Blood, Sweat and Tears: Medieval Literature, Cambridge, and Leonard Cohen

 

London, British Library, Egerton MS 1821, ff. 1v-2r

I was thinking, this morning, how there is never enough time for some things. 82 years, for instance, feels like far too little time – even though I had been expecting to read that Leonard Cohen had died every time I saw his name in the depressing little facebook ‘sidebar of 2016 shitshows’ that has evolved over the course of this year.

The image above – the opening pages of a medieval prayerbook made in the fifteenth century – came up in my teaching today. We were reading Julian of Norwich and talking, amongst other things, about the grotesque, weirdly solid droplets of blood she visualises – like the scales of a fish – dropping down Christ’s face as he dies on the cross. Medieval literature is very keen on blood, sweat and tears, as the image demonstrates. They flow, drip, trickle, spurt, smear and gush from text to text and (revoltingly, but historically and scientifically verifiably) across the pages of stained, damp-puckered, grimy manuscripts that have plainly caught the worst of human effluvia over the centuries. Such tears can seem both overwhelming, and off-putting. Margery Kempe weeps so often and so loudly that (she proudly records) onlookers frequently presume her to be drunk in church. Piers Plowman‘s Will wails so prolifically that he exhausts himself into deep sleep. Chaucer’s Troilus experiences what should be temporary sexual frustration as a fully realised episode cardiac and sanguinary gushing.

But blood, sweat and tears are also, depressingly, part of the experience of studying medieval literature at university. Echoing both medieval imagery of tears and the medieval love of sensory contact with books with impressive authenticity, a student describes how

‘[Y]ou open the book you’ve probably borrowed from the library. You are hit by the smell of the tears of thousands of other[s] … who have had to endure the same pain.

This idea of being caught in a tradition of academic suffering is not unique to Cambridge. When I started my Masters at Oxford (which is, admittedly, not a million miles from Cambridge in ethos), I read a helpful guide to the process, written by an academic. It mentioned – with no apparent hint of irony or humour – that a likely consequence of nine months of intensive study of English Literature was (I kid you not) ‘the dark night of the soul’. Both pieces of writing reminded me of an article by Mary Carruthers, which begins with the bizarre religious writings of the medieval theologian Peter of Celle. Peter wrote a book called On Affliction and Reading, which sounds suitably negative. By ‘affliction,’ Carruthers explains, Peter means:

examination of conscience … oral confession, flooding tears, mortification, kneeling in continuous silence, psalmody, and lashing.

Peter goes on to describe what the ‘reading’ part of his topic requires: not only mind-numbing repetition, carried out in the lonely narrowness of the monastic cell, but also something akin to physical torture. It is reading that lacerates the flesh, strips skin and muscles from the underlying bone, and tears at the body until the blood flows. It is like being in:

a market, where the butcher sells small amounts of his flesh to to God, who comes as a customer. The more of his flesh he sells, the greater grows the sum of money he sets aside. Let them, therefore, increase their spiritual wealth and fill their purse by selling their own flesh and blood, for flesh and blood will not possess the kingdom of Christ. 

As Carruthers comments, what is even more distasteful is the rhetoric of commodification, for the process is a lucrative transaction with God. However – having established this unsettling tradition in medieval theology – she acknowledges that medieval writers seemed to believe it was, at least, a kind of suffering that was necessary to gain benefits. She concludes, ultimately, that Troilus’ incessant weeping in Chaucer’s poem – weeping that’s often seen as absurd, comic, or pain annoying – is actually part of this tradition:

in Troilus, as in a great deal of medieval art, there is a deep connection between the grief and the argument, indeed, in some way the grief sets the arguing in motion … in this psychology, arguing needs an emotion like grief in order to come fully into being, to be invented and fruitfully intended in the first place, or else it remains dry and without fruit. 

Plainly, Peter of Celle – and all the other medieval writers who seem to glory in the experience of thoroughly miserable, painful, and excessive reading – must have believed they actually did stand to gain something from the experience, whether we believe that gain was actual enlightenment or, more cynically, the status achieved through a virtuoso performance of suffering. But should reading hurt?

In my favourite of Leonard Cohen’s songs, he teaches his listener to:

… leave no word of discomfort
And leave no observer to mourn
But climb on your tears and be silent
Like a rose on its ladder of thorns

I love this image of tears as a structure, a process that solidifies into a scaffolding that gives you the support to be silent. I love the epithets he uses to describe body and soul, including the gorgeous phrase ‘tangle of matter and ghost’: words that echo back to the King James Bible and to medieval English. And finally, I love the lines with which Cohen ends the song, with a litany of images of renunciation and farewell that end:

Bless the continuous stutter
Of the word being made into flesh.

I have listened to these lines, and this song, a lot of times. I’ve puzzled over that image of the word ‘stuttering’ as it turns into flesh – which is an image I love, but also a profoundly weird image of creation, and an image of creation that is startlingly accepting of brokenness and what we might see as impairment. I’ve listened to it all so many times, while I was speed-reading a particularly boring, un-poetic translation of the Roman de la Rose, that the image of the rose on its ‘ladder of thorns’ has seeped, irrecoverably, into my mental map of that text. I’ve never actually looked up what the song means (or is ‘supposed’ to mean). I could have looked it up for this post – but I really didn’t, and don’t, want to. And I didn’t enjoy putting into words even the tiny little bit of a response that I’ve managed in this post. I can’t help seeing me writing (clumsily) about Leonard Cohen as something a bit like that process of tearing off one’s flesh strip by strip in order to make money: a transaction that’s excruciating and simultaneously extremely crass. I’d like to write really beautiful, crafted, self-effacing sentences that somehow let Cohen’s poetry speak for itself, unimpeded, while also saying something. I don’t have the time.

What I do have, is the mental equivalent of muscle memory. I had the experience of writing two essays a week, eight weeks a term, for three years. A lot of those essays were awful. Some of them never got handed in. Some of them weren’t complete. But they pushed me to write a lot of words, and to think about a lot of words. They pushed me to read a lot. So, I know that – if I want to, or if I ever need to – I can sit down and write 1200 words to compare the images of blood and tears, flesh torn and flesh stuttering into Resurrection, across texts written eight centuries apart. I can learn to understand those texts I love better – even if I never really think about them in an academic way – because there’s an ingrained habit of writing out, testing out, building up, new responses to every text I ‘have’ to read, however little time there might seem to be.

RIP

The Window

Why do you stand by the window
Abandoned to beauty and pride
The thorn of the night in your bosom
The spear of the age in your side
Lost in the rages of fragrance
Lost in the rags of remorse
Lost in the waves of a sickness
That loosens the high silver nerves
Oh chosen love, Oh frozen love
Oh tangle of matter and ghost
Oh darling of angels, demons and saints
And the whole broken-hearted host
Gentle this soul

And come forth from the cloud of unknowing
And kiss the cheek of the moon
The New Jerusalem glowing
Why tarry all night in the ruin
And leave no word of discomfort
And leave no observer to mourn
But climb on your tears and be silent
Like a rose on its ladder of thorns

Oh chosen love, Oh frozen love…

Then lay your rose on the fire
The fire give up to the sun
The sun give over to splendour
In the arms of the high holy one
For the holy one dreams of a letter
Dreams of a letter’s death
Oh bless the continuous stutter
Of the word being made into flesh

Oh chosen love, Oh frozen love…

Gentle this soul

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Horcrux Theory of Chaucerian Manuscript Transmission

Adam Scriveyn

To those expecting that famous writers occupy their time with lofty, noble and improving thoughts, Chaucer’s shortest surviving poem must come as something of a disappointment. In fine British tradition, it’s a moan elevated to the level of an art form:

‘Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle,
Boece or Troylus for to wryten newe,
Under thy long lokkes thou most have the scalle,
But after my makyng thow wryte more trewe;
So ofte adaye I mot thy werk renewe,
It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape,
And al is thorugh thy negligence and rape.’

The poem – Chaucer’s account of his working relationship with his scribe – strikes an authentic note of irritation I can relate to today, especially considering that the third line translates (approximately) as an imaginative wish for the scribe’s annoying hipster beard to be afflicted with chronic flaky dandruff.The gist of the message is that Adam, the scribe employed by Chaucer to copy out his genius literary output, is constantly introducing errors. Chaucer is forced to spend his time doing corrections which, clearly, he feels are beneath his dignity.

For us, readers accustomed to print culture and to digital culture, to copyright laws and to fairly frequent news stories of authors jealously guarding their work against the distortions of film adaptations, TV versions or, even, internet fanfic, this seems a natural attitude for an author to take. We may snigger at Philippa Gregory – who now ‘insists’ on a clause in her contract prohibiting film makers from changing what the novelist, well known for her flexible relationship with historical fact, calls ‘the history of the novels’. But we broadly understand what she means.The accumulated changes and variations of generations of scribes represent a progressive ‘corruption’ of the original text that wrongs the author. Editors of medieval texts, from Caxton to George Kane, represent themselves as diligent correctors, wading through the scribbled masses of badly-copied manuscripts to weed out scribal errors. And it’s easy to imagine that this process is a process of restoring the author’s reputation, repairing damage done to his work and his reputation. Scribes and authors are thus natural enemies: the former weakening and chipping away at the work of the latter.

But I wondered, did medieval authors really feel this protective desire to control their words? Despite his poem to his scribe, Chaucer often seems oddly keen to exploit the potential for scribes to come up with different, and variant, readings. I’ve argued before that his Legend of Good Women is a suspiciously error-prone text, almost begging for the inclusion of predictable scribal variations. I’ve shown how the name of one male protagonist – Theseus –  gives way immediately to the oddly similarly-named Tereus, at exactly the point in the text at which Chaucer begins to talk about the corrosive effects of words and the slippery significance of men’s names. It seems entirely in keeping with the antifeminist cynicism of the Legend to find that, elsewhere, one scribe misread the word ‘venym’ (venom, or poison) as ‘wenym’: women. Such changes seem less like misrepresentations of the original spirit of the text, and more like deputised workings from the same source that set up the potential for error in the first place.

