Blood and Spirituality in Late Medieval English Literary Culture
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The Seat of the Soul: Blood and Spirituality in Late Medieval English Literary Culture By Sarah Star A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Sarah Star 2016 The Seat of the Soul: Blood and Spirituality in Late Medieval English Literary Culture Sarah Star Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto 2016 Abstract My dissertation uncovers the ways that medieval literature both shares a physiological vocabulary with medieval English medicine and extends it. I argue that medieval romances, devotional prose tracts, and dramatic works all use a specifically physiological language to represent transformative miracles. At the same time that these texts use this vocabulary, however, they also do what medicine cannot: medieval literature, I argue, complicates and extends its physiological background in order to represent religious identities, mark religious difference, and explain the inextricability of physical and spiritual life. To establish an intellectual context for my analysis, I examine the earliest known academic medical treatise written in English: the Liber Uricrisiarum (c. 1379) by Dominican friar, Henry Daniel. Daniel’s treatise serves not as a singular source for the medical ideas discussed here but rather as a contemporary intertext that shares a physiological language with literature and that intersects with medieval literary culture in its distinctly vernacular style. The succeeding chapters focus on the role of blood in providing physical form and conferring religious identity in the anonymous King of Tars, Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love, and the N-Town Nativity play. These works ii collectively demonstrate a desire on the part of late medieval writers to negotiate the shifting relationship between the body, religion, and the English language. Ultimately, I reconceptualize our understanding of late medieval intellectual culture, showing that medical works have relevance beyond a strictly professional or curative context and that literary works, in their physiological and symbolic representations of blood, combine medical and theological discourses in greater detail than scholarship has acknowledged previously. iii Acknowledgments This dissertation has been supported by the Department of English at the University of Toronto and by the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Travel grants were provided by the Department of English and by the School of Graduate Studies. I am very fortunate to have several people to thank personally for their help and support as I completed this project. First, I am especially grateful to my supervisor, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, for carefully reading every word, for helping me become a stronger writer, for providing valuable advice, for being unflinchingly honest and ever-pragmatic, and for supporting me intellectually and professionally—for being exactly who I needed her to be, and for being there precisely when I needed her. My other committee members have been exceptionally wonderful. It has been my pleasure to learn from the expertise of David Townsend, who inspired and encouraged me as an undergraduate to pursue graduate work in medieval literature, and has remained a source of inspiration and encouragement throughout my doctoral degree. It’s his fault that I’m a medievalist and that I want to keep being one. E. Ruth Harvey’s decades of scrupulous research on Henry Daniel’s texts made much of this project possible. She graciously shared her work with me and read mine with a keen critical eye, and my project is much better for it. Special thanks are also due to my internal department examiner, Will Robins, for challenging me to think of my work in terms that hadn’t occurred to me before. And, to my external examiner, Fiona Somerset, for recognizing the critical interventions in my iv work and asking the questions that have enabled me to think beyond what I’ve done already and toward what I’m going to do. Thank you to Norah Franklin and Dora Manklin for spending long days at Robarts with me from the very beginning through to the very end; I couldn’t have asked for better work buddies. I count myself lucky to have parents who have never had anything but enthusiastic support for me, who believe that degrees in the Humanities are worth pursuing, who have always said that I could achieve anything I want to, and who have always known that I would. But I also have to thank them for introducing me to my first medieval influences: Monty Python and Disney’s Robin Hood and The Sword in the Stone, and for watching them with me over and over and over again. Finally, I want to thank my best friend, biggest fan, and harshest critic (when I ask him to be), Jeff Espie, breaker of horses, for his unwavering