The Gawain-Poet and the Textual Environment of Fourteenth-Century

City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 10-2014 The Gawain-Poet and the Textual Environment of Fourteenth- Century English Anticlericalism Ethan Campbell Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/409 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] The Gawain -Poet and the Textual Environment of Fourteenth-Century English Anticlericalism by Ethan Campbell A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, the City University of New York 2014 ii © 2014 Ethan Campbell All rights reserved iii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Steven Kruger__________________________ __________________________ ______________________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Mario DiGangi__________________________ __________________________ ______________________________________ Date Executive Officer Steven Kruger_________________________________ Michael Sargent_______________________________ Richard McCoy________________________________ Supervisory Committee The City University of New York iv Abstract The Gawain -Poet and the Textual Environment of Fourteenth-Century English Anticlericalism by Ethan Campbell Adviser: Prof. Steven Kruger The 14th-century Middle English poems Cleanness and Patience , homiletic retellings of biblical stories which appear in the same manuscript as Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , offer moral lessons to a general Christian audience, but the introduction to Cleanness , with its reference to men whom “prestez arn called,” suggests that a central feature of their rhetoric is anticlerical critique. Priests do not appear as exemplars but as potentially filthy hypocrites who inspire God’s harshest wrath, since their sins may contaminate Christ’s body in the Eucharist. Using Cleanness ’s opening lines as a guide, this dissertation reads both poems as a set of warnings and exhortations aimed particularly at clerics. Throughout Cleanness , priest-like characters such as Noah, Abraham, and Daniel struggle against ritual defilement, and Patience presents an extended example of a single character, the prophet Jonah, who shirks his duties as an absentee priest. These contextual readings situate the poems within the rich textual environment of 14th-century anticlericalism, including the works of archbishop Richard FitzRalph; poets John Gower, William Langland, and Geoffrey Chaucer; Oxford dissidents and Bible translators such as Nicholas Hereford; and, most notably, John Wyclif, the Oxford philosopher and preacher who inspired the heretical Lollard movement. v The opening chapters present an overview of the anticlerical tradition in England and a summary of the central issues driving critique in the late 14th century. Subsequent chapters present close readings of Cleanness and Patience which foreground congruences between the Gawain -poet’s rhetoric and the anticlerical polemic favored by his contemporaries. Since anticlericalism became identified in the late 14th century with heretical positions on the sacraments such as Donatism and Lollardy, this analysis pays close attention to the poet’s references to baptism, penance, and the Eucharist, and concludes that, though he embraces clerically administered sacraments as essential elements of the Christian life, he shares many of the Lollards’ concerns about priestly corruption and its effects. The final chapter gives a similarly contextual reading to the two “canonical” works of the poet, Pearl and Sir Gawain , in which references to the priesthood are often overlooked, yet, I argue, crucial to each poem’s meaning. vi Preface and Acknowledgments Several years ago, my sister and I received a memorable gift from our father: a handwritten journal in which he responded to various questions about his life and told stories about his childhood in rural Nebraska, many of which we had never heard before. To the question of when and where he had been baptized, he wrote: I was baptized when I was 18 years old, after I graduated from high school. The baptism service was held at the Calamus River, on the ranch operated by Guy and Mary Boller. The minister was Rev. L— . The last time I knew, the Rev. L— was in prison for sexual assault. I’m not sure—maybe my baptism doesn’t count! This minister, it turned out, was a pedophile who had victimized young girls in the church for many years before being caught. My father’s feelings of betrayal were clearly still fresh decades later, as a man he’d once viewed as a spiritual mentor had secretly lived a double life as a sexual predator. But what most caught my eye in his description was its half-serious theological question at the end—is it possible, my father seemed to be asking, that a baptism performed by such a man might not “count”? In other words, can a pastor or priest who performs religious rituals as part of his office commit a sin so grave that those rituals become invalid? To phrase the question more broadly, does the effectiveness of a sacrament rely upon the virtues of the man performing it, or can the power of the office or the institution overcome the failures of the man? What seems especially striking in my father’s case is that the institution in question was the Church of the Nazarene, a relatively “low-church” evangelical Protestant denomination with roots in the Wesleyan holiness movements of the 19th century. Worship services in this vii denomination do not follow a set liturgical format, and members tend not to hold a “strong” view of the sacraments, viewing baptism, for example, as primarily a public commitment ceremony undertaken by adults and Communion as a commemorative celebration. My father was planting his tongue at least partly in his cheek, therefore, when speculating that any kind of action, no matter how criminal or immoral, might invalidate what he viewed as a purely symbolic ritual. All the same, the fact that an evangelical Protestant could consider, if only in jest, the possibility that a sacrament might not “count” if the one performing it were guilty of a grave enough crime provides valuable insight into the distress many contemporary Roman Catholics felt in the wake of their church’s sexual abuse scandals starting in the early 2000s. These were betrayals and disillusionments on a much grander scale, but also of a somewhat different kind, since Catholics, in keeping with official church teaching, tend to have a much stronger view of the sacraments performed by their priests, particularly the Eucharist. A Catholic priest’s fall from grace, in other words, means more to his parishioners than simply the loss of a once trusted spiritual mentor, but represents a failure that could threaten the practices that sit at the very heart of their faith. Yet even the sacramental experience of contemporary Catholics is only a shadow of the reverence medieval Christians paid to their church’s sacraments, especially the Eucharist. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 established the doctrine of transubstantiation as the church’s official position on the sacrament of the altar, and by the end of the 14th century, the practice of observing the miracle of bread and wine become Christ’s literal body and blood in the hands of a priest had become, as the historian Eamon Duffy puts it, “the high point of lay experience of the Mass” (96). Actually partaking of the elements, as opposed to simply watching the priest elevate them over the congregation, was an even more momentous occasion for most medieval viii churchgoers, as it typically occurred only once a year and involved first undergoing the sacrament of penance, a three-step process of confession to a priest followed by prescribed works of penitential satisfaction, and finally absolution. Any revelation that the priests who heard these confessions, assigned these works of penance, performed absolutions, and miraculously transformed bread and wine into body and blood at the altar had engaged in activities medieval Christians believed to be mortal sin could not fail to be profoundly unsettling. And yet the priesthood of the Western Christian church by the late Middle Ages, according to contemporaneous accounts from a huge range of writers, had become an outrageously corrupt institution. As the opening chapters of this dissertation will illustrate, parish priests and other forms of clerics in late 14th-century England—monks, friars, bishops, and popes, as well as lay officers of the church—were subject to vicious critiques from both parishioners and fellow churchmen, the latter often the most strident. Just a glance at the works of English literature from this period most often encountered by modern-day readers—the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland—reveals a fictional landscape teeming with lazy, gluttonous, greedy, lustful, even murderous clerics and church officials. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales , to take the most famous example, depicts a Pardoner who offers absolution for sins in exchange for fees and attempts to sell fake religious relics to his fellow pilgrims, as well

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