May Na Man Have in Talle": the Parabiblical Imaginary in Medieval English Literature
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"All May Na Man Have in Talle": The Parabiblical Imaginary in Medieval English Literature The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Tilley, Brandon Rhys. 2016. "All May Na Man Have in Talle": The Parabiblical Imaginary in Medieval English Literature. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33840700 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA © 2016 Brandon Tilley All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Nicholas Watson Brandon Tilley “All May Na Man Have in Talle”: The Parabiblical Imaginary in Late Medieval English Literature Abstract This is a study of four fourteenth-century narrative poems written in a parabiblical mode. The poems—Cursor Mundi (c. 1300), Cleanness, Patience and Pearl (all c. 1380s)—are substantially and thematically concerned with retelling, in English, portions of the Vulgate Bible. “Substantially,” I say, because each poem engages extensively and complexly with the plots of Scripture it stakes out, and “thematically” because each consciously foregrounds the activity of re-telling from prior biblical scripts, from pretexts, as it were, in the double sense that the Bible furnishes both authoritative exemplars and ulterior interests. After situating these texts in their (diachronic and synchronic) historical conditions, the thesis considers biblical and theological curiosities that drive these texts’ shared interest in “biblical disidentity,” then turns to a linked series of poem-specific studies. Cursor Mundi revisits the Bible as a place it has never before been and recuperates something it has never possessed—namely, a Bible larger than itself and constituted by a diversity of texts and traditions exceeding the Bible’s usual canonical bounds. Cursor Mundi’s thematic vastness provides an imaginative warrant for the subsequent texts, each of which applies the principle of imagining the Bible “in para” in order to conduct a specific visionary experiment. Cleanness finds in the Bible powers of beatific vision outstripping traditional limits upon that doctrine; Patience grows frustrated with the Bible’s unavailability to human need and imagines expressive alternatives to strict biblicity; and Pearl recalibrates the canons of human reason, establishing a habitus of non-Truth vis-à-vis a Scripture whose teeming it cannot contain. Taken together, our experimental texts help constitute a new mode of imaginative literature. iii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Situating the parabiblical 8 Characterizing the parabiblical 16 Contrasting the parabiblical: thought, word and deed in The Ormulum 26 Biblicizing the parabiblical 37 The chapters ahead 47 Chapter One: Thematizing the Parabiblical: Cursor Mundi 54 The spur to scilwisness 62 Seth and the effusive truth of the “vncuth contré” 71 Parabiblical probing 86 Parabiblical accesses 97 Transitioning parabiblicities: from principle to application 107 Chapter Two: Cleanness and the Mediation of Unclean Hands 109 “Thrynne wyses,” two parables and a beatitude 111 The beatitude and its reversal 114 Parable and its earthly elisions 117 Darkness and interiority in Cleanness’s “thrynne wyses” 124 Eucharistic use and hondel 136 Chapter Three: “I am an Ebru . Thou art God”: Patience and Divine Care 148 Patience’s divisions 158 Care and the shapes of Patience 163 From Cleanness and Patience to Pearl 173 Chapter Four: “A Tale Unresounable”: Pearl and the Parabiblicity of Plenitude 177 The lay of the (dream) land 181 Le surplus de sens 184 “A tale unresounable,” an objection “apert” 192 The uncertainties of God 195 A vision of the vision 201 Transition to further reflection 209 Coda and Conclusion 211 “Dyspleses not if I speke errour”: the Pearl-poet as subjunctive visionary 211 “If hit was fayr ther I con fare”: Pearl and desirous seeing 215 “Ethe to leve by the last ende”: Cleanness’s parabiblical typology 219 “A wonder to wene, yif Holy Wryt nere”: Patience and belief’s re-expression 229 Conclusion 233 Bibliography 238 iv For Timnah v Acknowledgments No project of this size, and certainly none this long in the making, comes to its end without accruing a good many debts of gratitude and love. I am happy to recall mine here. The Harvard English department has been my scholarly home for many joyous years. In addition to generous financial support, the department has provided sterling mentors, colleagues and friends in ample measure. My advisors on this project astonish me continually. Daniel Donoghue was my first teacher at Harvard; he made the rigor of learning Anglo-Saxon a genuine delight, and I am thrilled to have his enthusiasm and deep learning