Introduction: the Mother's Mark and the Maternal Monster
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NOTES Introduction: The Mother’s Mark and the Maternal Monster 1 . Douglas Kelly, “The Domestication of the Marvelous in the Melusine Romances,” in Melusine of Lusignan: Founding Fiction in Late Medieval France , ed. Donald Maddox and Sarah Sturm-Maddox (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1996), pp. 39–40 [32–47]. 2 . Sarah Alison Miller, Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 3; William F. MacLehose, “Nurturing Danger: High Medieval Medicine and the Problem(s) of the Child,” in Medieval Mothering , ed. John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 3 [3–24]. 3 . Siobhain Bly Calkin, “Marking Religion on the Body: Saracens, Categorization, and The King of Tars,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 104.2 (2005): 229 [219–238]. 4 . Kay Staniland, “Royal Entry into the World,” in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium , ed. Daniel Williams (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1987), p. 309 [297– 313]; MacLehose, “Nurturing Danger,” 8; Susan Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 78. 5 . Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Not of Woman Born: Representations of Caesarean Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 10 and 26. 6 . I Timothy 2:14; Dyan Elliot, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 3–6. 7 . Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 143. 8 . Alexandra Barratt, ed., The Knowing of Woman’s Kind in Childing (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), p. 46. MacLehose, “Nurturing Danger,” p. 5. 9 . Miller, Medieval Monstrosity , p. 57; Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 120. 196 NOTES 10 . Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 29–30; Felicity Riddy, “Middle English Romance: Family, Romance, Intimacy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance , ed. Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 235 [232–252]. 11 . Riddy, “Middle English Romance,” p. 245. 12 . Bettina Bildhauer, “Blood, Jews and Monsters in Medieval Culture,” in The Monstrous Middle Ages , ed. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), pp. 90–91 [75–96]. 13 . Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture , ed Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 4 [3–25]. 1 Women’s Secrets and Men’s Interests: Rituals of Childbirth and Northern Octavian 1 . The Middle English (Northern) Octavian romance exists in two extant manuscripts: The Lincoln Thornton Manuscript (Lincoln, Dean and Chapter Library, MS 91), and the closely related Cambridge Manuscript (Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.2.38). A third incomplete edi- tion exists in a fragment of an early print, Huntington (San Marino, Huntington Library 14615). Editions of each of these manuscripts are found in the facing-page Octovian . Frances McSparran, ed. Octovian EETS o.s. 289 (London: Oxford University Press, 1986). Internal evidence of the Lincoln Thornton manuscript suggests that it was copied in the sec- ond quarter of the fifteenth century, in the northeast Midlands, and the Cambridge manuscript later in that century, near Essex. McSparran sug- gests that both versions of the Northern Octavian were probably composed during the second half of the fourteenth century (42). Unless otherwise marked by “C.,” all citations will refer to the Lincoln Thornton text, fol- lowing the EETS edition edited by Frances McSparran. 2 . Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 29 and 185. Felicity Riddy also notes the persistent centrality of families to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century popular English romance, but avoids the term “family romance,” preferring instead to associate the romances with the idea of the “domestic.” See Felicity Riddy, “Middle English Romance,” pp. 235–252. 3 . Cooper, English Romance in Time , pp. 324 and 326. 4 . Heng, Empire of Magic , p. 185; David Salter, “‘Born to Thraldom and Penance’: Wives and Mothers in Middle English Romance,” in Writing Gender and Genre in Medieval Literature: Approaches to Old and Middle English Texts , ed. Elaine Treharne (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), p. 44 [41–60]; Jennifer Fellows, “Mothers in Middle English Romance,” NOTES 197 in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1550, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 43–44 [41–60]. 5 . David Salter, “‘Born to Thraldom and Penance’: Wives and Mothers in Middle English Romance,” in Writing Gender and Genre in Medieval Literature: Approaches to Old and Middle English Texts, ed. Elaine Treharne (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), p. 44. 