Author: Brianna

Hypertext: Metamorphosis, or Finding Philomela in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum

Published by Brianna

Andrea Davidson has just finished her undergraduate studies the University of Toronto. As the Milton Harris Undergraduate Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute this year, she has been thinking and writing about Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum for a very long time! bird

 

It is my absolute pleasure to bring Brianna’s blog from medieval to early modern…and back! Let me tell you about a remarkable book of sacred and secular poems, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, written by a woman named Aemilia Bassano Lanyer. Notoriously little is known about Lanyer, which has made her a prime suspect for many possible identities. Was she Catholic, Jewish, black, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, or Shakespeare herself? I don’t have any answers, so I’ll stick to Salve Deus and let Lanyer be.

There are nine known first editions of Salve Deus, printed by one Valentine Simmes near St. Paul’s Churchyard, London in 1611. Each copy has a unique combination of dedicatory poems, but all copies contain Lanyer’s long Passion meditation, “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” and all but one includes her short elegiac lyric, “A Description of Cooke-ham.” You can find an e-text transcription of one of those copies at Luminarium. You can also find an audio version at LibriVox. My edition of Salve Deus, edited by Susanne Woods in 1993, amalgamates all nine first editions into one master copy. Binding all of Lanyer’s known poems in one edition is almost like recreating Salve Deus’ manuscript form—Lanyer’s own version, her complete creation, recreated.

Whether you access Salve Deus through Woods’ edition or by any of the links I have listed above, you are contributing to a readership that is continually amalgamating and linking the many versions, copies, and editions of the single book that is Lanyer’s complete literary corpus.

Links, interlinks, and hyperlinks are also rhetorical structures; as a symbol, Philomela the nightingale represents them all. Her song and silence transport us from text to text to text. I argue that Philomela appears at three crucial moments in Salve Deus. Linking these appearances to Philomela’s ancient, medieval, and early modern literary history lets us see what conventions Lanyer preserved or modified in Salve Deus.

No matter which version of Salve Deus you have (except the Bodleian Library copy, which is missing “Cooke-ham”), it is obvious to see that Lanyer carefully counted out Philomela’s three appearances so that they would form two mirroring chiasms that interlink the first and last poems of the book. In lines 103-106 of the first dedicatory poem, “To Her Queenes Most Excellent Majestie,” Lanyer describes herself as such a troubled poet that

[her] untun’d voyce the dolefull notes doth sing
Of sad Affliction in an humble straine;
Much like unto a Bird that wants a wing,
And cannot flie, but warbles forth her paine (lines 103-106).

The warbling bird who represents the poet is undoubtedly the nightingale. [For proof, see below on Philip Sidney, “The Nightingale!”] Mirroring this passage, 105 lines from the end of the last poem, “Cooke-ham,” Lanyer answers the complaint in this passage. She explains that the lowly poet-nightingale has cause to be distressed, because Lanyer’s lower social rank keeps her separated from her noble patroness:

Unconstant Fortune, thou art most to blame,
Who casts us downe into so lowe a frame:
Where our great friends we cannot dayly see,
So great a difference is there in degree (lines 103-106).

These passages form the nightingale’s first chiasmus. The next one interlinks with it.

“To the Queenes…” “Cooke-ham” “Cooke-ham”
“Bird that wants a wing”

lines 103-106

 “sundry leyes”

lines 31-34

 “Unconstant Fortune” 103-106 lines from end “mournefull Ditty”

31-34 lines from end

Thirty-one lines from the beginning of “Cooke-ham,” when Lanyer is describing the vivacious flora and fauna of her patroness’ estate, she adds:

And Philomela with her sundry leyes,
Both You and that delightfull Place did praise.
Oh how me thought each plant, each floure, each tree
Set forth their beauties then to welcome thee (lines 31-34).

Thirty-one lines from the end of “Cooke-ham,” this passage’s echo shifts in tone:

Faire Philomela leaves her mournefull Ditty,
Drownd in dead sleepe, yet can procure no pittie:
Each arbour, banke, each seate, each stately tree,
Lookes bare and desolate now for want of thee (lines 189-192).

This sad passage suggests that Philomela drowns-sleeps-dies because Lanyer’s patroness has left Cooke-ham at the summer’s end. You should go read “Cooke-ham” to see if you agree! I think that Philomela dies because she has witnessed disruptive transgression at Cooke-ham: jealously, Lanyer steals the kiss that her patroness left on the bark of her favourite tree…and Cooke-ham’s entire ecosystem falls to pieces. Dying first, Philomela is the indicator species of that ecological crisis.

As the hyperlink of these four interlinking passages, Philomela indexes the progress of Salve Deus as her own process of metamorphosis. As a broken-winged bird who “cannot flie, but warbles forth her paine” at the beginning of the book, until she drowns “in dead sleepe” at the end, Philomela also prompts my ethical concern for the religious and social claims that Lanyer makes in Salve Deus. Why is Philomela wounded? Why is she silenced? Why must she die?

By way of an answer, I’ll treat Lanyer’s Philomela as a single link in the series of hypertexts that constitute the literary nightingale. There are nightingale corpses and wounds strewn throughout pre- and early modern literary history. Prepare to witness a flock of battered birds! Their injuries testify to different literary-historical circumstances and priorities. Their (im)mortalities enable narratives far greater than the nightingales themselves. Their separate sufferings are violently incidental to supernatural, transcendental, romantic, or poetic purposes. Poor Philomela! Here she is, in four genres.

