Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England: Speaking as a Woman

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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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

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Reason and Imagination in Chaucer, the Perle-poet, and the Cloud-author: Seeing from the Center by Linda Tarte Holley The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature: Grief, Guilt, and Hypocrisy edited by Jeff Rider and Jamie Friedman Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England: Speaking as a Woman by M. C. Bodden Heloise and the Paraclete: A Twelfth-Century Quest (forthcoming) by Mary Martin McLaughlin

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LANGUAGE AS THE SITE OF REVOLT IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ENGLAND SPEAKING AS A WOMAN

M. C. Bodden

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LANGUAGE AS THE SITE OF REVOLT IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

Copyright © M. C. Bodden, 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: 978–0–230–61876–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bodden, Mary-Catherine Language as the site of revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England : speaking as a woman / M.C. Bodden. p. cm.—(New Middle Ages) ISBN 978–0–230–61876–3 (hardback) 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Women—Great Britain—History—Middle Ages, 500–1500. 3. Women—Great Britain—History—17th century. 4. Women— Terminology. 5. Sex role—Terminology. 6. Women’s rights—Early works to 1800. 7. Equality—Early works to 1800. I. Title. PR421.B63 2011 820.999287—dc22

2011006315

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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To Kathleen Scullin For 28 years of friendship, wisdom, laughter, and above all, love And to Bonnie Wheeler For generosity, inspiration, support, and intellectual verve

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

xiii

Acknowledgments

xv

List of Abbreviations

xvii

Introduction

1

1

The Control and Criminalization of Women’s Speech

7

2

The “Imagined Woman”

37

3

Women, Conversation, Crime, and the Courts

57

4

The Assembly of Ladies: Rebelling in Eden

79

5

Code-Switching: Male Crossing into Female Speech Domain

97

6

Margery Kempe: “I grab the microphone and move my body”—Volatile Speech, Volatile Bodies

121

Conclusion

143

Notes

147

Bibliography

219

Index

245

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ILLUSTRATIONS

2.1 2.2

The Ladder of Virtues, Herrad of Hohenbourg, Hortus deliciarum The Serpent Deceives Adam and Eve, Cambridge, St. John’s College Library, MS K.26, fol. 4r. Reprinted by permission of the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge

44

45

Cover—British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, Satire 61, “Tittle-Tattle: Or, the Several Branches of Gossipping.” The cover is a portion of the woodcut, “Tittle-Tattle, or the Several Branches of Gossiping.” This woodcut went through several stages beginning in 1560 as a French satire on women’s gossip; a variant of this, the 1603 English imprint (the book cover), was titled “The Severall Places Where you May hear News” (British Museum SAT 61). But it later found more popular use as exemplifying, rather, “Tittle-Tattle: The Several Branches of Gossiping,” attesting to the fact that women’s speech—even if once represented as communicating news—was inevitably deemed (and registered) as gossip.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

F

irst I owe a particular debt to Kathleen Scullin for her steadfast support, her reading and proofreading every chapter draft, her excellent suggestions for improving them, and for her superb casseroles that she left on my kitchen counter to greet me after my many “graveyard shifts” with my manuscript. I owe special thanks to Ann Matter, both for a lifelong friendship and for the privilege of benefiting from her steady dedication to changing the world for women through mutual support and vocal activism. I am grateful beyond expression to Bonnie Wheeler for believing in my project, for her professional support, her humor, and for being a source of inspiration in her passionate commitment to finding new ways of looking at the Middle Ages and singular ways of assisting scholars across the disciplines in publishing those innovative views. To Roberta Frank, a life-long mentor, friend, and model of wit, brilliance, and humanity, I owe my love of early English literature, witty erudition (hers), and transforming, creative humor (also hers). I am deeply grateful, too, to Jori Woods, Michael Mikolacjczak, Jodi Melamed, Christine Krueger, Michael Gillespie, and Jen Anderson for their generous reading of portions of the typescript and their sound advice. Colleen Willingbring was especially valuable for her critical eye, her indispensable research skills and her constructive suggestions. To Abby Vande Walle’s meticulous proofreading, indefatigable research abilities, and level-headed patience both this book and I are immeasurably the better for it. I would like to thank, as well, the anonymous reader of this book from Palgrave Macmillan for the detailed suggestions and ideas for a better book. To Joanna Roberts, Palgrave editorial assistant, I am indebted for her careful preparation of the art and the text of this manuscript for production. I owe special thanks to Judith Bennett whose extensive and transformative work in women’s studies/history has long inspired me, and to Karma Lochrie for her generous nature as a resource for women scholars and her pioneering and imaginative scholarship on the interpretative possibilities of medieval sexuality.

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xvi

AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S

My thanks are due to the Marquette University Faculty Research Award and to the Margaret Flanagan and K. Scullin Estate Grant for funds toward the preparation of this manuscript. I want to acknowledge, too, Krista Ratcliffe, my department Chair, who generously arranged teaching schedules for me this past year, along with a research assistant for a few hours each week, which allowed a more efficient use of my time. Earlier versions of portions of Chapter 2 appear as part of the essay “The ‘Imagined Woman,’ ” in Image Makers and Image Breakers: Proceedings of a St. Michael’s College Symposium, ed. Jennifer A. Harris, (New York: Legas Publishing, 2003). Likewise, two pages of Chapter 5 appear in “Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale: Interrogating ‘Virtue’ through Violence, in ‘A Great Effusion of Blood’? Interpreting Medieval Violence, ed. Mark D. Meyerson, Daniel Thiery, & Oren Falk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), and earlier portions of Chapter 6 appear in “ ‘I Grab the Microphone and Move My Body’—Volatile Speech, Volatile Bodies, and the Church’s Attempt to Measure Holiness,” in The Catholic Church and Unruly Women Writers, ed. Jeana DelRosso, Leigh Eicke and Ana Kothe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). I thank the editors of those publications for permission to reprint versions of them here. Finally, I want to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to my former teachers, Angus Cameron and Michael Sheehan, no longer with us, for their example, early in my academic life, of rigorous scholarship, candid but kind critiques, generous help, and humorous spirit. To Mac Gatch and Helmut Gneuss who have served as friends and models of learning and scholarship, I owe a great debt. Their legacy remains an enduring presence in my life.

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ABBREVIATIONS

BMK CRO DRO EETS JEGP LMA PL STAC WRSO

The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, EETS o.s. 212 Cheshire Record Office Devon Record Office Early English Text Society Journal of English and Germanic Philology London Metropolitan Archives Patrologia Latina The Star Chamber West Sussex Record Office

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INTRODUCTION

W

hen I began this study of late medieval English women’s speech, Patricia Meyer Spacks’s brilliant Gossip was the only book-length treatment of women’s speech on the market at that time. Another book examining late medieval English women’s speech had just appeared: Bernard Capp’s richly detailed When Gossips Meet (2003).1 Capp’s work incorporated evidence from the late medieval period but focused largely on early modern England. Three years later, Sandy Bardsley’s excellent Venomous Tongues (2006) appeared.2 Bardsley’s book deals equally with medieval and early modern English materials. All three texts examine women’s speech as forms of gossip. All three find positive representations of women’s speech in the forms of gossip and scolding, alongside scandalous talk and deviant speech: Spacks liberates gossip, representing it as an alternate discourse, “a crucial means of self-expression, a crucial form of solidarity”3; Capp explores it, uncovering complex strategies of women’s networking at both the neighborhood level and within the patriarchal household; and Bardsley traces the legal (and religious) criminalizing of scolding to post–Black Death patriarchal concerns—the growing verbal and economic assertiveness of women—and rescues scolding from its long association with witchcraft. Even Fama, an edited volume (concentrating mostly on medieval Europe), which covered the broader political and legal ramifications of speech and raised the excellent question of why “talk was of such great moment to writers and their audiences, to lawyers, jurists, moralists, and artists,”4 devoted, nevertheless, its three essays concerning medieval England to gossip, disruptive speech in literature, and sins of the tongue—a reasonable enterprise, given the book’s title, “fama.” While gossip and scolding are redeemed through such historically sensitive readings, there is still no book-length treatment of late medieval English women’s language or speech as a site of cultural consequence— independent of its connections with gossip and slander. In contrast, early modern English women’s speech has fared much better. Indeed, it is due to the availability of early modern English court depositions in the

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L A N G U A G E A S T H E S I T E O F R E V O LT

vernacular that the chronological range of this book stretches to early modern England. Most medieval English women’s depositions, until the late 1500s, were vernacular testimonies converted into and recorded in Latin, necessarily compromising their usefulness as instances approximating a woman’s voice. The unique value of court depositions lies in their allowing us to hear more “authentically” women’s voices—even though what we hear is secondhand (through the recording scribe), and even though they cannot be read as an unmediated ref lection of reality. Yet, they can provide us, in Judith Bennett’s words, a way of “creating new interpretive agendas”5: they can allow us to reread these texts not only as microhistories of the social, cultural, economic, and legal conditions within a town or a village but—learning from the historiographical methodology of examining women’s testimonies whose pioneers include Laura Gowing, Garthine Walker, Bernard Capp, Sandy Bardsley, Martin Ingram, David Cressy, Cynthia J. Neville, J. A. Sharpe, Susan Amussen, Tim Stretton, Pamela Allen Brown, Kim M. Phillips, Anthony Musson, Sara Heller Mendelson, Patricia Crawford, Cordelia Beattie, and Maryanne Kowaleski6 —they can allow us to read these texts for insights into the way that such discourses construct women, the way they construct women’s communal relationships, and the way that they give us a more nuanced, complex picture of the agency that women exercised within formidable patriarchal constraints. It is my hope to build on the work of these pioneers, to apply narrative techniques to both archival and literary sources in examining early women’s self-expression in speech, and to do so within “a new interpretive agenda.” My book, Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England: Speaking as a Woman, has two objectives: to demonstrate that, despite extensive evidence indicating a wholesale suppression of early women’s speech (and thereby their access to knowledge), women were actively engaged in cultural practices and speech strategies that were at times complicitous with patriarchal ideology, but more frequently, appear to be subversive in undermining that ideology. Second, in leaving aside women’s self-expression from, solely, licentiousness, my book hopes to greatly expand the scope, the consequences, and the cultural forces of early women’s speech. In terms of those consequences and cultural forces, the texts examined in my book indicate that women’s conversation seems largely impelled by three epistemological concerns—offering us a way of reinterpreting traditional texts. Those epistemological concerns are: first, the drive to reconceptualize certain prevailing masculinist concepts and practices, opening them up thereby to public critical inquiry—as is evident in the court depositions of Chapter 3, in The Assembly of

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I N T RO DU C T ION

3

Ladies (Chapter 4), and in Chapter 5, the Clerk’s Tale (insofar as a maleauthored text can “speak to us in [female] registers generally foreign to that [male] dominant voice”)7; second, the drive to speak oneself into existence in relation to the present and past of a community—as is evident in The Book of Margery Kempe (the subject of Chapter 6) and in the court depositions; and third, the drive to invalidate knowledge systems that fail to account for women’s own subjectivities—as is compellingly evident in the court petitions and depositions and unmistakenly at play in The Assembly of Ladies, The Book of Margery Kempe, and, again, in the Clerk’s Tale. Fueling those three epistemological concerns were certain general attitudes toward speech, particularly about women’s speech. That women’s speech throughout the Middle Ages was inveighed against as excessive and regularly compared to goose dung and to urine is commonplace in literature, sermons, tracts, and plays. That it became by the sixteenth century the target of nearly every institutional discourse, eventually leading to an aggressive censorship of women’s (excessive) speech and then to its outright criminalization is of an intensely growing interest to medieval scholars. It is indeed bizarrely logical (much like the logic of science fiction) that hostility to women’s speech became literally materialized, physically incarnated into “the imagined woman,” the subject of Chapter 2. This materialization took the form of one of the most potent and theologically distorted incarnations of women’s (dangerous) speech, namely, its universal representation as the female, sexualized serpent of earthly paradise. Following, then, is a sketch of my book’s scope and organization. Scope and Organization of Book Chapter 1, “The Control and Criminalization of Women’s Speech,” asks why medieval and early modern England was so obsessed with speech—to the point that not a facet of speech, particularly women’s speech, escaped reproach, invective, socially coercive practices, and legal forms of control. This chapter examines certain assumptions about the nature of speech that seem to underlie the period’s excessive concern about speech in general, and then examines more particularly its aggressive sensitivity to the speech of women. Those assumptions or perspectives form three main categories: the unreliability of speech, the mystique of speech, and speech as uncontrollable (including its linked issue, the sins of the tongue). Overarching all three categories is the concept of speech as power. The third category or perspective, “speech as uncontrollable,” forms the greater part of the chapter because it received the greatest, and

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most hostile, attention from the authorities, and led inevitably to the control and criminalization of women’s speech. Chapter 2, “The Imagined Woman,” forms a companion piece to Chapter 1. It is literally iconic of the consequences of the period’s obsession with women’s speech, particularly, the overarching category of speech as power, and its subcategory, speech as uncontrollable. Through clerics’ and treatise writers’ theorizing, imagining, and iconically portraying the nature of women, we see two textual-linguistic strategies exposed: the politics of creating knowledge and the social construction of women’s nature. In other words, the creation of women’s subjectivity is a political process employing both the power of selection and the suppression of women’s multitudinous self. This chapter examines one of the most powerful visual forms of that political process, namely, the representations of women’s speech in the form of the serpent in Eden sexualized as female (despite the persistent pronoun “he” attached to the serpent in scripture). The chapter traces the way in which sexuality, having become the single literary and artistic means of defining the nature of women, led to systematically representing the speaking (male) serpent in Eden as female, including long curly hair, a bosom, and at times a bonnet. The “interpenetration of language and ideology,”8 female speech, and the biblical image of deception are thus reinforced for centuries. Chapter 3, “Women, Conversation, Crime, and the Courts,” explores through court depositions how conversational communities of women constituted a site for rethinking their worlds. In the world of the court every petition and every deposition poses a discursive risk for every woman and for communities of women. From each petition’s or deposition’s opening line, a woman is required to situate herself as a female subject within the terms of male discourse. Yet, depositions particularly reveal how women in defending themselves or their neighbors actively insisted on a different knowledge of their economic and sexual position—all the while dialoguing with the community by referencing its mores and its culture. Chapter 4, “The Assembly of Ladies: Rebelling in Eden,” demonstrates how the (female) author of The Assembly of Ladies (a 755-line poem) consciously used familiar root metaphors such as the Garden, first, to resist their historical and allegorical meanings and, second, to challenge their audience to think about the relationship between the subordinate position of women and courtly love metaphors that controlled discourse about love, beauty, and friendship. Making the literary domain of courtly love, the garden, her site of rebellion is a brilliant move because gardens never quite lost their early association with the “fall” of humankind, and more

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particularly their association with female temptation, female deception, female speech, and, especially, female untoward desire for knowledge. Chapter 5, “Code-Switching: Male Crossing into Female Speech Domain,” posits an intriguing variation on the subject of women’s speech: a male author (Chaucer) creates a male character, the Clerk, who turns the culture’s need to control women’s speech into a tale that defies the assumed links between women’s silence and the ideal woman while seeming to uphold these assumptions. The rhetorician Clerk (in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale) uses the concept of the game (“pleye the pley”) to confront language itself—both speech and silence—and its part in positioning a gendered self. He will make language—the very thing Bailly is suspicious of—the site of his revolt. He will language-cross into a feminine speech domain, appropriate feminine discursive patterns to blunt a public threat (Bailly’s attack on the clerk’s sexuality) and to coach women in the audience to use language to construct themselves and their future. Chapter 6, “Margery Kempe: ‘I grab the microphone and move my body,’—Volatile Speech, Volatile Bodies,” brings the Middle Ages into the twenty-first century by demonstrating the cultural and historical consequences of medieval (and twentieth/twenty-first-century) institutional discourses against women’s speech, namely, that they affect the legitimacy of texts as well as the subjects of those texts. Here, I examine the interconnection between the volatile speech and volatile body of Margery Kempe and the historical resistance by the scholarly and Catholic communities toward consenting to her place in the tradition of female hagiography. I have chosen not to deal with Shakespeare’s works for several reasons. First, they are already the subject of intense and continuous scholarship concerning woman characters and women’s language. Then, too, which plays could one omit without inviting earnest reproach from devoted scholars of those plays?

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CHAPTER 1 THE CONTROL AND CRIMINALIZATION OF WOMEN’S SPEECH

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hy was medieval and early modern England so obsessed with speech? Why was talk “of such great moment to writers and their audiences, to lawyers, jurists, moralists, and artists”1 as well as to individual women and men—not simply sitting across kitchen tables but standing in their doorways, in the streets, in bakehouses, gathered around birthing beds, at the back of court rooms, and in the midst of church services? What was it about medieval and early modern understandings of speech that made it necessary not only to punish moral and legal violations (extraordinary speech acts) but also to control normal, everyday speech? And why in particular were authorities, writers, and moralists so profoundly intent on controlling women’s speech to such an extent that some villages and towns built a metal mask predominantly to cover women’s faces and ‘nail’ their tongues?2 Finally, why did the “perceptions of women’s speech [undergo] a sea change” in the late Middle Ages,3 leading women’s speech to become increasingly policed, at times even criminalized, by early modern England? Apprehension and anxiety about men’s speech likewise became an increasing concern, but the frequent trope of “chaste, silent and obedient” and the dominance in early modern drama of representing women’s speech as subversive to domestic and national order4 makes it clear that unruly speech was perceived as largely female-gendered. This chapter intends, first, to examine in depth the anxieties about the nature of speech in general (applying to men and women) and then to consider women’s speech in particular, demonstrating how the categories at once and in overlapping ways lead to the control and criminalization of women’s speech. Mistrust and anxieties about the nature of speech seem to fall into three main categories: the unreliability of speech, the

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mystique of speech, and speech as uncontrollable (including its linked issue, the sins of the tongue). Speech as power is yet another category and requires a brief excursus. Its importance lies in its being a higher-order category than the other three: that is, it is because speech is power that renders it exceedingly dangerous when it is unreliable, or functions as mystique, or is uncontrollable; speech as power essentially subsumes and infuses the other three categories of anxiety. These three categories or perspectives provide, then, a context for considering the period’s excessive concern about speech, particularly its aggressive sensitivity to the speech of women. Of course, this single chapter can but sketch those several forces, but that sketch goes far to reveal the coercive pressures that seem to me most at play within these three perspectives. The Overarching Category: Speech as Power Speech can originate; it can propose what is not there. (M. C. Bodden)

The culture of medieval and early modern England was primarily an oral culture, at least for the greater part of its period. An intense concern with speech would therefore be natural. At first glance, the culture’s acute preoccupation with speech seemed to be a preoccupation with the problem of good and evil.5 Even later in the early modern period, the equation appeared straightforward and defined: “speech was conduct and conduct was speech.”6 And yet while both medieval and early modern writers and thinkers saw that speech fundamentally involved issues of good and evil, they suspected something more troubling and ambivalently attractive about speech. The historical scope of that ambivalence is caught by Michaela Paasche Grudin: “the very power in speech that dr[ove] the Christian fathers to seek to minimize it, whether in the individual soul or in the commonwealth, inspire[d] the humanists, following Cicero, to encourage its study.” 7 But medieval and early modern thinkers and writers sensed something deeper, more disquieting, more elusively spellbinding about speech long before later generations would theorize the cognitive potential of speech or would assert that all issues of religion, sexuality, philosophy, indeed all reality, are but a broader scope of our speech powers. On the one hand, while they believed that words or speech were imperfect ref lections of things and events that were there (as part of a divine order), they also, on the other hand, perceived that speech could propose what is not there. Speech could create: it could interpret an incident or describe an imagined situation. Interpreting means conceding

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indistinctness, alternatives; describing an imagined situation involves attending to “what is not there,” and/or entertaining “an alternative wholeness.”8 Both are forms of creation.9 That is what made speech so dangerous: it possessed “a power beyond its substance.”10 It could invent, even originate. That is what Plato grasped in his suspicion toward fable/ fiction, and Aelfric in his reproachful question to his monks, “Quid inieldus cum cristo?” [“What has Ingeld to do with Christ?”]—which raises the question of invented reality/truth as distinct from transcendent truth. It is the warning behind Chaucer’s placing homiletic rhetoric in the mouth of a deviant speaker, the Pardoner, and it is the driving concern of both Wycliffe and Robert Mannyng who found narratives dangerous even when employed as exempla by preachers (contaminating the pulpit with “newe sotelties” [subtleties]).11 Its ability to invent and originate is also what made speech so intensely absorbing: in religious thought, the creation of the world through God’s Word is the supreme and original speech act.12 “Dixit, et facta sunt: God spoke, and all things were made” (Psalm 33:9). This divine speech act “reveals no slippage between word and meaning or between word and world. It is the ultimate illocutionary act (‘God spoke, and all things were made’), utterance without différance.”13 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy remarked that of all the powers that comprise us, it is speech that “duplicate[s] and triplicate[s] the intensity of life on earth by bringing all separate processes, dispersed through centuries and over thousands of miles, into one stream of continuous conversation and recording.”14 It is speech, he felt, that is humankind’s contribution to the universe and through which “the whole life in the universe is changed.”15 Society lives by speech, dies without speech,” he said.16 Speech not only transforms ourselves and our world but even our future. Indeed, he concluded, it “gives us the ability to overcome historical death.”17 Speech as Unreliable: Between the Spoken Word and the Word “hit was ‘grorus glorus’ with a ‘glee.’ ” “Nay, yt was ‘glorus glarus’ with a ‘glo,’ ” (The Chester Cycle, Play VII: ll. 382, 388)18

Speech, however, was also unreliable—it still is. Chaucer’s preoccupation with speech was less with speech’s power than with its questionable ability to convey truth. Countless writers, scholastic grammarians, and theologians from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries were troubled by the same issue, including John of Salisbury, Robert Mannyng, Wycliff, Gower,19 Langland, the Gawain/Pearl poet.20 As obsessions go,

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it was a reasonable one. The question of whether truth could inhere in language had a rich and deep history, one complicated by two related, long-debated questions: was language based upon nature or convention, and, second, did language progressively deteriorate after the Fall? The first question was inherited from the classical period, largely filtered through Augustine; the second traces itself back to the first chapters of Genesis, particularly chapter 11.21 The belief was that language in its original form had expressed the natural essence of things. Over a period of time, language varied as an effect of psychologically diverse experience of things22 and names were arrived at by agreement or convention. Most medieval theorists echo Socrates’s23 (and Epicureus’s)24 views that language is a combination of “natural” and “conventional” linguistic materials. In fact, in Diane Cady’s words, by the high Middle Ages, grammarians were “often argu[ing] for both the conventionality and the naturalness of language in the same treatise—and sometimes in the same sentence.”25 John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon is the prime example most frequently offered.26 There, Salisbury explicitly admits that while language “partly derives its origin” from nature, it is mainly the “invention of man.”27 More intriguing however is Salisbury’s unhurried further musing over the ‘genealogical’ evidence of language’s origins: he traces genetically latent ancestral features, as it were, that have manifested themselves in later descendants. For example, the fact that the “number of elementary vowel-sounds” are limited “to five among all peoples,” he says, shows evidence of Nature’s wisdom and constraints.28 Likewise, he argues, nouns do not have degrees of comparisons because nouns are substances and substances in nature are “not susceptible of greater or less intensity.”29 Tense is natural to verbs “since there is no movement independent of time.”30 Salisbury’s view of language as a “clear footprint of nature impressed on [the devices of ] human reason,”31 and as evidence that the “will of god and the precepts of rational nature are the same,”32 underscores his view that verbal signs once conveyed truth/nature—a position common to most scholastic grammarians.33 This coexistence of tensions between natural and conventional accounts of language led Howard Bloch to describe the situation as one of “anguished ambiguity provoked by a deep split between what medieval writers knew about verbal signs and what they desired to believe about them.”34 Indeed it is an accurate and elegant characterization of the period’s linguistic difficulties. Marcia Colish’s impressive Mirror of Language captures the broader intellectual and theological ramifications of those tensions, especially the radical changes introduced by the Aristotelian-Boethian Categories that “forcibly and inescapably introduced

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eleventh-century grammarians to the concepts of substance and accident, genera and species. The idea that a given thing might be looked at in a variety of ways called into question the classical definition of the part of speech used to denote a thing, the noun.”35 Howard Bloch’s description of the situation, widely quoted by scholars in the field, was made however within the context of linguistic origins, or “the primacy of origins” as his book’s title, Etymologies and Genealogies, suggests.36 What he has in mind is early medieval sign theory. In fact, he references writers (in detail) no later than Abelard and John of Salisbury (as well as Marbod, Hildebert, Henry of Avranches, and Richard of Venosa). I think therefore we need to balance Bloch’s assessment. Anxiety regarding linguistic instability was certainly present in both early and late medieval theorists and writers. On the one hand, language and, even more so, speech with its context of audience, addressor, tone, emphasis, punctuation, etc. could never denote a one-to-one relationship between word and object or word and meaning. On the other hand, what writer or poet would want that one-to-one relationship? (For that matter what grammarians or scholastic philosophers would ever want to live a life of the mind limited to such semantic ‘isolates’?)37 Certainly not Chaucer whose House of Fame is a tour de force on the volatility and elusiveness of speech, and whose Pardoner’s Prologue is largely about deceptive rhetoric and deals with theological concepts as though they were counterfactuals of language.38 Or Gower, whose Confessio Amantis begins with a somewhat obscene linguistic riddle in the very act of announcing a lofty theme, and whose entire poem itself “is divided,” according to Diane Watt—its “various ‘voices’ . . . often contradict[ing] each other.”39 The same is true of the Roman de la Rose: Faus Semblant’s (False seeming, the hypocritical friar) collection of contradictory theories under his cloak of hypocrisy is a brilliant doubling of language in both pointing to that icon of fair speech in the service of Christianity (the mendicant friars), and also to language’s instability, especially its ability to be corrupted. Both speaker and speech are corruptible and corrupting. I think that we need to recall that medieval theorists and writers dove into ambiguities with a certain frisson of joy. Juggling elaborate systems of contraries was a celebrated strength of the high Middle Ages. Indeed, the intellectual verve in orchestrating highly intricate claims and distinctions within arguments and counterarguments drew admiring students and disciples to the scholastic philosophers engaged in these movements. The effect of the ‘linguistic turn’ in the humanities just decades ago is illustrative of a similar response: the poststructural movement, logical positivism, and deconstruction were never described

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by twentieth-century cultural institutions as causing anguish among its theorists and practitioners40 despite the fact that poststructuralism promoted the “death-of-the-author” concept, and logical positivism viewed statements about value—including ethical judgments—as noncognitive41 and therefore meaningless, while deconstruction, when viewed negatively, came to mean unbuilding texts to show that they had no meaning.42 Yet ninth-century’s Scotus Eruigena’s (ca. 800–880) contrasts of pairs of opposites with pairs of opposites, whole to parts, and the ontological and epistemological dependence of every binary term to its counterpart is an early form of structural linguistics as well as structuralism.43 And John Buridan’s44 (ca. 1295–1361) argument about the relationship between logic and grammar anticipates twentieth-century (non-anguished) arguments that texts (and speech and meaning itself ) are inevitably contextual. And then there’s Ockham (ca. 1287–1347) who posits a theory that, in a restricted sense, virtually liberates language from communication itself. Thought has its own language, a covert language, similar to the languages used for spoken and written communication, he proposed. This ‘mental’ language signifies objects naturally rather than conventionally. Conventional linguistic features such as participles and pronouns are not codified in this mental language.45 In this, Ockham anticipates Steven Pinker’s “language instinct” theory, namely, that thought is independent of language, and constructs its own internal language—mentalese. The danger in this theory, as Geoffrey Sampson sees it, is that ultimately it means that “my genes are determining what I believe or how I think.”46 And, then, too, what of the emphatic energies behind the history of “insolubles,”47 or behind the centuries of allegories and their dizzying pluralities of meanings and hyperrealities.48 The medieval preoccupation with language (and speech) may have involved anxiety about its inadequacy, but its dominant effect was to promote a liberating dynamic allowing theorists, writers, and general thinkers to inquire tenaciously and critically into the operations of the human mind, the nature of knowledge, and the nature of God. Their preoccupation was ultimately, if Wittgenstein and Ryle are modern representative practitioners, a compelling predilection to talk about talk.49 Still, there is that second issue of the progressive deterioration of language: the linguistic consequences brought about by Adam and Eve’s fall in Eden (when once “the earth was of one tongue, and of the same speech” Gen. 2:9) and later by the catastrophic division of languages through the building and fall of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1–18). In his powerful study, Language and the Declining World, John Fyler examines the

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progressive decline of language as represented in the tradition of medieval commentary descending from Augustine. Fyler writes that a series of falls, rather than a single fall, led to the ongoing decline of language. The first language is God’s [God is the Word and the Word is God], the second language is Adam’s, the third is the speech continued by his descendants after the Fall.50 In detailing the Augustinian paradigm of history, Marcia Colish concludes, “Human language [fell] farther and farther from its divine exemplar, until Christ the Incarnate Word, the second Adam born of the second Eve, grace[d] us with the possibility of redeemed speech.”51 Pentecost signified that redeemed speech through the gift of the tongues of fire above the apostles’ heads. Although Augustine, and later, Thomas Aquinas, regarded Pentecost as a redeeming response to the confusion of languages, they did not view it as a complete reversal of Babel’s effects. The gift of tongues was a means, through the teaching and transmission of the Gospels, of uniting the diverse communities despite their diverse languages.52 Medieval typological art reinforced the theme, often placing scenes of the Tower of Babel side by side with scenes of Pentecost (e.g., the Speculum Humanae Salvationis, the Holkham Bible, The Hours of Joanna I of Castile). So, too, did medieval mystery plays. The York Plays (ca. 1470),53 Play 43, the Pentecost event by the Potteres shows learned men reacting to the gift of tongues: Doctor 1: THer men maddis out of mynde. Thei make carping of ilke contré,/ And leris langage of ilk a lande. Doctor 2: They speke oure speche als wele as we, and in ilke a steede it vndirstande. (ll. 156–160) [Doctor 1: “These men act madly54 out of mind! They make chatter of each country, And learn language of each land.” Doctor 2: “They speak our speech as well as we, And in each stead they it understand.”]55

In the Chester Mystery cycle’s Pentecost play, Phillip and the other apostles praise their ability to speak at their “likinge” “all languages, both low and hye” (ll. 300–391). Nevertheless, as Fyler observed, for “medieval commentators, the restoration of such linguistic purity, though forecast by Pentecost, must await the Last Day.”56 But where (linguistic) confusion signified disorder and sin (Gower, Confessio Amantis, ll. 850–852, and 1030),57 it also offered comedic

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opportunities for writers,58 especially for playwrights. In both the Chester Mystery Plays and the N-Town Cycle the shepherds, responding to the angel’s announcing Christ’s birth with “Gloria in excelsis deo” are honored in being singled out for the news, but take time to argue about what exactly was said: The Chester Cycle, Play VII: The Paynters’ Play (the Play of the Shepherds): THIRD SHEPHERD 382 hit was ‘grorus glorus’ with a ‘glee.’ 383 Hit was neyther more nor lasse. GARCIUS.

384 Nay, yt was ‘glorus glarus glorius’; 385 methinke that note went over the howse. 386 A seemely man hee was, and curiouse; 387 but soone awaye hee was.

FIRST SHEPHERD

388 Nay, yt was ‘glorus glarus’ with a ‘glo,’ 389 and mych of ‘celsis’ was therto. 390 As ever have I rest or woo, 391 much hee spake of ‘glas.’59

N-Town Play Cycle, Play 16: Shepherds, (lines 62–69): 62. [Shepherd 1]: 63 64 65

Ey, ey, this was a wondyr note That was now songyn above the sky! I have that voys ful wele, I wote— Thei songe “Gle, glo, glory.”

66. [Shepherd 2]: 67 68 69

Nay, so mot y the, so was it nowth! I have that songe ful wele inum; In my wytt weyl it is wrought: It was “Gle, glo, glas, glum.”60

N-Town Play, lines 62–69: [Shepherd 1:

Shepherd 2:

Ay, ay, this was a wonder note That was now sung above the sky! I have that voice full well, I note— They sang, “Gle, glo, glory.” Nay, so might I thrive, so was it not! I have that song full well within In my wit well it is wrought: It was “gle, glo, glas, glum.”]

The clever garbling of the Latin by the shepherds in both plays points to the deteriorated state between evolved languages (vernacular) and the so-called sacred language of Latin; and it can certainly point to the inferiority of the peasant class’s own speech. After all, Chaucer had sanctioned

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a future of comedic mimetic speech in English vernacular narratives in the opening lines of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales: “Whoso shal telle a tale after a man, He moot reherce as ny as evere he kan Everich a word, if it be in his charge, Al speke he never so rudeliche and large, Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe, Or feyne thing, or fynde words newe.” (ll. 731–36)61 [Whoever shall retell another man’s story, He must repeat [narrate] it as near to it as he can Every single word, if it is in his power, Even though he speaks never so ignorantly or so freely, Or else he must tell his tale inaccurately, Or invent things, or find new words].

His practical point was that those pilgrims were of “all degrees,” and their speech was rude and could offend. His artistic point was to establish a rationale, an aesthetic, about imitating low speech in literary art (perhaps, as a way of keeping writers honest about England’s cultural breadth). It is no exaggeration to say that “Chaucer’s works are riddled with explanations about the primacy of speech ‘experienced’. . . .”62 But in the Shepherds’ passage, above, three remarkable linguistic issues are at play: first, the issue of language as language is placed at the center of this scene commemorating an historical moment in salvation history. Second, Latin, the vehicle for commemorating that historical moment, is not simply comically garbled; it is literally fractured and wittily ‘declined.’ Treating language as fractured has two significant consequences: it emphasizes language as an artificial construct, nonorganic, and it directs attention to speech as an act of vocalizing a set of arbitrary sound units (whether intended or not, it also points to the power of these units of sound to shape religious beliefs). When language is revealed as constructed, one becomes aware of its problems as an epistemological tool. That is, speech pointing to itself as strings of sound units being disputed necessarily points to speech/language’s unreliability (the third linguistic issue at play). The more radical consequence of playing with (and disputing) the speech of a religious event is that it points to salvation history as but a verbal construct—the very point made by George Steiner about history itself.63 It also points to speech as an interpretative act. Engaged in an interpretative act, the shepherds, hearing the same announcement, come

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to three different conclusions about what they’ve heard. Not unlike Piers and the priest quarreling (and generations of scholars, too)64 over the meaning of the text in Truth’s pardon: Et qui bona egerunt ibunt in vitam eternam;/Qui vero mala, in ignem eternum (Passus VIII, ll. 95–96).65 The priest disdainfully views the text’s wording, namely, “all who do well will be saved and those who do ill will not” as a platitude, not a pardon. Piers angrily tears up the pardon as a “simultaneous affirmation of true pardon [do-well], and criticism of paper ‘pardons.’ ”66 Nor is it unlike the Wife of Bath’s “Allas, allas! That evere love was sinne” (l. 614), a lament that interprets sexual love in marriage wholly at variance from scriptural67 and literary authorities in the Book of Wikked Wives read nightly to her by Jankyn. Nor, finally, is it unlike Arthur’s court of knights who, gaily laughing, utterly fail to interpret the green girdle as Gawain insists that it is: the sign of “couardise and couetyse” and “ζe token of vntrawζe” that he was “tan inne” [the sign of “cowardice and covetousness,” and “the token of untruth” that he was “taken/captured in”] (ll. 2508–09).68 However you look at it, speech is an interpretative event. Vernacular translations of scriptural passages representing speech made that unmistakably clear, as in the excerpts from Piers Plowman, the York Play, and the Chester Mystery cycles. What also must have been clear is that (vernacular) translations were political acts. They involve choosing a meaning within the full semantic range available to a given word. One of the best examples of the politics of translation is Chaunticleer’s famous interpretation of “Mulier est hominis confusio” (NPT l. 3164) as “Womman is mannes joye and al his blis” (NPT l. 3166).69 (Can this also be Chaucer’s cheeky reference to Gower’s “modor of confusion”?)70 Not just translation, but every form of communication involves interpretation, even communication within the same language, according to Steiner.71 Human communication equals translation, he says, whether inside or between languages.72 Yet speech/human communication, like the various languages that structure it, “divides as easily as it unites.” 73 The current brilliant work on language and linguistic idealism in Brian Friel’s drama, Translations, is instructive. On the surface, it candidly explores the hostile tensions between languages, here, the languages of the colonized (Ireland) and the colonizer (England).74 However, I think that it equally concerns the dangers inherent to communication within a single language. Friel had read Steiner closely; his characters even quote lines from Steiner’s theories. He was aware therefore of Steiner’s principle: every form of communication (or speech) inherently involves translation. Dislocation and disruption, Steiner shows, are often the consequences of one’s own linguistic-cultural “drive toward the formation

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of metaphors” 75: a Nietzschean view that proposes that we are driven to attack the older metaphors responsible for older modes of thinking and perceiving reality.76 (Nietzsche’s view assumes, of course, humankind’s ability “to volatize perceptual metaphors” 77 into viable systems). Stephen Jay Gould said much the same thing: “When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor [. . .] because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.” 78 The above all point to the same issue of the status of speech and its unstable capacity to convey truth: if the perception of our future or “domains of possibilities” 79 is constantly prey to finding new metaphors to reframe our expectations, to widen contextual cues drawn from past experience, or to move beyond the naturalized prevailing political, philosophical, or religious discourse, these new ways of framing such communication are themselves mutable, subjective, and thus unreliable means of conveying truth. The Mystique of Speech Hin, hin, hin, hin, his, tick, tock, taack, brededin, brededack, frr Rabelais, Book Four: Chapter 56, para. 5

In Book IV of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel,80 Pantagruel and his sea companions are “mightily frightened” hearing disembodied voices of “men, women, children, horses,” and guns.81 The skipper assures them that the mysterious noises and cries are from a bloody fight in the previous winter. The words and cries of men and women and the hacking of battle-axes, the crashing and shudder of armor and harnesses, and the neighing of horses all froze in the air, transformed into numerous ice chunks and fragments now thawing. Pantagruel found some not yet thawed, and threw whole handfuls of frozen words onto the deck which looked like “rough sugar-plums, of many colours. . . .” When the men warmed them between their hands, the frozen words “melted like snow, and we really heard them, but could not understand them, for it was a barbarous gibberish.”82 The narrator adds, “I perceived some very sharp words, and some bloody words which the pilot said used sometimes to go back and recoil to the place whence they came”—but with their throats cut.83 There were also “some terrible words.” When they had all melted together, the men heard “a strange Noise, Hin, hin, hin, hin, his, tick, tock, taack, brededin, brededack, frr, frr, frr, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, track, track, trr, trr, trr, trrr, trrrrrr, on, on, on, on, on, on, ououououon, gog, magog, and I do not know what other barbarous Words.”84

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The phenomenon of freezing and melting words is found in tall tales apparently as early as Plutarch’s essay, Progress in Virtue, in which he reports that Antiphanes said jokingly that in a certain city all the words congealed the minute that they were spoken because of the bitter cold. Only later in the summer people heard what they had been conversing about in the winter.85 Both Calcagnini and Rabelais offer versions of Plutarch’s tale, and we find echoes of it in Castiglione, Baron Munchauson, Samuel Butler, Joseph Addison, and in early and contemporary American tall tales. A simple but interesting version of the last, is recounted by Alvin Schwartz. Two girls are quarreling, but the freezing air made their words come out as ice cubes, a cube for each word. “But they were so angry, they collected the ice cubes in sacks and took them home. Then they melted them and listened to their words and enjoyed a good fight.”86 In the first incident with Pantagruel and the seafarers, speech exists for an entire season apart from the animals, humans, guns, and armor from which it issued. Its force and effect are, nevertheless, mediated by time, place, and climate: the thawed vocalizations are baff ling and frightening, even bloodied. It is a brilliantly astute metaphor to show speech as ontologically separate from the human and animal who utters it, and as having distant lingering effects. In the second episode, speech likewise maintains a separate existence from its speakers, but its force and effect are unmediated by time or place. It exists intact. The quarrel, itself a series of divisive and dividing words, remains an aggregate of sounds whose timing, tone, and rhythm remain synchronous with the melting of each cube. The first episode materializes the instability of speech, and, in dramatizing its transmogrifying abilities, the thawing out process literally exposes words as a wholly arbitrary system of sounds. Melting, in fact, becomes iconic of the unstable, dissolving, disintegrating, properties of speech. The example of the girls’ quarrel likewise materializes speech but emphasizes its ability to remain fixed, intact word for word. It is this extreme paradoxical, indefinable, and erratic nature of speech that imbues it with a mythical status. Here, speech, ordinarily unable to be pinned down is locked in ice; arrested in articulation, it is released in the air within another’s environment “where meaning is located not in the moment but in the moment’s release.”87 Chaucer, too, is uneasy about the extremes of speech’s erratic nature as well as its transforming powers. In his dream vision poem, the House of Fame (ca. 1380), speech is metaphorically figured as divided: it is both a castle of Fame and a house of Rumor. In Britton Harwood’s witty phrasing, “The castle and the wicker house are opposed to each other with a clarity that would make a structuralist’s heart leap.”88 The castle or palace of Fame is built on an ice mountain which is immobile although

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the ice is dissolving. “Rumor’s house, to the contrary, set in a valley, is entirely organic, a whirling, multicolored, crowded cage of twigs.”89 Contrasts, contradictions, and extremes riddle this poem. Martin Irvine rightly notes that Chaucer is exploiting “both the humor and the philosophical difficulties implicit in the grammarians’ view of the corporality of speech.”90 Indeed, Irvine’s meticulous study testifies to the depth of learning beneath the humor in Chaucer’s “exposition of speech sound.” The eagle-mentor’s account is “like a grammarian doing a dazzling piece of exegesis,” drawing on metaphysical explanations, and in a lengthy passage (Bk. 2. 762–822), his lecture “follows exactly the order of topics and illustrations treated in the commentaries on Priscian’s De voce.”91 Laurel Amtower likewise alerts us to certain serio-comic extremes that Chaucer perceives in speech. “Chaucer’s farcical rendition of the ontological impact of words,” she says, “at one and the same time deauthorizes Augustine and parodies the efforts of the scholastics, whose attempts to ‘fix’ the meaning of the great texts can thus be seen as amounting to nothing less than interpretive legislation.”92 Yet, the dream poem’s dominant issue concerns the failure of language to correctly portray our imagined or real experiences. It also points to language’s inability to “archive” or preserve the reputation or renown bequeathed to past great poets and the characters whom they have immortalized. Chaucer’s treatment (a deliberate misreading?) of the love of Dido and Aeneas earlier in the dream is perhaps the most cited instance. William A. Quinn puts it succinctly: “In the House of Fame Dido remains famous for having been deceived rather than simply betrayed,”93 hinting at the unreliability of literary sources and imperfect transmissions. Even Fame, itself, is largely rumor, being composed principally of material from the House of Rumor. But the mystique of speech, its elusive nature, its aberrant, sometimes treacherous, transformations and its vertiginous, circulating effects are reinforced by Chaucer with two especially arresting images. When they are but a spear’s throw from the House of Fame, Chaucer asks the eagle who is bearing him whether the erratic, roaring sounds he hears are coming from those speaking on earth or whether they are coming from some creature in the house. The eagle’s reply is significant: There is no corporeal creature in the house. Speech leaves behind its speakers on earth and f loats up to the House of Fame, where it takes on the semblance of its speaker: it “has so the very likeness of him who spoke the words that you would conclude [gesse] it were the same body, man or woman, he or she.”94 In other words, as one’s speech arrives at the House of Fame, the speaker becomes her/his own phonetic likeness—the phantom shape and the garb of the person speaking. But Chaucer’s further innovation is more startling: individuality of utterance is retained within the

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surging multitudes of speeches’ varying emotions and intimacies; streams of sound separate themselves and form the ghostly shape of the speaker her/himself. This is speech with material consequences and with ideologies intact. Yet, this renegade nature of speech is precisely what reinforces its mystique and feeds the culture’s fear of it: the fact is that the second that speech separates itself from us it can sustain itself, becoming a stratagem, wayward, complicitous with or mutinous toward the speech (and, worse, toward the ideology) of others. That anarchic force is exactly what Chaucer references in portraying the crowds of phantom speakers whispering news in each other’s ear, their rumors proliferating, mutating, growing increasingly volatile as they rush through windows, chinks, and fissures. But speech is also broken air, a fart. The learned and pompous eagle assures Chaucer: “Soun ys noght but eyr ybroken; And every speche that ys spoken, Lowd or pryvee, foul or fair, In his substaunce ys but air.” (ll.765–68) [Sound is naught but air broken: And every speech that is spoken, Aloud or privily, offensive or pleasing, In its substance is but air].

As Quinn phrases it, the eagle’s “definition of speech itself (ll. 780–81) reduces all discourse to the phantoms of ‘or noyse, or soun’ (l. 783).”95 This extreme aspect of speech, the fart, defines not only the broken air of released intestinal gases but also the speeches that Fame capriciously exalts. Chaucer pointedly connects speech-as-fart with the abuses of those practitioners whose profession and self-interest lay in co-opting speech, such as the smooth-talking mendicant friars. Branded home violators by William St. Amour (penetrante domos)96 they were viewed as usurping the parish priests’ preaching privileges97 and capable of talking a widow out of a farthing even when she had no shoes (Gen. Prol. ll. 253–55). Chaucer’s most famous example occurs in the Summoner’s Tale. The bed-ridden Thomas is visited by Friar John who badgers him in an interminably long sermon (on “anger”) to bequeath his wealth solely to Friar John and his convent. Suppressing his anger at the friar’s “false dissymulacioun” (l. 2123). Thomas promises Friar John a treasure on the condition that he divide it evenly with the members of his convent. The gift, Thomas said, was “hyd in pryvetee” under his “buttok” (ll. 2142–43). Groping

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deeply there, John is met by a fart whose sound no horse drawing a cart could ever have achieved (ll. 2149–51). Just as, in the eagle’s instruction to Chaucer, “all human speech is created by an act of percussion the effects of which amplify in space like the concentric circles formed by a stone thrown into water,”98 so, too, is the fart to be equally divided in the concentric dispersion of its noise and odor by a twelve-spoked wheel beneath which Friar John and his convent are ordered by the manor court to sit. As Britton Harwood summed it up: The fart is not only a reward for the friar’s preaching, but it is of course a figure for it.99 It is indeed a speech act of lowest degree. Speech as Uncontrollable “according to Augustine in De Magistro, the end of speech is to teach or to learn.” “secundum Augustinum libro de magistro finis locutionis est docere aut discere.” De Lingua, Oriel College Oxford MS. 20, ff. 140r-266r (ca. 1260–1280) “What becometh a woman best and first of all? Silence. What seconde? Silence. What third? Silence. What fourth? Silence.” Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetoricke (1553) “Bradford [Yorkshire] jurors presented Christina Jacdoghtre and Agnes Bastholpt as ‘communes litigatrices cum vicinis suis,’ or ‘common scolds with their neighbors.’ ” The National Archives: Public Record Office, London, DL 30 1957/129

The fact is that while the culture’s obsession with speech was based upon its perception of speech as unreliable, and as having a mystique, it was the perception of speech as uncontrollable and therefore as transgressive that received the most aggressive attention and most directly led to the control and criminalization of women’s speech. Although the three above quotations point to the interrelated cultural constructions of speech, they also point to the ways that each century’s ideological emphases framed its view of speech. In the late twelfth century, for example, speech was articulated as an ethical issue, leading to “the medieval preoccupation with sins of the tongue, which culminated in the mid-thirteenth century.”100 As Bettina Lindorfer remarks, treatises on sins of the tongue (theological classifications of the abuses of speech) remained substantially unchanged from the fourteenth through the seventeenth century except toward the end of the fifteenth century onward. There the later texts shift from merely organizing theological classifications of speech violations to stressing, rather, good verbal behavior as enacted spiritual and social practice.101 That change, along with “the intervention by authorities, the creation

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of new laws and decrees regarding speech . . . grant[ed] the condemnation of bad speech a different social meaning in the later centuries.”102 And indeed from the late thirteenth to the seventeenth century, pervasive and ubiquitous socioeconomic discourses resolutely constructed speech as an index to social class, personal conduct, and education. Lydgate’s “Churle and the Byrd” of the early fifteenth-century is instructive: the bird’s quick-witted and polished speech represents the sort of verbal adroitness and sophistication thought likely in a gentleman. The churl succumbs to the bird’s smooth rhetoric, releasing her from her cage. The bird declares it impossible to teach to a churl (“a natural foole”) “termys of gentilnesse.”103 In the late sixteenth century, the harmonious marriage is one where “The dutie of the man is, to bee skillfull in talke: and of the wife, to boast of silence.”104 The English Gentlewoman (1631) declares that a woman’s volubility of tongue “argues either rudenesse of breeding, or boldnesse of expression;”105 finally, Daniel Rogers (1642)—a bit beyond our time period—ref lects the increasing condemnatory male attitude toward the increasingly vocal female: “Such immodesties and insolencies of women, not able to containe themselves within boundes of silence and subjection, I am so farre from warranting, that I here openly defie them as ungrounded, and ungodly.”106 This mutual enterprise whereby speech as ethical construct and speech as social conduct abetted and sanctioned each other prepared the way ultimately for the legal construction of speech. As we shall see, by the late fourteenth century, the explosion of theological treatises on the sins of the tongue had produced a uniform discourse that “permeated not only poetry and sermons but also the law courts (whether ecclesiastical, royal, or local).”107 Not only had it “made its way also to the local level” but it was, as well, “thoroughly vernacularized and entrenched in [those] courts.”108 Of course, the interrelated sociopolitical, economic, and ideological forces that led to the control and criminalization of women’s speech were far more complex than the deliberately simplified evolution sketched above would suggest. To gain a sense of just how pervasive the preoccupation with speech was at every level of authority, note the sweep and number of these converging forces: there was the more religiously motivated force that involved the consequences of silence and speech for monastic discipline of a virtuous self; there was the force concerned with the effect of heresy, and of course, the pastoral movement initiated by the Lateran Council. Yet another force, the activity of the mendicant preaching orders (Franciscans and Dominicans) became an organizing force producing the handbooks on the sins of the tongue. Blasphemy, treason, the peasants’ revolt, defamation, and the postplague hostilities toward class structure were further economic and ideological forces leading to

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the control of speech. The first six forces are particularly significant to the issue of controlling women’s speech, and a simple sketch of them is all that can be accommodated in this chapter, but it will give some idea of the suffocatingly invasive role that control of speech played in every aspect of human relationships and its consequent, inexorable drive toward legislation, especially that of women’s speech. One of the earliest signs of alarmed concern about the hazardous potential of speech surfaced in the beginning years of the twelfth century, in the work of the gifted theologian Hugh of St. Victor, regarded as the St. Augustine of his time. His text, De institutione novitiorum,109 focusing “exclusively on the verbal behavior of monks”110 outlined a theory of disciplined speech. That Hugh was a canon regular is significant: canon authors’ treatment of silence and speech differed from monastic authors’ treatment. Carolyn Bynum remarks that whereas “canonical authors see silence as a preparation for fruitful discourse between men, monastic authors tend to see silence as a good in itself or as a preparation for discourse with God.”111 Indeed, she adds, “when canonical authors set out to treat silence, the discussion frequently evolves into a discussion of useful speech.” Hugh of St. Victor in fact, “urges edifying speech as a cure for too much silence.”112 The Franciscan, Raoul Ardent, inf luenced by Hugh of St. Victor, devoted a chapter in his Speculum universale113 (an encyclopedia or Summa of vices and virtues, late twelfth-century) to the usages of speech. So, too, Alain of Lille (late twelfth century), “one of the pioneers of the medieval tradition of the sins of speech”114 and a model for Jean de Meun and Dante,115 addresses verbal sins in his Summa of Teaching, his Treatise of Vices and Virtues, and his Complaint of Nature. The Franciscan Alexander of Hales, and the Dominicans, Vincent of Beauvais and Thomas Aquinas “all devoted a privileged space to sinful speech in their Summae” as well.116 However, what is unusual about Raoul Ardent’s treatment is his widened focus: not just monks’ speech was considered, but “the speech of laymen in all aspects of their everyday communications (political, family or commercial exchanges). Ardent’s Speculum is, according to Johannes Gründel, the masterpiece of medieval ethics in twelfth-century Europe.”117 This explosion of treatises on verbal behavior appears to have been a response to two disturbing, public struggles: the problem of heresy and “the gravest of all the sins of the tongue,” blasphemy.118 Lindorfer writes, “From the beginning of the twelfth century, heresy was the main problem of the official church.”119 The church tried to battle it with words, namely, sermons and confession (a testimony to the power of speech) and with the crusades. Indeed, the fact that the “foundation of the Dominican order and its sanction by the Pope [Innocent III] in 1215

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was a result of this fight against the heretics” underscores the concern of speech as power.120 The mendicants’ emphasis on sermon and confession marked “a new climax in attention to everyday verbal behaviour, an emphasis that was sanctioned by the fourth Lateran Council in 1215.”121 The effect of speech and its dangers assuming so singular a status had two consequences: it created a critical shift in cultural and ecclesiastical history, elevating the need to safeguard the tongue to the level or “the same degree of importance as that of the more conventional categories of ethics.”122 It also produced—with the dissemination of William Peraldus’s Summa de vitiis et virtutibus—a “corporate social definition” of sin.123 The extraordinary feature of Peraldus’s Summa (1236) was that instead of considering “verbal trespasses ‘daughters’ of the seven deadly sins, as they had been considered in Cassian or Gregory’s ethical systems,” he made these sins of the tongue an eighth deadly sin.124 His reasoning elevated the consequences of speech, as Joan Heiges Blythe’s study details,125 but the more critical effect lay in his multiplication of the number of verbal sins, revealing and confronting, thereby, “the multifarious speech of a new, vital urban life and incorporating many sins central to biblical and patristic culture. . . .”126 His twenty-four vices of the tongue included certain verbal “sins” increasingly associated with women’s discourse: complaining, wrangling, slander, quarreling, scorn, and too much talking (murmur, convicium, maledictio, contentio, derisio, multiloquium). The inf luence of this handbook was extraordinary. By the seventeenth century, the Summa had been printed all over Europe, including Middle English translations such as the fifteenth-century Book for a Simple and Devout Woman whose other main source was Lorens d’Orleans’ Somme le roy (1279).127 The latter, the Somme le roy, turns up in a wide range of English literature. Maintaining the traditional seven deadly sins, it organizes the sins of the tongue as a subcategory of Gluttony, a concept at play in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, the Parson’s Tale, and Gower’s Confessio Amantis, especially Book VI.128 The Somme’s impact in vernacular adaptations at the local level is evident in numerous English pastoral manuals that are either translations of it or derivatives of it. Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwit (Remorse of Conscience), The Book of Vices and Virtues (ca. 1375), and William Caxton’s Ryal Book are translations of Somme. Derived works include A Myrour to Lewde Men and Wymmen, Jacob’s Well: An English Treatise on the Cleansing of Man’s Conscience, and A Book for a Simple and Devout Woman, which is based on both Peraldus’s Summa, and Lorens’s Somme, among its other sources.129 One can now begin to see the inevitable direction of the pastoral action undertaken by these preaching orders. This unifying construction of the discourses on heresy and the sins of the tongue was organizing itself so well that within a decade or so (the late fourteenth century) these

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discourses were, as mentioned above, “thoroughly vernacularized and entrenched in courts as well as in literature.”130 Given that blasphemy is overwhelmingly associated with men, it (blasphemy) would seem to be remote to the issue of controlling women’s speech.131 Yet blasphemy is linked to treason and to “witch-speak,” and exemplifies the mystique of speech. Blasphemy (in contrast to heresy) was regarded as a nonintentional attack on God’s nature rather than an erroneous judgement about that nature. Cursing was one of the most common forms of blasphemy; it was viewed as a spontaneous illicit utterance usually swearing on parts of God or of Christ (“by god’s wounds,” “by Christ’s bones”) as distinct from conscious attempts to injure God or a divine concept. The Pardoner’s discussion, for example, “both begins and ends with blasphemy, in the specific form of swearing oaths,”—the oath being “performative language at its most transgressive.”132 Cursing was also the most publicly condemned form of blasphemy excoriated by “multiple fourteenth- and fifteenth-century exempla, poems, and artistic representations.”133 A typical narrative-exemplum would include most of these elements: A gentleman went hunting on a Sunday (itself already a violation) but failed to catch anything. He stopped at a tavern, sat there muttering and cursing his luck: “by god’s blood, this day is unhappy!” Before long, his nose began to bleed; further cursing ensued: he swore by “god’s passion,” “god’s wounds,” “god’s f lesh,” and “god’s nails.” Soon his ears, eyes, wrists, navel, hands, and other parts were streaming blood. Moreover his tongue turned pitch-black and shot out of his mouth in “a marvellous horrible, ugsome [‘loathsome’] and fearful manner.” He continued to bleed and curse until he died, while bystanders watched him in horror.134 Most such tales feature men (not surprisingly since, as we have learned, blasphemy is overwhelmingly associated with men). It is intriguing therefore to read Wycliff ’s feminized etymology of blasphemy as blas—femina ( foolish and harmful woman). Although he knew Latin but not Greek, it is faintly possible135 that Wycliff ’s linking blasphemy to the perception of women as verbally disruptive and notorious in speech had some ground. After all, Chaucer represents the Wife of Bath as claiming that men could neither swear nor lie half so well as women, and we know of a contemporary medieval Latin story asserting that certain women are such habitual swearers that they can scarcely speak without swearing or prefacing their remarks with some oath.136 Margery Kempe (ca. 1330) was tried several times for both heresy and blasphemy and Joan of Arc (1438) was accused of blaspheming and holding God in contempt of the sacraments. In 1606, an “Act of Parliament to ‘restrain the abuses of players’ ensured that in the 1623 revised version of the play [Othello] Iago’s blasphemies, very conspicuous in the earlier version, were

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cut.”137 The last raises the question: could one accuse Chaucer of what Salman Rushdie was accused of? That is, if you speak blasphemy through a fictional construct, are you yourself complicitous with the crime of blasphemy? Can Chaucer through the Pardoner’s Tale be accused of uttering injurious words against God? After all, as David Lawton reminds us, the tale itself is a discourse on blasphemy; it “condemns blasphemy; produces blasphemy; and is blasphemy.”138 On the other hand, is Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale intentionally likewise a polemic engaging with the ecclesiastical interdicts on language? What made blasphemy so heavily censured, so severely penalized,139 and so enduring a crime on the books (it was still a law in England until March 2008)140 lay in its links to treason and to the mystique of speech/ language. Blasphemy had long had roots in governments’ response to political opposition: Justinian (sixth century) in the Corpus Iuris Civilis, was able to “impose death for the sin of blasphemy,” which, he explained, caused divine anger, leading to the country’s “famine, earthquake and pestilence.”141 Charlemagne (ninth century) likewise severely punished blasphemy.142 Although it was primarily interpreted as an attack on the honor of God, blasphemy became seen as an attack on state religion (in France in the thirteenth century; in England in the sixteenth century) and therefore a crime against divine and secular authority. In sixteenthcentury England, an attack on the state religion, namely, the Church of England, whose head was the king, was consequently a treasonous act. Once a sin of the tongue, blasphemy now became a means of pursuing and executing political dissidents. Once a moral issue, it now functions broadly and readily as a legal means of controlling and criminalizing speech. Clerks appear to have gone out of their way to avoid writing blasphemous words when documenting instances of blasphemy. The conviction that certain utterances might have a material force (exemplifying a belief in the mystique of speech) led them to distance themselves so as to avoid “granting these words even greater power.”143 They appear to have resorted to using formulas such as the phrase “salvo honere” (“without insulting the honour”) or abbreviations such as R. L. S. N. D. D. (“renier le Saint Nom de Dieu,” meaning “to deny the Holy Name of God). Lindorfer144 writes that by “repeating and, even worse, by placing [the blasphemous words] permanently in official documents, one might have feared their infective powers.” In an impressive study, R. F. Yeager draws the connections: necromancy, enchantment, and witchcraft were forms of blasphemy, but they were also therefore (like gluttony) sins of the mouth. In Lorens’s Somme’s view, and possibly in Chaucer’s and Gower’s,145 the glutton who swore drunkenly was transgressing “the same law as the

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heretic and witch because, like them, he uses powerful verbal symbols improperly; in so doing, he, like heretic and witch, debases the eternal truth extant behind the symbol.”146 Larry Scanlon concludes: “Annexing blasphemous oaths to gluttony emphasizes the materiality of speech, its active participation in the same fallen world as food and drink.”147 Blasphemy’s link to “witch-speak,”148 and to women as the perceived performers of witchcraft lies in its being based on impious speech. Kirilka Stavreva defines “witch-speak” as “literally, overspeaking, getting the upper hand in a verbal strife, asserting oneself over one’s superior in the social or gender hierarchy.”149 Significantly, that also defines “scolding.” “To many popular writers in early modern England, the witch was, quite simply, a particularly heinous variety of scold, a woman whose harsh words more than merited the verbal affronts she received.”150 Scolds had existed long before they (and shrews and gossips) became the unf lagging and merciless topic of treatises, plays, and ballads of early modern England. Indeed, scolding had been viewed more as a “moral failing” than “an actionable crime” until mid-fourteenth century when it became “widely prosecuted.”151 Related to defamation (the use of inf lammatory language and an actionable offense), scolding now became “treated by the courts as a separate offense.”152 Karen Jones, tracking prosecutions for scolding in the local Kentish courts (1460–1560), found that they peaked in the early sixteenth century and then fell off. Marjorie McIntosh records a similar decline in the later sixteenth century.153 Interestingly, Jones’s extensive court records ref lect a rise in witchcraft prosecutions at the same time that scolding allegations decreased.154 Lynda Boose finds that records show not only the “sudden upsurge in witchcraft trials and other court accusations against women” but also “the ‘gendering’ of various available forms of punishment, and the invention in these years of additional punishments specifically designated for women.”155 Certain crimes, already defined as exclusively female (scolding, witchcraft, and whoring), show an increase, Boose notes, but what she finds “striking,” is that “the punishments meted out to women are much more frequently targeted at suppressing women’s speech than they are at controlling their sexual transgressions.”156 It is during this period, the sixteenth century, that we begin to see not only a more verbalized connection between the scold and the witch but we also find an intensification of treatises, popular literature, and court cases targeting women’s speech and women’s tongues. And although Sandy Bardsley’s study has indeed pulled “the scold out from under the witch’s historiographical shadow”157 (situating the scold, instead, in larger context of hierarchical and political concerns, economic instability, and the loss of “hue and cry”158), nevertheless, the scold’s links to the aberrant

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behavior of witches was the popular subject of treatises, pamphlets, plays, and ballads.159 For the first Anglican preacher George Webbe,160 “the tongue is a witch.” “Not just any tongue, Webbe might have added, but the female tongue in particular,” Kamensky161 notes. Playwright William Rowley asked: “She on whose tongue a whirlwind sits . . . Is not that scold a witch?”162 Richard Bernard thought the connection between women’s speech and witches was obvious: women “are more tongue-ripe, and lesse able to hide what they know, from others, and therfore in this respect, are more ready to be teachers of Witchcraft to others.”163 So, too, Alexander Roberts, minister at King’s Lynn in Norfolk, argued certain reasons164 and offered his own statistics, “More women in a farre different proportion prooue Witches then men, by a hundred to one,” listing as his sixth reason that, “they are of slippery tongue, and full of words.”165 Its connections with witchcraft certainly reinforced the feminization of the scold despite the fact that the general features constituting a scold included activities quite remote from witchcraft. A scold, Walker quotes, was “ ‘any woman offering an opinion’; ‘any woman who verbally resisted or f louted authority publicly’ ”; it even included “treacherous pamphlet wives who murdered their husbands.”166 Nevertheless, in her concluding remarks, Walker contends that despite the inclination “by contemporaries (and historians) to associate ‘scolding’ with women, the lines drawn around female and male behaviour were blurred, for men were frequently prosecuted for the same kinds of verbal disorders.”167 However, Bardsley’s study concludes that not only were women predominately prosecuted as scolds but also that the language of many village and borough ordinances against scolding “made it clear that women were expected to be the main transgressors.”168 Karen Jones and Michael Zell note a similar gendered disposition in the late fifteenth-century registries of Fordwich and Sandwich. These custumals directed that “any woman who scolded or quarreled in public was to carry a mortar through the town, preceded by a ‘piper or other minstrel making sport,’ and pay a penny to the piper, though Sandwich made the concession that a woman willing to pay 21d could be excused.”169 Malcolm Jones noted the gendered element of the judicial sentences of “hanging of a wooden mortar round the offender’s neck,” commenting that the “action of the pestle in the mortar is an obvious analogy to the sexual act.”170 He references the OED s.v. [which] “gives C. 15 and C. 16 citations from Maldon, Essex, for this sense, of which the earliest reads Uxor Johannes Morys est communis litigatrix et portabit mortarium—‘John Morris’s wife is a common scold and shall wear the mortar.’ ”171 “In Hereford the use of the cucking-stool was prescribed in 1486. In all three custumals [registries] the possibility of a man being so punished was not envisaged.”172

