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Between Past(s) and Future(s): Translating the Space of Appearance in MChriisdtopdhelre Je nEsenn glish Arthurian Literature

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

BETWEEN PAST(S) AND FUTURE(S):

TRANSLATING THE SPACE OF APPEARANCE

IN MIDDLE ENGLISH ARTHURIAN LITERATURE

By

CHRISTOPHER JENSEN

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

2019

Christopher Jensen defended this dissertation on May 20, 2019.

The members of the supervisory committee were:

David F. Johnson Professor Directing Dissertation

Reinier Leushuis University Representative

Jamie C. Fumo Committee Member

Bruce T. Boehrer Committee Member

A. E. B. Coldiron Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

ii

For Kelsey,

wimmonnen leofvest me.

And for Margery and Arthur, oft boþe blysse and blunder.

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I must begin by thanking the people who planted and cultivated many of the ideas that found some version of maturity in this present volume. David Johnson introduced me to

Arthurian literature in my first semester of graduate school and has endlessly encouraged and refined my critical approach in the years since. Anne Coldiron opened up the wide worlds of materiality and French-to-English translation to me, giving me my first foothold in the methodologies that would later define my course of study. Bruce Boehrer taught me patient reading and why Milton will always be my favorite academic hobby. Lori Walters immersed me more fully in the Francophone and walked me for the first time through the wilderness of the

Roman de la Rose. Finally, Jamie Fumo showed me how to turn my lifelong fascination with classical myth into something worthwhile and taught me (at last) how to stop worrying and love

Chaucer. My work would be nothing—or worse, on Hawthorne—without the support and encouragement shown to me throughout my graduate study by these brilliant scholars and teachers. I also thank Charles Brewer for serving as my University Representative through the majority of the process and Reinier Leushuis for his willingness to fill that role at the very last minute.

Looking backward, my time in the Frederick M. Supper Honors Program at Palm Beach

Atlantic University gave me much of the mental furniture that I arranged and rearranged time and again in the early years of my twenties when my interest in many of these ideas, if not these texts specifically, was born. Kathleen Anderson gave me the push I needed to study literature,

Josh Avery brought me into the Middle Ages for the very first time, Sam Joeckel trusted me with his own research and gave me the tools necessary for my Master’s-level work, and Beate

Rodewald, most of all, suffered through four straight semesters of my adolescent self-discovery and kindled my ongoing love affair with Hannah Arendt.

iv I also extend my profound gratitude to the Strozier Library staff members who have tirelessly processed my hundreds of requests and delivered loans to the Williams Building. I don’t think I could have written any of this without the Library Express Delivery Service.

My parents, of course, provided me with the opportunities I needed to pursue my very specialized interests and, for better or worse, knew better than to try to change my mind. I hope they’re proud of me.

The Medieval Studies Workshop at FSU, organized by Beth Coggeshall, gave me useful feedback on a very early draft of Chapter Three, as did the panel and audience of my session at the 2018 New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies. In particular, Jamie

Fumo, David Johnson, and Francis Cairns asked difficult questions for which I had to really dig for an answer. The audiences of my panels at the 2017 International Congress on Medieval

Studies and Southeast Medieval Association conference likewise gave me helpful comments on small arguments that together became the bones of Chapter Four. David Johnson was especially encouraging regarding my reading of despair as the motivating affect of the Stanzaic Morte

Arthur and sent me a draft of his own article on the Wheel of Fortune in that poem, soon after published in Arthuriana. Kat Tracy also gave me brief research notes on a related project that found their way, as these things often do, into that chapter.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge my friends and colleagues in

Tallahassee, especially Kim Anderson and Rachel Duke, who let me sit with them at conferences, and Rita Mookerjee, who gave me the venue to write something else for a change.

Above all, Kelsey Ward fed me and held me and talked me down off the ledge more times than I recall, especially in the last month of the process, and I can’t thank her enough for enduring my dissertation stress while she did most of the work of planning our wedding.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... vii

INTRODUCTION—ALWAYS ALREADY FALLEN: THE SPACE OF APPEARANCE AND TRANSVERNACULAR ADAPTATION ...... 1

CHAPTER ONE—ARTHUR AND THE SUBJECT OF HISTORY: THE INVENTION OF SPEECH IN LAȜAMON’S BRUT ...... 27

CHAPTER TWO—OTHERS SPOKE OF LOVE: RECONFIGURING THE CHIVALRIC IDENTITY CIRCUIT IN YWAIN AND GAWAIN ...... 67

CHAPTER THREE—ONE OR SEVERAL GAWAINS: IDENTITY AND INTERTEXT IN SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT ...... 102

CHAPTER FOUR—AFTER ARTHUR: THE STANZAIC MORTE ARTHUR AND THE PROBLEM OF SALVATION ...... 143

AFTERWORD—ARTHURIAN AFFECT: THE “ONCE AND FUTURE” THING ...... 180

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 183

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 196

vi ABSTRACT

The genre of Arthurian literature is defined by its presentation of a noble society of knights and ladies, most often utilized in literary texts as a kind of medieval shorthand for acceptable social behavior, perhaps especially in aristocratic settings. Knighthood is configured most often in French-language literature of the “twelfth-century renaissance” as an aspirational masculine social identity, an office ordained by God for the elite class. When that literature was translated into Middle English in the following centuries, however, the different social functions and expectations of literary chivalry in England provided a distinct terroir in which it might grow, producing narratives with a courtly cast for a decidedly broader audience, an audience perhaps far removed from the literal offices of king and knight. Arthur’s knights in Middle

English literature thus often embody a more generalized ethos, but the imaginary space of

Arthurian Britain ensures that its specular capacity for social commentary and the stimulation of aspirational identity remains intact, even when the practicable nobility of Arthur’s court does not necessarily cohere across texts and traditions.

vii INTRODUCTION

ALWAYS ALREADY FALLEN:

THE SPACE OF APPEARANCE AND TRANSVERNACULAR ADAPTATION

Wherever people gather, it is potentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not forever. That civilizations can rise and fall, that mighty empires and great cultures can decline and pass away without external catastrophes—and more often than not such external ‘causes’ are preceded by a less visible internal decay that invites disaster—is due to this peculiarity of the public realm, which, because it ultimately resides on action and speech, never altogether loses its potential character.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Introduction

The thematic core of Arthurian literature is the court. Across every language of composition and literary genre, the narrative of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, even when called by other names, depends centrally on the idea of a chivalric public established in the presence of its king. The geographic space of Arthur’s domain is identified variously—

Britain, England, Logres—and finds its capital in any number of castles, most often Caerleon,

Carlisle, and Camelot, but the defining feature of the Arthurian realm is its body politic, its court of knights and ladies with whom innumerable authors have populated their imaginings of a noble society lost to the ravages of time. Norris Lacy and Geoffrey Ashe argue that in all of its permutations, “King Arthur’s Britain is an idealized medieval kingdom, a sort of chivalric

Utopia,”1 which is to say, in the tradition of Thomas More, No-Place, an artificial world or

“speculative myth… designed to contain or provide a vision for one’s social ideas.”2 For this reason, the Arthurian legend is an inexhaustible mine for literary imagination. It is at once timeless and deeply rooted in a specific historical era; it has stayed relevant for a millennium by remaining perennially in a mythic past, while its characters and the social world they make up are updated again and again to reflect the attitudes and preoccupations of the cultures from which

1 Norris Lacy and Geoffrey Ashe, The Arthurian Handbook, second edition, Garland, 1997, p. 1. 2 Northrop Frye, “Varieties of Literary Utopias,” Daedalus, vol. 94, no. 2, 1965, p. 323. 1 the story continually arises. As Andrew Lynch writes, “Arthurian narratives are… always political documents” with a distinctly “ethical bent,”3 a simple, axiomatic reading, to be sure, but one that deeply informs the following study.

While the scholarship of Arthurian literature was, for many decades, predicated largely on a desire to understand the inherent meaning of its sundry elements through a recovery of their ultimate origins from an unending stream of historical sources and analogues, more recent work has taken a cue from cultural studies, understanding “the legend as a set of unstable signs appropriated by differing cultural groups to advance differing ideological agendas.”4 As may be readily observed, the literature surrounding Arthur and his court is endlessly malleable, its medieval authors, translators, and redactors not simply collecting or accreting a single monolithic

Arthurian legend over the course of the European Middle Ages but engendering a plurality of legends within often indistinct and inconsistent boundaries of text and context. Although many non-medievalists especially appear “to think of Arthurian romance as escapist literature, concerned with lost dreams and a past golden age,”5 countless scholars of the Middle Ages have shown that Arthurian literature and legend, both historical epic and courtly romance, had real and serious cultural and political implications, perhaps especially in England. Henry II framed his own supremacy over the Welsh with the staged discovery of Arthur’s body at Glastonbury in

1191, as did Edward I in his own visit to Glastonbury in 1278, and Edward III in 1330, each monarch carefully rhetorically positioning himself as the rightful—if not strictly lineal—heir to the Arthurian imperium. As W. R. J. Barron summarily notes, “Arthur was to remain for centuries an active force in island politics and his Round Table company a model for manifold

3 Andrew Lynch, “‘What cheer?’ Emotion and Action in the Arthurian World.” Emotions in Arthurian Literature: Body, Mind, Voice, edited by Frank Brandsma, Carolyne Larrington, and Corinne Saunders, Brewer, 2015, p. 51. 4 Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley, “The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend,” Culture and the King, edited by Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley, State University of New York Press, 1994, p. 4. 5 Elspeth Kennedy, “The Knight as Reader of Arthurian Romance,” Culture and the King, edited by Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley, State University of New York Press, 1994, p. 70. 2 forms of social idealism.”6 Arthurian literature is thus, as argued by Lynch above, by its nature political—related in a concrete way to the nature and construction of an organized society—and was evidently received and utilized as such in the medieval period.

What lends the story its weight, as previously noted, is its relative position in time:

Logres, like Troy before it, is always already fallen, and as Leah Haught observes, “Whether celebrated, scorned, or simply evoked, Britain's Arthurian past is precisely that, past, and, as a result, always already heading towards its own inevitable conclusion even if the particular narrative in question appears to end happily.”7 Even as early as Pseudo-Nennius’ ninth-century

Historia Brittonum, the dux bellorum Arthur’s appearance is already located in the distant past as part of a larger British history of conquest and loss, a literary movement carried forward by

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s influential Historia regum Britanniae. Arthurian themes and characters are thereby often used either to justify a present circumstance by projecting its etiology back into the mythic past, as in the case of the English kings above, or to cast a moral exemplar within the frame of a Golden Age by which the honorable deeds of a decidedly noble past society may be appropriately valorized—and their corresponding loss in the implied narrative present appropriately mourned. To make one brief example, the verse romances of Chrétien de Troyes are notable for using the narrative framework of Arthurian Britain to problematize the inner workings of twelfth-century French courtly society. The prologue to Le Chevalier au Lion laments the dearth of True Lovers in the poet’s time and turns to the age of Arthur’s knights for an example of how things were and still could be: a once and future society. As Lacy explains,

“Chrétien presents us, throughout his works, a varied picture of chivalry and the court, ranging

6 W. R. J. Barron, introduction to Arthur of the English, edited by W. R. J. Barron, University of Wales Press, 2000, p. xiv. 7 Leah Haught, “Ghostly Mothers and Fated Fathers: Gender and Genre in The Awntyrs off Arthure,” Arthuriana, vol. 20, no. 1, 2010, p. 3. 3 from theoretical ideals to general precepts to very explicit and precise rules,”8 but his stance is usually critical, pushing the stated communal goals of chivalry toward transcendence through the struggles and triumphs of individual knights.

As Chrétien’s subjects and influences spread across linguistic and cultural lines, however, the values he sought to interrogate necessarily changed. In the various direct translations of his romances into medieval languages other than French, there is a notable excision of the military and amatory vocabulary particular to twelfth-century France,9 but even in the thirteenth-century

French prose cycle now known as the Lancelot-Grail, produced ostensibly within fifty years of the poet’s lifetime, Chrétien’s characters and themes are so removed from their original context as to make them hardly recognizable, retooled for a new audience and a new literary purpose.

Within this cycle, Jane Gilbert locates, as in Chrétien, “something that in special moments surges up from elsewhere to demand a different way of being, ethically and ontologically more powerful because more difficult,”10 and in this description she begins to articulate, in broad strokes, the pervasive yet multifarious ethos of Arthur’s court. Although radically different in its literary technique and representation of the Arthurian world, the Lancelot-Grail retains the spirit of Chrétien’s ethical bent, a tenet held by more or less every iteration, even when a given text’s implicit ethics might diverge from those of its source. It is useful to consider, then, that the overwhelming majority of English-language Arthurian material composed before the late fourteenth century was adapted from French-language sources. Although English and French were, for several centuries, co-vernaculars on the island, the widespread process of translation and adaptation that produced Middle English Arthuriana has historically been regarded in

8 Norris Lacy, The Craft of Chrétien de Troyes, Brill, 1980, p. vii. 9 For a representative bibliography on the ideological movement of one of Chrétien’s poems across European vernaculars, see Sif Rikhardsdottir, Medieval Translations and Cultural Discourse, Brewer, 2012, especially the third chapter. 10 Jane Gilbert, “Being-in-the-Arthurian-World: Emotion, Affect and Magic in the Prose Lancelot, Sartre and Jay.” Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature: Body, Mind, Voice, edited by Frank Brandsma, Carolyne Larrington, and Corinne Saunders, Brewer, 2015, p. 25. 4 scholarship as involving “a cultural descent, or at the very least a broadening of appeal.”11 As

Burnley explains, “Anglicization often meant popularization, adaptation to a new audience of less sophisticated tastes,”12 and this attitude has deeply affected modern reception of the resulting

Middle English texts.

In comparison to their continental forebears, Middle English Arthurian romances have been routinely characterized as coarse, “flat, lacking in wit and subtlety,”13 and altogether inferior. Joseph Bédier’s sharp response to the Middle English Sir Tristrem in his 1902 edition of the Anglo-Norman Roman de Tristan by Thomas of Britain is a case in point: “Par son extrême brièveté, par les contraintes de versification qu’il s’est imposées, par son style tourmenté, il s’est interdit de jamais traduire son modèle, et nous ne lui devrons jamais de retrouver une phrase authentique de Thomas.”14 Bédier approaches Sir Tristrem solely as an artifact from which to reconstruct the fragmentary Roman de Tristan and thereby precludes himself from any sincere study of the Middle English poem as a Middle English poem. More recently, however, Alan

Lupack has convincingly argued for a reading of the English poem as a conscious and subtle parody of the courtly language and themes of Thomas’s text, by which it becomes “a poem of much more interest and merit than it has usually been given credit for.”15 This decidedly more positive reading participates in the much more recent—though still decades old—trend of recovering the reputation of non-Chaucerian, non-Malorian Middle English literature, a push perhaps most visible in the Medieval Institute and University of Rochester’s TEAMS Middle

English Texts Series. Instead of treating Middle English Arthuriana as derivative or as “mere translation,” recent work on the subject has sought to buck the often derisive critical tradition

11 J. D. Burnley, “Late Medieval English Translation: Types and Reflections,” The Medieval Translator: The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, edited by Roger Ellis, Brewer, 1989, p. 42. 12 Ibid. 13 Mary Flowers Braswell, introduction to Ywain and Gawain, Medieval Institute, 1995, p. 78. 14 Joseph Bédier, editor, Le Roman de Tristan: Poème du XIIe siècle, vol. 2, 1902, p. 88. 15 Alan Lupack, introduction to Sir Tristrem, edited by Alan Lupack, Medieval Institute, 1994, p. 152. 5 inherited from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Rosalind Field baldly states,

“Translators do not invariably render courtly French-language originals into coarser popular

English versions. Instead of trying to impose later patterns of expectation upon these texts, it is more useful to look at the variety and range of achievement they represent.”16

Thus when we consider the literary merit of Middle English Arthuriana before Malory, it is useful to evaluate it in a rich context of cultural continuity and exchange. Although it is true that much of it is not strictly “original” and relies heavily on French-language source material, this movement need not indicate any sort of “descent,” cultural or otherwise. Rather, the nature of the Arthurian legend and its unending growth relies on such movement, an ever evolving process of cultural commentary in the guise of legendary history. Literary adaptation into

English need not be understood, quoting Burnley, as “cultural descent”—by the end of the fourteenth century, English translators appear to have themselves looked down upon the overly mannered continental culture from which they inherited their Arthurian materials and consciously problematized its presence in their texts. By examining a series of diverse Middle

English Arthurian texts with clear French-language sources and paying attention to the kinds of things the English translators change and retain in their respective adaptations, I aim to explore the cultural discourses that both surround and constitute the ostensibly inherent nobility of

Arthur’s court. What becomes apparent quite quickly upon approaching these texts from this perspective is that many of the sites of change traditionally viewed as deficient in the Middle

English texts are often the result of larger shifts in culturally specific representations of the

Arthurian body politic and the corresponding modes of existence and social responsibility of the individuals it comprises—what might broadly be construed as the “space of appearance.”

16 Rosalind Field, “Romance,” The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 1, edited by Roger Ellis, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 300. My emphasis. 6 The Space of Appearance

I borrow the term from Hannah Arendt, who uses it in her 1958 opus The Human

Condition in conjunction with analysis of the Greek polis. For Arendt, the concept of the polis extends beyond the ancient city-state and comes to define the ideological aim of an ideal democratic society more generally, namely by emphasizing the human condition of plurality:

The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the

organization of people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space

lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be…

It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I

appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or

inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.17

Although the chivalric public of Arthurian literature is obviously not democratic, the space of appearance, in Arendt’s definition, “comes into being wherever [people] are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the public realm can be organized.”18 It is the condition by which people present and define themselves in the presence of others, without which “neither the reality of one’s self, of one’s own identity, nor the reality of the surrounding world can be established beyond doubt.”19 Arthurian literature generally is, following this schema, about the space of appearance as organized by the court, the space where knightly honor is tested, fin’amor born, and personal identity defined. The common scene in French romance of a knight’s public arming before the court, for instance, the socially codified event that grants him recognition in the space, “offers an illusion of wholeness and completeness that we call the chivalric subject [and which] culture idealizes because it answers

17 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958, second edition, University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 198. 18 Ibid., p. 199. 19 Ibid., p. 208. 7 specific needs and serves certain purposes,”20 namely as a model for the kind of behavior deemed appropriate for a given audience striving toward nobility—however that is defined. The process of adaptation, therefore, in many medieval iterations of the story thereby involves a necessary reconstruction in the target text both of how the people within the court are articulated and what the court’s stated value system, i.e., chivalry, might represent for a given audience, both personal and political.

The recent “affective turn” in academia has provided a useful framework for discussing the intimate and intrinsic relationship between the personal and political, and one of the aims of this project is to demonstrate how Arendt’s terminology might more clearly define some of this relationship’s particular literary contours, especially with regard to Arthurian literature. The terminology of affect “brings back the body: it signals an instinctual reaction to some kind of stimulation before cognitive processes produce a more complex emotion,” and the concerns the language of affect articulates “have come to be seen as crucial in shaping human response,”21 especially in the last two decades. As Corinne Saunders observes, however, “this seemingly radical ‘turn,’ like so many, was also a turn to the past: medieval thinkers, using very different models, took for granted many of [its] ideas.”22 The theory of the four humors, for instance,

“underpins a concept of mind-body continuum that resonates with current conceptions of the embodied mind,”23 and Jeffrey Cohen has influentially shown that many contemporary and perhaps avant-garde ideas about “posthuman” identity formation put forth by Donna Harraway,

Gilles Deleuze, and prominent queer theorists have very clear antecedents in the Middle Ages,

20 Elizabeth Scala, “Disarming Lancelot,” Modern Philology, vol. 99., no. 4, 2002, p. 381. 21 Frank Brandsma, Carolyne Larrington, and Corinne Saunders, introduction to Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature: Body, Mind, Voice, edited by Frank Brandsma, Carolyne Larrington, and Corinne Saunders, Brewer, 2015, p. 4. 22 Corinne Saunders, “Mind, Body and Affect in Medieval Arthurian Romance.” Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature: Body, Mind, Voice, edited by Frank Brandsma, Carolyne Larrington, and Corinne Saunders, Brewer, 2015, p. 31. 23 Brandsma, Larrington, and Saunders, p. 6. 8 such as the influence of celestial bodies on both the human physique and emotional state.24 As

Brandsma, Larrington, and Saunders explain, “emotion [in medieval thought] was both a bodily passion and a mental experience, and affect was understood to play a significant role in thought, moral judgment, intention and the shaping of the self.”25

Holly Crocker notes that harnessing emotions to influence the will was a main concern of medieval ethical philosophy, a process of “training the will through the formation of an ethical habitus,”26 which should be understood as a separate but related concept to the habitus put forth by Pierre Bourdieu.27 As Katharine Breen explains, habitus in medieval usage “is a synonym for the internalized Christian virtue whose loss is recounted in Genesis, but which can be regained, at least in part, through systematic right living.”28 Although the term was originally afforded only to the particular ethical life of clerics, many medieval writers blurred the distinction between habitus and the more lay-oriented idea of “custom” (consuetudo and assuetudo), offering the practice of forming habitus to a more inclusive audience. Habitus in this sense is therefore a deliberate training of the will toward an idealized vision of the self, made perfect through practicable social virtue. According to Crocker, however, “This training was not simply social, nor was it exclusively spiritual. It was moral, and the affects [i.e., emotional practices] were its principal vehicle, since they constituted a socially intelligible self that accorded to ethical principles with spiritual significance.”29 This definition is somewhat at odds with Bourdieu’s very influential homonymic sociological theory, which is defined more generally as the

24 Jeffrey J. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 25 Brandsma, Larrington, and Saunders, p. 6. 26 Holly A. Crocker, “Medieval Affects Now,” Exemplaria, vol. 29, no. 1, 2017, p. 84. 27 Although Bourdieu developed his notion of habitus from the work of medieval art historian Erwin Panofsky, “Bourdieu continued to rely on a medieval and medievalist vocabulary without seriously considering its origin. In addition to habitus, he made use of lesser Latin keywords such as auctor and lector and translated terms such as scholastic, gloss, and commentary that have close associations with the Middle Ages, while all but ignoring the period’s social and intellectual history.” Katharine Breen, Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150-1400, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 7. 28 Breen, p. 4. 29 Crocker, p. 84. 9 ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions by which an individual perceives the social world and reacts to it, often explained through sports metaphor as “feel for the game.” Bourdieu emphasizes that “an individual action cannot be detached from a habitus installed in the body,”30 an idea often rendered negative and unconscious, whereas medieval authors understand habitus as a welcome and active agent of personal and social change. In both uses of the term, however, habitus seeks to describe the action of an individual within society and the concomitant influence of society on the individual’s mode of behavior, a concept very much akin to some modern notions of affect. Crocker notes that “to practice an ethical habitus was to cultivate specific affects to produce different, frequently new forms of subjectivity.”31 Following Crocker, I use the terms in an intimately related, though not interchangeable way throughout my study and refer to the social public in which affects are allowed to occur as the space of appearance.

Breen and Crocker’s analyses of medieval habitus-formation accord broadly with a generic description of virtually any given Arthurian romance. The protagonist knights in

Chrétien de Troyes’s poems, for instance, are uniformly trained through the intercession of their emotional practices, usually love, to become better knights and more ethical human beings, a transformation Robert Hanning identified, decades before the affective turn, as the “chivalry topos.”32 Cohen connects this training to a kind of proto-masochism, a “domination of the body” by the beloved.33 Crocker is clear, however, to differentiate between affect and emotion:

The affect of ‘love’ was very different from the feeling that might strike an unsuspecting

knight in courtly literature. When Troilus sees Criseyde in the temple, to cite a familiar

example, the love her beauty elicits is a powerful emotion. Yet it is only when Troilus

30 Breen, p. 6. 31 Crocker, p. 94. 32 Robert Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Cenutry Romance, Yale University Press, 1977. For more on the particular affect(s) of chivalry in Chrétien and his Middle English translator, see Chapter Two. 33 Cohen, p. 105. 10 redefines himself as a lover through a painful process of suffering that he experiences the

affect of love.34

Returning to the example of Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot’s experiential love for Guinevere in Le

Chevalier de la Charrette impels him toward contemplation; he is often shown to be lost in thought, such that he is unaware of his own physical surroundings, including bodily pain when he crosses the sword bridge and later cuts off one of his fingers in an emotionally taxing effort to be intimate with Guinevere. It is the affect of love, however, by which he readily disregards his own honor at Guinevere’s request, shaming himself at the tournament by intentionally losing, which in turn demonstrates his quasi-masochistic humility and the proper subordination of prowess to the service of others in the ongoing formation of his habitus. As the knightly body is trained through the hard practice and physical demands of chivalry, so is the chivalric subject trained by the intentional cultivation of his emotions—which are, of course, inextricable from the knightly body and the chivalric public in which he has been physically and socially trained.

Stephanie Trigg notes that while the affective turn “is usually understood as naming a renewed emphasis on philosophical and phenomenological relations between cognition, experience, and feeling,” its use in the humanities, especially those fields with historically oriented research, often involves analysis of “changes in the discursive representation of emotions and the terminology used to describe them.”35 The project of understanding medieval affects can only be furthered by the study of literary adaptation, as in recent scholarly work by

Frank Brandsma36 and Sif Rikhardsdottir. Drawing from Barbara Rosenwein’s seminal study on emotional communities,37 Rikhardsdottir argues, “By looking at the adaptations of the source

34 Crocker, p. 83. 35 Stephanie Trigg, “Emotional Histories—Beyond the Personalization of the Past and the Abstraction of Affect,” Exemplaria, vol. 26, no. 1, 2014, p. 3. 36 Frank Brandsma, “Where are the Emotions in Scandinavian Arthuriana? Or: How Cool is King Arthur of the North?” Scandinavian Studies, vol. 87, no. 1, 2015, pp. 95-106. 37 Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early middle Ages, Cornell University Press, 2006. 11 text as evidence for the cultural predilections of reading communities that created and received those translations, one can discern patterns of literary, social and ideological preconceptions,” although she recognizes that “any effort to encapsulate the ideological and ethical codes that constitute a society is thwarted by the fact that society itself is in a constant state of progress and reform.”38 Affect is thus most broadly understood to be concerned with the embodied experience of individual subjects and their encounters with one another in society, and the historical application of its terminology is perhaps best utilized in analysis of the literary or cultural representations of these experiences.

Although it might be tempting to try and separate “individual” and “society” in this arrangement, it is useful to remember Brian Massumi’s dictum that “individuals and societies are not only empirically inseparable, they are strictly simultaneous and consubstantial. It is an absurdity even to speak of them using notions of mediation, as if they were discrete entities that enter into extrinsic relation to one another.”39 Rather, research into historical representation of lived experience requires a phenomenological approach; as Jane Gilbert argues,

“phenomenology… allows us to think about the relations between self and world, and between subject and object, dynamically and without privileging either term: the subjectivity that phenomenology proposes is not isolated, the objectivity not unresponsive.”40 Moreover, the language of affect opens up a rich vein of socio-literary inquiry. Sara Ahmed’s seminal analysis of emotions as cultural practice begins “with the messiness of the experiential, the unfolding of bodies into worlds, and the drama of contingency,”41 showing how affect, though often hard to define, “is constitutive not just of social beings, but also of social bodies in relation to objects

38 Rikhardsdottir, p. 3. 39 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Duke University Press, 2002, p. 71. 40 Gilbert, p. 16. 41 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, University of Edinburgh Press, 2004, p. 30. 12 and to each other.”42 In other words, if we may call the condition of interpersonal relations the

“space of appearance,” then we may call the modes of human action and relation that take place in that space “affects.” They are coextensive concepts: affect needs a space of appearance in which to meaningfully signify and the space of appearance is itself constructed, upheld, and potentially destroyed by the modes of social behavior and somatic condition affect describes. To consider Arthurian literature as an inherently political entity is thus to invite the study of its affects.

Crocker ends her article with a call to action, a proposition “to take medieval affects seriously as a way of rethinking subjectivity-formation in the Middle Ages,” which entails an engagement “with modern affect theory by calling attention to the impoverished subjectivities that contemporary theorizations allow, even impose. Above all, perhaps, it should conceptualize the habitus as medieval thinkers did, as a means for positive intervention in the ethical production of embodied identities.”43 The present study is a response to Crocker’s call, an attempt to reconcile the oftentimes poor critical treatment of Middle English translations with a perhaps more authentically medieval aesthetic of reception concerned with the cultivation and representation of a chivalric habitus. The unique socio-linguistic situation of medieval England complicates received binary notions of French and English identity, however, and it is vital to note that the literary changes wrought on Arthur’s court through translation from one vernacular language to the other are not uniform throughout the Middle Ages. Rather, French and English both existed on the island in a complicated cultural and linguistic dance that necessitates closer attention from English specialists and a perhaps more open minded attitude from French- language scholars than the tradition of the twentieth century might allow.

42 Trigg, p. 6 43 Crocker., p. 94. 13 French and England

No society is ever truly monolingual, but the peoples of medieval England lived in a particularly complex linguistic society with three major written languages—English, French,

Latin—and many other vernaculars present in border areas or major sites of trade. Although it is impossible to know what proportion of the English population in the Middle Ages spoke which vernaculars and in what contexts, scholars such as Richard Britnell,44 Marilyn Oliva,45 and

Maryanne Kowaleski46 have admirably demonstrated the widespread distribution of French in a variety of non-aristocratic usage, suggesting, alongside the presence of a significant amount of

French-language literature composed in England (not least the Chanson de Roland), that the literate populace of medieval England was, at minimum, functionally bilingual in such a way that the inherent character of an English national literary aesthetic presumed by twentieth-century scholars must be reexamined. For too long have the studies of French and English literature of the Middle Ages been siloed from one another by specialists and lingering post-medieval national rivalry.

The efforts of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and her collaborators, notably, have begun to ameliorate this severe division of specialization by moving away from periodizing terms like

“Anglo-Norman” and “Anglo-French” in favor of the broader, more inclusive “French of

England,” a neologism born not necessarily from the impropriety of either previous term, but from “the division itself and the separateness and self-enclosure of the categories they have come

44 Richard Britnell, “Uses of French Langauge in Medieval English Towns,” Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c.100-c.1500, edited by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al., York Medieval Press, 2009, pp. 81-89. 45 Marilyn Oliva, “The French of England in Female Convents: The French Kitchener’s Accounts of Campsey Ash Priory,” Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c.100-c.1500, edited by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al., York Medieval Press, 2009, pp. 90-102. 46 Maryanne Kowaleski, “The French of England: A Maritime Lingua Franca?” Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c.100-c.1500, edited by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al., York Medieval Press, 2009, pp. 103-117. 14 to signify.”47 Wogan-Browne argues that “the two terms, Anglo-Norman and Anglo-French, helped consolidate a model in which English lies dormant after the Conquest, having been overwhelmed and replaced by Anglo-Norman, but rises again in a late fourteenth-century efflorescence.”48 There is an insidious tendency among students of history to assume the situation of Normandy and England from the eleventh and twelfth centuries forward (let alone

Anjou, Aquitaine, et al.) was one of two mutually exclusive ethnic groups and languages, when the reality is much more complex, involving mutual cultural and textual exchange from earlier than is perhaps fully realized: “The idea of a culture as a monoglot entity proceeding in organic linearity through time and within the territories of a modern nation state cannot adequately represent medieval textual production and linguistic cultural contacts.”49 And while Wogan-

Browne diplomatically offers that linguistically savvy literary scholarship has often challenged the idea of a monolithic medieval English literature, it is still relatively uncommon for scholars to meaningfully extend this idea beyond Chaucer, Gower, and the broader genre of romance.

Award-winning studies claiming the clear and present cultural continuity between Beowulf and

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight have been published by major academic presses as recently as

2016.

Rather, what Wogan-Browne has been able to illuminate is that “older models of one language, one nation, one literature have increasingly come to seem inadequate for the study of

England’s medieval culture, in its internal dimensions as much as in its external exchanges and contacts.”50 Medieval English literature, as discussed above, is reliant in many ways on cultural exchange with the continent, but this should not be understood as a weakness or in terms of a

47 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “What’s in a Name? The ‘French’ of ‘England,’” Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c.100-c.1500, edited by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al., York Medieval Press, 2009, p. 1 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., p. 5. 50 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, introduction to Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of England, edited by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Thelma Fenster, and Delbert W. Russell, Brewer, 2016, p. 1. 15 necessarily hierarchical linguistic structure with French in the dominant position. In much study of medieval literature, as Ardis Butterfield notes, “there is often an implicit assumption (against our better knowledge) that a medieval writer is also working and thinking monolingually… [but] language among the educated was a matter of choice and negotiation between overlapping linguistic worlds.”51 This is true across medieval Europe in relation to Latin and the vernaculars at the very least, as discussed by Dante in De vulgari eloquentia, but the particular cultural situation in England demanded it even more. As Wogan-Browne explains of English and French,

“each enriched the other. In the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, for example, the new

Anglo-Norman regime in England encountered English-language writing as a prestigious vernacular in use across a wide range of genres and functions. This contact provided a crucial stimulus to the development of French as a written vernacular literature.”52 Thus it was Anglo-

Saxon literature that ultimately inspired the flowering of French-language literature in the twelfth century, although as I endeavor to show in my first chapter, this cross-cultural influence ran both ways from even before the Norman Conquest.

Focused study on the coexistence of French and English in medieval England is still relatively new. Wogan-Browne and Butterfield’s initial studies are only ten years old, and although dozens of essays and monographs have been published in the years since, the field does not yet have any totally agreed upon guiding principles beyond conceptualizing English literature in the plural. Earlier critics like Bédier, as discussed above, that pose medieval English literature as necessarily lesser than French, or those that seek to establish clear and inviolable national identities or characters through an examination of a given literature are largely dismissed, at least on those specific fronts, for lack of nuance. What is clear is that although French and English existed as shared vernaculars in England, there was often still a sense of rivalry between the two

51 Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 7. 52 Wogan-Browne, 2016, p. 2. 16 and a resulting set of hierarchical linguistic registers—language use coded for particular social settings. As Butterfield explains, however,

Work on dialect, code-switching, and multilingualism is in its infancy in relation to

medieval language use, but the more it proceeds the more we are reminded that languages

do not function autonomously in multilingual environments, but rather form a shifting set

of relationships in which meanings are produced through a constant process of contrast,

discrimination, overlap, and rivalry.53

The existence of English translations of French texts, especially in a culture in which English and

French share vernacular status, thus poses fascinating questions about the production and use of

English-language literature in the Middle Ages—and Arthurian literature in particular, given its specific cultural and geographic ties to the island of Britain.

Middle English Translation

Because of this complicated linguistic history, the critical tradition of Middle English romance, in particular, is nearly inextricably bound up with the study of French-to-English translation. In fact, as Rosalind Field has noted, “the history of English romance has always been seen as predominantly a history of translation,”54 citing Sir Walter Scott’s enduring 1804 claim that “there exists no English Romance, prior to the days of Chaucer, which is not a translation of some earlier French one.”55 This fact appears perhaps unbelievable at first, but it by and large holds up, at least as far as Middle English Arthurian literature is concerned; every extant Middle

English Arthurian romance produced before the mid-to-late fourteenth century has a French- language source or analogue. Translation as a literary practice in the Middle Ages, however, had

53 Butterfield, p. 14. 54 Rosalind Field, “Romance,” The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, volume 1, edited by Roger Ellis, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 296. 55 Walter Scott, introduction to Sir Tristrem: A Metrical Romance of the Thirteenth Century, Archibald Constable, 1804, cited in Field, 2008. 17 a different range of meaning than might be suggested by everyday use of the term in the twenty- first century, by which we mostly refer to the production from a given source language an equivalent target text by a translator imposing minimal authorial presence, although the actual process is more complex than the layman might realize.56 Medieval vernacular translation praxis is still a relatively new field of study, and scholars in the early years of translation theory were often dismissive of it. As Ivana Djordjević summarizes,

The attitude was that, biblical translation aside, in the Middle Ages there was no

translation as we know it: either because medieval writers had no notion of what

translation was, and thus produced all sorts of more or less free adaptations in the belief

that they were actually translating, or because they did share our equivalence-based

concept of translation but lacked the intellectual equipment necessary for its practical

application.57

The reality, however, is that although medieval translators of romance may have largely ignored formal equivalence as we understand it, their methods display notions of skopos and dynamic equivalence that deeply inform the shape of their texts.

Skopos, first set forth by Hans Vermeer and Katharina Reiß, is a technical term by which to identify the aim or purpose of a translation. As Susan Bassnett explains, Vermeer’s

“hypothesis is that the aim of the translation justifies the strategies employed,”58 which is to say the translation itself and the interpretation of that translation must take into account the intended function of the target text, which may or may not have any clear connection with the function of the source text. Skopos provides a useful vocabulary to bridge, perhaps, the linguistic and affective turns in academic study, shifting emphasis from the lexicon of a given translation to the

56 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, Routledge, 1995. 57 Ivana Djordjević, “Mapping Medieval Translation,” Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation, edited by Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows, and Morgan Dickson, Brewer, 2000, p. 9. 58 Susan Bassnett, Translation, Routledge, 2014, p. 6. 18 intended consequence of its composition for a given audience. Since the medieval source and target texts in question for the present study have demonstrably different audiences, the critic must evaluate the translation not solely from a perspective of formal equivalence or rarefied aesthetics but from a cultural understanding of the needs and expectations of the target audience—the modes of affect enacted in the text and potentially provoked in the reader. Further, as Anne Coldiron has usefully demonstrated, “in medieval texts, visibility, not invisibility, was the fetishized thing,” often especially as a signifier of foreignness, because the literary system in the Middle Ages was one “committed to preservation, continuity, hierarchy, authority and venerability.”59 Thus even in medieval England, so commonly assumed in scholarship to resent its continental occupation, we may observe Laȝamon’s explicit debt to “a Frenchis clerc,

Wace”60 acknowledged on the first page of his Brut. We also find conventional reference to “þe buke”61 or even to a named author like “Tomas”62 in the Middle English metrical romances and constant assurance from Thomas Malory that he is faithfully rendering the content of the

“Frensshe booke,”63 each Middle English author placing himself between the past and present to mediate his own version of the Arthurian space of appearance. As Rikhardsdottir explains,

“While medieval literary heritage reflects the ideological and social structures from which it originated, it also transcends the moment in history through this intertextual exchange. It both preserves traces of ideologies of that culture and foretells changes that lie ahead.”64

Along these lines, Michelle Warren has argued that medieval literature is never truly monoglot; it is always constructed and received in a web of multilingual allusions, resonances,

59 A. E. B. Coldiron, “Visibility Now: Historicizing Foreign Presences in Translation, Translation Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2012, p. 191. 60 Laȝamon’s Brut, edited by W. R. J. Barron and S. C. Weinberg, Longman, 1995, ll. 20-21. 61 Ywain and Gawain, edited by Albert B. Friedman and Norman T. Harrington, Early English Text Society no. 254, Oxford University Press, 1964, l. 9. 62 Sir Tristrem, edited by Alan Lupack, Medieval Institute, 1994, l. 2. It should be noted, however, that although Thomas wrote in Old French for the Angevin monarchy, he was himself famously of British birth, blurring the cultural distinction in a way that is not, perhaps, given enough credit. 63 Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, edited by P. J. C. Field, Brewer, 2017, p. 940, etc. 64 Rikhardsdottir, p. 1 19 and aesthetic expectations and highly reliant on processes of translation.65 As the editors of a recent volume on medieval textual transmission have noted, “Translation is never an innocent act… [it] is always, on some level, implicated in processes of interpretation, appropriation, or re- creation, even when a translator positions himself as a fidus interpres.”66 Thus we may see that in recent years, translation historians have recognized the unique cultural discourse of medieval translation and come so far around as to map its most distinct quality onto translation writ large—such that it is common today to find attitudes like that of Gerard Genette, who succinctly argues: “no translation can be absolutely faithful, and every act of translation affects the meaning of the translated text.”67 In other words, every translation is an interpretation, and the interpretations offered by the Middle English adaptors of French Arthuriana were each specifically crafted for a particular audience with particular cultural expectations of affective practice.

The complex socio-linguistic situation of medieval England blurs many of the standard theoretical scaffolds that might support a critical reading of intervernacular translation, not least any attempt to account for the difference between translating into English an imported French text from the continent and a homegrown insular French text, but since no such scaffold existed in the nineteenth century when many Middle English romances were first edited, as noted above in the case of Bédier, the specter of “mere translation” still occasionally looms, pronouncing the craft of these adaptors unworthy of its pedigree. Field usefully argues that “if too many ME romances are classified as translation, in the narrowest sense of the term, an obscuring of the creative vitality of ME fiction can result: we need rather to remain alert to the process of

65 Michelle R. Warren, “Translation,” Middle English: Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature, edited by Paul Strohm, Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 51-67. 66 Robert Wisnovsky, Faith Wallis, Jamie Fumo, and Carlos Fraenkel, introduction to Vehicles of Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Textual Culture, Brepols, 2011, p. 16. 67 Gerard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, translated by Channah Newman and Claude Doubinsky, University of Nebraska Press, 1997, p. 214. 20 translation as an active appropriation of significant material.”68 She proposes a distinction between translation, “the change of text into a target language,” and translatio, “a movement of ideas, cultural markers, place, which does not necessarily assume a textual relationship.”69

Djordjević recognizes this distinction as well, noting that it is especially important to invoke

“when a considerable time-lag exists between the originals and translations,” 70 as in the case of

Middle English romances composed in the fourteenth century from twelfth- and thirteenth- century French originals. “We notice,” Djordjević continues, “that certain elements of the original are altered in the translation, but we may well be looking at the kind of change that would—and does—occur in the process of adaptation within the same literary system, among texts written in the same language.”71 Rikhardsdottir similarly argues that a given translator’s

“deviations do not denote the translator’s lack of comprehension of his foreign material, but rather the recognition of and effort to bridge the cultural divide between the imported material and the literary tradition into which he is inserting his text.”72

Thus in approaching any Middle English translation of an original French-language text, it is vital to consider not only changes in linguistic or poetic form but the necessary corresponding shifts in content that take place in the process, each of which necessarily changes the text as a whole by varying degrees in a process of adaptation. While Field’s bifurcation is useful, the orthographic difference between translation and translatio is perhaps not as readily apparent to the eye as one might like. Given the status and widespread use of both French and

English as literary languages in medieval England, I will therefore employ the term transvernacular adaptation to describe this literary technique as practiced with regard to Middle

English Arthurian literature, accounting for the process of changing language along with the

68 Field, p. 296. 69 Ibid, p. 297. 70 Djordjević, p. 15. 71 Ibid. 72 Rikhardsdottir, p. 5. 21 addition of linguistic register and transformation of more specific cultural ideologies and affects.

