Chaucer's Visions of Manhood

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Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood by Holly A. Crocker

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CHAUCER’S VISIONS OF MANHOOD

Holly A. Crocker

CHAUCER’S VISIONS OF MANHOOD

© Holly A. Crocker, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7571–3 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7571–X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To Tommy

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood

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1. Seeing Gender’s Aspects: Vision, Agency, and Masculinity in the Tale of Melibee

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2. Portrait of a Father as a Bad Man: Visible Pressure in the Physician’s Tale

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3. “My first matere I wil yow telle”: Visual Impact in the Book of the Duchess

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4. Which Wife? What Man? Gender Invisibility between Chaucer’s Wife and Shipman

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5. Miscellaneous Chaucer: Proverbial Masculinity in Harley 7333

137

Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

he major benefit of writing a book while working at three different Universities and sustaining a cross-country relationship is the increased number of people with whom I have been privileged to discuss these ideas. These friendships have been rich and diverse; I hope the pages that follow capture some of their vivacity, since it is almost inevitable that I will fail to acknowledge some of those who prompted me to think more deeply about agency and vision, gender and Chaucer. I have been extremely lucky to have a supportive group of teachers and mentors, who have remained willing to read and discuss this project as it has coalesced into its present form. Warm thanks to Alcuin Blamires, Lynn Enterline, Leah S. Marcus, and John F. Plummer for sustained guidance and friendship. Their willingness to see me in different ways over the years—as successful student, developing peer, promising shrew, and lasting friend—keeps me going. Special thanks to Kathryn Schwarz, who, with her intelligence, generosity, and tenacity, exemplifies the scholarly model I hope to achieve. Terrific people in far-flung places have influenced this project’s development. I am grateful to all “the leftovers” for their intellectual energy during that magical year at St. Lawrence University; Danielle Egan and Tom Berger were particularly generous in their willingness to consider and challenge my preliminary ideas for this book. At the University of Cincinnati, I found an intellectual home that expanded my imaginative and academic horizons. Brock Clarke, Michael Griffith, and Margot Schilpp lent creativity to my writing, even as Leland Person and Jonathan Kamholtz ensured that I would become a scholar through what amounted to their collective sponsorship of my work. With their support, I received several large and small grants from the Charles F. Taft Memorial Fund and the University Research Council; these enabled me to conduct necessary archival research at the British Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Library of Congress. Lee also provided invaluable departmental support, including fourquarters of teaching release, which allowed me to write the bulk of this book.

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New colleagues at the University of South Carolina have made completing and revising this book a complete joy. Department Chair Steve Lynn performed impressive feats of administrative finesse to bring me to Columbia, and he remains dazzling in his ability to encourage and enable my work. From the moment I met him, Scott Gwara has been a fantastic senior colleague, combining precision and rigor with patience and kindness. The many debts I have accumulated in my brief residency only begin to indicate the lively intellectual community in which I happily find myself: thanks to Susan Courtney, Mindy Fenske, Greg Forter, Ed Gieskes, Tony Jarrells, Nina Levine, David Lee Miller, John Muckelbauer, Kristan Poirot, Larry Rhu, Esther Richey, David Shields, Dan Smith, Meili Steele, Rebecca Stern, and Gretchen Woertendyke, all of whom have read and discussed my work over the past year. I owe an even greater debt to a host of medievalist-theorist-literarytypes, who, through friendships old and new, have shaped this project in numerous ways. Bonnie Wheeler is foremost among these; without her support and understanding, this book would not have made it. I have also benefited from exchanges with Pete Beidler, Howard Bloch, Andrew Cole, Bob Eaglestone, John Ganim, Susanne Hafner, Bruce Holsinger, Cary Howie, Bobby Meyer-Lee, Robert Mighall, Kathryn Pratt, Lynn Ramey, Masha Raskolnikov, Josh Russell, Christian Sheridan, Nicole Nolan Sidhu, Michael Uebel, and Angela Weisl. At a crucial moment, Beth Robertson offered generous and challenging suggestions that prompted me to rethink part of the introduction. Likewise, the anonymous reader for the press suggested revisions that sharpened the book’s overall organization. Tison Pugh has been and remains my most cherished colleague; his wit, patience, and energy continue to inspire me. Without his comments and encouragement, I would never get anything written. An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared in “Seyd in forme and reverence”: Essays in Memory of Emerson Brown, Jr., and a portion of chapter 5 appeared in Medieval Feminist Forum. I am grateful to John Plummer and Sara Poor for permission to include this material here. Thanks also to the patient staff members at the British Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Beineke Rare Book Library. I am also indebted to the longsuffering interlibrary loan staff at the University of Cincinnati and at the University of South Carolina. The reference department at the Sterling Memorial Library offered invaluable assistance, as did my research assistant Barbara Bolt. It is a pleasure to acknowledge Thomas P. Crocker as the scholar who has had the greatest impact on my intellectual life. The scope, power, and

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diversity of Tommy’s thought confounds me less than the gentleness, modesty, and consideration with which he expresses it. He is at once fierce and funny; I have never known anyone like him. We have grown up together, shared work together, lived and loved together. I dedicate this book to him.

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INTRODUCTION: CHAUCER’S VISIONS OF MANHOOD

The firste fynger [of the devil] is the fool lookynge of the fool womman and of the fool man; that sleeth, right as the basilicok sleeth folk by the venym of his sighte, for the coveitise of eyen folweth the coveitise of the herte. —Chaucer, The Parson’s Tale (X. 852)

s a study of Chaucerian masculinities, this book examines gender’s (in)visibility. Within a modern critical idiom, emphasis on gender’s performativity highlights its dependence upon visibility.1 If we put our current interest in appearances, manifest and animate, proximate and tangible, into contact with similar medieval concerns, it becomes clear that gender’s visibility is at once mundane and powerful.2 In fact, as one of the most banal “technologies of the visible” at work in late fourteenth-century English culture, gender’s power lies in its ability to naturalize itself through a seamless assertion of ordinary status.3 Yet as Michel de Certeau importantly reminds us, what we encounter as the ordinary is a complex and creative achievement that gains its governing power from quiet gestures that almost pass unnoticed.4 Perhaps fittingly, no component of visibility assumes the privileges that derive from banality more vividly than masculinity, whether we are working within medieval or modern contexts. As the marker of the ordinary, masculinity gathers material power by putting on the veil of visible neutrality.5 This book therefore engages the ways in which invisibility accrues and maintains cultural privilege, often but not exclusively for men, frequently but not universally through the guise of manhood. Invisibility has a mystique in our present cultural moment, but this fascination is not simply a product of a world where improving technologies of surveillance make an escape from the visible seem increasingly appealing.6 The ability to see without being seen is a powerful and compelling fantasy, which runs deep in the Western philosophical tradition. As Glaucon’s retelling of the myth of “Gyges’s Ring” in Plato’s Republic suggests, invisibility bestows a power that exceeds the laws binding human community.7

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In this story, the shepherd, Gyges finds a ring that makes its wearer invisible. He then proceeds to sleep with the king’s wife, kill the king, and make himself ruler. Glaucon uses this narrative to pose the question: if one could get away with doing injustice, while never suffering injustice in return, what reason would one have to be just? This account therefore links the political and ethical conditions that shape and order humanity to the equal visibility of persons within their communities. As a result, invisibility is often depicted as dangerous, even evil.8 For twentieth-century theorist Emmanuel Levinas the story of Gyges is a parable expressing the evil that attends the deterioration of one’s “enrootedness,” a withdrawal into an individual self that Levinas views as a defining feature of post-Cartesian modernity.9 Accordingly, early science fiction adapts this myth to explore the technological conditions of modernity that alienate the individual through the production of invisibility. H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897) chronicles the deleterious psychic and social effects of elusive visibility, both for its protagonist and his audiences.10 Focusing only on the alienating effects of invisibility, Wells portrays his scientist as increasingly helpless in his attempts to wield the seemingly limitless power of passing unseen amongst his peers. The parody of Wells’s story in the 1987 farce Amazon Women on the Moon complicates this fiction’s ontological and ethical simplicity by emphasizing invisibility’s collaborative dimension. The “son of the invisible man” attempts to pass himself off as heir to these powers, but his performance of invisibility—which consists of a naked Ed Begley, Jr. cavorting around making spooky noises, sweeping off hats, and moving around chess pieces—simply highlights how clearly the other characters can see his bared body.11 Their declarations to the contrary, however, illustrate the ways in which members of an audience may invest an agent with power by pretending that they cannot see his machinations. Of course, this invisibility routine is not always so funny. Alternatively, an audience’s ability to act as if they cannot see a particular person might strip that same individual of social power or personal control. Modern writings on race show in poignant detail the ways in which invisibility may deny persons cultural power. Although its protagonist admits the occasional benefits of invisibility, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) relentlessly uncovers the ways in which a dominant group produces invisibility as a legible condition that translates into cultural deprivation.12 The book’s indictment shows that being treated as if invisible keeps a person from assuming agency by producing him as a visibly invisible member of the community. Ellison frighteningly illustrates the ways in which whites conceal and reveal bodies to assemble and maintain a privileged cultural identity for themselves. This Invisible Man thus adds a dimension to the ring of Gyges tradition that is crucial to my discussions of Chaucer,

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vision, and manhood. Ellison focuses on an audience’s variegated power over a performer, tracing the myriad ways viewers might shape a performance even as it unfolds. To cite only one well-known example, the dizzying and terrifying account of the “battle royal”—which the protagonist must endure in order to enjoy the putative honor of delivering a speech before his graduating class—is a constantly changing contest in which members of a fluid audience require a litany of humiliating feats from the speaker. Invisibility thus cuts in different directions, offering some ultimate power while denying others basic presence. Invisibility’s inherent dualism, I submit, is directly relevant to gender constructions, particularly the ways that dominant masculinity establishes its quiet claims to power over others, especially women. Aligning itself with an expansive invisibility that subjects others to its machinations and designs, masculinity asserts its comprehensive dominance by passing unnoticed. As Chaucer’s poetry shows, this story does not have to be so one-sided. Masculinity’s presumption of universality is the myth that this book challenges, and I suggest that Chaucer’s poetry provides multiple examples of masculinity’s failure to secure a comprehensive claim to conformity in the Middle Ages. By refusing to conceal the multiplicity and irregularity of masculinities, Chaucer resists the exclusionary oppression that Ellison exposes, which is based on the assumption that visible domination confers cultural privilege in an essential equivalence. Historians of the body have demonstrated that medieval categories of sex, gender, race, and sexuality were culturally constructed; yet the belief that sex was a product of divine agency, and that gender was the vehicle through which such idealized embodiment was made visible, meant that a man could not be excluded from the company of other men on the basis of these visually naturalized components of identity.13 Chaucer takes advantage of this inclusiveness, using visibility to dismantle masculinity’s claim to universal coherence. The Pardoner, for example, is a man, no matter how uncomfortable he makes the other pilgrims. Furthermore, the Pardoner is not invisible, no matter how much that offends the other pilgrims.14 While Chaucer the Pilgrim points to the Pardoner’s irregular maleness in the General Prologue, and the Host Harry Bailey underscores the Pardoner’s unorthodox sexuality at the conclusion to the Pardoner’s Tale, the Pardoner’s disruptive presence arises from the fact that he uncovers the irregularities and particularities that prevent masculinity from functioning as a universal term. The Pardoner in effect “outs” masculinity by making plain its diversity and contingency. Near the conclusion of the Pardoner’s Tale, the Host is so angered by the Pardoner’s suggestion that he is “moost envoluped in synne” (VI. 942) that it takes the Knight’s intervention to prevent the pilgrim company from disintegrating into violence. When the Knight intercedes to cool the ire

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between Host and Pardoner, he imposes a confederacy that is designed to reassert masculinity’s unified parameters. Even so, when these three men, who could not be more different in social, moral, and physical terms, come together in a staged reconciliation, the grouping displays the variability that the community of men might like to keep invisible. Father of English Poetry Exposed! When the Host and the Pardoner kiss and make up at the Knight’s behest, it is clear that men collaborate with one another to reveal and conceal a plurality of masculine visibilities. As comprehensive and revelatory as this pageant of masculinities may appear, the community of men framed by this scene remains partly hidden, obscured by the lingering specter of privilege conferred by invisibility. In the context of the reconciliation the Knight engineers there is another man who participates in this union even as he prevents his identity from becoming part of this spectacle. Of course, I am speaking of Chaucer, who, by reporting this scene through his pilgrim persona, keeps his poetic identity hidden in the folds of his literary corpus. Chaucer is the unseen seer in this instance, the invisible man whose apparent lack of control over the other men gives him the ability to figure their dealings.15 Throughout this book I am therefore interested in Chaucer’s construction of a model of manhood that achieves the privileges of invisibility by embracing the very lack of agency against which, in a different time and place, Ellison’s protagonist protests.16 By exploiting the split between the poet and speaker across the body of his work, Chaucer appears to open himself up to audiences, all the while keeping his poetic identity hidden through a sequence of self-stagings. It perhaps goes without saying that literary characters have no agency over visibility. Even as a literary character, however, Chaucer remains an elusive presence. As a pilgrim, Chaucer often defies visibility, allowing him to observe personal details of his fellow travelers that reveal their characters for inspection. While there are always gaps in Chaucer the Pilgrim’s ability to see, his imperfect vision far outdoes that of his fellow pilgrims. As Lee Patterson points out, Chaucer seems inscrutable to his comrades, puzzling Harry Bailey to such a degree that he asks with a kind of bewildered frustration, “What man artow?” (VII. 695).17 The Host cannot read Chaucer the Pilgrim’s persona, but his attempt focuses on the way Chaucer looks: Thou lookest as thou woldest fynde an hare, For evere upon the ground I se thee stare. Approche neer, and looke up murily. Now war yow, sires, and lat this man have place!

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He in the waast is shape as wel as I; This were a popet in an arm t’enbrace For any womman, smal and fair of face. He semeth elvyssh by his contenaunce, For unto no wight dooth he daliaunce. (VII. 696–704)

Harry Bailey calls attention to Chaucer’s sighted ability, but the pilgrim-poet’s visionary relations are equally bound up with the way that Chaucer looks, the way that he animates his body through performative gestures. Harry Bailey’s characterization of Chaucer’s appearance recognizes the agency Chaucer exercises over his own making, but it also attempts to curtail that agency by assigning meaning to the performance Chaucer devises. Interpreting Chaucer’s “cheere” (VII. 711) is supposed to enable the Host to determine the kind of story Chaucer will tell. Serving just as much to enjoin as to predict, after Harry Bailey tells Chaucer how to look (“up murily” [VII. 698]), he tells him what kind of story he should tell (“a tale of myrthe” [VII. 706]). While it is clear that the Host is after an entertaining story, he is unprepared for Sir Thopas’s excessive cadence. The difference between what Harry Bailey wants and what he gets from Chaucer’s performance demonstrates that there is always the potential for maneuver in the collaborative construction of identities, no matter how carefully scripted those positions might appear. In the interaction between Chaucer and Host, however, this possibility is taken to its extreme, displaying Harry Bailey’s inability to map the pilgrim persona Chaucer animates.18 The Host misreads Chaucer the Pilgrim, the nature of poetry, and the ideal of masculinity, because in seeking to constrict their potentialities, he only ends up with “drasty rymyng. . .nat worth a toord!” (VII. 930). Chaucer literally gives Harry exactly what he says he wants, which ends up being not at all what he expects or desires. The Host acts as if a rhyme that Chaucer learned long ago will more fully integrate this “popet” (VII. 701) of a pilgrim—who is notable for staring at the ground—into the social body of the pilgrimage. If Chaucer can entertain his fellows in a performance of tale-telling, he will show the creative skills that make him a good poet and illustrate the convivial temperament that makes him a good pilgrim. Chaucer is not very revealing in either respect. Chaucer is evidently a very poor poet, or so the justification he offers when Harry interrupts him would suggest: “why wiltow lette me / Moore of my tale than another man, / Syn that it is the beste rym I kan?” (VII. 926–28). When Harry Bailey rejects this tale of masculine beauty, however, it does not reveal Chaucer’s poetic deficiency, but instead, it suggests the Host’s readerly

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limitation. This seems impossible, especially considering that many critics of Chaucer agree with and are grateful for Harry’s interruption, however fictional. Furthermore, if we remember that the Melibee also fails to rate much praise among Chaucer’s later readers, we might think that Chaucer’s deep, dark secret had been exposed, that a poet well known enough to earn the Man of Law’s admiration has no rhyme. If the thought of the keeper of the Tabard Inn exposing as a fraud the poet who will become known as the “father” of English poetry has about it a tabloid-esque absurdity, that is no surprise. No one ever takes this exchange seriously as an indictment of Chaucer’s writing ability, nor are we meant to do so. Even if modern literary tastes have changed so that the Melibee has fewer fans than it once did, readers of Chaucer almost universally agree that Chaucer’s poor showing in the tale-telling contest is a good joke, one that is in keeping with the kinds of literary authority he establishes across his poetic works. In the Canterbury collection, as elsewhere, Chaucer’s position within the social group is at risk because he is a poet whose rhymes displease their hearers. In the exchange with Harry Bailey, in which Jeffrey Jerome Cohen notes that Chaucer is “reduced to an ‘elvish’ freak,” the Host tries to make poetry into a lubricant that performatively smoothes the joinings of voluntary associations.19 This model of poetry, however, is one that Chaucer does not animate. When Chaucer is instructed to perform poetry’s public role, he falls flat.20 He neither has the substance nor the appearance to pull off the identity that Harry Bailey demands. Besides noting its ostentation, I suggest that Chaucer’s failure is fortuitous, both in terms of gender and authorship. The Host’s recognition that Chaucer stands outside the pilgrimage polity, “For unto no wight dooth he daliaunce” (VII. 704), allows Chaucer to authorize a poetry that privileges erasure, mobilizing a type of invisibility that elsewhere signals disempowerment. Chaucer’s status as invisible outsider strips him of agency, but his seemingly harmless character gives him the ability to move more freely among the ranks of his peers. Because Chaucer is not a threat to anyone, he is left to his own devices, making him the unseen seer among the Canterbury pilgrims. Chaucer’s apparent lack of agency, then, gives him a type of power over himself that other characters in the collection simply do not have. While his persona hovers somewhere between the empowerment and erasure that invisibility alternately provides and administers, even Chaucer the Pilgrim seems to have more power over his self-presentation than first meets the eye. The Holy Trinity: Splitting the Difference The seeming surplus that keeps Harry Bailey’s assault from taking hold is this literary persona’s operation as a guise that hides Chaucer’s “true” identity, the

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masterful poet behind the hapless pilgrim. E. T. Donaldson’s and Donald Howard’s distinctions between different Chaucers—as Poet, Pilgrim, and Man—creates a composite Chaucer whose unseen mobility affords him the agency he never visibly asserts in his representations.21 I want to stress, therefore, that the power of Chaucer’s invisibility derives from his receivers, myself included. Our willingness to see a more commanding figure behind the image Chaucer presents arises from a feeling that his Pilgrim-persona is simply a mask that we are privileged and powerful enough to see, and to see through. Chaucer thus takes advantage of a bilateral ocular dynamic, assuming that his audiences exert control over the ways in which he becomes visible. Managing the optical agency of his viewers, Chaucer appeals to our desire to exercise control over what we see through an interpretive lens. With the collaboration of his audiences, Chaucer simultaneously shows and disavows his skill through the palimpsest of pilgrim overlaying poet. In simplest terms, since the Canterbury collection exists, we know that Chaucer is trolling around somewhere being a poet. So, when Chaucer fails to perform the identity of poet within the text itself, we give him a new one, assuming that his disclaimers, apologies, and excuses are parts of a carefully crafted fiction that he deploys. What might have looked like a lack of control in another character appears to be a device of agency in Chaucer’s case. In pointing to the poet’s invisibility, however, we do not keep him out of the text, but instead call attention to his presence within it. As in the menagerie of masculinity that the Knight collects at the end of the Pardoner’s Tale, we are aware that Chaucer must be substantially present in this scene, but we are also careful to respect the performance of invisibility he has manufactured for himself. Chaucer’s invisibility in his poetry gives him a kind of agency that asserts itself by refusing to announce itself. When he claims his role is that of a reporter in the General Prologue (I. 730–46), apologizes to his readers for the collection’s “cherles” tales in the Miller’s Prologue (I. 3169) and excuses his poor tale-telling as a fault of his ability in the link to Melibee, Chaucer styles his control over his narrative as its very lack, thereby depicting his poetic presence as his very absence.22 The Poet/Speaker/Man distinction allows Chaucer to hide his poetic agency behind a screen character we all take to be a literary pose. Equally important for the focus of this study, a tripartite Chaucer also allows his poetic and pilgrim identities to float free from the historical circumstances that influenced the way that “Chaucer the Man” interacted with others in his ordinary life. To be honest, I am not sure what the moniker “Chaucer the Man” is supposed to mean in general critical usage: if all we acknowledge by this phrase is that there existed in historical records a person named Geoffrey Chaucer, a civil servant whose service placed him between circles of court and city, and whose occupation never entailed playing the public

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role of “poet” in any regard, it remains unclear what we are meant to do with this shadowy figure once we have his outline in our sights.23 Are we supposed to keep him distinct from Poet-Chaucer, or think about him differently than Pilgrim-Chaucer? Either of these alternatives seems not only impossible, but also undesirable if we are talking about how to respond to Chaucer’s poetic self-stylings. Insisting that Chaucer the Man was a different figure than his poetic activity indicates allows scholars to focus on those traces of the man in his moment that we find most interesting in our particular cultural contexts. While this tendency is an unavoidable part of critical practice, a triptychChaucer encourages this scholarly habit in a way that has troubling repercussions. Because Chaucer uses the split between his different selves to hide political interests or veil personal concerns, critics also feel justified in ignoring political or personal currents that become visible, however fleeting. This fiction thus works against what David Wallace rightly argues should be “[t]he chief aspiration of a literary-historiographical criticism”: “to make visible, through an expansion of temporal and spatial parameters, relations and developments that would otherwise remain obscured or unconnected.”24 If we act as if Chaucer the Man really is a different figure from his poet or pilgrim counterparts, we indulge in the convenience of cultural privilege that Ellison critiques, using criticism to “make invisible” those elements of the Chaucerian corpus that disturb or disrupt our own political or personal sensibilities. Like the Poet/Pilgrim split that can be routinely breached as long as the requisite apologies or qualifications are attached, scholars have always cheated in relation to the Poet/Man separation, and they have always had to in order to produce meaningful criticism about Chaucer’s literary productions. Even so, this study seeks to make visible a remaining problem with the “Chaucer the Man” pose that we are encouraged to accept, because our collaborative production of its invisibility is relevant both to medieval and modern empowerings of a visibly neutral masculinity. This is no “death of the author” kind of division between producer and text; in fact, it is a reification of the author that confers the benefits of invisibility.25 So, like Superman, Chaucer leads a double life: clerk of the king’s works by day, copious producer of verse by night.26 This Clark Kent imposition assumes, however, that Chaucer is only influenced by the highest cultural standards of his day. As Superman our amazing poet only works to uphold the principles that keep his culture unified under orderly systems of beliefs.27 If we are going to puncture the Chaucer Pilgrim/Poet/Man distinction, it seems, we feel bound to do so only in the name of divine truth, human justice, or the Ricardian way.

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Over the past twenty-five years, critics have become more open about their willingness to bring “Chaucer the Man” back into his texts. Critics including Paul Strohm, Lee Patterson, David Aers, Peggy Knapp, and David Wallace have demonstrated how different cultural events and formations affected Chaucer’s everyday life and his poetic career.28 Tracing the influence of the king’s retinue, the peasants’ rising of 1381, confraternal guilds, literary production, and state formation, these scholars remind us that Chaucer the Man and Chaucer the Poet are only comprehensible in relation to one another. These scholars, along with critics including Carolyn Dinshaw, L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, and Christopher Cannon, have resisted the impulse to make invisible those elements of Chaucer (either in the life-records or his poetry) that do not serve to stabilize his “classical body.”29 The depoliticizing function of “Chaucer the Man” thus appears to be dead. Nevertheless, “Chaucer the Man” continues to resonate in a way that this study seeks to make visible. When we acknowledge that triptych-Chaucer’s identities are interdependent, we must recognize that their imbrication brings together the substance and appearance required to construct a convincing gender identity for Chaucer the Poet, Speaker, Man. Seeing Chaucer’s Manhed “Chaucer the Man” does not simply mean Chaucer the person, Chaucer the individual, or Chaucer the subject. Historical events, cultural attitudes, and personal experiences give contour to Chaucer’s manhed, but this position only becomes visible from our vantage point as his manhood. Showing the “temporal interlacement” of the Middle Ages, the legibility of this gender is filtered through the cultural lens that defines masculinities in late medieval England, but our historical distance means that we can only see this position as it corresponds to a narrative of gender difference in which we remain implicated.30 As my alternating use of the modern and Middle English terms suggest, these nouns blend into one another, sharing common features that defy temporal divides. But they also remain vividly distinct, emerging as they do from widely divergent registers of visible difference. Blurring modern boundaries of masculinity and femininity, the Middle English manhed has several meanings, whose overlapping resonance indicate this identity’s potential fluidity, despite the term’s linguistic function as a masculine noun in the Middle Ages. In simplest terms, manhed signifies what we might call masculinity; yet its elasticity shows that medievals saw the condition of manhood differently than we do, or at least differently than we admit.

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Perhaps most obviously, manhed simply refers to the human condition, or the qualities of humanity writ large.31 As a signifier of that which counts as human, the term issues ethical demands, only some of which are gendered according to a recognizable binary logic.32 As a borrowing from the Latin tradition of virtus, manhed signifies masculine virtues, including strength, loyalty, and bravery. But aspects of steadfast fortitude are not the only requirements for the medieval rendering of this masculine ideal, so that humility, mercy, and compassion also constitute its meaning. Potentially the most surprising elements of manhed, therefore, are qualities that valorize passivity.33 Indeed, passivity is often associated with manhed, though in a very specific sense, as the fifteenth-century Digby mystery demonstrates: “That for man diete, the maker of all, / By his manhed passyve.”34 As devotional literature suggests, late medieval piety associates Christ’s passivity with strength since it is an expression of love. Despite, or I would say because of, the maternal imagery used to vest Christ’s agony with emotive force, the association of obedient passivity with idealized femininity is difficult to maintain, at least in exclusive terms.35 This does not mean, moreover, that Christ was “feminized” by his passivity.36 Rather, as Chaucer’s depictions suggest, various men take up passivity, just as women do agency, in ways that complicate binary characterizations of gender without disrupting the ordering capacity of such divisions.37 Chaucer turns gender’s ocular logic against its governing ability, investigating invisibility’s potential as a collaborative strategy that allows men and women greater latitude in their performances. Active women and passive men continue to be associated with their “appropriate” gender appellations, assuming of course that their behavior passes as appropriate. And so, here’s the rub: Chaucer’s poetry reveals that people frequently get away with behaviors that exceed gender’s binary operation in medieval culture. These departures are commonly overlooked, however, because they appear to promote the oppositional hierarchy of masculinity and femininity more broadly. Only those departures that assert their normative allegiance may pass unnoticed. This book therefore acknowledges that late medieval genders depend upon performances of passing, tactics of coverage that simultaneously work to conceal and reveal contours of identity that satisfy prescriptive formulae. Performances of passing, just like assumptions of invisibility, may confer or deny agency depending on how they are deployed. In her 1929 novel Passing, Nella Larsen suggests that the desire of many light-skinned African Americans to “pass” is motivated by a yearning to possess the privileged identity associated with whiteness in American culture.38 White culture looks stable and self-contained; its members appear to have a sense of possession that looks impermeable to the outside observer. The problem is,

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once one passes to the inside of this culture, there is always the fear that one will be found out, exposed as a pretender, and punished for transgressing boundaries. This “imposter-syndrome” is especially acute in the case of persons whose visibility threatens to betray them, revealing them as interlopers squatting in forbidden territory. Fear of exposure and expulsion, however, is not unique to dispossessed groups.39 As contemporary cultural theorists point out, performances of passing are required for all visibly constituted identities, from class, to sexuality, to race, to gender.40 Members of any culture must use masquerade to maintain their associations; they must pass as white, male, manly, straight, educated, wealthy, and so on, to retain the privileges those positions confer.41 The following chapters pursue the ways in which men and women use performances of passing to maintain their affiliations with binary gender categories, even when their behavior visibly departs from those expectations in Chaucer’s representations. The very existence of passing, I acknowledge, introduces a crisis into the visible field by denaturalizing the legibility of identities that are supposed to be transparently stable. Marjorie Garber’s comparison of passing to treason is fitting, then, because as Robert Bernasconi argues, the fear of passing is bound up with the possibility that those visibly designated as inferior might take up positions of privilege traditionally reserved for those whose neutrality marks their power.42 As he contends in relation to twentieth-century American discrimination against racial minorities, “Racism wants to make its targets disappear, but it does not want them to disappear into anonymity. It wants to see them without seeing them.”43 By suggesting that men and women equally use passing to affiliate themselves with binary gender categories, Chaucer reveals the ways in which medieval standards for masculinities and femininities require transgression, at least in visible terms, as a normative condition of their successful production. That said, Chaucer’s poetry also acknowledges the problems an ocular imperative poses to gendered relations. If gender is put under visible pressure, it causes trouble, both for those who seek to fix its borders and for those who are caught in the snares set by would-be agents. When Robyn the Miller cautions the Reeve against looking too far into wifely “pryvetee” (I. 3164), it is not just an old cuckold’s trick; rather it is a means of sustaining the fiction of masculinity in the face of a kind of strict scrutiny that will only cause problems, both for the agent who sees and for the object of inspection in this dynamic. As Karma Lochrie argues, cuckoldry is an epistemological category based on knowing the secrets of others.44 But before we ever get to issues of knowing, there is the issue of seeing. For gender to work, it must be an open secret, one that depends on members of a community to see it as viable. Ludwig Wittgenstein in his later work

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suggests that the phenomenon of seeing-as reveals all acts of seeing to be contextually conditioned. What is seen depends not only on the setting in which it is “found” but also on the purposes and practices in which the act of seeing is embedded.45 Chaucer’s work thus acknowledges the ways in which increasing anxieties regarding visual relations threatens the delicate balance that allows gender to pass as a binary in late medieval culture. Opening Secrets This study argues for a historicist analysis of gender’s ocular production in Chaucer’s representations, but in a very specific sense: this book does not simply seek to excavate gender’s visuality from an alterior medieval moment for which Chaucer’s poetry is made to stand. Even if I could do such a thing, I would not know what I was looking at when all was said and done. As Wittgenstein elsewhere remarks regarding language’s situated particularity: “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”46 That is to say, without a modern framework for conceptualizing gender, Chaucer’s representations of masculinities or femininities would remain meaningless to us. The same goes for vision, as well as for poetry. This book therefore contributes a chapter to the story of sight, just as it offers a page to the narrative of gender, just as it adds a paragraph to the history of Chaucer’s representation. I believe it is important to own the critical agency my scholarly making entails, because in bringing together psychoanalytic and historicist methodologies to pursue Chaucer’s engagement with gender’s visibility, I pursue an overarching political goal subtended by two assumptions, neither of which should be obscured. First, in an era of making-believe, when an “instant revisionism” continually rewrites the present and thereby the past, it is necessary to examine how factual information assumes its meanings over time.47 As David Wallace acknowledges, the point of historicist criticism is not just to “make visible” particular features of the past, since in recognizing that “all historical criticism, consciously or not, takes place within the confining frame of grand historigraphical metaphors,” we must also admit that these broad figurative trajectories are, at least in small part, of our own critical making.48 Historicist criticism has a greater purpose than telling stories, for the ways in which we investigate past narratives—including those of gender, vision, and poetry—informs the ways in which we write and rewrite those stories for our shared present. Bruno Latour’s call to pursue what he calls “matters of concern” in critical practice is one attempt to recognize that the longrespected “fact” is a gathering over which historicist analysis can exercise constructive and creative influence.49 Though related to diachronic materialism, the hybrid practice I promote through this study does not

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assume that we can view “bodies in motion” from a historical distance, mainly because our own interpretive emplotment means that we too have a stake in the engenderings of vision that unfold in Chaucer’s poetry.50 Questions of desire and identification are thus crucial to a historical account of gender’s ocularity in Chaucer, but not just in terms of traumatic loss or melancholic repetition.51 The other assumption that galvanizes this study, therefore, is a belief in the productive and fulfilling potential of psychoanalysis. For, in positing subjectivity’s reliance on speaking, Freud and his later revisers identify a collaborative methodology imbued with a creativity that relentlessly outdoes what we might call “single point perspective” in interpersonal relations. What Anna O. called the “talking cure” is a failure only to the extent that it dismantles the analyst’s objective scrutiny; it is a success only to the degree that it explodes the analysand’s self-mastery.52 As even this staged vision of encounter demonstrates, there is no position of detachment that prevents a seer from being seen by another. The power to look is predicated on an acceptance of another’s power to look back.53 By addressing the ways we tell stories as a means of looking and of looking back, the concerns of psychoanalysis are inherently historical. This study therefore traces the affective ways in which we add reality to those facts constituting the narrative we collectively receive as the past.54 Thinking about our emotive investments in the historical reception of Chaucer allows us to confront the ways in which we continue to naturalize masculinity’s claim to universality by maintaining its privileged invisibility. Over the past fifteen years there has been an exciting flurry of critical work on medieval masculinities, but particularly in Chaucer studies, that interest appears to be moving elsewhere, into investigations of race, nation, rank, religion, and sexuality. This is due in part to masculinity’s modality, its ability to recruit other markers of identity to preserve its visible neutrality. While in one case sexuality might be used to define a man’s station, in another a man’s rank may be linked to his religion in the cultural imagination. This is just the way that masculinity works to assert its universal valence. My answer to the skeptical question “Isn’t every book on Chaucer a book on masculinity?” is therefore “of course it is.” But to that sweeping claim I would attach an important qualification: while every book about Chaucer is in some way about masculinity, very few books about Chaucer are in any way about masculinity’s formation. Notwithstanding this book’s dust jacket, which features a group of men variously yet collectively laboring, this study resists the idea that masculinities emerge strictly from material circumstances. Rather, by pursuing the ways in which different masculinities are privileged across the visible field, this book pursues the phenomenal construction of gender difference in Chaucer’s era.55 As I shall

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argue, we have not looked at the management of masculine visibility, the way male bodies are put together, covered over, or set forth to give an impression of universality. By ignoring masculinity’s visibility—either as an act of omission or commission—we have acceded to the terms that naturalize its claims to authority and its exercises of control. The chapters that follow trace Chaucer’s challenge to masculinity’s (in)visible privilege in late medieval culture. The first chapter, “Seeing Gender’s Aspects,” considers changes in medieval optical theory in relation to Chaucer’s allegorical construction of gender difference in his Tale of Melibee. Roger Bacon’s synthesis of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian optical traditions produces a reciprocal theory of agency, but Bacon covers the equalizing potential of his scientific observations through a spiritual interpretation of sight’s significance. Similarly, the Tale of Melibee calls attention to the dynamic reciprocity of gender relations, even as its allegory of marriage occludes Prudence’s shaping power over her husband’s identity. By making Prudence a part of Melibee’s consciousness, this tale illuminates the ways in which men use women’s (in)visibility to establish masculine agency. The problematic sententiousness of the tale, however, suggests that a universal version of masculinity reduces men’s identities to prescriptive formulae. Masculine reduction is also at the heart of the second chapter, “Portrait of a Father as a Bad Man,” though in examining the Physician’s Tale, I argue that Chaucer investigates the limits of feminine exemplarity in order to expose the disfiguring violence of gender’s ocularity. Looking at the scandal surrounding the marriage between Elizabeth of Lancaster and John Holland as that historical controversy potentially relates to the Physician’s Tale’s advice to parents and governesses, I argue that Virginia’s materialized passivity makes visible her father’s lack of agency in the formation of her perfect visibility. By changing a fable of political reform into a narrative of domestic sacrifice, Chaucer eliminates the exemplary distance that usually converts the sufferings of virgin martyrs into triumph, instead subjecting Virginius and his daughter to the visual imperative that increasingly defined gender politics in the late fourteenth century. By killing Virginia her father shows himself to be the head of his household, but in an extreme display that undermines the masculine power he seeks to affirm. Chaucer thus uses this tale to resist the mounting pressure of gender’s visibility, showing the graphic violence that results from its binary imposition. In an investigation the effect of growing iconoclasm on memorial practice, the third chapter, “ ‘My first matere I wil yow telle’: Visual Impact in the Book of the Duchess,” examines the ways that narratives may loosen gender’s visible grasp on the bodies its binary regime would order. In his Black and White narrative the dreamer seeks to institute a topographic

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relation of gender difference by instituting mnemonic distance from the beloved. This spatialized relation is complicated, however, because the distance that would ensure difference is not guaranteed by late medieval visionary relations. William of Ockham’s elimination of physical species in sight means that images could act on audiences at a distance; by considering the anxiety that the power of images begins to produce amongst religious reformers in the late fourteenth century, I suggest that Chaucer looks forward to defenses of devotional images like those later propounded by writers such as Reginald Pecock, who insists that a bond of love connects seer and image. Chaucer suggests the connection between White and Black is not tainted by the petty transactions of desire, and by so doing, he offers Black a way to compose himself through a public performance of poetic memory. The fourth chapter, “Which Man? What Woman?” investigates the effect of textual indeterminacy on gender mobility in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale. It is distinctly possible that Chaucer never intended to reassign this fabliau from the Wife of Bath to the Shipman; yet floating as it does between two speakers, this tale prevents a single perspective from framing the tale’s dynamics. Despite its adulterous exchange of money for sex, the story closes with one of the most affectionate portraits of marriage in Chaucer’s canon. This disjunction shows that women’s invisibility can fragment or consolidate the fiction of masculine empowerment. The tale therefore represents Chaucer’s fullest investigation of invisibility’s liberating potential. When the merchant acknowledges his wife’s ability to conduct herself, she adopts a version of feminine invisibility that expands her husband’s masculinity beyond the visibly patrolled boundaries of his public image. Together they achieve a collaborative mobility, which allows them to evade gender regulations for men and women in late medieval England. The final chapter, “Miscellaneous Chaucer: Proverbial Masculinity in Harley 7333,” examines a fifteenth-century manuscript anthology containing many John Shirley exemplars of Chaucer to suggest that the historicist project of “making visible” often makes invisible some of the most radical implications of Chaucer’s representations of gender. Because the manuscript contains thirteen proverbs that echo five of Chaucer’s most familiar poems, I argue that these anonymous verses masquerade as Chaucer, taking up a position of invisible privilege that shapes reception of his corpus. This collection constructs a masculine perspective that it uses Chaucer to authorize, thereby erasing many of the ways in which Chaucer challenges the binary difference between masculinity and femininity across his collected works. By reflecting upon the ways in which textualities influence the (in)visibility of the Chaucer we perceive, this chapter calls for

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a review of the ways in which Chaucer’s poetic body is made to matter in gendered terms in the centuries after his death, including our own. As this set of citational scraps shows, Chaucer’s visions of manhood can be altered by the material circumstances that shape our encounter with his corpus. This does not mean, however, that we can press his poetic body until it yields up all its unseen secrets. With its elusive Chaucerian visibility, Harley 7333 also issues an important caution against over-historicism, whatever the stripe; its selective captioning shows that there will always be a remainder, an excess that our critical investigations into this fragmentary corpus just cannot or will not make legible.56 When it comes to vision, manhood, and Chaucer, I should say at the outset that there will be a great deal left over even after what follows in this book. While there is a rich body of work on Chaucer and gender, much of that work focuses on tales or poems that I do not even touch, or I deal with only in passing. This book treats a much weirder kettle of fish than those studies that address the A-fragment, The Legend of Good Women, the “Marriage Group,” the Romance, or even The Pardoner’s Tale.57 I chose the poems included here because the strategies for gender formation involving visibility are less moderate than their aforementioned counterparts. Fantasies linking vision, agency, and masculinity are more extreme, as are the slippages that allow men and women to use invisibility to pass off their conduct to fit varying social expectations.58 These poems, if you will, are more excessive in their remainders, about the things that they cannot or will not reveal regarding Chaucer’s makings of gender. Paradoxically, I suppose, it is for this reason that they say more about the power of invisibility as a means to figure the relational identities of men and women. By exploiting invisibility’s performative potential, Chaucer allows for greater mobility in vision, agency, and therefore gender.

CHAPTER 1 SEEING GENDER’S ASPECTS: VISION, AGENCY, AND MASCULINITY IN THE TALE OF MELIBEE

Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight. —John Berger, Ways of Seeing

ohn Berger’s characterization of sighted relations looks forward to theories of the gaze that have framed feminist considerations of gender and visuality for the past several decades.1 Essential to the purposes of this chapter, his observation also looks backward to prior formulations of gender’s ocularity, particularly with regard to women’s agency as objects in visual economies. Berger recognizes that as an object of sight a woman may have agency, even as he also acknowledges that a woman’s visibility as an object may clarify the limits of her power over viewers. On this point at least, it might appear that Berger takes a lesson from medieval theorists of vision, many of whom consider the agency of the object in visual encounters. The similarity of this concern is mostly due to the fact that medievals also thought of identity as insistently ocular, so that writers from Boethius to Augustine, Albertus Magnus to Peter of Limoges, Robert Grosseteste to John Wyclif use scopic imagery to express personal and spiritual relations, often in gendered terms.2 To cite only one example, Augustine compares the flesh to a wife needing discipline, urging the husband-soul to correct his flesh-wife as a means to clear space for spiritual understanding, which here as elsewhere is articulated as a product of vision: “The light is clouded over and the truth cannot be seen, although it is there before our eyes.”3 The figurative tradition engendering vision has a long and rich history, only a brief part of which will feature in this chapter.4 The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries witnessed broad revisions to vision, both inside and outside the universities.5 These changes in medieval

J

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theories of sight, I suggest, allowed men to attain ocular privilege through the production of feminine agency as a visible marker of masculine power. This process of manufacture is relevant to Chaucer’s visions of manhood, and it is nowhere more visible than his Tale of Melibee. Chaucer’s representation of the Prudence and Melibee dialogue evinces a keen awareness that agency is connected to issues of vision, and that sight affects continuities of gender identity. Because this chapter opens a horizon onto those that follow, the first section surveys the most relevant medieval theories of sight in order to illustrate the complexity of visuality in Chaucer’s culture. I then offer a more extended examination of Roger Bacon’s optical theory to illustrate both the bilateralism of sighted agency and the consolidating narrative framework that makes this composite vision legible in conventional terms. I argue that Bacon’s attempt to synthesize competing theories of sight in accordance with a wider understanding of Christian metaphysics offers perspectival insight into Chaucer’s construction of a masculinity that depends on the invisibility of feminine agency in his Tale of Melibee. Later sections of this chapter will therefore consider the figurative formation of gender’s visibility in Chaucer’s most invisible tale, attending to the ways that Melibee’s masculinity gains coherence and retains legitimacy through the totalizing perspective of allegorical representation. Beginning this book by considering a masculinity that stands out for its conventional regularity demonstrates a central proposition of my argument: the key to making genders persuasive is the management of visibility, both its ability to reveal and conceal. Views of Sight The ability to manage visibility is both enabled and constrained by medieval theories of sight, which, in their variety, reveal vision’s unsettled philosophical status in the Middle Ages. Competing discourses of vision distributed agency alternately between seer and seen. Investing agency in the seer, extramission posited that rays, or species, emanated from the eye and struck an object, thus giving it form. The theory of extramission would therefore appear to offer most in terms of masculine agency, for this version of sight coheres most closely to what modern writers have come to think of as the penetrating, masculine, gaze.6 Extramissive theories of vision circulated amongst the early Greeks, but for medievals the influence of this model can largely be traced to Calcidius’s fourth-century translation of Plato’s Timaeus, along with its commentaries.7 While the stoics argued that the eye emitted a material substance akin to air, Plato’s version of extramission focused on the fiery power of light as it emanates from the viewer’s eyes.8 Even Plato allows for some agency of objects, however. In his

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account, the object emits a force that the eye’s luminous power engages in the intervening medium. This interaction forms an impression of the object, which is subsequently returned to the eye.9 The key for Plato, and for later proponents of extramissive vision, is the primacy of the viewer in the sighted encounter. The viewer holds power over visionary relations, to the extent that she/he brings inert objects into visibility through the animate power of the eye. This emphasis on an active viewer was important for medieval thinkers who favored extramission because it expressed the mind’s capacity to achieve spiritual illumination by focusing on internal rather than external vision.10 Augustine elaborates a rhetoric of increasingly spiritualized vision that allows the mind’s eye to regulate encounters with physical objects through visual experience. His tripartite hierarchy of vision, as corporeal, spiritual, and intellectual, characterizes encounters with the physical world as the lowest form of vision.11 Augustine describes this lowest form of sight in purely extramissive terms in De Genesi ad litteram: “The shaft of rays from our eyes, to be sure, is a shaft of light.”12 Augustine contemplates the deceptive potential of corporeal vision, suggesting that a viewer’s agency over a sighted experience can be limited through the misleading capacity of objects. He thus recognizes that objects exert a degree of power over sight, though in Augustine’s account this power should always be directed by the viewer’s ability to regulate corporeal vision. For Augustine, the “mind’s attention” [animi intentio] should control the experience of seeing.13 More than anything, this attention took the form of a withdrawal, so that the casual distractions of everyday spectacles, such as “the sight of a lizard catching flies or a spider entangling them as they fly into her web,” would not master the viewer’s contemplative focus.14 Since the visio spiritualis and the visio intellectualis direct vision back upon itself (they essentially remain forms of insight), they remain ever vulnerable to the sights of the exterior world. The deceptive and distracting potential of the visio corporalis prompted later theologians to reconceive the encounter with the physical world “in terms of causality rather than reflections,” as Beryl Smalley explains.15 Thus, as A. Mark Smith illustrates in his lucid account of perspectivist optics, the recovery of Aristotelian writings reconfigured the viewer’s agency in sense experience, so that “abstracted meanings. . .[are] not merely read into the phenomena, but [are] actually drawn from them.”16 Unlike Plato’s conception, the Aristotelian perspective on vision prioritized the power of the object in seeing. In what became known as the visual theory of “intromission,” a thing external to the viewer emitted rays, or species, which made an impression upon the eye. Aristotle’s comment in De anima, that we receive “the form of sensible objects without the

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matter, just as the wax receives the impression of the signet ring without the iron or the gold,” offered later thinkers a way to conceptualize sight as a phenomenon that brought sensory experience of the material world to the viewer.17 With scholasticism’s shift to Aristotelian frames of learning, intromission became the dominant theory of vision in the thirteenth century. By turning to Aristotle, medieval thinkers could envision sight as a process that directly involved the viewer in the physical world. Albertus Magnus (c.1200–1280), teacher of Thomas Aquinas, was one of the primary proponents of this shift to intromission. In a defense of the Aristotelian theory of vision, he attacked extramission, particularly its contention that a light emanates from the eye, insisting that vision results from the object’s ability to transform the intervening medium in a processional flux that finally impresses the surface of the eye.18 Although Albertus Magnus made use of new translations of Arabic writers (he cited Al-kindi and, by the end of his career, he referenced Alhacen), his resistance to Plato’s subordination of nature to mathematics largely separated him from the emerging science of perspectiva.19 By contrast, his older contemporary, the influential Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170 –1253), argued for the importance of mathematics to studies of vision.20 The difference between these thinkers was largely philosophical, since, as David C. Lindberg points out, they use about the same amount of mathematics in their work.21 Even so, Roger Bacon attacked Albertus Magnus for his ignorance, but dedicated himself to actualizing Robert Grosseteste’s argument in support of the mathematization of optics.22 Commonly regarded as a pivotal figure in the shifts that came to characterize the study of perspectiva, Grosseteste sought to retain aspects of extramission in his theory of sight. Most importantly, Grossesteste preserves an essentially Neoplatonic conception of light in his short treatise, De Luce.23 Positing the centrality of light as a generative form, Grosseteste suggests that all movement or change results from light. Elsewhere in De lineis, angulis, and figuris, Grosseteste argues that vision is an example of radiating force, resisting a strictly Aristotelian account of intromission by preserving the eye’s agency.24

Perspectival Shifts Although we might say that intromission was the dominant theory of vision by Chaucer’s day, this view of sight had also undergone a radical transformation. Vision’s wholesale alteration was galvanized by Neoplatonic interventions like those of Grosseteste, but it was vastly expanded by the incorporation of Greek and Arabic learning into the work of later writers such as Witelo (c. 1235–1275?), and John Pecham (c. 1235–1292).25

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Arguably the most important of these writers, often collectively referred to as the perspectivists, was the English Franciscan Roger Bacon (c. 1214–1292), who dedicated his efforts to synthesizing the competing accounts of extramission and intromission.26 Although he was accused of heresy and associated with magic in a popular apocryphal tradition, Bacon’s writings had a profound impact on visual relations, even into the seventeenth century.27 Bacon’s writings are ingenious and conventional, since his attempt to argue for the spiritual significance of geometrical optics also participates in the movement of translatio studii, or the effort to assimilate non-Christian learning into the canon of theological understanding produced by the Western church.28 It is the spiritual importance of this science, furthermore, that more clearly connects his writings on optics to the dynamics of visibility and agency that literary expressions explore. In a lively revision of Greek, Arabic, and Latin writings, Bacon reconfigures sighted agency by suggesting that viewers and objects equally exert .physical species during visual encounters.29 Closer scrutiny of Bacon’s views of sight is in order, for his claim that both seer and seen are simultaneously active and passive blurs gender distinctions established through medieval vision metaphors. Bacon often uses gendered metaphors to expound the workings of sight, but these are the some of the most confusing analogies he draws in his efforts to explain his science. He is on surer figurative ground when he employs images that elucidate the individual’s relation to an abstract condition, such as sin. For example, Bacon explains the differences between perfected, refracted, and reflected vision by referencing degrees of sinfulness in explicitly angular terms: “vision is of three kinds: direct in those who are perfect, refracted in those who are imperfect, and reflected in evildoers and those who ignore God’s commandments.”30 A hierarchy of virtue is implicit in this classification, but all three forms of sight offer benefits. According to Bacon, understanding the mechanical workings of even the most corrupt form of vision, reflected vision, is useful to the earthly Christian community. In a discussion memorable for its inventiveness, Bacon argues that mirrors could be employed in battle in such a way as to make one soldier appear to be many, or one army appear to be multiple: “Thus, for the benefit of the commonwealth and against infidels, apparitions of this sort could be produced.”31 While its putative pragmatism might weaken this analogy, Bacon’s figurative exposition at least matches the geometry of sight he is working to explain. Elsewhere Bacon’s metaphors are more troubled, but as the preceding classification scheme illustrates, the primary problem facing the Franciscan friar is the constraints inherent to the expressive tradition within which he seeks to situate his mathematical account of sight. This figurative context

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puts Bacon in a bind, because even as he expands and transforms scientific knowledge, the accepted truths of Christian doctrine must remain undisturbed. Bacon’s metaphoric treatments often look like rhetorical cover for his experimental project, yet scholarly analysis of the relation between science and religion in other medieval writings persuasively affirms his participation in the widespread thirteenth-century effort “to bring rebellious learning back into captivity to Christ.”32 Thomas Aquinas captures the sentiment of the period with his claim that philosophy is the handmaiden to theology (ancilla theologiae). This adage, which expresses the attempt to preserve and promote the knowledge gained from new translations of Greek and Arabic texts, employs an image of feminine submission to insist upon the docility of this material in the face of a robust Christian tradition. Yet this axiom equally illustrates the vigorous potential of the new learning. Although this figure is a cognate of the “beautiful captive” model of Christian exegetics derived from Deuteronomy 21: 10–13, it differs from this, its more strikingly debased counterpart, largely because the handmaiden image is not envisioned as a fully abject position.33 Besides the fact that theology is imagined as a female figure in this axiomatic rendering, philosophy is meant to exercise agency in this relationship, even if in doing so she remains faithful to the overarching command of her guiding mistress.34 I will return to this point later in this chapter, but I want open my discussion of Bacon’s optical theory by suggesting that the effort to fit perspectiva into this sort of gender hierarchy reveals a tension between agency and its appearance that is relevant to Chaucer’s representations of masculinity. After I discuss the possibilities for agency that Bacon’s theories of vision offer, I consider the ways that he reconciles a bilateral vision of sighted agency to the medieval church’s hierarchy of knowledge. My analysis of Bacon’s “competing loyalties” will not focus on his role in the development of experimental science.35 Rather, I suggest that Bacon negotiates the visibility of bilateral agency in a manner that acknowledges the contextual constraints that frame seeing. By making some of the more radical of his ideas less visible, Bacon’s representation of his science demonstrates the ways that particular versions of agency, those that do not conform to a dominant model, fade into the background of the visual field. As Bacon’s writing illustrates, such agency is not erased, but clearly registers as part of a fundamentally expanded point of view. This broadened horizon was not just theoretical, for it is clear that Bacon’s ideas had a transformative impact on later ways of seeing. Bacon and his peers precipitated a shift in the medieval worldview, one that moved the debate over sight past oppositional theories of sighted agency. Vision was no longer a “this way” or “that way” index of totalized control. Indeed, the coexistence of agency and passivity in the seeing subject

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opened the possibility for greater gender reciprocity. The following chapters will consider more closely the social implications of these shifts in medieval visuality. Here, however, I examine the relevance of Bacon’s scientific views of sight to literary representation. Although the objective goals of Bacon’s project do not lend themselves to the extended metaphors of Augustine, or even Grosseteste, his claims for the value of his science indicate its connection to representation. Bacon looks for synthesis in the particular processes of vision, treating the material world as the disparate figures of a unified narrative of divinity. Language’s contingency thus provides a means to consolidate the apparent disparity between the emanating force of the eye and the gaping receptivity of sight, seaming together agency and passivity through its poetic capacity to elude the linear trajectories that accompany analytic observation. An Objective Point of View: Visible Species Bacon’s poetic understanding of his science is most apparent in his representation of what was known as the “visible species” in sight. As Suzannah Biernoff points out, the term “species” is “etymologically rooted in the order of the visible,” but it means different things to different writers across the period.36 Before I discuss Bacon’s definition of this term, I want to emphasize that its conceptual flexibility was a key component of Bacon’s attempts to reconcile conflicting views of seeing. Bacon argues that the idea of the physical species functions in many understandings of sight, but he insists this concept has different names depending on its context of usage: Moreover, it is called “similitude” and “image” with respect to the thing generating it. . .it is called “species” with respect to sense and intellect, according to the use of Aristotle and the naturalists. . .It is called “idol” with respect to mirrors—for thus we frequently employ the term. It is called “phantasm” and “simulacrum” in the apparitions of dreams. . .It is called “form” by Alhazen, author of the widely known Perspectiva. It is called “intention” by the multitude of naturalists because of the weakness of its being in comparison to that of the thing itself. . .It is called “shadow of the philosophers,” since it is not clearly sensible except in the two instances mentioned, namely, of a ray falling through a window and of a stronglycoloured species. . .It is called “virtue” with respect to generation and corruption. . .It is called “impression” because it resembles impressions. . .It is called “passion” because the medium and sense, in receiving species, undergo a transmutation in their substance.37

According to Bacon, writers who would appear to be in conflict are actually in agreement about visual species. Here Bacon takes advantage of

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language’s association with vision’s imprecision, suggesting that different names only register different ways of seeing this aspect of sight. Admitting multiplicity in sight, however, is not a concessionary devaluation of visual perception. Instead, Bacon’s ability to chart the various processes involved in seeing explains the wide divergence between what he ultimately characterizes as partial views of this expansive subject. Even so, to accommodate such a variety of perspectives, Bacon’s definition of the visible species must be simple and capacious: hence, in Bacon’s work the visible species are described as the effect of an agent on a recipient. Just as “the virtue of the father produces the same thing in his semen,” the species are like the agent in essence and operation.38 Unlike Augustine’s use of the term, Bacon’s “species” do not constitute a likeness that an object simply makes visible in the realm of perception. Bacon’s species have force, to the extent that the species work to make a recipient like the agent. Continuing his convoluted adaptation of Aristotle’s generation model, Bacon emphasizes the power of the agent over the recipient: “the species and virtue of the father received in the mother are preserved by the presence of the mother.”39 Bacon nearly makes the mother into the father’s species, “the father and mother have the same specific nature,” but he stops short of collapsing the two into one.40 Bacon resists the idea of total passivity in the recipient, perhaps sensing the problems this condition would cause for the agent. In this example, if the father transforms the mother to resemble his own likeness too completely, the father’s presence might appear unnecessary, even redundant. Bacon merely touches upon the potential crisis this presents for the masculine agent with his claim, “[the presence of the mother] suffices in place of the father owing to the identity of specific nature.”41 Bacon avoids this masculine predicament and its attendant problems through his particular theorization of matter, which subtends his explanation of the visible species. Rejecting the notion of matter’s “passive potentiality,” he follows Aristotle by suggesting that visible species derive from an object’s active power.42 The kinetic force of matter does not act all on its own, however; the recipient, or seer, is also active in vision. Since we can see our eyes in a mirror, Bacon reasons, they must also emit species.43 This point causes complications, so Bacon labors to coordinate a Neoplatonic version of emanating force with an intromissive account of visible species. To do so, Bacon must elaborate the eye’s role in seeing. The result is a thoroughly reciprocal theory of vision, one that makes viewers active and passive in the processes of sight. Bacon’s bilateral theory of vision has an added effect, to the extent that it resolves even more clearly the problematic status of masculinity that his Aristotelian generation analogy introduces. In theorizing the eye’s agency, he clarifies a role for the

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recipient-seer that makes the father and mother complementary rather than competing forces in generation. Bacon invests the eye with unique type of agency, which, I argue, bears on representations of women as purveyors of spiritual guidance. As I will discuss later, when women are seers their agency is more benign because it supposedly emanates from the soul; the danger they pose in visual encounters thus emerges from their objective power to influence a viewer. Balancing women’s capacity as seers against their influence as sights hinges on Bacon’s theorization of the eye’s role in seeing. In some ways, the eye functions like any other object: its species excite the intervening medium, multiplying across the distance separating it from the object. This, however, creates a commingling unique to the eye as an organ of vision, meaning that the eye in effect completes the process of vision. The species of any agent multiply across the intervening medium, but they do not have the power to precipitate sight. As Bacon puts it, “the species of mundane things are not immediately suited of themselves to bring to completion an action on the eye, owing to the nobility of the latter.”44 This ability derives from what Bacon calls the eye’s “nobility” [nobilitatem] meaning its connection to the sensible powers of the animate soul. The eye is thus active in sight, though it cannot render sight independently of the object’s power. Yet Bacon invests the eye with a more sophisticated type of agency than regular objects, suggesting its volitional power in the process of vision: “Thus the species of the eye prepares for the approach of the species of the visible object and, moreover, ennobles the latter so that it is wholly conformable to and commensurate with the nobility of the animated body, the eye.”45 Bacon thus uses the eye’s connection to the soul to manage what otherwise might become the chaos of visual perception. Importantly, ordering the visual sense in this fashion creates a bilateral formation of agency with the potential to re-envision gender. As I will suggest through my reading of Chaucer’s Melibee, connecting the eye and the soul in a receptive viewer suggests that men and women have different relations to agency and its visibility. My reading of Chaucer is indebted to Bacon’s spiritualized narrative of vision’s receptivity, but before I turn to the more allegorical elements of his theory, I want to underscore the importance of Bacon’s mathematical attempt to structure sight. Bacon’s objective account charts a relation of visual reciprocity that confounds power relations staked on an oppositional binary, such as gender. Although Bacon suggests we must maintain appropriate distance from an object to be able to see it, he does not espouse a theory of visual separation. Instead, Bacon utilizes geometric optics to plot the connectivity of seeing, using a visual pyramid to explain the eye’s ability to receive coherent images. Bacon thus extracts coherent vision from the potential

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confusion of sense perception as follows: since all objects emit visible species in every direction, many of those species fall on the eye’s surface at oblique angles; only those species that enter the eye at a perpendicular angle are direct enough and therefore strong enough to form a distinct impression upon the eye. In sum, Bacon envisions a pyramid whose apex links the object’s perpendicular rays to the center of the eye. It is clearly possible that many pyramids could link the eye and the object, but Bacon organizes the infinite points of the object with his typical combination of simplicity and capaciousness: “For the principal requirement is only that the eye should perceive the thing itself, distinctly and sufficiently and with certitude; and this can be accomplished by a single pyramid in which there are as many lines as there are parts of the visible body.”46 Those species that enter the eye obliquely make up the total field of vision, producing visible but peripheral images as compared to the object’s sharp outline. Here Bacon makes room for “imperfect” vision, but he does so by mathematically charting the precision of visual perception. Plotting the exact workings of oblique vision is a characteristic habit of Bacon’s, for he seeks to lend certainty to all of sight’s aspects, including those that might appear to be peripheral to an account of vision’s primary workings. He does so, moreover, not by denying that vision functions in different ways across the intervening medium, but by charting sight’s multiple motions across its variable contexts. Species may be refracted or reflected by an obstruction, which means that they might reach the eye with different degrees of potency.47 Bacon attempts to see every aspect of vision, yet he must finally make sense of a mass of potentially conflicting points. Lest we forget, Bacon claims that the eye also has a part in sight’s operation, which means that there is a competing pyramid of vision that connects eye to object. In this area, Bacon’s theory is even more complicated than we might anticipate: because the eye sends forth species, these form multiple pyramids on every point of the object. After amassing a dizzying confusion of species multiplying between eye and object, object and eye, Bacon cuts through this perceptual chaos with an appeal to what amounts to the pragmatic simplicity of geometry. Since the perpendicular line is most intense, “one pyramid is the principal one, namely, that whose axis is the line passing through the centre of all parts of the eye (that is, the axis of the whole eye).”48 Bacon attempts to account for the totality of vision without losing sight of his goal, which is to show how vision’s fluid exchanges coalesce into an orderly process of seeing. Roger Bacon’s Big Picture I maintain that Bacon’s mathematical conceptualization of vision is important because it potentially revises oppositional theories of agency, expanding the

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horizon of sighted encounters through its description of a reciprocal dynamic linking seer and seen, recipient and agent. I also want to consider these expanded possibilities for agency in relation to the ways Bacon connects his objective account to his larger philosophical project. As Bacon saw it, his writings on perspective were one part of an explicitly theological vision of human understanding. In arguing for an expansive synthesis of secular and religious learning, Bacon made a bid for patronage to Cardinal Guy de Foulques, who was elevated to become Pope Clement IV in 1265. When the new Pope invited Bacon to share his work, Bacon assembled a mass of writing, including the Opus Majus, one part of which is explicitly devoted to optics. Although this text was a compendium of Bacon’s existing work woven together with new writing, its seven-part structure sought to provide the Pope access to the scholar’s comprehensive perspective. As such, the Opus Majus situates the study of optics, not just in relation to a case in support of mathematics and experimental science, but also in relation to Bacon’s arguments for the study of tongues and his writings on moral philosophy.49 From this work it becomes clear that Bacon views sight as a spiritual phenomenon. Yet mathematical analysis continues to imbue Bacon’s metaphorical musings on the spiritual relationship between sight and understanding, morality and sensation. Bacon sums up this synthesis with a trenchantly spiritual and figuratively rich defense of geometry: “we can understand nothing fully unless its form is presented before our eyes, and therefore in the Scripture of God the whole knowledge of things to be defined by geometrical forms is contained and far better than mere philosophy could express it.”50 Consequently, mathematical certitude undergirds Bacon’s writings on the morality of vision, thus making good his promise to shore up spirituality’s foundations with the objective pillars of geometrical optics. It is equally possible, however, that Bacon’s religious convictions inform his mathematical calculations. When Bacon enlists an argument for the importance of free will to explain the reciprocity he envisions for sight, he resolves the very conflict that had hitherto been irrepressible for an Aristotelian account of vision: It has been said that not only is intromission [of species] required for vision, but also the extramission and cooperation of its own power and species. Similarly, spiritual vision requires not only that the soul should be the recipient from without of divine grace and powers, but also that it should cooperate by its own power. For consent and the exercise of free will are required, along with the grace of God, if we are to see and gain the state of salvation.51

This comparison surpasses rhetorical invention, for in preserving the seer’s agency as an expression of free will, Bacon develops a more robust