1. Ovid’s Metamorphoses 

Written in Latin, 8 BCE. First English version was a translation from the French by William Caxton, 1480. First full English translation from the Latin was by Arthur Golding, 1567.

Philomela does not die in the Metamorphoses, although she is raped and mutilated. Tongueless, she weaves a tapestry that recounts her violation, then wreaks horrible revenge on her violator. At the end of the myth, Philomela, her sister, and her rapist all turn into birds. Ovid does not specify that Philomela metamorphoses into a nightingale.

Golding’s translation of Philomela’s complaint (prior to terrible glossectomy) aligns her sexual violence with the language of mortality:

But to th’ intent, O perjurde wretch, no mischiefe may remaine
Unwrought by thee, why doest thou from murdring me refraine?
Would God thou had it done before this wicked rape. From hence
Then should my soule most blessedly have gone without offence (VI, 686-689).

2. Philomena Praevia by John Pecham (???)

Written in Latin, 13th century. John Pecham was an English Franciscan friar. He may also be John Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury? French translation called Le Livret du Rossignolet, 14th century.

Philomena Praevia uses the nightingale as an allegory for the pious soul who embraces suffering as a form of devotional imitatio Christi (imitation of Christ). This illustration of the nightingale imitating Christ is from one copy of Le Livret du Rossignolet in the Légiloque manuscript (BnF, NAF 4338, 176r, ca. 1325-1350). Compare Christ on the cross to Philomela perched in the tree. See how the devotional reader is listening to the nightingale’s song? Her prayer book—the Livret du Rossignolet itself—is at her knees. The figure in the bottom right corner is the poet—holding the manuscript!

christ

Philomela’s song marks the hours of Christ’s Passion, intensifying along with Christ’s suffering,

Sic quassatis organis huius philomenae,
Rostro tantum palpitans fit exsanguis paene,
Sed ad nonam veniens moritur iam plene,
Cum totius corporis disrumpuntur venae (stanza 10).

The medieval French translation, Le Livret du Rossignolet, reads:

Quant elle a tant chanté que sa voix en est mue,
Elle remuet le bec, tout le corps ly tressue ;
Quant vient l’eure de nonne de mort elle est vainque,
Qu’elle n’a vaine ou corps qui ne luy soit rompue.

J.L. Baird and John R. Kane’s modern English translation reads:

And when it had sung so vigorously that it can sing no more,
It shakes its beak, all its body drenched with sweat,
And as the hour of Nones arrives, it is finally conquered by death,
With every vein in its body burst asunder.

Burst veins, sweat-drenched, conquered—the nightingale’s death at the hour of Christ’s death is her ultimate achievement. Philomena Praevia valorizes Philomela’s suffering and death as acts of pious decorum.

3. Lai du Laüstic, by Marie de France

Written in French, c.1155-1160. My analysis owes much to Danielle Quéruel’s analysis of the Lai du Laüstic as a variation of Ovid’s Philomela myth, “Silence et mort du rossignol : les réécritures médiévales de l’histoire du Philomèle”

In Marie de France’s sad song of courtly love, a lady secretly engages in an extramarital affair with a courteous, honourable, and generous knight. When her husband asks where she goes at night, the lady says that she likes to sit and listen to the song of the nightingale (laüstic). Philomela then represents the love between lady and knight. Jealous, the husband captures the nightingale, snaps its neck, and throws the broken body at his wife. The nightingale’s blood stains the lady’s chemise at the breast. At the end of the lay, the lovers honour Philomela’s body, ensconcing her in gold and entombing her in a golden cup.

Keep in mind the image of the lady with the bloody breast as my survey of literary nightingales shifts from medieval to early modern!

4. “The Nightingale” by Sir Philip Sidney

Sidney lived from 1554-1586. He was a superstar in the Elizabethan court. I can’t help being a huge fan of Sidney even four centuries later, but unfortunately his representation of Philomela makes me very uncomfortable…

Sidney’s poem elaborates a distinctly unpleasant tradition in Renaissance poetry, that the nightingale sings so sadly because she suffers physical pain. Reliving her rape, Philomela masochistically leans her breast against a thorn to pierce it. Sidney writes that she “Sings out her woes, a thorn her song-book making” (4).

In this poem, Sidney compares his own romantic misfortunes with Philomela’s. In the refrain, he argues that his suffering exceeds hers:

O Philomela fair, O take some gladness,
That here is juster cause of plaintful sadness:
Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth;
Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart invadeth (9-12, 21-24)

Apparently it does not matter to Sidney that this comparison trivializes Philomela’s sexual trauma, subjecting it to another appropriative violence!

Philomela: raped, tongueless, burst veins, broken bones, thorn in her side, dead. This is the hypertextual anatomy of Salve Deus’ wounded warbler: each injury marks a different part of her body, her literary identity, her symbolism. As a victim of sexual, devotional, tragic, and incidental violence, Philomela came to Aemilia Lanyer with her bones already broken and her breast already pierced.