Although “adaptation” as a literary concept has its own rich critical history not often bound up with medieval translatio, I follow Brian Massumi’s example in “poaching” terminology from the biological sciences: “When you uproot a concept from its network of systemic connections with other concepts, you still have its connectibility. You have a systemic connectibility without the system. In other words, the concept carries a certain residue of activity from its former role.”73

My use of the term hearkens back, perhaps, to its ecological roots, describing the large systemic changes that necessarily accrue with seemingly minor or incremental changes in the process of translingual textual transformation.

My study locates its guiding image in Arendt’s space of appearance. Uniformly, across all pre-Malorian Arthurian translations and adaptations, what changes from source to target text is ultimately the articulation of the imagined Arthurian public and what, in turn, it is made to represent. By examining Middle English texts with acknowledged French-language sources, I am able to draw attention to specific sites of change at which each English adaptor, in

Rikhardsdottir’s formulation, “bridge[s] the cultural divide between the imported material and the literary tradition into which he is inserting his text.”74 This bridging, I argue, necessarily involves a culturally specific transformation of the essential affects of the French-inflected

Arthurian narrative and a corresponding reconstruction of the space of appearance in which these affects may be said to occur.

A Note on Names, Texts, and Translations

Given the sprawling tradition of Arthurian literature in the Middle Ages, many of its characters are given different names from text to text and especially from language to language. I

73 Massumi, p. 20. 74 Rikhardsdottir, p. 5. 22 have, with the exceptions of Arthur throughout and Gawain in Chapter Three, tried to render these names as they appear in their manuscript context. Arthur thus appears consistently throughout this study as Arthur rather than Artus, etc., but Guinevere, to take one example, may appear as Wenhaver, Guenevere, or Gaynour, depending on the text in question. Gawain as well appears as Waluuanus, Walgan, Walwain, Walewein, Gauvain, and Gawayne at various points, but in the context of Chapter Three, in which I discuss the character as a metatextual entity, I have elected to call him “Gawain” consistently for clarity’s sake.

Due to financial and institutional limitations on direct access to manuscripts, I have relied on standard critical editions of my primary texts. In cases like the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, Ywain and Gawain, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which are all only extant in one manuscript, my choice was fairly straightforward, although I have on occasion consulted other editions for notes or variant editorial punctuation. For Laȝamon’s Brut, the text is extant in two quite different manuscripts, and although I address in Chapter One some of my reasons for using

Barron and Weinberg’s edition of the Caligula text, the presence and radical variance of the Otho manuscript is only really beginning to be adequately dealt with in criticism. The editions I have used here are, to my knowledge, the standard critical editions consulted widely in scholarship, with the exception of the Stanzaic Morte Arthur due to the fact that I was unable to procure a copy of J. D. Bruce’s Early English Text Society edition. P. F. Hissiger’s Mouton edition, recently republished by De Gruyter, relies heavily on Bruce’s text and uses the same line numbers, but some of his editorial decisions regarding spelling and punctuation slightly differ.

In providing modern English translations of Old French or Early Middle English passages, I have again utilized standard editions except where noted—on occasion, I have disagreed with these translations and provided my own. Middle English other than Laȝamon’s

23 remains untranslated with the expectation that the target audience of a study such as this is primarily specialists with advanced training in the languages of medieval England.

Description of Chapters

Arthur and the Subject of History: The Invention of Speech in Laȝamon’s Brut

In my first chapter, I explore in some detail what might be called an “affective geography” of Angevin England. Laȝamon’s Brut, composed in early Middle English ca. 1215, has been traditionally understood as a defiant, antiquarian revision of Wace’s 1155 Old French

Roman de Brut in the cast of an Anglo-Saxon epic. It was written in English, so the standard reading goes, as a subversive act against the widespread imposition of Norman culture on the island, reclaiming the native British hero Arthur by articulating him as a culture hero warding off foreign invasion. The poem is best understood, however, not as a conservative, anti-alien screed but as a diplomatic transvernacular adaptation that, through modifying the space of appearance and affective modes of identity formation found in its French-language source, ultimately diffuses much of Wace’s political energy and re-centers the translatio imperii on everyday people rather than gods and kings.

Others Spoke of Love: Reconfiguring the Chivalric Identity Circuit in Ywain and Gawain

In chapter two, my attention shifts from how the Arthurian space of appearance is formed toward what it is made to represent. The romances of Chrétien de Troyes, as described above, are animated by the affect of courtly love, which defines and motivates the formation of chivalric habitus, perhaps especially in the celebrated Chevalier au Lion. In the Middle English translation

Ywain and Gawain, however, many critics find a distinct departure from the elegant and sophisticated French source. It is often considered to have been composed for a lower class

24 audience hungry for a fast-paced narrative of adventure without all of Chrétien’s lyrical and philosophical frills. But a better explanation of the poem’s technique comes from a consideration of the form and literary function of knighthood in the respective time periods of the two poems’ authors. The affect of knighthood occupied a different literary valence in fourteenth-century

England than it had in twelfth-century France, and the Arthurian space of appearance in Ywain and Gawain thereby displays a marked turn toward a more accessible chivalric habitus than the

French poem might on its surface allow.

One or Several Gawains: Identity and Intertext in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Chapter three changes gears a bit to consider the wider implications transvernacular adaptation might have on the literary reputation of a singular knight and how that knight’s reputation, in turn, changes the ecology of the Arthurian space of appearance. This is my

“exception that proves the rule” chapter, in a sense, in that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is not explicitly derived in toto from a French-language source. Its structure and themes, however, are heavily indebted to the French tradition, even as they dramatically change and re-articulate them to great literary effect. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight showcases a complete English overhaul of Arthurian romance as a genre, beginning with the moral character of its protagonist.

The Gawain-Poet both draws from and explicitly rejects aspects of the French Arthurian tradition and in the process constructs a more complex and perhaps intentionally frustrating space of appearance that questions the validity of its predecessors.

After Arthur: The Stanzaic Morte Arthur and the Problem of Salvation

The final chapter concludes my study by examining what the Arthurian space of appearance looks like when Arthur is no longer present. Although Arthur himself has not

25 prominently featured in my analysis since Chapter One, the Arthurian world as a literary convention depends on his presence, even when he is not himself particularly active. This chapter proceeds from a comparison of the Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and its immediate source, the French Mort le roi Artu, particularly as they conceive of what happens after the event described in their titles. The Mort Artu is part of a longer cycle that begins, ostensibly, with the story of the Grail and chronicles the life and deeds of Arthur and many of his knights, so a sense of historical continuity is perhaps expected. The English poem, however, is self-contained and marks itself early on as a story of decline. Although the two narratives share obvious similarities due to their intrinsic textual relationship, the English poet modifies his source to fundamentally deconstruct the Arthurian space of appearance as described in the

French and draw attention to its explicitly toxic affect: the Arthurian world, in the English poet’s rendering, does not support the cultivation of a chivalric habitus, and its aesthetic mode is one of despair.

26 CHAPTER ONE

ARTHUR AND THE SUBJECT OF HISTORY:

THE INVENTION OF SPEECH IN LAȜAMON’S BRUT

The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different from the familiar, worn-out trivialities they had been presumed to say.

Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty”

Introduction

Within the twelfth-century Welsh chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum

Britanniae, commonly cited as one of the most influential books of the Middle Ages, we find

King Arthur’s first ‘official’ biography, a text which would “suppl[y] a basis and framework for

Arthurian romance and [exert] an influence extending through Spenser, Shakespeare, and many others.”75 Writing a generation before the era-defining French verse romances of Chrétien de

Troyes, Geoffrey depicts Arthur as an upstart Briton warlord, focused first on driving the invading Saxons from Britain and then expanding his embryonic North Sea empire, but the account of his life is crucially located within the larger structure of British history, serving as its narrative climax and reifying the notion of an erstwhile British supremacy lost in the flux of providential history. Leila Norako succinctly notes that Geoffrey’s history “is clearly proto- nationalistic in design, seeking both to glorify the ancestral rulers of Britain and to warn against the disunity that so often undid them.”76 The Britons are depicted in a state of nearly endless wartime, incited as often by dynastic feuds as by the threat of foreign invasion, but the reign of

Arthur, taking up nearly a third of the text, builds on these themes and occasionally overturns

75 Geoffrey Ashe, “Geoffrey of Monmouth,” The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, edited by Norris J. Lacy, Garland, 1996. 76 Leila K. Norako, “Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae,” The Crusades Project, Robbins Digital Library, University of Rochester, 2014. 27 them until Arthur’s own empire is brought down from within, giving way to a more complete

Saxon occupation.

This historiographical design proved enduring; as Geraldine Heng argues, “the foundational myth and regnal genealogy fashioned by the Historia devise an indispensable model, in culture, of an insular collectivity and political community that is specifically driven by continuity-through-disruption as its engine of historical development—thus producing the necessary conditions, and an indispensable matrix, for the future project of imagining England as a medieval nation.”77 The Historia’s preservation in over 200 Latin manuscripts78 attests to the impressive range of its transmission throughout the medieval period, and its common compilation alongside histories of the Trojan War, royal genealogies, and other national chronicles underscores the value of its historiographical invention, especially, as Heng identifies, for the earliest imaginings of the English nation. Perhaps even more striking, however, is the number of vernacular translations and adaptations it engendered, launching in earnest the so- called Brut tradition of British histories that find their beginning with the Trojan Brutus and his mythical conquest of Albion, of which there are hundreds of manuscripts written across nearly every language spoken in medieval Britain—often for explicitly propagandistic purposes.79

The two most celebrated of these translations are the French verse Roman de Brut, composed circa 1155 by the Jersey poet Wace, and the Middle English Brut, an alliterative adaptation of Wace’s poem by the English priest known as Laȝamon. Wace’s “courtly” rendering of Geoffrey’s narrative in octosyllabic rhyming couplets has been credited in large part with the meteoric rise of Arthurian romance in the Anglo-Norman-Angevin courts and appears to have

77 Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy, Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 58-59. 78 For a full list of extant Historia manuscripts, see Julia Crick, The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vol. III: A Summary Catalogue of the Manuscripts, D. S. Brewer, 1989. 79 For a detailed discussion of one instance with a representative bibliography, see Steve Boardman, “Late Medieval Scotland and the Matter of Britain,” The Power of the Past, edited by E. J. Cowan and R. J. Finlay, Edinburgh University Press, 2002, pp. 47-72. 28 earned him the patronage, for a time, of King Henry II for his “sequel” Norman history, the

Roman de Rou. As James Noble points out, the overtone of British nationalism inherent (though rarely positive) in Geoffrey’s text is greatly diminished for Wace’s Norman audience,80 the new regents of the island perhaps seeking to substantiate their own place at the dynastic table after the years of civil war now known as the Anarchy.81 The Britons of the Roman de Brut, as in

Geoffrey, are shown time and again to be poor stewards of their God-given island, but Wace interjects a marked air of cultural superiority that the Welsh Geoffrey was unable to access in his narration, a historiographical intervention that would have important and far-ranging implications for Angevin historiography and Arthurian literature more generally and for

Laȝamon’s succeeding English poem. The notion of assigning nationalist or proto-nationalist sentiment, a characteristically twentieth-century way of talking about linguistic and cultural identity, is a recurring critical problem in studies of these chronicles, but perhaps especially in those surrounding Laȝamon’s Brut, a British history composed in vernacular English near the

Welsh border during the Angevin period of Anglo-Norman rule.

Clearly defining national or ethnic identities in Laȝamon’s poem is difficult due to a variety of factors, not least the poem’s received vocabulary of institutional identity and the cyclical history of conquest and repatriation that makes up its narrative, but for many critics, especially those of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these rigid distinctions are key to the poem’s overall meaning. It is often categorized, as by J. S. P. Tatlock and other scholars of his era, as distinctly Anglo-Saxon in both its language and narration, an antiquarian throwback defiant of the widespread imposition of Norman language and culture on the island. The Brut is best understood, however, not as a conservative “England First” manifesto, but as a diplomatic

80 James Noble, “Patronage, Politics, and the Figure of Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and Laȝamon,” The Arthurian Yearbook II, edited by Keith Busby, Garland, 1992, pp. 159-78. 81 Charity Urbanski, Writing History for the King: Henry II and the Politics of Vernacular Historiography, Cornell University Press, 2013. 29 transvernacular adaptation emerging from the multi-ethnic context of the early thirteenth- century. As an English-language translator, Laȝamon carefully and consistently modifies the categories of communal identity made available by his Norman source, redirecting and even diffusing much of the narrative’s political energy, and, furthermore, greatly expands the capacity for his individual characters of all tongues and national identities to speak within the established space of appearance, a potentially radical historiographical adaptation with important and largely unexplored affective implications.

Laȝamon’s “English”

One of the major trends in Laȝamon scholarship from Frederic Madden’s first nineteenth- century edition forward is to view the poem as a nascent foray into English nationalism, a semi- articulate grasping at the still abstract idea of a post-Hastings English state and people. Henry II, of course, could trace Anglo-Saxon ancestry back to King Alfred through his maternal line, but his claim to the throne of England, and thereby the respective claims of his children, came through the complicated games of dynastic succession ignited by the White Ship disaster of 1120.

Norman nobles were not initially happy about the incipient Plantagenet dynasty, still less the surviving English and native Britons, and literature of the period is often charged in one political direction or another. For this reason, the date of the Brut’s composition and the identity of its earliest audience have been hotly debated for over a century. It survives in two manuscripts, both copied in the West Midlands in the late thirteenth century, albeit in notably different forms.82

British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A ix (hereafter Caligula) is often considered the primary manuscript due to its closer perceived textual proximity to Laȝamon’s original, though this view

82 Paleographical and codicological evidence mounted by C. E. Wright and N. R. Ker, respectively, strongly suggests such a late date of composition for both manuscripts. Ker promotes a possible date after 1275. See C. E. Wright, English Vernacular Hands from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Centuries, Clarendon Press, 1960 and N. R. Ker, The Owl and the Nightingale, Oxford University Press, 1963. 30 has been rightly challenged in recent decades.83 It collects the Brut (ff. 1-194) alongside a short

French-language prose chronicle detailing English royal history up to Edward III, two French hagiographies by the otherwise unattested Chardri, a French debate poem, and eight Middle

English lyrics, many of which are also extant in Oxford, Jesus College MS 29 (II).84 For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was agreed that the compilation of the Brut with this other bilingual miscellany in Caligula originated with Sir Robert Cotton, but the findings of C. E.

Wright and N. R. Ker in the 1960s suggest “strongly that ff. 195-261 belonged from the first” with the Brut. The presence of the French chronicle, especially, picking up where Laȝamon leaves off and continuing up to the author’s present, indicates that it may have been compiled, or even composed, as a direct continuation of Laȝamon’s text, an important material interpretive key for the latter that remains largely unexamined in any substantial depth.

The other manuscript, British Library, MS Cotton Otho C xiii (hereafter Otho), was characterized for the majority of its bibliographical life as a redaction of a text close to that found in Caligula, a marred transmission of Laȝamon’s original poetics producing an ultimately inferior, less authentically “English” text. As Christopher Cannon observed in 1993, “So thoroughly has the Otho text of the Brut been discredited in fact that recent criticism of the Brut has concentrated exclusively on Caligula as if Otho did not even exist.”85 For Cannon, the presumed revision of the Otho version of the Brut heralds a shift from an Old English literary aesthetic into a more continentally aware Romance, yet he privileges the other manuscript as more “original” with his conceptualizing of Otho as “a text that Laȝamon could have written,”86

83 See, for instance, Elizabeth Bryan, Collaborative Meaning in Medieval Scribal Culture: The Otho Laȝamon, University of Michigan Press, 1999 and Lucy Perry, “Origins and Originality: Reading Lawman’s Brut and the Rejection of British Library MS Cotton Otho C.xiii,” Arthuriana, vol. 10, no. 2, 2000. 84 For a detailed account of the correspondences between these two manuscripts, see Neil Cartlidge, “The Composition and Social Context of Oxford, Jesus College MS 29 (II) and London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix.” Medium Ævum vol. 66, no. 2, 1997, pp. 250-269. 85 Christopher Cannon, “The Style and Authorship of the Otho Revision of Laȝamon’s Brut,” Medium Ævum, vol. 62, 1993, p. 188. 86 Ibid., 204. 31 with the implicit understanding that Caligula is the text that Laȝamon did write, or at least very much like it. Lucy Perry has since advocated for “accept[ing] Otho as part of the larger Brut tradition,” favoring a comparativist stance toward the poem that places it in dialogue with texts such as the prose Brut tradition, Robert Mannyng’s Chronicle, and Wace’s Roman de Brut, in addition to the Caligula text.87 In any case, scholars since the publication of Françoise Le Saux’s landmark 1989 study on the Brut and its sources88 have largely agreed that the Worcestershire priest Laȝamon composed his massive poem in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, almost certainly after the death of Henry II in 1189 and before the accession of Henry III in 1216—i.e., during the reign of either Richard or John. There is competing circumstantial literary evidence for “conclusively” dating the poem during the reign of one king or the other with no true scholarly consensus, but many readings (Le Saux’s notably excluded) appear to assume a date late in John’s reign after the loss of Normandy to Philip II of France in 1204.89

Whether the poem was written before or after the Capetian conquest of England’s continental holdings is especially important to many scholars as it helps to characterize the poem’s general national outlook, which has been, as previously noted, one of the major sticking points in Laȝamon criticism—as Jorge Luis Borges rather infamously records, “Laȝamon sang with fervor about the ancient battles of the Britons against the Saxon invaders, as if he were not a

Saxon and as if the Britons and Saxons had not been, since Hastings, conquered by the

Normans.”90 A 1964 article by Ian Kirby proved very influential for decades in its insistence that

Laȝamon comprehensively linguistically separates the Saxon race from that of the later Angles— the Saxons cast as treacherous pagan invaders and longtime enemies of the Britons, the Angles

87 Perry, p. 82. 88 Françoise Le Saux, Laȝamon’s Brut: The Poem and its Sources, D. S. Brewer, 1989. 89 For a detailed account of scholarly controversy surrounding the date of Laȝamon’s composition, see Le Saux, 1989, especially pp. 1-13. I follow Le Saux’s proposed range of 1189-1216 and presume for my overall reading of the poem a post-1204 date during the reign of King John. See also Martin Aurell, “Henry II and Arthurian Legend,” for an account of the uses of Arthurian literature as Angevin propaganda during the reigns of Richard and John. 90 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Innocence of Laȝamon,” Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms, 1965, p. 161. 32 largely harmless immigrants and divinely ordained heirs of the island.91 Kirby’s thesis resolves some of the difficulty inherent in reading an English-language text in which the ancestors of the

English are often the villains; it remained unchallenged for many years, cited at length in Le

Saux’s monograph and informing her own understanding of the text as essentially anti-Norman.

She suggests that the “English” Angles are sanctified by their conversion to Christianity and links this reading with “the explicit condemnation of the ‘nið-craften’ of the Normans, mak[ing] the Norman Conquest morally incomprehensible where the former transferal of sovereignty

[from British to English rule] had appeared just.”92 Such a reading is subversive: an English- language history of Britain, then under Norman rule, that uses British history to ultimately glorify and justify Anglo-Saxon rule of the island through the divinely ordained transfer of institutions over and against secular notions of military conquest or dynastic politics. It depends, however, perhaps too much on Kirby’s thesis, which Neil Wright conclusively argued to be untenable in 1994.

Wright clearly shows that Laȝamon’s narration does not consistently characterize the

Angles and Saxons as distinct racial or otherwise institutional groups. He cites as his main example the introduction of Hengest, arguably the most reprehensible Saxon character in the whole history: if “Laȝamon did desire to distinguish between ‘good’ Angles and ‘wicked’

Saxons, one would certainly expect him to lay particular emphasis on Hengest’s Saxon origin.”93

In fact, however, Hengest announces himself to the British king Vortiger as such:

Ich hatte Henges; Hors is mi broðer.

We beoð of Alemainne, aðelest alre londe,

91 Ian Kirby, “Angles and Saxons in Laȝamon’s Brut,” Studia Neophilologica, vol. 36, 1964, pp. 195-219. 92 Le Saux, 1989, p. 222, n. 131. 93 Neil Wright, “Angles and Saxons in Laȝamon’s Brut: A Reassessment,” The Text and Tradition of Laȝamon’s Brut, edited by Françoise Le Saux, D. S. Brewer, 1994, p. 166. 33 of þat ilken ænde þe Angles is ihaten.94

(I am called Hengest; Horsa is my brother. We are from Germany, noblest of all lands, of

that very end that is called Angles.)

Hengest thus, according to the Caligula manuscript,95 comes from “Angles,” or Anglia, the region of Germany from which the Angles (or English) would later take their name, a detail made more striking by comparison with Laȝamon’s source, the Roman de Brut, at which corresponding passage reads simply:

Henguist, ki maire e ainz né fu,

Pur tuz ensemble ad respundu:

‘De Saixone, dist il, venum,

La fumes nez e la manum.’

(Hengist, the elder and first-born, replied for them all. ‘We come from Saxony,’ he said,

‘there we were born, and dwell.’)96

Laȝamon thus diverges from and adds to his source in order to emphasize Hengest’s origin in

Anglia as distinct from the larger region of Saxony, a fact he surely would not have included had he intended to represent the Angles and Saxons as different peoples with inherently different moral characters. Wright further points out that Hengest is accompanied by “Saxisce men” who are identified as “Hengestes cunnesmen,”97 thereby making Hengest “a Saxon from Angles,”98 just as the later “English” colonists (“Ænglene þeode”99) in the reign of Cadwallader send a

94 Laȝamon’s Brut, edited by W. R. J. Barron and S. C. Weinberg, Longman, 1995, ll. 6910-6912. My translation follows. 95 Otho reads, similarly, “Ich hatte Hengest; Hors hatte min broþer. / we beoþ of Alemaine; of one riche londe. / of þan ilke hende þat Englis his ihote.” Margaret Lamont translates “Englis” in this last line as an adjective, but the sense of the sentence remains the same: in both manuscripts, Hengest is directly identified with the Angles from his earliest appearance in Laȝamon. 96 Wace’s Roman de Brut: A History of the British, revised edition, edited by Judith Weiss, University of Exeter Press, 2002, ll. 6729-6732. Weiss’s translation follows. 97 Barron and Weinberg, l. 6992. 98 Neil Wright, p. 166 99 Barron and Weinberg, l. 15896. 34 message home to Saxland that is received by “heȝe Sexisce men.”100 These distinctions are not made in Wace, who never specifies whether these new arrivals are Angles or Saxons; rather, as

Wright argues, “it is Laȝamon himself who adds the detail that they are noble Saxish men, and so directly attributes the repopulation of England to the Saxons.”101 Kirby’s thesis thus does not hold, and Laȝamon’s apparently racialized attitude toward the peoples of Britain—so central to

Le Saux’s reading and many others—must be reconsidered.

Another influential branch of this disagreement grows from a 1990 Speculum article by

Daniel Donoghue entitled “Laȝamon’s Ambivalence.” Donoghue argues from both content and an examination of verse form that Laȝamon’s attitude toward the past is not charged in any particular institutional direction but is, rather, essentially ambivalent, both supporting the budding proto-nationalist sentiment of the thirteenth-century English and rejecting its ancestral terms: “Laȝamon puts the Anglo-Saxons in the role of villains at the same time he imitates the verse that perpetuated the fame of Germanic heroes such as Hengest,” consistently adapting

Wace’s characteristically Norman scenes of battle “to something more reminiscent of the preconquest Anglo-Saxons, even to the extent of transforming chivalric knights into Germanic foot soldiers.”102 The way most twentieth-century scholars resolved this irony—that of Borges’s

Saxon poet singing and celebrating the inherent vice of his own people—was, according to

Donoghue, to claim that “Laȝamon’s sympathies were nationalistic.”103 Laȝamon’s poetics, in this view, are a kind of sociolinguistic resistance, a merging of British history with Anglo-Saxon literary technique as a united front against the imposition of Norman language and culture.

Laȝamon, in this view, intentionally appropriates British history and sanctifies the invading

Saxons through their conversion to Christianity, blending the two peoples under the proto-

100 Ibid., l. 15933. 101 Neil Wright, 167. 102 Daniel Donoghue, “Laȝamon’s Ambivalence,” Speculum, vol. 65, no. 3, 1990, p. 546. 103 Ibid. p. 555. 35 nationalist banner of a Christian England, making the Christian Norman invasion of a fellow

Christian land, as in Le Saux, “morally incomprehensible.”104 Donoghue cites Michael

Swanton’s claim in English Poetry Before Chaucer—that “Laȝamon’s is ‘a national and not a racial history… [T]he story is not of the Britons but of the land of Britain’”105—as a case in point, qualifying that although other studies are perhaps not so forthright in this attitude, they use the term “nationalism” without precision, focusing too intently on the “Englishness” of

Laȝamon’s poetry without a corresponding critical analysis of what cultural weight

“Englishness” might carry in the early thirteenth century.

Rather, the modern concept of nationalism would have been alien to Laȝamon, who does, in fact, with one important exception, keep the Anglene and Bruttene, at the very least, linguistically separate, displaying instead, in Donoghue’s reading, an eschatological take on history in the vein of Gildas and Wulfstan: as the Britons were divinely punished for their apostasy by the arrival of the Saxons, so too were the English punished by the Normans.

Laȝamon reveals this cyclical position relatively early in his text when he bemoans the change of place names that occurs whenever the power structure shifts:

Seoððen her com vncuð folc, faren in þessere þeode

and nemneden þa burh Lundin an heore leode-wisen.

Seoððen comen Sæxisce men and Lundene he cleopeden;

þe nome ileste longe inne þisse londe.

Seoððen comen Normans mid heore nið-craften

and nemneden heo Lundres —þeos leodes he amærden!

Swa is al þis lond iuaren for uncuðe leoden

þeo þis londe hæbbeð biwunnen and eft beoð idriuen hennene;

104 Le Saux, 1989, p. 222, n. 131. 105 Donoghue, p. 555 36 and eft hit biȝetten oðeræ þe uncuðe weoren…106

(And afterwards there came strange people, they came into this land and named the city

Lundin after the custom of their country. Then came Saxon men and called it Lundene;

the name lasted long in this land. Then came Normans with their evil devices and named

it Lundres—they destroyed this people! So has all this land fared because of strange

people that have won this land and after been driven hence; and afterward, it is taken by

other strange people…)

In Donoghue’s reading, Laȝamon’s poem was not politically motivated in the way modern commentators often assume based on anachronistic ideas of nationalism. In other words,

Laȝamon did not set out to define an early English ethno-state, as may be implicit in the broadly pro-Angle or anti-Norman readings of much of the twentieth century. Rather, “the lessons of history […] taught Laȝamon to accept the Norman Conquest as part of the process of inevitable change, while poetry allowed him to draw solace from the nostalgic ideals of an Anglo-Saxon golden age.”107 His ultimate moral stance toward national conquest, so central to earlier interpretations of the poem, is thus, according to Donoghue, personal ambivalence in the face of inscrutable divine providence, and Laȝamon as a historical figure is rendered more or less in the guise of the eardstapa or Wanderer of Old English elegy.

While Donoghue’s argument has been criticized as avoidant rather than transcendent, since the poem is, for many readers, inherently political by nature of belonging to the chronicle tradition,108 it does raise important questions about medieval historiographical process and notions of communal identity. It has been shown through analysis of the Latin marginalia in the

Caligula manuscript—comparing its narrative with events found in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica

106 Barron and Weinberg, ll. 3543-3551. My translation follows. 107 Donoghue, p. 562. 108 See especially James Noble, “Laȝamon’s Ambivalence Reconsidered,” The Text and Tradition of Laȝamon’s Brut, edited by Françoise Le Saux, D. S. Brewer, 1994, pp. 171-182. 37 gentis Anglorum and Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, arguably the most authoritative

Anglo-Saxon- and Anglo-Norman-era histories, respectively—that Laȝamon’s poem was evidently received as a serious attempt at the historical chronicle, perhaps in spite of its alliterative verse form.109 More recent scholars have begun to tease out what exactly Laȝamon’s ethnic identity markers—Angle, Saxon, Briton, etc.—specifically delineate. Margaret Lamont observes that

the term “Ænglisc” as used in Laȝamon’s Brut is part of a larger move in English

historiography more generally, in which “English” becomes a broader, more inclusive

term than either “Saxon” or “Briton” before it. As far back as Bede’s Historia

ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes merge to become the

English people. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, too, the different kingdoms under the

heptarchy increasingly come under the rubric of Angelcynn as the history progresses.

These Anglo-Saxon era texts, both of which survived into the twelfth century, thus

provided a template for the assimilation of multiple groups into a tentative

“Englishness.”110

The political category of “English” arises only late in the Anglo-Saxon era as a calculated, quasi- propagandistic push toward unification in the face of Danish invasion; Alfred was the first ruler to use the title Anglorum Saxonum rex, as opposed to king of those under Danish rule, and

Æthelstan adopted the title rex Anglorum after capturing Danish York, signaling his reign over what must be understood as the whole of the isle of Britain qua England, not simply those people

109 See Carole Weinberg, “The Latin Marginal Glosses in the Caligula Manuscript of Laȝamon’s Brut,” The Text and Contexts of Laȝamon’s Brut, edited by Françoise Le Saux, D. S. Brewer, 1994, pp. 103-121. 110 Margaret Lamont, “When are the Saxons ‘Ænglisc’?: Language and Readerly Identity in Laȝamon’s Brut,” Reading Laȝamon’s Brut: Approaches and Explorations, edited by Carole Weinberg, Jane Roberts, and Rosamund Allen. Brill, 2013, p. 315. 38 descended from Hengest or living in the formerly independent Kingdoms of Mercia or East

Anglia, those founded, according to Bede, by the Angles.111

From its earliest usage, then, “English” as a marker of communal identity has contained multitudes and held a political—rather than ethnic or racial—valence, as we can infer from the fact that Æthelstan, a Mercian native (i.e., descended from the Angles) crowned King of Mercia before his accession to the throne of Wessex, retained the title rex Saxonum in Mercia after the declaration of rex Anglorum elsewhere. This suggests that while the term “Saxon” continued to refer to a particular set of ethnically and culturally homogeneous people, at least in some usage,

“English,” from the time of Bede in 731 through the tenth century, involved a broader spectrum of people and cultures than has perhaps been allowed in recent criticism, especially in discussions of the thirteenth-century Laȝamon’s apparently endemic “Englishness.” The same pattern follows in use of the term “Viking,” which in Anglo-Saxon vocabulary originally referred to Scandinavian pirates and only later came to identify Norse and Danish peoples of the Middle

Ages more generally, a linguistic widening that collapses multiple politically distinct people groups into a single, reductive category. The same pattern follows again in medieval usage of the term “Norman,” a tenth-century coinage referring to the ethnically Danish, Norse, Frankish,

Breton, and Flemish peoples living in the northern region of France previously called Neustria under the rule of the Norse invader Rollo and the succeeding Dukes of Normandy, a dynasty barely 200 years old by the time of Henry II’s ascension to the English throne. “Norman” is not an ethnic signifier in the same way that “Briton” or “Pict” is—it makes no aboriginal or otherwise genetically institutional claim to a people or homeland. Rather, it is a sociolinguistic convenience referring to people who originate from the cardinal direction North, at least relative to France. As Wace explains in the Roman de Rou:

111 See George Molyneaux, The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century, Oxford University Press, 2015, especially p. 200. 39 Justez ensemble north e man, / E ensemble dites Northman:

Ceo est huem de north en rumanz, / De ceo uint li nuns as Normanz;

Norman soelent ester apele / Cil ki la dunt north uient sunt ne,

E de Normanz est apelee / Normendie que il unt poplee.112

(Bring together ‘north’ and ‘man’ and together you say Northman, that is ‘man of the

north’ in the vernacular, and from this came the name Normans. Those who were born

where the north wind comes from are habitually called Normans, and from the Normans

is derived the name Normandy, which they have populated.)113

Indeed, in a full third of Laȝamon’s usages of the word “Normandie,”114 he reminds his audience that the region used to be known as Neustria—in at least three places where Wace does not invoke the ancient name—and only once mentions the Normans as a people,115 evidently mindful of the fact that Normandy, like England before it, did not always exist. In fact, when Laȝamon describes the post-Arthurian conquest of the island by the Saxon-allied African lord Gurmund, he adds to Wace’s account that many Britons fled into Neustria,116 inferring—unlike Wace, who wrote for the virulently anti-Celtic Norman court—that the later Normans were perhaps descendants of this British remnant.

In regard to use of “English” as a similar kind of identity marker, Lamont finds it

“tempting to trace […] a thread of medieval English self-definition that arises out of acknowledged multiplicity to Norman influence,”117 an unexpected reading, to be sure, but not impossible. Æthelstan’s reign as rex Anglorum coincided exactly with the last years of Rollo’s

112 Maistre Wace’s Roman de Rou et des Ducs de Normandie, vol. 2, edited by Hugo Anderson, Henninger, 1879, ll. 61-68. 113 The History of the Norman People: Wace’s Roman de Rou, translated by Glyn S. Burgess, Boydell, 2004, p. 91. 114 Barron and Weinberg, ll. 12061, 12177, 12591, 13054, and 14546. 115 Ibid., l. 3548, the infamous nið-craften passage in which Laȝamon laments the Normans’ arrival in England, where Wace mentions only that they struggled with English place names. 116 Ibid., l. 14546. Wace’s account mentions only that Britons fled into Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, whereas Laȝamon adds that some fled into Neustria and Ireland. 117 Lamont, p. 316. 40 rule over Normandy, and the Anglo-Saxon king’s half-sister Eadgifu was married to the Frankish king Charles the Simple in 918, just seven years after the latter ceded Normandy and, supposedly, his daughter Gisela to Rollo. Norman historiography, of which Laȝamon’s primary source the Roman de Brut, and more directly the Roman de Rou, may be considered a fairly typical example, was unique among medieval cultures in its approach to national self-definition.

As Marjorie Chibnall explains:

The Norman myth was different from other origin-myths. Dudo described a strange

vision that had come to Rollo before he began the conquest of Normandy [that] was

interpreted to mean that after his baptism Rollo would rule over many peoples who had

come together from many nations to become a single people. This acceptance of the very

mixed racial population […] which made up the Norman people from the first was

exceptional in origin-myths. Although Rollo was claimed as a descendant of the Trojan

Antenor, he ruled over a mixed people, and its strength was in the mixture.118

Just as Rollo’s Normandy comprised many peoples and cultures, so was Bede’s gens Anglorum composed of ethnic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—and so, in turn, did Æthelstan rule as rex

Anglorum over the ethnic Britons, Saxons, Danes, and Angles of the island known as England, and the Angevin rulers, under whom Wace and Laȝamon wrote, over the even larger and more socio-linguistically diverse Angevin Empire. Laȝamon’s complicated rhetorical choice to narrate

British history with an English voice through an acknowledged French-language source is not so mystifying—nor as endemically, defiantly Anglo-Saxon—when shown to belong to this same time-honored tradition of imagining England in the plural.

Englishness, as it was understood in its earliest form and through to the historiographical tradition of Laȝamon and his contemporaries, was nearly always a semi-fluid, intentionally

118 Marjorie Chibnall, The Debate on the Norman Conquest, Manchester University Press, 1999, p. 127. 41 inclusive category of communal identity, one that could encompass Angles, Saxons, Jutes,

Britons, sometimes Danes, and, perhaps by the early thirteenth century, some 150 years after the

Conquest, those disparate peoples previously called Normans. Jonathan Davis-Secord notes that the Otho scribe, especially, extensively reduces Laȝamon’s use of the term leod, which, though it can simply mean “land,” often connotes blood, people, etc. He suggests that this revision expresses a late thirteenth century attitude toward Englishness that saw Norman English literati, after the 1204 loss of Normandy, self-identifying as English and thus downplaying anything in the Brut that would have drawn attention to their particular status as newcomers or outsiders.119

It is a compelling argument, but the attitude Davis-Secord describes is just as present in Caligula, which, as previously noted, only names the Norman people once, in passing, and consistently renders its history according to the goal set forth in Laȝamon’s prologue:

þet he wolde of Engle þa æðelæn tellen,

wat heo ihoten weoren and wonene he comen

þa Englene londe ærest ahten120

(…that he would tell of the noble English, what they were called and from where they

came that first possessed the land of England…)

Caligula, as often as Otho, distinctly reduces particularities of Norman difference, especially when understood as an adaptation of Wace. In other words, in spite of the fact that the Angles did not arrive on the scene until late in time, Laȝamon considered his entire history, from the fall of Troy to the flight of Cadwallader, an English history.121 What was not in its own time English

119 Jonathan Davis-Secord, “Revising Race in Laȝamon’s Brut.” JEGP, vol. 116, no. 2, 2017, pp. 156-181. 120 Barron and Weinberg, ll. 7-9. My translation follows. 121 F. L. Gillespy argued in 1916 that “the work is to be considered a record not of Trojans and Britons, and so on, but of the English—the race which holds the country at a given time being the English race—banded together against outsiders and heathens.” See F. L. Gillespy, “Laȝamon’s Brut: A Comparative Study in Narrative Art,” University of California Publications in Modern Philology, vol. 3, 1916, pp. 473. I hold Gillespy’s study in high esteem and find myself drawn toward many of her arguments that have come under fire in the decades since her death, particularly her major emphasis on characterization and the poet’s articulation of mood. In this instance, 42 may become English through a process of cultural grafting and affective transformation of the

English space of appearance. Laȝamon’s use of the English language in the composition of his poem need not, as a bare fact, indicate any kind of politically subversive act against the incumbent Norman rulers, their language, or their culture. Rather, his historiographical practice of describing all the peoples of medieval Britain as “English” may, in fact, be an extension of

Norman self-fashioning that does not rely on primarily racial signifiers.

Laȝamon’s narrative, thus, cannot be considered “English” in the culturally exclusionary nationalistic or proto-nationalistic way many twentieth-century scholars have tended to read it.

Its language, though unique and perhaps archaistic, need not indicate an intentional preservationist turn toward a conquered and dying Anglo-Saxon culture. Attempts to explain its verse form by comparing it to Old English prose and meter have been uniformly inconclusive.122

Much of its vocabulary is idiosyncratic, and the length of its lines, to say nothing of the text as a whole, does not correspond to any surviving Anglo-Saxon exemplar. The academy’s own received prejudices about what medieval English poetic voice is supposed to sound like—many based on the example of Beowulf, a poem about a Geatish warrior’s adventures in Denmark with no clear extant reference outside of its own manuscript—are deposited unfairly onto our received image of Laȝamon the poet-priest. Le Saux, after failing to find any firm purchase in linking the

Brut to Old English sources, concludes matter-of-factly that “the Brut sounds English mainly because it is written in English, by a man whose mother-tongue was English, and whose cultural

however, I find her particular definition based solely on geographic possession too limited and not in the spirit of medieval communal signification. 122 See Eric Weiskott, English Alliterative Verse, Cambridge University Press, 2016, especially chapter 3, “Lawman, the Last Old English Poet and the First Middle English Poet.” Weiskott provides an excellent overview of previous scholarship, but although his project is to locate the Brut as an indispensable link between Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the history of alliterative verse, there is not enough manuscript evidence to conclusively prove any direction of Laȝamon’s literary influence beyond a few later metrical chronicles. His chapter is an erudite if roundabout way of agreeing with Le Saux’s simple statement that the Brut sounds like English because it is English. 43 background was English.”123 In the face, therefore, of a more nuanced understanding of the communal signification of Englishness, Donoghue’s image of a poet ambivalent to the social change around him, trusting in providence to order history rightly, begins to break down as well.

The fact of Laȝamon’s own re-ordering of history through his English-language writing, and, further, the fact of its marked difference from his sources, strongly suggests that his is not simply a matter-of-fact narration of a history of conquest attributed stoically to an interventionist deity.

Rather than commit his characters to generalized behavioral patterns based on ancestry and birthplace, Laȝamon’s poem, while certainly cyclical and oriented toward an etiology of

England, makes important emendations to Wace’s account, minimizing several affective particulars of cultural identity in order to emphasize not only the God-ordained sequence of history but the central role of individual people in enacting and performing within the space of appearance the events that comprise this sequence.

Minimizing Difference

In the adaptation from Wace’s French-language text to his own English poem, Laȝamon produces, in Le Saux’s estimation, “a fairly faithful translation.”124 He does not significantly alter the events or major characters, ostensibly because he is treating his subject as a narration of actual events, at least as he understood them. J. S. P. Tatlock notes that Laȝamon “almost never inserts wholly new episodes or incidents, except amplifications of what he has found in

Wace.”125 These amplifications, as many scholars have noted, increase the length of the English poem relative to its source by about 1200 lines.126 Le Saux, building on the earlier work of

123 Le Saux, 1989, p. 205. 124 Le Saux, 1989, p. 24. 125 J. S. P. Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain, University of California Press, 1950, p. 489. 126 Following Brook and Leslie’s edition, and later Barron and Weinberg’s, which reckons each set of two half-lines as one long line, roughly corresponding, in terms of meaning, to one French couplet. Madden’s earlier edition numbered the poem by half-lines, resulting in a 32,341-line poem and thereby dramatically inflating the poem’s 44 Håkan Ringbom, provides an indispensable table comparing the lengths of the major episodes in

Wace and Laȝamon’s respective poems, along with a measure of the difference between them.127

Although the table does not account for any translocations of narrative content, narratorial asides, or general differences in language and literary technique, it does show obvious trends in

Laȝamon’s overall process of adaptation, such as compression of the initial Brutus episode before he arrives in Albion—a loss of 197 total lines—and a steady march toward expansion starting with the birth of Christ during the reign of Kimbelin. The passages bearing the most sustained amplification are found in what may generally be called the Saxon section, including those scenes involving Constantine, Vortigern, and Uther—the scenes in which the Saxons are most fully rendered villainous. Overwhelmingly, however, the biggest changes occur in the

Arthurian section proper, a full 1021 lines added to the episode beginning with Arthur’s war of repatriation with Childric through the conquest of France and 902 total lines removed from the episode beginning with the Roman challenge through Arthur’s death, a sizable reduction in total in spite of the major addition of a striking and apparently original dream sequence beginning at line 13971. Le Saux’s table allows for a top-down look at the structure of the poem in comparison to Wace’s exemplar, and it is clear that Laȝamon’s additions (and three major sites of subtraction) emphasize particular moments in his English history, notably the beginning of the

British king Arthur’s reign and the events that led to it.

