University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
2011
Affective communities: masculinity and the
discourse of emotion in Middle English literature
Travis William Johnson
University of Iowa
Copyright 2011 Travis William Johnson
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4860
Recommended Citation
Johnson, Travis William. "Affective communities: masculinity and the discourse of emotion in Middle English literature." PhD (Doctor
of Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2011.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4860.
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Part of the English Language and Literature Commons
AFFECTIVE COMMUNITIES: MASCULINITY AND THE DISCOURSE OF
EMOTION IN MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE
by
Travis William Johnson
An Abstract
Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in English
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
July 2011
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Claire Sponsler
1
ABSTRACT
Scholars have recently begun to reconsider the importance of emotions,
suggesting that they are cultural constructions integral to human identity and social life.
Most of these studies, however, have ignored the medieval period, focusing instead on
the “civilizing process”—that is, the supposed development of social etiquette and selfrestraint—that is assumed to have begun in the early modern period. This dissertation
demonstrates that emotion was in fact a complex identity discourse well before the
Renaissance and was fundamental to the construction of pre-modern social categories
like gender. Exploring four masculine communities—clergymen, knights, university
students, and merchants—I show that each community was shaped and constrained by a
particular emotional ethos. Middle English poets were keenly aware of these constraints
and their work often challenged the culture’s emotional regimes.
I focus on literary texts from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries
because they were created during a time of heightened emphasis on the role of the
emotions in shaping selves and communities. In the years after the Black Death, England
witnessed significant demographic shifts and economic volatility that resulted in dramatic
transformations in the nation’s social landscape. Peasant rebellion, labor shortages,
migrant clergy, and an influx of foreign merchants radically altered the structure of
English society during these years. As a result, the institutions and ideologies that
defined English masculine identity began changing in ways not seen before. Poets not
surprisingly turned to the lexicon of emotion to negotiate these disruptions; in so doing,
they offered English men new ways of understanding themselves in the face of rapid
cultural change. The chapters examine a range of Middle English poems—the
Alliterative Morte Arthure, St. Erkenwald, Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale, and Lydgate’s
Bycorne and Chychevache—that illuminate particular emotions (anger, compassion,
grief, and sorrow) and their significance to codes of masculinity. I argue that these four
2
texts radically revised the forms and meanings of masculine emotional identity and
community.
This dissertation demonstrates that Middle English poets recognized the
transformative potential inherent in the lexicon of emotion and used it to reshape their
audiences’ understanding of critical cultural problems. The years from the 1350s to the
1450s were important not only in the emerging tradition of poetry in English, but also for
the development of the language and psychology of emotion. As poets tried to come to
terms with great social changes, they molded and manipulated the discourse of emotion
to interrogate what it meant to be a man in late medieval England. Affective Communities
reveals the importance of emotions as markers of gender and community and shows
literature’s role in responding to and imagining social change.
Abstract Approved: ____________________________________
Thesis Supervisor
____________________________________
Title and Department
____________________________________
Date
AFFECTIVE COMMUNITIES: MASCULINITY AND THE DISCOURSE OF
EMOTION IN MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE
by
Travis William Johnson
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in English
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
July 2011
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Claire Sponsler
Copyright by
TRAVIS WILLIAM JOHNSON
2011
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
_______________________
PH.D. THESIS
_______________
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
Travis William Johnson
has been approved by the Examining Committee
for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in English at the July 2011 graduation.
Thesis Committee: ___________________________________
Claire Sponsler, Thesis Supervisor
___________________________________
Jonathan Wilcox
___________________________________
Kathy Lavezzo
___________________________________
Adam Hooks
___________________________________
Glenn Ehrstine
For
Liam and Ophelia
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to offer my sincere thanks to all who shaped and contributed to this
dissertation. Claire Sponsler, Jonathan Wilcox, and Kathy Lavezzo have each influenced
my scholarly development and I am grateful for their generosity and support over the past
six years. I also wish to thank Glenn Ehrstine and Adam Hooks for their insightful
readings, questions, and critiques along the way. I am particularly grateful to Claire
Sponsler, who has been an extraordinary mentor throughout the dissertation process. Her
critical insight and ongoing support for my project has proven to be invaluable. She is
also the best writing coach I have ever had.
The University of Iowa‟s Department of English supported my project with the
Frederick F. Seely Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship, which not only allowed me to
focus on research and writing for an entire semester, but also gave me the opportunity to
teach an innovative literature course based on the dissertation. I wish to thank all of the
students who enrolled in “Love in the Time of Black Death” for reinvigorating my
passion for medieval literature and reminding me why I have dedicated my life to
education. Further research was made possible by the Valerie Lagorio Dissertation Prize
from the Department of English. The University of Iowa Graduate College Summer
Fellowship provided generous financial support in 2010 that allowed me to concentrate
solely on developing the dissertation and revising an article for publication.
Over the years, I have met many wonderful friends at the University of Iowa who
supported me in ways intellectual and spiritual: Chad Wriglesworth, Judith Coleman,
Erin Mann, Lindsey Row-Heyveld, Stephanie Norris, Joseph Rodriguez, Stephanie
Blalock, and Kats Mendoza all helped me through the grueling doctoral process. I owe a
debt of gratitude to William Hodapp and Patricia Hagen of The College of St. Scholastica
as well for their friendship and guidance. My deepest gratitude is extended to my wife,
Jess, and our two children, Liam and Ophelia. I could not have finished this project
iii
without their constant encouragement and loving support. Thus, it is to my family that I
dedicate this project.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE: THEORIZING AFFECTIVE COMMUNITIES ....................................1
Looking into King Arthur‟s Eyes .....................................................................1
Reading Medieval Emotion ..............................................................................3
Masculine Communities .................................................................................12
Emotional Spaces............................................................................................16
The Soundscape of Emotion ...........................................................................21
The Discourse of Emotion in Middle English Literature ...............................27
CHAPTER TWO: ST. ERKENWALD AND THE POLITICS OF COMPASSION .........31
A Community in Crisis ...................................................................................31
The Monuments of Masculinity......................................................................38
The Noisy Episcopate .....................................................................................44
Community Sights ..........................................................................................53
Blindfolds .......................................................................................................57
Corpse Sounds ................................................................................................66
Affective Communion ....................................................................................71
A Fraternity for All Men.................................................................................78
CHAPTER THREE: „SOM ESEMENT HAS LAWE YSHAPEN US‟: THE
REEVE’S TALE‟S DISCOURSE OF (DIS)PASSION ...................................86
Bloodless Commodities ..................................................................................86
Amalgam Nation .............................................................................................89
Povre Scolers ..................................................................................................97
Affective Economics ....................................................................................105
Beasts of „Burdon‟ ........................................................................................120
Bridling the Beasts ........................................................................................127
CHAPTER FOUR: LYDGATE AND THE MELANCHOLIC MERCHANTS ............137
Lydgate‟s Affective Turn .............................................................................137
The Monstrous Tradition ..............................................................................141
Men of Worth ...............................................................................................147
Conduct Unbecoming of a Man ....................................................................158
Recuperating a Melancholic Masculinity .....................................................174
Conclusion ....................................................................................................183
EPILOGUE: WEEPING LIKE A WIDOW ....................................................................187
WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................194
v
1
CHAPTER ONE
THEORIZING AFFECTIVE COMMUNITIES
Looking into King Arthur‟s Eyes
The Alliterative Morte Arthure offers one of the most emotionally ambivalent and
morally fraught accounts of King Arthur‟s rise and fall in medieval English literature and
thus makes a good starting point for a dissertation that examines masculinity and
emotional community. Written in the latter part of the fourteenth century when England
was losing control of its territories in France and the young king, Richard II, was
vacillating in his commitments to those military campaigns that would later be called the
Hundred Years War, the poem wavers between celebration and brutal critique of Arthur‟s
violent, hypermasculine program of revenge and conquest. Each moment in the poem
wrestles with the chivalric ethos and its demands for aggression, ferocity, and violence.
In the face of staggering loss, the poet asks his readers to meditate on the tenets of
aristocratic social life that are in part responsible for the endless conflicts in France. The
Morte-poet dissects the chivalric code, peeling back its skin and sawing through its
bones, looking for and trying to understand the organs that sustain this masculine body,
this medieval machismo that promotes destruction as much as heroism. In so doing, the
poem explores the social performances that chivalry demands and closely considers what
emotional effects those culturally encoded performances have on the individual psyche.
Indeed, central to the Morte-poet‟s version of King Arthur‟s tragic demise is the
emotional life of men and the scripts they must follow in expressing anger, shame, and,
above all, grief. As the king wrestles with the trauma that his imperial machinations
breed, as he tries to maintain his composure in the face of suffering and death, the
Alliterative Morte Arthure asks readers to contemplate how emotions might shape and
disrupt the prevailing construction of masculine identity.
2
Turning to the opening scene in Arthur‟s hall, we see that from the very beginning
the poet is interested in exploring the emotional lives of aristocratic men. When a senator
and sixteen knights sent by Sir Lucius Iberius, the Emperor of Rome, interrupt the Round
Table‟s Christmas Day feast, demanding that Arthur swear fealty and pay tribute to the
Roman Empire, the Morte-poet scrutinizes the complex emotional regime that controls
and limits masculine aristocratic social performances. The senator is a model of
courtesy, saluting the king and his hall, bowing to each and every member of the court,
before delivering what Mary Hamel calls a “carefully legalistic” message.1 Armed with
documents bearing the Emperor‟s seal and the signatures of notaries, the senator argues
that Arthur‟s empire belongs to the Romans and that Arthur must answer “why thou
occupies the lands / That owe homage of old til him and his elders / Why thou has ridden
and raimed and ransound the pople / And killed down his cosins, kinges anointed” (98101).2 Arthur is furious at these demands and his response—a burning, glowering
gaze—pits fiery affect against cold, legalistic rationality.
Valerie Krishna points out that the Morte-poet makes a significant departure from
his sources.3 In Wace‟s Brut, for example, it is the Camelot knights who grow angry
with the Roman messenger, defending the honor of the English crown, while Arthur‟s is
cast as a mediator who must calm his subjects‟ anger and mitigate the threat of violence.
The Morte-poet‟s shift of anger from subjects to king reveals, I argue, cultural
1 Mary Hamel, ed., Morte Arthure: A Critical Edition (New York: Garland, 1984), 256. Hamel
describes the senator‟s message as “carefully legalistic” and that it has the flavor of an official
summons to the “rebellious vassal to appear in his overlord‟s court to answer for his offenses
against the feudal contract entered into by his father (112)—a contract also documented by
official records in Rome.”
2 All references to the Alliterative Morte Arthure are from King Arthur’s Death: The Middle
English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, ed. Larry D. Benson and Edward
E. Foster (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994).
3 Valerie Krishna, ed., The Alliterative Morte Arthure: A Critical Edition (New York: Burt
Franklin, 1976), 166.
3
prescriptions for anger and its performance, and invites readers to consider the challenges
people face in enacting and maintaining a culture‟s emotional prescriptions. The poet
deliberately changes the characterization from an Arthur who must rein in his knights‟
anger to an Arthur who wrestles with his passions and uses that emotional battle to
subdue those men who have insulted him. The poet also casts Arthur‟s furious gaze as
not just a performance that communicates his anger and the potential for violence, but as
an actual act of violence. More than simply a smoldering gaze, Arthur‟s look is treated
as a physical act. Arthur‟s eyes, the poet writes, “cast colours” across the throne room,
and the Romans, as if physically struck by those colors, “for radness rusht to the erthe, /
For ferdness of his face as they fey were” (121-2).
Reading Medieval Emotion
The question that arises from this opening moment in the Alliterative Morte
Arthure, and indeed the question that propels my dissertation project is this: how do
emotions shape and challenge medieval codes of masculinity and community formation?
In recent years, emotions have emerged as an important area of inquiry for medievalists,
marking a significant shift away from assumptions that the emotional life of people in
medieval Europe was at best chaotic and childlike. Norbert Elias and Marc Bloch
popularized the idea that medieval people could not control their passions and were
essentially subject to ungovernable emotional forces. In The Civilizing Process, for
instance, Norbert Elias argues that medieval European societies lacked anything
resembling a superego:
People [in the Middle Ages] are wild, cruel, prone to violent
outbreaks and abandoned to the joy of the moment. The can afford
to be. There is little in their situation to compel them to impose
restraint upon themselves. Little in their conditioning forces them
to develop what might be called a strict and stable super-ego, as a
4
function of dependence and compulsions stemming from others
transformed into self-restraints.4
Elias‟s continuing influence is evident in recent studies of emotions such as Peter
Stearns‟ series of books on the emotional history of the United States. Arguing that
medieval society had no “general emotional control,” Stearns perpetuates Elias‟s grand
narrative:
Public temper tantrums, along with frequent weeping and
boisterous joy, were far more common in premodern society than
they were to become in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Adults were in many ways, by modern standards, childlike in their
indulgence in temper, which is one reason that they so readily
played games with their children.5
Stearns‟ books prove Barbara Rosenwein‟s point that Elias constructed a “seductive”
grand narrative in which “the history of the West is the history of increasing emotional
restraint.”6
Fortunately, the last two decades have seen the publication of a number of studies
that dispute Elias‟s views. William Ian Miller‟s Humiliation: And Other Essays on
Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence and Rosenwein‟s Emotional Communities in the
Early Middle Ages, for instance, demonstrate that the representation of emotions in
medieval literature is far more complex than the naked sentiments incapable of nuance
that Elias describes7. C. Stephen Jaeger makes a case for the civilizing process having
begun in the court of the Ottonian tenth-century kings or in the Carolingian court. As
4 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Function and
Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Blackwell, 1994), 319.
5 Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s
History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). See also Peter N. Stearns, Battleground
for Desire: The Struggle for Self-Control in Modern America (New York: NYU Press, 1999) and
American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 2006).
6 Barbara Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107
(2002): 821-45, 827.
7 William Ian Miller, Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle
Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).
5
Rosenwein rightly explains, “If the civilizing process cannot be tied to modernity and
state formation, if emotional expression is restrained even in the ninth century, then the
grand narrative has essentially become untenable even to one of its adherents.”8
To anyone not seduced by Elias, the staring contest in Arthur‟s throne room
reveals a complex set of conventions shaping and constraining emotions. In “The Politics
of Anger,” Stephen D. White demonstrates that there existed in medieval culture “an
entire discourse of feuding… which provided scripts or schemas for representing,
interpreting, and experiencing” emotions like anger.9 In an attempt to refute Bloch‟s
broad claim that unstable emotions led to irrational political behavior in the Middle Ages,
White shows that in medieval French political narratives there were “well-understood
conventions” for displaying anger that established boundaries for appropriate and
inappropriate emotional display and criticizes those who showed “excessive or totally
inappropriate anger.”10 Arthur‟s barely-controlled anger makes sense in the context
White describes, signaling that much is at stake in his battle for emotional control. The
king‟s silent, searing gaze suggests that he would be met with criticism should he give in
to emotional excess.
The theoretical foundation for Elias‟s grand narrative and its reductive view of
medieval emotionality is the hydraulic model, in which, as Rosenwein explains, emotions
are “like great liquids within each person, heaving and frothing, eager to be let out.”11
8 Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions,” 834. C. Stephen Jaeger locates the civilizing process
in the court of the Ottonian kings in The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the
Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939-1210 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).
He pushes back the starting date of Elias‟s grand narrative to the ninth century in Ennobling
Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
9 Stephen D. White, “The Politics of Anger,” in Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in
the Middle Ages, ed. Barbara Rosenwein (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 127-152,
146.
10 White, “Politics,” 138.
11 Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions,” 834.
6
Although it corresponds with theories of emotion and psychology promulgated by
Darwin (who hypothesized that when the human mind or “sensorium” was strongly
excited in intense situations, a “nerve-force” was liberated “independent of the will”12),
and Freud (who spoke of impulses and instincts that could be “deflected, repressed, or
sublimated but, unless given outlet, would never cease to press forward”13), the
hydraulic model is a direct descendant of medieval medicine‟s understanding of the
body‟s four humors. While humoral theory originated in early Greek medicine, the idea
that four fluids (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) circulated within the human
body and that their balance or imbalance was largely responsible for physical and
psychological ailments prevailed throughout the medieval and into the early modern
period. Nancy G. Siraisi explains that the four humors amounted to a materialist
explanation for emotion:
…[T]he four humors collectively were the means whereby an
individual‟s overall complexional balance was maintained or
altered. Hence, the balance of humors was held to be responsible
for psychological as well as physical disposition, a belief enshrined
in the survival of English adjectives sanguine, phlegmatic,
choleric, and melancholy to describe traits of character. Humoral
theory is probably the single most striking example of the habitual
preference in ancient, medieval and Renaissance medicine for
materials explanations of mental and emotional states.”14
As Rosenwein explains, the hydraulic/materialist view is appealing because it
“meshes with how emotions feel to us and how those feelings are embedded in our
language: „He flipped his lid‟; „I couldn‟t overcome my sadness‟; „He channeled his
anger into something constructive.‟ Here pressures build up and must be
12 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: Appleton,
1886), 66.
13 Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions,” 836, discussing Sigmund Freud, “Resistance and
Repression” in The Complete Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis, ed. James Strachey (New
York: Norton, 1966), 354-74.
14 Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge
and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 106.
7
accommodated.”15 The problem with the hydraulic model is that it encourages us to
think of emotions as universal and to imagine a binary conception in which “emotions are
either „on‟ or „off‟ depending on social, superego, or individually willed restraints.” The
hydraulic model does not take into account the fact that emotions are always the complex
product of cultural practices, expectations, moral beliefs, and individual judgment.
While the passions were very much rooted in the body—as we see in Arthur‟s
blushing face and burning eyes—they also had an active social life as well. If we turn to
Aristotle, we see that premodern conceptions of emotion were not bound inextricably to
the hydraulic/humoral model, but very clearly understood that emotions involved
cognitive-evaluative elements, including cultural beliefs and expectations as well as
individual evaluation about one‟s situation. In de Anima, Aristotle divides the human
soul into two parts, the rational and the irrational; he did not, however, maintain a sharp
division in which the rational mind was always opposed to the irrational and irascible
passions, but instead argues that, as Robert C. Solomon puts it, “beliefs, bodily motions,
and physiological changes are inseparable elements of emotion.”16 In Rhetoric, Aristotle
makes it clear that emotion is the product not of the body, but of an individual‟s
judgment, an evaluation of how one‟s condition or situation might lead to pleasure or
pain. Anger, he writes, is not reducible to a person‟s boiling blood or glowering eyes;
rather, it is a “distressed desire for conspicuous vengeance in return for a conspicuous
and unjustifiable contempt for one‟s person or friends.”17 With each expression of anger
comes a “certain pleasure derived from the hope for revenge.”18 Arthur, when
15 Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions,” 836.
16 Robert C. Solomon, ed., What is an Emotion? Classic and Contemporary Readings, 2nd ed.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5.
17 Aristotle, “From Rhetoric (1378a20-1380a4),” in What is an Emotion? Classic and
Contemporary Readings, ed. Robert C. Solomon, trans. Jon D. Solomon, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 6-9, 6.
18 Ibid., 6.
8
confronted by the Roman messenger and his demands for English tribute, is likewise not
reducible to his blushing face or burning eyes. His anger is not simply a Darwinian
nerve-force or Freudian impulse that seeks an outlet independent of will. Arthur‟s anger
is instead a process of evaluation in which he understands the Roman senator‟s demands
as contempt for his masculinity and aristocratic community. Arthur‟s physiological
response is symptomatic of his personal judgment: the king believes that his social status
is at risk and he deliberately responds with an angry gesture that is within the boundaries
prescribed for conduct in the English court.
A useful starting point for a nuanced analysis of emotion is Martha Nussbaum‟s
Upheavals of Thought which urges us to think about emotions as a complex interplay
between personal judgment and social norms, and to draw on both cognitive and social
constructionist models of analysis. Popularized in the 1960s, the cognitive view, like
Aristotle, argued that “emotions are part of a process of perception and appraisal,”
“judgments of weal or woe—that is, about whether something is likely to be good or
harmful, pleasurable or painful, as perceived by each individual;” social constructionism,
established in the 1970s, suggests that emotions are entirely constructed, formed and
shaped by the social practices and the metaphysical beliefs of a given culture (social
constructionists downplay the idea that there exist basic or universal emotions, and
postulate that “every culture has its rules for feelings and behavior, exerting certain
restraints while favoring other forms of expressivity”).19 Nussbaum urges us to allow for
a complex overlap between these analytical models, since while emotions must be subject
to “deliberation and revision in connection with general deliberation about one‟s goals
and projects,” they are also subject to a culture‟s behavior norms, religious beliefs, and
social practices.20 If we allow for theoretical overlap, and emphasize “plurality, conflict,
19 Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions,” 836-7.
20 Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 148.
9
and porous boundaries,” Nussbaum argues that we pave the way for “more balanced and
nuanced accounts of a society‟s specific emotional range.”21 In so doing, we can
discover that in the ethical, social, and political human creature, “emotions themselves
are ethical and social/political, parts of an answer to the questions, “What is worth caring
about” “How should I live?”
In exploring the complex overlap of individual appraisal and social norms that
shape emotion in medieval literature, we must also be attuned to the effect of language.
Nussbaum explains: “The fact that we label our emotions alters the emotions that we can
have. […] In the process of labeling, we are also frequently organizing, bounding some
things off from others, sharpening distinctions that may have been experience in an
inchoate way. From then on, we experience our emotions in ways guided by these
descriptions.”22 When the Morte-poet defines Arthur‟s emotion as “brethe,” he
categorizes it as a very specific type of anger, one that is associated with the fury of battle
and the “vengeful spirit,” further encouraging us to read Arthur‟s anger as a violent act in
of itself. Moreover, because “brethe” also denotes respiration or the “symptom of life,”
the emotion, according to Christine Chism, also demonstrates that the fury is integral to
both Arthur‟s physical constitution and social identity, operating as a kind of sustenance
that feeds and maintains his masculine power and authority in the English court.23 Brian
Massumi presses the shaping effects of language further, describing emotions and their
performances as a culturally constructed narrative. For Massumi, emotion exists in two
different psychological orders, the pre-linguistic and the linguistic. The internal
experience of emotion is pre-symbolic, pre-linguistic, unmediated, unqualified feeling
21 Ibid., 144.
22 Ibid., 149.
23 Christine Chism, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002),
214.
10
that can exist only within the self, but once an emotion is externalized by being named or
expressed in some way, that emotion experiences mediation and qualification and must
confront cultural expectations and face social ramifications. Writing emotion, Massumi
explains, is the “sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience,” the “qualified
intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically
and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into
function and meaning.” 24 Massumi‟s description of emotion as narrativized affect, as
sensibilities that, when fixed within the linguistic order, are inscribed with culturallyspecific meaning, is important in considering how representations of emotion in literature
can shape and challenge social identity. To borrow a phrase from Nussbaum, when we
investigate the “emotional grammar” of a given text, we stand to uncover not just the
forms and rules of emotional expression but the social and political significance
embedded within that grammar.
The connection between emotion and socio-political identity is made clearer in
Sara Ahmed‟s assertion that emotion is integral to the emergence and transmission of
nationalist and religious ideologies. For Ahmed, emotions function as claims that endow
the self and others with meaning and value. Citing examples of white nationalist
narratives that create “imagined others” who threaten to “take something away from the
subject (jobs, security, wealth)” and even to “take the place of the subject,” Ahmed urges
us to look to emotions in order to understand how a culture‟s master narrative is
constructed and revised.25 In thinking of emotions as claims that endow the self and the
other with meaning and value, we find more than an individual emotional experience, or
a form of self-presence; rather, we discover a form of social presence, a set of feelings
that are informed by national, religious, and socioeconomic ideologies that mark
24 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002), 28.
25 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 43.
11
individuals as part of a specific community. Emotion is a narrative that writes borders,
that creates the “surfaces and boundaries that allow us to distinguish an inside and an
outside,” that establishes margins that tell us who it is we are to love and hate and how
we are to properly understand and express those sentiments.26 We can see the social
presence of emotion in Arthur‟s blushing cheeks and burning eyes, an anger shaped by
the Roman Empire‟s threats to the king‟s authority and England‟s national sovereignty,
while the Roman Senator and his sixteen knights occupy the position of imagined other
that threatens to destroy and take the place of the self.
In The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions, William
Reddy argues that emotional expressions are like performatives, statements that have the
ability to transform people and things. Emotives are both “influenced directly by, and
alter, what they „refer‟ to,” and they “are instruments for directly changing, building,
hiding, intensifying emotions” that deeply affect both the subject and object of feeling.
Indeed, emotives are a “two-edged sword in that they have repercussions” on the goals
and people they are intended to serve.27 Though Arthur‟s angry gaze deeply affects the
Roman senator, casting him to the floor, it does not prevent the senator from gazing back,
momentarily destabilizing Arthur‟s dominant position. Such moments of emotional and
physical cathexis are a key focus of my study, since they show emotion‟s role in
challenging and disrupting normative socio-political positions.
For the Morte-poet, Arthur‟s fury, channeled via the gaze, can contact others‟
bodies, affecting the object of his rage. Arthur‟s gaze touches the senator and disrupts
the senator‟s emotional-political position with the result that the legalistic and rational
26 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 10.
27 William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 105.
12
Romans are pushed into a state of confusion, where they become nothing more than
crouching “kennetes” (hounds), relegated to the position of animality, passion divorced
from reason (122). The senator, taking part in this affective economy, returns a gaze that
seemingly reaffirms Arthur‟s political identity by recognizing him as the “lordliest lede,”
but also notes how Arthur too is animal-like: “By looking, withouten lees, a lion thee
seemes” (139). Thus, Arthur‟s fury, though powerful enough to demolish Rome‟s claim
to a hypermasculine dispassion, also dismantles Arthur himself and forces both masculine
communities—the Romans and the English—into animal positions.
Masculine Communities
My project is interested in exploring how communities such as the aristocratic
court of the Alliterative Morte Arthure shape and express emotional identity. Rosenwein
offers a useful model for considering how emotions might overlap with community.
Drawing implicitly on Stanley Fish‟s theory of interpretive communities, Rosenwein
theorizes the existence of emotional communities—that is, “groups in which people
adhere to the same norm of emotional expression and value—or devalue—the same or
related emotions.”28 Each community has its own discourse of emotion which provides a
common vocabulary for feeling, articulating, and evaluating the passions. Rosenwein
likens her theory to Foucault‟s notion of a common “discourse” in which people share
“vocabularies and ways of thinking that have a controlling function, a disciplining
function.”29 These discourses of emotion, she writes, are the glue “that holds the
narratives of self together” and “allow us to monitor our place in the „we‟ of the group.”30
What I want to highlight in Rosenwein‟s theory is not just its emphasis on the
28 Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 2.
29 Ibid., 25.
30 Rosenwein, “Identity and Emotions in the Early Middle Ages,” Die Suche nach den
Ursprangen von der Bedeutung des Fruhen Mittelalters (2004): 129-137, 130.
13
construction of shared emotional vocabularies or social norms but, more importantly, the
potential for deviance and punishment. My project is interested in the ways in which
emotion can challenge cultural norms rather than operating as a straight-forward
reflection of those norms. If we explore the affective lives of emotionally deviant
characters like Arthur—for after the opening scene in the courtroom he consistently
operates beyond the emotional limits his aristocratic court prescribes—we can see how a
community perceives and responds to those who violate social norms.
In the episode in which Arthur and his knights enter the Giant‟s Tower provides a
useful example of the policing of emotions. As the men debate the proper course of
action, the poet reveals that the community is invested in disciplining and recuperating
those who behave in an unknightly and therefore unmanly way. Sir Cador—
representative of chivalric hypermasculinity—is delighted by the Roman Empire‟s
threats; he laughs with excitement while exclaiming, “I thank God of that thro that us
thretes!” (249). Of course, the reason for Cador‟s rejoicing, the reason the letters of
Emperor Lucius “lightes” his heart is that they provide the Round Table with an
opportunity to return to the battlefield and to escape the life of leisure that has softened
the king and his knights, as Cador says to Arthur:
You must be trailed, I trow, but yif ye tret better!
The lettres of Sir Lucius lightes mine herte.
We have as losels lived many long day
With delites in this land with lordshippes many
And forlitened the los that we are laited.
I was abashed by our Lord, of our best bernes,
For grete dole of deffuse of deedes of armes.
Now wakenes the war! Worshipped be Crist!
And we shall win it again by wightness and strength!
(252-8).
Echoing contemporary criticisms of Richard II and other “courtly” men, Cador identifies
the Round Table community as pampered idlers whose delights in a peaceful life at court
14
have diminished their honor as knights.31 When Cador asserts that he is not only
saddened but embarrassed by the “deffuse of deedes of armes,” he reminds readers of the
poem‟s opening salvo with its declaration that all of the Round Table‟s chivalric exploits
originate in a fear of shame.32 Perhaps more striking is that Cador places England‟s
shame in the king‟s body. As Patricia DeMarco explains, when Cador exclaims “You
must be trailed,” he summons the image of Arthur “dragged ignominiously to the Roman
court” and “locates the potential for shame in the body of the sovereign, who bears
responsibility for leadership.”33
Curiously, however, Arthur wavers in his commitment to the chivalric ethos of
aggression and violence that Cador supports, going so far as to indicate to his knights that
he might consider signing a peace treaty with Rome instead of going to battle. In the
Alliterative Morte Arthure, the king attempts to resist the aristocracy‟s emotional
community and its demands for identity based in violent passions. Though Arthur earlier
signals his masculine power and prowess in the throne room, here in the Giant‟s Tower
he attempts to divorce the drive for honor from violent vengeance, two ideals that are,
according to DeMarco, typically presented in chivalric literature as “mutually constitutive
facets of masculine identity.”34 But Arthur‟s attempt to “redefine worthiness instead as
sovereign circumspection and self-discipline” is short-lived.35 His olive branch is
crushed under the weight of his knights‟ arguments for war. As knight after knight
proclaims his desire to exact vengeance on the Roman Empire, the king, perhaps
31 Patricia DeMarco, “An Arthur For a Ricardian Age: Crown, Nobility, and the Alliterative
Morte Arthure.” Speculum 80 (2005): 464-493, 471.
32 “That chef were of chivalry and cheftains noble / Both wary in their works and wise men of
armes / Doughty in their doings and drede ay shame” (18-20).
33 DeMarco, “Ricardian Age,” 470.
34 DeMarco, “Ricardian Age,” 477.
35 Ibid., 477.
15
reminded of what his chivalric identity requires, is quickly convinced. What is so
striking about Arthur‟s shift back into proper chivalric behavior is his acknowledgment
that his identity relies solely on his community of knights: “My mensk and my manhed
ye maintain in erthe / Mine honour all utterly in other kinges landes” (399-400). While
the king‟s assertion that his knights maintain his manhood likely represents a baronial
fantasy, a covert assertion that “sovereign power derives not…from the sacral nature of
the royal office…but rather from the conquests won by his knights,” Arthur‟s concession
also indicates that emotional regime of the chivalric ethos is reasserted.36 Arthur‟s desire
to continue living in delight and maintain peace is shutdown, and the framework of anger
and bloodshed is resecured.
Taking a cue from the Morte-poet, my project explores the emotional lives of men
in late medieval English literature, asking how Middle English poets confronted the
limits placed on men‟s emotional identities in the face of cultural change. In the case of
King Arthur, for example, his desire to resist prevailing constructions of masculine
emotion and later his desire to mourn his nephew‟s death are cast as pejoratively
feminine. Arthur tries at various moments in the Morte Arthure to reshape what it means
to be man and king, and opens up a space for considering the destructive potential of
chivalric values and their attendant emotional regime.
In exploring the emotional communities of men, I am indebted to the
groundbreaking work in medieval masculinity studies of the past two decades. Chief
among those are Clare Lees‟ Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages
and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler‟s Becoming Male in the Middle Ages.37
In the 1990s, many scholars were suspicious of the then new field of masculinity studies,
36 DeMarco, “Ricardian Age, 480.
37 Clare A. Lees, ed., Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, ed., Becoming
Male in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland: 1994).
16
with its seeming reassertion of masculine hegemony. Despite calls by Judith Butler and
Eve Sedgwick for a more nuanced study of gender and sexuality, the study of masculinity
was met with resistance and face the challenge of reassuring readers that it was not antifeminist and that masculinity was in face a complex issue worth examining. Lees
contends that if we approach masculinity using feminist methodologies, we can uncover a
“very different history of men,” a history that looks beyond the myth of the universal,
monolithic, “hegemonic male.”38 Invoking the warning against reductive or essentialist
notions in Butler‟s Gender Trouble, Lees argues that gender identity is never a consistent
or coherent whole, but rather stands at the volatile intersection of race, class, religion,
sexuality, and national identity. Cohen and Wheeler likewise resist reductive gender
binaries. The Alliterative Morte Arthure offers us a good example of the complexity
these scholars seek, since it shows us how competing models of masculinity can circulate
in the same culture. Just as more than one emotional community may exist
contemporaneously, more than one model of masculinity may exist. Gender and
sexuality, including the construction of masculinity, are not only multiplicitous in nature,
but, as Cohen and Wheeler put it, always in motion, “always crossing lines, always
becoming deterretorialized and reterretorialized, always becoming something other than
an immobile and eternal self-same.”39
Emotional Spaces
When Cohen and Wheeler describe gender as an ongoing process of
deterritorialization and reterritorialization, they urge us to consider how space might
shape and constrain gender identity. Indeed, the construction of masculinity and
femininity is, as Michael Uebel asserts, “nothing less than a process of spatialization.”40
38 Lees, “Introduction,” in Medieval Masculinities, xv-xxv, xv-xvi.
39 Cohen and Wheeler, “Introduction,” in Becoming Male, x.
40 Michael Uebel, “On Becoming-Male,” Becoming Male, ed. Cohen and Wheeler, 368.
17
In my study of masculinity and emotion, I thus pay close attention to a variety of spaces
that enclose emotional communities. I ask how location influenced men‟s emotional
experience and expression in late medieval England. As Arthur‟s blood-shot face and
glowering eyes attest, the masculine body was in many ways a public space, an
advertisement of a man‟s social and sexual identity. The body‟s complexion, the outward
appearance housing those heaving and frothing humors within, was a barometer for
reading gender and emotional stability. But, as I argue, gender and its attendant emotions
are not reducible to the body alone, but are shaped by the spaces the body inhabits.
Rosenwein notes that while emotional communities are often defined by and “anchored
within certain spaces,” a point I emphasize.41
Once again, the Alliterative Morte Arthure provides a useful example. In the
opening lines, the Morte-poet imagines the king, his empire‟s geographic space, and his
sovereignty as overlapping and intertwined bodies that are marked by turbulent emotional
states. King, empire, and sovereignty come together in the Morte-poet‟s use of the word
“crown” to describe Arthur‟s power. “Crown” refers to more than the diadem that sits
atop Arthur‟s head. Yet, it is also more than simply a reference to the king‟s rule or
sovereignty, the definition that most editors ascribe to it. In late medieval political
thought, the “crown” represents the nation‟s body politic that is, as Ernst H. Kantorowicz
argues, at once distinct and inseparable from rex and regnum. Not quite identical to
“realm” or “king,” “crown” was nevertheless closely related to these concepts. As
Kantorowicz explains, “in the phrase „head and Crown‟ the word Crown served to add
something to the purely physical body of the king and to emphasize that more than the
king's „body natural‟ was meant.” Similarly, “in the phrase „realm and Crown‟ the word
Crown served to eliminate the purely geographic-territorial aspect of regnum and to
41 Rosenwein, “The Places and Spaces of Emotion,” Uomo e spazio nell’alto Medioevo: 4-8
Aprille, 2002 (2003): 505-36, 531.
18
emphasize unambiguously the political character of regnum which included also the
emotional value of patria.”42 Crown, then, was the invisible link and conceptual
summation of the physical bodies of the king and his kingdom, the metaphysical
measuring stick that assessed and evaluated “all the royal rights and privileges
indispensable for the government of the body politic.”43 The Middle English Dictionary
(MED) confirms this definitional range, indicating that “coroun” may refer to diadem, the
king himself, the king‟s sovereign powers, the kingdom‟s possessions, or the nation‟s
geographic-territorial holdings.44 When the Morte-poet writes that Arthur had recovered
the “coroun of that kith riche,” he invokes all these referents, including the concept of
embodiment, which is linked to the notion of the “body politic.” Because the Alliterative
Morte Arthure later becomes obsessed with the physis of the king, with the chaotic
emotionality that disrupts his body and behavior, and with the martial prowess that
enables him to destroy the bodies of others, it seems significant that the Morte-poet
begins his tale with reference to a political theory that links the king‟s body to the physis
of his empire and the metaphysis of his nation‟s geo-political sovereign power.
After invoking the theoretical concept of Crown and the body politic, the Mortepoet turns to the physis of Arthur‟s realm. The poet is not simply concerned with the
purely geographic-territorial aspects of regnum, but also emphasizes the metaphysicalpolitical character of regnum and the emotional value of patria. The poet devotes a
staggering twenty-two lines to detailing the spatial magnitude of Arthur‟s crown, listing
no less than thirty-three nations, regions, and cities that encompass most of Western
Europe and Scandinavia, a geographic space that comprises the “coroun of the kyth
42 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieavel Political Theology
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 341.
43 Ibid., 377.
44 Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “coroune,” accessed April 2, 2011,
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med
19
ryche” (28). Here the poet clearly links the crown and body politic with the sprawling
geographic physis of Arthur‟s realm. What is most striking about the Morte-poet‟s map
is its emphasis on the affective economy of conquest and empire. As the poet concludes
his catalog of all those territories that Arthur rules “as him likes”—a phrase that asserts
the pleasure Arthur takes in his program of colonization—he notes that Arthur‟s pleasure
requires that his subjects know him to be “full cruel” (43). “Cruel” may refer to Arthur‟s
bravery and fierceness in battle, but it may also refer to an inclination to “make another
suffer,” and to savage men who are menacing and “apt to inflict injury.”45 This
emphasis on Arthur‟s cruelty is echoed in the end of the poem‟s map, which says that
Arthur “dressed all by drede of himselven,” indicating that it is through dread that the
king rules his empire. Perhaps his subjects‟ “drede” indicates feelings of awe and
reverence (as in the “drede of god”), but the poet also signals the anxiety of conquered
nations as well as the terror and uncertainty that afflicts Arthur‟s vassals.
What does it mean that Arthur rules through an economy of fear? Machiavelli
would later argue that fear is safer and more effective than love as a way for a king to
gain his subject-citizens‟ consent to the power that he holds. Fear, like love, works to
secure relationships between bodies, but, as Ahmed contends, fear operates differently in
that it establishes a difference between bodies.46 When the Morte-poet writes that
Arthur‟s subject-citizens “knew him for lord” through dread of his cruelty, the poet
demonstrates how the socio-political hierarchy is bound to the affective politics of fear
(43-6). Fear establishes the king‟s position as head of the body politic. In
acknowledging the dread of Arthur‟s subjects, the Morte-poet underscores a geography
and history of trauma. The poet casts England as a community that is defined by fear.
45 MED, s.v. “cruel.”
46 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 63.
20
Arthur‟s empire, including its territorial holdings and claims to geo-political
sovereignty, becomes not just an object of communal feeling and a source of pride for its
English subjects, but a body that is defined by its feelings of dread. And in its fear, the
body politic becomes fragmented. As the poet observes early on, the chivalric ethos that
drives Arthur‟s and his knights‟ military actions relies on the ever-present fear of shame
(“drede ay shame,” 20). This fear of shame drives the knights to violence and conquest,
which in turn inspire fear of punishment and death in the conquered subjects. The
difficulty is that fear cannot effectively unite a people. As Ahmed explains, fear cannot
bring bodies together “as a form of shared or fellow feeling”; rather, it is an emotion that
establishes “apartness.”47 Thus, the Morte-poet‟s fantasy of a violent, hypermasculine
English national body generates not a sense of wholeness, but a fractured array of sociopolitical orientations. From the very beginning of his epic then, the poet highlights the
interconnectedness of community, emotion, and space.
My dissertation pursues the links among community, emotion, and space beyond
the Alliterative Morte Arthure. Using three other representative poems, I examine how
emotional communities become defined by a variety of spaces, including those as
intimate as a bedchamber or as public as a church. St. Paul‟s Cathedral, for instance,
symbolizes the tensions between the ecclesiastical and lay communities in fourteenthcentury London, and this religious edifice is crucial to the St. Erkenwald poet‟s
reimagining of a masculine Christian community united by compassion. In The Reeve’s
Tale, Symkyn‟s mill is central to the emotional conflict between two disparate masculine
communities, that of the university men, Alyen and John, and that of the miller.
Lydgate‟s Bycorne and Chyevache asks us to consider how an illustrated misogynist
poem might help a merchant class community confront certain socio-economic anxieties
as it redefines urban interiors such as the hall, parlor, or bedchamber. Perhaps the most
47 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 63.
21
striking example of a similar use of space in the Alliterative Morte Arthure is Arthur‟s
attempt to hide his emotions by fleeing to the confines of his battlefield tent, where, as
Arthur bellows and roars, the Morte-poet points to another important facet of the study of
emotion: sound.
The Soundscape of Emotion
With the scene in Arthur‟s tent, the Morte-poet calls attention to the sound of the
king‟s passions, an overlooked feature of emotional communities that my project
foregrounds. Peter Travis asks us to think of medieval poems as “sonoric landscapes”
wherein sound carries a discursive and political charge.48 Medieval grammarians, he
explains, understood language as not only the expression of meaningful sounds, but also
the suppression of nonverbal or non-meaningful sound. Similarly, music‟s
mathematically arranged concordances required the discrimination and repression of
unwanted sounds. Medieval models of the body politic drew on these prescriptive
discriminations between meaningful and meaningless sound in language and music,
where “dissonance generated by a discordant element is likely to be classified as a
violation of the authorized harmonics of the orderly state.”49
Travis‟s understanding of sound‟s political potential is indebted to Noise: The
Political Economy of Music, in which Jacques Attali describes music or any organization
of sound (including language) as a tool for the creation and consolidation of community,
a symbol of the link between the power center and its subjects. Noise, in contrast,
fundamentally resists the order of language, music, and community, expressing, Attali
argues, “destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution and aggression against code-structuring
48 Peter Travis, “The Noise of History,” in his Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun’s
Priest’s Tale (University of Notre Dame, 2010), 201-66.
49 Travis, “Noise of History,” 202.
22
messages.”50 Because noise exists outside of the linguistic or musical order, it threatens
to violate and contaminate stability. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen puts it, noise “hovers at
the edge of meaning,” and because it cannot articulate but only suggest the merest hint of
coherent morphemes, it “cannot coalesce into signification.”51 The language and music
are the sounds of community identity and when they devolve into noise the very identity
of the community is threatened. Travis, thus, suggests that medieval poets used the
representation of sound to maintain or challenge social and political orders.
That is how the Morte-poet uses Arthur‟s noisy emotional performance in his tent.
After landing on the coast of Normandy, a Templar knight approaches and “touche[s] to
the king” with news of a “grete giaunt of Gene, engendred of fendes” that has “freten of
folk mo than five hundreth” (841-5). As the Templar “touches” (tells) the king, he also
“touches” the king‟s emotional core, triggering an intense outpouring of anxiety and grief
with word that the Giant has raped and murdered the Duchess of Brittany. Upon hearing
of the monster‟s horrific atrocities, Arthur cannot contain his passions any longer.