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In Bardsley’s study the whole range of secular jurisdictions (manors, small boroughs, larger boroughs) shows that “women accounted for between 90 and 95 percent of alleged scolds.”173 Jones’s and Zell’s Table 2174 reveals a similar percent: of 37 accusations in the borough of Fordwich (Kent) between 1450–1570, women accounted for 33 scolding accusations (nearly 90 percent). The Obsession with Controlling Women’s Speech The point is this: the object of the moral and legal injunctions against women’s speech was purportedly women’s verbal disorder and its destabilizing national, social, and domestic effects. But the sweeping range of the attacks against women’s speech points to a more deeply disturbing objective. The aim was to control every conceivable aspect of women’s speech by deconstructing and fantasizing its powers, interrelationships, and mobility: link women’s speech with aberrant activity and, voilà, witches;175 link it with evil itself, and behold, Malleus Malificarum, along with Tutivillus, the demon collector of women’s speech;176 link it with disorder, and, “uncovered” are Margery Kempe, Margery Paston, Ann Askew, Margery Knowles, Anne Clifford, Lady Elizabeth Vaux, etc., all associated with legitimate complaint and thus with endangering domestic and national order. Finally, link it with bodily looseness177 (indeed, link women’s tongue itself with sexual promiscuity),178 and we have hundreds of treatises, plays, and ballads of the nature of the “Ballad of the Discontented Married Man” whose alternative title “Of a Scould that could not keep her lips together” is aggressively candid about the link between scolds and wantonness. Its refrain repeatedly insists that the man’s wife cannot “keep her lips together.” Even the purely garrulous gossip—distinguishable from the scold by 1615 when John Stephens wrote his Satyricall Essayes—is reduced to an image of bodily incontinence: “Her knowledge is her speech; the motive, her tongue; and the reason is her tongue also: but the subject of her eloquence is her neighbours wife, and her husband, or the neighbours wife and husband both. Shee is the mirth of marriages, and publicke meetings . . . Shee carries her bladder in her braine, that is full; her braine in her tongues end, that shee empties . . . Her truth is, to make truths and tales convertible.”179 Women’s speech ‘leaking’ both sex and loss of virginity into the urinal is repeated in Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy: ‘Tell but some woman a secret over night,/Your doctor may find it in the urinal i’ the morning’ (1.3.83–4). Yet, in instances where there is no transgression in the women’s speech, its association with harlotry continued to be leveled against

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verbal women. Laura Gowing describes an incident (ca.1618) at the Red Bull playhouse in Clerkenwell. Joan Hewes, collecting money for admission and selling fruit with other women, became embroiled in an argument with Luke Bryan, a 60-year-old member of the King’s guard on his way into the playhouse: “he ‘asked how they did, Well quoth Joane Hewes . . . if you will paie me for your admittance, paie quoth the said Bryan you are a scould, a scould quoth the said Hewes it would sett your kitchen on fier to keep manie such scoulds, the said Luce Bryan replyeinge said unto . . . Joane Hewes thou art an arrant whore and a theefe.’180 Bryan’s refusal to pay is geared specifically toward the (female) context; because it is a woman demanding money, he shifts the emphasis of the exchange first on to her words, characterizing her demand as scolding, and then on to her body, calling her first whore, then thief.”181 The wide frontal attack on women’s speech plainly cannot be attributed solely to women as scolds or as social quarrelers. Joan Hewes’s simple request for an admission fee confirms this, as does Thomas Rogers’s (1613) court statement that he intended to bleed his wife’s tongue as his remedy for her “liberall” talk.182 Men’s obsession with control of women’s speech has, at bottom, a particular concern best summed up by Anthony Fletcher: “Speech represents personal agency. The woman who speaks neither in reply to a man nor in submissive request acts as an independent being. . . .” (Fletcher finishes the sentence, saying “who may well, it is assumed, end up with another man than her husband in her bed. Thus every incident of verbal assertiveness could awake the spectre of adultery and the dissolution of patriarchal order”).183 Fletcher’s insight accounts for the scope and relentlessness of the attack on women’s speech. Yet, what of the demonizing of the very sites themselves in which women gathered and held conversation? Demonizing the Sites Where Women Gathered and Conversed “Female association could be dangerous to the state,” Pamela Allen Brown wrote.184 She had in mind the weird sisters of Macbeth and the disabling consequences of their speech but what comes to one’s mind, as well, are the hundreds of scenes of female space and exclusively female company satirized in treatises, conduct manuals, and plays of the period. One thinks immediately of Webster and Dekker’s Westward Ho! (ca. 1604), Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor (ca. 1597), The Bachelor’s Banquet (1603), The Fyftene Joyes of Maryage (ca. 1507), Jonson’s ‘college’ of wives in Epicoene (1609/10), Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize (1611), and Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (ca. 1613). Even female alliances

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in approved female spaces such as the spinning circle receive a scathing critique, as in the earlier Gospelles of Dystaves (ca. 1510), pointing to growing male anxiety about the power of forged female relationships. Here a spinning circle, a community of neighbors, wants to write a gospel “according to women,” to document ancient lore so as to “legitimize their knowledge” and to counter ballads and books “that slander their sex.”185 The narrator is an aged cleric whose amicable standing with these “sixes matrones wyse and prudent” leads them to ask that he be their scribe. Assuming that their subject matter will be a diverting, even if foolish, sortie into lore (superstitions, herbal practices, etc.), he agrees. Throughout, he satirizes their aspirations for learning in the manner of a shared joke with his readers, but when the discourse turns to the women’s devising punishment for illicit sin, including subdividing sin into the manner of person committing it, with whom, whether clergy or married, the nature of public penance and restitution, the narrator removes any credit they might have by reducing them to “gossips,” and their discourse to a “gossips’ feast”—evoking thereby the “notoriety of the gossips’ feast”186 and the connections between gluttony and spiritual kinships reputed of the lying-in and christening ceremonies.187 Two particular female gathering sites were especially impugned: lying-in chambers and alehouses. The most obsessively targeted of the two (for both men and women, but more censoriously for women) was the alehouse. The connections made by balladeers, playwrights, parish priests, lawyers, and diarists between alehouses and illicit sexual activity and drunkenness found ample support in both common observations and legal evidence. Church court records, as Capp indicates, “reveal numerous cases of fornication, adultery and rape, often within the alehouse or tavern itself.”188 A. Lynn Martin’s citations of court cases in his booklength study of alcohol and gendered behavior (especially pp. 68–78)189 make evident the high number of legal actions involving prostitution and alehouses. So common was their connection that a typical contract “for an apprentice from the Merchant Tailors in 1451 stipulated that he should not frequent taverns”; the same requirement was a condition of Oliver Garnet’s (a tailor) indenture, namely, “to reject the illicit lure of . . . alehouses and taverns.”190 On the other hand, alehouses also served as respectable social centers. In his Relation of the Island of England, dated 1500, a visiting nobleman commenting on English sociability in terms of hospitality, wrote: “Few people keep wine in their own houses, but buy it, for the most part, at a tavern; and when they mean to drink a great deal, they go to the tavern, and this is done not only by the men, but by ladies of distinction.”191 As a gathering site, in fact, by the late 1500s the alehouse had taken over many

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of the community services formerly available in the church. “People resorted there for wedding parties, or wakes, or to celebrate a holiday with drink, food, and games.”192 Market women and vendors commonly stopped there at the end of the day;193 frequently groups of women and men went to the alehouse or tavern immediately after Sunday service (as a quarrel involving multiple female witnesses at Tidy’s alehouse in Sussex, 1613, after evening prayer attests).194 Indeed, Thomas Platter (1574–1628), from Switzerland, registered his amazement that women “more often than men” gathered in the alehouses for enjoyment. “They count it a great honor,” he notes, “to be taken there and given wine with sugar to drink; and if one woman only is invited, then she will bring three or four other women along and they gaily toast each other.”195 There were, however, certain norms and customs to be followed. “Respectable women could only attend with their husbands or together as a group of ‘gossips’; a woman entering alone would be marked as a prostitute.”196 Bernard Capp notes that in London, and perhaps in other towns, an unaccompanied woman might enter a public house alone, by day, “without meeting disapproval.”197 The point is that respectable women could “visit a tavern or alehouse without risking their good name, provided they adhered to the conventions.”198 Yet, it is precisely “respectable” women going to a tavern that Samuel Rowlands savagely attacks in his pamphlet Tis Merry when Gossips Meete, printed in 1601 and reprinted several times over the next 30 years. Rowlands takes pains to describe the three gossips’ respectable clothes, their respectable errands, and their respectable drinks (claret and sack), yet beneath “its light-hearted tone there runs a clear undertow of disapproval.”199 As the women grow ‘merrier’ with drink, they grow increasingly vocal about husbands. Their character quickly becomes rendered as self-serving, opportunistic, and manipulative. A few years later, in his A Whole Crew of Kind Gossips (1609), Rowlands’s tone has turned openly hostile. Here, the women “are portrayed as universally shrewish and variously spendthrifts, idle and violent.”200 These women meet to drink and to share bitter tales about their husbands whose offenses, Rowlands portrays as merely minor. In A Whole Crew’s preface, addressed “To the Maids of London,” Rowlands condemns the wives’ “f lagrant betrayal of wifely responsibility, and urges the maids to reject such behaviour when they too are married.”201 Not just taverns and alehouses as gathering sites for women are represented as destructive of social behavior and domestic peace, but female alehouse owners, the alewives themselves, are virtually demonized in literary and artistic representations. The Chester mystery cycle (early fifteenth century) features a Brewster in play 17, The Harrowing of

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Hell. Christ has rescued from hell all the souls who merited saving. Only the alewife is left, and in her lament about her unethical practices and her “hurting the common weal,” she carries all alewives ‘over the cliff ’ with her, prophesying their place in hell. At the end of the play, she is married to the devil. Mary Wack’s study of the implications of Chester’s The Harrowing of Hell offers intriguing and incisive perspectives: “representing the play’s one damned sinner as a woman, an alewife and tapster, suggests that the anxieties are specifically linked to gender issues. Civic records make clear that the abuses enumerated by the Tapster were practiced by both men and women in Chester, and indeed that men were beginning to outnumber women in the brewing trade. But by selectively figuring women as the sinners in this matter,” the scene is now “about justifying women’s exclusion from larger communities.”202 Excluding the woman from the “community of the saved is . . . a figure of women’s exclusion from the alehouses and in a larger sense from the city’s public economic life.”203 Indeed, in “nine separate parish churches,” Judith Bennett notes, artistic renderings show alewives “in hell, waving their jugs” and merry in an embrace with the devil.204 Male brewers clearly did not suffer the same opprobrium. In fact, Bennett observes that whereas in “the fourteenth century, alewives were represented as dishonest and alluring traders,” “by the sixteenth century, when male brewers and beer competed for customers with brewsters and ale, alewives were also represented as oldfashioned women who marketed foul drink.”205 The city of Chester passed a law in 1540 preventing any woman between the ages of 14 and 40 years of age to keep an alehouse. Bennett’s point: “They presumably hoped, by limiting alehouse-keeping to women thought to be either too young or too old for sexual activity, to clean up the ale trade and expunge its association with prostitution.”206 A community of drinking women explicitly aligned with the devil is most famously reinforced in John Skelton’s “The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng” (1517) where “drinking women explicitly constitute themselves as a women’s community contesting the authority of their husbands”207 and where Elynour, the alehouse owner, is pronounced by Skelton to be “sib” with the devil. In that poem, drinking women (and it is mostly women who are Elynour’s customers) threaten more than marital authority; they likewise subvert domestic and social economy. It’s not just Elynour who is engaged in “commercial crimes,”208 thinning her ale and contaminating it with hen droppings and her unwashed hands; the drinking companions, Kate, Cysly, and Sare, with their legs bare, their feet full unsweet, their patchy kirtles, and their raggedy smocks, along with “haltyng Jone,” Sybyll, Ales, and others pay for their ale by impoverishing their houses. Household goods are brought into the

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tavern: spoons, skillets, cradles, wedding rings, ladles, thimbles, spinning wheels; their husbands’ clothes, hatchets, and saddles are likewise tendered to pay the bill.209 As sites of dangerous female alliances the alehouse and tavern posed easy visible targets for civil and religious authorities and husbands, alike, but what about birthing or lying-in situations with their gathering of merry women in attendance? Ironically, the catchphrase “as drunk as women at a gossiping” refers not to the alehouse but to lying-in customs: excessive feasting and notorious drinking seem to have begun almost “as soon as the baby was born,” and to reach “its peak on the evening of the baptism.”210 Lying-in was the event in which “a woman gave birth and recuperated in the company of her female friends, neighbors, relatives and servants, with a midwife orchestrating the labor, delivery and recovery.”211 Its main effect was to assist the laboring mother. Its greater effect was the solidifying of the attending female social community through conversation and feasting.212 Of course, female gatherings and alliances did not in and of themselves “necessarily constitute a challenge to male patriarchy, or an exhibition of female solidarity.”213 As Linda Pollock reminds us, alliances are “highly context dependent, affected not only by class in English society but also by the social and economic circumstances surrounding the event.”214 Nevertheless, as Patricia Crawford asserts, “Childbirth was the female rite of passage par excellence” and in the female culture surrounding it, “we would expect to find the strongest testimonials to women’s solidarity.”215 Indeed, so socially and culturally important was the ritual of gathering with neighbors and kin at the childbed that some who were not invited “took offence, even to the extent of practising witchcraft on being excluded.”216 In one extraordinary instance, a villager, angered at being excluded, charged into the room of her neighbor then in labor, Mary Aussoppe, and cursing, prayed that the “plague of God light upon her, and all the plagues in hell light upon her.”217 Misogynists may well have had good reason to be anxious about the lying-in events. Lying-in could extend from three weeks to a month. As a sustained period of repeated, daily, exposure of individuals and kin to each other, it was unusually lengthy. It certainly afforded opportunities for female neighbors, friends, and kin to reinforce shared values, exchange news, and speculate about local authorities or parish politics. And if sites of power are in the micropolitics of daily life as gender and postcolonial studies suggest,218 then this “communal affair, bonding women among women and incorporating family and neighbours, baby and kin” could indeed “be construed as potential sources of disorder.”219 Feasting and drinking were excessive, admittedly, but, for authorities, more

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disturbing was the conversation. Talk at these events “was anything but idle.”220 Women could, and did, discourse of their “owne and Husbands powers.”221 They “talkt of their husbands’ frowardnes, some shewed their maids’ sluttishnes, othersome deciphered the costlines of their garments, some told many tales of their neighbours.”222 They engaged in serious business negotiations as John Paston II’s letter (1472) clearly intended his mother to do in asking that she attend the duchess of Norfolk’s lying-in. His “moodre,” he wrote, would be able to “meve my lady [the duchess] moche” and would be someone who would have “auctoryte to conclude for me” or would know “myn entente.”223 They commented on Puritan theological tenets, at times in double entrendres: “Children are blessings, if they be got with zeal by the/brethren, as I have five at home,” the First Puritan avers in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.224 Noting her own tipsy stumbling, she adds humorously, “ ‘Tis but the common aff liction of the faithful; we must/embrace our falls.”225 In Jonson’s The Magnetic Lady (and in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi), secrets enacted in the lying-in chamber “have the potential to rewrite the lines of inheritance,” suggesting the more dangerous complicities possible in female alliances.226 Adrienne Rich’s comment that the “deliberate withdrawal of women from men has almost always been seen as a potentially dangerous or hostile act, a conspiracy, a subversion, a needless and grotesque thing”227 sums up reason enough, perhaps, for some town governments of the sixteenth century to assume control of these ritual gatherings and to regulate childbed celebrations. In 1533, Chester passed a law in which “women were no longer permitted to have their customary elaborate childbed or churching ceremonies because of the “gret excesse and superf luose costs and charges” that denied the poorer classes their needs.228 “The law specifically forbade food and wine to be brought to the new mother in childbed or at churching and forbade all women to attend the laboring woman, except for her mother, sisters, and sisters-in-law and the midwife.”229 Wack concludes, “The law thus privatized a woman’s reproductive labor by excluding her friends’ presence during birth (again dividing woman from woman).”230 “At Leicester in 1568 the councillors voted to regulate ‘the superf luous charge and excess’ of feasts ‘for gossips and midwives.’ ”231 There was even an attempt to limit “to twelve the number of women permitted at such gatherings.”232 Jacobean preacher Robert Hill objected to the “ ‘effeminate speeches, wanton behavior, and unseasonable mirth, which often doth accompany such meetings as this.’ ”233 The Bachelor’s Banquet (1603)234 accused wives of the neighborhood of compelling the husband to wait upon the attending women, supplying them with food and drink at enormous expense even as they abuse him. Even as late as 1683 in the Women’s Advocate we find this response to a

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husband’s “aversion to women’s sociability during lying-in,”: “for gossips to meet . . . at a lying–in, and not to talk, you may as well dam up the arches of London Bridge, as stop their mouths at such a time. ‘Tis a time of freedom, when women . . . have a privilege to talk petty treason.”235 Site is a context that confers meaning. It allows a certain liberty that can lead to license, and license (a sphere of too little restraint) is how sites where women gathered would have been perceived by civic and religious authorities. In a sense, every gathering site is a material enactment of speech. It is a co-opting of a material terrain, and like speech, it becomes a field of power. It is a place where knowledge is exchanged. Space can exercise some control over one’s environment, but speech even more so. Speech as unreliable, as mystique, and especially speech as uncontrollable, in any site—in doorways, churchyards, around birthing beds, or in alehouses—can jeopardize both community interests and meaning itself. In its more intimate, casual form of talk, speech is even more dangerous: talk not only communicates; talk transforms. The paramount reason for the centuries of attempts to control not only women’s speech but also the sites fostering their conversation is that within these separate domains, these female alliances, lies the enabling and transforming agency of talk that may “mock rigorous boundaries and make sport of fixed positions, unhinging received meanings.”236 Speech courted even greater perils. It transforms not only boundaries and fixed positions but as RosenstockHuessy claimed, speech can transform ourselves and the world around us. For a patriarchally constructed social order, therefore, politics, law, and religion are at risk; even meaning itself is at stake.

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CHAPTER 2 THE “IMAGINED WOMAN”

Woman Becomes Sign There is a reason why Dante was so concerned with visualizing speech. In Canto V, Inferno, he asks Francesca “how and at what point at the time of sweet sighs did love concede that you should be aware of your hesitant desires?”1 He then shows how the literary description of Lancelot’s succumbing to love led Francesca and Paolo to feel the intimacy of the moment. Significantly, however, what “overcame” them (ci vinse) is the visualization of the famous literary kiss. They are unable to continue with the reading; yielding to the scene, they materialize the kiss. What was once a literary sin now becomes an immoral act in a Christian world. For the Middle Ages, sight—visualization—was the sense most critically involved among all the senses in the effort to know.2 For that reason, perhaps, Dante placed extraordinary stress on sight and eye imagery through the Commedia: how the pilgrim sees is an expression of the pilgrim’s struggle to know. The attempt to convey the meaning of the Commedia’s vision was itself an epistemological struggle. Indeed, the poem’s structure, itself, is based upon the increase of sight. The visualization of a celebrated kiss leading to poetic and artistic celebrations of legendary loves and (immoral) passions is easy enough to fathom. However, what is the link between the visual representation of women’s speech and the fact that sexuality became the “single literary and artistic means of defining the nature of women”3 from just prior to the Middle Ages and, indeed, up until the twentieth century? Presumably, classifying women as “virgin, widows, or married”4 constituted a socioeconomic designation, but it was clearly a classification determined by sexual activity. Nevertheless, the fact is that there were other highly visible alternate categories of women, namely, their work professions. Not only were women engaged in a variety

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of respectable professions, domestic, urban, and rural,5 but they were also engaged in a fairly extensive number of professions. One startling statistic indicates that “in Frankfort between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries women participated in about 201 occupations, of which they monopolised 65, predominated in 17, and numbered equally with men in three. In fifteenth-century Strasbourg women figure in the employment lists as ironsmiths, silversmiths, wheelwrights, grain merchants, gardeners, dressmakers and barrelmakers.”6 Fourteenth-century Ghent lists “many women among collectors, lenders and hoteliers,” and Paris archives document at least “fifteen exclusively female trades,” at the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries.7 Women ran professions, too. In medieval London, for example, women in silkworking ran workshops, trained apprentices, and “invested large amounts of money in purchases of raw materials and trading ventures.”8 So, too, widows of guild masters “supervised workshops, [and] took on apprentices and journeymen.” 9 The first question to be explored, therefore, is that, given women’s distinct profile of civic and economic responsibility, how did sexuality become the nearly exclusive literary and artistic means of representing the nature of women for some 700 years? Second, how did the representation of women’s speech become so closely linked—in theological, sociological, and literary texts—to women’s sexuality? Identity is not only constructed in the context of relations of meaning but also within relations of power that are themselves organized through institutionalized discourses. Positing an identity, then, requires situating one’s self or an other within that system or network of connected discourses (e.g., religious beliefs, medical theories, academic discourse— especially in its role in the production of knowledge) inscribed in material practices and (dominant) institutions. I want to explore a particular system and network of material practices whose behavioral codes, habits, drives, and reasonings produced, I think, the imagined woman.10 My intention is not to “posit a fixed hierarchy of cause and effect,” but, rather, to take Catherine Gallagher’s principle seriously, namely, to “trace the connections among texts, discourses, power,” and “the constitution of subjectivity,”11 which, here, is the imagined woman. Toward this end, I am guided by two major questions: first, what do these “texts” reveal about the links between language, knowledge, and power in the medieval culture? And, second, what image of the female person or what construct of women, do the texts imply? Both questions entail two, further, simpler ones (candidly modeled on New Historicism’s approach to text interpretation, including, naturally, history itself as text): if knowledge supports power, what are the structured power relations suggested by the

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“text”? And how do those vested with power attempt to curb any subversion of their power, and, ultimately, their authority? To locate the connections between language, knowledge, and power and the medieval construct of the imagined woman, one would, presumably, look toward Christian discursive practices concerning human sexuality whose language and doctrines surely exerted the greatest power in shaping women’s identity. Merry Wiesner’s study unsurprisingly concludes that “Christianity was the most important source of ideas about women for early modern Europeans.”12 What is interesting, however, is that early Christianity had unambiguously “affirmed sexuality as good.”13 Of course, certain moral limits were placed on it, particularly the modified “stoic idea that sexual intercourse could be justified only by its procreative function.”14 This precept turned out to be no mere cross-cultural borrowing of a philosophical idea. Not only did it usher in a new sexual ethic but also, inasmuch as that ethic was an expression of the Stoic’s repudiation of pleasure, it would lead to rigorous social controls and to an interpretation of the Bible “in such a way as to justify the repression of most sexual practices”—a new sexual ideal, in other words.15 Eventually, the monasteries would be the place where the Church would create “living examples of the new sexual [ethic or] ideal.”16 Indeed, by the High Middle Ages, sexual morality as a central Christian issue will have, in fact, become one of the strongest motivating forces for the convergence of certain historically specific discourses— discourses that, as Foucault17 has argued, created meaning systems [for women] through their discursive practices and dominated the way in which society defined and organized itself. Through such practices, those meaning (or knowledge) systems achieved the status and currency of “truth.”18 The specific discourses and their discursive practices touching upon our thesis, are these: 1) the mandate of celibacy for secular priests as well as for monks, 2) the elevation of marriage to a sacramental status, 3) the rediscovery and promulgation of Aristotle’s works, 4) the establishment of canon law as “an independent juristic science,”19 and 5) the reestablishment of the system of primogeniture. This chapter will focus chief ly on the first discursive practice, the mandate of celibacy, with a glance at a second practice, the sacramentalizing of marriage. The practice of celibacy for secular priests had been a desideratum for centuries, but never quite received complete consensus when the issue arose in various councils. However, the renewed war against clerical marriage during the Gregorian Reform,20 reaching its peak in the twelfth century, changed that, and the subsequent Lateran decrees of 1123 and 1139 “transformed clerical marriage from a legally tolerated institution into a canonical crime.”21 As Ruth Mazo Karras observes,

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“A whole new literature developed about the harms of marriage and the importance of chastity to salvation.”22 Literature “supporting virginity and chastity had long existed, directed at monks and nuns, [but] the new body of literature directed at the secular clergy placed a new emphasis on ritual purity.”23 Sexual activity was presented as polluting; women were polluting.24 Indeed, as Karras writes, sexual status was so “central to the distinction between clergy and laity,” that “we may say indeed that chastity was a sexual identity that was constitutive of how individuals would have understood themselves and their role in life.”25 As damaging as must have been what Brundage terms the singular zeal of the reformers for making sex and sexual desire the barrier between the worthy priest and the unworthy one,26 its consequences for women in every sphere were even more disastrous. In the first place, the state of celibacy (and chastity) itself placed monks and clerics in specific opposition to women. Where there had been formerly strong convictions about women’s inferiority, celibacy’s specific opposition now bred hostility and even loathing toward women. Second, “the written word was controlled by the clergy . . . who controlled the f low of knowledge and determined how people conceived of women or, rather, Woman.”27 Sermons, for example, whatever their spiritual lessons, “also served as a prime conduit of misogynistic lore.”28 In his comprehensive study of medieval pulpit literature, G. R. Owst candidly acknowledges the “harsh treatment of women usually meted out by the medieval pulpit.”29 Ultimately, the mandate for celibacy meant that celibate clerics, along with regular monks and secular prelates who were largely cut off from women “and lived and worked in an exclusively male universe, shut up in cloisters and scriptoria, in schools and faculties of theology,”30 would now create the norms and models that would determine women’s place in society.31 Relying on imagination and earlier antifeminist literature, monks, clerics, and prelates represented woman “as a distant, strange, and frightening figure of profoundly contradictory nature.”32 As a result, their literary texts (often aimed at other clerics) generated distorted attitudes toward women—attitudes that in turn generated still more texts inveighing against this “frightening figure.” In a sense, the Christian horror of sex was now, undisguisedly, a horror of women. By so representing women through antifeminist literature, the ecclesiastical hierarchy effectively articulated them into a discursive chain that would ultimately form for Western Europe a national coherent gender narrative that stretched “from the most learned treatises to the most frivolous of Latin poems, from commentaries on Scripture to common proverbs,”33 and from clever debates to tales of courtly love. However, that cultural practice references the level of literary activity, for the most

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part. At another level, other material practices—likewise controlled by the ecclesiastical hierarchy—worked even more powerfully to hold this discursive system in place, namely, visual language or art. Visual language, especially art and iconography, had the greatest impact because it was everybody’s language; that is, it was accessible to anyone who could see. As a material practice, visual language had yet a further advantage: it had the most powerful capacity for making the imagined woman a “reality.” In the first place, art and iconography have an almost endless capacity for exploiting language in ways linguistic constructs cannot. Linguistic terms attempt to fix a particular meaning, and thus, in some sense, are bent on containing the semantic field. Nevertheless, linguistic terms as well as art and iconography, in being able to exploit the sign systems available to us, can “name” reality, transforming what is not into what may be.34 Art and iconography are further advantaged by the more emphatic instability of the meaning of signs, themselves, not to mention the multileveled, unstable processes of interaction between sign and viewer. More to the point, however, in the medieval period, art and iconography through the exploitation of their sign systems were engaged in what is commonly regarded as a twentieth- and twenty-first century practice, namely, producing “f loating signifiers.” Floating signifiers, a phrase35 amplified by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, refers to the spirited and openly nervy trend in postmodern culture of detaching a sign or signifier from one concept or referent and attaching that sign to another concept or referent. A simple example is the equation V=2∏ R N over C.36 That equation is the sign or signifier for the physics formula for velocity. But it is also an image, much as is E=M C2. However, in a particular advertisement, that signifier for the equation of velocity was detached from its familiar meaning and attached instead to an ad for athletic shoes for women (San Jose State University, online). This names a new ‘reality’ for the physics formula. Closer to the link between religion and f loating signifier is the “Madonna prayer”37 aimed, a few years ago, at dignified, slum-free, wholesome Toronto. In her film documentary called “Truth Or Dare,” which recorded her “Blonde Ambition” concert tour, Madonna gathered her dancers and musicians nightly for a preconcert prayer circle. The Toronto constables had warned Madonna that she “would be arrested if she performed some of her raunchier numbers,” wrote Terry Mattingly,38 a freelance journalist. He then describes what happens next. “Then the scene shifts. ‘Dear Lord, this is our last night in . . . the fascist state of Toronto,’ says Madonna, before aiming her words at those gathered around her, instead of toward the heavens. ‘I just want you to know that I love you all, that I appreciate everything that you’re doing for me and that I’m here if you need me. Remember that in the

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United States of America there is freedom of speech, and let’s kick a**’.”39 Obviously signifiers aren’t just f loating in this prayer; they’re whizzing past God and the Toronto constables. Madonna had borrowed the signs of prayer (at least, the external ones)—the invoking of a divine spirit, the physical posture of a supplicant, the calling upon a community to share the request (which was, apparently, to kick a**),40 and, having detached these external signifiers of a particular religious reality, she f loated them to a different reality. The signifier “prayer,” particularly in conjunction with the wonderful boundary-pushing name “Madonna” the Pop Singer,41 not only lacks the religiousness of the traditional signifier “prayer” but the religiousness is wholly replaced with erotic and political signifieds. And because in her documentary that scene is replayed hundreds of times in different cities and countries, Madonna has constituted a new identity for “prayer.” Floating signifiers follow a four-stage sequence that Baudrillard calls “four orders.” The first-order signs are thought of as ref lecting a basic reality; the second order: signs now mask or pervert the reality; the third-order signs mask the absence of that reality (e.g., Madonna’s prayer in Toronto is not at all about a relationship with God). Finally, at the level of the fourth order, signs are pure simulation or simulacra—they have no relation to reality. It’s easier to discern how medieval art illustrates this four-stage sequence if we look for a second at postmodern art whose countless examples overtly and f lagrantly cut the stable connection or unity between the signifier and signified. A particularly lucid example dealing with the supernatural occurred in the 1996 “Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou” exhibited at the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles. Among the Haitian pantheon of religious deities there appeared a foothigh “STAR WARS” Darth Vader figure enshrined on a Bizango altar amidst skulls, candles, f lags, beads, and coffins. Bizango altars, considered the most secret of Haitian altars, emphasize life, death, and sexual regeneration, with imagery (ref lecting black magic and Masonic ritual) intended to intimidate in order to instill respect. But, the link between the Vodou divinities’ images/signifiers and their signified spirituality was broken and substituted by an image that didn’t link up in the former coherent chain, as Frederic Jameson42 would put it. The problem isn’t the fact that Western artifacts clutter these sacred spaces; after all, in several cultures f lags and beads are seen as invested with a certain spiritual energy. Nor is it the fact that the new signifier, Darth Vader, eclipses the aggregate signified of Bizango altars in its allusion to a superficial (though culturally powerful) Hollywood “text.” The problem is that the dialectical contradictions that the Vader figure sets up against that pantheon joins two meaning systems that lack a common identity

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of supernatural evil.43 Vader is hyperreal evil. The hyperreal evil does not line up with supernatural evil; that is, it doesn’t line up with the coherent chain of supernatural evil signified by the sacred pantheon. In a religious ‘reality,’ Vader’s evil is meaningless. Obviously, the origins of the pantheon divinities can, themselves, certainly be argued as hyperreal; however, in the present sign-system of the Haitian religious beliefs, the presumption for the believer is that those deities are supernatural, not hyperreal. And it is with the Haitian religious sign-system that the postmodern art exhibit was dealing. Even more closely related to our thesis are contemporary advertising practices of splitting signifiers from signifieds. The difference in contemporary advertising practices is advertising’s aggressive speed, the streamlining of such coding practices44 as well as the frequency of our exposure to the underlying codes. The consequence is that these codes become “familiar, taken for granted and unproblematic.”45 Eventually, in advertising’s evolution, repeated recognition allowed ads to become “briefer and the codes abbreviated and contracted.”46 The significance for our essay is this: the original “lived, organic contexts”47 of signs have been so habitually decontextualized that the relationship between the “material referent systems of daily life and this ‘second order’ language” of f loating signifiers is blurred.48 The boundary between the image, or simulation, and reality has broken down. Not only are the distinctions between real and unreal blurred but, more significantly (if I may pun), the unreal becomes the real. Disneyland is the most famous example;49 so are the widespread Cheers Bars in airports. The best hyperreal “reality” surely must be the fact that two Cheers actors won their lawsuit claiming that two life-size talking robots at a chain of Cheers-styled airport bars co-opted their signature characters.50 The effects of employing f loating signifiers in such a fashion are what underlie the successful production of the imagined woman in the Middle Ages. One of the most potent and ubiquitous representations of women– largely impelled by the reasoning and motivating forces of celibacy— was their portrayal as either potential sin or the cause of sin, visualized through sculpture adorning the front of cathedrals, through paintings, and through manuscript illuminations. One such illumination, The Ladder of Virtues, a miniature from Herrad of Hohenbourg’s twelfth-century Hortus deliciarum (garden of delights), is particularly instructive. There, Christians are seen desperately struggling “to make their way up [the ladder] toward perfection.”51 “Out of six reasons [for the various figures falling off the ladder] three have to do with the presence of women.”52 The visual language is seductively catechetical. The monk, the recluse, and the hermit who occupy the higher rungs appear to have climbed up the ladder with

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their backs to the rungs, fully facing, as they topple, the cause of their struggle, namely “the power of wealth, the desire for a comfortable bed, and excessive attention dedicated to a kitchen garden.”53 The suggestion in their posture is that from the beginning their eyes never left the cause of their struggle. The artistic coup, however, lies with the depiction of the cleric. Unlike the three religious on the rungs above him, the cleric

Figure 2.1 The Ladder of Virtues, Herrad of Hohenbourg, Hortus deliciarum.

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Figure 2.2 The Serpent Deceives Adam and Eve, Cambridge, St. John’s College Library, MS K.26, fol. 4r. Reprinted by permission of the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge.

has begun his climb facing the ladder’s rungs. He has set his back to his temptation, namely, the amica clerici (girlfriend) seen calling to him from the city walls. So magnetic, however, is the attraction of this elegant woman that the cleric’s body is virtually contorted in his struggle to resist her. Although his feet are planted forward, if precariously, on the ladder’s rung, the rest of his body is somersaulting backwards, literally bending back like a rubbery horseshoe, with his face and therefore his gaze toward the woman. Apparently, even with their backs toward women, no cleric was safe. But notice how the f loating signifiers operate: the amica clerici appears to begin as a “cause” of sin, but within the artistic narrative, she has moved to the next order whereby she represents the force of sin itself as we see in her effect upon the cleric. Indeed, within the relationship of sign and viewer, the viewer can regard her as sin itself not only because she signifies spiritual corruption but also because as a living embodiment of that corruption she exerts a physical force: the cleric’s body is not merely metaphorically distorted, it is represented as physically distorted in ‘reality.’

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Undoubtedly, the illustration in the Middle Ages that most powerfully promoted the imagined woman is the one in which the original lived religious context of devil-as-serpent signifying sin became transformed into woman as signifier of sin. I must emphasize here that I am not speaking of the demonization of women; that is wholly another concept. This discussion has, all along, been focused on the way in which certain widespread material and discursive practices representing women were themselves subjugated by particular alternative discourses producing an imagined woman. Specifically, I have been examining why material practices such as women’s work in respectable domestic and public industries, or the culture’s historical memory of women as mothers or maidens or wives were subjugated by and re-imagined by the sexual ethic of the ideal celibate and by the signifying practices of the sacrament of marriage (among other hegemonic practices). And I am suggesting that this construct of “woman” whereby the original lived religious context of devil-as-serpent signifying sin became woman as signifier of sin—the imagined woman—resulted chief ly from the convergence of two dominant meaning-systems: the mandate of celibacy for priests and monks, and the elevation of marriage to a sacramental status, leading to a pronounced hostility toward women’s speech. Significantly, in Christian iconography and long before the early Middle Ages, the serpent as Devil was “unambiguously male.”54 (My focus here is limited solely to the serpent associated with the “temptation and fall of man” in Genesis 3.)55 Of the Eastern tradition (which was incorporated into the Western tradition), H. A. Kelly writes, “As for the serpent’s sex, apart from the fact that the Hebrew word for serpent (nahash) is in the masculine gender, the Eden serpent was thought to have been very male, since it actually lusted after Eve, thus maintaining . . . its reputation as a phallic symbol.”56 In the twelfth century, the devil-as-serpent is still chief ly represented as male or as solely a serpent. In the Old English text of Oxford Bodleian Library MS Junius 11 (ca. 1000) Satan remains in hell. His subordinate, whom he sends to Eden, is described in these lines: “Wearp hine þa on wyrmes lic. and wand him þa ymbutan/ þone deaðes beam. Þurh deof les cræft” (Old English Gen. ll. 491–2). “He turned him[self ] then into the body of a serpent and wound himself then about the tree of death by means of the power/cunning of a devil.” The serpent’s gender is unmistakably male (“hine,” and “him”). In the St. Alban’s Psalter (ca. 1130), the devil is drawn in a human-like form with wings, but the serpent, emerging from his mouth to tempt Eve, is simply a serpent. The same is true of the Anglo-Norman play Le Mystère d’Adam, a mid-twelfth century play; the devil plays himself.

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By the thirteenth century, however, a major change begins to take place: the devil-as-serpent comes to be represented in art not as male but only as female or as simply a snake.57 The signifier of snake-as-devil is suppressed and becomes attached to “woman.” Snake-as-devil is now snake-as-woman. Remarkably, regardless of how vaguely drawn the serpent-devil was and regardless of whether its gender was clearly feminine, nearly all references to it in accompanying texts were male (“he”).58 So encoded in the culture’s imagination is the gender of the serpent as female that the disjuncture between referencing as male what are clearly the images of female serpent-devils on the same page or the same text is absolutely unproblematic for viewers or readers. To borrow Prasenjit Duara’s phrase,59 the continuity in code mis-signals a changed practice. That is, the signified, continually referred to as male, mis-signals the signifier who is clearly female. We see this in “Eva und Adam” by the thirteenth-century German poet Lutwin.60 The scene called “Transgression” or “Temptation” portrays the serpent’s head as slender, almost dainty, with hair coiffed into bundles above the ears, and crowned with a delicate crown. Nevertheless, the accompanying text refers to this graceful, decorous female serpent-devil as “he.” In the fourteenth-century copy of Speculum Humanae Salvationis in London, British Library, MS. Harley 4996, fol. 4v, the serpent “wears the demure but intricate fillet and braid of an aristocratic maiden,”61 but the gender of the serpent in the text is masculine. The same woman-as-serpent-devil occurs in the Belleville Breviary (ca. 1323), in “Original Sin” by Hugo van der Goes (1467–8), as well as in “Original Sin” by Raffello (1517) and in “The Fall of Man” by Hendrik Goltzius (1616).62 The same split between the signifier and signified is even more theatricalized when serpents of the Temptation scene are given not only women’s faces but also, at times, her upper body, for example, in “Temptation, Fall, and Expulsion” from Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (Musée Condé, Chantilly, MS 65, Limbourg Brothers 1413–16) where her red hair, long and wavy, and white breasts exactly repeat the image of Eve in the same picture. In the temptation scene in the west facade of Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, the head and breasts and shoulders of the serpent dominate the scene as the upper body twists with elegant, erotic defiance. The same drama appears in Michelangelo’s “The Fall and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden” (1508–12), and in “Temptation of Adam and Eve” by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1526). On at least one occasion, in a miniature that prefaces an English psaltery (St. John’s College, MS K. 26, fol. 4r, ca. 1270–1280), the serpent wears “an attractive little bonnet with collar,” borrowing from women’s fashion.63

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Obviously, these texts reveal how the connections between visual language, knowledge and power could construct a national gender narrative that overdetermined the image of women. They disclose something more disquieting, however, if one asks why this coercive discourse. Why this conf licting aesthetic that speaks of the masculine nature of devilas-devil but depicts a feminine nature of devil-as-serpent? The more obvious reason is the one that Bonaventure (1217–1274 A. D.) proposes. Bonaventure “admits that if the devil had appeared in human form, it would have been easier for him to have engaged Eve in conversation, but divine providence was unwilling to permit him so advantageous a strategy, and he had to be content with a compromise, namely, the body of a serpent, which nevertheless had a virgin’s face, as the Venerable Bede asserts.”64 Bonaventure clearly conceives of the devil as male but regards its woman’s face as God’s strategy. However, his position cannot account for the striking changes to the representation of this scene in the art and literature of the next few centuries. The first significant change is what I call the “liberating Adam” gesture. Temptation scenes depicting only a female Eve and a female serpent but no Adam now begin to appear. The artist of one of the copies of Speculum humanae salvationis (published as A Medieval Mirror)65 presents a temptation scene showing only Eve and the basilisk snake with a woman’s head. Both female faces are facing each other, absorbed in each other. The same duo is seen in the Woodcuts of the 1479 Peter Drach edition of Speculum humanae salvationis (Munich: Bayrische Staatsbibliotek MS.Clm 146, plate 4). Bonnell66 reprints plate 4, which depicts only Eve and the (winged) serpent whose face is clearly female and whose breasts, interestingly enough, resemble both the shape and size of the apple in Eve’s hand. Here, too, the female serpent and Eve, face to face, seem captivated with each other. In London, British Library, MS. Harley 4006, fol. 4v, a fourteenth-century copy of the Speculum humanae salvationis, Eve is alone again, face to face with the serpent who is a “beautiful bluebanded temptress.”67 And finally, in yet another copy of the Speculum humanae salvationis,68 the temptation scene, a woodcut, depicts solely the long-haired Eve and a serpent who “looks like a royal queen wearing robes and a crown . . . ; only the spotted bat’s wings behind her back and the serpent’s tail winding out from beneath her skirts make her something more than a noble queen of courtly romance.”69 Removing Adam from the temptation scene more than gestures toward exculpation. It is a metaphysical statement: Adam is now not present to the sin. He is present only to the beauty of Eve. Increasingly texts and artistic representations will distance his physical presence near the serpent by omitting references

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to both in the same passage or in the same artistic frame. What becomes emphasized, instead, will be Adam’s participation as an act of love and a desire to please Eve. Second, the motive for the serpent’s assuming a female face (and form) had traditionally been linked with nature of the temptation itself—to be like God. Vainglory, excessive pride in oneself and one’s achievement— the vice ascribed to women—would secure Eve’s downfall. Now the moral interpretation of the female serpent becomes chief ly linked to women’s speech. Sign Becomes Reduced to Dangerous Speech In a fifteenth-century manuscript of The Mirour of Mans Saluacioune,70 at first the usual “vainglory” reasons motivate Eve’s part in the “fall of man:” she, trusting the devil, “wald be like to God” 71 whereas Adam had eaten only “for luf ” and that “he ne hoped neuere the more to be like God olyve” (ll. 351–2) (“he never hoped to be like the living God”). Lest we miss that point, the narrator removes any ambiguity in the next two lines: “The woman therefore sinned more than the man Because she thought herself capable of being made like God.” (ll. 353–4)

However, it soon becomes evident that neither Eve nor her pride is the subject of this account of the temptation and fall. Woman is. Within the passage’s 39 lines (ll. 320–359), the poet-narrator refers to Eve herself only four times, but to “woman/women” ten times.72 The subject is woman; sin is woman. And the nature of the sin, pride, and vainglory becomes eclipsed by the sin of “glosinge”—woman’s speech (l. 356). The poet-narrator says that “to the aforesaid sin, she also [added] another full great, when she would betray her husband by ‘glosing’ ” (ll. 355–6).73 He adds, “for although the Bible’s text openly does not write it, no doubt she brought him in with “faging wordes white” 74 (l. 357). Yet, a third time he refers to women’s speech, saying to his audience, “O man, be warre in this of wikked wommans glosing” (l. 359). Then he widens the scope of disaster caused by women’s glosing, noting that “Sampsoune, David,” “wisest Salomoune” (l. 361–2) and the rest of “mankynde” (l. 368) could not escape “wommans arte” (l. 363).75 In the York Cycle, Play 6, (ca. 1378–mid-sixteenth century), Eve points out to Adam, now openly blaming her for the loss of Paradise, that

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if he had known that she was making a wrong choice he should have tried to change her course. Adam responds (ll. 147–154): Thurgh ille counsaille thus casten ar we In bitter bale. Nowe God late never man aftir me Triste woman tale. For certis me rewes fulle sare That euere I shulde lerne at thi lare, Thy counsaille has casten me in care, That thou me kende.76

Both the alliteration and the rhyme scheme here conceptualize woman’s speech as a calamity whose effects for humankind are coterminus with the loss of Paradise. “Counsaille” and “casten,” may not be brilliant poetry, but they are a brilliant catechesis: the calculated alliteration of “counsaille” and “casten” deliberately mimics the act of expulsion from Paradise. And the line is repeated at the end of the passage. Because alliteration calls attention to the relationship between “counsaille,” “casten,” and “care,” the hearer/reader can scarcely miss the direct linking of women’s speech (“counsaille”) to human tribulation (“casten” and “care”). The censorious exhortation, “now may God never let [any] man after me “triste” women “tale” is somewhat brutal in its double entendre. Not only does it harshly sweep aside the value of women’s speech, but it disturbingly links women’s speech with her sexual organs. The rhyme scheme itself becomes a weapon, adversely critiquing women’s speech: “bale” rhyming with “tale,” and “sare” with “lare.” Finally, in the Towneley (Wakefield) Cycle of Mystery Plays, Play 28, the Thomas of India play, when Mary Magdalene reports that Christ has arisen, Peter and Paul denounce it because the news comes from a woman (ll. 29–38)77: Paul. And it is wretyn in oure law/ ‘Ther is no trust in womans saw,/ No trustfaith to belefe;/ ffor with thare quayntyse and thare gyle/ Can thay laghe and wepe som while,/ And yit nothyng theym grefe.’/ In oure bookes thus fynde we wretyn,/ All manere of men well it wyttyn,/ Of women on this wyse;/ Till an appyll she is lyke—” And at lines 47–52: Thefor trast we not trystely,/ Bot if we sagh it witterly / Then wold we trastly trow;/ In womans saw affy we noght,/ ffor thay ar fekill in word and thoght,/ This make I myne avowe.

So great a threat is women’s speech perceived to be, that Peter and Paul fail to pick up on the astounding significance of Mary Magdalene’s news; instead, they appear to sidetrack themselves by launching into a

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conventional denunciation of women’s speech. This is no mere digression, however. Within a passage initially focused upon Christ’s death and resurrection, the playwright has cunningly connected Christ’s death to “womans saw” (speech), and to the “apple” that woman is like. (The connection between women’s gaze/sexuality and the apple was already a motif—note the Ancrene riwle’s (ca. 1225–1230) dictum, “when thou lookest upon a man thou art in Eve’s case; thou lookest upon the apple,” 78 —thus, here at once, we see here the links between women’s speech, gaze, sexuality, and Christ’s death.) What we are witnessing, I think, is the evolving of the image of the Fall of Humankind from once functioning as a critique of humankind to serving, now, as a critique of the nature of women, specifically women as speaking beings. Once encoded as evil, the serpent signifier began to assume more emphatically certain signifieds generated by distinct aspects of its physical nature, namely, its sinuousness, its undulating motion and the seductiveness of its basilisk stare, hinting at not only erotic seductiveness but rhetoric-as-seduction as well—qualities long recognized in the figure of the serpent but not stressed in the earlier iconography of the Fall of Humankind. (Within a century, however, Milton will speak of the serpent’s sinuousness as an analogue to rhetoric’s sinuousness).79 What paintings and illustrations now encode is the perceived erotic nature of evil ‘common’ to both serpent and Eve/ woman. The breakdown of the boundary between the mythological model (the serpent) and ‘reality’ (Eve) is now achieved. Distinctions between real and unreal are now blurred, and serpent as woman becomes interchangeable with woman as serpent, especially evident in medieval homilies and commentaries. It’s a postmodern moment. The four levels of Baudrillard’s are realized. First order: in religious culture, the “serpent” ref lects the ‘reality’ of evil/devil or otherworldly power. Second order: the “serpent” masks or perverts the basic ‘reality,’ now representing Eve (more than Adam) as signifying the otherworldly power of evil. Third order: “serpent”-as-Eve/(human)woman masks absence of non-human, otherworldly power; the viewer perceives Eve, not the biblical devil, as signifying the source of evil in the world. Fourth order: “serpent” assumes broader gender representation; now illustrated and theatricalized as woman: woman-image bears no relation to any ‘reality’; serpent-as-woman is now woman-as-serpent, it is its own pure simulacrum. Hyperreality is achieved. Yet that signifier of woman-as-serpent begins to f loat, again, whereby the serpent’s use of speech for evil ends become increasingly emphasized. The ethical dimensions of Eve’s/women’s speaking are now being foregrounded over and beyond the actual sin of disobedience. Woman-serpent-speech

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as a unified body of theory about women is attaining its own discourse, its own meaning-system, its own material practices. Finally, abetting this progression of serpent-as-evil to women-asserpent to woman-as-perilous speech was the extraordinary relationship between iconography and “blockbuster” theological texts. Sometime around 1170 a radical change in the written tradition of commentary on the serpent in the Garden occurred. The source is thought to have been Peter Comestor’s (d. 1178) Historia scholastica (1168–78?), a paraphrase of the Bible, supplemented with additional texts from Scripture and legend. In his commentary on Genesis, Comestor wrote80 “Elegit etiam quoddam genus serpentis, ut ait Beda, virgineum vultum habens, quia similia similibus applaudunt.” (“He also chose a certain kind of serpent, as Bede says, having a virgineal [maiden-like] face because like approves of/ favors like”). However, the source in Bede has never been found. After decades of research in Bede’s works, J. K. Bonnell wrote, “I have not been able to find in Beda anything remotely suggesting the phrase which follows Comestor’s ut ait Beda.”81 Bonnell speculates a possible misreading by Comestor of a corrupted phrase in pseudo-Bede, Questiones super Genesim. (PL 93.276). The problem was that Comestor’s Historia was a “blockbuster,” “the most famous book of the Middle Ages.”82 In fact, it soon became a university “setbook,” and by 1228, it was one of the three texts required for theological study by the mandate of the Paris General chapter.83 The high volume of the Historia’s use by both clergy and laity—evident in citations in medieval wills as well as in its high number of extant manuscripts84 —meant that its apparent misreading of Bede was multiplied thousands of times by readers whose own works themselves then became widely read and multiply copied. Vincent of Beauvais’ (ca. 1190–ca. 1264 A. D.) Speculum Naturale 85 and the exceptionally popular Speculum humanae salvationis (ca. 1324), also known as the liber laicorum (the laypersons’ book),86 are two such that come to mind. Literary texts, too, ref lect this change: Piers the Plowman describes the serpent as “ylik a lusard with a lady visage,”87 and the fourteenth-century Chester Plays’ scene (l. 208) not only assigns lines to the devil, stressing the female aspect of his guise: feete as an edder, a medens face— her kinde I will take. (ll. 195–6)

but gives stage directions that the serpent have the “Superius volucris penna, serpens pede forma, forma puella”88 (“upper part with the feathers of a bird, in the feet serpent-shaped, in the form, a girl”).

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In turn, these texts were greatly abetted by the moralized Bibles of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—essentially picture books that illustrated events from the Old and New Testaments. In one of the two earliest surviving examples of this Bible moralisée, the face of the serpent tempting Adam and Eve is wholly identical to Eve’s face and head, wavy hair and all. The staying power of this convention of the woman-headed serpent in the Mystery Plays lay in its practical nature: in the medieval plays “it was easier to put a human being on stage dressed up as a snake.”89 One of the best pieces of evidence testifying to the dissolution of the boundary between image and reality and the unproblematic acceptance of the underlying streamlined codes signifying woman as serpent-devil replacing the traditional devil-as-serpent is found in surviving glosses in a play text that recommend that “an ideal reptile should also have female breasts.”90 The sacramentalizing of marriage was mentioned, above, as a second discursive strategy shaping the imagined woman; it is worth a glimpse. Without getting into the complex web of forces that resulted in the elevation of the institution of marriage to a sacramental status, we know from documents, wills, and letters that in marital relationships many men expressed genuine affection for their wives, and many wives, especially wives of urban craftsmen, enjoyed a certain recognized status because of the importance of their contribution to the household’s daily needs as well as to the labor output.91 One would think, then, that sacramentalizing the institution of marriage not only ref lected an increase of humane relations92 in marriage but would also serve as a way of spiritualizing the institution.93 Yet, the wedding iconography of the period explicitly sends quite a different message. Earlier, in classical antiquity, wedding iconography (often depicted on sarcophagi, and/or diptychs and coins) usually ref lected harmony and certain civic virtues. These were the virtues of the communitas from which a marriage benefitted and to which it contributed. However, in the early Christian period, the desire of the Western church for its clergy to remain celibate led it to encourage a negative view of marriage. Paul’s oft repeated view (I Cor. 7:7–9) was appropriated incorrectly to reinforce that view. Even Joseph and Mary’s married status received little comment. Indeed, “until the eleventh century representations of Joseph and Mary’s wedding were extremely rare.”94 Thus, despite its elevation to a sacramental status, the medieval Church’s discomfort about “taking a . . . positive view of marriage”95 was often visible in its iconography. In fact, wedding iconography “had such negative overtones that it just as easily served the purpose of portraying diabolical temptation, as a twelfth-century capital in Saint Madeleine’s church at Vézelay shows.”96 In that carving St. Benedict is shown being

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tempted into marriage. Where the priest traditionally stood between the groom and the bride, there is the figure of a devil. The priest’s customary gesture of placing the woman’s hand in the man’s hand is replaced in an identical gesture by the devil’s attempting to place the woman’s hand in Benedict’s, encouraging, thereby, “an infernal ‘wedding.’ ”97 Above Benedict’s head is inscribed the caption, Sanctus Benedictus, and above the devil, the (ironically?) ersatz priest, the sculptor has chiseled diabolus. What is most significant, however, is that above the woman’s head the sculptor likewise has chiseled diabolus. The underlying new code of woman-as-devil is wholly taken-for-granted and unproblematic, even though it wrenches women as wives from their lived reality. A similar interpretation occurs on a capital at a cathedral, the same period, in Civaux, Vienne.98 A final question presses itself for the briefest of speculations: what is the relationship between the production of the “imagined woman” and the construct of a sexualized God as intensified from post Middle Ages up to the present? Whatever their initial impulse, whether noble, pragmatic, or religious, each of these pressures—the mandate of celibacy for clerics as well as monks, the elevation of marriage to the status of a sacrament, the rediscovery of Aristotle’s works,99 the establishment of canon law as an independent juristic science, and the re-introduction of primogeniture—became the forces behind ecclesiastical and secular laws for constructing women’s identity, and for controlling women’s sexuality as well as women’s access to power. In the (Foucaultian) spirit of dissolving period boundaries and crossing cultures, we confront the fact that each of these discourses ref lects, classically, the Ortner and Whitehead findings, namely, where “male prestige depend[s] heavily upon women’s activities and/or men’s relations with women,” attitudes and beliefs regarding female pollution, disruptiveness, and threat are developed.100 Not only are female activities and/or the female sexual deportment deeply scrutinized by the men but also in some societies (e.g., the Andalusian) the man’s concern for maintaining his prestige “takes the form of an almost paranoid obsession with the sexual conduct of his womenfolk.”101 And in both Andalusia and in the New Guinea Highlands, where male prestige activities depend upon the female sphere of activities,102 the “women are portrayed as highly threatening creatures who are capable of, indeed intent upon, destroying a man’s social standing and even his health and survival.”103 Furthermore, these are not simple practices of a social dimension or of an anthropological dimension. Current application of cultural theorists, e.g., Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida, would wholly support Leslee Nadelson and Stanley Brandes’s theses that the social dimension (or socioecclesiastical or sociospiritual) is “too deeply mutually implicated [with the erotic

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dimension] to be passed off as entirely different dimensions.”104 When Nadelson and Brandes examined “gender lore and gender-related myth,” they found “a world of status-anxious psyches, perseverating on the ways in which the erotic may threaten cherished social positions, and trying to imagine ways in which this might be forestalled.”105 By “perserveration” is meant the tendency of these individuals to persist in a particular mental activity, unable to or lacking the ability to shift easily to another at a change in stimulus. For example, the phrase lineage honor is connected with the position of the palace eunuch staff of Imperial China. According to our traditional sociohistorical training, that position has long been assigned to the social dimension (or sociopolitical). Yet, just how “social” is the social consideration behind the Sudanese women who in the name of lineage honor readily enforce “the brutal Pharaonic circumcision upon their daughters and granddaughters.”106 As for the status of palace eunuch staff, how separate is the social dimension from the erotic dimension in a position striven for by the many “eager young men from the provinces show[ing] up to apply, carrying their genitals in a jar.”107 The critical point to be drawn from this is “not just that sexuality is socially shaped and, in the course of this, inevitably curbed, but that the forms of society are themselves eroticized.”108 The mandate of celibacy, the elevation of the secular institution of marriage to the status of a sacrament, and the other institutions named—each of these is eroticized, and each of these shaped and was shaped by, enforced and was enforced by sexual discourse and sexual doctrine. Clearly, the process is circular: the social institutions themselves are shaped and structured by the very sexual practices and perceptions that those social institutions have shaped and devised to protect their privileges and their continuity. Given the patristic writers’ discourse on woman and the later medieval discursive practices concerning woman, it is clear what sex/gender the ecclesiastical and socioreligious institutions would have had to conclude that God had to be. And given that the social is deeply implicated with the erotic as the Nadelson and Brandes studies have proven (and as this study of the imagined woman has shown), then a sexualized God is an eroticized God. As with the imagined woman, we have proposed a sexualized God who by definition is not only no “more intricate than the workings of our own mind”109 but is also no greater than our own libido.