In terms of Laȝamon’s subtractions, Le Saux observes a further three subcategories.128

The first, omission of technical description, applies especially to descriptions of battle, in which

Wace’s impressive vocabulary of French war machinery is replaced by a more generalized

perceived length, which is, in fact, not substantially longer than the Roman de Brut when counted sense unit for sense unit. 127 Le Saux, 1989, p. 31. 128 Le Saux, 1989, p. 33 ff. 45 Germanic clash-of-arms motif, as described in detail by Donoghue.129 Although this tendency has been read as ignorance of contemporary English battle practices, especially by scholars who view the poet as an antiquarian or Anglo-Saxon relic, Laȝamon’s narration betrays instead a marked disinterest in the technical details of warfare. Rather than simply reproduce Wace’s terms or offer English corollaries, Laȝamon instead completely eliminates complicated military jargon in favor of shorter, perhaps more lyrical battle motifs such as rolling heads and clashing brands, motifs that evidently had more affective cachet for his English audience. The second of

Le Saux’s subcategories is the deletion of redundant or otherwise not immediately relevant material. The 31-line allegorical description of Wace’s sirens (ll. 733-764), for example, is trimmed down to a more direct eight (ll. 663-670), and the French poet’s description of the changing place names of Britain (ll. 3762-3784), discussed ad nauseam in scholarship, is whittled down to nearly half its original length (ll. 3543-3555), largely through the omission of

Wace’s insistent repetition of the fact that each new wave of arrivals did not speak the island’s earlier language. The elimination of this repeated detail, however, as perhaps with reducing the markedly French martial vocabulary, may be telling of Laȝamon’s larger narrative agenda: downplaying cultural and linguistic difference between the various inhabitants of Britain.

On this point, most notable among his sites of subtraction is Laȝamon’s systematic revision of Wace’s narratorial attitude toward the Britons, which he achieves not through adding positive commentary, but by removing their unfavorable traits and other details that might detract from their esteem—portraying them even more positively than his ultimate source, the

Welsh Geoffrey of Monmouth. A typical short example might be that of the Saxons fleeing

Cador’s advance after the death of Colgrim, of whom Wace records, “Si cum il mielz fuïr

129 Donoghue, pp. 546-550. 46 poeient; / Pur aler plus legierement, / E pur fuïr delivrement / Aveient lur armes getees.”130

Rather than impute to the Britons the dishonor of attacking unarmed men, Laȝamon instead writes, “þa gon he to fleonne feondliche swiðe, / and Cador þe kene com him after sone.”131 In the English version, Cador directly pursues the Saxon emperor, Childric, who cowers before the might of Arthur and his lieutenant. The Britons are strong and imposing, having no need to chase down and murder those who have already surrendered. Rather than utilize British culture as an affective byword for barbarism like Wace and Chrétien de Troyes, Laȝamon highlights their heroism and thereby changes their moral standing in the space of appearance.

More striking, however, are the closing passages of each long poem. Wace, describing the return to Britain of the Celtic lords Yvor and Yni after the death of Chadwalader, presents the

Britons—now called Welsh after the duke Gualun—as such:

Unc puis ne furent del poeir / Qu’il peüssent Logres aveir;

Tuit sunt mué e tuit changié, / Tuit sunt divers e forslignié

De noblesce, d’onur, de murs / E de la vie as anceisurs.

(They never again acquired sufficient power to get Logres. The Welsh have quite altered

and quite changed, they are quite different and have quite degenerated from the nobility,

the honor, the customs and the life of their ancestors.)132

At the end of his history of Britain, in a passage adapted closely from Geoffrey’s Historia, Wace doubles down on his characterization of the native peoples of that land as no longer deserving of political power there, diminished as they are since the time and example of Arthur, thereby reinforcing—if not reifying through the affect of French-language narration—Norman cultural

130 Weiss, ll. 9383-9386. “To run more freely and flee quicker they had jettisoned their arms and only carried their swords.” 131 Barron and Weinberg, ll. 10770-10771. “He [Childric] took to flight in furious haste, and the brave Cador pursued him closely.” 132 Weiss, ll. 14849-14854. 47 supremacy. Laȝamon’s treatment of this same material, although perhaps unexpected given his own Saxon heritage and tongue, is downright kind in comparison:

And Ænglisce kings walden þas londes,

and Bruttes hit loseden, þis lond and þas leoden,

þat næuere seoððen mære kings neoren here.

Þat ȝet ne com þæs ilke dæi, beo heonneurð alse hit mæi;

iwurðe þet iwurðe, iwurðe Godes wille.133

(And English kings took control of those lands, and the Britons lost it, this land and its

people, that nevermore since that time have been kings here. The day has not yet come,

whatever else may happen. Let be what will be, let God’s will be done.)

Laȝamon eschews any and all notion of British degeneration, stating simply that rule over the island was lost to English kings and alluding, in an oblique but important addition to Wace, to the Merlinic prophecy of Arthur’s return. He voices at the end of his British history the idea that although the line of kings from Brutus to Cadwallader is broken, it may still recur if God wills it.

Overall, while Wace displays an overwhelmingly positive attitude toward Arthur and his immediate coterie, even in comparison to Geoffrey, he bears a clear cultural grudge toward the

Britons—received from Geoffrey, surely, but also likely influenced by his presumed Norman patronage. Laȝamon, through removing the Britons’ less-flattering traits from the account and declining to comment on their supposed degeneration from their ancestors, substantially reduces the narrative impact of this bias and, in the process of narrating the story in English, reduces overall cultural difference. His subtractive changes are less a matter of language than culturally specific affect, resulting not merely in generally Anglicized narration but a complete overhaul in ethical perspective.

133 Barron and Weinberg, ll. 16091-16095. My translation follows. 48 In terms of Laȝamon’s expansions, much has been made of his piecemeal reintroduction of Merlin’s prophecies. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account, after Merlin prophesies to

Vortigernus about the dragons beneath his tower, they rise and do battle with one another.

Vortigernus asks Merlin to explain the sign, and he does so at length. Spanning chapters 109-117 of Geoffrey’s Historia and apparently collected and disseminated as their own discrete work, the prophecies of Merlin are eliminated from nearly all extant manuscripts of Wace’s Roman de

Brut.134 Wace writes simply:

Dunc dist Merlin le prophecies / Que vus avez, ço crei, oïes,

Des reis ki a venir esteient, / Ki la terre tenir deveient.

Ne vuil sun livre translater / Quant jo nel sai interpreter;

Nule rien dire nen vuldreie / Que se ne fust cum jo dirreie.

(Then Merlin made the prophecies which I believe you have heard, of the kings who were

to come and who were to hold the land. I do not wish to translate his book, since I do not

know how to interpret it; I would not like to say anything, in case what I say does not

happen.)135

As with his general narratorial stance toward all things Celtic, it has been surmised that Wace eliminated this section to appease his courtly Norman audience, ostensibly Henry II, whose hostility toward the native peoples of Britain and their literary culture is well documented. Wace seemingly limits the power of the British prophet in order to undermine any twelfth-century hope of an anti-Norman British uprising rooted in the idea of Arthur’s return, or at least to assuage

134 Weiss importantly notes that “‘Wilhelme,’ the scribe of MS L [Lincoln Cathedral Library 104], inserts Merlin’s prophecies in twelve-syllable lines” after a short scribal preface. MS P, British Library Add. 45103, includes a very similar addition in a different hand, although it is located about forty lines later in the text. See p. 190, n. 2. The overwhelming majority of Wace manuscripts, however, include no such prophecies, and the two that do attribute their French verse form to their respective scribes, not to Wace himself. 135 Weiss, ll. 7535-7542 49 those newly in power after nearly two decades of so-called Anarchy.136 Laȝamon makes no such narratorial aside, instead restoring, in the form of direct speech, thirty-three lines in which Merlin

“bluðeliche” tells Vortiger all about his coming misfortune at the hands of those he has wronged.

The poetic content here is obviously greatly compressed in comparison to Geoffrey, but in relation to Wace, the addition is striking.

Merlin’s prophecies, especially those related to Arthur’s second coming, are also interspersed throughout Laȝamon’s text at several places where they are present in neither Wace nor Geoffrey, each time reminding Laȝamon’s English readers of the validity of Merlin’s prophecy and the real hope of Arthurian salvation. This occurs most notably at lines 14295-

14297 after Arthur is taken away and the narrator reiterates the promise of a British messiah.

Whereas Wace states simply that he will say no more than Merlin did, which is that Arthur’s death would be doubtful and his body was taken away,137 Laȝamon writes that the Britons believe Arthur is still alive and that “while wes an witeȝe Merlin ihate; / he bodede mid worde— his quiðes weoren soðe—þat an Arður138 sculde ȝete cum Anglen to fulste.”139 Laȝamon continues in this passage, by invoking Arthur as a help for Anglen, to integrate the Britons into a broader English identity and reinforces the notion of Merlin’s authority as a seer, essentially guaranteeing for his English readers both that Arthur will return for their aid, perhaps in spite of the actions of their forebears, and that history is living and active, not simply the half-

136 See Noble, 1992; Aurell, 2007; and Blacker, 1988, who states, p. 70, that “this omission, in fact, is the most dramatic example of Wace’s draining of political import from the material associated with Arthur.” The Angevin court had every reason to suppress Celtic dissent to their rule of the island, and Henry II himself is recorded as personally refuting those Merlinic prophecies that might foment the idea of a future Celtic supremacy. See also note 138 below. 137 Weiss, ll. 13282-13286. 138 Many commentators have noted the indefinite article before Arthur’s name in Caligula, suggesting that it refers instead to “someone like Arthur,” or even Arthur, Duke of Brittany, grandson of Henry II and designated heir to the throne of England by his uncle, Richard I, before Arthur disappeared in 1203, likely murdered by John, which would suggest an earlier date of composition for the poem. This phrasing is not present in Otho, however, and since neither manuscript is contemporary with Laȝamon himself, it is impossible to say whether the article is a scribal error or intended by the author. 139 Barron and Weinberg, 14295-14297. My translation: “There was a wise man called Merlin; he prophesied with words—his sayings were true—that Arthur should yet come to aid the English.” 50 remembered words of a long-dead prophet and the deluded hopes of his followers. R. R. Davies notes that

such prophecies were certainly in circulation in Wales well before the advent of the

Normans, but they were augmented with the passage of each generation… Hope was the

great theme of the Merlinic prophecies—hope of delivery from, and extermination of, the

Saxons and hope of the advent of a messianic deliverer who would once more restore the

Britons to their rightful control of the Island of Britain.140

At face value, this would be a strange attitude for an English author to adopt toward his own people and culture—that same tension present in the readings of Borges, Kirby, et al. In

Laȝamon’s text, however, with its expanded notion of English identity, Arthur as British messiah becomes a different, more complex kind of symbol, unable or unwilling to break the Saxon yoke and with unclear intentions toward the Normans, who, according to Laȝamon’s historiography, might by the early thirteenth century have been considered English as well—unquestionably so by the time the extant manuscripts were copied. Thus where Wace eliminates Merlin’s pro-

British political sentiment, Laȝamon restores it but broadens its scope to include a far more diverse range of people within the English space of appearance.

Kelley Wickham-Crowley considers this re-grafting of Merlin from the original

Galfridian vine the crux of Laȝamon’s poetic technique, seeing in his historiographical presentation something resembling a Bakhtinian novel. Although this thesis goes perhaps too far in applying modern patterns of thought to a medieval text, Wickham-Crowley makes several astute observations, including that “Laȝamon was not ambivalent… he was instead an innovative compromiser who saw real prophecy, the true hand of God, in Merlin and in British tradition…

He comments on that prophecy in a way that could create a better political reality for all, based

140 R. R. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence, and Change: Wales 1063-1415, University of Wales Press, 1987, p. 79. 51 on individual morality that gave meaning to a larger social context.”141 He does this, she argues, by an increased attention to the role of the individual in the procession of history: “Instead of a slavish imitation or dead-end epic, the Brut emphasizes the individual, and the active repercussions of personal honor and choice, so that upon arriving at Merlin’s prophecies after many historical events as exempla, the reader’s choice becomes clear.”142 Her argument is so focused on establishing Laȝamon’s attitude toward Merlin, however, that Wickham-Crowley does not have space to sufficiently develop exactly what she means by “the individual” or “the reader’s choice,” leaving a tantalizing loose end that this present study seeks to tie up through renewed attention to the Arthurian space of appearance and the modes of affect it cultivates in

Laȝamon’s text.

The Invention of Speech

Beyond the case of Merlin, it is readily apparent that the bulk of Laȝamon’s additions to

Wace’s narrative comes in the form of direct speech. The drastic inflation of speech acts in the

English poem has been widely recognized in scholarship at least since F. L. Gillespy in 1916.

For Gillespy, Laȝamon’s intense focus on character is the soul of his text and the genius of his craft. As with the specific details of battle that he modifies or elides, Laȝamon creates dialogue for his historical actors where none previously existed in his sources. She argues: “Although

[Laȝamon] thought of himself as a historian, his is a poetic rather than a critical nature and his allegiance to imaginative verisimilitude is certainly equal to his desire for historic truth. He never thought of the two as conflicting elements.”143 This characteristically medieval attitude toward

141 Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley, “Laȝamon’s Narrative Innovations and Bakhtin’s Theories,” The Text and Tradition of Laȝamon’s Brut, edited by Françoise Le Saux, Brewer, 1994, p. 222. 142 Ibid., 223. 143 Gillespy, p. 375. This is a concept Stephen Colbert would later term “truthiness.” 52 the past, as previously noted, pervades Laȝamon’s text and allows him to expand English history with a sense of literary purpose distinct from his sources.

For example, Wace says of the French tribune Frolle, after being defeated in battle by

Arthur and his army: “Frolle, de la descunfiture, / Vint a Paris grant aleüre, / Ne s’osa aillurs arrester / Ne ne se volt aillurs fïer; / Recet defensable quereit / Kar Artur e sa gent cremeit.”144

The narrator presents an expected scene, a defeated enemy seeking refuge in the nearest fortifiable city. By this point in the Roman de Brut, readers have seen this exact sequence of events a dozen times or more: with each of the Saxon leaders, with each of the kings of the North

Sea, and now with Frolle. The response of Arthur’s enemies, in Wace’s account, is an established formula, consistent in terms of its content and occasionally even on the level of syntax. Of Gillomar, the Irish king, Wace says, for example: “Combatre s’ala cuntre Artur, /

Mais ne fist mie a buen eür.”145 Just 248 lines later, Frolle is described in nearly identical terms:

“A bataille ala cuntre Artur, / Mais nel fist mie a bon eür.”146 Laȝamon’s poem is also sometimes structured by formulas and stock phrases, but only rarely in the same way as Wace. Rather,

Laȝamon is far more prone to expansion, especially in the case of extreme emotions. When

Arthur defeats Frolle in the English poem, Laȝamon records the following:

Þa fleh into Parise Frolle þe riche

and þa ȝeten tunden mid teonen inoȝe;

and þa word seide, sorhful an heorte:

“Leouere me weore þat ich iboren neore!”147

(Then the mighty Frolle fled into Paris and closed the gates with great suffering. He said

these words, sorrowful at heart: “Better were it for me that I had never been born!”)

144 Weiss, ll. 9955-9960. “After Frollo was defeated, he came to Paris in great haste, not daring to stop anywhere or trust anyone. He was seeking a secure refuge, because he feared Arthur and his army.” 145 Ibid., ll. 9679-9680. “He went off to fight Arthur but was unsuccessful.” 146 Ibid., ll. 9927-9928. “He went to do battle with Arthur but was unsuccessful.” 147 Barron and Weinberg, ll. 11737-11740. My translation follows. 53 Rather than tell the reader simply that Frolle fears Arthur, Laȝamon depicts him in the deepest despair, both through narration—with the descriptions of his sorhful heorte and teonen inoȝe— and through the addition of direct speech. Frolle himself laments his condition, almost seemingly to the reader, as there is no clearly stated diegetic audience for his outburst. Whereas Wace records that Frolle made arrangements to fortify the city during his fearful arrival, it is only after his very short speech in Laȝamon that the citizens of Paris themselves are said to have “gunnen beouien” 148 and made provisions for the siege. The particulars are implicit in the French poem, but in the Brut it is Frolle’s individual, directly spoken reaction to Arthur’s unprecedented might that catalyzes the action of other characters. Rather than a formulaic presentation of past historical events, Laȝamon renders a scene that makes the engine of history an affective network of human actions and reactions—a space of appearance. This kind of adaptation, as Gillespy and

Tatlock agree, does not constitute substantive alteration of the historical data of his source, but it does, importantly, have the power to shape his implied reader’s emotional response to the event, emphasizing human action in history and thereby the reader’s own capability for reaction in the face of social or political change.

For Håkan Ringbom, enthusiasm for Laȝamon’s character choices like that propounded by Gillespy is misplaced, or at least exaggerated. While he recognizes that direct speech and markers thereof constitute the majority of Laȝamon’s additions to Wace’s text, he observes that they are often repetitive stock phrases, like the epithet “aðelest kingen” preceding many of

Arthur’s speeches,149 adding more to the ultimate tedium of his long narrative than to nuanced explorations of individual characters. “A certain monotony,” he argues, “was, of course, inherent in Lawman’s material, but it is a notable fact that while Lawman doubles the length of Wace’s poem hardly any of his amplifications extend further than to the well-known and familiar stock

148 Ibid., l. 11742. “Begun to tremble.” 149 The phrase is used once in reference to Argal and Uther, four times in reference to Aurelius, and upwards of forty times in reference to Arthur. 54 situations.”150 Ringbom, using Madden’s 32,000-line edition, operates under the assumption that the English poem is word for word substantially longer than its French source, a mistake with a detrimental effect on his understanding of the poem’s content and, ironically for his study, narrative technique. Still, he correctly identifies that Laȝamon more than triples the instances of direct speech from those found in Wace, inflating the number from 156 to a staggering 502, and notes that Laȝamon “uses direct speech in the same contexts as Wace, only much more frequently.”151 He explains that “Wace’s speech introductions follow the conventions of prose; they are as simple as possible, without any adornment.”152 usually some variation of “dist il.”

Laȝamon, by contrast, especially in the beginning of his Arthurian section, “makes up little scenes out of brief suggestions in his source,”153 often introducing a named messenger—such as the British soldier Maurin at line 10100, the “Scottisc þein” Patrick at line 10155, or the “oht mon” at line 13971—who interrupts the narration of the poem and delivers news to Arthur personally. Arthur, then, typically responds at some length, and these amplifications from one or two lines in Wace’s narrative voice to four, ten, even up to sixty lines in diegetic speech constitute a significant development in Laȝamon’s narrative technique and thematic emphasis.

Le Saux identifies this “messenger theme” as “Laȝamon’s major device for providing explicit causal relationships between the actions and decisions of given characters.”154 Drawing from Ringbom but turning back to some of Gillespy’s admiration of craft, Le Saux argues, “It is at the turning-points of Arthur’s career that the potentialities of the ‘messenger’ theme are exploited to the full, allowing the king to express himself (in direct speech) more fully than in

150 Håkan Ringbom, Studies in the Narrative Technique of Beowulf and Lawman’s Brut, Åbo Akademi, 1968, p. 123. 151 Ibid., 121. 152 Ibid., 113. 153 Ibid., 122. 154 Le Saux, 1989, p. 56. 55 Wace.”155 Indeed, at all of Arthur’s major milestones in Laȝamon’s account, including his coronation, his war with Childric, his duel with Frolle, his denunciation of Rome, and his discovery of Modred’s treachery, the English poet introduces a long speech or series of speeches not present in Wace, often instigated by the arrival of a messenger who interrupts the scene and transitions the narrative from one historical set piece to another through the intervention of human voice in the space of appearance. By naming these characters and providing them with speech, Laȝamon reifies their humanity, marking them “explicitly present”156 in the narrative and emphasizing the historical necessity of their human action through his dramatic reconfiguration of events in the public sphere. Simply put, Laȝamon discards generalized notions of communal loyalty and identity through anonymous offstage action and instead makes his characters speak in such a way that his history becomes “real,” populated by individual living humans whose actions and affects ripple out not just to one another but into the present tense of his implied audience.

During Arthur’s war with the Saxons, for instance, he is attacked by Baldulf, brother of

Colgrim, who gives up on waiting for the assistance of Childric in relieving the siege of York and decides to ambush Arthur and his army by night. In Wace, this action is quickly prevented by the intervention of an anonymous someone: “Par nui vuleit l’ost esturmir / E del siege faire partir, / Mais alcuns quis vit esbuschier / Le curut al rei acuintier.”157 In just two couplets,

Baldulf plans his attack and is foiled when Arthur learns about it through the coincidental observation of a friendly party. Laȝamon, however, does not leave the outcome of this scene to chance. He introduces “ænne cniht Bruttiscne— / he wes Arðures mæi, Maurin ihaten,”158 a sleeper agent in Baldulf’s retinue who slips away in the night to deliver Baldulf’s plans to Arthur

155 Ibid., 54. 156 Ibid., 49. 157 Weiss, ll. 9073-9076. “[Baldulf] intended to overwhelm Arthur’s army by night and make it give up the siege, but someone who saw them in ambush ran to tell the king.” 158 Barron and Weinberg, ll. 10099-10100. “…a British soldier—he was Arthur’s kinsman, called Maurin.” 56 directly. In a speech of eleven lines, Maurin greets his kinsman, informs him of his enemy’s plan, and gives him fielding advice, telling Arthur to “send nu uorð Cador, þene eorl of

Cornwaile,”159 whom Maurin himself will lead back to Baldulf’s camp in order that Cador and his men “muwen Baldulf slæn alse enne wulf.”160 Arthur follows these instructions, and the battle then plays out over just five lines, in which the reader is told that Cador and his British soldiers came upon the Saxon troop from all sides and killed or captured every last man except

Baldulf. While the scene of Arthur learning of Baldulf’s attack is increased from four lines in

Wace to seventeen in Laȝamon through the addition of Maurin and his speech, the following description of battle is actually compressed from eight lines in Wace to just five, a set of changes that demonstrates Laȝamon’s strong preference for speech acts over the presentation of violence.

For a text that is largely an account of ancient military conquest, in fact, Laȝamon’s intrusive narratorial commentary on the purpose of war is starkly different from that found in his source. This difference, exemplified in each author’s respective treatment of Arthur seeking advice about the coming war with Rome, signals an important adaptation in Laȝamon’s account that both further diminishes Wace’s air of continental superiority and establishes his own emphasis on the political responsibilities of individual people within the space of appearance.

According to Wace, when Arthur’s sovereignty is challenged by Roman emissaries and he takes counsel from his barons regarding how he should respond, a smiling Cador says on the way to the meeting place:

En grant crieme ai, dist il, esté, / E mainte feiz en ai pensé,

Que par oisdives e par pais / Devenissent Bretun malveis.

Kar oisdive atrait malvaistied / E maint hume ad aperecied.

Uisdive met hume en peresce, / Uisdive amenuse prüesce,

159 Ibid., l. 10110. 160 Ibid, l. 10114. 57 Uisdive esmuet les lecheries, / Uisdive espret lé drueries.

Par lunc repos e par uisdive / Est juvente tost ententive

A gas, a deduit e a tables, / E a alters geus deportables.

Par lunc sujur e par repos / Poüm nus perdre nostre los.

(I’ve often thought and been very afraid that the British would become weaklings through

peace and idleness. For idleness attracts weakness and makes a man lazy. Idleness brings

indolence, idleness lessens prowess, idleness inflames lechery and idleness kindles love

affairs. Much rest and idleness makes youth give all its attention to jokes, pleasure, board

games, and other amusing sports. Through long rests and inactivity we could lose our

renown.)161

Cador is itching for a war, a chance to shake the rust off his old warrior’s bones that have fallen into disuse in the Pax Arthuriana. His is an attitude common to older generations, disdainful of the very peace he has won for the younger populace through his valor. Walwein, in a scene not found in Geoffrey’s account, responds: “Bone est la pais emprés la gurre, / Plus bele e mieldre en est la terre; / Mult sunt bones les gaberies / E bones sunt les drueries. / Pur amistié e pur amies /

Funt chevalier chevaleries” (“Peace is good after war and the land is the better and lovelier for it.

Jokes are excellent and so are love affairs. It’s for love and their beloved that knights do knightly deeds.”)162 Walwein, of course, gives voice to a younger soldier’s perspective, one who understands that the only honorable purpose of war is to bring about peace, but true to his character as established here and in subsequent continental texts, Walwein also serves as the mouthpiece of characteristically French chivalry. A true knight’s martial deeds are performed in service to his beloved within the affective configuration of fin’amor,163 and Walwein’s advice here—informally delivered and ignored by Arthur and his barons—serves emotionally to

161 Weiss, ll. 10737-10752. 162 Ibid., ll. 10767-10772. 163 See Chapter Two. 58 undercut the British appetite for conquest by showing that their lust for battle serves no higher purpose, that it does not conform, in sum, to anachronistic Norman literary attitudes toward valor and knightly behavior, which therefore establishes the Britons, even at their apex, as inferior to

Norman military culture.

Laȝamon gives this scene an entirely different cast. When the Roman message is delivered, the Britons in attendance are outraged and attempt to murder the messengers. Arthur intervenes and admonishes his people, reminding them that “Ælc mon mot liðen / þer his lauerd hine hateð gan.”164 Afterward, the king and his barons adjourn to a nearby fortress to discuss their response. It is only after the formal council has begun, in Laȝamon’s version, rather than on the stairs on the way to the meeting, that Cador speaks, saying something very similar to that found in Wace:

Ich þonkie mine Drihte þat scop þes dæies lihte

þisses dæies ibiden þa to hirede is iboȝen

and þissere tiding þe icumen is to ure kinge,

þat we ne þuruen na mare aswunden liggen here.

For idelnesse is luðer on ælchere þeode

for ildelnesse makeð mon his monschipe leose,

ydelnesse makeð cnihte forleosen his irihte,

idelnesse græiðeð feole uuele craften,

idelnesse makeð leosen feole þusend monnen;

þurh eðeliche dede lute men wel spedeð.

For ȝare we habbeoð stille ileien —ure wurðscipe is þa lasse.

164 Barron and Weinberg, l. 12406. “Every man must go where his lord orders him to go.” 59 (I thank the Lord who created the light of day that I have lived to see this day dawn in the

court and hear this news which has come to our king, so that we need no longer lie idle

here. For idleness is hateful to all peoples since idleness causes a man to lose his valor,

idleness makes a soldier neglect his duty, idleness leads to many evil deeds, idleness

brings to ruin many thousands of men; few men prosper through idle habits. For a long

time we have lain idle—our honor is the less.)165

Although the text of Cador’s speech remains fairly consistent in the adaptation, relocating it to the formal war council changes the character of his message. It is no longer the extemporaneous and unsought opinion of an old veteran but rather official political counsel, which in turn shifts the reader’s reception of Walwain’s response:

Þat iherde Walwain, þe wes Arðures mæi,

and wraððede hine wið Cador swiðe þa þas word kende;

and þus andswærede Walwain þe sele:

“Cador, þu ært a riche mon! Þine rædes ne beoð noht idon,

for god is grið and god is frið þe freoliche þer haldeð wið—

and Godd sulf hit makede þurh his Goddcunde—

for grið makeð godne mon gode works wurchen

for alle monnen bið þa bet þat lond bið þa murgre.”166

(Walwain, who was Arthur’s kinsman, heard that and was greatly enraged with Cador,

who had said these words; and thus the good Walwain answered: “Cador, you are a rich

man! Your counsel is not appropriate, for peace and quiet are good if they are freely

embraced—and God himself created them through his divinity—for peace allows a good

man to do good deeds through which all men may be made better and the land happy.)

165 Ibid., ll. 12428-12438. 166 Ibid., ll. 12451-12458. My translation follows. 60 Walwain’s response, scathing enough in its brash delivery in Wace, is recalibrated in Laȝamon: he is enraged, indignant, and the narration is clearly sympathetic. His speech, like Cador’s, is entered as official counsel, which marks it as serious ideology instead of playful banter. Further, his message has been changed. He responds directly to Cador, pointing out his own social status as the reason for his flawed perspective: Cador is wealthy, a duke, and thus cannot perhaps see the toll war exacts on everyday foot soldiers. Rather than pontificate on love and prowess or the proper behavior of an aristocratic soldier, Laȝamon’s Walwain advocates for the common good, a broader notion of the chivalric habitus perhaps more immediately practicable by Laȝamon’s audience. Peace is the circumstance that allows the kind of generally good behavior among people that benefits all society. Because of this change, Walwain’s advice no longer undermines the specific wartime ethic of the Britons—it no longer imposes, that is, a markedly twelfth- century continental approach to military honor. Instead, it comments more generally on the prospect of conquest. Walwain, having lived in Arthurian peace for over a decade, tells Cador in no uncertain terms that there is no human goodness without peace, and he even appears to suggest through this conclusion that Arthur need not procure any more land.

This series of adaptations enacted by Laȝamon upon Wace’s text—the reduction of cultural difference, the amalgamation of British and English identity, the reintegration of

Merlin’s prophecies, and the addition of speech—shifts the dominant affect of the Arthurian space of appearance away from the received chivalric values of the continent and toward something more accessible to a broader, non-aristocratic Anglophone audience like the one

Laȝamon presumably wrote for. The overall emphasis is not squarely on the deeds of great men and the superhuman feats they were able to accomplish through their own indomitable wills; rather, the English poem places these great men—for indeed, they are still often superhuman— into a network of human action and exchange in which someone like Arthur requires the aid of

61 someone like Maurin, a nobody unattested elsewhere, in order to win a given battle. Characters are given strong emotions, and instead of stating only the effects of sorrow, rage, etc., Laȝamon depicts scenes with diegetic speech in which characters work out their wills and desires on the page. Frolle, the French tribune, despairs of his life on Arthur’s approach, and Merlin prophesies bluðeliche to Vortiger with a palpable smirk. The pageant of British history is rendered not as a rote, unilateral line from Brutus to Cadwallader but as a textile that depends on the voice and action of all sorts of people from different tongues and ethnicities, each given by Laȝamon a distinct human presence, to hold itself together. This historiographical technique has the effect of de-centering the British space of appearance as a hegemonic domain held solely by the political victor. Laȝamon’s English-language narration does, in this reading, appear defiant of Norman culture, but not in the exclusionary, nationalist dimension envisioned by scholars who understand

Laȝamon in preservationist terms; rather, Laȝamon’s Brut is radically inclusive, eliminating

Wace’s condescending tone and granting voice and the experience of humanity to all kinds of people.

One of Laȝamon’s most celebrated additions to his history is Arthur’s discovery of

Modred and Wenhaver’s treachery. In Wace’s account, after defeating Lucius and mourning the

Britons lost in battle against Rome, including his closest companions, Arthur captures the cities around Burgundy and sets his sights on Rome until we are told that “Modred l’en ad returné.”167

What follows is an extended narratorial lament over the shame and the disgrace of Modred’s usurpation of the British throne. We are reminded that he is Arthur’s sister’s son and that Arthur has entrusted his entire realm to Modred’s command. After nine lines of courtly handwringing over how Modred took undue homage from Arthur’s castles and barons, Wace finally reveals

Modred’s ultimate treason: “Kar cuntre cristïene lei / Prist a sun lit femme lu rei, / Femme sun

167 Weiss, l. 13015. “Modred made him turn back.” 62 uncle e sun seignur / Prist a guise de traïtur.”168 On the next line, as in the Baldulf/Maurin episode, Arthur somehow hears the news from an unnamed source and, in perhaps the most unintentionally charming use of litotes in French-language literature, Wace tells that reader that

Arthur “ne li sot gré d’icel servise.”169 Arthur then immediately leaves his French possessions to

Hoel and returns home to reclaim his kingdom.

In Laȝamon’s version, after cleaning up Burgundy, Arthur verbally declares his wish to become the emperor of Rome, and the reader is told that “monie of Rom-leoden wolden þat hit swa eoden”170 because of Arthur’s terrifying reputation as a warrior. (If Arthur has a defined flaw in Laȝamon, it is surely his unslakable thirst for power and landholdings.) A Merlinic prophecy is interjected—“þat Rom-walles sculden aȝein Arðure touallen”171—and then a messenger appears. He speaks with Arthur all night but cannot bring himself to deliver his message to the king. Instead, Arthur gets up in the morning “and strehte his ærmes; / he aras up, and adun sat swulc he weore swiðe seoc.”172 Barry Windeatt notes that “the gestural sequence of

Laȝamon’s Arthur in stretching his arms, standing up and quickly sitting down again, vividly conveys the punch in the stomach that is the impact of the dream’s intimation of Modred’s usurpation.”173 In addition to speech, Laȝamon provides affective, humanizing gestures to his characters, and Arthur’s near swoon before he relates his dream, just fourteen lines after Merlin is invoked to remind the reader of his unparalleled martial prowess, is a powerful image. For thirty-three harrowing lines, Arthur recounts his dream in direct speech to the messenger: he sits atop his hall, Modred strikes at its beams, Wenhaver (“wimmonen leofuest me”) pulls down its walls, Walwain’s arms are broken, and after Arthur gruesomely kills both Modred and

168 Ibid., ll. 13027-13030. “Against Christian law, he took to his bed the king’s wife; he treacherously took the wife of his uncle and lord.” 169 Ibid., l. 13034. “[Arthur] was not grateful to him for such service.” 170 Barron and Weinberg, l. 13955. “Many of the Roman people wished that it were so.” 171 Ibid., l. 13965. “That Rome’s walls should fall to Arthur.” 172 Ibid., ll. 13978-13979. “… and stretched his arms; he rose up, and sat down, as if he were very sick.” 173 Barry Windeatt, “Laȝamon’s Gestures: Body Language in the Brut,” Reading Laȝamon’s Brut: Approaches and Explorations, edited by Carole Weinberg, Jane Roberts, and Rosamund Allen, Brill, 2013, p. 266. 63 Wenhaver, striking off Modred’s head and hacking Wenhaver to pieces, he is abandoned at sea and set upon by monstrous creatures. On waking, he spends the night trembling, reflecting on his vision, and says, “Ich what to iwisse agan is al mi blisse; / for a to mine liue sorȝen ich mot driȝe.”174 As with the earlier example of Frolle, but to a far greater extent, Laȝamon uses the experience of abject despair to humanize his historical characters in a way that Wace does not attempt. Laȝamon’s Arthur is not simply a legendary warrior or a noble king of days gone by; he is a human being whose choices within the space of appearance are opened up by the actions of those around him. For Laȝamon, perhaps especially in this scene, it is not enough for news of this magnitude to come to Arthur offstage, as it were, and he therefore invents a dialogue between

Arthur and this unnamed messenger to slow down the action and shift the emphasis from the political enormity of Modred’s crime against Arthur the king to the emotional impact it makes on

Arthur the man.

Although the events themselves, in the broad view, do not change, the moods and attitudes of Laȝamon’s ostensibly historical characters, most especially Arthur, color his readers’ reception of how and why history occurred the way it did, and this adaptation is the soul of his narrative craft. Ringbom understands this from a perhaps less liberating perspective that many scholars after him, most notably Le Saux, have found persuasive. He argues instead that

Laȝamon imposes his own simple breed of moral determinism on his chronicle material.

His predecessors were mainly interested in how events took place, but Lawman also

shows why they happened. When Lawman finds time to go into details of his narrative,

he explains how the events in the Brut are caused by what went before and how they in

their turn determine what is going to happen afterwards… It is true that the events of the

narrative were ready-made for Lawman, but the increased stress laid upon their causal

174 Barron and Weinberg, ll. 14019-14020. “I know with certainty that all my happiness is ended; for as long as I live I must endure sorrow.” 64 connection and the art of the narrator’s intrusions do, I think, reveal his attitude to the

material as predominantly deterministic.175

According to Ringbom, Laȝamon’s presentation of history is precisely the kind perhaps expected by a mid-century scholar: one committed to the orthodox notion that, for a medieval chronicler, the events of history are ineluctably ordered either by God’s providence or through the movement of translatio imperii and that all recorded narratives are explanations or justifications for a present circumstance that could not have come about in any other way, hence his

“deterministic” outlook. Laȝamon’s notable departures from his source are understood to somehow underscore this rigid historiographical stance by reinforcing the idea of sequence, but this is not an altogether satisfying reading of his text, all things considered.

As demonstrated, the Brut is categorically not a story of how the Britons squandered their inheritance or how the pagan Saxons became the Christian Angles; it is a story of how England as an inchoate political concept—as a space of appearance—grows and expands though a natural cycle with each new generation, allowing room for Trojans and Britons and Saxons and more.

By amplifying his individual characters, especially the Arthurian ones, through the invention of speech and gesture, Laȝamon shifts the traditional understanding of translatio imperii away from the linear, wholesale displacement of one culture by another and toward a more nuanced, almost proto-populist exploration of how histories are constructed through the voice and action of individual people in the space of appearance. To observe Laȝamon in the context of his contemporaries and conclude that he composed something traditionally moralistic is to fundamentally misunderstand his work. When Laȝamon goes into the details, when he explains causal action, it is not to provide a deterministic moral framework of salvation but to enact a history informed and caused by the interaction of individual human affects and wills. Where this

175 Ringbom, p. 133. 65 attitude is perhaps implicit in Geoffrey and Wace, Laȝamon asserts it, adding speech where none previously existed and reintegrating the spoken prophecies of Merlin as a complicated assurance of English continuity whatever befalls.

66 CHAPTER TWO

OTHERS SPOKE OF LOVE: RECONFIGURING THE CHIVALRIC

IDENTITY CIRCUIT IN THE MIDDLE ENLISH YWAIN AND GAWAIN

Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Introduction

With the exception, perhaps, of Thomas Malory, no single author contributed so much and in so concrete a way to the development of medieval Arthurian literature as the twelfth- century French poet Chrétien de Troyes. Norris Lacy calls him “the most important creator of medieval romance and one of the most remarkable writers of the Middle Ages,”176 elsewhere naming him simply, like a demiurge, “the creator of Arthurian romance.”177 Such praise, on its surface, may appear uncritically hyperbolic, but any peripheral glance at the sheer volume of modern Chrétien scholarship, any cursory catalogue or examination of his craft, ideology, or influence, will reveal a skilled and meticulous poet justly credited, in many important ways, with the invention of Arthurian literature as we know it, particularly that which runs in the romantic vein. Composing for the courts of Marie de Champagne and Philippe d’Alsace,178 among unnamed others, Chrétien introduced such staples into the legend as the Joy of the Court, the adultery of Lancelot and Guinevere and, most dramatically, the object of the Holy Grail. His romances unanimously problematize the inner workings of chivalry and courtly love, pitting the duties and desires of his individual protagonists against their responsibilities as husbands, lovers,

176 Norris J. Lacy, The Craft of Chrétien de Troyes, Brill, 1980, p. vii. 177 Norris J. Lacy and Joan Tasker Grimbert, introduction to A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes, edited by Norris J. Lacy and Joan Tasker Grimbert, Brewer, 2005, p. xi. 178 On Chrétien’s patronage, see June Hall McCash, “Chrétien’s Patrons,” A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes, edited by Norris J. Lacy and Joan Tasker Grimbert, Brewer, 2005, pp. 15-25 67 or public knights, leading many readers to characterize them as psychological, exploring through their often formulaic plots the particularizing affect of chivalric interiority.179

This description is especially true of Yvain, or Le Chevalier au Lion, often hailed as

Chrétien’s structural masterpiece.180 After hearing the story of his cousin Calogrenant’s embarrassing failure at a magical spring, Sir Yvain rides off ahead of the rest of Arthur’s knights to take the challenge for himself and restore his family’s honor. When he completes the adventure, however, by killing Esclados the Red in a duel, the story is complicated by Yvain falling in love with Laudine, the dead knight’s widow. After a lightning-fast marriage, deeply informed both by an Ovidian sense of desire and the lady’s immediate need for a champion to defend her lands, Yvain is persuaded through mockery to follow Gauvain to the tournament circuit, leaving his new lands undefended and his new wife absent her beloved, though he promises to come back after one year. Of course, Yvain fails to return at the appointed time, and after he is publicly shamed in court, he flees to the wilderness and briefly loses his sanity. After waking up naked and receiving the medical aid of three damsels, Yvain rescues a lion, who becomes his constant companion. His goal for the rest of the romance is to prove his chivalric honor and thereby win back his wife and lands; to accomplish this, he renounces his name and identity, calling himself instead the Knight with the Lion, and undertakes several adventures to prove both that he is able to keep his word and that he has understood that his substantial martial prowess must be used in service to others. In the end, he fights Gauvain to a draw and is unmasked as Yvain, his original identity restored, but with new moral promise; he is then reunited with Laudine, their love perfected by the cultivation of his own knightly habitus.

The poem initially poses love and prowess as a kind of false binary, and the plot hinges on this perceived competition of two goods: the private good of feminine domesticity and the

179 See especially Robert W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, Yale University Press, 1977. 180 Legendary critic Paul Zumthor has called Yvain “le mieux construit des romans de Chrétien,” a sentiment echoed in other times by Jean Frappier and Norris Lacy. See Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale, Seuil, 1972, p. 481. 68 public good of masculine knighthood. Like Chrétien’s similar protagonist, Erec, Yvain is shamed by his colleagues for spending too much time with his wife. Gauvain chastises him, “Seroiz vos or de chix / […] / Que pour lor femmes valent mains?”181 (“Would you be one of those men… who are worth less because of their wives?”),182 arguing that in order to keep his lady’s love, he must continually prove his chivalric worth for fear of losing her, concluding, “Primes en doit vostre pris croistre.”183 (“A man must be concerned with his reputation before all else!”).184

Later, after he has broken his promise to return and thereby abandoned his marital responsibilities for fear of being called a coward, he is shamed by Laudine’s messenger, who calls him “le desloial, le jangleour, / le menchongnier, le guileour”185 and exposes him before the whole court as a false lover. The prevailing chivalric logic, as dictated by Gauvain, is such that to be worthy of a lady and to keep her affection, the knight must perform constant public displays of valor, which, paradoxically, take the knight out of the domestic sphere and preclude his actual intimacy with the lady. From this tension between love and prowess emerges not only the poem’s sens but also its matière. The overwhelming theme of the poem is that the ideal knight must, in fact, not choose between love and prowess at all, but rather submit them to a higher ideal that transcends and perfects them both.

