Newmedievalliterature

New Medieval Literature New Medieval Literatures is an annual journal of work on medieval textual cultures. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies. The title announces an interest both in new writing about medieval culture and in new academic writing. As well as featuring challenging new articles, each issue includes an analytical survey by a leading international medievalist of recent work in an emerging or established field. The editors aim to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Within this generous brief, they recognize only two criteria: excellence and originality. Editors Laura Ashe, University of Oxford David Lawton, Washington University in St Louis Wendy Scase, University of Birmingham Advisory Board Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Fordham University Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University Jeffrey Hamburger,Harvard University Sarah Kay, Princeton University Alastair Minnis, Yale University Margaret Clunies Ross, University of Sydney Miri Rubin, Queen Mary, University of London Paul Strohm, Columbia University Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris Submissions are invited for future issues. Please write to either of the editors: David Lawton, Department of English Washington University, Campus Box 1122 One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130-4899, USA [email protected] Wendy Scase, Department of English University of Birmingham, Edgbaston Birmingham B15 2TT, UK [email protected] For information about subscriptions and orders, guidelines for contributors, and contents of previous issues, please visit the NML Web site: http://artsci.wustl.edu/~nml/ New Medieval Literature 15 (2014) Edited by Laura Ashe, David Lawton, and Wendy Sacse © 2013, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2013/0095/290 ISBN: 978-2-503-54851-7 ISSN: 1465-3737 Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper Contents List of Illustrations vii Human Flight in Early Medieval England: Reality, Reliability, and Mythmaking (or Science and Fiction) James Paz 1 Sanctuary and Sovereignty: Hubert de Burgh in the Chronica majora Elizabeth Allen 29 Margaret’s Choice: Negotiating Space, Class Identity and Gender Ideologies in The Paston Letters Shannon MEYer 73 A Place of ‘Long-Lasting Evil and Unhappiness’: Rædwald’s East Anglia in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History Joseph Grossi 97 The Once and Future Herod: Vernacular Typology and the Unfolding of Middle English Cycle Drama Christopher TAYlor 121 John Foxe’s Chaucer: Affecting Form in Post-Historicist Criticism HOLLY Crocker 151 The Ethics of Election in theQueste del Saint Graal Lucas Wood 185 ‘Bycause the redyng shold not turne hem to enoye’: Reading, Selectivity, and Pietatis Affectum in Late Medieval England Sarah Noonan 227 vi Contents Romance, Affect, and Ethical Thinking in a Fifteenth-Century Household Book:nChetham’s Library MS 8009 James Wade 257 Heterosyncrasy as a Way of Life: Disability and the Heterosyncratic Community in Amis and Amiloun TORY Vandeventer Pearman 287 Analytical Survey: Encountering Disability in the Middle Ages Richard Godden and Jonathan HSY 317 Illustrations Figure 1, p. 58. ‘Knight Sparing his Father’s Murderer’, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 16, fol. 79v [82v]. Figure 2, p. 59. London, British Library, MS Royal 14.C.vii, fol. 19r. Figure 3, p. 60. ‘Common Bell of London’, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 16, fol. 84r (detail). Figure 4, p. 66. ‘Hubert de Burgh’s Vision’, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 16, fol. 93v. Human Flight in Early Medieval England: Reality, Reliability, and Mythmaking (or Science and Fiction)* James Paz t’s the early eleventh century and Eilmer, a young Benedictine monk living in IMalmesbury Abbey, takes it upon himself to fly. Eilmer has read the classical story of Daedalus and wants to test the truth of the fable, so he has fashioned a pair of artificial wings for himself. He may have made these wings from willow wand, stretching fine cloth or parchment over the frame, and may have attached this frame to the back of his shoulders while holding on to hand grips under each wing. Eilmer climbs to the summit of the abbey’s bell tower and looks out * This article’s use of science fiction as a lens with which to interpret medieval texts is indebted to several conversations with Carl Kears, a doctoral student in the English Department at King’s College, London. I would also like to acknowledge the Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies at King’s for providing us with a platform to present our initial ideas. My retelling of Eilmer’s tale is based on the account of it given by William