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idea of spirituality. With a synthesis of cooperation and control, force and consent, receptivity and grace, Bacon expands individual Christian experience by recognizing its reciprocity. As I suggested earlier, Bacon enables his vision of mutuality by linking the eye to the soul in his objective account of vision. In his interpretive exposition of perspective’s importance to divine wisdom, he makes this connection figuratively explicit. Recalling his scientific account of ocular anatomy, Bacon claims the eye’s complex structure is “the literal exposition. . .of the spiritual pupil, that is, the soul.”52 Citing the prominence of visual metaphors in scripture, Bacon claims that “nothing is more essential to [a grasp of ] the literal and spiritual sense than the certitude supplied by this science.”53 The scientific observations of optics, it is worth repeating, constitute the “literal exposition” [litteralis expositio] of spiritual truths expressed through figures of seeing. A series of comparisons illustrate the allegorical significance of perspectiva: Just as we see nothing corporeally without corporeal light, so it is impossible for us to see anything spiritually without the spiritual light of divine grace. And just as moderate distance of the [visible] object is required for vision of that object (thus the object must be viewed neither from an excessive nor from an insufficient distance), so the same thing is required spiritually, for remoteness from God through infidelity and a multitude of sins destroys spiritual vision, as do the presumption of excessive familiarity with the divine and the [overly bold] investigation of divine majesty.54

I will have more to say about appropriate distance as it relates to gender difference at later points in this book. In this chapter I want to highlight Bacon’s affirmation of human agency in relations with the divine, for it would seem that his willingness to acknowledge the necessity of human cooperation in spiritual salvation would open the way for a completely reciprocal theory of agency between persons. This is not the case, at least not in cross-gendered visual encounters. The anxiety that pervades Bacon’s discussions of such contact betrays a suspicion of women’s power as “sights.” He warns his audience to be guarded “when it is necessary either in confession of for some other reason to talk with women. For all men, however holy, strong species in this particular would disturb.”55 Simply through their visibility as objects, women threaten their male viewers. Elsewhere Bacon extols the position of viewer because it is through seeing that we gain understanding, both literal and spiritual. Yet the receptivity that seeing requires makes the viewing perspective vulnerable, particularly when the seer is a man, and the site of

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sight is a woman. A final longer passage from Bacon illustrates the threat that women pose to men in scenes of looking: Adam was tempted so that he damned himself and the whole human race because of the multiplication of species perceptible to the senses. So David the holy prophet deceived by the species of Bathsheba fell from adultery into murder. So the elders whom Daniel judged were deceived by the species of a woman.56

It is important to note that Bacon widens the parameters of encounter to include all five of the senses in this example. This expansion is part of an attempt to shield vision from charges of voluptuousness, for Bacon frequently holds other senses (especially touch and taste) primarily responsible for spiritual corruption.57 Due to its animate connection to the soul, Bacon continues to assert vision’s essential nobility: “But the species of the eye is the species of an animate body, in which the power of the soul rules.”58 This effort to set vision apart from the other senses actually indicates its integration within a total nexus of sensory experience, making “the species of a woman” broadly corrupting through its expanded potential for impact. Even if he locates culpability elsewhere, Bacon’s expansive vision carries risks, since it opens the receiver to temptations a weak-willed person might find difficult to resist: “So Eve received the species of the voice of the serpent and of the visible apple and its sweet odor.”59 Perhaps for this reason, Bacon installs precautions that would make perception into a more guarded affair, advising his audience to “avoid the shorter pyramids, and the multiplications, principal, direct, and at equal angles.”60 In his exposition of moral philosophy, he cites Cicero in order to denounce sensual pleasure, “For such pleasure hinders deliberation, is hostile to reason, and blindfolds the eyes of the mind.”61 Yet Bacon is no opponent of perception. Bacon also condemns the physical state of blindness, “for concerning this world the blind can have no experience worthy of the name.”62 This point threatens to jam Bacon’s synthesizing apparatus, since it is also clear that he believes there are things we should not see, or that we cannot see. To cite the most absolute example, Bacon claims aspects of divinity are “concealed” [occultatur] from us because they exceed mortal comprehension.63 What we see, then, is a decidedly vexed perspective: Bacon worries about the viewer’s vulnerability in perception, yet he also believes this receptivity is ultimately what makes Christianity superior to other religions. When he suggests that Christianity surpasses Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism in its visionary balance, Bacon appeals to what he presents as a

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common perspective: “to submit oneself entirely to the will of another is the supreme and the most difficult test of all, as every one knows. And therefore. . .the law of Christ is altogether superior.”64 Here we see Bacon’s interest in preserving the vitality of reciprocity, for he converts submission into an active gesture in his meditations on spiritual receptivity. He uses traditional gender commonplaces to locate the pitfalls of sight, but his mathematical account of vision depends on seeing reciprocity as a positively productive process. Without the bilateralism of agency between object and eye, there would be no vision for Roger Bacon. Significant for my purposes, the agency he affords the eye transforms what we might otherwise view as a weaker position of compliant submission into an equally powerful force. According to Bacon, an enduring wisdom accrues to the viewer who stays open to the threatening contingencies of sight. This form of yielding takes strength of will, for it is much easier to shut down perception than to remain receptive in the face of its complex dangers. The governing priority of spirituality, therefore, allows Bacon to argue that his bilateral account of agency “directs other sciences as its handmaids,” since his geometrical vision of optics is the fluorescence of his experimental model of inquiry.65 Reconciling Visions Bacon attempts to have it both ways, reconciling his bilateral account of sight to a hierarchy that privileges its spiritual dimension. To succeed, Bacon must acknowledge invisibility’s importance to visuality. Because visibility depends on invisibility in his theory of sight, Bacon argues that representation offers relief from the multiplicity of literal processes.66 Bacon’s emphasis on the power of invisibility is familiar insofar as he suggests that matters of greatest importance remain visibly elusive. Readers of medieval theology have certainly seen this idea before, for the association of divinity and invisibility is a staple of religious discourse.67 It is also a fixture of exegetical interpretation, since even in our own era, proponents of the “fruyt and chaf” model of reading regard the “letter” of the text as a disposable cover that occludes its more valuable, hitherto invisible, “sentence.”68 In an interesting turnabout, Bacon markedly departs from this tradition by suggesting the literal processes of sight are those that slip out of focus in our daily visual encounters. For Bacon, the spiritual sense remains immediately accessible and transparently obvious. Because the spiritual is settled in Bacon’s view, the literal is the sense in need of interpretive recovery. Instead of viewing sight as a finite objective process with multiple spiritual meanings, Bacon presents the multitude of optical phenomena as specific examples of a larger narrative of received spiritual wisdom. Unlike the commentator in allegoresis, whose aim, according to Rita Copeland and

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Stephen Melville, is “to produce tropes, which are then to be explicated,” Bacon observes literal sensory phenomena, which he then conforms to the figurative narrative of Christian understanding.69 There is no “unveiling” in Bacon’s allegoresis; instead, in a radical illustration of Copeland and Melville’s claim that the interpreter’s attempt “to ‘save’ or recuperate the text. . .[is] a covering of the text so that it can be hermeneutically ‘recovered,’” Bacon recovers vision, veiling its mathematical multiplicity with a consolidating allegory of spiritual truth.70 By treating the particularities of the physical world as a disparate mass that is collated through its spiritual interpretation, Bacon acknowledges the affective distance representation provides to viewers, who otherwise might not be able to abide the literal processes of physical sensation. In a particularly striking example, Bacon suggests that we could not endure the Eucharist unless we focused on its spiritual import, for we would recoil “from horror and loathing. For the human heart could not endure to masticate and devour raw and living flesh and to drink fresh blood.”71 Bacon thus treats spiritual meaning as a received certainty that covers over the disturbing potential of the literal, softening viewers’ encounters with a tangible world of animate matter by providing a conventional frame within which to understand its particulars. Using integentum in this way has been characterized elsewhere as a product of high scholasticism’s ossification of interpretation, and it is true that many Biblical allegories are considered settled by the schoolmen.72 My emphasis on Bacon’s correspondence to this broader trend is the ways in which he shows the vigor subtending received wisdom. It is not that Bacon seeks to obscure the scientific findings of his study; on the contrary, he uses spiritual interpretation to facilitate his audience’s ability to come to terms with the mass of information he presents. Familiar tenets give receivers a means to see the richness and density of a process that is fluid, particular, and spontaneous. Stringing together a series of terms, Bacon invests “species” with meaning through its complex sequencing: similitudo agentis et ymago et species et ydolum et simulacrum et fantasma et forma et intentio et passio et impressio et umbra philosophorum.73 If we ultimately see that all these expressions mean “species,” it is because we also comprehend the diverse components that constitute this broader term. While this synthesis might appear to flatten the field of vision, it actually widens the scope of seeing. Using familiar interpretive formulae allows for a more comprehensive view of his complex discoveries, and it this perspective, I suggest, that Bacon and Chaucer share. At the beginning of his Melibee, Chaucer appeals to the common belief that the “sentence” of the gospels is “al oon,” explaining his literary method thus: And though I nat the same wordes seye As y han herd, yet to yow alle I preye

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Blameth me nat; for, as in my sentence, Shul ye nowher fynden difference (VII. 959–62)

In what some would consider his most impersonal narrative, Chaucer avows his adherence to convention as a means to uncover his literary authority. Since the Melibee is an unremarkable retelling of Renaud de Louens’s Livre de Melibée et de Dame Prudence, itself a translation of Albertanus of Brescia’s Liber consolationis et consilii, we might say, as so many readers have done, that here Chaucer announces his lack of originality, highlighting his indebtedness to other sources as a means to establish his poetic orthodoxy.74 In doing so we would be right, but we would also miss the powerful point of this display. In the remainder of this chapter I argue that Chaucer’s invocation of the common literary ground of “sentence” allows him to explore the particular conditions of visibility required to produce or maintain an image of dominant masculinity in his culture.75 As I will show, Chaucer’s mobilization of the Melibee and Prudence dialogue provides a bilateral conception of gendered agency, but it employs allegory to make this dimension of their relationship easier to see in familiar terms. Allegory covers particulars of gender that might otherwise disturb settled binaries, but Chaucer does not erase the fluidity that characterizes the relational articulation of masculinity and femininity. Instead, he develops the power of invisibility, or visible neutrality, to allow for a dynamic of agency similar to Roger Bacon’s mathematical theorization of seeing. Just as Bacon reconciles his reciprocal vision of sight to a hierarchy of spirituality, Chaucer conforms his bilateral representation of agency to a binary of gender. Here I will focus less on the effect of this practice on Chaucer’s ability to assume invisibility as a means to establish literary authority. Besides the fact that the Thopas-Melibee melodrama is covered in the introduction to this study, I am more interested to show the ways that invisibility sustains gender, using the coverage that convention provides in order to present complex and multiple exchanges of agency as a discrete binary.76 By treating gender as an integentum that cloaks men’s complex, partial, and multiple relations to agency, Chaucer’s Melibee unveils the ways that a particular masculinity gains cultural dominance through its banality, neutrality, and conventionality. The Allegory of Marriage The particular dynamics of agency that pass between Prudence and Melibee are subsumed into a larger narrative of masculinity through the allegorical relation of marriage. As a figuration of Christ’s union with the

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Church, marriage is a sacrament because it is the living embodiment of this spiritual fusion.77 Although I will not deal with the historical changes involving medieval marriage in great detail, it is clear that the Church’s reform of marriage, which began in the latter half of the eleventh century, transformed its visibility over the next three centuries.78 As cultural historians explain, marriage became a key component in the Church’s effort to make its influence more visible in the lives of everyday people.79 The Church’s intervention changed the scope of privacy in marriage by loosening the family’s hold on such unions, but its emphasis on verifying the agreement between two parties still guarantees the need for a mediating witness to the bond. In an effort to discourage the practice of clandestine marriage, the Church offered to fill the role of disinterested witness, a seeing body whose only concern in its oversight was the purity of the sacral union.80 Through mechanisms including the proclaiming of the Banns and the performance of the marriage ceremony, the Church offered a ritualized display that certified the conversion of two bodies into one, orderly flesh.81 When Peter Lombard included marriage among the sacraments in the twelfth century, this classification made marriage into a visible but intangible union. The sacramental character of marriage thus called for this conversion to be substantiated even after the ceremony. Consent was an important element leading up to the marriage, but affection was a key aspect of the bond after the ceremony itself.82 Moving the will of one’s partner becomes a visible sign of spousal affection, and it is this ability, to use affection as a way to conform a spouse to one’s will, that makes marriage simultaneously bilateral and hierarchical in many medieval theorizations. Hugh of St. Victor provides a thorough explication of this idea: For since she was given as a companion, not as a servant or a mistress. . .she was made from the middle, that she might be proved to have been made for equality of association. Yet in a certain way she was inferior to him, in that she was made from him, so that she might always look to him as to her beginning and cleaving to him indivisibly might not separate herself from that association which ought to have been established reciprocally.83

Since the Parson echoes this formulation, we can safely assume that it colored Chaucer’s picture of marriage (X. 927–28). This view of conjugal mutuality allowed for women’s agency, but only in a specific sense: as Sharon Farmer explains, women were urged to use their influence to better husbands’ spiritual conditions.84 As an example of this discourse, Thomas of Chobham’s Summa confessorum concomitantly suggests a man’s control over his wife, “as a part of his own body,” and her power over him, “For no

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priest can soften a man’s heart as a wife can.”85 Although it promises parity, if we look more closely at this image, the only body that is visible in this commingling is the husband’s. Marriage thus allegorizes heterosexual coupling, recasting it as a spiritual union with the power to conceal the physical joining of two bodies. It does so, moreover, by focusing on masculinity’s governing priority over this bond. Giving medieval form to Jacques Lacan’s modern insistence that “the relation between the sexes does not take place,” medieval marriage occludes the literal “hybridity” of this union by incorporating a wife into her husband’s masculinity.86 To be sure, this manhood is an ethereal nothing, which is made virtually present only through a ritualized display of its conventional authority. Yet the ability to subsume feminine agency under a categorical formulation of masculine authority works to erase autonomous and/or erotic aspects of a wife’s identity.87 In other words, the only elements of feminine agency that become visible are those that are firmly incorporated into an image of manhood. This visibility, which should properly be regarded as a form of invisibility, more problematically enables a type of erasure, for the wifely particulars that might be wont to slip outside the boundaries of a husband’s masculinity are eliminated by this marital allegory. In short, this model of marriage makes a wife’s agency (in)visible by erasing her body, creating an image of masculine authority by incorporating femininity into a conventional rendering of manhood. The extremes of formal regularity that Chaucer achieves in his Tale of Melibee reveal the workings of this process, for its marital allegory foregrounds the centrality of feminine agency to a conventional image of masculine empowerment. It does so, moreover, by using marriage to incorporate Prudence’s character into Melibee’s. From its outset, Chaucer’s tale issues a constant reminder that this is an exchange between husband and wife.88 I am thus sympathetic to readings that literalize this tale in order to investigate its gendered consequences.89 But unlike those interpretations that consider Prudence in relation to the ideal wife as she was constructed in the late fourteenth century, I also want to consider the effect of allegory on her visibility.90 It is clear that Prudence is no regular wife even if this dialogue is set within the boundaries of marriage. She remains an allegorical figure to the very last. I therefore argue that Chaucer’s use of allegory is itself a consequence of gender. In short, using allegory in a story that admits feminine influence over masculine identity is a strategy to produce and maintain a coherent masculinity. If we view Prudence (or Sophie) as an allegorized aspect of Melibee’s consciousness, we make visible a model of the household in which masculine agency subsumes all feminine elements.91 Feminine influence becomes invisible in the Melibee, but as I shall suggest, the tension that emerges in this tale between invisibility and

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erasure problematizes the easy assumption that women can or should be incorporated into visions of masculine authority. The masculinity that results in the Melibee, many readers would agree, does not have the savvy cache often associated with Chaucer’s elusiveness. Invisibility, therefore, poses risks to traditional portraits of masculinity. These risks are due in part to the gender simplicity asserted by many allegorizations of marriage. Because gender is supposed to be a natural binary, indistinct due to its perpetual hold on sameness, it can be utilized to stabilize less constant relations.92 In Chaucer’s prose narrative, the allegory of marriage becomes the model for an ultimately idealized masculine consciousness, but this portrait remains convincing only if we attend to the agency that Prudence exercises in this relationship. This is a bit difficult in the Melibee, since a gender binary perfectly inscribes the interaction between its protagonist’s interior features, highlighting difference in Melibee’s consciousness while including such variation within the fulsomeness that gender difference allows. Here the masculine consciousness, in all its variety, is equivalent to the relation between man and woman, husband and wife. And, to be sure, this is no gender relation gone amok, where the household becomes a site that corrupts naturalized roles.93 Instead, a masculine consciousness in crisis, like Melibee’s, is ordered according to a gender hierarchy that locates authority in a man’s agency and erases any aspects of feminine autonomy that might threaten this portrait’s conventional parameters. Even as Melibee’s anger threatens to spin out of control, causing more destruction and visiting more grief upon his house, Prudence’s power is a component of Melibee’s authority. Prudence quickly sets aside her own victimization, for the entire dialogue consists of her repeated attempts to convince her husband to make peace with his enemies. The allegory of Melibee, then, uses the cover of a psychomachia to construct what is supposed to look like an idealized figuration of gender difference.94 As this story illustrates, however, the picture of masculinity that emerges from this conjugal allegory is troubling for its very banality. Although the tale points to Prudence as the source of her husband’s ordinariness, the classic critical dismissal of this tale is profoundly uninteresting in its own right. Instead, I urge a consideration of both the banality of Melibee’s masculinity and Prudence’s role in its creation, for it is the way in which Prudence’s agency is regularized to further the expectations for authoritative masculinity that makes her husband’s masculinity conventional to the point of erasure. I will have more to say about this point in the final sections of this chapter, but I want to foreground my argument with a claim that underpins much of what follows in the remainder of this book: because making masculinity depends on managing the (in)visibility of feminine agency, erasing those elements of female identity that supercede

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an imagined manhood limits the parameters of gender for both women and men. If men reduce women to formulaic models in order to consolidate their coherence in the public eye, then they reduce themselves to the regularized contours of a masculinity that merely records their limits. With its generalized focus, Chaucer’s Melibee serves as the ultimate parable of masculine reduction. I therefore want to begin by addressing the calamity that galvanizes this dialogue, because the attack upon Melibee’s house allows masculinity to be re-envisioned in terms of its relation to the private space of the feminine. In an allegory figuring proper gender relations through marriage, it is striking that individual masculine agency nearly dissolves the unity of Melibee’s house. Signaling secular masculinity’s connection with the interiorized space of the household, Melibee’s crisis is precipitated by his roaming in the fields, an act that could have conveyed his privileged independence. Acting as if he is an independent masculine subject who is unfettered by familial ties makes Melibee vulnerable, or so the advantage his enemies gain over him through his absence suggests. Moreover, by assaulting Melibee through his wife and daughter, his opponents make visible the constitutive role these feminine figures play in Melibee’s character. The trauma that precipitates the tale’s dialogue, then, hinges upon Melibee’s misperception of what constitutes dominant masculinity in his culture. His opponents understand in a way that he does not that the determinants of masculine control reside within the enclosed space of the domestic. As he comes to understand, in the transformation of manhood that accompanies conjugal marriage, femininity is radically refigured as a display of masculine potency. The Femininity Mystique The femininity that makes Prudence (and Sophie) part of Melibee’s consciousness, I submit, functions to pass off the legitimacy of a masculinity that might otherwise be exposed as visibly fragmentary and materially contingent. Prudence’s femininity is of course powerful, for it simultaneously must dematerialize her and substantiate her husband. Prudence in her advice exercises a large measure of agency, but because she passes off such activity as passivity, her influence secures her husband in his pretension to household authority. It is as a cure for Melibee’s “outrageous wepyng” that Prudence advises him to call together his friends and relatives for advice (VII. 990). Unironically, she counsels her husband to seek advice from other men, showing that her agency operates in order to secure her husband’s inclusion in the community of masculinity that sets itself up as universal. When that community assembles, however, it is clear that men cannot agree, or that when they do, their

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accord is not born of wisdom. Although a few sage members of the masculine congregation advise Melibee against war, they are a minority, which indicates that manly will collectively leans more toward rash violence than careful negotiation. Prudence’s counsel, at least in this initial instance, appears to be a failure. But I think we can agree that Prudence’s early counsel is a studied failure, a tactic that ultimately allows her to gain Melibee’s confidence. In this preliminary scene of advice, Prudence demonstrates the contingency of masculinity as it is produced by his peers, for she appeals to broader traditions of wisdom when she advises Melibee to disregard the masculine advice she instructed him to solicit at the outset of the narrative. Because the majority opinion is formed as a response to a temporally specific present enlivened by the passions of immediate violence, Prudence discounts its validity. Instead, she unfolds a narrative of counsel that is supposedly timeless, removed from the particular circumstances of petty infighting that would make revenge a specific reaction to shifting fortunes. Her advice is proverbial and general, so far removed from the happenings enflaming Melibee’s anger that it appears to be a superficial palliative to substantive injury: “in wikked haste is no profit” (VII. 1051). Yet it is Prudence’s ability to enliven this tradition of counsel—associating it with a femininity that works through a cultivated invisibility—that ultimately substantiates the “masculine” course of peace she recommends. Here she exemplifies the common medieval understanding of prudence as both a cardinal and capital virtue, for her practical wisdom crosses both moral and intellectual dimensions of deliberate action.95 In another respect, Prudence exemplifies the broad medieval tradition of translatio studii, since her character figures the assimilation of a classical virtue into the broader interpretive scheme that consolidates the totality of Christian truth.96 While Prudence’s recommendations draw from a stoic tradition in which the wise man cultivates an attitude of indifference to changes in his worldly fortunes, her advice more thoroughly reflects an emphasis on receptivity that derives from an idealization of Christ’s passion.97 Because the virtue of prudence was often connected to a visionary foresight that suggested divine insight, the generality of Prudence’s advice also reflects the association of spiritual guidance with female figures in an allegorical tradition.98 Her allegorical incorporation smoothes the texture of her advice, for she produces a unified position out of what might otherwise appear to be disparate citations of male authorities. No matter what Melibee says, Prudence appears to keep an eye on her ultimate goal, which is to convince her husband of the superiority of peace. This singular focus frees her from the regularized oppositions of formal disputation, since we see that her agency works in a fashion that is altogether different from her husband’s.99 Just as Melibee’s

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authority depends on the way that others see him act in a public domain, Prudence’s power accrues from the ways in which she hides her influence, even over this private exchange. Powerful analysis of this tale regards Prudence’s persuasive efficacy as the product of a “household rhetoric” that deploys appeals to the alluringly vulnerable female body in order to influence a threatening male within the private domain of the domestic.100 David Wallace and Carolyn Collette provocatively indicate the ways that women were advised to take up the type of feminine persuasion that Prudence proffers.101 As Wallace points out, certain arts of persuasion were considered properly feminine.102 Hence, as Paul Strohm argues, we should not underestimate the intercessory function of influential female figures in political matters usually thought to transpire only between men.103 Analysis of rhetoric’s association with femininity, however, shows that such a complementary assessment is often backhanded: women are said to be more effective at persuasion because they are thought to be more adept at deception.104 Prudence’s rhetorical skill does not in my view have this negative undertow, mainly because the tale’s allegorization of marriage insists on the invisibility of feminine influence.105 Moreover it does so, crucially in my view, by erasing Prudence’s association with the alluring, vulnerable female body. Prudence’s injury is her husband’s wounding, as she curiously suggests in her allegorization of the attack. As her verbal presence continually indicates, she does not have a body in this tale; she simply appears as a voice of guidance for Melibee’s benefit. The continual refrain, “whan she saugh hir tyme” (VII. 2243), indicates the ways that Prudence inhabits the position she promotes, becoming fleetingly visible only when her agency can be presented as a marker of Melibee’s control. Nevertheless, because Prudence’s discourse fits exactly within the “feminine” limits articulated by books including Le Ménagier de Paris, Le Livre du chevalier de La Tour Landry pour l’enseignment de ses filles, and “The Goodwife Taught Her Daughter,” her speech does not serve as a genderless model for those who must speak truth to power, meaning men.106 Instead, it shows more widely the ways that women’s agency is made invisible through the gendered guises of conjugal marriage. The mother in the Middle English advisory piece tells her daughter that she should visibly pay respect to her husband in a manner accordant with Prudence’s behavior: “Loke Qat Qou him bowe and loue ouer alle Qing. / Mekeli him answere and nozt to atterling / And so Qou schalt slaken his mod and been his derling. / Fare wordes wrath slaketz.”107 To be sure, conduct discourse produces a “household rhetoric” that associates women with private persuasion, but it does so, visibly in this tale, by erasing the female body through a masculinization of domestic authority. Prudence’s conduct perfectly exemplifies the lesson of female

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silence, which differs dramatically from the ways in which men are told to regulate their speech. Young men are also cautioned to control their tongues in late medieval conduct discourse, but their discretion is meant to lend them a power of surveillance, the ability to observe others while eluding similar scrutiny.108 Prudence offers a version of this advice to Melibee, suggesting that men should occupy a spectatorial place of dominance over the visual domain. Using over half a dozen adages, Prudence insists that it “is better to hyde youre conseil in youre herte than praye him to whom ye han biwreyed youre counseil that he wole kepen it cloos and stille” (VII. 1146–49). In her advice she does not caution Melibee against disclosing his secrets to her, markedly departing from the misogamous commonplace that wives cannot keep quiet about (men’s) private matters.109 Because Prudence characterizes her counsel as a fully integrated aspect of Melibee’s consciousness, the question of her secrecy is presented as settled within and by this marital context. Indeed, her defense of her advice appropriately feminizes her agency by making her power appear to be a component of Melibee’s masculine continence. That he has such a circumspect wife, in other words, shows his husbandly good sense. As David Burnley argues, by the late Middle Ages the virtue of prudence was “the essential ability possessed by all men to select the path which will lead to spiritual salvation.”110 Chaucer’s tale collapses the distinction between the marital couple and masculine subject, thereby making a prudent wife part of her husband’s identity. This incorporation is echoed by writers of conduct books for women, which show in broader terms the ways conjugal femininity produces women’s agency as a marker of masculine dominance in late medieval gender discourse. The Goodman of Paris uses Prudence as an exemplum showing that a wife should correct a husband using gentle methods of persuasion.111 And the Knight of the Tower tells his daughters to act in a manner recalling Prudence’s submissive silence, explicitly instructing them to use care when correcting their husbands: “euery good woman ought to. . .be of fayre and swete spekynge in repreuynge her lord of ony thynge.”112 As these writers suggest, a wife should persuade her husband within the confines of the household, which signifies the borders of his masculinity even in the supposedly unallegorical framework that everyday marriage provides. Despite its formative influence over social relations, the allegory of marriage does not simply make Prudence an invisible and thereby passive component of Melibee’s identity; instead, her visible integration into her husband’s persona also allows her to shape the consciousness she inhabits. A further reason for Prudence’s success, as I’ve already mentioned, is her mobilization of allegory. In other words, she employs her dematerialized state as a means to convince her husband that her agency is under his

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power. Because a woman is married to her husband, she is part of his flesh, and as such, she has no associations with female figures of rhetoric.113 Melibee’s initial rejection of feminine counsel allows room for her wifely role to be articulated as part of his masculine identity. When he voices traditional objections to wifely eloquence, a move that properly masculinizes him, his concerns set the stage for the feminization of Prudence. The femininity she takes up, as her answers to Melibee’s objections make clear, is conceived of only as a catalyst that maintains masculine continuity. Prudence’s reply to Melibee’s rejection, then, importantly sets her apart from the figures of feminine rhetoric who use the surface appeal of language to persuade their audiences. Prudence’s good woman does not look like Rhetorica—in either her negative or positive incorporation— because, importantly, her representation of the good woman is a feminine image without a visible body.114 It is significant, I believe, that much of the couple’s debate about feminine counsel turns on issues of gendered visibility. After asking her husband’s permission to speak, Prudence goes about the task of verbally fashioning the good woman, who, because of her invisibility, functions as a complementary reflection of the man for whom she was made. Her first step is to suggest that changing his course will not make Melibee look like a man who breaks his word in the eyes of his peers. Second, Prudence argues for the weight of her own advice by suggesting that good women exist even if they are visibly elusive: “For though that [Solomon] ne foond no good woman, certes, many another man hath founden many a woman ful good and trewe” (VII. 1078–81). This two-part strategy, which figures Melibee as visibly powerful and Prudence as invisibly pure, is the means by which she convinces her husband to heed her counsel. Since Melibee poses his objection to feminine counsel as an issue of “maistrie,” particularly in terms of the way it would seem to other people (i.e., other men), Prudence uses his concern with public appearance to defend her ability to offer advice. Accordingly, her answers to worries about women’s ability to keep secrets and about the quality of women’s counsel also depend upon the difference between a type of feminine conduct that is inappropriate because it makes its presence known and a type of womanly behavior that is valuable because it keeps its power concealed: “for ye han ful ofte assayed. . .how wel that I kan hyde and hele thynges that men oghte secreely to hyde” (VII. 1092;1094–95).115 Although Rebecca, Judith, Abigail, and Esther are potentially ironic figures of feminine virtue because they gain victory by stealth, Prudence’s use of these figures suggests that feminine secrecy only becomes dangerous when a woman’s identity is not fully integrated into a man’s.116 Prudence explains this process of manly

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assimilation by referring to the original act of creation itself: “And mooreover, whan oure Lord hadde creat Adam, oure forme fader, he seyde in this wise: / ‘It is nat good to been a man alloone; make we to hym an helpe sembable to hymself’” (VII. 1103–4). When a woman’s agency is part of her masculine partner’s will, her counsel constitutes one part of his consciousness. While this tale illustrates Prudence’s power over Melibee’s identity, her refusal to make her agency visible allows him to submit to her wisdom without appearing to lose authority over this exchange. Prudence’s position, therefore, is powerfully moving because it remains largely unseen. In another deployment of invisibility, Prudence presents the conclusion of her argument as foregone, thereby acting as if her counsel were already apparent to Melibee’s consciousness. Although some readers view Prudence’s shifting argumentative stance as one of its many faults, it becomes clear that her changing tactics simply offer alternate, overlapping, and potentially conflicting means to reach the presupposed validity of her argument, the priority of peace.117 In what I would consider to be the most radical example of this habit, Prudence invokes allegory to argue that the stakes of this conflict have to do with Melibee’s soul in order to represent peace as the ultimate gesture of power. Forgetting her own beating, her daughter’s wounds, and the enemies who invaded her house, Prudence claims that Melibee is responsible for his own suffering. If his self-control were not degraded, God would not have allowed his three enemies—the flesh, the fiend, and the world—to enter his body through his five wits and wound his soul in five places. Casting Melibee’s conflict in terms of sin, Prudence dematerializes the situation so that she can recommend patience as the ultimate manly virtue. Breaking his house is thus an instance that compels Melibee to grow, to take up the masculine perfection that Prudence lays out for him like a suit of clothes. Figurative Pressure: Exemplary Masculinity Prudence thus prevails over her husband’s objections, but not because she uses appeals to the female body, either her daughter’s or her own. Rather, her persuasive strength derives from her ability to present Melibee with a figuration of masculinity, which, she suggests, he will only achieve through her intervention. Her strategy is not flattery, because she does not tell him what he wants to hear; rather, she works by telling Melibee what he should want to hear. She knows how Melibee wants to be perceived by others, and by suggesting that her counsel provides the means to the masculine image he would like to animate, she gains her husband’s confidence. Prudence influences her husband, then, by deploying an image of masculinity that she invests with universal power. While she does not say

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so directly, Prudence’s dialogue with Melibee is a formational exchange that amounts to her instructions to him about how to be a man. Prudence does not seek to make Melibee into just any man, an anonymous participant in a version of masculinity that gains its claim to universality through its loose amalgamation of features. Instead, she seeks to make his masculinity universal by constructing his identity as a collection of manly commonplaces. John S. P. Tatlock’s observation that Prudence’s counsel is composed of the adages of “dead wiseacres” is thus plainly true.118 Rather than seeing the ordinariness of her wisdom as a weakness of her advice and the tale generally, I submit that the common quality of her counsel gives Melibee’s masculinity the appearance of universality. The banality of her advice, therefore, is its virtue. Constructing masculine mediocrity at its very best, Prudence allows Melibee to become a figure for masculinity writ large. To accomplish her goal, Prudence dangles a vision of masculine power in front of her husband. Even the first time that Melibee yields to her wisdom, it is clear the appeal that moves him is the masculine image with which her counsel allows him to identify. Connecting his name’s meaning, “a man that drynketh hony” (VII. 1410) to the commonplace wisdom that discreet language conveys to all, Melibee assumes the position of masculine universality with his own citational proverb: “He seith that ‘wordes that been spoken discreetly by ordinaunce been honycombes, for they yeven swetnesse to the soule and hoolsomnesse to the body’” (VII. 1113). To be the man that drinks from the honeycombs of discreet counsel, however, Melibee has to bend himself to his wife’s will. Submission is the organizing principle of the masculinity that Prudence recommends, but this passivity does not weaken Melibee’s image because Prudence presents such deference as a gesture of agency. Initially she does this by suggesting that her counsel serves Melibee’s self-governance, bringing the influence she exercises under the yoke of his control. Because she will only “enforme yow how ye shul governe yourself” (VII. 1114), she refuses to make her agency visible, and thus presents herself as the obediently humble spouse who works for her husband’s welfare. When she suggests God is the ultimate source of counsel, moreover, she adds another level of distance between her agency and her husband’s submission. Yet it is her ability to emphasize the power that accrues to the peacemaker that transforms Melibee’s masculinity into a model for other men. This is not an easy sell, for it separates Melibee from the vicissitudes that exert material pressure on his daily existence. Melibee acknowledges the difficulty Prudence’s advice presents a man who nevertheless must deal with the flesh and blood realities that invasion and violence inflict against his household, arguing instead that that vengeance is properly masculine,

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and that its exercise is necessary to maintain distinctions between men: “for by the vengeance-takynge been the wikked men dissevered fro the goode men, / and they that han wyl to do wikkednesse restreyne hir wikked purpos, whan they seen the punyssynge and chastisynge of the trespassours” (VII. 1431–32). Melibee envisions a community of men who regulate one another through exercises of physical discipline. His view of masculine power is decidedly more particular, more rooted in the practice of lived experience than the version Prudence promotes. In order to move Melibee to her will, Prudence continues to associate Melibee’s identity with a universal manhood whose foibles are regulated by God alone. In her view, the common contingencies of money, arms, and allies have no effect on the man who bears himself peacefully. Perhaps understandably, Melibee is not taken with his wife’s injunctions to rise above the specific circumstances that dictate the particular experiences of his daily life. Although he sees the merit of her counsel as it theoretically applies to exemplary manhood, he does not see himself holding the place of masculine perfection she designates. He resists her effort to make him into a model of manhood, “but every man may nat have the perfeccioun that ye seken; / ne I nam nat of the nombre of right parfite men” (VII. 1519–20), leading Prudence to declare with a kind of longsuffering exasperation: “ye han no wyl to do [vengeance] attemprely” (VII. 1538). Despite her frustration, by the end of the tale Prudence forces Melibee to assume the self-control she recommends. Her success, however, does not derive from her ability to show the inherent power of peace, which she calls “a greet vertu of perfeccioun” (VII. 1517). As relentless as rain’s erosion of rock, Prudence convinces Melibee through a patient form of gender coercion. She presents her husband with a polarized choice, compelling him either to be the model of manhood who organizes the general set of good men or to admit that his performance of masculinity claims no commonality with the qualities that distinguish the “gentil man” (VII. 1640). In effect she says that he can either be the model of masculinity or no man at all. We might therefore agree that Prudence’s counsel is a worn collection of adages, but we should also recognize that the way she deploys those familiar sayings to construct an exclusive definition of masculine identity is its own form of hardball. Prudence’s vision of manhood is singular, characterized as it is by a superabundance of self-control. Showing such mastery, as Prudence suggests in multiple ways, means going beyond the particularities of circumstance that may have been imposed from the outside by others. Instead of reacting to the action of one’s enemy, Prudence counsels, a man who has ultimate power will set the terms of his own action, and by so doing, deny the force of his opponent. One’s response to another’s attack, Prudence suggests,

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should confound his initial act so that it leaves the enemy at one’s mercy. The most effective way to reinscribe the terms of a struggle, she concludes, is to use peace to humble one’s opponents. It should be emphasized, therefore, that Prudence does not recommend submission; instead she advises taking up submission as a visible stance. Her position is expected, but only in an exemplary context framed by the Christian valorization of suffering.119 If we return to the optical discussion with which I began this chapter, it becomes clear that the quality of prudence that Melibee must incorporate is a perspectival virtue. It is true that Prudence herself was associated with vision, and that many medieval representations of her figure include three eyes, or three perspectives, to capture her ocular power.120 Commonly associated with the power to see the past, present, and future, Prudence’s wisdom arises from her ability to perceive the approaching consequences of events past and present.121 Hers is a multidimensional foresight, an active visionary power that reaches into the future. With her spiritualized agency, Prudence realizes Roger Bacon’s idealization of experimental science, for he claims a careful program of applied observation can provide “special knowledge of the future, present, and past, and in its display of wonderful works on behalf of Church and state.”122 As Chaucer’s Prudence illustrates, however, this ennobling vision must be guarded because it remains open to the predations of other men. Although she repeatedly tells Melibee that he should not be affected by the challenges that his enemies present, she does not recommend that he withdraw from the world as a means of protection. Rather, as a component of self-control, she formulates patience as that virtue which will allow him to remain resolute in the face of another’s aggression. Prudence’s wisdom is extremely conventional, but it is the banality of her counsel that makes it radical. Recognizing that all acts of aggression or deference are simply ways of presenting agency’s visibility, she answers Melibee’s final point of resistance, that her counsel will make him look unmanly, with a performance illustrating the staged nature of emotional expressions. When Melibee resists her advice by appealing to the very terms of visibility that motivate her appeal, “now se I wel that ye loven nat myn honour ne my worshipe” (VII. 1680), Prudence puts her counsel into action, showing her husband that displays of anger, and therefore gestures of peace, respond to the measured command of the prudently patient (wo)man. Prudence demonstrates the model of self-control she recommends, manifesting a superabundant command over emotional display through her “semblant of wratthe” (VII. 1686). Focusing on the energy she has expended on Melibee’s behalf, “I love youre honour and youre profit as I do myn owene, and evere have doon” (VII. 1687), Prudence calls attention to her service as a means to convince Melibee to credit her

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axiomatic wisdom: “the wise man seith, ‘The dissensioun bigynneth by another man, and the reconsilyng bygynneth by thyself ’” (VII. 1690). By making Melibee’s agency her priority once again, Prudence calls attention to her husband’s power over himself. Significantly, however, here his autonomy is a sign of weakness, since Prudence faults him for what she characterizes as a selfish inability to submit himself to the rule of another. Playing on spousal affection as the ability to conform a partner to one’s will, Prudence claims Melibee refuses her advice because “ye been so hardherted that ye wol do no thing for me” (VII. 1694). Because he lacks the capacity to relinquish power over himself, he shows that he does not love his wife as he does himself.123 Since Prudence appeals to her own selfsacrifice in this exchange, we might finally agree that Prudence exemplifies a feminine form of persuasion that moves her partner through an appeal to her vulnerability. We would be right to see this instance as an example of a household rhetoric of submission, but we must also acknowledge that this scene merely offers only a fleeting and partial glimpse of this persuasive position. Prudence does not linger upon the fragility of her situation, but immediately explains her anger’s utility when Melibee relents with his own proverbial apology, “Therfore the prophete seith that ‘troubled eyen han no cleer sighte’” (VII. 1701). Her show of displeasure has its intended effect, she claims, which is, once again, to bring about her husband’s wellbeing: “I make no semblant of wratthe ne anger, but for youre grete profit” (VII. 1706). Since her emotional reaction is transparently cultivated—she even has a proverbial explanation for it once her husband agrees to follow her course—it does not fit the use of feminine charisma that others attribute to successful rhetorical performances by women such as the Wife of Bath. Lest we forget, Prudence does not have much charm. Later readers of this story, at the very least, find her rhetoric dull, tedious, and overbearing.124 In the history of criticism that has consigned this story to the dustheap of Chaucer’s imagination, the Tale of Melibee has been characterized as a “lump in [most critics’] oatmeal.”125 In other words, the Melibee is a problem because it is boring. And it is boring, moreover, because Prudence is tedious.126 The only critical approaches to this tale that take Prudence’s role seriously fail to answer this deflationary albeit reductive charge. Prudence is sententious, and her failure to give off emotional sparks, except as an example to illustrate the power of emotional self-control, makes her effectiveness suspect, or, shall I say it, boring. When she glides off to smooth the feathers of Melibee’s enemies, who seemingly fall on their knees just as Prudence promised they would, the lack of complication in her efficiency makes her success less than gratifying.

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Melibee’s enemies are reportedly “supprised and ravysshed” by Prudence (VII. 1733), but they only read her intervention as a product of Melibee’s agency. Instead of acknowledging that the very woman who stands before them has suffered injury at their violent hands, they express their regret, “for we consideren and knowelichen that we han offended and greved my lord Melibee out of mesure” (VII. 1744). They only see Prudence as a cipher for her husband, which means that her agency is only visible as a product of Melibee’s control. In a gesture that piles on this effect, Prudence assures Melibee’s enemies that she represents her husband’s will, almost with a wink to secure the deal: “Forthermoore I knowe wel and am right seur that he shal nothyng doon in this nede withouten my conseil / and I shal so werken in this cause that by the grace of oure Lord God ye shul been reconsiled unto us” (VII. 1763–64). Oh, if Prudence could only wink, or nod, or show animation in any way! Behind Every Great Man. . . There’s a boring woman, or so Prudence’s invisibility would indicate. But before I concede to the old critical line that this tale is a failure, or that it is somehow a knowing Chaucerian joke, I want to pursue a little further the power of banality this tale sets forth.127 In looking at this tale as an example of the fürstenspiegel tradition, Richard Firth Green comments that the “court poet,” meaning Chaucer, is bound to such “general and unexceptional statements as Melibee.”128 Like the visibly neutral Chaucer of this tale, the idealized woman in this story does not have much appeal, even if she can claim the side of right for all her speaking. Most readers do not celebrate Prudence as an example of female power, or as an enfranchised feminine voice that makes men listen. The reason for this, I believe, is that Prudence’s ability to pass herself off as a visibly unseen part of her husband’s identity cuts against conceptions of identity that are based upon the power of being seen. As a cultural cliché, the modern phrase, “behind every great man, there is a woman,” functions as an after-the-fact apology, usually deployed at the moment of a woman’s unmasking. This phrase reveals a woman’s agency, but locates it as a secure part of her partner’s masculinity. By contrast, in this tale Melibee’s masculinity becomes more problematic if we look at this tale as one designed to figure feminine conduct. His gender trouble does not emerge, however, because he loses “maistrie” over his marriage.129 Prudence passes off her intervention as her husband’s will so deftly that no one recognizes her agency as threatening to her husband’s power. Rather, even when Melibee’s enemies rely on Prudence’s “wommanly pitee” (VII. 1747) to intercede on their behalf, the qualities they recognize in her are those that complement the strength they

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attribute to her husband.130 Melibee’s masculinity is problematic because it ends up being, to be blunt, boring. I do not think modern readers like the look of manhood as Melibee performs it, not in its particular foibles, and worse, not in its universal reform. While earlier audiences seem content to submit to the model of masculine continence that comes to define Melibee, later readers seem intent on differentiating themselves from this model through their expressions of disdain. Melibee’s last attempt to buck the good sense his wife relentlessly imposes, therefore, is the last stand against a masculinity that becomes insubstantially invisible. Melibee’s transformation from impetuous hothead to measured husband makes him the sort of man whose very banality makes him invisible. But his invisibility lacks the glamour of cultural myth, the power to see others in their most exposed states. Instead, he just isn’t there. Cutting against myths of masculinity that empower invisibility, Melibee’s actions threaten to erase him. When Prudence keeps Melibee from disinheriting his enemies, which would be a violation of her promise that would forever mark Melibee’s household, she so fully makes him a symbol of ideal manliness that he no longer exhibits individuated traits. And it is this version of the invisible man, I submit, that modern critics resist.131 The real danger with the model of masculinity that Melibee ends up with, moreover, is that the Chaucer who inhabits the borders of this narrative might have more in common with him than the character whose lack of visibility allows for greater mobility. If we recall early identifications of this tale with Chaucer’s persona, both by audiences and printers, it seems that Melibee’s invisibility potentially reflects Chaucer’s.132 Of course, all things considered, Melibee’s banality is all the fault of a woman, which is a lucky break for the conventional image of masculinity this story assembles. If we look at the audience-response that Chaucer incorporates into his fiction, Harry Bailey suggests that Melibee’s outcome is due to Prudence’s exemplary feminine conduct. What began as the Tale of Melibee ends as “Chaucers Tale of Melibee and Dame Prudence,” then morphs again into “my tale of Melibee, / And of Prudence and hire beignytee” (VII. 1889–90). Prudence is brought fully into view as a player in the tale, and according to Harry Bailey, she becomes the focus of the narrative itself. Now, we all know not to trust Harry’s judgment of Chaucer’s work, but his comments in this instance suggest that this dialogue between husband and wife ends up serving as advice to other women.133 So the story that catalogues the construction of universal masculinity is, underneath it all, or above all, a narrative designed to fashion idealized femininity. Bringing Prudence into the open, here, I suggest, is a way of diverting attention, of directing vision away from the image of masculinity that Melibee is left with at the end of this tale. Shifting focus

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from Melibee to Prudence is a way of recasting his masculine invisibility, of keeping it away from scrutiny so that it can pass as powerful. But lest we become even further distracted, let us not forget that Harry Bailey’s response really does not focus on Prudence. Although he gives her the patience that Melibee is supposed to end up with (thus collapsing her identity into her husband’s character), his response to the tale directs attention to his wife’s agency, and its visible status. Harry recounts a litany of examples of his wife’s unruly agency, incidents involving verbal and physical affronts to his masculine power. He does not see Prudence’s behavior, needless to say, in the same way that he views his wife’s conduct. Goodlief’s behavior is saturated with visibility; she wants to be seen, and she uses her husband as a means to make her agency known, inside and outside the domestic space of the household. If she is not acknowledged, if her neighbors do “nat in chirche to my wyf enclyne” (VII. 1902), she urges her husband to take vengeance against them for her sake. Unlike Goodlief, who displays her agency, Prudence expends energy so that her efforts will not be recognized, except perchance in passing. By taking up the place of the invisible in this gender dynamic, Prudence simultaneously privileges her husband’s visibility while she keeps it out of the harsh light of direct scrutiny. Because she is perceptibly invisible, she allows Melibee to be invisibly perceptible. This means that he can assume a universal masculinity, the banality of which escapes attention. The difference between Melibee’s masculinity and Harry’s, importantly, is the wifely intervention that gives it presence in the community. Lest I say this nowhere more clearly in this book, I am arguing that feminine agency makes masculine identity in Chaucer’s representations of gender. Chaucer’s poems illustrate that women’s varied relations to agency and visibility give form to the different ways that men are seen in their communities. While Prudence exercises control, she passes it off as her husband’s. While Melibee talks a good line about action, he never has to do a thing. The horns of this gender dichotomy meet somewhere in the unseen middle between active and passive. I therefore suggest that Chaucer’s willingness to take apart visions of masculine power that depend upon unilateral visions of agency is radically political, whether or not we apply his model of gendered exchange to the events of the late 1380s.134 If this tale can just as equally be viewed as a commentary on the Hundred Years’ War, Gaunt’s war with Castile, or the negotiations for a treaty with Flanders, that is because the politics of domination and submission on display in the English royal court takes much of its energy from the remaking of gender’s visibility in the late fourteenth century.135 In my next chapter, I address the politics of court scandal as it relates to issues of gendered visibility in Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale. Although my

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analysis moves away from optical theory, it engages further the ways in which women are visibly associated with passivity to consolidate men’s claims to masculine authority. By changing a fable of political reform into a narrative of domestic sacrifice, Chaucer illustrates even more vividly that men’s private relations with women influence the ways in which their masculinities appear in the public eye. Exemplarity is therefore at issue once again, but in this narrative Chaucer tests the limits of feminine visibility in order to expose gender’s disfiguring violence. While this assumption is implicit in his Melibee, in the Physician’s Tale Chaucer graphically shows that radical passivity is just as dangerous a threat to masculinities as visible agency. Before leaving what is finally presented as a story of Prudence, however, I would like to point out that there is no Goodlief to distract us from the bizarre stasis of gender difference in the Physcian’s Tale. In other words, in moving from one reputedly boring tale to another, we should acknowledge that the real thing that keeps Melibee’s masculinity out of the light of scrutiny is Goodlief’s spectacle of womanly irreverence. When such dynamism is stripped away, as it is in the Physician’s Tale, masculinities have no support for their claims to unity or attempts at invisibility.

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CHAPTER 2 PORTRAIT OF A FATHER AS A BAD MAN: VISIBLE PRESSURE IN THE PHYSICIAN’S TALE

Life can’t be sustained under the pressure of so many eyes —Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

he Chaucerian tale that most clearly concerns the development of a public masculinity is also the tale that most drastically fails to make relations between self and society visibly convincing.1 This is a tale in which a desperate father sacrifices his virgin daughter to save her from a corrupt court; but unlike its sources, Chaucer’s narrative has little political impact. Moreover, despite the display of private pathos in the Physician’s Tale, which shifts the focus of the Virginius story from the civic to the domestic, the tale is pathetic in its attempt to attach authentic sorrow to Virginia’s sacrifice.2 The events leading up to the maiden’s death appear to be a cobbled together mixture of conduct treatise, saint’s life, and political fable, which emphasize the importance of masculine regulation of femininity within the enclosed space of the household.3 The morbid violence that befalls Virginia, however, suggests that femininity is always a public discourse, which is simultaneously produced by and entangled in men’s displays of power. Virginius, Appius, and churl Claudius collectively acknowledge the organizing principle of Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee, for these men consistently act upon the assumption that a man’s masculinity is formed through his visible relations to the domestic. Unlike Melibee— married to a woman who passes off her agency as passivity to substantiate her husband’s show of control—Virginius governs a daughter whose perfected passivity outdoes any performance of masculine regulation he can make visible. With its grisly execution of patriarchal authority, this tale resists the common notion that feminine passivity promotes masculine

T

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power. As I argue, Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale further challenges gender’s visible imperative, unveiling its disfiguring logic through the image of Virginia’s sacrifice. In a sense, this tale would seem to affirm the empowering potential of feminine passivity, since Virginius is father to the compliant copy of himself, Virginia. Despite her capacity to reflect her father’s virtues, Virginia ends up posing a threat to her father’s public image. Instead of investing her father with a greater degree of masculine potency, Virginia’s absolute passivity debilitates her father, leaving him nothing to do as a man. As Virginius finds out, governing a figure of radical feminine passivity has a limit, because at a certain point it becomes evident that such a woman needs no masculine cultivation or regulation to produce her passive aspect. In other words, when it becomes clear that a woman’s passivity is genuine, the masculine authority established through displays of agency is exposed as a useless show. From the beginning of the story, Virginius’s challenge is to maintain visible control over the passivity his daughter manifests. As his daughter’s introduction makes clear, however, such control is unwarranted. At every turn, the substance of Virginia’s submission points not to her father’s control, but to her passive autonomy. Due to its independence, Virginia’s passivity is not the relationally constituted sort that supports a performance of masculine authority. In what appears to be a paradox, Virginia’s passivity requires agency. Virginia’s agency is the kind that a virtuous woman needs to remain passive, an independence that makes her willing to die to preserve her purity. Because she is invested in her own exemplarity, Virginia comports herself in a manner that is designed to fend off masculine aggressors.4 Indeed, Appius knows that to gain Virginia he must use trickery and stealth; if he were to attack the maiden using open channels he would fail in the face of her matchless purity. Appius therefore seeks to demolish the power that preserves feminine passivity, but by the end of the story, it is Virginius who destroys the agency of maidenly virtue. Virginius tries to figure his manhood through a wholly exemplary relationship that involves reflection and association: because Virginia embodies virtues that reflect positively on her father, his masculine image benefits from the positive associations her idealized traits bring him. Recalling the optical discourse that structures chapter 1, this relationship is essentially intromissive, in that Virginia’s qualities give shape to her father’s masculine identity. Consequently, Virginius’s agency over his daughter’s character is far more tenuous than he might like to pretend. When Appius sentences Virginia, he reorients the virtues that have hitherto been directed toward her father. Virginius’s lack of manly control therefore becomes apparent for all to see. Virginius kills his daughter, refusing to allow her to defend herself in the public courtroom. Taking away the agency required of feminine passivity,

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Virginius suffers an episode of patriarchal panic that arises from his loss of masculine authority in the public domain. Virginius seeks to suppress the visible influence that feminine passivity exerts over his character, attempting instead to assert his masculinity through a violent exercise of manifest agency. Although Virginia in her assent covers for her father, it becomes clear that in this story, unlike the versions by Livy or Jean de Meun, a father beheads his daughter to usurp control over the agency that makes her a pattern of feminine submission.5 After her death Virginius is able to dole out the mercy that he denies his daughter, pardoning churl Claudius in a gesture that some readers see as redemptive.6 It is true that Virginius finally gains the public honor that results from a visible exercise of power; nevertheless, the tale reveals Virginia’s awkward sacrifice as the source of this authority. In what follows I argue that Virginius, because he can only read feminine agency as a force that threatens to undermine masculine claims to control, loses the associations with virtue that his daughter’s perfected passivity secured. Furthermore, because he cannot admit that Virginia has a stake in her own passivity, Virginius ends up destroying the ideal she brought into being through her perfected visibility. When Virginius marks himself as head of the household, he does so through a literalizing act of violence that undermines the legitimacy of masculine agency. Scandalous Spectacles Virginius’s authority falls apart, I submit, due to the tale’s participation in the late medieval discourse concerned with the visible regulation of daughters. In what has repeatedly been labeled a digression, the tale’s advice to governesses and parents outlining the duties involved in managing daughters makes explicit the connection between successful productions of feminine passivity and respectable performances of masculine agency.7 A father marks his control over his household by the “surveiaunce” he exercises (VI. 95), and his supervision, directly or through his agents, is responsible for his daughter’s right conduct. The tale’s advice to guardians, which has been related by different critics to a string of late fourteenth-century scandals, registers the tension in visibility at the core of this tale, for the absence of Virginius’s agency in his daughter’s passivity is ultimately revealed.8 As such, this tale, like its sources, is indeed about evil governance, in this instance, evil governance of the domestic and the public consequences that arise from a man’s concern to display mastery over this enclosed domain.9 The advice concerning the regulation of young women suggests that it is important for men to make public shows of their control over private space. This advice dooms Virginius and his virtuous daughter, trapping both of them in an economy of visuality that transforms feminine passivity into a display of masculine power.

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As this tale demonstrates, ideally theirs is a relationship that eludes visible scrutiny. Virginia’s father gains public esteem from his daughter’s beauty and virtue, but not because of any actions Virginius takes to produce or enforce her qualities. Passive and pure, Virginia does not need masculine governance to perform her virtues. She seems just to have been made that way, as indeed, Nature’s comments on her creation would suggest. In a construction that emphasizes the visibility of masculine agency, the tale makes the father the generative creator in its rendition of Virginia’s origins: “This knight a doghter hadde by his wyf / No children hadde he mo in al his lyf ” (VI. 5–6). The wife certainly seems like an incidental afterthought, for the tale suggests that Virginius, “Fulfild of honour and of worthynesse” (VI. 3), supplies what Aristotle calls the “ ‘form’ and the ‘principle of movement’” in his daughter’s constitution.10 Serving as Virginia’s animator, the father invests her with the qualities that define her character. The beginning of the tale thus emphasizes the agency of Virginius’s paternity in his daughter’s composition, but it is that invisible influence that will later become the subject of masculine attack in the story. As long as father and daughter stand outside the regime of visual scrutiny, their dynamics of agency and passivity can pass unnoticed. Virginia can exercise agency over her virtue, while Virginius can passively absorb the respect her perfection confers. The advice to parents and governesses, however, casts this relation in a new, wholly regulatory light.11 The apparent independence of Virginia’s exemplarity, while perhaps not a problem as far as her conduct is concerned, is a serious problem in relation to cultural expectations regarding the visible production of gender difference. The urgency of the tone of this advice, especially read in light of the scandals to which this digression has been linked, demonstrates the increasing importance placed on public cultivation of feminine passivity in late medieval culture.12 When the virtue of daughters becomes a visible sign of patriarchal control over the household, gendered agency becomes subject to increasing regulatory pressure. If men are supposed to exercise control over their daughters, then the kind of feminine agency that Virginia displays becomes incomprehensible. Indeed, the only type of feminine agency allowed by this passage of advice is the kind that undermines masculine authority. Recasting both femininity and masculinity, responsible men are those who distinguish themselves by marking their control over the female bodies that inhabit their households. This logic of visibility requires men to administer femininity as a means of containing the willful materiality traditionally associated with the female flesh.13 As my description should indicate, a woman like Virginia is completely outside the bounds of this system. The notion that a woman could exercise agency to protect her purity or to enact submission is invalidated by this model of gender. According to this regime, a woman who is passive cannot act, except to submit to a fate appointed by men.

