité, il peut être dit omnipresent comme tout-puissant. De même, pour des raisons

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analogues, il peut être dit en quelque manière infini, infiniment grand, ou de grandeur infinie, ces termes étant, toutefois, entendus dans un sens métaphysique et non dans celui de l’extension proprement dite. Car, sans dimensions, sans étendue et infiniment étendu il est inextensible. En effet, il coexiste en même sens, il peut être dit: immense, car il n’est ni mesuré ni mesurable par aucune mesure, et incirconscrit, parce qu’il n’est ni circonsconscrit par quelque chose qui l’embrasserait entièrement; ni ne peut être circonscrit par quelque chose, mais il circonscrit, contient et embrasse tout lui-même.53

Finally, then, Aussi, estime Bradwardine, c’est avec raison que le Pythagoricien, le sixième des vingt- quatre philosophes qui nous ont laissé leurs definitions de Dieu, l’a appelé un cercle dont le centre est partout et le circonférence, nulle part. Ainsi, ce n’est pas en function de préoccupations théogiques seules, pas plus qu’en function de preoccupations purement scientifiques, mais par suite de la rencontre, dans un même esprit, de la notion théologique de l’infinité divine avec la notion géométrique de l’infinité spatiale que fut formulée la conception paradoxale de la réalité de l’espace imaginaire [my emphasis], de cet espace vide, veritable néant réalisé, dans lequel, trios siècles plus tard, s’abimeront et s’évanouiront les sphères célestes qui tenaient ensemble le beau cosmos d’Aristote et du moyen âge. Alors, pendant trios siècles le monde—qui n’était plus un Cosmos—apparut-il â l’homme comme place dans le Néant, entouré du Néant et meme, de part, en part, pénétré de Néant.

In short, then, Bradwardine’s argument poses the situation in book III— the adjustment of human freedom to an all-powerful God. Koyré has begun with the argument (familiar to us now but without complete agreement about its intentions or effects) that modern science begins in 1277, when the bishop of Paris “proclama solennellement” that it was possible that there were more worlds than one and, furthermore, that it was possible that “l’ensemble” of celestial spheres could, “sans contradiction,” be actuated by rectilinear motion. In the course of Koyré’s essay, he sets out the arguments of three thinkers—Henri de Gand, Richard de Middleton, and, finally, Thomas Bradwardine, whose theology (and he is, “avant tout,” a theologian) is a theology of an omnipotent divinity. At the same time, Koyré writes, Bradwardine is a worthy metaphysician and a talented mathematician (especially directed to geometry). The point is compelling: for all his theological training, Bradwardine pursues his argument about God, space, and motion “avec l’imperturbabilité” of the mathematician; his goal is concordance.

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With Bradwardine as example, then, Koyré goes on to present the question these medieval thinkers raised about void space and God’s creation of the world in that vide. In Corollary 4 of Cause de Dieu, Bradwardine responds “aux vieilles questions des Gentils et des Hérétiques qui demandaient aux fidéles”: “Où est ton Dieu et où était Dieu avant le monde?” (83). We will see the question again, and an answer, in my discussion of the Perle-poet’s Patience (in chapter 5). It was a compelling problem: if mathematics could take the measure of the universe, then where was the immeasurable? Bradwardine offers Augustine’s answer to the question, “Comment était-il dans le Monde?” We note Koyré’s use of the word “comment” (“how” instead of “where”) in this version of the question— an interesting shift from “où” in Bradwardine’s corollary since Chaucer will raise such a question and its form in The House of Fame. The answer is important: “Comme l’artiste dominant ce qu’il a fait”—as the artist dominating (mastering or ruling) that which he has made (87). Certainly it was with a great deal of satisfaction that one could call on an eminent theologian to justify—even to ratify—the role of practical craftsman/artist as giving visual and verbal shape to space in order to instruct. However, of course, the finite imagination bound by physical dimension must wrestle with intractable material while he imagines the boundless immaterial. In fact, as I will argue in chapter 4, Geffrey’s irritable response to the question of fame suggests the windy quarters of the future, a prospect that frames our sense of where the poet stands to look—meanwhile. When Chenu sets out “The ‘allegorical’ chain by means of which Alan of Lille, following existing sources, linked together the temple of Christ’s body, the temples in which men worship, the earthly church, and the heavenly city as so many expressions of one metaphoric temple” (113), he has come to the place where he shows us how “metaphor turned into ‘analogy’ ” when, “at the end of the [twelfth] century . . . men’s minds, changing in orientation, sought to find in visible form a foothold from which to mount upwards to the perception of spiritual realities” (113). An effective approach, then, was to model metaphysical space so that spiritual impulse might calculate its measure by means of everyday uses. This meanwhile or gap now gains our attention. The essays on “the encounter between Christianity and science” (chapters 1, 2, and 3) collected by Lindberg and Numbers demonstrate the shift from concentration on Plato’s Timaeus toward attention to Aristotle’s “elaborate scientific methodology and foundational principles” (52). Two observations bring focus to the extended energies of the faith-reason debate: The scholar theologians who studied mathematics found that “the radically contingent nature of the world”—specifically, motion in space— “revealed the limitations of natural philosophy”—that is, an acknowledged

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limitation of Plato’s way of organizing our understanding of the world we see. Second, although the theological content had not changed, “the traditional methodology of theology had been transformed by the emphasis on [the combination of ] natural philosophy and mathematics” (63). As Chenu writes, “It was not only the theologians in their schools who were the proponents of this intimate physical and spiritual relationship between man and his universe, this new balance between grace and nature” (37). But what is particularly suggestive is Chenu’s clear argument that “the twelfth century was a turning point in medieval civilization.” [S]o marked was the transformation that took place in the material conditions of life that it has been possible to speak of a “technological revolution.” Encouraged by the breakup of the feudal monopoly of the soil, by the economic and political emancipation of urban artisans organized into guilds, and by the active mobility of men and goods in a market economy, the use and spread of new techniques of production and commerce profoundly altered not only the material side of life but also the modes of perception, sensibility, and representation that pertain to the life of the spirit. (39)

Some sense of this material economic shift is available to us in Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the subject of chapter 1. Familiar to us now is Frank Kermode’s metered metaphor of the chronological tick/tock to explain the inf luence—on both narrative form and eschatological expectation—of the sense of an ending.54 The Christian’s works and days were shaped by what he or she saw as the abiding presence of the Day of Judgment so that stories narrated a similar pattern of expectation. In important ways, that sense of an ending presses early narrative closure against the eternal circle of boundless and timeless space. This familiar geometric model mirroring the plenitudinous creation of a wise Measurer assures us that there is no lack and no excess but simply space and time without end and, therefore, without measure—as opposed to our own finitude. However, from the contemplation of mysteries more and more convincingly argued in mathematical terms, practical reasoning began to sort out the implications of such comforting possibilities of order at home, as Foucault suggests. Marrone points to Aristotle’s warning, taken up by Bonaventure, “that science made two unalterable demands: immutability on the part of the cognitive object and certitude on the part of the knowing subject.”55 All of this attention to scientific certitude stands in the face of the argument that it was “par la presence de sa [God’s] majesté qu’il fait ce qu’il fait, et par sa presence il gouverne ce qu’il a fait”—like the masterful artist.56 As Marrone writes, “This new ideal placed a premium on consistency of

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theoretical precision and on concrete explication whenever possible linked to processes in the material world” (my emphasis, 249). Of course, Duns Scotus’ objection still stands “on the grounds that such a limitation to analogy would have prevented the human mind from having any natural concept of God.”57 Here is where the solution to where or how one might stand to know proves to be more demanding and demands more ways of understanding the might of the measurer. Immutability and certitude drive pedagogical aspiration. De Certeau raises a similar issue and reveals the widening gap between the medieval murmurings of the church (70) and the reader who seems these days to wander through an imposed system (that of the text, analogous to the constructed order of a city or of a supermarket) so that far from joining in the choric murmurings of the medieval churchgoer, the “reader” creates something un-known in the space organized by their [the authors’] capacity for allowing an indefinite plurality of meanings. (69)

In fact, citing Borges, de Certeau points out the argument that “one literature differs from another less by its text than by the way in which it is read.”58 We have seen how this argument unfolds. In other words (Foucault’s words actually), it has become “the language of calculation” (63). Text, then, says de Certeau, “By its nature available to a plural reading, . . . becomes a cultural weapon” (171). In fact, the question comes up in discussions of Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. What we do sense here is an uneasiness, even nostalgia, like Walter Benjamin’s, for the lost aura of art understood by and valued for its location: “the unique value of the ‘authentic’ work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value,” a “uniqueness embedded in the fabric of tradition.” In fact, Benjamin writes, “Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics” (1110).59 For the moment, however, standing in the location of Chaucer and the fourteenth century, it is useful to consider brief ly an example of Chaucer’s particular textual craft. His poetry is, of course, narrative verse typically—a mensural craft to be sure, requiring measured syllables, tandem lines, corresponding sounds. This poetry might very well serve as one of Latour’s indices or one of the miniatures Bachelard admires, for it is the case that this measured language, operating by mathematically musical rules, lays out the grid for the splayed motion of a narrative’s beginning, middle, and end. For example, the intellectually and spiritually powerful image—efficiently “miniaturized”—that closes Troilus and Criseyde stands as a rebuke to the simple craftsman who attempts to create measured narrative space while it exploits—even acts out—the mensural icon for that

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eternal circle where beginning and ending are at once temporarily framed for our understanding: Thow oon, and two, and thre, eterne on lyve, That regnest ay in thre, and two, and oon, Uncircumscript, and al maist circumscrive. (V, 1863- 65)60

Here, by means of this familiar palindrome, the verbal craftsman makes a poignant attempt to impose dimension on the immeasurable: he means to make a space for considering the inexpressible sorrow of the love narrative just told by setting it against the edgeless calm of God’s reign. When Stephen Nichols closes his introduction to the collection of essays on The New Medievalism, he says that “The alternate reality of the Middle Ages was a slippery and dangerous world of motion” (my emphasis) (23). But my reading of this passage from Troilus and Criseyde argues, by means of this model of a vast orderliness, for the heartening sense of surpassing possibilities. Even so, the same daunting realizations expressed in Chaucer’s image at the end of Troilus and Criseyde move us to the “slippery” irresolution of The House of Fame. Having remarked on these broadening questions of location, specifically pedagogical stance, we should remember how often—and pointedly— Chaucer charms us with homely spatial measure and motion. For all its final irresolution, The House of Fame, of course, exploits the poet’s delight in the physics of space, motion, and weight. In fact, the wit of Geoffrey’s weighty fears in the grip of the golden eagle’s science surely counters Troilus’ weightless soaring to the eighth sphere. The rational meat- carver in The Summoner’s Tale makes delectable wit of Euclidean geometry and physics to authenticate his craft and his problem- solving skills: he knows how to organize motion by means of a circle whose circumference is geometrically ordered and whose center is fixed—for optimum accuracy and potency. Responding to the detonation from John the carpenter’s teeming house with the exactitude of his own crafty measuring, the carpenter Reeve allows his miller to point out the power of scholars to change a small space into a large one just by talking about the idea—the logic of which argument must have prompted many a speculation about angels and pinheads. The wit in this little joke is clearer if we know Albert of Saxony’s observation on God’s spatio-mathematical adroitness: God could place a body as large as the whole world in a millet seed, and he could achieve this in the manner as Christ is lodged in the host, that is, without any condensation, rarefaction or penetration of bodies. Within that millet seed God could create a space of 100 leagues, or 1,000 or however many are imaginable. A man inside that millet seed could traverse

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all that many leagues simply by walking from one extremity of the millet seed to the other. Albert of Saxony61

As we will see, Guillaume de Guileville’s expansion of the metaphor acknowledges the degree to which Albert’s image saturates the culture. One staged incident of Chaucer’s spatial wit appears in “The Miller’s Tale.” As poor, duped John the carpenter cuts the rope holding his escape tub at the “water level” of the “f lood,” the narrator says dryly: And doun gooth al; he foond neither to selle, Ne breed ne ale, til he cam to the celle Upon the f loor. (I, 3821–23)

Now Chaucer is not doing theatre here, yet he would wish at least a moment—just a breath-catching space—for us to recognize that John is falling—moving through space—heading for a fall. The “fall” takes about as long as it would take to say, “he foond neither to sellen, Ne breed ne ale, til he cam to the celle Upon the f loor.” Chaucer has drawn our attention to the space of John’s fall by giving us time to anticipate his crash.62 “The Miller’s Tale” is full of this kind of spatial wit. In fact, in some sense the tale is about—let us say—compressed uses of space and in that respect counters the elegantly expansive scheme of “The Knight’s Tale.” Dox, in commenting on medieval drama more generally, says the “space [of the stage] is open to interpretation” so that “the actions, objects and bodies” of the performance “treat space not as a void to be filled or an object represented along with bodies and objects, but as a mode of thinking that is inherent in the performance itself.”63 This “mode of thinking” about space takes up ground in plain, read texts as well, specifically in Guillaume de Deguileville’s pedagogical exercise in The Pilgrimage of Human Life.64 Guillaume exploits the puzzle of the physics of the millet seed in order to demonstrate, with the homely image of bread, the power of the Eucharist—this time in strict pedagogical fashion, with Wisdom as mediatrix and Aristotle as pupil. Charity wishes to bake this bread to feed all of mankind and, as an exemplum, tells the story of a woman who always “knew right away how to do anything imaginable.” We should emphasize the point that this woman—Wisdom—knows how to do anything imaginable. The following conversation, then, between Aristotle and Wisdom, is an exercise in the hermeneutical logic of imagined space. In particular, here, Guillaume’s pedagogy applies effective logic to affective metaphor.

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Now Wisdom speaks to Aristotle as her friend and comes to her persuasive and expansive points—the measureless space of the heart and the extraordinary space of memory: “Have you ever seen how big the human heart is, either the outside or the inside?” “Yes, indeed,” he said. “I have seen it very clearly.” “Now tell me, on your oath,” she said, “How large is it, in your judgment?” “A kite,” he said, “that is only a little hungry would hardly be satisfied by it, for it is small—not very large at all.” “Next, I ask you,” she said, “if you know anything about its capacity and how much it would take to fill it up and satisfy it, or what would be enough for it?” “If it had the whole world at its command,” he said, “that would not be enough to fill it up and satisfy it.”

Now Wisdom offers another example for Aristotle, who has seen the great cities of Rome and Athens: she asks him where he has put all these wonders: “I have put them in my memory.” “Yes, I know that very well,” Wisdom responds, “and therefore you convince me that, if your memory is in your head, then you have enclosed two great cities with all their students in a place smaller than your head.” Wisdom continues: “Just as these things are set in small places in various ways, so also the sovereign good is placed within this bread truly—not imaginatively, not representatively or virtually at all. It is placed there and contained there corporeally and really, presently and truly, without pretence or deception.”

So it is with the heart: Since the heart is small, I have made the bread small as well. And since its capacity is great, I have placed the sovereign good inside in direct proportion, for the heart is nourished according to what it is. If it is small, the bread is small. If it wants much, it will find enough there to fill it and satisfy it. (Book I, 2979–3265)

When I cite Marrone citing Bonaventure citing Aristotle, it is as if we are, as Terry Eagleton writes about Walter Benjamin’s nostalgia, like Paul Klee’s angelus novus—“blown backwards into the future with . . . eyes fixed mournfully upon the past.”65 For my purposes the image raises important questions about what appropriations of pedagogical space Chaucer and

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two of his contemporaries—the Perle-poet and The Cloud of Unknowing author—hope for in their writings. Clearly, such texts available in the fourteenth century were sites of instruction. For all their differences in contexts, Chaucer and at least two of his contemporaries have taken up the instruction as privilege for granting us a place to stand to look—even, perhaps, to see. In chapter 1, I take The Nun’s Priest’s Tale as a test case for demonstrating how a writer might usurp bookspace to teach us to read new practices by exploiting, even violating, old, familiar boundaries. While The Nun’s Priest’s Tale—as narrative—is materially local in its mapping, its vista is wide—threatening and promising. I include as an appendix to this chapter an inscription model that maps the re-tellings of the Renart fable—a chronological index from there (the widow’s chicken yard) to here. In chapter 2, I undo, brief ly, Professor Wolfgang Clemens’ early point about The House of Fame—that Chaucer has used “factual observation to substantiate castles in the air”—but only to renegotiate its validity by arguing that Chaucer recasts the spatial implications about the long and short of this art or this faith or this science that reckons what we can know by measure against what we can only understand by imagining. In chapter 3, Chaucer shows us—with The Book of the Duchess—how metaphor attempts to define the gap between memory and the immediate but, then, ultimately reveals its signifying failure. Chapter 4 establishes the groundwork for metaphor in Perle by way of a pedagogical theorem that simultaneously exploits metaphor as it sorts out its uses—all done within sight of heaven. The subject of chapter 5 is Patience, where the Perle-poet offers a witty exercise in mapping the truancy of a chosen one whose narrative space is only temporarily marginalia, the space of play; for Jonah is clearly designated to act out the prophetic requirements of God’s own authoritative instruction. In pointed contrast to the close-framed material spaces of the ship’s hurrok, the whale’s belly, and the woodbine shelter, Jonah—and we—begin to understand the wideness of God’s justice, mercy, and, in particular, His patience. Ultimately the poet makes us aware of God’s reach—an awareness that comes to us by way of the literal and the poetic centering metaphor of the single dust mote in the morning light. I argue in chapter 6 that the author of The Cloud of Unknowing pits himself against the rising cultural pressures of consistent and concrete mathematical reckoning to instruct his student in how we might stand to gain a “view from nowhere,” to apply Thomas Nagel’s important argument. In the very process of denying the language of geometric measure, this

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pedagogue presses us, with effectual instruction, by means of dimension, to stand at ease in the face of the unaccountable. The epilogue of this book offers the argument t hat Chaucer’s A Treatise on the Astrolabe documents the giving of a gift, a pedagogical analogue the value of which lies in teaching his little Lewis (and us) how and where one might by the mean of self—see from the center—mathematically, literally, imaginatively.

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CHAPTER 1 THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE: BOOKSPACE AS PUBLIC PLAZA

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ince the 1990s—certainly anticipated by Gaston Bachelard’s poetics (1969)1 and intensified by Henri Lefebvre’s sociology (2004)2 —new vocabulary refines verbal strategies that focus on spatial design and spatial consciousness of writers and readers. More and more in our everyday work, play, and fervors—aside from the drama of “outer” space—we can read meticulous arguments about sites, movement across borders and edges, tourism, mapping, netting and webbing, remote sensing, distance learning. As Barbara Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka open their introduction to Medieval Practices of Space, they remind us that the word “space” has “lost its strictly geometrical meaning.”3 We can now think and write more precisely and more self- consciously, as David Herman puts it, about “how spatial reference in narrative is not an optional or peripheral feature of stories but rather a core property that helps constitute narrative domain”: “it is not just that knowledge about space makes it possible to understand narratives; more than this, narrative is a pattern of thinking and communicating, a cognitive style as well as a discourse genre, by means of which humans spatialize and thereby comprehend the world”— a kind of calculus, it seems.4 But Dick Harrison, writing about “spatial attitudes” in the Middle Ages, takes a quite different approach to argue that we need more information about the relationship between “microspatial circles” in the “macrospatial cosmos” before we determine what the spatial attitudes were. In practical terms, he writes: We do not know whether the average inhabitant of an average Somerset village thought of himself primarily as a Christian, as an inhabitant of a certain hundred [an administrative unit similar to a county], as a dweller

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in a particular village or simply as a person who lived and worked at a particular farm.5

David Herman and Dick Harrison engage us in two distinct but equally important ways to consider spatial consciousness. Herman catalogues the vocabulary for thinking about evidence of spatial consciousness in a text. Harrison provides us with a model for mapping that recalls de Certeau’s practice of space—a literal mapped-out space showing travel patterns of fourteenth-century villagers.6 Evidence for these travels is typically recorded incidentally and informally among other details of everyday life in commercial, legal, administrative, and domestic documents. Kathleen Biddick makes the observation that when the Nuremberg burghers cut “Jerusalem from the center of history” and excised “theological subject from the space of the city view,” they “transformed place and its temporal contingencies into space.” The effect, she writes, is the “amnesia signified by that empty space [that] has enabled figures to reestablish themselves in the foreground.” 7 Biddick has pointed out for us the appropriation of image space that documents an ethnographic shift. These three distinct spatial considerations for reading texts—Herman, Harrison, and Biddick—are particularly suggestive for the use Chaucer makes of the beast fable space in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Perhaps, in fact, Michel de Certeau has a particularly suggestive point when he argues that “The text was formerly found at school. Today the text is society itself ” (167). I am inclined to say that The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is a case of the windmill in a walnut shell. *

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Chaucer expects a great deal from both his reading or his listening audience for The Nun’s Priest’s Tale: he depends on a heightened sense of plain action within a physical space while asking us to consider the disposition of those events within a textspace laden with cultural expectation. The simple fable itself as Chaucer tells it is a cartographic landmark in the long history of that icon of popular culture both early and late—Reynard the fox. Moreover, this telling dramatizes the idea that the book has become the space of popular culture, supplanting the word of God and His exegetes with the vox populis. My point is that The Nun’s Priest’s Tale makes a brilliant political assertion that looks beyond the Jack Straw Rebellion to a place of the future when texts bridge the gap between here and there. Steven Justice’s energizing argument (for sharpening our perceptions of the text- conscious rebels of 1381 by inverting the intentions and effects of, for example, Walsingham’s responses) plainly sets out

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the rebels’ belief in the power of document. Simultaneously, Justice argues that by acknowledging the rebels’ literacy, we define the ideologue’s blind spots—blind spots that make us read a text both back and forth. 8 The insurgents “claimed literacy,” and so they placed themselves in “a clerkly space.” In fact, the Jack Straw “letters announced that they were taking over this space, and taking over the forms that went with it” (66). In his epilogue, Justice writes that he has ignored a “conventional” question: “Why did the rising happen?” and “all but ignore[d] another”: “What happened in consequence?” He answers the second question: “In other words, texts happened in consequence, which assumes more generally that texts do happen—they do not just mean or exist” (253). I would like to begin my argument by saying that this tale of an upstart fox presses us to consider popular culture of Chaucer’s day. How would we go about making such an assessment? In many ways, G.R. Owst has mapped for us a significant manifestation of popular culture when he documents varieties and uses of pulpit and sermon in medieval England.9 What these sermon texts do—and the reason for their deep-rootedness in the imagination of the folk—is what makes popular culture in our own day: they argue for common attention and common understanding for acting out the terms of the community. An interesting element in Jill Mann’s work on Ysemgrimus is the (somewhat) constant eating of body parts or skinning the delinquent as a way of teaching moral lessons. The punishments are not to be terminal: the parts and skin will grow back, but what is more, there is the apparently happy joke that the wolf ’s skin will provide parchment. As a matter of fact, Mann reports, “the bear’s motions from side to side as he slices off the wolf ’s skin are interpreted as ‘reading’ a leaf of parchment” (III, 951).10 Moreover, “The poet would thus have made his medieval readers aware that the very book which contained his poem was literally part of a dismembered animal body” (37). “Retrospectively, it becomes clear that this double- sidedness applies to all the other cases where the eating of one animal by another is in question.” Of course, the promise of a delicious meal becomes, in Chaucer’s hands, a strategic game between fox and cock where “guest becomes host and host becomes guest in a grotesque image of mutual devouring” (40). The “community” of the beast fable continues in practice. We recall, of course, that Gawain’s despair is “cured” by the court’s tolerant modification of the knight’s code of conduct: Gawain gains the approval of his community in spite of a moral ailment. So it is that problems and solutions define the space of the enterprise or the court, and part of the popular engagement comes from the sense that, at least for the

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narrated time, nothing is lacking in this created space and that all things are made practicable by, at least, a familiar logic. Bakhtin has made the useful point that the space of Greek romances (as distinguished from, for example, the community of Reynard) has little to do with the events of the narratives: the events are determined by chance alone, by “random contingency” (92) in a given place, but the “nature of a given place . . . figures in solely as a naked, abstract expanse of space . . . . [T]here is no implied native, ordinary familiar world (the native country of the author and his readers) against whose background the otherness and foreignness of what is foreign might be clearly projected” (100–101). So, Bakhtin says, the space in Greek romances is “filled with isolated curiosities and rarities that bear no connection to each other . . . since there is no scale for measuring these items and events, no clear background of the usual of one’s own world, against which to perceive unusual things” (102). The adventures, he says, are “suddenlys” (92) rather than episodes of community practice. In contrast, another kind of narrative—say, a series of tales about Reynard the fox—lies within the sequences of the historical, quotidian, biographical, biological, maturational (Bakhtin’s list) so that this kind of narrative “generates rules and defines the measure of a man” (91). The effect is that time “thickens, takes on f lesh, becomes artistically visible” in a commonly understood space “charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history” (84). A narrative of this sort has “ an internal organizing center . . . that is located ‘at home’ ” (103). In other words, we are conscious of events in what de Certeau describes as a “practiced place” (117). These “movements of time, plot, and history” are precisely the materials of Chauntecleer’s adventure. This “matrix of relationships” (Bakhtin, 102) is in place when Reynard is called to court to answer for his wickedness to those gathered against him. We gather there and know—from our “contractual proximity” as readers or perhaps as proxy citizens—what rhetoric to expect. We have seen this hero at work before. For all Reynard’s culpability (in this version at least), he gains from Noble his community’s highest honor by means of the very traits for which his accusers wish to indict him: he is made chancellor because, to run his kingdom, the king depends on shrewd assessment of human nature, keen rhetorical skill, and rascally energy. Reynard, then, makes his way home, proud to explain to his family that, as a powerful member of his community, he can now serve them all, and specifically his adventures will serve as a model for his son Reynardine. We rejoice in his spunk. Attesting to the Reynard tales as a site for popular culture are the remarkable and remarkably numerous visual and verbal representations of

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episodes—so many that Reynard becomes, practically, as much an icon in medieval culture as Christ or Mary, in spite of (as a result of?) the fact that the representations are carved under the misericords or on the backs of architectural bosses or serve as borders to the scribal texts—practical expressions of the familiar. Kenneth Varty has made a rich archive of reproductions of Reynard’s adventures in stone, glass, wood, ivory, and manuscript illumination.11 Lilian Randall has concentrated on images of Reynard and his friends and enemies in her extensive work on illuminated marginalia in medieval manuscripts.12 Varty gives particular attention to images (carved, chiseled, painted, or drawn) of Reynard with a rooster or duck on his back, the duck having become a favorite visual substitute for a Chauntecleer since the duck’s wingspread is visually dramatic (compared with that of a rooster) as the fox runs off with his catch over his shoulder. *

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Clearly, Reynard, his friends and family, his enemies and adventures, his triumphs and disgraces define popular culture for all ages and ranks. What was the cultural site in England of the 1380s when Chaucer takes up the story? What popular desires are satisfied by such cultural sites? A meeting place? A real or virtual community? A space where we recognize ourselves in others, by means of some objective perspective? Seeing from here to there? A place where we find patterns of behavior we can determine to imitate or to reject? Where we abstract our problems from the site of self for communal understanding—taking measure? A site where we simply affirm the best and the worst of ourselves? What in this Reynard story accounts for its popularity from the eleventh century to this day? What does the text do by standing as a meeting place? Does it furnish the listener or reader with the clarity of childhood dilemma? Frames a logic, though not necessarily the logic of the world? Or is it the logic of the world? Comforts us with the rational where the power of chance is limited or at least controlled? Controls the contingent by framing it, as if it were an experiment? Furnishes an occasion to observe surprise and panic objectively, in the company of the community? Satisfies expectation or pointedly, even poignantly, fails to satisfy expectations? Perhaps Huizinga begins to answer the question: Primitive, or let us say, archaic ritual is thus sacred play, indispensable for the well-being of the community, fecund of comic insight and social development but always play in the sense Plato gave to it—an action

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accomplishing itself outside and above the necessities and seriousness of everyday life.13

It is Jonah’s childlike play. De Certeau makes a point that I have found useful in thinking about the culture that The Nun’s Priest’s Tale reveals. He writes: The approach to culture begins when the ordinary man becomes the narrator, when it is he who defines the (common) place of discourse and the (anonymous) space of its development. (5)

In the case of Chaucer’s Chauntecleer and Russell (AKA Reynard), what is “the place of discourse”? What do we learn? We can’t trust wives? We should trust dreams? We mustn’t trust dreams? We can’t trust a fox? Can’t trust a rooster? Mulier est hominis confusio? I should trust my own judgment? I should keep my eyes open? My mouth shut? Perhaps the charm of this cultural site lies in following the logical—or illogical but nevertheless plotted—outcome of some conf lict. It may be that this site of popular culture draws fringes and disparate elements of culture into a community of common practices, desires, fears, hopes, delights. Or, what seems even more engaging, in this designated space one can know one’s place, make a name for oneself, define the culture by individual conduct, recognize a stranger or a friend. Whatever the case, we know that this culturally embedded fable genre becomes a narrative mnemonic, working with the efficiency of an icon by gathering in one place the ligaments of the past that draw the audience toward some truths affirmed in a text- bound present—the practice in terms of the imagined. E.W. Holloway’s 1852 translation from the German Reynard instructs in a number of ways (not the least of which are the elegant steel engravings by Leutemann) and closes with this verse: To wisdom now let one turn, Avoid the base, and virtue learn; For to that end, this book is writ, So do not fail to purchase it. Fables and parables can teach, Knowledge and wit, to all and each, That they from folly turn away, And wisdom learn, from day to day. To buy this book do not disdain, For worldly knowledge thou wilt gain;

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The course of things thou wilt espy, And in the end, wilt spare thereby. This is the end of Reynard’s story. May God assist to his glory.14

One hundred years later, Harry Owens, following in the line of Caxton and Göethe but offering “a modern American version” in 1946, opens his Scandalous Adventures of Reynard the Fox with this epigraph: This book for little price is sold, But image clear of the world it doth hold. Whoso into the world would look, My counsel is, —he buy this book.15

We are offered, it seems, a windmill in a walnut shell. Reynard’s charm continues today, of course, for a wide, bookish audience. In fact, Reynard’s history draws our attention as index to the culture But what was the market—or the marketplace—for this little folktale in 1381 in medieval England for a poet who knew stories from many books, from gatherings of court and home, from various languages, times, and places? For all the good evidence for the dramatic principle in The Canterbury Tales, it is peculiar that Chaucer never stages his narrative tellings in a tavern. Why is it that Chaucer’s pilgrims do not occasionally, when “the sunne wole adoun,” gather in a tavern setting for a storytelling on their three- day pilgrimage or tell a tale at Harry’s place? But not once does Chaucer set his storytellers and listeners in the space of an inn or tavern (though he might have done so had the pilgrims returned as planned to the Tabard to choose the best tale). We might compare, for example, the tavern tales in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, another pilgrimage scheme for storytelling or sermon, one clearly inf luenced by Chaucer’s narratives—both as pilgrimage outline, characters, and contentions. By means of contentions in Fielding’s narrative, we are decidedly aware of “community.” There are, of course, tavern locations in some of the Canterbury tellers’ tales: Chaucer’s pilgrims set out from Harry’s inn, where the horses are comfortable and where dinner is served with good ale. The Pardoner’s Tale opens in a tavern, but the narrative moves quickly down the road to Death. In fact, the Pardoner says he needs a bit of a stop at the alestake if he is to tell a tale, but even so we have no evidence that the pilgrims listened to his story as they refreshed themselves. Nowhere do we understand the pilgrims to be at

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ease in a public tavern space (instead of backing a horse) to eat and drink together while a tale is told. My answer to the question is that Chaucer’s habit of mind is shaped by the textbound space of storytelling. Even for his listening audience he was bound by the margins of page and book. But a remarkable shift is acted out in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Surely Chaucer’s habit of mind is unlike the Anglo-Saxon scop who must repeat the rhythms of obligation and aspiration as faithfully as possible since that community of listeners depended on accessible and retrievable mnemonics rather than a fixed space of the text. Clearly, Chaucer writes narratives that pointedly depend on space— whether community space or more specific spaces: The contrasting spaces of The Knight’s Tale and The Miller’s Tale, The Summoner’s Tale, where a mere cherle has the ymaginacioun to use ars-metrike to make a demonstracion of how one measures the soun or savour of a fart. I want to consider what prompts Chaucer to set out this limited narrative space of the beast fable against its own long history and the history of narrative play in general? Clearly, even retelling a single episode from the adventures calls to mind, for any attentive or practiced reader, viewer, or listener, all the marvelous (and witty) adventures of Reynard (or Russell) the Fox, Bruin the Bear, Tibert the Cat, fellow citizens of Noble the Lion’s court of justice. His audience have expectations. However, it is not the past that Chaucer exploits in retelling Reynard’s exploits but the present as potential for the future, a space with a view. Stephen Justice makes the interesting point that Chaucer’s pilgrimage pointedly leaves London and thereby exactly reverses the rebels’ travels of June 10, 1381, into London.16 In so doing, Chaucer would seem to stage a new power of the text—a potential for disseminating text over time and space. That the “illiterate” use texts/documents as hedges against subjection—as Justice convincingly argues for the rebels of 1381—while the authorities (in the way Walter Benjamin would use the term as authenticating powers17) imagined themselves as having text as defense against subversion— frames a powerful argument for any age. I want to argue that in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale Chaucer practices a new power wherein community authenticates text.18 Michael Riffaterre, in the course of considering memory and textuality, writes that there is “a vast terra incognita of other texts” and of “mythologemes, ideologemes, descriptive systems and sememic structures that the sociolect feeds into texts.” The result is that this “universe of stories, whatever readers have garnered from the sociolect and their readings, lives a latent life and remains in a state of potential indeterminacy until it is activated, fired, as it were, by what readers find in the

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text that is analogous and homologous to their stored- up possible worlds” [my emphasis].19 The Nun’s Priest’s “universe” opens with a site of necessary efficiency and order—no excess and no lack. The given, measured space is a widow’s yard, defined by a dry ditch and sticks to serve as a fence; the widow’s holdings are accounted for: two daughters, three large sows, three cows, and one sheep named Moll. The geometry is palpable: A povre wydwe, somdeel stape in age Was whilom dwelling in a narwe cottage, Biside a grove, stondynge in a dale.

