Ramblings on Christina of Markyate’s mouth

So I accidentally bought a book the other day (the bookshop was just there, flashing its volumes enticingly at me): The Life of Christina of Markyate, A Twelfth-Century Recluse. It’s published in 2005 by Toronto U. P., but is actually a re-issue of a 1959 edition+translation by C. H. Talbot, who managed with great effort to transcribe those parts of the single manuscript that were not destroyed or obscured by the Cotton fire of 1731 (honestly, why would you move a collection of priceless manuscripts to a place called Ashburnham House for temporary storage? Someone was just asking for trouble).  My excuse for the flagrant self-indulgence (it cost all of $9!) is that it is tangentially related to my thesis, as it’s a product of St Albans, and I’ll be using existing studies on the historical-writing culture of St Albans as a touchstone for more original work that I intend to do on other places.  And, although she lived during the first half of the 12th century, and the vita seems to have been writing during her vita, the surviving manuscript was written (apparently with some intentional alteration from the lost original) in the mid 14th, so it’s within my time period too[1].

I’ve only just started reading it, but I was immediately struck by the style of narration, in which speech is very prominent.  It frequently uses direct speech, marked by the use of the first person (note the punctuation of the transcription):

Dixitque. Dimitte me. ut eam hostium obserare. Quia licet minime Deum metuimus. saltem homines opere tali ne superveniant vereri debemus.
And she said to him: ‘Allow me to bolt the door: for even if we have no fear of God, at least we should take precautions that no man should catch us in this act.’ (42-43) 

Direct speech is both frequent and usually marks the emotional and moral crux of each scene. Not only that, but it emphasises speech and its style and effect to such a degree that it would not be an exaggeration to call the whole vita (well, so far as I’ve read) a narrative of speech events.

• Almost every scene centres around a particular potent occasion of speech. 
• Christina’s devotion to Christ is learned and expressed through speech, as is the battle for her mind and chastity. 
• The proof of her holiness is in her speech: eg, when young she speaks aloud to Christ in her room at night, in a loud clear voice, believing that no mortal could hear her while she was addressing God.
• Her spiritual education by Sueno is told in terms of his speech and the “colloquium” he had with her. And the elided “cum” in “cum”+“loquor” is appropriate: we are told that he is learning from her speech as much as the other way around.
• Similarly, when trying to force her into marriage, her parents’ primary method of coercion is to keep all religious, god-fearing men from having “colloquium” with her, as if blocking access to the words can keep God away. Instead, she is surrounded examples of bad speech, by “people given to jesting, boasting, worldly amusement, and those whose evil communications [mala colloquia] corrupt good manners [mores bonos]” (47).
• In addition, they set one of her best friends on her, who uses flattery and persuasion and sheer persistence for a whole year to try to persuade her to consent – to that one verbal act that constitutes a contract of betrothal or marriage (depending on verb tense).
• Vows, prayers and moments of verbal consent are the turning points that provide the dramatic structure of the narrative.
• In trying to seduce her, the evil bishop Ralph of Durham uses not force, or even simply words, but explicitly “that mouth which he used to consecrate the sacred species”, neatly demonstrating the moral difference between his speech and hers.

In the example I quoted above, the use of direct speech provides the dramatic and moral crux of the scene. Ralph is  trying to seduce/rape the young Christina in his bedroom, and she is employing a ruse to allow her nearer the door so that she can escape, while pretending to acquiesce. The direct speech thus dramatises the ploy, heightening its effect, and doubles it by having her feign what we as readers know is a completely insincere disregard for God and God’s omnipresence. At the same time, that jarring note serves as a harsh reminder of exactly what the bishop’s priorities should be, highlighting his hypocrisy and thus suggesting that Christina’s apparent dishonesty is excusable, in the service of a higher truth.

The bishop demands her oath that she would not ‘fail’ but that she indeed lock the door; she swears to it, darts out of the room and locks him in. These happen in reported speech, rather than direct, playing out the suggestions inherent in the direct speech.

Incidentally, the word I’ve rendered above as ‘fail’ is my own translation of ‘falleret’.  Talbot, who prefers throughout to read this text as a literal account of her life[2], misses the double meaning here and translates it as ‘deceive him’ – certainly the primary meaning in context, and the only meaning Ralph intends, but I would have preferred to have the ominous hint preserved.  To fall truly in this instance, to fail in her vows of virginity, would be to stay in the room with him.

This emphasises the difference maintained throughout the scene between her reading of words (which is largely allegorical) and his (determinedly centred on the physically present).  She observes that the door is closed but not bolted (“clausum… sed non obseratum”). Similarly, her chastity is so far defended, but not inviolable.  Bolting the door erects a physical barrier between her and her would-be violator, just as there is already a spiritual barrier between them.  She has kept her promise she made to him: she has locked the door both physically and spiritually, in a manner far more significant than he intended. She is not forsworn: she adheres to a truth he cannot comprehend.


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[1] Copying a text, especially with substantial editing, definitely counts as historical writing for my purposes.  Oddly, Talbot seems to make little distinction between the original author and the amending copyist – so far as I can tell, as he uses the word ‘biographer’ for both, he seems to assume they’re both from St Albans on the grounds of the same textual evidence (use of “nostrum” etc when referring to the saint or monastery).


[2] He emphasises the biographer’s close relationship to her and the fact that it was written in her lifetime, as well as the paucity of fantastical tales that mark most hagiography of the period, to conclude that it was a genuine attempt at a “history” of the real woman rather than a collection of “stock elements”.  I… disagree, mostly with that distinction.

The Tale of Zeus and Dame Ragnelle

No, it will make sense. Bear with me.

So, I’ve a conference next week at which I’m speaking on The Weddynge of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, a mid-15C analogue of the Loathly Lady tale that also appears in, for example, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. The fact that the conference theme is “Intimacy: Family, Friendship and Fealty” means that I can’t just go haring off after the diversion that occurred to me last night, so: once more unto the blog!

The history of the Loathly Lady figure relative to Irish sovereignty tales (in which the lady represents the country) has been well established.  I have no citations by me, as I am writing this on the bus, but I believe Frederick Madden had something to say about it in his collection of Gawain stories, and it goes on from there according to the usual patterns of late 19-early 20C myth-discovery.  That is, therefore, the accepted mythical ancestor of the figure, and as hunting out mythological precedents is rather out of fashion and the genealogy is well traced I don’t believe  anyone has thought to dispute it, or posit any additional ancestor.

But surely the obvious classical precedent is the god-who-comes-to-dinner? Zeus, or some other god (usually Zeus as the patron of hospitality), disguises him/herself as some ugly, poor old beggar and asks for shelter and food. Or, of course, for help crossing a river, etc.  This is a test, the protagonist responds according to their moral stature, and the god suddenly sheds his unprepossessing exterior to reveal himself in all his glory to pass judgement on the protagonist, along with appropriate reward or punishment.  I don’t recall offhand whether any examples of that trope appear in Ovid, but it’s entirely in keeping with the system of virtue and reward evident in the Aeneid, to consider just two of the most culturally influential classical texts extant in the Middle Ages.

The main linking device is, of course, the transformation: a disguised stranger who appeared unworthy according to the ideals of the genre – poor and old and helpless in Greek mythology, disgusting and unmannerly and often old in romance – is suddenly transformed into the epitome of those ideals. In addition:

• the transformation is in direct response to the actions of the protagonist towards the stranger,
• in entering the narrative, the stranger will, explicitly or otherwise, initiate a kind of test for the protagonist, in which their response demonstrates (and thereby establishes) their virtue,
• the stranger retains to him/herself the authority to pass judgement on the protagonist’s actions after the return transformation (rather than delegating that task to the narrator), claiming the status of moral arbiter of the narrative,
• similarly, the stranger him/herself dispenses punishment or reward.

