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Sin, Sanctity, and the Heroics of Devotion in Late-Medieval English Literature

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Sin, Sanctity, and the Heroics of Devotion in Late-Medieval English Literature “Fawty and Falce”: Sin, Sanctity, and the Heroics of Devotion in Late-Medieval English Literature A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Benjamin Daniel Utter IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Rebecca Krug, Advisor APRIL, 2016 © Benjamin D. Utter, 2016 i Acknowledgements “Youre bounte may no man prayse halff unto the valew” -Morte Darthur, I.ii.64 I must say that I have been hampered somewhat in my ability to commiserate with those fellow academics whose dissertation process experience was negative, because my own thesis committee has been outstandingly responsive and supportive. Siobhan Craig, Andrew Scheil, and John Watkins, models of patientia all, have endured draft after draft of my work and responded swiftly with encouraging, improving insights. Needless to say, any infelicities, errata, or outright howlers that persist in the following pages are probably things they advised me against retaining. My advisor, Rebecca Krug, has “causyd [me] to lokyn meche good scriptur and many a good doctor, which [I] wolde not a lokyd at that tyme, had sche ne be.” More than that, she has humbled me repeatedly with her intellectual generosity and patience. She has talked me down off the ledge a time or two, but for the most part her humane groundedness and wicked wit have kept me safely at street level. How can I thank her enough? She has been a mentor, counselor, friend, and reliable guide to Dinkytown’s better Chinese restaurants. Graduate school can feel like an endless journey. What luck, then, to have found myself among such endlessly delightful fellow pilgrims in both the MFA and English PhD programs at the University of Minnesota. Members of MEMRG and the participants at the Friday Writing Workshops helped me flesh out my ideas, as did members of the Rivendell Discussion Group, and the BABEL ii Working Group. BABEL’s conferences and causes continually renew my gladness that I am part of the community of medievalists. The University of Minnesota’s Center for Medieval Studies provided a nexus in which my obsessions converged with those from other disciplines, leading to collaborations and friendships. I am especially proud and grateful to have been able to help bring the visual beauty of medieval art into local classrooms, thanks to the Center’s community outreach project, Making a Medieval Book in the K-12 Classroom. Basit Qureshi, Amanda Taylor, and “Lady” Louise Rogers were my co-consipirators, with help from Sharon Fischlowitz. I think we did well. During my time at the university, I taught under the guidance of Eric Daigre, Tom Clayton, Rebecca Krug, John Watkins, Joe Hughes, and Andrew Elfenbein. Their intelligence, charisma, and care for students have, I hope, helped to shape my own pedagogy. My students, too, have been a reliable source of energy, pleasure, and inspiration (and not only for the chapters concentrating on sin). Thanks to them, I have been one of the lucky instructors who not only “teche,” but do so very “gladly” indeed. I am grateful to the University of Minnesota for provided not only teaching stipends and travel grants, but also a full year of funding in the form of the Departmental Dissertation Fellowship. I must also acknowledge Karen Frederickson: English department secretary, curator of lore, and guardian of procedural esoterica. Without her calm assistance to my helpless queries at nearly iii every stage of my coursework and doctoral candidacy . well, it doesn’t bear thinking on. My parents read to me early and often, so that hearing stories came to feel like being loved. Thanks to a series of extraordinary and caring English teachers and professors, this association did not subside, and it seems fitting to offer here my affection and thanks to Julia Thompson, Janice Bremer, Janice Rhodes, Jerrie Sears, Paula Levine, Dr. Jay Curlin, Dr. Tom Greer, Drs. Amy and Doug Sonheim, Drs. Susan and Johnny Wink, Dr. Gail Sigal, and, crucially, Dr. Gillian Overing, in whose Beowulf class I finally realized that I had been a medievalist all along. I have benefitted also from the examples and encouragement of numerous learned aunts and uncles, whose models of diligent and ethical dedication to the life of the mind, pedagogy, and intellectual service have taken numerous admirable forms. I cannot overstate my appreciation for the loving support in particular of Dr. Penny Giesbrecht, Drs. Ruth and Tarris Rosell, and Drs. Linda and David Keller, who taught me at an early age—after I disgraced myself by using their copy of Fellowship of the Ring as a convenient projectile, hitting my little brother squarely in the head—that “books are our friends, and should be treated well!” Presumably something was said about the care of one’s siblings, too, but in any case, my brothers Joseph and Andrew have shown