Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux (Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures)

COMIC PROVOCATIONS: EXPOSING THE CORPUS OF OLD FRENCH FABLIAUX

Edited by

Holly A. Crocker

COMIC PROVOCATIONS

STUDIES IN ARTHURIAN AND COURTLY CULTURES The dynamic field of Arthurian Studies is the subject for this book series, Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures, which explores the great variety of literary and cultural expression inspired by the lore of King Arthur, the Round Table, and the Grail. In forms that range from medieval chronicles to popular films, from chivalric romances to contemporary comics, from magic realism to feminist fantasy—and from the sixth through the twentyfirst centuries—few literary subjects provide such fertile ground for cultural elaboration. Including works in literary criticism, cultural studies, and history, Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures highlights the most significant new Arthurian Studies. Bonnie Wheeler, Southern Methodist University Series Editor Editorial Board: James Carley, York University Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington University Virginie Greene, Harvard University Siân Echard, University of British Columbia Sharon Kinoshita, University of California, Santa Cruz Alan Lupack, University of Rochester Andrew Lynch, University of Western Australia

COMIC PROVOCATIONS: EXPOSING THE CORPUS OF OLD FRENCH FABLIAUX Edited by

Holly A. Crocker Foreword by

R. Howard Bloch

COMIC PROVOCATIONS

© Holly A. Crocker, 2006. 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 2006 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: 978–1–4039–7043–5 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7043–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Comic provocations : exposing the corpus of old French fabliaux / Holly A. Crocker, editor; R. Howard Bloch, foreword. p. cm.––(Studies in Arthurian and courtly cultures) Includes index. ISBN 1–4039–7043–2 (alk. paper) 1. Fabliaux––History and criticism. 2. French poetry–– To 1500––History and criticism 3. Humorous poetry, French––History and criticism. 4. Tales, Medieval––History and criticism I. Crocker, Holly A. (Holly Adryan), 1971– II. Series. PQ207.C63 2006 841.03––dc22

2005057925

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: August 2006 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

CONTENTS

Foreword: R. Howard Bloch Acknowledgments Note on Texts and Translations Introduction: The Provocative Body of the Fabliaux Holly A. Crocker

vii ix xi 1

Part 1 Imaginative Generation 1. The Lewd and the Ludic: Female Pleasure in the Fabliaux Lisa Perfetti

17

2. Of Monsters and Men: The Power of Female Imagination in Les quatre Sohais Saint Martin Susanne Hafner

33

3. Go-Betweens: The Old Woman and the Function of Obscenity in the Fabliaux Nicole Nolan Sidhu

45

Part 2 Anxious Circulations 4. Coprus [sic] Christi: The Scatological Tales of the Fabliaux Sheila J. Nayar 5. Dressing the Undressed: Clothing and Social Structure in Old French Fabliaux Mary E. Leech 6. Conflicting Economies in the Fabliaux Christian Sheridan 7. Mobility and Resentment in a World of Flux: Arrogance in the Old French Fabliaux Kiril Petkov

63

83 97

113

vi

CONTENTS

Part 3 Mobile Formations 8. “Be careful what you wish for”: Folkloric Caution in the Fabliaux Ellen Lorraine Friedrich

131

9. Chaucer’s French Accent: Gardens and Sex-Talk in the Shipman’s Tale Peter G. Beidler

149

10. Rude Theory: The Rough Trade of the Fabliaux Cary Howie

163

11. Creative Choices: Notes on Translating the Old French Fabliaux Nathaniel E. Dubin

175

Notes on Contributors Index of Fabliaux Index

193 197 199

FOREWORD R. Howard Bloch

he essays in Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux explore the relation between the physical body, the body politic, and the textual corpus of the medieval comic tale. The fabliaux, which are at the root of a long tradition of short narratives in the West, have for the most part been taken as a pleasurable relief from more serious genres like the epic, romance, and the allegorical forms of thirteenthcentury France. Yet, the contributors to the current volume explore both the entertaining and serious dimensions of this “counter-genre,” in the phrase of Charles Muscatine. While treating the body, which is celebrated in all its members and pleasures, the authors remind us of the ways in which the fabliaux work to define the body’s limits and its deeper meanings—the point at which farcical beatings and scenarios of submission turn pleasure into something more grotesque and deadly; the point at which bodily production or excrement might be related to the sacred and even to the sacraments; the point at which bodily age transforms physical capacity into wisdom and cleverness; the point at which clothing comes into contact with the body to create multiple and illusory definitions of the self; the point at which the body renders inner states via gesture; the point at which firm distinctions between male and female bodies translates into the instability of gender. Above all, Comic Provocations probes the ways that bodies interact with each other. The essays on economic exchange, money, gift, and barter, on the conjugal unit and the family, on signs of social status and of social mobility, and on the relation of the comic to wider cultural debates serve to situate the individual body within the social corpus of the High Middle Ages. Though the contributors to Comic Provocations each speaks with a distinct voice, their contributions, which are the result of seminar discussions in the summer of 2003 on the medieval sense of the comic, respond in a remarkably coherent fashion to the questions of how the fabliaux can be defined as a unified or stable corpus, of whether the fabliaux are a source of social

T

viii

FOREWORD

order or disorder, of whether they are disruptive or conservative of existing values and institutions, of whether these often outrageous tales simply reflect or actually contribute to the great social transformation of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What provokes the comic? What does the comic provoke? The essays in Comic Provocations are united in their attention to the relation of language and of verbal play to both the individual and the social body. Such attention is made possible through the brilliant, witty, culturally attuned, deeply accurate metrically and lexically, singsong, bawdy and bad, never sallow or sad, rhymed translation of Nathaniel E. Dubin, whose essay on translating the fabliaux shows just how difficult it is to make things look simple. They run through this volume like a silk-basting thread, holding its diverse parts together, showing the way into the language secrets of the comic tale, and producing delight and admiration with each quotation of the medieval text. Comic Provocations is a volume put together by specialists of Old French as well as by those whose fields of expertise ranging from Chaucer and Middle English and medieval German literature to history and manuscript studies, to modern narrative forms and even film. The freshness and breadth of perspective brought to traditional disciplinary issues makes it an original and significant contribution to Old French and Medieval Studies. Its appeal stands as a provocation to renewed interest in the fabliaux as well as to the exploration of new paths within the inexhaustible field of the comic.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

his volume had its genesis in a 2003 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, “Old French Fabliaux and Medieval Theories of the Comic,” directed by R. Howard Bloch at Yale University. Thanks to the NEH, to Yale, and to Howard for providing the occasion, setting, and stimulus for this project. Other participants in the seminar were crucial to the development of this volume: thanks to Sam Bloom, Jean Jost, Dan Murtaugh, Dorothy Schrader, Larissa Tracy, and Judith Tschann for their helpful comments on many of these essays. Although he was not part of the 2003 seminar, special thanks also to Nathaniel E. Dubin, whose willingness to answer an unending string of queries about linguistic and textual matters has been invaluable and inspiring to all of us. Through a number of conferences, this volume has grown to include a larger community of scholars. Thanks to the University of Haifa, and their 2004 conference on the comic, for providing a venue for many of the ideas contained in these chapters. Portions of other chapters included here were first read at the annual meetings of the Modern Language Association, the Southeastern Medieval Association, and the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo. Thanks to audiences at those conferences for their provocative engagements with the work that has come to form this volume. Finally, I would like to thank the University Research Council, the Charles Phelps Taft Memorial Fund, and the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati for providing the funds and leave that allowed me to edit this volume. The research staff at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University and at the Thomas Cooper Library at the University of South Carolina also gave valuable assistance to me at different stages of this project.

T

—Holly A. Crocker

NOTE ON TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS

s a general rule, all quotations from fabliaux are from the Nouveau Recueil Complet des Fabliaux, ed. Willem Noomen and Nico van den Boogaard, 10 vols. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1983–98), abbreviated hereafter as NRCF, and cited parenthetically in the text by volume, fabliau, and line numbers. If there is a preferred scholarly edition of a given work besides the NRCF, or if the NRCF does not include a particular tale, each departure from the NRCF is specified in individual chapters. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are generously provided by Nathaniel E. Dubin (© 1994–2005). We would like to thank Professor Dubin for allowing us to use his amazing verse translations, which engage this corpus in provocative and energetic ways. In a few instances, authors have also provided their own more literal translations if these are relevant to the arguments of individual essays; these are noted in each case.

A

INTRODUCTION: THE PROVOCATIVE BODY OF THE FABLIAUX

Holly A. Crocker

I would like to see more clearly, but it seems to me that no one sees more clearly —Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception

he fabliau is a literary form without discrete borders. Mostly anonymous, the more than one hundred and twenty-seven tales that can be called fabliaux are grouped together by a definition that is at once so expansive and so limited that it simply points to the hazy boundaries of this genre, at the very least.1 Joseph Bédier’s classic formulation of fabliaux as contes à rire en vers potentially acknowledges that all genres are tropological formulations, useful insofar as they give ordering appearance to what might otherwise look like disparate narrative expressions.2 Genre, no matter the scope of its parameters, provides ground for the intelligibility of literary figurae (figures). And it is in terms of their literary legibility that the fabliaux are figuratively most provocative. Moving beyond any “law of impurity or . . . principle of contamination,” the fabliaux are radically transactional in their ability to fragment the generic boundaries that provide recognizable shape to other poetic bodies.3 Unstable in terms of authorship, audience, purpose, even effect, the fabliaux are almost impossible to see as a coherent creative corpus. Yet in simplest terms, it is the incoherence of corporeal coalescence that these “comic stories in verse” consistently make visible. As contributors to this volume suggest, corporeality is a provocative production in the fabliau. Figuring the body as a site of multiple and contested processes, fabliaux suggest that corporeal limits are never guaranteed. This is not to say, however, that the fabliaux construct a “grotesque” body, the

T

2

HOLLY A. CROCKER

multiplicity of which exceeds perceptual limits.4 Some do, extending the somatic range of sensibility to an ever-expanding corporeal multiplicity. But just as many fabliaux figure the body’s elusive parameters through radical reduction, a metonymic contraction that refuses to dilate materiality’s potential beyond particular body parts or pieces. This visual fragmentation, however, is not a means of bodily governance, a partitive threat that reinstitutes a cultural law of corporeal discipline.5 Instead this fragmentation is a means to mobility, insofar as the circulation of the body—in parts, as parts—acknowledges incorporation as a piecemeal construction creatively connected to its props, those symbolic and material markers that designate bodily coherence. As authors argue in the following chapters, fabliaux pressure different fabrications of the body, examining the ways that certain bodies are animated, covered, or codified through ornament, affect, or ritual. Fabliaux exhibit a canny awareness about the instability of discrete bodily formations, demonstrating that bodies figured as beautiful, noble, or sanctified are the product of a consolidating vision that can easily be blurred. Moreover, in admitting that old bodies, corrupt bodies, fecund bodies are equally part of the visual field, essays in this volume pursue the ways that the confluence of bodies—of those given and denied presence— offers a greater range of identities for the men and women whose interactions constitute the fabliau corpus. For, as the fabliaux suggest, partial bodies are open to possibility, to the creative generation that transactional interplay can make visible.6 Even as the fabliaux enlarge corporeal boundaries, they often contract those same horizons. To take Les quatre Sohais saint Martin as an iconic example (4.31), the body can be expanded and limited at once, sprouting new parts whose regular proliferation reduces the body to a single, defining piece. The multiplication of vits and cons shatters any notion of corporeal continuity; yet the ordering of the pricks then cunts that appear at the command of the wife then husband nevertheless consolidates a notion of the body as heterosexual. This simultaneity is especially marked if we consider particular stories in isolation. Taken together, this collection suggests that the fabliaux are not interested in putting together a comprehensive vision of bodily consistency. Heterosexual desire is probably the broadest circuit of corporeal continuity posited across these tales, but as these essays acknowledge, sexuality galvanizes a particular, and particularly limited, set of fabliaux. Other fabliaux engage the body as a site of social inscription, looking at the ways that corporeal practices divide persons into legible cultural categories of estate or profession. Sexuality may be one such practice, but even in stories that principally engage erotic desire, heterosexuality is presented in such transactional somatic terms—as a pleasuring of the radically erogenous body—that social regulations meant to keep heterosexuality “straight” are themselves exposed as fragmentary systems of coverage.

INTRODUCTION

3

There are nodes of continuity in the fabliaux, then, but these too are vulnerable, always liable to dispersal. The fabliaux make up a corpus that is continually in flux, changing its parameters as its different parts transform each other. This body, as the title of this collection suggests, is provocative, ever-engaging, enlarging, reducing, and challenging its borders. Because this is a literary body on the move, there is no tropological consistency among fabliaux. As a revealing attestation to this assertion, it seems fitting that the most effective critical insights into the fabliaux have emerged not from investigations into their features—their fixtures—but into their mouvance—their varied modes of coalescence.7 R. Howard Bloch’s reading of fabliaux as disruptive of the “natural” relation between language and meaning shares with Simon Gaunt’s more recent consideration of the fabliau’s tendency to topple traditional hierarchies, an awareness that these stories can only be seen as a whole if their corpus is defined by mobility.8 Furthermore, Keith Busby’s careful attention to the manuscript contexts of fabliaux importantly demonstrates this mobility’s materiality, insofar as different fabliaux are variously animated by their changing textual incorporations.9 It is therefore more appropriate to consider their transactional similarities, their shared methods of working through/out/against stable corporeal formations. And, as this volume suggests, the generative interplay that creates and breaks the coherence of the fabliaux is always vested in a creative dynamic of dialogic exchange. In many ways this contention is a recombination of the critical positions that have given shape to studies of the fabliaux, particularly this volume.10 The rapid dialogue of the fabliaux has long been considered one of their most characteristic, even realistic, features.11 Furthermore, the ways in which the verbal interchange between characters puts at issue the stability of language has often been investigated for the ways that such concerns connect these stories to wider clerical debates, often about women.12 Moreover, the ways in which their interactive language obscures or exposes relations to the body has frequently been cited as a potential link between fabliaux and more courtly genres.13 Yet, these essays suggest, the dialogic transactions of the fabliaux are not simply linguistic. Instead, this volume engages the fabliau body’s creative capacities in all its multiplicity, including its overlapping imaginative, sensory, social, and sexual dimensions in an expansive conception of “the flesh.”14 A fabliau formation of the flesh, it should be noted, stands in uneasy opposition to theological treatments of language’s disciplinary inscription of the body, not by rejecting condemnations of its fallen materiality, which Augustine most famously associates with a killing literalism, but rather by assuming the full possibilities of corporeal plentitude that a writer such as Augustine denounces (albeit through a provocatively lingering exposition of its enduring purchase over his spiritual understanding).15 Instead of

4

HOLLY A. CROCKER

constructing binaries between body and language, or between flesh and spirit, fabliaux assume the mutuality of traditional binaries, focusing instead on how these tensions remain both animate and proximate for their continual opposition. How the flesh might imbue the spirit or vice versa is to name just one (or two) of the provocative impasses that the fabliaux relentlessly pursue, even to their most obscene, profane, or scandalous ends. Because they are interested in the connections that sustain binary divisions, fabliaux often collapse many of the classifying questions our critical discourse would impose: are they bourgeois or courtly, misogynist or feminist, realistic or fantastic, conservative or subversive? Through their shameless appeals to the possibilities of the flesh, fabliaux expose such questions as part of a continuing effort to get our analytical hooks into a literary corpus that will simply not give straightforward answers to settle these concerns. Yet this continuous provocation, it seems, is the point of the fabliaux writ large: through their arousing multiplicity, fabliaux explore the ways that bodies infuse one another, often by embracing social and sexual divisions that are meant to preclude such congress. To take one example, fabliaux are often interested in the ways in which the intermingling of voices precipitates the commingling of bodies. Importantly, for the fabliaux this intercourse operates at a level that delicately suspends a division between language and the body. As L’Esquiriel demonstrates (6.58), the voice does not just inhere within or emanate from a discrete body; rather, through its aural and oral potential, the voice blurs boundaries between dialogic participants, thereby opening the way for a combinative proliferation of bodies whose fluctuations allow them greater mobility.16 In a scene often compared to L’Amant’s objection to Raison’s use of the word coilles (testicles) in Jean de Meun’s continuation of Le Roman de la Rose, the young maiden in De L’Esquiriel hounds her mother until she names “cele rien / Que cil home portent pendant” [that thing that hangs in a man’s britches] (6.58.26–27).17 Norris J. Lacy argues that here “the ordinary use of ordinary language empties it of erotic force,” since the girl and Robin subsequently engage in a dilating verbal exchange that explores his vit in all its frisky potentiality.18 Her nearly incantational use of the word vit, however, suggests that its repetition does not strip the word of its fleshly resonance: “Vit, dist ele, Dieus merci, vit! . . . Vit dit mon pere / Vit dist ma suer, vit dist mon frere” [“Penis!” She cried, “Penis, God bless it! . . . My father and the other / children say penis. Sister, brother, / say penis] (6.58.43, 45–46). Since this verbal exchange involves the girl and her mother, it is necessary to consider the effect that this deployment achieves in their interactive dynamic. The mother is obviously uncomfortable with the sonorous

INTRODUCTION

5

power of words, since the iteration of vit is something she seeks to put off limits for her daughter: “Ja nous fames ne la devon / Nomer en nis une maniere, / Ne au devant ne au derriere” [We women musn’t be so bold / as call it by its right name nor / refer to it by metaphor] (6.58.[27.19–27.21]).19 As her prohibition suggests, naming a body by its principal part, no matter how (in)directly, connects the body of the speaker with that part through the verbal contact that the voice enables. Or so L’Amant’s objection to Raison’s speech indicates. When the lover says that “[Coilles] ne sont pas bien renomees / En bouche a courteise pucele,” [[testicles] are not worthy of praise / in the mouth of a polite maiden] he acknowledges that Raison’s voice connects her mouth to the part it names.20 In his effort to keep “testicles” out of a polite young woman’s mouth, L’Amant discovers that social regulations of speech designed to prohibit bodily relations offer alternative paths to those same corporeal connections. Raison suggests as much to the lover when she claims that calling coilles by their “proper” name avoids the ways in which desire inevitably saturates substitute significations. But simplicity in reference, many fabliaux suggest, does not necessarily empty particular words of their fleshly charge. If we return to the daughter’s exchange with her mother in L’Esquiriel, it becomes clear that her teasing interaction with her mother is an invitation for her mother to share along with her the pleasurable corporeal possibility that iterating the forbidden vit offers. Blurring their bodies in a relation that is highly eroticized, the daughter’s verbal play acknowledges the corporeal desire that binds both mother and daughter to the father’s body (part). But for her part, the mother runs away in tears, disturbed by the awareness that all her partitioning of language has no effect on the girl’s speech. My point in examining this scene—which is often treated in fragmentary fashion as linguistic foreplay for the enthusiastic sex that ensues—is to suggest that the fabliaux are interested in the ways that dialogic interchange opens up possibilities for the body, and not just heterosexual exchanges.21 Such transactional interaction can expand corporeal limits by rhetorical inflation, using “deferral in speech, of speech, that substitutes for the object or act” to facilitate the fleshly commingling involved in sexual coupling.22 But unlike La Damoisele qui ne pooit oïr parler de foutre (4.26), verbal interplay can also reduce bodies to somatic zones of sensory pleasure, whether or not the characters want to admit the erotic possibilities that such fragmentary interconnections offer. The mother’s reaction in L’Esquiriel shows that such reduction can intermingle bodies in ways that violate divisions of same-sex or familial desire. While the mother’s recourse to corporeal regulations that gender norms would impose does nothing to prevent her daughter’s heterosexual initiation, the daughter’s vigorous physical encounter with Robin might very well be the safest collapse of bodies that this narrative

6

HOLLY A. CROCKER

imagines. L’Esquiriel’s emphasis on the ways in which corporeal congress loosens and expands social relations suggests that the creative capacity of the flesh extends beyond any given body. Pursuing an expansive notion of corporeality, essays in this collection treat the fabliaux as a creative body that generates multiple and sometimes conflicting coherences. The three chapters in “Part One: Imaginative Generation” explore the ways in which the (fe)male body’s reproductive capacities become imaginatively incorporated across the genre. Lisa Perfetti, Susanne Hafner, and Nicole Nolan Sidhu variously look at the ways that women create (sometimes literally) by using the generative powers of the imagination. Although Hafner acknowledges the latent threat of monstrosity in the female imagination for many medieval writers, Perfetti and Sidhu examine the productive powers of women’s creative imaginings, suggesting that the sexual volition of many female characters is less important than the intellectual pleasures that their sensual appetites generate. In fact, by linking creativity and sensuality in the bodies of women, these essays suggest that the fabliau writers themselves might be associated with this generative potential, lending what Hafner calls a “dangerous” creativity to the fabliau corpus itself. As Lisa Perfetti argues in her essay, “The Lewd and the Ludic: Female Pleasure in the Fabliaux,” even in fabliaux traditionally associated with women’s lascivious appetites, such as La Saineresse (4.36), the primary factor facilitating wifely transgression is a creative rhetorical performance that elicits its own intellectual pleasures. In De Berengier au lonc Cul (4.34) the wife humiliates her husband in a manner that affirms her mental dexterity and verbal deftness. Tales such as Les trois Chanoinesses de Couloigne (10.121), La Damoisele qui ne pooit oïr parler de foutre (4.26), and L’Esquiriel (6.58) point to women’s investment in the pleasures that linguistic play can open up, while fabliaux such as Le Sohait desvé (6.70), Le Vilain Mire (2.13), and La Bourse pleine de Sens (2.8) suggest that recourse to such modes of expression perhaps offer women an alternate means of influence in the hierarchized domain of the medieval household. Susanne Hafner, “Of Monsters and Men: The Power of Female Imagination in Les quatre Sohais saint Martin,” similarly examines the female capacity to create, tracing Aristotelian notions of monstrosity as they relate to the woman’s generative capacity in Les quatre Sohais saint Martin (4.31). Medieval commentaries expand connections between monstrosity, bestiality, and sodomy they find in Aristotle and establish a direct link between the conception of a monster and the images impressed upon the woman’s mind at the moment of conception. Although this fabliau represents the female imagination as dangerous and destructive, the woman is granted the power to create. Contrary to his wife, the husband’s wish is limited to reversing

INTRODUCTION

7

his wife’s productive generation. Thus the fabliau itself becomes a creative body, the feminized creativity of which is ever-ready to disrupt discrete corporeal formulations. Nicole Nolan Sidhu, “Go-Betweens: The Old Woman and the Function of Obscenity in the Fabliaux,” argues that the gossiping, scheming old woman becomes a figure for the fableor in many tales. By examining fabliaux including Le Prestre qui ot Mere a Force (5.41), La vieille Truande (4.37), and Auberee (1.4), Sidhu suggests that this conflation allows the jongleur to gain material wealth by using a generative knowledge of sex, which derives from the experienced body of the old woman. The pervasiveness of this figure, whose engagement in an information economy in which gossip, tales, and sexual knowledge are exchanged for money and goods, reflects with remarkable exactitude the fabliau authors’ position as tale-tellers plying their trade on the margins of an economy dominated by land-based wealth. The body’s generative power also features prominently in “Part Two: Anxious Circulations,” but these four essays suggest that corporeal continuities are often reactions to sources of social unease. Sheila J. Nayar and Mary E. Leech read bodily fragmentation as a creative catalyst, addressing the humorous ways that fabliaux reveal and conceal their radical partitioning. While Leech and Nayar are interested in a more literal version of circulation— of Christ’s body, of men’s clothing—Kiril Petkov and Christian Sheridan address the redistribution of values that attends transactional exchange. The four essays address cultural tensions associated with bodily incoherence, but Sheridan and Petkov demonstrate the generative mobility of these corporeal circulations. By focusing on the transactional productivity of bodily multiplicity, they suggest, fabliaux reveal the contingency of these social anxieties. Sheila J. Nayar’s essay, “Coprus [sic] Christi: The Scatalogical Tales of the Fabliaux,” traces the potentially obscene pleasures associated with the body whose fragmentation is radically creative, namely that of Christ. Acknowledging that these “shit” tales, including Des chevaliers, des .ii. clercs, et les villains (B.N. MS 837.33),23 Le Vilain Asnier (8.92), and La Crote (6.57) do not figure visually sanctioned bodily pleasures, Nayar traces the use of excremental imagery to figure the “everyday matter” involved in potentially problematic corporeal relations. In addressing the homiletic resonance of these stories, she argues for a relationship between eating the body of Christ and excremental symbolism, especially as the fragmentation and multiplication of Christ’s body relates to ruptures in official Catholic doctrine during the thirteenth century. Nayar concludes that oral play with excrement (which becomes literal in La Crote) amounts to a comic critique of the concept of transubstantiation as it might be conceived by members of local communities.

8

HOLLY A. CROCKER

Mary E. Leech’s essay, “Dressing the Undressed: Clothing and Social Structure in Old French Fabliaux,” investigates the correspondence between circulating clothing and the bodies these garments are supposed to signify. As she observes, clothing often confuses the office, status, and gender of fabliau characters. Stories such as Le Chevalier a la Robe vermeille (2.12) and Les Braies au Cordelier (3.17) use clothes to reveal the sexual indiscretions of women. Both these transgressions, Leech suggests, point to a crisis in masculinity that the mobility of clothing highlights. While the male body is meant to guarantee a man the seamless assumption of his masculinity, a story such as Frere Denise (6.56) suggests that a piece of clothing (a habit) can easily substitute for the manhood that is effectively lacking in the monastic celibate male. Gendered agency is played out through the transformative interchangeability of clothing, for when the wife of a knight recognizes Denise as female and bestows fine dresses upon her, she “miraculously” resumes a femininity that is only as permanent as the pieces of fabric she uses to cover her body. Christian Sheridan, in his “Conflicting Economies in the Fabliaux,” uses Constant du Hamel (1.2), Les Deus Changeors (5.51), and Le Bouchier d’Abeville (3.18) to investigate what he argues are conflicting modes of economic organization in the fabliau. Since different models of economic organization depend upon, even articulate, varying conceptions of the self, person, and body, Sheridan argues that the tension evident between gift, barter, and money economies is responsible for much of the transactional inventiveness of the genre. By arguing that different modes of exchange entail different systems of relationships, Sheridan examines the ways in which money’s presence in fabliaux subtends gift or barter transactions. As he suggests, money in many fabliaux does not have the equalizing power that many theorists claimed it has, but is deployed in ways that were traditionally associated with other modes of exchange. In using money in gift- and barter-situations, fabliau characters assert money’s adaptability. This hybridization of money, finally, reflects the genre’s interest in corporeal negotiations that are ever-mobile. Kiril Petkov’s essay, “Mobility and Resentment in a World of Flux: Arrogance in the Old French Fabliaux,” considers the ethos of fabliaux in a historical context, arguing that these narratives address widespread arrogance among all social strata in a period during which ideas of justice and morals are unstable. As Petkov suggests, fabliaux develop a new value system to address breakdowns in hierarchical notions of estate, expressing authority in terms of gender, profession, and social rank through negative approximations of arrogance. Addressing a wide range of stories, Petkov argues that the fabliau’s interest in arrogance is likewise invested in a promotion of mobility for, typically, the characters who resist social mobilities

INTRODUCTION

9

are censured for their arrogance. Such arrogance, he contends, leads to a revelation of lack, showing the contingency of markers that are meant to divide bodies from one another in visible terms. In concluding that the fabliaux assert a positive morality, one based on conditional exchanges inflected by utility and merit, Petkov’s essay importantly acknowledges the ways in which different characters achieve varying degrees of mobility in their particular circumstances. The final section, “Part Three: Mobile Formations,” demonstrates the elastic conception of the body that this collection pursues. Showing both disconnections and overlaps between zones of corporeal continuity, Ellen Lorraine Friedrich’s essay examines the creative generation of several fabliaux in relation to social anxieties associated with bodily desire. Since her analysis puts fabliaux into contact with a broader folkloric tradition, it shares with Peter G. Beidler’s essay an interest in thinking about the fabliau’s influence over other creative incorporations, in this case Chaucer. Because these chapters fit and discomfit the creative bodies they touch (including this volume), they illustrate Cary Howie’s theoretical consideration of the fabliau, particularly the ways in which the genre’s roguish language elicits a radical bodily commingling that eludes disciplinary divisions. These essays, along with Nathaniel E. Dubin’s reflections on translation, refigure traditional approaches to the fabliaux, showing the ways that a critical body fragments and reconvenes through its creative multiplicity. Ellen Lorraine Friedrich, in her essay, “ ‘Be Careful What you Wish for’: Folkloric Caution in the Fabliaux” treats the circulation of fabliau “parts” outside the genre, situating Les quatre Sohais saint Martin (4.31) in a medieval tradition of exempla tales that unfold the catastrophes caused by covetousness. Along with Le Couvoiteus et l’Envieus (6.71), Friedrich relates Les quatre Sohais to a folk tradition of cautionary stories and sayings on the folly, futility, and danger of wishing.24 Her consideration of the problematic nature and language of wishing, as well as the importance of St. Martin as the grantor of these particular four—as opposed to the more common three—wishes, points to sources for and analogues of the fabliaux that expand the horizons of this genre through a common impulse to caution against immoderate desire. As Friedrich argues, this motif not only predates the fabliaux but also extends to common prohibitions against wishes that remain current in our own folkloric adages. Peter G. Beidler is similarly interested in the ways in which impulses of the fabliaux operate outside the discrete boundaries of their cultural milieu in his “Chaucer’s French Accent: Gardens and Sex-Talk in the Shipman’s Tale.” Here Beidler engages a classic aspect of fabliau studies, namely, the influence that this genre had upon certain of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Yet, instead of suggesting that Chaucer was influenced by a lost Old French

10

HOLLY A. CROCKER

fabliau, Beidler traces the resonance of many fabliaux to suggest the erotic atmosphere of Chaucer’s tale. In thinking about the ways in which these fabliaux use language to eroticize the body, Beidler runs a comparative line of argument that expands the parameters of both the fabliaux and Chaucer. As he suggests, the ways in which Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale employs verbal interplay to expand the erotic possibilities of the bodies of both monk and wife indicates that the Old French fabliaux were connected to other literary formations, even those distant in both place and time. Cary Howie, “Rude Theory: The Rough Trade of the Fabliaux,” breaks down the notion that a divide exists between the forbidden language of the fabliaux and that “rudeness” that our own critical idiom frequently forbids. As he suggests, the rogues of Old French narratives, such as Trubert (10.124) and Rutebeuf ’s Le Miracle du Sacristain, speak with shifty eloquence.25 But Howie refuses the critical distance that our literary analyses often assume, arguing that we are equally shifty in our engagements with fabliaux. There is a necessary equivocation in any attempt to do justice to the rude speech, the “rudesce,” (coarseness) of fabliaux. We are at once like and unlike the rogues as whom, and through whom, we speak: like, inasmuch as rogues inevitably posit the question of what they might have in common with us; unlike, inasmuch as they remain explicitly to one side of our best attempts to nail them down, resistant and irresistibly “autre choze” (something else). Calling a rogue a rogue—determining what a rogue, or a fabliau, is—gets us nowhere. Rude theory, on the other hand, responds to the rogue’s call by accepting its priority, which is to say the priority of an economy of gift and reception, call and response, over any attempt to define a literary or social object. As a personal essay on methods of translation, Nathaniel E. Dubin’s “Creative Choices: Notes on Translating Old French Fabliaux,” perhaps seems disconnected from the fluid corporeal possibilities traced by this volume. Yet in his reflections upon the choices he makes in creating the verse translations of the fabliaux that other authors use in their essays, another bodily coalescence appears between Dubin’s body and the fabliaux themselves. In deciding which stories to include, in reflecting upon how he “hears” their verbal dynamism, and in thinking about how to render that fusion into verse formations, a transactional exchange emerges between his “translator’s ear” and the aural evocations of these narratives. This fusion of translator and text, Dubin notes, is mobile, insofar as the life of any given translation is finite, changeable over time. His responses to these texts are creative, finally, figuring a body for these stories that simultaneously transforms his own. It might be observed that a volume like this one, which features work from scholars in French, German, History, English, and Film Studies, is

INTRODUCTION

11

itself an incoherent body. The sundry variety of the essays included here, moreover, might appear to undo notions of critical coherence that the very idea of an essay collection traditionally promotes. These reactions, however fictionalized in the present formulation, are the kinds of responses that this volume seeks to provoke and thereby embrace. For, these essays show, bodies are miscellaneous collections constituted from a disparate assortment of pieces.26 The multiplicity of this collection’s conception and organization thus urges a consideration of the fabliau inside and outside the critical parameters that have hitherto defined this comic corpus. While these essays engage the rich traditions that have constituted fabliau studies, this collection also stands outside that discourse, forging a critical body that enlarges the provocative power of the fabliaux by acknowledging their contact with other aspects of medieval studies. By pursuing the ways that bodies infuse one another, particularly in the fabliaux, this volume exposes the contours of a corpus that remains provocative. Notes 1. This number is accepted by Nouveau Recueil Complet des Fabliaux, ed. Willem Noomen and Nico van den Boogaard, 10 vols. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1983–98). Per Nykrog, Les Fabliaux: Étude d’histoire littéraire et stylistique médiévale (Copenhagen: E. Munksgaard, 1957) includes 160 tales. 2. Joseph Bédier, Les Fabliaux: Études de littérature populaire et e’histoire littéraire du moyen âge, 6th ed. (Paris: É. Champion, 1964), p. 30. 3. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Glyph 7(1980):202–213, reprint in Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (New York: Longman, 2000), p. 222 [219–31]. 4. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), p. 26, who distinguishes the classical body, that which is closed and complete, from the “grotesque body.” 5. R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 59–99, argues that sexual fragmentation, particularly literal and symbolic castration, figures a reimposition of the law. 6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of a “body without organs” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 149–66, is helpful in thinking about the corporeal possibilities that fabliaux explore through their expansive redistribution of the body into limitless zones. 7. See Paul Zumthor, La lettre et la voix: De la “littérature” médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1987), pp. 160–68, where he relates textual mouvance to what he characterizes as the “intervocalité” of medieval vernacular literary cultures. 8. Bloch, Scandal of the Fabliaux; Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 234–85.

12

HOLLY A. CROCKER

9. Keith Busby, Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript, 2 vols. (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002), vol. 1. 10. Since studies of the fabliaux have made up part of the annual journal Reinardus from its inception in 1988, and since the fabliaux have enjoyed a healthy monograph tradition for over a century, the citations included here are themselves partial. For a fine overview of the development of the field, including its principle issues of contention, see Brian J. Levy, “Introduction,” The Comic Text: Patterns and Images in the Old French Fabliaux (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 1–29. 11. Considerations of fabliau realism are also usually connected to their tendency to include specifics of time and place. The ways in which characters verbally navigate a world that seems rooted in the everyday is connected to the view of the fabliau as a miroir du temps (reflection of the age). In their opposition to the polarizing theories of Bédier and Nykrog, who alternatively asserted that the fabliaux were written for bourgeois and courtly audiences, critics including Jean Rychner, Contribution á l’étude des fabliaux: Variantes, remaniements, dégradations, Recueil de travaux publiés par la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Neuchâtel, 28, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1960); Jürgen Beyer, Schwank und Moral, Untersuchungen zum alfranzösichen Fabliau und verwandten Formen, Studia Romanica, 16 (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1969); Philippe Ménard, Les Fabliaux: Contes à rire du moyen âge, Littératures modernes, 32 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983); Charles Muscatine, The Old French Fabliaux (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); and Mary Jane Stearns Schenk, The Fabliaux: Tales of Wit and Deception, Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages, 24 (Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1987), suggest that the audience for these tales is much more mobile than divisions between courtly and non-courtly would allow. 12. See Edmund Faral, “Le fabliau latin au moyen âge,” Romania 50(1924):321–85; and Peter Dronke, “The Rise of the Medieval Fabliau: Latin and Vernacular Evidence,” The Medieval Poet and his World (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1984), pp. 145–65, for discussions of the connections between the fabliaux and “intellectual” culture. For a consideration of fabliaux in terms of more modern intellectual currents, especially considering antifeminism, see Thomas D. Cooke, “Pornography, the Comic Spirit, and the Fabliaux,” in The Humor of the Fabliaux: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Thomas D. Cooke and Benjamin L. Honeycutt (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974), pp. 137–62, who sees the “pornographic” elements of the fabliau as constitutive of an antifeminist, aggressive masculinity. Lesley Johnson, “Women on Top: Antifeminism in the Fabliaux?” Modern Language Review 78(1983):298–307, questions the easy association between women’s lascivious behavior and assumptions of antifeminism, pointing out that women in these stories often defeat men in contests of wit or will. Sarah Melhado White, “Sexual Language and Human Conflict in Fabliaux,” Comparative Studies in Society and History,

INTRODUCTION

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

13

24(1984):185–210, argues that the imagery of the fabliaux “express a strong sense of sexual fragmentation,” (p. 208), while Gaunt, Gender and Genre, traces the genre’s relentless mockery of absolutist notions of masculine control, especially those founded upon sexual potency. Nykrog’s contention that the fabliaux engage in a “burlesque” of courtly culture situates the debate over the connection between the fabliau and other courtly genres, namely romance. See Benjamin L. Honeycutt, “The Knight and his World as Instruments of Humor in the Fabliaux,” in Humor of the Fabliaux: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Thomas D. Cooke and Benjamin L. Honeycutt (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974), pp. 75–92; Keith Busby, “Courtly Literature and the Fabliaux: Some Instances of Parody,” Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 102(1986):67–87; Albert Gier, “Chrétien de Troyes et les Auteurs de Fabliaux: La Parodie du Roman Courtois,” in The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Norris J. Lacy, Douglas Kelly, and Keith Busby, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987–88), vol. II, pp. 207–14; and Anne Elizabeth Cobby, Ambivalent Conventions: Formula and Parody in Old French (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995), pp. 23–54. For representative explorations of this conception of the flesh, see Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Directly relevant to the studies in this volume, E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), addresses women’s associations with the flesh in her treatments of the fabliaux. On Christian Doctrine 3.5.9, trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), pp. 83–84. Patrologiae cursus completus, series Latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, 221 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1844–64), vol. 34, pp. 68–69; St. Augustine, Confessions 2.2, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961), p. 44. On this point see the two extremely helpful essays by Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Vivek, who together argue for the voice as a nonsignifying remainder that can never be fully disciplined by writing. While Mladen Dolar, “The Object Voice,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Lalecl and Slavoj Vivek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 7–31, points to the voice’s quality as a “leftover” of the symbolic, Slavoj Vivek,” ‘I Hear You with My Eyes’; or, the Invisible Master,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Lalecl and Slavoj Vivek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 90–126, claims “the voice acquires a spectral autonomy,” indicating its insistent visibility despite attempts to structure its legibility. See Muscatine, Old French Fabliaux, pp. 146–50; Roy J. Pearcy, “Modes of Signification and the Humor of Obscene Diction in the Fabliaux,” in

14

HOLLY A. CROCKER

18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

The Humor of the Fabliaux: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Thomas D. Cooke and Benjamin L. Honeycutt (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974), pp. 163–64; Norris J. Lacy, Reading Fabliaux (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1999), pp. 80–81. Lacy, Reading Fabliaux, p. 81. Although the NRCF uses manuscript B for its base text, the editors include lines 29–50 from A, designated in the “Texte Critique” as lines 27.1–27.21. See Noomen and van den Boogaard, Nouveau Recueil Complet des Fabliaux, vol. 6, pp. 35–36, for a discussion of the differences between these versions and the decision to include these lines from A. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la rose, ed. Ernest Langlois, 5 vols. SATF (Paris, 1914–24), ll. 6930–31. Most critics, including Muscatine, Lacy, and Bloch, see this exchange as evidence for the girl’s sexual knowledge. This interpretation is undoubtedly correct, but my reading seeks to privilege the dialogue as it affects its immediate participants, the girl and her mother. Bloch, Scandal of the Fabliaux, p. 90. This fabliau, which does not appear in the NRCF, has been taken from The French Fabliau B.N. MS. 837, vol. II, trans. Raymond Eichmann and John DuVal (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985). In her essay, Friedrich prefers the manuscript rendering of the title for this fabliau, whereas I follow the NRCF in its spelling and capitalization here. Howie follows Michel Zink’s edition, Rutebeuf: Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Poche, 1990), pp. 585–633, whose title he uses in his essay. While the conception of the body as a collection of competing processes is clearly indebted to modern readings of Spinoza, specifically his Ethics, contemporary currents in medieval studies, particularly the debate in textual studies over differences between anthologistic and miscellaneous constructions of textual bodies, offer tantalizing promise in thinking about the multiplicity of corporeal coalescence evinced by the fabliaux. See Ralph Hanna, III, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and their Texts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 1–34, who argues that the miscellaneous construction of a text involves a piecemeal process. By contrast, Seth Lerer, “Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology,” PMLA 118(2003):1255 [1251–67], uses “anthologistic impulse” to describe “the distinguishing feature of manuscripts or sections of manuscripts guided by a controlling literary intelligence.” These distinctions are important to considerations of the fabliau’s constructive contact with other literary bodies, because as Keith Busby shows in his Codex and Context, the material configurations and arrangements of fabliaux say much about their coherences in particular contexts.

PART 1 IMAGINATIVE GENERATION

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 1 THE LEWD AND THE LUDIC: FEMALE PLEASURE IN THE FABLIAUX

Lisa Perfetti

This essay argues that the primary factor facilitating wifely transgression in fabliaux is a creative rhetorical performance that elicits pleasures that are more intellectual than sexual.

omen in the fabliaux are sexually insatiable and likely to cuckold their husbands, using their quick wit to get away with their sexual indiscretions. This truism about fabliau women has been used by some as evidence to demonstrate the fabliaux’ misogyny, while others have argued that it puts women “on top,” making us admire the clever resourceful heroine and laugh scornfully at the weak, gullible, or dim-witted husband.1 It is not my intent in this essay to rehash the debate over the fabliaux’ presumed antifeminism. Rather, I propose to look at the intersection of the lewd and the ludic to ask what other kinds of female pleasure besides sexual pleasure are evoked in the fabliaux and to consider the range of attitudes toward those pleasures. A fabliau that opens up this investigation is La Saineresse (4.36), in which a wife and her lover are able to have sex under the very nose of the husband because the lover has disguised himself as a female physician, or bloodletter, who has come to administer a bloodletting treatment to the wife, who claims she is ailing from a “goute es rains mout merveillouse” [a marvelous pain in the loins] (4.36.37).2 The “treatment” works so well that the lady is not only healed, but quite refreshed, and she describes it in some detail to her husband, who approves and commends the lady doctor.3

W

18

LISA PERFETTI

The first interesting thing about this fabliau is the impetus for the wife’s betrayal, which is established in the first four lines of the tale. Her husband boasts that no woman could trick him (“bouler”). When the wife hears this boast, she thinks aloud to herself (“si en parla priveement” [and spoke about it on the sly] (4.36.5)) and swears that she will make a liar out of him. Thus, the desire motivating this act of cuckoldry is not sexual desire, but the desire to prove her husband wrong and take him down a notch or two for his boasting. That the deception takes place in the form of an adulterous liaison comes as no surprise, being a stock motif that is virtually de rigueur in the fabliau. This is not to say that the cuckoldry is a direct result of the husband’s boast; the wife apparently recognizes the false lady doctor, and thus this episode appears to have been plotted beforehand between the wife and her lover. But for the reader of the tale, the narrative sets up a cause-effect relationship between the act of boasting and this particular act of adultery. The next noteworthy thing about the fabliau is that whereas the sexual act is only described in five lines, the wife takes twenty-eight lines to recount the marvelous “healing” she received, first from the painful blows she received, and then from the long tube with the delicious unguent that was used to anoint her wounds. The only direct reference to sex is the word “foutue” (4.36.44); the majority of the description of the act comes through the metaphors for the bleeding treatment and its instruments. Since the pivotal work of R. Howard Bloch, it is clear that earlier readers of the fabliaux were mistaken to view the fabliaux as reflecting a medieval taste for sex that is more open and natural: “Indeed, if there is any pleasure attached to sex in the Old French comic tale (and the question of ‘if ’ is worth posing), such pleasure derives less from the body than from a deferral in speech, of speech, that substitutes for the object or act.”4 Bloch’s skepticism that the pleasure of fabliaux about sex is erotic is certainly borne out by the conclusion to La Saineresse. After the husband has praised the “good unguent” his wife has received from her physician, the narrator explains: Cil ne s’est pas aperceü De la borde qu’ele conta; Et cele nule honte n’a De la lecherie essaucier! Por tant le vout bien essaier: Ja n’en fust païe a garant, Se ne li contast maintenant. (4.36.100–106) [The cuckolded man didn’t dream what kind of yarn his wife was spinning, who gave an account of her sinning

LEWD AND THE LUDIC

19

quite brazenly, but free from blame To prove him wrong had been her aim, and she thought her revenge would fall short if she didn’t tell him all.]

The narrator refers to the wife’s tale as a “borde,” which carries the connotation more of a joke or playful trick than of a lie or deception. He furthermore explains to readers that the satisfaction or payment she received came from the telling of her story. When he explains that she wouldn’t have felt “païe a garant” [fully paid] unless she gave all the details of the “treatment,” this contrasts specifically with the husband’s earlier admonition to his wife to pay the lady doctor well for her services. For the wife, the sexual act is only the preparation for the source of her real satisfaction, which comes through the fabrication of her own joke.5 The lady is as much a storyteller as the narrator, making her linguistic artistry, rather than her sexuality, the center of the tale. It is also noteworthy that she does not brag to her husband that she has proven him wrong. Even though she has essentially recounted the adulterous act in great detail, he doesn’t get it, and the satisfaction of his not getting it is sufficient. The pleasure is a private pleasure, shared only by her, the “doctor,” and of course, the reader. As with many fabliaux, the narrator’s judgment of the spouses is ambivalent. He begins the tale by noting that the husband bragged very foolishly. The husband also looks ridiculous in flirting with the lady doctor in disguise, whose garish clothing is described in some detail. As she arrives, the husband says to her “Dieus vous gart, dist cil, bele amie! / Venez seoir lez moi ici.” [“You lovely lass, God keep you, too,” he said. “Come sit beside me here.”] (4.36.24–25). The “lady” defers, explaining that she isn’t at all tired and thus has no desire to sit next to him. Readers of the fabliau were unlikely to feel very sorry for the husband. Laurent Joubert, sixteenthcentury physician and author of a treatise on laughter, specifically commented on the lack of compassion we feel for the cuckolded men of fabliaux, such as those told in the Decameron. He admired “the stories of Boccaccio, of which those telling of the infidelities that wives perpetrate on their husbands we find most conducive to laughter, because it seems unfitting, without inspiring compassion, that a man be thus deceived.”6 Joubert also comments on the value of using witticisms to render tit for tat, and notes that among the different forms of humor, “I find the funniest the ability to render tit for tat, and for a taunt, to come back with a clever reply.” The lady’s cuckolding of her husband would thus have seemed a fitting comeback to her husband’s loutish behavior. In the conclusion, however, the narrator reiterates the stock condemnation of women’s cunning, calling any man a fool who thinks he can’t be tricked by a woman. Yet the last line

20

LISA PERFETTI

evokes admiration for the heroine of the tale, who “Boula son seignor premerains!” [did a premier job of tricking her lord] (4.36.116). This tale illustrates well how sex, deception, and women’s cunning ultimately are concerned with pleasures other than the erotic. The kind of “winning” sought by women is not always achieved through dominating the household or getting away with adultery but rather by making a joke that others (particularly arrogant husbands) don’t get. Another fabliau that suggests this kind of pleasure is De Berengier au lonc Cul (4.34.). As in La Saineresse, the wife in this fabliau sets out to punish her bragging husband. In this case, the bragging is even more egregious as we are told that this most cowardly and lazy “knight” boasts that no one in his wife’s family can match him for valor and prowess. This claim is most vividly disproved when the wife, suspecting his boasts are just hot air, dresses in a suit of armor and secretly follows him into the forest, where she witnesses him hanging his shield on a tree and beating it to pieces. The wife sets out to punish her husband for his arrogance and his deception by delivering a punishment comprised of two steps. In the first part of the punishment the wife, still in disguise, confronts her husband, chastising him for destroying the woods with all his wild and senseless hacking. The husband, trembling with fear, offers to make repayment, but the “knight” gives him only one choice: either joust with her there or kiss her ass. The cowardly husband chooses the latter option and is surprised by the curious “long ass” of his opponent. When the husband asks this strange knight to reveal his identity, he is told that he is Berengier au lonc Cul, who puts all cowards to shame. Having been humiliated by having to kiss the knight’s hindparts, the husband will then return home to receive the second part of his punishment. His wife has quickly left for home and timed it just so that when her husband returns, he will find her in bed with her lover.7 When the husband, true to her plan, returns from his day of “heroic adventures,” discovers them together and threatens her, the wife tells him to shut up and that she will call upon Berengier au lonc Cul, which effectively silences him, for he has been defeated. Presumably, the husband never realizes that Berengier au lonc Cul and his wife are one and the same, but both parts of the punishment shame the husband by “rubbing it in his face”: with her genitals in the first case, and with her adultery in the second. Although infidelity and sexual display are at the base of this story, the woman’s quest for satisfaction comes from a desire to deflate her husband’s pretensions. What is being punished is the husband’s arrogant boasting and, in the case of two of the manuscripts, his pretension to a noble station that ill befits his peasant birth.8 But just as the wife in La Saineresse does not tell her husband that she has proved him wrong, the wife in Berengier enacts her revenge without the husband ever

LEWD AND THE LUDIC

21

understanding how she has bested him. The lady’s claim that she is Berengier is a well-crafted fiction, and in two manuscript versions, her pretense is explicitly labeled a story: “A ce most a finé son conte” [with this word she finished her tale].9 We know the lady’s tale is a cleverly improvised fiction whereas the husband does not. In the scene just before, where the wife spies on her husband, we share her gaze as she sees the ridiculous “battle” in which her husband is engaging; we thus also share in the knowledge that the ferocious knight exacting humiliating revenge on the husband is in fact his wife.10 More important than the fact that the wife is able to cuckold her husband with impunity is the fact that the husband never “gets it,” never learns that she has “told a tale,” and never understands just how he has been duped—knowledge enjoyed only by the woman, the narrator, and by us. Consideration of the two different manuscript traditions of this tale leads to some interesting thoughts concerning the intersection of wit and gender. The first version of the story uses the story to imply a lesson about the danger of letting one’s wife get the upper hand. The concluding moral announced by the narrator runs: “Desconfit se sant et maté. / Et cele fait sa volanté, / Qui ne fu sote ne vilaine: / A mol pastor chie los laine!” [He knows he’s lost; he’s ill at ease. Henceforth she’ll do as she may please; she’s not base-born, and she’s no fool. The shepherd’s weak: the wolf shits wool] (4.34.293–96). While the narrator shows admiration for the woman who has been clever and behaved appropriately, the last line suggests that the emphasis is on the man who, if weak, will be unable to shepherd his household properly. Version II, by contrast, concludes with seven lines emphasizing that it is bad to boast. Both versions approve the woman’s behavior, but the two manuscripts of version I take the content of the story to draw a conventional lesson about proper gender roles in marriage. Other differences between the two versions reinforce this emphasis. For example, version II mentions twice that the husband boasts about his prowess to other people, not just his wife, whereas in version I the husband is only interested in deceiving or impressing his wife, making the central issue much more one of a contest between spouses.11 Version II also puts more emphasis on the wife’s purposeful strategizing of how to disprove her husband, whereas version I lets the plot itself do this. For example, about twenty lines are devoted to how the wife ponders (“porpensse”) the best way to verify her belief that her husband is lying (4.34.78–97). Following this reflection, when her husband again brags that she must love him because of his valor, she does not challenge him, but rather says she would love him with all her heart if she only knew for sure that what he claims is true, a remark that initiates his foray into the forest, where she will be able to prove him wrong. The text then adds that he kisses his wife, they have

22

LISA PERFETTI

supper and then go to bed: conjugal harmony reigns. This version clearly makes more of how the wife is skillfully masking her own plans by giving the impression that all is normal. The differences between these two traditions demonstrate how the same story could be put to different uses and could valorize or de-emphasize women’s wit. Traditionally, one of the principal reasons for the poor reception of the fabliaux has been the preponderance of obscenities and sexual language. Although there are more euphemisms and figurative language about sex than actual obscene vocabulary, the reference to sexual activity is quite blatant. As many have pointed out, the humor comes precisely from the fact that sexual acts are described without any use of sexual language at all, thus demonstrating Freud’s explanation of the pleasure of the joke coming from circumventing a taboo. When we ponder the humor of the fabliaux, however, we generally seek to discover how the humor works and not for whom. Who exactly thought the fabliaux were funny? Some scholars of the fabliaux believe that the scatological humor is typical of adolescent boys, while others see its appeal to sophisticated rhetoriqueurs. But what of women? Would they have laughed at fabliaux describing sexual acts? We know little, of course, about the audiences of fabliaux and in what circumstances they were told and heard, and so consideration of women as readers of the genre must remain speculative.12 An excellent example that suggests how women might have welcomed sexual humor is Watriquet’s charming Les trois Chanoinesses de Couloigne.13 The narrator, none other than Watriquet himself, chances upon three canonesses celebrating the feast of the Ascension in a church. The tale presents us with a somewhat unsavory portrait of the three women who are getting tipsy, bathe in the nude in front of a male visitor, and who have been practitioners of the arts of love that now their beauty is a bit “usees” [worn]. In recompense for tales of love and “bons mots” [good words] by this talented menestrel, the women offer him wine and food from their copious feast. They compliment him on his offerings, then ask him to delight them with tales that are, in his words, more concerned with “paroles crasses et doilles” [crude and tasty talk]. One of the women explains: Si que de risees nous moilles Dist l’une des mieus emparlees, Nous sommes compaignes quarrees; Di hardiment de quan qu’il touche A vis, s’il te vient a la bouche: Ja n’en seras de nous repris. Ne voulons pas choses de pris, Mais ce qui mieus rire nous face!”