Enter a theory from Ben Clarke, who makes analogy – persuasively – to popular culture. He argues that we might see the inevitable splitting of the work of medieval authors such as Chaucer into multiple, different versions as akin to that great invention of J. K. Rowling, the Horcrux.

Horcruxes, as you will recall, are the splinters of the soul into separate parts, which increase the power of the individual by allowing him to send his soul out into the world, diversely embodied. Each Horcrux, or soul-fragment (or manuscript) acts both subordinately to the guiding soul, and with physical autonomy. The image is one of schism and splitting of soul (authority, self) that is not merely destructive, but paradoxically powerful – and it is powerful because it accepts this inevitable pluralising of the self and this process of reduplication. With this analogy in mind, perhaps we can stop thinking of the variant manuscripts of a text such as Chaucer’s Troilus or his Legend of Good Women as a series of erratic scribal corrosions of Chaucerian authority.

Each new manuscript isn’t so much a fragmentation that disempowers the author, as a Horcrux, a split fragment of his soul that goes out into the world to carry on his authoritative work in (or on) a multitude of new bodies.

This is not a Horcrux – though it is a split manuscript body – but rather, how I picture Dumbledore’s face, when Rowling outed him.

Trigger Warnings (Again), and a Weird Sense of Disconnection

New academic year, new spate of newspaper articles on ‘trigger warnings’. This time, it’s the Guardian‘s piece by Frank Furedi, blazing with the news Too Many Academics Are Now Censoring Themselves. Now, with the revelation that the government is discounting the voices of non-British academics, and with the knowledge that we’re in the middle of a process that will, quite likely, make it impossible for many of us to continue meaningful research reaching outside Britain at all, you might expect that this article would express some sense of genuine concerns.

Instead, it reminded me of the sorts of stream-of-consciousness speeches you sometimes hear at conferences, where someone – cradling a half-empty glass of warmish Echo Falls – demonstrates why he (or possibly she) is in the wrong business for working with students. Furedi describes how – apparently – a colleague’s lecture on the Holocaust was interrupted by a student yelling out a self-righteous rant: “Stop showing this, I did not come here to be traumatised!” Strong stuff, eh? Notice how it’s always a friend or a colleague this sort of thing happens to – not the author himself. Sort of like those anecdotes that begin ‘well, my mate was actually at Woodstock when …’.

It’s perhaps unfair of me to cast doubts on the complete and utter veracity of this section of the article. Of course, some students are ruder than others about the content of lectures, but my brittle sense of self-esteem is not generally crushed beyond repair by the odd negative comment, especially when I can use my special powers of mature reflection to determine that it probably says more about the student than it does about me. On the other hand, when I get comments that suggest, hmm, maybe I didn’t introduce that particular element (the graphic rape, say, or the really anti-semitic bit) as well as I might have done, I am also capable of thinking about why that was, and how I might do it better. Not, how I might self-censor. But how I might, you know, learn something new from my students.

The problem with this article is that, for all it claims ‘too many’ academics are ‘censoring themselves’ (what would be the correct number of self-censoring academics, Prof Furedi?), it seems to be describing a remarkable lack of … censorship. Furedi describes courses that continued in their tracks, and lectures that were given, and classes that continued despite student complaints, and exam questions that made it onto the paper. So, I was left wondering, is this really a bit of a storm in a teacup?

I’ve written, and thought, about the trigger warnings controversy before. I do worry about it. I do dislike the implication that, if a student finds something upsetting, shocking, or offensive, he or she should feel entitled to have it stricken from the course. I have read the stories of universities where academics feel they can’t teach texts like Titus Andronicus, because it’s got rape in it. I have seen student petitions to ban certain speakers, and I’ve worried about the way these petitions often do seem to demonise second-wave feminism. I do think there is a worrying link between the research and teaching interests of women – and especially lesbian women – and the topics that regularly seem to require ‘trigger warnings’. There is, surely, something deeply, unfortunately ironic in the fact that we, as a society, need to be having conversations about rape, and yet, conversations about rape frequently fall into the category of ‘things too painful to talk about here’.

And yet, despite all of those concerns, I really do find Furedi’s view on trigger warnings and censorship almost impossible to take seriously. I do not find that my students regularly request more warnings. I certainly don’t find them queuing up to tell me they can’t read this text or that text because it’s violent or offensive. I regularly teach texts that depict graphic rapes. I regularly teach texts that are outrageously, phenomenally racist in their portrayals of the Middle East, of Jewish people, of people of colour. There is an entire lecture series (not by me!) in our medieval literature paper, titled simply ‘Violence’. And the thing is, these topics are extremely popular with students. Students see content warnings on my lectures – so they know that lectures on ‘romance’ (which they might expect to be about love and kittens) are actually going to be quite nasty. And they don’t seem to object to that. They come, they debate, they want to have a space to talk about these things. Last week, the first question after the first lecture was ‘can I write a feminist essay on to these texts, please?’

Students need spaces to discuss difficult subjects. Obviously, my students are a specific group, in a specific place – but I just do not recognise them in the popular portrayals of students that crop up in article’s like Furedi’s. And I don’t see myself in his portrayal of ‘us’ academics – as someone carefully picking my words and ruefully deciding to limit my searing intelligence to the narrow confines of a more boring lecture. This may be because my intelligence is just, well, rather run-of-the-mill compared to the academics he quotes in his article. But, it’s much easier to claim you would have written a brilliant lecture – if only you’d felt you were allowed to do it – than to actually write that brilliant lecture, isn’t it? So, I feel a weird sense of disconnection when I read Furedi’s piece (and other pieces like it). Yes, these students who yell out polemics in lectures, who force their lecturers to self-censor, sound like a worry. But … where are they, and why have I not met them yet?

Syllabus Sharing – Freebie Reading Lists for Langland, Chaucer and Romance

This post is precisely what it says on the tin. When I prepare my reading lists, I spend a lot of time looking at other people’s syllabuses and other people’s discussions of pedagogy (especially those by Liz Gloyn, who blogs here, Rachel Moss, who blogs here, Jane-Heloise Nancarrow, here, and Carissa Harris, whose blog I’m eagerly awaiting). I’ve always – lazily? – crowd-sourced support and tips.

I find it hugely useful when people take the trouble to put details – reading lists, in particular – online. It also seems to me that these lists might give students, especially undergrads thinking about postgraduate work, some ideas about fun things to read. In that spirit, here are my reading lists for my MPhil teaching for next term, complete with some (speculative) annotations about what I’m doing and why.

MPhil in Medieval Literature

I’m teaching one component of this course, which is taught in three seminars of 90 minutes each. The idea is that students discuss texts – and theory – that they’ve read before, and over the course of a term (with six seminars in total delivered by two academics) they write an extended essay. They also attend classes in palaeography and codicology, which are assessed by written exercise, and, throughout the course of the whole nine months, they write a dissertation.

When I’ve taught this course previously (in 2015 and 2016), I’ve used a running theme of ‘community’ to draw my texts together, and I’ve encouraged students to look at manuscripts in the University Library that include the texts we’re studying. In each seminar, I’ve brought in short extracts from historical and theoretical texts, to contextualise the literary material – this reflects my training at the University of York, which was quite heavily historical and theoretical, and my training during my PhD, which was broadly based in book history. Although those are my interests, Cambridge has a big tradition of doing close reading, and this is one of my favourite methodologies, so we also do a fair bit of that in class. I’ve been reasonably happy about the way the course has run, but this year I’ve been rewriting the syllabus to include more theory and (I hope) to give students more choice of different approaches.

Week 1: Space, Place, Community: Langland in London

I’m fascinated by the way Langland imagines communities, and maps them onto all sorts of spaces – real, imaginary, allegorical, architectural, somatic, arboreal … the list goes on. But I also think the manuscript history of Piers Plowman is a good way in to thinking about networks of production and transmission. The theory I’d want to look at this week is what I think of as ‘heavy’ theory – it is philosophical as much as it is literary or cultural – but I think it matches up very well with Langland’s own tendency to play games with epistemology.

I include some quite old scholarship – notably, Carruthers’ Search for St Truth – partly because I love it, and partly because I want students to be able to think about changes over time. I’m also including studies that don’t relate directly to Langland, to model the way we use secondary scholarship for its methodology or its insights into the heavy theory, and not just for its direct comments on a primary text. Personally, I’m thinking about these issues in the context of the recent ‘Women at Sea‘ conference, which used the space of the academic discussion to host works of creative writing. But I don’t yet know whether or not students will agree, or whether they’ll see something entirely different.

Primary:

Langland, William, Piers Plowman : A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, ed. and D. Pearsall (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008)

or

Langland, William, The Vision of Piers Plowman ; a Critical Edition of the B-Text Based on Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, ed. by A. V. C. Schmidt (London: Everyman, 1995)

or

Langland, William, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions, ed. by A. V. C. Schmidt (London: Longman, 1995)

Secondary:

The journal devoted to Langland studies is the Yearbook of Langland Studies.

McAvoy, Liz Herbert, ed., Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body within the Discourses of Enclosure (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008)

Benson, C. David, Public Piers Plowman: Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)

Carruthers, Mary, The Search for St Truth. A Study of Meaning in Piers Plowman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973)

Cassidy-Welch, Megan, ‘Medieval Practices of Space and Place’, Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27:2 (2010), 1-12.

Cole, Andrew, and Andrew Galloway, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)

Foucault, Michel [1967]) ‘Of other spaces’, trans. Lotus, in N. Leach (ed.) Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, London: Routledge, 1997), 330-336

or

Foucault, Michel, [1967] ‘Different Spaces’, trans. R. Hurley, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault Volume 2, ed. J. D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 1998), 175-185.

or

Foucault, Michel, [1967] ‘Of other spaces,’ trans. M. Dehaene and L. De Cauter, (eds.), Heterotopia and the City, eds. Dehaene and Cauter (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 13-30.