Running to his tent, the king bellows (“romes”) in anguish as he writhes (“welteres”) and
wrings his hands in what the poet describes as a confused and unreadable performance:
“There was no wye of this world that wiste what he mened” (888-91). Arthur‟s flight to
his tent is an apparent attempt to hide his emotional outburst from his subjects. As
Arthur hides himself in his tent and sounds his anguish, his emotional struggle cuts him
off from the rest of his aristocratic community. When the Morte-poet indicates that
Arthur‟s sounds are entirely illegible, Arthur moves into the indecipherable realm of
noise. When Arthur bellows, he removes himself from the linguistic order and from the
ordered sounds of his emotional community, hovering “between meaningful language
50 Jaques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 27.
51 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, "Kyte oute yugilment: An Introduction to Medieval Noise,"
Exemplaria 16.2 (2004): 267-276, 268.
23
and a perturbing nonlinguistic sonority.”52 The king‟s performance here, to put it in
Atalli‟s terms, acts as destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution and aggression against his
masculine and sovereign identity. With this noisy outburst, the poet momentarily cuts
Arthur off from his aristocratic community.
Though noise functions as a signifier of social discord, it can simultaneously
signal (re)generative opportunities. The bellowing that comes from of Arthur‟s tent may
point to discord, but it may also reveal, as Travis puts it, “liberating opportunities of
social change.”53 Attali notes that “pure noise” is the “absence of all meaning,” but in
that absence is also the “presence of all meaning,” an “absolute ambiguity” that in its
destruction of signification and order opens up the possibility for new meaning and a new
order to replace the old.54 The Middle English conception of “noise” points to this dual
function. As the MED shows, “noise” had a range of meanings and could signify both a
pleasant and an unpleasant emotional state.55 JoAnna Dutka suggests that from an
instrumental perspective medieval “noise” refers to “pleasant musical sounds,” but
Richard Rastall insists that in the non-musical sense “noise” is agitating.56 Thus,
medieval “noise” hovers between pleasure and agitation, between rejoicing and
lamentation, and perhaps between “meaningful language and perturbing nonlinguistic
sonority.”57 The disruptive ambiguity of Arthur‟s bellowing interrupts the social order
while concurrently opening up a way to reimagine masculine emotionality. The Morte52 Cohen, “Medieval Noise,” 269.
53 Travis, “Noise of History,” 204.
54 Attali, Noise, 33.
55 MED, s.v. “noise.”
56 JoAnna Dutka, Music in the English Mystery Plays (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute
Publications, 1980), 101; Richard Rastall, Music in Early English Religious Drama, Vol. 2
(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1996-2001), 89.
57 Cohen, “Medieval Noise,” 269.
24
poet does not clearly signal a new emotional identity for Arthur to replace the old; we
have to wait until the final moments before we see Arthur embrace a feminized emotional
position, a scene I discuss in the epilogue to this dissertation. But it is here at the onset of
Arthur‟s tragic narrative that the poet begins the process of destabilizing the king‟s
masculine identity with the noisy perturbations of his body and soul. The poet then
further undercuts the king by linking the sounds of his emotions with women and
monsters, slowly opening up a space for noise‟s regenerative force.
When Arthur subsequently encounters a weeping widow on Mont St. Michel, the
poet further suggests that Arthur‟s battle with emotional turmoil is a battle with his
masculine identity. Climbing a craggy mountain in search of the Giant, the king spies a
“woful widow wrigand her hands, / And gretand on a grave grisely teres” (950-1). The
widow‟s hand-wringing, bellowing, and crying echoes Arthur‟s noisy emotional
performance in the tent as has the effect of making Arthur‟s earlier performance now
fully legible. Her noisy performance also forecasts the king‟s ultimate breakdown into
widow-like weeping during the narrative‟s final movement, which will blur the emotional
lines that demarcate medieval masculine and feminine identities. Chaucer offers perhaps
the starkest example of the gendered use of grieving. In the Knight’s Tale, tearful,
vociferous grieving is the prerogative of women. To wail loudly is the only actiona
available to the Theban widows, who must beg for a man to act on their behalf. The
Knight casts Duke Theseus as the representative of stoic but also violent masculinity; he
grieves, but only insofar as he expresses and negotiates that grief through an aggressive
act. When Theseus sacks Thebes, he effectively silences the sounds of loss and
melancholy, reasserting order within the Theban community of widows.
In the Alliterative Morte Arthure, Arthur similarly attempts to use masculine
aggression as a recuperative force, but the weeping widow immediately reduces his
proclamation to meaningless gibberish. The king introduces himself as a “curtais and
gentle” knight who will be a “mendement of the pople,” but the “old wife” immediately
25
undercuts Arthur‟s masculine performance, declaring “Ya, thir wordes are but waste,”
explaining that despite Arthur‟s imperials claims, the Giant “for bothe landes and lythes
full little by he settes” (986-94). Reducing Arthur‟s claims to little more than noisy
morphemes that are as senseless as his earlier emotional confusion, the poet pushes the
king to the edge of meaning.58 As Arthur hovers along that edge, the poet links the king
and the Giant, further undercutting Arthur‟s claims to his masculinity and sovereignty.
The Giant, the widow explains, has established his own kingdom within the geographic
physis of Arthur‟s Crown, thereby disrupting the body politic of the English empire. He
has established his own economy of fear and conquest, inspiring, like Arthur, fear and
“drede” in his subjects—evidenced by the kirtle he has sewn out of the beards of the
kings of conquered nations. The widow urges Arthur to submit, to “kneel in thy kirtle
and call him thy lord” (1024). Here the woeful widow, whose affective performance has
already asked readers to recast Arthur as feminine, also attempts to reposition Arthur in a
very specific subject position: that position of dread wherein one cowers before the “full
cruel” gaze of the sovereign. Through the woeful widow‟s affect, Arthur‟s
hypermasculine declarations are meaningless and the poet opens up the possibility for
dislodging Arthur from his privileged masculine socio-political position. Arthur
understands that if he is to reassert his masculinity and sovereignty over both body and
nation and translate his declarations into meaningful morphemes, he needs to destroy the
Giant who threatens to overtake his position.
The Morte-poet, however, refuses Arthur an easy victory, troubling his battle with
echoes of his earlier emotional battles and his alignment with the monstrous and the
feminine. Whether or not Arthur detects these parallels, he clearly recognizes that the
Giant affords him the opportunity to relinquish emotional restraint and give in to violent
rage. Here on the battlefield, outside of the court (and his tent), Arthur finds an
58 MED, s.v. “waste.”
26
appropriate emotional outlet. Indeed, the poet writes that once Arthur finally gazes upon
the Giant, he “shuntes no lenger”—that is, he no longer restrains himself—and rushes at
the Giant in an anxious fury (1055). But as the Giant grabs the king in a vicious embrace,
enclosing the king “clenly to crushen his ribbes,” the poet sounds alliterative and verbal
echoes of the king‟s emotional struggle (1134-5). As Arthur wrestles and rolls about in
the bushes with his naked doppelgänger, the poet links this physical battle with the
widow‟s affective display:
Wrothly they written and wrestle togeders
Welters and wallows over within those buskes
Tumbelles and turns fast and teres with weedes,
Untenderly for the top they tilten togeders,
Whilom Arthur over and other while under… (1140-5).
Echoing the vocabulary and alliteration of both Arthur‟s and the widow‟s sorrowful
outbursts, the poet undermines the king‟s battle with the Giant by reminding the audience
of his earlier difficulties with emotional restraint. Arthur‟s aggression and violence
become suspect. Arthur‟s battle with the Giant asks readers whether the king has
surrendered to an unreasonable level of anger or truly has control over his body. Indeed,
as the king and the Giant tumble and turn together, their bodies become tangled and
confused, tilting and toppling over one another. For one brief moment, the reader cannot
discern which is which. In this moment, the Giant and king become physical
representations of noise. The Giant is a figure who exists outside of the political order;
he is a signifier, like noise, of social discord. As Arthur finds himself momentarily
entangled in an intimate but raucous embrace with this physical manifestation of noise,
the poet imbues the scene with an ambiguity that undercuts Arthur‟s sovereignty over the
physical and the metaphysical. Although Arthur eventually defeats the Giant, the noise
of emotion and melee further batters against his masculine identity.
27
The Discourse of Emotion in Middle English Literature
The Alliterative Morte Arthure offers a useful entry point into the study of
emotion‟s role in medieval gender and community formation. In highlighting the
emotional life of King Arthur and the scripts that his community endorses for expressing
anger, shame, and grief, the Morte-poet exposes the destructive limitations of aristocratic
masculinity in fourteenth-century English culture. Indeed, the Alliterative Morte Arthure
asks readers to interrogate an aristocratic discourse of emotion that privileges aggression,
anger, and violence. The poet‟s emphasis on Arthur‟s fear-riven “crown,” reveals a deep
concern with the aristocracy‟s hypermasculine program of conquest and colonization,
which showcases emotion‟s important overlap with the symbolic function of space. With
Arthur‟s raucous emotionality, the poet likens emotion with sound and highlights the
ways in which the passions can be disruptive. Yet as the poet underscores the destructive
capabilities of emotion, he also opens up a space in which to ponder what would happen
if men were not given to aggression and violence. What would this kind of nonviolent
masculinity look like?
In the following chapters, I explore how Middle English poets grappled with the
norms of emotional expression. I focus on literary texts from the late fourteenth and
early fifteenth centuries because they were created during a time of heightened social
change. In the years after the Black Death, England witnessed significant demographic
shifts and economic volatility that resulted in dramatic transformations in the nation‟s
social landscape. Peasant rebellion, labor shortages, migrant clergy, and an influx of
foreign merchants radically altered the structure of English society during these years.
As a result, the institutions and ideologies that defined masculine identity began changing
in ways not seen before. Poets, I argue, turned to the lexicon of emotion to negotiate
these disruptions. My project demonstrates that emotion was a complex identitydiscourse in the Middle Ages and was fundamental to the construction of premodern
social categories like gender. In the following chapters, I explore three more
28
communities—clergymen, university students, and merchants—demonstrating that each
community was shaped and constrained by a particular emotional ethos. As I show,
Middle English poets were keenly aware of these constraints and their work often
challenged the culture‟s emotional regimes.
In the next chapter, “St. Erkenwald and the Politics of Compassion,” I explore the
poem‟s use of men‟s emotional ties to confront the theological debates and social
tensions that strained relations between the clergy and laity in the fourteenth century. By
most accounts, St. Erkenwald‟s story of a bishop baptizing a revivified pagan corpse with
his tears at St. Paul‟s cathedral is a conservative defense of ecclesiastical authority. I
argue, however, that the poem‟s close attention to the anguish and empathy that
overwhelms both Bishop Erkenwald and the men of London functions as a counternarrative that undermines the clerical community‟s dominance. As the male members of
the episcopate indulge in decidedly unmasculine emotional surfeit, the poet resists the
ecclesiastical community‟s privileged separation from the lay community, and envisions
a Christian community that elides social and political divisions through a shared
emotional ethos. Indeed, the poem emphasizes a new communal harmony, as at the end
of the poem the entire male populace of London—bishops, clerics, and laity alike—
leaves the cathedral behind in a spontaneous procession, discussing their “mourning and
mirth.” In privileging the bonds of emotion, however, the poet skirts the edge of
heterodoxy as he suggests that the fundamental edifices of Christian faith—the
monumental and iconographical—are not as important as the compassion that binds men.
St. Erkenwald disputes long-held beliefs about the authority of the clergy and their power
to maintain social hierarchies, redefining English Christian community as something all
men can participate in equally.
In the third chapter, “The Reeve’s Tale‟s Discourse of (Dis)Passion,” I explore the
educational system that shaped late-medieval university students‟ attitudes about
masculinity. English universities promoted a version of masculine identity that was a
29
mix of ecclesiastic and aristocratic manhood, creating the potential for an identity
conflict. John and Aleyn, the two Cambridge clerks of Chaucer‟s fabliau, face contrary
demands for, on the one hand, quiet dispassion and, on the other, forceful aggression.
The affective work of the tale revolves around the attempt by the two clerks to resolve the
seeming incompatibility of the ecclesiastic and aristocratic worlds. The result is John and
Aleyn that justify violence, especially against women, as a reasonable, rational, and
dispassionate demonstration of masculine dominance. In the Reeve’s Tale, Chaucer
demonstrates that emotion can be a coercive agent that men use not only to form an
emotional community, but also to assert the superiority of their community by
dominating others.
The final chapter, “Lydgate and the Melancholic Merchants” turns to the
merchant class of fifteenth-century London and their anxieties about household
management and financial prosperity. Writing for a wealthy merchant patron, Lydgate
imagines a world where wives not only govern their husbands, but force them to fall
victim to a man-eating monster. The poem thus focuses on a melancholic masculinity
that is captive to grief. I argue that Bycorne and Chychevache uses this melancholy to
address mercantile concerns about household governance, business success, and the
building of a lasting legacy. At the poem‟s end, Lydgate reimagines melancholy as a
sign of power and privilege, departing from the traditional narrative of melancholy as he
converts feelings of disempowerment into signs of masculine exceptionality. In so doing,
Lydgate anticipates early modern writers‟ understanding of melancholic suffering as not
only a mark of spiritual and intellectual greatness in men but also an affect that a man
might adopt by choice.
My goal in these chapters is to demonstrate that medieval emotions, much like
their modern counterparts, are “upheavals of thought,” as Martha Nussbaum puts it, that
30
are so transformative that they can actually “reweave the fabric of one‟s life.”59 Middle
English poets recognized the transformative potential inherent in the lexicon of emotion
and used it to envision alternate versions of masculinity The years from the 1350s to the
1450s were important not only in the emerging tradition of poetry in English, but also for
the development of the language and psychology of emotion. As poets tried to come to
terms with great social changes, they molded and manipulated the discourse of emotion
to interrogate what it meant to be a man in late medieval England. Affective Communities
reveals the importance of emotions as markers of gender and community and shows
literature‟s role in responding to and imagining social change.
59 Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 83.
31
CHAPTER TWO
ST. ERKENWALD AND THE POLITICS OF COMPASSION
A Community in Crisis
While digging the footings for a new St. Paul‟s Cathedral, London‟s merry
masons discover a mysterious tomb engraved with grotesque gargoyles and strange
“roynyshe” markings.60 Unable to curb their curiosity, the men pry open the lid of the
tomb and find a “blissfulle” body, uncorrupted by decay. The episcopate‟s learned
clerics are dumbfounded: the runes are in a queer, indecipherable tongue and neither the
city‟s chronicles nor the church‟s “martirlage” have record of the body that‟s so clearly
marked with signs of holiness and virtue. Word of the iconographical and lexicological
enigma soon reaches the rest of London, and the lay community joins the ecclesiastical
community to marvel, fret, and despair over their inability to make sense of the body.
Bishop Erkenwald, however, hears news of the “troubulle in þe pepul,” of the growing
hysteria that threatens to disrupt the city. He rushes to St. Paul‟s, attempting to calm his
ecclesiastical brethren and reinstitute order in his lay flock through the rituals of High
Mass. The religious ceremonies fail to assuage the mob‟s anxieties and St. Paul‟s dean
frantically explains to the bishop that the body represents something absolutely
“vnknawen.” Erkenwald publicly rebukes the dean for his frenzied response and for
presuming that man‟s intellect could sufficiently “vnlouke” the mystery. Such marvels,
the bishop explains, can only be explicated through an appeal to God‟s grace. Erkenwald
promises that he has come to London to make that appeal and that he will transform the
body into a testament of “faithe and of fine beleue.”
By most accounts, St. Erkenwald is a conservative defense of ecclesiastical
authority. Indeed, when we watch Erkenwald publicly censure the dean, reprove the
60 All references to St. Erkenwald are from Clifford Peterson, ed., Saint Erkenwald (University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1977).
32
Londoners for their anxiety about the uncorrupted corpse, and proclaim his intentions to
reaffirm their Christian faith, it‟s easy to see why scholars like Christine Chism argue that
the Erkenwald-poet ultimately promotes “ecclesiastical hegemony.”61 As John
Scattergood puts it, the poet “asserts the validity of clerical access to the miraculous, and
proposes that the clergy and the clergy alone, have understanding” of religion and all its
mysteries.62
While Erkenwald certainly voices a confident defense of ecclesiastical authority,
the voices of despair and dissent linger throughout much of the poem. Most of the poem‟s
first half is devoted to systematically undermining both the institutional edifice of the
Christian cathedral and the competency of its ecclesiastical elite. Chism rightly suggests
that when Bishop Erkenwald arrives, he enters with an air of strength and authority. But,
in the second half of St. Erkenwald, we watch as the bishop‟s confidence and authority
give way to anxiety and feelings of impotency. Through divine aid, Erkenwald is able to
interrogate the uncorrupted body. Yet, when he discovers that the body represents not a
virtuous Christian king or saint, but rather a pagan from Britain‟s ancient, pre-Christian
past, the bishop‟s promise to reveal an iconographical testament to Christian faith begins
to break down. The Londoners are visibly shaken, confused, and distraught by the
news—many of them erupting in noisy outbursts of emotion—and Bishop Erkenwald‟s
poise subsequently collapses.
In a moment of extraordinary pathos, the bishop sobs over the body and
accidentally baptizes the pagan with his tears. Chism argues that the baptism invokes
“piety and respect for the London episcopal administration,” but given the poet‟s
emphasis on clerical failures, the bishop‟s emotional instability, and the accidental nature
61 Christine Chism, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002),
48.
62 John Scattergood, “St. Erkenwald and the Custody of the Past,” in his The Lost Tradition:
Essays on Middle English Alliterative Poetry (Portland: Four Courts Press, 2000), 179-99, 198.
33
of the baptism, it seems more probable that the poet continues to challenge the authority
of the ecclesiastical elite.63 A close reading shows that the Erkenwald-poet repeatedly
denies the ecclesiastical community its privileged separation from the lay community, its
claims to special knowledge, and access to the divine. The poet instead imagines a new
Christian community that unites ecclesiastical and lay men not through the “architectural
and spatial centrality” of the cathedral or the rituals of Mass, but through the bonds of
emotion.64 Indeed, as soon as Erkenwald baptizes the body, it disappears, leaving no
evidence, no icon for the eye to see. In the end, the Erkenwald-poet suggests that the
fundamental edifices of Christian faith—the monumental and the iconographical—are
not as important as the compassion that bonds men. As the narrative concludes with the
London community—bishop, clerics, and laity alike—leaving the cathedral in a
procession, as bells ring throughout the city, in an aural symbol of the community‟s new
affective bond, St. Erkenwald effectively rewrites the boundaries of masculine Christian
community. The poem ultimately rejects ecclesiastical privilege and instead promotes a
utopian vision of English community where all men, no matter their political or socioeconomic identity, have a place.
Why should a poem that celebrates one of London‟s more important saints
challenge the city‟s ecclesiastical community? The answer lies in fourteenth-century
tensions between the English Church and the laity. For Londoners of the fourteenth
century, St. Paul‟s represented a central civic space, a place that was used not only to
commemorate religious holidays, but also for a variety of secular activities, including
legal business, trading, and various city festivals. These secular activities—many of
which devolved into violent brawls in the churchyard—disturbed many among St. Paul‟s
clerical community, so much so that the dean and his chapter took measures to prevent
63 Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 49.
64 Ibid., 45.
34
the laity from accessing various parts of the cathedral grounds, going so far as to build
gates and walls around the precinct. As Peter Draper notes, the “symbolic function of the
precinct walls should not be under-estimated” as they marked the boundaries between
and defined the limits of London‟s ecclesiastical and lay communities.65 These symbols
of separation, however, did not dampen tensions or prevent the laity from accessing the
cathedral entirely. In 1385, Bishop Braybrooke issued a formal decree threatening to
excommunicate anyone who sold goods, played football, shot at crows, or generally
caused a ruckus at the cathedral. Braybrooke seems to have been more interested and
active in cathedral-city relations than most bishops in the period, but his relationship with
the London laity was nevertheless vexed. His attempts to revive the cult of St.
Erkenwald in 1386 have been seen as an effort to strengthen ties between the cathedral
and London‟s laity.66 However, the cult never generated much enthusiasm among
Londoners, which is perhaps symptomatic not only of the city‟s relationship with the
bishop, but also of its increasing feelings of detachment from the cathedral.67 The wills
of Londoners in this period demonstrate a remarkable disregard for St. Paul‟s, with very
few bequests to the old or new works at the cathedral.68 Moreover, the laity had very
little interest in establishing chantries in St. Paul‟s in this period.
These feelings of detachment may have been the result of Bishop Braybrooke‟s
program of retrenchment and reform at St. Paul‟s that, in many ways, emphasized the gap
65 Peter Draper, “Enclosures and Entrances in Medieval Cathedrals,” in The Medieval English
Cathedral: Papers in Honour of Pamela Tudor-Craig, Harlaxton Medieval Studies X, ed. Janet
Backhouse (Lincolnshire: Shaun Tyas, 2003), 76-88, 78.
66 Caroline M. Barron and Marie-Helene Rousseau, “Cathedral, City and State, 1300-1540,” in
St. Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London, ed. Derek Keene, Arthur Burns, and Andrew Saint
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 33-44, 40.
67 Barron, “London and St. Paul‟s Cathedral in the Later Middle Ages” in The Medieval English
Cathedral, ed. Backhouse, 126-49, 129-30.
68 Barron and Rousseau, “Cathedral,” 35.
35
between clergymen and laity. While cutting back on the clergymen‟s “burden of
hospitality”—a burden that required canons to hold large banquets that would promote
“friendship” between church and city—Braybrooke also continued in the spirit of
thirteenth-century efforts to further isolate the cathedral and its ecclesiastical body from
its urban surroundings.69 Braybrooke supported increasing the church‟s economic
hegemony, giving, for example, St. Paul‟s college of minor canons a new, separate legal
identity that allowed them to own and rent out land.70 Caroline Barron suggests that St.
Paul‟s dean and canons likely became the largest landholders in all of London in this
period. Braybrooke‟s reforms and the anonymous St. Erkenwald—some scholars argue
for a 1386 date for authorship—coincide in a period when tensions between ecclesiastic
and lay communities often gave way to anticlerical polemic. St. Paul‟s was an important
site for marking religious dissent, with Lollards nailing their anticlerical and heterodox
manifestos to the doors of the cathedral in 1382, 1387, and 1395.71 Given how large a
symbol of the social tensions between the ecclesiastical and laity St. Paul‟s was, it is
perhaps not surprising that the Erkenwald-poet would locate his critique at the site of
London‟s cathedral.
The late-fourteenth century was a period of widespread social change and unrest
that provoked anticlerical sentiment. As the labor shortage that followed the Black Death
created opportunities for social mobility and financial gain, the Church quickly
discovered that it was not “immune from the fluidity and commercialism of late
fourteenth-century society.”72 While the thirteenth century witnessed a dramatic
69 Barron and Rousseau, “Cathedral,” 34.
70 Virginia Davis, “The Lesser Clergy in the Later Middle Ages,” St. Paul’s: The Cathedral
Church of London, ed. Keene, Burns, and Saint, 157-61, 159.
71 Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 73, 97, 200.
72 Gerald Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), 356.
36
increase in the ranks of the clergy to the point that there were not enough benefices to go
around—some estimates indicate that there were as many as four or five priests for every
English parish73—the plague decimated the clerical surplus. In fact, after the Black
Death, there was a shortage of clergy that left many poor, rural areas without parish
priests.74 The plague no doubt killed some clergy, but one of the major reasons for the
shortage was that new, lucrative business opportunities in crafts and trade lured many
men away from training for the priesthood. At the same time, the clergymen who
remained found an ever increasing demand for their services and, therefore, more
opportunities for profit. Many chaplains and cantarists migrated from the countryside to
larger ecclesiastical centers where they could find better endowments and lay
contributions. Gerald Harriss notes that London, in particular, “offered profitable
employment and was a magnet for priests from other dioceses.”75 The influx of outsider,
profit-motivated priests into London became rich fodder for anticlerical attacks, including
those of Chaucer‟s Parson, who lambasts migrant priests in the Canterbury Tales‟
General Prologue:
Wel oghte a preest ensample for to yive,
By his clennesse, how that his sheep sholde lyve.
He sette nat his benefice to hyre
And let his sheep encombred in the myre
And ran to Londoun unto Seinte Poules
To seken hym a chauntrie for soules
Or with a bretherhed to been witholde.76
While the profit-motivations of the clergymen no doubt helped undermine the
laity‟s trust in their spiritual guides, the increase in lay literacy in the fourteenth-century
73 J.H. Moorman, Church Life in England in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1945), 52-3.
74 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 355.
75 Ibid., 355.
76 Geoffrey Chaucer, “General Prologue,” Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed.
Larry Benson, 3rd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 505-511.
37
also challenged ecclesiastical authority. The Church‟s privileged access to religious
learning—learning that was denied to the laity because of the Church‟s insistence on
Latin as the sacred language—meant that the clergy “controlled the means of salvation”
and kept the laity in a subordinate and passive role; however, the growth in lay literacy
led to a growing curiosity about the meanings of religious rituals and texts.77 An
English translation of the Bible, along with religious instructional and devotional texts,
began circulating widely in the period. The Church was suspicious of the translation of
sacred texts into English, which, as Harriss notes, “invaded clerical control of their
interpretation and charismatic authority.”78 Chism argues that the Erkenwald-poet,
writing during this period of religious tumult, offers a solution to the ecclesiastical
community‟s anxieties by quelling the growing “civic and religious agency of the London
laity.”79 I will argue just the opposite, that the Erkenwald-poet offers a challenge to the
intellectual and spiritual elitism of London‟s episcopate.
The pronounced religious conflicts and socio-economic volatility that
characterized late-fourteenth century England likely would have left many yearning for
some sense of stability. The endgame of St. Erkenwald‟s critiques of the Church‟s
institutional edifice is to offer a solution for those Englishmen seeking stability. I say
Englishmen because the Erkenwald-poet specifically targets the masculine-dominant
institution of the medieval Church and defines the London laity as an entirely masculine
community. (Women are conspicuously absent from St. Erkenwald‟s London.) The
Erkenwald-poet uses the enigmatic tomb in order to dispute the authority of St. Paul‟s
community of clerics and effectively lower them to the same level as the English laity.
At the same time, St. Erkenwald challenges the traditional symbols of religious ritual,
77 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 352.
78 Ibid., 353.
79 Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 44.
38
hierarchy, and masculine identity—symbols that represent the gulf between clergymen
and laymen—and replaces them the bonds of a communal compassion.
The Monuments of Masculinity
The Erkenwald-poet makes it clear from the start he is interested in disrupting the
monuments that define English masculinity and religious community, beginning with a
question about the integrity of English history. St. Erkenwald devotes its first thirty-eight
lines—no small amount in a poem that numbers only 352 lines total—to challenging
temporality as a single, reliable, and immutable narrative of national and religious
conquest. Indeed, the poet obliterates all sense of time‟s linearity and singularity when
he invites several moments, separated by centuries, to coexist. As Karl Steel notes,
temporality in St. Erkenwald is anything but linear; rather, time is “piled up, mixed, all
moments touching.”80 The poem‟s first line curiously places its events “noght fulle
longe sythen” Christ‟s crucifixion, yet mention of the poem‟s eponymous hero, St.
Erkenwald, in the fourth line also places us in the seventh century.81 Not long after, the
cathedral-building project is referred to as the “New Werke,” a well-known thirteenthcentury rebuilding venture (38). In the Erkenwald-poet‟s hands, time is plural and
overlapping. This temporal heterogeneity defies what Jonathan Gil Harris calls the
“national sovereignty model of temporality,” where “each moment [has] a determining
authority reminiscent of a nation-state‟s: that is, firmly policed borders and a shaping
constitution.”82 In place of these policed borders, St. Erkenwald offers a history without
80 Karl Steel, “Will Wonder Never Cease: St. Erkenwald with Claustrophilia,” In the Middle,
November 19, 2009, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2009/11/will-wonders-never-cease-sterkenwald_17.html, par 4.
81 Erkenwald was consecrated Bishop of East Saxon in 675. For a brief account of Erkenwald‟s
life, see Eamon Duffy, "London's Cathedral Saint and His Legend," The Medieval English
Cathedral, ed. Backhouse, 150-67.
82 Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 2.
39
borders that is akin to Carolyn Dinshaw‟s desire for all moments to touch one another
and form “networks around each other in which no moment will ever quite be abandoned
or ever simply itself.”83 The poet establishes a temporality that dislocates linear
understandings of time that maintain masculinist heteronormative regimes, and collapses
temporalities as a way of elegizing specific moments and peoples in the past, allowing
those moments to touch each other and the present while eliding the painful, disquieting
moments in between. While the purpose of the Erkenwald-poet‟s affective historymaking is not clear at first, it is important to note that he sets up the potential for time to
act as a conduit for affective connections. The poet breaks down the barriers of time,
allowing his audience to entertain the idea of touching the past.
St. Erkenwald‟s first thirty-eight lines also challenge the efficacy of
monumentality as a stabilizing force and symbol of community identity. More
specifically, the Erkenwald-poet assesses the ability of Christian monuments to serve as
lasting touchstones for religious identity. Opening amidst a tumultuous period of
religious and political transition, the poem reminds us of Britain‟s fractious identity in the
early medieval period. As Ruth Nisse explains, the Erkenwald-poet begins by
“questioning the historical integrity of British Christianity with an explanation of the
need to demolish the very center of the English Church, St. Paul‟s Cathedral, because of
the Saxon use of it „in Hengist dawes‟ as a pagan temple and reestablish it, free of the
pollution of religious syncretism.”84 The city of London had been converted once to
Christianity, then the heathen Saxons came and “peruertyd alle þe pepul” into wicked
apostates who turned the holy churches into vile “temples þat temyd to þe deuelle” and
83 Steel, “Will Wonder Never Cease,” par 4. Carolyn Dinshaw, in Getting Medieval: Sexualities
and Communities, Pre- and PostModern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), explores the
“fellowships” connecting queer subjects past and present, and argues that imagined communities
can be built among marginalized peoples across time.
84 Ruth Nisse, “„A Coroun Ful Riche‟: The Rule of History in St. Erkenwald,” English Literary
History 65 (1998): 277-295, 277.
40
began to worship all manner of pagan deities, from Apollo to Mahoun (10-11). But St.
Augustine arrived after a number of “ronke yeres” and “plantyd the trouthe / And
conuertyd alle þe communnates to Christendome new” (13-14). Augustine “clansyd” the
pagan temples through a series of name changes that Nisse calls a “linguistic sleight of
hand,” transforming, for example, Jupiter and Juno into Jesus and James respectively.85
We might think of the converted temples as a sort of architectural manuscript that
functions like a palimpsest, the buildings and their names still carrying traces of the
pagan past. Steel writes that the memory of the temples “persist[s] in or with the
churches poetically, through the stressed J that sustains the past as a point of contact, as
an echo.”86 Through alliteration, the poet makes sure that Jesus sounds Jupiter and
James calls on Juno, makes certain that the Christian names of the churches resound with
echoes of the heathen past. After a period of monument razing and rebuilding, “þe
temple Triapolitan…abatyd and beten doun and buggyd efte new” as St. Paul‟s
Cathedral. The “mayster-toun” of London, seat of the “mecul mynster,” then becomes
the architectural focus for remaking London as a monument to English Christian identity.
The Erkenwald-poet understands what Henri Lefebvre refers to as
monumentality‟s “clearly intelligible message”: the monument claims to “express
collective will and thought,” asserts itself as a marker of social, political, and religious
consensus, a symbol of everyone‟s membership in a particular community and
ideology.87 The poet demonstrates, however, that monumentality‟s claim to consensus is
specious, since monumentality can be more accurately described as a form of coercion
used by a dominant community to marginalize, repress, and eradicate the identities of the
85 Nisse, “Rule of History,” 277.
86 Steel, “Will Wonder Never Cease,” par. 4.
87 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Blackwell, 1992),
143, 220.
41
minority. Lefebvre asserts that monumentality is an inherently masculinist project,
violating the landscape as it erects spaces dedicated to gods and kings, spaces that
represent force, violence, and power.88 In St. Erkenwald, Christianity re-conquers the
heathen English through a violent architectural stratagem; suppression and conversion are
achieved by razing and rebuilding the pagan spaces as inescapable markers of Christian
supremacy. This sort of architectural oppression was not unfamiliar to the English; St.
Erkenwald‟s cathedral building echoes other moments in England‟s long history of
colonization, most notably the Norman Conquest. Anglo-Saxon England‟s political and
cultural subjection to the Normans, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen notes, “found blunt material
expression in the spectacular reconfiguring of cityscape and countryside.” The Normans
built a castle and cathedral “machine” that transformed the topography of England with
stone monuments that asserted the conquest‟s permanence.89 St. Erkenwald describes
the violent process of tearing down the old St. Paul‟s, a perverted monument that is not
simply demolished (“abatyd”), but also viciously “beten doun” before it can be built
anew (37).
The Christian cathedral with its enormous towers reaching toward heaven evokes
an atemporal ideal of the human spirit transcending death and living on in perpetuity.
Such atemporality made the cathedral an affective touchstone for the religious
community, a touchstone that could transform “the fear of the passage of time, and
anxiety about death, into splendor.”90 The cathedral was meant to be a concrete, stable
marker of communal ideology, assuring its members of God‟s omnipotence and the
existence of an afterlife. The Erkenwald-poet, however, undermines the cathedral‟s value
88 Lefebvre, Space, 262.
89 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “The Flow of Blood in Medieval Norwich,” Speculum 78 (2004): 2665, 33, 38.
90 Lefebvre, Space, 221.
42
as an affective touchstone when he challenges its fundamental claim to durability and
permanence. The poet seems to echo Lefebvre‟s insistence that monumentality is always
“unable...to achieve a complete illusion.”91 The Erkenwald-poet reminds us that St.
Paul‟s Cathedral, in both its Anglo-Saxon and later iterations, will not last, keeping fears
of the passage of time alive. The poet refers to the cathedral-building project that Bishop
Erkenwald oversees as the “New Werke” (38), a term that was used to describe the
thirteenth-century renovation of St. Paul‟s cathedral. The anachronism of locating a
thirteenth-century construction project in the seventh century disrupts temporality and a
masculine narrative of national and religious sovereignty. Like the Beowulf-poet who
tells his readers of Heorot‟s impending demise, the Erkenwald-poet reminds us that the
seventh-century project is not the last, that St. Paul‟s will burn to the ground in 1087, will
face the flames one again in 1136, and will undergo a massive renovation program
between 1256 and 1314. The poet thus uses the “New Work” construction project to
undercut the effectiveness of the cathedral as a stable affective touchstone for the
religious community.
Just as St. Paul‟s future acts as a destabilizing force, so too does the cathedral‟s
past in the form of the tomb and its uncorrupted body. The tomb is presented as an
enigma that tantalizes the episcopacy and laity alike, but defies understanding. The poet
describes the tomb as:
Hit was throghe of thykke ston thryuandly hewen,
Wyt gargeles garnysht aboutes alle of gray marbre.
The sprele of þe spelunke þat sparde hit o-lofte
Was metely made of þe marbre and menskefully planede,
And þe bordure enbelicit wyt bryʒt golde letters,
Bot roynyshe were þe resones þat þer on row stoden (47-52).
While the skillfully carved marble garnished with grotesque monstrosities is likely meant
to inspire wonder in Londoners that such a “menskefully planede” work would lie hidden
91 Lefebvre, Space, 222.
43
beneath their cathedral‟s site, the tomb‟s basic appearance is entirely conventional. As D.
Vance Smith notes, the “work of the tomb itself emerges from within, so to speak, the
audience‟s horizon of aesthetic expectation, and can be appreciated and evaluated without
a hint of anachronism or ethnocentrism disturbing the scene.”92 The tomb‟s evocation of
death would also have not been disturbing. Late medieval parish churches and cathedrals
were spaces for commemorating the death, with cemeteries, altars celebrating saints, and
chantries memorializing members of the clergy and laity.93 St. Paul‟s was no exception
and it became increasingly popular as a burial site in the late medieval period. What is
disturbing is not its associations with death, but the “unlocatability of the tomb and the
body within, quite literally, the interior work of memory.”94 When the learned clerks of
St. Paul‟s episcopate fail to identity the tomb, history and temporality once again break
down, and with them the commemorating function of the church.
The Erkenwald-poet first indicates this disruptive “unlocatability” with the
“roynyshe” letters inscribed on the tomb. The Middle English Dictionary (MED) notes
that “renishe” and “runishe,” meaning “strange, uncouth” and “strange, mysterious”
respectively were often confused in Middle English.95 Clifford Peterson notes that with
“roynyshe,” Erkenwald-poet uses “not one but two words” with separate etymologies.96
92 D. Vance Smith, “Crypt and Decryption: Erkenwald Terminable and Interminable,” in New
Medieval Literature Vol. 5, ed. Rita Copeland, David Lawton, and Wendy Scase (Oxford
University Press, 2002), 59-85, 60.
93 Clive Burgess, “„Longing to be Prayed For‟: Death and Commemoration in an English Parish
in the Later Middle Ages,” The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval
and Early Modern Europe, ed. Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 44-65; see Beat Kumin, The Shaping of Community: The Rise and
Reformation of the English Parish c. 1400-1560 (Scolar Press, 1996), 159-167 for a discussion on
chantries and their use in parish churches for commemorating deaths.
94 Smith, “Crypt and Decryption,” 60.
95 Middle English Dictionary, s.vv. “renishe,” “runishe,” accessed October 22, 2009,
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/
96 Peterson, Saint Erkenwald, 91, n52.
44
To be “strange, mysterious” is to be queer, uncategorizable, and indecipherable. To be
“strange, uncouth,” is to be alien and barbarous. The “roynyshe” words on the tomb
perhaps recall England‟s pre-Christian past with its fractious history of violence,
conquest, and conversion. The “roynyshe” inscription, mysterious and uncouth, forces
the Londoners to remember the ruins of the razed pagan temple, which form the
foundation of the cathedral that they stand on as well as to acknowledge the tomb as
some savage part of their ancestry. The “roynyshe” lettering suggests an uncategorizable
enigma, but at the same time locates the tomb in the (barbaric) English past. While the
“resones” (or sentences) are unreadable, it is “their very impenetrability,” as Seeta
Chaganti puts it, “their resistance to being read” that challenges English religious
identity.97
The Noisy Episcopate
The tomb‟s impenetrable, “roynyshe” inscription challenges the authority of the
“numerous and essential body” of learned clerics that made up St. Paul‟s ecclesiastical
community. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the English episcopate, with its
network of deacons, vicar-generals, canons, and priests, “constituted an intellectual,
administrative, and…spiritual elite.”98 While the bishop was nominally the leader of the
episcopacy and its cathedral, it was usually the dean and the major canons who saw to
administration and finances. As senior members of the Church, the duties of deans and
canons to royal and ecclesiastical administration meant they had “relatively little time to
devote themselves exclusively to their cathedral duties.”99 Indeed, the prebendal system
that developed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries demanded absenteeism. Thus, the
97 Seeta Chaganti, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription,
Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 56.
98 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 323.
99 Davis, “The Lesser Clergy,” 157.
45
daily liturgical cycle at secular cathedrals like St. Paul‟s was left to a host of lesser
clergymen that included minor canons, vicars choral, chantry priests, and lay clerks, at
times numbering more than 500 in all.100 Although the dean was theoretically supposed
to manage and supervise this massive body of lesser clerics, making sure that they
performed their duties, this was not easily accomplished. The lesser clergy at St. Paul‟s
cathedral received, as Kathleen Edwards points out, “more than their fair share of
condemnation” in this period, facing accusations of immorality, avarice, and
negligence.101 They were frequently were frequently censured for moral improprieties
and became the target of complaint.102 Thus, a number of reforms were instituted
throughout the late-medieval period that sought to clarify the qualifications, duties, and
lifestyles of the lesser clergy. Bishop Braybrooke, who led the London episcopacy when
St. Erkenwald was written, was especially known for his efforts to reform St. Paul‟s
ecclesiastical community and its relationship with the city of London.103 While
attempting to address complaints, Braybroke‟s reforms perhaps aggravated tensions,
since many of his changes privileged ecclesiastics and gave groups like the minor canons
more wealth and power.
When the Erkenwald-poet imagines “clerkes” crowned with tonsures studying the
“roynyshe” script, he likely refers to the cathedral‟s body of lesser clergymen that
includes the college of minor canons, a community of ecclesiastical elite unique to St.
Paul‟s. The twelve minor canons that, among their many important administrative duties,
100 Barron and Rousseau, “Cathedral,” 34; Barron, “London and St. Paul‟s,” 129.
101 Kathleen Edwards, The English Secular Cathedral in the Middle Ages (Manchester
University Press, 1949), 36-7; See also William Page, “Secular Canons: Cathedral of St. Paul,” A
History of the County of London (1909), 409-433, accessed December 15, 2009,
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=35353.
102 Page, “Secular Canons,” 411.
103 Davis, “The Lesser Clergy,” 159-60; Barron and Rousseau, “Cathedral,” 36-8.
46
deputized for the major canons in singing the daily service, represented the apex in St.
Paul‟s lesser clergy. Typically, the duties of the secular cathedral‟s major canons were
handed down to the vicars choral, but St. Paul‟s had an extra body of clerical elite in the
form of minor canons. While there was considerable overlap in the function and
obligations of the minor canons, vicars choral, and chantry priests, St. Paul‟s minor
canons had considerably more prestige and income. As Virginia Davis puts it, they were
seen as the “winners in the race for promotion” in an age when benefice was not
guaranteed.104 The college of minor canons did not consist just of men born into
privilege, but was a community theoretically open to “all social ranks except freedmen
and serfs.”105 For men in the fourteenth century, the minor canons thus represented a
potential avenue for social mobility. Nevertheless, the men who achieved the status of
canon had to be both intellectually superior and ambitious. They also had to make
connections with important people as they competed for promotion, give that, as Derek
Neal explains, anyone with clerical ambitions had to “confront the pervasive and
inescapable importance of competition and patronage.”106 Indeed, many English men
may have jettisoned their clerical ambitions in dismay “at learning that being a
clergyman” required too much of them, “required too much masculinity, too much
competition, sycophancy, and entanglement.”107 Edwards notes that the English
chapters, including St. Paul‟s college of minor canons, “included many new men,
particularly clerks who had risen in the royal service or at the universities.”108 We can
assume then that most of the men who reached the level of minor canon were not only
104 Davis, “The Lesser Clergy,” 159.
105 Ibid., 158.
106 Derek Neal, The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England (University of Chicago Press,
2008), 92.
107 Ibid., 121.
108 Edwards, English Secular Cathedral, 34.
47
well, but represented some of the most clever, ambitious, and competitive men in the
English church.
Despite the sometimes humble origins of these powerful Church men, there is
little evidence to suggest that the minor canons had strong relationships with the London
laity. Rather, their loyalties and interests seem to have been linked with the cathedral.
Many of these men were not Londoners by birth, and financial records and wills attest to
their loyalty to the ecclesiastical community over the city and its people (very few canons
left money to anyone in London).109 It is difficult to know for certain if the minor
canons‟ outsider status upset the London laity, but we can speculate that it exacerbated
the gulf between St. Paul‟s ecclesiastic body and Londoners. Perhaps even more
aggravating was the enormous financial power these men exercised in London.
While this group of clerical elite had existed in some form for centuries at St.