The trouble with this is that it’s a bit of a jump from Greek mythology to mediaeval romance.  And there is a good deal of cultural filtering and reconditioning that must take place there to make any Greek story (or figure) have any relevance to a late-mediaeval audience.

So where else can we find a more immediate precedent to this figure, a precedent that provides a type of bridging device between classical myth and late-mediaeval readership? a precedent in a tradition that is entirely accustomed to absorbing classical and/or pagan stories and recasting them to its own set of moral values?

Well:

... whanne Seint Iulian reste hym aboute midnyght al forweried [weary] and the wedyr colde and a gret froste, he herde a vois that wepte piteously and cried: 'Iulian, helpe me ouer for Goddes loue or ellis I perische for greuous colde.' And whanne he herde that voys he arose al sodenly [immediately] and passed the colde water and founde that pore creature that deied nigh for colde, toke hym up and bere hym to his hous and light the fere and dede al his diligence to warme hym. And as he myght in no wise make hym take warmthe he toke hym in his armes and bare hym to his bedde... And a litell after he that apered to be so sike and as a foule lepre stied vp shinyng into heuene, saieng to his oste: 'Iulian, oure Lorde hathe sent me to the, sendyng the to saie that he hathe receiued thi and ye bothe shull reste in oure Lorde witheinne a litell tyme' And anone he vanished awaye... (Gilte Legende, ed. Richard Hamer, EETS 2006; v. 1, 144)

Appropriately enough, that comes from the story of St Julian Hospitaller, Zeus’ descendant in the role of protecting the sacred laws of hospitality and defending the safety of guests.  But it works perfectly well in a Christian context, thus refigured – well enough that throughout the Gilte Legende (and elsewhere), saints and even Jesus himself regularly pop up where they’re not expected, mysteriously disguised, usually as someone helpless, and initiate a test of some kind or another.  Quite of a piece with the popular belief that saints really could interfere in a very material way with everyday life – all your big brothers are watching you.

So, if Dame Ragnelle has cross-genre precedents in, for example, St Julian and others, can we expect that her contemporary audience might have recognised them and picked up on the currents? I think so – if nothing else, Ragnelle seems to deliberately play with the collision of genre, pushing herself forcibly into society, conscious of her own incongruity and playing it for all it’s worth with her fine clothes and horse.  If so, the audience could expect her at her appearance to make demands which would set up a challenge as a moral test – apparently for both Arthur and Gawain. And she does, tests which Gawain passes and Arthur fails (largely by fobbing responsibility off on his nephew).

But if she refers to or recalls testing figures in hagiography, does this have an effect on what is being tested? Courtly virtues? Christian ones?  The story of St Julian explicitly opposes the life of the court (and its values) with the humble Christian values that  attend helping mysterious sick strangers (for which you have to live in an isolated hut beside a ‘flode’). The Wife of Bath’s nameless loathly lady gives a pillow-lecture that could be read as being in opposition to ‘courtly’ virtues. And Gawain, when his ugly wife has become beautiful, thanks God for her deliverance from a curse (and presumably for his from the equally horrible fate of having to look on her all the time). Perhaps Arthur’s failure is that he tries to adhere to courtly virtues which are (or could be read as) so dependent on appearance as reflective of personal status.

Arma Christi, pedii alii

I visited the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne) a few days ago, and don’t know why I’ve never got around to it before.  It is a very good place to spend an afternoon.  Though their mediaeval collection is small, and mostly comprised of worn wooden statuary[1], there were a few late mediaeval paintings that I spent some time peering at curiously, much to the amusement of the curator (apparently they weren’t the ones most people were interested in).

The most interesting one was this: 

Hans Memling. Man of Sorrows in Virgin’s Arms. Flemish, 1475-79. Oil and gold leaf on wood panelling. At the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne).

It’s quite small – less in height than the length of my forearm – so despite the vivid colours, no one else was much interested in it.  But the scarlet particularly is very brilliant (less so in the image here than in real life), and the expressions of the faces – especially those of the heads scattered around the background – are very vivid and characterful.  Mary and Jesus are a little more conventional, and less colourful, save for the blood.

What struck me about this painting was, firstly, that it’s an arma Christi, a convention (or genre, really) that I thought was rather outdated by this time (though it’s way out of my field, so I could be very wrong).  I was also curious to see that the rather brief information on it didn’t mention that, or give any explanation of the visual conventions to which Memling appeals. 

The second curious thing is that, among the traditional objects of torture – the whipping-post, the flail, the spear, the hammer and nails – are positioned the heads, hands and feet of the multitude who jeered him.  The hands particularly are interesting, positioned variously to pinch, punch, slap, whip and jeer (one seems to be making a rude gesture?), as if to cover all the insults that a hand might inflict on a man.  The fragmented bodies of the crowd become weapons against Christ, and therefore for him, extensions (by implication) of his own body – literally his arma.  And the vivid personalisation of every face (from many different professions and social ranks, given their clothing) implicates and involves them as individuals, not as tokens.  I don’t know how common this sort of image was, but I haven’t seen it before.  Is anyone else familiar with this as a tradition?

All in all, it seems to me that Memling was using more recent techniques – the vivid colours, the realistic portraiture – to reinvigorate much older images – not only the arma Christi itself, but the fascination with and veneration of the bodily fluids.  Christ catches and cups the blood running down his side, drawing attention to it and perhaps beginning the process of converting it to a relic. The blood on his head and shoulder is echoed and reinforced both by the duplication of the colour in the costumes of the crowd, and by the pure, clear tears running down Mary’s cheeks.

If this is deliberate (and if I’m not misreading completely), perhaps Memling is trying to draw his viewers into the picture, to show real “modern” people as the tormentors of a traditionally recognisable Christ, to convey that very personal “we are his tormentors, we daily wound him with our sins” message.

Incidentally, in hunting the web for the image (before I thought to go to the NGV’s website) I found this:

At the Capilla Real (Granada); image from Wikipedia.

Same artist, same period, but apparently much less expensive production – the duller colours may be due to less careful preservation, but the gold leaf background is lacking.  Interestingly, Mary’s headscarf is much less ornate, and Jesus’ hair less beautifully brushed.  The combination of these factors would lead me to guess that this one came first, and the NGV version was, perhaps, commissioned by a richer patron after he/she saw the Capilla Real painting. And that might have been a good reason to change those two religious-looking folk in the top left corner to something a little less politically suggestive.
Also, this one has a rooster (on top of the whipping post, where there’s another head in the NGV painting), presumably he who crew three times; which makes this version more of a retelling of the Passion than a focus on the arma.

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[1] There was one curious carving of St John the Baptist, which I puzzled over for a while – I couldn’t work out whether he was meant to be wearing the skin of a goat or a dragon.  I remembered lately it’s meant to be a camel skin he wears, but this one had dragon scales, goat hooves and a reptilian but goat-shaped head.  Apparently very odd depictions of unfamiliar animals aren’t unique to the illustrators of bestiaries!

The fiend as God’s sergeant (part 2/2)

And if the fiend functions as God’s – executor, as it were – carrying out God’s will to the greater glory of the saints while managing to be evil himself (because apparently God has great PR officers), what can we say about these lads?  This is the torture and mastectomy of St Agatha, and I think I may venture to hypothesise that the two at her with pliers are EVILEVILEVIL. Look at their faces – they’re approaching the fiendish themselves[1].

Bibl. Nationale, MS n. a. fr. 16251 fol 87v. Le Livre d'images de Madame Marie, c. 1300. Image taken from Caviness 82.

Hassig has written a chapter on specific details of mediaeval portrayals of Jews/monsters/others/foreigners/devils, all of which elide rather tellingingly at some point.  If I recall[2], there were several things that functioned most strongly in depicting evilother, among them distorted faces, grimaces, crouching posture, tightly curled hair and dark skin.  All of these features are not only present in these unpleasant-looking lads, but accentuated by contrast in every case to the serene, upright, very pale figure between them. So they are associated, not only by narrative function but by visual language, with the actions of the devil.  Standing in for him in the physical performance of Agatha’s martyrdom, they take on physical attributes associated with him – but also, of course, with themselves as ethnically other.