LEWD AND THE LUDIC

23

[So that you’ll make us wet with laughter. We [three] are unshakable friends. Tell without shame about things concerning the prick if it should cross your lips: never will you be reproached about it by us. We don’t want things of value, but rather what will best make us laugh!]

The women’s behavior, while immodest and tinged with sexual overtones, gives the central place of honor to humorous tales. The performance they desire from their male visitor is entirely linguistic in nature rather than sexual.14 They furthermore justify their licentious behavior by pointing out that they are not in public, but rather “en lieu secré” [in a hidden/secret place] where they can’t be blamed for the telling of “gogues et risees” [jokes and jests]. This seems to be the thrust of the one woman’s reassurance that the three of them are solid friends and so won’t tell about their activities after the evening is over. Part of what makes the scene so titillating for the male poet/narrator is that he gains temporary access to this all-female ludic community, which is of course what enables him to write about it and let others know about these secret female pleasures. While this tale is completely fictional, it is quite likely that medieval women both laughed at and told sexual jokes in private that they would have blushed to hear in the company of men.15 Publicly, of course, women were expected to avoid references to sexual language. In the Ménagier de Paris, women are told that they mustn’t speak “de nulle laidure, non mye seulement de con, de cul ne de autres secretz membres de nature, car c’est deshonneste chose a femme d’en parler” [of anything dirty at all, not only cunt, ass, or other private parts, for it is unseemly for a woman to speak of these].16 Christine de Pizan similarly cautions girls to avoid behavior that is “bold, skittish, or ribald,” especially in the presence of men.17 According to Hostiensis, cardinal bishop of the thirteenth-century, women used euphemisms for sexual terms and would blush to even hear mention of sex.18 Laughter itself was highly discouraged in women because it indicated a loss of control over the body. Conduct manuals proscribing proper etiquette for women, particularly bourgeois or aristocratic women, place side by side warnings against laughing too much with cautions about immodest bodily movements or gestures, like sitting with her legs spread or jumping about.19 A laughing woman is also a loose woman. Sexual humor was thus often considered unladylike for women to enjoy and certainly to tell. Yet the notion that sexual language and humor should be a pleasure forbidden to women was not without its challengers. Indeed, some literary examples ridicule the idea that women’s modesty can be protected by

24

LISA PERFETTI

sheltering them from sexual language. In La Damoisele qui ne pooit oïr parler de foutre (4.26.), for example, the maiden cannot bear to hear the word “fuck,” but shows no hesitation in engaging in the act once metaphorical terms are used. The fabliau’s message about female sexuality can be interpreted in two quite different ways. The first implication of the tale is that even virtuous women who speak prudishly, or claim to be disgusted by sex, really want it. Their modesty is merely a show. But the second, more interesting, implication is that hiding sexual knowledge from women actually makes it difficult for them to remain chaste.20 Indeed, this is the explicit lesson drawn from L’Esquiriel (6.58).21 The beginning of the fabliau presents a mother lecturing her fourteen-year-old daughter on proper etiquette: . . . Fille, ne soiez mie Trop fole ne trop vilotiere, Ne de parler trop prinsautiere, Car a mal puet en atorner A feme quant en l’ot parler Autrement que ele ne doit. Por ce chastier se devroit Feme de parler folement, Car il en mesavient sovent. Sor totes choses garde bien Que tu ne nomer cele rien Que cil home portent pendant. (6.58.16–27) [Don’t let yourself, my daughter, be too outspoken or loquacious nor, when you do speak, too audacious. People won’t readily forgive a woman who’s too talkative and says things that are unbecoming, and for this reason every woman ought to refrain from idle speech. There’s one thing more I want to teach you most insistently of all: don’t speak the word by which we call that thing that hangs in a man’s britches.]

The mother’s lecture (with the exception of its incongruously specific admonition about the male member) could be lifted out of any of the dozens of conduct manuals written in the fourteenth century. Not surprisingly, the very thing that is forbidden becomes so intriguing to the girl that she nags her mother incessantly until she finally affirms that “vit” is the name given to this shameful member. The girl excitedly repeats the word until her mother flies crying from the room. An enterprising youth

LEWD AND THE LUDIC

25

named Robin, who has heard the mother-daughter conversation and become aroused, presents himself to the curious maiden who desires to know what it is that he is holding in his hands. He explains that it is a squirrel (with two “eggs” in his “nest”) who is hungry, looking for nuts. When the maiden regrets that she has already eaten some that morning and thus has none left to offer, Robin reassures her that his squirrel can find them in her belly. The squirrel seeks his nuts with gusto, much to the delight of the maiden. Much of the humor of the fabliau derives from the pleasurable “economy” of the joke that substitutes metaphorical for literal. But I would argue that it additionally plays with and challenges commonplace notions that women should not use sexual language. In the version of Paris Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 837, the narrator draws the moral of the story: “Par cest fablel vueil enseignier / Que tels cuide bien chastier / Sa fille de dire folie / Et quant plus onques le chastie / Tant le met l’en plus en la voie / De mal fere se dieus me voie” [Through this fabliau I want to teach that he who thinks he can keep his daughter from speaking foolishly by lecturing her only puts her all the more on the path of poor behavior the more he lectures her.]22 While the source of comic pleasure is the playing with language, the fabliau illuminates the spurious connection between linguistic and sexual purity. One does not maintain a maiden’s chastity by keeping her ignorant or forbidding her to speak of sexual matters.23 And because it is women who most often had to censor their speech to follow norms of prudery, women may also have been the ones most likely to delight in the fabliaux’ flouting of such standards by saying the unsayable. A passage in Boccaccio’s Decameron is yet more explicit about the value of women’s knowledge of sexual terminology and, more importantly, the value of their demonstrating their knowledge of sex to men. In a discussion of the value of tales in which women justifiably deceive their husbands, Filostrato comments that women should actively tell such tales “so that men may come to learn that women, for their part, know just as much about these things as they do. This cannot be anything but useful to you, for when someone knows that others know about such matters, he will not easily wish to deceive you.”24 Filostrato’s comment suggests that women’s professed ignorance of sexual matters only makes them more vulnerable to men’s seductions and, ultimately, betrayal. The fabliaux’ lesson about female knowledge is, of course, far more ambiguous, but the ludic treatment of sexual language gets at the same issue: it is not knowledge of sex or sexual language that endangers women’s chastity but rather women’s ignorance or feigned ignorance. Another interesting possibility raised by the fabliau of the squirrel is that both sex and sexual humor can be pleasures shared together by men and women. While the fabliaux are generally characterized by their contestive

26

LISA PERFETTI

spirit, there are a few fabliaux that could suggest a shared intimacy of joking. L’Esquiriel, for example, has sometimes been seen as a tale about a naïve girl seduced by a more clever young man, but nothing excludes the possibility that the couple take knowing and mutual delight in their linguistic acrobatics. I would like to propose one other fabliau suggestive of a similar pleasure enjoyed by a married couple. In Jean Bodel’s Le Sohait desvé (6.70), a husband returns from a three-month business trip too tired from the wine he has drunk to perform his conjugal duties, and so his wife dreams of a “prick market” at the annual fair where she can purchase pricks of all shapes and sizes.25 Just at the moment of her dream where she has selected the choicest of pricks and is now sealing the bargain with the merchant by slapping his palm, her hand strikes her sleeping husband who awakes in alarm and asks to know what she has been dreaming. As she recounts the details of her dream, he becomes aroused, places his penis in her hand and asks her how much he would get for it at the prick market. She responds: Sire, se je voie demain Qui de teus en aüst plain cofre, N’i trovast qui i meïst ofre, Ne qui donast gote d’argent. Nes li vit a la povre gent Estoient tel que uns toz seus En vaudroit largement ces deus: Teus com il est, or eswardez Que la ne fust ja regardez De demande pres ne de loin! (6.70.192–201) [As I hope to survive, I vow that someone selling a full coffer of them would find no one who’d offer a speck of money for the lot. Why, even those the paupers bought were such that one of them with ease would equal at least two of these the way it is now. Look here, sire, there it would never find a buyer who’d ask to see the thing up close.]

The husband appears to take no offense at her remark: —Suer, fait il, de ce n’ai je soin: Mais pran cestui et lai toz çaus, Tant que tu puisses faire miaus! (6.70.202–204)

LEWD AND THE LUDIC

27

[“So what?” he says. “That’s how it goes. Take this one—the others don’t matter!— until you think you can do better.”]

The fabliau clearly plays on stereotypes about female desire for large sexual organs as well as the male fear of inadequacy, reinforced by the narrator’s closing comment that the husband was a fool for telling everyone the story the next day since now Jean Bodel has been able to turn it into a fabliau. But this small detail seems to me to be quite provocative, for it makes us envision the husband running around town to tell his story. Why? Could it be that he has found it amusing, and has now taken the opportunity to continue his pleasure by telling a good joke to his friends? As we read the words on the manuscript page, what we are of course missing is tone. Were the wife’s words to her husband said with scorn or with playfulness? Was his response delivered with resignation and humility or rather with the jocularity that comes from knowing that he needn’t measure up to the fantasy world in which pricks are sold by the pailfull?26 While the overall context of the fabliau corpus entitles us to assume the wife’s dissatisfaction with her husband’s meager member, the tale itself gives little such indication. The narrator admittedly comments that the wife would have preferred to keep sleeping, “Car sa joie li torne a duel” [since now her joy has turned to sorrow] (6.70.148), when she leaves her fantasy world for the reality of the conjugal chamber in which the only man present is fast asleep. Yet early on in the text, the wife is too timid to wake her husband despite her unfulfilled desire, for she fears that he will think her “glote” or oversexed (6.70.65–69).27 We are not dealing here with a woman like the wife in Les quatre Souhais saint Martin, who wishes her husband to be covered in pricks from head to foot. Thus, it seems to me entirely possible that the couple uses the lady’s dream as an occasion for playful jesting, accompanied by the sexual pleasure that follows, similar to the paired pleasures in L’Esquiriel. In this possible reading, the humor unites the couple rather than separating them, and one wonders whether readers of the tale may then have carried the jesting of the tale into their own bedrooms.28 The tone of conjugal jocularity I have proposed is far from the spirit of most fabliaux, and perhaps was not what was intended by the tale’s author, Jean Bodel. Yet we know that fabliaux were likely to have been read aloud, and that much could be determined by the gestures and tone of voice adopted by the minstrel. We also understand that readers could interpret the tales in different ways based on their own experiences, perspectives, and knowledge of other stories or literary traditions. While I have been arguing that the fabliaux showcase women’s pleasure at tricking their husbands through their superior mastery of wit and language, the

28

LISA PERFETTI

fabliaux also suggest to me possibilities for pleasures shared by women and men. As tales that celebrate the power of wit and verbal dexterity to overcome obstacles, including those based on traditional power roles, the fabliaux ultimately are not concerned with either praising or blaming women.29 There are, of course, fabliaux that showcase the power of women’s wit to bring errant husbands back into line. In Le Vilain Mire (2.13), a wife uses her cleverness to make her jealous husband stop beating her and recognize his mistreatment of his faithful and deserving wife, and in La Bourse pleine de Sens (2.8), the wife teaches her unfaithful husband about the precious commodity of good sense that he has been squandering as he wasted both time and money with a mistress who cared only for his material wealth. In these texts, wit is the only tool available to women whose inferior power status makes them unable to influence their husbands through any other means. Many fabliaux certainly do mock female sexuality, and the stock condemnations of female lasciviousness and cunning circulating in the genre, taken as a whole, make for a rather unflattering portrait of female pleasures. But these antifeminist platitudes are often not central to the spirit of the works and are used in such a formulaic way as to empty them of meaning or even to undermine them through irony. In reading through the lens of the clichés about feminine lasciviousness, we may often miss the pleasures that have more to do with the mind than the body, that focus more on wit and language than on sex, and take far more delight in the ludic than in the lewd. Notes 1. Lesley Johnson, “Women on Top: Antifeminism in the Fabliaux?” Modern Language Review 78(1983):298–307, is probably the best-known argument against the view that the fabliaux are inherently antifeminist. For the best work describing the antifeminist elements of many fabliaux, see chapter 5 of Norris J. Lacy, Reading Fabliaux (New York and London: Garland, 1993), pp. 60–77. Although Lacy chooses one of the most extreme examples of misogyny to illustrate his case (La Dame escoillee), he rightly points to the fact that the fabliau corpus is very heterogeneous and that many fabliaux, while they use stock clichés about women, are ultimately focused on other issues. 2. Translation mine. 3. The anonymous La Saineresse survives in one manuscript only, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 837, dating from the end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century. 4. R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 90.

LEWD AND THE LUDIC

29

5. This point has been made similarly by Roy J. Pearcy, “Modes of Signification and the Humor of Obscene Diction in the Fabliaux,” in The Humor of the Fabliaux: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Thomas D. Cooke and Benjamin L. Honeycutt (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974), p. 188 [163–96]. 6. Laurent Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, trans. Gregory David de Rocher (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980), p. 24. The following citation in the text appears on the same page. 7. Pamela Allen Brown, Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p.114, rightly points out that this kiss on the posterior should not be perceived as the “punchline” since the tale continues for another forty lines focusing on the wife’s triumph. 8. There are three extant manuscripts of the fabliau, conventionally divided into two versions. Version II (based on Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 837) shows more interest in condemning the husband for his lazy, boastful behavior than for his inappropriate marriage to a woman of the nobility and is more explicit in labeling him “pereceus et vains / Et vanterres” [lazy, vile, and boasting], translation mine (4.34.10–11(A)). 9. Verse 260 of Bern, Burgerbibliothek 354 and verse 262 of Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 19152. Translation mine. 10. As Norris J. Lacy has observed, many fabliaux emphasize the act of observation, which is key to the humor. A subject transformed into an object by the presence of a hidden observer, becomes more risible. Lacy also points out that the many visual markers in the narration (such as the terms “Ez vos” [voilà, or Look!]) show how the narration heightens the visual experience for the audience, making it more akin to theatrical performance than to mere reading aloud. Norris J. Lacy, “Subject to Object: Performance and Observation in the Fabliaux,” Symposium 56.1(2002):17–23. 11. Version II (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 837) mentions other “audiences” for the husband’s boasting at lines 34, 84, and 242. 12. Evidence for women as readers of the fabliaux is far less available, e.g., than the evidence of female audience for the later French farces, which frequently address women explicitly. Bruno Roy, Une Culture de l’équivoque (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1992) details fifteenth-century mixed gatherings of men and women at which obscene or risque riddles and other linguistic games were told. Evidence for the fabliaux, however, is lacking. One fabliau that suggests the presence of women at the telling of fabliaux is La Damoisele qui sonjoit (4.25), where a young lady is raped in her sleep, awakes to chastise the man for robbing her of her virginity, but then demands that he do it again since she doesn’t remember anything of when he did it to her while she slept. The humor presumably lies in the quick, joke-like shift from the maiden’s expected reprimand about taking her virginity to an assertive demand for more. The narrator concludes by wishing that “cez dames qui ci sont” (4.26.71) will have a dream such as that of the damsel in his story. The narrator’s rather lewd suggestion to his

30

LISA PERFETTI

13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

female audience here follows in the tradition of many medieval male narrators who leer at their lady listeners. This fabliau is contained in one extant manuscript (Paris, Arsenal, 3525, fol. 84a–88a). Unfortunately, about fifty-six verses are missing. In chapter 6 of my book Women and Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), I mention this fabliau in connection with a similar scene in the Thousand and One Nights. In the Arabic text, the women play a larger role in actually making the jokes. The impact of public versus private settings on women’s use of humor in the Middle Ages, and in many cultures around the world today, is a topic I explore in chapter 3 of Women and Laughter, devoted to William Dunbar’s Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, in which three women drink and tell jokes about their husbands using scabrous language. Le Ménagier de Paris, ed. Georgine E. Brereton and Janet M. Ferrier (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), p. 129. 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. James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 426–27. I trace the association between women’s laughter and sexuality in Women and Laughter, pp. 8–11. In four of the five manuscripts, the reason for the maiden’s disgust is that she is “desdaigneuse” (disdainful) or “orgeilleuse,” (arrogant) while in the fifth (entitled De la Pucele qui abeuvra le Polain [The maiden who gave water to the horse] she is simply described as beautiful. There are two manuscripts containing L’Esquiriel. The translation is mine, since Dubin’s does not translate the verb “cuide,” which serves to bring more attention to the parent’s mistaken belief that such instructions can be effective. Keith Busby, Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript, 2 vols. (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002), vol. 1, p. 446, notes that the compiler of one of the manuscripts containing L’Esquiriel (Bern, Burgerbib. 354, fol. 39va–41ra) was particularly fond of “linguistic” fabliaux. In addition to this fabliau, it has La Grue (along with Le Heron, this fabliau is called Cele qui fu foutue et desfoutue in the NRCF 4.30), La Pucele qui voloit voler (6.65), La Damoisele qui ne pooit oïr parler de foutre (4.26), and Porcelet (6.67). Busby also notes that the “penchant for euphemism” stands in stark contrast to the explicit language of the tituli, which are often in red, thus drawing more attention to the problem of language and representation in the fabliaux. Busby makes a compelling argument for paying much more attention to the manuscript context of the fabliaux, since looking at the ordering and placement of tales, the use of tituli and explicits, and other marks on the folios can indicate much about how the compilers and audiences interpreted the meaning of the texts. Also

LEWD AND THE LUDIC

24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

31

see Charles Muscatine, who calls fabliaux such as these “anti-prudery poems” which he believes mock new norms of decency: Charles Muscatine, The Old French Fabliaux (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 133–41. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella (New York: Norton, 1982), p. 422. Only one manuscript for Le Sohait desvé survives: Bern, Burgerbib. 354, fol. 100d–102d. Dubin translates the title of this fabliau as “The Wild Dream,” but it can also be translated either as “The Wish for Pricks” or “The Crazy Wish.” Sarah Melhado White, “Sexual Language and Human Conflict in Old French Fabliaux,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 24(1982):198 [185–210], comments that the husband takes his wife’s insult with good humor and that “a certain normalcy is restored.” White assumes “good humor” rather than humor and attributes it only to the husband. One fabliau that is more explicit about a wife’s joking about sex is La Dame qui se venja du Chevalier (7.82). In order to frighten and humiliate her naked lover who has taken cover upon the husband’s sudden return, a wife tells her husband that he should go seek his sword to kill the one who has been between her legs more in that week than he had ever been. When the husband returns with his sword, the lady leads him to the threshold of the bedroom where she stands, one leg on either side. The text notes, “Li sire en a ris et gabé, / Puis dist: ‘Bien me savez gaber!’ [The lord laughed and joked about it, then said: You sure know how to pull jokes on me!”] (7.82.199–200); Translation mine). Of course the fabliau is far from flattering to the clever woman or her husband, for the wife has in fact allowed another man between her thighs and the tale concludes by warning men never to trust their wives. Muscatine, Old French Fabliaux, p. 123, also notes the significance of this passage, arguing that it shows that the wife is portrayed with sympathy. For Mary Jane Stearns Schenck, the presence of a trickster and a dupe is one of the defining characteristics of fabliau, and so, not surprisingly, she classifies this tale, which lacks these elements, as a “dream vision.” See Mary Jane Stearns Schenck, The Fabliaux: Tales of Wit and Deception, Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages, 24 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1987), pp. 68–69. Schenck, The Fabliaux, p. 108, sees the amoral, pragmatic ethos of the fabliaux connected both to shifting power structures in the new urban economy of the thirteenth century and to the tradition of wisdom literature: “The primary means of thwarting the values of conventional society, especially for those who do not have wealth, power, or status, is cunning. From Scheherazade, who tells story after story to avoid execution, to the Aesopic tradition of weak but clever animals, narratives in wisdom collections demonstrate how to survive in a less than equitable society.” Her analysis of gender as it relates to wit, however, is rather cursory (see pp. 99–102).

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 2 OF MONSTERS AND MEN: THE POWER OF FEMALE IMAGINATION IN LES QUATRE SOHAIS SAINT MARTIN

Susanne Hafner

Examining medieval Aristotelian commentaries, this essay argues that Les quatre Sohais saint Martin shows both the monstrosity of peasant identity and the imaginative generation that the female body enables.

abliau were a popular genre and existed practically in every vernacular language, though the most prominent corpus comes from the north of France. For lack of a more precise alternative, the genre has mainly been defined in very general terms, by way of its length, its content, and its effect: All fabliaux are short (ranging from eighteen lines to approximately twenty printed pages), they are mostly sexual or scatological in theme, and they are meant to be funny. But, as R. Howard Bloch states, “if the fabliaux have any coherence as a generic grouping . . . , this unity lies less in a single origin, thematics, intention, or form than in the sustained reflection upon literary language writ so large across these rhymed comic tales whose subject, mimetic realism nonwithstanding, is the nature of poetry itself.”1 In other words, the genre’s preoccupation with sexual organs and sexual language stands for a primary literary desire, not a sexual one. With this premise in mind, I want to look at Les quatre Sohais saint Martin and its shape-shifting bodies from a Bakhtinian perspective, viewing the grotesque body as “in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body.”2 Les quatre

F

34

SUSANNE HAFNER

Sohais saint Martin, “Saint Martin’s Four Wishes,” is also, as I will argue, informed by a solid background knowledge of contemporary medical literature. The principles of generation as they could be found in Aristotle and his commentaries are being utilized to conjure up an idea of femininity that is demonized and terrifying in its faculties: In this fabliau, woman has the divine power to create—her word can be made flesh. The essence of this fabliau lies at the intersection of what we say, what we see, and what we think: language, image, and imagination. The literature recruited to bring this connection to the fore will either pre- or postdate the Middle Ages. The problem is, as David Friedman states in his Cultural History of the Penis, that “the penis had virtually disappeared from Western art for eight hundred years.”3 Out of sight, however, does not mean out of mind: The advent of Christianity and a culture linking sexuality and shame covered up the image and censored the word, but it could not lobotomize people’s fantasies. Especially not the vivid imagination of the literati, those who could read and write and who had at their disposition libraries full of classical, pre-Christian, and highly entertaining literature, particularly the works attributed to schoolbook authors such as Virgil and Ovid. The scholarship that has been looking for possible sources for the fabliau has mainly suggested religious and didactic models, notably the Middle Latin exempla.4 I would like to suggest a different route that is less pedagogical, but more phallic in nature, Priapic poetry. Both genres share an obsession with the unnatural, fragmented human body, whose limbs do not add up to a harmonious whole, but which is monstrous in its uncontrolled unshapeliness. In either case, this fertility gone awry is placed in a rural setting of gardens, fields, crops, and peasants. What has changed dramatically with the introduction of Christendom is our attitude toward sex and to the genitalia visually reminding us of it: they are no longer put on display, celebrated, and revered, but instead they are demonized, feminized, and ostracized. In Les quatre Sohais saint Martin, for instance, the wishes granted by the saint allow a peasant and his wife to form, deform, and reform their bodies. The peasant, nameless and only defined by his occupation, worships St. Martin so faithfully that the saint one day appears to him. In return for his prayer, he grants four wishes to the peasant and his wife. The woman uses this unique opportunity to amend her husband’s shortcomings: she asks for his body to be covered with penises in all imaginable varieties. Her husband, not happy with this turn of events, retaliates by endowing her with the female counterparts, which are described in equally graphic detail. Displeased with their new appearances, the peasants use their third wish to have all their genitalia disappear, realizing too late that now they have nothing left. Thus, they have to waste their fourth and final wish to restore

OF MONSTERS AND MEN

35

their original state. The moral of the story: “Par cest fablel poez sauoir / Que cil ne fet mie sauoir / Qui mieus croit sa fame que lui / Souent l’en vient honte et anui” [This fabliau clearly explains / that a man doesn’t use his brains / when his wife’s judgment sways his views / Calamity often ensues] (4.31.187–90(A)).5 The vilain, the person who lives in the village as opposed to the aristocratic castle or the bourgeois city, needs to be controlled and put in his place to prevent ambitions beyond his estate. Therefore, the degree of agency granted to him in the fabliau is limited. He is described in terms of a farm animal, mindlessly laboring in the field.6 His daily peasant existence is framed both in time and in space: by the ringing of the church bell and the stretch of land that he can plough in a day.7 He is not personalized by being named, but classified by his social status as peasant. His wife actually calls him “beast” (“beste,” 4.31.40, 136). St. Martin is the appropriate saint for this rural milieu as his feast day marks the end of the season, the beginning of employment for farmhands, and the traditional slaughtering of cattle and geese.8 He interrupts the peasant’s preset routine with his apparition. His invocation by the peasant has the character of automatic chanting, as the text insistently repeats the naming of the saint “toz iors” (“every day,” 4.31.4; 9; 17), giving the impression that Martin is called without special occasion or purpose, and that the peasant is actually overdoing his pious veneration. The saint responds with an equal expression of overabundance. He grants the man four wishes instead of the conventional fairytale three, adding to the perfect number. This is already an indication for the audience that something is dreadfully amiss. The peasant knows what he wants: material gain. “Souhaiderai tout maintenant / Terre, richece, or et argent” [I want right now / land, riches, gold, and silver] (translation mine; 4.31.53–54(A)).9 He is, however, reluctant to relinquish any of the wishes to his wife for fear that she might desire something inappropriate. He knows: what women want is different. Instead, the vilain is worried that his wife might wish to transform him— into a bear, an ass, a goat, or a horse.10 Only when she assures him that she loves him more than any other man does the peasant allow her to make the first wish. Why the four animals? Contrary to her husband, the woman does not want to add to her belongings—she wants to change his shape. The vilain’s assumption is that these animals are her amors, her lovers; and bears, asses, goats, and horses are indeed the major participants in bestial intercourse. The special inclination of peasants for this practice has been reported by sources as different as Giraldus Cambrensis in his twelfthcentury observations on rural life in Ireland,11 the Kinsey Report,12 or in Preben Sørensen’s account of country life in Scandinavia.13

36

SUSANNE HAFNER

The fabliau’s peasant, too, lives like a beast and is a beast in the eyes of his wife, who complains about his lack of stamina: “C’un seul vit ne me valoit rien / Sempres ert mol comme pelice” [Your one prick couldn’t satisfy, / just hanging limply like a fox / stole, but now I’ve a wealth of cocks!] (4.31.128–29). Therefore, her wish St. Martin is an ecstatic outburst, calling for multiple penises. The wife conjures them up in a litany similar to the peasant’s repeated invocations of the saint, earlier in the field: Je demant dist ele en non dieu Que vous soiez chargiez de vis Ne vous remaignent oeil ne vis Teste ne braz piez ne costé Ou par tout ne soit vit planté Si ne soient ne mol ne doille Ainz ait a chascun vit sa coille Toz dis soient li vit tendu Si samblerez vilain cornu Quant ele ot souhaidié et dit Du vilain saillirent li vit Li vit li saillent par le nez Et par la bouche de delez Si ot vit lonc et vit quarrez Vit gros vit cort vit reboulez Vit corbe vit agu vit gros Sor le vilain n’ot si dur os Dont vit ne saillent merueillous Li vit li saillent des genous Por dieu or entendez merueilles Li vit li saillent des oreilles Et par deuant en contremont Li sailli vns granz vis du front Et par aual dusques aus piez Fu li vilains de vis chargiez (4.31.94–118(A)) [“I wish,” she said, “that, in God’s name, / there spring up penises galore / over your body, aft and fore! / On face, arms, sides, from head to foot, / may countless penises take root, / and let them not be limp or slack: / let each be furnished with its sack, / and let them stand stiff and upright! / Now, won’t you be a horny sight!” Then, as soon as the woman spoke, / hundreds of pricks began to poke / out all over. Penises grew / around his nose and his mouth, too. / Some pricks were thick, some oversized, / some long, some short, some circumcised, / curved pricks, straight pricks, pointed and hardy . . . / every bone in the peasant’s body / was miraculously endowed / and prickled, fully-cocked and proud. / You’ve never heard wonders like these! / Pricks grow out of his ears, and he’s / amidst his forehead, standing

OF MONSTERS AND MEN

37

tall, / the most enormous prick of all, / and right down to his feet he’s coated / with penises erect and bloated].

Thus, the peasant’s body is reconfigured, sprouting penises in all directions. They are “planted” on top of his regular body parts, which, in their spattered listing, contribute to the ensuing anatomical confusion. The end result of the peasant’s metamorphosis is a body consisting of fragmented human parts and a multitude of penises, which in their fruitful genesis are an outgrowth of nature. The underlying idea of agricultural fertility gone berserk is stressed by the use of botanical vocabulary such as planter, saillir, or chargier (fruit). This “wild anatomical fantasy”14 of overabundant body parts is what contemporaneous learned discourse would have labeled a “monstrosity.”15 According to Aristotle, such deviations from the norm happen: when the movements [that came from the male] relapse and the material [that came from the female] does not get mastered, what remains is the most “general,” and this is the [merely] animal. People say that the offspring which is formed has the head of a ram or an ox; and similarly with other creatures, that one has the head of another, e.g., a calf has a child’s head or a sheep an ox’s head.16

What is interesting in Aristotle’s explanation is the equation of “female,” “general,” and “animal.” The female matter which is not mastered by the male seed prevents the normal human development of the offspring and creates a child which bears both animal and human characteristics. Aristotle emphasizes that he is talking about “resemblances only,”17 which are not meant to be understood as a real mixture of species. Later interpretations of Aristotle’s works, however, do read his explanation of monstrous resemblances literally. Vincent of Beauvais, for instance, asked the logical next question, wondering how such beings would be engendered. Quoting the above passage of Aristotle’s in the mid-thirteenth century, Vincent continues: “This type of monstrosity occurs in this way, that is, by means of coitus between different species, or by means of an unnatural type of copulation.”18 Thus, he is carrying the identification of female and animal offered to him by Aristotle to another level. Bestiality, according to Vincent of Beauvais, is intercourse with a beast or like a beast; he does not draw a distinction between the two. Amboise Paré, who wrote the highly influential compendium on Monstres et Prodiges in 1573, describes this “copulation comme bestes brutes” as “wherever their appetite guides them, with no regard for the time or other laws ordained by God and Nature.”19 This inappropriate appetite, to be contained and controlled with the help of laws established by God and nature recalls the framing of the peasant’s workday with the help of the church bells: God—and the confines of the

38

SUSANNE HAFNER

field: nature. And indeed, the couple’s animal urges do not come forth until St. Martin unhinges these limitations. Consequently, the vilain’s “natural” shape is abandoned in favor of a grotesque multiphallic body, which is custom-designed, one might say, to satisfy his wife’s insatiable sexual appetite. The woman is engendering a monster, not in her womb like Aristotle’s exemplary cases, but in her mind; and this monster can take shape due to the special power bestowed upon her by the saint. Belief in the influence of the female imagination on the generative process was widespread. An early instance can be found in Genesis, where Jacob develops an effective method of genetic engineering by exposing the females in Laban’s flock to the view of differently peeled rods of three kinds of trees: “And he put them in the troughs, where the water was poured out: that when the flocks should come to drink, they might have the rods before their eyes, and in the sight of them might conceive. And it came to pass that in the very heat of coition, the sheep beheld the rods, and brought forth spotted, and of divers colours, and speckled.”20 An even clearer picture of this “indissoluble and fateful association among the image, the feminine, and the monstrous”21 emerges from the apocryphal Testament of Reuben, where the result of such an impression is a race of giants: “The Watchers . . . changed themselves into the shape of men and appeared to the women when they were having intercourse with their husbands. And the women, lusting in their minds after their phantom forms, gave birth to giants (for the Watchers seemed to them tall enough to touch the sky).”22 The author of the Secreta Mulierum, long believed to be Albertus Magnus, is aware of this tradition as well, and he brings it in direct relationship with the creation of monsters. “A monster of this type [part animal, part human] can also be caused by a special action of the imaginative power of a woman who is having coitus.”23 He therefore adapts Galen in suggesting that there should not be any paintings in bedrooms. Anecdotal evidence abounded, for instance about the “hairy virgin,” who was born covered with fur, because at the moment of conception, her mother had been looking at a picture of John the Baptist in his animal skins, placed at the foot of her bed. Similarly, Hippocrates was said to have defended a mother from the accusation of adultery after she had given birth to a black child, although both she and her husband were white. Hippocrates traced the child’s skin color back to the portrait of a Moor, also affixed to the mother’s bed.24 Monsters who are shaped according to their mothers’ imagination thus reveal female desire visually. Phantasizing alone can create an effect, and the vilain’s wife finds herself empowered to materialize the image of her sexual appetite by drawing a verbal picture of a well-endowed male.25 Her husband bears the marks of sexual transgression on his body and thus

OF MONSTERS AND MEN

39

displays his descent from Cain, the ur-peasant, who is marked by horns and lumps on his body, too, “as a sign of his degraded human nature.”26 Thus, the “vilain cornu,” “the horned peasant” (4.31.102(A)) is iconographically related to Cain, who is occasionally portrayed with horns on his head and who is eventually killed by Lamech, who mistakes him for an animal.27 The Middle Irish Lebor Gabála describes Cain as possessing an affliction similar to the peasant’s “sprouting”: “God set Cain in a sign, . . ., a lump upon his forehead [and a lump (on) each of his cheeks, and a lump on each foot and on each hand] . . . Then Cain . . . dwelt, a wild fugitive, in the eastern border of the land called Eden.”28 Cain becomes the biblical Urvater of all peasants and all monsters, a genealogy which many texts develop quite explicitly.29 According to Genesis, Cain is the first husbandman, offering fruits of the earth, to Abel’s first shepherd.30 After his expulsion from Eden, he settles on the margins of the known world. Quite a few medieval maps depict the monstrous races—some would say: Cain’s descendants—east of Eden. Typologically related, although not identical, are the post-diluvian descendants of Ham. Ham, the youngest of Noah’s three sons, dishonored his father by seeing him naked and mocking him. For this reason, Noah cursed him to be the servant of servants, and of his brothers.31 This is the Biblical passage abused to justify serfdom, slavery, and, ultimately racism. When Noah distributes the continents to his sons after the Flood, he gives Africa to Ham to populate. The black skin of the Africans is the typological equivalent of Cain’s mark, visualizing inferiority.32 The alternative depiction of Cain’s or Ham’s progeny with horns as the markers of transgression and servitude instead of color, although less frequent, does exist, for example in the proverb “Rusticus est quasi bos, nisi quod sua cornua desunt,”33 which likens the peasant to an ox without horns. The fabliau’s peasant, however, indeed is cornu, horned, after his transformation. When it is his turn to make a wish, he retaliates for his wife’s monstrous phantasy by wishing as many female genitalia upon her as she has endowed him with penises: Je souhaide dist li preudom Que tu aies autrestant con Com i’ai de vis par deseur moi Autrestant con aies seur toi Adonc fu ele bien connue Qu’ele ot .ij. cons en la veue .Iiij. en ot ou front coste a coste Et con deuant et con d’encoste Si ot con de mainte maniere Et con deuant et con derriere

40

SUSANNE HAFNER

Con tort con droit et con chenu Et con sanz poil et con velu Et con pucel et con estrait Et con estroit et con bien fait Et con petit et con a’orce Et con parfont et con seur boce Et con au chief et con aus piez Adonques fu li vilains liez (4.31.139–56(A)) [“I wish,” the fellow said at once, / “that you had just as many cunts / on you as I have pricks on me. / May your cunts pop out rapidly!” / At once the cunts start to arise. / A pair appears before her eyes, / four on her forehead in a row, / and cunts above, and cunts below, / and cunts behind, and cunts in front, / every variety of cunt / bent cunts, straight cunts, cunts gray and hoary, / cunts without hair, cunts thick and furry, / and virgin cunts, narrow and tight, / wide, gaping cunts, and cunts made right, / cunts large and small, oval and round, / deep cunts, and cunts raised on a mound, / cunts on her head, cunts on her feet . . . / the peasant’s joy is now complete.]

Contrary to his wife’s verbally explicit and creative act, the peasant’s wish only amounts to a “same to you.” The image of female monstrosity is carefully crafted as a reflection of the male monstrous body, which the wife had conjured up earlier. Both passages consist of two parts, the wish and its fulfillment. The wishes are introduced by formulaic statements of intent: “Je demant dist ele en non dieu / Que vous soiez chargiez de vis” (4.31.94–95(A)); and “Je souhaide dist li preudom / Que tu aies autrestant con” (4.31.139–40(A)). Both are concluded by parallel sentences summarizing the impending transformation: “Si samblerez vilain cornu” (4.31.102(A)) and “adonc fu ele bien connue” (4.31.143(A)). The vilain as a construction of female desire is reflected from the female body as its mirror image, revealing a deficit in the process: Whereas the woman is able to create an image of her desire verbally, all the man can do is reverse this desire. The main difference between the male and the female catalogues consists in the lack of a male wish list, which would parallel the woman’s specifications: The vilain does not have any erotic phantasies to which he could now give shape.34 It is the second part of the passage, describing the fulfillment of the wish, which puts the female transformation into words, not the peasant himself. The fabliau takes over the task of reshaping the female body, displaying the same lack of proportion which the peasant had previously demonstrated, giving overabundant prominence to the transformation passages bulging out of the narrative. Their bipartite structure mimics divine creation in its presentation of wish and fulfillment. “Let there be a multiphallic body,” says the woman, “and there was a body.” The grotesque result of this imaginative process is a mockery of God’s creation of man in his likeness.

OF MONSTERS AND MEN

41

The man becomes; the woman is. There is no equivalent to the dynamic “sprouting” of limbs which marks the configuration of the vilain. The unknown author of this fabliau even uses grammar to make his point: except for the occasional employment of a form of avoir, there are no verbs in the peasant’s wish. Within the chronological development of the narrative, this delineates the initial creative potency of the woman, who is transforming a male body into the image of her desire. This image is consequently turned into a mirror image. But most of all, it shows her true—female—nature. Even before St. Martin’s miraculous intervention, the vilain’s wife has had this inappropriate sexual appetite. So when the peasant tells his wife, at the sight of her multivaginal body, that they won’t be able to walk down the street anymore without her being recognized as “connue,”35 he is expanding his pun to three levels: his wife will be visibly bedecked with cons, and because of her multiplicity, she will be “known” in the biblical sense. But what he also means by “connue” is that the community will recognize her for what she is—think pars pro toto—and what has now been externalized in plain view. The conviction that women can influence the shape of their offspring with the help of their imagination has had a long afterlife. Mary Toft of Godalmin, “the pretended rabbit breeder,” is one notorious example. In 1726, she triggered a serious and heated medical discussion when she gave birth to seventeen rabbits. She claimed that this was due to the sight of a rabbit in the field, after which she could not help but think of rabbits incessantly.36 I would also put products such as WombSongs Mozart, “developed by a leading neuro-biologist and a Grammy award-winning music arranger,”37 into the same category, but many an expecting mother shopping at geniusbabies.com might disagree. Ultimately, Les quatre Sohais saint Martin is a story about control: Controlling with whom your wife sleeps, controlling what she looks at while she is doing it, and controlling what she is thinking while she is doing it. Her thoughts, her fantasies, and her desires, however, defy control, and this is the terrifying energy behind the fabliau. Notes 1. R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 19. 2. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 17. 3. David M. Friedman, A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis (New York: Free Press, 2001), p. 42. 4. See, e.g., Maryvonne Hagby, Man hat uns fur die warheit . . . geseit. Die Strickersche Kurzerzählung im Kontext mittellateischer “narrationes” des 12. und

42

SUSANNE HAFNER

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

13. Jahrhunderts (Münster: Waxmann, 2001), discussing in this case the fabliaux’ German counterparts, the maeren. NRCF, 4.31, pp. 191–216. In my study, I will refer to the version of MS A (Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale, fr. 837) rather than to MS B (Berne, Bibliothéque de la Bourgeoisie, MS 354), which served as the basis for the “Texte Critique.” Although essentially identical, the two versions differ in detail, and the redaction of A is more explicit in its wording at several of the passages that are relevant for my argument. My reading of this fabliau is valid for all its extant manuscript versions, but all references are to the line numbers of A. In this connection, see Paul H. Freedman, “The Representation of Medieval Peasants as Bestial and Human,” in The Animal/Human Boundary: Historical Perspectives, ed. Angela. N. H. Creager and William Chester Jordan (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002), pp. 29–49. “Il n’ert vespres iusque.VII. liues” [You’ve hours of daylight left for tilling, (4.31.35(A))] is the reprimand he receives from his wife when he comes home. Vespres (vespers) refers to one of the canonical hours, the evening prayer service. A liue (English: league) describes the distance a person can walk in an hour and can normally be converted to 3 miles. The vilain had seven leagues left to plough; in other words, it was still early in the day. See David Hugh Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 3rd ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 325. See also Ellen Lorraine Friedrich’s comments in her contribution to this volume, pp. 131–47. Dubin translates this passage as follows: “I now intend to make my wishes / for gold and silver, land and riches!” “Ne connois pas bien voz amors: / Se deïssiez que fusse vns ours / Ou asnes ou chieure ou iument / Jel seroie tout esraument.” [If you should wish I was a bear / or jackass, or a goat or mare, / I would become one on the spot. / I know how much you love me: not] (4.31.81–84(A)). He comments in his Topography of Ireland (1184) that the Irish were so rural “living like beasts” that they were “particularly addicted to such abominations” (quoted from Joyce E. Salisbury, ed., Sex in the Middle Ages [New York and London: Garland, 1991], p. 180). Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1940) respectively Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953); see also Joyce E. Salisbury, “Bestiality in the Middle Ages,” in Sex in the Middle Ages, ed. Joyce E. Salisbury (New York and London: Garland, 1991), p. 183. Preben Meulengracht Sørensen, The Unmanly Man: Concepts of Sexual Defamation in Early Northern Society, trans. Joan Turville-Petre (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 1983). See Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, p. 345. For a brief overview over premodern monster lore, see Norman R. Smith, “Portentous Births and the Monstrous Imagination in Renaissance Culture,” in Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations, ed. Timothy Jones and David A. Sprunger (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2002), pp. 267–83.

OF MONSTERS AND MEN

43

16. Aristotle, The Generation of Animals, ed. and trans. A.L. Peck (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1943), vol. IV.3, pp. 417–19. 17. Ibid., p. 419. 18. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Naturale, vol. 23, l. 41; quoted in Danielle Jacquard and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 163. 19. “Il est certain que le plus souvent ces creatures monstrueuses et prodigieuses procedent du jugement de Dieu, lequel permet que les peres et meres produisent telles abominations au desordre qu’ils font en la copulation comme bestes brutes, où leur appetit les guide, sans respecter le temps ou autres loix ordonnes de Dieu et de Nature.” Quoted in Amboise Paré, Des Monstres et Prodiges, ed. Jean Céard (Genève: Droz, 1971), p. 6. 20. “Ut cum venissent greges ad bibendum ante oculos haberent virgas et in aspectu earum conciperent factumque est ut in ipso calore coitus oves intuerentur virgas et parerent maculosa et varia et diverso colore respersa.” (Genesis 30:38–39). Quoted from Biblia Sacra Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, 3rd ed., ed. Robert Weber (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1983). The English translation is taken from the King James Version, which in this case coincides with the Vulgate. What is getting lost in the Vulgate’s translation into English is the wonderful ambiguity of the Latin terminology: Virga, the rod, is also the Latin term for penis. The sheep are looking at Jacob’s manufactured virgae instead of the rams’. The image is more powerful than the object and the offspring does not look like their biological fathers, but rather like Jacob’s generative device. 21. Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 31. 22. Quoted in The Apocryphal Old Testament, ed. H.F.D. Sparks (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), pp. 519–20. 23. Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, Women’s Secrets, trans. Helen Rodnite Lemay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 116. 24. See Paré, Des Monstres et Prodiges, p. 15. For further examples, see Huet, Monstrous Imagination, pp. 13–35 as well as Valeria Finucci, “Maternal Imagination and Monstrous Birth: Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata,” in Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, ed. Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 53–63. 25. Not unlike, more recently, the mother of the “Elephant Man,” whose admiration of a circus elephant’s trunk caused her son’s deformity. See Arnold Davidson “The Horror of Monsters,” in Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines, ed. James Sheehan and Morton Sosna (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 53. 26. John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 96. 27. Ibid., pp. 96–97. 28. Ibid., p. 96. See also, Genesis 4:16. 29. See Friedman’s chapter on “Cain’s Kin” in ibid., pp. 87–107.

44

SUSANNE HAFNER

30. Genesis 4:2–4. 31. Genesis 9:21–27. 32. For a detailed discusssion of “The Curse of Noah,” see Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 86–104. 33. See Hans Walther, ed., Proverbia sententiaeque latinitatis medii aevi: Lateinische Sprichwörter und Sentenzen des Mittelalters in alphabetischer Anordnung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1966), p. 641. 34. Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant, p. 35, points out the same gender difference: “The fabliaux in particular (but medieval literature in general) emphasize the sluggish sexual drive of male peasants who are much more oriented toward the gastrointestinal side of bodily urges. . . . Boorish materiality and the grotesque or bestial body belong to male peasants while females are rendered as desirable and even rather clever if greedy and eager.” 35. “ia’mes ne vendroiz par rue / Que vous ne soiez bien connue” [when you go walking, you’ll continue / to be known for all the cunt in you] (4.31.163–64(A)). 36. See Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in EighteenthCentury England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See also Rictor Norton, Early Eighteenth-Century Newspaper Reports: A Sourcebook, “The Rabbit Woman,” November 23, 2001, updated September 5, 2002 http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/grub/rabbit.htm last accessed October 15, 2005. 37. http://www.geniusbabies.com/mozmuscascom.html last accessed October 15, 2005.

CHAPTER 3 GO-BETWEENS: THE OLD WOMAN AND THE FUNCTION OF OBSCENITY IN THE FABLIAUX

Nicole Nolan Sidhu

The scheming of the old woman in several fabliaux replicates the position of the fableor, who similarly trades sexual knowledge in an information economy.

n the fabliau La Housse partie (3.16), a rich old widower gives his son all his money, then finds himself destitute when the son decides to dismiss his father from the household. Faced with expulsion, the old man has no response but to weep and beg his son for a rag to cover himself with. He is only saved when his young grandson, directed to find the old man a horse blanket, divides it and announces his intention to give the other half to his own father, thereby frightening the son into generosity. Things would have been very different if the son attempted such a trick on his elderly mother, for no old woman in the fabliau takes such treatment lying down.1 Although they are inevitably poor, marginalized and exiled from the household, the old women of the fabliau are a font of resources, cleverly deploying their verbal skills to extract wealth from the establishment. In this, they are of infinitely greater interest to the fableor than their elderly male compatriots. La Housse partie stands as one of the only fabliaux to include an old man. Old women, meanwhile, are the star players in several fabliaux, which not only feature them but also permit them to dominate their tales’ plots in a manner allowed for few fabliau characters. These fabliaux show a particular

I

46

NICOLE NOLAN SIDHU

interest in featuring old women who use obscene speech to make their way in the world. In creating such characters, the fableor draws on a long-standing association in medieval culture between old women and obscenity.2 In this essay, I will examine three fabliaux that feature old women who engage in obscene tale telling: Le Prestre qui ot Mere a Force (5.41), La vieille Truande (4.37), and Auberee (1.4).3 My first purpose is to note the profound similarities between the fableor and his elderly protagonists. Like the professional entertainer, the old women of these three fabliaux are information workers specializing in obscene knowledge. Like him, they are alienated from the primary economic and social unit of the Middle Ages, the household. Yet they also earn a living by claiming intimate knowledge of household affairs. The fableor’s recognition of the hardships that attend social marginalization, I argue, earns these crones a markedly more sympathetic portrayal than that given to other female characters in the fabliau. At the same time, the fact that the old woman’s obscenities are associated with social subversion presents a threat to the fableor’s status as a legitimate literary professional, authoring tales suitable for mainstream consumption. Thus, my second purpose is to examine how the fableor distances himself from the old woman when her obscenities threaten fixed social hierarchies. Recent discussions of the fabliau’s gender politics have explored the genre’s contradictory tendency to delight in subverting gender norms and destabilizing gender categories even as it deploys a misogynist discourse.4 My work here continues this exploration of the fabliau’s ambivalent misogyny by investigating the fableor’s conflicted relationship with the woman whose reputation for obscene language and bawdy tale telling so closely approximates his own. Speaking from the Margins: The Fableor and the Old Woman In courtly literature, where the excellence of aristocratic society is frequently signified by its ability to produce beautiful, sexually fertile women, the old woman is an obscenity merely by virtue of her physical existence. In these works, the metamorphosis of firm, young feminine flesh into the wrinkled skin and sagging body parts of the old woman is a horrifying signifier of mortality and death (and a pertinent reminder to still-beautiful women of the despicable future that awaits them). Frequently, the authors express their disgust at the old female body using the voice of the old woman herself. In Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, la Vieille mourns: Mes or m’estuet plaindre et gemir, Quant mon vis effacié remir

GO-BETWEENS

47

Et voi que froncier le convient, Quant de ma biauté me souvient Qui ces valés fesoit tripe. (12765–69) [but now I must complain and moan when I look at my face, which has lost its charms; and I see the inevitable wrinkles whenever I remember how my beauty made the young men skip.]5

The persistence of this figuration of the regretful old woman throughout the later Middle Ages is witnessed in François Villon’s fifteenth-century poem, Le Testament, in which la Belle Heaulmière exclaims with grief at the disappearance of a beauty that once allowed her to ride roughshod over merchants, clerks, and priests: C’est d’umaine beaulté l’issue: Les bras cours et les mains contraites; Les epaulles toutes bossues; Mamelles . . . quoy? Toutes retraites, Telles les hanches que les tetes [And this is human beauty’s end: Arms writhed, crazed hands too weak to lift, Back hunched until the shoulders bend. My breasts? No tits to nudge a shift; My tail the same, skin all adrift.] (Stanza 58)6

The old woman’s physical degeneration often translates into moral degeneracy. In Guillaume de Lorris’ Roman de la Rose, the vices figured on Deduit’s garden wall frequently take the form of the elderly female body. There is Hatred, who sports a wrinkled face, Covetousness, whose hands are claw-like and hooked, and Old Age herself, a wrinkled, toothless hag of whom the Lover remarks: Ce ne fust mie grant morie S’ele morist, ne grans pechiez, Car tous ses cors estoit sechiez De viellece, et anoinentis. (348–51) [If she had died, it would have been neither a great loss nor a great wrong, for age had already dried up her body and reduced it to nothing.]7

Nor is this figuration of the old woman limited to the secular and courtly. In his sermon “On Conversion,” Bernard of Clairvaux characterizes the fleshly will, who opposes reason and divine will, as a “crazy old hag” who storms about with her hair standing on end, her clothes torn, and her breasts bare. The old woman’s speech identifies her with the body parts and

48

NICOLE NOLAN SIDHU

activities that are opposed to Christian codes of morality: “Siquidem voluptuosa sum, curiosa sum, ambitiosa sum, et ab hoc triplici ulcere non est in me sanitas a planta pedis usque ad verticem. Itaque fauces, et quae obscene sunt corporis, assignata sunt voluptati.” [I am passionate, inquisitive, ambitious; because of this triple festering sore, there is no soundness in me from the soles of my feet up to the top of my head. And so the palate and the privy parts of this body have been handed over to passionate pleasure.]8 Perhaps most threatening is not the old woman’s own innate moral corruption, but her ability to corrupt other younger women, deploying an obscene discourse replete with an intimate knowledge of sexuality and human psychology to instruct her youthful cohort in vice. Jean de Meun’s la Vieille, for instance, is a notorious corruptor, advising Bel Acueil in all manner of feminine perfidy. The old woman’s capacity to teach vice is a particular worry for churchmen. In his sermons, Jacques de Vitry warns widows and chaste women against the power of the elderly entremetteuse (go-between) to lead them into sin.9 Similarly, Conrad de Megenberg warns against the “anus maledicta” who ruins domestic morals: deformed and ugly, but still vital, creeping, and wily as a serpent, the old woman catches women in her snares and delivers them to men—and their doom.10 These fears extend to religious women as well. In De institutione inclusarum (twelfth century) Aelred of Rievaulx rails against the perverting influence of the old gossip on cloistered nuns: uix aliquam inclusarum huius temporis solam inuenies, ante cuius fenestram non anus garrula uel rumigerula mulier sedeat, quae eam fabulis occupet, rumoribus ac detractionibus pascat, illius uel illius monachi, uel clerici, uel alterius cuiuslibet ordinis uiri formam, uultum moresque describat, illecebrosa quaeque interserat, et puellarum lasciuiam, uiduarum quibus licet quidquid libet libertatem, coniugum in uiris fallendis explendisque uoluptatibus astutiam, depingat. [You will scarcely find some one of the nuns alone at this time before whose window a chattering old woman or a rumormongering woman does not sit, who occupies her with stories [chatter], feeds her with rumors and detractions, describes the figure, face, and manners of this or that monk, cleric, or another man of any order at all, interjects all sorts of lecherous things, and depicts the lustiness of girls, the freedom of widows to whom is permitted whatever pleases and the cunning of wives in deceiving their husbands and in fulfilling their desires.]11

Aelred indicates the economics of exchange between poor old women and the young women they entertain when he remarks of the “anus” and the nun: “Sic cum discedere ab invicem hora compulerit, inclusa voluptatibus,

GO-BETWEENS

49

anus cibariis onerata recedit.” [So when the hour compelled them to take leave of each other, the cloistered woman departed laden with pleasures, the old woman with victuals.]12 As Jan Ziolkowski points out in an article on medieval associations between old women and obscenity, at least some of these fears were rooted in historical reality.13 If old women were no longer engaged in reproduction, their age, experience, and gender qualified them to carry out a variety of intimate tasks that no other members of medieval society could perform. Throughout the Middle Ages, the majority of gynecological and obstetrical care was relegated to old women.14 Old women of the middle strata were often called upon to testify in court on matters of sexuality and reproduction. Women who were raped, widows claiming to have been impregnated by deceased husbands, and women condemned to death whose execution would be deferred if they were found pregnant were all subject to the examinations of old women.15 Old women’s access to younger women, paired with their sexual experience, often entitled them to instruct on sexual matters that were too intimate to be communicated by men. Athonius Guainerius, an early fifteenth-century professor of medicine, advises that fertility problems caused by the excessive length or shortness of the penis can be resolved if an old woman instructs the wife on the most beneficial positions to use during sexual intercourse.16 In a less officially sanctioned capacity, old women also functioned as important sources of information for younger women. While younger women were often tethered to the home, the old woman, relatively free of the household cares that dogged the wife, had much greater freedom of movement. Whereas men obtained news over the course of their daily travels, many women relied on old women for information about their communities.17 A brief examination of the fableor’s place in medieval society illustrates how close his status is to that of the old woman, both in her historical role and her figuration in the medieval imagination. Like the old woman, the fableor is alienated from the household, lacks access to the major source of wealth in the medieval economy—land and property—and is forced to depend on the generosity of others for his livelihood. The entertainer’s economic marginality is illustrated in the fabliau, Des Putains et les Lecheors (6.64), a humorous retelling of the creation myth, in which God creates the three estates and is about to go away when he is followed by a rag-tag band of minstrels and whores who demand a source of livelihood. God responds by giving the minstrels to the aristocracy and the whores to the priests. But the traveling entertainer’s continuing economic marginalization is witnessed in the narrator’s complaint over the cheapness of lords in giving their proper reward to minstrels and the comparative wealth of the priests’ concubines.

