Robison Dissertation Final 2016

The Path to Wholeness: The Therapeutic Potential of Bodily Writing in Late Medieval Dream Visions A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Katherine Ann Robison IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Advised by Rebecca Krug April 2016 © Katherine Robison 2016 Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the unwavering support of my advisor, Rebecca Krug. Throughout my time in the program, she remained an invaluable source of enthusiasm and direction, especially as I worked on this project away from the University, and a willing soundboard for all of my concerns. Thank you, Becky, for being a wonderful mentor, champion, and friend. I am also indebted to the rest of my committee for their thought-provoking suggestions and guidance. John Watkins responded to every chapter I sent him with incredible alacrity, and Katherine Scheil and Mary Franklin Brown offered perceptive insights and questions that helped me think about this study in new ways. Thank you all for being so generous with your time. I am extremely grateful to JB Shank, Kathryn Reyerson, and the Center for Early Modern History for sponsoring my Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellowship and helping me better understand the historical context of my argument. My deepest thanks to my peers and colleagues in the English Department, the Medieval and Early Modern Research Group, and the Medieval and Early Modern Interdisciplinary Graduate Workshop (“Ye Olde Workshoppe”) for providing feedback at each stage of my project’s development and for being a truly wonderful community. I will be forever grateful for the fortuitous circumstances that led me to meet Julie Singer and Ryan McDermott while presenting my research at the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo. Their feedback on my papers—and their own work on the topics of literary healing and penance—shaped the development of my argument in several fundamental ways. Finally, I need to thank my wonderful husband, Ryan Robison, for being a stalwart pillar of support and sanity for the last six years, and the rest of my family for their love and encouragement. My heartfelt thanks to you all! i Table of Contents Introduction Bodily Writing: An Apocalpytic Template …………………………………………… 1 Chapter One Reading Bodies and Writing Wholeness ……………………………………………… 12 Chapter Two Bodily Writing as Penitential Satisfaction in Piers Plowman ………………………… 62 Chapter Three Bodily Writing as (Textual) Reproduction in Le Roman de la Rose ………………… 122 Chapter Four Bodily Writing as Political Cure in L’Advision-Christine …………………………… 178 Chapter Five Bodily Writing as Comic Reinvention in the House of Fame .……………………… 236 Conclusion “Put in ryme that proces”: Bodily Writing in Today’s World ……………………… 287 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………… 297 ii Introduction Bodily Writing: An Apocalyptic Template Louis Heyligen, a musician at the papal court of Avignon, recorded in his Chroniques de Flandre that in 1347 a “great mortality and pestilence” had begun in the Orient. He describes the conditions in terms that recall the plagues of the Apocalypse: “On the first day it rained frogs, serpents, lizards, scorpions and many venomous beasts of that sort. On the second day thunder was heard, and lightning flashes mixed with hailstones of marvelous size…killed almost all men, from the greatest to the least. On the third day there fell fire together with stinking smoke from the heavens, which consumed all the rest of men and beasts.”1 This plague, later known as the Black Death, spread quickly and within two years had slain half of Europe, including Heyligen himself. The Black Death was not the only catastrophic event to strike during the fourteenth century. Just a few decades earlier, northern Europe was devastated by a Great Famine (1315-1322)—what some historians have termed Europe’s only true famine.2 Adding to these calamities was the Hundred Years War that raged from 1337 to 1453, the 1 “Eodem anno, in mense septembri, incepit quaedam et maxima mortalitas et pestilentia…Primo quidem die ranas pluit, serpentes, lacertos, scorpiones et multa hujus generis venenatorum animalium; secundo vero die audita sunt tonitrua, et ceciderunt fulgura et choruscationes mixte cum grandinibus mire magnitudinis super terram, que occiderunt quasi omnes homines…tercio die descendit ignis fetido fumo de celo, qui totum residuum hominum et animalium consumpsit” (Breve Chronicon clerici anonymi ex MS Bibliotheca Regiae Bruxellis, in J.-J. de Smet, ed., Recueil des chroniques de Flandre/ Corpus chronicorum flandriae [Brussels: Hayez, 1856], 3:14, quoted in Laura A. Smoller, “Of Earthquakes, Hail, Frogs, and Geography: Plague and the Investigation of the Apocalypse in the Later Middle Ages,” in Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000], 157). 