So Christianity’s tendency to create enemies [3] comes in handy here – we have a sliding scale between foreign and devil, between not-us and persecutor and enemy of God, where the only difference between foreigner, pagan, idol, demon and Satan is  of degree.


As the corollary to this, what does Agatha resemble in this picture? Well, in context, that’s rather obvious – who stands around looking bright and benevolent while surrounded by tormentors, with arms stretched out to either side of his head?  And is a complete contrast to devils? In case we missed the similarity, she has her convenient halo to point it out.  There is also a clear sexual difference – she is pure and white and fully clothed (save where they have exposed her body for humiliation and torture) with skirts to the ground, while their legs are bared and the violating instruments are held in a suspiciously phallic position.

Physically, she is approaching (literally) Christ – she is raised above her tormentors, as if halfway to heaven.  And alright, so she has breasts and that’s not entirely Christ-like – but hey, her tormentors are (sergeant-like) removing those for her, so that won’t be a problem for much longer.   Remove those curves, and she would be almost entirely masculine in appearance. 

Of course saints are often depicted as resembling Christ, or rather partaking of the same visual code of virtue and holiness, just as the torturers resemble the devil. But a female saint is visually farther from Christ to begin with, and it’s hardly illogical that she should become masculinised in depiction in the process of approaching him[4].  Caviness has mentioned the tendency towards masculinisation in the tortures visited on female martyrs - Agatha’s isn’t the only mastectomy, and the torments often appear to result in a masculine display of physical courage or fortitude, etc (Caviness 90).

I’ve described it as purely visual, but of course the cultural attitudes are hardly limited to the pictorial. Though Caviness is primarily discussing images, rather than literature, she implies that this tendency is also present in the shape of the stories of the female martyrs: “The threat of the female is expunged by her becoming masculine (or female-less) in response to bodily exposure and torture.  The repetition of the mastectomy topos in so many saints’ lives, possibly by a borrowing from one to the other, is an indication of its cathartic power” (93). 

But doesn’t this imply that ‘female’ is something expunged from the body to leave a pure male remaining? Yet the feminine is already defined by its lack relative to the male body, so logically in lacking both masculinity and femininity one becomes genderless.  Is there, then, a similar tradition (though fainter, I think) in the purification of male saints by castration? I can’t think of nearly so many instances, but one could construct an idea of an idealised non-gendered spiritual body, purged of sex. 

Of course, this is rather too (theo)logical and rather less fundamentally attractive than the idea of ripping off women’s breasts or ‘improving’ the bodies of admired women until they resemble men (the best of men), so it’s not likely to have such a wide currency in popular stories.


[1] Cf. the faces of the people flaying St Barthlomew (from the same ms) in the picture at the end of the last post: one's turning his head away, one looks uncomfortable, and one looks like he's positively enjoying himself.  All three are similarly dressed to Agatha’s tormentors, and the face of the third is the most distorted. 


[2] Unfortunately I haven’t read this article for over a year and my photocopy of it is in Canada and I can’t source it over here in Adelaide, but I shall sharpen the specifics as soon as I get back to Ottawa. I don’t think my memory misrepresents her.

[3] It's ridiculous, isn't it? given the cultural dominance of Christianity for, oh, 1700 years, its insistence on a neurotic self-representation as a persecuted minority. Childhood really is a very formative time, apparently for religions as well as people. It is a very attractive self-representation too, isn't it - it means you needn't mature emotionally beyond that childhood phase of ranting at injustice and being misunderstood, and may construct enemies everywhere at a moment's notice. After all, you're the victim, right?


[4] This raises a question, which I’m not addressing now because I’m really just thinking aloud (well, on a screen): Are any female martyrs depicted in a Marian code, rather than a Messianic one? I can’t think of any, and it’s less intuitive – but are the unmartyred female saints depicted consistently in the visual tradition of Mary, then? Is there an appreciable divide there?


Cited.
Caviness, Madeline H. Visualizing women in the Middle Ages: Sight, spectacle and scopic economy. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania P., 2001.
Hassig, Debra. "The iconography of Rejection: Jews and other Monstrous Races". Image and Belief: Studies in the Celebration of the Eightieth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art. Ed. Colum Hourihane. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1999. 25-46.

The fiend as God's sergeant (part 1/2)

In the medieval narratives [of female martyrs] good girl and bad girl alike were stripped only to mortify the flesh, whether at the behest of an evil emperor or of Satan, who oddly enough carries out the punishments to which sinners are condemned by God. (Caviness 85)

Well, but it isn’t odd. At least according to the pattern of the Gilte Legend (which, incorporating as it does many different versions of many different stories from many different traditions, rarely has a pattern but does manage one in this case), infernal intervention in saints’ lives is always associated with the pattern of divine will. Fiends enact God’s purpose, both in demonstrating the saint’s glory and in performing divine vengeance on sinners. They get the dirty work, but their actions tend to God’s ends. Of course, from a narrative point of view, every character and action in a moralistic short story point towards the same moral end; but the articulation (by narrator, saints and fiends) of the fiends’ purposes show a deliberate unity between infernal and divine intentions.

I’ve only a few pages of the Gilte Legende with me here in Adelaide, and none have examples of Satan or fiends explicitly involved with a martyrdom (though, as I mention in my next post, they’re there ‘in spirit’ in the person of the tormentors). But of the eight pages I have (well, sixteen – eight photocopies of facing pages), there are enough consistent references to fiends to generalise about their behaviour – and they are far from autonomous.

When the son of the provost who sent St Agnes to the brothel goes to visit her there (presumably with rape in mind, given he takes a gang of his friends along), he is foiled by a/the fiend acting in concert with heavenly light:

And whanne he wolde haue touched her the bryghtnesse of the light come ayeinst hym, and he yelded no worshippes ne thankyngges to God, wherfor he was anone strangeled of the fende. (110)

“Strangled by the fiend” (“strangled” can mean “smothered” or even just “killed”) seems almost a figure of speech (though of a piece with the literal behaviour of fiends elsewhere), until Agnes explains to his father that yes, in fact, agency in that act does belong to the devil, and is due explicitly to the boy’s choice of him over God:

He of whom he wolde fulfell the wille toke pouer vpon hym and slough hym, and whanne his felawes sayn the miracle of God thei turned ayein all dredfulli withouten any harme. (110)

Moments like this in which fiends punish sinners usually occur as a direct result of some action by the saint[1] (though notice that the saint does not instruct the fiend to do so):

[St Longinus] toke an axe and braste doun all þe ydollis... And þe fendis þat wente oute of þe ydollis entrid into the [evil] prouost and within his felawis, and þay al torente hemself as madde men and knelid doun to Longius. (212)

Longinus then removes the devils and restores the men to sanity[2]. Similarly,

... the preste of the idoles that hadde geue his counsell [to kill St Vitalis] was anone rauished withe the fende and was verray wood .vij. dayes and cried in the place wher Seint Vitall was buried: ‘Allas, Vitall, how thou brennest me.’ And in the .vij.te day þ fende threwe hym in the riuer wher he deied cursedly”. (284)

Even when not punishing the saint’s tormentors, the fiends invariably (so far as I can recall) take action solely for the benefit of the saint – the moral and demonstrative benefit, that is, even if they humiliate his/her body. They enable the saint to either ascend to a higher moral plane, or (more commonly) to demonstrate his/her moral/spiritual superiority and the power consequently given him/her by God.

The demonstration, of course, works on two levels: to other characters in the narrative, and to the reader. Some incidents are designed more for one audience than the other: proof aimed at the world of the narrative often involves very public confrontation or spectacular miracles, as in the previous examples, while those aimed at the reader need not be witnessed by other characters, and are more likely to recall stories of Christ’s actions or passion.