of Malmesbury in Gesta regum Anglorum, ed. by Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom, II.13. In order to fill in some of the more technical details, I have also drawn on the reconstruction in Hallion, Taking Flight, pp. 16–19. James Paz ([email protected]) is a Lecturer in Early Medieval English Literature at the University of Manchester. Abstract: Anglo-Saxon England produced the first Western European who can be plausibly shown to have flown. Eilmer of Malmesbury was a Benedictine monk living in the early eleventh century who had read the classical story of Daedalus and wanted to test the truth of the fable. Eilmer fashioned a pair of artificial wings, leapt from the abbey tower, and flew for a full furlong before falling to the earth and breaking both his legs. While it is difficult to strip Eilmer’s tale of its mythical associations, the probability of his feat does not buckle under scrutiny. It stands, therefore, at a crossroads. Are we dealing with a technological reality or an imaginative story? This article uncovers and examines some of the most striking incidents of human flight in the literature, art, and science leading up to Eilmer’s lifetime in order to gain a sounder understanding of the monk’s performance. In doing so, I wrest that performance away from conventional histories of science but also challenge earlier dismissals of the flight as mere legend. Keywords: William of Malmesbury, Eilmer the Flying Monk, man-made wings, Halley’s New Medieval Literatures, 14 (2012), pp. PB–<?> BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/J.NML.1.103185 Comet, cosmology, Old English poetry. 2 James Paz beyond the city wall to the valley of the River Avon. Perhaps he utters a last little prayer. And then he leaps. The monk falls fast, head first, before his wings start to stabilize him, and his body evens out into a steady glide. Before long passersby in the city below are pointing up at the bird-man and gasping. As Eilmer flies over the city wall, pleased with the success of his careful planning and design, a sense of pride wells up in his breast-coffer. How high can he go? But a violent gust of wind suddenly unsettles him. Doubt creeps into Eilmer’s mind. What is he, a mortal, fallen man, doing in mid-air like this? Panic sets in. The wind blows harder, and Eilmer frantically tries to flap his man-made wings, but now he is losing control altogether. His speed drops, and the monk plunges to the earth, landing heavily on his legs. He hears a thud and a crack. Leaping from the tower, Eilmer flew for a full furlong (a flight lasting for around twelve to fifteen seconds) before crash-landing and breaking both his legs. He remained lame from that day on, and his disabled, limping body must have served as an ambiguous sign around the abbey in the years to follow. In one sense, Eilmer’s tale reads like a cautionary one in the same tradition as the myth of Daedalus and Icarus. And yet, the monk himself always insisted that his fail- ure had been a technological, rather than moral, one: if only he had fitted a tail to his hinder parts, Eilmer claimed, he might have succeeded. It is difficult to know exactly what Eilmer’s fellow monks made of his attempted flight. The fact that he was able to plan, design, and execute it in the first place — and to perform it so publicly — suggests that they did not disapprove. What is more, the monks of Malmesbury evidently remembered the incident and were willing to pass it on, until it reached the ears of William of Malmesbury, who was the first to document the story in hisGesta regum Anglorum in the twelfth century. From there, Eilmer’s fame spread and his tale was repeated and rerecorded throughout the medieval and early modern periods, eventually reaching us in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, where it has been convincingly recon- structed by modern aeronautic experts and even re-enacted in 1962 with the help of the RAF Royal Tournament Display Team.1 The first detailed, histori- cal research into Eilmer’s flight was carried out by Lynn White Jr in 1961, and his article remains the most significant scholarly engagement with the account.2 1 Some photographs of this re-enactment are provided in Woosnam, Eilmer: The Flight and the Comet, pp. 7–8. 2 White, ‘Eilmer of Malmesbury, an Eleventh Century Aviator’. Human Flight in Early Medieval England 3 Yet the tale has moved outside the bounds of scholarship and into the realm of creative medievalism. It has certainly been preserved locally: a stained glass window installed in Malmesbury Abbey in the 1920s shows Eilmer holding a pair of Da Vinci-esque man-made wings; and until recently Malmesbury was also home to a pub named the Flying Monk.

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