Goldberg, Jeremy, ‘John Rykener, Richard II, and the Governance of London,’ Leeds Studies in English NS XLV (2014): 49-70 (51).

Hanna, Ralph, London Literature, 1300-1380 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Horobin, Simon, ‘Harley 3954 and the audience of Piers Plowman,’ in Medieval Texts in Context, eds. Graham D. Caie and Denis Renevey (London: Routledge, 2008), 68-84.

Justice, Steven, Writing and Rebellion : England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)

Justice, Steven, and Katherine Kerby-Fulton, eds., Written Work: Langland, Labor and Authorship (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)

Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, and Denise L. Despres, Iconography and the Professional Reader. The Politics of Book Production in the Douce Piers Plowman. Medieval Cultures Vol. 15 (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

Lefevbre, Henri, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991)

Lindenbaum, Sheila, ‘London Texts and Literate Practice,’ in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: University Press, 1999), pp. 284-312.

Mooney, Linne R., and Estelle Stubbs, Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature (York: Medieval Press, 2013)

Scase, Wendy (ed.), Essays in Manuscript Geography. Vernacular Manuscripts of the English West Midlands from the Conquest to the Sixteenth Century (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007)

Steiner, Emily, Reading Piers Plowman (Cambridge: University Press, 2013)

Warner, Lawrence, The Myth of Piers Plowman. Constructing a Medieval Literary Archive (Cambridge: CUP, 2014)

Whitehead, Christiania, Castles of the Mind: A Study of Medieval Architectural Allegory

Zeeman, Nicolette, Piers Plowman and the Medieval Discourse of Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Queer Communities in Medieval Romance

Some of the secondary reading for the previous week has times (thematic or theoretical) with queer theory, but this week’s focus is more explicit. I’m quite ambivalent about Queer Theory, so I’m interested to see what students make of it – and whether they think there’s a distinction to be made between texts that depict same-sex desire and/or gender nonconformity, and texts that are queer? Frankly, I also think these romances are a lot of fun, so they should be nice to read and teach.

Primary:

Le Roman de Silence. A thirteenth-century Arthurian verse-romance by Heldris de Cornuälle, ed. Lewis Thorpe (Cambridge, W. Heffer, 1972)

or

Silence: A Thirteenth-century French Romance. A facing page translation by Sarah Roche-Mahdi (East Lansing, MI: Michegan State University Press, 1992).

The Squire of Low Degree, in Sentimental and Humorous Romances, ed. Erik Cooper (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2005). Online at http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/kooper-sentimental-humorous-romances

Sir Degrevant, in Sentimental and Humorous Romances, ed. Erik Cooper (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2005). Online at http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/kooper-sentimental-and-humorous-romances-sir-degrevant

Secondary:

Arthuriana 7.1 (1997) and 12.1 (2002) are special issues devoted to studies of the Roman de Silence.

Ashe, Laura, Ivana Djordjević and Judith Weiss (eds), The Exploitations of Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010)

Burns, E. Jane, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993)

Butler, Judith, Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004)

Callahan, Christopher, ‘Canon Law, Primogeniture, and the Marriage of Ebain and Silence,’ Romance Quarterly 49:1 (2002): 12-20.

Clark, Robert A., ‘Queering Gender, Naturalising Class in the Roman de Silence,’ Arthuriana 12: 1 (2002): 50-63.

Cooper, Helen, The English Romance in Time. Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the death of Shakespeare (Oxford: University Press, 2004)

Diamond, Arlyn, ‘Sir Degrevant: What Lovers Want,’ in Pulp Fictions of Medieval England. Essays in Popular Romance, edited by Nicola McDonald (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), 82-101.

Dinshaw, Carolyn, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012)

Doyle, Kara, ‘Thisbe Out Of Context: Chaucer’s Female Readers and the Findern Manuscript.’ Chaucer Review 40 (2006): 231-261.

Edwards, A. S. G., ‘Gender, Order and Reconciliation in Sir Degrevant,’ in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1994): 53-64.

Giffney, Noreen, Michelle M. Sauer and Diane Watt (eds), The Lesbian Premodern, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

Hanna, Ralph, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, ‘The History of a Family Collection.’ In The Wollaton Manuscripts: Texts, Owners and Readers, edited by Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2010), 3-19.

Heng, Geraldine, Empire of Magic. Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2003)

Karras, Ruth Mazo, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing unto others, 2^nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2012)

Lees, Clare E. (ed.), Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994)

Lochrie, Karma, Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005)

Lochrie, Karma, Peggy McCracken and James A. Schultz (eds), Constructing Medieval Sexuality (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)

McDonald, N. F., ‘Desire out of Order and Undo Your Door,’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer 34 (2012): 247-275

McNamer, Sarah, ‘Female Authors, Provincial Settings: The Re-versing of Courtly Love in the Findern Manuscript,’ Viator 22 (1991): 279-310

Pugh, Tison, Sexuality and its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)

Putter, Ad, and Jane Gilbert (eds), The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance London: Pearson Education, 2000)

Saunders, Corinne J., ed., A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004)

Terrell, Katherine H., ‘Competing gender ideologies and the limitations of language in Le Roman de Silence,’ Romance Quarterly 55: 1 (2008): 35-48

Silenced Communities: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and Canterbury Tales

 This week will be the last seminar of term, so I wanted to bring together some canonical primary material with a broad range of secondary material, some of which is quite explicitly polemical. I’m interested to see how this week runs. I’ve taught explicitly violent material (and sexually violent material) quite a lot over the past two years. I’m aware (obviously) of all the controversies over trigger warnings and content notes and the ethics of teaching these texts, but I’m pretty committed to teaching them, and I do see it as a form of feminist work to teach them. My experience is that students feel the same way.

I really wanted to give students some second wave feminist material – despite (or because of?) the fact that it can be difficult. For example, as someone commented when I suggested her work, Brownmiller’s views on race might take some criticism. But I think it’s especially important to read second wave feminism in the current climate, because it’s so easy to dismiss (without reading) female scholars as ‘dated’ or ‘bigoted’ – rather than reading them as people who had huge insights that moved the conversation on.

Primary

For this seminar I would like you to read The Legend of Good Women and any of the Canterbury Tales you wish to choose – but the Merchant’s Tale, the Wife of Bath’s Tale, and/or the Reeve’s Tale, are recommended.

The Legend of Good Women and The Canterbury Tales from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford, 1987)

Secondary:

Alcoff, Linda, and Laura Gray, ‘Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation?,’ Signs 18: 2 (1993): 260-290.

Bourdieu, Pierre, Language and Symbolic Power, edited and introduced by John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991)

Brownmiller, Susan, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975) 

Cannon, Christopher, ‘Raptus in the Chaumpaigne Release and a Newly Discovered Document Concerning the Life of Geoffrey Chaucer,’Speculum 68 (1993): 74-94

Carruthers, Mary, ‘The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,’ PMLA 94:2 (1979): 209-222

Cixous, Hélène, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1:4 (1976): 875-93

Collette, Carolyn P., Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (York: Medieval Press, 2014)

Delany, Sheila, The Naked Text: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)

Desmond, Marilynn, Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006)

Dinshaw, Carolyn, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1989)

Edwards, Suzanne M., The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2016)

Evans, Ruth, and Lesley Johnson (eds), Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect (London: Routledge, 1994)

Frank, Robert Worth, Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972)

Galloway, Andrew, ‘Chaucer’s Legend of Lucrece and the Critique of Ideology in Fourteenth-Century England,’ ELH 60:4 (1993): 813-832

Gavey, Nicola, Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape (London and New York: Routledge, 2005)

Hansen, Elaine Tuttle, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1992)

Harris, Carissa, ‘Inserting “a grete tente, a thrifty, and a long”: Sexual Obscenity and Scribal Innovation in Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales,’ Essays in Medieval Studies 28 (2012): 1-16.

Klindienst, Patricia, ‘The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours,’ in Rape and Representation, eds. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda A. Silver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 35-64.

Mardorossian, Carine M., ‘Toward a New Feminist Theory of Rape,’ Signs 27:3 (2007): 743-75.

McDonald, N. F., ‘Chaucer’s “Legend of good women,” Ladies at Court and the Female Reader,’ The Chaucer Review, 35: 1 (2001) 22-42.

Niebrzydowski, Sue, “‘So wel koude he me glose’: The Wife of Bath and the Eroticism of Touch,” in The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain, eds. Amanda Hopkins and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge, Eng., 2007), pp. 18-26.

Robertson, Elizabeth, and Christine M. Rose, eds., Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2001)

Saunders, Corinne, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001)

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak,’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988)

and/or

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ‘History,’ in A History of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 198-311. Includes a revised version of the previous essay.

Strauss, Barrie Ruth, ‘The Subversive Discourse of the Wife of Bath: Phallocentric Discourse and the Imprisonment of Criticism,’ ELH 55:3 (1988): 527-54.

Please feel free to nick any or all of these reading lists! Or to let me know if you’d do something different/recommend some more reading. 

Silence, Suffering, and a Shakespearean ‘Cutted Up Pear’

 

Hitomi Manaka as Lavinia, in Titus Andronicus (Ninagawa, 2006, RSC).

This post is closely based on part of a lecture – the second of a series – given at the University of Cambridge on 28/04/16. It includes, amongst other things, responses to the current British Library exhibition ‘Shakespeare in Ten Acts’. The lecture series was titled ‘Shakespeare: Performing the Unspeakable,’ and its two sub-parts were ‘Silence’ and ‘Suffering’. 

Recently, I gave a couple of lectures on the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays – both in themselves, and as cultural artefacts – prompt us to think about the relationships between silence, suffering, and complicity. Shakespearean silence has a compelling performance history. In Shakespeare’s plays, the scripted silences – moments when, for example, the ghost of Hamlet’s father stalks away unspeaking from Horatio, or Cordelia refuses to elaborate on her brief response to her father – are many, and well known.