Macarius, for example, is tested privately, “in the supulture of a dede man” in “a place of desert”, recalling Christ’s temptation in the wilderness[3] and his entombment (possibly also the harrowing of Hell). The fiends who find him have no purpose but “to make hym afraied”, and Macarius’ imperviousness causes them to flee, helpfully informing the audience as they go that he has “ouercome us”. Another more violent fiend later tries to attack him with a scythe, “but he myght not”. Macarius need not even speak to deter this fiend, as he is simply and mysterious impervious. This fiend is also handily explicit in not only demonstrating Macarius’ moral superiority, but explicating its nature to the reader:

And thanne he saide hym: ‘A, thou Makarie, thou makest me to suffre gret violence, for I may do nothyng ayeinst the. And I doo as thou doost, thou fastest and I ete not, thou wakest and I slepe not, but one thing is wherin thou ouercomest vs most.’ Thanne the abbot saide: ‘Wherin is that?’ And the fende saide: ‘Humilitie, wherfor I may do nothyng ayeinst the.’ (93)

The place of the fiend in these tales is very ordered.  It cannot be a true enemy, with motivations and agenda of its own, nor can it pose a real threat to the saint or to God’s plan.  Though malicious, it acts only within God’s plan, and can have effect only against those who have already committed themselves to the devil by actions against God or God’s proxy.  Attempted action against that proxy serves only their aggrandisement – and the fiends not only seem to know this, but sometimes get quite chatty with the saints about it (Longinus is another such).  They may have rebelled originally against God, but they seem incapable of rebelling against their place as it is now in the natural order. 

I am reminded of Dante’s Minos:

Gustav Doré's impression of Minos, 1890

Stavvi Minòs orribilmente, e ringhia:
essamina le colpe ne l'intrata;
giudica e manda secondo ch'avvinghia.
Dico che quando l'anima mal nata
li vien dinanzi, tutta si confessa;
e quel conoscitor de le peccata
vede qual loco d'inferno è da essa;
cignesi con la coda tante volte
quantunque gradi vuol che giù sia messa. (Inferno V.4-12)

Minos crouches in the second circle, “horrible and growling”, examining the sins of all who come before him and, by the number of times he curls his tail, indicates the circle to which divine judgement condemns the sinner. Enacting God’s justice, he nevertheless remains monstrously other – an infernal other, not divinely elevated. He points doom with that least human organ, the tail, rather than the hand with which God made the world. Similarly, a loving God is not directly responsible for the horrors visited on the saint or meted out against his/her tormentors (as the saint does not instruct the fiends to punish the pagans); but nevertheless they remain part of a greater divine plan.

It seems to me this view of the fiend serves two functions: reassurance and permission.  On the one hand, the fiend is not active in the world without the supervision of God: these torments, while physically horrific, not only guarantee the saint a place in God’s presence but are ordained by God, who ultimately has control over the situation, over the worst of what happens to us in life.  On the other hand, by token of the first, the martyrdom is an act of God and may therefore be venerated, obsessed over, fetishised, depicted, relished as a work of literature or art. It creates and defines an acceptable way of looking, for images like this:

The flaying of St Bartholomew; Bibl. Nat. MS n. a. fr. 16251 fol. 67v. Le Livre d'images of Madame Marie, c. 1300.

[1] Note that in Agnes’ case the punishment is prompted not by her action but by action against her. I may have to collect a larger sample group to observe whether this is usually gendered. Cf. St Vitalis, whose death is the precipitating factor; though I think I would argue that for a saint martyrdom is an action, potentially the moment of their greatest power.
[2] Upon which, they kill him. At his own request. And the provost weeps for him. Saints are peculiar.
[3] And in Jerusalem, technically, thanks to Lucifer and his superspeed travel. And I’d just like to say that, if refusing the suggestion that you throw yourself off a tall building is a qualification for divinity, I manage to do that every day. Well, I would if more people suggested it to me on a regular basis. I think I would make a relatively sensible deity.  Though some sects might carry out pogroms in the name of correct use of punctuation and antecedents.

Cited:
Caviness, Madeline H. Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
Dante. Inferno. Ed. Giorgio Petrocchi. Società Dantesca Italiana, 1994.

Cleopatra D IX: MS V, ff. 118-168. South English Legendary.

A fragment of an otherwise unknown manuscript of the South English Legendary.

 

Description.

Parchment, 51 ff., 265 x 165 mm with the text block 205 x 112 mm. Written in one column of 40 lines. Folios in twelves, with ff. 1-5 of the first quire lost and the final quire in eight. The last leaf is blank. Written in two hands, both Anglicana approaching textura, very clear. B is rounder with smaller strokes. A writes ff. 118-149v (John Evangelist, Thomas of Becket), B ff. 149v-166 (Theophilus/Virgin, Cecilia, Gregory). No decoration save the “traditional blue initials flourished in red with marginal extensions”, not filled in (Görlach, Textual tradition 112). All folios but the last numbered in modern foliation.

 

Contents.

The end of a manuscript of the South English Legendary, lacking at least five leaves from its first quire and probably several other quires containing a more complete collection of the poems. The South English Legendary is a popular collection of saints’ lives in vernacular verse, surviving in many manuscripts, originating in the Worcestershire/Gloucestershire region in the late thirteenth century. Görlach observes that it seems to have been confined to this region “for the first 50-80 years of its existence, spreading into the Midlands only in the second half of the 14th century” (Revision 9). The legends contained in this manuscript are (Brown 267-68):

- 118r: The final eight lines of St John the Evangelist (Him sende here his ringe a3en & þonked him also...). ½ p.

- 118r-149v: St Thomas of Canterbury, followed by his Translation (Gilberd was Thomas fader name þat trewe was & god...). 32 ff.

- 149v-155v: St Theophilus, with Miracles of the Virgin (Seint Teophle was a gret man & gret clerk also...). 7 ff.

- 155v-158v: St Cecilia (Seint Cecile of noble kinne ibore was at Rome...). 4 ff.

- 158v-166v: St Gregory (All þat beoþ in sinne i-bounde / And þencheþ godes merci to abide...). 9 ff.

 

Origin.

Görlach’s study of the dissemination and variations of the Southern English Legendary, together with the dialect and orthography of this version, led him to place it in the Gloucestershire/Oxfordshire region (Görlach, Textual tradition 112). Its acquisition by Prise may suggest a religious house in Gloucestershire, as he enacted the dissolution of many houses there and apparently none in Oxfordshire (cf. Pryce; Ker, Sir John Prise), although there is no evidence that he acquired it directly from its original location rather than from another collector.

 

Date.

Görlach judges both hands in this manuscript as belonging to the middle of the fourteenth century.

 

Later provenance and position within codex.

At some point during the sixteenth century the manuscript, or possibly its remains, fell into the hands of Sir John Prise, employed by Henry VIII during the 1530s to close down monasteries in the west of England (Ker, Sir John Prise 5). Prise’s aversion to altering or rebinding the manuscripts in his collection (ibid) suggests that it would have passed on to Cotton (presumably via one or more intermediaries) alone, unbound with any other manuscript within the codex. The gap in foliation between the previous manuscript and this, however, suggests the presence of two blank leaves, possibly used by Prise to enclose this fragile fragment to prevent the loss of further leaves (if indeed it was fragmented at this point).

While Prise may have been more concerned with the preservation of the original state of his manuscripts than many of his contemporaries, his attitude was not entirely reverent. Ker mentions the “numerous, strongly Protestant and anti-Becket” notes in Prise’s hand written in the margin by that legend: “What arrogance is this! of one that had spent his tyme more in merchandize hauking and hunting than in lernyng” (qtd. in Ker, Sir John Prise 21). Precious his books may have been to Prise, but ultimately utilitarian.