Among French narratives, Yvain’s story is only attested in Chrétien, but his literary fame, along with his lion’s, spread widely beyond the Francophone world, translated and adapted by the middle of the fourteenth century into at least five other European languages. Michelle

Szkilnik theorizes “the reason [Yvain] was favored outside France is probably the same reason

[it] was avoided by French-speaking writers,” namely that it was widely regarded, even by

181 Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier au Lion, edited by David F. Hult. Chrétien de Troyes: Romans, suivis des Chansons, avec, en appendice, Philomena, edited by Michel Zink, Livre de Poche, 1994, ll. 2484, 2486. 182 Chrétien de Troyes, The Knight with the Lion (Yvain), translated by William Kibler. Arthurian Romances, edited by William Kibler, Penguin, 1991, p. 326. 183 Hult, l. 2499. 184 Kibler, p. 326. 185 Hult, ll. 2719-2720. 69 medieval readers, as a masterpiece.186 It appeared as Hartmann von Aue’s Middle High German

Iwein, as the Old Norse Ívens saga, in Old Swedish as Herr Ivan Lejonriddaren (which saw a later translation into Danish), and bears a close Welsh analogue in Iarlles y Ffynnon or The Lady of the Fountain.187 Each adaptor, of course, brought his own set of narrative and poetic changes to the story in order to reorient the text for his intended audience, but the essentials of Chrétien’s narrative—the fountain, the betrayal, the lion, the reconciliation—are universally retained.

Of particular note among these non-French texts is the mid-fourteenth-century Middle

English translation, Ywain and Gawain, the only such direct treatment of any of Chrétien’s texts in English, although a case can certainly be made for Sir Percyvell of Galles. The English poem has often suffered critically for comparison to Chrétien’s text, but as a translation, and a fairly close one at that, it offers an interesting insight into the cultural politics involved in transvernacular adaptation in the mid-fourteenth century, particularly regarding the form and function of chivalric affect in the space of appearance. The most striking difference between the two texts on a level of pure content is that the English poem reduces its source narrative by roughly one third, nearly all of which is taken from the narrator’s complicated ruminations on courtly manners and long Ovidian asides on love and desire, aspects traditionally thought to be

“Chrétien’s chief glories.”188 Scholars have characterized the English poet as a minstrel and his audience as provincial for their apparent lack of interest in these lofty ideals of French chivalry, but the poet does not just leave a series of gaps where all the tears and sighing used to be. Rather,

186 Michelle Szkilnik, “Medieval Translations and Adaptations of Chrétien’s Works,” A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes, edited by Norris J. Lacy and Joan Tasker Grimbert, Brewer, 2005, p. 202. 187 The case of Iarlles y Ffynnon is a special one in that, while clearly an analogue of Yvain and found in manuscript alongside Peredurand Geraint, texts which correspond closely with Chrétien’s Perceval and Erec et Enide, respectively, the direction of influence is nearly impossible to parse. It may well be that Chrétien’s poem and the Welsh romance both descend from a common narrative exemplar. On this relationship, see Tony Hunt, “The Textual Relationship of Li Chevaliers au Lion and Iarlles y Ffynnawn,” Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, vol. 33, 1974, pp. 93-113. See also A. H. Diverres, “Iarlles y Ffynnawn and Le Chevalier au Lion: Adaptation or Common Source?” Studia Celtica, vol. 16, 1981, pp. 144-163. 188 Norman Harrington, “The Problem of the Lacunae in Ywain and Gawain,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 69, no. 4, 1970, p. 659. 70 he skillfully shifts the narrative’s attention away from matters of love and toward trowth, a practical social value with immediate application for his fourteenth-century audience. In the process, however, by removing most of the love from the love and prowess dichotomy, he redefines the very notion of chivalric affect and thereby the role of the individual in the

Arthurian space of appearance. Although the essentials of the narrative remain, this change has important implications for the overall theme and meaning of the text, many aspects of which have not been adequately explored.

Chrétien de Troyes and Chivalric Identity Circuit

Although not much is known about the poet himself, textual evidence suggests Chrétien’s romances enjoyed huge popularity almost immediately—they are preserved, all told, in more than forty extant manuscripts and fragments, although, “as is usually the case with Old French texts of the earlier period, no manuscripts survive from Chrétien’s own time.”189 Of these, the earliest are the Tours Cligés, dating from the late twelfth century; the Clermont-Ferrand

Perceval, from the early thirteenth; and the Annonay fragments, which were compiled in the first quarter of the thirteenth century and contain all of the romances except Le Chevalier de la

Charrette. Noting, of course, that “it is dangerous to generalize on the basis of two or three manuscripts,” Keith Busby suggests that “one can infer by looking at the transmission of other works that the romances circulated individually in the early stages and that they were gathered into larger collections of different kinds as time passed.”190 The Annonay fragments, in particular, appear to constitute an early œuvres complètes, demonstrating a nascent appreciation of Chrétien as an author (in the Foucauldian sense) that would continue in the production of later

189 Keith Busby, “The Manuscripts of Chrétien’s Romances.” A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes, edited by Norris J. Lacy and Joan Tasker Grimbert, 2005, p. 65. For a full and exhaustive survey of the extant manuscripts, see Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes, edited by Keith Busby, Terry Nixon, Alison Stones, and Lori Walters, Rodopi, 1993. 190 Ibid. 71 manuscripts, which are generally divided by scholars into four major categories: “collections of

Arthurian romances, of Arthurian and non-Arthurian romances, of vernacular verse narrative, and of Perceval with the Continuations.”191 Some of the most celebrated of these collections are

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 794, also known as the Guiot Manuscript;192

Chantilly, Musée Condé 472;193 and BnF, fr. 1450,194 which famously integrates Chrétien’s romances (and the first two Perceval Continuations) into the middle of Wace’s Roman de Brut in an apparent effort to create a more complete picture of Arthurian history, the scribe introducing

Chrétien by name as an authority on the Matter of Britain on par with Wace: “Mai ce que

Cretiens tesmogne / Ponés ci oïr sans alogne.”195

It is perhaps surprising, therefore, given the apparent popularity of his work among wealthy audiences, the rois and contes of the prologue to Erec et Enide, that manuscripts of

Chrétien’s poems are somewhat seldom found to be illuminated. The first appears in the record almost a century after the poet’s projected death in the late twelfth century and, excluding Pierre

Sala’s sixteenth-century version of Le Chevalier au Lion, only ten such manuscripts or fragments survive. Of these, none contains Cligés and just two contain Erec et Enide. Unsurprisingly, the largest number of surviving illustrations depict scenes of the Grail from Perceval or its

Continuations, but Yvain and his lion and Lancelot’s fateful trip on the cart are also found more than once. The remaining unadorned manuscripts, however, “may have as much to tell us about the reception of Chrétien’s romances as the illustrated ones,” Busby argues, “for despite the universal association of courtly romance with wealth, the modest nature of some of the copies

191 Keith Busby, “The Manuscript Context of Arthurian Romance,” Handbook of Arthurian Romance, edited by Leah Tether and Johnny McFadyen in collaboration with Keith Busby and Ad Putter, De Gruyter, 2017, p. 99. 192 On Guiot, see Keith Busby, Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript, Rodopi, 2002, especially pp. 93-108. 193 On Chantilly, see Lori Walters, “The Formation of. Gauvain Cycle in Chatilly, MS 472,” Neophilologus, vol. 78, 1994, pp. 29-43. 194 On BnF, fr. 1450, see Lori Walters, “Le Rôle du scribe dans l’organisation des manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes,” Romania, vol. 106, 1985, pp. 303-325. 195 “But you may hear Chrétien’s testimony here without delay.” 72 suggests owners of modest means and the likelihood… that the romances were performed aloud, luxurious illustrations being superfluous in such a situation,”196 a reading perhaps borne out by the scribal use of oïr in conjunction with Chrétien’s name in BnF, fr. 1450. In any case,

Chretien’s texts, and especially his subjects, quickly spread beyond his original audience: “They were copied, imitated, transposed, quoted broadly and consistently throughout the thirteenth century in French-speaking domains,”197 leading ultimately to the dramatic inflation and integration of Le Chevalier de la Charrette and the Conte du Graal into the massive prose

Lancelot-Grail Cycle. “The transposition of the Charrette into the prose Lancelot,” Szkilnik explains, “especially testifies to the perfect familiarity with Chrétien’s romances shared by prose writers and their audiences.”198

As noted above, Le Chevalier au Lion was not itself popular among French-speaking adaptors in the way that Le Chevalier de la Charrette and Le Conte du Graal obviously were.

Among readers, however, it was evidently a favorite. Chrétien’s text, a 6808-line French romance in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, is extant in seven complete manuscripts—five more than the Charrette—and four fragments. From among the complete manuscripts, it is collected four times with its companion piece, Le Chevalier de la Charrette;199 once alongside the non-

Chrétien Gauvain romance L’Âtre Périlleux;200 once in a romance miscellany containing fragments of Wace, the Roman d’Éneas, and Marie de France;201 and finally in BnF, fr. 794, the

Guiot Manuscript, which collects all of Chrétien’s works. The fragments include, of course, the aforementioned Annonay fragments and BnF, fr. 1450, both of which are evidently author- centric compilations, at least in part. But while near-contemporary readers appear to have

196 Busby, 2005, p. 71. 197 Szkilnik, p. 202. 198 Ibid. 199 Chantilly, Musée Condé 472; BnF, fr. 12560; Princeton, Garrett 125; and Vatican, Reg. lat. 1725. 200 BnF, fr. 1433. 201 BnF, fr. 12603. 73 collected and preserved Chrétien’s named works together in a custom not often afforded to other twelfth-century authors, the man himself remains a mystery to modern readers as his texts do not often identify themselves with clear historical referents. As John Baldwin notes, “The closest

Chrétien comes to acknowledging his contemporary world lies in the recurrence of certain aristocratic amusements that accurately correspond to current practice,”202 such as the games and tournaments in which his characters often participate. In fact, Baldwin characterizes Chrétien as distinctly un-political, even calling his romances “oblivious to the political, matrimonial and martial events of his day.”203

It has long been demonstrated, however, at least in literary criticism of his work, that

“Chrétien de Troyes was an ironic observer of the courtly society of his time, and his works, particularly Yvain, abound in critical comments and laconic asides,”204 although scholars have never exactly seen eye to eye on how this irony functions. Peter Haidu’s seminal dissertation

Aesthetic Distance in Chrétien de Troyes, while focusing primarily on Cligés and Perceval, emphasizes the eponymous aesthetic distance Chrétien’s irony creates between the subject and the reader in Yvain, allowing the reader insight into the narrative and its implied values unavailable to the characters within the story, “as if Chrétien de Troyes were offering a guided tour through a living laboratory of charming foolishness: with a sideward wink or a meaningful nudge, he would suggest comparisons which both brought together certain aspects of his story and provided the observer with material for instructive meditation.”205 For Haidu, as for Jean

Frappier before him, the distance Chrétien creates between reader and story is intended precisely to prevent overt identification between the reader and the protagonist: “the romance offers for

202 John Baldwin, “Chrétien in History,” A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes, edited by Norris J. Lacy and Joan Tasker Grimbert, Brewer, 2005, p. 4. 203 Ibid., p. 12. 204 Renée Curtis, “The Perception of the Chivalric Ideal in Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain,” Arthurian Interpretations, vol. 3, 1989, p. 1. 205 Peter Haidu, Aesthetic Distance in Chrétien de Troyes, Librairie Droz, 1968, p. 9. 74 observation an autonomous world of fiction whose realities are radically different from those to which the observing reader is accustomed.”206 Other critics like Tony Hunt, who might be said to represent the mainstream of Yvain scholarship due to the sheer volume he himself has produced, have read the use of irony in Yvain as socially subversive, generating “in the audience a discomfort and insecurity which can only be attenuated by a critical response to the scenes which unfold before its uncertain gaze.”207 Hunt identifies in the narration of Yvain several key moments in which the audience’s expectations, particularly regarding depictions of love and arms, are overturned by the failure of Chrétien’s characters to meet their stated ideological goals.

The romance, in effect, dismantles the expected structure of the genre and in so doing marks itself as “an ironic study of courtly romance which examines two problems: the reception of courtly narrative and the relation of love and chivalry,”208 problems that fall neatly under the umbrella of affect.

Norris Lacy similarly argues that “Chrétien provides in most of his poems a development which we may think of as his chivalric dialectic,”209 a proto-Hegelian process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis by which the individual knight matures out of the destructive either/or mentality that defines the early episodes of Chrétien’s romances. This process is used to build an affective critique of knightly culture, both within the text and, presumably, within the courts for which Chrétien wrote. As Lacy explains, “By the time we come to his last work, knighthood, notably in Perceval’s mind but apparently for other characters as well, can be reduced to a kind of chivalric catechism, a series of rules and precepts which can be recited and learned and which, if followed, will bring success and glory,”210 although the plot of each romance ultimately negates this flawed perspective. Arthurian chivalry, in Chrétien’s rendering, is a house divided, a

206 Ibid., p. 263. 207 Tony Hunt, Critical Guides to French Texts: Yvain, Grant and Cutler, 1986, p. 26. 208 Ibid., p. 34. 209 Lacy, 1980, p. 11. 210 Ibid., p. 3. 75 set of behaviors or emotional practices intended—in theory—to defend the weak and uphold justice through feats of prowess, but in practice inverted such that acts of defense are primarily undertaken to increase the knight’s renown, an empty and inauthentic code of conduct followed slavishly to its letter with no investigation into its spirit or purpose. In Yvain, this is presented as

Gauvain’s advice following the hero’s wedding to Laudine: “Primes en doit vostre pris croistre.”211 Yvain takes Gauvain at his word, following him uncritically into the homosocial pursuit of tournament glory with no heed for his wife. It is clear, however, “that Chrétien is not criticizing an ideal as much as he is depicting the perversion of that ideal.”212 Chivalry, clearly, is still a stated good, the honor and reputation of Arthur’s court ultimately upheld, even as its telos is called into question. As Lee Patterson writes, “The fact that ideals are always contaminated by the impurity of history does not make them any the less deserving of admiration or less worthy of belief.”213 A text like Yvain, in which strength is tamed in the affective service of love or religion, might be intended to inspire a knightly audience to pursue such transcendent values in their own space of appearance rather than the violent delights and violent ends of unalloyed martial aggression.

Each of Chrétien’s knights, according to Lacy’s schema, experiences a moment of crisis, spurred by what Donald Maddox identifies as a “specular encounter” in which the protagonist is forced, usually through the action of another character, to name or recognize his own personal failings.214 This unwelcome visit is always precipitated by the hero’s own poor judgment, however, and the resulting quest, “the period of wandering and tribulation which typically follows, then constitutes not only an expiation of the hero’s faults but a process of maturing as well, a maturing both of perception and of character,” by which he “pays for his error at the same

211 Hult, l. 2499. 212 Ibid., p. 4. 213 Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, p. 172. 214 Donald Maddox, Fictions of Identity in Medieval French Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2000, especially pp. 83-98. 76 time as he comes to understand it and generally to arrive at a synthesis of what he previously thought to be irreconcilable opposites.”215 For Yvain, this is the ideal of strength in service to others—as embodied by his lion. Rather than pursue prowess for the sake of his reputation,

Yvain learns that its proper place is in defense of the helpless. Hunt and Lacy craft their arguments in the context of historical studies of chivalry like those of Stephen Knight216 and

Georges Duby,217 in which the chivalric romance genre is understood as having been promoted by lay authorities to mitigate the destructive tendencies of militarized young men in twelfth- century France by “socializing knighthood through an association with women, refinement of manners, and moral justice,”218 what we might identify as an affective practice. The genre creates for its aristocratic audience “a unifying ethos which was largely an amalgam of moral precepts drawn from the works of Cicero and Christian spirituality” by posing an “ethical circuit in which love of a lady inspires a knight to chivalric feats and endeavors, which in turn reinforce and promote the lady’s love of him,”219 in other words, the formation of a chivalric habitus through the affect of courtly love, the very complication at work in the first part of Le Chevalier au Lion.

Robert Hanning contends that this binary of love and prowess, which he names the chivalry topos, is inherent in the greater genre of chivalric romance, of which Chrétien’s are surely the finest example. It is precisely the romance genre’s posed competition between love and prowess, “two universal human drives,”220 that produces, in Hanning’s estimation, a literary form capable of working out the implications of individuality through the construction of a quest with a single hero as its organizing principle. He writes:

215 Lacy, 1980, p. 6. 216 Stephen Knight, Arthurian Literature and Society, MacMillan, 1983. 217 Georges Duby, “Youth in Aristocratic Society: Northwestern France in the Twelfth Century,” The Chivalrous Society, translated by Cynthia Postan, Arnold, 1977, pp. 112-122. 218 Hunt, 1986, p. 12. 219 Ibid., p. 13. 220 Hanning, p. 54. 77 Moving through time and space which he both organizes (for the audience) around his

personal quest and experiences or perceives in a subjective and limited way, the romance

hero deliberately opens himself to experience in all its variety and unexpectedness. This

active acceptance of life as an adventure, rather than as a battle for endurance or an

attempt to protect hard-won security in an enclosed place against threatening, unknown

forces, leads the knight into situations which challenge his acceptance of social values

and therefore offer an alternative to an identity defined by forces outside himself.221

The primary form this alternative takes is the emotional experience of love, by which the hero is able to encounter a private, individual vision of joy and personal fulfillment, usually bound up with his effort to permanently attain his beloved. In the course of adventures through which the hero becomes estranged from his love-object and attempts to reconcile with her, “he comes to see clearly that he has acted against his real happiness, in being led astray by false or received values, and consequently perceives the necessity of shaping his actions so as to attain his imagined self-perception—the vision of himself made complete by fulfilled desire.”222 Love, or at least erotic desire, is thus a necessary component in the ethical circuit of chivalry, tempering and even redirecting the aggressive impulses of the knight toward the stabilizing impulse of domesticity, and the affect of chivalry serves thereby as a model and process of masculine self- regulation.

As we have seen, this dialectic of performance in the masculine public and feminine domestic spaces of appearance is the core of Le Chevalier au Lion, which Jeffrey Cohen has called, for this reason, “a romance of heterosexuality.”223 Cohen explores in his book the variety of affective means by which medieval writers establish personal identity through association with non-human objects, forces, and animals, notably in a chapter on chivalry in which he

221 Ibid., p. 3. 222 Ibid., p. 4. 223 Jeffrey J. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, University of Minnesota Press, 2003, p. 62. 78 examines the existentially necessary relationship between a knight and his horse. He quotes thirteenth-century author Jordanus Rufus on the subject, who writes, “No animal is more noble than the horse, since it is by horses that princes, magnates, and knights are separated from lesser people and because a lord cannot fittingly be seen among private citizens except through the mediation of a horse.”224 The horse, a non-human body, through the augmentation of riding equipment and rigorous training, becomes an integral part of the human knight’s public identity, even lending its own name (cheval) to the knight’s role (chevalier) and the socio-ethical system by which the knight himself is rigorously trained (chevalerie). Knighthood, however, according to Patterson, “is not a vocation elected by these men but their very mode of being, an ideological conditioning that precludes self-reflection because it wholly conditions self-construction.”225 As

Cohen explains, “The dependence of chivalric identity upon equine mastery, upon what the

German romances call ritterschaft, demanded the learning of complicated and proliferating sets of skills. Human and equine bodies had to be trained extensively to foster endurance and coordination, to implant in both animal and human flesh the corporeal knowledge of how to embody a charge.”226 By the time cheval and chevalier were adequately trained, they were operating nearly as one being, a physical reality certainly assumed but not often directly depicted in chivalric romances like Yvain outside of tournaments. Knight and mount are thus trained intensively in love and arms: the animal nature of the cheval broken so that it may became a destrier, the masculine energy of the man redirected that he may become a chevalier, each depending on and modifying the other in what might be called an identity circuit—one existenz consisting of multiple discrete parts: horse, rider, equipment—that creates and enacts the proper chivalric subject. In Deleuzean terms, an assemblage, a becoming-knight.

224 Ibid, p. 46. 225 Patterson, p. 176. 226 Ibid., p. 51. 79 As far as the plot of Le Chevalier au Lion goes, this process of self-regulation through association is absolutely central. Yvain, as has been amply treated, receives his specular encounter in the form of Laudine’s messenger who publicly harangues him for his lack of constancy. He is confronted with the fact that Gauvain’s chivalric advice about reputation was not in keeping with his own happiness, and the following scenes show the dissolution of his proud social status as he is reduced through his grief to a feral state, eating raw meat in the wilderness, outside of the space of appearance. According to medieval theorists of chivalry like

Ramon Lull and Christine de Pizan, “there are not good and bad knights but only true and false ones, knights and non-knights.”227 Yvain, in these scenes, loses not just his name and identity but his very mode of being, forsaking the basic human condition of plurality. Pearsall notes that “this is the customary response to extreme embarrassment in medieval romance: it constitutes a kind of mental suicide, a revulsion against the pain inflicted on the inner self so violent that mental life must be suspended, blocked off, until some form of redemption becomes available.”228 He gradually regains his humanity over time, first bartering venison wordlessly with a hermit for man-made bread, then recovering clothes and his wits from three damsels who heal him of his madness with a magical ointment. After saving their town from Count Alier, Yvain is accorded all manner of praise by the townspeople for “la proeche qu’en li voient”229 (“the prowess they saw in him”), but he leaves without telling them his name and before they are able to reward him—the first act of valor Yvain accomplishes purely for the sake of others.

This is where the narrative of Le Chevalier au Lion turns and introduces one of its most important features, the eponymous lion, who, even more than a knight’s trained warhorse, becomes inextricably bound up with the protagonist’s identity and capacity for growth. Yvain

227 Patterson, p. 177-178. 228 Derek Pearsall, “Courtesy and Chivalry in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Order of Shame and the Invention of Embarrassment,” A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, Brewer, 1997. p. 361. 229 Hult, l. 3252. 80 investigates a noise in the forest and happens upon “i lion en i essart / Et i serpent qui le tenoit /

Par le keue, si li ardoit / Toutes les rains de flambe ardant”230 (“a lion in a clearing and a serpent who held it by its tail and burned it all over its back with burning flame”). After considering for a moment which beast he would rather help in this skirmish, he decides to help the lion, believing that a venomous and wicked creature like the serpent (likened, linguistically, to Sir Keu, the source of Yvain’s shame in the first arc of the narrative) deserves only harm. He has to cut off the tip of the lion’s tail to free it from the serpent’s grip, symbolizing Yvain’s own painful release from the trappings of scorn and reputation, and the lion is afterward rendered almost human in its thanksgiving, standing up on its hindlegs to embrace Yvain with tears in its eyes.

This affective encounter marks the true beginning of Yvain’s journey toward reconciliation, both between himself and Laudine and between the ideals of love and prowess. From this point on,

Yvain and the lion are never apart, and the next time Yvain aids someone in need, he gives his name only as the Knight with the Lion, rejecting his old name and reputation in favor of building a new identity dedicated to the habitus-forming principles of chivalry rightly imagined: in service to others.

One of the earliest and most influential articles on the lion in Chrétien’s poem is that by

Julian Harris, who asks, “Can the lion be regarded as anything else than a symbol of God?”231

Harris reads the lion as Yvain’s salvation, drawing from the lore of medieval bestiaries to present the lion as a Christological type by whose presence Yvain is enabled to grow and improve.

Scholarship of the following decades answered Harris’s initial question with a resounding yes, however, beginning perhaps with Lacy, who firmly but gently corrects Harris’s Robertsonianism, writing, “It cannot be denied that the lion commonly represented Christ for the medieval reader;

230 Ibid., ll. 3348-3351. 231 Julian Harris, “The Role of the Lion in Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain,” PMLA, vol. 64, no. 5, 1949, p. 1160. 81 yet, it seems to me that this religious interpretation is perhaps not a fundamental one.”232 Rather,

Lacy understands the lion structurally as an ethical replacement for Gauvain in the back half of the narrative. Gauvain, as the traditional representative of Arthurian chivalry, instigates Yvain’s fall from grace by urging him toward a year of tournaments. By his characteristic stasis, Gauvain operates as a foil for the protagonist: “he is at first morally indistinguishable from Yvain, and, since he undergoes no evolution, he remains for the reader a figure of what Yvain once was—a knight who sought adventure for its own sake… Yvain does evolve, of course, and we see the emergence not so much of a religious ideal as of a new ideal of knighthood.”233 The impetus for this evolution, of course, is the lion, whose identity Yvain grafts onto his own in a new circuit of chivalric identity.

Without the aid of the lion, Yvain may not accomplish any of his own chivalric growth or refinement. As Cohen articulates, “Taming the exotic beast enacts the process of domesticating

[Yvain’s] own selfhood, of transforming his identity from the individuations of heroism to a more relational mode of being.”234 The lion is at once his helper and his moral exemplum; when

Yvain swoons on return to Laudine’s spring, the lion, thinking his companion dead, drags

Yvain’s sword from its scabbard, props it on a nearby stump, and rushes toward it headlong in attempted suicide. Mercifully, Yvain wakes and the lion corrects his course, but from this action, among others, Yvain may observe strength rightly directed in service: a lion, king of beasts, behaving like a trained hunting dog.235 The lion is self-evidently capable of tremendous martial power, rending the giant Harpin’s body from sternum to pelvis in a following scene, but he is also singularly devoted to Yvain and acts only at his command. Yvain, too, quickly comes to

232 Norris Lacy, “Yvain’s Evolution and the Role of the Lion,” Romance Notes, vol. 12, no. 1, 1970, p. 199. 233 Ibid., p. 200. 234 Cohen, p. 62. 235 See Karl Uitti, “Intertextuality in Le Chevalier au Lion,” Dalhousie French Studies, vol. 2, 1980, pp. 3-13. Uitti demonstrates that Chrétien’s poem is full of references to the Tristan narrative, not least in the figure of the lion, who responds analogously to Tristan’s dog Husdent, whose barking must be trained and controlled in a manner similar to how the lion represents the training Yvain must undergo to become a proper knight. 82 love the lion, refusing to be parted from him upon entering a nearby town and going so far as to remark, “Je remaurrai cha dehors, / Que autant l’aime comme mon cors”236 (“I will remain here

[outside with the lion], for I love it as much as I love myself”). Were it not for the lion’s aid,

Yvain would be unable to win back Laudine’s love—in fact, Yvain, so named, cannot. When

Lunete brings the fully armored knight before his lady to be granted favor at the end of the romance, he asks her, “Mes avez li vos dit de moi / Que je me sui?”237 (“But have you told her

[Laudine] who I am?”) and Lunete replies, “Nenil, par foi, / Ne ne set comment avés non, / Se chevalier au leon non”238 (“Not at all, by my faith. She does not know you by any name other than Knight with the Lion”). Inasmuch as it is Yvain’s erotic drive toward reconciliation that drives the plot, that redirects his socially misdirected thirst for masculine renown toward a

“vision of himself made complete by fulfilled desire,”239 it is not Sir Yvain but the Knight with the Lion, the man re-trained through close affective association with a non-human body, who ultimately completes this circuit.

Yvain, paradigmatic of protagonist knights in chivalric romance, is thus necessarily a composite character defined variously by emotional contingency: first with Calogrenant, then

Laudine, then Gauvain, and finally the lion. These characters’ respective roles in the narrative reconfigure the way Yvain interacts with his world. He is first consumed with his own honor for familial love of Calogrenant, then struck by erotic love for Laudine such that he forgets why he originally came to the fountain, then fearful for his public reputation due to Gauvain’s advice, and ultimately imagined through partnership with the lion as the ideal chivalric subject. These characters act as discrete affective nodes in the identity circuit through which Yvain is able to attain a kind of individuation: he must acknowledge, by way of a specular encounter, that his

236 Hult, ll. 3793-3794. 237 Hult, ll. 6703-6704. 238 Hult, ll. 6704-6706. 239 Hanning, p. 4. 83 previous associations were flawed in order to rearrange his priorities and aspire to growth. His martial energies, emblematized in Calogrenant and Gauvain, must be redirected toward service of a lady. But when he fails that lady and abandons the defense of her lands, he must be trained again through the lion’s example so that, as romance hero, he may define and represent a perfected affect of chivalry. It is no wonder why critics from the Middle Ages to the present have regarded Le Chevalier au Lion as a marvel of literary structure. When it was adapted and translated into other cultures and languages, however, particularly in fourteenth-century England, these components shifted to accommodate cultural difference, leaving the bones of the story intact but its articulation of the chivalric subject noticeably and necessarily changed.

Knighthood and Trowth

Ywain and Gawain is preserved only in London, British Library, Cotton Galba E ix, a large parchment miscellany of 114 folios dating from the early fifteenth century. In addition to the poem in question, the manuscript contains twelve separate full Middle English texts, including The Seven Sages of Rome, a rood poem, The Gospel of Nicodemus, The Pricke of

Conscience, and a brief Prophecies of Merlin. There are six distinct scribal hands at work, the first—a clear Anglicana Formata—responsible for the first 48 folios, which contain Ywain and

Gawain and The Seven Sages of Rome.240 The language of the poem is Northern in dialect, and

“because certain North-East Midland forms are often reflected in the rhyme, the language is assumed to be that of the original author, who probably composed the work some fifty to one hundred years before this particular version was written down,”241 which is to say in the early-to-

240 Information on the manuscript is catalogued in detail in Ywain and Gawain, edited by Albert B. Friedman and Norman T. Harrington, Early English Text Society no. 254, Oxford University Press, 1964. While their analysis of the poem’s text and audience has not aged particularly well in light of more recent scholarship, Friedman and Harrington’s physical description of the manuscript, to say nothing of their textual apparatus, is still very useful. 241 Mary Flowers Braswell, introduction to Ywain and Gawain, edited by Mary Flowers Braswell, Medieval Institute, 1995, p. 77. 84 mid-fourteenth century. The pages are arranged in two columns of forty-seven lines each, and the verse form is, true to its French source, octosyllabic rhyming couplets, the traditional meter of continental romance. The poem is manifestly a close translation of Chrétien’s Chevalier au Lion, and the notion that the English poet worked directly from a manuscript of Chrétien’s poem “is established beyond doubt by the almost identical conduct of the narrative, by striking similarities in descriptive detail, and by the many passages of word-for-word translation.”242 He does not, however, name Chrétien as his source; rather, he relies on traditional references to “þe buke” throughout.

In spite of the poem’s close proximity to the French source in both form and content,

Friedman and Harrington are vociferous in their claim that it “is by no means a slavish translation of Yvain,”243 calling it instead “clearly the work of a minstrel catering for the sober, realistic audience of a provincial baron’s hall, an audience whose sensibilities and sympathies were not adjusted to Chrétien’s elaborate and subtle representations of courtly love or to high- flown chivalric sentiment.”244 Szkilnik, too, identifies the Ywain-Poet as “a minstrel from the northern part of England,” surmising that “he was addressing a different audience from

Chrétien’s, probably male, who did not care much for amorous casuistry and liked a faster pace for the narrative.”245 Mary Flowers Braswell, recalling Friedman and Harrington, draws attention to the perceived narrative lacunae created in the transition from French to English in order to claim that “they may represent the English poet’s conscious attempt at pandering to an audience who would eschew such subtleties in favor of a more fast-paced and action-filled plot,” an audience she later characterizes as “seeking courtly sophistication rather than owning it.”246 R. S.

Loomis is perhaps the only critic of the twentieth century to consider the poem “comparatively

242 Friedman and Harrington, p. xvi. 243 Ibid. 244 Ibid., p. xvii. 245 Szkilnik, pp. 206-207. 246 Braswell, p. 79. 85 free from the crudities of the minstrel style. In fact,” he writes, “one may suspect that it was no rimester of the marketplace or the village green, but a schoolmaster or a priest who composed this excellent adaptation from the French.”247 He goes on to remark, “It might be heresy to say so, but I say it unblushingly: Ywain and Gawain is a better story, better told, than most of the stories in Gower’s Confessio Amantis and than several of the Canterbury Tales.”248

Loomis’s view notably excluded, the dominant mode of criticism when approaching

Ywain and Gawain has been to regard it as a lesser work of literature than Yvain, a text inescapably bound up with its noble and sophisticated source such that it is rarely read on its own merit or considered more than a poor imitation. What has led many critics to dismiss Ywain and

Gawain is the apparent shift in attention from Hanning’s chivalry topos, the competing affects of love and prowess that form the very heart and structure of Chrétien’s romance. A provincial

English audience such as that proposed for Ywain and Gawain, so the common argument goes, would be less concerned with the subtleties of split chivalric loyalty or elegant Ovidian asides plumbing the depths of introspection, preferring instead a rapid-paced, no-nonsense narrative of adventure—sheer entertainment with little to no deeper consideration of the form and function of the culture from which it arises. But as John Bollard has discussed,

These comments, in their use of such terms as minstrel, sober, realistic, provincial,

rapid-paced, and no-nonsense in opposition to subtle, elegant, dilatory, and

sophisticated, imply a scale of literary value judgment: elegance, sophistication, subtlety

and introspection are desirable, even preferable features of a work. Whether this would

be true for a medieval English romance audience remains uncertain. What we must

consider is whether the meaning of the English romance is carried or expressed in a

247 Roger Sherman Loomis, The Development of Arthurian Romance, Hutchinson University Library, 1963, p. 141. 248 Ibid. 86 different vehicle than Chrétien chooses; it may, in other words, have another sort of

sophistication.249

In sum, we must understand that there is nothing “mere” about translation literary; as David

Matthews explains, “however close the correspondence to the original may seem, the later text is necessarily imbued with the ideology of its times of production.”250

In the case of Ywain and Gawain, the difference of nearly two hundred years between its composition and that of its source is nothing to gloss over. If Yvain has been understood in relation to the real practices of twelfth-century feudalism, as in the work of Tony Hunt and

Stephen Knight, then how can Ywain and Gawain, as a translation, be expected to “appear essentially unchanged in a milieu completely different geographically, temporally, and most importantly, ideologically?”251 Rather, as Georges Duby has argued,252 the cultural conditions of twelfth-century France in which romance germinated and flourished had changed substantially even by the end of that century, giving way to the decline of Arthurian verse romance in favor of extended prose cycles. A fourteenth-century English author, so far removed from the terroir of his twelfth-century French source, Matthews suggests, “could only apprehend the text of Yvain, not its context,”253 hence the holistic reduction of the affect of courtly love, a defining feature of twelfth-century French romance. Sif Rikharsdottir, too, argues that “whether or not the audience was familiar with the story of the Knight with the Lion, the omissions, abridgements and revisions signal the adaptations, both structural and thematic, that the text underwent as it was transformed from its twelfth-century French elite milieu into its new Middle English form.”254

249 John K. Bollard, “Hende Wordes: The Theme of Courtesy in Ywain and Gawain,” Neophilologus, vol. 78, no. 4, 1994, p. 656. 250 David Matthews, “Translation and Ideology: The Case of Ywain and Gawain,” Neophilologus, vol. 76, no. 3, 1992, p. 461. 251 Ibid., p. 452. 252 Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, Pantheon, 1983, especially pp. 274-276. 253 Matthews, p. 455. 254 Sif Rikhardsdottir, Medieval Translations and Cultural Discourse, Brewer, 2012, p. 94. 87 To be fairly read and studied as a fourteenth-century artifact, Ywain and Gawain must be understood as a product of its own place and time, a culture strongly influenced in concrete and specific ideological ways by the writing of Chrétien de Troyes and his imitators (e.g., the

Arthurian enthusiasm of Plantagenet monarchs and the calculated social construction of knighthood in the time of Edward III as a distinct reflection of perceived chivalry in Arthurian romances255), yet also far removed from social the realities to which Chrétien himself responded.

As Matthews clearly summarizes: “Both Ywain and Gawain and Yvain are ostensibly about knighthood, but there are very different versions of knighthood in the two poems, simply because that institution in late medieval Britain was very different to what it had been in twelfth-century

France.”256 The cultural practice of knighthood, in other words, served a different affective role in England than it had in France, resulting in a necessary re-articulation of both the chivalric subject and the Arthurian space of appearance to accommodate this difference.

The most productive way to reconcile the compositional and ideological differences between the two poems while preserving the critical integrity of the English text has been to conceptualize the major changes in terms of what might have been appropriate to an English audience. “These transformations,” Matthews argues, “in the case of an English and a French text, can be comprehended not simply as translation but as a kind of textual colonizing.”257 The most obvious of these transformations, as noted above, is the large-scale removal of passages on courtly manners and erotic love, producing several “gaps” in a side-by-side reading of the two poems. Harrington understands these lacunae as a “sacrifice of what are usually thought to be

Chrétien’s chief glories: his subtle probings of the human heart, his finely wrought descriptions of the trappings of court life, his elaborate Ovidian flourishes, and, above all, his minute examination of the social, moral, and psychological problems arising from the delicate

255 Juliet Vale, Edward III and Chivalry: Chivalric Society and its Context, Boydell, 1982. 256 Matthews, p. 460. 257 Ibid., p. 456. 88 relationships between love, marriage, and chivalry,”258 what I would identify as chivalry’s affect.

He proposes that these erasures are not due to faulty copying but rather “the personal prejudices of the English poet, prejudices which, vague and ill-defined as they are necessarily, seem to be characterized by a distaste for highly charged displays of emotion, suggestive or immoral allusions, and excessively cruel and bloody descriptions.”259 Similar arguments have been made based instead on the perceived taste of the English audience, notably by John Finlayson, who proposes that “a more likely explanation [for the omissions] is that the English poem was composed for a less sophisticated audience than that for which Chrétien wrote.”260

Other scholars advance a richer, perhaps more sympathetic view of the Ywain-Poet and his audience. Gayle Hamilton outlines the comprehensive shift in translation from matters of private, interpersonal love—the soil from which Chrétien’s chivalric subjects are allowed to grow—to a broader notion of trowth, simply understood by Hamilton as truthfulness in word or faithfulness to a verbal promise.261 The MED defines trowth variously as honor, integrity, fidelity in matters of love and kinship, nobility of character, adherence to the chivalric ideal, and, dubiously, “a vaguely specified but implicitly comprehensive virtue,”262 and Helen Cooper ascribes to Chaucer and Langland the notion that it is “a quality… humankind can share with

God.”263 Although Hamilton’s definition of trowth is perhaps narrow, limiting her reading of the poem as a whole, her observation of the concept in the translation process of Ywain and Gawain was groundbreaking in scholarship of the text. The change is discernable very early in the poem’s narrative. In the prologue of Le Chevalier au Lion, Chrétien introduces the major

258 Norman Harrington, “The Problem of the Lacunae in Ywain and Gawain,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 69, no. 4, 1970, p. 659. 259 Ibid. 260 John Finlayson, “Ywain and Gawain and the Meaning of Adventure,” Anglia, vol. 87, 1969, p. 313. 261 Gayle K. Hamilton, “The Breaking of Troth in Ywain and Gawain,” Mediaevalia, vol. 2, 1976, pp. 113. 262 “Treuth,” Middle English Dictionary, University of Michigan, 2014. 263 Helen Cooper, “The Supernatural,” A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, Brewer, 1997, p. 291. 89 impetus of his story by describing the nobility of Arthur’s court and their preoccupation with love, turning on this point to lament as follows:

Mais or y a molt poi des siens

Que a bien pres l’ont tuit laissie

S’en est Amours mout abaissie;

Car chil qui soloient amer

Se faisoient courtois clamer

Et preu et largue et honorable;

Or est Amours tournee a fable

Pour chou que chil qui riens n’en sentent

Dient qu’il ayment, mes il mentent;

Et chil fable et menchongne en font

Qui s’en vantent et droit n’i ont.264

(“But today very few serve love: nearly everyone has abandoned it; and love is greatly

abased, because those who loved in bygone days were known to be courtly and valiant

and generous and honorable. Now love is reduced to empty pleasantries, since those who

know nothing about it claim that they love, but they lie, and those who boast of loving

and have no right to do so make a lie and a mockery of it.”)265

Chrétien’s conflation of nobility and courtesy with an Ovidian take on love is clearly stated; those in Chrétien’s present who have forgotten the affect of proper courtly love may look to the space of appearance in the Golden Age of Arthur’s Court for an example of its practice, where

264 Hult, ll. 18-28. 265 Kibler, p. 295. 90 “some told of past adventures, others spoke of love,”266 and the rest of the poem, with its heavy emphasis on the chivalric habitus and frequent references to Ovid, bears this reading out.

The Ywain-Poet, however, takes a different tack, opting instead to depict Arthur’s knights swapping stories not about love but “dedes of armes and of veneri / And of gude knightes þat lyfed þen, / and how men might þam kyndeli ken / By doghtines of þaire gude ded.”267 The

English poet’s knights do not speak of love at all, but rather the “honowre” they acquire from their mighty deeds. The narration focuses on their martial prowess almost entirely before introducing what Hamilton and others identify as Ywain and Gawain’s major theme:

Þai tald of more trewth þam betw[e]ne

Þan now omang men here es sene,

For trowth and luf es al belaft;

Men uses now anoþer craft.

With worde men makes it trew and stabil,

Bot in þaire faith es noght bot fabil;

With þe mowth men makes it hale,

Bot trew trowth es nane in þe tale.268

This eight-line discourse on trowth corresponds directly with lines 18-28 of Le Chevalier au

Lion, the passage on love quoted above. Rather than look to Arthurian Britain for an exemplar of true lover, who through the redirection of his masculine energies through the affect of desire may become the perfect knight, the English audience is invited to remember the faithfulness inherent in antiquity, or perhaps a more generalized sense of justice and moral goodness that transcends the word of law. Both stories must, by virtue of their telling, take place in an idyllic past when people appeared to understand the ethical circuit these values formed, unlike in the poets’

266 Ibid. 267 Friedman and Harrington, ll. 26-39. 268 Ibid., ll. 33-437. 91 respective narrative presents, in which, for Chrétien, love has become “empty pleasantries” and, for the Ywain-Poet, men tell “noght bot fabil.” The English poet adapts Chrétien’s Golden Age topos to address the original theme of love only in passing, dwelling instead for several lines on the affective practice of trowth, nebulously defined as it may be. As in Chrétien, there is a clear distinction drawn between action and that which is merely spoken: the French text notes that modern love is but pleasantry, and the English text bemoans that a word without corresponding deeds is dead. Ywain and Gawain, at its outset, keeps the same narrative formula and rhetorical positioning from its French model, but it shifts its emphasis away from love and toward a notion of trowth, by which its protagonist may readily and ably cultivate his chivalric habitus.