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CHAPTER 3 WOMEN, CONVERSATION, CRIME, AND THE COURTS

I

n breaking open the study of depositions, historians uncovered valuable testimonial evidence of women’s active roles in the legal system. Their work allows me to present a further way of looking at such testimonies: first, by repositioning these depositions within a cultural role other than solely a legal one, we can then read them as representative of speech events and reasonably faithful accounts of women’s conversations: that is, witnesses’ testimonies are recorded by a scribe but frequently we are given witnesses’ direct speech. This opens up these oral testimonies to a detailed analysis of women’s interpretative maneuvers and rhetorical courage within legal (masculine) discourse. Second, using discursive analyses in this way (i.e., looking at the use of language as social action, as situated performance, and as expressive of a particular ideology) allows us to witness women devising forms of talk/conversation so as to insist on a different knowledge of their economic and sexual position, to openly negotiate the terms of their subordination (while sometimes being complicit with those terms), and to speak themselves into existence in relation to the present and past of their communities. Finally, women’s depositions give a wealth of detail about the experience of women that literature cannot offer—given literature’s particular purpose and aesthetics. Depositions “record” women’s (and men’s) voices describing life on the streets, in upper bed chambers, in the kitchen, in neighbor’s doorways, describing their struggles holding off sexual attacks, their apprehension for another’s safety, and their personal risk in bringing food or wood or medical help to neighbors. Petitions and Depositions For a woman every petition and every deposition poses a discursive risk. From its opening line a woman is required to situate herself as a female

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subject within the terms of male discourse. And the discourse of the consistory courts1 assumed an ordered society based on masculine ethics within a “social system whose most fundamental assumption, at least in theory, was the natural inequality of its members.”2 Theoretically, depositions were “verbatim transcriptions of responses by defendants and witnesses to questions asked and answered in private without the presence of the litigants or proctors”3 —although privacy did not necessarily ensure truthfulness.4 Yet, the form of the consistory court’s deposition itself already challenges the possibility of an unmediated verbatim account: “depositions were taken in response to written lists of questions (called interrogatories) drawn up in advance”5 —by “church court officials.”6 The words of female witnesses, especially, “were filtered through the minds of male clerks, who might alter their significance when noting them down.” 7 Nevertheless, two factors lend greater credibility to the deposition as a more faithful account of witnesses’ attitudes and observations than our scrupulous caution as researchers has allowed us to stress in the past. First, depositions, while they are indeed composed according to legal phrasing, nevertheless allow witnesses and plaintiffs themselves the greater part in controlling what was included or excluded, and what was emphasized or suppressed. In that respect depositions come as close as we’ll ever get to a record of the voices of women (as well as the voices of nonelite citizens in general: workers, priests, ministers, etc.). Second, in the case of defamation/slander, depositions offering reported conversation were probably carefully recorded because the guilt or innocence of the alleged defamer is determined by the very words themselves. A certain standard of accuracy therefore can be relied upon even though the words cannot wholly mimic the original discourse.8 In the longer and more contested suits, the interrogatories “focused on witnesses’ credit and especially on the vulnerable values of women’s credit.”9 The connection is significant: interrogatories sought to discover answers about a real or apparent disruption of public, civic, or moral stability—a stability long associated with male order/power. Its subversion, on the other hand, was profoundly associated with women’s sexuality. Petitions—particularly those defending oneself against the charge of slander against men—held particular dangers for women. Honorable manhood depended not only on exercising control over his own behavior but also on exercising control “over the sexual behaviour of the women with whom he was associated.”10 “Without the core of a worthy sexual reputation all other contributing facets to male reputation could be meaningless.”11 Margaret Knowsley, for example, had made specific allegations of sexual impropriety against Stephen Jerome, minister at Nantwich, who occasionally employed her. Jerome’s assaults

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took place in the summer and autumn of 1625. Shortly after, she had “very sparingly utter[ed]” some of the particulars “in private unto Alice Powell whom I tooke to be my very good friend.”12 Because these friends spread the story, Knowsley then “became equally vociferous herself, only to retract her allegations throughout much of 1626 when she found the local magistrates determined to blame her rather than the minister for the scandal.”13 By early 1627 her trial, now a defense against Jerome’s prosecution of her for slander, was underway. Despite the fact that the Nantwich judges received “unimpeachable judicial authority” that corroborated Knowsley’s version of events,14 Knowsley was sentenced to public f logging through the streets. The point is that in her petition justifying allegations of sexual harassment, Knowsley must constitute herself within terms already disadvantaging her because those terms require that she constantly refer to her body and her sexuality. In having therefore to refer repeatedly to her body and sexuality, she is likewise evoking for the court and the judge the actual “source” of male anxiety, namely, the dependence of men’s identity on women’s sexual honor— always precarious by nature. All the more striking therefore is her petition. Not only does she manage to define herself against the dominant discourse—insisting on a different knowledge of a woman’s economic and sexual position—but also she interrogates the dominant discourse. First, she had dared to allege judicial corruption advantaging Jerome and illegally confining her and her baby to six weeks in jail. Referencing a previous examination of her by the judges, Knowsley argued, there was nothing sayd to her charge, but the cause was dismissed to the hearing of the Justices of Namptwich Hundred, at their monthly meeting; which sayd justices (never calling your poor petitioner) in her abscence, examined certayne witnesses against her without ministering an oath to them. Upon which examinations, Sir Thomas Delves, being taxed for taking too weake security formerly, (tho upon the same she did appeare) and shee, in regard to her poverty, having an husband and many small children, maintayned onely by his hand-labour, being unable to give better security, the sayd Sir Thomas, upon Sir Robert Cholmondeley his first warrant, committed her to the Gaole of Chester, where she remayned six weekes, and upward, before the Assizes, (leaving many small children at home, and having one sucking on her breast) almost to the utter famishing of herself, and her sayd childe.15

Such specific written allegations were “by definition an act of defiance, especially when openly articulated in detail by a woman.”16 In appropriating legal discourse, a site of male power, Knowsley has exposed it as a site

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of contradictions. The justices’ failure in fundamentals of legal processes such as not requiring oaths of witnesses was one instance, but Knowsley also notes that they examined witnesses in court in her absence, confining her to jail for six weeks not for slander or defamation but because neither she nor her husband could tender any financial security as a bond. And then despite the fact that at the next hearing, “no man coming in to object any thing [against her],”17 and having been discharged once again, she is now being compelled—by one of the local magistrates responsible for hiring Jerome—to appear in court yet again to undergo prosecution for the same charge. Knowsley’s petition is a conscious political act. It is intended to initiate steps to prevent what she sees as a miscarriage of justice by the local administrators. Only later in the petition, in summing up the details of Mr. Jerome’s various sexual assaults and her answers to his attack on her character does she ask for compassion from the judges. Second, Knowsley’s description of her position and her view of the events reveals not only the astonishing number of hours of domestic work done daily on behalf of men, but it also reveals the unacknowledged dependence of men upon women’s work. Every instance in which Jerome importunes her arises out of his anticipation of her domestic service. Knowsley recalls: Mr. Jerome came in accidentally into Ellen Caroles her howse where I was, and being certified (after his inquiry) who I was, desired me to bring some rushes for him into his chamber which I promised him I would, and accordingly did so, and when I had layd downe the rushes before him and was ready to depart, he sayd unto me, good woman, stay a while, I must speake with you, and the substance of his speech was this, that he hadd an inward burning in his body, and to confesse the truth (sayd he) I cannot be satisfied without the use of a woman, though I have skill in phisick I have used al meanes possible I could, and they are not available, and therefore if it please you, you shall be the woman, which if you will yield unto, you shall not loose thereby: and I answered that I was no such woman and that he was deceived in me, and did much wonder that he should speake after that manner unto me.18

Clearly, Jerome depended upon the fact that Knowsley’s poverty compelled her to undertake “piecemeal” work all over the neighborhood. As a minister, he himself had access to the same houses that Knowsley had. Indeed, the very fact that she worked for others represented opportunities for him: “Not long after Mr. Jerome came to wydow Miles her howse where I was sucking the breasts of Mrs Mary Cardy19 [helping in expressing milk from her breast]”20 and accosting her later, Jerome notes, “that I

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was one that used to suck womens breasts therefore in pretence thereof I might come to him at any time without suspition.”21 Intriguingly, the fact is that men’s sexual activity was a topic of women’s conversation—at least in this village. According to others’ depositions, Knowsley herself discussed her relationship with Jerome “while walking with Dorothy Clowes down Birch Lane; meandering with Alice Clark in the Ridley field; making a stack of hay with Anne Davies; kneeling by the fireside knitting with William Barnes’ two daughters; and, yes, even with her midwife, Jane Whickstead, as she went into labour.”22 Despite sermons, conduct books and treatises inveighing against “gossip” and “wicked words,” and the risk of their being themselves accused of slander and facing court trials and disgrace, women discussed men’s sexuality. “Mary Brown and Ellen Bradwall fell ‘into conference and speeches of the ministers within Nantwich’ around the latter’s sick-bed. A street squabble between Alice Powell and Marjery Bickerton . . . was easily quelled when ‘at last they fell a talking of Mr Jerome.’ ”23 Other women’s conversations hinted at Jerome’s being “found with another man’s wife with his britches round his heels,”24 while still another imagined “Jerome had once ‘done penance with a white sheet around him and a white rodd in his hand.’ ”25 David Turner’s view that men’s sexual violations could provoke strong social disapproval is true, although, as Amy Froide points out, “the punishment and stigma undergone by ‘immoral’ men was almost always less than that experienced by ‘immoral’ women.”26 Disapproval is evident, of course. Yet, there is a broader critique also at play in these conversations. Mary Brown’s and Ellen Bradwall’s exchange about the “ministers within Nantwich” seems to strengthen Patrick Collinson’s remark that a “respectable clerical marriage was almost a contradiction in terms.”27 Clearly implicit, too, is evidence of the failure of the “barrage of advice about correct behaviour,” the “incessant calls to stay home,” and ubiquitous directive “to speak only when spoken to.”28 Ironically, the actions of the ministers, the justices of peace, and the local administrators provoked conversations that could only bring into relief the very subject that they strove to suppress, namely, “elite male anxiety about women.”29 Far from being silenced, these women’s public critique demonstrates cognitive freedom and a sense of their collective selves. Nor is Knowsley’s a simple petition privately communicated to the Justices. It is a dialogue with the community. Community regulations are communities’ forms of controlling its inhabitants’ moral and civic behavior. The fact that public apologies (or a form of them) were part of sentences rendered for defamation put everyone on notice that

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“defamation was construed as a neighbourhood sin.”30 Slanderous words were, indeed, aimed at a particular neighbor’s moral behavior; however, “open scandal damaged the whole street, neighbourhood, or parish. This collective aspect of reputation weighed heavily with contemporaries”; indeed, whenever “a neighbourhood, parish, or town suffered a damaged reputation, its inhabitants might find themselves exposed to jeers and abuse in markets and other public places.”31 It is to this “collective aspect of reputation” that Margaret Knowsley’s 2,500 word petition had addressed itself. Just as did Agnes Barons’s deposition of July 1636. Barons, about 24 years old, was one of two maidservants in the kitchen with Audrey Rowell when Rowell spotted Humphrey Harris at the kitchen window loading gravel. Rowell observed aloud that Annie Geffrey had cost William Harris (Humphrey’s father), 40 pounds. The hint at sexual misconduct was unmistakable, particularly since Rowell then added that “there was not such an old whoremaster more, in the country.”32 The plaintiff, William Harris, sued Rowell, and called upon both Barons and Elizabeth Mills (the other maidservant) to give testimony. But Barons’s own sexual character and financial honesty now came under attack. As part of Rowell’s counsel’s defense strategy, they charged that she had been brought before a justice of peace by Mr. Done, her previous master, who had accused her of leaving his employ without permission and of stealing food worth 18 pence (considered grand larceny).33 Rowell’s counsel also alleged that Barons had borne an illegitimate child four years before. Simple and direct as Barons’s response appears to be, it was, in fact, a careful threading through the troubled terrain of national debates about the economic and religious identity of women. The issues concerned “masterless women” versus women as subject to a master’s authority, perceived as parallel to that of husbands, fathers, and the church.34 Linked to the economic independence of women were fears about women’s sexual freedom (a view clearly subscribed to by Rowell’s defense counsel). Barons’s cultural experience, however, could reasonably suppose the “right to mobility,” an economic value that gave servants “their most powerful weapon in negotiations for better wages and working conditions, whether from the current master or a different employer.”35 Nevertheless, women’s labor was “perceived as less ‘free’ than that of their male counterparts,”36 and, in fact, local officials could “order unmarried women between the ages of twelve and forty years into service, for whatever wages the officials thought fit.”37 In Barons’ own lifetime, women without employment, “found masterless,” were typically “ordered to the House of Correction for a whipping.”38 Seventeenth-century court records—contemporary with Barons’s quitting of Mr. Done’s service— “are littered with orders to masterless individuals, frequently women,

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to put themselves into service.”39 Consequently, despite Barons’s having given her master the usual three months’ notice of her intention to quit his service, presumably intending then to work for a Mr. Pomery in the same parish, he could expect the law to support his refusal to part with her. Barons’s answer is not simply personal, it is political: And [Mr Done] did procure a process from Mr Cabell [ justice of peace] to call [me] And [I] went to the justice, and there Mr Done did charge [me] that [I] had made a covenant to serve him, and that he would not release [me] of his service. And [I] then did refuse to go to his service, and denied any such promise, as [I] justly might. And then Mr Cabell told Mr Done that he [Mr Done] had nothing to do with [my] service, except he could charge [me] with any wrong [I] had done in [my] service, or had stolen anything. Whereto Mr Done answered that he would not charge [me] with anything. Yet afterwards in [the] presence of Mr Cabell, Mr Done did say to [me] that he could charge [me] for a piece of beef which [I] gave away at his door. And then Mr Cabell examining the matter farther, Mr Done said that [I] gave away a piece of beef at his door to a poor woman worth 18 pence. And [I] did then presently prove before the justice by him that bought the beef that the piece of beef did cost but 14 pence, and that it was boiled in [my] master’s house, and that ten people had the same at dinner. And [I] gave a little of that which was left to a poor woman at the door, and some of it [I] kept in the house ‘til next day. And when Mr Cabell saw how he was abused by hearing such a brabble, he was very angry with Mr Done and did bind over him and [me] to answer at the [Quarter] Sessions. And [I] was at the last Sessions at the Castle of Exeter but was not called nor questioned there, only [I] was willed to pay Mr Cabell’s clerk the fees. And [I am] a single woman and unmarried. And about four years since, [I] was betrothed and had banns published in the church. And the man left [me] and refused to marry [me], after he had abused [me] and brought [me] with child.40

She is only a servant, yet an emphasis on female agency surfaces everywhere in Agnes (or Anne) Barons’s deposition. Consciousness of gender inferiority or an anxiety about her moral reputation is almost undetectable. Compliance and subordination are wholly absent. Barons actively insists on a different knowledge of her economic and sexual position—all the while dialoguing with the community by referencing community mores and its culture, even as she intends to liberate herself from the cultural expectation of obedience to the master. Barons’s unapologetic “[I] did refuse to go to his service,” and her description of having “justly” denied his claim of a covenant between them, emphasize her agency and silently remind the community that she had availed

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herself of the sociolegal custom of giving notice on Lady Day,41 March 25, the first of the quarter days when servants could be hired or terminated and rents were due. What is more, she aligns herself as proactive in positive female community activities, dispensing charity. In fact, in her deposition, female agency, consistently compared to male agency, emerges as knowledgeable and honorable: unlike Mr. Done, she has not lied about a covenant, she has not falsely accused anyone of theft, and she has not falsely misstated the monetary value of the beef. And unlike the (male) counsel’s deliberate intention to cast doubt on her sexual chastity, she reasserts her right to an honorable sexual reputation while simultaneously revealing the desertion by the man betrothed to her after the banns for their marriage had been published. Published banns were key to the community’s view of her position. Many couples regarded the official betrothal “as a warrant to initiate sexual relations, taking pregnancy as an urgent cue for marriage. Such mores were based on mutual trust and the vigilance of informal community sanctions.”42 Martin Ingram’s position is more qualified: “attitudes toward antenuptial fornication are best summed up as ambivalent”43 and the “narrow dividing line between bridal pregnancy and bastardy . . . made it impossible for local communities to regard sex before marriage in church as wholly licit.”44 The fact is, however, that Barons’s defense—however mediated by the court clerk—has reconstructed the hegemonic ideology (respect for economic property, charitable obligations, marriage accountability) and has shown the dominators (men) to be the violators of the ideological standards propagated by themselves. The judge’s anger over the “brabble” is aimed at Mr. Done, not at Barons (even though both are to appear at another Sessions, where Barons notes that she was left unsummoned, implying her silent acquittal). Yet, shaping Barons’s and every woman’s deposition, like some unshakable, sentient metaphor, is the force of the male sphere, men’s legal powers, their domestic authority, their financial credibility, their community standing, their legal identity itself. And just as metaphors are structural (for example, the concept “argument,” as understood and expressed in terms of the structured concept of “war”45) so, too, are these forces. Women’s legal powers, their domestic status, their financial vulnerability, their community standing, their legal identity itself were understood (by women and men) in terms of the men’s authority, male constraints, male hierarchal powers; in other words, the male sphere. And as with the effects of a metaphor, the male sphere shaped women’s discourse, determined their rhetorical strategies, and their framing methods, for example, focusing upon a scene or a set of meanings that favors the deponent’s view of the event, and, one hoped, the judge’s

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interpretation of the event. “The proverb ‘words are women, deeds are men’ reminds us that one of women’s greatest strengths resided in discourse, which they were apt to employ as a mode of direct and vigorous action.”46 In such a world of inequities where solely language (not speech) was as available to women as to men, it makes sense, in my view, that language, along with, eventually, speech and discourse, became the arena in which women frequently outmaneuvered the interpretative practices of men. The very instability of language disallows any closed process of meanings. Devising narrative strategies that can disrupt and subvert culturally inherited truths dependent upon that instability could save lives, as Margaret Bonefant’s discursive powers quite possibly did. Margaret Bonefant testified in Anne Younge’s suit in 1608 for separation from her husband on the grounds of violence. Bonefant had remained friends with Anne Younge after Younge and her husband James had left Bonefant’s house where she had lodged them both in 1607. Visiting Anne later in Anne’s own house in St. Bride’s parish (London) on a Sunday afternoon in February, she found her “so beaten and47 bruised and swollen about her head face and body that she was not able to speake nor go nor stirre any of her limes [limbs] to helpe her selfe, and her jawes were displaced or otherwise so hurt with beating that she was not able to stirre them and the gristle of her nose was so bruised that until by the helpe of a surgion it was raysed and the f leshe soupled [supplied] she could not well fetche or take any breathe at the nose, but seemed as thoughe she were more lyke to dye of that beating than to recover and lyve.”48

Bonefant’s description shows genuine narrative power—particularly her use of a clinical register to communicate the excessive brutality of Anne’s husband’s physical violence. Her meticulous description of Anne Younge’s wounds had in mind the judge’s perspective. As Gowing’s research shows, “the measurement of violence” was “one of the most problematic points of marital separation litigation . . . .At the court, women and men fought over the level of violence alleged, men redefining what their wives claimed to be life-threatening violence as ‘light chastisement.’ ”49 Furthermore, extensive print debate had long waged about the appropriate levels of conjugal battery. Bonefant’s scrupulous description therefore was critical if Anne’s litigation suing for separation from her husband were to succeed.50 Significantly, Bonefant’s deposition also has in mind male hegemony. It illustrates James C. Scott’s point about the “more knowing and

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manipulative consciousness”51 of the relatively weak. Scott argued that the relatively weak did not merely submit to the practices of the elite groups. They sought “agency through the manipulation of the texts, languages and performances which were intended to explain, demonstrate and justify the power of their superiors.”52 For example, Bonefant further deposes that shortly after “this jurate” (probably Bonefant53) saw Anne Younge in this condition, James Younge came into the house, whereupon Bonefant said that “she was sory to see his wife in this miserable case.”54 Younge replied that he had been cheated of his wife’s full estate. Bonefant remarked: “that was not the waye to know or understand of her estate but if he would know that [,] it must be his kynd usage of her and not that severitie for that was the waye to make an end of them bothe. Ay, quoth he the same JamesYounge, I am told I shall be hanged if she die within a year and a daye but if I be there is but one out of the waye.”55

The point is that while Bonefant understands the texts of her superiors (concerning women’s subjugated identities, or coverture’s burying her legal and economic identity, or unruly wives undermining social and domestic order), she has astutely defined the terrain of discussion with James Younge not in terms of marital assumptions, etc., but in terms of social issues and legal liability: kindness to Anne, she advises, was far more likely to gain information about her estate and would prevent them both from a disastrous end. Kindness, the alleviation of another’s misfortune, intersubjective responsibilities—the social values and attitudes prevailing at the time—prompted not just her intervention but that of neighbors and friends. Bonefant testifies that Mrs. Anne Cotes, one Mr. Grace and diverse others present saw Anne Younge “in that pittifull sort.” In fact, when she went twice more in the same week to see Anne Younge, who “hath been in such want,”56 she saw “Mrs Cotes and others that came to her give her money and send for drink wood and coals and for meat and likewise for oyntmentes for her and for diverse things that was fit for her comfort she having no money her self but being in great want and need et aliter dixit quod nescit.”57

As calloused as was Younge’s response about beating his wife nearly to death, it is valuable in disclosing that others had warned him about his actions, revealing, thereby, women’s openly intervening and publicly critiquing his actions. His later personal testimony grumblingly reveals that (despite the legal and conjugal prerogatives enjoyed by

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husbands—namely “disciplining” one’s wife) “one Mrs Cotes” refused to leave Younge’s house, facing down his wrath. Younge sullenly admits: “that same daye that he this respondent did so strike his sayd wife presently after one Mrs Cotes one of his sayd wive’s acquaintance being ther told him this respondent that if his wife did otherwise than well he this respondent should be hanged whereupon he this respondent sayd unto her that if she would not be quiett she might and it were well if she were gone out at doores, but she went awaye none the sooner.”58

Bonefant’s situating cruelty and greed as the context for her entire narrative was shrewdly tactical, first, because it substantially challenges the possible charge that Anne Younge’s speech might have been provocative (thereby guilty of undermining domestic order) justifying James Younge’s “disciplining” her,59 and second, it stands the chance of diminishing the inf luence of James Younge’s possible broader opposing testimony. James Younge, however, did not take the usual path that men accused of marital cruelty usually took, namely, to explain “their violence as a rational response to their wives’ misconduct.”60 “Younge went even further and deftly turned his wife’s accusations around so that it was he that was in mortal danger.”61 Her “wickedness” (namely, the “divers times” when he “hath gone out of doors she hath falne downe of her knees and prayd to god that he this respondent might never come in at the doors againe”),62 her keeping to her bed in counterfeit sickness, etc. drove him, he claimed, to a “desperat mynd” and “he did stabb him self with a knief which he carried to bed with him in the brest in twoe places.”63

“It was a consummate achievement in narrative self-defence: the case’s result does not survive, but the story effectively transformed one story, wholesale, into another.”64 Yet, not all neighbors and kin and friends felt the need to remonstrate or intervene in men’s violence toward their wives: evidence of communal intervention suggests that. “It was women, more often than men, who protested to violent husbands, sometimes physically interposing themselves between husband and wife, and coming to court, later, to testify to their female neighbour’s precise injuries, and it was women to whom battered wives turned first.”65 Unfortunately, among the gentry failure to intervene was not uncommon. In 1608 Ann Dighton and her husband, Thomas, were staying at the Earl of Lincoln’s house in Chelsea where friends of Ann, Mary

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Morrante and her husband, were also staying. That night, Ann went to the Morrante’s rooms, her face “all awashed with tears,”66 exclaiming that “she could not endure that life meaning and so expressing her husbandes crueltie towardes her.”67 When Mary Morrante offered to share her bed with Ann, sending her servant back to Ann’s room to get her night clothes, Thomas proved to be every bit as cruel as Ann had claimed. He “nipt” the servant “very cruelly by the arme and pushd her awaye from him saying gett you downe the stayers or I will break your neck downe.”68 And he added, “your mistris weare better kis my wives [wife’s] tayle then kepe her ther from me.”69 Both Ann and the servant went together, then, to retrieve her night clothes only to be locked by Thomas in his room. He beat Ann viciously as she got into bed, and refused to free her and the servant even when one of the Earl of Lincoln’s men entered the room to put an end to the abuse. Repeatedly, Ann, the servant, and Mary Morrante were brutalized by Thomas as they tried to secure Ann’s things, and repeatedly they reported his escalating violence against them to Mary Morrante’s husband as they returned to the Morrante’s rooms. Yet, Morrante himself did not intervene nor at first did the Earl’s men except the one ( John Bevrely).70 Only later did the Earl himself finally intervene, coming to blows with Thomas. On the other hand, not a one of these women remained passive in the face of dangerous violence despite their disadvantageous position and their physical inferiority. All acted upon a (apparently) common assumption about what was not to be tolerated as spousal “discipline.” 71 Mary Morrante’s maid, Ann Hill, constructs the scene representing Thomas’s response to Mrs. Ann Dighton’s attempts to leave him because of his violence, “he . . . would gryn most grievously att her . . . and knock one fist upon an other saying he would chayne her to his bed post and use her as he used Bartholomewe (whom he pretended to be his bondman) and whom he kept chained at a post with bread and water only to eat and drinck and a pad of straw to lye on like a dogg.” 72

Morrante’s maid’s narrative signals her agency not only as a witness conveying a particularly damning view of a man of the gentry but also as a politically savvy narrator. “Grievously” certainly aligns her sympathy with Ann, but, combining “grievously” with “gryn” emphatically and directly hints at Dighton’s sadistic nature. Adding the description of Dighton knocking one fist upon another as he bragged to Ann of chaining her to his bed post much as he had chained Bartholomewe, his alleged

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bondman, to a post with only bread and water could just possibly imperil the “reasonable man” argument.73 In this masculinist legal culture, men’s domestic violence was perceived as “an extension of their nature and expected role” (ergo, the “reasonable man”) and it was “sanctioned to uphold household order.” 74 In Cheshire, for example, Walker points out that only one husband out of eight suspected of wife-killings was executed, and “none of those who beat their wives to death was convicted of murder.” 75 The recklessness of Dighton’s threats implies confidence in any court’s viewing of his action as rational spousal discipline.76 However, the key to a husband’s defense of spousal violence was the issue of provocation.77 “Husbands whose wives were not ‘mild and modest’ were understandably ‘drive[n] . . . to unmanly cruelty.’ ” 78 But, “provocation” itself, was broadly—even inconsistently—construed as Susan Amussen’s study shows.79 Church courts could allow separation on the basis of cruelty (or adultery), but because the level of cruelty was, ultimately, based on the question of the wife’s provocation, the maid’s theatricalizing of Dighton’s speech act becomes invaluable and strategic as a means of challenging Dighton’s actions as simply “judicious brutality.” And when combined with Mary Morrante’s testimony (Morrante having been responsible for the Dighton match in the first place), Dighton’s actions are exposed as gratuitous and vicious. Mary Morrante testified that Dighton was a man of “forward crabbed,” of “uncivill and rude disposicon”80 to his wife, whom she described as “youngh and timorous,”81 a “very myld gentle and softly natured young gentle-woman.”82 The craft and narrative strategy that I have ascribed to the maid’s testimony is, I think, not exaggerated. Courts frequently resisted recognizing that a couple’s marriage was beyond repair even in the face of substantial evidence. Indeed, overwhelming evidence was often not enough. The John Ashton and Anne Sherman case is a classic example: Ashton of “fringe gentry status” married Anne Sherman of St. Mary’s, Leicester, in April of 1627. From the third night of the marriage, he beat her, and frequently thereafter. Her father and village women examined her bruises and blackened body, and went to the local justice, but after each of his sentencings, Ashton returned home, and resumed the beatings with even more intensity. At one point he bound her to the bedpost for two days, naked, and without food, and threatened her with a knife. In 1630, Anne filed for separation. Capp remarks that what makes this story so “significant is how long the justice, Anne’s father, and the minister persisted in seeking a reconciliation in the face of overwhelming evidence that Ashton was mentally unbalanced.”83 I proffer the AshtonSherman case instancing extreme institutional and family pressure (and,

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often, wives’ own cooperation)84 to keep the marriage intact primarily to show what made Morrante’s maid’s narrative such a critical achievement. However much the clerks and proctors did “to shape complaints and memories into pleas and testimonies,”85 the witness and the plaintiff could exercise a modicum of control in what they chose to emphasize or to suppress. Morrante’s maid focuses her testimony not so much on Dighton’s act of violence, but more so on the viciousness of his character. By repeating instances of his gratuitous cruelty through his mistreatment of her, her mistress, and Bartholomewe, the bondman, she establishes his character as one of wanton brutality where the culture’s understanding of men’s character conferred upon them a natural drive towards domestic order. She is manipulating the dominant class’s understanding of their divinely ordered dominance. Whatever the case’s ultimate resolution, her narrative challenges alternative meanings to Dighton’s actions as a husband. What is more, all the evidence seems to show that a woman’s choice to sue for separation could be successful only if the witnesses’ accounts were successful. As we have seen: a wife’s own version of cruelty was readily challenged by the husband’s redefining his violence as chastisement; courts still viewed marriage as indissoluble, granting separation only from “board and bed,” and not from each other (meaning no right to remarry); and “stricter standards of proof in separation cases”86 were introduced by the canons of 1604. Both wives and witnesses to suits were undoubtedly aware of circulating stories of failed suits, and quite likely aware, too, of the declining number of suits for separation.87 Institutional and family pressure certainly contributed greatly to delaying couples’ separations, as Capp documents, (involuntarily prolonging, as well, the wife’s physical abuse) but wives, themselves, must have consciously deferred their suits until witnesses’ narratives could be shaped. The maid (and other witnesses) surely comprehended that there were epistemological consequences to their framing of events. In fact, Ingram’s study of depositions leads him to conclude that “witnesses often found it difficult to remember incidents which quite matched the enormities alleged by the prosecution, but sympathetically did their best.”88 All the more credit, then, to Morrante’s maid focusing her rhetorical skills on the viciousness of Dighton’s character rather than on his act of violence, itself. Lady Elizabeth Vaux, on the other hand, insisting on the prerogatives of class, ignores her subordinate position as a woman testifying against a man. Equally significant is the fact that her rhetorical skills show greater sophistication than either those of Windsor or Collins, the men involved in the litigation. In late January 1622, Elizabeth Vaux had arrived in the parish of St. Mary le Strand to take rooms in a building owned by Robert

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Collins where William Windsor (Lady Vaux’s nephew) and his family had taken lodgings for some time already. Windsor had contracted with Collins for bedding and furniture for Vaux’s rooms. When she arrived she found that Collins “had not prepared such lodgings and beddinge for her servants.”89 Windsor sent one of his servants to fetch Collins. It was now 11:00 at night. Collins arrived but, his “carriage and spech” made it clear that he had “lattlie comen from the taverne.”90 The fracas that results is a theatrical mix of a gentleman’s righteous indignation, a commoner’s melodramatic consciousness of his position as a king’s subject presumably equal therefore under the law, and Lady Vaux’s dramatized counterallegations. In Collins’s civil action against the Windsors and the Vaux (and several others whom he names), he charges that hee the said sir William Windsor at your said subiectes first cominge into the roome did take occasion to picke some causeles quarrell with your said subiect but hee not speakinge many wordes did with his fyste stricke your majesties said subiecte a blowe on the syde of his head under his eare with which blowe hee felled your orator to the ground and then in most firce and cruell manner beate him with his fyste and kicked and spurned him up and downe the said dyninge roome with his foote but your highness said subiecte having recovered himself upon his legges then the said Lady Windsor Sir Ambrose Vaux the Lady Vaux Thomas Gibbes Edward Lee Christian Clemend and Ann Becket and other the confederates aforesaid and other persons whose names as yett to your orator are unknown in verie ryotous rowtous and unlawfull manner with force and Armes they beinge all Armed with weapons viz: swordes daggers pocketts daggers stillettoes and other weapons as well invasive as defensive without any cause knowne whye to your said subiecte did most furiously fircely cruelly ryotously routously and unlawfully assault your said subiecte some of them houldinge your subiecte by the Armes and body while other some did in terrible and cruel manner beate wound and most greeviously hurte your highness said subiecte.91

Collins added that he had called out for help to save himself “from being murthered,”92 but Windsor, the Ladies and others held the door shut so that the “very many”93 people who would have come to his aid, could not get in. In his “plea and answeare” (similar to a deposition), William Windsor counteralleged that Collins not only loudly and rudely denied contracting with him for furniture and bedding for Lady Vaux but he also insisted “most contemptibly” upon “standing upon tearmes”94 as if the said complainant had been every way as good a man as this defendant, whereupon this defendants being very loath to medle with a

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fellowe of soe base a condition as the complainant was though he was much provoked thereunto did in all faire and peaceable manner persuaded the complainant to bee quiete and goe out of the roome and hee would talke with him againe the next mournige [sic] when he hoped to finde him more sober, for this defendant then conceived the complainant both by his carriage and spech to have lattlie comen from the taverne95

But Collins grows more incensed, piling on now more “vile, base and reprochefull speeches”96 against both Windsor and the Ladies. Yet these women, as Windsor points out, “did in most milde and temperate manner beseech [Collins] to depart and to give noe more cause of offence.”97 However, the more fairly the Ladies dealt with Collins, Windsor notes, the more abusive Collins became, leading Windsor to threaten to remove him whereupon Collins “redoublinge his sawsy language,” Windsor took him “by the sholders” and “gave him a box of the eares and offered to thrust him out of doores.”98 Collins then “called up diverse of his servants, and commanded them presently to breake open this defendants chamber doore beinge then latched.”99 The servants are willing to do this but are advised by Windsor not to followe the counsell of their said master for that he conceived the plainant was druncke, but the said servants not contented herewith did breake open the said doore and came violently into the roome to this defendant and the two said Ladies there beinge none else in the said roome, and this defendant beinge then in his pantables [slippers], and ready to goe to bedd, whereupon this defendant seeinge the said servants cominge to lay violente hands upon him, did stept to his sword lieing upon the table and offered to drawe the same unlesse they would departe out of his chamber.100

I have included a hefty third of Collins’s and Windsor’s charge and countercharge, respectively, for two reasons: first, they perfectly illustrate the coded language used by plaintiffs and defendants where social differentiation was thought to advantage the elite, and second, they allow us to see the strikingly different rhetorical stance taken by Lady Vaux in her “plea and answeare.” Windsor’s defense shows him engaging in the “discourse of restraint”—minimizing his actual physical actions but emphasizing his civility and restraint, repeatedly referencing signs of the “base condition” of the plaintiff. Collins’s standing upon terms as if he “had been every way as good a man as [Windsor]”101 was particularly egregious to Windsor. Nevertheless, Windsor stresses his own calming manner until Collins’s servants charged up the stairs to lay violent hands upon him. At that point, he threatened to use his sword. Status—more

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so than self-defense—is what Windsor foregrounds as legitimating his claims. ‘Inviolable personal space’ traditionally belonged to one’s betters; Collins and his servants were invading it.102 To Windsor’s advantage, as well, was the fact that violent acts by the upper class “could be justified as responses to unreasonable affronts by men of the lower orders.”103 On the other hand, while the “discourse of civility was used to bolster” claims of violence, it was also used “to undermine claims of violence.”104 The “discourses of restraint were not the preserve of the godly elite but were used and manipulated by men of all sorts to legitimate their actions and undermine those of their adversaries.”105 Indeed, the discourse of restraint “incorporated notions of violent self-defence and violent retaliation to extreme provocation.”106 This point lies behind Collins’s inf lated list of weapons and attackers, a seemingly brash claim given Windsor’s explicit assertion of having reached for a sword only late in the quarrel, and his insistence that only he and the two ladies were in the dining chamber. And where Windsor refers to “fayre and peaceable manner” and “milde and temperate,” signifying the “natural” civility of his and the ladies’ rank, Collins signifies his own restrained nature by, ironically, alleging that he was “kicked and spurned” and “furiously fircely cruelly ryotously routously and unlawfully”107 assaulted. Rage was the cultural marker that Collins intended to manipulate. By constructing Windsor’s actions in terms of rage, Collins appropriates the code of civility that views rage “as the negative image of the positive characteristic of reason displayed by the civil man.”108 On the lighter side, Collins’s redundant references to his being “your majesties said subiect” or “your highnes said subiect”109 borders on being excessive compared to other similar Star Chamber civil action documents. Yet he too has his legal sights set on status. Constantly aligning his social and physical person with “his majesty”—as though he were but an arm’s length away from the king’s dais—elevates his rank. Despite the fact that it reminds one of Dickens’s parody of legalese, it is probably not so extravagant a stance. After all, his civil suit against both the Windsors and the Vaux presumes that that he regarded them as no more above the law than he.110 Elizabeth Vaux’s “plea and answeare” differs strikingly from Windsor’s and Collins’s in both stance (she adopts a more objective air at times) and register (at times demotic). She, as Windsor had, foregrounds Collins’s defiant attitude concerning the bedding and furniture contracted for. However, she strengthens the issue of status. Collins, she said, often redobled theise words in A dareing and provokeing manner and dared the said Sir William Windsor soe as this defendent and the Lady

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Windsor his wife being both of them very fearefull did solicite and intreate the said Sir William Windsor to forbeare to strike the said Complainant and to lett him alone.111

Where Windsor comments on Collin’s “braveing” him, Vaux intensifies Collins’s action, saying that he “dared the said Sir William Windsor”112 (meaning “challenge” or “terrify”). And Collins’s actions were so brazen that they had to “intreat” Windsor not to respond with (honorable) violence.113 Collins has violated not only Windsor’s inviolable personal space but in endangering the living quarters of Lady Vaux and Lady Windsor, he has made them both “fearfull.”114 Vaux also brings home a point whose consequences Windsor may not have fully appreciated. Collins had claimed that the constable and “some other persons which hee brought with him to keepe your highnes peace”115 had used force to break open Windsor’s chamber door and rescued Collins. Windsor, on the other hand, had testified that Collins had ordered his servants to break down the door, and that the constable, having been called because of the public noise, came to his chamber door, and “perceiving upon how small grounde the complainant [Collins] had made the said hurliburlie and Brabble in his owne howse was very sorry for the same and wente away well satisfied.”116 Vaux, however, seems to have comprehended the situation as one requiring a resolution to the contradictory perspectives regarding the constable’s part. She testifies that after the constable came, he found that there was noe hurte done but that the doore was broken which was broken by the Complainant and by his owne servants and by his Comaund, as the Complainant him selfe could not then denye; departed away as Conceyveing if any misdemeanor at all had beene Comitted it was done only by the plainant himselfe and by his procurement.117

By pointing out that the constable had learned that Collins had commanded his own servants to break down the door and that Collins could not deny this, Vaux removes whatever degree of indeterminancy there might have been as to whose force was used and what damages Collins could feel entitled to. It also brings into focus the near-circus nature of the spectacle: a lady’s midnight demand for better furniture and bedding, a supposedly drunken landlord breaking down his own door and requiring his servants to charge up the stairs with “fyer Forke spit and prongs”118 to battle a knight and two ladies, and the knight himself wielding a sword while dressed in slippers and ready for bed. But Vaux’s political cleverness manifests itself especially in her use of language to legitimize one culture and censor another. She offers direct

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quotations—a rhetorical stance absent in both Collins’s deposition and in Windsor’s “plea and answeare.” Their testimony offers evaluative happenings whereas Vaux engages in performative utterances. When Collins refused to leave the chamber, she says, he againe redobled his ill language and provokeing speeches, against the said Sir William Windsor, and Cryed out what will you thrust me out of my owne house this is my habitacion, and I will staye here in spite of you or wordes to that effecte.119

And she adds that after the constable had left, Collins in a rageing and furious manner went downe againe to his servants and required them to Come upp sayeing I am but one peculiar bodie and what is my life to me but hee hath a wife and Childeren (meaning Sir William Windesor) and shall I bee dared by him and kept out of my owne habitacion or wordes to that effect.120

Vaux’s using Collins’s linguistic patterns intends to delegitimize Collin’s claim. By linguistic patterns I mean general speech patterns, dialogic interactions or conversational discourse, not detailed linguistic syntax or grammatical elements. My argument, here, is intended as speculative and I offer it as but an interesting aspect of the representation of Lady Vaux’s political activity. The issue involves the implication of linguistic politeness. It is true—“no linguistic structures can be taken to be inherently polite”;121 I have in mind, rather, Bruce Fraser’s “socialnorm view”122 of linguistic politeness. That view contends that standards of behavior exist in any age and in any society, according to which a speaker is judged as having spoken politely or not. But, as Richard Watts has shown (passim), polite and impolite utterances inevitably involve the speakers in a struggle for power. At bottom, “politeness contains a politics, a practical immediate recognition of social classifications and hierarchies, between sexes, the generations, the classes.”123 Lynne Magnusson’s study of everyday speech genres in early modern England is of value here. Magnusson’s goal was to demonstrate how Shakespeare (d. 1616) could have drawn upon these speech acts. Using every day speech genres, including language patterns of business letters,124 she found that among a speaker’s goals were identity and freedom. When speech actions created risk, speakers employed a repertoire of politeness discourse strategies that enabled them to maintain and repair that identity. The Elizabethans, she noted, “enacted their personal relationships with a rhetorical complexity and eloquence that Shakespeare assimilated.”125 Deviation from standard forms of politeness could therefore signal problematic relationships.

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Wolsey, a man of “base origins,” serves as an example in Henry VIII, 2.4, 141–8. When Wolsey “asks Henry to clear him of malice in bringing the divorce suit against Queen Katherine,”126 Shakespeare represents “Wolsey’s distorted courtesy”127 toward Henry by particularizing his “deviation from . . . speech behavior.”128 The speech exposes Wolsey’s anomalous social situation—namely, a butcher’s son pronouncing to kings and queens—allowing Shakespeare to emphasize “the way in which the forms and resources people have available for manipulation are those speech forms that they habitually live within.”129 Lady Vaux’s representation of Collins’s voice and his perspective allows her to construct his identity as one both uncivil and “inferior.” His exclamations, his public scolding of Windsor, his directness in speech illustrate his inability or disinclination to maintain practices of managing aggression and social repair. The effect of Vaux’s manipulating his speech patterns would be, of course, to limit his participation as “equal under the law” in using the legal system to bring his grievance against the Windsors and Vaux. Levison and Brown’s130 studies argue that directness in speech can be interpreted as minimal politeness. The court of the Star Chamber would not have missed that implication. Moreover, Vaux’s use of direct quotes reintroduces a present time into the circumstances of recalling a past event. A smart rhetorical move. It conveys a spontaneity and an impression of a more accurate memory about the incident. It gives her testimony an air of objectivity. More than either Collins’s or Windsor’s, Vaux’s testimony conveys a distinctive authorial personality. Vaux was, in fact, no stranger to litigious circumstances—she had lost her lands after her first husband, William Wybarn, was found guilty of recusancy; she then married Ambrose Vaux, a spendthrift and f lamboyant reprobate whose family was even more notorious for their strong recusant activities than Wybarn had ever been131 and whose connections with the Guy Fawkes plot were brought to court, and, finally, she had been the center of a public brawl during a play at the Globe Theatre that brought a number of the nobility, including Vaux herself, to the Star Chamber.132 A certain strongheadedness seems to have been part of Elizabeth Vaux’s character. It is not surprising therefore that she had shaped her narrative to “claim a verbal and legal authority.”133 She would have been uncommonly familiar with legal strategies. Familiarity with legal strategies on the part of maids, ladies, and wives, as ref lected in these depositions and petitions, indicates just how much law shaped people’s lives and behavior. “Legal affairs, legal rights and legal remedies were constant preoccupations.”134 Law was “central in dispute settlements” whether land disputes, “or debt, or reputation” or

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unruly neighbors.135 The fact is, law was “virtually omnipresent in human affairs.”136 In other words—and this is significant—“law was not merely about power: it was an inf luence upon the way in which innumerable men and women ordered their lives.”137 Intriguingly, studies show that between 1580 to 1640, about 60,000 suits (on the average) were “initiated yearly before the central courts of king’s bench, common pleas, chancery, exchequer, [etc.]” and even “greater numbers [were] heard in local courts.”138 Estimates from urban and rural courts suggest that there was by 1580, “over one suit initiated for every household in the country!”139 The volume testifies not so much to early modern England’s being a litigious society as rather, according to Craig Muldrew, that litigation can be interpreted as evidence of dispute resolution or prevention as well as of conf lict. Evidence in contemporary diaries, letters, autobiographies, pamphlets, and treatises seem to portray England as “a society which placed a very strong cultural and social emphasis on interpersonal neighbourly dispute resolution.”140 The “notion of reputation and honor was central to the relationship between the individual and the community.”141 Credit itself “depended on strategies for judging character and for gauging interpersonal trust based on words and actions.”142 Indeed, the word “credit” ref lects that centrality—referring less to cash viability than to a “household’s reputation for honesty, fair dealing and reliability.”143 Household’s reputation was but a whisper away from a woman’s reputation. Rowell’s attorney’s counting on the link between household reputation and its female servants is what compelled Agnes Barons to face down Mr. Done’s claims. James Younge’s vicious reaction to finding his wife’s estate less than he had first thought led him to punish her as though she were a disreputable wife. Sharpe observes that concern for reputation appears to extend “from the very top to very near the bottom of English society in this period.”144 Community mattered so much in this respect and in this period because “privacy was an unfamiliar concept.” People’s “conduct was evaluated through neighborly comment and gossip.”145 And, of course, in this patriarchal society reputation was situated within masculinist concepts and framed by masculinist practices. Agnes Barons contested the assumption that single women could not be masterless, challenging as well as the link between the economical and one’s sexual reputation. Margaret Bonefant, understanding the legal complexities of conjugal violence, foregrounded greed as James Younge’s motive for brutally beating his wife, critiquing thereby the justice system’s wellknown, privileged defense for husbands, namely, the practice of redefining physical abuse as “appropriate chastisement” for an unruly wife. Both Bonefant and Morrante’s maid called into question a knowledge system that too little represented women’s own subjectivities, especially in the

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case of reputation. As defined by a male justice system, the concept of reputation presumed that men were naturally superior beings with a natural right to dominate women. Consequently, men could get away with engaging in horrendous actions against women without severe economic or social damage to their reputation. The criteria of reputation as applied to both men and women, therefore, ensured that it was largely women whose reputation suffered. Destabilizing male privileged reputation was necessary to rescue women’s reputation. Morrante’s maid by focusing on the viciousness of Dighton’s character rather than on the level of violence involved in his actions reconceptualized a masculinist practice. Margaret Knowsley subverts the honorable reputation ascribed to a town’s justice system by pointing out the corrupt relationship between that system and the town government whose several town officials responsible for hiring Stephen Jerome were now functioning as justices prosecuting his case for him against Knowsley. In so doing she, much as did Agnes Barons, strove to speak herself into existence in relation to the present and past of a community, and to invalidate knowledge systems that failed to account for women’s own subjectivities.

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CHAPTER 4 THE ASSEMBLY OF LADIES: REBELLING IN EDEN

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f only the first four stanzas survived, we might now be lamenting the lost Jane Austen of the fifteenth century,” C. S. Lewis remarked of the author of The Assembly of Ladies, a late fifteenth-century narrative poem.1 Implied, of course, was his judgment that the author was unable to sustain the quality of her opening lines; on the other hand, he has conceded the lines themselves to be exceptional. Indeed, later in the same paragraph he acknowledges that “the detail of the poem shows powers akin to genius,” but its perceived failure in allegorical treatment leads him to say that as an allegory, “it is as silly a poem as a man could find in a year’s reading.”2 Significantly, Lewis thought the author to be a woman. This is a matter of no small consequence: most scholars of the succeeding decades balked at the theory of a female author3 despite the fact that the narrator refers to herself as the author of “this booke,”4 (l. 740) that the poem survives in three manuscript compilations several of whose lengthy poems deal largely with women’s experience,5 involve women narrators, address a female audience,6 female eloquence, female choice,7 and a significant portion of whose contents appear in a related manuscript thought to be a woman’s anthology,8 many of whose lyrics were copied and possibly composed by women of prominent Derbyshire families.9 (It is a comment on our contemporary cultural disposition that while we have accepted Chaucer’s fictional persona as legitimizing his authorship of the Canterbury Tales and we have no quarrel with Will’s fictional persona in Piers Plowman as pointing to William Langland, we still fret over and cavil at assigning female authorship to a fictional persona who pointedly states that she “made this book”).10 Its early history of commentary and criticism has made this poem one of the most underrated and misunderstood texts among those medieval works thought to

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be written either for women or by a woman (illustrating thereby the consequences of giving priority to dominant [masculinist] discourses that determine genre expectations and narrative legitimacy).11 The fact was (and is) that this verse narrative is very much a woman’s book with a woman’s agenda. Indeed, it is remarkable as the first poetic narrative attempt by an English female author not only to comment on women’s public reality but also to recover women’s experience by challenging the most popular representation of women’s private love relationships with men, the medieval garden, the classic locus of courtly (and spiritual) love. The challenge is playful, even mischievous, and cleverly subversive, with an undercurrent of a social and political critique. Making the garden her site of rebellion is a brilliant move because gardens never quite lost their early association with the “fall” of humankind, and more particularly their association with female temptation, female deception, and, especially, female untoward desire for knowledge. The opening line raises the challenge immediately. Instead of using the classic trope of the “fresh season” to set the courtly love scene, the narrator opens with “In Septembre, at fallyng of the leef,/ The fressh season was al to-gydre done/ And of the corn was gadred in the sheef;” (ll. 1–3). The use of autumn as a setting is itself striking. Surviving English courtly love narratives do not feature it, although love lyrics do. What purpose would the poet have in adopting the trope of harvest, the dying of the year, the same well-noted season when the Pearl poet’s narrator despairingly throws himself on the grave of his dead daughter, and the same season when Gawain sadly leaves Arthur’s court and begins his journey to meet his death? She certainly knew that the rhetorical trope of “fressh season” or “spring” was, famously, the metaphor that holds Nature and Love as inextricably bound together as though the appearance of one was the condition for the other. Her intention was, I think, to underscore the temporality of love, to insist that love is as naturally yoked with death as it is with new life and spring; indeed, that the vocabulary of one is interchangeable with the vocabulary of the other. In the midst of singing about a heady new love medieval love lyrics fairly burst to deplore love’s troubling relationship with nature and death. Love is: “Like bud that blooms and withers soon;/ Like passing day that ends in rain.”12 Or again, “Spring’s about with love again,/ With blossom and with birds’ refrain” “Worms beneath the ground make love;/ Women f launt their pride above—/ The spring becomes them well.”13 And lest we miss the aesthetic effect of her invoking a season of faltering energies as a frame for the theme of love, she directly begins a dismantling of the “emblematic epistemology”14 of pleasure gardens; i.e., the garden as a complex semiotic system, whose plants, architecture, rivers, and arbors move beyond

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mere representation of a world to an epistemology based on supposed infused meanings ref lecting the nature of human relationships as well as one’s relationship to God. Or in Foucault’s words, an epistemology founded on the “sovereignty of the like,” whereby resemblances guided “the play of symbols,” and “made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible.”15 The poem involves a dream allegory in which the narrator and other women are summoned to the house of Lady Loiaulte, to a council where they present their petitions of grievances against men by whom they feel injured or wronged. Rules of procedure, clothing details, social decorum, and legal protocols seem disproportionately stressed. The poem’s dream and its aftermath, in Carol M. Meale’s phrasing, appear to be “a jumble of literary motifs and topoi.” It has been widely criticized, moreover, “for its seeming lack of motivation and direction”16 and its unresolved and unsatisfactory ending (despite the fact that unresolved endings are a convention of most dream poems).17 The ending models, as I hope to demonstrate, a way of living with contradictions. On the one hand, the author’s success in getting her audience to recognize their susceptibilities to both real and imagined aspects of cultural and legal institutions implies a conclusion. On the other hand, the ending is in harmony with the poem’s theme of pursuits thwarted and desires unrealized: the journey through the ‘charted’ territory of the garden, for example, is sheer struggle, love is inconstant, petitions are unresolved, and even explaining precisely the nature of her grievance seems unmanageable for the narrator. Gardens, as a dominant paradigm, were no easy task to subvert. Literally rooted in nature, gardens implied a healthy relationship between divine order and human order. Thus, being ref lective of divine order, gardens sanctioned the vision of patriarchal order. Moreover, any challenge to the garden metaphor meant a challenge to its literary concept, its representation in art, architecture, and its botanical figures of nature and “kynde.” Specifically, gardens’ symbol and image had for centuries constructed a pervasive and hegemonic way of viewing love, love-relationships, one’s relationship with God, the origin of good and evil, and finally, the nature of the soul. As late as 1759, 258-some years after The Assembly’s composition, the garden image and symbol continued to thrive as an heuristic paradigm of civic and social behavior, as in Voltaire’s “il faut cultiver notre jardin” referring (among other meanings) to the self ’s ability to practice wisdom in the face of others’ uncritical acceptance of evil and misery as part of a perfect world. Like all hegemonic metaphors, the garden-metaphor’s effect was gained by excluding the particularities of alternative experiences—in this

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case, women’s experience. All the more exceptional, then, is the author’s challenge not only to the hegemonic metaphor but also to art itself as the cultural representation of knowledge, particularly knowledge of and about women. With their manipulated space, their form and design, their trellising, turfed seats, arbored walks, grottos and mazes, gardens were not only art and architecture but their very art form was itself the subject of art. Hundreds of tapestries, Books of Hours, romances, medieval calendars, panel paintings, engravings, ivories, painted woodcuts, and love poems richly exploited the image either of the biblical garden of Eden, or its offspring, the hortus deliciarum and the hortus conclusus, or, simply, pleasure gardens. In the Roman de la Rose, alone, there are 92 miniatures celebrating various parts and activities in the garden. These gardens, these artistic networks of coded information, evoked complex responses about nature and love in general, but, in particular they evoked a specific perspective on women. The point is that art (and literature) composed women’s identity. Art and literature controlled women’s meaning. Art exerted visual and social pressures by depicting women as occupying the binary of good and evil. We need think only of the representation of Eve and Adam, or the (female) snake in Eden (discussed in Chapter 2), or Susannah in the garden (signifying innocence, as well as an object of lust), or Lady Idleness in the Garden of Mirth in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, or “fresshe May” in Januarie’s “paradys” garden in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale. Thus, in interrogating the garden as artistic construct itself, the narrator is deliberately contesting the underlying metaphor about love relationships and the power/knowledge systems that perpetuate the inequities of such relationships. The Assembly’s garden is a pleasure garden, a descendant of the hortus deliciarum, the garden of delights, one of the most candidly sexed spaces in Middle English Literature, a place considered iconic of harmonious freedom of movement, a designed intimacy for lovers, and a metaphor for the woman’s body (e.g. Song of Songs, Roman de la Rose, Merchant’s Tale). The hortus deliciarum especially, but so, too, the pleasure garden, was a rich meta-narrative: full of self-referential symbols. Like the iconic arrow that loops back to point to its own tail and becomes a self-pointing arrow, pointing not only to its performative action of “pointing” but also to its body as a locus of meaning, the pleasure garden’s self-referential symbols point to themselves, each, as performative actions, while also inviting the viewer to appreciate these same signs as strategies of interpretation and sites of particular and potential meanings. As with all richly encoded sign systems, however, they do more: they function intertextually and intermedially (gardens reference other media such as scripture, illuminations,

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tapestries, etc., as well as other gardens). The effect is to set up comparisons of their artifice with other models, other poetic or narrative efforts, forcing the reader to engage, then, in both critique and creative interpretation. The Assembly of Ladies author is counting on this. Her garden’s (and that of pleasure gardens, in general) “masonry of compas environ/ Ful secretly,” (ll. 53–4) and water barriers point not only to the privacy, refuge, and cool refreshment of pleasure gardens but they reference as well its controlled entries: who is kept out and who has access to its pleasures. Spatial illusions and arranged, changing perspectives signify an artificial environment, a contrast to the world outside the garden, and a pleasure to one’s cognitive perception, yet they also point to the motif of love’s ingenious pursuit. Artful turns and purposeful misdirection by means of low hedges’ obscuring narrow, disappearing paths propose, analogously, imagined accesses, and negotiated borders, yet they also reference the commonplace of the amorous siege as well as the comfort of the church.18 Its “straight raked paths and alleys” suggest “the conduct to be expected of a Christian,”19 yet they point likewise to the rigid dimensions of a created (paradisal) world whose fantasy insists upon an ordered social system and ordered (gender) behavior in the midst of its contrived regularity. Sheltered desire is expressed through extensive, shady bowers, yet they are often composed of impenetrable hedges. Finally, there is the treasure at the garden’s center—rich in its multi-references. The whole ref lects Matthew Johnson’s observation that “gardens are not just about plants, they are about ideology and social power.”20 Underlying all of this, as mentioned earlier, the garden’s erotic symbols and images unabashedly echoed Christian meanings as well. One of the key passages that had erotically identified gardens with women (and with a woman’s womb), “A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse . . . . Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits,” in the Song of Songs 4.12–13, also identified it with the church as the beloved of Christ, and with the virginity of Mary, according to patristic commentaries. Erotic associations maintained in dozens of medieval lyrics indicate, as documented in Sara M. Wages’s research, that “the concept of sexual love was inextricably entwined with the concept of woman, the object of love, and that the garden served as a metaphor for both.”21 Most notably in the earlier thirteenth-century Goliardic songs the imagery sought, at times, as Derek Pearsall writes, “specific correspondence . . . between the features of the garden and the body of a woman: ‘Ver prope f lorigerum, f lava Licori,’ [‘When Spring is almost in f lower, Golden Lycoris’].”22 Carmina Burana’s (thirteenth century) is another such example: “A virgin island contains a virginal garden./ I entered

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its chastity.”23 Then, too, there are the Middle English lyrics “I have a new garden,” known otherwise as “per jennete,” “The lily-white rose,” as well as the Middle Scots examples of William Dunbar’s “Sweet Rose of Virtue.”24 Even in the final years of the fifteenth century and the opening of the sixteenth, the symbolic view of the garden is superbly effected in Dunbar’s narrative poem, the Tretis of Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo. Indeed, its opening thirty-five lines are a virtuoso imitation of the rhetorical excesses and semantic equivalences of garden descriptions. However, his exquisite closed garden construct is then subjected to the same sort of violence modeled in the Roman de la Rose: the speech that he assigns to the three beautiful ladies seated in the garden concerns solely sex, and, more astonishing, their subject (the sexual failings of their husbands) is coarsely expressed.25 From the moment that The Assembly’s narrator and several ladies and gentlewomen as well as knights and squires step into the garden, the author begins the deterritorialization 26 of its symbolic terrain. The narrator is immediately accosted by a knight who bluntly asks, “What is your purpose here?” (l. 15). As courtly interactions go, his is a nongallant question put in a noncourtly manner, an action that so violates the tradition of the courtly knight—still in play27—that it leads us to wonder if this is part of women’s public reality, that is, being addressed by the curt speech of men where curtness seems uncalled for. And, in fact, given that gardens represented “demarcated space,” as Andries Van den Abeele writes, and one of the “important points of reference whereby one can measure the degree of civilisation, or the absence or imperfection of it,”28 the knight’s query is at odds with a place presumably created for leisure and easy contemplation. The narrator replies, “I seyde ageyne, as it fil in my thought:/ ‘To walke aboute the mase, in certeynte, /As a womman that nothyng rought.’ ” (“I said what came to my mind: ‘to walk about the maze, certainly, as a woman with no cares’ ” [ll. 16–18]). This seemingly casual response sets up a key motif in the poem, doubly enriched if we accept Judith M. Davidoff ’s assessment that the narrator’s “vision is set in the double frame of a garden maze inside a garden maze.”29 Moreover, this is anything but a casual reply. In answering that her intention was “to walk about the maze, certainly, as a woman with no cares,” the narrator offers a social presentation of herself that is consciously inconsistent. In the first place, mazes were notoriously difficult to negotiate—with their sandy alleys, their deliberate dead-ends, their disorienting patterns, and cross-paths bordered with low rails.30 Thus, to place the adverb, “certeynte,” next to the word “mase,” is wonderfully oxymoronic as an ironic description of the navigation of mazes.

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She adds another twist. In the clause, “to walk in the maze certainly as a woman having no cares,” “certeynte” can modify either “maze” or “a woman with no cares.” Not only does the tactical phrasing problematize the issue of reality (i.e., could such challenging gardens ever be conducive to relaxation and meditation, much less nurture genuine love relationships?), but it also raises questions about women’s identity. Read as: “I am walking about the maze certainly as a woman who cares nothing” the word “certainly” opens up a particular ambiguity. Is it the maze that is the focus of wary, calculated, certain walking? Or is it the women’s appearance of being carefree that is the focus of calculation or certainty? That is, is she stressing women’s need to appear carefree when their bodily movements are literally bound by constricting and disorienting mazes? Is the issue, then, women’s appearance of freedom within courtly relationships—of which medieval gardens are so symbolic? Is she, in fact, critiquing women’s place, their identity, in the contemporary discourse? Indeed, if we accept a more discordant, alternative reading of “nothyng rought” as meaning “certainly as a woman beyond caring,” it characterizes women’s experience within the world of love relationships as deeply ironic and hazardous. As it turns out, critiquing women’s position in the current discourse is to be a key issue in her complaint. The knight, catching the cleverly imprecise phrasing, presses her further: whom did she seek, and why was her color so pale? She replies, “therby lith a tale” (l. 21). His reply catches us off-guard: “That I must know, and right away. Tell on and make it quick” (ll. 22–23). She reprimands him gently: “Wait. You’re certainly a hasty one; I’ll have you know it is no small thing” (ll. 24–25). The whole (loosely translated) exchange is a rhetorical maneuver. It ushers in the beginning of a series of similar maneuvers whereby the poet using humor and critique in the role of subversion ref lects on the cultural dimension of what is expected of gentlemen and ladies. What gentleman, what knight, sensing something amiss with a melancholy lady would not seek to discover the cause of sadness and offer remedy? Her audience, however, would have caught the irony: the chivalric etiquette expected of (and missing in) the knight was part of the same courtly love discourse that while it “elevated” women as an object of adoration and glorified sexuality, likewise legitimized the “wilful neglect of all the natural and social complications of love.”31 If “love was the source of chivalric virtue,”32 and “aristocrats of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries . . . eagerly sought to emulate”33 the romance models of chivalric virtue, the knight’s failure in chivalric manners is an indicator of the courtly lovers’ failure in love as charged by the ladies and gentlewomen in the later dream sequence. 34

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Describing to the knight another afternoon in which she and some companions were walking in the same garden, she says that, with one assent, to pass their time they went into the maze. And toke oure weyes yche aftyr other entent: Som went inward and went they had gon oute, Som stode amyddis and loked al aboute; And soth to sey som were ful fer behynde And right anon as ferforth as the best; Other there were, so mased in theyr mynde, Al weys were goode for hem, both est and west. Thus went they furth and had but litel rest, And som theyr corage dide theym so assaile For verray wrath they stept over the rayle. And as they sought hem self thus to and fro I gate my self a litel avauntage; Al for-weryed, I myght no further go, Though I had wonne right grete for my viage; So come I forth into a streyte passage, Whiche brought me to an herber feyre and grene Made with benchis ful craftily and clene;

(we went into this maze and took our way, each after their own fashion; some went in and thought that they went out; some stood in the middle and looked around; and in truth, some were very far behind but suddenly they were as far forward as the best; others were so “mazed” in their minds that all ways seemed good to them, east and west. Thus they went on and had little rest; and some, their courage did them so sorely assail, that for pure wrath they stepped over the rail. As they sought themselves to and fro I won some advantage. I was too tired to go further, despite having “wonne right grete” [literally, come a long way for my journey]; so I entered a narrow passage which brought me to an arbor fair and green, made with benches admirably crafted and elegant . . . [ll. 33–49]). Three features are immediately apparent: first, this is not the traditional single woman awaiting her lover in the garden as so many illuminations depict; this is a scene of many women engaged in nonparadisal, nonenjoyable movements. Second, there is an anxious tension between the external environment and the internal feelings of those walking in it. Indeed, she repeatedly constructs all of the women in terms of anxiety and struggle. Third, everything in this garden is concealed: the direction to its center, the exit, the relationship of the paths to each other, and the source of the stream. This representation of the garden is itself a political

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act because it re-represents (intentionally) the masculinist function and understanding of gardens. No site of love is this; no leisurely walking two-by-two. No f lower-sprigged lawns on which lovers lie, engaged in private discourse. Rather, this garden is cast as a maze, and lovers are absent. The extraordinary touch in this poem is, in fact, the maze. It appears to be unique in Middle English love-vision poems. In fact, Judith Davidoff ’s “extensive survey of Middle English love-vision poems reveals no other poems with actual mazes.”35 John Stephens regards it as the “poet’s own re-creation.”36 Stephens, Davidoff, Pearsall, Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson, Jane Chance, Ann McMillan, Colleen Donnelly, Carol M. Meale, and Simone Marshall offer various interpretations of the maze metaphor, that include, among other meanings, chaos and confusion, alienation, the problem of female difference, women’s subjectivity, a state of mind much like the season (the falling of the leaves),37 “women’s experiences in a life of restricting social conventions”38 and “a woman author’s attempt to negotiate her way through the courtly discourse of love, a discourse established by men and which embodies masculine desire.”39 I would add that, in the first place, the uniqueness of introducing a maze in a love poem dream vision reinforces the poet’s bemused exposé of the deceptively peaceful environment of the garden with its connotative structure of harmonious relationships and amorous meanings. Chaos and confusion, weariness, and wrath are not only implied, they eclipse the garden’s vaunted offerings of peace and harmonious relationships. In the larger conceptual realm, the effect of the maze is to transform the context of the garden into a set of failed recognitions of similitudes and interplay of symbol. What is evoked, rather, are questions and (potentially comic) unease (does the audience detect the reciprocal mimetic representation in the rhetoric of both maze and courtly love exigencies?): “how could I have entered a path that I thought I had just left,” “every direction seems inviting but each ends in exhaustion,” “I seem to be seeking myself endlessly.” Second, of greater achievement it seems to me—and one thus far unacknowledged—are the more exuberant, contradictory sensations raised by the concept of a maze, some of which are amusingly disjunctive: does the maze represent “the thrill of getting lost”40 and then finding oneself again or is it the site of crisis, of struggle? Are the impasses that one reaches of one’s own making through personal choice of paths (and relationships?) or is it a game to test one’s memory (of an earlier deception?) or to test one’s theoretical reasoning? Does the maze (and the garden itself?) demand a cognitive perception of space even though one knows that mazes are founded on the illusion of perspective? Why would

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one commit oneself to a path (or a journey) without a hint of how much further she needs to go? How is it possible to have a coherent experience in a space (or in a social “game” of courtly love) that repeatedly changes course and where one’s memory has no chance of building on traces in the midst of vanishing boundaries and f leeting spatial relationships? There is something of Ovid’s meaning in this maze, something of the aberrant and the trapped, such as when he describes Daedalus’s building baff lement: “so Daedalus in countless corridors/ Built baff lement, and hardly could himself/ Make his way out, so puzzling was the maze.”41 The perspective on which mazes are founded is not merely illusory; it is compromised by concepts of pleasure and beauty, much as are the discourses of love. Indeed, in many ways, the aesthetic formulations of love discourses disguise their multiple contradictions: love is said to ennoble the lover even as he pursues his often corruptive ends; love claims a desired freedom while indulging in a desired confinement, the beloved is said to be sovereign over all other beautiful creatures, but she is mediated as a valuable commodity; and, finally, the beloved is described as inf licting pain upon the lover, while at the same time she is regulated to a position of helplessness. The garden being both patriarchal and courtly love metaphor for a woman’s body alerts us that the first step is already fraught with danger and possibilities. And if the garden is the space wherein to engage in love relationships, the beloved is faced with the fact that the design of the maze is by its very nature intended to deceive her as to where she is. When the narrator remarks, “Other there were, so mased in theyr mynde,/ Al weys were goode for hem, both est and west./ Thus went they furth and had but litel rest” (ll. 38–40), we are reminded that this is a space intended in its concept to disadvantage the journeyer. There is no total view except by the one(s) who designed the maze. It brings to mind Bernard Tschumi’s comment on labyrinths (which applies equally to mazes): one “can never see it in totality, nor can one express it. One is condemned to it and cannot go outside and see the whole.”42 One is at the mercy of the maze much as one is at the mercy of its coded meanings. Specifically, women are caught by the misery and pleasure of the literary codes of love and their perpetuation of inequities in love relationships. Ultimately, it is the maze that determines how the walker views the garden, not the treasure at its center—much as with the tactical rhetoric of courtly love discourse. In the end, too, it is the ladies’ imagination that schematizes their future movements through the maze, and ultimately through the architecture of the garden. Every boundary calls upon one’s judgment and one’s ego, and the boundaries although prescribed, clearly intend to limit and weary the walker. Medieval gardens were in fact

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often very extensive, and were never made to look “natural”; on the contrary, it was the “artfulness” of their construction that appealed to the medieval sensibility for symbolic landscapes and allegorical constructs (rivers, wheels, stairs, arbors, the hortus conclusus) and continued to authorize women’s and men’s generic expectations (the established discourse of courtly love and human and divine relationships). It is this very artificiality, this hyperreality and its implications, that the narrator examines and critiques. Gardens, in the late medieval period, even into the late sixteenth century, were meant to reproduce nature and the cultural (and occasionally theological) assumptions about nature’s harmony. Nature was seen as emblematic of God, its former harmony ref lecting the order and goodness of God. The garden construct was an artistic reproduction of an ideal form (the Garden of Eden or earthly paradise) and, as such, it was intended to be a copy of the “original” garden. But, as with all simulacra, the copy increasingly produces varied copies, further and further removed from its (perceived) original. Consequently, as Gilles Deleuze43 argues, in hyperreality ideal forms have been permanently lost in the reproduction of the simulacra; as a result, the construction of this hyperreality has no connection to the real. Baudrillard’s Disneyland44 or Las Vegas’s casinos are instructive: both constructed realms of fantasy are meant to imply that the rest of the world is real, but that they (Disneyland and the casinos) are havens, places of imagination. So, too, the pleasure garden is a reproduction of an ideal place of ideal relationships. Like Disneyland and the casinos, each of which exist as a “message city”—a place completely made up of signs,—the pleasure garden is symbolic terrain, wholly made up of signs. It is presumably a ludic world, a system of codes for imaginary, ideal behavior. Yet, hyperreality, we now know, encourages one’s consciousness to become convinced that everything (in this particular environment) being fantasy, one is therefore emotionally detached; everyone consents to the simulation, everyone simply plays along. However, a warning: we might be interacting in an imaginary world, but that imaginary world takes our real money (as for example, in casino gambling). The highly stylized garden and its semiotic order are, likewise, meant to support the fantasy of a paradise of love, and social relationships redolent of love. Because the visual material resemblance of the garden to the imagined paradise is transparent, our consciousness consents to what it thinks is but a system of signs, and we assume that we have emotional detachment. If the symbolic system becomes too pervasive we become socialized to its symbols and forget to question them. Put more broadly, we no longer question the metaphor by which we conceptualize the garden’s meanings. Rather, the semiotic order becomes our life-world. Dani Cavallaro summarizes