There is also the possibility that Prise may have received the manuscript intact. This is perhaps more likely: history was his subject, not the vagaries of poetic saints, and a mere fragment of such a text might have not seemed worth preserving. If, then, it passed on to Cotton as a whole and was fragmented by him (see introductory post), he may have bound it with another two leaves to distinguish it from the ‘serious’ matter of the volume, or to hold it together pending proper binding. This is another question on which the manuscriptitself could shed light, as the age and wearing of the outer leaves of the manuscript and of the sheltering leaves ought to give some clue as to how long each has spent unprotected.

 

Lacunae.

Perhaps fittingly, considering its position as the final manuscript in the codex, this manuscript’s value as a witness lies less in its contents than in its later history. The poems it contains, with minor variations, survive in more complete manuscripts and have been published several times, while their cousins and progeny live on in texts such as the Canterbury Tales and the Gilte Legende. On the other hand, its treatment at the hands of Prise (and possibly Cotton) stands with the fate of the psalter in Royal 13 D I in testimony to the likely fate of a good many such manuscripts at the hands of the Protestant antiquarians. The violence visited on the ‘body’ of this manuscript seems to evidence a need to correct and subdue a recalcitrant creature amongst the diligent, precious subjects better beloved of their keepers. As such, the mystery of its missing leaves and the firm rebukes written in its margins form an appropriate counterpart to the quiet survival of the Brief Chronicle, and to the repeated studying and reproduction of the Liber Alani de Ashbourne.

 

 

Cited.

Brown, Carleton. A Register of Middle English Romance and Didactic Verse. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1916.

Görlach, Manfred. The textual tradition of the South English Legendary. Leeds: University of Leeds, 1974.

----- An East Midland Revision of the South English Legendary: A Selection from MS C. U. L. Add. 3039. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1976.

Ker, Neil R. “Sir John Prise”, The Library 5th series 10 (1955): 1-24.

Pryce, Huw. “Prise, Sir John (Syr Siôn ap Rhys) (1501/2–1555).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford UP, 2004. 03 Dec 2009.

Structure and symmetry in the Gilte Legende (1): St Julian

So, a couple of weeks back I discussed the disjointed nature of some of the vitae in the Gilte Legende (ed. Richard Hamer, EETS OS 327-8, 2006-7). I also mentioned the plethora of stories of Julians that the author tells under the entry for St Julian (v. 1 pp. 141-47) just to make sure we know which St Julian is the right St Julian; but despite the generally confused nature of that entry, the story of St Julian itself is beautifully symmetrical, and his saintly functions relate perfectly to the events of his life.

Briefly, the story is this. Fleeing a prophecy that he will kill both his parents (laid on him as punishment by a hart he was hunting), he moves away, marries and conveniently gets set up as a lord in a nicely feudal castle, as happens to so many unconnected vagabonds. When his parents find his castle, his wife invites them in, realises who they are, lavishes hospitality on them and gives up her bed to them, going to sleep elsewhere for the night. Returning home, he sees a man and a woman in his wife’s bed and kills them both in a fit of jealousy. As he emerges from the bloody chamber he meets his wife emerging, pointedly, from the chapel, and is slightly chagrined to hear her explanation. Realising that “whan I wende to eschewe this sorifull dede I most cursed haue fulfelled it” (144), he flees his castle and society and goes hermit – with his wife, who refuses to desert him. “And thanne they went togedre besides a grete flode where many men perisched, and there besides in that desert thei made a litell hospitall for to do there penaunce and for to bere ouer all tho that wolde passe” (ibid), until one day a horrible slimy smelly old leper turns up and says HELP ME ACROSS THE RIVER. Well, given the Greek-myth heritage of this story which has already been so obvious I didn’t even bother to use the word Oedipus anywhere, we know how this bit goes. He helps the leper, takes him in and feeds him and, because he's dying of cold, “toke hym in his armes and bare hym to his bedde and hilled hym diligently” (ibidetc). And lo and behold, the leper is secretly an angel sent by God to receive his penance and promise him that he will be taken to God soon. Incidentally, that “hilled” is probably “healed” but could also mean “cover, wrap” and possibly “embrace”. So perhaps it’s not surprising that if he was cuddling a leper (who probably had flu, and also fleas) in his bed, it was only “a litell after” that he and his wife both “slepten in oure Lorde Ihesu Crist”.
Just like Sir Gawain, this story invites diagrams. So:

No, I'm not procrastinating, why do you ask?

The story is driven by three revelations, each following an action of Julian’s. Pursuit of the hind leads to a prophecy, the murder of his guests is followed by the revelation of their identity and charity to the leper is followed by the revelation of the angel. In turn, each revelation leads to a journey:

I COULD continue to elaborate this picture and add all the other little structural things mentioned below and more, but I don't think Paint would let it be legible after another two lines or so.

Interestingly, the first two journeys are principally away, fleeing a prophecy and his shame respectively. It is only the third journey, instigated by God, that is a journey to a specific destination. Also, the first journey would seem to be in an upwards direction: socially, he ascends, and topographically he ends up in a nice tall castle which is presumably on some sort of a hill. But the folly of this social and earthly ascension is revealed by the consequences of his (newly acquired?) social pride, when his jealousy leads him to murder. The next journey is deliberately downwards, through the social scale and to the banks of “a grete flode”, and it is here that the spiritual state is reached which allows him to ascend correctly in the end. Or, to put it another way, his initial quest is away from his birth identity, now revealed as dangerous, to one which is more socially pleasing and validated by the community but leads to grave sin through a lack of his own self-knowledge (failing to recognise his parents), and thence towards social obscurity that leads him to discover a purer and truer identity in God.
There are other pleasing little contrast-dualities happening in the structure:

• Most obviously, Julian’s attitude to his guests changes from the initial monstrous misunderstanding of his duties as host (and son) to his parents, to the self-sacrificing devotion he shows to an unfamiliar leper (who stands in for his spiritual father). There are shades of a similar guest in the hart, not recognised by Julian even as human until it speaks, and thereby foreshadowing his slaughter of his parents.
• Wilderness vs. culture, where the first (initial forest, final flood) bracket the second and seem to be places of truth and self-knowing, while the second causes obscurity of the soul and blinds with frivolous things.
• More specifically, the bedroom vs. the church. Note that, while Julian was in his bedroom being murderous, lustful, prideful, greedy et al, his wife was in the church, dutifully at her morning prayer after being beautifully hospitable and giving up her bed to the guests. Both emerge from their respective spaces of darkness and light at the same moment, and it is the sight of her that initiates the revelation of Julian’s error (“and whanne he seigh her he hadde mervaile”, 144), removing his blindness.
• His wife has a pleasing sense of symmetry also, promising to stay with him in good time and in bad, “for sethe I haue parted with you in ioye I shall be partener of your sorw”. Their impending departure (and de-part in Middle English could also mean divide) “parts” the story into two, and there is a sense that her presence and her “part” in his fate will be a decisive factor in making this a clean break, providing a sort of rebirth.
• The initial promise of the hart is echoed and laid to rest in the promise of the angel, the first predicting dire acts and bloody division from his parents, the second imminent peace and reunion with his heavenly father.

So, all in all, a very clever little example of certain elements from classical legend rewritten comprehensively enough to a) not feel patchy and disjointed and b) seamlessly rewrite the messages to a mediaeval Christian moral setting.

The Gilte Legende and disjointed saints.

There are the saints everyone knows. They tend to have a well-defined life story, usually set in a particular place and time in history, a collection of miracles done before and/or after their death, and a particular personality and purview that leads to them being called on for certain things (patron or not).

Then there are the saints who are essentially a collection of folklore and local associations, or blends of one and another, Christianised versions of a couple of incidents from classical mythology with some half-remembered local story mixed in and tacked on to the name of someone who might be a regular saint or might be a duplicate or no one at all, really. And these ones rather tend to fail on the whole coherent narrative front.