*

*

*

A yeerd she hadde, enclosed al aboute With stikkes, and a drye dych withoute. (NPT, 2821–23, 2847–48)

As it stands, the detailed description of the location for the adventure is appropriate for folktales we know—those that read, “Now grandmother lived deep in the wood, down a path leading away from the village.” The space is defined. However, in spite of this conventional folktale opening and for all the fact that audiences had long taken delight in this story as it stood in the practical and quotidian margins of their culture, so far Chaucer’s version ultimately presents itself in terms of bookish authority, documentation, and accounting—as if it were a record for a housing inspector, tax adjustor, or a city planner. Sherri Olson deepens our sense of the material work of such a place in her book entitled A Chronicle of All That Happens. 20 The court rolls of Upwood and Ellington become “documents of practice” (27). She writes: [I]f it is true that some juror “slots” became attached to specific (probably major) tenements, in a manner analogous to the disposition of pews described . . . in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, what more powerful testimony could there be of the villager’s concrete thinking, translating an aspiration into immediate everyday practice? For in such an arrangement, the organic “connectedness” of the pre- plague village, in terms of the “prized attainment” of landholding, was artificially resurrected in the mechanistic linkage of a particular tenement with a particular office. It represents the effort to imprint a desired landscape of the mind, that lived in memory, upon the real landscape of the village. (232)

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A detail from J.S. Raftis’s A Small Town in Late Medieval England: Godmanchester 1278-1400 21 documents what “happens” in village space: the village record-keepers took annual inventory of the villagers’ holdings in Godmanchester, including such things as crops and f leeces. The organization of the list is not according to richest to poorest, poorest to richest, or sheep to millet but from where the record keeper logically began his walk through the village and so “ref lects the itinerary through the town”—a clerical practice, to be sure. And one other way of understanding the material realities of village econometrics is the following: “the produce of meadow [for purposes of taxation] may have been measured simply in terms of f leeces and lambs available for sale” (100) rather than actual productivity. Daniel Lord Small, in his mapping studies of Marseilles around 1350, shows “how notaries habitually translated vicinities (where work was done) and landmarks into streets.” 22 The new logic for mapping seems to have been at work throughout western Europe.23 The hope was to describe properties precisely and clearly—that is, to identify a site according to its place in the city grid rather than to explain the work that went on in the place or rather than to explain what geographic landmarks (a gate, a grove, a hill, a bog, a church, a pasture, a creek, a bridge, a mill) identified the place. A hundred years earlier, before 1250, representation on the city council of Marseilles had been determined by craft membership and not by quarter or status, and artisanal vicinities were to some extent territorial units of governance. By 1380, however, the goal was a more rational notarial system (but not necessarily more empirically rational). The effect of such methods for mapping a village was to loosen spatial and historic connections between the artisans of the town (tanner, butcher, winemaker, ironmonger, physic, shoemaker, weaver, dyer) and the records of ownership. Charles Burroughs makes a useful follow-up observation to Small’s interest in the new work of notaries in Europe during the mid-1300s (specifically Italy): by the early 1400s notaries yielded to lawyers because of “[c]hanging practices of space,” specifically when popish inf luences decried the uses of porticos in the city because “the pope would never truly be master of a city in which porticoes provided potential mischief makers with hiding places and vantage points”24 —practical uses and abuses of space. But Michael Camille’s work on manuscript illumination and carnival therein is especially important to my argument here. Camille makes use of Henri Lefebvre’s image of the “bleak regime of the empty sign”—the result of “substituting a mental and therefore abstract space for spatial practice” whereby “differences” are “reduced to signs.” Camille compares the

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medieval city of Notre Dame (where “city streets were a realm of more elastic and self-generated signification”) to the modern one. Even more suggestive is Camille’s conclusion: Before their eradication by the centralizing and ruthlessly quantifying urban grids constructed by the modern French state, the house signs of medieval Paris marked sites of multiple and shifting identities, places of communities, shared structures of the imaginary, which were not imposed from above or outside, but which were articulated from within the teeming multiplicity of the body politic itself.25

In other words, practice maps the space. At a later point I want to consider in some detail de Certeau’s arguments about “spatial stories,” but his point about “marking out boundaries” to the effect of “spatial legislation” in stories begins to sharpen the focus on implications of textspace in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale: “there is no spatiality that is not organized by the determination of frontiers.”26 Borders count and measure. Dick Harrison argues for the significance of borders as he considers “space as a qualitative concept.” He writes that it becomes important not to neglect boundaries in discussions of space. True, centres did exist, but—at least in certain societies—the most conspicuous part of the centre was often the area where it met the periphery. Centrality and liminality [perceived threshold] must not be regarded as opposite concepts but rather as two parts of the same structure. We can not discuss spatial centres without taking into consideration the boundary of the centre in question.27

When we look closely in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale at the details of the widow’s messauge (the fourteenth- century term used in documents to designate house and attendant buildings), we are struck by the choice of detail. In particular, we note that the single sheep among the household goods is named Malle—though neither the daughter, the widow, nor any of the other creatures (except Colle “our dogge,” who is later a part of the mêlée) is named. The case is that sheep were highly valued for their renewable products—wool and manure, as well as milk and fine cheese. They were only slaughtered if they died from age, accident, or disease. Even then, of course, they furnished vellum— for the manuscript page. Perhaps, then, we should not be surprised that this valued member of the household has a name. 28 The practical materiality—even geometry—is notable from the opening of our Nun’s Priest’s telling.

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The objective of Justice’s book on writing and rebellion in England in 1381 is to have us view “our canonical literature from its social outside, from great regions of rural experience and practice” that, he argues, “lords and chroniclers and poets barely knew of,” “ a political culture in the countryside” that “they could not know” even after the events of 1381.29 However, the rebels circulated texts as “posted broadsides” and thereby made a first and—most important—a “visible and public declaration that laicie and bondi had begun to occupy the cultural terrain of economic and intellectual privilege.”30 The textual evidence of their rebellion, Justice writes, placed them in what had been defined immemorially as a clerkly space, a space of writing and documentary record marked by specialized form and formulae, by specialized languages and hands, by all the parchment that f lowed into the royal chancery and back out again. The letters announced that they were taking over this space, and taking over the forms that went with it.31 In the course of considering “science and the self ” in Alan of Lille and John Gower, Simpson makes the argument that “sophisticated conception[s] of politics” might well be found in poetry “since in great poetry the boundaries between different discourses are certain to be more f luid.”32 Simpson, Justice, de Certeau, and Taylor make four useful sides to my argument: Simpson argues for the f luid boundaries of imaginative writing; Justice concentrates on the usurpation of document by rebellious citizens; de Certeau claims (arguing from the example of court proceedings) that when “an ensemble of circumstances is brought together,” it “founds spaces” and thereby creates “a theater of actions”33; Andrew Taylor argues for “textual margins as a site of ideological conf lict between the authority of the book and the vitality of the world.”34 In light of these observations, we may turn to Chaucer’s story of Reynard. Or is it Chauntecleer’s story? Chaucer was a bookish man. Many of us would have liked him as he sat dumb as any stone to read books or to write them until late at night, so that he was hard to wake betimes. Nevertheless, he showed a deep uneasiness about the truth of what he read in books and an even deeper skepticism about uses for his own books. What vital space is Chaucer anticipating for books? In the case of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, Chaucer chooses a simple, long-standing, popular tale to make a new point about books and storytelling, to practice a new esthetic possibility. For all his anxiety about (or hope for) future readers, as I see it, Chaucer claims the book itself as a new and common gathering place, a public square. Although Chaucer often draws our attention to both his listening and his reading audiences, from where we stand (Lefebvre’s idea of “scale”),35 the book is the centric point. In important ways, Chaucer is

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practicing verbal perspective, his own version of the perspective paintings he heard about and saw in Italy. Chaucer as narrator (or through his proxy) regularly acknowledges us (his distant audience) and those who heard and read before us. For example, since love language shifts with the culture, he frets over the fact that Troilus’s love language might not move us to the deep sympathy appropriate to such a sorrowing lover because love language shifts with the culture. When Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s exploits the expected uses of the venerable beast-fable genre as a story for the populace, we would misplace the point of the telling if we fail to see that it is neither unequivocally didactic, nor satiric, nor allegorical while at the same time associations with other versions of Reynard’s tales and with other beast fables would recall familiar allegory, satire, and moral didacticism. Or, as one late seventeenth- century publisher writes: “The history of Reynard the Fox, and Reynardine his son: In two parts. With morals to each chapter, explaining what appears doubtful or allegorical: and every chapter illustrated with a curious device, or picture, representing to the eye all the material passages. Written by an eminent statesman of the German empire, and since done into English, Dutch, French, Italian, &c.”36 This bookmaker is not at all troubled by the idea that his audiences will misunderstand the narratives. But, remarkably in Chaucer’s telling, by means of the widow’s borders, we are established inside a space where we can move about among a variety of textspaces so that the tale itself is a mapping of story form: fable, chronicle, epic, romance, mystery, dream-vision, tragedy; of scriptural exegesis, predication; astrological, pharmaceutical, and dream lore; scenes of the deaths of kings and senators; betrayals of Ganelon, Judas, and Synon; interventions of gods and goddesses. Tracing the tellings and accumulated modifications of Reynart’s popularity may well reveal part of medieval popular culture for us, but Chaucer’s tale—temporally located in post-1381 England—gives immediacy or presence to history, a moment bound by the recorded past on one hand and propelled by future possibilities on the other. De Certeau would call this event “reading as poaching.”37 With the simple device of metaphor—using the gauge of the upstart fox to measure the political space of Jack Straw’s contingent—Chaucer’s narrative draws us into a cultural space of the moment by claiming the book itself as plaza, the common public ground where everyday possibilities are foregrounded. Bakhtin, we recall, directs our attention to just such narrative, where time “thickens, takes on f lesh, becomes artistically visible” and is “charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history.” What is more, Chauntecleer keeps temporal order while the fox devises the plot.

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Few textual spaces are more charged than this village with its clamorous chase after the fox and Chauntecleer. It has all the elements of a lived space: This sely wydwe and eek hir doghtres two Herden thise hennes crie and maken wo, And out at dores stirten they anon, And syen the fox toward the grove gon, And bar upon his bak the cok away, And cryden, “Out! Harrow and weylaway! Ha, ha! The fox!” and after hym they ran, And eek with staves many another man.

Indeed, there are Colle (“oure dogge”), Talbot, Gerland, Malkyn (“with a dystaf in hir hand”), cow, calf, hogs (troubled by the barking of the dogs and men shouting)—all shouting and running so that we would think “hir herte breeke” and “yolleden as feendes doon in helle.” Ducks, geese, bees f ly about. In fact, So hydous was the noyse—a, benedicitee!— Certes, he Jakke Straw and his meynee Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrille Whan that they wolden any Flemyng kille, As thilke day was maad upon the fox.

And finally, Of bras they broghten bemes, and of box, Of horn, of boon, in whiche they blewe and powped, And therwithal they skriked and they howped, It semed as that hevene sholde falle. (3375–3401)

The site for this event is pointedly located between heaven (as if it would fall on us) and hell (as if hellhounds were among us). But there is a practical explanation for the scene. Harrison’s explanation of a specific kind of community organization documents a fourteenth-century example of a spatial paradigm suited to my current purpose—the community “hue and cry”: In practice, the tithing [a unit of ten families] was responsible for many things that are today thought of as police functions, e. g., catching thieves and preventing criminals from escaping. If a criminal (or a suspected criminal) ran away, the tithing was obliged to chase him and raise the “hue and cry,” i. e., to shout and blow horns. (38)

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Poole also makes the point as a historian might: “It was the duty of the village when a crime had been committed to raise the hue and cry after the criminal to capture him if they could, and to keep him in custody.”38 Werner Rösener, notes that there was A gradual change from peasants simply residing next to one another to peasants sharing a life and sharing economic activities as they deliberate together or represent themselves communally to the outside world. From their early undeveloped forms, the association and cooperation of neighbours eventually evolved into the village community as a body politic; this process lasted from the high to the late Middle Ages until the village community finally emerged as a distinct legal and administrative association.

When the village emerged as a “complex process,” Rösener continues, “The local observance of justice, the call for neighbourly help as well as the maintenance of territorial regulations, and more specifically apprehension of criminals and bringing them before the courts were in many regions the responsibilities of medieval village communities.”39 On the matter of good fencing and good neighbors, “peasants who lived in villages were advised to fence in their gardens for their own good as well as that of their neighbours” (161). By Chaucer’s day, in many ways, document, text, book—whether legal, scholarly, spiritual, or game—had come to serve as a hedge against contingency, had become the space and emblem of ordered and ordering authority. Books offered, then, a formal space, a site for memory, moment, or future for taking stock of ordered time. The lay- out of the illuminated manuscript pages whose margins had visually “told” Reynard’s story, whatever the scribe’s text might be, was set out first by the scribe’s careful geometry of letter and line written down as the authoritative text and then hedged in by the contingent illuminations (sometimes thematically related to the text but as often not connected thematically at all). While the abstract lettered signs were carefully organized for authoritative meaning—spatially, grammatically, and semantically— the marginal images, tatting the borders of script with the play of imagined worlds, claimed the attention of the illiterate of Chaucer’s day, or, I like to think, the attention of anyone lucky or persistent or rich enough to see an illuminated manuscript. However, in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, Chaucer violates this convention and argues, by spatial design, that the contingent calls for our attention. In fact, we are not surprised to be reminded of how often Chaucer celebrates the energy of the unprecedented by joyfully exploiting or violating precedent. What

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is particularly important in reading Chaucer’s version of Reynard’s old story is the pointed spatial consciousness that reverses the visual and spatial layout of a manuscript page. Standing outside the orderly, authoritative, documenting text, the manuscript margins had ref lected other ways of being, the outside chances of life beyond the pale—the staked- out space. The politically significant moment in Chaucer’s reference to Jack Straw has long been recognized, and our attention now can be extended to include and consider not merely the intrusion of the fox into the chicken yard but the assertion of the tale itself. We may take advantage of this one contextualized moment in the long course of Reynardian history, for Chaucer’s keen critical map, here framed by generations, even centuries, of old stories and genres, stakes out a new political space. Riffaterre says subtexts (not episodes or themes) are “the verbal means of storing and retrieving information” and are significant because they point “to memory gradually assuming dominance over the written text . . . as if the text were shutting itself to the reading eye and laying itself bare to the mind’s eye.”40 Riffaterre’s image is useful in much the same way as the perspectivist’s centric point: by what means do we acknowledge the centric point and thereby place ourselves before the narrative space for ourselves? That is to say, where do we stand to look? On June 10 of 1381, the Jack Straw rebellion of the rising working class was the day’s news. That moment’s news oddly extends itself in Chaucer’s tale and gains force by being bound in this resonating textual space. Chauntecleer—that icon of time and order, purveyor of textual authority, master of his house—this literate rooster has dreamed up an intruder through the bordering and ordering hedge; and with that dream- shape soon realized among the cabbages, that old perception of book and auctoritee has shifted ground. Nancy Mason Bradbury, by way of considering “popular festive forms,” compares the certainty of Chaucer’s Parson with Chauntecleer’s multiple voices.41 Specifically, we are denied the usual and satisfying practice of the simple fable genre— the simple matter of taking the fruyt and leaving the chaf. Since there is God’s plenty of moral lessons at the end of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the clear—and satisfying—application of a single moral lesson is blurred. We are not merely left in doubt about what the moral lesson is, but we wonder which authoritative source might move us to act morally or even which rhetorical application we might employ to prove a point. What is more compelling, however, is that the nature of the question has shifted: what are the possibilities of narrative space when marginal play breaks through the hedge, when textual space can become the

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vox populis, leaving gaps for the contingent? Andrew Taylor poses the dilemma when he writes, Using a characteristic recent idiom, I have referred above to the Smithfield Decretals as a site of ideological conf lict. But if the metaphor implies, as I think it does, that this is a location we regard from high, as objective witnesses to a conf lict that precedes us, then it is not well chosen.

Taylor continues and calls to mind Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere: We cannot approach a book without situating ourselves within a particular institutional apparatus and undergoing its disciplines. To read either the text or its margins requires an emotional investment, whether it is in a vision of a unified Age of Faith rising above sublunary disorders and bringing harmony from dissonance or in a vision of human resistance and freedom . . . However we envisage it, the conf lict within these pages is one we half create while it half creates us.42

The wisdom of his argument is clear and, unexpectedly, gives the term “site” more force rather than less. But even as he writes, Taylor uses the word “situate,” with its etymological connection to “site,” inevitably to deny our borderless mind’s eye. This issue will be the subject of my conclusions. Gary Saul Morson, at the conclusion of a piece called “Essential Narrative: Tempics and the Return of Process,” writes that “the literature of process takes us beyond providence, beyond structure, and beyond harmony into a world where things can either be or not be.”43 Morson’s idea echoes Bakhtin’s impatience with systems that force out contingent voices—in the sciences, literary theory, history, or esthetics. His argument is that “temporality of literary works as understood by poetics is radically different from that of life, because in life there is genuine contingency. In a literary work, the purely contingent is, from the structural point of view, a f law” (277). Morson explains tempics in terms of its opposite narrative form—“structuralist narratology, which spatializes plots and offers us a pattern, if not a symmetrical diagram, of what has happened” (279). On the other hand, when Augustine wishes to explain how we measure narrative time, he begins empirically by measuring the matter before him—the length of sounds of syllables in the book he holds. He goes on to extend his measuring to the length of a Psalm: I am about to repeat a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my expectation alone reaches itself over the whole: but so soon as I shall have once

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begun, how much so ever of it I shall take off into the past, over so much my memory also reaches: thus the life of this action of mine is extended both ways: into my memory, so far as concerns that part which I have repeated already, and into my expectation too, in respect of what I am about to repeat now, but all this while is my marking faculty present at hand, through which, that which was future, is conveyed over, that it may become the past. (Confessions, XI, xxviii)44

Augustine’s point is to call attention to the reader’s similarity to God when we read a familiar psalm or song: from the start, we know its beginning, middle, and end. We should note that Augustine has not closed down the possibility of contingent events, but he has forcefully argued for the human desire to place ourselves so that we may see from here to there. Chaucer has done as much for us. Although he is rarely at rest in perceived precedent or harmony, he turns anxiety of the contingent into art by furnishing it bookspace, allowing the outside chance to become the inside narrative. But we could not know that allowance without acknowledging precedent boundaries. Then the margins of culture become the text itself and assert a new esthetic—subject to any contingency, any “suddenly,” but with the margins always available in memory for the sake of placing ourselves. In the light of our attention to Chaucer’s fox and cock story, it is amusing to see how Morson characterizes our turn- of- the- century (1999) view of narrative contingency: Newtonian “universal and timeless laws of the natural world,” applied to, say, narrative, come up against important opposition. Impressive challengers such as “Darwin, Clausewitz, Adam Smith, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Jane Jacobs” may be described by Sir Isaiah Berlin’s language: “these are ‘foxes,’ aware of many truths irreducible to systematic unity, who have dismissed as utopian the faith of their ‘hedgehog’ opponents that uncertainty, plurality, and the need for narrative will surely turn out to be temporary obstacles” (278). When Chaucer places the marginal at the center of his bookspace, he has made readable the convergence of time and space from a centric textual point. There is no tile f loor to represent visual perspective, but the textual allusions threading the narrative warp of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale are equivalents of those visual gauges. In other terms, Chaucer provides a space where we might hope to see everyday practice, where we might see time “thickened,” homely, full of possibility and, therefore, of uncertainty.

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Chaucer cannot read the future any more than St. Augustine can, but he provides us a way to read time and place, then and now: “One time there was a picket fence with space to gaze from hence to thence.”45 At least two of Chaucer’s contemporaries raise important questions about the reckoning gaze.

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CHAPTER 2 THE HOUSE OF FAME: “I WOT MYSELF BEST HOW Y STONDE.”

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ne of the richest moments in Chaucer’s writing comes in the early dream vision—The House of Fame—where Geffrey, the poetdreamer, replies, with immediate (and uncharacteristic) irritation, to the question, “Artow come hider to han fame?” (The House of Fame, III, 1872): Have you come to this place (Fame’s house) for fame? Up to this point in the nerve-wracking f light from earth through space, Geffrey has responded as a willing (but not eager) student of the eagle pedagogue. In spite of the quite real fear of falling, he has given careful attention to matters of science—celestial mapping, the physics of sound, motion, space. These scientific reasonings, clearly set out by his earnest guide, comfort him intellectually but do little to ease his fear of falling, because he is faced by the reality of his own weight. In short, Geffrey is as impressed by the information as he is fraught by his imagination and the now shrinking view of the distant spot of earth. This eagle’s eye focuses on what should entertain the poet as he makes his way through the universe to Fame’s house. The dreamer is, after all, eager to find a receptive audience for his poems. Even so, Geffrey is quick to respond to the opportunity to make a case before Fame: he says, “I wot [know] myself best how y stonde” (III, 1878). However, this edgy self-assertion gives way to open space—with no authority for clear answers. In fact, the effect of the poem seems to be a rich irresolution. There is a striking parallel image in the Cloud-author’s chapters 31 and 32. The Cloud-author argues quite seriously that his student is to ignore worldly distractions (even those that are charitable): thou schal stalworthly step aboven it with a fervent sterying of love, and treed hem down under thi fete. And fonde to cover hem with a thicke

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cloude of forgetyng, as thei never had ben don in this liif of thee, ne of other man outher. (31: 1208–12) Do that in thee is to lat as thou wist not that thei prees so fast apon thee, bitwix thee and thi God. And fonde to loke as it were over theire schuldre, seching another thing; the which thing is God, enclosed in a cloude of unkowyng. (32: 1218–21)

The recommendations, images, and cast of minds suggest that those things that the Cloud-teacher recommends for his young student point up remarkable connections among fourteenth- century didactic philosophies. Geffrey’s response to the question of his desire for fame expresses a radical idea for a man of the fourteenth century in England, an answer seriously wrong in two important ways: (1) in the face of the abiding Anglo- Saxon tradition that fame, based on action, offers immortality and (2) in terms of the doctrine that only God knows the human heart and so knows best how one stands. Skirting either of those principles to avoid some cultural or doctrinal cliché raises important questions about Geffrey’s sense of his place in the culture of the fourteenth century— its recorded past and its anagogical future, its historical realities and its spiritual obligations. Geffrey the dreamer is not asking for recognition for his civic, esthetic, political, or spiritual contribution. Nor is he willing to give up conclusions about himself to any crowd of readers of his poetry, especially future readers. He will not stand still for the authority of public opinion to forward an assessment. Moreover, he apparently will not stand still for spiritual bookkeeping. After all, where does he “stand”? How does he “stand” among the authoritative names carved in ice and in the absence of someone of great auctoritee? What is more, what place does his text take—in time or in the space of the world? By means of scientific demonstration embedded in a dream, there is the suggestion of a poet’s hope of a new text that draws attention to spatial and temporal incertitude as it provides the place for seeing. Long ago, Wolfgang Clemen argued that the eagle sets out “real factual observation to substantiate castles in the air.”1 On the other hand, Michel de Certeau recasts such an image in his discussion of the “mediating role” of borders and frontiers that offer a “transformation of the void into a plenitude, of the in-between into an established place.”2 In both thinkers—Clemen and de Certeau—the effect is a new place to stand so that we freely consider both here and there. Paul Zumthor appears to point out such possibilities when he says, in 1993, that by the sixteenth century it would be the case that “l’espace aura perdu ses axes, expansion infinite, comme la lumiére.”3 We can usefully read lumiere as both light and understanding.

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And, most important, Zumthor’s language recasts the theological geometry of the circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere—but without the comfort offered by Bradwardine, for example. What, then, are the spatial implications for the fourteenth century about the long and short of this art, or this faith—or this science that reckons what we can know by measure or enumeration against what we can only consider by imagining? What gauge or index might we use standing between here and there, reading Chaucer’s poem in the space of our cumulative experience while we observe, as we can, objective information? The problem is basic—in terms of the present book—but startling in light of Thomas Nagel’s proposal for a truly objective view of the world made possible by subjective awareness. Nagel considers the question by standing where he might explain his “view from nowhere”—that place that acknowledges the gap between objective and subjective views and then accommodates the gap by considering that “some things can only be understood from the inside, and [that] access to them will depend on how far our subjective imagination can travel” (18). In either case, the connection between reason and the imagination is crucial. When we read The House of Fame, we might very well argue—scientifically, philosophically, and esthetically—that we are granted a view from nowhere. As the dream unfolds, it seems to be all about taking the measure of Geffrey’s travel—in the world, universe, or cosmos, or, we might say, the temporal gauge of Geffrey’s place—as an astrolabe might show us. The well-informed and earnest eagle as teacher is quite willing to explain that every natural thing moves toward its natural place where it is best “conserved,” according to its kyndely [natural] enclynyng (729–36): heavy things fall downward; lighter things f ly upward. If Geffrey has made good use of his reading, he will know, as Stephen Nichols reminds us, that The Middle Ages did not forget for a moment the paradox of this geocentric system. To be at the center of the universe meant to be at the bottom of an ascending scale of quality at the furthest remove from the unmoved center of perfection.4

Of course, the eagle scholar cites his sources: any philosopher can tell you as much, including Aristotle and Plato. But the eagle knows a great deal about proper instruction and knows, in particular, that the next step is to support his reasoning with material example so that Geffrey may consider—scientifically—the nature of sound. The eagle is notably dullwitted here if he thinks his student—the poet-dreamer—is to be moved by the simple argument that sound is air broken. So, ignoring Geffrey’s

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having been hustled out of his material place and ignoring what must be this dreamer’s sense of “place” as a poet, the teacher plainly denies that Geffrey will find a place among the stars: he is no prophet, nor was meant to be. The eagle’s intentions, however, are good. Therefore, for his student’s advantage and to make the material truth clear, he will explain sound’s motion in terms of physics—surely an intellectual comfort if not a material one. We might hope, then, that the eagle has some awareness of Geffrey’s very particular interest in this conversation in spite of a rather raw beginning: the eagle will explain in terms of ordinary experience for his weak-witted listener, whose will is strong—he would like to know— but whose wit surely would fail to make use of abstruse examples from the physics of such masterful minds as Plato’s and Aristotle’s. “I preve hyt [sound’s motion] thus—take hede now—Be experience” (787–88). John of Salisbury’s pedagogy will work here. This practical approach to the science of motion—in this case, the movement of sound—is impressive. The pattern of instruction is familiar: practice precedes precept. [We feel, with Geffrey, a gripping incertitude in the face of this exposure to “every kind of accident” barely checked by the eagle’s solicitous tone. However, the “practical” matter of experience offers the queasy traveler a heady sense of motion just now—with the chance to understand things from this new direction far from his natural place where he, by nature, ordinarily settles, like a stone, among his books. As Nichols reminds us, “motion was the concept on which the coherence of this system [of geocentric spheres] depended” (15). The important cultural implications of the physics of revolving spheres become clear when “geocentrism [The uppercase G appears in the text: lowercase is all right?] penetrated all aspects of the medieval world by providing the grounds for the tight coherence mapped on it by theological and philosophical metaphysics. Spatially, physically, historically, everything that existed was perceived as tightly linked in the present and through the past” [my emphasis] (15). We can understand Geffrey’s uneasiness: he is far from home. We should reconsider brief ly here the opening ref lections on dreams in The House of Fame, for they are plainly “about” science. The conversation between (more or less) Geffrey and the eagle is about physics and astrology—energizing sciences in Chaucer’s day. Aside from the dreamer’s lack of will to learn by experience, Chaucer’s interest in the sciences of his day is evident—in this early poem, in The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale (chemistry), The Summoner’s Tale (math), A Treatise on the Astrolabe (astronomy), and his own translation of Boethius’ Boece. Consequently, then, the eagle’s pedagogical earnestness on Geffrey’s behalf is appropriate—prompted, it seems, by a forward—if not a promising—student.

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The exercise is interesting to us as popular science but also as something of a workshop in pedagogy. The occasions for instruction in Chaucer’s writings and in writings from two of his contemporaries are especially important since we are given to think that the fourteenth- century culture of learning depended on both a listening audience and a reading audience— wherever some teacher might find such students. The eagle, of course, wishes to explain sound’s motion by lecture and demonstration, for in this case, his protégé is so dull as to spend his time poring over books— authoritative resources, of course—but without the support of careful observation and practice. When the eagle sets out “factual observation to substantiate castles in the air,” his argument is that books offer ineffectual authority compared to experience. The questions of authority (books) and experience (practice) clearly take on an intellectual energy and urgency here. In the course of the eagle’s setting out this scientific proof “by experience,” Geffrey grows increasingly uneasy about their physical progress. His responses are tight-lipped, his acknowledgements, increasingly grudging. In fact, he is fairly clear- sighted in his claim that, yes, he knows— from gauging his f light—where he is: he has watched the familiar things of earth grow smaller and smaller. The problem, however, is complicated because he does not know how he is in this place—as body or spirit. The question how? is important here in the open space as it will be later at Fame’s house. The question comes from the physical pressure of the occasion, certainly, but the implications are as debatable in the eagle’s pedagogy as they were in 1277—when faith and reason contended in the fields of theology and science. The allusion is from II Corinthians, where St. Paul raises the question of his material presence in the face of God.5 The dreamer’s joke is a delicious one that owes its wit to Paul and to Dante, in the first place, but then to Chaucer’s own authority of immense personal and cultural persuasion—Boethius. Chaucer has brought scientific argument to bear on the poet- dreamer’s quite subjective hope for Fame. Boethius’ inf luence in The House of Fame has long been acknowledged, and I want to consider here his approach for organizing pedagogy, science, and the place of the self in the world. These three prospects for reading The House of Fame also serve in the chapters that follow, for the Perle-poet and for The Cloud of Unknowing author. In particular, we can turn now to Book II, Prose 7, in Boece, where Philosophie is asking her student Boethius to consider what brings one to “perfeccioun of virtue” in the face of some success, having “wel adminystred the commune thynges, or doon gode desertes to profit of the commune.” In short

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Philosophie is talking about fame: good work is relatively insignificant when we “see now and considere how litel and how voyde of all prys [honorable recognition] is thylke glorye.” Certeyn thing es, as thou hast lerned by demonstracioun of astronomye, that al the envyrounynge of the erthe about ne halt [holds or possesses] but the resound of a prykke at regard of the gretnesse of hevene; that is to seyn that, yif ther were maked comparysoun of the erthe to the gretnesse of hevene, men wolde juggen in on al that the erthe ne heelde no space [my emphasis]. Of the whiche litel regioun of this world, the ferthe partye is enhabited with lyvynge beestes that we knowen as thou hast thyselve lerned by Tholome [Ptolemy] that proveth it. And yif thow haddest withdrawen and abated in [subtracted from] thy thought fro thilke ferthe partie as moche space as the see and the mareys contene and overgoon, and as moche space as the regioun of drowghte overstreccheth (that is to seyn, sandes and desertes), well unnethe sholde ther duellen a ryght streyte place to the habitacioun of men. And ye thanne, that ben envyrouned and closed withynne the leeste prykke of thilke prykke, thynken ye to manyfesten or publisschen your renoun and doon yowr name for to be born forth? But yowr glorye that is so narwe and so streyt ithrungen into so litel bowndes, how mochel conteneth it in largesse and in greet doynge? (II, Prose 7, 21–49)

Philosophie reminds Geffrey that once we station ourselves inside these “litel boundes,” we will see Wisdom’s conversation with Aristotle about the potential power of a small space—the heart. We will see more about Albert of Saxony’s image of the millet seed’s spatial potential. In fact, we and Geffrey begin to understand ourselves as being of a place—a very small place—while we move about among widening possibilities by means of the mind’s motion. Philosophie has hardly finished with Boece: Keep in mind, she says, that “Thilke wrytynges profiten litel, the which writynges long and dirk eelde doth awey, bothe hem and ek hir auctours! But yow men semeth to geten [beget] yow a perdurablete [immortality], when ye thynken that in tyme comynge your fame schal lasten. But natheles yif thow wolt maken comparysoun to the endless spaces of eternyte, what thing hastow by which thow mayst rejoisen the of long lastynge of thi name? (Book II, Prose 7, 89–98)

Philosophie knows how to make a case. Boece is little more than a speck; his reputation, but a pinprick. Being in place for this reality check is not granted to everyone. However, we must give particular attention to

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Philosophie’s incontrovertible assertion that Boece has forgotten what he is: Thow has left for to knowen thyselve what thou art . . . thow art confounded with foryetynge of thiself. (Book I, Prose 6, 69–70)

The lesson is that Boethius must begin to acknowledge the world’s expanse and know himself as he stands. Nevertheless, Philosophie encourages Boece, for there is, she is happy to say, some promise, since Boece has acknowledged “the resoun of God. And therefore doute the nothing, for of this litel spark thine heet of lif schal shine” (Book I, Prose 6, ll. 91–93). Setting one’s “streyt ithrungen” glory inside “the endless spaces of eternyte,” how can one rejoice? Philosophie’s instruction, for both Boethius and Chaucer, defines “place” for them in the midst of and by means of immensities of space and time. The extraordinary implication here and in Thomas Nagel’s argument for a view from nowhere is that—as finite as we materially are, we can by mind participate in the light of understanding. Chaucer’s dream f light, then, poses complicated ideas even as we enjoy the witty drama of the eagle’s pedagogy. And although the authoritative theories come to us from an extraordinary bird that mimics Dante’s guide and anticipates another glorious avian pedagogue—Chauntecleer—we might well believe that everyday conversations and speculations about scientific reasoning, spiritual urgency, and philosophical queries fill the air of fourteenth-century England as regularly as church bells sounded to organize daily practices. Reason and imagination, we see, contend for privilege and precedent as authority. Clearly, Chaucer’s impressive argument for both reason and imagination as basic for learning comes by way of examples from Augustine and John of Salisbury. As an acknowledged teacher, John’s principal pedagogical terms became standard elements in the teacher’s work. For John, then, reason “is centrally situated between the chamber of imagination and memory so that from its watchtower it may pass upon the judgments of sensation and imagination” (Metalogicon, IV, 17, 229).6 In fact, this teacher argues that “imagination is . . . the first activity [movement] of the soul after it is subjected to external stimulation” (IV, 11, 220). These activities work in the following order: sensations yield imagination from which two comes opinion, which is then organized by prudence which nurtures “the maturity of scientific knowledge” (Met. IV, 12, 222). As assurance, John cites Hugh of St. Victor, who clarifies the place of faith: faith is “a certitude which is greater than opinion, but which falls short

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of science” (IV, 26). And John is brave in his assertions: “ideas are countless” (IV, 31): Reason in creatures is a spiritual force that examines the nature of things and acquires a knowledge, not only of material entities, but also of concepts perceptible by the intellect alone. (IV, 31, 250)

John cites Martianus Capella’s poetic description of reason’s reach: [Reason] is the sphere . . . comprised of all the elements, and lacking nothing of which any nature may be conceived to consist. It includes all heaven and all the seas, the various parts of the earth, the infernal regions, and towns as well as crossroads, with their [manifold] activities and fortunes, as well as every sort of thing, particular or general, that may be mentioned. This sphere is evidently an image, as well as an idea of the world. [my emphasis] (IV, 31, 250)

The language here is important, for John uses two crucial terms— “image” and “idea” so that we may now station ourselves in a place were we might simultaneously consider what we see (perceive) and what we imagine (conceive). Or, we might say, we take for our understanding analogue or metaphor. This expanding sphere of possibilities, like Nagel’s exercise, is the space all three of these Middle English writers consider as a way of explaining their work—by setting out their instructional models and providing a place where we might stand to look. In the course of his long- standing argument against the fictitious Cornificius—“Our Cornificius, opponent of logic” (Book IV, 25, 241), John establishes the terms of his pedagogy by employing dialectic for setting out reason, since it teaches both how to teach and how to learn. In dialectic, reason discloses its own identity, and makes manifest its nature, purpose, and potentialities. Dialectic alone knows how to know, and it alone both wills and has the power to make men learned. (Book IV, 25, 242)

By chapter 40 of book IV, John concludes his argument with Cornificius and sets out the eight obstacles to understanding the rich sphere of possibilities. The list of eight obstacles is instructive, to be sure, but largely it serves as a review of this educational theory. John’s precision of expression in the third from last chapter of the last book on instruction in logic is a clear and generous summary: “ ‘To know oneself ’ is, according to Apollo, practically the highest wisdom”

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(IV, 40, 270). At the next moment, John explains with the pressing question: Of what use is it to understand the nature of the elements and of things composed of the elements, to study the principles of quantitative and numerical proportion, to speculate about the opposition of virtues and vices, to pay careful attention to inferences in reasoning, and to dispute with probability on all sorts of points, if, meanwhile, one remains ignorant of himself?