great care for me and the work that I do. So too have my wonderful cousins (near-siblings, all), and the rest of my extended family members and in-laws. I would add to this list iv of family the congregation and choir members of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in St. Paul, the board members of Operation Dignity International, the community of neighbors on Hague Ave., and the members and friends of Team Monicle Multisport. All of these have abided with looks of admirably convincing interest any number of my enthusiastic rhapsodies about various saints, poems, and scholarly skirmishes. And my daughter, Serena, who brings me the most joy, has borne without complaint the air of faint distraction I’ve worn for too much of the time that she has known me. I dedicate this project to my wife, Brandy Lee, who has shown astonishing restraint in never once remarking that a dissertation focused on imperfection ought not have taken nearly so long from one with as much direct experience of it as she knows me to have. She is, to borrow Malory’s words, “the moste valyaunte and fayryst that I know lyvyng, or yet that ever I coude fynde.” v Abstract This project makes the case for the narrative usefulness and importance of imperfection, by exploring the relationship between saints and heroes in late medieval English writing. It is easy to find examples of saints who are heroes (St. George slaying the dragon) and of heroes who become saints (Malory’s Lancelot dies with sweet smells emanating from his corpse, a sign of sanctity). But my project looks behind simple narrative and character function to address a deeper issue: what kind of hero/saint (or saint/hero) emerges from the later Middle Ages' pervasive skepticism about human perfectibility? Given that every medieval Christian was expected to grapple with knowledge of eternal accountability for sin, what are the limits of individual “greatness” and how are the saintly heroic and heroically saintly intertwined? My dissertation moves from knightly chivalry in the courtly romances Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, to the daringly nonconformist spirituality of a laywoman in The Book of Margery Kempe, to the feats of the folk anti-hero Robin Hood, celebrated in popular ballads, in order to trace the ways in which the heroic interpenetrates literary and religious writing. I argue that the late medieval heroic is characterized simultaneously by unity and rupture: it strives toward transcendent wholeness yet derives its vitality from a sense of fragmentation and frailty. vi Table of Contents Introduction ……………………………………………….………..…... 1 Chapter 1 Obdurate Penance, Davidic Parallels, and the Problem of Sin in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ……...…….………...... 20 Chapter 2 “mech tribulacyon for cawse of hys wrytyng”: Saint Paul and the Apostolic Mission of Margery Kempe …………........….75 Chapter 3 Hallowed but Hollow: Perfection and the Aesthetics of Heroism in Malory’s Galahad ………………………........................ 126 Chapter 4 “Thys ys bot ryght weke gere”: Dismas, Devotion, and Desperation in the Early Robin Hood Ballads …………………………… 185 Conclusion ……………………………………………………….……. 248 Works Cited …………………………………………………………... 255 Utter 1 INTRODUCTION “scriptum est sancti eritis quia ego sanctus sum.” -1 Peter 1.16 “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.” -Leonard Cohen, “Anthem.” In the popular Middle English romance Richard Coer de Lyon, King Richard wears his crusader cross as a totem “intended to offer protection against both creditors and assailants as [he and his knights] seek vengeance against God’s enemies in the Holy Land.”1 This is a boisterously superlative hero, one who, the poet assures us, “nevere was founde coward!” (4). Richard is, in short, a winner. He triumphs at an exchange of blows, overpowers a lion with his bare hands and, once he has “prest out al the blood” (1106), proceeds to devour its heart. He even maintains his vigor by feasting (at first unwittingly but then unremorsefully) on the flesh of a defeated Saracen. The poem is a celebration of these victories, as well as his capture of Acre and massacre of Muslim prisoners, all performed in the service of and empowered by the cross he wears. It is in response to poems such as these, which achieve what John Finlayson calls the now “unmodish . blending of heroic action with militant, Christian, nationalism,”2 that the anti-hero has loomed large in recent studies of the medieval heroic ideal, to such an extent that it has produced a reactionary lamentation at the decline in the status of and interest in the hero qua hero, the “protector,” in the earliest sense of heros (ἥρω-ς), who commands attention chiefly for his (almost invariably his) greatness, rather than for his 1 Peter Larkin, Richard Coer de Lyon, TEAMS Middle English Text Series (Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2015), http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/larkin- richard-coer-de-lyon Introduction.
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