Most of the stories in the Gilte Legende are actually somewhere between these two categories. Nicholas, for example, is well known and well defined and doesn’t stand much danger of being confused with anyone else. But the events of his life are more a series of vaguely connected events than any coherent narrative; and over a third of the space devoted to him in the Gilte Legende[1] is a conglomeration of miracles[2] attributed to him that took place after his death, which are essentially two stories repeated with slight variants, or at least miracles organised along two common themes (whence his popular personality):

• A Christian debtor attempts to cheat a patient Jew, who brings him to judgement. The Christian hands the Jew a staff, swears that he has given the Jew the money he owes him, then receives his staff back. He goes free, but is hit by a cart which kills him and breaks open his staff to reveal the gold inside. Men advise the Jew to take the money, but he refuses and says that he will only do so if the dead man should come to life again by the power of St Nicholas. This duly happens, and the Jew is christened.
• A Jew takes an image of the saint and keeps it in his house, charging it to keep watch over his goods. When thieves break into the house and steal everything but the statue, the Jew “bette [the image] and tormented it cruelli” (Nicholas ll. 244-45), and the wounded saint, appearing to the thieves and berating them for getting him thumped, so terrifies them that they return everything they stole. And everyone lives happily ever after – ie, the thieves become righteous and the Jew becomes a Christian.
• Nicholas raises a dead child to life, after the sorrowing father berates him for neglecting to protect a family who was so devoted to the saint.
• A man prays to St Nicholas that he might have a son, promising to give the son and a gold cup to the church. The child being of age, the father has a cup made, decides he likes it too much to give it up, has another of equal weight and value made, and offers that instead. He travels to the church by boat, and commands his son to bring him water in the first cup, upon which boy and cup fall overboard and are lost. Arriving, he offers the second cup, but it is thrown down from the altar three times. Then the child appears, with the first cup, and claims to have been saved from the sea by St Nicholas. The father, rather prudently, offers up both cups.
• A child is born, again by Nicholas’ intervention, and his father builds a chapel to Nicholas in gratitude. The king takes the child into service, and on St Nicholas’ feast day the child misses his home, knowing how his father would be celebrating it. Standing before the king and holding a rich cup he bemoans this, and the king declares that “for ought þat þy Nicholas can doo þou schalte abide here now” (ll. 305-6). And of course Nicholas immediately poofs him back home to his father. Or possibly he was born in Normandy and kidnapped by the sultan while overseas (Crusading? Serves him right), who liked to beat him, particularly on Christian saints’ days, for some reason. But praying to St Nicholas on that saint’s day, and thinking of the joy at his house on that day, he awakes to find himself in his father’s house again.

Despite the fact that he apparently has popular, wide-spread, firm associations for many people, Nicholas remains thematically disjointed. The Jew has little to do with the child, and neither has any obvious parallel in the story of his life. One can argue similarities between the miracles. For example, the theme of guarding possessions and the possibility of covetousness appears in both Jew stories and the second child story, and the cup appears in the third but has lost its narrative function. The grieving father in the first child story berates Nicholas in a way that seems similar to both Jews exhorting Nicholas to return them their possessions, providing a link to the idea of the child as property to protect to the other stories. But the connection is a tenuous one and no more convincing than, I daresay, one could make between almost any collection of stories attributed to multiple saints.

Saint Nicholas, however, looks like a picture of unity compared to Saint Makary. Here’s what he gets up to:

• It begins “Makarie went oute of a place of desert and entred [in] the sepulture of a dede man and leyed his hede downe vpon the dede bodi in stede of a pilow” (St Macarius ll. 1-3). No, there is no context or motivation or preamble – why do you ask? A fiend with nothing better to do decided to scare him and made the dead body speak. Makary “dred hym nothyng” (l. 7), but instead beat the body up, which made the fiends flee and is probably exactly what Jesus would have done.
• This one time Makary was heading for his cell and met a fiend who told him he couldn’t attack him because of his humility.
• When Makary was feeling troubled by temptations, he used to take a sack of gravel and go walking in the desert, of which he said to Theosebe (no, we aren’t told who he is) “I slee hym that sleith me” (l. 22).
• Once he met a fiend who was tempting his brethren with wine. And he asked the fiend which of them was succumbing, and the fiend told him Theotist. And so Makary talked to him and told him that wasn’t such a good idea, and next time he met the fiend, the fiend was rather piqued that Theotist was now holier than all of them.
• Once he found a severed head and had a chat to it about where its soul was.
• While going into a “ferre desert” (l. 50) he dropped rosary beads to mark his way, probably figuring that this sack of gravel was really heavy and the birds wouldn’t eat rosary beads. But a devil gathered them up and put them next to his head, which just goes to show that birds are secretly evil.
• Once he advised a brother who was considering leaving his cell not to do so!
• Once he killed a flea for biting him, or possibly a fly, and then repented and went to live naked in a desert so lots of flies could bite him.

See what I mean? The only common threads are that sometimes he talks to dead people and that he likes a nice masochistic stroll in the desert. I think I like him.

The entry for St Julian the Hospitaller is disjointed in a rather different way [3]. The author is confronted with the fact that there are, in fact, six or possibly seven different Julians that his audience may be familiar with (not to mention St Juliana), and the only way they can be distinguished is by their stories. So he tells all the stories, while insisting that his focus is on the Hospitaller – although only 64 lines out of 218 are actually about that man. To summarise:

• Julian was bishop of Emans, and people claim he was Simon the leper that Jesus healed. And people say that this is the Julian that people pray to for safe harbour, but they would be wrong.
• There was another Julian of Auvergne, who was beheaded by the provost Crispin.
• There was also another Julian who was the brother of… well, a Julian. They built a church and made people stop and help them work on it and smote people who tried to trick their way out of it.
• Then there was the Saint Julian that we were going to talk about, who killed his own mother and father out of ignorance when they were his guests. Which is why we pray to him for safe harbour. He saw the error of his ways, you see.
• Also there was Julian the Apostate who did nasty things to Christians. But he was not a saint. Saint Basil smote him. Do not get any of the other Julians confused with him. No, not even the one who killed his guests who were also his parents. He didn’t mean to.

And of course, when dealing with saints, there’s always the really literal meaning of disjointed. One could probably make a very complicated connecting argument out of the disjointed nature of the tales reflecting the torn-up bits of martyrs scattered hither and yon, sometimes over an entire country (or beyond, thank you Pardoner). It’d be a bit of a reach, because it assumes some kind of overreaching cultural intent behind these stories – authorial intent pretty much goes out the window when you’re just collecting a bunch of stories from all over the place and trying to work out how they fit together without changing them much.

Although, come to think of it, from one angle it’s not that far-fetched – if it’s about possession and example, which end up being the same thing, just with different intents of proof. As for example: the physical limbs of a martyr (or traitor, as I wrote about once before) can be strewn over a wide range to provide an example to as many people as possible, from the point of view of their enemy, and to prevent their reassembly come Judgement Day. But for the sympathetic, or the faithful, their very triumph over the latter obstacle is proof of their power, and their power is by the same token disseminated over a wider range, letting more villages and provinces lay claim to a bit of a saint - or a bit of the saint’s stories. And in many cases, the post-mortem perambulations of the persecuted in popular legend may be due precisely to the pressures of possession – we have a bit of his arm bone in our reliquary, his head was carried through this very town on the way to its burial, Bertha’s great-grandmother had a friend who touched the cloak of the person carrying his ashes towards Rome. And, well, if so many people from all over the place can lay claim to him, he (or his bits) must have really got about.

Of course, in many cases, it’s just that the stories were never whole in the first place. And that cutting fictional people up is fun.

-------------------

[1] Following Hamer’s two-volume edition, EETS 327-328, 2006-2007. Of the entry on St Nicholas, ll. 1-199 are his life, 200-319 later miracles.

[2] What's the collective noun for miracles?

[3] The actual story of Julian’s life, when we reach it, is conversely as perfectly structured a narrative as one could wish for. I may look at it in another post.