This pressing argument drives our three writers and supports Nagel’s insistence on the mutually absorptive power of the objective and the subjective. One other point, this one from Plato, furnishes the logic of John’s argument for careful teaching, and, coming early in book II, it asserts its distinction by means of a short chapter (chapter 2) in order to state clearly the uncompromising basis for The Metalogicon: “Plato [unlike Aristotle] did not organize logic into a scientific art. Use came first [my emphasis], for here, as elsewhere [for Plato], precept followed practice” (II, 2, 77). This pedagogical conclusion is important: practice comes before precept. This powerfully plain argument for experience or practice in order, therefore, to know as precept stands even now as the terms of pedagogical practice. In fact, Michel Lefebvre7, Michel de Certeau, and Thomas Nagel—all argue for the everyday practice of realities if we are to have some gauge for determining what we might know. It is in the fourteenth century, however, that Geffrey’s sharp-eyed instructor sets out his own pedagogical style—in the course of his flight into the heavens—with inevitable similarities to John’s carefully reasoned instructional style. In particular, of course, this eagle will preve all by experience. But, in fact, the eagle draws into his conversation the subtleties of pedagogical rhetoric and invites anyone who disagrees to furnish proof to the contrary. What is particularly striking in Chaucer’s poem is the dramatization of John’s earnest conclusion about the use of reason for understanding. On his way to Fame’s house, Geffrey has had a fine display of the rational method for coming to knowledge by means of progress from sensation to imagination to opinion to prudence to mature science. Geffrey—now wod in a were [perplexed]—has more information than he can use 8 —especially as he watches Fame at work: not only does he have opinions about the works of some of Fame’s petitioners and their placement among others of Fame’s note, but now he must acknowledge the unreasonable decisions she makes—willy-nilly—as the wind blows from the black or golden horn or from the whirling house of whispered rumor. He is in motion: To sleep, to dream (imagine) by “experience” what proves to be pretty useless, even disheartening, information for a poet, then to be set

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down alone in a desolate landscape (a manuscript page scrubbed bare?9) by his self- satisfied guide to “learn” from Lady Fame—where there is no reason. We should not be at all surprised to miss the comfort of seeing a man of greet auctorite who can ease our minds. Geffrey’s dismay, barely controlled, seems quite reasonable in light of generations of teachers who argue for self-knowledge. Having viewed the tiny pinprick of earth, Geffrey is bemused by the were he is in, for now he is instructed by what he cannot depend on for instruction—either from the eagle or from some authority from distant time or place. Although he may take into account what he knows, the instructive task now is to understand what it is we cannot know and thereby gauge what we do know. As John writes: Slipping about in a mire of incertitude, man apprehends as much as he can. At times his opinions are true, inasmuch as they constitute accurate representations of reality. (II, 33, 253–54)

What is a dreamer to do? Geffrey’s stubborn discounting of his instructor’s logic and pedantic rhetoric on the one hand and, on the other hand, irrational expectations for fame virtually undermines the poet’s apparent power: (1) to prove by logical argument and (2) to move by affective language. Our dreamer— naively, it seems—practices the kind of hermeneutics recommended by extraordinary instructors of the past: he seems to have subverted authority and argued for imposing the self among the world’s countless possibilities. He argues that only from the ref lecting self can he include all that he might know (or fail to know). Moreover, the intensified image of Geffrey, wexen in a were (generally glossed as beginning “to increase in perplexity”) takes on more meaning if we see the occasions where Chaucer uses the word were (a device for trapping a crowd of fish)—to explain “uncertainty.” In The Parliament of Fowls, the dreamer, guided by Africanus, comes to two gates—one unto the welle of grace, the other Unto the mortal strokes of the spere Of which Disdayn and Daunger is the gyde, Ther nevere tre shal fruyt ne leves bere, This strem yow ledeth to the sorweful were There as the fish in prysoun is al drye; Th’eschewing is only the remedye! The Parliament of Fowls (134–40)

In the proem to book III of Troilus and Criseyde, the narrator offers a delicate and soulful plea to Venus for instruction. The word were again serves

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as an image of uncertainty and perplexity—in this case, the possibilities and impossibilities of joys or sorrows in love: Ye [Venus] holden regne and hous in unitee; Ye sothfast cause of friendsip ben also; Ye know al thilke covered qualitee Of thynges, which that folk on wondren so, Whan they kan nought construe how it may jo [go? happen? play out?] She loveth hym or whi he loveth here, As whi this fish, and naught that, comth to were. Troilus and Criseyde, III, 29–35

The poet then asks Venus for guidance through love’s perplexities because Ye folk a lawe han set in universe, And this knowe I by hem that lovers be, That whoso stryveth with yow hath the werse. Now, lady bright, for thi benignite, At reverence of hem that serven the, Whos clerc I am, so techeth me devyse Som joye of that is felt in thi servyse. Troilus and Criseyde, III, 36–42

It is no surprise to see Chaucer’s narrator serving as love’s clerc here, longing for instruction for his perplexities, but the dream-narrator of The House of Fame has options. Caught, now, in a were, Geffrey must manage the physical perplexity of the eagle’s talons and then the more abstract space of Fame’s uncertain practices. Here is a masterful point of poeticism where Chaucer claims mind and body for our attention. Geffrey’s fear about whether he is moving in body or spirit takes on wit at the expense of the dreamer while we weigh the gravitas of St. Paul’s uncertainty. Nagel’s language is useful to explain the point: “New external perspective depends on whether it can place the internal perspective within the world in a way that enables one to occupy both of them [objective and subjective views] simultaneously” (77). The views of the world Geffrey sees are, finally, realistic: the eagle’s tedious scientific pedantry and Fame’s willful misrepresentation of the beautiful, the bad, and the ugly. But what Geffrey learns about those realities should be considered in two ways that Nagel explains “as form and content” (101). That is, What they [all our thoughts] are about depends not on their subjective form but on what has to be referred to in any explanation of what makes them true.

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When Augustine writes, “What we do not know about God constitutes our truest wisdom concerning Him,” he has called attention to the promise of incertitude these fourteenth-century writers set out for us. Nagel’s central argument offers a similar promise. Moreover, in considering form and content, Nagel might well explain Geffrey’s (Chaucer’s?) open- ended design for his dream/poem: The question is how limited beings like ourselves can alter their conception of the world so that it is no longer just the view from where they are but in a sense a view from nowhere, which includes and comprehends the fact that the world contains beings which possess it, explains why the world appears to them as it does prior to the formation of that conception, and explains how they can arrive at the conception itself. (70)

Nagel acknowledges the problems with this exercise: The objective standpoint can’t really be domesticated. Not only does it threaten to leave us behind, but it gives us more than we can take on in real life. When we acknowledge our containment in the world, it becomes clear that we are incapable of living in the full light of that acknowledgment. Our problem has in a sense no solution, but to recognize that [my emphasis] is to come as near as we can [my emphasis] to living in light of the truth. (231)

In 1159, John of Salisbury draws similar conclusions, toward the end of The Metalogicon, about the knowing self: “Truth is both the light of the mind and the subject matter of reason”—the form and the context (IV, 39, 267). It is in just such proximate space that Geffrey stands, reminding us again of Nagel’s argument: “However often we may try to step outside of ourselves, something will have to stay behind the lens, something in us will determine the resulting picture, and this will give grounds for doubt that we are really getting any closer to reality” (Nagel, 68). For all that, however, we may learn to see from the center. The gathering of fame-seekers at Fame’s house now makes a claim on our attention because the scene has the force of detailed reality—as dreams often do. But even more important, the scene with the hostess is instructive in a way that the eagle’s science cannot be: it instructs in human nature. Moreover, given that context, we would not expect the calculus of division and succession, quantitative differences satisfactorily measured and numbered. The dream vehicle, as always, raises questions about what we know. In fact, dream operates as metaphor in the ways John of Salisbury argues that poetry might do. That is, it might well give us an “Accurate apprehension of reality, which [he says] is the basis for

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calling things true” (IV, 33, 254). Chaucer has used dream metaphor— the poem itself—for portraying accurately observed realities of apprehension and misapprehension. In fact, by the end of book III, the sound from Fame’s house—as of a great wind—so frightens Geffrey that he thinks of Boethius’ observation that one’s thought could f ly so high with the wings of Philosophye that one could f ly beyond all material elements with the operations of science and measure. In fact, Geffrey, arguing that the sound is “lyk betynge of the see . . . ayen the roches holowes” (II, 1034–35), goes on to take the measure of just how high he must be, making a geographic analogue: And certain, or I ferther pace, I wol yow al the shap devyse Of hous and site, and al the wyse How I gan to thys place aproche That stood upon so high a roche, Hier stant ther non in Spayne. (III, 1113–17)

My argument here is that the eagle’s rational “science” is set against the “domesticated” realities of human nature. Homebound and domesticated humans are abstracted from objective truth, “slipping about in a mire of incertitude.” Nevertheless, this urge—this “appetite for reason”—is as real, we can argue, as any other desire. The pedagogical exercises in Geffrey’s f light—posing the accountable sciences against the f luid realities of human nature—have set up ironic ref lections, especially since the medium is a dream—not reality except in the sense that dreams in fact occur: this dream is the light of the mind on the matter of fame. Or, as John would say, “Reason is [becomes], in a way, the eye of the mind” (IV, 38, 266). It is Nagel’s observation that “Not only can we form the pure idea of a world that contains us and of which our impressions are a part, but we can give this idea a content which takes us very far from our original impressions (70) as we stand behind the lens” [my emphasis]. The poet’s complex metaphor includes the reality of reasoned impulse—“factual observation substantiating castles in the air” that even now we can take into consideration, for there is little difference between this dream vision and William James’s moving account of what he learned from Gustav Theodor Fechner as he planned his lectures on the psychophysicist /visionary—A Pluralistic Universe. Robert D. Richardson records James’s “account of how he came actively to understand that the earth is indeed alive”: On a certain spring morning I went out to walk. The fields were green, the birds sang, the dew glistened, the smoke was rising, here and there a man appeared; a light as of transfiguration lay on all things. It was only a

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little bit of the earth: it was only one moment of her existence: and yet as my look embraced her more and more it seemed to me not only so beautiful an idea, but so true and clear a fact, that she is an angel, an angel so rich and fresh with herself, turning her whole living face to heaven, and carrying me along with her into that heaven, that I asked myself how the opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from life so far as to deem the earth only a dry clod, and to seek for angels above it in the emptiness of the sky.10

“The whole scheme,” as James saw Fechner’s logic, “is got from the fact that the span of our own inner life alternately contracts and expands” (501). Here is James’s argument for “The power of seeing analogies” (502). Stephen Nichols’s note to his remarks on dream visions (which may be seen “as an attempt to penetrate the boundaries of the known,” p. 2) sharpens the argument that text may provide space for understanding. He writes, Inventing new forms of representation did not seem to pose a problem requiring theoretical elaboration in the Middle Ages. Understanding the implications and significance of such initiatives did. Consequently, one finds treatises on reading, like Hugh of Saint Victor’s Didascalicon or Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s Poetria nova. The artes poeticae of the Middle Ages, as well as prefaces to vernacular works, all stress the arduous task of reading as an almost mystical activity of penetrating veils.11

It is as if reading were prayer. The eagle’s skepticism about Geffrey’s reading habits is not merely wit. Nichols argues that Dante has provided not only “a figure of the mind’s ascent towards spiritual life, but shows to what extent the Commedia itself is a vast metaphor for the mind motion of the human striving to transform perception to thought and wisdom of a higher state” (19). James Simpson makes similar observations in his reading of John Gower’s and Alan of Lille’s work, arguing that their poems are “coherent psychological allegories, anatomizing and representing the education of a single soul” (13). There is a “psychology of reading” (14), and the “meaning of both works is to be located less in their represented narratives, than in the sense of those narratives, a sense which is understood only through the reader’s act of interpretation”—an enformacion (14–15). Both Alan and Gower depend on the receptive mind for good effect.12 The narrative space of instruction offered in The House of Fame lacks a satisfying transformation of “perception to thought and wisdom of a higher state.” It seems appropriate now to reconsider my word incertitude in The House of Fame. Another way of looking at the conclusion would

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be to argue that Chaucer was perfectly at ease without the presence of someone of great authority who might put him in his place. After all, the possibilities—in this dream—range far and deep, drawing the past up to the moment where Geffrey and we may look toward the edge of the next time and place. There is in Geffrey that same spirit of adventure—in the full face of dread—that we see in Nagel’s rounding assertion that “The idea of a full conception of reality that explains our ability to arrive at it is just a dream” (55). Chaucer seems to have provided his own metaphor for incertitude. About reading medieval texts, Howard Bloch considers the following question: [W]hat is at stake in reading it [the medieval text] like any other? What would happen if we were to take literally the possibility of reading à la lettre, or according to interpretative criteria suggested by the text itself ?13

He takes a significant step toward adventurous reading—the kind of reading that must nearly always have prompted anyone of the fourteenth century who could read and, furthermore, could find a book. I want to consider Bloch’s challenge of reading a text as it seems to stand now, and I do something like that, I think, in my reading of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale in chapter 1 when I take up the spatial matter of that tale—“a windmill in a walnut shell” or in a millet seed, for that matter—that recovers for us a quality of mind that has moved some distance from The House of Fame, for it inscribes a standing place no larger than a chicken yard—index or analogue for a practical space of the world, where work takes the day’s measure, where use and practice claim the space. All the while, exits and entrances give way to new threats and promises—as we see in The House of Fame. However, this insistence on finding a place to stand to know takes another turn at the end of Chaucer’s writings—specifically in A Treatise on the Astrolabe. But just here for the moment, I want to point out a striking scene in Isabel Colgate’s novel The Shooting Party (1980).14 Olivia, a quiet observer among the characters and quite curious about how/where she stands, has a short conversation with her husband Bob as they are dressing for the next event of the shooting party set on Sir Randolph’s fine old estate. Bob’s “perfunctory kind of categorizing” of other people, of other social groups seemed to be “enumeration rather than enlightenment.” She argues that they know nothing about these other possibly intelligent and civilized people. Bob suggests that he can hardly think they would interest him. But Olivia persists in her point as she makes conversation with

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Sir Randolph later: “Are we all so beautiful and brave?” she asks. The question seems to have been prompted by remarks Sir Randolph, the arch-observer, addresses to Olivia’s image of their England. He argues that it is a myth, that to try to change that sense of themselves, he says, “would mean working against the whole current of history” (108). *

*

*

“However often we may try to step outside of ourselves,” as Nagel says, “something will have to stay behind the lens” (The View from Nowhere, 69). Even Geffrey knows That every kyndely thing that is Hath a kyndely sted ther he May best in hyt conserved be; Unto which place every thing Thorgh his kyndely enclynyng Moveth for to come to What that hyt is awey therfro. (The House of Fame, II, 730–36)

Adrienne Rich knows the question: “Where do we stand to look is the question.” And Chaucer, the Perle-poet, and The Cloud of Unknowing author provide textspace where we might usefully stand to consider the answer.

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CHAPTER 3 THE BOOK OF THE DUCHESS: THE SPACE OF SELF

H

amlet’s name- calling—“Frailty, thy name is woman”—should be the official and celebrated moment when medieval metaphor and its narrative extension, allegory, die, hounded to death by a drive toward particularizing abstractions that mark out space by gesture and word, space of event, where we meet the contingent. If Guillaume’s and Jean’s allegories exploited the mind’s prism by peopling the garden with, say, Disdain, Reason, Fair Welcome, as C.S. Lewis believed they did,1 then Hamlet has set the terms for a new metaphor or allegory now designed to turn idea into event: “You wanna see Frailty; I’ll show it to you, show you where it operates,” as opposed to saying, “I will clothe frailty in its own imitable gear.” In all the guises “woman” might act out, says Hamlet, “I’ll show you frailty”—but “frailty” with the lowercase “f ”— open to all and particular eventualities. This new metaphor is a move toward Lukács’s “abstract particularity” in contrast to the “concrete typicality” usually assigned (by Lukács specifically) to the medieval temperament and to its allegory.2 The new allegory refracts and scatters distinctive details of this frailty, and assembles them for scrutiny. Hamlet heaps the distinctions into the living body— what Michel de Certeau would call an ensemble.3 For the moment, Hamlet speaks: all the fractious elements of frailty can be found in woman. The next move is to demonstrate by acting out, not by iconographic gratification, but by asserting a new model. Everyman and Piers make way through signifying terrain, but the terrain Hamlet maps is womankind, and the terrain can be marked out as a world of variation, uncertainty. The Book of the Duchess demonstrates Chaucer’s reservations about allegory as a way of knowing. He seems to understand, as Paul Ricoeur will argue,4 that metaphor—a looking from here to there to make

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connections—depends upon our consciousness of the available gap between the named and the unsayable, a “deviation.” In this dream poem, the knight struggles to reanimate, in the present moment, the stillness (as Bachelard understands the quality5) of memory. How does the medieval dream genre, so often employed as allegory, unexpectedly come to serve as the literary form in which Chaucer dispels the old allegorical mode, even as he employs the allegorical device most thoroughly and seriously? In fact, the poem provides the field of failed metaphor. Stephen Kruger argues that “dreaming in the Middle Ages” eventually comes to be the exercise of seeking to know; dreaming became an epistemological drive that grew out of both doctrinal and practical urges, superrational, on the one hand, and concerned with the powers of human reason, on the other.6 Especially important is Kruger’s assertion that there is a developing self-ref lective drive in the dream genre and a simultaneous widening of the gap between God and man. By extension, the dream became a setting for the complex dramatizations of reason and its conf lict with faith. I press Kruger’s very useful point further to say that in The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer raises suggestive questions as he attempts to reason out sorrow’s esthetic space. He resists allegorical trappings to present sorrow and admits the enduring obligation of poetic art to know and express what ultimately cannot be counted on for organizing the world into accountable, recordable form. In the spirit of medieval interest in classification, Kruger discusses the range of dreams—high, middle, and mundane. He writes that “in the later Middle Ages, new philosophical and theological movements tended to push God and the human being ever further apart, emphasizing the gap between divine action and human understanding . . . on the one hand, a mysticism that sought superrational unity with God; on the other, a science that concentrated its attention more and more fully on the mundane realm accessible to human reason” (130). As a natural consequence of this increasingly widening and acknowledged gap between the ordinary and the suprarational, dream poems employed allegory to link the material world with spiritual, ideological, or intellectual abstractions. We should not be surprised, then, to find innovative poets or storytellers who resist dependence on easy didacticism and allegorical cloaking devices, who resist neat equations that blur particularized experience. It is helpful to emphasize Kruger’s comparison between Cicero’s revelatory dream for instruction (teaching us how to live) and Ovid’s exploration of emotion (a refinement of classification). These distinctions open the way to understanding the shift from iconographic allegory to what I call “refracted allegory.” In fact, I want to argue that Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess, occurring at a stage prior to

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Hamlet’s egocentric rage against the trivial mnemonics of allegory, opens up a new esthetic that sidelines the old art of “picturing” the invisible. In this new way of constructing an abstraction, details are not reassembled for a satisfying close but are splayed and rendered subject to particularizing reason, experience, and perception. How are we to know how another suffers sorrow, or how are we to let our friend know that we understand not just Sorrow, but proper sorrow, “proper” in de Certeau’s sense—that it is one’s own, appropriate to oneself? Karl Morrison’s work on the idea of empathy as a cultural impulse—I Am You: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art—furnishes ground for this consideration.7 But first, we turn to the poem itself. Chaucer’s obligation to his patron and to his poetry must have been heavy under this assignment to remember Blanche—both privately and publicly, it seems. He was a young poet, and I am reminded of a young friend who says that the most deeply sorrowful events are, he fears, simply common. Allegorizing sorrow, then, should be easy. But the dialogue between dreamer and knight in Chaucer’s poem becomes, to use Kruger’s term, “self-ref lexive”—not openly, but by the deepest implications of what language might do to make sorrow known and thereby to shape a setting for living memory, a linguistic space, a poem by means of which the listener/reader might come to understand. This aesthetic promotes a new spatial consciousness, for precisely in this poem’s space the poet’s obligation is in the making, and we read toward realization. We should consider Lukács’s argument that “concrete typicality” characterizes the thought of the Middle Ages. We know that the Catholic Church made sweeping and impressive pedagogical uses of “universals,” a mnemonic device that surely served some needs of an oral culture. Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, by way of contrast, furnishes a startling narrative example of the modern “abstract particularity” that Lukács sees as distinguishing itself from medieval “concrete typicality” and projecting cultural consciousness in the twenty-first century by means of this distinction. The occasion for the image is Oedipa’s first view of San Narcisco, where she has gone to execute the will of an old friend/lover. The view from the slope where she stands to see is important for its metaphoric impossibilities since it shows her only the linear precision of a technological icon of space. She drove into San Narcisco on a Sunday, in a rented Impala. Nothing was happening. She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well- tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen

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her first printed circuit . . . Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning [my emphasis], of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narcisco, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.8

The rest of Pynchon’s narrative is, of course, Oedipa’s attempt to assign some empirical mapping to the abstract clues connecting herself to San Narcisco. In any case, Oedipa sets out to define the life logic of the place, what happens in the place. The narrator in The Book of the Duchess carries out a similar mission as he earnestly, naively attempts to clarify the invisible motions of the heart. He performs what de Certeau calls “a work of mourning by putting knowledge into the realm of fiction” (5), into the realm of dream. In making the distinction between mapping and touring,9 de Certeau writes that “mapping” is “a plane projection totalizing observations as in scientific discourse” (Oedipa’s view from the slope or the index, for that matter); de Certeau’s “touring,” on the other hand, is a “series of operations” of “ordinary culture” (Oedipa’s geographic moves through San Narcisco). The narrator’s physical advance (through the woods) toward the Black Knight de Certeau would call “mapping,” the science of motion. In fact, the mathematical precision— and stillness—documents the forest and fences off the motion of the sorrowing heart. The transition is compelling, for the next stage of the dreamer’s travel is “touring”—that series of operations that trace out or move among—in this case—the space of sorrow. De Certeau makes this instructive point: Both contemporary scientific analyses that reduce memory to its “social frameworks” and the clerical techniques that in the Middle Ages so cleverly transformed it into composition of places and thus prepared the modern mutation of time into a quantifiable and regulatable space, forget or reject its detours, even when the latter offer the major advantage of explaining by what procedures and for what legitimate strategic reasons the occasion—that indiscreet instant, that poison—has been controlled by the spatialization of scientific discourse . . . In this way, surprises are averted. Proper maintenance of the place eliminates these criminal tricks [the contingent].10

However, there is another way to explain the seeking spirit in The Book of the Duchess, for ultimately, of course, the Black Knight argues that he is the contingent.

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We recall that in recounting the circumstances of his dream, the narrator says that he fell into a welcome sleep—delayed because of an abiding, nameless uneasiness. The knight’s dilemma, like the narrator’s own, seems, therefore, to make some claim on our willing dreamer’s attention. In tracing the impulse toward empathetic understanding in Western culture, Karl Morrison uses three twentieth- century authors ( James Joyce, Luigi Pirandello, and Thomas Mann) to demonstrate the enduring claim—even now—of the self that longs to include the “you” in order to understand the world and to be able to say “I am you.” The two human energies that Morrison says sustain this drive are procreative (biological) and creative (esthetic). Procreation is the dominating male drive to have what he desires in order to re- create (himself ?). The creative empathetic urgency is that of the artist who wants to master the material of his art.11 The two energies—biologic and esthetic—come into unexpectedly sharp focus in The Book of the Duchess. Moreover, de Certeau’s touring/mapping distinctions furnish a way to frame the narrator’s efforts to understand—even to participate in—the Black Knight’s sorrow and, at the same time, to demonstrate the poet’s struggle to speak the abstraction that resists being said.12 Chaucer’s obligation to write this memorial poem for Blanche includes the need to make her joyous beauty available to those who hear or read about her, or to those who remember her. Citing the esthetics of Gerhoch of Reichersberg (1092/93–1169), Morrison writes, . . . the true goal of inquiry into any work was not its “positive values”— that is, the material composition—but its “negative values”—that is, contents of a text that were unsaid and unsayable. (196)

How is the conscientious poet to get this job done, especially a poet who is unsatisfied with, though in the debt of, the typical verbal and visual genres of his day—allegory and iconography? The opening details of Chaucer’s dream poem construct an illusion of purposeful activity. Even as the dreamer lies in bed, we are part of outward motion from one place to another: book, bed, storied window, birds’ songs, a cloudless sky. We enjoy broad reaches of air and light, of time and place (tales of ancient Greece and Troy, the Augustan age). Then the dreamer is “awake,” mounts his horse, moves along to join Octavian (Augustus Caesar!) and the hunters. On foot, now(?), he greets the whelp who seems to know him but who runs away as inconsequentially as he appeared, leaving the dreamer in a dark but orderly wood. We are reminded of another dog who acknowledges a familiar traveler—the old dog Argos, who welcomes Odysseus home, to his

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proper place. In Chaucer’s poem, too, the dreamer’s familiar (spiritual comforter and guide) brings him to a quiet, well- ordered space where he is at ease, charmed to give us a meticulous accounting of mathematical precision and stillness. Medieval gardens aside, this account is so precise that, once again (as we have seen in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale), we seem to read some notarial documentation, and we seem to know exactly where we stand. Consequently, the account deepens our confidence in the dreamer-guide: his observations are thorough, rational, pertinent, and measurable—as if he were prepared to make his report on the state of the royal forest. Hyt ys no need eke for to axe Wher there were many grene greves, Or thikke of trees, so ful of leves; And every tree stood by hymselve Fro other wel ten foot or twelve— So grete trees, so huge of strengthe, Of fourty or fifty fadme lengthe, Clene withoute bowgh or stikke, With croppes [crowns] brode, and eke as thikke— They were nat an ynche asunder— That hit was shadewe overall under. And many an hert and many an hynde Was both before me and behynde. Of founes, sowres, bukkes, does Was ful the woode, and many roes, And many sqwirelles that sete Ful high upon the trees and ete, And in hir maner made festes. (416–34)

We note the comfortably established space here, defined by the assembled activities of the animals. Now this careful observer summarizes: Shortly, hyt was so ful of bestes That thogh Argus, the noble countour, Sete to rekene in hys countour, And rekene with his figures ten—[Arabic numerals] For by tho figures mowe al ken, Yf they be crafty, rekene and noumbre, And telle of every thing the noumbre— Yet shoulde he fayle to rekene even [correctly] The wonders me mette in my sweven. (435–41)

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The enumeration is familiar, even satisfying; but it is important to consider the point at which the narrator indicates that numbers and reckoning are useless: no matter how intelligent or “crafty” an accountant might be, he would fail to “rekene even” the “wonders” of this dream. For the moment, the reckoning purports to be of trees and leaves, but the narrator, along with the hunters, has “romed right wonder faste/Doun the woode; so at the laste/I was war of a man in blak” (443–45). In contrast to the motions of the first scenes of the dream, once we step through the dark grove of trees lit only by the starlike flowers, there is virtually no visible movement. The Black Knight, failing to respond to the motions of his body, is absolutely still, his back against one of the tall oaks; the dreamer approaches quietly and stands “as still as ought” (459). Because the mathematical language is evident in this poem, it is important to read ought as zero. The zero has no power alone but has the power to move and augment: “Although a sypher in augrim have no might in significacion of it-selve, yet he yeveth power in significacion to other.”13 To deepen the sense of the empty-hearted knight, the poet reports the knight’s sorrowful song: he “sayd a lay” “Withoute noote, without song” (472). Hearing this tuneless complaint—so unexpectedly at odds with the birds’ tunes and the animals’ festes—and seeing the knight’s deep despair, the simple-hearted dreamer fears for the poor man’s life and stands quietly by. The only motion now is that of the blood rushing to bring aid to the heart—an oddly charming image with the invisible but powerful effect of moving us away from the mathematical precision and accountability of place that now delimits—sets up the boundaries of—the space of imagination. We sense, with the knight’s very blood, despair and terror rushing to the aid of the heart: The blood was f led for pure drede Doun to his herte, to make him warm— For wel hyt feled the herte had harm— To wite eke why hyt was adrad By kinde, and for to make hyt glad, For hit ys member principal Of the body. (489–96)

The combination of scientific discourse (the heart as “member principal/ Of the body”) with affective language (“pure drede,” “feled,” “adrad,” “glad”) plots the narrator’s mental state. Now here is everyday practice up close, and the events assembled are as close to home as we can expect. The heart’s blood raises the question: what is causing this illness? The narrator, immersing himself in the sorrowful heart, finds the reckoning difficult.

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How else can he know? Chaucer knows the quality of such stillness and the place of his narrator who, like the heart’s blood, must find the reason for this terrifying effect—a different kind of “reckoning” indeed from numbering the f lowers, trees, and creatures of the wood. It is, after all, the poet’s reckoning. It is a reckoning we have seen in practice from John of Salisbury: For dialectic teaches both how to teach and how to learn. In dialectic, reason discloses its own identity, and makes manifest its nature, purpose, and potentialities. Dialectic also knows [how] to know, and it alone both wills and has the power to make men learned. (Metalogicon, IV, 25, 242)

For all his self- effacement, the dreamer draws us into the space of his attention, moving us nearer and nearer to understanding what we see. In his chapter on “rhetoric swallowed up in hermeneutic,” Morrison offers Augustine’s view of Moses as an example of the ordinary man’s attempt to know and understand: “We mortals do not know the hearts of mortals,” not even the hidden depths of our own hearts, and Moses, feeling his inadequacy in the face of God, says, “Show me thyself.”14 In the course of this discussion of Augustine’s argument for the usefulness of “signs” for “knowing,” Morrison makes this important reading of Moses’s attempt to understand: for Augustine, “the movement of the mind, in understanding, could not be called a sign.” Instead, “ref lecting upon the act of understanding—understanding understanding, as it were—turned the attention of the mind and the feelings to objects of thought that understanding denoted by likeness, contiguity, or contrast” (my emphasis). “The mind becomes the meaning that it begets,” and the “action of the mind presses toward understanding.” In rational cognition, the mysterious instant when the mind’s eye was formed, or conformed, with the object of contemplation, could be described as a rapid f lash of light f looding through the mind (animus) and quickly withdrawing into its secrets, leaving vestiges in the memory from which vocal words were formed [citing De cat. rud., 2.3 Corp. Christ., ser. Lat., 46, pp. 122–23]. I repeat that conformation of image with archetype included participation of the image in the archetype. As image, the mind’s eye became that with which it was conformed. This transformation into likeness was true of understanding in general. (180)

It is this “transformation into likeness” bringing “understanding” that seems to be at work in this poem. First, however, there are the practical matters of introduction to be carried out between narrator and knight.

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It has generally been understood that Chaucer’s narrator is, or seems to be, a bit dull-witted as he rather timidly—we might say, delicately—asks questions of the manfully sorrowful Black Knight. But one analogy for the narrator’s role seems especially useful for explaining his connection with the suffering lover. Rose Zimbardo15 points to the relationship of king and fool as an appropriate comparison with this relationship between the knight and the dreamer. The narrator’s immediate and intensifying regard for this worthy knight encourages him in his hope to understand this fine, stalwart man. Taking Zimbardo’s observation a step further, I take Lear and his Fool as specific models, for Lear’s Fool is the best part of the king—not that part that operates as king—ceremonious, royal, self-important, and ruling. Far from Lear’s slender self-knowledge, the Fool figures that “unsayable” and “unseeable” (to use Morrison’s language) part of Lear that does know, so that when Lear seems mad as he comes to know himself, then he himself “plays” the fool; and, we note, the figure of the Fool simply disappears while Lear now acts out the fool- element. We have no information about what happens to the figure of the Fool in King Lear unless we understand that it is the Fool’s consciousness that now, finally, assembles the proper space of Lear’s painful understanding, or that Lear, finally, now knows that Cordelia (the heart? his fool?) is the mirroring consciousness that could not speak her love—and is, finally, his knowing and known Fool. The hard questions have always been the material Fool’s to raise until Lear knows them as his own. This process is a form of the cultural impulse Morrison describes: “I am you”—the movement toward knowing another in order to participate fully in a life outside of self. This motion is what Thomas Nagel, in our current culture, recommends, anticipated in many ways by what Chaucer’s narrator/dreamer/poet works toward in this poem. Eventually, Lear knows what his Fool knows, knows him to be, like himself, cold. It is “a strange hermeneutics,” Morrison writes, that “appears to anticipate Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle”: “By observation, the viewer changes the phenomenon” (177). And now we can turn again to the heart’s cry of the Black Knight. When the Black Knight argues that his sorrow is no “gere,” he is speaking the poet’s mind: particular sorrow will not make itself visible by conventions of costume or language. Sorrow takes up the space of one’s own bed: And thus I lyved ful many a day, That trewely I hadde no ned Ferther than my beddes hed

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Never a day to seche sorwe; I fond hyt redy every morwe. (1252–55)

Sorrow now is ready at hand, a matter of daily activity—of memory. Before his lady’s death, the knight’s longing comes to joy when she takes him “in hir governaunce” (1286), and “Al was as oon, withoute were” (1295). There was no need for either metaphor or math: all was oned—as the Cloud- author explains. “And thus we lyved ful many a yeare/so wel I kan nat telle how” (129–97). There is no language available for the joy and ease any more than there is for the sorrow and pain. Now, what use can the poet make of such material? He is no better equipped to tell the knight’s joy than to tell his sorrow. How can he make the loss of the fair White available to himself, let alone to us? Although it has rarely been Chaucer’s choice to exploit the possibilities of allegory, his readers have often pressed the allegorical template into Chaucer’s stories because pointing up the allegorical import offered a satisfying spiritual and intellectual exercise of medieval authoritative and witty rhetorical art. Chaucer certainly knows its power, but it is his nature, I believe, to place us so near to his subjects that the conventions are no longer in focus, present but out of focus. I use Constance and Griselde as examples of this effect—the effect of looking from here to there, from the actual to the perceived. Constance, storied icon of constancy, turns her own attention to the enduring icon of Mary as Mother. However, it is the event of Constance’s comparison between herself and Mary that gains for us the immediacy of tender care. Constance and her charity are not abstractions. For all the cultural expectations that her name raises about allegory and its lessons, we are made to understand this specific young mother’s way of knowing love. Constance does not “stand for” Mary, but is the realization of tender mercy. In point of fact, it seems that Robert Jordan’s observations about the Bakhtinian dialogic in The Man of Law’s Tale prompts us to see Chaucer’s dramatic presentation of Constance and her baby—among these “self- contained rhetorical parcels”16 —as a heart-warmingly human space in a tangle of rhetorical f lourish. This verbal counterpart to the visual Madonna of Humility f lattens or blurs the effects of allegory and its attendant rhetoric. We, then, are hard-put to consider Constance as more than one of us, but by the comparison, Chaucer has managed to make us love Constance as mother, as our own, while we acknowledge Christ’s loving Mother. We watch the shifting focus here (819–68): With baby Maurice in her arms,

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Constance moves toward the rudderless boat, kneels on the shore, looks to heaven, and addresses Mary. “Mooder,” quod she, “and mayde bright, Marie, Sooth is that thurgh wommanes eggement Mankynde was lorn, and damned ay to dye, For which thy child was on a croys yrent. Thy blissful eyen sawe al his torment; Thanne is ther no comparison bitwene Thy wo and any wo man may sustene.”

And then, “Thow sawe thy child yslayn before thyne yen, And yet now lyveth my litel child, parfay!” (The Man of Law’s Tale, 840–49)

This Constance is real. We know where she stands: “she looked bakward to the londe, . . . /And up she rist, and walketh doun the stronde/Toward the ship” (864–65). We see both here and there, and the space between is our vantage. Albert Cook, in his book on Piero della Francesca, Temporalizing Space, makes a point about visual art that seems to apply in important ways here because it has to do with the observer’s eye. Cook has us consider Constantine’s dream of the True Cross: “Taking measurement from the calculated fixed point of an observer’s eye and organizing material thematically with respect to a central observer [reader?]—the two procedures, perspective and observer-organized thematics, are quite naturally associable to each other.”17 So it is with our view of Constance, who, like us, has a place to stand to look. Nor is Griselde a personification of patience: she is patience as occasion shows us, with all of the attendant features proper to this particularized young woman—given presence by event. Her patience is legend. But Chaucer manipulates response by directing our attention to her everyday motion in time: she draws water from the village well; she sets the jug aside to hurry with the other girls to see what Walter is planning, which girl he will choose. I, for my part, am not prepared to revert to the notion of Griselde as an allegorical figure of patience when she seems to be like me, like people I know—eager to see, curious to know, part of the culture. Readers like me, thereby, are inclined to imagine ourselves in real, living occasions where patience, working at will, acts out its own terms.