Even if Lanyer had not read all of the poems that I have surveyed here, she was almost certainly aware of the classical, Christian, and romantic instantiations of the nightingale when she wrote her into Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. How did she become aware of them? I wish I could answer that question! What I can do is suggest how Lanyer modified the nightingale tradition to suit her needs and objectives in Salve Deus.

Lanyer’s Philomela is associated with the poet, like Sidney’s. Like Pecham’s, she is also paired with a Passion meditation, the long poem that gives Salve Deus its title. Like Marie de France’s nightingale, she dies in testimony to transgression and romantic violation. Lanyer’s Philomela also differs from these earlier nightingale prototypes: her song is the poet’s voice; she has broken wings instead of a bleeding breast; her death may cause or indicate environmental crisis at the end of Salve Deus. The crisis as consequence of Lanyer’s own transgressive kiss (stolen from the tree and her patroness) situates Philomela, doubly, in the ecosystem of Cooke-ham and in the interlinking symbolism of Salve Deus.

Does Lanyer’s Philomela have an Ovidian metamorphosis? Her death leaves little hope for resurrection. Her association with the image of Christ on the cross in Lanyer’s Passion meditation, as in Pecham’s Philomena Praevia, entangles the nightingale’s suffering in a Christian ontology of redemption, but I think that Philomela’s literary history poses its own resistance to that idea of redemptive suffering. When Lanyer bewails “Unconstant Fortune” to close her book’s first nightingale chiasmus, she refuses to condone the cause of her misfortune in silence. Unlike Ovid’s Philomela, Lanyer retains her tongue. When she kills off her nightingale (and the rest of the ecosystem) at the end of “Cooke-ham,” Lanyer punctuates her own exit from poetry without ever puncturing Philomela’s breast: “Drownd in dead sleepe,” perhaps the nightingale “can procure no pittie” because she actually, for once, does not suffer in death. In Salve Deus, Philomela’s metamorphosis has already happened, because Lanyer does not allow her nightingale to suffer anymore.

But we cannot read Philomela without reading her literary history. She is a hyperlink. Using the language of digital humanities to trace her literary history hypertextually, we pass from ancient to medieval to early modern periods easily, finding modifications or metamorphoses of the Philomela myth that link from text to text to text.

Paul Bettany’s Chaucer Isn’t Too Pop Culture, Or Why A Knight’s Tale Deserves Academic Love

Published by Brianna
Breaking my own rule of never watching a film adaptation before reading its source text, I watched Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale long before I read Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale.  In my defence, I had forgotten much of the film’s content by the time I got around to reading the Canterbury Tales, and I hope to demonstrate that it would not have mattered if I did.  Now that I have re-watched the 2001 motion picture as a medieval literature student and a screenwriter with a particular penchant for adaptations, I have recognised an unexpected medieval-ness behind Helgeland’s boldly modern text, and I have re-weighed the efficacy of transmission of medieval literature through popular culture.
If you have not heard of or deigned to watch A Knight’s Tale, here is the official trailer:
Either way, I hope you will read on as I grapple with a) Helgeland’s anachronistic and “generic translation [that turns] high culture into popular culture” (Forni 254); b) the accepted view of popular culture as low culture; and c) our tradition and authority complex when it comes to medieval and medievalist texts.

From The Knight’s Tale to A Knight’s Tale

What makes a modern adaptation or reinterpretation text scholastically and artistically valid in the realm of medievalism (defined here)?  In working toward an answer, I am indebted to Louise D’Arcens and her 2008 article titled “Deconstruction and the Medieval Indefinite Article: The Undecidable Medievalism of Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale.”  She points out the significance of Helgeland’s indefinite “A” as opposed to Chaucer’s definite “The” and explains, among other things, that the film’s “undecidable medievalism” places it in a different category from, say, Peter Jackson’s strict adaptation of Lord of the Rings.  It is tempting, as a history buff or a Chaucerian or a medievalist, to watch, study, and criticise A Knight’s Tale as an adaptation of The Knight’s Tale, which almost necessarily leads one to view it as an American / capitalist / individualist / [insert any modern ideology with negative valence here] warping of the medieval period.  But these judgments rely on the a priori notion that the film’s sole intention was to create a visual adaptation of a medieval story, a medieval sport, a medieval society.  What I have gathered reading interviews with writer/director Brian Helgeland and watching the film as an admittedly childish (read: unassuming) medievalist leads me to reject that idea in favour of a more forgiving reading of the film as a medievalist text.

A Knight’s Tale is less a visual translation of and more a response to the modern that can be found in the medieval (or the medieval that can be found in the modern); it was first conceived by Brian Helgeland as a medieval sports film, and his inspiration for the film’s story stemmed from the fact that only nobles could compete in jousting tournaments (Reel 6 Interview).  Based on this tidbit, the primary “source text” for A Knight’s Tale is not, in fact, The Knight’s Tale.  The film is not an adaptation of Chaucer’s text at all (which is, by the way, a rendering of Boccaccio’s Teseida, not an original story, at least in the modern sense of the term).  Its inspiration stems from Helgeland’s fascination with the medieval sport of jousting, and its construction is based more on an ideology of cultural transmission than a strictly historical or literary tradition.  Helgeland explains Chaucer’s presence in the text, which clearly goes beyond the film’s title:

“One of the dangers of a period movie is that everything gets kind of put up on a pedestal and covered in varnish…I was an English major, and when we studied Chaucer he seemed like a guy who stepped out of a museum with dust all over him. But he had to be a more kind of out-there guy to write all that stuff. So having no idea, I’m hoping Paul [Bettany]’s version of Chaucer is closer to who Chaucer probably was…” (Contact Music)

Helgeland wanted Geoffrey “Geoff” Chaucer in his film to subvert the museum quality of the medieval period.  And for those of you who are still hoping for faithful adaptation, Helgeland did intend for his film to take place during a six-month period of Chaucer’s life for which historians have no record, which means that a) he did do his research and b) our adaptation theory can be thrown out the window.  The film’s setting and story is set in a fanciful medieval neverland, really.  Helgeland gets off the hook.

Furthermore, Brian Helgeland’s interviews reveal that a dialogue with, rather than a translation of, the medieval period was in his head for the making of A Knight’s Tale.  One interviewer remarks that “it seemed the movie was about youth and identity in some ways, and also questioning the powers that be” (Contact Music).  I would argue that this film’s subversive questioning is what makes it so delightfully medieval.  Even if you disagree, it is clear that Helgeland’s aim was to coax to the surface those medieval aspects of modern society, or to tease out the modern-seeming aspects of medieval society.  In short, the film really is easier to appreciate if one’s critical viewing considers Helgeland’s vision for the film:

“We have computers and cell phones and cars, and all that. But they had all that too, they had horses, they wrote things down — I really believe that people have never changed, really. They laugh, they fall in love, they go to war, they never change” (Interview with Marty Mapes).

Of the people, By the people, For the people 

Perhaps it’s the American in me that delighted in William, Watt, and Roland’s quest to stick it (jousting!) to the (noble)man.  Don’t we all love an underdog story?  The short answer: not if it gets too close to beloved literature and literary figures.  The long answer: not when it propagates “the pervasive, and ostensibly insurmountable, chasm between the popular and the academic Chaucer” and “transform[s] a Boethian exploration of human happiness and divine justice into a predictable and vulgar myth of fulfilment” (Forni 254); and certainly not when it “refus[es] to acknowledge the nature and mannerisms of social customs and people in Europe at the time” (Jeffrey Badder).  In defense of the first complaint, Kathleen Forni does make an astute observation.  She argues that A Knight’s Tale denotes the modern reception of Chaucer as a figure for popular culture (as opposed to Shakespeare’s popularity with intellectuals) (Forni 262).  While I agree that Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales lends itself well to the modern storyteller who might wish to create a comic, pop culture-y text set in the medieval period, I do not necessarily think that we should lament it.  After all, even Shakespeare wrote for the masses–the foundlings occupying the standing space in theatres were part of the Bard’s carefully aimed double entendres and satire.  And the modern conception of popular culture–having much to do with mass printing–does not really fit in Chaucer’s time.  This brings me to Forni’s second point.

As I noted earlier, Brian Helgeland clearly did not have an adaptation of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale in mind when he set out to write A Knight’s Tale. He had jousting, 70s rock, and the philosophy that a man can change his stars guiding his script.  He was writing a tale about a knight, not the tale about the knight, as  Louise D’Arcens articulates in her argument.  He is not trying to recreate Chaucer’s “Boethian exploration of human happinessand divine justice,” so we certainly cannot hold his film to that standard.  Consequently, I cannot agree with Forni’s judgment on A Knight’s Tale on the grounds that her arguments are supported by assumptions that simply cannot be applied to Helgeland’s film.  Furthermore, she does not consider the film’s genre, or the fact that film is meant to be massively consumed and is closely bound up with “popular culture,” which she seems to think is a dismantling of Chaucer’s image as the classy father of English poetry. A Knight’s Tale is irreverent, maybe, but so is the Canterbury Tales. A Knight’s Tale is a comedy, a kind of modern tribute to the medieval sport of jousting.  (All criticism I read about the film did allow that the cinematography of the actual jousting is phenomenal.)  So why can we not appreciate A Knight’s Tale for what it is?

Our Obsession with Lineage: A Pristine Medieval Period

Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale subverts textual authority in a way that especially bother medievalists.  Whether it is with Queen’s “We Will Rock You” or Jocelyn’s failure to conform to our ideas of a medieval noblewoman, Helgeland defies expectations anyone might draw from the title of the film, its inclusion of Geoffrey Chaucer, or its medieval setting.  Is it, then, the feeling of being duped that upsets the likes of Jeffrey Badder and Kathleen Forni?

The former’s tone of disappointment as he describes the opening scene certainly points to the frustration of expectation:

“The crowd “does the wave” as at a modern baseball stadium, competitors pump their breastplates like football players, and the nobles, apparently fans of 1970’s rock-and-roll, sing along to the theme music; the guitar solo, in fact, is even timed to appear as though it comes from the trumpet players on the tournament grounds” (Jeffrey Badder).

The opening of A Knight’s Tale reminds me of scenes in Shrek where 90s pop music rules the fairytale land.  No one seems to be bothered by it, perhaps because Shrek is acknowledged as a fairytale; it is animated.  Although A Knight’s Tale does pull the rug out from under those of us who come in to the film expecting a historically accurate adaptation of Chaucer’s first Canterbury Tale, I would argue that the film is straightforward and honest about its fairytale quality from the beginning.