The unseen butterfly; or, Thoughts on the space between the literal and the allegorical

This is a reflection written for the end of our Mediaeval Body course. It takes for granted a certain definition of 'the mediaeval body', and refers implicitly and explicitly to the class readings over the course of the semester. Consequently, there's no explanation of these references in the course of the essay, and, except for direct quotes (and a reference to The Book of Vices and Virtues, which wasn't on the reading list), nothing is footnoted. To make this more comprehensible for a blog post, I've added a separate set of footnotes, explaining the references. The numbered footnotes are in the original reflection; the lettered ones are just for this post.

The reflection is a response to a quote from Michael Camille: "In this period long before the Cartesian split between mind and body there was much more of a continuum between the two. The body was the receptor and receptable of sensation and crucial in the process of cognition. All knowledge, even that of the divine, had to be channelled through the body."

The Unseen Butterfly

The Book of Vices and Virtues describes the liar as “a butre-flye, þat lyueþ by þe aier and haþ no þing in hire guttes but wynd, and at euery colour þat sche seþ sche chaungeþ hire owne”.¹ It is not an isolated image: Lorens d’Orleans’ carefully explicated catalogue of the seven deadly sins is full of references to sinners not merely as animalistic, but almost literally as animals. The lines between what is literal and observable in the world and the allegorical understanding of the literal can be seen to shift and blur in the late mediæval period, sited most strongly on the symbolic interpretation of the body. Camille’s understanding of the body as “receptor and receptable of sensation and crucial in the process of cognition” and of the consequent necessity of channelling “all knowledge, even that of the divine”² through the body is particularly relevant here. The most potent and challenging ideas in the mediæval world, as well as ideas trivial and comic, could be expressed and understood most powerfully – most viscerally – when located on the physical body. Over and over, mediæval writings demonstrate the need to literalise the abstract, in particular to experience it through the body in order to make it understood, to own it or perhaps even to control it.

The observation of real butterflies has little place in Lorens d’Orleans’ allegorical depiction. Such a metaphor today would draw scepticism, because we hold the image of a literal butterfly as a separate naturalistic definition in our minds, and expect a good metaphor to mimic it. There is an echo of appropriateness in the fact that butterflies come in a variety of colours and will instinctively seek out perches against which their particular array will camouflage; but they will not change colour themselves, and neither Lorens nor his audience can possibly have seen them do so. The accepted fact of changing colour, then, was an attribute not of the observable butterfly, but one that belonged to the communal imagination. Lorens’ butterfly is an almost purely allegorical creature, appropriate to the liar because she³ feeds on air – on words – and has no power “in hire guttes” but that same air, her body mutating of necessity to suit her changing circumstances. Other animals to which he compares sinners – pigs, hyenas, mermaids – are described in similar terms. The mundane, exotic and fantastic are all colourful symbols rather than worldly creatures, creatures that inhabit the bestiary rather than pigsty or hedgerow. Lorens’ animals are not products of the literal. His pigs do not behave like mundane pigs, but recall the Gadarene swine “in tokenynge þat glotouns þat leden here lif in glotonye as swyn, þe deuel haþ power to entre wiþ-ynne hem and drenche hem in þe see, þat is to seye in helle”.⁴ They are memorable, repulsive, even amusing reminders of the effect of sin on the sinner. Conversely, the phrasing in which the traits of the animal are applied to the sinner is strikingly literal: almost invariably a metaphor, not a simile. The effect of this is to reinforce the message of inhumanity and degradation that results from each sin described, no less true for being allegorical and unobservable in the real world. The mirroring of the bestial state of mind in the bodies of the sinners thus becomes a way of observing the ‘real’ truth about sinners.

Gerald of Wales^a provides a more literal depiction of bestial human bodies. Claiming true physicality for his werewolves, ox-men, man-women, deformed children and other monsters, he repeatedly invokes his own observations as authority. Insisting on preserving the littera of his account of Ireland’s people, he nevertheless engages with the allegorical when he attributes all these deformities to the moral deficiencies of the Irish.⁵ Similarly, his accounts of individual creatures, though often sympathetic, lend themselves easily to moral allegory reminiscent of Lorens’ depiction of humans reduced by their actions to the level of beasts. He himself glosses his account of the woman who had “bestial intercourse” with a goat, for example, to say that the woman proved herself “more a beast in accepting him than he did in acting”.⁶ The real Irish thus become, via Gerald’s pen, a people whose (supposed) primitive morals and essential foreignness make them fascinating but subhuman, the monsters that live among them simultaneously result, punishment and symbol of their moral state. If Mittman^b is correct, Gerald’s History and Topography of Ireland is, on the one hand, an attempt to externalise and explore his own hybridity, and on the other to recast himself as a member of society by defining an ‘other’ far more monstrous and alien than himself. Accounting for his ambivalent attitude towards the creatures he describes, this suggests that the act of writing was for Gerald both a means to understanding his own mixed-race body and his place in the world, and to use images of the deformed body and mind to manipulate his readers’ understanding of what true otherness meant.

To turn from the sub-human to the divine: the cult of Sainte Foy^c, like that of many another saint, was primarily a practical one. Her physical presence in Conques served to answer the everyday needs of their bodies – assistance with pregnancy, healing or freedom of prisoners. The concern of her flock for their own bodies is matched by the concern they project onto the saint for her ‘body’ - the anthropomorphic jewelled reliquary containing her mortal remains. Bernard of Angers narrates stories of the man who refused to worship her image, and the girl who refused to stand up as it was carried by, together with the punishment inflicted on them by the saint “as if [they] had shown disrespect for the holy martyr herself”.⁷ Bernard’s narration of the village’s direct and practical tales is coloured by his theological education, and his anxiety to demonstrate that the cult conforms with accepted church standards. Close identification of the saint with her ‘body’ is a crucial element in defending Conques from the charge of idolatry: the image is not worshipped as an idol, but for the martyr it represents. The physical form of the statue, though valuable, is understood by the devout to be less important than what it contains and symbolises. While the literal, observable statue is for the villagers a means to access the saint and comprehend her sanctity, it also has the potential to be a distraction. Bernard eliminates this possibility by (literally) incorporating it, isolating it within the story of a man who made that mistake. The fool who wished the statue would shatter in order that he might snatch the fallen jewels becomes an example of wrongful understanding of the relationship between the observable and the mysterious. He is justly punished, bodily humiliated for concentrating on the physical body to the exclusion of the spiritual.

Mediæval attitudes towards death also show a complex interchange between literal and allegorical understandings of the body. Death as a literal experience was never far away from the susceptible body, nor was it distant as a metaphorical realm. According to Camille, “the body was not thought to be truly dead, its spirit separated from the body, until a year after burial. Only when all the flesh had left it and it was nothing, nobody, was it ‘Death’”. The body itself thus bridges an uneasy gap between life and non-existence, a gap which could be transgressed in other ways: the intercession of dead saints for the living via the physical remains of their bodies (such as Sainte Foy), the categorisation of lepers and the religious as ‘dead’ to the world, or stories in which people could walk from the ordinary world into the realm of the dead with their own fleshly feet. The metaphorical death of the leper, priest or nun was enacted on the living body to bring the symbolic as close as possible to the literal. A new monk, for example, was required to close himself for three days in a cloister as Christ did in his tomb, before joining his brothers in his new ‘life’.⁹ More dramatically, a leper’s seclusion office includes hearing mass under a black cloth “after the manner of a dead man, although by the Grace of God he yet lives in body and spirit”, and having a spadeful of earth cast on each foot by the presiding priest in a symbolic burial.¹⁰ All wore clothes physically denoting the special status of their body.¹¹ Similarly, Owein’s journey to Purgatory^d does not appear to be unnatural or impossible. The trials are difficult – many men have died attempting them – but not beyond the strength of a truly virtuous Christian who can keep his mind on his divine guide. Like the pilgrim Dante, he walks from this world into the next in his own body, insisting like Dante on the literal truth of the allegorical journey. Believing the story of either descent requires the capacity to subordinate the observed state of reality to the allegorical, but the potential for a literal interpretation strengthens the emotional effect of the story. Everyday humans do not typically stroll into Purgatory and back; but the possibility of such a literal crossing (even if fantastic) makes death seem perhaps a little more controllable, more understandable.