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What if Hamlet had said, “Frailty, thy name is Ophelia”? We could certainly appreciate the wit. But to define the field of expectation by “woman” is to leave us free to discover varieties of frailty modified and practiced by individual and human vagaries. What does this shift from old allegory to new allegory mean for medieval art? How does it operate in Chaucer? Would we expect to see such shifts in the Patience-poet? What are the implications for Chaucer’s esthetic theories? What kind of conversation would Chaucer and the Patiencepoet make about their art? The scene where Bercilak and his men dress out the slain deer while Gawain “rests” seems to me to be one of these enriched spaces that Bakhtin and de Certeau amplify for us. The rules for “breaking of the deer” are clear and real. The poet is matter- of-fact. In other words, there are no surprises. The steps are common enough so that the poet merely confirms the practical details of field- dressing the deer. But the scene’s purpose seems to be for expressing the camaraderie of hunters whose satisfaction comes from comparing this specific occasion with many others they have acted out and remember. For example, they measure the weight or richness of the quarry by assuring us that “Two fyngeres thay fonde of the fowlest of all.” That is, the least of the deer slain had two fingers’ depth of fat about the ribs. In short, as hunts go, this one is quite satisfactory. This event takes its place in the community of memory—of hunts we have known. It is a set piece, a device the Gawain-poet seems to take particular delight in, a practiced space in which we (might) recognize ourselves. Chaucer uses a similar device as he describes his Pardoner: “of his craft fro Berwyk into Ware/Ne was ther swich another pardoner” (693–94). Based on this description, we understand that this man has all the attributes of a pardoner and, moreover, that what he is is defined when the poet, filling out the lines of expectation for pardoners, particularizes this pardoner so that we would know him from all other pardoners we could know. We would know, then, by seeing abstraction refracted. Chaucer does not depend either on concrete typicality or on abstract particularity. Giotto makes similar innovations when he asks us to “read” through a wall so that we appreciate “the dramatic impact of pictorial narrative when the figures are painted not just on the wall but ‘through’ it, like sculpture in receding stagelike niches” or “fictive stagelike spaces on the other side.”18 We understand from where we stand. In his book on sciences and the self in the Middle Ages, James Simpson makes a clear and useful statement about metaphor in much the same way that Ricoeur would have us understand metaphor. Specifically, Simpson writes about Gower and Alan of Lille: “The space in which the image as metaphor works is between the reader, the image itself and the mind of

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the creator.”19 In spite of subtle differences between Alan and Gower, both work under “a reader-oriented aesthetic, where the reader must participate in the construction of meaning.” In particular, we are to understand that such reading as Gower’s Amans does “involves a collapse of ‘otherness,’ both personal and historical, into a complete identity with the reader”—all “in the service of readerly desire,” all “ostensibly part of a therapeutic process” (254–56). This “readerly desire” operates in The Book of the Duchess, too. In fact, we are first introduced to the narrator as a reader of an old text. Then, as the dream develops, we see him attempting—in what seems to be some “therapeutic process”—to read the thoughts of the sorrowful knight, and we are given a chance to watch the poem as process toward the light of understanding for dreamer, poet, reader, and the sorrowing soul. Chaucer, like any attentive medieval Catholic, had an obligation to use language in the service of truth and reason, but the complication is that he felt a second obligation for the use of language as poetic art. The Catholic Church appropriated Plato’s esthetic [?aesthetic?] template for the practice of its faith. The studied and comforting spiritual strategy for the conscientious alignment of thought (contrition of heart), word (confession of mouth), and deed (works that endorse contrition). However, Chaucer’s double-edged obligation is an impossible one—whether he is writing as a conscientious Catholic or as a conscientious poet: his task is somehow to link—by frail or blunted words—the abstract separated from the instance. And in the heart of this poem about sorrow, the Black Knight brushes aside any attempt simply to give Sorrow a name, with the result that this dream-poem begins to serve as evidence for the esthetic responsibility of a practicing poet. In fact, not only does the Black Knight see it as his charge to demonstrate the failure of faulty strategic reckonings of chess and numbers to account for his sorrow, but he, for all the help of the willing friend, insists that language—that index of reason, as Patrick Gallacher has taught us20 —fails us unutterably. What does happen, however, is that the name- seeker sees his own familiar ailment in the figure of the Black Knight. We might argue that the knight is a guide for the dreamer, or we might see that the dreamer draws the answer from the Black Knight as well as for him and for himself. The poem’s charm is that each of these options is available. What is more, by granting us as readers the space to stand and, in Simpson’s language, to “participate in the construction of meaning” (254), Chaucer contributes to the empathetic tradition. Significantly, for a moment in this particular poem we seem to stand in the space of metaphor—between dreamer/poet and his will to make sorrow readable and present in this moment. But the moment is f leeting. Once the narrator presents himself to the still figure of the knight, there is mutual courtesy. The Black Knight is gracious and

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apologetic, sorry not to have noticed the narrator sooner. The narrator, moved by the fine presence of the knight, is apologetic for intruding on his quiet, contemplative space. Each, out of courtesy, is willing to continue the conversation. The narrator tells us what he sees and how he interprets what he sees, but the accountant’s rational language, which has served him before, no longer works. Only when he takes up the language of the heart do we begin to understand. First, he listens with real interest as the knight explains his loss in terms of an analogue—chess moves: taking up his position as knight, he reviews his strategy for protecting his queen ( fers). For a time, the problem has seemed to be the failure of reason: his strategy has failed. Our dreamer understands the tactic. The game of chess fascinated gamesters in the Middle Ages because the geometric precision of the game board and the mathematical base for the game itself progressed according to complex but theoretically predictable strategies. The game had the simultaneous appeal of mapping, geometry, and warfare.21 De Certeau, however, argues for the fascination in terms of memory: “The memory of earlier moves is essential in every game of chess” (80).22 But even the dreamer’s earlier reckoning—based on the mapped organization of the dream-wood—makes a pointed contrast to the abstract mathematical calculations the knight uses as the model for his campaign to win the queen. There is a material mapping of the woods, like that of the Town Council in Godmanchester, but the abstraction of a chess game as an analogue for winning love has the efficiency of Latour’s inscription, a kind of index. When do we notice that reasoned argument fails to explain, or that analogies with game-playing—chess or the hunt—fail to explain dark sorrow? Plainly saying that his lady is “ded” is the beginning of the knight’s own understanding and, therefore, of his listener’s. Desire for his lost lady (Morrison’s “procreative” urge) and his desire to construct the sorrowful love-longing so that his listener will understand (Morrison’s “esthetic” urge) come together in Chaucer’s poem here: For whoso seeth me first on morwe May seyn he hath met with sorwe, For y am sorwe, and sorwe ys y. (595–97)

We should note that sorwe now has its own space. He (poet? dreamer? knight?) has begun the move toward understanding by at least speaking a word for the unsayable. It is only a start, and Morrison reminds us of Augustine’s “insistence on the inaccessibility of one mind to another through words.” In fact, “authentic hermeneutical discourse was wordless, and even lacked such

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extension in time as speech requires” (177). So what comes next? Finding language inadequate to say his sorrow, he (poet? dreamer? knight?) reconstructs the motions of sorrow when the lady first rejects him: I durste no more say thertoo For pure fere, but stal [stole] away; And thus I lyved ful many a day,

If there is no convention, no gere for expressing his love, then the best the poet can do is, by language, to make the space of sorrow—or of joy, for that matter: Oure hertes wern so evene a payre That never nas that oon [one] contrayre [contrary] To that other for no woo. For soothe, ylyche they suffred thoo Oo [one] blysse and eke oo sorwe bothe; Ylyche they were bothe glad and wrothe. (1289–94)

The particulars of this sorrow are acted out in the space of this knight’s body and mind. Allegory is helpless here, for this sorrow simply does not stand for any other, or all other, sorrow. 23 But what the dreamer can do is to look from “here,” where he stands, to “there,” where sorrow stands, to understand by contiguity (the linking self ) both contrast and likeness, knowing, however, that the matter is only revealed in the shaping space. Of course, for all its intractability, poetry attempts to create the space where one might stand to see, think, and understand. John of Salisbury has said so all along: “For the soul, as it were by the ref lected ray of its own contemplation, finds in itself what it defines” (121). John is describing the pedagogical process at work in the willing student. This “ref lected ray of its [the understanding spirit’s] own contemplation” is the exchange we see in Chaucer’s poem. Now we watch the narrator to consider how much he understands or chooses to acknowledge. We should remember that he draws closer to this impressive knight, hears his lament, and then determines—dear man—to devise a tale in the hope that he might prompt some clarity of mind: Anoon right I gan fynde a tale To hym, to loke wher I might ought Have more knowynge of hys thought. (536–38)

There is a great deal to be said for this fellow who thinks that perhaps an appropriate tale would coax therapeutic information from the sorrowful

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knight. We remember, too, that this dream has been prompted by our narrator’s own restlessness and uneasiness of mind—unnamed but (or, therefore) troubling. Moreover, the dreamer himself had been comforted by an old tale. Perhaps such therapy will work on this worthy knight.24 In an interesting and quite appropriate way to think about this troubled dreamer who wishes to aid the fine (and troubled) stranger, de Certeau writes, “The disappearance of the First Speaker [God, who said, “Let there be light”] creates the problem of communication, that is, of a language that has to be made and not heard and understood” (138). What had been an “anchorage,” de Certeau goes on to say, is now lost, and the individual becomes the “subject” and “drives the subject to make himself master of a space and to set himself up as a producer of writing” (138) and, I add, in order to understand. The poignancy of the dreamer’s attempts to “understand” the knight broadens in the light of de Certeau’s argument that medieval murmurings of the reader made the act of telling part of the body—“the reality of the practice of reading” (172). But once the text—any text—was released from the Church (where the reading, in large part, took place before the listening layman), an “indefinite plurality” replaces the coherent voice of the Church (from the Restoration onward, de Certeau argues) and makes “understanding” increasingly complex. Nevertheless, this “indefinite plurality” is what the Black Knight argues for and, in so arguing, takes the poet’s role: real sorrow follows no convention, has no imitable trappings but turns itself out in a network of connections that have to do with memory and moment. The minute adjustments are gauged by bringing the moment’s sway into the mnemonic field. In casting its light over memory, the moment grants a particularized set of properties gathered up as self. In the process, the gratifyingly complete and comforting assertion of the First Speaker is lost: there is no concrete typicality to speak of. The Black Knight’s analogy of his defeat in a game of war (chess) is another way of raising the question of orderly control of power and is an appropriate analogy—in a limited way—for a knight. As a man of war, this knight has an important, strategic position. But God wolde I had oones or twyes Ykoud and knowe the jeupardyes That kowde the Grek Pictogores! I shulde have pleyd the bet at ches And kept my fers the bet therby. (665–69)

But it is an unsatisfactory analogy in this matter of the heart—unsatisfactory because, argues the knight, no matter how shrewdly he might

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have played the game of chess, the whims of fortune would have proved to be more powerful than strategy. For a time he had thought that if he understood Pythagoras’s mathematics, perhaps he could have made the right moves in this game. How foolish of me, he says: For whan that I avise me wel And bethenke me every del How that ther lyeth in rekenyg, In my sorwe, for nothing. . . . (697–700)

There is no reckoning to prepare for the contingent or for the sorrowing mind, no table or index by which the fainting heart may be construed. Remarkably, the knight defines his dilemma, and in that defining he begins the poet’s work. What does it mean for the Black Knight to say that he is sorrow? He himself is the space that embodies and enacts the eventualities of sorrow, and there is no point, actually, in naming it. He is, he protests, no allegorical figure. Instead of being a “sign,” he is sorrow and nothing other than sorrow: he is the thing itself— memory, hope, absence. Not even the explanation of his delight in small attentions, hesitations, courage meticulously catalogued from the still memory of his lady’s grace—her step, countenance, throat, hair, voice, her looking—establishes the place. Nor does sorrow stand aside from him as simple abstraction or memory. This propelling, empathetic understanding drives the narrative to recreate the self and to master the art of telling. Ricouer writes that metaphor “teaches us something, and so it contributes to the opening up and the discovery of a field of reality other than that which ordinary language lays bare” (148); Aristotle says metaphor defines genius; Morrison points out that “Augustine’s insistence on the inaccessibility of one mind to another through words is striking in a rhetorician” (177). These perplexing expectations for saying make up the poetic space of The Book of the Duchess—in the way the knight longs to speak his loss, in the way the dreamer/poet and knight struggle to know. The willing work of the dream narrator and the Black Knight together is, we might say, to transact sorrow so that “I” may understand “You.” This transaction is as much as one could ask. If there is no way of simply knowing proper sorrow—sorrow “of the very self,” there is the possibility of a will to participate in eventualities beyond the self. The poem ends inconclusively (not a surprise from Chaucer), and the effectiveness of Chaucer’s choice for narrator—the willing but plodding narrator—becomes clearer. His will is ready. But unless the “I” can be of the sorrowful heart—becoming the “You”—complete

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understanding evades him—us. The poet’s job, then, is impossible but, like the dreamer, he is willing. When the knight agrees to tell his story, he asks the dreamer to “swere” that he will “herkene to hit” (752): the knight will “Hooly, with al the wit I have/Here you as wel as I kan” (756–57). It is all the young poet can say—as well. The Cloud author imposes the same obligation on his young reader. The dreamer/poet will here with al the wit I have. The promise is honest, unassuming, cleareyed. In the course of reviewing the problem, the poet has provided the space for memory, a place for us to stand in order to point from here to there. At the least we begin to understand what it is that we cannot fully know—another’s heart. As Augustine knows, the human will to make thoughts visible can only set up unsatisfied longings25: it is the persisting will’s desire for the light of understanding that grants us, at least, a way toward knowing. It is not the case that Chaucer gives up his role as poet, but he does willingly define his role as poet in terms of its complex motion. The splaying of consciousness is nerve-wracking, tedious, demanding in ways a young poet might find too exacting, considering the intricate spaces of the heart. Like Constance and Griselde, like the Gawain-poet’s image of comradeship among the hunters and their recollection of other hunts, like the stray pup who takes comfort in seeing his friend, the blood that rushes to the aid of the heart, even the birds who sing in accord—these contextual spaces provide us with what the Greeks exploited and the Middle Ages began to reinvent: motion and gestures of the heart gathered for a moment to satisfy our will to “here” and, perhaps, to understand. We may well begin to hear with all our wits—to be present even as we acknowledge the distance between us and the Speaker. It is tempting to think of Keats’s letter to George and Georgiana Keats in 1823, in which Keats uses the familiar, homely image of himself as participating in the experience of the simple sparrow that “picks about the gravel.”26 This “disinterested” participation in another’s joy and sorrow is metaphor of the kind Aristotle says comes from the most fertile and ingenious mind, a mind that says “frailty is woman” or “I am sorrow and sorrow is me.” We come to understand how to understand frailty and sorrow only as they are variously practiced. We had thought that one thing might stand for another, that metaphor might work in this dream-poem. We had thought that by the end of this poem the image of sorrow, the name of the heart’s condition, would furnish a place to look from. The Black Knight and the poet himself refuse to grant us any place other than the sorrowing self, however. As Keats writes, “I am however young, writing at random—straining at particles of light in the midst of

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a great darkness—without knowing the bearing of any one assertion of any one opinion.” There is no abstraction or typicality that re-presents sorrow. The still, quick heart—accessible to the understanding will in some trackless way—is found only here and “stands for” nothing other. The Black Knight and the Fair White—figures that might have served us as allegory or metaphor for love’s games and strategies or for rhetorical play—are simply “gere,” trappings. For Keats, of course, “Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced” since meaning, after all, is “use.” Chaucer knows the poet’s work and the risk of metaphor—one thing “standing for” another. Perhaps Keats also shows us a way of reading the Patience poem—the subject of chapter 5—when he describes himself as struggling to understand, “straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness.”

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CHAPTER 4 PERLE: THE PEDAGOGY OF SOUL AND SELF

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or all the argument against metaphor or analogy for expressing sorrow’s place in The Book of the Duchess, the Perle-poet effectively exploits possibilities of metaphor as he sets out a dialectical exercise that John of Salisbury would have applauded: the conversation by which, finally, body informs soul by an unusual reversal. Fro spot my spyryt þer sprang in space; My body on balke [ground] þer bod. (II, 61–62)1

The sorrowing dreamer begins to understand that his perle is not by any means lost, but stands now in a context that freely grants him revelation although not necessarily comfort. Moreover, in the course of the exercise, the dreamer begins to understand the nature of the risk he takes as he mourns for his lost pearl. For the moment, however, the scenery is spectacular: The adubbemente of þo downeз dere Garten [cause] my gost al greffe forзete. So frech f lauoreз of fryteз were, As fode hit con me fayre refete [refresh]. (II, 85–88)

The simple smell of fresh fruits and the birds’ music refresh him—as if it were food. How? He is dreaming, after all. We recall that, for John of Salisbury, sensation is the first move toward reason or science. The Perle-poet’s fine metaphor is the first of many to indicate the tenor of this dreamer’s thought—his way of dressing out his mind. In fact, having come from the mound (grave of his darling) through the crevices of cliffs toward a forest, he “ne wyste in þis worlde quere [where] þat hit wace” (II, 65). He sets out his situation in a suggestive way: his first

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inclination is to figure where in the world this place might be—relative to himself. He imagines himself, then, as central to his observation. We can watch his progress—directed and defined by carefully calculated positions of image that demonstrate how he stands. As we will see, however, his stations merely furnish a view from here to there—a position from which this sorrowing heart, throughout, attempts to gain purchase. While we stand at the heart of his effort, he figures his place by metaphor. With the kind of directed wit we often enjoy in the Perle-poet, we will see that his central metaphor in Perle is precisely about metaphor and the evaluating eye—in this case, the jeweler’s eye. Four carefully designed images shape the poem’s argument and track the dreamer’s developing focus. First, we understand that the dreamer prides himself on having the eye of a jeweler—an image that is central in its angles of inf luence. This recurring image—not a metaphor so much, we would note, but the acting out of dream-seeing—is not centrally embedded in the poem but is an assertion that provides angles of attention throughout the poem and supplies a narrative drive, while the two images of keen-eyed hawk and musing quail appropriately frame the first half of the poem and draw our attention to the dreamer’s shifting sense of himself as he stands in the world. As Gaston Bachelard says, writing about dream and image: “Either the dreamer becomes the being of his image, absorbing all its space[,] or he confines himself in a miniature of his images” (173). Something of this sort happens by way of the hawk and the quail figures in the first half of the poem and draw attention to the dreamer’s way of placing himself. The third bird image is the extraordinary phoenix—no earthly image but the dream of perfect beauty in f light. We are to understand, Bachelard writes, that “Sometimes, it is in being outside itself that being tests consistencies” (215). A.C. Spearing makes a similar point about Perle, using language specific to the poem: It is the “shape of error that reveals boundaries of truth.”2 The dreamer in Perle, with hawklike intensity and focus, moves toward such boundaries, humbly raises questions with the attitude of the quail, and, finally, understands what he can only believe in the dream figure of the phoenix bird. Bachelard makes a suggestive argument in the next to last chapter of The Poetics of Space, when he confronts the issue that I think drives his book. That is, philosophers see “profound metaphysics” as “rooted in an implicit geometry which—whether we will or no—confers spatiality upon thought.” When these philosophers are “confronted with outside and inside,” they “think in terms of being and non-being.” Unfortunately, then, “[s]imple geometrical opposition becomes tinged with aggressivity.”3 I will say more about this argument in chapter 6,

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when I turn to The Cloud of Unknowing—another statement of opposition to mathematical formulae for matters of the spirit. The result of such imposition, says Bachelard, is that under the “false light” of “ ‘geometrical intuitions’, ‘this side’ and ‘beyond’ are faint repetitions of the dialectics of inside and outside: everything [then] takes form, even infinity” [my emphasis] (212). Important for my argument here is the complicated construction of sorrow in Perle, which moves us to acknowledge, as does the dream of sorrow in The Book of the Duchess, the impracticality of imposing “spatiality upon thought,” for all the dreamer’s hopes. The dreamer himself has taken up the question of self and soul in terms of figurative language, specifically figurative language of the dream embedded in the ground of the dreamer’s sorrow—a rooted sorrow (like MacBeth’s) of an “vrþly herte” In setting up his dilemma—not simply the figure of sorrow, but a space where he might evaluate it—he seems to recognize, admit to, and exploit the human tendency to evaluate his sorrow rationally. However, he is faced with what he can only “understand” as irrational. He thereby quite naturally and usefully contemplates an argument of earnest fourteenth-century scientist-theologians based on the values of imagination as opposed to proof. But as the dreamer looks from here to there—f lung down on the mound where his joy is buried, then leaving behind the dreaming body to move in spirit or dream, he is startled by his own sight. He fears that though he has time to describe the beauty of what he sees across the river, he can hardly speak what he sees: For vrþly herte myзt not suffyse To þe tenþe dole [part] of þo gladneз glade Forþy [for the fact that] I þoght þat Paradyse Watз þer ouer gayn [opposite] þo bonkeз brade [broad]. (135–38)

Even so, the wideness of such glad glory is moving—especially to a sorrowful heart. However, he realizes that the question is not what he sees—he trusts his jeweler’s eye—but how he can prove, rationally evaluate and relate, what he sees. At the moment (l. 36), the Perle- dreamer’s mathematical explanation serves, takes the measure of gladneз: generally, ordinary folks—the vrþly herte—would understand a mere tenth of this splendor. The pattern of the poem, however, monitors the shift away from the physical spot of his sorrowing heart. We are, again, to consider the dreamer now as “spotless,” without his place, far from the central spot from which he has, up to now, believed he could gauge his position. That is, he has lost his grounding. Nevertheless, from where he looks now, the dreamer

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can only hope that the stream he sees is the dividing line—or perhaps we are to read devyse as “device” or “plan” or “means”—by which he will come to understand—what? From this point in the poem the dreamer-generated metaphors accumulate and gather force along with the numerically designed concatenation of the poem’s music. In fact, the poetic matrix of the poem is a metaphor about metaphor—the jeuler- dreamer’s evaluating eye. Perle makes use of the metaphor early in her conversation with the dreamer: I halde [consider] þat jueler lyttel to prayse Þat leueз [believes] wel [altogether] þat [whatever] he sez with yзe. (301–02)

Raising questions, then, about the jeweler’s eye, she suggests that such evaluation serves effectively only to a point. We have a sense, then, that the dreamer is being pressed to admit to some limitations of the practiced jeweler’s eye. Nevertheless, and naturally, he can only define what he sees in terms of what he has seen by means of his earthbound, material vision. Consequently then, given his nature and his craft—and the combination is productive—he describes at some length what he sees so that by the end of section III, he is able to clarify to himself (at least) the progress of his sense of things: On lengthe I loked to hyr [to perle] þere; Þe lenger, I knew hyr more and more. (167–68)

The pace of these two lines reveals the studied quality of his seeing: For a long time I looked toward her there (Full pause). The longer—another formal pause where we will add “I looked”—I knew her more and more. We are reminded of the beauty of Keats’s maturing autumn— ripening “more and still more.” The literal, lettered rhythm of the lines moves us quite thoroughly—without proof. These simple words move us simply. The linking word between these two sections (III and IV) is more so that opening stanza III, we see that The more I frayste [examined] hyr fayre face, the more he longs to call to her, but he is shy. He sees her in a strange place and stands uneasily at a distance from her: To calle hyr lystcon me enchace [Desire did press me to call to her.] Bot baysment [confusion] gef my hert a brunt [blow]. I seз hyr in so strange a place, Such a burre [blow] myзt make my herte blunt [stun my heart]. (173–77)

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“Gladdening expectation” and “desire” are part of the language Andrew and Waldron use to explain the dreamer’s response to what he sees as he stands in shy confusion: I seз hyr in so strange a place. Stanza IV then introduces the image of the hawk—the first of the three birds that explain the events of the dream. More þen me lyste [more than was my custom] my drede aros. I stod ful style and dorste not calle; Wyth yзen open and mouth ful clos I stod as hende [courteous] as hawk in halle. I hoped þat gostly watз þat porpose [significance]; I dred onende [concerning] quat schulde byfalle, Lest ho me eschaped þat I þer chos [held in my sight, pinpointed], Er I at steuen [voice] hir moзt stalle. (181–88)

Stunned to (an unaccustomed) silence (more þen me lyste), fearful that a call to her would frighten her, he stands ful style—eyes open, mouth closed, watching her approach—watchful, hawk-like, taking account. The poet has given two full stanzas to dramatize Perle’s entrance. And she is all we could wish for in a pearl of great price. Þat gracios gay wythouten galle, So smoþe, so small, so seme slyзt, [fittingly slender] Ryseз vp in her araye ryalle, A precios piece [being] in perleз pyзt [set out]. (IV, 1, 189–92)

It serves us brief ly here at these lines to view the dreamer and Perle as they stand toward the end of the poem. Our last view of Perle (section XVII) shows the humble dreamer asking for one favor before he must leave her, for he longs for assurance that his pearl is safely tended: he would like to see where she dwells. What is her place? How or where can he think of her as being? By section VII Perle has assured the dreamer that she is holy Hysse [God’s], for Hys prese [value], Hys prys [excellence], and Hys parage [lineage] Is rote and grounde of alle my blysse. (VII, 419–20)

This grounding of divine value, excellence, and lineage and its rootedness can only direct the dreamer to consider the contrast between his spot and hers. But for now the dreamer is in a troubling place, standing there at the divide between what has the aspect of familiar things and what

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offers the prospect of unbelievable things: for all her spotless beauty and his joy in that perfection, how can Perle claim to be queen of heaven: Art þou þe queen of heuenez blwe? (VIII, 423). He goes on to explain that we (his fellow earthdwellers) had always believed that Mary is Queen of Heaven and, in fact, we call her Fenyx of Arraby Þat fereles [matchless] f leзe of hyr Fasor [Maker] (VIII, 431–32)

Here is a bird—single of its kind, of incomparable sweetness—who sprang matchless from the Creator’s hand. We know the story, but we have never seen the bird. Not even the jeweler’s keen sight serves him in this case, for this bird is imagined—a matter of mind that assures us (whether the bird represents Christ or Mary4) that eternal joy is available to those who understand. From this section of the poem (VIII) to section XVIII, we sense an increasingly quiet attentiveness in the dreamer. Andrew and Waldron make such an observation at XVI, 901–04. However, I see the shift beginning more subtly, but steadily, with the phoenix image. Unlike the two birds the dreamer compares himself to—the hawk and then the quail—the phoenix .becomes a serviceable metaphor though he has no material presence.. Our last view of Perle (section XVII) shows the humble dreamer asking for one favor before he must leave her, for he longs for assurance that his Perle is safely tended: he would like to see where she dwells. What is her place? How or where can he think of her as being? She is pleased to have him see her dwelling-place, but she must explain that he cannot enter—inwyth not a fote (stanza XVII): To streche [make one’s way] in þe street þou hatз no vygour.

The tone here is one we may well expect from a young person who tenderly serves an elderly friend. Bot [unless] þou wer clene wythouten mote. (XVI, 971–72)

She has, however, gained permission of þe Lombe for the dreamer to se þat clene cloystor [her dwelling place] (XVI, 969), and so Perle takes his arm, turns him in the right direction, and says, If I þis mote [place, or “speck”?] þe schal vnhyde [reveal to you], Bow [turn] vp towarde þys borneз heued [stream’s head],

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And I anendeз [opposite] þe on þis side Schal sve [follow] tyl þou to a hil be veued [‘til you come in sight of a hill]. (XVII, 973–76)

The dreamer simply obeys, saying, “Þen wolde I no lenger byde.” Here is one of those occasions, so moving for us as readers, when this poet draws us into the figure of someone like himself, like us, by simple gesture that comes as naturally as leaves to the tree. For all the dreamer’s spoken heart-longing, nowhere else in the poem are we so deeply moved by this man’s sorrow. For now the dreamer accepts the gift of assurance but without heart’s ease. This gesture shows us, as simply as possible, the movement of the dreamer’s heart toward Perle’s His last vision before he wakens—broadened now to include Perle—is of the New Jerusalem, and he recognizes the place from his reading: I knew hit by his deuysement [description] In þe Apocalyppez, þe apostel John. (XVII, 1019–20)

Though the dreamer has no place there now, still held as he is by the earthbound man’s desire to map the spot where Perle dwells, he must stand now in his own place beneath the moon to see: An-vnder [Beneath] mone so great merwayle No f leschly hert ne myзt endeure, As quen I blusched [gazed] vpon þat bayle [castle wall or bailey], So ferly [marvelous] þerof watз þe fasure [design]. I stod as stylle as dased quayle. (XVIII, 1081–85)

In his dazed stillness, he sees the marvelous design. We have come to enjoy—here and in other poems—the Perle-poet’s details of probable locations—landscapes, woodlands, interiors—realistic and convincing detail suited to the story. The image of the hawk that opens section IV is one of those occasions when the poet’s eye for realistic details charms us. When we come to this mirroring detail of the quail to close section XVIII—the end-frame section of Perle—we are right to look for the connection. As a matter of fact, the hende hawke of section IV, whose eyes are wide open, has its isomorph in the dased quayle. The Perlepoet’s hunt lore explains the shift in the dreamer’s angle of vision. These two birds that, for all practical purposes, open (hawk) and close (quail) the dream-narrative, draw our attention to two important effects: we see first the hende hawk-eyed jeweler who loves beautiful things, means to see spaces abroad, and recover what he desires. But the end of the poem

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proper shows us the stylle, quail-eyed reader of texts who is at home on the ground. Hawk and quail, standing at either end of the narrative frame, pitch the subtle revelation of soul to self. We might very well be satisfied now with this narrative revelation figured by the dreamer’s focusing attention, but however thoroughly the Perle-poet effaces himself in the narrative proper, he ultimately and necessarily reveals himself as the artist making his art. The aesthetic implications are not readable in the usual ways, and we suspect that this poet depends on us to see his ordering hand in the embedded configuration of his imagination. He begins the reconfiguration of the telling by raising doubts from the very beginning about the effectiveness—either for art or reasoning—of metaphor, even in the use of such effective metaphors as hawk and quail. Early in the narrative (VI), Perle asserts quite plainly that the dreamer is vncortayse—an especially sharp criticism since we have learned that he imagines himself to be hende. But if he believes, Perle argues, that the marvels he sees are illusion and thereby suggests that he would believe our Lord would make a lie, that very Lord who quite faithfully promised to offer him life though fortune might cause his flesch to dyзe, then Зe setten hys wordeз ful westernays [awry] Þat leueз noþynk bot [unless] зe hit syзe. (VI, 1, 307–08)5

One reads God’s words all wrong to believe only what he might prove by eye. Such a limited perception is distressing, and, of course, Perle sees little value in a jeweler who only believes what he can see with his eyes: I halde þat iueler lyttel to prayse Þat leueз wel [without doubt] þat he seз with yзe. (VI, 1, 301–02)

She argues, then, for metaphor and imagination. Spearing, in his discussion of “poetic identity” in Perle writes: If any poetic self- consciousness is to be found in Pearl, it is of a more oblique kind. Of the four poems [of the Gawain-poet], this displays the most ostentatiously elaborate verbal artistry; it is also a poem about artistry of a different but equally elaborate kind, that of the jeweler. The lost pearl is refound in a brilliantly adorned heavenly setting, where she has been transformed from a fading rose to “a perle of prys” (272), and a rich accumulation of metaphors merges her beauty and value into that of paradise and of Christ himself, “þat gay Juelle” (1124). It is tempting to read the jeweler as a figure of the poet, and to see the two fused, as Brownlee [suggests for Roman de la Rose].6

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“In Pearl,” Spearing writes, “ ‘the language of metaphor and symbol’ [Brownlee’s language] is attributed not to the poet but to the transcendent realm of his [the jeweler’s] vision.” 7 But Spearing’s argument is that in Perle there is no “poetic self-consciousness” (such as we find in Chaucer’s dreaming poets). Spearing’s observation is useful for redirecting attention to metaphor as an option for anyone who, like the dreamer, wants to situate himself relative to an other, or from some other position or disposition. The exercise is what John of Salisbury calls the work of “the abstracting intellect.” These are “to say images of things clearly discernible by the mind. For the soul, as it were by the ref lected ray of its own contemplation, finds in itself what it defines. The exemplar of what is defined exists in the mind, while the example exists among actual things” (121). We have seen a similar process in the Black Knight. In the case of Perle, too, the dreamer defines the issue and sets about the task of understanding—without the mediation of a “poetic consciousness.” The effect is to engage us in a revelation: Perle is what she means to him. For the moment, however, we benefit from John of Salisbury’s observations on how “science originates from sensation” and his distinctions among “science,” “wisdom,” and “faith.” He says rather flatly: “Science is so dependent on sensation that we would have no science concerning things we know by our senses, if these things were not subject to sense perception.” He goes on to cite Hugh of St. Victor, who says, “Faith is a voluntary certitude concerning something that is not present, a certitude which is greater than opinion, but which falls short of science.” It is this space between faith and exactitude that the dreamer seems to address. And John explains Hugh by saying, “Here, by the way, the word ‘science’ is used in an extended sense, as including the comprehension of divine things.”8 Clearly, the Perle-poet’s poem is about “the comprehension of divine things,” but there is a persistent uneasiness about the uses of metaphor[s]. This uneasiness is largely because the dreaming jeweler is so likely to make rather crude uses of them. Given these persuasive and authoritative arguments about uses of metaphor, we could probably make a case for the dreamer’s ready wit. That is not the case in this poem, however likely we are to fall for the ploy early in the poem. Here is how the matter seems to be going so far: the dreamer knows the value of what he has lost, measuring his loss in terms of his own grief. That argument Perle takes up a bit later—once she has given her protégé tools for understanding. Considering that the dreamer presents himself as a judge of gems (17), apparently certifying his credentials as jeweler or at least as someone with an eye for beauty, our sympathy for his loss deepens: we can only imagine his sorrow at losing an incomparable beauty—perfect in every way and, as he believes, his own—his pryuy perle wythouten spot (12). But the question he asks—and the answer

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we wait for—is: what can he expect now? Does Perle mean that this brief moment of joy is followed by lasting sorrow, even deeper now that he had thought for a while that he might live in such joy forever with Perle? Section II of the poem moves immediately from the perle wythouten spot to introduce wordplay that stages the dreamer’s dilemma for us: Fro spot my spyryt þer sprang in space. As a consequence of his disorientation, the dreamer attempts to reestablish his accustomed place from which he understands what he sees and to gain some sense of himself—for the next five stanzas—by means of the suggestive idea of ornament, adornment, or beautiful objects beyond the material place of the burial mound. From this spot, however, his spyryt þer sprang in space. From this moment in the narrative the words spot and spotless promise oddly disparate readings: the dreamer is spotless now in his own way, since he has no material place. In fact, he has lost the familiar context for explaining his grief. Perle, too, is wythouten spot, as the dreamer remembers her, that perfect roundness of a pearl. We would have to say that dreamer and dream pearl are, at the very least, in some tandem position by means of which they may see each other and, by instruction, might come to some place where they may explain themselves to each other. We have seen the motion acted out between the Black Knight and the dreaming poet, the hermeneutics of self and other, as Karl Morrison shows us. Perle figures the pedagogical opportunity. As readers, we can take account of the dreamer’s daily practice in the details by which he connects his material world with the spiritual world. As we begin to see, those connections fashion his dream, but eventually show themselves to be inadequate. Spearing makes the point: “The poem’s protagonist is represented as fully capable throughout of criticizing his own imperfections.” Elizabeth Salter makes a similar point in her essay on Piers Plowman and Perle: “Much of the pressure we feel when reading Piers Plowman, our sense of close engagement with the meaning of the poem, is derived from a persuasion of the historical reality [my emphasis] of the dreamer’s own life.” 9 What do we know about him? How do we know what we know about him? We know that he has lost something most important to him, and that his lasting sorrow prompts him to explain this lost thing—most beautiful to him and of immense value. The truth is, he says, that if he searched the world over, he would find nothing that would compare to the perfectly beautiful, and therefore valuable, possession now lost. He has, in short, an eye for the value of f lawless beauty. Perle calls it sorquydryзe [pride]. The proof of his keenness of vision lies in his description of the “world” he sees from his relocation— to the dream of his Perle: My goste is gon in Godeз grace/ In auenture þer meruayle meuen [where marvelous things take place] (63–64). Appropriately, then, the root of the linking word in section II is dubbet, with variations

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to suggest adornment, array, splendor; adorned, or arrayed. And although the dreamer can only imagine where he is, he identifies his place as only he would—in terms of the craftsman’s eye for beauty. This distinguishing feature of the dreamer directs our attention throughout the poem: what he sees is relative to the spot he leaves behind and to what he imagines as perfect beauty. The season is August, and the summer’s end defines the sorrowing heart. However, the beauty of the fragrant fields quickens the sense of pleasure at the moment that it wrenches the sad heart, for he thinks, perhaps, his treasure would enjoy with him the spot of harvest fruit and fragrance. The dreamer’s comfort is f leeting, and he clasps his hands in despair—his resound [reason] effective only to a point (45–52): A devely dele [desolate grief ] in my hert denned [lay deep] Þaз resound [reason] sette myseluen [enjoined me to] saзt [ease of mind]. (I, 1, 51–52)

Scripture reasonably offers the consolation that gresse mot grow of grayneз dedd (l. 29: John 12: 24–25), but this sorrow is not rooted here in the ground of this poem. And so, exhausted, he dreams. He takes pains to have us understand what he sees, but he must trouble himself to explain by metaphor, for otherwise we could never believe his eyes. For the moment the dreamer tells us quite straightforwardly that what he sees—color and light moving over rich rocks—must be described as a tapestry: For wern neuer webbeз [web, weaving] þat wyзeз [folks] weuen Of half so dere [beautiful] adubbemente [ornament]. (71–72)

Leaves like burnished silver quiver thick on each branch extending from trunks of indigo blue. Even the grauayl þat on grounde con grynde [is ground] underfoot weren precious perleз of oryente (II, 3, 81–82). So far his dream has the cast of home, the familiar—for all the use of the pearl metaphor. But soon, the very beams of the sun are dull: In respecte of þat adubbement (II, 3, 84). More splendors of the glorious hills ease his sorrow, but especially the birds’ singing—f lying in woodland company—bring him joy. The music, he says, comes from those birds: Of flaumbande hweз [hues], boþe smale and grete. But not content with color and size, he makes further homely connections for us: Bot sytole- stryng and gyternere Her reken [fresh] myrvþ moзt not retrete [reproduce]

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For quen þose bryddeз her wyngeз bete, Þay songen with swete assent [concord]. (90–94)

The upshot is that So gracios gle couþe no mon gete As [so as to] here and se her adubbement. (95–96)

One could hardly imagine such beauty. The metaphors are conventional. We can find them in medieval love songs, scripture, contemplative treatises. But here in this poem the intensity oddly tightens as the scene broadens, as fortune sends this dreamer out of the woods into open country. There is an expanding wonder: So al watз dubbet on dere [glorious] asyse [fashion] Þat fryth þer [where] fortwne forth me fereз. Þe derþ [splendor] þerof for to deuyse [devise] Nis no wyз worþé þat tonge bereз. (99–100)

No one is worthy of telling this splendor. No tapestry, no music, no language can render its beauty: it is as if this craftsman would draw attention to his own craft here. He seems consciously to develop our confidence so that we see how well he himself might work his craft—as jeweler. But for the moment, he has lost his footing. The dream is metaphor, of course, but quite unsettling for one who, transported to this extraordinary place, has no gauge for evaluation. Consequently, he dazzles us with his descriptions. Two similes control stanzas 4 and 5 of section II. The simile in stanza 4 comes as he walks out of the woods and sees the lay of the land with the river running through it. Þe fyrre in þe fryth, þe feier con ryse Þe playn, þe plontteз, þe spyse, þereз; And raweз and randeз and rych reueres [rivers], As fyldor fyn [like fine gold thread] her bonkes brent [shaped]. (II, 4, 103–6)

The farther the dreamer goes into the woods, the more impressively the meadow, the young plants, the spice and pear trees rise up. And rows and strips of land edging the streams and splendid rivers, like threads of fine gold, brighten the banks. He has made his way from the burial mound to a vista. The dreamer’s sudden arrival at a water by schore þat schereз seems— is—abrupt, and the word schereз10 underwrites the break. Moreover, the shift—that schereз—is the gap between the metaphors that organize the

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topographical realities of stanza 4 and the dream-precision of bright stones in stanza 5: In þe founce [foundation] þer stonden stoneþ stepe [bright] As glente [beam of light] þurз glas þat glowed and glyз [glinted]. (II, 5, 113–14)

And here is the simile of stanza 5: these stones shine: As stremande [beaming] sterneз [stars] quen stroþ-men [earthy men] Staren in welkin [sky] in winter nyзt. (II, 5, 115–16)

The very ground here has the beauty of a winter sky. Now, however, at the moment of his joyous appreciation of this glory, he can only compare it to his homely place. Here, the dreamer’s scorn of these folks who seem merely to sleep under the beaming stars of a winter night is at odds with the reader’s pleasure, for it poses the moment for us in such familiar terms that we are prepared to make our own story: the hardworking man, having crossed his fields comes home to set aside his implements, anticipating his carefully tended supper with his daily companions, and then sleeps under the abiding stars. In its picture of simple earthbound humans, this image counters stanza 2 in the next section of the poem (section III), for the dreamer says he certainly might have said more about the startling beauties except that the vrþely herte is not sufficient, even by one-tenth, to understand the joy he might express. The effect we see is a beauty available to anyone of us, but the dreamer looks away. In truth, he is daunted at the thought that Paradise Watз ouer gayn [opposite] þo bonkeз brade (III, 2, 137–38). Although the dreamer makes much use of metaphor’s authenticating force, we sense his growing uneasiness with the disjunctive effects of his efforts: he cannot stand where his love stands. In her work on the “inward wits,” Ruth Harvey reviews the inf luence of Avicenna (the Persian “ ‘Second Teacher’ after Aristotle”) through Aquinas. She offers this summary of Avicenna’s teaching, suggesting his clear distinction between what he says about body and what he says about “soul and mind.” Harvey explains: The spirit is the border between body and soul, the middle term [my emphasis] linking the two extremes of immaterial and material. It mediates between animal perception and angelic reason, as man himself is the middle term between the beast and the angels.11

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These ways of describing what we see in daily practice (what Harvey describes as “the data of its [the mind’s] own sensory experience”), and how we use what we see to recast our perceptions, seem to establish that middle ground that we might describe as metaphor. In concluding her argument about the inward wits, specifically as Aquinas saw them, Harvey writes: The great importance of Aquinas’s viewpoint lies in his conviction that in this life at least, human knowledge depends on sensibilia. From our impressions of the external world, either directly or apprehended, or combined and modified in our own imaginations we come to all our knowledge. This is a theory which not only permits, but necessitates symbolism; and it was to have extensive consequences in later disputes over the status and values of works of the imagination. Thus the importance of the inward wits derives precisely from their “in between” nature: their intermediate position between sensible and intelligible, material and incorporeal, which is characteristically human. (58)

In the course of reviewing Aquinas’s argument, Harvey notes: “Since memory is an organ . . . , what is described in it must be something sensible, which has all the limitations of individuality and particular nature” (58–59). Samuel Edgerton, taking up Edward Cranz’s reading of Anselm’s, Abelard’s, and Augustine’s discourses on the “mind’s eye,” says, “What Cranz may have revealed in these Latin discourses is the crucial turning point in Western cultural history when philosophers first understood themselves as detached from nature, as outside observers limited by the inadequacy of their mental formae to perceiving and describing phenomena only metaphorically” (40).12 In fact, Edgerton continues, “Internal and external ‘reality,’ our medieval forebears discovered, are truly different matters demanding separate if equally exacting constructs. In the terminology of modern semiotics, the sign has irrevocably separated from the signified. In Lacanian psychoanalytic dialectics, Anselm may have expressed for the first time the alienation of his subject ‘eye’ from the allseeing ‘gaze’ of the world- God.”13 Elizabeth Salter made the point some time ago that we can distinguish—should distinguish—between allegory and figure (to state very plainly the opening of her argument) because, Much more continuously inf luential was the typological or figural method, which did not deal so much in distinctions and polarities as in relationships. (78)14

And I would argue for connections between where we are and where we may imagine ourselves to be.