I am inclined also to view the medieval scholar’s discomfort with A Knight’s Tale as a manifestation of our obsession with tradition and lineage and of our tendency to view historical figures such as Chaucer and historical cultures as pristine and sacred (in that they should be preserved and studied rather than embodied, filtered, and transmitted in a modern hand).  After all, the notions of textual tradition and authority have existed at least since Chaucer’s lifetime; in Troilus and Criseyde, for example, he probably invented a classical textual source for his story, crediting a “Lollius” whose name only appears in the Chaucer’s text.  What’s more, Chaucer and other medieval writers freely borrowed, innovated, and plucked pieces from other texts while modern authors are governed by not only copyrights protecting intellectual property and reverence for the past, including its literary figures.  This creates a standard for film adaptations that is creatively restrictive.  While there is something to be said for strict adaptations, the strength of Brian Helgeland’s comic and epic tale is in its humour and its apparently modern view that “a man can change his stars.”

Conclusions

“If we are to truly grasp the significance of a medievalist text within the undecidability of medievalism, we need to accept, and not condemn, its partial truth, its blithe purloining, and most of all its fluctuating allegiances, which it directs promiscuously not only to the medieval past, but also to other…pasts, the present, and even the future” (D’Arcens 98).

Louise D’Arcens’s conclusion resonates with my experience watching A Knight’s Tale for the second time (the first time as a medievalist).  It was marked by delight and recognition of unexpected medieval elements.  I anticipated a quirky medieval-esque comedy, so I was pleasantly surprised whenever Helgeland dropped gems like the importance of pilgrimage (in Chaucer’s introductions of Will as Sir Ulrich).  And although steeped in modern ideology, I recognised Helgeland’s construction of an estates satire within the template of Hollywood’s cathartic good vs. evil plotline: The priest, for example, is shushed by the fiery Jocelyn as tries to silence her in his cathedral.  Geoff Chaucer calls attention to the class divide at tournaments and pokes fun at the noble class by addressing “everybody else here not sitting on a cushion” when he introduces Sir Ulrich.  And unredeemable baddie Count Adhemar is thoroughly shown to be as ignoble in manner as Will is in blood.

My viewing of the film was consquently enriched by my determination to watch it as a product of its time and as in dialogue with, rather than necessarily deriving from, a bygone time and culture that continues to intrigue modern society.  As scholars and film-viewers, we can learn something from such a reading of Helgeland’s text: taking a break from the traditional criticism of medievalist texts is beneficial, for both academic inquiry and cinematic pleasure.

Works Cited:
D’Arcens, Louise. “Deconstruction and the Medieval Indefinite Article: The Undecidable Medievalism of Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale” in Parergon, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 88-98. Australian and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2008. Article. Web. 31 March 2016.
Forni, Kathleen. “Reinventing Chaucer: Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale” in The Chaucer Review, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 253-264. Penn State University Press, 2003. Article. Web. 31 March 2016.

 

http://luna.wellesley.edu/record=b1546663~S1

Chaucer Goes Digital

Published by Brianna

It took me a while to start thinking critically about digital humanities in tandem with medieval literature even though I have been doing digital humanities in my study of medieval literature since nearly the beginning. Part of my coming round to digital medieval studies has been asking a lot of scattered questions about what exactly “digital medieval studies” comprises, accomplishes, and means for an undergraduate who wept the first time she saw a medieval manuscript in person.

What is Digital Humanities?

In a post about introducing digital humanities at the undergraduate level, Adeline Koh remarks, “At its best, the digital humanities is about engaging more critically with the intersections between technology and how we act, think and learn.”

In the same article, she explains that most current undergraduates, like myself, are already digital humanists.  This implies a broad and dynamic definition of digital humanities; it gives us an opportunity to engage in our fields of study in novel ways, and it necessitates interdisciplinary study like never before.  In my consideration of this definition, I have generated two specific questions: How do the goals of medieval study inform and affect the academic use of technology?  What changes do these intersections produce in our preservation, contemplation, translation, transmission, criticism of and interactions with medieval literature, both as artefact and text?  I will use some early modern and modern transmissions of Chaucer’s works to explore these two questions, focusing on my experience in Wellesley College’s Special Collections and my findings online.

Reading Chaucer in Special Collections

Over two visits to Wellesley College’s Special Collections, I leafed through about a dozen works of Chaucer printed between the mid-15th and 19th centuries and tried to form a research question.  I thought about how readers of Chaucer related to his works and how that affected the transmission of Chaucer’s works throughout the early modern and modern periods.  I wondered why other texts such as those of John Lydgate appeared in books titled “Chaucer’s Works,” and I wanted to know more about the celebrity that appears to have grown around Chaucer after his death.  In brief, the physical books upon which I pondered for several hours at a time led me to ask particular questions in my study of Chaucer’s work.  And these questions were very different from those which developed while I engaged with online Chaucer sources.