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the use of hyperreality best: “hyperreality serves specific ideological purposes. It is an illusion, yet its principal aim is to make us forget that this is the case.”45 The Assembly of Ladies’ author confronts this totalizing semiotic order, this world in which the codes and images have come to control behavior and relationships. She is inviting her audience to see how in such a heightened, imagined world, the ladies have forgotten to question their reasoning processes and their habits of thinking. They have begun to assess social relationships and amorous friendships by this heightened reality. They are unable to perceive the reality of romantic possibilities without relating it to the courtly love system. Thus in a world of such heightened reality, a woman is more likely to give herself to the courtly lover, as, indeed, the petitions of grievances by the many ladies indicate. The author’s deliberate disruption of the (masculinist) forms of courtly love narratives, their garden images and their dream visions, is her way of reminding us that this is a fake love system, an illusory world, but the ladies (not the narrator) still respond as though the love-system were authentic. Love appears to be accessible through the garden’s reproduction of signs of harmony and love, but it is not accessible in reality. The ladies are protesting about something that is fake but that “something” has real consequences. Much as the maze is conceived from its creator’s perspective and therefore only its creator has a global view of its structure, so, too, the construct of the courtly love system initially conceived from a privileged perspective expressed in “pure literary hyperbole,” now had become in its fifteenth century permutations, “a part of a code of polite behavior”—co-opted by the “late medieval nobleman.”46 Any agency that women assume that they have is part of the ludic realm, part of the hyperreal, coded system. As Jeffrey T. Nealon expressed it, “agency is necessarily a matter of response to already given codes.”47 Our narrator is subverting certain performative signs expressed in garden emblematic epistemology so as to expose and reveal the fantasy of this simulated locus of love and relationships. Finally, any ambiguity about the narrator’s intention is removed by the second half of the poem where she appropriates yet another dominant paradigm that had long assigned certain values to love-relationships, namely the fictional grievance courts of love.48 Her intention seems less concerned with providing a judgment upon, or even a mock-solution to, the bills of complaint, but to convey, instead, the insubstantiality and failure of grievance courts.49 In the dream, when the ladies are summoned to the court of Lady Loiaulte, Perseveraunce, one of her officers, dictates a protocol: all must wear blue, they are to embroider their mottoes on their sleeves (presumably their grievances),50 and no one is to be excused from this council nor delay attending it. The final instructions are even

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more intriguing: no men may accompany them. When she hears this last instruction, the narrator, shocked, replies: “Nat one?” “ey’ benedicite!/ What have they don? I pray yow telle me that” (ll. 148–149). Given that this tale begins with a knight’s comment on the narrator’s pallor as she walks in a garden, itself universally understood as the “visual analogue of the ideal love affair,”51 and given that the narrator is “musyng with sighes depe” (l. 76), and that the “grief ” that they feel in their “hert” (ll. 124, 125) is the reason that she and her companions are being summoned to the court, to ask, then, “What have [men] don?” (l. 149) is a brilliant parody of women being “mazed, mazed” about men.52 Its brilliance lies in its rhetorical consequences. It compels the audience to fill in the answer of “what men have done to women.” It spares the author any didactic critique of male lovers’ failings. Most effective, it introduces a new complexity. Minimally expressed as her “shocked” query is, its implied criticism is of a deeper level. Not only is the irony of the rhetorical question meant to be appreciated but it also points to the inherent irony of courtly love discourse itself (its posture of male melancholic powerlessness and its fiction of women coded as controlling and sexual yet willingly complicit in their own subordination). As it turns out, the maze, the dream, and the court of love, even the ladies’ preparations for presenting their grievances, all constitute an “ambivalently situated” discourse of resistance. (Carole Anne Taylor’s caveat is particularly applicable here: “resistance is never purely resistance nor simply there in a text but always ambivalently situated in relation to what it resists”).53 Although initially eager to comply with the requests made by Perseveraunce and to present her bill, the narrator’s own behavior begins to ref lect the conf lict. She now resists every prescribed condition except the wearing of blue—the color of steadfastness.54 Twice she has refused to reveal her motto (grievance) or sew it on her clothing: first, to Countenaunce’s direct request to know the substance of her petition, she replies, “And for my word [motto], I have none; this is trewe;/ It is inough that my clothyng be blew” (ll. 312–13), and later to Perseveraunce she spiritedly retorts, “And so I told to Countenaunce here afore;/ Al myn array is bliew, what nedith more?” (ll. 412–13). Wendy Matlock remarks on the lady dreamer’s unusual behavior: “[s]he will not embroider French words, a marker of cultural prestige in fifteenth-century England, on her clothes for anyone. Her behavior may imply a criticism of the fabulous displays of wealth and refinement expected at court but her willingness to buy the expensive dress suggests her complicity in this extravagance.”55 I find Colleen Donnelly’s perspective on the narrator’s behavior about the mottoes quite attractive: Donnelly writes that the narrator’s refusal to wear a motto offers her anonymity that “allows her

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to speak for her class and gender as an ‘everywoman,’ rather than making her sound self-serving or tying her to one particular motto or complaint and thereby weakening the universality of her voice and dream.”56 “By refusing to be labelled by wearing a motto upon her sleeve, the narrator, for a time, stands alone, a woman who is more than a pretty piece of thread (the motto) and more than the martyr her lover has made her (the complaint).”57 I think Donnelly is right, but I also think that the poet is intent on subverting male-constructed images of the acquiescent woman. And the next set of images seem to support this. After the narrator’s companions have presented their petitions in writing, Lady Loiaulte asks to hear the narrator’s petition. Her answer is impudent, almost reckless: “It may so happe peraventure ye shal” (l. 682)—which has in it something of the playful response “maybe you will and maybe you won’t.” And when Lady Loiaulte presses her, her response is almost shocking. She openly “puts her own will above Lady Loiaulty’s,”58 insisting that Lady Loiaulte “Abide a while, it is nat yit my wil” (l. 690). These are images of obstinacy, it is true, but pressing for our attention as well are the images of teasing reposts and playful posturing in comparing gowns and in her wagering bets as to which of them would receive the most praise for their “array.” This literary construct openly resists fixed subjectivity; this is no stereotypical woman who in a conventional allegorical dream would be submissive and open to education and guidance. This is willfulness, obstinacy, reckless speech, and playfulness. Nor is the narrator’s the only subjectivity being examined. Having constructed an all female court the poet can now assume multiple and constantly changing points of identification including those of Perseveraunce, Diligence, and Lady Loiaulte—making sustained allegory therefore superf luous (and criticism of the writer’s deficiency in applying allegorical conventions unwarranted). For example, Perseveraunce, as a gentlewoman, had assiduously respected the differences in rank between her and the ladies among them. She gave only the most formal answers to the numerous questions which the lady dreamer put to her. Now, as Donnelly notes, within the dressing chamber of Lady Loiaulte’s castle, Perseveraunce reverses “the prior model of discourse between them.”59 She now closely questions the lady dreamer, she calls her an “old acqueyntaunce” (l. 402) and she candidly seeks intimate confidences from her. Even Diligence now calls the lady dreamer her “suster” (l. 259). Yet, once they all leave the privacy of the boudoir and step into the room leading to Lady Loiaulte’s great court, these “familiar address[es] are dropped,”60 and protocol is again picked up. Parallels between the two bowers (boudoir and garden bower)61 cannot have escaped the audience. As literary sites, bowers provide the poet/dreamer a refuge, a place to

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rest where the poet’s meditations or dreams allow her/him to pose questions and gain critical insight into current concerns. More significant, bowers had transformative uses. Indeed, in Lydgate’s “A Complaynte of a Lover’s Lyfe” (i.e., “The Complainte of the Black Knight”) the poet’s narrator wanders into an “erbere” (ll. 125–29) where metamorphoses are starkly featured among the depictions on the park’s wall (Daphne, Acteon, Narcissus). Lydgate’s narrator’s concerns are not simply the lover’s complaint. They are literary concerns: he openly questions whether he has the nature and imagination to dramatize the experience that he is but a witness to. Finally he says that he can but record his story with the hope that it will help others. The same is true of La Belle Dame Sans Mercy (Roos’s translation of Chartier’s French poem).62 The poet sits in a bower whose branches and leaves were so thick that “no man me espy” (ll. 184–189) and watches a sorrowful knight unsuccessfully plead his case with the Belle Dame who questions the sincerity of courtly love language, and, more broadly, the validity of courtly love discourse. In the first place, the challenge that the poet has placed in the Belle Dame’s mouth acts likewise as a critique of the generic expectations of such discourse. Second, in having the Belle Dame question the credibility of courtly love language, the narrator perforce raises questions about language itself as a medium of truth, particularly a language communicating through allegorical conceits, genre, tropes, and proverbs—which is why, in Roos’s translation, Rossell Hope Robbins can perspicaciously note that its significant difference lies in the fact that “the woman is to be praised for exposing the fatuity of amor cortois.”63 In the Assembly’s garden bower, the narrator’s dream reveals courts as linguistically framed. All of the bills of complaint recognize powerlessness as gendered. The fact that men are explicitly not permitted to join them in this journey references the legal reality of women being made voiceless in the courts, reinforced in homilies, laws, and conduct books that enjoin women to be silent. Thus, to include men in their grievance court would have been to include a voice whose greater authority would have silenced theirs. Excluding men strongly suggests, too, that women need to establish their identity apart from the masculinist strategies of socializing women to their constructed identity and their “natural” status. In the other bower, the ladies’ dressing chamber, the narrator raises the issue of consciousness of social class (through the dropping of protocol). She also engages in social critique, and draws a delightful sketch of the ladies laying bets. Here is diversity and changeability; here is multiple subjectivity. Both bowers are staging areas: both allow the narrator to transform herself from a woman wearied by negotiating the maze to a person of active social agency; both empower the narrator to challenge

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the boundaries of women’s enclosure, women’s speech, and the way that women must position themselves in obtaining legal redress. Yet the narrator has in mind a further objective, more ambitious than critiquing gardens-as-analogies, courtly love fictions of female empowerment and inadequate legal systems. She is contesting the literary representation of women itself. She has openly problematized the issue of male-inf lected literary genres (e.g., the dream vision, courtly love expectation, enclosed-garden metaphors) that simultaneously idealize and marginalize women within male-female relations. She has assessed the “truths” behind these literary genres, especially the way that their hyperboles control the representation of women’s experiences. Ultimately, she is challenging the way that men have controlled literary forms that sought to express women’s experiences, particularly in male-female relationships. In so doing, they thus controlled the literary means of mediating women’s self-concepts and of counseling women’s behavior. In their move toward autonomy, medieval women seemed to favor stories as a means of counseling other women, as well as self-mediation. By that I mean they explored their self-narratives or those of others as a way of perceiving themselves and others, and as a way of monitoring and directing their (and others’) actions toward a desired end. If we look at the literary conversations of women in The Assembly of Ladies, or in Lanyer’s “The Description of Cooke-ham” (1611)64 with its female Eden and its authorization of the litigant status of Anne Clifford, or Isabel Whitney’s (1573) self-representation in the mock-testament in her “Wyll,” or Margery Kempe’s (ca. 1436–8) narrative of her conversation with Christ, or if we examine Margaret Knowsley’s petition or Agnes Barons’s account of her economic and sexual position, we see how their stories re-represent certain discursive practices and understandings, especially the liminal status of women as entrepreneurs or as litigants in courts, revealing the contradictory suppositions and imperatives within those practices. Significantly, they also reveal the way in which, as Helling demonstrates, there is “no one linear and non-contradictory discourse in which to frame one’s life.”65 In other words, when their subjectivity or identity is the content of their conversation, medieval women frequently refuse discourses that represent their subjectivity in ways they no longer consent to—particularly discourses favoring reasoning and linear argument, especially allegory with its solemnizing, encumbered cultural meanings. An allegorically determined understanding of the garden was, fundamentally, a socially determined understanding of women. Rather, these women frequently appear to choose to employ discourse that often embodies ambiguity and shifting purposes. On the one hand, such discourse appears to support the dominant authority; yet, on the other

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hand, it strategically articulates a subversive perspective. Indeed, the very issue for which the ladies seem to gather together, namely to submit their complaints concerning their aff lictions and injured love relationships, has been noted by several scholars to be the unsatisfactory part of the poem. The complaints, they say, are “wordy and incoherent” in style;66 as love-petitions, they tend “to ramble badly and say nothing.”67 The narrator’s part in the episode represents, for one critic, her “self-satisfied stubbornness,”68 but for another, it suggests the narrator’s “lack of assertiveness and low self-esteem”69 consistent with her behavior throughout the poem. Moreover, there is “an exasperating unwillingness to regard words as anything but metrical counter,” 70 and the narrative’s ending is “inconclusive,” and “leaves the reader dissatisfied.” 71 (Clearly, the narrator herself doesn’t see it that way. She pointedly counsels the knight, and her audience: “Rede wele my dreame, for now my tale is done.” [“Be advised by my dream, for now my tale is done.”]) (l. 756). Several of these same scholars and others have noted, at the same time, that the poet is quite good with descriptions of specific court scenes, and that she “handles casual conversation” in a “vigorous and natural way.” 72 Yet, if our poet demonstrates artistic f lair in the handling of casual conversation and specific court scenes but appears “incoherent and wordy” in her handling of grievances, shouldn’t we then be asking this question: is it the grievances that she cares about or is it the opportunity to use the casual conversations and particular court scenes to expose women’s precarious status in courts and courts of love? If the history of grievances, including love-complaints, tendered in both fictional courts and real courts has demonstrated that medieval women were generally powerless to do anything about their aff lictions, whether or not they were legitimate, isn’t it a testimony to this poet’s genius that she has no intention of working up yet another set of grievances, but simply appropriates the literary convention of fictional grievance courts to convey, instead, their insubstantiality and failure? And not only are fictional courts represented as being imperfect and f lawed, but, as Wendy Matlock has ably argued, our poet has “emulated the contemporary legal system” that so frequently was unable to deliver justice for “real-life petitioners in actual courts.” 73 In contriving a grievance court whose officers are, exclusively, women, the poet has constructed a female framework for the analysis of women’s experience. It may be no less a narrative ruse than are the male-authored courtly love texts with their elaborate protocols sanctioning and limiting cultural values about men and women. However, creating a council of women pointedly contests women’s unequal status: it suggests that privileged (male) power differences were the shaper of women’s identity, the source of their (unreciprocated) loyalty, and the shaper of their agency.

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Looking at (and playing with) literary protocols has been for our author not simply an engagement with literary and conceptual rubrics of love and relationships—e.g., gardens as a literary mode of institutionalizing male dominion in relationships—but it has also enabled her to recognize and use the (conspiratorial) persuasive tactics of its rhetoric to recognize, perhaps, the “[gendered] self itself as rhetorical form.” 74 Certainly, it has brought to her audience’s attention the gendering of court prerogatives. More impressive, it has encouraged her to challenge dominant metaphors sanctioning idealized (disabling) love and gardens as forced subordination and resistance. Like Eve, she sought knowledge, and in that she displayed the independence of thought necessary to become wise about the garden.

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CHAPTER 5 CODE-SWITCHING: MALE CROSSING INTO FEMALE SPEECH DOMAIN

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n the Clerk’s Tale of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Griselda’s silence has long been the subject of intense scholarly interest; however, neither Griselda’s speech nor her silence is the focus here. Rather, I am interested in a particular facet of Chaucer’s rhetorical brilliance, namely, the way a male author (Chaucer) uses a male narrator (the Clerk) to employ the strategies of women’s speech, thereby confronting an understanding of maleness itself, and, at the same time, endorsing women’s speech as a means of their gaining discursive authority and some control of their identity in the public narrative. In the Prologue to the Clerk’s Tale, Herry Bailly confronts the Clerk and attempts to emasculate him by addressing him as a “virgin,” “coy as . . . a mayde” (IV.2). The Clerk recognizes in Bailly’s disempowerment strategy a parallel of what men do to women; it is the old, traditional claim to power based on sex and male virility by asserting, through slurs, the other’s lack of sexual virility whether covertly expressed as male impotence or as the subordinate sexual status of a “coy mayde.” The Clerk’s responses are immediate and brilliant: first, he appears to succumb to, and then overthrows Bailly’s disempowerment threat. But, in his choice of the Tale, Griselda, he intends something more revolutionary. First, the Tale will confront Bailly’s challenging whether the Clerk is fully male by inviting consideration of another kind of male that a man may be. Further, the Tale confronts Bailly’s (and the reader’s) understanding of maleness itself, undermining, along the way, both Bailly’s and the reader’s confidence in binary oppositions. However, it is in the Envoy to the Tale that Chaucer’s most innovative intervention in gendered practices occurs. There he openly questions the way that writers (such as Petrarch, hagiographers, authors of conduct books, etc.) map a language

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and a set of material and discursive practices onto men’s and women’s cultural roles. Two such practices especially contested (in both Tale and Envoy) are the linking of a woman’s silence to sexuality as a construct of the ideal woman/wife and the trend of linking a Clerk’s silence and his posture of study to a questionable sexuality and gender. Herry Bailly’s opening address to the Clerk is illustrative of both practices. It is an unbroken series of insults,1 beginning with a startling comment on the Clerk’s sexuality, “Ye ryde as coy and stille as dooth a mayde/ Were newe spoused, sittynge at the bord;/ This day ne herde I of youre tonge a word” (IV.2–4). Such silence can only mean, he adds, that you are studying “aboute som sophyme”2 (a misleading argument or disputed questions of logic).3 Bailly’s insults are not only excessive, but they are also gratuitous, when one considers that the Clerk’s only fault seems to be his riding in silence, deep in thought. What is it about the behavior of a thin Clerk riding in a quiet pose of study that Herry Bailly associates with the feminine, the “mayde”: “newe spoused, sittynge at the bord”? He had already singled out the Clerk earlier in the General Prologue, attacking his “shamefastnesse (modesty)”: “Lat be youre shamefastnesse,” he chided; “Ne studieth noght” (IV.840–41). “Shamefastnesse” can of course be ascribed to both men and women. Significantly, however, in the entire corpus of Middle English documents, “shamefastnesse” is linguistically paired only with “mayde” or “maydens.” Furthermore, he rhymes the Clerk’s “shamefastnesse” with the word “Prioresse” (IV.842), specifically coupling, thereby, the Clerk’s behavioral habits with those of the Prioresse. It compels us to wonder yet again what it is about that posture of silence and an undisclosed interiority of thought that triggers the intensely personal and half-hostile tone of Bailly’s string of innuendos about clerks. That women’s silence had profound associations with women’s chastity has long been established as a commonplace. Then, too, traditionally a clerk’s demeanor was supposed to summon similar expectations: it was to be maidenly—even to “resemble a virgin newly spoused.”4 Yet that does not fully account for Bailly’s slur against the Clerk’s sexuality. In that period, fewer than half of the students studying philosophy and theology went into orders.5 The Clerk’s profession did not therefore automatically assume ministry as his next stage nor chastity in speech and demeanor as his proper conduct. At heart, the more troubling issue concerns the expectation of the age and the expectation of the Host that identified a man’s silence and, in particular, identified study with chastity, notably the chastity of a virgin newly spoused. To be modest about one’s words and actions if one’s chosen profession is scholarship makes some sense since immodesty raises questions about one’s judgment and thus about one’s credentials. But to associate men’s silence and study

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with chastity, or a scholar with “a virgin newly spoused” is an unambiguous social/sexual construct that identifies thinking with repressed sexuality, and intellectual endeavors with unfulfilled erotic experiences. Admittedly, our current age understands knowledge, language and writing to be sexually coded, and to be therefore social/sexual constructs, but there is no evidence that the Middle Ages actively theorized knowledge or study to be sexually encoded (although they clearly understood that it could be: Walter’s pursuit of knowledge of Griselda is patently voyeuristic and sexual; and Scripture’s use of the word “know” included among its meanings “to know carnally” as in Matthew 1:25, “Joseph knew not Mary until the birth of Jesus,” and in Luke 1:34, in Mary’s response to being told that she would bear a child: “How can this be, since I know not man?”). In particular, however, the study of sophisms and fallacies (which Bailly ridicules) was not theorized as sexually encoded. Nevertheless, if we accept the concept that thinking is by nature deconstructive and that the Clerk’s posture of thinking emphasized the discipline of rhetoric as a natural part of his habitus (whose propensities Bailly twice censures), we come close to a possible answer to the hostile association of men’s silence and study with chastity. By its very activity, rhetorical analysis purportedly reveals the constructed nature of our thoughts. As an entry into language rhetoric is likewise an entry into a shared culture and ideology, and, thus, is a privileged entry into the unconscious (of those inhabiting that shared culture). Ultimately, rhetorical analysis interrogates a culture’s ideology. As such, it is threatening because it represents power uncontrolled by the other. If one cannot control what another does with her/ his mind, presumably, then, one lays claim to control of what the other does with her/his body. This is what Bailly attempts with the Clerk. The control laid claim to, in a patriarchal society, was the control of others’ sexuality.6 This concept—that rhetoric as power sets up a corresponding attempt to control that power—is supported not simply by rhetoric but also by certain discursive practices.7 Herry Bailly’s public representation of the scholar/Clerk as “mayden” and “coy” is an overt attempt to question the Clerk’s virility, to deny his sexuality and gender, and therefore to effectively bar his access to power. It also ensures the Clerk’s marginalization, which thus marginalizes his point of view. That, in turn, essentially marginalizes his privileged entry into the unconscious. This sequence of denying the sexuality, gender, and power of the Clerk parallels medieval society’s treatment of women. Chaucer’s Clerk recognized this. Bailly’s treatment of the Clerk was precisely the treatment exercised toward women. It is this recognition, I think, that leads the Clerk to determine to “pley the pleye,” as Bailly phrased it. But where Bailly meant a game, a narrative to entertain them,

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the rhetorician Clerk uses the concept of the game to confront language itself—both speech and silence—and its part in positioning a gendered self. He will make language—the very thing Bailly is suspicious of—the site of his revolt. He will employ code-switching or “language-crossing,” i.e., a speaker’s alternating use of two or more languages in discourse. (The whole of this argument—indeed, the chapter itself—assumes of course that the Clerk is an individualized voice, a character with his own patterns of thought orchestrated through the speaking consciousness of Chaucer. That point bears mentioning because distinction between characterological and authorial voice in fiction is not uncommonly (nor unjustifiably) blurred by scholars and readers.8 Indeed, Bakhtin’s concept of “hybrid voices” testifies to the tendency to reduce the voices of the narrator, the characters, and the author to a single voice).9 Specifically, then, my claim is that the Clerk will language-cross into a feminine speech domain. Contextualization: The Question of Translation How problematic is it for this tale’s narrator (not the tale itself ) to somehow represent the strategies of a woman’s voice in the late fourteenth century? One colleague worried: this tale is written in rime royal, one of the most elevated forms of Middle English verse; its vocabulary and style place it undoubtedly in an elite literary culture. After all, he added, it is a translation into Middle English from Petrarchan Latin. I agree to a certain extent. The issue of translation can pose genuine problems, particularly when the narrative concerns relationships involving feeling and intention. One of the scenes in the Clerk’s Tale is a perfect example. In the Marquis Walter’s plan to test Griselda’s unquestioning obedience to him (the implications of which I examine in greater detail later), he leads her to think that he must sacrifice their daughter for the people’s sake: “Nat as I wolde, but as my peple leste” (IV.490). As Walter enters Griselda’s bedroom bent on testing her with the removal of their daughter, Petrarch describes Walter’s demeanor with this brief phrase, “turbida fronte” (“with troubled brow”).10 But Chaucer (for reasons that I hope to make clear later) has already prepared us to experience something far more unsettling in Walter’s face as he enters Griselda’s bedroom. Just two or three lines earlier, Chaucer/the Clerk has abruptly intervened in his own narrative, switching suddenly to the first person, to comment on the act of testing itself: these tests of Griselda are praised by some men (IV.459), he remarks, but, as for him, given that Walter has already tested her at length, it is an evil to test a wife when there is no need, “And putten hire in angwyssh and in drede” (IV.462). He then renders

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Petrarch’s description of Walter’s “disturbed [or grim] brow” as, rather, Walter’s “stierne face and with ful trouble cheere” (IV.465) (“with grim face and fully troubled demeanor”). It is a brilliant moment in translation: it calls attention to the politics of translation (some people praise such tests of Griselda, i.e., his source, Petrarch, but he, Chaucer/the Clerk, does not) and to the epistemological dimension of words: quite apart from the indeterminate meaning of words themselves, how does a (pictorial) representation—whether in Latin or in the vernacular—of one’s exterior give the reader/audience access to a privileged interiority of the subject? Or, if the representation of physicality is fundamentally the registering or cataloguing of surfaces, is not this particular act of translation essentially the act of interpretation? Indeed, “What is at stake in medieval translation is not linguistic equivalence or the transfer of meaning, but interpretation of the source text,” Ruth Evans asserts.11 And, is not interpretation profoundly linked to one’s subjectivity? Petrarch’s representation of Walter’s demeanor gives the effect of direct disclosure; its unnuanced brevity suggests the unmediated transparency of a sovereign’s will that comprehends the salutary effects of mandating virtuous obedience. Although, as John Finlayson asserts, “Walter is not presented in Petrarch as a judicial figure or one of imminent divine symbolic status,”12 nevertheless, Petrarch’s explanation as to why he translated the story suggests that he did indeed link its moral significance to humankind’s relationship with God.13 Chaucer’s translation, on the other hand, appears to represent Walter as an involuntary accomplice to his people’s wishes. However, given the earlier behavioral aspects of Walter already represented to us by the narrator-Clerk, Chaucer’s translation intends, in my view, to disrupt Petrarch’s patriarchal notion of virtuous submission to the will of another, and to effect greater psychological depth, namely, to expose Walter’s sadism that masquerades as anxiety and concern for what he “moot doon” (IV.489) to Griselda’s daughter. Not only, therefore, is there no attempt at linguistic fidelity in Chaucer’s translation of this scene, but there is, to borrow Ruth Evans’s words, an almost “aggressive displacement”14 of the text of that scene. It illustrates, perfectly, the type of translation problem posed by a source-narrative involving feelings and intention. As a general principle on the theory and practice of translation in the Middle Ages, I find Rita Copeland’s position invaluable as a guide. In her view, translating is anything but a “self-effacing service to an authoritative text.”15 The act of translating is also an act of composing, she argues; it is a “form of appropriation and substitution,”16 —all of which deeply involve ideological considerations. Sherry Simon makes the same point: translation involves “a process of mediation which does

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not stand above ideology but works through it.”17 What we need to look at, Copeland writes, is the broader context in order “to locate the terms by which the aims of translation have been redefined.”18 Those broader contexts include “other discursive practices, such as hermeneutics or political theory, or . . . the relationship between academic and vernacular cultures.”19 “The history of translation and its theory through the Middle Ages can only be written as a history of the conf luence and rupture of these and many other systems.”20 More specifically, what of the complexities of rime royal? Can they be managed to employ strategies of a woman’s voice?21 Chaucer himself provides precedents: Troilus and Criseyde, a translation/re-write of Il Filostrato, is written in rime royal.22 In Book III, 1100–03, when Troilus faints at the foot of Criseyde’s bed, Pandarus tears open Troilus’s shirt to show “a mannes herte” (l. 1098). He then demands, “ ‘Nece, but ye helpe us now,/ Allas, youre owen Troilus is lorn!’/ ‘Iwis, so wolde I, and I wiste how,/ Ful fayn,’ quod she. ‘Allas, that I was born!’ ” The syntactical arrangement of Criseyde’s answer is deliberately chaotic, imitating the perceived conventional characteristics of women’s speech (repetition, hyperbole, unfinished sentences).23 Nevertheless, notice the order and the control of the rhyme scheme. The same is true of her speech in Book V, 1061–64, when Criseyde realizes that her reputation as a traitor will be the future subject of men’s books and women’s voices: “O, rolled shal I ben on many a tonge!/ Thorughout the world my belle shal be ronge!/ And wommen moost wol haten me of alle./ Allas, that swich a cas me sholde falle!” If Chaucer can adopt the voice of a woman suddenly faced with a sexually charged and politically uncomfortable situation or with the dread of her future reputation, he can certainly fashion a male narrator who can, likewise, adopt the same stratagems, particularly a narrator who, he notes, is skilled in sophymes and the colors of rhetoric. One might also note that rime royal’s claim to “elevated stature and elite literary culture,” was itself open to parody: Chaucer as a fictional persona narrating the Tale of Sir Thopas, in the Canterbury Tales, opened both himself and rime royal to accusations of drasty riming. Rime royal is again the vehicle for satire in the 1541 poem, “The Schoolhouse of Women,” a lengthy and wide-ranging attack on women, rehearsing stock examples and prevailing arguments against women “with a humorous, earthy, and sometimes vulgar spirit that undoubtedly contributed to the immense popularity of the piece.”24 The “Schoolhouse” complains how “The wife again doth nought but glaver [chatter]/ And hold him up with ‘yea’ and ‘nay.’ ”25 It portrays women as gossips who “babble fast”26 and whose powers of reasoning are “not worth a turd.”27

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Given, therefore, that translators “can use language as a cultural intervention, as part of an effort to alter expressions of domination, whether at the level of concepts, of syntax, or of terminology,”28 translating from Petrachan Latin certainly offered a way of intervening in, even contesting, inherited literary material. As Seth Lerer remarks, “Acts of writing after someone—Chaucer writing after Boccaccio, Spenser writing after Chaucer, and so on—become acts of quitting: ways of recasting inherited material to meet new social contexts or aesthetic expectations.”29 “Translation, too, becomes a form of quitting, and the status of the Canterbury Tales as a set of purported translations (for example, in the explicit acknowledgements to Petrarch in the Clerk’s Tale or to Livy in the Manciple’s Tale) finds itself transformed, within the poem’s larger structure, into forms of literary contestation.”30 “The relationships among the translators and the translated, then, are not simple in the Clerk’s performance,” Carolyn Dinshaw remarks.31 “Translatio always involves a relation to a previous authority or figure of the proper.”32 It “articulates a movement away from the authoritative, the proper, and an establishment of another authority or propriety. Taking a cue from the etymology of translatio, we might call this structure of identifications (Clerk/Griselda, Petrarch/Walter) loosely transferential, drawing upon the psychological implications of the term.”33 “The Clerk’s identification against Walter can be read as his critique of Petrarch’s translatio and a working-out of a new kind of literary authority.”34 David Wallace goes further: “First, and fundamentally, Chaucer reverses the direction of Petrarch’s literary translating.”35 Translation (in the Clerk’s Tale) can produce a negative effect, according to Emma Campbell. Campbell argues that by “undermining Petrarch’s text through translation, the Clerk (and Chaucer) thus establish another form of male, clerical authority that includes women in the text by insisting that they both acknowledge the negative representations of themselves by male authors and reproduce those stereotypes through their own behavior.”36 Campbell and dozens of scholars over the years have noted that the Envoy is pitted against the Tale’s ostensible themes of obedience and patience. The implication is that the negative representation of women—via the Envoy—is therefore reinstated by the Clerk. However, this need not be the effect at all. Where there is a host of conf licting material offered, there is likewise, as Toril Moi argues, a space within that host to read other possibilities: that is, if the conf licts become apparent to us (and to the Clerk as speaker), we already have a destabilization of the hierarchical male subject and female object, we already have a disruption of gender expectations. Indeed, at the end of the Clerk’s Tale, when he explicitly gestures toward the Wife of Bath, the Clerk reminds

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the audience of her earlier effective dismantling of the categories which assign innate traits and behavior to women. Her critiquing such essentialist categories opened up a range of alternative ways of viewing women and women viewing themselves. Code-Switching/Language-Crossing This claim—that the Clerk crosses into the feminine speech domain— requires somewhat broad support because it traverses several disciplines (anthropological-linguistic, ethnographical-linguistic, and sociolinguistic disciplines). Yet, because it confronts particular, lingering assumptions about language37 the claim likewise requires a narrower, focused support. Three such specific assumptions concern us: first, code-switching is usually ascribed to a speaker’s moving from a nonprestigious language to a prestigious one. The question naturally arises: why, then, would the Clerk, who belongs to a more prestigious (male) culture, language-cross to a less prestigious (feminine) culture? Second, in code-switching or language-crossing, at least two languages are involved. However, in the Clerk’s Tale, only one language (Middle English) obtains. Third, feminine speech practices are generally not considered a language. In responding to these assumptions, I intend to draw especially upon Roxy Harris’s and Ben Rampton’s38 research on South Asian English, Creole, and Panjabi code-switching among male and female British South Midlands’ teenagers and on Roger Hewitt’s39 ethnographic account of Afro-Caribbean speech forms in the speech of white British adolescents and on Cecelia Cutler’s40 studies dealing with white hip hoppers speech as a performance of African-American English speech. For speech codes, I draw on Mikhail Bakhtin’s41 concept of heteroglossia and speech genres, Celso AlvarezCáccamo’s42 anthropological-linguistic theory of speech codes, and Nikolas Coupland’s43 stylistic variation and persona in sociolinguistics. I also use the work of Laura McClure and John Winkler. Finally, I draw on Gerry Philipsen’s44 ethnographic study on speech codes, and brief ly on William Leap’s sociolinguistic research of gay discourse. The Theories: Code-Switching, Linguistic Ideologies “Code-switching” once meant, predominantly, a speaker’s alternating use of two or more languages in discourse.45 However, code-switching has come to include a broad range of sociolinguistic practices46 from nuanced registering of alternation in discourse or shifting in gendered discourse to appropriating street slang and its linguistic ideologies to expressing in a single language an internal strata of “linguistic codes,” e.g., class,

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ethnocentric dispositions, profession, gender-specificity, age, ideological positioning, etc. An even wider range of meaning is given to codeswitching in Bill Manhire’s definition. For him, code-switching is what occurs “when speakers in the course of a sentence, shift between one language and another, one dialect and another, one register and another. Often it is simply a matter of shifting registers and tones.”47 Admittedly, Manhire’s description is viewed as far broader than the standard meaning of code-switching in sociolinguistics.48 Significantly, however, the movement in sociolinguistic studies within the past decade has been to dissolve the links between language practices and social activity, or in Coupland and Jaworski’s broader phrasing, sociolinguistic studies now show “how the concept of social practice has in many ways dissolved the distinction between ‘language’ and ‘society.’ ”49 In their judgment, “ ‘the linguistic’ in Sociolinguistics nowadays needs to account for what speakers, seen as social actors or agents, are able to achieve (functionally) when they use the resources of linguistic diversity.”50 This is precisely what code-switching involves, as I use it. “Language-crossing” is a form of code-switching. Language-crossing occurs, Ben Rampton says, when a speaker code-switches to a “language which isn’t generally thought to ‘belong’ to the speaker.”51 This type of crossing, Rampton argues, “involves a sense of movement across quite sharply felt social or ethnic boundaries, and it raises issues of legitimacy that participants need to reckon with in the course of their encounter.”52 The question, then, is: what would speakers (or Chaucer’s Clerk) have to gain in crossing “sharply felt social or ethnic boundaries”? In separate studies, Hewitt (in the late 1980s) and Rampton (in the late 1990s) documented Afro-Caribbean and white British male and female teenagers language-crossing into Panjabi and white London teenagers crossing over into ‘London Jamaican’ creole.53 These participants were crossing over social or ethnic boundaries and adopting a nonprestigious language to which they had no evident ethnic or social connection. One singular advantage of this language-crossing dynamic lay in its providing a contrast to the dominant (Eurocentric) culture—not unlike Howard Giles’s Communication Accommodation Theory.54 Even more significant to my thesis is Harris and Rampton’s finding that this languagecrossing frequently occurs “just at the moments when transgression and impropriety are made the focal issues,”55 —not unlike the moment that Bailly’s assault on the Clerk’s sexuality provokes the Clerk to respond that he was under Bailly’s “yerde” (“ruler,” “penis”),56 at which point he promptly chooses a tale and a mode of communicating it that both disobey Bailly’s mandate and challenge his ideology of masculinity. Significant, too, is Rampton’s second observation that language-crossing

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“frequently turned ethnicity into a focal object of play, contemplation and dispute”—much as the Clerk through language-crossing turns the construct of masculinity, and gender itself, into a focal object of play, contemplation, and dispute.57 Borrowing identity is a temporary bonus of language-crossing. The practice of using a language variety that belongs to another group (the sociolinguists’ description of language-crossing) includes, for sociolinguist Cecelia Cutler, white suburban teenagers in America using AfricanAmerican Vernacular English speech markers to affiliate with hip hop culture. “Borrowing another language variety is often an expression of identity,”58 her research reveals (as does Mary Bucholtz’s dissertation study on African American Vernacular English and European American Youth Identities).59 Cutler’s research in the schools of predominantly white middle- and upper-middle class neighborhoods in and around New York City shows “language-crossing” by most white hip hoppers who “have not acquired African-American English in any real sense of the word.”60 The type of crossing that they engage in involves the use of the invariant “be,” “an aspectual marker in African-American English that signals a habitual or repetitive action;” in addition, they drop the linking verb, and they use the typical discourse marker, “you know what I’m saying.”61 An excerpt from Cutler’s example is representative: “people be callin’ me a wannabe, but I don’t know what they Ø talkin’ about, you know . . . What I do ain’t nobody’s business, you know what I’m sayin.’ ”62 I reference Cutler’s research, first because it exemplifies code-switching within a single language.63 Second, and even more important, she is at pains to point out that despite the fact that the white hip-hoppers employ African-American hip-hop grammatical elements and lexical features they are merely “performing a certain type of Blackness in terms of their use of linguistic and other ethnic markers;” they are not “trying to pass as Black” in most cases.64 Rather, Cutler insists, “they are asserting various alignments—whether positive, negative, or ambivalent—towards African Americans, hip-hop culture, and mainstream White culture.” In fact, “they also employ speech features that mark them as White and/or speakers of regional varieties.”65 Chaucer’s Clerk uses no uniquely feminine linguistic markers. (Although Elaine Treharne argues, persuasively, in my view, that Chaucer skillfully emulates aspects of a female language in portraying the Wife of Bath;66 clearly, feminine linguistic markers therefore would not be beyond his skill). He is not trying to pass as feminine. Indeed, his speech features generally mark him as male. But, as we will see, in signaling stances, in projecting a certain persona, his speech and communication codes, especially as indexed by his affective and epistemological dispositions, allow

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him—similar to Rampton’s, Harris’s, and Cutler’s language-crossers—to align himself with the female community. Code-Switching: Two or More Languages? Concerning the second assumption, namely that language-crossing involves at least two or more languages: my position is that languagecrossing can occur within a monolingual situation. I have already addressed that issue, in part, with the discussion of Cutler’s findings (whose work is reinforced by other sociolinguists).67 However, the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and the later theories of Celso Alvarez-Cáccamo have already opened the door for claims such as mine. In Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel,” he construes the multi-voiced nature of language not as the diversity of language but as languages of a language. “The unity of a literary language is not a unity of a single, closed language system, but is rather a highly specific unity of several ‘languages’ that have established contact and mutual recognition with each other (merely one of which is poetic language in the narrow sense).”68 Quite apart from the dialogism of the author as speaker and the author’s speaking personage (which themselves constitute “languages” within the novel), Bakhtin’s principles of discourse in “single-languaged” novel69 are, in his view, the same principles of any given single language. At the basis of a given single language “there lie completely different principles of specification and formation (in some cases a functional principle, in others, a contentthematic one, in a third group, a strictly social-dialectological one).” 70 These languages within a single language “do not exclude one another and intersect in a variety of ways (the Ukrainian language, the language of epic poetry, the language of early Symbolism, the language of the student, the language of a generation, the language of the minor intellectual, the language of the Nietzschean, and so on).” 71 In other words, a single language is a galaxy of speech domains whose constraints are not solely structural or dependent upon linguistic markers; rather, the “grammatical, syntactic, and lexical structures themselves instance or embody kinds of social relationship.” 72 The Clerk’s Tale: A Galaxy of Speech Domains In the Clerk’s Tale the social relationships embodied in the structural level alone are dizzying. At least four conf licting genres operate at the tale’s surface: legend, romance, allegory, and hagiography. Each of these genres’ different (often regular) patterns invites different expectations.

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Legends involve a single episode, connect some imaginary event to a person or event in history, and their authenticity is disputable. Allegory allows event, persons, and history itself to mean everything and one thing. It imposes its own signifiers on structure and vocabulary along with an insistent correspondence between its literal and figurative levels. Interpretability is fairly rigid in the face of signifiers that are multiple and nearly endless. Hagiography bears some resemblance to allegory in that it plays with typology. But its emphasis is on trauma, generally centered in an ideological battle (theology or Christian tenets) between the saint and the tyrant, resulting in physical torture or imprisonment. The torture is never successful, and the saint “triumphs” through prayer even though they are generally martyred. Tests were also inherent to the narrative scheme of the medieval romance (a f luid genre in Chaucer’s age), usually in the form of adventure or quests. Its pattern likewise included (ironically in our Tale) a distressed lady. Loss and reconciliation, “the blisful ende” as Chaucer’s Clerk remarks, generally resolved romances.73 Each of the social relationships embodied in these conf licting structures invite different expectations. Legends insist upon almost no strategy of reading; on the other hand, hagiography’s lexical structures overdetermine moral interpretations. Yet, hagiography borrows from legends, history, and romance. Romance, for its part, allows for social disorder;74 indeed, its own structure is in conf lict: “the narrative always moves toward social integration and unanimity, but it is at the same time concerned with socially alienating desires that threaten to impede progress toward closure or to rupture social unity.” 75 In terms of linguistic self-awareness, the Clerk’s Tale approaches the brilliance of Chaucer’s House of Fame. This Tale is a rhetor’s (the Clerk) almost perfect representation of language as rhetorical and authority (literary, social, and religious) as linguistic. Language Is Not the Only Code in Code-Switching The concept of code-switching takes another turn in the mid-1990s when Alvarez-Cáccamo insisted upon a reconceptualization of “codes” in code-switching. Challenging the whole notion of “languages as indivisible constructs” 76 much as Bakhtin had, he overturns the concept of code-as-equivalent-to-a-distinct-language. Moreover, he clarifies and advances Bakhtin’s position. Use of language is a coded activity, he agreed, but it isn’t the only code going on when one is speaking. The act of communicating is itself also a coded activity. “Codes are previous to and relatively independent from languages and from other signaling systems. Codes mobilize signaling materials from languages, kinesic and proxemic systems, and probably from other systems we are still unaware

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of.” 77 But “codes are not these materials themselves, nor the intentions themselves, nor the interpretations themselves.” 78 Rather, “codes are ‘used’ in order to interpret and produce speech—they are not the speech material itself.” 79 He offers one of his case studies as an example. The president of the Galician Federation of Sport Shooting is interviewed on television by a Galician-speaking interviewer. The president, from Galitia, speaking Spanish, used a reportive code that “is socially associated with Spanish”; still speaking Spanish,80 he switched to an “evaluative/complaining code” that represents a Galician “social identity.”81 Thus, while the use of language itself was an ongoing coded activity, the act of communicating was also an ongoing coded activity. As AlvarezCáccamo phrased it, a person can “speak Galician in Spanish.”82 As both the Tale and the Envoy will show, the Clerk emphatically “mobilize[s] signaling materials” from other systems (hagiography, conduct manuals, legal and social attitudes toward women’s speech). In negotiating language codes to manage his ambiguous identity and his affective and epistemological stances, the Clerk’s social voices register a particular theme, a particular genre, a particular ideology, especially an ideology privileging the subjugation of women, itself rooted in a questionable definition of masculinity. Speech Codes, the Ideology of Communication, and Style It is the communicative act that Gerry Philipsen likewise stresses in his definition of speech codes. In the ethnography of communication, Philipsen’s field, speech codes are a system of socially constructed “symbols and meanings, premises, and rules, pertaining to communicative conduct.”83 Summed up, the five principles of his speech code theory state that speaking is rooted in and emerges from particular speech communities, each of whose speech exhibits a social pattern of language, manifests an ideology about communication, shapes the particular culture of that community, and forms its cognitive processes.84 (Philipsen’s coding principles have perhaps their most pragmatic manifestation in gay discourse).85 Philipsen’s multi-year study on the speech codes of “Teamsterville” and “Nacirema” (American spelled backwards)86 classically illustrates those principles. (Teamsterville is Philipsen’s fictional name for an area near the south side of Chicago, consisting of white male, blue-collar workers.) While Nacirema is preoccupied with metacommunication, Teamseterville’s ideology of communication virtually ritualized talk itself, particularly talking or speaking as a man. The three types of situations marked for male talk had so distinctive a pattern and a meaning

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that when Philipsen, as a supervisor of neighborhood youth, used speech as a way of dealing with some young people needing discipline, his very use of speech itself to make his points was regarded as unmanly. In their view, a man who uses speech to inf luence boys is not really a proper “man”; consequently, he was seen by many as “queer.” Speech codes are forms of gendering one self. In Teamsterville’s ideology of communication, not only is talk proscribed when some other expressive action is required (violence, silence, etc.) but also because talk signifies solidarity (a “man” talks only with his equals), talk is then considered inappropriate when a “man’ is threatened. That is, any one threatening a man is obviously not in solidarity with him. To engage in talk with such a person is perceived as undercutting both a “man’s” status and his own speech. Both Bailly and late medieval ideology of communication likewise had so ritualized silence itself as the sign of the [idealized] woman that the Clerk’s not speaking threatened the “manly code” of speech, and he was perceived to be “unmanly.” Teamsterville, Nacirema, and the Clerk’s narrative all illustrate the fact that distinctive speech codes within a monolingual situation shape distinctive cultural communities, distinctive cognitive processes and distinctive social, ethnic, and gender boundaries. Style in language is yet another way that a speaker can express “an array of identities across social contexts.”87 Nikolas Coupland, noting the inadequacy of traditional definitions of style as limited to dialect and as noncontextual, proposed almost radically that “style is everything and everywhere—to the extent that we define styles as context-related varieties, and contextuality as the rationale for sociolinguistics.”88 In other words, style is discourse, and it is paralinguistic. “Style,” Bucholtz notes, “resides not in speakers but in situations and is characterized by its instability.”89 “Style thus is not a product of agentive acts but of factors that are largely unconscious, whether cognitive (à la Labov) or social (à la Bell).”90 Combining sociolinguistic and literary approaches to linguistic style gives a richer meaning. Bucholtz proposes that style (in that combination) can vary widely, “expressing not a single self but an array of identities across social contexts.”91 Furthermore, “the joining of stylistics and sociolinguistics also admits a more central focus on variation not only within speakers but across speakers within the same social category.”92 Gender is certainly one such identity that can be expressed with style. Recognizing the need to avoid any suggestion of an essentialist speech domain, I want to foreground Elinor Ochs’s point regarding gender indexing: “few features of language directly and exclusively index gender.”93 Rather the path between gender and certain linguistic features is indirect. It generally relies on a “prior association of language with

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particular interactional, social, and pragmatic meanings that in turn are linked to gender.”94 Summary of the Theories The final question, in what way can feminine speech practices be considered a language has, clearly, now been answered. Bakhtin’s theory about single language containing languages (speech domains) and Alverez-Cáccamo’s thesis that the act of communicating while using a language is itself a coded activity signaling different selves demonstrate the supple dynamics and permeability of speech domains. Moreover, the notion that any category of knowledge or any human meaning system (such as “language”) is a coherent, internally consistent whole has long been dismantled by postmodernism critical thinking. All is heterogeneity; all is multiple perspectives, multiple discourses, and multiple possible “realities.” Language is heterogeneous in construct, multiple in its possible “realities,” and speech codes constitute many of those “realities.” And it is about speech that we are speaking: the Clerk is speaking to the pilgrims. I have then established that a speech domain can include everything from phonemic systems, a dialect, style, speech genres, street slang, distinctive speech patterns, a particular register with its semantic patterns, and communicating codes that draw upon extralinguistic systems such as body language. It engages linguistic practices, identity practices, especially shared-identity practices.95 It involves borrowing cultural elements, and it can include lexical and prosodic elements, personal style and self-presentation. Indeed, a speech domain appears to include worlds of semiotic systems beyond pragmatic patterns of speech and linguistic forms. One could almost say that a speech domain could be defined as “everything and everywhere,” to borrow Nikolas Coupland’s assessment of “style” in sociolinguistics.96 The Text: Feminine Speech Practices All of these elements are involved in the Clerk’s language-crossing to a feminine speech domain. There are no claims in my argument for a unitary feminine identity nor an essentialist feminine linguistic domain, and certainly not for a monolithic, fixed category of a feminine speech community. I am arguing, however, that the Clerk’s rhetorical enterprise for challenging Bailly’s attempt to question his sexuality, particularly the linking of it to the Clerk’s pose of study and his silence, involves engaging in certain feminine speech practices. You call me a

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woman? You associate my sexuality with my silence? You impugn my virility? Well, then, I will speak as a woman. I will use classic feminine strategies: I will meet your aggression indirectly. I will blunt the threat with words, tell a story that examines the issue. Specifically, I will tell a story about silence and about sexuality. My story employs self- effacement as self- expression, the construct of the ideal woman. Indeed, my tale will concern a woman historically proclaimed as ideal because she offers almost no voice for herself. My voiceless Griselda will expose the cultural fiction of successful virile masculinity. This tale will be one that reexamines not only the ideology of communication but also the ideology of masculinity and virility. Its narrative will show that aggressive virility always leads to violence. And toward this, I will marshal signaling materials from other systems. I will use the narrative most closely associated with women, the hagiographic tale, that arch, religiously venerated, example of disempowerment. I will negotiate its signifiers and those of allegory and conduct manuals, as well, so that I am aligned with the female community. And everywhere throughout the Tale, I will expose the discursive practices that privilege subjugated knowledge and censorship of women’s speech. Hagiographic stories, as the Clerk knew, model virtues–in this case, the silent patience and blind obedience of Griselda. Indeed, within its ideology of communication hagiographies postulate silence as an index to women’s virtue. In fact, Walter goes so far as to equate a woman’s bodily silence and verbal silence with her “womenhede.” In the Clerk’s hands, however, the genre subverts itself by disavowing its ostensible “lesson.” Where a hagiographic tale would generally praise “blind obedience,” the Clerk, instead, presses the reader to ask what sort of person would require blind obedience. Only a person privileged with asymmetrical power as we see early in the Tale—the very sort of power identified early with Walter’s virility, identifying, in turn, his maleness or male identity. When we first meet Walter, we are immediately made aware of his masculinity described in terms of his virility. “Hunting and hawking” (the national sports), center his person at the intersection of national and masculine constructs (IV.80–81). These two sports situate not just his interests but his character. Hunting and hawking are Walter’s obsession, the Clerk notes, and have led him to neglect duties proper to his leadership (IV.78–82). Even his relationship to his people is expressed in gendered terms of masculine potency. Would he, they plead, stop “hunting and hawking” long enough to wed and provide the country with an heir, preferably a “knave child” (IV.444). Their future, they say, is dependent upon his (masculine) potency. Here we see Chaucer/the Clerk’s higher aim. A gender that depends upon asymmetry of power for its identity

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raises questions about the accepted modes for constructing gender itself. The Clerk’s exploration of the hagiographical genre—through this Tale of Griselda—ref lects his concerns with this mode. In particular, I think that it raises questions, as I suggested earlier, about the way in which medieval male writers (e.g., Petrarch, hagiographers, authors of conduct books, etc.) construct (idealized) gendered identities by mapping upon them a language and a set of discursive and material practices. Two strategies, in particular, ref lect this aim. First, his retelling of the Tale recodes it and openly resists the preferred reading, and second, he creates his own bogus allegory within the Tale, revealing hagiography’s complicity with violence. In this chapter, the focus for us will be the matter of his recoding the Tale, with a brief account, later, of the design and effect of the bogus allegory. The recoding begins, first, by recontextualizing Petrarch’s popular,97 semi-hagiographic98 story about Griselda, which uncritically idealizes both obedience99 and the feminine. His recontextualization suppresses certain favorable qualities that Petrarch (and the French version) has mapped onto Walter’s character, such as his extreme sadness when he watches Griselda face the loss of her second child and his weeping when he grants Griselda her request for the return of her smock lest she walk naked back to her house. Most remarkable, the Clerk adds changes that substantially increase the degree of torture involved in Walter’s testing of Griselda; for example, no longer is Walter’s servant reluctant to take Griselda’s daughter and then her son from her, but now, in the Clerk’s recoding, he does so with savage gestures convincing Griselda that her children are to be murdered within minutes of leaving the palace gates. The emphasis upon torture is intended, as I have argued elsewhere,100 to expose the violence inherent to hagiography and promoted by its moral discourse that sanctioned masculine cruelty and women’s self-mutilation as an aesthetic of female sanctity. The Clerk thereby problematizes the concept of masculinity by deliberately associating masculinity with brutality (especially masculinity engaged in the scrutiny of female conduct). Strikingly significant is the fact that hawking and hunting, the material practices ascribed to his virility, are predatory in nature, verging, as we said, on obsession. It makes sense then that when Walter sets out to seek a bride, he conducts not a search but rather a surveillance, as predatory in nature as are his hawking and hunting. The culture of surveillance is a culture that seeks control and rarely recognizes boundaries in its search for omniscience. It is a deliberately destabilizing practice: far more than simply a fascinated looking, surveillance is also a mode of “disciplinary investigation,” whose unconscious drives “furrow . . . the will to

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know and the resultant relations of power.”101 The extreme condition placed upon their marriage contract ref lects that: Griselda is not simply to obey all of Walter’s wishes but she is to do so by denying her body any natural expression in response to his wish, whatever its nature. “Whan I sey ‘ye,’ ne sey nat ‘nay’/ Neither by word ne frownyng contenance” he demands (IV.355–56). Here is the link between virility and predation and the asymmetrical power such virility appropriates to itself. Walter intends literally to inscribe his power upon Griselda’s body. His power is to be so internalized that it will produce in her his required material effects, namely, her restraint of her natural physical responses. That is why he is driven to check her “chiere” (her mien, her bodily responses) so incessantly. The fact that Chaucer significantly increased the number of “references to facial expressions where none exist in his originals” indicates an intention to emphasize the physical nature of Griselda’s response.102 It certainly makes suspect Walter’s later attempt to justify the brutality of his surveillance by telling the villagers that he was but testing her “womenhede.” The reader/audience, aware of the physical and mental torment involved in his gratuitous testing, recognize the ordeal as fundamentally an inexorable desire to witness in Griselda’s body the physical effects of his power. The irony is enormous. The neurotic intensity of his desire to test Griselda is bound to be unappeasable because the behavior that he imposes upon her, namely, her silence and undisclosed interiority of thought, removes from him any visible sign of his power. There is a stunning parallel: the very behavior in Griselda that drives Walter’s desire to torture her is the same behavior in the Clerk that drove Bailly to attack both the knowledge that the Clerk’s quiet pose of study points to and the lack of access to the Clerk’s otherness that his silence protects. In both Griselda and in the Clerk, silence protects their otherness. Bailly’s objection to this pose and this silence takes the form of questioning the Clerk’s masculinity and, thus, his power. Significantly, it is this same behavior which hagiographers map onto their women saints, construing it as virtuous but frequently “displaying” it in an almost complicit relationship with violence and torture. Thus silence glorified as a virtue in women enables their destruction. (Lynn Staley’s chapter on “Chaucer and the Postures of Sanctity,” offers one of the most incisive discussions of this concept).103 This recoding of the Tale has allowed the Clerk to mimic the imposition of and the experience of silence as one of the major tensions of female subjectivity. More important, it has recoded silence less as a virtuous habit than as, rather, a practice imposed upon the subordinated other, enabling and nurturing the predation, brutality, and voyeurism of those imposing the silence.

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Not only has Chaucer raised a profound question about the cultural identity that is coded onto silence and speech but he has also brought us to a critical consciousness about the so-called naturalness of his culture’s social and moral practices of constructing gender. Toward this end, he deliberately constructs a bogus designer allegory in the Tale (about which I have argued in greater detail, elsewhere).104 Brief ly: by a bogus allegory, I mean an allegorical paradigm that appears to invite parallels between human and divine action but actually doesn’t. This bogus designer allegory is a strategically brilliant device for deconstructing allegories themselves, thereby raising questions about our strategies of reading them, particularly our strategy of interpreting the nature of God by interpreting our human nature. That is, it compels us to ask ourselves about our human impulse to create analogues between ourselves and God, an impulse that fails to consider whether a God would act like a human, and neglects to question the basis upon which we ascribe to God our human notion of domination. Specifically, through such an allegory, the Clerk has set up a system of classic, easily recognized symbolic representations that have no intention of fully signifying correlated meanings, much less of pointing beyond those meanings, in a sustained way, to universal correspondences. The allegoresis elicits one kind of interpretative activity, but the narrative elicits a different kind, which actually works against the allegory’s. In this tale, when the allegory is interpreted, fidelity to God’s will appears to be the driving impetus behind the series of (Walter’s) tests. However, when the narrative is interpreted, a disquieting subjugation of one human being by another appears to motivate the series of tests. For example, when Walter tests Griselda, the allegorical interpretation presumes the easily recognized symbolic representation of God’s testing of Job; yet, at the story’s level, Walter (God?) compels a community of people, including papal officials, to consent to elaborate mental torture of a woman and to abuse their public positions of trust as a means of achieving that end. The same dissonance of allegorical parallels occurs in the facile typological relationship implied between Griselda and the Virgin Mary, in, namely, the declared submission of their wills. Yet, Mary’s “yes” could not be more opposite to Griselda’s. Mary’s “fiat” is not only free and unforced but it puts her at odds with her betrothed husband, Joseph. Griselda’s “yes” is compelled as a condition for marriage, a grotesque manifestation of harmony with her husband. Furthermore, Mary’s “fiat” is a response to what she perceives as a blessed and undeserved event, and her “Magnificat,” uttered a few months later, makes that clear. In those lines she proclaims herself “full of joy” over God’s having “done great things for me” (Luke 1.49). Griselda’s state is

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explicitly described by Chaucer/the Clerk as full of “tormentynge”—a term original to Chaucer’s version. “Tormentynge” is, in fact, a crucial addition: it consciously disrupts the overtly coded allegorical correspondences and wholly denies them any divine significance: after all, terrorizing Griselda is hardly a divine act. At the same time, the bogus designer allegory achieves one of its other intended effects, namely, exposing hagiography’s complicity with violence. The Envoy Yet it is the Clerk’s second brilliant move that is Chaucer’s most innovative intervention in gendered practices. This occurs in the Tale’s Envoy. Traditionally, the envoy of a tale, rather than being a logical conclusion to the poetic narrative, “often is rather a means of connecting the action to actual life, by establishing a realistic context for the abstract ideas of the poem.”105 The Clerk’s Envoy does just that and more. In an exceptionally daring move, the Clerk uses the Envoy’s seven stanzas to engage in reverse discourse against subjugated knowledge—both his own promoted by Bailly’s attack on his pose of study, and his sophymes106 and that of women, promoted through the Tale’s glorification of women’s silence. Reverse discourse is itself a form of code-switching. It is discourse strategy and political strategy: its intention is to resist (and call attention to) the place of language in the construction of social roles and identities. Reverse discourse depends upon linguistic practices that—in this case—construct a relationship between communal attitudes and gender. It mimics the strategy that the oppressor uses against one by echoing the same categories and vocabulary used to marginalize one. However, in its mimicry of those categories and intellectual paradigms, reverse discourse greatly impedes the counter-identification that it aims for.107 Then, too, if reverse discourse is too rigid in its mimicry,108 it risks being counterproductive in its effect. The response of twentieth-century scholars to the Clerk’s Envoy suggests that for them, at least, his reverse discourse was, in fact, counterproductive. There is no question that his Envoy recites the culture’s prevailing accusations against women’s speech. It even includes contemporary mythological representations of the extremes of women’s unauthorized speech, such as Echo and Chichevache, as well as the extremes of women’s conduct, such as the fierce tiger and the camel. The Clerk’s deliberate overstatement of those accusations and calculated exaggeration of the mythological representations achieved what Foucault claimed reverse discourse can achieve, namely, it can “reinvest an originally stigmatized category with positive meaning.”109 How is it then that through the twentieth- and the twenty-first century, so many scholars construed

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those inversions and exaggerations as a satirical attack on women’s speech, even declaring the Envoy to be a sideswipe at the Wife of Bath? The question that seems not to have been asked is this: how could the Clerk, said to be responsible for the exceptional finesse and rhetorical maneuvers so evident in the Tale, be likewise said to have concluded the Tale with an Envoy of clumsy and unnuanced exaggerations–which is what we would have to call the Envoy’s literary efforts if we label them satire. Yet, rhetoric is the Clerk’s expertise; Bailly is volubly leery of the lexical and grammatical virtuosity (the “sophymes”) for which clerks were known. To conclude, then, that the Envoy is pure satire seems to me to be of a piece with the dominant discourse’s (i.e., “male critics with male [views]”110) determination to find an allegorical validation of women’s subjugated status in the Tale. Given the intellectual paradigms privileged by dominant institutional views, the scholars of the twentieth century would have perceived the Clerk’s Envoy as supportive of those institutional views of women’s speech. Here is the baff ling situation: On the one hand, the Envoy appears to be a series of warnings critical of women’s speech. Yet the tale is about a good woman who modeled silence, was tortured for it, and abandoned by her village when Walter, her husband, was rumored to be selecting a younger woman as his new wife. Nor did Walter suffer as a result of his imposing inhuman conditions on his wife. As clever as he was with false reasonings (sophymes), the Clerk had to have seen the dilemma: women (and Clerks) are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Women are required to be silent as an index to their virtue, and yet their silence suppresses their knowledge. Clerks, too, are identified in terms of their silence, leading them to be perceived as questionable in their gender and sexuality. It is this dilemma that he exploits in the reverse discourse. He is calling for countervailing discourses as a means of disrupting the process of subjugating knowledge that censorship of women’s speech, especially women’s public speech, privileges. The Clerk ends the tale by directly addressing the pilgrims and declaring, “Griselde is dead and so is her patience” (IV.1177, my translation). This is scarcely a gesture endorsing or honoring either Griselde or her patience. It is, in fact, slightly irreverent—of both Petrarch and of the burden of such patience. And even though his next few lines make clear his objection to any woman feeling constrained to model her life on Griselda, he is bent on making his position unambiguous. He is articulating the barriers that warrant dismantling. He is crossing the speech domain: with a consciously constructed self, he links his voice with women’s voices, legitimizing their raised voices and his. He loudly announces: “For which I crie out in open audience” (IV.1179)—not silence, not patience, but speech, especially public speech, is the means by which women (and the

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threatened male) can subvert the sort of disempowerment attempted by Walter in the Tale. He grows more specific in the next stanza, in both a comic and serious spirit: not only should the “noble wyves, ful of heigh prudence” (IV.1183) not remain silent but they should follow Echo who replied to every reply. Language is control, the Clerk says. Don’t be cowed for your innocence, but sharply take control, he coaches, rhyming “governaille” (governance) with “countretaille” (reply or counter-tally). Countretaille is a term that points to speech as a form of commerce, to commerce as a form of sex, and, finally, to commerce as a form of speech. What is intriguing about commerce as a form of speech is that it anticipates the 1970’s sociolinguists’ position that linguistic competence is a form of “capital,” as operating in “linguistic markets.” That is, in a “tightly knit social community, exchange becomes meaningful only at the intersection of multiple systems of value.”111 Chaucer’s Clerk even adds, “for commune profit.” This is no insignificant addition, considering that the increasing economic autonomy of middle-class women during this period was one of the reasons for “the burgeoning of works voicing hostility towards [outspoken] aggressive women.”112 Women need to break out into speech, use language to meet danger to them: “Lat noon humylitee youre tonge naille” (IV.1184); “Folweth Ekko, that holdeth no silence,/ But evere answereth at the countretaille” (IV.1189–90); and “archewyves,” he adds, “Ne suffreth nat that men yow doon offense./ And sklendre wyves, fieble as in bataille,” “clappeth as a mille, I yow consaille” (IV.1195, 1197–98, 1200). (“Let no humility your tongue nail; follow Echo that holds no silence,/ but ever answers the reply;” and “archwives,” he adds, “Do not suffer that men do you offense. And slender wyves, feeble as in battle,” “clap as a mill, I you counsel”). This was an audacious literary act: hostility to women’s speech was widespread in the Middle Ages, as we know. Authorities strongly legislated against it for good reason: speech was the way in which women historically resisted and subverted traditional bodies of thought and offered a privileged mode of viewing knowledge as differently structured by one’s experience. The Clerk’s story itself proved that: by confronting language itself, both speech and silence, he reveals how it positions a gendered self. By codeswitching, choosing speech genres such as hagiography and by disrupting its signifiers and exposing its linguistic ideologies (silence as indexical of virtue, [masculinist] verbal aggression as indexical of authorial testing of ‘womenhede’), he critiques the traditional values assigned to hagiographic tales. By exaggerating the major trait of masculinity as valued by Bailly, namely, virility, he reveals virility’s dependence upon violence to maintain its relation of power toward others, a relationship sanctioned by hagiography as instrumental in shaping saints. By linking the questionable

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practices of power to saint-shaping by means of robbing women of their active agency and demanding speechlessness as a sign of their virtue, the Clerk challenges the linguistic ideologies embedded in the speech practices or speech domain expected of women, particularly the link between silence and womanly virtue. The Envoy reinforces this: de-“essentialize” the link between gendered practices and identity. Use language/speech to negotiate the norms, conduct, communal roles and discourses that define your masculinity or femininity. Use language/speech to (re)construct your world, your future.