Paul‟s, it was Bishop Braybrooke who formalized the college‟s existence in 1394.
Braybooke‟s objective was not only to organize St. Paul‟s twelve minor canons into a
cohesive religious community that wore the same clothing and shared the same dining
space, but also to give them a “legal identity as a community with a common seal” that
allowed them to communally own property.110 Edwards points out that with such
enormous powers being granted to these “close corporations” of cathedral canons, they
eventually gained “almost complete control over the cathedral government and
business.”111 In addition, financial records indicate that the canons did not shy away
from using their power to amass vast amounts of wealth.112 The dean and his chapter of
canons held such a large estate of urban property that Barron suggests they were
109 Barron and Rousseau, “Cathedral,” 36.
110 Davis, “The Lesser Clergy,” 159.
111 Edwards, English Secular Cathedral, 35.
112 Ibid., 39-49.
48
“probably the largest single landowner in the city,” and in part because of their wealth
became, Barron suggests, “more remote, or cut off, from the city in the later medieval
period” partly because of their financial hegemony. 113
When St. Paul‟s clerics convene to study and discuss the mysterious tomb, the
Erkenwald-poet speaks to this context of fourteenth-century criticisms of the
ecclesiastical elite. “Mony clerkes,” the poet writes, study those queer “vigures”
engraved in the marble and “muset hit to mouthe and quat hit mene shulde,” but no one is
able to parse the “roynyshe” symbols (54). Despite the London clerics‟ best efforts, they
cannot “brynge hom in wordes,” cannot translate the ruins into a language they
understand (56). The cleric‟s intellectual superiority and special access to the divine
relied heavily on his skills in languages beyond the vernacular. Latin, of course, was one
of the principal markers of the gulf between ecclesiastical and laity—that is, the priests‟
privileged access to Latin symbolized that they “controlled the means of salvation”—but
the elite clergyman was expected to know other languages and be adept in allegoresis. 114
Unexpectedly, however, at the tomb in St. Paul‟s, the clerics‟ linguistic skills fail them:
they are confronted with an inscrutable set of signs and their authority begins to break
down. In this moment of inexplicability when the clerks try “to mouthe” the sounds of
the “roynyshe” sentences but fail to understand what those sounds mean, we encounter an
ecclesiastical community—including perhaps the most masculine of all churchmen, as
Neal might put it—made impotent.115
113 Barron, “London and St. Paul‟s,” 133, 129-30; see also D. Keene and V. Harding, A Survey
of Documentary Sources for Property Holding in London Before the Great Fire (London Record
Society, 1985), 40-9 and C.N.L. Brooke, “The Earliest Times to 1485,” in A History of St. Paul’s
Cathedral and the Men Associated With It, ed. W.R. Matthews and W.M. Atkins (London, 1957),
60-5.
114 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 352-3.
115 In The Masculine Self, Neal‟s suggestion that the priesthood may have demanded “too much
masculinity” in the eyes of many late-medieval men refers to all levels of priesthood (121).
However, given the competition and patronage requires of the minor canon, we might presume
that the minor canon represented some of the most “masculine” of all churchmen.
49
The Erkenwald-poet marks this impotency with the noise of the clerics‟
frustration and anxiety. The verb “musen” typically means “to ponder, meditate, reflect,
or muse,” but it also implies nervous affect, such as fretting, worrying, brooding, and
thinking ill thoughts.116 “Musen” can also signify “to murmur uneasily, mutter, grumble,
and complain.” Given the Londoners‟ anxious, almost hysterical response to the
uncorrupted corpse later in the poem, it is likely that the clerics‟ musings indicate anxiety
and frustration over their own inability to make sense of the tomb and its engravings. As
the clergymen mumble and mouth the inscription, wondering “quat it mene shulde” (54),
their intellectual musings give way to fretful ponderings and, as they fail to decipher the
words, they begin to grumble and mumble about their lexicological shortcomings.
In this scene, the Erkenwald-poet begins to interrogate the efficacy of religious
icons and sight itself through the clerics‟ murmuring frustrations and failed attempts to
understand the “roynyshe” text. Medieval theories of the bodily senses taught that, as
C.M. Woolgar says, there were “special connections between sight, the imagination and
memory” and these connections were especially crucial to the “process of religious
contemplation and thought.” With a “fertile imagination,” a man could meditate on an
object from or image of the past and “conjure before him and create the reality of the
events of the past.”117 Woolgar argues that there must have been a “common
imagination and way of seeing things” that would help viewers understand national and
religious iconography, and that would allow an artist to use iconography to “inspire
particular recollections” and feelings about the past.118 The “roynyshe” tomb, however,
defies the Londoners‟ imaginations, flouts their ability to conjure whatever event in the
116 MED, s.v. “musen.”
117 C.M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England, (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2007), 187.
118 Ibid., 187.
50
past the sepulcher represents. Without a recognizable language or icon to guide them
towards a specific memory about the past and without a competent body of clerics to
render the language and icons recognizable, the London laity of St. Erkenwald soon finds
themselves in complete disarray.
Once word of the inexplicable marvel reaches the city, the strange “tithynges”
spark a desire among the laity to congregate, gaze upon, and make sense of the “toumbe
wonder” (57). The Erkenwald-poet defines this London lay community as entirely
masculine and social undifferentiated:
Mony hundred hende men highide þider sone.
And mony a mesters mon of maners diuerse.
Laddes laften hor werke and lepen þiderwardes,
Ronnen radly in route wyt ryngande noyce (58-62).
In five short lines, the Erkenwald-poet covers the entire masculine social spectrum,
beginning with “burgys,” an enormously broad category that refers to any urban freeman,
merchant, or craftsmen, and ending with “laddes,” a term for both youths and low-born
churls.119 The immediate effect of the enigmatic tomb on London is one of both
inclusion and exclusion: the tomb builds an inclusive community, except that women are
excluded.
What is even more striking is that the poet hereafter almost entirely elides
differences between London‟s ecclesiastical and lay communities. The Erkenwald-poet
never again refers to the cathedral‟s ecclesiastical community as a separate entity. There
is a later reference to St. Paul‟s dean, and Bishop Erkenwald, of course, the leader of the
episcopate, takes center stage shortly thereafter, but the body of lesser clergymen—the
canons, clerics, and priests—are completely subsumed into the body of Londoners. The
confusion the tomb inspires has the effect of uniting clergy and laity into a single,
anxious mob. Their anxious musings serve as a prelude to London‟s “ryngande noyce,”
119 MED, s.vv. “burgeis,” “ladde.”
51
and it is in this noise that we find the origins of a new affective community of London
men, clerical and lay.
While the clerks‟ vocal musings hint at an anxious emotional response to the
“roynyshe” tomb, the “noyce” of the Londoners provides a much clearer indication of the
tomb‟s emotional effect. As the MED shows, “noyce” can suggest both a pleasant and
unpleasant emotional state, although the word typically favors the latter definition.
Though the men‟s “noyce” may reveal a pleasurable level of excitement, it can also
indicate perturbing feelings, anxious commotions, and outcries of lamentation.120
Mirroring the clerics‟ frustrations, the men of London erupt in a loud “noyce” that gives
voice to a shared emotional state and indicates an originary moment of masculine
community building.
That might seem an odd claim, since noise is usually seen as an underminer of
community. As I note in the first chapter, noise resists the order of language and the
community language signifies, expressing what Jaques Attali describes as “destruction,
disorder, dirt, pollution and aggression against code-structuring messages.”121 Noise
“hovers,” as Cohen puts it, “at the edge of meaning,” and because it cannot articulate but
only hint at coherent morphemes, it “cannot coalesce into signification.”122 The voices
of language are the sounds of community identity and when the voices of St. Erkenwald‟s
London devolve into the indefinite sounds of “noyce,” the signification and therefore the
very identity of that community is threatened. Late medieval theories of the bodily
senses conceived of the world as a moral soundscape, with each sound having an
120 MED, s.v. “noise.”
121 Jaques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 27.
122 Cohen, "Kyte oute yugilment: An Introduction to Medieval Noise," Exemplaria 16.2 (2004):
267-276, 268.
52
association with good or evil. Woolgar notes that “cacophony, pure noise, senseless
words” were associated with all manner of moral depravity and even had links with the
Devil himself.123 If noise is the “interdiction of transmitted meaning,” whatever
emotions St. Paul‟s clerics or the London men are attempting to convey to each other are
imprecise and garbled.124 Rather than define their emotions with the English vocabulary
and impose order on their passions through language, the Erkenwald-poet mangles their
syntax and reveals a group of men reeling in disorder, staggering in their collective
frustrations, unable to make sense of the “roynyshe” tomb and their feelings about it. As
the London men stare at the strange tomb, all they can do is make noise.
Though the London men “ronnen radly” along the edge of meaning, their noise
nevertheless signifies the potential to build their community anew. “[P]ure noise” may
be the “absence of all meaning,” but Attali writes that in that absence is also the
“presence of all meaning,” an “absolute ambiguity” that in its destruction of signification
and order opens the way for a new order to replace the old.125 As noise signals
destruction, it simultaneously signals regeneration. The fluidity of the Middle English
conception of “noyce” perfectly conveys this simultaneity. Woolgar argues that most
Middle English words for the bodily senses were fluid and uncodified, perhaps indicating
that the late medieval understanding of the bodily senses, including emotion, was
ambiguous as well.126 This ambiguity in the discourses of sense perception and emotion
gave medieval authors opportunities to trouble and renegotiate identity. The ambiguity
of their emotional “noyse” both disrupts the London community in St. Erkenwald while
simultaneously offering the community the chance to reimagine and reorder itself. The
123 Woolgar, The Senses, 75.
124 Attali, Noise, 25.
125 Ibid, 33.
126 Woolgar, The Senses, 6-7.
53
“noyce” dissolves social stratification and unites the men into a single body; it “destroys
order to structure a new order.”127 The Erkenwald-poet uses the noise of confused
emotions to raze the Londoner‟s community, making space for the building of a new
communal identity.
The disruptive-regenerative potential of noise and emotion carries through much
of the poem. For example, as soon as the men pry open the marble tomb and peer within,
their emotional response to the uncorrupted flesh of the “blissfulle body” with its
unblemished “rialle wedes” is both troubling and unifying: “Bot þen wos wonder to wale
on wehes þat stoden, / That myʒt not come to knowe a quontyse strange” (73-4). The
men‟s shared sense of wonder indicates an ambiguous emotional state, a feeling that is at
once giddy, happily astonished and excited, but also perplexed, distressed, and perhaps
even ashamed.128 None of the London men, from the cathedral clerics to the working
“laddes,” can parse the “roynyshe” letters or make sense of the tomb and its body. The
Erkenwald-poet captures that anxiety and shame in his use of the subjunctive “myʒt,”
stressing that the men‟s wonder comes in part from a concern that they might never
figure out who this corpse is and what it means. Indeed, the almost redundant phrase
“quontyse strange”—the “strange, strange thing”—underscores the tomb‟s absolute
alterity and the London men‟s collective, but nonetheless anxious and ambiguous,
emotionality.
Community Sights
While the Erkenwald-poet embraces the disruptive-regenerative potential of noise
and emotion in his mission to redefine Christian masculinity and community, he
conspicuously rejects sight and image. The London community is given a loud voice, but
127 Attali, Noise, 20.
128 MED, s.v. “wonder.”
54
it is denied a coherent vision of its most important icon. Although St. Erkenwald is, in
the beginning, a poem about tearing down the pagan temples of old and building a new
monument to Christian supremacy, the Erkenwald-poet not only fails to describe the
completion of the building project but also denies us a complete look at St. Paul‟s
cathedral. Indeed, when the London clerics gather to ponder the marble sepulcher, the
poet jars our sense of space when he writes that the learned men gather “in þat clos,” in,
that is, “the walled precinct of a cathedral, church, or monastery” (55).129 Because the
masons only lines before were digging the foundations for the new cathedral under the
remains of the razed pagan temple, the sudden mention of a “clos” that only lines before
did not exist is confusing. Over the course of the next twenty lines the poet uses
variations of the Middle English word for “within” three times and writes that the marble
tomb was guarded in “þe sayntuare,” an vague term that could refer to a sacred space, the
entire church, a Christian community, the area around the altar, a shrine to a saint, or
even a pagan temple (64, 66, 68, 75).130 The poet clearly wants to locate us inside, but
he refuses to be specific about the appearance of those interior spaces. It is, in fact, never
clear what state the cathedral is in. It appears to be always incomplete, always in a state
of becoming. The St. Paul‟s of St. Erkenwald has no visual solidity and thus no
monumentality. Although the poet allows us to gaze in wonder at the gargoyle-laden
tomb, we never have a sense of the cathedral within which that tomb lies.
The Erkenwald-poet‟s downplaying of sight and privileging of sound has
theological implications. In the medieval hierarchy of the bodily senses, sight was
typically located at the top, followed by hearing, smell, taste, and touch, in a ranking that
mirrored the “order of sensory organs, describing them from the top of one‟s head
129 MED, s.v. “clos.”
130 MED, s.v. “seintuarie.”
55
downwards.”131 Because the eyes were considered the closest of all sensory organs to
the brain, sight was not only thought to be the quickest and most vigorous of the senses,
but was the most important bodily conduit to the soul.132 One reason for sight‟s primacy
was that the eye not only received information but had the ability to influence the object
of its gaze. The eye was considered both a site of intromission—that is, vision was “the
result of the action of the object being suffered or impressed” on the eye—and
extramission, in which the eye actively emitted a ray that met and intermingled with the
ray of the object.133 Sight, as Sarah Stanbury notes, was thought to be a “property of
physical contiguity”: “In looking we are connected physically to the object we see by
agency of…visual rays.”134 This physical connection forged through the gaze was
especially important for late medieval affective piety, which used religious images as
devotional aids to connect the worshipper with the divine. Contemplation of the image of
a suffering Christ or a tortured saint could lead to a “physical as well as emotional
cathexis” that inspired empathy and faith, and enabled the worshipper to understand
divine truths.135
But the affective gaze was not without its dangers, including that of idolatry. The
Erkenwald-poet writes in a period in which “hostility to liturgical elaboration, the
adornment of churches, and above all to the veneration of images” was becoming more
prominent in Lollard critiques of the Church.136 Fourteenth-century Londoners would
131 Woolgar, The Senses, 23.
132 Ibid., 148.
133 Ibid., 21, 178.
134 Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 6 and 220, n13.
135 Stanbury, Visual Object, 6; Woolgar, The Senses, 178.
136 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 387.
56
have been attuned to these anxieties about images and idolatry, and the “roynyshe” tomb
may have struck some as a dangerous icon. The collective gaze of St. Erkenwald‟s
Londoners on tomb may have amplified those anxieties, since, as Woolgar observes, the
gaze‟s moral and spiritual effect “might be multiplied by great numbers of people looking
at the same things—the look of crowds for example—in both positive and negative
directions.”137 We might then read the crowd‟s frenzy as a marker not only of affective
community but also of the tomb‟s potential as a spiritual contaminant. The shared gaze
leads to a shared emotional response that becomes magnified in its collective state. The
crowd of London men gazes in unison and, as they find themselves frustrated by the
inexplicable icon, they break into a fit of noise. The noisy emotional outburst with it a
deep distrust in images and icons that carries over to the poet‟s refusal to describe the
appearance of St. Paul‟s Cathedral, a refusal that perhaps indicates the poet‟s misgivings
about the iconography of Christian community.
The spiritual threat posed by the gaze is made clear when the Erkenwald-poet
describes the body in the tomb, offering up the corpse as an object of devotion:
Al wyt glisnande golde his gowne wos hemmyd,
Wyt mony a precious perle picchit þer-on,
And a gurdille of golde bigripide his mydelle,
A meche mantel on-lofte wyt menyuer furrit
(Þe clothe of camely ful clene wyt cumly bordures),
And on his coyfe wos kest a coron ful riche
And a seemly septure sett in his honed.
Als wemles were his wedes wyt-outen any tecche
Oþir of moulynge oþir of motes oþir moght-freten,
And als bry[g]t of hor blee in blysnande hewes
As þai hade [g]epely in þat [g]orde bene [g]isturday shapen.
And als freshe hym þe face and the fleshe nakyde
Bi his eres and bi his hondes þat openly shewid
Wyt ronke rode, as þe rose, and two rede lippes
As he in sounde sodanly were slippide opon slepe (78-92).
In a poem that has denied us a vision of St. Paul‟s cathedral, it is striking that the
Erkenwald-poet devotes so much attention to the corpse‟s appearance and spends so
137 Woolgar, The Senses, 178.
57
much time provoking our visual senses. In describing the corpse, the poet confronts the
idolatrous potential of affective piety. Indeed, the poet‟s attention to the splendor of the
corpse and his adornments encourages a contemplative gaze that carries the “obsessional
traces” of fetish that, as Stanbury notes, always “occupies a zone of illegitimacy.”138 As
if recognizing that “outlaw pleasure” in the “excessive attachment to a material object” is
potentially idolatrous, the Erkenwald-poet quickly shifts from visual to aural description.
When Bishop Erkenwald hears news of the corpse, the corpse is not introduced visually,
but rather in terms of the emotional effect of its appearance: the look of the corpse is so
much “troubulle” to the people that they perpetually “cry” out and “crakit” loudly as they
gaze (109-10). Instead of recounting the visual details of the man‟s body once again, the
Erkenwald-poet translates the visual into the aural. Acknowledging the threat of the
gaze, the poet shifts from sight to sound, in the process suggesting that sound helps create
an affective community.
Blindfolds
Bishop Erkenwald, the leader of London‟s Christian community takes center
stage in the final two-thirds of the poem as the Erkenwald-poet interrogates of masculine
identity and affective community. As the bishop of London, Erkenwald was a figure of
privilege and prestige, exercising considerable influence in both Church and Court.139
As a member of the clergy, he was bound to an oath of celibacy—the “primary feature
distinguishing priests in their professions from laymen.”140 Despite his power and his
celibacy, the bishop was less removed from other Londoners than we might suspect.
138 Stanbury, Visual Object, 17.
139 The bishopric was largely a political appointment made by the king—“the Crown,” Harriss
writes, “regarded the episcopal rank as giving additional weight and dignity to a political role”—
and most of the bishops in this period were trained in law rather than theology. Harriss, Shaping
the Nation, 311-12.
140 Neal, The Masculine Self, 100.
58
Masculinity in late medieval England did not rely solely on profession or status, but on
the notion of good governance, what Neal refers to as “husbandry.” Husbandry called for
a man‟s governance of himself—that is, moderation, self-restraint, and self-control—and
governance of his “substance”—that is, the accumulation and management of wealth,
property, and household dependents.141 The bishop, as leader of the episcopacy‟s land,
cathedral, lesser clergy, and lay employees, was one of the preeminent figures of
husbandry in late medieval English society. As leader of the London episcopate,
Erkenwald would have represented the epitome of masculine governance. While many
scholars point out that a bishop was in many ways only the figurehead of his episcopacy
and was mostly absent from the cathedral, St. Paul‟s bishops in this period were the
exceptions, widely known for their close participation in cathedral affairs. Bishop
Braybrooke, in particular, was dedicated to the cathedral and its ecclesiastical
community, spending more than half of his time at St. Paul‟s.142 Because of
Braybrooke‟s activism and St. Paul‟s enormous landholdings, St. Erkenwald and its
eponymous hero might be read as a sort of mirror for bishops, a critique perhaps of
Braybrooke himself. More broadly, Erkenwald‟s trouble with good governance functions
as a critique of social hierarchies and becomes the central symbol of a new affective
masculine community.
Bishop Erkenwald‟s immediate response to London‟s anxious, fretful “noyse” is
an attempt to reassert his authority in the London see and to demonstrate his good
governance by cutting off the visual threat, blocking the men‟s vision of the sumptuous
enigma and diverting their eyes to a safer place. Erkenwald‟s strategy for reasserting
control over his episcopacy is to secure the cathedral‟s entrances and thus to separate St.
Paul‟s ecclesiastical community from London‟s laymen. When Erkenwald arrives, he
141 Neal, The Masculine Self, 91.
142 Barron and Rousseau, “Cathedral,” 34.
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says nothing to the noisy Londoners, who have gathered to welcome him, but rather
passes without a word “in-to his palais” and closes the door (114-5). The Erkenwaldpoet makes it clear that the Bishop‟s objective is to control the laity‟s access to the
cathedral and its icons: the Bishop “ditte þe durre” (closed the door) to “deuoydit”
(blocked) the London men‟s gaze (116). The bishop‟s desire to renew a physical
separation between the cathedral and urban residents echoes historical tensions between
St. Paul‟s and the city of London. In the 1280s, Barron writes, St. Paul‟s clergymen “felt
that their precinct…had become permeable and subject to intrusion” and so “secured
royal support in making the enclosure more secure.”143 Throughout the thirteenth
century, the men of London gathered in the northeast section of the cathedral grounds for
the folkmoot, but because of the troubled relations between the cathedral‟s clergymen
and the laymen of the city, Edward I “ordered that gates and walls should be built to
enclose the precinct and, effectively, to cut the Londoners off from their folkmoot site.”
By 1321, the dean and canons managed to “exclude the Londoners from free access to the
cathedral precinct.” 144 As Draper notes, St. Paul‟s precinct wall had an important
symbolic function that “served to mark the boundary of ecclesiastical territory and to
define the limits of the immediate jurisdictions of the community.”145 Erkenwald
likewise defines the limits of London‟s ecclesiastical and lay communities, revealing not
simply a deep anxiety about the inexplicability of the tomb but its community-building
function. When Erkenwald closes the door, he prevents the laymen from using the tomb
to affectively commune with their ecclesiastical brethren. Rather than speaking to the
noisy men and trying to calm their hysterical thoughts, the bishop asserts his control by
barring them from the source of their “noyse.” As Erkenwald indicates later in his
143 Barron and Rousseau, “Cathedral,” 34.
144 Barron, “London and St. Paul‟s” 129-30.
145 Draper, “Enclosures and Entrances,” 78.
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prayers, he wants to close off access to the marvel that has opened Londoners to an
emotional state that threatens to disrupt and remake the community.
In closing St. Paul‟s door, Erkenwald also bars access to himself, revealing
anxiety about the disruptive, perhaps emasculating, potential of his own emotional
outburst. Once Erkenwald erects a wall between cathedral and city, he spends the night
weeping and praying. Begging for an answer to the conundrum of the uncorrupted
corpse, pleading for a “visoun or elles” that will unlock the “mysterie of þis meruaile þat
men opon wonders,” the Bishop‟s prayer gives way to a desperate “wepande” (121-25).
In yielding to his emotions, Erkenwald violates the principle of good governance that
demands self-control and self-restraint, especially in emotional display. In the context of
a profession that called for “too much masculinity,” for the bishop of London to weep
openly would be an emasculating revelation of weak self-governance.146
The bishop‟s tears have several possible meanings. Clifford Peterson wants to
read his weeping as a sign of Christian humility because, as the poet writes, the prayer “al
wepande he sayde / Thurghe his deere debonerte” (122-3).147 As Andre Vauchez notes,
especially in the context of hagiography, weeping is a symbol that indicates undeniable
proof of a devotee‟s love of God.148 Woolgar likewise suggests that weeping is a
legitimate affective display for the devout and the penitent, and is very different from the
“sounds of disorder” and “questionable moral virtue.”149 But, as we well know from
Margery Kempe, weeping, no matter the devotional context, is a potentially disruptive act
that is just as likely to perturb as it is to signify Christian humility. Weeping is never
146 Neal, The Masculine Self, 121.
147 Peterson, Saint Erkewnald, 98, n123. The word “debonerte” is fairly limited in its definitional
scope, signifying generally kindness, graciousness, and/or humility. MED, s.v. “debonerte.”
148 Andre Vauchez, Sainthood in the Late Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 438.
149 Woolgar, The Senses, 79.
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entirely divorced from the sounds of disorder. Weeping is an unstable emotional sign
that signals the disruptive-regenerative potential inherent in noise. What the bishop‟s
weeping suggests is that he shares the men of London‟s concerns about the
inexplicability of the uncorrupted body, that he, albeit secretly and perhaps unwillingly,
also shares in the burgeoning affective community between the ecclesiastical and laity,
even though as the bishop of London, he is bound to a hierarchical social structure, which
he seeks to maintain.
Erkenwald tries to shut down tomb‟s de-hierarchizing influence through the sights
and sounds of Christian ritual. Before re-revealing the corpse to the masculine
community‟s gaze, before reigniting the noisy hysteria that he shut down with the close
of a door the night before, Erkenwald opens the church doors for celebration of the
sacraments:
Mynster dores were makyd opon quen matens were songen;
Þe byschop hym shope solemply to synge þe heghe masse;
Þe prelate in pontificals was priestly atyride.
Manerly wyt his ministres þe masse he begynnes,
Of Spiritus Domini for His spede on sutile wise,
Wyt queme questis of þe quere wyt ful quaynt notes (128-33).
What is striking in this passage is the emphasis on the sounds of religious ritual: the
chanting of matins, the singing of high mass, and the choir resounding with sweet
harmonies. Opposing disorderly and disruptive “noyse,” the ritualized singing works as
what Attali calls a “tool for the creation and consolidation of community.”150
Combating the potential confusion and chaos that noise breeds, music restrains and
regulates. When ideological institutions like the Church control this organization of
sound, it fashions an aural link between a “power center and its subjects.”151 According
to Attali, the three strategic uses of music by those in power are to “make people Forget,
150 Attali, Noise, 6.
151 Ibid., 6.
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make them Believe, and Silence them.”152 In St. Erkenwald we see all three strategies at
work. The singing of mass, with all its trappings of tradition and ritual, functions as a
diversion from the unsettling effect of the sepulcher while simultaneously silencing the
men‟s hysterical cries.
The Erkenwald-poet does not, however, reveal the effects of the church music on
the assembled men, leaving open the possibility that Erkenwald‟s ritual organization of
sound is ineffective. While we are told that many a “gay grete lorde was gedrid to herken
hit,” the consequences of that hearing are left unclear. If Erkenwald used the new
polyphonic conventions of late medieval English worship, his music might even have
been unintentionally destabilizing. The liturgical music of fourteenth-century England
moved increasingly toward polyphony with composers beginning to delight in “sonority
for its own sake,” and expanding the number of voices and complexity of composition
over the years.153 Harriss notes that the liturgical use of polyphony was, in this period,
“pioneered in the cathedral and collegiate churches” and, by the end of the fourteenth
century, a “balanced choir” trained by professional musicians became common
practice.154 The “queme questis of þe quere” voicing their “ful quaynt notes” during
Erkenwald‟s mass may indicate one of these professionally trained, polyphonic choirs.
St. Paul‟s was at the “forefront of musical development,” adopting polyphony
earlier than other secular English cathedrals, not surprisingly, since the development of
polyphony paralleled the development of Gothic cathedral architecture in the thirteenth
and fourteenth century, the same period of St. Paul‟s “New Work.”155 These immense
152 Attali, Noise, 7.
153 M.F. Bukofzer, “English Church Music in the Fifteenth Century,” in Ars Nova and the
Renaissance 1300-1540 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 165-213, 166.
154 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 328.
155 Barron and Rousseau, “Cathedral,” 43.
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cathedrals were specially designed for “sonorousness and amplification,” their high naves
creating a “cavernous, echoing pattern” that produced “an auditory experience without
parallel.” Polyphony took advantage of the Gothic cathedral‟s acoustic potentials: the
“reverberation meant the prolongation of musical notes, leading to overlapping tones and
a continuous background sound.”156
Although the polyphonic music echoing through the naves of these cathedrals was
no doubt aurally stunning and welcomed by many as a “moving away from abstract
intellectualism towards a more personal devotion”—the multiple voices suggesting a
more inviting and inclusive sort of Christian community—there were others who
condemned polyphony as a dangerous sort of sound, a wanton melody that was more
disruptive than devotional.157 As Bruce Holsinger puts it, the “harmonious and liquid
sweetness of polyphony” was linked to ideas of gender inversion and queer sexual
practices, and the overlapping aural resonances therefore became deviant sexual caresses
of the ear.158 By the fourteenth century, there were a number of virulent polemics
circulating in England and France that described polyphony‟s overlapping tones, the
“intervallic tensions and unisons” as a “musical simulacrum of intimate relations between
men.”159 While the Erkenwald-poet is silent on the potential dangers of polyphonic
music, he is also conspicuously silent on the music‟s potential community benefits. The
men “herken” the music, allow it to enter their sensory gates and caress their ears with its
“liquid sweetness,” but the poet leaves the liturgical music‟s effects undetermined.
156 Woolgar, The Senses, 66.
157 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 329; F.L. Harrison, Music in Medieval Britain, 2nd ed. (London:
Routledge, 1963), 147-77, 193.
158 Bruce Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2001), 137-87, 141.
159 Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire, 161. Holsinger further explains that the polyphonic
musical notation, with the notes inscribed on top of and touching one another, was a visual
indication of the perverse aurality.
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Indeed, we must ask how the music might have affected the words that the priest and his
choir articulated during polyphonic song. Is the sense of the liturgy disturbed by the
perverse overlapping of musical notes? If the purpose of the liturgical music is to
“clarify the rhetorical canvas of words and help convey meaning correctly both to listener
and participant,” what happens when that music represents a potential perversion?160
And what happens when the words that accompany the potentially perverse music are
unintelligible to the listener and participant?
The music of Erkenwald‟s mass likely represents an attempt to silence London‟s
“noyse” and reassert order, but because the words of the fourteenth-century mass were
not in English and so remained largely “inaudible and incomprehensible” to the laity, the
communal effect of the mass is uncertain. As Harriss points out, the priest‟s
indecipherable liturgical language reflected a “gulf” between the clergy, “as guardians of
mysteries defined and performed in a learned language, and the laity, as ignorant and
largely passive observers.”161 Growth in lay literacy and private devotion during the
fourteenth century helped narrow that gulf, as did devotional handbooks. Popular books
like Mirk's Instructions, The Lay Folks' Catechism, and The Lay Folks' Mass Book taught
the laity how to follow along with the priest‟s ritualized choreography, through the
“sequence of confession, gospel, offertory, and the canon of the Mass, culminating in the
consecration and the elevation of the Host and priest‟s communion,” while also
encouraging them to “echo these stages by private prayers in the vernacular.”162
Woolgar suggests that liturgical rituals created a sense of participation, and perhaps even
a greater sense of religious community, among the attendees.163 But, as Eamon Duffy
160 Woolgar, The Senses, 81.
161 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 364.
162 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 364; Duffy, The Stripping of Altars: Traditional Religion in
England 1400-1580 (Yale University Press, 1992), 91-130.
163 Woolgar, The Senses, 180.
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notes, the liturgical rituals “could only be used to endorse existing community power
structures because the language of Eucharistic belief and devotion was saturated with
communitarian and corporate imagery” that perpetually reasserted the social and religious
hierarchies. The rituals of mass may have been “deeply felt” by many in the
congregation, yet at its core the rituals were devices for “the validation of power
structures.”164
Although the Erkenwald-poet does not outright undercut the bishop‟s
performance at the pulpit, he nevertheless leaves open the possibility that the Londoners
have not been moved by Erkenwald‟s use of religious ritual. In part that may be because
while the assembled men may “herken” the sounds of mass, they may not have
comprehended those words entirely. In the earlier Middle Ages, Latin was thought to
have special sacred powers, its grammatical structure surrounded by an “aura of sanctity”
that made it specially attuned to God‟s message.165 To simply hear the holy language
spoken, no matter its intelligibility, was enough to receive knowledge of God. By the
fourteenth- and fifteenth-century, however, the unintelligible Latin may not have been all
that satisfying to the laity anymore. As one fourteenth-century Wycliffite sermon writer
notes, citing the words of St. Paul, “hearing was given to man in order to know his
belief…and belief was hearing Christ‟s word.”166 However, for Wycliffites, hearing
meant understanding, as is evident in their support for translating the Bible into the
vernacular in this period. We might read Erkenwald‟s “incomprehensible” songs and
sermons as functioning similarly to the tomb‟s “roynyshe” inscription, defying coherency
and undercutting the authority of the Church. Erkenwald‟s mass, vexed by inexplicable
164 Duffy, Altars, 92-3.
165 Woolgar, The Senses, 101.
166 Ibid., 65.
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language and polyphony, may in that case undercut the aural or visual link between what
Attali would call Erkenwald‟s “power center” and his subjects.
Corpse Sounds
The Erkenwald-poet uses the corpse‟s emotional performance to further
undermine the bishop‟s power center and offer the Londoners a new community identity.
Following the mass, Erkenwald attempts to reframe the enigma of the tomb as a sign of
God‟s infinite power, promising to translate the corpse into a “fastynge of [y]our faithe
and of fine bileue” (173), an unambiguous confirmation of Christian supremacy, but the
corpse has other plans. The bishop orders the corpse to speak and explain his miraculous
condition, but it replies with bellowing, bending, wriggling, and weeping. The corpse‟s
first movements and sounds—the poet writes that he “brayed a litelle” (190)—do little to
comfort or reassure the community. Peterson glosses “brayed” as the third person past
singular of the verb “breiden,” meaning to twist or writhe suddenly. However, the word
“brayed” is also the third person singular of the verb “braien,” a verb for vociferous
shrieking, bellowing, weeping, roaring, and howling.167 Given the “drery dreme” (191)
or the mournful voice, that follows the “braying,” and the corpse‟s later effusive
emotional displays, it is not unreasonable to presume that perhaps the Erkenwald-poet
envisioned the corpse weeping and wailing before launching into its sad story that
culminates in the revelation of its eternal torment in hell. If the corpse is supposed to be
a coded message of Christian supremacy, the sudden sounds of emotional distress
emerging from the tomb disturbs that message.
The corpse‟s noises give way to a troubling tale. As it narrates its story, the corpse
casts itself as a model of masculine virtue and good governance. Living in England more
than five centuries before the birth of Christ, the corpse was a “lede of the laghe,” a judge
167 MED, s.vv. “braien,” “breiden.”
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in the city of New Troy, who served under a “bolde Breton” named Sir Belyn (200-13).
This judge, although a pagan, characterizes himself as a model of good governance, full
of moderation, prudence, and self-restraint, and a good manager of property and
dependents.168 Even under the threat of torment and torture, the judge stood firm:
Þe folke was felonse and fals and frowarde to reule,
I hent harmes ful ofte to holde hom to riʒt
Bot for wothe ne wele ne wrathe ne drede
Ne for maystrie ne for mede ne for monnes aghe,
I remewit neuer fro þe riʒt by reson for no myn awen
For to dresse a wrange dome, no day of my lyue (231-6).
The pagan judge tries to set himself apart from the other folk of New Troy as a man who
would not buckle under threat or bribery and was not prey to “fals and frowarde”
behaviors and emotional excess. Conspicuously couching his masculine virtues within
the discourse of emotion, the corpse argues that as a judge he was immune to “wrathe”
and “drede” (fear and doubt).169 Unlike his false and felonious brethren in New Troy,
the judge claims that he was never “frowarde,” a word that suggests all manner of deviant
behaviors including “unnatural, wrong, immoderate” emotions. 170 But, the judge‟s
“braying” suggests a bit of “frowarde” behavior on his part, revealing an emotional
excess that hints at a lack of restraint. The uncorrupted corpse, the seeming object of
saintliness and devotion opens up the possibility that it harbors some undesirable traits.
It is here that the Erkenwald-poet implicitly links the pagan judge and bishop
Erkenwald. Both are bound to strict masculine codes, yet both are unable to maintain
them. Both are meant to be models of hypermasculine self-restraint, yet both are given to
emotional outbursts. Their inability to live up to an ideal points to the impossibility of
that ideal. As the poet undercuts personal masculine virtues, he simultaneously
168 Neal, The Masculine Self, 91.
169 MED, s.v. “drede.”
170 MED, s.v. “forward.”
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undermines the masculine power structures, by using the pagan judge‟s story to once
again destabilize the edifice of the Church. Despite the razing of the central pagan
temple and the building of a new cathedral, St. Paul‟s still contains memories of the past.
The judge‟s startling assertion that “in my power þis place was putte al to-geder” (228)
urges the assembled community of men to see him not simply as an ancient pagan, but as
a founding father of sorts, a man responsible for building their city and its architectural
spaces. As Erkenwald and his men stand within St. Paul‟s—an architectural project that
is simultaneously complete and incomplete, always in a state of becoming—they must
recognize that the cathedral itself can never be entirely successfully as a monument, can
never become a stable marker of community identity.
As the corpse‟s biography undercuts the Church‟s masculine power structure and
symbols of community, it simultaneously offers the means for building a new community
based on affective connections. The pagan judge reveals that he has a history of serving
as an object of communal wonder and devotion, having acted as an affective touchstone
for his community of New Troy; his incongruous appearance (his royal clothes and
scepter do not match his status as a judge identity) was a marker of communal
celebration, a way for the citizens of New Troy to both honor the dead and mourn their
loss. During his explication of the judge‟s sumptuous clothing, the Erkenwald-poet
again pairs sight and sound, beginning with the soundscape of the community‟s
emotional distress before giving way to an explication of the visual. The poet tells us that
when the judge died, the city space of New Troy resounds with the din of sorrow,
echoing with the “loud and confused noise[s]” of grief.171 Everyone in New Troy, the
Erkenwald-poet writes, “menyd” the judge‟s death, a word that stands at the intersection
of lamenting and remembering, and indicates both the loud, emotional effusion that
171 “Quen I deghed,” explains the corpse, “for dul deyned alle Troye” (246). According to the
MED, “deyned” indicates a “loud and confused noise.” MED, s.v. “dinen.”
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accompanies loss and the act of committing something to memory172 In their sorrow,
the people of New Troy congregated around the judge‟s body, and in a deeply affective
moment of mourning and communion, dressed the body in garments that would, for
them, commit judge‟s goodness to memory. In dressing the judge, New Troy translated
the sounds of loss into a visual sign, and commemorates both a symbol of virtue and the
unity of their community.
As the corpse recounts his history as a communal touchstone, it begins to serve as
an affective touchstone for the community of Londoners gathered around the tomb. Even
before the corpse explains the events surrounding the judge‟s death, the Londoners are
moved to awe and distress:
Quil he in spelunke þus spake þer sprange in þe pepulle
In al þis worlde no worde, ne wakenyd no noice
Bot al as stille as þe ston stoden and listonde
Wyt meche wonder forwrast, and wepid ful mony (217-220).
Most striking about their emotional response is the marked absence of sound. The
Erkenwald-poet underscores that the gathered men not only speak “no worde,” but are so
utterly disturbed by the corpse‟s braying and “drery” tale that they cannot make a single
noise. The men are so distressed by the corpse‟s story that their own voices are
momentarily silenced. The verb “sprange” emphasizes the severity of the community‟s
silence, underscoring the absolute absence of sound by contrasting their “ston” stillness
with a verb that indicates a sudden outpouring of sound or a bounding, leaping movement
often associated with elation.173 Together, the men signal their awe and absence of joy
in their collective silence. The silent communion is fleeting, however, and the London
men begin to writhe in distress, moving from stillness to a bodily struggle with emotion,
before giving way to a vociferous outpouring of emotion, breaking the stillness with a
172 MED, s.v. “menen.”
173 MED, s.v. “springen.”
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noisy exclamation of sorrow and anxiety. With “ful mony” men weeping as the
uncorrupted corpse speaks, the Erkenwald-poet brings two disruptive noises together as
the corpse and the London men begin to sound their affective union.
Although Erkenwald displays a confident belief that the body will serve as a
testament to Christian faith, his emotions once again show doubt, anxiety, and even
desperation. He responds to the pagan‟s tale of masculine virtue with an anguish that
speaks openly of uncertainty. Indeed, when Erkenwald asks the judge how it is that his
body and clothing are untouched by decay, he asks “wyt bale at his hert” (257), that
indicates sorrow as well as a misery that carries with it the threat of dangerous and
destructive misdeeds.174 I am not suggesting that the bishop explicitly threatens the
community with balefulness, but his emotions cast doubt on his ability to translate the
inexplicable sign of Britain‟s fractious pagan past into a sign of Christian supremacy.
The bishop reveals some nervousness about the pagan‟s lack of decay, suggesting in his
questions that the corpse‟s body was likely “embawmyd” (261). Nonetheless, the bishop
recognizes that there is a flaw in his suggestion: the embalming process could not account
for the corpse‟s unsullied garments and the fresh “coloure” of his flesh (263). Thus,
Erkenwald‟s suggestion becomes more of a desperate wish for an answer to the enigma
than a rational appraisal of the evidence. The corpse admonishes Erkenwald‟s desire for
an easy solution, explaining that he was not embalmed but that God, in recognition of the
pagan‟s good works, granted his body and clothing a sort of immortality, a materiality
immune to the passing of time (265-72). Although the corpse‟s explanation, on one
level, bolsters Erkenwald‟s promise that the body is a sign of God‟s power and authority,
the explanation undermines conventional Christian theology, since only a saint‟s corpse
should be immune to decay.
174 MED, s.v. “bale.”
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Affective Communion
When Erkenwald finally asks the pagan about the fate of his soul, the poem
approaches an emotional climax that helps revise the standard symbols of masculine
identity and Christian community. “Quere,” Erkenwald fretfully presses the pagan
corpse, “is ho [soul] stablid and stadde if þou so streʒt wroghtes” (274)? The bishop‟s
question implies that he is uneasy at the thought that a pagan man has entered the ranks
of the beatified and yet is fearful that this “streʒt” man, this noble and virtuous judge,
might languish in hell. Erkenwald cannot negotiate what the pagan means or what he is
supposed to feel. The body utterly defies the conventions of sainthood and threatens to
contaminate the London community by setting itself up as an idol for affective
contemplation and communion. It is here that the poet seems to subvert the bishop‟s
masculinity entirely, where we see Erkenwald‟s prudence and self-restraint breakdown.
He becomes desperate. Medieval orthodox Christian theology posits that a pagan cannot
reach heaven no matter how good the works he “wroghte” in life, but the bishop
nevertheless insists that good works might be enough to save the pagan, quoting a
“psalmyde” as if he is trying to convince himself, the London men, and even the pagan
judge: “Þe skillfulle and þe vnskathely skelton ay to me” (278). Erkenwald wavers on
the edge of heterodoxy, wishing aloud that righteousness were enough to leave the spirit
unscathed. The bishop begs the pagan to say that his “soule in sele quere ho wonnes”
(279-80), that his body represents an icon of proper religious devotion.
Erkenwald‟s authority is once again challenged by noise and emotion. In a series
of garbled, inarticulate sounds and frantic, apoplectic gestures of the head, the pagan
judge reveals that Erkenwald‟s final question is a desperate wish that hovers on the
border of heterodoxy. The corpse “hummyd,” writes the Erkenwald-poet, a Middle
English word that covers a range of suggestive sounds that include humming, murmuring,
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and buzzing, that can be used to cover up shame and embarrassment.175 The pagan‟s
shame is rife with ambiguity as well, suggesting not only that he feels embarrassed for
not being among the “sele quere,” but also that he feels ashamed of the bishop‟s
behavior. The judge seems to recognize he and the bishop have failed to maintain their
masculine codes of prudence, moderation, and self-restraint. And as the humming
reflects the shame of both men, the convulsive wagging of the judge‟s head similarly
reflects both men‟s slipping self-control.176 The humming sounds and wagging gestures
represent a raw and noisy emotional outpouring that denies the Londoners a coherent
resolution and reflects the failed masculinity of London‟s leaders, past and present. With
a “gronynge ful grete” (282), the pagan judge dislocates language from the discourse of
emotion and instead privileges a primeval noise that undermines Erkenwald‟s power and
authority. Humming, wagging, and groaning, the pagan unleashes an affective spectacle
that suggests but does not pronounce, that intimates but does not enunciate. Gnashing
morphemes and garbling syntax, the judge rends the faith of the Londoner‟s in the
dominant symbols of Christianity and masculine authority. With these accepted symbols
of hierarchy and community now vacant, the London men—clergy and laity, high- and
low-born, rich and poor—begin to reform their community through collective emotional
performance. When the judge reveals that he has been “dampnyd dulfully into þe depe
lake” (309) for all eternity, the men “alle wepyd for woo þe wordes þat herden” (310).
