IMAGINING JUDITH: AN EXAMINATION OF JUDITH’S REPRESENTATION IN THE MIDDLE ENGLISH METRICAL PARAPHRASE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT by TERRI VAUGHN Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON December 2009 Copyright © by Terri Vaughn 2009 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge the important people who made this work possible. I am indebted to numerous librarians for their willingness to order special material for my studies. In particular, I want to express appreciation to Amy Mashberg for helping me obtain quick access to a variety of works not available in the UTA or UT libraries. I appreciate the willingness of Rosemary Poprocki to scan and email 120 pages of a facsimile of Egerton 2710. Additionally, I am obliged to Michael Livingston for making available his new edition of the Middle English Metrical Paraphrase even while it is still at press. Thanks are also due to several people who helped me with reading and translating French, Latin and Old English: my daughter, Jada Pothina, for help with French texts and Raúl Ariza-Barile for transcribing and translating a brief portion of the Old French manuscript, Egerton 2710; Kevin Gustafson, Rebecca Stephenson, and Paul Taylor for checking and correcting my Latin translations; and Jacqueline Stodnick for assistance with Old English. Indeed, I owe the initial idea for this project to a seminar paper on Judith written for an independent study on women in Anglo-Saxon literature conducted with Prof. Stodnick. As always,I am grateful for the constant encouragement given to me by both my co-chairs and medievalist mentors (Kevin Gustafson and Jacqueline Stodnick); and I am especially thankful that Kevin Gustafson expressed his belief in my project by keeping up with me and my work over cups of tea. In addition I am grateful to Penelope Ingram for her willingness to join my committee in the last stages of the process. Of course the expressions of support from family and friends kept me motivated when writing seemed difficult, but the ultimate supportive presence has been my loving husband, Ron Cockroft. Without his confidence in my abilities and willingness to sacrifice time and money I would never have finished. November 17, 2009 iii ABSTRACT IMAGINING JUDITH: AN EXAMINATION OF JUDITH’S REPRESENTATION IN THE MIDDLE ENGLISH METRICAL PARAPHRASE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT Terri Vaughn, PhD The University of Texas at Arlington, 2009 Supervising Professors: Kevin Gustafson and Jacqueline Stodnick The poet-paraphraser of The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament (MEMPOT) imagines Judith and other women biblical characters as courtly ladies, whose performance and dress reflect the values and customs of literary courtesy, as well as the poet’s interpretation of Christian morality. Judith’s narrative in particular resonates with the positive views accorded to women by some medieval romance texts and yet supersedes these by positioning Judith as mobile—able to move independently within the world of men—and aggressively verbal—commanding her fellow Hebrews and advising the Assyrian general. These characteristics go beyond the mobility and verbal acuity of Judith in biblical tradition, where Judith is defined more clearly as subordinate to masculine society through an emphasis on her widowhood and chastity. Bakhtinian analysis indicates that the treatment of Judith in MEMPOT is a product of heteroglossia —the blending of familiar ideolanguages that occurs within each person’s speech and writing. In lieu of repeating the authoritarian discourse associated with the patriarchal image of Judith, the MEMPOT-poet has allowed his/her own internally persuasive discourse to produce a female hero that reflects both the poet’s openness to gender equality and insistence iv on the hierarchies of social estate. The poet accomplishes this altered image of Judith through details of dress and courtly manners, as well as a carnivalesque portrait of her superior “woman’s wit”—adding to the biblical account by presenting her correcting the male elders in the temple, digging a well to provide water for her community, and directing the people to apportion the spoils of war to men and their wives. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................iii ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................... iv Chapter Page 1. INTRODUCING MEMPOT’S JUDITH ……………………………………..………..….. ..... 1 1.1 Introducing MEMPOT ....................................................................................... 1 1.2 Following Tradition (Sometimes)...................................................................... 4 1.3 Re-Presenting Women ..................................................................................... 9 1.4 Summarizing the Study .................................................................................. 13 2. ENVISIONING JUDITH FOR A MEDIEVAL AUDIENCE ............................................. 24 2.1 Signifying Judith ............................................................................................. 24 2.2 Imagining Audience in Theory ........................................................................ 26 2.3 Designing Texts for a Medieval English Audience ......................................... 31 2.4 Constructing MEMPOT’s Audience: To Gender or Not to Gender ................ 35 2.5 Viewing Medieval “Woman” ........................................................................... 40 2.6 Inventing Medieval Judith ............................................................................... 52 2.7 Considering Readers and Writers .................................................................. 69 3. FASHIONING JUDITH IN EARLY ENGLISH TRADITIONS ........................................ 73 3.1 Vesting an Aristocratic Judith ......................................................................... 73 3.2 Adorning Judith as Noble Hero ...................................................................... 75 3.3 Robing Judith’s Noble Chastity ...................................................................... 90 3.4 Dressing Judith “For Show”: Early Visual Portrayals ..................................... 95 3.5 Clothing Judith for Conversation: Bakhtinian Insights ................................. 104 vi 4. ADORNING JUDITH FOR THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY ..................................... 107 4.1 Embellishing Courtly Judith .......................................................................... 107 4.2 Creating Dress in Theory ............................................................................. 108 4.3 Exploring Medieval Attitudes Toward Dress ................................................ 115 4.4 Being: Judith Is Adornment .......................................................................... 124 4.5 Doing: Judith Performs Adornment .............................................................. 134 4.6 Performing the “Organic Body” .................................................................... 141 5. ENHANCING JUDITH’S COURTLY PERFORMANCE ............................................. 144 5.1 Bi-gendering Judith ...................................................................................... 144 5.2 Preceding Judith: Romance Foremothers ................................................... 146 5.3 Presenting Judith’s Performance: MEMPOT’s Additions ............................. 160 5.4 Reversing Patriarchy: Judith as Carnival ..................................................... 176 5.5 Questioning Judith’s Powerful Performance ................................................ 187 6. PARTING WITH JUDITH ........................................................................................... 191 6.1 Re-Telling Judith .......................................................................................... 191 6.2 Succeeding Judith ........................................................................................ 195 6.3 Embodying Judith ......................................................................................... 196 6.4 Concluding Judith ......................................................................................... 198 NOTES ......................................................................................................................................... 202 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................................ 290 BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION ................................................................................................ 315 vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING MEMPOT’S JUDITH 1.1 Introducing MEMPOT While the Latin Vulgate was not available to the majority of English-speaking Christians during the Middle Ages, stories of the Bible in other forms, including dramatic, pictorial, and verse, entertained and inspired audiences outside of the clerical vocation. Today the latter form is, perhaps, the least studied and appreciated, particularly in some of its longest variations. Yet these works must have been popular with at least some contemporary audiences and seem to have had the approval of the church along with visual representations, for neither vernacular biblical