50

NICOLE NOLAN SIDHU

The fableor also boasts a mobility similar to that of the old woman, moving from household to household, his very marginality allowing him access to knowledge that is usually forbidden to strangers. The special intimacy of the entertainer is witnessed in the fabliau Jouglet (2.10). In this tale, the title character, the minstrel Jouglet, is on such close terms with one of his patrons, a well-to-do woman, that she gives him the task of guiding her witless son to his wedding and telling him what to do. Even on the wedding night, a time when couples are usually left to themselves, Jouglet remains on an intimate footing; he sleeps in a chamber beside the couple, a position so proximate that in the morning, the bride can call out to Jouglet from her bed (2.10.187). Like the old woman, the fableor trades on information, earning his livelihood through his claims to a privileged knowledge of intimate situations and gossip. In a manner very similar to the tale-telling techniques ascribed to the old woman, fableors often begin their narratives with claims regarding the truth of the events they describe. In the introduction to La Male Honte, for instance, the fableor announces that he will tell a true story: Seigneur, oiez & escoutez Un fablel qu’est faiz et rimés Del roi qui Engleterre tint. Tout ce fu voirs . . . (5.43.1–5)18 [Listen and hear, my lords! for I’m telling a fabliau in rhyme about a king who reigned in Britain. All this is true . . .]

Other fableors characterize their tales as juicy tidbits they have picked up in the course of their travels. In the introduction to Cele qui fu foutue et desfoutue, the fableor claims to have heard the story from someone else and, like any good gossip, refuses to reveal his source: Voudré je un fabliau ja fere Dom la matiere oï retrere A Vercelai devant les changes. Cil ne sert mie de losenges Qui la m’a racontee et dite. (4.30.3–7) [I’ll now write a fabliau down whose story I heard in the town of Vézelay, by the exchange. It’s not at all within the range of my purpose to say who told it.]

GO-BETWEENS

51

And again, like the old woman, the fableor’s narratives often concern matters of illicit sexual behavior. Indeed, one could scarcely find a better description of the fabliau than in Aelred of Rivaulx’s account of old women’s tale telling in De Institutione Inclusarum as depicting “the lustiness of girls, the freedom of widows to whom is permitted whatever pleases and the cunning of wives in deceiving their husbands and in fulfilling their desires.”19 Old Women in the Fabliau The fableors’ representations of the old woman emphasize those facets of her cultural status that most closely parallel those of the entertainer. The old woman of the fabliau is always poor and always alienated from the household, a condition that forces her to capitalize on her knowledge of sexuality and human psychology to gain access to the wealth that her marginal social position denies her. In this respect, the old woman embodies the essence of what several scholars have noted is a fabliau tendency to lionize characters who “use savoir, their wit and ingenuity, to undermine the position of other characters who believe that their avoir, their place in a fixed social hierarchy . . . is god-given and unassailable.”20 In Le Prestre qui ot Mere a Force (5.41), for example, an old mother is angered when her sole source of support, her son the priest, insists on spending all his money on his concubine and seeks justice by telling her tale to the local bishop. La vieille Truande begins by introducing us to an old beggar woman whose clothes were so worn that Du premier drap i ot le mains Ele ne pot tenir as mains Escroele ne drap ne piece Que tot n’i akeuse & assiece. (4.37.41–44) [Of the cloth of which they’d been made little was left, it was so frayed, and all she could hold in her hands was resewn patches, shreds, and bands.]

The climax of the narrative occurs when the old beggar woman manages to obtain a cloak from a pretentious young courtier by entertaining a passing nobleman with outlandish lies regarding her relationship to the young man. Similarly, the fabliau Auberee concerns the machinations of a poor old seamstress employed by a lovesick young man to arrange a rendezvous with a married woman (1.4). If the old woman is a compatriot of the fableor, her reputation as an obscene speaker in the vernacular also predates that of the fableor by several

52

NICOLE NOLAN SIDHU

hundred years. Ziolkowski notes that medieval culture’s tendency to associate old women with obscene language and bawdy story telling has a long history, dating back to Roman antiquity and extending through the texts of the church fathers and other early Christian writers.21 Thus, when the fableor tells a fabliau he speaks in a voice that medieval culture had long associated with old women. The “old women” fabliaux seem to pay homage to this fact by featuring elderly female protagonists who not only dominate the action of the fabliau but also control its plot. In La vieille Truande, the initial encounter between the pretentious young courtier and his elderly nemesis in a picturesque forest clearing is created by the fableor. After that, however, the old woman takes over. Conceiving of a passionate desire for the courtier, the old woman narrates to him her vision of a possible erotic encounter. The young man rejects her in disgust and she in turn responds by substituting another narrative of obligation, claiming to be his mother. When a passing lord arrives and insists on arbitrating the dispute, the old woman’s imaginative constructions of her relation to the young man continue to dominate: the nobleman is so entranced and amused by the beggar woman’s fertile imagination that he refuses to acknowledge the young man’s testimony that the two are strangers, instead forcing the young man to decide whether the old woman is his mother or his lover. In Auberee, the fableor’s indebtedness to his old female protagonist is even greater. The tale concerns a young man who is disappointed when his father’s determination to arrange a strategic marriage prevents him from marrying an attractive local girl. Devastated when the girl marries a rich widower, the young man employs the poor old seamstress Auberee to arrange a meeting between the two. Auberee obliges, planting the young man’s cloak in the couple’s bedroom to induce the rich husband to accuse his young wife of adultery and exile her from the house. When the sexual interlude between the young man and the wife has been accomplished, Auberee returns to the house claiming to have accidentally left in the couple’s bed a cloak that she had been repairing, thereby leading the husband to believe that his initial conviction was a mistake and prompting him to welcome back his wife. With the exception of the initial account of the young man’s love affair, the plot of Auberee is entirely determined by its title character. There quite literally would be no Auberee without Auberee herself. Moreover, Auberee’s skill in predicting the husband’s responses to various “plot twists” has a literary cast, for it depends on the same knowledge of generic convention in narratives of marital strife that the fableor himself depends upon. In many respects, the fableor’s treatment of the old woman in these narratives amounts to a celebration of the very features that make her most distasteful and fearsome to other authors. La vieille Truande, for instance,

GO-BETWEENS

53

makes a mockery of the aesthetic horror at the female elderly body that courtly fictions like le Roman de la Rose engage in with great sincerity. When the old woman claims to be his mother, the young courtier responds with an outraged disgust that echoes the horrified descriptions of the Roman de la Rose: —Vois, fait il, por le geule Diu, Sui bien honis! A ci boin giu Quant ceste laide vielle torce Se fait me mere tot a force: (4.37.129–32) [“Ugh!” he exclaims. “By the Lord’s face, the joke’s on me! What a disgrace when this old, ugly, ragged slut claims I’m her son and God knows what!”]

But in this case, the old woman, completely undeterred by the young man’s rejection and displaying none of the pathetic regret over the passing of youthful beauty that we see in the Roman’s Vieille, continues with her seduction, guaranteeing the young man that while she may have lost her beauty, her body is still made for pleasure. When the nobleman requires the young courtier not only to ferry the old woman across the river, but also to give her his cloak and accept a kiss from her, his fate stands as a comical condemnation of the romance tendency to place too great a value on aesthetics while neglecting the noblesse oblige that medieval estates theory requires of the wealthy aristocrat. While the old women of the fabliau often act in ways that mainstream medieval ethics would deem wrong or illicit, the narrators of these tales show a remarkable commitment to displaying the bad behavior of old women in a context that forces the audience to recognize the greater injustices that prompt it. The mother of Le Prestre qui ot Mere a Force is hunchbacked, dark, hideous “et de touz biens contralieuse” [and adverse to all good things (5.41.6)].22 And she is hardly a model of ethical behavior. After appealing to the bishop, she then lies and fingers another priest as her son when she mistakenly thinks that the bishop means to hang her son for his misdeeds. The bishop then forces the pseudo-son to take his “mother” home. When the old mother and the pseudo-son meet up with the real son on their way back from the court, she goes along with her real son’s attempt to get money out of the fake one by volunteering to take the old woman off his hands in exchange for a considerable fee. But the fact that the author of Le Prestre qui ot Mere a Force has been careful to outline the old woman’s desperate situation juxtaposes the old woman’s bad behavior with the still-greater imperative of medieval ethics that a mother

54

NICOLE NOLAN SIDHU

ought to be treated “a grant honor” (5.41.35), particularly when the alternate demand on a child’s resources is a concubine illicitly benefiting from Church wealth. The old beggar woman of La vieille Truande is a prodigious liar, but the fableor’s careful depiction of her destitution forces us to see the old woman’s sins in the context of the larger injustice of poverty. This treatment is markedly different from that given to other women in the fabliau.23 While the fabliaux of adulterous wives may celebrate the subversive energy of the wives’ manipulations, they never contextualize any wife’s behavior within the legal and economic gender inequities of medieval society. No fabliau wife ever receives a sympathetic hearing from a court for complaints about her husband’s ill treatment and no nobleman ever forces a husband to give his wife more money.24 Art and Obscenity: The Literary Old Woman But while the fableor is willing to sponsor the old woman under certain circumstances, there are other instances in which the narrator distances himself from her. If the narrators of Le Prestre qui ot Mere a Force and La vieille Truande remain loyal to their old women, the narrator of Auberee takes a more ambivalent attitude to his protagonist. The differences between these narrators are worth noting not only for what they reveal about fabliau gender politics but also for what they can tell us about the conditions under which vernacular obscenity emerges as a socially acceptable literary discourse in the Middle Ages. Having finished his narration of Auberee’s successful plots and even having congratulated her on her triumph by remarking that the old woman “Bien a son loier deservi, / Quant touz troi sont a gré servi!” [more than deserves her fee / because she’s satisfied all three] (1.4.652–53), the narrator nevertheless concludes with a condemnation of Auberee and her ilk that expresses precisely the figuration of the old woman that we see in Jacques de Vitry and Aelred of Rievaulx: Par cest fablel vos vel mostrer, Mieus ne’puet on fame troveer Que de son cors face mesfait Sé par autre fame nos’fait Telle ist fors de’sa droite voie Se n’iert fame qui la desvoie, Qui seroit nete et pure et fine. (1.4.627–33(E))25 [This fabliau should prove to you one rarely finds a woman who has lost her honor, who’d have dared

GO-BETWEENS

55

had not some woman interfered. Because another has misled Them, many fall, who would instead Have been upright, pure and unblemished.]

Five of the six complete manuscript versions of Auberee include the moral.26 But even if they did not include it, the narrative’s insistence upon the virtue of the young wife and its emphasis on Auberee’s role in corrupting her implicitly illustrates the same principle that the moral explicitly states. At no time in Auberee does the young wife ever express a desire for her erstwhile lover. This is true even at the moment when she might indulge herself with him without fear of reprisal. Having sought refuge from her angry husband in Auberee’s house after the discovery of the cloak, the wife finds herself locked in a bedroom with her young admirer. Nevertheless, she continues to reject the young man, threatening to cry out for help, and only gives in when the young man points out to her that her reputation will already be besmirched by her cries, since everyone will think that the two have engaged in adultery: La borgeise ne set que face: Mieus li vendroit estre a repos Qu’el porroit acuillir tel los Par ses voisins et tel renon; Jamés n’avroit se honte non. (1.4.396–400) [What can she do but acquiesce? She has to quietly submit, for, if the town got word of it, her reputation and good name would be destroyed and turned to shame.]

In the lead-up to this scene, the narrator is at pains to illustrate Auberee’s central role in the wife’s fall from virtue, for it is Auberee who coaches the young man into sexual aggression, advising him to persist even in the face of a refusal and guaranteeing him that the wife’s physical pleasure in coitus will overcome any initial resistance. The contrast between Auberee and the other old woman fabliaux suggests that while the fableor is willing to celebrate and sponsor the old woman when she deploys obscenity in situations that already violate accepted secular and ecclesiastical moral codes, he returns to more traditional condemnations of the old woman’s obscenities when she uses them to subvert a legitimate social institution. By distinguishing himself from the old woman in this way, the fableor also makes a distinction

56

NICOLE NOLAN SIDHU

between obscenity and social subversion, claiming a place for vernacular obscenity in mainstream literary discourse by demonstrating how it can be deployed to affirm, rather than subvert, social hierarchies. This distinction is crucial to the fableor’s ability to assert the legitimacy of obscenity as a literary art; the moment that the fabliau occupies in literary history is one in which vernacular obscenity is just beginning to emerge from the shadows of the household into the public, literary sphere. As numerous scholars have noted, there are no literary precedents in Old French for the matter of the fabliau. And in spite of the continued use of risqué texts from the ancient world and the common use of obscene imagery in religious illustration and architecture, obscenity remains a risky business in the Middle Ages, particularly when it is expressed in the vernacular by those outside medieval authority structures.27 As we can see from the condemnations of the old woman that I have cited above, the distinction between obscenity and social subversion is not always clear. In this climate, the professional entertainer could easily be lumped in with the obscene subversions of the old woman. Ekkehard of Saint-Gall (tenth century) illustrates this conflation when he cites both minstrels and old women in a list of individuals that the holy Wiborada scrupulously avoids: Inepta etiam parvulorum ludicra devitans, nugaces ioculatorum scurrilitates despiciens, aniles veteranarum fabulas detestans, ad incesta quaeque carmina pudicas aures obduravit [Also avoiding the silly games of small children, despising the meaningless scurrilities of jesters, spurning the old womanish fables of old women, she closed her chaste ears against all kinds of sinful songs.]28

In order to promote the fabliau as a legitimate literary production worthy of mainstream consumption, the fableor must necessarily confront the association between vernacular obscenity and social subversion. He must distinguish himself, in other words, from the obscenities of the old woman even as he speaks in a style closely associated with her. In Auberee, the narrator turns a head-on confrontation with the threat of the old women’s obscenities into a convincing justification of his own art. And he does so, ironically, by a disavowal of that art. At the outset of the tale, the fableor denies his own narrative creativity when he announces that he will tell a true tale “Tot einsi com avint a ligne./ Or oez qu’avint a Compigne!” [just as it happened, nothing missing./ It happened in Compiegne. Listen!] (1.4.5–6). The implication, then, is that such creatures as Auberee are not the product of fevered literary imaginations— they actually exist. This same principle is also implied in the moral, which announces that the fabliau has demonstrated a general truth that women in

GO-BETWEENS

57

general (rather than the one particular woman of Auberee) are vulnerable to the kinds of corruption the narrative displays. All of this implies that the fableor, by making the details of the old woman’s machinations public knowledge, builds a bridge that extends masculine authority into the private spheres where writers like Aelred of Rievaulx imagined that subversion was most likely to occur. Thanks to the fableor, husbands like the wealthy bourgeois of Auberee will be less likely to credit so implicitly the testimony of old women. Thus, the fableor’s truth-claims turn his appropriation of the obscenities that medieval culture associates with the old woman into a demonstration of his own social efficacy. For if Auberee is an expert go-between in the private sphere, if her social marginality, sexual knowledge, and mobility allow her to negotiate adulterous pleasure, the fableor is also an “entremetteur” who uses these same gifts to negotiate between the old woman’s private domain and the public world of masculine authority. The author of Auberee indicates his “go-between” status quite literally at the outset of the tale when he announces that in putting the story into rhyme “je me sui mout entremis” [I’ve really put myself out] (1.4.3, emphasis added).29 The expression is a common one in fableors’ introductions, always used in the context of the fableor’s effort to put stories into rhyme or fine speech. During the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the verb entremettre signified exceptional effort as in: “I really put myself into it.” Nevertheless the notion of “putting oneself between” that the compound of entre and mettre in a reflexive verb suggests still pertains, for in turning gossip into literature, the fableor becomes an intermediary between the private, hidden world and the public world where masculine authority can be effectively enforced. This is not to say that the fabliau’s instructive capacity would have constituted its primary value for either the fableor or his audience. Clearly, there is pleasure to be had in watching Auberee’s clever machinations, as the fableor’s first congratulations to the old woman illustrate. However the important role that truth-claims and moralizations play in allowing the narrator of Auberee to distinguish himself from the antisocial valences of obscene discourse shows that these remarks are not extraneous or tacked on. Rather, they are what allow those other, more subversive pleasures to be written and enjoyed. In the old woman fabliaux, the fableor convinces us that the old woman and her obscenities can enter the public, literary sphere, if they enter under the careful supervision of a male literary professional who allows them free rein when they can be marshaled to morally appropriate ends, but who can simultaneously redirect the social trajectory of the old woman’s obscenity when she threatens to overstep her bounds.

58

NICOLE NOLAN SIDHU

Notes 1. In this essay, I will be focusing only on women whom the narrator himself identifies as “vieille.” It is true that the widows who appear in several other fabliaux may well have been classified as old, but the term does not clearly indicate old age since the term could also include women who were still of childbearing age and who thus would not share the traveling entertainer’s alienation from the household. 2. Jan Ziolkowski shows that many medieval writers associate old women with obscene speech and behavior, a notion that medieval culture inherits from the classical period. See Jan Ziolkowski, “The Obscenities of Old Women: Vetularity and Vernacularity,” in Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages, ed. Jan Ziolkowski (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 73–89 and “Old Wives Tales: Classicism and Anti-Classicism from Apuleis to Chaucer,” Journal of Medieval Latin 12(2002):90–113. 3. In this essay, I define obscenity less as a lexical phenomenon than as references to human activities or parts of the human body that prevailing social custom prohibits from polite discourse and that are subject to emotional aversion or inhibition. For a similar definition, see Jeffrey Henderson, The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 2. 4. See, E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Lesley Johnson, “Women on Top: Antifeminism in the Fabliaux?” Modern Language Review 78(1983):298–307; Norris J. Lacy, Reading Fabliaux (New York: Garland, 1993), pp.60–77; Sarah Melhado White, “Sexual Language and Human Conflict in Old French fabliaux,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 24(1984):185–210. These analyses raise questions about the depth and extent of fabliau misogyny by taking seriously various features of the fabliau that seem to lionize women or subvert gender norms— for instance, women’s frequent victories, women’s resistant speech, the fabliau’s tendency to overturn fixed hierarchies, and its obsession with genital display. 5. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Daniel Poirion (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1974). All subsequent Old French citations from the Roman, noted parenthetically, are taken from this text. Translation: Charles Dahlberg, The Romance of the Rose (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 222. 6. François Villon, Le Testament, in Poems of François Villon, trans. Peter Dale (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1978, 2001), pp. 9–18. 7. Translation: Dahlberg, Romance of the Rose, p. 35. 8. Bernard of Clairvaux, “Ad Clericos de Conversione,” in Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. Jean Leclercq et al. (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1966), vol. 4, p. 83. Translation: Marie-Bernard Saïd, Sermons on Conversion (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981), p. 43.

GO-BETWEENS

59

9. Jole Agrimi and Chiara Crisciani, “Savoir Médical et Anthropologie Religieuse: Les représentations et les fonctions de la vetula (XIIIe–Xve siècle),” trans. Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Annales ESC, 5(September–October 1993):1300 [1281–1308]. 10. Ibid., p. 1301. 11. Aelred of Rievaulx, De institutione inclusarum, ed. Charles Dumont, Sources Chrétiennes, 76 (Paris, 1961), pp. 44–46. Translation: Ziolkowski, “The Obscenities of Old Women,” p. 83. 12. Ibid., p. 46. Translation mine. 13. Ziolkowski, “The Obscenities of Old Women,” p. 81. 14. Agrimi and Crisciani, “Savoir Médical,” p. 1285. 15. Shulamith Shahar, Growing Old in the Middle Ages: “Winter Clothes Us in Shadow and Pain,” trans. Yael Lotan (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 86. 16. Cited in Ziolkowski, “The Obscenities of Old Women,” p. 87. 17. See Agrimi and Crisciani, “Savoir Médical,” p. 1295 and ibid., p. 82. 18. Other examples of fabliaux that begin with truth-claims on the part of the fableor include: Les Braies au Cordelier (3.17), Le Prestre qui ot Mere a Force (5.41), Les Perdris (4.21), Le Vilain de Bailleul (5.49), Les deus Changeors (5.51), Le Couvoiteus et l’Envieus (6.71), and Cele qui se fist foutre sur la Fosse de son Mari (3.20). 19. Aelred, De Institutione, pp. 45–47. 20. Gaunt, Gender and Genre, p. 235. See also Gabrielle Lyons, “Avoir and Savoir: A Strategic Approach to the Old French fabliaux” (unpublished PhD dissertation, Cambridge, 1992) and Charles Muscatine, The Old French Fabliaux (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 24–46. 21. Translation mine. Dubin translates this line “and adverse to all good things on earth.” 22. See, Ziolkowski, “Old Wives’ Tales,” pp. 110–113 and “The Obscenities of Old Women,” pp. 73–75. 23. The question of the genre’s misogyny toward women of childbearing age has been a matter of long-standing debate in fabliau studies. The issue is complex one, not amenable to easy either/or classifications. However, as scholars have acknowledged in a number of recent studies exploring the complexity of fabliau approaches to gender, the genre’s misogynist facets cannot be ignored. For instance, E. Jane Burns proposes that the dialogue of fabliau wives often interrogates medieval gender norms, but still notes that the genre defines female nature as “irrational, pleasure-seeking, and wholly corporeal in opposition to the rationally endowed thinking male.” Similarly, Simon Gaunt argues that the fabliau use gender to express a wideranging interest in social mobility, but avers that “despite the anarchic and subversive spirit of the fabliaux, and despite their radical view of gender, they remain misogynistic.” See Burns, Bodytalk, p. 28 and Gaunt, Gender and Genre, p. 274. 24. One fabliau, La Couille noire (5.46), does feature a wife pleading in court for relief from a bad marriage. However, both the tale’s content and its conclusion only illustrate the foolishness of such an appeal. When the wife of

60

NICOLE NOLAN SIDHU

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

La Couille noire asks an ecclesiastical court for an annulment of her marriage, the husband’s answer shames her into a recognition that her behavior (to say nothing of her complaint) is inappropriate. While five out of the six complete manuscript versions of Auberee include the moral, it does not appear in the NRCF “Texte Critique.” The citation here is taken from the text of manuscript E in the NRCF “Textes Diplomatiques.” The manuscripts designated A, E, D, F, and J all include the moral. Manuscript C does not include the moral. See NRCF, vol. 1, pp. 172–293. For the use of obscene Latin texts see, Ziolkowski, “The Obscenities of Old Women,” p. 74. For the use of obscene imagery in art see, James Jermain and Anthony Weir, Images of Lust: Sexual Carvings in Medieval Churches (London: B.T. Batsford, 1986). Ekkehard of Gall I of St. Gall, Vitae Sanctae Wiboradae: Die ältesten Lebensbeschreibungen der heiligen Wiborada, ed. Walter Berschin (St. Gallen: Historischer Verein des Kantons St. Gallen, 1983). Translation mine. See also Ziolkowski, “The Obscenities of Old Women,” p. 85. Translation mine. Dubin translates this line “I’ve spent much time” to preserve his “rhyme.”

PART 2 ANXIOUS CIRCULATIONS

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 4 COPRUS [SIC] CHRISTI: THE SCATOLOGICAL TALES OF THE FABLIAUX Sheila J. Nayar

This essay treats several scatological fabliaux, arguing that their “everyday” treatment of consumption dovetails with anxieties over transubstantiation during the period. God’s holy blood! Why, this is shit! —La Crote

he scatological tales of the fabliaux reflect few of the tensions and dissident pleasures typical of the genre. They are notably distinct, for one, in their sexual conservatism; indeed, they are comparatively puritanical in their non-discussion of sex. Further, these fecal-minded tales—which are generally “cort et petit” (6.57.4, “brief and short,” as one fabliau describes a turd)—possess few of the corpus’s familiar motifs, such as the humorous value of cunning or the comic eroticism of voyeurism. Nor do these fabliaux attract much critical attention, as if the very nature of their “business” negates their being discussed with a comparable urgency or agency. While other bodily parts find themselves tackled with theoretical vigor, the same cannot be said for shit. Then again, only a scant number of scholarly works have been dedicated comprehensively to the subject of coprology. Perhaps it is that no one wants to be identified with fecal matter, even as an abstract, intellectual area of study. Nonetheless, as the handful of anthropologists and sociologists who have tackled it show, “toilet humor” can reveal much about a culture’s socially stratified spaces. As Mary Douglas points out in Purity and Danger, it is at its fringes—those areas that leak “marginal stuff,”

T

64

SHEILA J. NAYAR

like urine, blood, spittle, feces—where we see the vulnerable points of a society’s ideas most especially symbolized.1 Further, the historically traceable interface in the Middle Ages between the scatological and the sacred can illustrate—in profound, unexpected, and perhaps even potentially subversive ways—social tensions that existed vis-à-vis religious structures and doctrine. This, in essence, is the intention of what follows: to draw syncretically from anthropology, sociology, medieval history, religion, and literature in order to parse several scatological fabliaux apropos medieval social hierarchies and attitudes to the Christian body, as well as to highlight— inadvertently but fortuitously—the tales’ remarkable economy and plasticity of form. Contemporarily, defecation is still associated with childhood incontinence; when it happens accidentally in adulthood or due to infirmity of age, it is depicted as something filthy, degrading, even abhorrent. In a sense, defecation signals loss of control, an inability to separate one’s rational self from one’s bestial, unserviceable leftovers.2 Conceivably, this is why “adult” shit stories in contemporary Western culture circulate around the margins. Not unlike the shit-related illustrations that girdle the body of medieval manuscripts, these stories float about in the so-called invisible, ephemeral, or private sectors—via crass jokes, limericks, kitsch paperweights, and the Internet. But sometimes the toilet and the content that is deposited into it are not so private, not so easily disguised or concealed. That defecation took place in the Middle Ages within sight of others is clearly indicated in codices that describe monastery latrines. In fact, evidence suggests “that excretion could on occasion legitimately occur in the midst of a social gathering taking place in a public room.”3 Certainly too the well-known cry of Gardez l’eau!—Mind the water!—which was shouted before a chamber pot’s contents were cast down into the street—testifies to the proximity of the medieval town dweller to human waste. According to Michael Camille, this is why medieval people did not—in contradistinction to Mary Douglas’s formulations—“problematize faecal matter as ‘dirt,’ as Freud’s ‘matter out of place.’ ”4 Instead, as Camille contends, “Shit had its proper place in the scheme of things. Not yet a secret secretion, it ran down the middle of the streets, its odours omnipresent. As manure it was part of the cycle of life, death and rebirth, and as everyday matter it found its way onto the pages of prayer-books.”5 Still, we should be cautious not to misread presence as paean. Shit’s public currency must have also been more than simply a case of its being “everyday matter.” After all, the quality and condition of one’s defecation signals health, or the unfortunate lack of it. Shit is the expulsion of not only the unnecessary, but also the bad, the polluted, the diseased. Its various textures

COPRUS [SIC] CHRISTI

65

and hues and odors can alert one to a diarrhea induced by scurvy, amoebic infection, or too many choke pears, as is the case in Jouglet (2.10), the one scatological fabliau not directly addressed here.6 In other words, its very essentiality and ineradicability, compounded by its general lack of utility—of its being literally waste—must have given human feculence in the Middle Ages a particularly charged and provocative place. It was too close for comfort, yet also too close for wholesale repression. This isn’t to say that waste was necessarily loved, embraced, or regarded as something inoffensive and innocent. (Here, the earlier entreaty for caution about shit’s “proper place” begins to materialize.) For, even in Rabelais—whose work is oft cited for its carnivalesque materializing of things high and spiritual—scatological humor is “neither ‘innocent’ nor ‘unsophisticated,’ but part of a more complicated set of satirical strategies used to lampoon the powerful of the day . . . Rabelais’ texts illustrate that even in the sphere of comedy, faeces were never wholly embraced as being possessed of positive qualities.”7 Perhaps then, it is best to think of the scatological fabliaux as operating in a similar vein, as something akin to satire. Satire has, after all, often been leavened with excremental language as, say, in the comedies of Aristophanes. One might even say that its presence is in some respects logical, given that satire is “an ancient form of mudslinging.”8 As Irvin Ehrenpreis notes in his work on Jonathan Swift, “satire is traditionally associated with filth, and the satirist is described as throwing turds and urine on those whom he ridicules.”9 (As we will see later, it was also verbally flung out at medieval churchgoers during homilies.) Perhaps, in advance of our discrete analyses, we might speculate that this is one of the reasons that shit in these fabliaux tends to be delighted in—sniffed, eaten, or diarrheally discharged with a conspicuous lack of loathing or transparent disgust. Not because it’s not dirt but simply because it is. It is in effect dirt circulating as a symbolic reflection and/or inversion of the institutions that circulate it. If we are amenable to this proposition, that the scatological fabliaux operate around the margins of satire—parodying institutional expectations and demands, though not exactly with designs on remodeling them—then what emerges is a narrative canvas of great discursive possibility, one shifty and malleable, given its capacity to register at once on several bodily planes: corporeal, social, spiritual. Of course that may get us into some interpretive hot water, for how are we to be sure that, while one body is being rebuked, another is not simultaneously undergoing rapprochement? How can we distinguish between currents of conflict that are being exposed and those that are, through some comical capsizing, being exploited? Finally, how can we be sure that a jongleur isn’t offering one version of his tale—shaped

66

SHEILA J. NAYAR

to accommodate the particular social makeup of his listeners for that particular, discrete performance? Fortunately for us, our access to this multivalent canvas is aided by the orally inflected nature of these stories. That is, given that they were orally transmitted, and to an audience still very much of the oral mentalité,10 their meaning could be expected to emerge from an allegorical and/or necessarily outwardly turned model—especially in the case of a model being wittily mangled or inverted. As Martha Bayless notes in Parody in the Middle Ages, “Inversion and the substitution of one register for another are the foundations of medieval religious parody. Medieval parodic humor often practices comedy of debasement . . . [and] frequently takes the form of the literal-minded visualization of allegory or of spiritual metaphor.”11 In fact, Howard Helsinger maintains that scholars have altogether neglected the possibility of “a close connection between the literal details of the fabliaux and the allegorical commonplaces” of the medieval period.12 If this is so, then this kind of toilet humor ought not to demand any kind of private, independent groping for meaning. Rather, it ought to arise out of a play with concrete, familiar, shared realities of life—with a publicly delineated social hierarchy, for instance, or with a readily identifiable constellation of ecclesiastical symbols. Moreover, because of the proximity of excreta to our own human bodies, it is a play that is written not only on but also helplessly and haplessly through the human body—not to mention, all those other bodies that our own lowly human one has been forced to represent. The human body with its various parts has often been used to depict visually the structural configurations of the group. As Douglas has argued, the physical body frequently acts as a “map” onto which social structures are grafted, reproducing the social body in small.13 The very title of Des chevaliers, des .ii. clercs, et les villains (B.N. MS 837.33)14 gives away immediately the social body it plans to parody—namely, that of the tripartite division of medieval society, commonly referred to as the “Three Estates.” In this fabliau, we have three distinct pairs of men—namely, knights, clerics, and churls—idiosyncratically expressing their appreciation for a beautiful meadow through which they pass. These three estates of medieval society—that is, those who fight, those who pray, those who work—are reflected perceptibly in the verbal responses of each pair to the bucolic setting. More than that, they are replicated in the bodily relations of these three sets of characters to the meadow. Our characters literally move down (i.e., closer to the ground) as they likewise descend down the symbolic body as represented by their reactions to the shady place. The sensitive knights appear high on their horses and speak of the garden’s being a prime spot for feasting on food and wine, thus symbolizing the mouth and the act of consumption. The clerics, men of spirit, arrive

COPRUS [SIC] CHRISTI

67

(in terms of height) at a middle range, that is, by foot; they speak of the garden’s potential for sexual liaisons, which of course forces us further down the body—toward the genitals and an (ironic) allusion to reproduction. Last are the churls, insensitive chaps, who are equated with the ground. This is represented not only by the shovels they carry, but also by their squatting in order to let loose their bowels. These are men who are literally “down to earth.” Their bodily function is that of waste production, which emerges from “their” body part-cum-social structural space, namely, the ass. This bodily hierarchy is of course established in the very structure of the poem itself—at the top appear the knights, at the bottom of the poem, on its lower rungs, appear the churls. To be sure, this fabliau’s “pleasant place” is also an allusion to the motif of the verdant gardens found in courtly literature of the time, “those richly symbolic settings for the enactment of the private moralities of eroticism in which the age was so fertile.”15 Moreover, the religious-related topos off which the setting plays—namely, the Hortus conclusus familiar from the Song of Solomon—would not be lost on the medieval layperson.16 In our case, though, it is fertility of a different sort, with the romance becoming palimpsestically overlaid with an Edenic garden parodically shat upon. Nevertheless, historical documents of the medieval period attest to the body’s having served concurrently as a social structural allegory. An early fourteenth-century medical treatise makes it well apparent that the body’s interior was seen much like a court, consisting of a hierarchy of spaces: a noble portion, a service portion, and in between them a wall—the diaphragm—similar to the wall that separated the workers in feudal society from the others. Below this wall lie the body’s nether parts . . . the crude part, the place where all that is superfluous or noxious is eliminated. As with seigneurial residences, this lower section performs a nutritive function; it furnishes food to the organs lodged in the noble space above, the delicate organs associated with the nobler functions of strength and wisdom.17

And yet, this fabliau exhibits an intriguing attempt at rewriting its own accepted three-estate structure, that very allegory of which we speak. For, after the careful and crisp delineation of the three estates, the jongleur diverts into a tangled explanation asserting that peasants are not necessarily churls because being a churl is an issue of behavior and attitude,18 not of enforced class placement. Thus, here we see a perfect example of high and low trying to be maintained or confined to their traditional places on the body, but not without that body’s tripping over its own legs. Perhaps it is an inversion of the social order for comic effect; or maybe it is, as Charles Muscatine contends, a reflection of the social evolution of that time period,

68

SHEILA J. NAYAR

which was developing at a faster rate than its social thought; for, the fabliaux often “suggest that many people, while they must have accepted in principle the clear, simple, traditional system, were actually responding to a newly ambiguous atmosphere of social change, competition, and social hostility.”19 The sharp and even constipated circumscription of this poem’s basic structure is finished off with a diarrheal denouement that betrays a cognitive dissonance—an apparent attempt to extricate itself from traditional social strictures. Perhaps the oft-mangled nature of many of the fabliau’s endings speaks less to an accidental slip in intactness of form than to the jongleur’s need at this juncture for a more spontaneous mode of thinking on his feet. Why? Because, up until this point, the entire fabliau as it is has the potential to follow one of several, sometimes even antithetical, ways. Which way the jongleur takes depends on that last added poetic morsel. If one ends Des chevaliers, des .ii. clercs et les villains with the churls straining because there’s no pleasure in the world like fouling fairness with feces, a reversal occurs: the tale becomes one about the fairness of the foul act, the subversive pleasure of the churls’ not only defecating on grounds formerly trod by higher ups, but of staying to admire their creation, that is, those surroundings that their very waste has fertilized.20 Fertilizer plays an even more pronounced role in the equally brief fabliau Le Vilain Asnier (8.92). A manure-hauling vilain enters a market where spices are sold with his cart-drawing asses and loses consciousness due to the overwhelmingly pungent bouquet of unfamiliar spices. Only the equally pungent scent of his own manure revives him, thanks to the ingenuity of a preudome. Muscatine reads this fabliau as accepting “the natural baseness of villeins with more or less good humor,”21 while Norris J. Lacy maintains that the immiscibility of preudomes and peasants reflects the fabliaux’ usual “class conservatism.”22 But one need not accept ipso facto that this is all that this fabliau is about. Or, rather, such an interpretation potentially belies the fabliaux’ amazing dexterity and also its more profound allegorical dimensions. The last lines of the verse, which speak to the human who divests himself of pride as being wise, seem to have almost no genuine connection to the story just told. Yes, the vilain may be seen as having been proud in entering the spice-laden market with his cartful of compost. But has he really divested himself of pride in saying he will never return? And the fact that he is brought back to consciousness, thanks to the acrid aroma of manure: does this really help enforce the moral in convincing terms? If this is an ass with two asses, why is he saved without any form of punishment, especially considering that he has displayed no wit or cunning whatsoever? So, yes, this fabliau can be seen as reinforcing the extant social structure, wherein a peasant (represented by excrement and asses that symbolize the

COPRUS [SIC] CHRISTI

69

base nature of sensual people23) enters a street of a more noble status (represented by spices and burghers and learned men) and is brought back to consciousness only by way of his own degraded spice, manure. However, once again, if one eliminates the last few lines, the entire story can be interpreted in a manner diametrically opposed to the standard reading that peasants are crude. But this other version, which possesses as much, if not more, rich allegorical purpose and meaning, is only exposed when one brings concretely into the discussion one of the foremost users of excreta in literature during this time period, the Church. Christian texts safeguarded and decoded by the clerical elite in the Old French fabliaux epoch were a “particularly rich source of condemnation of excreta,”24 and homiletic narratives of the period made ample use of shit imagery in their exempla. Waste materials in these and other Christian tracts were commonly used as a metaphor for filth, and “through being associated with sin and degradation, negative evaluations of excreta were constantly reinforced”; in this way, such narratives espoused “the view that Fallen humanity was utterly debased in the face of the purity of God. The things of this world were nothing, mere excretions, and were to be rejected so as to win salvation.”25 (So, instead of obscene language necessarily bubbling “up from below to challenge official or state discourse,” as proposed by Bakhtinian theory, here we see something more ironically akin to concepts of postcolonial satire, where excremental imagery can be deployed by the state as part of an official display of power.26) St. Bernard considered the human being nothing less than “a bag of excrement, food for worms.”27 In fact, “the foul substance that was the human body” was seen generally by medieval theologians “as pouring out odious substances, including excreta, stinking and putrid.”28 (Later, of course, Martin Luther’s writings would abound with the same ripe excretal metaphors, only this time they would be applied to the Church itself.) But in our muleteer fabliau, we might conjecture, the ignoble human body has its revenge. The contemptible, debased this-worldliness of defecation leads not to damnation but to a Christ-like resurrection, a fact that could not possibly have been lost on an audience steeped in concrete reminders of the lessons of the Church, as well as iconographic conventions that were part and parcel of a widely disseminated and transparent typology.29 Manure, which at the time would very likely have included human feces, might well be forcing a vilain metaphorically to “eat his own shit,” as per Muscatine’s interpretation; but the substance also brings him back to life. The spicy odors of the street, on the other hand—which one can see as part of a larger allegorical allusion to the Church (i.e., the incense that would have thickly permeated its air during mass)—is, ironically, the scent responsible for his downfall. Shit causes our humble peasant to rise again;

70

SHEILA J. NAYAR

manure yields a new chance at life, regrowth, rebirth, and an acknowledgment not having to do with shameful pride, but with the fact that “Mout en est liez et joie en a” [he’s glad for it, and life is sweet] (8.92.45). This is, in other words, a kind of inversion of a theological imaginary into a terre-ological imaginary, one where earth, not the heavens, begets resurrection. This in no way negates Muscatine’s or Lacy’s readings, nor even Victor LeClerc’s claim that the fabliau allegorically reflects how peasants are unable to survive without dirt.30 Nonetheless, there seems just as likely contained within its form a humorous commentary on, perhaps even a bit of rebelling against, Church dogma. But to get there more explicitly—and ultimately to bring all these various threads together—we move to the last and perhaps most outwardly baffling scatological fabliau. As its title promises, La Crote (6.57) takes as its focus a piece of shit. A husband is given three guesses as to the identity of an invisible, bean-sized mass that we know she has pulled out of her buttocks. He first guesses dough, next wax, and then—anxious not to lose their wine-related bet—pops it in his mouth to exclaim, “Par le sanc Dé, fet il, c’est merde!” [God’s holy blood! Why, this is shit!] (6.57.56). This fabliau’s very brashness urges several questions: what possibly could this fabliau mean—or does it even have any meaning beyond the humor of a wife making her husband partake of his own feces? Perhaps it speaks of some kind of scarcity, given that the promise of food and drink will compel individuals even to eat somebody else’s shit. Interestingly, though, the husband exhibits no horror or disgust at having eaten his wife’s waste. Is this a sign of his stupidity? All said and done, he does win the bet, which is based on a form of knowledge. So, where then is the grotesque humor—as opposed to simply the gross humor of his “reabsorb[ing] the already absorbed”31? And why this effluvia alone? If we are here transgressing the bodily order, why only through this symbol of excretal dirt? Once again, I must emphasize what Peter Dronke similarly maintains in The Medieval Poet and His World, namely, the existence in these tales of “well-established, almost predictable, allegorical meanings that would be familiar to audiences.”32 And again, much as Helsinger has advocated, I believe “we should not be surprised to find burlesque forms of allegory in the fabliaux.”33 In fact, much as he does for fabliaux like Les Perdris (4.21) and Le Bouchier d’Abeville (3.18), we can turn once again historically to the Church to unpack the traditional imagery being parodied in this scatological tale. But let us get there indirectly, by way of the fabliau’s own coy, playful start. In the first section of this bipartite tale we have what one might call a playful inversion on the Christian notion of the “Word made Flesh.” This metonymic phrase appears in John 1:14 and, of course, figuratively implies

COPRUS [SIC] CHRISTI

71

God’s incarnation on earth as Jesus Christ. Why an inversion? Because the husband, in lifting his testicle in the darkness and asking his wife to guess what he holds—and later in the wife’s requesting the same of him vis-à-vis a piece of her turd—is doing the precise opposite: forcing the Flesh to be made Word. Not only is this a notable twist on the wordplay that scholars like R. Howard Bloch have deemed integral to the comedy of the fabliaux;34 it is also an example of the fabliaux’s provocative play with the body—specifically, in this case, as its materiality comes face to face with issues of spirituality and transcendence, not to mention the malleable ephemerality of language. In this way, it sets us up for the parody to come. The masserote, or tiny ball or lump (with potential shades of chewiness [maschier {to chew}]), which our husband pulls between his fingers, is described as being “plus grosse que un pois” [about the size of small bean] (6.57.29).35 The first guess he makes is that it is paste. The word can of course refer to any doughy substance; but what is curious and ultimately relevant is that in the sixteenth century Protestants were known to have thrown themselves “on the monstrance in a Corpus Christi procession in order, as they said, to ‘destroy this God of paste’ ”36 Of course this pasty substance in the fabliau has already been linked with the potential winnings of wine. Indeed, the wine comes directly after—and directly as a result of— the man’s ingesting the masserote, possibly mirroring how in the thirteenth century, laypeople were sometimes offered “a cup of unconsecrated wine for cleansing the mouth after communion.”37 If the reader has not already figured out the allegorical reversal I am alleging here, let me cite Louis Marin who, in his book titled Food for Thought, demurely points out that “one might say that every culinary sign is eucharistic [and] . . . that all cookery involves a theological, ideological, political and economic operation by the means of which a nonsignified edible foodstuff is transformed into a sign/body that is eaten.”38 No wonder, then, that one of the most commonly exploited images in medieval parody was of feasting or eating: “Food was the locus classicus for comedy of debasement, [though] parodists were not alone in using kitchen humor. The same explicit association of inversion and misplaced emphasis on food was used, for instance, by the authors of the Old French Aucassin et Nicolette, in which soldiers of the inverted world use cheeses and rotten apples as weapons.”39 Of course in this fabliau we do not have cookery per se, but rather a parodic play on traditional eucharistic imagery. Precedence exists for it, though: in the fabliau Le povre Clerc (7.79) a priest’s corruption of the sacraments is connoted via blood resembling wine and a stone resembling a cake.40 These may appear thin allusions to the modern sensibility; but that would not have been the case for the medieval individual. Even well into

72

SHEILA J. NAYAR

the late Middle Ages, “The Mass and the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood were everywhere, and the influence of the eucharistic doctrine pervaded the shared culture of the time.”41 (So, even the husband’s second guess of wax would not be lost on medieval laypersons, given that historical documents attest to wax’s being utterly necessary for the adoration of the Host and part of any “scheme of veneration”—especially during the moment of elevation.42) Still, La Crote takes all this a vulgar step further, given that it is kitchen humor by way of the toilet. But there even exists precedence for this form of parodic play. In fact, in medieval festival culture, degradation of the mouth via contact with the body’s lower stratum was a verbal degradation of particular importance: Festival life “celebrated change, inversion of order, the material body, and grotesque realism [and]. . . references to the carnal were deliberately fostered and used to degrade and thus fertilize the static, completed world of the intellectual and spiritual.”43 (There are shades of this feasibly in the wife’s response to her husband’s correct guess as to the identity of the masserote, “Par mon chief, vos avez dit voir: Ce est merde” [6.57.58–59], which is the equivalent of “By my head, you’ve seen it’s shit.”) Most convincing of all of the links between scatology and the sacred in medieval France—and to the implied contention here that spectators would make the connection—are the mock sermons of the period: for, “In their most carnivalesque moves, mock sermons also perform bestornement (reversal) of the ‘right’ and ‘left’ sides of the sacred, whereby excréments become sacrements and vice versa.”44 In La Crote of course there are other multiple inversions to note: we have the woman giving the inverted sacrament to the man (certainly there are collateral shades of Eve enticing Adam with the apple); we have an inversion of the hole it comes out of and the one it goes down; we even have the echoing of Messe (the rite of Mass) reverberating in the word masserote; but perhaps most relevant and inverted of all is the husband’s exclamation upon biting down on the turd, “God’s holy blood! Why this is shit!” Here, the blood of Christ is syntactically linked with the masserote, which, the husband, according to the fabliau, is not only chewing but also kneading. Though Nathaniel E. Dubin acceptably translates the phrase “La masche et mere entre ses denz” (6.57.53) as “chews and rolls it around his tongue,” Willem Noomen has indicated that mere (from the infinitive merier) is the equivalent of the modern French pétrir [to knead].45 In other words, the allusion to bread is being continued! We have here, in effect, the commemorative wine of the Eucharist connected to the (inverted) bread of the same, and the (inverted) body of Christ connected with his blood. In other words, an idiomatic expression that might otherwise be deemed throwaway proves itself to be a sly and integral example of fabliau

COPRUS [SIC] CHRISTI

73

wordplay—one that renders the material world parodically (though perhaps to the modern reader, still perplexedly) commingled with the spiritual. However, tracing this fabliau’s satiric resonances apropos eucharistic devotions still does not locate the possible motives behind such potentially scandalous correspondences. In other words, Why? Why this level of sacramental offensiveness—a level that some contemporary Catholics might deem too blasphemous to believe? The answer can be found in the Middle Ages, in the Church’s very reformulation of the eucharistic process, which was taking place at precisely this time. Up until the eleventh century, what would today be considered “rather basic eucharistic issues had remained only loosely formulated.”46 However, “in the decades around the year 1200, when the pace of progress was most rapid, religious practice underwent a tremendous upheaval.”47 In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council decided amongst other things—including the making of confessions private, regular, and compulsory (a tension that I would suggest also plays out in the fabliaux48)—to formally state the doctrine of transubstantiation, that is, of the actual, as opposed to potentially symbolic, transformation of the communion bread and wine offered at mass into the body and blood of Christ. Whereas before Christianity looked exclusively “to holy men and early medieval society turned to saints to effect the connection between God and humankind through prayers of intercession,”49 now the faithful were being instructed “to place the body of Christ inside their own bodies for an intimate encounter.”50 Certainly a new conception of one’s relationship with God and, more generally, with the notion of private life was being promulgated; but for many, getting there couldn’t have been easy: “To question transubstantiation was to doubt the literal application of Christ’s words to his disciples at the Last Supper . . . Yet to ingest these substances as the body and blood of Christ was an act of primitive injury that on a conscious level was abhorrent.”51 Indeed, medieval historian Miri Rubin contends that “[a]t the centre of the whole religious system of the late Middle Ages lay [this] ritual which turned bread into flesh.”52 Of course, the debate between the two sides—miracle versus logic, literal versus figurative, Paschasius versus Berengar53—had been happening as far back as the eleventh century. Not incidentally, it had been taking place in the centers of learning, the schools of northern France, the same region from which the fabliaux sprung. Here, the Eucharist was discussed “within the space created between the breakdown of Augustinian symbolism and the emergence of Aristotelian realism.”54 But with the Fourth Lateran Council, debate gave way to doctrine, and the “ways of access to Christ’s body and its uses and abuses [became] constant sources of tension and

74

SHEILA J. NAYAR

conflict as the body was packaged, used, experienced, touched, carried, smelt, and contemplated.”55 How did you remove the bread from its nature?56 What if you were not worthy of reception of the consecrated Host? And what of the body’s defiled nature: how could it possibly accept Christ’s body? It is hard to conceive how individuals who, swayed by the concreteness of the reminders of their faith, could have fathomed eating Christ: “An educated man, priest or monk, may have perceived, for example, personifications of sins and virtues as metaphors or allegories, but his listeners most certainly added flesh and blood to the metaphor and believed in its real existence.”57 In this way, transubstantiation would have appeared to many to be an act of cannibalism. Guibert of Nogent writes, for instance, of a child seeing in his priest’s raising of the Host, not a wafer but an infant58; and the Cathar peasants of Montaillou expressed consternation at the moral possibility of Christ’s being able “to pass through the unmentionable parts of the human body.”59 Further, how could this bread suddenly become Christ and force the holiest to mingle with the most polluted? And wouldn’t the nature of digestion mean that one was helpless to excrete Christ as shit? Even that the husband in La Crote does not see the piece of shit, but rather determines what it is solely on the basis of touch and taste, does not—on the basis of the issues revolving around transubstantiation—seem accidental. For, around 1222, in order to solve the problem regarding at which moment precisely the bread became flesh, distinction was made between eating by taste (which was determined to be sacramental), and eating by sight (which was not); hence, “communion was protected as the highlight of the sacramental, the tasting, ‘smackying,’ of the host-God.”60 But if this does not render the fabliau as necessarily sacrilegious, is it not at the least anticlerical? Not necessarily; or, rather, the listeners of the time could have interpreted its anti-transubstantiation theme in one of several, possibly even antithetical, ways, depending on the jongleur’s objectives. Still, it is worth noting that, if one takes into account mouvance (mobility), or the variance of texts, which Lacy deems essential to a consideration of fabliaux,61 it appears that at a later date, this fabliau might well have struck its scribe as being too profane. For, according to Noomen, the preferred and primary text (and the one he ultimately uses to develop his Texte Critique) is 6.57e, which is subsequently “corrected” in version 6.57a. Essentially, in this later tale, the reference to kneading is reconfigured into the Old French equivalent of putting, while the theologically resonant idiomatic buildup ensconced in the husband’s exclamations are homogenized and tempered. Instead of “Par le foi” [“By my faith”] accompanying his first guess, “Par le cuer dieu” [“By God’s heart”] his second, and “Par le sanc Dé” [God’s holy blood] his third, “By God’s heart” replaces all three idiomatic phrases. So,

COPRUS [SIC] CHRISTI

75

not only is a patent allusion to bread removed from 6.57a, but God’s holy blood is excised as well—as if possibly to render the fabliau less sacramentally suggestive.62 Nevertheless, the story’s jongleur-auteur [author] dexterously constructed a tale that could appeal to different audiences or normative sensibilities, depending sheerly on how it was presented. Earlier I contended that interpretive shifts could be induced by a few last-line alterations on the jongleur’s part. In the case of this fabliau, though, quite remarkably no changes at all to the actual text would be necessary—only to allusions implied or gestured during the performance of the text. While one of these “versions” could certainly be deemed anticlerical, there is another that, without altering any wording, might appear wholly supportive of the Church, and not only of its commands but also its clerics. As the potential for an anticlerical, formal religion-parodying sentiment has already been made obvious, focus here will be on the possible proChurch reading of this tale. But, first, if this were being presented as an anticlerical/anti-transubstantiation/heretical allegory of sorts, funneling it through peasants would not be the first time that a storyteller (eager to appeal to the higher social strata via the safety of comic distance) had placed dissent—or displaced it, even—into the mouths of lower sorts. The ability for this fabliau to straddle both worlds is of course facilitated by its loose, almost nonexistent identification and/or place-name tangibility as regards characters: husband and wife have no names; there are no clear indicators of who they are or where they belong beyond their gender and comparatively low-class status (though the wife admittedly is cast as “pretty uppity”). But on to the explicitly pro-clerical/anti-transubstantiation version: Bakhtin tells us that “one of the main attributes of the medieval clown was precisely the transfer of every high ceremonial gesture or ritual to the material sphere.”63 However, as Otto Höfler, who has worked on the problems of religiousness and consciousness and their intersection with the comic in Germanic medieval texts, points out, in such texts, “mockery and derision bordering at times on blasphemy are never addressed to the transcendental divinity itself . . . Laughter, intentional abuse and debasement are invariably directed at the image that substitutes for the divinity.”64 So, here, shit becomes an acceptable parody because it is a substitute that does not imply that participants have ceased “believing in God or the holy character of the rituals”; and this would have been equally the case for most clergy who apparently were “not only unafraid of parody in church but took part in it themselves. Fear of parody and ridicule [was] a sign of weakness, not strength.”65 Anxieties of bodily consumption were in this way defused without dislodging transubstantiation.