Together the men of London look upon the heart-wrenching corpse, hear its noises and its
prayers, and mourn with an affective communal unity that bonds them in their present,
but connects them to their pasts.
175 MED, s.v. “hummen.”
176 The word “waggyd” can indicate, according to the MED, struggle, vacillation, and lack of
steadfastness. MED, s.v. “waggen.”
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When Erkenwald joins the men in their affective union with the corpse soon after,
the poet seemingly elides all social and religious division and completes his fantasy of a
masculine community not bound to traditional power structures. Finding “no space to
speke,” no room for a coherent articulation of his grief and frustrations, the bishop
“spakly…[g]oskyd” (312). Erkenwald relinquishes control of his passions, relinquishes
his claim to his hypermasculine/hyper-restrained identity and weeps in front of the
London men. As the bishop weeps, he breaks down the the boundaries between
ecclesiastical and lay men. The bishop‟s weeping becomes a social leveler that allows all
men access to participate in the same religious practice and community, one that is not
divided by educational, linguistic, or economic barriers.
Despite the pathos of this moment, the Erkenwald-poet resists moving into
heterodoxy entirely, resists leaving the Church and its leadership utterly in shambles.
The poet recognizes that the affective union of all men holds a threat of spiritual
contagion even as it highlights the regenerative potential of emotion, and so the poet
eases back on his challenge to Erkenwald‟s symbolic leadership. He allows Erkenwald‟s
tears to baptize and save the pagan judge‟s soul, reaffirming the bishop‟s superior
position. In this moment of lacrimal baptism, the poet also valorizes the importance of
Church sacraments by emphasizing the importance of baptism.
While allowing the bishop to resume his symbolic position as leader of the
Christian community, the Erkenwald-poet empties that position of some of its former
power and prestige in the process. Indeed, it is only by accident that Erkenwald baptizes
the judge. Showering (“lauande,” 314) the body with his tears, Erkenwald recognizes the
corpse‟s potential contagion (or the potential queerness of sharing bodily fluids) and so
he tries to reframe his union with the body as a sacrament. Like his earlier hope that the
pagan‟s soul sings in heaven‟s blissful choir, Erkenwald fantasizes aloud about
performing a baptism:
74
“Oure Lord lene,” quoþ þat lede, “þat þou lyfe hades,
By Goddes leue, as longe as I my[g]t lacche water
And cast vpon þi faire cors and carpe þes wordes,
„I folwe þe in þe Fader nome and His fre Childes,
And of þe gracious Holy Goste‟ and not one grue lenger;
Þen þof þou droppyd doun ded hit daungrede me lasse” (315-20).
What is striking about Erkenwald‟s speech is that he imagines rather than acts, fantasizes
about baptism but does not perform it, describes the sacrament but does not really
proceed with it. The hypothetical nature of the baptism is indicated by the use of “might”
not “will.” The bishop explains that if he might procure water, then he might be able to
baptize the body, change the soul‟s fate, alter the events of the past, and transform the
non-Christian image into a Christian icon worthy of such affective devotion. According
to E. Gordon Whatley, the fact that the bishop‟s wish is ultimately fulfilled indicates the
importance of baptism and the bishop‟s “place in the scheme of salvation.” While I agree
that the Erkenwald-poet maintains the importance of the sacraments, Whatley‟s claim
that the bishop‟s “very human tears of compassion” easily reaffirms the old church power
structure is dubious.177 The prevailing aspect of biscopal identity in fourteenth-century
England “was its severity,” with the “spirit of correction” and stern “moral
reformation…more prominent than that of compassion.”178 The spirit of biscopal
masculinity privileged self-restraint and good governance over emotional attachments.
As Sarah McNamer notes, compassion was feminized in late medieval religious thought
and was a “powerful, creative, and disruptive force” that often challenged the masculine
edifice of the Church.179 When Erkenwald gives in to feminized compassion, he
undermines his authority, but also offers the men of London a new affective mode free
177 E. Gordon Whatley, “Heathens and Saints: St. Erkenwald in its Legendary Context,”
Speculum 61.2 (1986): 330-63, 352.
178 A. Hamilton Thompson, The English Clergy and Their Organization in the Later Middle
Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 40-1.
179 Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 19.
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from the old masculine power structures. In Erkenwald‟s tears, the poet imagines a
feminized (or less masculinized, at least) affective bond based on compassion. Though
the pagan judge gives Erkenwald credit for the baptism—“For þe wordes þat þout
werpe,” says the corpse, “and þe water þat þou sheddes— / Þe bry[g]t bourne of þin
eghen—my bapteme is worthyn” (329-30)—he concludes by saying that Erkenwald‟s
participation in the collective emotional spectacle has larger benefits to London
community. Indeed, the baptism does not simply redeem the pagan‟s soul or reaffirm the
bishop‟s leadership, but rather profits all of “vs” (340). The affective connections forged
during the baptism have brought the London men “fro bale”—that disruptive, dangerous
emotion—to a community united in “blis” (340).180 Erkenwald‟s tears have not only
changed the past, but have connected the past and present in an affective communion.
That Erkenwald‟s tears could symbolically bridge the gap between histories and
communities represents a radical revision of the theology found in St. Erkenwald‟s
sources. Interestingly, the idea of lacrimal baptism itself marks an important theological
gap: the idea that tears could act as baptismal waters originates in the Anglo-Saxon
church, stemming from a series of insular misreadings of Rufinius‟ translation of Gregory
of Nazianzun‟s sermon De Luminibus. The misreadings were carried over into the first
accounts in England of the Gregory-Trajan mythos, St Erkenwald‟s primary source of
inspiration. In this tradition, Gregory the Great hears the story of how the Roman
emperor Trajan took pity on a poor widow begging for justice for the murder of her son
and abandoned his military duties to render justice. Knowing full well that the heathen
ruler‟s good works were not enough to redeem his soul, Gregory weeps and prays; his
tears of compassion are said to have moved God to rescue Trajan‟s soul from hell. As the
story is first recounted in the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon Whitby Vita S. Gregorii,
Gregory never physically baptizes Trajan‟s body, but the moment of redemption is
180 “Fro bale has brogt vs to blis; blessid þou worthe” (340).
76
nevertheless referred to as baptismum lacrimarum. T. O‟Loughlin and H. Conrad
O‟Brian explain that the Whitby biographer defined this moment of compassion and
redemption as a baptism because those theological sources available to him—namely
Rufinius‟s translation of De Luminibus and Archbishop Theodore‟s Iudicia—described
the tears of contrition as a type of baptism.181 The Whitby biographer was likely aware
of the theological difficulties presented by the Gregory-Trajan episode, but, according to
O‟Loughlin and O‟Brian, he probably presumed that even though Trajan‟s evils could not
be cleansed by the usual waters of the sacrament, the saint‟s tears must have represented
a cleansing water of sorts, “so there is at least some water (which is the element of the
sacrament) present.”182 What the Whitby biography did not know was that Gregory of
Nazianzun used the idea of baptismum lacricmarum as merely a metaphor for a
Christian‟s tears of contrition, that the devotee‟s tearful penance and remorse renewed the
redemptive effects of their original baptism, but this specific meaning was dislodged and
confused during the processes of translation.183 Nevertheless, Gregory‟s tears, like those
of the penitent, were a deeply personal gesture of faith, representing one man‟s
compassion and his trust in God. Although the Whitby biographer‟s understanding of
lacrimal baptism ignited a theological debate that continued throughout the centuries
about the fate of the noble pagan, his reading of the Gregory-Trajan mythos remained the
dominant reading throughout the Middle Ages.
The Erkenwald-poet thus translates a deeply personal gesture of faith into a
deeply interpersonal gesture of community. What began as an important gesture of
contrition, and what later become symbolic of a heated theological debate about the noble
181 T. O'Loughlin and H. Conrad O'Brian, "The Baptism of Tears in Early Anglo-Saxon
Sources," Anglo-Saxon England 22 (1993): 65-83.
182 O'Loughlin and O'Brian, “Baptism of Tears,” 70.
183 Ibid., 73-4.
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pagan and “good works,” the Erkenwald-poet converts into an emblem of community
identity. While so many critics have emphasized how much St. Erkenwald owes to its
sources in the popular Gregory-Trajan story, the Erkenwald-poet‟s alliterative version is
in fact a radical departure from the tradition. St. Erkenwald totally refigures the story
from a tale about the Roman church and an imperial past to a more localized narrative
that emphasizes the “fluidity of [England‟s] mythic-historical past.” When the
Erkenwald-poet reinterprets the Gregory-Trajan tradition, he not only disrupts the
tradition‟s authority, but implies that national histories and religious exemplum are “open
not only to interpretation but rewriting.”184 In St. Erkenwald, the affective connection
formed among bishop, pagan, clergy, and laity reinterprets English religious community
as an inclusive one that attempts to elide some of the hierarchies that divide men.
After creating a new affective community around the judge‟s corpse, the poet lets
the corpse disappear. The poet tells us that the judge‟s corpse blackens and decays
immediately after its speech to the community:
Wyt this cessyd his sowne, sayd he no more.
Bot sodenly his swete chere swyndid and faylide
And alle the blee of his body wos blakke as þe moldes,
As roten as þe rottok þat rises in powdere (341-5)
All of the signs that once suggested sainthood are eradicated. The uncorrupted body and
its ruddy complexion rot away. Anxious not only about the potential for icons to become
idols, the poet is also concerned that the memory of the judge‟s former pagan identity and
the sorrows associated might override its new identity. The Erkenwald-poet tries to elide
this troubling memory by erasing the icon itself. The value in the object of devotion, the
poet seems to imply, lies not in its materiality, not in the physicality of the connection
made via the affective gaze, but in the immaterial emotional bond that transcends space
and time. The “crafte” of the material object, he suggests, maintains a corrupting
184 Nisse, “Rule of History,” 281.
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potential. As the poet denied us a vision of a complete St. Paul‟s Cathedral, he also
refuses to prolong our vision of the corpse. While the corpse initially helped to elide the
gap between past and present and forge a new affective community, its materiality now
threatens to reopen that gap and disrupt that community.
A Fraternity for All Men
When the Erkenwald-poet removes the corpse‟s “chere,” he removes what the
MED defines as a “face…expressing emotion,” or the “outward appearance or…display
of emotion,” but he maintains that the bonds of community transcend material bodies and
spaces.185 Indeed, the London community immediately demonstrates that the human
and/or architectural body-as-affective-touchstone is no longer necessary:
Þen wos louynge oure Lorde wyt loves vp-halden
Meche mournynge and myrthe was mellyd to-geder;
Þai passyd for the in processioun and alle þe pepulle folowid
And alle þe belles in þe burghe beryd at ones (349-52).
Though the source of their noisy confusion and communion has been resolved, the
Londoners remain united in their “mournynge and myrthe.” All the people, the poet
notes, leave together in a single procession with the mourning and mirth “mellyd togeder,” signaling conversation.186 If the Londoners speak of their mix of mourning and
mirth, they are making sense of their shared experience and re-encoding their “noyce”
into the linguistic order. If noise, as Travis puts it, can function as a “counter-harmonic”
that heralds social change, we might imagine the Londoners‟ discourse as the discovery
of that new harmonic.187 If noise symbolizes aggression and rebellion against the
prevailing order, we might imagine the Londoner‟s movement from noisy, wordless
emotionality to coherent discussion of those emotions as the negotiation of a new order.
185 MED, s.v. “chere”
186 MED, s.v. “melen.”
187 Travis, “Noise of History,” 205.
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As if to emphasize the Londoner‟s new social harmony, locates their affective connection
in the ephemeral sounds of the ringing city bells, an aural symbol of the men‟s mourning
and mirth. City bells were important aspects of premodern communities, writes Alain
Corbin, with their sounds producing an “emotional impact” that “helped create a
territorial identity.”188 While the sound of a city bell carries with it the notion of limits
and can reinforce “divisions between an inside and an outside,” the Erkenwald-poet
maintains that all of the London men are inside this affective community.189 Rather than
ring only the bell in St. Paul‟s, the poem‟s concluding line describes the miraculous,
harmonious resounding of all the bells in the “burghe” in unison with St. Paul‟s. The
poet leaves us with an aural signal of affective community.
Of course, questions remain as to what appeal this new affective community
would have had to English men in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Why use the socalled “saint of London” to flirt with heterodoxy and challenge the material touchstones
of Christian community? Part of the answer lies in St. Erkenwald‟s importance to St.
Paul‟s. Following the so-called “New Work” (1258-1314) in which St. Paul‟s Norman
choir was replaced by a more impressive Gothic structure built in the Perpendicular style,
Erkenwald‟s shrine was likewise rebuilt in the Gothic style, complete with an
“elaborately carved stone and alabaster” superstructure and an interior that was laden
with precious metals.190 Finished in 1326, Erkenwald‟s new shrine was an imposing
fixture located directly behind the cathedral‟s main altar in a new chapel devoted to St.
Mary. Yet, despite this privileged location within the cathedral, Erkenwald‟s feasts were
largely neglected in the late fourteenth century which led Bishop Braybrooke to send out
188 Alain Corbin, “The Auditory Markers of the Village,” The Auditory Culture Reader, Michael
Bull and Les Back, eds (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 117-125, 117.
189 Ibid., 118.
190 Whatley, The Saint of London: The Life and Miracles of Saint Erkenwald: Text and
Translation (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1989), 68.
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official diocesan letters in 1386 ordering all Londoners to resume full liturgical
observance of Erkenwald‟s feasts on April 30th and November 14th.191 Some scholars
even speculate that St. Erkenwald may have been an occasional poem written under
Braybrooke‟s patronage to be read aloud at these feasts.192 Records indicate that in the
two decades following Braybrooke‟s decree there was some continued effort to promote
the saint and his cult—some expensive gifts, a few elaborate processions, further goldwork on the shrine, and the “construction of an imposing and costly ironwork fence
around it”—but the degree to which the cult appealed to the laity is a matter of debate.193
Whatley views the activity around the shrine as evidence of the cult‟s importance, while
Barron argues that the evidence demonstrates only “minimal support from
Londoners.”194 While Richard II‟s ritual reconciliation with London included a
procession to Erkenwald‟s shrine in 1393, this does not necessarily signal the saints‟
popularity with the London laity.195 Indeed, as Barron and Duffy both point out, we
know that there was a fraternity associated with Erkenwald‟s shrine that had its own
chaplain and likely included some prominent members of the city laity, but there are only
two references to bequests made to this religious guild in 1378 and 1404, suggesting a
waning interest in the cathedral, the saint, and his cult.196
191 Whatley, Saint of London, 67.
192 Duffy, “London‟s Cathedral Saint,” 164.
193 Whatley, Saint of London, 67; see also William Dugdale, The History of St. Paul’s Cathedral
in London (Tho. Warren, 1658), 15, accessed November 22, 2009, http://books.google.com/books
?id=92ZZAAAAQAAJ&dq=the+history+of+st.+paul%27s+cathedral+dugdale&source=gbs_navl
inks_s.
194 Barron, “London and St. Paul‟s Cathedral,” 144.
195 Duffy, “London‟s Cathedral Saint,” 154; T. Wright, ed., Political Poem and Songs Relating
to English History, 2 vols., Rolls Series (London, 1859-61), 1.293.
196 Duffy, “London‟s Cathedral Saint,” 164; Barron, “London and St. Paul‟s,” 144. Barron notes
that a “Walter Potenhale, a woodmonger, made a bequest to the lights of the fraternity of St.
Erkenwald in 1378” and a “Nicholas Hotot bequeathed 13s.4d. to the fraternity in 1404,” fn 92.
81
That the Erkenwald fraternity received such little support from the London laity is
perhaps indicative of the increasing disconnect between cathedral and city in this period,
something the Erkenwald-poet seems keen to address. Despite Braybrooke‟s successful
attempts at reforming St. Paul‟s ecclesiastical community, Barron writes that “he seems
to have been less successful at attracting Londoners (and particularly the London
governing elite at whom the Erkenwald poem may have been aimed) to support the
„mother church.‟”197 Indeed, we might read the fact that there were no further bequests
from Londoners to the Erkenwald shrine after 1404 as the laity‟s, and perhaps even the
parochial clergy‟s, silent reproval of Braybrooke and the cathedral community. “[F]irst
class feasts in the cathedral,” such as Erkenwald‟s would have demanded that the
parochial clergy of the diocese “come to the cathedral in their copes and walk in
procession with the canons and ministers in the choir of the church.”198 That
Braybrooke had to issue a mandate in 1393 reminding the parish priests of their
prescribed role in the cathedral events perhaps indicates some resistance.199 The laity
and parochial clergy‟s lack of support for the fraternity is even more striking given the
dramatic increase in London‟s parish fraternities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
After the Black Death, religious fraternities played an important role in building and
maintaining social communities. While the fraternities and their priests were of course
responsible for organizing their own elaborate feasts and processions dedicated to their
patron saints, they offered community members benefits beyond spectacle events,
offering charity to members in need, the mediation of quarrels to avoid litigation, and
197 Barron, “London and St. Paul‟s,” 145.
198 Ibid., 145.
199 W. Sparrow Simpson, ed., Registrum Statutorum et Consuetudinum Ecclesiae Cathedralis
Sancti Pauli Londinenensis (Nichols & Sons, 1897), 393-4 and Documents Illustrating the
History of St. Paul’s Cathedral (Westminster: Camden Society, 1880), 15-24.
82
funeral rites.200 Between 1350 and 1550, there were 150-200 new parish fraternities
established in London alone. Harriss argues that although the fraternities were
doctrinally orthodox, they may have represented a subversive force because they “gave
the laity an active and responsible role” and strengthening their participation in the
Church.201 The “increasing assertion of the role of individuals,” writes Draper,
“especially the laity” posed “considerable problems for the traditional hierarchical
structure within the Church.”202 The laity‟s rejection of Braybrooke‟s Erkenwald cult
likely represents their rejection of the St. Paul‟s religious community in favor of their
own parish communities. Braybrooke‟s attempts to revive the Erkenwald cult were,
Whatley suggests, “part of a wider movement…at reasserting traditional sacramental
modes of worship in the face of” what Braybrooke thought of as “popular apathy.”203
This popular apathy, however, likely represents the growing gap between city and
cathedral, and the London laity‟s greater devotion to the parish church fraternities.
The dramatic increase in religious fraternities may have represented to some an
alarmingly fractured and diffuse London community divided not only by urban space,
social class, and profession, but by religious identity as well. As Harriss writes, latemedieval Londoners may not have had a “sense of community” due to a variety socioeconomic tensions that were developing in the period:
It can be argued that neighborhood divisions and social tensions
inhibited [a sense of community]. London was, indeed, a
collection of parishes if not villages, and the parish church was the
immediate focus of social and religious identity. Structural
tensions between social classes and between merchants and crafts
surfaced in times of crisis; youth cultures clashed in riots of
journeymen and servants with the students at the Inns of Court;
200 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 360.
201 Ibid., 294, 360.
202 Draper, “Enclosures and Entrances,” 87.
203 Whatley, Saint of London, 204, n45.
83
aliens, who formed 4 per cent of London‟s population, were open
to xenophobic attack.204
While Harriss later concedes that some of the citywide processions and celebrations may
have fostered a communal experience, religious and socio-economic divisions
nevertheless remained alive throughout the period. Given the increasing volatility and
fluidity within London and the tensions between cathedral and city, the fantasy of a
fraternity for all men, one that elides social, economic, and religious hierarchies may
have been particularly attractive to many London men. The Erkenwald-poet clearly
defines his new masculine affective community as one that not only cuts across the entire
masculine social spectrum, but also unites all urban spaces, all the parishes and villages
within London, signaling that union through the miraculous ringing of all the city bells.
The poet likewise indicates that his fantasy of community cohesion does not, as Whatley
would have it, establish a conservative defense of cathedral hierarchy and privilege or
admonish the laity‟s strengthening participation in religious community and devotion, but
rather undercuts the cathedral‟s position as affective touchtone, challenges some of the
bishop‟s and his lesser clergymen‟s authority, effectively shrinking the gap between
ecclesiastical and lay. The poet takes London‟s cathedral saint, one of the most important
symbols of St. Paul‟s identity, and transforms him into a figure that razes the cathedral
walls symbolically separating clergymen and laymen. What the Erkenwald-poet perhaps
imagines for the London community, then, is an appealing solution to these cultural
divisions, a solution that attempts to bridge gaps, a solution that at once valorizes the
laity‟s importance while at the same time disrupting the symbols and structures that
define masculine hierarchies and demand certain behavioral codes like aggression,
competition, and even good governance. In the end, what we have is imagined
community in which hierarchies are, for the most part, flattened and what defines men, is
204 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 307; see also Sylvia Thrupp, “Aliens in and Around London in
the Fifteenth Century,” in Studies in London History Presented to Philip Edmund Jones, ed.
A.E.J. Hollaender and William Kellaway, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969) 251-72.
84
not the traditional masculine code of behavior, but an emotional bond of compassion that
unites men across space and through time.
There is perhaps room to speculate about what appeal this affective community
may have had for the anonymous author. The history and provenance of St. Erkenwald
and its poet are largely unknown, but the poet‟s Northwest Midland‟s dialect indicates
that he came from outside London, likely in the area of Cheshire.205 St. Erkenwald
survives in only one manuscript, MS. Harley 2250, a late-fifteenth-century miscellany of
religious texts. Most scholars agree that St. Erkenwald was likely written in the latter
part of the fourteenth century or the first decades of the fifteenth century, but there is
little consensus as to the poem‟s occasion and audience. While 1386—the year
Braybrooke ordered his diocese to resume celebrating Erkenwald‟s feast days—has been
an attractive date for the poem‟s composition, there is no evidence to corroborate this
date. Moreover, there is little that suggests the poem or its poet ever made it to London.
For one, the fact that the poem is extant in only one manuscript suggests a limited
readership. Plus, paleographic evidence indicates that the manuscript remained in the
hands and households of Cheshire families in the late medieval and early modern
periods.206 Although Barron writes that the Erkenwald-poet seems to have known
London and its audience well, we cannot be sure.207 Nevertheless, the poet‟s deep
concern with the divide between cathedral and laity suggests that he was at least aware of
contemporary religious tensions in London. His concerns with the hierarchies of church
and city life may also indicate anxiety about the uncertain career paths many men
confronted in this period. Some like to speculate that the Erkenwald-poet may have been
one of the profit-motivated careerist priests that Chaucer‟s Parson complains about who
205 Peterson, Saint Erkenwald, 23-6.
206 Ibid., 8-11.
207 Barron, “London and St. Paul‟s,” 144.
85
“ran to Londoun unto Seinte Paules / To seken hym a chauntrie for soules / Or with a
bretherhed to been witholde”208 Traveling from Cheshire to London and confronted
with the difficult competition and demands for sycophancy that came with a successful
career in the Church, perhaps the Erkenwald-poet wrote his poem as a means of
garnering attention and favor from those churchmen higher up the ladder.
The poem‟s interest in challenging the masculine symbols and structures that
bolster these hierarchies point, I think, in a different direction. Although the poem seems
to have a vested interest in London‟s contemporary cultural problems, the Erkenwaldpoet‟s image of a masculine affective community may have appealed to men beyond
London‟s city walls. Indeed, when St. Erkenwald challenges the architectural symbols of
religious community and unites all the parishes in London, he challenges the geographic
fixedness of community identity. In breaking down the material symbols, structures, and
icons that root men in a particular community, the Erkenwald-poet opens up the potential
for all men, no matter their geographic position or place in history, to unite into one
fraternity.
208 Chaucer, “General Prologue,” 1.509-11.
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CHAPTER THREE
„SOM ESEMENT HAS LAWE YSHAPEN US‟: THE REEVE’S TALE‟S
DISCOURSE OF (DIS)PASSION
Bloodless Commodities
The Erkenwald-poet‟s hope-filled fantasy of a Christian brotherhood that
transcends the divisions of class, space, and time is not the only model of affective
community available to Middle English poets. Indeed, many of the narratives that
confront masculine anxieties and social tensions in late medieval England are angry,
bitter, and melancholic. While St. Erkenwald quietly elides women from his tale,
Chaucer noisily displaces women in his fantasy of masculine community. In this chapter,
I turn to the misogynist discourses that pervade Chaucer‟s poetry, showing how he
manipulates the language of affect to simultaneously shore up men‟s identities while
constructing a deeply antifeminist sentiment. Nowhere is this misogynist affect more
apparent than in The Reeve’s Tale, Chaucer‟s dark fabliau that, for many, is almost too
bleak and caustic even to be called a fabliau. John Plummer writes that Chaucer‟s story
of two Cambridge clerks who rape a mother and her daughter in order to reap vengeance
on a thieving miller contains a “real sense of injustice, of pathos, and bitterness of
afterthought which fits uncomfortably in the fabliau form.”209
Perhaps because of the tale‟s troubling injustice, it has received far less attention
than its sibling fabliau, The Miller’s Tale. When scholars do consider the Reeve’s Tale, it
is often only as a point of contrast to the Miller‟s bawdy yarn. This should not be terribly
surprising. In the Reeve’s Tale, Chaucer asks his readers to find humor in sexual assault
and that does not sit well with the modern reader. It is difficult to stomach John and
Aleyn‟s “disport,” the pleasure and consolation they experience when they attack the
209 John Plummer, “Hooly Chirches Blood: Simony and Patrimony in Chaucer‟s Reeve’s Tale,”
Chaucer Review 18 (1983): 49-60, 58.
87
miller‟s wife and daughter, Malyne. As a result, the characters can seem remote, dim
reflections of real men and women with real passions and desires. In The Yale
Companion to Chaucer, Seth Lerer maintains this viewpoint, describing the world within
The Reeve’s Tale as cold, inhuman, and seemingly devoid of genuine affect:
The Reeve takes the laughter of the Miller’s Tale and turns it into
spite. He takes the things of everyday life—those things that, in
the hands of Nicholas become imaginative props in some stage
play of desire—and turns them into bloodless commodities. In the
world of the Miller, people are goods and chattels. Alisoun is as
much a possession as an object of desire. But in the world of the
Reeve, people seem to fade into the background compared to
things; indeed, people are things. […] This is a world not of desire,
but of goods, where value lies only in inheritance, where miller‟s
mill for money.210
Lerer is right to suggest that in this fabliau people, especially women, become “bloodless
commodities,” things that are exchanged like capital in a misogynist economy. But, the
Reeve‟s world is not a world without human emotion. Like the Miller, the Reeve enacts
a masculinist “stage play of desire” in which economics are but one of many reasons
masculine communities compete for dominance, and in which emotions play a large role.
A close look at The Reeve’s Tale reveals how Chaucer uses emotions, disquieting though
they may be, to evaluate and renegotiate masculine social identities.
The Reeve’s Tale shows us that the affective touch is not limited to the lover‟s
embrace or, in the case of St. Erkenwald, the tears of consolation. Holly Crocker writes
that this story of two Cambridge clerks seeking revenge demonstrates that affective
relations “can be quite competitive, even coercive, in [their] consolidating processes.”
John and Aleyn‟s coercive touch demonstrates that “not all affects, or their analyses, deal
in terms of love or joy,” but rather often deal in “divisive feelings.”211 In this chapter, I
210 Seth Lerer, “The Canterbury Tales,” in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 243-94, 252.
211 Holly Crocker, “Affective Politics in Chaucer‟s Reeve’s Tale: Cherl Masculinity After 1381”
Chaucer Review 29 (2007): 225-58, 252.
88
focus my investigation on the two Cambridge clerks, John and Aleyn, exploring how
their education and socio-economic status inform their divisive feelings. Crocker has
already demonstrated the important role emotion plays in the Reeve’s Tale, but she
focuses on Symkyn and how his social rank “derives from his attention to local
governance, over himself and his household,”212 and how his role as husband, father,
and businessman demand an affect that includes prudent management, moderation, and
self-restraint. While Crocker briefly examines the clerks in her study, she does so only to
suggest that John and Aleyn share a common “cherl” masculinity with Symkyn that
depends on the instrumental use of women. Crocker is correct to assert that the
Cambridge clerks view women as nothing more than tools necessary for the
demonstration of masculine prowess, but the philosophies and ideals behind their view
are very different from Symkyn‟s. As we shall see, unlike Symkyn‟s, John and Aleyn are
an amalgamation of two seemingly incompatible communities, the ecclesiastic and the
aristocratic, the result of which was a “potentially traumatic cognitive dissonance, a
double bind in which men are asked to model and embody” potentially conflicting social
performances and affects.213
Chaucer represents this amalgamation as the source of considerable anxiety. In
The Reeve’s Tale, we watch as the two clerks attempt to appease two different models of
identity that demand, on the one hand, quiet dispassion and, on the other, a loud
aggression. The result is that John and Aleyn can justify rape as a reasonable, rationale,
212 Ibid., 229.
213 Christina M. Fitzgerald, The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 54. Fitzgerald is here writing about the cognitive dissonance that no
doubt developed when men were asked to perform “masculine ideals dramatically and publicly,
even as they are also taught that ideal masculinity is disembodied and that embodiment is a fallen
state.” Although Fitzgerald‟s subject is English guilds, her suggestion that men might feel a
cognitive dissonance, a sense of anxiety and discomfort because they are asked to maintain two
conflicting ideas about masculinity, is useful in considering John and Aleyn‟s amalgam identities.
89
and dispassionate demonstration of masculine dominance. Chaucer deploys the discourse
of emotion and its attendant sounds as coercive agents that men use not only to “mete out
differences and find commonalities that form the basis of community,” but also to assert
the superiority of their community by dominating other men and women. John and
Aleyn‟s fears and desires may trouble modern readers, but as William Ian Miller
explains, the study of emotions can reveal “the social and cultural contexts in which it
makes sense to have those feelings and ideas.”214 The Reeve’s Tale helps reveal how
certain misogynist philosophies affected late medieval university men and the damaging
effects of their thoughts and feelings.
Amalgam Nation
To be a university student in late medieval England was to be a part of an
amalgam culture that comprised two diverging masculine identity systems. Although
Oxford and Cambridge were essentially “male corporate enterprises” that began as
centers for building and training an educated class of English clergymen, the university‟s
raison d’etre had changed considerably by the fourteenth century.215 University
students had long come from a diverse socio-economic background where higher
education was seen as an escape from the rigid class structures of English society and the
first step into the ecclesiastical world and a life as a cleric. When in the years following
the Black Death, the opportunities for lucrative careers outside the Church expanded, the
“imperative towards a clerical career” virtually disappeared for many undergraduates.216
214 William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press),
8.
215 Alan Cobban, English University Life in the Middle Ages (Columbus, OH: Ohio State
University Press, 1999), 2; Gerald Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), 344.
216 R.N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 40.
90
Instead, the university became a training ground for all manner of men who had
“aspirations for upward social movement” and hoped that an education would give them
an advantage.217 The university education, Ruth Karras writes, was an important status
symbol that “gave one cachet as a certain kind of man.”218 The late medieval university
thus became a masculine way-station of sorts, a place where men hovered between
ecclesiastical and secular models of identity, while they sorted out what kind of man they
might become. As undergraduates, the men occupied a unique category that was
influenced by, but nevertheless separate from, the prevailing modes of masculinity,
forming a community buffeted by competing notions of manhood. In The Reeve’s Tale,
the result is a masculine community anxious to assert its manhood by appeasing these
conflicting ideals.
Once a student entered the medieval university, he joined the ranks of a group
separate from the rest of the world. The title of “clerk” effectively divided the student
from other communities of men in late medieval society. While English universities
endeavored to “define themselves as essentially lay corporations,” as Alan Cobban notes,
the undergraduates nevertheless became partially aligned with the secular clergymen
because they were given the “privilege of clerical status.”219 This meant that students
received the first tonsure as a rite of passage that marked them as both scholars and
members in the lowest of the minor ecclesiastical orders.220 The first tonsure was no
doubt an important visual symbol of membership in the university community, but
clerical status provided more tangible divisions between student and the outside world as
217 Ibid., 39.
218 Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe.
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 73.
219 Cobban, University Life, 3.
220 Swanson, Church and Society, 41; Cobban, University Life, 3.
91
well. Cobban explains that clerical status “brought with it the claim that undergraduates
and all scholars of whatever degree were immune to the normal processes of secular
jurisdiction” and were instead subject only to the ecclesiastical court system.221
Ecclesiastical jurisdiction made sense when most university students were preparing for
careers in the church, but by the fourteenth century, when many students were focused on
others careers, many among the laity eyed this legal distinction with suspicion. Cobban
writes that the citizens of Oxford and Cambridge viewed university clerks as
“constituting elitist fraternities that had…arrogated themselves unwarranted
privileges.”222 Suspicions about the university community‟s separate legal identity in
turn fueled town and gown tensions during the late medieval period. The university
men‟s clerical status “was a very clear statement that…[they] formed a privileged estate
within the town” which “created a climate of resentment which led to the eruption of
periodic clashes between townsmen and scholars.”223
As part of Cambridge‟s elite fraternity, John and Aleyn would have been steeped
in a culture that privileged monastic ideals including quiet contemplation, intellectual
abstraction, and the denial of bodily pleasures. This is perhaps not surprising given that
their university masters were either members of a fraternal order or the secular clergy.
John and Aleyn‟s close encounters with the religious orders would have had a profound
impact on their conception of masculinity and emotion; in particular, they would have
been affected by what some medieval historians refer to as the “third gender” scheme.224
221 Cobban, University Life, 3-4.
222 Ibid., 4.
223 Cobban, The Medieval English Universities: Oxford and Cambridge to c. 1500 (Aldershot:
Scolar Press, 1988), 257, 259.
224 See especially Jo Ann McNamara, “An Unresolved Syllogism: The Search for a Christian
Gender System,” in Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West,
ed. Jacqueline Murray (New York: Garland, 1999), 1-24 and Jacqueline Murray, “Masculinizing
Religious Life: Sexual Prowess, the Battle for Chastity, and Monastic Identity,” in Holiness and
92
Cobban notes that English universities, much like their Continental counterparts, had a
“puritanical attitude” about all things recreational, encouraging students to adopt what
Gerald Harriss calls a “quasi-monastic” identity that was “clearly modeled on that of the
regular clergy, with the provision of a common refectory, church,” and cloister-like
dormitory. Part of this quasi-monastic identity came in the form of university rules
prohibiting licentious behaviors such as drunkenness, gambling, fighting, and sexual
activity that were seen as common off-campus entertainments particularly among young
men. But for many men in the late Middle Ages, this quasi-monastic ethos with its denial
of earthly pleasures would have represented the potential denial of manhood altogether.
Of course, the “normal avenues by which secular men proved their masculinity”—that is
to say, sexual and military prowess—were in most respects closed to Christian clerics.225
Because of this prohibition against sexual and military action, medieval clerics faced
difficult questions about what essentially defines a man: Jo Ann McNamara writes, “Can
one be a man without deploying the most obvious biological attributes of manhood? If a
person does not act like a man, is he a man? And what does it mean to „act like a man,‟
except to dominate women?”226 To answer these questions, medieval clerics in the
central and late medieval periods carefully redeployed the “myth of uncontrollable male
lust” in order to compensate for these potential masculine short-comings.227
Celibate clergymen redefined masculinity as an emotional discourse, refiguring
masculinity as something that a person feels instead of something a person does. With
Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. P.H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (Cardiff: University of
Wales Press, 2004), 24-42.
225 Murray, “Masculinizing Religious Life,” 26.
226 Jo Ann McNamara, “The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 10501150,” in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 3-30, 5.
227 Murray, “Masculinizing Religious Life,” 26-7.
93
masculinity thus refigured, sexual desire and other potentially unruly passions became
“signs of manhood.” To feel (but not act on) certain urges like lust and wrath were sure
symbols of one‟s potential masculine prowess. Because these passions when left
ungoverned can pose a threat to manhood, the cleric‟s successful “battle” for chastity and
emotional stability became the ultimate sign of his masculine prowess.228 The celibate
clergy were thus able to redeploy the discourse of emotion, sexuality, and military
prowess in the service of remaking their masculine identity without having to participate
in passionate and/or violent activities. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the
masculine identity of ecclesiastics and university students necessarily valorized the
emotional self or simply figured masculinity as a governing of those emotions. Most
masculine identities in the Middle Ages hinge on the basic notion that manhood is
marked by the stable mind and body. Ecclesiastical culture acknowledged the existence
of certain feelings and desires, but the ultimate goal was to shut down those passions as
much as possible. As Karras notes, masculine scholastic thought was diametrically
opposed to “feminine approaches” to religious thought and identity like affective piety
that sought to humanize and forge intimate connections with the divine. The masculine
approach, on the other hand, sought to “dehumanize the human.” Conceptualizing the
world in “principles and abstractions,” the ideal masculine mind battled personal and
emotional entanglements with the world.229
A stoic, perhaps nearly passionless masculinity may have been the ideal, but the
young men of medieval Oxford and Cambridge nevertheless had “strong libertarian
tendencies, which manifested themselves in the excesses of drunkenness, gambling,
immorality, disorder, and crime.”230 If the dispassionate man was the ideal, then we
228 Ibid., 27.
229 Karras, From Boys to Men, 88.
230 Cobban, Medieval English Universities, 363.
94
might describe the reality of university life as passionate. The Reeve’s Tale reveals the
difficulties certain clerks had in living up to the dispassionate ideal. When we first meet
John and Aleyn, Chaucer is quick to highlight their passionate, libertarian tendencies
toward excess, describing them as “testif” men who are “lusty for to pleye” and think
“oonly for hire myrthe and revelrye” (4004-5).231 As the modern cognate for “testif”
suggests (testy), the Cambridge students are characterized as a bit unstable: impatient,
willful, headstrong, and perhaps even irritable.232 Right from the start, Chaucer
introduces the men via a discourse of emotion that is ambivalent in its depiction of
masculine identity. For example, “lusty” is an ambiguous word that might indicate a
vigorous, energetic person, but often describes a pleasure-loving character that is given to
licentiousness.233 The men‟s desire to “pleye” could reveal innocent merriment, but can
also suggest far more dubious affairs like gambling or sexual intercourse. Given the
libertarian tendencies that characterize student life in late medieval England, the men‟s
“revelrye” probably runs the definitional gamut. As the MED notes, “revelrye” signifies
all manner of “merrymaking,” from joyful carousing to “disorderly conduct” and “hostile
action.”234 With this wide affective range in mind—that is, a revelry that runs from joy
to rage—if the two clerks are devoted “oonly” to their revelry, we might conclude that
they are subject to their passions. We might also conclude that Chaucer is implicating
university students and their inability to live up to their quasi-monastic ethos. Because
Oxford and Cambridge students were notorious for their tavern-loving lifestyles, their
appetite for drink, prostitutes, and violence, it is not surprising then that Chaucer would
231 All references to The Reeve’s Tale from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed.
(New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1987).
232 Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “testif,” accessed March 27, 2010,
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/
233 MED, s.v. “lusty.”
234 MED, s.vv. “revel,” “revelrie”
95
highlight appetitive and emotional excess in his two Cambridge scholars. Like the
medieval clergymen who restructured masculine identity to suit their celibate lifestyles,
however, medieval university cultures also retooled masculinity, reframing their excesses
as legitimate and controlled expressions of their identity.
In medieval thought, excess was often considered part of the feminine domain.
Directly opposed to rationality and moderation, the surfeit appetite and intemperate
passion was usually figured as a threat to manhood. Indeed, linking the sins of the tavern
to softness and effeminacy is a common trope in both university statutes and late
medieval conduct treatises.235 Despite these warnings about effeminizing excess
drunken revelry and moral decadence was a mainstay of medieval student life. While
Cobban notes that alcohol was an important “lubricant of social intercourse” in medieval
society, Karras suggests that, for the university students‟ masculine communities, the
rowdy and raucous tavern carousing that went along with drink was an important
“expression of camaraderie and belonging.”236 Thus we might read John and Aleyn‟s
eagerness to overindulge, their devotion “oonly” to mirth and revelry, as important
affects that mark them as part of their masculine community.
The fact that medieval university students would accept excess as an appropriate
vehicle for masculine identity and homosocial bonding highlights medieval masculinity‟s
uneasy balancing act and its desire to overlook potential inconsistencies. On the one
hand, the ideal man is figured as rational and stable. He can govern his appetites and rule
his passions. He can battle his desires. Of course, the ecclesiastical version of
masculinity that John and Aleyn were exposed to at Cambridge may take this notion of
stability to an unrealistic extreme because it asks the men to dehumanize themselves, but
they would still have understood masculinity as that which is fundamentally stable and
235 Karras, From Boys to Men, 96.
236 Cobban, University Life, 202 ; Karras, From Boys to Men, 96.
96
unwavering. “[R]ational governance of the lower sensitive faculties (including the
affects),” explains Crocker, was represented as a “masculine enterprise” in the conduct
treatises of the period.237 Men and masculinity were aligned with reason while
femininity was aligned with passion. On the other hand, non-ecclesiastical models of
masculinity, like that of the aristocracy, promote certain aggressive behaviors that might
be read as signs of instability or excess. Medieval romance‟s depiction of aristocratic
manhood, for example, is replete with heroes whose masculine prowess is demonstrated
through heterosexual acts and violent altercations. According to Karras, the aristocratic
model was something that many clerks found alluring because of a yearning for social
mobility, a desire to mimic their socio-economic superiors—a subject to which I will
return shortly.238 The theoretical problem with this type of aggression—whether on the
battlefield and in the bedroom—is that it could undercut a man‟s claims to rationality and
stability. How does a man participate in a sexual act without feeling too much desire?
How does he fight without feeling too much wrath? Hard as it might be to imagine
melding these conflicting forces, medieval masculinity systems insisted that aggression
and moderation could coexist in the same person. A man could slaughter others on the
battlefield and call it a rational and controlled demonstration of his superior strength.
The same goes for sex. This does not mean, however, that the coexistence was
unproblematic. As we see in both the Alliterative Morte Arthure and St. Erkenwald,
medieval literature is filled with male protagonists who are tormented by overweening
passions. Indeed, many medieval narratives, regardless of genre, would have a hard time
asserting that the male characters are perfect models of restraint.
237 Crocker, “Affective Politics,” 230. See also Joan Cadden, The Meanings of Sex Difference in
the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), 180-3.
