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Home , Apollonius (crater), Beves of Hamtoun (poem), Confessio Amantis, Diocese of Winchester, Ipomadon, Norman Blake (academic)

Secrecy and Fear in Confessional Discourse: Subversive Strategies, Heretical Inquisition, and Shifting Subjectivities in Vernacular Middle English and Anglo-French Poetry

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Christine M. Moreno

Graduate Program in English

The Ohio State University

2012

Dissertation Committee:

Lisa J. Kiser, Adviser

Ethan H. Knapp

Sarah-Grace Heller

Christine M. Moreno

2012

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... iii

Dedication...... vi

Acknowledgments...... vii

Vita ...... viii

Chapter 1 - Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 2 – Gower: Confessio Amantis and the Middle Way...... 52

Chapter 3 – Partonope of Blois: Secrecy, Inversion, and Revision ...... 138

Chapter 4 – Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: Fear and Secrecy in the Interstices ...... 228

Conclusion ...... 322

Bibliography ...... 336

Abstract

This project looks at confessional moments in three texts from the late Fourteenth and early Fifteenth centuries in which the subjectivities of the central figures shift noticeably in relation to challenges to orthodox behaviors and beliefs, both on a secular and a sacral level: John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, the anonymously translated

Partonope of Blois, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. In all these confessional moments, which involve secrecy and fear, the interiority of the confessant and that of the confessor contour the confesssion and reveal potentially subversive and political criticisms. Late medieval English poets use the very discourses of the institutions under scrutiny in order to challenge institutional corruption as well as cultural, social, and political corruption. By bringing an insular mechanism to challenge itself, such as confessional discourse to challenge confessional efficacy, poets enable a dual dialectic in order to illuminate the inefficacy of ideologies, social and cultural codes and structures, and institutional hierarchies; once brought under scrutiny, poets can position various subjectivities through mobile figurations in order to posit reformation on an individual level.

Secrecy and fear are the primary investigatory foci of this project. My first point of entry in exploring poetic calls for personal, cultural, political, and institutional reformation is through the institial spaces that poets open within the confessional iii moments in the texts. In these institices, secrecy shapes the nature of the dialectic exchange primarily through the affective response of fear. Secrecy itself is premised on a liminal distinction between self and others, and its etymology reveals, it insists on things being held apart intentionally and separate from the knowledge of others. Within this definition, will and desire work in tandem, although they are not aligned under the same impulse. This cooperation seems too simplistic when considering confessional acts, either orthodox or heterodox, in medieval secular and vernacular literary texts, especially when confronted with non-normative figurations, such as unknown identities, marginalized or ritualistic behaviors, and dissembling deponents. Questioning when desire and will come into conflict around the entire action of secrecy proves more difficult. As subjects come into dialectic exchanges with potential adversaries, lovers, or authorities, the impulse for self-protection begins to dominate the discourse. Fear shapes the discourse and compels strategic maneuvers of secrecy into the subjects’ reactions and responses, and consequently, influences and determines the subjectivities at hand.

On a broader level, the texts examined in this project consider the way language, translation, and vernacularity also contribute to reformational calls. Division, inversion, and corruption serve as the primary points of disorder from which poets approach their reformational agenda. By blending the political with the ecclesiastical, and the secular with the sacred, these poets open a space for investigation, subversion, and/or remedy that begins with corruptions and deviances and moves toward reformation through good self-governance. The essential questions in this investigation of confessional discourse

iv using the lenses of secrecy and fear are rather secretive themselves, encapsulating the interstices that poets open for reformational challenges: Why this text? Why now?

Dedication

This project is dedicated to my children, Alana and Christopher, without whom there is no beauty, truth, or love in my world. Kindness, humility, bravery, and grace define them. I am honored to have their love, support, and patience through my journey.

Acknowledgments

My thanks go to my dear friend Larry, who sacrificed much in order that I might succeed, and to Rachael and Amanda, who lit the path so I might find the way. My deep gratitude goes to my adviser, Dr. Lisa Kiser, who never failed to advise generously and to support wholly; to Dr. Ethan Knapp who enabled me to believe in the strength of my voice; and to Dr. Sarah-Grace Heller who endured my hybrid French/English and cheered me on anyway. My thanks also to Dr. Christopher Jones whose deep integrity and humble guidance taught me what a true teacher is. Thanks to the English department at

Ohio State for financial support and for wonderful teaching opportunities. Finally, thanks to Kathleen Griffin, Coordinator of Graduate English, who managed to shepherd me through forms, policies, fears, and tears with her brilliant smile and endearing kindness.

vii

Vita

1995...... B.A. English, University of Colorado

2004...... M.A. English, University of Colorado

2005-2011...... Graduate Teaching Associate,

Department of English, The Ohio State University

2011-2012...... Lecturer, Department of English, The

Ohio State University

Fields of Study

Major Field: English

Minor Field: History

viii

Chapter 1 - Introduction

In this search [of the soul] the speaker experiences not only the insider’s

conflict between concealing and revealing but also that of the outsider between

probing and desisting – between the chance for self-knowledge and remaining

a stranger to oneself. - Sissela Bok1

Shifting Subjectivities and Dynamic Self-Definition

Secrecy assumes a kind of polarity or opposition and requires a dynamic tension or interplay. Of a kernel of truth that one opponent knows and might willingly hide, his opponent remains ignorant. The discernment of that hidden truth requires interplay of inquiry, the dialectic towards uncovering and discovery, between two subjects: the inquisitor and the deponent. Interrogation using a confessional model creates an intimate space with these two subjects that teases out a new dynamism of interiority based on will and desire. In earlier Middle English poetry, subjectivities were fairly static; a character was defined by his generic type, and his words and actions underscored or defined his subjectivity.2 Characters such as Bevis of Hampton and Havelok the Dane filled subject

1 Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (New York: Vintage, 1989) 83-84. 2 Here, I generally mean pre-Ricardian 14th-century poetry, although the argument of when “subjectivity” is an applicable term is anything but static itself. In the subjectivity debate, I align myself with Sarah Kay and Sarah Spence, both scholars primarily working in Old French, who argue that poetic figures as “subjects” (that is, as holding subject positions such as Marxist theorists, particularly Althusser, posit) are prevalent in early 12-century French and Occitan poetry. Spence positions her argument away from the 1 positions as knights influenced by Anglo-Norman nobility, following the chivalric code, who discover their previously (and intentionally) concealed birth identities through heroic quests to restore order and centering on a maturation theme.3 This kind of subject role evolved from the Old French romance figuration of Le Bel Inconnu, a late twelfth- or early thirteenth- century poetic hero, who became modified and reworked in Anglo-

Norman and English romances and transmitted through the late fifteenth-century as “The

Fair Unknown.”4 The figuration of the questing knight seeking answers to his identity shaped a subject position that reappears in a modified form in later Middle English texts, whereby the chivalric code is de-emphasized in favor of the courtly lover figuration. Old

French romance still provides the antecedent textual model for this figuration of the ignorant courtier, most predominantly from the thirteenth-century Le Roman de la Rose.

Generically, Le Roman de la Rose is both a romance and an allegory that would seem to strain against each other and its multiple generic markers differs from more generically

Marxist subject supporting an ideology by defining the subject as emerging from the shift to vernacular texts, which in turn creates a “self that is defined through a complex process of identity and difference:” Sarah Spence, Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17. Sarah Kay acknowledges a self-hood that functions as a subject interacting within an assigned “indeterminate space” in Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 49. Stephen Greenblatt, on the other hand, argues that subjectivity begins to emerge in the Sixteenth Century with the idea of a deliberate “self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity” in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 2. 3 Bevis of Hampton and Havelok the Dane belong to a group of romances called The Matter of Britain whereby the heroes’ maturation and discovered identity serve as analogues to the maturation and identification formation of Britain following the Norman Conquest. Bevis of Hampton is an early fourteenth-century poem; Havelok the Dane is dated circa 1290. For further discussion of these texts, see especially the general and individual introductory material in Four Romances of England: King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston, edited by Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999). 4 For a full discussion of provenance, dating, and authorship of the French romance, Le Bel Inconnu, see Karen Fresco’s introduction and annotations: Renaut de Bagé Le Bel Inconnu (Li Biaus Descouneüs; The Fair Unknown), edited by Karen Fresco, translated by Colleen P. Donagher, music edited by Margaret P. Hasselman (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992). For a discussion of provenance and transmission history as well as the background of the English hero, The Fair Unknown, see Lybeaus Desconus, Early English Text Society, No. 261, edited by M. Mills, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). 2 stable Middle English romances, yet the subject position of the lover as an unlearned courtier carries across these disparate genres.

The emergence of a new vernacular genre based on sacramental confession brought characters into a confined space of dialectic exchange, one of intimacy based on inquiry and revelation and usually limited to a physical stasis.5 Such a limitation on physical movement between the characters requires different narrative constructions in order to keep the confession, the characters, and furthermore, the text itself, from remaining static. Instead, we see the dynamics of exchange and interplay turn inward to a more psychic dynamism shaped by will, desire and affect more than by codified behaviors.6 In this interiority, strategies of secrecy emerge and shape the confession as well as the investigation. Penitent and confessor both deploy maneuvers meant to conceal, reveal, dissemble, divert, and uncover truths that, in turn, reveal essential human qualities, frailties and strengths alike. In turn, the texts function in multiple ways.

Narrowly, these poems are aesthetic representations of the dialectics of confession and of instructions in courtly love; broadly, they offer the poets a medium for ideological critiques of social, political, and ecclesiastical institutions.

5 In a formal sacral confession, the confessor and the penitent would most likely be limited in physical movement given the oral/ auricular emphasis of the speech-act. In less obvious confessional interchanges, the characters move freely and are not confined to a physical stasis. I examine this kind of confessional dynamism in Chapter 4 on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. 6 The codified behaviors to which I refer here are based on the chivalric ideals from the early Arthurian romances (e.g. - the twelfth-century romances of Chrétien de Troyes) and from the rules of courtly love loosely articulated by the Occitan troubadours and by Andreas Capellanus in The Art of Courtly Love. The change I am arguing is from a physical code for specific actions to psychological actions guided or shaped by questioning from confessional and inquisitorial models. See Peter Biller especially in his discussion of confession in the Middle Ages and in his work on Languedocian inquisition, respectively: Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages, edited by Peter Biller and A.J. Minnis (York: York Medieval Press, 1998), 1-33; Inquisitors and Heretics in Thirteenth-Century Languedoc: Edition and Translation of Toulouse Inquisition Depositions, 1273-1282, edited by Peter Biller, Caterina Bruschi, and Shelagh Sneddon (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2011). 3

The fourteenth-century English poets in particular experimented with the confessional mode for courtly poetry and in doing so, created fuller-dimensional figurations that push the limits of static subjectivity, frequently breaking from prescribed roles through the expanded focus on interiority along with emphatic development of characters’ desire and will. Geoffrey Chaucer fully brings his characters into the psychological realm in The Canterbury Tales, in The Book of the Duchess, in The Legend of Good Women, and more especially, in Troilus and Criseyde. Further, though, Chaucer enhances that space of interiority that Sarah Spence posits in which the self acts with agency (i.e. – will and desire) beyond the parameters of the circumscribed subject position.7 Chaucer’s contemporary, John Gower, expands the interior realm of the subject in his Confessio Amantis, which is arguably the most successful English poem of the Fourteenth Century to use the confessional mode. Where in his earlier works, Vox

Clamantis and Mirroir de l’Omme, Gower restricted his generic structures to a complaint poem and a speculum poem, respectively, he remarkably merges several genres into the confessional model of the Confessio Amantis and contains the several forms into a dream-vision frame narrative that reaches back to antecedent models from antiquity.8

7 See Sarah Spence, Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 8 For the frame narrative model, I suggest Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the likeliest text, whereas for the dream-vision, I suggest Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae is a primary candidate. Because the dream-vision motif is the first point of framing, or the exterior narration point of the emboîtement structure, one might argue that Guillaume de Lorris’ section of Le Roman de la Rose from the early Thirteenth Century is a more apt model than Boethius. I think that the Boethian model is more fitting, in this case, because the introduction of the Christian virtues and vices comes in the second level of framing in the Confessio instead of as the first point of entry for the hortus conclusus as in Le Roman de la Rose. Gower’s first point of entry to the hortus conclusus is through the pagan gateway, so to speak, of Venus and Genius, so that the first ideology or discourse the reader encounters in the Confessio is a non-Christian one. 4