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Salter’s argument is that Medieval views of history, concepts of time and concepts of reality were based figurally upon a philosophy of promise and fulfillment, most completely described and illustrated by the Scriptures, but discernible as a constant rhythm in every part of Christian experience, past, present, and to come. . . . [T]ypology offered richer rewards to the imagination than allegory. (77)

In many ways, what Salter argued names what troubled Chaucer in The Book of the Duchess—the Black Knight’s resistance to allegorizing his sorrow as Sorrow. Simply retelling his story could not gather in the memory and this moment with the next, as figured sorrow does. Moreover, Chaucer as poet was concerned to consider the matter as a problem of his own art: how would he be able to show this sorrow—an uncommon sorrow because there is only one that is proper to the Black Knight. So, then, Salter’s citing Auerbach here is significant: Nothing could, surely, be more stirring for the creative artist than the knowledge that “the figural structure preserves the historic event in order to interpret it.”15

We may recall here Bachelard’s pleasure in miniatures. My language for setting out Salter’s allegiance to Auerbach’s figural prospect includes the esthetic impulse to provide a space where the reader/viewer might stand to take in the scheme that includes here and there, preserving the context of memory as the moment instructs the ref lecting self. As the dreamer acts from such a place, drawing his conclusions and revelations, the reader has the pedagogical vantage point—standing in the gap between here and there. However, there is another dimension of the poem we enjoy considering: the poet—for all his absence in this poem—has, after all, made the poem. Where does he stand when he creates this poem? In their chapter on “Scriptural Science and Signification”16 A.J. Minnis and A.B. Scott set out the fervent question of how one can. or should. read Scripture, for the troubling question has been taken up, certainly, from as early as Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Aristotle had “forced medieval thinkers to rethink their strategies for analyzing the scope and hierarchy of the sciences,” and from that point “the issue of the exact character and status of theology became a burning one.”17 Minnis and Scott point to Robert Grosseteste and Bonaventure to demonstrate the tone, energy, and logic of their arguments against imaginative interpretations of scripture. Grosseteste means to lead us “away from a slavish adherence to the

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images of the imagination.”18 Aquinas states the problem (9, 1 of The Sum of Theology): It seems that sacred writing should not use metaphors. For what is appropriate for a lowly type of instruction does not seem to be appropriate for one, which holds the supreme place among all others, as has already been said. To proceed using various likenesses and images is appropriate for poetry, which however is the most lowly among methods of instruction. So it is not appropriate for this science [i.e., theology] to use likenesses of this sort. (239)

Bonaventure had offered careful regulations for when one might apply metaphor, since clearly not all readers know how or when to apply metaphor to Scripture. Furthermore, not all Scripture should be read metaphorically: sometimes Scripture should be read literally, sometimes metaphorically, or both ways simultaneously.19 Aquinas states his opposition: It must be said that it is appropriate for sacred writing to teach that which is divine and spiritual under the guise of comparison with corporeal objects. For God makes provision for all things in a way that suits their nature. It is natural for man to reach intellectual things by means of sensible things, because all our knowledge originates in sensation. So it is quite appropriate that in Holy Scripture spiritual things are imparted to us under the guise of metaphors taken from corporeal things.20

So far, metaphors have served the dreamer and us, as audience, quite well—up to this point. But the effectiveness of metaphor comes into question at the beautiful divide from which the dreamer takes his place. And from that point, a new pedagogical device drives the poem, largely because the dreamer is no longer on familiar ground: he seems to grow still. The section on Pygmalion and Aristotle (XIII, 3) serves as the achieved divide between the dreamer’s attempts to make metaphor work for him as the link between his heart and the place of his desire. And, interestingly, section XIII has no link—that formative device that has deftly drawn us forward to this moment/place in the poem. The linking word for XIII, 1, should have been ryght. As easy as these connections come for this poet, here the concatenate drops to line 3: Bot he com þyder ryзt as a chylde. In this case, the meaning of the word shifts, for it is precisely (so I read the word) as a child comes to Christ. The line is familiar, but the setting—its placement—reconfigures its point: unless one come ryзt as a child. Even so, the dreamer’s bound spirit still wants to know who shaped this beautiful pearl: Quo formed þe þy fayre figure? Whoever made your clothes was quite wise, he judges: Þat wroзt þy wede, he watз ful wys. The craftsman’s eye, the joy in a beautiful job, continues to fashion

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this dreamer’s question. Musing, it seems, he says neither Pygmalion’s art nor Aristotle’s reason teaches us what we need to know about such beauty. We are struck by the dreamer’s persistent attempts to make sense of what he sees. As readers, however, we may be suitably impressed with this man’s question—dreaming or awake—for he has formulated the great argument of theologians and scientists who would attempt to know where we could find such a creator. Even the scientist-theologians were forced to rely on the imagined artist mastering His work as he created the universe. And clearly, the devoted man says, þy beauté com neuer of nature (749). Perle’s answer is plain, clear, matchless: No, her beauty comes from My makeleз Lambe þat al may bete [amend] (XIII, 4, 757). The dear man stands astonished: Quat kyn þyng may be þat Lambe Þat þe wolde wedde vnto hys vyf? Ouer alle oþer so hyз þou clambe To lede with hym so ladyly lyf. (XIII, 5, 771–74)

We have rarely watched a match for this f latfooted, indelicate fellow who would raise such a question of his heart’s desire. Perle must correct the dreamer now, for she is not a matchless queen. Her tone is matter of fact, thoroughly without rancor or guile; her point is extraordinary because it eliminates all irritable reaching after fact or metaphor to demonstrate— for there is no comparison in the world: “Maskelles,” quo þat myry21 quen, “Unblemyst I am, wythouten blot, And þat may I with mensk [courtesy] menteene [maintain]; Bot ‘makeleз quene’ þenne sade I not.” (XIV, 1, 781–84)

This spotless beauty clarifies the terms with which the dreamer must address the divide that separates him from her—however close he sees himself as “being there.” For she must make clear to him that there is no possibility of understanding her place in relative terms. There is no high or low, no here or there, no present or past. She is not makeleз, for there is no scale, no calculus by which to determine gradation. We are reminded in section XIV of Salter’s argument that Perle and Piers Plowman (in particular) are examples of figural as opposed to allegorical readings. We are not reading a parallel narrative. Perle explains: her story is not Christ’s story. She is, instead, simply of Him: When I wente fro yor worlde wete, He calde me to hys bonerté [beatitude]

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“Cum hyder to me, my lemman swete, For mote ne spot is non in þe.” (XIII, 4, 761–64)

Perle will not allow the jeweler—her old friend—to organize what he sees in terms of relative value—as or like—the very motion that has brought the dreamer as far as he may go. Metaphor has limited use here. I want to return to a word in section IX that serves as the linking device for that section and, I believe, realigns the narrative construction of the poem. The word is date, and its base meaning is “point of time.”22 Professor Gordon’s note is useful: [D]ate here becomes the linking-word of the group of five stanzas which follow, and thus this word, which in its ordinary uses was not of frequent occurrence, has to be used ten times in the positions fixed by the metrical form. In working the word into these positions the poet sometimes strains its meaning a little, as when he makes date of daye mean “dawn” in 517 and “end of the day” in 541. Here [in l. 492] it seems that the recognized sense “limit” has been extended slightly: “that is too exalted a point to reach.” The basic meaning here is “limit,” as implied by Perle’s answer: “There is no boundary to his generosity.” (63–64)

The force of the word date for this section of the poem calls attention to the geographic division that had offered such promise to the dreamer—the river that appears to mark the boundary between self and understanding. While the dreamer persists in qualifying what he sees in terms of rank, temporal limits, and divisions, the conversation in section IX explains Perle’s rankless, atemporal, and edgeless state. However, the nature of Perle’s place has more wit to it by means of the vineyard metaphor, for Perle explains that Þer is no date (limit) of hys godnesse, and in explaining the kingdom of heaven she quotes Matthew, who quotes Christ’s own metaphor of the vineyard. The use of the metaphor here in this place in the narrative is remarkable for the fact that, so far, metaphor has served to limit the dreamer’s understanding. However, to use the vineyard metaphor as a device for explaining no date to God’s goodness is to employ the very temporal code the dreamer has persisted in using, and the very one the poet now exploits. Why employ this constrained parable to describe God’s unlimited goodness? For one thing, we can imagine few more time-gauged economic exercises than the harvesting of grapes—tyme of зere þe terme watз tyзt [terms of the agreement are set] (503); Þat date of зere [date of the year is right for harvesting]: wel knawe þys hyne [laborers] (505). Seeing idle men, the Lord says, Ne knawe зe of þys day no date? [Aren’t you aware of the length [limit] of this day?] (516)? Er date of day hider arn we wonne. [We came here before the edge of day.] (517); And nw [new] men to hys

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vyne he broзt Welneз wyl [well-nigh until] day watз passed date [The lord brought new men to his vineyard “until the day’s end was almost passed”] (527–28); At the edge of day of euensonge/On oure [one hour] byfore þe sonne go doun [the lord goes to strong men standing idle who say they had no contract to work] (529–34): Þe sunne watз doun and hit wex late. To take her hyre he mad sumoun; Þe day watз al apassed date. (538–40)

Section X, stanza 1, linking: The date of þe daye þe lorde con knaw. (541)

Knowing the limit of the day, the lord tallies up the day’s accounts, but ultimately he awards equal shares to everyone. The complaints intensify, summarized by those who say “þou dotз hem us to counterfete” (556): how can you think that they resemble us? How compare them to us? The answer is that the lord does not counterfete (compare), for there is no way to measure inoghe; accounting does not count: “Of more and lasse in Godeз ryche,” Þat gentyl sayde, “lys no joparde.” (601–02)

In fact, the central line of the poem—line 606 of 1212 lines—Leave dashesopens the numerical center of the poem as it directs us to þe grace of God [that] is gret inoghe (612). However, at line 606 we consider the word Queþer-so- euer—wheresoever, whichever, whethersoever, for the word describes God’s place: It is ynoghe and without limit. Both more and lasse are linking words from section X to section XI so that, to delight us, the linking word from XI to XII is ynnoghe—for the grace of God is gret innoghe (612, 624, 636, 648, 660).We are encouraged to see that more and lasse are meaningless as gauges for what is simply ynnoghe. The edgeless and absorbing plenitude of section XI—this innoghe— spreads to section XII, but there is no linking word between sections XII and XIII—no edge here. This last line of section XII and the first line of section XIII fail in the linking repetition of the word ryзt. However, the opening stanza to section XIII does indeed link—come round again—to place our dreamer once again at the center of the poem: Iesus con calle to hym hys mylde [disciples] And sayde hys ryche no wyз myзt wynne

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Bot he com þyder ryзt as a chylde, Oþer elleз neuermore com þerinne. Harmleз, trwe, and vndefylde, Withouten mote oþer mascle of sulpande [polluting] synne, Quen such þer cnoken on þe bylde [building], Þer is blys þat con not blynne Þat þe jueler soзte þurз perré pres, And solde all hys goud, boþe wolen and lynne, To bye hym a perle watз mascelleз. (XIII, 1, 721–32)

This dreamer’s desire is desire of self for soul’s assurance—in the face of sorrow. The cumulative and abiding effect is to raise questions about the poetic art. Ironically, then, when throughout the narrative our attention is drawn by metaphor to the poetic device of analogy , we begin to notice the degrees of shift from metaphor to realization. The shift of the place of the lost pearl forms the narrative of the soul’s progress in time. Until the events are no longer understood as a place to get to, but make plain the properly pyked (fixed) space of the self, metaphor maps the course—until the dreamer drops metaphoric aids as Perle takes place for him. I want to point up the inadequacy of metaphor in this poem by saying that the dreamer is himself displaced, for his loss is not merely the child herself but the sorrowing soul that resides in the doleful self. Perle may be a lost, well-loved child, but the revelation comes when the dreamer understands there is no place—from here to there—where he can stand outside himself to regain his place in God’s favor, since it is his simple self—in the fullness of understanding—that can serve the pleasure of the Prince. The poet has been scrupulous in causing us to believe in the dreamer’s description of his despair and hope. The relentless telling goes only so far, however. In Section XI we are inside the parable of the vineyard—a biblical allegory to demonstrate God’s justice. But the poet takes a turn here—the sort of device we sometimes call “irony,” sometimes call “wit,” sometimes, “game.” When this poet makes such a move, we might call it “clarity.” Section XI comes at the halfway point of the poem’s division into twenty sections. Its repeating word is innoghe (or inoghe, innoзe, innogh) and follows a logic from more and lasse in Section X. The perfection of the round, smooth, unblemished pearl might well serve as a figure for a revelation, but our dreamer, for all his dream, is earthbound—one of those stroþ-men who sleep (to dream?) beneath the stars that shine on a winter’s night (II, 5, 115–16). But his grief has moved him beyond his home to a place that is gret ynoghe. Between Sections X and XI the

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dreamer (and we, too, perhaps) is up against a conundrum—in the face of grace set out here at the numerical center of this poem: there are 121223 lines in the poem, and the lines from 601 to 612 make stanza 1 of Section XI. The ingenuity of the numbering is that the center argues for what is centerless—God’s grace. The dreamer has a long, long way to go before the truth of this perplexity becomes clear, and even longer before he understands its comfort. That understanding will require a good deal more than a jeweler’s eye. If we think the dreamer has things straight now, we are mistaken, and we watch his continued attempts to get answers. We have seen him express fears that neither Aristotle nor Pygmalion can ease. And we have seen that even Perle’s explanation is unsatisfactory for this fellow (Section XV): perhaps, he says, you could just show me where you live: any fixed spot will be a help. We have seen the loving attention and plainspoken direction Perle offers the traveler. We have seen that he turns to the stability of text—so that John’s revelations might support his own. Indeed, the dreamer now confirms his revelations, for the time being, by the metaphor of bread and wine and by his recognition that this bread and wine, He gef vus to be his homly hyne [servant] Ande precious perleз vnto his pay. (XX, 5, 1211–12).

For all his homeliness, the dreamer may yet be part of that circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere. But the poet has not finished with us as readers. Or, better, we have not seen the end of this poet’s studied observation of sorrow. There is a resolved stillness in the close of the poem, offered by means of the poet’s searching wit, carefully calculated in by way of the 1212 lines of the poem—so that we are right to suspect that the poet again relishes the occasion for a mathematical puzzle—especially in considering the irresolute heart and incalculable spirit. What he has done here is to arrange his characters so that they set out the divide that keeps the circle just and moves us both to know and prove endless grace. We may begin to see the clarifying device by recalling Chaucer’s closing palindrome in Troilus and Criseyde—another setting for inconsolable sorrow. Troilus’s death takes him beyond home and love. From the heavens, he views his own death, his slain body: And whan that he was slayn in this manere, His lighte goost ful blissfully is went Up to the holughnesse of the eighthe spere,

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In convers letyng everich element; And ther he saugh with ful avysement The erratic sterres, herkenyng armonye With sownes ful of hevenyssh melodie. And down from thennes faste he gan avise This litel spot of erthe that with the se Embraced is, and fully gan despise This wrecched world, and held al vanite To respect of the pleyn [full, complete] felicity That is in hevene above; and at the laste, Ther he was slayn his lokyng down he caste, And in himself he lough right at the wo Of hem that wepten for his deth so faste. Troilus and Criseyde (V, 1807–22)

Then the palindrome concludes the poet’s ref lections on the sorrowful story he has just told and which he has directed to John Gower, Ralph Strode, and Christ for correction. He speaks directly “to the Lord,” addressing him as follows: Thow oon, and two, and thre, eterne on lyve, That regnest ay in thre, and two, and oon, Uncircumscript, and al maist circumscrive. . . . (V, 1863–65)

The formula draws attention to the center that does not hold while it gathers everything to itself, and thereby explains the circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. The Perle-poet’s poem is 1212 lines long. The center is at line 606. The mathematical formula: 1-2-3 O 3-2-1 works in part I of the poem (lines 1- 606) and again in part II of the poem from line 607 (the halfway mark of Section XI) to the last line of the poem, line 1212. This venerable palindrome had engaged mathematicians, philosophers, and theologians for centuries before the Perle-poet claims it for his poem. For 1 x 2 x 3 = 6; 3 x 2 x 1 = 6. Moreover, 1 + 2 + 3 = 6; 3 + 2 + 1 = 6. We may move numerically backward or forward as this poem poses the matter of simple sorrow—reading 606 as a perfect fullness in the first half of the poem; reading the next 606 lines (607–1212) as the second half of the poetic round. The poem’s 1212 lines themselves can be organized, then, in units of 6: each of the stanzas is 6 lines long. What is more, if we multiply 12 times 12, our answer is 144—a number that, given enough zeroes, comes to 144,000—the

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number that is clearly inoghe. The zero (or ought), as we have seen, figures the unmoved mover, Who in this case includes within Himself the 144,000 John accounts for: “I seghe,” says John, “þe Loumbe hym stande On þe mount of Syon ful þryuen and þro, And with hym maydenneз an hundreþe þowsande, And fowre and forty þowsand mo. . . . ” (XV, 868–70)

The linking word(s) for this Section XV is neuer þe lesse or finally (l. 912) neuerþelese, Can our Perle-poet mean such wit? Can his audience have looked for such game? No doubt, for the mystery of numbers must have struck the minds of the lively craftsmen who set out miniatures and cathedrals, acres and maps, in the attempt to participate in the shape of creation, 24 both here and there, no more nor less, but enough to tease us out of thought. But what about the play of metaphor in this poem? And if God stood as artist when he created the universe, where does the poet, prefigured by the divine artist, stand to write his poem. The Perle-poet figures the sorrowing self carrying all his human gear with him as he plunders the heart for some way to explain what is most precious to him. Metaphors take him pretty far, giving him some way to view “the shape of error that reveals boundaries of truth,” to recall Spearing’s explanation. As both Salter and Spearing have argued, the poet causes the dreamer to show himself. Even so, the poet is the homely artist at work mastering his art—by stagecraft, stream of consciousness, immediacy of response, and detailed psychology. The shift at Section X turns us toward: Thow oon, and two, and thre, eterne on lyve, That regnest ay in thre, and two, and oon, Uncircumscript, and al maist circumscrive.

It is as much as the dreamer can know as he sleeps under the simple stars on a winter’s night.

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CHAPTER 5 PATIENCE: THE SPACE OF PLAY

B

y remarkable wit, the longing for a place to stand to understand turns to game in Patience. One of the most moving and remarkable aspects of the poem is the playful—and painful—exchange between Jonah and his god. God chooses Jonah for a job the young prophet does not want. Already, Jonah seems to be one of us—the child who did not want to clean up her room, do her homework, write a thank-you note, and the adult who rather likes to do the right thing in a timely manner but vaguely refuses to act. In fact, God and Jonah are quite honest with each other and speak in conversational tones that remind us of St. Augustine’s dilemma in Book 10 of The Confessions: And from thee, O Lord, unto whose eyes the bottom of man’s conscience is laid bare, what could be hidden in me though I would not confess it? For so should I hide thee from me, not myself from thee. (X, ii)1

Here is how things stand, then: I will confess therefore; what I know by myself will I confess, yea, and what I know not. And that because what I do know of myself, by thy showing it me, I come to know it: and what I know not of myself I am so long ignorant of, until my darkness be made as the noon day in thy countenance. (X, v)

It is this light of God’s countenance that dogs Jonah’s steps so that Jonah begins to understand the place Augustine describes: Where that light shineth into my soul, which no place can receive. . . . This it is which I love, when as I love my God. (X, vi)

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The “light” and the “place” are important in reading Patience, and the narrative provides us with a field of play that demonstrates Jonah’s moves in the direction Augustine has set out. Generations of readers have considered and admired the central image of the poem for its homely beauty—the “mot in at a munster dor” (268). In this moment of the poem, Jonah—the mot—is swirling downward through the huge jaws of the whale’s throat—through jaws so mukel that they offered no þret more to this speck than a “mot in at a munster door so mukel weren his chawlez (l. 268). The centrality of the image is literal—line 268 of 531 total lines. 2 We are not surprised by the Gawain-poet’s numerical attention to the structure of his poem, but the genius is in causing this central space of the poem to draw meaning to and from itself as Jonah gains a foothold here and there under God’s encompassing eye. Koyré points to a lack of precision in Bradwardine’s description of God’s presence in the world. In the course of his clarification, he offers us a carefully considered assessment of the vexed argument about where God might have (comfortably) stood when he created the world, and explains the possibilities of motion in void and infinite space. 3 There are two kinds of movement God might take advantage of: there is (1) movement local and (2) movement positionnel (Latin: situalis).4 However, the matter becomes clearer as Koyré begins to distinguish between motion of body and motion of soul: La terminologie de Bradwardine n’est pas très précise; le movement positionnel, motus situalis, est un movement dans lequel un corps change de position relative par rapport à un autre corps sans changer de place; il s’oppose par là [in this way] au movement local, où de [wherein comes] translation de loco ad locum. . . . Quant à [as for] l’âme [,] elle ne peut avoir qu’un movement par accident ou par participation; ce n’est pas elle qui se meut, mais le corps auquel elle est conjointe et, en vertu du movement du corps, l’âme se trouve être présente des lieux différents du monde. (85, n.7).

As we will see, in the course of explaining God’s place as he created the world and in the created world, Bradwardine has set out Jonah’s and God’s field of play. The interest in reading Augustine beside Jonah’s story is in distinctions of tone. Augustine writes with the easy conviction that he has God’s ear, as does Jonah: each man has a listener whose answers he longs for and fears. This observation is not to suggest something new. In fact, the biblical version of Jonah’s story sets up the tone for the poet’s narrative. For example, when God reverses his vengeful attitude toward the people

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of Nineveh—Jonah’s message having shown them their folly, Jonah furiously asks God to take his life. God’s answer is a question—a reasonable response to this young man who has, we should note, upheld his part of the bargain: “Dost thou think thou hast reason to be angry?”5 The poet’s telling ref lects the reasonable tone of the question—however tense. But Jonah, of course, says he might as well be dead: Now, Lorde, lachout my lif, hit lastes to longe!6

God’s response seems fair enough: Herk, renk [man], is þis ryзt so ronkly [violently] to wrath For any dede þat I haf don oþer demed þe зet? (431–32)

When God angers Jonah by causing the sheltering vine to wither, once again He asks, “Dost thou think thou hast reason to be angry, for the ivy?” ( Jonas IV, 9). Jonah answers in God’s own terms: “I am angry with reason even unto death” (IV, 9). The simple, human delight in play or game provides the plain narrative design of Patience. Of course, we are not surprised to see game-playing in this poet’s story of Jonah when we recall the game in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in which game so clearly maps the narrative. Morrison reminds us that the element of game in religious contexts became “metaphors that the Fathers drew from . . . to describe their quest for God.” Embedded in this game-element is the two-pronged pressure of rivals— to assert the self and to know one’s rival in order to assert oneself.7 The space of play in Patience, however, develops in a game series like our old, homely game of hide-and- seek, the one we have played in summer dusk and cold winter shadows. Our pleasure in this poet’s game is that each player—God or Jonah—is in one way and at one time or another hidden or hiding so that both God’s and Jonah’s roles shift from fugitive to pursuer. Of course, as it turns out, Jonah’s hiding places—ship’s hurrok, whale’s belly, shading vine—are not hiding places at all since Jonah is not the one who is hiding. The fact is that God Himself is hidden from Jonah’s understanding. Therefore, the game becomes a cunning play of the poet’s wit when he exploits the grave scholastic, theological, and scientific problems revealed by the simple light of day, when God granted place and its space by saying, “Let there be light”: Where did God stand when he created the cosmos, the universe? The implications of this question become clearer as Jonah’s story develops—toward the simple light of day.

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It is peculiarly interesting that Max Jammer, in writing Concepts of Space: the History of Theories of Space in Physics, reports an early Talmudic narrative about a nameless young Jew who is caught in a storm at sea.8 [A] horrible storm threatened a boat on which a company of pagans and one Jewish boy were sailing; as their life seemed to be in danger, each passenger reached for his idol to worship it, but without success; finally the Jew yielded to the pagans’ request and prayed to his God, whereupon the sea calmed down. When they came to the nearest port, all of them went ashore to buy provisions, except the Jew. When asked why he stayed aboard, he replied, “What can a needy stranger like me do?” Whereupon they answered, “You a poor stranger? We are the strangers. We are here, but our gods are in Babylon or Rome; and others amongst us who carry their gods with them derive not the least benefit from them. But you, wherever you go, your god is with you. Berachoth, IX, Halacha 1

What is specifically important in Jammer’s telling of this story, aside from the sailors’ theory that Jonah’s god is everywhere, is that the little narrative leads pretty quickly to the question about where God might have stood when he created the world—that vexed and vexing question whose history Jammer reviews (32–51). In introducing his quick history of space theory, Jammer says that in Judaic tradition the term “place” “denoted God” (3). This “Jewish Palestinian metonymy is not to be taken simply as a metaphor, but is evidently the result of a long process of theological thought which culminated in the concept of the Divine Omnipresence” (31). “This notion that God was at one and the same time here and there, had no pantheistic consequences in Jewish theology, but led to the association of God and space as an expression of ubiquity” (32). It is useful to say here that theories of space have tantalized and taunted philosophers, scientists, and theologians from Plato to the present. To summarize rather baldly but helpfully here: up to the Middle Ages, Plato talks about space as a poet would—by means of metaphor; Aristotle talks about space—as a logician would—in terms of reason; Bradwardine—and I choose him with important considerations—talks about space in his role as theologian.9 These questions about space in the Middle Ages were driven largely by developments in early science that provoked uneasiness about how, but especially where, God worked as creator of heaven and earth and—void space. While good citizens of Western cultures went about their daily lives practicing uses of space by

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journay, rod, and foot and uses of time by the church bells, the seasons, and mass days, Plato and Aristotle prompted their readers to puzzle out the mysteries of created (maybe) void (maybe) infinite (maybe) space. The questions—at least for the thinkers of the fourteenth century— were driven by two basic and often opposing impulses: (1) to explain the details of natural science and (2) to establish God’s omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. We could hardly ask for more thoroughly plainspoken theories of one’s place in the world than the Patience-poet gives us. For all his sparring with abstractions such as Patience and Poverty (a team), Pity, Mercy, Cleanness, and so on, he is driven to deal with them as material reality. In fact, since these abstractions—specifically Patience and Poverty—are inevitable parts of our lives and, given this speaker’s sense of game, he will play me with boþ (36) since in þe tyxte [in the Beatitudes] þere þyse two arn in teme [team] layde (37). Somehow the poet fills the abstract space of these two ladies with quotidian possibilities—a team for everyday work or play: Þus poverté and pacyence arn nedes playferes (45). Our narrator is reasonable enough to go along with what is needful: Sythen I am sett with hem samen [together], suffer me behoves [it behoves me to endure]; Þenne is me lyзloker [more inclined, likely] hit lyke and her lotes [manners] prayse, Þenne wyþer [vigorously] wyþ [resist] and be wroth and þe wers [the worse] have. (46–48)

He must, it seems, take the lesson he is given to teach as it is set out in Scripture. And then this judiciously pointed passage: What dowes me [what good does it do me] þe dedayn, oþer dispit make? Oþer [whether] зif my lege lorde lyst on lyve [in this life] me to bidde Oþer to ryde oþer to renne [run] to Rome in his ernde [errand], What grayþed [do I gain] me þe grychchyng bot grame [sorrow] seche? (50-53)

What good would it do to grumble? Whether God wishes me to ride or run to Rome on His errand, grumping would bring nothing but more trouble. This early lesson is certainly one of patience. Clearly this strategy is one Jonah might take up, but then there would be no game, a kind of easy dullness that has never satisfied this poet. We have a rivalry to be played out here.10 God makes a move; Jonah counters it. We follow each move with an eye to the astuteness of the strategist. God makes the first move.

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John Burrow’s observation about the size of the Patience manuscript aptly serves my plan for explaining what I see as a fundamental organizational principle in the Patience-poet’s Jonah narrative. The observation tells us about ourselves as readers as we tend to the material space of the text. What is more, we also sense something about an early reader holding the very book, let us say, in the winter of 1400. Burrow writes: The rather humble manuscript, of about the same dimensions as this book [the same dimensions as the one in my hand as I read Burrow and Turville-Petre’s introduction to A Book of Middle English], is written in a small, ungainly script, dated about 1400, and includes twelve clumsy illustrations.11

The “ungainly” script and the “clumsy” images offer “information” about the material presence of the book—the kind of space it took up or the place it came from, how a reader might approach the book—as opportunity, as a reminder of a familiar story now offered by means of a different consciousness—different, certainly, from the biblical account a reader might have heard or read for oneself. The editors go on to map the place of the book—probably—“in the North-West Midlands, in Cheshire, on the border with Staffordshire” (161). The events of language teach us the origin of this book. In fact, the Linguistic Atlas does the mapping for the editors and so on, to us. We take up the book and activate the eventual words. What Burrow has done here (and so often argues for) is to turn our attention, as we read, to the mere business of living—daily activities measured in space and time. Of course, if we pick up this homely manuscript, with the next step we are called on to see how this poet means to retell the old Jonah story, and to what end— for present friends and colleagues and, as it turns out, for his readers in the twenty-first century. The God who speaks in the Patience-poet’s version of Jonah’s strategies is not subtle. He makes the first strategic move with a certainty of purpose and promptness. We listen now to the developing “conversation” between God and Jonah, and the poet’s language provides the roaring tone: “roзlych rurd rowned in his ere; rys radly”; “rayke [haste] forth even.” The assignment is clear. Nym [take] þe way to Nynyvé wythouten oþer speche, And in þat ceté [city] my saзes [sayings] soghe [sow] alle aboute Þat in þat place at þe point I put [place or press] in þi hert. (66–69)

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The empirical precision of the assignment is notable: “place,” “point,” “put.” Now Jonah’s strategy comes from a practical intelligence set with a precision equal to God’s, but from the point of view of fear: If I go to Nineveh “wyþ þos tyþings,” he says, they will, Pynez me in a prysoun, put me in stokes.