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CHAPTER 6 MARGERY KEMPE: “I GRAB THE MICROPHONE AND MOVE MY BODY”— VOLATILE SPEECH, VOLATILE BODIES

(Variation on the line in the song, “Recognized Thresholds of Negative Stress,” by Boogiemonsters: “Come and grab the microphone, come and move my body.”)

T

he Book of Margery Kempe brings the medieval anxieties about women’s speech into the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Indeed, it’s a good thing that Margery Kempe’s opening sentences begin in resistance, and with the body—who knows what might have been known or missed had she remained dutifully quiet—because her decision not to abide in silence, to exert, even to disrupt, her physical space/body as integral to her participation in a life with God, has been endlessly subjected to communities of criticism,1 at first frankly hostile and, only in the last two decades conceding (a still sometimes qualified) admiration. Nevertheless, despite the current thriving religious and scholarly appreciation for Margery Kempe, neither the medieval Christian community nor the current Catholic community (of which I am part) has ever, during her lifetime or in the intervening centuries, endorsed her status as a mystic,2 much less her sanctity—despite individual contemporaries’ public support and individual scholars’ articles affirming that status. I want to explore, very brief ly, the reason for this range of response from both the scholarly community and, especially, the Catholic (learned) community, and then to examine the interconnection between the volatile speech and volatile body of Margery Kempe, and the attitude evinced by the scholarly (and Catholic) community toward her place in female hagiography. At the outset, I want to emphasize that I am not attempting to argue whether Kempe was a mystic. That has been admirably defended by a

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number of notable scholars challenging long-accepted attitudes toward mystics and toward Kempe and greatly refocusing the terms of the debate: in particular, they have shown us how the construct of the female body and the feminine as a central hermeneutic for comprehending both human experience and mystical experience is differently understood by men and women and by succeeding cultures. It is they who have provided “a forum from which [Kempe’s] worth as a writer, as a mystic and as a wholly exceptional woman can be reappraised in a less prejudiced way.”3 Chief among these are, surely, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Laurie Finke, Sarah Beckwith, Clarissa Atkinson (who argues for Kempe’s religious orthodoxy, as well), Diane Watt, David Lawton, Eluned Bremner, Carolyn Dinshaw, Sarah Salih (whose argument that “[o]ne is not born, but rather one becomes, a virgin,”4 shows that “even a lustful wife and mother such as Margery Kempe could reclaim a virginal state”5), Denis Renevey, Sandra McEntire (with her compelling analysis of the evolution of personhood and feminine spirituality), David Aers (who reminds us that the “devotional is political”), Lynn Staley, and Karma Lochrie (perhaps the scholar whose work on the relationship between mysticism and female sexuality has most inf luenced Kempe studies).6 Nor am I reexamining whether hers was a mystical voice. That, too, has received a wide range of support. Carolyn Dinshaw remarked that Kempe’s prophecies suggest that Kempe “exists in some sense out of her world’s time, in a spiritual time frame (the everlasting now of the divine) that is radically separate from the secular chronology governing others around her.” 7 Ruth Shklar regarded Margery’s “brand of political mysticism” as escaping “orthodox and heterodox definition.”8 Shklar argues that Kempe’s “ ‘voice,’ or subjectivity—that most elusive yet noisy figure in the Book—is generated in part from the pressures of church authority attempting to circumscribe orthodox belief.”9 She adds, “Kempe not so much proves her own legitimacy as questions the processes of legitimation themselves.”10 Santha Bhattacharji’s “Medieval Contemplation and Mystical Experience” is invaluable for its insightful contextualization of Kempe’s mystical voice.11 Sarah Beckwith’s work on the dual-voice of the mystic’s text (the voice of God and the voice of the mystic) modeled for scholars a way of understanding Kempe as an historical individual whose “internalization of God [is] interlocuted by that very self, and one is quite inconceivable without the other.”12 Yet the fact is that “Kempe’s ‘legitimacy’ is . . . still at issue,”13 as Shklar tersely concluded 15 years ago. And that is the issue that I want to explore: as I asked earlier, why has neither the medieval Christian community nor the current Catholic community ever endorsed her status as a mystic, much less her sanctity? Perhaps the most complete, direct,

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and powerful framing of this issue was Sarah Beckwith’s: “The persistent implicit or explicit focus of the questioning seems to be this—can we believe her? Is she telling the truth? Is she really a saint, visionary, pilgrim, mystic, Lollard, orthodox Catholic, protofeminist (delete as applicable—she has been claimed for all camps)?”14 Despite the small library of articles, books, and chapters of books dedicated to answering those very questions over the last two decades, Albrecht Classen could recently and legitimately still ask a modified form of the same question: “Does Margery, however, truly count as a fully-f ledged mystic, or was her Book the result of simple-minded devout piety and of a sincere interest to produce a religious text for her contemporaries’ spiritual instruction?”15 Classen further points out that “although her text . . . has been the object of close investigations ever since [1934], . . . [f ]undamental questions concerning Margery Kempe’s mystical account in her Book still await critical examination.”16 Clearly, then, the most intense debate in Kempe studies continues to be the authenticity of her mysticism as given voice in her Book. Indeed, Sandra McEntire’s assessment in 1992 remains ominously true today: “ ‘most controversial’ is the only issue about which critics agree” concerning Kempe.17 Here, then, is my question: if both her mystical visions and her mystical voice have been rigorously investigated and defended by individual scholars, what other reason might underlie the fact that her status as a mystic cannot garner collective sanctioning by any scholarly (or Catholic) community? As Carolyn Dinshaw once asserted, despite Kempe’s secure place in our literary canon, “Margery Kempe herself has not been taken entirely seriously as a visionary, let alone a candidate for canonization by the Church.”18 A range of critical categories of scholarship seeking to account for this resistance have investigated language, writing, theological, economic, political, medical, and literary cultures. Some years ago, Karma Lochrie began to interrogate the categories themselves. We need, she argued, a “re-examination of our critical categories for understanding late medieval mysticism, mystical language, and mystical texts”19 as a means of meeting (and perhaps overcoming) the ways in which “scholars have participated in the marginalization of Margery Kempe.”20 Using contemporary theories of gender and textuality and medieval theological concepts of “f lesh” and “body,” Lochrie examined the way “the mystic text [constitutes] a practice through which the body is translated into a written corpus.”21 The mystic’s f lesh becomes the text, in other words. Yet, the ideology that views f lesh and text as separate “prohibits our seeing the two as practicing essentially the same thing.”22 Katherine J. Lewis, too, shifted her perspective from our usual critical categories in order to “shed a different light on why the Book presents Margery as a

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saint and why it did not succeed in fostering the posthumous cult which Christ envisaged [in Margery’s visions].”23 Failure to venerate Margery Kempe as a saint, she writes, “arguably has less to do with any perceived deficiencies in Margery Kempe or her Book (as is often assumed) and more to do with the nature of the saints which late medieval English people favoured and the dynamics of their cults.”24 Lewis, in fact, makes a persuasive case for “the ways in which the Book establishes that Margery also meets that other essential saintly criterion: the ability to perform miracles, to intercede with God for the benefit of devotees.”25 The standard evidence necessary for undertaking Kempe’s qualifications for veneration—if not sanctification—have, then, been at hand for nearly two-thirds of a century. Lewis’s question deserves therefore to be put forward again: why is Margery Kempe still not venerated? I’d like to approach Lewis’s question from yet another perspective. Veneration as a public endorsement is a stage in the process of saintmaking, and saint-making itself is a formal process undertaken by the Catholic community involving Catholics of all levels of learning.26 It is therefore largely the Catholic community’s disposition toward saints and mystics that I must tap into. Both now and in Kempe’s time the Catholic community within the broader civic community constituted a “co-presence of cultures,”27 a concept usually referencing current network media, yet wholly applicable here. The concept simply means, in Yochai Benkler’s words, a “simple co-ordinate coexistence,”28 in which peoples are (and were) customarily and regularly present to each other, interlinked in their relationships whether or not they were aware of or knew each other, and who shared “a common spatial-temporal reference system.”29 The Catholic community, as a co-present culture, constituted a significant ecclesial-political dimension of the larger discourses surrounding the issue of Kempe’s controversy. That was, and is, crucial: the co-presence of cultures is not only a means of producing meaning and culture itself but is also an agent of mediating meaning and culture. As such, the disposition of the (learned) Catholic culture heavily inf lects the authenticity of Kempe’s status as a mystic or saint.30 My argument, therefore—consonant with the thesis of this book—looks at the way in which women’s speech and attitudes towards women’s speech led (and still lead) to the resistance to Kempe’s text as semi-hagiographical, and to Kempe’s status as a mystic. At bottom, I am asking (and examining) how such co-present cultures’ institutional discourses against women’s speech affect the legitimacy of texts as well as the subjects of those texts. The reaction of (Catholic) scholars to Margery Kempe is, I think, related to a methodological tendency that began to be identified some decades ago in a number of disciplines and still f lourishes: namely, a

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disposition that at times does not see as problematic its own ethnocentric position as a stance from which to interpret the culture of an earlier century, in this case the female hagiographic culture of Margery Kempe’s England. I use “ethnocentric” in two senses: first, as a term that (sympathetically) recognizes our human nature: that is, given that we lack transcultural human ability, we are unable to step outside our views or beliefs to see if they “correspond with reality.”31 Richard Rorty labels this ontological state as “an inescapable condition—roughly synonymous with ‘human finitude.’ ”32 Second, I mean ethnocentrism as it is commonly understood in social and cultural studies, that is, as meaning “the inclination” or “habitual disposition . . . to view other communities and cultures from the perspective or security of one’s own, and therefore inclined to judge them by the norms or conventions with which one is familiar,” or “to gauge other societies by those criteria which are significant in one’s own society.”33 Catholicism, as with most religious institutions, expresses its ethnocentric stance toward female sanctity in its elaborate criteria both about women and about women’s sanctity.34 It is crucial to note that this ethnocentric stance—whether taken by scholars of religious sensibilities or not—likewise affects the transmission of any text, which, in turn, affects the legitimacy of its subject and the subject’s claimed experience. By “transmission,” I mean not only physical reproduction or reconstruction of a text but also the (Catholic) scholarly discourse about texts; insofar as such discourse reconstructs a given text for the reader it affects the reception of that text. Among other things, such a discourse privileges scholars’ ethnocentric stance over the ecclesial-political, social, and gendered network of relations surrounding the subject of a text—here, “Margery Kempe.”35 The general methodology of (Catholic) scholars’ ethnocentric stance toward The Book of Margery Kempe has had the effect of displacing coherent interpretative communities of Kempe’s world with our own interpretative communities. In Kempe’s world three issues were at stake. First, the issue of women’s speech, especially public speech, triggered strong, even violent reactions during the Middle Ages, to the extent, in fact, that, as we’ve seen, several towns attempted to legislate against it.36 As both Chapters 1 and 3 have established, writers and moralists increasingly wrote and preached against women’s speech as subversive of domestic and national order. Second, in the patriarchal culture of Kempe’s period, the transgressive nature of public speech was associated with a transgressive sexuality.37 Third, the issue of women’s physical space/body was at stake: in a period when women’s bodies were their husband’s or the Church’s, and much of the language surrounding women’s bodies—in Canon Law, sermons, conduct literature, and plays—was a language of vilification,

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commodification, and the grotesque, Kempe literally negotiated to have her body back (from her husband), she openly created a language of transgression and disruption around her body, and she interrogated the interconnection between her bodily and symbolic power. These three issues—to be brief ly explored later—have created a dilemma in “authorizing” the spirituality of Margery Kempe’s text. Although we (contemporary) scholars understandably view ourselves as ‘beyond’ the medieval ecclesial-political and gendered binaries that linked women’s public speech, particularly, female verbosity with sexual promiscuity, a closer look at our culture suggests that some co-presence of cultures’ attitudes continue to be embedded in our institutional discourse. For example, members of the co-present cultures of Kempe’s period held a certain body of values whereby they perceived their place in the culture and in the world. Silence was one such value in female mysticism. That same set of values likewise viewed female verbosity as linked with sexuality. Within the conceptual scheme of ethnocentrism, such a value would have been held as universal, enduring, and applicable to all societies and cultures and not merely to our own. And this appears to be accurate: much as we decry the prejudices of the Middle Ages that promoted the association of female verbosity with looseness and sexuality, we still do not like noisy women. Ironically, that speaks to the subject of this book: language as the site of revolt for medieval and early modern English women. In contemporary interpretative communities, especially sectarian ones, a particular image of women still prevails. Noisy women are regarded as disruptive, and their discourse is viewed as disorderly. Even scholars not tied to the image of the ideal woman are tied to the image of a non-noisy woman. The current culture’s idealized woman is not given to public dialoguing and is not given to ad hoc public preaching. This leads me to the second element of the methodology involved in our ethnocentric stance. The relationship between contemporary attitudes toward women who will not abide in silence and the woman saint or mystic who models silence (unless she is haranguing against pagan beliefs) has led a number of critics of the recent past to mount a counterdiscourse to Kempe’s text, specifically its status as hagiography. Counterdiscourse, I realize, is involved in the reading (and the writing) of any text insofar as reading is a function of a reader’s personality, of the institutions in which she/he works and lives, and a function of the context in which the text is read. What I am concerned about here is the creation of a particular meaning based upon our expectations of a particular context. When we make genre—here, hagiography—an especially important context for our interpretations, we dramatically reconstruct the text because “genre expectation creates meaning.”38 David Knowles, for example,

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decided that Margery Kempe “can only improperly and accidently be classed among the English mystics.” Although he appreciated Kempe’s book as “a document of the highest value for the religious historian of the age,” he felt that it had “little in it of deep spiritual wisdom, and nothing of true mystical experience.”39 B. A. Windeatt, the superb editor of The Book of Margery Kempe, with his historically sensitive construction of the theology and spirituality of the period, concluded, nevertheless, that “we cannot claim Margery’s Book to be the autobiography of a great mystic—the quality of her mystical experience prevents this—but it remains one of the most immediate ‘Lives’ of the period.”40 Verena E. Neuburger felt that Kempe’s mysticism “was nothing but a vehicle to liberate herself from sexual subjugation.”41 She remarked, “I consider this the beginning of her fight for independence.”42 “[B]y denying her husband access to her body, she symbolically claimed the right to a room of her own.”43 Albrecht Classen, on the other hand, in proposing Kempe as both mystic(al)44 and as quasi-mystic(al)45 begins to move us toward a solution. The effect, then, of our ethnocentric stance toward The Book of Margery Kempe—the effect, in other words, of our gauging her spiritual culture and her authentic spirituality by criteria considered significant in our own spiritual culture and our own expectations of hagiography, the effect, in other words, of not recognizing our own culture’s perpetuation of older views—has been not only to limit her vision and her voice but also to create an impasse in interpreting and “authorizing” the spirituality of her text. Ultimately, that affects the actual transmission of her text. And that, in turn, determines what constitutes for critics a hagiographic text. First, then, I need to touch on the issue of Kempe’s (and women’s) volatile speech and volatile body. Margery “Grabs the Microphone” Margery Kempe’s speech, especially her unauthorized public speech and her repeated ref lections of her place in God’s favor, fundamentally problematizes scholars’ validating her spirituality. Women unable to control their own voices were, of course, a “common thread in medieval literature”46 and in medieval socioreligious discourse.47 As Chapter 1 established, that lack of control fell, likewise, within the theological classifications of the abuses of speech as one of the sins of the tongue. For her own interpretative communities Kempe’s voluble speech and her loud weeping created a divided view of her spirituality. Some praised her publicly; some cursed her, as she says, and ascribed a devil to her weeping and her preaching. The fact is that “mysticism was a public discourse” in the Middle Ages.48 “It was neither private nor passive, but

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communal, dialogic, and active.”49 Kempe’s roarings and copious tears as an expression of her bodily communication with God were, it seems, too public. Nevertheless, within the hagiographic tradition, “a tearful display [was] closely linked to the concept of patience, and, thus, an important validation of saintly worth.”50 Marie d’Oignies was supposed to have wept so much whenever she saw or heard the Passion, that “the kerchiefs intended to cover her head remain[ed] perpetually damp.”51 Pauline, Mary of Egypt, Clare of Assisi, and Elizabeth of Hungary were all said to have wept copiously during moments when they felt an exceptional closeness to Christ.52 Despite the fact that tearful responses as part of female mystical experiences are sanctioned and recorded by male hagiographers, Kempe’s roarings and weeping were met with hostility by most in her community at Lynn.53 At one point, the famous preacher, Friar William Melton,54 banished her from his sermons at her parish church, St. Margaret. And, at Canterbury, where she had gone on a pilgrimage, the monks cited her excessive weeping as signs of a heretic. Kempe recognized that her own interpretative community’s hostility toward her loud weepings was both interconnected with and complicated by the friar’s open criticism of her.55 This cultural tension is shrewdly read by Susan Dickman: “In Margery Kempe we see female mysticism moving out of its traditional Eucharistic context and, therefore, potentially away from clerical control.”56 And William Melton, the preaching friar “seems to have sensed this.”57 Despite the number of “doctors of divinity” and “bachelors of divinity” and friars who went to him asking that Margery be allowed to remain in church during his sermons, telling him that her tears were “a gift of God,” the friar “would not believe that it was a gift of God.”58 Rather, he said, she could return on one condition only: that she “would acknowledge” that her weepings were a “heart condition, or some other sickness.”59 In other words, in his view the language of her body was not an authoritative means of communicating grace from God whereas sermons from the pulpit were. In that he was heir to a strong tradition.60 But, in fact, it is precisely the “deficiency in clerical discourse,” that the “mystics’ physical response redress[ed].”61 As Danielle Régnier-Bohler proposed, “The discourse of the clerks is not enough, the word is insufficient. Under this tension, words become a river, and the cry, the original language, apparently regressive, comes to make up for the word’s poverty.”62 The spontaneity and directness of Margery’s tears and sobs while not privileged as was the written word (or spoken sermon), was “a different order of communication.”63 It should be seen “as a woman’s attempt to signify a mystical experience whose intensity cannot be written but must be inscribed by living f lesh.”64 Bodily expression, in other words, becomes embodied speech.

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The several clerics’ expressed hostility towards Kempe’s loud weepings becomes even more telling when one realizes that “the tears or ‘roaring’ which formed such a visible part of Margery Kempe’s religious life were not unusual at all, but fairly common among certain types of mystics.”65 Lochrie noted the same point, and added: Kempe’s actions were not only common to a number of mystics but were a well-known “model of compassion found in medieval dramatic depictions of the Virgin and Mary Magdalene.”66 Frank M. Napolitano points to the Towneley Crucifixion that “presents Mary as inconsolable: ‘Mi sorow it is so sad,/ No solace may me safe;/ Mowrnyng makys me mad,/ None hope of help I hafe;/ I am redles and rad.’ ”67 Moreover, she will remain “redles and rad” until she is “in her grave,”68 the text goes on to say. So relentless is “Mary’s loud tearful lament about Christ’s bloody body and the abandonment by his friends,” Napolitano asserts, “that even John the apostle is overcome.69 Dozens of extant altarpiece and wall paintings from the period depict the Virgin Mary swooning in tears beneath the cross.70 Indeed, “few preachers described Mary’s vigil under the cross without an emotional portrayal of her tears. San Bernardino exclaimed that Mary’s tears fell in such abundance ‘that you would think her f lesh and spirit dissolved in tears.’ ” 71 In the sermons and devotional works in the fourteenth century, Mary’s tears signified her co-suffering with Jesus, “like him pouring out the substance of her body in grief. Her tears, like his blood, are a symbol of the death and rebirth made possible at Calvary, relived by the Church in the rite of baptism.” 72 Spivey Ellington draws the connection to Kempe’s tears or “roaring”: “Depictions of Mary dissolved in tears at the foot of Jesus’ cross or receiving his lifeless body after the deposition are representative of the kind of religious devotion with which late medieval Christians were familiar.” 73 “Margery may actually have been consciously imitating Mary’s own grief, in an attempt to experience what the Virgin experienced and therefore become a more perfect imitator of the Mother of God.” 74 Gail McMurray Gibson argues that throughout Kempe’s religious life, she was guided by her desire to imitate the Virgin.75 Even the “domestic and housewifely services which Margery Kempe repeatedly performs for the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child in her visionary life are not naive or childish attempts at mysticism, as they have so often been interpreted, but rather deliberate and self-conscious emulation of the Marian model.” 76 The absence of Christ and his burial “produces a crisis in Kempe’s reading and a rupture in her desire. Its absence becomes displaced in the Virgin’s sorrow and her own marvelous body with its wresting, writhing . . . and loud roars.” 77 However much Kempe’s practices of weeping and loud roarings provoked a resistance to her place as a mystic, it was her preaching, her

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cultural criticism, and her prophecy78 that ensured a particularly virulent ecclesial-political feature’s being embedded in her text, and its reception: namely, the variety of patristic and theological texts supporting the silent female as the ideal female.79 Its virulence lies in what it leads to: a loquacious woman was associated with a menacing sexuality. To rework Ella Shohat’s principle: the Church’s denial of ideal-woman status to noisy females has historically formed a corollary to the literal denial of spiritual and mystical status to Kempe. “The struggle to ‘speak for oneself ’ cannot be separated from a history of being spoken for, from the struggle to speak and be heard. Speaking for oneself is not a simple act, however, but rather a complex process.”80 As we saw in Chapters 1 and 2, the history of hostility against the noisy woman (and commendation for the ideal woman) brimmed with laws, sermons, conduct books, ballads, mystery plays, treatises, and tales. “What was preferred,” Gail Ashton observes, “was full integrity, a virginal body unbreached in every way.”81 Joyce E. Salisbury comes to the same conclusion: women’s sexuality “was perceived to be open and receptive” and “this openness was extended to include such things as garrulousness—that is, women with open mouths.”82 She cites Tertullian: women who are talkative have “their belly” as their “god, . . . so too what is neighbor to the belly.”83 Karma Lochrie notes that the increased emphasis upon women as f lesh rather than as passive body made possible a gendered psychology of sin and a sanctioning of integritas or the sealed body (a body closed off from the world though chastity, silence, and enclosure).84 “I wish you were enclosed in a house of stone, so that no one should speak with you,”85 one of the Canterbury monks exclaims to Margery when she responds to his question by citing a story from Scripture. Impenetrable enclosure is his image, sealing in both body and speech—the entire reason of the stone enclosures for cloistered religious women. Thus, in terms of gender and the theological network embedded in Margery Kempe’s description of the monk’s reply (and, indeed, throughout her text,) the breaching of the lips assumed a breaching of the virginal body. This is critically significant in the transmission and reception of Kempe’s text. For one thing, in the Catholic Church’s classification of saints, Kempe’s status is already compromised. “For female saints but not for males, the official classification turned on sexual condition: women saints were recorded as either virgin or widow, while men were confessors, bishops [. . .].”86 As Kathleen Coyne Kelly explains, “[W]hat is at stake here is not just the virgin and her body, but the thing that they have come to represent: the body of the Church.”87 As a mother, Kempe already fell into the nonvirgin category (along with her role model, Bridget of Sweden)—a status that would have been conspicuously reinforced by her “unauthorized” and, thus, suspect,

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public speech. Moreover, in Kempe’s case, not only does she seem to engage in constant talk but the talk is of sexual love and female sexuality. And even though erotic language was the mystics’ common form of expressing their relationship with God, unlike most mystics, Kempe did not deny her sexuality. Indeed, in the initial part of her narrative, she speaks of being a sexually active woman. Bremner writes that “the marginalization of female sexuality is central to The Book of Margery Kempe because Kempe’s monumental task, in the Book as in her life, is to prove that she is able to escape the contaminations of her sex.”88 Sidonie Smith lays bare the consequences: “To the extent that she establishes her chastity within the text, to the extent that she reaffirms through the text, as well as in the text, her subordination to all fathers, she is allowed the voice of authority.”89 In other words, “the suppression of women in patriarchy, in the Middle Ages as now, depends upon a strict channeling of female speech and sexuality.”90 Kempe, of course, will not be channeled: she “creates for herself a role which sidesteps both of these requirements: she consents to be neither shut away nor speechless.”91 Moreover, Kempe was able to “claim cultural authority for her word precisely because Christ [had] singled her out as his friend.”92 Her perceived prophetic role led a monk (Chapter 12) “who held [a] great office” and initially “despised her” to ask her whether he would be saved. Margery praying to Christ learns that the monk had “sinned in lechery, in despair, and in the keeping of worldly goods.” When she fears passing on to the monk Christ’s revelation to her, Christ, she records, told her to “speak boldly in my name” (Chapter 12). This authorization of her “bold” speech is reinforced by those who are determined to test her prophetic powers. In Chapter 71, a priest “who had great faith in her feelings and in her revelations—but desired to test them at various times” asked Kempe to tell him whether the Prior of Lynn, the priest’s own good patron, “should be called home to Norwich.” Again, in Chapter 24, Kempe cautions a priest against giving money to a young man (whom she has not met) because she has “an understanding of what his conduct might be,” and, she prophesies, “he will deceive you in the end.” The priest was “very displeased” with Margery; for his part, “he much commended [the young man’s] behavior.” Kempe’s warning, however, proved to be right. There is a certain disadvantage to the assumption of the prophetic role, especially by women: one can scarcely conceal the fact that one is blurring the boundary between personal spiritual insight and public socioreligious challenges. One is privileging one’s voice as a means of critiquing not only the religious disposition of one’s contemporaries but also their political and personal power. Ultimately, it sanctions one’s continuing participation in public discourse.

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Add to that Kempe’s contentiousness, and her authenticity as a mystic becomes even more questionable—first, within the male hagiographic tradition that assigns almost universally to female saints a particular narrative pattern of meekness and restraint,93 and, second, within the broader patriarchal attitudes toward national and domestic order and law. Further, according to Karen Winstead,94 during this period the increasing economic autonomy of middle-class women such as Margery Kempe appears to have triggered a plethora of works voicing hostility towards outspoken, aggressive women. In the transmission of her text as a record of her spirituality, this situation has scarcely changed: Kempe’s noisy weeping, her bold passages of physical familiarity with Christ and Mary, her frank confession of sexual fantasies, and her repeated ref lections about the significance of her weeping were the very features that, being denied any religious or cultural significance by most (Catholic) critics through all but the last decade of the twentieth century, formed the book’s inferior status as literature and denied it a place as the discourse of a genuine mystic. From the aborted text published by Wynken de Word in 1501 up to current scholarship, the majority of articles on The Book of Margery Kempe constitute a counterdiscourse to her narrative, greatly problematizing the transmission of her text. Hope Emily Allen, for example, one of the brightest, most measured scholars of her period, refrained from passing judgment upon Kempe’s mysticism. Rather, she said, she intended her “notes to be a study in Margery Kempe’s suggestibility.”95 Despite Herbert Thurston’s (whom she admired) pronouncement that Kempe’s “hysterical temperament [was] revealed in her page of the narrative portions”96 of her book, Allen gave Kempe greater credit, although not for authentic self-representation. Rather, Allen wrote that it is “characteristic of Margery’s instinctive and zealous honesty that in her accounts of the personal opposition which she encountered she often ref lected back the highly spiritualised ideals of piety current in her world which she herself was incapable of making her own.”97 These two charges, the hysteria (Thurston’s diagnosis) that presumably disqualified her from consideration for authentic holiness, and the charge (by Allen) of a “constructedness” of text that appropriated the ideas and motifs of currently circulating saints’ lives and manuals on spirituality have never quite disappeared from scholarship even in the twenty-first century.98 The point is that much as it was true of interpretative communities of the past and the ideologies to which they were subject, we, too, cannot isolate our responses from the ideological pressures surrounding the concept of speech and women to which we are still subject today. Indeed, as an interpretative community, the scholarly community of the late twentieth century added its own sniffiness, its own attitudes toward

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noisy women, toward illiteracy, and toward the discourse of spirituality. Even current savvy feminist scholars who have questioned both past and recent cultural readings of Margery Kempe and her book, and who credit her with a great deal, do not credit her with a hagiographic text. For them, she may have “dislocat[ed] social boundaries,”99 she may have “appropriat[ed]” and “replaced patriarchal language” with authentic female experience,100 and she may have “articulate[d] a new ideology of spiritual value through the active life”101 but, in their view, she did not produce a hagiographical text (much less “embody” the signs of sanctity). The sticking point for most scholar-critics’ stance on whether Kempe’s book is hagiographical seems to be this: many mystics and holy women wrote about their spiritual experiences but they did not appear to view their lives as spiritual experiences. They saw God’s work in their lives, they recognized moments of grace and moments of spiritual failure, but they did not write as though they saw their entire life itself as a spiritual experience. Like them, Kempe is talking about God’s work in her life but Kempe sees her entire adult life as the work of God. Even her contentiousness, her public confrontations, her stances on money, her stances on sexual intercourse, were in her view all an integral part of her relationship with Christ; all part of her movement toward genuine mystical experience. The distinction is this: rather than construing her self as merely the conventional instrument of God—which was the position of the Church and the position expressed in martyrologies and hagiographies regarding all human actions and achievements—she sees every bit of herself, not just her actions and her achievements, but also “hyr felyngys & reuelacyons” even the very “forme of her leuyng” (BMK, 3–4), not as any mere instrument but as wholly ref lecting God’s goodness. Indeed, in her view, these feelings and revelations and the form of her living are so privileged a part of her special relationship with Christ, that, as she records, “ower Lord” has “comawnded” and “chargyd” them to be written so that God’s “goodnesse myth be knowyn to alle þe world” (BMK, 3–4). Laurie Finke poses an interesting theory that embraces my above point but adds a further dimension to it. Finke remarks that what she finds “most fascinating about this text—and what I believe sets it apart from others of its kind by mystics like Julian, St Bridget and St Catherine—is its presentation of the politics of sanctity, something which few medieval religious genres ever display as blatantly. What I mean by this phrase is that in Kempe’s account of her life we see not the results of an individual’s sanctification, but the messiness of the process—the conf lict, opposition, persecution, ridicule and danger that followed in the wake of audacious claims to sanctity like Kempe’s.”102

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Along with representing her feelings and revelations as ref lecting God’s goodness, Kempe ‘produces’ independent confirmation of her extraordinary relationship with Christ by noting that some of these “archebysshopys & bysshoppys, doctowrs of dyuynyte & bachelers” and anchorites to whom she had confided her mystical experiences took it on “perel of her [their] sowle,” knowing that they would answer to God, that Margery “was inspyred wyth þe Holy Gost” (3). The disapproval of such verbalized self-consciousness about her place in the mystical tradition is ref lected in scholars’ remarks which note, for example, that Margery appropriates “tropes lifted from [other saints’] texts,”103 or that “[s]he embeds . . . passages and ideas from other texts to validate her own mystical experience.”104 Claire Sponsler (one of the best theorists of the ideological work performed through the staging of the cycle plays) aiming to explain and defend Margery’s engaging in pious practices that “continually brought her up against church officialdom,”105 writes, “Margery is an obvious expert in the arts of the theatre, adept at the use of evocative gestures (weeping, falling to the ground) . . . and carefully managed scene-stealing (disrupting church services, one-upping obstructionist authorities).”106 She adds that “Margery obviously performs her piety in a highly public way and with a keen eye for the effects of her actions on her varied audiences.”107 Sponsler’s point is illuminating: namely, that Kempe’s “construction of herself as a figure of spiritual significance” could have been “shaped in part by the example of drama.”108 Yet phrases such as “carefully managed scene-stealing,” and “a keen eye for the effects of her actions,” cannot help but imply a contrived nature to Kempe’s mystical experiences. Kempe’s pilgrimages likewise come under suspicion: “Although Kempe attributed her pilgrimages to be the commands of Christ, these christological desires also conveniently coincided with her own.”109 And, when Kempe describes her confrontation with the lawyers of Lincoln (BMK, p. 135/26–35)110 a critic not only found it “a bit too reminiscent of Christ in the temple”111 but openly doubted its veracity.112 Yet is precisely this very dialogism with the mystical tradition of the past that Laurie Finke sees “as central to the visionary experience” in the series of mystics in her study.113 This “intense interaction of one’s own voice and another’s voice”114 enabled women to engage with cultural representations that “paradoxically confined” them and “enabled them to challenge their cultural figurations.”115 It seems to me, then, that construing Kempe’s voiced visionary experience as largely derivative or as fictional illustrates the difficulty of contemporary scholars in getting past her determination to assert her identity, to create her own “self.” These objections to Kempe’s volubility in shaping her subjectivity derive, I think, from the problem within

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our (Catholic) ethnocentric stance of understanding holiness. Whether feminist or not, critics’ understanding of holiness is still very much tied to an understanding of the hagiographical past. And the hagiographical past, together with its understanding of holiness was, largely, a male construct—as research into the language and structure of Saints’ Lives pretty much concludes.116 This matters, because such texts rarely included daily events and personal experiences of their female subjects except as events and experiences characteristic of either conventional pious practices or, of a saintliness meant to be representative of “ideal womanliness.”117 Female hagiography, particularly that written between 1200 and 1500, was largely masculine narrative—“one that [spoke] and [wrote] from the heart of patriarchal power structures.”118 In fact, referring specifically to The Book of Margery Kempe, Wendy Harding119 concludes that despite the re-reading of the text by contemporary feminists, they ultimately determine that “masculine definitions of femininity . . . shaped . . . Margery’s spirituality.” Gail Ashton puts the situation more broadly, “[A]ll hagiography but especially female is a textual and cultural construct.”120 What seems to me frankly evident in such a construct is that the paradigm of a life as holy is, therefore, a male paradigm. That, in turn, means that any woman writing her life as a ref lection of her relationship with God, who includes in that ref lection her daily events, personal experiences, and feelings, particularly her sexual yearnings, which she candidly views as part of her struggle toward union with God, is bound to create a self that little resembles the “self ” of male-authored hagiography. In the first place, Kempe’s is a female-authored hagiography.121 Kempe, now over 60 years of age, literally dictates to two scribes her narrative, her understanding of her spiritual identity, her “self.” Indeed, The Book of Margery Kempe is virtually one long response to all of the interrogations, all of the efforts, by clerics, parish priests, monks, bishops, and neighbors to determine just who she is. In the second place, as the past decade of scholarship has shown us, female visionaries, including Kempe, made the body the site of their struggle to define both human and divine experience as well as the meaning of that experience. Kempe “Moves Her Body” Among other beliefs concerning female physiology, the insatiability of feminine desire supported the notion that women were constitutionally unable to transcend their femininity. Even if they led lives of virginity, they could not fully transcend their bodily limitations,122 a position that Gregory of Nyssa reinforces in what was intended solely as a brother’s loving praise of his sister, Macrina. In the Introduction to his account of

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Macrina’s life (written in the form of a letter to the monk, Olympius), Gregory pointedly reminds Olympius, that it is a woman [his sister] who was the subject of their previous discourse, “if indeed she should be styled ‘woman’ for I do not know whether it is fitting to designate her by her sex, who so surpassed her sex.”123 In theological terms, a woman was “deemed able to perceive God only through that body,”124 unable therefore to achieve genuinely spiritual mystical union with Christ. Consequently, “sexuality and notions of the female body became the central issues for women in pursuit of the contemplative life.”125 Julian of Norwich imaginatively explores that very aspect of woman’s physicality that was repeatedly condemned by theologians from Jerome through Bonaventure. For her, those “deficiencies” (her excess moisture and her menstrual purging) become the precise means of identifying her with Christ. “Like her, Christ, as God incarnate, is dominated by physicality.”126 Margery Kempe is bolder. “She actualizes the metaphors that describe mystical union by conveying with voice and body the throes of sexual passion.”127 Harding has in mind Margery’s tears and sobs, but a far more audacious actualization of such metaphors was her public wearing of a white robe, the virginal white of the brides of Christ. In one single rhetorical act, she asserts her sexual freedom, her liberated body, her autonomous female identity, and she ‘legitimates’ her spiritual union with Christ. In “a world that devalued women’s bodies,”128 Kempe publicly inscribes on her own body its corporeal worth and autonomy. She takes into the civic sphere her conf lict about (traditional) celibacy in “her determination to resist submission of her body to any worldly purpose.”129 This “spectacular” self-presentation not only challenged conceptions of fixed categories (namely, those of virgin, widow/singular, married) but also defied fixed social identities of wife and mother and religious visionary. The Mayor of Leicester recognizes her challenge when he objects: “I wil wetyn why þow gost in white clothys, for I trowe þow art comyn hedyr to han a-wey owr wyuys fro us & ledyn hem wyth þe” [I want to know why you go about in white clothes, for I believe you have come hither to lure away our wives from us, and lead them off with you] (BMK, 116/12–14). In Margery’s view, Christ singling her out as “a synguler louer,” “a mayden in þi sowle,” “myn owyn derworthy derlyng,” and “myn owyn blyssed spowse,” (BMK, 52–53/24–31) allows her to “reinterpret social and religious conventions, putting in place new definitions that are consistent with the needs of lay piety.”130 When Margery forlornly asks Christ if she will dance as “maydenys dawnsyn now meryly in Heven,” (BMK, 50/20), Christ replies that “for-as-mech as þu art a mayden in þi sowle, I xal take þe be þe on hand in Hevyn & my Modyr be þe oþer hand, and so

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xalt þu dawnsyn in Hevyn wyth oþer holy maydens & virgynes” (BMK, 52/26–30).131 Ashley concludes that the “external definition of virginity given by conventional religion has been replaced by a chastity of soul which can coexist with the demands of married life in the world.”132 Even though the female body was “itself a target of the medieval female’s repression”—as witnessed through the austerities practiced by women saints—and even though this repressed body was a “concept integral to representations of sainthood” by the Church, nevertheless, women’s bodies offered to women saints, the “means of discovering alternative identities and evading pre-constructed notions of the feminine.”133 Kempe’s exploration of her body and her sexuality gave her a persona, gave her an imagistic depiction of her relationship with Christ, and gave her a dialectic that presumed a physical relationship with a physical Christ. We see this in those visions where she describes in a memorably sensual way, her lying alongside Christ and touching his feet, and, we note it again in her physical participation as a helpmate to Mary in a holy family scene (Chapters 6 & 7, 52–55). Kemp openly transgressed the old barriers between the sacred and the secular. She literally interconnects her earthly experiences with divine presence in the record of her dialogues with Christ. For example, in Chapter 12, God tells her that she is pregnant again, and later she mentions that she feels “unworthy” to hear God speak to her when she is still having sex with her husband.” Even Margery’s relish of food and drink—as distinct from other mystics’ abstinence from it—becomes a means of presenting her body as a “strong witness to God.”134 Mazzoni remarks on Margery’s “repeated, almost obsessive references to food and drink even at the height of her spiritual experiences.”135 In one of her visions, for example, Margery looked after the child, Mary, “until she was twelve years of age, with good food and drink,” and later, in the same vision, she carried a “f lask of wine sweetened with honey and spices.”136 In Beverley, under house arrest (Chapter 53), Kempe is slipped “a surreptitious cup of wine to quench her thirst (brought to her by the jailer’s wife by means of a ladder placed outside the window),”137—a scene “instantly recognisable as the representation of an orthodox imitatio Christi.”138 Finally, in a moment of thanking God and of desiring to save others’ souls, Margery says to God: “If it were your will, lord, I would for your love, and for the magnifying of your name, be chopped up as small as meat for the pot.”139 This common metaphor (she has used it earlier with her husband as a means of expressing her revulsion at continuing sex with him) is picked up by Christ in her later meditation: “I thank you . . . that you would be chopped up as small as meat for the pot for [others’ salvation], so that I would, by your

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death, save them all from damnation if it pleased me.”140 For Margery “food may mean something beyond what we eat, that food is about love and life, and, even, death, too.”141 The fact that “the love she put into her preparation of food [for herself, her husband, and her children] spilled on the food itself ”142 leads Mazzoni to suggest that readers “accept and read against the grain an anecdote,”143 which Margery herself objected to as a tale contrived against her not long after her conversion. On a fish day, sitting at a table rich in various fish, Margery was reported to have chosen to eat the good pike instead of the humbler red herring, exclaiming: “ ‘Ah, false f lesh, you would now eat red herring, but you shall not have your will.’ And with that she set aside the red herring and ate the good pike.”144 Mazzoni proposes that rather than reject the tale as false or even slanderous, “we could instead choose to read this story as the portrayal of a situation where, in tune with her harmonious life passages to and from feasting and fasting, Margery identifies excessive abstinence as sinful, and enjoyment of good food as a divine grace.”145 Kempe’s exploration of her body and her sexuality gave to her, in other words, a narrative code that completely broke with the narrative code of male hagiography. With male hagiography, the principles and assumptions about holiness were expressed through “external, immediately recognisable holy symbols” intended to “validate the idealized female subject,” e.g., ordeals of sexual abstinence, patience, charity, and devotion to the passion. “Any potential transgressions conf licting with a cultural ideal of womanliness—such as moments of autonomous action or speech—are glossed, and a potentially subversive subject is brought back into the safe confines of hagiographical genre and the Church.”146 Consider, for example, the impulse of the hagiographer who went so far as to characterize a certain “female saint by her silence,” yet that female saint was a successful preacher and a writer of sermons. Indeed, one of “her speech[es] still existed” and her own biographer had heard that speech.147 With female authored hagiography, however, the body as the site of their struggle opened to women visionaries the means to “redefine the meaning of female silence and powerlessness.”148 I would like to propose that Margery Kempe moved beyond even that limited triumph. As I see it, her exploration of her body and her life as an integral part of her relationship with Christ unapologetically dissolved, for the first time, the boundaries between the sacred and the secular. It is true that with other saints, boundaries between the f lesh and mystical discourse are crossed, (e.g., Catherine of Sienna, Angela of Foligno, Julian of Norwich), but in Kempe’s case, she is the first to dedicate in her text as much space to the minutiae of her life as she does to her

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visions and dialogues with Christ. For her, the obstacles in her travels, the hostility of other pilgrims, the confrontations with friars, monks, and parish priests, the anxiety about her sexuality, and the continuous verbalized ref lections about the public censure, and, at times, support of her visible devotion through her loud weeping were all integral to her struggle to “redefine God and the experience of God” in her life.149 Her body moved beyond the struggle of female powerlessness to the bolder spirituality. She has moved mystical discourse to a new register. The effect of her text was to remove the limits from the hagiographical frontier. But here, an interesting problem within contemporary interpretative communities arises: not a few feminist critics, many of whom have retrieved Kempe’s text and rescued its cultural and social value, seem themselves unable to take that final step of conceding dissolved barriers and the implication of authentic mysticism that it invites. Despite our feminists’ concerns with intersubjective elements of women’s experience, feminists’ advocacy of the body as a source of voice and truth and authentic experience, and feminists’ approval of transgressive and subversive means for overcoming masculine control of one’s cultural and religious orientation, many of us (feminists), in the case of Margery Kempe, seem not only to resist the dissolution of the boundaries between the sacred and the secular but, indeed, seem intent upon preserving these boundaries. Earlier, we saw resistance to the authenticity of her expressions of mysticism in the frequent reconstruction of her remarks and her events. But it is more evident in the almost sweeping failure to accord her text a hagiographical status. Even when Kempe employs traditional male hagiographical methods of negotiating a self (her self, that is), for example when her actions or dialogue ref lect the sources which she quotes—a practice undertaken by all hagiographers and all biographers— her attempts are called into question by our interpretative communities. Consider the fact that the chief saints (Bridget, Marie d’Oignies, and, possibly, Angela of Foligno) whom she quotes about their tears, about their dress, and about their travel, also expressed their intense spirituality through tears and phrases modeled in earlier Saints’ lives. Yet their tears and expressions are not faulted as conferring authority upon their selves; no contemporary critic foregrounds their traits as tropes; they are allowed to be traits of holiness.150 Nor are their clothes or lack of them pointed out as a form of staging their holiness. When Angelo of Foligno’s imitated Christ’s nakedness and suffering, by removing all of her clothes at the foot of the crucifix in church, her confessor and friends were horrified at this and ashamed, and critics, too, have been appalled by this mimesis, but no critic saw her behavior as staged, and not a one

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resisted crediting her narrative as hagiographical based on counterfeited pious practices. In fact, Angela of Foligno’s action has been described by one contemporary critic as “seeking to imitate Christ; in her mimesis of his nakedness and his suffering, she mimes nakedness and suffering for us as readers. For her, Christ is not a text to be read, but a role to be acted.”151 Another critic, while noting Angela’s gradual distancing of self from accepted modes of conduct, nevertheless places her among “many holy women [who] had meditated on the loving surrender of the bride; but Angela acts it out [at the foot of the crucifix].”152 With Kempe, however, the counter-discourse has had the effect of suppressing the religious significance of Kempe’s dictated work. Kathleen Ashley, whose work is one of the richest and most sympathetic examinations of how Kempe’s text “enacts a solution to the cultural dilemma of how to achieve spiritual validation while remaining an active member of mercantile society,” comes closest to ceding to Kempe the authenticity of a holy text.153 Yet, as she compliments Kempe on giving spiritual validation to the active life, she says of Margery’s text: “the life it describes is ostensibly directed toward the sacred to the exclusion of mundane social obligations.”154 The term, “ostensibly,” is itself a nonvalidating term, meaning, as it does, “to all outward appearance.” Had “ostensibly” been omitted or had it been replaced by the word “clearly, (thus: “the life it describes is clearly directed [. . .],” the effect would have given to Kempe’s text the nod toward a hagiographical stance. In a sense, all counter-discourse about a genre attempts to “fix” the genre. And yet, we have learned elsewhere to free ourselves of this impulse to stabilize and fix genre boundaries. Samuel Richardson’s period scarcely hesitated in accepting his series of letters as a novel—which is what he called it—despite the fact that it radically departed from its antecedents of the modern novel of adventure (e.g., Robinson Crusoe), the modern romance (Atalantis), the novella, satirical romances and the petites histoires. And we have accepted a nearly transformational morphing of the genre of the novel in John Barth’s works. In poetry, too, we have a boundless tolerance for endless forms of writing, and some decades ago, we accepted the dissolution of the boundaries between fiction and biography in the once controversial Ronald Reagan biography, as well as in Ann Oakley’s autobiography, Taking It Like a Woman, where she invents characters in her autobiography. Culturally, therefore, we have agreed not to cling to the old standards and forms of the novel or of poetry or of autobiography or biography. Why continue, then, to hang onto old standards of hagiography? What is it about our own communal identity, our own interpretative communities that wishes to keep the boundaries of that

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genre rigid? Is it not that our current (Catholic) culture’s attitude toward women’s public speech has problematized a genre for us? And have our expectations of a genre, then, created a particular meaning—that is, what constitutes hagiography? And, finally, has not this, in turn, problematized something much more profound, namely, what constitutes religious and spiritual values?

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his study, indebted to a generation of scholars engaged in publishing accurate representations of medieval and early modern English women, and their voices (in texts), has been concerned with investigating women’s voices, particularly their speech, as a site of revolt. In order to discover some of the reasons why this period’s civic and religious authorities were so obsessed with speech, I set out to examine certain of the period’s basic assumptions about speech in general. Tracing perspectives well documented in Medieval and Early Modern England on the nature of speech—its unreliability, its mystique, its uncontainable or uncontrollable nature—brought me face to face with the unease of writers, theorists, rhetoricians, and theologians about the extremes of speech. The perspectives themselves (speech as unreliable, as mystique, and as uncontrollable) when taken together reveal the ability of speech to jeopardize reputations, community interests, and religious and political authority. Women’s speech, especially, became recognized as capable of destabilizing authoritative discourses, domestic economy, and power structures. More disturbingly, where women were concerned, “speech represented personal agency,” as Anthony Fletcher succinctly phrased it.1 Inevitably, the authorities’ apprehension about the effects of speech, coupled with their assumptions about the nature of speech, led to the control and criminalization of women’s speech. To recognize how the period viewed the transforming power of speech is to understand the pervasive social and ecclesiastical strictures that arose to silence women, and even to control the sites where women gathered to talk freely. The effect of such perspectives and such anxiety about women’s speech combined to form a hostile construct of women that grew further and further distanced from the experience of actual women, who contributed significantly to civic and economic life. As Chapter Two reveals, by contrast to the actual lives of professional, working, married, and single women, an “imagined woman” was emerging. Tapping already into the construct of the verbally and morally transgressive Eve, the construct of the imagined woman developed largely through the inf luence

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of monastics whose cloistered life and embrace of celibacy put them at a remove from, and in opposition to, women. Clerical interpretation of the Fall in Genesis became progressively wrenched loose from the text, shifting its focus from a critique of human disobedience, to a critique of woman as seductive devil/snake, and finally to women as dangerous speech, itself. The “imagined woman” embodied in far-ranging texts, from sermons and tracts to proverbs and comic verse, exerted even greater force and fostered greater accessibility when embodied in the visual language of public places such as sculpture on the front of cathedrals, paintings, tapestries, manuscript illuminations, and mystery plays. Testifying in their own behalf or on behalf of other women, as the court depositions of Chapter Three amply show, allows us to view women asserting agency beyond male control and imagination. In their court depositions women across class lines courageously and resourcefully testify to their claims, in the face of a legal system that encoded men’s natural superiority and consequent right to dominate. In these testimonies the women challenge and even subvert the “knowledge systems” that disprivilege them. Given a voice by their position as witnesses, they employ rhetorical strategies that exploit the conventions of the legal system while at the same time presenting a narrative about women’s experience that counters and sometimes subverts the patriarchal discourse that defined civil and domestic order. The Assembly of Ladies, as I have shown, likewise rewrites women’s experience, disrupting, thereby, the patriarchal discourse that defined women’s sphere and status. The Assembly of Ladies is very much a woman’s book with a woman’s agenda. The female author employs the period’s most celebrated metaphor conceptualizing love relationships (the medieval garden) so as to critique that same metaphor. Appearing to celebrate women’s give-and-take in love relationships, the metaphor— itself a brilliant linguistic domain—conceptualizes, in fact, women’s exclusion, her retreat from the world, her false refuge, her choice of inconsistent and duplicitous progress, and her walled-in silence wherein the male lover undertakes a linguistic pursuit aimed to secure her surrender. Perhaps The Assembly of Ladies has been undervalued as a literary achievement because it has not been read on its own terms: as a woman writer’s subtle, often playful interrogation and disruption of prominent literary and cultural tropes that privilege male dominance over women. In successive scenes from a labyrinthine garden, a bower, and a grievance court—venues that in the dominant discourse purport to elevate and/or protect women—the poem’s female narrator and characters struggle to find themselves, to speak their experience. The poem’s somewhat disjunctive narrative and dialogue, far from being

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artistic lapses, combine to expose, if only implicitly, women’s disempowerment within dominant cultural tropes—thus giving voice to forms of cultural silencing. Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale is also a sly exercise in subversion that resists acquiescence to patriarchal cultural models while appearing to employ them—here, the model of the idealized woman: silent and obedient to her husband. Through his tale, the Clerk undercuts hypermasculinity across class lines, linking the behavior of the coarse Herry Bailly toward the Clerk with that of the noble Marquis Walter toward Griselda. Like the author of “The Assembly of Ladies,” the Clerk uses his narrative to forefront woman’s disempowerment in a masculinist system (and as a corollary, his own threatened disempowerment as an “unmanly” man), revealing the irrationality and violence beneath behavior tacitly approved in the culture, and then, in the Envoy, explicitly counseling wives to resist such subjection as he has done, in the telling of the tale. “Do not,” he urges, finally, “let humility nail your tongue.”2 Scholarship on Margery Kempe and The Book of Margery Kempe has perhaps answered by now all of Sarah Beckwith’s questions—is Kempe “telling the truth? Is she really a saint, visionary, pilgrim, mystic, Lollard, orthodox Catholic, protofeminist” that “she has been claimed for all camps,”—except one: the issue of whether she is an authentic mystic. I have explored certain elements in our institutional discourse that might account for communities’ past and current resistance (both by academic and Catholic (learned) communities)—to assigning, collectively, that status to her. First, we are still somewhat prey to a particular image of women. We do not like noisy women, and Margery Kempe was a woman of “bold speech.” As I pointed out, even scholars who are not tied to the image of the ideal woman are tied to the image of a non-noisy woman. This coupled with her verbalized self-consciousness of her place in the mystical tradition, her frequent talk of sexual love as part of her communings with Jesus, and our own expectation of the hagiographic genre problematized any collective consent to her status as a genuine mystic. Kempe herself, of course, did not need us to accord her text a hagiographical status. She simply, noisily, moved forward the boundaries of the hagiographical frontier. The various studies in this book have, I hope, substantiated the two objectives that this study set out to demonstrate: namely, as I put it, that despite extensive evidence indicating a wholesale suppression of early women’s speech (and thereby their access to knowledge), women were actively engaged in cultural practices and speech strategies that were at times complicitous with patriarchal ideology, and yet subversive in undermining that ideology. Further, in terms of the consequences and

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cultural forces of women’s speech, the texts examined in my book indicate that conversation seems impelled by, largely, three epistemological concerns: first, the drive to reconceptualize certain prevailing masculinist concepts and practices, opening them up thereby to public critical inquiry; second, the drive to speak oneself into existence in relation to the present and past of a community; and third, the drive to invalidate knowledge systems that fail to account for women’s own subjectivities. Conversational communities of women constituted—and still do—a site for rethinking their world. They provided for women a network that allowed cognitive freedom, an exploration of points of correspondence between what they were hearing and what they had lived, between their self-narratives and the master narrative whose metaphors, laws and conduct codes constructed them and their world. A single exchange of views, a set of speech acts, opens to the speakers the way in which knowledge critiques and interprets “experience and auctorite.”3

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NOTES

Introduction 1. Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighborhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 2. Sandy Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 3. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 5. 4. Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail, ed., Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 1. 5. Judith M. Bennett, “Medievalism and Feminism,” Speculum 68.2 (1993): 327. 6. Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Capp, When Gossips Meet; Bardsley, Venomous Tongues; Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Cynthia J. Neville, “Widows of War: Edward I and the Women of Scotland during the War of Independence,” in Wife and Widow in Medieval England, ed., Sue Sheridan Walker (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 109–139; J. A. Sharpe, Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England: The Church Courts at York, Borthwick Papers 58 (Heslington, York: University of York, Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, 1980); Susan Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Pamela Allen Brown, Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Kim M. Phillips, “The Invention of the Scold,” History Workshop Journal 66.1 (2008): 253–58; Anthony Musson, ed., “Appealing to the Past: Perceptions of Law in Later Medieval England,” in Expectations of the Law in the Middle Ages, (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2001), 165–80; Sara

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NOTES

Heller Mendelson, “ ‘To shift for a cloak’: Disorderly Women in the Church Courts,” in Women and History: Voices from Early Modern England, ed. Valerie Frith (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1995), 3–18; Patricia Crawford and Laura Gowing, ed., Women’s Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Routledge, 2000); Cordelia Beattie, “Single Women, Work, and Family: The Chancery Dispute of Jane Wynde and Margaret Clerk,” in Voices from the Bench: The Narratives of Lesser Folk in Medieval Trials, ed. Michael Goodich (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 177– 202; Maryanne Kowaleski, “A Prosopography of Scolds in a Medieval English Town,” Paper presented at the 34th International Congress on Medieval Studies, The Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, May 1999. 7. E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), xvi. 8. Kate McKluskie, “Women’s Language and Literature: A Problem in Women’s Studies,” Feminist Review 14 (1983): 54.

1

The Control and Criminalization of Women’s Speech

1. Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail, “Introduction,” in Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 1. 2. The device is called a scold’s brank or brace and fits over the head like a cage, usually with a metal tongue depressor built in. Some extant branks show additional spikes on the tongue depressor preventing its wearer from speaking without injury. Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 109, argues that despite the “scattered references to these vicious instruments, there is scant evidence that the branks were regularly inf licted upon women. The records of the Chester Corporation and the Stockport Court Leet are typical in that they contain not a single order or notice to that effect.” My demure is slight (Walker’s work is among the top in the field). Yet, thousands of defamation cases in late sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury English courts likewise contain not a single order or notice as to the cases’ resolution. Given the expensive undertaking by claimants and given the occasional reference to fines and punishments in a few cases among these thousands of cases, we can nevertheless assume that fines and punishments were very likely the usual resolution to these cases. It may be that scolds’ branks were not “regularly inf licted upon women,” but given the expense of towns’ having these branks forged and the number of towns in which some of these branks survive, I think we need to assume that they did indeed inf lict them, whether regularly or not. And the object of that inf liction was far more likely to be women than men, if Sandy Bardsley is right: in the Liber Albus (1419), the rules for the governance of London, the compiler’s list of crimes ascribed to indicted men omits scolding but lists

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3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

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it as an habitual practice by indicted women. The omission, Bardsley says, is no accident. In the articles setting out rules for each London wardmote (a court or ward meeting by inhabitants within a certain ward), Bardsley writes, “scolding was again listed among a list of crimes for which women might be indicted but was left out of the comparable list for men.” Sandy Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 85. Both the 1486 Latin ordinances of the borough of Hereford, and the 1510 decrees of the borough of Northallerton (Yorkshire) make it clear that “from the time of its emergence as a legal category, scolding was ref lexively a female-gendered crime” (85). (Walker lists the towns of Altrincham, Macclesfield, Congleton, Carrington, Knutsford, Stockport, Chester, and the parish of Acton near Nantwich as places where scold’s bridles were listed by nineteenth-century antiquarians; see Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, 108n172). Bardsley, Venomous Tongues, 2. William Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew; Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness; Jonson, Epicene; and Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl. Judging from the wealth of extant literature on the subject: Peter Abelard, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice (New York: Penguin Books, 1974), 187–89, citing Augustine, Retractiones 1, preface; Proverbs 10:19 (Vulgate); James 3:2, 5; Gregory, Moralia 7.37. See also Erasmus, Lingua (1525), Robert Mannyng, Handlyng Synne (1303), and John Gower, Vox Clamantis (1377–81). Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5. Kamensky’s specific reference to New England attitudes toward speech is couched within the larger British context. The Puritans, with their obsession with speech, “were turning out to be even more English than they intended.” David Waldstreicher, “The First Linguistic Turn,” Reviews in American History 27.1 (1999): 17 [14–21]. Michaela Paasche Grudin, Chaucer and the Politics of Discourse (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 6. Walter Brueggemann, “Life-Giving Speech amid an Empire of Silence,” Michigan Law Review 105.6 (2007): 1124 [1115–32]. Brueggemann’s essay is an analysis of James Boyd White’s Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force. The full sentence is “Imagination is the capacity to entertain an alternative wholeness that is not enthralled to the particular demand of the immediate moment.” By “creation,” I refer not to the medieval understanding of God’s conferring existence ex nihilo, but rather to its understanding of humans “actualiz[ing] what God had already created in potency.” Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, “The Analogy of Creation in Dante,” Speculum 32.4 (1957): 706 [706–721]. “Where we would use the term ‘creativity’ loosely, patristic

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10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

NOTES

and mediaeval thinkers used it with great care to refer only to the work of the Creator. The term that could be applied to the agents of creation, generation, and making equivocally was auctor.” “God, nature, and man are all auctores on a descending scale, with creation only appropriate to the first” (707). In Canto XXIV, ll. 40–63 of Purgatorio—a speech act insofar as the texts were, apparently, verbally presented—Giuseppe Mazzota sees “Dante’s formulation to Bonagiunta of the poetic process as an act analogous to the Incarnation,” but not a divine act or an act ex nihilo. Giuseppe Mazzotta, “Dante’s Literary Typology,” MLN 87.1, The Italian Issue (1972): 3 [1–19]. Leslie K. Arnovick, “ ‘In Forme of Speche’ is Anxiety: Orality in Chaucer’s House of Fame,” Oral Tradition 11.2 (1996): 338 [320–45]. Susan E. Phillips, “Gossip and (Un)official Writing,” in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 484 [476–90], writes that Mannyng worried about the exemplum’s “ability to entertain,” and his narratives “dangerous affinity with idle talk.” He was aware of the common objection that exempla, including classical fables and new verse chronicles, sull[ied] the pulpit with ‘newe soteltes.’ ” See also, Susan E. Phillips, “ ‘Janglynge in Cherche’: Pastoral Practice and Idle Talk,” in Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), Chapter 1. According to J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed., ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 8, a speech act occurs where “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action.” Examples may be “I pronounce you husband and wife,” or “I nominate you to be Chair.” Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 395. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality (Norwich, VT: Argo Books, Inc., 1970), 120. Ibid., 121. Ibid., 16. Wayne Cristaudo, “Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2008ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford. edu/archives/spr2008/entries/rosenstock-huessy/, accessed December 3, 2009. The Chester Cycle Plays, ed. Gerard NeCastro, Play VII (7), The Play of the Shepherds. At From Stage to Page—Medieval and Renaissance Drama, http://www.umm.maine.edu/faculty/necastro/drama/, accessed October 2, 2009. Gower examines language (and sexuality) in Confessio Amantis, completed 1390–1393; Wycliff (and his associate translators) chose to retain as closely as possible the syntax of his Latin Vulgate source of the Bible even when the meaning was almost incomprehensible in English because he could not risk introducing error; and John of Salisbury’s examination

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20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

151

of the language of morals in the Policraticus may well be one of the first examples of discourse analysis applied to political thought. And his study of grammar and rhetoric in the Metalogicon attempted not only to show grammar as fundamental to truth but also to examine the way that language imitates nature itself. For Salisbury’s uniting grammar and rhetoric, see also Marjorie Curry Woods, “The Teaching of Writing in Medieval Europe,” in A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to TwentiethCentury America, ed. James J. Murphy (Davis, CA: Hermagoras, 1990), 77–94. The “Gawain poet was intensely concerned with the productive possibilities of controlled ambiguity.” Ross G. Arthur, Medieval Sign Theory and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), ix. Douay-Rheims Bible: Genesis 11: 1, “And the earth was of one tongue, and of the same speech.” scripturetext.com/genesis/11-1.htm, accessed December 8, 2009. Earl R. Anderson, A Grammar of Iconism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1998), 54. Referring to the Cratylus, Anderson writes of Socrates: “The same things have different names in different dialects, he notes, because the experience of them is ‘relative to individuals.’ Language diversity, therefore, results from variation in the psychological experience of things (485e–86a). This point was disputed later by Aristotle, who, in De interpretatione, insists upon the fundamental unity of psychological experience among human beings regardless of cultural difference.” John A. Alford, “The Grammatical Metaphor: A Survey of Its Use in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 57.4 (1982): 736 [728–60]. Language as expressing the natural essence of things was the position favored by Plato in the Cratylus, “where Socrates argues that words have a logical relation to reality, while Aristotle is usually associated with the conventionalist point of view.” Alford cautions us to note that tendencies rather than rigidly held stances more accurately describe their positions. Epicureus likewise thought that language ref lected the essence or psychological experience of things. Stephen R. L. Clark, “The Evolution of Language: Truth and Lies,” Philosophy 75.293 (2000): 402 [401–421] argues that the “Epicureans explained human speech by suggesting that our ancestors produced relevant gestures and sounds by nature, and that local circumstances (and later history) generated all the different tongues” (402). Diane Cady, “Symbolic Economies,” in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 128 [124–41]. Alford, “The Grammatical Metaphor,” 736; John Fyler, Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 18; Cady, “Symbolic Economies,” 128–29.