confidence and love. v Table of Contents Front Matter: Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents vi Introduction: Reading Blood 1 1: Writing not “newe þinges,” but “newely”: Henry Daniel and Medieval English Literary Culture 16 I. Vernacular Authority 22 II. Translation, Compilation 29 III. Writing “Newely” 36 IV. Daniel’s Vernacular Style 44 V. Some “new þinges” 51 2: “The stat of lyf prinspally”: Blood and Medieval English Medicine 58 I. Physical Life 60 a) Urine, Blood, Illness, Health 60 b) White Blood 68 II. Spiritual Life 75 a) The Liver 75 b) Spirit and Soul 78 III. Blood, Soul, Life 85 vi 3: Anima carnis in sanguine est: Blood, Life, and The King of Tars 87 I. Medical Discourses of Blood: Henry Daniel 91 II. Medical Discourses of Blood: The King of Tars 102 III. Religious Discourses of Blood 113 IV. English Discourses of Blood 122 4: “The precious plenty of his dereworthy blode”: Visions of Blood and Soul in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love 125 I. Blood and Visions 130 II. Medical Vocabulary 138 III. The Soul 152 5: Palpat Beatam Virginem: Doubt and Physiology in the N-Town Nativity Play 158 I. The N-Town Nativity Play and its Singularity 161 II. Doubt 166 III. Salomé 172 IV. Another Miracle 182 V. N-Town’s “Language Situation” 190 Conclusion: Medieval Blood and Vernacular Authority 196 Appendix A: Daniel’s Words 202 Works Consulted 225 vii 1 Introduction Reading Blood In the Prologue to “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” Alisoun narrates the deceitful scheme by which she charmed her fifth husband, Jankyn. While she was still married to her fourth husband, she says, she began to pursue “That Jankyn clerk” by telling him that he enchanted her: And eek I seyde I mette of hym al nyght, He wolde han slayn me as I lay upright, And al my bed was ful of verray blood; ‘But yet I hope that ye shal do me good, For blood bitokeneth gold, as me was taught.’ And al was fals; I dremed of it right naught, But as I folwed ay my dames loore, As wel of this as of othere thynges moore. (III.577-584)1 This dream, and Alisoun’s description of it, reveals a salient point about the relationship between blood and interpretation that provides the foundation for this dissertation. Blood, for Alisoun, is the site of interpretation; it “bitokeneth” something more than the result of the violence done to her dream-self by dream-Jankyn. It signifies not violence, but gold, which must mean that Jankyn “shal do me good.” As Christine Ryan Hilary explains, this connection between blood and gold was made previously in at least two treatises on the interpretation of dreams: Artemidorus Daldianus, Oneirocritica (second century) and Arnoldus de Villa Nova, Expositiones visionum (c. thirteenth century, printed in 1524).2 By 1 This and all subsequent quotations from Chaucerian texts are from Larry D. Benson, ed. The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 2 The Explanatory Notes for the Wife of Bath’s Prologue were written by Christine Ryan Hilary. See page 870. For an edition of Artemidorus’s work, see Roger A. Pack, ed. Onirocriticon libri V (Lipsiae: in Aedibus B.G. Teubneri, 1963). There is no modern edition of Arnoldus’s treatise. The text is printed in Opera omnia, 2 drawing on these two treatises, composed in or translated into Latin, Alisoun uses specialized ideas about the signification of blood to her own advantage, and adds a further meaning: blood betokens gold, but this is a positive signification that can in turn be analyzed to mean that Jankyn will be a good lover. Scholars have long examined Alisoun’s hermeneutic ability and classical learning in the Prologue. For A. J. Minnis, the human source of Alisoun’s learning is crucial: Jankyn, a clerk of Oxford, who reads to her, teaching her the classical, misogynistic material contained in his book of wicked wives. Alisoun demonstrates an understanding of texts to which women would not have had access, but this knowledge is mediated through a clerical man who chooses to teach her only misogynistic rhetoric.3 For Carolyn Dinshaw and Lee Patterson, Alisoun’s interpretive capacity opposes her to male dominated clerical learning. Dinshaw argues that Alisoun’s “joly body” is in direct opposition to the “lerned mens lore”—Alisoun’s body is a text that is against the male gloss. Patterson agrees that Alisoun positions herself in opposition to male clerical traditions, but for a different reason. The Wife redefines reading: as Patterson puts it, she “avoids the preemptions of Augustinian hermeneutics,” she “offers a mode of reading that is at once literal and moral,” and she “insists that interpretation must be deferred, that meaning (whether personal or literary) is available only at the end.”4 All of these scholars maintain that Alisoun has an impressive connection to Latinate learning at the same time that she opposes herself to it.