Digital Chaucer

The Harvard Chaucer Page was one of the websites I used for my first post, as it provided me with analogue texts for the Wife of Bath’s Tale and introduced me to the motif of the loathly lady.  Luminarium, my second source for online research on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, supplies links to notes and musings on the Wife and her prologue and tale.  These are two of several sites that are devoted to Chaucer and in varying states of dis/repair.  Many provide bibliographies with dead-end links; some were created for specific courses on Chaucer, and most include the text of the Canterbury Tales in middle English, modern English, and sometimes both.

It is perhaps surprising that it took more time for me to gather online sources for Chaucer than it did to call up books from Special Collections or to pull primary and secondary texts at the library.  In the time it can take me to wade through and digest the sprawling online resources on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, I can easily have spent enough quality time with the likes of Riverside Chaucer and Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales to have developed a reasonably focused research question.

To address my first question (How the goals of medieval study inform and affect the academic use of technology), I tend to follow a pattern of using online resources as a secondary means of gathering information and more importantly as a tool for surveying the field after I have already formulated a question; otherwise I end up staring at my laptop screen, overwhelmed by the vastness of information before me.  Sites like those mentioned above help me broaden my scope of research after I have asked questions and engaged with the text.

Genius.com, a website primarily used for compiling and annotating music lyrics, has the potential to fill my perceived needs in a similar but distinct way.  I discovered it in an article about an Assistant Professor of English at Boston College who used the website in his Chaucer course.  His students annotated lines in The Canterbury Tales, engaging with the text in a collaborative way and allowing the professor to see patterns in their thinking about the text.  The section on the Canterbury Tales allows users to annotate the text directly, adding photos, notes, links, translations, and even videos.

Another unconventional though much less academic digital platform for Chaucer’s tales can be found on The Toast.  I include Mallory Ortberg’s humourous take on the Wife of Bath’s Prologue because it is a reminder that Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is not just meant to be studied as an analogue to other texts or as a thread in the textual tradition in which he writes.  The tales are witty and clearly meant to bring pleasure to the reader, and Mallory Ortberg amplifies this aspect of and deeply engages with the text while creating a distinct tale of her own, which is essentially what medieval literature does; Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale clearly departs from earlier versions of the loathly lady motif, but the changes he were meant to make better sense to his contemporaries, and that meant transforming the tale to bring sentence and solas to the reader.

Conclusion

The intersection of digital and medieval studies is clearly expansive and potentially overwhelming.  It demands a new process and a new way of thinking about how we–as academics, as readers, and as the next generations of textual transmitters–relate to our beloved medieval texts.  Historically, academia has more clearly delineated the concepts of the medieval manuscript as an artefact and the medieval manuscript as a text, but the digitization of artefacts for wide scholarly use blurs those lines.  For example, I can find an electronic copy of the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales in the Huntington Digital Library and study it closely for its marginalia and illumination, or I can read the unadorned text provided by Project Gutenberg, which notes variations across manuscripts and moreover provides an easy-to-read compilation of the tales.  Both the artefact and the text are open access, I save a trip to the library, and my backpack is a little lighter for its lack of a copy of Riverside Chaucer.  I am free to organically form ideas and questions about the manuscript or the text, or both.  I can remark upon the variations in the text that are bound to appear from the manuscript to the Gutenberg text, which is based on Keats’ edition of Chaucer (a student’s edition, and one that I also leafed through in Special Collections); I can bounce between websites giving summaries and commentaries on the text (which mimicks the process of annotation and commentary to the extent that the reader has at her fingertips the thoughts and criticisms of other readers).  I can, in sum, interact and engage with medieval texts in myriad ways with the digitization of them.  And with the anticipation of more collaborative platforms like that found in Genius.com’s literature section, I can look forward to contemplating and commenting on medieval texts in more collaborative ways, too.

 

Gower, Gawain, and a Gat-toothed Pilgrim

Published by Brianna

On the first day of my last medieval literature course, our professor asked us to choose our favourite medieval character.  After my mind initially went blank (as it often does when such topics arise), it reached for Alisoun, the Wife of Bath: Geoffrey Chaucer’s subversive, brazen pilgrim and serial monogamist.

The Wife of Bath in all her glory. From the Ellesmere Manuscript; this image from Luminarium.

The Wife of Bath in all her glory. Image from Luminarium.

 

I encountered her during my first year at Wellesley as a wide-eyed English major with a sudden appetite for medieval lit.  Her tale of maistrie has fascinated me again and again, so it is only fitting that in my first post I focus on one of the themes which has captured not only me (and my favourite dead white guy Chaucer) but also a smattering of other storytellers from the medieval period.

For those of you who have not read the Wife of Bath’s Tale (or those simply wanting a refresher), Shmoop provides a respectable summary here.

The Loathly Lady

The archetype of the loathly lady is of Irish origin and was a staple in Arthurian romance.  The Wife of Bath places her tale in Arthurian tradition by making her setting evident in the very first line: “In th’olde dayes of Kyng Arthour/ Of which that Britons speken greet honour,/ Al was this land fulfild of fairye” (ln 857-9, Chaucer and Robinson).  Chaucer places the Wife’s tale in line with The Tale of Florent in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (c. 1390) and the anonymous Weddyng of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell, and the Wife transforms it to conform to the sentence of her prologue, which subverts power dynamics in marriage; I find the idiosyncrasies surrounding the loathly lady portrayed by the Wife most delightful for both their sentence (meaning) and solaas (entertainment).

loathly-lady

The Loathly Lady lives on…in opera! The Loathly Lady debuted in 2009 and in true medieval fashion amalgamates personages from across time into a single opera-musical based on the Wife of Bath’s Tale.