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It is therefore true that respectable women can only be read in “one way” as a result of this discourse. Yet the details of one potential historical link between the tale’s advice to guardians of maidens and household politics of the late fourteenth century also shows that the public management of daughters transforms the visibility of masculinity. The domestic scandal that simultaneously has a likely and unlikely connection to Chaucer’s narrative is the controversy surrounding the marriage of Elizabeth of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt and charge of Katherine Swynford.14 Although Elizabeth of Lancaster was betrothed to the Earl of Pembroke in 1380 when she was twelve years old, she eloped to Spain with John Holland in 1386, only returning two years later once her first child was born, her prior bond was annulled, and she was married to Holland. George Lyman Kittredge initially suggested this historical link with the incredulous question “Is it possible that Chaucer put the following verses into the Doctor’s mouth without thinking of his own sister-in-law?”15 Even his framing of the question is interesting, because it registers the visible presence such an event would assume in the public imagination. Associating the powers of scandal and celebrity, Kittredge nods to what Michael Camille calls “the increasing emphasis on sight” in the late fourteenth century.16 Critics including Huling E. Ussery, George Williams, and John Gardner are probably right to assert that Chaucer would not have been as gauche as to insult Katherine Swynford or John of Gaunt for their roles in this affair. Even so, chronicle accounts of the principals involved in the story attest to the increasing demand for men to display agency over women in visible, public performances.17 This incident itself suggests that the royal household has become a public arena for gendered displays of control. Court, in the Westminster Chronicle’s account of Elizabeth’s transgression, is presented as a public place where younger members pattern their behavior after more experienced practitioners. Private conduct here is public display. Thus when Elizabeth is “introduced into the royal court to study the behaviour and customs of courtly society,” her ensuing involvement in a scandalous affair serves as negative commentary on social habits of the elite members of this simulated private space.18 While we might reductively conclude that Elizabeth’s disgrace is the fault of her father, or her governess (her father’s agent), accounts of the affair actually resist this reading.19 As the Westminster Chronicle’s rendition of the event makes clear, court manners are not responsible for Elizabeth of Lancaster’s broken betrothal. Her reported naiveté, which would presumably offer evidence of the cloistered protection of her virtue, makes her vulnerable to John Holland’s advances: [H]aving herself come to womanhood, she was introduced into the royal court to study the behaviour and customs of courtly society. Here Sir John

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Holland, the present king’s uterine brother, fell violently in love with her at first sight and pursued his wooing night and day until at last his constantly renewed campaign of enticement led to such folly that by the time her father the duke left for the coast she was with child.20

Details cataloguing Elizabeth’s resistance or receptivity to Holland’s suit are conspicuously absent. She does nothing to precipitate the loss of her chastity, though it might be argued that her very lack of doing contributes to her pregnancy because she fails to resist Holland’s seduction. It would appear, then, that Elizabeth’s lack of agency in the preservation of her chastity is partly responsible for the public scandal that results from her liaison with Holland. Here it seems that her type of feminine passivity, which precludes any sort of self-direction, makes her more vulnerable to the designs of aggressive men. Elizabeth’s susceptibility to Holland’s seduction would thus seem to argue for a different type of passivity, a performative form like Virginia manifests.21 Virginia has agency over her passivity, which means that she directs herself to preserve the integrity of her virtue. By training women to direct themselves in the arena of courtship, young women would be less vulnerable to the unpredictable desires of aggressive men. Since such feminine agency would potentially disrupt the marriage market of late medieval elites, it is not surprising that the tale’s advice to parents and governesses does not valorize Virginia’s cognate form of feminine passivity. Focusing on prevention as a defense against masculine aggression like Holland’s, the tale’s digression on regulation assumes that feminine agency—in any shape, form, or disguise—is essentially detrimental to masculine authority. According to this passage, a daughter’s autonomy will necessarily make her more receptive to masculine seduction. The goal of the tale’s advice to parents and governesses, therefore, is to eradicate feminine agency in all its guises. To do so, it suggests that feminine agency must be contained by masculine regulation, even in its representation of private bonds between women. As the directions to governesses indicates, a father would have two reasons to retain a particular governess, “Outher for ye han kept youre honestee, / Or elles ye han falle in freletee, / And knowen wel ynough the olde daunce, / And han forsaken fully swich meschaunce / For evermo” (VI. 77–81). Chaucer’s sources for this passage, which seek to pattern children after Ambrose’s “consecrated virgin” model of behavior, do not include a woman whose virtue was formerly compromised in their chapters instructing parents on the choice of governesses.22 By contrast, Chaucer’s tale gives such a woman six times the space of her ever-chaste counterpart, suggesting a preoccupation with women’s private knowledge that speaks to the pressured relationship between masculinity and visibility in this tale.23 Men must exercise surveillance over every aspect

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of the domestic, including those lessons of experience that women might share between themselves. Visible Agents Although a woman with a colorful past might not immediately seem like a suitable candidate for governess, the digression’s emphasis on the governess’s knowledge of women’s secrets would give a maiden’s male guardian access to this aspect of femininity. This passage therefore seeks to re-envision the widespread representation of an invisible web of women interconnected through a common relation to (men’s) secrecy, bringing women’s experiential knowledge of feminine agency into the open in order to subject it to masculine governance.24 It is worth noting that the unseen confederacy of femininity is a frightening image to men in medieval culture, prompting antifeminist writers to depict gatherings of women as necessarily detrimental to husbandly interests and private tranquility.25 These invisible bonds between women are often portrayed as stronger than those between marital partners: in the Chester Noah, for example, Noah’s wife refuses to board the ark without her gossips.26 Her affection for her feminine cohorts is deployed in that play to demonstrate a kind of recalcitrance that necessitates masculine regulation, suggesting a connection between masculine authority and feminine rebellion that is at once juridical and visible.27 The tale’s advice suggests that women’s invisibility lies within the jurisdictional control of masculine governance, depicting feminine secrecy as an outlaw formation that justifies men’s visible dominance of the domestic domain.28 Furthermore, when the tale suggests that “A theef of venysoun, that hath forlaft / His likerousnesse and al his olde craft, / Kan kepe a forest best of any man” (VI. 83–85), it aligns feminine agency with the type of transgressive challenge to masculine authority that poaching represents in late medieval culture. Feminine agency, according to the discourse that justifies its containment, can only be read as a threat to masculine regimes of control. It is, therefore, a particular type of feminine agency, culturally represented as devoid of positive exemplary power, that the advice to governesses and parents assumes. In conduct discourse, when this type of feminine agency is made visible, it is uncovered as an example of behavior that should be avoided.29 While the Physician’s Tale admits that this type of feminine behavior is powerful, it also suggests that its containment depends upon schemes of visibility. If a woman schooled in the “olde daunce” works in a clandestine fashion to encourage a girl’s independent will (which is necessarily deemed subversive), it could prove disastrous to masculine strictures of control. Chaucer’s tale underscores the seriousness

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of such a threat, not just by including thirty-three lines on the governance of maidens in a tale that is only two-hundred and eighty-six lines long, but also by suggesting that an older woman who secretly undermines the virtue of a young maiden by failing to maintain proper vigilance in her regulation is guilty of treason: “For whoso dooth, a traitor is, certeyn” (VI. 89). This indignant tone is extended, “Of alle tresons sovereyn pestilence / Is whan a wight bitrayseth innocence” (VI. 91–92), which fits with accusations of hyperbole by those who are quick to devalue the tale’s excesses, but which also demonstrates the hierarchical gender relationship between governess and parent. Coming as it does after the poaching metaphor, the tale’s accusation of treason casts the relationship between governess and parent in terms of masculine authority. Both crimes, which are traditionally crimes of men, challenge the king’s authority, suggesting that he does not have the power to order his domestic domain.30 Poaching, which was governed by the king’s law of the forest, is an especially direct affront to the king’s power to regulate the domestic body through a system of surveillance.31 Furthermore, Barbara Hanawalt argues that poaching is a game that “centers on elements that define male identity” because it “permits all of the same challenges and skills of hunting, but adds elements of stealth, danger, violence, sexuality, and assertion of independence.”32 Her reading of poaching suggests that a masculinity which uses the power of invisibility, eluding the forces of patrol that invest the king’s office/person with prestige, gains greater power through the mobility of its agency. Part of the appeal of poaching is its rebellion against established authority; it is a revolt that simultaneously takes on a hidden and overt character. The poacher works by stealth, but he often marks his crimes, thus ensuring their discovery. This element of competition, Hanawalt argues, makes poaching a man’s game. Furthermore, instances in which poachers leave signs of emasculation demonstrate poaching’s connection to sexual domination. For example, Simon Tuluse’s illegal hunting party left a particularly telling mark: taking the head of the deer, he “put it on a stake in the middle of a certain clearing, which is called Harleruding, placing in the mouth of the aforesaid head a certain spindle; and they made the mouth gape towards the sun, in a great contempt of the lord king and his foresters.”33 As an example of masculine competition, poaching shows that two men can have different relations to visibility yet have similar claims to authority. In this situation, the king’s authority is based on an assumption of totalized visibility, but the poacher’s power is founded on an ability to keep himself out of view. The poacher similarly assumes a comprehensive control over sight, for it is only when he chooses to be seen that he leaves marks to insult the king’s agents. While this analysis of poaching is narrow, focusing as it does on a set of illegal hunters whose social status made theft of the king’s deer a socially

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symbolic act rather than an economically sustentative deed, it becomes clear that the poacher has more direct access to sight than the king.34 The king depends on his agents, the wardens and foresters, for the patrol of his domain, but the poacher actually works the contours of the wood, using his acute vision to succeed over the game of the hunt.35 In his cross-gendered use of this metaphor, Chaucer admits that poachers have keener sight than the king against whom they trespass, or even his agents whom they outwit. Similarly, in this regard the tale admits that women have more insight into feminine ways than men. But a governess who leads her charge astray—the great danger that the section of advice warns against—does not do so only for her own profit.36 Unlike the aforementioned sort of poacher, who establishes individual masculine prowess by hunting venery, an old woman cannot ruin a girl’s sexual purity all by herself. While the advice suggests that a poacher turned forester is the best defense against the designs of a new and crafty hunter, the poacher this tale assumes has always been working for another, unseen agent. To be sure, a different group of poachers worked the king’s forests in a lucrative trade of venison, selling quality meat to clients who could afford to pay.37 To transfer this metaphor back to its sexual domain, in medieval literature there is always the assumption that the old woman is available as a guide, or perhaps even as a bawd, for the would-be young lover.38 While the go-between is an oft-maligned figure, one of the things that makes the female entremetteuse successful is her ability to predict and manipulate the ways that women respond to men’s seductive pleas. As Nicole Nolan Sidhu points out, in the Old French fabliau tradition, the female go-between exhibits a keen insight into the workings of gender.39 In a fabliau such as Auberee, Sidhu explains, this power equally extends to the old woman’s heightened ability to observe men, since the title character uses her “skill in predicting the husband’s responses” to his wife’s apparent infidelity to further the wife’s actual seduction by the lovesick young man.40 By enlisting an older woman’s visionary power to consolidate the totalizing reach of masculine authority, this tale suggests that guardians can more effectively eradicate feminine agency, which is represented in the Physician’s Tale as the foundational threat that might leave a daughter vulnerable to a suitor or his representative. Although the old woman’s potential as a threat is apparent in this passage, the poaching analogy is different from the “go-between” motif in one essential aspect: Chaucer’s usage insists that this type of governess is no longer a threat to a young woman’s chastity because she has been converted into an agent of masculine regulation. Chaucer’s transformation of poacher to forester therefore suggests that such feminine agency must be taken over by masculine governance for it to gain legitimate purchase on

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the visual field. If this type of woman does not become an agent of the masculine power she once resisted, she will become a gender outlaw, and not the romantic sort who figures in the Robin Hood ballads and stories. With the addition of the treason charge, women who act outside the limits set down by masculine authority are painted as criminals of an unglamorous sort. Since treason itself was classified as agency against an absolute authority to whom one should bear allegiance, any action against masculine governance places a woman outside the rules that would make her visibly “feminine.” Chaucer’s use of treason to describe this trespass fits with its expansion to what we might see as more mundane sites of governance. In 1352 the crime of treason was broadened, adding what came to be known as its “petty” dimension: “And moreover there is another manner of treason, that is to say, when a servant slayeth his master, a wife her husband, when a man secular or religious slayeth his prelate, to whom he oweth faith and obedience.”41 As a result, treason in the household was no small matter, but was visibly linked to masculine control over the domestic body. As Paul Strohm and Frances Dolan argue, this recasting of treason is meant to punish the feminine agency that coverture law is designed to obscure.42 As this provision suggests, it is permissible for women to act in the enclosed space of the household, as indeed they would have to in order to accomplish certain ordinary tasks; but when that agency becomes apparent, if it is not a product of masculine direction, it is criminal. Murder, unequivocally, makes a woman’s independent actions visible in starkest terms. Invoking treason in the Physician’s Tale, however, shows that feminine agency must be visible as a product of masculine direction at all times. This provision in the 1352 treason statute, which was, ironically, designed to clarify and thereby limit offenses that qualified as treason, underscores the pressure of visibility on masculine authority in the late fourteenth century. If a woman acts, it must be to serve that authority “to whom [s]he oweth faith and obedience,” who is always a man. The advice to parents and governesses sets up a regulatory system of surveillance that visibly aligns gender according to an active/passive binary. Femininity thus becomes carefully mapped as a visual regime responsive to masculine control; masculine authority, therefore, depends very heavily on the visible display of feminine submission. Masculine Regard The way that treason is developed in Chaucer’s day, paired with the emphasis on women’s visible displays of passivity, makes an incident like that which befell Elizabeth of Lancaster almost inevitable. In other words, the tale’s advice to governesses and parents, because it insists that feminine

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agency outside masculine regulatory supervision will be ruinous for a maiden, sends a young woman into situations where her only defense against seduction will be the woman who works as an escort at the father’s direction. The young woman herself, this advice almost guarantees, will have no way to defend herself against a man’s advances. The advice to parents and governesses places all responsibility for a maiden’s virtue upon men. As others have noted, this version of femininity has little if anything to do with Virginia’s identity, a point to which I shall return shortly. Presently, however, I suggest that this rewriting of femininity does impact Virginia’s fate, because in assigning all agency in a relationship to the masculine participant, the tale’s beginning suggests that a woman’s virtue depends on a man’s exercises of control. In other words, if a woman suffers “shame,” this is an evaluation of masculinity, since it is assumed that a woman is passive in her encounters with a man.43 The difference between seduction and violation, then, depends on the man’s attitude toward the woman whose submission he demands. If we return to the Elizabeth of Lancaster affair, the chronicle description protects her from the charge that she failed to preserve her purity by rolling her conduct into a description of John Holland’s part in the incident. As the Westminster Chronicle tells the story, it is John Holland’s active pursuit of Elizabeth, not her failure to resist his courtship (or Katherine Swynford’s failure to prevent his courtship), which leads to their precipitous union. So no matter how harshly we seek to judge Elizabeth, her governess, or her father for the passivity or permissiveness that might have led to the broken betrothal, in the chronicle’s account, the circumstances leading to Elizabeth of Lancaster’s marriage provide further evidence documenting the (sometimes reckless) potency of John Holland’s masculine agency.44 In the Westminster Chronicle descriptions, Holland is often violent and imprudent: he is responsible for the torture and death of the Carmelite friar who accuses Lancaster of plotting against the life of Richard II, and he falls out of favor with Richard II for killing the son of the Earl of Stafford in a rash fit of angry revenge after two of his squires are murdered by the Earl of Stafford’s grooms.45 His relentless pursuit of Elizabeth, then, “squares with everything known of John Holland’s character,” as Sydney Armitage-Smith remarks.46 According to the Westminster monk, it is the unrestrained nature of Holland’s masculinity that is responsible for the lapse in propriety which causes Elizabeth to break her public bond to the Earl of Pembroke. Despite his unchecked behavior, Holland does not cut a bad figure in the chronicle’s presentation. In fact, he is made the Earl of Huntingdon and noted for his chivalric prowess in tournaments.47 He retains status and power despite occasional lapses in self-restraint. We could chalk up such

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latitude as an instance of medieval realpolitik, wherein Holland’s indiscretions are read more generously because he is half brother to the king. Such is surely the case, except that as uncle to the king, John of Gaunt is no slouch when it comes to court machinations. If Holland’s breach of conduct with Elizabeth of Lancaster were really viewed as an insult to her father, there would have been no reason for John of Gaunt to give his new son-in-law such a visibly central place in his expedition to Castile. When Elizabeth leaves for Spain it is to keep her out of sight until she and the child she is carrying can be reintroduced into the domain of court culture, but when her husband leaves England it is to accompany his new father-in-law in a military campaign in which he will make his loyalty and courage known.48 John of Gaunt provides the occasion for Holland to cover his indiscretions with his daughter, allowing him to enhance his reputation for prowess and loyalty at court through his performance on the battlefield. So on the one hand we see that an incident that has the potential to mar the reputation of a young woman is simply regarded an excessive example of the masculine vigor that otherwise gains him honor in courtly society. On the other hand, it is clear that there is a difference in Holland’s masculine aggression that separates his excesses from the predations of other men. The key distinction between types of men turns on masculine regard, or how each views the passive feminine object he plans to master.49 Holland works to gain Elizabeth in order to incorporate within himself the virtues that make her worthy. Despite its fervor and haste, this courtship is not meant to debase Elizabeth or dishonor John of Gaunt. In fact it is clear that Holland’s marriage to Elizabeth affects his performance of public loyalties, since many of Holland’s successes and failures in court politics are inflected by his marriage. Especially in Froissart, Holland is reputed to have the type of strength required to save the failing reign of Richard II.50 His “brave and soldierly” fortitude, paired with the bonds of brotherhood he shares with both Richard and Henry, supposedly makes him the perfect man to find a solution that will save Richard’s crown. As Richard’s advisors explain, You must hide your real intentions until this trouble has blown over and your brother the Earl of Huntingdon [ John Holland] is able to join you. It is a great pity that he is at Calais, for those who revolt against you in England would keep quiet and not dare offend you if they knew he was with you. Also, he is married to the Earl of Derby’s [Henry Bolingbroke’s] sister [Elizabeth of Lancaster] and through his mediation we hope and believe that you would reach a peaceful solution with everyone.51

Holland is the appropriate mediator between feuding cousins, related to one by blood and the other by marriage.

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Although it seems that Holland continually sided with Richard in all conflicts with the Lancastrian half of the family, Henry’s frustration at Holland’s participation in plots against his life after his accession makes clear that Holland’s marriage to Elizabeth should have secured bonds between all three men. As Froissart reports, Henry is disgusted by Holland’s designs on his life, thinking such a plan must be the fault of Richard: “He went in angrily and said to Richard of Bordeaux: ‘I saved your life with great difficulty and now you are trying to have me murdered by your brother, who is my brother-in-law. . .’”52 Holland’s marriage to Elizabeth, therefore, shows that bonds between men are often secured through relationships with women. A man’s masculine identity, moreover, is influenced by the way that he perceives the relationships he forms with other men through women. When John Holland’s head finally ends up being transported to London in a basket like “a catch of fish” it is because he privileges his ties with brother over brother-in-law.53 This marriage splits Holland’s obligations between Richard and Henry, yet it is that same private bond that is posited as England’s last hope for peaceful resolution of the public conflict between claimants to the throne. Marriage to Elizabeth magnifies the sacrifice Holland is willing to make on Richard’s behalf, because Holland betrays his brother-in-law (and king) to preserve his king (and brother). Exemplary Fictions In chronicle accounts, these men share a collective view of Elizabeth of Lancaster: she is a passive conduit through whom they negotiate their interpersonal relations.54 As a result, these powerful players treat her as a commonly held value, the purity of which must be preserved within their ranks. The kind of masculinity these elites exemplify thus depends on a fiction of femininity distinguished by its absolute passivity. In other words, Elizabeth must remain essentially passive lest her self-direction contaminate exchanges of agency between these men. Even as they endeavor to destroy each other, Elizabeth must not be violated, because to do so would unravel the fabric of masculinity they continue to share. The power balance between these men breaks down, but not because Elizabeth becomes the site of one man’s attack against another. Indeed, she is too close to the principals in this intrigue to be fully or exclusively identified with any one of them. She remains Henry Bolingbroke’s sister, Richard II’s cousin, and John Holland’s wife. A man who harmed her, as these possessive relations indicate, would injure a part of his own identity. Furthermore, Elizabeth of Lancaster visibly certifies all three men’s collective membership in the most privileged social group of late medieval England, despite the sharp differences

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that otherwise lead them into conflict. In sum, the fiction of feminine passivity these men hold in common secures an elite identity for what might otherwise appear to be men with very different masculine interests. The masculinity they cultivate in relation to Elizabeth functions as a visible marker of social status that groups these men together as elites. Even as the chronicles bear witness to a disruption of royal succession, Elizabeth’s inert presence suggests Richard’s downfall is a transfer of power between comparable rivals who share a common set of (family) values. Elizabeth visibly affirms the affinity of these men, foregrounding the continuity that is preserved with a shift to the Lancastrian regime. This example thus shows that men use women to form (in)visible bonds, but it also demonstrates that these “feminine” connections level differences in rank that necessarily exist between particular members of a social group. These accounts prioritize social continuity in order to take the edge off regicide, since the most fractious and traumatic struggle over the body politic in late fourteenthcentury England only involves men of the highest status. Clearly, this fiction of passive femininity concomitantly serves an important exclusionary function, for it securely vests power in an elite form of masculinity, whose purveyors remain untouchable by those rustici seeking political recognition during this troubled period.55 The absolute passivity that Elizabeth of Lancaster models is therefore supposed to be a comforting fantasy, for it simultaneously unites and elevates elite men, separating them from their own tumultuous infighting through the image of a consolidating manhood. In Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale, the politically unifying fantasy of feminine passivity turns into a domestically divisive nightmare of masculine violence. Whereas Shelia Delany argues that Chaucer deprives Livy’s story of its dramatic motivation by effacing the “theme of class conflict” present in the original, I suggest that Chaucer emphasizes the anxieties surrounding social rank in a context where such distinctions must continually be made visible.56 Although it is true that in making Virginius a wealthy knight and Appius a local judge Chaucer places the men “more or less on the same social level,” the effects of such broad lumping together of men is considerably more fraught than Delany admits.57 Paul Strohm points out that concerns over station are consciously marked in the tale with language pitting “knyght” against “cherl” in a “conspiracie” to make Virginia a “thral” (VI. 2; 142; 149; 183).58 Linda Lomperis further remarks that the contest between these men “not only exposes the bodily anxieties surrounding aristocratic lineage, but also reminds one of the specific threat to aristocratic security posed by the events of 1381.”59 Appius’s design against Virginia seeks to resolve the nebulous difference between “gentil” and “cherl” by deploying the starkly differentiating terms of law.60 He rejects the collective vision of masculinity that Virginia potentially enables,

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seeking to elevate himself through her debasement. Appius therefore attempts to reinscribe the social boundaries that Chaucer effaces in his revisions of this narrative. His resistance to a broader collective of masculinity jarringly reveals that the “associational polity” David Wallace sees as characteristic of the Canterbury assemblage is less comforting for some members of the social body than others.61 In short, Appius’s attempt to ruin Virginia is a display meant to formalize his superiority over other men. Sitting in his “consistorie,” invested with the power to “yaf his doomes upon sondry cas” (VI. 162; 163), Appius confirms his ability to administer the sentence that will distinguish grades of masculinity in this collectivized arena. His design is not just meant to defile Virginia; the long historical and literary record of violence against women suggests that he could come up with a less involved way to violate her, even if she is “strong of freendes” (VI. 135). Rather, Appius’s scheme is directed against Virginius, making visible the father’s reliance upon his daughter’s passivity for his claims to agency. Drawing from more contemporary events, Slavoj Vivek identifies a structure of violation in the Serbian use of “rape as a weapon” that is similar to the cycle Appius uses to uncase Virginius’s masculine control as insubstantial show: “the father—the representative of authority. . .is exposed in his utter impotence, which makes him guilty in his own eyes as well as in those of his daughter; the daughter is guilty for causing her father’s humiliation; and so on.”62 Appius pries apart the interconnections that make Virginia comprehensible as a product of Virginius, interposing himself between the two in a way that destroys both.63 When Appius awards Virginia to Claudius, “The cherl shal have his thral, this I awarde” (VI. 202), he rewrites Virginia according to the collective masculine use her passivity makes possible. Through his scandalous rendering of a shared masculinity, Appius insists that all three men in the tale hold Virginia in common. With his alternative form of homosocial desire, Appius consolidates a masculinity that is based on difference, violence, and domination.64 Asserting agency over what he assumes is Virginia’s inert femininity, Appius marks her father’s helpless inability to resist his hierarchical formation of a collective masculinity.65 If Virginia is there for the taking, Appius’s sentence suggests, it is because her father does not have the power to prevent her from being there or from being taken. He is weaker than the man who will seize her, a bad father because he can do nothing to prevent her sexual violation. This logic certainly comes to dominate the tale, and as I will argue, it is an attitude that takes hold because Virginius shares Appius’s view of his daughter. Before I discuss the effect of a common masculine belief in absolute feminine passivity, however, I want to pause here to note the difference between the Virginia these men carry around in their minds and the Virginia the tale describes.

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When Appius hands down his judgment he appears to view Virginia as a passive ornament, a docile body he can take using direct action and sleight of hand against her father. Imbedded in his operation to procure Virginia, however, there is at least the passing possibility that Appius recognizes the power of self-determination that Virginia’s description affords her. It is easy to see that Appius’s worry over her being “strong of freendes” (VI. 135) is really just another comment on the power of Virginius, who is also “strong of freendes” (VI. 4); but the judge’s decision to use deception, as I mentioned before, derives from an acknowledgement of Virginia’s agency. Appius reflects to himself that “she / Confermed was in swich soverayn bountee / That wel he wiste he myghte hire nevere wynne / As for to make hire with hir body synne” (VI. 135–37). Here as elsewhere, Virginia seems quite unlike a woman such as Elizabeth of Lancaster, who in her defenseless passivity was lucky enough to be seduced by a man willing to marry her. Indeed, to prevent the advances of a man like John Holland, daughters were often advised to pattern themselves after a maiden like Virginia.66 As others have pointed out, the advice to parents and governesses has nothing to do with Virginia’s character because hers is already fully formed as a model of exemplary feminine virtue.67 The list of qualities that Virginia incorporates without direction reads like a list of instructions in a conduct treatise. While Virginia comports herself “[w]ith mesure eek of beryng and array” (VI. 47), William Caxton’s translation of the Book of the Knight of the Tower warns the daughters to whom the work was addressed to “be softe humble. . .and not to be ouer wyld to spryng ne lepe. . .For many haue lost their maryage for to shewe them ouer moche and to make ouer grete semblaunce.”68 While “Bacus hadde of hir mouth right no maistrie” (VI. 58), Christine de Pizan claims that the single woman “must also be careful never to be seen affected by too much wine, for she who has such a fault would never be expected to have no other good. Therefore all maidens should water their wine and make it a habit to drink little.”69 Virginia enacts in detail the model of feminine modesty: She hath ful ofte tym syk hire feyned, For that she wolde fleen the compaignye Where likely was to treten of folye, As is at feestes, revels, and at daunces, That been occasions of daliaunces. (VI. 62–5)

Chaucer’s account of Virginia suggests that the young maiden has the capacity to protect her own virtue using direct action and sleight of hand.

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She has the discretion to distinguish between legitimate and illicit pastimes, suggesting that her cultivated agency, because it works to keep her purity intact, is a type of self-direction that women need to preserve their passive strength. In her brilliant analysis of the tale, Anne Middleton argues that Virginia’s autonomy points to the “incongruity between active virtue and passive sacrifice,” which “itself becomes a formal interest in the tale.”70 She sees this mismatch as part of a pattern in the tale that explores the “literary limits of the exemplum,” arguing that this incompatibility demonstrates Chaucer’s interest in challenging and complicating the moral absolutes of his sources.71 I want to pursue a bit further the incongruity she identifies in the tale’s discourse of exemplarity because this conflict is also present in Chaucer’s sources, many of which were used to pattern the lives of young aristocratic maidens. Frederick Tupper, Karl Young, and Martha S. Waller point to Ambrose’s “consecrated virgin” model, along with later manuals that incorporate Ambrose’s teachings, as Chaucer’s sources for different aspects of Virginia’s conduct.72 Working like matryoshka stacking dolls, Ambrose’s De virginibus, Vincent de Beauvais’s De Eruditione Filiorum Nobilium, Aegidius Romanus’s De regimine principum, and then Fray Juan Garcia de Castrojeriz’s Regimiento de Principes were collected for the use of medieval noble households in the rearing of children.73 These later manuals of governance, constructed for the French and Castilian royal households, give evidence of a growing tradition of Christian pedagogy that seeks to shape children of noble birth with models of chaste conduct drawn from patristic sources. From the ways that patristic models of the “consecrated virgin” were deployed in secular aristocratic culture in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it is clear that the conflict between agency and passivity is a defining feature of maidenly virtue. Women must be active in their sacrifice for their passivity to appear as virtue. Even so, Middleton’s contention that the tale uncovers a problem in the discourse of exemplarity is undoubtedly correct, especially as the ideal of feminine purity relates to the lived lives of women in late medieval culture. When we examine Virginia’s exemplarity in this tale, either in relation to the Roman matronly model or the Christian martyr type, a gap in representation emerges between her formal exemplarity and her historical particularity. H. Marshall Leicester, Jr. emphasizes the exemplum’s reliance on the historical existence of the figures it valorizes with his claim that “[e]xempla can be thought of as selections from individual lives rather than distillations from collective life. Indeed, it is important that an exemplum have some claim to historicity because its authority is in fact empirical: the lives of actual persons prove that the general moral is true.”74 Virginia’s exemplarity reveals the spectral

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quality of this empirical authority, since she is denied access to the discourse of feminine virtue for which she becomes a sacrificial icon. Her connection to historicity, because it conflicts with the rarefied formal possibilities of exemplarity, prevents her sacrifice from achieving the political, religious, or social effects that attend martyrdom. Readings of the tale that associate Virginia with sainthood acknowledge the agency that such a position implies, but they cannot account for the futility of her sacrifice in the context of the tale. J. D. W. Crowther notes Virginia’s difference from Christian saints Margaret, Dorothy, and Agnes, women who speak in their own defense and whose bodies suffer shame and torment to preserve the Christian principles they cherish.75 As Sandra Pierson Prior argues, the tale’s shift from a Roman to a Christian model of virginity makes such agency problematic: because the tale is now interested in presenting Virginia as a perfect victim, she must be static and constant in her exemplarity.76 She further points out that the perfect victim, Christ, willingly gave himself up to sacrifice in a gesture that everyday Christians are supposed to mirror in their surrender to God upon conversion.77 From her initial description, anyway, it appears that Virginia has the strength of will to stand up for her virtue and to make the sacrificial decision that would mark her purity if such a choice were required. But it never comes to that in the tale. In fact, readers point out over and over again that Virginia loses her autonomy, that the choice Virginius offers her is already made, and that her assent to her death looks compulsory.78 This change, I submit, is due to the crisis in masculinity that her agency makes visible. It is not that Virginia “loses” her agency somewhere along the way to the temple. Indeed, Virginia’s autonomy is taken from her, and it is the rhetoric of historicity that links her exemplarity to the present that does so. In the tale’s advice to guardians of maidens, Virginia’s description is linked to other women. When this happens, when she is posited as a real, live girl, the contemporary apparatus that orders the female body through the visible regimen of femininity also applies to her. Real Pressures In other words, if Virginia is meant to be real, or to have been real, then her agency must appear as an explicit product of masculine direction. While Virginia might manifest the divine gift of grace that enables other Christian martyrs, even advocates of her saintly connection concede that this association is only ever implied in the tale by her conduct. The most direct link to masculine authority, as I have already noted, is to her father’s paternal presence, which we are told is invisible due to its foundational priority. Virginia is supposed to be a pattern of her father, but the

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connection is hard to see unless we already know it exists.79 If masculine agency must be seen as the producer of feminine passivity, then Virginia is a problem. Her performance of feminine passivity supercedes her father’s place, taking on a renown that confers fame onto Virginia alone: She was so prudent and so bountevous. For which the fame out sprong on every syde, Bothe of hir beautee and hir bountee wyde, That thurgh that land they preised hire echone. (VI. 110–13)

Virginius here is nowhere to be seen, which is an absence that tells too much in a culture requiring a man’s visible governance of the household. When Virginia becomes a community celebrity, a virgin superstar whose self-direction amazes those who hear about her, she exceeds the boundaries of visibility that were set for actual women. If we analyze another exemplary figure of feminine passivity whose agency also becomes apparent as an independent production, we see how a performance like Virginia’s opens her father’s lack of conspicuous governance to visible scrutiny. Susan Crane argues that Chaucer’s version of the Griselda story “sharply interrogates women’s place in marriage,” using her “perfect visibility” to show how her will must be completely subsumed into Walter’s.80 While it is true that Griselda’s “purely enacted identity” means that she has no interiority, I want to underscore more strongly an element of Crane’s reading, that the direct correspondence between Griselda’s performance and her selfhood actually subjects Walter’s conduct in marriage to sharp interrogation.81 While my argument thus comes at Crane’s insight from a different perspective, I am concerned here to emphasize the visible pressures that feminine performances of passivity place on masculinities, because Virginius’s strategic intervention in the Physician’s Tale is meant to deflect the gaze that Griselda’s conduct directs toward Walter’s tyrannous behavior. While even the Clerk condemns Walter for his unreasonable treatment of Griselda, Virginius gets away with beheading his daughter as a gesture of his own self-sacrifice. He does, then, what Walter cannot fully accomplish, finally incorporating his daughter into his character to pass off the visible authority of his masculine agency. The key difference between Virginius and Walter, I believe, is Virginius’s treatment of the female body. While Walter uses Griselda’s naked body as a means to display her helplessness in the face of his power, Virginius seeks to deny altogether that his daughter has a body. Linda Lomperis seeks to shift critical attention back to what she calls the “bodily aspects of the tale,” but also acknowledges that this turn is something the tale itself resists, since

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“in the second half of the tale, the maid’s body virtually disappears as the story turns its attention wholeheartedly to a situation in which engage in power relations with each another.”82 I certainly do not disagree with this contention, yet I want to stress that the presence of Virginia’s body in the tale is only ever virtual, constantly on the margin somewhere between the visible and the invisible.83 The only manifestation of her body comes through her passive agency. Once her ordering power is set up as perfect, everything about her, not just her body, fades into the background. The fight between Appius and Virginius is over paternity, the invisible masculine presence that is supposedly responsible for her perfection.84 It is only because we know that Appius’s true design is to make Virginia “with hir body synne” (VI. 138) that we understand the full consequences of Virginia’s reassignment as Claudius’s “thral” (VI. 202). The sexual access that Roman men claim to the bodies of the women they hold in servitude is the unsaid understanding these men share. Otherwise, what goes on in Appius’s courtroom is strictly a property dispute between men. As we all know, what appears to be a mere property crime often has more sinister implications for the bodies of actual women in medieval society.85 What Virginius understands, what we all know from this case among others, is that the rape of a woman is often treated under law like damage to property. Appius here is authorizing such damage, claiming that Virginia is a piece of property that Claudius can use as he sees fit. Even though her body remains invisible, it is the real thing that is being apportioned through Appius’s sentence. For this dispute to take place, then, these men must share a view of Virginia’s body as invisible. When Appius summons Virginius to court, and Claudius bases his action on Virginius’s claim to his daughter, they act on the formal assumption that a daughter is her father’s passive possession. But when Virginius shows up alone in Appius’s court, keeping his daughter out of sight until after her doom is settled, he validates the assumptions that underpin this legal structure. These men collectively share a view of feminine passivity, therefore, but it is not the same kind that Virginia performs early in the tale. Instead of the bleeding, suffering, speaking body of a martyr, these men agree that hers is the docile, passive, permeable body of a victim. For Appius’s sentence to have any meaning, all three men have to believe that Virginia is the kind of woman who, if handed over to a man for sexual violation, will be so passive that she cannot resist. In a terrible irony, these men assume that Virginia’s passivity is of the sort that would legally prevent her from being a victim of rape, but would morally assign her guilt for her violation. Her passivity would prevent her from putting up physical resistance, which was an important component for successful rape pleas.86 Failure to make a display of resistance, according to the law, indicated a disposition of will, which for moralists, was the key

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index of a maiden’s complicity in such an incident.87 As Augustine makes clear, there is room for a woman to remain pure as long as she refuses such violation, at least on the level of spiritual agency: “since no one, however magnanimous and pure, has always the disposal of his own body, but can control only the consent and refusal of his will, what sane man can suppose that, if his body be seized and forcibly made use of to satisfy the lust of another, he thereby loses his purity?”88 But since these men assume that Virginia has no will other than that of the man who possesses her, such an exemption would not apply to her. The agency she exercises over herself, these men insist through the way that they treat her, is a product of masculine manipulation. In other words, they treat Virginia as if she is nothing but a body, a headless figure unable to direct herself. As a result, Virginia loses her head in this story, not once, but twice. Before her father decapitates her, she loses the self-determining power that is associated with her volitional intentionality. “How could this happen?” we might ask. Well, in a self-consuming move more bizarre than the violence that ends this tale, Virginia becomes subject to the conduct regulation she initially figures. Instead of enjoying the brackets that usually extend to exemplary women in conduct discourse, Virginia is judged according to the standards that apply to the conduct of actual women. To give an example of the exemplary distance that Virginia is denied, in the Book of the Knight of the Tower women are exhorted to be humble and meek like Mary, even as the speaker also acknowledges that such a task is impossible. He suggests that Mary was not like regular women because she had divine knowledge of her day of death; this difference, however, is supposed to make women strive with even greater fervor to be like the immaculate virgin because they must make up for their mortal disadvantages, that is, their lack of inspired foresight.89 Although conduct books for women always juxtapose more contemporary examples of good women with such transcendent iconic examples, it is clear that the women who merit mention are included because they are extraordinary.90 While these women are called meek, humble, and obedient, they achieve these qualities through their self-governance, discipline, and fortitude. If all women patterned themselves after such women, men would have a harder time meeting this discourse’s parallel demand, that they show their masculinity through their cultivation and regulation of such feminine virtues. Regular women are thus meant to simulate the conduct of such models, but not to replicate it. Exemplary women, in turn, enjoy a special status that allows them to act in independent ways, which other women can only copy at the behest of men. For regular girls and real women, their agency comes from men, if that agency is socially respectable. Because this tale associates independent feminine agency with the ruinous license of sexual appetite,

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good girls must not simply look passive, they must really be passive. By making femininity into a form of absolute passivity, this tale reduces women to bodies, collections of arms, legs, torsos, and feet, waiting to be completed by manly heads.91 Because men are also bound by the regulatory discourse of conduct literature for women, when the tale catalogues the responsibilities of parents, Virginius can no longer just assume the place of head of the household. In a gruesome enactment, he must show himself to be the head of his daughter. The courtroom allows no such room for display, because in order to keep his place of priority, Virginius has to keep his daughter’s body out of sight. When he represents Virginia as her head, however, he can really do nothing to defend her. So, even as I am claiming that this tale takes women and makes them into docile bodies that men trade in their power struggles with one another, I am also suggesting that such transformation does not confer onto these men the agency they strip from women. What we see in Appius’s courtroom is the passing performance that constitutes masculine agency in this discourse. Virginius represents his daughter, but his resistance to Appius’s sentence has no impact. At the end of the day, even if this is supposedly a conflict over paternity, this shame really does not impact Virginius. He cannot suffer or speak pain in ways that can resist or remedy this situation. All his presence in court does, finally, is make visible his claim to his daughter’s body. By keeping her out of sight, he asserts his agency over her. As Virginia finds out when her father gets home, that masculine power does her no good. It is simply a competitive show designed to impress other men. This is not to say that Virginius does not also perform for his daughter. When he returns from Appius’s courtroom, he takes up a theatrical position that is meant to convey his own helplessness. “[W]ith a face deed as asshen colde” (VI. 209), Virginius unveils the sorry choice he has already made for his daughter. Here, but at no other point, Virginius requires that his daughter speak to certify the choice he has determined for her. But this is no reemergence of some repressed or ignored feminine agency; when Virginia speaks her voice is so heavily scripted that she sounds like the mother of all B-movie slasher-victims: “Goode fader, shale I dye? / Is ther no grace, is ther no remedye?” (VI. 235–36). Let us be clear; this is a maiden who does not have a name until her father renders his sentence: “ ‘Doghter,’ quod he, ‘Virginia, by thy name, / Ther be two weyes, outher deeth or shame’ ” (VI. 213–14). For all my talk about her early agency and autonomy, Virginia’s is a power that derives from a tradition she is not allowed to inhabit. Disfiguring Gender Even if Chaucer did not read Livy, his changes to this story highlight the violence that attends the visible connection between the public and the

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private in late medieval gender politics. In Jean de Meun, which Chaucer did read, the distraught father commits an act of helpless violence to expose the corruption of the court. His is a spontaneous and public action, a radical gesture that immediately confirms the truth of his complaint against the miscarriage of justice. While many readers have noted the dramatic difference that Chaucer’s domestication of the tale’s violence makes to perceptions of Virginius, he seeks the same type of power from violence that Melibee does before Prudence’s intervention. Virginius struggles throughout the tale to mark his actions as masculine, to gain a kind of agency that will make him invulnerable to the attacks of his enemies. Because he buys into a version of masculinity that requires the visible exercise of agency, he dooms himself and his daughter to the violence that this regulatory regime entails. He is dependent on his daughter for his masculine image, but he is vulnerable because he has made her passive to display his prowess. His brutality, therefore, is a final run at agency, at getting free from the vulnerability his passive daughter exposes. Rather than allow his daughter to become a weapon to be used against him by his enemies, he destroys her. My version of these events is quite different from that of Livy or Jean de Meun; in fact, it is deliberately made to sound like a pop-fiction plot of manliness that emerges from violence. As I just related, the events of the Physician’s Tale sound more like the weird back-story of Kaiser Soze in The Usual Suspects.92 There, the crime overlord in the making, when he comes home to find his wife and family violated and held hostage, unleashes his violence against those he loves instead of those who endanger them. In his discussion of this episode, Slavoj Vivek relates this act of “forced choice” to freedom of will: “by cutting himself loose from the precious object through whose possession the enemy kept him in check, the subject gains the space of free action. Is not such a radical gesture of ‘striking at oneself ’ constitutive of subjectivity as such?”93 While Vivek goes on to discuss other plots that complicate his notion of freedom, this example interests me because it works only if we assume the beloved object is passive, and that subjectivity is endowed with a type of agency marked by its violence. Let us recall that when Kevin Spacey’s character Verbal Kint (who is, incidentally, Kaiser Soze) tells the story of Kaiser Soze, he calls him “a myth, a spook story that criminals tell their kids at night.”94 When Kaiser Soze kills his family it does, as Vivek points out, give him greater power over his enemies.95 But this power is the kind that suits a monstrous supercriminal. It makes him a mythic player in a game that only takes place between men. To put it in Vivek’s psychoanalytic terms, this strategy works only if woman is symptom of man.96 If we look at the Usual Suspects in conjunction with the Physician’s Tale, it becomes clear that this symptom causes a violent fever in the emergent masculine subject.

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My point in addressing Vivek’s reading of this relatively recent film is that neither the movie nor the interpretation takes into account how a woman becomes the symptom of a man. Through her structural relation, as either wife or daughter, Vivek and the film assume she simply is. Now elsewhere Lacan looks at this process as part of the entry into the symbolic, the subjectifying course that language itself requires.97 The violence of lining up under the symbolic, which makes woman into a symptom of masculinity, is graphically evident in Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale. I would agree with Vivek here that the man’s choice is forced, that he can either take up the “crazy” masculine position being offered, or he can be no man at all.98 This possibility of floating free without an identity means invisibility as erasure, a snuffing out that leaves no room for mobility. Virginius cannot handle that possibility, because visibility appears as the requirement for identity in this context. In order to save himself, he kills his daughter off as that part of himself that he must make dispensable. In other words, he must make Virginia passive, actually inert, so that he can identify her as a part of his character that he can jettison. So there is a blotting out in this tale, in that Virginia’s agency is erased even before she is destroyed as a body. While one of my central premises in this book is that a certain type of invisibility offers greater freedom because it allows increased flexibility for identity, the invisibility pressed upon Virginia is not of that variety. Indeed, when the regulatory regime of conduct literature is imposed upon this story, that type of invisibility is eliminated, for both women and men. Once we concede visibility as a requisite for identity, gender’s regulatory imposition is no joke, as the Physician’s Tale demonstrates in graphic terms. The tale’s advice to parents and governesses presents gender in terms of agency, which it treats as binarily exclusive. In other words, as the advice section puts it, agency is something that either a man or a woman may have in a relational construction of identity. If Virginia has agency, as her description indicates, then Virginius cannot, or so goes the twisted logic of gender visibility. When this logic gains entry into the tale, which is itself a symptom of the late medieval emphasis on visibility in identity, Virginius has to make his daughter passive in order to make himself active. Of course Virginius has had agency all along, but if it does not have conspicuous presence, it does not “count.” The same goes for Virginia, who has been passive all along, but whose gestures of submission cannot pass as such unless they take on the scripted marks of compulsion. Thus, though it is necessarily true that all men and women are simultaneously active and passive, when conduct becomes subject to an ordering regime of visibility, what normally passes as masculine or feminine is no longer allowed. Gender becomes more rigid, which means that men are directed to be noticeably active and women are told to be obviously passive.

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The situation at the end of the Physician’s Tale, then, is the ridiculous acting out of this gendered demand. Virginius is as active as a man could be, chopping off his daughter’s head and bringing down a corrupt judge through his gruesome act. Likewise, Virginia is as passive as a woman could be, assenting to her father’s pronouncement and withdrawing to mourn her execution in silence. This sequence shows that gender is a violent and bizarre regime that would disfigure the bodies it governs if it were given the full range of vision that we see in this tale. In other words, if gender had the comprehensive power of visibility it is afforded in this tale, here is what you would get—a helpless father chopping off his innocent daughter’s head. Not a pretty picture, to be sure. Even if Virginius is able to dispense mercy at the end of this tale, it is a power bought dearly through a kind of horror that cannot easily be effaced. When we analyze the events of this tale in relation to Chaucer’s changes to his source matter, I obviously do not think that the advice to governesses and parents is digressive. Nor do I think it was meant to criticize any historical figures, from John of Gaunt, to Katherine Swynford, to Elizabeth of Lancaster, to John Holland. Instead, I argue this tale takes on the regime of visibility, exposing its consequences in a new era when conduct was increasingly becoming subject to public scrutiny through vehicles including celebrity and scandal. Not only does history show that conduct literature is ineffective, but Chaucer’s transformation of this story also shows that it is disfiguring to those subjects to whom it applies. This applies to the women who are ruled by this advice and the men expected to rule according to it. With violence so shocking that it verges on the ridiculous, this tale depicts what happens when visible expectations for conduct allow no room for exceptional behavior. If we cannot turn a blind eye to certain forms of action that do not fit with prescriptions for identity, in this instance gender identity, then those categories must collapse, lest they destroy the bodies they govern. In Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale, expectations for visibility affect not just performances of identity, but also the composition of physical bodies. In the next chapter I pursue visibility’s bodily impact. While here we see that the body’s destruction enables Virginius to show agency, the power that he gains is of an excessive and monstrous kind. In the Book of the Duchess, the subject of the next chapter, I consider whether this horror is the only outcome. As I shall argue, telling a story is a way of countering the visible pressure of gender, of adding flexibility so that certain behaviors can be expanded to fit particular expectations. Linda Lomperis speaks to this possibility as a motive for the (failed) attempt to control the body in the Physician’s Tale, suggesting that “fiction making would have given both women and men a certain degree of autonomy in shaping their own lives,

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allowing them at the same time to remain both within and outside of oppressive social constraints.”99 This creative ability, finally, is something that Virginius could have used. While Virginia might have been compared to a book, Virginius’s refusal to read his daughter as anything but a threat to his agency dooms the both of them to this tale’s violent conclusion.

CHAPTER 3 “MY FIRST MATERE I WIL YOW TELLE”: VISUAL IMPACT IN THE BOOK OF THE DUCHESS

Take one fresh and tender kiss Add one stolen night of bliss One girl, one boy, some grief, some joy —Johnny Cash, Memories Are Made of This

eginning with a broken metamorphosis, Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess attempts to resolve the scandal of gender’s visuality through its relational construction of a memorial poetics. In the Ovidian story, metamorphosis saves Alcyone from suicide; this transformation revives her and reifies her husband, changing both into sea birds.1 Chaucer’s rendition sees Alcyone dead within three days of the return of her husband’s body. Mortality, along with its ultimate proof, death, is more visible in Chaucer’s poem than in his sources.2 Chaucer’s treatment of the Ceyx and Alcyone narrative thus reveals a suspicion of superficial visions that is relevant to the larger composition to which it belongs. This account, like the Black and White story it presages, is a tangible arrangement of differences that are narrative, visual, and topographic.3 Because gender difference is staked on degrees of visual distance in the Book of the Duchess, this chapter addresses the spatial arrangement of perspective across its aesthetic, religious, scientific, and philosophical contexts. The process of spatial arrangement is more relational than linear in the poem itself, so the argument of this chapter will follow the poem’s meandering path in order to address the artistic, religious, and intellectual controversies that Chaucer finesses through his creation of a powerful feminine image. Although the major focus of what follows is the coalescence of Black’s masculinity in relation to White’s idealized image, most readers agree that

B

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the story of Ceyx and Alcyone provides entry into the Man in Black’s narrative. This conjunction offers us a preliminary vision of the literary form that Chaucer develops in relation to emerging controversies concerning the power of images. As Mary Carruthers convincingly suggests, the medieval dream vision was a rhetorical performance of memory work, which leads its audiences through a series of images in a stationed sequence of seeing.4 Since medieval thinkers made no distinction between verbal and visual inventive capacities, the composition of memorial images was thought of in physiological, aesthetic, and moral terms. As a result, in this chapter I am interested in the gendered implications of reading Chaucer’s poem as a memorial composition across these late medieval discourses.5 Making changes to a narrative’s constitution alters its members’ relations to one another, covering over bodies in a way that changes gendered relations. Nevertheless, this poem also attempts to answer challenges to memorial practice precipitated by shifts in theories of perception.6 While I will argue that Chaucer carefully treads the line between the appropriate use and immoderate abuse of images, I shall also suggest that in establishing distance from a beloved figure, Chaucer constructs a version of masculinity that gains legitimacy from its detachment.7 Medieval Memory and Unending History The contrasting perspectival positions of Alcyone and Ceyx suggest that the gender-mapping this story effects depends on negotiations of distance. Calibrating the distance from which one sees, so the old story goes, is an important development in what is credited as the emergence of the “Renaissance” subject through single-point perspective in art.8 But as this episode indicates in the Book of the Duchess, the distance from which one perceives another is an ethical stance that settles identities even before it is acknowledged as part of the artistic landscape. Alcyone’s inability to gain distance from her beloved suggests her commitment to Ceyx, though her failure to commemorate her husband through memory’s orderly symbolizing processes leads to her death. Medievals recognized the moral implications of perspectival distance, particularly in their discussions of memory. As an integral chamber of perspective, memory involved the gathering of images into a designated mental space, often represented as a house.9 This spatialization of memory has a physiological foundation, for the vis memorativa is part of a larger partitioning of the brain that enables the orderly formation of images.10 Attending the “Galenization” of Aristotle’s conception of mental faculties, the most standard diagram of the medieval brain designated three chambers, imagination, reason, and memory, to explain the cognitive functions of “receiving, processing, and storing.”11

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Although different writers designated various cellae, the recollective space of memory is always the chamber most distant from raw sense perception.12 Due to its creative capacity to re-member images, memory necessarily involves a moral element. Albertus Magnus’s notion of the chamber of memory pointedly relates its function to the ethics of temporal distance, suggesting that those images we preserve over time define an individual’s moral priorities.13 Such ordering of memories can work to make certain elements of a past more or less visible. As D. Vance Smith argues, memory is “As capable of placing things at a distance as it is of forgetting. . .”14 Memory can thus work to figure acts of erasure as ethical by setting certain images beyond what Smith provocatively calls the “vanishing point of their history.”15 While I take Smith’s point, that the expansion of memory to include sites that are “too remote” disrupts the order that mnemonic technique was designed to provide, his claim that “Memory deals with what is contiguous, adjacent, to the subject,” holds alternative interpretive potential for Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess as it relates to the poem’s arrangement of gendered distance.16 Memory does not simply deal with those images that are close to the subject; rather, it designates them, creating the relational distance that invests certain figures with proximity so that they constitute the history of a particularly ordered subject. Memory keeps specific images close in a way that recalls the particularities of temporality: “we [should] attend to those circumstances of things which can occur accidentally and externally.”17 But importantly, memory also maintains this time-bound specificity as a limit of spatial proximity. Temporality prevents nearness from implying sameness in a mnemonic relation. Following Aristotle, Albertus Magnus argues that each figure in one’s store of memory maintains its distinctness as it is attached to a particular, and specifically past, moment in time: “What is to be remembered entails a distinction of time, which is past time”18 Memory thus offers breathing room between one’s present and one’s past, allowing the continual recollection of the subject in a process that subjects history to cognitive invention. Here I want to emphasize the distance that memory offers, because Chaucer’s Ovidian introduction suggests that distance institutes difference. The ways in which Ceyx and Alcyone relate to distance establishes a difference between them—a substantive difference that marks a gendered relation. The narrator’s desire to gain distance, to separate himself from Alcyone’s swoon, keeps his identity from collapsing into the image of feminine mourning that he uses to compose gender difference. The narrator’s lack of interest in Alcyone’s narrative demonstrates that her story is simply a cue for meditative invention in which he has scant emotional or ethical investment: “But what she sayede more in that swow / I may not telle yow

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as now; / Hyt were to longe for to dwelle” (215–17). This lack of empathy—which takes on comic proportions for some readers—belies a perspectival difference that this poem in its entirety is interested in naturalizing.19 Maintaining appropriate distance from one’s compositional “matter” emerges as the ultimate measure of masculinity in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess. Alcyone’s inability to see herself as separate from her husband smacks of excess to many, but the poem uses her figuration of radical reciprocity to fit femininity according to its vision of masculine continence. When her husband dies her story is over. Ceyx’s near invisibility, moreover, suggests a position of detachment that frees him from the entangling power of heterosexual admixture. This detachment, in both the narrator and Ceyx, suggests that a woman is a good figure to compose with, as long as the ultimate product of the mnemonic collation remains the distinctively masculine subject. Men may create images of femininity, then, but only those sorts that contribute to the formation of the ordered manly image. This relational composition is assuredly heterosexual, because it suggests that women and men are ideally bound to each other in a structure of reciprocity. Nevertheless, resisting the visible pressure that late medieval conjugality places on masculinity, the process of creating femininity as a visible expression of masculine authority means that this reciprocity has reflexive effects, but only for men. A woman’s story, as Alcyone’s narrative illustrates, becomes part of a man’s particularly ordered history. When the dreamer wakes into an alternate space for mnemonic composition, the challenge of the poem’s remainder is to establish appropriate masculine distance in a field where the markers of mnemonic measure are themselves subject to revision. As the Man in Black’s condition illustrates when the dreamer stumbles upon him, heterosexuality’s attachments threaten to undo ordered images of manhood. The Man in Black’s collapse troubles the association of manhood with the roving or penetrating power of perception.20 Yet getting Black to “see straight,” to take up the empowered position of differentiated vision that will signal his manly continence, is not an option in this commemorative landscape. As Black’s story unfolds, it becomes clear that the poetics of elegy—its transformative power of consolation—has undergone its own metamorphosis in Chaucer’s hands.21 This is because the alliance between masculinity and distance expressed through definite lines of vision is less clear in the Man in Black’s domain than in the dreamer’s Ovidian narrative. The narrator’s dream is characterized by features common to memory work: with its harmonious rhythms of song, its visual images of Troy, and its textual rendering of love, this dreamspace is a memory chamber designed for manufacture.22 But the dreamer’s interactive collaboration with Black departs from the clearly stationed path of guided vision that usually typifies the form. In its usage of

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Troy, this poem’s adaptive mnemonic practice begins to emerge. As the “vanishing point” of English mythography, Troy is the familiar yet remote point of origin where a composition of idealized manhood should begin. Stories of Troy serve up images of destruction to accompany their promises of renewal, founding English national identity on a fantasy of continuum. The perpetuity of connection elides all breaks in history that death— through the devastations of war, plague, or time itself—may threaten. History, according to this myth, does not have an end. The comfort of this narrative, especially read in conjunction with the text and gloss of the Roman de la Rose, suggests that following a path to a successful conclusion includes unforeseen departures. A teleology can contain, in an active sense, circuitous designs. And so what has been taken to be this narrative’s lack of linear structure, with its shifts between Ovidian narrative, Trojan history, and amorous allegoresis, not to mention its failed hunt and its lost whelp, is a thread of representation that ultimately consolidates the Man in Black’s masculinity. Without the meandering, working through of gender difference that this opening set of images provides, the Book of the Duchess would simply be an elegiac portrait of grief that sets consolation as its ultimate aim. As the winding, usually conflicting, debate concerning this poem’s aim and impact demonstrates, consolation cannot be the effective goal of this composition.23 While I am willing to acknowledge that the poem’s performative potential opens the possibility for its success as an act of commemoration, the public aspect of this elegiac mode depends on a method of collectively ritualized reading that contrasts with the privately dialogic exchange figured by the poem. By reminding us to consider the Book of the Duchess in its philosophical context, in which Ockham’s challenge to universals “admitted shared, objective knowledge only of singulars,” Kathryn L. Lynch emphasizes the dialogic intervention that Chaucer constructs in the form of the poetic dream vision.24 Her contention—Chaucer changes dream vision by making it a more provisionally interactive exchange that is not overseen by a universal power—complicates the poem’s relation to mnemonic practice.25 Changing theories of knowing and seeing, this poem suggests, cause a crisis of distance for the manly subject. The adaptive mnemonic practice this poem achieves through its collaborations between men, however, negotiates a via to preserve manly composure. Locating the Imagination In assigning narrative verse to the Man in Black’s formless grief, the narrator collates the Black Knight as a memorial subject, showing more broadly that masculinity, its construction and validation, is a visual art of

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cognitive recollection. Yet the poem unfolds its mnemonic formation of the masculine subject in response to a perceptual challenge that is not simply aesthetic. The Man in Black’s difficulty, I suggest, has to do with the problems that a shift in medieval perspective introduces to the relation between memory and elegy. The influence of intromissive theories of vision, which asserted images’ material influence over the viewer, complicates memorial relations to lost objects.26 Later medieval monastic practice accommodates the material power of images, departing from the Augustinian notion that images are simply mental pictures without tangible substance.27 The predominance of intromission, which prioritized the object’s power to impress the eye of the viewer, was in part an effort to assert the tangible autonomy of the physical world. The suggestion that images were not formed independently of the encounter with what Augustine pejoratively called visio corporalis, however, still did not lend certainty to the processes of vision.28 Faculty psychology attempted to order the transformation of raw sense data into conceptual images, but even with its partitioned arrangement of perception, visions could go astray. The mental topography that Albertus Magnus devised, for example, made room for the roles of “imagination,” “opinion” and “phantasy” in the construction and retention of images.29 In his account, sensory data moved from the eye to the common sense, then through the imagination, opinion, and phantasy, until it finally reached the memory, which was just as much a storehouse for concepts as images. As even the modern terms for his scheme indicate, the intermediate distance between the gathering of sensation and the storage of images was an interpretive space for the transformation of perception. Albertus Magnus inherited the notion that “phantasms” might influence the mind from Avicenna’s model of brain cells (Avicenna’s three cell model included the imagination, reason, and memory), but Albert’s classification of faculties represented a more involved attempt to deal with the ways that judgment, emotion, and desire work upon the visual power of perception.30 In Albert’s system, the imagination played a slightly different role than we might expect. More closely connected to immediate sensation, the imagination coalesced the images that informed the faculty of opinion. The opinion assessed the intentiones of perception, providing what we might consider to be the emotional temperature, color, or texture of a sensation. This faculty was evaluative, insofar as it presented certain images as pleasurable, frightening, disgusting, and so on. But the more creative aspects of mental function were performed by the phantasy. Since this faculty had the visual power of division and combination, it also had the potential for deception. Although the phantasy performed a crucial cognitive function in its ability to conjure images leading to new and inventive ideas,

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unless it was governed by reason, it could be distracting or misleading.31 Thomas Aquinas argued that phantasia and imaginatio were one and the same faculty, but he accepted the essential principle that Albert propounds, for Aquinas also views what he classifies as the imaginative power as simultaneously the most promising and threatening mental capacity.32 Later thinkers such as Roger Bacon adapt this model even further: Bacon places the common sense and the imagination within his first cell, which he calls the phantasia, but his scheme also seeks to regularize the creative powers of the imagination through its designation of the virtus cogitativa as the middle ventricle, before his combination of opinion and memory in the posterior chamber.33 Bacon’s version of the faculties made inventive cognition more mechanical, but he still cannot guarantee that images will not become deceptive through the viewing process. The creative capacity of mental imaging, as Alastair Minnis points out, easily could have led to a “theory of literary aesthetics.”34 That it did not, at least not in any systematic or explicit manner, is certainly due to a widespread philosophical suspicion of the imagination, which is prominent as far back as the time of Augustine.35 Despite this distrust, medievals did not abandon the powers of the imagination altogether. As Minnis demonstrates elsewhere in his reading of Piers Plowman, Langland was keenly interested in the imagination’s inventive capacity to form moving images.36 He was not alone, but was one among many makers of the later Middle Ages who investigate the full aesthetic potential of the power of images. Because this aesthetic practice requires a careful negotiation of religious and philosophical objections, the attempt to spatialize the brain offers an internal topography of distance that is designed to regulate the object’s power over the memories that constitute the viewer. The distancing potential of faculty psychology is therefore a part of and a response to the dominance of visual theories of intromission, since intromission enabled a shift in aesthetic practice that focused on the image’s power to affect audiences.37 Faculty psychology is a companion to intromission, but even its careful partitions cannot fully manage the impact of images. One manifestation of this change in seeing is that the artistic practice of the later Middle Ages significantly “fractures distance” in an effort to involve viewers in the images they encounter.38 As Michael Camille argues, “This new emphasis on the object in intromission did not imply that there was a move away from subjectivity in Gothic art.”39 Instead, in a move toward experiential immediacy, scholars including Camille suggest that images in medieval art become more affective in their appeals to individual viewers. 40 Because images are no longer iconic cues to imaginative reflection, but instead manifest their own particularizing

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gestures of ecstasy or suffering, they involve viewers in evocative ways that have tangible consequences. Images, because they could meet, catch, or even anticipate the gaze of an individual viewer, did not allow the spectator the distance that figurae drawn according to familiar tropological formulae offered. Intimate Difference, or the Impact of an Image This developing aesthetic is most visible in representations of Christ’s passion. Sarah Stanbury, in discussing such figures in later devotional literature and art, argues that “to be seen and to command the gaze of others is to control visual relations, to be moved from the edge to the center, to be, in effect, like Christ.”41 But in her analysis of the ways in which the image of Christ’s crucified body disrupts versions of visuality that align a penetrating gaze with masculine authority, she acknowledges that the image’s summons to participate in the visual image of Christ’s bleeding body also issues a prohibition.42 For example, in the Thornham Parva Crucifixion, Stanbury points to the averted eyes of the saints who surround Christ, suggesting that this feature, which she also shows to be common in other English crucifixion scenes, “allows the body to float free of narrative.”43 In distancing its internal viewers from the experience of the scene of which they are part, Stanbury argues that Christ’s body becomes a display that is staged for the larger community. The dynamic involved in seeing Christ’s suffering, I submit, is important to thinking about the masculine distance Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess institutes, for both establish a relation between seer and seen that preserves difference through intimacy. Insofar as the body of Christ as an object of vision unsettles the unilateral connection between seeing and control, Stanbury is right to accept Foucault’s claim that in the premodern world, becoming a public spectacle signified cultural power: “To be looked at, observed, described in detail, followed from day to day by an uninterrupted writing was a privilege.”44 Miri Rubin, Sarah Beckwith, and Eamon Duffy similarly suggest that seeing the body of Christ, either through images or the host, may very well have been the most important aspect of late medieval lay piety.45 It is not much of a leap, therefore, to suggest that focusing vision on the body of Christ would have suggested to onlookers a relation between being seen and wielding power. Indeed, lay participation in religious displays, their active stagings and material figurations, would suggest that members of medieval communities wanted their role in worship to be visible to others.46 Moreover, if we shift our focus to the proliferation of display in secular culture, from guild participation to differentiated liveries, it is clear that becoming a sight for others to see was an important part of medieval

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identity formation.47 Nevertheless, I suggest that this equation between privilege and visibility is more complicated, because just to be looked at was not a sufficient condition of control in medieval culture. Becoming visible is not as important as managing one’s visibility. “[T]o be, in effect, like Christ” (emphasis mine), does not mean that one has the same relation to visibility as Christ.48 In scenes figuring Christ’s suffering, those who are most immediately present cannot look directly at his wounds. Indeed, Middle English religious lyrics underscore Christ’s separation from viewers by suggesting their inability to witness the horror of his injury: “But werse me dot, that he ne can / To me turnen onis his eye / Than all the peine that I drye.”49 As scholars who have studied the importance of Christ’s body in medieval piety emphasize, these images of suffering are designed for their external viewers. The averted glances of spectators in crucifixion scenes thus indicate that Christ’s body is too terrible to look upon.50 Their deference, it is worth emphasizing, creates a privileged place of vision for the audience of viewers outside the frame of the image, emphasizing Christ’s address to His external readers. Because one must be invited or instructed to look at the wounded, bleeding body of Christ, the collapse of distance that this focus produces does not eradicate difference. Contemplating the privilege of this “ocular communion,” to use Suzannah Biernoff ’s phrase, the image of Christ’s boundless mercy is designed to humble its spectators.51 Sharing the pain of Christ, then, becomes a way for viewers to meditate upon their mortal differences from a divine image of human benevolence.52 Even in its affective call to readers, images of Christ’s suffering use intimacy to express difference, sometimes in aggressive terms. A lyric from the mid-fourteenth century illustrates the force with which an image of the wounded Christ can confront its audiences: “Biheld my side, / My woundes sprede so wide. . ./ Lok upon me! Put fro ye pride.”53 Images of Christ’s suffering open His material body in radical ways that grant viewers almost palpable access to his pain. Despite initial invitations to viewers to let their eyes crawl over or linger upon Christ’s gaping wounds, images of Christ’s suffering do not offer spectators unlimited powers of investigative scrutiny. On the contrary, medieval images engaged their viewers in richly controlled ways more nuanced than simple polarities of visibility express: “The nailes, the scourges, and the spere, / The galle, and the thornes sharpe—/ All these moun witnesse bere / That I thee have wonnen with min harte.”54 By directing the ways in which viewers saw (and not just whether or not they saw), images established their power. Indeed, Sara Lipton demonstrates that viewers must carefully be directed to look at a crucifix in visibly controlled ways for its meanings to achieve purchase in specific instances.55 These images create a mental ductus, a path through

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which a viewer is supposed to see Christ’s body as a meditative experience. 56 By shaping a way of seeing Christ’s body, images lead viewers through a contemplative encounter. This does not mean that viewers were simply passive recipients of the images presented to them. Instead, spectators were meant to take an active role in the reception of those figures that made impressions upon the senses. According to theories of intromissive vision, the reception of images was an active, adaptive, creative process, because viewers were expected to make something of the images they encountered. As V. A. Kolve observes, “in the Middle Ages to be audience to an ‘image’ (whether verbal or visual) implied activity, not passivity. It called one to thought, to feeling.”57 How one responded to images one received, then, expressed an ethical or spiritual relation to them. Negotiations of distance did not simply express relations of power; instead, it conveys relations of commitment. How one responds to a powerful image, therefore, forms an important part of the composition of the self. The complicated dynamics of viewers’ relations to religious images is relevant to Chaucer’s poetic composition of the Man in Black, because the type of differential intimacy that a viewer achieves with a figuration of the Man of Sorrows, for example, is similar to the kind of deferential reverence that Chaucer’s poem attempts to legitimate in its grieving knight.58 Composing Chaucer’s Man in Black The averted gaze, which admits familiarity even as it establishes difference, expresses the perspectival separation that the Man in Black needs in order to disentangle his masculine identity from White’s image. His ability to gain this differential outlook would be impossible without his interactive encounter with the dreamer. My reading of the poem thus shares with R. A. Shoaf ’s analysis of confession a concern for the way in which the narrator brings the Man in Black to a deeper understanding of his position through his articulation of White.59 Since, as Karma Lochrie has demonstrated, confession involves the management of visibility, it is necessarily bound up with the detachment that an intimate examination of the self entails.60 The account that Black offers, however, is not simply a fragmentary airing of the self through verbal exposure; instead, it is an organized aesthetic production that involves constructing an image with definite shape.61 As such, this confession is a mental painting that is supposed to move its audience to plain understanding. But as the narrator’s perpetual misunderstanding of the Man in Black indicates, his image is initially a jumble of imbricated emotion without readable borders. There is no distance between the Man in Black and the image of White he seeks to present.

