Damage and Displacement in Medieval Travel Literature

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Travail Narratives: Damage and Displacement in Medieval Travel Literature A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Jennie Rebecca Friedrich June 2015 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Andrea Denny-Brown, Chairperson Dr. John Ganim Dr. Michelle Raheja Copyright by Jennie Rebecca Friedrich 2015 The Dissertation of Jennie Rebecca Friedrich is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements I feel fortunate to be able to say that I have thoroughly enjoyed writing this dissertation, although it has been challenging and arduous at times. I owe the pleasure of the experience in large part to my dissertation advisor, Andrea Denny-Brown, who has challenged my thinking at every turn, but remained incredibly supportive and committed throughout this process. She has been a remarkably consistent source of stimulating conversation about these ideas. She has also, crucially, been ready with bits of levity at key intervals. I would also like to thank my committee members, Dr. John Ganim and Dr. Michelle Raheja, for their guidance and expertise. I am grateful for the opportunity to work with a committee comprised of people who are kind and generous human beings in addition to being brilliant academics. I would also like to thank my friend and colleague Rebecca Addicks-Salerno, for her input on Dante and the Italian literary tradition, and my friend Lee Singh, for long- winded academic discussions and for reminding me to break for meals occasionally. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Kathryn Vulić at Western Washington University for providing me with such a comprehensive introduction to medieval literature in such a brief period of time. There is much to learn and love in this field of study, and I am glad to be a part of it. I will genuinely miss this project and the camaraderie that I have enjoyed in the doctoral program at the University of California, Riverside, but I look forward to contributing my voice to the larger scholarly conversation through the publication of this dissertation. iv ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Travail Narratives: Damage and Displacement in Medieval Travel Literature by Jennie Rebecca Friedrich Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, June 2015 Dr. Andrea Denny-Brown, Chairperson This dissertation redefines the role of damage in narratives about travelers, poetic tropes about traveling body parts, and even the traveling “bodies” of medieval manuscripts by examining the relationship between travel and physical hardship central to medieval travel narratives and the concept of travel in the medieval vernacular. Recasting damage as a productive force in the travel experience highlights its ability to disrupt the normalizing impulses of cultures that privilege able-bodiedness and opens up new conceptions of travel that do not depend on bodily wholeness to develop characters, significance, or storylines in travel literature. This study employs a disability studies approach coupled with theories of incorporation and materiality to interrogate the traveling body’s ability to disrupt its own movement in ways that augment rather than impede narrative development. This approach lends a new cultural agency to texts as disparate as the legends of the dog-headed Saint Christopher, works by Dante and Chaucer that employ the trope of the traveling heart, and medieval mystery plays that construct simulated pilgrimages for their audiences. v TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 – Cannibalizing the Cannibal Saint Medieval Cultural Incorporation and the Conversion Narratives of Saint Christopher ...................................................12 Chapter 2 – Concordia discors: Discord and Incorporation in Dante’s Vita nuova and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde ............................................55 Chapter 3 – The Cant of Simulated Pilgrimage ...............................................................100 Chapter 4 – Divine Travail: Christ’s Conflicting Mobilities in the York Plays ..............147 Coda .................................................................................................................................185 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................191 vi Travail in Medieval Travel This dissertation argues that cultural associations between travel and bodily injury in the medieval period have been overlooked in existing criticism in medieval studies. Researching the effects of travel on bodies of various kinds represented in medieval narratives allows us to see that alienation from the body is not just a metaphor in travel literature, but also a physical process brought on by harsh conditions and very real environmental threats. I examine narratives about travelers, poetic tropes about traveling body parts, and even the traveling “bodies” of medieval manuscripts, each of which record damage, and a literary-cultural fascination with travel-related damage, in different ways. In the process, I redefine the role of damage as an obstacle to travel. The narrow view of obstacles in relation to travel, both pre- and postmodern, is that they offer nothing but negative influence to the traveler’s cultural experience. According to this view, anything that gets in the way of forward progress, including bodies or parts of bodies, is disabling. The language of disability thus reveals itself in scholarly responses to literature featuring non-normative bodies or bodily matter—obstacles to movement must necessarily be obstacles to travel, especially in medieval literature, in which travel is so dependent on the physical strength, savvy, and endurance of the individual traveler. This approach to travel assumes that the most important element of the journey is getting there, and that anything that slows or stops the traveler slows or stops travel. In fact, the history of the word “travel” carries this meaning within it, as the English word comes from the Old French word “travail,” meaning “suffering or painful effort.” This 1 etymological link indicates that the work of movement is also essential to discussions of travel, and this is where obstacles become productive. While obstacles impede movement, they increase the labor required for movement, often adding cultural significance to the experience by requiring the traveler to interact with his or her environment in new and uniquely challenging ways. This emphasis on resistance invites a conversation on the role of obstacles in marking culturally marginal bodies or spaces in the medieval landscape. Obstacles to travel are generally conceived as external to one’s body, but the obstacles I will focus on in this dissertation exist in the bodies of travelers, whether as flesh, organs, limbs, or skin. Reframing the conversation as one of matter that arrests or interrupts normative progress allows us to read bodies or parts of bodies that disallow uninhibited movement as travailing bodies. Rather than being relegated to the category of “bodies that can’t,” these bodies become productive in their enhanced capacity for labor- related “travel.” After all, the significance of travel, in life and in literature, rarely exists solely in the arrival at a destination. A modern travel narrative is comprised of the flight delays, lost luggage, and language barriers that make the rest of the story worth telling, and ultimately make the final destination worth reaching. As Irina Metzler explains, the value of the struggle—or for my purposes, travail—also extends to the practice of scholarship: Transferring the analogy of the social model of disability to the historical disciplines, after a fashion, we, the modern researchers, historians, and even medieval specialists, are disabled by our lack of distinct, neatly arranged bodies of sources and struggle to find materials. And as in the social model of disability, where disability is seen as a construct, so as a discipline too medievalists need to 2 recognise that an apparent lack of sources is a construct of the rigorously mono- disciplinary school of thought prevalent until fairly recently.1 Located in the “struggle” of disability that Metzler describes, I argue, is a focus on the form, function and structure of, as well as the relationships between, texts that scholars may not have studied so closely were it not for the gaps in chronology or the missing or marred pages that inhibit normative modes of categorization and interpretation. While she applies the social model of disability to the difficulties of historical research in this passage, I extend this idea to include literary analysis that focuses on the structure and form of “damaged” texts. In this project I take a disability studies approach combined with theories of incorporation in order to examine travel in general, and medieval travel in particular, through processes of damage, alienation, and disorientation. Using Robert McRuer’s recent critique of compulsory able-bodiedness, for example, allows me to rethink the traveling body in terms that are better suited to medieval conceptions of wholeness: in economies dependent on physical labor, as he argues, the system demands that its workers conform to a standard of physical ability, but an ideal that

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