238 Karras, From Boys to Men, 98.
97
The ecclesiastical model for masculinity understood this dilemma, and posited the
so-called “third gender” and its aggressive battle against the urge to be lustful or violent
as the solution, reaffirming that there was a way to be aggressive and rational at the same
time. I argue that the aristocratic and ecclesiastic models, though incompatible in many
of their ideals, would have led university students like John and Aleyn to the conclusion
that their own aggressions in the tavern and beyond could be “rational and controlled”
even during an act that was sexual, violent, or both.239 Chaucer‟s two clerks stand
between conflicting models of masculinity and they believe that they can and should
appease the demands of both models. They can live up to the dispassionate ideals of the
clerical community; they can live up to the aggressive ideals of the aristocratic
community. John and Aleyn‟s seemingly paradoxical understanding of masculinity
would have, as Karras writes it, “helped [them] reconcile the idea of aggressivity” with
the more stoic “life of the mind.”240
Povre Scolers
John and Aleyn‟s desires to appease diverging identity models are largely due the
fact that late medieval undergraduates aspired to move up the social ladder, whether in
ecclesiastic or civic realms. The quiet, contemplative world of the university prepared
them for a life in the service of the Church. At the same time, rowdy debauchery prepared
the men for life among the upper classes of English society. Karras explains: “Loud
outspoken public display was the prerogative of the aristocracy, the groups with which
the students were attempting to identify, even if it was not the group from which they
came.”241 Thus, John and Aleyn‟s emotional identity, hovering between dispassionate
and passionate revelry, reveals two very different socio-economic aspirations.
239 Karras, From Boys to Men, 82.
240 Ibid., 98.
241 Karras, From Boys to Men, 98.
98
Many students like John and Aleyn saw education not necessarily as the
beginning of a career in the Church, but rather as an “avenue for advancement,” a way to
increase their market value in social and financial spheres outside of the Church. Indeed,
the “increasing attractions of a non-clerical career” drew many English men away from
the priesthood in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.242 The successful clerical career,
marked by a steady rise through Church ranks, was becoming more and more an
uncertain career path. Swanson writes that the number of benefices and prebends
available was often “insufficient” to employ all of England‟s clerics.243 One of the
results of this dearth in benefices, the “uncertain employment possibilities and fluctuating
clerical recruitment,” was that more and more students “delayed ordination [into the
priesthood] until their ecclesiastical prospects seem assured,” though delay did not
always lead to benefice either.244 There were always positions available at the parish
level, but many students did not see the parochial benefice as a means of upward
mobility. As many as 450 parochial benefices were left unfilled each year, suggesting
that the university students rejects the parish as an undesirable job prospect.245 While
the surviving records suggest that “few graduates ended up unbeneficed or in the poorer
livings,” the benefice and prebend market was nonetheless enormously competitive, some
graduates did end up in these so-called “poorer livings,” and as many as half of all
students dropped out before taking a degree.246 Chaucer was well aware of the uncertain
242 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 351.
243 Swanson, Church and Society, 46. Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 351, notes that there were
often parochial benefices available but many parish churches were left vacant in this period
because they were perceived as financially unrewarding and not conducive to advancement in the
ecclesiastical ranks.
244 Swanson, Church and Society, 46, 50.
245 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 351.
246 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 351.
99
job prospects facing late medieval university students as evidenced his description of the
Clerk of Oxford who joins the Canterbury pilgrimage:
And he nas nat right fat, I undertake,
But looked holwe and therto sobrely.
Ful thredbare was his overeste courtepy;
For he hadde geten hym yet no benefice,
Ne was so worldly for to have office (290-4)
The Clerk of Oxford is in difficult financial circumstances, shabby and emaciated
because he is without a job. Lacking benefice or office, the clerk is forced to offer his
prayers in exchange for the money necessary to pay for tuition and books: “And bisily
gan for the soules preye Of hem that yaf hym wherwith to scoleye” (303-4).
Given Chaucer‟s depiction of the Clerk as unbeneficed and impoverished, it is
perhaps tempting to view John and Aleyn‟s identity as “yonge povre scolers two” as a
straightforward indicator of their financial destitution and emotional despair. Indeed, the
range of definitions that the MED lists for “povre” suggest nothing beyond the
impoverished man who feels “wretched, unfortunate, and deserving of pity.”247 John
and Aleyn‟s “povre” status and northern dialect is often read as confirmation of their
lower socio-economic status and intellectual deficiency. It is certainly possible John and
Aleyn might come from a lower income family, since medieval English universities
educate not just the well-off, but also a large number of men with backgrounds in
yeomanry and husbandry-farming.248 But it is more likely that John and Aleyn were not
poor in a socioeconomic sense. “Povre scoler” or “povre clerk” is a formulaic and occurs
repeatedly in the literature and university records of the period.249 Typically, the title of
“poor scholar” refers to a student “who is unable to support himself for the duration of a
247 MED, s.v. “povre.”
248 Karras, From Boys to Men, 72.
249 J.A.W. Bennett, Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1974), 99.
100
lengthy course of study without some measure of assistance.”250 Given the length of
time it could take to earn a degree, many students required some financial assistance.251
It should be noted that these students in need were “secular students” unattached to
fraternal or monastic orders, clerks not yet committed to a particular profession and not
yet assured of a career with the Church or Crown.252 Most of these secular students,
however, were of “average means” and “could not be described as „poor‟ according to
any literal interpretation.”253 This is not to say that there were not genuinely
impoverished students, but records indicate that less than one percent of all students came
from backgrounds in serfdom or similarly impoverished socio-economic statuses. 254
Chaucer likely describes Jon and Aleyn as “povre scholars” because they are part of a
community of secular students who, like the Clerk of Oxford, are “without exhibitions or
benefices,” without gainful employment and relying on the charity of a patron or
university fellowship. As J.A.W. Bennett notes, the clerks may have been impecuniosi,
but “they were in no sense impotentes—the term used for scholars in dire need.”255 Still,
this idea of impotentes must have hovered over the heads of these two secular scholars
who were confronting a volatile economy in the fourteenth-century England where
clerical employment and financial security were anything but certain. The threat of
250 Cobban, Medieval English Universities, 304.
251 Financial support most often came in the form of fellowships, patronage, student loans, and,
in some cases, employment in the university garden or as a manservant for one of the wealthier
students. See Cobban, University Life, 28-31.
252 See Maurice Keen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Penguin, 1990),
245-6.
253 Cobban, Medieval English Universities, 304.
254 Ibid., 306-7. University records indicate that in some extreme cases begging licenses were
granted to students by the chancellor. In the English universities‟ early years, begging was
“acceptable through the mendicity of the friars,” but Cobban explains that this practice was
considered less and less appropriate during the late medieval period.
255 Bennett, Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge, 99.
101
becoming the poor, impotent clerk, the destitute and, therefore, powerless and ineffective
male must have represented a considerable anxiety.
John and Aleyn‟s membership in the “gret college” that men “clepen the Soler
Halle at Cantebrigge” reveals that they are part of a masculine community that, in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had particularly high career ambitions and,
presumably, high career anxieties. Derek Brewer, Bennett, and Cobban have all offered
convincing speculations that “Soler Halle” is actually a reference to Cambridge‟s King‟s
Hall, an aularian community that not only had a “certain prestige as a royal foundation,”
but was also the first English college to regularly admit undergraduates into its student
body.256 Virtually all of the members of King‟s Hall, when compared to the rest of
Cambridge‟s student population, were either fairly well off or had the support of a patron,
and were by no means “povre” in any literal sense.257 Edward II established King‟s Hall
as a “reservoir of educated personnel” from which the king could actively recruit
members for civil service in the royal bureaucracy.258 Bennett believes that Chaucer‟s
two clerks were law students because John speaks in “legal terms,” cites legal maxims,
and otherwise uses words that have a “legal flavor.”259 If the men were indeed members
of King‟s Hall, Bennett‟s suggestion makes sense. Damien Riehl Leader explains that
throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, King‟s Hall members “consistently
256 Ibid., 93. See 94-6 for Bennett‟s convincing argument that Soler Hall is King‟s Hall. See
also Damien Riehl Leader, A History of The University of Cambridge: Volume I The University to
1546, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 80.
257 Cobban, English University Life, 40.
258 Bennett, Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge, 93.
259 Ibid., 105. Bennett writes that John “thinks of the loss of his corn in legal terms, citing a
legal maxim (4179 ff.) of which the Harleian manuscript supplies the Latin form: „qui in uno
gravatur, in alio debet relevari‟ („if a man in a point be ygreved, in another he sal be releved‟).
He speaks also of „amendement‟ and esement‟ (4185-6), both terms with a legal flavor, even if
that flavor is not obvious here; indeed the precise sense of „compensation‟ here required is
evidenced only once again, in a legal contract of later date.”
102
specialized in law to an extent unparalleled in any other Cambridge college. The
tradition was one of service.”260 While John and Aleyn would thus have been united in
their shared educational and professional aspirations, their membership in King‟s Hall
would not have ensured prestige and/or success. Rather, John and Aleyn‟s membership
in King‟s Hall further indicates masculine identities that are unfixed and wavering.
In Chaucer‟s day, the reference to King‟s Hall would not simply have carried with
it the prestige of royal connection; King‟s Hall also “enjoyed a certain notoriety in the
'seventies and 'eighties because of bad management.”261 The leadership of King‟s Hall
was composed of a warden and six elected seneschals. Following a series of untimely
deaths, resignations, and expulsions in the latter half of the fourteenth century, the
running of King's Hall fell on young and inexperienced scholars, “most of which had not
yet earned their B.A.s”262 Cobban explains that these “rather extraordinary
circumstances” that, out of necessity, put a “handful of young, inexperienced scholars
without degrees” in seneschal positions, continued through much of the later fourteenth
century and led to “detrimental and perhaps even disastrous consequences."263
Accusations of mismanagement were so bad that in 1385 the hall‟s warden, Simon
Neyland, “had to be expelled along with six offending fellows.”264
Chaucer is clearly conscious of the King‟s Hall‟s governing system and seems
well aware of its reputation for mismanagement. He depicts a Soler Halle that is teetering
on the edge of disarray. Chaucer figures the warden of Soler Halle as an angry,
260 Leader, History, 79.
261 Derek Brewer, “The „Reeve‟s Tale‟ and the King‟s Hall, Cambridge,” The Chaucer Review
5.4 (1971): 311-17, 312.
262 Bennett, Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge, 104.
263 Cobban, The King’s Hall within the University of Cambridge in the Later Middle Ages
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 178.
264 Brewer, “King‟s Hall,” 312.
103
exasperated, and ineffectual leader whose chaotic emotional display likely reflects those
detrimental and disastrous consequences that Cobban mentions. The community‟s
disorder comes to light when the hall‟s manciple, an officer who is charged with
purchasing provisions and overseeing the wheat and malt supplies for the college, is
waylaid with a “maladye” and Symkyn, the miller of Trumpington, feels free to steal “an
hundred tyme moore than biforn” (3993-96). The miller understands that Soler Hall‟s
masculine community is out of balance because of its inadequate leadership, and the
manciple‟s ailing body underscores the hall‟s ailing body politic. Without the expertise
and watchful eye of its manciple, the hall‟s “transient, youthful” and inexperienced
governing body is powerless to stop the miller from cheating the college.265
Chaucer highlights the impotency of King‟s Hall through the warden‟s noisy
affective display. As Trumpington‟s miller becomes a “theef outrageously,” the warden,
Chaucer writes, “chidde and made fare” (3998-99). To “chiden” is to vent anger and
argue vehemently, but it is also used to describe the screeching of animals.266 Likewise,
“maken fare” is a “bustling or noisy activity” that leads to “commotion” and
“disturbance.”267 Enraged by the miller‟s thievery, the warden devolves into a
screeching tirade replete with frenzied gestures that lead to a perturbing commotion. The
miller seems unshaken by the warden‟s affective onslaught, meeting it with his own noisy
rebuff: “He craketh boost, and swoor it was nat so” (4001). When Chaucer describes the
miller‟s rebuttal with “craketh boost,” he emphasizes the miller‟s arrogant bravado,
265 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 346, explains that even when the governing bodies of English
universities were in the hands of experienced scholars, they differed in general from those of the
Continent. English universities were “never controlled by the senior and salaried members of the
higher faculties as on the Continent. Until the later sixteenth century they remained democratic
rather than oligarchic.”
266 MED, s.v. “screech.”
267 MED, s.v. “fare,” 6.
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signaling both impudent bragging and loud, sharp bursting sound.268 Compared with the
miller‟s aggressive defense, the warden‟s emotional and gestural assault is clearly
ineffective. And in the ineffectuality of his emotions, Chaucer challenges the warden and
his university community‟s ability to both maintain their masculine ideal of the
dispassionate mind and to channel their aggressive urges to rational and therefore
effective ends.
John and Aleyn‟s plaint to their warden reveals that the clerks are anxious to
reassert order in their community and reaffirm their own sense of masculine power,
prowess, and authority. Symkyn‟s thievery has made the Cambridge clerks, who are
accustomed to a privileged and distinct legal status, impotent and subject to his
machinations. The two men plead with the warden (“bisily they crye,” 4006) to give
them leave to go to Trumpington so that they may witness the grinding of the grain and
thereby regain some semblance of control over their provisions and the miller‟s thieving
ways. Though the clerks‟ busy cries may be further evidence of their “testif” and “lusty”
behavior, or, as Bennett suggests, a reflection of their undergraduate status and subjection
to the warden and the “discipline of the college,” we should also read their affective
display as an anxious desire to defend their warden and masculine community. In their
plea, John and Aleyn stake their reputations as men and members of King‟s Hall on their
ability to coerce the miller into an honest transaction. “Bisily,” according to the MED,
suggests an anxious and uneasy state of mind and the men‟s avowal to defend their
college‟s provisions from the miller‟s “sleighte” and “force” indicates that the miller
stands at the epicenter of that anxiety.269 The miller offers the men an opportunity to
appease the two models of masculinity between which they hover: they can assert
268 MED, s.v. “craken.”
269 MED, s.v. “bisili,” 3.
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themselves as men of superior intellect, capable of uncovering and quelling the miller‟s
“sleighte” of hand; or they can demonstrate their ability to control aggression and cut off
the miller‟s “force.” That John and Aleyn arm themselves with a “good swerd
and…bokeler” (4019) indicates the men‟s desire to appear aggressive and capable of
violent actions. The clerks construct an affect of aggression with the hope that it will, as
Crocker puts it, “create categories of distinction for and within their communities.”270
Affective Economics
From the start, John and Aleyn‟s confrontation with Symkyn demonstrates that
affect can be part of a strategy of coercion that disrupts masculine hierarchies and
reshapes identities. The two clerks attempt to surround Symkyn in his workspace,
forcing the miller to labor between their two bodies, thereby signaling a challenge to
Symkyn‟s socio-economic power and status. John, feigning curiosity, insists on hovering
over the miller and watching the mill in action:
“By God, right by the hopur wil I stande,”
Quod John, and se howgates the corn gas in,
Yet saugh I nevere, by my fader kyn,
How that the hopur wagges til and fra.” (4036-9)
As John forces himself and his watchful gaze onto the miller, Aleyn imposes himself
“bynethe” the miller and his hopper so that he might “se how that the mele falls doun /
Into the trough” (4041-2). Chaucer injects the masculine repositioning with emotion
when Aleyn echoes John‟s anticipation and delight in placing the miller under the power
of their surveillance, exclaiming that the supervision “sal be my disport” (4043). Here
Chaucer renders the clerks‟ gaze as an affective touch capable of refashioning the
emotional/political relationship between subject and object. Their eyes become a conduit
for both achieving and evaluating a new power position. Aleyn‟s “disport” functions as
an appraisal of sorts, anticipating that their act of surveillance and their repositioning of
270 Crocker, “Affective Politics,” 227.
106
their bodies will bring pleasure and consolation, a mix of gratification and solace, a balm
for their distress.271
If we pause to consider the mill as an architectural symbol of Symkyn‟s socioeconomic and sexual identity—that is, as an edificial body that blends workshop and
household—we might read the clerks‟ appropriation of that body as an erotic but
troublingly coercive affective communion. First, Symkyn‟s mill represents a powerful
masculine body that dominates the agrarian economies of the city and its surrounding
areas. Chaucer indicates the extent of the miller‟s economic reach when he writes “Gret
sokene hath this millere, out of doute, / With whete and malt of al the land aboute”
(3987-8). “Soken” refers to a mill-owner‟s exclusive right to “grind and take toll of all
the grain” of a town and its neighboring areas.272 The rights of “soken” typically
belonged to the lords of manors, but, as Bennett explains, the late fourteenth century was
a period of great socio-economic fluidity and some millers could amass enough wealth to
buy the freedom of their mills.273 Chaucer emphasizes the power of Symkyn‟s “soken”
when he notes that his reach extends to “al” the lands that surround Trumpington. While
Cambridge was not necessarily legally bound to the Trumpington mill, it was bound to it
geographically. The colleges‟ increasing numbers in this period “severely taxed the
milling resources of the city” and because the colleges had no claim to the service of the
city‟s mills, they were forced to seek mills outside of Cambridge.274 Trumpington, only
a few miles from Cambridge, was the only logical choice. John and Aleyn are thus
compelled to participate in Symkyn‟s economy. They are unwilling subjects to
Symkyn‟s desires. At the same time, it is also important to note that the mill is Symkyn‟s
271 MED, s.v. “disport.”
272 Bennett, Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge, 91.
273 Ibid., 91.
274 Bennett, Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge, 107-8.
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household space and the place where he raises his family. William F. Woods explains
that this household is an important means of Symkyn‟s social advancement, a “kind of
surrogate mill” that converts family into signs of status and prestige.275 The miller‟s
wife, his daughter Malyne, and their family “lynage” that connects them to the town
parson, are all figured as important symbols of Symkyn‟s prowess. Thus, the miller‟s
strong economic body and his “visible dominance” over men, women, trade, and property
appears “to actualize a fully legitimate fantasy of masculinity in the late medieval
imagination.”276 This is a fantasy that John and Aleyn aim to disrupt.
If Symkyn‟s mill is, as Woods suggests, a space that is permeated by sexual
symbolism, a household/workplace that “enables the transformation” of family and grain
into social and economic status, then John and Aleyn‟s attempts momentarily to usurp the
mill are efforts to dispel the mill‟s “transformative magic.”277 Cary Howie‟s recent
work on affect and space in medieval narrative describes the permeable architectural
enclosure as an ambivalent but erotic point of contact that “at once resists and solicits
penetration.”278 To be surrounded by walls with windows and doors “is not to be sealed
off,” but rather is to “be summoned, paradoxically, into a more concrete, ecstatic
relation” with what lies beyond the enclosure‟s boundaries.279 In the case of Symkyn,
his mill (and the powerful “soken” it represents) both opposes and invites the two clerks‟
infiltration. The mill insists that John and Aleyn are subordinate to the miller‟s desires,
275 William F. Woods, “Symkyn‟s Place in the Reeve’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 39.1 (2004):
17-40, 32. Woods explains that the wife‟s dowry is likely substantial and likely to benefit the
children, so there‟s also a material sort of wealth that the household also showcases.
276 Crocker, “Affective Politics,” 231.
277 Woods, “Symkyn‟s Place,” 32.
278 Carey Howie, Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 16.
279 Howie, Claustrophilia, 4.
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but it also challenges them to confront that uneven power structure. Howie imagines the
contact between inside and outside, between those within and those without as something
of an affective touch that has the power to redefine the identities of those who participate
in the contact. Howie‟s discussion of this affective touch operates primarily on the level
of hermeneutics, considering the medieval text as an enclosure of sorts that invites
transhistorical relationships with other texts and readers; yet, his definition of the
affective, participative touch is useful in understanding the emotional dimensions of the
clerks‟ conflict with the miller. “To touch,” he writes, “is to experience a limit and open
a connection.”280 Whether the touch occurs on the level of the visual, hermeneutical, or
the tactile and sexual, it “traces the outline of a community.”281 Although Howie‟s
affective touch is mostly figured as a happy and erotic sort of tryst between minds,
bodies, and texts, he does not rule out the potential for the affective touch to include
violence. It is hard to read the clerks‟ invasion of the mill and their attempts lock
Symkyn in their gaze and between their bodies as anything but a violent, penetrative act.
Indeed, John and Aleyn‟s coercive gaze requires, as Howie explains of the violent,
affective touch, “an ecstatic reorientation of the most basic (and finally damaging)
ontological presuppositions: that this body cannot be touched; that this body is
impenetrable and forever lost.”282
Symkyn‟s aggressive affect, his bellicose masculinity, relies on the claim that he
is untouchable. In the first sixteen lines of the tale, Chaucer twice emphasizes that no one
dares touch the miller. When Chaucer first introduces Symkyn to his readers, he remarks
that the miller bristles with three blades: a “long panade,” a “joly popere,” and a
“Sheffeld thwitel” in his hose (3929-33). Symkyn‟s phallic trifecta positions him as a
280 Ibid., 7.
281 Ibid., 7.
282 Ibid., 7.
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man not to be trifled with. Chaucer makes it clear that the miller‟s reputation for
aggression and brutality precedes him, for “no man, for peril, dorste hym touche” (3932).
The miller‟s anger and ferociousness, however, is advertised not simply by weapon
quantity but by weapon type. While the “Sheffeld thwitel” would have suggested, as a
number of editors point out, a blade made out of high quality steel, it would have also
indicated Symken‟s tendency to act on violent impulses.283 The “thwitel,” Bennett notes,
is “poorly evidenced” in the fiction of the period, with some scribes making nonsense of
the word.284 But, fourteenth-century records indicate that outside of fiction, the
“thwitel” had a nasty reputation as a weapon suited for street brawls. Records that
mention the “thwitel,” all “concern brawls (one actually at Trumpington) in which a man
is killed by his opponent‟s „thwitel.‟”285 As if to affirm the hot-temperedness that the
“thwitel” suggests, the Reeve classifies the miller as a “market-betere”—that is, a bully
or “quarrelsome swaggerer”—and reiterates that “dorste no wight hand upon hym legge”
(3936-37).
As the clerks try to compel the miller to stand between them, to submit to their
surveillance, the men reorient Symkyn‟s belief that he is untouchable and impenetrable.
While the clerks dare not lay their hands on the miller‟s blade-bedecked body, their gaze
should be considered a type of physical contact. As I discuss in the second chapter,
medieval conceptions of the bodily senses not only figured sight as the quickest and most
vigorous of the five senses, but also believed that the eyes had the ability to physically
touch, interact with, and influence the object of their gaze. Sight was both gateway and
transmitter. Vision was “the result of the action of the object being suffered or
283 Benson, The Riverside Chaucer, 850, notes that Sheffield had a reputation for high-quality
steel in the fourteenth century.
284 Bennett, Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge, 5.
285 Ibid., 5, n2.
110
impressed” on the eye and the eye emitted a ray that met and intermingled with the ray of
the object.286 In both instances, as Sarah Stanbury notes, sight was a “property of
physical contiguity.”287 The eye‟s ability to enact a participative touch was, of course,
crucial to late-medieval affective piety which used religious imagery to forge affective
connections with the divine. The gaze could lead to a “physical as well as emotional
cathexis” that inspired empathy and faith, and enabled the worshipper to understand
certain divine truths.288 The clerks‟ supervision of Symkyn contains no empathy, which
is perhaps reflective of their dispassionate, dehumanized outlook on personal emotional
entanglements; nevertheless, their gaze functions as a physical and emotional cathexis
that is meant to subjugate the miller and offer some consolation to the clerks. Chaucer
figures the clerks‟ surveillance as an affective touch that threatens to intimidate, restrain,
and oppress. John and Aleyn‟s sight is marked as a potentially violent affective
connection that seeks to penetrate Symkyn‟s masculine architectural body and reorient
the power relations between the men. These “povre scolers,” these Cambridge
impecuniosi—whom the miller threatens to make impotentes in his “soken” and with his
thievery—attempt to render Symkyn impotent under their gaze.289 In this moment,
Chaucer demonstrates that affective connections and their recuperative functions can be
fraught with prejudice and hostility. Chaucer shows us “the ways in which affect moves
286 C.M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England, (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2007), 21, 178.
287 Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 6 and 220, fn 13.
288 Stanbury, Visual Object, 6; Woolgar, The Senses, 178.
289 Here I am deliberately echoing Bennett‟s discussion of the poor scholar and the differences
between impecuniosi—the clerk who was without benefice and required some financial aid—and
impotentes—the clerk who was financially and emotionally destitute. See Bennett, Chaucer at
Oxford and at Cambridge, 99.
111
between bodies precipitating an unmediated, uninitiated, and often-unwanted form of
contact.”290
John and Aleyn‟s supervision operates as an aggressive, affective touch that
produces pleasure while it coerces, and that this attempts to appease the two often
conflicting identity-models that inform their masculine selves. Their anticipation for
“disport” acknowledges their anxieties and cravings for solace. Though their desire for
“disport” requires an act of aggression, it is an act that is figured as rational and
controlled. Indeed, the clerks‟ objective is to moderate and restrain the miller‟s
activities. But, as Symkyn, points out, balancing rationality and emotion is a delicate
enterprise. In The Reeve’s Tale, the coercive, affective touch breeds further hostilities.
Symkyn smiles when he hears of their professed interest in the workings of the mill, a
gesture that communicates both pleasure and scorn, immediately undercutting the clerks‟
fantasy of domination.291 Then, the miller categorizes the men and their surveillance as
“nycetee” (4046). “Nycetee” is a curious Middle English word that has a wide semantic
range.292 Are the men foolish, lazy, and timid? Clever, cunning, and precise? Wanton,
lustful, and excessive? Chaucer perhaps signals all three possibilities. While “nycetee”
may signify the violent, eroticized gaze that the clerks try to enact in the mill, it is worth
noting that both of the masculine identities represented in Chaucer‟s tale stand on the
precipice of affective surplus. Chaucer indicates that neither Symkyn nor the Cambridge
students are models of self-restraint and so “nycetee” might express the unstable affects
that characterize both communities of men. Furthermore, the clerks‟ giddy “disport”
reveals that they are delighted with their own cleverness, their ploy to shut down the
290 Crocker, “Affective Politics,” 251.
291 A smile is a gesture capable of considerable nuance. The MED shows that to “smilen” is to
communicate a range of potential affects including pleasure, ironic amusement, satisfaction
because of secret knowledge, disbelief, scorn, and deception. MED, s.v. “smilen.”
292 MED, s.v. “nicete.”
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miller‟s thievery. At the same time, the miller‟s smile suggests that he scoffs at the clerks
and sees the Cambridge men‟s surveillance as a foolish, ineffectual ruse. “Nycetee” thus
wavers between rationality, affective surfeit, and intellectual deficiency. With this choice
of word, Chaucer deploys an affective vocabulary that is entirely unstable and wholly
malleable. The clerks‟ “nycetee” is a fitting symbol of the men‟s affective identities
which cling to competing definitions of masculine governance and emotionality.
When Symkyn, the bristling and boisterous representative of affective surplus,
gives voice to the clerks‟ “nycetee,” Chaucer suggests that the bridling of affect is a
difficult proposition. While affect may be wholly malleable and capable of coercion, the
“povre” clerks do not understand that the affective touch invites the one who‟s touched to
touch back. As Howie notes, to touch someone or something is “to open a connection” or
“ecstatic relation.”293 Indeed, as the clerks threaten the miller with their gaze‟s coercive
extramission, their gaze also intromits the miller‟s loaded smile.
Sarah Ahmed‟s theory of the “affective economy” is useful in understanding the
increasing hostility and hate that circulates between the miller and John and Aleyn.
Drawing on Marxist and psychoanalytic theories, Ahmed suggests that emotions operate
as an economy that involves “relationships of difference and displacement without
positive value.” Emotions, she writes, “work as a form of capital: affect does not reside
positively in the sign of commodity, but is produced as an effect of its circulation.”294
What she means here is that affect, like Marx‟s understanding of capital, acquires surplus
value through circulation and exchange. Symkyn‟s thievery may decrease the substance
of the clerks‟ grains, but it leads to an increase in anger and aggression. Likewise, the
clerk‟s attempt to invade the mill and lock the miller in their gaze leads to further
hostilities. Ahmed writes that “signs increase in affective value as an effect of the
293 Howie, Claustrophilia, 7.
294 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 45.
113
movement between signs: the more signs circulate the more affective they become.”295
Hate increases, it builds a surplus in and between the men as they “touch” one another.
Symkyn‟s mill functions here not simply as a symbol of economic capital—that is, the
circulation of commodities, money, and the like—but also as a symbol of affective
capital and surplus. Symkyn‟s thievery is a center of local corruption and, as his bladebedecked body suggests, corruption breeds animosity. The clerks‟ affective relation with
the miller is not, however, limited to their individual feud, and as Ahmed‟s theory of the
affective economy suggests cannot be “contained within the contours of a subject” or
restricted to the “particular.”296 While an emotion like hate may respond to a particular
person and/or situation, “it tends to do so by aligning the particular with the general; „I
hate you because you are this or that,‟ where the „this‟ or „that‟ evokes a group that the
individual comes to stand for or stand in for.”297
The affective economy of the Reeve’s Tale thus represents not just the battle
between three men, but rather a war between masculine communities and ideologies.
Symkyn hates John and Aleyn not only for their “bumptious self-confidence” and their
attempts to use him for their “disport,” but also because of their “educational privilege,”
because of their identity as clerks and members of Cambridge‟s elite community.298
Before the miller hatches his plan to strip the bridle off the clerks‟ horse and let it run
wild, the miller specifically targets John and Aleyn‟s educational status. He vows to
“blere hir ye / For al the sleighte in hir philosophye” (4049-50). To “blere” the eye is
295 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 45.
296 Ibid., 46.
297 Ibid., 49.
298 I am borrowing two phrases from V.A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The
First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford University Press, 1984), 253, who suggests that both the
Reeve and the miller Symkyn, because of their “station in life,” are aligned against the clerks and
their educational/legal identity.
114
proverbial for hoodwinking, but we might also read this as Symkyn‟s counter to the
clerks‟ coercive gaze, blocking their eye‟s extramissive touch. Moreover, because
“blere” can also indicate bellowing and insulting—noisy gestures characteristic of the
Trumpington miller‟s affective deficiency—Symkyn‟s defense becomes an aggressive,
perhaps cacophonous assault.299 Symkyn indicates that the counterattack on the clerks‟
“ye” is a direct response to the “sleighte” in their learning. The clerks‟ “sleighte”
education vacillates between an acknowledgement of the men‟s cleverness, prudence, and
power and the unimportance, slenderness, and poor quality of their scholarship.300 With
a single word, the miller conceives of the two clerks as a potential threat while also
attempting to mitigate that threat by diminishing the ideological institution that defines
the clerks. The two clerks‟ surveillance jeopardizes the miller‟s powerbase, but when
Symkyn thinks about his anger, he directs it toward the clerks as representatives of Soler
Hall at Cambridge. He does not insult the men themselves but rather their university
education and clerkly identity. As Ahmed notes, “[h]ate is involved in the very
negotiation of boundaries between selves and others, and between communities, where
“others‟ are brought into the sphere of my or our existence as a threat.”301
Chaucer brings the Cambridge-Trumpington affective economy and its production
of surplus passions into greater relief through the destabilizing discourse of noise. As I
explained earlier, Jacques Attali theorizes that noise fundamentally and symbolically
opposes order. The organization of sound (language, music, etc.), he writes, is an
important “tool for the creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality.”302 We
299 MED, s.v. “blere.”
300 MED, s.vv. “sleighte,” “slight.” “Sleighte” indicates cleverness and prudence, while “slight,”
which is often spelled as “sleighte,” refers to something that is flimsy, trivial, and unimportant.
301 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 51.
302 Jaques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 6.
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might think of the clerks‟ “philosophye” as an organizing discourse that includes a
particular linguistic order, a specific organization of sounds and utterances. As members
of Cambridge‟s quasi-monastic community, John and Aleyn would have been among the
privileged members of late-medieval English society who could read, write, and speak in
Latin. Latin organized and facilitated the clerks‟ “philosophye,” their knowledge,
learning, and scholarship; it created and consolidated the clerks‟ privileged status and
separation from the laity. Noise, however, represents the interdiction of language‟s
consolidation and can threaten a community‟s social order. Late medieval universities
understood the threat noise posed to the moral and intellectual integrity of their
communities, instituting strict guidelines against any activity that might disrupt the quiet
contemplation, anything that, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen would put it, produces “perturbing
nonlinguistic sonority.”303 The miller‟s vow to “blere hir ye” suggests a noisy sort of
response to the clerks‟ ruse. As I noted above, “blere” suggests a cacophonous bellowing
and so we might read Symkyn‟s “blere”-ing as an aggressive noise that functions as an
“interdiction” of the clerks‟ fantasy of privilege, separation, and domination. Because the
miller targets not just John and Aleyn but the “sleighte in hir philsophye,” the noise also
specifically threatens the clerks‟ Cambridge community.
When noise destroys order, it often leaves a space for the structuring of a new
order.304 Symkyn‟s “blere”-ing works in the same way. The clerks threaten to
destabilize Symkyn‟s locus of control, to reorder the Cambridge-Trumpington‟s
masculine power structure, and the miller means to stop them. Not only that, but the
miller promises to escalate his larceny and thus expand the power of his “soken,”
indicating that the affective economy continues to produce surplus: “The moore queynte
303 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, "Kyte oute yugilment: An Introduction to Medieval Noise,"
Exemplaria 16 (2004): 267-76, 269.
304 Attali, Noise, 20.
116
crekes that they make, / The moore wol I stele whan I take” (4051-2). Symkyn curiously
describes John and Aleyn‟s ploy as “queynte crekes,” a phrase that suggests a range of
sounds. Editors usually take “crikes” as the plural form of “crike” and gloss it as a
“trick,” but the MED is less certain.305 “Crekes” could also represent a noun form of the
verb “criken,” which would indicate a croaking, cackling, clucking sound or words
spoken harshly, noisily, and/or foolishly.306 Symkyn aligns the clerks‟ “queynte” tricks
with a noisy foolish discourse that hovers on the edge of nonlinguistic animal prattle.
Indeed, “queynte” is often used to modify spoken and/or written language that deceives
or equivocates, language that refuses to communicate ideas directly.307 Symkyn thus
uses the affective economy and its competing sounds—the miller‟s “blere” versus the
clerks‟ “crekes”—in an attempt to reorder masculine community identity. John and
Aleyn, representatives of the Cambridge “philosophye,” are reduced to cackling and
croaking animals whose efforts at “disport” are made deficient.
The two sound-words here—“blere” and “creke”—function similarly to the
“signs” in Ahmed‟s affective economy: “the more signs circulate,” she writes, “the more
affective they become.”308 Symkyn suggests that if the clerks make “moore crekes,” he
will become “moore” angry, he will steal more grain, and he will ultimately become more
powerful. With each “creke,” the miller must increase his “blere.” The men‟s affective
surplus continues to proliferate and, Symkyn imagines, the affective surplus can be used
in his favor. When the miller strips the bridle off Bayard, the clerks‟ horse, the men‟s
305 The MED puts a question mark next to this definition of “crike”: “?A turn, trick, stratagem.”
If this is the correct definition, Chaucer‟s Reeve’s Tale is the only extant text that uses the word in
this way. MED, s.v. “crike.”
306 MED, s.v. “craken.” “Craken” is sometimes spelled “criken.”
307 MED, s.v. “queinte,” 2: “to speak or write elaborately, often deceptively, not plainly or
directly; quibble; also, behave graciously or charmingly; dissemble”
308 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 45.
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discourse devolves into one-word emotional peals, running about the countryside
screaming “Harrow!” and “Weylaway!” (4072). In the miller‟s “blere”-ing and the
clerks‟ lamenting, the noise “makes possible the creation of a new order…a new code in
another network.”309 In this moment, John and Aleyn have lost control of their passions
and relinquished their claims to the rational control of aggression. Symkyn is thus free to
reconsolidate his “soken.”
When the clerks lose control of Bayard, they lose control of the discourse of
sound and emotion. In his meticulous account of horse imagery in medieval narrative,
Kolve writes that the bridle represented “man in control of his entire animal nature, of all
his senses and their appetites.”310 While John and Aleyn‟s struggles to regain control of
Bayard is most often read as a metaphor for unbridled lust—indeed, the clerks‟ bed trick
adds to the erotics of the bridle image—Kolve urges us to consider the horse not as a
representative of lechery alone. Rather, Bayard‟s pursuit of the “wilde mares” and his
lusty “weehees” represent more generally “passion and appetites indulged without
restraint or measure.”311 The threat that Symkyn poses to the clerks is not simply about
lust; his noisy, aggressive assault threatens to destabilize the very core of the clerk‟s
masculine identities. John and Aleyn‟s “philosophye,” their (potentially conflicting)
university‟s masculine ideals—ideals that run the gamut from dispassionate self-restraint
to acts of aggression—crumbles as they run through the fens. The men are clearly aware
that their very identities as members of the university‟s masculine community are at
stake. John cringes at the shame and embarrassment awaiting him at Soler Hall: “men
309 Attali, Noise, 33.
310 Kolve, Imagery of Narrative, 245.
311 Ibid., 251.
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wil us fooles calle, / Bathe the wardeyn and oure felawes alle” (4111-2).312 The miller
has effectively made the representatives of Cambridge, the “povre scolers” into scolares
impotentes. Furthermore, their inability to control the miller threatens to make them
outcasts in their community, “fooles” who will suffer the scorn of their “felawes.”
Chaucer very clearly indicates that the noisy affective economy threatens all of
these men‟s claims to rationality and control. Bellowing noisy laments and chasing
Bayard through the fens, Aleyn, Chaucer writes, completely forgets “his housbandrie”
(4077). Chaucer‟s use of the word “housbandrie” is a provocative choice. As I noted in
the second chapter, English men across the economic spectrum evaluated themselves
according to what Derek Neal calls the ideal of “husbandry” that “included being a
„husband‟ in the modern sense, but also in the now archaic sense of „manager,‟ one who
both orders and sustains.”313 The basic “substance” of the late medieval husband was
comprised of his wife and family along with his wealth, land, and property. Prudent
management of one‟s substance became the hallmark of the successful medieval husband
or householder. We might then read Symkyn‟s “soken,” his wealth, property, and family,
as representative of successful management. Late medieval husbandry demanded more,
however, than the material signs of prudent management and sustainable wealth. In
addition, a man needed to display moderation, self-control, and self-restraint. While the
governing of property and household dependents was “central to husbandry,” it also
demanded “the rule and limitation of self.”314
This notion of self-governance extended to the affective self. Like most models
of medieval masculinity, husbandry discouraged emotional excess and encourage a
312 Bennett, Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge, 98, notes that Chaucer uses felawes “in the
academic sense of socii,” a synonym for scolares and/or clerks.
313 Derek Neal, The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2008), 58.
314 Neal, The Masculine Self, 58.
119
“disciplined mode of regulation.”315 Despite Symkyn‟s visible signs of dominance,
Symkyn‟s bristling and “blere”-ing emotionality reveals what Crocker calls an “affective
deficiency” that undermines his aspirations to embody a “respectable masculinity.”316
Likewise, Aleyn becomes deficient. Of course, Aleyn‟s “housbondrie” refers literally to
the corn he‟s charged with guarding, the corn he has “al forgat” in his mad race into the
fens (4076). While neither John nor Aleyn are “housbondes” in any literal sense of the
word—that is, “the master of a house, paterfamilias”—they are bound to similar
principles of moderation, self-restraint, and the management of their substance and
wealth.317 Given that the unbridled horse is most often a symbol of unrestrained passions
and immoderate appetites, it is reasonable to suggest that Chaucer‟s use of housbondrie
reiterates the horse‟s symbolic purpose. When Chaucer writes that Aleyn “was out of his
minde,” these implications of failed masculine governance grow. John and Aleyn‟s
husbandry, which is based on affective restraint and rational control and is the very core
of their masculine identities, threatens to disappear completely. Here we discover that
the affective economy and its increasing surplus in passions have the potential to unmake
men.
Beasts of „Burdon‟
The twin discourses of sound and emotion become more pronounced in the
second half of the tale as makers and un-makers of masculine identity. In losing control
of their horse, John and Aleyn have been reduced to noisily lamenting (“pleyneth”) their
shame and pleading (“bisoght”) for food and lodging (4114-8). Though the miller invites
the men back into his home, his invitation is embroidered with ridicule, as the two clerks‟
315 Crocker, “Affective Politics,” 234.
316 Ibid., 235-6.
317 MED, s.v. “housbonde”; Neal, The Masculine Self, 62.
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chaotic emotionality becomes the target of Symkyn‟s scorn. Once again he challenges
the very efficacy of the men‟s university training and their belief in the power of rhetoric
and the dispassionate life of the mind:
Myn hous is streit, but ye han lerned art;
Ye konne by argumentes make a place
A myle brood of twenty foot of space.
Lat se now if this place may suffise,
Or make it rowm with speche, as is youre gise (4122-6).
Symkyn‟s joke touches on two important issues concerning clerkly identity. First, the
English university student‟s masculinity depended on his rhetorical prowess. Cambridge
and Oxford undergraduates were unique in that they received much more intensive
training in the rhetorical arts than those who studied at the Continental universities.318
English clerks had a reputation for their “rigorous and sustained training in linguistic
logic,” a skill that “was of immediate service in the outside world” and thus important for
their employment prospects. The study of logic relied most prominently on the
disputatio, an educational process that Karras argues heavily influenced the young men‟s
sense of masculinity as it promoted “the rational aspect of manhood.”319 For the late
medieval university man, the disputation process was the competitive sport. Karras
explains that this agonistic discourse was deeply embedded in the culture of medieval
education and was informed by the aristocratic-chivalric model of an aggressive and
violent masculinity: “The whole basis of formal education was to take a stand on one side
or another of a thesis and defend one‟s position against attackers, in the first instance
against one‟s teacher and later other academic adversaries. This was a sort of ceremonial
combat.”320 The language that clerks used to describe their disputations suggests that
318 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 345-6.
319 Karras, From Boys to Men, 89.
320 Karras, From Boys to Men, 90. See also Walter Ong, Fighting for Life: Context, Sexuality,
and Consciousness (Ithaca, NY: 1981), 118-48 especially.
121
they were interested in imagining themselves as intellectual warriors participating in
tournaments. As William Courtenay has shown, clerks appropriated the terminology of
swordplay, using words like impugnatio, adumbratio, and evasio to describe debates.321
Just as clerics reframed celibacy as a battle for chastity, clerics appropriated the discourse
of battle in order to masculinize their intellectual activities. In appropriating this violent
and aggressive discourse, late medieval university culture adopted, in Karras‟ words, “the
notion of masculinity as violent domination of men,” even though “the violence was
metaphorical, using words as weapons.”322 Once again, we discover that clerkly identity
relied on potentially conflicting ideals. John and Aleyn would have learned that the ideal
man was the dispassionate, rational man, but they would have learned much of this
through a disputational process that promoted aggressivity and domination as a means of
demonstrating rational manhood.
When Symkyn suggests that John and Aleyn‟s “lerned art” and “argumentes” are
powerless to expand the size of his mill-house, he renders their rhetorical-combat skills
impotent. Of course we do not expect the clerks to literally rend and reshape the mill
with their words, but Symkyn‟s ridicule nevertheless reminds us of the clerks‟ failed
attempt to invade and disrupt the mill‟s symbolic status. The miller attributes John and
Aleyn‟s inability to achieve “disport” to a deficiency in the very essence of their
masculinity. When Symkyn mentions the men‟s “lerned art,” “argumentes,” and
“speche,” he asks us to consider how these two English clerks‟ measure up specifically to
their university‟s model of manhood. At the same time, Symkyn‟s stab at the Cambridge
men‟s rhetorical deficiency highlights language‟s association with ordered sound and
321 William Courtenay, Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England (Princeton
University Press, 1987), 29-30. Karras, From Boys to Men, 91, also notes that twelfth-century
academics like Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury adopted the language of combat to describe
educational and disputational processes.