In addition to a new interiority, these vernacular confessional poems, or those in which confessional discourse holds a key function, create a model of ambiguity or betweenness that defies easy generic classifications. These texts are not one kind of text or another, but rather fall into multiple genres and often fit poorly into any rigid boundaries. Along with resistance to a precise generic identification, confessional poems move between the secular and the sacred, challenging orthodox beliefs and complicating the subjective functions of the poetic characters, thus creating another level of fused texture. The blurring of boundaries in romances is not new to fourteenth-century English poetry; as early as the mid-Twelfth Century, the Occitan poets, both troubadours and romanciers, consistently mixed the courtly and the ecclesiastical often as satiric and scathing criticism of the French monarchy and the Papacy.9 In the Occitan romance,

Flamenca, for example, the poet coyly constructs an orthodox clerical figure who displays every marker of a Cathar Perfect, the ultimate heretic in twelfth- and thirteenth- century Languedoc.10 At the same time, this confessor complies with and conforms to

9 See variously Paterson, Akehurst and Davis, Nelli, Huchet, Dragonetti, and Gaunt and Kay for comprehensive studies on troubadours, twelfth-century Occitan poetry, and the Occitan regional history represented through literature: Linda M. Paterson, The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan society, c. 1100-c. 1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); F.R.P. Akehurst and Judith M. Davis, editors, A Handbook of the Troubadours (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); René Nelli, L’Érotique des Troubadours (Toulouse: Édouard Privat, 1963); Jean-Charles Huchet, Le Roman Occitan Médiéval (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991); Roger Dragonetti, Le Gai Savoir dans la Rhétorique Courtoise: Flamenca et Joufroi de Poitiers (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982); Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay, editors, The Troubadours: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 10 René Nelli makes a fascinating argument that this central subject is heretical in two ways: Guillem assumes the guise of a cleric, thereby antagonizing the divine office, and he carries his profane desire into the realm of the sacred, thereby conflating the two disparate worlds of secular courtliness and ecclesiastical devotion. Nelli concludes that this figure, William of Nevers, represents a kind of heretical amalgamation as he is neither fully chivalrous nor fully ecclesiastical, and consequently, he functions as a kind of metonymic figuration for the Occitan region itself, an integration of the tenets of courtesy and heretical impulses: “ . . . le poète se le représente – avec plus de recul encore – comme reposant à la fois sur les valeurs chevalereques, sur le naturalisme amoureux et sans doute aussi sur la << liberté >> cathare [. . . the poet imagines it – with still more detachment – as if resting at the same time on chivalric values, on natural 5 the codified behaviors for an orthodox Catholic cleric, although he uses his clerical position to seduce a nobleman’s wife within the sacred space of the church. In this way, this figure is drawn dually as a heterodox/ heretical cleric and as a courtly lover. The deliberate integration of an ecclesiastical motif with a courtly romance motif opens the text to a wider array of poetic constructions enabling the poet to move in an exculpatory way between overt poetic satire and covert and potentially subversive criticisms. This integrated fusion of motifs seeps into English vernacular poetry as texts move across the

European continent into England, particularly through the Thirteenth and Fourteenth

Centuries. Cross-regional transmission of romances, lais, and hagiographies, for example, opened English poetry to less rigid generic and character frameworks enabling secular works a kind of self-authorizing mode in which to tuck or disguise potentially heterodox constructions or politically dangerous criticisms of church and state authorities. Consequently, the influence and infiltration of complex, amalgamated subjectivities and narratives, including the structuring devices of these secular tales, arguably emerge from regional poetry already breaking boundaries of strict auctoritas.11

By the late medieval period in England, we see poets pushing the boundaries between poetry as an artistic medium and poetry as a medium for lay instruction, and for ideological, political, and social criticism. William Langland’s Piers Plowman offers a love and without doubt also on Cathar freedom]:” René Nelli, L’Érotique des Troubadours (Toulouse: Édouard Privat, 1963), 237 . And perhaps more to the point, he argues that William “. . . par ailleurs, du caractère anti-romain – donc hérétique – que sa fiction prêtait à l’amour [. . . in addition, is of an anti- romance character -- therefore heretical – which his fiction has given to love]” (Nelli, 237). [emphasis and translation mine] 11 See A. J. Minnis for a complete discussion of auctoritas, literary authority, and textual transmission. In particular, Minnis’ discussion of the forma tractandi (form of the treatment) and the forma tractatus (form of the treatise) offers an extremely useful insight into the impulses and concerns for careful and proper transmission of texts including such factors as affect, compilation, and intention: A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship (London: Scolar Press, 1984). 6 useful example of generic ambiguity in a text that is clearly both secular and sacral as it offers a kind of pastoral and clerical instruction in the vernacular while maintaining a purposeful poetic integrity. As a leading poet in the English alliterative revival, Langland sacrifices neither form nor meaning in his late fourteenth-century poem. He, too, brings a unique amalgamation to his allegorical figures in which he bases the vicious and virtuous figurations on the dream-vision, allegorical model of Le Roman de la Rose, but then creates a new, more complex and multi-layered characterization of his various figures such as Will, Lady Meed, Kynde, Need, and Conscience. Langland enables an innovative literary subjectivity through the confluence of the poem’s allegorical figures, including the Virtues and Vices, because they function as literary subjects in their instructive and penitential roles and as allegories. Further, Langland imbues all the poetic figures including the Dreamer with an interiority that works on the levels of desire, will and affect.12 Langland integrates the broad spectrum of concerns and fears regarding the push for vernacularity in Ricardian England: ecclesiology, dialectic on heterodoxy and orthodoxy, and heretical challenges. His integration of Latin and the West Midland

Middle English dialect as well as the hyperbolic alliterative form indicates a cultural tolerance for a kind of hybridic poetic language alongside generic complexities. The efficacy and intent of Langland’s integrative approach offers much scholastic

12 Nicolette Zeeman offers a rich, comprehensive treatment of the triangulation of desire, will, and affect in her book Piers Plowman and the Medieval Discourse of Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Her argument, however, does not focus on the potential subjectivity or interiority of Langland’s figures, but instead, focuses on the characters’ exteriority (i.e. - inter-relations, allegorical roles, pastoral functions) by which this triangulation is produced. Peter Haidu, however, argues that allegory requires an interiority and a dialectic exchange in order for the metaphorical and the exegetical meanings to unfold: Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval/ Modern (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). See also Emile Benveniste on the idea that a subject who can self-identify “I” through speech is already subjectified regardless of linguistic or physical relationships: Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). 7 investigation as witnessed by the surge in Langland scholarship.13 Although Langland is not considered a court poet and Piers Plowman bears few, if any, markings of championing the chivalric or courtly codes, his poem shows how the trajectory of amalgamation carries over into England from France and breaks into multiple poetic means by which to challenge and critique social, political, and clerical institutions and their discourses. In the wake of the surge toward reform in late fourteenth-century

England in all arenas, but particularly in terms of ecclesiastical and clerical reform, it is not surprising that poetry served as a strong medium by which to challenge orthodoxy and the status quo.

In the early Fifteenth Century, along with several other vernacular and secular poems, the English translation of Partonope of Blois emerges infused with the conceptual threads of Troynovaunt, self-governance in order to establish social and political order, the role of counsel versus personal choice and action, and translatio studii and translatio imperii amongst other forms of translation, such as the idea of nation building through individual actions versus through conquest alone (i.e. – the idea that translation begins at

13 See, for example, Andrew Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), in which Cole argues that Langland opens a middle ground away from a binary rigidity between heretic and orthodox adherent by “inventing,” so to speak, Lollard discourse. See also Matthew Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), who discusses the relation between parliamentary discourse and Ricardian poets including Langland as a more organic relationship rather than a segregated division of discourse and aesthetics. David Aers offers a new perspective on Langland’s orthodoxy by imposing an Augustinian lens onto Piers Plowman, thereby suggesting that any sign of a heretical flavor – Pelagian, Lollard, Wycliffite – or even a heterodox impulse is an over-determined or incorrect analysis of the poem: David Aers, Salvation and Sin: Augustine, Langland, and Fourteenth-Century Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). 8 the level of the subject rather than at the level of authority).14 I believe there are two primary points to access these changes in subjectivity and reformation across cultural boundaries and sovereign realms/ reigns: fear and secrecy.15 By using fear as a lens with which to read subjective desire and will, we not only gain insight into the affective consequences or milieus of vernacular poetic suggestions for reform, but we also open new avenues along which to discover cultural beliefs about late medieval English institutions, ideologies, and self-hood. Secrecy and strategies deployed by the desire and will for secrecy emerge as the central apparatuses for revealing and exploring fear as an affective operation in these texts.

One of the things I seek to investigate in this project is how poets integrate fear and secrecy in confessional discourse within secular poetry as well as how the transmission of desire, will, and affect opens a venue for political and social critique.

Additionally, how do these components work together in shaping subjectivity to empower the individual self in reformation movements in the secular, vernacular poetry from late thirteenth-century French romance to late fourteenth- and early fifteenth- century Middle English poetry? There are many areas on which to focus in textual transmission, but for the scope of this project, I am most interested in the way literary subjectivity in its gradual evolution requires new modes of poetic form and content, such as through inquisitorial modes of inquiry rather than through traditional penitential models that one would expect in confessional discursive exchanges or through integrating

14 Other early fifteenth-century poems undertaking these broad concepts include John Lydgate’s Troy Book and The Siege of Thebes, Thomas Hoccleve’s My Compleint and The Regiment of Princes, the anonymous poem, Mum the Sothsegger, and several of the Gawain romances. 15 See below for more detailed definitions and the methodologies I propose in relation to fear and secrecy in this project. 9 necromancy as a tool to affirm orthodoxy rather than something to be shunned.

Alongside these poetic changes emerges a change in focus from character actions determined by heroic ideals, such as chivalry and courtly love, to a subjective interiority that prioritizes and seeks to protect the self rather than to uphold an artificial code. The three texts I examine herein bend the discourse of orthodoxy towards a call for reform, whether a formally doctrinal discourse of the Church, the social discourse of courtesy/ courtly love, or the political discourse of counsel and engin.16 The first text, John

Gower’s Confessio Amantis, moves across all three of these discourses (ecclesiastical, social, political) and fully embodies the way confessional discourse, fear, and secrecy come together in the literary subject. The second text I consider is the fifteenth-century translation of a thirteenth-century Old French romance, Partonope of Blois, in which the narrator functions as one of the literary subjects while the text itself swirls around in layers of secrecy, inversions, and heretical tensions between the Christian chivalric hero and his series of encounters with unknown, non-Christian “others.”17 Finally, I look at

16 I use the term engin here to mean “cunning,” “ingenuity,” and “craft.” The word undergoes subtle yet significant changes etymologically from the Classical Latin ingenium (meaning severally “natural disposition,” “genius,” and “clever thought”); across the Occitan region around the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries as genh (meaning “wit” or “conduct”); into the Northern regions of France in the Thirteenth and early Fourteenth Centuries as the Old French engin (where the definitions expand into roughly twenty or so variant meanings, generally grouped into four categories: “native wit, intelligence, cleverness,” “true meaning [of words],” “trick, deceit, cunning, stratagem,” and “craft, skill, art.” The Middle English Dictionary (MED) cites two categories for engin, where the undercurrent of purposeful intent, desire, or will to act malevolently or mischievously is interestingly tempered down from the antecedent Old French definitions: “(a) Innate ability or intelligence, talent; skill, ingenuity, cleverness; also a skill or craft; (b) deceitfulness, trickery; evil intention or design; a trick, a snare:” The Middle English Dictionary, http://quod.lib.umich.edu.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/m/med/ s.v. “Engin” (accessed July 31, 2008). See also Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 950; Emil Levy, Petit Dictionnaire Provençal-Français, Troisième Édition (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1961), 205-206; and A. J. Greimas, Dictionnaire de l’Ancien Français jusqu’au milieu du XIVe siècle (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1968), 219-220. 17 I use the term “others” here along the lines of Geraldine Heng and Sharon Kinoshita rather than through a more politically charged post-modernist theoretical use of the term. Heng argues that in medieval 10

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, in which the characters continually shift between subjectivities as Chaucer combines moments of virtuosity and viciousness, dissimulation and emphatic concealment, and an ever-present gaze of inquisition through the eyes of Pandarus who himself, is a mixed literary subject. Chaucer challenges social and political discourse through a subtle mode of confessional investigation. Although he avoids Christian orthodox discourse, partly because the setting is pagan Troy, Chaucer actually calls doctrinal efficacy into question through the contradictory actions, intentional secrecy, and careful statements of the central figurations.