Owein also confronts the apparent paradox that all the souls he sees are fully incorporated, experiencing horrible torments visited on bodies which they ought no longer possess. This is hardly unexpected, however. Torments inflicted on some incorporeal spirit are difficult to comprehend and carry no power, and would therefore lose any relevance as an allegory. The mediæval spirit, moreover, cannot be satisfactorily separated from the body. Even at the moment of death, the moment of that very separation, it is often depicted wafting from the physical mouth in the shape of a miniature copy of the body it is departing. If the soul is the self, and the self is located in the body, soul and body are inextricable. Any torments visited on the soul must be therefore comprehended through the suffering of that body, even in Purgatory or Hell, with all its leaking fluids, piteous moans and susceptibility to pain and damage. The power of such an allegory can be seen in the accounts of holy women like Christina Mirabilis^e who underwent (or were said to undergo) these pains literally during life, enacting or experiencing in their own bodies in life what they understood to be a literal reality awaiting those bodies in death.

Here, of course, the distinctions between the allegorical and the literal blur into little more than a personal judgement call; as they must, given their overlapping nature. To a culture that believes in the physical reality of Hell, of divine intervention, of the Host changing imperceptibly but literally into flesh, the narrower tag of “observable” is nonsense. But the distinction is important, even if it serves only to demonstrate the relative unimportance of the observable in the mediæval Christian world, a world overlaid with symbolism and ordered by an invisible power. Allegory and physical reality were interdependent: literalisms in allegory served to explain what one could observe literally in the world or in one’s self. What is a real butterfly to that? There were, indeed, truths considered literal that were too mysterious to be appropriate for human observation. Paradise is one: Owein is prevented from entering the final gate because he is not ready. Transubstantiation is another, as Aquinas so painstakingly explains: though Christ is literally there, “since the way [he] exists in this sacrament totally transcends nature, his body can be seen only by God’s own mind and the blessed in heaven with whom he shares the vision. Men can know it in this life only by faith”.¹² And orthodox priests seem to have been horrified at the twelfth-century depiction of the Trinity appearing to Abraham with three heads^f – despite the fact that the metaphor it embodied was one the church itself insisted was literal.

It would be a difficult and ultimately fruitless task to try to determine just how literally any of these metaphors was believed. The answer, no doubt, would vary from person to person, culture to culture and generation to generation. Did the discrepancy between Lorens’ butterfly and the butterfly on the twig really bother anyone? Did people eye priests over sceptically and mutter mutinously that anyone could see they weren’t actually dead? Aquinas’ care to explain the exact mechanics of transubstantiation, and Bernard of Anger’s defensiveness about the possibility of worship being transferred from idea to idol, suggest that the boundaries between observation and allegory could be and sometimes were problematic. However, the beauty of allegory is that it allows – indeed, requires – belief and understanding of the world on multiple levels at once. In an era fascinated with self-exploration, the observable butterfly is of limited interest; but the allegorical butterfly provides an opportunity to explore the relationship of the physical human body to the world, and vice versa. The continuum between mind and body allowed things that were real purely in the mind – the imaginary, the allegorical, the divine – to be translated and understood through the medium of the body, in order to return them more real to the imagination. There is therefore no absolute neat division between the literal and the imagined: both frequently spilled out into the space between them in which meaning could be explored. If the three-headed Trinity had the capacity to shock the conservative with its literal embodiment of a spiritual metaphor, the fact that it existed at all shows that the space between the two extremes was at once fruitful and fascinating to the mediæval mind.

1 The book of vices and virtues: a fourteenth century English translation of the Somme le roi of Lorens d'Orleans, ed. W. Nelson Francis, Early English Text Society OS 217 (London: Oxford UP, 1942), 60

2 Michael Camille, ‘The image and the self: unwriting late medieval bodies,’ in Framing Medieval Bodies, eds. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester & New York: Manchester UP, 1994), 94.

3 Considering the treacherous mutability of the feminine body in mediæval thought, the gendering of the butterfly as feminine may well be deliberate. As the French “papillon” is masculine, the use of “elle” or “sche” is unlikely to be an accident of grammar.

4 Vices and Virtues, 47.

5 Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. John J. O’Meara (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 181.

6 Gerald of Wales, Topography, 75.

7 The Book of Sainte Foy, trans. Pamela Sheingorn (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP), 79.

8 Camille, ‘The image and the self’, 84-85.

9 Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (New York: Cornell UP), 58.

10 Peter Richards, The Medieval Leper and his Northern Heirs (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1977), 123.

11 Lorens d’Orleans extends the metaphor from the body of the priest to that of the sinner when he speaks of backbiting, saying that those who slander “þe goode holy men of religioun” who are “dede as in þis world” are themselves transformed into “þe felle and wikkede best þat men clepeþ heyene, þat goþ and delueþ vp dede bodies of folke and eteþ hem” (Vices and Virtues, 59).

12 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation, ed. Timothy McDermott (London: Eyre and Spotswood, 1989), 578.

a Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. John J. O’Meara (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982). Gerald of Wales writes of his travels in Ireland, telling of the strange ways of Ireland. Cocks crow at a different time, snakes are not poisonous, children are often deformed or weak, there are werewolves and other odd creatures, etc. He is particularly (and sympathetically) interested in the monstrous hybrids he met there – several creatures, half human and half beast, which are all the results of humans copulating with animals, because the Irish are so degenerate. He himself is half Welsh, and his mixed blood seems to have led to discrimination against him during his lifetime.

b Mittman, Asa Simon, “The Other close at hand: Gerald of Wales and the ‘Marvels of the West’”, ed. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills, The Monstrous Middle Ages,(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), 97-112. Mittman speculates that Gerald’s own hybridity led him to attempt to assert his essential similarity with the English by providing through his writing an example of a race far more alien than himself.

c The Book of Sainte Foy, trans. Pamela Sheingorn (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1995). Bernard of Angers is the author of several of the documents in the Book, particularly the miracle tales in which he, a theologically educated man and a convert to the cult of Sainte Foy, tries rather defensively to justify the worship of the rich jewelled golden statue that contains her relics by recounting stories of the miracles that Sainte Foy has delivered to the community of her worshippers in the town of Conques – including punishing anyone who doesn’t treat her reliquary with due respect.

d ”The Knight Owein’s Journey through St Patrick’s Purgatory”, ed. John Shinners, Medieval Popular Religion 1000-1500: A Reader (Ontario: Broadview, 1997).

e ”The Life of Christina the Astonishing”, ed. E. Spearing, Medieval Writings on Female Spirituality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002). Christina the Astonishing really is. After leading a quiet life as a virtuous shepherdess, she dies, then subverts expectations by flying out of the coffin at her funeral and perching on the rafters of the church. After this she refuses to be normal. She regularly flits about, perches on roofs and in trees, can’t abide the smell of humans, flees into the wilderness, is chained up by her despairing family and miraculously escapes, curls herself up into a ball of flesh regardless of trifles such as bones and sinews, and feeds herself on her own milk. She also takes up throwing herself into burning ovens, drowning herself, hanging herself and inflicting lots of painful tortures on her body, all of which heal instantly, though she screams in pain. The narrator tells us that she does this because God has promised her that her pain in this life will alleviate that of souls burning in Purgatory, and allow them to ascend to heaven faster.

f A twelfth-century image of the Trinity appearing to Abraham, depicted as an enthroned angel with three heads. Reproduced in Camille, “The image and the self”, 73.