76

SHEILA J. NAYAR

This of course does not mean that anxieties and doubts regarding the Church campaign for transubstantiation were resolved. This eating (and excreting) of Christ’s flesh highlighted a major tension for medieval persons, one “rooted in a perceived dualism between the body and the soul that had long been part of popular Christian imagery, in which the soul was viewed as dwelling with Christ while the body was associated with the devil.”66 Indeed, at one point in this fabliau, the wife exclaims concerning her husband’s testicle, “Li maleoiz feus le vos arde” [“May it roast in the fires of hell!”] (6.57.20), and even more significant than that are the fabliau’s last few lines: for, when her husband figures out that what he’s tasting is a piece of her shit, she tells him, “Ja mes ne gaigerai a vos: Deable vos ont fait devin” [I’ll bet no more with you. Satan’s made you a sage] (6.57.60–61). Their attitudes to his ingesting her little mass are, at best, unfettered. Perhaps this explains the introduction of the devil, which serves as a kind of “double insurance” to excuse the materiality of the scene. Though this connection may not be overtly obvious to contemporary audiences, it is, to reiterate, in large part because the story is intended to be elastic, an all-purpose template that can expediently change its clothes. In fact, there are two ways in which the devil might more exactly be employed in this fabliau. First, citing the devil at the end would be a quick, efficient route to permitting a spectator an escape—an ability to leave without a guilty conscience what might otherwise be perceived as an anti-Catholic sentiment. If “the devil made them do it,” then the spectator is not implicated; responsibility is deflected or, rather, transferred onto the shoulders of that satanic being who represents everything that the Church is assiduously combating. But for the audience of the time, there is also a second possibility. With certain performative intimations from the jongleur, the devil might well have been made to register in the realm of the physicalized Others. After all, who better to “attribute Christian doubts about this doctrine to [than] those social groups deemed most vulnerable to error, disbelief and disrespect toward the sacred”?67 According to historical sources and ecclesiastical writings, this would have included women and Jews, who were regarded—and manufactured—as being impure, contaminated, and, in the case of the Jews, even allied with the devil. (Certainly the Fourth Lateran Council’s concurrent doctrine that Jews “be marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples through the character of their dress”68 speaks to the heightened tension that existed between the two religious groups.) Indeed, many apocryphal stories arose at the time about both Jews and women “stealing, mistreating, and mocking the host. . . .”69 Homiletic narratives decried the “stubborn Jewish literalness that cannot distinguish between the Host as Christ’s body, that is, nonfood, and the unconsecrated

COPRUS [SIC] CHRISTI

77

biscuits that are food.”70 This fabliau perhaps functioned in its own less savory brand of the comic to highlight not only the Other’s inability to identify excrement except through taste, but his subsequent dumb willingness to consume it without frowning or spitting it out or cursing his wife. As Joan Young Gregg contends, “The communicant ‘eating’ Christ’s body and ‘drinking’ his blood had to see in the mirror of this act, not himself, but the disbelieving Jewish Other.”71 In this way, “the repressed ambivalence and guilt suffered by the Christian committing the atavistic sacrifice of the Mass [was projected]. . . onto some other figure, outside the group, who could absorb the blame.”72 As such, the amorphous unnamed nature of our married couple rendered them a “natural screen upon which to project the alienating emotions stirring the Christian unconscious . . . to unleash in Christians projective fantasies by which the Christian could assuage his own anxieties. . . .”73 And so, as Alfred Thomas argues, as the “metaphor of society as a body became sacralized as the body of Christ, so too were women and Jews identified metonymically with the negative body parts associated with dirt and sex.”74 Very likely, this “version” of the fabliau would have been one that the Church would have appreciated, perhaps even at one point actually condoned. For, it would have helped to displace the psychically difficult transition for the masses to the new doctrine, just as the Church itself was attempting homiletic overcompensation through its Host-glorifying exempla.75 For a brief moment, spectators got to take hold of that which otherwise had hold over them, in an amusing détente effectively liberating because it was also certifiably safe. The eating of the Body (of Christ) was pulled down to earth for parodic inversion—into an eating of the body— and in this way rendered commonplace, everyday, and, so, nontoxic. Moreover, it demanded no separation of the spectatorial one from the many, no extrication of the personal body from the institutionally demarcated Christian corporate body. In this way, the vulgar image had the capacity to resist and simultaneously represent power, a reflection indeed of “the radical ambiguity of scatology.”76 But just as significant here has been the evidence of the malleability of the fabliau, the ability for a tale literally to change its tail—that very end portion of the story whose alteration can redirect the entire trajectory of the story, and in this way accommodate an assortment of audiences.77 With the tweak of a last few octosyllabic couplets, a jongleur could shift from poking fun at churls to promoting their cause and provoking their laughter. This of course would have been the most economically efficient way for the jongleur to construct, perform, and maintain his finite mental library of stories. Thanks to the nature of such a porta-poetry, he could recycle his

78

SHEILA J. NAYAR

own satirical body of work, perhaps confounding the peasant no less than did the bread that was able endlessly to reproduce as Christ’s body. Notes I am grateful to Nancy McElveen for her numerous comments and suggestions, as well as to the anonymous reader who helped me reshape this paper. Finally, I thank the editor of this volume, Holly A. Crocker, for her helpful and insightful critical reading of the essay. 1. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (New York: Praeger, 1966), p. 115. 2. Madeline H. Caviness, “Obscenity and Alterity,” in Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages, ed. Jan M. Ziolowski (Leiden: Brill, 1998), p. 159 [155–75]. 3. David Inglis, A Sociological History of Excretory Experience: Defecatory Manners and Toiletry Technologies (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), p. 104. 4. Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), p. 111. 5. Ibid., p. 111. 6. Jouglet may well be considered one of the “most scatological” of the fabliaux, in terms of its manic dedication to indiscriminate defecation (i.e., in a water closet, in a fireplace, in a bucket, in a bed). Nonetheless, it does not readily manifest the same social and religious symbolism or topoi that I see operating in the fabliaux discussed here. 7. Inglis, Sociological History, p. 90. 8. Joshua D. Esty, “Excremental Postcolonialism,” Contemporary Literature 40(Spring 1999):26. Online at http://infotrac.galegroup.com last access date is August 3, 2004. 9. Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 691. Quoted in ibid., p. 5. 10. For more on orality and narrative composition and transmission, see Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982). For texts specific to the subject apropos the Middle Ages, see, amongst others, M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979) and Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 11. Martha Bayless, Parody in the Middle Ages: The Latin Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 197. 12. Howard Helsinger, “Pearls in the Swill: Comic Allegory in the French Fabliaux,” in The Humor of the Fabliaux, ed. Thomas D. Cooke and Benjamin L. Honeycutt (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974), p. 100 [93–106]. 13. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 121. 14. This fabliau, which does not appear in the NRCF, has been taken from The French Fabliau B.N. MS. 837, vol. II, trans. Raymond Eichmann and John DuVal (New York: Garland, 1985).

COPRUS [SIC] CHRISTI

79

15. Paul Piehler, The Visionary Landscape: A Study of Medieval Allegory (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1971), pp. 98–99. 16. Song of Solomon 4:12. This meadow is not enclosed, which means that it might also evoke images of the Garden of Eden, that paradisal place where all sorts would have been able to mingle before a “fall” into social estates. 17. Georges Duby and Philippe Aries, A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 522. 18. John DuVal, Fabliaux Fair and Foul (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), p. 44. 19. Charles Muscatine, The Old French Fabliaux (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 37. 20. This is of course counter to Per Nykrog’s contention that the fabliaux represent a decidedly aristocratic point of view. See Per Nykrog, Les Fabliaux (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1973). 21. Muscatine, Old French Fabliaux, p. 39. 22. Norris J. Lacy, Reading Fabliaux (New York: Garland, 1993), p. 37. 23. Peter Dronke, The Medieval Poet and His World (Rome: Edizioni di storia eletteratura, 1984), p. 155. 24. Inglis, Sociological History, p. 80. 25. Ibid., p. 81. 26. Esty, “Excremental Postcolonialism,” p. 3. 27. Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 115. 28. Camporesi summarized in Inglis, Sociological History, p. 81. 29. Examples of such reminders include biblical teachings rendered in stained glass and sculpture. Émile Male, L’art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1948), p. 11. 30. Thomas D. Cooke, The Old French and Chaucerian Fabliaux: A Study of Their Comic Climax (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978), p. 50, n. 35. 31. R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 53. 32. Dronke, Medieval Poet, p. 155. 33. Helsinger, “Pearls in the Swill,” pp. 93–106. Emphasis added. 34. Bloch, Scandal of the Fabliaux, pp. 59–100. 35. “Bigger than a pea” would probably be a more exact translation. 36. Christopher Elwood, The Body Broken: The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the Symbolization of Power in Sixteenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 155. Emphasis added. 37. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 56. 38. Louis Marin, Food for Thought, trans. Mette Hjort (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 121. 39. Bayless, Parody in the Middle Ages, p. 197. 40. Helsinger, “Pearls in the Swill,” p. 104.

80

SHEILA J. NAYAR

41. Elwood, The Body Broken, p. 13. 42. See, for instance, the autobiography of the twelfth-century Guibert, Abbot of Nogent. The phrase “scheme of veneration” appears in Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 60. 43. Warren Edminster, The Preaching Fox: Subversion in the Plays of the Wakefield Master (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 46–47. 44. Jacques E. Merceron, “Obscenity and Hagiography in Three Anonymous Sermons Joyeux and in Jean Molinet’s Saint Billouart,” in Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages, ed. Jan M. Ziolowski (Leiden: Brill, 1998), p. 337 [332–44]. 45. Nouveau Recueil Complet des Fabliaux, ed. Willem Noomen and Nico van den Boogaard, 10 vols. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1983–98), vol. 6, p. 318. 46. Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 14. 47. Duby and Aries, A History of Private Life, p. 531. 48. See, for instance, Le Prestre qui abevete (8.98) and even Le Chevalier qui fist sa Fame confesse (4.33). Indeed, Georges Duby asks with respect to the altered form of confession required of Catholics after 1215, “[C]an there be a revolution more radical or an effect on attitudes more profound and prolonged than that which followed the change from a ceremony as public as penance . . . to a simple private dialogue?” see ibid., pp. 531–32. 49. Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 13. 50. Duby and Aries, A History of Private Life, p. 531. 51. Joan Young Gregg, Devil, Women, and Jews: Reflections of the Other in Medieval Sermon Stories (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 191. 52. Paraphrase of Clifford Geertz in Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 1. 53. Paschasius believed that Christ’s very body was present in the Host, while Berengar took the more “figurative” approach. See ibid., pp. 14–20. 54. Ibid., pp. 17–18. 55. Ibid., p. 82. 56. This very question was asked by Hugh of Langres. See ibid., p. 19. 57. Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. János M. Bak and Paul A. Hollingsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 11. 58. In Carolly Erickson, The Medieval Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 103. 59. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 97. 60. Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 64. 61. Lacy, Reading Fabliaux, pp. 11–16. Curiously, Lacy does not take mouvance into account in his own parsing of La Crote. Instead, he deems it a “short and uncomplicated” fabliau. 62. For more on Noomen’s assessment, see the NRCF, vol. 6, p. 318. 63. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 20.

COPRUS [SIC] CHRISTI

81

64. As summarized in Aron Gurevich, Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1993), p. 163. 65. Ibid., p. 169. 66. Gregg, Devil, Women, and Jews, p. 42. 67. Alfred Thomas, “Alien Bodies: Exclusion, Obscenity and Social Control in The Ointment Seller,” in Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages, ed. Jan M. Ziolowski (Leiden: Brill, 1998), p. 218 [214–32]. 68. Canon 68, “Medieval Sourcebook: Lateran IV: Canon 68 on Jews.” Online at http: //www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/lat4-c68.html. 69. Thomas, “Alien Bodies,” p. 218. 70. Gregg, Devil, Women, and Jews, p. 192. 71. Ibid., p. 192. 72. Ibid., pp. 191–92. 73. Ibid., p. 182. 74. Thomas, “Alien Bodies,” p. 218. Emphases added. 75. Gregg, Devil, Women, and Jews, p. 191. 76. Esty, “Excremental Postcolonialism,” p. 3. 77. Perhaps even in a possible economy of reheard, hand-me-down, familiar stories, part of the humor and anticipation was in not knowing which ending to expect or what final curveball was to be delivered.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 5 DRESSING THE UNDRESSED: CLOTHING AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE IN OLD FRENCH FABLIAUX Mary E. Leech

Clothing re-dresses gender roles in many fabliaux, even if these tales maintain a superficial allegiance to patriarchal order. The ability of women to circulate clothing illustrates and conceals their power in a domestic economy where the vulnerability of men becomes evident.

ven when clothing is not central to the plot of a given fabliau, descriptions of cloaks, leggings, tunics, gowns, and various items abound. This fascination with clothing across the fabliaux is distinct from other literary representations. In the romance tradition, which normally features noble characters, clothing often serves a revelatory purpose, displaying virtue and status even before characters demonstrate these qualities. In other instances, clothing, or the change of it, represents a transition from one social position to another. Fabliau images of clothing, by contrast, challenge social rank and values, even if these comic tales maintain social order at a “surface” level. Many traditionally dispossessed characters use clothing to challenge culturally prescribed hierarchies in the fabliau (e.g., in Boivin de Provins, 2.7); yet in this paper I will examine the ways that women use clothing to undress the stability of social order. Although these stories maintain a superficial allegiance to patriarchal cultural control, the ways in which women circulate clothing reveals that gender hierarchy is a costume that women manipulate to hide and therefore maintain their agency.

E

84

MARY E. LEECH

In an age of signs and symbols such as the Middle Ages, clothing, especially in literature, becomes one of the most important vehicles for social presentation. The significance of dress in the Middle Ages, as historians Françoise Piponnier and Perrine Mane explain, “went further than the mere definition of a social class, gender, or regional difference . . . there were deep divisions in attitudes to personal status, whether inherited, acquired, or chosen. Distinctive features of a more and more elaborate kind multiplied on clothing and accessories, proving . . . the medieval taste for encoding people and situations.”1 In everyday situations, clothing presented a social identity that was maintained and scrutinized.2 In literature, the symbolism works just as intricately, in that descriptions of clothing are carefully constructed to speak to the expectations, if not the experiences, of various audiences.3 In romance literature, fine clothing is an indication of high station and noble virtue. A good example of relating clothing to status in this type of literature is in Chretién’s Erec et Enide, when Erec refuses to let Enide wear finer clothes until the queen dresses her. This act works symbolically to show Enide’s obedience to her husband and obligation to her queen. Before she is re-dressed in fine clothes, though, Enide shows those virtues of chastity, obedience, and “courtliness” that the fine clothes represent. Enide’s noble character is clearly demonstrated before her clothes outwardly confirm these qualities. And, though the queen is nominally responsible for marking Enide’s noble identity with rich clothing, Erec retains control over this social inscription through his prohibitions and directions. Likewise, in Cligés, Alexandre refuses to wear the furs and silks given to him by his father (which are outward indications of his status as royalty) until he has proven himself anonymously in Arthur’s court. In other words, fine clothing reinforces authoritative structures within the plot, positioning the agency of social control clearly in the masculine sphere. Marie de France also presents a strong relationship between clothing and inner virtues, both directly and indirectly, by how the characters act and dress throughout the tales. The first thing Lanval’s lady does when she takes him as a lover is to have him dressed in rich robes. Though this agency is nominally feminine, the change in status only becomes permanent when Arthur rules for the knight at the end of the narrative. In Bisclavret, the key to Bisclavret’s humanity lies in his clothes. His scheming wife is able to keep him in his werewolf form by stealing his clothes, and it is only when the king returns his clothes to him that he can resume his human form. Poor clothes cannot hide the merits of Enide or Lanval, nor can they disguise the deceitful nature of Bisclavret’s wife, who dresses elegantly in an attempt to gain favor with the king. Images of clothes, then, are closely

DRESSING THE UNDRESSED

85

linked to gender, status, and its control in romance plots.4 In these narratives, moreover, the symbolic power of rich clothing is reasonably stable: the social system that is triumphant at the end is an ideal one wherein masculine characters sartorially mark their inferiors in a chivalric relation of entitled dominance. The transmission of clothing in fabliaux, though, is not stable, nor do these tales work to establish ideals of personal virtue through sartorial signs. The morally or socially unworthy often possess clothes beyond their station, and characters who are given extravagant gifts of clothing are not always virtuous or worthy of such gifts.5 More often, clothing in the fabliaux is used in some sort of exchange. While this exchange is at times economic (clothing traded for goods or nefarious services), clothing often plays a more symbolic role—as an indication of fluctuating social power. The imagery of class tension and political instability is indicative of the social concerns that formed the fabliaux,6 which typically portray characters that unsettle relations of control that are elsewhere represented as hierarchically stable. Unlike the romance, the fabliaux purposefully undermine notions of social stability by suggesting that control of clothing is equivalent to control over identity. The notion that clothing can remake identities through its infinite recirculation is broadly upsetting in the Middle Ages, so it is not just the romance tradition that works to make clothing an external confirmation of a person’s innate worth. Through sumptuary restrictions, the exchange of clothing is nominally restricted. Inherent in this control of clothing is a social marking that is placed (literally) on the body, which defines the identity of that body in a social context.7 While sumptuary laws were not unique to the Middle Ages, their purpose and impact, particularly in terms of clothing imagery in literature, cannot be understated. As E. Jane Burns points out, garments that were regulated were understood as traded goods that could visibly produce and insure a specific social station.8 Alan Hunt speaks of the purpose of “governance” in such laws as “an ongoing set of practices that persists until its target of object undergoes some significant change towards a reconstructed object or, alternatively, is abandoned.”9 Hunt claims that sumptuary laws exist on the borders of modernity, and that the anxieties that appear as a response to the onset of modernity provide a starting point, a point of articulation (rather than of causation), but this methodological strategy requires exploration of the deeper level of the structural tensions, the forms of class, gender and status relations that constitute the bedrock on which sumptuary legislation rested and of which it can best be regarded as a barometer of both popular and governmental anxiety.10

86

MARY E. LEECH

The regulation of clothing, then, becomes a measurement for social distress and cultural fear. In romance literature, sartorial symbols maintain a certain ideal of hierarchical social order. Character qualities, often given form as fine dress, remain stable because there is no outside threat, no social encroachment to destroy the illusion.11 With the fabliaux, the use of symbols does not exalt social stability as much as comment on it or even demean it. The symbols in the fabliaux become indications of places of social discomfort rather than defenders of social ideals. In two tales of infidelity, Le Chevalier a la Robe vermeille (2.12) and Les Braies au Cordelier (3.17), clothes engender social rank and status, and the exchange of clothes reveals the ways in which gender “dresses” social agency. Both husbands at some point “own” or wear the clothes of the lovers who have usurped them; yet, at the same time the wife in each tale claims to establish a “correct” social rank for her husband, even as she cuckolds him. In Le Chevalier a la Robe vermeille, the wife convinces her husband that the red robe her lover has left behind is really a gift from her brother to the husband. Later, she convinces him to reject it, despite its fine quality, because it is not good enough for him. The husband in Les Braies au Cordelier ends up wearing the lover’s pants rather than his own when the lover makes a quick exit and takes the wrong pants. The wife then convinces the husband that the priest’s pants are evidence of her attempts to conceive his child. In both these tales, the wife takes control away from the husband, telling him an outrageous lie that eventually is accepted as “truth.” While the lie allows the wife to go unpunished and makes the husband look foolish within a marital hierarchy, it also allows the husband to retain the outer semblance of social control. Gendered performances become a central part of who wears what, who dresses whom, and who has control over the social presentation of another’s body. Agency does not necessarily belong to the one who “should” have it according to preconceived social traditions (i.e., the husband), but to the one who is best able to exert control over another’s body (in these tales, the wife). In these stories of infidelity, the bodies of the husbands are passively inscribed, once with the wife’s lover’s clothing and again when the wife dictates the role the husband’s body should play in the relationship.12 In these two cases, the sexuality of the male body is inscribed by the female, giving what Judith Butler calls the “sexed significance” of the masculine realm a female source.13 The passivity of the supposedly dominant male body points to an important social fear concerning masculinity and masculine authority, which is humorously played out in how easily the husbands believe the unbelievable stories told to them by their wives. In these tales, women

DRESSING THE UNDRESSED

87

play a dominant role and direct the action of the tales to their satisfaction, which is evidenced by their direction of meaning in clothes. Rather than providing evidence of adultery, clothing is reinscribed by the wives as proof of their marital devotion and virtue as well as the status of their husbands. While this method is antithetical to the ideals of romance, each fabliau husband still maintains his social standing. The male role of dominance is usurped, leaving the male authority figure deceived, chastised, and impotent to change or even understand the situation. In the end, although the appearance of social stability is maintained, the tale shows that masculine authority is an illusion that is as changeable as a suit of clothes. In Le Chevalier a la Robe vermeille, the vavassour’s ability with words defines his social position, but his wife’s power to outplay him verbally gives her ultimate control over these aspects of his identity. He is “pour son preu / Entendoit a autre maniere, / Qu’il avoit la langue maniere / A beau parler et sagement” [[the vavassour’s] interest / inclined in a different direction, / for he could use words to perfection / and spoke with skill and with great prudence] (2.12.18–21). While he is known for his use of words (the presumed indicator of his masculine authority), his wife is able to fool him with her words at two different points: once when she convinces him that the robe is a gift from her brother, and again when she convinces him that he does not want a secondhand robe. The “moral” of the tale also points to a loss of masculine control, as the author writes: Cest dit as mariez pramet Que de folie s’entremet Qui croit ce que de ses ieus voie, Mes cil qui tient la droite voie Doit bien croirre sanz contredit Tout ce que sa fame lit dit! (2.12.313–17) [This fabliau teaches all men that they’re committing folly when they trust what they’ve seen with their eyes. Those that are sensible and wise Won’t dream to raise a contradiction To what their wives say, fact or fiction.]

Here again, it is the semblance of order that is important. The humor disguises the feminine agency and emphasizes the positive outcome. As in the romance, the wife helps the husband to appear socially authoritative; but in the fabliaux, the wife has the power to maintain an outward appearance of virtue while continuing with adulterous behavior. Likewise, in Les Braies au Cordelier, the husband is a rich merchant who is displaced by a poor priest. What tips the husband off to the wife’s affair

88

MARY E. LEECH

is the discovery of writing tools in the pockets of the pants he has mistakenly put on and not the quality of the pants themselves. Again, substitution is a factor, as the husband looks for money but finds the cleric’s pen and knife instead. Phallic symbols aside, the husband does not notice the shabbiness of the pants until he seeks his money—the symbol of his status. Like the vavassour, the husband in this tale is handily outwitted by his wife, who is able to get her husband to parade around town wearing her lover’s pants on his belt; but later she compels him to do penance for thinking her unfaithful. She accomplishes this coup with the aid of another priest, whose complicity undermines the presumed stability of masculine authority in the tale. Once again the deceitful nature of the wife is emphasized, first at the beginning of the tale, as the borjoise the cleric loves is described as “Qui mout estoit saige et cortoise; / Mout savoit d’enging et d’aguet” [wellmannered and genteel she was, / well-versed in subterfuge and ruse] (3.17.8–9), and then at the end with a similar “moral” finishing the tale.14 In the end, however, it is her ability to maintain the outward appearance of social order that is more important than her deceitful nature: “Mout a bien sont plait afiné!” [She made it all turn out just so!] (3.17.358). Her husband does not lose his standing in the town, and she is able to carry on with her affair. With regards to the comic aspect in these tales, the humor of reversed gender roles mixes with anxiety about social structure. Images of power reversal, duping of authority figures, and substitutions of roles for one class by another work as a method, as R. Howard Bloch suggests, of dealing with the anxiety that comes during times of social upheaval. The comic element, the “joke” of the fabliaux, according to Bloch, serves as both censor and subversion, a way of making the significant less important: “Serving at the same time to both affirm and subvert, the comic is a transitional phenomenon . . . a potential space between the symbolic and the real.”15 By playing out social disruption as a farce, the fears are trivialized, even though they do not entirely disappear. Bloch also speaks to the theme of fragmentation in the fabliaux, and what the fragmented body may signify in terms of linguistic disruption, the nature of story telling and poetic representation.16 Part of the loss of power presented in these tales is also tied to the fragmented role/body of the husband, which is publicly displayed through a particular article of clothing. As an article of trade, the red robe of the knight in Le Chevalier a la Robe vermeille is described as “Robe d’escarlate novele / A vestue de fres ermine” [(his) new robe of red / of fine wool lined with ermine fur] (2.12.30–31). Ermine was an expensive and rare fur usually associated with royalty. Whether the knight is of royal blood is not as important as the luxuriousness of the garment, particularly as it belongs to a young knight who is just proving himself. When the husband accepts the robe, which he at first

DRESSING THE UNDRESSED

89

thinks is too extravagant, he accepts a role that he himself feels uncomfortable performing. Once he does accept the role/robe, his wife tells him that it is not suitable and that the more prestigious item of clothing is the green robe that has been fitted to his body. Meaning in clothing, as Susan Crane writes, becomes “the place of luxury consumption in the wider economy, and the exceptional importance that clothing acquired with the convergence of special performance such as exotic provenance, fine quality, tailoring . . . [was seen through how courtiers] thought of their clothing as a representational space for making personal assertions.”17 When the red robe is replaced with the green one, the husband’s own robe and one that is custom fit for him, he is inscribed again in his original social and personal standing by the wife who has deceived him, making his original status uncertain, though outwardly nothing seems to change. All in all, the husband has no say and no control over the social or domestic role he plays, as his wife takes away his power using the tools in which he has been educated: argument and fine words. The husband in Les Braies au Cordelier has no more control over his social performance than the husband in Le Chevalier a la Robe vermeille. The wife gets him to leave the house, tricks him when he comes back early, and tricks him again when he discovers that he is wearing the wrong pants. Furthermore, the wife convinces the husband that the pants were meant to bring them children because of a dream she had. In this story, the wife not only inscribes her husband’s body with the pants of her lover, but she also questions his role as a father by suggesting that he who wears those pants (the priest’s) will impregnate her. Even if the paternity of their other children is not called into question, the virility of the husband is associated with that of the cleric. This association creates a sexual rivalry in which the less “deserving” character, at least in terms of socialized gender roles, is clearly the more successful, even if the outward appearance of propriety is superficially maintained. In both these tales, the confusion of social structure and gendered authority is emphasized by the wife’s “trade,” particularly the ways in which her wit gives her power over the domestic domain. The sensuality of the wives in these tales, together with their victories over their husbands, forms a double threat to social conventions but, more importantly, to masculine authority. Manuel Aguirre speaks of how the fear of feminine sensuality is only a symptom of a bigger issue: “Something besides faithlessness on the part of woman lies at the root of [images of female sensuality]: the transmission of power is at stake, and the woman is the key figure . . . essentially, the woman here is an agent of [unwanted] change.”18 Within this threat of usurped power lies the fear of substitution and possibly replacement of those social roles and identities that were once constant and enduring, or at least the loss of control over these roles and identities.

90

MARY E. LEECH

In the last tale I wish to discuss, Frere Denise (6.56), a woman actually assumes the role of a man by dressing as a cleric, thereby presenting the dangers of displaced gender in a different light. Masculine or feminine control over the body of Denise becomes symbolic of the larger struggle for social authority and stability. Her role as a man is designed by a corrupt priest who desires sexual favors from her; her restoration to virginal maiden is directed by the wife of a knight. How Denise is dressed by other characters governs how she is seen and accepted by the society around her. As in the two previous tales, the “reality” of the situation is not nearly as crucial as its outward appearance. Though a masculine role is usurped, the primary concern in this story is the restoration of the socially inscribed feminine body. The same issues of social transgression and deception discussed earlier are apparent in Frere Denise; yet these are played out here in the imagery of Denise’s body and how it is perceived. While the lecherous priest dresses her as a man but uses her as a sexual object, the knight’s wife dresses her as a noble maiden and marries her off to a former suitor. The fine dresses Denise receives signal her return to her original social role as marriageable noble maiden despite her time as the wicked priest’s lover.19 Here again, the fragmenting of social conventions is played out on a body and how it is clothed; but in this tale, the body that is remade is seemingly unaware or unconcerned about the dramatic changes it endures, as well as the repercussions of those changes. Throughout the entire tale, Denise never acknowledges that she has done anything wrong, and she never openly challenges male authority as the wives did in the previous tales. As a good woman should, she listens to her primary male authority figure, which is Brother Simon, and the advice he gives her seems to fit with what Denise thinks is virtuous: joining a religious order. As Barbara Hanawalt suggests, men strove to keep women in their appropriate social role: “Since [medieval men] regarded women as by their very nature unruly, the best way to control them was to enclose them.” Despite this attempt at control, “[f]emale challenges to male spatial domination occurred continually throughout the Middle Ages.”20 Exerting physical control over a woman’s body and appearance was seen as a way to control the woman herself; yet despite these attempts, women still managed to retain or even usurp control from the male authorities that tried to dominate them. This battle over who controls social identity, this time female social identity, is one of the major underlying tensions in Frere Denise. Brother Simon does all he can to control and dominate Denise. He takes her away from her mother, re-dresses her as a man, cuts her hair (the ultimate symbol of a woman’s beauty), and coerces her into an affair. In this way, he attempts to assert authority over her body, despite the moral and

DRESSING THE UNDRESSED

91

social corruption his authority entails. Since Denise does not resist this affair, we can say that his enforced role works, at least for a while. The other brothers never suspect that Denise is a woman, showing the gender fluidity that can inhere within the very name of “Denize.” She even becomes a favorite among them, demonstrating that a presumably immutable role (a masculine clerical identity) has been successfully assumed by one who has no place in this exclusively male domain. Denise’s identity is discovered when she leaves the shelter of the monastery and goes into the secular world as the guest of a knight. Though the knight in this story should be the central authority figure as he is wealthy, courteous, and noble, he is a relatively minor character. His wife gives him tacit authority by calling him in to confront Brother Simon, yet it is the lady who takes the most significant action. The knight’s contribution to the situation is to name a price Brother Simon must pay for violating Denise, placing the transgression within the realm of wrongful commerce rather than moral sin. It is the wife, however, who rewrites Denise’s social status and value as a noblewoman through the re-dressing of her body. In transforming Denise and placing her in a masculine role, Brother Simon is the one who challenges masculine identity and its social authority. Significantly, no other man in the story recognizes a transgression against masculine authority. When the knight’s lady suspects Denise’s secret, she challenges the role Denise has undertaken by asking Denise to be her confessor: “Frere Denize est aseneiz/ De ma confession oïr” [Brother Denise I’ve chosen to / hear the confession I would make] (6.56.200–201). Both Denise and Simon are horrified by this prospect, and the lady’s demand to have Denise as a confessor only adds to the tension concerning who controls the social identity of the disguised Denise. Butler describes part of this tension by stating that if “gender is the cultural meanings that a sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders.”21 Still, the concept of gender and gendered social roles is closely linked to the body and the presentation of that body, which Butler discusses in relation to the theories of Foucault, particularly the correlation between social power and bodily control: “The body gains meaning within discourse only in the context of power relations. Sexuality is an historically specific organization of power, discourse, bodies, and affectivity.”22 While dressed as a cleric, is Denise masculine or feminine? Though others view her as a man (and she performs publicly as a man), she is used as a passive “female” by Brother Simon.23 As long as Simon has control over Denise’s body, he directs the social perception and determines the

92

MARY E. LEECH

social role that Denise will play. Nevertheless, underneath the public image of clothing Denise is still female, which is seen in a perverse way by how Brother Simon “undresses” her by sexually exploiting her yielding “feminized” flesh. Seeing Denise as a man who is used as a woman disrupts the social structure and fragments the basic definition of masculine and feminine in much the same way the other tales challenged socially inscripted masculine authority. In dressing Denise as a noblewoman and summoning her mother, the knight’s wife appears to want to repair Simon’s disruption of masculine authority. By rescripting Denise’s body and returning her to proper familial authority, which in this case is also feminine, the knight’s wife restores the outward appearance of social norms while giving these norms an originary agency that is feminine rather than masculine. What is even more disruptive here is that the masculine agency over Denise’s body was socially unacceptable. The only way to “correct” this fault is to eliminate the masculine control and thereby restore accepted order. The feminine agency of this restoration points implicitly to the inability of masculine authority to inscribe proper social identity. The knight’s wife takes the reformation of Denise’s social role one step further, as she allows Denise’s mother and suitor to believe that Denise is still a virgin (6.56.292–98). Though this gesture follows the theological line touted by Augustine, that women who do not consent to sexual violation remain virgins because their spirit is pure,24 the wife of the knight does not reveal the loss of physical virginity, even to Denise’s mother. By re-dressing Denise, then, the wife restores not only her social status as a noblewoman, but redefines her body as well. As in the other tales, part of the threat of social disruption comes from a cleric. Brother Simon has effectively perverted two social communities: the noble realm and the rarefied monastery. The borders and values of both structures, along with the gender roles in both, are transgressed, leaving the threat of disorder and chaos within the understanding of how these roles work and what they mean within the community at large. The wife’s restoration of Denise is an attempt to reorder the appearance of the values and structure for both the nobility and the clergy. By the end of the tale, however, it is only the superficial structure, the “dressing” of the social role that is protected: Denise is not physically a virgin, but that does not matter if the community believes she is one. The only ones who know “the truth” are Brother Simon, who began all the trouble in the first place, the knight, whose concern for Denise seems to be economic, and the knight’s wife. Their collusion in maintaining the surface order of the culture at the expense of “truth” becomes a disruption of the value system in and of itself by all levels of the social order (noble,

DRESSING THE UNDRESSED

93

cleric, wife). While the outer appearance of stability is preserved, the audience that hears the tale once again understands that the appearance is very deceiving. In the conclusion of The Performance of Self, Susan Crane asserts that “bodily guises and disguises are not really inert things but substantial communications, less immediately reliable than words but structured along lines similar to those structuring identity . . . any category important to defining self . . . can find direct expression in dress.”25 In the three tales presented here, the self-identity displayed in dress is directly related to how the self is defined according to a system of values inscribed on the body. The exchange of clothing between genders presented in these fabliaux points to a realization that the cultural values once seen as immutable are in a state of flux. What is “undressed” during the course of the tale becomes “dressed” or “re-dressed” in a manner that seemingly retains stability, yet part of the joke is that the audience has seen the naked truth, so to speak. The mutability of dress points to the mutability of social identities that are meant to be written on the body in an essential inscription, particularly those of gender. That each tale ends with some form of deception still in place, despite the outer return to the norm, indicates further that while everything may appear unchanged, underneath the surface the control of socially prescribed gender roles is not absolutely determined. Notes 1. Françoise Piponnier and Perrine Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages, trans. Caroline Beamish (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 155. 2. Public display of self or “performance” as part of social identity has no doubt long been a part of any culture. Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 54, makes an interesting observation about the “salesmanship” of such performances, and the possibly commercial aspect of a particular social role: “This deployment of symbol-using skills [as commodity] is familiar today in advertising and public relations, both of which are based on the sale of intellectual labor. Such labor first became a commodity when the conduct of hierarchy and government became a matter of persuasion; many intellectual formations had worked to this purpose earlier, of course, but the decay of ascriptive hierarchy brought such operations to the cultural consciousness.” 3. Sarah Spence, Rhetorics of Reason and Desire: Virgil, Augustine, and the Troubadours (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 120, discusses the intricate relationship between the poet/troubadour and the audience and the latter’s expectations. She compares the poet to a lover who cannot control the reaction to the words presented: “As a poet, the troubadour . . . is in control—of language, of medium, of audience. He can and does create ex nihilo

94

MARY E. LEECH

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

and so controls the truth of his poem. As lover, however, he articulates the position of an Augustinian orator who must wait for his audience to complete the dialogue.” In other words, the construct of meaning in imagery, of courtly love or clothing, is just as rooted in audience reaction as it is in authorial presentation. E. Jane Burns, Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 22, discusses the relationship between tales of courtly love and the “luxurious dress of amorous players” and how gender and status are performed by clothing on the bodies of the elite. Susan Crane describes the association of ritual and symbolism in clothing to the social performance enacted by specific groups to form or maintain social identity. See specifically the introduction of her book The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 5–7 [1–9]. In the tale Le Prestre qui ot Mere a Force (5.41), a priest is chastised for dressing his mistresses better than his mother. That the mother is a nasty woman is irrelevant to the presumed insult to her status. In Le Pescheor de Pont-seur-Saine (4.28), a fisherman buys his wife an expensive blue dress for which she later proves unworthy (she is unfaithful). These are just a couple of many examples of such imagery in the fabliaux. Charles Muscatine discusses the social and economic influences on the culture that produced the fabliaux. Charles Muscatine, “The Social Background of the Old French Fabliaux,” Genre 9.1(Spring 1976):5–6 and 11–12 [1–19]. Structuralist notions of culture, such as those of James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 235, define culture as “a coherent body that lives and dies. . . . Culture is a process of ordering, not disruption.” The ordering of a society, as anthropologist Mary Douglas points out in her book, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), p. 113, includes defining what is “pure” and what is “polluted” and can often lead to a fixation on how to maintain and define social “purity.” Culture may be a process of ordering, yet when some aspects of culture point to a failure in that ordering it results in a widespread communal fear of structural breakdown of both the community’s ability to maintain control and the loss of individual standing in that community. E. Jane Burns argues that sumptuary laws attest to the power of clothing to “overwhelm biological heritage and effectively forge a social body from cloth.” Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, pp. 31–32. James Hunt, “The Governance of Consumption: Sumptuary Laws and Shifting Forms of Regulation,” Economy and Society 25.3(August 1996):412 [410–427]. Ibid., p. 414.

DRESSING THE UNDRESSED

95

11. J. Huizinga speaks of the power of symbols to explain and maintain social perception and order when more “realistic” approaches fail or are less reassuring: “The ethic and aesthetic value of the symbolic interpretation of the world was inestimable. Embracing all nature and all history, symbolism gave a conception of the world, of a still more rigorous unity than that which modern science can offer. Symbolism’s image of the world is distinguished by impeccable order, architectonic structure, hierarchic subordination. . . . As each notion arises in the mind, the logic of symbolism creates a harmony of ideas. The special quality of each of them is lost in this ideal harmony and the rigour of rational conception is tempered by the presentment of some mystical unity.” J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), pp. 205 and 206. 12. In both tales, the wife is able to continue the affair with her lover without interference from the husband. 13. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 164. 14. At the end of the tale, once the wife has chastised her husband for doubting her, she is then able to meet her lover whenever she wants. The tone of the last few lines, which do not state the “moral” as explicitly, is clearly triumphant and admiring: “Bien a la borgoise tendu / Au borgois le sac as beçaces: / En toz leus et en totes places / Porra mais venir et aler / Que ja n’en osera parler / Li cous ja mais jor de sa vie. / Bien s’est la borgoise chevie: / Mout a bien son plait afiné! / A tant ai mon flabel finé!” [As for her man, at any rate, / she’d packed his bags for him but good! / In whatever places she would / henceforth see fit to go or come, / her cuckold was bound to keep mum / meekly for the rest of his life. / She really pulled it off, the wife, / and made it all turn out just so! That finishes my fabliau] (3.17.352–59). 15. R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 125. 16. See the conclusion of ibid. particularly pp. 101–103 and 109–111 [101–149]. 17. Crane, The Performance of Self, p. 13. 18. Manuel Aguirre, “The Symbolic Role of Women,” in Exhibited Only by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, ed. Valeria Tinkler-Villani and Peter Davidson, with Jane Stevenson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), p. 61. Though in this particular place Aguirre is talking about Shakespearean female characters, particularly Gertrude and Lady Macbeth, the point about female power and female sexuality is relevant to the issues in the fabliaux as well. Aguirre also speaks about how the sensuous woman is portrayed as treacherous or villainous, and the meek woman is praised. 19. Her passing as a man corrupts her femininity in most literal terms. Yet this also brings in Augustine’s assertion that women who remain chaste at heart

96

MARY E. LEECH

20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

remain virgins, even in (or especially in) cases of forcible rape. His discussion (Augustine, The City of God, trans. Maras Dods [New York: Modern Library, 1950], book I, ch. 18 (p. 22)), thus suggests (even though he does not say so explicitly) that femininity can be remade, or preserved, even when marred by masculine transgression. Barbara Hanawalt, Of Good and Ill Repute: Gender and Social Control in Medieval Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 83. Hanawalt also discusses how women in religious orders were considered particularly threatening, as they were often self-sufficient and not under any clear male authority. In this tale, the enclosure in the religious order is meant to redefine her sexuality, but in the end, a woman restores Denise’s “virginity.” Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 10. Ibid., p. 117. For a more detailed discussion of Foucault’s thoughts on the body, power, and sexuality, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), pp. 153–55. Though the type of sexual relationship is not clear (i.e., is Denise being sodomized by Brother Simon or having standard intercourse?) the hint of a male/male relationship here may also be part of the transgression being corrected. Once Denise is clothed as a woman, there can be no doubt as to how she will perform sexually. See above, note 19. Crane, The Performance of Self, p.177.

CHAPTER 6 CONFLICTING ECONOMIES IN THE FABLIAUX Christian Sheridan

This chapter traces conflicting modes of economic organization in the fabliau, arguing that the hybridization of money reflects the genre’s interest in mobile corporeal negotiations.

his essay examines several fabliaux through sociological and anthropological theories of exchange. When read in this context, fabliaux such as Constant du Hamel (1.2), Les Deus Changeors (5.51), and Le Bouchier d’Abeville (3.18) register a conflict among different modes of economic organization—gift, barter, and money economies. The conflict among these different models in turn helps explain what can often seem to be unmotivated acts in fabliau plots. More importantly, these different models of economic structure and the social logic they imply can explain the mutability of the fabliau as a genre and the mobility of their audience(s). Different models of economic organization require different conceptions of the self.1 In other words, what is at stake in these texts in which the logic of these different economies compete is not just which character comes out ahead of the rest (although that is a major concern for the fabliau as a genre) but the very definition of personhood itself. Since the fabliaux date from a particularly volatile period in economic history—the so-called commercial revolution of the long thirteenth century—it is perhaps not surprising that they record such a contest over social roles.2 In addition to these changing attitudes toward indviduals, the fabliaux also record changes in the use of commodities, particularly money. Again, this change can be

T

98

CHRISTIAN SHERIDAN

traced back to a conflict between models of exchange. Mark Osteen encapsulates the difference between the logics of a gift and a market economy when he writes that “in gift economy, objects are personified; in a market economy, persons are objectified.”3 Osteen’s discussion highlights the difficulties the overlap of these differing economies pose in formulating definitions. An object that began life as a commodity may become a gift, remain a commodity, or, if it drops out of circulation, may cease to exist in either category. Thus, the point put forth by Osteen that “a commodity is not a thing, but a process, or better, a system of relationships” serves as an important reminder that the very categories we use to define things and people are constantly being renegotiated and this process of renegotiation is nowhere more apparent than in those texts in which we can trace the effects of different models of exchange.4 As a social phenomenon exchange lies at the heart of any community. The three broad models of exchange—gift, barter, and monetary—that form the background for my discussion of the fabliaux always overlap to some extent, but there are some key features that can be isolated in each instance.5 The first are the obligations entailed by gift exchange. To be blunt, there is no such thing as a free gift.6 Receiving a gift implies an obligation to reciprocate. And here we see one example of a potential overlap between different models of exchange—if one reciprocates immediately, the exchange seems to be less like gift giving and more like barter. Barter implies that the parties involved in the exchange are interested in the objects; gift exchange suggests that they are interested in their relationship vis-à-vis each other. In other words, the logic of barter implies that the objects of exchange are valued as objects, but the logic of gift exchange suggests that objects are more important for their symbolic value. Certainly, precious objects given as gifts have significant intrinsic value, but the fact that what would be otherwise worthless objects can be treasured as gifts suggests that the gift exchange process itself adds value. And here we see another analogy between exchange models, in this case between the gift and money. Just as the stamp of a mint can add value to a lump of already precious metal, so also the process of gift exchange can invest any object with greater symbolic value. This analogy suggests that there may not be as great a distinction between forms of exchange as many thinkers assume. But the difference persists—engaging in gift exchange is not the same as engaging in monetary or market exchange (and I will be using the latter two terms interchangeably). So the question remains, if there is no such thing as a free gift, if any receipt of a gift involves an obligation to reciprocate, where does the notion of the gift as disinterested, that which one gives not to gain some reward but only to please the recipient, come from? Pierre Bourdieu provides one answer when he highlights the time

CONFLICTING ECONOMIES IN THE FABLIAUX

99

between the initial gift and its reciprocation. The passage of time is a key factor that allows the exchange to be classified as gift and not barter. As Bourdieu argues, this passage of time allows the parties to “misrecognize” the obligations gifts entail.7 The process of gift exchange can thus be thought of as a fiction the participants dwell in themselves to disguise the fact that all gifts are “double-voiced”: being both disinterested, in thatthrough giving a gift one aims to please the recipient and self-interested, in that one awaits the receipt of a return gift.8 The fictions necessary for gift exchange to occur connect this sociological concept with storytelling more generally and as we shall see in the fabliaux, the characters who succeed in these competitive exchanges are also often those who are the best at telling a story. The second feature of gift exchange important for my argument is its agonistic nature.9 The giving of a gift often involves the desire to outdo the person with whom one is exchanging. Following the logic of the gift economy as described by Mauss and others, one aims to give a gift that is so extravagant that one cannot be returned in turn or, if it is, the giving of it will ruin the giver. One partner “wins” the exchange when the other can no longer return the gift. In this sense it becomes difficult to separate the giving of gifts from the exacting of revenge. Indeed, revenge itself might be thought of as a form of exchange comparable to the gift since in both gift exchange and revenge, the exchange is less important in and of itself as it is for the way in which it plots the relationship(s) between the parties in the exchange.10 It is this connection between gift exchange and revenge that allows us to see the logic of the gift operating even in those fabliaux that do not explicitly represent gift giving. The agonistic nature and obligatory reciprocation of gift exchange suggest that it is a theoretical lens suitable for viewing many of the fabliaux, which so often involve characters getting back at each other through an exchange of dirty tricks. However, gift exchange can underemphasize one key feature of the fabliau: the centrality of desire. In order to account for the important role-that desire plays in fabliaux we must expand our repertoire of exchanges, and here barter serves as the most useful model. In gift exchange, as we have seen, the exchangers’ desires are not the paramount factor directing the exchange; indeed, those desires are often sublimated so that the gift exchange can appear disinterested. But in barter no such sublimation is necessary: self-interest is assumed. Each trader wants what his counterpart has or no exchange takes place. In this way the needs and desires of the exchangers are given; what allows the exchange to take place is not just that each side wants what the other has, but also that they know that they want it and that the other side has it. In other words, knowledge, as well as desire, is the key to a successful transaction.11 But this emphasis

100

CHRISTIAN SHERIDAN

on knowledge poses a fundamental question: what if the information is wrong? What if one misrecognizes one’s own or the other’s desires? This lack of knowledge can short-circuit an exchange, and even if an exchange does take place, it will be unsatisfactory. Money provides one means of avoiding this dilemma. By translating all commodities into a universal form, money allows people’s desires for those commodities to become portable. As thinkers since Aristotle have recognized, money obviates the need for a “coincidence of desires” in order for an exchange to occur. But even as money fulfills this vital social role as a medium of exchange, it creates its own set of social issues that concerned medieval thinkers and continue to engage modern academics. Monetary theory holds that money is marked by a dual nature. As suggested above, it is a medium of exchange, but in its role as a repository of value it is also an object of exchange, a commodity in and of itself. This dualism in modern theories of money recalls an equally marked duality in medieval understandings of money. On the one hand, money was seen as the ultimate solvent, a corrosive substance dissolving the traditional bonds that held a feudal society together. When money replaced land as the means lords used to reward their dependents, the physical tie the land represented no longer existed; people could literally take the money and run. On the other hand, money was seen as establishing order and equality by allowing legitimate commerce, and this latter point became the focus of many scholastic writers on money. The monetized marketplace was viewed as a means to establish equality out of the willed inequality inherent in commercial transactions.12 In other words, these thinkers recognized that in a monetized marketplace, each person aimed to maximize profits, and yet they held that from this continuous cycle of profit seeking, equality would emerge as each instance of profit and loss canceled out another. Scholastic writers followed different routes to arrive at this understanding of equity in monetary exchange. Some thinkers maintained an arithmetical model of exchange, meaning that each party should end up with exactly the same amount of money. For instance, Henry of Ghent concluded, “Therefore in [a] contract of buying and selling equality ought to be preserved between mutual selling and receiving so that neither takes in more than he sells” [In isto ergo contractu emptionis et venditionis sic debet servari aequalitas inter mutuo dantem et recipientem, quod neuter plus recipiat quam det].13 Such a model required the intervention of an outside authority to balance the result. Others propounded a geometrical theory of money that viewed an exchange as equal even if one party received more money because they recognized that fluctuating market conditions required a more flexible approach.14 The difference here is between an absolute and a relative definition of equality, but both models

CONFLICTING ECONOMIES IN THE FABLIAUX

101

agree that the outcome of any transaction should be the establishment of equality while simultaneously recognizing that the use of money implies a concern for profit. The world of the fabliaux appears distant from these theoretical concerns. If anything, the plots of the fabliaux suggest that the outcome of any exchange must be unequal so that some characters may completely vanquish others. This suggests that the fabliaux follow the gift exchange model, but even a brief glance at the fabliau corpus will reveal that these texts are saturated with references to money.15 Richard Spencer has linked the prevalence of money in the fabliaux to a critique of social institutions.16 On the whole, I agree with Spencer’s point, but suggest that we must place money in the larger context of exchange. Exchange lies at the heart of any social organization, and money provokes the social critique Spencer identifies, not so much because of some intrinsic property, but because it represents a model of exchange that was increasingly dominant during the fabliau period. By placing money in the context of other models of exchange, we can better understand its role in the fabliaux and make sense of texts in which money is surprisingly absent or, more importantly, of texts that suggest the limitations of money. That is, the idea that the fabliaux represent conflicts and overlaps among gift, barter, and money economies helps explain those texts that suggest money cannot play the socially ordering and equalizing role medieval thinkers ascribed to it. Before turning to my discussion of individual fabliaux, it will be useful to review briefly the conceptual background provided by the different models of exchange. Ultimately, the differences between these models revolve around the attitudes they imply toward people and things. In a gift economy the goal would be to vanquish one’s trading partner so that he or she is no longer able to exchange. The gift exchange model implies that the objects being exchanged are secondary; of primary importance is the status relationship between the trading partners. Under the barter model, this situation is reversed; that is, barter suggests that the traders are not really interested in their partners at all; rather, their interest is in the outcome of the exchange and obtaining the desired object. In money or market exchange neither objects nor relationships are paramount; rather, the aim is to maximize individual profit. Both market exchange and barter may be as agonistic as gift exchange, but only in the gift model does one party try to end the cycle of exchange by ruining the other party. Of the three models of exchange, the discourse of the market dominates the fabliaux. References to money abound, but even in those texts that are the most concerned with money, the plots seem to be following not the logic of monetary exchange as understood by medieval thought but the older economy of the gift. Perhaps more interestingly, some texts that we would

102

CHRISTIAN SHERIDAN

assume are very concerned with money, such as Les Deus Changeors, contain few references to it nor are greatly concerned with market exchange, and others, such as Le Bouchier d’Abeville, while again not containing significant references to money, can be read as near allegories of market exchange. These suggest once again that what we see in the fabliaux is not a straightforward evolution from gift to barter to money, but it is a conflict and hybridization of all three models. Despite its title, the fabliau Les Deus Changeors has very little to do with money. The two friends are described as being skilled in the currency exchange business (“Et mout savoit / Chascuns du change maintenir” [the two exchangers were of great ability / in their profession] (5.51.8–9)), but we never see them at the exchange, nor hear them discussing the market and its vagaries. The world of market exchange that the moneychangers represent remains firmly in the background. However, that background does shape the fabliau in several ways. For one, the jongleur uses the discourse of commerce to describe noncommercial interactions. For instance, in describing the enduring friendship of the moneychangers, the jongleur notes that they remained steadfast through loss and through gain: Ainsi furent mout longuement Entr’aus deus sanz acompaignier, Fust a perdre ou a gaaignier. (5.51.14–16) [For a long time they kept this mode of living as two bachelors, both in times of profit and in loss].