They will, Wryþ [twist] me in a warlock [fetter], wrast out myn yзen [eyes]. (79–80)

God’s strategy—moving words of the heart that will win this campaign— lacks the ring of success for Jonah; so he makes a move in the other direction, thinking, I wyl me sum oþer waye þat He ne wayte after [that he will not be overseeing] I schal tee [go] into Tarce and tary þere a whyle, And lyзtly [probably] when I am lest [lost from his sight] he letes me alone. (86–88)

Jonah makes his way to the port of Joppa, complaining all the way: ay janglande for tene (90). He takes passage, and Watz neuer so joyful a Jue as Jonas watz þenne (109), for he assumes that God Had no maзt [might] in þat mere [sea]12 no man for to greve” (112). The narrator, of course, directs our attention appropriately: Lo, þe wytles wrechch! Jonah could have recalled the Psalm of David (93): Hope зe þat He heres not þat eres all made? (123). Could Jonah be foolish enough to misjudge his opponent, to think that God, who made every ear in the world, would fail to hear Jonah’s plans? The Patience-poet’s irony in demonstrating Jonah’s dull-wittedness would have registered clearly for his contemporary audience—either clerical or secular. Of course, the familiar Psalm 138 establishes the ground for the question: “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I f lee from thy face?” (Psalm 138, 7). Here we could have ample evidence for God’s omnipresence so that this poet’s audience could only shake their heads at Jonah’s folly and follow his adventure with smug interest. God’s turn: He wastes no time in calling up the winds to buffet the ship. The effect: Hit watz a joyless gyn [trap or trick] þat Jonas watz inne (146). The sailors can only assume that someone aboard their ship has angered his god. When they find Jonah hiding in the stern (hurrok)13 of the boat, then they ask straightforwardly: What þe devel hatz þou don, doted wrech? (196)

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Jonah’s response is notable. In fact, the response, based on Jonah’s early impertinent escape, seems to introduce the rules for this adventure. He responds promptly and honorably—as if he acknowledges that God has won this round—with the effect that we begin to think he understands something important that he has missed before. The sailors, whose various gods have received their tributes so that they fear no retribution, give this “synful schrewe” good advice: “Do gyf glory to þy godde” (204) now. In a tone of quiet amazement and illumination, Jonah addresses the sailors but, it seems, talks primarily to himself as he explains what he begins to know: “I am an Ebru,” quoþ he, “of Israyl borne; Þat Wyзe [Man] I worchyp, iwysse, þat wroзt [made] alle þynges, Alle þe worlde with þe welkin [sky], þe wynde and þe sternes, and alle þat woneз [dwell] þer withinne, at a worde one [at a single word]. (205–08)

Jonah acknowledges his guilt, is pitched overboard by the crew, and the winds cease: He watz no tytter outtulde [no sooner f lung overboard than] þat tempest ne sessed (232). The outcome for the sailors is good: a sweeter wind now blows them to land so that, To our mercyable God, on Moyses wyse [in the way of Moses], With sacrafyse up set [set up] and solempne vowes, And graunted hym on [only] to be God and graythly [truly] non oþer. (238–40)

Meanwhile, Jonah makes his way to the whale’s belly. And now that the terms are clear, the game continues. The raging storm God gathers up gives the poet an opportunity to do what he does best: he gives us a mise en scène so that we know where we may stand to see God’s work: the storm calls on the combined resources of the sailors for organizing a survival plan. The space of the ship is the scene of everyday work, and the language and pace are rhetorically apt— strong, frenzied, suggesting a trained orderliness, particularly in the face of the contingent. One detail in particular points up the precision of the sailors’ work that interests the poet. It occurs as Jonah boards the boat to set sail for Tarshish, and establishes the well- ordered workaday world. Jonah, on the run, finds a good boat in Joppa, ready to sail, bargains for his fare, pays them with the agreement that they will take him to Tarshish as fast as winds and tide will allow. Jonah steps on board; the sailors put their gear in order to sail: Þay her trame ruchen [adjust their sails]14 Cachen up þe crossayl, cables þay fasten,

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Wiзt at þwyndas weзen her ankres [swiftly weigh anchor] Spynde spak to þe sprete þe spare bawelyne, Gederen to þe gyde-ropes, þe grete cloþ [mainsail] falles. Þay layden in on ladde-borde and þe lofe wynnes; Þe blyþe breþ [ joyful breath]at her bak þe bosom he fyndes, [finds the sail’s bosom] He swenges me15 þys swete schip swefte fro þe haven. (101–08)

The detailed vision of this scene—and the contrastingly frantic one under God’s rage—has the quality of living that we expect in the Patience-poet. The use of the (pleonastic) me suggests that the poet himself has tron on þo tres [tread on those deck boards] and watched sailors at work—reading the weather and matching their hopes. The scene changes, of course, when the winds follow God’s commands. Gathering up the poetical and lived intensity, the poet shows us the sailors as they take up their accustomed work with determined practicality to keep the water from filling their boat: Mony ladde þer forth lep to laue [dip] and to kest [cast] Scopen out þe scaþel [harmful] water þat fayn scape wolde. For be monnes lode [burden] neuer so luþer [vile], þe lyf is ay swete. (154–55)

That is, the young men (who would fain escape) find life sweet in the face of losing it. They will do whatever is required to save their lives: they throw out the cargo—baggage, featherbeds, fine clothes, their chests, boxes, coffers—to lighten the load on the chance that they might take advantage of a calmer wind. But the storm grows fiercer (wroþer) and more mad (wodder) so that the weary men know that they are lost without powerful help. Their energy makes a thorough contrast to Jonah’s impassivity in his place behind the hurrok. The small spaces in this poem—the boat (itself a microworld) and the other three hiding places—gain pointedness, one after the other. The Aristotelian logic of spatial measure within the universe, with his illustrative image, is curiously appropriate to the events of this poet’s narrative. Jammer writes that space for Aristotle was “the inner boundary of the containing receptacle.” Here is Aristotle’s image, as Jammer describes it: The place of the sailor is in the boat, the boat itself is in the river, and the river is in the river bed. This last receptacle is at rest relative to the earth and therefore also to the universe as a whole.16

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In fact, Aristotle’s image suggests a zooming out so that we see the little space of the sailor embedded in the expanding universe. In our poem, the poet’s thoroughly natural images of space as hiding place and strategic play are embedded in a familiar narrative pattern so that God’s containing and defining power establishes the terms of a game. The poet gains this effect on five discrete occasions in the poem: (1) the ship itself; (2) Jonah’s hiding place in the ship before the storm—the hurrok; (3) the belly of the whale; (4) the woodbine; (5) the central image of the mote within the cathedral door. The biblical version of Jonah’s plunge toward the whale’s mouth is inward and downward. The engaging aspect is that Jonah is contained “even to the soul” in this deepness so that the distinction between contained body and contained soul is blurred. The waters compassed me about even to the soul: the deep hath closed me round about: the sea hath covered my head. Jonas II.6

For his part, the poet marks Jonah’s progress from the open boat, to the open sea, to the dark space of the whelming waves to the wylde walterande [wallowing] whal . . . þat watz beten fro the abyme [and] bi þat bot flotte (247–48). The whale has been gathered up to the stormy surface and watz war of þat wyзe [man] þat þe water soзt [sought] (249). As the whale is aware of the creature that the sea seeks to overwhelm, we sense the dramatic return to the moment just before Jonah is shoved (schowved) into the sea. What follows is the poet’s own version of the scene. As the sailors hold Jonah by his feet, the whale swyftely swenged hym to swepe, and his swolз [gullet, swollen mouth?] opened. . . . þe fysch hym tyd hentes [quickly seized]; Withouten towche of any tothe he tult [tilted] in his þrote. (250–52)

The whale seizes Jonah, swallows him without a tooth’s touching him, and Thenne he swengez and swayues to þe se boþem [bottom], Bi mony rokkez ful roзe [rough] and rydelande [?shifting] strondes. (253–54)

Then Jonah—the poet’s striking line here that dramatically teaches us about the space of God’s reach—finds himself “wanlez [bereft] of wele [well-being] in wombe of þat fissche” (262); “colde watz his comfort” (264). We should note here that Jonah is typically mindful of his bodily comfort or discomfort. Looking ahead to the charming scene in the

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woodbine shelter, we compare that happy comfort—always under God’s eye—to this deep, cold, and murky respite. We come here, then, to the central deep of this poem at line 268 (of 531). Even beyond Aristotle’s image of the sailor bound by the containing cosmos, this poet puts (presses) us to understand Jonah’s place in the world. But for all the palpable and chilling threat—deep into the ocean, deep into the whale’s belly—surrounding Jonah, we are granted a space to stand that is thematically and numerically central to the poem. The image, like God’s mercy, is gratuitous but material—both to the intent of the poem and in view of the poet’s work in the world. The cathedral doors open to let in light and to show us the glinting mote—that speck in the whirl of all created things—finite and disorderly. However, in this place of homely image, when we may recognize and acknowledge uncertainty and finitude, Jonah’s (and so our own) understanding comes in the light of God’s unbound presence: by such light one might know Jonah’s place. Few images could more elegantly provide, with such economy of language, the instantiation of God in the universe and His abiding proximity to everything in that universe. And þrwe in at hit þrote without þret more As mote in at a munster dor, so mukel [huge] wern his chawlez [ jaws]. (267–68)

I will return to this image, which draws deepening interest as the poet’s narrative develops. For now, the poet’s game is only half-played. Jonah—that mot in his mawe (299)—has been tumbled hel ouer hed (271) through gills, slime, filth, and intestines, until he comes up short (blunt) in a space like a broad hall. He gains a foothold, feels around the place, and stod up in his [the whale’s] stomak þat stank as þe deuel (274)—an old attribute of the devil that we hear even today. So far we have watched Jonah move from Judaea to the boat on the wide sea to a small hidden space of the boat, the hurrok. From there his travels begin again: out of the boat, into the whale’s belly. He then searches for a small space where he might, again, feel safe. In fact, he searches In uche a [every] nok [nook?] of his [the whale’s] navel (278) for some place where he might rest. Handily, then, Jonah happens upon another nook where there is no defiling filth, where he sits in reasonable comfort except that it is dark [merk]: from this darkness he calls to God. We note again the tone of this exchange. The biblical speech begins sonorously: I cried out of my aff liction to the Lord: and he heard me. I cried out of the belly of hell: and thou hast heard my voice. Jonas: II, 3

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The biblical passage is presented as a recounting. That is, the speaker is telling us what he said to God. Not so for this poet’s version: The conversation is immediate and dramatic—in dialogue, staging, and subtlety of language, impressing us, thereby, with Jonah’s strategies. Now, Prince [f lattering epithet], of þy prophet pité þou have. Þaз I be fol and fykel and falce of my hert [humble topos as opening], Dewoyde now þy vengeaunce, þurз vertu of rauthe [praise for God’s capacity for pity]; Þaз I be guilty of gyle as gaule [an unsound spot as on a tree, for example, O.E.D.] of prophetes, Þou art God, and alle gowdez [things of value] ar grayþely [truly] Þyn owen. Haf now [as he humbly rounds out his argument] mercy of Þy man and his mysdedes, And [Here is the strategic challenge:] preve Þe lyзtly [with ease] a Lord in londe and in water. (282–88)

By now the whale is irritated by “þat mote in his mawe” (299). We are not to miss the finitude of this “speck.” In fact, for three days and three nights this mote embedded in the whale’s belly is carried about in the ocean while the waves beat all around the body of the whale, a sojourn reminding readers of Christ’s own harrowing of Hell. However, the space of this harrowing seems to be Jonah’s heart: . . . ay [ever] þenkande [thinking] on Dryзten, His myзt and His merci, His mesure þenne. (294–95)

The poet’s phrase, His mesure þenne, is significant in the strategy of his argument, for it works in two ways—as His mesure (reasonableness) from here, or his distance from here—thence. Surely by now we begin to understand the extent of God’s reach and God’s distance from him. Ande as sayled þe segge [man], ay sykerly he herde Þe bygge borne [waves] on his [the whale’s] bak and bete on his sides. (301–02)

As if the narrative were not enough to present the image of God’s mesure even in comparison to the whale encompassed by the sea, the poet has Jonah speak his understanding of his own finitude—even to the recognition that he is bound by his own body and in a place as deep as the mind can imagine—apparently at the far deepness from God’s care, he thinks. Note in the following passage just how much Jonah knows from

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his dark place in þe se boþem (313) and how much he—even now—fails to understand: Careful am I, kest out fro þy cler yз And desevered fro þy syзt; зet surely I hope Efte to trede on þy temple and teme to Þyseluen [make conversation with you]. (314–16)

Note the embedding language next: I am wrapped in water to my wo stoundez; Þe abyme byndes þe body þat I byde inne; Þe pure poplande [billowing] hourle [hurl, whorl] playes on my heved; To laste mere [depth? boundary?] of uche a mount, Man, am I fallen; Þe barrez [bars] of uche a bonk [bank] ful bigly [hugely? completely?] me haldes [holds]. (317–22)

Having come this far in Jonah’s campaign of self against God, I want to give some attention to the enduring arguments over God’s presence in the universe, doing so in order to suggest the kind of place the Patiencepoet now posits. Edward Grant makes the observation that the metaphor explaining God as a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere is part of Thomas Bradwardine’s third corollary. It applies only to God and not to the cosmos, a step Nicholas of Cusa was to take a hundred years later. Furthermore, Bradwardine’s third corollary is less important than the other four of his five corollaries concerning infinite void space—in spite of the fact that the metaphor for God as a circle became a staple for arguing about both God and the universe. Grant goes on to trace the historical considerations of “much ado about nothing” (infinite void space) and God’s place in it before and after Bradwardine.17 Grant argues that two quotations from Bradwardine’s inf luential De causa Dei contra Pelagium, “written perhaps in 1344,” are important for tracing the developing medieval concepts of infinite void space. The first is Bradwardine’s comforting image of God as a circle. Bradwardine’s argument for “God’s unlimited immensity,” Grant writes, is his second popular quotation and comes from St. Augustine’s Confessions, 7.5. The passage from Augustine presents the fervent voice of one who has struggled to understand evil and so now mulls over the matter, using an image pertinent to Jonah’s dilemma. Considering the nature of evil, then, he sets now before the eyes of my spirit the whole creation, and whatsoever I could discern in it; as the sea, the earth, the air, the stars, the trees, the mortal creatures; yea, and whatever else in it we do not see, as the firmament of the heaven; . . . And I made one great mass of all thy creatures, distinguished by

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their several bodies. . . . And this mass I made huge enough, not yet so great as in itself it was . . . but as big as I thought convenient, yet every way finite. But thee, O Lord, I imagined on every part environing and penetrating it, though every way infinite. As if there were supposed to be a sea, which everywhere and on every side, by a most unmeasurable infiniteness should be only sea; and that sea should contain in it some huge sponge, but yet finite; which sponge must needs be everywhere and on every side filled with that unmeasurable sea. So I thought thy whole creation to be in itself finite, filled by thee who art infinite. (VI, v)18

As Grant glosses his translation of this passage, “Augustine sought to compare the creature to the creator by imagining the Lord embracing the world ‘on every part and penetrating it.’ ”19 The biblical narrative, as we see, has Jonah cry out: “The waters compassed me about even to the soul: the deep hath closed me round about” ( Jonas 2.6). This pervasive sense of being compassed about—from St Augustine, the biblical account, and the Patience-poem—brings us back to the central image of the poem itself— the mote in the munster dor. On three occasions when we find Jonah temporarily at ease in some small hidden space, we have a chance to consider how he sizes up his situation—of mind and body. In each case, he must answer for himself when he emerges from the measurable space that has protected or comforted him from challenge or threat—that is, from contingency. Historians of this physical and metaphysical (or scientific and theological) controversy over God’s extension in both time and space often argue that Bradwardine set out the clear terms of the subject so that rationalizations for one side or the other could go on with the debate—even into the seventeenth century. The basic consideration was “whether God is outside of every place,”20 as Richard of Middleton formulates the question (ca. 1300) (145). But the more troubling question became where God stood at creation. Richard and Duns Scotus rejected the idea of “infinite extracosmic void space” (where God might stand to get his work done), but Bradwardine (along with Jean de Ripa and Nichole Oresme) was a persuasive supporter of the idea—especially since he seemed able to bring science as well as theology to bear on the question.21 Although Richard and Duns Scotus seemed to gain support for “the general medieval view that no God-filled space existed beyond the world,” the “idea of such a space, especially in the form espoused” by Bradwardine and Oresme, continued into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and even resurfaced as counter to the waning “Aristotelian physical system” (147). Although, as we have seen, Bradwardine’s metaphor of God as circle seems not to have been the most powerful point of his argument, the image comes up repeatedly to state the problem if not to solve it. H. Lamar Crosby describes Bradwardine “as a man of affairs,” but “he

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was esteemed more especially by his own and succeeding generations for his intellectual achievements.”22 One result of this issue of God’s “place” was the question of predestination and the possibility—or impossibility— of free will—depending on whether or not God had a place to stand when he created the world. One of the wittiest uses of this argument—and the argument inspires wit in a number of medieval thinkers—comes when the Nun’s Priest argues that Chauntecleer might well have avoided the sorrowful event with Russel the fox if only he could have cited for his use this eminent thinker on the matter of necessity and predestination. Grant makes the point that “space was perhaps the only scientific subject in which scholastics could hold their own. Mathematics played no role [since God and space are dimensionless]. The tools of analysis in determining the existence and nature of space were metaphysics, theology, and thought- experiments” (263). In fact, Edith Wilks Dolnikowski makes a very clear summary of the issues of God’s presence in the midst of the fervid urgency to take God’s measure, to know Him by number: The De causa Dei gives every indication of Bradwardine’s confidence in the power of human reason to comprehend the natural world, within the boundaries of our temporal existence, so long as thinkers do not limit God by applying the same standards to him as they would to physical phenomena. For created beings, he argued, temporal and spatial limits are good because they allow us to make comparisons, to measure, to study nature in general.23

Dolnikowski’s discussion of the powerful inf luence of Bradwardine is useful in two ways for my argument in the case of Jonah: (1) “In contemplating the range of theological topics to which mathematics and mathematical concepts were applied, one may reasonably conclude that in the fourteenth century theology had been quantified” (62); (2) Bradwardine’s view of contingency was introduced, it appears, to humans (created beings) without reason or causes: “To the human mind, the future provides endless opportunities for choice, for willing cooperation with or conscious disobedience of God’s plan for creation” (204). This free will (the possibility of the contingent) was exhilarating to some, frightening to others. The eruptive pattern for some seemed counter to the idea of a divinely ordered world, since ordinary, necessarily human, perceptions of temporal events were altogether inadequate for moving about in the eternal and, hence, boundless sphere of God’s inf luence. God is, finally, the source of free will (186–87). “Human beings must live in and make

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choices in a world governed by time: they cannot know with any certainty what will happen in the future and, at any rate, the conviction that God knows the future does not allow them to abnegate their responsibility for their own moral conduct in the present” (187). Dolnikowski points to Chaucer’s reference to Bradwardine in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale (VII, 3242) as a demonstration of Chaucer’s interest in Wyclif and the controversy over the Eucharist as containing the body of Christ (and therefore arguing about divine presence in finite space). Bradwardine’s language is repeated for us, a filling- out of Chauntecleer’s own remarkable fund of ancient and current knowledge. Whatever the case, Chauntecleer’s audience (beyond his favorite lady) must have enjoyed the philosophical ironies of having a rooster (however fine, and however well equipped to measure time) fail to cite Bradwardine on theories of time, including predestination and necessity—both of which draw attention to contingency within that circle by means of which we understand all that eternity might well include—without measure. Dolnikowski, reading from Bradwardine’s De futuris contingentibus and his De causa Dei, offers a very clear (and useful) explanation from Bradwardine to explain the complicated matter of time and the contingent: Bradwardine again makes use of a geometrical image to explain how God sees the transition from past to future without changing himself: God is like a point at the center of a circle, and the points moving along its circumference are instants of time. Thus God can see a particular point first as future, then as present, and finally as past in a single observation. 24

Moreover, the Nun’s Priest’s question about necessitee—he says the answer is hard to understand—can only be answered by the hooly doctour Augustyn,/Or Boece, or the Bisshop Bradwardyn so that we would know whether God’s foreknowledge necessarily (nedely) means he must do a thing or means that free choys be graunted me (ll, 3230–50). The storyteller is willing to leave the question unanswered (I wol nat han to do of swich mateere.). He hurries on to his tale of a cock. These are the questions Chauntecleer—and the narrator—must leave hanging as they face the contingent fox, and they are questions that come up in a different form later in this book. For a time, then, Jonah languishes in a small nook of the whale’s belly. For all the moment’s despair, Jonah expects soon to move about again in God’s temple (the world?), and he will make conversation “to Þyselven” (316), to God Himself. The upshot of Jonah’s timeout under the sea’s whelm inside the great swell of the whale’s body has brought some order to his thoughts,

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and most revealing is the poet’s choice of words to show us the effect—two (alliterating) words in particular: “I haf meled with Þy maystres mony longe day” (329). There are questions about glosses for meled and maystres. I read meled as “meddled” as Burrow and Turville-Petre do, but with the sense we read in the OED under mele, where we see an example from William Palerne (1350): “What man so ich mete wiþ or mele wiþ speche . . . ” The sense seems to be to “engage” with speech or make conversation. The word, as Jonah uses it, seems to suggest that he has engaged in conversation— necessarily in his own mind—with God’s maystres, that is “mysteries (as Burrow and Turville-Petre read the word—“mysterious ways”). Pointedly, Jonah has had a chance, now, to think about divine mysteries and has found them persuasive—especially when he considers those vain men who give up mercy for “þynk þat mountes to noзt her mercy forsaken” (332). I am persuaded that this poet is willing to use the word þynk (þycan or þycean) as if it were “thought”—not “thing.” There were perfectly good Middle English words for “thing”—attested to by the OED—nearly always with the g: þyng, þynge. We are given a witty option here—not surprising from a man who can imagine any one of us—including himself—as but a single mote in the rush of light through the cathedral door and within that same light can expect by þynk (thought or thinking) to know God’s infinite presence. Such speculation must have seemed, indeed, to be much ado about nothing for a poet whose sensibilities were gathered, shaped, and delighted by living in a world he took pleasure in measuring—even in taking the measure of fat to assess the value of the day’s hunt. What follows Jonah’s ref lections is a promise of commitment based on his confidence in God’s mercy: Bot I dewoutly awowe, þat verray betz halden, Soberly to do Þe sacrafyse when I schal save worþe, Offer Þe for my hele a ful hol gyfte, And halde goude þat Þou me hetes [commands]; haf here my trauthe. (333–36)

Having pledged his faithfulness to God as any lover would, and thereby having verbally demonstrated a turn in the condition of his heart, Jonah has only a moment of delayed gratification. God’s move: Thenn oure Fader to þe fysch ferslych biddez Þat he hym sput [spit] spakly [immediately] upon spare drye [dry land]. (337–38)

The whale obeys God’s command, and so does Jonah: he will go to Nineveh; quoþe þe lede [man], “lene me Þy grace” (347). The language

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allows us to focus now on the complex relationship between God and Jonah. Morrison’s discussion of the empathetic “I am you” serves here to develop an important aspect of the Patience-poem. As a way of explaining how the “I” and the “you” learn by means of what is opposite to each (part of “the hermeneutics of empathy”), Morrison draws on Bernard of Clairvaux, whose five types of “participation through love made it possible for the self to be communicated.” The last two types of participation apply to the relationship between Jonah and God: “by desire, when the soul, clinging to God in desire becomes one spirit with him; and by condescension, when the Word of God was incarnated by union with the clay of human f lesh, and two natures unite in one person” (36). Morrison continues (39): A visual metaphor may be helpful. Empiricists visualized the world as a chain of causes and effects that were phenomena, even accidents. Their world was twodimensional. They rejected a far more complex, threedimensional way of visualizing the world—namely, the belief that the world was not a chain of events, but rather a sphere of life, continually unfolding from itself and enfolding upon itself, a sphere in which contrasting poles were identical because, in its ceaseless unfolding and enfolding, its center was everywhere and its circumference, nowhere. (39)

The point Morrison sets out here in this passage is that the conception of concentric order shows how “polar opposites are united by a kind of natural sympathy.” In this case, “contrast remains, but remains as an aspect, even as proof, of participation through sympathy,” of knowing by means of the other (39). When Morrison brings Huizinga’s study of play into his argument for the sparring of opposites, he has come close to the power of the Patience-poet’s dramatization of Jonah’s game “in deadly earnest” (40) where, to use Huizinga’s language, “the player . . . felt himself transformed into another ego which he did not so much represent as incarnate and actualize” (145). Jonah is, after all, actualizing God’s plan. At least, such seems to be the case for the moment. However, the recurring edginess of tone in this Jonah story seems to come from the fact that Jonah’s understanding still falters: he assumes that God is pursuing him, but we, along with Jonah, slowly begin to see that Jonah—with a kind of f ledgling patience—has always been pursuing God. Whose game is this then? The episode of the woodbine gives us a pretty clear answer. Jonah does what God has asked him to do. He has caused the Ninevites to listen to God’s directions. When God, in his mercy, does not punish

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them for their sins, Muche sorзe þenne satteled [settled] upon segge Jonas (409). In fact, He wex as wroth as þe wynde towarde oure Lorde (410), for he has been beaten in this round, too—even as he has thought God and he had come to an understanding. He has gone to great trouble, suffered anxiety. For all that, his efforts as prophet only make him look foolish: God will not punish the Ninevites for their sins. So he sulks in a “lyttel boþ” he has made, pointedly, to keep out the light so that he might rest. Exhausted, he sleeps while God continues the game, for He has caused the woodbine (ivy) to take the shape of a beautiful green shade house where no schafte myзt/þe mountaunce of a lyttel mote upon þat man schyne (455–56)—not a mote of light to disturb Jonah in his green shade, although the schyre [bright] sunne umbeschon [surrounded it]. Such a lefsel of loþ never lede hade (447): Such a surpassing leaf-house no man has ever had. Who could be happier than Jonah? Any of us who delight in being at ease are moved by his childlike joy: he is too happy to eat and ever he laзed [laughed] as he loked þe loge alle aboute (461), laughing as he looked all about the lodging. Filled with pleasure, Jonah falls into a deep sleep: a sloumbe-slep sloghe under leves/Whil God wayned [sent] a worme þat wrot upe þe rote (466–67), and then come wind and sun to parch the leaves until, once again, Jonah has nowhere to hide from the enduring light. That full joy of the child is ruined, and in his petulance Jonah says, once again, that God might as well kill him outright. And, once again, God has reason on his side: Think about it, Jonah. You are angry at losing this contingent thing in which you have invested not even an hour’s time creating or cultivating it. In fact, says God, “Why art þou so waymot [furious], wyзe, for so little?” (492). Jonah’s protest is as utterly human as it is revealing: “ ‘Hit is not lyttel.’ Quoþ þe lede, ‘bot lykker [is more like] to ryзt [to what is right].’ ” This argument might or might not gratify some readers , for God’s argument that the shading woodbine is lyttel reminds us of God’s view of his world compared to Jonah’s human one. The comparison deepens when God demonstrates the narrowness of Jonah’s view: Yet you would be willing for me to let a city full of my own creatures, my own handiwork, perish: “Why schulde I wrath with hem [seek vengeance on them], syþen wyзez [folks] wyl torne [change]/And cum and cnawe [know] Me for Kyng and My carpe [teaching] leve [believe]?” (518–19). This hondework is God’s own, a part of him, made by his own hand, just as the woodbine was made by his hand. Moreover, Jonah, like those Ninevites, was created by God’s hand. What Jonah must learn, it seems, is his place in the wider view so that he might well serve, and serve well, as God’s prophet. For as lyttel (insignificant) as Jonah and his woodbine are within the circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, he is never out of the range of God’s light

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anymore than is the dust mote in the cathedral door. In fact, this light shows itself in the enduring—that is, patient—application of reasoned argument compelled by love for the work of one’s hands. Once again this poet has generated spiritual space by way of esthetic practice. The homely image of the mote in þe munster door—with its implied incident of gesture and motion—draws us into the space of empathy and understanding. For one thing, we simply imagine our poet/cleric opening the cathedral door for morning prayer, letting in spring’s early sun. Watching (bemused?) as numberless dust particles move through the lit gust of morning air, he focuses brief ly on one mote while all are in motion, filling the space of worship here at the center of his poem—the place where he stands to know and asks us to consider—patiently—with him—the place that marks out finitude within the infinite light of God’s abiding presence everywhere. So it is with Jonah—hiding in the ship’s hurrok, in the murk of sea and whale’s belly (drenched like a sponge), inside the shading ivy—always imagining himself stationed at some controlled and bordered place where he can consider his next move. Those scientist-theologians who wondered where God could stand to create a boundless world submitted their proposals, while the oblique and engagingly rootless arguments continue to shimmer variously among the infinite and contingent possibilities. Meanwhile, the Patience-poet designs for us a place of understanding within the measurable center of his poem—line 269 of 532—where without calculation we might take in the abiding light of the world and thereby know, truly, the place of God’s patient spirit at play. Finally, then, this story is about God’s patient love for Jonah—that restless, unruly mote in the midst of the world’s full and enduring light. It is as if the poet asks us to consider a view such as Nagel’s—“a concept under which we ourselves fall as instances—without any implication that we are the central instances” (18).

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CHAPTER 6 THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING: THE DIMENSIONLESS SPACE OF THE SEEKING SPIRIT

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y reading of The Cloud of Unknowing provides a counter to the cultural ground of science and faith and the question of where or how one might stand to know. At the moment that I use the familiar language of “knowing,” “understanding,” or “seeing” for acting out this teacher’s instruction and for “standing” in some place with a view, I have misrepresented the activity. In fact, what we have come to understand as a carefully reasoned set of principles, based in interesting ways on scholarly/theological or scientific/mathematical argument for where one might stand to know, is troubling for this teacher. He denies dimension and, therefore, measurable place, to recommend—instede—a cloud of unknowing: tyme, stede, and bodi—these thre schulden be forgeten in alle goostly worching (prologue to chapter 59). As a corollary, we are to understand that tyme has meaning only in terms of the worching might of thi soul, the whiche is thi wille (309). Denying space and measure, then, defines the Cloud-author’s instruction. The instruction is in five movements: I. He sets out the need for the stede [place] of pasture1. II. The contemplative, like Mary, sits ful stylle, conscious of no one other than self relative to God. III. The contemplative now becomes the parfit lover. IV. In this perfection, then, there is no gaze from here to God’s stede. V. Indeed, the stede is the lover—this nought when it is noughwhere wrought. The lover himself, by ready dissolution of self, is space without defining measure. On one hand, the Cloud-teacher takes up the theological language of someone like Bradwardine (arguing for the unbound presence of God). On the other hand, he exploits the language of scientists in order to dismiss their reasoned way of knowing mysteries by imposing measurable units of time and motion. The result is that he must necessarily

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appropriate specifics of scholarly ideas—both theological and scientific— on the spatial nature of the universe and man’s place in it in order to deny them for his own purposes of instructing the contemplative. We are not surprised by such accommodation of cultural practice since, as Edward Grant summarizes, “one may reasonably conclude that in the fourteenth century theology had been quantified.”2 However, from the outset the Cloud-author acknowledges his precarious stance as he recommends the rejection of structured, framed orderliness for understanding God and His place in the world, what Gallacher describes as “proportion beyond understanding.”3 The closely reasoned argument for a way of loving God subverts the exercise the teacher himself acts out, for he is writing a text of instruction on the ways of unknowing. Moreover, as he will acknowledge, he is at odds with a good part of his fourteenth- century culture since he is a contemplative who stands against methodologies of logic and reason and against the rhetoric of those exercises, as he willfully employs them for his present spiritual and didactic purposes. His argument will take the aggressive tone we see in the Christ of The Dream of the Rood—the warrior of zealous love who must lift up the foot of love and trod down the imposing reason. In fact, the thesis of chapter 9 states the case clearly: in the tyme of this werk the minde of the holiest creature that God maad [made] letteth [hinders] more than it profiteth. (60–61)

He frets over the human impulse to measure, especially the carefully measured words of spiritual leaders who gain the effect of an orderliness that purports to mirror God’s own creative acts. What charms his present- day readers—and probably the young man (twenty-four years old) who may choose to take up this worche (learning and doing)—is its homeliness, in its Middle English sense of familiar place or, in some cases for the Cloud- author, “closest” or “most dear.” He combines this homeliness with the clear sense of (1) his own deeply rooted doubt that what he knows can be transmitted by logical argument and (2) his belief that, nevertheless, his audience has a willing desire to understand God’s grace and love. The effect is that he orders his work by means of the loving will between teacher and student, with the sort of humility that Plato recommends—the humility without envy between teacher and pupil. In fact, Augustine, as teacher, draws our attention to just this work. Students, he says, are affected while we are speaking, and we are affected while they are learning. We dwell in one another; and, thus, it is as though they speak

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in us what they hear, and in them we learn after some fashion what we teach.4

Our attention, then, is drawn to the loving exchange between teacher and pupil. As a matter of fact, we will see how the Cloud-author is pleased to note that, in the process, the student has taught him. Simpson’s argument in Science and the Self in Medieval Poetry is instructive here: “What place can there be for the ‘science’ of poetry in poems that give such high profile [as Alan de Lille and John Gower give us] to ‘scientific’ knowledge, and whose very structure is determined, in part, by hierarchies of the sciences?”5 For the purpose of making clear the connection between science and self, Simpson frames his argument with definitions of enformacion and informacion. The point is the important pedagogy of the “shaping text.” “What has been represented in the poem will become enacted in its readers.”6 That is, Alan and Gower are not only instructing (informing). They are also “forming” the student: “The Confessio, like the Anticlaudianus, is a person-shaped poem” since “the poem aims at human fulfillment through an educative process, so too is the poem’s shape controlled by that end.” 7 With an idea now familiar to us, Simpson cites Gower’s Confessio where “God is represented as an artist, or as one who gives form, both to primary elements and to the human soul.”8 God informs the soul as an artist shapes his matter. And, Simpson prompts me to argue, the reading enforms the reader. In the case of the Cloud-author, however, the teacher resists offering information though he longs to enform his reader. For all its insistence on spirituality and its resistance to materiality, the Cloud-teacher’s language has the simple directness of conversation. At several points—and on at least one heated occasion—our teacher openly scorns the rhetoric of those who purport to instruct in the ways of spirituality. At the same time, he takes for granted the willing love ascribed— by this work—to his student. If we follow the contemplative task with the attention the author asks his contemporary reader to do, we move through three stages (leaving aside the details for a moment): (1) we will fully accept the role of attentive pupil/reader; (2) we will suppress the urge to know by measurable and material logic; (3) we may appropriate to ourselves the willful energy to move about in immeasurable possibilities and promise. By these means, we see that the pupil must disengage from everything he thinks he knows, for neither reason nor the light of understanding serves these purposes. Even those places where the pupil might dwell comfortably—some place where thou hast wonid [dwelled]—will serve only to leave the pupil scaterid. There is an interesting pedagogical and stylistic problem in this teacher’s hope to quell a restless mind: he is

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generally unwilling to indulge in metaphor for explanations since metaphor, like painting, distracts and turns the pupil from the quiet sense of the attentive self to something outside and aside—a misdirected angle, we might say. There is a typical wit in chapter 57 that makes us wonder if Flannery O’Connor’s character in “Parker’s Back” might echo this complaint when Parker proudly displays to his wife a Byzantine Christ tattooed on his back. She is not impressed and argues that “God don’t look.” We are not expected to see him or take his measure. Our teacher explains that oure werke schuld be goostly, not bodily, ne on a bodily maner wrought (57, 2004–5). This seeing from here to there is the exercise of ful emty soules of any trewe devocion [souls empty of any true devotion] (57, 1991). Finally, then, leve thin outward wittes, for St. Denis has told us that The most goodly knowing of God is that, the whiche is knowyn bi unknowing (71, 2371–72). However, on important occasions, the hope of making known to his reader the conditions of this work is too urgent to ignore the poetic image-making he distrusts. As a matter of fact, Simpson’s argument for poetic context for material science is here actively resisted, making clear in that resistance the likelihood of its beguiling success. The resistance gains force as we read the manual. For the moment, however, the Cloud-teacher uses an important metaphor—in fact, a mathematical metaphor—to explain the elements of this stede the pupil might take up. This instruction has to do with how we, as pupil/readers, might measure our werk. We want to know what gauge is available to the willing pupil if the teacher says, Bot thus wil I bid thee. Loke on no wyse that thou be withinne thiself. And schortly withoutyn thiself wil I not that thou be, ne yit aboven, ne behynde, ne on o side, ne on other. “Wher than,” seist thou, “schal I be? Noghwhere, by thi tale!”

Our teacher is encouraging: Now trewly thou seist wel; for there wolde I have thee. For whi, [because] noghwhere bodily is everywhere goostly. (ll. 2291–97)

This expanding will knows no boundaries but calls on love’s operating might, present to us “in the twinkling of an eye,” an athomus of time. We have seen the issue in intellectual, scientific, and doctrinal terms for taking measure and for using mathematical models for explaining God’s presence. More particularly, we have Bradwardine’s familiar argument that time is the divine construct that demonstrates God’s presence. As Dolnikowski writes, Bradwardine offers “a mathematical argument

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concerning the external limits of permanent continua to verify the theological truth that God creates and provides spatial and temporal limits for every existing thing.”9 Our teacher, then, sets the conditions of this work against the measurable world and against the fervent science of measurement while taking advantage of the principle that the werk of the contemplative, the pases [paces] of the willing soul, take time’s measure. This contemplative practice is as important to the result as the tax assessors who paced the demesnes of the fourteenth-century countryside. Meanwhile, the question of space is becoming clearer, and the willing pupil begins to think through the problem of being noghwhere bodily (l. 2298). Aristotle’s definition of time as the measure of motion repeatedly served as the ground for argument about God’s omnipresence in time and space, as we have seen in Bradwardine. In that case, we gave attention to where God takes his place in the universe. In the case of the Cloud, our teacher offers as the basis for his instructions the argument that, since time is the measure of motion in space, then time for the contemplative is measured by proper motion, the werk of the soul—the loving will—toward God. From the beginning, we are struck by our author’s imperative, but therefore edgy, placement of material reality up against what he calls the werk of this book and the tyme of this werk. These phrases are repeated again and again in the prologue (a listing of the subject matter for each of the 75 chapters): 11 uses of the werk of this book and 4 uses of the tyme of this werk. There is a closing shift in the phrase as it appears in the prologue’s description of the last chapter: there we will be assured Of somme certain tokens bi the whiche a man may prove whether he be clepid [called] of God to worche in this werk. Our teacher wants to assure That a worcher in this werk schuld not deme ne think of another worcher as he feleth himself: this exercise will be generated from the desiring will of each pupil. The pupil becomes his own guide in the tyme of his werk. Two points become clear: “use” is the workable word, and the measure of effective werk (use) is to lerne to lift up the fote of thi love and step towards that state and degree of levyng that is Parfite, and the laste state of alle (1, 245–47). The werk is the desire of thin herte. So the teacher concludes his introduction to contemplative practice. Chapter 2 establishes the place of practice—the stede of pasture. Chapter 3 introduces the rule of nakid entente. By chapter 4, we are made to understand that time is measured by the work of the willing soul: plainly, For nothing is more precious than tyme (l. 347). And for the second time in this course of instruction, the Cloud-teacher anticipates his reader’s questions: Bot soroufully thou seist now: “How schal I do? and sith this is soth that thou seist, how schal I geve acompte of iche thing seerly. I that into this day, now of foure and twenty yere age, never toke hede of tyme?”