Tony Hunt also subscribes to a strain of this reading, noting, “In Ywain and Gawain the love element is entirely subordinated to the theme of chivalric trowthe, in which the keeping of one’s word is all-important. The coordination of love and chivalry is not made to appear problematic,” a change he argues makes the poem “so strongly individualized” as to earn it “the status of autonomous [work] in which the source has acted as a stimulus rather than as a constraint.”269 This divergent theme, clearly stated in the prologue, plays out comprehensively in the plot of the romance and, in spite of the English poem’s close correspondences with its source, changes its overall theme from Chrétien’s original in several important ways. One brief example can be found in the poets’ respective descriptions of Yvain/Ywain’s love at first sight of

Laudine/Alundyne. Chrétien’s treatment develops in its 66 lines an Ovidian treatise on love, in which Yvain’s heart is struck by Love through his eyes (“par les iex el cuer le fiert”270) and the lady unknowingly avenges the death of her husband by leading Yvain’s heart away as a captive.

The image of the wound of love, “la plaie d’Amours,”271 that worsens in the presence of its

269 Tony Hunt, “Beginnings, Middles, and Ends Some Interpretive Problems in Chrétien’s Yvain and its Medieval Adaptations.” The Craft of Fiction: Essays in Medieval Poetics, edited by Leigh A. Arrathoon, Solaris, 1984, p. 110. 270 Hult, l. 1372. 271 Ibid., l. 1377. 92 doctor is developed at length, and the passage as a whole marks an extended break from the action of the scene—the funeral of Esclados the Red—in order to draw out the problem of how

Yvain’s chivalric duty to complete his adventure and return to court with the tale is complicated by his erotic desire for Esclados’s wife. This problem is brought about by the experiential emotion of love, whereas Yvain’s later cultivation of his habitus is accomplished by love’s affect, as previously explained. The English poet’s version of the scene, by contrast, reads simply as follows:

Luf, þat es so mekil of mayne,

Sare had wownded Sir Ywayne,

Þat whare so he sal ride or ga,

His hert sho has þat es his fa.

His hert he has set al bydene,

Whare himself dar noght be sene.

But þus in langing bides he

And hopes þat it sal better be.272

Although he retains the central conceit of Chrétien’s passage through the battle motif that paints

Alundyne as Ywain’s enemy, the Ywain-Poet does not dwell on or appear to relish the erotic complication, greatly reducing the 66 analytical French lines to a tight eight. Coupled with the noted thematic change in the prologue, this adaptation signals a decisive departure in the English poem away from Chrétien’s examination of love as affective practice.

Accordingly, while Yvain and Laudine’s marriage is consummated both for love and politics, Ywain and Alundyne’s marriage is almost entirely political. It must be clearly stated that although it is not his primary focus but rather the kind of complicating detail that gives his

272 Friedman and Harrington, ll. 871-878. 93 stories their affective power, Chrétien also absolutely renders the marriage in the context of immediate political expedience: Laudine’s lands need a defender in the absence of her husband, and she presents the idea of Yvain to her court first as a necessary champion, for “fame ne set porter escu / ne ne set de lance ferir”273 (“a woman does not know how to bear a shield or strike with a lance”274). This practicality is tempered with Ovidian love, however: upon reviewing the situation, the barons “li prïent qu’ellë otroie / Ce qu’elle feïst toute voie, / Que Amours a faire li commande / Ce dont los et conceil demande”275 (“implored her [Laudine] to do what she would have done anyway, for Love commanded her to do that for which she asked their advice and counsel”276). While Laudine approaches her barons with the idea of a political marriage in their own best interest in light of Arthur’s approach, the narrator assures us that Laudine ultimately marries Yvain for love, continuing the poem’s theme as set forth in the prologue.

No such assurance exists in Ywain and Gawain. On the contrary, the Ywain-Poet renders the scene as follows:

Sone unto þe kirk þai went

And war wedded in þaire present.

Þare wedded Ywaine in plevyne

Þe riche lady Alundyne,

Þe dukes doghter of Landuit;

Els had hyr lande bene destruyt.277

The overall focus on love as motivating affect, as an emotional force of personal and societal change, so entirely central to Le Chevalier au Lion, is thus nearly eliminated in the English poem. Alundyne marries Ywain precisely so that Arthur will not destroy her lands. Ojars Kratins

273 Hult, ll. 2098-2099 274 Kibler, p. 321. 275 Hult, ll. 2139-2142. 276 Kibler, p. 322. 277 Friedman and Harrington, ll. 1251-1256. 94 agrees, noting, “When Ywain agrees to protect [Alundyne’s] lands against Arthur and the Lady accepts him in marriage, she has concluded what is primarily a practical business matter… We cannot interpret the union of Ywain and the lady here as an example of courtly love or [even] as a case of natural love between two exemplary individuals.”278 Without the impetus of courtly love, however, the habitus or ethical circuit as described by Hunt and Hanning, in which “love of a lady inspires a knight to chivalric feats and endeavors, which in turn reinforce and promote the lady’s love of him,”279 cannot exist, and the theme of the poem thus turns on a different axis.

Ywain still follows Gawain after the wedding and fails to return after the appointed year, but in the English poem, “Ywain’s mistake in the amatory sphere is merely a symptom of his chivalric immaturity,”280 namely that he has failed to keep his word or conform to his promised trowth. When Alundyne’s messenger comes to shame Ywain at court, she says, “It es ful mekyl ogains þe right / To cal so fals a man a knight,”281 an addition by the English author with no parallel in Chrétien’s poem, where he is denounced over and over again as a false lover with no reference to his knighthood. In Ywain and Gawain, chivalric identity is bestowed solely by this ideal—fidelity to one’s word, or at least a performative affect of general goodness. The problem of how love can inspire prowess or vice versa is rendered moot; rather, as Finlayson argues, the question seems to be “whether one can achieve happiness by preferring prowess and glory to love, and the answer is decidedly in the negative.”282 Ywain’s subsequent adventures are still inspired by the thought of reconciliation with Alundyne, as in Chrétien, but his motivating affect is not love itself but the performative keeping of his word—a theme clearly also at work in the

French, though subordinated to the ethical circuit constituted by love and prowess. This loss of

278 Ojars Kratins, “Love and Marriage in Three Versions of the Knight of the Lion,” Comparative Literature, vol. 16, 1964, pp. 29-39. 279 Hunt, 1986, p. 13. 280 Hunt, 1984, p. 110. 281 Friedman and Harrington, ll. 1611-1612. 282 Finlayson, p. 333. 95 what makes romance as a genre particularly individualizing, the translator’s choice of reputation as driving theme over desire, is surely what causes readers to chafe against Ywain and Gawain in comparison to Le Chevalier au Lion, what makes critics characterize its plot as flat and lacking subtlety. But regardless of what modern readers may aesthetically prefer, the poet behind Ywain and Gawain is not Chrétien de Troyes, nor is he writing for the aristocratic public of twelfth- century Champagne. His poem is a skillful adaptation produced for a fourteenth-century English audience in need of a more distinctly English Knight with the Lion—a romance knight for an audience that no longer recognizes itself in romance knights and their perhaps overly complex moral world. The knight-in-translation must represent the more comprehensive affective practices of duty and desire for a wider reading public.

The Place of the Lion

The lion in this case, displaced from the poem’s title, can no longer represent or symbolize for the English Ywain the strength-in-service required of Chrétien’s character. Rather, if it is to retain its place in the narrative, the lion must somehow illustrate chivalric trowth through faithfulness to one’s word, perhaps obedience—or else be simplified into a purely fun companion beast with little to no literary value. While Rikhardsdottir briefly notes that “the

English translator adapts [the lion’s] symbolic function to his own narrative agenda,”283 Loomis adopts the latter view, writing, “It is quite unnecessary to see in the grateful lion ‘a symbol of the courage which Ywain finds in himself’ …in order to enjoy the animal’s very human and humorous behavior.”284 Juliette De Caluwé-Dor, similarly, eschews the intertextual canine nuance afforded to Chrétien’s lion by Karl Uitti, writing simply of its English counterpart, “The

283 Rikhardsdottir, p. 101. 284 Loomis, p. 141. 96 lion is assimilated into a dog, and the adapter seems to take pleasure in describing it as such.”285

She also correctly notes, however, that the English poet is the only medieval translator or adaptor of Le Chevalier au Lion who includes the lion in the poem’s ending, a change suggesting that the

Ywain-Poet did, in fact, have some design for the king of beasts. Nearly all commentators on the

English lion downplay its role in the poem, probably because, on its surface, it is one of the least changed aspects of the adaptation. As in the French, Ywain immediately bonds with the lion—

“Sirs, [so] have I wyn, / Mi lyoun and I sal noght twyn; / I luf him als wele, I ȝow hete, / Als my self at ane mete”286—and adopts its presence as essential to his nominal identity as “þe knight with þe lyoun.”287 Randy Schiff is perhaps the only scholar to take a hard critical stance on the lion, writing in his recent Marxist analysis, “The lion’s activities emphasize that force, not right, dictates both chivalric success and the political legitimacy it sustains…. The exiled Ywain and lion act both lawlessly and exceptionally, dissolving the law as they impose their will,”288 a position that does not seem to have found much traction among other scholars.

In a diluted sense, however, this idea of lawlessness may be a helpful interpretive key to understanding the lion’s new role in a romance that does not acknowledge the particular ethical or affective tenets of French chivalry. The lion’s unswerving loyalty to Ywain, retained from the

French source, is not coeval with obeying his commands to the letter. In fact, the lion at times directly disobeys Ywain in pursuit of a perhaps higher form of loyalty. When Ywain and the lion rescue Lunet from the executioner’s pyre, for instance, Ywain first declares, “With me es bath

God and right, / And þai sal help me forto fight, / And my lyon sal help me; / Þan er we foure

285 Juliette De Caluwé-Dor, “Yvain’s Lion Again: A Comparative Analysis of its Personality and Function in the Welsh, French, and English Versions,” An Arthurian Tapestry: Essays in Memory of Lewis Thorpe, edited by Kenneth Varty, Brewer, 1981, p. 236. 286 Friedman and Harrington, ll. 2219-2222. 287 Ibid., l. 2662. 288 Randy Schiff, “Reterritorialized Ritual: Classist Violence in Yvain and Ywain and Gawain,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 56, no. 3, 2014, pp. 224. 97 ogayns þam thre,”289 and, correspondingly, “His lyown made hym redy way.”290 Upon engaging

Lunet’s captors, however, who have falsely accused her of treason in an apparent bid to gain influence over Alundyne, Ywain agrees to restrain (“chastise”291) the lion and fight the false knights man to man: “He bad his lyoun go to rest; / And he [the lion] laid him sone onane / Doun byfore þam everilkane; / Bitwene his legges he layd his tail / And so biheld to þe batayl.”292 But

Ywain is quickly injured, and the lion rises from his spectator’s position to assist his master by rending the evil steward from his shoulder down to his knee “so þat men myght his guttes se,”293 an attack so brutal, the narrator informs us, as to make the man’s corpse unfit for burial. Ywain, then, seeing the lion’s disobedience, tries his best to curtail his companion’s violence, but the lion has a mind of its own, capable of deliberation, and recognizes that Ywain is not at all displeased with the result: “Þe liown thoght, how so he sayd, / Þat with his help he was wele payd.”294 The ends, it seems, have justified the means—or, more faithful to a reading centered on trowth, the spirit of the law through a commitment to justice has superseded its letter. The lion thereby evens the odds for Ywain, but it is sorely wounded in the process, a bodily sacrifice that so deeply moves Ywain that he fears for his sanity. It is an emotional scene that highlights the

English poet’s affective notion of trowth as enacted through loyalty and obedience.

The lion disobeys Ywain’s direct command to stay away from the battle, but in so doing saves Ywain’s life and is not directly punished for his action. Rather, the women surrounding the battlefield pray to God for a deliverer, only after which the lion strikes, demonstrating, at least on the part of the narration, that extrajudicial violence for the sake of justice is divinely sanctioned.

As the lion is attacked on all sides and near-fatally wounded by Ywain’s enemies, we may even

289 Friedman and Harrington, ll. 2519-2521. 290 Ibid., l. 2528. 291 Ibid., l. 2580. 292 Friedman and Harrington, ll. 2592-2596. 293 Ibid., l. 2618. 294 Ibid., ll. 2627-2628. 98 see a kind of penal substitution for Lunet, whose execution was prevented by its attack. While

Schiff characterizes this scene and others like it as Ywain imposing his own chivalric will on his enemies through sheer force and with total disregard for the rule of law, it must be noted that the law being disregarded, at least in this scene, is inherently unjust. Lunet has not actually committed treason, and her opponents are attempting to slander and then murder her to further their own political agenda. Ywain and the lion’s defense of Lunet transcends the letter of the law in order to protect the blood of the innocent, one of the core tenets of knightly habitus in any age.

The lion’s own violence and disobedience in this scene thus play out as a kind of microcosm for the kind of trowth and obedience Ywain himself needs to learn in the poem as a whole, namely that his interpretation of Gawain’s advice regarding a knight’s reputation— “For when a knyght es chevalrouse, / His lady es þe more jelows”295—was woefully flawed. In seeking to win the praise of other men by proving himself at tournaments, Ywain appears to have forgotten to uphold justice, specifically in his pledged defense of Alundyne’s lands, the very reason for their marriage. In this scene, the Knight with the Lion upends the stated will of legal precedent regarding treason and favors the cause of the real victim, by which it may be demonstrated that trowth as a nebulously defined chivalric ideal is perhaps best understood as a general commitment to justice and moral goodness.

The heroes of old whom the Ywain-Poet commends for their trowth in the opening lines of the poem are not the true lovers of Chrétien, whose chivalric honor depends on keeping their particular promise to a lady-love. Rather, the Golden Age established in Ywain and Gawain is one defined by a perhaps frustratingly general sense of follow-through, fidelity to one’s word, which, in a knight’s case, includes the upholding of justice. Broadly imagined, it is an affect immediately applicable for an audience of any social station, even one that cannot literally aspire

295 Braswell, l. 1463-1464. 99 to the practice of chivalry. Although nearly every scene in which the lion appears in the English poem is very close to the language of Chrétien’s original, this larger affective shift in the text as a whole destabilizes the significance of its presence. The lion can no longer symbolize or specifically embody martial prowess directed in the service of others, the theme which animates

Chrétien’s text, because that valence of the poem is eliminated in the adaptation—and the established process of forming a knightly habitus along with it. Rather, the lion of Ywain and

Gawain functions as an emissary of a perhaps more natural justice. As an unspeaking animal, it can neither swear an oath nor violate it; instead, it appears to intrinsically understand moral right and continually helps Ywain to bring it about, even at the expense of perfect obedience.

It is clear that the English adaptation of Yvain absolutely and without question reduces the complex chivalric ethic of Chrétien’s original. But the common criticism of the English poet—that he fundamentally misunderstood his source or intentionally cut Chrétien’s lyric arguments about erotic desire simply for the sake of cleaner plot and faster action—is at best not especially fair and at worst symptomatic of a larger hegemonic structure in the modern academy that devalues simplicity in narrative. As Matthews suggests, the English poem performs upon the

French a kind of textual colonizing in which the Arthurian space of appearance of the original is modified and imbued with the affective practices of a new time and place. It should not be surprising that fin’amor, a quintessentially French affect and motif, is excised from Ywain and

Gawain—it was similarly removed from every other medieval translation of the poem. Rather, this nearly complete elimination of a foundational part of Chrétien’s poem should be lauded, as by Loomis, as a novel, perhaps even radical, adaptation of a canonical literary masterpiece. The establishment of the chivalric habitus as based on a complicated interplay of the military skill and erotic desire of aristocratic men, so central a concern of Chrétien’s works and twelfth- century French romance more generally, is simply not important to a fourteenth-century English

100 audience. Instead, what Ywain must accomplish to be reconciled with Alundyne is something far less specific, the cultivation of a habitus practicable for an audience of any social class: he need only make good on his promises.

101 CHAPTER THREE

ONE OR SEVERAL GAWAINS:

IDENTITY AND INTERTEXT IN SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT

The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is; we get entangled in a description of qualities he necessarily shares with others like him; we begin to describe a type or a ‘character’ in the old meaning of the word, with the result that his specific uniqueness escapes us.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Introduction

Since the publication of its first modern edition by Frederic Madden in 1839, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has amassed a reputation as perhaps the finest Middle English romance, if not the finest—or at least “the most subtle and complex”296—romance in any medieval language.

Composed in the mid-to-late fourteenth century by the anonymous author of Pearl, Patience, and

Cleanness, the poem displays a masterful command of both formal construction and the vast thematic matrix of Arthurian literature. Scholars have traditionally assumed a courtly context for

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, based both on its technical detail and “close knowledge of the aristocratic culture of the time,”297 but its manuscript ecology among three religious texts and its specific north-west Midlands dialect have frustrated attempts to locate it within the circles that

Chaucer perhaps wrote for. Although the poem’s narrator claims to relate the tale strictly as he

“in toun herde, / with tonge,”298 a “stori stif and stronge, / With lel letteres loken, / In londe so hatz ben longe,”299 which is to say from well-established English poetics in both oral and written traditions, the work of Ad Putter and Elisabeth Brewer, among others, has made clear the indelible relation of the English poem to the preceding French-language literary tradition.

296 W. R. J. Barron, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Arthur of the English, edited by W. R. J. Barron, University of Wales Press, 2001, p. 164. 297 Michael J. Bennet, “The Historical Background,” A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, Brewer, 1997, p. 81. 298 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, edited by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 1925, Clarendon, 1985, ll. 31-32. 299 Ibid., ll. 34-36. 102 Formally, Sir Gawain participates in the revival (or perhaps survival) of the Anglo-Saxon alliterative line and famously incorporates the bob-and-wheel stanza pattern, but it uses these distinctly English forms to create, much in the manner of Chrétien de Troyes, a unique composition describing an individual knight’s quest beyond the familiar borders and communal, signifying power of Arthur’s court.

As a focal character, Gawain operates in many ways like Yvain or Perceval in Chrétien’s poems, cultivating his own chivalric habitus over the course of his adventure and returning, altered, to the Arthurian body politic, which alters in turn by his reincorporation. Unlike in

Chrétien, however, the poem is not structured around Gawain’s many aventures, in which the protagonist knight encounters various chance obstacles and challenges that test his habitus—as in Perceval and its Continuations, which prominently feature Gawain as a protagonist. Rather, these scenes take place in one-line increments across just two stanzas, less page space than it takes for Gawain to get dressed. As Randy Schiff notes, the poet’s “perfunctory recounting of

Gawain’s armed fights signals that he is interested primarily in the social dimension of knighthood.”300 While the poem is thus immediately recognizable as a romance in the vein of

Chrétien and his continuators, it is also unique for its particular emphasis not on character as displayed through the active presentation of love and prowess, but rather through sustained interrogation of Gawain’s public reputation. Indeed, many critics have noted that Gawain’s principal antagonist in the poem is, in fact, his own reputation, and Lee Patterson has suggested that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a romance “in which the dialectic of inner and outer,” the push and pull between private desire and public expectation, “is comprehensively thematized.”301 The poem, in fact, draws focused attention to the chivalry topos as a literary construct. More than any other medieval text, therefore, (save, perhaps, the Stanzaic Morte

300 Randy Schiff, “Unstable Kinship: Trojanness, Treason, and Community in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” College Literature, vol. 40, no. 2, 2013, p. 92. 301 Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, p. 11. 103 Arthur, to which I will return in the following chapter), Sir Gawain problematizes the Arthurian space of appearance from which Gawain arises as inherently flawed from its outset. The struggle between Gawain’s reputation as established in the space of appearance and his own ability to act with or against it in private is the poem’s primary tension, and the text is at endless war with itself over the experiential ethic of the court and who exactly Gawain, as its representative outside the walls of Camelot, actually is.

Instead of a single, consistent Gawain, the implied audience of Sir Gawain and the Green

Knight is presented with a quasi-rhizomatic character whose public identity is spread out across the testimony of diegetic others and contradictory intertextual references. Gawain is, from his earliest appearance in the poem, an unstable signifier, pulled in at least three directions by the poem’s own narration and the competing external literary traditions from which it draws, including the Galfridian chronicle tradition, the French romance tradition, and the nascent tradition of Gawain as Northern English folk hero. From a certain point of view, “Gawain” is not a man at all but something resembling an affect, a performative identity rendered in discrete, socially defined pieces that the protagonist knight may choose to pick up and wear at will, not unlike the individual components of his armor. Yet at the same time, Gawain the man is distinctly embodied such that it is his blood relation to Arthur, or at least his rhetorical claim to it, that reifies his person, and when he returns to Camelot after his adventure, he invites the court, like Christ, to examine his scar, the mark of his mortality and encounter with the Other. He is himself an “endeles knot,” a concentration of inextricable ideological multitudes linked with one another in a deceptively simple character, and ascribing any given literary context to his construction has the power to drastically alter the reader’s mode of encounter with the poem.

Thus, for the purposes of this chapter, I will treat Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as both an intra- and transvernacular adaptation of insular and continental literary ideas, forms, and

104 expectations that together constitute a decidedly critical articulation of the Arthurian space of appearance and the individual knight’s role and relevance within it.

Gawain and Gawain

The Sir Gawain manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton Nero A x) is a relatively small vellum codex of ninety leaves,302 measuring just shy of 5x7 inches and described by Derek

Brewer as a “rather unimpressive manuscript with twelve rather poor quality illustrations.”303 It contains all four of the extant works now commonly attributed to the so-called Gawain-Poet, each “written in the same small sharp hand, which is dated by general consent around 1400”304 and attributed “not [to] the poet but [to] a scribe who inevitably made some errors.”305 Although there is no external evidence with which to definitively place the manuscript’s early provenance or place of composition, “the dialect of the scribe has been quite precisely located to a part of

Cheshire,” and “while the scribal dialect does not, of course, necessarily reveal the place of actual writing, it does seem consistent with possible topographical allusions in Sir Gawain,”306 specifically the description of the wilderness of Wirral at ll. 698-708. Based on the consistency of the unique dialect across all four poems in the manuscript, Tolkien and Gordon, among others, assert that “there was no important difference between the language of the scribe and that of the poet,”307 placing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight fairly confidently within the context of a north-west Midlands court in the mid-to-late fourteenth century.

Of the poet himself, we know very little—neither his name, rank, nor class, whether clerical or lay, married or single. Brewer notes, “In Pearl he presents himself as a father

302 A. S. G. Edwards, “The Manuscript: British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x,” A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, 1997, p. 197. 303 Derek Brewer, “Introduction,” A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, 1997, p. 1. 304 Tolkien and Gordon, p. xi. 305 Derek Brewer, p. 1. 306 Edwards, p. 197. 307 Tolkien and Gordon, p. xiii. 105 mourning his dead two-year-old child, and in Patience as poor, but both of these might be consonant with his being either clerical or lay,”308 or, importantly, a matter of non- autobiographical narration. Brewer continues, “He must have been educated, obviously, and of a certain social standing. He is a courtly poet of some kind of court.”309 In truth, it is unclear whether the four poems were all actually composed by the same author, although this is the common scholarly assumption, due in large part to “their survival in a unique manuscript… written by a single scribe in a consistent dialect.”310 Numerous other details have aided in this assignation, including “correspondences of vocabulary and stylistic features, the thoughtful and inventive use of verse forms and narrative framing, a propensity for balance and symmetry in the shaping of narrative, [and] the highly skilled handling of viewpoint and perspective.”311

Although there do remain skeptics,312 most commentators tend to hold with Dorothy Everett, who says, “It seems easier to assume a common author than to suppose that two or more men writing in the same locality and the same period, and certainly closely associated with one another, possessed this rare and, one would think, inimitable [poetic] quality.”313 There is, thus, much we do not and cannot know, and it is this irresolvable uncertainty about the poet and his milieu, Brewer suggests, that fuels the never-ending critical anxiety about his many textual ambiguities: if we could only be certain of the poet’s identity or that of his audience, perhaps his work would open itself up more fully.

As is commonly noted, ambiguity within Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has been the central thread in the poem’s scholarship over the last century or more. Richard Moll

308 Derek Brewer, p. 2. 309 Derek Brewer, ibid. 310 Malcolm Andrew, “Theories of Authorship,” A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, 1997, p. 23. 311 Ibid. 312 See, for example, Morton Bloomfield, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Appraisal,” PMLA, vol. 76, 1961, pp. 7-19 and David Lawton, Middle English Alliterative Poetry and its Literary Background, Cambridge University Press, 1982. 313 Dorothy Everett, Essays in Middle English Literature, Oxford University Press, 1955, p. 68. 106 characterizes the critical trends of the 1990s, especially, as emphasizing “the instability of [the poem’s] signs” and “the disparity between Gawain’s reputation for courtly refinements and his own self-image,”314 and John Plummer draws attention to discourse surrounding “the symbolic value of the Green Knight, interpretations ranging over a spectrum which includes vegetation deity, death, and Satan,” ultimately concluding that “the essential point of the Green Knight’s ambiguous appearance is the ambiguity itself.”315 As Derek Pearsall observed in 2011,

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the poem upon which I wrote my M.A. thesis nearly

sixty years ago, and I have written on it several times since then, but I am still not sure

what it is about, [by which] I mean that I do not know what it means, or why it is

significant, though I do know that it is significant… In fact, there is hardly any medieval

poem in which it seems more important to find out what is meant. It seems deliberately

set up to engage our interest so as to provoke our frustration.316

Pearsall traces the dominant modes of the poem’s twentieth-century criticism, beginning with the influential Freudian fantasy put forth by John Spiers317 and continuing through the Robertsonian exegetical approach and Morton Bloomfield’s analysis of the poem’s comedy318 before turning to the prevailing New Critical concern with the “necessary tension and ambiguity of poetry,” most pronounced in “the subversion of the [romance] genre through the disturbance of the moral and chivalric assumptions appropriate to romance and the age of chivalry.”319 Romance, of course, is a hard enough term to parse in its own right, presenting “enormous difficulties of

314 Richard Moll, “Frustrated Readers and Conventional Decapitation in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Modern Language Review, vol. 97, no. 4, 2002, p.793. 315 John Plummer, “Signifying the Self: Language and Identity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives on the Pearl Poet, edited by Robert J. Blanch, Miriam Youngerman Miller, and Julian N. Wasserman, Whitston, 1991, p. 199. 316 Derek Pearsall, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Essay in Enigma,” The Chaucer Review, vol. 46, nos. 1 and 2, 2011, p. 248. 317 John Spiers, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Scrutiny, vol. 16, 1949, pp. 274-300. 318 Bloomfield, 1961. 319 Pearsall, 2011, pp. 250. 107 definition for modern critics,”320 but any degree of structural criticism of Sir Gawain and the

Green Knight will reveal no shortage of ambiguities, for the poem relies heavily on a series of binaries by which it develops both its plot and themes. Barron describes a “dialectic of opposites which pervades all levels of the text, from the opening opposition of ‘blysse’ and ‘blunder,’ through contrasting pairs of symbols, structurally juxtaposed episodes, to the underlying contrast between civilized and natural values leading to Gawain’s ultimate choice between chivalric

‘trawþe’ and the instinct for self-preservation.”321 These are the same binaries, broadly, that structure twelfth-century French romance and its direct Middle English imitators, as observed in

Chapter Two, but appear, by the end of the fourteenth century when the Gawain-Poet was writing, to have held less affective sway in England.

Ad Putter begins his admirable study by drawing attention to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s

Tale, a poem contemporary with Sir Gawain and Chaucer’s only fully Arthurian text, noting that

“in his telling the Arthurian world is reduced to a self-consciously fictitious setting” within which is engendered “the moral that true nobility lies not in ancestry but in virtue. Chaucer may well have expected his audience to take this moral to heart, but doing so depends precisely on not taking the Arthurian setting seriously.”322 The Arthurian space of appearance, in Putter’s reading, is somewhat parodic in Chaucer’s text, and Gower, in his analogous Tale of Florent, removes the explicitly Arthurian elements from the plot entirely. By the end of the fourteenth century, the cultural capital of Arthurian romance in English was evidently in decline, although this postulation must be held in tension with “the large number of French Arthurian romances in verse and prose listed in the wills and inventories of the English royalty and nobility,”323 to say

320 W. R. J. Barron, “The Ambivalence of Adventure: Verbal Ambiguity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Fitt I.” The Legend of Arthur in the Middle Ages, edited by P. B. Grout, R. A. Lodge, C. E. Pickford, and E. K. C. Varty, Brewer, 1983, p. 29. 321 Barron, 1999, p. 182. 322 Ad Putter, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance, Clarendon, 1995, p. 1. 323 Ibid., p. 2. 108 nothing of the proliferation of so-called folk romances in this same period and immediately after.

The concerns of the Ricardian poets were apparently not suited to tales of heroism and high adventure; Putter argues that “they focused instead on interpersonal relations and the ethical obligations and inner conflicts they impose on us,”324 although it is my contention that Arthurian literature, perhaps especially as rendered by Chrétien de Troyes and his imitators, is concerned expressly with inner conflicts imposed by ethical obligations. The Gawain-Poet is a prime example, appearing to share this attitude in the construction of his Arthurian world: “His romance consistently subordinates action to reflection, armed combat to psychological drama. It humanizes the hero, implicating him in an intricate plot that tests and strains his commitments to promises and to contracts he has entered into,” making its themes “relevant beyond the social circle of a small baronial household.”325 What sets the Gawain-Poet apart from his contemporary

English poets, in other words, is his apparently good-faith literary dialogue with the preceding

French Arthurian tradition, though it is noticeably changed in his adaptation.

This has puzzled critics, many of whom find it difficult to reconcile the Gawain-Poet’s apparently sincere use of the Arthurian setting and romance genre with the contemporary examples of Chaucer and Gower. “The readiness with which such labels as ‘anti-romance’ or

‘meta-romance’ are applied to Gawain is symptomatic of criticism that is caught between an awareness of the literary and moral self-consciousness of this romance, and the belief that it cannot accommodate these qualities without ceasing to be a romance proper.”326 Rather, Sir

Gawain and the Green Knight derives much of its power by taking the romance genre and its

Arthurian space of appearance seriously, calling its values into question through the individual and embodied experience of its protagonist. “Like the best French Arthurian romances,” Putter writes, “which expose and explore the tensions between love and duty, conscience and worldly

324 Ibid., p. 3. 325 Ibid. 326 Ibid., p. 4. 109 glory, obligation and self-interest, Gawain problematizes the moral laws we live by. Their

Arthurian world is unrealistic only to the extent that it actualizes those unthinkable situations and dilemmas which life ordinarily spares us.”327 This study, following Putter, seeks to read Sir

Gawain as a romance with at least one foot in the French literary tradition, as a transvernacular adaptation not of a single text but of a set of recognizable themes and affects that depend, at their core, on the sincere application of the Arthurian setting as a space of appearance in which the cultivation of a chivalric habitus may occur. Part of what vexes so many attempts at holistic interpretation, however, is the poem’s intertextual web of decidedly non-French sources as well, such that it does not wholly resemble, and often upends, its most immediate exemplars.

It may be useful, then, to begin with a discussion of some of the poem’s possible sources and analogues. The famous beheading motif, for example, evidently first occurs in an Irish prose narrative called Fled Bricend, and although its earliest manuscript dates from the beginning of the twelfth century, the story itself is probably much older, telling how several heroes of Ulster compete with one another in a series of contests, in one of which “each of them faces a challenge to behead a superhumanly strong opponent on condition that he shall submit to a return blow the next day.”328 Exactly as in Sir Gawain, the challenger wields an axe, is able to change his appearance, and “when his head is cut off he picks it up and goes away without replacing it on his shoulders.”329 The similarities are obviously striking, but it is exceedingly unlikely that the

Gawain-Poet himself had direct access to Fled Bricend. The motif recurs, however, in several popular French-language narratives and at least one High German one. A scene in Le Livre de

Caradoc, part of the long version of the First Continuation of Chrétien’s Conte du Graal (ca.

1200), has drawn the most attention as a possible source for Sir Gawain, given the following points of agreement:

327 Ibid., p. 6. 328 Tolkein and Gordon, p. xv. 329 Ibid., p. xvi. 110 Arthur and Guenever are at table ready for a feast, but Arthur, according to his custom,

waits for a marvel before beginning it. The challenger rides into the hall on horseback

and first addresses Arthur, but Caradoc undertakes the adventure. The period between the

blows is a year, and when the challenger delays his return blow Caradoc accuses him of

cowardice. In the prose version of this story, known first from the text printed in Paris in

1530 as Perceual le galloys, the challenger is dressed in green satin.330

Although this prose version dates from more than a century after Sir Gawain, it bears witness to a fascinating textual analogue in which this supernatural challenger in the Caradoc narrative is dressed in green, a detail otherwise apparently original to Sir Gawain. Another close analogue is the Old French Perlesvaus, in which Lancelot is challenged in a Waste City by a young knight with an axe, beheads the challenger, and then returns to the place a year later only to shrink from the first return blow given by the young knight’s brother, almost exactly as in Sir Gawain.

Although Tolkien and Gordon note that “all these variants of the beheading theme clearly derive ultimately from an Irish story like that found in Fled Bricend, in which it was a test of courage and honor,”331 it is unclear how aware of this extended process of cultural remediation that medieval English authors actually were, drawing, as they did, directly from French texts that were themselves developed at some remove from hypothetical Celtic exemplars. Elisabeth

Brewer locates another main area of source and analogue study in the temptation theme. “The motif of sexual temptation appears in Chrétien’s Perceval and its Continuations and in

Perlesvaus,” all additionally analogues of the beheading theme, “and Gawain is several times represented in situations in which he does not succumb,”332 as in Perlesvaus when he refuses the advances of two maidens in a tent and later, after disenchanting an associated evil custom,

330 Ibid. 331 Ibid., p. xvii. 332 Elisabeth Brewer, “The Sources of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, Brewer, 1997, p. 246. 111 refuses them again. In the First Continuation, however, the same source as the Livre de Caradoc discussed above, Gawain does not resist such temptation: “After the siege of Brun de Branlant’s castle, Gawain, who is recovering from his wounds rides on and on until he comes upon a beautiful girl in a pavilion. When she hears who he is, she offers herself to him entirely and

‘loses the name of maiden.’”333 In the little-read Fourth Continuation, too, Gawain encounters a lady in a pavilion who seeks to seduce and kill him at the direction of her husband, superficially similar to his situation in Sir Gawain, but he detects her hidden knife while crossing himself at her bedside and subsequently rapes her.334

In fact, although Chrétien, as discussed in Chapter Two, presents Gawain fairly consistently as a foil for his protagonists, a martial exemplar to be surpassed or transcended by submitting the practice of chivalry to a higher service than combat, authors in the immediate decade after Chrétien developed Gawain into a lover, a reputation “which frequently causes excitement when he approaches a castle, and an element of burlesque even enters the stories,”335 as in the Chevalier à l’Epée and La Mule sans Frein, setting a clear thematic precedent for Sir

Gawain’s famous celebration of “luf-talkyng.”336 As B. J. Whiting has pointed out in an incredibly influential article on Gawain’s reputation for courtesy, although Gawain is not an adulterer in these tales, he is by no means celebrated for his chastity.337 This is an important distinction, however. With the exception, perhaps, of the Fourth Continuation, Gawain is never guilty of adultery, as Lancelot and Tristan so fundamentally are; he is also never cast as the typical courtly lover, complaining to the skies about the cruelty of his lady or losing his sanity after being rebuffed—rather, his manners appear to prevent him from being overwhelmed by his

333 Elisabeth Brewer, p. 247. The quoted passage is from l. 2715 in Roach’s edition, which reads more fully as “D’amor, de jeu, de cortoisie / Ont puis ensamble tant parlé / Et bonement ris et jüé, / Tant qu’a perdu non de pucele, / S’a non amie et damoisele.” I will return to this passage at some length below. 334 In Williams and Oswald’s edition, ll. 12638-9: “Weille ou non, sosfrir le estuet / Le ju de mon seignor Gavain.” 335 Elisabeth Brewer, p. 244. 336 Tolkien and Gordon, l. 927. 337 B. J. Whiting, “Gawain, his Reputation, his Courtesy, and his Appearance in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale,” 1947, Gawain: A Casebook, edited by Raymond H. Thompson and Keith Busby, Routledge, 2006, pp. 45-94. 112 passion. Even in the course of his many recorded trysts in the early years after Chrétien, Gawain is most often a model of courtly manners—as when he falsely claims in the First Continuation to have raped the maiden in the pavilion in order to preserve her public honor, as argued by

Frappier338—or of chivalric restraint, lecturing his brothers on the great dishonor of committing rape in Claris and the Vulgate Merlin. Gawain is presented in these texts, as perhaps expected given the influence of Chrétien de Troyes, as the paragon of knightly virtue, the example of chivalric habitus to which other knights aspire: an embodied subject completely mastered by its control of social manners.339

Alongside his newfound amatory reputation, Gawain’s fame as a strong and courteous knight also continued to grow. In several long episodes of the Prose Lancelot, he can be seen holding his own in battle and offering true friendship to Lancelot, who calls him “le mieldre cheualiers du monde,”340 the best knight in the world. Moreover, the narrator records:

Mesire Gauuains fu tous iors loiaus uers son seignor. Il ne fu mie mesdisans ne unuieus.

ancois fu tous iors plus cortois que nus & pour chou lamoient plus dames & damoiseles

& pour sa cheualerie. Il ne fue mie uantans entre chualiers de cose quil feist onques. Il fu

tous iors sage & atempres & sans vilonnie dire.341

(Sir Gawain was always loyal to his lord. He was never slanderous or envious, but was

always more courteous than anyone else, and because of this and because of his chivalry,

338 Jean Frappier, “Le Personnage de Gauvain dans la Première Continuation du Conte du Graal,” Romance Philology, vol. 11, 1957, pp. 331-344. 339 Fuller accounts of Gawain’s character in French romance can be found in Fanni Bogdanow, “The Character of Gauvain in the Thirteenth-Century Prose Romances,” 1958, Gawain: A Casebook, edited by Raymond H. Thompson and Keith Busby, Routledge, 2006, pp. 173-182 and in the early work of Keith Busby, including “The Character of Gauvain in the Prose Tristan, 1977, in Thompson and Busby, 2006, pp. 183-207 and Gauvain in Old French Literature, Rodopi, 1980. 340 H. Oskar Sommer, editor, The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, vol. 4, Le Livre de Lancelot del Lac, p. 129. 341 Ibid., p. 358. 113 ladies and damsels loved him more. He never boasted among knights about anything he

ever did. He was always wise and moderate and never spoke discourteously.)342

To all appearances, Gawain is an exemplary knight throughout most of the Lancelot-Grail, and it is precisely his courteous manners and chivalric virtue that women find desirable, a depiction consonant with the intent of his nuptial advice to Yvain in Le Chevalier au Lion. As Whiting notes, “there are no qualifications, no slanders, no hints of evil. Except for a scene in the Grail castle where he is disgraced and misused, Gawain has yielded the absolute leadership to Lancelot without losing prowess”343 throughout the greater part of the Lancelot-Grail up until his slaying of eighteen knights in the Grail quest.

In the Mort Artu, the final section of the Lancelot-Grail we find the first true glimpse of what Edward Kennedy identifies as the “degeneration of Gawain”344 that took place over the first half of the thirteenth century: the swearing of a bloodthirsty oath to destroy Lancelot after the deaths of his brothers. Although one of his final acts in this text is to seek forgiveness from

Lancelot, claiming responsibility for his part in the destruction of their shared world, many commentators note that Gawain of the Mort Artu, overshadowed as he is by Lancelot, ceases to be the model for courtly virtue found in the earlier romances. It is commonly agreed, however, that Gawain’s reputation in French literature reaches its nadir in the Prose Tristan (ca. 1240),

Whiting noting that it presents “the most consistently and unrelievedly black picture of Gawain to be found in literature.”345 In this text, Gawain, among other things, takes life “out of hate, envy, or to get possession of a woman,”346 kills Driant’s horse before murdering him in cold blood, throws Lamorat’s head into the road after decapitating him out of spite, disrespects the

342 Whiting, p. 62. 343 Ibid. 344 Edward Donald Kennedy, “Gawain’s Family and Friends: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and its Allusions to French Prose Romance,” People and Texts: Relationships in Medieval Literature, edited by Thea Summerfield and Keith Busby, Brill, 2007, p. 157. 345 Whiting, p. 62. 346 Ibid, p. 63. 114 Grail quest, and, perhaps worst of all, makes fun of Tristan’s haircut. After the Tristan, “the remaining prose romances seem to direct no more than pin-pricks at Gawain,”347 a tradition of representation that slowly but dramatically altered Gawain’s place in the metatextual canon and cultural memory of Arthurian literature by its inclusion in the so called Post-Vulgate Cycle, an eventual primary source for Thomas Malory.

Kennedy argues that “the Gawain-Poet appears to have intended his work for two audiences: one would be those English who had no familiarity with French prose romances, and they, like most readers today, would not have recognized allusions to the fall of the kingdom [as described in cyclic romance] and the degeneration of Gawain.”348 This French prose tradition, as described above, presents a radically different portrait of Gawain than an exclusively English- speaking audience would have presumably had access to, although it is, of course, impossible to know the exact social composition of the Gawain-Poet’s original audience, many of whom were likely well-versed in French-language literature. Gawain of the English, as witnessed by the roughly contemporary Alliterative Morte Arthure and Awyntyrs off Arthure, among others, owes the most popular part of his origin to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia and its direct adaptations in the Brut tradition, such as Wace’s Roman de Brut, Laȝamon’s Brut, and various metrical chronicles in both French and English. He is Arthur’s nephew and finest knight, an unparalleled soldier—save Arthur himself—and the apex of Arthurian society, although occasionally given to anger when the honor of his king or people is called into question. He successfully engages in single combat with the Roman Emperor Lucius and meets his end among all of Arthur’s best knights while reclaiming the realm from his treacherous brother Mordred. Much of what would have been recognizable to an English-speaking audience in the fourteenth century would have been gleaned from this deeply ingrained chronicle tradition, the historical accounts of Arthur and

347 Ibid. 348 Kennedy, p. 157. 115 his coterie that most often included their story in the context of a wider British history beginning with the Trojan diaspora, as discussed in Chapter One. Gawain in Laȝamon’s Brut, for example, is a champion of the people, an advocate for the common good, and in the widely circulating

English folk romances and ballads of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Thomas Hahn asserts

“the name of Gawain was the proverbial equivalent of courtesy itself.”349 Barron has even called this tradition a “hagiology of Gawain,”350 a far cry from anyone’s account of the character found in the Prose Tristan.

Much like Ywain and Gawain, as argued in Chapter Two, these folk romances and ballads are thought to have been composed for a decidedly non-courtly audience who may have only seldom interacted with actual knights, an audience for which the affective practices of the chivalric space of appearance are rendered more generally, as with Ywain and Gawain’s treatment of trowth. As Hahn argues, “Popular romances, in substituting idealizations of knightly conduct for the conduct itself, may have had greater impact in creating and reinforcing chivalric sentiment (in particular, among non-chivalric audiences) than anything knights did for themselves.”351 Spread out across so many tales and tellings, each of them relatively self- contained and removed from any sort of governing historiographical structure like that found in a chronicle, or even a prose romance, Gawain becomes less a character than a narrative function, a readily identifiable means by which an audience may parse any given story in which he appears.