Whatever obstacles their friendship had to overcome can be described in the same terms as their business transactions. An even more remarkable instance of this commercial metaphor occurs when the adulterous moneychanger has just given the married changer a peepshow of his own wife. The adulterer declines to show the lady’s face, but the husband does not object since he believes himself to be well paid by the glimpses of her individual body parts: “Je m’en tieng mout bien a paiez, / Fet cil, se Dieus me beneïe!” [“You have rewarded me,” he says, / “more than enough, God bless my soul!”] (5.51.120–21). The fabliau itself is premised on the idea that the female body is a commodity as the wife circulates between the two friends, but this scene represents that commodification taken to an extreme: not only is the wife’s body described as if she were a type of prized livestock, with each part receiving praise, but the husband then equates seeing those parts as a form of payment.17 This scene suggests that not just the body, but even mere glimpses of parts of the body

CONFLICTING ECONOMIES IN THE FABLIAUX

103

are now objects of exchange between men, and thus it represents the power of market exchange to enlist any object as a commodity. But if, following the logic of market exchange, the wife has become a commodity, she does not continue to act like one. No, this commodity strikes back, and she does so by recognizing that the humiliation she has suffered at the hands of her lover calls for a response not in the terms of market exchange, in which she seeks profit for herself, but in the terms of a gift economy, in which she must inflict a similar or more degrading humiliation on the lover. With her husband in the room and her lover trapped naked in the bath, the wife forces the lover to crouch behind her or risk being revealed. As the jongleur makes clear, the wife’s vengeance is not predicated on the similarity of the two tricks, but on the level of humiliation the person being tricked experiences: Mout losenge cil durement Cele qu’il tenoit a amie, Mes la dame n’i entent mie, Ainz l’a derrier son cul torné: Le musart a si atorné Qu’il ne la puet veoir el vis. Onques nus hom a mon avis Ne fu mes ausi desjouglez. (Emphasis mine; 5.51.234–41) [Despite all his cajolery, the woman he thought was his friend will neither listen nor attend to what he says: she’s turned her rear and where the fool’s placed he can’t see ’er (at least not look her in the face) No man’s been put back in his place with so much contempt as I live.]

The lover’s humiliation stems both from his position crouched by the woman’s ass and from the passivity forced upon him. In the wife’s eyes his fault lies as much in his failure to “act like a man” and confront his friend as it does in the trick he played on her. Before suggesting that he cower behind her as her husband approaches, she needles her lover about his cowardice: “Je vous voi bel et grant et fort, / Si vous desfendez comme preus!” [You have the looks and size and strength—/ defend yourself, then, like a man!] (5.51.182–83). Having gotten rid of her husband, she dismisses her lover contemptuously, having proven him a coward and a scoundrel (5.51.266–67). As humiliating as being the object of a peepshow was for the wife, it did not transgress her socially constructed gender role; if anything, it took that role to an absurd extreme. However, the wife’s

104

CHRISTIAN SHERIDAN

trick on the lover does transgress gender roles and in doing so changes their relationship to each other just as the gift exchange model requires. Despite this insistent sense that honor, not profit, is at stake, the fabliau’s moral reinvokes the market exchange that has formed its background by suggesting that he who plays a dirty trick on a woman will be paid back with interest: “qui fet a fame un mal tret, / Ele en fet dis ou quinze ou vint” [he who tries to trick a woman, / the wrong he does she’ll return to him / ten- or fifteen- or twentyfold] (5.51.286–87). The lover’s humiliation, his being stripped of his masculine identity, suggests that we view the fabliau in the terms of a gift economy, but the language the fabliau uses to represent that humiliation comes from the discourse of market exchange. Thus we have underlying the plot the logic of the gift, but on the surface, the discourse of the market. This situation suggests that Les Deus Changeors represents a hybrid between a gift and market economy. Nowhere is this hybridity more evident than in the wife’s dismissal to her lover: “Vassal, fet ele, tel eschange/ Doit l’en fere au musart prové” [Brave heart, she says, here is the change/ a nitwit gets back for his own] (5.51.264–65). Of course “eschange” does not have to be translated as “change” as in loose coins; it can have a more general sense of any exchange.18 But in its immediate context (it rhymes with “change,” the currency exchange) and in the larger context of the fabliau, it recalls once again market exchange. And in doing so the word suggests the collapse of gift and money economies into each other: the wife has gotten her revenge following the logic of the gift economy, but she has expressed that revenge in terms from the money economy. This hybridization continues to be evident in Constant du Hamel, in which money plays a much larger role; but again, the plot seems as driven by the honor concerns of the gift economy as it is by the profit seeking of the money economy. Constant du Hamel is noteworthy for the amount of money represented. In trying to bribe Ysabel to sleep with them, the priest, the provost, and the gamekeeper offer her over 30 livres (1.2.28, 57, 104). In his attempts to escape the false charges the three suitors bring against him, Constant promises nearly 27.5 livres (1.2.226, 297, 358), and for bringing each suitor to Ysabel’s trap, Galestrot the maid receives 2.5 livres (1.2.448, 533, 265). Given the constant fluctuations and devaluations of French currency, it is difficult to establish a precise equivalent for these sums, but considering that a century later, a skilled mason might earn anywhere from 10 to 15 livres a year, it becomes clear that (even when one assumes a high rate of inflation) these are enormous sums for the members of a rural community to have at their disposal.19 Of course the historical reality of the transactions portrayed in the fabliau is beside the point.20 The transactions and sums represented are important not for the information they may provide into the workings

CONFLICTING ECONOMIES IN THE FABLIAUX

105

of a rural economy in thirteenth-century France but for the attitudes toward money, commodities, and people they suggest. As we saw in Les Deus Changeors one of the effects of money in this fabliau is that the characters habitually use monetary metaphors to express themselves. For instance, when the provost is trying to seduce Ysabel, he compares his lovemaking to Constant’s using a pecuniary metaphor: “Mielz valt de mon solaz une once / Que ne feroit du sien dis livres” [A single ounce of my caresses / is worth a pound of that man’s pawing] (1.2.49–50)21; later, after his dogs have mauled the three suitors, Constant thinks himself well-paid: “Et cil se tint a bien paié” (1.2.843; see also 1.2.123–24 and 1.2.231–32). This use of commercial valuation in noncommercial settings suggests how deeply the logic of monetary exchange has penetrated. But if we return for a moment to the actual sums portrayed, we might come to a different conclusion. The sums are so enormous that they do not suggest that the characters in Constant du Hamel are savvy consumers but that they do not know the value of a livre. That is, although the prevalence of money in the plot suggests that the characters are following the logic of monetary exchange—attempting to maximize their profits—their actual use of money suggests that they do not understand that logic very well. But they do understand the logic of the gift economy in which what matters is not the objects exchanged nor even the exchange itself, but the relationship between exchangers and how it changes as a result of the exchange. The clearest statement of this idea comes when Ysabel is explaining her plan to Constant that he rape the wives of the three suitors as the men, trapped in the barrel of feathers, watch: “La premiere vos covient foutre, / Et puis les deus se vos volez; / Si seront honiz et matez” [I mean for you to fuck the first / and if you can, the other two, so you’ll have shamed and licked them too] (1.2.653–55).22 By this point, the husband and wife have gotten the suitors’ money and jewels and are quite rich, but as Ysabel’s comment makes clear, money was not the main objective. This desire for revenge and not just profit also explains the seemingly gratuitous beatings and mauling by dogs that the three suitors suffer. They have already suffered physically, financially, and psychologically by being crammed in the barrel together, having all their money taken by the two peasants, and watching Constant rape their wives. But all these humiliations were private; when Constant beats the men with his club and his dogs pursue them, they are shamed in front of the whole community: Ez voz la presse qui engroisse; Tote la gent de la parroisse I acorent de totes parz,

106

CHRISTIAN SHERIDAN

Et par bussons et par essarz. [Molt i ot grant noise & grant presse, & chascuns d’aus voire s’engresse] Por ce que mal atornez furent, Poi de lor voisins les connurent.23 [see all the people who surround them, who’ve arrived from miles around, across the fields and through the brush, the entire parish, making such a throng and such a brouhaha, eager to see them, for they are in poor condition].

Versed in the logic of the gift economy in which honor matters more than objects, Constant and Ysabel know that it is not merely enough to make more money than one’s adversary or even to hurt him physically and psychologically. To truly triumph in a gift economy, one must shame the adversary as well. The three suitors on the other hand do not recognize that Constant and Ysabel understand the connection between exchange and honor in a gift economy. Because the husband and wife are peasants, the three suitors ascribe to the couple only the most materialistic of motivations. As he describes his plan to the other two, the priest says: Qui de lui se velt entremetre De son chatel l’estuet jus metre Tant que besoig, poverte ou faim La face venir a reclaim. (1.2.166–69) [Ainsi doit on servir vilaine.]24 [the man who’s going to seduce her must rob her blind and thus reduce her to poverty and starvation, then he’ll have her cooperation. Now that’s the way to treat a peasant].

The suitors associate the logic of the gift economy with their own higher social standing. When they fail to encumber Ysabel through accepting their gifts of money and jewels, they resort to the false accusations, acting on the assumption that if the peasants cannot be manipulated under a code in which honor is paramount, they can be controlled on a more immediate, material level. The suitors are wrong on both counts because Ysabel understands what they do not: that the different models of exchange and the social logics each suggests have collapsed into each other. In order to be

CONFLICTING ECONOMIES IN THE FABLIAUX

107

successful in the world of the fabliaux, one must be able to recognize this overlap and shift easily between these three models. The final fabliau I examine, Le Bouchier D’Abeville, makes this point abundantly clear. Like Les Deus Changeors, Le Bouchier d’Abeville presents very few specific references to money. However, I believe that of the three fabliaux considered here, it represents the most compelling image of market exchange. This image, along with the text’s implications of both barter and gift exchange, make this fabliau the most complete portrait of the conflicting economies I am examining. Viewed through the lens of the different models of exchange that I have identified, Le Bouchier seems nearly to alternate between modes. It begins with the butcher, David, failing to find any livestock worth purchasing at the market. The jongleur makes a point of telling us that David had brought with him a great deal of money (3.18.36–37) and that he is willing to use that money to secure the night’s lodging he needs (3.18.41–43). However, when he arrives at the priest’s house to which he has been directed, he does not mention money but only asks for charity. He says to the priest: Beau sire, se Deus vous aït, Herbegiez moi par charité; Si ferez aumosne & bonté. (3.18.60–63) [Father, as God may send you aid, I ask your hospitality in honor and in charity].25

Only after the priest’s initial rejection does he offer money (3.18.82–84), but even as he does so, he appeals to the discourse of gift exchange by emphasizing that by selling him a night’s lodging (and presumably making a profit from the deal), the priest would be placing an obligation on the butcher. In other words, he attempts to invoke the logic of gift exchange, with its clearly defined social hierarchies, at the same time he offers money, the ultimate dissolver of hierarchy. Finding his first two gambits thwarted, the butcher moves their relationship into a realm somewhere between a gift and a barter economy (at least from the priest’s perspective) by offering to trade the stolen sheep for a night’s accommodation (3.18.130–31). The exchange itself, sheep for lodging, seems to have the immediacy of barter, but once again, the butcher invokes the idea of the gift when he implies that the priest would be doing him a favor by accepting the sheep and thus relieving him of its burden on the long walk home. Not only does the priest accept this scam, but he also fails to recognize the butcher as the man he just sent packing.

108

CHRISTIAN SHERIDAN

The sheep draped around David’s shoulders acts as a disguise because unlike money, it allows the priest to see his transaction with David as not merely commercial, but something more akin to a gift exchange between equals. The priest can thus believe that he is preserving his honor by not doing business with a layman. David more clearly follows a barter model when he trades the sheepskin for sex with the servant and the priest’s concubine, and he is once again successful in his exchanges. These exchanges more closely follow the classic definition of barter since David’s interest lies not in changing the status level of the women, but in using them to diminish the status level of the priest. But as we have seen, barter suffers from the need for coinciding desires. In this case, the butcher has a sheep, the priest lodging; later in the story, the butcher has the sheepskin, the women have their bodies. Once we move beyond this interpersonal level, there is no guarantee that there will be such easy pairing of trading partners, and this situation makes money necessary as a medium of exchange. In Le Bouchier, the last exchange replicates this process: having traded with everyone in the household, the butcher converts the skin into money by selling it to the priest; thus he is able to take its value away with him. But again, he stresses that the priest will not only be getting a bargain, but incurring the butcher’s gratitude as well: Il i a trois livres de leine, Si est bone, si m’aït Deus! Trois sous vaut, vos l’arez por deus, Et molt bon gré vos en saré. (3.18.308–311) [The wool must be a three-pound load and first rate. I’ll sell it to you, though it’s worth three for only two shillings and be grateful to boot].

These hybrid appeals suggest that David knows that the priest is as mercenary as any merchant, yet feels his social position precludes his active involvement in the market. As such, the priest is open to the butcher’s manipulations. Of course, the priest is only deluding himself: he is deeply involved in all types of exchanges, including the market. Once the butcher offers the sheep in exchange for lodging, it is translated from product to commodity. But here we are dealing with a most remarkable commodity. What kind of commodity can be traded three times, embody the desires of four people simultaneously and still retain its value? That most fungible of commodities, money itself. In other words, within the fabliau the sheepskin performs a structural function similar to that of money, representing the desires of all

CONFLICTING ECONOMIES IN THE FABLIAUX

109

consumers. It can perform this role only because of David’s skill as a storyteller. His convincing performances tell a story about the sheep and its skin in much the same way the markings of a coin tell a story about its reliability as currency and the authority of the issuing prince. Of course, only the narrator, the audience, and the butcher know the source of the skin’s superadded value, providing the tale with its comic payoff. The other characters are operating according to the logic of different economies, either gift or barter. The butcher is able to move comfortably among all three. As the opening account of David’s shopping trip makes clear, he is a discriminating consumer, not wasting his money on poor merchandise, so he is clearly adept at navigating the monetized economy. But his interactions with the priest and the two women suggest that he can also understand the logics of gift exchange and barter. More importantly, he is able to recognize that the other characters operate according to those older models and tailors his speech accordingly. In this way, the butcher of Abbeville is like a jongleur himself—faced with the mutable material of the fabliaux corpus and the uncertain composition of audience as they move from performance to performance, both the butcher and the jongleur refashion their material as appropriate, and they are able to do so because of the different models of economic and social organization that crisscross the fabliaux. Notes 1. Mark Osteen, “Introduction,” in The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines, ed. Mark Osteen (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 21 [1–42]. 2. Peter Spufford, Money and its Uses in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 263. See also An Smets, “De la maille à la livre et de l’amour au commerce: Le rôle de l’argent dans les fabliaux,” Reinardus 12(1999):175 [173–88]. 3. Mark Osteen, “Gift or Commodity?” in The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines, ed. Mark Osteen (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 233 [229–47]. 4. Ibid., p. 230. 5. See John Davis, Exchange (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992) for a discussion of exchange as an all-encompassing social concept. 6. Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans. W.D. Halls (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 36. 7. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Work of Time,” in The Gift: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, ed. Aafke Komter (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), p. 142 [135–47]. 8. Osteen, “Introduction,” p. 4. 9. Mauss, The Gift, p. 6. 10. See Davis, Exchange, p. 29 for an expanded “repertoire” of exchanges. 11. Caroline Humphrey and Stephen Hugh-Jones, eds., “Introduction,” in Barter, Exchange, and Value: An Anthropological Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 6.

110

CHRISTIAN SHERIDAN

12. In the discussion that follows, I rely heavily on Joel Kaye’s book, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), here particularly pp. 13 and 45. 13. Henry of Ghent, Henrici de Gandavo: Quodlibet I, ed. Raymond Macken, vol. 5 in Opera Omnia (Leuven: University Press, 1979) quest. 40, p. 221, quoted in ibid., p. 102. Translation mine. My thanks to Karl Schudt of the Department of Religious Studies, Saint Xavier University for help with the translations. 14. Godfrey of Fontaines, Godefroid de Fontaines: Quodlibet V, ed. M. de Wulf and J. Hoffmans, vol. 3 in Les philosophes belges, 15 vols. (Louvain: Institut supérieur de philosophie, 1914), quest.14, p. 64, quoted in Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century, p. 112. “If, however, there be a contract of buying and selling, and measurable equality is made between the thing sold and the price paid, it is a lawful contract.” [Si autem sit contractus emptionis et venditionis, et fiat rationalis adaequatio inter rem emptam et pretium datum, est licitus contractus.] Translation mine. 15. Smets notes that more than one out of every two texts in the Nouveau Recueil Complet des Fabliaux, ed. Willem Noomen and Nico van den Boogaard, 10 vols. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1986), includes a reference to money. For a precise count see Smets “De la maille à la livre,” p. 176. 16. Richard Spencer, “The Role of Money in the Fabliaux,” in Epopée Animale, fable, fabliau, ed. Gabriel Bianciotto and Michel Salvat (Paris: Presse Universitaire de France, 1984), p. 573 [563– 74]. 17. I am grateful to the members of the NEH Seminar, “The Old French Fabliaux and the Medieval Sense of the Comic,” Yale University, Summer 2003 for this point. 18. Raymond Eichmann and John DuVal translate the phrase “tel eschange” as “such retaliation.” The Fabliaux of B.N. MS 837, ed. and trans. Raymond Eichmann and John DuVal (New York: Garland, 1984), vol. 2, p. 207. 19. Steven Proctor, “Money and Prices in Medieval France” http:// www.maisonstclaire.org/resources/pricelist/pricelist.html (August 5, 2004). Last accessed on January 31, 2006. 20. In fact there does not seem to be a question of realism here since the livre was a fictional “money of account” and not real specie, Smets, “De la maille à la livre,” p. 177. 21. Here Dubin’s translation differs from the NRCF critical text, which has the provost being even more extravagant: it would take 10 pounds (livres) worth of Constant’s lovemaking to equal 1 ounce of the provost’s performance. 22. The NRCF critical text differs slightly from Dubin’s translation: “The first I would like you to fuck / And then the [other] two if you wish / So you will have shamed and humiliated them.” 23. Lines in square brackets are variants from MS BN, fr.837 that Dubin includes in his translations. The NRCF critical text reads, “There the crowd grows [gathers] / All the people of the parish / They come from all parts /

CONFLICTING ECONOMIES IN THE FABLIAUX

111

Both through bushes and through fields. / Because they are so badly prepared / Few of their neighbors recognize them.” 24. Lines in square brackets are variants from MS BN, fr.837 that Dubin includes in his translations. I include this variant since it emphasizes the class antagonism underlying the priest’s scheme. 25. The NRCF critical text differs slightly from Dubin’s translation: “Good father, so may God help you, / Lodge me for charity’s sake / If you practice alms and goodness.”

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 7 MOBILITY AND RESENTMENT IN A WORLD OF FLUX: ARROGANCE IN THE OLD FRENCH FABLIAUX Kiril Petkov

Arrogance defines a negative morality in the fabliau by marking different characters with lack. In a period when ideas of justice and morality were shifting, valorizations of utility and merit operated through such negative appraisals.

uring the period between 1050 and 1250, western Europe was in the grips of dynamism on an unprecedented scale, there by affecting all spheres of life. Shifts of such a magnitude have not been seen since the cataclysms of Late Antiquity and remained without match for centuries to come. The key word was change. Nothing was stable, opportunities abounded for those willing to seize them, and the Western world was wide open to a reconceptualization of the major social values. A new ethos emerged, predicated on the structural reorganization of economy and society that made the distribution of wealth less dependent on the distribution of power. The implications of the ethos of change reverberate throughout the Old French fabliaux, the bulk of which belongs to the period.1 The self-assertive drive of the epoch is beautifully captured in their terse, down to earth, and action-filled verse. The fabliaux are populated with prosperous peasants marrying into the nobility, independent wives, indulging clerics, hard-working bourgeois busy at amassing riches, and knights trading their arms for wit and shrewdness. They shed light on a key problem, of crucial significance both for contemporaries and modern scholars: how does mobility affect traditional forms of justice and morals, and how is

D

114

KIRIL PETKOV

society restructured in a world so fluid that even its language fails to represent reality?2 Although the “fabliau ethos” has been a staple problem of the inquiry into the fabliau genre since its inception, analytical breakthroughs are rare. Perhaps the best recent example in the field, Simon Gaunt’s perceptive study of the interrelationship between gender and the fabliau genre, postulates that “the principal preoccupation of the genre is, rather, an impulse to overturn perceived hierarchical structures of all kinds, to reveal them as artificial and susceptible to manipulation.”3 Building on Gaunt’s work, in this essay I argue that the impulse to overturn and undermine was most conspicuously expressed in the fabliau perception of widespread pride and arrogance among all strata of society: analyzing this perception, I submit, tells us much about the social reorganization that took place during the period. Enter, therefore, orgueil and his kindred, bufoi, bobance, desmesure, de grant maniere, and other minor relations in the family of pride and arrogance. As a heuristic device that helps grasp the contents and orientation of the discursive structures of the fabliau world, this conceptual domain has been overlooked. As about one-fifth of the one hundred and fifty or so fabliaux use the term orgueil and its derivates, the omission is not justified. Categories such as gender, estate, domestic authority, language, and nature are frequently expressed in terms that modern English adequately translates as “arrogance.” It is my contention that all the interest in mobility notwithstanding, the fabliaux are on a quest to define a social order that would substitute for the destabilized estate society. The fabliau ethos is the idealized version of an encompassing system, more comprehensive than the existing estate order and resting on a principally different value register. The fabliau yardstick is a world “that never was,” but one that is rapidly taking shape. To put it succinctly, it is dimly perceived through its nearest approximation, the discursive image of a class-based society struggling to define itself in moral terms. In the process of this struggle, the fabliaux elaborate a new value system. More often than not, this is done by references to a “mirror image,” a negative benchmark of what the fabliaux cherish most, an image embodied by those characters branded as “arrogant.” Who were the arrogant characters in the fabliaux? A short list shows them spread across the board—peasants, town servants, priests, innkeepers, students, and bourgeois. Male representatives of two of the three estates and their womenfolk are consistently targeted as arrogant. When it comes to gender, arrogant women span the social spectrum. There is a significant exception though. The knights are not on the list. Only two fabliaux,

MOBILITY AND RESENTMENT

115

Le Vilain au Buffet (5.52) and Le Prestre et le Chevalier (9.103), hint at a possible connection between arrogance and the leading social group that earlier periods traditionally considered as defined by displays of orgueil. In the first tale, however, the arrogant character is a count’s seneschal and his status discounts the possibility that he was a knight (5.52.283–311). In the second fabliau arrogance is a deliberately chosen plot strategy. Faking a supremely arrogant attitude, an impoverished knight managed to outwit a greedy priest who tries to get hold of the noble’s last meager belongings. The fabliau makes sure, however, that we are aware that the knight was not in the least bit arrogant (9.103.480–83, 699–709, 1063). Given that in the fabliaux the knights are fully implicated in the political and moral economy of savoir (knowledge) and all it entailed, this plot strategy, fully in the fabliau spirit, comes to identify as arrogant not the knight but the priest who, as a member of the ecclesiastical estate, is supposed to be the very embodiment of humility. Estate tensions are conspicuous in the majority of cases where social conflicts are cast in a value-oriented language involving perceptions of arrogance. The forceful streak of anticlericalism blames priests for arrogance in Le Prestre comporté (9.102), Le Prestre teint (7.81), and Le Bouchier d’Abeville (3.18) where the element of lay-ecclesiastical hostility is strong. The arrogant, wife-seducing lecher-priest is a fabliau commonplace.4 The tension between peasants and seigneurial administration is also expressed in the language of arrogance. In Le Vilain au Buffet the positive figure is a peasant with a sound sense of savoir that helps him get the better of a count’s seneschal, described twice in possession of a good deal of arrogance (5.52.37,95).5 The bourgeois dislike for nobility transpires in the behavior of the innkeeper in La Plantez and is promptly dubbed as arrogance (7.76.6–31). In De Berengier au lonc cul charges of arrogance reflect a strongly pronounced estate tension between rich peasants and nobility (4.34.117). In version B of La Damoisele qui ne pooit oïr de parler de foutre a peasant’s daughter who is hypersensitive to vulgarities surely puts on the air of a gentle dame; accordingly, she is “Qui mout par estoit orgoilleuse” [arrogant, perverse, and scornful] (4.26.3–4).6 She deserves deflation not so much because her sentiments do not match her station, but because she does not have what it takes to act the part she claims. Relations between men and women, especially spouses, frequently evolve within gender norms and expectations that are manipulated, challenged, and subverted by characters defined as arrogant. Male expectations, above all, are the fabliau authors’ targets. Confronted with arrogance, men deal with their recalcitrant ladies using any means possible. Rough

116

KIRIL PETKOV

treatment, along with a good dose of savoir rules in La Dame escoillee, a fabliau preserved in six manuscripts whose plot entered other vernacular traditions, is perhaps the strongest condemnation of a noble lady who does not accept the subordinate role expected of a wife (8.83.13, 226, 384, 491, 544). The unfaithful wife of another knight in Le Chevalier qui fist sa Fame confesse is similarly accused of arrogance and threatened with death: “Par l’ordre Dé, / Dame, quele est vostre fierté / Et vostre orgueil! / Je l’abatrai, / Quar a mes poins vous ocirrai!” [Lady, by God’s own holy mass/ how dare you show such haughtiness?/ I’ll take it down a notch or two!/ Just let me get my hands on you! / I’ll kill you!] (4.33.239–41). Peasants do not shrink from using naked force either, as in Sire Hain et Dame Anieuse where a mock trial by combat breaks the arrogance [beubant, bofoi] of a peasant’s wife who wants to “wear the breeches” in the house (2.5.336,404). Ditto for bourgeois classes. “What tactics, lady, should I use / if she turns proud [s’elle s’orgeille] and starts screeching?” asks the rich young bourgeois in Auberee (1.4.350–51). Anxious that the object of his desires, a married woman, would refuse to yield to his advances, he receives an answer that pretty much advocates rape (1.4.352). Arrogance in women is also unacceptable in fabliaux featuring ladies who choose more peaceful even though no less determinate ways to contest male-dominated hierarchy. The priest in Le Prestre teint considers arrogant the married bourgeoise who not only spurned him but maltreated his go-between as well (7.81.206). In L’Evesque qui beneï le Con it is impossible to disentangle estate and gender in the characterization of the bishop’s mistress as fiere et orgoillose [arrogant], for the simple reason that she would require the bishop to get into her bed, rather than going to his residence herself (6.68.115–18). The rich merchant in La Bourse pleine de Sens is led to realize that his mistress is nothing more than an arrogant harlot, “Et s’ele est orgeilleuse et fiere, / Com afiert a tel pautonniere” [contemptuous and haughty / the way you would expect a bawdy / woman to be] as she shows him the door when he pretends to have lost his fortune and asks for lodging for the night (2.8.203–204). And a peasant’s wife, introduced as arrogant, wicked, and disdainful “Une mout orgoilleuse dame, / Et felonesse et despisant” [a very arrogant lady / wicked and contemptuous] in La Couille noire proves the fabliau verdict by being so struck by the realization that her husband’s testicles are black that she requests divorce from the local bishop only to be bested in a contest of savoir and laughed at in his court (5.46.2–3).7 The arrogant heart [Mes cuers qui ert si orgilleus; My heart that was so arrogant] of the bourgeois woman in Conte de fole larguesce who gives away the family fortune to show that she is in charge of the household changes when the husband makes her share his arduous journey to realize where money comes from.8 Finally, not only women are arrogant.

MOBILITY AND RESENTMENT

117

Les deus Changeors, qualifies as arrogance folie et orgueil [folly and arrogance] a man’s attempt to manipulate a woman (5.51.284–87). The fabliaux hammer home the same lesson over and over again: it does not matter whether an arrogant character contests or affirms established authority. What matters is whether they adhere to values compatible with the principles of mutability and mobility, which render the very concept of authority problematic and contestable. The same lesson can be derived from analyzing the discourse on arrogance employed in the context of domestic authority. In version B of Le Vilain de Farbu a dim-witted peasant arrogantly [Et li uilains forment s’orguelle; and the peasant got so arrogant] calls for his dinner (6.62.81b).9 The noble daughter-in-law of a merchant in La Housse partie is “Qui fiere estoit et orguilleuse: / Du preudomme estoit desdaigneuse” [haughty and disdainful / and found the good man’s presence painful] (3.16.221). Servants too, do not escape accusations of arrogance. The maid in Le Bouchier d’Abeville is charged as arrogant [orgeilleuse] for claiming the sheepskin that the butcher sold to her and her mistress (3.18.345). So is the maid in Le Foteor, being independent, talking back, and claiming the right to sexual services that her mistress hankered after (6.59.248–49). In all these cases, as the fabliau authors make their audience aware, accusations of arrogance highlight misplaced authority or attempts to establish the latter on the basis of an unsubstantiated or unjust claim. The tensions between the city and country are reflected in Le Vilain Asnier (8.92), a fabliau that identifies as arrogance a poor peasant’s accidental straying into the spice dealers’ lane in Montpellier. The miraculous revival by a heap of dung shoved under the peasant’s nose by a worthy town man is used to attack those who, led by arrogance, “seek pridefully to rise” above their natural status [Qui d’orgueil se desennature: / Ne se doit nus desnaturer!] (8.92.49–51).10 This story draws in broadest terms the fabliaux’ uses of arrogance. Charges of arrogance and the tensions they express are commonly leveled where assertions of power, authority, and domination clash with claims to independence and self-determination. Construction of identity, acquisition of agency, fulfillment of desires, and striving for supremacy are consistently represented as reasons for arrogance. Resistance to being defined by others is a major part of the encounters involved in the fabliau discourse on arrogance. Travelers call on members of the ecclesiastical estate because the priests are expected to be charitable and hospitable with strangers for God’s and their profession’s sake. The priests resist. In Le Bouchier d’Abeville and Le Prestre et le Chevalier the request for charity is taken as an affront. The priest’s personal character is not at stake; instead, maintaining the boundaries between estates is a priority. To provide lodgings for vilains, that is, lay people, would make

118

KIRIL PETKOV

these boundaries permeable (3.18.56sq). Even the king, a layman himself, would not be afforded lodging (9.103.166–67). The same attitude transpires in contests between members of the lay estates. In Berengier au lonc cul the knight-arriviste, yesterday a peasant’s son, strives to defend the status and estate bought with his father’s money by assuming the identity of a fighter. When the ruse fails, he loses the claim on knightly identity and everything that goes with it, even though his formal title remains (4.34.270–83).11 The seneschal in Le Vilain au Buffet believes that arrogance is a sign of his status; his right to self-identification that arrogance is supposed to construct is rejected with the slap on the neck that the peasant deals him. Resistance is a staple in the gender discourse, rigidly structured by societal norms that identify anyone trying to flout them as arrogant. The ladies in La Dame escoillee and Guillaume au Faucon (8.93), the young bourgeois wife in Auberee, and the peasant wives in La Couille noire and Sire Hain et Dame Anieuse assert themselves vis-à-vis their husbands and would-be lovers by rejecting expectations imposed on them.12 As these women suggest, the arrogance of fabliau characters is not just an attitude; it is part and parcel of what they are, in an essentialist, ontological, and organic way. Why are these characters, or their haughty peers, considered arrogant in the genre? The short answer of the fabliaux is, at least at first glance, because of lack. They lack essential qualities that would define them in the eyes of others in the same way that they define themselves. The arrogant characters appear cognizant of what they lack; but so is the public. The lack is of avoir in the first place, the traditional identity-supplying rank and status. As they try to make up for the shortcoming and use savoir, the arrogant types are revealed as lacking that too.13 But is it, in fact, lack that defines fabliau characters as arrogant? Upon closer inspection, what the fabliaux identify as lack appears to be a misrepresentation, a convention masking deeper realities that the fabliau authors preferred to obfuscate if not to obliterate by employing the convenient construct of lack. On the surface, it is indeed all lack. The peasant knight in De Berengier au lonc cul lacks avoir: courage, bravery, and fighting abilities. Put to the test, his savoir fails him as well. He even fails to recognize his wife’s body parts that he is supposed to know all too well. The seneschal in Le Vilain au Buffet is miserly with something that does not even belong to him; he therefore lacks justice and generosity. The arrogant priests in Le Bouchier d’Abeville and Le Prestre comporté are a far cry from the ideal ecclesiastic, someone known through humility, charity, chastity, and abstinence. Moreover, town dwellers characterized as arrogant suffer from lack of essential qualities of their own. The wife of the salt dealer in Conte de fole larguesce is arrogant because she lacks the business skills and shrewdness needed to

MOBILITY AND RESENTMENT

119

keep the household going. The money changer in Les deus Changeors lacks, as his lady lover points out, discretion and intelligence, qualities well needed in his trade. The same representation—or, rather, mystification, as we shall see later—of arrogance as lack obtains in matters of gender. The mistresses in La Bourse pleine de Sens and L’Evesque qui beneï le Con have neither love nor loyalty for their lovers. The arrogance ascribed to the girl in Auberee by her lover-to-be is more than a reflection of the male expectations for automatic submission. It is the lack of loyalty in Le Chevalier qui fist sa Fame confesse that causes the cuckolded husband’s angry outburst and accusation of arrogance. Loyal wives could also aspire for dominance, but when they do, these stories similarly show that they lack what it takes to domineer. The tailor’s wife in Sire Hain et Dame Anieuse claims the right to wear the breeches and is ready to defend it with physical force, pure and simple. In La Dame escoillee the lady’s claim is staked on that precious fabliau possession, savoir (8.83.455, 463–44). Through the young count’s ingenuity, however, it becomes quite clear that the lady, in fact, lacks savoir, no matter what her assertions are. The domestic sphere is traditionally seen as a conservative environment where no clearly destabilizing forces take place throughout the premodern period. However, authority, whose discursive base the fabliaux love to deconstruct, is present there too and, as it turns, it is made out of lack and promptly represented as arrogance. The peasant in Le Vilain de Farbu appears to lack the one thing that time concedes indiscriminately to those advanced in age, which gives them leverage and puts them in charge of the household: experience and the capacity to learn from it. The lack of ability to learn from experience denies the peasant the right to claim the authority in his household and the revelation gives a hollow ring to his arrogance. The peasant’s inability to learn from experience, when to touch, with what to touch, and how to eat, as his son Robin sarcastically remarks, debunks the foundation of his authority at home (6.62.29–36) The fabliaux’ stress on lack indicates that their value benchmark is juxtaposed against the system from which the arrogant characters apparently derive their claims. The clash between “arrogant” types and “fabliau favorites” gives us the fabliau verdict on what constitutes normative morality and what comprises a deviation. Contrary to Jürgen Beyer’s (and others’) assertions, the fabliaux do have a positive morality. It is just that the latter does not represent what modern scholars habitually perceive as such, the Christian and courtly ethos of the High Middle Ages. The “fabliau ethos,” therefore, is a catchphrase in need of definition itself; it is not a given.14 The genre’s discourse on arrogance demonstrates that the

120

KIRIL PETKOV

fabliaux adhere to two fundamental values: utility and equality. To grasp the fabliau ethos as the norm of a projected social order based on these values and underpinned by the organizing principle of mobility, on the one hand, and arrogance as a deviation and contestation of that norm, on the other, requires an inquiry into the values and principles defining the perception of arrogance and its offer of an alternative morality. Take equality for instance. The fabliau world features peasants slapping seneschals, women fighting men in trials of physical strength, laymen passing judgments on clerics, townfolks on nobility, and vice versa. Men and women are also equal in their right to sublimate any contest to the level of wit, cleverness, and quick thinking. Arrogance is a vehement protestation against such a definition of equality. Arrogant characters see equality as particular and group-specific, not a like equality for all. It applies to categories of people with the same or similar social standing. Between such groups, be they gender-, estate-, or age-defined, there is no equality. Despite other reasons, the priests’ frequent forays into married laywomen’s beds are a double satisfaction, of both their sex drive and their sense of superiority. Arrogant women want to be the masters of their husbands, to order them about, and to “wear the breeches.” The same criterion applies to men. Those men who try to dominate and humiliate women are identified as arrogant and rightly punished with mortification—like the young money changer in Les deus Changeors. Economy too is subject to contesting interpretations in the encounters where arrogant types confront positive characters. In the fabliaux, economy is based on the power of money to assign meaning to things, and hard work and guarding, rather than fortuitous arrival at riches and squandering, are appreciated.15 In such a context, one can understand the charge of arrogance in Le Prestre et le Chevalier. The knight would be arrogant if he put pleasure—here sex—before wealth. Arrogance is the insistence (which here is actually a pretense since the knight is concerned with his bill) that the economy of pleasure overrides the economy of money (9.103.703–709).16 Conte de la fole larguesce and La Plantez put forward the same notion: economy is not about economizing (that is why “squandering” has no meaning for those represented as arrogant in the three fabliaux), and that profit is not measured with money. In the fabliaux acquisition is validated as merit; it is based on overcoming difficulties and investing labor and effort. The fabliau moral is that one economize even if one has. Arrogant characters certainly lack this perception. In a world where everything is perception, integrity also becomes a social anxiety, an unstable category that suggests a further dimension of arrogance, misleadingly represented as lack by the fabliaux. The issue is how to define integrity in the first place. Frequently, the fabliau definition of integrity is

MOBILITY AND RESENTMENT

121

elaborated through juxtaposition to notions of integrity held by persons labeled as arrogant. In Auberee, the young woman’s first reaction when she finds herself in bed with a man proves that she refuses to submit to others’ valuations. As Auberee and the young man argue however, the fabliau connects private acts and their public perception. The same perception is the reason for introducing arrogance in Le Chevalier qui fist sa Fame confesse. The cuckolded knight, who accused his wife of arrogance when she fails to behave in the way he perceives the public would have demanded, ends up accepting as normative the same moral argument that convinced the young woman in Auberee that she might commit adultery without jeopardizing her integrity. His wife’s strongest argument is that had she been unfaithful, the neighbors would have known. The fabliau vindicates her. The argument for the ultimate importance of public perception (here misrepresented as positive by the wife) negates the validity of the knight’s accusation of arrogance, even as the neighbors laugh at his expense between themselves. Love and loyalty do get entangled in fundamentally conflicting categorizations of morality, also expressed in the perception of arrogance. The lady friends in La Bourse pleine de Sens and L’Evesque qui beneï le Con are expected to act from a sense of obligation deriving from the contract, but they instead act by considering what could affect their own interests and are labeled arrogant. To sum up: what matters in all cases examined above is that arrogant characters are perceived as rooting for valuations fundamentally antagonistic to the morality of mobility. Where mobility-obsessed fabliaux postulate a like equality for all, arrogant types espouse a particular morality fragmenting the permeable world of the tales. In a context where the perception of others is one’s benchmark for integrity, the arrogant characters resist being valuated by others. In a world where money assigns meaning to all things the arrogant ones push for a “give away” economy. Where loyalty is considered a duty, an adherence to contractually sanctioned obligation, they insist on defining obligation as a freely taken liability. Where the fabliaux insist on morality as a set of self-imposed constraints, for the arrogant characters it is their interests that condition their moral judgment. Arrogance is thus not just a hollow claim but an alternative value system as well. Its representation as lack is a mystification, a strong strategy to devalue such a system by denying its very existence. Furthermore, one’s place in the social hierarchy of the world in flux, according to the fabliaux, depends on the qualities that are supposed to go with the specific place one claims as his or her own. From this follows that if the discourse on arrogance requires that avoir and savoir go together then the fabliau world is a locus of a sociological group. Not yet components of a clear typology or social space, the members of that group nonetheless

122

KIRIL PETKOV

share a clear set of dispositions.17 What the inquiry into the discourse on arrogance suggests is that the ethos of the fabliaux has a quite distinct image of its potential as a social agent. As Ira Katznelson notes, transindividual dispositions constitute cultural configuration within which people act.18 The social ethos of the fabliaux defines the ideal social agent as a class-based society. The shared dispositions of the fabliaux map out the dimensions of a class order, gathering, as real life does, their human material across the board in the name of hard work, wits, wealth, and power. The fabliaux not only reflect: they actively enact class for, as E.P. Thompson put it, “class itself is not a thing, it is a happening.”19 The fabliau class ethos is not based on the fusion of “peasant mentality and money economy.”20 The sphere of social action within which arrogance clashes with its positive alternatives is much broader and deeper. The agent that the discourse on arrogance identifies as the winner in the fabliau competitions is not a class of vilains. Nor is it a specific class at all, even though it is an ideal order in which those who succeed will act like “lords,” infusing with the best of the noble ethos the life that only money can buy. The fabliaux agree that God created the estates, but they see themselves as facilitating the transition to a more convenient, class-based social order. The discourse on arrogance is a cohesive force in this process of transformation and class formation. The fabliaux direct resentment against those who hold positions in the establishment or seek to fit into a situation even though they lack what it takes to be there. Such characters are seen as having an unfair advantage.21 I say “advantage,” for the arrogant claim a higher position in the relationship negotiated in the course of the interaction. And I argue “unfair” because of their lack, imagined as it is by the fabliaux. “Fair” and “unfair” are of course contingent projections of the perceptions of social justice. Questions of justice arise when conflicting claims are made upon the design of a practice.22 The subject of contestation therefore is not the power conferred by status (or control by traditional means), or power per se, but the normative perception of justice underpinning the existing power structures. Mobility has created the notion of like justice for all, a value register distinct from the arrogant characters’ criteria. Justice being the central ethical judgment of a society’s functioning, the discrepancies in its valuation give rise to resentment that turns into a powerful affective drive for social restructuring, so that a new—and just—social order is constructed. In a just society there would be some inequalities of status, as there would be some inequalities of class.23 The justice that the fabliaux call for is fairness, or the elimination of the distinctions identified within the discourse of arrogance. That process would restore fairness and a proper balance between the social worlds revealed in the actions of the arrogant characters.24

MOBILITY AND RESENTMENT

123

Even more importantly, fabliau equality is a like equality for all, but it is not absolute. Yet it is just because it is conditional, predicated on merit and utility. For the same reason mobility in the fabliaux is individual, but not automatic.25 The status establishment comes to be perceived as unjust because it sanctions the existence of those who embrace social and moral criteria fundamentally inimical to the conditions of the competition. By selecting, in a systematic way, those aspects of life that are represented as malfunctioning, the fabliaux indicate the direction of change. Their social vision is just to the extent that it would not sanction the principles of a status order, the members of which could point to institutionalized norms as their justification for disrespecting other members of that order. The typical outcome of the action correcting arrogance is the arrogant characters’ demotion, moralization, and reinsertion in estate/gender /domestic/natural identities that the fabliaux endorse as valid. Not a few of the arrogant types fade from the tales having neither achieved their goals nor reconciling with their failures. What will emerge from the resentment they indubitably harbor, however, is a subject of another inquiry. In the postfabliau world of the later Middle Ages and the early modern epoch the arrogant types will vent their resentment by assuming the vestments of the mobility that they militated against, changing in the process the very meaning of arrogance. The core significance of the perception, however, that of an alternative value system, persists to the present day, even though the equalizing drive of bourgeois morality, acknowledged or unacknowledged, masks it with the more acceptable designation of audacity. Notes The research for this study, part of a larger inquiry into the discourse on arrogance in the late medieval and early modern period, began during a 2003 Summer Seminar at Yale University, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I would like to express my gratitude to NEH and above all to R. Howard Bloch, the Director of the Seminar, for his unqualified support and hospitality. The discussions in the seminar forced me to rethink my tentative argument. Special thanks are due to Dan Murtaugh, who provided invaluable help with some of the tricky Old French passages engaged in the inquiry. Nathaniel E. Dubin provided most of the translations in what follows, but I should note a key departure: Dubin prefers to render orgueil with “haughty” or its synonyms in order to preserve the cadence of his translation (as he should), whereas I use it as a technical term. This, of course, is a reduction, but taken as terminus technicus, orgueil allows me to focus on the core concepts expressed through the welter of Old French terms (and their modern English correspondences) and render them consistently, depending on context, either with “arrogant” or “proud,” referring to the conceptual core. Linguists might

124

KIRIL PETKOV

be horrified, but my concern is with the underlying logic that produces clusters of terms with a core meaning rather than with individual shades of that same meaning. Thanks are also due to Holly A. Crocker, for the thorough editing of my sometimes loose thoughts, and to the volume’s readers for their insightful comments. 1. None of the vernacular traditions in German, Italian, Spanish, or English reflects the central preoccupation of the long twelfth century in such depth and breadth. Closest to the fabliaux are the German and Italian traditions, but they are still too courtly and not interested enough in mobility and its products; see, for example, the Middle High German collections, Gesammtabenteuer: Hundert altdeutsche Erzählungen, ed. Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, 3 vols. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961); Neues Gesamtabenteuer: Das ist Fr. H. von der Hagens Gasamtabenteuer in neuer Auswahl, ed. Heinrich Niewöhner (Dublin-Zurich: Weidmann, 1967); Novellistik des Mittelalters: Märendichtung, ed. Klaus Grübmüller (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1996); and the Italian novelle in Il Novellino, ed. Alberto Conte, introduction by Cesare Segre (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2001). The fabliaux have attracted considerable attention as of late. An elegant and insightful survey of the burgeoning literature in the field is provided by Brian J. Levy, The Comic Text: Patterns and Images in the Old French Fabliaux (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 1–29 and the bibliography that accompanies it. 2. R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Bloch’s study is an ingenuous inquiry into the relationship between language and social reality and demonstrates the extent to which language can operate as something more than a mere “representation” of reality. 3. Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 235 [234–85]. See note 14 below for Muscatine’s, Schenck’s, and other scholars’ views. 4. NRCF 9.102.240 for Le Prestre comporté. The priest is fel et orgueilleus [wicked and arrogant]. See NRCF 7.81.234 for Le Prestre teint, where the lady complains to her husband that the priest has arrogantly [de grant maniere] sent the old hag to convince her to accept his advances. For Le Bouchier d’Abeville see NRCF 3.18.58, and version H in 3.18.284, where the term is uniformly orgueil. 5. In the first case version A has the correct wording with orgueil; version E spells orguuel whereas T substitutes duel, which makes less sense in the context. The second reference is only preserved in E; the other three versions, ATJ, omit the line altogether. 6. This popular fabliau is extant in five manuscripts, which differ so much that NRCF divides them into three traditions. The version I use here is B, representing tradition II according to the NRCF editors. This is the only tradition that suggests estate tensions. The versions ACE, tradition I, point to an aristocratic context; version D, tradition III, is entirely gender-oriented

MOBILITY AND RESENTMENT

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

125

and has no estate implications. For a subtle analysis of the gender-related context of the five versions see Gaunt, Gender and Genre, pp. 280–84. Quite appropriately, the demoiselle of noble status in ACE is referred to as desdaigneuse rather than orgoilleuse; I am inclined to believe the difference is not just the result of a line lacuna between vv. 5–6 in the ACE manuscripts. The additional adjective, felonesse, v. 4 in B seems to support this conclusion. Dubin translates this passage as “haughty, perverse and scornful, spoiled and naughty.” Dubin’s translation renders the wife “a most unpleasant woman and a disdainful shrew.” Recueil general et complet des fabliaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles, imprimé ou inédits, ed. Anatole de Montaiglon and Gaston Raynaud, 6 vols. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1964), 6.146.309, 324. Dubin translates this statement as, “my heart was so very haughty.” See also the summary and discussion of Barbara N. Sargent-Baur, “Philippe de Remi’s” Conte de fole larguese: “A Fabliau with a Difference,” in “Por le soie amisté:” Essays in Honor of Norris J. Lacy, ed. Keith Busby and Catherine M. Jones (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 463–74. The NRCF “Texte Critique” uses a variant reading “li vilains molt s’en esgohele,” which Dubin translates as “the peasant was more than elated.” Dubin has it “will not seek pridefully to rise / One’s rightful place no one surpasses.” The tale is discussed as representative of the fabliau’s conservative, “even reactionary” spirit and anti-vilain bias by Norris J. Lacy, Reading Fabliaux (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1999), pp. 35–45. I respectfully disagree with such a generalization, although I accept the remark that the lesson here is “class segregation.” For the nobles’ predilection not to acknowledge the existence of their servants and generally people below their own status, especially striking in situations that modern sensibility perceives as intimate and private, see Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (New York: Urizen Books, 1978). NRCF 8.93.621 for Guillaume au Faucon. The term is hardiement [boldly]. The dynamics of avoir and savoir as a strategic approach of the fabliau genre is postulated, and its workings explained, by Gabrielle Marie Lyons, Avoir and Savoir: A Strategic Approach to the Old French Fabliaux (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1992), especially pp. 53–59, and pp. 180–87. See her “La stratégie dans les fabliaux,” Reinardus 4 (1991): 111–17, which derives from this project. Charles Muscatine, The Old French Fabliaux (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 24–46, where he notes that “social thought was much slower than social evolution in the Middle Ages,” and pp. 73–104, where he sees the fabliaux “ignoring conventional morality.” He sees the fabliau ethos as “hedonistic materialism.” See also Mary Jane Schenck, “The Fabliaux Ethos: Recent Views on Its Origins,” Reinardus 1 (1988): 129 [121–29]. Jürgen Beyer, Schwank und Moral. Untersuchungen zum altfranzösischen Fabliau und verwandten Formen (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Verlag, 1969)

126

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

KIRIL PETKOV

maintains that the fabliaux present a nonmoral view of the world; he presents the same argument in “The Morality of the Amoral,” in The Humor of the Fabliaux: A Collection of Critical Essays, eds. Thomas D. Cooke and Benjamin L. Honeycutt (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1974), p. 21 [15–42]. See also Elisabeth Schulze-Busacker, “La moralité des fabliaux,” in Épopeé animale: fable, fabliau, ed. Gabriel Bianciotto and Michel Salvat (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984), pp. 525–47, and Philippe Ménard, Les Fabliaux: Contes à rire du Moyen Age (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), pp. 108–142. Ménard concludes his section on fabliau morality quoting Gustave Lanson, p. 142, who asserts that the fabliaux “eliminate, for a moment, all notions of morality, authority, and social utility.” Among the fabliaux that employ the discourse on arrogance two tales endorse the opposite perceptions of economy, Le Vilain au Buffet (5.52), where the count gives freely to all who want in the spirit of the old aristocratic generosity, and Du denier et de la brebis, in Nouveau recueil de contes, dits, fabliaux, et autres pieces inedites des XIIIe, XIVe, et XVe siecles pour faire suite aux collections Legrand, d’Áussy, Barbazan, et Meon, ed. Achille Jubinalk, 3 vols. (Paris: E. Pannier, 1839), vol. 2, pp. 264–71, where the Coin states that things only have the meaning that money assigns to them (no line numbers). The knight states that even if he is called arrogant for turning down the priest’s generous offer to slash his bill if he only gave up the request for his mistress, he would live with it, for there is nothing more precious, and nothing a knight would not give up, to have a beautiful lady (in his bed). I would like to thank Dan Murtaugh for his invaluable help with these (and other) somewhat tricky lines. That much has already been pointed out in most of the newer studies on the fabliaux, perhaps best by Muscatine, Old French Fabliaux, pp. 26–46. Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, ed. Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 18–19 [1–23]. Katznelson postulates shared dispositions as one of the four levels on which social classes actualize themselves. I would like to thank Torbjörn Wandel for bringing this study to my attention. E. P. Thompson, “The Peculiarities of the English,” in Socialist Register 1965, ed. Ralph Miliband and John Saville (London: Merlin Press, 1966), p. 357 [349–65] Schenck, “The Fabliau Ethos,” 129. For the trend to see resentment—or ressentiment—as the emotional apprehension of undeserved advantage in class context, see the short but instructive survey of J.M. Barbalet, Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure: A Macrosociological Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 62–81 and pp. 126–48. The classical statement about the role of resentment is, of course, Nietzsche’s. See, On the Genealogy of Morals

MOBILITY AND RESENTMENT

22. 23.