But there are, too, silences of a less certain kind. Silences that teeter on the brink between scripted and unscripted, that stretch out between the stage and the audience and last just long enough to cause a stir, an uneasy rustle of doubt.

Barbara Jefford and John Gielgud in Measure for Measure

One such example comes from Barbara Jefford’s performance of Isabella in Measure for Measure. In the script as we have it, Isabella – the virtuous novice who leaves her convent to petition for her brother’s life and attracts the romantic attention of the Duke – speaks for the last time several dozen lines before the end of the play.

In that time, the Duke twice proposes marriage to her, and twice receives no scripted answer. Some productions solve the problem – an eager nod, a horrified shake of the head – but Jefford, instead, froze in silence. She waited until the uneasy rustles and stirs of her audience communicated that their watching discomfort was too much – and only then did she speak. At the first performance, the silence reputedly lasted for around thirty seconds. As the production run continued, audiences collaborated: in their increasingly prolonged silences, they tacitly reinforced her decision to freeze out the spoken script and drown the duke’s proposal in a prolonged and shared speechless response.

Jefford’s silence allows the audience – supposedly passive – to collude with the character’s refusal to assent to a proposal of marriage that is phrased as a command. It sets into sharp prominence the assumptions about power and oppression that are latent in the text. The actress’s silence capitalizes on the permeable boundary between actor and audience, and it offers a succinct demonstration of the way in which plays – and characters, and characters’ responses – become rooted in time, snagged into the contemporary debates by hooks and links and tensions we can barely recognise, but whole constraining and constructing effect we still must feel.

Ira Aldridge in the role of Othello. James Northcote, c. 1826.

This was the tension negotiated by Ira Aldridge, often described as the ‘first’ black actor to play Shakespeare’s Othello. Born in 1807 in New York, Aldridge worked for much of his career in Britain. Audiences of the time romanticised Aldridge – indeed, he and the companies with whom he acted encouraged this romanticisation – picturing him not as the son of freed slaves and born in New York, but as a mysterious and noble African, estranged from his natal land and bearing evocative hints of a hidden story to tell. Perhaps shrewdly, Aldridge claimed descent from the Fulani people – even then, a group (or groups) dispersed over a wide area and representing people born in several different African countries – and this deliberate exoticism was balanced by posters representing him as an ‘African Roscius,’ a name that alluded to the Roman actor and freed slave, whose name was a byword amongst Shakespeare’s own contemporaries for Classical excellence in acting.

Aldridge’s presence tacitly argued that a black actor could – and did – embody and communicate the emotions Shakespeare had written for is characters, the identity that this white dramatist had constructed for a white performer. He made visible the argument – polemical at that time and in that place  – that a black man could embody all the emotions of white humanity.  Amidst this was a tacit – and occasionally, explicit – division within Aldridge’s audiences, between those who saw his acting as propaganda to stoke contemporary arguments against the slave trade, and those who had vested interests – based on that same trade – in castigating a black man who dared to see himself as a talented actor interpreting the most canonical works of a white dramatist. For Aldridge did not only play Othello. He also – in whiteface – took on the roles Shylock, Macbeth, Richard III and Lear, and even Iago: famous roles that have been closed to black actors until very recently, and which still draw racist comments when played by actors who are other than white.

Aldridge died after a phenomenally successful career, and shamefully, his record of acting Shakespearean heroes has remained closed to actors of colour. Often, the objection made is that audiences would not accept a black Hamlet, Lear, or Richard III. The absurdity of the criticisms Ira faced is nicely captured by David Oyelowo, who comments acerbically:

Theatre by its very nature is make-believe. If I’m on stage and I say I’m in tears, you believe me. If I say I’ve got an army of 30,000 offstage, you believe me. I don’t know why if I suddenly say I’m King of England that is so much more controversial.

This outburst was in my mind as I prepared to think about the violence – not only racial, but also gendered – in one of Shakespeare’s earliest and most vilified plays, Titus Andronicus. Titus is a gruesome, intensely bloody, violent and spectacular play, a play whose eponymous hero – the battle-hardened and well-respected Roman general Titus, the people’s choice for the newly-vacated post of Emperor of Rome following the death of the old Emperor and the unresolved squabbles of his two sons – experiences a devastating reversal of fortunes. Bent on revenge for his sons’ deaths in war, Titus orders the sacrifice of a young captive prince of the Goths, son of the captive queen Tamora. In counter-revenge, Tamora and her lover – delightfully known, with Shakespearean casual racism, as ‘Aaron the Moor’ – plot against Titus, arranging the rape of his daughter Lavinia by Tamora’s other sons. Not content with rape, the two men cut out Lavinia’s tongue and chop off her hands, to prevent her from speaking, or in any way gesturing or signaling, what has happened to her.

DEMETRIUS:
So now go tell, and if thy tongue can speak,
Who ’twas that cut thy tongue and ravished thee.

CHIRON
Write down thy mind, bewray thy meaning so,
And if thy stumps will let thee play the scribe.     (Titus, Act 2, Sc. Iv, 1-4)

Elizabeth Applyby as Tamora, Titus Andronicus, New Wimbledon Theatre, 2016.

Titus was extremely popular in its day, but it has been widely seen as unperformable, and the language in which it is criticised carries its own telling tacit messages about what it is that so signally failed to impress generations of readers. In 1687, Edward Ravenscroft declared:

‘tis the most incorrect and indigested piece in all his Works; it seems rather a heap of Rubbish than a Structure.

Ravenscroft makes an obvious pun in his language of distaste: he cannot ‘digest’ a play centred on human flesh made grotesquely palatable. He is, of course, punning on Titus’ own grim revenge. Having trapped Tamora, queen of the Goths, mother of the men who raped and murdered his daughter, in his house, Titus makes his grim declaration of intent:

TITUS: … with your blood and it I’ll make a paste,
And of the paste a coffin I will rear,
And make two pasties of your shameful heads,
And bid that strumpet, your unhallowed dam,
Like to the earth swallow her own increase.
This is the feast that I have bid her to,
And this the banquet she shall surfeit on (Titus, Act. V, Sc. Ii, 86-92)

This violence was complicated, in a production put on by RSC-based actor and director Antony Sher and his partner Greg Doran, which played in Johannesburg in 1995, and which is the subject of Sher’s book Woza Shakespeare. As Sher observes – and as others have subsequently recognized – the 1995 production offered a challenge to prevailing ideas about which accents were ‘speakable’ on stage, or at least ‘speakable’ for Shakespeare. The accents of the cast included a variety of South African accents – by no means British (or rather, English) ‘Received Pronunciation’. This was a double-layered resistance to silencing: not only were these accents seldom those heard on stage – and therefore, never those associated with Shakespearan tragedy or High Culture – but also, they make ‘speakable’ the racial and class conflicts represented by (for example) Sher’s version of his father’s Afrikaans accent.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Woodburne, who played Lavinia in Doran’s production, engaged in research for her role that included meetings with individuals who had undergone amputation of the tongue, for example as as a surgery for cancer. Woodburne discovered that the loss of a tongue did not merely cause sufferers to lack speech. The amputation also resulted in an inability to swallow saliva – forcing sufferers to drool, or wipe saliva constantly from their mouths. It was a lack of dignity, as well as a form of silencing.

But responses to the play reiterate some of the repressive attitudes directed, much earlier, against the playing of Othello by black actors. Sher’s book records a letter, sent privately to Doran by a would-be theatregoer (and the audience we’re talking here would be predominantly white and often Anglophile), saying:

“she could not abide the excruciating experience of the ugly accents of South Africa abusing some of the most beautiful language ever written” (Sher and Doran, Woza Shakespeare, p. 226)

The terminology of this woman’s complaint – terms of ‘ugly’ foreign accents silencing ‘beautiful’ language – is shocking, in that it casts Doran as director, and his actors, in the roles of the rapists Chiron and Demetrius, abusing Shakespeare’s beautiful language. Doran is a skilled director, and no doubt the quotation he chooses to reproduces is carefully selected, but nevertheless, its terminology is extremely telling in is tacit assumptions. The idea of ‘ugly accents’ of one country “abusing” the beautiful language of another is too disturbingly suggestive in the context of Lavinia, a woman whose ‘beautiful’ tongue is ‘abused’ and silenced by the ‘ugly’ activity of invaders to her native land, invaders who – in this production – were played by mixed-race men speaking in accents inseparable, for listening audiences, from the fact of their ethnic heritage.

Doran’s decision to remind us that whiteness is not default, that Received Pronunciation accents are not the only way to play Shakespeare, come together here, to result in a production some would-be viewers found impossible to countenance hearing. The suffering outside the play, in extremely recent South African history, made itself felt in audience’s – or potential audiences’ – attempts to impose silence on anything that suggested its expression.

Michael Fentiman’s Titus Andronicus. RSC, 2013

For Michael Boyd’s productions of the history plays, a piece of tinned pear was used as a cut-out tongue for Henry VI, which is almost contemporary with Titus. Both the Telegraph and the Guardian offered articles that leant heavily on the insights of Sandra Smith, the RSC’s head of wigs and makeup; both articles – and remember, these are newspapers coming from quite opposed political stances – were fascinated by Smith’s accounts of how the blood of the play – and especially, the details of Lavinia’s gory tonguelessness – were created behind the scenes. The Telegraph piece explains:

“Smith’s Tupperware boxes contain three different consistencies for application to the skin: the gloopiest is thickened with cellulose from a high street chemist; the darkest is tinted with treacle. Another box contains blood balls the size of large grapes held together with cling film. Reynolds stores one in her mouth to pop when her tongue is cut out. “Don’t worry, it tastes like toffee apples,” says Smith.”