Fear and Affect

Fear both drives and challenges the efficacy of confession and the veracity of dialectic exchange within confessional discourse.18 Additionally, the foundation of vernacularity presumes an inherent movement to risk in the face of fear in order to prioritize or champion vernacular texts, both ecclesiastical and secular. The ultimate value of what is at stake in concealment and revelation, in insistence upon vernacular discourse, and in substantive dialectic exchange whereby subjectivity forms and reforms

romance, the collective desire of a community shapes a proto-typical nationhood against which non- members of the community test the preservation, will, and cultural sense of the community: Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Kinoshita suggests a more integrative cultural dynamic in which translation of cultures occurs porously through interactivity and cultural intersection: Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Unlike Heng, though, Kinoshita identifies those outside the cultural hegemony as “others.” 18 See Rei Terada on fear and the feelings of emotions: Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion After the ‘Death of the Subject,’ (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001). See Lauren Berlant on the complex and inherent contradictions among desire, will, and hope in terms of affective response: Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2011). See Melissa Gregg on the implications of affect in and on cultural discourse: Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, editors Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010), 1-28. 11 determines the level of fear and the concomitant strategic secrecy deployed by the subject. Usk, for example, repeatedly explores the nuances of secrecy and continually refines or seeks to modify how it pertains to Love. Yet in his own political circumstance as a prisoner to be executed for treason, Usk seemingly deflects his fear of death into a testament to Love through almost obsessive discussion of privitée, secrets, and inherent meanings. Consequently, affect drives Usk’s testimony rather than reason or

“philosophy” as does the Boethian model he mimics. Chaucer sublimates his characters’ fears by giving his narrator figures the power to mold the audience’s affective response to the characters without actually narrating the subjects’ fears. This narrative strategy sets

Chaucer apart from his peers in that he places the onus of conveying fear and affective cues onto his narrator figures while fully investing these emotional states into his characters in a subtle, yet remarkably sophisticated way. Gower bifurcates fear and affect into his binary figurations of Genius and Amans so that neither figure functions independently as a fully embodied subject or characterization without the other due to the affective dynamic Gower creates between the two figures through their confessional dialectic exchange. But, as I argue in Chapter 2, fear is the primary mode by which confessional discourse unfolds in the Confessio Amantis. In Partonope of Blois and in an even more pronounced way in its antecedent French text, fear and affect bounce around in a limbo state through audience imagination of things unseen and the affective response and fear that things fully present, yet invisible or unseen, create. In Troilus and Criseyde,

Pandarus’ neutrality, or seeming ambivalence, allows for a greater affective response by the audience to the lovers’ plight. In turn, fear, inculcated by the lover figurations, creeps

12 off the page into the audience’s own imagination and affective experience with the story and the text. Indeed, Chaucer’s epilogue transfers the characters’ fear neatly onto his audience as he apotheosizes Troilus and commands, “Go litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye.”19 The ensuing responsibility placed on the audience to reform in response to the grievous burden of fear and the affective response to the lessons of poor counsel, political intrigue, and institutional corruption neatly shifts the burden or culpability from

Chaucer, the poet/ author, onto the audience to complete the analogous relationship between the Troy of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the Troynovaunt of Richard II’s enthusiastic imagination.

Secrecy: Etymology, Usage, and “Privitée”

To interrogate strategic secrecy, it is necessary to define secrecy and the ways in which it is particularly overt in Middle English texts and their antecedent French texts.

Secrecy itself is premised on a liminal distinction between self and others, and as the etymology of “secret” indicates, it insists on things intentionally being held apart and separate from the knowledge of others. Within this definition, will and desire work in tandem although they are not aligned under the same impulse or intent. This cooperation seems too simplistic when considering confessional acts, either orthodox or heterodox, in medieval vernacular or literary texts, especially when confronted with non-normative figurations, such as unknown identities, marginalized or ritualistic behaviors, and

19 Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, V.1786. All citations from Chaucer in this project are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition, edited by Larry D. Benson and others (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987). 13 dissembling. More difficult, yet more interesting to me, is questioning when desire and will come into conflict around the entire action of secrecy beyond merely concealing or hiding something. What happens, for instance, when the self desires to fully disclose, as in a confession, but cannot willingly or with full volition face the consequences of a truthful disclosure? Further, how does secrecy determine, shade, or complicate affect?

It is important to distinguish secrecy from privacy; the former seeks to protect the latter. Privacy is a condition driven by desire, whereas secrecy is a volitional act. In her work on secrecy, ethics philosopher Sissela Bok distinguishes between privacy as something that seeks defense against “unwanted access by others” and secrecy as a practice that may guard privacy, but also protects selfhood, the communal, and the sacral.20 Indeed, the etymology of the two words “secret” and “private” show a markedly divergent path beginning, quite interestingly, with Chaucer’s distinction between the two terms in The House of Fame and in Troilus and Criseyde.21 By the end of the Fourteenth

Century, “secrecy” holds a meaning based on nominal and adjectival functions as something that is secret or that can be discovered or revealed, whereas “privitee” is confined to a nominal function meaning something that is a universal secret or something that should not be made known. The distinction between the two terms further emphasizes the division between the political and the sacred as well as the division

20 Bok, Secrets, 13. 21 In The House of Fame, Chaucer makes the distinction that something spoken “either privy or apert” cannot be hidden because it is sounded and set out into realm “betwixen hevene and erthe and see” (Geoffrey Chaucer, The House of Fame, Book II, lines 717 and 715, respectively). In Troilus and Criseyde, particularly in Book III, Chaucer distinguishes secrecy as a space of unspoken intimacy and “privete” as the apparatus surrounding the kernel of secrecy and the lovers’ discretion about their union. The idea that privitée is associated with speech acts and the movement from a concealed space into a public discourse venue amplifies with Thomas Usk in his quasi-confessional poem The Testament to Love (see below for an expanded note on Usk and speech). 14 between desire and will, which evolves from the incipient antiquarian definitions of

“secret” found in Old Latin; the word moves westward across the Occitan region of

Southern France and into Anglo-Norman England, generally bypassing the regions of

Northern France. The word secroi appears only once in the thirteenth-century Anglo-

Norman romance Amadas et Ydoine in which it is used as a nominal antonym for

Amadas’ lust, but its presence in early medieval England romance poetry suggests its importance as a calque and as a significant concept.22 The earliest definitions of

“secrecy” come from Cicero and Livy in the political arena, yet undergo significant changes to the sacral when the word moves into Languedoc.23 The poetic uses of

“secrecy” begin with an adjectival function first, then evolve into a nominal function; the verbal function only emerges in the late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Middle

English romances. In terms of a deliberate action, “secrecy” works to construct subjectivity once it is deployed strategically through the impulses of desire and will.

“Privitée,” with its nominal function works against constructing the subject because it limits the subject’s action towards or against either a dialectical “other” or the subject’s community.24

There are two grammatical functions for the word “secret” according to the

Oxford English Dictionary: adjectival/ nominal and verbal. The verbal use of the word is an obsolete form meaning "to keep secret, hide, conceal" and used primarily in the

22 Middle English Dictionary: S-SL, edited by Robert E. Lewis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986), s.v. “Secret.” Hereafter, cited as MED: S-SL. For further discussion on the provenance of the romance Amadas et Ydoine, see Hugo Andresen, “Bruchstück aus dem altfranzösischen Roman Amadas et Ydoine,” Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 13 (1889): 85-97. 23 See below. 24 Middle English Dictionary: PL-PY, edited by Sherman M. Kuhn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), s.v. “Privitee.” Hereafter, cited as MED: PL-PY. 15

Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, although not earlier.25 The adjectival and nominal use of the word “secret” foundationally seems more relative to my discussion, being neither obsolete nor dating earlier than the Modern English period; however, as this project will demonstrate, the verbal connotations and function of “secret” more aptly align with the strategies of secrecy. Because the sources of the word “secret” come from

Old French and from Classical Latin, and only seep into Middle and Modern English slowly, I believe it is useful to trace the etymological and cultural developments of

“secret” in order to fully grasp its significant innovative deployment by Chaucer, Gower, and the late-fourteenth, early-fifteenth English poets. The relatively incipient, nascent use of “secret” immediately expands the possibility of subversive and critical tensions embodied in these poets’ works. So, veering away from a cultural discussion of secrecy,

I digress here briefly with a linguistic discussion. I'll return to the nominal etymology of

“secret,” beginning instead with the adjectival etymology.

The adjectival form of the word is secré in Old French, also used adjectivally, and secretus, -um in Classical Latin used as a declinable adjective. The Oxford English

Dictionary gives the first adjectival definition of “secret” as, "Kept from knowledge or observation; hidden, concealed," with the added qualification, "Predicatively, kept from public knowledge or from the knowledge of persons specified."26 The first quotation associated with this specific usage of “secret” in English literature is from the 1399

25 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, http://library.ohio-state.edu.proxy.lib.ohio state.edu/search/y?SEARCH=oed, s.v. "Secret,” (accessed July 19, 2008). Hereafter, cited as OED. 26 OED, http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.ohiostate.edu/view/Entry/174537?rskey=D4My9U&result=1#eid, s.v. “secret,” (accessed July 19, 2008). 16 political poem Richard the Redeless (Prologue, line 61: “Lete Зoure conceill corette it

[sc. this treatise] ffor Зit it is secrette”), attributed to William Langland by the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, although Langland scholars contest this attribution and ascribe the authorship and provenance to a Langlandian-style poet from the West

Midlands.27

The interesting point of this attribution of provenance is that the word “secret” is not usually found in West Midland poetry, either in the late-Fourteenth Century or earlier, nor is it used either adjectivally or nominally through the Fifteenth Century in any

Middle English literary texts except those of Southern and East Midland provenance.

The Middle English Dictionary cites Geoffrey Chaucer's 1385 poem Troilus and

Criseyde as the earliest occurrence of “secret” in Middle English specifically using the adjectival word with the primary meaning cited above ("kept from knowledge") from

Book II, line 1664: "Ek oother thing, that toucheth nought to here/ He wol yow telle . . .

That secret is."28 The Middle English Dictionary adds a qualification to the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary by adding the idea of authority and power to the meaning.

Hence, we see the Middle English Dictionary's definition of “secret” (adj.) as "Kept from general knowledge, to be known only by a few, secret; secret places, places unknown to the authorities."29 The political turmoil of London and the East Midland shires, particularly Lincoln and Essex, throughout the Fourteenth Century is alluded to in this slight modification of the definition of a word that begins in antiquity with political

27 OED, s.v. “secret.” 28 MED: S-SL, s.v. “secret.” 29 Ibid. 17 connotations. David Burnley argues that although word lists exist from the mid-

Thirteenth Century in England, readers unfamiliar with particular words or "termes" in

Middle English manuscripts "must normally have attributed meaning to unfamiliar written forms by a process of contextual glossing."30 Further, Burnley argues that unknown words borrowed from French (and less so from Latin), words that Thomas Usk calls "privy termes," are emphatically important in terms of ideological, political, religious, and historical contexts.31 Burnley says, "Termes are lexical items recognized as being in some way restricted in their occurrence," and that this restriction "may be a tendency for the lexical items to occur commonly in certain types of discourse" such as science, religion, and law.32 Bearing in mind Burnley's argument on discursive pertinence as well as the provenanced occurrence of the adjectival use of “secret” in fourteenth-century England, I suggest that the adjectival use of the word comes to

English as an Old French loan word, specifically through Anglo-Norman contact. I will

30 David Burnley, "Lexis and Semantics," in The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. II, 1066-1476, edited by Norman Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 412. See also A. J. Minnis and Rita Copeland, for example, for further detailed discussion about medieval marginal glossing and textual commentaries: A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scolar Press, 1984); and Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 31 See Thomas Usk, The Testament of Love, edited by R. Allen Shoaf (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), Book 3, chapter v, line 625. Usk makes a very interesting and useful distinction between “privitée” (generally, things that should not be known by Man) and “secrecy” (Usk uses the word “secretnesse”) in reference to the intimacy created by the intercourse - physical, emotional, and visual, but specifically, not verbal – of two people/lovers. He writes, “And many suche mo have ben knytte in trouthe, and yet spake they never togyder, for that is a thyng enclosed under secretnesse of pryvité why twey persons entremellen hertes after a sight” [“And many more such {lovers} have been joined in truth, and yet they never spoke together, for that {speech} is a thing enclosed under the secrecy of unknown things why two people’s hearts intermingle after one sight”]: Usk, Testament of Love, 1, v, 420-422. Usk’s exclusion of speech in intimacy, privitée, and secrecy suggests that the act of oral and aural confession resists the parameters of secrecy and discovery of hidden things. It also opens lines of inquiry into the relationship between heterodox confessions, vernacularity, and the efficacy of speech itself, specifically in terms of love, but also in terms of politics due to his political situation. 32 Burnley, “Lexis and Semantics,” 413. 18 return to the Anglo-Norman, Old French, and Classical Latin etymological history of the adjectival form of “secret.” First, though, I would like to pick up the nominal thread of the word “secret” as it differs in meaning significantly from the adjectival meaning, in part because the primary antecedent language for the nominal form is the Classical Latin secreta,-um used as a substantive noun, rather than the Old French secré.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the primary nominal definition of “secret” as "something kept secret."33 The two sub-definitions under this primary listing show the divergent paths the word undergoes from a more direct Classical Latin trajectory on one hand and from a more circuitous path on the other from Old French through an Old