24. 25.

127

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). On “fair” and “unfair” in relation to justice see John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness,” Philosophical Review, 67.2 (April 1958): 164–95. Rawls, “Justice as Fairness,” p. 172. W.G. Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice: A Study of Attitudes to Social Inequality in Twentieth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 5, pp. 258–84 and p. 282. For such a definition of justice see Rawls, “Justice as Fairness,” p. 165. Thomas H. Marshall, “The Nature of Class Conflict,” in Class, Citizenship, and Social Development: Essays by T. H. Marshall, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), pp. 172–73 [171–75]. Marshall’s definition of class is consonant with my reconstruction of the fabliau world’s perception: class is “a force or mechanism that operates to produce certain social attitudes.” See also page 164.

This page intentionally left blank

PART 3 MOBILE FORMATIONS

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 8 “BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR”: FOLKLORIC CAUTION IN THE FABLIAUX Ellen Lorraine Friedrich

This essay traces a folkloric tradition cautioning against immoderate desire, arguing that certain fabliaux participate in this tradition by highlighting the folly of wishing.

s a child, when I began sentences with “I wish . . .,” as in “I wish I could go to the beach today,” or “I wish we had a television,” I usually heard warning words of folk wisdom from my mother: “If wishes were horses, we’d all take a ride.” Her words implied that wishing was in some way inappropriate, for if wishes were easily granted, we could all “goof off.” At a deeper level, my mother communicated the concept that wishing could approach covetousness, craving that which does not belong to us, or that to which we have no right. More ominously, regarding the recklessness of the ill-conceived wish and its unpredictable outcome, my mother cautioned, “Be careful what you wish for . . .,” with the implied risky result: “You just might get it . . . (and then you’ll really be in trouble).” In this essay I examine the short Old French fabliau, Les .iiij. sohais saint Martin (4.31),1 situating it in a medieval tradition of exempla tales on the catastrophes caused by covetousness—inordinate desire—and relating it to a folk tradition of cautionary stories and sayings on the folly, futility, and danger of wishing. I consider, moreover, the problematic nature and language of wishing, as well as the importance of St. Martin as the grantor of these particular four—as opposed to the more common three—wishes. In

A

132

ELLEN LORRAINE FRIEDRICH

so doing, I reflect on analogues of the fabliau and the use of various types of humor therein to caution against immoderate desire.2 In Les .iiij. sohais I find an extreme use of comedic absurdity—scandalous, salacious, and scabrous as it is—that serves nevertheless to warn the fabliau audience about indiscriminate wishing. The anonymous narrator of Les .iiij. sohais saint Martin tells his audience about a pious vilain so devoted to St. Martin that one morning the latter rewards the former with four wishes, cautioning him to be careful while making them. When the peasant arrives home, his wife persuades him to let her make the first wish. In the discussion that ensues, the vilain recalls that St. Martin told him he should wish for something that can be of use to him and his wife. The woman, having swiftly sized up her own needs as well as having noted the shortcomings of her husband, asks that her partner be loaded up with pricks [ Je di, . . . / Que tot soiez chargiez de viz] (4.31.94–95), a wish that provides the first outrageous reminder to the audience that the tale is indeed a fabliau.3 When pricks pop out all over the peasant’s body, he cleverly decides to equalize the number of their genitalia by wishing that his wife sport as many cunts as he has pricks: [Que tu raies autretant cons/Comme je ai de viz sor moi; May you be arrayed with as many cunts as I have pricks on me] (4.31.144–45). With the second wish carried out, realizing that the two of them have created bodies unsuitable for public display, and that they have already wasted two wishes [Or avon deus sohaiz perduz!; Now we have two wishes lost!] (4.31.176), the woman directs her husband to make the third wish so that he won’t have any more pricks nor she cunts. Thus, in a scene resembling slapstick, the peasant wishes the multiplicity of genitalia away, so that his wife becomes furious when she finds no trace of her cunt, and he grows irate when he sees nothing left of his prick. The wife orders the solution: That the man use the fourth wish to give himself one prick and her one cunt, thereby returning the two to their original state, having lost nothing, except the potential for the riches they might have gained had they used the wishes wisely, as St. Martin had cautioned the peasant: “Garde toi bien au sohaidier” [Watch yourself well upon wishing] (4.31.29). As noted above, similar warnings about wishing exist in the modern world. Recently, my cousin quoted the preferred precept of her mother on the wisdom of wishing, “Well, just put the wish in one hand and spit in the other and we’ll see which fills up first.” There is a variant of that proposition, a “dirty” (if “spit” is relatively “clean”) version: “Put the wish in one hand and shit in the other and we’ll see which fills up first”—a fabliau-like saying if ever there was one. These last two aphorisms, as well as the aforementioned ones, in addition to stressing the unlikelihood of, and the inherent

“ B E C A R E F U L W H A T Y O U W I S H F O R”

133

danger (or at least the potential concomitant messiness) in having our desires fulfilled, demonstrate how speakers adapt their messages to their audience, adjusting vocabulary and expressions according to the maturity and social situation of the listener, and may suggest how traditional tales on the negative consequences of immoderate wishing have varied over the millennia. I will eventually elaborate upon the “clean” / “dirty” dichotomy of the last two dictums, specifically relating them to the fabliau(x). But first, I submit that one who gives advice, in likening wishes to horses, relegates the acts of granting and making wishes not only to the realm of the futile and the improbable but also to the realm of extreme foolishness, if not to that of the absurd. All of these are domains we recognize as familiar to the fabliau corpus. Similarly, weighing wishing against what may become tons, or mountains, of spit—or shit—evokes nothing so much as the risible or the comic, and therefore wishing, as an unproductive or counterproductive activity becomes, along with its unpredictable outcome(s), laughable. Consequently, according to our own modern folk precautions, wishing literally isn’t (or is only) worth shit. As demonstrated by St. Martin’s warning, “Garde toi bien au sohaidier” [Watch yourself well upon wishing] (4.31.29), and as implied in the folk wisdom previously cited regarding the worthlessness of wishing, we can surmise that there may exist a taboo, a general prohibition, or at least a caution in some societies against wishing, praying,4 or asking for too much. Moreover, in some languages we find linguistic problems in expressing the formulation of, and therefore even the concept(ion) of wishes. An exact verb for “to wish” does not exist in a number of languages, and a desire must be expressed in other ways, suggesting the limitations of language (and likely the concomitant societal reluctance) to express the yearning to affect, or effect, the future, thereby problematizing the transaction between the potential grantor of a request and the grantee. In the major Iberian languages, for example, one precedes the “wish” by Oxalá . . .(Portuguese) or Ojalá . . .(Spanish), both derived from Hispanic Arabic law sá lláh literally meaning “Allah / God willing”,5 followed by a phrase requiring the subjunctive to express the desire, thus leaving the doubtful results in God’s hands. Arabic and Hebrew do not have a verb meaning “to wish”, and even in Old French, the language of the fabliaux, the periphrastic verb so(u)hait(i)er / so(u)haid(i)er, is used, but not exclusively.6 The sense of the infinitive so(u)haid/tier (etymologically “to ‘under’ promise”)7 ‘promettre de façon à ne pas trop s’engager’8 [to promise in such a way as not to commit too much], conveys the sense that the grantor of the sohais remains both less than totally committed to the realization of the

134

ELLEN LORRAINE FRIEDRICH

“wishes” and doubtful about the outcome of them in the hands of the wisher, as we see in the case of St. Martin in Les .iiij. sohais.9 Understanding the English translation of the title, “The Four Promises / Vows [‘Wishes’] ‘of ’ [or ‘from’—belonging to] Saint Martin,”10 suggests that the “gifts” are the saint’s to give away, to reward—or possibly to punish—the peasant, as we shall see, as the saint’s probably threatening prophetic words promise: “Je t’an randrai ja ta deserte:” [I will give (back to) you soon “what you deserve”] (4.31.19). Furthermore, the saint practically predicts the uselessness or waste of the wishes, as well as the danger inherent in making them, when he warns the peasant about misusing them, “Tu n’i avras nul recovrier” [You will have no remedy for the evil] (4.31.30).11 The abuse of the wishes, first (and second) for multiple genitalia, third for their total disappearance, and fourth for one single sex organ apiece for the peasant and his wife, all duly granted by St. Martin, constitutes the comic originality of the fabliau. The sheer absurdity of the wishes, as well as the predicaments in which the couple find themselves, serve to highlight for the audience both the dangers and the futility of inordinate desire and ill-considered wishing. So, one might ask, what is St. Martin, or any saint, doing in such an unsaintly scenario? On one hand, he undoubtedly functions as a narrative hook—a circumstantial detail—along with the identification of the vilain as Norman (4.31.1), to fit the folkloric nature of the tale and to appeal to local audiences. On the other hand, the mention of St. Martin (de Tours), one of the patron saints of medieval France and a saint normally understood to symbolize charity, invites us to think about other associations with his character. In fact, and significantly for this fabliau, an examination of the medieval folk tradition surrounding St. Martin reveals that his character eventually became conflated with the licentious and ithyphallic, and at times androgynous, pagan god Bacchus. Born around 316 to pagan parents in Pannonia (now Hungary), Martin became a Roman soldier and was sent to Gaul, where one day, he cut his cloak and divided it down the middle to give half of it to a cold, naked beggar, thus establishing the future saint’s reputation for charity. When Christ appeared to Martin in a dream, he converted to Christianity, left the army, and began to convert others. The saint and his disciples founded the first monastery ever in Gaul, and in 372 he became bishop of Tours, where, after his death near there in 400, his shrine became a pilgrimage destination.12 Still a popular saint today, there are hundreds of churches and villages dedicated to him in France. However, the folkloric tradition associated with his character exists at the other end of the continuum from his reputation as a charitable saint. This patron saint of soldiers, beggars, and

“ B E C A R E F U L W H A T Y O U W I S H F O R”

135

innkeepers also serves as the patron saint of tavern keepers, vine growers, drinkers, and reformed drunkards. Moreover, Martin’s Feast Day, November 11, coincides with the festivities of Bacchus, the god of wine. “Martinmen” got drunk on the new wine during the medieval celebration that has been linked by some to the Vinalia, the Roman wine festival. One dictionary entry for Martinmas asserts that Martin took the role of Bacchus in the festivities of excess.13 Martin thus effectively replaced Bacchus, a god portrayed both with and without a phallus, and one who often appears alongside his son Priapus, the phallic god, each of them with a gigantic phallus. Therefore, Martin’s playing the role of the deity of hedonism, whose son Priapus serves as the protector of farmers like the vilain of our fabliau, and has as his attribute the phallus,14 might predict the saint’s function in the fabliau as a furnisher (if indirectly) of phalluses. Consequently, in Les .iiij. sohais, the Norman peasant’s devotion to St. Martin, a popular saint whose festival, as we have seen, was conflated with that of Bacchus, connects the story to license, and opens the way for the tale’s traditional cautionary lessons to be presented in an entertaining, and indeed hilarious, way to its audience. We can understand the stimulating effect and inspiration the Roman god’s ithyphallic status (rather than his deficiency) might have on the peasant’s wife. Who better to offer the possibility of fulfilling a certain phallic wish than St. Martin? The wife’s likely knowledge of the major attributes of Bacchus/Martin might encourage her enthusiasm in wishing that her husband’s body have plenty of pricks, especially since she observes that the one he had was useless to her because “It was always soft” [Sanpres iert mous] (4.31.133). Furthermore, probably cognizant of the opportunity for licentious behavior inspired by the festivities of St. Martin and Bacchus, the peasant hesitates little before ordering up an equal number of cunts for his wife. The narrator describes the reaction of the peasant to the cornucopia of cunts as “mout liez” [much overjoyed] (4.31.160), which allows the audience an instant to picture the prospect of the abundant sexual activities the husband and wife could enjoy with their surplus genitals—before the woman realizes what life in public might be like for the couple in such a condition. The solution is no better than the problem, when, after using the third wish, the spouses find themselves with no sex organs at all, in a state similar to that of Bacchus (Martin) when he is represented as an androgynous, asexual young man. Thus St. Martin the Mischievous (my appellation), a saint who encourages a man to leave his work and go merrily away [tot lieemant] home (4.31.25), and a saint whose festivities relate him to the phallic gods, offers wishes that will likely be used naughtily, and yet come to naught, as the saint warned: “Garde toi bien au sohaidier, / Tu ni avras nul recovrier!” [Watch yourself well upon wishing / You will have no remedy for the evil]

136

ELLEN LORRAINE FRIEDRICH

(4.31.29–30). Martin therefore operates as a trickster figure who presents a promise (or the possibility thereof) to the peasant of ameliorating his lot in life, only to set him up for failure. St. Martin, then, embodies the ambiguity inherent in ill-conceived wishes prompted by inordinate desire and cautioned against in stories and sayings. St. Martin also appears on the scene to offer a (deceptive) boon—a gift—and to double it in another medieval tale, here referred to as De Covoteus.15 Authored by Jean Bodel (1165?–1210),16 the verse narrative, generally considered one of the earliest fabliaux, and at eighty-five lines less than half the length of the two hundred line Les .iiij. sohais, serves as yet another warning on the subject of wishing, and as a caution against covetousness. Unlike Les .iiij. sohais, where St. Martin’s counsel concerns not wasting wishes, and where the peasant couple winds up back at their starting point, in Bodel’s tale St. Martin actually anticipates the horrible outcome, setting the two characters up to realize their devastating fate. The narrative, analogous in a number of ways to Les .iiij. sohais, inscribes the story of two sinful fellow travelers, Covoitanz [Covetousness or Greed], and Envieus [Envy/Envious(ness)], who, while out riding, come across St. Martin, and travel with him a while until their ways part. St. Martin decides to test the ill will of his companions [il les ot espermentez / De lor mauvaises volentez; he tested them / On their ill will] (6.71.31–32), offering a “gift” [un don] to one of the two (6.71.42), with the other receiving twice as much [deus tanz] (6.71.45). Assuming Envieus will wish for riches, and hoping to receive twice as much, Covoitanz demurs to his fellow rider to make the first wish, encouraging him to wish lavishly [Soies larges de sohaidier; Be generous in wishing] (6.71.53). Covoitanz eventually feels obliged to threaten Envieus with a pummeling for delaying his wish, whereupon Envieus finally relents, warning Covoitanz about getting nothing from the wishes if he (Envieus) can help it [n’en avrez riens, se ge puis!; you can have nothing from it if I can help it] (6.71.73). Envieus thus asks for one of his eyes to be put out by St. Martin, so his companion will lose both eyes and suffer a doubly grave wound. The saint soon grants the wish(es), leaving Envieus one-eyed and Covoitanz blind, hence fulfilling St. Martin’s expectations, as well as his implied prophesy. Given that Bodel presents Covetousness and Envy within his fabliau as, not surprisingly, sinful (6.71.13–25, 32–33, 37, 56, 58, 86), employing expressions such as “Qui menoient mauvaise vie” [Who led bad lives] (6.71.13), naming his characters so that medieval, as well as today’s modern audiences recognize the companions as representing two of the seven deadly sins, and Covetousness, a broken commandment (Exodus 20:17) as well, and finally, that he provides a disastrous end to his story, we can place

“ B E C A R E F U L W H A T Y O U W I S H F O R”

137

the fabliau within the tradition of moral, religious, didactic, and exempla tales on the catastrophes caused by covetousness, or inordinate desire.17 De Covoteus thus functions as a cautionary tale and represents a graphic illustration of the horrific consequences of indiscriminate wishing for the fulfillment of excessive desires. Both narratives, De Covoteus and Les .iiij. sohais saint Martin, the latter which I will argue also references, albeit in a comedic fashion, the two sins in question (covetousness and envy), frame a moral argument against covetousness, as well as against wishing, especially for that beyond our lot in life, folklore motifs still found in modern times in story and speech. The two fabliaux present “high” and “low” versions of a folktale type, similar to the two almost interchangeable versions of the folk wisdom regarding wishing: “Put the wish in one hand and spit/shit in the other and we’ll see which fills up first.” The distinction between high and low forms of the same tale reflects forms of folkloric speech that function on dual levels, in two worlds, one more correct, if colloquial, the other more carnivalesque, more evocative of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of billingsgate, or marketplace style of expression.18 Choosing “shit” over “spit” in modern speech, as well as multiplying pricks and cunts instead of eliminating eyes in medieval fabliaux both exemplify the “turnabout,” a “shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear.”19 In discussing grotesque realism, Bakhtin defines “upward” and “downward” in their bodily aspect: the upper as the face or head, and the lower, the genitals, belly, and buttocks.20 De Covoteus exemplifies the upper body, dealing as it does with the eyes, while Les .iiij. sohais concerns the lower parts, the genitals. The speech in De Covoteus, while threatening, upsetting, and even nauseating, dealing as it does with a grievous wounding (the putting out of eyes), bears little relation to that of Les .iiij. sohais, which promises genital pleasure, and festively, gleefully describes the distortions of the lower body—even placing its parts hilariously on the upper body—recalling the premise that “laughter has its origin in deformity of some kind.”21 I argue that the two fabliaux in which St. Martin appears on the scene to grant wishes function as perverse analogues of each other, De Covoteus, taking the high road, and Les .iiij. sohais the low. The former makes use of horror, or black humor, to caution against greed and envy, and the latter, of low comedy almost evocative of slapstick without the action (except for the popping out of pricks and the caving in of cunts), to warn equally against covetousness, envy, and immoderate desire. Before addressing in more detail the parallels in the two tales, I should like to consider the folk motif classification of the two fabliaux and the question of the number of wishes made in each. Both the stories, not

138

ELLEN LORRAINE FRIEDRICH

surprisingly, along with many of the versions of wishing narratives that French medievalist Joseph Bédier and others list or mention,22 fall into a motif type of world folk literature classified in Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature as “J2070. Absurd Wishes.”23 Further, De Covoteus has its own subcategory, “J2074. Twice the wish to the enemy. (The covetous and the envious). A can have a wish, but B will get twice the wish. A wishes that he may lose an eye, so that B may be blind.”24 This fabliau does in fact have antecedents and analogues, as Bédier notes, calling the fabliau “one of the favorite examples of medieval preachers” [l’un des exemples favoris des prédicateurs du moyen âge].25 An early thirteenth-century variant of the “Twice the wish to the enemy” (envious / covetous wish) that makes use of the same black humor as De Covoteus comes from the Old Spanish Libro de Alexandre. One editor of the work, José Fradejas Lebrero, considers the apologue of “el cobdiçioso” [the covetous one] and “el envidiant” [the envious one] the first versified tale in the Spanish language.26 Francisco Marcos Marín, in the introductory notes to his definitive edition of the work, concludes that the Libro was composed prior to 1250, possibly closer to 1205, making it roughly contemporaneous to Bodel’s De Covoteus (c.1194–1197).27 In the first verse of the Spanish version, the anonymous author announces his intention to set forth an exemplum: “Un enxenplo uos quiero en esto aducir” [An exemplum for you I want to adduce about that] (stanza 2360). The moral tale is contained in 6 of the 2,675 cuaderna vía strophes (a total of 24 verses—slightly more than a quarter of the length of the 86 verses of the Old French De Covoteus). The stanzas (2360–65) tell essentially the same story as the Old French version, except that the grantor of wishes is a saintly or good man [un santo ome; el buen ome](stanzas 2361, 2365), or, according to the edition of Jesús Cañas, “un ric’omne” [a rich man].28 Apparently, in only one edition is the grantor identified as more than human.29 Since in the case of the Old Spanish apologue (as in the case of the Old French De Covoteus), the wish and the doubled wish involve actual physical action and not the magical instant appearance of multiple members, a man of means is indeed sufficient to perform the deed—the putting out of eyes—even though the basic story line Bédier summarizes requires “un être surnaturel” [a supernatural being],30 a condition satisfied by St. Martin as the source of “aid” in both of the Old French tales, De Covoteus and Les .iiij. sohais. Carl Lindhal and the other editors of Medieval Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and Customs provide an entry on “Folktale” classifying oral prose fiction in three broad subdivisions.31 One of the three subsections, “Ordinary Folktales”—that the editors recognize as “far from

“ B E C A R E F U L W H A T Y O U W I S H F O R”

139

ordinary in content”—includes a category called “Religious Tales,” the description of which illuminates not only the Spanish exemplum mentioned above, but De Covoteus as well as Les .iiij. sohais saint Martin: supernatural aid comes from figures such as Christ or St. Peter rather than from fairies, and supernatural adversaries tend to be demons rather than giants. These oral tales greatly resemble medieval exempla, and it is indeed in exempla collections that we tend to find their medieval predecessors. In the widespread modern version of “The Wishes” (AT 750A)[32] Christ and St. Peter walk the earth, dispensing three wishes to a pious peasant, who uses them well, and three more to a foolish one, who uses the first two poorly and must then use the third to undo the others. Medieval predecessors of this tale often include only half of the modern plot; pious exemplum literature tends to focus on the three good wishes granted the pious man, while medieval fable and jokes often develop the plot of the three foolish wishes, which are sometimes the “gifts” of a demon rather than God.33

We can argue that, as well as purporting to provide aid, St. Martin in fact “crosses the line” and functions more as a “supernatural adversary” in the fabliaux/exempla that we have seen so far. He may have more in common with the concept of “demon” than with Christ or St. Peter. Brian J. Levy in The Comic Text notes “some resemblance between the devil,” who appears in the dit (tale) or conte pieux (pious or moral story), Du Vilain qui donna son ame au deable, and St. Martin in the two fabliaux we consider here.34 Indeed, if not devilish in character in the humorous Les .iiij. sohais and the moralistic De Covoteus, St. Martin appears at least mischievous.35 The citation concerning “Religious Tales” echoes, but is more expansive than Bédier’s plot line,36 and Stith Thompson’s previously cited Motif-Index includes other variants in subcategories of type “J2070. Absurd Wishes:” “J2071. Three foolish wishes,” which lists Les .iiij. sohais, and cross references both “C773.1. Tabu: Making unreasonable requests,” as well as “K175. Deceptive bargain: Three wishes.” The classification “J2072. Shortsighted wish” has a number of subordinate groupings, including the well-known “Midas’s touch,” and we find still more subcategories involving wise and foolish wishes.37 Thompson does not even comment on the fact that he has categorized Les .iiij. sohais under “J2071. Three . . . .” The index entry for “three” in the Motif-Index comprises a page and a half of small print, whereas the entry for “four” occupies only a little over half a page,38 indicating the former’s importance in folklore, although four has its significance also. According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, three is considered a “perfect number,” expressive of “beginning, middle, and end,”39 a concept that relates well to storytelling, perhaps at least partially explaining the surfeit of

140

ELLEN LORRAINE FRIEDRICH

stories where three wishes are granted. The anonymous author of Les .iiij. sohais, by increasing the number of wishes, increases the hilarity, allowing not only both husband and wife to have an absurd multiplicity of sex organs, but also for both of them to be ludicrously totally lacking in genitalia, before the abashed restoration of one genital organ apiece. We find one of the better-known examples in medieval French literature of the less scandalous versions of the granting of three wishes— although not all of the wishes are used—in Marie de France’s thirty-four-line fable “Del Vilein e del folet” dated between 1160 and 1190.40 The fable in verse tells of a peasant who catches a goblin who gives him three urementz (prayers, desires, or wishes) (verse 3)—here again we have the problematic language expressing the concept of wishes—in return for the peasant’s not showing him to anyone. Naturally, the peasant was thrilled with his luck (verse 5), and when his wife comes home he gives her two of the urementz. For a while the couple does not make any wishes, until one day at a meal of mutton when the wife has an overwhelming desire to have some of the loin and marrow for herself but cannot get her hands on it. She then wishes for her husband to have a long beak so he can get the marrow for her. Not surprisingly, the man is shocked at what happens to him, and uses the second wish to return his face to its original condition. Marie leaves her story there, with no third wish fulfilled, closing with a general warning about people who lose out because of their gullibility. Lacking a third wish, this particular fable remains incomplete and unsatisfying, but other versions carry the story through to its natural conclusion, an ending similar in some respects to that of Les.iiij. sohais. The anonymous ninth-century Romulus Anglicus Latin collection contains a tale that has precursors, one by Phaedrus who wrote between 15 BCE and 50 CE, and another in the fifth-century composition, the Panchatantra.41 Similar to the Marie de France fable, the Latin narrative begins when a peasant captures a dwarf who, so that the peasant will release him, promises to fulfill three desires for him. When the man’s wife asks for two of the wishes, he keeps one for himself. In this narrative too there comes a day when the wife so desires the marrow of mutton that she wishes an iron beak for her husband so he can reach the marrow for her. The wife then wishes the beak away, leaving him with no nose at all, so that her husband is forced to use the third wish to return to his original state. This story quite resembles Les.iiij. sohais saint Martin in that the deformity is wished, wished away—leaving no protrusion at all—and then wished back to its original form. Moreover, although I will reserve the argument for a later study, the language of desire for a long, hard body part, as well as the presence of a woman who wants to suck juice in a context of eating and drinking—both well-known metaphors for sex acts—suggest to me that

“ B E C A R E F U L W H A T Y O U W I S H F O R”

141

there may be more to both stories than meets the eye. Regardless, a large part of the humor found in these tales lies in the conjuring of outsized body parts for men in order to serve the pleasure of women, followed by the total disappearance of the same hard protrusions, and, finally, their restoration to their original and normal form(s). Similarly, comedic components of the fabliau Les.iiij. sohais saint Martin consist of the audience’s imagining the sheer number and variety of pricks and cunts ordered up, and receiving the accompanying description of their location and forms, followed by the shock of every trace of such important parts vanishing into thin air, and finally, the realization that the last wish must be used to return the bodies to their original state(s), therefore losing all hope of improving one’s lot, or pleasure, in life. In comparison, the Latin narrative seems only mildly humorous, and the Marie de France fable even less so, but taken in context, the two tales again remind us of the complications of immoderate sensual desire, regardless of whether the desire is overtly sexual or not. Both Bédier, in his classic work Les Fabliaux: Études de littérature populaire et d’histoire littéraire du moyen âge, and Fradejas Lebrero, in his edition of the Sendebar: Libro de los engaños de las mujeres,42 a collection of tales translated from Arabic into Spanish around 1253, assert that the oriental versions of the wishing tales tend to provide the “obscene” variations. They specifically mention, not surprisingly, the Mille et une Nuits / Las mil y una noches where, on night 596, although Bédier declines to define the wishes, a couple uses their first wish to obtain a giant phallic member for the man, one so enormous that the man can’t even stand up. He therefore wishes it away with the second wish, and wishes it back as it originally was with the third and last wish.43 Les .iiij. sohais saint Martin may have more in common with this last tale, at least erotically, than with the other examples of stories where three wishes are granted. But in the fabliau, the anonymous author, by adding an extra wish (i.e., the second wish for the woman to have outstanding—or in-caving—orifices), has multiplied the merriment, even as he (or she) has increased the greedy “need” for the husband to match his plural parts with an equal number on his mate’s body. Similarly, Jean Bodel has multiplied misery and the black humor in his account of Covoitanz and Envieus through the double pain and loss of Covoitanz’s two eyes to Envieus’s one empty ocular orifice. Thus both Les.iiij. sohais saint Martin and De Covoteus, as indicated, function as cautionary tales about the dangers of short-sighted wishing, and both warn against immoderate desire, whether a desire to do others harm as in the case of De Covoteus, or for more than one has in Les.iiij. sohais (and similarly, in other variants mentioned herein). The two main

142

ELLEN LORRAINE FRIEDRICH

characters of the former correspond to the couple of the latter. Covoitanz, in the more classic of the two narratives, whose nominalized name derives from Old French coveitier / convoitier, -ir “to desire,” from Latin cupiditas “desire,”44 a term, which, when personified, is represented by Cupid, the god of erotic love. Covoitanz thus recalls the character of the wife, who desires excessively. As Webster’s makes clear, “Covetous implies inordinate desire often for another’s possession.”45 Specifically, the wife desires, not just one prick to replace her husband’s soft one, but a whole body covered with them. Her husband functions as Envieus, whose name derives from Latin invidia (envious) from Latin invidere (to look askance at); “painful or resentful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another joined with a desire to possess the same advantage.”46 Thus when the husband notices that his wife has the advantage of using, at least potentially, his multiple members for her plural pleasure, he becomes desirous of being able to exercise the same sort of sexual excess and must wish her body inundated with vaginas. Although we may laugh at the capers of the covetous couple and wince at the pain of the traveling companions, from each narrative we understand an extreme example of the catastrophe that can be caused by covetousness, as well as the folly and futility—the wastefulness—of the act of wishing in the first place. Each fabliau has a different focus. In De Covoteus it is on the horrible, vicious, permanent ending, whereas in Les.iiij. sohais the spotlight focuses on the three hilarious, absurd, temporary dilemmas in which the characters find themselves, the outcome of each typifying one of the two primary characteristics of the fabliau corpus—violence and humor—both here focused on the body and its parts. The sentence found at the end of another fabliau, Les .iii. dames qui troverent un Vit, “Cil qui tot covoite tout pert” [She who covets all, loses all] (8.96.128), applies in some manner to both De Covoteus and Les .iiij. sohais saint Martin. In De Covoteus, Covoitanz lost all his sight, even if Envieus lost only half, yet they were both morally and metaphorically blind all along. The peasant and his wife in Les.iiij. saint Martin lost the product of the day’s work the poor man did not perform, as well as a chance to have more material goods, or at least to have a very good time if they could have determined how to appear in public with the surplus of sex organs. “Be careful what you wish for,” the implicit and, at times, the explicit warning included in medieval and modern cautionary tales and folk wisdom—albeit at times couched in humor—is likely a caution not to covet or wish at all. We are warned not to covet anything—worldly goods or body parts—beyond what we already have. All wishes are in fact foolish and futile, and therefore absurd and necessarily short-sighted, as we do not, in fact, have access to the future and what it holds for us.

“ B E C A R E F U L W H A T Y O U W I S H F O R”

143

Notes I would like to thank R. Howard Bloch, director of the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer 2003 Institute “The Old French Fabliaux and the Medieval Sense of the Comic” at Yale University, as well as my colleagues at the Institute, for encouraging my interest in this particular fabliau. Moreover, I am indebted to my readers, both Holly A. Crocker and the volume’s anonymous reviewers, for their suggestions. Members of my family, especially Carla Augusta Friedrich and Janet Young Brown, contributed to the underpinnings of this essay and the folk wisdom contained herein. And, as always, thanks to my friend and colleague, H. Dianne Brain. Teresa Inman, research librarian at Presbyterian College, assisted in the acquisition of source material in the early stages of my research, and Denise Montgomery at Valdosta State University Library similarly assisted me later in the project. 1. I have chosen to use the “.iiij. sohais” form of the title (instead of “quatre Sohais”) since it recalls the manner in which references to the wishes appear in medieval manuscripts. References to manuscript variations also come from the NRCF and are so indicated. English translations provided in this essay are my own literal ones. 2. Joseph Bédier treats what he refers to as the variants of a basic story type, of which Les.iiij. sohais saint Martin represents one example, in Les Fabliaux: Études de littérature populaire et d’histoire littéraire du moyen âge, 6th ed. (1894; repr. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1964), pp. 212–28. Whereas Bédier focuses on categorizing versions of the fabliau, I concentrate on situating Les.iiij. sohais within a popular tradition of cautionary tales. I use the terms “analogue” or “analogous” because I focus both on the similarities in structure in the narratives, as well as on how the tales function in warning against the dangers of desiring. 3. The anonymous narrator announces “Un fablel merveilleus et cointe” [A surprising and funny tale] (4.31.3) at the beginning of his story. 4. I do not mean to imply that prayer and wishing are interchangeable. They do, however, have features in common, e.g., the concept that there may be correct and incorrect ways of doing both, or that both wishing and praying, when requests are formulated, are actions that carry the concomitant hope for, if not the expectation of, some sort of result. 5. For etymology, see the Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española, 22nd ed., 2 vols. (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 2001), 2:1613. The primary meaning and sense of the verb desear “to want” is not an exact equivalent of English “to wish.” 6. For example, the author of Les.iiij. sohais saint Martin also uses “je di” [I say / ask], 4.31.94. 7. So(u)haid/tier, formed periphrastically on Gallo-Roman *subtus haitare, from Latin subtus [beneath, below, underneath] and Germanic *haitan “ordonner, promettre” [to order, promise], suggests that the act of wishing, as well as the language expressing it are more complicated matters than they seem on the surface. For meanings and etymologies, see dictionaries and

144

ELLEN LORRAINE FRIEDRICH

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

etymological dictionaries: Le Nouveau Petit Robert. Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1993), p. 2121; Oscar Bloch and Walther Von Wartburg, eds., Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue française, 7th ed. (Paris: PUF, 1932), p. 601; Algirdas Julien Greimas, Dictionnaire de l’ancien français (Paris: Larousse, 1980), p. 600; Nouveau Dictionnaire Étymologique et Historique, ed. Albert Dauzat, Jean Dubois, and Henri Mitterand, 3rd ed. (Paris: Librarie Larousse, 1971), p. 703. Nouveau Dictionnaire, p. 703. The plural substantive sohais (sohait singular) of the title actually means something between “promise” and “vow,” rather than today’s translation of the term, “wish.” The title of the fabliau, Les.iiij. sohais saint Martin, demonstrates the genitive use of the oblique case, common in Old French, to indicate possession of the “wishes” by the saint. For an explanation of the three constructions (the genitive use of the oblique case, a, and de) used to express possession in Old French, see William Kibler, An Introduction to Old French (New York: Modern Language Association, 1984), p. 141, section 47.3. For my translation of “Tu n’i avras nul recovrier” [You will have no remedy for the evil; 4.31.30] see Greimas, Dictionnaire, p. 542, “Ni’a nul recovrier, le mal est sans remède” [There is no remedy for evil, evil is without remedy]. See, e.g., Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend [Funk and Wagnalls], ed. Maria Leach and Jerome Fried, 2 vols. (New York: Crowell, 1950), 2:682; Allison Jones, The Wordsworth Dictionary of Saints (Ware, Herfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), p. 172; Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 14th ed. by Ivor H. Evans (Great Britain: Harper [Cassell], 1991), p. 708. Standard Dictionary, 2:682. See also Brewer’s, pp. 66, 708, 880. Bédier notes that St. Martin was “un patron de la bonne chère” [a patron of the good life; Les Fabliaux, p. 472]. Standard Dictionary, 2:682; and again, Brewer’s, pp. 66, 708, 880. Noomen and van den Boogaard list the fabliau in their NRCF as Le Couvoiteus et l’Envieus (6.71, e.g., on pp. vii and 272), but refer to it in their discussion as Du Couvoiteus et de l’Envieus (6.71, p. 276). They note that the title appears at the beginning of the text in MS D (the one they choose to edit) as Du Couvoitous, and as De Covoteus et de l’Envieus at the end of the text (6.71, p. 275). They also observe that the title Del Couvoiteus et de l’Envieus is named, in error, at the beginning of another fabliau (6.71, p. 275). Bédier refers to it as “Le Convoiteux et l’Envieux” (Les Fabliaux: Études, p. 457), and Per Nykrog as “Le Couvoiteus et l’Envieus” in the index of his Les Fabliaux (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1957; new ed. Genève: Droz, 1973), p. 314, although he uses a number of other spellings throughout his study. Brian J. Levy, in The Comic Text: Patterns and Images in the Old French Fabliaux (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000) identifies the fabliau in his index as “Le Couvoiteus et l’Envieus” (p. 259). Nathaniel E. Dubin, in his soon to be published fabliaux edition and translation, refers to the Old

“ B E C A R E F U L W H A T Y O U W I S H F O R”

16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

145

French text as Du couvoitous, and has translated the title in English as “Mr. Greed and Mr. Envy.” Within the Old French text(s) (manuscripts) of the fabliau the main character is most often referred to as “Covoitant,” nominative “[li] Covoitanz/s.” Therefore, as I summarize the story line I use Covoitanz, both to differentiate the personage from the title, and to recall the Old French language of the text. Depending on the reference, eight or nine fabliaux are attributed to Bodel. See, e.g., Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: Le Moyen Âge (1964; rev. ed. Paris: Fayard, 1992), pp. 748–51 or Nykrog, Les Fabliaux, p. 325. Peter Speed, in an anthology entitled Medieval Cautionary Tales (New York: Italica Press, 2003), pp. 105–106, includes a prose translation of Le Couvoiteus [De Covoteus] among the sixteen fabliaux he has chosen to represent the French tradition of cautionary tales. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Introduction,” Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 1–58; esp. pp. 6–11. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 11. Ibid., p. 21. Mary A. Grant, The Rhetorical Theories of the Laughable: The Greek Rhetoricians and Cicero (Madison: University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, 1924), p. 32. Grant refers to Plato and Aristotle. See also R. Howard Bloch’s commentary on the association of the comic and the phallic in R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 110–111. Bédier, Les Fabliaux, pp. 212–28. See, e.g., José Fradejas Lebrero, ed., Sendebar: Libro de los engaños de las mujeres (Madrid: Castalia, 1990), pp. 119–21. Stith Thompson, ed., Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends, 6 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956, 1957), 4:174. Ibid., 4:174. Bédier, Les Fabliaux: Études, p. 457. Cited in Elena Catena’s edition of the Libro de Alejandro (Madrid: Castalia, 1985), p. 308, unnumbered note to verse 2360a, in reference to Fradejas Lebrero’s edition of Sendebar (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1981). The apologue occurs in Catena’s edition on p. 308. “Estudio [Ensayo] crítico,” in Libro de Alexandre, ed. Francisco Marcos Marín (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1987), pp. 24–26, [pp. 11–89]. Stanzas 2360–65, which comprise the apologue, appear on pages 414–15. Scholars date De Covoteus from the period 1194 to 1197 (NRCF, 6.71, p. 276). Jesús Cañas, Libro de Alexandre, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Cátedra, 1995). See page 528 for the apologue. The grantor of wishes is called “un ric’omne” at stanza 2361 and “el buen omne” at stanza 2365. Fradejas Lebrero refers to the grantor as “Mercurio” (Sendebar, unnumbered note, p. 120).

146

ELLEN LORRAINE FRIEDRICH

30. Bédier’s summary of the common story line: “un être surnaturel accorde à un ou plusieurs mortels le don d’exprimer un ou plusieurs souhaits, qu’il promet d’exaucer. Ces souhaits se réalisent, en effet; mais, contre toute attente et par la faute de ceux qui les forment, ils n’apportent après eux aucun profit, quand ils n’entraînent pas quelque dommage” [a supernatural being accords one or more mortals the gift of expressing one or more wishes, that he promises to carry out. These wishes are realized, in fact, but, contrary to all expectations, and by the fault of those who make them, the wishes do not bring the makers of them any profit, even when they don’t bring with them some harm] (Translation mine; Bédier, Les Fabliaux, pp. 212–13). 31. Carl Lindahl, John McNamara, and John Lindow, eds., Medieval Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and Customs, 2 vols. (Santa Barbara; Denver; Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2000), 1:348–51. I do not treat the subject of orality in this essay. Most of the major works on the fabliaux treat the subject at least briefly. For instance, Bédier recognizes the folkloric roots of many fabliaux themes and includes modern oral narratives in his schema of the five groups of the wishing tales (Les Fabliaux, pp. 212–28). See also Willem Noomen’s “Performance et mouvance: À propos de l’oralité des fabliaux,” Reinardus 3(1990):127–42; and the index references for “fabliaux” in Evelyn Birge Vitz’s Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1999), esp. pp. 20–21. 32. AT 750A is a reference to an Aarne-Thompson motif classification. 33. Lindahl et al., Medieval Folklore, 1:350. 34. Levy, The Comic Text, pp. 167–69, 272. Levy points out in pages 167 and 272 that Du Vilain appeared as number 141 in volume 6 in Montaiglon and Raynaud’s Recueil générale, but was “subsequently removed from the fabliaux corpus” (p. 167). For his comments on the devil and St. Martin, see page 169. 35. The assertion that St. Martin functions as a trickster figure, and that he is a bit devilish warrants further investigation, which I will likely undertake. In support of his association with a devilish figure I note that Brewer’s offers the information that the devil is “traditionally assigned to Saint Martin” to serve as a “running footman,” p. 709. 36. See note 30 above for Bédier’s story line. 37. Thompson, Motif-Index, 4:174. 38. Ibid., “three” 6:791–93; “four” 6:312–13. 39. Brewer’s, pp. 1097–1098. 40. Marie de France, Marie de France: Fables, ed. and trans. Harriet Spiegel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). The text of the fable is on page 164; the facing page English translation on 165 (although I am paraphrasing and translating my understanding of the Old French text); for the approximate date of composition, see page 5. 41. Anthologized and commented in Francisco Rodríguez Adrados’s El cuento erótico griego, latino, e indio (Madrid: Ediciones del Orto, 1994), pp. 183–84. See also his introductory essays on “[Las] Fuentes . . .”[Sources . . .], pp. 19–54, esp. pp. 32–54.

“ B E C A R E F U L W H A T Y O U W I S H F O R”

147

42. Fradejas Lebrero, Sendebar. (Madrid: Castalia, 1990). The exemplum and the editor’s notes are found on pp. 117–21. Bédier, Les Fabliaux, esp. pp. 220–21. 43. Every copy of volume 6 of Richard F. Burton’s The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Printed by the Burton Club for Private Subscribers Only [1885]) that I have been able to examine no longer contains the story (the pages having been torn out) “The Three Wishes, or The Man Who Longed to See The Night of Power” (from the section of the volume entitled “The Craft and Malice of Woman”). I have, however, located a copy of the text on the internet at http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0750a.html#nights (last accessed on September 25, 2005). I have also consulted Las mil y una noches, ed. Juan Vernet, 2 vols. (Barcelona: Planeta, 2005), noche 596, 1:342–45, esp. p. 343. 44. See etymological dictionaries including Greimas, Dictionnaire, p. 146. 45. Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: MerriamWebster, 1990), p. 300. 46. Webster’s, p. 417; see also, Greimas, Dictionnaire, p. 235.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 9 CHAUCER’S FRENCH ACCENT: GARDENS AND SEX-TALK IN THE SHIPMAN’S TALE Peter G. Beidler

Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale was probably not based on a lost Old French fabliau, but the genre’s penchant for animal euphemism more broadly influences the tale, particularly its garden scene.

t has sometimes been assumed that, because of its Parisian-area setting and its macaronic use of bits of the French language—“Quy la?” (Who’s there?)—Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale must have had a French fabliau source, now lost to us.1 John Webster Spargo in his introductory note to the tale in the original Sources and Analogues gave that theory the weight of authority with this opening comment: “In the absence of an authentic source, the likeliest thing that can be said is that, if we had one, it would probably be an Old French fabliau very similar to the Shipman’s Tale, of which the atmosphere is all French.”2 That theory, if not discredited or abandoned altogether, has generally been set aside as unhelpful to scholars who seek to understand the more English emphases of the tale of the merchant of SaintDenis, his clever wife, and his good friend the monk daun John. Writing in a time when the accepted view was that Chaucer had never read Boccaccio’s Decameron, Spargo confidently declared that Decameron VIII, 1, while the closest analogue, was not the source of the Shipman’s Tale. Many scholars, myself included, are now taking seriously the idea that Chaucer’s primary source was indeed the first tale of the eighth day of the Decameron.3 While I agree that Decameron VIII, 1 was probably the primary source of the Shipman’s Tale, in this paper I urge that we once again consider

I

150

PETER G. BEIDLER

Chaucer’s French accent in the tale. I do not suggest that we exhume the dead notion that Chaucer’s source for the Shipman’s Tale was a lost French fabliau. I do suggest, however, that certain elements in the garden scene in the Shipman’s Tale point to the influence of several extant Old French fabliaux. The implications of my work will be of most interest to Chaucer scholars, because I propose that Chaucer was probably influenced by French fabliaux even when he worked primarily from an Italian original. They will also be of interest to those who work primarily on the Old French fabliaux because I propose that French comic tales were not isolated texts that appealed only to contemporary audiences listening on specific occasions in one or two locations, but that they had a broader influence well past the time of their initial composition and delivery. I focus here on two elements in the hundred-line garden scene in the Shipman’s Tale. First, the meeting of a frustrated wife and a lecherous cleric in a garden-like setting sounds at times remarkably similar to a scene in the fabliau Aloul (3.14). Second, daun John’s mention of a weary rabbit in his suggestive sex-talk to the wife in that garden picks up the flavor of animal euphemisms common in French fabliaux. These elements suggest that when Chaucer adapted the Italian story to French setting and characters, he might have been influenced by several pieces of French fabliaux. These pieces, taken together, contribute to our understanding of it and give it a French intonation or accent. In a sense, then, I am urging a different kind of support to Spargo’s statement that in the Shipman’s Tale the “atmosphere is all French,” not just because the garden is in Saint-Denis, a town near Paris, but also because it involves elements probably derived from the fabliaux.

The Garden Encounter in Aloul At the start of the Shipman’s Tale the wife and the monk meet while daun John says his morning devotions in the garden of the merchant of Saint-Denis. That amazing hundred-line scene, in which the wife and the monk come together as relatives (“cousins”) but part a few minutes later as promised lovers with an arrangement to meet for purposes of prepaid sexual pleasure, shows Chaucer at his most original. There is no parallel scene in Decameron VIII, 1, in which the two lovers, the German soldier Gulfardo and the proud Milanese wife Ambruogia, do not meet face-to-face, but rather use a letter-carrying go-between to negotiate the terms of his lust and her greed. Chaucer’s garden scene is without question his most strikingly original addition to the story of the traditional fabliau love triangle—cuckolded husband, deceiving wife, lecherous

CHAUCER’S FRENCH ACCENT

151

cleric—but it bears a suggestive similarity to a scene in the Old French fabliau Aloul. In the thirteenth-century Aloul, a story about a rich but miserly farmer named Aloul who marries a nobleman’s daughter, the wife and her future lover meet in a natural outdoor setting. Because Aloul loves his money more than he loves his wife, however, he is less than generous with his cash: Alous estoit uns vilains riches, Mes mout estoit avers et ciches, Ne ja son vueil n’eüst jor bien: Deniers amoit seur toute rien, En ce metoit toute s’entente. (3.14.5–9)4 [Aloul was rich. He earned his living by farming, but he wasn’t giving: in no case would he spend his wealth, he loved his coins beyond all else and lavished on them all his care.]

Even though Aloul’s wife has been faithful to him and he has no reason to suspect her of infidelity, he is irrationally jealous and never lets her go out without him, even to church. After two years, she is so angered and frustrated by his stinginess and his jealousy that she scarcely sleeps. She is ready to accept a lover just to spite him: A la dame forment desplest Quant ele premiers l’aperçoit, Lors dist que s’ele nel deçoit, Se lieu en puet avoir & aise, Dont sera ele mout mauvaise. Ne puet dormir ne jor ne nuit: Mout het Aloul et son deduit, Ne set que face ne comment Ele ait pris d’Aloul vengement, Qui le mescroit a si grant tort. (3.14.30–39) [From when she first got the impression of his mistrust she was aggrieved and swore that he would be deceived if she could find the place and time, or else she wasn’t worth a dime. By day and night all sleep has fled, she hates Aloul and hates his bed,

152

PETER G. BEIDLER

she doesn’t know what she can do to take revenge on Aloul, who harbors suspicions without cause.]

One April morning this sleep-deprived and angry wife arises early and walks out into the orchard for a barefoot stroll on the dewy lawn. There she encounters the local priest, who lives in the house next door and is up early to take a morning stroll: La dame s’est prise a lever, Qui longuement avoit veillié; Entree en est en son vergié, Nus piez en va par la rousee, D’une pelice ert afublee Et un grant mantel ot deseure. Et li prestres en icele eure Estoit levez par matin. Il erent si tres pres voisin Entr’aus dues n’avoit c’une essele. (3.14.48–57) [The lady rose, and she got moving, who’d long awake been lying there, and went out to her orchard barefoot, walked across the dew-soaked lawn, wearing the light cloak she’s put on and a large mantle over it. The priest that day had also quit his bed to take the morning air. Their two houses were very near, between them just some wooded land.]

A wall separates the two orchards. The priest begins the conversation from his side of the wall by asking what causes the wife to rise so early in the morning. The wife’s reply introduces talk about the health benefits of the “dew” (which pretty clearly is meant to suggest semen) and the medicinal qualities of a certain “root” (by which the priest clearly means his penis): —Sire, dist ele, la rousee Est bone et saine en icest tans Et est alegemenz mout granz, Ce disent cil fusicien. —Dame, dist il, ce cuit je bien, Quar par matin fet bon lever. Mes l’en se doit desjeüner D’une herbe que je bien connois.

CHAUCER’S FRENCH ACCENT

153

Vez le la, pres que je n’i vois; Corte est et grosse la racine, Mes mout est bone medecine: N’estuet meillor a cors de fame. (3.14.70–81) [“Father,” the lady answered, “isn’t the dew both good and beneficial? It lightens the heart something special, so all the doctors say, they do.” “Lady,” he said, “I think so too, for rising early is a treat, and for one’s breakfast one should eat an herb about which I could teach you something. See—it’s there in reach. The root of it is thick and short, but such good medicine that naught is better for the health of women.”]

Aloul’s wife is immediately interested and invites the priest to come across the wall to show her this special herb-root. The priest, of course, is only too happy to come over and show her: —Sire, metez outre vo jambe, Fet la dame, vostre merci, Si me moustrez se ele est ci. —Dame, fet il, iluec encontre. A tant a mise sa jambe outre, Devant la dame est arestez. “Dame, dist il, or vous seez, Quar au cueillir i a mestrie.” Et la dame tout li otrie, Qui n’i entent nule figure. (3.14.82–91) [The lady in her turn asks him in: “Step over, Father, please, and show me. Have we some? Where does it grow?” “Right over there, lady.” Then he climbed across to her property and came and stood in front of her. “Lady,” he said, “sit you down there, for gathering it calls for skill.” The lady submits to his will, quite ignorant of rhetoric.]