2 Massimo Montanari, The Culture of Food, trans. Carl Ipsen (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), 70. Montanari observes, “Repeated incidents of nutritional stress…prepared the way for the plague epidemic that devastated the continent between 1347 and 1351” (70). 1 Papal Schism that occurred between 1378 and 1418, the Uprising of 1381 in England, an earthquake in 1382, and civil war in France from 1407-1435. As John Aberth states, “At no other time in history did so much variegated misery—famine, war, plague, and death—descend all at once as upon England and Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.”3 Little wonder, then, that people believed the end of the world was nigh and employed the language of the Book of Revelation to describe their circumstances.4 By placing the horrors of the late Middle Ages in an Apocalyptic context, however, writers implicitly offered their readers hope of eventual peace and refuge.5 The writings of the apostles, especially John, promised that after suffering and death would come a new and better world: the reign of Christ in the Millennium.6 While the literalism of the Millennium had been discounted by early Church Fathers such as Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory, new interpretations gradually offered the possibility of its actually 3 John Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague, and Death in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2001), 6. 4 Plagues are foretold in Revelation 16: 8-11 and 18:8 and the Apocalyptic portions of the Gospels: Matt. 24: 7 and Luke 21: 11. Laura Smoller writes, “Contemporary authors described the onset of the great pestilence not just with terrifying omens, but specifically with language drawn from Christian apocalyptic” (“Of Earthquakes,” Last Things, 157). 5 As Aberth puts it, “In a time of darkness, suffering, and death, comes the promise of redemption, renewal, and resurrection” (Brink, 6). 6 Richard K. Emmerson explains that medieval readers “took John at his word when he referred to his Revelation as a ‘prophecy’” (“The Apocalypse in Medieval Culture,” in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn [Ithaca: University of Cornell Press, 1992], 299). Michael Camille argues that “in this climate of heightened popular enthusiasm,” artistic depictions of the Apocalypse in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were made for an audience who expected to literally witness these events for themselves” (“Visionary Perception and Images of the Apocalypse in the Later Middle Ages,” in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, 277). 2 occurring.7 Slowly but surely, the concept of a literal period of peace spread across Western Europe. Robert Lerner states, “Granted that the Augustinian taboo against literal millennialism had by no means been lifted, ever more Western European prophets were beginning to challenge it. In other words, faith in a wondrous earthly future was growing just when Western Europeans were poised to storm the globe and survey the heavens.”8 Such optimism, along with a growing interest in subjective, individual experience (that would ultimately lead to the Reformation), encouraged a preponderance of visionary writings, both “authentic” and “literary.”9 The fourteenth century in particular saw an influx of prophets, visionaries, and mystics as well as vernacular translations and new interpretations of the Book of Revelation.10 Within this milieu, “the visionary aspect of 7 Augustine asserted that the Church was already living in the Millennium, which Christ had established during his ministry, and that the Book of Revelation was a spiritual allegory rather than historical prophecy. (In so doing, he divorced the regenerative tradition, which he reserved for the Final Judgment, from the eschatological tradition of apocalyptic thought.) Consequently, the Council of Ephesus condemned belief in a literal Millennium in 431. See Justine Rydzeski, Radical Nostalgia in the Age of Piers Plowman: Economics, Apocalypticism, and Discontent (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1999), 22. Rydzeski notes, however, “Whether the Church sanctioned belief in the Millenium or not, it was unable to counteract the apocalyptic fervor and beliefs of the masses, which it found easier to harness than to eliminate” (Radical Nostalgia, 22). For a helpful overview of millennialism, see Robert E. Lerner, “The Medieval Return to the Thousand-Year Sabbath,” in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, 51-71. 8 Lerner, “Medieval Return,” 71. Perhaps the most famous, and radical, of these new interpretations was the work

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