 

The Wife of Bath’s Tale

From the very beginning, the knight of the Wife of Bath’s Tale entirely lacks gentilesse, which sets up the tale to be rooted in the genre of estates satire.  He gets into trouble in the first place because he rapes a beautiful maiden while gallivanting around the countryside; his behavior towards women does not improve even after the queen (unnamed in the tale but taken to be Queen Guinevere since the knight is of King Arthur’s court) intercedes to save his life.  It is not until he is given a dressing down by Chaucer’s version of the loathly lady, an ugly fairy woman, that he takes his first step toward redemption by relinquishing his maistrie to her.  The old hag’s gentility sermon distinguishes her from the other two loathly ladies of the knight Florent (in Gower) and Gawen.  Beginning at line 1109, the knight’s ugly bride delivers a speech that echoes Alisoun’s philosophy on authority:

But for ye speken of swich gentillesse

As is descended out of old richesse,

That therefore sholden ye be gentilmen,

Swich arrogance is nat worth an hen!

Looke who that is moost vertuous alway,

Pryvee and apert and moost entendeth ay

To do the gentil dedes that he kan.

Taak hym for the grettest gentilman.

Crist wole we clayme of hym oure gentillesse,

Nat of oure eldres for hire old richesse (Chaucer and Robinson, lines 1109-1118).

The Wife’s old woman goes on to invoke such personages as Dante, Seneca, and Boethius; her lecture functions to restore some amount of agency (or at least an element of reality) to the figure of the loathly lady, creating a more vibrant character than exists in either Gowers’s or Gawen’s tales.

Her lesson gives way to her final proposition:

To han me foul and old til that I deye,

And be to yow a trewe, humble wyf,

And never yow displese in al my lyf,

Or elles ye wol han me yong and fair,

And take youre aventure of the repair,

That shal be to youre house bycause of me… (Chaucer and Robinson, lines 1220-1225)

In brief, she offers to be beautiful yet potentially unfaithful or old and ugly yet loyal to him.  Interestingly, the other two tales feature a slightly different offer; both loathly ladies force their husbands to choose between having them fair by day and foul by night or vice versa.  In the spirit of Harry Bailey’s stipulations for the pilgrim’s tales, the prospect of cuckoldry does give the Wife of Bath’s version of the tale greater solaas.  

The knight defers to her judgment on the matter, and, transformed by the love of the old woman, the knight becomes agreeable and loving towards his fair and faithful fairy wife, and they live happily ever after.

Sir Gawain

The knight in The Weddyng of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell is none other than Syr Gawen (or Gawain), an Arthurian regular.  The unnamed narrator of this tale describes Dame Ragnell, the loathly lady, as vividly hideous, but both King Arthur and Syr Gawen generally behave with nobility.  At least with as much nobility as one can expect.  For example, in lines 303-8 King Arthur replies to the dame’s offer with mixed horror and humour (driven by incredulousness):

Alas! he sayd, nowe woo is me,

That I shold cause Gawen to wed the,/

For he wol be loth to saye naye.

So foull a lady as ye ar nowe one

Sawe I never in my lyfe on ground gone;

Gawen, in contrast, does agree to marry Dame Ragnell if it means saving his king’s life, even after Arthur insists that the sacrifice is too great:

…Thowgh she were as foull as Belsabub,

Her shall I wed, by the Rood,

Or elles were nott I your frende… (Correale and Hamel, lines 345-347)

Even after Gawen has beheld the repulsive Dame Ragnell, he behaves courteously, reflecting the gentilesse that is only exhibited by the Wife of Bath’s knight post-transformation.  After Dame Ragnell refuses to be wed early in the morning (line 575), the narrator describes her preparing for the ceremony:

She was arayed in the richest maner,

More fressher than Dame Gaynour:

Her arayment was worth iii thousand mark

Of good red nobles, styff and stark,

So rychely she was begon.

For all her rayment she bare the bell

Of fowlenesse that ever I hard tell,

So fowll a sowe sawe never man! (Correale and Hamel, lines 590-597)

Even as the narrator starkly compares the dame’s revolting appearance to the magnificence of King Arthur’s court, Gawen’s nobility shines through, for unlike the Wife’s loathly lady, Gawen’s bride-to-be does get a proper wedding.  Unfortunately there is a leaf missing from the manuscript shortly after the festivities begin, and the narrative does not pick up again until after Gawen and the dame have gone to bed.  The wailing and tossing characteristic of the Wife of Bath’s knight is missing from the description of Gawen’s first night with his bride.  Instead, we find the knight simply turned away in bed while Dame Ragnell pleads with him to at least kiss her for saving his king (line 635).  And without needing the lecture received by the Wife’s knight, Gawen responds to her:

…I woll do more

Then for to kisse, and God before! (Correale and Hamel, lines 638-639)

The Wife of Bath’s Tale ends at this point, but the tale of Gawen’s marriage continues for some 150 lines.  After the glorious kissing of two fair people, a vital piece of the dame’s background is explained.  She is a princess cursed by her stepmother and has been awaiting her Prince Charming.  The first time I read through this tale, I thought the additional background surrounding Dame Ragnell made her more realistic and less archetypical, but after returning to the Wife of Bath’s loathly lady, I am more inclined to see Dame Ragnell as an archetypical fairytale princess.  In this anonymous Arthurian poem, the loathly (cursed) lady (princess) undergoes transformation.  In contrast, the Wife of Bath’s loathly (fairy) lady acts upon the errant knight to elicit change in him.  There is no indication in the tale that she required anything from him in order to undergo her physical transformation.