The language is pointedly gustatory, relating the blood to ‘treacle’ and to ‘grapes’ long before Smith is quoted to tell us that the actual liquid tastes ‘like toffee apples’. There’s a cosy domesticity to the description too – the blood is in ‘tupperware’; the products used to doctor it up are from ‘a high street chemist’; the wrap is ordinary ‘cling film’. It is as if we are at a cosy picnic. Later in the article we’re told, with seeming precision, Smith’s views on props for the gruesome scenes:

Only foodstuffs will cut it for body parts: chicken fillets for tongues, tinned pears for penises, lychees for eyeballs. “Anything else will roll or bounce… the sound effects are important, too.

Yet, much as we pretend, the issue is not mimesis, but the reassuring effect of being told mimesis is attempted. For there’s something more to this – the Guardian article makes the tongue, the organ of speech, ‘palatable’ in its absence. It diverts our attention from the violation that is – in left-wing terms – an epistemic violation enacted on an oppressed subject, a woman. The Telegraph, whose view is traditionally more right-wing, extends its attempt to sweeten the pill of this violence with focus on eyeballs and penises as well as tongues. The violation it concentrates upon is more generally bodily; less purely to do with speech and silence.

Rose Reynolds, playing Lavinia, used blackjacks – the sweets – to rapidly blacken the interior of the her mouth between scenes, so that she could appear convincingly orally mutilated. It’s a decision that’s ingenious in its quickness and cheapness – and disturbing if it’s funny, as this backstage edible evidence of mutilation echoes worryingly towards the cannibalistic pie – another edible evidence of mutilation – that Titus will serve to Tamora, forcing her to eat the minced bodies of her own murdered sons. This visual recreation of Lavinia’s silence substitutes blackness for absence, for lack of speech, in a way that is disturbing given the racial politics of the play.

But equally disturbing is the popularity of this detail with audiences.

Audiences do not simply suspend their disbelief – for Shakespeare, an anachronistic concept – they relate on multiple levels to imaginary character and to the actor behind. The fact that the actress sucked liquorice sweets to achieve the effect of a silenced, blackened mouth, is not mere side detail. It contextualises the disturbing way in which this play – and this performance – produces the effect of silence. Lavinia is mutilated; victimised, by mouth. Tamora, her opposite number, the villain to her innocent heroine, is, however, also a victim, and also victimised by mouth: she is forced, unknowingly, to eat the bodies of her own murdered children. The sweet food that creates the illusion of Lavinia’s enforced silence offers a disturbingly saccharine, palatable parallel to the gruesome minced meat Tamora must ingest.

The penultimate exchange of the play forces us to interrogate these responses. Lucius, son of the dead Titus, brother of murdered brothers and a raped sister, gives absolution to all the white male members of the cast. Tamora, he sentences to a shameful ending, but his most bitter venom is saved for Aaron, the black lover of Tamora:

LUCIUS: Set him breast-deep in earth and famish him;
There let him stand and rave and cry for food.
If any one relieves or pities him,
For the offence he dies. This is our doom.
Some stay to see him fastened in the earth.

AARON
Ah, why should wrath be mute and fury dumb?
I am no baby, I, that with base prayers
I should repent the evils I have done.
Ten thousand worse than ever yet I did
Would I perform if I might have my will.
If one good deed in all my life I did
I do repent it from my very soul.                      (Titus, Act V, sc. Iii, 78-89)

Aaron’s rantings are – so the play text suggests – the ends of his speech; the last of his proto-Othelloesque fluency. But Doran and Sher, putting on the play in Johannesburg in 1995, refused this silencing. They allowed the final speech – unlike Aldridge, who rewrote the plot to save Aaron’s child – but they broke down a more disturbing expectation. The character who played Aaron, a black man, was not simply shuffled hurriedly offstage to prepare for the final few lines of climax. Bound, and sunk within a pit, he was positioned within the theatre foyer, ranting at uncomfortable audience members as they left. Hearing the actor make true the threat Shakespeare scripts for him – ‘why should wrath be mute and fury dumb’ – the largely white audiences of the production took refuge in uneasy silence, refusing to acknowledge what they saw.

These details should give us pause for thought. As these descriptions of palatable severed tongues and tasteful fake blood indicate, we are uncomfortable with gendered violence. We prefer to concentrate on stage effects, not the implications of those effects, just as Aldridge, the first black Othello, was required to normalise his biography into a romantic echo of Othello’s own history, to cover the narrative of an American black man with the more palatable story of an exotic African prince. So too, we romanticise. We focus on the novelty of details behind the stage (details of tinned pears and fake blood). In so doing, do we ignore the real violence, the real horror, behind the blood, the masks, and the stage props?

A Medieval English Islamophobic Romance, Written in the Daily Mail

Crusaders and Saracens Battle. Boulogne sur Mer BM, MS 142, f. 153v (detail)

A few weeks ago, while I was busy with various things including signing an open letter written by my colleague*, I discovered in passing that a very small group of people I’d never met or spoken to were getting quite het up about my teaching of Medieval romance. This was, naturally, a bit of a surprise. My students seemed broadly quite positive about the course, so I put it to the back of my mind. But, this morning, I saw something on David Perry’s blog – Islamophobic rallies in Prague were attended by participants wearing the costumes of medieval Crusaders – and something suddenly clicked for me.

The criticism I’d received had come from a Change.org petition (I’m not sure whether to be insulted or pleased it’s only got 94 signatures, or rather less than a full lecture hall). The main critique focussed on our open letter, but I also came to a criticism – apparently written under the misapprehension that I’m a history lecturer, but clearly referring to my course:

“A more legitimate concern in academia should be that a history lecturer calling for this act of censorship thinks Medieval romance perpetuates Islamophobia –  a breathtaking a-historicism that really should have alarm bells ringing.”

At the time, I was bemused.

Did the writers think Islamophobia didn’t exist in the Middle Ages? Did they not realise that the Crusades took place between Christians and Muslims? Did they think Islam didn’t exist? Or was the issue that I was commenting on these romances as texts that have continued to shape our cultural imagination, rather than dusty historical documents that could not possibly have any influence on present day Islamophobia?

I suspected it was largely the last issue. Medieval romances have a peculiar status in popular imagination. If you ask most people to name a medieval story or a medieval author, they’ll come up with Chaucer. But if you start telling them the plots of medieval romances, they’ll recognise quite a lot of these before they even get close to recognising the plot of, say, The Book of the Duchess or The Prioress’s Tale. And I’m not just talking about the well-known Arthurian legends, or the Robin Hood stories. There’s a children’s picture book, which was one of my big brother’s favourite stories, which retells the tale of the Middle English romance Robert of Sicily, a text so obscure to medievalists that I often have to go through the plot when I talk about it at conferences. The plots and tropes of medieval romances are hidden in plain sight.

By contrast, history is quite regularly cited on all sides of the debate over Islamic/Christian relations (or Islamic/Western relations). President Obama has been heard to refer to the Crusades as an example of Islamophobic warfare; one response – which also claimed the Catholic Church had “almost nothing to do with” the Inquisition – was to label these wars as “a defensive Christian reaction against Muslim madmen of the Middle Ages”. While I applaud the alliteration, and look eagerly forward for the Don Draper spoof it suggests to me, ‘Muslim madmen’ isn’t exactly the most nuanced idea, and nor is it new – and this continuity is what the fiction shows us.

Medieval romances portray Islamic (or ‘Saracen’) opponents as raging, intemperate, unchecked by Christian piety. The Siege of Milan, for example, opens with a description of Saracen atrocities perfectly calculated to enrage Christian listeners:

“The Sultan, Arabas the strong
Warred against Christendom with wrong,
…
In Tuscany, towns did he win,
And stuffed them full of heathen kin,
…
The images that there should be,
Both the Cross, and the noble Mary,
He burned them in a fire. 
And then his idols he set up there,
In the churches and abbeys that there were.”

The passage is crammed with clichés. Brute force? Check. Moral absolutes? Check. Desecration of religious icons and pyromaniac destruction of culture? Check. Idol worship? Check. You get the picture. This isn’t a sober historical account of cultural conflict – and I like to imagine hard-bitten Crusaders, permanently sun-burned from years living cheek-by-jowl with their Muslim opposite numbers, sniggering heartily into their beards at the idea of Islamic idol-worshippers. But my absolute favourite detail comes in the middle lines: like a Daily Mail columnist on a slow news day, the writer crams in a topical reference to the dangers of immigration, with the hyperbolic image of Tuscan cities crammed with ‘heathen kin’. THESE MUSLIM EXTREMISTS BURNED A CHURCH: NOW THEY’RE BRINGING THEIR FAMILIES TO YOUR HOLIDAY VILLA!

Muslim Extremists Sunbathing, circa 1499.                       Bodleian Library, MS Douce 337, f. 85r

Is the history of the Crusades that has seeped into cultural consciousness, or is it the fiction? Images of enemy foreigners, dark-skinned, brutal, impressively strong, and ferociously determined to crush out Christianity and insinuate foreign ‘kin’ into European cities, echo through Medieval romances. Long after we stopped thinking about Medieval romance, we continued to consume stories in which the enemies and anti-heroes are cast from the same mould, part of the same set of tropes.

It’s not hard to see that narratives like the one I quoted above are perpetuating an Islamophobic perspective. But, when we fail to trace contemporary tropes of Islamophobia back to their medieval sources, we miss a crucial part of the narrative.

When the Siege of Milan was likely written, some time around 1400, the world it described was already far in the past. The simplicity of noble, Christian Crusaders and brutal Saracen invaders offers both distraction from much messier contemporary conflicts (the early shadows of the Wars of the Roses, the violent inter-Christian battles with France), and also a covert message about England itself. Like the Daily Mail, the romance seeks to externalise the threat of disorder, to personify it as belonging to foreign aggressors. But at this time, the desecration of church images of ‘the Cross and the noble Mary’ – iconoclasm, that is – was a threat much closer to home. The Lollards, the heretical sect who became prominent towards the end of the fourteenth century, posed a real threat to the statues, icons, and paintings that enriched medieval churches across the country. For readers of this romance in the fifteenth century, the idea of destructive, iconoclastic violence is unmistakably mapped onto earlier images of religious warfare, of Saracen enemies, as if to insist that such a threat could only come from outside.