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She is abstract, lacking a tangible outline in the Man in Black’s opening attempts at representation. Despite his best efforts to explain the cause of his suffering, White is effectively invisible in Black’s opening articulation of his pain. Now, the complaint that Black utters is pretty plain about the cause of his woe: “Now that I see my lady bryght, / Which I have loved with al my might, / Is fro me ded and ys agoon” (477–79), but as a private expression, this complaint remains unintelligible. The artistic equivalent of a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear its crash, the Man in Black’s expression is meaningless. While the dreamer’s voyeuristic position makes him unique witness to Black’s sincere expression, he lacks the cognitive map that will make such utterance comprehensible. He too is without bearings at the beginning of this exchange, because as a sojourner traveling along a mental pathway, the connections between stations in this sequence remain unclear. The dreamer must gain intimacy with the Man in Black in order to understand his vision of White. The closeness the dreamer achieves with Black, however, does not eradicate the difference between these two men. By making Black visible as an organized commemorative subject, the narrator identifies himself with a version of manhood that gains influence from its virtual invisibility. Since this entire poem concerns the speaker’s articulation of himself as a poetic authority, I am not suggesting that the dreamer is substantively invisible in this sequence. But I am suggesting that in his focus on the Man in Black’s account of White, the dreamer makes his centrality less perceptible. In other words, he is supposed to be seen as invisible in his poetic function. Even as I argue that this poem bares the meditative process of creative composition, its presentation of Black as a puzzling challenge obscures the narrative’s relentless construction of the dreamer’s artistic mastery. The speaker, therefore, is virtually invisible, which is a subject position that I suggest Chaucer validates elsewhere through his own poetic persona. If we focus on the dreamer’s Black and White narrative, without accounting for the ways in which he uses his invisible influence to give shape to this construction, I believe we miss the ways in which this poem acknowledges the collaborative character of gender’s relational fixity. As a memorial subject of the dreamer’s making, the Man in Black is nothing if the narrator does not see him. But the dreamer initially cannot apprehend Black because he uses abstraction to represent loss. Making himself visible as an icon of grief more generally, “For y am sorwe, and sorwe ys y” (597), Black’s expression of himself consists only of negation: wishing for death, the Man in Black will not let the dreamer see him except as a void of meaning. He cannot tell his sorrow because it cannot be understood. When he catalogs the series of reversals that constitute his

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existence, “My song ys turned to pleynynge, / And al my laughtre to wepynge” (599–600), his complaint ends with the image of a woman—an allegorized image of Fortune. Since she is a commonly held culprit for all sorts of downfall, it is no wonder that the dreamer does not understand the specific loss that precipitates Black’s suffering. As Donald Howard has noted, even if we grant that the Man in Black’s complaint is a literal rendering of his initial poetic expression, it, along with the outpouring of woe that follows, is so highly stylized that it is hard to know with certainty that the cause of the knight’s grief is the death of an actual woman. 62 This collection of grief simply formalizes the ways in which literary knights suffer without locating the particularity of that pain. My point in emphasizing the familiarity of the Man in Black’s modes of expression is to suggest that his figures, because they derive from a discourse other than grief, establish a distance between dreamer and knight. This homosocial break, furthermore, points to the crisis in mnemonic collation that impairs Black’s ability to take up a masculinity defined by a unilateral claim on perception. From his opening articulation of loss, it just as easily could be that this knight has failed in the pursuit of love. His mnemonic practice is completely out of order, because he uses familiar images to express an unlooked for kind of pain. And, if any image of femininity might suggest the damage that heterosexual intimacy can inflict against a man, the monstrous figuration of Fortune that he blames for his condition would bolster the connection of his loss with betrayal in love. The Man in Black’s construction of Fortune, therefore, opens the pathway to associations between feminine mutability and masculine dissolution. Unlike a traditional dream vision, her entry into the poem indicates a rift between images and their meanings, highlighting the failure of a recollective practice that depends on the stability of signs and the regularity of perception. Bending the Rules: Relational Masculinity Fortune’s image—which emphasizes the chaos that results from feminine identity unordered by masculine intervention—suggests that the manly subject absorbs the deleterious impact of her wayward mobility. Although the catalogue of reversals Black recites is a set of woe borrowed from Chaucer’s French sources, this grouping acknowledges that in her pleasing aspect Fortune offers the possibilities of happiness that the Man in Black now mourns.63 Fortune “al behoteth and nothing halt” (621), inflicting more pain by luring her victims into a false sense of lasting pleasure. Fortune, as representations by Machaut suggest, builds images of manly control that appear to be stable.64 The danger she poses, therefore, is in her

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radical unsettling of any notion of ordered manhood itself. By consolidating images that only turn out to be chimerical, Fortune’s circuitous games suggest that the project of collating the masculine subject along lines that are stable in their legibility will turn out to be a frustrating ruse.65 The Man in Black is stuck in his process of composition, because as “An ydole of fals portrayture” (626), Fortune’s shifting suggests that images can mislead their viewers. As late medieval concerns over the power of religious images suggest, the danger of idolatry arises from images’ ability to assume independent meanings. When images become valued for anything other than their contemplative use by spectators, they become dangerous, at least according to various religious reformers. As The Lanterne of Li{t puts it: “The painter maketh an image forged with diverse colours till it seems in the eyes of fools like a living creature.”66 The complicated involvement of seers in religious iconography opens the possibility that viewers could be subjected to meanings beyond their control. Theories of intromission, as I have already noted, do not strip viewers of agency. Nevertheless, anxieties regarding the influence of figurae prompt religious writers to articulate viewers’ responsibilities in seeing. If the laity had keener spiritual vision, such crafted images would be unnecessary, as William Thorpe suggests: “the word of God suffiseth to all faithful men and women, without any such images.”67 This prescriptive regulation of sight is designed to defend viewers against the manipulations of false images. Apparently, the Man in Black did not exercise this measure of caution, but was taken in by what he describes as Fortune’s deceptive vision: “She ys fals, and ever laughynge / With oon eye, and that other wepynge” (633–34). Using the familiar image of the scorpion to represent Fortune, Black recollects her figure’s irresistible menace: I lykne hyr to the scorpioun, That ys a fals, flaterynge beste, For with his hed he maketh feste, But al amydde hys flaterynge With hys tayle he wol stynge And envenyme; and so wol she. (636–41)

Kittredge traces Chaucer’s indebtedness in this passage to Machaut, but elsewhere Chaucer uses the figure of the scorpion to suggest dissembling betrayal.68 More to the point, Chaucer’s various images of the scorpion similarly relate to a false woman’s façade of steadfastness. While the Sultanness in the Man of Law’s Tale and May in the Merchant’s Tale deploy

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images of feminine constancy to hide the acts of betrayal represented with the scorpion (II. 404; IV. 2058–65), Phebus’s use of the image to assail the (truthful) crow in the Manciple’s Tale emphasizes the effect of this dissembling vision: “ ‘Traitour’ quod he, ‘with tonge of scorpioun, / Thou hast me broght to my confusioun’” (IX. 271–72). When the crow breaks Phebus’s image of his wife’s fidelity, he muddles the borders of masculine identity that Phebus used his version of her loyalty to consolidate. In fact, even after he kills his wife, Phebus has a hard time letting go of the image of feminine constancy upon which he has founded his version of manhood: “O deere wyf ! O gemme of lustiheed! / That were to me so sad and eek so trewe” (IX. 274–75). Each of these uses of the scorpion involves the fragmentation of a vision of submissive femininity, suggesting as they do that the appearance of feminine meekness is a show designed to delude the (masculine) eye. The effect of this double vision of femininity, they also demonstrate, is the dissolution of the ordered masculine subject. When Black invokes the image of the scorpion to represent Fortune, he opens the possibility that images of feminine meekness are false idols that have the power to lead their viewers astray. If images have no substance, Black’s exposition of loss suggests, then there is no via, or way, that prevents the fragmentation of the masculine viewer. Accordingly, when Black plays a game of chess with Fortune, she uses her adaptability to outmaneuver him. And, according to the grieving knight’s account of events, this conclusion is inevitable: even equipped with Pythagoras’s mathematical tactics, she would beat him, as she would almost any other opponent: “For Fortune kan so many a wyle / Ther be but fewe kan hir begile” (673–74). Chess, which depends on definite lines of sight and ordered strategies of motion, gains its particularity from its spatial, relational rules.69 Black’s match against Fortune thus defeats any process of gender formation figured according to a definite structure. Different pieces in the medieval game of chess gain their identities through their relation to the positions of others, and as a result, even in our modern version of the game different pieces in chess can only move in set paths or ways. The most important piece of the game Black describes is the fers, which draws its identity from its limited mobility and customary proximity to the King. H. J. R. Murray explains that fers originally did not denote a feminine figure, but rather derived from furzan, meaning “wise counselor.”70 When its gender inflection became more fixed through names such as “regina” or “quene,” a gendered problem of double vision beset European players. Adopted from the Arabic form of the game, a pawn reaching the eighth line of the board was transformed into a furzan even if the original remained on the board. Now, a king could use multiple wise counselors on his side, but more than one queen, Murray notes, presented a quandary.

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The doubling of queens blurred sexual division, requiring the pawn to undergo a sex change, “but by its becoming a Queen when the original Queen was still upon the board the moral sense of some players was outraged.”71 As Murray goes on to explain: the possible plurality of Queens was evaded by an alteration in the nomenclature. . .in France and England where there was a possible choice between Reine (Queen) and Fierce (Fers), many players tried to restrict the use of Reine (Queen) to the original Queen, and Fierce (Fers) to the promoted pawn.72

The malleability of language here covers the slippage in a binary of sexual difference. In his analysis of the difficulties posed by naming in the Book of the Duchess, Peter W. Travis convincingly argues that the multiple gender significations of the word fers facilitate, perhaps create, the dreamer’s famous meconaissance.73 I am interested in the confusions this gender plurality produces because it suggests that the rules constituting the game of chess are less rigid than we might (or Black might) like to acknowledge. Here we see that rules that appear to be firm adapt to particular circumstances. Because players of medieval chess were obviously more interested in keeping sexual difference distinct, certain strictures bend to keep other divisions intact. The flexibility of what appears to be a rigidified structure, I believe, says much about the relational construction of gender that this poem traces using its Black figure. The fers was supposed to be limited to one diagonal move and was supposed to keep close to the king. As Black’s sorrow suggests, when the fers is lost, the game is up because the King cannot long be sustained.74 He treats the fers as a singular figure that cannot be replaced through transformative promotion. Black’s fers, in his imaginative order, strictly means “queen”; her separation from the King, furthermore, strictly seals his doom. But the rules of chess allow for more flexibility to preserve the king. If the king is separated from his “queen,” another pawn may be fashioned to provide the relational cover that keeps the king’s position intact. Clearly, then, I believe this passage is playing a game other than chess: the Man in Black’s chess allegory shows that his gender-mnemonic fails because it is too rigid in its rules. When the Man in Black comes up against the necessary adaptability of organized systems, he falls into the void of incomprehension. Because Fortune’s ability to beat him at chess suggests that what appear to be definite paths are not stable, true, or fixed, Black can see no way through his loss of meaning. He is in a real fix, since his recollection of himself depends upon following legibly set trajectories to construct a coherent

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image of masculinity. Black’s crisis, then, is one of seeing: because he wants to see gender as a stable, black-and-white binary, Fortune’s unsettling flexibility fragments his masculinity. In effect, the Man in Black must be brought to a new kind of perception, which uses the mobility of the object on view to figure an enduring relation. This mode of seeing, I submit, depends upon the materiality of that which is seen, insofar as the object’s tangible presence gives lasting shape to the viewer’s sensory impressions. If images are representations of actual things in the world, and not merely the viewer’s mental constructs, then the seer’s relation to those images assumes a greater degree of substance. This is only the case, however, if the receiver of an image allows for the agency of that which is seen: Black cannot make anything he wants of the images that make an impression on him. When he remembers White, therefore, she cannot simply appear as a tropological reflection of the Man in Black’s desires for femininity. Instead, in acknowledging the autonomy of the object, Black must make his relation to her independent identity manifest. When he articulates the way in which her autonomy signifies his character, he keeps her particular qualities from breaking free of his own. In recognizing her independence, therefore, he still asserts her relational composition. But instead of folding her into a version of himself, he unfolds himself through a version of her. When he explains his relation to White, therefore, Black adapts himself to fit a narrative of feminine worth that has independent weight. This negotiation of supplementarity, I suggest, gives the Man in Black the appropriate measure of distance from White since he must recognize her distinct identity.75 It also allows him to suggest that the ideal characteristics he locates in her are real outside the space of his mental composition. By orienting himself according to those exemplary features, he achieves a mnemonic practice that is flexible enough to achieve lasting coherence. The narrative dynamic that Black engages with the dreamer replicates the kind of perceptual fluidity that he must achieve in order to keep his vision of himself intact despite the alterations of time, of circumstance, of Fortune. The narrator’s misrecognition of the Man in Black’s loss—whether or not it is deliberate—calls upon the knight to shape his woe according to a less abstract image: “ ‘Good sir, telle me al hooly / In what wyse, how, why, and wherfore / That ye have thus youre blysse lore’” (746–47). He thus gives Black the opportunity to compose White as an independent object that nevertheless reflects his worth. By figuring his relation to her— which ends up being an account of how he brought her to love him—she invests his manhood with its own substance. Black thus has the chance to realize the ultimate fantasy of masculine composure: when he explains his

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affiliation with White, the Man in Black has the opportunity to animate White as a legitimate subject, whose identity is comprehensible in relation to his character, but whose virtue is believable outside the context in which he presents her. Like those models of exemplarity Matthew de Vendôme describes in his Ars Versificatoria, her perfect qualities illustrate his superlative worth.76 Unlike a purely rhetorical composition, White’s living, breathing substance gives life to the model of manhood her ideal femininity inspires. Seeing Distance: Ockham’s Challenge and the Image Debates But as we all know, even if the dreamer does not recognize the obvious fact, White is dead. Complicating this construction further, Peter W. Travis’s important analysis of the linguistic instability of “white” in ancient and medieval philosophy shows the ways that this term challenges meaning.77 Functioning as a name for any object, white posed a philosophical problem because it was thought to designate a quality, not a thing. Citing discussions from Aristotle and Anselm of Canterbury, Travis argues that the misunderstanding that moves the Book of the Duchess stems from the dreamer’s (and the reader’s) inability to see “White” as a term that designates a (white) object: “it points successfully only toward the idea of whiteness, while failing to point in the direction of a particular white something-or-other.”78 Serving as the principle example in debates over color for centuries, Black’s use of “white” engages the epistemological conundrum that subjective perception poses. While scholars including Travis and Kathryn Lynch address the function of “white” in Chaucer’s poem as it relates to Ockhamist epistemology, I want to link their helpful analysis to another of Ockham’s interventions, specifically his elimination of material species in the process of seeing.79 Ockham’s discussions of language, as we might expect, are closely connected to his theories of perception. When he attempts to eliminate physical species from the process of seeing, images become intellectual phenomena. Intuitive and abstractive cognition, by similarly relying on immediate knowledge of an object, eliminate the need for species.80 This immediacy is more apparent in intuitive cognition, insofar as Ockham defined intuitive cognition as the ability to know an object, including whether or not it exists, and whether it is present or absent. Abstractive cognition, by contrast, offers no ability to affirm an object’s existence or presence. Nevertheless, Ockham claims there is no need for species in perception, because intuitive cognition (the immediate encounter between intellect and thing) provides the mediating function in abstractive cognition. So, all that abstractive cognition needs is intuitive cognition, along with a habitus in which to store this broader awareness.81

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As scholars point out, Ockham’s elimination of species further allowed for action at a distance, in that a body could act upon another from a disconnected point without any accounting for the intermediate space between object and viewer. To cite one of his most “efficient” examples, Ockham argues that when a ray of light enters a window it produces an intense point of light on the facing wall, but not in the intervening parts of the medium. Thus he concludes, “the sun can act immediately at a distance.”82 Ockham’s claim, that he simply removed redundancies in perspectivists’ accounts, is particularly relevant to a unitary account like that of Roger Bacon. As I suggest in chapter 1, in his attempt to reconcile Neoplatonic theories of vision with their Aristotelian competitors, Bacon retains the multiplication of species present in Grosseteste’s emanationist theory, but incorporates it into his intromissive description of vision. In what David C. Lindberg characterizes as the “optical synthesis of the thirteenth-century,” Bacon invokes Aristotle to grant the eye a degree of agency.83 Referring to Michael Scot’s mistranslation of De generatione animalium, Bacon argues that the eye does more than receive images; instead, he contends, the eye must emit species in order to excite (or ennoble) the species that regular objects give off.84 Species, in the account that Ockham undercuts, are the corporeal manifestation of the eye’s agency, its tangible power over the images it receives. In Bacon, as in Grosseteste, the species emanating from the eye measure the distance between object and viewer. 85 Species thus account for the mediating space that situates the difference between viewer and image. Ockham’s elimination of species removes this differentiating distance, and an even more radical step, suggests that objects can act upon the surfaces they strike without respecting the lines of sight that separate them in other versions of perspective. Even so, if we consider Katherine Tachau’s important observation, that Ockham’s elimination of species did not have immediate effect on philosophical views, the collapse of distance that his theory of perspective produces should have little impact on the ways that members of late fourteenth-century English culture saw images.86 Moreover, his suggestion that things can act from a distance should not impress deeply viewers’ relations to other objects in their daily visual connections. Yet if we look at the ways that this scholarly discourse influenced debates over religious ornamentation, its theory and its practice, it becomes evident that seeing images makes elegiac memorialization a very difficult task in Chaucer’s day. Ockham’s elimination of species shares with the religious reformers a desire to “dematerialize” images, although there is a radical difference in the motivation behind such a move in reformist accounts. Like Roger Bacon, John Wyclif divided vision into its sensory and intellective

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capacities.87 Even as a cognitive process, his version of sight also required species to measure seeing. As Heather Phillips explains, in his discussion of the Eucharist, Wyclif uses the language of species to express Christ’s “intentional” or “virtual” presence in the bread.88 Just as an image is reflected in a mirror, so Christ is multiplied through every point of the host.89 Furthermore, Wyclif ’s comments on images in Tractatus de Mandatis Divinis, in which he suggests that images can serve as books for the unlearned just as long as their “dead” forms do not become independent objects of veneration, in turn suggests that images for Wyclif could perform an important role in religious devotion, but only as long as vision remains measured.90 By emphasizing the difference between the proper use and immoderate abuse of images, Wyclif was not all that different from other orthodox religious reformers, who similarly complained about the independent presence images could assume for the unlearned. Among these conventional expressions of concern about the power of images over viewers is the worry that unsophisticated viewers cannot exercise the discipline over the eye required to keep images in their proper places.91 Ideally designed as cues for cognitive meditation, writers including Wyclif feared that more powerful images would lead astray the minds of undisciplined viewers, and so would corrupt the spiritual seeing that moments of visual contemplation were supposed to offer.92 If, then, responses to images were still up to the viewer—and even more so in the realist rhetoric of Wyclif than that of later reformers—then the challenge that Ockham posed to species was indeed a great threat. If there was nothing to mark difference between seer and seen, and if objects could act upon viewers from a distance, then the viewer’s vulnerability could only be countered through cognitive discipline, equal here to spiritual measure. Ockham effectively reinvests viewers with agency in an intromissive account, suggesting that intuitive and abstractive cognition are products of an active mind. While his is a shift in emphasis only, Ockham’s attempt to eliminate physical species leaves no room for the unsophisticated viewer who cannot discern between things that strike the eye. Wycliffite reformers situate their attacks against images as a means to protect less sophisticated viewers from these powerful figures. Although their rhetoric also critiques misplaced veneration, in their suggestion that the material components of religious images would better serve the poor, tracts such as “That the worship of images is unlawful and accursed,” which forms part of the piece On the Twenty-Five Articles, go further than Wyclif in their call for the destruction of images.93 While Wyclif makes the oblique comment that fewer expenditures on religious ornamentation would benefit

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the impoverished, his observation does not pertain to the piece by piece destruction and distribution of images.94 As the former tract indicates: Certis Qese Qes ymagis of hemselfe may do nouQer gode ne yvel to mennis soulis, but Qai my{ten warme a mannes body in colde, if Qai were sette upon a fire, and Qo silver ande jewelis upon hem wolden profite to pore men, and Qo wax for to li{t pore men and creatures at Qer werke.95

This work resists the idea that images serve as books to the unlearned, suggesting instead that ornamental figures are nefarious tricks designed to delude the unwary eye: “Hit semes Qat Qis offrynge to ymagis is a sotile caste of Anticriste and his clerkis.”96 This discourse condemns those who offer reverence to images, but expresses a wary cynicism about the ability of viewers to resist powerful figures. Better not to have images at all, than to risk the idolatry that potentially attends the use of religious representations. Elegaic Idolatry: Making the White Album In a climate suspicious of images’ power, traditional commemorative figures of elegy are highly problematic. “Graving,” painting, revering, or presenting images are fraught activities in late fourteenth-century England.97 As we see with Black, the attempt to express a relation to the death of the beloved can end up producing an image so elaborate in its stylization that it is unreadable. A. C. Spearing claims that “the Book of the Duchess, like other public elegies of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, expresses the feeling appropriate to a death.” Yet this poem’s articulation of mouring is a cumulative construction that departs from the conventions of elegy.98 Ardis Butterfield aptly notes that Spearing’s comment “begs the question of what an appropriate response to death might be—a problem which has continued to tax both poets and mourners.”99 As she points out, Chaucer’s poem deliberately refuses the definite markers of elegy, differing from poems by Froissart and Jehan de la Mote in its representation of grief as a private struggle. Froissart’s poetic commemoration of Queen Philippa and Blanche herself in his Le Joli Buisson de Jonece assumes the personal flavor of love dit that Chaucer adopts in the Book of the Duchess. Appearing as it does in a sequence of thirty persons he extols, Froissart’s commemoration takes on “a far more direct, even crudely explicit, social function than Chaucer’s Knight’s eulogy of the lady White.”100 If we further note that Chaucer refuses to identify with precision any of the characters in what I would characterize as a mnemonic scene, then it seems clear that his exposition of the Man in Black’s grief obscures the public connections of commemoration that were open to other poets.

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Chaucer thus uses the dream vision to develop a different version of elegy, which answers the charges against material images in philosophical and religious writings. Refusing to make White into a simple figurative image, Black does not “color” her using the verbal or visual ornaments of rhetoric that might display her as an idol of his imagination.101 Chaucer instead allows the Man in Black to develop a memorial verse form that focuses attention on the collection of the masculine subject in its recollection of her form. The Man in Black thus encourages his audience to adopt a sidelong look at his image of White by presenting her figure as it inflects his identity. We are encouraged to look at White, but only with an averted gaze that settles on the image of manhood made visible through White’s neutrally colored image. As the Black Knight constructs his story, we see that his masculinity is a product of the identity White materializes. Describing his youth, he claims that he serves the ideal of love, an abstract doctrine that brings him into courtly society.102 Without an object to make his desires material, the worship of love is a disorganized pursuit, rendering the Man in Black its malleable monument: Paraunter I was therto most able, As a whit wal or a table, For hit ys redy to cacche and take Al that men wil theryn make, Whethir so men wil portreye or peynte, Be the werkes never so queynte. (779–84)

In assuming the qualities of blankness, of whiteness, the Man in Black is prepared to absorb the virtues that he receives from White’s figure. But by using White as a quality to paint himself, Black shields her figure from the scrutiny that ordinary effictio directs toward the feminine image. 103 The Man in Black’s presentation of White does not allow the nearly tactile investigation of her form that characterizes other literary catalogues of feminine beauty, avoiding what Robin Hass aptly describes as “a textual and ocular ‘feel out’” in many rhetorical presentations.104 But let me stress that we do see White, just through a line of sight that diverts our focus to Black’s masculinity. Alastair Minnis observes that Chaucer amplifies the discretion that Machaut’s lover exercises in describing the physical features of the beloved, arguing from a biographical perspective that “Chaucer could not be too familiar in textualizing the wife of the powerful Gaunt, a woman who had been one of the most eminent heiresses throughout Europe.”105 He further acknowledges, however, that Chaucer is not “averse to elaborating on

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the traditional physical attributes.”106 And, in a departure from Machaut’s Behaingne, the Man in Black’s description of White follows the rhetoricians in outlining her moral virtues. It seems, then, that Chaucer walked a fine line with Black’s portrait of White: she is a rhetorical figure, but she is of a carefully fashioned natural hue. Chaucer’s amplifications and alterations of traditional rhetorical practice, I suggest, offers the Man in Black a way to present a verbal image without incurring attacks against their powers to deceive. Assessing earlier medieval critiques of verbal dissembling, Andrew Cowell notes that Alain de Lille worries that rhetoric will “conceal, misrepresent, or ‘discolor’ the ‘natural’ body.”107 In his De planctu Naturae Alain charges that the rhetor “discolors the colors of beauty by the meretricious dye of desire.”108 This tinting, which amounts to tainting in Alain, is problematic because it uses color to cover over falsehoods. White can also serve this purpose in other contexts, as Hugh of St. Victor’s comments illustrate: The writings of philosophers, like a whitewashed wall of clay, boast an attractive surface all shining with eloquence; but if sometimes they hold forth to us a semblance of truth, nevertheless, by mixing falsehoods with it, they conceal the clay of error, as it were, under an over-spread coat of color.109

White here is dangerous because it fools the eye by giving the impression of a lack of color. But let us recall that “white,” a quality, is different than “blanch” a verb.110 Taking Chaucer’s use of “White” in his Book of the Duchess as a transliteration of “Blanche,” I suggest that Black’s method of recollection is an active attempt to fashion his beloved as a colorless rhetorical figure. It is thus important to think about Black’s rendition of White as a process of “blanching” that drains the image of its ornamental lures. In seeking to present his White as a figure without color—an image of the living White in all her natural beauty—the Man in Black negotiates the tricky divide between the proper use and immeasured abuse of images in late medieval culture. Reformist discussions were highly suspicious of language’s “color.”111 Reminiscent of twelfth-century attacks on rhetoric, Wycliffite writers associate “color” with dissembling tricks that can lead audiences astray: “Qei stelen first Qer patrimonye bi colour of ypocrisie.” And elsewhere, “Addyng many lesynges therto so colwrably, that the puple {ife as myche credense to hem as to the trwthe.”112 But formulaic description also provides measure, which leads me to argue that the presentation of White is a carefully crafted rhetorical piece that is designed to free her form from the taint of desire that other images carried. Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s method of descriptio thus offers a regulated way to present a figure of beauty: . . .let nature, more powerful than art, polish the chin smoother than marble. Let the milky supporting column of the head, of exquisite color, raise the

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mirror of the face on high; from the crystalline throat let there proceed a certain splendor which can strike the eyes of the beholder and steal the heart.113

If we further note Geoffrey intertwines terms of whiteness with those signifying transparency and reflectivity [lactea, speculum, cristallino] the appeal of convention in White’s portrait lies in its ability to present her image without unnatural, artificial, or external suggestions of coloration. Black’s image of White, then, is a “colourles” image, insofar as the qualities of her portraiture that move the viewer naturally inhere within her form.114 In discoloring White, however, Black materializes her as a substantial figure meriting reverence. As a process of animation, the stages of bringing White into view makes her particularity increasingly evident.115 When he spies her in a crowd of ladies, she brings to life a figurative ideal, as she is characterized according to expectations for femininity that make real women into narratives of exemplarity.116 Taking advantage of the shared discourse of description between conduct discourse and religious elevation, he uses ethereal images of light to assert White’s natural beauty: That as the someres sonne bryght Ys fairer, clerer, and hath more lyght Than any other planete in heven, The moone of the sterres seven. (821–24)

His language uncannily echoes that used by John Bromyard in a fourteenth-century sermon praising the Virgin Mary. Bromyard claims the queen of heaven is the moon “amonge the steres of heven,” and “the sonne, the wiche is chosen the cheff of all the seven planetys.”117 More strikingly, his description illuminates White in a manner similar to Robert Grosseteste’s Chasteau d’Amour, which, in its English translations, crystallizes this purifying poetics with its allegorical description of Mary’s idealized figure: “The castel. . .is blaunched als whit as any driven snawe.”118 Black uses White’s particularity to assert the universal scope of her beauty, thereby overcoming, Russell A. Peck argues, the problem of subjectivity in language raised by Nominalist thought and posed in the poem when the narrator avers: I leve yow wel, that trewely Yow thoghte that she was the beste And to beholde the alderfayreste, Whoso had loked hir with your eyen. (1048–51)119

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Because Black animates White in the specific terms that suggest her palpable presence, “I sawgh hyr daunce so comlily . . . Laughe and pleye so womanly” (848; 850), he can assert that his perspective informs that of his audience: “With myn? Nay, alle that hir seyen / Seyde and sworen hyt was soo” (1052–53). As he figures her character, we are watching him watch her. Furthermore, regulating visual access to White makes the Man in Black the ultimate focus of this composition. Black makes himself a sight. The Man in Black’s priority in the visual field comes about, however, through his management of the ways that onlookers see. In this ocular terrain Black’s ability to control White’s visibility establishes his place of privilege. I should note too, however, that the dreamer plays the collaborative role of exploratory interlocutor in this visual/verbal sequence. In leading the Man in Black to unfold his relation to White, the narrator allows himself to be led through the stations that compose Black’s masculinity: But wolde ye tel me the manere To hire which was your firste speche— Therof I wolde yow beseche— And how she knewe first your thoght, Whether ye loved hir or noght? (1130–34)

Taking up the narrator’s invitation shows the growing intimacy between this homosocial pair, but it simultaneously underscores the interplay of expectations that structure relations between seer and seen in late medieval conceptions of sight. Similarly, the Man in Black’s rendition of his pursuit of White emphasizes the reciprocal agency that exists between the two. The beauty of her presence exerts power over him, yet his reaction to her, including her initial rejection, demonstrates that he wields control over his sensory experience of emotion. The back-and-forth negotiation that characterizes the courtship of Black and White protects both from associations with frivolity or idolatry. It is important, I believe, that in delineating his suffering for White, the Man in Black comes to an appreciation of her power to self-direct. Insofar as his stylized avowal of service means little to White, “God wot, she acounted nat a stree / Of al my tale, so thoghte me” (1237–38), Black confronts her ability to reject a composition that makes her merely an element of manly identity. When she rebuffs his unilateral version of their union, which would require, “That she wolde be my lady swete” (1225) in return for his steadfast affection “And swor. . ./ Ever to be stedfast and trewe, /. . .And never other lady have” (1226;1227;1229), she demands that he recognize her

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power, not just over him, but also over herself. Black’s confrontation with her agency nearly undoes him, but his retreat into himself also gives substance to the appeal he makes to White. The willingness of the Man in Black to endure in his desire shows White that his committed resolve also exerts influence over her. Black convinces White, “and she wel understod / That I ne wilned thyng but god, / And worship, and to kepe hir name / Over alle thynges, and drede hir shame” (1261–64), offering his disfigured form as evidence to prove that even as she shapes him, he also fashions her. This relation of idealized complementarity, which asserts the reciprocal agency of partners, avoids the pitfalls that changing theories of perception open up in a gendered field of sight. In his account Black and White become visible, but in ways that prevent investigation of either. Both ultimately escape scrutiny in this dynamic, because both exert agency. White is not simply enfolded in his narrative, nor is Black merely a function of her beauty. The Man in Black uses White as a figure to compose with, but the power she wields over his inventive capacity is clearly manifest. Yet the dreamer’s final questions about White’s whereabouts potentially expose the breakdown of this gendered arrangement of difference. In pointing to White’s absence, “ ‘Sir,’ quod I, ‘where is she now?’” (1298), the dreamer points to the crude reality that White is nowhere to be seen in this scene. And, by opening up the possibility that White has betrayed the grieving knight, “Nyl she not love yow? Ys hyt soo?”(1140), or that Black has wronged the missing lady, “Or have ye oght doon amys, / That she hath left yow?” (1141–42), the narrator potentially suggests that one partner can overrun the other in a reciprocal relation. The image of distributed agency the Man in Black offers, “Oure hertes wern so evene a payre / That never nas that oon contrayre” (1289–90) begins to sound like the ornamental trappings of a pretty story. Without a way to substantiate his narrative, Black’s account of love simply points to the hard kernel of his loss, which is the most visible remainder of his complementary vision. The options the dreamer presents attempt to locate a particular source for Black’s loss, even though betrayal as an end to a story of love would also make this story’s structure typical despite its specificity. By trotting out disloyalty as a potential cause of the Man in Black’s suffering, the dreamer also suggests that agencies do not always balance out in provisionally negotiated exchanges. He thus returns to the problem of collaborative seeing, acknowledging that subjective limitations may allow one partner to gain advantage over the other in a perceptual dynamic that elsewhere takes on a more menacing guise.120 Although the narrator’s queries illustrate the continual threat that reciprocity in agency poses to participants in visual relations, his line of inquiry also gives entry onto a commemorative path that avoids these hazards.

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White’s Mythology Black’s blunt answer to the dreamer’s question, “She ys ded!. . .Yis, be my trouthe!” (1309), is a gesture of affirmation, of death, but more importantly, of love. In remembering himself through his relationship with White, the Man in Black elevates his image above the taint that petty transactions of desire import into gendered exchanges. Anticipating fifteenth-century defenses of religious images, the Man in Black insists that the love animating his vision of White leads them to a mutual relation free from competitive negotiations of control. As Reginald Pecock argues of devotional images, a bond of love connects seer and seen: Seen we not that, if a man loue a child, he wole sette his cheke to the cheke of the child, his i{e to the childis i{e, his forhede to the childis forhede, his nose to the childis nose, and therbi the more love is gendrid anentis the child? Whi not in lijk maner the more loue and good affeccioun mai be gendrid anentis God or a Seint bi such touche to be maad bi the bifore sett ymaginacioun to God or the Seint? Whethir not oon man schal loue bi so miche the more a lord, if he mai be admyttid for to come so ny{ that he lie with the lord in oon bed?121

Furthermore, love preserves difference by making intimacy more than a collapse into sameness. Chaucer’s Black and White image, then, uses death to free love from desire. As I will argue in the next chapter, elsewhere Chaucer explores the ability of partners in a relation of intimacy to escape gender distinctions by deploying invisibility. While I do not think this narrative of loss and love goes as far in its suspension of gender binarism as I will suggest he does in the Shipman’s Tale, I submit that even in an early composition like the Book of the Duchess, Chaucer is interested in exploring ways for partners to exceed gender’s visual impositions. In this recollection love smoothes the junctures of intimate relations, softening the borders a gender binary would make legible through its competing flows of agency. Yet these boundaries of difference ultimately remain perceptible. The familiarity Black achieves with the dreamer gives the knight distance from his feminine composition, allowing the regularity of recollective narrative to establish gender as a binary that cannot fully be effaced by affection. For, what we see at the end of this poem, when the Man in Black breaks off his exchange with the dreamer and rides off to the “long castel” sitting on its “ryche hil” (1318;1319), is a retreat from the private, intersubjective negotiation of identity that shows the way past fixed assignments of gender. During the span of their marriage, Black claims that he and White enjoyed a relation in which, “Al was us oon, withoute were” (1295). With her loss, the presupposition of gender’s rigidity

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nearly destroys Black, for he is cut off now, without a way to escape from a system he cannot finesse without a partner. In his relation to the dreamer, the absolute adaptability of gender as a differential modality becomes apparent, in that a homosocial bond can just as easily serve to distinguish masculinities. Yet I suggest this connection between men has a telling effect, because, its power lies in the ability to remember heterosexual difference as a distinct binary, despite the evidence Black’s story offers to the contrary. Even as the Man in Black’s account demonstrates that gender cannot be staked on a binary separating agency from passivity, the dreamer’s inquiry continually asks him to figure his account along such lines. Part of what gets worked out in Black’s mnemonic, then, is a way to pass off White as passive. Since she is dead, we might think that she is as passive as a woman can be. But as I argue in the previous chapter, a feminine figure of absolute passivity is threatening to men, because a woman perfectly incorporated—like Virginia—needs no masculine intervention to cultivate her static aspect. And here too, White’s drastic absence from the poem precipitates a break in Black’s manhood simply because there is nothing for him to do in response to her absolute stasis. With White gone, Black cannot enjoy a suspense of gender, because the conventional binary that gave their pairing the veneer of difference is bisected with her death. The dreamer offers the Man in Black a way out of his masculine short-circuit, showing him that a homosocial relation can also rearticulate his manhood. The masculinity that the dreamer brings Black into, however, uses femininity to take up visible neutrality in the public eye. It is true that the knight’s declaration of White’s death allows him to represent her in a way that substantiates his worth, because asserting her perfection justifies the extremity of his pain. Denis Walker’s claim, that Black participates in “the more rhetorical process of rendering Blanche White, making the lady fictional in order to preserve her symbolic value,” indicates the function that the dreamer’s narrative finally assumes in this collaborative collation of masculinity.122 This memorial sequence makes the material lady into a fictional function of Black’s manhood, a piece of white mythology that verifies the purity of his commitment.123 In other words, this process of rhetorical animation blanches White, which in turn whitens Black. In making her into a bit of white noise, which neutrally gives shape to his cognitive composition, the knight elevates himself above the petty transactions of desire that can characterize any relations between seer and seen. White’s narrative allows the Man in Black to retreat, not into private isolation, but into the public eye, where his emotional commitments are not on display. Withdrawing to court, to the public arena that masquerades as

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private space, Black reenters the social world wearing the privileges of invisibility. Since the narrator obviously makes good on his vow to “put this sweven in ryme” (1332), this poem displays masculine emotion, using a carefully calibrated display of feminine agency to grant distance to the man whose sentiments this image is supposed to represent. Very often, readers of this poem express an assumption that I obviously share, that the Man in Black is meant to figure John of Gaunt’s response to the death of Blanche of Lancaster.124 And, though I wholly agree with the analysis of Phillippa Hardman, who suggests the portraits of Black and White are “verbal equivalents for the images sculpted on aristocratic funeral monuments,” I want to focus in closing on the masking effect that fixing John of Gaunt in such a memorial posture might achieve.125 Because, I submit, instead of exhibiting grief that verges on excess, this poem represents mourning in a way that makes John of Gaunt’s actual gestures invisible. And, if we note the various suspicions of Gaunt’s affection, including allegations that he began his affair with Katherine Swynford before Blanche’s death, especially as those modern rumors join up with his hasty remarriage to Constance of Castile, this poem mnemonically figures a response to loss that was perhaps less perceptible in late fourteenth-century court society.126 In the end, then, the Book of the Duchess once again illustrates the visible pressures that attend performances of persuasive masculinity in Chaucer’s day. What we see with his Black and White story, unlike the partitive violence of the Physician’s Tale, is that narrative can provide cover, remaking bodies and their relations in ways that continue to satisfy gender prescriptions. So, even as this tale ends up converting White into a marker of Black’s manhood, it shows that a viable masculinity must respect feminine agency. This kind of reciprocity, while it never breaks down gender in this story, suggests ways for gender’s undoing that I argue Chaucer pursues more distinctively elsewhere. Here the fantasy of masculine continence appears to succeed, mainly because Black finds a homosocial relation that allows him to recollect his love for White under the banner of gender difference. The reason for the apparent success of gender in this story, then, is its careful attention to the management of visibility. In ways that other Chaucerian characters simply do not seem to understand, the collaborators in this narrative engage gender as a process of passing, and thus fit White and Black into their masculine or feminine roles by effacing their evident departures from those very models of gender. This kind of vision is a softening purview, which lets pass certain details that might cut against the broad outlines of identity it attempts to preserve. As we see in the Book of the Duchess, gender is a formation of coverage. It is not that this tale attempts to deny White’s agency; on the contrary, Black highlights her power. But he does so in a way that integrates her

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influence, making her agency part of his emergent masculinity through a story of love. He thus covers her agency with his own, converting her power into a product of his adoration at the end of the day. And, in declaring White’s death in starkest terms, Black prevents her material absence from haunting this composition as a specter. He does not seek to put her away, to shut her up in a tomb where her corporeal deterioration is neatly hidden. In staging masculine collapse, White is brought into view only as the purity of her animation frees Black’s affection from desire’s staining agency. Bringing White to life as a dead woman, therefore, allows the Man in Black to take full advantage of the possibilities that memorial compositions offer. By leading us through a vision of feminine beauty, the Man in Black composes himself as a man whose emotional investments finally become inscrutable.

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CHAPTER 4 WHICH WIFE? WHAT MAN? GENDER INVISIBILITY BETWEEN CHAUCER’S WIFE AND SHIPMAN

The truth will emerge at some future moment, and I will struggle to explain it and I will fail, and there will be consequences that might be serious, might be comic. —Brock Clarke, The Ordinary White Boy

any readers wonder if the Shipman’s Tale was originally assigned to Alisoun of Bath, and for good reason.1 The opening’s “feminine” pronouns, the tale’s echoes of both the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, and the story’s characterization of the “revelous” wife of St. Denys make the tale a seeming fit for a weaver whose commercial experience leads her to view marriage as the ultimate marketplace wherein monetary gain and sexual satisfaction can be acquired by a savvy dealer.2 The tale’s narrative origins are murky, which muddies the tale’s eventual assignment to a character whose presence in Chaucer’s Tales is as unremarkable as the Wife of Bath’s is striking. My interest in a tale that has often been thought of as an unexceptional “lover’s gift regained” fabliau begins with the uncertainty of the tale’s speaker, because I argue the gender fluidity of the unseen teller reflects the mobility that invisibility offers men and women in their everyday negotiations of identity. Thinking about this tale as a story that is ever on the move, suspended between two speakers in an incomplete authorial redistribution, I suggest that the Shipman’s Tale is Chaucer’s most radical investigation of the ways that men and women use invisibility to negotiate their exchanges of agency and passivity without regard for the borders a gender binary would impose. This invisibility is enabled not by a philosophical debate or a social shift, but by a textual ambiguity. In this chapter I therefore consider the historical

M

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and material circumstances that shape our ways of seeing Chaucer’s work. Even though the pronouns in lines 11–19 are not feminine, they give the impression of a feminine perspective: The sely housbonde, algate he moot paye, He moot us clothe, and he moot us arraye, Al for his owene worshipe richely, In which array we daunce jolily. And if that he noght may, par aventure, Or ellis list no swich dispence endure, But thynketh it is wasted and ylost, Thanne moot another payen for oure cost, Or lene us gold, and that is perilous. (VII. 11–19)

These lines are stable in the textual tradition, creating a material resilience that prevents the identity of the speaker from being settled with certitude. Because this textual crux unsettles the tale’s gender perspective, I suggest it casts light on invisibility’s importance to formations of masculinity in two ways. The narrative multiplicity of the Shipman’s Tale is revealing, first because it shows that Chaucer masters Alisoun of Bath’s agency through a manipulation of her visibility. But examining the Shipman’s Tale with one eye on the Wife of Bath also shows that a visible hierarchy of gender can be suspended through a collaborative performance of passing. Even if Chaucer never meant these tales to be confused, we see that textual indeterminacy allows for a more fluid relation between speakers and tales, husbands and wives, women and men. The perspectival ambiguity produced by this textual uncertainty operates most obviously at the level of speaker, for it is worth noting that the verbal agility and sexual daring of the merchant’s wife is a performance that comes right out of the Wife of Bath’s playbook, if not her mouth. The wife of the Shipman’s Tale complains about her husband’s sexual and financial parsimony, she accuses her husband of being a sorry host to his friend, and she excuses her own financial indiscretions without arousing suspicion. That’s not even to mention her sexual trading. The wife, as others have observed, is an abler merchant than her husband in that she circulates the only currency she has, her body, and recoups multiple profits.3 She wins material and sexual reward, losing nothing in her hazard through a discreet management of cuckoldry. The conduct of the merchant’s wife, as Peter Beidler points out, is marked by masculine traits including “leadership, independence, sexual aggressiveness, cleverness, selfassurance, articulateness, and an ability to do successful business.”4 These usually transgressive features, however, do not call attention to the wife as

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a candidate for censure. Unlike the Wife of Bath, the wife of St. Denys produces marital harmony through her continued ability to direct her sexual agency for personal gain. So, if once upon a time the Wife of Bath was the speaker Chaucer had in mind for this tale, it must have been during a time when he viewed Alisoun more as an unreconstructed arch-wife. It is the very unreconstructed nature of the Shipman’s Tale, particularly in terms of visibility, that makes it at once appropriate and unfitting for the Wife of Bath. “Unreconstructed” is a term I take from its use in the current discourse of pop-politics, where it usually functions as a pejorative characterization suggesting a politician’s inability or refusal to change her political views to match those of party or peers. This expression, which itself has broken loose from its historical associations, is nevertheless appropriate for describing the wife of the Shipman’s Tale as her behavior relates to kind of conduct the Wife of Bath promotes in her Prologue: it suggests that over time what was a transgressive outlook must be normalized, domesticated, harmonized.5 What was an outlawed position must visibly move toward the center to achieve social or political credibility. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, I submit, articulates a radical femininity that is visibly resituated. The Shipman’s Tale, on the other hand, refuses this reconstitution. It retains the raw potential for unrepentant feminine agency that makes Alisoun of Bath a striking figure in the first place. The Shipman’s Tale suggests that gender categories, and the social relations that depend upon them, obtain despite, or really because of their elusive visibility. This is not to say that the Shipman’s Tale undermines marital harmony. On the contrary, the picture of marital felicity that concludes the narrative is as tender as any in Chaucer’s canon. Indeed, readers often worry about the tale’s lack of moral judgment at its conclusion, suggesting through different arguments that Chaucer implies a condemnation of these characters even if they remain unaware of such censure.6 In what we might call an “invisible moral,” the tale’s portrait of conjugal happiness belies the spiritual bankruptcy of the wife, the monk, and often the merchant. These interpretations, I suggest, assume a logic of exposure often present in fabliaux: vices are outed, fools are uncovered, scoundrels are humiliated. This punitive economy of visibility depends on unseen seers—a voyeuristic audience, author, or God—to put things right through a stabilizing gaze that evaluates the belittling antics of the characters from a position of moral difference.7 While I certainly agree that elsewhere Chaucer uses this structure of invisibility to situate tales and tellers, the redistribution of speakers here means that this apparatus is not fully screwed down. In fact, the suspension of the Shipman’s Tale between two speakers, each of whom invisibly haunts the borders of the narrative, means that the control, invisibility often secures is itself suspended.8 The accident of textual

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indeterminacy, therefore, creates a unique effect. Because this tale is unmoored, invisibility offers no cover for a moralistic approach to the tale’s events. In fact, hanging as it does between two characters, both of whom are shady in some respect, this tale suggests the ways that invisibility becomes a strategy for getting away with conduct that would otherwise meet with social or moral reproof. What Do Wives Want? According to the wife of St. Denys, the answer to this question is quite simple. She tells Daun John that women want six things from a husband: he should be “[h]ardy and wise, and riche, and therto free, / And buxom unto his wyf and fressh abedde” (VII. 176–77). Besides casting her desire in relational terms, the wife suggests that her satisfaction is the index of masculine potency. She gets to decide if and when her husband meets the standards of masculinity she articulates. As Vern Bullough explains, expectations for medieval men were often pinned to their ability to please women.9 The wife from the Shipman’s Tale wants her husband to be “free” with sex and money, but she also apparently wants him to have enough self-direction that he will be respected in public.10 The Wife of Bath, at least with her old husbands, does not put much stock in a man’s ability to make a good showing among his peers. While she shares with the merchant’s wife a desire for a rich husband, she wants her husband to be feeble enough in wit or will that she can have her way with him. Paired with her sexual bullying, the Wife’s ability to dominate husbands displays her agency in a fashion suggesting her relentless intractability has a performatively visible element. Like Harry Bailey’s Goodlief, who I discuss in contrast to Melibee’s Prudence in chapter 1, the Wife insists that her control over the domestic remains manifest. In fact, Alisoun’s courtship with Jankyn is facilitated by her visibility; once they are married, however, he sees it as his task to keep his Wife out of the public eye. When Jankyn tells Alisoun of Bath that she may no longer roam from house to house, his concern derives from the duties of his new masculine role, which is not simply clerical. When he reads to her from Ecclesiasticus, it becomes apparent that Jankyn believes his job as a husband requires him to keep his wife at home: “he commandeth and forbedeth faste / Man shal nat suffre his wyf go roule aboute” (III. 652–53). It is true that Alisoun’s former roaming prepared the way for her marriage with Jankyn before her fourth husband was out of the picture, much less in the ground: And for to walke in March, Averill, and May, Fro hous to hous, to heere sondry talys—

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That Jankyn clerk, and my gossyb dame Alys And I myself, into the feeldes wente” (III. 546–49)

So Jankyn knows from personal experience the things that wives can get up to while they are outside the household.11 Before they were married the Wife is attracted to the young cleric for physical reasons, because he has nice legs, and also because he forms part of a larger social circle that Alisoun enjoys. He is imaginatively included in the “vigilies and. . . processiouns,/. . .prechyng eek, and. . .thise pilgrimages, /. . .pleyes of myracles, and. . .mariages” (III. 556–58) she lists immediately before and after she recounts her liaison with Jankyn in the fields. As a husband, Jankyn seeks to turn this knowledge to his own good, using his former experience with Alisoun to contain her character within the domesticated circuit of his masculine control. His regulation of the Wife, including the beatings that mar her body, are part of a visible regime of domination increasingly mandated for men in control of a household. Through Jankyn’s prohibitory admonitions to Alisoun Jankyn enacts what he believes is a common standard of masculine behavior: “Whoso that buyldeth his hous al of salwes, And priketh his blynde hors over the falwes, And suffreth his wyf to go seken halwes, Is worthy to been hanged on the galwes!” (III. 655–58)

It might be argued that the proverbial cast of Jankyn’s sermoning undermines his pronouncements; yet I submit that the formulaic nature of his prescriptions suggest their importance to his performance of what we might call a regularized model of married manhood. His citational ability to invoke a long line of masculine authors, is nothing more than an attempt to cow Alisoun into submission through the impressive power of a patriarchal lineage.12 But she is not very impressed with what he has to say; rather, it is his ability to use his book of wicked wives to silence her that drives her to distracted violence.13 As she puts it, “And whan I saugh he wolde nevere fyne / To reden on this cursed book al nyght” (III. 788–89), she strikes, tearing leaves from the book in a physical interruption of his masculine performance. Most readers of this exchange are rightly impressed with Alisoun’s brassy ability to challenge her clerical husband. Her bold action, however, is really a reaction against a model of manhood that also resonates outside clerical discourse. This discourse derives from traditional authors, but its implementation

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takes on a much more homely cast. In other words, masculine governance depends upon visible control, so that the ordering reason associated with male empowerment also presses upon new husbands as a compulsory responsibility. As Mary Carruthers points out, “one would expect an inexperienced young man whose head is still full of the university to draw on just such bookish stuff in seeking to counsel his wife.”14 After Jankyn weds Alisoun, and the Wife “to hym yaf I al the lond and fee / That evere was me yeven therbifoore” (III. 630–31), his temperament undergoes a change. Alisoun claims that soon after her nuptials, she regrets her union. Despite her claim that Jankyn’s abilities in bed gave him the power to win her affection “thogh he hadde me bete on every bon” (III. 511), she suggests that theirs becomes a purely confrontational relationship. Jankyn resists the Wife’s desires, refusing to tolerate “nothyng of [her] list” (III. 633) as a show of self-direction. Jankyn apparently feels obliged to mark his domination over his newly gained estate. The most noticeable way to do this, as his actions suggest, is to produce a visible change in Alisoun of Bath. If he can turn a wandering woman into a submissive wife Jankyn will affirm his domestic control. In other words, if Jankyn can bend the Wife to his will, then he will assimilate Alisoun into his masculine character, just as marriage mandated. When Jankyn becomes a husband, he dedicates his attentions to conserving the integrity of the household as an enclosure. Arguing for a transhistorical trend in western patriarchal societies, Catharine MacKinnon claims that women are equated with the private, a zone of seclusion that provides man’s solitude.15 With Alisoun of Bath we see the violent imposition that this production of privacy entails. Her resistance reveals that the cultural assignment of women to the household as private space is a creation designed to consolidate a public version of masculinity. Creating a secluded space where one’s intimate details are concealed from the eyes of others is Jankyn’s goal, because it gives him, as man of the house, a space of cultural invisibility from which to manage how and when others see him.16 It is not, however, that the household becomes invisible through this management; on the contrary, it is marked as invisible, off limits to the prying eyes of those outside its erected boundaries. The Wife, like the domestic domain within which Jankyn seeks to enclose her, is supposed to be seen as invisible, as the private province that her husband cultivates and regulates. When Jankyn tries to keep Alisoun at home, therefore, it is so that others will see him as a man whose regulation figures the household as a transparent reflection of his masculine discipline. Ruling by Thumb Jankyn runs into gender trouble, like those four husbands who preceded him, because Alisoun is a woman who refuses to cede agency. Stubborn as

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a lion, she battles Jankyn to maintain her ability to go and to do just as she has in the past. The Wife’s refusal to submit to Jankyn, however, is not the most serious challenge she poses to his attempt to present a seamless front of masculine control. Her wandering means that the borders of the household seep, but it is her tendency to bring into the open details of their domestic wranglings that really does damage the image of manly continence that he seeks to pass off through a fabrication of privacy.17 In her recollection of her affection for her “gossib,” also named Alisoun, she invokes an image of feminine invisibility that Jankyn’s masculine governance attempts to counteract. Unlike the invisibility Jankyn seeks to impose upon Alisoun, the Wife suggests that women use unseen connections to make the faults of men public knowledge.18 Explaining that her female friends knew her business better than her parish priest, Alisoun confesses that her wont is to disclose the private doings of her husband: For hadde myn housbonde pissed on a wal, Or doon a thyng that sholde han cost his lyf, To hire, and to another worthy wyf, And to my nece, which that I loved weel, I wolde han toold his conseil every deel. (III. 534–38)

While her free tongue embarrasses her husband, his reaction to her verbal laxity is to curse himself because he should not have allowed her to know his “pryvetee” (III. 542).19 When women use their unseen connections to spread humiliating details of domestic intimacy, they indeed make a muddle of the sharply delineated masculine image a man seeks to construct for himself. As Jankyn’s proverbial wisdom indicates, men’s relations to masculinities are dangerously black and white. In seeking to fit themselves into formulaic constructions of manhood, they tolerate no feminine intervention.20 Women’s invisibility, therefore, can only be legible as that which men impose. Because a woman’s invisibility is figured as a means of exercising agency, and because feminine agency is portrayed as necessarily detrimental to masculine claims to control, a woman’s invisibility is dangerous unless it appears as a function of manly direction. In other words, the kind of invisibility that Jankyn wants for the Wife must be seen. Her every action must be a transparent reflection of Jankyn’s manly governance; invisibility, then, is a continual process of keeping Alisoun in view as a neutral part of the visual field that Jankyn surveys as his own. It almost goes without saying that Alisoun makes a complete mockery of her husband’s attempt to produce her as the invisible marker of his private domain. Her account of their

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marriage, which includes details of Jankyn’s sexual ability and physical violence, is credible due to its unflinching attention to details that others might pass over in silence. The Wife’s recollection of her experience with Jankyn thus takes apart any claim to comprehensive masculine governance he might have attempted to pass off in their community. At least among the Canterbury pilgrims, Jankyn is outed as a man who cannot control his wife. Her praise of his bedroom skills grants him a masculine potency that accompanies youthful vitality, but her report of his erratic violence undercuts the continent pose of lecturing husband he takes up when he reads from his book. It is true that husbands were allowed to chastise their wives, leading to the infamous “rule of thumb” apocrypha associated with wife-beating in the history of English common law.21 Although there is no historical evidence to support the supposition that a man was legally allowed to beat his wife with an instrument (stick, rod, staff ) only as large as his thumb, men were permitted, even expected, to discipline all members of their households, including wives.22 As Emma Hawkes points out, a beating was supposed to be administered, almost like any other kind of curative, for the good of its recipient.23 The actual historical meaning for the phrase “rule of thumb,” therefore, more fittingly captures a husband’s ability to strike his wife in medieval culture; using a pragmatic rule of measure, a man was expected to keep his composure while he meted out the appropriate amount of violence to curb an unruly spouse.24 This kind of domestic violence is not figured as a brawl; rather, it is represented as part of the discipline that keeps the household running in good order. There is another tradition of domestic violence, however, that unsettles the notion that striking one’s wife confirms masculine authority. In the Old French fabliau “Sire Hain et Dame Anieuse,” like the Chester and Wakefield Noah plays, wife beating is a sign that a husband has lost control over the household and the masculine self it implies.25 In “Sire Hain et Dame Anieuse” the husband and wife fight for the husband’s pants in order to decide who should have dominance in the household. This extreme spectacle is necessary because the wife already thinks she rules the household, “Or cuides bien que ja soit tiue / La baillie de no meson?”26 Calling in the neighbors to referee, the couple agrees to rules of combat that prevent either from striking the other with anything other than their hands. When the two go at it, their sport is bloody awful: [Sire Hain] is hard-pressed and hot and hankering to land some punches, but he can’t, because [ Dame Anieuse] lunges at him—she’s not at all afraid. Flailing with both her fists, she laid

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it on him thick; [Sire Hain] reeled and staggered. What else is there? Their clothes were ragged and bloodied; what with all the drubbing, the punching, swinging, hitting, slugging, they’d both given and got the same.27

Although the husband gets the better of the wife, in their combat they match each other equally insofar as the bodies of both fighters bleed and neither combatant overpowers the other. Sire Hain only beats his wife because she stumbles and falls into a basket; as she is quick to point out, his is not a victory of strength. Nevertheless, the neighbors call upon her to respect the rules of combat to which she agreed. When Anieuse relents, she must promise to serve her husband [que ton baron serviras] but her pledge is limited by her capacity to live within the absolute boundaries of this compact.28 When she qualifies her vow, she potentially suggests that inveterate feminine intractability will limit the subservience she will be able to perform: “I’d gladly give my word, except / by such as me, can it be kept? / That’s all that I can guarantee.”29 Because the conditions of her submission themselves have no limit, her qualification is necessary. Like Le ménagier de Paris, who says “the wife ought to obey her husband and do all his commandments whatsoever, great and small and even very small,”30 Anieuse becomes subject to the whim of her husband: so from no on it’s your place to obey him utterly whatever he says, for only at his pleasure can you escape your present fix.31

Rather than see this imposition of absolute masculine rule as fully successful, I argue that Anieuse curtails the domestic range of masculine control, showing through her qualification that one person’s complete domination of another is unwarranted. Although Le ménagier de Paris basis his qualification on social rank, “I am no marquis,” he also acknowledges that such absolute submission would be an excessive masculine demand: “I am not so foolish, so overweening nor of so small sense that I know not well that ‘tis not for me to assault nor to assay you thus, nor in like manner.”32 Moreover Sire Hain’s bedraggled and bleeding body shows his inability to claim comprehensive masculine authority over anyone, most of all himself. Instead of validating the claim that some men—those who do not stage brawls with their wives in their backyards—are due comprehensive deference, this fabliau, like the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, indicates that all men are compromised through the everyday negotiations of “maisrie” that constitute marriage.