Occitan descent that, in turn, descends from Classical Latin. The first sub-definition pertains to a late Middle English concept of an occult or an arcane knowledge, God's secrets so to speak, which the poets repeatedly caution against uncovering. It states:

"Something unknown or revealed or that is only known by initiation or revelation; a mystery; chiefly pl., the hidden affairs or workings (of God, Nature, Science, etc.)."34

The earliest quotation given under this meaning is from John Gower's Confessio Amantis

(ca. 1390), in which Genius, the priest of Venus who is confessing the would-be lover

Amans through a series of exempla, cautions, "’Was nevere yit so wys a clerk,/ Which mihte knowe al goddes werk,/ Ne the secret which god hath set/ Ayein a man mai noght be let.’”(CA, VI, 1571-1574)35 The underlying impulse of this definition turns upon authority and the separation of authority and authorized knowledge from either the public

33 OED, s.v. "secret." 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. In this section of Book VI, Genius is narrating the tale of Ulysses and Telegonus to Amans as an exemplum of the vice of Sorcery. All citations from Gower in this project are taken from The Complete Works of John Gower, edited by G. C. Macaulay. The English Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901). 19 or from the layman. The Classical Latin source word is the verb secerno -cernere, from which the noun forms from a substantive function into the nominal word secretum -i as we see in Lewis and Short’s Latin Dictionary. Lewis and Short define the verbal form, secerno - cernere, as "to put apart, to sunder. sever, separate" and the nominal form, secretum -i, as "1) retirement, solitude, a solitary place, retreat, 2) a secret, mystery, and

3) in his private papers."36 The Latin meanings fixate around the idea of separation and solitude rather than on things dependent on other things to either uncover, reveal, discover, or maintain the covert state. The Oxford Latin Dictionary paints a fuller picture of the diminished sense of secret as a mystery or as something "unknown" or

"unrevealed" (as per the OED) and an emphatic sense of seclusion and non-public place(s). The first three definitions given for the nominal form of secretum-i return to the incipient idea of privacy or of a private self. Hence, the first given meaning, "A situation in which one is withdrawn from one's companions or from society, seclusion, retirement; in private, apart from the rest; the state of being withdrawn from an activity, aloofness" describes a state of being or a quality rather than an actual thing itself.37 The Classical

Latin source words are not fully nominal, but participle forms only. In emphasizing the active verbal sense of secretum -i, the Latin meanings resist the static nature of a passive

(or passively held) secret. Indeed, both the Oxford Latin Dictionary and the Oxford

English Dictionary cite the Classical Latin verb secerno - cernere as the stem for the nominal and adjectival forms, secretum - i and secretus -a -um, respectively. The verbal

36 Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary: Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary Revised, Enlarged, and in Great Part Rewritten by Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1879), 1652-1653. Hereafter, cited as Lewis and Short. 37 Oxford Latin Dictionary, edited by P. G. W. Glare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 1718. Hereafter, cited as OLD. 20 form of secerno - cernere holds remarkably different meanings from the descendant adjectival and nominal forms. The Oxford Latin Dictionary cites four distinctly different meanings, none of which carry the connotation of covertness: "1) To remove from a mixture, group, separate off; to isolate by an intervening space or barrier; 2) To set aside as unfit, discard, eliminate; 3) To separate in thought, treat as distinct; to dissociate oneself; 4) To separate into parts, divide up."38

Of particular importance and interest are two nominal words synonymous with the participle meaning of secretum: arcanus and occultus. Lewis and Short’s Latin

Dictionary incorporates the word “secret” in the definitions of both arcanus and occultus, and through these synonymous variant meanings, we see the division between the political and the sacral starting to form in the Classical Latin period. Arcanus -a -um is cited as "shut up, closed, silent, that [which] keeps a secret, hidden, sacred" and the source text for this last meaning, “sacred,” is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 10.39

The definition for occultus -a -um is "[participle] hidden, concealed, private, [and as a substantive noun] secrecy, secrets," with the source texts given as Cicero’s Epistulae ad

Atticum, Plautus’ Curculio, and Livy’s Historia.40 This word and its definitions give a political overtone to the synonymous secretum so that there is a spectrum of nuanced meanings developing around the word “secret” both as an abstraction and as the thing itself.

38 OLD, s.v. "secerno – cernere." 39 Lewis and Short, 153. 40 Lewis and Short, 1251-1252. 21

The second sub-definition under the Oxford English Dictionary's citation for the nominal form of “secret” shows the division between the political and the sacred: "In

Liturgical use: A prayer or prayers said by the celebrant in a low voice after the

Offertory and before the Preface."41 This definition reaches its apex in Old French, declining in use to a handful of instances in the early Fourteenth Century and completely disappearing from literary applications following this lone appearance in John Trevisa's

1387 translation of Higden's Polychronicon, "Sche wolde selden come at cherche, and

þan unneþ sche wolde abyde þe secretes of þe messe" [“She would seldom come to church, and then scarcely would she dwell on the secrets of the mass”].42 It is noteworthy that Trevisa writes in a Southern dialect and is translating a chronicle here, not composing poetry. To find a literary or poetic application of “secret” using this particular sub-definition of the nominal form, we need to look back into the thirteenth-century

Anglo-Norman texts that carry the Old French and Old Occitan antecedent sacral meanings.

Before turning to the texts themselves, I’d like to consider some of the Old French and Old Occitan dictionaries and lexicons for their etymological and semantic citations for the French sources of “secret.” Two Provençal dictionaries, Levy's Petit Dictionnaire

Provençal Français and Honnorat's Dictionnaire Provençal-Français, both cite the adjectival form of secré as meaning "secret, intimate, discrete,"43 and further, "that which

41 OED, s.v. "secret." 42 Ibid. Citation from John Trevisa’s Translation of the Polychronicon of Ranulph Higden, Book VI: An Edition Based on British Library MS Cotton Tiberius D.VII, edited by Ronald Waldron (Heidelberg: Winter, 2004). 43 Emil Levy, Petit Dictionnaire Provençal Français (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1961), 337. 22 is hidden, that which is not made known."44 Nominally, the definitions differ with Levy attributing "secret of the Mass" to the nominal form and Honnorat simply ascribing

"secret" to the nominal form. Frédéric Godefroy adds a particularly religious meaning,

"the low Mass," to the adjectival definitions in his Lexique de L'Ancien Français and in his Dictionnaire de L'Ancienne Langue Française et de Tous Ses Dialectes du IXº au XVº

Siècle. In the former work, Godefroy includes a nominal expansion of this religious meaning of secré: "Secrète, oraison que le préte dit tout bas á la messe" [“Secret, prayer that the priest says entirely low in the mass”].45

The literary texts themselves bear witness to the contextual support for the etymological changes in the word “secret” particularly in the Old French, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English romances where strategies of secrecy shape the very stories and characters. For example, the story of Tristan and Yseult, whether Beroul's twelfth- century Old French text or Thomas' early thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman text, depends on secrets and secrecy as its foundation. In the Twelfth Century, Occitan troubadour poets used the word secré in two very specific poetic forms: the trobar clus form

(meaning "to find closed") and the coblas form (meaning "covered"). The formal considerations of the poems reflect and mimic the very word secré, which in turn, serves as a defensive barrier to non-Occitan speakers as well as a political strategy by the troubadour poets who themselves were landed nobility in the Languedoc region. The subversive political and religious heretical tensions within Occitania prompted the French monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church to instigate inquisitorial procedures in which

44 S.-J. Honnorat, Dictionnaire Provençal –Français (Genève: Slatkine, 1971), 1147. Translation mine. 45 Frédéric Godefroy, Lexique de L'Ancien Français (Paris: H. Welter, 1901), 477. Translation mine. 23 the landed aristocracy and the populace were investigated, tortured, and frequently executed for their secret dealings. We see the tracings of the political weaponry both in the poetry and in the inquisitorial manuals that the Church composed with the specific focus to exact the secrétz of heresy and subversion. Four specific manuals written and used by the Dominican inquisitors, the Ordo processus Narbonensis (ca. 1248), the

Doctrina de modo procedendi contra hereticos (composed between 1278 and 1298), the

De inquisitione hereticorum (late thirteenth-century) and Bernard Gui's Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis (ca. 1323)46 begin with initial questioning about

“professional knowledge” or knowledge, of things held secretly from the outside community, that in some way pushes against orthodox faith.47 The implication is that secrets and secrecy are heretical in nature and volition, somehow violating orthodoxy by conflating the sacral with the arcane. Indeed, in the early Thirteenth Century, the troubadour poet, Peire Cardenal, scathingly satirizes the Dominican order and the

Languedocian Inquisition in his sirventes, Ab votz d'angel, lengu'esperta, non blesza.48

The fourth strophe (stanza) of the poem reads:

Religïons fon li premieir' enpresza

de gent que trieu ni bruida non volgues,

mas Jacopi apres manjar n'an quesza,

46 See Ordo processus Narbonensis, edited by Kurt-Victor Selvge, Texte zur Inquisition (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1967). 47 John H. Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 50-51 & 138. 48 A sirventes is a political and/or satirical poem of the troubadours meant to be sung with intensity and great energy. For further discussion and greater definitive insight on the sirventes genre (and other poetic genres of Occitan poetry), see the Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises: Le Moyen Âge, préparé par Robert Bossuat, Louis Pichard, et Guy Raynaud de Lage (Paris: Fayard, 1964). 24

ans desputon del vi, cals meillers es.

Et an de plaitz cort establia,

et es Vaudes qui-ls ne desvia;

e los sicretz d'ome volon saber,

per tal que meills si puoscon far temer. (25-32)

[The beginning of the religious order was founded

by people who did not want either strife or noise,

but Dominicans do not go quietly after a meal,

rather they argue over wine, which one is better.

And they have established a court of complaint,

and anyone who deviates from them is a Waldensian;

and they want to know the secrets of a man

the better to make themselves feared].49

Here, sicretz is the oblique plural form of the Old Occitan word “secret.” Notice the overtly political and strategic connotations that the nominal form has developed in the short distance and span from its Classical Latin source word. The earliest occurrence in

Old Occitan of “secret” is in the eleventh-century poem by the first troubadour, Guilhem

IX, entitled En Alvernhe part Lemozi. This is a particularly bawdy poem in which the speaker uses the word secretz as an idiom for transgressive sexual acts: "e ja par el nostre secretz/ non er saubetz" [and now by him our secret/ will never be known] (17-18).50 The

49 Peire Cardenal, "Ab votz d'angel, lengu'esperata, non blesza," in An Introduction to Old Occitan, William D. Paden (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1998), 268. Translation mine. 50 Guilhem IX, "En Alvernhe part Lemozi," in An Introduction to Old Occitan, William D. Paden (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1998), 74. Translation mine. 25 infusion of physicality and sexuality here is unique, having no similar antecedent meanings in Classical Latin or in Old Occitan. However, in the thirteenth-century Old

French romance, Amadas et Ydoine, the word secroi appears in nominal form and refers to Amadas' anticipated sexual liaison with Ydoine: "En son corage, en son secroi/ Fait ceste devise par soi" [In his heart, in his secret/ this is devised by him].51 Beginning in the Thirteenth Century, then, the influence of the romance literary genre on the meanings of the word “secret” becomes more pronounced and important as the word itself moves into England through Anglo-Norman borrowing and language contact. Norman Blake argues that this generic influence on English indicates "clear assimilation of French language and poetic techniques, even if the number of French words it contains is relatively small" and further suggests that "during the same century [the Thirteenth

Century], French romance begins to make an impact on English, and most of those which are found in Middle English have French sources or parallels."52

The word “secret” undergoes a divided usage in fourteenth-century England, which we see in the court poetry of Chaucer and Thomas Usk. The Middle English words found in both Chaucer and Usk are “secré” and “privitée.” The change emerges from the idea of God's secrets or what Chaucer deems “privitée.” In several of the tales in The Canterbury Tales and in Troilus and Criseyde, the idea of a secret that should not be revealed or attempted to be discovered or uncovered, essentially a thing that should not be made known to Man, emerges as a foundational part of the poems' narrative plots.

