Shaping the World: The Geographies of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108 By Andrea Allison Lankin A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Jennifer Miller, Chair Professor Maura Nolan Professor Joseph Duggan Fall 2011 © 2011 – Andrea Allison Lankin All rights reserved Abstract Shaping the World: The Geographies of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108 by Andrea Lankin Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Jennifer Miller, Chair Shaping the World: The Geographies of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108 takes a manuscript from late thirteenth-century and early fourteenth-century England as an entrance point for explorations of politics and cultural history. I read multiple scribes’ contributions to Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108 (Laud 108) as a dialogue among writers and readers. This previously unrecognized conversation, in Laud 108’s South English Legendary collection of saints’ lives and in the romances Havelok the Dane and King Horn, reveals thirteenth- and fourteenth-century conceptions of the geographical shape of the world. It also betrays the scribes’ consistent engagement with the process of creating Englishness. The Laud 108 texts define English identity against and in reference to imagined Jews and Muslims. They also contrast English people with the exotic, wondrous beings who occupy both the far and mythical east and the near, but still exotic, western lands of Scotland and Ireland. Laud 108 appears in the aftermath of the Third Crusade, the 1237 Crusade of Richard of Cornwall and in the period surrounding the 1290 expulsion of the Jews from England. Memories of the civil wars of the 1130s and 1250s still trouble English stability, and the conflict between church and state that led to Thomas Becket’s 1170 death and subsequent canonization has not been forgotten. Laud 108 engages, sometimes openly, often obliquely, with twelfth- and thirteenth-century English unrest. Its saints’ lives and romances hide subtle, politically dangerous allusions to English politics in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, including the civil wars of the 1130s and 1250s. Chapter 1, Shaping the World: Laud 108 as a Map, argues that Laud 108 is itself a map, parallel to contemporaneous physical maps such as the Hereford Map, and that we can use geographical and cartographical theory to determine how Laud shapes and imagines the world. In this chapter, I explore the impact of Laud 108’s placement of England in the 1 imagined map of the world. Chapter 2, Thomas Becket’s Saracen Lother, examines the Laud 108 Life of Thomas Becket, the longest, most elaborately decorated section and therefore most important part of the codex. The chapter connects the nameless heathen lands from which Thomas Becket’s legendary mother originates to the deeply and carefully constructed England where Thomas lives and dies. Chapter 3, ‘Time out of Lind’ and the Iews of the South English Legendary, looks at the Laud South English Legendary (SEL)’s investment in English historical memory and asks whether the constructed Jews in the SEL can mirror actual, historical Jews in England until their expulsion in 1290, around the time of the production of the codex. Chapter 4, The Case of the Lissing ‘Vita’: Shadows of Gistory in Havelok the Dane, extends the examination of English historical memory to the traumatic histories of civil war that may underlie Havelok the Dane and Part B of Laud 108. The final chapter, The Wonders of the West: Displacing Marvels in Laud 108, returns to the conception of Laud 108 as map, investigating the imagined peripheries of the world and studying the ways in which the margins of the world connect back to England. I close the project with a coda, The Enemies are (Almost) Here: The Geographies of King Horn, in which I examine the Saracens who invade an England-like space in King Horn. Using these invaders, I argue that the project of Laud 108 as a whole codex includes bringing societal threats near to, but not quite into, English narrative and England itself. 2 Table of Contents Preface and Acknowledgments ii Chapter 1. Shaping the World: Laud 108 as a Map 1 Chapter 2. Thomas Becket’s Saracen Mother 23 Chapter 3. “Time out of Mind” and the Jews of the South English Legendary 50 Chapter 4. The Case of the Missing “Vita”: Shadows of History in Havelok the Dane 72 Chapter 5. The Wonders of the West: Displacing Marvels in Laud 108 100 Coda: The Enemies are (Almost) Here: The Geographies of King Horn 136 Bibliography 141 Appendix: Codicological Description of Laud 108 159 i Preface and Acknowledgments In England, at the end of the thirteenth century, England’s sense of itself and its place in the world was in flux. Two centuries following the Norman Conquest, the multiple literary languages of England were changing in relative