brought to bear on these pages. James Simpson is a model of scholarship, generosity and style: he makes me want to do this work, and reminds me constantly of its nobility and importance. And I simply would not be who I am, in scholarly terms and others, were it not for Nicholas Watson. Drawn into the field of medieval studies by his sheer intellectual charisma and erudition, I enjoy few things more than I do geeking out with him over stuff like what follows. Gwen Urdang-Brown, graduate program administrator extraordinaire, has been a friend from the beginning. She makes this feel like a special place indeed. Harvard has blessed me with friends of whom I can never get enough. Jimmy Biblarz, Aaron Buchner, Avik Chatterjee, Kevin Holden, Case Q. Kerns, Amelia Klein, Aden Kumler, Liz Maynes-Aminzade, John McMillian, Jennifer Ohlund, Scott Poulson-Bryant, Peter Kishore Saval, and Bryan Wockley have helped me in all the best ways to remain a person while becoming a PhD. Halfway through my time at Harvard I became a member of Eliot House, the most energizing place I’ve ever lived. I could never express how much Eliot has enriched my life, but I can single out a few folks who have been especially important. Francisco Medeiros and Sue Weltman make this place a home for me and everyone else, and I am grateful every day to see them. Gail O’Keefe and Doug Melton foster the Eliot community in countless ways, and I have grown as a person for knowing them. Gail, in particular, helped me feel the urgency of this project, a favor I could never repay. Floreat, Eliot family: you are boundlessly beloved. Two groups of friends have helped buoy my spirits as I worked at this thesis. By some stroke of luck my best friends, as I conclude my formal education, are still pretty much the ones I had when I began it, ahem, some time ago. To Ted Amoroso, Theo Busse, Brian Chambers, Michelle Chasse, Brett Gamboa, Chris Mangandi, Glenn Vigil, Rishikesh Vilash and all your beautiful families—we may not see each other often, but I think of you constantly and treasure your friendship as an unlooked for gift. And to my 58 family, too many to name and too raucous to pin down: you guys make up my favorite place on earth, a space I feel lucky to share with you. My family has patiently awaited this book for years. I’m glad now to have it ready to show them, and gladder still to have all my thunder stolen by the recent arrival of my first niece. Miss Molly Jewell outshines any dissertation I could ever dream of, and I am grateful to her parents, my sister Bridget and her husband Ken, for bringing her into my life. My own parents, Rhys and Georgan Tilley, sparked the interest in books so gaudily on display in the pages that follow, and vi have sustained it—and me—with an immensity of love I can only hope to pay forward. The toughness it took to get this thesis done comes from my favorite auntie Nay. My Australian family—from Buba and Zaida down to Rudy and Addy—have welcomed me with love in a place I once never even thought to visit. Timnah and I will be back soon now, I promise. And as for you, Timnashul, you are the names of things. I too much, and I am home wherever you are. vii Introducing the Parabiblical This is a study of four long fourteenth-century narrative poems written in what I describe as a parabiblical mode. The four poems—Cursor Mundi (c. 1300), plus the works of the so- called Pearl-poet, Cleanness, Patience, and Pearl (all c. 1380s)—are all substantially and thematically concerned with retelling, in English, portions of the Vulgate Bible. “Substantially,” I say, because each of our poems engages extensively and complexly with the plots of Scripture it stakes out, and “thematically” because each poem consciously foregrounds the activity of re- telling from prior biblical scripts, from pretexts, as it were, in the double sense that the Bible furnishes both authoritative exemplars and ulterior interests. Considered from different perspectives, the dynamics between these elements, Scripture’s authority and its ulteriority, or furtherness, begin to change. Taken together, our experimental texts help constitute a new mode of imaginative literature. This study aims to show that new mode working in and through some of the best known non-Chaucerian texts of the fourteenth century, and thereby to sketch, preliminarily, some features of a broader cultural imaginary that these texts reflect and partly comprise. Although a complex of issues most exigent in the late fourteenth century drives the fullest expression of the parabiblical imaginary, elements of it are intermittently discernible well into the Anglo-Saxon period. Indeed the very category of “English literature” seems shaped at its traditional beginning by factors of parabiblical concern.