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Insofar as these stories limit masculine authority in the household to a power governed by reason, they match moralists’ prescriptions. For, as Bartholomeus Anglicus put it, “The male passeth the female in perfect complection, in working, in wit, in discretion, in might and in lordship.”33 Anieuse’s promise affirms that, in theory, men were meant to have absolute control over their spouses. As her qualification indicates, however, the reason of men was meant to make the exercise of husbandly authority more moderate in practice. In “Sire Hain et Dame Anieuse,” as in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, masculine violence is not a secret, at least in part because husbands and wives fight. Wife beating, especially in this Old French fabliau, also involves a wife who is beating, here her husband. Like Anieuse, who spoils for the fight her husband proposes, the Wife of Bath hits first in her showdown with Jankyn. Tearing the leaves from his objectionable volume, Alisoun tests her husband’s posture of self-control: “and eke / I with my fest so took hym on the cheke” (III. 792). Her blow only serves to enrage Jankyn, who loses all pretence of manly composure: “And he up stirte as dooth a wood leoun, / And with his fest he smoot me on the heed / That in the floor I lay as I were deed” (III. 794–96). When Jankyn sees the consequences of his deed, he becomes afraid, worried that his reaction was rash, heedless, and excessive. Even though the Wife provokes Jankyn, his response oversteps the boundaries that define respectable lay masculinity. Playing Household As How the Goode Man Taght Hys Sone explains, it is a husband’s responsibility to display self-control in dealing with his wife: “Wyrche with thy wyfe, as reson ys; / Thogh sche be sirvunt in degree, / In some degre sche fellowe ys.”34 Jankyn’s fear, then, is his acknowledgment that he has lost the masculine composure he has been seeking to wear. Instead of a responsible, disciplined husband he looks like a young amateur, a new spouse whose ability to string together a line of patriarchs only points to his lack of manly maturity, wisdom, and experience. When Jankyn loses his composure, he forfeits the control he purported to exercise over his newly acquired domestic domain. Striving with one’s wife, admonitory writers agree, signifies a loss of masculine authority. As the Knight of the Tower explains, “With suche goodly wordes ye aught to entrete youre wiff to bring her oute of her leudenesse; for yef a man rebuke her, and fare foule with her, it will make her do and thenke the worse, as it were to putte fere in flexe.”35 As we see with Jankyn’s outburst, the Wife’s practice in such marital politics quickly comes to the fore. Since we know that the blow that Jankyn serves Alisoun leaves her partially deaf, when she falls to the

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ground her deathly stillness is no joke. But when she regains consciousness, Alisoun’s rebuke is a targeted shot more effective than any physical buffeting. Her pitiful reply, “ ‘O! hastow slayn me, false theef ?’ I seyde, / ‘And for my land thus hastow mordred me? / Er I be deed, yet wol I kisse thee’” (III. 800–2), refers directly to the masculine estate with which she has visibly endowed her husband. As Alisoun makes clear, Jankyn abuses the masculine authority that having a rich and loving spouse gives him. If she dies from his blows, he will be exposed as a brute who uses violence to maintain a false image of domestic order. Jankyn will by all appearances look like a young bachelor who was unable to handle the responsibilities that conjugality imposed. Losing his composure, then, means that Jankyn loses his masculine position. Even his regret is tinged with the awareness that striking Alisoun separates him from the reasoned model of masculine measure that a (married) clerical man was supposed to uphold. Because Jankyn is schooled in the lore of the Church fathers, he knows that his violent outburst lowers him, making him worse than a woman whose lack of reason supposedly prevented her from measuring her conduct.36 Alisoun, in other words, acts like Jankyn expects a wife to act. His task as husband, however, is to administer reason to curb her brawling tendencies. As Aquinas asserts, “woman is naturally subject to man, because in man the discretion of reason predominates.”37 When Jankyn strikes Alisoun with unmitigated violence, his inability to uphold the manly image of disciplined husband becomes apparent. Nevertheless, his failure has an interesting effect. Alisoun explains that when he grants her “maistrie,” the ability to “ ‘Keep thyn honour, and keep eek myn estaat’” (III. 818; 821), she restores the masculine image he has failed to pass off as his own. Because she was from that day forth “as kynde, / As any wyf from Denmark unto Ynde, / And also trewe” (III. 823–25), she gives off the appearance that theirs is a hierarchically stable marriage. Although he grants her a private expanse of agency, she acts like his is the determining force in the household. I am not, therefore, arguing that the Wife turns over her agency to Jankyn; nor I am suggesting that the Wife retains the control Jankyn that offers. Rather, I am underlining the fact that the two reach a private accord, which admits the wife’s equal investment in invisibility. Even if Jankyn does not run his household through visible modes of governance, Alisoun’s performance of passivity suggests to all onlookers that he does. Because she is willing to act like the obedient spouse, he gets to look like the empowered husband. The issue of whether or not this transformation is “real,” in my opinion, is as fantastical as the loathly lady’s transformation in the Wife’s Tale. It is impossible to tell if the Wife is really obedient, whether Jankyn really regains his power, or who is really in control of this

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relationship.38 As Arlyn Diamond suggests about the romance version of this dynamic, it appears that as soon as a man gives up his fantasies of empowerment, a woman steps in to gratify them.39 While I agree that this is what happens in both the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, I am not convinced that this move contains the radical possibilities that invisibility opens up for these characters. When privacy becomes a space where partners negotiate flows of agency between themselves, both can be gender outlaws even if as a couple they pass for respectable. In fact, if we turn to the Shipman’s Tale, it becomes apparent that respectability is a mask that all couples don in order to cover up the slippages in agency between partners. While I will argue that the Shipman’s Tale is more radical because it is not visibly attached to the Wife of Bath, I acknowledge that both stories validate women’s equal investments in invisibility. Men in both accounts benefit from women’s use of the private as a space to negotiate gender fluidity, since women ultimately protect men by concealing their foibles and faults. Even so, these stories depart from one another because these women use invisibility for completely different reasons. As I shall argue, the wife of the merchant keeps her husband’s masculine image intact because he recognizes her agency. But with Alisoun of Bath the story is different. Because Jankyn loses his composure and strikes Alisoun, he loses the ability to claim the household as a province of enclosure. At any moment, she could expose the violence that upholds the boundaries of their domestic privacy. So Jankyn needs Alisoun to cover for him, to take up a position of feminine subservience to conceal his lack of manly control. While the Wife of Bath appears to assume the position his submission begs of her, later, on the pilgrimage to Canterbury, she seems only too happy to assert her mastery over their exchange. As her account demonstrates, even after the fact, when a man attempts to foist a position of subservience onto a woman, the violence that supports his appearance of control reappears. In effect, the Wife of Bath’s Prologue exposes Jankyn, whose beatings Alisoun claims “That feele I on my ribbes al by rewe, / And evere shal unto myn endyng day” (III. 506–7). Even if her marriage to Jankyn is over, she outs him as a man who was unable to keep up his husbandly front except through beating. Alisoun’s use of invisibility, I suggest, is different from that of the wife of the Shipman’s Tale, because as we see, the world of the Wife of Bath is shot through with punitive sightlines. In her Prologue, Alisoun of Bath suggests that invisibility is a passing state of vision. If a personal feature is kept out of view, it is because the moment for its exposure has not yet arrived. In the Wife of Bath’s domain, details are saved until their accumulation can best be used to secure personal advantage. Alisoun gathers particulars of her husbands’ private doings until she can best use them to assert personal power. She thus

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depends on a traditional fabliau-dynamic of vision, where secret goings on will finally be revealed in a denouement that distributes winnings to the savviest player(s). Her Prologue, therefore, is her after-the-fact performance of dominance over Jankyn, since she uses the arena of pilgrimage to paint him as a bad husband from Southwark to Canterbury. Invisibility, at least for Alisoun, is a way to gain unseen advantage over a marital opponent. Even if Alisoun remembers Jankyn fondly for the sexual satisfaction he provides, the Wife’s ability to expose his violence is a form of resistance to this most extreme form of masculine domination. She does not let his brutality pass, even under the cover of chastisement that husbands were allowed in the name of household order. Yet the punitive use the Wife makes of her husband’s secrets, we should also acknowledge, is effective because Jankyn is a bad husband. Manipulating men with their private doings, even if it is what the Wife recommends, itself takes on the color of domestic bullying. In other words, Alisoun uses invisibility to stage her claim to public control, constructing the private as a space that allows her to mark her dominance over Jankyn. She thus uses the household as Jankyn would like to, as an enclosed domain that gives her the ability to manage how others see her. In its investigation of sexual and monetary trading, the Shipman’s Tale similarly looks at the household as a space where a woman can gain advantage over men. As I shall argue, when the story begins, the wife of St. Denys is visible only as a part of her husband’s estate. As a secret agent, she uses the mobility of her unseen status to cuckold her husband. When Daun John attempts to use her secret as a means to establish his masculine dominance, however, the wife undoes the regime of vision that relentlessly works toward revelation. Taking up the possibility that the Wife of Bath points to in her Prologue, the wife of St. Denys reshapes the private, making it into a visibly neutral space where she and the merchant negotiate a balanced dynamic of agency. Marital Mimicry To bring about this shift in perspective, the merchant has to change his way of seeing. While the tale’s introduction of the merchant suggests he is an upstanding member of his community, it also indicates the importance of visibility to his financial success. As Helen Fulton explains, merchants were associated with a particular public image, a careful masculinity that equates self-discipline and financial control.40 While the tale’s equation of wealth and wisdom is perhaps a mocking jab that nevertheless admits the inevitability of the commercial way of life, this conjunction, “That riche was, for which men helde hym wys” (VII. 2), underscores the power of public perception in this emerging social milieu.41 People believe the

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merchant is wise because they know that the merchant is rich.42 This surplus-value is all very good for the merchant, assuming that his wealth is secure. But as we know from the General Prologue’s description of the Merchant, and as we find out during the Shipman’s Tale’s unfolding events, the status of a merchant’s wealth is a fluctuating variable. So, it seems that being rich also involves a performative aspect. Now, acting wise is perhaps one way of giving it out that one is rich; but since acting wise is not a conspicuous mode of conduct, this association also threatens to become soft. As we see with the merchant, a better way to let on that one is rich, and thus to prove that one is wise, is to make people think you have money. The simplest way to make people think that you have money is through a program of financial “largesse” (VII. 22). My point in rehearsing the tale’s logic of visual valuation is to suggest that the merchant’s way of seeing depends on cultivating a paradoxical public image involving equal shares of measure and generosity.43 So, even though it might seem a simple enough task to gain a reputation for generosity, if one also seeks to preserve a reputation for careful management of wealth, this balancing act becomes a bit tricky. Here’s where a wife comes in handy, especially a beautiful one who is known to be “compaignable and revelous” (VII. 4). Not only does an attractive wife imply that one’s financial prowess and sexual capacity are interconnected, but a beautiful wife also may act the part of sociable hostess that a man’s regard for his reserved figure may otherwise preclude. The merchant thus needs his wife to have agency, but only the kind that marks his direction. In other words, when the wife acts, she must do so to make her husband’s self-restraint manifest. Her friendly disposition is a supplementary performance designed to signify a part of the merchant’s character that his personal regulation prevents him from enacting. Her entertaining charm calls attention to her husband’s superabundance of self-control, which is comprehensive enough to allow his wife a kind of latitude that might threaten other men. The wife’s beauty and charisma, then, are meant to confirm the merchant’s confidence in a masculine position linking sexual and financial abundance. In accordance with this image, when the tale begins the merchant sees his wife simply as part of his estate, another portion of the wealth that he carefully manages for profit. Any agency she manifests he reads as service to him. Like Jankyn, the Merchant views his wife as part of his estate, and as an extension of his character. Indeed, the wife’s initial concern with “array” (VII. 14) is not presented as wifely transgression against reasoned husbandly governance. Unlike satirical treatments of women’s luxurious dress, including lyrics as pointed as “Against the Pride of Ladies,” the merchant apparently sanctions his wife’s appetite for apparel.44 The merchant

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ignores the warnings of moralists, who claim that elaborate dress is a sign of immoderate desire.45 For example, the manuscript Harley 1764 translation of the Book of the Knight of the Tower includes a sermon by a bishop, who claims that Noah’s flood was caused by women’s excessive dress: “And whanne the deuell sawe hem so disguysing and counterfetinge hem, he made hem fall into the foule synne of lechery, that displesed so moche oure Lorde, that he mede it reyne fourti dayes and fourti nightes withoute cesing.”46 Fine clothing often implies sexual waywardness, but it also carries a taint of social transgression. As the ménagier explains to his wife, her dress is meant to reflect his station, “according to the estate of your kinsfolk and mine. . .without new devices and too much frippery, or too little.”47 We might say, then, that the wife’s wardrobe threatens her husband’s image of restraint right from the outset. But since her “compaignable” temper provides a contrast to his wise facade, his lenience with her indicates his generosity to others. The wife’s desire for fine apparel equally shows that she shares her husband’s values, suggesting that she too takes great care to present a refined public image. While the wife may not fulfill Biblical or moral prescriptions for a model wife, her attention to appearance confirms that she is a perfect wife for her mercantile husband.48 This economy breaks down because the merchant fails to see his wife as a partner in the arena of exchange that is their household. Instead, he views her as a passive ornament decorating the private estate he builds for both. Although in far less violent terms than Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale, which I discuss in chapter 2, this story once again shows the dangers that feminine passivity poses to masculine authority. Because he makes his wife invisible by assuming that she is a fully incorporated part of his character, he does not recognize that because marriage makes her part of his estate, she is able to exercise even greater influence over the ways that others see him. In plain terms, if the wife is part of the husband, then what she does affects the husband’s identity. Structures of conjugality and laws of coverture make the husband’s dependence on his wife’s behavior more visible. Although the men in the Shipman’s Tale perhaps wish that they could inhabit a cloistered community immune to feminine influence, when the monk tries to exploit the largesse of the friend with whom he claims a bond of “cosynage” (VII. 36), it becomes apparent that women influence men’s masculinities. Moreover, in contrast to White in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, the wife of St. Denys is more than an image; her animation is of her own making. Unlike other fabliaux, the Shipman’s Tale admits that women have agency, and it suggests that such control is legitimate in this transactional world of manly exchange. It may appear that this reading of feminine autonomy works only if we accept the imaginative explanation connecting the Wife of Bath to this narrative. Yet I suggest that the gender ambiguity of the tale’s teller

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more thoroughly suspends gender’s binary distributions of agency because it prevents either men or women from using visibility as a form of domination. The fact we are left with a tale that is assigned to a male narrator by the textual tradition does not clarify this matter, but instead contributes to the gender indeterminacy that characterizes the tale.49 Arguments for the Shipman further confuse this masculine position in their attempts to account for what appears to be a feminine perspective: “The sely housbonde, algate he moot paye, / He moot us clothe, and he moot us arraye” (VII. 11–12). Critics including Frederick Tupper, Robert L. Chapman, and Hazel Sullivan argue the Shipman mimics a female perspective, taking up a “typical” feminine position that uses sex for gain: “Thanne moot another payen for oure cost, / Or lene us gold, and that is perilous” (VII. 18–19).50 If only by chance, these claims unhinge gender’s binary apparatus, for they assume that a man can inhabit a feminine perspective in order to pursue masculine interests. These scholars seek to resolve gender ambiguity, but their use of mimicry instead magnifies interconnections between masculinity and femininity. Although this mimetic display is supposed to be a transparent masculine strategy of dominance, this mode of authority clearly depends on the agency of women for its galvanizing power. By mimicking an unruly spouse, “In which array we daunce jolily” (VII. 14), these early lines identify wifely excess as the culprit for marital infidelity. Assigning responsibility is designed to contain such feminine agency, making its menace visible in terms implying censure. Yet the theoretical malleability of “mimicry” indicates the ways in which a strategy of the powerful reveals itself to be a tactic of the dispossessed.51 Because mimicry must admit the ascendancy of the position it puts into play, it unsettles the distinction between supremacy and surrender in a marital hierarchy. In this instance, “feminine” mimicry reveals the vexed position of masculine authority, for in its protest against women’s sartorial excesses, it suggests that husbands are subject to their wives’ demands for finery. Moreover, the significance of this tactic in Chaucer’s poetry brings us back to the Wife of Bath’s narrative position. Many feminist readings of the Wife of Bath invoke Luce Irigaray’s concept of “mimicry, or playing with mimesis” to argue for the dissident power of Alisoun’s performance.52 Deliberately taking up a feminine role reveals its contours, and provides, as Irigaray notes, a way “to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus begin to thwart it.”53 The Wife of Bath, critics including Carolyn Dinshaw and Susan Crane point out, is able to convert her subjection to misogynist discourse into her own vehicle for identity.54 But what happens if this tactic of resistance is transferred to the Shipman? Does it immediately become a strategy of masculine power, a way of colonizing

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visibility to suggest men’s “proper” place of control over a marital hierarchy?55 Although this is the strategic goal of this tactical appropriation, I suggest that a man’s mimicry of a subversive woman admits that feminine agency is a power that cannot be repressed or ignored. If this voice belongs to the Shipman, then the passage represents a man’s acknowledgment that women appoint themselves in transactional negotiations of desire, including adultery. We should therefore contemplate what it means for a man to make this “form of subordination into an affirmation,” because if we accept the idea that this version of femininity subjects men, then the demarcating line between dominance and submission becomes less easy to discern, particularly along the fault-line of gender. In its typological approximation of a feminine position, this revelation articulates the pressures that conjugal masculinity places upon men, for it shows that husbands are obligated to satisfy wives in order to assure their public standing. The onus here, as the narrative voice makes clear, is upon men to please women. So if this voice thwarts a position of submission, it does so by affirming men’s obligations to satisfy women. Equally important in this caricature, however, is the admission that women direct themselves through unseen channels. If a woman does not get “ynough” of what she wants from the man whose public responsibility it is to make her happy, she will make herself happy by manipulating her invisible status in the household to form satisfying compacts with others. She will find what Irigaray provocatively calls that “ ‘elsewhere’ of feminine pleasure,” using invisibility to fragment the image of masculinity her husband seeks to cultivate.56 If the speaker of this passage is the Shipman, the subversive potential of his mimicry derives from his ability to argue that women use secret agency to dominate and even destroy worthy husbands. Yet the wife’s use of invisible agency in the Shipman’s Tale, despite these ominous lines, does not lead to a good man’s demise. If anything, the wife’s ability to manipulate men through unseen channels brings the monk’s duplicity into the open even as she protects her husband from looking like a cuckold. Unless we see feminine agency as necessarily inimical to masculine governance, this voice does not necessarily form part of a mimetic satire.57 Instead, the tale allows a woman’s voice to overwrite the image of manly control that the merchant desires, admitting right from the beginning that a husband’s status depends on the way his wife’s agency becomes visible in the public eye. Even if this voice is menacing, the transactional cast that this womanly voice gives marriage only illustrates the suitability of the merchant and his wife as partners in their conjugal union. If the merchant is married to a wife who expects to be rewarded for the good face she puts forward to the public, then she is a perfect match for her “superficial” husband, who gains substantial profit from his creative ability to pass off value through

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market exchange.58 Furthermore, the tale’s characterization of their bond as a contractual arrangement between parties who exert equally limiting agency perfectly fulfills the doctrine of conjugality upon which marriage’s sacramental status was based.59 Wife and merchant thus gain greater freedom to negotiate their identities somewhere between the binary of agency and passivity that a regime of visibility seeks to impose. When this couple uses invisibility as a reciprocally enabling tactic, they are able to pass off aspects of their behavior to fit a gender binary. This collaborative passing, I suggest, results in a relationship wherein each member limits the other. Even as this tale illustrates the dangers that accompany men’s marital responsibilities, I suggest that we view this union as an arrangement that gives equal play to women’s agency in the household. First Movers The wife’s powerful ability to use the invisibility that her wifely role bestows upon her has its initial impact during her encounter with Daun John in the garden. It is unclear exactly who begins the seduction that leads to their adulterous compact, though as John C. McGalliard points out, they both show themselves to be opportunists waiting to capitalize on any opening that might confer advantage.60 If we look at the events leading up to the garden scene, it is clear that the monk thinks he is in control because he already believes he masters the private domain of his friend the merchant. While the tale suggests that the merchant and his wife have many guests, “For his largesse, and for his wyf was fair” (VII. 22), the monk is a regular visitor whose company the merchant obviously values. Treating the monk like his sworn brother, the merchant invites Daun John “That he sholde come to Seint-Denys to pleye / With hym and with his wyf a day or tweye” (VII. 59–60). Now, in all likelihood the wife is involved in their festivities, but the tale is nevertheless careful to underscore the masculine community that their society fosters: “And thus I lete hem ete and drynke and pleye, / This marchant and this monk, a day or tweye” (VII. 73–74). It is only on the third day, after they have affirmed the affection that causes “ech of hem. . .[the] oother for t’assure / Of bretherhede whil that hir lyf may dure” (VII. 41–42), that the merchant withdraws from his friend to attend to his accounts. A closer look at the bonds of friendship that connect these men reveals that the wife, for all her presence in the story, is hardly worth mention during the lines that set out the history and affection that exist between merchant and monk. The wife does not register in this visible field because her doings are not legible as acts that effect the dealings of men. Assuming that she indeed helps her husband entertain his guests, the wife is the unseen

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mover in this episode. But when the wife appears in the garden, the monk does not recognize her ability to match him in an opportunistic game. On the contrary, the monk views the wife as part of her husband’s masculine estate. Similar to the Old French fabliau “Les Deus Changeors,” the wife becomes the monk’s object of desire because of his friendship with her husband.61 In the Old French tale the wife serves as conduit of desire between the two men (albeit without the husband’s knowledge), but in the Shipman’s Tale the wife’s agency short-circuits this flow of homosocial affection. When the monk makes a joke that is potentially off-color, responding to the wife’s social pleasantries with a comment that asserts his sexual superiority to “thise wedded men, that lye and dare” (VII. 103), his jesting reveals the assured dominance he believes his intimacy with her husband gives him over her. Teasing his friend’s wife about her husband’s sexual potency, “I trowe, certes, that oure goode man / Hath yow laboured sith the nyght bigan” (VII. 107–8), the monk assumes a posture of familiarity that asserts sexual control over the wife. Because Daun John is so close to her husband, he already assumes that he may “pley” with the wife, because he already assumes that the merchant’s “chaffare” is equally his own (VII. 59; 285). While Daun John certainly steps over the line with his verbal sport, his inappropriateness illustrates the presumption that accompanies relations that men assume transpire only between themselves. There is no harm in kidding with the merchant’s wife, his comment suggests, because as his friend’s possession there is no danger that she can take initiative, even to take offense at his comments. Because both men regard the wife as a passive player in their relations, a conduit through whom their masculine good cheer is circulated, the monk acts as if he can tease her in the same way that he would her husband. But he could not be more wrong. As the wife’s reaction illustrates, what may have begun as an unfitting joke quickly misfires. Showing the rippling productivity of misfire in language, it is not just that Daun John’s joke does not do what he intends; rather, it does something else, producing a different set of possibilities than those he perhaps initially imagined.62 When Daun John teases the wife about her husband’s sexual prowess, she unleashes an emotive complaint that suggests her sexual despair is so serious that it might lead to suicide: “In al the reawme of France is ther no wyf / That lasse lust hath to that sory pley. . .Wherfore I thynke. . .of myself to make an ende” (VII. 116–17; 121–22). Even if we discount her declaration as overblown melodrama, we should keep in mind that her complaint underscores her ability to appoint herself, even to the point of self-annihilation. Right from the start, the wife points to her agency in determining her own private affairs. Using the seclusion of the garden encounter to disclose the

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inner workings of her marriage, the wife suggests that she is a woman with opinions and desires, even if the proprieties of marriage require that she normally keep such feelings or wants under wraps. It is no wonder, then, that the monk “bigan upon this wyf to stare” (VII. 124). If he is shocked by the wife’s response, the monk does not seek to shut down the wife’s revelatory agency. He invites further disclosure, perhaps even invoking the power of his office to secure the wife’s trust. When Daun John swears on his “portehors” to keep the wife’s secrets (VII. 135), he makes a play to turn her agency to his benefit. His scheming, however, does not reveal a premeditated plan to manipulate the wife for sex. Since the wife exercises a surprising independence Daun John does not control the ensuing events. Instead, he must wait for the wife to tip her hand before he knows how to play the game that unfolds. While the two certainly match each other move for move, the wife works to convince Daun John to mold himself according to a model of manhood she desires. As she worries about the masculine bonds her disclosure might break, she gives the monk the opportunity to become the type of man for whom such loyalties are superficial. Telling Daun John that she will unfold her woe, “With myn housbonde, al be he youre cosyn” (VII. 147), the wife sounds the depths of masculine loyalty that the monk is willing to profess. As if on cue, the monk takes up the position she offers, telling her that his friendship with the merchant has always served a different purpose, “To have the moore cause of aqueyntaunce / Of yow, which I have loved specially / Aboven alle wommen, sikerly” (VII. 152–54). The monk may be telling the truth, but since he claims for himself the identity of deceptive plotter, his affection for the wife is impossible to authenticate. And, though a profession of feeling perhaps gives the monk’s seductive rhetoric a nice shine, his affection is unimportant to the wife. She goes on to tell the monk that what she really needs is a man who is not like her husband, a man who will satisfy her sexual and financial demands in the barest of transactional arrangements. In fact, when she tells him that she will “doon to yow what plesance and service / That I may doon, right as yow list devise” (VII. 191–92), the wife leaves feeling completely out of the bargain. While the wife promises to give herself over in payment to the monk, what she wants is a man who is willing to take her body, give her money, then be on his way. She does not want a lover, a man who expects her attachment to him to last for more than the single meeting to which she agrees. Taking Cover The wife asserts her control, but the monk does not see her agency. Demonstrating the ways that seeing can make others invisible, the monk

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refuses to recognize that the wife influences his masculinity with her demands. Even if we view him as a savvy swindler, we should also acknowledge that the wife delineates the contours of the manhood he assumes in his seduction. What she does not anticipate, however, is his attempt to recast their bargain in terms that would erase her agency in order to affirm his power. Because he does not view the wife’s agency as legitimate, he does not see the deal he makes with her as binding in ways that other visible arrangements might be. Although we might agree that a contract for adultery is a more shady arrangement than others, as Mary Flowers Braswell demonstrates, the legal terminology peppering the tale suggests that the two set up their agreement as if it were an above board transaction.63 While his clever trick allies this tale with other “lover’s gift regained” plots, Chaucer’s description of the way in which the monk gains the needed money from the merchant underscores the shared belief that important negotiations take place between men.64 The monk views the wife as part of the merchant’s privacy, a province of his friend’s masculinity that is vulnerable to his predations because she acts outside her husband’s direction. The wife has slipped outside the boundaries of masculine control that her invisibility would enforce, but the monk’s double-cross reintegrates her into her husband’s character through its threat of exposure. In order to have sex with the wife, the monk goes to her husband, suggesting a need for contact that reveals his interest in the merchant. By sleeping with his wife, the monk attempts to dominate his friend. The monk treats this marital couple as a single entity, circulating his power through the wife because he views her as part of her husband’s identity. The monk’s double-cross, then, is designed to unveil his power, at least to the wife. Even if the merchant never finds out about his friend’s free use of his “chaffare” (VII. 285), Daun John’s deception will show the wife that he has been in control of their negotiation all along. Illustrating Karma Lochrie’s claim that cuckoldry depends on exposure, Daun John’s “repayment plan” is designed to display his dominance over wife and merchant, for he collapses the currencies in which this couple trades with his shady deal.65 The wife’s body is equal to the merchant’s money in the monk’s scandalous conversion. His trick is effective, however, because it threatens to expose the wife’s agency over her husband’s estate. If the wife does not cover for Daun John, she will be exposed as an unfaithful wife who exploits her husband’s largesse to suit her unreasonable demands for finery. Failing to keep the monk’s deception concealed, then, has the consequence of making the wife’s agency visible only in its negative aspect. Any positive effect her influence may have had will be effaced by the deed that the monk uncovers through his trick. But if the wife keeps the monk’s secret, she also illustrates his power.

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Like the aforementioned Old French fabliau “Les Deus Changeors,” the monk seeks to make the wife’s agency into a sign of his control over her husband. In the Old French story, as I mentioned earlier, a currency trader develops a passion for his best friend’s wife, who, after much pursuit, finally agrees to take him as her lover. Their secret relationship gives the couple pleasure until the lover decides to use the power of exposure to make his dominance visible. Showing his friend (her husband) the naked body of his beloved, he uses the lady’s fear to show her how much power he wields over her and her duped husband. As the lady struggles to keep her face hidden from her husband’s perusal, her lover (her husband’s friend) brags about the beauty of his lady. The husband of course does not recognize the body in the bed as his wife’s, and even shows his foolishness by wishing that his wife were as beautiful as the female figure put before him: “The testimony I have seen, / shows that for some sin I have been / punished, in that too soon I wed.”66 The lover’s trick is similar to Daun John’s because it collapses the conjugal couple, making both passive in the face of the lover’s power. If the wife covers for the monk, and of course she must do so if she can, then it appears that she is under his control as a result of this game. Unless she disappears into her husband’s masculine identity, the wife will make Daun John look like the superior player in this battle of wits and wills. In similar fabliau plots, such as those from Boccaccio’s Decameron, the wife’s answer confirms this conclusion. For example, in story VIII, 1, the wife is forced to admit that she received the lover’s money and so must hand it over to her husband to conceal what is characterized as her guilt. In a variation on this motif, in VIII, 2 the wife can only register her frustration with the priest who dupes her by sending him a pointed message: “Belcolore says that she swears to God you won’t be grinding any more of your sauces in her mortar, after the shabby way you’ve treated her over this one.”67 The clever Belcolore is clearly fooled by the priest’s ploy, but despite her quick answer, she cannot redirect the situation to reassert her autonomy. In this story as in VIII, 2, it seems that the wife will think twice before making such bargains in the future.68 These tales, like many others, are not specifically designed to punish a wife’s adultery; however, other “lover’s gift regained” plots contain feminine agency by making masculine regulation visibly superior through this double-trick. The feminine agency these stories admit, then, becomes subject to masculine control and part of the savviest man’s ability to figure his own identity. Women may have agency in Boccaccio’s fabliaux, but only when it defines and confirms the superior masculine player in each tale’s economy. When Daun John exploits his friendship with the merchant to acquire the money he needs to sleep with his friend’s wife, he sets out to gain this visible kind of masculine authority. If he can compel her to act in his defense, to shift the blame

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so that he gets away with cheating her, then the monk can affirm his visible dominance. The only unlooked for departure from this plan in the Shipman’s Tale is the wife’s answer itself. The quick-witted turn of her reply is similar to those of other wives in similar situations. The wife’s comeback departs from other answers, however, because it illustrates that masculine potency is itself a show over which she exerts influence. When the wife tells her husband that she will repay the debt the monk owed using the very terms of conjugality designed to affirm marital affection, she consolidates the merchant’s image of masculine potency even as she thwarts Daun John’s attempt to assert visible dominance. In preventing her husband from looking like a cuckold, she preserves the guise of manly power with which she has hitherto invested him. Despite her actual infidelity, throughout the tale the wife acts the part of a good wife. As others have pointed out, this couple’s marriage is strikingly affectionate compared to that of other fabliau couples.69 Although the wife complains of her husband’s lack of sexual prowess, when he returns from his business trip we see a display of marital feeling that looks genuine. And, even though Thomas Hahn is right to point out that the merchant’s sexual potency is connected to his fiscal prosperity, this linkage does not cheapen the loving portrait of marriage we see near the tale’s conclusion.70 The wife’s quick welcome, “ful redy [she] mette hym atte gate” (VII. 373), is not an index of his success in this particular business venture. As the tale points out, the wife’s conduct is a standing habit: “As she was wont of oold usage algate” (VII. 374). The merchant’s sexual and financial abilities are connected, and in a way that allows this couple to spend “al that nyght in myrthe”(VII. 375). A Private View But it takes a perspectival shift to achieve this concluding portrait of conjugal affection. To return briefly to the garden scene, after the wife seals her compact with Daun John we see that her view of her husband is not as flattering as it later appears. The wife’s chiding rebuke of her husband illustrates the difference between the masculinity she wants and he performs.71 Having shut himself away to attend to his affairs, the merchant is the picture of husbandly respectability. Unlike critics who fault the merchant for neglect, I am not suggesting that he is a bad husband who deserves a cuckolding.72 On the contrary, when the merchant explains to his wife the complexities of his trade and instructs her concerning how to run the household during his absence, he performs the cultural role of husband to perfection. His reply to her reproof, “ ‘Wyf,’ quod this man, ‘litel kanstow devyne / The curious bisynesse that we have’” (VII. 224–25), shuts her out

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of the accounting that goes on in his enclosed chamber, but in so doing, he provides the reasoned guidance that husbands were supposed to administer to wives. Furthermore, in advising the wife “for to kepe oure good be curious, / And honestly governe wel oure hous” (VII. 243–44), he indicates that the wife’s actions are an extension of his own. Even though the wife demonstrates her involvement in everyday domestic affairs, for example when she instructs the cooks to prepare the meal for Daun John, the merchant does not see such intervention as separate from his household governance. After his embarrassing exchange with Daun John, the merchant is a different man, but not because he is “riche and cleerly out of dette” (VII. 376). For, it becomes clear, he remains indebted to the private economy that this story scandalously reveals. This tale, with its attention to exchange, accounting, and debt, remakes the merchant’s masculinity by drawing attention to its conjugal dimension, particularly a husband’s responsibility to satisfy his wife’s sexual desires. But its attention to the marriage debt as a masculine obligation, I should add, is not one-sided. We do not see the merchant laboring to satisfy an insatiable wife, recalling the familiar idea of masculine dissolution pervasive in medieval misogynist lore. Parting ways from the Wife of Bath’s domineering discourse, this tale shows the ways that the marital debt binds partners in a sexual relation that is pleasurable for both. And, though most medieval thinkers posited pleasure as part of intercourse because they believed it promoted the procreative purpose of sex, the Shipman’s Tale leaves this generative aim out of its picture of marital (sexual) affection.73 Instead, sex becomes a way of negotiating agency between partners, a joining of bodies that works out this pair’s differences through a common experience of erotic enjoyment. When the merchant returns home, this literal view of conjugality comes into focus because he recognizes his wife’s agency. The merchant again instructs his wife, but his mild reproof carries a different charge than his earlier directions. Indeed, his concern when he addresses the wife is not with money; instead, he worries about how her management affects his masculine image: Telle me alwey, er that I fro thee go, If any dettour hath in myn absence Ypayed thee, lest thurgh thy necligence I myghte hym axe a thing that he hath payed. (VII. 396–99)

Through his anxiety, the merchant admits the control the wife wields over the goods that constitute his manhood. He articulates her fault as a failure to credit the debts paid to her, inadvertently glossing the error that earlier

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led the wife to make her contract with Daun John. Without knowing it, the merchant identifies her former failure, her refusal to credit the “debt” he pays her in their conjugal affairs. In accounting for this fault, however, the merchant also acknowledges that the wife has an equal stake in the private dealings that give their household its public front. Privacy is not simply his domain; rather, its cultivation is influenced by the unseen doings of both parties in this marriage. When the merchant advises the wife to take better care in future dealings, he gives her legitimate space to act as a partner in their union. Although the merchant has no knowledge of the sexual valence his instructions carry, when he tells the wife to “Keep bet thy good, this yeve I thee in charge” (VII. 432), he gives her the power to make distinctions between proper and improper uses of assets, including her body. Now, the merchant does not suggest that the wife may act in any way that she sees fit; on the contrary, he depends upon their marital bond to limit the wife’s agency so that it promotes his empowered image. She has power to conduct herself, but only insofar as her behavior remains within the boundaries that being a faithful wife set forth. The merchant is able to assert the manly authority that marriage confers upon him, however, only because the wife gives him leave to do so. When she curses the monk, she follows her invective with a justification of her agency that outlines the way she will conduct herself in future transactions. Her disgust with Daun John, “I kepe nat of his tokenes never a deel” (VII. 403), suggests that she now prefers her husband’s respectability over the monk’s opportunism. The cleverness of her answer, then, derives not just from its ability to hide her infidelity; it too is a doublescheme, outlining her commitment to a type of femininity that exercises agency for her husband’s benefit. She therefore recognizes that women’s ability to exercise agency through invisibility is enabled by the conjugal relationship, and it is this position that she protects by empowering her husband’s masculinity. If it were not already clear to the wife that her husband is cut from completely different cloth than the monk, when he acknowledges her control, the merchant offers the wife more than financial or sexual satisfaction. In her protest against the monk’s deception, she identifies the bonds of masculine friendship Daun John breaks through his double-cross: “I wende, withouten doute, / That he hadde yeve it me bycause of yow / To doon therwith myn honour and my prow” (VII. 406–8). Realizing that the monk acts the part of philandering schemer in earnest, the wife turns away from this model of masculinity and reasserts her husband’s superiority through her promise of submission. By pledging the obedience that she owes her husband according to a hierarchical version of marriage, “I am youre wyf; score it upon my taille” (VII. 416), she promises him that

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which, by all appearances, he already has. Her suggestion, however, that she “bistowed [the money] so weel / for youre honour” (VII. 420–21), takes on new import in the context of her prior behavior. She gives her husband permission to exercise the authority his position as husband is meant to confer. The wife takes responsibility for the way that her actions shape her husband’s masculine image in the public eye, and by so doing, converts what could have been a moment that exposes his frailty into an instance that consolidates his power. So, instead of a confessional about face from a penitent adulteress, we see a clever wife turn the fallout from her deception to her husband’s good. In giving her body as payment to her husband, she defines the parameters of her agency in a way that prevents her from trading sexual favors with other men. Granting her invisible agency a private visibility, I am suggesting, curtails her power to direct herself. But this is not to say that the merchant finally gains the comprehensive dominance that early in the tale he assumes is his by virtue of his position as husband. On the contrary, he must respect the influence that his wife exercises by admitting that she too dispenses their goods and thus influences the image of their collective “hous” (VII. 20). Furthermore, he must become the kind of man she desires, fulfilling all of her prescriptions for masculinity. The merchant comes close to meeting her standard, but the sexual deficiency the wife attributes to him earlier stems from the limitations that ignoring her agency produce. What we see when he comes home from his meeting with Daun John, therefore, is a sexual performance expanded by the realization that his wife can manage herself. By seeking to satisfy the wife, which requires him to recognize her as a player with autonomous desires, the merchant allows her to shape his vision of manhood. Moreover, when the wife keeps her husband from looking like a cuckold, there is no way for him to look like a fool. Some may object that the wife’s obedience is merely a pose, a show she stages in order to hide her guilt. But as we see with her aggression, too, the performances a person puts on are constitutive of identity. As this tale illustrates, it is the way that certain performances of selfhood gain legitimate visibility that give them lasting impact, and as I have been arguing, this is always a collaborative process. A story the ménagier uses to illustrate the virtues of discretion to his new wife underscores the point that men and women in a marital relationship must work together to constitute collaborative identities: a wife leaves her husband for a younger man; when she is deserted by her lover, she becomes a prostitute. Instead of shaming her through abandonment or separation, the husband sends her brothers after her and stages her homecoming as a return from the religious pilgrimage on which he claims to have sent her. As the ménagier explains, such moments of coverage are necessary because “his wife’s

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honour. . .touched the honour of himself and his children, and so may you learn what wise men and wise women ought to do for each other to save their honour.”74 As we see with the wife and the merchant, when a pair collaborates to negotiate relational gender positions that are limited by one another, neither partner can use the visibility of the other to extend his or her image. So, by giving her husband’s masculinity a place of visible legitimacy, the wife keeps herself from being used as a tally of his financial success. In allowing the merchant to take up a public pose of masculine agency, moreover, the wife models her husband’s manhood to fit her private desires. It is not, therefore, that the merchant is allowed to be passive when he’s at home. On the contrary, he gains a new dimension of agency, but it is one that slips outside the boundaries of a regularized public manhood. In his ability to satisfy his wife’s sexual desires, the merchant acquires a new position over which he does not have to exercise control. The merchant’s sexual performance is not an exercise of potency that shows his masculine restraint even as it satisfies his marital debt. Rather, his ability to give his wife more than “ynough” results from his ability to release the reins of domestic control that he is otherwise bound to wield. Like the “selfshattering” that Leo Bersani argues accompanies sex, the merchant is able to lo(o)se himself—that public, cultivated image of merchant masculinity— through his private intimacy with the wife.75 The merchant thus gains a sexual surplus, an abundance of manhood that supercedes the boundaries of self-discipline his daily craft requires him to make visible. In other words, because the merchant does not have to account fully for his agency in the bedroom, he can lose sight of the boundaries that otherwise mark gender. While this private license certainly puts both the wife and the merchant on the side of sin in a medieval sexual register, it also reveals the marital affection required to transform two bodies into one flesh.76 Chaucer’s Parson condemns a display of marital affection like we see at the conclusion of this tale, echoing the teachings of contemporary moralists when he criticizes couples who “assemble oonly for amorous love and. . .for to accomplice thilke brennynge delit, they rekke nevere how ofte. Soothly it is deedly synne; and yet, with sorwe, somme folk wol peynen hem moore to doon than to hire appetit suffiseth” (X. (I) 942). Worried that nonprocreative sex diminished reason, partners were encouraged to respect the clear boundaries between themselves by treating sex as a debt to be paid in a regular, disciplined, and controlled fashion.77 Augustine, too, suggested that a man hides his intimacy because his procreative organs are not fully ruled by his will during intercourse.78 But since women were not aligned with reason anyway, the real self that sexual relations put at risk, as we see here, was the crisply defined masculine subject. As Bersani argues, “As soon

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as persons are posited, the war begins. It is the self that swells with excitement at the idea of being on top, the self that makes of the inevitable play of thrusts and relinquishments in sex an argument for the natural authority of one sex over the other.”79 By turning the private into a domain where partners exchange agency, the Shipman’s Tale allows the wife and the merchant to escape from the daily regulations that impose divisive gender proprieties. When this divide between selves fades, the need for trade—in sex, money, and esteem, that is, in power—also recedes. A Shady Speaker My final take on this tale’s invisible speaker, then, is that it opens up more possibilities for gender fluidity than either Alisoun of Bath or the nameless Shipman could alone. As I have argued at different points throughout this book, invisibility cuts in different directions depending on how it is taken up as a strategy of coverage. As the Wife of Bath illustrates, invisibility can be a confrontational tactic, a method of exposure that allows one to gain advantage over an opponent. Such an economy of vision, while it is perhaps necessary to uncase abuse, concomitantly ends up limiting mobility because it assumes a punitive frame of vision. Nevertheless, Alisoun of Bath shows that exposure is sometimes worth the visible limitations that come with it. Her use of invisibility as a weapon exposes Jankyn’s faulty claim to manly composure even as it marks her as a disobedient spouse. But the Shipman’s tack, too, uncovers masculine authority as a performative ruse. In seeking to pass off a version of femininity as the culprit for masculine weakness, he confirms the ability of wives to shape the public images of men through private dealings. When men force women into positions of invisibility, we see that women can use these unseen places for purposes that fragment men’s claims to control. Through her adulterous meandering, the wife of the Shipman’s Tale confirms the subversive threat that making women visibly neutral entails. Her deft management of the invisible illustrates that a woman’s agency, and the unseen circuits in which it travels, can fragment or augment a man’s performance of masculinity. But in a liberating transformation of the invisible, the wife of St. Denys shows her husband that she is not a public marker of his private control. By remaking the private as a space where both can enjoy a transactional fluidity of agency, the wife opens opportunities for both to cross borders of gender without being subject to punitive surveillance. Without a definite speaker, then, this tale suspends gender lines that saturate the normal field of vision. Because this text “floats” between perspectives, it draws a veil over classifications that might otherwise gain fixity through their legibility. This is not to say, however, that there is not

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at least the perception of an unseen seer who gives order to the meaning of the events in this tale. As I mentioned at the outset of this chapter, many readers, based on their own expectations for Chaucer’s vision of human affairs, fix his authoritative eye on the moral failings of these characters.80 Money, adultery, and deception: all come under the censorious gaze of our timeless author. While Chaucer’s staged invisibility simultaneously invites and punishes such appropriations of his unseen mobility, the temptation to bring a Chaucerian view into the open is not new. In my final chapter, I examine the ways that later audiences make Chaucerian masculinities visible. This chapter thus continues an inquiry into the ways that textualities influence our visions of Chaucer and his masculinities. By examining a short set of proverbs from a manuscript miscellany containing several of Chaucer’s works, I am interested in the way that making the contours of his works textually visible effaces many of the radical possibilities for which I have hitherto argued. While I have suggested that different male characters at various narrative junctures attempt to perform according to formulaic cultural standards for masculinity, in this set of proverbs we see that Chaucer’s manhood itself is subjected to such stratification. As a result, Chaucer’s masculinities become reduced, boiled down to a formula that can be passed off as an authentically “medieval” masculinity by later readers.

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CHAPTER 5 MISCELLANEOUS CHAUCER: PROVERBIAL MASCULINITY IN HARLEY 7333

. . .the incomprehensible can be merely an object of scorn, but not if there is [. . .] a way of using it as a pretext —José Saramago, Seeing

y standards of literary criticism or book history Harley 7333 is a manuscript that merits little notice. Written in six to nine hands, containing various works by Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate, seemingly the most distinctive aspect of this fifteenth-century “library of secular literature” is the light it casts on John Shirley’s role in the formation and transmission of the Chaucerian corpus.1 Margaret Connelly studies this manuscript because it contains Shirley exemplars of Chaucer, the existence of which, Julia Boffey and John J. Thompson observe, illustrates the circulation of copies of vernacular poetry outside of a London literary circle or book market.2 Consisting of seven discrete fascicles, the manuscript also offers passing evidence supporting Ralph Hanna’s contention that the production of medieval manuscripts is miscellaneous in character, by which he means that it depends upon the materials a copyist has to hand.3 And, if we further note the many changes the Augustinian canons made to their copy texts, the manuscript demonstrates that religious houses were involved in the production of vernacular literature in the fifteenth century.4 Harley 7333, it seems, variously validates many of the central propositions forwarded in medieval textual studies over the past twenty-five years.5 Although our list of critical contentions that Harley 7333 supports could extend further—to trace the irregular courses of diachronic book histories through the Dissolution of the monasteries and beyond—the multiplicity of this manuscript’s affiliations makes it insignificant.6 John Manly’s

B

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dismissal of its potential for Chaucer scholars says much about the manuscript’s broader lack of importance: “[Harley 7333] has suffered so much from editing in its own text and in the texts of its exemplars that it is of no authority.”7 To put it mildly, Harley 7333 is excessive: with its litany of literary authors and its mass of textual particulars, it is hard to draw a critical bead on this compilation. Since it has no distinct focus, Harley 7333 is difficult for scholars to see as a substantial manuscript. Because its multiplicity makes it invisible, Harley 7333 makes legible many of the interpretive paths I have pursued in this study. When I began this book I suggested that masculinity is a guise of (in)visibility. In drawing this study to a close, I would like to suggest that textual studies offers a way to see the fabrication of Chaucerian masculinities as both effective and affective. For, as I shall argue, Harley 7333 puts together a version of Chaucer’s manhood through its material constitution. Using its literary compilation, this manuscript forms a body for Chaucer that is distinctively masculine. This manly body can only pass as Chaucer’s, however, if it is persuasively animated for its audiences in a way that asserts itself as ordinary, or invisible. Here I say “masculine” or “manly” body to acknowledge that there is nothing that materiality can authenticate about Chaucer’s purported maleness, here or elsewhere. Through this textual assemblage, however, Chaucer’s “manly” body gives a performance that suggests a genuine (gendered) identity with tangible substance. In making a performative appeal to materiality, this manuscript passes as Chaucer despite the visible lapses in its representation of his corpus. To adapt Seth Lerer’s phrasing, Harley 7333 shows that even the miscellaneous construction of a body of literature creates an “anthologistic effect,” the impression that certain works are joined together to form a cohesive whole that implies and therefore produces a critical or interpretive design.8 This effect can only be achieved, however, if a work’s reception becomes the point of visible contention. In other words, only when textual construction is staged as an affective act of reception can material joinings take on the guise of critical intention. As we see in Harley 7333, reception situates textual compilation in a way that covers, or even excuses, failures in representation. Because, we must admit from the outset, the Chaucer that this text puts forward does not fit the regularized contours of his poetic identity that we have come to expect. Or, yet, it might be more accurate to say that this collection defamiliarizes the Chaucer we are accustomed to seeing. This chapter thus deals with some of the most visible instances of masculinity in Chaucer’s canon, yet the men of the First-Fragment, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Merchant’s Tale look markedly different in this compilation. Indeed, this Chaucer shows the constructed origins of his textual manufacture. Most plainly, the alterations of the copyists to Shirley’s versions

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of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales betray their ecclesiastic investments.9 To cite just a few of the most visible examples, the manuscript expunges all indications of priestly corruption in the Reeve’s Tale by removing the parson (Symkyn’s wife becomes the daughter of a “swanherd”), it omits the Shipman’s Tale altogether as a way to erase Daun John’s exploitation of his religious office, and it cleans up the Pardoner’s theological disruption by ending his tale with the pious comment, “And Jhesu Crist, that is oure soules leche, / So graunte yow his pardoun to receyve, / For that is best; I wol yow nat deceyve” (VI. 916–18). The producers of Harley 7333 only saw Chaucer according to a definite outline, which they reveal through their idiosyncratic renderings of the texts they copy. But we can also see that the way the Chaucerian booklets are put together in this manuscript creates a representation of Chaucer’s poetic identity that takes on the appearance of intention. This Chaucer achieves an anthologistic effect even if, as in all likelihood it was the case, the manuscript was produced in an incremental process.10 Chaucerian Receivership This Chaucer is not invisible, but because his figure is presented as a production of reception, the manuscript itself asserts the regularity of its Chaucer. In other words, by constituting the Chaucerian body of this manuscript through a representation of compilation as an interpretive process, we are asked to see this peculiar instantiation of Chaucer as invisible. Even if this Chaucer clearly fails to achieve authenticity through a materially inflected performance—showing, shall we say, bearing, the marks of alteration—we are asked to see this Chaucer as genuine. It matters little that the ideological construction of this manuscript is transparent; Chaucer’s body may be exposed in strategic ways to promote particular ideational commitments that it authorizes. Harley 7333’s construction suggests that certain representational values are privileged through its compilation.11 As Seth Lerer argues, auctoritas is vested in the texts themselves, and not the persons who compile them.12 From the copyists’ manipulations, it would seem that Chaucer’s authenticity does not rank highly among this manuscript’s concerns. In what follows I argue that this manuscript is engaged with the production of an apparently authentic Chaucer, and in a way that reflects upon the influence that reception exerts over the creation of gendered identities. As such, Harley 7333 sheds light on the ways that our own critical practices inflect the Chaucerian masculinities that become textually visible. The representation of reception provides a means to make visible only those bodily contours that an audience finds visibly appealing. Reception, and the interpretation it entails, becomes a vehicle, a cover, and potentially an excuse for representation.

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In Harley 7333 we see that reception is an act of representation, a critical process of compilation fusing textual fragments to form a poetic body that ever remains “true” to its original. In other words, reception makes visible a particular version of an identity that asserts its representational authenticity. As Harley 7333 indicates, this process of compilation is an engendering practice, for the attitude it makes visible is a masculine perspective. The portion of the manuscript that contains Chaucer’s works also includes a collection of thirteen proverbs that mimic Chaucer. Signed “Quod Impingham,” these couplets consist largely of Chaucerian lines redeployed in a context that makes them an interpretation, if not an impersonation, of Chaucer’s masculinity: Proverbes: t Next Qe derke nyght Qe g[r]ay morow, So is ioye next the ende of sorow. Yf a man be in @ poynt agrevid In a noQer he may be relevid. Gode it is a man to bere him even For al day men mete at vnset steven. Wyne and women make men folls Ofte men falle betwyxst two scoles. Beware of hem that can no shame Women’s tonges be neuer lame. Wylde bestes men may meke, But women answeris ben neuer to seke. Yf a woman be fresshe arrayed & gay Sche ne wille hir howse kepe a day. Qerfore bete wel hir skynne And than she wolle kepe hir Qerin. A man shulde wedde aftir his estate For yought & age be ofte at debate:. For the fresshe month of May & Janyuer Ofte ben at debate & gretlye they ware. Be ware the wele whan wemen wepe, Qt women wot not for consel thei kepe. Lo! She that Qee have hard telle Qt causid Adam to go to helle, Also sche made oure Lorde God to dye. Lo! Such a craft a woman can pleye! Quod Impingham13

Staged as an act of reception, these twenty-six lines make visible the contours of Chaucer’s manhood by representing reception as an act of

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material compilation. These proverbs, furthermore, recast the Chaucerian booklets to figure the contours of Chaucer’s masculinity in a way that is specific to this textual rendering. For, if we acknowledge that the construction of the medieval book creates the unique volume, we should also recognize that this process generates a distinct Chaucer—one who reflects the anthologistic impulse of the proverbial reader.14 Impingham’s joinings, I submit, stage the act of reading as a miscellaneous process of collection, in that the reader takes from the texts that he has at his perusal (i.e., other Chaucer poems). But this gathering simultaneously appears to be guided by an ideational intelligence that genders the figure of the poet through its material construction of his body of work. Reading, Writing, and “Makinge” This process depends on depicting the reader as textual compiler, or, to be more specific, as literary maker.15 Harley 7333 represents a reading position by assigning the proverbial presentation of Chaucer to the unseen persona who voices these lines. “Impingham,” whether or not he was anyone beyond a name, thus assumes the varied positions of reader, writer, compiler, and speaker through this poetic captioning of the Chaucerian corpus.16 By putting together Chaucer’s sentences in a way that invests them with received authority, Impingham becomes the proverbial example illustrating the mobile invisibility that “makers” including Chaucer enjoy before they are listed among the ranks of auctores.17 As we see with Harley 7333, when Chaucer becomes visible as a cultural authority, he loses the adaptive agency that his relative anonymity afforded him during his own era.18 His masculinity can be shaped to suit another maker, who is textually figured as a receiver of Chaucer’s works. This unseen Impingham, moreover, may cloak the manipulative agency he asserts over Chaucer’s manhood because his position remains obscure. Is he a writer, reader, speaker, or compiler? By inhabiting all these positions at once, Impingham passes off his Chaucer as a particular rendering that represents a broader consensus. Because he is so many things to this Chaucer, Impingham’s receptive position assumes a privileged invisibility through its making of a Chaucerian masculinity. Impingham’s multiplicity in this manuscript, then, calls for a reassessment of the loose acceptance of equivalence between “making” and “writing” in contemporary medieval studies.19 Indeed, if we take the shadowy “Impingham” to be a maker in his own right, we must admit that the Middle English “makere” is a more nuanced term than any approximation that “writer” attempts to capture.20 While the preference for “writing” over “literature” in our contemporary critical vocabulary attempts to account for the importance of documentary culture and textual transmission

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in late medieval England, “writing” nevertheless effaces the impact that reception and its representation exert over modes of literary and textual composition.21 Reception’s erasure is by no means deliberate; rather, as Steven Justice indicates in the closing remarks of his Writing and Rebellion, thinking about a work’s investment in its own reception is just part of what historicist critics do: “one thing we might learn is that official culture need not be read as it wishes.”22 Making the ideational commitments of documentary culture legible through an interrogation of their strategies for reception, Justice suggests that a historicist criticism must be skeptical about the ways that works present themselves. Justice’s acknowledgment that writing asserts strategies to shape reception adjusts an older historicist faith in the uncomplicated visibility of textuality. No longer can critics be content with a fantasy, as Stephen Greenblatt famously puts it, “to speak with the dead.”23 Nearly twenty years after Shakespearean Negotiations, we now know that the dead are liars. Or rather, recognizing that a desire for conversation is not a craving for honesty, we now know through unflinching work like Greenblatt’s that the dead may manipulate visibilities to suit purposes that otherwise would remain obscure. Assuredly, the New Historicism has amply illustrated that the dead are not straight talkers; and, because talk is not enough in attending to the circumstances of a work’s production, textual formations assume greater importance. Pursuing connections between a work’s literary and material compositions, Jeffrey Masten begins his Textual Intercourse with what he describes as the “desire to sleep with the dead.”24 Here the tangible intimacy of textual studies reveals much about the ways in which writers collaborate to figure their own visibilities. But because we also know that to sleep with someone—dead or alive—can easily be premised on a lie, or on a fabricated image, we also know that such contact often gets us no closer than speaking to honest communication. Nevertheless, the intimate connection that textual studies offers, which I am deliberately eroticizing without romanticizing, need not give us anything honest for it to give us something meaningful to premodern studies.25 Because manipulations are often—if not always—more appealing than truths, examining a text’s presentational strategies yields insights into formations of identity in late medieval culture.26 Investigating the more comprehensive process of textual making, I submit, is to examine a work’s “technologies of the visible.”27 Writing, definitely, is part of this process, but as Impingham’s couplets illustrate, it can be only a small part. A work’s reception, which the material construction of a text like Harley 7333 puts at issue, can assume a larger role in the composition of an identity because it subsumes reading, writing, compiling, and speaking. The proverbs of Impingham are a textual making of literary reception that is

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probably a constructed fiction, since in all likelihood there was no flesh and blood Impingham. Despite, or I would suggest because of, Impingham’s shadowy figure, these proverbs achieve even greater persuasive impact: treating a particular manly attitude as the received wisdom that any anonymous reader can take from the Chaucerian corpus, these verses make Chaucer’s masculinity singular yet general. Reception becomes a process assigned to a quasi-fictional character whose particular rendering of Chaucer assumes larger influence. Common Man’s Chaucer The commitments that emerge from the proverbs reflect a reading position, but because these verses trade on the authority of the recognizably Chaucerian, they provide an interpretive boilerplate that figures Chaucer’s identity by shaping his reception. Through Impingham’s construction of his own Chaucer, we see that the history of a work’s reception is responsible for the meaning of the work itself.28 Even if we recognize that the proverbs included in Harley 7333 are a particular rendition of Chaucer that stand quite apart from the poems they co-opt, these verses nevertheless demonstrate that such a reading of his works can pass itself off as culturally authoritative. By taking up the form of the proverb, Impingham suggests that these Chaucerian couplets are the commonplace truisms that emerge from the poems they engage.29 No longer a reflection of a particular reader, this compilation of adages outlines the borders of the Chaucerian in broad interpretive terms. Opening with the couplet, “Next Qe derke nyght Qe g[r]ay morewe / so is ioye next the ende of sorow” (1–2), these proverbs expand and contract the horizons of Chaucer’s poetic masculinities. Indeed, it must be added, the proverbs from Chaucer are themselves common sayings, which means that they resonate more broadly than their specific Chaucerian contexts would imply. A version of the initial couplet appears in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, but its more clearly drawn antithesis, “And next the derke nyght the glade morwe; / And also joie is next the fyn of sorwe” (T&C 1.951–52) forms part of the litany of contrasts that Pandarus uses to bolster Troilus in his nascent dedication to loving Criseyde (T&C 1.946–52). Pandarus uses proverbial wisdom—a common catalogue of opposites—to convince Troilus that his suffering in love will turn to comfort.30 Including this proverb in an axiomatic series is meant to articulate what everybody else already knows about love, serving as a gesture of collective assurance that validates Troilus’s transformation from foe to servant of love. Cliché is a cultural comfort in this situation, identifying Pandarus as a source of broader wisdom that will situate Troilus’s amorous torpor as properly conditioned masculinity in the service of love.

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But knowing what we know about the fate of Troilus’s love from the outset of Chaucer’s poem, Pandarus’s advice also takes on the fallacious cast of common lore that will lead to individual ruin. He is clearly telling Troilus what he wants to hear, perhaps for no better reason than it makes Pandarus look like a knower in this situation. Pandarus’s ability to trot out collective adages simultaneously advances and undermines the dedication to love that Troilus professes. The situation of this proverb in Harley 7333 shows an awareness of the folly that this contrast locates in Chaucer, not least of all through the gloomier tone of its comparison. While R. H. Bowers suggests reading “gay” for the manuscript “gray” (due to a copyist’s error, or the fluidity of proverbs themselves), the reduced antithesis that “gray” effects also acknowledges the fortitude and detachment that Troilus gains through his suffering.31 The tempered optimism of this proverb is especially relevant to the image of Chaucerian manhood that Impingham’s verses express as a whole, because the dislocated vision Troilus achieves through his awareness of Criseyde’s shifting affection is the manly attitude that is necessary to survive the catalogue of womanly unruliness the majority of the verses expound. This proverb, taken with the two that follow, creates a hardened yet adaptive masculinity that emerges from diverse points across Chaucer’s body of work. Deriving from the Reeve’s Tale and the Knight’s Tale respectively, the subsequent verses invest masculine power in a pragmatic system of adaptive force. Moving quickly from the metaphysical possibility of transcendent reward to the pragmatic domain of tangible retribution, the adage from Troilus is linked to the legal maxim motivating the revenge of the Reeve’s Tale: “Yf a man be in @ poynt agrevid / In a nother he may be relevid” (3–4). If someone is going from the dark of night to (at least) the gray of day, this combination suggests that such change must be made in the competitive world ordered by legalistic principles. Recalling as it does the beating that John and Aleyn administer to the thieving Symkyn, this adage implies a rougher distribution of justice than these phrases might assume were they not filtered through this Chaucerian context.32 But this ready toughness is qualified by the following axiom, “Gode it is a man to bere him even / For al day men mete at vnset steven” (5–6), which in the Knight’s Tale explains the outrageous happenstance that lands Palamon in the very grove where the disguised Arcite recites the events of his life and love that have transpired since the sworn brothers/enemies were parted (I.1523–24). A measured character, which is ever prepared to administer violence, is the masculine temperament this trilogy figures. Proverbial Surplus While we may agree that this broad outline of a masculinity is indeed a figure Chaucer promotes through his poetry, the ten proverbs that follow

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the first three couplets illustrate the miscellaneous process of interpretive compilation that is required to give this manly vision coherence. By importing cultural adages that have no specific Chaucerian reference, this entire set of maxims demonstrates the process by which a consistent masculinity enters the visible field. The first three proverbs combine features from a multiplicity of Chaucerian masculinities (and we must admit that the manly identities articulated between Chaucer, Knight, Reeve, Troilus, Pandarus, John, Aleyn, Symkyn, Palamon, and Arcite are radically divergent) to form a composite whole that in essence “shrinks” these varied instantiations to fit one mold. This contraction of the Chaucerian horizon, however, only works because this domain is simultaneously broadened. The extra-Chaucerian verses in this collection connect the manhood that emerges from Chaucer to common cultural ideas about women. These beliefs are presented as masculine attitudes, and as such, they are deployed to animate the posture of manhood that emerges from this Chaucerian figure. To be clear, the first three proverbs are not limited to Chaucer; they also circulate outside a Chaucerian context. Nevertheless, their conjunction through Chaucer gives them their meaning in Harley 7333. Proverbs four through eight, conversely, have no Chaucerian connection. Their textual association with a Chaucerian masculinity, however, inflects Chaucer’s manhood through their broader social resonance. In other words, through the joinings of compilation, Chaucer’s masculinity is forced to take up and perform a series of cultural attitudes that have no substantive place in his poetry. The attitudes about women’s pernicious agency that these other proverbs express crop up in Chaucer’s poems. But as I have argued, men’s efforts to contain, efface, or expose that agency as detrimental only end up highlighting the similar fragility, contingency, or futility of said masculinities. Chaucer’s poetry, I submit, broadly consolidates a masculinity whose evenness and efficacy makes it practically invisible. I have also argued that men must admit women’s agency for this model of manhood to be persuasive, even if that agency is ideally directed for masculine profit toward passive aims. Impingham’s verses effectively attempt to construct a gender position that Chaucer’s poems show up as ridiculous: here the invisible man, whose measured character covers his administration of force, is pitted against a version of femininity that depends on the visibility of agency. And, unlike January from the Merchant’s Tale or John from the Miller’s Tale, this model of masculinity maintains its composure in the face of such feminine display. But how is this possible? If in the poems themselves Chaucer demonstrates that denials of feminine agency (either through ignorance or erasure) lead to masculine demise, how can these proverbs reinstitute, or even extend, the condemnation of womanly will? As I have argued, the key to the manly

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continence that Chaucer promotes is its invisible power. By suggesting that men need not assert their agency, he keeps the risk of visible verification for men continually at bay. Similarly, by suggesting that women’s exercises of agency “count” as passivity, he keeps the risk of legible activity for women out of bounds. In other words, even as Chaucer’s poems admit that women have agency and that men are passive, successful fictions of gender require characters to pass off their behaviors so that they fit cultural gender expectations. Chaucer’s poems, therefore, suggest that genders are flexible systems of coverage that may be adapted to maintain a greater range of behaviors for both men and women. The Chaucerian “Fixer” Despite its loose play with Chaucer’s texts, Impingham’s proverbs resist this fluidity. The opposition “Wyne and women make men folls / Ofte men falle betwyxst two scoles” (7–8), situates the remainder of the proverbs, all of which attribute manly weakness to feminine intractability. We might agree with Impingham that many of Chaucer’s men are unable to realize a desire for unlimited potency in his various poems. Moreover, we might also acknowledge that some of these characters blame their individually debilitating experiences on feminine agency broadly conceived. But by connecting masculine control with retributive violence and by associating manly frustration with womanly conduct, this sequence of proverbs restricts masculine multiplicity to a singular outlook, which it then uses its textual show of Chaucerian auctoritas to authenticate. By staging the act of reception as the creation of meaning, this text enables a masculine reader who takes Chaucer as an auctor who condemns womanly will. The act of reception, which here manifests itself through proverbial deployment, creates a Chaucer who authorizes the masculine outlook that the individual reader expresses through textual assembly. Through his proverbs, Impingham—as reader, writer, speaker, maker—uses Chaucer to suggest that violence is the most effective means to curtail even the perception of feminine insubordination against men’s assertions of control. After suggesting that “Women’s tonges be neuer lame”(10), the collection asserts the fragility of masculine regulation in a couplet whose validity the Wife of Bath’s fifth husband Jankyn learns through experience: “Wylde bestes men may meke, / But women answeris ben neuer to seke”(11–12). While Alisoun claims “Stibourn I was as is a leonesse, / And of my tonge a verray jangleresse” (III. 637–38), the following two couplets refigure in disturbing wise both the challenge that the Wife poses to her clerical husband and the means by which he seeks to assert his husbandly authority when his invocation of patriarchal authority fails. Impingham’s

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proverbial commonplace, “Yf a woman be fresshe arrayed & gay / Sche ne wille hir howse kepe a day” (13–14), is borne out by Alisoun’s fine clothing and her continual roaming. However, Jankyn’s use of violence to curb Alisoun is also represented as a typical manly response to such wifely disobedience: “Qerfore bete wel hir skynne / And than she wolle kepe hir Qerin” (15–16). While Jankyn’s loss of composure takes on a more calculated appearance, the Wife’s ability to answer her husband, or to hit back in a struggle for “maistrie” illustrating Jankyn’s lack of measure, is erased by this axiomatic rendering (III.818). Impingham’s couplets, therefore, conjoin Chaucerian moments that obscure the consequences of feminine challenge. Women may be the cause of masculine sorrow, but men nevertheless beat back disruptive feminine agency using physical force. These verses, then, only focus on the advantage that a man derives from the increased power his physical might gives him over an adversary, whether that opponent is a man, in the case of Symkyn, or a woman, in the case of Alisoun. These proverbs ignore the potential for violence to compromise or undermine the masculine authority of the perpetrator. We might see John and Aleyn’s abuse of the two women of that tale as its own attempt to pass off a counterfeit manhood, or we might see Jankyn’s attack against his wife as part of the account that Alisoun unfolds to explain the fractious equilibrium she achieves with her young husband, but the proverbs strip away these contexts, setting up a new framework of wifely disobedience in which to read these maxims as prescriptions. In putting these stories together, Impingham’s proverbs suggest that masculine control depends upon complete intolerance of feminine agency. These proverbs pass over details of feminine action that might argue for its legitimacy, even superiority. This set of verses, therefore, expresses an absolutist view of feminine agency, insisting that women must be manhandled, becoming visible only as passive components in masculine displays of power. If there is a danger that a woman’s will cannot be reduced, the following proverbs suggest, a man would do better to avoid alliances with women altogether. By routing a proverb from Cato through its familiarizing context in the Miller’s Tale (and this manuscript also contains a version of Cato in an early booklet), Impingham suggests that men should avoid marriage with young wives because their will is too hard to beat out of them: “A man shulde wedde aftir his estate / For yought & age be ofte at debate” (17–18). Pairing this couplet with the conflict that organizes the Merchant’s Tale, “For the fresshe month of May & Janyuer / Ofte ben at debate & gretlye they ware” (19–20), these proverbs advance the argument that women’s agency leads to the fragmentation of masculine authority. In the Miller’s Tale, read in light of the proverb, Alisoun is sure to cuckold

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John; similarly, in the Merchant’s Tale, viewed in relation to this maxim, May is determined to fool her old husband. Making Chaucer Over While the destruction of manly control certainly takes place in several of the stories I treat in this study, such moments of dissolution are precipitated by a man’s attempt to confirm his power through visible means. These shows of authority, as Chaucer’s various poems demonstrate, belie a lack of manly measure, which the assumption of invisibility confers. But as we see with Impingham’s proverbs, textual making may cover up the manly charades of power that undo many of Chaucer’s men. As a gathering of poetic adages, the proverb collection fragments and reconstructs the Chaucerian corpus to hide those variations on masculinity that invest value in feminine agency. Impingham instead uses his Chaucerian allusions to open the way for a more elaborate yet reductive condemnation of women’s activity than any poem by Chaucer would allow on its own. Although the means by which the Miller’s Alisoun and the Merchant’s May bring about the humiliations of their aged husbands vary considerably, the verses in this collection lump these women together as examples of unruly young wives whose agency destroys the manly stature of their respective husbands. Because Alisoun’s disruptive vivacity and May’s performative passivity are invisible in this proverbial rendering, joining them through pastiche also erases the variations in masculine folly that motivate, perhaps validate, these very different scenes of “feminine” betrayal. In other words, grouping these very different wives together makes their adulterous conduct appear to be unmotivated by anything other than the essentially unmanageable appetites of young women. But hollowing out feminine agency as an intentional expression of womanly identity has a further consequence: it confines masculinity to a set of maxims that express a particularly formulaic position. We may recognize this Chaucer as a product of some unnamed person(a) called “Impingham.” But if we register this assemblage as a Chaucer at all, its ideational creation of a limited masculinity gains traction. Instead of focusing on the varied bits of Chaucerian manhood that this collection leaves out, we are asked to see the proverbs’ correspondences to the larger Chaucerian corpus. As a result, we are asked to accept that Chaucer’s poetry promotes masculine power by condemning feminine will. To ground this contention, the remainder of these proverbs uses what I call “Chaucerian resonance” to condemn women’s agency, employing the connections between Chaucerian moments already invoked to grant the closing couplets

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comprehensive scope. The warning against women’s tears, “Be ware the wele whan wemen wepe” (21), is a saw that January would have done well to heed since May “first and forward. . .bigan to wepe” as a strategem to allay January’s suspicions about her dedication to him (IV. 2187). Because the context of this compilation only recalls May’s duplicitous design to cuckold her blind husband, and not January’s outrageous demand that his young wife remain an unmarried widow, it recasts this story to substantiate the misogynist commonplace that women use tears to cover their indiscretions.33 Read in light of the adage from the Miller’s Tale, this proverb suggests that January’s only mistake is to wed a young bride. His narcissistic projections and jealous manipulations are not manifest here, which means that the youthful intractability of “fresshe May”(IV. 1859) is solely responsible for her husband’s downfall. Using textual compilation as a means to obscure the details of masculine folly, Impingham’s proverbs provide cover to men who are held up for ridicule in Chaucer. As such, this combination of verses accomplishes what men like Chaucer’s Merchant cannot: reinventing the Merchant’s Tale as a successful punitive exposure, this poetic assemblage asserts that feminine agency is the only cause of a man’s failure to exert mastery. Through the claim that a woman “causid Adam to go to helle” (24), these proverbs define a woman’s activity exclusively as a relational index of manly ruin. And, by connecting common domestic experience with the original fall of man, “Also sche made oure Lorde God to dye / Lo! Such a craft a woman can pleye!”(25–26), these verses universalize the threat that feminine agency poses to masculine authority. Because agency makes women dangerous, this collection seeks to deny them a legible role in the everyday hierarchy of marriage except that which husbands beat into wives in the visible domain of the medieval household. Creating a Diversion Women become visible in these proverbs as fixtures that consolidate a singular fiction of masculine coherence. But Impingham’s representation of women in this compilation, I submit, is identical to his treatment of Chaucer. Nevertheless, I am not suggesting that Impingham, by making Chaucer appear to be a passive figure he can use to authenticate his own position, “feminizes” Chaucer. As I have been arguing, binaries of agency and passivity do not split along such neatly gendered lines. Instead, Impingham’s distortion of Chaucer, like his reduction of women, illustrates that any gender depends on the careful management of (in)visibility. Impingham’s representation of women works only insofar as we remain willing to ignore those aspects of feminine behavior that his poetic

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invocations and conjunctions obscure. For example, if we overlook the fact that Criseyde’s “slydynge” is largely due to a suppression of her agency (T&C 5.825), then we can see Troilus’s detachment as an appropriate defense against what then only becomes readable as the inveterate mutability of feminine affection. An audience must allow certain characteristics that might undermine the model of manhood being advanced to pass unseen for his vision of womanly identity to hang together as a coherent image. Impingham’s construction of femininity, then, is as particular as his Chaucerian composition of masculinity. Through their representational specificities, these gender positions distinctively belong to this literary production. But so it is with any gendered creation. As I have labored to show in this book, Chaucer’s representations of femininity and masculinity markedly vary across his works. In closing, I am ready to assert that each literary making—from the Book of the Duchess to the multiple Canterbury Tales—assembles gender positions that are unique to their particular poetic circumstances. But in saying that White, Virginia, or the Wife of St. Denys are women who are different from one another, I am not really claiming to say much. Assuming my own Pandarus pose, in suggesting that Melibee, Appius, or Jankyn are men who are not the same as each other, I am simply seeking to appeal to what we already know, or see. I believe most readers of Chaucer readily admit that they perceive differences between his men (and women). Nevertheless, most of us also recognize a consolidating vision in Chaucer that elides gender variations. Chaucer appears to compile a coherent rubric of manhood through his poetry, but its consistency, I suggest, continually depends upon Chaucer’s deployment of invisibility as a representational strategy. Because a singular model of Chaucerian masculinity never fully comes into view, it achieves the adaptive power that Impingham’s initial Chaucerian allusions underscore in their proverbial conjunction. And it is here, in constructing the invisibility of his own masculine position, that Impingham most fully animates a Chaucerian model of manhood. For, although I have characterized the Chaucerian masculinity that these proverbs structure as Impingham’s, in the context of Harley 7333, that manly position is fully identified with Chaucer in a way that it becomes visible as Chaucer’s. Impingham fades into the background because he focuses vision on the Chaucer of his compilation. And, since this proverbial rendering does not present this Chaucer as Impingham’s Chaucer, this masculinity does not appear to be Impingham’s manhood either. As I have already argued, the ability to cloak his attitude in the guise of Chaucer gives the masculinity of Impingham’s collection greater cultural leverage. But I want to return to this gesture of coverage here in closing,

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because in so obscuring his own position, which we might characterize as a mode of passing, or as a means of masquerade, Impingham pulls off a Chaucerian manhood. Chaucer serves as a distraction from the “real” source of agency in Impingham’s collection (and I put “real” in scare quotes here, once again to acknowledge Impingham as a textual ghost). Nevertheless, Chaucer’s figure can be deployed for a purpose that markedly departs from the texture of his writings because Chaucer refuses to own, inhabit, or animate his works in a fully visible fashion. Lest we forget, Chaucer’s only identifications of his work come in sidelong nods or outright disavowals. Even when he acknowledges himself as a maker whose works will be transmitted, Chaucer posits such terms of authorship in formulaic terms. As Glending Olson has demonstrated, “Adam Scriveyn” takes the form of a “book curse,” and his conclusion in Troilus and Criseyde, “Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye” (T&C 5.1786) is a traditional closing that Chaucer takes from Ovid, among others.34 Putting on Chaucer It is no wonder then, that Chaucer’s corpus can be worn almost like a costume for a masquerade ball. In a final analogy, I suggest that this Chaucerian “putting on” recalls the gruesome performance of Morpheus, who animates Ceyx’s material remains in order to execute Juno’s errand in the Ovidian refabrication that begins Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess. When her husband’s reanimated corpse announces the incontrovertible truth of his death, however, Alcyone does not see this moment as an impersonation. She does not see Morpheus speaking through her husband’s waterlogged body. She sees her husband Ceyx, even as she hears him speak words that cannot possibly be his own. Nevertheless, this grisly scene invests ultimate authority in the message that Morpheus delivers: because her husband actually stands before her, the words his figure speaks gain credible substance. Alcyone, then, knows that this Ceyx both is and is not her husband. Similarly, because the material that Impingham takes up is Chaucer, he may animate it in a way that departs from Chaucer’s figure. We may recognize, like Alcyone, that the proverbs condemning feminine agency as the exclusive cause of masculine weakness are not a faithful performance of any Chaucerian masculinity. But because his manly figure can be made to voice such attitudes, they gain tangible credence anyway. Impingham’s textual reception of Chaucer functions in a manner similar to Morpheus’s animation of the dead Ceyx: he is clearly there, giving life to the poetic figure he has co-opted. But even as we recognize that this rendering simultaneously is and is not Chaucer, we must also acknowledge that in the role of literary receiver, Impingham gains greater latitude

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because he maintains invisibility. His manhood, finally, is Chaucerian because it exercises power through the mobility that passing unseen affords. To be clear, it is not the masculinity that Impingham expresses through his Chaucer that I am identifying as Chaucerian. Indeed, I am suggesting that the masculinity of his Chaucer, because it relies on visible exercises of power, is a model that Chaucer takes apart through his poetry. Instead, this method of covering agency, of disavowing visible control to achieve power, is Impingham’s truest imitation of a Chaucerian manhood. As Impingham’s collection demonstrates, there is no single model of masculinity that is Chaucer’s. While many men and women have gender identities that are fixed, the most successful agents in Chaucer, whether they are women or men, are those who use invisibility to float indistinctly between traditional renderings of masculinity and femininity. Gender, we see in Chaucer, is a trap of visibility.35 And, as we see through Impingham’s collection, even Chaucer can get caught in this textual snare. I characterize the trap of gender as textual, finally, to acknowledge that our ways of seeing Chaucer are inflected by our material encounters with his poetic representations. And our interaction with Chaucer’s corpus is always represented, either to ourselves or to others, as reception. This seems fair, especially since Chaucer expresses his status as maker through imagined textual relations: when he dedicates his Troilus and Criseyde to “moral Gower” and “philosophical Strode” (T&C 5.1856; 1857), he represents their contact with his work as reception. But his invitation for correction, “To vouchen sauf, ther nede is, to correcte, / Of youre benignites and zeles goode” (T&C 5. 1858–59), is, once again, a particular rendering of a formulaic convention.36 Improving Reception Writers commonly ask readers to improve their works in calls that acknowledge and affirm textual making as a process connecting producers and receivers of literary works. By directing his work to those whom he designates, Chaucer further shows that literary works include strategies designed to influence reception. Even so, this nod to a readership also belies an admission that the receivers of texts have ultimate control over a maker’s material leavings. As Impingham’s proverbs attest, receivers can make much or little of an author’s work, especially if they obscure the influence their interpretive positions exert. And, as J. S. P. Tatlock suggests through his primal Chaucer scene—in which he imagines the chaotic conditions of Chaucer’s papers in October, 1400 as an attempt to account for the variations he observes in studying the surviving copies of the Canterbury Tales—we are heirs to this relation of reception.37

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Whether or not we survey the fragmentary remains of the Chaucerian corpus, we must admit that reception creates interpretive fictions that sustain and explain an author’s (in)visible relation to his works. While this authorial (myth) making is a historical process, Impingham’s collection suggests that we may attend to the influence of its particularities only if we acknowledge its shaping presence. Only if we make our methods of reception visible, then, can we take responsibility for the Chaucers we deploy. As a maker taking leave of my own book, I want to acknowledge retraction as my primary means for articulating Chaucerian masculinities. In disavowing masculinity as a model in Chaucer, I affirm it as a mode, a state of becoming rather than being. As such I am suggesting that Chaucer’s manhood is nothing, that is, purely a show of substance that achieves authority through persuasive performance. In this respect masculinity as it functions in Chaucer is no different than femininity: as long as it satisfies formulaic prescriptions, a gender remains legible despite its other manifest departures from those same standards. To take up Judith Butler’s formulation in my own way, even as Chaucer’s poems “do” gender, they also “undo” it.38 Even as Chaucer’s poems fit Impingham’s constructions, they also discomfit them. When they fulfill cultural expectations for gender, any number of Chaucer’s characters simultaneously achieve socially unexpected modes of femininity or masculinity. These unlooked for departures, because they are involved in the confluence of regular gender roles, are easy enough to see. Like other gender modalities, this book finally suggests that Chaucer’s manhood—because it is an active, fluid, means to multiple identities—is hidden in plain sight.