51 Amadas et Ydoine, cited by Frédéric Godefroy in Dictionnaire de L'Ancienne Langue Française (Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1969), 348. Emphasis and translation mine. 52 Norman Blake, "Introduction," The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume II, 1066-1476, edited by Norman Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 8. 26

In Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385-1387), the word “secre(e)” is used repeatedly, both adjectivally and nominally, with the meaning "secret, confidential information, discreet."

Pandarus pushes Troilus to reveal the name of his love interest, to which Troilus, in his refusal to name her (Criseyde), says of men who are lovers, "And namelich in his counseil tellynge/ That toucheth love that oughte ben secree; / For of himself it wol ynough out sprynge,/ But if that it the bet governed be."53 In Chaucer's The Miller's Tale, the divinity scholar, Nicholas, tells the lewd carpenter, John, that God’s “privitée” must remain unknown or secret: “Men sholde nat knowe of Goddes pryvetee./ Ye, blessed by alwey a lewed man/ That noght but oonly his bileve kan!” and “Axe not why, for though thou aske me,/ I wol nat tellen Goddes pryvetee.”54 Interestingly, though, the word

“secré” retains its nominative and adjectival functions as something that is secret or that can be discovered or revealed. With Chaucer, conceptual secrecy divides into the ideas of “privitée” and that which is “secré”. Thomas Usk's The Testament of Love gives some insight into the politicization of the word “secret” in the late-Fourteenth Century as he suggests his imprisonment and death-sentence are directly related to any “secré” that he has previously written and revealed. In Book I of The Testament of Love, Usk reflects on his doomed state: "I avaunte not in praysyng of myselfe, therby shulde I lese the precious secré of my conscience."55 The idea of something political and secret is reflected in the word “secré,” while Usk follows Chaucer's use of “privitée” as being something that should not be known, although one desires to know that which is held apart or secret.

53 Troilus and Criseyde, I.743-746. 54 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, “The Miller’s Tale,” 3454-3456 & 3558. 55 Usk, Testament of Love, 1.vi, 643-644. 27

Usk is counseled by Love who cautions him not to seek answers to secrets before committing himself to serve Love, and she will reward him with knowledge: "wherfore into myne householde hastely I wol that thou entre and al the parfyte privyté of my werkyng make it be knowe in thy understondyng as one of my privy famyliers."56

Clearly, the word “secre” has taken on dual meanings in the Fourteenth Century, moving apart from the religious or sacred impulses in the antecedent French source words towards the political (with “secré”) and towards the arcane (with “privitée”). Religious connotations disappear from the lexical uses of “secret” as secular theology replaces orthodox intercession. Moreover, the rise of vernacularity in the Fourteenth Century seems to be as culpable for the division of religious and secular connotations in the word

“secret” as for the division between “secré” and “privitée.”

Recent scholarship on secrecy suggests that the term largely falls in line with the nominal and adjectival usages delineated above. Secrets in terms of place negotiate the idea of voyeurism and transgressive gazing as integral to the medieval conception of

“privitée.” Secrets in terms of sexualized transgressive desire undergo keen examination by Karma Lochrie who argues that medieval confessional discourse was “an open secret” in which secrecy is rather “a discourse of truth” rather than a protective action, as I imagine it to be.57 In a different vein, Karen Sullivan discusses secrecy as it pertains to heretical inquiry in the Languedoc area of southern France, particularly in relation to the

Cathar and the Waldensian heresies, to the Dominican inquisitors (e.g. - Bernard Gui, et

56 Usk, Testament of Love, 2. iii, 293-295. 57 Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 24. 28 al) and to Bernard of Clairvaux.58 While too broad to fully integrate within the scope of this project, Jewish esoteric traditions offer perhaps the most interesting links to secrecy and its function in constructing or revealing the subject. Maimonides’ Guide for the

Perplexed is a foundational work in the philosophy of the esoteric and the transmission of secret knowledge.59 I suggest that Maimonides’ influence on medieval culture regarding confessional discourse, pastoral instruction, and even poetic imagination is perhaps more profound than previously believed and bears further investigation.

Confession and Inquisition: Orthodoxy, Heresy, and Pastoral Manuals

Confession is at the heart of strategies of secrecy in terms of orthodoxy and the subjective roles regulated and prescribed by the medieval Church. In an attempt to regulate confession, infusing it with sacramental weight, the Church constructed a unique power dynamic between confessor and penitent. The sacrament of confession presumes truth and full disclosure; any withholding or willful concealment negates contrition and therefore, precludes absolution. The important element here, in orthodox confession, is

58 See especially, Karen Sullivan, The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Truth and the Heretic: Crisis of Knowledge in Medieval French Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 59 See Moses Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, translated by M. Friedländer (London: Routledge, 1928). Additionally, see James Diamond’s argument that dissemblance (one strategy of secrecy) is a form of self-heuristic exercise by which desire and will compete with words and exempla. I discuss Diamond further in Chapter 2 on Partonope of Blois: James Diamond, Converts, Heretics, and Lepers: Maimonides and the Outsider (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). See also Moshe Halbertal on esotericism (a sacred form of secrecy) in which he argues that the will to preserve the sacral nature of The Torah sets up a conflict between concealment and revelation through which the esoteric becomes a hermeneutic itself and oral transmission becomes the medium of pastoral teaching: Moshe Halbertal, Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and its Philosophical Implications, translated by Jackie Feldman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). From Halbertal’s argument, I would argue the relationship between secrecy, fear, and affect are essentially embodied in the confessional discourse of Christian and of secular medieval texts. Both Diamond’s and Halbertal’s work on Maimonidic thought in medieval society offer important and insightful vision of understanding the conception of self- hood and reform as well as on communal shaping of subjectivity and knowledge. 29 the requisite intercessionary medium, the priest/ confessor, who acts as God’s agent on earth and who willingly desires to assume pastoral care for his subjects’ souls. The penitential subject should willingly cede power to his intercessor in his own desire to save his soul. Both confessor and penitent are charged with absolute truth; dissimulations, concealments, and withholdings fracture the pastoral bond, whether born through affective fear or malice.

Heterodoxy similarly challenges confessional efficacy and modifies the interdependent subjectivity of penitent and confessor to a more nuanced co-dependency.

Catharism, a heretical sect found in pocket communities throughout Western Europe but especially strong in the Languedoc region of France during the twelfth century, demonstrates the challenges posed by the very precepts of sacral confession by reforming the arcane and sacred into the mundane and profane. While I do not intend to analyze specific heresies or veer off into a tangential arena about particular figures or sects, I believe that a brief summation of one of the more prominent and anathematic heretical sects, the Cathars, will allow a fuller understanding of the arguments I set forth in this project regarding heterodoxy, inquisition, secrecy, fear, and subjectivity.

Following the tenets of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the Orthodox Church pushed to invest and educate clerics and priests with knowledge and power towards an active, intercessional pastorality using aural confession as a means towards personal salvation. Among other profound deviations from orthodoxy and ecclesiastical compliance, the Cathars did not participate in individual confession of personal sin between an invested orthodox confessor and a confessant. Rather, they engaged in a

30 communal type of confession, the consolamentum, in which “Perfects” (perfecti) or

“Good Men” served as clergy who publicly underwent a type of ritualistic confession, generally as spokesmen for the community. Similar to orthodox confession, the consolamentum was a purification rite for the soul, however; instead of seeking absolution dependent of satisfaction, the perfecti undertook ritual prayers in a communal setting and received a verbal pardon from the community of perfecti. The emphatic points of this ritual are the verbal petition for the intercession of the Holy Spirit and the verbal bestowal of pardon before the Cathar community. This unorthodox ritual of confession displaced the construction of subjectivity from the individual as a confessing subject to the collective community. Yet, while orthodox confession was not practiced, modes of confessional inquiry and models of pastoral power emerged in the void left by the absence of an individual penitent. Dominican inquisitors sent to depose the Cathar heretics by the Church, assumed the role of confessor to the Cathars, particularly to the perfecti who were subjectified as purified elites within the community. Further, the inquisitors’ use of formal inquisitorial manuals patterned after pastoral confessional manuals created a similar role of subjectivity for the confessor while the Perfect or heretical confessant, specifically not a penitent, remains outside a prescribed, orthodox subjective role. Complicating subjectivity in terms of inquisition versus confession is the confessor’s own state of grace or ability to serve as a suitable pastor. As James B. Given suggests for determining orthodox or heretical confessional practices in twelfth-century

Languedoc, “the efficacy of a sacrament depended on the moral status of the priest who

31 performed it.”60 By representing the orthodox Church as inquisitors rather than confessors, the Dominican clergy deposing the heretical communities deflected moral scrutiny off their pastoral efficacy back onto the transgressive sinners under question.

Their inquisitorial manuals specifically focus on strategies by which to reveal dissimulations and secrets in order to ferret out heretical impulses and egregious sins.

The difference between the inquisitorial manual and a confessional manual lies in the pastoral intent shaping each manual; the former offers strategies intended to catch secretive and strategic transgression in the non-penitent, where the latter offers guidance intended to instruct and lead the penitent out of secrecy into full disclosure. Within the inquisitorial depositional framework, the individual deponent takes on a metonymic role of alterity, standing outside the orthodox role of penitent and embodying the secrets of a heretical community. Traditional mimetic roles of a confessing subject and a pastoral salvific guide are altered under inquisitorial confessional models.61 Secrecy, then, inverts into a strategy with which to uphold ideologies by those who hold dominion within the orthodox institutions. Consequently, within heterodoxy, marginality and alterity infuse subjectivity in the heretical Languedocian confessional subjects instead of the normativity and mimicry premised and required by orthodox confession.

60 James B. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, & Resistance in Languedoc (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997), 11. 61 Michael Taussig suggests that subjectivity fuses in an mimetic exchange whereby each participant in the act of trying to comply and conform to the expected behavior might actually “repress” or perform the behavior in a dissimulative way; Taussig calls this “mimetic excess” where subjects pass beyond the point of “dialectic enlightenment” and move into a more potent realm of “sacred actions.” See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Taussig argues that truths become “manipulated and manipulatable” in this realm. I suggest this, then, is one of the ways in which fear and secrecy deploy in tandem to enable the subject to protect himself from becoming objectified under scrutiny: Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1992), 254-255. 32

Because the Dominican preachers brought their inquisitorial manuals into Anglo-

Norman England, bypassing the Northern regions of France and the typical route for textual transmission of antecedent texts, both secular and sacred, into England, the model for heretical inquiry was readily available as an alternative mode to orthodox or religious interrogation.62 The first questions the inquisitorial manuals pose presumes the subject is holding a secret or is actively engaged in secrecy, and thus, the interrogation begins with ferreting out what the deliberately concealing subject knows. This is a marked difference from the confessional manuals in which the pastor gently suggests sins and offers examples of such sins in efforts to evoke contrition in the presumably ignorant penitential subject. I would suggest that the inquisitorial manuals offer models of interrogation for secular purposes more fittingly than do the confessional manuals. It is the former model of inquiry that seems to fit the affectively charged passage in Gower’s Confessio Amantis cited above more comfortably than do the confessional manual models. As Genius, the specifically non-clerical, unorthodox (perhaps even heterodox) priest of the pagan

62 For fuller discussions on the introduction of inquisitorial manuals into England, see variously G.R. Owst, Thomas N. Tentler, John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer, John Shinners and William J. Dohar, Katherine Kerby-Fulton, John V. Fleming, Marjorie Curry Woods and Rita Copeland, and especially Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis: G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England: A Neglected Chapter in The History of English Letters & of the English People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933) and Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscripts of the Period c. 1350-1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926); Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1977); John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer, eds., Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A Translation of the Principal Libri Poenitentiales and Selections from Related Documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938); John Shinners and William J. Dohar, eds., Pastors and the Care of Souls in Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998); Katherine Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006); John V. Fleming, “The Friars in Medieval English Literature,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, edited by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 345-379; Marjorie Curry Woods and Rita Copeland, “Classroom and Confession,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, edited by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 376-406; Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis, editors, Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages (York: York Medieval Press, 1998). 33 goddess Venus is the inquisitor of a would-be lover who is a heretic, in a sense, to Love, it would seem that a manual for heretical inquisition is a more appropriate manual to use in secular poetry and romances than the sacral confessional manuals prescribed by the

Orthodox medieval Church.

Here, there are specific moments of subjective isolation where the central character undergoes some semblance of confessional inquisition and responds through different figures or acts of strategic secrecy. The heroic figures fit the courtly romantic ideal of knighthood in most cases, or are courtly lovers. Through analysis of the heroes’ responses to confessional inquiry, I question how secrecy works to construct individual, communal, and consequently, subjective selves in secular literary texts. I intend to show how the dynamics among desire, will, and affect challenge and reform ideologies and discourses particularly as they themselves conform, reform, and determine medieval subjectivity.