Gawain becomes synonymous with chivalric behavior, however it is defined, and in so doing becomes the embodiment of the Arthurian ethos, a sort of socio-ethical weathervane. “In this way,” Hahn continues, “stories like those of Sir Gawain serve social and political functions, making identification with chivalric values possible for a much wider spectrum of the king’s

349 Thomas Hahn, introduction to Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, edited by Thomas Hahn, Medieval Institute, 1995, p. 3. 350 W. R. J. Barron, “Bruttene Deorling: An Arthur for Every Age,” The Fortunes of King Arthur, edited by Norris Lacy, Brewer, 2005, p. 62. 351 Hahn, p. 10. 116 subjects than an elite Order or an actual tournament might ever affect.”352 Barron has argued that the critical undervaluation of these texts up until the 1990s “has deprived Sir Gawain and the

Green Knight… of an important part of its creative context,”353 and although many modern readers have often denigrated these popular English romances in comparison to the “elegant” or

“sophisticated” romances of Chrétien de Troyes, they were never really intended to have the same effect. Rather, “the narratives unfold through traditional plots and reiterated motifs, glorify a popular hero whom everyone knew, and eventuate in happy endings which bring the characters within the story to terms with one another, and which reconcile the audience outside the story to the structures and ideals epitomized by a ‘chivalric’ (or hierarchically ordered) society.”354

Gawain’s role in these romances, therefore, whether marrying a loathly lady or honorably defeating a rival knight and bringing him back into the Arthurian fold, is to reconcile his encounter with the Other with the implicit values of the Arthurian space of appearance, thus securing “the audience’s identification with the hero, and with the naturalness of the social order he represents.”355

By considering these folk romances alongside Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we may see how they all participate, as Rosalind Field argues, in the apparently established English tradition of “translating ‘Gawain’ back again from his French identity, of womanizing and immoral foil to Lancelot and other Arthurian knights, to a hero in his own right,”356 a movement evidently simultaneous with his counterpart Walewein’s trajectory in the medieval Low

Countries.357 Acknowledging this important contemporary context for Gawain’s good name in

352 Hahn, p. 10. 353 Barron, 1999, p. 164. 354 Hahn, p. 11. 355 Ibid., p. 25. 356 Rosalind Field, “Romance,” The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 1, edited by Roger Ellis, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 310. 357 See Bart Besamusca, “Walewein: A Middle Dutch Antidote to the Prose Lancelot, Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society, vol. 47, 1995, pp. 301-310 and David Johnson, “‘Men hadde niet Arsatere vonden 117 England, Richard Moll has importantly sought to also bring attention back to the chronicle texts themselves, in which Gawain’s courtesy has often been overstated by critics citing Whiting.

“Geoffrey’s Gawain, it must be stressed, is not the model of courtesy found in later romances and he is mentioned in the Historia in only three scenes,”358 first in an aside explaining his training under Pope Sulpicius, later in battle against Lucius, and between these two initiating the violence that leads to all-out war between Rome and Britain. Sent by Arthur as an ambassador to formally challenge Lucius to either withdraw his army from the coast of Gaul or engage with

Arthur in combat, Gawain instead loses his temper when the Emperor’s nephew, Quintilianus, taunts that the Britons are better at boasting than fighting, leading Gawain to cut off his head and retreat in haste, but not before killing one of his pursuers and telling him to inform Quintilianus, in hell, that Britons always make good on their boasts.

This scene (and accompanying bon mot) is one of the most memorable in the Historia, and Moll notes that it was reproduced and often expanded in the post-Galfridian insular Brut tradition, as in Peter Langtoft’s Chronicle (1307), Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s Chronicle (ca.

1330s), and Thomas Gray of Heton’s Scalacronica (1355), all post-dating the French prose romances and roughly contemporary with the burgeoning English folk tradition. The mistake many critics make, according to Moll, is to “[view] the different Gawains chronologically.

Rather than accept that the historical and romance Gawains [were] both current at the time Sir

Gawain was written,” such critics—even those seeking to draw attention to the often overlooked

English tradition in which Gawain was, in fact, a model of courtesy—often end up ignoring the actual text of the historically inflected chronicles. Instead, Moll argues, “part of the expectation of Arthurian history was a Gawain who could not control his temper, and who was prone to

alsoe goet’: Walewein as Healer in the Middle Dutch Arthurian Tradition,” Arthuriana, vol. 11, no. 4, 2001, pp. 39- 52. 358 Moll, p.795. 118 beheading those who implied that the British were all talk and no action.”359 Thus, just as an audience familiar with the French prose romance tradition might be surprised by Gawain’s attested courtesy throughout the poem, an audience familiar with the Galfridian chronicle tradition would be summarily shocked when Gawain’s apparently vanquished opponent reaches down to pick up his severed head, reversing the expectation set by previous literary representations of Gawain.

By all accounts, then, the Gawain-Poet was aware of the French tradition, drawing episodes and descriptions directly from the First Continuation—to say nothing of his minor inclusion of Mador de la Porte toward the beginning of Fitt II, a character who otherwise only appears in medieval literature in the Old French Mort Artu and its two Middle English adaptations. He also, however, claims to have adapted his story from an English oral source that he “in toun herde,”360 and although this acknowledgement is most likely rhetorical, it suggests a distinct engagement with the English tradition(s) that makes Kennedy’s dual-audience and

Moll’s triple-audience hypotheses very attractive. Moreover, the poet acknowledges in his closing lines a debt to “þe Brutus bokez,”361 offering their record to his audience as an assurance of his tale’s veracity within the larger scope of Arthurian history. Gawain, by the middle of the fourteenth century when Sir Gawain is speculated to have been written, had become all things to all people, an inherently unstable signifier by virtue of the vast proliferation of his appearances in various European literatures. As Elisabeth Brewer suggests, the Gawain-Poet

might thus have been able to choose whether to make Gawain heroic…, or a Grail knight,

or even a—possibly comic—figure with a taste for amorous adventure. The poet might,

furthermore, have been able to exploit the uncertainty of his audience as to which Gawain

359 Ibid, p. 801. 360 Tolkien and Gordon, l. 31. 361 Ibid., l. 2523. 119 they were about to encounter, just as he makes both the lord of the castle and the lady

question Gawain’s identity during his stay at Hautdesert.362

Ultimately, it is Lord and Lady Bertilak’s direct challenges to Gawain’s stated identity that provoke much of my interest in the poem. They introduce a high degree of uncertainty into the text and are able thereby to confuse and frustrate the audience as much as they confuse and frustrate Gawain himself. But the ambiguity they provide is compounded by the poet’s closing reference to “þe Brutus bokez” and his decision to bookend his romance with a reminder of the destruction of Troy. This particular and particularizing historiographical frame provides a large and looming political dimension to the poem’s problem of identity that both centers the poet’s vision for the Arthurian space of appearance and further destabilizes Gawain himself.

Civilization and its Discontents

As briefly noted above, the Arthurian chronicle tradition said to have been favored by insular readers typically begins, following Geoffrey’s Historia, with an account of Aeneas’ flight from the burning Troy and the subsequent conquest of Albion, later called Britain, by his great- grandson, Brutus. This branch of the legend locates the Arthurian world distinctly within time at a particular point on the continuum of both British and world history, linking Britain rhetorically, perhaps especially in its Arthurian era, with Troy—a fallen secular empire torn apart by internecine strife and attack from foreign enemies in collusion with domestic traitors. As discussed in Chapter One, the Britons in these nominally British histories (almost uniformly written by Norman and Angevin authors or those in their employ) are portrayed as degenerate, no longer worthy of their legendary pedigree, but the influential medieval European concept of translatio imperii often began its linear staging of history with Troy at the head, its far-flung

362 Elisabeth Brewer, p. 244-245. 120 conquering sons establishing the ruling families across Britain and the continent with their settlements. Although Chrétien’s romances were more than once compiled or even interpolated into such chronicles (as in BnF fr. 1450, where his texts are rendered as part of Wace’s Roman de Brut), the French romance tradition after Chrétien, by contrast, more often begins its

Arthurian history at the crucifixion of Jesus and subsequent translation of the Grail to Britain by

Joseph of Arimathea, establishing a decidedly more spiritual ethos for its narrative. Robert de

Boron’s Merlin, for instance, although it directly expands the Merlinic narrative found in

Geoffrey and Wace’s shared history, elides the Trojan lineage of his characters entirely, opting instead for an emphasis on Merlin’s infernal parentage and the history of the Grail, both direct narrative responses to the crucifixion. Both these branches of the tradition thus seek to marry the

Arthurian narrative to another authorized history, thereby augmenting the legend of Arthur with the cultural weight of its literary predecessors and evoking in its space of appearance an ethical continuity particular to its branch. In the case of what has been identified as the romance tradition, descended from the crucifixion, the Arthurian public becomes Grail-obsessed and somewhat mystical in nature with its focus on visions, prophecies, and miracles that displace the social practice of chivalry. The chronicle tradition, by contrast, continues to locate the Arthurian empire within the bounds of secular geopolitics and limit the scope of its behavioral codes largely to warfare and notions of personal honor.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, of course, although in many respects a romance in the

French tradition, famously begins and ends with a description of “þe sege and þe assaut” of

Troy.363 Continuing from this image, the poet provides a brief account of Aeneas’ treason and the migration of his descendants throughout Europe—Romulus to Rome, Tirius to Tuscany,

Langobard to Lombardy, and finally Brutus to Britain, a land “where were and wrake and

363 Tolkien and Gordon, ll. 1, 2525. 121 wonder / by syþez hatz wont þerinne.”364 By including this frame, the Gawain-Poet initiates a particular set of generic expectations, which he goes on to confirm by placing Arthur, like

Geoffrey does, at the climax of his brief history of Britain, declaring that “of Bretaygne kynges, /

Ay watz Arthur þe hendest.”365 Arthur belongs to a noble British lineage that stretches back directly to the Trojan diaspora, and his inherent nobility and right to kingship come ostensibly from this heritage, something the poem might be expected to examine. As Lee Patterson has carefully explained, however, invoking the fall of Troy in any medieval text involves a complicated negotiation with the literary past. Although Geoffrey’s very brief account of

Aeneas’ arrival in Italy and war with Turnus is ultimately derived from Virgil, “the authoritative version of Trojan history [in the Middle Ages] was Benoît’s Roman de Troie,” 366 a twelfth- century French romance in verse contemporary with Wace and thought also to have been composed for the court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s

“expansive narrative… defined the problem of Trojan history in terms of two, interrelated questions: how could a society destroy itself in the process of enacting its most deeply held values? and why was it unable to withdraw from the course of disaster even when the outcome had become terrifyingly clear?”367 Drawing on the allegedly firsthand accounts of Dictys of

Crete and Dares of Phrygia, the French poet structures his account of the ancient cataclysm with a generically characteristic exploration of the tenets of French chivalry played out over a series of interpersonal relationships, serving both to explain and obfuscate the causes and outcomes of the war itself. Benoît’s text was incredibly influential in the Middle Ages, translated into Latin

364 Ibid., ll. 16-17. The inclusion of this historical pedigree in a romance is fairly uncharacteristic, though not unheard of. Chrétien invokes the translatio imperii in the prologue to Cligés, for example, and Wace’s Roman de Brut is itself a monumental French-language romance chronicle that adapts Geoffrey’s Trojan history directly. 365 Ibid., ll. 25-26. 366 Patterson, p. 115. 367 Ibid. 122 prose by Guido delle Collone as Historia destructionis Troiae, which was itself adapted into

Italian as Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, the primary source for Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.

The examples of Geoffrey and Benoît, among related national chronicles, established

Troy in the literary imagination as the fountainhead of European history and civilization, with the result that burgeoning nations like Britain and France were placed alongside Rome in the direct bloodline of ancient heroes. Geoffrey dramatizes this relationship, placing Julius Caesar in dialogue with the British king Cassibelanus regarding their shared heritage and the bonds of brotherhood it should—in theory—provide, Cassibelanus arguing for an alliance with Rome on this basis. As Patterson argues, however,

That the originary moment of secular history should be an overwhelming catastrophe is

itself an unsettling fact, but that it should also be a catastrophe whose causes are obscure,

whose events stand in a painfully enigmatic relation to the individual, and whose ultimate

meaning resists decipherment—these are qualities that made the Trojan story a continual

anxiety for the medieval historical consciousness, and run counter to, or subterraneously

undermine, the uses of Trojan descent and translatio imperii in the service of secular

interests.”368

Trojan heritage, in other words, is itself a fundamental instability. As Troy fell, so did Rome, and so, in this context, must Logres, but further than this, these empires all establish themselves in a toxic space of appearance defined by the privileging of allegedly noble blood and the internal violence that erupts between those who bear it. Aeneas’s safe departure from the city is established by Benoît as reward for selling out his family, a treason the Gawain-Poet considers

“þe trewest on erthe,”369 and when Cassibelanus invokes brotherly ties to prevent Caesar’s invasion of Britain in Geoffrey’s Historia, he evidently ignores the fact that Romulus, the father

368 Patterson, p. 123. 369 Tolkien and Gordon, l. 4. 123 of Rome, famously murdered his brother. Mordred, in turn, will in time slay his uncle and cause the death of his brother and the realm he represents, a vision of the future briefly utilized to much pathetic effect in The Awntyrs off Arthure and spelled out intimately in the Alliterative Morte

Arthure.370 As much as the God-ordained movement of empire and learning provides, for medieval authors, a perhaps comforting structure to the teeming pageant of history, the image it evokes at its core is one of civil strife and unavoidable destruction. When the Gawain-Poet frames his text with the story of Troy, he is both placing Arthur’s Camelot in an established secular historiographical lineage and clearly signaling the foretold ruin of its space of appearance by the very chivalric affect it nurtures in its walls—the multifarious affective practice Gawain, bodily, represents, in all his various permutations.

Randy Schiff argues that Trojanness in the poem “is treated as symbolic capital, an available if unstable historical component used in the maintenance of British community.”371

Lineal descent from ancient heroes is woven “into a story of degeneration, as the frame’s militarist empires fade into a decidedly frivolous Camelot,”372 emphasizing the Galfridian tradition of British decline inherent in most iterations of the chronicle tradition. “By presenting

Gawain almost exclusively as a courtier rather than a fighter,” Schiff argues, “the Gawain-poet uses treason’s legacy to stress how Britain’s originally Trojan ethnie has devolved from an epic warrior culture to an overly sophisticated, indeed comic Camelot.”373 This argument is perhaps overstated, conflating appropriate festal revelry with essential frivolity, which the poem itself does not bear out. The poet describes the “rych reuel” of the court’s fifteen-day celebration of the

370 The Alliterative Morte Arthure also ends, somewhat cryptically, with an invocation of Arthur’s Trojan heritage, though it claims his descent from Hector rather than Aeneas. This would seem, on its surface, to align Arthur with the Kings of France, who claimed descent from Hector’s son Francio, rather than with the British lineage of Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas. One could make an argument here for a perhaps intentional confusion of these royal bloodlines in light of the Hundred Years War, a contemporary concern for the alliterative poet, which might imply that the right to the French throne belongs to Britain based on ancient genealogy. 371 Schiff, p. 82. 372 Ibid., p. 83. 373 Ibid. 124 Christmas feast as “oryȝt,”374 an adjective meaning “right” or “morally correct,” and the Green

Knight’s later challenge to the court is predicated on the reputation of Arthur’s knights specifically for their prowess: “…þy burnes best ar holden, / Stifest vnder stel-gere on stedes to ryde, / Þe wyȝtest and þe worþyest of þe worldes kynde.”375 Moreover, when the Green Knight draws attention to the feasting, he does so not to undermine the celebration itself but to taunt

Arthur’s men toward action with their own reputation, a challenge not to their bodily persons or capacity for violence but their public performance of affective practice in the space of appearance. He asks, “What, is þis Arþures hous? […] / Þat al þe rous rennes of þurȝ ryalmes so mony? / Where is now your sourquydrye and your conquestes, / Your gryndellayk and your greme, and your grete wordes? / Now is þe reuel and þe renoun of the Rounde Table / Overwalt wyth a worde of on wyȝes speche.”376 By recalling their pride and great words, he confirms their renown is based on something concrete, a conquest of their realm accomplished decidedly in the vein of their Trojan ancestors. It is paramount to remember, however, that the Green Knight’s challenge is not in good faith; it is instigated by Morgan le Fay in hopes of shaming the court and killing Guinevere out of spite, so his critique of the observance of one of the most important

Christian liturgical feasts need not indicate any essential failing of Arthurian society’s militaristic ethos.377 Rather, the challenge is imagined not as a proper jousting duel, as might be generically expected, but a grisly beheading game that, on its surface anyway, would involve the spilling of innocent blood in the very presence of the king, and the poet attributes the court’s reluctance to

374 Tolkien and Gordon, l. 40. 375 Ibid., ll. 259-261. 376 Ibid., ll. 309-314. 377 The presentation of religious observance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a point of heated contention in scholarship of the poem. Helen Cooper calls it “a Christian poem, but… not a religious one.” Similarly, David Aers argues that religious ideology is completely absorbed into the practice of chivalry, such that the “church and its sacrament of penance is immersed in, even subordinate to, courtly forms of life,” whereas Michael Twomey has characterized this scholarly attitude as an essential misunderstanding of medieval Catholicism in light of post- Reformation theologies. See Cooper, “The Supernatural,” pp. 277-292 and Aers, “Christianity for Courtly Subjects,” 91-103 in Brewer and Gibson, 1997, and Twomey, “‘Hadet with an aluisch mon’ and ‘britned to noȝt’: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Death, and the Devil,” The Arthurian Way of Death, edited by K. S. Whetter and Karen Cherewatuk, Brewer, 2009, pp. 73-93. 125 accept it “not al for doute, / Bot sum for cortaysye,”378 a proper display of courtly deference to

Arthur in light of the affective practice of chivalry.

When Gawain enters the poem in this scene as a speaking character, it is in a meticulous display of self-deprecation as Arthur’s “wakkest” knight “and of wyt feblest,”379 stating that his own nobility comes not from his behavior but only from his familial relation to Arthur—and by extension his Trojan genealogy: “No bounté bot your blod I in my bodé knowe.”380 Schiff correctly notes that Gawain in this scene “publicly defines himself through kinship, [conjoining] cultural and biological notions of self: both impeccable manners and noble ancestry ground his public being,”381 and Derek Pearsall importantly argues that “his speech is a masterpiece of courtly rhetoric, in which he releases Arthur and the court from shame, takes upon himself the foolish challenge, and reassuringly proposes himself uniquely qualified to take it up, since he will not be missed, and the only virtue in him is that Arthur is his uncle.”382 It would be a mistake, Pearsall argues, to read this speech as genuine humility: “it is as proud as any boast, but it is phrased with beautiful and nonchalant courtesy.”383 In one short speech, though feigning humility, Gawain displays his inherent possession of noble ancestry and his trained mastery of courtly affectation, essentially denigrating himself while showing off at the same time. In the process, however, he taps into the civilizational instability inherent in his Trojan heritage, and by claiming it as his only “bounté,” or goodness, he problematizes the space of appearance within which his goodness is so loudly proclaimed.

Moreover, the Green Knight reveals to him at the end of the poem that “his prime antagonist has been not a strange green challenger who has seemed to represent everything that

378 Ibid., ll. 246-247. 379 Ibid., ll. 354. 380 Ibid., ll. 357. 381 Schiff, p. 81. 382 Derek Pearsall, “Courtesy and Chivalry in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Order of Shame and the Invention of Embarrassment,” A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, Brewer, 1997, p. 358. 383 Ibid. 126 Arthur’s court is not, but one of his own kin.” 384 Morgan le Fay, Gawain’s maternal aunt, has been behind the scenes from the very beginning, and Gawain’s relation to her stands in striking parallel to his relation to Arthur.385 As Helen Cooper argues, “In the meticulous mirror- symmetry of the poem’s structure… this revelation is reflected exactly by Gawain’s claim at the start that the only good thing about him is Arthur’s, his uncle’s, blood in his body.”386 He is the blood-related nephew to both of these opposite figures, the esteemed relation of sister’s son, and thus even as he represents and embodies Arthurian values as an extension of Arthur’s own bloodline, he might also represent and embody their dark opposite through his connection to

Morgan. The Trojan inheritance assured by the frame narrative—that of a civilization bearing in its societal fruit the seeds of its own destruction—is made manifest in Gawain himself. And if

Gawain, the pride of Logres, is different than he appears (as the rest of the poem blatantly indicates), the implications for the ethical character of the court are staggering.

Gawain and Not-Gawain

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is essentially a poem about reputation, the publicly held belief or opinion about someone to which their own being may or may not wholly conform.

The Green Knight comes to Arthur’s court to challenge its inhabitants to live up to their renown, and Gawain ultimately becomes their representative, his own public image as established within the court repeatedly surfacing outside the court over the course of the narrative—for good or for ill. Metatextually, Gawain’s reputation appears to have very few functional limits aside from his relation to Arthur, and the Gawain-Poet carefully and consistently works to subvert audience

384 Cooper, p. 289. 385 Kennedy importantly observes that the character of Morgan and her textual evolution into Arthur’s half-sister is one that took place within the thirteenth-century French tradition. The Prose Merlin and its continuations establish her magical training under Merlin and hatred of Guinevere, and their absorption into the Lancelot-Grail, in turn, provided the English poet’s probable source for the Green Knight’s explanation of her role in the poem’s events. Here, too, the Gawain-Poet weaves together various threads from the divergent traditions, using one to fortify his reading of the other. 386 Cooper, p. 289. 127 expectation about which “Gawain” he is presenting in any given scene. Within the poem,

Gawain is identified first, obviously, as Arthur’s nephew and then, ostensibly, as his weakest and stupidest knight. At the beginning of the second fitt, however, he is associated with the “endeles knot” or pentangle, a five-pointed star worn on his shield and surcoat and found only in this romance. The symbol is one of the most cryptic in the poem but is usually understood to represent the fact that “Gawain is virtuous in five ways, and in each way with reference to five things, viz. the five wits, the five fingers, the five wounds, the five joys, and five ‘social virtues.’”387 Although the overt references to Solomon, the wounds of Christ, and the joys of the

Virgin388 tempt many readers to understand the shield and its symbol in a religious context,

David Aers argues instead that “the pentangle itself, far from being an emblem of unworldly transcendentalism, enshrines exclusively upper class virtues (‘fraunchyse,’ ‘cortaysye’) and draws the term ‘clannes’ into the same domain… In this form of Christianity the five wounds of

Christ and the figure of the Virgin Mary sacralize the values of the secular nobility.”389

Moreover, the pentangle is Gawain’s identificatory symbol, doubly displayed on his person as an outward and quintessentially public symbol of his presumed inward virtues—i.e., the internalized behavioral codes, or habitus, of Arthur’s court. His ‘clannes’ or purity, as Aers observes, refers not necessarily to his freedom from sin but to his freedom from the social vice of discourteous public speech, as represented by his performative modesty at court.

As the poet explains, “Forþy hit acordez to þis knyȝt and to his cler armez, / For ay faythful in fyue and sere fyue syþez / Gawan watz for gode knawen, and as golde pured, /

387 Tolkien and Gordon, note on l. 632, p. 93. 388 The image of the Virgin found on the inside of the shield may also evoke Arthur’s shield Pridwen, which, according to Geoffrey and his adaptors, also bore an image of the Virgin. Gawain in this poem and Arthur in the Historia both utilize devotion to Mary to inspire their feats of prowess, a fascinating spin on the chivalry topos. This further reference to the chronicle tradition serves again to destabilize the picture of Gawain qua perfect courtier we are given, signaling instead the warlike Arthur of the Historia, who singlehandedly kills 470 Saxons after calling on the Virgin for aid, and by extension his rash young nephew who decapitates a Roman prince. 389 Aers, p. 95. 128 Voyded of vche vylany, wyth vertuez ennourned / in mote.”390 This last quoted line, the two- syllable bob of the stanza, emphasizes the public nature of Gawain’s adoption of the pentangle as his symbol: mote derives from the Old English noun ġemōt, defined as a meeting or encounter.

Closely related is the Middle English verb moten, from the Old English mōtian, both meaning to speak or argue. The Gawain-Poet’s use of “in mote” to describe the context of Gawain’s virtues precisely locates the emergence of his chivalric subjectivity within the space of appearance, where people encounter and speak with one another in order to construct themselves and their shared world. In this case, what is being constructed is “Gawain,” whose public image is firmly established on his absence “of vche vylany.” Although vylany has a moral dimension, as in modern usage of “villainy,” its fourteenth-century definition more often refers to social rudeness and discourtesy, closer to the twelfth-century sense of the Old French vilain, meaning commoner or churl.391 Gawain is “voyded” of such behavior, an example of perfected courtly habitus as an aristocratic social ideal. It is thus agreed in the Arthurian public that the virtues represented by the pentangle intrinsically accord with Gawain’s embodied self, but as anyone who has ever lived in a society knows, that which is spoken and even publicly agreed upon does not necessarily accurately represent reality.

Rather, these presumed values are the subject of continued scrutiny throughout the rest of the poem, especially after he arrives at Lord Bertilak’s castle. The generically expected martial aventures by which the protagonist knight’s chivalric training is usually tested are glossed over in the course of a single stanza. Gawain is shown in the broadest possible strokes in battle with dragons, wolves, wild men, bulls, bears, boars, and giants, all across just four lines. As before, his character as a warrior is assumed and never called into question because it is not the poet’s

390 Tolkien and Gordon., ll. 631-635. 391 See, for instance, Chaucer’s description of the Knight in the General Prologue, who “nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde” (Benson, Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., l. 70) and Kay’s apology to Guinevere for his rude words in Ywain and Gawain: “…if we did noght curtaysly, / Takes to no velany” (Braswell, ll. 87-88). 129 concern. In fact, he calls attention to the fact that he is bucking expectation in an aside explaining that it would be difficult to tell even a tenth of his adventures—and then quickly moves on.

Gawain struggles more with the winter cold and the isolating experience of his own growing dread due to his impending encounter with the Green Knight, praying—aptly—to the Virgin for safe haven on Christmas Eve. When he arrives at Hautdesert, however, “all þe men in þat mote made much joye / To apere in his presense prestly þat tyme, / Þat alle prys and prowes and pured

þewes / Apendes to hys persoun, and praysed is euer.”392 The poet again makes explicit the space of appearance by locating the people of Hautdesert “in þat mote,” and the virtues they “ful softly”393 whisper about with one another are again his “sleȝtez of þewez” and propensity for

“talkyng noble,”394 his skill with manners and his courtly speech.395 As in the French romance tradition when his appearance at a given castle causes excitement because of his reputation as a lover, Gawain’s reputation in this poem as a master of “luf-talkyng”396 precedes him. In fact, it is exactly this reputation that is utilized against him in the subsequent temptation scenes. In order to test Gawain’s commitment to his publicly performed virtue, the poet places the main site of conflict in the poem in as private a setting possible: a bedroom.

Other than the figure of the Green Knight himself, the three scenes of highly charged flirtation in Gawain’s bedroom are probably the most memorable feature of the poem, interlaced with Lord Bertilak’s three morning hunts. Tasked by her husband and Morgan le Fay with seducing Gawain into breaking character, Lady Bertilak embroils Gawain in a contest of courtly wits, a complicated verbal dance in which Gawain the man is finally pitted directly against his

392 Tolkien and Gordon., ll. 910-913. 393 Ibid., l. 915. 394 Ibid., l. 916-917. 395 Sleȝt (or slyȝt) can refer to wisdom, prudence, skill, or trickery, depending on the context. It is used three other times in the poem: once in the idiom “not… for slyȝt vpon erþe” (l. 1854), meaning “not by any means”; once in reference to the girdle’s ability to cheat death (ll. 1858); and once to Lady Bertilak’s expertise in the conventions of chivalric romance as a literary genre (l. 1542). This usage at l. 916, although it may be read as yet more intentional ambiguity about the nature of courtly manners, seems instead to mean simply “skillful” in the same sense as the Lady’s practiced knowledge of romance. I will return to the lady’s expertise below. 396 Tolkien and Gordon, l. 927. 130 own reputation. After cornering him in his bed and waiting for him to feign awakening, Lady

Bertilak begins, “I wene wel, iwysse, Sir Wowen ȝe are, / Þat alle the worlde worchipez quere-so

ȝe ride; / Your honour, your hendelayk is hendely praysed / With lordez, wyth ladyes, with alle

þat lyfe bere.”397 In her opening salvo, Lady Bertilak establishes that she knows who Gawain is and what people say about him: he is universally praised for his honor and nobility, words connoting his courtly behavior. Gawain’s response is measured and characteristically deferential, as in his prefatory speech in Arthur’s court. He tells her, “Gayn hit me þynkkez, / Þaȝ I be not now he þat ȝe of speken; / To reche to such reuerence as ȝe reherce here / I am wyȝ vnworþy, I wot wel myseluen.”398 Gawain signals here a fundamental disconnect between his embodied self and his reputation, but as before, his performative humility is itself a display of his mastery of the Arthurian behavioral code.

The lady’s test of his courtly behavior, however, includes a distinctly sexual dimension.

She declares to Gawain, ‘Ȝe are welcum to my cors,”399 which, as Tolkien and Gordon note, may be translated as “You are welcome to my person” in the sense of “I am at your service,” but the more immediate sense of cors is her physical body, especially in light of what the rest of her temptation entails. Although his reputation within the poem is decidedly for manners and for

“luf-talkyng,” with an emphasis on speech, the poem here reaches outside of itself and into the

French tradition, in which Gawain is known for his frequent trysts. Concluding this scene, the lady expresses playful doubt about Gawain’s identity (“þat ȝe be Gawan, hit gotz in mynde”400), and he is afraid that he has somehow dishonored himself or his host, failing himself and his king in the process. In fact, the fear he feels is part of the temptation; the lady employs the same

397 Ibid., ll. 1226-1229. 398 Ibid., ll. 1241-1244. The pronoun “myseluen” in line 1244 may lend the line to be read as a phrasal pun, meaning either “I am a worthless person, as I myself know” with the pronoun in apposition or “I am a worthless person—I know myself well” with the pronoun as an object and the inference that the self Gawain knows is unlike the one ascribed to him in public. In either case, the line displays a practiced linguistic dexterity in keeping with his courtly reputation. In other words, he is practiced in putting himself down with swagger. 399 Ibid., l. 1237. 400 Ibid., l. 1293. 131 rhetorical tactic used by the Green Knight in his challenge to Arthur’s court, baiting him with the notion of his own mannered reputation to entrap him within the contradictory conventions of courtly behavior. She asks for a kiss, arguing that the famous Gawain could never have spoken with a beautiful woman for so long and not have craved one from her. To agree is to potentially dishonor her husband, but to refuse is to immediately dishonor the lady herself, both options sullying his own reputation for refined manners. He is ultimately persuaded by her argument, however, and quickly agrees to her proposition. I quote Putter’s incisive reading of the scene at length:

It is no coincidence that just at the moment when Gawain complies with her request for a

kiss, when Gawain’s self and his model overlap, the words of Gawain’s concession

conflate the grammatical person ‘I’ with which we represent ourselves and the ‘he’ by

which we are signified in the discourse of others. Instead of saying: ‘I will grant you a

kiss lest I displease you,’ Gawain’s answer registers a striking shift to the third person: ‘I

will grant you a kiss lest he displease you.’ At the point where Gawain and his image in

the Lady’s words merge, he inscribes himself into the Lady’s narrative where he figures

as a ‘he,’ and abandons the ‘I’ which realizes his identity as a separate individual.401

Gawain returns here to the disconnect signaled earlier between himself and the public “Gawain,” but he appears, through this action, to collapse the space between them, though perhaps only aspirationally.

This scene strongly echoes one found in the First Continuation of Perceval, alluded to toward the beginning of this chapter, in which Gawain, returning injured from the siege of Brun de Branlant’s castle, meets a damsel in a pavilion. When he greets her, she replies, “Et cil qui fist

401 Putter, p. 115. 132 et soir et main / Salt et gart monseignor Gavain / Et vos après, et beneïe,”402 to which he wonders aloud why God should bless ‘Gavain’ and himself. She tells him that although she has never met

Gawain, she loves him because he has “plus sens et larguece, / De cortoisie et de proëce, / Qu’il nait en chevalier vivant.”403 Gawain attempts to assure her that he is, in fact, the man she professes to love, but she refuses to believe him until she brings out an embroidered image of the famous knight to compare their appearances. Finally convinced, she kisses him several times and tells him, “Amis… en abandon / Vos met mon cors et vos present. / Vostre serai tot mon vivant,”404 after which they “laugh and play” together until she has “perdu non de pucele, / S’a non amie et damoisele.”405 As Putter records, “The passage is the first in French romance in which a lady falls in love with the idea of Gawain rather than the man himself,” 406 though it is a motif that would recur at least three times: in Hunbaut, L’Âtre périlleux, and Perlesvaus, all thirteenth-century. “She shows no interest in her guest before she positively identifies him as

Gawain… Like Bertilac’s wife, the ‘pucelle’ of the First Continuation has a preconceived notion of Gawain and both refuse to believe they are dealing with him when he fails to meet their expectations,”407 although I would qualify that Lady Bertilak does not actually disbelieve

Gawain but rather uses the idea of his public identity as further ammunition for her temptation.

The second morning in Hautdesert proceeds similarly, the lady invoking Gawain’s famous strength and courtesy to persuade him to kiss her again, but this time she gestures explicitly outside the text itself, using the language of romance as a literary genre in a proto-

Borgesian deconstruction of the poem’s very conventions: “…of alle cheualry to chose, þe chef

402 Roach, ll. 2629-2631. “And may he who made the morning and evening save, guard, and bless my lord Gawain, and then you.” Translated by Putter, p. 110. 403 Ibid., ll. 2649-51. “…more wisdom and liberality, more courtesy and prowess, than any living knight.” Translated by Putter, p. 110. 404 Ibid., ll. 2702-2704. “‘Friend,’ she says, ‘I surrender and present to you my body. I will be yours while I live.’” Translated by Putter, p. 110. 405 Ibid., ll. 2715-2716. “…lost the name of maiden and had become lover and lady.” 406 Putter, p. 111. 407 Ibid. 133 þyng alosed / Is þe lel layk of luf, þe lettrure of armes; / For to tell of þis teuelyng of þis trwe knyȝtez, / Hit is þe tytelet token and tyxt of her werkkez.”408 The lady refers to written romances, the “written proof and text” of knightly deeds and their most esteemed virtue: love. She continues with a description of “how ledes for her lel lufe hor lyues han auntered, / Endured for her drury dulful stoundez, / And after wenged with her walour and voyded her care, / And broȝt blysse into boure with bountees hor awen.”409 In no uncertain terms, she describes in detail the chivalry topos, the affect of courtly love that animates the generic conventions of romance—the knight’s practiced devotion to a lady, his endurance of sorrow for her love, his overcoming trials through his prowess, and their blissful union in her bower—before turning these conventions on

Gawain, saying that since he is a young and healthy knight and since she has never heard anything about him but praise, he must also have a paramour for whom he has long suffered. As

Putter argues, “She projects in her words a lover of ladies to whom a long tradition of chivalric romance has given its seal of approval, so that Gawain may model himself on the ideal these romances have constructed,”410 by inference the same romances utilized as sources for this scene by the Gawain-Poet. She doubts his identity, as in the First Continuation, and insinuates that he could overpower her, as he does to the treacherous lady in the Fourth Continuation. Lady

Bertilak’s offer hinges on the idea that even if he is not so accomplished in the amatory sphere as his reputation suggests, he may yet become so. She has already questioned, twice at this point, whether the man in her company can really be Gawain at all since he does not behave as expected, an interrogation that threatens the very notion of his publicly constructed selfhood and the civilization he represents. If he is not Gawain, then he is not Arthur’s nephew, nor does he embody the five virtues of the pentangle and thus of Arthur’s court. “The possibility of regaining his name, his identity, by identifying with the ‘Gawain’ constructed by the Lady and the

408 Tolkien and Gordon, ll. 1512-1515. 409 Ibid., ll. 1516-1519. 410 Putter, p. 108. 134 literature of the past is the bait which the temptations hold out to him.”411 His response, however, maintains his mannered image.

When the lady asks him to teach her about the things of love while her husband is away, he tells her, “Bot to take þe toruayle to myself to trwluf expoun, / And towche þe temez of tyxt and talez of armez / To yow þat, I wot wel, weldez more slyȝt / Of þat art, be þe half, or a hundreth of seche / As I am, oþer euer schal, in erde þere I leue, / Hit were a folé felefolde, my fre, by me trawþe.”412 To attempt to explain anything about the themes and accounts of literary romance to someone far better versed in their lore would be foolish. Gawain, an actual knight, defers to the lady on the theory and practice of chivalry, but his words hearken back to the narrator’s elision of Gawain’s aventures in Fitt II. Gawain and the lady are not presently involved in a romance of adventure, nor do they feature in a romance of love. As discussed in

Chapter Two, one of the romance genre’s hallmarks, especially in the French tradition, is to marry the two concepts by submitting martial prowess to the service of love such that both are enhanced. This chivalry topos is the meat and potatoes of Arthurian literature and the affective practice by which the chivalric habitus is refined. The Gawain-Poet, through this exchange, rejects that model. The affect of courtly love here is inverted by the lady in order to mislead

Gawain and ultimately to dishonor Arthur’s court. Gawain’s reticence to teach her comes not from any deficiency on his part, moral or social, but from a courteous desire to honor his host, especially while staying as a guest in his house. Although his behavior does not, perhaps, accord with his reputation as established in the French romances it seems Lady Bertilak has been reading, he upholds the courtly manners for which he is known at home and whose symbol he has not worn in days.

411 Ibid., p. 114. 412 Tolkien and Gordon, ll. 1540-1545. 135 Where Gawain finally fails is in the lady’s third attempt to trap him, when he agrees to accept her love token, a green girdle, and keep it a secret from her husband. He only does so, however, with the understanding that the belt is enchanted and will save him from his impending death at the hands of the Green Knight, which is a lie devised to expedite his fall. The following day, Gawain dons his armor, pentangle and all, and finally sets off toward the Green Chapel. His guide, knowing who he is, attempts to persuade him one last time to abandon his errand, assuring him that he will not tell anyone, that Gawain’s public reputation—this time for bravery—will remain secure. Entering the forest and finding the chapel, described by Gawain as the place where the devil himself says his matins, he is afraid. The narrator fleshes this out, heightening the drama of the scene with repetition of an exclamatory “What!” at the beginning of three separate lines. Gawain, however, verbalizes the contrary, as if to summon or reify his courage:

“My lif þaȝ I forgoo, / Drede dotz me no lote.”413 Instead of running, Gawain bravely confronts his enemy, announcing himself loudly using both his name and a signifier of his reputation:

“now is gode Gawayn goande ryȝt here.”414 He appears here, as in the scene of his first kiss with

Lady Bertilak, to be collapsing the space between Gawain and “Gawain,” choosing in this instance to present himself as “gode Gawayn,” a warning to the Green Knight of just who approaches, but also, perhaps, an aspirational identity brought into the Green Chapel from the space of appearance to bolster himself for the coming blow.

Through the intervention of public opinion, Gawain is thus able to curb his natural, bodily reaction of fear. Pearsall observes that “the imperatives of the body can be circumvented, in the code of honor, by various strategies; they do not have to have their way. Thinking on higher or more urgent things is one strategy for withstanding the temptations of the body,”415 and although his argument here is specifically about Gawain’s presumed lust in the temptation

413 Ibid., ll. 2210-2211 414 Ibid., l. 2214. 415 Pearsall, pp. 354-355. 136 scenes, the affective emphasis on somatic response rings true for Gawain’s overwhelming dread as well. As knights in French romance utilize the love of their ladies to inspire their great deeds and thereby cultivate their chivalric habitus, Gawain calls instead on an image of himself perfected, the image projected onto him by the court and which he might not, on his own, be able to attain. Gawain depends on the pentangle—the emblem of the poem’s Arthurian values—and the shield bearing the image of the Virgin, which he is said earlier to gaze upon such that his

“belde neuer payred,”416 and through that variation on the chivalry topos, Gawain is able to transcend, in theory, his bodily limitations. The Green Knight, however, is not convinced by his show. After sharpening his axe for so long that Gawain begins to lose his nerve, he vaults over the stream on the axe’s long pole and finally comes face to face with his opponent. Gawain assumes the position and readies himself for the blow, but as the Green Knight swings his massive axe, Gawain flinches, and the Green Knight roars, “Þou art not Gawayn… þat is so goude halden, / þat never arȝed for no here by hylle ne be vale, / And now þou fles for ferde er

þou fele harmez! / Such cowardise of þat knyȝt cowþe I neuer here.”417 Responding directly to

Gawain’s opening line upon arriving at the Green Chapel, the Green Knight contradicts his claim, linguistically separating Gawain from the goodness ascribed to him by others: “You are not Gawain, who is held to be so good.” Whereas the lady only playfully questions him, wondering if, perhaps, he is not who he says he is, the Green Knight declares his judgment as a statement of fact. Gawain the Good, the noble King Arthur’s nephew and darling of Logres, who never feared the attack of any army, would never flinch before the blow is even struck. Here, at last, the gap between Gawain and “Gawain,” the man and the affect, is solidified. And though he tries again, braves two more strokes, and receives his small mark for his failure to report the girdle to his host, the damage is done. The Green Knight informs him that it was a set-up, that he

416 Tolkien and Gordon, l. 650. 417 Ibid., ll. 2270-2273. 137 was being observed the whole time, that the girdle was his idea from the beginning and that

Gawain, purported master of courtesy, has dishonored his host. He has been found wanting for the first time in the text, and he is ashamed.