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NOTES

Introduction: Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood 1. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1989), a work that “broke” gender and performativity onto the modern academic stage. In her Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 241, Butler suggests that performance entails reflexive involvement, acknowledging its visual dynamism. 2. Works illustrating performance’s substantive influence over medieval manifestations of identity that have been most important to this project include Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark, eds., Medieval Conduct (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); and Bruce W. Holsinger, “Analytic Survey 6: Medieval Literature and Cultures of Performance,” New Medieval Literatures 6 (2003): 271–311. 3. Kathleen Biddick, “Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible,” Speculum 68 (1993): 389–418. 4. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 5. Works that have been helpful in my thinking about medieval masculinities, both in literary and historical terms, include Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, eds., Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland, 1997); Clare A. Lees, ed., Medieval Masculinities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Peter G. Beidler, ed., Masculinities in Chaucer (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1998); Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 6. See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), whose entire argument for the political centrality of modern performance relies on a type of invisibility that escapes specular regimes of cultural regulation.

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7. Plato, Republic, Book II, 359c-d, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), p. 1000. 8. Indeed, in José Saramago’s Blindness, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (New York: Harcourt, 1995), the extreme epidemic of blindness creates a complete breakdown of ethics and politics. When no one can see, all become invisible to one another. 9. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (London: Kluwer Publications, 1991), p. 60. 10. H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man (1897; New York: Scribner & Sons, 1924). 11. John Landis, Joe Dante, dirs. Amazon Women on the Moon (Universal Studios, 1987). This skit is a spoof of Claude Raines’s performance in James Whale’s The Invisible Man (Universal Studios, 1933), itself a filmic representation of H. G. Wells’s book. Whale’s film, and particularly Raines’s portrayal of the invisible man’s disintegration into dementia, spawned its own B-movie genre, most recently culminating in Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man (Columbia Tri-Star, 2000). 12. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; New York: Vintage, 1995). 13. See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Shultz, eds. Constructing Medieval Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. Matthew Adamson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, eds., Premodern Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1996); Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson, and Alan V. Murray, eds., Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages (Leeds: University of Leeds Press, 1995); John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2000). 14. Critical work on The Pardoner’s Tale, which is both vast and rich, has done more to explore connections between gender, sexuality, and the body than any other tale. For representative examples of this nuanced subfield, see Monica McAlpine, “The Pardoner’s Homosexuality and how it Matters,” PMLA 95 (1980): 8–22; Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Steven Kruger, “Claiming the Pardoner: Toward a Gay Reading of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale,” Exemplaria 6 (1994): 115–40; Glenn Burger, “Kissing the Pardoner,” PMLA 107 (1992): 1143–56; and Robert Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse (New York: Palgrave, 2000). 15. Here I pursue the gender implications of the poetic authority that A. C. Spearing explores in his study, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Other critics who explore the impact of perspectiva on Chaucer’s work and who have greatly influenced the arguments that follow

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17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

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include Norman Klassen, Chaucer on Love, Knowledge, and Sight (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1995); Carolyn P. Collette, Species, Phantasms, and Images: Vision and Medieval Psychology in The Canterbury Tales (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); and Linda Tarte Holley, Chaucer’s Measuring Eye (Houston: Rice University Press, 1990). My reading agrees with the “crisis” theory of masculinity, wherein phallic, hegemonic, or dominant masculinities are always on the verge of falling to pieces. As Arthur Brittan suggests in Masculinity and Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), this theory assumes that in previous centuries, men knew who they were. This present panic, however, also gives men more mobility to adapt their gender positions to changing social conditions. See Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), who investigates the ways in which American masculinities are repackaged after World War II so that a kind of domesticity that earlier might have been viewed as problematic becomes the masculine ideal. Part of Chaucer’s appeal is the sense of familiarity many readers develop with his persona. See Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), who discusses this phenomenon over six centuries. Lee Patterson, “ ‘What Man Artow?’: Authorial Self-Definition in the Tale of Sir Thopas and the Tale of Melibee,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991): 117–75. See Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J.L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 84, who relates the performative theory of J. L. Austin to the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan in a discussion of the effects of “language misfire”: “The act of failing thus opens up the space of referentiality—or of impossible reality—not because something is missing, but because something else is done, or because something else is said: the term ‘misfire’ does not refer to an absence, but to the enactment of a difference” (emphasis original). Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Diminishing Masculinity in Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas,” Masculinities in Chaucer, ed. Peter Beidler (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1998), p. 143 [143–56]. See Anne Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,” Speculum 53 (1978): 94–114. E. T. Donaldson, “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” Speaking of Chaucer (London: Athlone Press, 1971), pp. 1–7; Donald Howard, “Chaucer the Man,” PMLA 80 (1965): 337–43. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 65, suggests that “male mastery rests upon an abyss, and that the repetition through which it is consolidated is radically and ceaselessly undermined,” because the masculine subject is constituted through lack. Her claim that American male subjectivity of the post-war period is represented through traumatic lack is useful in the Chaucerian context

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23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

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because in Chaucer lack functions like a possession defining identity. Because he has lack Chaucer is a man. Howard, “Chaucer the Man,” p. 337, puts it this way: “And in his best poems we feel him as a ‘man speaking to men.’ ” David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. xvii. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (London: Arnold, 1989), pp. 114–18; Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” Partisan Review 42 (1975): 603–14. See Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), especially chapter 5; and Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson, eds., Chaucer Life-Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 411–93. Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987) indicts this totalizing mode of medieval historicist criticism, while Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, analyzes its gender bias. Besides works by Wallace and Patterson listed earlier, also see Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); David Aers, Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge, 1980); Peggy Knapp, Chaucer and the Social Contest (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). See Dinshaw’s Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, listed earlier, and also her article “Chaucer’s Queer Touches / A Queer Touches Chaucer,” Exemplaria 7 (1995): 75–92; Louise O. Fradenburg, “Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress’s Tale,” Exemplaria 1 (1989): 69–115; Christopher Cannon, “Raptus in the Chaumpaigne Release and a Newly Discovered Document Concerning the Life of Geoffrey Chaucer,” Speculum 68 (1993): 74–94; also see Cannon’s “Chaucer and Rape: Uncertainty’s Certainties,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 67–92. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), p. 26, defines the classical body as that which is closed and complete. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Introduction: Midcolonial,” The Postcolonial Middle Ages, p. 5 [1–17], points out the “the impossibility of choosing alterity or continuity” as a critical model for contemporary scholars. See the MED (Middle English Dictionary), s.v. “manhed(e),” 1–3, pp. 134–36, for numerous examples suggesting the three strict senses of this term (1) the human condition; (2) Manly virtues; (3) Belonging to the race, age, or occupation of men. Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 4, 31, 81–82, points out that Jerome and other early Church fathers associated vir with a type of strength that either men or women could assume.

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33. To my eye, some of the most exciting work underway in medieval/ theoretical studies pursues connections between masculinity and passivity. Michael Uebel, “Toward a Symptomatology of Cyberporn,” Theory and Event 3 (2000), argues for the connectedness of masculinity and maschochism, while Robert Mills, “ ‘Whatever You Do Is a Delight to Me!’: Masculinity, Masochism, and Queer Play in Representations of Male Martyrdom,” Exemplaria 13 (2001): 1–37, traces its possibilities in a medieval context. 34. The Digby Plays: With an Incomplete “Morality” of Wisdom, Who is Christ, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS, e.s., 70 (London: Trübner & Co. for EETS, 1896), IV. 962. 35. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 110–69. 36. Bynum’s use of this term in Jesus as Mother is less problematic than most, though she does not acknowledge that passivity is not exclusively a feminine characteristic, particularly in the Middle Ages. In Chaucer studies, uses of “feminize” are more troubling: two prominent examples of this tendency are Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and Jill Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer, Feminist Readings Series (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1991), although these two studies employ the term to quite different effects. Jill Mann, in an attempt to counter what she rightly identifies as a “worrying” habit in medieval feminist criticism—namely, to naturalize the very gender stereotypes that feminist criticism purports to expose— retitled the 2002 edition of her book, Feminizing Chaucer. While it will become clear that I strongly agree with her contention that Chaucer “not only questioned the superiority of active masculinity. . .but that he also questioned the nature of active power itself, distributing agency through a multiplicity of causes which embrace the apparently passive” (p. xv), I do not think that calling such a move “feminizing” is sufficient. I agree that Hansen’s uncritical use of the term as if it has wholly negative connotations is wrong. That said, I do not think Mann succeeds rhetorically in positively recharging the word. Her own appeal to reading Chaucer within a medieval context suggests that this term would be negative when applied to a man. See the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), s.v. “feminize,” which suggests that the term has to do with the construction of womanly identity. 37. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 27, points out that “the very flexibility and elasticity of the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ ensures their longevity.” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, “Introduction,” Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York and London: Garland, 1997), p. xix, make the important further distinction that “male” and “female” are also fluid constructions, “not simple binaries, but multiplicities that are simultaneously relational and oppositional”; however, I am interested here in the ways that gender terms make room for such multiplicities, and even variations, in bodily formations.

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38. Nella Larsen, Passing (1929; New York: Collier Books, 1971). 39. Michel de Certeau, p. xvii, in fact, suggests that marginality itself has become universal, although members of the borderlands of culture are not homogeneous because they do not all have the same access to “information, financial means, and compensation of all kinds.” 40. See the collection of essays, Maria Carla Sànchez and Linda Schlossberg, eds., Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion (New York: New York University Press, 2001), for a complete exploration of the possibilities of this strategy. Although essays in Elaine K. Ginsberg, ed., Passing and the Fictions of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996) are more interested in the juridical binary of transgression and punishment as they apply to the categories of race and gender, Ginsberg in her introduction acknowledges that “passing has the potential to create a space for creative self-determination and agency: the opportunity to construct new identities, to experiment with multiple subject positions, and to cross social and economic boundaries that exclude or oppress” (p. 16). 41. For example, Philip Roth’s novel, The Human Stain (New York: Knopf, 2000), features as its hero a light-skinned African-American who has passed as Jewish since his youth. His downfall from his position as Dean of a stuffy northeastern college, which clunkily pits the secrets that canonicity keeps against the embarrassed exposure that “political correctness” demands, remains interesting because it shows the delicacy with which the protagonist has calibrated his persona of mild-mannered professor. 42. As Margery Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1997), points out “If treason works, it gets mainstreamed or translated into another, non-oppositional category, a new political orthodoxy. . .If we were to. . .replace “treason” with some metrically equivalent word—like “passing”—we would be characterizing a social and sartorial inscription that encodes (as treason does) its own erasure” (p. 234, emphasis original.) Robert Bernasconi, “The Invisibility of Racial Minorities in the Public Realm of Appearances,” American Continental Philosophy: A Reader, ed. Walter Brogan and James Risser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 352–71. 43. Bernasconi, “The Invisibility of Racial Minorities,” p. 358. 44. See, Karma Lochrie, “Women’s ‘Pryvetees’ and Fabliau Politics in the Miller’s Tale,” Exemplaria 6 (1994): 287–304. 45. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd edn. (London: Blackwell, 1958), especially part II. 46. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II, xi, p. 223. 47. Régis Debray, “The Three Ages of Looking,” trans. Eric Rauth, Critical Inquiry 21 (1995): p. 531, 529–55; Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): p. 228, 225–48. 48. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. xvii. 49. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?” pp. 232–33. Interestingly, Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making

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of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 146–55, points out that medieval memory work explicitly involved such “gatherings,” connecting associations in catena and ordering them through collatio. Although he articulates his concerns in relation to early modern studies, the work of Jonathan Gil Harris is useful for defining this methodology. See his article, “Shakespeare’s Hair: Staging the Object of Material Culture,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001), p. 485 [479–91], in which he traces the Aristotelian “particularization” of matter current in premodern science to Marx’s later understanding of objects as part of “the domain of labor and praxis” (emphasis original). The medievalist who most sensitively pursues this “long view” of history is Rita Copeland, whose “Childhood, Pedagogy, and the Literal Sense: From Late Antiquity to the Lollard Heretical Classroom,” New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 125–56, and Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), illustrate the importance of this approach. I am greatly influenced by the excellent work of L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, whose writings illustrate the vital connections between historicism and psychoanalysis in medieval studies. Her suggestion that renunciation leads to satisfaction, which she most fully elaborates in her book, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), influences much of what follows. Yet her emphasis on loss, mourning, and trauma often belies a disciplinary impulse, the desire to show medievalists the ways in which a fascination with the past functions as a psychic defense against temporal rupture. “Anna O.” was the pseudonym used for Bertha Pappenheim by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1957). Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman Native Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 58, expresses in gendered terms the promise and failure that unilateral vision holds for the seer: “What a man looks for. . .is fortunately what he always/never finds: a perfect reflection of himself.” Here I am influenced by Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 12, who urges critics to admit that we “add to reality,” thus countering what he identifies as an unimaginative trend in intellectual culture: “Critical thinking disavows its own inventiveness as much as possible. Because it sees itself as uncovering something it claims was hidden or as debunking something it desires to subtract from the world, it clings to a basically descriptive and justificatory modus operendi.” In medieval studies, I would say that Nicholas Watson’s article, “Desire for the Past,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 59–97, comes closer than anything I have seen to achieving this creative enjoyment, mainly because he avows his commitments (to Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food

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56.

57.

58.

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to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) in an effort to understand the affective connections that book achieves with the past it explores. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 262–68, who traces our intersubjective and intercorporeal commitments even to the point at which “active=passive” (265). As he acknowledges in his 1952 essay “An Unpublished Text by Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of His Work,” The Primacy of Perception, trans. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 11, this phenomenal interconnectivity is fundamentally ethical. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus, Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, introduction by Bertrand Russell (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1961), p. 74, in his final proposition (seven) famously claims that “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” As he makes clear in proposition six, this means endeavoring “to say nothing except what can be said, that is, propositions of natural science.” Much of Wittgenstein’s later writing, however, was an attempt to speak about matters of mind and language, even if they could never be fully clarified or elucidated. Besides the studies by Dinshaw, Hansen, and Mann listed earlier, also see Catherine S. Cox, Gender and Language in Chaucer (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997); Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Sheila Delany, The Naked Text: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Anne Laskaya, Chaucer’s Approach to Gender in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1995); Florence Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Angela Jane Weisl, Conquering the Reign of Femeny: Gender and Genre in Chaucer’s Romance (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1995). See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), who gives a survey of the importance of vision in the Western philosophical tradition, with particular emphasis on twentieth-century thought. In this study I follow Jay, p. 15, in focusing “on a discourse rather than on a visual culture in its entirety.” Thus, while I am influenced by theorists of medieval visual culture, including Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: the First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), as well as D. W. Robertson, Jr., Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), my work focuses on the ways that writers discuss vision and images. While I will acknowledge the way that certain images influence discursive representations, my priority is the way that those images areexpressed through language.

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Chapter 1 Seeing Gender’s Aspects: Vision, Agency, and Masculinity in the Tale of Melibee 1. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 47. Berger’s analysis anticipates Laura Mulvey’s seminal argument, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975): 6–18, only by a few years. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 8, rightly suggests that the Mulveian gaze is an attempt to reassert the viewer’s agency in the face of an image’s power. 2. See Dallas G. Denery, II, Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology, and Religious Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 3. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, 140, Patrologia Latina 37 ( J. P. Migne: Paris, 1845) 16.1825–26: Certe caro tanquam conjux est. . .ama et castiga, donec fiat in una reformatione una Concordia [your flesh is like your wife. . .love and correct it, until it is formed into one bond, one harmony]. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1987), 4.14, p. 85. For the Latin, see Augustine, Confessions: Introduction and Text, ed. James. J. O’Donnell, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 4.14, p. 42: [et obnubilatur ei lumen et non cernitur veritas, et ecce est ante nos]. 4. For early theories of vision, see David Hahm, “Early Hellenistic Theories of Vision and the Perception of Color, Studies in Perception, ed. Peter K. Machamer and Robert G. Turnbull (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1978), pp. 60–95. David C. Lindberg, “The Science of Optics,” Studies in the History of Medieval Optics (London: Variorum Reprints, 1983) I: 338–68; other histories of optics include those by Vasco Ronchi, notably Optics: The Science of Vision, trans. Edward Rosen (New York: New York University Press, 1957), and The Nature of Light: An Historical Survey, trans. V. Barocas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); for the connections between femininity and vision in Greek thought, see Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 2–8. 5. See David C. Lindberg, Theories of Optics from Al-kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), who, in my opinion, gives the most useful survey of shifts and continuities between ancient and medieval optical theory. Also of critical importance to this study, Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2002), links theories of vision to medieval conceptions of embodiment, including gender. Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), gives a fascinating historical account of the relations between medieval optics and allegory. 6. For key discussions of the dominating masculine gaze, including attempts to rework this model, see Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” pp. 6–18; Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade,” Screen 23 (1982): 28–54; and bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), pp. 115–31.

164

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7. David C. Lindberg, ed., trans., “Introduction,” Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva in the Middle Ages: A Critical Edition and English Translation of Bacon’s Perspectiva with Introduction and Notes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. xxix–xxx; also see, Stephen Gersh, Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism: The Latin Tradition (South Bend, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1986), pp. 421–33. 8. Lindberg, Theories of Vision, pp. 3–6, pp. 9–11, pp. 91–94; Plato, Timaeus, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato, trans. Francis Macdonald Cornford (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co., 1937), 45b–46c. 9. Lindberg, Theories of Vision, pp. 3–6, pp. 9–11, pp. 91–94. 10. Augustine, The Trinity, trans. S. McKenna, Fathers of the Church, 45 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1963), p. 315 (1.1); p. 343 (12.1); p. 355 (12.8). Augustine associates internal vision with the mind and external vision with the senses. 11. Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor, 2 vols. Ancient Christian Writers, ed. Johannes Quasten, 41–42, (New York: Newman, 1982), 2:191 (12.11.22). 12. Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 1: 37–38. 13. Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 2: 194 (12.25). 14. Augustine, Confessions, 10.35. p. 243: [stelio muscas captans vel aranea retibus suis inruentes implicans saepe intentum facit (O’Donnell, vol. 1, 10.35, p. 141)]. 15. Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 229. 16. A. Mark Smith, “Getting the Big Picture in Perspectivist Optics,” Isis 72 (1981), p. 571 [568–89]. 17. Aristotle, De anima, Aristotle: On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, trans. W. S. Hett. Loeb Classical Library 288 (1957; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 2.12.424a. 18. Lindberg, Theories of Vision, 104–7; also see Lindberg, “Introduction,” Roger Bacon and the Origins of “Perspectiva,” pp. xl–xlii. For the attack on extramission’s theory of rays, see Albertus Magnus, Summa de creatures, II, quest. 22, in Opera omnia, ed. Auguste Borgnet, 38 vols. (Paris: Vivès, 1890–95), vol. 35, pp. 210–28. 19. For Plato’s claim, see the Timaeus, 53d. For its influence, see David C. Lindberg, “On the Applicability of Mathematics to Nature: Roger Bacon and his Predecessors,” British Journal for the History of Science 15 (1982), pp. 7–10 [3–25]. 20. Lindberg, Theories of Vision, 94–95; A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and Origins of Experimental Science 1100–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), pp. 116–17. 21. Lindberg, “Introduction,” Roger Bacon and the Origins of ‘Perspectiva,’ p. xli. 22. Jeremiah M. G. Hackett, “The Attitude of Roger Bacon to the Scientia of Albertus Magnus,” Albertus Magnus and the Sciences, ed. James A. Weisheiple (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1980), pp. 53–72;

NOTES

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

165

Roger Bacon, Opus minus, Opera quædam hactenus inedita, ed. J. S. Brewer, 3 vols. (Wiesbaden: Kraus Reprints, 1965), vol. 2, p. 327. He also attacks Albert in his Opus tertium, Brewer, vol. 1, p. 38. Robert Grosseteste, On Light, trans. Clare C. Riedl (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1942), p. 10: “Light is the first corporeal form.” See Crombie, Robert Grosseteste, pp. 106–7; Lindberg, Theories of Vision, 95–98; and Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, 67–73, for a discussion of Grosseteste’s view of light. See Lindberg, “Introduction,” Roger Bacon and the Origins of “Perspectiva,” p. xxxviii. Smith, “Getting the Big Picture,” p. 568, n. 1, presents a pithy timeline for the major works of this tradition. De aspectibus, the Latin translation of Alhacen’s Arabic Book of Optics (eleventh century), appeared in the midthirteenth century; Roger Bacon composed his Perspectiva (Opus Majus, Pt. V) in the 1260s; Witelo’s Perspectiva appeared in the mid-1270s, and John Pecham’s Perspectiva communis dates to the late 1270s. On Bacon’s life, works, and influence, see Theodore Crowley, O. F. M., Roger Bacon: The Problem of the Soul in His Philosophical Commentaries (Louvain: Éditions de l’Institut supérieur de philosophie, 1950); and Stewart Easton, Roger Bacon and His Search for a Universal Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952). This is not to diminish the importance of the other perspectivists. In fact, as the most widely disseminated perspectival treatise, Pecham’s Perspectiva communis was the most familiar statement of optical theory until the seventeenth century. Furthermore, as Akbari points out in Seeing through the Veil, pp. 38–39, the encyclopedias would have provided a major source for general knowledge about the processes of sight. For a discussion of Pecham’s work, including its wide-ranging influence, see David C. Lindberg, “Introduction,” John Pecham and the Science of Optics: Perspectiva communis, ed. David C. Lindberg (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), pp. 12–32. Bacon has often been credited with instigating this movement, although it is most accurate to say that they shared “a common fund of information” (Lindberg, ed. John Pecham, p. 26). My interest in Bacon is in his elaborate effort to illustrate the worth of optics in spiritual terms. See Denery, Seeing and Being Seen, pp. 75–115, who suggests that Peter of Limoges took Bacon’s program very seriously, attempting to explicate the moral dimensions of sight in his widely read, Tractatus moralis de oculo (written around 1280). For Bacon’s associations with heresy and magic, see George Molland, “Roger Bacon as Magician,” Traditio 30 (1974): 455–60; and Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1923), pp. 616–92. See Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 87–126. Bacon’s major influences seem to have been Ptolemy, Alhacen, and Grosseteste (as well as the many sources that informed the works of these

166

30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

NOTES

writers). See Lindberg, “Introduction,” Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva, xlii–xliii, for a complete catalogue. References to Bacon are formatted to give a sense of the Perspectiva’s independence from and inclusion within the Opus Majus. For all citations, I use David C. Lindberg’s facing page edition (see n. 7 for complete details), hereafter referred to as the Perspectiva. I follow the internal divisions of that work, citing part, distinction, chapter, and line numbers. For readers using an edition of the Opus Majus, each citation to the Perspectiva is to Pt. V of that text. See n. 49 for references to the standard Latin and English editions of the Opus Majus. Bacon, Perspectiva, III.iii.2, lines 139–41 [Et in statu presenti est visio triplex, scilicet recta in perfectis, fracta in imperfectis, et in malis et in negligentibus mandata Dei est per reflexionem]. Bacon, Perspectiva, III.iii.3, lines 160–62 [Et sic pro utilitatibus rei publice et contra infidels possent huiusmodi apparitions fiere utiliter]. David C. Lindberg, “Science as Handmaiden: Roger Bacon and the Patristic Tradition,” Isis 78 (1987): 518–36, 527. “[Y]ou shall bring her home to your house and she shall shave her head and pare her nails. And she shall put off her captive’s garb, and shall remain in your house and bewail her father and mother a full month; after that you may go in to her, and be her husband, and she shall be your wife.” For analysis of this passage’s gendered model of reading, see Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 3–27. See Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (New York: Antheneum, 1985), pp. 63–87, and pp. 177–209 for a discussion of grammatical gender and the habit of representing allegorical figures of wisdom as female. More recently, Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), suggests that the spectrum of female tutelary figures represents a Christian divinization of the feminine. Lynn Thorndike, “Roger Bacon and Experimental Method in the Middle Ages,” Philosophical Review 23 (1914): 283–92; also see Easton, Roger Bacon and his Search for a Universal Science; and N.W. Fisher and Sabetai Unguru, “Experimental Science and Mathematics in Roger Bacon’s Thought,” Traditio 27 (1971): 353–78. Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, p. 74, explains its roots in the Indo-European spek (“to see”) and relates Bacon’s definition of “species” to those of Augustine and Grosseteste. Roger Bacon, De multiplicatione specierum, Roger Bacon’s Philosophy of Nature: A Critical Edition with English Translation, Introduction, and Notes, of “De multiplicatione specierum” and “De speculis comburentibus”, ed. David C. Lindberg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), I.i.42, 43–44, 46–48, 53–55, 56–58, 60–61, 64, 67–69: [Dicitur autem similitudo et ymago respectu generantis eam. . .Dicitur autem species respectu sensus et intellectus secundum usum Aristotelis et naturalium. . .Dicitur vero ydolum respectu speculorum, sic enim multum utimur. Dicitur fantasma et simulacrum in

NOTES

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

49.

50.

51.

167

aparitionibus sompniorum. . .Forma quidem vocatur in usu Alhacen, auctoris Perspective vulgate. Intentio vocatur in usu vulgi naturalium propter debilitatem sui esse respectu rei. . .Umbra philosophorum vocatur, quia non est bene sensibilis nisi in casu duplici dicto, scilicet de radio cadente per fenestram et de specie fortiter colorati. . .Dicitur vero virtus respectu generationis et corruptionis. . .Impressio vocatur quia est similes impressionibus. . .Vocatur autem passio quia medium et sensus in recipiendo speciem patiuntur transmutationem in sua substantia]. Bacon, De multiplicatione specierum, VI.ii.24: [idem facit virtus patris in seminibus]. Bacon, De multiplicatione specierum, VI.ii.30–31: [et ideo species et virtus patris recepta in matre conservatur per presentiam matris]. Bacon, De multiplicatione specierum , VI.ii.29–30: [pater et mater are eiusdem nature specifice]. Bacon, De multiplicatione specierum , VI.ii.31–32: [que sufficit loco patris propter idemptitatem nature specifice]. Bacon, De multiplicatione specierum , I.iii.50–70. Bacon, De multiplicatione specierum , I.ii. Bacon, Perspectiva, I.vii.2. This chapter, “In which it is shown that in the act of sight the species or power of the eye extends to the visible object,” sets forth Bacon’s position, which he elaborates in the next two chapters. See also, Biernoff, pp. 85–92, who is particularly helpful in elucidating the relationship that this reciprocity implies. Bacon, Perspectiva, I.vii.4, 143–44: [species rerum mundi non sunt nate statim de se agree plenam actionem in visum propter eius nobilitatem]. Bacon, Perspectiva, I.vii.4, 147–49: [Et sic preparat incessum speciei ipsius rei visibilis, et insuper eam nobilitat, ut omnino sit conformis et proportionalis nobilitati corporis animati, quod est oculus]. Bacon, Perspectiva, I.vi.1, 18–21: [Nam principaliter non requiritur nisi quod visus percipiat distincte rem ipsam et certitudinaliter et sufficienter; et hoc fieri potest per unam pyramidem in qua sint tot linee quot sunt partes in corpore viso]. Bacon, Perspectiva, I.vii.4, 157–62. Bacon, Perspectiva, I.vii.4., 167–69: [una pyramid est principalis, scilicet illla cuius axis est linea transiens per centrum omnium partium oculi, que est axis totius oculi]. For the English citations, see The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, trans. Robert Belle Burke, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1928); for the Latin, I use The “Opus Majus” of Roger Bacon, ed. John Henry Bridges, 2 vols. (Frankfurt/Main: Minerva G.m.b.H, 1964). Bacon, Opus Majus, Pt. IV, “The Application of Mathematics to Sacred Subjects,” 1: 234: [quia nihil est nobis ad plenum intelligibile, nisi figuraliter ante oculos nostros disponatur; et ideo in scriptura Dei tota rerum sapientia figurationibus geometricis certificanda continetur et longe melius quam ipsa philosophia posit exprimere (Bridges, 1:212)]. Bacon, Perspectiva, III, iii.1, 68–74: [Et dictum est quod ad visionem exigitur non solum ut fiat intus suscipiendo, sed estramittendo et cooperando per

168

52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

57. 58. 59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

66. 67.

68.

NOTES

virtutem propriam. Nam motus liberi arbitrii et consensus requiruntur cum gratia Dei ad hoc ut videamus et consequamur statum salutis]. Bacon, Perspectiva, III.iii.1, 36–37: [Hec est igitur litteralis expositio. . . pupille spiritualis, id est, anime]. Bacon, Perspectiva, III.iii.1, 17–18: [et ideo nichil magis necessarium est sensui litterali et spirituali sicut huius scientie certitudo]. Bacon, Perspectiva, III.iii.2, 79–81: [Nam sicut hichil videmus coporaliter sine luce corporali, sic impossibile est nos aliquid videre spiritualiter sine luce spirituali gratie divine]. Bacon, Opus Majus, Pt. IV, “The Application of Mathematics to Sacred Subjects,” 1: 242: [quando oportet vel in confessione vel ob aliam aliquam causam loqui cum mulieribus. Nam omnes homines quantumcunque sanctos species fortes in hac parte turbarent (Bridges, 1: 219)]. Bacon, Opus Majus, Pt. IV, “The Apllication of Mathematics to Sacred Subjects,” 1: 241: [Et Adam allectus est ut se et totum genus humanum specierum sensibilium multiplicatione damnaret. Sic David sanctus propheta per speciem Betsabeae deceptus de adulterio cecidit in homicidium. Sic sense presbyteri quos judicavit Daniel secie mulieris decepti sunt (Bridges, 1: 219)]. Bacon, Opus Majus, Pt. VII.iii.5, 2: 680 (Bridges, 2: 271). Bacon, Perspectiva, I.vii.4, 176–77: [Species autem oculi est species animati corporis, in qua virtus anime dominatur]. Bacon, Opus Majus, Pt. IV, “The Application of Mathematics to Sacred Subjects,” 1: 241: [Sic Eva receipt seciem soni serpentis et pomi visibilis et suavis odoris (Bridges, 1: 219)]. Bacon, Opus Majus, Pt. IV, “The Application of Mathematics to Sacred Subjects,” 1: 241–42: [ut vitent pyramides breviores, atque multiplications principales et rectas et ad angulos aequales (Bridges, 1: 219)]. Bacon, Opus Majus, Pt. VII.iii.5, 2: 679: [Impedit enim consilium voluptas rationi inimica et mentis oculos perstringit (Bridges, 2: 270)]. Bacon, Perspectiva, I.i.1, 28–29: [quia cecus nichil potest de hoc mundo quod dignum sit experiri]. Bacon, Opus Majus, Pt. VII.iv.1, 2: 821 (Bridges, 2: 402). Bacon, Opus Majus, Pt. VII.iv.1, 2: 814: [Sed maximum quidem et arduissimum est subjicere se vuluntati alterius omnino; ut quilibet novit. . .est Christi legem omnino praevalere (Bridges, 2: 395)]. Bacon, Opus Majus, Pt. VI.ex.iii, “Chapter on the Third Prerogative or the Dignity of the Experimental Art,” 2: 633: [et imperat aliis scentiis, sicut ancillis suis (Bridges, 2: 221)]. Bacon, Opus Majus, Pt. VII.iv.1, 2: 821 (Bridges, 2: 402). Herbert Kessler, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), traces this tradition in the pictorial art and aesthetic theories of Byzantium and the Latin West. This idea derives from Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), 3.5.9. The most well known elaborators of this critical methodology in the twentieth century are D.W. Robertson, Jr., and Bernard F. Huppé.

NOTES

69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

75.

76.

77. 78.

79.

169

See n., 75 for their allegorical interpretation of Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee. Besides other works listed later, see their, Fruyt and Chaf: Studies in Chaucer’s Allegories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), which sets their exegetical interpretations of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and Parliament of Fowls in relation to other medieval allegorical accounts. Rita Copeland and Stephen Melville, “Allegory and Allegoresis, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics,” Exemplaria 3 (1991), p. 169 [159–87]. Copeland and Melville, “Allegory and Allegoresis, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics,” p. 171. Bacon, Opus Majus, Pt. VII.iv.1, 2: 822: [Praeterea nec possemus sustinere propter horrorem et abominationem. Nam cor humanum non posset perferre ut carnes crudas et vivas masticaret et comederet et sanguinem crudum hauriret (Bridges, 2: 403)]. For a discussion, see Jesse M. Gellrich, “Allegory and Materiality: Medieval Foundations of the Modern Debate,” Germanic Review 77 (2002): 146–59. Bacon, De multiplicatione specierum, I.i.24–26. W.F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster, eds., Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (London: Routledge, 1958. First published in 1941), pp. 560–614. In the grandest rendering of the tale’s allegorical scope, D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 368; and Bernard F. Huppé, A Reading of the Canterbury Tales (Albany: SUNY Press, 1967), p. 235, believe this tale’s “sentence” is key to the spiritual allegory that is the Canterbury Tales. Lee Patterson, “ ‘What Man Artow?’: Authorial Self-Definition in the Tale of Sir Thopas and the Tale of Melibee,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 117–75, is in my view the best treatment of Chaucer’s literary authority as it emerges from this sequence. Also valuable is Larry Scanlon’s discussion of this tale as it relates to one strand of the fürstenspiegel tradition in his book, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 206–15. I am most intrigued by his claim, p. 212, that the lay authority he sees Melibee expounding “describes the rule of law as it was coming to be defined in later medieval England. Although I do not treat the intersection of documentary culture and gender visibility in this study, it holds fascinating potential.” See Ephesians 5, in which Paul compares marriage to Christ’s relation to the Church. James Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 187–90; pp. 235–75; pp. 332–36; and John Noonan, “The Power to Choose,” Viator 4 (1973): 419–34, trace the development of the consensual theory of marriage during the Middle Ages. See Michael M. Sheehan, Marriage, Family, and Law in Medieval Europe, ed. James K. Farge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 84, who explains that after Peter Lombard included marriage among the seven sacraments the institution was overhauled “at all levels of thought ranging from theology, through moral guidance and law, to confessional practices.”

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80. Henry Ansgar Kelly, Love and Marriage in the Age of Chaucer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975) for a discussion of clandestine marriage. 81. See Matthew 19: 5–6, which describes marriage thus, “And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” 82. While marital consent and companionate affection are two different concepts in the history of marriage, Frederick Pedersen, in his article, “‘Maritalis affectio’: Marital Affection and Property in Fourteenth-Century York Cause Papers,” Women, Marriage, and Family in Medieval Christendom: Essays in Memory of Michael M. Sheehan, ed. Constance M. Rousseau and Joel T. Rosenthal, Studies in Medieval Culture, vol. 37, Medieval Institute Publications (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan UP, 1998) 175–209, explains that the two were becoming more closely linked during the later Middle Ages: “Marital affection is an elusive concept with a long history in European law. The meaning of the phrase developed over the centuries, initially meaning the wiling of the (property) consequences of marriage, but developing into a phrase that encompassed the internal psychological quality of marriage” (207). 83. Hugh of St. Victor, De sacramentis Christianae fidei, On the Sacraments of Christian Faith, trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy, 1951), p. 329. 84. Sharon Farmer, “Persuasive Voices: Clerical Images of Medieval Wives,” Speculum 61 (1986): 517–43. 85. Thomas of Chobham, Thomae de Chobham: Summa Confessorum, ed. F. Broomfield, Analecta Mediaevalia Namurcensia 25 (Louvain, Éditions Nauwelaerts, 1968), p. 375: [sicut parti corporis sui. . .Nullus enim sacerdos ita potest cor viri emollire sicut potest uxor]. 86. See Jacques Lacan, “God and the Jouissance of [/]The Woman,” Feminine Sexuality, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1982), p. 138 [137–61]. As Glenn Burger argues in his book, Chaucer’s Queer Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 73, the “hybridity” of medieval conjugality required “the feminizing of the female (as Aristotelian body and receptacle, mother, helpmeet, needing male protection and regulation) and the masculinizing of the male (as possessing the vital seed in procreation, head of the household, agent of outward action) in the newly sacramentalized partnership of marriage.” 87. Elizabeth Robertson, Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), pp. 77–93, shows that marriage was also allegorized in religious writings in order to separate women from sexuality. 88. See W. W. Lawrence, “The Tale of Melibeus,” Essays and Studies in Honor of Carleton Brown (New York: New York University Press, 1940), pp. 100–110, and his Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), pp. 119–44, who argues that the tale’s concern is marriage. 89. In this line of argument I am influenced by Carolyn P. Collette, “Heeding the Counsel of Prudence: A Context for the Melibee,” Chaucer Review 29

NOTES

90.

91.

92.

93.

94.

95.

96.

171

(1995): 419 [416–29], who argues that this story, including Chaucer’s use of it, “may be understood as part of a group of texts designed to instruct aristocratic women,” though she does not pursue further the relevance of this type of wife to constructions of masculinity. Also see David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 212–46, whose insightful chapter on this tale galvanizes the argument that follows. Besides Collette, n. 89, see Elizabeth Lunz, “Chaucer’s Prudence as the Ideal of the Virtuous Woman,” Essays in Literature 4 (1977), p. 4 [3–10], argues “that Chaucer introduced Prudence as an ideal of human virtue, offered specifically as a model to women for their roles in medieval marriage and society.” Monica McAlpine, “Criseyde’s Prudence,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25 (2003): 199–224, considers this virtue in relation to Criseyde, but in doing so suggests the importance of this trait to late medieval notions of femininity. Denise N. Baker, “Chaucer and Moral Philosophy: The Virtuous Women of The Canterbury Tales,” Medium Aevum 60 (1991): 241–56, treats Prudence’s representation in abstract philosophical terms. See Joan Ferrante, Woman as Image in Medieval Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), p. 42, who claims that marriage was an important way for writers to figure “the harmony that results from the union of opposites” as a means of instituting order over disparate matter. Charles A. Owen, Jr., “The Tale of Melibee,” Chaucer Review 7 (1973): 269–70 [267–80], notes that during the turbulence of the late 1380s—when some argue that Melibee was written to address political events—Chaucer was very interested in articulating and developing the image of the “good woman.” See Sawles Warde, Medieval English Prose for Women: Selections from the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse, ed. Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 86–109. In this narrative, wit’s control over the physical senses, who would otherwise be run by his wife will, is figured in terms of a husband governing his household; In the same vein, Bernard of Clairvaux, On Conversion, Bernard Clairvaux, Selected Works, trans. G. R. Evan, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), pp. 65–97, deploys a grotesque image of a wife as will, who causes upheaval in the household because she does not respect her husband, Master Reason. Prudentius’s fourth-century Latin poem, Psychomachia, is often cited as the first personification allegory, and has come to signify an entire genre, which, Michel Zink, “The Allegorical Poem as Interior Memoir,” Yale French Studies 70 (1986), p. 100 [100–126], suggests should be “understood in the broadest sense as a description of the movements and the conflicts within psychological as well as moral consciousness.” For a discussion of the virtues as they were commonly disseminated to a lay audience in the later Middle Ages, see Richard Neuhauser, The Treatise on Vices and Virtues in Latin and the Vernaculars ( pre-1800 Works ) (Torholt: Brepols, 1993), chapter 2. Rosemond Tuve, “Notes on the Virtues and Vices, Part 1,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26 (1963), p. 267 [264–303], identifies

172

NOTES

97.

98.

99.

100.

101. 102.

103.

104.

105. 106.

107.

Aristotle, Cicero, Macrobius, and the “Pseudo Seneca,” Martin of Braga, as the “four streams” of classical thought that inform this tradition. D. L. Burnley, Chaucer’s Language and the Philosopher’s Tradition (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1979), pp. 82–116; pp. 151–70, is particularly good at tracing the ways that prudence was adapted to a Christian model of compassion. See Warner and Newman, n. 34, for this larger tradition. In relation to prudence, see J. A. Burrow, “The Third Eye of Prudence,” Medieval Futures: Attitudes to the Future in the Middle Ages, ed. J. A. Burrow and Ian P. Wei (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2000), 37–48. See A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, eds., with assistance from David Wallace, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100–1375: The Commentary Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 212–76, for a discussion and examples of the quaestio or the disputatio. Prudence’s style is more similar to these fictions of orality than to interactive or performative models (such as the quodlibet). This is David Wallace’s phrase, which forms part of his chapter’s title. His concluding suggestion, Chaucerian Polity, p. 246, that women’s “household rhetoric” cannot be “acknowledged as political work,” indicates his awareness of the female invisibility that this discourse mandates for women (emphasis original). See n. 89, earlier, for full citations. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 225; Farmer, “Persuasive Voices,” 517–43, also cites instances in which women are urged to use persuasion, even deception, in order to make sure husbands dispense property to the church. Paul Strohm, “Queens as Intercessors,” Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 95–120. As Strohm points out, the decline in queenly authority from its zenith in the twelfth century resulted in the formation of a new feminine role, that of intercessor. This type of influence relied on appeals to the female body, either as alluring or as vulnerable. Strohm acknowledges, in contrast, that this kind of female authority is different than Prudence’s “good counselor” role. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (New York: Methuen, 1987); and Lee Patterson, “ ‘For the Wyves love of Bathe’: Feminine Rhetoric and Poetic Resolution in the Roman de la Rose and the Canterbury Tales,” Speculum 58 (1983): 656–95. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 218. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 221. Wallace suggests the most common “go-betweens” are wives and friars, but most of his examples have to do with the ways that wives prevent masculine violence in the private space of the domestic. See The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter, The Good Wyfe Wold a Pylgremage, The Thewis of Gud Women, ed. Tauno F. Mustanoja (Helsinki: Suomalaisan Kirjallisuuden Seuran, 1948), E.V.24–7.

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108. For example, in The Consail and Teiching at the Vys Man Gaif His Sone, Ratis Raving and other Moral and Religious Pieces in Prose and Verse, ed. J. R. Lumby, EETS 43 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for EETS, 1870), the father repeatedly suggests this to his son. 109. The most famous example of this in Chaucer’s canon is summed up by the Wife of Bath’s story of Midas’s wife, who could not keep the secret that her husband had “asses eres” (III. 954) growing on his head. See chapter 4 for a discussion of the Wife’s relations to secrecy and visibility. 110. Burnley, Chaucer’s Language and the Philosopher’s Tradition, p. 52. 111. See Le Mesnagier de Paris, ed. Georgina E. Brereton and Janet M. Ferrier, trad. Karin Ueltschi, Lettres Gothiques (Paris: Librarie Générale Française, 1994) I.ix (pp. 324–407). 112. William Caxton, The Book of the Knight of the Tower, ed. M. Y. Offord, EETS, Supplementary Series, 2 (London: Oxford University Press for EETS, 1971), lxxv. 27–28; 33–34. 113. As Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, argues, p. 172, “In the sense that a woman’s ‘head’ was her husband or father, she lacked the necessary social and symbolic organs to represent the entire corporeal hierarchy. Instead, defined primarily by her reproductive function, she served as man’s body, both literally and metaphorically.” 114. Also see Wayne Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995) who suggests that early modern discussions of rhetorical restraint use the image of a discreet woman to suggest this virtue. 115. A flyleaf poem written around 1464 expresses the popular sentiment that Henry VI’s troubles derived from his marriage to Margaret of Anjou in terms that illustrate Melibee’s worries about gendered visibility. Once Henry was able to ride over England (in a gesture that recalls Melibee’s roaming over the fields) dressed in cloth of red gold; but now, after allowing his wife to rule his counsel, he dares not show himself. Henry, significantly, makes his complaint beside a hall underneath a hill, from which he claims Margaret “was the cause of all my mon.” The poem’s refrain, taken as its title, “God Amend Wykkyd Cownscell,” associates visible wifely agency with the dissolution of a man’s public image. See Rossell Hope Robbins, ed., “God Amende Wykkyd Cownscell,” Neuphilogische Mitteilungen 57 (1956): 94–102, for the text of the 53–line poem. 116. W. Arthur Turner, “Biblical Women in The Merchant’s Tale and The Tale of Melibee,” English Language Notes 3 (1965): 92–95. 117. Daniel Kempton, “Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee: ‘A litel thing in prose,’” Genre 21 (1988): 263–78, points out that Prudence invokes contradictory authorities in a manner similar to a scholastic Book of Sentences. 118. John S. P. Tatlock, The Development and Chronology of Chaucer’s Works (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963), p. 189. 119. The classic treatment of Chaucer’s valorization of suffering is Georgia Ronan Crampton, The Condition of Creatures: Suffering and Action in Chaucer

174

120.

121. 122.

123.

124.

125.

126.

NOTES

and Spenser (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974). See L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 1–41 for a theorization of sacrifice’s relation to the multiple states of enjoyment. See Burrow, “The Third Eye of Prudence,” for a discussion of this iconographic tradition. Akbari, Seeing through the Veil, p. 7, classifies Prudence’s mirror as “the good mirror which makes visible what could otherwise never be perceived. . .the helpful mirror of foresight held by Prudence.” Burrow, “The Third Eye of Prudence,” pp. 39–41. Bacon, Opus Majus, Pt. VI.ex.iii, “Chapter on the Third Prerogative or the Dignity of the Experimental Art,” 2: 632: [ut tactum est in futurorum praesentium et praeteritorum cognitione speciali, atque in operum mirabilium exhibitione pro Ecclesia et Republica (Bridges, 2: 220)]. See Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, pp. 110–11, and Farmer, “Persuasive Voices,” pp. 517–43, who distinguish between wife as sensible (assertive) counselor and vulnerable (passive) intercessor. See Dolores Palermo, “What Chaucer Really Did to Le Livre de Melibee,” Philological Quarterly 53 (1974), p. 306; 316 [304–20], whose dismissals of Prudence derive from her sense that the tale is a “pretentious and undistinguished piece of bourgeois moralizing” that is vulgar for its very disruption of gender order. Later, she makes the gendered stakes of the Thopas-Melibee explicit, suggesting that Prudence is a joke because the tale satirizes her overblown rhetorical style: “While Sir Thopas exudes a sort of medieval machismo. . .in the Melibee, by way of contrast, a domineering albeit polite wife argues her husband into acquiescence.” Turner, “Biblical Women in The Merchant’s Tale,” p. 94, calls Prudence “insufferably patient and pedantic.” Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 207, asks “What wife was ever so learned or pedantic as Prudence in Chaucer’s Melibee?” Edward E. Foster, “Has Anyone Here Read Melibee?” Chaucer Review 34 (2000): 398 [398–409]. I am interested in Foster’s excuses for Melibee’s unpopularity because they admit and justify Melibee’s status as Chaucer’s invisible tale, although his reading only applies to later audiences. For analyses of the tale’s manuscript- and print-traditions, which attest to its popularity, see John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales, Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, 8 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 2: 371–72; Seth Lerer, “ ‘Now holde youre mouth’: The Romance of Orality in the Thopas-Melibee Section of the Canterbury Tales,” Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry, ed. M. C. Amodio (New York: Garland, 1994), pp. 181–202; Daniel S. Sylvia, “Some Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer and Middle English Studies in Honor of Rossell Hope Robbins, ed. Beryl Rowland (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974), pp. 153–63. To be fair, most readers do not say that Prudence is tedious (with notable exceptions; see n. 124). In fact, most critics who dismiss the tale as boring, dull, or tedious assign this fault to Chaucer or his source. Yet the simple

NOTES

127.

128. 129.

130.

131.

132. 133.

134.

175

truth is that Prudence speaks for much of the tale. So, when Ruth Waterhouse and Gwen Griffiths, “ ‘Sweete Wordes’ of Non-Sense: The Deconstruction of the Moral Melibee, part I” Chaucer Review 23 (1989): 338, [338–61], claim that “It is not necessary to read far into the tale to realize that its truly tedious surface level can have such a soporific effect upon an audience,” the droning to which they refer is Prudence’s speaking. There are three traditional views of the tale: it stands as a marker of medieval alterity, more popular then than now; it serves as an example of Chaucerian irony, as a joke on any number of targets; or it serves as a moral / historical allegory, a structural point that gives shape to the Canterbury collection. For the “difference theory,” see E. Talbot Donaldson, ed. Chaucer’s Poetry (New York: Ronald Press, 1975), p. 937; and Lee Patterson, “What Man Artow?” 117–75; for the “joke theory,” see Trevor Whittock, A Reading of the “Canterbury Tales” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 210–13; John Gardner, The Life and Times of Chaucer (New York: Knopf, 1977), pp. 291–96; for “allegory readings,” see Donald R. Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 309; Lynn Staley Johnson, “Inverse Counsel: Contexts for the Melibee,” Studies in Philology 87 (1990): 137–55; Paul Strohm, “The Allegory of the Tale of Melibee,” Chaucer Review 2 (1967): 32–42. Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), p. 164. My reading thus disagrees with Mari Pakkala-Weckström, “Prudence and the Power of Persuasion—Language and Maistrie in the Tale of Melibee,” Chaucer Review 35 (2001): 399–412. Paul Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, pp. 104–5, n. 9, reports a conversation with Susan Crane in which together they come up with an economical rendering of the point of this chapter: “The possibility arises, in other words, that what appears to be a prescription for female conduct might not be about women at all, but only a way of saying something further about men.” Indeed, Paul Strohm, “The Allegory,” p. 34, suggests that readers’ difficulties with the tale arise from the “curious passivity” Prudence recommends in the face of foes who, according to one exegetical tradition, are meant to be fought with concentrated agency. In early printed Chaucers, the Melibee is often identified as “Chaucer’s Tale.” See particularly Alan T. Gaylord, “Sentence and Solaas in Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales: Harry Bailly as Horseback Editor,” PMLA 82 (1967): 226–35. The historical associations of the tale have been asserted and renewed. In the 1940s the critical debate focused on whether Chaucer’s translation of a work recommending patience in a ruler was directed to prevent John of Gaunt’s impending campaign to support his wife’s claim to the throne of Castile. See, J. Leslie Hotson, “The Tale of Melibeus and John of Gaunt,” Studies in Philology 18 (1921): 429–52; W.W. Lawrence, “The Tale of Melibeus,” pp. 100–110. Gardiner Stillwell, “The Political Meaning of Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee,” Speculum 19 (1944): 433–44,

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anticipates my argument that men realized long ago that personal matters retained political importance, arguing as he does that Prudence might be a model of wifely counselor that Anne was perhaps being urged to assume in royal affairs. Later reassessments of the political valence of the tale include William Askins, “The Tale of Melibee and the Crisis at Westminster, November, 1387,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 2 (1986): 103–12; V. J. Scattergood, “Chaucer and the French War: Sir Thopas and Melibee,” Court and Poet: Selected Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, ed. Glyn S. Burgess (Liverpool: Cairns, 1980), pp. 287–96; R. F. Yeager, “Pax Poetica, On the Pacifism of Chaucer and Gower,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1987): 97–122; Johnson, “Inverse Counsel,” p.141, acknowledges the gender transgression that Prudence’s advice entails: “She begins by undercutting two tenets of a predominately male and hierarchical society.” 135. Judith Ferster, “Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee: Contradictions and Context,” Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, ed. Denise N. Baker (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), p. 82 [73–89], comments on the flexible topicality of the poem in terms evocative of invisibility: “But the notion of disguise could also be used to explain the fact that the tale is a self-consuming artifact. What better disguise is there than to pretend not to be saying anything at all?”

Chapter 2 Portrait of a Father as a Bad Man: Visible Pressure in the Physician’s Tale 1. Anne Middleton, “The Physician’s Tale and Love’s Martyrs: ‘Ensamples Mo Than Ten’ as a Method in the Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer Review 8 (1973): 9 [9–32], counters the argument that this tale is uncharacteristic for Chaucer in terms I find particularly compelling: “it is so utterly and modestly Chaucerian that it is practically invisible” (emphasis mine). 2. Nevill Coghill’s condemnation of the tale’s “horrifying piece of sentimental savagery” in his essay “Chaucer’s Narrative Art in the Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer and Chaucerians: Critical Studies in Middle English Literature, ed. Derek Brewer (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1966), p. 126 [114–39], is an extreme expression of a sentiment echoed by many. I have found John Hirsch’s “Modern Times: The Discourse of the Physician’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 27 (1993): 387–95, useful insofar as he reads the tale as a response to a “modern” shift in cultural perspective that becomes more dominant in the early modern age, what we might look forward to as Stephen Greenblatt’s notion of “self-fashioning,” Renaissance SelfFashioning: from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 3. For recent assessments of the tale’s suspension between history and fable, see Angus Fletcher, “The Sentencing of Virginia in the Physician’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 34 (2000): 300–308; Andrew Welsh, “Story and Wisdom in Chaucer: The Physician’s Tale and The Manciple’s Tale,” Manuscript, Narrative,

NOTES

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

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Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton, ed. Robert Boenig and Kathleen Davis (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000), pp. 76–95. Brian S. Lee, “The Position and Purpose of the Physician’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 22 (1987): 141–60, discusses the tale as a homiletic exemplum. See Helen Corsa, ed., The Physician’s Tale, A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. 2, part 17 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), for a summary of criticism linking the tale to different literary forms. P. B. Taylor, “Chaucer’s ‘Cosyn to the Dede,’ ” Speculum 57 (1982), p. 316, n. 1 [315–27], suggests that Virginia’s deception is the kind Augustine classifies as innocuous in his De mendacio because it is the kind of lie “that save[s] innocence or protect[s] purity.” As he further notes, Chaucer would have been well aware of Augustine’s classification since the Parson reproduces almost verbatim in his tale (X. 608–10). Livy, From the Founding of the City: Books Three and Four, trans. B. O. Foster, in Livy II, Loeb Classical Library 233 (1959; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 142–67. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy, 3 vols. (Paris: H. Champion, 1965–70), 1:559–628. For a discussion of Chaucer’s potential familiarity with Livy, see Bruce Harvert, “Chaucer and the Latin Classics,” Writers and Their Background: Chaucer, ed. D. Brewer (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1975), pp. 137–53. Jerome Mandel, “Governance in the Physician’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 10 (1976): 324 [316–25], in the ultimate patriarchal metaphor, compares Viginius’s mercy to God’s. Almost everyone who discusses this tale in detail, however, sees this passage (which is actually an example of amplificatio not digressio) as important. John S. P. Tatlock, The Development and Chronology of Chaucer’s Works (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963), p. 153, who uses these lines to suggest an historical connection that helps situate the tale as one of Chaucer’s first in the Canterbury collection, makes a particularly strong statement: “no such serious, overt and practical criticism of life is to be found anywhere else in the Canterbury Tales.” Recently, Michael Uebel, “Public Fantasy and the Logic of Sacrifice in the Physician’s Tale,” American Notes and Queries, 15 (2002): 30–33, suggests that this tale’s focus on private governance is designed to maintain social unity. Sarah Stanbury, “The Body and the City in Pearl,” Representations 48 (1994): 30–47, traces the ways that a woman’s body allegorically stands for the paradisal city, pointing to the fragilities its contingencies reveal. George Lyman Kittredge, “Chaucer and Some of His Friends,” Modern Philology 1 (1903): 1–18, first connected this passage to the elopement of Elizabeth of Lancaster, as I shall discuss later. Most accept this connection, but George Cowling, Chaucer (London: Methuen, 1927) links it to a different royal incident involving the abduction of Elizabeth of Halle in 1387. As both episodes suggest, the fashion in which daughters behave, or conversely, the manner in which men treat noble women, has public impact on political dealings.