John Gower’s Confessio Amantis: “Somewhat of lust, somewhat of lore”

Late fourteenth-century England witnessed multiple changes and challenges to social structures, political power, and pastoral care. Essentially, the estate system, already weakened through corruption and the burden of the Hundred Years War, slowly began to unravel and calls for reform increasingly resounded through London. Richard

II’s court and the Church were prime targets for such criticism and reformation, not only through sacral sermons and epistles, but through secular poetry as well. Alongside calls for vernacularity and pastoral reform from Wycliffe and his followers, William Langland

34 and the court poets, Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower, amplified the focus on ecclesiastical and political corruption and underscored the need for change either through works of allegory, satire, or hybrids of poetic genres.63

Against this historical background, we see the poetic begin to merge more fluidly with political and clerical discourses than does earlier medieval English poetry. While

Anglo-Norman poetry revolves around the political and questions of the efficacy and scope of regnal power, the narrative focus is generally on upholding aristocratic identity and lineage.64 Cultural and ecclesiastical issues fell to the outer edges of these poems, if they appeared at all.65 By the late-Fourteenth Century, however, English poets fully engaged in mixing discourses. Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales offers a ready example of a conflation of discourses, partly by the nature of its being an estate satire, but partly as a reflection of the integration of ideologies and discourses emerging in Ricardian court poetry. Critics have argued that the dynamics and boundaries of court poetry and its

63 For the scope of this chapter, my reference to ecclesiastical corruption comes from the three poets’ emphases on clerical abuses, primarily at the local or parochial level rather than on the larger papal level. This type of criticism aiming at local or insular pastoral care aligns with the Wycliffite calls for vernacular theology on a local level. Regarding political corruption, I am referring to the idea of bad counsel in all three poets’ major works as well as the idea of a Troynovaunt, a primarily urban model for political hegemony addressed by Chaucer and by Gower. 64 I understand the Anglo-Norman literary period as falling roughly between the early Twelfth to the early Fourteenth Centuries, and certainly falling before the Ricardian period of court poetry. Susan Crane’s work on Anglo-Norman romance informs my understanding of the dating, of insularity, and of the ideas of identity and lineage. See Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), for an in-depth discussion of Anglo-Norman culture and literature. While M. Dominica Legge identifies the Anglo-Norman literary period as spanning the early Twelfth to the late Fourteenth Centuries, she includes other poetic forms such as the lyric and hagiography as well as drama and liturgical prose in her dating of the period. See M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), for further reference. 65 There is a limited corpus of prose writings in the Anglo-Norman dialect and within this time-frame, although I am limiting my remarks in this case to the poetic writings and specifically the romances. See Ruth J. Dean Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Literature (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society Occasional Series 3, 1999) and M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background, for complete corpora, discussions, and dating of Anglo-Norman texts. 35 subjects and subjectivities serve to uphold, construct, and further the idea of London as a cultural and intellectual sphere, and thus, add to the authority of Ricardian England as a site of equal stature to Continental Europe.66 Consequently, these kinds of static limitations creep into generic classifications that further hold late fourteenth-century poetry in more-or-less rigid nominal spaces.67 More recent critics suggest that the court poets in particular have been constructed as much by generic containment as by traditional understandings (or perhaps, by understandings of tradition) of what court poetry and/ or late medieval English poetry might and should be. Indeed, Lynn Staley offers a more synthetic understanding or way to read the Ricardian poets that allows for a much less polarized and contained framework for their poetry. Rather than dividing a poet from his function in and around the court, Staley argues that a more fundamental way to approach the division inherent in a Robertsonian model is to recognize that “poets have the ability to elide the powers that patronize them.”68 In arguing that court poets

“interrogate linguistic practices”69 of court, and by extension of social, political, cultural, and ecclesiastical practices, Staley opens up the poetic discourses of these poets’ works to

66 In particular, D.W. Robertson, Jr. argues that Chaucer’s and Gower’s poetry are secondary or adjunct to their primary roles as courtiers. In his book, Robertson writes, “Chaucer, the acknowledged master of late medieval English craftsman in words, was a royal servant first, and a poet only by virtue of court patronage,” and later of Gower, “[he] was probably far from being as alert as Strode, or as knowledgeable about the world and its affairs as Clifford or Clanvowe, he could very likely offer Chaucer support for his basic attitudes:” D. W. Robertson, Jr., Chaucer’s London (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1968), 179 & 213, respectively. While identifying Chaucer and Gower as politically savvy and in service of the court, Robertson’s argument creates a false polarity (either courtier or poet) that limits and consigns their poetry to a personal avocation of sorts rather than as substantive critiques that add to, rather than prop up, the intellectual and cultural life of London and England. 67 See John M. Bower, Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007) and The Politics of "Pearl": Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001) for a fuller discussion of the ideas of tradition and the parameters or definitions of court poetry and the three primary court poets, Chaucer, Gower, and Langland. 68 Lynn Staley, Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 21. 69 Staley, Languages of Power, 3. 36 an integrated space in which a poet or his poetry need not fit into one category at the expense of others.70 And further, Marion Turner critiques the idea of a false barrier between court and city poetics.71 While outside the scope of court poetry, Langland, too, complicates the ecclesiastical emphasis of The Vision of Piers Plowman by infusing his theologically-based allegorical figures with political, social, and contemporary cultural markings.72 Katherine Kerby-Fulton’s distinction between fear of political retribution versus fear of clerical retribution is also useful in understanding how amalgamated modes, genres, and discourses function in these three poets’ works.73

In the Confessio Amantis, Gower challenges the ideas of orthodoxy, of prescribed poetic form, and of literary subjectivity by blurring the lines of traditional confessional discourse.74 Further, by integrating language to encompass the vernacular and Latinate

70 Staley sets up a useful lens by which to read the complexities of Chaucer’s and Gower’s critical poems without requiring a poetic resolution to those very areas and problems that the poets call into question. Further, Staley allows the poets a level of expertise and accomplishment without diminishing their poetic techniques or style as she acknowledges, “The textual histories of both the Confessio Amantis and the Legend of Good Women evince their authors’ political understanding of both works as well as the difficulties each had with adapting these poems to a new political situation” (Staley, Lanugages of Power, 25). This kind of critical inclusion opens up a space for my own arguments in this project on amalgamations and strategic discursive maneuvers by Gower, Chaucer, and the anonymous poetic transcriber of the French poem Partenopeu de Blois into Middle English that I discuss in the next chapter. 71 Marion Turner, Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 72 The marriage of Lady Meed to False in Piers Plowman, Passus II, comes to mind here where the court and political realms serve as the foundation for her spiritual trial. See William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman B-Text, 2nd edition, edited by A.V. C. Schmidt (London: Everyman, 1995). 73 Katherine Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). 74 Fiona Somerset would challenge the use of the term “orthodoxy” in relation to a secular work. In her book, she argues that applying ecclesiastical discourse to a vernacular, secular poem is a confusing, if not incorrect, critical approach. Rather, she uses the terms “extra-clergial” to apply to texts that are neither purely clerical nor secular: Fiona Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). While I agree that terms such as “orthodox,” “heterodox,” and “heretical” may seem incompatible or inherently exclusive with secularly focused texts, I believe that this kind of conflation is both necessary and appropriate, particularly in terms of the texts under consideration in this dissertation. The poets I analyze herein enable such merging of secular and sacred in their construction of amalgamated subjectivities, genres, and affectations. 37 and the secular and sacred, and by constructing conflated or mixed subjectivities for the confessor/ tempter and the penitent/ lover, Gower effectively creates a liminality that carries through the entire poem and requires the reader to apply a different lens by which to read the text. Katherine C. Little argues that in late Medieval texts, a different hermeneutic develops regarding the interrelations between sight/hearing, and viewer/listener in terms of defining the self.75 Little’s argument offers a useful foundation in understanding the affective contract created by the text and the reader because, she writes, “abstract discussions of sin and sinners . . . insist on the individual listener as the center of interpretation.”76 Here, she refers specifically to the confessional manuals meant for pastoral care, although she later applies her argument to the Confessio to demonstrate that Gower creates an interpretive role for the reader to understand how interiority through confession works to enable self-definitions that might veer away from orthodox teachings about the self. The crux of her argument about the literary subjectivity of Amans as a flawed penitent and failed lover is intended to reform traditional notions of the self defined through pastoral intercession, which is in response to the contemporary fears about Wycliffism. My own argument differs from Little’s in that I see Gower’s project not as a reformational model in sympathy with the Wycliffites, but rather as a text that shows how secrecy and fear, affect and will, define the self against and resistant to pastoral care. In turn, I believe Gower reduces the individual to an undefined self at the end of the poem in order to champion a reform of social,

75 Katherine C. Little, Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). 76 Ibid, 21. 38 political, and clerical institutions. In other words, Little posits self-definition as a response to calls for clerical reform towards vernacular authority following Wycliffe. I suggest, however, that Gower pushes for clerical reform to support traditional orthodoxy by showing that secrecy and fear make any attempts at self-definition impotent. In challenging orthodoxy through confessional and pastoral motifs, I believe Gower ultimately endorses the ideologies of Church, Monarchy, and Estate through repeated calls to reform how we see and hear rather than what we see and hear. Such a contradictory position, though, comes through the transmission of French poetics from subversive and heretical impulses and from multiply figured subjectivities.

Sarah Kay argues that in medieval French romance and Occitan troubadour lyric, critics acknowledge contradiction, yet they look through it rather than at it and thereby overlook the important cultural commentaries and critiques lying embedded in multiplicities, amalgamations, and uneasy subjectivities.77 The critical bent to polarize, to insist on purified either/or constructions, neutralizes or positions contradictions within texts as tropic devices, as insignificant, or as simply weak or unskilled writing. As Kay suggests, however, these contradictory moments are the very things we should look at in a text in order to reveal subversive tensions, imbedded criticisms, and challenges to discourse.

77 Sarah Kay, Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 3. 39 uses of secrecy in medieval romance and in select examples of non-romance Ricardian poetry. Secrecy functions severally in these texts, having distinct narrative functions, challenging ideologies, and constructing subjectivity. More intriguingly, secrecy works as a discrete power operation comprised of desire, will, and affect. I am interested specifically in the liminal space between secretive concealing and revealing where the tense interplay between will and desire underpins and constructs subjectivity, identity, and ultimately, affectivity. The individual, functioning first as an isolated self, must negotiate and define himself as a subject within ideological boundaries, must reveal or discover his identity in both his name and in his function within or, at times, against his community, and must conceal or manage hidden knowledge in order to move into dialectical and dialogical engagement with other textual subjects. For example, a heroic figure in romance seeking absolution through confession, such as Amans or Gawain, is first constructed as an individual self, and then is modified into a subject against whom the confessor interacts. The external desire and will of a subject’s community or of an inquisitorial “other” push the individual self into his specifically constructed subjectivity.

However, within this transformative process, a liminal space opens in which the individual risks exposing himself as fully vulnerable to loss of dominion, or in a

Foucaultian sense, he risks his potential subjectivity.

In a confessional mode, this space itself becomes a dynamic interstitial fusion of desire and will. Subjects probe and reveal, attend to pastoral care and seek absolution, and instruct and reform. Ultimately, this space functions as a genesis of sorts in which subjectivity and self-hood are defined and redefined. Gower manipulates his figures of

Genius and Amans precisely, then, as quasi-allegorical figures of genesis and psyche forming and growing through their interchanges within the confession. By the end of

Book VIII, Amans is dismissed and Genius retreats, both having moved out of the interstice of inquiry and development and out of their consigned subject roles as confessor and penitent. In essence, Amans has achieved a more fully realized self-hood.

In order to move from this betweenness, however, Amans, as an individual self, employs various strategies to configure and to protect himself, exercising his own will and desire to either conform to his subjectified role or to negotiate a modified or different subjectivity, while finally becoming an affective and affecting subject.78 Venus separates the multiply subjected figuration of Amans, conflated as a lover and a penitent and functioning allegorically, into his more realistic portrait as the poet, John Gower, aged and defeated in his petition to serve in Venus’ court.