The Space of Appearance(s)

Shame, as Pearsall keenly observes, is a necessarily public emotion: “It is finding out that what he has done was already being talked about, and indeed was planned to happen just as it did, that drops Gawain into the abyss. It is not what he did that so fills him with embarrassment, but that he was found out in the way that he was.”418 The real fall for Gawain is the experience of knowing that he will have to return to Camelot in the knowledge that he does not measure up to his famous reputation, especially since the girdle turned out to be something other than he expected. “Once he had accepted the girdle, he behaved with the noble courtesy and courage that was customary to his public self and that constructed also his private self. Now he is aware of the gap between the two that existed all the time, of the lies that he has told himself, of the disunity of his personality.”419 In fact, Gawain’s first response upon finding out that he has been tricked is to embark upon a decidedly uncourtly misogynistic rant that rhetorically positions himself among the ranks of Adam, Solomon, Samson, and David—biblical men “beguiled” by feminine charms. By invoking this tradition, he again externalizes his behavior: when he is good, it is only because he can look toward Arthur’s blood, or the pentangle, or Mary, or the girdle to give him moral strength, but when he comes up short, it is only because a woman has misled him. The ethic set forth in the Arthurian public, the one Gawain has embodied throughout the text, is defined almost entirely by the testimony of others. If Gawain represents it faithfully, then the chivalric habitus cultivated in that space of appearance is no habitus at all because it is inherently

418 Pearsall, p. 360. 419 Ibid. 138 and emphatically not an internalized virtue. Rather, it depends on the public appraisal of various signs and affects, which may not reflect reality without major distortions.

The Green Knight’s gift of the girdle in their parting dialogue becomes one of the most salient images of this theme in the poem: “For hit is grene as my goune, Sir Gawayn, ȝe maye /

Þenk vpon þis ilke þrepe, þer þou forth þryngez / Among prynces of prys, and þis. pure token /

Of þe chaunce of the grene chapel at cheualrous knyȝtez.”420 Intimately understanding the culture of Arthur’s court, he intends the girdle as a public marker of the Adventure of the Green Chapel, signaling that Gawain is meant to wear it as a sash “among prynces” so that his story will be known to other “cheualrous knyȝtez.” It is a symbol of Gawain’s virtuous and intrinsically knightly ability to keep his word even in the face of certain death, a moral not unfamiliar to other

English romances of the period like Ywain and Gawain or The Avowyng of Arthur, but the

Gawain-Poet turns the expected lesson on its head by having Gawain outright reject this interpretation of the girdle. He understands it instead as a badge of shame, agreeing to wear it not for its beauty nor for any praise he has won or will win from it, but because it will remind him of his sin and the weakness of his flesh: “quen pryde schal me pryk for prowes of armes, / Þe loke to þis luf-lace schal leþe my hert.”421 Calling back to Gawain’s previous habit of looking on the image of the Virgin within his shield to inspire courage, the poet effectively replaces that affective practice with the humiliation of the girdle. Moreover, when he puts it on over his armor, laced over his right shoulder and under his left arm, it effectively crosses out the underlying pentangle, negating its symbolic value.

Gawain himself appears to have learned something from this adventure, no longer relying solely on his courtly reputation or putting so much stock in appearances. Nearly everything in the poem turns out by the end to have been other than it originally seemed. This is something of a

420 Tolkien and Gordon., ll. 2396-2399. 421 Ibid., ll. 2437-2438. 139 stylistic hallmark of the Gawain-Poet, who, according to Cooper, “repeatedly shows the protagonists of his poems getting things wrong, having to be trained to read the world they inhabit; and in that process, the central character also serves as a surrogate for the reader of the poem. Gawain’s or Jonah’s or the Pearl-dreamer’s making sense of his world charts a parallel process in which the reader learns to ‘read’ the text properly.”422 This process of education may be linked, within the broader genre of chivalric romance, to the same kind of moral pedagogy received by the knights of French romance, as discussed in Chapter Two, whose intensive bodily training as knights is repeated in the cultivation of their habitus. In turn, they bring their newly perfected chivalric values back to court and, often, improve the space of appearance with their findings. Gawain’s brief moral education under the tutelage of the Green Knight appears intended to prompt the audience’s own rejection of the superficiality of manners without substance. In this light, the poem participates directly in the tradition of French romance as described by Lacy, in which literary knighthood is often “reduced to a kind of chivalric catechism, a series of rules and precepts which can be recited and learned and which, if followed, will bring success and glory.”423 Gawain’s adventure, however, in keeping with the English tradition, serves to overturn the perhaps expected values of reputation and even of public oath- keeping in favor of a still more nebulous articulation of trowth, that notion of chivalric goodness broadly construed made practicable even by an audience who might never have encountered an actual knight.

Gawain’s traditional role in English romance is to reconcile his encounter with the Other with the implicit values of the Arthurian space of appearance. Having learned the error of his ways, he returns to Arthur’s court to much acclaim, but he blushes with shame as he tells his sorry tale and finally points to the girdle, saying, “Þis is þe token of vntrawþe þat I am tane inne,

422 Cooper, p. 278. 423 Norris Lacy, The Craft of Chrétien de Troyes, Brill, 1980, p. 3. 140 / And I mot nedez hit were wyle I may last; / For mon may hyden his harme, bot vnhap ne may hit, / For þer hit one is tachched twynne wil hit neuer.”424 Brought now publicly into the court,

Gawain presents the girdle as the sign of his failure—his “vntrawþe,” the linguistic opposite of chivalric virtue—and the indelible mark of sin upon his humble soul. By all accounts, the image- conscious space of appearance should reject their favorite son, or at least mock him for his folly, as often happens to other knights across the tradition. But the Gawain-Poet throws his audience for another loop and records the court amiably laughing and resuming the same kind of revelry recorded in the earliest scene of the poem. In fact, they adopt the green girdle as one of their own cherished symbols, and it is “acorded þe renoun of þe Rounde Table, / And he honoured þat hit hade euermore after.”425 Arthur’s court, rather than learning from the substance of Gawain’s adventure and working to improve themselves, characteristically miss the point of the symbol, misappropriating it as yet another outward symbol of their own empty reputation.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight restructures the Arthurian space of appearance such that it is shown to be ineluctably tangled in its own contradictory metatextual histories. It is marked from its inception with an apparently genetic Trojan instability, ignorant of the Grail quest that might lead to its salvation, and rendered fruitless by the proliferation of aristocratic codes of chivalric behavior that do not in and of themselves accord with the internal cultivation of a personal, ethical habitus in its individual inhabitants. The poem seeks, in Field’s language, to “[translate] ‘Gawain’ back again from his French identity”426 and locates his moral character by the end of the poem, like the hero of the English folk tradition, in the camp of more accessible social values. His courtly manners, the refined code of conduct buttressing the ethical walls of

Arthurian civilization, explicitly cannot save him and, in fact, hinder his journey toward personal growth, and the poem ends with one final reminder that Troy, the civilization that birthed Arthur,

424 Tolkien and Gordon, ll. 2509-2512. 425 Ibid., 2519-2520. 426 Field, p. 310. 141 the practices of his court, and all the great cultures of Europe, was destroyed from within by the practice of its most cherished values.

142 CHAPTER FOUR

AFTER ARTHUR:

THE STANZAIC MORTE ARTHUR AND THE PROBLEM OF SALVATION

Love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public. Because of its inherent worldlessness, love can only become false and perverted when it is used for political purposes such as the change or salvation of the world.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Introduction

For many recent readers of Middle English literature, no single text has been more unfairly maligned than the fourteenth-century Stanzaic Morte Arthur. It is perhaps best known as the primary source text for the final two tales of Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, but it is itself a transvernacular adaptation from the last section of the Old French Lancelot-Grail Cycle and contains the first extant English adaptation of the love between Lancelot and Guinevere. From its unfortunate position in the transmission history of the Arthurian legend, the Stanzaic Morte has shivered in the collective shadow of Malory and the Lancelot-Grail, only very recently beginning to emerge. As its editorial title suggests, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur is an account of

King Arthur’s death and the destruction of the Round Table fellowship rendered in Middle

English verse. Its poetic form is unique and has, on account of its rhyme scheme, been unfavorably compared to minstrel composition, but as I have indicated throughout this study, the widespread critical derision toward so-called “minstrel” literature in Middle English is more indicative of twentieth-century trends in academic scholarship than the presumed aesthetic attitude of a medieval audience. By all accounts, though extant in just one manuscript, the

Stanzaic Morte appears to have been commercially distributed, and although its individual history of transmission is nearly impossible to reconstruct, it exerted a tremendous influence on the plot and even the language of Malory’s monumental text.

143 The literary tradition of Arthur’s death finds its popular origin, as with many Arthurian themes and motifs, in Geoffrey’s Historia, where Arthur is said to have turned from his projected conquest of Rome back toward Britain upon receiving news of his nephew Mordred’s Saxon- backed usurpation of the British throne—to say nothing of his adultery with Arthur’s wife.

Mounting an invasion, Arthur and his army slaughter the opposition force, but Arthur is grievously wounded in the process and mysteriously carried off to Avalon for rehabilitation, passing his crown to Duke Cador’s son Constantine. Constantine controversially kills Mordred’s children, who have continued to destabilize the realm, but rightful British supremacy is ultimately restored on the island, at least for a time. The Lancelot-Grail Cycle of the early thirteenth century, as discussed in Chapter Three, removed the Arthurian narrative from the wider context of secular history and gave it new biblical roots, establishing its origin with the translation of the Holy Grail from Jerusalem to England. It also added dozens of new characters and changed the genealogies of some of the ones established by Chrétien and the chroniclers, such that Arthur’s nephew Mordred becomes his bastard son from an incestuous union with his half-sister. Guinevere, too, is given a new love interest in Lancelot, a theme adapted from

Chrétien’s Chevalier de la Charrette, and their celebrated relationship becomes one of the main narrative threads of the Cycle. By the time the Lancelot-Grail gets to its conclusion in the Mort le roi Artu (hereafter Mort Artu), the Grail quest has been completed and the Arthurian world left to languish in its destructive wake, but much of the affective weight of the crumbling of Arthur’s kingdom comes from the fact that the Mort Artu was composed as part of a cycle, a longer narrative in relatively discrete parts that build on one another to produce a weightier and more climactic literary whole. Malory’s Morte Darthur, too, itself an adaptation of the Lancelot-Grail interpolated with references and long passages from other sources, builds to its conclusion slowly over the course of hundreds of pages and shorter episodes.

144 The Stanzaic Morte, however, does not belong to any such cycle. It announces in its opening lines that the Grail quest had been completed in a stunning victory for Arthur’s court, its first major departure from its source, but now several years have passed and the people are growing restless. Textually divorced from any clear originary frame or wider history of Britain, the poem stands on its own, somewhat like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as a self-contained narrative of what “aunturs” befell “in Arthur dayes”427—of the twilight of the Arthurian space of appearance and how it destroyed itself from within. Unlike Sir Gawain, though, the poem does not focus on the adventure of a single knight but rather encompasses the entire Round Table fellowship, interrogating the scope and limits of Arthurian chivalry, perhaps especially the notion of fin’amor so roundly dismissed by the other Middle English texts examined in this study. The standalone nature of the poem, gesturing at the popular French tradition without incorporating any of its recognizable contextual elements, participates in the same cross-cultural movement of affective broadening explored in the other chapters of this study. The alleged “minstrel” stylings of the Stanzaic-Poet, so often derided by scholars, locate his account of Arthur’s death firmly within the English tradition of translating the Arthurian space of appearance in such a way that the ethical practice of chivalry is expanded beyond the acquisition of arcane courtly manners or the favor of a lady. The Stanzaic Morte, additionally, introduces an original coda to its titular event, refocusing the grand themes of clashing armies and civilizational collapse back onto the individual lives of the war’s survivors. They attempt to turn away from the wreckage of their former world but are ultimately unable to conceive of a mode of existence beyond its prescribed ethical boundaries, producing an account of the final days of Arthur’s court that is motivated by the affect of despair.

427 P. F. Hissiger, editor, Le Morte Arthur, Mouton, 1975, ll. 5-6. 145 The Widening Gyre

Much to the consternation of non-specialists, there are at least four famous and influential medieval texts given the title “Death of Arthur.” Chronologically, these are the thirteenth-century

Old French Mort Artu, the fourteenth-century Middle English poems known as the Alliterative

Morte Arthure and Stanzaic Morte Arthur, and Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century Morte

Darthur. Modern editorial convention has seen fit to orthographically differentiate their titles just enough that they are identifiable by sight, but in academic vernacular usage, they are nearly always known simply as “the Mort(e)” with a qualifying adjective. Of these English texts, two, as previously noted, are adaptations of the earlier French narrative, itself part of the much longer

Lancelot-Grail Cycle. Also known as the Vulgate Cycle, the Pseudo-Map Cycle,428 or the Prose

Lancelot (after its central narrative section), the Lancelot-Grail is without question one of the most influential texts of the Middle Ages. William Kibler considers it “the summa of Arthurian literature,”429 as its authors apparently sought to compile as much Arthurian material as possible into a series of long prose narratives that together comprise the whole history of Arthurian

Britain, taking inspiration from and often directly adapting parts of Geoffrey’s Historia, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, and other scattered Arthurian texts like the works of Robert de

Boron. Editorially structured in five discrete parts, it appears to have begun as a sort of trilogy made up of the Lancelot (on its own sometimes called the Lancelot Proper), the Queste del Saint

Graal, and the Mort Artu, sometimes referred to collectively as the Prose Lancelot (or, frustratingly, the Lancelot-Grail Cycle), but the five parts “were not composed in the sequential

428 Medieval scribes and readers of the Cycle attributed its genesis to the twelfth-century Welsh courtier Walter Map, but this assertion has been proven time and again to be untenable. Joshua Byron Smith’s recent book on the subject, however, explores the relationship between this mistaken attribution and the “ecclesiastical networks of textual exchange [that] played a major role in exporting Welsh literary material into England in the twelfth century,” essentially writing a new history of how Arthurian material entered and proliferated in the Anglo-Angevin courts. See Smith, Walter Map and the Matter of Britain, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 429 William Kibler, introduction to The Lancelot-Grail Cycle: Text and Transformations, edited by William Kibler, University of Texas Press, 1994, p. 3. 146 order in which they narrate events.”430 Rather, the original three texts were later accompanied by the Estoire del Saint Graal and the Merlin—each of which adds a biblical/historical frame to the

Arthurian world—and the Suite du Merlin, a continuation of the Merlin Proper that exceeds the length of the original by about 400% and contains early adventures of Arthur and his knights that directly link the history of the Grail to the story of Arthur’s court. Kibler notes that the Lancelot

Proper, i.e., the large central section, “may or may not have originally been intended as part of a vaster whole”431 when it was composed around 1210, but it was quickly seized upon by other authors who added the Queste around 1225, the Mort Artu no later than 1230, and the two preludes about a decade later. Together, these five texts entangle a massive number of threads from previous Arthurian material and weave them alongside a “complex matrix of prophecies, foreshadowings, and reminders to underscore the conjunction of sacred and secular history”432 that find their ultimate focus in the object of the Grail and the person of Lancelot, respectively, both emblematic of the Arthurian space of appearance as imagined for a thirteenth-century

French audience.

The project is objectively ambitious, audacious in its scope, but whether the compilation is artistically successful is a question often debated among critics. Seventeenth-century poet Jean

Chapelain’s assessment of the Lancelot-Grail as a “dungheap” littered with scattered literary gems, for instance, has proven rather enduring due to the Cycle’s meandering structure and inherent lack of consistent thematic focus. But later critics were also able to swing the pendulum far the other way. Ferdinand Lot proposed an understanding of the Cycle being “well-composed as a tragedy in five acts,”433 and Jean Frappier, similarly, argued for a “coherent conceptual plan

[that] preceded the composition of the prose romances—a plan thought to derive from the well-

430 Kibler, p. 2 431 Ibid. 432 Ibid., p. 5 433 Ferdinand Lot, Etude sur le ‘Lancelot en prose,’ 1918, Champion, 1954, p. 74. 147 ordered mind of a hypothetical author.”434 As E. Jane Burns has more recently shown, however,

“the critical positions of the Vulgate’s detractors and defenders are less radically opposed than they might first appear,” citing both Chapelain’s distaste for the text’s apparent disunity and

Lot’s painstaking work of showing how it is structured not by the norms of later narrative but by entrelacement, two critical poles from which we might observe “a constant preoccupation with origins, an unspoken desire to validate the literary artifact by returning to its authorial source.”435

Lot’s analysis, unfortunately, only holds true for the Prose Lancelot—the middle section of the

Cycle—and not for the Queste or the Mort Artu, and the Cycle as a whole remains impenetrable to readers expecting internal continuity or unwavering authorial presence across its five branches. Rather, recent studies have relied on “accepting digression in narrative development, repetition of stock motifs, the plurality of authorial voices, self-contradiction, and ellipsis as givens of the prose romances,” indeed even embracing “the issues of narrative recasting and discontinuity as essential aspects of thirteenth-century prose composition.”436 The Lancelot-Grail as a cycle thus resists analysis according to Foucauldian notions of the author-function, but within—and occasionally even across—its constituent parts, we may still find some semblance of order.

The Cycle’s most recent editorial title, Lancelot-Grail, points to some of these observable organizational structures, since its overall story does hinge, for the most part, on the life of

Lancelot and the Grail quest. Lancelot replaces Gawain, in terms of his narrative function, to the extent that he embodies the secular notion of Arthurian chivalry as an aspirational ethical habitus and is considered chief among Arthur’s knights within the courtly space of appearance. He is a mighty warrior, essentially undefeated in battle, but also honorable, charitable, and motivated by his love of Guinevere throughout the Lancelot Proper. As Kibler clarifies, however, “the Queste

434 E. Jane Burns, introduction to Lancelot-Grail, vol. 1, edited by Norris J. Lacy, Garland, 1993, p. xvii. 435 Ibid., p. xviii. 436 Ibid. 148 del Saint Graal, produced most probably under Cistercian influence, replaces the earthly loves of

Lancelot and the Round Table knights with a spiritual love—a celestial chivalry—in the service of God.”437 The displacement of personal desire so central to earlier literary notions of chivalry, as discussed in Chapter Two, is removed to an even higher plane, the love of God transcending erotic desire for the lady, a literary comparison common to medieval allegory. Moving into the final section, the Mort Artu, the story derives much of its emotive power from the preceding parts of the narrative. The character of Galahad, maybe especially, forms a crucial link across these three parts of the Cycle, born in the Lancelot and surpassing his father’s spiritual achievements in the Queste, effectively shifting the ethos of Arthurian chivalry from the secular, as represented by Lancelot, toward the divine. Moreover, “his success at the task [of the Grail quest] is ultimately undermined by events in the Mort Artu that lead inevitably to the downfall of

Arthur, the end of his realm, and the twilight of Arthurian chivalry.”438 The Cycle ultimately succeeds as a narrative, for many readers, because of the interaction between its constituent parts, but a glance at the extant manuscript tradition reveals that textual reception of the Cycle in the Middle Ages was quite different than we might expect.

Collecting all five sections together was not unheard of, but it was relatively uncommon.

Perhaps surprisingly, only nine out of the more than two hundred surviving manuscripts and fragments contain a version of the Cycle with representation from all five parts. Rather, it was most often sectioned off into three distinct groupings that were collected together as single units:

(a) the Estoire, the Merlin Proper, and the Suite du Merlin; (b) the first two parts of the Lancelot; and (c) the final third of the Lancelot, the Queste, and the Mort Artu. There is, in fact, no extant manuscript containing the entire Lancelot Proper on its own,439 and, according to Burns, “the

437Kibler, p. 3. 438 Burns., p. xix. 439 Alexandre Micha, editor, Lancelot: roman en prose du 13e siècle, vol. 1, Droz, 1980, pp. ix-xxiii. 149 array of variation in textual presentation across the corpus is maximal.”440 Thus we find manuscripts containing the Queste by itself, or paired with the Mort, but also often with just part of the Lancelot or in conjointure with selections from all five parts. Albert Pauphilet describes one manuscript that compiles the Estoire with the Queste and the Mort with no intrusion from the Lancelot at all.441 As we may observe, then, there did not exist any definitive unified text of the Lancelot-Grail in the Middle Ages, each manuscript compilation potentially provoking a radically different mode of encounter with the received text and emblematizing the Arthurian legend’s essential tendency toward fragmentation. The modern critical understanding of the

Cycle as a distinct literary entity is thus somewhat misleading, although we may certainly observe medieval precedent for it in the nine manuscripts that do contain all five texts. It is crucial to remember that these five branches, though they undoubtedly build on and respond to one another, were written and redacted by many different authors and scribes, nearly all of whom modified the received text in ways that make textual genetics exceedingly difficult.

Turning our attention toward the Cycle’s final section, then, we find what Burns identifies as “the most chronicle-like of the Vulgate narratives,” a story of civilization’s end

“which exhibits less of the repetition so common in the other Vulgate tales.”442 Whereas Burns describes the Mort Artu as “chilling and brutal,” especially in comparison to the “interminable tales of adventure that precede it,”443 Norris Lacy paints it instead as “an understated conclusion, less epic than simply sad and pathetic,”444 a mere epilogue to the narrative climax of the Queste.

Regardless of critical appraisal, it is certainly more structurally straightforward than its companions, casting off the limits of extensive entrelacement in favor of setting up its characters and scenes like a series of dominos falling one after the other until there is no representative of

440 Burns, p. xx. 441 Albert Pauphilet, editor, La Queste del Saint Graal, Champion, 1921, pp. iii-xiv. 442 Burns, p. xxxi. 443 Ibid. 444 Norris Lacy, Preface to Lancelot-Grail, vol. 4, edited by Norris Lacy, Garland, 1995, p. xi. 150 the court’s previous honor or glory left standing. Whereas “the author of the Queste took the physical history of the Grail as described by Robert de Boron and turned it into a spiritual history,”445 the Mort reverts the narrative of the Lancelot-Grail back firmly into the secular, using the wake of the Grail quest itself as a catalyst for major ethical and affective change in the space of appearance. Norris Lacy argues that “the Grail quest… prefigures, indeed overtly announces, the destruction of the Round Table and the ultimate ruin of the Arthurian fellowship,”446 and the spiritual themes of the Queste, in their revision of the tenets of chivalry, in effect strip those tenets of the affective weight they carried in the earlier stories of adventure.

Lacy continues: “Readers of the Lancelot, noting the praise of chivalry in that romance, might expect the Grail quest to be the highest expression of chivalric endeavor. If by that we mean chivalry as espoused and practiced at Camelot, the truth is exactly opposite: the Holy Grail and the Round Table incarnate radically incompatible ideas.”447 When readers get to the Mort, then, they encounter only the husk of Camelot, a withered space of appearance with a huge number of knights absent—killed in pursuit of the Grail, but worse than that, many of them by Gauvain himself.

The Mort Artu begins with the return of Bors to Arthur’s court, who publicly recounts the assumption of Galahad and the conclusion of the Grail quest before Arthur takes a census of his surviving knights, saying, “Seigneur, gardez entre vos quanz de voz compaignons nos avons perduz en ceste queste.”448 They find that thirty-two have died, all of them in battle, but Arthur, hearing that Gauvain is responsible for many of their deaths, brings him into the public space of the court and makes him swear upon his honor as a knight to truthfully confess his deeds. After

445 Richard Barber, “Chivalry, Cistercianism and the Grail,” A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, edited by Carol Dover, Boydell and Brewer, 2003, p. 8. 446 Norris Lacy, “The Sense of an Ending: La Mort le Roi Artu,” A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, edited by Carol Dover, Boydell and Brewer, 2003, p. 116. 447 Ibid. 448 Jean Frappier, La Mort le roi Artu, 3rd edition, Droz, 1956, p. 2. Lacy’s translation: “Lords, look around among yourselves and see how many of your companions we have lost in this quest” (p. 91). 151 thinking for a moment, Gauvain replies, “Je vos di por voir que g’en ai ocis par ma main dis et uit, non pas pour ce que ge fusse mieudres chevaliers que nus autres, me la mescheance se torna plus vers moir que vers nul de mes compaignons. Et si sachiez bien que ce n’a pas esté par ma chevalerie, mes par mon pechié; se m’avez fet dire ma honte.” 449 The Mort opens on successive scenes of public revelation of the quest’s results, highlighting the communal, regulatory nature of the space of appearance, but it also clearly displays that in light of divine revelation, Arthurian chivalry has begun to devour itself. The endless pursuit of proving one’s prowess has turned destructively inward, and Arthur’s own nephew, regarded in the earlier tradition as the embodiment and aspirational ideal of their shared culture, is personally responsible for this decimation of the court’s ranks but claims it was not for the sake of proving his own prowess.

After this confession, however, Arthur, “seeing that the adventures of the kingdom of Logres had been brought to a close, so that scarcely anything more could occur,” attempts to hold the court together by calling for a tournament at Winchester “because he did not want his companions to give up bearing arms.”450 This call, according to Lacy, “conveys clearly the futility, almost the absurdity of what is to come. The absence of adventures in a chivalric romance is virtually a contradiction in terms: adventures are the lifeblood of such narratives. Now adventures are finished, and the activity provided by tournaments is an end in itself; it is no more than pretense or, at best, sport.”451 With the age of adventures “estoient si menees a fin,” the Arthurian way of life cannot continue in any productive or meaningful way, and the story begins in earnest its account of Camelot’s precipitous decline as the friendly tournament devolves into blood feud.

449 Frappier., p. 2. Lacy’s translation: “I tell you truly that I myself killed eighteen, not because I was a better knight than any other, but because misfortune afflicted me more than any of my companions. And you may be assured that it was not a feat of prowess, but rather the consequence of my sin. Now you have made me confess my shame” (p. 91). 450 Lacy, 1995, p. 91. The full sentence in the original is as follows: “Et li rois, por ce qu’il veoit que les aventures del roiaume de Logres estoient si menees a fin qu’il n’en avenoir mes nule se petit non, fist crier un tornoiement en la praerie de Wincestre, por ce qu’il ne vouloit pas toutevoies que si compaignon lessassent a porter armes.” (Frappier, p. 3). 451 Lacy, 2003, p. 117. 152 When discussing the fall of Arthur’s kingdom in the Mort Artu, scholars typically fixate on one of two major causes: the illicit love of Lancelot and Guinevere or the treachery of

Mordred.452 The latter, although complicated by the new narrative details that make Mordred

Arthur’s bastard son and the product of incest, is more or less directly adapted from the

Galfridian chronicle tradition. Even as far back as Geoffrey, Mordred’s treason represented the purportedly cannibalistic nature of the wider British space of appearance, always ultimately brought down from within by civil strife. The Gawain-Poet appears to evoke this tradition with his inclusion of the Trojan frame, as discussed in Chapter Three, but the Lancelot-Grail does not emphasize the inherent instability of Trojan ancestry, nor does it continue the story of Logres after Arthur and his last surviving knights have fallen. Rather, since the Lancelot-Grail is compiled as an almost exhaustive taxonomy of Arthurian chivalry, and since that chivalry has now broken down in the aftermath of the Grail quest, Mordred’s treason is presented as symptomatic of the specific decline of Arthurian socio-ethical culture. Logres as an imagined space is always already fallen, but the Lancelot-Grail taps into and modifies the Arthurian ur- narrative to depict the Arthurian space of appearance after the Grail as a chivalric public whose center simply cannot hold.

It is also commonly noted, however, that the Mort Artu places a heavy emphasis on fate or fortune, which Lacy argues to mean “that events are effectively removed from the agency of human control,”453 a reading at least superficially at odds with the failure of the human institution of chivalry. After a surprise war with Rome and Gauvain’s burial but before his final battle with Mordred on Salisbury Plain, Arthur has a dream in which he is taken by a beautiful lady and lifted up onto a high mountain, where he is set upon a turning wheel. The wheel, it is

452 Lori Walters has edited an excellent collection on the former detailing the highlights of that storied tradition. See Lori Walters, editor, Lancelot and Guinevere: A Casebook, Routledge, 2002. 453 Lacy, 2003, p. 121. 153 explained by the lady, is the Wheel of Fortune (“la roe de Fortune”454), and from its vantage

Arthur is able to see the whole world, a common image of the goddess Fortuna ultimately derived from Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. The lady further explains that Arthur has to this point been the most powerful king ever to have lived, but now, because of his pride in his conquests, he will be cast down—indeed, he is told that “n’i a nul si haut assiz qu’il ne le coviegne cheoir de la poesté del monde”455 and is then dashed to the earth so “felenessement” that he loses the use of his body and its members. This iteration of Arthur’s dream appears to be original to the Lancelot-Grail, although the roughly contemporary Middle English Brut of

Laȝamon appends a thematically similar dream to the standard chronicle account at this point, as discussed in Chapter One, in which Arthur’s hall is destroyed by Wenhaver and Modred and he falls from the top, breaking his right arm. Walwain’s arms are also broken in this dream, and after Arthur dismembers Wenhaver and Modred, he is abandoned at sea and set upon by monsters. Within the Brut, this sequence clearly represents the destruction of Arthur’s realm from within and Arthur’s inability to effect meaningful change through his normal mode of problem-solving in that text: just war. Arthur’s broken right arm should prevent him from fighting back, but he uses his left (sinister) hand to slay first his nephew and then his queen. The fact that Walwain, the face of the British military ethos in the latter part of the Brut’s account, also has his arms broken suggests not simply a personal failure of overreach or excessive ambition on Arthur’s account but a deeper, more systemic problem within Arthurian or, more broadly, British society.

There is no reason to believe that Laȝamon and the author(s) of the Mort Artu were familiar with one another’s work, but a comparison of the scenes is potentially fruitful for understanding the function of the dream in the French text as they are ultimately drawn from the

454 Frappier, p. 226. 455 Ibid., p. 227. “…no one is so highly placed that he can avoid falling from worldly power” (Lacy, p. 150). 154 same sources. When the narrator of the Mort Artu speaks of the irreparable crushing of Arthur’s

“cors et des menbres,”456 it should be understood not just literally but metonymically as the failure of the Arthurian body politic, of which Arthur is the head. As in the Brut, the Mort Artu’s dream is prophetic, showing Arthur what is to come if he engages Mordred in battle. After

Arthur explains his dream to the archbishop, they proceed to Salisbury Plain and encounter an inscription left by Merlin that says, “EN CESTE PLAINGNE DOIT ESTRE LA BATAILLE MORTEL PAR

QUOI LI ROIAUMES DE LOGRES REMEINDRA ORFELINS.”457 Arthur and the reader are both assured that Merlin only speaks the truth on account of his divine foreknowledge, and the image of a kingdom orphaned by its dying lord, when understood in tandem with the dream of Fortune, communicates the idea that the social identity of Logres cannot survive without Arthur, at least not without undergoing radical alteration. The archbishop pleads with him to turn around or to send to Lancelot for aid, as Gauvain had begged him twice in life and once again after death, but

Arthur is resolute, if much more frightened than usual, and continually refuses counsel.

While the chronicles, from which the Mort’s narrative structure is basically adapted, obviously depict Arthur’s final battle with Mordred, they leave their overall histories fairly open- ended because their stories are ultimately about Britain, not just Arthur. British history continues after Arthur in Geoffrey and Wace, but the Lancelot-Grail finds its focus squarely on Arthur and his court. By relocating the terminus a quo of Arthurian history from the destruction of Troy to the sacralizing of the Grail, the Lancelot-Grail presents not “an endless register of events leading from some starting point and heading toward an indeterminate future, but an eschatological construction with a precise goal to be reached,”458 namely the attaining of the Grail, making everything else appear secondary. Many critics do, in fact, read the Lancelot-Grail as the Estoire

456 Ibid. 457 Frappier, p. 228. Lacy’s translation: “This plain will be the site of the terrible battle by which the Kingdom of Logres will be orphaned” (p. 150). 458 Richard Trachsler, “A Question of Time: Romance and History,” A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, edited by Carol Dover, Boydell and Brewer, 2003, p. 26. My emphasis. 155 de Lancelot, as the explicit to the Mort itself names the text in several manuscripts. In this schema, Arthur is necessarily a secondary character to his best knight and the adventures that befall him, something that would appear to undermine the idea of Arthur as guiding principle of the Cycle. As Richard Trachsler writes, however, “Arthur’s biography is subordinated to the

Grail story, yet they are linked in a way that makes Arthur’s biography indispensable to the new story. The place is Arthur’s realm, his reign is the time in which the conquest of the Grail will be achieved.”459 Arthur’s kingdom and his own place in it are special, not just one in a line of functionally endless British monarchies, and the reason for their unique status is the specific space of appearance cultivated within the kingdom’s borders and according to Arthur’s personal example. It is an affective space that both invented courtoisie and mastered its emotional practices, in so doing providing the necessary conditions in which the Grail Knight might be born and nurtured. The Mort Artu finds in this Arthurian exceptionalism its very foundation, and once Arthur and his knights are dead, there is nothing much left to say. There is no promise of or even gesture toward Arthur’s return from Avalon, and the audience is instead given his tomb, marvelous and rich, with an inscription that reads “CI GIST LI ROIS ARTUS QUI PAR SA VALEUR

MIST EN SA SUBJECTION .XII. ROIAUMES.”460 Arthur is remembered, in the end, only as a conqueror, the affective practices that once defined his court as a noble space of aspirational identity rendered illegible, a silent monument to futility.

The Cycle in England

The number of extant manuscripts and fragments of the Lancelot-Grail is on par with those that remain of Geoffrey’s Historia with more than 200 currently catalogued. Given that the celebrated poems of Chrétien de Troyes from just half a century earlier survive in fewer than 50

459 Ibid. 460 Frappier, p. 251. Lacy’s translation: “Here lies King Arthur, who by his valor conquered twelve kingdoms.” 156 copies, it is no wonder Oskar Sommer referred to the Cycle as the Vulgate, for it became the common or vulgar version of the story standard across much of medieval Europe in the decades after its composition. Its manuscripts were “produced in large numbers from the first half of the thirteenth century, when the individual texts were composed and the Cycle brought into being, until the first years of the sixteenth century,”461 mostly in northern France, but with significant numbers written in other Francophone areas like England and northern Italy. The majority of these more than 200 surviving manuscripts and fragments are currently in France “and have probably been there since they were written, but 42… are now in England or Wales, 2 now in

France were probably in England during the Middle Ages, and a further 25 were in England during the nineteenth century before returning to the Continent… Thus, nearly a third of the survivors have been in England or Wales at some time.”462 The records of royal and aristocratic libraries in England show that several copies of the Cycle were passed down as inheritance, including from Isabella of France to her son Edward III, which appears to have made its way down to Richard II based on a 1384 document that mentions “vne Romance de Roy Arthure” and

“vn liure appelle Galaath.” Roger Middleton concludes that “by the end of the fourteenth century the [English] crown possessed… some six or seven Lancelot-Grail manuscripts,”463 to say nothing of the volumes mentioned in the wills and testaments of other nobles. Furthermore, we must deduce from the presence of English-made copies the existence of French-made exemplars and, similarly, sources for the various English adaptations of the Cycle material.

Given the English-language literary tradition’s noted reluctance to incorporate the principal elements of the Lancelot-Grail into its portrayal of Arthur until the late fourteenth century, it is perhaps surprising that selections from it were directly adapted at least five times,

461 Roger Middleton, “Manuscripts of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle in England and Wales: Some Books and Their Owners.” A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, edited by Carol Dover, Boydell and Brewer, 2003, p. 219. 462 Ibid., p. 219. 463 Ibid. 157 most frequently from the Estoire del Saint Graal and the Merlin. The most famous adaptation, of course, is Malory’s late fifteenth-century Morte Darthur, but the production of these

“translations spread from a century after the composition of the original to 250 years later,”464 in which time the literary and political climates shifted dramatically from that in which the

Lancelot-Grail was born. The earliest of these is the octosyllabic verse romance Of Arthour and of Merlin, an adaptation of the Merlin contemporaneous with Ywain and Gawain and preserved in the Auchinleck Manuscript. The late fourteenth-century miscellany known as the Vernon

Manuscript collects a five-page alliterative Joseph of Arimathie directly after a fragment of the

A-text of Piers Plowman, summarizing an early part of the Estoire. Cooper notes that “its manuscript context strongly suggests that it was valued as a religious work rather than for any

Arthurian connections it might have,”465 especially since Arthur is never mentioned and the Grail only in passing as “þe disch wiþ þe blode” at line 297 in reference to Joseph’s vision of a reliquary altar. The Grail quest itself would not appear in English until Henry Lovelich’s 1425 rhyming adaptations of the Estoire and the Merlin, but “there is no evidence of their wider readership or influence.”466 In the decades following, the anonymous prose Merlin was composed around 1450 and John Harding’s Chronicle, which is essentially an adaptation of

Geoffrey’s Historia with an interpolated summary of the Grail quest, in the 1460s. Harding is careful, however, to remove Mordred’s incestuous parentage and make sure that Galahad is begotten by a married Lancelot. Uniformly, these English adaptations of the Lancelot-Grail material “indicate singularly little interest in the romance elements of the Arthurian stories,”467 focusing instead on the prophecies of Merlin and the origins of the Grail, elements which could be more generally classified as belonging to British history in the chronicle tradition. The many

464 Helen Cooper, “The Lancelot-Grail Cycle in England: Malory and his Predecessors.” A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, edited by Carol Dover, Boydell and Brewer, 2003, p. 148. 465 Ibid., p. 150. 466 Ibid., p. 151. 467 Ibid, p. 149. 158 adventures of the Round Table fellowship led by Lancelot, to say nothing of his adulterous affair with Guinevere, the most popular version of the story rendered for French-speaking audiences from the thirteenth-century forward, barely register a mention in English-language texts before

Malory—with one notable exception.

Always Already Fallen

The Stanzaic Morte Arthur is preserved only in London, British Library, Harley 2252, a sixteenth-century miscellany compiled by a London bookseller called John Colyns, although

Weinberg notes that “paleographical and paper evidence has established an earlier date for that section of the manuscript containing the Stanzaic Morte, revealing its previous existence as an independent, commercially produced booklet, published between 1460 and 1480.”468 It is thought to have been composed about a century earlier, however, in the north or north-west

Midlands, making it a near-contemporary of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The poem is agreed to be a redaction or adaptation of the Mort Artu, “translated into an understated, almost ballad-style register in 8-line stanzas rhyming abababab, a form that seems to have had some associations with historical material or rhymed chronicles,”469 although the English poet’s particular take on the received material differs greatly in many respects from his source. It is clear to many scholars that he knew some iteration of the insular chronicle tradition, made evident by his brief reference to the Trojan founding of Britain toward the end of the poem,470 but perhaps found in the Mort Artu a version of the Arthurian legend that prioritized the ideals of chivalry he sought to examine through his adaptation of the narrative. In terms of the poem’s size, Benson notes that the poet “reduced the material he inherited from the French to about a

468 Carole Weinberg, “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” Arthur of the English, edited by W. R. J. Barron, University of Wales Press, 2001, p. 100. 469 Cooper, p. 151. 470 Hissiger, ll. 3376-77. 159 fifth of its original length,” resulting in “a work that succeeds because of its lean and rapid narrative and that gains force because of its more obvious focus upon the actions themselves.”471

The Stanzaic Morte is a much shorter, more direct narrative than the Mort Artu that recalibrates the retained material in order to account for that which it cuts. In the process, it articulates a version of the Arthurian space of appearance that appears to not just shift but reject outright the ethical terms of its source.

Like Ywain and Gawain, the Stanzaic Morte has suffered both for comparison to its source and simply by virtue of its composition in Middle English. Although virtually all modern critics point to the end of the text and the poet’s apparently original introduction of Launcelot and Gaynour’s parting scene as a major achievement of affect, the text as a whole is still often derided for its form. Richard Wertime’s 1972 PMLA article on the poem’s theme and structure is ultimately quite complimentary, but he lays out a laundry list of its perceived faults that serves as an effective summary of early critical history:

[E]ven in the stronger sections of the poem there are anomalies which frustrate the

enjoyment of the reader today. Basically these are five: (1) the awkward, unvarying use

of the ballad stanza, made even less exciting by an impoverished verbal range; (2) a

perplexing discrepancy between the narrator’s evaluations of the characters and their

actions, and what seems to us—indeed quite often to the characters themselves—the

obvious moral implications to be drawn; (3) the tyrannical sense of necessity that

sometimes dominates the poem; (4) a mixed focus on the main characters, principally

Launcelot and Gawayne, who, though occasionally very human, appear for the most part

471 Larry D. Benson, introduction to King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, Medieval Institute, 1995, p. 2. 160 to be rigidly stylized abstractions; and, finally, (5) a lopsided lack of attention to

motivation and probability that makes certain events seem bewilderingly arbitrary.472

As if in response to each of these points, however, another contradictory article has been published. Sharon Janson Jaech and Jenifer Sutherland have both written on the stanzaic form, the latter demonstrating that far from “impoverished,” the poet’s rhyming vocabulary establishes and builds on expected patterns to generate emotional response from his audience,473 and Fiona

Tolhurst and Kevin Whetter, among several others, have recently argued that the poet’s use of characterization throughout is, in fact, much more complex than earlier criticism has typically allowed.474 Rather, as Sherron Knopp observed even in the 1970s, “faults in the eyes of one critic become merits in the opinion of another, and vice versa,” to the point that “one begins to wonder whether everyone has read the same poem.”475

What is abundantly clear upon reviewing the critical literature is that “almost every discussion of the poem assumes from the outset that it is essentially the story of Lancelot and

Guinevere.”476 Read as redaction of the Mort Artu, in which this relationship takes center stage, and against the received cultural background of Malory’s influence, “the terse lines in which the

Stanzaic-Poet sketches the famous emotional triangle do indeed seem lacking in psychological detail.”477 With a text only about a fifth as long as his source and operating under the self- imposed restraints of rhyming meter, the poet obviously does not attempt to reproduce the Mort

Artu word for word, nor even, in many cases, sense for sense. His versions of Launcelot and

Gaynour participate in a radically restructured narrative, and “to blame the poet for what he has not done is to ignore what he has accomplished: an exquisitely detailed and compelling portrait

472 Richard Wertime, “The Theme and Structure of the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” PMLA, vol. 87, no. 5, 1972, p. 1075. 473 Jenifer Sutherland, “Rhyming Patterns and Structures of Meaning in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” Arthuriana, vol. 12, no. 4, 2002, pp. 1-24. 474 Fiona Tolhurst and K. S. Whetter, “Standing Up for the Stanzaic-poet: Artiestry, Characterization, and Narration in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Malory’s Morte Darthur,” Arthuriana, vol. 28, no. 3, 2018, pp. 86-113. 475 Sherron E. Knopp, “Artistic Design in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” ELH, vol. 45, no. 5, 1978, p. 563-4. 476 Ibid. 477 Ibid., p. 564. 161 of the chivalric spirit associated with Arthur and embodied in his best knight, followed by a carefully calculated rehearsal of its destruction.”478 The differences between the two texts highlight the expected process of translating the space of appearance from its courtly French context to a more general English audience, but this should not be considered an aesthetic fault, nor its narrative “simplified” in the sense that it cannot withstand scrutiny. Rather, Kennedy argues “that in popularizing this work the author was concerned with factors besides narrative technique and had a conception of the Arthurian tragedy quite different from that of the French

Mort Artu.”479 Whereas the Lancelot-Grail as a cycle presents a panoramic imagining of the

Arthurian world from the promise and prophecy of its earliest beginnings to the world past its prime in the Mort Artu, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur instead presents itself as a self-contained romance. Through the process of adaptation, it scrutinizes the very tenets of roman courtois to show, not unlike Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, that the unreflective and overly codified notion of behavior endemic to the Arthurian space of appearance in French-language romance is perhaps itself the problem.