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9. Sheila Delany, in both her article, “Politics and the Paralysis of Poetic Imagination in The Physician’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 3 (1981): 47–60, and her book, Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), argues that Chaucer’s domestication of the tale’s sources diminishes its artistic and political impact. My reading parts ways with her strictly Marxist account, principally because I stand with a (Marxist-feminist) theorist like Catharine MacKinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 119–20, who claims “the personal as political is not a simile, not a metaphor, and not an analogy. It does not mean that what occurs in personal life is similar to, or comparable with, what occurs in the public arena. It is not an application of categories from public life to the private world, as when Engels (followed by Bebel) says that in the family the husband is bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat. . .what it is to know the politics of woman’s situation is to know women’s personal lives, particularly women’s sexual lives.” Although Mandel, “Governance in the Physician’s Tale,” p. 320, takes up the relation between absolutism and martyrdom in the tale in a more abstract fashion than I will do here, I am much influenced by his argument that the tale’s concern is with “fraud, art, and governance” as it is figured through the (gendered) politics of the domestic. 10. Aristotle, De Generatione Animalium, Aristotle: Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck, Loeb Classical Library 366 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 109. 11. It is no accident that a tale embedded with court scandal ends up being about a scandalous court. Court, both the royal and legal arenas, are spaces of presentment, of seeing and being seen, hopefully in the ways that one designs. My thinking here is indebted to Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 39–64; pp. 78–87, who claims that royal and legal courts are spaces of visible ritual in medieval culture. I am also influenced by thinkers who address our own spectacles of court. See Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 54–105, who discusses what courts keep invisible in modern trials. As we all know, there are certain things that jurors are simply not allowed to see in a courtroom; also, as Andrea Dworkin argues, “Trying to Flee,” Los Angeles Times, October 8, 1995, p. M6, sometimes there are certain things that jurors simply refuse to see when they sit in judgment. The violence that attends this interplay, between making certain things visible as “facts” and keeping others concealed as “immaterial,” is the dynamics that Chaucer’s tale takes up at the most basic level. 12. Charles A. Owen, Jr., “Relationship between the Physician’s Tale and the Parson’s Tale,” Modern Language Notes 71 (1956): 84–87; Raymond Preston, Chaucer (London: Sheed and Ward, 1952), p. 228; and Nevill Coghill, “Chaucer’s Narrative Art,” p. 128, all claim that these lines are spoken in Chaucer’s own voice. Owen, “Relationship between the Physician’s Tale”

NOTES

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

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p. 85, argues that their “emotional temperature” suggests that they are Chaucer’s public comment (of condemnation) on this royal scandal. See R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 49–63, which is a distillation of his important article, “Chaucer’s Maiden’s Head: ‘The Physician’s Tale’ and the Poetics of Virginity,” Representations 28 (1989): 113–34. Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, p. 104, discusses the feminine’s connection with the unruly and seductive art of rhetoric (which was likened to the female flesh), and also suggests that Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale “explores. . .the violence of perception, or, more specifically, of the look.” Rita Copeland, “The Pardoner’s Body and the Disciplining of Rhetoric,” Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 138–59, points out that theorists claimed the undisciplined body of rhetoric “is a sexually wayward body. . .and that the disciplinary permeability of rhetoric is nothing less than ambiguity of gender.” See the continuation of Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, The Westminster Chronicle, 1381–94, ed. and trans. L. C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 192–93. Kittredge, “Chaucer and Some of His Friends,” p. 5, n. 7. Michael Camille, “The Image and the Self: Unwriting Late Medieval Bodies,” Framing Medieval Bodies, p. 77 [62–99]. Huling E. Ussery, Chaucer’s Physician: Medicine and Literature in FourteenthCentury England (New Orleans: Tulane University Press, 1971), p. 135; John Gardner, The Poetry of Chaucer (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), p. 296; and, George Williams, A New View of Chaucer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965), p. 162, who claim that the advice would more likely have been directed toward Chaucer’s own wife, Philippa, who served longer in John of Gaunt’s household than her sister. His reasoning is similarly based on a feeling that Swynford would have been beyond even veiled reproach. Westminster Chronicle, 1381–94, pp. 192–93: [“set illa viripotens tunc effecta in regalem cuiram est delata ad conspicandum gestus aulicos et mores eorum”]. Emerson Brown, Jr., “What Is Chaucer Doing with the Physician and His Tale?” Philological Quarterly 60 (1981), p. 134 [129–49], makes a similar point: “The Physician’s Tale demonstrates that no matter how perfect a child is and how free from the need of a ‘maistresse,’ she can still be destroyed by wicked forces beyond her or her parents’ control. That hardly seems an exemplum calculated to keep parents and governesses on their toes.” Westminster Chronicle, 1381–94 pp. 192–93: [“set illa viripotens tunc effecta in regalem curiam est delata ad conspicandum gestus aulicos et mores eorum. Quam ut aspexit dominus Johannes Holand, frater domini regis nunc ex parte materna, vehementer captus est ejus amore, propter quod die notuque eam sollicitavit; tamen per permporum intervalla tandem tam fatue illam allexit sic quod tempore transitus domini ducis per eum extitit / impregnata”].

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21. Virginia’s passivity thus fits with Sigmund Freud’s formulation of its normative function in his, “Femininity” (1933), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), vol. 22, p. 115 [112–35]: “One might consider characterizing femininity psychologically as giving preference to passive aims. This is not, of course, the same thing as passivity; to achieve a passive aim may call for a large amount of activity.” I have discussed this formulation of feminine passivity as it relates to constructions of masculinity in my article, “Performative Passivity and Fantasies of Masculinity in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 38 (2003): 178–98. 22. Frederick Tupper, “Chaucer’s Bed’s Head. I. Chaucer and Ambrose,” Modern Language Notes 30 (1915): 5–7; Karl Young, “The Maidenly Virtues of Chaucer’s Virginia,” Speculum 16 (1941): 340–49; Martha S. Waller, “The Physician’s Tale: Geoffrey Chaucer and Fray Juan Garcia de Castrojeriz,” Speculum 51 (1976): 292–306. 23. As Waller explains in The Physician’s Tale, p. 300, n. 15, this metaphor “may owe something to the numerous figures derived from hunting in the Roman de la Rose.” 24. See Karma Lochrie’s excellent chapter on gossip in her Covert Operations: Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 56–92, where she makes the following observation, important to my interpretation of invisibility in conduct discourse: “Gossip was also associated with a kind of insurrectionary discourse on the part of women as a marginalized medieval community, one that existed alongside—but also in resistance to—a variety of institutionalized, written discourses,” (p. 57). See also Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Knopf, 1985), p. 12, who acknowledges gossip’s ability to shore up dominant structures of visible control despite its purportedly invisible operation. 25. For examples, see “The Gossips’ Meeting,” Jyl of Breyntford’s Testament and Other Poems, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: Printed for private circulation, 1871), p. 29; “Good Gossips,” Songs and Carols of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Thomas Wright (London: T. Richards, 1856), pp. 91–95; 104–107. 26. Wakefied Master, Noah, Medieval Drama, ed. David Bevington (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), pp. 290–305. 27. They are, then, agents of the public law, which Slavoj Vivek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), argues depends on its written, visible dimension for its power. As Vivek points out, p. 57, ignorance of the public law is no excuse; since the public law is available to be known, it achieves greater jurisdictional scope. 28. In Slavoj Vivek, The Fragile Absolute, or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000), p. 149, he suggests that transgression is a support of the regulatory system of the law because it justifies its existence. 29. This tactic fits with Larry Scanlon’s definition of the “public exemplum,” Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 81–88,

NOTES

30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

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which he claims often operates through negative examples. Virginia’s tale corresponds to Scanlon’s definition of the exemplum, p. 34, as “a narrative enactment of cultural authority,” but it does so in gendered ways that complicate a straightforward binary of power, or that points to the monarch as a centralizing oversight against legal abuse. From the time of the Norman conquest (and arguably before), the forest was an idea, a jurisdiction of royal authority. As Charles R. Young explains, The Royal Forests of Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), p. 3: “the royal forest was first of all an area in which a special kind of law—the forest law—applied. . .From its beginning the royal forest was to some extent an artificial creation that included lands without woods and villages that were alien to the idea of a forest in any physical meaning of the term.” G. J. Turner, in his, “Introduction,” Select Pleas of the Forest, ed. G. J. Turner, Selden Society, vol. 13 (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1901), p. ix, [ix–cxxxiv], explains the social arrangements that emerge from the forest as a legal district governed by the king: “But although the king or a subject might be seised of a forest, he was not necessarily seised of all the land which it comprised. Other persons might possess lands within the bounds of a forest, but were not allowed the right of hunting or of cutting trees in them at their own will.” The law of the forest was established with the arrival of the Normans. The boundaries of the legitimate royal forest was a cause of continual dispute between the kings and the barons until they reached a settlement, which was included in the Magna Carta. These provisions were expanded and clarified in 1217 in the Forest Charter. The statute of 1327 established the perambulations of the forest for the late Middle Ages, since they were confirmed by Richard II in a statute of 1383. Since the forest law was a legal system that developed separately from common law, it produced its own administrative class. Besides foresters, who patrolled the forests to protect the king’s game, there were wardens and rangers over the forests, making the forest districts very heavily surveilled areas. Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Men’s Game, King’s Deer: Poaching in Medieval England,” “Of Good and Ill Repute”: Gender and Social Control in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 143; p. 154 [142–57]. Qtd. in Hanawalt, Of Good and Ill Repute, p. 153. Young, Royal Forests, 107–8, suggests about half of poachers hunted for sport. This does not mean that all of those who hunted for sport saw their activity as a type of political affront, although when they were caught they would be charged with a crime that treated their practice as such. By the late fourteenth century, Young, Royal Forests, suggests that the system of apportioning the offices of forester (and warden) had in effect become hereditary appointments of patronage to the king’s favorites. This meant that many foresters took the post for the prestige or income, not the work: “by the fourteenth century many of the forest officials were performing their duties by deputy while enjoying the income from the offices. Both because of the authority of their offices and the abuses of power, the foresters earned for themselves a bad reputation” (p. 164).

182

36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

NOTES

Foresters, then, were visibly tied to the king, but their performance of duty was more for personal gain. This historical situation seemingly complicates Chaucer’s use of the poaching metaphor even further, because it suggests that a poacher turned forester works for personal interest, but now cloaks that action in the guise of respectable authority. See Jean Birrell, “Who Poached the King’s Deer? A Study in Thirteenth Century Crime,” Midland History 7 (1982): 9–25, who discusses habitual poachers who acquired venison for others. Birrell, “Who Poached the King’s Deer?” pp. 9–25. Besides the varying kinds of female guides who aid the lover in Le Roman de la Rose, there is the tradition of female bawd exemplified in what is known as the “weeping bitch” motif. In these stories, of which Dame Sirith is probably best known [Dame Sirith, The Trials and Joys of Marriage, ed. Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2002)], a young man seeks the aid of an old woman, who helps him win his lady’s love through deception. See John Hines, The Fabliau in English (London: Longman, 1993), for a discussion of this tradition. Nicole Nolan Sidhu, “Go-Betweens: The Old Woman and the Function of Obscenity in the Fabliaux,” Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux, ed. Holly A. Crocker (New York: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 45–60. Sidhu, “Go-Betweens,” p. 52. For the text of Auberee, see Recueil Complet des Fabliaux, eds. Willem Noomen and Nico van den Boogaard, 10 vols. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1983–98) 1: 4. Select Documents of English Constitutional History, ed. George Burton and H. Morse Stephens (1901; New York: Macmillan, 1930), 72.2. See J. G. Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 59–101, for a discussion of the parameters of this statute. Paul Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 121–44; Frances Dolan, “Battered Women, Petty Traitors, and the Legacy of Coverture,” Feminist Studies 29 (2003): 249–77. Robin L. Bott, “ ‘O, Keep Me from Their Worse than Killing Lust’: Ideologies of Rape and Mutilation in Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,” Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 189–211, argues that the shame associated with rape is figured as a disease that must be removed before it infects the male body. Chaucer’s Complaint of Mars, due to an attributive gloss by copyist John Shirley, has also been connected to John Holland’s scandalous behavior, both with Isabel of York and with Elizabeth of Lancaster. See Walter W. Skeat, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1899), pp. 65–66; pp. 86–87, for further details. Westminster Chronicle, 1381–94 pp. 72–75; pp. 122–23; pp. 144–45; pp. 158–61.

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46. Sydney Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964), p. 459. 47. Westminster Chronicle, 1381–94 pp. 294–95; pp. 342–43; pp. 450–51. 48. Holland served as constable in Lancaster’s army. See Henry Knighton, Chronicon Henrici Knighton vel Cnitthon, monachi, Leycestrensis, ed. J. R. Lumby, 2 vols. (Rolls Series, 1865–86), ii. 207, and Westminster Chronicle, 1381–94 pp. 164–65. 49. “regard,” deriving as it does from the French “regarder,” principally means “to look at, gaze upon, observe.” In the Middle Ages it had an even more plain connection to regulation because it was a legal term. Under forest law, the “regard” was, according to Young, Royal Forest, “an institution that provided a general survey of the vert and of encroachments upon the forest” (p. 157). Also see Turner, Select Pleas of the Forest, pp. lxxv–lxxxvii, who discusses the practice and its procedures in detail. 50. Froissart, Chronicles, ed. and trans., Geoffrey Brereton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 448. 51. Froissart, Chronicles, pp. 450–51. 52. Froissart, Chronicles, p. 467. 53. Froissart, Chronicles, pp. 467–68. 54. See René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), pp. 1–52; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 1–27; and Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157–210, for a discussion of the three interrelated concepts of masculine rivalry, triangulation of male homosocial desire, and the traffic in women that enable such rivalries and triangulations. 55. Here I refer to Walsingham’s report of Richard II’s dismissal of the rebels’ petition for political recognition following the 1381 rebellion: “Rustics you were and rustics you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as before but incomparably harsher,” Historia Anglicana, qtd. in R. B. Dobson, ed., The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 311. For the Latin, see Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, ed. H. T. Riley, 2 vols. (London, 1863–64), 2: 18: “Rustici quidem fuistis et estis; in bondagio permanebitis.” It should be noted that Walsingham’s “rustici” could also be translated “churls.” 56. Delany, “Politics and the Paralysis of Poetic Imagination,” pp. 47–60. 57. Delany, “Politics and the Paralysis of Poetic Imagination,” p. 52. 58. Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 159. 59. Linda Lomperis, “Unruly Bodies and Ruling Practices: Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale as Socially Symbolic Act,” Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 29 [21–37].

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60. Glenn Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 53–54; pp. 131–39. 61. David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 109, suggests that Appius’s gaze is “tyrannical.” 62. Vivek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, p. 74. 63. Lynda E. Boose, “The Father’s House and the Daughter in It: The Structures of Western Culture’s Daughter-Father Relationship,” Daughters and Fathers, ed. Lynda E. Boose and Betty S. Flowers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 19–74. 64. As Sedgwick, Between Men, points out, p. 50, cuckoldry is a bond between men that is “necessarily hierarchical in structure,” serving as it does to distinguish men from one another on a sliding scale of worth. 65. According to Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) p. 183, women should not be able to govern female sexuality if men intend to exchange them amongst themselves for power and profit: “Commodities can only enter into relationships under the watchful eyes of their ‘guardians.’ ” 66. See Katherine J. Lewis, “Model Girls? Virgin-Martyrs and the Training of Young Women in Late Medieval England,” Young Medieval Women, ed. Katherine J. Lewis, Noël James Menuge, and Kim M. Phillips (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 25–46, is particularly helpful in tracing this practice in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 67. Middleton, “The Physician’s Tale and Love’s Martyrs,” p. 19; Fletcher, “The Sentencing of Virginia,” p. 305. 68. William Caxton, The Book of the Knight of the Tower, ed. M. Y Offord, EETS Supplementary Series, 2 (London: Oxford University Press for EETS, 1971), p. 28 (lines 11–13; 14–15). Also see p. 72 (lines 20–31), which instructs virtuous women to dress modestly to honor God and family. 69. Christine de Pizan, A Medieval Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasury of the City of Ladies, ed. Madeleine Pelner Cosman, trans. Charity Cannon Willard, (New York: Persea Books, 1989), p. 203. 70. Middleton, “The Physician’s Tale and Love’s Martyrs,” p. 17. 71. Middleton, “The Physician’s Tale and Love’s Martyrs,” p. 26. 72. Tupper, “Chaucer’s Bed’s Head,” pp. 5–7; Young, “The Maidenly Virtues,” pp. 340–49; Waller, “The Physician’s Tale,” pp. 292–306. 73. See Waller, “The Physician’s Tale,” pp. 293–94, for this genealogy. She claims that Don Bernabe, Bishop of Osma charged in 1344 with the education of the five-year-old heir to the Castilian throne, Infante Pedro, comissioned Fray Juan Garcia de Castrojeriz to prepare a Castilian version of Aegidius’s treatise. Castrojeriz’s verion, which contained extensive commentary, was widely copied and circulated in manuscript, and was printed in Seville in 1494. The infante Pedro became Peter I of Castile (the Cruel), whose assassination in 1369 Chaucer treated in the Monk’s Tale. Waller suggests that Chaucer may have had access to this text, either on a visit to Spain in 1366 or after Constance, Peter’s heir, became John of Gaunt’s second

NOTES

74. 75. 76.

77. 78.

79.

80. 81. 82. 83.

84.

85.

185

wife. Waller’s contention, p. 305, that “It appears likely indeed that the literate and religious Constance should have taken to England with her the volume prepared by her grandmother’s confessor for her father’s instruction with its chapters devoted to the nurture of noblemen’s children,” is suggestive to my argument, because it also connects the instructions to parents and governesses in John of Gaunt’s household, here through a different wife. H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the “Canterbury Tales,” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 117. J. D. W. Crowther, “Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale and its ‘Saint,’ ” English Studies in Canada 8 (1982): 125–37. Sandra Pierson Prior, “Virginity and Sacrifice in Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale,” Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, ed. Cindy Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 165–80. Prior, “Virginity and Sacrifice,”, p. 170. Fletcher, “The Sentencing of Virginia in the Physician’s Tale,” p. 306; Hirsch, “Modern Times,” pp. 388, 390; See Diane Speed, “Language and Perspective in the Physician’s Tale,” Words and Wordsmiths: A Volume for H. L. Rogers, ed. Geraldine Barnes, et al. (Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 1989), pp. 119–36; Thomas B. Hanson, “Chaucer’s Physician as Storyteller and Moralizer,” Chaucer Review 7 (1972): 132–39. This is similar to the claim of Lianna Farber, “The Creation of Consent in the Physician’s Tale,” Chaucer Review, 39 (2004): 162 [151–64], that the tale’s operation is ideological, to the extent that it “stress[es] the way those who have control over [Virginia] educate her and teach her to understand reality.” Crane, The Performance of Self, p. 29 [29–38]. Crane, The Performance of Self, p. 34. Lomperis, “Unruly Bodies and Ruling Practices,” p. 29. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 30, argues that the virtual “is a lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect.” See Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 77, who claims that “Paternity is corporeally uncertain, without evidence. But patriarchy compensates for that with the law which marks each child with the father’s name as his exclusive property.” See, Corinne Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2001), who gives a history of the development of and changes in rape law and the ecclesiastical responses the issue generated. As she points out, p. 75, in the later Middle Ages, when the law generally becomes more influenced by Roman law, primogeniture means that the act of rape is marginalized in contrast to charges of abduction: “actual rape, when it did not occur in the context of abduction or loss of virginity, was largely ignored, even while the notion of violation of the female body played an important rhetorical role in the recording of case histories and in legal theory.”

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86. As Joseph Allen Hornsby, Chaucer and the Law (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Press, 1988), pp. 116–17, points out, a 1382 statute gave husbands or fathers the right to seek damages for rape even if the woman consented (because she did not have the right to dispense of herself ). Barbara Hanawalt, “Of Good and Ill Repute”: Gender and Social Control in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 124–41, suggests, however, that a woman’s ability to present her rape appeal in a manner consistent with legal regulations made a big difference in a father’s or husband’s suit. If a woman or girl could not articulate her appeal in the format designated by the court (without changing the account over what might be several recitations) her case was almost sure to be decided in favor of the accused. 87. According to jurists, however, such resistance had to be easier to see. Glanville advises that “A woman who suffers in this way must go, soon after the deed is done, to the nearest vill and there show to trustworthy men the injury done to her, and any effusion of blood there may be and any tearing of clothes.” George D. G. Hall, ed. and trans., Tractatus de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Regni Anglie qui Glanvilla Vocatur, The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England Commonly Called Glanvill (London: Nelson, 1965), p. 175: [Tenetur autem mulier que tale quid patitur mox dum recens fuerit maleficium uicinam uillam adire, et ibi iniuriam sibi illatam probis hominibus ostendere et sanguinem si quis fuerit effusus et uestium scissions]; Henry Bracton, De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, On the Laws and Customs of England (c. 1250), ed. George E. Woodbine, trans. Samuel E. Thorne, Selden Society (1968; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 394–95, likewise says that an appeal of rape must indicate “whether garments were torn and whether blood was shed by the ravishment.” [tunc de scissione vestimentorum et de sanguinis effusione per corruptionem]. 88. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1950), Book I, 10: 18 (p. 22). 89. See Caxton, Book of the Knight, Cviij, Cix, and Cx (pp. 145–48). 90. This elevation over regular women is expressed both in terms of social status and virtuous conduct in Caxton, Book of the Knight, pp. 148–50. For example, immediately after the example of Mary is elaborated, there are two chapters, Cxj and Cxij, that recommend contemporary women as models. 91. See Camille, “The Image and the Self,” who, in discussing images of women from medical discourse, points to what my catalogue leaves out—making woman into a body really ends up making woman into a womb: “She is all body. . .Indeed her whole body is held in by networks of linear control, rendering her passive and waiting, a mere receptacle for male semen” (p. 83). 92. The Usual Suspects, dir. Brian Singer (Gramercy Pictures) 1995. 93. Vivek, Fragile Absolute, p. 150. 94. Qtd. from the film’s dialogue. 95. Vivek, Fragile Absolute, p. 150. 96. Jacques Lacan famously states that “The Woman does not exist,” he also claims that courtly love creates woman as a blank screen upon which he

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may project his narcissitic fantasy in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 149–50. 97. Jacques Lacan, “A Love Letter,” Feminine Sexuality, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1982), pp. 149–61, especially p. 150. 98. Vivek, Fragile Absolute, p. 150. In The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), Vivek suggests that an identity based on inclusion within a community, (which, if we remember our Aristotle, is the condition that stitches “human” and “identity” together), always involves what he calls “forced choice”: “the subject must freely choose the community to which he already belongs, independent of his choice—he must choose what is already given to him. . .he is never actually in a position to choose: he is always treated as if he had already chosen” (pp. 165–66, emphasis original). To make the “crazy” choice to destroy that which one holds most dear, then, is a sign of one’s belonging to a community, according to Vivek. 99. Lomperis, “Unruly Bodies and Ruling Practices,” p. 28.

Chapter 3 “My first matere I wil yow telle”: Visual Impact in the Book of the Duchess 1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books IX–XV, trans. Frank Justus Miller, ed. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library 43 (1916; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) XI. 410–749. 2. James Wimsatt, “The Sources of Chaucer’s ‘Seys and Alcyone,’” Medium Aevum 36 (1967): 231–41, suggests that Chaucer probably used Ovid, along with Machaut’s Dit de la fonteinne amoreuse, and the Ovide moralisé. See A. J. Minnis, with V. J. Scattergood and J. J. Smith, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 90–112, for a survey and discussion of Chaucer’s sources. 3. See Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge, 1966), pp. 50–81, who argues that medieval thinkers turned rules of place and image in the rhetorical construction of memory to devotional purposes. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 34–45, explores locational memory using two principal metaphors, that of the book, or tablet, and that of the house, or “cella.” Both writers stress that memory, as a constitutive element of rhetoric (particularly in the Rhetorica ad Herrenium), is a practice that gains its kinship with art through the application of regularized discipline. 4. It is important to distinguish, then, between dreams, which were the province of the imagination, and dream visions, which were the territory of the memory. As Carruthers explains in her Book of Memory, pp. 58–59, Aristotle suggests that dream images are spontaneous combinations of the imagination. For an image to reach the vis memorativa, by contrast, it would have to become part of what we would call “long-term memory.” As she discusses in her Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of

188

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

NOTES

Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 171–220, dream visions are a recollective representation of compositional invention. Works including A. C. Spearing’s, Medieval Dream-Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Barbara Nolan, The Gothic Visionary Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Kathryn L. Lynch, The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988) suggest that medieval dream vision was almost purely a literary form. Steven Kruger’s Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), shows that even as dreams were considered to be physiological in some respects, in others they were thought of as expressive, either in purely aesthetic or in divinely prophetic terms. Kruger’s work, as well as J. Stephen Russell’s The English Dream Vision: Anatomy of a Form (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1988), indicates that the view of dreams in the Middle Ages crossed discourses of theology, art, and science. Although Yates and Carruthers show in rich and ample ways the rhetorical and creative processes of memory, I would credit Michael Camille, particularly his essay, “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Medieval Practices of Seeing,” Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 197–223, for thinking about the connections between aesthetics and physiology in medieval conceptions of perception and epistemology. See Katherine Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology, and the Foundations of Semantics, 1230–1345 (New York: Brill, 1988); David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 141–46. As W. R. Jones, “Lollards and Images: The Defense of Religious Art in Later Medieval England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (1973): 27–50, suggests, the debate over religious images turned on contrasting definitions of idolatria: “The English iconodules defined idolatria in a narrow, historical sense, applicable to pagans and infidels, who worshipped the wrong things, and sometimes to sorcerers, who used images for magical purposes” (p. 43). Reformers, by contrast, applied idolatria to a broad range of image-usage, only excepting reverence for signs that were themselves stripped of ornament (e.g., a “poor cross”). While this debate is only in the nascent stage when Chaucer is supposed to have composed this poem, the challenges to sight that contribute to anxieties regarding images are already circulating. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), pp. 11–23. Besides Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 33–45, I am also indebted to D. Vance Smith, “Irregular Histories: Forgetting Ourselves,” New Literary History 28 (1997): 161–84; “Plague, Panic Space, and the Tragic Medieval Household,” South Atlantic Quarterly 98 (1999): 367–413; and Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), who connects memory to the rhythms of the everyday and the locus of the medieval household. This “domestication” of memory is important to my thinking about gender, because it suggests ways

NOTES

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

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in which repetitions, arrangements, and elisions that characterize memory work also typify the reiterative processes of coverage that give categories of masculinity and femininity their naturalized cultural appearance. For an analysis of medieval diagrams that divided the brain into chambers, see Edwin Clark and Kenneth Dewhurst, An Illustrated History of Brain Function (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 10–24. Avicenna’s influence is elucidated in John E. Murdoch, Album of Science: Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984), pp. 325–26; and finally A. Mark Smith’s essay, “Getting the Big Picture in Perspectivist Optics,” Isis 72 (1981): 572 [568–89], has a succinct and sophisticated diagram of the interworkings of medieval faculties, which culminate in the recollective gathering of memory. The classic accounts of medieval faculty psychology remain Murray Wright Bundy’s The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1927), pp. 177–224; and Ruth E. Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1975). A. Mark Smith, “Getting the Big Picture,” pp. 572–73, discusses the interrelation of Galen and Aristotle in medieval theory; this classificationscheme is from Carolyn Collette, Species, Phantasms, and Images: Vision and Medieval Psychology in the “Canterbury Tales” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), p. 6. See Harvey, The Inward Wits, pp. 39–49; pp. 53–61. This point is Bundy’s, The Theory of Imagination, p. 192, though Collette, Species, Phantasms, and Images, p. 9, also emphasizes the role of temporality in the scheme of Albertus Magnus. D. Vance Smith, “Plague, Panic Space,” p. 379. D. Vance Smith, “Plague, Panic Space,” p. 374. D. Vance Smith, “Plague, Panic Space,” p. 385. Hugh of St. Victor, “Hugo of St. Victor: ‘De Tribus Maximis Circumstantiis Gestorum,’ ” ed. William M. Green, Speculum 18 (1943): 484–93. (p. 490, lines 26–27): [ut eas quoque quae extrinsecus accidere possunt circumstantias rerum non neglegentur attendamus]. Albertus Magnus, Commentary on Aristotle, On Memory and Recollection, trans. Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, ed. Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 127. See Charles Muscatine, who, in Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 107, claims that Chaucer’s use of comic versions of Ovidian narrative (e.g., Machaut’s Fonteinne Amoureuse ) “brings into the most serious part of the poem a tasteless vein of humor.” Derek Pearsall, “The Roving Eye: Point of View in the Medieval Perception of Landscape,” Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V.A. Kolve, ed. R. F. Yeager and Charlotte C. Morse (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 2001), p. 469 [463–77] rightly points out that medieval art allows for a free gaze over a visual scene, since pictures often rely on their viewers “to read, scan,

190

21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

NOTES

store, and recompose.” But he does not take into account the discipline of cognitive composition in his consideration of the eye’s mobility: “the eye moves about the picture, not under any constraining discipline of order, and chooses its moments of truth.” Mnemonic practice, which regulates the process of image making, means that the “wandering around” that Pearsall identifies as part of the experience of medieval art is meant to assume its own orderly composition. This measured, stationed seeing is thus more akin to what Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (1975): p. 11 [6–18], describes as “the determining male gaze [which] projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly.” In her influential and provocative analysis of loss in elegiac poetics, Louise O. Fradenburg, “ ‘Voice Memorial’: Loss and Reparation in Chaucer’s Poetry,” Exemplaria 2 (1990): 169–202, argues that Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, like other works of death, uses a system of threat and reward to obscure loss, thereby providing through narrative “inconclusiveness” a defense against its persistence. For, as she points out, the birth of poetry and the promise of prosperity await Chaucer’s masculine dyad in a relation of reward that staves off the threat of isolation accompanying protracted mourning. See Carruthers, Craft of Thought, pp. 176–79, for a discussion of the exedra, a chamber designed for compositional memory work. As she points out, these chambers were often decorated with familiar images that were designed to spur mental invention. Interestingly, Michael Norman Salda, “Pages from History: The Medieval Palace of Westminster as a Source for the Dreamer’s Chamber in the Book of the Duchess,” Chaucer Review 27 (1992): 111–25, argues that this dreamscape is not based on a “literary” scene (such as a particular illuminated manuscript), but is a rendering of St. Stephen’s chapel. Petrarch, perhaps in a bid for inventional ingenuity, complains about those who “decorate their rooms with furniture devised to decorate their minds and. . .use books as they use Corinthian vases or painted panels and statues,” Petrarch: Four Dialogues for Scholars. . .from “De remedies utriusque fortune,” ed. and trans. Conrad H. Rawski (Cleveland, OH: Press of Western Reserve University, 1967), p. 31. See Minnis, The Shorter Poems, pp. 73–160, for a liberal overview of the critical history of the poem, especially the issue of consolation and its relevance to the Man in Black’s condition at the end of the poem. Kathryn L. Lynch, “The Book of the Duchess as a Philosophical Vision: The Argument of Form,” Genre 21 (1988): 279–306; She elaborates this argument in her book, Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions. Lynch, “The Book of the Duchess as a Philosophical Vision,” p. 285. Although Fradenburg addresses defenses against loss in broader terms than I do in this chapter, her “ ‘Voice Memorial’ ” traces elegy as a mode of defense against the past in a way that I find instructive. For a helpful discussion, see Michael Camille, Gothic Art: Glorious Visions (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), pp. 16–23.

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28. Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor, 2 vols. Ancient Christian Writers, ed. Johannes Quasten, et al., 41–42, (New York: Newman, 1982), 2:191 (12.11.22). 29. Bundy, The Theory of Imagination, pp. 187–93. 30. Bundy, The Theory of Imagination, pp. 187–93. 31. Bundy, The Theory of Imagination, p. 191. 32. See Alastair Minnis, “Medieval Imagination and Memory,” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, The Middle Ages, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 240–42, for a discussion of Aquinas’s differences from the opinions of his teacher, Albertus Magnus. 33. See Roger Bacon’s Perspectiva, which is Pt. V of the Opus Majus. For all citations, I use David C. Lindberg’s facing page edition, Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva in the Middle Ages: A Critical Edition and English Translation of Bacon’s Perspectiva with Introduction and Notes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), hereafter cited as the Perspectiva. Bacon’s description of these divisions, especially as they relate to the multiplication of species, is contained in the Perspectiva, I.i.4; also see Lindberg’s Roger Bacon’s Philosophy of Nature. A Critical Edition, Introduction, and Notes, of “De multiplicatione de specierum” and “De speculis comburentibus” (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), I, ii, lines 86–88, and lines 287–88, for a description of the memory as the final space that the species reach. Bundy, The Theory of Imagination, pp. 195–98, discusses Bacon in relation to other theorists. 34. Minnis, “Medieval Imagination and Memory,” p. 242. 35. Minnis, “Medieval Imagination and Memory,” p. 242. 36. Alastair Minnis, “Langland’s Ymaginatif and Late-Medieval Theories of Imagination,” Comparative Criticism 3 (1981): 71–103. 37. See William J. Courtenay, Covenant and Causality in Medieval Thought (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984), pp. 208–9, who explains that symbols for Aquinas “declared. . .an action or effect.” See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. and trans. Colman E. O’Neill O. P., vol. 50 (London: Blackfriars, 1965), 3a. 25, a. 3, which demonstrates Courtenay’s suggestion in relation to the reverence due to images of Christ: “Applying this to our problem, we conclude that no reverence is shown to the image of Christ insofar as it is an independent reality—a piece of wood, carved or painted— for reverence cannot be given to any but a rational being. It remains that whatever reverence is shown it has in view its function as an image. From this it follows that the same reverence is shown to the image of Christ as to Christ himself. Since, therefore, Christ is paid divine worship, so too his image should be paid divine worship” [Sic ergo dicendum est quod imagini Christi, inquantum est res quaedam, puta lignum sculptum vel pictum, nulla reverentiaexhibetur: quia reverentianonnisi rationali naturae debetur. Relinquitur ergo quod exhibeatur ei reverentiaexhibeatur imagini Christi et ipsi Christo. Cum ergo Christus adoretur adoratione latriae, consequens est quod ejus imago sit adoratione latriae adoranda].

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38. Sarah Stanbury, “Regimes of the Visual in Premodern England: Gaze, Body, and Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale,” New Literary History, 28 (1997): p. 279 [261–89]. 39. Camille, “Before the Gaze,” p. 207. 40. See the classic study by Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York: Meridian Books, 1957). Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Susannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) resist in different ways Panofsky’s clean periodization of affective directness. Rachel Fulton’s From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), is also useful for thinking specifically about devotion to Christic and Marian images in medieval devotional practice. 41. Stanbury, “Regimes of the Visual in Premodern England,” p. 279. 42. Stanbury, “Regimes of the Visual in Premodern England,” p. 267. 43. Stanbury, “Regimes of the Visual in Premodern England,”, p. 273. 44. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. 191. 45. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: the Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 131–34; Sara Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 23; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 96–102. 46. Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp. 243–71; Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 109–117; and Mervyn James, “Ritual, Drama, and Social Body in the Late Medieval Town,” Past and Present, 98 (1983): 3–29. 47. See Susan Crane’s The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), chapter 1 and chapter 4; Louise O. Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). 48. Stanbury, “Regimes of the Visual in Premodern England,” p. 279. 49. Middle English Lyrics, ed. Maxwell S. Luria and Richard L. Hoffman (New York: Norton, 1974), #215, (p. 208). 50. Stanbury, “Regimes of the Visual in Premodern England,” pp. 271–73. 51. Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages, pp. 133–64. 52. See Phillipa Hardman, “Chaucer’s Man of Sorrows: Secular Images of Pity in the Book of the Duchess, the Squire’s Tale, and Troilus and Criseyde,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 93 (1994): p. 206 [204–27], who shows that fourteenth-century lyrics depicting Christ’s suffering ask the reader “to ‘behold,’ ‘look,’ ‘see’ the sorrows and pains of Christ,” which she connects to the growing popularity of the Man of Sorrows in continental, then English art. Such cues to pity, Hardman argues, p. 219, are a “challenge: an opportunity to assess one’s own emotional health, to discover by confronting the archetype of sorrow whether one has a pitiful human heart, or an unmoved and ‘fendly’ one.”

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53. Middle English Lyrics, #212 (p. 206). 54. Middle English Lyrics, #217 (p. 209). 55. Sara Lipton, “The Sweet Lean of His Head”: Writing about Looking at the Crucifix in the High Middle Ages,” Speculum 80 (2005): 1172–208. Also see Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998), pp. 100–108, who discusses what he calls the “topography of visionary experience.” 56. Carruthers, Craft of Thought, pp. 77–81. 57. V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: the First Five “Canterbury Tales” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 30. 58. As Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 184–85, explains of the imago pietatis, “Christ is shown oppressed by suffering, although the Crucifixion is past, as the wounds in hands, feet, and side bear witness. . .The intention is entirely meditative, to confront the beholder with a timelessly suffering Christ and thus to arouse his compassion.” 59. R. A. Shoaf, “Stalking the Sorrowful H(e)art: Penitential Lore and the Hunt Scene in Chaucer’s ‘The Book of the Duchess,’ ” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 78 (1979): 313–24. 60. Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: the Medieval uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), especially chapter 1. 61. Mary Carruthers, “ ‘The Mystery of the Bed Chamber’: Mnemotechnique and Vision in Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess,” The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony, ed. John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), p. 79 [67–87], makes the connection between confession and elegy explicit: “The elegiac poem is like a confession only because both activities are dependent on memory-work. Each involves a sustained, deliberate act of remembering, though their goals are different. Both also begin in grief, mourning (for one’s self, for another) as the matrix of remembering.” 62. See Minnis, Shorter Poems, p. 125. 63. See Guillaume de Machaut, Jugement dou Roy de Behaigne and Remede de fortune, ed. James I. Wimsatt, William W. Kibler, and Rebecca A. Baltzer, The Chaucer Libarary (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 112–15 (ll. 1050–107); and pp. 218–23 (ll. 905–1000). 64. See George Lyman Kittredge, “Guillaume De Machaut and the Book of the Duchess,” PMLA 30 (1915): 1–24, who argues that the image of Fortune is influenced by the Remede de fortune, Jugement dou Roy de Behaigne, the eighth Motet, and Comfort. 65. Minnis, “Langland’s Ymaginatif,” p. 73, points out that the chimera was itself an animal produced from the recombination of imagistic fragments (a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail). 66. The Lanterne of Li{t, ed. L. M. Swinburn, EETS, OS 151 (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co. for EETS, 1917), p. 37. 67. Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse, ed. A. W. Pollard (London: A. Constable & co., 1903), p. 137.

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68. Kittredge, “Guillaume De Machaut and the Book of the Duchess” argues that Chaucer is here indebted to Machaut’s ninth Motet. Also relevant is Vincent of Beauvais’s claim, Speculum naturale, Speculum quadruplex; sive, Speculum maius, vol. 1(Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlaganstalt, 1964–65), 20.95.col.1549, that the scorpion has a face “somewhat like a maiden’s.” 69. Carruthers, “Mystery of the Bedchamber,” p. 80, claims that chess is a game of memory because “It is a game of patterns, one that depends on ‘finding’ images in places, the essential technique of memory. And these remembered patterns enable the invention of each new game.” Despite the relational adaptability of medieval chess, the remembered moves that Carruthers cites give the impression of permanence, at least by the time that Ludwig Wittgenstein uses chess as an example of rule-following in Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Writght, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd edn. (1967; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), 320 (p. 58): “. . .if you follow other rules than those of chess you are playing another game” (emphasis original). Certainly, we can see that Black reads the rules of chess as static, and that he lacks the inventive capacity to adapt to changing situations. 70. H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), p. 423. 71. H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess, p. 426. 72. H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess, pp. 426–27. 73. Peter W. Travis, “White,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 1–66. I am highly indebted to Travis’s exhaustive inquiry into the ways that “White” precipitates misrecognition in relation to medieval debates concerning meaning and reference in language. My interest in his thinking about this meconaissance is the potentially deliberate character of Black’s misrecognition. As we see with the fers confusion, misrecognition can be applied to preserve categorical stability in one instance by sacrificing clarity in the case of another seemingly stable distinction. 74. See Jenny Adams, “Pawn Takes Knight’s Queen: Playing with Chess in the Book of the Duchess,” Chaucer Review 34 (1999): 125–38, who insightfully connects the high stakes of Black’s game to the widespread practice of gambling on chess. 75. See Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 429–50, who posits the “logic of the supplement” as a continual threat to invention, insofar as the creator’s place is continually subject to displacement. 76. Matthew de Vendôme, Ars Versificatoria, Les Arts poétiques du XII et XIII siècles, ed. Edmond Faral (Paris: E. Champion, 1924), pp. 121–31. Matthew has seven models of description, each of which moves from describing exterior features to interior worth. 77. Travis, “White,” pp. 13–18. 78. Travis, “White,” p. 17. 79. Lynch, “The Book of the Duchess as a Philosophical Vision,” pp. 288–95. Like anyone who has tackled this knotty topic, I am greatly indebted to

NOTES

80.

81.

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

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Katherine Tachau’s work. Particularly important to what follows is her Vision and Certitude, esp. chapter 1 and chapter 5. Also, her article “The Problem of the Species in Medio at Oxford in the Generation after Ockham,” Mediaeval Studies 44 (1982): 394–443, is highly valuable for my thinking about the mediating role of species in cognitive conceptions of distance. See Tachau, Vision and Certitude, pp. 115–35. See William of Ockham, Opera philosophica et theologica, II Rep, Q. 12–13, eds. P. Boehner, G. Gál, and Steven Brown, 7 vols. (St. Bonaventure, NY: Editiones Instituti Franciscani Universitatis S. Bonaventurae, 1974–88) vol. 5 p. 269, lines 1–6: “Et ideo concedo quod in omni sensu, tam interiori quam exteriori, est cognito intuitiva, hoc est, talis cognitio virtute cuius potest praedicto modo cognoscere rem esse vel non esse, licet non sit cognitio intuitive ocularis. Et in hoc decipiuntur multi: credunt enim quod nulla sit cognitio intuitiva nisi ocularis, quod falsum est.” [I concede that there is intuitive cognition in every sense, interior as well as exterior—that is, such cognition by virtue of which, in the aforesaid way, a thing is known to be or not to be; granted, this is not ocular intuitive cognition. And, in this way, many are deceived: for they believe that there is not intuitive cognition unless it is ocular, which is false.]. And further, II Rep. Q. 12–13, Opera philosophica et theologica, 5, p. 268: lines 1–11: “Ad cognitionem intuitivam habendam non oportet aliquid ponere praeter intellectum et rem cognitam, et nullam speciem penitus. Hoc probatur, quia frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora. Sed per intellectum et rem visam, sine omi specie, potest fieri cognitio intuitiva, igitur etc.” [it is useless to achieve by more things what can equally well be achieved by fewer; but intuitive cognition can occur by means of the intellect and the thing seen, without any species.] Ockham’s objection to species can be considered antirepresentational. See A. Stephen McGrade, “Seeing Things: Ockham and Representationalism,” L’Homme et son Univers au Moyen Age, Philosophes Médiéaux 27 (Louvain-laNeuve: 1986): 591–97. Ockham claims that habits are synonymous with species in Aristotle, and further argues that they are a locational way of preserving things past: II Rep. Q. 14, Opera philosophica et theologica, 5, p. 261, lines 13–18: “Cognitio autem intuitiva imperfecta est illa per quam iudicamus rem aliquando fuisse vel non fuisse. Et haec dicitur cognitio recordativa; ut quando video aliquam rem intuitva, generatur habitus inclinans ad cognitionem abstractivam, mediante qua iudico et assentio quod talis res aliquando fuit quia aliquando vidi eam.” William of Ockham, “Et per consequens potest sol immediate agree in distans” III Rep. Q. 12–13, Opera philosophica et theologica, 6, p. 53, line 7. See Lindberg, Theories of Vision, pp. 104–22. Bacon, Perspectiva, I.v.1; also see I.vii.4. Bacon, Perspectiva, I.ix.4. See also De multiplicatione specierum, Pt. I. Tachau, Vision and Certitude, especially Part 3; her article, “The Problem of the Species in Medio,” gives a more compact account. Heather Phillips, “John Wyclif and the Optics of the Eucharist,” From Ockham to Wyclif, ed. Anne Hudson and Michael Wilks, Studies in Church

196

88. 89. 90.

91.

92.

NOTES

History 5 (London: Blackwell, 1987), p. 247, n. 12 [245–58], provides the relevant passages of comparison between the two writers. Phillips, “John Wyclif and the Optics of the Eucharist,” pp. 253–56. For example, see De Eucharistia, ed. J. Loserth and F. D. Matthew, Wyclif Society (London: Trübner, 1892), pp. 11–13. John Wyclif, Tractatus de Mandatis Divinis, ed. J. Loserth and F. D. Matthew, Wyclif Society (London: C.K. Paul, 1922), pp. 152–58. Wyclif claimed that the exposure to images could have good or ill effects: in their “proper” usage, the exposure to images kindled the faith of the mind, encouraging devout worship of God. By contrast, in negative instances, an image could lead one astray from true faith, which would entail adoration of an image with latria (the adoration due to God alone). His distinction between the proper and improper use of images is summed up in his statement, p. 156, “Et patet quod ymagines tam bene quam male possunt fieri: bene ad excitandum, facilitandum et accendendum mentes fidelium, ut colant devocius Deum suum; et male ut occasione ymaginum a veritate fidei aberretur, ut ymago illa vel latria vel dulia adoretur. . .” G. R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscripts of the Period c. 1350–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), p. 131, identified a group of writings that constituted a nonheretical critique of images. See also G. R. Owst, Literature and the Pulpit in Medieval England (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1961), pp. 135–50. Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), p. 153 n. 65, suggests that these writings might be called “Wycliffite” Lollardy, since Wyclif preserved Gregory the Great’s claim that images were books for the unlearned even as he criticized the improper use of images as idolatry. Wyclif was not alone, nor was he unorthodox, in cautioning against the deceptive power of images. Citing Grosseteste, Wyclif claims in Tractatus De Mandatis Divinis, p. 64, that “the variety of apparel, buildings, utensils, and other objects invented by pride constitutes the book or graven image of the devil, by which mammon or another is worshipped in the image. Therefore the whole church, or a great part of it, is tainted by this idolatry, because the works of their hands are effectively more highly valued than God.” His comments are similar to those of Richard Fitzralph, (Owst, Literature and the Pulpit, p. 141) who claims that “those who venerate such images for their own sake and make offerings to them to procure healing or benefits of some kind appear to be true and potent idolators.” And, as Nicholas Watson illustrates in his “ ‘Et que est huius ydoli materia? Tuipse’: Idols and Images in Walter Hilton,” Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image, ed. Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 95–111, before Hilton penned his defense of images in his De adoracione ymaginum, he had used iconoclastic rhetoric to represent the sinful soul in several works, both Latin and vernacular.

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93. On the Twenty-Five Articles, Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. Thomas Arnold, vol. 3 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 463. 94. John Wyclif, Sermones, vol. 2, ed. J. Loserth and F. D. Matthew, Wyclif Society (London: Trübner, 1888), p. 165. 95. On the Twenty-Five Articles, p. 463. 96. On the Twenty-Five Articles, p. 463. 97. As the charge against and answer of an accused heretic from the turn of the fifteenth century indicates, the legitimacy of image-making depended on the affective effect of an image’s figuration in the century after Chaucer’s death. While the “Sixteen Points on which the Bishops Accuse Lollards,” English Wycliffite Writings, ed. Anne Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 19, claims “Qat neiQer crosse ne ymages peynted or grauen in Qe worship of God or any oQer seyntis in Qe chirche shuld be worschipid,” the accused replied, p. 23, that “Qe making of ymages trewly peynted is leueful, and men mowen leuefuliche worschippe hem in sum manere, as signes or tokones.” 98. Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry, p. 55. 99. Ardis Butterfield, “Lyric and Elegy in The Book of the Duchess,” Medium Aevum 60 (1991): p. 50 [33–60]. 100. Butterfield, “Lyric and Elegy in The Book of the Duchess,” p. 39. 101. MED s.v. “colour,” (n.) (4), and (5b), associate “color” with devices of rhetoric, and those with deception. As I note later, this usage was often taken up by those who resisted the use of images in devotional practice. 102. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. John Jay Perry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), p. 31, makes it clear that love is an interactive ideal: “Love gets its name (amor) from the word for hook (amus), which means ‘to capture’ or ‘to be captured,’ for he who is in love is captured in the chains of desire and wishes to capture someone else with his hook. . .so the man who is a captive of love tries to attract another person by his allurements and exerts all his efforts to unite two different hearts with an intangible bond. . .” 103. See Robin Hass, “ ‘A Picture of Such Beauty in their Minds’: The Medieval Rhetoricians, Chaucer, and Evocative Effictio,” Exemplaria 14 (2002): 383–422. Also see Valerie Allen, “Portrait of a Lady: Blaunche and the Descriptive Tradition,” English Studies 74 (1993): 324–42, who argues that Chaucer attempts to render a more complex method of description for Blanche by admitting a relation between mind and body. 104. Hass, “A Picture of Such Beauty in their Minds,” p. 408. 105. Minnis, Shorter Poems, p. 86. 106. Minnis, Shorter Poems, p. 87. 107. Andrew Cowell, “The Dye of Desire: The Colors of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages,” Exemplaria 11 (1999): pp. 116–18 [115–39]. As Carruthers and Ziolkowski point out, many medieval writers connect rhetoric’s colors with perception, insofar as sight was described as its vehicle, with the other senses serving as its “colors.” 108. Qtd. in Cowell, “The Dye of Desire,” p. 116.

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109. Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon, IV, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 102. 110. As Cowell, “The Dye of Desire,” points out, p. 119, n. 13, Cistercians chose undyed cloth for their habits to avoid such associations with dissembling. See MED s.v. “blaunchen,” (v.) (1) which suggests that “blaunchen” can mean “white-wash” in a context that suggests iconoclasm. See particularly its usage in Mandeville: “A faire kirk all ouer whyte blaunched. . .for. . .Qe Sarzenes gert blaunche Qam. . .to fordo Qe paynture and Qe ymages Qat ware purtraid on Qe walles.” 111. The connection between coloring in language and art was sometimes made explicit by those who objected to images in devotional practice, as we see in the Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich 1428–31, ed. N. P. Tanner, Camden Fourth Series, vol. 20 (London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society, 1977), p. 44, “lewd wrights of stokes hawe and fourme suche crosses and ymages, and after that lewd peyntors glorye thaym with colours. . .” 112. John Wyclif, Sermons, Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. T. Arnold, vol. 2 (1871), p. 15; Treatise of Miracle Plays, Reliquiae antiquae, ed. T. Wright and J. O. Halliwell, vol. 2 (London: J.R. Smith, 1845), pp. 42–57. 113. Geoffrey de Vinsauf, The Poetria Nova, The Poetria Nova and its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine, ed. and trans. Ernest A. Gallo (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966), pp. 583–89: [. . .metumque polito / Marmore plus poliat Natura potentior arte. / Succuba sit capitis pretiosa colore columna / Lactea, quae speculum vultus supportet in altum / Ex cristallino procedat gutture quidam / Splendor, qui possit oculos referire videntis / Et cor furari. . .]. 114. See MED, s.v. “colourles,” (adj.) (b), which means “artless (style).” 115. Diane M. Ross, “The Play of Genres in the Book of the Duchess,” Chaucer Review 19 (1984): 1–13, identifies the three modes of expression the knight uses to identify White: lyric, allegory, and proces, or sequential narrative. Although she sees each of these modes ending in failure, I would argue, with many other critics, that this layered structure is an attempt to arrange the knight’s identity in a fashion that covers over such failures with at least the image of consolation. 116. In William Caxton’s translation of the Book of the Knight of the Tower, ed. M. Y. Offord, EETS Supplementary Series 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for EETS, 1971), p. 150, ll. 10–14: Cxij, “Example of many good ladyes of tyme presente,” the Knight tells of many women who should be made models for emulation. Of the woman married to a “symple” man, the knight claims: “And therfore she ought to be preysed in all estates / and to be sette amonge the good ladyes / how be it that she was no grete mystresse / but the goodnes and bounte of her may be to al other a myrrour and exemplary / wherfore men ought not to hyde the fayttes and good dedes of ony woman.” 117. Qtd. in Owst, Literature and the Pulpit, p. 19. 118. Robert Grosseteste, Carmina Anglo-Normannica: Robert Grosseteste’s Chasteau d’Amour, to which are added, “La Vie de Sainte Marie Egyptienne” and an

NOTES

119. 120.

121. 122. 123.

124.

125. 126.

199

English version of the Chasteau d’Amour, ed. M. Cooke (1852; New York: Burt Franklin, 1967), ll. 392–93. Russell A. Peck, “Chaucer and the Nominalist Questions,” Speculum 53 (1978): 745–60. This kind of declaration, since it is an attempt to remember the absent beloved, finds particular resonance with Reginald Pecock’s defense of images in his treatise, The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, ed. Churchill Babington, Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland During the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1860), vol. 1, p. 268, when he argues that the affection produced by a (devotional) image is similar to the remembrance of an absent friend: “Wherefore the other next present being of his freend, which is next aftir his bodily present visible being, is the next grettist meene aftir his bodily visible presence into the gendering of the seid affeccioun.” Even more striking, Pecock uses the image of bodily embrace for a loved one to suggest the ways in which images of Christ move viewers to devotion, p. 271, “(euen ri{t as we han experience that oon persoon gendrith more loue to an other, if he biclippe him in armys, than he shulde, if he not come so ny{ to him and not biclippid him,)—it muste nedis folewe, if thou ymagine Crist or an other Seint for to be bodili strei{t thoru{out the bodi of the ymage, that thou shalt gendre, gete, and haue bi so miche the more good affeccioun to God or to the Seint, that thou dost to him touching him in the ymage as bi ymaginacioun.” Pecock. The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, p. 272. Denis Walker, “Narrative Inconclusiveness and Consolatory Dialectic in the Book of the Duchess,” Chaucer Review 18 (1983): 15 [1–17]. See Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 207–71, who uses this term to refer to the misplaced metaphysical desire to strip language of its figurative coloration. Blanche of Lancaster died, probably of plague, in 1368. See Minnis, Shorter Poems, pp. 80–81. Chaucer’s reference to the poem as “the Deeth of Blaunche the Duchesse” in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women makes the poem’s occasional status clear, even though it does not establish a definitive date for the composition or performance of the poem. Phillipa Hardman, “The Book of the Duchess as a Memorial Monument,” Chaucer Review 28 (1994): 209 [208–13]. See Sydney Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964), pp. 75–78; pp. 138–41. For discussions of John of Gaunt’s marriage to Blanche as it relates to Chaucer’s poem, see Donald R. Howard, Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World (New York: Dutton, 1987); George Kane, Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992). It should be noted that biographers of both Gaunt and Chaucer generally conclude that Gaunt’s affection was sincere. My point is a simpler one, and relates to the ways in which Chaucer’s poem makes such sounding of sincerity impossible.

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NOTES

As Minnis, Shorter Poems, points out, p. 77, “In the final analysis, we cannot claim familiarity with Gaunt.” Also see, Adams, pp. 134–35, who emphasizes the contractual, arranged character of Gaunt’s marriage to Blanche.

Chapter 4 Which Wife? What Man? Gender Invisibility between Chaucer’s Wife and Shipman 1. Richard F. Jones, “A Conjecture on the Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 24 (1925): 512–47; Robert A. Pratt, “The Development of the Wife of Bath,” in Studies in Medieval Literature, ed. MacEdward Leach (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961): 45–79; William W. Lawrence, “Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale,” Speculum 33 (1958): 56–68; and William W. Lawrence, “The Wife of Bath and the Shipman,” Modern Language Notes 72 (1957): 87–88. 2. See MED, s.v. “revelous,” “revelry” Although the MED defines the word as “disposed to revelry, merry,” and defines “revelrie” as “amusement, diversion, pleasure,” the word “revelour” is used with pejorative connotations in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue (III. 453) and in the Cook’s Tale (“Perkyn revelour”). Furthermore, other virtuous women in the tales are separated from adjectives that do not suggest gravity and propriety. For example, Canacee in the Squire’s Tale (V. 360ff.) and Virginia in the Physician’s Tale (VI. 61) are distanced from “revelry.” Here I pursue the argument, forcefully and eloquently articulated by Mary Carruthers, “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,” PMLA 94 (1979): 209–22, that the rules outlined for women in books of deportment are themselves subject to qualification when transferred to the domain of the late fourteenth-century household. 3. William F. Woods, “A Professional Thyng: The Wife as Merchant’s Apprentice in the Shipman’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 24 (1989): 140 [139–49]. 4. Peter Beidler, “Contrasting Masculinities in The Shipman’s Tale: Monk, Merchant, and Wife,” Masculinities in Chaucer, ed. Peter Beidler (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1998), p. 142 [131–42]. 5. “Reconstruction,” as a term dating from the reformulation of the American Union after the Civil War, suggests that the political position one has held is in need of correction so that it corresponds to the ideas of the polis. See the OED, s.v. “unreconstructed,” which suggests this term’s relation to political heterodoxy. The neologism “unreconstructed” first appears in The Liberator, November 17, 1865, and again in the December issues, where it is used by radical Republicans to suggest an ideological fixity that would preclude a political change of heart on the part of former southern rebels (and would thus argue for a denial of citizenship). By January 1866 this term gains wider momentum, popping up in the New York Times. It is finally reappropriated by southern writers in May, 1867, in a piece in the Southern Cultivator. Warm thanks to David Shields for directing me to these references.

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6. For examples of this long tradition, see Robert K. Root, The Poetry of Chaucer (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1906), p. 189; Donald R. Howard, The Idea of the “Canterbury Tales” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 276; Murray Copland, “The Shipman’s Tale: Chaucer and Boccaccio,” Medium Aevum 35 (1966): 11–28. Robert Adams, “The Concept of Debt in the Shipman’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 6 (1984), pp. 87–88 [85–102], sees the tale’s lack of moral focus as part of a (moral) critique: “however puzzling or shocking its [amoral] conclusion may be, the body of the narrative does contain an indirect moral critique of the way of life it describes.” This focus on the tale’s (im)morality is also taken up by Michael W. McClintock, “Games and the Players of Games: Old French Fabliaux and the Shipman’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 5 (1970): 112–36; George R. Keiser, “Language and Meaning in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 12 (1977–78): 147–61; and Gerhard Joseph, “Chaucer’s Coinage: Foreign Exchange and the Puns of the Shipman’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 17 (1983): 341–57. 7. See A. C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), especially chapters 1 and 2, for an excellent analysis of the ways that psychoanalytic theories of looking intersect (or miss) medieval ideas about the privileges and dangers that accompany the ability to see from an unseen position. Spearing’s discussion of Actaeon, pp. 35–39, which he argues is a narrative moment that includes the audience in the transgression of looking, is a good example of the moral responsibility that attaches to looking in the medieval (and early modern) imagination. 8. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 201–4, explains that the invisibility of power is the key to panopticism’s success. 9. Vern L. Bullough, “On Being a Male in the Middle Ages,” Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare Lees (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 31–45. As The Goode Man Taght Hys Sone, Trials and Joys of Marriage, ed. Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2002), also makes clear, a husband was expected to satisfy his wife, by among other things, providing her with clothing. I am also influenced in my interpretation of masculine responsibility in this chapter by Anne Laskaya, Chaucer’s Approach to Gender in the “Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer Studies XXIII (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 15–31; pp. 176–88. 10. As Myne Awen Dere Sone, ed. Tauno F. Mustanoja Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 49 (1948): 145–93, puts it, “To wynne Qe wyrschyp and honoure. / Be liberall, sone, curtase, and wyse, / If Qou will wyn Qe lofe and pryse” (lines 386–88). 11. In The Consail and Teiching at the Vys Man Gaif His Sone, Ratis Raving and other Moral and Religious Pieces in Prose and Verse, ed. J. R. Lumby, EETS 43 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for EETS, 1870) the speaker refuses to counsel his son on whether or not to take a wife. His outline of the stages

202

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

NOTES

of life, however, suggests that marriage is a natural stage in a young man’s transition from youth to maturity. The new husband marks his wisdom, moreover, by treating his wife well, and by acting blamelessly]: “Be war, my veddyt sone, for-thy / And treit thi wyf recht tendyrly; / And gyf hir cauß of gud bounte, / Sa that defalt be nocht in thee” (lines 1800–1803). See Lee Patterson, “ ‘For the Wyves Love of Bathe’: Feminine Rhetoric and Poetic Resolution in the Roman de la Rose and the Canterbury Tales,” Speculum 58 (1983): 656–95, for a discussion of the Wife of Bath’s ability to use dilatio in order to resist the linear rhetoric of her male opponents. See also, Susan K. Hagen, “The Wife of Bath: Chaucer’s Inchoate Experiment in Feminist Hermeneutics,” Rebels and Rivals: The Contestive Spirit in the “Canterbury Tales,” ed. Susanna Greer Fein, David Raybin, and Peter C. Braeger (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1991), p. 112, [105–24], who usefully identifies the critical tendency to use the “values of the prevailing authority. . .to judge the Wife at fault for being in opposition to those values.” See John A. Alford, “The Wife of Bath Versus the Clerk of Oxford,” Chaucer Review 21 (1986): 113 [108–32], for an analysis of the different strategies of Alisoun and the Clerk in terms of the distinction between philosophy and rhetoric. His suggestion that the Clerk’s method ( philosophy) is a linear disposition that is “terse, moral, guided by knowledge, motivated by the desire for truth,” is similar to Jankyn’s in its formal organization and ostensible purpose. Also see Robert A. Pratt, “Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wyves: Medieval Antimatrimonial Propaganda in the Universities,” Annuale Mediaevale 3 (1962): 5–27, who traces the prevalence of the contents in Jankyn’s book in clerical discourse, particularly at Oxford. Carruthers, “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,” p. 222, n. 38. Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 168. Also see Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 135–76, for a fascinating discussion of making women into men’s secrets. The medieval household was not a private space that was unseen by others. See David Herlihy Medieval Households (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 149–55, for a discussion of the circulation of members in the household during the late Middle Ages. Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 24–44, explains that the royal household was simply an assemblage of persons. As an idea, then, even in more urban, mercantile arrangements, the household was not a bounded space outside the perusal of others. Moreover, as Barbara Hanawalt explains in her Crime and Conflict in Medieval England, 1300–1348 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 155–60; The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 205–19; and Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), medieval living arrangements, especially in urban settings, were more open to the perusal of neighbors than those of later periods.

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17. What I am suggesting, then, is that privacy in the Middle Ages is always a fabrication. As Herlihy explains, Medieval Households, pp. 112–30, those boundaries were often designated by roles that persons were meant to perform. 18. See Sheila Delany, “Strategies of Silence in the Wife of Bath’s Recital,” Exemplaria 2 (1990): 49–69; and Susan Signe Morrison, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: The Wife of Bath and Vernacular Translations,” Exemplaria 8 (1996): 97–123. Also see Lochrie, Covert Operations, pp. 56–61. 19. This point recalls Chauntecleer’s famous assertion, “Mulier est hominis confusio” (VII. 3164), which is, according to Benson, Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn. (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1987), p. 939, “Part of a comic definition of woman so widely known that it was almost proverbial.” For a survey of its circulation, see Carleton Brown, “Mulier est Hominis Confusio,” Modern Language Notes 35 (1920): 479–82. One example of this passage, from the pseudo “Letter of Blessed Bernard to Abbot Codrille,” makes explicit the connection between woman as riot and the reduction of man’s stature: “Woman is man’s confusion—an insatiable beast, a continual care, the dwelling of turbulence, an impediment to chastity, a man’s destruction, the channel of adultery; she is the enslaving of man, and his heaviest weight of all,” qtd. in Carolly Erickson, The Medieval Vision: Essays in History and Perception, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 201. 20. As Melibee attests (VII. 1055; see chapter 1 of this book for a discussion), it was common wisdom that men should not reveal secrets to women. While admonitory literature such as Myne Awen Dere Sone suggests that men should guard their private dealings with anyone, Alisoun herself affirms the stock belief that women could not keep secrets through her Midas account (III. 969–73). 21. For information about the spread of this faux etymology, see Henry Ansgar Kelly, “Rule of Thumb and the Folklaw of the Husband’s Stick,” Journal of Legal Education 44 (1994): 341–65; Medieval historians (see particularly the work of Hanawalt and Brundage) point to the paucity of statistical evidence documenting domestic violence as we define it now. This empirical scarcity is due at least in part to the visibility of domestic relations in the medieval household, since there is also the suggestion that the networks of visible surveillance that were simply part of medieval community relations (the church, neighbors, and family) kept marital cruelty (the standard for marital separation) under their own watch. 22. See James A. Brundage, “Domestic Violence in Classical Canon Law,” Violence in Medieval Society, ed. Richard W. Kaeuper (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), pp. 183–95, who suggests that men could use a reasonable standard of chastisement to subdue their wives, but who also explains that men who were abusive were condemned by canonists, to the extent that abused wives could seek legal separation from their violent spouses. The literature he surveys also suggests, interestingly, that clerics were expected to keep closer control over their wives, and thus were allowed greater latitude in means of chastisement. Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth

204

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

NOTES

Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages, trans. Chaya Galai (New York: Methuen, 1983), pp. 89–90, suggests that in some European towns, “men were punished for being beaten by their wives.” Barbara Hanawalt, “Violence in the Domestic Milieu of Late Medieval England,” Violence in Medieval Society, ed. Richard W. Kaeuper (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), p. 197 [197–214], suggests that the addition of familial violence to the 1352 Statute of Treason suggests that “the patriarchal establishment seemed to fear violent insurrection from wives, apprentices, minor clergy, and servants as well.” As she explains, pp. 204–5, sermons, advice literature, and even historical incidents suggest that marital harmony was the domestic state men were encouraged to foster. If a husband became abusive, the community—either on its own or through legal means—would moderate that man’s excessive discipline. Emma Hawkes, “The ‘Reasonable’ Laws of Domestic Violence in Late Medieval England,” Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts, ed. Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), pp. 57–70; I have found the following essays from the same volume particularly useful in my construction of this chapter: Philippa Maddern, “Interpreting Silence: Domestic Violence in the King’s Courts in East Anglia, 1422–1442,” pp. 31–56; Eve Salisbury, “Chaucer’s ‘Wife,’ the Law, and the Middle English Breton Lays,” pp. 73–93; and Garrett P. J. Epp, “Noah’s Wife: The Shaming of the ‘Trew,’” pp. 223–41. See the OED, s.v., “Rule of Thumb,” which is defined as “A method or procedure derived entirely from practice or experience, without any basis in scientific knowledge; a roughly practical method.” As far as I can determine, this phrase post-dates Chaucer’s culture, but as folklorists explain, it was probably derived from a measurement of cloth that dates from the Middle Ages. “Sire Hain et Dame Anieuse,” Nouveau Recueil Complet des Fabliaux (NRCF), eds. Willem Noomen and Nico van den Boogaard, 10 vols. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1983–98), 2.5. All translations of this fabliau are by N. E. Dubin, © 2003. Many thanks to Professor Dubin for allowing me to use his unpublished verse translation of this fabliau. See also, Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974–86); The Towneley Plays, ed. Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Epp, “Noah’s Wife,” conducts an extremely useful comparative analysis of these and other Noah plays in relation to issues of domestic violence. NRCF, 2.5.120–21. Dubin’s translation conflates the domestic-political resonance of masculine governance: “Do you imagine you possess / The sovereignty here already?” NRCF, 2.5.260–69: [Sire Hains fu hastis & chaus, / Qui del ferir mout se coitoit; / N’en pot mes, quar mout le hastoit / Anieuse, qui pas nel doute: / Des deus poins si forment le boute / Que sire Hains va chancelant. / Que vous iroie je contant? / Tout furent sanglent lor drapel, / Quar maint cop & maint hatiplel / Se sont doné par grant aïr].