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27. John of Salisbury, The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury, trans. Daniel D. McGarry (1955, repr. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 39. 28. Ibid., 39. 29. Ibid., 40. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 41. Brackets, i.e., around “the devices of ” are McGarry’s. See also, John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, CCCM 98, ed. J. B. Hall (Turnhoult, Belgium: Brepols, 1991), 1.14, 33, and 34. 32. The Statesman’s Book of John of Salisbury, Being the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Books, and Selections from the Seventh and Eighth Books, of the Policraticus, trans. John Dickinson (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), www. constitution.org/salisbury/policrat456.htm, accessed November 6, 2009. In Section II, “The Law,” Dickinson comments, “While he repeats the cliche that ‘nature is the best guide of life,’ and seems to take it for granted that the will of God and the precepts of rational nature are the same.” Dickenson records Salisbury as saying, in Chapter V, “The things which derive their value from nature are not only everywhere the same, but are held in esteem among all peoples; those which depend upon opinion are uncertain.” 33. Keith Allen, Linguistic Meaning, vol. 1 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 136–37. “In direct line of intellectual descent from Aristotle were the medieval monks of the 13th–14th centuries known as the scholastic grammarians.” They reinterpreted Latin grammar “in terms of the meanings of grammatical classes, relations, and functions, which they believed to ref lect the nature of the world we perceive.” (Parminedean permanence represented in the noun class; Heraclitean f lux in the verbs). Because they “thought that God created a logically organized world,” they believed that “the sense of grammatical classes is determined by the nature of the world we live in.” 34. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Geneologies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 44. In fact, Bloch’s sentence continues following a dash: “a split evident in the easy copresence of what seem like mutually exclusive explanations of linguistic origin (natural versus conventional) as well as in an even more pervasive dichotomy between semiological theory and practice”. 35. Marcia L. Colish, The Mirror of Language, A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 99. 36. Bloch, Etymologies and Geneologies, 44. 37. “Semantic isolates” is intended as a play on the concept of language isolates, that is, languages thought to have no relationship to other languages: e.g., Basque and Zuni. 38. In a counterfactual there is no existing or real entity that could make the statement verifiable or true. Buying indulgences, which the Pardoner sells, is itself a counterfactual: if there is a purgatory, (a certain number of ) indulgences will shorten your purgatorial time by one year. Or the

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39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

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Pardoner’s relics scam: if any one is so steeped in sin that s/he cannot confess it, or any woman has made her husband a cuckold, they can “offer no grace” to these relics (i.e., these relics will have no effect on them). Diane Watt, Amoral Gower: Language, Sex, and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 24. Admittedly, there was the horror stricken culture critic here and there who decried modernism’s move toward meaninglessness. Noncognivitism claims that moral knowledge is impossible. Deconstruction, more positively perceived, refers to ‘unbuilding’ a text so as to show what might be omitted, overlooked, or suppressed, especially given, first, the failure of language to be able to say everything, and, second, the way that privileged terms or concepts can produce radically different meanings when placed in a different context of judgment. Stephen Gersh, “John Scottus Eriugena and Anselm of Canterbury,” in Medieval Philosophy, Routledge History of Philosophy vol. III, ed. John Marenbon (London: Routledge, 1998), 120–49. See 125n8. www.hse. ru/data/154/256/1235/Vol%20III%20Medieval%20Philosophy%20 -%20John%20Marenbon.pdf, accessed November 12, 2009. John Buridan argued that while “the logician’s notion of truth and the grammarian’s notion of congruence are separable in theory,” no complete significance of a piece of discourse can be determined without both (here, I have modified the syntax of Buridan’s statement). Context is everything in the act of interpretation. “Perhaps the most inf luential Parisian philosopher of the fourteenth century,” John Buridan exercised enormous inf luence on philosophical thought both during the later scholastic and early modern periods. Jack Zupko, “John Buridan,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2008 Edition. ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/buridan/, accessed November 12, 2009. David Chalmers, “Is there Synonymy in Ockham’s Mental Language?,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, ed. Paul Vincent Spade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 76 [76–99]. Geoffrey Sampson, The ‘Language Instinct’ Debate (London: Continuum, 2005), 133. Paul Vincent Spade, “Insolubilia,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100–1600, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony John Patrick Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 246 [246–53]. “Medieval literature on ‘insolubles’ began to appear by the early thirteenth century at the latest and continued to the end of the Middle Ages. Insolubles were primarily certain sorts of self-referential sentences, semantic paradoxes like the ‘liar paradox’ (‘What I am now saying is false’).” By “hyperreal” I mean, in Baudrillard’s terms, “the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another, reproductive medium.”

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49.

50.

51. 52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

NOTES

Jean Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, 2nd ed. ed. Mark Poster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 147. David Bloor, Wittgenstein, Rules, and Institutions (London: Routledge, 1997), 30: “Talk of coins, taken collectively, is not about a reality that is independent of such talk. It is, in a sense, just talk about talk.” See also, Times Literary Supplement, (TimesOnline), April 8, 2005, review of two books on British philosophers, R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott: “ ‘Talk about talk’ was how the well-known Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle defined a dominant strand in European philosophy in the inter-war period. He was commenting on the search for a rigorous basis to verify statements and, in particular, on the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle.” Fyler, Language and the Declining World, 3–4, writes that a series of falls, rather than a single fall, led to the ongoing decline of language. The first is God’s (using the Gospel of John [ John 1:1]: God is the Word and the Word is God: Et Verbum erat apud Deum/ Et Deus erat Verbum). “The second language is Adam’s, when he gives names to the birds and animals, and the third the speech he hands on to his descendants after the Fall. The fourth and most depraved comprises our diverse tongues after [the Tower of ] Babel.” Ibid., 191n22, referencing Colish, Mirror of Language, 7–54. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (London: R. & T. Washbourne, Ltd., 1915), 2.2.176; 3.7.7; 2.1.51.4. In the last citation, 2.1.51.4, Aquinas is arguing that as a manifestation of God’s power, God “can infuse into humans even those habits, which can be caused by a natural power.” Thus God “gave to the apostles the science of the Scriptures and of all tongues, which men can acquire by study or by custom, but not so perfectly.” See also, the New Testament, Paul’s letters (Ephesians 2:14–15) and John 17: 20–23. “The only copy of the York Plays to survive was written about 1470, and was originally the property of the corporation of the city. It was probably compiled from the various prompt copies belonging to each gild that performed a play, and the language may therefore be that of the late 14th century or early 15th century.” Dennis Freeborn, From Old English to Standard English: A Course Book in Language Variation Across Time, 3rd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 195. See comparable form madde, v. to act madly, l. 2414 [From OE gemædd, mad.], cited in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd ed. ed. Norman Davis (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1968), 197. Richard Beadle, ed., The York Plays, (London: E. Arnold, 1982; Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, 1993), http://name.umdl.umich. edu/York, accessed November 12, 2009. Quotation is from Play 43, 384. Fyler, Language and the Declining World, 43.

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155

57. John Gower, Prologue to Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). Division is the cause of evil (ll. 849– 1052); and sin is “moder of divisioun” (l. 1030). 58. The friar’s ‘gift’ of a fart to be equally divided in twelve ways in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale is often interpreted as a parody of the feast of Pentecost. See Alan Levitan, “The Parody of Pentecost in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale,” University of Toronto Quarterly 40 (1971): 236–46; Bernard S. Levy, “Biblical Parody in The Summoner’s Tale,” Tennessee Studies in Literature 11 (1966): 45–60; Glending Olson, “The End of The Summoner’s Tale and the Uses of Pentecost,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 209–245. 59. The Chester Cycle Plays, ed. Gerard NeCastro, Play VII (7), The Play of the Shepherds. From Stage to Page—Medieval and Renaissance Drama, http: //www.umm.maine.edu/faculty/necastro/drama/, accessed October 2, 2009. 60. Douglas Sugano, ed., The N-Town Plays, TEAMS Middle English Text Series, www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/sdntn16.htm, accessed June 20, 2010. 61. All citations from Chaucer’s works are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1987). All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 62. The full quote reads “Chaucer’s works are riddled with explanations about the primacy of speech ‘experienced’ as opposed to written texts that are ‘authored,’ and which then come to represent the ‘dictates’ of ‘auctoritee.’ ” Dennis L. Weeks and Jane Hoogestraat, “Introduction,” in Time, Memory, and the Verbal Arts: Essays on the Thought of Walter Ong, ed. Dennis L. Weeks and Jane Hoogestraat (London: Associated University Presses, 1998), 19 [9–22]. 63. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 29. 64. John A. Alford, “The Design of the Poem,” in A Companion to Piers Plowman, ed. John A. Alford (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 42: In speaking of the mid-to-late-twentieth-century scholars, Alford writes, “The pardon scene represents the most notorious crux in the entire poem.” “Scholarship has focused primarily on three questions. Is the pardon valid? Does its preoccupation with works deny the importance of grace in salvation? What is the significance of Piers’s tearing of the pardon?” 65. William Langland, Piers Plowman: The A-Version, ed. George Kane (Berkeley, CA: The Athlone Press, 1988), Passus VIII, ll. 95–96. 66. James Simpson, “The Transformation of Meaning: A Figure of Thought in Piers Plowman,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 37.146 (1986): 179 [161–83]. 67. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue. Not simply Jerome’s anti-matrimonial statements quoted in Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wives, but the widely read text

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68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73.

74.

75.

76. 77.

NOTES

of Innocent III’s “De contempt mundi” ref lected the general belief that original sin was transmitted through carnal intercourse. Innocent writes that “even between married persons,” the act is never performed “without the itch of the f lesh, the heat of passion, and the stench of lust.” “Quis enim nesciat concubitum etiam coniugalem nunquam omnino committi sine pruritu carnis, sine fervor libidinis, sine fetore luxurie.” The text and translation is given by Douglas Wurtele, “The ‘Double Sorwe’ of the Wife of Bath: Chaucer and the Misogynist Tradition,” Florilegium 11 (1992): 179–204n10. See also Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II, ii, 154.1. (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne Ltd., 1920). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Tolkien and Gordon. Chaucer, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1987), l. 3166. Gower completed the first revision of Confessio Amantis in 1390. Chaucer clearly knew Gower’s works, calling him ‘Moral’ Gower at the end of Troilus and Criseyde and giving him power of attorney on one of his trips to Italy in 1378. In the first version of his Confessio Amantis, Gower portrays Venus as calling Chaucer her disciple and her poet, and as having filled England with ‘Ditees and of songes glade’ in the f lower of his youth (l. 2945). Confessio Amantis, ed. Peck, 522n7. “Translation is fully implicit in the most rudimentary communication.” Steiner, After Babel, 471. Ibid., 47. Charles Isherwood, “Eloquent Tongues but Anguished Irish Hearts,” New York Times Theatre Review, January 26, 2007, http://theater2.nytimes. com/2007/01/26/theater/reviews/26tran.html, accessed August 14, 2009. See Helen Lojek’s discussion of the relationship between Brian Friel’s plays and Steiner’s theories in Helen Lojek, “Brian Friel’s Plays and George Steiner’s Linguistics: Translating the Irish,” Contemporary Literature 35.1 (1994): 97 [83–99]: “Once Friel used Steiner’s discussion of translation as a basis for his play Translations, however, he pointed interpreters toward an inclusive, useful metaphor for approaching the body of his work.” The Nietzsche quote is cited by Timothy O’Leary, “Dramatic Speech Acts: Language and the Politics of Postcolonialism in Friel’s Translations,” Paper presented at the MOSAIC: Film, Performance, Kinetic Art Conference at the University of Sydney, June 2000, Part I. http://www. ssla.soc.usyd.edu.au/conference/Oleary.html, accessed November 13, 2010. O’Leary is arguing the Nietzshean inf luence in George Steiner, After Babel. See Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), 82–86 [79–97]. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” 84. By perceptual metaphors, I have in mind, generally, metaphors that tend to link perceptual and psychological interpretations, e.g., the man at a party who is referred to as a ping-pong ball. This “could be interpreted

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78. 79.

80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88.

89. 90.

91. 92. 93.

94.

157

perceptually as movement and mingling or psychologically as gregariousness.” Valerie F. Reyna, “Meaning, Memory, and the Interpretation of Metaphors,” in Metaphor: Implications and Applications, ed. Jeffrey Scott Mio and Albert N. Katz (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), 50 [39–57]. For the ping-pong perceptual metaphor, Reyna cites Phyllis Louise Lim, “Meaning Versus Verbatim Memory in Language Processing: Deriving Inferential, Morphological, and Metaphorical Gist,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona, 1993). Stephen Jay Gould, Bully For Brontosaurus (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991), 264. N. Katherine Hayles, “Desiring Agency: Limiting Metaphors and Enabling Constraints in Dawkins and Deleuze/Guattari,” SubStance 30.1/2 (2001): 145 [144–59]. Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book IV, Chapters 55–56, trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter Antony Motteux (Digireads.com Publishing, 2009), 396. Ibid. Ibid., 397. Ibid., 398. Ibid. Plutarch’s Moralia vol. 1, trans. Frank Cole Babitt (London: Heinemann, 1927), 418–21. Alvin Schwartz, Whoppers, Tall Tales and Other Lies (New York: Lippincott, 1975), 9, 117n. W. F. Garrett-Petts and Donald Lawrence, “Thawing the Frozen Image/Word: Vernacular Postmodern Aesthetics,” Mosaic 31.1 (1998): 144 [143–78]. Britton J. Harwood, “Chaucer on ‘Speche’: House of Fame, the Friar’s Tale, and the Summoner’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 26.4 (1992): 344–45 [343–49]. Harwood, “Chaucer on ‘Speche,’ ” 345. Martin Irvine, “Medieval Grammatical Theory and Chaucer’s House of Fame,” Speculum 60.4 (1985): 855 [850–76], notes that Priscian states, “for if air is corporeal, then vox, which consists of struck air, is shown to be corporeal since it touches the ear and is divided into the three ways which pertain to corporeal things, namely, in depth, breadth, and length. This being the case, vox is heard from every direction.” Irvine cites Priscian, Institutiones grammaticae, ed. M. Hertz in H. Keil, Grammatici Latini, 2:6. Irvine, “Medieval Grammatical Theory,” 862. Laurel Amtower, “Authorizing the Reader in Chaucer’s House of Fame,” Philological Quarterly 79.3 (2000): 277 [273–91]. William A. Quinn, “Chaucer’s Recital Presence in the House of Fame and the Embodiment of Authority,” The Chaucer Review 43.2 (2008): 175 [171–96]. House of Fame, ll. 1079–82. “Gesse” includes “perceives” and “judges” in its primary meanings.

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NOTES

95. Quinn, “Chaucer’s Recital Presence in the House of Fame,” 180. 96. Lillian M. Bisson, Chaucer and the Late Medieval World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 89–90. (“domos” as an alternate form of “domus.”) 97. But see Penn R. Szittya, “The Antifraternal Tradition in Middle English Literature,” Speculum 52.2 (1977): 305–11 [287–313], especially the reference to Arnold Williams’s study of English Episcopal registers that suggests that the usurpation of preaching privileges “may have been the other way around” (307–308). 98. Peter W. Travis, “Thirteen Ways of Listening to a Fart: Noise in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale,” Exemplaria 16.2 (2004): 332 [323–48]. 99. Harwood, “Chaucer on ‘Speche,’ ” 344. 100. Bettina Lindorfer, “Peccatum linguae and the Punishment of Speech Violations in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times,” in Speaking in the Medieval World, ed. Jean E. Godsall-Myers (Leiden, NLD: Brill, 2003), 24 [23–42]. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid., 25. 103. Henry Noble MacCracken, ed., The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Part II. EETS o.s. 192 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 468–85, verse 33 and 49. 104. John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godlie Form of Household Government (London, 1598), cited in Margaret Mikesell, “The Formative Power of Marriage in Stuart Tragedy,” Modern Language Studies 12.1 (1982): 41 [36–44]. 105. Richard Braithwaite, The English Gentlewoman (1631; Amsterdam, Netherlands: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd., & Da Capo Press, 1970), 89. 106. Heidi Brayman Hackel, “ ‘Boasting of Silence’: Women Readers in a Patriarchal State,” in Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 104 [101–121]. (For the quotation, Hackel cites p. 285 of Daniel Roger’s Matrimoniall Honour.) 107. Bardsley, Venomous Tongues, 26. 108. Ibid., 34. 109. The Latin text of this treatise (ca. 1125?) appears in Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, v. 176 (Paris, 1844–1865), col. 925–52. 110. Gabriella Ildiko Baika, “Lingua Indisciplinata. A Study of Transgressive Speech in the ‘Romance of the Rose’ and the ‘Divine Comedy.’ ” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2007), 6. http://etd.library.pitt. edu/ETD/available/etd-07092007-125443/unrestricted/GBaika1.pdf, accessed December 3, 2009. 111. Carolyn Bynum, “The Spirituality of Regular Canons in the Twelfth Century: A New Approach,” Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s. 4 (1973): 12 [3–24].

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159

112. Bynum, “The Spirituality of Regular Canons in the Twelfth Century,” 12. Bynum cites “Hugh, De institutione, xiv, PL 176, col. 945B-D.” Augustinian spirituality, the dominant inf luence in Hugh of St. Victor’s text, views silence as “not merely a matter of self-discipline but a necessary preparation for useful speech.” Phillip Sheldrake cites Carolyn Bynum’s example of Peter of Porto, Regula clericorum, Book 1, chapters 32–36 in PL 163 cols. 720–722, as illustrative of that approach. I should add that Porto’s Regula clericorum draws largely on the Rule of St. Benedict, but his added material urging good example by word as well as deed ref lects the Augustinian approach. Bynum cites Regula clericorum, I, ii, PL 163, cols. 708C-D and 709B-C. Phillip Sheldrake cites note 13: Peter of Porto, Regula clericorum, Book 1, chapters 32–36 in PL 163, cols. 720–722, in Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 45. See Philip Sheldrake, “Christian Spirituality as a Way of Living Publicly: A Dialectic of the Mystical and the Prophetic,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 3.1 (2003): 19–37. 113. Raoul Ardent, Speculum universale distinctionem de virtutibus et vitiis eisdem oppositis, ca. 1195, Bibliothèque Nationale MS. la. 3240, ff. 1r-203v: 161r. 114. Baika, “Lingua Indisciplinata,” 7n13. 115. See Alan M. F. Gunn, The Mirror of Love: A Reinterpretation of “The Romance of the Rose” (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1952). For connections between Alain of Lille and Dante, see Peter Dronke, Dante and Medieval Latin Traditions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 116. Baika, “Lingua Indisciplinata,” 9. 117. Ibid., 6. 118. Edwin D. Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 162. 119. Lindorfer, “Peccatum linguae,” 29. 120. Ibid., 30. 121. Ibid. 122. Richard Newhauser, The Treatise on Vices and Virtues in Latin and the Vernacular (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1993), 197. 123. Craun, Lies, 10. The “pastoral discourse on deviant speech had an uncommon power because of its composition by a militant literate elite, its claims to govern all speech, its authorities (biblical, patristic, philosophical), its use in confession (the gateway to the Eucharist), and its advocacy by (supposedly) every priest as a religious teacher.” Craun, (9–10), adds, “Although vast in quantity and varied in type, this pastoral literature constructs a ‘corporate social definition’ of sin, one for all Christians to know and to use in governing their conduct.” 124. Baika, “Lingua Indisciplinata,” 8. 125. Joan Heiges Blythe, “Sins of the Tongue and Rhetorical Prudence in ‘Piers Plowman,’ ” in Literature and Religion in the Later Middle Ages.

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160

126. 127.

128.

129.

130. 131.

132.

133.

134.

135.

NOTES

Philological Studies in Honor of Sieg fried Wenzel, ed. Richard G. Newhauser and John A. Alford (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), 120–123 [119–142]. Craun, Lies, 16. Book for a Simple and Devout Woman: A Late Middle English Adaptation of Peraldus’s Summa de vitiis et virtutibus and Friar Laurent’s Somme le roi, edited from British Library MSS Harley 6571 and Additional 30944, ed. F. N. M. Diekstra, Mediaevelia Groningana 24 (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1998). R. F. Yeager, “Aspects of Gluttony in Chaucer and Gower,” Studies in Philology 81.1 (1984): 46n, 12 [42–55], provides the following references for “Chaucer’s use of the Summa and other sources, see Germaine Dempster, Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (New York, 1958), 723 ff; H. G. Pfander, ‘Some Medieval Manuals of Religious Instruction in England and Observations on Chaucer’s “Parson’s Tale,” ’ JEGP, XXXV (1936), 243–258; R. Hazelton, “ ‘Chaucer’s ‘Parson’s Tale’ and the Moralium Dogma Philosophorum,” Traditio, XVI (1960), 255–264; Siegfried Wenzel, ‘The Source of the “Remedia” in the “Parson’s Tale,” ’ Traditio, XXVII (1971), 433–454, and ‘The Source of Chaucer’s Deadly Sins,’ Traditio, XXX (1974), 351–378.” This list is given in Craun, Lies, 18n32. The Book of Vices and Virtues is edited by W. Nelson Francis, EETS o.s. 217 (London, 1942) and Jacob’s Well: An English Treatise on the Cleansing of Man’s Conscience, ed. Arthur Brandeis, EETS o.s. 115 (London, 1900). Other editions: Ayenbite of Inwyt, or Remorse of Conscience, ed. R. Morris, EETS o.s. 23 (London: Trubner, 1866), A Myrour to Lewde Men and Wymmen: A Prose Version of the Specullum Vitae, ed. V. Nelson (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1981). Bardsley, Venomous Tongues, 34. Ibid., 97. Medieval narrative poetry, “exempla,” and “artistic representations overwhelmingly associated swearing and blasphemous speech with men.” Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 198. Sandy Bardsley, “Sin, Speech, and Scolding in Late Medieval England,” in Fama, 152 [145–64]. See also Edwin D. Craun, “ ‘Inordinata Locutio’: Blasphemy in Pastoral Literature, 1200–1500,” Traditio 39 (1983): 35–62. Gerald R. Owst, Literature and the Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 423–424. Cited in Bardsley, “Sin, Speech, and Scolding in Late Medieval England,” 154n30. On the other hand, even though he did not know Greek, Wycliff wrote directions about the need to carefully distinguish among available synonyms when translating from Latin to English; that coupled with his noting that Peter and Paul blasphemed in Christ when they denied

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NOTES

136.

137.

138. 139.

140.

141. 142.

143. 144. 145.

146.

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Christ, and his frequently accusing clerics and church administrators of blaspheming when they referred to his work as heresy, indicates that he was keenly aware of the wholly nongendered meaning of “blasphemy.” It raises the question, then, of whether he offered the false etymology as a slur against women. Thomas Wright, ed., A Selection of Latin Stories from Manuscripts of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. Percy Society Publications, vol. 8 (London: Percy Society, 1842; also, London: T. Richards, 1843), 61–62: “NON solum autem viri, sed quaedam mulieres, tantam habent jurandi consuetudinem, quod vix etiam sine juramento loqui possunt, quin aliquod juramentum praetermittant.” Frank Kermode, “Taking God’s name in vain,” London Review of Books, January 17, 2002, www.guardian.co.uk/books/series / londonreviewof books, accessed December 3, 2009. David Lawton, Blasphemy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 101. A frequently cited case is that of James Nayler, a Quaker from Bristol, who claiming equality with God, in 1656 rode into Bristol on a horse, surrounded by followers who sang “Holy, holy, holy.” He was sentenced to “be repeatedly set in the pillory and scourged; that he be branded on the forehead with the letter ‘B’; that he have his tongue bored with a iron and be confined afterwards in prison and set to hard labour.” Leonard W. Levy, Treason Against God: A History of the Offense of Blasphemy (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 265–294. The issue of abolishing the law was forced because of “Sudan’s arrest of a British schoolteacher accused of insulting Islam by letting her students name a class teddy bear Muhammad. The Sudanese ambassador was summoned; Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a protest. But it didn’t take long for someone to point out that Downing Street was standing on diplomatic quicksand: Britain itself has a law making blasphemy a crime.” Kim Murphy, “Britain’s Blasphemy Law No Longer Sacred,” Los Angeles Times, March 2008, 6, A3. Baika, “Lingua Indisciplinata,” 272. Ibid.: “Charlemagne reinforced the provision on blasphemy from Justinian’s code, initiating a legal tradition faithfully followed by his close successors, and in 1140, Gratian, in his Decretus, still made dozens of references to blasphemy.” Lindorfer, “Peccatum linguae,” 35n15. Ibid., 35. Yeager, “Aspects of Gluttony in Chaucer and Gower,” 49: Apart from the numerous French manuscripts of Lorens’s Somme le roy, “at least nine separate English translations of it have survived in manuscripts datable before 1500, [and] we may perhaps suppose that Friar Lorens’ classification of wicked magic and gluttony as related would have been familiar to some in the audiences of Pardoner, Parson, and the Confessio Amantis.” Ibid., 50.

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147. Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, 198. 148. Kirilka Stavreva, “Fighting Words: Witch-Speak in Late Elizabethan Docu-fiction,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30.2 (2000): 309–338. 149. Ibid., 310. 150. Kamensky, Governing the Tongue, 156. 151. Bardsley, Venomous Tongues, 82. On the other hand, David Underdown has proposed that “before the middle of the sixteenth century, the authorities do not seem to have been particularly concerned about [the scolds], and they were dealt with by the routine processes of presentment to the ecclesiastical or manor court, with penance or small fines as the customary punishments.” David Underdown, “The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England,” in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 119 [116–36]. 152. Bardsley, Venomous Tongues, 6. 153. Phillips, “The Invention of the Scold,” 257; Karen Jones, Gender and Petty Crime in Late Medieval England: The Local Courts in Kent, 1460–1560 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2006), says that McIntosh “found concern with scolding in the lesser local courts growing from the late fourteenth century to the mid-fifteenth, dropping slightly towards the end of the fifteenth century, then rising again to peak in the 1520’s and 1530’s after which it declined, reaching about the same low level by the end of the sixteenth century as it had been in 1370” (98–9). 154. Jones, Gender and Petty Crime; after 1559, “in the subsequent three years there was a substantial increase in witchcraft prosecutions in the diocese” (178). Jones references the increase again in her conclusion, “The Canterbury church courts saw a marked increase in witchcraft cases, beginning in the late 1550’s. This peaked in 1561 and had disappeared by 1563, possibly due to the passage of the Witchcraft Act that year” (198). 155. Lynda E. Boose, “Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42.2 (1991): 184 [179–213]. 156. Ibid. 157. Michelle Wolfe, review of Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England, by Sandy Bardsley, H-Net Book Reviews, May 2008, www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=14508, accessed December 11, 2009. 158. Bardsley, Venomous Tongues, argues that the hue and cry fell into disuse in the late fourteenth century as the criminalizing of women’s speech became more pronounced. Moreover, a large percentage of some 1,200 cases in her study indicate that hues and cries were raised on men, and that ultimately the “system of the hue and cry was one that disproportionately provided protection for women and punishment for

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159.

160. 161. 162. 163.

164.

165.

166. 167. 168. 169.

170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175.

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men.” Sandy Bardsley, Women’s Roles in the Middle Ages (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 137. Reginald Scot, “Discoverie of Witchcraft,” 1584, dramatists include Webster, Middleton, Shakespeare, Ford, Dekker, Rowley, and poets, Spenser and Ben Jonson. George Webbe, The Arraignment of an Unruly Tongue (London, 1619), 22. Kamensky, Governing the Tongue, 151. Ibid., 266n36, cites Rowley et al., Witch of Edmonton, 188. Richard Bernard, A Guide to Grand-Jury Men (London, 1629; Early English Books Online, Cambridge University Library), 89. http://0 -eebo.chadw yck.com.libus.csd.mu.edu/search/full _rec? SOU RC E=pg i m a g e s .c f g& AC T ION=ByI D& I D = 9 9 8 49 019& SEARCHCONFIG=undefined&ECCO=undefined, accessed October 28, 2010. Similar to those in Malleus Maleficarum. Mentioned are such reasons as women being prone to believing, fickle in heart, easily impressed, having loose tongues, and vengeful. Malleus Maleficarum, ed. and trans. Christopher S. MacKay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 116. Alexander Roberts, A Treatise of Witchcraft, sections 41 and 43 (Project Gutenberg, 2005), www.gutenberg.org/files/17209/17209-8.txt, accessed December 10, 2009. Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, 101, 102, 102n135. Ibid., 271–2. Bardsley, Venomous Tongues, 85. Karen Jones and Michael Zell, “Bad Conversation? Gender and Social Control in a Kentish Borough, c. 1450–c. 1570,” Continuity and Change 13.1 (1998): 26 [11–31]. Malcolm Jones, “Folklore Motifs in Late Medieval Art II: Sexist Satire and Popular Punishments,” Folklore 101.1 (1990): 73 [69–87]. Jones, “Folklore Motifs,” 73. Jones and Zell, “Bad Conversation?,” 26 Bardsley, Venomous Tongues, Figure 7: Study of Scolding Prosecutions by Gender and Jurisdiction between 1311–1529, 86–7; quote, 87. Jones and Zell, “Bad Conversation?,” 16. For distinctions between witchcraft and demonic possession, David Harley, “Explaining Salem: Calvinist Psychology and the Diagnosis of Possession,” The American Historical Review 101.2 (1996): 307–330 is most instructive. See also Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (New York: Longman, 1987), 124; Peter Rushton, “Women, Witchcraft and Slander in Early Modern England: Cases from the Church Courts of Durham, 1560–1675,” Northern History 18 (1982): 116–32; and Henry Goodcole, The wonderfull discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer a Witch, late of Edmonton, her conviction and condemnation and Deth. Together with the relation of the divels accese to her, and their conference together (London, 1621).

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176. These women that sit the church about/They be all of the devil’s gang/ diuina impedientes [impeding the divine service].” For an extensive study of Tutivillus, see Margaret Jennings, Tutivillus: The Literary Career of the Recoding Demon, Studies in Philology, Texts and Studies 74.5 (1977): 1–95; for its implications for literature and drama, see Kathy Cawsey, “Tutivillus and the ‘Kyrkchaterars’: Strategies of Control in the Middle Ages,” Studies in Philology 102.4 (2005): 434–51. John Mirk’s Festial, an enormously popular vernacular sermon collection aimed at late fourteenth-century rural congregations, situates the fiend on women’s shoulders. John Mirk, Festial: A Collection of Homilies, ed. Theodore Erbe, EETS e.s. 96 (London: Kegan Paul, 1905), 279–80. 177. The principle behind it held that “a loose tongue made a loose woman.” Kamensky, Governing the Tongue, 27. 178. For men (as well as women), a lengthy textual and artistic history had long associated the tongue and penis; as its association as it “became more explicit in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so too did the imagined relationship between rhetorical and sexual performance.” Carla Mazzio, “Sins of the Tongue in Early Modern England,” Modern Language Studies 28. 3/4 (1998): 101 [95–124], see n. 42. 179. John Stephens, Satyricall Essayes characters and others (London, 1615), 308–09. 180. Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 118n13: Joan Hewes c. Luke Bryan (1618), DL/C 225, fo. 341r-v. 181. Ibid., 118. 182. Thomas’s wife “(the said Suzan being more liberall of her speeche than this respondent [Thomas Rogers] thought fittinge for her) did . . . once saie that he had heard of a man that had a wife given mutche to talkinge and he perswaded her to be lett bloode in the tongue and thereby made her to talke more mildlie And that he thought he should be faine to use the said Suzan soe . . . .” Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 223n89, citing Rogers c. Rogers, DL/ C 221, fo. 1193v. 183. Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 12. 184. Pamela Allen Brown, Better a Shrew Than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 65. 185. Phillips, Transforming Talk, 182. 186. Ibid., 156. 187. Feasting was a “ubiquitous feature of late medieval spiritual kinship. Indeed, by the fifteenth century, gossips had become synonymous with feasts in popular and penitential literature.” Phillips, Transforming Talk, 156. 188. Bernard Capp, “Gender and the Culture of the English Alehouse in Late Stuart England,” in The Trouble with Ribs: Women, Men and

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189. 190. 191.

192.

193. 194.

195.

196. 197.

198. 199. 200. 201. 202.

203. 204.

205. 206. 207. 208. 209.

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Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anu Korhonen and Kate Lowe (Helsinki: COLLeGIUM Studies Across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2007) vol. 2, 112 [103–127]. A. Lynn Martin, Alcohol, Sex, and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 68–78. Martin, Alcohol, Sex, and Gender, 77. Charlotte Augusta Sneyd, trans., A Relation, or Rather a True Account, of the Island of England (London: The Camden Society, 1847), 21, www.archive. org/stream/islandengland00camduoft/islandengland00camduoft_djvu. txt, accessed December 10, 2009. Patricia Fumerton, “Not Home: Alehouses, Ballads, and the Vagrant Husband in Early Modern England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32.3 (2002): 495 [493–518]. Capp, “Gender and the Culture of the English Alehouse,” 119. Mercie Locke of Easbourne v. Margaret Grevett of Easbourne (also referred to as Eastbourne), WRSO EpI/ 11/12, fos. 50v–54v, 59–61, & 72. Thomas Platter’s Travels in England, 1599, ed. and trans. Clare Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1937), 170. The (translated) text of Platter’s Travels in Clare Williams’s edition runs from pp. 145–232. Fumerton, “Not Home,” 495. Capp, “Gender and the Culture of the English Alehouse,” 120: “even a woman unaccompanied might enter an alehouse or tavern during the day without arousing suspicion or disapproval, provided she looked respectable, behaved quietly and did not linger.” Ibid., 105. Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighborhood in Early Modern England. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 49. Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination, 20. Capp, When Gossips Meet, 49. Mary Wack, “Women, Work, and Plays in an English Medieval Town,” in Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England, ed. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 42 [33–51]. Ibid. Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 125–26. Ibid.,123. Ibid., 122. Wack, “Women, Work, and Plays,” 38. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters, 125. John Skelton, The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng, Quartus Passus, http: //www.luminarium.org/editions/elynour.htm, accessed June 24, 2010.

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210. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 164. Cressy references ample evidence in diaries, account books, and literary and documentary sources about the secular and festive aspect of baptisms. “Festive drinking might begin as soon as the baby was born, with the gossips in the birthroom and the menfolk in the parlor. But it often reached its peak on the evening of the baptism” (164). “Lavish hospitality attended aristocratic baptisms, while humbler households celebrated in parlours, alehouses, or taverns” (164). Cressy adds, “Christening parties were notorious for their sexual banter” (165). 211. Janelle Jenstad, “ ‘Smock Secrets’: Birth and Women’s Mysteries on the Early Modern Stage,” in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England, ed. Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn Read McPherson (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007), 89 [87–99]. 212. Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 108–109. 213. Linda A. Pollock, “Childbearing and Female Bonding in Early Modern England,” Social History 22.3 (1997): 287 [286–306]. 214. Ibid. 215. Patricia Crawford, “The Construction and Experience of Maternity in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England. Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren, ed. Valerie Fildes (London: Routledge, 1990), 21, 27 [3–38], cited in Pollock, “Childbearing and Female Bonding,” 288. 216. Pollock, “Childbearing and Female Bonding,” 300. 217. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, 108–109. In note 172, MacDonald cites the Aussoppe source as the Bodleian Library, Oxford MS Ashmole 193, f. 67v. 218. Louise Morley, “Hidden Transcripts: The Micropolitics of Gender in Commonwealth Universities,” Women’s Studies International Forum 29.6 (2006): 543–51. See Synopsis: Abstract online,doi:10.1016/j. wsif.2006.10.007, accessed June 24, 2010. Using the framework of micropolitics in its analysis of women students’ and staffs’ experiences within the gendered structures of higher education, the essay examines how discriminating practices can occur through “informal networks, coalitions, and exclusions, as well as by formal arrangements in classrooms and boardrooms.” 219. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 84. 220. Phillips, Transforming Talk, 159–160. 221. Henry Parrot, The Gossips Greeting (London, 1620), sig. B3v. Cited in Caroline Bicks, Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003), 29–30. 222. Thomas of Reading, or Six Worthie Yeoman, Chapter 12, 6th ed. (London: printed by Eliz-allde for Robert Bird, 1632). 223. Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, Part I, no. 271, etext.lib. virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/PasLett.html, accessed December 15, 2009.

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224. Thomas Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, in Plays on Women, ed. Kathleen E. McLuskie and David Bevington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), Act 3.2., ll. 35–36. 225. Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Act 3.2., ll. 185–86. Puritan gossips would certainly have been keenly aware of the double meaning of key theological terms such as “zeal” and “fall.” 226. Jenstad, “ ‘Smock-secrets,’ ” 95. 227. Quoted in Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 1984), 55. Parker cites the 1977 edition of Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (London: Virago Press, 1977), 105. 228. Wack, “Women, Work, and Plays,” 40. 229. Ibid. 230. Ibid. 231. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 85. 232. Ibid. 233. Ibid. 234. Faith Gildenhuys, ed., The Bachelor’s Banquet (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1993), especially Chapter 3. 235. Adrian Wilson, “The Ceremony of Childbirth and its Interpretation” in Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England, 82 [68–107]. In note 81, Wilson cites as his source for the quote M. Roberts, “ ‘Words they are women, and deeds they are men’: images of work and gender in early modern England,” in Women and Work in Pre-industrial England, ed. L. Charles and L. Duffin (London, 1985), 154–155; Wilson, “The Ceremony of Childbirth,” 87, points out, “The effect of the lying-in month was to withdraw from the husband two of the customary fruits of marriage: his wife’s physical labour and her sexual services. From the woman’s point of view this made possible a period of rest and recovery.” “The wife’s bodily energies and sexuality now, for the space of ‘the month’, belonged to her; what marriage had taken away from her, the ceremony of childbirth temporarily restored.” 236. Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (1986; repr. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 3.

2

The “Imagined Woman”

1. Dante, Inferno, Canto V, ll. 118–20. “Ma dimmi: al tempo d’i dolci sospiri, / a che e come concedette amore/ che conosceste i dubbiosi disiri?” Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, ed. Tommaso Di Salvo (Bolgna: Zanichelli, 1985), 91, ll. 118–20. 2. Norman Klassen, Chaucer on Love, Knowledge and Sight (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1995), x. In thirteenth- and fourteenth-century natural philosophy, “confidence in the centrality of sight spill[s] over into philosophy as sight becomes strongly associated with varieties of knowledge.”

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3. Evident not merely in sermons, but ubiquitously in historical treatises, pastoral works, and pedagogical works. Carla Casagrande, “The Protected Woman,” trans. Clarissa Botsford, in A History of Women in the West, vol. II. Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 79–82 [70–104]. The source of this quotation continues to elude my search for it (but see Casagrande, “The Protected Woman,” 70–84). 4. Pierre J. Payer, The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), notes that some twelfthand thirteenth-century scholastic thinkers varied in their proposal of the three-fold division (virgin, widow, and married persons), namely that “the three states of chastity are (1) those who never have and who propose never to experience sex willingly (virgins); (2) those presently unmarried who have experienced sex willingly and who propose never more to experience it (‘widows’); (3) those who are married and who legitimately exercise their rights to sex” (161). Payer signals with quote marks that the category of widows could also include those who had not married but still engaged in intercourse (161–62). 5. What is interesting is that “it is not uncommon to find women following two or three bye industries,” (i.e., industries carried on in the home, usually dealing with textile or with the “production or sale of food and drink”) “whereas men as a rule confined themselves to a single craft.” Eileen Power, Medieval Women, ed. M. M. Postan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 62. See also Barbara A. Hanawalt, ed., Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); David Herlihy, Opera Muliebria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990); Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, ed., Single Women in the European Past, 1250–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire, ca. 1300–1520 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); and Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 6. Pilar Ballarín, Margarita M. Birriel, Cándida Martinez, and Teresa Ortíz, ed., Women in the European Union: Women in the History of Europe, Chapter 1.2: “Women’s Waged [Paid] Labour,” University of Granada, Spain. www.helsinki.fi/science/xantippa/wee/wee1.html, accessed August 14, 2007. But see Honeyman and Goodman, who note that by the 1500s “in Frankfort, Strasbourg, Nuremburg, Meningen, Stuttgart, and Munich, women were also excluded from a large number of crafts and, more generally, from the world of work. Male workers attempted to remove competition for jobs by singling out and removing women. Journeymen demanded restrictions on women’s work, even in instances where this worked against their own economic interests.” Katrina Honeyman and Jordan Goodman, “Women’s Work, Gender Conf lict, and Labour Markets in Europe, 1500– 1900,” The Economic History Review, n.s. 44.4 (1991): 612 [608–628].

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7. Other professions cited in the Paris archives were “gold and tin beaters and those who make shot silk, silk hatmakers, gold hatmakers, warpers, carders, etc. They also carried on other trades in competition with men, as for example, with white cloth dressmaking.” Ballarín, Birriel, Martinez, and Ortíz, Women in the European Union, Chapter 1.2. 8. Maryanne Kowaleski and Judith M. Bennett, “Crafts, Gilds, and Women in the Middle Ages: Fifty Years after Marian K. Dale,” in Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages, ed. Judith M. Bennett, Elizabeth A. Clark, Jean F. O’Barr, B. Anne Vilen, and Sarah Westphal-Wihl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 17 [11–25]. 9. Ibid., 15. 10. “The Imagined Woman” is Chiara Frugoni’s phrase. Chiara Frugoni, “The Imagined Woman,” in A History of Women in the West, vol. II, trans. Clarissa Botsford (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 336–422. As I use it, I mean a contrived image of woman ungrounded in social or personal experience. 11. Catherine Gallagher, “Marxism and the New Historicism,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 37, 41. 12. Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 15. 13. Thomas Fox, Sexuality and Catholicism (New York: George Braziller, 1995), 19. Wiesner-Hanks notes that “for New Testament roots of Christian ideas about sex, the letters of Paul and those attributed to Paul are far more important than the Gospels containing the words of Jesus” (22). However, as Wiesner-Hanks adds, “Like all early Christians, Paul expected Jesus to return to earth very soon, and so regarded sex as one of the earthly concerns that should not be important for Christians” (23). Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Christianity and Sexuality in The Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice (London: Routledge, 2000). Although, as Wiesner-Hanks notes, “Jesus seems to have said very little about sex,” (Christianity and Sexuality, 22), Paul Veyne and Michel Foucault argue that “well before the triumph of Christianity,” among the pagan Romans “there existed a ‘virile puritanism.’ . . . Christianity, through its interpretation of Genesis and original sin and the teachings of Saint Paul and the Church Fathers, provided . . . a conceptual framework for the new sexuality, complete with its own vocabulary, definitions, classifications, and distinctions.” Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 93. Le Goff ’s cites Veyne and Foucault, “L’amour et la sexualite,” L’Histoire 63 (1984): 52–59. 14. Fox, Sexuality and Catholicism, 18. 15. Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, 94. 16. Ibid., 93. There is something pointedly ironic about sexual morality becoming “a central Christian issue.” After all, “Jesus said remarkably little about sexual conduct, and sex was not a central issue in his moral teaching.” James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval

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17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

NOTES

Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 2. Indeed, the Gospels themselves “are very discreet on the subject of sexuality” (Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, 95). Even the apostle Paul, for the most part, affirmed sexuality and marriage. He “did not identify the f lesh with sinful sexual activity” (95). Yet, it is interesting to note how virginity itself becomes viewed both as menaced or menacing in Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie’s Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1999) and in Karen A. Winstead’s Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002). At the same time, despite the fact that other alternative discourses are excluded and suppressed, they nevertheless afford potential sites (women’s speech, certain myths, personal visions, etc.) where hegemonic practices can be contested. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 233. While a “return to evangelical purity, to the ideals of the Apostles,” was the proclaimed intention, in reality, an “innovation” was what the reformers had in mind, specifically “to regulate the lives of clerics as well as laymen” and “to improve the morals of the clergy by extending to secular priests the rule of celibacy incumbent on monks.” Jacques Dalarun, “The Clerical Gaze,” trans. Arthur Goldhammer, in A History of Women in the West, vol. II, 18 [15–42]. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 220. Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others (New York: Routledge, 2005), 43. Ibid. Ibid., 43–45. Ibid., 45. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 70, 245, 252, 401–04. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Including Women,” trans. Arthur Goldhammer, in A History of Women in the West, vol. II, 7 [1–10]. Margaret Hallissy, Clean Maids, True Wives, Steadfast Widows: Chaucer’s Women and Medieval Codes of Conduct (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 14. G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2nd rev. ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), 20, 375–404. Dalarun, “The Clerical Gaze,” 15–16. Klapisch-Zuber, “Including Women,” 7. See also Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture 13th–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 1. Dalarun, “The Clerical Gaze,” 16. Ibid.

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34. The way in which reality, so to speak (literally), is sheer linguistic construct is captured by Andre Brink’s insight about Don Quixote (Andre Brink, The Novel: Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino [New York: New York University Press, 1998]). Brink writes, “The main action of the opening situation is constituted by processes of naming, of [Quixote’s] horse, his lady, and himself ” (20). In each case, “the name is more than a mask for a paltry reality: what really happens is that in each case the name transforms what is into what may be” (21). 35. Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 39, described nonlinguistic signs whose lack of definite signifieds and instability leave them open to construction and conversion, constituting thereby a “f loating chain of signifieds.” 36. “Floating Signif iers,” http://legacy.lclark.edu/~soan370/glossary /referent.f loat.html, accessed August 14, 2009. 37. This episode is a separate event to be distinguished from the “Like a Prayer” autobiographical album. 38. Terry Mattingly, “The Church and Madonna’s Prayer Life” (1992), www.gospelcom.net/ tmattingly/tmatt/freelance/spotfire.htm, accessed August 14, 2009. 39. Mattingly, “The Church and Madonna’s Prayer Life.” 40. A prayer’s basis of love and faith, its centering vocabulary, and its disposition of humility seem to be missing. 41. The name, Madonna, is itself a classic example of the arbitrary and differential nature of the sign, as the refrain in Madonna’s song, “Like a Prayer” erotically/prayerfully asserts: “When you call my name it’s like a little prayer/ I’m down on my knees, I wanna take you there/ In the midnight hour I can feel your power/ Just like a prayer you know I’ll take you there.” 42. Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 119 [115–25]. 43. In contradistinction to the power of evil, Hollywood’s Vader is defeated, ultimately, by his own evil even though his last act was a salvific gesture toward good. 44. Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” 119. 45. Robert Goldman, Reading Ads Socially (London: Routledge, 1992), 68. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., emphasis mine. 48. Ibid. 49. Disneyland is hyperreal because it is “presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest [of our world] is real,” while, in fact it is as infantile, nonsensical, and raucous as Disneyland, just as “prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral.” Jean Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, 2nd ed. ed. Mark Poster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 174–75, specific quotes are on p. 175.

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50. Emily Farache, “Supreme Court Says ‘Cheers’ to Cliff and Norm,” E. Online News, October 2, 2000, 1, http://www.eonline.com/News /Items/0,1,7176,00.html, accessed August 16, 2007. 51. Frugoni, “The Imagined Woman,” 357. 52. Ibid., 358. 53. Ibid. 54. Alan Humm, “Lilith Pictures: with Adam and Eve,” jewishchristianlit. com/Topics/Lilith/aNePics.html, accessed June 28, 2010. 55. As to Jeffrey M. Hoffeld’s assertion that Lilith is the basis for the woman-headed serpent in Eden, who, in Pseudo-Ben Sirach, is described as Adam’s first wife, Henry Ansgar Kelly’s research agrees with J. K. Bonnell’s. Kelly writes, “Bonnell rightly dismisses Lilith as a possible inf luence upon the feminized Eden serpent, since there is no evidence that she was ever regarded as serpentine in form in the Middle Ages.” ( Jeffrey M. Hoffeld, “Adam’s Two Wives,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, n.s. 26.10 [1968]: 430–40.) Henry Ansgar Kelly, “Metamorphoses of the Eden Serpent During the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” Viator 2 (1971): 302 [301–332]. 56. Kelly is citing Bereshith Rabbah, 18.6 (147); italics Kelly’s. For a sketch of the Western iconographic and literary traditions of the non-Edenic and the Edenic serpent, see Kelly, “Metamorphoses of the Eden Serpent,” 303–13. 57. As in Adam & Eve (3rd century fresco in the Catacomb of St. Pietro and St. Marcellino, Rome), and also in the 1504 and 1507 illustrations by Albrecht Durer (see the “Garden of Eden Gallery” http://faculty.hope. edu/bandstra/rtot-cd3/rtot-cd/resources/ch1/CH1_EDEN.HTM, accessed 25 June 2010). 58. One of the unusual exceptions occurs in the Chester Plays, “The Creation,” at l. 294 where Eve refers to the snake as “she”: “This edder, lorde, shee was my foe.” www.umm.maine.edu/faculty/necastro/drama /chester/, accessed June 25, 2010. 59. Prasenjit Duara, “Response,” in Symposium on Prasenjit Duara’s Rescuing History from the Nation, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29.4 (1997): 2. 60. Both text and illustration of “Eva und Adam” by Lutwin appear in a mid-fifteenth century manuscript from the National Library of Vienna, Codex Vindobonensis 2980. 61. Nona C. Flores, “ ‘Effigies Amicitiae . . . Veritas Inimicitiae’: Antifeminism in the Iconography of the Woman-Headed Serpent in Medieval and Renaissance Art and Literature,” in Animals in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. Nona C. Flores (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996), 179 [167–95]. 62. A series of illustrations of the Temptation of Adam and Eve, spanning several centuries, can be found at online at textweek.com/art/garden _of_eden.htm, accessed August 14, 2009. The Hendrik Goltzius painting is available online at “The Ecole Initiative: Index of Images,” alphaom. tripod.com/tmp/imagesE.htm, accessed June 25, 2010.

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63. Frugoni, “The Imagined Woman,” 359, 359n33. Frugoni notes that a “cycle of miniatures like this might have been used for educational purposes, for psalms were used to teach children Latin and help them learn to construct phrases with which to comment on the miniatures themselves. The danger in the female sex was thus learned along with the rudiments of language” (359). 64. Kelly, “Metamorphoses of the Eden Serpent,” 319n88, emphasis mine. Kelly cites Bonaventure, In 2 Sent. 21.1.2 ad 2, Opera omnia 2 (Quaracchi 1885), 495. 65. Adrian Wilson and Joyce Lancaster Wilson, A Medieval Mirror: Speculum Humanae Salvationis, 1324–1500 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu, accessed August 16, 2007. 66. J. K. Bonnell, “The Serpent with a Human Head in Art and in Mystery Play,” American Journal of Archaeology, Second Series 21.3 (1917): 274 [255–91], fig. 7. 67. Flores, “ ‘Effigies Amicitiae . . . Veritas Inimicitiae,’ ” 179. 68. From Speculum Humanae Salvationis printed in 1473 by Günther Zainer, printed in Flores, “ ‘Effigies Amicitiae . . . Veritas Inimicitiae,’ ” 182, fig. 4. 69. Flores, “ ‘Effigies Amicitiae . . . Veritas Inimicitiae,’ ” 182, fig. 4. 70. Avril Henry, ed., The Mirour of Mans Saluacioun[e]: A Middle English Translation of Speculum Humanae Salvationis, a Critical Edition of the Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Illustrated from Der Spiegel der menschen Behältnis, Speyer: Drach, c.1475 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987). 71. Ibid., l. 343. 72. “Eve” at lines 327, 347, 351, 367; “woman/women” at lines 322, 331, 333, 342, 345, 349, 353, 359, 364, 366. 73. The modern English version of these lines is my translation of the Middle English. 74. “Faging” means “coaxing, beguiling.” In his edition of Richard St. Victor’s “A Treatise Named Benjamin,” Edmund G. Gardner, ed., The Cell of Self-Knowledge: Seven Early English Mystical Treatises Printed by Henry Pepwell in 1521 (New York: Duffield and Co., 1910), 27n1, notes that one of the copies (Harley MS 674) reads “glosing” for “faging.” 75. Henry, The Mirour of Mans Saluacioun[e]: A Middle English Translation of Speculum Humanae Salvationis. 76. My translation: “Through ill counsel outcast are we In bitter bale! Now may God never let [any] man after me Trust a woman’s tale! For surely it rues me full sore That ever I listened to your lore. Your counsel casts me now in care, As you well know!” The York Plays, ed. Beadle, http://name. umdl.umich.edu/York, accessed July 1, 2010. 77. The Towneley Plays, Play 28, Thomas of India, ll. 29–38 and 47–52, http: //name.umdl.umich.edu/Towneley, accessed December 2, 2010. All citations from The Towneley Plays are from the University of Michigan’s online Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.

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78. James Morton, ed. and trans., The Ancren Riwle: A Treatise on the Rules and Duties of Monastic Life (London: J. B. Nichols and Sons, Printers, 1853), 53. 79. “The Tempter . . . ” “to passion mov’d, Fluctuats disturbd, yet comely, and in act Rais’d, as of som great matter to begin. As when of old som Orator renound In Athens or free Rome, where Eloquence Flourishd, since mute, to som great cause addrest, Stood in himself collected, while each part, Motion, each act won audience ere the tongue, Somtimes in highth began.” (Book VIII, ll. 665, 667–75) John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; Renaissance Editions, 1997). See also Satan’s argument in which he defines God as the “forbidder” who, because he is envious, must not, therefore, be a real God. (Book VIII, l. 815), https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/767 /lost.pdf?sequence1, accessed July 2, 2010. 80. Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, v. 198 (Paris, 1844–1865), col. 1072. 81. Bonnell, “The Serpent with a Human Head,” 257n3. 82. Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952), 178. 83. The other two texts were the glossed Bible and Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Flores, “ ‘Effigies Amicitiae . . . Veritas Inimicitiae,’ ” 169. 84. As evident in Friedrich Stegmüller’s Repertorium Biblicum Medii Aevi, an alphabetical list of all commentaries on the Bible. Flores, “ ‘Effigies Amicitiae . . . Veritas Inimicitiae,’ ” 169. 85. Speculum Naturale, Lib. 20, chap. 33, vol. 1, col. 1478 in the Douai edition of 1624. I am citing Bonnell, “The Serpent with a Human Head,” 258. 86. This was “the guide most frequently consulted by Christians from most [of ] Europe for almost 400 years.” “Medieval Manuscript Facsimile” cited online at www.edilan.es/hojas/0000e.htm, accessed June 30, 2010. 87. William Langland, Piers Plowman (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), Passus 18, 153. 88. The Chester Cycle, Play II, The Drapers Playe. http://www.archive. org/stream/chesterplayscoll00wrig/chesterplayscoll00wrig_djvu.txt /, accessed June 25, 2010. 89. Frugoni, “The Imagined Woman,” 359. 90. Ibid. 91. Susan Mosher Stuard, ed., Women in Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976). See also, Michael M. Sheehan, Marriage, Family and Law in Medieval Europe: Collected Studies, ed. James K. Farge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); Jacqueline Murray, ed., Love, Marriage, and Family in the Middle Ages: A Reader (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2001), chaps. 2, 5.

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92. The Church’s motives were humane as well as spiritual: it “tried to forbid marriages forced upon the couple against their will, to reduce levels of consanguinity, and to sanction the indissolubility of the relationship. First and foremost, however, it tried to give the legal contract more dignity, accompanying it with special blessings . . . .” Frugoni, “The Imagined Woman,” 347. Despite the fact that “theological discussions of marriage emphasized that both parties had to consent to the union, a provision which served at least in theory to mitigate the absolute control that noble men exercised in negotiating marriages, the predominant theme was the subordination of women.” Sharon Farmer, “Clerical Images of Medieval Wives,” Speculum 61 (1986): 519 [517–43]. 93. At least two popes, Alexander III and Celestine III, tried to “tread an equitable path through conf licting claims and interests” in disputes concerning the legitimacy of certain marriages–disputes often complicated by collusion or genuine ignorance or dual ecclesiastical and secular jurisdiction concerning inheritance through the marriage. Charles Duggan, “Equity and Compassion in Papal Marriage Decretals to England,” in Love and Marriage in the Twelfth Century, ed. Willy Van Hoeck and Andries Welkenhuysen (Leuven/Louvain, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 1981), 72 [59–87]. Both popes explicitly attached importance “to marital affection, to mutual responsibilities, to care for children, to a fair solution if alienation arises, to the eradication of abuse, and at least to discretion in potentially scandalous situations.” (72). 94. Frugoni, “The Imagined Woman,” 340. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid., 340–41; fig. 5, 343. 97. Ibid., 341. 98. Ibid., 344, fig. 6. 99. Aristotle’s various writings dominated the curriculum in the universities, according to Prudence Allen, and his concept of gender formation fairly much shaped the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century attitudes on gender behavior. Prudence Allen, R. S. M., The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution 750 BC -AD 1250 (Montreal, Quebec: Eden Press, 1985), 441–44. Thomas Laqueur points out that Aristotle’s Masterpiece or the Secrets of Generation Displayed, “loosely based on the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata,” “was continuously reprinted from the middle of the fifteenth century to the 1930’s, if not to the present.” Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 246n6. 100. Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, “Introduction: Accounting for Sexual Meanings,” in Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality, ed. Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 20 [1–27], emphasis mine. 101. Ortner and Whitehead, “Introduction,” 20.

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102. Ortner and Whitehead cite Raymond Kelly’s (unpublished) study of the Sepik area of Papua New Guinea where male prestige is achieved through activities such as hunting and warfare, activities organized independently of women and of relations with women (Ortner and Whitehead, “Introduction,” 20). There, “relatively little elaboration of beliefs about female pollution” is developed (20). On the other hand, in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, male prestige is directly connected with female productive labor, namely women raising the pigs that “men need for their prestige-generating exchange relations” (20). This female activity is regarded by the men as having the “capacity to undermine their husbands’ ambitions” (20). Thus, there, “beliefs about female pollution tend to f lourish, as do male cults that both defend men against such pollution and ritually assert male self sufficiency” (20). An interesting corollary of Kelly’s argument appears to be that, in New Guinea, the separation “between sources of male prestige on the one hand and male-female relations on the other, allows for the development of independent female social groupings and/or independent sources of female prestige” (20). The same is true concerning Samoan women (21). 103. Ortner and Whitehead, “Introduction,” 20. 104. Ortner and Whitehead, “Introduction,” 24, summarizing the theses of both Stanley Brandes, “Like Wounded Stags: Male Sexual Ideology in an Andalusian Town,” in Sexual Meanings, 216–39, and Leslee Nadelson, “Pigs, Women, and the Men’s House in Amazonia: An Analysis of Six Mundurucú Myths,” in Sexual Meanings, 240–72. 105. Ortner and Whitehead, “Introduction,” 24. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid., 25, emphasis mine. 109. Sara Maitland, A Big-Enough God (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1995), 2.

3

Women, Conversation, Crime, and the Courts

1. J. A. Sharpe notes that “Up to about 1500, slander had been the concern of the ecclesiastical courts, or of local tribunals. From that date the common law courts began to interest themselves” in defamations “and rapidly developed a wide cognizance in this area.” J. A. Sharpe, “ ‘Such Disagreement betwyx Neighbours’: Litigation and Human Relations in Early Modern England,” in Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 170 [167–87]. 2. Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3. 3. Helen Ostovich and Elizabeth Sauer, ed., Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscript and Print, 1550–1700 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 16.

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4. What is true of Stephen Robertson’s assessment of witnesses in nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries North America was not so far removed from the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. “Many of those involved in legal proceedings were forced to participate and did so under the threat of punishment. All who testified might have had reasons to lie: to establish innocence or guilt, to pursue animosities or protect friendships, to please the powerful or thwart them.” Stephen Robertson, “What’s Law Got to Do with It? Legal Records and Sexual Histories,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14.1/2 (2005): 162 [161–85]. Stephen Robertson is summarizing Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, “Introduction: The Crime of History,” in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, ed., History from Crime (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), ix. 5. Origins Network, London Consistory Court Depositions, http://www. origins.net/help/popup-aboutbo-lccd2.htm, accessed July 1, 2010. 6. Sara Heller Mendelson, “ ‘To shift for a cloak,’ Disorderly Women in the Church Courts,” in Women and History: Voices from Early Modern England, Valerie Frith, ed. (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1995), 5. 7. Ibid. 8. Herbert H. Clark and Richard J. Gerrig, “Quotations as Demonstrations,” Language 66.4 (1990): 764–805, esp. 792, 800, conclude that even though direct speech as represented in writing need not mimic the original utterance in every aspect, it is “conventionally implied” that the wording is verbatim in texts such as law court records (792). 9. Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 239. 10. Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex, and Marriage (London: Longman, 1999), 207. 11. Ibid. 12. Cheshire Record Office, Quarter Sessions Records, Quarter Sessions Files 56/2/37 article 5. (CRO, Q JF 56/2/37 art. 5). 13. Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighborhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 276. 14. Steve Hindle, “The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley: Gossip, Gender and the Experience of Authority in Early Modern England,” Continuity and Change 9.3 (1994): 404 [391–419], notes that “the Nantwich magistrates had contacted Jerome’s previous employers in Newcastle, and taken certificate of his conduct. The Newcastle authorities informed them that Jerome had been discharged of his post at St. Nicholas’ for behaviour ‘so notoriously scandalous both to the church and to us by whom he was entertained as we cannot with any due respect continue him in that place unless we should heape much reproach on ourselves.’ ” 15. Petition of Margaret Knowsley to the Justices of Chester, at the Cheshire Quarter Sessions, ca. June 1627. CRO, Q JF 56/2/35. 16. Hindle, “The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley,” 396. 17. Petition of Margaret Knowsley, CRO, Q JF 56/2/35.

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18. CRO, Q JF 56/2/37, art. 1. 19. Hindle reads this name as Mrs Mary Cordy. “The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley,” 415n41. 20. A practice intended to relieve women who had miscarried or who had stillbirths. 21. CRO, Q JF 56/2/37, art 3 & 9. 22. Hindle, “The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley,” 407. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 401, 416n60. 25. Ibid., 401 and 416n61. Jana Pisani, “ ‘He Must Be Despised’: Hostility to Ministers in Early Modern Cambridgeshire,” World History Review (Fall 2003): 69 [62–84]: “These penances were often highly public, such as that for adulterers, which in the diocese of Ely as well as other areas of England required the sinner to kneel before the congregation to confess his or her misdeeds while wearing a white sheet.” 26. Amy Froide, review of “Nothing is so secret but shall be revealed: The scandalous life of Robert Foulkes,” by David Turner, in English Masculinities, 1660–1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen (London: Longman, 1999), 169–92 appears in H-Net Book Reviews for H-Albion, May 2000, h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=12048959965234, accessed June 5, 2009. 27. Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 106. 28. Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),226. 29. Kathleen McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989), 225. 30. Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 40. 31. Capp, When Gossips Meet, 269. 32. Mendelson, “ ‘To shift for a cloak,’ ” 15, citing Devon Record Office MS Chanter 866, Diocese of Exeter Depositions 1634–1640. 33. Grand larceny was considered “theft of goods valued at over a shilling (12 pence) . . . a felony or capital crime in common law.” Mendelson, “ ‘To shift for a cloak,’ ” 9. 34. See John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Household Government, for the Ordering of Private Families, according to the Direction of God’s Word (London, 1630); and Richard Braithwaite, The English gentleman and English gentlewoman, 3rd ed. (London, 1641). 35. Mendelson, “ ‘To shift for a cloak,’ ” 8. 36. Ibid., 9. 37. Ibid., 3. The Statute of Artificers of 1563 was intended to “determine wage rates at the local level, to control conditions of employment for many workers including apprentices, and to restrict the mobility of labour.” Donald Woodward, “The Background to the Statute of Artificers: The Genesis of Labour Policy, 1558–1563,” The Economic History Review, n.s. 33.1 (1980): 32 [32–44].

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38. Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720 (New York: Routledge, 1993), 48. In Chapter 2, note 51, Crawford points out that there were “numerous cases in the Mayor’s court book in Norwich.” 39. David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 37n104. 40. The entire passage is printed in Mendelson, “ ‘To shift for a cloak,’ ” 15–16, citing DRO, MS Chanter 866. 41. March 25 in the Julian calendar was the calendar year’s New Year’s Day until 1752. 42. Mendelson, “ ‘To shift for a cloak,’ ” 9. 43. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 230. Ingram’s studies lead him to ask “just how firmly engaged were such couples” who were court defendants accused of sexual relations before marriage. He notes that while “as many as 70 percent of cases in the court of the archdeacon of Salisbury in the year 1627–1629” alleged prior intention to marry, such allegations were rarely made by defendants in Wiltshire (229). Informal promises seem to coexist with the (declining) practice of “formal spousals” (229). 44. Ibid., 230. 45. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 4. 46. Sarah Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 215. 47. I have everywhere expanded the abbreviation for “and.” 48. Anne Younge als Lingham c. James Younge (1608), Consistory Court of London Deposition Book, LMA, DL/C 218, 50–51, transcription mine. (Also cited in Crawford and Gowing, ed., Women’s Worlds in SeventeenthCentury England, 173). 49. Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 208–09. 50. Indeed, neighbors’ (or friends’ or kin’s) testimony was crucial to any married woman’s need for litigation: “since neither husband nor wife could testify against each other in court, a wife could not complain against certain actions of her husband” (Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 38). Except for ecclesiastical or church courts, married women did not have the right to litigate in their own names. See Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 11. And “common law allowed women very limited legal capacities.” See Subha Mukherji, “Women, Law, and Dramatic Realism in Early Modern England,” English Literary Renaissance 35.2 (2005): 251 [248–72]. 51. Michael J. Braddick and John Walter, “Introduction. Grids of Power: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Early Modern Society,” in Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy, and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, ed. Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 5 [1–42]. The discussion in Braddick and Walter concerns Scott’s distinction between a “public transcript”

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52.

53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

NOTES

and a “hidden transcript,” namely, that “behind the public transcript of compliance and deference lies a more knowing and manipulative consciousness” (5). Braddick and Walter, “Introduction. Grids of Power,” 5. Braddick and Walter’s language references James C. Scott’s point that the relatively weak did not simply accept the dominant discourse that served to make authority by elite groups appear natural, but, rather, engaged in tactics that constitute a “hidden transcript” beneath a “public transcript.” See Braddick and Walter, “Introduction,” 5–12 and note 8. LMA, DL/C 218, p. 51. I hesitate to differ from Laura Gowing’s identifying this “jurate,” as a “friend” (Domestic Dangers, 213) as distinct from her earlier naming Margaret Bonefant (209) as the narrator and deponent of the piece. My choice of Bonefant as both “jurate” and “deponent” is based on the deposition of Joan Brown against Thomas Hellyer in which Joan Brown within the same deposition refers to herself as both “jurate” and “this deponent.” Crawford and Gowing, Women’s Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England, 159–61, 161. LMA, DL/C 218, p. 51. LMA, DL/C 218, p. 51. “Ay” is written in the manuscript as “I.” LMA, DL/C 218, p. 51 (for both quotes). Crawford and Gowing, Women’s Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England, 174, read “sad want” where I see “such want.” LMA, DL/C 218, pp. 51–52. LMA, DL/C 218, p. 88. Bonefant sets the scene as early in her deposition as possible: it is a response to the 2nd and 3rd articles of the deposition. The first article usually establishes one’s credibility and relationship to the litigants. Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 237. Ibid. Younge c. Younge (1608), LMA, DL/ C 218, p. 89. Younge c. Younge (1608) LMA, DL/ C 218, p. 89. I read “knife” as “knief,” comparing it to “quiet” on the same page, p. 89. Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 238. Ibid., 217. Ann Dighton als Hardy c. Thomas Dighton (1608), London Metropolitan Archives: Consistory Court of London Deposition Books, 1572–1640, DL/ C218, p. 16. Dighton c. Dighton (1608), LMA, DL/ C218, p. 16. Ibid., 109. Ibid. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 16–19, 109–112. Dighton als Hardy c. Dighton, DL/ C 218, pp. 17–19. Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 141. Ibid., 140.