I suspect we want to believe that a medieval world capable of the brutality of the Crusades was motivated by simple, ideological hatred. Yes, such brutality – witnessed by historical records – is appalling, but these people were not like us. The murky, conflicted and submerged fears I see in this medieval romance make me question that assumption. This fiction allows its readers to externalise those conflicted, nagging fears that come from within and to give them simpler, more tangible forms, to translate them into stark archetypes of good and evil. It does not merely reflect a past society that hated and feared Islam; it reflects a past society that exploited the idea of hatred and fear of Islam for its own ends. This, for some people, is a disturbing idea, an idea that must be slapped down as ‘a-historical’. If we accept that medieval Christendom was motivated by something more cynical, more complex, than burning religious ideology and passionate conviction, then we’re faced with the disturbing possibility that we are, truly, not so very different from the Crusaders who committed those atrocities.

Postscript

The image at the top of my post shows armies neatly identified by their respective religious symbols: the cross for the Christian crusaders; the crescent for their Muslim opponents. But underneath this image, in pointed contrast to its militaristic aggression, is an image you might read as cultural exchange, or at least as an interesting contrast to the scene above. It shows two people sitting in a military tent – perhaps during a lull in the fighting – playing a game of chess.

Boulogne sur Mer BM, MS 142, f. 153v (detail)

Note *

This open letter is discussed here and here. It concerned a promotional video for the University of Cambridge, which was presented by David Starkey.

Safe Space and the University (Trigger Warning)

I’m turning over a lot of thoughts about safe spaces and triggers at the moment.

Next year, I’m going to go into a lecture hall, hopefully with about 50-70 undergraduates, and I’m going to talk to them about how a brutal rape becomes funny, and then, about how men use it as an excuse to act out violent homoerotic fantasies. I’m going to talk about how the rapist – like most rapists in this context – is an immigrant, a foreigner. Many of his co-rapists are black. They are all monstrous, probably by nature. But then, most women are natural liars, with no sense of loyalty. Even supposedly impartial observers are so disgusted with them (or so bored?) they’ll write whole accounts of this brutal rape narrative, without ever mentioning the word rape.

Well, ok. You know, if you’re reading this, that I’m talking about a fictional narrative, and a fictional narrative written over 500 years ago (though that ‘impartial observer’ I’m thinking of is a scholar, who deserves a ‘WTF were you thinking’ for his article on the Alliterative Morte). You probably know, if you read this blog regularly, that I won’t go into the lecture hall and say it all just as I’ve written it here. I will explain context; I will talk to my students about how insidiously damaging this narrative is, how it still influences us, how it lies to us. I will name the problems: I will call it misogynistic and racist. But, it will still upset a lot of those students.

I know that, statistically, in that class of 50-70 students, some will be survivors of rape or sexual assault. Some will be students of ethnic minorities. Well over half will be women. That lecture hall will not be a ‘safe space’ for them to learn about literature in. It’s really difficult to know what to do about that. Do I give these lectures – which I firmly believe are good literary criticism, and provide us with good tools to be wise to the ways in which literature perpetuates racism and misogyny? Or do I avoid saying anything that will have these students shrinking inside, and feeling personally exposed, and upset?

The context of this question is this letter, which I’ve signed, and which went out in the Observer today. The gist of it is that, at the moment, there’s a big debate about what ‘safe space’ should mean in a university. Should speakers who may be controversial – or worse, who may say profoundly upsetting things – be allowed to speak? Should students feel duty-bound to protest?

I want to be clear: this is not, for me, about ‘censorship’. That letter only mentions the word ‘censorship’ once – in the quoted title of an article providing context. I don’t think no-platforming any individual is censorship (I don’t like it, but that’s not what it amounts to). It seems reasonable enough to decide you don’t want someone to speak – and it’s certainly reasonable to demonstrate, or protest, against invitations to speakers with whose views you profoundly disagree. No. The problem is that, when you look at the bigger pattern, we are still much more willing to silence women than men, feminists than not. That’s a pattern that worries me.

It worries me because I would like to keep teaching in a context where I can talk about things that are profoundly upsetting, and triggering, and on which I do have an ideological perspective. I want to teach in a context where people feel able to disagree with me – absolutely, categorically, without reservations – but where they’ll talk to me about it. I don’t want to see a university where we never mention questions like the politics of rape, of heterosex, of prostitution, of race relations.

Women, Hawks, and English Literature Exams

At Cambridge, if you study English, you sit two compulsory final exams: one in Tragedy, and one in Practical Criticism, which is close reading of a selection of texts and extracts. On the spur of the moment, you have to work out how to take the text to pieces, and how to put it back together again in some form of coherent argument. I can’t honestly remember very much about my own Prac Crit exam, except that it over four hours long, it was a very hot summer and the room where I was taking my exam had malfunctioning heating, which couldn’t be switched off. But I was reminded of it the other day, as we discussed why this exam can seem so intimidating.

I know lots of people I know claim that doing English Literature ‘ruined’ books for them, that taking a book to pieces as you do when you’re doing close reading spoils it. The original idea of Practical Criticism – as it was developed by critics in the early twentieth century – was that students should learn to read texts without knowing the most basic details about them, such as the name of the author (and therefore, his or her gender) or the date he or she was writing. In theory, this should be freeing. It’s quite close to the anti-hierarchical aims of Feminist Pedagogy. And yet, it is still intimidating, and that sense that something has been pulled to pieces and laid bare can, I think, relate as much to us as readers, as to the texts we read. In short, you can feel very exposed doing close reading.

I love close reading (and I’ve done a bit of close reading in this post, largely as an antidote to writers’ block). But, as I did it, it occurred to me how difficult it is to untangle questions of gender and exclusion from English Literature, even when we think we’ve stripped back texts to their most basic, unmediated forms. So I thought I’d share what I was thinking.

This post also gives me the chance to link to this lovely piece about Tudor falconry, because, as you might guess from the image above, this post is partly about hawks. The other night, I went to a book talk in Heffers in Cambridge, because I wanted to see Helen MacDonald talk about her book H is for Hawk, which I read just before Christmas and which I’ve mentioned on here before. With her were David Cobham and Bruce Pearson, who wrote and did the images for The Sparrowhawk’s Lament. I’ve not read it (and I really want to now), but the book charts the state of British birds of prey, many of which are in very low numbers. MacDonald asked Cobham how he’d come to the title for his book, and he replied that it comes from a medieval poem, which he’d read in hospital while waiting for a serious operation.

Obviously, I pricked up my ears. It turns out that the poem he titles ‘The Sparrowhawk’s Lament’ is one of the many medieval lyrics that use the Latin refrain ‘Timor mortis conturbat me’ – ‘The fear of death troubles me’.

As Cobham was being anesthetised, so he says, he thought he heard the ring of an Angelus bell, and the sound of a choir singing the Latin line – which is, of course, from the medieval Office of the Dead. This eerie anecdote made me think about the poem, and so I sat down to do some close reading on it. I’ve not pulled it together, but just left it as a sequence of comments to show you how I read the poem.

The burial of the dead (from the Office of the Dead). London, BL MS Yates Thompson 3, f. 211r.

 The poem like this:

In what state that ever I be,
Timor mortis conturbat me.

As I me walked in one mornynge
I hard a bride both wepe and synge;                     bride=bird
This was the tenor of hir talkynge –                        substance of its reply
Timor mortis conturbat me.

I asked this bride what he mente.
He said “I am a musket gente.                                  musket=male sparrowhawk
For dred of deth I am nygh shent:                          nygh shent= nearly destroyed
Timor mortis conturbat me.

Jhesu Cryst, whan he shuld deye,
To his Fader lowde gan crye.                                    gan crye = cried out
‘Fader, he seyde, ‘in trynyte,
Timor mortis conturbat me’.”

Whan I shal deye I knowe no day
Therefore this song synge I may
What contree or place can I not seye
Timor mortis conturbat me.

I really love the language here. The Latin phrase itself is beautifut. ‘Conturbat’ suggests  disturbed motion. The verb ‘turbare’ means ‘unsettle’ or ‘disturb’ all on its own (it’s related to words like ‘turbulence’ and, I think, ‘tornado’), and the prefix ‘con’ intensifies that sense, so that you have a cumulative effect of overwhelming, spiralling movement. I think it’s probably what Yeats is getting at with the opening lines of The Second Coming: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer”.

This evocation of turbulent motion is juxtaposed with the following image of the bird, so that we have a suggestion of the hawk tossed and ruffled from the wind. This is supported by the words the bird itself uses to describe its condition: ‘nigh shent,’ or ‘almost destroyed. This word has three overlapping senses in Middle English: primarily, it refers to the physical state of being injured or hurt, a sense that is strengthened because it rhymes with the word ‘rent,’ meaning ripped or torn apart, and we know from studies carried out in psychology of reading that our brains subconsciously register rhyme words as we read. However, this first meaning of the word gives way to a spiritual meaning of ‘damned’ and a moral sense of ‘shamed’: to be ‘shent’ is to be injured in both body and soul. The line rationalising this injury is mysteriously vague: “For dred of deth I am nygh shent” could refer to the hawk’s own impending death – ie., fear of mortality, which is the usual inteprretation of the Latin line – but in this context of the speech of a bird of prey, a bird whose function is to deliver death, it could also suggest the fear of inflicting mortal wounds, which would explain the mingled fears of shame and damnation. 