They have sex right there. Although the wife seems to resist, she also enjoys the encounter and immediately promises the priest that, if he will

154

PETER G. BEIDLER

keep their affair secret, she will meet him often and make him wealthy in sexual pleasure: “—Sire, dist ele, cest afere Gardez que soit celé mout bien, Et je vous donrai tant du mien Que toz jors mes serez mananz. Foi que doi vous, bien a deus anz Qu’Alous me tient en tel destrece, Qu’ainc puis n’oi joie ne leece.” (3.14.108–114) [“Father,” she answered him, “see to it that what’s occurred here stays unknown, and I’ll give you from what I own so much that you’ll be rich from now on. For well-nigh two years, I vow, Aloul’s kept me in such distress I’ve known no joy or happiness.”]

She offers to please him and herself sexually because, after all, her husband makes her miserable. There are obvious differences between the garden scene in the Shipman’s Tale and the orchard scene in Aloul. Aloul is a farmer, not a merchant, for example, and he sleeps through his wife’s encounter with the man who becomes her lover, rather than sequestering himself in his counting house. He is said to be jealous, unlike the merchant of Saint-Denis, who is not. The lover is a priest, not a monk, and never claims to be a friend or cousin to the man he cuckolds. The wife of Saint-Denis, unlike Aloul’s wife, has gone into debt to buy clothing, and she charges the monk for the sexual pleasure she gives him. The site for their meeting is a garden, not an orchard, there is no wall that the monk has to scale, no sexual allegory of “dew” and “root,” no sexual assignation on that site, and so on. And, of course, the story line in Aloul goes on in ways that have no relation to the events in the Shipman’s Tale. The main story in Aloul—85 percent of the total narrative—is yet to come. Despite these broad differences, the similarities are sufficiently specific that the orchard scene in Aloul might well have provided Chaucer with the fundamental structure for the garden scene and some of the subsequent characterization in the Shipman’s Tale: a dissatisfied wife receptive to the advances of a clerical suitor she chances to meet very early in the morning in an outdoor setting while her husband is otherwise occupied in the house; the husband’s concern for making money (see Shipman’s Tale VII.287–90); the greeting in which the cleric asks why the wife is up so early (VII.99); the wife’s complaints about her husband’s deficient sexuality

CHAUCER’S FRENCH ACCENT

155

and generosity (VII.114–17,161–77); the cleric’s conviction that he can help her (VII.125–30); the wife’s agreement to provide sexual services to the cleric if he promises to agree to keep matters secret (VII.130–33); and the sleazy cleric’s obscene sex-talk to the intended victim of his lust. Daun John’s Fabliau Sex-Talk Chaucer’s monk speaks very much in the manner of the Old French fabliaux when he talks to his friend’s wife about the nocturnal doings of husbands and wives. When they first meet in the outdoor setting, the priest in Aloul quickly asks the wife why she is up so early: “ ‘Dame,’ fet il, ‘bon jor aiez! / Por qu’estes si matin levee?’ ” [“ ‘Lady, good day to you!’ he said. ‘Say, why are you so early risen?’ ”] (3.14.68–69). The priest’s opening is nicely reflected in the monk’s opening words to the wife of Saint-Denis in Chaucer’s story: “ ‘What eyleth yow so rathe for to ryse, / Nece?’ quod he”(VII.99–100).5 Daun John then launches immediately into what I am calling sex-talk: [I]t oghte ynough suffise Fyve houres for to slepe upon a nyght, But it were for an old appalled wight, As been thise wedded men, that lye and dare As in a fourme sit a wery hare, Were al forstraught with houndes grete and smale. (VII.100–105)

These lines are interesting for several reasons. For one thing, the monk is the first to bring up the subject of what happens between a man and his wife in the bedroom. He says that five hours of sleep at night is plenty, except for an old wedded man who lies in bed motionless, like a tired rabbit cowering in a grassy burrow while hounds harass him just outside. The implication of the monk’s reference to the sexual incapacity of married men is clear enough: the monk, single and fresh from a night’s rest, would not be so like a weary rabbit. That the monk has some such meaning in mind seems clear enough from his immediately following reference to the husband’s “labor” all night long, thus driving his wife out of her bed so she can get some rest: But deere nece, why be ye so pale? I trowe, certes, that oure goode man Hath yow laboured sith the nyght bigan That yow were nede to resten hastily. (VII.106–109)

The monk is so embarrassed by his talk of sexual laboring that he laughs and then blushes: “And with that word he lough ful murily, / And of his owene thought he wax al reed” (VII.110–111). Clearly, then, the monk

156

PETER G. BEIDLER

has introduced sex-talk into his conversation with the wife. Seeing that she has got up early and is pale, he immediately jumps to the conclusion that her husband is either a cowering rabbit or that he overworks her sexually. That gives the wife a perfect opening to assure the monk that the latter is certainly not the case, and that she is the least sexually satisfied wife in “al the reawme of France” (VII.116). I want to return to the image of the tired rabbit (“wery hare”) cowering in the grassy hollow or burrow (“fourme”).6 The hare and the form, especially in the erotic context of a fabliau, might well have suggested to a Chaucerian audience that they should be taken as symbolic of the male and female genitals. Old French fabliaux regularly refer to the human genitals by not-very-veiled animal euphemisms. Though the explicit words con and vit were often used of the female and male genitals, other terms were used, particularly when educating supposedly naive or inexperienced women and men about sexual matters, or when an attempted seduction might prove more successful with a certain indirection of speech. A favorite among these euphemisms was the use of animals as genital identifiers. There is, of course, nothing surprising in the use of animals to identify human sexual parts. We do it still in English: pussy, beaver, cock, lizard, one-eyed snake, and so on. There is no need here to give extended examples to show how the writers and speakers of Old French fabliaux used animal euphemism for the human genitalia, but a short survey will demonstrate just how widespread they are across the fabliaux. Perhaps the most literal example occurs in La Sorisete des Estopes (6.66), in which a stupid peasant has to be taught by his bride’s mother what and where his wife’s con is. On his mother-in-law’s instructions, he believes that it is hidden in a basket of rags. On his way home with the basket of rags, a mouse escapes from the bundle of rags and runs off through the fields. He chases the creature, then pleadingly addresses it as his “sweet cunt.” Others use the figurative potential of language for sexual humor. In Porcelet a young man and wife decide to have fun by giving pet names to their genitals (6.67). She names his “wheat,” apparently because of its similarity in shape to a stalk of wheat and its use as a satisfying food for her, and hers “piggie” because it is never clean and because of its appetite. In Guillaume au Faucon (8.93) the wife of a nobleman invents a private language to convince the young man who is literally dying for love of her that he may have her sexually after all. She tricks her husband into unwittingly giving Guillaume his “falcon,” thus saving Guillaume’s life by giving him a present of his wife’s genitals. The lexical fun is compounded when we note that in French faucon is a pun on “false cunt.” And in La Damoisele qui ne pooit oïr parler de foutre (4.26), which features a woman of refined sensibilities who will not allow her father to hire any workmen who use

CHAUCER’S FRENCH ACCENT

157

the word “fuck,” the humor of the story derives from an enterprising young man’s ability to seduce the young woman with an elaborate fiction involving animal euphemisms. By calling his penis his “horse,” he eventually convinces the young woman to allow him access to her genitals, which she’s called her “pasture” and her “spring.” In Cele qui fu foutue et desfoutue an inexperienced young woman is led to think that a young man who has killed a bird offers to trade it to her for “a fuck” (4.30). Although the young man’s penis is never directly called a crane (or heron), there is more than a hint of that association in the language he uses.7 A famous example of an animal euphemism for the penis comes in L’Esquiriel (6.58), which involves the sexual initiation of a young woman whose mother has insisted that the literal name for penis, “vit,” is indecent. As it turns out, the erotic potential of figurative language is even more potent, particularly that of animal euphemism. When the girl asks an approaching young man what he is holding there inside his pants, he tells her it is a squirrel, and invites her to pet it. When the girl regrets that she ate the nuts she would have fed the squirrel, Robin assures her that it is not too late, and not long afterwards Robin’s squirrel does scurry up to the nuts. One last example of the use of animals as is the improbable Le Prestre et la Dame (8.95), which is about a randy priest who bets a woman’s tipsy husband a goose that he is strong enough to lift three people at once. As he is performing this feat of strength, the fabliau uses animal euphemisms to confirm the priest’s sexual trickery. He puts his “ferret” (“fuiron”) into the designated place, which the author explains with his own pun about rabbits: “a coney gets lonely when it doesn’t have a ferret in her nest” (8.95.139–41).8 When he is finished the priest admits that he failed to lift the three bodies and promises to bring a fat goose around to the wife the next day. The priest hints that the fat goose is another euphemism for his ferret. To return to Chaucer, the point is that when the monk in the Shipman’s Tale speaks of a weary rabbit cowering in the form, he is by indirection speaking of a flaccid penis lying lifeless and inert in or beside a woman’s vagina—too worn out, too frightened—to do anything but lie there immobile. By using that metaphor of the rabbit-as-penis, the monk would have been connecting not only with the fabliau tradition of using animal euphemisms for the genitals, but also with a widespread tradition associating the rabbit with sexuality—or the failure of sexuality. I am by no means the first to comment on the monk’s reference to the weary hare cowering in a form.9 Others have noted the generally sexual nature of hares. D.W. Robertson, Jr., for example, speaks of the iconography of the rabbit as “a small furry creature of Venus” and of the “play on words . . . possible in French involving con and conin”10—the latter being,

158

PETER G. BEIDLER

as we have seen in Le Prestre et la Dame, a French word for hare. Robertson, however, makes no specific reference to Chaucer’s use of the weary hare in the Shipman’s Tale. Beryl Rowland has a whole chapter on the symbolism of the hare and finds many alternative readings of its “shifting symbolism”: “Indicative of worldliness, timidity, lechery, physical exhaustion, ignorance of love, fortuitous love and sexual deviation, the [hare] provides striking illustrations of human frailty.”11 Her reading of the monk’s comment in the Shipman’s Tale is curious but perhaps not far from the mark: “By means of the expressive hunting image, conjuring up the picture of the timid husband, his ardour exhausted, quailing before his insatiable mate, he prepares the accommodating wife for the frank enquiry to follow.”12 Thomas W. Ross mentions the monk’s comparison of “the merchant to a hare that lies motionless in a rabbit warren, beset with hounds,” but he immediately affirms confidently that “there is no connection with symbolic sexual hunting here.”13 On the basis of the French connections I have been exploring in this paper, I disagree with Ross, and suggest instead that Chaucer scholars need to look more at the larger corpus of fabliaux to gain a richer understanding of Chaucer’s engagements with the form. Although there has been little scholarly agreement about the meaning of the monk’s reference to the weary rabbit cowering in a form, there is wide recognition of the association in the Middle Ages between rabbits and sexuality. Karl P. Wentersdorf gives a manuscript illustration showing a nude man embracing a rabbit larger than he is (see his figure 6), and speaks of lechery as “the vice primarily symbolized by the hare.”14 Medieval illustrations often show rabbits in close association with holes. For example, The Hunting Book of Gaston Phoebus shows a colorful illustration of a dozen rabbits either in or in close proximity to a series of burrows, with a text that reads, “The wild rabbit is of an idle and roving disposition, even though he spends the day cramped in his burrow. At dusk he goes in quest of his favorite herbs along with the rest of his clan or exercises himself in amorous pursuit of lady rabbits.”15 It seems logical enough to conclude, in view of the fabliau use of animals to stand for the human genitals, and in view of the frequent references in the medieval period to the symbolism of the rabbit as a sexual symbol for the male or female organs, or for lechery in general, that the monk in the Shipman’s Tale employs overt sex-talk when he compares the husband of the woman he desires to a “wery hare” who lies motionless in its “fourme” afraid to move because of the hunting dogs. He is really talking about a penis too limp and inactive to do a woman’s genitals any good. The implication, of course, is that the monk’s own rabbit is ready to rise up and show the merchant’s wife’s bunnie a ripping good time. He does not want to come right out and say that, but he clearly hopes that the wife of

CHAUCER’S FRENCH ACCENT

159

Saint-Denis will take his meaning. She apparently does take his meaning, because she immediately after tells the monk that she has a miserable sex life: In al the reawme of France is ther no wyf That lasse lust hath to that sory pley. . . . Wherfore I thynke out of this land to wende, Or elles of myself to make an ende, So ful am I of drede and eek of care. (VII.116–17, 121–23)

Daun John is of course unctuously sympathetic to the lovely young wife, and a few minutes later she calls daun John “my deere love” (VII.158), tells him of her need for a hundred francs, offers to give him in exchange whatever “plesance and service” (VII.191) he may desire, and then, a deal having been struck, lets him grab her “by the flankes,” embrace her “harde,” and kiss her “ofte” (VII.202–203). She has apparently understood his euphemistic sextalk well enough. Is there any reason why we should miss it? If I am right in making the associations I have been urging, then there is a connection between the Old French fabliaux and the Shipman’s Tale after all. The orchard scene in Aloul might have suggested to Chaucer certain motifs that he incorporated into the garden scene, and the Old French penchant for using animal euphemisms for the sexual parts may give us, as it apparently gave the wife of the merchant of Saint-Denis, clues to the meaning of daun John’s suggestive language about rabbits and burrows. Certainly there are no such animal euphemisms for the genitals in Decameron VIII, 1. Is it any wonder that the French monk blushed when he engaged in such sex-talk? And is there any reason that we, as readers of this tale about a woman who claims, with obvious hyperbole, to be the most sexually frustrated wife in the whole realm of France, should not hear Chaucer’s French accent in the tale? Notes 1. Fragment VII, line 214. This and all other quotations, cited hereafter parenthetically in the text, are taken from Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 2. Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. W.F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941; repr. Humanities Press, 1958), p. 439. Spargo’s phrasing is echoed by Thomas D. Cooke in The Old French and Chaucerian Fabliaux (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978): “ ‘The Shipman’s Tale’ is very similar to the French fabliaux in its economy and symmetry. . . . [I]t comes closest in both style and content of all of Chaucer’s fabliaux to the French” (pp. 171–72).

160

PETER G. BEIDLER

3. I review the history of the relationship between the Shipman’s Tale and Decameron VIII, 1, in “Just Say Yes, Chaucer Did Know the Decameron: Or, Bringing the Shipman’s Tale Out of Limbo” in Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Dean Schildgen, eds., The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), pp. 25–46. See John Scattergood, “The Shipman’s Tale,” Sources and Analogues of the Canterburry Tales, Ed. Robert Correale and Mary Hamel (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2005), 2:565–81. For a convenient translation, see Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. and trans. G.H. McWilliam, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 1995). 4. Although I use Nathaniel E. Dubin’s lively verse translations for all fabliaux in this chapter, a somewhat different translation of Aloul, without the original French text, appears in Fabliaux, Fair and Foul, trans. John DuVal with introduction and notes by Raymond Eichman (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), pp. 107–129. 5. I have argued elsewhere that the standard punctuation of these lines is wrong. All editors have placed the close-quotation mark at the end of line 99, thus giving the “why-are-you-up-so-early” line to the wife. I would, rather, place the quotation mark after the first word in line 100, giving line 99 to the monk. A cleric, of course, was supposed to be up early making his morning devotions—daun John is saying “his thynges . . . ful curteisly” (VII.91)—so there would be no need for the wife to ask why he was up so early: the reason is obvious. It is the wife’s early-morning visit to the garden that is unusual. For a more complete statement of my argument, see “Where’s the Point?: Punctuating Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” “Seyd in form and reverence”: Essays on Chaucer and Chauceans in Memory of Emerson Brown, Jr., ed. T.L. Burton and John F. Plummer (Provo, VT: Chaucer Studio Press, 2005), pp. 193–204. 6. It is not entirely clear exactly what this “fourme” in line 104 is. Some take it to be a rabbit warren, some a rabbit’s hole or burrow, some a shallow gully or furrow or depression in the grass where the rabbit can hide. For my reading of the line any of these is acceptable. The Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kuratn and Sherman M. Kuhn (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1952–2001), vol. F.1, p. 770 calls it “the burrow or retreat (of a hare, etc.).” 7. This tale has two manuscript traditions, which were considered separately until the NRCF combined them under one title, Cele qui fu foutue et desfoutue (4.30). Here I refer to the NRCF’s version I, which exists in five manuscripts (A, B, E, D, F), and is elsewhere referred to as La Grue (Joseph Bédier, Les Fabliaux: Études de littérature populaire et e’histoire littéraire du moyen âge (Paris: É. Champion, 1925), no. 73; Per Nykrog, Les Fabliaux: Étude d’histoire littéraire et stylistique médiévale (Copenhagen: E. Munksgaard, 1957), no. 76. Version II in the NRCF, represented in one manuscript, is often called Le Heron (Nykrog, Les Fabliaux, no. 78). See Noomen, NRCF, volume 4, pp. 153–55, for a discussion of these versions and the NRCF’s decision to combine them under a standardized title.

CHAUCER’S FRENCH ACCENT

161

8. Translation mine. Dubin renders these lines as follows: “Their mood is bad, / Because these coneys feel depressed / When there’s no ferret in their nest.” 9. I suspect a Chaucerian pun on both parts of the term “wery hare” (VII.104). The hare is both a rabbit and a penis. As a cowering rabbit the husband is said to be “wary”—i.e., vigilant, frightened, suspicious; and as a penis he is said to be “weary”—i.e., tired, worn out, weak, depleted. 10. D.W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 113. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1971). 11. Beryl Rowland, Blind Beasts: Chaucer’s Animal World (Kent State University Press, 1971), p. 102. 12. Ibid., p. 94. On page 93 Rowland, with little explanation, refers to the monk as having “the good wife on the psychoanalyst’s couch.” 13. Thomas W. Ross, Chaucer’s Bawdy (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972), p. 102. Chaucer clearly knew of possible associations of hares with sexuality. In describing the Monk he says, “Of prikyng and of huntyng for the hare / Was al his lust” (I.191–92). In this context, of course, the hare would mostly be a euphemism for the female organ, not the male. The Friar says that, “thogh this Somonour wood were as an hare, / To telle his harlotrye I wol nat spare” (III.1327–28). In the Knight’s Tale Theseus comments with amusement on the fact that Emily, the object of the hot passion of Arcite and Palamon, knows “namoore of al this hoote fare, / By God, than woot a cokkow or an hare” (I.1809–10). The connection of the cuckoo with sexual misconduct was well known, so associating it with hares in a romantic context is more than suggestive. We should remember that in the Merchant’s Tale, another Chaucerian fabliau, Priapus is referred to as the “god of gardyns” (IV.2035). The fact that the monk’s rabbit-remark takes place in a garden might in itself have suggested phallic associations. There was, of course, neither a rabbit nor a garden in Decameron VIII, 1. 14. Karl P. Wentersdorf, “The Symbolic Significance of Figurae Scatologicae in Gothic Manuscripts” in Word, Picture, and Spectacle, ed. Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1984), p. 3 [1–19]. 15. Gaston Phoebus, The Hunting Book, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS français 616. The text is quoted from the reproduction by Miller Graphics (Fribourg, 1978), p. 24. See also folio 176v in the Luttrell Psalter, BL Additional MS 42129, conveniently available in Janet Backhouse, Medieval Rural Life in the Luttrell Psalter (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), plate 21.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 10 RUDE THEORY: THE ROUGH TRADE OF THE FABLIAUX Cary Howie

This theoretical consideration explores the “shifty eloquence” of the fabliaux, arguing that there is a necessary equivocation in any attempt to do justice to the rude speech of the genre. We are at once like and unlike the rogues as whom, and through whom, we speak.

ike many of the contributors to this volume, I don’t give a shit about what essentially constitutes a fabliau. This nonchalance, this nonchiance, might seem rude or rogue-like, to say the least. After all, as Jacques Derrida puts it in one of his last published essays, “One begins acting like a [rogue] as soon as one begins uttering ‘profanities’.”1 In abdicating “proper speech” for those erotically charged linguistic turns through which rudeness marks itself as such, I am on the one hand doing nothing more than conforming to a fabliau corpus, loosely bound, whose concern with shits and fucks, given and refused, could not in a sense be more acute. But to insist on this generic conformity is to lose sight of the fact that such a return to the register of the fabliaux remains necessarily approximate. For us (whoever we are), as for these texts (whatever they are), it is always only a question of acting like a rogue, of the distance interposed by this simile, this simulacrum. The rogue, Derrida argues, is “always designated in the second or third person.”2 In other words, an equivocation lies at the heart of both the bad words of the past and their modern transmission. This equivocation, I would wager, takes place most clearly and forcefully around the thin, fragile distinction between the rogue and his speech, between rudeness and theory: a distinction condensed into this tenuous, easily forgettable sliver of

L

164

CARY HOWIE

signification: like. To speak, then, of giving or not giving a shit about what makes a fabliau is, at the very least, to articulate the extent to which both this rude speech and its rude object turn toward the rhetoric of giving even as they refuse to give. This invocation and suspension of the gift has all the shifty eloquence of Sheri Ann Cabot when, asked by the mock filmmaker in Best In Show what a buxom young blonde might have in common with her nonagenarian millionaire husband, she responds: “We both like to talk. And not talk.”3 It is, in other words, impossible to speak of or with the fabliaux without having it both ways. Jean-Charles Huchet symptomatically describes the fabliau as “une bourse pleine de sens dont les gloses prodigues étalent la munificence signifiante, sans pour autant en révéler le secret” [a sack full of meaning whose prodigious glosses spread the munificence of signification without, for all that, revealing its secret].4 What does a fabliau do? It spends and hoards. It secretes in both senses; its sense is the ambivalence of secretion. What do critics of the fabliau do? They equivocate. The fabliau is and isn’t the best source of doubletalk before Danny Kaye and deconstruction. It is and isn’t a treasure trove (the monetary metaphor is inescapable) of psychoanalysis before the couch. It is and isn’t the key to unlocking class-based cultural practices upon which historicisms new and old have staked a set of narrative claims. In La Damoisele qui ne pooit oïr parler de foutre, the protagonist’s problem is our problem: she can’t abide the company of men who “qui nomast lecherie, / Vit ne coille ne autre chose” [would talk dirty and name cocks, balls, and other things] (4.26.II. 22–23).5 She fucking hates it when people talk about fucking: her language is indissociable from its (forbidden) object. It’s not just a question of the intimate implication of every énoncé in the circumstances of its énonciation. Rather, the fabliau—like our talk about the fabliau, and with all the fraught coincidence of this “like”—shows the extent to which explicitness and equivocation are inseparable. Nonetheless, they are inseparable only as long as it remains a question of objects in the world—those cocks and balls and unspeakable, utterly speakable other things—from which I am completely discrete, even as I speak and seek to be certain of them. What gives? Another way of saying this would be to avow that I don’t give a shit about genre. Simon Gaunt, Kathryn Gravdal, Tison Pugh, and others have usefully shown genre’s heuristic value, the pleasures provoked by having a tradition (traditio) to betray (traditio).6 Call it what you will— mobility, intergenericity, queering—the fabliau is a genre only in the way that we might say, passing a body on the street, c’est pas mon genre, and with a parallel negativity. What is a fabliau? It is not romance, not epic, not hagiography, not lai, not theater, not lyric, not body-soul debate, not

RUDE THEORY

165

commedia, not sermon, not speculum. Or it is all of these. There is an unquantifiable difference there that makes all the difference. In fact, “there is” does no justice to rogues. (Or perhaps it does too much justice; perhaps it is precisely punishing.) Rather, rogues—textual or otherwise—can never be the object of disinterested designation. They are either a promise or a threat. They pique and they terrify. In this essay, I want to take up a suggestion that Jean-Luc Marion has recently made: what would happen, he asks, if we were to replace the metaphysical search for certainty, haunted by the prospect that certainty might ultimately be in vain, with an erotic search for assurance, where I would ask, first and foremost, no longer “What am I?” but “Am I loved?”7 What would happen if we, likewise, began to ask of the texts we take up not so much what they are but, instead, how they give a shit or don’t, how they love and are loved? This would be to ask, still more fundamentally, how they summon and constitute us through their erotic call: how they give and withhold themselves, and how we come to take place in and as the social by taking what they give. The erotic phenomenology of the fabliaux is a rude theory. No one is more rude, and across so many genres, than the thirteenth-century Parisian poet-for-hire Rutebeuf. Among the poems ascribed to him are a couple of so-called fabliaux, including, most famously, a story (Le Pet au Vilain) about some demons who mistake a dying peasant’s fart for his soul and unleash it upon the infernal depths. Rutebeuf’s name, as the poet himself insists, comes from “rude” and “boeuf”; he is rough, ox-like. A particularly elaborate instance of this occurs at the end of a short narrative poem (Le miracle du Sacristain) in which a devout married woman and a sacristan elope with their houses’ respective possessions and are ultimately rescued from “sin” (pechié, 341) and sprung from prison by the Virgin Mary. Rutebeuf claims to have gotten the story from someone named Benedict: A Rutebuef le raconta Et Rutebuez en .I. conte a Mise la choze et la rima. Or dit il que c’en la rime a Chozë ou il ait se bien non, Que vos regardeiz a son non. Rudes est et rudement huevre: Li rudes hom fait la rude huevre. Se rudes est, rudes est bués; Rudes est, s’a non Rutebuez. Rutebuez huevre rudement, Souvent en sa rudesce ment. (749–60)

166

CARY HOWIE

[He told it to Rutebeuf, and Rutebeuf put the thing into a story and made it rhyme. Now he says that if in these rhymes there might be something that is not good, you should look to his name. He’s rough [rude] and works roughly: a rough man makes a rough work. If he’s rough, an ox is rough; he’s rough and thus has the name Rutebeuf. Rutebeuf works roughly, and often in his roughness tells lies.]8

“Rudesce,” then, is explicitly equivocal. From the unitary “choze” that Rutebeuf puts into rhyme, this rough poetics opens up the possibility of good and bad things, where the moral ambivalence of the rhymed “thing” inheres within this thing’s repeated enunciation. “La choze” breaks up at least potentially into multiple “chozë,” just as Rutebeuf’s name ceases almost immediately to designate an author and dissolves into its resonances: coarseness, oxen, falsehood, labor. Looking to Rutebeuf’s name, as he instructs us, doesn’t so much resolve the dilemma of the morally ambivalent “choze” as reproduce it and write it again and, still more forcefully, in the cacophony of “rudesce.” What, then, might Rutebeuf’s repetitions tell us about the policy of give-and-take through which we constitute our scholarly and erotic lives? Only this, but this is everything: Rutebeuf is no certifiable thing; his essential “rudesce” is no essence at all. Yet something more is at stake here than the sheer play of the signifier, no matter how tempting it may be to evoke R. Howard Bloch’s notion of the fabliaux as “speculation upon language as speculation,” staging again and again the resistance of a text—any text—to its reader’s questions.9 “Rude” names less a mode of being—even a metalinguistic mode of being—than a tautological turning: a rough man makes rough stuff; that’s why he’s rough. The relation between the “hom” and the “choze” or “huevre” is not one of subject to object: the rough man is implicated in what he makes, even constituted by it. For rude theory, the “choze” recurs roughly, outlined, alluded to, reproduced, and disseminated through a thousand puns; but it is never the same when it returns, precisely because it inheres within this turning. To ask what it is misses the point: better, then, to let the “choze,” singular or plural, arrive. Le miracle du Sacristain, as will undoubtedly be noted by readers who give a shit, is not technically a fabliau. It is a miracle: an exemplum with special effects, meant to edify and, if possible, convert its audience. Yet it immediately becomes clear that this short poem is autre choze (something else) as well. After a long exhortation to avoid envy, Rutebeuf introduces his pious protagonists. They are noteworthy, among other things, for resisting the temptation to steal the candles that belong to the abbey church.10 Yet for all their virtue, they fall hard and fast. Rutebeuf insists on this: “Tot va, ce poeiz vos veoir, / Choze qui prent a decheoir. / Tost fu lor penitance fraite / Qui n’estoit pas demie faite” [A thing that starts to fall [apart] goes fast; you

RUDE THEORY

167

can see this well. Their penitence, which wasn’t even half done, was soon broken] (165–68). Rutebeuf ’s “rudesce,” in fact, knows no middle narrative register: either he’s stalling out on “envie” for thirty lines or he’s speeding things up and pushing them off the cliff. So the wife and the sacristan fall in love, and after declaring this love at some length, they steal what they can and hit the road. Rutebeuf goes to some lengths to stress what they have and haven’t done: “Ancor n’ont de noiant mespris / Ne fait pechié ne autre choze / Dont Diez ne sa Mere les choze” [In the town they took lodging. So far they haven’t done anything wrong, nor committed a sin or anything else for which God or his Mother would chastise them] (350–52). But what is this something else, this “autre choze,” that somehow could lie beyond the bounds of sin, a “choze” that recurs in the following line as the verb for divine rebuke? A few lines later, when the canons wake up without their usual bells and decide the sacristan must have had too much to drink the night before, Rutebeuf interjects: “Mais je cuit qu’autre choze i a, / Foi que doi Ave Maria” [But I think it’s something else, / By the faith I owe the Ave Maria] (373–74).The “autre choze,” a thing elsewhere and otherwise, is sketchy and must be handled sketchily; it is an ambiguous alterity that at once interrupts and constitutes the canonically social. This is, I should emphasize, a text preoccupied with the coextension of materiality and possession. “Ciz siecles n’est mais que marchiez” [This world is nothing more than a market] (17), Rutebeuf declares at the beginning of the poem. Rough theory, rough poetics is thus also rough trade. When the pious wife, restored to her husband, enjoins him to check his belongings and be assured that everything is where it was, she says specifically, “Aleiz veoir a votre choze: / Pechié fait qui de noiant choze” [Go take a look at your things. / He who accuses for nothing commits a sin] (643–64). The thingness of things cannot be thought apart from their ownership. The wife’s body is, in this sense, as much a part of her husband’s array of “choze” as any glittering object. But how, then, does “autre choze” compare to “votre choze”? More than just a coyly shady or possibly unspeakable act—say, along the lines of the erotic “surplus” in Marie de France or Peter Damian’s sodomia—this other thing, constantly to one side of what can be said directly, just off the screen, is a thing only owned by otherness, constituted through the deferral of attribution.11 In other words, it’s not that my milkshake is better than yours; it’s just that it’s other than yours, that it occurs only in the horizon of an alterity that exceeds even you, even the logic of possession. So is rude theory a theory of dispossession? Is it one in which even that most closely guarded of signifiers—a name—tears itself apart to demonstrate the extent to which it, too, remains “autre choze”? It is tough to say

168

CARY HOWIE

what Le Miracle du Sacristan is finally about: covetousness or lust, how devils can take on human form, the intercessory powers of the Virgin, or the dangers of praying too close to someone else. (One of my younger brothers attended an evangelical college in Tennessee where men and women could mingle together unsupervised only while praying. There was, he informs me, a lot of prayer going on.) That is, like Rutebeuf’s name, and like that “choze” that both names and defers the narrative Rutebeuf receives from Benedict, the belongings stolen by the lovers, and the problem of belonging more generally, the text as a whole lies somewhere between an outline and a throwaway line; it’s all arc and gag. What rude theory doesn’t offer is a nicely regulated narrative, a history. This patently isn’t, thank God, yet another carefully contextualized reading of the complicated (and interminable) shifts of acts and identities through which sexuality constitutes itself. It is somewhere between a theorem and a fart, owned by no one, relentlessly “autre choze”: as they say where I come from, “a whole ’nother thing.” Let me be clear about this: it is not just a question of the thrill of polysemy or transgression, according to which the most important thing we could say about a text (or about being in the world) would be “well, that’s different.” Rude theory exposes itself, and exposes itself roughly, but its roughness only reciprocates and redoubles the rough outline through which the world exposes itself: the frayed edges of the finitude of bodies. Rude theory might be distinguished, in this way and however tentatively, from the rogues through whom—or more crucially, like whom—it speaks. What is a rogue? Here again the question of being gives way literally to an erotic call, a pick-up line. Rogue (voyou), “has an essential relation with the voie, the way . . . the waywardness [dévoiement] of the voyou consisting in making ill use of the street.”12 What is more, “if the voyou is a dévoyé, one who is led astray, the path to becoming a voyou is never very far from a scene of seduction.”13 Rogues exist in the shadow of fraternal community or out in its streets, on the lam. Their community is, strictly speaking, no community at all: they have nothing in common but their seduction, their libidinal pull, the flash of teeth or skin (or candlesticks) that can turn a citizen or a church lady from the straight and narrow. They have nothing in common but this turning.14 No rogue in Old French literature turns more tricks than Trubert. The 3,000-line text in his name is “more like a sequence of fabliau plots involving the same characters than a single fabliau.”15 Again and again, a naive country boy (“non sachant et nice,” 10.124.13) returns to a nobleman who inevitably fails to recognize him and ends up cuckolded, smeared with shit, anally pierced, tied up, and beaten, among autre choze. More than once in the text, the noble entourage uses the same word for Trubert’s

RUDE THEORY

169

tricks as Rutebeuf uses for the workings of the devil: the sacristan and the pious dame are “enchanted” into their elopement;16 here too the duke’s wife claims that Trubert “Tant me dit et tant m’enchanta / Je ne sai coment ne a quoi / Qu’en un lit se coucha o moi / Et de moi fit ses volentez” [spoke and enchanted me to such a degree—I don’t know how or by what means—that he lay with me in a bed and did with me what he would] (10.124.380–83). Trubert is elsewhere literally “malfez / Qui ainsi nos a enchantez” [a devil who has thus enchanted us] (10.124.2356–57). What is more in Trubert enchantment is contagious: it is the duke himself who is accused of having “enchantez” the household of his enemy, King Golias, when Trubert, disguised as a Golias’ bride, exposes his cock to the king’s priest (10.124.2667). The turn of the trick—from the trick by which someone fucks me to the trick by which someone fucks me over—exceeds any single agent. But what bears emphasizing—beyond the ways in which Trubert (always “molt bien desguisez”, 10.124.469) works his magic on the duke, King Golias, and their men (and women)—are two moments in which Trubert is even more of a rogue. When Trubert, welcomed as a worldrenowned builder into the duke’s castle, sleeps on a mattress that is far too comfortable for his rustic tastes, “Plus de cent foiz torne et retorne. / Tant torna qu’a dormir s’atorne” [he turns and turns again, more than a hundred times. He turns so many times that he turns his way to sleep] (10.124.583–84). Even the word fois (time), Derrida insists, is etymologically a turn, coming as it does from “this strange word vicis, which has no nominative, only a genitive, an accusative, vicem, and an ablative, vice, each time to signify the turn, succession, alternation, or alternative.”17 Trubert, like all rogues, cannot keep still; he marks the incessant alternation that breaks up anything like progress or (feudal) order. To pick up Gaunt’s canny observation about the narrative structure of the text, Trubert is pure sequence, sequence without purpose and without resolution. But what does this have to do with a rude theory and the rogues it might rely upon, beyond figuring a time of transgression, a necessary and mildly amusing supplement to the normal but, finally, nothing particularly surprising? The ramifications of roguery become less facile when Trubert is mistaken for his sister by the duke and his men, who find him in drag at the door of his house. They take him to the duchess, informing her that “—Ce est le suer au desloial; / Ele ne set ne bien ne mal, / Onques mes ne fu entre gent” [this is the disloyal one’s sister; she knows neither good nor evil; she has never been among people] (10.124.2374–76). If, as I’ve suggested, Rutebeuf ’s rough poetics, his rude theory, entails an ethically ambiguous adequation of subject to object, “hom” to “heuvre,” here this ethical ambiguity becomes explicitly social. Trubert—or, in his masquerade, Florie, née

170

CARY HOWIE

Coillebaude18—is in a sense beyond good and evil because he has never been “entre gent,” has never ostensibly been exposed to that constitutive between of the social, that entre, which alone makes it possible to speak of the ethical. Trubert is, even more literally than Rutebeuf, a self-made man (and occasionally a self-made woman), and this solipsistic self-fashioning goes so far as to elide the entre, the very possibility that something else, or someone else, might be out there, issuing a call to which it might be possible to respond. That is to say, Trubert is immune both to Rutebeuf’s “autre choze” and Marion’s “ailleurs.” Rogue that he is, he turns upon and returns to himself: he is quite literally impenetrable, his various seductions fundamentally before or beyond the erotic. Trubert thus shows the (ultimately sadistic) solipsism that haunts even the delicate disavowals of Roland Barthes when, in his preface to Renaud Camus’ Tricks, he observes: what society will not tolerate is that I should be . . . nothing, or to be more exact, that the something I am should be openly expressed as provisional, revocable, insignificant, inessential, in a word: irrelevant. Just say “I am,” and you will be socially saved. To reject the social injunction can be accomplished by means of that form of silence which consists in saying things simply.19

The simple sequence, that narrative concatenation which alone (if hyperbolically) sustains both Trubert and Camus’ text, stages the making and unmaking of the social. Every trick bears the trace of this rough trade: every rendezvous bears the risk of the rogue. Yet to be nothing, or in any case next to nothing, to “reject the social injunction,” is simultaneously to acknowledge the risk that inheres within all sociality and to deny it, by fortifying oneself with endless provisionality, refusing to do anything more than turn. Rutebeuf, in contrast, ends the Miracle, much as he and other Old French writers end their hagiographies, with an exhortation to prayer: Or prions au definement Jhesucrit le Roi bonement Qui nos doint joie pardurable Et paradis l’esperitable. Dites Amen trestuit encemble, Ci faut li diz, si com mei cemble. (761–76) [Now let’s pray well, here at the end, to Jesus Christ the King, that he might give us everlasting joy and spiritual paradise. Now say Amen, everyone together. Here ends the tale, as it seems to me.]

Here, at the end, in the moment of fullest exposure to the finitude of speech and the finitude as and across which we constitute ourselves as

RUDE THEORY

171

“nous,” the narrative shifts to the optative: we pray that it might be so. And then this “amen” is turned over to “you,” before the authorial “I” speaks itself one last time, in that final “as it seems to me.” Us, you, me: in this pronominal plurality, in this strange community of bodies and signifiers touching a story at its end, offered to an eternal horizon, “rudesce” takes place as the necessary coarseness through which the world, here, within time, is spoken and coheres in its very delimitation. Just an outline and a detail, one “choze” and another, but infinitely more than “saying things simply.” Here, entre gent, among people but more importantly among others, in a social register that risks something more “pardurable” than the provisional, our erotic “encemble” offers a call and waits for an answer— indeed, receives its own coherence, its own being together, as the answer to this call. Rude theory, then, might also offer a response to the various kinds of academic border police, eternally flashing their unflashy badges: authority, certainty, rigor, proof. Rude theory, that is, tells them to fuck off. But it does so only by foregrounding the erotics of this injunction: to fuck off is precisely not to have kept a distance; it is to respond to a prior sharing, the muddled middle that rogues, police, and ordinary citizens have in common. In other words, the distinctions between “us,” “you,” and “me” may very well be contested—their strife may be perpetual, at least on this side of “joie pardurable”—but they owe everything to each other. Or rather, they owe everything to the horizon they share, the “joie” that lays bare the erotic pull to which they variously respond; to which we variously respond. How, then, might rude theory contribute to and perhaps even constitute a queer theory in the strongest sense, one that perhaps has only really begun to be thought? It is, first and foremost, a reassertion of the erotic as that which holds us together (singular and plural, scholars or not) even when we pull apart, even when we fuck off or tell each other to do so. It is, as I have said, also a reminder of the limits of rigor: rude theory shows the extent to which naming a thing as precisely (or simply) as possible does not necessarily do justice to this thing; the extent to which the logic of calling a spade a spade threatens, like Rutebeuf’s calling a “boeuf” a “boeuf,” to lose its ostensible transparency, threatens to occlude more than it discloses. Just as, for Eve Sedgwick, the preposition beside might counter some of the linear logics (of before and beyond) that continue to subtend a lot of contemporary thought, Rutebeuf shows how finitude can only be felt alongside another thing, another body, that remains just outside my grasp.20 Touching me, yet entirely intact. This touch is risky: there’s always the chance that it might be a ruse. Yet it is precisely this risk, the return of the rogue, that we must run if we are to hope for anything like the unexpected, anything that might get

172

CARY HOWIE

beyond or to the side of the stories (especially stories of belonging and recognition) that we’ve become all too accustomed to repeating. Dispossession, in this economy, would not be a matter of refusing a name, refusing to claim or be claimed, but of being exposed to what is in excess of these names, finite and necessary as they may well be. This rough sketch is part of an ongoing engagement with a certain kind of thought, at the edges or in the interstices of the contemporary and the medieval, where both of these are heard in the full resonance of the relations they perform and presuppose: con-temporary; med-ieval: with and between.21 One of the names associated with this thought is Derrida, of course; another is Marion; still another is Jean-Luc Nancy. Between these names, entr’eux, in the society they inaugurate and never cease to exhaust, it is possible to cite a particularly poignant passage from Nancy’s book on robbed, disrobed thought, La pensée dérobée: Qu’elle soit manifestée, dans l’ordre du manifeste, par une ‘homo’ ou par une ‘hétéro’ sexualité, la pensée est en elle-même ouverture de cette différence aux termes incommensurables dont le ‘sexe’ est à la fois le lieu et la figure, la forme et la force: la différence qui n’est pas rapport à un objet, mais touche et tension entre des êtres. [Whether it’s manifested, within the order of the manifest, by a homo or a heterosexuality, thought is in itself the opening of this difference, whose terms are incommensurable, for which sex is at once the place and the figure, the form and the force: difference which isn’t a rapport to an object but touch and tension among beings, among some beings.]22

Earlier I spoke of being exposed to “what is in excess of these names,” or in Nancy’s terms, “what is in excess of the manifest,” but I could as well have said “what is most internal to these names” and “what takes place where they touch.” Rutebeuf’s roughly written “autre choze” marks the apparently heterosexual touch and tension between two beings, a sacristan and a married woman, who haven’t properly touched, but it also marks the differently embodied and eroticized touch and tension between the dispersed finitude of a storytelling “I” and a community of readers and listeners, variously finite, with whom this “I” prays.23 It also marks, finally, the touch and tension between the bodies, rough and ox-like, from which a name derives, coheres, and scatters. Rude theory summons and seduces us as it plies this rough trade. Notes I want to thank Bill Burgwinkle and Bob Clark for inviting me to speak about queer theory and medieval studies at the 2004 Modern Language Association Annual Convention in Philadelphia and the 2005 International Medieval

RUDE THEORY

173

Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan, respectively. This essay owes its genesis to them. Sepp Gumbrecht gave helpful comments on an earlier draft. Holly A. Crocker has been an inspiring and roguish interlocutor: my thanks to her most of all. 1. Jacques Derrida, Rogues, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 68. 2. Ibid., p. 64. 3. Best in Show, directed by Christopher Guest, Warner Bros., 2000. “Sherri Ann Cabot” is portrayed by actress Jennifer Coolidge. 4. Jean-Charles Huchet, “De la perversion en littérature,” Poétique 18.71(September 1987):271 [271–90]. Translation mine. 5. Translation mine. These lines are from NRCF, 4.26, “Textes Critiques,” II:22–23. Because Dubin’s translations are concerned to confer the poetic sonority of these and other lines, I have chosen to provide my own more literal translations to show their “rude” resonance. 6. Here I am thinking specifically of Simon Gaunt, “Genitals, gender and mobility: The fabliaux,” in Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 234–85; Kathryn Gravdal, “Poem Unlimited: Medieval Genre Theory and the Fabliau,” L’Esprit Créateur 33:4(Winter 1993):10–17; and Tison Pugh, “Chaucer’s Queering Fabliaux,” in Queering Medieval Genres (New York: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 45–79. 7. See Jean-Luc Marion, Le phénomène érotique (Paris: Grasset/Poche, 2003). In a characteristic passage, Marion asserts, e.g., “car en régime de vanité, je peux bien reconnaître ‘je pense donc je suis’ très certainement—pour aussitôt annuler cette certitude en me demandant ‘à quoi bon?’ “ [under the regime of vanity, I can recognize “I think, therefore I am’ with great certainty, but just as quickly cancel out this certainty by asking myself ‘what good does it do?’ ”](Translation mine, p. 43). The only thing that can provide assurance against this suspicion of the vanity of one’s own existence is the possibility of love from elsewhere, from beyond: “En disant ‘m’aime-t-on,’ je ne sais donc pas qui je suis, mais je sais du moins où je suis: je me trouve ici, à savoir là où me retrouve la question que je (me) pose, là où j’éprouve la vanité qu’elle tente de conjurer, là où m’adviendra (ou non) l’appel venu d’ailleurs” [When I say “Does someone love me?” I don’t know who I am, but I at least know where I am: I find myself here, in other words in that place where the question that I ask (myself) finds me, where I feel the vanity it attempts to conjure away, where the call from elsewhere will (or will not) come to me] (Translation mine, pp. 67–68). 8. All line references are to Michel Zink’s standard scholarly edition, “Le miracle du sacristain et d’une dame accompli par Notre-Dame,” in Rutebeuf: Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Poche, 1990), pp. 585–633. Translation mine. 9. R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 18–19.

174

CARY HOWIE

10. In what should go down in history as a locus classicus of clerical virtue, Rutebeuf remarks of his sacristan, “Quant la chandoile estoit emprise / Devant la Vierge debonaire, / De l’osteir n’avoit il que faire” [When the candle was lit before the generous Virgin, he did not try to steal it] (Translation mine; 140–43). 11. For an elegant recent discussion of both Marie de France and Peter Damian, see William Burgwinkle, Sodomy and Masculinity in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 12. Derrida, Rogues, p. 65. 13. Ibid., p. 20. 14. In this way, rogues aren’t far from saints, as Genet no doubt understood and as I argue in “As the Saint Turns: Hagiography at the Threshold of the Visible,” Exemplaria 17.2 (Fall 2005): 317–46. 15. Gaunt, Gender and Genre, p. 248. 16. For example, the pious dame is so “Et si vaincue et enchantee, / Quant ele est assise au mangier / Il li couvient avant changier / Couleur .V. foies ou sis, / Pour son cuer qui est si pencis, / Que li premiers mes soit mangiez” [conquered and enchanted that when she sits down to eat her heart is so pensive that she has to change color five or six times, even before finishing her first course] (Translation mine, 206–211). 17. Derrida, Rogues, p. 6. 18. Trubert takes on the name “Coillebaude,” literally “Happy Balls,” until the “mestresse” of the duchess’s entourage informs him that Florie is more becoming. See Trubert 10.124.2409–15. 19. Roland Barthes, “Preface,” in Renaud Camus, Tricks, trans. Richard Howard (London: Serpents Tail/High Risk, 1996), p. vii. 20. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 8: “Beside is an interesting preposition . . . because there’s nothing very dualistic about it; a number of elements may lie alongside one another, though not an infinity of them. Beside permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking: noncontradiction or the law of the excluded middle, cause versus effect, subject versus object.” 21. See, in this regard, Catherine Brown’s eloquent meditation on medievalism, “In the Middle,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30.3(Fall 2000):547–74. 22. Jean-Luc Nancy, La pensée dérobée (Paris: Galilée, 2001), p. 13. Translation mine. 23. I am thinking too of Mark Jordan’s recent book, Blessing Same-Sex Unions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), in which he observes, “Unbridled sex is hardly the most transgressive queer act. That is only what queers are scripted by public imagination to do. Praying over queer sex— now that transgresses” (p. 18).

CHAPTER 11 CREATIVE CHOICES: NOTES ON TRANSLATING THE OLD FRENCH FABLIAUX Nathaniel E. Dubin

This essay reflects on methods of translation that are important if not unique to the fabliaux. In acknowledging the mobile finitude of translating this corpus, it pays tribute to the vivid dynamism of the genre’s expression.

hen I started translating fabliaux, I wanted to translate not so much the tales as their telling. What drew me to these texts is their narrative skill, their love of wordplay, their refreshing political incorrectness. Over the years my philosophy of translating has evolved, and through endless revisions conscious choice has come to replace instinct, so that I can now formulate my goals as a translator and how and why I seek to accomplish them. The French compare translations to women: “lorsqu’elles sont belles, elles ne sont pas fidèles; lorsqu’elles sont fidèles, elles ne sont pas belles.” No doubt the fabliaux authors would approve the sexism, but I no more share this view of translation than I do of women. For one, an ugly translation of a beautiful work has not been true to the original. Moreover, it naively assumes that translation aims at reproduction. I see translation more like a recreation, like turning a poem into an art song. A translation is a reading; ultimately what you produce depends more on how you understand the work than on the work itself. Where technical translators focus on the message, literary translators return to the word, asking why the author chose that word to express that meaning and why a teller or writer

W

176

NATHANIEL E. DUBIN

wanted to convey that meaning in the first place. Let me give a somewhat trivial example. If words rhyme in one language but not the other, you can look for synonyms (in which case they do rhyme) or decide what the whole sentence means and find another way to convey that message. When the fisherman of Pont-seur-Saine tells his wife about being waylaid and forced to buy his freedom by sacrificing a body part, he weighs his options (Le Pescheor de Pont-seur-Saine, 4.28.123–24):1 s’il me trenchaissent les oreilles, li mons en parlast a merveilles.

and if they sliced off both my ears the world would speak of it for years.

Do I mean that because they marvel at it people would speak about it for years? No, a merveilles just means “an awful lot,” and it would cause all that talk because back then they sometimes cut thieves’ ears as a punishment so they would be shunned by society. This exemplifies the two greatest challenges any translator faces: dealing with linguistic and cultural differences. That I express a quantity in terms of time instead of as an adverb of manner in no way alters what the fisherman means. If it calls for an explanatory note, so does the Old French. Because it is a form of interpretation, translating requires a mastery of the active skills in the target language and of the passive skills in the source language, with an extreme sensitivity to tone, register, and nuance. Translators must hear and appreciate the original without translating and feel enough at home in the language to trust themselves and their instincts, a trust that should be justified most of the time. You develop this control by active practice in both languages, but the active skills no longer exist in Old French. That language is long gone, but the fabliaux remain. All languages change, and as English changes my fabliaux will become outdated. The average life of a translation is thirty years, except where the author has translated his/her own work or where we read it for other reasons. No one today takes Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat seriously as translation, and Catullus’s translations of Sappho stand on their own as original poetry. Whether I succeed or fail, my translations remain translations. Today only Borges’s Pierre Menard, who set out to pen “a few passages which would coincide word for word and line for line” with Cervantes’s sixteenth-century Castilian Don Quijote, could produce an authentic fabliau. To translate the fabliaux one must know what they are, yet here is a genre that defies definition. No two scholars have the same list of which poems constitute true fabliaux. While a translator can make do with the sketchiest of definitions and deal with exceptions on an individual basis, Joseph Bédier’s “contes à rire en vers” says nothing about their subject

CREATIVE CHOICES

177

matter, kind of verse, or most salient stylistic features. It would also exclude fabliaux not intended as humor and those that do not tell a story. As pithily as possible, I would call a fabliau “a short narrative in verse meant for light oral entertainment.” The word “narrative” allows more latitude than conte, and “oral entertainment” has important implications for the potential translator. Their authors designed them to be performed by professionals who knew how to lead an audience. Any other aim a fabliau may have is secondary to entertainment. Some may instruct (even more pretend to, and almost all do insofar as they have to win the audience over to the author’s point of view), but aside from such moral tales as La Housse partie (3.16), they do not seek to move us, except occasionally to enlist our sympathy for a character or to surprise us by a sudden reversal of tone. It helps somewhat to isolate the principal stylistic differences between the roman and the fabliau, for doing so tells a lot about how I “hear” them, which of course affects how I translate. In the roman we find long speeches, interior monologues, detailed description, and introspection. Length alone does not account for these, for they also characterize Marie de France’s Lais. Rather, I see here a forerunner of modern psychological literature. The fabliau typically has a strong authorial presence, rapid-fire dialogue, and, for all their superb character portraits, pretty one-dimensional characters. Finally, the finest romanciers have an extremely light touch. Not that the fabliaux are somehow clumsy—the less successful romans can be more heavy-handed in their seriousness than most fabliaux are in their bluntness. Let us speak instead of their “blatant subtlety” and unparalleled “indelicacy of touch.” This raises the question of authorial presence, and how I view it underlies all my translations. As I see it, fabliau authors do not stay in the limelight because so little time elapses between their appearance in the exordium and the end of the story. We recognize Chrétien’s voice immediately although he may remain in the background for pages at a time in his lengthy romans. But in the fabliaux I would call “authorial presence” a misnomer. It is not the author, but the narrator we hear. These techniques keep the performing jongleur in the mind of his audience as a living, individualized personality. Most fabliau authors are anonymous, very likely to their medieval audience as well. Not so the jongleurs. The texts had no need to name them; they had already introduced themselves. Our closest equivalent to fabliau entertainment is probably the stand-up comic, but I would not put humor as the primary difference between fabliau performance and a roman. The latter must have been more like a reading. Comparison of fabliau manuscripts supports both oral and written transmission. Encoded in the text is a kind of script to guide the performance: what persona to create, when and how to gesture.