status. Latin remained most educated Christian writers’ primary choice for formal, theological, legal or didactic writing. However, Anglo-Norman (French) was the most established and common vernacular language for popular literature. Middle English appeared accompanying Anglo-Norman and sometimes Latin materials, in manuscripts such as the early thirteenth-century London, British Library, Cotton Caligula A.ix, but rarely in isolation.1 The economic and political aftermath of the Third Crusade at the end of the twelfth century, and the rumors circulating from later, more disastrous crusades, helped English Christians categorize themselves in opposition to the eastern Muslims whom the Crusaders fought.2 A series of civil wars, sometimes triggered by the untenable systems of royal and national finance, troubled England’s stability.3 Uneasy relations between the Christians and Jews of England, also often stressed by the same financial troubles that caused and resulted from the civil wars and Crusades, culminated in Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290.4 1 Of course, Latin, Anglo-Norman and Middle English were not the only languages used in thirteenth-century England and the British Isles. In Wales, rich twelfth- through fifteenth-century Welsh- language literatures show close connection to the Anglo-Norman, Old French and Middle English script communities; for instance, a Middle Welsh form of the Chanson de Roland circulates in ten copies. Annalee C. Rejhon, ed., Cân Rolant: The Medieval Welsh Version of the Song of Roland, University of California Publications in Modern Philology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Jews spoke and wrote in Hebrew as well as in Latin and Anglo-Norman. See Malachi Beit-Arié, The Only Dated Medieval Hebrew Manuscript Written in England (1189 CE) and the Problem of Pre-Expulsion Anglo- Hebrew Manuscripts (London: Valmadonna Trust Library, 1985) and Patricia Skinner, ed., Jews in Medieval Britain (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer Press, 2003), 5-6. On the various complications of multilingual post-Conquest Britain, see the articles in D. A. Trotter, ed., Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2000). Some knowledge of Hebrew was available to the producers of Laud 108; see note 57 below for a reference to the Hebrew alphabet in Laud 108’s Childhood of Jesus. 2 On England’s involvement with Crusade history, see Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades: 1095-1588 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). On literary responses to that history, see Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). See also Chapter 4, “The Case of the Missing ‘Vita’.” 3 On the interconnection between English finance and civil war, examine J. R. Maddicott’s discussion of the mid-thirteenth-century Barons’ Wars in Simon de Montfort (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also Chapter 4 below. 4 The best source for the interaction of English finances and English-Jewish relations is Robert C. Stacey, Politics, Policy and Finance under Henry III: 1216-1245 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). See also Robin ii Since books mirror, respond to and recreate the worlds outside the books, one way to discover how thirteenth-century English readers and writers imagined their rapidly- changing world is to choose a book from that period and investigate the interior world it constructs. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Miscellaneous 108 (Laud 108) responds to and recreates the political and literary tensions of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In the dissertation project as a whole, I read the codex Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Miscellaneous 108 (Laud 108) as a means of entrance into late thirteenth-century England’s construction of itself and the world around it. Chapter 1, Shaping the World, builds the dissertation’s theoretical framework. Exploring medieval theories of mapping and of imagining space, I conceptualize the book-as-artifact as a type of map. The chapter includes a physical description of Laud 108 and connects the book’s design to the places listed in the book. The map in Laud 108, I argue, shapes a sacred geography of the known world. It marks out places that saints and heroes have, by their presence and by their actions, rendered holy, and imagines a world made up of these holy places. The map that Laud 108 creates, its world-in-a-book, is not usable for travel, but rather for imaginative journeys and mental pilgrimages. The creation of this map or world-in-a-book is performative; it alters the world by depicting it. Laud 108 participates in the politically- weighted work of creating the world in its readers’ minds, therefore affecting their interpretations of politics, war and intercultural relations in the world outside of the book.