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The answers to these two questions—where can I be? And how shall I use my time?—shape (as Simpson would say, enforme) the Cloudauthor’s textspace, now beginning to be “person- shaped.” By chapter 70, the pupil will hear this injunction: And therefore travayle fast in this nought and this noughwhere (l. 2344). Edgeless energy gathers up the understanding. The prologue and opening of chapter 1 is an address, then, from teacher to pupil. Opening chapter 2, our teacher sets out instructions for reading a text that (1) distrusts rhetoric, (2) distrusts discursive argument, (3) begrudges distynging (classification), and (4) means to deny—in ways by which they are generally understood— tyme, stede [place], and bodi. We are reminded in this fervent opening of C.S. Lewis’s joyful admission that, for all his reluctance to admit God’s presence, he was, one day, hauled in, like a fish on a hook, to admit the quite thorough infusion of God’s power. For the contemplative, says the Cloud teacher, God has kyndelid thi desire ful graciously, and fastnid bi it a lyame [leash] of longyng (1, 37–38). It is this pull of loving desire that drives the work of both teacher and pupil. The point is clarified for us in the following passage: [God] by His Manheed is the verrey keeper of tyme. And He, bi His Godheed and His Manheed togeders, is the trewist domesman and the asker of acompte of dispending of tyme. Knyt thee therefore to Him by love and by beleve; and than by vertewe of that knot thou schalt be comoun parcener [partner] with Him and with alle that by love so be knytted unto Him that is to sey, with oure Lady Seinte Mary, that ful was of all grace in kepyng of tyme with alle the aungelles of heven that never may lese tyme, and with alle the seintes in heven and in erthe, that by the grace of Jhesu kepe tyme ful justly in vertewe of love. (4, 368–76)

Nothyng, the teacher writes, is more precious than tyme (4, 347–48). The caution, made as early as chapter 4, is that heaven may be won or lost in a moment—“in the twinkling of an eye.” The passage is worth our attention now: This werk asketh no longe tyme er it be ones treulich as sum men wenen; for it is the schortest werke of all that man may ymagyn. It is neither lenger ne schorter then is an athomus; the whiche athomus, by the diffinicion of trewe philisophres in the sciens of astronomye, is the leest partie of tyme; and it is so litil that, for the littilnes of it, is undepartable and neighhonde [nearly] incomprehensible. This is that tyme of the whiche it is wretyn: Alle tyme that is goven to thee, it schal be askid of thee how thou haste dispended it. And skilful [shrewd] thing it is that thou geve acompte [account] of it; for it is neither lenger ne schorter, bot

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even according [equivalent] to one only [a single] sterying [stirring] that is withinne the principal worching might of thi soul, the whiche is thi wille. (4, 301–09)

We should note here that the worching is the motion that measures time, and that motion is the might (energy) of the willing soul that moves (steps) toward God. The teacher continues: For even so many willinges or desiringes—and no mo ne no fewer—may be and aren in one oure [hour] in thi wille, as aren athomus in one oure [hour]. (4, 309–15)

We recall that this athomus is indivisible (undepartable) and nearly incomprehensible. But there is more, for God’s grace is available: And yif thou were reformed by grace to the first state of mans soule, as it was before sinne, than thou schuldest evermore, bi help of that grace, be lorde of that stering or of thoo sterynges; so that none yede forby [goes forfeit], bot alle thei schulde streche [extend] into the sovereign desirable and into the heighest wilnable thing, the which is God. (4, 311–15)

If motion is the measure of time in space, then our instructor owes us some clarification. Hodgson offers the kind of aid we may use if we are to understand this unit of measure (as it was construed by the philosopher- scholars of the fourteenth century). In Greek Testament the least part of time, the atom, was signified by “the twinkling of an eye.” “In medieval Latin its time-value was regularly fixed. It was the smallest medieval measure of time and equivalent to 15/94 a second. An hour equaled 5 points, 15 parts, 40 moments, 60 ostents, and 22,560 atoms.”10 We know, then, according to our teacher, that time is measured for the contemplative by the motion of the loving will. Or to put the idea another way, the loving will gives time measure by filling the moment. The same economy and precision of measure define Albert of Saxony’s millet seed, we recall. This lightest work of all, then, is to think only of God. However, the reader should be warned: For at the first tyme when thou dost it [this work] thou fyndest bot a derknes, and as it were a cloude of unknowynge (4, 289). The teacher is relentless; for, he insists, if one wishes to know this sweetness of love (4, 293), it behoveth alweis be in this derknes as long as thou maist, evermore criing after Him that thou lovest (4, 295–96). Having, then, introduced this darkness that necessarily and desirably comes between the developing contemplative and his intentions, this

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thickness that clouds his “wittes” and “ymaginacion,” surely the teacher means to comfort his pupil by offering a homely analogue: And wene not [do not think], for [ just because] I clepe [call] it a derkness or a cloude, that it be any cloude congeled of the humours that f leen [f ly] in the ayre, ne yit any darkness soche as is in thin house on nightes, when thi candel is oute. (4, 410–12)

As natural as this analogue may appear to be, it is useful to note that in his Physics, Aristotle uses a narrative with a similar analogy for illustrating “how our sense of time comes from the subjective experience before and after, rather than from the objective observation of motion.”11 When the sleepers awoke they failed to realize that any time had passed because the last now [my emphasis] of their former consciousness was linked to the first now of their waking; thus the intervening time was lost to them. Scotus then related Aristotle’s story to the common experience of falling asleep and awakening in a dark place: usually we cannot tell what time it is without referring to an external source of information.

The Cloud-author has, with remarkable canniness, brought his reader to a metaphysical point without ostensible erudition. Our teacher is not troubled that we would lose track of measured time on a dark night but that we understand the desirable release from the very requirement of marking time in some artificial way. The release from such calculation places the contemplative before the cloud of unknowing, as if it were an unknotting. Moreover, now, in chapter 5, he calls his pupil to attention, turns him into an actor, anticipates his response so that we enjoy the dialogue: Bot soroufuly thou seist now: “How schal I do?” [And] “ . . . how schal I geve acompt [account] of iche [each] thing seerly [separately], I that into this day, now of foure and twenty yere age, never toke hede of tyme?” (4, 357–59)

The answer, then, is that the loving will grants place—if not measure—to fill up this athomous of time. By chapter 6, our teacher establishes in his plainspoken way the ground for the argument of the rest of the treatise: God may wel be loved, bot not thought (6, 457). The contemplative spirit now chooses his beloved— the thing that cannot be thought. This act of choosing is to send out the “scharpe dart of longyng” into the cloud of unknowing (6, 464). Everything, we have been told, must be hidden except the target.

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By chapter 10, the ground of release—not the target now, but the place where one would stand—must be established. The cause of this [intrusion of f leshly pleasure or pain] is the grounding and the rotyng [rooting] of your entent in God, maad in the beginning of your levying [living] in that state that ye stonde in. (10, 643–45)

The point (according to chapter 13) is to gain the vertewe of meekness [which] is not ellis [else] bot a trewe knowing and felyng of a mans self as he is [my emphasis]. (13, 715–16)

Here, then, is the would-be contemplative’s complicating condition: at the moment that the pupil seems to have accomplished a significant meekness, of self-knowledge, he must admit to a more inparfait meekness that serves only to remind him of himself in the material world—a start, but a precarious state since this meekness merely reminds us of a material condition—belapped in foule stinkynge pride (14, 767). At this point, our teacher senses a potential drop in his pupil’s attention or confidence, even a restless gaze, so that he now offers an answer by exemplum—an acting out of pedagogical synthesis and redirection (chapters 8–26). The narrative seems to be about Mary, but we understand Mary’s role by means of Martha. We recognize Mary as the perfect contemplative in terms of Martha’s contrasting everyday practice, her busyness. Christ forgives Mary’s sins. We know as much, of course, but we would be wrong to think he reminds her of her sins: not for hir grete sorrow, ne for the mynde [memory] of her synnes, ne yit for hir meekness that sche had in the beholding of hir wrechidnes only. (16, 805–06)

Well, then, why? we might ask. Bot whi than? Sekirly for sche loved mochel.

The mise en scène is important: Martha maad hir besy aboute the dightyng [preparing] of His [oure Lord’s] mete. (17, 845–46)

while Mary hir sister sat at His feet: Theder beheld sche with al the love of hir hert. For fro thens list hir not remowe [move] for nothing that sche saw ne herde spoken ne done aboute

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hir; bot sat ful stille in hir body [my emphasis], with many a swete privé and lysty [longing] love put upon [pressing against] that highe cloude of unknowing bitwix hir and hir God. (17, 851–55)

With this scene before us, the teacher indulges in a digression—in some ways a political digression. He raises questions about Mary’s abstraction from household obligations and insists that Martha should not be blamed for raising questions about Mary’s detachment from practical work of the world: sche [Martha] had lytyl herde of soche perfeccioun (19, 904–05). However, he graciously adds, she was courteous and spoke in few words to voice her complaint (19, 906). We see a lapse here, it seems, so that our teacher indulges in his own wretchedness at the thought of those who complain against contemplatives, for they are like Martha—but unlike her in their boystously [rude] speaking (19, 910). They simply do not know the possibilities: thei knowen no betir levyng then is that thei live in theimself (19, 917). Our teacher, then, takes Christ’s charity toward Martha as an example in bono for himself: he himself will excuse the ignorance of his colleagues just as God has forgiven this teacher’s own ignorance—charitably and petuously [with pity] (19, 919–20). We are drawn as readers—and surely such is the case for the young man who reads this work of love—to the plainspoken humility of this teacher. I want to return to this explanation of our author’s argument for the contemplative life as counter to the active life by taking the lesson a step further to consider what seems to me the compelling argument in the treatise, opened here but from this point in the treatise becoming increasingly the substance of the argument: This was greet love; this was passing love (22, 1023). For the moment, I want to draw attention to the cumulative effect of the Cloud-author’s strategies for displacing the work of contemplation—this passing love. Time, we know now, is measured by the loving will, not by everyday practice for all our modes of measure— foot, rod, journey. I have argued that this contemplative moves against the logic of math or geometry to explain God’s presence in the world—or in void space, for that matter—as a way of explaining His power and knowledge in community with humankind. However, our teacher knows the presiding school of scholastic thought well enough to employ its strategies to his own purpose—his purpose as a teacher and a practitioner of the contemplative life—the schortest werk of all. I want to look specifically at chapter 34, where our teacher uses two analogies that seem to indicate the difficulty—in the face of strong currents of scientific and theological rationality—of setting out this program of unknowing.

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He writes that the pupil who wishes to take up this contemplative life must understand a basic idea: this werk is what the contemplative longs for, clearly. But more important, neither it is goven for inocense, ne withholdern for synne (34, 1273–74). This werk is neither a gift nor a bribe. In fact, all indications are that the work makes its on way. Here the teacher offers a short way to describe what this work is, this stripped- down intention so that thin entent be nakedly directe unto God (34, 1298–99). In fact, he uses metaphors to explain. And, yif I schal schortlyer [brief ly] sey, lat that thing do with thee and lede thee wherso it list. Lat it be the worcher, and thou bot the suffrer [object]; do bot loke apon it, and lat it alone. Medel thee not therwith as thou wouldest help it, for drede lest thou spille al.

This power or energy or steryng is not will, not desire, bot a thing thou wost never what, that sterith thee to wilne and desire thou wost never what (34, 1287–88). The stirring has no name, but these analogies of shaping forces are as close as this teacher will come to an explanation. In fact, he says, the nearer one thinks he has come to truth, the more he must guard against error. Therefore, we must be careful in our reading just as the dreamer in The Book of the Duchess must proceed with caution: the sorrowing knight is not the vehicle of sorrow any more than the loving soul is the empty vessel to be filled: the lover is the place of willful entente. For all the care our teacher has taken to explain the space of the loving soul by displacing it, he ultimately rests in metaphor so that, paradoxically, rendering science useless for contemplation comes down to a pointedly quotidian spatial metaphor: Be thou bot the tre, and lat it be the wright; be thou bot the hous, and lat it be the hosbonde wonyng [dwelling] therin. (34, 1291–95)

The pronoun “it” is werk, a kind of energy, it seems. But carefully, carefully does our teacher continue: no mene may lede therto. For a moment it appears that we might find comfort in an analogue—as the scientist might say, or a metaphor—as a poet might say. However, our guide is wily: he offers no analogue, no metaphor now, no easy sighting from here to there. And he makes the werk plain: . . . in this werk men schul use no menes, ne yit men mowe not com therto with menes. All good menes hangen upon it, and it on no mene; ne no mene may lede therto. (34, 1307–9)

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I read mene and menes as “intermediary” or “intermediaries.” There is no outside link of the loving soul to what it contemplates, for the contemplative is to be the material and the vessel. The desiring will is both the designer and the in- dweller. There is no here to there—no metaphor or analogue—to make the connection since the contemplative soul assumes the shape of what he loves and hates whatever is not of that shape. By chapter 68, our teacher gives us a name for this emptied, pliant, fertile, unbound cloud, now acknowledged by the loving desire as Al [All], as our inner man clepith [calls] it (68, 2314). As early as chapter 20, but only in the beginning stage of instruction, we have learned that Mary has chosen the better part because that parfite sterynge of love that byginneth here [with Mary’s abstraction from worldly duty] is even of noumbre with [equivalent to] that that [which] schal last withouten ende in blis of heven; for al is bot one [my emphasis]. (20, 93–55)

With this language—that parfite sterynge of love and al is bot one—we may enjoy the advantage now of recursive reading, especially since we do not have the advantage of the fourteenth-century audience—the attentive student who could ask questions along the way. Nevertheless, we are clearly, now especially from chapters 43 to 48, moving toward some clarification: And thou schalt understonde that thou schalt not only in this werk forget all other creatures then thiself, or theire dedes or thine, bot also thou schalt in this werk forgete bothe thiself and also thi dedes for God, as welle as alle other creatures and theire dedes. For it is the condition of the parfite lover, not only to love that thing that he loveth more then himself, bot also in maner for to hate himself for that thing that he lovith. (43, 1521–26)

This characterization of the contemplative as the parfite lover closes my argument for how space matters in The Cloud of Unknowing. It marks the moment when our teacher draws the longing reader to this work and to this werk. He has dismissed “here and there” as disruptive to the desiring will and rendered shapeless any hope of triumph by means of a raid on the inarticulate. Then imagine with what delight he offers, and the willing pupil receives, the idea that God delights in the lover’s game. In fact, the teacher now speaks in the spirit of game. The game is a delicate one: leerne the to love listely [ joyfully] with a softe and a demure contenaunce, as wel in body as in soule (46, 1631–31). And gamely be it seyde, I rede [advise] that thu [you] do that in thee is, refreynyng [restraining] the rude and the grete steryng of thi spirite;

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right as [ just as if ] thou on no wyse wouldest lat Hym wite [know] hou fayne thou woldest see Hym and have Hym or fele Hym. (46, 1633–35)

This lover’s game continues, and the pedagogue anticipates the question: This is childly and pleyingly spoken, thee think, paraventure. Bot I trowe whoso had grace to do and fele as I sey, he schuld fele God gamesumly pley with hym, as the fadir doth with the childe, kyssyng and clipping [embracing], that weel were him so. (46, 1636–38)

The point of this game is to avoid the risk of practiced gestures and expressions of body designed to draw God’s attention to your love—a truly puerile exercise since we can hardly call on body to express spirit. And furthermore, God, of course, knows everything about us in any case. One more useful point about this “gamely” tone in chapters 43 through 48: we may well think of Jonah in the last of these chapters, chapter 48, where our teacher offers a bit of a corrective to his insistence that the ardent pupil control his joy: we should consider for a moment this “mede [reward] in blis bothe in body and in soule” and should note this promise: God forbade that I schuld departe that that [which] God hath couplid, the body and the spirit; for God wil be served with body and with soule, bothe togeders, as seemly is, and rewarde man his mede in blis bothe in body and in soule. And in erles [anticipation] of that mede, sumtyme He wil enf laume the body of a devoute servaunt of His here in this liif—not onys or twies, bot paraventure right ofte, and as Him likith—with ful wonderful swetnes and counfortes. Of the which, som beth not coming fro withoutyn into the body bi the wyndowes of our wittys, bot fro withinne, rising and spryngyng of habundaunce of goostly gladness, and of trewe devocion in the spirit. (48, 1687–96)

Jonah could have used such instruction so that he might have enjoyed God’s gamesumly gift of the woodbine. However, as we may understand now, Jonah’s delight is childish since it comes from plain bodily ease and joy, not fro withine, rising and spryngyng of habundance of goostly gladness, and of trewe devocion in the spirit (48, 1694–96). Jonah is not an apt pupil, but we are with him as he begins to understand how to play the desiring lover’s game. Finally, we, too, see that it is God’s patience as teacher and lover that shapes Jonah’s story and Jonah as storytelling prophet.

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I want to return now to Morrison’s hermeneutics of empathy and what proves to be a useful way to think about The Cloud of Unknowing. Morrison has taught us a way of viewing our culture—a view that works in two ways. First, this hermeneutics dissolves mere temporal borders that classify by studied logic. Second, the dissolution becomes an unknowing of self by means of the other. “I am you”—potentially every other self that may be or has been or will be. As the Cloud-author writes in his The Book of Privy Counselling, I sey þat perfeccion of mans soule is not elles bot an oneheed maad bitwix God & it in parfite charitee.12

The Cloud-author’s work effaces—while it admits—both temporal and spatial borders and edges for the sake of the desiring soul and yet relies on what we can only know from where we are. But perhaps the anonymous reader of the Cloud-author offers the most apt accounting of the cloud’s werk—the space of the loving soul: Then God with lovely cownttynance takyth The sole and pottyth [puts] hym into the mydyst of hys hart.13

Having lifted the foot of love, this self is willing to start there and to remain there—where “tyme, stede, and body . . . schuld be foregeten” (59, 2089) within the cloud of simple love, with the possibility that this energy resides in a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. It may, of course, show itself as a mote in the cathedral door, or as the loving sorrow of a noble knight, or as the omnipresence of the light of God’s countenance into a bean-vine. As a matter of fact, the measure of this motion, falling into the hands of a homely storyteller like Chaucer’s Reeve, might take its place in the bemused notion that scholars (like Aleyn) can turn a small space into a large one simply by thinking about it. For the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, there is no point in looking from here to there or asking where to stand to look. From his point of view such longings water the passions, encourage pride in the intellect, and charge the sensual body. At the very historic moment of attention to reason, especially as the rational reveals its power in mathematics and the sciences, this contemplative takes up the question of spatial measure in order to demonstrate its ineffectiveness for his work. In fact, finally, a soul is where it loves: And sekirly as verily is a soule there where it loveth. It is not necessary, then, to streyne oure spirit neither up ne doune, ne on o side ne on other. This teacher is hardly concerned to “explain” where

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God stood to create the universe or to consider the theological geometry of the universe and God’s place in it. What is finally endearing about this teacher is that his last thrust toward his pupil demonstrates where pedagogical fervor may very well lead us: he uses the seductive image of the ark to show how the space of the loving soul might be envisioned—a deplorable exercise under most circumstances of contemplation, but—as conclusion to his manual of instruction to his receptive student—ultimately irresistible: And weel is this grace [of contemplacion] and this werked licned to that arke. For right as in that arke were contenid alle the juelles and the relikes of the temple, right so in this lityl love put [placed] ben contenid all the vertewes of mans soule, the whiche is the goostly temple of God. (71, 2397–2400)

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EPILOGUE

W

e can assume that each of three Middle English writers— Chaucer, the Perle-poet, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing—is writing pretty close to the same time and place in fourteenth- century England. Each sits in some reasonably ordered, or quiet, place to think and write. We have the sense, in these seven works specifically, that each is aware of himself in the midst of complexities, but each is particularly conscious of his complex role as teacher. Sitting for a time at some material distance from the complexities, even imagining himself so engaged, would prompt speculation about how he—or anyone—might stand to know, how one might give a clear account of whatever we see or hope to understand. Each of these writings has a powerful didactic pressure, moving between speaker and listener to provide a place of understanding— more directly, or more obviously, in The Cloud of Unknowing and Patience, but equally pressing in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale (rather selfconsciously as a writer exploiting the familiar fable genre), theatrically in Perle, and ceremoniously in The Book of the Duchess (memory as public expression). Gaston Bachelard acknowledges this pressure—both as teacher and writer—as he introduces his poetics of space: But shall I have the strength to write this book? For there is a great distance between the words we speak uninhibitedly to a friendly audience and the discipline needed to write a book. When we are lecturing, we become animated by the joy of teaching and, at times, our words think for us. But to write a book requires really serious ref lection.1

One point is worth noting: the writers of the fourteenth century would very likely have had occasion—even, regularly—to read their writings aloud so that audiences, sometimes had the advantages (as John Burrow demonstrates in Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative) of voice, expression, and gesture. Even if the student could find the book and read for

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himself, he is likely to read aloud. Consequently, the sense of conversation must have been promising and compelling. It is important to note that Bachelard’s sense of himself as a teacher is expressed by a man who established his career as a scientist before he came to acknowledge the limits of science; he writes that “scientific thought . . . is always related thought [my emphasis]. [On the other hand], the image, in its simplicity, has no need for scholarship” (xv). Bachelard’s animation from the “joy of teaching” reminds us of Augustine’s argument that students and teachers “dwell in one another” so that “we learn after some fashion what we teach.” It is Karl Morrison’s hermeneutical, “I am you.” In fact, it seems important to acknowledge that, as we read, the text becomes the pedagogical gap, the place where we might stand to look. Considering Bachelard’s distinction between “related thought” (science) and the “simplicity” of the image (poetry), we can see how these fourteenth-century writers have constructed places for us, places where we may begin to think of ourselves as standing always between metaphor (conceived connection) and analogue (perceived connection)—between imagination and reason. So it is with the reader/narrator/dreamer in The Book of the Duchess, who will imagine himself as nearly as possible in the heart of the Black Knight, so that he might know and thereby explain (perhaps even comfort) this sorrowing man. Distinguished from this affective mode, the saturation of learning pointedly sinks the conventional pedagogical stance of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale as fable while it poses a universe of vistas— views from within and outside the public plaza demonstrated by means of a familiar fable. In fact, models (analogues) of Reynard’s story define and redefine Reynard’s audience and offer us an index of habit. Pedagogy takes an obtuse angle when we understand that the Patiencepoet’s instruction is like Chekhov’s theory of narrative: the idea is not to offer a solution to a problem, but to instruct in formulating the problem accurately. Pointedly, neither our poet’s nor the Bible’s storytelling intends to offer Jonah as an emblem seeking patience. Such a dull device would hardly demonstrate either the pedagogue’s skill in the use of instructive homily or of exemplum. In spite of the fact that Jonah takes instruction from the Teacher Himself, the young prophet is angry to the very last—angry even unto death, he says. In fact, the drama—biblical or poetic—ends without resolution for Jonah. Clearly, to understand the point of Patience, we must consider God as an inventive teacher and skilled game-player who allows us to take our places among the motes in the light of his patient instruction, an everlasting marker or gauge. Such a gauge is not immediately available to the sorrowing dreamer in Perle.

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Only by the developing clarity of vision, standing at a sorrowful distance between his Perle and himself, can he—or we, for that matter—begin to take the measure of his loss. The instruction comes from the dreaming self, as his vision clears and sharpens. The Cloud-author takes up his pedagogical task unaided and—more pointedly—untrammeled by measure or image, hedge or frame. Instede, he is stirred to a stillness from which the loving will lifts him into a circle (familiar image to serve here) the circumference of which is nowhere, and whose center is everywhere he himself is. We have seen that Nagel comes quite close to this state of contemplation when he insists that “the view from nowhere” is, finally, not possible: it cannot “really be domesticated,” as Nagel writes, or be “homely” as the Cloud-author writes, for we must, after all, “acknowledge our containment in the world,” and so cannot easily release ourselves from the material realities of everyday practice. The Cloud-author struggles to argue the case by directing attention to both Martha’s and Mary’s ways of understanding. As John Burrow writes, when the Cloud-author insists that physical symbols do not carry us “over into the realm of the spirit,” he “shows medieval exegesis at its rare best.” Burrow continues: “The two realms of the ‘bodily’ and the ‘ghostly’ have been joined by God; but that is no reason for confusing one with the other.” 2 The Cloud-author argues for an enlightened courage that looks toward Nagel’s persuasive argument: When we acknowledge our containment in the world, it becomes clear that we are incapable of living in the full light of that acknowledgment. Our problem has in this sense no solution, but to recognize that [my emphasis] is to come as near as we can to living in light of the truth. (231)

Such, too, is the hope of the Cloud-teacher for his student. A reading of Chaucer’s A Treatise on the Astrolabe seems a fitting close to this book. Chaucer’s son, Lewis (as Chaucer describes his student petitioner), has effectively moved his father (friend, teacher, grandfather?) to show him how an astrolabe works. This handheld analogue takes the measure of the space and motion of the universe from wherever Lewis may stand—if he gets his nombres and proporciouns right. Any well-informed instructor would be pleased to agree to such a request. But there is a deeper sense of promise here, an acting out of that familiar exchange we may see between teacher and student, and Chaucer’s image gains our attention: . . . for as moche as a philosofre saith, “he wrappith him in his frend, that condescendith to the rightfulle praiers of his frend.” (5–7)

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This friend takes into account the young fellow’s hopes, gathers them like another skin around himself so that he may see as the boy sees, and thereby instruct him as they take the measure of the universe—by way of analogue. It was not all that long ago that, with an eagle, he had taken such f light—by way of dreaming, and by way of little Lewis’s longing to understand, Chaucer grants us a place—even now—to stand between reason and the imagination in order to see from the center.

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NOTES

Preface 1. Andrew Taylor, “Playing on the Margins: Bakhtin and the Smithfield Decretals,” in Bakhtin and Medieval voices, edited by Thomas J. Farrell, 35. Tampa: University Press of Florida, 1995. 2. Arlyn Diamond, “Introduction” to “Colloquium: The Afterlife of Origins,” in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, edited by Frank Grady, The New Chaucer Society, Washington University: University of Notre Dame Press, Vol. 28, 2006, 219 3. Nick Halpern, The Everyday and the Prophetic. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. 4. John Burrow, Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature. Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 2002. 5. James Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus and John Gower’s Confessio amantis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 6. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. of Les Mots et les choses. New York: Vintage, 1966,71 7. Karl M. Morrison, “I am You”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. 8. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. 9. Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Etienne Gilson. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. p. xxxv.

Introduction 1. Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, 206; Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, Chapter 5, “Space,” esp. p. 100. 2. David C. Lindberg, “Science and the Early Church,” in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, edited by David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., 19–48. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

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3. Steven Marrone, The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century (Vols. I and II). Leiden: Brill, 2001. 4. Marrone, “Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus on the Knowledge of Being,” Speculum, vol. 63, No. 1 ( Jan., 1988), 22 and 50–52: “In fact it would seem that neither thinker was much interested in specifying exactly what the intelligible light might be. Both [Robert Grosseteste and William of Auvergne 1210–45] employed the image of illumination not to lay out the precise epistemic or noetic conditions under which knowledge of propositional truth could be attained but instead to exhibit the intensities of cognitive certitude and show how they were ordered. Under these constraints the image of light worked as shorthand for a universal carrier of intelligibility, regardless of whether one took it to be divine light, mind or simply truth itself. It was thus the image’s practical function in a particular type of explanation rather than its metaphysical or noetic import that was crucial, for it succeeded in making particularly clear a view of the levels of certitude dependent, ironically, on Aristotle’s schema for the sciences.” 5. It is useful to note Marrone’s distinctions between Pierre Duhem’s assessment of the inf luence of medieval science on seventeenth- century science and Alexandre Koyré’s view: Duhem argued that “medieval thinking played an instrumental role, laying the foundations for most of the significant achievements of the seventeenth century,” but “Koyré believed the opposite,” that “the essential attributes of modern science, on the level of theory, praxis and results, were concocted from scratch in the seventeenth century” (9). 6. Marrone, Light, 515. See note 7 for reference to Duns Scotus’s text. 7. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944: reprinted by Liberty Fund, Inc., from the 1944 edition (revised and corrected from the original 1940 Clarendon Press edition), Indianapolis, Indiana, 2003, 425. 8. A.H. Armstrong and R.A. Markus, Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960, 39–41. 9. Katherine H. Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology and the Foundations of Semantics: 1250-1345. New York: E.J. Brill, 1988. 3, n. 2. 10. Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images: 400-1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 11. Carruthers cites Peter of Celle citing Augustine as his source, who “wrote that in contrast to the direct vision of God there (ibi), here “spiritual seeing is constructed by means of our recollection of images of corporeal things” (73 and see note 49). 12. See Carruthers’s note on J.-P. Antoine’s essay about picture- space: “Mémoire, Lieux, et Invention Spatiale” and his idea about “temporal progression” (251, n. 77).

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13. Andrzej Piotrowski, “Architecture and the Iconic Controversy,” in Medieval Practices of Space, edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka, Medieval Cultures, Vol. 23, 101–127. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 14. Marrone, 340, 523. 15. Light, 337. See also note 7: “Essentially this understanding of the Augustinian position led Allan Wolter to remark that ‘the medieval theory of analogy’ was rooted in Augustinian illumination.” (Wolter, The Transcendentals and Their Function, pp. 32 and 40–43). See also Marrone, “Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus,” Speculum, 63, No. 1, Jan., 1988, 22 and 50–52. 16. Duns had “attacked Henry’s position on the analogical nature of mind’s primitive notion of being by insisting that God was never known in a common concept analogically signifying divinity and creatures but only in one that was univocal to the two” (523). 17. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, 163. 18. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (eds), God & Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. 19. Edward Grant, “Science and Theology in the Middle Ages,” in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, edited by David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, 49–75. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. 20. “It was as if he brought to completion the efforts of Henry of Ghent and Matthew of Aquasparta to set mind and its activity entirely in the world while not forgetting its natural orientation towards God. Here was an Aristotelianizing noetics and epistemology effectively harnessed to the aspirations of an Augustinian cast of mind.” (531) 21. Suzanne Akbari, Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. 22. John of Salisbury, The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: A Twelfth- Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium, trans. Daniel D. McGarry, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962. 23. See McGarry’s note, p. 5, n. 21: Metalogicon, probably from μeτά λογικών: “about” or “on behalf of logic” or “logical studies” (the Trivium). 24. OED: Wyclif ’s use of the word “prudence” suggests the potential of the word for considering practical as well as spiritual matters: OED, “Wyclif Eph.iii 4 ‘As эe redinge mown vnderstonde my prudence in the mysteries of Crist.” He is citing Ephesians 3:4: “As you reading, may understand my knowledge in the mystery of Christ,” p. 2343. 25. Karl F. Morrison, “I Am You”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art. Princeton, 1988, 182–83. 26. St. Augustine, The Trinity, Chapter XII, “On the Catechising of the Uninstructed.”

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27. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, xxxv. 28. Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” in Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present: A Research Annual,edited by Henrika Kuklick and Elizabeth Long, Vol. 6, 1–41, Greenwich: JAI Press Inc., 1986. 29. Nagel too has made use of James’s “art of fiction” by citing, in an essay on “Concealment and Exposure” (1998), a passage from The Golden Bowl, where Maggie knows of her husband’s deception, and her husband sees that she knows. Nagel uses this Jamesian stand- off to demonstrate the view that takes in the subjective and the objective at once: “What we can tolerate having out in the open between us depends on what we think we can handle jointly without crippling our relations for other purposes” (15). “Concealment and Exposure” in Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 27, no. 1 (Winter), 1998, 3–30. 30. Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” in Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present: A Research Annual, edited by Henrika Kuklick and Elizabeth Long, Vol. 6, Greenwich: JAI Press Inc., 1986, 1–41. 31. William Ivins, Jr., On the Rationalization of Sight with an Examination of Three Renaissance Texts on Perspective. New York: Da Capo Press, repr., 1975; Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Renaissance Discovery of Linear Perspective, New York: Basic Books, 1975. See also Linda Tarte Holley, Chaucer’s Measuring Eye, Houston: Rice University Press, 1990, 6–7. 32. Latour, 8, reviewing Edgerton’s point from “The Renaissance Artist as a Quantifier,” in M.A. Hagen, ed., The Perception of Pictures, Vol. I, New York: Academic Press, 1980, 189. 33. Latour, 9, citing Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the 17th Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, 51. 34. Latour, 10. 35. Latour, 7, citing Ivins, 1973, 9. See Holley, 5. 36. See Bachelard’s chapter 7, 148–2, esp. p. 159: “I haven’t the advantage of actually seeing the works of the miniaturist of the Middle Ages, which was the great age of solitary patience. But I can well imagine this patience, which brings peace to one’s fingers . . . Also one must love space to describe it as minutely as though there were world molecules, to enclose an entire spectacle in a molecule of drawing.” The remarkable point, he says, is that “images cannot be measured. And even when they speak of space, they change in size. The slightest value extends, heightens, or multiplies them. Either the dreamer becomes the being of his image, absorbing all its space or he confines himself in a miniature version of his images” (173). 37. Bachelard makes a similar assertion in his introduction: “Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor” (xxxii).

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159

38. Bachelard goes on to recall “a great novelist”—Henri Bosco and his Monsieur Carre-Benoit à campagne: “The only piece of furniture among all that he possessed, for which Carre-Benoit felt real affection was his solid oak filing cabinet, which he contemplated with satisfaction whenever he passed in front of it. Here, at least, was something that was reliable, that could be counted on. You saw what you were looking at and you touched what you were touching. Its proportions were what they should be, everything about it had been designed and calculated by a meticulous mind for purposes of utility. And what a marvelous tool! It replaced everything, memory as well as intelligence. In this well-fitted cube there was not an iota of haziness or shiftiness. Once you had put something in it, even if you put it a hundred or ten thousand more times, you could find it again in the twinkling of an eye, as it were. Forty- eight drawers! Enough to hold an entire well- classified world of positive knowledge. M. Carre-Benoit attributed a sort of magic power to these drawers concerning which he said that they were “the foundations of the human mind” (77). Bachelard reminds his reader that “this is said by a very commonplace man . . . For with this filing cabinet [Carre-Benoit] has succeeded in embodying the dull administrative spirit.” 39. Stephen G. Nichols, “The New Medievalism: Tradition and Discontinuity in Medieval Culture,” in The New Medievalism, edited by Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols, 4. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. 40. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. of Les Mots et les choses, New York: Vintage, 1966, esp. 50–60. 41. Tachau makes interesting use of this same passage from Chaucer to demonstrate how—after the 1340s and the Parisian ferment—“we merely reach an important watershed in the creation of the rich noetic legacy that medieval scholastics bequeathed to subsequent generations of intellectuals and to culture more generally” (vii). 42. Marjorie Hope Nicholson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the “New Science” on Seventeenth-Century Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960. 43. Nicholas Howe, “The Landscape of Anglo- Saxon England: Inherited, Invented, Imagined,” in Inventing Medieval Landscape, edited by John Howe and Michael Wolfe, 92–112. Tampa: University Press of Florida, 2002. 44. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. 45. Dorothy Hartley, Lost Country Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979, 57. Isak Dinesen’s telling of the legend of Sorrow-Acre directs us to the confrontation of love and justice measured out by a mother’s brave work to cut a hayfield in a day’s time in order to save her son’s life. 46. J. A. Raftis, A Small Town in Late Medieval England: Godmanchester, 12781400. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1982, 95.