The poem begins with the trappings of verse romance, a narrator calling his audience to listen well to his story of the adventures that took place “in Arthur dayes,” but also promising to

“telle of there endinge, / That mykell wiste of wo and wele.”480 In the second stanza, the narrator informs his audience that once the “Sangrayle” had been found and all the court’s enemies defeated, Arthur and his knights lived in peace and health for four years. The poem thus establishes in its opening lines an image of the court triumphant by their own power, a reading in accordance with the insular chronicle accounts of Arthur’s military victories. The Grail is almost

478 Ibid., p. 565. 479 Edward Donald Kennedy, “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur: The Adaptation of a French Romance for an English Audience,” Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend, edited by Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley, State University of New York Press, 1994, p. 92. 480 Hissiger, ll. 5, 7-8. 162 an afterthought, just one of the many “aunturs that they byfore them found,”481 presented here neither as their crowning achievement nor as a harbinger of their destruction. The scene containing Bors’s return to the court and Arthur’s census of those lost in pursuit of the Grail is completely eliminated from the French source, as is Gawain’s public confession of guilt. There is nothing to suggest in the opening stanzas of the poem that anything spiritual has displaced feats of arms in terms of the court’s ethical center. Rather, the opening scene of the poem is of Arthur and Gaynour in their private chamber recounting stories of old adventures until Gaynour tells

Arthur about how his “courte begynnyth to spill / Off duoghty knightis all bydene,” and how his

“honour beginnes to fall, / That wont was wide in world to sprede.”482 These knights are not, as in the Mort Artu, dead; rather, in the absence of adventure in this time of peace, they have presumably sought military honor elsewhere, and for this reason—to bring knights and their feats of prowess back to Arthur’s court—a tournament is cried.

Kevin Whetter importantly observes that “the tournament is not Arthur’s idea but

Gaynour’s, offered to Arthur as a solution to the problem of the court’s declining honor.” 483 The scene’s placement in their private chamber is something of a generic inversion, given that most romances, even in Middle English, tend to open on public scenes of feasting, emphasizing both the chivalric public and the king’s place within it. The counsel here is given in private to hold a public spectacle, and “the fact ‘That ladyes and maydens might se [there] / Who that best were of dede’ possibly suggests that, as is often in the case of romance, the knights are here inspired by their (wished-for) lovers.”484 The Stanzaic Morte, more clearly than Ywain and Gawain at the least, thus invokes the spirit of fin’amor, drawing from the French literary tradition beyond its immediate source to foreground a “traditional” courtly imagining of the space of appearance.

481 Ibid., l. 11. 482 Ibid., ll. 23-26. 483 K. S. Whetter, “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Medieval Tragedy,” Reading Medieval Studies, vol. 28, 2002, p. 89. 484 Ibid. 163 Marco Nievergelt similarly argues that Gaynour “provides what is in effect political counsel, reminding Arthur of his public duties and advising him that ‘a turnement were best to bede’ (32).

The tournament in turn contributes to preserving normative and functional gendered roles of male action and female spectatorship.”485 In the Mort Artu, Arthur publicly calls for a tournament because he does not want his men, in light of the closing of the age of adventure, to give up the practice of arms. In this context, the promise of tournament glory rings necessarily hollow because it cannot engender further glory in an adventure-yet-to-come since the Grail quest has made an end to them. In the Stanzaic Morte, however, the private setting of the queen’s advice “represents the productive and harmonious articulation of the domestic and the political, of the sexual and chivalric within an idealized Arthurian world that, however, as is suggested by

Gaynor’s remarks, is in the very process of slipping away into the past.”486 Drawing from its source, then, the Stanzaic Morte imagines the Arthurian way of life in decline, but for importantly different reasons. Whereas secular chivalry in the Mort Artu was once good but has been superseded by the spiritual ethos of the Grail, Arthur’s court in the Morte Arthur’s is not transformed by any such catalyst and begins to destroy itself through the practice of its own most deeply held values. It is beholden to ideologies like courtly love, as demonstrated in Gaynour’s feminine call for masculine feats of prowess and Launcelot’s later fateful promise to the Maid of

Ascolot, but it has not yet in this opening scene begun to destroy itself, in part because the affective transformation of the space of appearance through the Grail quest and its aftermath has been removed from the narrative entirely.

Another major theme of the French text removed in the adaptation, or at least radically modified in presentation, is the oppressive presence of fate. As noted above in Wertime’s critique, a modern reader coming to the poem with some knowledge of Malory might feel

485 Marco Nievergelt, “The Place of Emotion: Space, Silence and Interiority in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” Arthurian Literature, vol. 32, 2015, p. 38. 486 Ibid. 164 railroaded by the “tyrannical sense of necessity” rushing the narrative to its inevitable conclusion, making some events and characterizations appear “bewilderingly arbitrary.” This is, for Wertime, primarily a matter of aesthetics, for he notes at some length that the poem is generally free of the influence of fate or Fortuna. Rather, he argues, “the forces of destiny are imbedded in the structure of chivalric society and in the natures of its individual members, whose actions within the limitations of the accepted social code govern, almost entirely, the course of events.”487 Chivalric society and the code of behavior it promotes necessarily limit the scope of these characters’ actions and emotional responses. In other words, they cannot behave other than by the code tacitly agreed upon in the space of appearance, and the result is what Wertime identifies as a “tragedy of consequence.”488 The court’s downfall is not caused by the subtle workings of some sinister outside force but is a natural consequence of the actions its human characters take, and indeed must take if they are to retain their identity and remain in their society.489 The tragedy comes from observation that human society tends inexorably toward destruction, and the adaptations in the poem’s content repeatedly emphasize the role individual humans play in the assurance of cataclysm simply by behaving as expected.

Knopp has noted, for instance, “the frequency with which characters act upon knowledge which the narrative shows to be limited and misleading.”490 Nearly all of the poem’s central calamities are, in fact, caused by simple misinterpretation of events, and the moments of most palpable division in the Round Table fellowship can be traced backward to moments of misreading. Gaynour is without a champion because she has sent Launcelot away for his supposed affair with the Maid of Ascolot, a reasonable assumption within the world of the text

487 Wertime, p. 1075. 488 Ibid. 489 The common trope of a knight, like Yvain or Tristan, who goes mad and lives in the forest after he is confronted with his failure, losing both his personal and chivalric identities in the process, comes to mind here. Abstinence from public life is perhaps the only way to avoid what Sara Ahmed calls “the drama of contingency,” as Launcelot and Gaynour perhaps discover in the poem’s final pages. 490 Knopp, p. 106. 165 given her own relationship with him and its social configuration within the strictures of courtly love. Moreover, Gaynour needs a champion in the first place because she is falsely accused of poisoning the Scottish knight—a claim with no evidence other than the bare fact that she served the meal. Perhaps the most tragic of these circumstances, however, is Arthur’s final battle with

Mordred. In a huge departure from the Mort Artu, Arthur actually follows Gawain’s advice and seeks a truce with Mordred, a stay of thirty days in which time he will reconcile with Launcelot and seek his aid in the coming battle. Arthur, Mordred, and their armies all appear on the battlefield to sign a treaty, and the process is very nearly completed without a problem: “But as they acordyd shulde have bene, / An edder glode forth upon the grownde; / He stange a knyght, that men myght sene / That he was seke and full unsownde. / Owte he brayed with swerd bryght,

/ To kylle the adder had he thoghte. / Whan Arthur party saw that syght, / Frely they togedyr sought. / There was no thynge withstande theym myght; / They wend that treson had bene wroghte.”491 The battle that ultimately kills Arthur is caused by the sudden appearance of a snake and a panicked soldier’s attempt to kill it, a scene with no parallel in the Mort Artu. That soldier’s drawing of his weapon prompts Arthur’s knights to believe they are under attack and to quickly retaliate. Within the interpretive frame of chivalric society, perhaps especially on the field of battle, this is a completely reasonable conclusion. Nothing treasonous or outright malicious has occurred in this scene at all, and its affective power hinges on the near-miss of peace terms and assured victory for Arthur foiled by the blind and unknowing intrusion of nature into the human space of appearance. Fate is not behind the downfall of Arthur’s court in the

Stanzaic Morte any more than blind human accident and socially appropriate behavioral response.

491 Hissiger, ll. 3340-3349. 166 The larger-scale revision of fate as a controlling influence in the poem’s text is perhaps most evident in the account of Arthur’s dream. After a hard battle with Launcelot in which

Gawain is grievously wounded, Arthur turns his forces back to Britain to put down Mordred’s insurrection. The Roman interlude is removed from the narrative entirely, as is Gauvain’s display of valor in dueling the Emperor. Rather, Gawain dies on the ship before landing in Britain, accidentally hit on the head by one of his own men’s oars while preparing to engage Mordred’s forces on the shore. Arthur wins the ensuing skirmish but is distraught to find Gawain dead, and he afterward fights Mordred’s army in several battles across the southern coast of Britain.

Finally, a time is set soon after the Feast of the Trinity for a confrontation between the two leaders, and the night before the battle, Arthur is beset by terrible dreams corresponding closely, though not exactly, with those he has in the Mort Artu.

In the first of these, although he sits on a giant wheel, the figure of the goddess Fortuna is removed. The English poet records: “Hym thowht he satte in gold all gledde, / As he was comely kynge with crowne, / Upon a whele that full wyde spredd, / And all hys knyghtis to hym bowne.”492 In the French version, Fortuna herself picks Arthur up and places him on the wheel, explaining to him that it is, in fact, the Wheel of Fortune on which he sits. From his place at the top of the wheel, he can see the whole world, and Fortuna informs him that he will be punished for his excessive pride in its conquest. The Stanzaic Morte removes this rationale from the dream, along with any notion of punishment. The only mention of Arthur’s conquests is in the poem’s opening stanzas, in which we are told that there is peace in the realm because Arthur has defeated his enemies. The common characterization of Arthur as a militant warlord bent on expanding his borders, a rendering taken up in several contemporary Middle English texts in addition to the French, has been severely diminished here, and we are told merely that “The

492 Hissiger, ll. 3172-3175. 167 whele was ferly ryche and rownd; / In world was nevyr none halfe so hye, / Thereon he satte rychely crownyd, / With many a besaunte, broche, and be.”493 This description clearly depicts

Arthur’s wealth, as the previous line about his knights bowing to him suggests both his power and their proper reverence, but while the presence of the wheel itself still would almost certainly have evoked Fortuna for a medieval audience, her own removal from the scene is striking.

Kennedy suggests that “presenting the wheel without the goddess could make Fortune seem more like an impersonal force than a goddess who is punishing Arthur for his pride,”494 a reading consonant with my own. By removing both the concept of excessive pride and its requisite punishment, Arthur is absolved of the sins imputed to him by the French text. Furthermore,

Arthur is not alone in the Stanzaic Morte. His knights are present and bowing before him on the wheel, demonstrating that the fall is perhaps not Arthur’s alone. Although I argue that the Mort

Artu ultimately depicts Arthur’s fall from the wheel metonymically, his paralysis at the bottom signifying the ethical torpor of his society in the aftermath of the Grail quest, the English poet makes this image much more explicit in his adaptation, a rhetorical choice we might consider characteristic of such Middle English adaptations. The Stanzaic Morte renders a public version of Arthur’s fall, placing the content of his dream within the space of appearance such that although Arthur retains the adoration of his subjects at the top of the wheel, they are replaced— as the wheel turns—by devils. Absent the presence of Fortuna, the scene retains an air of judgment, but a particularly Christian one.

David Johnson has recently drawn necessary attention to the English poet’s additions to the scene, namely what Arthur sees beneath the wheel. As the poet records: “He lokyd downe upon the grownd, / A blake water ther undyr hym he see, / With dragons fele there lay unbownde, / That no man durst hem nyghe nyee. / He was wondyr ferd to falle / Amonge the

493 Ibid., ll. 3176-3179. 494 Kennedy, p. 99. 168 fendys ther that faught. / The whele overtornyd ther withal, / and everyche by a lymme hym caught.”495 The Mort Artu presents only Fortuna’s decision to dash Arthur upon the ground, where he is divested of his “cors et des menbres,” but the English poem specifies that when

Arthur, sitting resplendent in gold, looks to the ground below, he sees a black water teeming with dragons and fiends. Moreover, he is “wondyr ferd to falle,” and when the wheel inevitably turns over, he is caught by the demons below, who latch onto his limbs. Johnson has argued that the scene’s imagery may find its origin in the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, which presents an afterlife vision in which the dead must cross a bridge over a dark river while the hands of fiendish men reach up to drag them down. Conceding that “Gregory’s text might not have been the immediate source on which our poet drew,”496 Johnson demonstrates that the popularity of the Dialogues and its wide-ranging transmission into several European vernaculars undoubtedly influenced Middle English otherworld visions, including the influential St. Patrick’s Purgatory and Visio sancti Pauli, which present similar images of an infernal wheel half-submerged in boiling black water on which sinners are endlessly turned, sometimes set upon by snakes and demons.

Although it is unnecessary and virtually impossible to trace his direct source, the image of a purgatorial wheel is attested in enough Middle English texts to suggest that by removing the person of Fortuna from Arthur’s dream and adding a festering fen filled with fiends, the

Stanzaic-Poet “converts a motif of high French culture into one with the moralizing overtone of popular religion, redolent with the same kind of sensational piety that we find in Gregory’s

Dialogues and the Middle English Visions of the Otherworld.”497 The movement of French- language Arthuriana into Middle English, as we have seen, involves a necessary modal shift

495 Hissiger, ll. 3180-3187. 496 David F. Johnson, “Black Waters, Dragons, and Fiends: Arthur’s Dream in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” Arthuriana, vol. 28, no. 3, 2018, p. 22. 497 Johnson, p. 26. 169 from an explicitly courtly audience’s literary expectations to those of a more general one, and in his adaptation of Arthur’s dream, the Stanzaic-Poet, as Johnson argues, “presents his audience with an Arthur who, like them, will be judged by God, and whose fate, like theirs, will be determined by his individual merits.”498 In this way, the stanzaic Arthur resembles his predecessor found in Laȝamon’s Brut, who, as argued at length in Chapter One, is given a surplus of affective gestures and direct speech that culminate in an original dream vision, serving to humanize the man whom Laȝamon’s French and Latin sources treated only as a legendary cog in the machine of providential history. Although the dream in Laȝamon’s account does involve

Arthur wandering “agon wide ȝeond þan moren”499 (“far and wide over the moors”) and dragged into the sea by a lion, there is no infernal subtext to the images beyond the appearance of some

“grisliche fuȝeles”500 (“horrible birds”), and the lion, in fact, is explicitly said to be the most noble animal created by God. The imagery of Laȝamon’s dream is overall much more obscure than that found in the Stanzaic Morte, which still resembles its French source even though its narrative sequence and affective character are consistently modified to shift the text’s emphasis from a courtly ethos—which the English poem rejects—toward something more generally moral.

Love Among the Ruins

Without any noteworthy dissent, critics agree that the highlight of the Stanzaic Morte

Arthur is its account of what happens after the titular event, namely the parting of Launcelot and

Gaynour and their respective spiritual careers. The scene appears to be wholly original to the

English poem, although a superficially similar one appears in a single manuscript of the Mort

Artu, now located in the Vatican Library as MS Palatinus Latinus 1967. In every other Lancelot-

498 Ibid., p. 27. 499 W. R. J. Barron and Carole Weinberg, editors, Laȝamon’s Brut, Longman, 1995, l. 14005. My translation follows. 500 Ibid., l. 14006. 170 Grail manuscript, the queen’s flight from London and subsequent death are only cursorily reported. After Mordred’s seizure of the British crown, Guinevere fears for her life, thinking she will be seen as a political threat and flees under cover of darkness to seek refuge in an abbey apparently founded by her ancestors. The abbess very nearly does not let her in, only agreeing to do so with the understanding that she and Arthur must be reconciled should Mordred be defeated. After this scene, the queen is not heard from again until after Arthur’s death when

Lancelot returns to do battle with Mordred’s sons. We are told, in Lacy’s translation, that

…no one could have been more enraged and grief-stricken than he, for on the very day

when the battle was to take place, he had received the news that his lady the queen had

died and departed this world three days before. And it had happened just as he was told,

for the queen had recently left the world. But never had a lady met a finer death or

repented more nobly, nor had any lady more fittingly asked our Lord’s mercy, than had

she.501

Her story, central in so many ways to the plot of the Mort Artu, ends abruptly, off-stage, and is reported by a messenger. Even Lancelot’s reaction takes up just one sentence before he moves on to avenge his lord and lady in battle. The author does not linger on the queen’s motivations—we are told simply that she entered the abbey out of fear and that she repented of her sins, whatever those may have been.

Lancelot’s final days are, perhaps fittingly given the text’s appellation of Estoire de

Lancelot, imagined more fully. After vanquishing Mordred’s sons, Lancelot harries the remaining rebel forces, slaughtering them “com se ce fussent bestes mues”502 and leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. He has lost all sense of chivalric honor or decorum with the dissolution of

Arthur’s court, a killing machine motivated only by hatred and revenge. He rides, “en tel ire et en

501 Lacy, 1995, p. 156. The corresponding passage in Frappier is on p. 254. 502 Frappier, p. 256. Lacy’s translation: “as if they were dumb animals” (p. 157). 171 tel duel,”503 in no particular direction until he happens upon a hermitage. Going inside, he finds an ancient chapel attended by the former Archbishop of Canterbury and his own cousin

Blioberis, both refugees from the fall of Logres. Having lost the people dearest to him and the chivalric space of appearance that gave his relationships meaning, Lancelot decides to give up the things of the world and devote himself to the service of God. After a time, he takes priestly orders at the Archbishop’s direction and is reunited, by happenstance, with his brother Hector.

For four years, he lives a life of fasting and vigils, of the variety, we are told, that no other man could have endured, but he eventually dies, his soul ascending to heaven in the company of innumerable angels, and his body is translated to Joyous Guard to be interred beside the remains of his friend Galehaut. Bors, happening upon his cousin’s funeral, takes Lancelot’s place at the hermitage, and the Cycle ends with Arthur’s last surviving knight giving up his claim to earthly power and forever departing the political world for the isolated service of Christ.

Palatinus Latinus 1967, however, tells a different story entirely. In just this one manuscript, after Lancelot kills Mordred’s sons and rides into the wilderness in single-minded fury, he hears a bell ring, which calls him to his senses enough to investigate. He finds a wealthy abbey nearby, where he is welcomed and attended to by two servants. One of these servants reports Lancelot’s arrival to the abbess, identifying him only as “li plus beaux chevaliers dou monde,”504 and the abbess, in turn, calls for Guinevere, who had previously taken the habit in this very abbey, to see if it is anyone she may have known in her former life. Upon seeing

Lancelot, Guinevere swoons, and after he recognizes her face in the garb of a nun, Lancelot swoons as well. They both soon recover and talk for a while, Lancelot assuring the former queen that she need no longer fear Mordred’s sons and even telling her that she could claim the throne for herself by right and with confidence. She demurs, however, telling him instead, “Vous savez

503 Ibid., p. 258. Lacy’s translation: “angry and distraught” (p. 158). 504 Ibid., p. 264. Lacy’s translation: “the most handsome knight in the world” (p. 158, n. 2). 172 bien avis que nous avons fait moi et vous tele chose que nous ne deüssiens user le remenant de nos vies ou servise Nostre Seigneur.”505 Elizabeth Archibald remarks that “the effect of this episode is rather sentimental; they seem pleased to see each other. The queen remembers her worldly greatness with some smugness and addresses Lancelot as ‘biaux douz amis,’ even though she now wants to save her soul. Her sense of guilt is rather coyly expressed.”506

Following her example, though, Lancelot swears that he, too, will seek religious service, and after two more days’ lodging in the abbey, he receives pardon from his lady and departs, the lovers sharing one final kiss before we are told that Guinevere lived only one more year, which she spent fervently in prayer for the souls of Arthur and Lancelot. The manuscript then picks up the standard narrative of Lancelot’s hermitage, now given by this interpolation a decidedly different cast. Whereas the standard narrative sees a vengeful, broken Lancelot divesting himself of the things of the world in the face of monumental loss, the penance of Palatinus Latinus

1967’s Lancelot is motivated in an important way by Guinevere’s example, her sworn knight resolving one last time to complete an act of service for her love, redeeming in a supremely important way the affective practice of fin’amor as described in Chapter Two and at least some aspect of the fallen court’s erstwhile ethical code. Guinevere is given a noble burial, and

Lancelot is seen, as previously noted, sung into heaven by flights of angels after four years in the priesthood, spurred to salvation for love of the queen.

This version of events is extant in only one of the many Lancelot-Grail manuscripts, and although there is no way of knowing for sure, it is commonly agreed that the poet of the Stanzaic

Morte Arthur did not have access to it, nor was he aware of its narrative. Both texts tell of a final meeting between the queen and her lover, but their similarities are largely superficial, so it is

505 Ibid., p. 265. Lacy’s translation: “You know that you and I have done things we should not have done. So I believe we should spend the rest of our lives in the service of our Lord” (p. 158, n. 2). 506 Elizabeth Archibald, “Some Uses of Direct Speech in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Malory,” Arthuriana, vol. 28, no. 3, 20018, p. 78. 173 important to emphasize that the Stanzaic Morte is not an adaptation of Palatinus Latinus 1967.

The English poet employs a fundamentally different approach to the scene that hammers home the themes he has developed throughout his text, and it is wholly at odds with the ethos of its

French cousin. Archibald characterizes the scene as “relentlessly serious, with no nostalgic looking back.”507 The scene begins with Gaynour’s escape to the abbey. We are told that when she “wyte that all was gone to wrake, / Away she went, with ladys fyve, / To Aumysbery, a nonne hyr for to make.”508 In the standard text of the Mort Artu, it is apparent that the queen does not take the habit, since the abbess only grants her sanctuary on the condition of reconciling with

Arthur in marriage, something she would be unable to do having taken a vow of chastity. The

English poem modifies her motivation substantially, showing Gaynour actively seeking contrition in the form of religious vocation rather than simply fearing for her life, a narrative tradition adapted ultimately from Geoffrey of Monmouth. By the time we see Launcelot again, the queen has been fully integrated into a new community of religious women, a spiritual replacement of sorts for the secular public of Arthur’s court. Further adapting the events of the

Lancelot-Grail, Launcelot’s war with Mordred’s sons is removed, and the story picks up instead with Launcelot arriving too late to help Arthur and diverging from his party to seek news of the survivors. Almost out of his mind with grief, he stumbles on Gaynour’s cloister, and when she sees him, she swoons three times and is carried to her chamber by her sisters.

The dialogue that follows is the heart of the scene and, in many respects, the climax of the poem. Before Launcelot is able to approach, Gaynour tells the abbess, “I knowlache here /

507 Ibid. 508 Hissiger, ll. 3567-3569. The Stanzaic Morte is the first text that names the abbey where Guinevere took her vows, a tradition continued by Thomas Malory. As a location, Amesbury has important literary and historical resonances, namely as the site of the Saxon Treachery of the Long Knives as recorded in the Galfridian chronicles and the subsequent memorial of Stonehenge. An abbey was founded there by the Anglo-Saxon queen Ælfthryth in 979, ostensibly as penance for her part in the death of her stepson, Edward the Martyr. The abbey was converted to a Fontevraud Priory by Henry II in 1177 and hosted Eleanor of Provence, Queen consort of Henry III, after the Second Barons’ War until her death in 1291. Malory promotes Guinevere to the position of Abbess, and historical record shows that the prioresses of Amesbury throughout the fourteenth century often had close familial associations with the crown, perhaps inspiring the Stanzaic-Poet’s choice for the location of Guinevere’s rehabilitation. 174 That throw thys ylke man and me, / For we togedyr han loved us dere, / All thys sorowfull werre hathe be. / My lord is slayne, that had no pere, / And many a doughty knyght and free.”509 The queen accepts and even claims responsibility for both the war and the deaths of Arthur and his knights. She continues: “Whan I hym see, the sothe to say, / All my herte bygan to colde / That evyr I shuld abyde thys day, / To se so many barons bolde / Shuld for us be slayne away.”510

Although the English poem excludes the scene from the beginning of the Mort Artu in which

Gauvain must account for the slaying of eighteen of his fellow knights, the spirit of that scene is relocated here to Gaynour’s lament over her involvement in the final destruction of the Arthurian space of appearance, the palpable chill she experiences on sight of Launcelot. Like Gauvain in the earlier text, Gaynour attributes the event to her sin, telling Launcelot that she has given up her station and her claim to worldly power in order to seek God’s mercy and “to have a syght of hys face, / At domysday on hys ryght syde.”511 As with Arthur’s dream 500 lines earlier, the

English poet evokes God’s final judgment of the soul to characterize the queen here in Arthurian

Britain’s end times. By appealing to a much more popular and accessible image of religious practice than the convoluted mysticism of the Grail, the poet locates the source of Gaynour’s salvation outside any configuration of courtly society. Only by rejecting outright all the things of her former life is she finally able to attain, or at least sincerely hope for, forgiveness.

While Gaynour has thus withdrawn from the world, she encourages Launcelot to find renewed purpose: “For my love now I the pray, / My company thow aye forsake, / And to thy kyngdome thow take thy way, / And kepe thy reme from werre and wrake, / And take a wyffe with her to play, / And love wele than thy worldys make.”512 She begs him never to return to her, to seek another lover and to make her his wife, divinely sanctioning their love licit through the

509 Ibid., ll. 3638-3643. 510 Ibid., ll. 3646-3650. 511 Ibid., ll. 3660-3661. 512 Ibid., ll. 3663-3668. 175 sacrament of marriage. Andrew Lynch notes that “world is one of the poem’s key repeated terms, with multiple related usages that lie behind the emotional resolution the poem offers at its end. It features prominently in assessments of worthiness” in addition to the senses of “supreme material reward” and “the transitoriness of life on earth.”513 Gaynour uses the term in this scene specifically to evoke the space of appearance, the secular public in which Launcelot must seek his “worldys make” and establish his own chivalric kingdom in their holy union. Although

Gaynour has symbolically died to the world through joining a cloistered order, she expects

Launcelot, as the pinnacle of Arthurian society, to continue in that function, reviving the

Arthurian order and its guiding principle of fin’amor—but importantly modified through the practice of marriage. Tolhurst and Whetter argue that “the pathos of the scene is so intense because all here is said and done for love: Gaynour is, in effect, begging Launcelot to prove his love for her by leaving her to make amends to God. Launcelot responds in kind to this emotionally fraught request, first with a strong objection to it then with an extraordinary pledge through which he will prove his devotion to her.”514 Launcelot declares in response that he too will seek penance in religious vocation, praying for Gaynour’s soul specifically as long as he lives, but before he leaves to do so, he asks her one more time for a kiss. In the Palatinus manuscript, this kiss is key to the scene as it represents the reason for Lancelot’s penance—the last, salvific hurrah for fin’amor which seems to undo the narrative of futility and social collapse found in every other manuscript of the French text. In the Stanzaic Morte, however, Gaynour refuses, saying, “That wyll I not. / Launcelot, thynke on that no more; / To absteyne us we muste have thought / For suche we have delyted in ore.”515 She models a kind of contemptus mundi, forcibly turning Launcelot’s attention away from their own feelings and the affective practices of

513 Andrew Lynch, “Making Joy/Seeing Sorrow: Emotional and Affective Resources in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” Arthuriana, vol. 28, no. 3, 2018, p. 46. 514 Fiona Tolhurst and K. S. Whetter, “Standing Up for the Stanzaic-poet: Artistry, Characterization, and Narration in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Malory’s Morte Darthur,” Arthuriana, vol. 28, no. 3, 2018, p. 92. 515 Hissiger, ll. 3714-3717 176 courtly life that brought them into one another’s orbit. She tells him to contemplate the humility of Christ instead and concludes, “Thynke on thys world how there is noght / But warre and stryffe and batayle sore.”516 The Arthurian world, the space of appearance of which Launcelot and Gaynour once stood, bodily, as exempla, is here unmasked for what it is: nothing but war and strife and hard battle, certainly unable to lead one toward salvation.

After this, the lovers finally part, each of them fainting and carried off by their companions. But Launcelot cries out to the same God he has just sworn to serve, despairing of his life, asking, “Allas, forbare, why was I borne?”517 Having lost his love, and thereby his reason for living, he disappears into the woods, stripping off his “ryche atyre” and loudly weeping “as he were wode.”518 He experiences the Arthurian public’s last bout of lovers’ madness, like Yvain and Tristan before him, what Pearsall describes as “a kind of mental suicide, a revulsion against the pain inflicted on the inner self so violent that mental life must be suspended, blocked off, until some form of redemption becomes available.”519 This trope in

Arthurian romance serves to sever the individual from the collectivity of society, but usually only temporarily. Yvain, as shown in Chapter Two, gradually regains his place in society through the affect of courtly love, improving himself over time for the express purpose of reconciliation with Laudine, but Launcelot in the Stanzaic Morte, without the promise of

Gaynour’s love, stands to lose himself permanently. As Weinberg argues, “the very anguish of their parting, expressed so movingly and realistically, recalls to mind the depth and sincerity of their love and its steadfastness. Codes of conduct which can bring out the best in personal behavior interact with social and political contexts which doom these individuals and their world

516 Ibid., ll. 3720-3721. 517 Ibid., l. 3741. 518 Ibid., ll. 3745, 3747. 519 Derek Pearsall, “Courtesy and Chivalry in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Order of Shame and the Invention of Embarrassment,” A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, Brewer, 1997. p. 361. 177 to destruction.”520 It was their love, expressed in the terms available to them in the Arthurian space of appearance, that—according to Gaynour, at least—destroyed their world; going back to the beginning of the poem, it was, in fact, Gaynour’s idea for a tournament, a final celebration of the chivalry topos by which noble men and women might publicly perform their societally defined roles, that set the events of the cataclysm in motion. But now, without that affective structure to give his life purpose, Launcelot does not know how to behave. As in the narrative of the standard Mort Artu, however, he is recalled to his senses by the appearance of a chapel.

Inside he finds the Archbishop of Canterbury and Sir Bedivere praying over Arthur’s tomb and immediately takes the habit of a monk upon recognition of the space, dying to the world and shortly thereafter taking holy orders as a priest.

Launcelot serves the chapel as its mass priest for seven years, in which time he is joined by other surviving members of the Round Table company, including Bors. He leads them “in penance and in dyverse prayers,” and eventually “so lyttel they wexe of lyn and lerys / Theym to know, it was stronge.”521 Although they each lose their trained physique, the bodily signifier of their chivalric identities, and turn from the practice of arms toward the ringing of bells and the reading of books, the scene is perhaps too familiar. Here we find once again Launcelot leading the former Knights of the Round Table in the direct presence of King Arthur, or at least his corpse. Launcelot and the other knights, their habitūs having been cultivated in the Arthurian space of appearance, are seemingly incapable of understanding social order in terms other than the chivalric. Arthur’s court has not been transcended through Launcelot’s spiritual turn so much as re-created in miniature. He has found a new love in Christ, or perhaps the Virgin, and has rebuilt a version of Arthur’s court not just from its ashes but using Arthur’s literal body as its foundation. As in the French narrative, there is no assurance of Arthur’s return. Instead, the

520 Weinberg, p. 111. 521 Hissiger, ll. 3828, 3832-3833. 178 closing image of the English text is again of his tomb, now containing Gaynour’s bones as well, and the monks who dwell there even in the poet’s present, singing for salvation.

The Old French Mort Artu exists as the final part of a much longer cycle, the convergence of hundreds of plot threads that brings the story of Arthur’s court, perhaps best represented in the person of Lancelot, to a close after the climactic Grail quest. Because of his sexual sin with the queen, Lancelot is deemed unworthy of the Grail, and the court, ipso facto, begins to cannibalize itself. The events of the Mort Artu are all contingent on the love between

Lancelot and Guinevere, but they also represent the natural life cycle of a code of behavior that has outlived its usefulness. The affective practices that formerly cultivated inward goodness and brought glory to Arthur’s court now bring only division and strife. The Arthurian world, in the end, is ruined by the very thing that once made it good. In the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, by contrast, there is no indication that the aristocratic practices so highly praised in the early parts of the Lancelot-Grail have ever produced inward goodness. Rather, like other Middle English adaptations of French Arthurian material, the courtliness of the Mort Artu and the confusing, often contradictory space of appearance it presents are notably modified to present a more generalized moral outlook, although this should not be taken as a fault. The standalone nature of the poem allows the poet a greater freedom with his material. He can excise the concept of the

Grail and the divine chivalry it heralds entirely, focusing instead on a far more practical notion of religion in Arthur’s dream and the text’s final pages, and he often appears to amplify courtly practices like fin’amor in order to specifically highlight their socially destructive affect.

179 AFTERWORD

ARTHURIAN AFFECT: THE “ONCE AND FUTURE” THING

Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succession; it is broken in the middle, at the point where ‘he’ stands; and ‘his’ standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap in time in which ‘his’ constant fighting, ‘his’ making a stand against past and future, keeps in existence.

Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

Conclusion

The study of non-Chaucerian Middle English literature is in the midst of a decades-long revival, and critical winds are changing in such a way that the definition of “translation” as a category of literary composition is being expanded beyond its traditional bounds. This recent development has allowed modern readers to better comprehend the multilingual, cross-cultural contexts in which much medieval literature was originally composed and read, a necessary and important antidote to the nationalist ideological trends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which much of modern medieval studies was unfortunately formed. The founding fathers of our field, as Evelyn Meyer writes,

did not merely establish new academic disciplines and lay the groundwork for our field

by developing standardized versions of vernacular languages, grammars, dictionaries and

editions of medieval literature. They also contributed to the larger national(istic) projects

of creating their cultural heritage(s) and were in direct competition with neighboring

countries for national superiority.522

The result of these projects was a “purifying” of national heritage that indelibly influenced the subsequent editing—and thereby reception—of medieval literature, “leaving us with nineteenth- century renditions of what was believed to be medieval literature, rather than a truly critical

522 Evelyn Meyer, “Manuscript Versus Edition: The Multiple Endings of Yvain/Iven/Ywayne and their Gender Implications,” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik, vol. 68, 2011, p. 98. 180 edition of that medieval literature,”523 a critical edition that might not shy away from something like the fact that the only extant manuscript of the Chanson de Roland, France’s national epic, was produced in England. The Middle Ages were vibrantly multicultural in ways that contemporary scholarship is continually discovering, and our own understanding of how the embryonic nation-states of medieval Europe interacted with and helped to define one another through cultural exchange is enriched year by year.

But the performative nostalgia of imagining Arthurian Britain as a Golden Age of courtly behavior has taken on a troubling subtext in the era of “Make America Great Again.” At its worst, the Arthurian legend can be weaponized against forces of progress or social change, positing a necessary step backward to a bygone era when people were more “refined” or

“civilized,” which is a dangerous concept when those terms are only vaguely defined and the

Arthurian space of appearance is presumed to have been historically real. A chronicle like

Wace’s Roman de Brut, for instance, uses the example of a fallen British empire for the express purpose of glorifying Britain’s new Norman-Angevin rulers—and thereby justifying the ongoing oppression of Britain’s indigenous peoples. Wace’s text is, on its surface at least, an explicitly proto-nationalist text in the way that it articulates and portrays people groups based on their language and country of origin. The Britons in his account, amplifying the political energies of

Geoffrey of Monmouth, deserve their diminished place in society, and there are several examples throughout Plantagenet history of Monarchs pointing to the purported site of Arthur’s tomb at

Glastonbury specifically to quell any hope of British rebellion in the name of his return. Even some of the Middle English Gawain romances, in their idealization of knighthood and broad generalization of aristocratic behavior, may be said to serve a somewhat insidious function in

523 Ibid., p. 99. 181 valorizing a historical overclass and imputing to a real political office the imagined aspirational ethics of literature.

Arthurian romance, especially as it was apparently written and consumed in the context of the French-speaking aristocracy, relies on this Golden Age topos as the very foundation of its narrative construction, and while this practice is not in and of itself harmful, the expected moral good implicitly present in the imaginary space of the past is culturally specific. Words and concepts, especially complex ones having to do with ethics and normative social behavior, are not always easily transmittable across languages, even when those languages share a historical background and geographic space. The Arthurian space of appearance, located always in a semi- legendary past, may contain any number of social ideas so long as they may be alloyed with some notion of chivalry, but as Richard Barber explains, “who or what a knight was depended on the language you spoke: the Latin miles means soldier, the German Ritter and the French chevalier a horseman, the English knight a man who serves a lord. Only in English can we distinguish between chivalry and knighthood.”524 What becomes clear on examination of just one avenue of medieval cultural transmission, however, is that these categories and the ethical and affective practices they might represent were, in fact, somewhat flexible. Middle English authors were, for the most part, able to mediate French-language Arthurian literature by cannily adapting its space of appearance so that it might promote the affective practices appropriate to their

English-speaking audiences. The resulting transvernacular adaptations retain the basic narratives of their sources while consciously and consistently modifying the elements their composers deemed irrelevant in their English context in a process much more complex and artistically impressive than early critics, with perhaps too monolithic a notion of “national literature,” would ever have deigned to allow.

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195 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Education 2019—Ph.D., Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL English: Literature, Media, and Culture—Medieval Literature, History of Text Technologies • Dissertation: “Between Past(s) and Future(s): Translating the Space of Appearance in Middle English Arthurian Literature” • Committee: David F. Johnson (chair), Jamie C. Fumo, Bruce T. Boehrer, A. E. B. Coldiron, Reinier Leushuis

2014—M.A., Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL English: Literature—Medieval Literature • Thesis: “An Ordered Holism: That Hideous Strength and the Medieval Mind” • Committee: David F. Johnson (chair), A. E. B. Coldiron, Bruce T. Boehrer

2012—B.A. magna cum laude, Palm Beach Atlantic University, West Palm Beach, FL English, Philosophy

Teaching and Research Interests Arthurian literature; Chaucer; Margery Kempe; Christine de Pizan; Thomas Malory; C. S. Lewis; Beowulf; translation, adaptation, and intertextuality; mythography; Middle English language and literature; Old English language and literature; subjectivity; affect; existentialism; trans- and proto-nationalism; book and media history; utopian literature; speculative fiction

Classes Taught—as Instructor of Record Good and Right and Real: Introduction to the Short Story (LIT 3024), Summer 2019 King Arthur: Origins and Adaptations (ENL 3210), Spring 2019 The Idea of England: Medieval Literature in Translation (ENL 3210), Fall 2018 “Nor the gilded monuments”: The History of Text Technologies (ENG 3803), Summer 2018 Translators Without Borders: Medieval Literature in Translation (ENL 3210), Spring 2018 Time Capsules: The History of Text Technologies (ENG 3803), Spring 2018 The ‘Other’ Mother: Women in Literature (ENG 3383), Fall 2017 The Dream of Nebuchadnezzar: Medieval Literature in Translation (ENL 3210), Fall 2017 The Art of the Personal Essay: Freshman Rhetoric and Composition (ENC 1101), Summer 2017 Survival is Insufficient: The History of Text Technologies (ENG 3803), Spring 2017 The Translation of Empire: Medieval Literature in Translation (ENL 3210), Fall 2016 How to Stop Time: The History of Text Technologies (ENG 3803), Fall 2016 Freshman Rhetoric and Composition (ENC 1101), Summer 2016 It’s All About Death, Honestly: Introduction to the Short Story (LIT 2020), Spring 2016 The Existential Narrative in Speculative Fiction: Introduction to Fiction (LIT 2010), Fall 2015 “Cheerful Nihilism”: Introduction to the Short Story (LIT 2020), Fall 2015 Freshman Rhetoric and Composition (ENC 1101), Summer 2015 Tropes, Themes, and Memes: Introduction to the Short Story (LIT 2020), Spring 2015 Writing About Time Travel: Special Topics in Composition (ENC 1145), Fall 2014 Freshman Rhetoric and Composition (ENC 1101), Summer 2014 Writing About Doctor Who: Special Topics in Composition (ENC 1145), Spring 2014 Freshman Rhetoric and Composition (ENC 1101), Fall 2013 Defense Against the Dark Arts: Freshman Writing and Rhetoric (ENC 1102), Spring 2013 196

Publications verse translation of Beowulf, ll. 1156 – 1170, in Beowulf by All, edited by Elaine Treharne and Jean Abbott, Stanford Text Technologies, 2018

Conference Presentations “Arthur in the Age of Brexit: Joe Cornish’s The Kid Who Would Be King,” 7th Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, St. Louis, MO, 19 June 2019 “The Role of the Lion in the Middle English Ywain and Gawain,” 54th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, 10 May 2019 “One or Several Gawains: Identity and Intertext,” New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Sarasota, FL, 8 March 2018 “The Death of Guinevere: Arthur’s Court and the Politics of Enclosure,” Southeastern Medieval Association, Charleston, SC, 18 November 2017 “Dissonance Theory: The Score of HBO’s Westworld,” South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Atlanta, GA, 3 November 2017 “Despair and False Hope in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, 11 May 2017 “The Figure of Hector in BL Harley 4431,” Texts and Contexts, Columbus, OH, 21 October 2016 “I’m Not There: Medieval Autofiction and the Art of Personal Revision,” 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, 14 May 2016 “Margery Kempe and the Ethics of Ambiguity,” Southeastern Medieval Association, Little Rock, AR, 22 October 2015 “‘The brutal surgery from without’: Boethius, Freud, and The Pilgrim’s Regress,” 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, 16 May 2015 “Love Among the Ruins: A Post-Debate Rose Manuscript,” Southeastern Medieval Association, Atlanta, GA, 16 October 2014 “The Discarded Mage: Lewis’s Merlin and the Medieval Mind,” 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, 9 May 2014 “The True West: Lewis and Tolkien’s Mythopoeic Avalon,” Christianity and Literature Southeast Conference, West Palm Beach, FL, 10 April 2014

Conference Sessions Organized and/or Chaired More “Lesser” Arthuriana, 54th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, 12 May 2019 Authoring the Self: Autobiography and Auctoritas, 52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, 11 May 2017

Membership International Arthurian Society, North American Branch Medieval Academy of America New Chaucer Society Southeastern Medieval Association Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship

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