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75. Ibid., 140 and 140n122. 76. And reminds one of the fact that two centuries later in nineteenthcentury America, the extreme action of wife murder was still perceived as “a defense of the core tenets of patriarchy—sexual control, access, and regulation of women’s sexuality.” Sean T. Moore, “ ‘Justifiable Provocation’: Violence against Women in Essex County, New York, 1799–1860,” Journal of Social History 35.4 (2002): 896 [889–918]. 77. “At court, men measured their own violence with care, emphasizing its rationality in response to women’s ‘provocation’, ‘misbehaviour’, or ‘misuse’.” Gowing Domestic Dangers, 219. 78. Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, 141. 79. Susan Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), Chapter 2. In pre-1660 Norfolk, male heads of households could be, and often were, punished in the courts for not maintaining obedience and sexual continence among their household. Yet, the level of violence considered acceptable was challenged by neighbors and communities who intervened in what they viewed as excessive “disciplining.” 80. Dighton c. Dighton, LMA, DL/ C 218, p. 19. 81. Ibid., 18. 82. Ibid., 17. 83. Capp, When Gossips Meet, 115–16; quote on p. 116. 84. Wives were keenly aware of the social repercussions of suing for separation. Capp echoes their concerns: “How would they live while the case was pending, and where? Who would protect them from his vengeance?” Moreover, in separations secured through church courts, remarriage was not permitted to either party. Capp, When Gossips Meet, 116. 85. Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 238. 86. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage, 181. 87. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage, 181–82: “In the archdeaconry of Chichester, in twelve sample years between 1580 and 1640, there were in all only three separation causes . . . . In the diocese of Ely in the 1580s, there were one or two separation or restitution cases each year,” and in Wiltshire in the 39 year period between 1601 and 1640, there were a total of nine separation cases. 88. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage, 183. 89. The Plea and Answeare of Sir William Windsor Knight One of the Defendants to the Bill of Complaynte of Robert Collins Complainant (1622). The National Archives, London (formerly Public Record Office) STAC (The Star Chamber) 8/88/9. The complaint by Collins and the “plea and answeare” by William Windsor and by Lady Elizabeth Vaux are all taken from the Star Chamber documents, The National Archives, London (formerly Public Record Office) STAC 8/88/9. 90. Ibid.

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91. The Bill of Complaint of Robert Collins Complainant Against Wm. Windsor, Lady Vaux, et alia (1622). STAC 8/88/9. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid. 94. The Plea and Answeare of Sir William Windsor Knight to Robert Collins Complainant (1622). STAC 8/88/9. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid. 102. Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, 40. 103. Ibid., 270. 104. Ibid., 271. 105. Ibid., 270–71. 106. Ibid., 271. 107. The Bill of Complaint of Robert Collins Complainant Against Wm. Windsor, Lady Vaux, et alia (1622). STAC 8/88/9. 108. Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, 41. 109. The Bill of Complaint of Robert Collins Complainant Against Wm. Windsor, Lady Vaux, et alia (1622). STAC 8/88/9. 110. This was the period when challenges to James I’s claim to the divine right of kings led to the counter-assertion that the king was under the law and not above it; this implied equity before the law. 111. The severall Plea and Answeare of the Lady Elizabeth Vaux One of the Defendents to the Bill of Complaint of Robert Collins Complainant (1622). STAC 8/88/9. 112. The severall Plea and Answeare of the Lady Elizabeth Vaux to Robert Collins Complainant (1622). STAC 8/88/9. “dare” meant “defy,” “challenge,” even “scare,” “terrify,” as in “For our approach shall so much dare the field,/ That England shall couch down in fear, and yield” (Henry 5, iv, 2) or “Let his grace go forward,/ And dare us with his cap like larks” (Henry 8, iii, 2). Swynfen Jervis, A Dictionary of the Language of Shakespeare (London: John Russell Smith, 1868). 113. The severall Plea and Answeare of the Lady Elizabeth Vaux to Robert Collins Complainant (1622). STAC 8/88/9. 114. Ibid. 115. The Bill of Complaint of Robert Collins Complainant Against Wm. Windsor, Lady Vaux, et alia (1622). STAC 8/88/9. 116. The Plea and Answeare of Sir William Windsor Knight to Robert Collins Complainant (1622). STAC 8/88/9. 117. The severall Plea and Answeare of the Lady Elizabeth Vaux to Robert Collins Complainant (1622). STAC 8/88/9.

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118. Ibid. The inserted correction in the manuscript has been occasionally read as “spit and tongs” but I read it as “spit and prongs.” Prongs were a type of spit whose middle section resembled a trident. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid. 121. Richard Watts, Politeness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 168. 122. Bruce Fraser, “Perspectives on Politeness,” Journal of Pragmatics 14.2 (1990): 219–36. 123. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges,” Social Science Information 16.6 (1977): 662 [645–68]. 124. The same is true of language patterns advised for Merchants Groups that Magnusson examines in John Browne’s The Marchants Advizo, a business writing manual (1590) that went through three editions by 1640. Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 62, 122–23. 125. Ibid., 1. 126. Ibid., 32. 127. Ibid., 33. 128. Ibid., 32. In Henry VIII, 2.4, ll. 141–149, we read: Most gracious sir, In humblest manner I require your highness That it shall please you to declare in hearing Of all these ears—for where I am robbed and bound, There must I be unloosed, although not there At once and fully satisfied—whether ever I Did broach this business to your highness; or Laid any scruple in your way which might Induce you to the question on’t? 129. Ibid., 33. 130. Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 131. After Wybarn’s death, Elizabeth inherited his brother Edward’s lands and goods as well as those of Edward’s son; both had been accused of recusancy. In early 1612, she married Ambrose Vaux. However, Wybarn’s lawyer, Dudly Norton, convinced her to turn her inheritance over to him, preventing Ambrose from going through her inheritance. Norton however may have himself fraudulently misused her inheritance. Norton had told Elizabeth that her inheritance was necessary to pay her husband, Wybarn’s, debts. But Wyborne/ Wybarn, in his will assumes that he will leave his wife a good sum, because he speaks of leaving a “liberal” provision for his “wellbeloved wife.” Norton, being Wybarn’s lawyer, had to know that Wybarn had no great debts.

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NOTES

132. Mary Blackstone, “The Star Chamber Deposition of Lady Elizabeth Vaux,” in Reading Early Modern Women, 35–39. The Court of Star Chamber documents are PRO STAC 8/289/3 Ambrose Vaux vs. Sir Richard Blunt, Edward Wybarne, Dudly Norton, Joseph Mules. 133. The phrase is lifted from Laura Gowing’s study of London women’s court cases. In its extended form the phrase reads “to claim a verbal and legal authority that was at once powerful and fragile.” Laura Gowing, “Language, Power, and the Law: Women’s Slander Litigation in Early Modern London,” in Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England, ed. Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 28 [26–47]. 134. James Sharpe, “The People and the Law,” in Popular Culture in SeventeenthCentury England, ed. Barry Reay (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 246 [244–70]. 135. Nowhere was it “more true than in early modern England” that law was internalized and part of a culture. Sharpe, “The People and the Law,” 246. 136. Ibid., 247. 137. Ibid., 246. 138. Craig Muldrew, “The Culture of Reconciliation: Community and the Settlement of Economic Disputes in Early Modern England,” The Historical Journal 39.4 (1996): 915–16 [915–42], emphasis mine. 139. Ibid., 916. 140. Ibid., 919. 141. J. A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History, 1550–1760, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 95. 142. The “expansion of credit in Tudor and Stuart England depended on strategies for judging character and for gauging interpersonal trust based on words and actions, strategies aimed at limiting the natural uncertainties about judging the character of others.” Aaron Kitch, “The Character of Credit and the Problem of Belief in Middleton’s City Comedies,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 47.2 (2007): 407 [403–426]. 143. Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, 10, cites Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998). 144. Sharpe, Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England, 3. 145. Sharpe, Early Modern England, 95.

4

The Assembly of Ladies: Rebelling in Eden

1. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 264. 2. Ibid., 249. His objection is that genius will never be fulfilled if it offers material unworthy of its chosen form (here, the allegory). He judged the author’s treatment of the allegorical genre to be inconsistent and almost incidental to the subject matter.

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3. Walter W. Skeat proposed the Countess of Oxford, Margaret Neville, based partly on his view regarding the female narrative persona. Walter W. Skeat, “The Authoress of ‘The Flower and the Leaf,’ ” The Athenaeum, March 14, 1903, 340. Skeat references his earlier argument in the Modern Language Quarterly, ii (1898–99): 111. Ruth Marie Fisher likewise thought that the author was a woman associated with the court of the Duke of Suffolk. Ruth Marie Fisher, “The Flower and the Leaf and The Assembly of Ladies: A Study of Two Love-Vision Poems of the Fifteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1955), cited in Simone Celine Marshall, The Female Voice in The Assembly of Ladies: Text and Context in FifteenthCentury England (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 2. Ethel Seaton felt that Sir Richard Roos was a possible candidate. Ethel Seaton, Sir Richard Roos: Lancastrian Poet (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961), 296. G. L. Marsh proposed John Lydgate. G. L. Marsh, “The Authorship of ‘The Flower and the Leaf ’ ” JEGP 6.3 (1906–1907): 375 [373–94]. In 1987, Alexandra A. T. Barratt examined the assumptions and cultural biases that framed so much of the earlier scholarship on the authorship of the poem. While not explicitly promoting a female author for this work, her arguments removed the barriers that had long hampered theories favoring the possibility of a female author. Alexandra A. T. Barratt, “ ‘The Flower and the Leaf ’ and ‘The Assembly of Ladies’: Is There a (Sexual) Difference?” Philological Quarterly 66.1 (1987): 2 [1–24]. Still, in 1988, Judith M. Davidoff, remaining neutral throughout an intriguing essay, ends by hypothesizing the ironic device of a male author using a female persona. The several skillful manipulations going on in the poem, she concludes, “would be an example of what an especially talented poet could do with structural patterns to which he felt confident his audience would respond.” Judith M. Davidoff, Beginning Well: Framing Fictions in Late Middle English Poetry (London: Associated University Presses, 1988), 158–59. Subsequent scholarship seems to have moved toward favoring female authorship. Colleen Donnelly thought that both The Assembly of Ladies and The Flour and the Leafe “may have been written by aristocratic women who, normally denied access to a superior education, learned to read and write and may have read or heard romances, lyrics, and dream visions.” Colleen Donnelly, “ ‘Withoute Wordes’: The Medieval Lady Dreams in The Assembly of Ladies,” Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 15 (1994): 36 [35–55]. So, too, does Marshall, The Female Voice in The Assembly of Ladies. 4. All citations from The Assembly of Ladies are from The Floure and the Leafe; The Assembly of Ladies; The Isle of Ladies, ed. Derek Pearsall, TEAMS Middle English Text Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1990). Also available at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams /assemfrm.htm, accessed August 6, 2009. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. The narrator further tells the knight that she titled the book, L’Assemble de Dames. One could hardly ask for a more specific example of authorial self-reference.

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NOTES

5. Cambridge Trinity College Library MS R. 3.19, 55r-65v; British Library MS Additional 34360, fols. 37a-49a; and Longleat House MS 258, fols. 58a-75b. 6. Jane Chance, introduction to The Assembly of Gods: Le Assemble de Dyeus, or Banquet of Gods and Goddesses, with the Discourse of Reason and Sensuality, ed. Jane Chance, TEAMS Middle English Text Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999), par. 9, http://www.lib.rochester. edu/camelot/teams/chance.htm, accessed August 6, 2009. 7. To borrow from Ashby Kinch, “ ‘To thenke what was in hir wille’: A Female Reading Context for the Findern Anthology,” Neophilologus 91.4 (2007): 729–44, foremost among the manuscript’s major themes are the power of female eloquence (as demonstrated in Gower’s story of Peronelle and Richard Roos’s translation of Alain Chartier’s La Belle Dame Sans Mercy) and the tension between female choice and social compulsion (as demonstrated in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls and Gower’s story of Rosiphelee). 8. The manuscript is Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.1.6, the so-called Findern Anthology. “The names of five women appear in the manuscript, two as scribal signatures, following lengthy stints of copying, and three in the margins of various texts.” Nicola F. McDonald, “Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, Ladies at Court and the Female Reader,” The Chaucer Review 35.1 (2000): 36 [22–42]. 9. Sarah McNamer, “Female Authors, Provincial Setting: The Re-Versing of Courtly Love in the Findern Manuscript,” Viator 22 (1991): 282 [279–310]. 10. Marshall, The Female Voice, 5, should be credited with this observation. She pointed out that when Chaucer as a character refers to himself in the General Prologue it was considered a legitimate means of determining authorship; the same, she adds, was true of the character of Will in Piers Plowman. The character of Will was accepted as a fictional persona of William Langland. 11. “It fails to satisfy the rime tests over and over again. In fact, some of the rimes can only be described as bad.” Walter W. Skeat, The Chaucer Canon: With a Discussion of the Works Associated with the Name of Geoffrey Chaucer (New York: Haskell House, 1965), 110. D. A. Pearsall refers to a large section of the poem as “a low ebb in fifteenth-century verse.” D. A. Pearsall, ed., notes to The Floure and the Leafe and The Assembly of Ladies (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1962), 167. A. C. Spearing groups the poem with those whose use of the “dream framework . . . is no more than a literary convention, taken over through sheer inertia on the poet’s part.” A. C. Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 4. For H. S. Bennett, the poem has many enlivening touches, but, as to its attempts at dream and allegory, “[t]he machinery has creaked and groaned to no purpose.” H. S. Bennett, Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Verse and Prose (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 135. The poem, he concludes, “cannot be considered a success”

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NOTES

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

187

and “is not redeemed by any poetic vision of life, or by any mastery of technique” (136). Poem #18 in Brian Stone, trans., Medieval English Verse (New York: Penguin Classics, 1964), 44, ll. 3–4. Poem #84 in Stone, Medieval English Verse, 200, ll. 1–2, 31–33. Howard Marchitello, “Garden Frisson,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33.1 (2003): 149 [143–77]. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 2002), 19, 48 . Carol M. Meale, “Women’s Voices and Roles,” in A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c. 1350–c. 1500, ed. Peter Brown (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 79 [74–90]. Although she credits the poem with greater depth and feminist aims than previous scholars had, Ann McMillan finds the “poem’s structure is uneven, its ending inconclusive.” Ann McMillan, “ ‘Fayre Sisters Al’: The Flower and the Leaf and The Assembly of Ladies,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 1.1 (1982): 33 [27–42]. For example, The Parliament of Fowles, House of Fame, The Book of the Duchess, The Legend of Good Women, De Planctu de Naturae. On the garden as metaphor of the church, see Stanley Stewart, The Enclosed Garden: The Tradition and the Image in 17th-Century Poetry (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 54. Also, Paul Meyvaert, “The Medieval Monastic Garden,” in Medieval Gardens, ed. Elisabeth B. MacDougall (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1986), 51, writes that “the earthly paradise of Eden was seen as an image of the Church, in which the redeemed had access to Christ, the Tree of Life.” The garden also served as a figure of the mind; see St. Teresa and St. John. See also George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Andrew Marvell in Stewart, The Enclosed Garden, especially Chapters 3 and 5. J. T. Rhodes and Clifford Davidson: “The beginning and end of time were marked by the garden.” J. T. Rhodes and Clifford Davidson, “The Garden of Paradise,” in The Iconography of Heaven, ed. Clifford Davidson. Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph Series 21 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994), 95 [69–103]. John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 54. Matthew Johnson, Behind the Castle Gate: From Medieval to Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 2002), 45. Citing Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987); and John Barrell, “The Public Prospect and the Private View: The Politics of Taste in EighteenthCentury Britain,” in Reading Landscape: Country-City-Capital, ed. Simon Pugh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 19–40, Johnson sees a similarity in English eighteenth- and fourteenth-century attitudes toward gardens.

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21. Sara M. Wages, “Remarks on Love, Woman and the Garden in Netherlandish Art: A Study on the Iconology of the Garden,” in Rembrandt, Rubens, and The Art of Their Time, ed. Roland E. Fleischer and Susan C. Scott (University Park: Penn State Press, 1997), 192 [177–224]. 22. Derek Pearsall, “Gardens as Symbol and Setting in Late Medieval Poetry,” in Medieval Gardens, ed. Elisabeth B. MacDougall (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1986), 239. 23. Poem #93, “Hortum habet insula virgo virginalem,” in The Love Songs of the Carmina Burana, trans. E. D. Blodgett and Roy Arthur Swanson (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1987), 106. 24. Reginald Thorne Davies, ed., Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1972), 158, 246, 262. 25. William Dunbar, The Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, ed. Eve Salisbury, originally published The Trials and Joys of Marriage, TEAMS Middle English Text Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002), www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/tmfrm.htm, accessed August 6, 2009. 26. I use the concept of “deterritorialization” less in the Deleuze and Guattari sense and more in the sense that Caren Kaplan uses it. She claims that “We must leave home, as it were, since our homes are often sites of racism, sexism, and other damaging social practices.” Reterritorialization is, it seems, what Michelle Cliff describes as “finding a social space to inhabit that will not deny any of the complicated parts of [one’s] identity and history.” Caren Kaplan, “Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse,” Cultural Critique 6, The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (1987): 194, 195 [187–98]. Michelle Cliff, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1980), cited by Kaplan, page numbers not given. 27. In Literature of Courtly Love: Introduction, originally published in The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Selection, TEAMS Middle English Text Series, ed. Kathleen Forni (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005), par. 1, www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/forcrtlvint.htm, accessed July 16, 2010, Kathleen Forni notes that in editions of Chaucer’s works as late as the sixteenth century, “most of the poems that accompanied” those works, “deal in some fashion with what is broadly categorized as fin amours or courtly love.” She continues: “The aristocratic amatory idiom is today considered one of the most inf luential and enduring literary legacies of the Middle Ages” and the evidence of certain texts “dominated by amorous subjects, suggest that the theory and practice of fin amours was a fetishized obsession among fourteenth- and fifteenth-century social elites.” “John Stevens,” she notes, “suggests that from the late fourteenth until the sixteenth century,” courtly love was a ‘game of love,’ that included “reading and talking about love, and acting, playing, and emulating the lover, [and] provided a primary form of polite recreation for ‘social play’ and ‘social display.’ ” According to Anna Dronzek, courtesy books of the period assumed that one’s external

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NOTES

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

189

behavior (i.e., etiquette) was considered an indicator of that person’s morality or goodness. Anna Dronzek, “Gendered Theories of Education in Fifteenth-Century Conduct Books,” in Medieval Conduct, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark. Medieval Cultures 29 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 137, 153n8 [135–59]. Andries van den Abeele, “Gardens and Secret Places in Bruges,” par. 7, http://users.skynet.be/sb176943/AndriesVandenAbeele/gardens.htm, accessed August 8, 2009. Davidoff, Beginning Well, 146. Davidoff argues that garden’s maze is paralleled in the dream portion of the poem “where comings and goings seem every bit as chaotic and frustrating as wandering in a maze” (149). Mazes of this sort exist in this period but are not common (the Internet lists several such mazes in later London). See Davidoff about mazes as unique in dream vision poetry. Davidoff, Beginning Well, 214nn30, 34. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924; repr. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1999), 99. Larry D. Benson, “Courtly Love and Chivalry in the Later Middle Ages,” in Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays, ed. Robert F. Yeager (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984), 240 [237–57]. Ibid., 241. According to Kathleen Forni, Richard Firth Green “acknowledges that for aristocrats, gentry, and the merchant class, the fiction of courtly love offered a system of etiquette, polite behavior, and good breeding.” Forni, Literature of Courtly Love: Introduction, par. 1. Green argues that “since the capacity to experience exalted human love was, by definition in the middle ages, restricted entirely to the well-born, it followed that one way in which a man might display his gentility was to suggest that he was in love.” Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 114. Davidoff, Beginning Well, 213–14n30. John Stephens, “The Questioning of Love in the Assembly of Ladies,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 24.94 (1973): 134 [129–40]. Stephens acknowledges the image’s “continued semantic association” within lines 32–38, developing the notion of “maze” as “bewilderment,” and the verb mazen (and its metaphorical implications), but he dismisses the possibility of the poet’s borrowing heavily moralized meanings as represented in classical works such as Ovide Moralisé and Boccaccio’s De Genealogie Deorum Gentilium. Ibid., 132. McMillan, “ ‘Fayre Sisters Al,’ ” 38. Meale, “Women’s Voices and Roles,” 79. Rachel Sullivan, “Guide to Mazes in New South Wales: Lost in the Labyrinth,” The Sydney Morning Herald, May 30, 2009. http://www.smh. com.au/travel/lost-in-the-labyrinth-20090527-bn9d.html, accessed August 8, 2009.

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NOTES

41. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 8:169–71. 42. Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 49. 43. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 253–65. 44. Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 12–14 [1–42]. 45. Dani Cavallaro, Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson (London: The Athlone Press, 2000), 212. 46. Green, Poets and Princepleasers, 114, 115. 47. Jeffrey T. Nealon, Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 23. 48. The tradition of the grievance court of love is described by Andreas the Chaplain in De Amore, Bk. II, chap. VII, where judgments concerning complaintes d’amour and questions d’amour are passed down by Queen Eleanor, as well as countesses (e.g., Lady Ermengarde of Narbonne, Countess de Champagne and the Countess of Flanders) and where the assemblies of counselors to the Queen or Countess were all-female courts. P. G. Walsh, ed. and trans., Andreas Capellanus on Love (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd, 1982), Bk. II, chap. VII. Literary models appear in Gower’s Temple of Glas, Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls and Legend of Good Women. 49. Much of this view is indebted to Wendy A. Matlock’s impressive article, “ ‘And long to sue it is a wery thing’: Legal Commentary in The Assembly of Ladies,” Studies in Philology 101.1 (2004): 20–37. 50. For example, one’s sleeve reads “Une sans chaungier” (“one without changing” [l. 590]); another reads “Oncques puis lever” (“I cannot ever rise” [l. 598]), and a third reads “Bien monest” (“well advised” [l. 675]). 51. Laura L. Howes, Chaucer’s Gardens and the Language of Convention (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997), 65. 52. To quote, perversely, fresshe May’s ready answer to Januarie’s claim to have seen her engaged in intercourse with Damyan (Merchant’s Tale, 4.2387), “ ‘Ye maze, maze, goode sire,’ quod she.” 53. Carole Anne Taylor, “Humor, Subjectivity, Resistance: The Case of Laughter in The Color Purple,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 36.4 (1994): 463 [462–82]. 54. Fisher, “The Flower and the Leaf and The Assembly of Ladies,” 193, cites a fifteenth-century English poem attributed to the Duke of Suffolk, whose lines read: “ ‘Lo yit,’ quod he, ‘my colour shal be blewe/ That folke may know of my stedfast lyvyng.’ ” The early sixteenth-century poem, The Court of Love, refers to wearing the color “blewe” in whose “signe thay were, and ever will be true,/ Withouten chaunge” (ll. 246, 248–49). The Court of Love, (originally published in The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Selection), TEAMS Middle English Text Series, ed. Kathleen Forni

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NOTES

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64.

65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

191

(Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005), http://www. lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/forcrtfrm.htm, July 15, 2010. Matlock, “ ‘And long to sue it is a wery thing,’ ” 30–31. Donnelly, “ ‘Withoute Wordes,’ ” 46. Donnelly, “ ‘Withoute Wordes,’ ” 46. Matlock, “ ‘And long to sue it is a wery thing,’ ” 33. Donnelly, “ ‘Withoute Wordes,’ ” 43. Donnelly, “ ‘Withoute Wordes,’ ” 44. For example, King Horn visits Rymenhild in her private bower; Tristan prepares a bower in the wood of Morois for himself and Iseult. La Belle Dame Sans Mercy appears in two of the three manuscripts containing The Assembly of Ladies: MS Longleat 258, fos. 120 r-136v (1460–70) and MS Trinity R. 3.19, fos. 98r-108v (1500–25). Rossell Hope Robbins, “The Chaucerian Apocrypha,” in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, ed. J. Burke Severs and Albert E. Hartung (New Haven, CT: The Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967–1973), 4:1094 [1061–1101 and 1285–1306]. The country-house poem, “The Description of Cooke-ham” appears as the last poem in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, in which Lanyer (1570?-1645) rewrote the Fall of Humankind and represents Eve not as being deceived, but rather, as “seeker and source” of knowledge. Naomi J. Miller, “(M)other Tongues: Maternity and Subjectivity,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 159 [143–66]. I. Helling, “Autobiography as Self-Presentation: The Carpenters of Konstanz,” in Life Sentences: Aspects of the Social Role of Language, ed. Rom Harré (London: John Wiley and Sons, Ltd., 1976), 42–48. See esp. p. 33, Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harré, “Contradiction in Lived and Told Narratives,” Research on Language and Social Interaction 25 (1991–1992): 33 [1–36]. Fisher, “The Flower and the Leaf and The Assembly of Ladies,” 175. Ibid., 174–75. Stephens, “The Questioning of Love in the Assembly of Ladies,” 137. Barratt, “ ‘The Flower and the Leaf ’ and ‘The Assembly of Ladies,’ ” 18. Derek Pearsall, “The Assembly of Ladies and Generydes,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 12.47 (1961): 236 [229–37]. Fisher, “The Flower and the Leaf and The Assembly of Ladies,” 175. Ibid., 163. Matlock, “ ‘And long to sue it is a wery thing,’ ” 21, 22. “Bradford Vivian draws from the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to suggest that rhetoricians recognize ‘that the self may be conceived as a form—a rhetorical form—that exists only in its continual and aesthetic creation, in its indefinite becoming’ (2000, 304).” See Kendall R. Phillips, “Rhetorical Maneuvers: Subjectivity, Power, and Resistance,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 39.4 (2006): 311 [310–32]. Phillips is quoting Bradford Vivian, “The Threshold of the Self,” Philosophy

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and Rhetoric 33.4 (2000): 304 [303–18]. (Phillips’ citation differs only in minor ways from Vivian’s statement.)

5

Code-Switching: Male Crossing into Female Speech Domain

1. Pull yourself out of such sober reveries, (nurtured, presumably, by such studies); he continues: sober reveries contravene the spirit of the pilgrimage. “For Goddes sake,” be “of bettre cheere!” This is not the time “for to studien here” (IV.7–8). You agreed to participate “in a pley,” and now you “nedes moot unto the pley assente,” so “tell us som myrie tale” (IV.10, 11, 9). Don’t cause us to lose sleep by preaching “as freres doon in Lente,/ To make us for oure olde synnes wepe,” and, finally, lose the rhetorical colors: you can save those for addresses to the king; for us, speak plainly so that we can understand what you say (IV.12–14). 2. Wendy Allman points out that the sophyme was “the prestige academic discourse of the fourteenth century”; “Petrarch,” she says, “engages in virulent objection to sophymes originating in England,” leading her to propose the Clerk’s Tale, particularly the Prologue and the Envoy, as Chaucer’s humorous response to Petrarch. Wendy Allman, “Appropriating Genres: the Clerk’s Tale as Sophisma,” Paper presented at the 33rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, The Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, 10 May 1998. A similar objection seems to lie behind Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo’s remark in his first Disputation dedicated to Pier Paolo Vergerio in 1401: “What is left in logic which is untouched by British sophisms?” Cited in Stephen Read, ed., Sophisms in Medieval Logic and Grammar (Dordrecht, NLD: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), xi. 3. Fallacies appear to be the commonest form of sophismata in current textbooks on logic. However, S. Morris Engel distinguishes a sophism from a fallacy thus: “A sophism is an argument that though correct in appearance is nevertheless invalid.” S. Morris Engel, With Good Reason: An Introduction to Informal Fallacies, 3rd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 164. 4. Warren S. Ginsberg referencing the General Prologue (I. 840–841) and Romaunt of the Rose (l. 1000). “The Clerk’s demeanor ought to be maidenly” cites Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 76, in which Mann points to the “gentler ideal of ‘Totum regit saeculum’: Clericos simplicitas decet puellaris” which she translates as “a maidenly innocence is fitting for clerks.” Ginsberg also cites, among others, William of Wheatley’s (f l. 1305–1331) work on Boethius’s Disciplina scholastica, whereby he writes that “the scholar ought to be so chaste and modest in word and action, that he may resemble a virgin newly spoused.” This latter text can be found online at “The Clerk of Oxford in Fiction” at http://www.archive.org

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/stream/clerkofoxfordinf00hultiala/clerkofoxfordinf00hultiala_djvu.txt. Warren S. Ginsberg, explanatory notes to The Clerk’s Prologue and Tale in The Riverside Chaucer, 879. 5. Alexander Murray writes, “In the fourteenth century . . . the proportion of tonsured clergy [clergy in orders] among students at some new universities . . . [was] astonishingly low—for instance, 35 per cent at Cologne, and 20 per cent at Heidelberg.” Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 264. 6. The Lateran decrees of 1123 and 1139 that “transformed clerical marriage from a legally tolerated institution into a canonical crime” come to mind immediately: these were a direct consequence of the reformers’ zeal for making sex and sexual desire the barrier between the worthy priest and the unworthy one. James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 220. Heterosexuality itself has long been argued to be a socialization that took place historically under conditions of patriarchy whereby the male ruling-class dominance asserted “sexual control over women and dominated men while the dominant men themselves remain[ed] sexually invulnerable.” Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Homophobia, Heterosexism, and Pastoral Practice,” in Homosexuality in the Priesthood and the Religious Life, ed. Jeannine Gramick (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 31 [21–35]. Ruether continues: One of the ways to establish this system of sexual control was “to create a celibate elite that [became] regarded as above sexuality, morally and spiritually superior to the lower class of sexual people” (31); eventually, the “celibate elite not only [held] itself aloof from sexuality, but also defin[ed] everyone else’s sexuality by strictly delimiting what they [could] do, and when and with whom they can do it” (31–32). Samuel Laeuchli’s study, Power and Sexuality: The Emergence of Canon Law at the Synod of Elvira (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1972), 88, reveals how the Church used sexual legislation as a way of creating Christian identity. By setting exceptionally rigorous sexual taboos for the clergy (as distinct from sexual legislation for the laypeople), the Elvira synod meant to associate clearly the clergy’s Christian identity with their sexual conduct. See also Pierre J. Payer, The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); and Peggy Reeves Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 7. In the methodology of cultural and linguistic anthropologists, abstracts and ideological preoccupations provide less a site out of which meanings arise than do interactions in a particular situation. Traditionally, our philosophical, religious, or social conceptions (of power, religion, morality, human rights) have started from the representational character of language and/or the mind; rather than asking how those linguistic expressions/representations acquire definite meaning, i.e., “content,” I intend to examine how those expressions are used in social practices,

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according to standards implicit in those practices. Proverbs, for example, are treated by cultural and linguistic anthropologists not as slices of cultural wisdom but as means or resources available for use in specific situations. The question is not “What do proverbs say,” but rather “How are proverbs used?” Instead of focusing upon what type of morality might be represented by the proverb, the concern now is to see how that morality itself is invoked and negotiated in a discourse. 8. The problem of eliding author, narrator, and character voices is especially endemic to Greek plays in which the voice of the chorus narrator/ persona and the voice of the poet are frequently perceived to be the same. It naturally raises the question: “Whose voice do we hear in a choral ode?” Judith Fletcher, “Choral Voice and Narrative in the First Stasimon of Aeschylus Agamemnon,” Phoenix 53.1/2 (1999): 29 [29–49]. Paul Strohm observes of the Clerk’s Tale, that “this tale, like all of Chaucer’s tales, embraces many voices, including those of predecessor texts, of Chaucer the poet-narrator, of the Clerk himself. But . . . the predominant voice of the tale is that of the Clerk, and he is presented to the audience as conservative satirist, elaborately deferential to authority in his own conduct and in his literary imagination.” Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 159. In fact, so dominant is the Clerk’s voice that Strohm consciously blurs it with Chaucer’s voice in noting the tale’s critique of ideal obedience: “Whether we view this critique as issuing from Chaucer or from his Clerk, it calls into question many features of the hierarchical ideology that the tale seems to advance” (160). Elizabeth D. Harvey notes the slippage between characterological and authorial voices not only in the Wife of Bath’s being paired “repeatedly” with “female characters created by female authors,” but also in later female characters such as Molly Bloom who in the writings of some theorists such as Hélène Cixous “comes to stand for the irrepressible female spirit.” Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London: Routledge, 1992), 16. Even Erasmus, adopting a female voice in The Praise of Folly, ascribes a reality to the character’s voice that displaces his own authorial voice: “ ‘But if you think my speech has been too pert or wordy,’ he says at the end of Folly and then reminds us again in the letter to Dorp, ‘keep in mind that you’ve been listening to Folly and to a woman.’ ” Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices, 63, citing Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, trans. Clarence H. Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 138, 160. Interestingly enough, Chaucer himself in his poem to Bukton cites the Wife of Bath as though she were an authoritative voice on the sorrows of marriage (along with his having characters in the Tales cite the Wife of Bath, as well). See Strohm, Social Chaucer, 73. 9. For “hybrid voices,” see Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259–423.

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10. J. Burke Severs, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale (1942; repr. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1972), 268, Pars III, translation mine. 11. Ruth Evans, “Vulgar Eloquence? Cultural Models and Practices of Translation in Late Medieval Europe,” in Translating Others, ed. Theo Hermans, vol. 2 (Manchester: St. Jerome Press, 2006), 301 [296–313]. 12. John Finlayson, “Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Chaucer’s ‘Clerk’s Tale,’ ” Studies in Philology 97.3 (2000): 268 [255–75]. 13. Finlayson, “Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Chaucer’s ‘Clerk’s Tale,’ ” 270. In his letter, Petrarch writes that while Griselda’s patience “seems hardly imitable,” he wishes “to encourage the readers to imitate at least this woman’s constancy, so that what she maintained toward her husband they may maintain toward our God . . . . I would number among the men overf lowing with constancy whoever would suffer without a murmur for his God what this little peasant woman suffered for her mortal husband.” (270), citing “The Clerk’s Tale” in W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster, ed., Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Chicago: Humanities Press, 1941, repr.; New York, 1958), 69–81, 330; and Aldo Bernardo, trans., Francis Petrarch: Letters of Old Age, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 2:668. David Wallace, “ ‘Whan She Translated Was’: A Chaucerian Critique of the Petrarchan Academy,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 190 [156–215], argues that the “implied analogy between Walter and God can be taken seriously in Petrarch’s text because Walter’s tyrannical proclivities are played down or passed over without comment.” 14. Evans, “Vulgar Eloquence?,” 301. 15. Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 223. 16. Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, 36. The larger, but not the full, quote reads: “The medieval practice of translation as a form of appropriation and substitution will be conditioned, as in Roman contexts, by rhetorical theories of invention” (36). 17. Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (London: Routledge, 1996), 8. 18. Rita Copeland, “The Fortunes of ‘Non Verbum pro Verbo’: or, Why Jerome is not a Ciceronian,” in The Medieval Translator: The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, ed. Roger Ellis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989), 35 [15–35]. 19. Copeland, “The Fortunes of ‘Non Verbum pro Verbo,’ ” 35. 20. Ibid. 21. Rime royal is the form used by a number of late medieval (and early modern English) writers to express women’s voice and concerns. In addition to Chaucer’s use of it in the Prioress’s Tale, it was used by Richard Roos for La Belle Dame sans Mercy (mid-1400’s), The Flower and the

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22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

NOTES

Leafe (female narrator) (ca. 1470), by Samuel Daniel in the “Complaint of Rosamond” (1592), and by Shakespeare, to some extent, in Lucrece (1594). Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, a translation of Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato (ca. 1335) is characterized by Barry Windeatt as a process of “composition through adaptive translation.” Barry Windeatt, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 54. Elaine Treharne, “The Stereotype Confirmed? Chaucer’s Wife of Bath,” in Writing Gender and Genre in Medieval Literature: Approaches to Old and Middle English Texts, ed. Elaine Treharne, Essays and Studies 55 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 109 [93–115]. Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, ed., Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 12. The text, “The Schoolhouse of Women,” occurs on pp. 137–55. Anon., “The Schoolhouse of Women,” 140. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 138. Simon, Gender in Translation, 9. Seth Lerer, “The Canterbury Tales,” in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 288. Lerer, “The Canterbury Tales,” 288. The actions of quitting and response that so structure the Canterbury Tales provide, according to Seth Lerer, “a model for a future literary history” (288). Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 136. Ibid. Ibid., 137. Ibid. Wallace, “ ‘Whan She Translated Was,’ ” 195–96. Emma Campbell, “Sexual Poetics and the Politics of Translation in the Tale of Griselda,” Comparative Literature 55.3 (2003): 212 [191–216]. Portions of this chapter were presented at conferences in San Diego and Milwaukee. In both instances, scholars in the audiences voiced hesitation to accept code-switching as meaning anything other than a switching between two (or more) languages by one speaker in a single interaction. Fortunately, the last decade of studies by Celso Alvarez-Cáccamo, Cecelia Cutler, Mary Bucholtz, David Graddol, Joan Swan, Elizabeth Gordon, Mark Williams, Bill Manhire, Natalie Hess, and others has opened up the parameters of research whereby the movement has been, as Coupland and Jaworski put it, away from thinking of language as a set of static categories to thinking of language instead as “experienced by users themselves as a complex set of social processes.” Nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski, “Social Worlds through Language,” in The New Sociolinguistics Reader, ed. Nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 7 [1–21]. That is, “there has been a

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38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

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steady shift away from formalist approaches to sociolinguistic description towards a more integrated approach—understanding how linguistic forms are used in the context of communicative functions” (7). Roxy Harris and Ben Rampton, “Creole Metaphors in Cultural Analysis: On the Limits and Possibilities of (Socio-)Linguistics,” Critique of Anthropology 22.1 (2002): 31–51. Roger Hewitt, White Talk, Black Talk: Interracial Friendship and Communication Among Adolescents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. Chapters 4 and 5. Cecelia Cutler, “Language as Prestige: Crossing Over,” in “Do You Speak American. What Speech Do We Like Best?,” 1–4, www.pbs.org /speak/speech/prestige/crossing, accessed January 8, 2010. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination; and Michael McKeon, ed., Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Celso Alvarez-Cáccamo, “Rethinking Conversational Code-Switching: Codes, Speech Varieties, and Contextualization,” in Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 16–19, 1990 (Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1990), 3–16. Celso AlvarezCáccamo, “From ‘Switching Code’ to ‘Code-Switching’: Towards a Reconceptualisation of Communicative Codes,” in Code-Switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction and Identity, ed. Peter Auer (London: Routledge, 1998), 29–48; Celso Alvarez-Cáccamo, “Codes,” Paper Presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Philadelphia, PA, Dec. 2–6, 1998. Online at http://www. udc.es/dep/lx/cac/aaa1998/alvarez-caccamo.pdf, accessed July 22, 2010. Nikolas Coupland, Style: Language Variation and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Nikolas Coupland, “Language, Situation, and the Relational Self: Theorizing Dialect-Style in Sociolinguistics,” in Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, ed. Penelope Eckert and John R. Rickford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 185–210. Gerry Philipsen, “A Theory of Speech Codes,” in Developing Communication Theories, ed. Gerry Philipsen and Terrance L. Albrecht (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), 119–56. Peter Auer and Ben Rampton question the traditional views of codeswitching in language interactions. Both observe that such views restricted themselves to “participants, topic or setting,” and the way in which those issues revealed a social meaning behind the choices to code-switch or not. Peter Auer, “Introduction: Bilingual Conversation Revisited,” in Code-Switching in Conversation, 3 [1–24]. However, Rampton argues, there is a further option other than those views—a kind of “language crossing” that explores “other people’s ethnicities, embracing them and/or creating new ones,” and this option “is very far from rare.” Ben Rampton, “Language Crossing and the Redefinition of Reality,” in Code-Switching in Conversation, 300 [290–317].

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46. Contemporary study of women’s speech involves three disciplines: “sociolinguistics, which examines the formal properties of speech and relates them to social context and social roles; discourse analysis; and comparative ethnographic studies that focus on verbal genres.” Laura McClure, Spoken Like a Woman: Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 32. McClure (32n1) directs us to several important studies of women’s speech in other cultures: Elinor Keenan, “Norm Makers, Norm-Breakers: Uses of Speech by Men and Women in a Malagasy Community,” in Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, ed. Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 125–43; Susan Gal, “Between Speech and Silence: The Problematics of Research on Language and Gender,” in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the PostModern Era, ed. Micaela di Leonardo (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 175–203; Gloria Goodwin Raheja, “The Limits of Patriliny: Kinship, Gender and Women’s Speech Practices in Rural North India,” in Gender, Kinship, Power: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary History, ed. Mary Jo Maynes, Ann Waltner, Birgitte Soland, and Ulrike Strasser (New York: Routledge, 1996), 149–74. 47. Bill Manhire, Dirty Silence: Impure Sounds in New Zealand Poetry. Cited in Elizabeth Gordon and Mark Williams, “Raids on the Articulate: Code-Switching, Style-Shifting and Postcolonial Writing,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 33.2 (1998): 75 [75–96]. 48. Gordon and Williams, “Raids on the Articulate,” 75. 49. Coupland and Jaworski, “Social Worlds Through Language,” 3. 50. Ibid., 8. 51. Rampton, “Language Crossing,” 291. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 290–317. Rampton focuses especially on “crossing” at the boundary as distinct from crossing over the boundary; he is interested in how crossing is a form of (playfully) negotiating expectations (resistance) in adult directed activities, and in social relationships. Roger Hewitt, White Talk, Black Talk: Interracial Friendship and Communication Amongst Adolescents, documents the sociolinguistic impact on the language and culture of white London teenagers that the Afro-Caribbean (or “London Jamaican” creole) used by young black Londoners has had. 54. Howard Giles and Robert N. St. Clair, Language and Social Psychology (London: Basil Blackwell, 1979) proposed that some of the cognitive reasons for code-switching and other changes in speech lay in a speaker’s desire to stress or suppress the social differences between themselves and those with whom they are interacting. Giles posits that when speakers seek approval in a social situation they are likely to converge their speech to that of their interlocutor. This convergence or style-shifting includes elements such as language of choice, dialect, grammatical complexity and accent. On the other hand, in order to stress the social distance between

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55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66.

67.

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themselves and their audience, the speaker might also resort to “divergent speech.” Here, the speaker would restrict her/himself to using linguistic features belonging to their own group. Harris and Rampton, “Creole Metaphors,” 42. Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 364–65n92, notes that “yerde” as “penis” “is not a slang usage.” He cites R. H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), who includes documentation of a text that “describes in sober legal prose the tests to which a husband’s ‘yerde’ or virga was subjected to demonstrate impotence (89n53).” Rampton, “Language Crossing,” 309. Cutler, “Language as Prestige: Crossing Over,” 1. Mary Helen Bucholtz, “Borrowed Blackness: African American Vernacular English and European American Youth Identities” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1997). Cutler, “Language as Prestige: Crossing Over,” 4. Ibid. Ibid. Cecelia Cutler, “Hip-Hop Language in Sociolinguistics and Beyond,” Language and Linguistics Compass 1/5 (2007): 520 [519–38], notes that “Researchers often use the term ‘language’ in a loose sense to describe the linguistic variety associated with hip-hop and its relationship to AAE, but the degree to which the linguistic features of HHL overlap with those of AAE actually makes it difficult to argue that it constitutes a language unto itself. Perhaps ‘language style’ is a more appropriate designation.” She repeats this point, noting that “over the past two decades sociolinguistics has identified a language—perhaps more accurately termed a ‘language style’—associated with hip-hop consisting of a range of phonological, grammatical, and lexical patterns” (528). Ibid., 527. Ibid. Treharne, “The Stereotype Confirmed? Chaucer’s Wife of Bath.” Treharne argues that in attempting “to invent a female language” (96) for the Wife of Bath, Chaucer deliberately “emulates aspects of a woman’s language”—repetition, volubility, hyperbole, unfinished sentences (109), etc.—and is so successful at “replicating women’s speech that critics and students are so frequently momentarily beguiled into believing they are reading the real words of a real woman” (115). “Chaucer’s linguistic acuity and his ability to deceive—despite the formal restraints of the written verse form—are what make his observations, not only of social mores and culture in late fourteenth-century England, but also of social and communicative interaction so interesting” (115). Cutler cites, among others, Lanita Jacobs-Huey, “Is there an authentic African American speech community: Carla revisited,” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (1997) 4.1.331–70; Mary Bucholtz,

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68.

69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

NOTES

“Borrowed Blackness”; H. S. Alim, “Hip Hop Nation Language,” in Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-first Century, ed. Edward Finegan and John R. Rickford (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 387–409; Nikolas Coupland, “Language, Situation, and the Relational Self,” 185–210. Michael McKeon, ed., Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 350. The translation of Bakhtin’s theory is by McKeon. See also Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Social stratification has the power to exploit and inf lect language. There are languages even within the stratifications, particular to “any given moment of verbal-ideological life” (290). “Thus at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the coexistence of socioideological contradictions between the present and the past, between different epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form. These ‘languages’ of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying ‘languages’ ” (291). “Literary language is in effect a dialogue of languages, a ‘highly specific unity of several ‘languages’ ” (295). Ken Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 213, citing Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel.” Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin, citing Bakhtin, 258. Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin, citing Bakhtin, 258. “For the consciousness living in it,” Bakhtin asserts, language is “a concrete heteroglot opinion on the world. All words taste of a profession, a genre, a movement, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, a day and hour.” Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin, citing Bakhtin, 19. Ibid., 21. Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 188. Cooper points to “the blisful ende” as indexing a romance. Noah D. Guynn, review of The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature, by Peggy McCracken, SubStance 31.2&3 (2002): 307 [306–310], remarks that for some medieval scholars, “romance offers a space for late feudal culture to explore, and even thematize, oppositional forces that it imagines to be capable of subverting or destroying political and social hierarchies.” Guynn, review of The Romance of Adultery, 309. Alvarez-Cáccamo, “Rethinking Conversational Code-Switching,” 10. Alvarez-Cáccamo, “Codes,” 2. Ibid., 3. Alvarez-Cáccamo, “From ‘Switching Code’ to ‘Code-Switching,’ ” 31. Alvarez-Cáccamo, “Rethinking Conversational Code-Switching,” 11. Or, as Alvarez-Cáccamo phrases it, alternately, speaking “Spanish with a vernacular prosody” (10).

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81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86.

87. 88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94.

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Ibid. Ibid., 10. Philipsen, “A Theory of Speech Codes,” 133. Ibid., 119–56. According to William L. Leap, gay discourse has its own syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. In his book, Word’s Out: Gay Men’s English (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and his article, “Gay Men’s English” (1993), Leap, in a controlled, limited study, examines the linguistic ways in which gay men’s gender is conveyed by gay men themselves through language. The problem complicating Leap’s arguments is that gender identity is variable and not fixed, and one cannot claim linguistic regularity from a gay community that is not homogenous. Nevertheless, Leap’s definition of language for his hypothesized linguistic community is worth knowing. It includes “descriptions of grammar as well as discourse, that is, descriptions of speaker knowledge of language (e.g. syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) as well as the uses which speakers make of that knowledge in different social and cultural domains.” William L. Leap, “Gay Men’s English: Cooperative Discourse in a Language of Risk,” New York Folklore 19.1–2 (1993): 46 [45–70]. His book documents what he viewed as distinctive prosodic and syntactical and phonological features of Gay speech including habitual code switching and lexico-semantic borrowing from women’s speech practices. Several of Leap’s lexico-semantic and phonological features of Gay speech have been studied, as well, by Robert J. Podesva, Sarah J. Roberts, and Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, “Sharing Resources and Indexing Meanings in the Production of Gay Styles,” in Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice, ed. Robert J. Podesva, Sarah J. Roberts, Kathryn CampbellKibler and Andrew Wong (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2002): 175–89, as well as by Rudolf P. Gaudio, “Sounding Gay: Pitch Properties in the Speech of Gay and Straight Men,” American Speech 69 (1994): 30–57. The communities forming the study of Nacirema’s speech code were Santa Barbara and Seattle. They were thought to represent the majority of American speech codes. Bucholtz, “Borrowed Blackness,” 86. Coupland added that it would be “futile to try to theorize style, since a theory of style would be a theory of everything.” Coupland, “Language, Situation, and the Relational Self,” 185. Bucholtz, “Borrowed Blackness,” 85. Ibid. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 100, citing Elinor Ochs, “Indexing Gender,” in Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, ed. A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 340 [335–58]. Bucholtz, “Borrowed Blackness,” 100.

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95. As Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall succinctly put it, “identities may be linguistically indexed through labels, implicatures, stances, styles, or linguistic structures and systems.” Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, “Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Linguistic Approach,” Discourse Studies 7.4–5 (2005): 585 [585–614]. 96. Robert D. Angus, review of Style: Language Variation and Identity, by Nikolas Coupland, California Linguistic Notes 34.1 (2009): 3 [1–6], writes that Coupland is taking issue “with traditional notions that existing ‘speech repertoires’ are employed to negotiate social meaning and identity” (3). His objection is that such a limiting concept such as “speech repertoires” does not “engage political and ideological implications, nor do they pay adequate attention to the ‘contextualization of speaking’ ” (3). 97. That the Griselda story was “one of the most familiar and popular in European literature” can be inferred from manuscript testimony. Warren Ginsberg, notes in The Riverside Chaucer, 880. Charlotte C. Morse mentions knowing of “188 manuscript copies of Petrarch’s Latin Griselda.” Charlotte C. Morse, “What to Call Petrarch’s Griselda,” in The Uses of Manuscripts in Literary Studies: Essays in Memory of Judson Boyce Allen, ed. Charlotte Cook Morse, Penelope Reed Doob, and Marjorie Curry Woods (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992), 265 [263–303]. 98. Speculation as to whether the tale was a fable or a history cannot rely upon the title commonly given as the source of the tale, Petrarch’s fable, De obedientia ac fide uxoria mythologia, as Charlotte C. Morse demonstrates. The title comes from the 1581 Basle edition, and appears to have been based upon rubrics in the manuscripts. But manuscript rubrics (from which titles were commonly drawn) “were often scribal in origin [and] especially subject to variation.” Walter Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 311–313, here paraphrased in Morse, “What to Call,” 264. As Morse points out, while fabula occurs in a number of manuscripts, “fifty-seven manuscripts designate the tale as an historia” before the tale’s beginning (269). In an earlier article, Morse reminds us that “sharp distinctions between history and fiction, common to modern thinking, were neither common nor especially meaningful in the late Middle Ages.” Charlotte C. Morse, “The Exemplary Griselda,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 7 (1985): 63 [51–86]. Her manuscript research offers strong specific support: although the Clerk’s Tale is rarely copied apart from the Canterbury Tales, it “appears once with saint’s lives and three times with romances, illustrating the tendency, particularly in the English tradition, to group saints’ lives and romances, suggesting a less sharp distinction.” Morse, “The Exemplary Griselda,” 66n33. Examining the complicated early Christian and medieval attitudes toward martyrdom, she concludes, nevertheless, that “Petrarch thought of Griselda in terms of pagan martyrs,” while Chaucer thought of her in terms “of Christian martyrs. . . .” Morse, “Exemplary Griselda,” 81. Given that Chaucer’s sources were Petrarch’s Latin and

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the anonymous French Livre de Griseldis ( J. Burke Severs, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale [1942; repr. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1972]), the weightiest evidence supporting Morse’s conclusion might well come from Ilía Golenitscheff-Koutouzoff ’s work on the French evidence of transmission and reception of the Griselda tale; he “considers the view of Griselda as a martyr to have been commonly held in France and Italy in the 15th century.” See Ilía Golenitscheff-Koutouzoff, L’Histoire de Griseldis en France au XIVe et au XVe siècle (Paris: E. Droz, 1933), 133; here paraphrased by Morse, “Exemplary Griselda,” 81. Quite apart from the evidence drawn from historical sources and textual transmission, the Tale is unquestionably hagiographic in key ways. The “wild excesses of hagiography,” as Helen M. Jewell describes the unrestrained features of the biographies of female saints, are, here, conspicuous: the repeated humiliating indignities quietly accepted, the assumed brutalities against her children silently suffered, the exultation of self-effacement, and the emphasis upon submission as the female ideal of obedience. Helen M. Jewell, Women in Medieval England (New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 10. Further, the Clerk’s frank caution at the Tale’s end, “This storie is seyd nat for that wyves sholde/ Folwen Grisilde as in humylitee,/ for it were inportable . . . ” underscores the didactic purpose intrinsic to that “storie of swich mervaille” (IV.1142–44). Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer, 188, notes that the Host describes the tale “at the end both as a ‘legende’, with its primary meaning of a saint’s life, and a ‘gentil tale’, the romance opposite of the ‘cherles tale.’ ” 99. Morse raises a question about the “undue favor for the obedientia/fides rubric” which the 1581 Basle edition, as the standard edition, of the tale encouraged. Morse, “What to Call,” 264. She notes that almost half of the classifiable manuscripts contain “[r]ubrics identifying Griselda’s virtues” (272). “These rubrics fall into two broad categories, the obedientia/fides rubrics and the patientia/constantia rubrics” (272). “Twenty-six, or perhaps twenty-seven” manuscripts present a variation of the first category (274). Thirty-five manuscripts’ rubrics identify Griselda with patientia/constantia (277). The obedientia/fides rubrics “collocate with the term uxor [wife] for Griselda,” while patience and steadfastness “is associated with spiritual martyrdom” (278, 279). Petrarch, Morse argues, “took some trouble to redirect his story to its new readers of Latin, whom he assumed would be men” (278). Since in the Middle Ages, one practiced patientia in one’s relationship with the world as distinct from practicing obedientia in relationship with “another to whom one is obedient and devoted” (279), Morse regards patientia/constantia as the more fitting with Petrarch’s moral conclusion (278). This does not pose a problem for my position because Morse’s question asks where the weight of the Petrarch/Chaucer’s interest lies (i.e., which set of virtues is it weighted toward?). That patientia/ constantia might well dominate, does not diminish the significance of the obedientia/fides function in the tale.

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100. M. C. Bodden, “Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale: Interrogating ‘Virtue’ through Violence,” in ‘A Great Effusion of Blood’?: Interpreting Medieval Violence, ed. Mark D. Meyerson, Daniel Thiery, and Oren Falk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 218–19 [216–40]. 101. Griselda Pollock, “Feminism/Foucault—Surveillance/Sexuality” in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994): 9 [2–41]: “The will to know and the resultant relations of power are furrowed by the more unpredictable and destabilizing plays of fascination, curiosity, dread, desire, and horror.” 102. Thomas H. Bestul, “True and False Cheere in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale,” JEGP 82 (1983): 501 [500–514]. 103. See Part II, Chapter 5, “Chaucer and the Postures of Sanctity,” in The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture, by David Aers and Lynn Staley (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 252 [179–259]. Staley argues that the “Clerk construes Griselda as more than the focus for complicated male drives and desires. Her poverty and her virtue designate her as a signifier for another level of holiness: the symbols with which he surrounds her inevitably recall the Christ who challenges the world’s power and wealth.” Later, both Aers and Staley add (263), that the “call to Christ is a call to consciousness.” That such a call “poses serious risks to all civil or ecclesiastical structures that are based on the assumption that powerlessness can be mythologized or weakness sanctified” in support of authority (263). 104. Bodden, “Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale: Interrogating ‘Virtue’ through Violence,” 216–40. 105. Daniel Poirion, Le Poete Et Le Prince: L’evolution Du Lyrisme Courtois De Guillaume De Machaut a Charles d’Orléans (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1965), 373, here as paraphrased in Ginsberg, notes in The Riverside Chaucer, 883. 106. “I trowe ye studie aboute som sophyme,” and “It is no tyme for to studien heere” (IV. 5, 8). 107. Shannon Bell, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 102. See also Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike’s “critique of cultural nationalism’s entrapment in a reverse-discourse” and its relation to counter-identification mentioned in Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004), 41. 108. For example, by identifying men as singular in form (call them all violent or all predisposed to harming women), a person uncritically mimics the dominant discourse’s strategy of identifying women as the enemy instead of offering to them a different set of terms. 109. A frequently cited example of such reinvestment is that of Gay Pride’s public appropriation of the pink triangle used by the Nazis to separate and signify sexual deviants. Homophiles and sexologists of the late

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nineteenth century used the medical category of inversion to argue for “naturalness” of certain forms of gender or sexual deviance. For “reverse” discourse, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 1:101. 110. I am borrowing John Stephens and Marcella Ryan’s description of the prevalent and limiting views that dominated the scholarship on the “marriage group” in the twentieth century. John Stephens and Marcella Ryan, “Metafictional Strategies and the Theme of Sexual Power in The Wife of Bath’s and Franklin’s Tales,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 33 (1989): 57–58 [56–75]. 111. W. Flagg Miller, “Metaphors of Commerce: Trans-Valuing Tribalism in Yemeni Audiocassette Poetry,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34.1 (2002): 29 [29–57]. 112. Karen A. Winstead, “Saints, Wives, and Other ‘Hooly Thynges’: Pious Laywomen in Middle English Romance,” Chaucer Yearbook 2 (1995): 153 [137–54].

6

Margery Kempe: “I grab the microphone and move my body”—Volatile Speech, Volatile Bodies

1. Apart from instances of hostility recorded in her Book, negative criticism has been well-documented several times over, especially, in the last decade of the twentieth century. Perhaps Margery’s chances were doomed when one of the best critics, editors, and translators of The Book of Margery Kempe, Barry Windeatt, concluded—more as a lament rather than a reproach, I think—in his Introduction to his edition of that text, that despite the fact that the “Proem [to The Book] makes clear that this life is being recalled because of God’s wonderful dealings with Margery, to God’s glory rather than Margery’s” (22), nevertheless, “we cannot claim Margery’s Book to be the autobiography of a great mystic—the quality of her mystical experience prevents this—but it remains one of the most immediate ‘Lives’ of the period” (23). For nuanced interpretations of Margery Kempe’s mysticism, see Nancy F. Partner, “Reading The Book of Margery Kempe,” Exemplaria 3.1 (1991): 29–66, esp. pp. 31–33; Sara Beckwith, “Problems of Authority in Late Medieval English Mysticism: Language, Agency, and Authority in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Exemplaria 4.1 (1992): 176–78 [171–99]; Sheila Delany, “Sexual Economics, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and The Book of Margery Kempe,” in Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect, ed. Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (London: Routledge, 1994), 72–74 [72–87]; Eluned Bremner, “Margery Kempe and the Critics: Disempowerment and Deconstruction,” in Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992), 123–31 [117–35].

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2. I am aware of Mariateresa Fumagalli Beonio-Brocchieri’s argument that the term “mystical” in the Middle Ages “is used neither for the state of a soul nor for an experience, even less for a person, man or woman,” but, instead, refers solely to theology, as in “mystical theology.” Mariateresa Fumagalli Beonio-Brocchieri, “The Feminine Mind in Medieval Mysticism,” in Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance, ed. E. Ann Matter and John Coakley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 19 [19–33]. I employ the word, “mystic,” as it is popularly used in current medieval scholarship, namely, as “an intimate relationship of origin between God and human beings on the basis of which humans can turn to God and be reunited in ecstasy, excessus, or deification” (19), but I would modify that description with Ellen Ross’s representation of the more typical medieval mystic: “They do not seek momentary ecstatic experiences of God, . . . but rather they envision a holistic lifelong path on which a growing relationship with the Divine is coupled with a deepening love of self and neighbor.” Ellen Ross, “ ‘She Wept and Cried Right Loud for Sorrow and for Pain’: Suffering, the Spiritual Journey, and Women’s Experience in Late Medieval Mysticism,” in Maps of Flesh and Light: The Religious Experience of Medieval Women Mystics, ed. Ulrike Wiethaus (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 49 [45–59]. 3. Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writing of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, Studies in Medieval Mysticism 5 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 22. 4. Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 1. 5. Kim M. Phillips, “Four Virgins’ Tales: Sex and Power in Medieval Law,” in Medieval Virginities, ed. Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans and Sarah Salih (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 81 [80–100]. 6. McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, especially Chapter 5; “Margery Kempe: Wisdom, Authority and the Female Utterance”; Laurie A. Finke, “Mystical Bodies and the Dialogics of Vision,” in Maps of Flesh and Light, Ulrike Wiethaus, ed (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 28–44; Sarah Beckwith, “A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe,” in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology, and History, ed. David Aers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 34–57; Clarissa W. Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); Diane Watt, “Political Prophecy in The Book of Margery Kempe,” in A Companion to The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 145–60; David Lawton, “Voice, Authority, and Blasphemy in The Book of Margery Kempe,” in Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992), 93–115; Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Bremner, “Margery Kempe and the Critics: Disempowerment and

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7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

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Deconstruction”; Carolyn Dinshaw, “Margery Kempe,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2003), 222–39; Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England; Denis Renevey, “Margery’s Performing Body: The Translation of Late Medieval Discursive Religious Practices,” in Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England, ed. Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 197–216; Sandra J. McEntire, “The Journey into Self hood: Margery Kempe and Feminine Spirituality,” in Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, 51–69; David Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing 1360–1430 (London: Routledge, 1988), Chapter 2, “The Making of Margery Kempe: Individual and Community,” 73–116; Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). Dinshaw, “Margery Kempe,” 226. Ruth Shklar, “Cobham’s Daughter: The Book of Margery Kempe and the Power of Heterodox Thinking,” Modern Language Quarterly 56.3 (1995): 278 [277–304]. Ibid. Ibid. By that, Shklar means that Kempe (through her narrative) “sets forth her own model of dissent and reform as a critique of the prevailing discourses that would define heresy” (279). Santha Bhattacharji, “Medieval Contemplation and Mystical Experience,” in Approaching Medieval English Anchoritic and Mystical Texts, ed. Dee Dyas, Valerie Edden, and Roger Ellis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 56 [51–59]. Beckwith, “Problems of Authority,” 197. Shklar, “Cobham’s Daughter,” 278n4. Beckwith, “Problems of Authority,” 177. Albrecht Classen, The Power of a Woman’s Voice in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures: New Approaches to German and European Women Writers and to Violence Against Women in Premodern Times (New York: Walter de Gruyter, Inc., 2007), 272–73. Classen’s chief concern is to discover the significance of Kempe’s book as a contribution to the literary discourse of her period; in doing so, he provides a superb exploration of mysticism and autobiography in Chapter 8 of his book. Ibid., 272. Sandra J. McEntire, introduction to Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, x [ix–xvii]. Dinshaw, “Margery Kempe,” 222–39. Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh, 8. Ibid. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 228.