Partonope of Blois: Uncovering and Reforming Identities

The fifteenth-century Middle English Partonope of Blois is founded on secrecy, whereby the chivalric hero must discover his identity and that of his invisible lover in order to move toward complete investiture in the codified orders of chivalry and courtesy.79 The heroic figure, Partonope, undergoes a series of trials as per the romance

78 I use affectivity in a complex sense, here, to encompass an internalized emotional response of the subject and his dialectical “other” along with an external emotional effect on himself, others, and his community. I am interested in how secretive strategies, such as concealing, dissembling, and revealing, inform confessional acts and identity, reform relationships between and among subject positions, and challenge generic presumptions about a subject who is under inquiry. 79 Perhaps it is more correct to say the hero becomes interpellated into the ideologies of chivalry and courtesy since this text most closely yields to a Marxist reading of the three texts I examine in this project. And while hybridity is more particularly associated with Post-colonial literary criticism, I believe that in 41 tradition; however, before each test, the poet creates a space for interior reflection, holding him in an awkward stasis, that allows the audience to see the processes of desire, affect, and will at work. External challenges work in tandem with his interiority to set

Partonope apart from the traditional chivalric hero so that the poet creates a multi- dimensional figuration that resists fixed subjectivity. Partonope must undergo tests outside the bounds of prescribed romance poems that are primarily tests of revelation and concealment; he must discover his own identity and role as a descendent of Troy and specifically resist the desire to discover the identity of his invisible lover, a fairy whose hybridity requires secrecy. Complicating the poem and the shifting literary subjectivities of Partonope and Melior, his lover, is the narrator figure whom the poem’s translator creates as a blended figure of story-teller, social commentator, and Pandarus-like intercessor. This narrator takes on a kind of pastoral function through which he reveals

Partonope’s interior secrets and reveals his own desire to manipulate the French text that he tells us he is recounting. Partonope is held apart from his community by virtue of his quest and held apart from the truth of his identity and that of his love by the intercession of the narrator. The hero must remain separate from the community in order to establish

this case, Marxist critical approaches are equally if not more useful because the emphasis in the text and in my project is on literary subjectivity, discourse and ideological reformation, and challenges to orthodoxy. Towards a Post-colonial reading, however, the use of strategies of secrecy as a subversive maneuver along with the blurring of the self/other paradigm support the possibility of equivocal readings. For instance, Hugh B. Urban’s work on secrecy as a weapon to challenge orthodoxy and to prioritize alterity fleshes out the ideas of subjectivity, hybridity or amalgamation, and reformation argued throughout this project. Of particular value in understanding resistance and subversion as they relate to the literary subject is Urban’s work on tantra: Hugh B. Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). See also, Hugh B. Urban, “The Torment of Secrecy: Ethical and Epistemological Problems in the Study of Esoteric Traditions,” History of Religions 37, no. 3 (1998): 209-248.

42 his subjectivity, yet at the same time, the efforts to conceal his lover’s secret hybridic identity define the individual hero’s desire, affectivity, and will.

Partonope of Blois descends from a twelfth-century French romance treatment of the story of Cupid and Psyche.80 The approximately one thousand lines devoted to his initial meeting and interaction with his lover, Melior, are the primary focus of my argument, although I examine the unusual construction of the narrator figure as well throughout the text. A.C. Spearing argues that Melior and Partonope’s initial love scene is an awkward moment in the text because the poet/ narrator and the audience fill the bedchamber as voyeurs, which creates an almost pornographic diversion to the greater purpose of Partonope’s chivalric functions and the narrative driving that development.81

Because Melior remains invisible to Partonope in this scene, I intend to argue that the specifics of the concealments and gradual revelations within the scene serve strategic functions beyond Spearing’s argument of deflecting the plot transmission. I suggest that

Melior’s hybridity, her fairy/ woman self, is built on the basis of secrecy as well as being an important factor in shaping Partonope’s identity. Both Melior and Partonope’s subjectivity depends on divergent, fully volitive actions: the series of maneuvers by which her internal secret identity is revealed in a climate of specific mandates to conceal their love and sexual union. This latter action models a double-binding of sorts because

Melior remains invisible to Partonope through much of the romance; their physical love

80 All citations from Partonope of Blois in this project are taken from The Middle English Versions of Partonope of Blois, Extra Series 109, edited by A. Trampe Bödtker (London: Early English Text Society, 1912). 81 See more on Spearing’s argument in A. C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

43 and sexual union is already always concealed, yet through formal narration, this love and union is fully divulged to the audience. Consequently, the audience is forced to look at the interplay of power within and through the speech acts, those pseudo-confessional moments whereby identity and subjectivity is negotiated and formed, instead of through the poem’s narration, to understand how hybridity serves as a strategy of secrecy.

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: Communal and Marginal Secrecy

In this chapter, I examine community responses to orthodoxy and the secretive strategies that the individual uses within that community to construct or maintain his subjectivity. I intend to argue that affective impulses drive the deployment of strategic secrecy both at the individual and at the communal level in the figurations of the three primary characters, Troilus, Criseyde, and Pandarus.

One of the most interesting aspects of this poem is that Chaucer enables his characters to move between active engagement within the community and with other characters and passive reflection. The latter condition of self-reflexivity pushes the construction of subjectivity inward so that the characters are developed by their external subject positions as well as through their internal negotiations toward self-definition. The dual portrait of the externalized subject and the internalized figure requires the constant negotiation between will and desire and the ensuing affective subjectivity created from that negotiation opens a path for a more complex dialectical engagement between the characters rather than the one-dimensional, seemingly flattened exchange between inquisitor and confessant in the previous texts under consideration in this project. By

44 allowing the characters, particularly Troilus and Criseyde, to be still and contemplative,

Chaucer holds the individual subject in a solitary dialectic position, what Walter

Benjamin calls the “dialectical image,” which allows the character to continually negotiate his subjectivity through Pandarus’ battles to uncover his secrets.82 Thus, the strategies of secrecy lie in Troilus’ and Criseyde’s silence against the ritualistic impulses of Pandarus in his continual interrogation and not in the specific inquiry and active concealment themselves.

Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde also challenges strategic uses of secrecy and centers on the individual apart from a community. I look at the scenes in which Pandarus questions Troilus and then Criseyde about love. Within these scenes, Chaucer embeds quasi-confessional modes and discourses similar to that involving Genius and Amans in

Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Pandarus positions himself as a confessor, working to extract heart-truths from the would-be lovers.83 However, Chaucer resists imbuing

Pandarus with pastoral power. Pandarus’ desire and will to know Troilus’ and Criseyde’s heart secrets instead become secrets themselves that Chaucer uses strategically to manipulate his own audience into a complicit desire to construct his characters’ subjectivity. In this way, the audience becomes subjectified into the community of the

82 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 83 I differ here from Gretchen Mieszkowski, who identifies Pandarus as a “go-between.” She argues that such figures in medieval literature serve an essential function in medieval literature of bringing couples together for “courtship, marriage, a love affair, or simply for sex:” Gretchen Mieszkowski, Medieval Go- Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1. I understand Pandarus to be a figure whose subject role shifts among several figurations (e.g. - confessor, authority, tempter, voyeur) rather than functioning with the static subjectivity of an intercessor. 45 text and finds itself duplicitous, although passive, participants in the communal strategies of secrecy at work in the text.

Where the previous chapters look at the moments before a secret unfolds, this chapter examining Troilus and Criseyde considers the aftermath of the revelation of secrets. The strategies of secrecy turn in this text to containment and to attempts to restore the exposed truths to their initial covert form. Subjectivity, then, is determined as much by the desire to take back divulged secrets as by the willful attempts to impose identity onto Troilus and Criseyde by Pandarus in the wake of their disclosed secret

Conclusion

Current scholarship on secrecy, subjectivity, and confession gestures towards the roles that desire, will, and affect play in confessional discourse and reform, yet no one scholar synthesizes this confluential paradigm. In her work on the ritual of confession and performing selfhood, Susan Crane argues a clear distinction between confession and inquisition where both are ritualized actions, but they differ in their focus; confession was a sacramental rite reliant on the individual “confessant’s willing submission” to the ritual whereas inquisition was a judicial rite performed for the community for the “health of the church” instead of the salvation of the individual.84 Crane notes that although there are fundamental differences between both rituals of inquiry towards a subject, they both

84 Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identify During the Hundred Years War, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 79. 46

“assume a hidden, interior truth of the self that is painful to reveal.”85 Although Crane’s argument is quite sound and clearly logical, she fails to account for this “hidden” interiority that I believe informs and shapes the subject’s desire and will that in turn, produce and react to the affective response of fear; strategic secrecy works on both parties to these ideological inquiries that bring a vibrancy to vernacular poetry and the subjective figurations therein that determine the efficacy of the investigation, the reliability and the subjectivity of the figures, and enhance the poetic aesthetics and textuality of the poetry. While the ideological intent of truth in confession and purification seems plausible, I find that in the confessional moments in vernacular texts, the opposite of true revelation occurs and secrecy commands the primary pattern over compliant or obedient subjects in the confession. Similarly, Karen Sullivan explicates the internal natures of the individual heretic and the inquisitor, both of which suggest subjectivity shifts in multiple ways depending on the type of confessional discourse at hand.86 Sullivan argues for a complexity of secrecy and inquisitional strategies, but she does not explore the areas of desire, will, and affective fear. She does, however, offer very important scholarship on the interiority of the inquisitors, not simply of the deponents, that brings the subjectivity of both parties to a confession or an inquisition into consideration.87 Chloë Taylor looks at confession from a perspective of interiority in which the confessant undergoes a “process of becoming a self” through the examination of conscience firstly and then through the deposition of the confessor. Taylor

85 Crane, The Performance of the Self, 80. Crane refers her readers to Talal Asad’s work on the individual under religious investigation: Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 83-124. 86 Sullivan, Truth and the Heretic. 87 Sullivan, The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors. 47 distinguishes this mode of actively becoming a subject instead of an Augustinian perspective of discovering the essential being of the subject through confessional discourse and examination.88 Taylor goes on to refine her argument about confessants who perform exomolgeses for visual affirmation of the state of sin instead of hiding and enacting secret strategies to protect the self from the fear of confessional inquiry and the dialectic exchanges to confirm the state of sin, to probe for hidden truths, and to either shrive or to dismiss the penitent. In this sense, my focus on the interior, affective processes of confession takes a much different path from Taylor’s processional, visually performative confessional act. Karma Lochrie offers a thorough examination of secrecy as part of a self-protective mechanism in the face of threatening or disabling investigations. Yet, Lochrie’s primary focus in her work on secrecy insists on an eroticism and sexualization of those moments in which “covert operations” begin.

Further, Lochrie emphasizes “covering” and the covert, which are post-facto responses to inquiry. I differ in my understanding of secrecy as a pre-facto, pro-active strategy in an affective response to fear. For instance, Lochrie argues that an act of confession is charged with eroticism for both participants in the discourse: “The discourse of confession was clearly charged with the erotic for both participants, but chiefly for the priest, who after all, not only controlled the secrets revealed but experienced pleasure in the talk and in the triumph of his will to know over the penitent’s will to conceal.”89

Where Lochrie’s argument can be neatly and effectively teased out in connection with

88 Chloë Taylor, The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault: A Genealogy of the ‘Confessing Animal’ (New York: Routledge, 2009), 16. 89 Lochrie, Covert Operations, 36. 48

Chaucer’s Pandarus figure in his pseudo-pastoral prodding of Troilus and Criseyde, I think eroticism is too unwieldy and over-determined in regard to pastoral desire.

Gower’s Genius does not exhibit any erotic excitations in his shriving Amans even though some of the exempla (i.e. - “Apollonius of Tyre”) might well be argued to be erotically charged, but certainly not for the pastor narrating the tale. Lochrie’s work is useful, though, as a means to examine the sites of secrecy, such as amongst gossips and in convents. I am less focused on location than on the subjective response and affectivity that pushes secrecy into an action within confessional discourse.