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NOTES

47. M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, sel., ed., and trans. by Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little, 111. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. 48. Edith Wilks Dolnikowski, Thomas Bradwardine: A View of Time and a Vision of Eternity in Fourteenth-Century Thought. New York: E.J. Brill, 1995. Dolnikowski’s work clarifies much of the language, principles, and arguments of this “substantial reevaluation of all ancient authorities.” Especially suggestive for me is her explanation of Aristotle’s distinction between “successive” and “continuous beings,” borrowing, she says, “from the language of geometry” (106). The uncanny effect is an assured articulation of Foucault’s questions about “the order of things.” 49. Alexandre Koyré, “Le vide et l’espace infini au XIV siècle,” 17, in Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge,1949, 45–91, and in Metaphysics and Measurement, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968, esp. 1–15. 50. Koyré, Metaphysics and Measurement, 4. 51. It is rather natural to think here of Chaucer’s f light to the House of Fame—the subject of my chapter 2—where Geffrey’s f light grants an impressive, even poignant, opportunity for considering one’s place in the order of things. 52. Koyré, “Le vide et l’espace infini au XIV siècle,” 17, 1949, 90–91. 53. Here Koyré is citing Bradwardine: De Causa Dei in Thomae Bradwardini Archiespiscopi Olim Cantuarensis, De Causa Dei contra Pelagium et de Virtule causarum ad suos Martonenses Libri tres. Londini, MDCXVIII. Koyré explains (n. 3, p. 80) that De Causa Dei is made up of three books: The first is consecrated to God; the second, to man; the third, au problème de la concordance de la liberté humaine avec la toute-puissance de Dieu(81). 54. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 55. Marrone, The Light of Thy Countenance, 249. 56. Koyré, 87. 57. Marrone, “Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus,” 53. 58. De Certeau, 169, citing Borges quoted by Gérard Genette, Figures, Paris: Seuil, 1966, 123. 59. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in The Critical Tradition, edited by David H. Richter, esp. sections I and V, 1109–1110. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998. 60. Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry D. Benson, third edition. Boston: Houghton Miff lin Company, 1987. References to Chaucer’s text will be from this edition unless otherwise noted. 61. Albert of Saxony, Edward Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200-1687. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 171, n. 8, and cited with pointed usefulness by Donnalee Dox, “Theatrical Space, Mutable Space, and the Space of Imagination: Three Readings of

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62.

63. 64.

65.

161

the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” in Medieval Practices of Space, edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka, Medieval Cultures, Volume 23, 178, n. 24. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Peter Brown, “The Containment of Symkyn: The Function of Space in the Reeve’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review, 14, 3, 225–36. Brown shows “precisely how Chaucer systematically seeks to make organic space a part of his material realism” (226). Dox, 183. Guillaume de Deguileville, The Pilgrimage of Human Life (Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine), trans. Eugene Clasby, vol. 76, Series B, Garland Library of Medieval Literature. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992, 40–44. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991, 339.

1

The Nun’s Priest’s Tale: Bookspace as Public Plaza

1. Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. 2. Michel Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London: Continuum Press, 2004 and Critique of Everyday Life: Volume One, trans. John Moore. London: New Left Books, 1991. 3. Medieval Practices of Space, edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka, ix. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 4. David Herman, Unpublished manuscript. See Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. And see also Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, edited by David Herman. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1999. 5. Dick Harrison, Medieval Space: The Extent of Microspatial Knowledge in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. Lund: Lund University Press, 1996, 17. 6. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. See also Michal Kobialka, “Staging Place/Space in the Eleventh- Century Monastic Practices” in Medieval Practices of Space, 1–36. 7. Kathleen Biddick, “Ethnography and City Views,” in Medieval Practices of Space, eds. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michael Kobialka, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 234–36. 8. Steven Justice, Rebellion and Writing in England in 1381. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, 258. 9. G.R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961. 10. Jill Mann, Ysengrimus: Text with Translation, Commentary and Introduction. New York: Brill, 1987. 11. Kenneth Varty, Reynard, Renart, Reinaert and Other Foxes in Medieval England: The Iconographic Evidence. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999.

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12. Lilian Randall. Images in the Margins of Illuminated Manuscripts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. 13. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955, 25. 14. E.W. Holloway, Reynard the Fox, a poem in twelve cantos, translated from the German by E. W. Holloway, with thirty-seven engravings on steel, after designs by H. Leutemann. Dresden: Publications for the Proprietors of A. H. Payne, 1852. 15. Harry J. Owens, The Scandalous Adventures of Reynard the Fox, a Modern American Version by Harry J. Owens. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1945. 16. Stephen Justice, Rebellion and Writing in England in 1381. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1994, 224. 17. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, edited by.David H. Richter, 1106–22.Boston: Bedford Books, 1998. 18. Justice, 188. 19. Michael Riffaterre, “The Mind’s Eye: Memory and Textuality,” The New Medievalism, edited by Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols, 33. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. 20. Sherri Olson, A Chronicle of All That Happens: Voices from the Village Court in Medieval England. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996. 21. J.A. Raftis, A Small Town in Late Medieval England: Godmanchester, 12781400. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1982, 95. 22. Daniel Lord Small, “The Linguistic Cartography of Property and Power in Late Medieval Marseille,” in Medieval Practices of Space ,eds. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 47. 23. Small cites Derek Keene’s “The Property Market in English Towns A. D. 1100-1600,” in D’une ville a l’autre, eds. Giulio Bollati and Paolo Fossati, where Keene makes the point that “cartographic conversations were not particular to Marseille” but were taking place throughout Europe, especially after shifts in properties as a result of the Black Death. 24. Charles Burroughs, “Spaces of Arbitration and the Organization of Space in Late Medieval Italian Cities,” in Medieval Practices of Space, eds. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 70. 25. Michael Camille, “Signs of the City: Place, Power, and Public Fantasy in Medieval Paris,” in Medieval Practices of Space, edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 1–36. 26. De Certeau, 123. 27. Harrison, Medieval Space, 13–14. 28. Austin Lane Poole, From Domesday Book to Magna Carta: 1087-1216, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951, 53: “It was seemingly only in the last resort that sheep were sent to the butcher.” 29. Justice, 5.

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30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

45.

2

Justice, 37. Justice, 66. James Simpson, 274. De Certeau, 123. Andrew Taylor, “Playing on the Margins: Bakhtin and the Smithfield Decretals,” Bakhtin and Medieval Voices, edited by Thomas J. Farrell, 31. Tampa: University Press of Florida, 1995. Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London: Continuum, 2004, 82. Information for this item appears at http://wwwlib.umi.com/eebo/ image/31557. De Certeau, 165–76. Austin Lane Poole, From Domesday Book to Magna Carta: 1087-1216. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951. Werner Rösener, Peasants in the Middle Ages, trans. Alexander Stützer. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992, 150–55. Riffaterre, in The New Medievalism, 36–37. Nancy Mason Bradbury, “Popular-Festive Forms and Beliefs in Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne” in Bakhtin and Medieval Voices, 179.. Andrew Taylor, “Playing on the Margins: Bakhtin and the Smithfield Decretals,” 17–37, in Bakhtin and Medieval Voices, ed.Thomas Farrell, 36. Tampa: University Press of Florida, 1995. Gary Saul Morson, “Essential Narrative: Tempics and the Return of Process,” in Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, edited by David Herman, 277–314. Columbus: Ohio State University, 2000. St. Augustine’s Confessions with an English translation by William Watts, 1631, in two volumes, London: Heinemann, 1912. Further references to St. Augustine’s Confessions will be to this translation. De Certeau, 127, “Es war einmal ein Lattenzaun/mit Zwischenraum, hindurchzu-/schaun.”

The House of Fame: “I wot myself best how y stonde.”

1. Wolfgang Clemen, Chaucer’s Early Poetry, tr. C.A. M. Sym, 1963, 98. See note to l. 712 in The Riverside Chaucer, p. 983. 2. De Certeau, 127. 3. Paul Zumthor, La mesure du monde: représentation de l’espace au Moyen Age, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1993, 390. 4. Stephen Nichols, “The New Medievalism: Tradition and Discontinuity in Medieval Culture,” in The New Medievalism, edited by Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1991, 15. Nichols cites Hans Blumberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987, 138, where Blumberg points out the “diminished efficacy of [the material world] that is far removed from the purity and regularity of what it comes from, being, as it were, multiply refracted [my emphasis].”

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5. See Benjamin Koonce’s Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame: Symbolism in The House of Fame, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966, 151, where he shows us the Ovidian image of Fame’s house and its central position in the cosmos: Ryght even in myddes of the weye/Betwixen hevene, erthe, and see (714–15). Professor Koonce’s point is that Chaucer is perfectly satisfied to use the centrality of Fame’s house as a “pagan inversion of the Scriptural house of God, the divine center of man’s spiritual life”—suggesting a “mid-point” (151–44). 6. John of Salisbury, The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: A Twelfth- Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium, trans., Daniel D. McGarry, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962, IV. 17, 229. Citations will be from this text throughout unless otherwise noted. 7. Michel Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume One, trans. John Moore, London: New Left Books, 1991, and Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Eveyrday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore, London: Continuum Press, 2004; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. 8. Sheila Delaney makes the point that fantomes, I, 493, may refer to literary illusions as well as false dreams. See the note on l. 493, Riverside Chaucer, Explanatory Notes, 981. 9. See Holley, p. 111. 10. Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, New York: Houghton Miff lin, 2006, 501. 11. See Nichols, n. 3, 23. 12. James Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus and John Gower’s Confessio amantis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 13. Howard Bloch, “The Medieval Text—“Guigemar”—As a Provocation to the Discipline of Medieval Studies” in The New Medievalism, 99–112. 14. Isabel Colgate, The Shooting Party. New York: Viking Press, 1982.

3

The Book of the Duchess: The Space of Self

1. C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958. 2. Georg Lukács, “The Ideology of Modernism,” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, edited by David H. Richter, 1126–41. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998. 3. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday, trans. Steven Rendall, 86. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. 4. Paul Ricouer, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, SJ. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977, 137ff. 5. Gaston Bachelard, 9.

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6. Stephen Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 130. 7. Karl F. Morrison, “I Am You: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. 8. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49. Philadelphia: N.B. Lippincott, 1966, 13. 9. De Certeau, Chapter IX, “Spatial Stories,” 117–30. 10. De Certeau, 89. 11. Karl F. Morrison, “I Am You”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988, passim, esp. XIX–XXVI of his introduction. 12. Morrison, 196. 13. See OED under nought, 7c: “Arith. a cipher. Noughts and crosses. See Ought sb.3. vulgar corruption nought in sense “cipher.” “Probably originating in an erroneous division of ‘a nought’ as ‘an ought’; but by many associated with the figure ‘O’ of the cipher, which they take as the initial O of ought. Oughtes and crosses.” In any case, the knight is as “still” as nothing, as zero, a mere cipher now. See Paul Acker, “The Emergence of an Arithmetical Mentality in Middle English Literature” in The Chaucer Review, Vol. 28, No. 3, 1994, 293–302, esp. n. 50. 14. Morrison, 174, 178, 180. 15. Rose Zimbardo, “The Book of the Duchess and the Dream of Folly,” The Chaucer Review, 18, 1984, 329- 46. 16. Robert Jordan, “Heteroglossia and Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,” in Bakhtin and Medieval Voices, edited by Thomas Farrell, 90. Tampa: University Press of Florida, 1995. 17. Albert Cook, Temporalizing Space: The Triumphant Strategies of Piero della Francesca. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, 21. 18. Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991, p. 79 and n. 44. 19. Simpson, 244. 20. Patrick J. Gallacher, The Structural Uses of the Theme of Speech in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Illinois, 1966. 21. Richard Eales, Chess: The History of a Game. New York: Facts on File Publications, 1985. See especially chapter two, “The Symbolic Game of the Middle Ages,” 39–70. As a matter of fact, Eales uses The Book of the Duchess to demonstrate the allegorical uses of the chess game, in this case, “making the whole game depend on the loss of his queen” (62). It is the case that after 1475 the queen gains more force in the game (71–77). 22. In this instance, de Certeau is citing the historian and anthropologist, Marcel Détienne, in the course of discussing storytelling. He writes, “In this space of textual practices, as in a chessgame in which the pieces, rules

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23.

24.

25. 26.

and players have been multiplied out to the scale of a whole literature, Déteinne has an artist’s sense for the innumerable moves that have already been executed” (80). See a helpful opposing view where number and allegory work in The Book of the Duchess: Russell A. Peck, “Theme and Number in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess,” in Silent Poetry, edited by Alastair Fowler. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. See Morrison’s note on Baldus de Ubaldis, a medieval lawyer who argues that since “[f ]iction imitates nature,” then “fiction has a place only where truth can have a place,” xxiii and notes 10 and 12. Morrison, 174, n. 11. John Keats, “To George and Georgiana Keats,” March 17 [1819] in English Romantic Poetry and Prose, edited by Russell Noyes, 1224–26. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.

4

Perle: The Pedagogy of Soul and Self

1. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, edited by Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. References to Perle will come from this edition unless otherwise indicated. 2. A.C. Spearing, “Poetic Identity,” in The Companion to the Gawain-Poet, 35–51. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997. 3. Bachelard, 212: Bachelard is citing Jean Hippolite: La Psychanalyse, No., 1, 1956, 35. 4. See Andrew and Waldron’s note to ll. 425–32, 74, on the uses of this image of the Phoenix to describe either Christ or Mary. 5. See Gordon’s note to the Perle-poet’s use of зe, Appendixes, pp. 105–106: One aspect of French linguistic inf luence on Pearl is the use of зe pl. as the polite form of the singular “you,” and an understanding of this usage is of importance for a full appreciation of the poem. Зe (and yow, your) are used, in addressing one person, only to impart a tone of formality or humility. (The workmen were being insolent in using þou to the lord, 556). Thus the Pearl in her first greeting uses зe, 257–58, after which she uses þou, &c., throughout. The Dreamer uses þou throughout (and thus shows plainly that he is addressing no stranger . . . The Pearl often uses зe with a general reference: “all you people in the world.” So 858. This probably explains зe in 698, and similarly your 497, yor, 761, yow 951. Also possibly зe 307, 308, your 305, 306 . . . Though the distinction between þou, зe (between equals) was beginning to be blurred, it cannot be neglected in the fourteenth century, especially any work containing dialogue. Þou was still in full colloquial use, and the substitution of зe was seldom without at least a change of tone; and the failure to use зe could in certain circumstances be either insolent or forward. 6. Spearing, Companion, 41.

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7. Spearing cites K. Brownlee, Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut, Madison, 1984. 8. John of Salisbury is citing Hugh of St. Victor, Summ. Sent., I, I: De Sacram., Leg. Nat. et Script.; and De Sacramentis, I, 10, c. I (n Migne, P. L., CLXXVI, 43, 35, and 330), 223 9. Spearing continues this point as he closes his essay “Poetic Identity”: The protagonist understands he has moved from suffering to awe. Spearing cites W.A. Davenport, The Art of the Gawain-Poet, London, Athlone Press, 1978: “Any inclination to judge is forestalled because he judges himself ” (50). ( See Elizabeth Salter, “Medieval Poetry and the Figural View of Reality,” in Proceedings of the British Academy, 54, 1968, 73–92.) 10. See Gordon’s note on l. 107, p. 51. 11. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. London: The Warburg Institute: University of London, 1975, 28 and n. 76. 12. F. Edward Cranz, “The Reorientation of Western Thought circa 1100 A.D.,” Four unpublished lectures. Department of History, Connecticut College, New London, 1984. 13. Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. 14. Elizabeth Salter, “Medieval Poetry and the Figural View of Reality,” in Proceedings of the British Academy, 54, 1968, 73–92. 15. Salter, p. 77, citing Erich Auerbach from Mimesis, trans. W. R. Trask , New York, 1957, and from his lecture “Figura.” 16. A.J. Minnis and A.B. Scott, eds., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism— c.1100- c.1375, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, 239, citing Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, i (Ia I), edited by T. Gilby (London and New York, 1964, 32–40, with the permission of Eyre and Spottiswoode, London. 17. Minnis and Scott, 200. 18. Minnis and Scott, 196. 19. Minnis and Scott, 236, 6. Bonaventure: “On the Mode of Expounding Holy Scripture.” 20. Minnis and Scott, 239. 21. Gordon reads myry as “fair” for l. 781, certainly a reasonable linguistic choice for myry. But the opportunity is too charming, given what we know of this curmudgeonly dreamer and the thoroughly easy spirit of the lady, not to read “merry” here. 22. Perle, note to l. 492, p. 63. See also The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, edited by Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982, 312. Andrew and Waldron argue for reading date at l. 492 as rank: “to dere a date: ‘too exalted a rank,’ ” (p. 77). 23. One line seems to have been lost at 472. See Gordon, 17, and note to l. 472

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24. Robert M. Jordan, The Shape of Creation: The Aesthetic Possibilities of Inorganic Structure. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.

5

Patience: The Space of Play

1. St. Augustine, Confessions, with an English translation by William Watts, Vol. 2, 1631, London: Heinemann, 1912. 2. In fact, if we subtract the two lines containing the image itself, we are within one line of the numerical center. 3. “Le vide et l’espace infini au XIV siecle,” Archives d’historie doctrinale et littérâire du moyen age, 17, 1949, 45–91: 4. Koyré, “Le vide,” 79. 5. The Holy Bible, Jonas, IV, 9. Translated from the Latin Vulgate and Diligently compared with Other Editions in Divers Languages, Douai, A.YD. 1609; Rheims, A.D. 1582. Published as revised and annotated by authority with a preface by the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, London: Burns and Oates, 1914; Belgium, 1964. 6. Patience in A Book of Middle English, 2nd edition, edited by J.A. Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996, l. 425. References to Patience—text, notes, and glosses—will be to this edition unless otherwise noted. 7. Morrison, see chapter 4, “Malevolent Sympathy,” and especially p. 78. 8. Max Jammer, Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics. New York: Dover Publications, 1993, 31–32. 9. Invaluable information for the introductory remarks to this chapter come from Max Jammer; Edward Grant. Much Ado about Nothing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981; Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmo, 1200-1687. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Edith Wilks Dolnikowski, Thomas Bradwardine: A View of Time and a Vision of Eternity in Fourteenth-Century Thought. New York: Brill, 1995; God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, edited by David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986; H. Lamar Crosby, Jr., Thomas of Bradwardine: His Tractatus de Proportionibus: Its Significance for the Development of Mathematical Physics, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1961. 10. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955. See especially chapter V, “Play and War” and chapter VI, “Playing and Knowing.” 11. Anonymous, Patience in A Book of Middle English, J.A. Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds., Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001, 161. 12. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, edited by Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, York Medieval Texts (second series). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. I like Andrew and Waldron’s glosses on mere: “sea” in the present line (112) but “boundary” in l.

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NOTES

13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

169

320. I would read “boundary” here in l. 112 so that the sense of containment works with the sea as it does with the mountain in l. 320. As Andrew and Waldron point out, however, the poet is closely following Jonas here. Jonas II, 7. Hurrok is the word for the part of the boat between the bench where the rower sits and the back end of the boat. O.E.D. Ruchen, I would argue, is “folded,” a milliner’s term for a special kind of fold. See O.E.D. So the sailors fold their gear according to the guiding wind. See the glosses of Burrow and Turville-Petre, especially ll. 103–4: “ ‘They swiftly weigh their anchors at the windlass, quickly fastened to the bowsprit the bowline kept in reserve.’ The bawelyne is spare because it is used only in difficult sailing conditions to hold the sail steady.” And ll. 106–8: “They set a course to port and gain the luff (turn into the wind). The favourable wind at their back finds the belly of the sail; it turns this fine ship swiftly from the harbour.” Burrow and Turville-Petre, “Syntax,” 5.3.3, p. 41. “This kind of dative [the pleonastic me] expresses the speaker’s interest in the fact stated.” The use, the editors go on to say, is familiar in this poet’s work. Jammer, 19. See Book 10 of Aristotle’s Physics. Edward Grant. Much Ado, esp. pp. 135–44. St. Augustine, Confessions, VII, v, Watts. Grant, Much Ado, 140. Grant, chapter 5: “The Historical Roots of the Medieval Concept of an Infinite, Extracosmic Void Space” and Chapter 6: “Late Medieval Conceptions of Extracosmic (“Imaginary”) Void Space,” 105–147. Grant offers a clear and solid “conceptual history” of these questions as ground for the f lourishing scientific community of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. See especially, p. 144 with n. 127. But see also p. 143 with its n. 124, where Grant argues against Koyré’s point “that Bradwardine formulated the paradoxical conception of imaginary space by uniting in the same mind ‘la notion théologique de l’infinité divine avec la notion géométrique de l’infinité spatiale’ (“Le vide et l’espace infini,” 91). H. Lamar Crosby, Jr., Thomas Bradwardine: His Tractatus de Proportionibus: Its Significance for the Development of Mathematical Physics. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1961, 7. Dolnikowski, 204, and especially chapter seven: “Time in the De Causa Dei.” Dolnikowski, p. 185 and esp. n. 56.

6

The Cloud of Unknowing: The Dimensionless Space of the Seeking Spirit

1. The Cloud of Unknowing, edited by Patrick J. Gallacher, Medieval Institute Publications, Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1997,

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170

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2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Introduction, 259. References in the text will be to this edition, unless otherwise noted, and are cited by chapter and line number. Edward Grant, “Science and Theology in the Middle Ages,” in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986, p. 62. Gallacher, Introduction, citing his translation of Thomas Gallus and apparent inf luence on the Cloud-author, p. 7. Morrison, p. 40, n. 15, citing Augustine De cat. rud., 12.17, Corp. Christ., ser. Lat., 46, p. 141, Tr. In Ev. Johan., 21.7.8 (Corp. Christ., ser. Lat., 36, 216–17. Simpson, 230. Simpson, 133. Simpson, 7. Simpson, 2. Dolnikowski, 173. Hodgson, 186, n. 17/16–18, citing Du Cange, seventeenth-century glossator of medieval Latin. Dolnikowski, 69, n. 80. Hodgson, The Book of Privy Counselling, p. 153, l. 26–27. Anonymous “Mystical Prayer” in English Mystics of the Middle Ages, ed. Barry Windeatt, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, 106–7.

Epilogue 1. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. xxxv 2. John Burrow, Essays on Medieval Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, 145.

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INDEX

“abstract particularity,” 71, 73, 82 aggregation, 6–7, 20 Akbari, Suzanne, 10 Alan of Lille, 27, 46, 68, 82–83, 137 Albert of Saxony, 12, 15, 18, 30–31, 60, 141 Andrew, Malcolm, 95–96 angelus novus, 32 Aquinas, Thomas, 103–4, 106 Aristotle Augustine and, 2, 4, 19, 157 Book of the Duchess and, 87–88 Bradwardine and, 24 Christianity and, 27–28 Cloud of Unknowing and, 139, 142 House of Fame and, 57–58, 60, 63 intellect and, 8–9 Patience and, 118–19, 123–25, 128 Perle and, 103, 105–7, 111 science and, 2, 22, 24–25, 155, 159 Wisdom and, 12, 18, 31–32 Armstrong, A.H., 4 “art of fiction,” 157 Auerbach, Erich, 105 Augustine, Saint Aristotle and, 2, 4, 19, 157 Book of the Duchess and, 84, 87–88 Bradwardine and, 24, 27 Cloud of Unknowing and, 136 God and, 66 Morrison and, 78, 84 Moses and, 78 narrative time and, 51–53 Patience and, 115–16, 127–28

9780230_105102_12_ind.indd 179

Perle and, 104 Peter of Celle and, 156 reason and, 13, 18, 61 science and, 1–5, 7–10, 27 self and, 12, 22 teaching and, 152 Avicenna, 103 awareness, 33, 37, 41, 52, 57–59, 124 see also self-awareness Bachelard, Gaston, 7, 12, 16–18, 29, 35, 72, 92–93, 105, 151–52, 158 Bacon, Roger, 4 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 37–38, 47, 51–52, 80, 82 Baldwin, Charles Sears, 11 Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre, 17 Benjamin, Walter, 29, 32, 42 Bergson, Henry-Louis, 16 Berlin, Isaiah, 52 Bernard of Clairvaux, 132 Biddick, Kathleen, 36 Black Knight, 74–75, 77, 79, 83, 86–89, 99–100, 105, 152 Bloch, Howard, 69 Boethius, 58–59, 61, 67 Bonaventure, 28, 32, 105–6 Book of Privy Counselling, 148 Book of the Duchess, The, 71–89 Bradbury, Nancy Mason, 50 Bradwardine, Thomas, 24–27, 57, 116, 118, 127–30, 135, 138–39 Burroughs, Charles, 44 Burrow, John, 120, 131, 151, 153

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180

IN DEX

Camille, Michael, 44–45 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 19, 41 “Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,” 58 “Knight’s Tale,” 31, 42 “Man of Law’s Tale,” 80–81 “Miller’s Tale,” 31, 42 “Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” 9, 28–29, 33, 36, 40, 42, 45–46, 49–50, 52, 69, 76, 130, 151–52 “Pardoner’s Tale,” 41 “Squire’s Tale,” 19 “Summoner’s Tale,” 30, 42, 58 Capella, Martianus, 62 Carruthers, Mary, 4–5, 10, 156 Catholicism, 1, 73, 83 Chekhov, Anton, 152 Chenu, M.-D., 23–24, 27–28 Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy (Armstrong and Markus), 4 Chronicle of All That Happens, A (Olson), 43 Cicero, 11, 72 Clark, Elizabeth, 4 Clemen, Wolfgang, 33, 56 Cloud of Unknowing, The, 135–49 Book of the Duchess and, 80, 88 divinity and, 9 House of Fame and, 55–56, 59, 70 instruction and, 33, 151 perception and, 1, 4 Perle and, 93 Cochrane, Charles, 3, 7–9 Colgate, Isabel, 69 Concepts of Space: the History of Theories of Space in Physics ( Jammer), 118 “concrete typicality,” 73, 82, 86 context, 12–13, 24, 33, 50, 66, 88, 91, 100, 105, 117, 138 Contra Faustum (Augustine), 7 Cook, Albert, 81 Cornificius, 62 Cranz, Edward, 104 Crosby, H. Lamar, 23, 128 Crying of Lot 49, The (Pynchon), 73

9780230_105102_12_ind.indd 180

De causa Dei contra Pelagium (Bradwardine), 127, 129–30 de Certeau, Michel, 23, 29, 36, 38, 40, 45–47, 56, 63, 71, 73–75, 82, 84, 86, 165 De futuris contingentibus (Bradwardine), 130 de Gand, Henri, 26 de Guileville, Guillaume, 15, 18, 31 de Middleton, Richard, 26, 128 de Ripa, Jean, 128 divine illumination, 2–4, 6, 8, 22, 153 Dolnikowski, Edith Wilks, 24, 129–30, 138, 159 ductus, 5, 8 Duns Scotus, John, 2–3, 5–10, 16, 20, 29, 128, 142 Eagleton, Terry, 32 Edgerton, Samuel, 14, 18, 104 faith Augustine and, 13, 18 Book of the Duchess and, 72, 83 Cloud of Unknowing and, 135 House of Fame and, 59, 61 observation and, 33 Patience and, 131 Perle and, 98–99 reason and, 3–4, 7, 10, 13, 59 science and, 1–3, 8, 10–11, 24–28, 135 View from Nowhere and, 51, 52, 57 Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 67–68 Fielding, Henry, 41 Foucault, Michel, 19–20, 28–29 Geffrey, 17, 27, 55–60, 63–70 Gerhoch of Reichersberg, 75 Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative (Burrow), 151 Gilson, Etienne, 16 Gower, John, 46, 68, 82–83, 112, 137 Grant, Edward, 10, 127–29, 136, 169 Grosseteste, Robert, 105

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IN DEX

Halpern, Nick, xiii–xiv Hamlet, 71–73, 82 Hanawalt, Barbara, 35 Harrison, Dick, 35–36, 45, 48 Harvey, Ruth, 103–4 Henry of Ghent, 2, 157 Herman, David, 35–36 Hodgson, Phyllis, 141 Holloway, E.W., 40 House of Fame, The (Chaucer), 9, 17, 27, 30, 33, 55–70 Howe, Nicholas, 22–23 Hugh of St. Victor, 61, 68, 99 Huizinga, Johan, 39, 132 I Am You: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art (Morrison), 11–12, 73 Illumination, see divine illumination; manuscript illumination imagination body’s space and, 77 House of Fame and, 55, 57, 61, 63 mathematics and, 1 measure and, 16 metaphor and, 14–15, 17, 25 metaphysical and, 10 Perle and, 93, 98, 104–6 reason and, 7–9, 61, 152, 154 science and, 2, 14, 63 sensation and, 10–11, 13–14 sermon texts and, 37 infinity, 17, 21, 93 inscriptions, seeing by means of, 15–16, 33, 84 instruction Book of the Duchess and, 72, 74 Cloud of Unknowing and, 9, 135–41, 146–47, 149 exchange of information and, 14–16 House of Fame and, 55, 57–59, 61–66, 68 material space and, 5–6, 27 Patience and, 152–53

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181

pedagogy and, 33–34, 152 Perle and, 100, 105–6 Reynard and, 40 Treatise on the Astrolabe and, 153–54 Introduction to Metaphysics (Bergson), 16 Ivins, William, 14, 16 Jack Straw Rebellion, 36–37, 47, 50 James, Henry, 13, 157 James, William, 67–68 Jammer, Max, 118, 123 John of Salisbury, 7, 10–13, 18, 23–24, 58, 61, 66, 78, 85, 91, 99 Johnson, Samuel, 13 Jordan, Robert, 80 Joseph Andrews (Fielding), 41 Joyce, James, 75 Justice, Steven, 36–37, 42, 46 Keats, John, 88–89, 94 Kermode, Frank, 28 King Lear, 79 Klee, Paul, 32 Kobialka, Michal, 35 Koyré, Alexandre, 24–27, 116, 155 Kruger, Stephen, 72–73 Lacan, Jacques, 104 Latour, Bruno, 12–16, 18, 29, 84 Lefebvre, Henri, 35, 44, 46, 63 Lewis, C.S., 15, 71, 140 Light of Thy Countenance, The (Marrone), 2 Lindberg, David, 1, 10, 27 Lombard, Peter, 105 Loukas, Hosios, 6 Lukács, Georg, 71, 73 MacBeth, 93 Mann, Jill, 37 Mann, Thomas, 75 manuscript illumination, 39, 44, 49 Marrone, Steven, 2–4, 8–10, 20, 22, 28, 32

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182

IN DEX

mathematics Book of the Duchess and, 76–77, 80, 84, 87 Cloud of Unknowing and, 33–34, 135, 138, 144, 148 measure and, 1, 24–30 motion and, 74 Patience and, 129 Perle and, 93, 111–12 spirituality and, 14 world order and, 18 Matthew of Aquasparta, 157 measurements Book of the Duchess and, 81–82 Cloud of Unknowing and, 9, 135–36, 138–39, 141–42, 144, 148, 153 House of Fame and, 57, 66–67, 69 imagination and, 1 instruction and, 16 knowledge and, 19–20 mathematics and, 24, 27–28, 33 measured space, 43 narrative and, 28–30, 51 Nun’s Priest’s Tale and, 39, 43–45, 51 Patience and, 120, 123, 129–31 Perle and, 93, 109 reality and, 23 religion and, 24 Treatise on the Astrolabe and, 153–54 see also space Medieval Practices of Space (Hanawalt and Kobialka), 35 Metalogicon, The ( John of Salisbury), 7, 11, 61, 63, 66, 78 metaphor, 17–20 Minnis, A.J., 105 More, Henry, 21–22 Morrison, Karl, 11, 73, 75, 78–79, 84, 87, 100, 117, 132, 148, 152 Morson, Gary Saul, 51–52 Moses, 78, 122 Nagel, Thomas aggregation and, 20

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“art of fiction” and, 157 awareness and, 15–18, 57 Book of the Duchess and, 79 circumspection and, 12–13 divine and, 7 House of Fame and, 65–67, 69–70 Patience and, 134 reason and, 9 understanding and, 61–63, 153 “view from nowhere” and, 20, 22, 33, 51 narrative Book of the Duchess and, 71, 73–75, 77–79, 82–87, 152 Cloud of Unknowing and, 142–43 House of Fame and, 64–65, 68 measure and, 28–31 Nun’s Priest’s Tale and, 33, 35, 38, 40–42, 47, 50–52 Patience and, 116–21, 123–26, 128, 130 Perle and, 92, 97–98, 100, 107–8, 110 New Medievalism, The (Nichols), 30 Nichols, Stephen, 18, 30, 57–58, 68 Nicholson, Marjorie, 20–22 Numbers, Ronald, 10, 27 O’Connor, Flannery, 138 Olson, Sherri, 43 ordered motion, 5 Oresme, Nichole, 128 Ovid, 72, 163 Owens, Harry, 41 Owst, G.R., 37 Parliament of Fowls, The (Chaucer), 64 Pecham, John, 4 Perle, 1, 4, 9, 27, 33, 59, 70, 91–113, 151–53 perspectivism, 4, 14, 50 Peter of Celle, 23, 156 Philosophie, 59–61 Physics (Aristotle), 142 Piers Plowman, 100, 107

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IN DEX

Pilgrimage of Human Life, The (de Guileville), 31 Piotrowski, Andrzej, 6 Plato, 24, 27–28, 39, 57–58, 63, 83, 118–19, 136 Pluralistic Universe, A ( James), 67 poetic identity, 98–99 Poetics of Space, The (Bachelard), 12, 16, 92 Poole, Austin Lane, 49 Pynchon, Thomas, 73–74 Raftis, J.A., 23, 44 Randall, Lilian, 39 rationality, 3, 7, 16–18, 39, 44, 63–64, 67, 72, 77–78, 84, 93, 144, 148 realism, 24, 160 related thought, 152 Richard of Middleton, 128 Richardson, Robert D., 67 Ricoeur, Paul, 71, 82 Riffaterre, Michael, 42, 50 Rösener, Werner, 49 St. Paul, 59, 65 Salter, Elizabeth, 100, 104–5, 107, 113 Scandalous Adventures of Reynard the Fox (Owens), 41 science Aristotle and, 22 Augustine and, 7 Bachelard and, 152 Cloud of Unknowing and, 135, 137–39, 145, 148 divine illumination and, 8 faith and, 1–3, 8, 10, 24–28 House of Fame and, 30, 33, 55, 57–59, 62–63, 67, 72–74 inscriptions and, 15 models and, 14 Patience and, 115, 118–19, 128 Perle and, 91, 99, 105–6 perspective and, 4, 14 poetry and, 20–21 self and, 46, 82

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183

sensation and, 11 Science and the Self in Medieval Poetry (Simpson), 46, 137 Scott, A.B., 105 self-awareness, 2, 22, 151 see also awareness Sentences (Lombard), 105 sermons, 37, 41 Shooting Party, The (Colgate), 69 Simpson, James, 46, 68, 82–83, 137–38, 140 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 37–38, 82, 88, 98, 116–17 Small, Daniel Lord, 44 Small Town in Late Medieval England, A (Raftis), 23, 44 space architectural, 6 Book of the Duchess and, 71–74, 76–88 Cloud of Unknowing and, 135, 139–41, 144–46, 148–49 depicted space, 6 God and, 26–27 House of Fame and, 55–57, 59–62, 65–66, 68–70 imaginative, 16–17 inhabited, 17–18 material space, 5 measurement and, 9, 24–25, 28–32, 153 memory and, 32 motion and, 5, 27–28, 153 narrative and, 35–36 Nun’s Priest’s Tale and, 36–47, 52–53 Patience and, 116–20, 122–30, 134 perception and, 14–16, 22 Perle and, 92–93, 97, 99–100, 105 poetics of, 17, 151 “practice of,” 36 void space, 6 see also measurements Spearing, A.C., 92, 98–100, 113

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184

IN DEX

Tachau, Katherine, 4, 19, 159 Taylor, Andrew, 46, 51 Timaeus (Plato), 27 Treatise on the Astrolabe, A (Chaucer), 18, 34, 58, 69, 153 Trinity, The (Augustine), 12 Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer), 29–30, 47, 64–65, 111–12 truth Book of the Duchess and, 83, 92 Cloud of Unknowing and, 139, 145, 153 divine illumination and, 6 divine truth, 3 House of Fame and, 58, 66–67 illumination and, 22 Nun’s Priest’s Tale and, 40, 46, 52 pedagogy and, 13 Perle and, 100, 111, 113 prudence and, 11

9780230_105102_12_ind.indd 184

science and, 8 truth content, 4–5 Turville-Petre, Thorlac, 120, 131 univocity, 7–10, 16 Varty, Kenneth, 39 View from Nowhere, The (Nagel), 7, 20, 22, 33, 51, 57, 61, 66, 70, 153 Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham (Tachau), 19 V[U]ncortayse, 98 Waldron, Ronald, 95–96 William of Auverge, 155 William of Couches, 10 Witelo, 4 Zimbardo, 79 Zumthor, Paul, 56–57

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