322 Karras, From Boys to Men, 91.
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affect‟s association with noisy disorder. If language is a series of structured sounds that,
as Cohen puts it, “demarcates the civilized from the barbarous,” then perhaps we should
also consider the clerks‟ rhetorical deficiency as a sound deficiency.323 The clerk‟s
“harrows” and “weylaways,” their “pleynts” and “beseeches” reveal a noisy and unstable
emotional state that seems to indicate a deficient masculinity.
But, it is the miller, not the clerks, who stands at the heart of the twin discourses
of sound and emotion in second half of The Reeve’s Tale. In the beginning of the tale,
Chaucer figures Symkyn as a powerful pollutant that infects the CambridgeTrumpington‟s affective and business economies. Symkyn is the figure of affective
disorder and all its potential to disrupt and dissolve community identity. In the drunken
revelry and snorting slumber that interrupts that second half of the tale, the Trumpington
miller also becomes the figure of noise and all its potential to disrupt and dissolve
masculine power structures. The voices of language are the sounds of community
identity and when those voices descend into the indefinite sounds of noise, the
signification and therefore the very identity of the community is threatened.
It is useful to consider more closely how noise and emotion might function as
contagions. While some recent studies of emotion resist the model of “emotional
contagion” because it “risks transforming emotion into a property, as something one has,
and can then pass on, as if what passes on is the same thing,” in The Reeve’s Tale it
remains useful to think of emotion as able to be spread by contact.324 If we continue
thinking about the affective politics in The Reeve’s Tale as an economy where emotional
capital circulates between subjects and communities creating surplus affect, then we
might think of noise in the same way. The clerks‟ “crekes” lead to the miller‟s “blere”ing which initiates the clerks‟ “weylaways.” Noise and emotion come together in this
323 Cohen, “Medieval Noise,” 270.
324 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 10.
123
affective economy and continue to build an increasing surplus of noise and emotion. It is
therefore useful to hold onto this notion of contagion even if it risks misrepresenting
emotion as a property. Symkyn‟s loud blustering and blaring are sources of infection in
the Cambridge-Trumpington community. The clerks‟ wailing laments coupled with their
deficient “lerned art,” “argumentes,” and “speche” likewise threaten to infect their
Cambridge community.
When the narrative turns to raucous feasting, we might ask how the clerks‟ loud
laments and pleas have affected/infected Symkyn. The miller‟s merrymaking represents
another moment of affective surplus, but when he descends into noisy, wordless disorder,
I would argue that the miller has been infected by the clerks‟ plaints and pleas. Their
emotional abjection and seeming subjection has given him great “disport,” yet his
affective state becomes confused and disordered soon after. Chaucer describes the
Miller‟s drunken celebration as a riotous confluence of grotesque sounds and distorted
language: “He yexeth, and he speketh thurgh the nose / As he were on the quake, or on
the pose” (4151-2). It is not surprising that Symkyn‟s discourse is disturbed by “yex”-ing
eruptions. The Middle English verb “yexen” can either refer to belching or hiccupping,
an all-purpose term for the body‟s spastic, audible reactions to overindulgence.
However, the verb also carries with it some sense of emotional turmoil; as the MED
notes, “yexen” can also indicate “sobbing.” While Chaucer gives no further indication in
this moment that the miller is emotionally distraught, it is not entirely unreasonable to
imagine the drunken miller devolving into slurring fits of passion, including perhaps a
bout of weeping. With this verb hovering between noise and emotion, Chaucer not only
underscores the body‟s physical response to excessive drinking, but also suggests an
emotional imbalance.
This slippage between sound and emotion prefaces the Chaucer‟s description of
Symkyn‟s nasally vocalizations. Curiously, Chaucer does not allow Symkyn any
dialogue in this moment of drunken revelry. Rather, the audience is left with only the
124
sound of the miller‟s distorted discourse. Chaucer notes that he sounded as if “he were
on the quakke,” a proverbial expression for a “croaking,” hoarse voice. At the same time,
“quakke” potentially sounds the noun “quake” and the verb “quaken,” both of which
indicate trembling, shuddering, and muttering “because of strong emotion,” especially in
fear, apprehension, and anger.325 Chaucer provides no specifics that explain the miller‟s
emotional state here, but we might imagine that the miller is experiencing residual anger
and anxiety left over from the day‟s dramatic events. In his drunkenness, he slips into
emotional insecurity. As the miller‟s “yexing” and “quaking” flutters uneasily between
the sounds of the grotesque body and the sounds of emotional expression, his sound and
speech devolves into a “perturbing nonlinguistic sonority” that denies the miller anything
that resembles meaningful language.326 Chaucer refuses to give the Miller one word of
dialogue and instead highlights the ways in which the sounds of body and emotion jar his
speech.
Noise‟s disruptive potential continues to threaten even as the miller slumbers.
After the miller and his family stumble off to bed, they unite in a three-part chorus of
dissonant snores:
This millere hath so wisely bibbed ale
That as an hors he fnorteth in his sleep,
Ne of his tayl bihynde he took no keep.
His wyf bar hym a burdon, a ful strong;
Men mighte hir rowtyng heere two furlong;
The wenche rowteth eek, par compaignye (4162-7).
Chaucer jokes about the musicality of snoring when he describes the wife‟s breathing as a
“burdon,” the “low-pitched undersong accompanying the melody.”327 John and Aleyn
hear the family‟s sonorous insufflations and are quick to label them a perverse sort of
325 MED, s.vv. “quake,” “quaken.”
326 Cohen, “Medieval Noise,” 269.
327 MED, s.v. “burdoun.”
125
“melodye” (4168). Aleyn pokes John and whispers, “Herdestow evere slyk a sang er
now? / Lo, swilk a complyn is ymel hem alle” (4170-1). Kolve writes that the family‟s
snoring is, “in every possible sense, a carnal music.”328 Indeed, snoring was considered
by some in the Middle Ages as sleeping “according to the flesh” and, of course, Symkyn
and his family‟s loud snoring is a result of their overindulgence. At the same time,
Chaucer recasts the family as a herd of snorting, singing horses. When Chaucer writes
that Symkyn “fnorteth” in his sleep, he likens the family‟s sounds to that prominent
symbol of unbridled human appetite and passion. They become beasts of “burdon.” And
as Symkyn “fnorts,” as he sounds moral and affective deficiency, he gives the clerks an
opening to once again try to reorient the mill‟s masculine hierarchy.
If Chaucer wants to imagine Sykmyn‟s and his family‟s snoring as a carnal
chorus, we can read this as the moment in The Reeve’s Tale when sound signals the
breakdown and rejuvenation of masculine community identity. As I have mentioned
before, Attali describes music as an organization of sound that works as a “tool for the
creation and consolidation of community.”329 Combating the potential confusion and
chaos that noise breeds, music restrains, regulates, and brings order to sound. And when
ideological institutions like the University or the Church control this organization of
sound, it fashions an aural link between a “power center and its subjects.”330 Aleyn
invokes the Church when he jokingly refers to the snoring as a “complyn,” the Church‟s
night song signaling the last of the seven daily services or canonical hours. Of course,
Chaucer means for the comparison to be absurd. The dissonant three-part “fnorting”
represents the complete disorganization of sound that must resist rather than promote the
consolidation of community. If noise symbolizes the interdiction of transmitted meaning,
328 Kolve, Imagery of Narrative, 251.
329 Attali, Noise, 6.
330 Attali, Noise, 6.
126
then Symkyn‟s “fnorts” threaten to sever rather than secure a link between his power
center and his subjects.331 Chaucer makes it clear, according to Kolve, that Symkyn‟s
“droning office” symbolizes a new vulnerability. The clerks, Kolve observes, “are quick
to take note of the horse's tail that this deep sleep has left vulnerable--the tails of his wife
and daughter.”332 When Chaucer writes that in his “fnorting,” Symkyn “took no keep”
of his “tayl bihynde,” he not only continues to align the family with a bestial carnality, he
also suggests that Symkyn‟s masculine identity is at stake. “Tail” is often part of stock
expressions that describe something or someone that occupies an inferior position or
signifies little worth.333 It is also worth mentioning that “hors tayl” is a Middle English
phrase for penis. Chaucer thus indicates through the family‟s “melodye” that Symkyn‟s
social and sexual identities are in peril, open to the clerk‟s coercive, affective touch. As
with Aleyn before him, for Symkyn “al was out of his mynde his housbandrie.”
As Symkyn‟s family unites in a perverse “complyn,” John and Aleyn recognize
that as noise pollutes, disrupts, and destroys order, it also leaves open the potential for
restoration. In Symkyn‟s “yexing,” “quaking,” “fnorting,” and “rowtyng,” Chaucer
introduces the disruptive ambiguity of Symkyn‟s emotions and noise, undercutting the
miller‟s claim to power while simultaneously opening up the possibility for the clerks to
reimagine and reorder that power. The family‟s metamorphosis into a herd of singing
horses gives each student the opportunity to regain “control of his entire animal nature, of
all his sense and their appetites” and demonstrate both rationality and aggression.334
John and Aleyn will bridle these beasts.
331 Ibid., 33.
332 Kolve, Imagery of Narrative, 251.
333 MED, s.v. “tail.”
334 Kolve, Imagery of Narrative, 245.
127
Bridling the Beasts
The Cambridge clerks‟ stratagem for recovery, their vicious assault on the
miller‟s wife and daughter—what has been trivialized by the term “bed-trick”—is best
understood within the context of their university education, which relied on deeply
antifeminist sentiments that imagined women as nothing more than instruments. Because
the medieval university system was essentially a “male corporate enterprise that was in a
state of continuous interaction with the prevailing religious culture,” women were for the
most part absent from the daily lives of most students and faculty. 335 While there were
some positions available for women in the university culture, these were usually servile
positions such as laundress. But despite their absence, women nevertheless loomed as an
absent presence. For one, university students were steeped in a deeply misogynistic
discourse that dismissed women as weak and deficient human beings, incapable of
control and aligned with unruly passions.336 Moreover, women were an important
presence in the young men‟s Latin readers, but their presence was often in scenes that
featured sexual violence. Marjorie Curry Woods explains that young male clerics were
“the most important and consistent audience of texts about rape read during the Middle
Ages.”337 Beginning in grammar school, John and Aleyn would have regularly
encountered literature that included scenes of sexual assault. These narratives ultimately
encouraged male adolescents to think of sexual violence as a way to negotiate and
demonstrate masculine power. Woods writes that “sexual imagery is omnipresent” in the
335 Cobban, University Life, 2.
336 Karras, From Boys to Men, 83-5.
337 Marjorie Curry Woods, "Rape and the Pedagogical Rhetoric of Sexual Violence," Criticism
and Dissent in the Middle Ages, ed. Rita Copeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 56-86, 58.
128
basic Latin readers for medieval boys, and “rape is a common narrative vehicle in these
texts."338
These rape narratives promoted two troubling but nevertheless influential ideas
about women and rape. First, according to Woods, rape often "signifies the onset of [the
rapist‟s] manhood,” a sexual rite of passage. Second, the Latin readers often frame rape
as a "seduction gambit in which both participants are willing" and when a woman says
"No" she really means "Yes.”339 This does not mean that rape was tacitly accepted
throughout medieval European culture, as Diane Wolfthal has shown in her study of late
medieval manuscript illustrations.340 Wolfthal explains that the biblical tradition is often
critical of assailants, sympathetic to victims, and “exhibits a tragic force that makes clear
that rape is a savage act.”341 But much like the multiple models of masculinity
circulating in this period that often promote conflicting ideals, the Middle Ages
“inherited two intertwined traditions” about “forced sex with an unwilling victim” from
the classical and biblical traditions.342 John and Aleyn likely would have been aware of
these biblical traditions deriding rape, but the classical tradition nevertheless would have
been just as prevalent in their educational lives. Woods argues that these rape narratives
helped medieval schoolboys negotiate "their anxieties about adulthood," allowing them to
simultaneously explore the "role of powerless victim" and the "role of powerful
perpetrator of violence." This bifurcation of self, for male adolescents, was an important
338 Ibid., 56. Woods focuses her attention on Liber Catonianis or Cato Book and Ovid's Ars
amatoris, books that were widely used for acquiring basic Latin literacy.
339 Woods, “Sexual Violence,” 61.
340 Diane Wolfthal, “„A Hue and a Cry‟: Rape Imagery and its Transformation,” Art Bulletin 75
(1993): 39-64.
341 Ibid., 40.
342 Woods, “Sexual Violence,” 60.
129
way for "working out issues of power and powerlessness," and rape narratives helped you
men navigate their way to the threshold of manhood.343 For John and Aleyn, then, rape
perhaps signified a legitimate way to console their bruised egos (becoming subject to
Symkyn‟s desires) and reassert their masculine identities.
Woods also explains that grammar books neither allegorized nor moralized rape
narratives, which may have encouraged young men to adopt a dispassionate view of
sexual assault. Latin readers did not offer explicit instructions on how the boys should
feel about or interpret the literature; rather, notes and glosses focus on grammar,
vocabulary building, and reading comprehension. As students advanced, the pedagogy
became more sophisticated, but the emphasis remained on structural and rhetorical
elements.344 We might then conclude that when the Latin readers ask the boys to think
of these stories only in linguistic and rhetorical terms, they ask them to take a critical
distance of sorts, to feel nothing at all about the women in these narratives. That is, the
grammar books advocate a detached and dispassionate view of sexual violence. Women
and coercive sexual acts become restrained and confined to the linguistic order.
The classical rhetorical exercise known as declamation—a tradition of formal
argumentation that influenced the medieval disputational process—likewise promoted a
rhetorical use of rape. In Greek and Roman declamations, sexual identity and erotic
violence were the prominent topics. Looking at “lurid legal cases” involving
transvestism, prostitution, rape, and adultery, students would practice oral argumentation.
The purpose of these exercises was, in Woods‟ words, “to develop verbal skills in
arguing both sides of a case using arresting if implausible examples to generate interest
and memorability.”345 While late medieval English students may not have used these
343 Woods, “Sexual Violence,” 66.
344 Ibid., 66.
345 Woods, “Sexual Violence,” 66.
130
lurid cases in practicing their own disputational skills, compilations of these declamations
circulated during the Middle Ages and may have been available to clerks like John and
Aleyn. The classical declamation‟s tradition of limiting rape cases to rhetorical exercises
would have further encouraged an already dispassionate understanding of woman and
sexual violence. Because university men thought of the disputational process as
ceremonial combat, a venue for the demonstration of a man‟s rhetorical power and
linguistic prowess, these declamations, like the grammar books, may have asked men to
think of rape as a part of that battle, rhetorical and otherwise, to express masculine
dominance. When young men like John and Aleyn were embedded, from grammar
school to university, in a misogynist ethos which, as Karras puts it, “naturalized sexual
violence,” they would have learned that it was “if not acceptable, at least not unusual for
men to demonstrate or fulfill their heterosexual desire by force.”346
While the university‟s misogynist discourse would have influenced John and
Aleyn‟s perceptions of women and rape, their clerical status would have pressured them
to adopt an active and aggressive sexuality. Although the medieval university was firmly
connected to the ecclesiastical world and promoted a quasi-monastic lifestyle, celibacy
was not a prerequisite. As I noted above, many clerks had no intention of graduating let
alone being ordained as priests. Nevertheless, Karras explains that the expectation that
university students would become clerics and vow celibacy “persisted” into the later
Middle Ages and so students faced “the implicit charge of emasculation attendant on a
life of chastity in the eyes of the laity.” 347 At the same time, clerks were warned about
the burdens of marriage. Women and the marital union represented a potentially
troublesome “emotional entanglement” that would disrupt the university student‟s
dispassionate life of the mind. Thus, for the university student, women were instruments
346 Karras, From Boys to Men, 78.
347 Karras, From Boys to Men, 80-1.
131
necessary to combat charges of emasculation. Women functioned only as
“advertisements that university men were not feminized.” 348 To think of women as
anything more than an instrument was to entangle oneself in a dangerous sort of
emotionality. Prostitutes, therefore, were important members of the English university
town‟s community. Both Oxford and Cambridge forbade sexual activity, but these
regulations, like those prohibiting students from frequenting taverns and gambling, were
not always enforced. Having sex with a woman on campus was worse—Oxford
threatened expulsion for that particular “lapse of the flesh”—and so it was understood
that a man had to leave the confines of the university and demonstrate his masculinity in
the community at large. 349 There was but one caveat to all this sexual aggression: it was
supposed to be a rational and controlled aggression so that it contrasted with the irrational
and uncontrolled feminine. The young student could not allow his sexual activity to belie
his status as a stable and restrained man.
Yet, as Karras points out, university students were under the impression that
aggressive masculine sexuality and dispassionate self-restraint could “coexist even in the
same individual and certainly in the same subculture. This understanding of masculinity
helped medieval students reconcile the idea of sexual aggressivity with the life of the
mind.”350 As I discussed earlier, the clerical culture‟s notion of the third gender, or the
battle for chastity, also suggested to young students that desire and dispassion, aggression
and control, could coexist in one man. Given the students‟ linguistic training manuals,
which reduced sex and violence to rhetorical exercises, thereby emptying them of any
passions or emotional entanglements, the university students were well prepped for
reconciling sexual aggression with rationality. While this model of masculinity seems
348 Ibid., 81.
349 Ibid., 80.
350 Ibid., 82.
132
paradoxical, it helps explain John and Aleyn‟s rationale for assaulting Malyne and her
mother. It shows how these two men might imagine their actions not only as legitimate
demonstrations of masculine power, but as aggressive acts that advertise control of the
passions.
When Aleyn hears Symkyn and his family‟s snorting “complyn,” he sees an
opportunity to “swyve” Malyne, but it is an act that he rationalizes with legal discourse:
Som esement has lawe yshapen us,
For John, ther is a lawe that say thus:
That gif a man in a point be agreved,
That in another he sal be releved.
Oure corn is stoln, sothly, it is na nay,
And we han had an il fit al this day;
And syn I sal have neen amendement
Agayn my los, I will have esement (4179-86).
Aleyn sees his opportunity to reap revenge and assert an aggressive sexuality, but he is
careful to describe his sexual activity as a rational and controlled act, lest it be thought an
unmediated animal drive. While Aleyn‟s summary of “esement,” rife with northern
dialectal idiosyncrasies, might strike us as more of a rustic proverb than a legal maxim
that makes the clerks looks foolish and absurd—this is fabliau after all—it is nevertheless
important to acknowledge Aleyn‟s attempt to legitimate his violence and aggression.
Both “esement” and “amendement” have, as Bennett puts it, at least a “legal flavor” to
them.351 Given John and Aleyn‟s likely connection to King‟s Hall at Cambridge, the
men were probably law students who would naturally frame their desire for
“compensation, redress” in dispassionate legal terms. Curiously though, the use of
“esement” as a term for “compensation” is poorly evidenced; according to the MED,
there is but a single extant legal contract from 1405 that uses “esement: in the same way.
As a legal term, “esement” usually refers to “the right or privilege of using something not
one‟s own, such as a pasture, a forest, a waterway, a well, domestic facilities, etc.” 352
351 Bennett, Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge, 105.
352 MED, s.v. “esement.”
133
This legal notion of “using something not one‟s own” is a fitting description of
Aleyn‟s understanding and use of Malyne‟s body. According to Neal‟s description of
late medieval husbandry, Malyne and her mother would be considered essentially part of
Symkyn‟s masculine substance, in the same category as his land, properties, business,
and livestock. Aleyn reaffirms women‟s absolute instrumentality when he likens the
“swyve”-ing of Malyne to the use of a pasture, a well, or, more appropriate to this tale, a
mill. Like these properties and resources, women are regarded in this scene as non-actors
in the men‟s transactions and exchanges; the affective economy is between the men
alone. They are the ones who trade and transact capital. Women, like affect, money, and
goods, function as a form of the men‟s capital and therefore have no will. As Karras
notes, some of the rape narratives that university men were exposed to did not consider
women‟s will or consent a relevant topic of discussion. In these narratives, “neither
consent nor lack of consent is implied. Consent is simply irrelevant.”353 For Aleyn,
“swyve”-ing Malyne is not assaulting Malyne; it is asserting his rights and privileges to
use Symkyn‟s property. Aleyn uses Malyne‟s body to usurp the mill‟s “transformative
magic,” the mill‟s literal and symbolic capabilities to transform a man‟s economic and
sexual substance.354
While John does not frame his assault on Symkyn‟s wife in similar legalistic
terms, he likewise presumes that the sexual violence is a necessary tool in shoring up his
masculine identity. With thoughts of Aleyn‟s sexual “pley” running through his head,
John “maketh routhe and wo” (4200). His anguish and self-pity come from the
knowledge that he still faces shame and embarrassment in his university community.
Aleyn, he says, “auntred hym, and has his nedes sped” (4205). That is, Aleyn took a risk
and accomplished his purpose: he has successfully demonstrated his sexual prowess and
353 Karras, From Boys to Men, 87.
354 Woods, “Symkyn‟s Place,” 32.
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power over the fierce Symkyn. Because John has not yet confirmed his manhood
through a similar act of mastery, he is “but an ape” (4202). John remains among the
ranks of the beasts, irrational and potentially subject to another‟s will. Or worse, he is
nothing more than a sad “draf-sak,” a useless bag of grain-refuse, rubbish, and filth
(4206).355 John knows that when he returns to Cambridge, Aleyn will someday tell of
“this jape” and his deficiency will be revealed: “I sal been halde a daf, a cokenay!”
(4207-8). Chaucer represents John‟s “routhe” and “wo” as a rational appraisal of his
predicament, allowing John to explain in great detail why he feels the way he feels which
leads him to what seems like the logical solution: he needs to assault a woman too. John
must “arise and auntre it” because as “men sayth,” “Unhardy is unseely” (4210). The undaring and unaggressive male is the unhappy and unmanly “draf-sak.” Chaucer thus
portrays John‟s decision to claim “esement” as a rational and controlled intellectual
exercise. It is not sexual appetite that motivates John, but the threat of his “felawes” in
King‟s Hall seeing him as unmanly. Chaucer suggests that, in John‟s mind, the sexual
assault is a dispassionate act that will shut down the threat of future emotional
instabilities. In this moment, “swyve”-ing Symkyn‟s wife is perceived as a controlled act
of aggression.
Of course, the problem that remains is how we are to read The Reeve’s Tale‟s
devolution into violent and emotional chaos in its final lines. Kolve insists that neither
the clerks nor the miller are able to fully restore themselves and “all the characters are
reduced to one level and held at a distance, like pigs in a poke, fighting in darkness.”356
It is a reading that I am tempted to agree with. I would like to say that Chaucer ends his
tale with all three men looking like pathetic “draf-saks,” overtly registering his own
disgust with these men‟s actions and intentions. But, Chaucer allows the clerks a victory
355 MED, s.v. “draf.”
356 Kolve, Imagery of Narrative, 253.
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in the end, and one that suggests that the men continue to rationalize their actions as
reasonable and without passion. Although the assault scenes are hardly without
passion—John, Chaucer writes, “priketh harde and depe as he were mad” (4231)—the
madness appears to be fleeting and the men never treat the women as anything more than
instruments for their “esement.” Aleyn‟s first words to Malyne are his farewells. He
delivers a mock-romantic valediction in which he proclaims to be Malyne‟s “awen clerk”
and then gives no further response to her when she reveals the location of their stolen
grain or when she “almoost” starts “to wepe” (4248). Leaving without a “thank you” or a
comforting word, without any sign that Malyne‟s distress has affected him, Aleyn, like a
good university man, refuses to become emotionally entangled with a woman. And when
Aleyn returns to what he thinks is John‟s bed, he describes the “swyve”-ing as an act that
demonstrates his superior manhood not his heterosexual desire, a “noble game” that
serves only to make John look the “coward” and he the dominant man (4263-67). But,
Aleyn mistakenly whispers this declaration into Symkyn‟s ear and, of course, violent
bedlam ensues.
The pandemonium does not, however, as Kolve insists, reduce both the clerks and
the miller to the same level. It may make the men look absurd—which is perhaps
Chaucer‟s point—but the clerks are still the clear victors in this tale. As Symkyn himself
points out, the clerks‟ “esement” claims have “disparaged” his wife and daughter, have
sullied the “lynage” and disgraced his reputation (4271-72). John and Aleyn have spoiled
the miller‟s “substance” and reduced his masculine status in the community. They have
de-valued his capital in the Trumpington-Cambridge economies. Though John and Aleyn
do not escape the brawl entirely unscathed, it is the miller and his family who are
ultimately left in noisy emotional disarray. When Symkyn is knocked down by his
wife‟s staff, we see that that link between the power center and its subjects has finally
broken down completely. The clerks beat Symkyn into submission while he impotently
makes noise, crying out “Harrow!” (4307). As the clerks depart with their stolen grain in
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hand, we might read them as now fully in control of this affective economy. John and
Aleyn have successfully reoriented the masculine power structures within the miller‟s
“soken.” They dared to touch Symkyn and they have had their “disport.”
Chaucer‟s conclusion to The Reeve’s Tale is a far cry from the utopian vision of
community envisioned by the Erkenwald-poet. As the clerks work to stabilize their
masculine identities, Chaucer demonstrates that not all emotional communities are built
on a foundation of camaraderie and compassion. Rather, John and Aleyn demonstrate
how affect can be a coercive agent used to assert superiority over other men and women.
Like St. Erkenwald, The Reeve’s Tale is a narrative of boundary reconstruction. But
unlike the Erkenwald-poet, Chaucer demonstrates how emotional community building
necessarily relies on the marginalization of others. In the next chapter, I will show how
Lydgate synthesizes Chaucer‟s and the Erkenwald-poet‟s approach to masculinity and
emotional community as he writes a recuperative narrative of masculine solidarity while
simultaneously asking his audience to displace women from community.
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CHAPTER FOUR
LYDGATE AND THE MELANCHOLIC MERCHANTS
Lydgate‟s Affective Turn
During the 1420s, what has been called “the apogee of his public career as a
poet,” Lydgate designed a series of mummings and disguisings for London‟s elite
celebrate such festive occasions as Twelfth Night, Candlemas, Christmas, and May
Day.357 to Mixing genres and media forms, the texts often featured a presenter or herald
reciting verses while silent actors mimed the action; musicians may have accompanied
some these performances and the verses were sometimes visible in the form of wallhangings or murals.358 Lydgate‟s multi-genre, mixed-media spectacles not only
influenced early modern dramatic traditions like the masque, but they also reveal the
interests and anxieties of certain elite communities in fifteenth-century London. For
Maura Nolan, some of the mummings “reflect the growing desire of the mercantile class
for the cultural trappings of the aristocracy.”359 Claire Sponsler argues that the
mummings “provided arenas for working through” challenges to hegemony, “fostering a
creative refashioning of recalcitrant and unpleasant socio-economic realities.”360 While
the dramatic works dedicated to royal and mercantile communities have recently received
a fair amount of critical attention, Lydgate‟s short misogynist comedy, Bycorne and
357 Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371-1449): A Bio-Bibliography, English Literary Studies 71
(Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1997), 28.
358 Glynne Wickham‟s Early English Stages: Volume One 1300-1576 2nd ed. (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1980), 191-228 offers a useful summary of mummings and
disguisings and Lydgate‟s influence on their development.
359 Maura Nolan, “The Performance of the Literary: Lydgate‟s Mummings,” in John Lydgate:
Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 169-206, 171.
360 Claire Sponsler, “Alien Nation: London‟s Aliens and Lydgate‟s Mummings for the Mercers
and Goldsmiths” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York:
Palgrave, 2000), 229-242, 237.
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Chychevache, has been little discussed. 361 Perhaps because of its overt antifeminism or
because the patron is not clearly defined, Bycorne and Chychevache has been written off
as little more than a typical example of medieval misogynist comedy.362 While
misogyny may be, as R. Howard Bloch suggests, “culturally constant” in the Middle
Ages, Andrea Denny-Brown is surely right to say that it would be reductive to suggest
that Bycorne and Chychevache offers only “stock misogyny.”363 Bycorne and
Chychevache may be misogynist comedy, but I will argue that it also airs serious
concerns and like Lydgate‟s other dramatic works seeks, as Nolan puts it, “imaginary and
symbolic resolutions to critical cultural problems and contradictions.”364
Lydgate‟s Bycorne and Chychevache uses shame and melancholy to address the
concerns of fifteenth-century London merchants about household governance and success
in commerce, concerns we see expressed in other texts circulating in the same period,
such as conduct poems. Through a series of five laments, Lydgate deploys a discourse of
361 Bycorne and Chychevache has been the subject of only two recent critical investigations:
Andrea Denny-Brown, “Lydgate's Golden Cows: Appetite and Avarice in Bycorne and
Chychevache”, in Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century, ed.
Andrea Denny-Brown and Lisa H. Cooper (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 35-56;
Christine F. Cooper Rompato, “Stuck in Chychevache‟s Maw: Digesting the Example of
(Im)patient Griselda in John Lydgate's A Mummyng at Hertford and Bycorne and Chychevache,”
in At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern
Europe, ed. Timothy J. Tomasik and Juliann M.Vitullo (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 73-92
362 It is not surprising that critics have read Bycorne and Chychevache as a conventional
misogynist comedy: Lydgate is working in a well-established medieval tradition and the two
monsters of his poem appear in French works dating back a century. See Malcolm Jones,
“Monsters of Misogyny: Bigorne and Chincheface--Suite et Fin?,” in Marvels, Monsters and
Miracles: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations, ed. Timothy S. Jones and David
A. Sprunger (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University Press, 2002), 203-221.and Steven M.
Taylor, "Monsters of Misogyny: The French 'Dit de Chincheface' and the 'Dit de Bigorne.'
Allegorica 5 (1980): 99-124 for discussions of misogyny in the Bycorne and Chychevache
tradition.
363 R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love
(University of Chicago Press, 1991), 7; Denny-Brown, “Lydgate's Golden Cows,” 35.
364 Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), 3.
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loss, which imagines a melancholic masculinity that is captive to grief, without control,
and forced into a feminized subject position in the household. What is so striking about
Lydgate‟s use of shame and melancholy in Bycorne and Chychevache is that he
reimagines the affect associated with shame and melancholy as a sign of power and
privilege. My argument in this chapter is that Lydgate departs from the traditional
narrative of melancholy as he converts feelings of disempowerment into signs of
masculine exceptionality. In so doing, Lydgate anticipates early modern writers‟
understanding of melancholic suffering as an affect that a man might adopt by choice in
order to display his spiritual and intellectual greatness.
Bycorne and Chychevache thus marks another important shift in the literary uses
of emotion. Like Chaucer and the Erkenwald-poet, Lydgate manipulates the discourse of
emotion in order to confront social problems and create narratives for recuperation.
Bycorne and Chychevache‟s drama of loss creates an affective community for London
merchants, valorizing their feelings of grief and shame. Lydgate‟s displacement of
masculine anxiety and renegotiation of the meanings of disempowerment is another
important example of the political potential of emotion and how it might reshape social
hierarchies. But the conversion of melancholy to a sign of masculine privilege does not
come without a cost to feminine identity. As Lydgate reconfigures men‟s loss as a gain,
he simultaneously devalues women‟s associations with power and emotion. Even more
starkly than The Reeve’s Tale, Bycorne and Chychevache demonstrates that emotions can
be used to create categories of difference that marginalize and demonize as much as they
unify and recuperate.
Of particular relevance to Lydgate‟s revision of melancholic masculinity in
Bycorne and Chychevache is the modern affective turn in the writing of history and
literary criticism—a turn that has become an important strategy in queer studies that
seeks to disrupt teleological understandings of history that marginalize queer identity.
Affective history essentially dislocates linear understandings of time, and collapses
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temporalities as a way of elegizing specific moments in the past, allowing those moments
to touch the present, while eliding the painful, disquieting moments in between.365 In
the first chapter, I demonstrate that this basic methodology of affective history—that is,
creating a space for temporal heterogeneity—is crucial to the Erkenwald-poet‟s revision
of masculine religious and social hierarchies. Similarly, Lydgate is not afraid to disrupt
and collapse temporal borders among past, present, and future in order to construct a
recuperative narrative for his male audience. Of course, the idea that affective
community and history can be founded on misogynist discourse is disconcerting. But, as I
note in the previous chapter, the vitriol of medieval misogyny should not prevent scholars
from exploring the ways in which Middle English writers deployed antifeminist
discourses in order to shore up masculine identities. While discourses of misogyny were
often deployed to cultivate male solidarity and displace male anxieties, frustrations, and
resentments about urban or courtly life onto women, Lydgate takes misogyny a step
further. 366 Instead of simply displacing men‟s commercial frustrations onto women in
the household, Lydgate collapses the borders of gender, space, and time, asking men to
embrace a new feminine affect that effectively supplants women altogether.
365 For queer studies, the affective history is an important method for recuperation and recovery.
See Heather Love‟s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard
University Press, 2009) for a lucid discussion of affective history‟s important role in recent queer
studies. As Carolyn Dinshaw has demonstrated, forging transhistorical bonds between queer
subjects past and present can be reparative to modern queer identity. Dinshaw‟s influential
Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and PostModern (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1999) explores the “fellowships” connecting queer subjects past and present,
and argues that imagined communities can be built among marginalized peoples across time.
Though affective histories have been criticized as engaging in creative anachronisms that distort
more than elucidate the past, the objective of my project is neither to critique nor valorize the
modern affective history. Rather, I believe that the basic methodology of modern affective
history is important in understanding how Lydgate conceives of building a masculine affective
community.
366 For a discussion of the discourse of misogyny in late medieval and early modern English
poetry, see Elizabeth Heale, Wyatt, Surrey, and Early Tudor Poetry (London: Longman, 1998),
esp. 48.
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The Monstrous Tradition
Steven M. Taylor‟s “Monsters of Misogyny” positions Lydgate‟s Bycorne and
Chychevache within the ranks of other popular antifeminist satires of the period that
operate simply as “safety valves for the misogynist tensions in society, turning aggression
into laughter, however ambivalent.” The purpose of this ambivalent laughter, Taylor
writes, is to spur men to reclaim their “masterful masculinity” and “wonted
supremacy.”367 While I do not dispute that Lydgate is encouraging some sort of
masculine reclamation, I agree with Jennifer Floyd when she writes that because
Lydgate‟s version of the Bycorne and Chychevache tradition contains, unlike its
predecessors, multiple speakers, the narrative becomes multivalent or "rhetorically
fractured undermining any straightforwardly antifeminist message."368 Indeed, the grief
and melancholy that pervades each scene and within each character of Lydate‟s Bycorne
and Chychevache disrupts claims that the poem is a conventional antifeminist
comedy.369
Bycorne and Chychevache begins with conventional antifeminist tropes, but as it
transitions through six distinct individual and communal voices, “each of whom address a
367 Taylor, “Monsters,” 107.
368 Jennifer Floyd, “Writing on the Wall: John Lydgate‟s Architectural Verse (PhD diss.,
Stanford University, 2008), 205.
369 Like Lydgate‟s other mummings and disguisings, Bycorne and Chychevache seems to have
been a multimedia spectacle. In his headnote that appear in MS Trinity College Cambridge
R.3.20, John Shirley indicates that Bycorne and Chychevache is "þe deuise of a peynted or
desteyned clothe” intended for display and recitation in a “halle a parlour or a chaumbre.” The
anonymous scribe of MS. Trinity College Cambridge R.3.19 introduces the work as both
disguising and a mumming. Because of Lydgate‟s involvement in a number of multi-media
productions in the 1420s, it‟s reasonable to assume that Bycorne and Chychevache served in both
capacities. For more information on the multimedia aspects of Lydgate‟s work, see Jennifer
Floyd, “St. George and the 'Steyned Halle': Lydgate's Verse for the London Armourers,” in
Lydgate Matters, ed. Denny-Brown and Cooper, 139-64; Claire Sponsler, “Text and Textile:
Lydgate's Tapestry Poems," in Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textile, Clothwork, and Other
Cultural Imaginings, ed. E. Jane Burns. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 1-14 and
“Lydgate and London‟s Public Culture,” in Lydgate Matters, ed. Denny-Brown and Cooper, 1333.
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slightly different, often gendered audience,” it becomes clear that Lydgate is not
interested in simply maintaining the same old misogynist narrative.370 Lydgate opens
his poem with an “ymage in poete-wyse” instructing the “prudent folkes” in his audience
to listen closely to the “matere” of Bycorne and Chichevache, a story that promises to
interrogate both the “acorde” and the “stryves,” the emotional tumult that the husbands
must confront in their marriages (1-7). The narrator goes on to explain that the two
beasts are effectively judges of moral character: the pastures in which they graze are
filled only with “patient men” and “wymmen goode” (8-21). A man masticated in the
jaws of Bycorne or a woman chewed to bits in Chichevache‟s mouth is a sure sign of
individual virtue. When the two beasts emerge during this speech, “oon fatte a noþer
leene,” Lydgate makes it clear that one of the beast‟s pastures is not as verdant as it once
was. Corpulent Bycorne delivers an impassioned three-ballad soliloquy lamenting the sad
plight of his wife, Chichevache, who is slowly starving to death because “humble wives”
are “ful scarce” these days (22-35). Bycorne adds that his pasture nonetheless thrives
with men who are not only patient, but also meek and submissive as they “Dar to theyre
wyves be not contrarye / Ne frome theyre lustis dar not varye” (39-40).
After Bycorne‟s complaint about unruly women who defy both their husbands
and the boundaries of Chichevache‟s pasture, a melancholic “companye of men” enter
and ask their “felawes” in the audience to join them as they bewail their loss of
governance in the household to “maystresses,” sovereign women who doom the men to
Bycorne‟s pasture (43-70). Then, in a surprising thirty-year leap back in time, Lydgate
revisits Chichevache‟s final meal, in which a woman named Griselda is “devowred
ypurtrayhed in the mouth of Chichevache,” crying out to “alle wyves” that they must
continue to defy their husbands, to “Beothe crabbed, voydeþe humylitee” if they want to
survive (71-7). Chychevache then appears and her emaciated body that is “nothing save
370 Floyd, “Writing on the Wall,” 205.
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skyn and boone” serves as a testament to the wives‟ success at being defiant,
domineering, and ill-tempered. In a four-stanza monologue (78-105), Chichevache
grieves for her losses, her lack of nourishment, her bodily decline, and the passing of
women “lyche Gresylde in pacience” (87). Bycorne and Chychevache concludes with
what appears to be another movement backward in time as an old man fails to rescue his
wife from Chychevache‟s maw and asks the men in the audience to once again join
together in the grieving process and to unite as an affective community (106-33). Men,
he concludes, are indelibly “Lynkeld in a doubled cheyne,” bound between their unruly
wives and the hideous Bycorne, but nevertheless bound together by their shared grief and
shame.
To understand Bycorne and Chychevache‟s appeal and the extent to which
Lydgate revises masculinity and affect therein, we must first consider Lydgate‟s French
and English sources. By the time Lydgate composed his misogynist satire of two
married, man-eating beasts in the 1420s, Chychevache, at least, was a recognizable
literary figure. Chaucer assumes his audience is familiar with Chychevache‟s reputation
for devouring patient wives when he makes only a fleeting allusion to her in his Envoy to
the Clerk’s Tale:
O noble wyves, ful of heigh prudence,
Lat noon humylitee youre tonge naille,
Ne lat no clerk have cause or diligence
To write of yow a storie of swich mervaille
As of Grisildis, pacient and kynde,
Lest Chichivache yow swelwe in hire entraille! (IV.1183-8)
Despite the seeming familiarity of this satirical tradition though, only two fourteenthcentury French poems that mention a beast named Chicheface survive. As Floyd notes,
the dearth of extant source materials makes the “cultural life” of the two monsters before
Lydgate a “bit murky.”371 I agree with Floyd that the brevity of Chaucer‟s allusion,
371 Floyd, “Writing on the Wall,” 209.
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however, suggests that the legend “already enjoyed a degree of cultural diffusion beyond
that otherwise implied by the survival of a single identified copy of a single version of the
story.”372
The anonymous Dit de Chincheface is the most extensive version of the tradition
that predates Lydgate.373 Composed of sixty-eight octosyllabic verses rhymed in
couplets, the Dit features a henpecked husband who, besides complaining about his
vicious virago of a wife, warns virtuous or “docile” women about a threat that lurks along
the borders of their nation. He explains that two years previously, while riding through a
forest in Lorraine, he unexpectedly encountered a fearsome beast named Chincheface—
literally “Skinny-face” or, as Taylor more poetically puts it, “Miser-muzzle.”374
Chincheface, according to the narrator, is a towering but emaciated-looking creature,
terrifying to behold with its enormous eyes and teeth as long as “roasting pits.” The socalled Miser-muzzle, he says, only preys on patient women “Who know how to speak
properly, / Who never reach such a point / That they got angry in any way / With their
lord for anything he may do” (28-31).375 In the Dit, however, the beast‟s skinny frame is
not the result of malnourishment. In fact, she seems to be eating quite well. Chincheface
has already terrorized the women of Tuscany, Lombardy, and Normandy—scarcely a
dozen good women in these regions remain—and the monster is likely moving into
neighboring regions. This prompts the henpecked husband to offer up a bit of ironic
advice to all docile women—advice that we hear Lydgate‟s Griselda later echo—in the
372 Ibid., 210.
373 The French Dit de Chincheface survives in MS 7218 Bibliotheque Nationale.
374 Taylor, “Monsters of Misogyny,” 99.
375 Taylor, “Monsters of Misogyny,” 111. The original French is as follows: “Qui sagement
savent parler, / N‟oncques ne sont en itel point / Que por ce se coroucent point / Vers lor seignor
ppor rien qu‟il face” (28-31).
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hope that it will thwart the beast‟s very particular dietary needs and eventually lead to
her demise:
For God's sake, Ladies be endowed
With great pride and dissension.
If you lord speaks to you,
Answer him in a completely contrary way
If he wants peas, let him have gruel.
Take care that nothing which suits him
Will ever be done by any of you (57-63).376
This earliest extant version focuses only on Chincheface‟s predatory efficacy, figuring
the monster as a terror from without, an alien invader that threatens to destabilize
masculine governance by maliciously murdering all of the nation‟s virtuous women with
recognizable purpose. Although Chaucer changes the name to Chichevache, or “Skinnycow,” which suggests a grazing animal of the bovine variety rather than a forest predator
(a point to which I will turn later), his Envoy echoes the Dit‟s satirical advice to women
and seems to adopt its representation of the beast as an alien entity. It is important to
note that Chaucer figures the wife-eating beast as simply a threat to feminine virtue,
adopting the French tradition of Chichevache as a straight-forward vehicle for misogynist
satire, a figure that embodies that masculinist nightmare of unruly femininity.
In Lydgate‟s version of Bycorne and Chychevache, however, Chychevache
becomes a more complex character who grieves for her losses and, as we shall see, even
elicits some pity in the audience. Lydgate‟s melancholic Chychevache suggests that
Lydgate may have been familiar with Jehan le Fevre‟s Lamentations of Matheolus, or
some other lost source that drew on the spirit of le Fevre‟s brief allusion to the beast. The
Lamentations, a loose French translation of a caustic thirteenth-century Latin text written
by Mathieu of Boulogne, is considered by some to be one of the central texts of late
376 Taylor, “Monsters of Misogyny,” 113. The original French is as follows: “Por Dieu, dames,
soiez garnes / De grans orguex et d‟atties. / Se vo sire parole a vous / Respondex-li tout a rebours
/ Se il veut pois, qu‟il ait gruel / Gardez de rien qui li soit bel / Ja nule de vous ne li face.”