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28. NRCF, 2.5.378: [ {you must} obey and serve your man]. 29. NRCF, 2.5.383–85: [Par foi, bien le vueil creanter / Por que je m’en puisse garder; Ainsi en vueil fere l’otroi]. 30. See Eileen Power, trans., The Goodman of Paris: A Treatise on Moral and Domestic Economy by a Citizen of Paris (London: Routledge, 1928), p. 145. See the French in Le Mesnagier de Paris, ed. Georgina E. Brereton and Janet M. Ferrier, trad. Karin Ueltschi, Lettres Gothiques (Paris: Librarie Générale Française, 1994), I.vi.24. 1117–19. His emphasis, even in this passage, is on keeping the appearance of the husband’s control intact, for he goes on to say “nor behoveth it that your husband tell you the cause of his commandment, nor what moveth him, for that would seem a sign of your willing to do or not to do it according as the cause appeared good to you or otherwise, the which ought not to fall upon you nor upon your judgment, for it behoveth him alone to know it, and it behoveth not you to ask him, save it be afterwards, by your two selves alone and in private” (p. 145) Brereton and Ferrier, I.vi.24.1119–27. 31. NRCF, 2.5.364–67: [Si te covient d’ore en avant / Fere del tout a son plesir, / Quar de ci ne pués tu issir / Se par son commandement non!]. 32. Goodman of Paris, p. 137. Brereton and Ferrier, I.vi.10. 868; 869–72. 33. Bartholomeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, trans. John Trevisa, ed. Robert Steele (New York: Cooper Square, 1966), VI.13.74. 34. How the Goode Man Taght Hys Sone, lines 130–32. 35. The Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry, ed. Thomas Wright, EETS 33 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. for EETS, 1868), chapter XVII, p. 25. 36. The belief in woman’s lack of reason, and thus measure, was widespread in the clerical tradition. See Alcuin Blamires, ed. Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), for a variety of readings from the Latin and vernacular traditions that make this assertion. 37. Qtd. in Erickson, The Medieval Vision, p. 204. 38. Peggy Knapp, “Alisoun Weaves a Text,” Philological Quarterly 65 (1986), pp. 398–99 [387–401], who gives a compelling reading of what she calls “four ways. . .[of ] seeing Alisoun” that culminates in an assertion that Alisoun’s reconciliation with Jankyn mediates the oppositional strands of critical analysis (medieval and modern) that constitute the fabric of her text. 39. See Arlyn Diamond, “Chaucer’s Women and Women’s Chaucer,” The Authority of Experience, ed. Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), pp. 60–83. Other useful readings that concentrate primarily on the Wife of Bath’s Tale include H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., “Of a Fire in the Dark: Public and Private Feminism in the Wife of Bath’s Tale,” Women’s Studies 11 (1984): 157–78; Susan Crane, “Alison’s Incapacity and Poetic Instability in the Wife of Bath’s Tale,” PMLA 102 (1987): 20–28. 40. Helen Fulton, “Mercantile Ideology in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 36 (2002): 311–28. For information on merchants’ changing social position in the late fourteenth century, see Sylvia Thrupp, The Merchant

206

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

NOTES

Class of Medieval London (1948; repr. Ann Arbor Paperback, 1962). Other recent studies, most notably D. Vance Smith, Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) esp. pp. 23–43; pp. 126–36, also suggests that the problematic account of their exchange of money in the medieval imaginary made merchants more careful to conceal their identities in the public eye. While Fulton, “Mercantile Ideology in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale,” p. 312, agrees that merchants did not mark their social identities through ostentatious displays, she also points out that “By the late fourteenth century, merchants were too powerful, too visible, too integral to the urban economy, especially in London, to be marginalized through the odd satirical portrait or unflattering anecdote based on the conventional stereotype of the greedy materialistic merchant.” In The Descryvyng of Mannes Membres, Twenty-Six Political and Other Poems, ed. J. Kail, EETS 124 (London, K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. for EETS, 1904), p. 64, which compares the state to a man’s body, merchants are represented as the thighs of the state. Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 352; p. 365, suggests that the tale nods to the legitimate inevitability of the bourgeois life. W. E. Rogers and P. Dower, “Thinking about Money in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale,” New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 119–38, give a helpful reading of Patterson’s argument as it relates to criticism of the tale. See “The Qualities of a Gentleman,” Reliquiae Antiquae, ed. Thomas Wright and J. O. Halliwell, 2 vols. (London: J. R. Smith, 1845) 1.252, which suggests that generosity is necessary for a man’s good repute. In what follows I am greatly indebted to Alcuin Blamires’s article, “Refiguring the ‘Scandalous Excess’ of Medieval Woman: The Wife of Bath and Liberality,” Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 57–78. Although Blamires’s analysis focuses on the Wife of Bath, the association of liberality and masculinity in medieval discourse is important to my analysis of the expansion of gender that takes place in the Shipman’s Tale. See “Against the Pride of Ladies,” Political Songs of England from the Reign of John to that of Edward II, ed. T. Wright (London, Camden Society, 1839), p. 153. A host of short poems from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries (including pieces by Lydgate and Hoccleve) attack women’s affinity for “horns,” which came to stand for feminine excess in dress. Sir Richard Maitland’s Satire on the town Ladies, (sixteenth century) is particularly interesting because it attacks bourgeois wives who attempt to mimic the nobility and hence waste their husbands’ money. See G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1961), pp. 390–411, for a discussion of moralists’ reactions against excesses in attire. He also cites a sermon in which the daughters of the devil are described using references to contemporary fashion: “for women settyn all here stodye in pride of array of here hed and

NOTES

46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

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of here body, to lokyn in myrrourys, in kemyng here heed, in here hornys, in peerlys, in other ryche array abowte the heed, in ryngys, in brochys, in hedys, in long trayles” (p. 96). While “The Pride of Women’s Horns,” Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. Rossell Hope Robbins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959) p. 139, makes women’s extravagance its principal target, it also admits that men are equally guilty of vanity in dress. Other poems, such as “A Song of Galaunt,” Ballads from Manuscripts, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, The Ballad Society (London: Taylor & Co., 1868–73), 1.445, and “Against Proud Galaunts,” Political Poems and Songs from the Accession of Edward III to That of Richard III, ed. T. Wright, 2 vols. (London: Rolls Series, 1859–61), 2.251, associate men’s fashion with the confusion of gender roles and the decay of society. The Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry , chapter XLVII, p. 62. Goodman of Paris, p. 50. Brereton and Ferrier, I.i.10.133–34; 136–37. Theresa Coletti, in her article, “The Mulier Fortis and Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 15 (1980–81): 236–49, argues that Chaucer’s initial description of the wife suggests that she is an inversion of the “good wife” from Biblical prescription. See Benson’s explanatory notes to the Man of Law’s Epilogue (II.1163–190) for a survey of criticism that connects this passage, present in 35 MSS. to the issue of the Shipman’s Tale’s speaker. Frederick Tupper, “The Bearings of the Shipman’s Prologue,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 33 (1934): 352–71; Robert L. Chapman, “The Shipman’s Tale Was Meant for the Shipman,” Modern Language Notes 71 (1956): 4–5; and Hazel Sullivan, “A Chaucerian Puzzle,” A Chaucerian Puzzle and Other Medieval Essays, ed. Natalie Grimes Lawrence and Jack A. Reynolds (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1961), pp. 1–46. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. xix, differentiates strategies and tactics between the powerful and the weak based on their alternate appropriations of space (strategy) and time (tactic). See Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 113–31; Dinshaw uses Irigaray even as she surveys other feminist approaches to the tale. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 76. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, pp. 113–31; Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 86–92. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, pp. 36–38, argues that strategies attempt to spatialize positions of power by appealing to propriety of place. Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, p. 77. See Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 329–36 for a discussion of the ways that male power articulates itself outside regulatory strictures of control.

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58. See John Ganim, “Double-Entry in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 30 (1996): 294–305, who claims that the entire tale is an “allegory of creative bookkeeping” that involves passing off values through “organizing the world into a system of tropes and understandable and manipulable units, consistent with a particular set of values” (p. 298; p. 296). 59. Glenn Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 37–77, discusses the opportunities and pressures that that an emerging emphasis on conjugal affection placed on lay gender roles in the late Middle Ages. 60. John C. McGalliard, “Characterization in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale,” Philological Quarterly 54 (1975): 1–18. 61. “Les Deus Changeors,” Nouveau Recueil Complet des Fabliaux (NRCF), eds. Willem Noomen and Nico van den Boogaard, 10 vols. (Assen, NE: Van Gorcum, 1983–98), 5.51. All translations of this fabliau are by N. E. Dubin, © 2003. Thanks to Professor Dubin for allowing me to use his unpublished verse translation of this fabliau. 62. Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J.L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 84. 63. Mary Flowers Braswell, “Chaucer’s ‘queinte termes of lawe’: A Legal View of the Shipman’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 22 (1988): 295–304. 64. See “Verses Concerning the Pepper-Mill,” The Literary Context of Chaucer’s Fabliaux, ed. Larry D. Benson and Theodore M. Andersson (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971) pp. 280–81; “The Priest and the Lady,” Literary Context, pp. 328–37. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex,” Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157–210, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 1–27, provide analysis of the circulations of homosocial desire that “trafficking” women can facilitate between men. 65. Karma Lochrie, “Women’s ‘Pryvetees’ and Fabliau Politics in the Miller’s Tale,” Exemplaria 6 (1994): 287–304. 66. NRCF, 5.51.105–7: [Au tesmoing que j’en ai veü. / Aucun pechié m’avoit neü / Que j’ai si tost fame espouse]. 67. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam (London: Penguin, 1972), VIII,1; VIII, 2. See John Finlayson, “Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale, Boccaccio, and the ‘Civilizing’ of Fabliau,” Chaucer Review 36 (2002): 336–51; and Carol F. Heffernan, “Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale and Boccaccio’s Decameron, VIII, 1: Retelling a Story,” Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, ed. Keith Busby and Erik Kooper (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990), pp. 261–70, for a more developed discussion of connections between these stories and Chaucer’s tale. 68. Boccaccio, Decameron, VIII, 1 and VIII, 2. While VIII, 1 is a story designed to punish a woman’s greed, VIII, 2 is supposed to illustrate the deceptive nature of priests. It is clear that the woman in VIII, 1 is punished, but Belcolore comes to a reconciliation with the priest, but only, as the tale

NOTES

69.

70.

71.

72.

73.

74. 75.

76.

77.

209

points out, because he uses the authority of his office to frighten her: “But Belcolore was infuriated with the priest for having made such a fool of her, and refused to speak to him for the rest of the summer until the grape-harvest, by which time he had scared the life out of her so successfully by threatening to see that she was consigned to the very centre of Hell, that she made her peace with him over a bottle of must and some roast chestnuts” (p. 560). Woods, “A Professional Thyng,” p. 147; Paul Stephen Schneider, “ ‘Taillynge Ynough’: The Function of Money in the Shipman’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 11 (1977): 207 [201–9], argues that the wife’s display of affection for her husband indicates that she will not be involved in similar adulterous exchanges in the future. Thomas Hahn, “Money, Sexuality, Wordplay, and Context in the Shipman’s Tale’, Chaucer in the Eighties,” ed. Julian N. Wasserman and Robert J. Blanch (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), p. 235 [235–49]. As Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 214, notes, “The ease and speed with which she converts her own offence into a cause of complaint against her husband is nicely observed.” David H. Abraham, “ ‘Cosyn and Cosynage’: Pun and Structure in the Shipman’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 11 (1977): 319–27; Schneider, “ ‘Taillynge Ynough,’” pp. 201–9. Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 93–4; pp. 134–65; and pp. 247–48, traces converges and differences between medical and moral views of sexual pleasure. Goodman of Paris, pp. 184–86 (p. 184). Brereton and Ferrier, I.viii.11–12. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1988), p. 218 [197–202], where Bersani elaborates the often unrecognized oscillation inherent to sexuality: “the self which the sexual shatters provides the basis on which sexuality is associated with power. It is possible to think of the sexual as, precisely, moving between a hyperbolic sense of self and a loss of all consciousness of self. But sex as self-hyperbole is perhaps a repression of self as self-abolition.” See James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), whose discussions of marital sex during different periods is especially helpful. Although his flowchart of regulations stipulated by various penitentials (figure 4.1, p. 162), predates Chaucer’s era, taken together with his discussion of marital sex in the period after the black death (pp. 487–518), it becomes clear that marital sex was an activity that moralists feared would corrupt partners in a conjugal union. Strict regulation of marital sex, accordingly, was not only meant to save married couples from the sins of sensuality, but also to demonstrate the disciplined order that ruled even the most private goings on in the household. See Katharina Wilson and Elizabeth M. Makowski, eds.,“Wykked Wyves and the Woes of Marriage”: Misogamous Literature from Juvenal to Chaucer (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990), especially chapter 4 for a survey of

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materials that express this view. Also see Owst, Literature and the Pulpit, pp. 378–79. 78. Augustine, City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, introduction by Thomas Merton (New York: Modern, 1950), Book XIV, chapter 18 (pp. 466–67). Citing the revelatory shift in sight that occurs upon the fall, Augustine attributes sexual shame to both men and women. His examples of marital sexuality, however, assume that a man controls the domain where such intimacy takes place; thus he turns out servants, sends away attendants, and so on, so that his shame will not be revealed. 79. Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” p. 218. 80. Besides articles by Richardson, and Adams, several other articles suggest Biblical allusions in this tale as part of an undercurrent of morality in the tale. This Christian undertow, which assumes that medievals could see marks of spirituality in ways that moderns cannot, is indebted to the Augustinian reading practices outlined by D. W. Robertson, Jr., in his revolutionary study, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), particularly pp. 52–137. I do not wish to argue against the contention that medievals had more acute powers of spiritual insight than we do today. Instead I want to admit that medievals were just as prone to don cognitive blinders in their readings of signs that could carry spiritual import as we are in our more secular culture. In other words, while I am indebted to articles including Gail McMurray Gibson, “Resurrection as Dramatic Icon in the Shipman’s Tale,” Signs and Symbols in Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. John P. Hermann and John Burke, Jr. (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1981), pp. 102–112; Lorraine Kohanske Stock, “The Reenacted Fall in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale,” Studies in Iconography 7–8 (1981–82): 135–45; and R. H. Winnick, “Luke 12 and Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 30 (1995): 164–90, I do not see that the spiritual ethos to which their analyses point is attached to any point of view in the tale. Like other Old French fabliaux (Les quatre Sohais saint Martin, NRCF, 4.31; L’Esquiriel, NRCF, 6.58), this tale acknowledges tropes of common morality even as it refuses to affirm them.

Chapter 5 Miscellaneous Chaucer: Proverbial Masculinity in Harley 7333 1. John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, eds., The Text of the “Canterbury Tales” Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), p. 207. See Linne R. Mooney, “John Shirley’s Heirs,” Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): p. 190 [182–98], who suggests that Harley 7333 was written by “at least eight scribes.” Her division of the hands, which differs from that of Manly and Rickert, interests me because she suggests that three scribes, one of whom was responsible for the portion of the manuscript containing Impingham’s proverbs, worked together in a close collaborative relationship, “passing texts and quires from one to the

NOTES

211

other for completion” (p. 190). The three scribes that Mooney identifies are responsible for the Shirleian material in this manuscript, which, incidentally, also means that these scribes were involved in producing the portions of the text containing Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and shorter poems (Mooney’s scribes B, C, and D also copied Shirleian material that was not by Chaucer, but they were responsible for all the Chaucer copying in the manuscript according to her identifications). The maker of the Impingham proverbs, then, played a pivotal role in the compilation of Chaucer’s body of work in this manuscript. 2. Margaret Connelly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England (Brookfield, IL: Ashgate: 1998), pp. 173–75; Julia Boffey and John J. Thompson, “Anthologies and Miscellanies: Production and Choice of Texts,” Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 280 [279–315]. John J. Thompson, “After Chaucer: Resituating Middle English Poetry in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period,” New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies, ed. Derek Pearsall, (Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press, 2000), pp. 189–90 [183–99], makes a similar point in discussing this manuscript’s relevance to Hoccleve’s self-promoting praise of Chaucer. 3. Ralph Hanna III, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and their Texts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), especially pp. 1–34. 4. A. I. Doyle, “Publication by Members of the Religious Orders,” Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 109–23; also see Christopher Cannon, “Monastic Productions,” The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 316–48, who discusses the holdings of late medieval monastic libraries and explores the atmosphere of patronage in monastic institutions of the late fifteenth century. In the case of Harley 7333, however, Doyle cautions against too comfortable an assumption that the manuscript was produced at Leicester Abbey, since the spelling has been associated with North Hampshire by Jeremy Smith (Connelly, John Shirley, p. 186, n. 21). From the names and rebuses in the manuscript, however, it is clear that the manuscript was among the Abbey’s holdings by the late fifteenth century, and it is also clear that the manuscript was compiled there. The marginal notation on folio 150r, “Doctor Peni wirt this booke,” would appear to be a clear indication of production; but as Linne R. Mooney points out in her discussion, “John Shirley’s Heirs,” p. 194, this inscription appears on one of two folios that her “Scribe E” copied, and this quire is written by two hands that do not appear elsewhere in the manuscript. This annotation, then, because its fascicle is rather unique, does not settle the location of production for the manuscript. Since Leicester itself was a locus of royal power during the last years of Henry VI’s reign, most scholars who have considered this manuscript believe the Shirley exemplars would have come into the

212

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

NOTES

hands of the Augustinian Canons through such contact, if not patronage. Ralph Hanna III, “Augustinian Canons and Middle English Literature,” The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie, and Ralph Hanna (London: British Library, 2000), p. 34 [27–42], suggests that Shirley might have spent time at Leicester Abbey, perhaps among a group of long-term guests that Hanna describes as “Augustinian groupies.” I date the emergence of medieval literary manuscript studies as the York conference “The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study,” organized by Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter in October, 1981. See Ralph Hanna III, “Analytical Survey 4: Middle English Manuscripts and the Study of Literature,” New Medieval Literatures 4 (2001): 243–64, for a survey and bibliography of this important field. Indeed, if its library catalogue is to be believed, Leicester Abbey possessed one of the finest monastic libraries of late medieval England (with an incredible 900 volumes!). M. R. James in his survey “Catalogue of the Library of Leicester Abbey,” Leicestershire Archaeological Society 19 (1937): p. 126 [118–30], argues that the survival of the Leicester Abbey Catalogue is more important than that of the library, because the catalogue suggests that the library itself did not contain “many lost treasures.” Nevertheless, the provenance of Harley 7333 illustrates the local histories of particular volumes that resulted from the bureaucratic mechanisms of the Dissolution. Recording personal information of the Ithell family from the mid-sixteenth to the early seventeenth century, this manuscript was probably acquired from Leicester Abbey by Peter Ithell, who was commissioned to make a survey of Leicestershire’s ecclesiastical holdings in 1534–35. His family’s continued use of this volume as a repository for personal information suggests an interesting alternative to studies of the institutional construction of the postReformation library. Jennifer Summit’s claim in her article, “Monuments and Ruins: Spenser and the Problem of the English Library,” English Literary History 70 (2003): [1–34], that “library-building served the ends of nationbuilding” remains true for bibliophiles like John Bale, John Leland, Sir John Prise, or the later Matthew Parker, but Ithell’s use of Harley 7333 suggests that the histories of unique volumes are also bound up with the histories of individual subjects and their families. Manly and Rickert, The Text of the “Canterbury Tales,” p. 211. Seth Lerer, “Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology,” PMLA 118 (2003): p. 1255 [1251–67], uses “anthologistic impulse” to describe “the distinguishing feature of manuscripts or sections of manuscripts guided by a controlling literary intelligence. . .[as] a moment when the idea of the anthology is thematically present in the texts.” As discussed above (n. 4), in recent years doubt has been cast on Manly and Rickert’s proposition that Harley 7333 was copied by the canons at St. Mary de Pratis in Leicester. Nevertheless, Mooney’s description of the close collaboration amongst the scribes might suggest a monastic production. Although the existence of six scribes working together fits with the commercial production of

NOTES

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

213

vernacular literature as described by C. Paul Christianson, “Evidence for the Study of London’s Late Medieval Manuscript-Book Trade,” Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, pp. 87–108, and even though Andrew Taylor, “Manual to Miscellany: Stages in the Commercial Copying of Vernacular Literature in England,” Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): 1–17, shows that networks in which different book craftsmen worked on separate fascicles of a single volume existed as early as the thirteenth century, both scholars suggest an independent yet interlocking structure for the production of books before commercial scriptoria. Indeed, the existence of a close collaborative relation, in which different scribes worked within the same quires, would point to a more centralized framework for composition. The “Catalogue of the Library of Leicester Abbey” lists several individual works included in Harley 7333 that would suggest that as late as 1477 the manuscript booklets had not yet been bound together. See Manly and Rickert, The Text of the “Canterbury Tales,” p. 216, for a discussion of the most well known of these titles. The library catalogue itself, which was printed in two consecutive issues of the Leicestershire Archaeological Society in 1937, offers other possibilities. Accepting John Guillory’s claim in his article, “Canonical and Non-canonical: A Critique of the Debate,” English Literary History 54 (1987): p. 488 [483–527], that the canon is a “selection of values,” and combining it with Ralph Hanna III’s contention in Pursuing History, p. 31, that miscellanies create “private, individual canons,” Seth Lerer, “Medieval English Literature,” p. 1254, examines the way that the idea of the anthology “controlled much of the dissemination, marketing, and critical reception of vernacular English writing.” Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 12. This collection exists uniquely in British Library manuscript Harley 7333, fol. 121v–122r. Although the transcriptions I use in this article are my own, R. H. Bowers prints these proverbs and traces the circulation of the Chaucerian proverbs and non-Chaucerian verses in his useful piece, “Impingham’s Borrowings from Chaucer,” Modern Language Notes 73 (1958): 327–29. My departures from Bowers, noted in my discussion, deal with spelling and punctuation. See Hanna, Pursuing History, p. 9, who argues that unique volumes belie a “range or spectrum of literary communities.” These literary communities, I agree, produce authorial identities that are fitted to their immediate readerships. The proverbs of Harley 7333 demonstrate, however, the ways in which situating reception as a matter of representation give such particular identities wider resonance. While Seth Lerer, “Medieval English Literature,” p. 1254, points out that “narrators often dramatize their acts of reading as acts of perusing an anthology,” these proverbs further suggest that the act of reading is represented as the compilation of an anthology. Manly and Rickert, The Text of the “Canterbury Tales,” p. 215, counter the common assumption that “Impingham” is the name of a scribe by observing

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that the hand is the same as most of the booklet, and so it is unlikely that this writer would sign only these twenty-six lines if he were only a copyist. John Manly nominates Benedict Burgh, whose Cato and “Master Benet’s Christmas Game” are included in Harley 7333, noting that Burgh was prebend of Empingham, Rutland, from 1463–77. This assignation, however, is only speculative, since it depends on cellarer William Stoughton’s knowledge of Empingham based on the Abbey’s landholdings in the region. 17. See A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 2nd edn. (1984; Aldershot, Wildwood House, 1988), pp. 190–210, where Minnis explores Chaucer’s self-identification with the role of compiler. Glending Olson, “Making and Poetry in the Age of Chaucer,” Comparative Literature 31 (1979): 272–90, usefully traces the relationship between making and craftsmanship in medieval vernacular literature. 18. As Seth Lerer suggests in Chaucer and his Readers, Chaucer’s later imitators saw him as an auctor whose sentences could be rearranged. As he argues, p. 11, to be an auctor was to be “one participant in an enterprise shared by scriptor, compilator, and commentator ”; Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 74–108, demonstrates that many fifteenth-century Chaucerians did not draw a line between textual criticism and imitation. To write as Chaucer was also to write about Chaucer. 19. Really, the problem is that there is no investigation of parity or lack thereof between these terms. Rather, there seems to be an uncomplicated elision of two uses of “writing.” In the first instance, “writing” is a sign of literacy that can be deployed for institutional ends or local resistance. See Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); Susan Crane, “The Writing Lesson of 1381,” Chaucer’s England: Literature in a Historical Context, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 201–21; and Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). In the second, “writing” is a textual product that gains meaning through its material construction, transmission, and reception. The most apparent examples of this treatment appear under the section heading of The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature: “Writing in the British Isles,” which includes chapters on writing in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Now certainly, these two terms overlap in key instances, like Emily Steiner’s investigation of “relationships between the institutional and the expressive, the material and the textual, the literate and literary, and Latin and the vernacular” in her book, Documentary Culture and the Making of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 10. “Making,” a modern transliteration of a Middle-English term (which admittedly does not account for the multilingualism of medieval insular writing anymore than any other English term does), gives a fuller sense of the ways that construction, transmission, and reception of texts connect our

NOTES

20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

215

notions of writers and receivers, sometimes to the point of effacing distinctions between them. See MED s.v.: “maker(e)”: 3. (a)–(c); s.v.: “maken”: 5. (a)–(f ); s.v. “makinge”: 5. (a)–(c). All of these terms give a sense of ordinatio and compilatio as central components of the production of medieval texts. While many definitions of “writere” or “writen” or “writing” indicate the process of composition commonly associated with authorship, only one definition includes acts of textual assembly as “writing,” and there perhaps only as a metaphor expressing the process of conjoining events in narrative sequence: s.v.: “writen” 5. (b): to compose (a treatise, song, and so on); also, compile the narrative of (a saint’s life) [quot 1250]: St. Marg. (2) 301: “Theodoius Qe clerc, he wrot hire vie.” It is because I strongly agree with David Wallace, who, in characterizing the habits of the contributors to the Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, p. xxi, claims that “Medieval literature cannot be understood (does not survive) except as part of transmissive processes—moving through the hands of copyists, owners, readers, and institutional authorities—that form part of other and greater histories (social, political, religious, and economic),” that I believe we need a more finely calibrated term to acknowledge reception’s influence on literary meanings. Justice, Writing and Rebellion, p. 261. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 1. Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaborations, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 1. By focusing on the work of Greenblatt and Masten, I take seriously Ralph Hanna’s call for contact between medieval and early modern textual studies in his “Analytical Survey 4.” However, in recognizing that “one cannot arbitrarily believe in period closure in book history” (p. 248), I also acknowledge that I am not pursuing Harley 7333’s later trajectories, which means that I am making my own, limited, “medieval” version of this manuscript. As Andrew Taylor points out in his Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and their Readers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 201, “one of the characteristics of the manuscript is that the simple difficulty of piecing out the letters only reveals more clearly what is true to some degree of any act of reading, that it is an act of desire.” Kathleen Biddick, “Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible,” Speculum 68 (1993): 389–418. Lerer, “Medieval English Literature,” p. 1254; p. 1261. See Julia Boffey’s and A. S. G. Edwards’s article, “ ‘Chaucer’s Chronicle,’ John Shirley, and the Canon of Chaucer’s Shorter Poems,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 201–18, which discusses other proverbial renderings of Chaucer in several manuscripts, particularly Additional 16165, as part of what

216

30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

NOTES

they describe as “the gradual establishment, through the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of Chaucer’s reputation for gnomic wisdom” (p. 213). See W. W. Skeat, ed., Early English Proverbs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), p. 64, for parallels to this antithetical series. Bowers, “Impingham’s Borrowings from Chaucer,” p. 328. The margins of Ha4 and Ht include the Latin legal maxim: “Qui in uno gravatur in alio debet relevari.” See, Juvenal, Satire VI, Juvenal and Perseus, ed. and trans. G. G. Ramsay (London: Routledge, 1918), p. 82; Jacques de Vitry, “Sermon 66,” Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, ed. Alcuin Blamires (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 146–47; and Giovanni Boccaccio, The Corbaccio, trans. Anthony K. Cassell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), p. 35. Glending Olson, “Adam Scriveyn and the Book Curse,” Thirty-Eighth International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, May 8–11, 2003; I would like to thank Professor Olson for sharing and discussing this unpublished paper with me. My phrasing her is indebted to Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. 203, who claims “visibility is a trap.” See John S. P Tatlock, “The Epilog of Chaucer’s Troilus,” Modern Philology 18 (1921): 625–59, for other examples of this habit. Looking forward to the engagement of readers with printed books, Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 20–21, points out that the invitation to improve a text becomes a way of gendering different readers. “Gentlemen” readers are asked to correct the texts they read, while women readers are invited to play with texts they peruse for entertainment. John S. P. Tatlock, “The Canterbury Tales in 1400,” PMLA 50 (1935): 100–139. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 10–16.

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INDEX

abstractive cognition (Ockham’s), 93–5 action at a distance (Ockham’s), 94 Aers, David, 9 affect, 13, 138 devotional representation and, 31, 83–6 “Against the Pride of Ladies,” 120, 206 n. 44 Akbari, Suzanne Conklin, 163 n. 5, 167 n. 27, 174 n. 120 Alain de Lille, 98 Albertanus of Brescia, 32 Albertus Magnus, 17, 20, 79, 82, 164 n. 18, 189 n. 13, n. 18, 191 n. 32 Alhacen [Alhazen], 20, 23, 165 n. 25, 166–7 n. 51 Al-kindi, 20, 163 n. 5, 188 n. 6 allegoresis 30–1, 81 allegory, 14, 18, 25, 28, 31–2, 34–9, 41, 88, 91, 99, 163 n. 5, 166 n. 34, 168–9 n. 68, 170 n. 87, 171 n. 94, 175 n. 127, 177 n. 7, 198 n. 115, 208 n. 58 Allen, Valerie, 197 n. 103 Amazon Women on the Moon (film;1987), 2 Ambrose, 67 Anna O., 13, 162 n. 52 Aquinas, Thomas, 22, 83, 117, 191 n. 37 Arabic learning, 20, 21, 22, 90, 164 n. 25 Aristotle, 19, 20, 23, 24, 54, 78, 79, 93, 94, 195 n. 81

Augustine, 17, 19, 23, 24, 71, 82, 83, 133, 166 n. 36, 168 n. 68, 177 n. 4, 210 n. 78 Augustinian canons, 137, 211–12 n. 4 Avicenna, 82, 189 n. 10 Bacon, Roger, 20, 21–32, 44, 83, 94, 165 n. 25, n. 26, n. 27, n. 29, 166 n. 30, n. 36, 167 n. 43, n. 49, 191 n. 33 banality, 1, 18, 32, 35, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 174 n. 126. See also, gender (banality of) Barthes, Roland, 158 n. 25 Bartholomeus Anglicus, 116, 205 n. 33 Beckwith, Sarah, 84, 192 n. 45 Beidler, Peter G., 108 Berger, John, 17, 163 n. 1, 188 n. 8 Bernasconi, Robert, 11, 160 n. 42 Bersani, Leo, 133, 209 n. 75 Biddick, Kathleen, 1, 142 Biernoff, Suzannah, 23, 85, 165 n. 23, 166 n. 36, 167 n. 43, 173 n. 113, 192 n. 40 Blamires, Alcuin, 206 n. 43 blaunche(n), 98, 99, 103, 198 n. 110 blindness, 29, 79, 149, 156 n. 8, 210 n. 80 Bloch, R. Howard, 179 n. 13 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 128, 208 n. 67, n. 68, 216 n. 33 body Chaucer’s, 4–5, 9, 15–16, 138–41, 144, 151, 210–11 n. 1 Christ’s, 84–6

242

INDEX

body––continued domestic, 58, 60, 64, 65, 206 n. 40 invisibility of, 33–5, 38, 40, 70, 72 manly, masculine, 2, 33, 34, 72, 77, 115, 138, 173 n. 113, 182 n. 43, 206 n. 40 rhetoric and, 38, 40, 179 n. 13, 197 n. 103 textual, 138–41, 144 woman’s, 34, 35, 38, 41, 66, 68, 69–70, 71–2, 74, 75, 108, 111, 126, 127, 128, 131, 132, 170 n. 86, 172 n. 103, 173 n. 113, 177 n. 7, 179 n. 13, 185 n. 85, 186 n. 91 Boethius, 17 Boffey, Julia, 137, 215 n. 29 Book of the Knight of the Tower [Le Livre du chevalier de La Tour Landry], 38, 39, 66, 71, 116, 121, 184 n. 68, 186 n. 90, 198 n. 16 Bowers, R.H., 144, 213 n. 13 brain (spatialization of), 78, 82, 83, 189 n. 10, n. 11. See also, distance (brain topography), faculty psychology Braswell, Mary Flowers, 127 Bromyard, John, 99 Brundage, James, 169 n. 78, 203 n. 21, 209 n. 76 Bullough, Vern, 110, 201 n. 9 Burger, Glenn, 156 n. 14, 170 n. 86, 208 n. 59 Burnley, David, 39, 172 n. 97 Butler, Judith, 153, 155 n. 1 Butterfield, Ardis, 96 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 159 n. 36, 161 n. 54 Calcidius, 18 Camille, Michael, 55, 83, 162 n. 58, 186 n. 91, 188 n. 5 Cannon, Christopher, 9, 211 n. 4 Capellanus, Andreas, 197 n. 102

Carruthers, Mary, 78, 112, 160 n. 49, 187 n. 3, 188 n. 5, 190 n. 22, 194 n. 69, 197 n. 107, 200 n. 2 Castrojeriz, Fray Juan Garcia de, 67, 184 n. 73 Caxton, William, see Book of the Knight of the Tower Certeau, Michel de, 1, 160 n. 39, 207 n. 51, n. 55 Chapman, Robert L., 122 Chasteau d’Amour, 99 Chaucer, Geoffrey Book of the Duchess, 14, 75, 77–105, 121, 150, 151, 168–9 n. 68 Clerk’s Tale, 69 Complaint of Mars, 182 n. 44 Goodlief, 48, 49, 110 General Prologue, 3, 7 Harry Bailey [Host], 3, 4–6, 47–8, 110 Knight, 3–4, 7 Knight’s Tale, 144, 145 Man of Law’s Tale, 6, 89, 207 n. 49 Manciple’s Tale, 90 Merchant’s Tale, 138, 145, 147–8, 149 Miller’s Prologue and Tale, 7, 11, 145, 147–8, 149 Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 203 n. 19 Pardoner, 3–4, 139, 156 n. 14, 179 n. 13 Pardoner’s Tale, 7, 16, 139, 156 n. 14 Parliament of Fowls, 168–9 n. 68 Parson, 33, 133, 177 n. 4 Physician’s Tale, 14, 48, 49, 51–76, 104, 121, 150 Reeve’s Tale, 11, 139, 144, 145 Shipman’s Tale, 15, 102, 107–35, 139, 150 Sir Thopas, 5 Tale of Melibee, 6, 7, 14, 17–49, 51, 73, 110, 120, 150

INDEX

Troilus and Criseyde, 138, 143–4, 145, 150, 151, 152 Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, 15, 45, 107–35, 146–7, 173 n. 109, 202 n. 12, n. 13, 203 n. 20, 205 n. 38, n. 39, 206 n. 43 Chaucer the Man, Pilgrim, Poet, Speaker, 4–9 chess, 2, 90–91, 194 n. 69 Chester Noah, 57, 114, 204 n. 25 Chobham, Thomas of, 33 Christ, 10, 32, 37, 68, 84–6, 95, 193 n. 58 Christine de Pizan, 66 Christian learning, 18, 21–2, 28, 29, 31, 37, 44, 67, 68, 166 n. 34, 172 n. 97, 210 n. 80 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 6, 155 n. 5, 158 n. 30, 159 n. 37 Collette, Carolyn, 38, 189 n. 11, n. 13 color art and, 33, 97–9, 198 n. 111 “colourles,” 198 n. 114 debates over, 93, 97–9 163 n. 4, 198 n. 111 emotions and, 82, 197 n. 107 language and, 199 n. 123 rhetoric and, 97–9, 197 n. 101, n. 107 compilation (textual), 138–50, 210–11 n. 1, 213 n. 15, 215 n. 20 conduct discourse, 38–9, 51, 53–6, 57, 66–8, 71–2, 74, 75, 99, 121, 175 n. 130, 180 n. 24, 186 n. 90, 200 n. 2 confession, 28, 86, 193 n. 61 conjugality, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 80, 109, 117, 121, 123–4, 128, 129, 130–1, 170 n. 86, 208 n. 59 Connelly, Margaret, 137, 211 n. 2, n. 4 Consail and Teiching at the Vys Man Gaif His Sone, 173 n. 108, 201 n. 11

243

“consecrated virgin” (Ambrose’s), 56, 67 consolation, 80–1, 190 n. 23, 198 n. 115 Constance of Castile, 104, 184–5 n. 73 contemplation, 19, 85–6, 89, 95 Copeland, Rita, 30–1, 161 n. 50, 179 n. 13 court judicial, 51, 52, 70, 72, 73, 178 n. 11, 186 n. 86 royal, 48, 55–6, 61–2, 97, 103, 104, 178 n. 11 Courtenay, William J., 191 n. 37 coverture law, 60, 121 Cowell, Andrew, 98, 198 n. 110 Crane, Susan, 69, 122, 175 n. 130, 178 n. 11 Crowther, J.D.W., 68 cuckoldry, 11, 108, 119, 123,127, 129, 132, 147, 149, 184 n. 64 “death of the author,” 8, 158 n. 25 Debray, Régis, 160 n. 47 Delany, Sheila, 64, 178 n. 9 Denery, II, Dallas G., 165 n. 27 Derrida, Jacques, 194 n. 75, 199 n. 123 detachment, 13, 78, 80, 86, 144, 150 diachronic materialism, 12, 137 Diamond, Arlyn, 118 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 9, 122, 158 n. 29, 166 n. 33, 207 n. 52 dissolution of masculinities, 36, 88, 90, 130, 148, 173 n. 115 of the monasteries, 137, 212 n. 6 distance brain topography and, 77–9, 82–3, 189 n. 10 exemplary, 14, 71 historical, 9, 11, 79 masculinity and, 15, 42, 78, 80, 81, 84, 86, 88, 92, 102, 104 memory and, 15, 78–9, 83

244

INDEX

distance––continued representation and, 31, 78, 79–80, 82, 83–5, 86, 102 visual, 15, 25, 28, 77–80, 83–5, 92, 93–6, 102, 194–5 n. 79 Dolan, Frances, 60 domestic violence, 111, 114–19, 147, 172 n. 106, 203 n. 21, 203–4 n. 22, 204 n. 23 dreams, 187 n. 4 dream vision, 78, 80, 81, 88, 97, 187 n. 4 Donaldson, E.T., 4, 7 Duffy, Eamon, 84 Dworkin, Andrea, 178 n. 11 elegy, 80, 82, 96–7, 190 n. 26, 193 n. 61 Ellison, Ralph [Invisible Man (1952)], 2–3, 4, 8 epistemology, 11, 93–5, 188 n. 5 erasure memory and, 79–80 visibility and, 6, 15, 22, 34–5, 38, 47, 74, 127, 142, 145, 147, 148, 160 n. 42 Eucharist, 31, 95, 192 n. 45 exemplarity, 14, 37–9, 41–6, 47, 49, 52, 54, 67–8, 71, 92, 93, 99 extramission, 18–19, 20, 21, 24, 27, 94, 164 n. 18 eye agency of, 18–19, 20, 23, 25, 26, 29, 82, 94–9, 167 n. 44 connection to soul, 25, 27–8 frailty of, 89, 90, 95–9 nobility of, 25, 29 object’s influence over, 19–20, 23, 25, 26, 94–9 priority of, 19, 29, 30, 189–90 n. 20 public, 36, 49, 103, 110, 123, 132, 205 n. 40 fabliaux, 15, 59, 107, 109, 114–16, 119, 121, 125, 128–9, 182 n. 38, 210 n. 80

faculty psychology 78–9, 81–3, 189 n. 10 Farmer, Sharon, 33, 172 n. 102 Felman, Shoshana, 157 n. 18, 178 n. 11 Fitzralph, Richard, 196 n. 92 flesh, 17, 31, 33, 40, 41, 54, 133, 163 n. 3, 170 n. 81, 179 n. 13 forest law, 57–9, 181 n. 30, n. 31 regard and, 183 n. 49 foresters, 57–9, 181 n. 31, n. 35 Fortune, 88–92, 193 n. 64 Foucault, Michel, 84, 158 n. 25, 201 n. 8, 216 n. 35 Fradenburg, L.O. Aranye, 9, 161 n. 51, 174 n. 119, 190 n. 21, n. 26 Freud, Sigmund, 13, 161 n. 52, 180 n. 21 Froissart, 62–3, 96 Fulton, Helen, 119, 205–6 n. 40 fürstenspiegel, 46, 169 n. 76 Garber, Marjorie, 11, 160 n. 42 Gardner, John, 55 Gaunt, John of, 48, 55, 62, 75, 97, 104, 179 n. 17, 184–5 n. 73, 199 n. 126 gaze averted, 84–7, 97 feminist theory and, 17, 18, 84, 163 n. 1, n. 6, 189–90 n. 20 gender allegory of, 14, 32–6, 39, 166 n. 34 banality of, 1, 18, 32, 35, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 174 n. 126 as collaborative, 4, 10, 11, 12–13, 15, 32, 46, 48, 81, 87, 90, 100, 101, 103, 104, 107, 108, 118, 124, 132, 133, 134, 153 as coverage, 10, 11–12, 14, 15, 32, 78, 104, 105, 109, 133–4, 146, 150, 153, 159 n. 37, 188–9 n. 9 distance and, 9, 12, 14–15, 28, 42, 77–80, 92, 102 (in)visibility, 1–10, 15, 16, 18, 30, 32, 34–5, 37, 38, 40–1, 46–8, 49, 57–8, 74, 80, 87, 102, 104,

INDEX

107–10, 112–13, 117–19, 123–4, 127, 131, 134–5, 138, 141, 148, 152, 155 n. 6, 172 n. 100, 180 n. 24, 201 n. 8 materiality and, 1, 13, 16, 36, 54, 80, 103, 108, 138, 139, 141, 152 order, 174 n. 124, 175–6 n. 134, 206–7 n. 45 as outlaw formation, 59–60, 118 passing and, 3, 10–12, 16, 36, 46, 48, 51, 54, 72, 74, 103, 104, 107, 108, 109, 113, 114, 117, 118, 122, 124, 134, 135, 138, 146, 147, 150, 151, 152, 160 n. 40 phenomenal construction of, 13–14 reception (textual) and, 139–40, 216 n. 36 reciprocity, 14, 23, 24, 25, 28, 30, 32, 80, 100, 101, 104, 124, 133 relational, 16, 32, 39–40, 46, 48, 51, 52, 74, 77, 80, 81, 87, 88–93, 102, 103, 107, 110, 124, 133, 134, 149, 159 n. 37, 208 n. 59 rhetoric and, 38–9, 40, 45, 98, 103, 172 n. 100, 173 n. 114, 179 n. 13, 185 n. 85, 202 n. 12 suspense of, 102, 103, 107, 108, 109, 121–2, 134, 206 n. 43 violence of, 14, 43, 49, 72–6 visuality of, 10–13, 14, 17–18, 38, 40, 48, 54–5, 72–6, 77, 102, 109, 133, 138, 145, 149, 169 n. 76, 173 n. 115 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 98–9 “God Amend Wykkyd Cownscell,” 173 n. 115 “The Goodwife Taught Her Daughter,” 38 go-betweens, 59, 106 n. 72 gossip, 57, 113, 180 n. 24, n. 25. See also, privacy, women (secrecy) governance, 34, 42, 51–60, 67, 69, 71, 74–5, 112–14, 116, 117, 120, 123, 130, 171 n. 93, 177 n. 7, 178 n. 9, 179 n. 19, 184 n. 65, 204 n. 26

245

Gower, John, 137, 152 Green, Richard Firth, 46 Greenblatt, Stephen, 142, 176 n. 2, 215 n. 25 Grosseteste, Robert, 17, 20, 23, 94, 99, 165 n. 23, 196 n. 92, guilds, 9, 84 “Gyges’s Ring,” 1–2 Hahn, Thomas, 129 Halberstam, Judith, 159 n. 37 Hamburger, Jeffrey, 193 n. 55 Hanawalt, Barbara, 58, 186 n. 86, 202 n. 16, 203–4 n. 22 Hanna, III, Ralph, 137, 211–12 n. 4, 213 n. 11, n. 14, 215 n. 15 Hardman, Phillipa, 104, 192 n. 52 Harley 7333 (British Library MS.), 15–16, 137–50, 210 n. 1, 211 n. 4, 212 n. 6, 212–13 n. 9, 213 n. 10, 213 n. 13, 213 n. 14, 213–14 n. 16, 215 n. 25 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 161 n. 50 Hass, Robin, 97 Hawkes, Emma, 114 heterosexuality, 34, 80, 88, 103 historicism, 12, 15–16, 67–8, 142, 158 n. 27, 161 n. 51, 174 n. 119 Hoccleve, Thomas, 137, 206 n. 44, 211 n. 2 Holland, John, 14, 55–6, 61–3, 66, 75, 182 n. 44, 183 n. 48 homosocial bonds, 64–5, 88, 100, 103–4, 124–5, 183 n. 54, 208 n. 64 household masculine authority and, 34–5, 39, 41, 42, 48, 51, 53–4, 69, 72, 110–14, 116–19, 121, 129–30, 149, 170 n. 96, 171 n. 93 rhetoric and, 38, 172 n. 100 royal court and, 55, 67, 179 n. 17, 184–5 n. 73 treason and, 60 visibility of, 47, 48, 53–4, 55, 60, 69, 72, 110–14, 116–19, 123,

246

INDEX

household––continued 124, 131, 149, 188 n. 9, 202 n. 16, 203 n. 17, n. 21 How the Goode Man Taght Hys Sone, 116, 201 n. 9 Howard, Donald, 7, 88, 158 n. 23 Hugh of St. Victor, 33, 98 Huppé, Bernard F., 168 n. 68, 169 n. 75 idolatry, 23, 89, 90, 96–7, 100, 188 n. 7, 196 n. 91 images debates surrounding, 15, 77, 82, 83, 88, 89–90, 92, 93–6, 188 n. 7, 196 n. 90, n. 91, n. 92, 197 n. 97, 198 n. 111, 199 n. 120 devotional, 83, 84–6, 89, 93–6, 96–7, 102, 188 n. 7, 191 n. 37, 192 n. 40, n. 52, 198 n. 53, 196 n. 90, n. 92, 197 n. 7, 198 n. 111, 199 n. 120 feminine, 10, 22, 40, 52, 57, 64, 77, 79, 80, 86, 88, 89–90, 92, 96–9, 101, 113, 121, 150, 171 n. 92, n. 93, 173 n. 114, 186 n. 91 masculine, 32, 34, 41–2, 47, 52, 64, 73, 80, 86, 88, 89, 92, 113, 117–19, 120–21, 123, 129, 130–31, 132, 133, 134, 144, 173 n. 114 memorial, 78–9, 81, 82, 104, 160–1 n. 49, 187 n. 3, n. 4, 189–90 n. 20, n. 22, 194 n. 69 Impingham, 140–53, 210 n. 1 intimacy, 84–8, 100, 102, 112, 113, 125, 133, 142, 210 n. 78 intromission (visual theory), 19–21, 24, 27, 52, 82–3, 86, 89, 94, 95 intuitive cognition (Ockham’s), 93–5, 195 n. 80 (in)visibility, see gender ((in)visibility) Invisible Man (film; 1933), 156 n. 11. See also Ellison, Wells Irigaray, Luce, 122–3, 184 n. 64

Jay, Martin, 162 n. 58 Jean de Meun, 53, 73 Jones, W.R., 188 n. 7 Justice, Steven, 142 Kelly, Henry Ansgar, 170 n. 80, 203 n. 21 Kessler, Herbert, 168 n. 67 Kittredge, George Lyman, 55, 89, 177 n. 8, 193 n. 64, 194 n. 68 Knapp, Peggy, 9, 205 n. 38 Kolve, V.A., 86, 162 n. 58 Lacan, Jacques, 34, 74, 157 n. 18, 186 n. 96 Lancaster, Elizabeth of, 14, 55–6, 60–6, 75, 177 n. 8, 182 n. 44 Lanterne of Li{t, 89 Larsen, Nella, [Passing (1929)], 10 Latour, Bruno, 12 Leicester Abbey, 211–12 n. 4, 212 n. 6, n. 9, 213 n. 10 Leicester, Jr., H. Marshall, Jr., 67 Le Ménagier de Paris, 38, 115, 121, 132–3 Lerer, Seth, 138, 139, 174 n. 125, 212 n. 8, 213 n. 11, n. 15, 214 n. 18 “Les Deus Changeors,” 125, 128 Levinas, Emmanuel, 2 Lindberg, David C., 20, 94, 163 n. 5, 164 n. 19, 165 n. 27, 165–6 n. 29, 191 n. 33 Lipton, Sara, 85, 193 n. 55 Livy, 53, 64, 72, 73, 177 n. 5 Lochrie, Karma, 11, 86, 127, 180 n. 24, 202 n. 15 Lomperis, Linda, 64, 69, 75 Louens, Renaud de, 32 “lover’s gift regained,” 107, 127–8 Lydgate, John, 137, 206 n. 44 Lynch, Kathryn L., 81, 93, 187–8 n. 4 lyric poetry, 85, 88, 89, 96, 97, 120, 180 n. 24, 192 n. 50, 193 n. 58, 206 n. 42, n. 44, 206–7 n. 45

INDEX

Machaut, Guillaume de, 88–89, 97–98, 187 n. 2, 189 n. 19, 193 n. 64, 194 n. 68 MacKinnon, Catharine, 112, 178 n. 9, 202 n. 15 “maker(e),” 141, 146, 151, 152–3, 215 n. 20 Mandel, Jerome, 177 n. 6, 178 n. 9 manhed, 9–12, 158 n. 31 Man of Sorrows [imago pietatis], 86, 192 n. 52, 193 n. 58 Manly, John M., 137, 174 n. 125, 210 n. 1, 213–14 n. 16 manuscript studies, 212 n. 5 marriage allegory of, 14, 32–6, 38, 39, 170 n. 81, 171 n. 92 Christ’s union with the Church, 32–3, 169 n. 77 conjugality, 15, 33–6, 38, 39, 80, 109, 112, 117, 121, 123, 124, 128, 129, 130, 131, 149, 169 n. 78 n. 79, 170 n. 86 John Holland and Elizabeth of Lancaster, 55–6, 60–4, 177 n. 8 mimicry and, 119–24 sexual debt, 130–3 transactional, 107, 115, 121, 123–4, 129, 131, 134, 201 n. 9 Mary (Virgin), 71, 99, 186 n. 90 masculinities, 1–216. See also, body (manly, masculine), distance (masculinity and), gender, governance, household (masculine authority and), images (masculine), vision (masculinity and) Massumi, Brian, 161 n. 54, 185 n. 83 Masten, Jeffrey, 142, 215 n. 25 matter, 20, 24, 31, 80, 161 n. 50, 171 n. 92 Matthew de Vendôme, 93, 194 n. 76 McGalliard, John C., 124, 208 n. 60 memory, 14, 15, 77–83, 87, 88, 91, 92, 94, 96–7, 101, 103–5, 160–1 n. 49, 187 n. 3, n. 4,

247

188 n. 5, n. 9, 189 n. 10, 189–90, n. 20, 190 n. 21, 191 n. 32, n. 33, 193 n. 61, 194 n. 69, 199 n. 20 Melville, Stephen, 31 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 162 n. 55 Middleton, Anne, 67, 176 n. 1 Mills, Robert, 159 n. 33 mimicry, 119–24, 140, 206 n. 44 Minnis, Alastair, 83, 97, 172 n. 99, 190 n. 23, 191 n. 32, 193 n. 65, 199–200 n. 126, 214 n. 17 misfire (language), 125, 157 n. 18 misogynist discourse, 39, 57, 122, 130, 145–6, 147, 148–50, 151, 179 n. 13 mnemonics, see memory Mooney, Linne R., 210–11 n. 1, 212 n. 9 Mulvey, Laura, 163 n. 1, 189–90 n. 20 Murray, H.J.R., 90–1 Muscatine, Charles, 174 n. 124, 189 n. 19 Myne Awen Dere Sone, 201 n. 10, 203 n. 20 Newman, Barbara, 158 n. 32, 166 n. 34 Noah Plays, 57, 114, 204 n. 25 Nominalism, 99 Ockham, William of, 15, 81, 93–6, 195 n. 81 Olson, Glending, 151, 214 n. 17 On the Twenty-Five Articles, 95 optics, 14, 18–32, 44, 49, 52, 94, 93–6, 163 n. 4, n. 5, 165 n. 25, n. 27, 194 n. 79. See also, vision, visual theory Ovid, 77, 79, 80, 81, 151 Panofsky, Erwin, 192 n. 40 passing, 2–3, 10–12, 16, 36, 46, 48, 51, 54, 72, 74, 103, 104, 107, 108, 109, 113, 114, 117, 118,

248

INDEX

passing––continued 122, 123, 124, 134, 135, 138–9, 146, 147, 150, 151, 152, 160 n. 40, n. 41, n. 42, 208 n. 58 passivity absolute, 24, 52, 63–4, 65, 72 feminized, 10, 51–3, 54, 56, 73–5, 149, 159 n. 36 Christ’s, 10 manhed and, 9–10 men and, 10, 42, 49, 54, 56, 62, 63–4, 65–6, 69, 73–5, 133, 141, 146, 147, 159 n. 33, 175 n. 131 radical, 49, 51–3, 63, 65, 103 women and, 10, 36, 39, 51–3, 54, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63–6, 67, 69–70, 72, 73–5, 103, 117, 121, 125, 146, 147, 148, 174 n. 123, 180 n. 21, 186 n. 91 Patterson, Lee, 4, 9, 158 n. 27, 169 n. 76, 202 n. 12, 206 n. 41 patriarchal panic, 53 Pearsall, Derek, 189–90 n. 20, 209 n. 71, 212 n. 5 Pecham, John, 20, 165 n. 25, n. 27 Peck, Russell A., 99 Pecock, Reginald, 15, 102, 199 n. 120 perspectiva, 20–2, 23, 28, 156 n. 15 perspectivists, 21, 94, 165 n. 25, n. 27 Peter of Limoges, 17, 165 n. 17 Phelan, Peggy, 155 n. 6 Piers Plowman, 83 Phillips, Heather, 95, 195 n. 87 Plato, 1, 14, 18–20, 24, 94, 164 n. 19 poaching, 57–9, 184 n. 34, 181–2 n. 35, 182 n. 36 Pope Clement IV [Cardinal Guy de Foulques], 27 Prior, Sandra Pierson, 68 privacy, 33, 36, 38–9, 49, 51, 53, 55–7, 63, 72–3, 81, 87, 96, 102–4, 112–13, 117–19, 121, 124, 125, 127, 129–34, 172 n. 106, 177 n. 7, 178 n. 9, 202 n. 16,

203 n. 17, 203 n. 20, 205 n. 30, 209 n. 76, 213 n. 11. See also women (secrets) prudence (virtue of), 37, 39, 44, 69, 170–1 n. 89, 171 n. 90, n. 91, 172 n. 92, n. 98 psychoanalysis, 12, 13, 73–4, 173–4 n. 119, 180 n. 21, 185 n. 84, 186–7 n. 96, 201 n. 7 “The Qualities of a Gentleman,” 206 n. 42 rape, 65, 70–1, 182 n. 43, 185 n. 85, 186 n. 86 reason, 29, 78, 82, 83, 112, 116–17, 120, 130, 133, 171 n. 93, 205 n. 36 reception textual, 7, 13, 15, 31, 138–43, 146, 151, 152–3, 213 n. 11, n. 14, 214 n. 19, 215 n. 21 visual, 23, 25, 28–30, 37, 86–7, 92 rhetoric, 19, 22, 27, 68, 78, 95, 97, 98, 126, 187 n. 3, 188 n. 5, 196 n. 92, 197 n. 101 amplificatio, 177 n. 7 collatio, 160–61 n. 49 digressio, 177 n. 7 dilatio, 202 n. 12 descriptio, 98 effictio, 97 gender and, 38, 40, 45, 93, 98, 103, 172 n. 100, 173 n. 114, 174 n. 124, 179 n. 13, 185 n. 85, 202 n. 12, n. 13. See also, women (rhetoric) Rickert, Edith, 174 n. 125, 210 n. 1, 212–13 n. 9, 213 n. 10, 213–24 n. 16 Robertson, Jr., D.W., 162 n. 58, 168 n. 68, 169 n. 75, 210 n. 80 Robertson, Elizabeth, 170 n. 87 Roman de la Rose, 81, 182 n. 38 Romanus, Aegidius, 67 Roth, Philip, 160 n. 41

INDEX

Rubin, Gayle, 183 n. 54, 208 n. 64 Rubin, Miri, 84 “rule of thumb,” 114, 203 n. 21, 204 n. 24 saints’ lives, 51, 67–8 Saramago, José, 156 n. 8 scandal, 14, 48, 53–7, 65, 75, 77, 127, 130, 178 n. 11, 178–9 n. 12, 182 n. 44 Scanlon, Larry,169 n. 76, 180 n. 29 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 184 n. 64, 208 n. 64 “self-shattering,” 133, 209 n. 75 Shaviro, Steven, 163 n. 1 Shirley, John, 15, 137–8, 182 n. 44, 210–11 n. 1, 211–12 n. 4, 215 n. 29 Sidhu, Nicole Nolan, 59 Silverman, Kaja, 157 n. 22, 207 n. 57 “Sir Hain et Dame Anieuse,” 114–16 Smalley, Beryl, 19 Smith, A. Mark, 19, 165 n. 25, 189 n. 10, n. 11 Smith, D. Vance, 79, 188 n. 9, 205–6 n. 40 Spearing, A.C., 96, 156 n. 15, 187–8 n. 4, 201 n. 7 species, visible, 15, 18–19, 21, 23–6, 27–9, 31, 93–5, 166 n. 36, 167 n. 43, 191 n. 33, 194–5 n. 79 Stanbury, Sarah, 84, 177 n. 7 stoics, 18, 37 Sullivan, Hazel, 122 Swynford, Katherine, 55, 61, 75, 104, 179 n. 17 scorpion (image of), 89–90, 194 n. 68 Shoaf, R.A., 86 Summit, Jennifer, 212 n. 6 supplementarity, 92, 120, 194 n. 75 surveillance, 1, 39, 56, 58, 60, 134, 203 n. 21 Tachau, Katherine, 94, 194–5 n. 79 Tatlock, John S.P., 42, 152, 177 n. 7, 216 n. 26

249

Taylor, Andrew, 212–13 n. 9, 215 n. 26 “technologies of the visible,” 1, 142 textual studies, 15, 107–9, 122, 135, 137–42, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 152, 212 n. 5, 214 n. 18, n. 19, 215 n. 20, n. 21, n. 25 Thompson, John J., 137, 211 n. 2 Thorpe, William, 89 translatio studii, 21, 37 Travis, Peter W., 91, 93, 194 n. 73 treason, 11, 58, 60, 160 n. 42, 203–4 n. 22 Trigg, Stephanie, 157 n. 16, 214 n. 18 Trinh T. Minh-ha, 161 n. 53 Tupper, Frederick, 67, 122 Uebel, Michael, 159 n. 33, 177 n. 7 Ussery, Huling E., 55, 179 n. 17 Usual Suspects (film; 1995), 73–4 viewer power of, 3, 7, 18–20, 24, 25, 27, 85, 86, 92, 163 n. 1, 189 n. 20 receptivity of, 17, 20–1, 25, 28–9, 30, 31, 82, 83, 86, 92, 94–6, 199 n. 120 susceptibility of, 25, 28–9, 31, 83–4, 89–90, 94–6 Vincent de Beauvais, 67, 194 n. 68 virtuality, 34, 70, 87, 95, 185 n. 83 vision bilateral, 7, 18, 22, 24–5, 30, 32–3 connectivity in, 15, 18, 25–9, 102–3 corporeal [visio corporalis], 19, 82 distance and, 15, 25, 28, 77–80, 83–5, 92, 93–6, 102, 194–5 n. 79 femininity and, 59, 60, 68, 90, 109 free will and, 27–8 intellectual [visio intellectualis], 19, 93 masculinity and, 3, 18, 19, 22, 24, 35, 36, 43, 48, 65, 80, 92, 135 objects of, 11, 13, 17–21, 23–8, 30, 62, 73, 81–4, 92, 93–5, 97, 167 n. 43 perfected, 21, 26 punitive, 109, 118, 134, 149

250

INDEX

vision––continued pyramid in, 25–6, 29 reciprocity in, 14, 23, 24, 25, 28, 30, 32, 80, 100, 101, 104, 124, 133 reflected, 21, 26, 52, 83, 95, 112, 113, 161 n. 53 refracted, 21, 26 sin and, 21, 27–9, 41, 133 spiritual [visio spiritualis], 14, 17, 19, 21, 25, 27–30, 30–2, 89, 95, 165 n. 27, 210 n. 80 stationed, 78, 80, 189–90 n. 20 unilateral, 48, 84, 88, 100, 161 n. 53 visual theory (medieval) Aristotelian, 19–20, 24, 27, 94. See also, intromission Neoplatonic, 18–20, 21, 24, 94. See also, extramission voyeurism, 87, 109, 156 n. 15, 201 n. 7 Walker, Denis, 103 Wallace, David, 8, 9, 12, 38, 65, 170–1 n. 89, 172 n. 100, n. 102, n. 106, 184 n. 61, 215 n. 21 Waller, Martha S., 67, 180 n. 23, 184–5 n. 73 Warner, Marina, 166 n. 34 Watson, Nicholas, 161 n. 54, 196 n. 92 Wells, H.G., [The Invisible Man (1897)], 2, 156 n. 11 Westminster Chronicle, 55–6, 61–2 Wheeler, Bonnie, 155 n. 5, 159 n. 37 wife-beating, see domestic violence Williams, George, 55, 179 n. 17 Witelo, 20, 165 n. 25 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 11–12, 162 n. 56, 194 n. 69 women agency and, 17, 25, 33, 39, 41, 46, 48, 52, 54, 60, 67–8, 71, 74, 112, 121, 122, 123, 124, 128, 131, 134, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 158 n. 32 body and, 34, 35, 38, 41, 66, 68, 69–70, 71–2, 74, 75, 108, 111, 126, 127, 128, 131, 132,

170 n. 86, 172 n. 103, 173 n. 113, 177 n. 7, 179 n. 13, 185 n. 85, 186 n. 91 conduct discourse and, 39, 53–6, 57, 66, 71–2, 75, 99, 120–1, 170–1 n. 89, 171 n. 90, 177 n. 8, 184 n. 68, 186 n. 90, 198 n. 116, 200 n. 2, 206 n. 45, n. 46 gossip and, 113, 180 n. 24, n. 25 guidance and, 25, 37–8, 59, 182 n. 38 (in)visibility of, 3, 10, 14, 15, 17, 33, 35, 40, 46, 48, 49, 57, 60, 64, 69, 74, 107, 113, 118, 123–4, 131, 134, 147, 149 as objects, 17, 28–9, 62, 63–4, 80, 103, 183 n. 84, 184 n. 65, 208 n. 64 passing and, 11, 16, 33, 51, 60, 74, 126, 132–3, 146, 152 passivity and, 10, 36, 39, 51–3, 54, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63–6, 67, 69–70, 72, 73–5, 103, 117, 121, 125, 146, 147, 148, 174 n. 123, 180 n. 21, 186 n. 91 as sights, 17, 25, 28–9, rhetoric and, 38, 40, 45, 98–9, 103, 172 n. 100, n. 102. See also rhetoric (women), gender (rhetoric) species of, 28–9 secrecy and, 40, 56, 57, 112–13, 180 n. 24, 180 n. 25, 202 n. 15, 203 n. 20. See also, privacy Woolf, Rosemary, 193 n. 58 Wyclif, John, 17, 94–6, 195–6 n. 87, 196 n. 90, n. 91, n. 92 Yates, Frances, 187 n. 3, 188 n. 5 Young, Karl, 67 Ziolkowski, Jan M., 197 n. 107 Vivek, Slavoj, 65, 73–4, 180 n. 27, n. 28, 187 n. 98.