178

NATHANIEL E. DUBIN

I prepared two versions for my first three translations, one in verse and one in prose. Compared to the verse, the prose fabliaux were flat, joyless, clumsy, and unfunny. I had translated the conte, but not the rire. Only the naked plot remained, exposed under the harsh light of its own sophomoric inanity. Surprisingly, a brief explication revealed that the word-for-word versions were also inaccurate. Language does not signify by literal meaning alone. I conclude that a prose translation of these texts is a mistranslation, and not just because rhyme is more entertaining and funnier or that verse better recaptures the sound and banter of the performed fabliau, although all that is true. But the fabliaux contain many elements that Old French prose seldom uses. Rhyme and meter constrain the author no less than the translator. In La Bourse pleine de sens (2.8), Renier’s servant is named Geoffroi only to rhyme with palefroi. The author uses it five times. Luckily, “Jeffrey” and “palfrey” are acceptable slant rhymes. He also tells us five times that the dress of blue Ypres cloth Renier buys is finer than any from here to Cyprus, because Chipre rhymes with Ypre. Had it rhymed, he might well have said that you’d find no better if you went as far as New Haven. Now, while I use all sorts of approximations for French words at the rhyme, I will not stoop to using the American GI pronunciation “wipers.” Even the best fabliaux make constant use of chevilles, or fillers, to round out the meter. Most elegant is the use of doublets, often added without regard for logical sequence as the rhyme requires. Most common is the empty parenthetical “I guess” (ce m’est vis, ce me samble etc.) and adverbs expressing rapidity. I was amused to read in one article that the people in a certain fabliau were always in a hurry. I have yet to come across any fabliaux characters who take their time about anything, even when they are glum and pensive. These myriad adverbs and parentheticals are often meaningless when there’s no rhyme or meter to justify them; omit them from a prose translation, and it’s no longer a translation. “It seems to me” translates the secondary meaning of si com moi samble, not the primary meaning (“four syllables, feminine rhyme with nasal vowel”). In verse you keep them where they fit, leave them out where they don’t, and add them when you need them. Whether absent or present they fulfill the identical function they have in the original, while the prose translation senselessly bows to constraints no longer relevant to its form. We can see how this works in two examples from Le Vilain qui conquist Paradis par Plait (5.39.16–19): [He kept on his way behind him. He followed the angel until, it seems to me, he entered Paradise. He went inside after him.] aprés li a tenu sa voie. Tant suï l’angle, ce m’est vis,

and, following, the peasant went behind the angel, till he spies

CREATIVE CHOICES

que il entra em paradis; aprés lui est laiens entree.

179

them enter into Paradise and enters Heaven, as had they.

I replace the filler ce m’est vis with one less irrelevant, “till he spies.” Both supply a rhyme for “Paradise.” In the next I double the first filler and eliminate the second (5.39.52–54): [Says St. Thomas: “I will go to him. He shall not remain here, may that never please God!” He comes up to the soul in the open area.] Fait Sains Tumas: “G’irai a lui. N’i remanra, ja Deu ne place!” A l’ame s’en vient en la place.

“Please God, he won’t stay, to be sure. I’ll go to him,” Saint Thomas added, and straight off to the soul he headed.

While all have some rhyming chevilles for meter, the best fabliaux do not use words just for rhyme (unless it’s a funny rhyme), except such things as place names, quantities, and, less often, saints invoked. The weakest are filled with extra verbiage and trivia that can make translation very difficult; where the words are right on the button and the narrative flows easily the translation suggests itself. But even the best fabliaux are not elegantly crafted like some romances. Crafted, yes, with much attention to timing, wordplay and dramatic effect, but not for elegance. Chrétien and the Roman de la Rose do not borrow vocabulary and forms from other dialects and use far fewer chevilles. “Filler” does not imply that an expression is inappropriate, however. Even ce m’est vis calls attention to the narrator’s presence for oral delivery in an informal setting and can help create his personality. Since few scholars see eye to eye on what constitutes a fabliau, I decide for myself whether or not a work belongs in my collection. Since I aim to remain true to a specific text, not just the story, I start by establishing a text for the version I will translate. Here I do not look for closeness to the original, but for the most readable and enjoyable retelling. Rychner and others assume that the process of transmission inevitably affects a work negatively; I do not.2 While poets are better writers than copyists, we do find some hacks among them, and the jongleurs who performed their works were quite capable of improving the repertory. I correct my manuscript only for rhyme, meter, and obvious incoherence, self-contradiction, or illogic, even when superior variants are available, and rarely add missing passages. I could not have done this without the diplomatic texts of every manuscript version in Willem Noomen’s monumental edition and its wonderful set of explicatory notes.3

180

NATHANIEL E. DUBIN

One cannot overstate the difficulty of these texts: the unfamiliar vocabulary and obsolete colloquialisms, their mixing of dialects and strained elliptical syntax, the frequent impossibility of pinning down an exact meaning. I set as my goals: to respect the integrity of the individual line, to preserve humor and wordplay wherever possible, to give a feeling of performance, and to recreate a reasonable facsimile of the rhythms, all as I understand and “hear” it. My translation of the exaggeratedly rhetorical opening of the exordium to Le Foteor shows how far I will go to achieve this (6.59.1–4): Qui fabloier velt, si fabloit, mais que son dit n’en affebloit por dire chose desresnable. L’en puet si bel dire une fable qu’ele puet ainsi com voir plair.

Let fabulists confabulate; but tales too fabulous deflate a fable’s worth and make it feeble. A tale well-told can please the people. as pleasantly as gospel truth.

Just as my translations are translations, not fabliaux, Modern English is not Old French, but it is closer to it than Modern French in everything but vocabulary, accentual pattern, and word order within the morphemic unit. Phonetically, Old French lies halfway between the two: less tense, vowels less rounded, vowels nasalized, and nasal consonants retained, many fricatives, diphthongs not yet reduced. It also resembles English in syntax, polysemy, idiom, concrete (as opposed to analytical) diction, and sense of humor. Any translator must cope with three kinds of difference: linguistic, sociolinguistic, and cultural referents. The phonetics of rhyme and meter are the most obvious linguistic difference, but not the most difficult to resolve. English-speaking critics dwell on the “rollicking” sound of the fabliaux, but that’s their ear hearing tonic stress where none exists. Some rhythms sound inherently funny in English, but by the thirteenth century French no longer had rhythmic patterns, so I try to tone them down somewhat and reserve the heavy, regular iambs for such moments as the breathless blow-by-blow description of sexual activity in L’Esquiriel (6.58.165–70): sire escuiruel! or del cerchier! Bones nois puissiez vous mengier! Or cerchiez bien el plus parfont, jusques iluec ou eles sont, quar, par la foi que doi ma teste, molt a ci savoreuse beste!

my faithful squirrel! Go and hunt for tasty nuts! Eat all you want! So, happy hunting! Deeper! Harder! By my head, go straight to the larder where all those walnuts are and treat yourself royally, delicious creature!

CREATIVE CHOICES

181

But for the most part I try to recreate the original meter with a varied three- or four-beat, octosyllable line, enjambing often to compensate for the preverbal pronoun placement and lack of tonic stress in Old French. Rhymes are also less marked in Old French, because of the lack of stress and high incidence of verb endings. Although medieval practice does not favor them, I use slant rhymes nearly three-eights of the time, more for texts with many imperfect rhymes, less where rimes équivoques (rhyming homonyms) predominate. I do not follow the medieval practice of rhyming words with themselves in different grammatical settings (like dative versus accusative). Old French poetics frowned on using the same rhyme twice in a row, so I avoid it, except as a substitute for rhétoriqueur display (Le povre Clerc, 7.79.63–70): Si com li clers se demantoit en quel leu ostel troveroit, .i. prodom l’oï demanter; tantost lo prist a apeler: “Qui estest vos qui la alez?” “Certes, un clers sui, molt lassez car je ne finai hui d’aler & si ne puis ostel trover.”

While the student wondered, distressed, where he would find a place to rest, a good man heard what he expressed and then and there took interest. “Who are you, stranger?” he inquired. “A student, truly, very tired, for I’ve been on the march all day and cannot find a place to stay.”

My greatest challenge rhyming occurs when the semantic unit overlaps the couplet break, normal practice in Old French. Received wisdom has it that this made memorization easier, but I tend to think it reflects a difference between Old French prosody, based on the line, and English, based on the couplet, and has a phonetic basis. Rhymes can be very funny in English, but not in French, with a few notable exceptions (Le Pescheor de Pont-seur-Seine, 4.28.21–22): quar jone fame bien peüe sovent voudroit estre fotue.

for a young wife who gets her food will frequently want to be screwed.

When a single idea occupies two non-rhyming lines, I frequently find myself one line off because I’ve instinctively translated it as a couplet. Usually the best solution is to follow my instincts and switch the order of the lines. A detailed analysis of a short passage will show how this works. In Les deus Changeors (5.51) a man has revealed all his mistress’s naked charms to her husband, keeping her face hidden. To repay him, she arranges for

182

NATHANIEL E. DUBIN

her husband to come home while the two of them are bathing together and taunts him with exposure, luring her husband ever closer to the tub and even inviting him to join her while her lover cowers behind her in fear. When her husband leaves, she breaks off their relationship and sends him on his way. Here the husband has started to undress, and the lover pleads with the woman to keep him out of the tub (5.51.229–36): & dist: “Dame, por Dieu merci, ne honissiez moi & vous ci, que se vostre sires me trueve, ja n’i avra mestier contrueve ne parole ne serement!” Molt losenge cil durement cele qu’il tenoit a amie, mes la dame n’i entent mie.

[and said, “Lady, for God’s sake, / don’t shame me and yourself here, / for if your husband finds me / of no use will be tall tale / or word or oath.” / He wheedles very hard / the one he used to consider his friend, / but the lady doesn’t pay attention at all.] Although “of no use will be tall tale or word or oath” forms a single idea, “tall tale” rhymes with the preceding “find” and “oath” with the following “hard.” One can translate this passage respecting the order of the French lines, but the result is blander than the original: “My lady, for God’s sake,” he said, “do not bring shame upon my head or yours, for if your husband should find me, then of no earthly good were alibi or oath or word.” Although he wheedles very hard, the woman he thought was his friend will neither listen nor attend.

The enjambments make him sound prosaically calm, almost reasonable, in contrast with the strong rhythms of the surrounding narrative. The passage comes to life if we switch the order to make the two middle lines a rhyming couplet: and says, “For God’s sweet mercy, dear, if your husband should find me here, nothing I said would much avail, no solemn oath or fairy tale.

CREATIVE CHOICES

183

Don’t bring shame on yourself and me.” Despite all his cajolery, etc.

But a modern audience will probably not find the situation quite as comic as did a medieval one, so we need to rely on diction to elicit a laugh. Although the idiomatic “fairy tale” is funny, the rhyme itself is not. Moreover, “avail” and the syntactic inversion, usual in French in impersonal constructions but less common in English, impart a studied ring to his words out of keeping with the lover’s nervousness, and reducing contrueve ne parole ne serement to a doublet fails to bring out his mounting panic. Ideally, we want a colloquial and markedly iambic couplet with the triplet occupying a single line: no word nor oath nor fabrication will rectify the situation.

Just as the wealth of morphological rhymes makes me jealous in my capacity of translator, their tendency to switch suddenly between the simple past and the historical present can exasperate me. We do the same in English, but not so wildly. I generally go with the French. Maybe it will disturb my readers, but to me it helps preserve the flavor of the old language without sounding affected. For reasons of rhyme or meter, I will switch even when Old French doesn’t, since those considerations determined their choice in the first place. On the other hand, their use of the passé composé in historical present narration (“he has come in and now he sits down”) works less well in English, and I always respect their use of the imperfect. The “approximative” nature of American English, as opposed to the precision of Modern French, provides a great advantage in translating Old French. We don’t worry about the mot juste [finding the exact word when we speak]. Old French syntax is similarly lax, in fact, even more so than English. Giving the general idea is precise enough, but Modern French demands tightness. Many passages allow for a variety of interpretations, and where Modern French forces you to choose one, English does not. We need not end up with all the same meanings; that there are multiple meanings already makes it closer to Old French. Conscious wordplay aside, the authors seldom intend these ambiguities; they simply don’t care. Que will often do for any subordinating conjunction; only the mood of the verb in the subordinate clause limits our options. Some (mostly Francophone) critics rationalize the frequent anacolutha and ellipses as possible because the mime in performance would clear them up, but I suspect people were simply comfortable speaking this way. Colloquial style plays some part in this, but ultimate responsibility must go the language itself.

184

NATHANIEL E. DUBIN

Modern French translations often end up with a degree of precision that medieval authors never dreamed of. Of course, one can put things precisely in Old French and intentionally use the modern idiom for elaborate ambiguities, but in neither case does the language do so of its own accord. Some explicatory notes in the Nouveau Recueil Complet des Fabliaux show just how much the two idioms differ, whereas English can follow the Old French word for word: (Le Bouchier d’Abevile, 3.18.369–71): Se me sires juré l’avoit,

The priest himself might contradict it, chaiens ne te warandiroit, but all the same you’d be evicted, tant t’ai forment cueilli en hé! you fill me with such strong dislike!’ [If my lord had sworn it, wouldn’t make it a sure thing for you in here, I have taken such a strong hatred to you.] “Même si mon mari l’avait promis sous serment, il ne saurait te garantir que tu puisses rester plus longtemps ici à la maison, tellement je t’ai prise en haine.” [Even if my husband had promised it under oath, he would not be able to provide you a guarantee that you could stay any longer here in the household, I have to such an extent developed a hatred of you.]

(Like spoken English, Old French can use a clause as the subject of a verb.) In all fairness, these notes are parsings, not translations. No less revealing, we get a note each time someone uses ambiguous phrasing to mislead a potential victim. As with syntax, English proves more supple for slippery vocabulary than Modern French, but translation remains a challenge. Many commonplace objects and concepts are unfamiliar to us. Some words have no equivalent in English or have different associations from their English counterparts. Old French loves doublets, so I sometimes translate one word by two to capture nuance and fill out the meter. Of course I do not want to add any meaning not present in the original, but extra wordplay is fair game, for example, in Le Vilain qui conquist Paradis par Plait (5.39.9–10): ne trueve qui rien li demant ne nule cosse li commant.

it found no one to ask it questions or give it orders or directions.

Similarly, I occasionally reduce a doublet to one word to stay within the eight allotted syllables. When you move between civilizations, humor, the fabliaux’s outstanding feature, can pose problems. They find some things very funny that we do not,

CREATIVE CHOICES

185

or would prefer not to—violence, for example, and ethnic jokes, belittling women, and mocking the handicapped. I neither tone down nor apologize for such values. I want rhyme and rhythm to lure my reader into a temporary acceptance of the cruel streak that runs through medieval society, without masking it in stilted, archaic diction. I may venture a joke that only a contemporary English speaker could catch, so long as it adds nothing to the literal meaning and involves no anachronism. When the author of Le Fevre de Creil tells us that “the blacksmith won’t leave off praising the boy’s penis and goes even further than before,” I have no qualms about writing (5.42.78–80): Li fevres ne s’en vout pas tere de löer le vit au vallet; plus que devant s’en entremet.

The blacksmith goes right on repeating the young man’s praises, waxes lyric in superphallic panegyric.

Translating names seldom poses a problem. I go with Old or Modern French or an English equivalent at the dictates of the verse: Rainier in one fabliau, Renier in another. Names that mean something I translate if I think of a convincing equivalent, like Hook (Haimet), Crook (Barat), and Mistress Naggie (Dame Anieuse). Terms of address require careful attention to context. Usually the situation readily suggests an equivalent, but how to assess the appropriate level of intimacy or formality when the knight addresses female pudenda as sire cons (the noun is masculine) in Le Chevalier qui fist parler les cons (3.15)? “Sir” would mislead an English speaker; Old French uses sire for courtesy, but not necessarily deference (as opposed to messire). Sire prestre can become anything from “Father” to “Mr. Priest” depending on what tone of voice I hear. In Le povre Clerc, in the wife’s mouth dans clers becomes “mister scholar” and “my scholar” in the husband’s. Clerc is always difficult (clergyman? some specific Church rank? student?), as are government officials (provost, eschevin) which have no exact equivalent. Ami/amie is always thorny, covering as it does the whole gamut of interpersonal relationships from total strangers to the most intimate sincere or insincere committed involvement, marital, premarital, or illicit, and for which no English word captures the myriad of nuance implied by their use. Old French uses dame for female religious; “lady” won’t do in English. Few characters have names, so I have to follow Old French usage where people address each other by relationships. This works for son, mother, niece, and so on, but doesn’t sound natural for married couples. If justified by the situation, “sire” or “lord” will do for “husband,” but to call one’s wife (or any woman besides a nun) “sister” conjures up unwanted cultural overtones for an American speaker.

186

NATHANIEL E. DUBIN

More saints than principal characters have names in the fabliaux. People constantly swear by them, often to fill out the meter, seldom to supply a rhyme. The word at the end of the other line of the couplet was more likely chosen to rhyme with the saint. Choosing one’s saint calls for careful interpretation. The innkeeper in Les trios Aveugles de Compiegne (2.9), who has been taken for mad, swears to his sanity by St. Cornelius and the “faith he owes his daughter.” Cornille rhymes with fille. One might assume that since innkeepers’ daughters often get seduced in these stories, the humor lies here. Should we drop Cornelius and have him swear by holy water to rhyme with daughter, which also fits in with the exorcism he must undergo? But that makes for an odd oath, and the scene may take place in the Abbey Church of St. Cornelius, the principal religious house in Compiègne. Better throw the baby out with the holy water and keep the saint (2.9.307–308): “Non sui, fet il, par saint Cornille ne par la foi que doi ma fille.”

“By the faith owed my child and Saint “Cornelius,” he says, “I ain’t!”

The saints invoked may vary from manuscript to manuscript. In the A version of Le Chevalier a la Robe vermeille (2.12), the hero promises to devote himself to a long list of random and obscure saints that well fits his unstable befuddlement. The C version has him praying to the patron saints of cuckolds and rabies, among others. Both are funny in their own way, but the saints in manuscript C coincide with the pilgrimage he maps out. Unlike saints, place names are usually of no special significance when they do not give the geography of the action or call attention to the quality of merchandise, especially cloth or wine. A character who’d rather be “1,000 miles away” will wish him- or herself in Montpellier, Aleppo, or whatever rhymes. For exclamations like voi, diva, and ahan, suitable contemporary equivalents do not easily come to mind. This brings us to proverbs, which occur frequently. Here I try to find an equivalent English saying or attempt a semi-literal adaptation that sounds proverbial and fits in with the cultural experience of medieval France: “As goes the market, buy or sell” [C’est de tel vente, tel marchié], “The shepherd’s weak; the wolf shits wool” [A mol pastor, chie los laine]. Le Vilain au Buffet ends with a string of proverbs with nearly identical English equivalents (5.52.255–60): si dist a soi: “Qui siet, il seche, & si dit on, qui va il leche.

“ ‘The stay-at-home gets left behind’ and, as they say, ‘Seek, and you’ll find.’

CREATIVE CHOICES

S’a mon ostel fusse arestuz, ne fusse a piece revestuz de robe d’escarlate nueve. L’en dit: Qui bien chace, bien trueve.”

187

If back at home I had remained I never would just now have gained the robe of fine wool I have on, so ‘Nothing ventured, nothing won.’ ”

Other fabliaux distort a proverb for a laugh. Le Pet au Vilain (5.55.50) alters a word in Trop estraindre fait cheoir [Clutching a thing too tightly makes you drop it], replacing “to fall” with “to shit” (chiier). “One lets loose when one grips too tightly”—translating literally makes for a funny line, but the essence of the joke lies in the pun, not the vulgarity. Other culturally induced headaches are probably not worth the trouble they give. Fashions have changed drastically. Who knows what a surcot looked like? Certainly not my dictionary. Currency, weights and measures, gaming terminology, and so on, all present the same difficulty. It makes sense to treat wordplay as cultural insofar as it is a form of humor. No translation can come close to doing justice to the fabliaux unless it brings across their constant, almost subversive wordplay. I want my English to indulge in and comment on the rhetorical games going on in the Old French more joyously than any footnote. Wherever I detect a twisting of the language, I want my translation to tip off the reader that something funny, in both senses of the word, is going on. Supposedly, puns are nearly impossible to translate. Translators will substitute one joke for another, or, as I prefer, forget the pun in their original and make another close by in the text that works in their language. I do not often have to resort to this kind of displacement. Instead I give free rein to English polysemy. Much more difficult is when the syntax intentionally creates two specific meanings, one common and one hinted at, and I must choose between them. A “literal” prose translation will always target the former. We find thinly veiled sexual references in the most innocent words. In Le Pescheor de Pont-seur-Seine, a wife wishes that a dog would choke on that part of her husband’s anatomy she refuses to mention, using enossé (from os, “bone,” a common expression for erection in French and English). In L’Esquiriel a young girl who has just learned the word for “penis” (vit) accepts Robin’s invitation to play with his “pet squirrel” and notices how lively it is: “Il est toz vis!”—a near-perfect homonym for “It’s one hundred percent penis (viz).” Some fabliaux are little else than a lengthy development of a single play on words. When the pun is the whole story, if you can’t make that pun, you may as well not translate any of it. In La Male Honte (5.43), which I call “Siám’s Legacy,” Honte, an English peasant, bequeaths his trunkful of earthly possessions to the king. Honte’s trunk (la male Honte) also means “terrible

188

NATHANIEL E. DUBIN

disgrace,” thus the quid pro quo. I hope readers will know to pronounce my invented Celtic name “shame,” but how far can one go without altering the tale beyond recognition? Le Vilain au Buffet offers sociolinguistic difficulties. At an open feast, a peasant asks where he should sit. Before lavishly furnished homes, hosts assembled makeshift tables and benches from whatever was at hand. The ill-tempered seneschal first hits him, then provides a small chest (buffet) to sit on. Later, the peasant says he must return what he has borrowed, but gives him a blow (buffet) instead of the chest. We need a homonym for a chest and a blow. “Buffet,” both a piece of furniture and a blow, gives us purely visual wordplay, not homonymy, and surely the peasant could not read. And why this need to return his buffet? In English you “give” someone a seat; in French you “lend” it. One can seldom reproduce the same wordplay in two languages. Still, one can make the reader aware of its presence. Porcelet (6.67) offers a good example. It reserves its pun for the punch line, which the author drags out over the entire second half of this short fabliau. In this variant of the naming game, the husband having fed his “wheat” to his wife’s “piggie” to the point of exhaustion, he takes a dump on her, explaining that only the bran is left. Bren also means “stool.” Here I must make do with a deconstruction of the wordplay (6.67.41–50): “Q’avez vos fait en mon devant?” “Dame, ce est brans qui espant por doner a vostre Porcel, que, foi que je doi Saint Marcel, do Fromant qui est en despans n’i est remés fors que li brans.” “Conmant, sire, est donques failliz li Fromanz? Or est mal bailliz Porcelez, se Deus me doint sen, qu’il n’a cure de vostre bran!”

“What have you left at my front door?” “Some husks and waste I’ve scattered for your Piggie’s sustenance, dear lady, for I’m at my Wheat’s end already and nothing’s left, in Saint Marcel’s name, just the chaff and empty shells.” “How now, sir? Can it be that Wheat has run dry? That’s bad news indeed for Piggie here, who has no taste, so help me God, to eat your waste.”

With dirty words I ran into a totally unexpected difficulty, the only one that I predict will ultimately never be solved: the problem of shock value, which is, of course, cultural. Why I don’t know, but the English words for the female organs seem much dirtier than the names we give the corresponding male parts, while the exact opposite holds true in the Romance languages. We can talk glibly about “dicking around” and commonly use

CREATIVE CHOICES

189

“balls” to mean “nerve,” but “cunt” is invariably crude. In contrast, déconner (meaning, among other things, “to dick around”) generally does not upset the French too much, and calling someone a con (cunt) is vulgar, but much less insulting than couillon (balls). In fact, many people do not know its literal meaning. As a result, unlike in French, in English La Sorisete des Estopes (6.66) comes across as very obscene and Le Fevre de Creil less so. I have gauged audience reactions to both in both settings, and one cannot mistake them. Where the words were considered offensive, Old French could offer no “clean” equivalents, dignified by Latin roots and medical usage, with the possible exception of oriner (urinate) in place of pisser (piss), though the latter isn’t very dirty. Thus, their word for “intercourse” is also their word for “fuck,” as in a sense it should be. They could only choose between the blunt (improper) word and a euphemism, which could be either neutral, like “to take one’s pleasure,” or obscene, like “to stick it to her.” We usually run into metaphors already familiar to us in English or graphic enough to translate literally (parsnip, donkey). When they don’t rhyme I have plenty from other fabliaux to choose from. Sometimes the poets invent their own, like demoisiaus reveleus (“merry young gentleman,” which I render as “party boy”). We once find “church bells” as a euphemism for orgasm. The priest sounds two bells, which gives “once the priest’s sated and he has rung out both his bells.” Thus, translating one pun word for word may produce another, but the literal meaning of the passage remains the same, and for the figurative meaning the presence of a joke counts more than the joke itself. When Robin demonstrates how the girl can feed his squirrel with the walnuts she ate the day before, “he puts his squirrel in up to the nuts in earnest.” Euphemisms in the fabliaux usually serve to underscore obscenity, not attenuate it. Lack of a “proper” word makes it tricky to assess the appropriate register when the text does not use a euphemism. In a few cases register does not matter. In the husband’s assessment of his wife’s appreciation of his sexual prowess in Le Pescheor de Pont-seur-Seine, one may switch the placement of the obscenity and neutral euphemism (4.28.45–50): Se je ne te fotoye bien tu me harroies plus c’un chien. Je m’en esfors por toi sovent. Ja fame por nul garniment n’amera si bien son mari com por fere ce que je di.

If I did not do you-know-what you’d hate me like a mangy mutt I push myself to do my stuff for your sake. Clothes are not enough to keep a wife’s love; satisfaction depends much more on fucking action.

190

NATHANIEL E. DUBIN

At other times the choice is clear (when the girl’s mother in L’Esquiriel reluctantly tells her daughter what that thing hanging between a man’s legs is called, we need the official word), or the requirements of register and wordplay may conflict. At the climax of Le Pescheor de Pont-seur-Seine, the wife, who till now has spoken in neutral euphemisms (“thing”) or childish expressions (“dingle-dangle”), learns that her husband has not lost his penis and in her joy blurts out vit. Best would be to translate with a nonmetaphoric vulgarity. But she reclaimed her dowry of cows when she threatened to leave, and she now calls out, “Ramaine les bestes!” [Bring the animals back!], an unintentional sexual pun (beste was slang for “penis”) that neither shows up in English nor is graphic enough for a reader to catch, so I render the passage thus (4.28.195–99): El rapele sa chamberiere: “Ramaine les bestes arriere!, ele li crie a grant alaine. Ramaine les bestes, ramaine! Me sire a son vit recouvré.”

She calls her servant straightaway: “Bring back the animals, I say!” She calls out loud, “Bring back the beef! Return the stock! It’s my belief my husband’s meat has been restored.”

In short, fabliau authors show us that a euphemism doesn’t make reality any prettier. In La Damoisele qui ne pooit oïr parler de foutre, a naming game fabliaux, a sudden switch from proper diction to extreme vulgarity highlights and belittles the girl’s prudery (4.26.19–23): La damoisele n’avoit cure, por ce qu’ele ert de tel nature, que en nul sen ne sofrist mie sergent qui nomast lecherie, vit ne coille ne autre chose.

The young lady had no intent, because such was her temperament, of having household help so coarse they’d even mention intercourse or cock or balls, et cætera.

She cannot even countenance lecherie, a blunt, but perfectly proper, ecclesiastical term, whereas euphemisms she heartily approves of. A penis is a pony, testicles are grooms, her vagina a pond, her anus a trumpeter. (The fabliau burlesques the high style by turning her crotch into a locus amœnus.) Her in-bed conversation with the new hired hand becomes ever more tacky, and when the dialogue gives way to narrative the author glosses what they’ve been saying in no uncertain terms (4.26.198–206): “Dame, je dot lo corneor, fait Daviz, que il n’en groçast

He answers, “But the bugler, lady! I fear the anger of your sentry

CREATIVE CHOICES

se li polains dedanz entrast.” Cele respont: “S’il en dit mal, bien lo batent li mereschal!” Daviz respont: “Ce est bien dit.” A tant li met el con lo vit, si fait son boen & son talant si qu’ele nel tient pas a lant.

191

“if we allow my pony entry.” She answers him, “Your stable boys can beat him up if he makes noise.” David replies, “Yes, I approve.” He has his way and goes to shove his cock up her cunt; his attacks redouble; she won’t find him lax!

L’Esquiriel manages to be even coarser by sticking to the metaphor, piling on details to explode the euphemism. Robin’s “squirrel” overdoses on walnuts (6.58.187–96): Tant a vonchié, le fol, le glout, que cele senti le degout aval ses nages degouter. “Esta! fet ele, ne bouter! Ne ferir, Robin, ne ferir! Tu as hurté de tel aïr & tant feru & tant hurté que .i. des oés est esquaté. Ce poise moi, c’est granz domages–– l’aubun m’en cort par mi les nages!”

He vomited so much, the glutton, that she felt running down her bottom the trickle of the overflow. “Stop pumping!” she implores him. “Whoa! Stop pumping, Robin, stop your pumping! You’ve gone about it with such thumping and with such vigor beat and pushed that now one of the eggs is squooshed. What a great loss this is! Alas, there’s egg white running down my ass!”

Could obscenity put it any more grossly? I do not pretend to put the fabliaux in the vanguard of the war against hypocrisy any more than I would late night television. Norris Lacy persuasively demonstrates the deep-rooted conservatism of the fabliau ethic.4 Fabliaux authors ridicule innovation, nonconformity and pretence. Their foul language, blunt descriptions of bodily functions and mild blasphemy scandalized many, but few saw them as a direct attack. To equate provocation with rebellion projects contemporary cultural assumptions onto the French Middle Ages, and to second-guess their unconscious motivations is pure speculation. One may find fault with an imperfect world, yet never dream of changing it. They love slippery language because they spoke a slippery

192

NATHANIEL E. DUBIN

tongue. They did not make it so; they made it more so. Wordplay is only the “how” of what I deal with as a translator, and vulgarity is but one of many linguistic issues raised by fabliau diction. Seconded by the verse they are written in, these works touch on all: deceptive speech, misunderstanding, literalism and metaphor, truth and fiction, the power of the word to create reality and unreality. For me, translating the fabliaux meant involving our language in the debate. If not, I only translate a story. No doubt I set myself too many tasks: to write rhymed couplets, to respect the integrity of the line, to produce a funny, performable text, to clue the reader in on what is happening rhetorically and all that it implies, while, most difficult of all, balancing the demands of one against the others. Had I written on the nuances I could not capture, this would have been a much longer paper. I only hope that my small degree of success justifies the liberties I took and the sacrifices I had to make. Notes 1. For the convenience of readers, I have standardized all titles in this essay to those provided by the NRCF. I have also provided the NRCF citations for each fabliau in the event that readers would like to reference these texts. These citations are provided for purposes of comparision only. For, readers will note, the texts I use in this essay differ from the “Textes Critiques” of the NRCF. There is an obvious and important reason for these differences: these texts are cited from my facing-page critical edition of 116 fabliaux, which is currently in preparation for publication. 2. Jean Rychner, Contribution à l’étude des fabliaux. Variantes, remaniements, degradations, 2 vols. (Neufchâtel-Genève: Droz, 1960). 3. Willem Noomen and Nico van den Bogaard, eds., Nouveau Recueil Complet des Fabliaux, 10 vols. (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1983–98). 4. Norris J. Lacy, Reading Fabliaux (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993).

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

PETER G. BEIDLER is the Lucy G. Moses Distinguished Professor of English at Lehigh University. His books on medieval subjects include The Wife of Bath (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996) and Masculinities in Chaucer (D.S. Brewer, 1998). He has edited the chapters on the Miller’s Tale and the Reeve’s Tale for the new Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, now in production from D.S. Brewer. He also publishes widely in other fields, especially contemporary Native American fiction and Henry James. He was named the National Professor of the Year in 1983 by CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education) and the Carnegie Foundation. R. HOWARD BLOCH is Augustus R. Street Professor of French at Yale University and the author of numerous books and articles on medieval French literature and history, including The Scandal of the Fabliaux (Chicago, 1986) and, most recently, The Anonymous Marie de France (University of Chicago Press, 2003). An officer in the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is currently working on a book on the Bayeux Tapestry and the Anglo-Norman world. HOLLY A. CROCKER is Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. Her articles appear in Chaucer Review, Shakespeare Quarterly, Medieval Feminist Forum, and a number of edited collections. Her book, Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood, is also with Palgrave. NATHANIEL E. DUBIN is Professor of French at St. John’s University. He has devoted the last thirteen years to studying the fabliaux and has presented numerous papers on the subject. He is currently working on an edition for scholars and students of 116 fabliaux with facing verse translations, commentary, and notes. Four of his translations have appeared in the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, vol. 1 (7th ed., 1998) and four others have appeared in different journals ELLEN LORRAINE FRIEDRICH is Assistant Professor of Modern Languages at Valdosta State University in Georgia. She has published essays on the character of Bel Acuel in the Romans de la rose, on Chrétien de Troyes’s Le Chevalier de la charrete, and on promoting French programs in higher education. Upcoming works include essays on the figures of Lancelot and Tristan in contemporary film. SUSANNE HAFNER is Assistant Professor of Medieval German Literature and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin. Her book Maskulinität in der höfischen

194

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Erzählliteratur (Masculinity in Courtly Narrative) is in press. In her current research projects, she is working on medieval glosses in Aeneid manuscripts, the reception of priapic literature, and a study of the Middle English Sir Perceval of Gales. CARY HOWIE is an Assistant Professor in Romance Studies at Cornell University, where he teaches medieval French and Italian literature, critical theory, and queer studies. His book, Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature, will be published by Palgrave in 2006. MARY E. LEECH is Adjunct Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati. Her primary interests focus on medieval medical and metaphoric treatments of the body. Her article, “Why Dame Ragnell Had to Die: Feminine Usurpation of Masculine Authority in ‘The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell’ ” will appear in The English Loathly Lady Tales: Collected Essays, ed. Elizabeth Passmore and Susan Carter, Studies in Medieval Culture (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, forthcoming, 2006), pp. 300–332. SHEILA J. NAYAR is Assistant Professor of English and Communication Studies at Greensboro College. Her interests include the concepts of orality and literacy, especially as they intersect with visual and textual storytelling practices. Among her publications are articles in Visual Anthropology, Film Quarterly, and the New Review of Film and Television Studies, and she is currently completing a manuscript entitled Cinematically Speaking: The Orality-Literacy Paradigm for Visual Narrative. LISA PERFETTI is Associate Professor of French at Muhlenberg College. Her articles on women, laughter, and feminist pedagogy appear in journals including Exemplaria and Medieval Feminist Forum. She has written a book, Women and Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), and edited a collection of essays, The Representation of Women’s Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005). KIRIL PETKOV is Assistant Professor of Mediterranean History at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. He specializes in high and late medieval sociocultural history and Mediterranean cultural encounters. Among his publications are two books, Infidels, Turks, and Women: The South Slavs in the German Mind, c. 1400–1600 (Peter Lang, 1997) and The Kiss of Peace: Ritual, Self, and Society in the High and Late Medieval West (Brill, 2003), and several articles. He is currently engaged in a project dealing with the transformation of late medieval and early modern values. CHRISTIAN SHERIDAN is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at St. Xavier University. His article, “May in the Marketplace: Commodification and Textuality in the Merchant’s Tale,” appeared in Studies in Philology (Winter, 2005), and he is working on a book project, Chaucer’s Interpretive Marketplace. NICOLE NOLAN SIDHU is Assistant Professor of English at East Carolina University. She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 2002. Her article on Chaucer’s comedy is forthcoming in Palgrave Advances in Chaucer Studies (ed. Larry Scanlon).

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

195

An article on masculine piety and chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale will appear in Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing, and Household, ed. Jeremy Goldberg and Maryanne Kowaleski. Other articles on Canadian literature and culture have appeared in Canadian Communications (1998; 2002) and Words with Power (2002). She is currently completing a book on obscene discourse in medieval literature.

This page intentionally left blank

INDEX OF FABLIAUX

The following fabliaux feature in essays in this collection. Unless otherwise noted, the volume and fabliau numbers from the Nouveau Recueil Complet des Fabliaux, eds. Willem Noomen and Nico van den Boogaard, 10 vols. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1983–1998) are given in parenthesis. Aloul (3.14) 150–155, 159 Auberee (1.4) 51–57, 116, 118, 119, 121 Cele qui fu foutue et desfoutue (4.30) 30 (n. 23) 50, 157, 160 (n. 7) Constant du Hamel (1.2) 97, 104–106 Conte de fole larguesce 116, 118, 119, 120 Couvoiteus et l’Envieus (6.71) 59 (n. 18) 144 (n. 15) 136–139, 141–142 De Berengier au lonc Cul (4.34) 20–21, 115, 118 Des chevaliers, des .ii. clercs, et les villains (B.N. MS. 837.33) 66–68 Frere Denise (6.56) 90–93 Guillaume au Faucon (8.93) 118, 125 (n. 12), 156 Jouglet (2.10) 50, 65, 78 L’Esquiriel (6.58) 4–6, 24–27, 157, 180, 187, 190, 191 L’Evesque qui beneï le Con (6.68) 116, 119, 121 Le Bouchier d’Abeville (3.18) 70, 102, 107, 117, 118, 184

La Bourse pleine de Sens (2.8) 28, 116, 119, 121, 178 Le Chevalier a la Robe vermeille (2.12) 86–89, 186 Le Chevalier qui fist sa Fame confesse (4.33) 116, 119, 121, 185 La Couille noire (5.46) 116, 118 La Crote (6.57) 70–78 La Dame escoillee (8.83) 28 (n. 1), 116, 118, 119 La Damoisele qui ne pooit oïr parler de foutre (4.26) 5, 6, 24, 30 (n. 23), 115, 164, 190 Le Foteor (6.59) 117, 180 La Housse partie (3.16) 45, 117, 177 La Plantez (7.76) 115, 120 La Saineresse (4.36) 17–20 Le Sohait desvé (6.70) 26–28 La Sorisete des Estopes (6.66) 156, 189 La vieille Truande (4.37) 51–52, 54 Le miracle du Sacristain 165–168, 170–171 Le povre Clerc (7.79) 71, 181, 185 Le Prestre comporté (9.102) 115, 118, 124 (n. 4) Le Prestre et la Dame (8.95) 157, 158 Le Prestre et le Chevalier (9.103) 115, 117, 120 Le Prestre qui abevete (8.98) 80 (n. 48)

198

INDEX OF FABLIAUX

Le Prestre qui ot Mere a Force (5.41) 53–54 Le Prestre teint (7.81) 115, 116, 124 (n. 4) Le Vilain Asnier (8.92) 68–70, 117 Le Vilain de Bailleul (5.49) 59 (n. 18) Le Vilain au Buffet (5.52) 115, 118, 126 (n. 15), 186–188 Le Vilain de Farbu (6.62) 117, 119 Le Vilain Mire (2.13) 28 Les Braies au Cordelier (3.17) 59 (n. 18), 86–89 Les Deus Changeors (5.51) 59 (n. 18), 102–107, 117, 119, 120, 181

Les Perdris (4.21) 59, 70 Les quatre Sohais saint Martin (4.31) 2, 33–41, 131–143 Les trois Chanoinesses de Couloigne (10.121) 22–23 Les trois Dames qui troverent un Vit (8.96) 142 Porcelet (6.67) 30 (n. 23), 156, 188 Sire Hain et Dame Anieuse (2.5) 116, 118, 119, 185 Trubert (10.124) 168–170, 174 (n. 18)

INDEX

adultery 17, 18, 19–20, 54, 55, 57, 86, 87, 88, 102, 121, 151–153, 154 Aelred of Rievaulx 48, 51, 54, 57 Aguirre, Manuel 89 animals 35–36, 37, 38, 149, 150, 155–159; see also bestiality, imagery anticlericalism 74, 75, 88, 90–93, 107–109, 115, 117, 118, 154–155 antifeminism, see misogyny Aristotle 34, 37–38, 100 arrogance 8–9, 18–20, 113–127 Athonius Guainerius 49 Aucassin et Nicolette 71 avoir 41, 51, 116, 118, 121; see also savoir Bacchus 134–135; see also St. Martin Bakhtin, Mikhail 33, 69, 74, 75, 137 Barthes, Roland 170 Bayless, Martha 66 Bédier, Joseph 1, 138, 141 Bernard of Clairvaux 47, 69 bestiality 35–36, 37 Beyer, Jürgen 119 Bible 38–39 billingsgate 137 Bloch, R. Howard 3, 18, 33, 71, 88, 166 blood 64, 70, 71, 72, 75, 88 boasting, see arrogance Bodel, Jean 26–27, 136–138, 141 body as commodity 102–103 dominant 86, 87, 116, 117

eroticized 5, 40, 52, 156, 165, 171–172 female 6, 8, 37, 39, 40, 46–47, 90–93, 102–103, 118, 167 fertile 37, 46, 49 fragmented 2, 5, 7, 34, 37, 88 hierarchy of 67 hybrid 4–6, 34 grotesque 1, 33, 38, 39, 40, 41, 72 inversion 34, 70–72, 137 and language 4–5 male 8, 36–37, 41, 86, 88–89 materiality of 2, 3, 37, 65, 71, 76 mobility of 102–103, 109 old 46–47, 53 passive 86, 90–93 socially inscribed 66, 67, 84, 85–86, 87, 89, 90, 91 see also corpus Bourdieu, Pierre 98–99 bourgeois 115, 123 bread 72–73 Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable 139 Burns, E. Jane 85 Busby, Keith 3 Cain 39 Cambrensis, Giraldus 35 Camille, Michael 64 Cañas, Jesús 138 Chaucer, Geoffrey Shipman’s Tale 149–161

200

INDEX

Chretién de Troyes 177, 179 Cligés 84 Erec et Enide 84 Christ 7, 71–73, 74, 77, 78, 134, 139 Christine de Pizan 23 Church 69, 73, 75, 76, 77 class formation 122 clothing 83–96 circulation of 85, 87–88, 93 and gender 84–85, 88, 90–93 social status 84–85, 86–89, 93 comedy absurd 132 black 137 clean vs. dirty 131–132 low 66, 71, 75, 137 slapstick 137 see also humor, parody commodity 97–98, 108 female body as 102–103 money as 97, 100–111 communion 71, 73, 74 conduct books 23–24 corpus 1–3, 33, 109, 163; see also body Corpus Christi 71 courtly literature 3, 47, 83, 84, 177, 179 Covetousness 47, 131, 136–137, 138, 142, 168; see also desire, sin Crane, Susan 89, 93 cuaderna via 138 cuckoldry, see adultery Damian, Peter 167 Decameron 19, 25, 149, 150, 159 Derrida, Jacques 163, 169, 172 desire 2, 5, 9, 18, 19, 27, 33, 35, 36, 38, 40, 52, 99–100, 131–133, 134, 136–137, 140–141, 142 devil 76, 139, 168, 169; see also St. Martin domestic authority 114, 117, 119 Douglas, Mary 63–64, 65 Dronke, Peter 70

Dubin, Nathaniel 72 Du Vilain qui donna son ame au deable 139 economic organization barter 97, 98, 99–100, 101, 107, 108, 109 gift 97, 98–99, 101, 103–104, 105–106, 107, 108, 109 money 97, 100–102, 104–105, 106, 107–108, 109, 122 economy 120, 121, 122 Eden, Garden of 67 Ehrenpreis, Irvin 65 Ekkehard of Saint-Gall 56 entremetteuse/entremettre 48, 57; see also go-betweens envy 136, 137, 166; see also desire, sin erotic phenomenology 165 estates 2, 8, 35, 49, 53, 66, 67, 79, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 122; see also social anxiety, social status eucharist 72, 73–75 exchange 3–11, 48–49, 85, 86, 93, 97–111, 120 excrement, see shit exemplum/exempla, 9, 34, 69, 77, 131, 137, 138, 139, 166 fableor, see storyteller “Fabliau ethos” 114, 119–120, 122 flesh 3–6, 34, 47, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75 vs. spirit 4 folk motifs 137 folk wisdom 131 food 66, 71, 76–77 Foucault, Michel 91 Fourth Lateran Council 73, 76 Fradejas Lebrero, José 138, 141 French currency 104–105 Freud, Sigmund 22, 64 Friedman, David 34

INDEX

Galen 38 Gaul 134 Gaunt, Simon 3, 114, 164, 169 gender hierarchy 21, 83, 87, 88, 103, 116, 118 norms 5, 46, 89, 90–93, 103, 115 upheaval 46, 86, 87, 88, 89, 103–104, 113, 115, 118, 119 generation 2, 34, 38, 49 genitalia 20, 26, 34, 36, 39, 131, 132, 137, 152, 169,188 genre 1, 33, 52, 97, 113, 163–165, 176–177 go-betweens 44–60 gossip 48, 50 Gravdal, Kathryn 164 greed 136; see also desire, sin Gregg, Joan Young 77 Guibert of Nogent 74 Guillaume de Lorris 47 hairy virgin 38 Hanawalt, Barbara 90 Helsinger, Howard 66 Henry of Ghent 100 Hippocrates 38 Höfler, Otto 75 homiletic narratives 69, 76–77 honor 104, 105–106, 108 horned peasant 39 Hostiensis 23 household 20, 21, 46, 50, 51, 56, 116, 119; see also domestic authority humiliation, see shame humor linguistic 19, 20, 23, 25, 157, 180–181 scatological 20, 65, 66, 70, 72 sexual 20, 24–25 see also comedy, parody Hunt, Alan 85

201

imagery agrarian 35 animal 35–36, 39, 149, 150, 155–159 fertility 34, 37 imagination 33–44, 52 information workers 46, 49, 50; see also old woman, storyteller Jacques de Vitry 48, 54 jealousy 151 Jean de Meun 4, 46, 48 jews 76–77 jokes, see comedy, humor, parody jongleur, see storyteller Joubert, Laurent 19 Katznelson, Ira 122 Kinsey Report 35 knights 20, 66, 114–115, 118 Lacy, Norris J. 4, 68, 70, 74, 191 languages Arabic 133 English (modern) 183, 184, 185, 188 French (modern) 180, 183–184, 185, 188 Hebrew 133 Hispanic Arabic 133 Iberian 133 Old French 133, 138, 180, 183, 184, 185, 188 Old Spanish 138 Spanish (modern) 133 language and body 4–5, 34 chevilles 178–179 doublets 184 dynamism 3–5, 87, 113, 114, 177, 191–92 euphemism 24–5, 149, 150, 153, 154, 156–159, 187, 189–90, 191

202

INDEX

language—continued literalism 3, 6–7, 25, 37, 66, 73, 76, 178, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 192 obscenity 22, 46, 51–2, 163–164, 191 proverbs 186–187 puns 187–188 realism 72, 137 rhymes 176–183, 185, 186, 189, 192 sexual 33, 155–156, 187–191 vulgarity 22, 115, 188–189, 190, 191 laughter 19, 23, 77, 137 Lebor Gabála 39 LeClerc, Victor 70 Levy, Brian J. 139 Libro de Alexandre 138 Lindahl, Carl 138 livre, see French currency lust 168; see also desire, sin Luther, Martin 69 Mane, Perrine 84 manure 64, 68–70, 117 manuscript traditions/variants 21, 55, 117, 179–180 Marcos Marín, Francisco 138 Marie de France 167, 177 Bisclavret 84 “Del Vilein e del folet” 140 Lanval 84 Marin, Louis 71 Marion, Jean-Luc 165, 170, 172 Martinmen 135 Mary Toft of Godalmin 41 masculine authority 57, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 117, 120 masculine passivity 86–89, 103 Mauss, Marcel 99 medical literature 34, 38, 41, 49 medieval folklore 138–139 Ménagier de Paris 23 Midas’s Touch 139

Mille et une Nuits/Las mil y una noches 141 misogyny 17, 46 mobility of fableor 50, 109 justice 122–123 morality 97, 114, 117, 119–120, 121, 123 social 113–114, 117 monetary theory 100–101 money 88, 97–111, 120, 121, 122 as hybrid 101–102, 103, 104–105, 106, 107, 108, 109 monstrosity 34, 37, 38, 39–40; see also bestiality monstrous races 39 Montaillou 74 moral at end of tale 55, 56–57, 68, 74, 75, 77–78, 87, 88, 177 Motif Index of Folk Literature 138, 139 Muscatine, Charles 67–68, 69, 70 Nancy, Jean-Luc 172 nature 38, 69, 74, 114 Noomen, Willem 72, 74, 182 Nouveau Recueil Complet des Fabliaux 184 obscenity vs. social subversion 46, 49, 55–56 old woman sympathetic 45–46, 50–51, 52–53 transgressive 47–48, 54–56 Osteen, Mark 98 Panchatantra 140 Pannonia (now Hungary) 134 Paré, Amboise 37 parody, religious 65, 66, 71–72, 75, 77; see also comedy, humor patriarchal order 83, 87, 88 peasants, see vilains performativity, see storyteller Phaedrus 140 Phoebus, Gaston 158

INDEX

Piponnier, Françoise 84 pleasure conjugal 26–27 linguistic 19, 20, 23, 58 sexual 5, 24–26, 53, 55, 120, 153–154, 159 women’s 20–23, 25–26, 27–28 poverty 49, 51, 53–54 Priapic poetry 34 Priapus 135; see also St. Martin priests 51, 88, 90–93, 107–109, 117–118 Pugh, Tison 164 Rabelais, Francois 65 rape 55, 105, 116 reproduction, see generation resurrection 69 Robertson, D.W., Jr. 157–158 rogue 163, 165, 168, 169, 171 Roman de la Rose 4–5, 46–47, 53, 179 romance 83, 84, 86, 87, 177, 179 Romulus Anglicus 140 Ross, Thomas W. 158 Rowland, Beryl 158 Rubin, Miri 73 rudeness 163, 166, 167, 171 Rutebeuf 165–169, 170, 171, 172 Rychner, Jean 179 St. Augustine 3, 92 St. Bernard, see Bernard of Clairvaux St. Martin 34, 134–136 feast day 35, 135 relation to Bacchus 134–135 relation to devils 139 relation to Priapus 135 St. Peter 139 sacraments 72, 73–75, 77 satire 65, 69, 102 savoir 115, 116, 118, 119; see also avoir scatology 63–81 Secreta Mulierum 38 Sedgwick, Eve 171

203

Sendebar: Libro de los engaños de las mujeres 141 sex 17, 18, 25, 153 sexuality 2, 48, 49, 51, 91, 158, 168, 172 shame 18, 20, 21, 103–104, 105, 106, 120 shit 63–81, 117, 132, 133, 137 sin 69, 136–137, 167 social ambiguity 169–170 social anxiety 35, 86, 88, 97, 113, 115, 120, 122 social pretension 106, 118 social stability 83, 87, 89, 90, 106, 114, 121, 122, 169 social status 51, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 97, 102, 106, 107, 108, 118, 121, 122, 164 sodomia 167; see also Peter Damian Sørensen, Preben 35 Spargo, John Webster 149, 150 spit 131, 133, 137 storyteller performativity of 26–27, 50, 65–66, 67, 68, 74, 75, 76, 77–78, 109, 177, 180 woman as 19, 20, 46, 51, 86–87, 89 sumptuary restrictions 85–86 theory monetary 100–101 queer 171–172 rough 166, 167 rude 163–174 Thomas, Alfred 77 Thompson, E.P. 122 Thompson, Stith 138, 139 Tours 134 translation finite lifespan of translation 176 linguistic and cultural challenges 176, 180, 182, 186–187, 191–192 literary vs. technical 175–176, 180, 187 transubstantiation 73–78

204

INDEX

vilains 35–37, 38–39, 40–41, 66–67, 68, 69, 75, 115, 116, 117, 119, 122 vinalia 135 Vincent of Beauvais 37 Villon, François 47 voice authorial 177, 178 intermingling 4–5 interplay 3–5, 87 Watriquet 22–23 Wentersdorf, Karl P. 158 Wiborada 56

wishing 31, 34–36, 39, 40, 41, 131–147 absurd 138, 142 abuse of 134 foolish, futile 142 taboo against 133 women agency of 86–87, 89, 90–93 audience for fabliaux 22–23 cunning of 19 feminine sensuality 27 wit 17–31, 51, 58, 89, 120, 122 Ziolkowski, Jan 49, 52