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medieval French antifeminism.377 Written circa 1371-2, the Lamentations, according to
Andrea Denny-Brown, may have been one of the sources for Jankyn‟s Book of Wicked
Wives while Christine de Pizan cites it as one of the motivations for writing the City of
Ladies and challenging misogynist depictions of women.378 Throughout the
Lamentations, le Fevre writes from the point of view of a henpecked husband and
expounds on the “bestial nature of rebellious wives.” Broken and browbeaten, le Fevre
takes a moment to compare himself to Chicheface, claiming that he is “comme une
chicheface, /Maigre par dessoubs ma peaucelle [like a chicheface/ thin beneath my
skin].”379 Although le Fevre does not explain or expand on the antifeminist implications
of the Chicheface legend, it is clear that le Fevre, like Chaucer, presumes that his
audience is aware of the Chicheface legend. As Denny-Brown explains, the audience‟s
supposed awareness of the legend suggests that Chaucer and le Fevre need only focus on
the “one evocative, memorable detail that drives home its antifeminist argument”: unlike
the Dit, Chicheface is thin because there are no good women left alive. What separates le
Fevre‟s allusion from Chaucer‟s is that le Fevre uses Chicheface as a symbol for
diminishing masculinity; in le Fevre, Chicheface represents not bestial and unruly
femininity, but the rebellious woman‟s effect on her husband. When the browbeaten
husband‟s monstrous wife defies his governance and publicly humiliates him, she turns
him into a “most pathetic and feminized monster himself.”380 Lydgate, I will show,
draws on Chichevache‟s representational slippage in le Fevre, her movement between
377 Denny-Brown, “Lydgate‟s Golden Cows,” 37.
378 Ibid., 37.
379 Jehan le Fèvre, “Les Lamentations de Matheolus” et “Le Livre de Leesce” de Jehan le
Fèbre, de Resson, ed. A.G. Van Hamel (Paris: Emile Bouillon, 1892-1905), 3:3220-2. English
translation from Floyd, “Writing on the Wall,” 210.
380 Denny-Brown, “Lydgate‟s Golden Cows,” 37.
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feminine and masculine symbolisms. Further, Lydgate takes this slippage and imagines
it as the basis for an affective connection. In Lydgate, “the horrifying aspects of the
monster, become grounds for pity rather than terror on part of the reader, listener,
observer” and, I will argue, also becomes the foundation for a recuperative relationship
that rewrites the rules of masculinity and emotion.381
Men of Worth
From the very start, Bycorne and Chychevache offers itself first as vehicle for
affective history- and community-building. In the opening lines, Lydgate seeks to create
and memorialize a narrative event that can act as an affective touchstone for a masculine
community, an affective moment that will always be in reach, will always be able to
collapse time and touch the community‟s present. The “ymage in poete-wyse” opens
with a clear call to affective community: “O prudent folkes,” Lydgate says, “takeþe heed
/ And remembreþe, in youre lyves, / How þis story doþe proceed” (1-3). In these lines,
Lydgate brings together the “folkes” in his audience by suggesting a shared narrative that
forms the basis for an affective bond. By telling audience members to “remembreþe” the
production throughout their lives, Lydgate creates a touchstone for an enduring
community. In this initial call to communal memory, however, we also get a first
glimpse of Lydgate‟s discourse of loss and the melancholic masculinity it produces. As
Gabrielle Spiegel explains, when we cling to the idea that there exists a “recoverable
past,” we cling to a paradox that simultaneously reveals a “desire for history and the
recognition of its irreparable loss.” The desire for history, Spiegel writes, is “the desire to
recuperate the past,” but it also marks the “inaccessibility” of the past. 382 Embedded in
Lydgate‟s poem is a temporal instability that, even before its jarring time-travel leaps
381 Taylor, “Monsters of Misogyny,” 100.
382 Gabrielle Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography
(Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997), xxi, 79-80.
148
later in the narrative, establishes a disrupting sense of loss upon which Lydgate builds his
grief narrative. The first lines of Bycorne and Chychevache reveal the desire for a
community that is, in its imagined connection to a pastness, in some ways already lost.
Lydgate asks his audience members not simply to “remembreþe” (consider, reflect on,
commemorate) this lost history for the rest of their “lyves,” but to integrate the narrative
into their lives and thus to incorporate this sense of loss into their very being.383
Lydgate begins by asking the assembled “folkes” to collectively internalize Bycorne and
Chychevache‟s drama of grief. The “poete-wyse” narrator is quick to qualify that the
community this poem recuperates is a masculine one concerned with “þe housbandes and
þeyre wyves, / Of þeyre acorde and of þeyre stryves” (4-5, emphasis added). Lydgate
clearly aligns the possessive þeyre with the interests of men. The pronouns not only
assume that men possess the wives, but strikingly suggest that the emotional
vocabulary—the feelings of accord and strife—are the possessions of men as well. As
Brian Massumi might put it, the “narrativizable action-reaction circuits” of love and loss
are gendered masculine within the first five lines of the drama.
Who would commission Lydgate to adapt the Bicorne and Chichevache tradition
into a multimedia composition and why? While the vast amount of extant antifeminist
comedies speaks to the general popularity of the literary tradition, it is not clear what
appeal Bycorne and Chychevache would have for fifteenth-century Londoners. Why
craft a poem for display or performance that hinges on melancholic masculinity? Why
construct an affective history and community that relies on the emotions that accompany
loss? Unlike Lydgate‟s other London mummings and disguisings, Bycorne and
Chychevache does not specify a particular patron, audience, venue, or occasion. The
copyist John Shirley prefaces the poem with this headnote: “Loo, sirs, the devise of a
383 Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “remembren,” accessed April 28, 2011,
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/
149
peynted or desteyned clothe for an halle, a parlour, or a chaumbre, devysed by Johan
Lidegate at the request of a werþy citeseyn of London.” For modern readers, Shirley‟s
designation of the patron as a “worthy citizen” seems vague and ill-defined. Indeed,
“citisein” can refer to any “freeman of a city or town” and so the denotative range
appears to be quite broad. But, as Shannon McSheffrey explains in her study of civic
culture in fifteenth-century London, civic and ecclesiastical documents of the period are
full of descriptive terms for men‟s socioeconomic status that are, to us, inexact, but were
probably “nuanced and perhaps even precise” descriptors for medieval readers.384
“Citisein” highlights the most important of legal divisions in late medieval London
between the enfranchised and unenfranchised. The freemen of London, who comprised
about one-fourth of the male population, were the only men afforded the privilege of
voting for and serving in the city government. Though political office was certainly a
route to considerable power, it was not the principal benefit of citizenship. In return for
their obligation to pay city taxes, the citizens were free to trade retail, were exempt from
tolls, and benefited from membership in one of London‟s 120-odd guilds.385 These
citizens were by-and-large merchants and craftsmen whose primary objective was
financial gain achieved through a variety of business activities that included not only
wholesale buying and selling but also real estate investment, finance, and shipping. The
citizens or freemen of fifteenth-century London had special opportunities to enjoy the
most privileged of urban lifestyles that could put them on a par with the aristocracy and
gentry.
384 Shannon McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 161.
385 Gerald Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), 283; Maurice Keen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Penguin, 1990),
117.
150
Of course, not all citizens were equal. When Shirley gives the citizen “worthy”
status, he may be signaling a more precise identity for the patron: a wealthy merchant of
considerable esteem. McSheffrey has shown that official civic documents in London
deployed a “standard set of formal attributes” for rating a citizen‟s political, economic,
and moral character. These records most often used comparative (and therefore
evaluative) forms of adjectives when referring to those citizens of high regard who were
suited for civic office: these men were more sufficient (pluis sufficeauntz), abler or more
powerful (potentiores, pluis vaillantz), trustworthy (fideidigni), good and serious (boni et
graves), and, above all, more worthy (valiores, meliores, prudhommes, bones gentz) than
the rest of the male population.386 McSheffrey writes that this standardized language of
civic identity indicated precise “gradations of wealth and status [that] determined where
in the official hierarchy” men could serve.387 In the fifteenth century, the most worthy
men, or at least those who were part of the London oligarchy, were members of the
merchant class. Maurice Keen writes that the merchant capitalists “more or less
monopolized the higher city offices” including the mayor, shrievalities, and aldermanries.
To be a part of this elite civic establishment, a merchant needed money and lots of it. A
man of “worship,” a man aspiring to hold political office was expected to maintain an
expensive lifestyle which demanded not only visible symbols of prosperity—an
expensive household, fine clothing, and the like—but also more public contributions to
guild celebrations, church feasts, and alms.388
386 See Sylvia Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London (Chicago: University of
Chicago, Press, 1948), 15.
387 McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture, 161; See also Thrupp, Merchant Class, 100102 and Clive Burgess, “Shaping the Parish: St. Mary at Hill, London, in the Fifteenth Century,”
The Cloister and the World: Essays in Honour of Barbara Harvey, ed. John Blair and Brian
Golding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 259-73.
388 Keen, English Society, 99.
151
While we cannot be absolutely certain that Lydgate‟s worthy citizen is a
prosperous merchant, the commissioning of an expensive wall-hanging and/or theatrical
production from England‟s de facto poet laureate likely signals an attempt on the patron‟s
part to publicize his wealth and status to London‟s elite. We need look no further than
Chaucer‟s portrait of the elegantly dressed Merchant to see that success in business was
important in determining whether or not a man could be considered “worthy”:
Well koude he in eschaunge sheeldes selle.
This worthy man ful wel his wit bisette:
Ther wiste no wight that was in dette,
So estatly was he of his governaunce
With his bargaynes and with his chevyssaunce.
For soothe he was a worthy man with alle… (I.278-83)
Thrupp explains that the London merchant was anxious to be considered “worthy” and
“estatly…of his governaunce,” and so modeled his “habits,” or the public expression of
his wealth, on those of the gentry.389 Merchants prided themselves on being the social
equivalents of gentlemen, and, if successful, perhaps equal in standing to esquires and
even knights.390 Thus, a merchant was always eager to showcase the “soundness and
success” of his business and one sure way to do this was to decorate his home with
painted cloths and heraldic-themed plate, and hold feasts and coterie productions for his
fellow guild members.391 For the London merchant, whose prestige could not depend on
deeds in battle or other romantic notions of manhood, patronage offered a way to
demonstrate his good governance and mark his “estatly” position in the London
community at large. Commissioning Bycorne and Chychevache would have been a
symbolic act that advertised the patron‟s status to other men.392 Though stained wall389 Thrupp, Merchant Class, 144.
390 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 287.
391 Thrupp, Merchant Class, 144-5.
392 See Ruth Mazo Karras‟s chapter “Masters and Men,” in From Boys to Men: Formations of
Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), and
Derek G. Neal, The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago
152
hangings represented a more inexpensive artwork than woven tapestry, guild records
indicate that they were nevertheless a popular and well-regarded commission.393 If the
poem was indeed illustrated on a cloth wall-hanging and displayed in the merchant‟s
household, it would have functioned as a “lasting work that could continue to advertise”
the patron‟s worthy status long after the initial unveiling and performance.394 Displayed
in the household as an emblem of conspicuous consumption, Bycorne and Chychevache
would have been a valuable and memorable sign of the citizen‟s estatly-ness, whether
actual or aspirational, in London‟s elite civic establishment.
If we look to some of the patrons and audiences defined in Lydgate‟s other
dramatic works, we can say with greater certainty that this worthy citizen was a London
merchant and the audience was likely comprised of his fellow guild members.
Productions like the Mumming for the Mercers of London, Mumming for the Goldsmiths
of London, and The Legend of St. George were commissioned by wealthy guilds in the
1420s. It was during this decade that Lydgate became London‟s de facto poet laureate
and members of both the royal and merchant classes sought him out to produce poems
and dramas for a variety of occasions.395 Derek Pearsall observes that Lydgate found
himself “deluged with commissions” from Londoners after 1426 and the large amount of
commissioned occasional works that are extant attest to his popularity and prestige.396
Press, 2008), for detailed discussions on the major role labor, wealth, and property acquisition
played in late-medieval urban masculine identity.
393 Floyd, “Writing on the Wall,” 215, n22 and n23.
394 Floyd, "St. George,” 156. Floyd is here speaking to the Armorer‟s painted tapestry poem that
would have been displayed in their guild hall, but the worthy citizen‟s desires likely mirror the
Armorer‟s desire to advertise wealth and status.
395 Pearsall, John Lydgate (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970), 166.
396 Pearsall, Bio-Bibliography, 28. Lydgate‟s occasional and dramatic works include five
mummings, two disguisings, Henry VI’s Triumphal Entry into London, The Legend of St. George,
Mesure Is Tresour, Of the Sodein Fal of Princes in Oure Dayes, Pageant of Knowledge, A
Procession of Corpus Christi, and Soteltes at the Coronation Banquet of Henry VI. See
153
C. David Benson describes Lydgate‟s literary output in this period as “civic,” not simply
because he was writing for the citizens of London, but because the literature seems to
articulate London‟s civic voices, addressing the concerns of its various citizens.397 In
Lydgate‟s dramatic works the voice of communal solidarity seems appropriate for
members of merchant and craft guilds: Benson explains that some of the mummings
emphasize “the sort of pragmatic, decent, and well-regulated communal behavior
advocated by medieval London citizens in the rules of their craft and especially parish
guilds.”398 While we cannot know for sure which particular guild or guild-member
commissioned Lydgate‟s misogynist production, its later readers were men of the
merchant class: records indicate that the manuscripts in which Bycorne and Chychevache
survives circulated among London‟s fifteenth-century merchant community.399
The competitiveness that pervaded merchant-class culture helps explain the
appeal of the poem‟s melancholic content. Mercantile culture in London was
competitive, as is made clear by the stratifications through the standardized evaluative
vocabulary we find in civic documents, but also codified visually via clothing.
Sumptuary legislation distinguished, at least in theory, gradations of merchant wealth,
creating visual demarcations between the greater and lesser businessmen. For example,
only merchants worth £1,000 in goods were allowed to wear silk and cloth priced at five
Sponsler‟s recent edition John Lydgate: Mummings and Entertainments (Kalamazoo, Michigan:
Medieval Institute Publications, 2010).
397 C. David Benson, “Civic Lydgate: The Poet and London,” John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture,
and Lancastrian England, ed. Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (University of Notre Dame
Press, 2006), 147-68, 148-9.
398 Benson, “Civic Lydgate,” 160.
399 For more information on the merchant class‟s connections with John Shirley and the three
manuscripts in which Bycorne and Chychevache appear, see Felicity Riddy, “Mother Knows
Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text,” Speculum 71 (1996): 66-86, 81, n52 and n54;
and Linne R. Mooney, “John Shirley‟s Heirs,” The Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): 18298. MS Trinity College Cambridge R.3.19 and MS Harley 2251 were among a number of
manuscripts associated with the households of London merchants and both scribes had access to
manuscripts owned by John Shirley, including Trinity College Cambridge R.3.20.
154
marks or more.400 While sumptuary laws eventually proved impractical, they
nevertheless indicate an impulse to highlight and maintain class distinctions. Because
sumptuary laws were essentially unenforceable, men and women often dressed above
their station, wearing fur and jewelry that were signs of a higher rank, and thus obscuring
instead of accentuating class division. The flouting of sumptuary laws suggests that
merchants and craftsmen were eager to move up (or, at least, be perceived as moving up)
the social ladder. Guild livery further distinguished ranks, separating the merchant elite
from lesser businessmen. The pressure to maintain one‟s status was constant, and guild
livery was a potent visual marker of the fickleness of prosperity. When Thrupp explains
how merchant guilds signaled internal hierarchies through the wearing of livery—that is,
the economically dominant men were granted the privilege of wearing official guild
clothing (the “company colors” as it were)—she indicates that there were at least some
liverymen who had to resign their posts because of an inability to pay dues.401 While the
non-liveried yeomanry was not a homogenous group of has-beens—many of them were
young men with growing capital, who would one day enter the livery—it seems that a fair
number were business failures.
A merchant‟s anxieties were not limited to internal guild hierarchies, but they
could be sparked by the threat of non-citizens. Sara Ahmed‟s recent discussion of the
role fear plays in race relations and post-colonial identity can be useful here in
considering the London merchant‟s fear of non-citizen “Others” and how it finds
expression in Bycorne and Chychevache. For Ahmed, racialized fear involves the tense
relationship of bodies in close proximity “whose difference is read off the surface,” and
the dominant culture‟s discourse of fear works to continually re-establish “apartness,” re-
400 Thrupp, Merchant Class, 148.
401 Ibid., 13.
155
establish distance between the different bodies.402 In white nationalist narratives, the
idea of apartness is crucial because it constructs black identity not simply as something
that threatens to harm the white self but imagines blackness as a force that threatens to
dissolve the white individual‟s “very existence as a separate being with a life of its
own.”403 Thus, as Ahmed explains, the racialized discourse of fear is often “concerned
with the preservation rather than gratification” of the subject and his/her community
identity: the Other is perceived as threat to “us,” to “what is,” and to “life as we know
it.”404 This same kind of emotional discourse of the Other may have informed the
strained relations between London merchants and their various competitors in the
fourteenth and fifteenth century. Though the distance between medieval merchants and
non-merchants was not “read off the surface” of bodies in the same way it inscribes
blackness and whiteness, the merchant was nevertheless concerned with preserving a
privileged “apartness” akin to what we find in modern racialized discourses of fear. For
example, some of the lesser merchants who usually depended on shop-keeping for their
livelihood complained about the “foreigns” (forenseci, forein), or non-citizen (but
perhaps native) inhabitants of London, who bought and sold goods in town as if they
were freemen.405 As the MED shows, the word “forein” imbues the non-freeman, nonguild-member with a sense of alterity: the title of “forein” not only establishes a man‟s
distance from the civic elite, but it aligns him with the “stranger” “born in another
country or belonging to another nation.”406 Citizen shopkeepers saw these “foreign”
402 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 62-3.
403 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 63-4.
404 Ibid., 64.
405 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 284.
156
residents‟ illegal retail business as a threat to both their financial prospects and that
privileged “estatly” status that came with the title of “citisein.” The foreigner‟s business
activities in some ways threatened to obscure the division between enfranchised and unenfranchised or, in Ahmed‟s terms, threatened to erase the citizen‟s existence as a
“separate being with a life of his own.” Furthermore, many London business men were
also concerned about the growing economic power of non-English alien merchants—
especially the Hanseatic and Florentine merchants who resided, traded, and lent money in
the city—which contributed to xenophobic feelings throughout the fifteenth century. As
Ahmed rightly points out, the racialized discourse fear and its fantasy of white loss very
often works to “justify violence against others.”407 Late medieval England was no
different and, at times, anti-alien sentiment seethed among the English to point of
violence against immigrant groups.408 Although aliens made up only about four percent
of London‟s population, the merchant class‟s “baffled resentment” of the small
immigrant population‟s wealth and influence helped stoke the fires of chauvinism in the
national consciousness.409 Finally, in the latter part of the fourteenth century fledgling
merchants and craftsmen from the countryside began flocking to urban centers, London
especially, sometimes bloating guild memberships. Though these men from the
countryside were not technically foreigns once they gained guild membership, and the
migrations were necessary because London‟s population had been decimated by plague
and famine, the constant influx of new businessmen not indigenous to the city must have
406 MED, s.v. “forein.”
407 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 64-5.
408 Harriss cites one notable example of violence that came in the wake of the Peasant‟s Revolt
of 1381in which “hundreds of Flemish immigrant textile workers and their families were
murdered in the Vintry and outside Blackfriars.” Shaping the Nation, 307.
409 Ibid., 270. Harriss uses The Libelle of the Englyshe Polycye and Anglia, propter tuas naves
et lanas omnia regna te salutare deberent as examples.
157
heightened the already palpable anxieties about outsiders invading London markets who
threatened the merchant class‟s hegemony.
The merchant‟s anxieties about competitors inside and outside the guilds were
likely increased by the possibility of dynastic impermanence as well. An urban business
man might amass a considerable fortune during his lifetime, but that wealth usually
dissipated following his death. Indeed, as Gerald Harriss explains, merchant dynasties
“rarely established themselves for more than two generations.”410 Writing in the
fifteenth century, William Caxton observed that very few sons of London merchants
prospered and that the wealth seldom continued “unto the thyrd heyre.”411 Records
indicate that one of the problems was a dearth of male heirs. Because of recurrent plague
and the high childhood mortality rate, the chances of a surviving male successor were not
always in the merchant‟s favor.412 Moreover, London‟s inheritance laws, known as
legitim, also inhibited the hope of establishing a merchant dynasty. The inheritance law
gave the widow a "life interest in the house" plus one third of the merchant‟s wealth
while the other two-thirds were split between the eldest son and the merchant‟s funeral
bequests. Having but a third of the father‟s fortune could limit the son‟s business
opportunities. If the son was underage, and he often was, the widow had control over
two-thirds of the merchant‟s fortune and might choose the run the business herself.
However, merchant widows typically married another merchant amalgamating her late
husband‟s fortunes with the new husband‟s. Sponsler argues that these anxieties about
the merchant man‟s failing legacy find expression in conduct books of the period in
which the husband is characterized as anxiously anticipating the “dissolution of his
410 Thrupp, Merchant Class, 191.
411 W.J.B. Crotch, ed., The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton (E.E.T.S, No. 176,
1928), 77-78.
412 Thrupp, Merchant Class, 200; Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 287.
158
domestic fiefdom” when another man will inevitably step in and take control of his wife
and goods after his death.413 Like the discourse of fear that must have permeated the
merchant‟s relations with his “foreign” competitors, the merchant had to fear the “other”
within the merchant class who would one day erase the self and existence that his wealth
and household represent. While every merchant‟s goal was, as Felicity Riddy indicates,
“to achieve long-term prosperity, and, if possible, to move upward,” the chances of that
prosperity building a dynasty was in reality next to none.414 These inheritance laws and
marriage practices ensured that merchant wealth reinforced the mercantile class as a
whole—that is, the money, land, and properties continued to circulate among a small elite
group of business men—but, because inheritance was not entirely patrilineal, it
contributed to the striking fluidity of the merchant class in this period.415
Conduct Unbecoming of a Man
The merchant‟s concerns about asserting his “worthy” status, defending himself
against “alien” competitors and creating a lasting dynasty overlap in what was the
dominant symbol of masculine identity in the urban centers of late medieval England: the
household. A London citizen wanted to be considered “estatly…of his governaunce”
and, as McSheffrey puts it, the public perception of a man‟s worthiness and good rule
began at home.416 The household was considered a microcosm that reflected the
merchant‟s abilities as a business manager and his potential as a political leader. A man‟s
household could make or break his “worthy” status. Although we can only guess at some
413 Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval
England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 61.
414 Riddy, “Mother Knows Best,” 69; also see E.F. Jacob, The Fifteenth Century: 1399-1485.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 367-70 for information on the increasing migration of English
working men and women in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
415 Thrupp, Merchant Class, 200.
416 McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture, 161.
159
of the economic pressures that may have produced angst in the worthy citizen of London
in the 1420s,417 the conduct literature that circulated among London‟s merchant
communities suggest that Bycorne and Chychevache would have spoken to their concerns
about business and household management, concerns which become decidedly gendered
in the home. Indeed, Bycorne and Chychevache survives in manuscripts that include
conduct poems like How the Goode Wife Taught Hyr Doughter and How the Goode
Many Taght Hys Sone, suggesting that a mercantile readership saw these texts in
conversation. In conduct poems we find the “highly prescriptive” and “thoroughly
masculine” voice of bourgeois civic culture outlining the proper behaviors for men and
women who aspire to be good, virtuous members of the London elite.418 For the urban
man, good property management was most important in achieving happiness and
prosperity. As the “goode man” tells his son, a man‟s most important duty is to “rewle
wele thyn astate” (79).419 Or, as Sponsler puts it, the late medieval husband must assert
“control of the rambunctious world of goods surrounding him.” 420 The world of
raucous goods that the merchant needed to bridle included not just his material properties
but those people in his custody as well: servants, apprentices, and, of course, his wife. It
is worth reiterating Derek Neal‟s description of late medieval masculinity as
“husbandry,” which “included being a „husband‟ in the modern sense, but also in the now
archaic sense of „manager,‟ one who both orders and sustains.”421 This masculine social
body relied on the visible signs of successful household governance like surplus wealth,
417 See Thrupp, Merchant Class, esp. 191-233 for an overview of the socio-economic dilemmas
the merchant class faced in this period.
418Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, 56, 58.
419 How the the Goode Man Taght Hys Sone in The Trials and Joys of Marriage, ed. Eve
Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2002), 79.
420 Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, 59.
421 Neal, The Masculine Self, 58.
160
land, property, obedient wives, and social connections forged through the marriages of
sons and daughters. For urban men, the household represented a “distinctive complex of
values—stability, piety, hierarchy, diligence, ambition, and respectability,” as Riddy has
shown.422 And, as Holly Crocker puts it, the “ordered regulation” of this symbolically
charged household provided a man with a “public account of his masculine
character.”423
It should be noted that self-governance was as important to the public account of a
man‟s masculine character as his management of goods. Instructional treatises like How
the Goode Man Taght Hys Sone indicate that late medieval masculine identity was
shaped by a discourse of affect: the portrait of the ideal husband and household governor
depended on certain limits to masculine emotional expression. The masculine body, like
the household, functioned as a microcosm of moral and political order. For McSheffrey,
men‟s good rule began at home, but I would argue that conduct manuals suggest that
good rule began in the embodied self. Conduct books promote a model of masculinity
that, according to Crocker, attempts to avoid any affect altogether “by presenting
masculine agency as a disciplined mode of regulation.”424 Though the speaker in How
the Goode Man Taght Hys Sone spares few words of advice on methods of bodily and
emotional control, the poem‟s relative silence on the topic, according to Sponsler,
indicates that there is an underlying assumption about masculine self-governance. In the
medieval understanding of masculinity, the male “is seen as by nature reasonable and
controllable, linked innately with rationality” and in the courtesy texts we find a maleness
422 Riddy, “Mother Knows Best,” 68.
423 Holly Crocker, “Affective Politics in Chaucer‟s Reeve’s Tale: Cherl Masculinity After 1381”
Chaucer Review 29 (2007): 225-258, 233.
424 Crocker, “Affective Politics,” 231.
161
that is cast as “innately docile and well-governed.”425 While the conduct poems spend
little time on the subject, the message they send about masculine emotionality is
nevertheless loud and clear: a man must always display moderation, self-control, and
self-restraint. Stability in the household is achieved only through a dispassionate affect.
The “goode man” explains that any sort of emotional surfeit, whether it is expressed
through laughter (“Lagh not to moche, for that ys waste”) or anger (“Be not to hasty them
to chyde”) can lead to disorder (67, 117). Emotional expressions of any sort suggest a
masculinity that is “overdon unskylfully”—that is, a man given to excess, intemperance,
unreasonable or foolish decisions, and the unjust treatment of others (111).426
Both Bycorne and Chyechevache and conduct poems suggest that the biggest
obstacle men face in constructing a stable self and household is their wives. Thus, as
Riddy argues, conduct books were concerned with establishing limits to women‟s
activities in and out of the household.427 Both How the Goode Wife Taught Hyr
Doughter and How the Goode Man Taght Hys Sone assume that women are by nature
unruly and emotionally unstable, and warn that if the husband fails to keep his wife in
line, “the entire system--and the masculine identity built on it--falls apart.”428 In Bycorne
and Chychevache, Lydgate speaks directly to the conduct-poem model of masculine
governance as he introduces a world where the entire masculine household system has
irrevocably broken down and the men‟s emotionality is in shambles. Following
425 Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, 56, 59.
426 MED, s.vv. “overdon,” 1, “unskillfully,” 1.
427 For example, Trinity College Cambridge MS R. 3.19 includes a number of other works
concerned with women‟s identity including “On Women's Chastity,” “A Plea to Lovers for
Sympathy,” “A Lover's Plea,” “An Episte to His Mistress,” “A Lover's Envoy to His Sovereign
Lady,” “The Craft of Lovers,” “Balade against Hypocritical Women,” “The Legend of Good
Women,” “The Describing of a Fair Lady,” “Balade: Beware of Deceitful Women, and “The
Wise Man's Advice to His Son.”
428 Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, 60.
162
Lydgate‟s call to affective history-making, we learn from Bycorne that the wives have
long subverted their husband‟s authority and have come to dominate all aspects of
household life. Good, patient women are “ful scarce,” Bycorne says, and only
“contrarye” women remain: “Þeyre tunge clappeþe and doþe hewe /… Þat neyþer cane at
bedde ne boord / Þeyre husbandes nought forbere on worde (32-5). The husbands have
lost control of the households that define their social selves—represented here by their
bedchambers and dining halls—to their tyrannical wives. Bycorne explains that as
masculine governance breaks down, the men become “my foode and my cherishing”
(36). Lydgate here equates men‟s loss of control in the household (and, I suspect, the
men‟s loss of “estatly” or “worthy” status) with death. Lydgate blames the death of
masculinity on the feminine voice that, when left unrestrained, violently disrupts the
stability of the household.
These masculinist fears of uncontrolled femininity perhaps reflect cultural
anxieties about increasingly independent-minded women in late-medieval London.429
429 In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, girls began migrating to urban centers to seek
employment as servants in affluent households. Riddy argues that leaving the household at such
an early age and effectively escaping their parents‟ jurisdiction undoubtedly “encouraged
independence and self-assertiveness” in these girls and made them much more “difficult to
contain and control” (71). For an informative account of women‟s business activities in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, see Barbara Hanawalt, “Women as Entrepeneurs,” in The
Wealth of Wives: Women, Law, and Economy in Late-Medieval London (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 160-184. Adult women continued in this track of independence and selfassertiveness, not only becoming executors of large amounts of capital as widows but also
managing their own businesses. Although some women entered the business world because of
economic necessity, and many of their business activities were in “feminine” trades—
embroidery, cloth garnishing, and silk manufacturing among the most popular—many men
viewed women‟s entrance into the business world as a violation of man‟s domain. While
mercantile and craft business was typically conducted within the household, the ideal medieval
household was supposed to maintain a marked gender divide between the masculine workplace
and the feminine domestic space. Women‟s business activities transgressed this divide. For more
on the ideal household gender divide, see Riddy, “Mother Knows Best,” 71 and 76-7; Thrupp,
Merchant Class, 173; Janet M. Cowen and Jennifer C. Ward, „Al myn array is bliew, what nedeth
more?‟: Gender and the Household in The Assembly of Ladies,” in The Medieval Household in
Christian Europe: c. 850-c. 1550: Managing Power, Wealth, and the Body, ed. Cordelia Beattie,
Anna Maslakovic, and Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 107-128; and Karen L.
Fresco, “Gendered Household Spaces in Christine de Pizan‟s Livre des trios vertus,” in Medieval
Household, 187-198.
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Conduct poems promote a misogynist ethos that limits the woman to a role “as wife and
mother within the home; her domesticity is represented as a prime virtue and she herself
as the repository and maintainer” of her household‟s and husband‟s public identity.430
How the Goode Wife Taught Hyr Dougter is interested in keeping women confined to the
house—that is, warning women about the dangers of other men‟s houses, the market, and
of course the tavern—and instructing her on proper household management: “Mych
thynge behoven them / That gode housold schall kepyn” (143-44).431 A wife must
devote herself to all things “Houswyfely,” justly ruling the servants that maintain the
household‟s domestic space, and avoiding sins like pride and “ydellschype” (111-14).
The implication is that a wife who is incapable or unwilling to keep a good household not
only tarnishes her own image, but ultimately leads to her husband‟s undoing as well.
Like the “comyn women” of the tavern, a bad wife will “maken yong men evyll to spede,
/ And bryngeth them often to myschefe” (62-4). The wife‟s ordering and disordering of
the domestic space signals the husband‟s level of household and affective governance.
Or, as Crocker puts it, the husband‟s “comprehensive governance makes [his wife‟s]
agency a reflection of his domestic regulation.”432
When Bycorne laments the disordered household that results in Chychevache‟s
starvation, he concentrates on the destructive power of women‟s tongues:
Ful scarce, God wot, is hir vitayle,
Humble wyves she fyndethe so fewe,
For alweys at the countretayle
Theyre tunge clappethe and dothe hewe;
Suche meke wyves I beshrewe,
That neyther cane at bedde ne boord
Theyre husbandes nought forbere on word (29-35).
430 Riddy, “Mother Knows Best,” 68.
431 How the Goode Wife Taught Hyr Doughter in Trials and Joys, ed. Salisbury.
432 Crocker, “Affective Politics,” 233.
164
Here the feminine voice is figured as a frightening weapon of feminine empowerment as
it chops down masculine governance. In conduct books for both men and women, the
human voice is figured as one of the principle vehicles for individual and communal
disorder. In How the Goode Man Taght Hys Sone, men are cautioned to restrain their
tongues because “Thyn owen tonge may be thy foo” (35). If a man is hasty to speak, he
might say something daft or offensive. The male voice, however, is considered only a
threat to self, while the female voice is reckoned a threat to both self and others. When
left unrestrained, woman‟s voice functions much like Jaques Attali‟s conception of noise;
as their tongues clap and hew, they become the “destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution, and
aggression against” the domestic regulation.433 In both conduct poems and Bycorne and
Chychevache, the poets cast the unregulated feminine voice as “weapon, blasphemy,
plague,” an assault on the masculine order, or a violence against their husband‟s domestic
and social self.434 In How the Goode Wife Taught Hyr Doughter, the mother spends
much of her energies instructing her daughter on the strictures of speech and the dangers
it poses not only to her own reputation but also to the stability of her household. In fact,
instructional literature charges a woman‟s voice with the task of maintaining her
husband‟s affective stability. If the husband is moved to an emotional excess like wrath,
it is the wife‟s duty to reassert balance: “Fayre wordes wreth do slake; / Fayre wordes
wreth schall never make, / Ne fayre wordes brake never bone, / Ne never schall in no
wone (41-44). When the feminine tongue is regulated properly, it can be reparative tool.
Just as music, what Attali conceives as the ordered regulation of sound, can be a tool for
433 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 27.
434 Ibid., 27.
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the “consolidation of community, of totality,” the feminine voice can be tool for the
consolidation of her husband‟s masculine governance.435
In Bycorne and Chyechevache, however, the feminine voice is without “fayre
wordes,” without an ordered regulation, and so the tongue becomes a destructive force
that breaks the “wones” (households/customs) and eventually leads to the men‟s broken
“bones.” Without a benevolent feminine voice to help shore up the husbands who are
teetering on the brink of disorder, their masculine social selves perish. In the absence of
a regulated feminine voice, and in the presence of clapping, cutting, noisy tongues, the
husbands‟ power center crumbles.436 Bycorne notes that the husbands cannot “forbere on
word” from their wives at “bedde ne boord.” “Forbere” is a striking word choice because
it not only indicates the men‟s doleful condition—that is, the men cannot “stand” the pain
or “endure” the sorrow that their wives‟ tongues bring—but it also suggests that the
men‟s emotionality is excessive and out of balance: they cannot “abstain” or “refrain”
from their grieving.437 The word also carries with it a deep sense of loss; according to
the MED “forberen” can also mean “to relinquish, give up, part with, or lose (something);
to become separated from (companions).”
Lydgate here narrativizes the men‟s emotionality as a discourse of bereavement.
“Bedde” and “boord” are of course synecdoches that emphasize the household spaces of
sustenance (the dining hall) and sexuality (the bedchamber), spaces that are important
symbols of urban masculine identity.438 In using these words, Lydgate not only aligns
435 Attali, Noise, 6.
436 In Noise, Attali writes that the organization of sound (music, language, etc.) “links a power
center to its subjects, and thus, more generally, it is an attribute of power in all of its forms,” 6.
As the feminine voice resists the masculine order and defies the masculine organization of sound,
the link between the power center (husbands) and its subjects (wives) breaks down.
437 MED, s.v. “forberen,” 1, 2a, 4.
438 It is no accident that Lydgate chooses to build an emotional community where the “bedde”
and “boord” stand. As Shirley indicates in his headnote, Lydgate‟s poem was designed to be
displayed in the hall, parlor, and bedchamber. In fifteenth-century England, the hall was still the
166
sexuality and nourishment, placing one space associated with matters of the flesh next to
another, but also connects the powerful feminine voice with sexual desire and with the
rending, tearing, and swallowing of flesh. The medieval misogynist tradition often vilifies
female sexuality by depicting women as duplicitous, promiscuous cuckolders. Lydgate
pushes this convention further when he links women‟s sexuality with appetite and
consumption. Because this linking comes from Bycorne—the beast who consumes
men—the feminine voice and its desires become aligned with monstrosity. Bycorne
observes that because of their sharp tongue, women‟s lustis reign supreme in the dining
hall and the bedchamber and the men are powerless to stop them: The husbands “Dar to
þeyre wyves be not contrarye / Ne from þeyre lustis dar not varye / Nor with hem holde
no chaumpartye (39-41). The women‟s tongues function like the monster‟s maw and
lead to an incipient death of sorts: the wives have cut (hewe) the men off from their
masculine governance which will ultimately lead the men to their deaths in the mouth of
Bycorne.
most public spatial indicator of the urban man‟s identity and membership in a community. Mark
Girouard in Life in an English Country House (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1978), 30-1, explains that the hall was the medieval man‟s “supreme expression of power, ritual,
wealth and hospitality.” Girouard notes, however, that by the fifteenth century the great halle of
the Middle Ages was well “past its prime” and the locus of household dining and entertainment
was gradually giving way to smaller and more intimate locations like the parlor. See Patricia
Fumerton‟s “Consuming the Void: Jacobean Banquets and Masques,” in Cultural Aesthetics:
Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991), 111-168, 113, who describes the “proliferation of rooms” beyond the hall in latemedieval England and the increasing desire to dine in private locations like the parlour. Parlour
began its life referring only to private chambers in a religious house that are reserved for
“consultation and conversation,” but by the time Lydgate writes Bycorne and Chychevache it
indicates any “room off of a main hall affording some privacy” that is “used for conversation or
conference.” See MED, s.v. “parlour,” 1. The bedchamber was a more private space, but was
nevertheless also important to a man‟s reputation. Eve Salisbury in her introduction to The Trials
and Joys of Marriage, par. 18, explains that masculine social power and prestige were intimately
entwined with sexual prowess; a late-medieval man‟s inability to perform in the bedchamber and
to produce male-heirs translated into “emasculation and potential ridicule in the public sphere.”
Shirley‟s location of the wall-hanging in three key household spaces echoes Bycorne and
Chychevache‟s world in which husbands “dar not varye” from their wives‟ monstrous “lustis”
and cannot “forbere” them at “bedde ne boord.”
167
The men are left with nothing but what appears to be a disordered and powerless
affect, mourning their loss of identity until the day that Bycorne eats them. Once
Bycorne leaves the stage, the “companye of men” mope onto the scene, gathering in a
cheerless fellowship to lament their sad fates. Echoing Lydgate‟s opening invocation that
unites the audience with a call to shared history, the company begins with a call to a
shared humiliation and subjection: “Felawes,” the company says in unison, “takeþe heede
and yee may see / How Bicorne casteþe him to deuoure / All humble men, boþe you and
me / Þer is no gayne vs may socour” (43-6). Hopeless and ashamed, the men share in
and sympathize with each other‟s losses. The company expresses the hopelessness of
their plight when they say that there will be “no gayne,” no profit or elevation of status
that could provide them with “socour”—that is, comfort, recourse, or respite.439 The
company‟s anxieties about “gayne” also reverberate with the merchant‟s commercial
concerns, indicating business‟s intimate overlap with the domestic in the household. With
their commercial/domestic fiefdoms in ruins, the men appear to be resigned to a perpetual
melancholy. Lydgate further encourages an affective connection between his merchantclass audience and the fictive company of men with the call to “boþe you and me,”
inviting the patron and his “felawes” to identify as “humble” but hopeless men, to
identity with irrevocable loss (“no gayne” or “socour”).
As the men reveal their humiliation, exposing themselves and their hopeless
plight, the transformative potential of shame comes to the forefront of the narrative.
While the discourse of fear attempts to re-establish existing boundaries between bodies,
to reassert certain phobic conventions that bolster cultural hierarchies, the discourse of
shame works differently, attempting instead to alter those boundaries and hierarchies.
This is because fear attributes “bad feeling” to an object or other, while shame is a
439 MED, s.v. “socour.”
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turning away from another to the self, “consumed by a feeling of badness that cannot
simply be given away or attributed to another.”440 Silvan K. Tomkins has described
shame as one of the primary negative affects because it is so bound up in the self‟s
perception of itself, perceptions that include deeply embodied feelings of self-loathing
and disgust.441 Shame‟s self-centeredness has led Eve Sedgwick to assert that it is
unlike any other affect in that it “attaches to and sharpens the sense of what one is”; other
emotional states attach to objects and actions, but shame attaches only to the self. As
Sedgwick puts it, “one is something in experiencing shame.”442 In Bycorne and
Chychevache, Lydgate likewise suggests that the men are something of a masculine
community in experiencing not just the loss of masculine governance itself but in the
lingering shame of that loss. Indeed, embedded in the word “humble” is the shame of
being made meek, docile, and submissive.443 Shame is what provokes the men‟s deep
melancholic complaint. “Wo be þer-fore, in halle and bour,” the company grieves, “To
alle þees husbandes, which þeyre lyves / Maken maystresses of þeyre wyves (47-49).
Woe, the company of men explains, endures inside the men as they watch their wives
subvert masculine governance and make themselves masters of the household. If the
expression of shame, as Sedgwick argues, is a “peculiarly contagious” affect capable of
reconstituting “interpersonal bridges,” then I would argue that Lydgate here deploys
shame in his discourse of loss to begin his project of masculine recuperation. Indeed,
Ahmed argues for shame‟s transformative potential as it “involves the de-forming and re-
440 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 104.
441 See Silvan Tomkins, “Shame—Humiliation and Contempt—Disgust,” in Shame and its
Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1995), 133-78.
442 Eve Kosofky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke
University Press, 2003), 37.
443 MED, s.v. “humble.”
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forming of bodily and social spaces, as bodies „turn away‟ from the others who witness
the shame.”444 The difficulty, however, is that the melancholy that the shame provokes
in the Lydgate‟s men potentially emasculates/feminizes them.
Lydgate‟s resolution is to appropriate and legitimate the affective discourse that
he figures as feminine in Bycorne and Chychevache. While men certainly grieved during
the Middle Ages, and the literature across genres is rife with men sobbing, moaning, and
loudly lamenting, the public expression of masculine grief was nevertheless fraught with
anxiety. Melancholy in the classical tradition was an “unfortunate malady that affected
all great men;” Aristotle theorized that all gifted philosophers, poets, and statesmen were
afflicted by melancholy including the likes of Ajax, Bellerophon, Empedocles, Plato, and
Socrates. Juliana Schiesari notes that, “given this status of „eminence,‟ melancholy could
thus become a praiseworthy attribute in its own right.” This was not the conclusion drawn
by most medieval writers, however, “who characteristically viewed the condition as an
unwelcome disease.”445 During the medieval period, mourning and melancholy were
largely regarded as potentially “subversive of the rule of reason and domestic and social
order,” an affective state that marked a man as irrational, weak, incapable of self-control,
and perhaps impious.446 For the grieving father in Pearl, his melancholy becomes a
point of contention, a potential marker of his inadequate faith, and so the poem becomes
a lesson in orthodox Christian belief and the appropriate expression of grief. As Callahan
explains, there was a didactic tradition that began with the Church Fathers that concerned
itself with the “pedagogy of grief.” While moderate tears that were “directed toward the
444 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 103.