6 . Gail McMurray Gibson, “Blessing from Sun and Moon: Churching as Women’s Theatre,” in Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 144 [139– 154]; see also Adrian Wilson, “The Ceremony of Childbirth and Its Interpretation,” in Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England, ed. Valerie Fildes (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 68–107. 7 . Kay Staniland suggests that in terms of the woman’s retreat into the lying-in chamber, “All of the late fifteenth-century accounts of court cer- emonials simply use the formula ‘when it plessithe the Queen to take to hir chambre,’ or a variation upon it, to describe the withdrawal of the heav- ily pregnant queen from the court. A sixteenth-century document [BL, Egerton MS 985, f.98] suggests that four to six weeks were normal.” See Staniland, “Royal Entry,” p. 301. As Becky Lee points out, emergencies and sudden labor might disrupt the normative gender exclusions, in which husbands, or in extreme cases, doctors might be present. See Becky R. Lee “A Company of Women and Men: Men’s Recollections of Childbirth in Medieval England,” Journal of Family History 27 (2002): 94 [224–241]. Likewise, Renata Blumenfeld-Kosinski notes the early presence of doctors at some royal births. See Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Not of Woman Born , p. 15. 8 . Nicholas Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry (London: Methuen, 1984), pp. 8–9. 9 . Ibid., p. 8. 10 . Lochrie, Covert Operations , p. 93. For a reading of the pregnant body’s representation of paternal and lordly dominance over a female body and feminized polity, see John Carmi Parsons, “The Pregnant Queen as Counselor and the Medieval Construction of Motherhood,” in Medieval Mothering , ed. John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1996), p. 46 [39–62]. 11 . Lochrie, Covert Operations , p. 9. 12 . Wilson, “Ceremony,” p. 73. 13 . Staniland, “Royal Entry,” p. 302. 14 . Kim M. Philips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England , 1270–1540 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 116– 117. Philips cites a 1494 Royal Ordinance describing the enclosure of a pregnant queen after attending mass: Then all the ladies and gentlemen to go in with her; and after that no man to come into the chamber where she shall be delivered, save women; and they to be made all manner of officers, as but- lers, panters, sewers, carvers, cupbearers; and all manner of officers 198 NOTES shall bring to them all manner of things to the great chamber door and the women officers for to receive it in the chamber. 15 . Denise Ryan, “Playing the Midwife’s Part in the English Nativity Plays,” The Review of English Studies (n.s) 54 (2003): 437 [435–448]. 16 . Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Not of Woman Born , p. 115. As Blumenfeld- Kosinski notes, infanticide was a likely recourse in many cases of unwed childbirth. 17 . Heldris de Corn äuille, Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance , ed. and trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1992). The same desire to avoid slander or embarrassment at the hands of men who witness such a scene is evident in the fifteenth-century Middle English gynecological text, Barratt, ed., Knowing of Women’s Kind in Childing , pp. 40–42. The text suggests that its translation to the ver- nacular was completed in order to shield women from the embarrassment of male curiosity and slander by making it possible for women to treat other women. 18 . Lee “Company of Women and Men,” p. 94 [92–100]. 19 . Gail McMurray Gibson, “Scene and Obscene: Seeing and Performing Late Medieval Childbirth,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29.1 (1999): 8–9 [7–24]. 20 . Parsons, “Pregnant Queen,” p. 43. 21 . Miller, Medieval Monstrosity , p. 140. 22 . For a reading of this trope in mystery plays, see Gibson, “Scene and Obscene.” 23 . Louis Th é o Maes, “Les D é lits de Moeurs dans les Droit P é nal Coutumier de Malines,” Revue du Nord 30 (1948): 11–12, quoted in Myriam Greilsammer, “The Midwife, the Priest, and the Physician: The Subjugation of Midwives in the Low Countries at the End of the Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 21 (1991): 290 [285–325]. 24 . Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Not of Woman Born , 94. Felicie is referred to by crit- ics as both Jacoba and Jacqueline. As Karma Lochrie notes, this defense ultimately proved unsuccessful due to the increasing role of licensing and partitioning of roles involved in the medical professions, but the defense’s appeal to a presumed notion of propriety suggests the larger stakes involved for those who have access to and authority over the female sexual reproductive body, and the arguments and logic that surround it concerning female and male propriety and masculine control of women’s bodies through observation.