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23. Katherine J. Lewis, “Margery Kempe and Saint Making in Later Medieval England,” in A Companion to The Book of Margery Kempe, 199 [195–215]. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 200. 26. The saint-making process is now largely initiated by an organization or a religious society, etc., brought to the attention of the local bishop and then, if sufficient cause is deemed, it is immediately taken over by Rome’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints. 27. Karlheinz Stierle, “Translatio Studii and Renaissance: From Vertical to Horizontal Translation,” in The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 55–67. 28. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 33. Benkler’s concept of simple or complementary coexistence is largely concerned with the Internet and its ability to change patterns of information and cultural production. 29. John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 82. 30. At one time, it was virtually the “vox populi,” or local campaigns, that seemed to have promoted a cause for a particular person’s candidacy for sainthood. Later, anyone petitioning on behalf of a candidate for canonization had to be put their case in the hands of an official representative, a “procurator.” Pope Gregory IX’s Decretals (ca. 1234) established the canonization process as being under the absolute jurisdiction of the pope. In the eighteenth century, Pope Benedict XIV’s five volumes on beatification and canonization that remained the official source for procedures until Pope John Paul II’s radical reformation of the canonization process. For a brief account of the history of the development of saints and their cults, see Kenneth L. Woodward, Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t and Why (New York: Touchstone Publishers, 1996), esp. 51 and 52–86. 31. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 28. 32. Ibid., 15. 33. For “ethnocentric” I am relying on Webster’s Third International Dictionary (1993) and The Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992) both of which offer as their first and most usual meaning of the term, “the inclination” or “habitual disposition” “to view other communities and cultures from the perspective or security of one’s own, and therefore inclined to judge them by the norms or conventions with which one is familiar” or, “to gauge other societies by those criteria which are significant in one’s own society” (Kenneth McLeish, ed., Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought [London: Bloomsbury, 1993]). 34. Gail Ashton, The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography: Speaking the Saint (New York: Routledge, 2000), notes that one element

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is “particularly problematic . . . in the case of female hagiography; representations of saintliness become inextricably mingled with representations of ideal womanliness. Thus, what it means to be a female saint is not quite the same as what it means to be a male saint” (2). This ideal womanliness included “a valorisation of silence” (3). Mirk’s Festial (part of Ashton’s study), written prior to 1415 and intended as religious instructions for clerics, stresses silence and submission as necessary to holiness. Because Mirk was threatened “by a late medieval upsurge in lay piety, especially a female lay piety,” he often suppressed details of women saints who preached or were disruptive of male authority (14). His texts emphasized, rather, “the patient fortitude of a chaste, saintly woman who keeps her own counsel and is frequently meek, frequently passive” (17). Karen A. Winstead’s study of holy or pious women in Middle English romances supports this emphasis upon silence and submission. The writers of these romances, she says, “used the familiar conventions of saints’ lives to endorse a new kind of ‘saint.’ Demure, gentle, and obedient, the ‘martyrs’ of [those Middle English romances] differ sharply from the obstreperous heroines of contemporaneous martyr legends” (Karen A. Winstead, “Saints, Wives, and Other ‘Hooly Thynges’: Pious Laywomen in Middle English Romance.” Chaucer Yearbook 2 (1995): 139). On the other hand, Winstead suggests, the fact that saintliness became so frequently associated then with “submission to male authority figures” might well point to an emerging sociocultural problem, namely, that “gender roles and relations were being contested and needed to be affirmed” (152). See also Clarissa W. Atkinson, “Female Sanctity in the Late Middle Ages,” in The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Lynn Staley (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 225–36; Catherine Sanok, “Reading Hagiographically: The Legend of Good Women and Its Feminine Audience,” Exemplaria 13.2 (2001): 269–303; Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, “Women and Mysticism in the Medieval World,” in Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)3–24. Finally, within two centuries, the “ante” on elevation to sainthood was raised. “Until the early years of the seventeenth century, saint makers continued to apply rather elastic criteria, ‘excellence of virtues’ and ‘multiple excellence of life,’ the clearest evidence of which was miracles. In 1602, theologians of Salamanca . . . introduced a quite different standard: the humanist notion of ‘heroic virtue.’ ” Anne Jacobson Schutte, Aspiring Saints (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 77. Heroic virtue involved what was called “the glory of grace,” whose prime example was no longer the earlier kinds of miracles such as curing others or levitation, “but rather such full participation in Christ’s Passion as to receive physical marks identical to his wounds” (77). 35. It bears mentioning that Lynn Staley views The Book of Margery Kempe as a fiction and proposes a “Kempe” or a “Margery” as the author critiquing fifteenth-century cultural attitudes and political and religious views whom she distinguishes from the “protagonist” Margery. Although Staley’s

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study raises intriguing issues, too many moments in The Book of Margery Kempe seem to contradict Staley’s chief thesis. Two episodes (among others) come to mind: first, that of Kempe’s having Christ authorize, as a means of testing, her explicit sexual fantasies with naked clerics in which the devil forces her to be “comown to hem alle” (The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, EETS o.s. 212 [London: Oxford University Press, 1940, repr. 1997], 145, hereafter cited as BMK), and, second, Kempe’s insistence that she contrived the wearing of a hair-cloth nightly so that her husband never noticed it through years of intercourse with him and the bearing of children. The first episode is outright unsound theology for both the Middle Ages and our own twenty-first century: the end (Kempe’s achievement of virtue through testing) never justifies the means (“authorized” fantasies of gratifying the sexual urges of the naked clerics). The second episode exhibits such psychic perturbation that it would render untrustworthy that person’s critiquing of cultural and political/religious views. Staley’s proposal of “Margery”/”Kempe” as an author critiquing fifteenth century cultural attitudes, etc., loses much ground here. If an “author’s” perception of her (here, Margery’s) events of her life is conspicuously f lawed in her theology and if she is f lagrantly indulgent in her psychic disposition at times, the whole poses an insurmountable threat to her stance as an author having any credibility because it proposes that the “author” cannot evaluate certain fundamental elements of her life much less that she can evaluate the complex spectrum of her culture. 36. G. G. Coulton, Medieval Village, Manor, and Monastery (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960): At Billingham (in Northumberland or Durham), “ ‘it is ordained by common assent that all the women of the township control their tongues without any sort or defamation’ ” (92). “The cucking-stool [a public toilet seat] for scolds was an indispensable village institution; [the town of ] Shields is fined (or threatened) three times for neglecting to provide one” (92). From the Extracts from the Halmote Court Rolls of the Prior and Convent of Durham, 1345–83, is an entry about Hazeldean: “Hesilden, 1376 . . . . It is enjoined upon all the women of the vill that they restrain their tongues and that they do not quarrel nor swear at any one.” Edward P. Cheyney, trans., “English Manorial Documents,” in Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History, vol. 3, no. 5 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1907), 29, http://www.archive.org/stream/translationsrepr03univiala#page/n147 /mode/2up, accessed December 1, 2010. 37. For example, in Book I, Chapter 46, p. 149, the Mayor of Leicester having heard of her public speaking, called her “a false strumpet.” In the following chapter, p. 151, the Steward of Leicester after asking “many questions, to which she answered readily and reasonably,” “took her by the hand and led her into his chamber, and spoke many foul, lewd words to her, intending and desiring, as it seemed to her, to overcome her and rape her.” And seeing her “boldness in that she was not afraid of any

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38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

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imprisonment, [he] struggled with her, making filthy signs and giving her indecent looks.” In Book II, Chapter 6, pp. 280–81, the priests residing near Aachen went to her lodging and “called her an Englishwoman with a tail, and spoke many filthy words to her, giving her indecent looks.” The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. B. A. Windeatt (London: Penguin Books, 1994). All references will be from Windeatt’s edition except for the Middle English citations, which will be from BMK. Translations based on BMK are my own. Keith Green and Jill LeBihan, Critical Theory and Practice: A Coursebook (London: Routledge, 1996), 187. David Knowles, The English Mystical Tradition (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), 148. Windeatt, 23. (cited earlier in endnote 1, Chapter 6). Classen, The Power of a Woman’s Voice, 292n65. Verena E. Neuburger, Margery Kempe: A Study in Early English Feminism (Bern: Peter Lang, 1994), 69. Ibid.,113. Classen, The Power of a Woman’s Voice, 272, 281, 298, 308. Ibid., 241, 279. McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, 170. Among the endless sources inveighing against women’s lack of control of their speech, two popular sources are especially illustrative: the conduct book entitled The Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry (ca. 1372), and the mystery play, “Noah,” from The Towneley Plays (early 1400s). Eve’s real sin was her speech, according to the Knight of La Tour Landry. Not only did she answer “too-lightly,” but also, he emphasizes, she answered “with-oute counsaile of her husbonde, helde with hym talkinge . . . for the ansuere longed to her husbonde, and not to her.” Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry, Chapters XXXIX–XLVI, http://www.hti.umich.edu /cg i/c/cme/cme-id x?t y pe=HTM L &rg n=DI V0&by te=7892759, accessed June 2, 2009. In the Towneley Cycle mystery plays, Noah can scarcely bring himself to pass on to his wife God’s warning about the imminent f lood because he fears her obstreperous reproaches. He warns the audience: my wife can “byte,” “whyne,” and “skryke” (shriek), and he advises the male spectators: “Yee men that have wifis/ whyls thay ar yong/ If ye luf youre lifis/ chastice thare tong,” The Towneley Plays, Play 3, Noah and the Ark, ll. 230, 232, and 397–98. Sandy Bardsley notes that the Towneley and Chester Noahs “focus their aspersions on wives’ unruly speech. What is obnoxious about wives, therefore, is less their presence per se (which husbands desire) than their loudness and insubordination.” Bardsley, Venomous Tongues, 60. Finke, “Mystical Bodies and the Dialogics of Vision,” 35. Ibid. Ashton, The Generation of Identity, 127. Ibid. Ibid., 127–28.

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53. Windeatt, Chapters 61 and 62. 54. See BMK, 321: the note (regarding p. 148/28–29) proposes Melton as the preaching friar. 55. Windeatt, 188: “Then many people turned against her and were very glad that the good friar held against her. Then some men said that she had a devil within her, and they had said so many times before, but now they were bolder, for they thought that their opinion was much strengthened by this good friar.” 56. Susan Dickman, “Margery Kempe and the Continental Tradition of the Pious Woman,” The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984), 165 [150–68]. 57. Ibid. 58. Windeatt, 187–93, and 189. 59. Ibid., 189. 60. For example: Paul’s letter to the Corinthians (I Cor.14:34–35): “Let your women keep silence in the churches.” “For it is a shame for a woman to speak in the church.” Or, again, Paul to Timothy (I Tim. 2:12–15): “I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” 61. Wendy Harding, “Body into Text: The Book of Margery Kempe,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 186n18 [168–87]. 62. Ibid., citing Danielle Régnier-Bohler, 479. Harding’s translation of Régnier-Bohler’s conclusion more strongly points up the issue of female mysticism’s language distancing itself from clerical control than does the English version of Régnier-Bohler, “Voix littéraires, voix mystiques” in Histoire des femmes en occident: Le Moyen Age, ed. Christiane KlapischZuber, vol. II (Paris: Plon, 1991), 479. For the English version, see “Literary and Mystical Voices,” in A History of Women in the West, vol. II, 463 [427–82]. 63. Harding, “Body into Text,” 173. 64. Ibid., 173–74. 65. Donna Spivey Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 98. 66. Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh, 7. 67. Frank M. Napolitano, “Discursive Competition in the Towneley Crucifixion,” Studies in Philology 106.2 (2009): 170 [161–77]. (See also The Towneley Plays, Play 23, The Crucifixion, ll. 382–384). 68. The Towneley Plays, Play 23, The Crucifixion, l. 385, translation mine. 69. Napolitano, “Discursive Competition in the Towneley Crucifixion,” 171. John says, “For the sorow that I see/ Sherys myn harte in sonder,/ When that I se my master hang/ With bytter paynes and strang;” (ll. 455–58 Napolitano’s text) (ll. 418–21 on University of Michigan Towneley Plays site).

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70. The Little Office of the Virgin Mary—which speaks of her agony at the cross—“formed a kind of appendix to the Psalter, the prayer book normally used by the laity. Sometime during the thirteenth century it became detached and became a separate book: the Book of Hours.” The Marian Library/International Marian Research Institute Site: http://campus. udayton.edu/mary/resources/bkhours.html, accessed October 23, 2010. In turn, the Book of Hours typically had at its core the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The early fourteenth-century Hours of the Virgin, in Cambridge University Library MS Dd. 8.2, is filled with “historiated initial scenes from the life and Passion of Jesus.” Ellen M. Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 44. 71. Spivey Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul, 97n63. 72. Ibid., 97n64. Spivey Ellington references Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 222–23. 73. Ibid., 98. 74. Ibid. 75. Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 49–51. 76. Ibid., 50. 77. Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh, 174–75. 78. Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 75: “Kempe amasses the details and re-creates the dramas encircling three kinds of speech—mystical visions and communings, weepings, and cultural criticism, including prophesy.” 79. Ashton, The Generation of Identity, 103. 80. Ella Shohat, “The Struggle Over Representation: Casting, Coalitions, and the Politics of Identification,” in Late Imperial Culture, ed. Román de la Campa, E. Ann Kaplan, and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1995), 173 [166–78]. 81. Ashton, The Generation of Identity, 103. Ashton remarks that woman was perceived as “represent[ing] the border between body and soul, the fissure within which boundaries might be erased, for she especially was, even physically, open to corruption and concupiscence” (138). 82. Joyce E. Salisbury, “Gendered Sexuality,” in The Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 87 [81–102]. 83. Ibid.; Tertullian, “To His Wife,” in A Select Library of the Ante-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: Eardmans Publishing, 1951), 43. 84. Karma Lochrie, “The Language of Transgression: Body, Flesh, and Word in Mystical Discourse,” in Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. A. J. Frantzen (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 115–40, esp. 120–23 and 127.

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85. “I wold þow wer closyd in an hows of ston þat þer schold no man speke wyth þe.” BMK, 27. The exchange occurred during the famous interrogation scene at Lambeth by Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury. 86. Susan Francis Jarek-Glidden, “Conjoining Silence and Speech: The Textual Voice of Margery Kempe” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1994), 44, quoting Elizabeth Robertson, Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 40. The phrase “while men were confessors, bishops,” cited by JarekGlidden as belonging to the Robertson citation, appears to include pages beyond Robertson’s quote. See Robertson, 32–43. Apart from Theresa of Avilla and Catherine of Siena, women saints have been categorized by the Catholic Church according to the “virgin/virgin martyr or nonvirgin” status. Elizabeth Stuart, Spitting at Dragons: Towards a Feminist Theology of Sainthood (London: Mowbray, 1996), 17. 87. Kathleen Coyne Kelly, “Menaced Masculinity and Imperiled Virginity in the Morte Darthur,” in Menacing Virgins, ed. Coyne Kelly and Leslie, 102 [97–114]. “These two bodies are equated many times in patristic texts. For example, Jerome says that ‘no vessel of gold or silver was ever so dear to God as the temple of a virgin’s body’ ” (102). Coyne Kelly, 218n13, cites Jerome’s Letter XXII to Eustochium: “Neque enim aureum vas et argenteum tam carum Deo fuit, quam templum corporis virginalis.” From Select Letters of St. Jerome, ed. T. E. Page, E. Capps, and W. H. D. Rouse, trans. F. A. Wright [Cambridge: Harvard University Press/ Loeb Classical Library, 1933], 104–105). 88. Bremner, “Margery Kempe and the Critics,” 119. 89. Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography, 55. 90. Bremner, “Margery Kempe and the Critics,” 119. 91. Ibid., 119–20. 92. Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography, 75. 93. Winstead, “Decorous Lives: Saints and Consumers, 1400–1450,” in Virgin Martyrs, 112–46; and Ashton, “Articulating an Identity: Speech, Silence, and Self-Disclosure,” in The Generation of Identity, 12–13 and Chapter 3, 103–36. 94. Winstead, “Saints, Wives, and Other ‘Hooly Thynges,’ ” 153. 95. Meech and Allen, BMK, Hope Emily Allen’s Prefatory Note, lxv. 96. Ibid., lxv–lxvi. Herbert Thurston, “Margery the Astonishing,” The Month (November 1936), 452 [446–56]. 97. Ibid., lxv-lxvi. 98. While hundreds of books and articles ref lect a research that argues The Book of Margery Kempe to be a genuine account of a woman’s spiritual journey toward holiness, there are also books and articles in which these two charges linger despite their authors’ eagerness to critique Kempe fairly. Recent examples include the illuminating study by Mary Hardiman Farley, “Her Own Creature: Religion, Feminist Criticism and the Functional Eccentricity of Margery Kempe,” Exemplaria 11.1

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99. 100. 101.

102. 103. 104. 105.

106. 107. 108. 109.

110. 111. 112.

215

(1999): 1–21, which examines Kempe’s behavior in terms of the diagnostic criteria for Personality Disorders, and the exceptional, thorough study of conf licting narrative modes in saints’ lives (in The Book of Margery Kempe) by Helen Clare Taylor who notes that Kempe’s “image of the dovehouse full of holes as Christ’s body is full of wounds,” “suggests a deliberate echo [of Richard Rolle], rather than a casually remembered image” (96). Helen Clare Taylor, “Hagiography to Autobiography: Generic Conf lation in The Book of Margery Kempe” (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 1991), 96. For a broader scope of the book’s reception history, see Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 224–28; and Jennifer Lane, “Explaining Margery Kempe: A Review of the Literature,” http://fac.cgu.edu/~torjesek/matristics /kempereview.html, accessed April 3, 2007. Janet Wilson, “Margery and Alison: Women on Top,” in Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, 225 [223–37]. McEntire, introduction to Margery Kempe, xiv. Kathleen Ashley, “Historicizing Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe as Social Text,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28.2 (1998): 381 [371–88]. Laurie A. Finke, Women’s Writing in English: Medieval England (New York: Addison Wesley Longman Limited, 1999), 180. Taylor, “Hagiography to Autobiography,” introduction [no page number, 2nd page]. Ibid., 100. Claire Sponsler, “Drama and Piety: Margery Kempe,” in A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe, ed. John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis 141 [129–43]. Sponsler, “Drama and Piety,” 130. Sponsler’s essay includes valuable details about the vibrant theatrical traditions in the region, especially in Lynn. Ibid., 132. Ibid. Jarek-Glidden, “Conjoining Silence and Speech,” 26. See also pp. 132–33, concerning the confrontation with the Archbishop of York. Jarek-Glidden writes, “The resulting confrontation scenes, in which Kempe emerges as victor, must therefore be regarded at least in part as fictive accounts with the requisite literary license taken.” BMK, Chapter 55, 135; see also Windeatt, Chapter 55, 174. John C. Hirsch, The Revelations of Margery Kempe: Paramystical Practices in Late Medieval England (Leiden, NL: E. J. Brill, 1989), 45. Hirsch, The Revelations of Margery Kempe, believes that one of the confrontations (Kempe and the lawyers of Lincoln, 135/26–35) may be entirely fictive: “[t]here are reasons to doubt the veracity of this particular scene—for one thing it is a little too reminiscent of Christ in the Temple; for another men of the law do not traditionally admit shortcomings of whatever sort” (45).

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216 113. 114. 115. 116.

117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

122.

NOTES

Finke, “Mystical Bodies and the Dialogics of Vision,” 29. Ibid., quoting Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 354. Ibid., 30. Ashton, The Generation of Identity, 1, includes in her study of “medieval female hagiography produced by men during the period 1200–1500,” Mirk’s Festial, The Life of Saint Katherine of Alexandria, the Early SouthEnglish Legendary, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, and The Golden Legend. Brigitte Cazelles asserts that the hagiographic texts in her study are a “product of a predominately male discourse.” Brigitte Cazelles, The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 43. The predominately male-authored hagiographic tradition is a premise in Amy Hollywood’s insistence that scholars need to make a distinction between “male and male-defined understandings of women’s religiosity and women’s own texts” (88). See Amy Hollywood, “Suffering Transformed. Marguerite Porète, Meister Eckhart, and the Problem of Women’s Spirituality,” in Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York: Continuum, 1994), 88 [87–113]. Ashton, The Generation of Identity, 2. Ibid., 3. Harding, “Body into Text,” 168. Ashton, The Generation of Identity, 4. I have already offered arguments, above, to Staley’s view that “Margery” was a fictional persona created by an author bent upon a critique of her/ his culture, but a particular view proposed by my graduate student, Kate Haffey, is especially relevant here: “Margery’s relation, in the first few chapters, of her carnal desires and her later temptation with the genitals of clergy men become very interesting when we consider the fact that she was dictating this to a priest. To me, it is amazing that these conversations took place, but to suggest that a writer would sit down and create a woman who relates these images to a priest, is, I find, even less believable. Margery (a real Margery) as a vessel of God (or who thinks she is a vessel of God) would feel a need to relate her whole life, including that scene. An autonomous author creating a fictional character would have no such need and might think that he or she is risking the book not being published should such material be placed in it.” (Kate Haffey, English 204 Seminar: “Women, Money and Power,” M. C. Bodden, Marquette University, Fall 2003). Most frequently quoted is Jerome’s judgment: “As long as a woman is for birth and children, she is different from man as body is from soul. But when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman, and will be called a man.” Commentary on Ephesians II, Chapter 5 (cited in both Harding, “Body into Text,” 179, and Elizabeth Robertson, “Medieval Medical Views of Women

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NOTES

123.

124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

129. 130.

131.

132. 133. 134.

135. 136. 137.

138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146.

217

and Female Spirituality in the Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich’s Showings,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body, 148 [142–67]). Gregory of Nyssa’s account is found online at http://www.fordham. edu/halsall/basis/macrina.html#life, accessed January 18, 2010. See “Introduction” to his account. Robertson, “Medieval Medical Views of Women,” 149. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 154. Harding, “Body into Text,” 173. Jane L. Huenneke, “Groupies for Jesus: Sexual Freedom and Female Identity in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, and The Book of Margery Kempe,” Proceedings of the 11th Annual Northern Plains Conference on Early British Literature (Minot State University, Minot, ND, 2003), 128. Huenneke here cites Leslie A. Donovan, Women’s Saints’ Lives in Old English Prose (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 122. Huenneke, “Groupies for Jesus,” 131. Kathleen Ashley, “Historicizing Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe as Social Text,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28.2 (1998): 379 [371–88]. As “maidens dance now merrily in heaven,” Christ replies that “for as much as you are a maiden in your soul, I shall take you by the one hand in heaven and my mother by the other hand, and so shall you dance in heaven with other holy maidens and virgins.” Ashley, “Historicizing Margery,” 379. Ashton, The Generation of Identity, 5. Cristina Mazzoni, “Of Stockfish and Stew: Feasting and Fasting in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Food and Foodways: Explorations in the History and Culture of Human Nourishment 10 (2003): 177 [171–82]. Ibid., 172. Windeatt, Chapter 6, 52–53. Liz Herbert McAvoy, “ ‘aftyr hyr owyn tunge’: Body, Voice, and Authority in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Women’s Writing 9.2 (2002): 166 [159–76]. The text actually describes the wine as being in a pot, with a cup sent up alongside of it, but McAvoy’s construction of the scene as reminiscent of the cup of wine offered to Christ at Calvary is valid, nevertheless. Ibid., 166. Windeatt, 181. Ibid., 245. Mazzoni, “Of Stockfish and Stew,” 182. Ibid. Ibid. Windeatt, 288. Mazzoni, “Of Stockfish and Stew,” 182, emphasis mine. Ashton, The Generation of Identity, 12.

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218

NOTES

147. Petroff, Body and Soul, ix. 148. Ibid., 217, citing Finke, “Mystical Bodies and the Dialogics of Vision,” 44. 149. Ibid. Petroff ascribes this feature to three Continental saints: Marguerite d’Oingt (ca.1260–1310 CE), Angela of Foligno (1248–1309 CE), and Umiltà of Faenza (1226–1310 CE). 150. Ashton, The Generation of Identity, 11: “Heffernan [T. J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 16] identifies a pattern in hagiographical tales where the act of writing gathers up all the myths and stories surrounding its subjects, whether oral, eyewitness record, or previous, perhaps contradictory, versions of a fictional life, and offers a sanctioned authority which allows all to be brought back into a Christian paradigm.” As a result, it might be said that the subject’s “single-minded pursuit of virtue is to achieve union with Christ rather than to perfect self or character.” Ashton, The Generation of Identity, 11–12. 151. Petroff, Body and Soul, 214, also observes that Angela’s “focus on physicality seems to be reinforced by God himself when she joyfully recalls on her way home” that Christ said to her: “ ‘All your life, your eating and drinking, sleeping and all your living is pleasing to me.’ ” (translation Petroff, 214). 152. Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua to Marguerite Porete (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 215. 153. Ashley, “Historicizing Margery,” 374. 154. Ibid., 377.

Conclusion 1. Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 12. 2. Merchant’s Tale IV Envoy, 1184. 3. Wife of Bath’s Tale.

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INDEX

Page numbers in bold refer to figures. Abelard, Peter, 11, 149 n5, 219 Adam, 48–50, 51, 172 n54 Adam and Eve, 12–13, 45, 51, 53, 82, 154, 172 n54, n57, n59, n62, 231 advertising, 43 Aers, David, 122, 204 n103, 206–7 n6, 219, 221 agency (female), 2, 30, 36, 63, 64, 66, 68, 93, 95, 119, 144 Alain of Lille, 23, 159 n115 alehouses, 31–3, 36, 166 n210, 228 see also taverns Alford, John A., 151 n23, n26, 155 n64, 160 n125, 219, 222 allegory, 79, 81, 92, 94, 107–8, 112–13, 115–16, 184 n1, n2, 186 n11, 234 Allen, Hope Emily, 132, 210 n35, 214 n95, 222, 232 Allen, Keith, 152 n33, 219 Allen, Prudence, 175 n99 Allman, Wendy, 192 n2, 219 Alvarez-Cáccamo, Celso, 104, 107, 108–9, 196 n37, 197 n42, 200 n76, 77 Amtower, Laurel, 19, 157 n92, 219 Amussen, Susan, 2, 69, 147 n6, 181 n79, 219 Anderson, Earl R., 151 n22, 219 Angela of Foligno, 138, 139, 140, 218 n149

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Aquinas, Thomas, Saint, 13, 23, 154, 156, 220 Ardent, Raoul, 23, 159 n113, 220 Aristotle, 151, 152, 153, 241 Arnovick, Leslie K., 150 n10, 220 art, 13, 41–3, 48, 81, 82 see also iconography, visual language Arthur, Ross G., 151 n20, 220 Ashley, Kathleen, 137, 140, 189 n27, 215 n101, 217 n130, 132, 218 n153, 220, 226 Ashton, Gail, 130, 135, 208 n34, 211 n50, n51, n52, 213 n81, 214 n93, 216 n116, n117, n118, n120, 217 n133, n146, 218 n150, 220 Ashton, John, 69 Askew, Ann, 29 Atkinson, Clarissa W., 122, 206 n6, 209 n34, 220 Auer, Peter, 197 n42, n45, 219, 220, 239 Aussoppe, Mary, 34, 166 n217 Austin, J. L., 150 n12, 220 authority church’s, 122, 218 n150 cultural, 131, 180 n52, 194 n8 legal, 76, 183 n133 men’s, 33, 64, 93, 103, 209 n34 secular, 22, 26, 28, 39, 62, 94, 204 n103 women’s, 97, 131, 139, 212 n60

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246

IN DEX

Babel, Tower of, 12–13, 154 n50 Baika, Gabriella Ildiko, 158 n110, 159 n114, n116, n117, n124, 161 n141, n142, 220 Bailly, Herry (Host), 5, 97–100, 110, 114, 117, 118, 144 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 107, 108, 194 n9, 200 n71 ballads, 27, 28, 29, 31, 130, 165 n192, 228 Bardsley, Sandy, 1, 2, 27–9,147 n2, 148 n6, 149 n2, n3, 158 n107, n108,160 n130, n133, n134, 162, n151, n152, n157, n158, 163 n168, n173, 211 n47, 220, 244 Barons, Agnes, 62–4, 77–8, 94 Barthes, Roland, 171 n35, 221 Baudrillard, Jean, 41–2, 153 n48, 171 n49, 190 n44, 221 Beadle, Richard, 154 n55, 173 n76, 244 Beattie, Cordelia, 2, 148 n6, 221 Beckwith, Sarah, 122–3, 145, 205 n1, 206 n6, 207 n12, 14, 221 Bede, 48, 52 Pseudo-Bede, 52 Bell, Shannon, 204 n107, 221 Benedict, Saint, 53–4 Rule of St. Benedict, 159 n112 Benkler, Yochai, 124, 208 n28, 221 Bennett, H. S., 186 n11, 221 Bennett, Judith M., 2, 33, 147 n5, 165 n204, n208, 168 n5, 169 n8, 221, 233 Benson, Larry D., 155 n61, 189 n32, 221, 224, 229 Beonio-Brocchieri, Mariateresa Fumagalli, 206 n2, 221 Bermingham, Ann, 187 n20, 221 Bernard, Richard, 28, 163 n163, 221 Bestul, Thomas H., 204 n102, 221 Bhattacharji, Santha, 122, 207 n11, 222

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Bible, 39, 52, 105 n19, 151 n21, 174 n82, n83, n84, 222 Bible moralisée, 53 Holkham Bible, 13 Bickerton, Marjery, 61 birthing, 7, 34, 36 see also lying-in Blackstone, Mary, 184 n132, 222 blasphemy, 22–3, 25–6, 161 n135, n138, n139, n140, n142, 206 n6, 233, 236 Bloch, Howard, 11, 152 n34, 36, 222 Bloor, David, 154 n49, 222 Blythe, Joan Heiges, 24, 159 n125, 222 Boccaccio, 103, 189 n36, 195 n12, 13, 196 n22, 227 Bodden, M. C., 204 n100, n104, 222 body, the Griselda’s, 114 Margaret Knowsley’s, 59 Margery Kempe’s, 5, 121, 126, 127, 128, 135–9, 207 n6, 212 n61, n63, n64, 216 n119, n122, 217 n127, n137, 230, 239 serpent’s body, 46 woman’s body, 30, 59, 82, 83, 88, 122, 125, 130, 136, 137, 139, 206 n3, n6, 211 n46, 213 n81, 235 woman/serpent’s body, 47, 48 Bonaventure, Saint, 48, 173 n64 Bonefant, Margaret, 65–7, 77, 180 n53, 59 Bonnell, J. K., 48, 52, 172 n55, 173 n66, 174 n81, 85, 222 Boose, Lynda E., 27, 162 n155, 222 Bourdieu, Pierre, 183 n123, 222 Braddick, Michael J., 179 n51, 180 n52, 223 Bradwall, Ellen, 61 Braithwaite, Richard, 158 n105, 178 n34, 223 Brandes, Stanley, 54–5, 176 n104, 223 Bremner, Eluned, 122, 131, 205 n1, 206 n6, 214 n88, n90, 223

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IN DEX

Bridget of Sweden, 130, 133, 139 Brink, Andre, 171 n34, 223 Brown, Mary, 61 Brown, Pamela Allen, 2, 30, 147 n6, 164 n184, 223 Brown, Penelope, 76, 183 n130, 223 Brueggemann, Walter, 149 n8, 223 Brundage, James A., 40, 169 n16, 170 n19, n21, n26, 193 n6, 213 n82, 223, 240 Bryan, Luke, 30, 164 n180 Bucholtz, Mary, 106, 110, 196 n37, 199 n67, 201 n87, 89, 94, 202 n95, 223 Buridan, John, 12, 153 n44, 244 Burns, E. Jane, 148 n7, 223 Bynum, Carolyn, 158 n111, 159 n112, 223 Cabell, Mr, 63 Cady, Diane, 10, 151 n25, 26, 223 Campbell, Emma, 103, 196 n36, 223 canon law, 39, 54, 125, 193 n6, 233 Capp, Bernard, 70, 147 n1, n6, 165 n197, n199, n201, 177 n13, 178 n31, 181 n83, n84, 223, 224 Caroles, Ellen, 60 Casagrande, Carla, 168 n3, 224 Castiglione, 18 Catherine of Sienna, Saint, 138 Cavallaro, Dani, 89, 190 n45, 224 Cazelles, Brigitte, 216 n116, 224 celibacy, 39–40, 43, 46, 54, 55, 136, 143, 170 n20 censorship of speech, 3, 112, 117 Chance, Jane, 87, 186 n6, 224 chastity, 40, 64, 84, 98–9, 130–1, 137, 168 n4 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 5, 11, 14, 15, 18–21, 25–6, 97, 100–103, 106, 112,114–16, 149 n7, 151 n26, 155 n58, n61, 156 n67, n70, 157 n88, n89, n93, 158 n99, 169 n128, 161 n145, 167 n2, 186 n10, n11, 192 n4,

9780230618763_12_ind.indd 247

247

194 n8, 196 n22, n29, 199 n56, n66, 200 n73, 202 n98, 202 n97, 204 n103, n105, 205 n112, 222, 224, 225, 228, 229, 230, 233–9, 241, 242, 244 Chaunticleer, 16 Cheers, 43, 172 n50, 227 Chester see mystery cycle plays town of, 33, 35, 59, 148–9 n2, 177 n15 Cheyney, Edward P., 210 n36, 224 Cholmondeley, Sir Robert, 59 Christianity, 11, 39, 169 n 13, 244 Clark, Alice, 61 Clark, Herbert H., 177 n8, 224 Clark, Stephen R. L., 151 n24, 224 Classen, Albrecht, 123, 127, 207 n15, 211 n41, 44, 224 Cleaver, Robert, 158 n104, 178 n34, 224, 226 Clergy, 31, 40, 52, 53, 170 n20, 193 n5, 6, 216 n121 Clerk (General Prologue and Clerk’s Tale), 5, 64, 97–100, 101, 103–106, 108–109, 111–19, 144, 192 n4, n8, 204 n103 clerks, 26, 58, 70, 98, 117, 128, 192 n4 Cliff, Michelle, 188 n26, 224 Clifford, Anne, 29, 94 Clowes, Dorothy, 61 code-switching, 5, 97, 100, 104–108, 116, 196 n37, 197 n42, n45, 198 n47, n54, 200 n76, n79, n80, 219, 220, 229, 239 Colish, Marcia, 13, 152 n35, 154 n51, 224 Collins, Robert, 70–5, 181 n89, 182 n94, 111, 113, 116, 117 Collinson, Patrick, 61, 178 n27, 224 Comestor, Peter, 52 conduct literature and manuals, 30, 61, 93, 97, 109, 112, 113, 125, 130, 189 n27, 211 n47, 226 conversation see women, conversation of

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248

IN DEX

Cooper, Helen, 200 n73, 203 n98, 225 Copeland, Rita, 101–2, 195 n15, 16, 18, 19, 225 Cotes, Mrs Anne, 66–7 Coulton, G. G., 210 n36, 225 Coupland, Nikolas, 105, 110, 196 n37, 197 n43, 198 n49, 200 n67, 201 n88, 202 n96, 220, 225 courtly courtly love, 4, 40, 80, 85, 87–91, 93–5, 186 n9, 188 n27, 189 n32, n34, 221, 228, 235 courtly romance, 48 Coyne Kelly, Kathleen, 130, 170 n16, 214 n87, 225 Craun, Edwin D., 159 n118, n123, 160 n126, n129, n133, 225 Crawford, Patricia, 2, 38, 148 n6, 166 n215, 179 n38, n46, n48, 180 n53, n56, 225, 235 Cressy, David, 2, 147 n6, 166 n210, n219, 167 n231, 225 crime, 26–7, 39, 148 n2, 161 n140, 178 n33, 193 n6 Criseyde, 102 Cristaudo, Wayne, 150 n17, 225 Cummings, Brian, 150 n13, 225 Cutler, Cecelia, 106, 196 n37, 197 n40, 199 n58, n60, n61, n62, n67, 226 d’Oignies, Marie, 128, 139 d’Orleans, Friar Lorens, 24, 160 n127, 161 n145, 222 Dalarun, Jacques, 170 n20, n30, n32, 226 Dame, Belle, 93, 186 n7 Dante Alighieri, 23, 37, 149 n9, 150 n9, 151 n26, 159 n115, 167 n1, 219, 226, 228, 235 Darth Vader, 42–3, 171 n43 Davidoff, Judith M., 84, 87, 185 n3, 189 n29, 30, 35, 226 Davies, Anne, 61 Davies, Bronwyn, 191 n65, 226

9780230618763_12_ind.indd 248

Davies, Reginald Thorne, 188 n24, 226 defamation, 27, 58, 60–2, 147 n6, 148 n2, 184 n144, 210 n36, 240 Dekker, Thomas, 30, 149 n4, 163 n159 Delany, Sheila, 205 n1, 226 Deleuze, Gilles, 89, 157 n79, 188 n26, 190 n43, 191 n74, 226, 230 Delves, Sir Thomas, 59 de Meun, Jean, 23, 82, 228 depositions, 1–4, 57–8, 61–5, 70–1, 75–6, 129, 144, 177 n5, 178 n32, 179 n48, 180 n53, n59, n66, 184 n132, 222 see also testimony Derrida, Jacques, 54 de Word, Wynken, 132 Dickman, Susan, 128, 212 n56, 226 Dighton, Ann, 68–70, 78, 180 n66, 67, 72, 181 n80 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 103, 122, 123, 196 n31, 207 n6, 7, 18, 226 Disneyland, 43, 89, 171 n49 Dod, John, 158 n104, 178 n34, 226 Done, Mr, 62–4, 77 Donnelly, Colleen, 87, 91–2, 185 n3, 191 n56, 57, 59, 60, 226 Drach, Peter, 48 dream vision poetry, 18–19, 81, 85, 92–3, 185 n3, 186 n11, 189 n30, 226, 241 Dronke, Peter, 158 n115, 218 n152, 226 Dronzek, Anna, 188 n27, 226 Duara, Prasenjit, 47, 172 n59, 227 Duggan, Charles, 175 n93, 227 Dunbar, William, 84, 188 n25, 227 Elynour Rummyng, 33, 165 n209, 241 Epicureus, 10, 151 n24 Erasmus, Desiderius, 149 n5, 194 n8, 227 Eruigena, Scotus, 12, 229

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IN DEX

ethnocentrism, 105, 125–7, 135, 208 n33 Evans, Ruth, 87, 101, 195 n11, n14, 205 n1, 206 n5, 226, 227, 238 Eve, 13, 45, 46–9, 51, 53, 82, 96, 143, 172 n54, n57, n58, n62, 173 n72, 191 n64, 231 Eve’s hair, 47–8, 53 see also Adam and Eve Fall, the (of Humankind), 4, 10, 12–13, 46–7, 49, 51, 80, 144, 154 n50, 191 n64 Fame (House of Fame), 19–20 Farley, Mary Hardiman, 214 n98, 227 Farmer, Sharon, 175 n92, 227 Fenster, Thelma, 147 n4, 148 n1, 220, 227 Finke, Laurie A., 122, 133, 134, 206 n6, 211 n48, 215 n102, 216 n113, 218 n148, 227 Finlayson, John, 101, 195 n13, 227 Fletcher, Anthony, 30, 162 n151, 164 n183, 165 n200, 227, 243 f loating signifiers, 41–3, 45, 171 n36, 227 Flores, Nona C., 172 n61, 173 n67, n68, n69, 174 n83, 227 Forni, Kathleen, 188 n27, 189 n34, 190 n54, 228 Foucault, Michel, 39, 54, 81, 116, 169 n13, 170 n17, 187 n15, 204 n101, 205 n109, 228, 238 Fox, Thomas, 169 n13, 228 Foyster Elizabeth A., 177 n10, 228 Fraser, Bruce, 75, 183 n122, 228 Freeborn, Dennis, 154 n53, 228 Friar John (Summoner’s Tale), 20–1 friars, 11, 20–1, 128, 139, 212 n54, n55 Friel, Brian, 16, 156 n74, n75, 234, 237 friends (community of ), 34–5, 59, 65–7, 129, 179 n50 Frith, Valerie, 177 n6, 235

9780230618763_12_ind.indd 249

249

Froide, Amy M., 61, 168 n5, 178 n26, 221, 228 frozen words, 17 Frugoni, Chiara, 169 n10, 172 n51, n52, n53, 173 n63, 174 n89, n90, 175 n92, n94, n95, n96, n97, n98, 228 Fumerton, Patricia, 165 n192, n196, 228 Fyler, John, 12–13, 151 n26, 154 n50, n56, 228 Gallagher, Catherine, 38, 169 n11, 228 gardens garden of delight, courtly love, 4, 43, 80–94, 96, 144, 187 n14, n18, n20, 188 n21, n22, 189 n28, n29, 231, 234, 242, 243 garden of Eden, 4, 47, 52, 80–3, 88–9, 96, 172 n57, 187 n18, n19, 188 n22, 234, 239, 242 Garnet, Oliver, 31 Geffrey, Annie, 62 Genesis, 46, 52, 143, 151 n21, 169 n13 Gerrig, Richard J., 177 n8, 224 Gersh, Stephen, 153 n43, 229 Gibson, Gail McMurray, 129, 213 n75, 229 Giles, Howard, 105, 198 n54, 229 Ginsberg, Warren S., 192 n4, 202 n97, 204 n105, 229 glosing, 49, 173 n74 Goldman, Robert, 171 n45, n46, n47, n48, 229 Goltzius, Hendrik, 47, 172 n62 Gordon, Elizabeth, 196 n37, 198 n47, n48, 229 gossip, 1, 29, 61, 77, 147 n3, 150 n11, 177 n14, 230, 238, 241 Gould, Stephen Jay, 17, 157 n78, 229 Gower, John, 9, 11, 13, 149 n5, 150 n19, 155 n57, 156 n70, 160 n128, 161 n145, 229, 244

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250

IN DEX

Gowing, Laura, 2, 30, 65, 147–8 n6, 164 n180, n182, 177 n9, 178 n30, 179 n48, n49, n50, 180 n53, n56, n60, n64, 181 n77, n85, 184 n133, 225, 229 Graddol, David, 196 n37 Green, Richard Firth, 189 n34, 229 Gregory of Nyssa, Saint, 135–6, 149 n5, 217 n123 Griselda (Clerk’s Tale), 97, 99–101, 103, 112–16, 117, 144, 195 n13, 196 n36, 202–3 n98, 203 n99, 204 n103, 223, 236 Grudin, Michaela Paasche, 8, 149 n7, 229 Gründel, Johannes, 23 Guattari Félix, 157 n79, 191 n74, 230 Guynn, Noah D., 200 n74, n75, 229 Hackel, Heidi Brayman, 158 n106, 229 hagiography, 5, 107–9, 113, 116, 118, 121, 126–7, 135, 138, 140–1, 203 n98, 208–9 n34, 215 n98, n103, 216 n116, 220, 242 Hallissy, Margaret, 170 n28, 230 Hanawalt, Barbara A., 168 n5, 230 Harding, Wendy, 135, 136, 212 n61, n62, n63, 216 n119, n122, 217 n127, 230 Harré, Rom, 191 n65, 226, 230 Harris, Humphrey, 62 Harris, Roxy, 104–105, 107, 197 n38, 199 n55, 230 Harvey, Elizabeth D., 194 n8, 230 Harwood, Britton J., 18, 21, 157 n88, n89, 158 n99, 230 Helling, I., 94, 191 n65, 230 Henderson, Katherine Usher, 196 n24, 230 Henry, Avril, 173 n70, n75, 230 heresy, 22–5, 161 n135, 207 n10 Herrad of Hohenbourg, xiii, 43, 44 Hess, Natalie, 196 n37 heteroglossia, 104, 200

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Hewes, Joan, 30, 164 n180 Hewitt, Roger, 104, 105, 197 n39, 198 n53, 230 Hill, Ann, 68 Hill, Robert, 35 Hindle, Steve, 177 n14, n16, n19, 178 n22, n23, n24, n25, 230 Hirsch, John C., 215 n111, n112, 231 Hirschkop, Ken, 200 n60, n70, n71, n72, 231 Historia scholastica, 52 Hoffeld, Jeffrey M., 172 n55, 231 Hollywood, Amy, 206 n6, 216 n116, 231 Hoogestraat, Jane, 155 n62, 244 “hue and cry,” 27, 162 n158 Huenneke, Jane L., 217 n128, n129, 231 Hugh of St. Victor, 23, 159 n112 hyperreality, 12, 43, 51, 89–90, 153 n48, 171 n49 iconography, 41, 46, 51–3, 172 n61, 187 n18, 227, 239 see also art, visual language (under language) imagined woman, the, 3, 4, 38–9, 41, 43, 46, 53, 54, 55, 143, 169 n10, 172 n51, 173 n63, 174 n89, 175 n92, n94, 228 Inferno, 37, 167 n1 Ingram, Martin, 2, 64, 70, 147 n6, 179 n43, 181 n86, n87, n88, 231 insolubles, 12, 153 n47 interrogatories, 58 Irvine, Martin, 19, 157 n90, n91, 231 Jameson, Frederic, 42, 171 n42, n44, 231 Jarrek-Glidden, Susan Francis, 214 n86, 215 n109, 231 Jaworski, Adam, 105, 196 n37, 198 n49, 225 Jenstad, Janelle, 166 n211, 167 n226, 231

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IN DEX

Jerome, Stephen, 58–61, 78, 177 n14 Joan of Arc, Saint, 25 John of Salisbury, 9–11, 150 n19, 152 n27, n31, n32, 232 Johnson, Lesley, 87, 205 n1, 226 Johnson, Mark, 179 n45, 233 Johnson, Matthew, 83, 187 n20, 232 Jones, Karen, 27, 28, 162 n153, n154, 163 n169, n172, n174, 232 Jones, Malcolm, 28, 163 n170, n171, 232 Jonson, Ben, 30, 35, 149 n4, 163 n159 Julian of Norwich, Saint, 133, 136, 138, 206 n3, 217 n128, 235 Kamensky, Jane, 28, 149 n6, 162 n150, 163 n161, 164 n177, 232 Kaplan, Caren, 188 n26, 232 Karras, Ruth Mazo, 39–40, 170 n22, n23, n24, n25, 232 Kelly, Henry Ansgar, 46, 172 n55, n56, 173 n64, 232 Kempe, Margery, 3, 5, 25, 29, 94, 121–40, 145, 205 n1, 206 n3, n6, 207 n7, n8, n15, n17, n18, n19, 208 n23, 209 n34, n35, 211 n37, n42, 212 n56, n61, n66, 213 n77, n78, 214 n86, n88, n90, n98, 215 n99, n100, n101, n105, n109, n111, n112, 217 n128, n130, n134, n137, 220, 221, 222, 223, 226, 227, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 237, 238, 241, 242, 244 Kent, 27, 29, 162 n153, 163 n169, 232 Kermode, Jenny, 184 n133, 229 Kinch, Asby, 186 n7, 232 Kitch, Aaron, 184 n142, 233 Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, 168 n3, 170 n27, n31, 212 n62, 224, 226, 228, 233 Knowles, David, 126, 211 n39, 233 Knowles, Margery, 29

9780230618763_12_ind.indd 251

251

Knowsley, Margaret, 59–62, 78, 94, 177 n14, n15, n16, n17, 178 n19, n22, 230 Kowaleski, Maryanne, 2, 148 n6, 169 n8, 233 The Ladder of Virtues, 43–4, 44 Laeuchli, Samuel, 193 n6, 233 Langland, William, 9, 79, 155 n65, 174 n87, 186 n10, 233 language visual language , 41, 43, 48, 143 see also art, iconography language-crossing, 100, 104–7, 111, 197 n45, 198 n51, n53, 199 n57, 239 Lanyer, Aemilia, 191 n64, 236 Lawton, David, 26, 122, 161 n138, 206 n6, 233 Leap, William L., 104, 201 n85, 233 LeBihan, Jill, 211 n38, 229 Le Goff, Jacques, 169 n13, n15, 170 n16, 233 Le Mystère d’Adam, 46 Lerer, Seth, 103, 196 n29, n30, 233 Leslie, Marina, 170 n16, 225 Levinson, Stephen, 170 n130, 223 Levy, Leonard W., 161 n139, 233 Lewis, C. S., 79, 184 n1, 234 Lewis, Katherine J., 123–4, 206 n6, 208 n23, 234, 244 Lilith, 172 n54, n55, 231 Lindorfer, Bettina, 21, 23, 26, 158 n100, 159 n119, 161 n143, 234 lineage honor, 55 Livy, 103 Lochrie, Karma, 122, 123, 129, 130, 207 n6, n19, 212 n66, 213 n77, n84, 215 n98, 234 Loiaulte, Lady, 81, 90, 92 Lorens, Friar see d’Orleans, Friar Lorens Lucas Cranach the Elder, 47 Lutwin, 47, 172 n60 Lydgate, John, 22, 93, 158 n103, 185 n3, 234

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252

IN DEX

lying-in, 31, 34–6, 167 n235 see also birthing Lyotard, Jean-François, 54 MacCracken, Henry Noble, 158 n103, 234 MacDonald, Michael, 166 n212, n 217, 234 MacDougall, Elisabeth B., 83, 187 n18, 188 n22, 234 Macrina, 135–6 Madonna (Madonna Louise Ciccone), 41–2, 171 n38, n39, n41, 235 Magdalene, Mary, 50, 129 Magnusson, Lynne, 75, 183 n124, 234 Manhire, Bill, 105, 196 n37, 198 n47 Mann, Jill, 192 n4, 234 Mannyng, Robert, 9, 149 n5, 150 n11 Marshall, Simone Celine, 87, 185 n3, 186 n10, 234 Martin, A. Lynn, 31, 165 n189, n190, 234 Mary (Virgin), 53, 83, 99, 115, 129, 132, 137, 212 n65, 213 n70, 227 Matlock, Wendy A., 91, 95, 190 n49, 191 n55, n58, n73, 234 Mattingly, Terry, 41, 171 n38, n39, 235 maze, 84–8, 90, 93, 189 n29, n30, n36, n40, 190 n52, 242 Mazzeo, Joseph Anthony, 149 n9, 235 Mazzio, Carla, 164 n178, 235 Mazzoni, Cristina, 137–8, 217 n134, n141, n145, 235 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 150 n9, 235 McAvoy, Liz Herbert, 122, 206 n3, n6, 211 n46, 217 n137, 235 McClure, Laura, 104, 198 n46, 235 McDonald, Nicola F., 186 n8, 235 McEntire, Sandra J., 122, 123, 205 n1, 206–7 n6, 207 n17, 215 n100, 223, 244 McIntosh, Marjorie, 27, 162 n153 McLuskie, Kathleen, 167 n224, 178 n29, 235

9780230618763_12_ind.indd 252

McManus, Barbara F., 196 n24, 230 McMillan, Ann, 87, 187 n16, 189 n38, 235 Meale, Carol M., 81, 87, 189 n39, 235 Meech, Sanford Brown, 210 n35, 214 n95, n96, n97, 222 Melton, Friar William, 128, 212 n54 Mendelson, Sara Heller, 2, 148 n6, 177 n6, 178 n32, n33, n35, 179 n42, n46, n50, 235 Michel, Dan, 24 Michelangelo, 47 Middleton, Thomas, 29, 30, 149 n4, 167 n224, n225, 184 n142, 233, 235 Mills, Elizabeth, 62 Milton, John, 51, 174 n79 Moi, Toril, 103 monks, 9, 23, 39, 40, 46, 54, 128, 130, 135, 139, 152 n33, 170 n20 Moore, Sean T., 181 n76, 236 Morrante, Mary, 67–70, 77–8 Morse, Charlotte C., 202 n97, n98, 203 n99, 236 Muldrew, Craig, 77, 184 n138, n143, 236 Murphy, Kim, 161 n140, 236 Musson, Anthony, 2, 147 n6, 236 Mystery Plays Chester Cycle mystery cycle plays, 9, 13–15, 16, 32, 52,150 n18, 155 n59, 172 n58, 174 n88, 211 n47, 224 N-Town Cycle, 14, 155 n60, 237 Towneley Cycle (Wakefield), 211 n47, 212 n67, n68, n69, 237 York Cycle, 13, 16, 49, 154 n53, n55, 244 mysticism, 122–3, 126–9, 139, 205 n1, 206 n2, n6, 207 n15, 209 n34, 212 n62, 221, 231, 238 Nadelson, Leslee, 54–5, 176 n104, 236 Nantwich, 58–9, 61, 149 n2, 177 n14

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IN DEX

Napolitano, Frank M., 129, 212 n67, n69, 237 Nayler, James, 161 n139 Nealon, Jeffrey T., 90, 190 n47, 237 Neuburger, Verena E., 127, 211 n42, 237 Neville, Cynthia J., 2, 147 n6, 237 Newhauser, Richard, 159 n122, 160 n125, 222, 237 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 17, 107, 156 n75, n76, 237 Ochs, Elinor, 110, 201 n93, 237 Ockham, William of, 12, 153 n45, 224 Ortner, Sherry B., 54, 175 n100, n101, 176 n102, n103, n104, n105, 237 Ovid, 190 n41, 237 Owst, Gerald R. (G. R.), 40, 160 n134, 170 n29, 237 Pandarus, 102 Pantagruel, 17–18 Paston, John, II, 35 Paston, Margery, 29 patriarchy, 34, 131, 168 n5, 181 n76, 193 n6, 231 Paul, Saint (the apostle), 50, 53, 154 n52, 160 n135, 169 n13, 170 n16, 212 n60 Payer, Pierre J., 168 n4, 193 n6, 238 Pearsall, Derek (D. A.), 87, 185 n4, 186 n11, 191 n70, 228, 238 Pentecost, 13, 155 n58, 233, 237 Peraldus, William, 24, 160 n127, 222 Perseveraunce (The Assembly of Ladies), 90–2 Peter, Saint (the apostle), 50, 160 n135 petitions, 3, 4, 57–62, 76, 81, 90–2, 94–5, 177 n15, n17 Petrarch, 97, 100–1, 103, 113, 117, 192 n2, 195 n12, n13, 202 n97, n98, 203 n99, 227, 236

9780230618763_12_ind.indd 253

253

Petroff, Elizabeth Alvilda, 209 n34, 218 n147, n148, n149, n151, 238 Philipsen, Gerry, 104, 109–10, 197 n44, 201 n83, 238 Phillips, Kendall R., 191–2 n74, 238 Phillips, Kim M., 2, 147 n6, 206 n5, 238 Phillips, Susan E., 150 n11, 164 n185, n187, 166 n220, 238 Plato, 9, 151 n23 Platter, Thomas, 32, 165 n195, 243 Plowman, Piers, 16, 52, 79, 155 n64, n65, 159 n125, 174 n87, 186 n10, 219, 222, 233, 241 Plutarch, 18, 157 n85, 238 Policraticus, 151 n19, 232 Pollock, Griselda, 204 n101, 238 Pollock, Linda A., 34, 166 n213, n215, n216, 239 Powell, Alice, 59, 61 Power, Eileen, 168 n5, 238 Priscian (Priscianus Caesariensis, grammarian), 19, 157 n90 Quinn, William A., 19, 20, 157 n93, 158 n95, 239 Rabelais, Francois, 17–18, 157 n80, 239 Rampton, Ben, 104, 105, 107, 197 n38, n45, 198 n51, n53, 199 n55, n57, 230, 239 Régnier-Bohler, Danielle, 128, 212 n62 Renevey, Denis, 122, 207 n6, 239 Reyna, Valerie F., 157 n77, 239 Rich, Adrienne, 35, 167 n227 Richardson, Samuel, 140 rime royal, 100, 102, 195 n21 Robbins, Rossell Hope, 93, 191 n63, 239 Roberts, Alexander, 28, 163 n165, 239

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254

IN DEX

Robertson, Elizabeth, 214 n86, 216 n122, 217 n124, n125, n126, 239 Robertson, Stephen, 177 n4, 239 Rogers, Daniel, 22, 158 n106 Rogers, Thomas, 30, 164 n182 Roos, Sir Richard, 93, 185 n3, 186 n7, 195 n21, 240 Rorty, Richard, 125, 208 n31, 239 Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen, 9, 36, 150 n14, n17, 225, 240, 242 Ross, Ellen M., 206 n2, 213 n70, 240 Rowell, Audrey, 62, 77 Rowlands, Samuel, 32 Rowley, William, 28, 163 n162 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 193 n6, 240 Rumor (House of Fame), 18–19 Ryan, Marcella, 205 n110, 242 Ryle, Gilbert, 12, 154 n49 St. Amour, William, 20 St. Clair, Robert N., 198 n54, 229 Salih, Sarah, 122, 206 n4, n5, 207 n6, 238, 240 Salisbury, Joyce E., 130, 213 n82, 240 Sampson, Geoffrey, 12, 153 n46, 240 Scanlon, Larry, 27, 160 n132, 162 n147, 240 Schutte, Anne Jacobson, 298 n34, 240 Schwartz, Alvin, 18, 157 n86, 240 scold(s), 21, 27–30, 147–8 n6, 162 n151, n155, 222, 238, 243 scolding, 1, 27–30, 76, 148–9 n2, 160 n133, n134, 162 n153, n155, 163 n173, 220, 222 scold’s brace, 148–9 n2 Scott, James C., 65–6, 180 n52 serpent as Devil in scripture, 4, 45, 46–8, 51–3, 172 n55, n56, 173 n64, 232 as sexualized, 3–4, 45, 46–8, 51–3, 172 n55, 173 n66, 174 n81, n86, 222, 227

9780230618763_12_ind.indd 254

Severs, J. Burke, 191 n63, 195 n10, 203 n98, 239, 240 Sharpe, J. A. (Sharpe, James), 2, 77, 147 n6, 176 n1, 184 n134, n135, n141, n144, n145, 240 Sheldrake, Philip, 159 n112, 241 Sherman, Anne, 69 Shklar, Ruth, 122, 207 n8, n13, 241 Shohat, Ella, 130, 213 n80, 241 silence glorification of, 5, 22–3, 110, 112, 126, 158 n106, 159 n112, 209 n34, 212 n60, 214 n93, 229 in the Clerk’s Tale, 97–100, 111–12, 114–19 Simon, Sherry, 101, 195 n17, 196 n28, 241 simulacra, 42, 190 n44, 221 sins of the tongue, 1, 3, 8, 21–4, 127, 159 n125, 164 n178, 222, 235 see also blasphemy, defamation, glosing, gossip, heresy, scolding, see scold(s), scolding, slander Skeat, Walter W. (W. W.), 185 n3, 186 n11, 241 Skelton, John, 33, 165 n209, 241 slander, 1, 24, 31, 58, 61, 147 n6, 159 n118, 163 n175, 176 n1, 184 n133, n144, 225, 229, 240 Smail, Daniel Lord, 147 n4, 148 n1, 220, 227 Smith, Sidonie, 131, 213 n78, 214 n89, n92, 241 Sneyd, Charlotte Augusta, 165 n191, 241 Socrates, 10, 151 n22, n23 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 1, 147 n3, 241 Spade, Paul Vincent, 153 n45, n47, 224, 241 Spearing, A. C., 186 n11, 241 Speculum Humanae Salvationis (A Medieval Mirror), 13, 47–8, 52, 173 n65, n68, n75, 230

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IN DEX

speech as deviant, 1, 9, 159 n123 as mystique, 3, 8, 17, 19–21, 25–6, 36, 143 as power, 3–4, 8–9, 15, 18, 23–4, 26–7, 29, 36, 143 as uncontrollable/ transgressive, 3–4, 8, 21–5, 36, 125, 143, 158 n110, 211 n47, 220 as unreliable (unreliability of ), 3, 7–9, 15, 17, 21, 143 controlling of women’s speech, 7, 23, 25–6, 29 criminalization, criminalizing of, 3–4, 7, 21–2, 26, 162 n158 women’s speech (see also talk, talking), 1–5, 7–8, 21, 23, 25, 27–30, 36–8, 46, 49–52, 57, 84, 94, 97, 102, 112, 116–19, 121, 124–7, 131–2, 138, 141, 143–6, 162 n158, 164 n182, 170 n18, 198 n46, 199 n66, 201 n85, 211 n47, 231, 235, 239 speech act, 7, 9, 21, 69, 75, 146, 150 n9, n12, 156 n75, 237 speech codes, 104, 109–11, 197 n44, 201 n83, n86, 238 speech practices female speech practices, 104, 111, 119, 201 n85, 239 male speech practices/talk, 7, 22, 109–10 Spivey Ellington, Donna, 129, 212 n65, 213 n71, n72 Sponsler, Claire, 134, 215 n105, 241 Staley, Lynn, 114, 122, 204 n103, 207 n6, 209 n34, 209–10 n35, 216 n121, 219, 220, 242 Star Chamber, The, xvii, 73, 76, 181 n89, 184 n132, 222 Stavreva, Kirilka, 27, 162 n148, 242 Steiner, George, 15–16, 155 n63, 156 n71, n74, n75, 234, 242 Stephens, John (f. 1615), 29, 164 n179

9780230618763_12_ind.indd 255

255

Stephens, John, 87, 189 n36, n37, 191 n68, 205 n110, 242 Stone, Brian, 187 n112, n13, 242 Stretton, Tim, 2, 147 n6, 178 n28, 242 Strohm, Paul, 150 n11, 151 n25, 194 n8, 223, 238, 242 Sugano, Douglas, 155 n60, 237 Sullivan, Rachel, 189 n40, 242 Swan, Joan, 196 n37 Szittya, Penn R., 158 n97, 242 talk, talking (women), (see also speech), 22, 24, 30, 35–6, 57, 61, 148 n7, 150 n11, 164 n182, 211 n47, 223 taverns, 25, 31–2, 34, 71, 72, 165 n197, 166 n210 see also alehouses Taylor, Carole Anne, 91, 190 n53, 242 testimony, 23, 62, 67, 69–70, 75–6, 95, 179 n50 Thomas (Summoner’s Tale), 20 Thompson, John B., 208 n29, 243 Thurston, Herbert, 132, 214 n96, 243 tongue, women’s, 27–30, 118, 145, 164 n182, 210 n36 translation (as interpretive and political act), 16, 100–3, 155 n63, 156 n71, n74, n75, 195 n11, n15, n16, n17, n18, 196 n22, n28, n36, 208 n27, 223, 225, 227, 237, 241, 242 Travis, Peter W., 158 n98, 243 Treharne, Elaine, 106, 196 n23, 199 n66, 243 Troilus (Troilus and Criseyde), 102 Turner, David, 61, 178 n26, 228 Tutivillus, 29, 164 n176, 224, 231 Underdown, David, 162 n151, 179 n39, 243 vainglory, 49 Van den Abeele, Andries, 84, 189 n28, 243

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256

IN DEX

Vaux, Ambrose, 71, 76, 183 n131, 184 n132 Vaux, Lady Elizabeth, 29, 70–4, 76, 181 n89, 182 n91, n107, n109, n111, n 112, n 113, n115, n117, 184 n132, 222 violence, 65, 67–70, 73–4, 77, 78, 84, 110, 112–14, 116, 118, 145, 181 n76, n77, n79, 204 n100, n104, 207 n15, 222, 224, 236 virginity, 29, 40, 83, 135, 137, 170 n16, 206 n4, 207 n6, 214 n87, 225, 240 voices female, 185 n3, 186 n10, 234 mystical, 117, 122–3, 134, 136, 212 n62 power of woman’s voice, 186 n7, 207 n15, 211 n41, n44, 224, 234 women’s, 2, 58, 92, 100, 102, 112, 117, 122, 127, 131, 134, 139, 143–4, 148 n6, 177 n6, 187 n16, 189 n39, 194 n8, 195 n21, 206 n6, 207 n15, 211 n41, n44, 217 n137, 224, 231, 233, 235 Wack, Mary, 33, 35, 165 n202, n207, 167 n228, 243 Wages, Sara M., 83, 188 n21, 243 Waldstreicher, David, 149 n6, 243 Walker, Garthine, 2, 28, 69, 147 n6, 148–9 n2, 163 n166, 180 n73, 181 n78, 182 n102, n108, 184 n133, n143, 229, 243 Walker, Sue Sheridan, 147 n6, 237 Wallace, David, 103, 195 n13, 196 n35, 207 n6, 226, 243 Walter, John, 179 n51, 180 n52, 223 Walter, Marquis (Clerk’s Tale), 99–101, 103, 112–15, 117–18, 144, 195 n13 Watt, Diane, 11, 122, 153 n39, 206 n6, 244

9780230618763_12_ind.indd 256

Watts, Richard, 75, 183 n121, 244 Webbe, George, 28, 163 n160, 244 Webster, John, 30, 35, 163 n159 Weeks, Dennis L., 155 n62, 243 Whitehead, Harriet, 54, 175 n100, n101, 176 n102, n103, n104, n105, 237 Wiesner (Hanks), Merry E., 39, 169 n12, n13, 244 Wife of Bath (Wife of Bath’s Tale), 16, 25, 103, 106, 117, 156 n67, 194 n8, 196 n23, 199 n66, 205 n1, 226, 242, 243, 244 Williams, Mark, 196 n37, 198 n47, n48, 229 Wilson, Thomas, 21 Windeatt, Barry (B. A.), 127, 196 n22, 205 n1, 211 n37, n40, 212 n53, n55, n58, 215 n110, 217 n136, n139, n144, 222, 224, 232 Windsor, William, 70–6, 181 n89, 182 n91, n94, n107, n109, n115, n116 Winstead, Karen A., 132, 170 n16, 205 n112, 209 n34, 214 n93, n94, 244 witchcraft, 1, 26–8, 34, 162 n154, 163 n159, n165, n175, 239, 240 witches, 27–8, 29, 163 n162, n175, 233 “witch-speak,” 25, 27, 162 n148, 242 witness(es), 32, 57–60, 70, 144 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 12, 154 n49, 222 woman imagined see imagined woman, the women (see also speech, women’s and tongue, women’s) as masterless, 62, 77 conversation of, 2, 9, 30, 34–6, 48, 57, 58, 61, 94–5, 145

7/21/2011 8:06:54 PM

257

IN DEX

Woods, Marjorie Curry, 151 n19, 202 n97, 236, 244 Wybarn, William, 76, 183 n131 Wycliff, John, 9, 25, 150 n19, 160 n135 Yeager, R. F., 26, 160 n128, 161 n145, 189 n32, 221, 244

9780230618763_12_ind.indd 257

Younge, Anne, 65–7, 179 n48, 180 n62, n63 Younge, James, 65–7, 77, 179 n48, 180 n62, n63 Zell, Michael, 28–9, 163 n169, n172, n174, 232 Zupko, Jack, 153 n44, 244

7/21/2011 8:06:54 PM

9780230618763_12_ind.indd 258

7/21/2011 8:06:55 PM