445 Julie Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the
Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 6.
446 G.W. Pigman III, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), 2.
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salvation of the soul of the dead” were an acceptable and necessary expression of grief,
mourning nevertheless was always a problematic affective mode: mourning an individual
that is in heaven could suggest defective reason and faith.447
Moreover, the public expression of grief is also traditionally the prerogative of
women. Katharine Goodland, in her study of female mourning in medieval and early
modern drama, writes that in the classical and medieval traditions, the performance of
grief—that is, the “artistic channeling of the fear, anger, anguish, and moral
bewilderment that result from the death of a loved one”—is “incumbent upon the female
relatives of the deceased, simultaneously a responsibility, a right, and a source of pride.”
Women as mourners, Goodland argues, are represented as the “interpreters of the
meaning of death” and the “embodiments of the communal memory.”448 Or, to put it in
Massumi‟s terms, the feminine voice narrativizes loss, gives it meaning by framing it
within “semantically and semiotically formed progressions” or rituals.449 Chaucer‟s
Knight’s Tale, for example, frames the public expression of sorrow with the feminine
voice: the grieving Theban women construct a melancholic narrative that construes their
loss of status and husbands‟ deaths as unjust and moves Theseus to reap vengeance.
While mourning and melancholy are not always feminized in medieval narrative,
Bycorne and Chychevache certainly works within that dramatic tradition. It is important
to note that the men‟s affective display comes paired with their movement into a
feminized position in the household. When the men narrativize their loss and identify
their shame and melancholy, it comes with the realization that they are not masters of the
447 Leslie Abend Callahan, “The Widow‟s Tears: The Pedagogy of Grief in Medieval France and
the Image of the Grieving Widow,” in Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle
Ages, ed. Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl (Palgrave Macmillan,1999), 245-63, 246.
448 Katharine Goodland, Female Mourning in Medieval and Renaissance Drama: From the
Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (Ashgate, 2005), 8-9.
449 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 28.
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household any longer. Gender roles have been flip-flopped. The feminine voice now
asserts governance and so the masculine voice submits to grief.
When Lydgate deploys his discourse of loss, however, he also begins a project of
recuperation. Lydgate reimagines this discourse as a sign of power and control; as
Schiesari would put it, Lydgate converts “the feeling of disempowerment into a
privileged artifact.”450 As the company of men and the male audience wallow in each
other‟s grief, Lydgate gives them a stratagem for recovery: to embrace, albeit grudgingly,
their subordinate positions as a new marker of masculine identity, grounded in their
feelings of melancholy. “Þis is þe lawe,” explains the company, “Þat þis Bycorne wol
him oppresse, / And devowren in his mawe / Þat of his wyff makeþe his maystresse; / Þis
woll vs bring in gret distresse” (50-5). Yet to be a member of this melancholic
community is to not only share the experience of “gret distresse” and to suffer the
“oppresse”-ion of “maystresses” and Bycorne, but also, as the company further explains,
to have an identity marked by “humylytee”: “For we of oure humylytee / Of Bycorne
shalle devowred be” (56). Men, the company implies, are subject not because of a
weakness, but because of a virtue.451 Lydgate legitimizes the men‟s affective state by
reframing their “humble” statuses within the virtue of humility. Domination by a
“maystress” becomes a symbol of righteousness. Rather than recuperate their lost
identities and mount a defense against Bycorne or reclaim their sovereignty in the
household, the men instead revise their identities as a way to valorize their new positions.
Membership in this affective community is not marked by household governance or
control of the passions but by a subjection and depression that is taken on by choice:
450 Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia, 8.
451 MED, s.v. “humilite” defines it as a “virtue” marked by “humble behavior or conduct.”
172
We stonden pleynly in suche cas,
þat þey to ys maystresses be,
We may wel sing and seyne allas!
þat wee gaf hem þe souereynte.
For we be thralle and þey beo fre,
Wher-fore Bycorne, þis cruell beste,
Wole vs devowren at þe leest (57-63)
Subjection to Bycorne and the “maystresses,” although cause for “distresse” and
emotional outbursts, becomes symbolic not of flaw or failure but of virtue and agency.
The portrait of “total masculine submission” to the unruly feminine is, as Nicole Nolan
Sidhu explains, “quite rare in medieval gender comedy,” but not uncommon in Lydgate‟s
oeuvre of misogynist complaints.452 Focusing her study on Lydgate‟s Disguising at
Hereford, a theatrical production that like Bycorne and Chychevache features husbands
complaining about their unruly wives, Sidhu writes that in medieval gender comedies,
including fabliau and farce, the husband usually puts up a much more stalwart defense
against their wives than the timid lot we find in Lydgate‟s two misogynist performance
pieces. The men in Chaucer‟s gender comedies, for example, are often dominant and
sometimes domineering. And, when the medieval gender comedy does depict husbands
as weak and passive, it is typically used as an “ironic denigration” that intends to ridicule
husbands who do not assert control over the household, “to issue injunctions for a more
forceful masculine behavior.”453 Or, as Taylor puts it, this type of misogynist comedy
aims “to awaken the uxorious husband, to shake him out of his shameful lethargy before
it [is] too late.”454
But Lydgate rewrites the men‟s shameful meekness as a sign of masculine virtue
when he notes that the women‟s “souereynte” is a gift from the men, a position that the
husbands “gaf” to their wives. Here Lydgate recalls Chaucer‟s Wife of Bath and her tale
452 Nicole Nolan Sidhu, “Henpecked Husbands, Unruly Wives, and Royal Authority in
Lydgate's Mumming At Hertford,” The Chaucer Review 42 (2008): 431-460, 434.
453 Sidhu, “Henpecked Husbands,” 438.
454 Taylor, “Monsters of Misogyny,” 103.
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of women‟s desire for sovereignty.455 Lydgate, however, seems to counter Chaucer‟s
story of female empowerment when he suggests that the gift of sovereignty leads not to
marital bliss but to men‟s sorrow. Sidhu writes that Lydgate‟s gender comedies “fail to
acknowledge” Chaucer‟s attempts to move beyond an oppositional model of gender
relations in stories like the Wife of Bath‟s Tale.456 Instead of brokering a power-sharing
agreement in their marriages like the Wife and Jankyn, Lydgate‟s men can only express
reluctance and regret about their act of charity—they can‟t help singing “allas!” But
Lydgate nevertheless describes this marital-world-turned-upside-down as absolutely
contingent on that act of charity. Even as Lydgate fantasizes about masculine subjection
and stresses feelings of melancholy and grief, he empowers his masculine audience and
the fictive company‟s position. Lydgate attributes men‟s “thralle”-dom—that is, their
decidedly unworthy, un-“estatly” degree— to the men‟s choice to save their wives from a
cruel fate.457 In his Disguising at Hereford, Lydgate similarly legitimates masculine
passivity by deploying the religious discourse of martyrdom which, Sidhu explains,
“advocates nonviolence in the face of tyranny.”458 Lydgate describes marriage as
“purgatorye” and the suffering husbands as “holy martirs, preued ful pacyent.”459 Lydgate
also invokes the language of masculine martyrdom in the Payne and Sorowe of Evyll
Maryage (a poem which appears in one of the manuscripts in which Bycorne and
455 It should also be noted that Lydgate specifically references the “worthy Wyf of Bathe” as an
important symbol of women‟s sovereignty in his Disguising at Hereford, another occasional
performance piece that focuses on unruly wives to create a misogynist comedy. See Disguising
at Hereford in Mummings and Entertainments, ed. Sponsler, line 168.
456 Sidhu, “Henpecked Husbands,” 435.
457 MED, s.v. “thralle”: “1b: „a subject; also, a subject nation‟; 1c: „a person of low degree, a
wretch; an inferior; also, a prisoner, captive; -- also coll.; ?also, a servile person [quot.
a1500(1422)]‟; 1d: „the state of slavery, servitude.‟”
458 Sidhu, “Henpecked Husbands,” 439.
459 Disguising at Hereford, ll. 87, 135.
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Chychevache survives) writing that “wedlok is an endles penaunce… A martirdome and a
contynuaunce.”460 Though Lydgate does not specifically invoke a religious discourse in
Bycorne and Chychevache, the specter of martyrdom nevertheless haunts the text with
the repetition of words like “humble,” “humilitee,” and, above all, “patience,” which
suggest Christian virtue. Lydgate‟s company of men thus is able to reimagine their
feminized positions as a badge of honor and sacrifice: they are willing to submit,
choosing to patiently endure hardship, and opting to forfeit their happiness.
Recuperating a Melancholic Masculinity
Lydgate‟s appropriation of mourning and melancholy in Bycorne and
Chychevache as a symbol of masculine superiority anticipates the early modern period‟s
shifting understanding of affect. While the late medieval period valorized emotional
afflictions like lovesickness—in courtly literatures, intense eroticized suffering “was a
mark of one‟s nobility, a testimony to one‟s patrician feelings”—Lydgate takes it a step
further when he recuperates melancholy to a position of exceptionality.461 Douglas
Trevor claims in his study of melancholy in early modern England, before the sixteenth
century, it would be “impossible” to find a medieval writer who viewed melancholy in
positive terms.462 Most critics consider the late fifteenth-century Florentine philosopher
Marsilo Ficino to be the first writer to produce a counter-narrative of melancholy,
recasting it as a positive virtue for men, especially artists.463 The Fician model of
460 Payne and Sorowe of Evyll Maryage in The Trials and Joys of Marriage, ed. Salisbury, ll. 71
and 73.
461 M.C. Bodden, "Disordered Grief and Fashionable Afflictions in Chaucer's Franklin's Tale
and the Clerk's Tale," Grief and Gender: 700-1700, ed. Jennifer C. Vaught (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003), 51-63, 53.
462 Douglas Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 12.
463 For an overview of Ficino‟s celebration of loss and melancholy, see Schiesari, The
Gendering of Melancholia, 112-140.
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melancholy elevated sadness to a sign of elite exceptionality, an “inscription of genius
within them.”464 Or, as M.C. Bodden puts it, melancholic suffering became a “sign of
spiritual greatness.”465 While Ficino‟s “genial” melancholy was not universally
accepted throughout the early modern era, his work attests to a burgeoning understanding
of affect as fluid and malleable. Trevor explains that in the sixteenth century, humanists
began rethinking, expanding, and amending their understanding of emotional and
spiritual afflictions. The result was that affect could be revised: for early modern English
scholars, melancholy was “repackaged as a mood that attests to bookishness and
contemplativeness, if not fantastic powers of prognostication.”466 As writers aspired to
melancholic sufferings in their self-portraitures—whether casting sadness as genial or
miserable—affect moved from objectal to dispositional. That is, melancholy was not
something that happens to the self, but rather was a part of the self.467 While Lydgate is
not concerned with repackaging melancholy as a sign of elite intellectual dominance, he
similarly reimagines sadness and shame as dispositional in masculine identity. In other
words, when Lydgate asks his audience to embrace Bycorne and Chychevache‟s narrative
of grief, he asks men to internalize shame and melancholy and think of it as integral to
their masculine superiority.
The recuperation of melancholy was also the appropriation of a feminine domain
which, according to Schiesari, resulted in the “cultural devaluation of women‟s sense of
loss.”468 As men‟s feelings of loss and sorrow were converted into signs of prestige,
464 Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia, 7.
465 Bodden, “Disordered Grief,” 53.
466 Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy, 9.
467 Ibid., 13. Trevor explains that Galenic humoral theory—the dominant scientific
understanding of human psychology in the Middle Ages—is “richly objectal, forever identifying
the passions with bodily substances, but these are internal objects, not internalized ones.”
468 Schiesari, The Gendering of Melacholia, 12.
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melancholy developed into a masculinized domain that wasn‟t available to women.
Women‟s grief became nothing more than a quotidian emotion that “did not seem to bear
the same weight or „seriousness‟ as a man‟s grief.”469 In his elevation of masculine
melancholy, Lydgate likewise begins to devalue women‟s association with certain
affective states. As Lydgate later writes, the wives achieve their new position as master
of the households in Bycorne and Chychevache because they “exyle Pacyence” (116).
“Pacience,” according to the MED, is a term aligned with affect, meaning “the calm
endurance of misfortune,” the “willingness to bear adversities,” or moderation and selfrestraint. In suggesting that empowered women have banished patience, Lydgate
devalues any sort of feminine affect that defies the model of the meek and mild wife. As
Lydgate imagines wives “hewe”-ing their husbands with their noisy tongues, he
undercuts the legitimacy of women‟s power and emotion. At the same time, Lydgate
appropriates a part of “Pacyence” on behalf of men when he imagines the husbands
willingly, though perhaps not calmly, bearing adversity in their household. Of course,
this revision of affect that allows men to appropriate certain feminine traits requires the
audience to accept some gender fluidity. Fifteenth-century readers, though, would have
been primed for this fluidity, especially readers of Chaucerian romance. Susan Crane
observes that in these romances men often co-opt feminine traits in order to expand
masculine identity “beyond the limitations difference imposes” and escape any part of
their identity that is “restrictive” or “diminishing.”470 Chaucerian romance imagines
469 Schiesari, The Gendering of Melacholia, 13. See also Goodland‟s chapter “Deranging
Female Lament in Renaissance Tragedy” in Female Mourning, 101-117. On the representation
of melancholy in Renaissance drama, Goodland writes, “Melancholia signified different things
based upon gender: an enabling disorder for men, it suggested a precious sensibility, a nearness to
transcendent truth in the sensitive man who succumbed to the melancholia of the age. On the
other hand, melancholia in women was disabling. Melancholic women were, at best, depressed,
and, like „poor Ophelia / Divided from herself and her fair judgment‟ (Hamlet 4.5.84-5), mad in
the extreme” (117).
470 Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Princeton University
Press, 1994), 20. Susan Crane argues that the “centrality and complexity” of masculine identity in
177
masculinity‟s movement into feminine territory as a necessary recuperative process. The
feminine becomes but an instrument for the construction and maintenance of masculinity.
In revising a feminized affect as a sign of masculine exceptionality, Lydgate can release
the company of men from the restrictions of their diminishing masculinity in the
household.471
The most important figure in Lydgate‟s drama of loss and recovery is
Chychevache, Bycorne‟s starving wife. Chychevache, I argue, stands at the heart of
masculinity‟s co-opting of the feminine when she asks men to identify with an abject
femininity. Late in the poem, the emaciated Chychevache appears, a “beest sklendre and
lene” with flesh that is “no thing saue skyn and boone.” Lydgate establishes the monster
as a touchstone for affective community, her body reflecting the company‟s own
“sklendre and lene” masculinity. Like the men, Chychevache narrativizes her identity
with a discourse of shame and loss: “Chychevache, þis is my name, / Hungry, megre,
sklendre, and lene, / To shewe my body, I haue gret shame” (78-81). Standing before the
audience, naked and deformed by starvation, exposed and vulnerable, Chychevache
mirrors the company of men‟s psychological state. Moreover, Chychevache lays claim to
what Sedgwick calls the “peculiarly contagious” affect of shame, inviting the men to
forge an “interpersonal bridge” through their shared humiliation and melancholic
suffering. The men‟s identification with Chychevache‟s sadness is made easier because
Chaucerian romance “makes it more than simply the reverse of femininity.” Although medieval
gender identity relied on fundamental differences between males and females, masculine and
feminine behavior was not simply a matter of binary oppositions. A man‟s biological difference
from a woman did not “exile from man all traits associated with the feminine” (17). Many
medieval thinkers conceived of gender as a single continuum in which man represented centrality
and universality while woman represented alterity and inversion. The continuum model argued
that men and women were fundamentally the same—women were just inverted men—and so this
model allowed for considerable gender slippage. Man‟s central or universal position potentially
opened him up to all gendered traits, making him potentially able to occupy all positions on the
continuum.
471 For Crane‟s complete discussion of masculinity‟s appropriation of feminine traits in medieval
romance, see Gender and Romance, 16-21.
178
her body suggests gender hybridity. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen explains, medieval
monsters have an “ontologically problematic relationship between gender and
embodiment.”472 A monster‟s body is often confusing, resists easy categorization, and
exhibits characteristics of both the masculine and the feminine. Christine Cooper
Rompato insists that this category confusion extends to Lydgate‟s Bycorne and
Chyechevache, arguing that “despite the gender of [Lydgate‟s] two beasts, they represent
men who consume women with their voracious appetites, and women who consume
men.”473 Indeed, Bycorne‟s corpulent body is an important symbol of women‟s
monstrosity: vice, rebellion, and immoderate appetite. Bycorne‟s excessive fleshliness
and appetite, his extreme “corporeality and consumptive drive,” ally him with the
traditional “misogynist representation of women.”474 Moreover, because Bycorne is
partly responsible for women‟s “souereynte”—that is, his power to consume man
perpetuates woman‟s power—man-eating Bycorne becomes a metaphor for man-eating
woman.
Chychevache‟s body likewise is an important symbol of men‟s deteriorating
status. Cohen notes that when a medieval body is marked with a “desubstantiating
ascesis”—that is, the deterioration, loss, or denial of the flesh—it is most often gendered
masculine. Moreover, in her recent study of cycle dramas, Christina Fitzgerald argues
that, contrary to the theories of post-structural psychoanalysis, “in this [late medieval
English] culture it is maleness that is marked by lack, not femaleness”: masculinity, she
writes, “comes to be defined by sacrifice, by quiescence, [and] by emotional
472 Jeffrey J. Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999), xii.
473 Rompato, “Stuck in Chychevache‟s Maw,” 89.
474 Cohen, Of Giants, 69.
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reticence.”475 As in le Fevre‟s Lamentations, in which the monster‟s emaciated body
functions as a symbol of the rebellious woman‟s effect on her husband, Chychevache‟s
deterioration, her lack mirrors the company‟s lack. Chychevache‟s “megre, sklendre, and
leene” identity, like the company‟s communal mourning, slips between the masculine and
the feminine and allows the company and audience to bond through the monster‟s shame
and the grief it provokes.
Lydgate further encourages his male audience to identify with Chychevache‟s loss
as she launches into her own vehement misogynist invective. Chychevache makes clear
that it is women who are responsible for her thirty-year fast and resulting bodily decline.
Her existence, she explains, depends on “meeke” women “lyche Gryselde in
pacyence”—a reference to Chaucer‟s patient protagonist in The Clerk’s Tale—but it has
been “ful longe” since she has found a “gode repaaste” (85-91). She has been traveling
“frome lande to londe” for “more þane thritty Mayes” and “yet oone Grisylde neuer” has
she found (96-8). In her complaint, Chychevache invites the audience to sympathize and
join her as she “greueþe” and tries to come to terms with her “thralle”-dom. Like the
men, Chychevache‟s identity—and her flesh for that matter—has been transformed by
women‟s “contrarye” conduct. As the women shed their femininity and don their
husband‟s masculinity, they defy Chychevache, leaving her pasture and her hopes empty:
“For more pasture I wil not stryve / Nor seeche for my foode no more, / Ne for vitayle me
to enstore” (101-3). While Chychevache‟s bleak outlook further develops her and the
audience‟s affective connection, it also reinforces the idea that Lydgate asks men to coopt a feminized affective identity. The empty pastures in Chychevache‟s lament function
similarly to Lydgate‟s claim that women have exiled patience: the pasture represents
women‟s disconnect from their femininity. The pasture is femininity left vacant. And
475 Christina M. Fitzgerald, The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 10.
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with femininity unoccupied, it is essentially open for men to colonize. Lydgate once
again devalues women‟s affect in the service of empowering men. With Griselda, the last
denizen of Chychevache‟s pasture and the last symbol of feminine patience consumed
and digested thirty years ago, there are no women left to populate the feminine pasture.
The pastures are empty, Chychevache explains, because the wives “beon wexen so
prudent,” refuse their former identities, and “wol no more beo pacyent” (104-5).
Nevertheless, Lydgate is not content to leave his male audience commiserating in
Chychevache‟s pastures; rather, Lydgate continues building an affective history for the
men through what appears to be two time-travel events. While Lydgate‟s opening
invocation only hints at a temporality that is collapsible and capable of fostering
transhistorical affective bonds, Chychevache fully realizes this fantasy of a recoverable
past. First, Lydgate travels thirty years back in time and reenacts Chychevache‟s last
meal: “Þanne shal þer be a woman deuowred ypurtrayed in þe mouþe of Chichevache
cryen to alle wyves” (Rubric 5). With the male audience members already identifying
with feminine bodies, Griselda‟s masticated flesh, like the two monsters, becomes a site
of gender ambivalence, slippage, and collapse. In this reenactment of the fictional past,
Lydgate asks the men to fantasize about being both the consumer and the consumed, to
simultaneously malign and align with the feminine. Similar to his portrayal of
Chychevache, Lydgate offers up Griselda‟s body as a hybrid fantasy that simultaneously
reflects masculine loss and recovery. As a consumable object, Griselda can embody the
feelings of masculine melancholy, the shame of losing governance. While Chychevache
asks men to confront their shame of a dwindling masculine identity, Griselda‟s gory
death perhaps symbolizes the fear of losing masculine identity altogether. Griselda
becomes another symbol of masculinity‟s “de-substantiating ascesis” in Bycorne and
Chychevache. As her flesh dwindles, fragments, and is consumed in front of the
audience, she becomes aligned with the masculine body. At the same time as
Chychevache‟s monstrous female maw chews up this masculinized body, Lydgate returns
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to the theme of monstrous, violent female sexuality. Like the jaws of other medieval
monsters, Chychevache‟s fearsome maw “has a specifically sexual dimension,” a
“synechdotal point of overlap” where the mouth is interchangeable with the vagina,
where the monstrous orifice is conflated with monstrous female sexuality.476 When the
men collectively identify with Griselda, they share a fantasy where monstrous femininity
consumes them echoing the drama‟s earlier nightmare of feminine tongues “hewe”-ing
masculinity in the household. Lydgate thus memorializes and offers Griselda‟s loss as an
affective touchstone for the audience‟s melancholy, a marker of a fictional past event that
imagines a painful shared history of loss and shame. When Griselda is “deuowred…in
the mouþe of Chichevache,” Lydgate gives his audience an affective history in which
men in the present can touch bodies in the past.
But as Chychevache eats Griselda, Lydgate also reenacts a violent fantasy that
allows men to emotionally connect with Chychevache across time. We know from
Chychevache‟s diatribe that Griselda has been dead for thirty years, yet Lydgate insists
on reliving the grisly scene. Memorializing this fictional event also allows the audience
to reach back and touch their misogynist forebears (embodied in Chychevache‟s flesh) in
order to experience a world where women are still “pacyent” and men are “souereyne.”
In this affective history, Lydgate offers up a perverse Eucharistic moment where
Chychevache and the audience unite in communion. When Griselda is chewed and
swallowed by Chychevache, who is also representative, in part, of a diminishing
masculine identity, Lydgate imagines masculinity ingesting femininity, devouring the
female body and making it a part of its masculine flesh. When Chychevache consumes
the virtuous Griselda, the last patient, charitable, and self-sacrificing woman in the world,
Lydgate allows his audience to fully realize their fantasies of both dominating and
embodying womanhood. As the final vestige of womanly virtue enters Chychevache‟s
476 Cohen, Of Giants, 69.
182
body, as it is digested and absorbed in her “entrayle,” it simultaneously enters into the
male body (77). Chychevache and the men absorb feminine identity, making Griselda,
her “humylytee” and “pacyence” a part of themselves. In this moment of communion,
Griselda‟s body and emotions become the recuperative touchstone for masculine
community.
As the audience engages in this affective communion in and with the past,
Lydgate suggests that it is a past that might be recovered. In reconnecting men with their
misogynist forebears and their violent fantasies, Lydgate reminds men of their potential
for domination and control. And with this reminder, Lydgate revises masculinity as an
identity that doesn‟t simply rely on action, on what a man does, but rather relies on what
a man could do. In other words, Lydgate imagines masculinity as pure potential. This
idea of potential is most evident when the company of men grudgingly accept their
subordinate position. They not only insist that the inverted gender hierarchy is contingent
on their act of charity, but further propose that their charity could be revoked at any time:
“But who þat cane be souerayne, / And his wyf teeche and chastyse, / þat she dare not a
worde geyne-seyne, / Nor disobeye no maner wyse, / Of such a man, I cane devyse, / He
stant vnder proteccion / Frome Bycornes iurisdiccyoun (64-70) Although the men
remain in thralldom, the potential to reverse these circumstances and escape Bycorne‟s
“iurisdiccyoun” remains as well. As if emphasizing the contingency of their subordinate
roles, the company of men propose that any man could “teech and chastyse” his wife,
could reassert his dominance, and could realign the gender hierarchy if he chose to do so.
This potential to recover the old masculinity unites the audience under the auspice of a
promising future. Responding to the men‟s fears that there might be little profit or
“gayne” in their subject statuses, Lydgate suggests here, and in the reenactment of
Griselda‟s death, that the men might re-“gayne: the past, recover their dominance, and resubordinate their wives. Thus, when Lydgate conceives of masculinity as pure potential,
he reasserts that their melancholy and subject statuses are a matter of choice. This not
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only allows men to adopt a feminine affect in order to escape and/or recuperate their
diminishing masculinity, but also allows them to maintain a fantasy of hypermasculine
governance. As Lydgate expands men‟s identities beyond the conventions of
masculinity, he simultaneously holds onto those conventions. Although the men move
into feminine pastures and adopt a feminized affect in order to release themselves from
the restrictions of their de-substantiating masculinity, they don not relinquish their ability
to reclaim the old masculine pastures.
Conclusion
In the end, then, Lydgate‟s poem provides a fantasy of emotional fellowship that
embraces melancholy and shame as a means of recovery. Lydgate asks the husbands to
adopt what is usually considered a disempowering affect, but allows them at the same
time to continue holding onto their former masculine selves. The result is an easy
solution to the late medieval urban anxieties we see expressed in the period‟s conduct
poems. Lydgate offers his fifteenth-century mercantile audience an affective community
in which performances of mourning and melancholy do not threaten their claims to
masculine governance but rather represent their exceptionality as men. In the closing
moments of the poem, Lydgate underscores this affective solution in which loss and
recovery intertwine, using the symbol of the “double cheyne.” The poem time travels for
a second time and focuses on an old man chasing Chychevache and “manassing þe beest
for þe rescowing of his wyff” Griselda. Unable to rescue the last vestige of feminine
virtue, the old man confronts Chychevache‟s empty pasture and wallows in despair: “It is
an inpossyble,” he mourns, “To fynde euer such a wyff” (110-1). Then the old man from
the past turns and touches the audience‟s present. He speaks across the thirty-year span
and explains that when women make “hem self so stronge” they not only “exyle
Pacyence” but they “outraye humylytee” (116, 122-3). When a wife empowers herself
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she violently rages and vanquishes her former affective self.477 Lydgate here not only
further devalues women‟s emotionality, but also reiterates one last time his project of
cooption and recovery. The men in Bycorne and Chychevache have already adopted
some part of patience and humility in the narrative of their melancholic selves, but
Lydgate stresses men‟s claims to these feminized affects and thereby reasserts men‟s
exceptionality. Women, he explains, have exiled patience and humility, and so men are
now a free to embody and express these affects. At the same time, Lydgate makes sure to
emphasize man‟s superior affective identities in their potential to occupy both masculine
and feminine positions. The old man finishes the poem‟s final lament maintaining men‟s
ability to both embrace their “thralle”-dom while maintaining the possibility of “fre”dom:
Yif þat yee suffer, yee beo but deed,
Þis Bicorne awayteþe yowe so soore,
Eeke of youre wyves yee stonde in dreed
Yif yee geyne seye hem any more;
And þus yee stonde, haue done yore,
Of lyff and deeth bytwixen tweyne,
Lynkeld in a double cheyne (127-133)
Lydgate sustains man‟s exceptionality by reiterating that a man‟s identity is contingent on
choice. The above two choices represent a double bind: to adopt a melancholic but
patient subjection is to be consumed by both Bycorne and the contrary wives; to reassert
dominance is to withdraw charity and to cast the wives back into Chychevache‟s pasture.
While in the logic of Lydgate‟s world the “double cheyne” presents men with a solutionless dilemma, the double-chain nevertheless provides a comforting resolution to the
audience‟s anxieties about masculine identity. Lydgate gives his audience members a
new affective community whose subjection to melancholy paradoxically leads to a
fantasy of absolute agency.
477 MED, s.v. “outraien,” 1: “(a) To overcome (sb.), conquer, vanquish; destroy (sb.),
annihilate.”
185
What is striking about Lydgate‟s Bycorne and Chychevache is that its
transformational and recuperative process never tries to escape the specter of shame and
melancholy. Lydgate perhaps recognizes that these are powerful emotions that institute,
as Sedgwick writes, “durable, structural changes in one‟s relational and interpretive
strategies toward both self and others” and affective histories and communities can never
elide these feelings altogether:
Which means, among other things, that therapeutic or political
strategies aimed directly at getting rid of individual or group
shame, or undoing it, have something preposterous about them:
they may "work"--they certainly have powerful effects--but they
can't work in the way they say the work. (I am thinking here of a
range of movements that deal with shame variously in the form of,
for instance, the communal dignity of the civil rights movement;
the individuating pride of the "Black is beautiful" and gay pride;
various forms of nativist resentment; the menacingly exhibited
abjection of the skinhead; the early feminist experiments with the
naming and foregrounding of anger as a response to shame; the
incest survivors movement's epistemological stress on truth-telling
about shame; and, of course, many many others.) The forms taken
by shame are not distinct "toxic" parts of a group or individual
identity that can be excised; they are instead integral to and
residual in the processes by which identity itself is formed. They
are available for the work of metamorphosis, reframing,
refiguration, transfiguration, affect and symbolic loading and
deformation, but perhaps all too potent for the work of purgation
and deontological closure.478
Lydgate understands that emotions like shame and melancholy cannot be excised entirely
from the masculine community in Bycorne and Chychevache. They are integral to and
residual in the formation of masculine identity. Thus, Lydgate refigures affect itself, the
grief and the humiliation, as badges of honor and signs of masculine charity and
exceptionality. Instead of trying to purge these emotions, Lydgate offers them to his
audience as a communal touchstone that bonds men across space and through time. But,
similar to St. Erkenwald’s utopian vision of community, when Lydgate radically
redefines melancholy as a sign of masculine privilege, he sets up a category of difference
478 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 62-3.
186
that exiles the feminine. The reality of Bycorne and Chychevache‟s affective community
is that it, like The Reeve’s Tale, relies on the instrumental use and abuse of women.
Indeed, Lydgate and his contemporaries deny the merit of women‟s emotions and use
women only as a conduit for men‟s emotional bonding. We might even read the
incorporation of patient Griselda as Lydgate‟s attempt to forge his own masculinist
affective bond with his literary forebear, Chaucer. Lydgate‟s Griselda is likely an
allusion to The Clerk’s Tale‟s patient and virtuous heroine.479 Given that Lydgate
plants Griselda and her grisly death some thirty years in the past, he not only imagines an
affective history for his audience, but also opens the potential for an affective connection
across history between Chaucer and himself. When Lydgate uses Griselda as a vehicle
that collapses temporalities and allows the fictional past to touch the present, Lydgate
creates a literary bond in which he touches Chaucer through the melancholic Griselda,
forming another masculine affective community that at once transcends time and space
and relies on the instrumental use of the feminine body.
479 Rompato, “Stuck in Chychevache‟s Maw,” 75.
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EPILOGUE
WEEPING LIKE A WIDOW
Near the end of the Alliterative Morte Arthure, King Arthur walks alone on the
slaughter-slick battlefield, his eyes searching the bodies strewn across the plain,
desperately looking “with rewth at his herte” for the tattered remnants of the Round Table
(3939).480 He turns over corpses left and right, examining the faces of the dead that map
his failing empire. It is the geography of defeat, an atlas of woe written by the lifeless
bodies of the earls of Africa, Austria, Argyle, and Orkney, the kings of Ireland, the nobles
of Norway, and the Dukes of Denmark. With these fallen soldiers, the poet offers one
final map of Arthur‟s imperial power, charting England‟s crumbling Crown, its decaying
sovereign metaphysis. Finally, Arthur discovers the remains of his Round Table brethren
encircled by the mangled corpses of Saracen warriors. When the king finds his nephew,
Sir Gawain, lying face down in the grass, he is overcome with grief. Groaning “ful
grislich with gretande teres,” Arthur kneels down and picks up Gawain in his arms,
kissing his nephew‟s face until his beard runs red with blood (3950). Then, he bursts into
heartrending lament:
“Dere cosin of kind in care am I leved,
For now my worship is went and my war ended!
Here is the hope of my hele, my happing in armes,
My herte and my hardiness holly on him lenged!
My counsel, my comfort, that keeped mine herte!
Of all the knightes the king that under Crist lived!
Thou was worthy to be king, tough I the crown bare!
My wele and my worship of all this world rich
Was wonnen through Sir Gawain and through his wit one!
“Alas,” said Sir Arthur, “now eekes my sorrow!
480 All references to the Alliterative Morte Arthure from Larry D. Benson and Edward E. Foster,
ed., King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte
Arthure, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications,
1994).
188
I am utterly undone in mine owen landes!
A doutous, derf dede, though dwelles too long!
Why drawes though so dregh? Thou drownes mine herte!”
(3956-68).
When King Arthur concludes his lament, he stumbles and falls to the earth in a swoon.
The sovereign‟s heart, writes the poet, had “bristen for bale” in that moment (3974).
Curiously, however, the surviving Round Table knights arrive and interrupt their king‟s
mourning. They order Arthur to stop his grieving because it is unmanly and threatens to
harm his social identity. “It is no worship,” they say in unison, “to wring thine hands; /
To weep als a woman it is no wit holden! / Be knightly of countenance, als a king sholde,
/ And leve such clamour, for Cristes love of heven!” (3977-80).
In these two moments of extraordinary pathos and heartlessness, we see once
again the tensions between a masculine community‟s emotional ethos—its gendered
discourse for feeling and expressing the passions—and the individuals who must contend
with these often restricting tenets. Arthur recognizes that with most of his Round Table
butchered on the battlefield, his empire and his very identity as sovereign lord have been
vanquished. The king understands that with the death of Gawain—a man who is the
chief example of the chivalric community‟s hypermasculine program of aggression,
bloodshed, and conquest—he is “utterly undone,” not only as king, but as man too. The
people and the spaces that defined his masculine community are, for the most part, gone.
Thus, Arthur feels free to express openly his woe. The king voices his emotional
disorder, erupts with a noisy outpouring of grief and melancholy. Yet, the poet reveals
that even in the face of irrevocable loss, the cultural constraints on affect remain potent
arbiters of feeling and expression. Those knights that remain cannot sit idly by while
their king unmans himself, wringing his hands and weeping “als a woman.” They rebuke
their sovereign for his noisy clamor and attempt once more to coerce him into reasserting
masculine governance, trying to shame him into silencing his emotion and acting “als a
king sholde.” The surviving men of the Round Table desperately try to reassemble the
remnants of their former selves and to restore the symbolic head of their chivalric body.
189
The tension between affective community and individual desire, between a
culture‟s emotional codes and the individual‟s need to crack those codes is the foremost
concern of my dissertation. As King Arthur‟s battle with himself and with his chivalric
community‟s discourse of masculine affect potently reveals, Middle English poets were
not only keenly aware of the varied emotional scripts that shaped and constrained human
identity, but were also interested in challenging and sometimes rewriting those scripts.
We see evidence of this in the final movement of the Alliterative Morte Arthure when the
king finally resists his community‟s demands and launches a defense of his womanly
“clamour”:
“For blood,” says the bold king, “blinn shall I never
Ere my brain to-brist or my breste other!
Was never sorrow so soft that sank my herte;
It is full sib to myself; my sorrow is the more.
Was never so sorrowful a sight seen with mine eyen! (3981-5).
What is so striking here is not just the king‟s resistance but that he cannot maintain that
resistance. Despite vowing never to stop his emotional “clamour,” never to cease
lamenting until his brain and breast burst with the sorrow, Arthur subsequently returns to
battle, donning the identity of chivalric knight and sovereign lord one final time. The call
for aggression and the lust for vengeance prove to be too strong for Arthur to resist. And
this is perhaps the poet‟s point. In Arthur‟s return to chivalric masculinity and his death at
the hands of Mordred, the Morte-poet highlights the pointless viciousness and
destructiveness that are part of the aristocracy‟s hypermasculine chivalric code.
Moreover, in the king‟s wavering defiance, his vacillating desire to resist his masculine
community, the poet opens up the possibility for reimagining or rewriting the discourse
of emotion and masculine identity.
In emphasizing that the medieval discourses of emotion were not only subject to
critique but were, in fact, malleable, my dissertation seeks to expand the history of
emotions. In these four chapters, I have mapped four diverse affective communities,
outlining the complex emotional landscapes that shaped masculine communal identities
190
in late medieval English society. I have also shown that Middle English poets saw fit to
revise the language and grammar of masculine emotionality in order to help men confront
critical cultural problems. Middle English poets understood that emotions have the
power to “reweave the fabric of one‟s life,” and could be deployed to challenge and
remake social identity regimes.481
As most medievalists will attest, all too often the men and women of the Middle
Ages are written off as barbarous and puerile. In Norbert Elias‟s grand narrative—that is,
a history of the West that tells of story of growing emotional restraint—the medieval
period has the emotional life of a child. The Elias narrative asserts that self-discipline,
control, and suppression—and, indeed, the very invention of subjectivity—come after the
medium aevum, that middle childhood space between the birth of humanity and its
maturation into stable, modern adulthood. To be medieval is to be without a “strict and
stable super-ego,” without the forces of social conditioning that shape and constrain
individual compulsions, drives, and emotions.482 Yet, as my study of emotions in
Middle English literature demonstrates, the discourse of subjectivity was alive and well
long before the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, or whatever post-medieval period one
might imagine is the birthplace of modern, civilized, emotionally intelligent humanity.
While the emotional ethos may have been different in the Middle Ages than in the
modern period, as King Arthur‟s struggle with his men and his sorrow reveals, it
nevertheless represented a complex and varied discourse of identity.
The history of emotions is an enormous subject and there is much left to be done
in this emerging field, including with medieval emotion. My dissertation has focused
primarily on issues of gender, but as my research into medieval clerics, university
481 Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 83.
482 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Function and
Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Blackwell, 1994), 319.
191
students, and merchants suggests, emotional identity is not limited to gender. The
discourses of emotion are also intertwined with education, religion, socio-economic
status, and a host of other identity categories. Future work in medieval emotion must pay
closer attention to how emotion shapes (and is shaped by) a constellation of identity
categories. Sound also plays a surprisingly important role in the meanings of emotion,
and scholars would do well to look more closely at the soundscapes in medieval
literature. Furthermore, genre and form are of particular importance and future studies
should consider how, for example, emotions in the alliterative poetry of the Northwest
Midlands are represented differently than in a London fabliau or an East Anglian drama.
My project is necessarily selective, choosing to focus on four particular masculine
communities in order to show how emotions are integral to medieval discourses of
human social identity and their places—normative or marginal—within a community.
Above all, my project demonstrates the potential for reading emotions as transgressive, as
forces that can break down boundaries like gender.
Crossing the gendered boundaries of emotion can be a liberating experience. In
the final moments of the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the mortally wounded king
seemingly rejects the hypermasculine discourse of chivalric identity once and for all as he
appropriates the identity of the woeful widow. After gathering the bodies of his Round
Table brethren, laying them next to one another and studying their lifeless frames, the
dying king staggers about, dizzy in his grief, crying out like a madman before swaying
and falling into a swoon. Looking upon those men who “maintained [his] manhed by
might of their handes, / Made [him] manly on molde and master in erthe,” Arthur finally
realizes that his “lordship”—his identity as man, chivalric knight, and head of the English
sovereign body—have been effectively erased with the destruction of most of his
community (4278-9). There is no one left to rebuke the king for acting as a woman, no
community voice present to shame him for wringing his hands and wailing his laments.
192
Without those constraining voices, the king feels free to move from hypermasculine
aggressivity to a femininized subjectivity:
Here restes the rich blood of the Round Table,
Rebuked with a rebaud, and rewth is the more!
I may helpless on the hethe house by mine one,
Als a woful widow that wants her berne!
I may werye and weep and wring mine handes,
For my wit and my worship away is forever!
Of all lordshippes I take leve to mine end! (4282-8).
With the Round Table in splinters, the king is free to adopt the identity of the woeful
widow, the recurring image of feminine emotionality in the Alliterative Morte Arthure.
With the men who maintained his manhood, who constrained Arthur with the demands to
behave “als a king sholde” now dead, Arthur easily slides into a feminine affective mode,
one that eschews aggression and violence, and instead embraces emotional effusion as
the process for negotiating trauma and loss. Arthur imagines himself sitting alone on the
heath in front of his home, weeping and yearning for his lost husband and children. The
loss of his knights means the loss of his “worship,” the loss of an honor circumscribed by
his chivalric community. Recognizing this loss, Arthur discovers that he may curse,
weep, and wring his hands—those expressions he has tried to hide, tried to resist, or has
been rebuked for throughout the narrative—and that he may take leave of his
“lordshippes,” a word that encompasses all those elements of Arthur‟s identity: self,
nation, and sovereign metaphysis.483 With his “lordshippes” gone, Arthur finds himself
able to do what he could not do before: “forgive al gref” (4324).
Crossing the gendered boundaries of emotion does not, however, come without a
cost. Arthur‟s move into weeping widowhood remains vexed in the end of the
Alliterative Morte Arthure, demonstrating that the revision of emotional identity can
marginalize as much as recuperate and/or unify. For one, the king‟s move to forgiveness
483 Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “lordshipe,” accessed April 28, 2011,
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/
193
comes coupled with a persistent desire for vengeance. Only a moment before Arthur
claims that he can now “forgive al gref,” he orders his surviving knights to “merk
manly”—that is, pursue manfully—Mordred‟s children, to kill them and sling their
bodies into the sea (4320-1). Even in the face of death, Arthur cannot give up entirely on
his hypermasculine identity, grasping at the fragments of his former self. Nevertheless, I
would suggest that Arthur here maintains his claim to a feminine, passive emotional
subjectivity when he offers forgiveness to everyone but Mordred‟s children. In so doing,
Arthur not only prevents Mordred‟s children from participating in Arthur‟s (dying)
community but more importantly suggests that men are capable of occupying both
masculine and feminine emotional realms.
When Arthur adopts weeping widowhood but maintains his hold on knightly
countenance, the question remains as to where women fit into the emotional regime. The
simple answer is that the Morte-poet, like other Middle English poets, gives scant thought
to women‟s participation in these emotional communities. Like St. Erkenwald, Chaucer‟s
Reeve’s Tale, and Lydgate‟s Bycorne and Chychevache, the Alliterative Morte Arthure
suggests that women have little place in these emotional communities. While the poets in
my dissertation emphasize the regenerative potential of emotion and its attendant sounds
and spaces, women are in effect silenced. The Alliterative Morte Arthure may re-write
and re-sound the borders of masculine emotionality with the king‟s womanly “clamour,”
but in the process it reifies the hierarchy of men over women.
194
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