This reminds me of T. H. White, whose novel The Sword in the Stone echoes this poem and imagines a goshawk half-mad with this fear and guilt, driven to kill whatever comes near it, but tormented by its own murderous impulse. White’s hawk is a real character in his novel, more than a mere personification of the fear of death, speaking – as this hawk does – almost in a human voice. Yet this hawk can also be read as a symbol, and the juxtaposition of the bird of prey with the narrative of Christ’s Crucifixion evokes another parallel, this time to a comparable medieval lyric. The Corpus Christi Carol begins plaintively “The falcon hath borne my mate away …” and the image of the falcon and its prey gives way to the image of a dead knight mourned by his lady, and, finally, to a tombstone that bears the legend “Corpus Christi”: the body of Christ. Here, as in ‘The Sparrowhawk’s Lament,’ the bird of prey foreshadows the death of Christ on the cross. It’s incredibly bleak, this image of Christ pleading on the Cross to his Father, but it gives the familiar, often over-theologised narrative a piercing immediacy: even Christ fears death.

The final stanza of this poem could seem enigmatic, even anti-climatic: instead of offering some kind of comforting resolution of these jumbled images of whirling death, the falcon, and the crucifix, it returns to a first-person speaker meditating on the utter unknowability of death. We can’t even be sure (because medieval texts don’t generally indicate one way or another, although modern punctuation can) whether or not the speaker of the last stanza is still the hawk, or whether it is now the ‘I’ of the opening lines. This anonymity of the speaking voice gives it a loneliness, but also allows it to speak for all of us – it could be anyone’s voice, facing down death.

If you look at what the rhymes are doing in this poem, you’ll see the rhyming tercets of the first two verses (rhymes across three lines, followed by the refrain, timor mortis conturbat me) give way to an imperfectly-rhymed quatrain in the third verse (deye/crye/trynyte/me) that seeks to incorporate the refrain into the rhyme scheme. And, finally, the last verse is a perfectly rhymed quatrain, with the refrain entirely incorporated, as if to still the turbulent movement and spiritual turmoil the line articulates. The Latin line initially jars the rhyme scheme and cannot be reconciled with the English speakers’ thoughts; by the end of the poem, it has become part of the speaker’s own idiom, chiming in with the speaker’s own thoughts.

This is, obviously, a poem about mourning, and a poem about the basic Christian confrontation with death. But, as I read its echoes backwards into the ancient Latin of the liturgy, sideways into the medieval Corpus Christi Carol, and forwards into Yeats and White, I think it’s also a poem about communication. How do we express fears? At what point do we manage to grapple with the language of death in such a way that it becomes part of our own vocabulary? When does the strange speech of the hawk suddenly start to make sense?

British Library MS Harley 7026, f. 16r (detail)

I know this poem, but not primarily as a medievalist, because in T. H. White’s Sword in the Stone (the story of King Arthur’s childhood), the birds of prey kept in the castle mews sing a version of it. This neatly links Cobham’s and MacDonald’s books, since she talks a lot about White and his writing. The version of the poem I’ve quoted above is from a manuscript written by a grocer, Richard Hill, who lived in London in the late fifteenth century. In fact, I happen to know that the Corpus Christi Carol I quoted above is in the same manuscript, so it’s perhaps no surprise that the two texts echo each other. However, the poem is much older than the late fifteenth century: in a slightly different version, it’s found in the Vernon manuscript, a huge book (it weighs over 2okg), which was copied somewhere in the West Midlands, in the 1390s. So, the poem is at least this old, and might well be even older.

It is difficult not to notice – even before I add the contextual historical information about Richard Hill – that the echoes that readily come to my mind to contextualise this poem, are echoes of male writers’ texts, or (in the case of the Corpus Christ Carol), echoes of texts whose authors are unknown. The gendered speakers of the poem are male, although we do not know the gender of the initial speaker who hears the bird ‘both weep and sing,’ and since women certainly did fly sparrowhawks, there is no strong reason to assume a male speaker. One of the most famous medieval texts on hawking, which lists each bird alongside the person to whose social status it is most appropriate (“… in what state so ever I be …”) is associated with a woman, Dame Juliana Berners. More persuasively, the Corpus Christi Carol, which maps the same image of the falcon and the dying Christ onto a love story, a story of the bird’s lost mate and the lady mourning her lover, might prompt us to hear a female speaker. Like the hawk that both weeps and sings, the lady of that poem “weepth both night and day“.

In the earlier version of this poem, the version written sometime in the fourteenth century, the pronouns used to refer to the sparrowhawk are less settled than they are in this later version. In the version I quote, the hawk is a male, a ‘musket,’ and is ‘he’ (I promise I looked carefully at the manuscript, and though it’s swirly handwriting, it’s definitely ‘he’). But in the earlier version, the hawk is ‘she,’ although still a ‘musket,’ presumably because hawks (like ships or bells) are often ‘she’ even when given male names. Once we recover these facts, the significance of that ‘anonymous’ voice in the final lines comes clearer – to me, anyway. The speaker is not gendered, but – like hawks, ships and bells – anonymous speakers throughout English Literature are often, in Virginia Woolf’s words, women. Finally, Helen MacDonald points out that hawking itself is a gendered business, with hawks imagined as women to be courted, romantic partners like the mournful lady in the Corpus Christi Carol.

To recover female voices within such a male-dominated poem – and within such a male-dominated textual tradition, with its echoes of Yeats and White, the clerics of the medieval Church and the Father and Son of the Trinity – is difficult, and daunting. As is fairly often the case, it requires more contextual knowledge to find the echoes of women’s voices in this poem. This is because close reading is never really close reading in perfect isolation from the hierarchical structures of English literary culture – as the first proponents of Cambridge Practical Criticism thought it could be. It’s a tool we use, not an ideology. But, at the same time, we can’t forget that, studying hundreds of years of male-dominated literature and literary criticism, it’s a tool that can’t be separated from the ideological conditions in which it was developed.

Note

I wrote this in the middle of 1) horrible writers’ block and 2) lurgy, so please be gentle. It’s Cambridge-focussed, but the basic question – how do we learn to read literature, and can the tools we use ever be free of gender bias – is pretty relevant to all of us, I think.

Advent at King’s College, Cambridge: A Post about Learning to Belong

View from Garret Hostel Bridge over Clare, with King’s Chapel in the distance.

Since I started teaching this term, I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes something inclusive. How do I include all of these students? How do I attract students who’re already worrying they may not ‘fit in’? At what point do I have to do something that threatens to leave some of them behind, and when can I afford to use terminology and concepts that aren’t easily accessible?

Medieval literature can seem pretty inaccessible. As a medievalist, I have a working familiarity with Latin; I know a fair bit about reading and handling manuscripts (these texts aren’t easy to read and even when printed in modern editions, they use letters we don’t usually see, like þ and з), and I rely on a lot of Christian theology which, like the Latin, can carry very awkward connotations about inclusion and exclusion.

This term, I was lecturing on the long Middle English poem Piers Plowman, which is phenomenally demanding. The impact of the exclusionary aspects of the text break down along gendered, racial and class lines, which is what makes them so difficult to teach around. To give the most obvious examples, students from State schools are less likely to be familiar with Latin; students who have never been targets of anti-Semitism may be less likely to find Langland’s habitual vitriol triggering, and I’m very conscious that my background as a high church Anglican gives me an advantage in coming to terms with the implications of a text that truly believes all non-Christians are in for eternal damnation. The effects of unfamiliarity are what we might call micro-exclusions (extending the useful concept of microaggressions). They’re tacit, but they do affect us along those lines of pre-existing discrimination.

This Sunday, I went to the Procession for Advent service at King’s College Chapel, a service that is not dissimilar in its liturgical texture, nor in its high potential for exclusion, to Piers Plowman. Now, I’ve got to admit, since I got my current job, I have been pinching myself to believe it’s not a giant mistake, and one of the things that got me most geekily excited was getting to hear King’s choir.

Church interior, from the Psalter of Henry VI (London, BL MS Cotton Domitian A. XVII, f. 12v). Henry VI initiated the building of King’s College Chapel.

You can get a bit of the idea of the structure of the service from this youtube link (sorry for the quality), but basically it’s choir singing interspersed with Bible readings. It began in darkness – and 88 metres of cathedral can get very, very dark at the altar end when the only light is coming in through the far door – and gradually, as the choir processed slowly up towards the altar, they brought candles and light with them.

I’m no expert on liturgy, medieval or modern. And this service was set up in 1934 by the then Dean of King’s, so it’s not got a long history. Eric Milner-White served as a chaplain in the First World War, and I’ve always associated that kind of post-war atmosphere of piety with the kind of service this is.

But, despite its newness, the service made me think of the ancient pre-Easter service of Tenebrae, in which all the lights in the church are gradually put out, until at last a book is slammed shut and the noise echoes around the pitch black church. That service is threaded through the medieval narrative of Piers Plowman, in which the author imagines Christ descending into Hell in the form of a light, which leaves the world in darkness on Good Friday, but which lightens up Hell, blinds the devil, and frees the souls kept captive there.

This service is, obviously, a reverse of that one, and, in a similar way to Tenebrae or to a medieval poem like Piers Plowman, it was full of symbolic light and sound and gesture. The antiphons between readings or hymns were sung in Latin; there was a bit of post-conversion T. S. Eliot and a couple of medieval carols.

A carol written by Henry VIII: bastard in his personal life, but hey, cute music manuscript. London, BL MS Add. 31922, f. 36v.

I know a lot of people would find many aspects of this service, and its context in a university college chapel, highly problematic. It’s not an accessible form of worship, as you can tell from the connotations I’m finding in it. It’s not designed to be easily interpreted, and a perfect (literal) example of this was found in the notes at the beginning of the service booklet, which warned us not to expect to be able to read it during the service itself. And you don’t just wander along. You can queue for a place in the street on the day, but you’ll be sitting behind the rood screen, and the majority of people who go, are going because they have tickets. Finally, you have a sense that you’re trespassing into male-only space. King’s choir has traditionally been all male, and it did piss me off to see that the male choir had a group of women processing with them, whose job was to carry the candles … but not to sing.