Florent

The Tale of Florent resembles Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale more closely than that of Syr Gawen, so it does reveal some of the knight’s less-than-noble tendencies (although the Wife’s knight still takes home the dirtbag award).  Like the tale of Syr Gawen’s wedding, John Gowers’s tale of a knight named Florent features a more or less demure loathly lady who seems to have been waiting around in the forest for her Prince Charming to break her ugly spell.

Florent’s trespass is not as repugnant as that of the Wife’s knight; he is accused of murdering an emperor’s son, Branchus, while in a foreign land and must go on a quest to discover what women desire most in exchange for the king and queen’s pardon.  (Apparently Florent’s gentilesse is so well-known that the king and queen have mercy on his noble spirit.)  We begin to see the similarities between Gower’s knight and Chaucer’s knight when Florent encounters the unnamed hag; Florent, a bit more clever than the Wife’s knight (who does not inquire after the loathly lady’s one demand until after she saves his life), asks after the ugly woman’s intentions and rejects her proposal upon hearing it (line 166).

After some reasoning, Florent reconsiders the advantages and disadvantages of marrying an old hag, though he thinks it through before he actually says anything (again, more prudent than his contemporary counterpart):

And thanne he caste his avantage,

That sche was of so gret an age,

That sche mai live bot a while

And thoghte put hire in an ile [isle],

Wher that noman hire scholde knowe,

Til sche with deth were overthrowe. (Correale and Hamel, lines 180-185)

It is not gallant, but it is more in line with the concept of gentilesse than Chaucer’s knight since Florent is not so vocal about the misery of his situation and sets the old hag on his horse to take her to the castle:

Thogh sche be the fouleste of all,

Yet to th’onour of wommanhiede

Him thoghte he scholde taken hiede;

So that for pure gentilesse,

As he hire couthe best adresce,

In ragges, as sche was totore,

He set hire on his hors tofore

And forth he takth his weie softe… (Correale and Hamel, lines 323-330)

With the hope of being pardoned by the wisdom of his hideous bride-to-be, Florent takes her to his castle to prepare her for the court; Gower adds more delicious detail to the foulness of the lady while conveying Florent’s noble efforts to have her treated like a fair one:

Hire ragges thei anon of drawe,

And, as it was that time lawe,

She hadde bath, sche hadde reste,

And was arraied to the beste. (Correale and Hamel, lines 350- 353)

…

Thei myhte hire hore lockes schode,

And sche ne wolde noght be schore

For no conseil, and thei therfore,

With such atyr as tho was used,

Ordeinen that it was excused,

And hid so craftelich aboute,

That noman myhte sen hem out. (Correale and Hamel, lines 355-361)

Florent and his loathly lady wed under the cover of night like the Wife of Bath’s knight and lady, but following in the footsteps of Gawen, Florent’s gentility prevents him from doing anything more than turning away from his ugly wife on their wedding night (line 388).  He ultimately resembles Gawen, and the loathly lady, rather than Gawen, ends up undergoing dramatic transformation.  Like the poem, this tale ends with the explanation that Gawen’s new bride was a cursed maiden on a quest to break a spell that made her hideous.  We do hear the terms under which the spell can be broken, which involves a knight who is willing to surrender his maistrie to his loathly-looking lover, but the tale’s emphasis remains to be the physical transformation of the dame and not the psychological change of the knight.

The Genius of Tweaking Tradition

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a triumph of integration, and it is reflected in each tale.  Though I have chosen to focus on the archetype of the loathly lady and to read only two similar medieval works alongside it, I have stumbled across dozens of other connections to the text from as far away in time as Ovid’s Metamorphoses (more information on that here).  The most difficult decision was to choose which thread to follow.

Looking at these three texts–The Wife of Bath’s Tale, The Weddyng of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell, and The Tale of Florent–helps us grasp their intertextual richness and consequently helps us tease out and appreciate their individualities.  The loathly lady archetype comes to life in unexpected ways in each tale, especially the Wife’s; we can better get a sense of Chaucer’s purpose for the text if we know how it differs from others: Alisoun’s subversive, feisty attitude trickles down to the old woman in her tale; it manifests in her gentility lecture, the details of her proposition, and importantly in the tale’s focus on the internal transformation of the knight that is evoked by a fairy woman.  And that, dear reader, is why the Wife of Bath’s Tale is still my number one.

 

Works Cited:

 

Chaucer, Geoffrey and F.N. Robinson (ed.). The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. pp. 116-122. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987. Print.

Correale, Robert and Mary Hamel. Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. II. pp. 405-448. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002. Print.