I was wondering how to respond to this, as I looked back over the carols the choir sung, and particularly one Middle English carol. It’s in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden. B. 26, f. 14v, if you’re interested, and A Clerk of Oxford has a nice blog post about it. There’s a version on youtube here, you can look at the manuscript page (complete with music) here, and here are the lyrics (I’ve modernised thorn to ‘th’ and yogh to ‘y’ or gh, but left the rest of the spelling as is):

Nowel, nowel, nowel,
Nowel, nowel, nowel.

Owt of your slepe aryse & wake
For God mankynd nowe hath ytake
al of a maide without eny make,
of al women she bereth the belle.

And thorwe a maide faire and wys,
Now man is made of ful gret pris,
Now angelys knelen to mannys seruys,
& at this tyme al this byfel.

Now man is brighter than the sonne,
Now man in heuen an hye shal wonne,
Blessyd God this game is begonne,
& his moder emperesse of helle.

That euer was thralle, now ys he fre,
That euer was smalle, now gret is she;
Now shal God deme both the & me,
Unto his blysse, yf we do wel.

Now man may to heuen wende,
Now heuen & erthe to hym they bende,
He that was foo, now is oure frende,
This is no nay that Y yowe telle.

Now, blessyd brother, graunte vs grace
At domes day to se thy face,
And in thy courte to haue a place,
That we mow there synge nowel.

The place where this carol manuscript was copied was an exclusionary space: a monastery in Worcester, a space whose exclusion mirrors wider exclusions of women throughout medieval society. The choir who sung it in King’s Chapel are performing in a context of music and worship which, likewise, has an exclusionary history, a history of male-only space in which the Church and the university often seem to speak in one (Latin) voice. Yet, this carol balances exclusion with strong, and interestingly gendered images of community. 

The carol places Christ’s birth in the context of his coming battle with the devil, which will see Mary reign as ’emperesse of Hell’. The ‘game’ begun with Christ’s birth is this contest, and this word reminds me very much of other medieval narratives. Langland’s Piers Plowman, which was written perhaps sixty or so years before this carol is first recorded and was circulated in the same West Midlands area, imagines the conflict between Christ and the devil over the rights to the souls in Hell as a matter of wit and trickery, not just a contest of brute force. In the same way, Langland’s contemporary the Gawain-poet, also writing in the West Midlands, uses the motif of a ‘Christmas game’ to stage a conflict over the human soul of his hero.

I love the drama of that image, and I love how the carol telescopes time, so that everything from Christ’s birth to the Harrowing of Hell is condensed into this single narrative, with a glance forward even to the end of Time.

The image of the first verse is completely standard, even a bit of a cliché: Mary is ‘a maide without eny make,’ that is, a woman without a ‘make’ (= mate, or husband) and a woman without any ‘make’ (= match or peer; ie., a peerless woman). The next mention of her, however, jolts us out of cliché: 

Blessyd God this game is begonne,
& his moder emperesse of helle.

The chronology of the carol skips straight from Christ’s birth and the beginning of the ‘game’ for man’s soul, to the image of the Virgin reigning over conquered Hell. There’s a similar startling discontinuity in another medieval carol, Adam Lay Y-Bounden, which I’ve written about before, and which jumps straight from the taking of the apple in the garden of Eden, to its unexpectedly fortunate result, the coming of the Virgin Mary to be humanity’s intercessor in heaven.

The exclusion of parts of the well-known narrative lets us look at it in a new light. On the one hand, the writer has entirely excluded the human history of Mary from his carol. This image of Mary as a powerful empress rather than a human mother harks back to the older iconography (which you can still see a lot of in the Orthodox Church). It’s deliberately more awe-inspiring and less sympathetic than the later imagery of Mary as nurturing mother, and it’s slightly out of step with the fifteenth century, slightly exclusionary and distant, bringing us up short. But, at the same time, it makes me wonder whether this exclusionary image doesn’t have its positive points: it’s an image of a female figure who is primarily powerful rather than emotional, awe-inspiring rather than humble.

And the depictions of gender become even more startling. When the author describes ordinary humanity, he writes:

“That euer was thralle, now ys he fre,
That euer was smalle, now gret is she”

(‘Whoever was enslaved, now he is free./ Whoever was small, now great is she.’)

This is the sort of elegantly gender-balanced language you’d expect in a modern piece of writing, by someone rendering feminist theories of language into religious verse. And yet it fits into this fifteenth-century carol.

Finally, what puts a shiver down my spine (in a good way) is the last verse, which I’ll quote again in modern English:

“Now blessed brother grant us grace
At doomes day to see thy face,
And at thy court to have a place,
That we may there sing nowell.”

Partly, this works for me because in medieval literature, there are dozens of writers who use unexpected family relationships to imagine their bond with God. But I like both the parity and the monasticism implied by ‘brother’. Since this manuscript was copied (if not necessarily composed) in a monastery, I like to think that the writer might have been imagining Christ as if he were another ‘brother’ in religion. It suggests a real familial warmth to the relationships between monks, which I don’t think we often think about.

I do think this is interesting in terms of gender. We’re so often encouraged to think about how oppressed or disempowered groups might establish mutually supportive relationships, and we often study the bonds created in the women-only spaces inhabited by medieval nuns, or the support between medieval women from all walks of life.

But we’re less inclined to look at the emotional and familial bonds between men, perhaps because emotional and familial bonding is (in modern culture) so often seen as part of the feminine sphere and, in the extreme, as an aspect of wifework, which I’ve written about before. So, we end up reinforcing the idea that emotion and accessability are gendered, that we should always be able to imagine and relate to women’s emotions, while men’s are a closed book.

The author of this carol didn’t imagine a Christian community in which ‘he’ meant ‘all humanity’ and women weren’t mentioned, which is something some modern writers still fail to do. And I find it difficult to fault him for falling back on the exclusively male space of the medieval monastery as his personal image of the ‘court’ of heaven, because I can see how, for a medieval monk, the language of ‘brotherhood’ might provide the most immediate emotional connection.

I feel lucky to be able to read all of the resonances of liturgy and medieval context into a service like this one, a poem like Piers Plowman, or a carol like ‘Arise and Wake’. I’m conscious that people often perceive the kinds of texts I read, and the kinds of experiences I’m having at the moment, as inaccessible, and feel these kinds of text or performance are ‘not for them’. I’m trying to find ways to make these texts more accessible – not by ignoring the difficulties of interpretation they cause, but by exploring the ways in which they can question even the exclusionary situations within which they were produced. The richness of these medieval carols, of this (perhaps exclusionary) modern liturgy, of a poem like ones I teach, is something incredibly difficult to grasp. But when you do grasp it, and get through all of those micro-exclusions, you may find texts – and people – struggling with the same questions of how to avoid exclusion, how to imagine a properly inclusive community.

Update

I just thought I’d link to an account of the Carols from Kings TV service, filmed a few days ago, on Mary Beard’s blog. I was passing through King’s as the TV crew were preparing to film, and found out they light the chapel from outside, which makes sense, but also makes it look amazing as you look back across the river. Here.

Notes

It’s worth knowing that, as a college, King’s has an established tradition of active efforts to attract students who might not initially feel comfortable applying to Cambridge.

If you want to know more about medieval carols or their manuscripts, check out this blog post over at the British Library site, by Sandra Tuppen. It’s a lovely Christmassy read.

If you think feminism is winning, read this. (Trigger warning)

I’ve just been absolutely blown away by the question one of my brilliant students asked. So much so, in fact, that it’s only just sunk in.

Now, I’m enjoying lecturing and it’s the beginning of term, so it’s maybe not surprising that the five minutes of questions at the end of the lecture has been my favourite bit. Yesterday, I was lecturing on one of the theories about how to define Middle English romance as a genre. There’s an idea that it grew out of national epic, as a way to offer the class of men who needed to marry and to fight (that is, knights) a paradigm of virtuous life that wasn’t the peaceable, celibate life of the medieval saint. So far, you may think, so dry. But this lecture meant I talked a lot about racism and a fair bit about sexual violence, because both of those things are used by medieval authors to imply that men – and English men at that – are not thugs but heroes, while painting women and non-whites as inferior.

One popular episode in the Arthurian tradition is a really glaring example. Arthur – our wonderful English hero – travels to France, where he is told that a murderous giant has abducted an aristocratic woman, Arthur’s own subject. Arthur goes charging to the rescue, but he is too late. An old woman tells him she has just buried the mutilated body of the woman he seeks to protect: she was raped so violently she died.

This horrific episode is, in narrative terms, designed to serve an important and specific purpose. Arthur, the hero, is no saintly warrior. In his youth, he committed incest with his sister and produced a son, Mordred, whom he then tried to kill by sentencing all the babies born within that time to death by drowning. Arthur’s sin of sexual deviance followed by murder of an innocent can only be blotted out by the dramatic description of a worse sin of the same kind, which throws our sympathy behind the ‘least worst’ option.

In my lecture, I discussed this example, the rhetorically sophisticated language of the author, the parallels to post-medieval tropes of English masculinity, and a host of other things. In my mind, this episode was typical of Middle English romance, because of the way it uses the graphic violence of rape to further the reputation of a defender of women, rather than to change or explore the situation of the raped woman.

My student asked whether we ever read romances in which men rape their wives.

I began to explain that, in medieval England, the law did not recognise marital rape as a crime, and as I explained that, it dawned on me that the majority of my students – people who are young adults in 2014 – have never lived in a time in which, in England, marital rape was not a crime. They saw it as a medieval barbarity.

My title responds to Laura Bates’ article in the Guardian, which claims that the backlash against feminism proves that we are winning. I like her argument. I think she’s right. The sea change that means that my students can image marital rape might have been a medieval crime shows she is right. When I was born, marital rape was legal in England. It should be shameful that this brings me closer to a medieval legal system than to modern one. But, at the same time, I’m shocked by the slowness of real change – it took six hundred years to move on with the definition of rape! And that makes me second-guess the ‘progress’ we’re trying to celebrate.