Several scholars help my understanding of the various terms and figurations that push my arguments in particular directions over others. Literary theorists working on ideologies and discourse obviously shape my initial framework of confessional discourse; the Frankfurt School of Marxist philosophers, in particular, inform my beginning questions of fear as an inherent affective response that shapes subjectivity.90 Scholars working on medieval French and Occitan poetry open new avenues of thinking about the interrelation of poetic responses to social, cultural, clerical, and political antagonism.91

Post-colonial work on hybrid culture and the emergent poetic and aesthetic responses to amalgamations and fusions of dominant and subaltern voices and visions expose the

90 See, for example, Althusser, Benjamin, and Horkheimer and Adorno: Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by B. Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971); Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 91 Sarah Kay, Sarah Spence, Simon Gaunt, and Sharon Kinoshita all produce excellent medieval French scholarship on a variety of subjects that bear further investigation in their relation and applicability to medieval English texts: Sarah Kay, Courtly Contradictions, and Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Sarah Spence, Texts and the Self; Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay, editors, The Troubadours: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries. 49 unreliability and unsuitability of using absolute rigid binaries to approach shifting subjectivities and heretical, heterodox and/ or unorthodox figures and challenges to authority tucked into interstitial spaces in the poetry I am examining here.92 For example, combining medieval French poetic scholarship with poetic championing of vernacular authority, Michelle Bolduc argues that the purposeful choice of medieval poets to use contrary ideas in medieval poetry underscores the equivalent weight of vernacularity to the auctoritas of Latinity.93 In terms of the relation between political power and challenges to ideologies and institutions, Peter Haidu offers an excellent lens by which to view the need for mobility in subjectivity, rather than static subject positions. Haidu suggests that political power relies on reconstituting subjectivity (referred to as “post-

Athusserian theory), which presents a correlative for my understanding of the political and the individual towards reformation.94 As I discuss further in the following chapters, the confluence of the ecclesiastical and the literary underpin the works of Henry Angsar

Kelly, Walter L. Wakefield, G. R. Owst, and Peter Biller whose investigations invaluably delineate the distinctions between confessional and inquisitorial discourse as well as opening up the argument for heretical inquiry in vernacular texts.95

92 Homi K. Bhabha is the foremost scholar on cultural hybridity: Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Recent medievalist scholars working on hybridity (cultural and textual) are Patricia Clare Ingham, Geraldine Heng, and Sif Rikhardsdottir: Patricia Clare Ingham, “Contrapuntal Histories,” in Postcolonial Moves: Medieval Through Modern, edited by Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003): 47-70; Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic; and Sif Rikhardsdottir, Medieval Translations and Cultural Discourse: The Movement of Texts in England, France, and Scandinavia (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012). 93 See Michelle Bolduc, The Medieval Poetics of Contraries (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2006). 94 See Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle Ages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 95 See Henry Angsar Kelly, Inquisitions and Other Trial Procedures in the Medieval West (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Variorum, 2001). See Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, Heresies of the 50

Ultimately, I intend to demonstrate that the subject is created through an internal process of negotiation, rather than from ritual or from disclosure. I chose my three texts, particularly, because they have specific moments of subjective isolation where the central character undergoes some semblance of confessional inquisition and responds through different figures or acts of strategic secrecy. The heroic figures in these texts are similar for they fit the courtly romantic ideal of knighthood in most cases, or are courtly lovers.

Through analysis of the heroes’ affective responses to confessional inquiry, I want to question how secrecy works to construct individual, communal, political, and consequently, subjective selves in secular literary texts. I intend to show how the dynamics among desire, will, and affect challenge and reform ideologies and discourses particularly as they themselves conform, reform, and determine medieval subjectivity.

High Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). See G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England. See Peter Biller, Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages. 51

Chapter 2 – Gower: Confessio Amantis and the Middle Way

In this chapter, I focus on John Gower and his late fourteenth-century poem,

Confessio Amantis. I examine the models of ecclesiastical and political institutions and their discourses that Gower specifically prioritizes in the Prologue to the Confessio as a way to understand exactly what ideologies and subjectivities Gower brings together, or perhaps, brings under poetic inquiry, and from which he constructs new amalgamated models of subjectivity, revelatory discourse, and self-governance to replace the former ones. I begin by exploring the interstices between the exempla and the dream-vision framing of the poem to consider the ways that Gower uses these interstitial sites to create innovative models that in themselves mimic or perform, so to speak, the “middle way” he champions in the Prologues. I then examine the correlative relationship between inquisitorial and confessional texts that are foundationally influential, are dialectically replicated, or are covertly integrated into the exchanges between Amans and Genius that fall outside the exempla and the structure of Amans’ confession itself. Next, I turn to those parts of the poem, particularly throughout Books VI and VII, where the narrative shifts from a confessional frame into a discursive mirror-for-princes trope that resembles the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secreta Secretorum and Brunetto Latini’s Li Livres dou Trésor.96

96 Both G. C. Macaulay and R. F. Yeager identify these works as source texts for Gower. Of further interest to me in this project, is the infusion of the esoteric and of the notion that privitée is also aligned with secretive strategies as these texts inherently suggest. See G. C. Macaulay’s introductory comments on the Confessio for a further detailed discussion on Gower’s sources: G.C. Macaulay, M.A., The Complete Works of John Gower, The English Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901). See Yeager’s discussion on 52

I argue that these moments in the poem where didacticism focusing on revealing hidden truths displaces the orthodox confessional model destabilize the subjectivity of the two central figures and allow Gower to move his figurations between orthodox and heterodox subject positions. Amans moves from sincere penitent to cunning faitour trying to petition for entry into Venus’ service when he knows full well, and maintains the fact with insistent secrecy, that he is too old to serve Love in the first place.97 More intriguingly, though, Genius’ subjectivity turns subtly from a confessor figure to a complex blend of tempter figure and heretical inquisitor. Finally, through the focus of the new paradigm I suggest the Confessio enables, I consider the way Gower imagines a unified society, encompassing political, ecclesiastical, and social spheres, through the

Confessio specifically. I intend to show that through his careful construction of a poetic middle way, Gower opens up the idea of medieval subjectivity that reflects the reformative nature of English political, social, and ecclesiastical discourse in the late-

Fourteenth Century. I suggest that Gower manages such amalgamation through his adoption of the structures of romance and courtesy conventions, orthodoxy and heretical inquisition, pastoral care, and the internal processes of secrecy that emerge through confessional inquiry. Gower uses interstitial sites of discourse and ideology to build a supportive framework by which England with all its varied citizenry and loci might reach

Gower’s possible motives for using these two source texts for Books VI and VII, but particularly as a “way to give the authority of the past to his opinions” and as a way to transition smoothly from a cataloguing of sins to advice for kings through the metaphoric connection of Nectanabus as instructor to Alexander the Great and Gower to Richard II or to Henry IV: R. F. Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 213. 97 I use the word faitour here to reflect a duality in Amans as well as to incorporate the language Gower uses himself in the text. In Old French, the word generally means one who creates through dissemblance. See below for a further discussion of faitour as a term used in inquisition. 53 a utopian social ideal whereby corruption and viciousness are replaced with a reformed community of social, political, and ecclesiastical harmony.

Merging Discourses and the Poetic Middle

The Confessio Amantis, written in octo-syllabic couplets in the late-Fourteenth

Century (ca. 1390) during Richard II’s reign, uses an English literary dialect common to

London. Gower further infuses Latin verses and marginal commentary into the framing of the poem, creating a bi-lingual poetic that both champions and challenges the contemporary calls to vernacularity extending outside the realm of the court. The poem merges several genres popular to the late medieval English literary period; the poem begins as a dream-vision with a reverdie trope in which a Lover falls asleep and is visited by Venus and her priest, Genius. Amans, the Lover figure, petitions Venus to serve in her court, placing the poem in a courtly love tradition. Venus insists that the Lover be shriven by her priest before she admits him into her service. Gower complicates the poem by creating a complex frame-narrative surrounding the Lover’s confession to

Genius in which Genius offers multiple exempla to illustrate the sins or vices at hand.

Written in octo-syllabic couplets, the poem flows haltingly at times due to the inverted syntax, dialectic exchanges that are not readily apparent, and the frequent intervention of the Latin verses that are often grammatically ambiguous. Gower surrounds the eight books comprising dream-vision with a secondary framing of a Prologue and an Epilogue commenting on the ills of the state, church, and social estates. Further, the beginning of the Prologue bears a dedicatory passage to Richard II, which is notably changed to a

54 dedication to Henry IV in a recension dating from the end of Richard’s reign; depending on the particular manuscript, then, the poem can be either an affirmation, a criticism, or a cautionary mirror-for-princes poem, although still limited to a cultured, courtly audience.

The poem concludes with the rejection of Amans as a potential servant to Venus because he is too old to be a Lover per the codes of courtesy, and the poet reveals Amans to be a figuration of himself, Gower, the poet who will now dedicate himself to writing books for

England’s sake and to prayer, turning from his desire to be a courtly Lover.

Recognizing Gower’s impulse to mix antagonistic models, such as pagan and

Christian figurations, and looking for interstices in the spaces he opens through fear and secrecy proves a useful frame for reading the Confessio. From the basic level of language through the formal frame narrative itself, Gower moves between seemingly opposed set discourses and ideologies. The poem is written in Middle English, for example, the vernacular language of the Ricardian poets. Yet, Gower punctuates his poem with Latin glosses and Latin prefaces to the inquisitorial exchanges between

Amans and Genius. The essence of the poem’s meaning, so to speak, lies then in the interstice of languages and discourses. It is as if Gower intentionally makes the intersection between vernacular discourse and Latinity a primary site of secrecy for the poem’s frame.98 Further, though, Gower deliberately merges relatively static ideologies

98 Katherine Kerby-Fulton offers an interesting perspective on liminality in vernacular texts that focuses on theological concerns in her introductory discussion on intellectual freedom and censorship. She argues that “there were spaces for tolerance – or intolerance of authority” and that those spaces were contested sites in which secular texts vied for “episcopal authority.” She specifically questions what happens when texts that are generically revelatory, such as dream-visions, “entered that contested space.” While Kerby-Fulton does not discuss Gower specifically in this book, I believe her argument for a controversial interstice between tolerance and intolerance extends to the many interstitial spaces Gower opens throughout the Confessio, not only poetically but ideologically as well. Katherine Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion, 8. 55 and discourses, such as courtly love and pastoral confession, in order to emphasize the weaknesses in rigid constructs, beliefs, and subjectivities. For example, in the Prologue,

Gower reiterates over and again that division is the cause of the world’s decay and that the world is divided through lack of love: “thurgh lacke of love/ Where as the lond divided is” (Prol.892-893).99 We would expect Gower to make a logical connection, then, that love will remedy division and that this remedial advice will come soon after identifying that “The man is cause of alle wo,/ Why this world is divided so” (Prol.965-

966). Instead, Gower keeps division in play through the remainder of the Prologue and into Book I by recalling the various oppositions, tensions, and disparities that contribute to divisive discord. He moves from war to discordant nature to a psychomachian debate and concludes with linguistic division.100 Yet, in the middle of these enumerated divisions, Gower constructs a model of Man as a mélange with all creation, and this, in turn, allows for Gower to put the onus on Man as the middle way for his poetic project:

Forthi Gregoire in his Moral

Seith that a man in special

The lasse world is properly,

And that he proeveth redely.

99 Unless otherwise noted, all citations from the Confessio Amantis are from the Macaulay edition: G. C. Macaulay, M. A., The Complete Works of John Gower, The English Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901) and are herein cited by the Book and line number. 100 Interestingly, Gower spends the majority of this end section of the Prologue on natural discord and on the psychomachian debate, giving relatively little space to actual physical wars. He anticipates or perhaps reflects his own writing of the Confessio when he culminates the divisions with his example of the Tower of Babel and linguistic division: “Wherof divided anon ryht/ Was the langage in such entente,/ Ther wist non what other mente,/ So that thei myhten noght procede” (Prol.1022-1025). As we come to see, the figurations of Amans and Genius, and later, of Venus, cannot bridge the divide in language. The Lover Amans is dismissed from potential service having failed to confess successfully and Genius is dismissed before his pastoral duty is completed because he fails to ferret out truths or effectively communicate his teachings. 56

For man of Soule resonable

Is to an Angel resemblable,

And lich to beste he hath fielinge,

And lich to Trees he hath growinge;

The Stones ben and so is he. (Prol.945- 953)

It is noteworthy in these lines that Gower calls Gregory and his Moralia a moral authority for a composite model, although I do not intend to suggest that Gregory is arguing hybridity rather than the traditional interpretations of man as a Gregorian microcosmic figure.101 However, I believe Gower uses church auctorité as a medium for criticizing and emphasizing further the discord ensuing from divisiveness. Just a few lines later in the Prologue, the poet/ narrator figure reminds us, “Division, the gospell seith,/ On hous upon another leith,/ Til that the Regne al overthrowe./ And thus may every man wel knowe,/ Division aboven alle/ Is thing which makth the world to falle” (Prol.969-972), here again, invoking a kind of moral authority for his poetic project. A. J. Minnis offers a useful model by which to approach my idea of a liminal space held apart and unresolved throughout the Prologue as a multifarious space rather than an oppositional space.102

Minnis breaks the prologue into a sapiential and an ethical frame on which the amorous confession and the varied exempla within that frame build to a synthetic poem of love and wisdom, of caritas and of auctoritas, melded into “moral utilitas.” By arguing that

101 In his notes to his edition of the Confessio, Russell A. Peck explains Gower’s citation of Gregory as an example “that man is a microcosm was one of Gower’s favorite ideas:” John Gower Confessio Amantis, edtied by Russell A. Peck, Vol.1 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 299. I do not disagree with Peck, here, but I would argue that this passage of the Prologue in totem suggests that Gower is invoking an ecclesiastical authority to complicate or deter the impulse to construct binarily opposed ideas of division and unity. 102 A. J. Minnis, “John Gower, Sapiens in Ethics and Politics,” Medium Ævum 48 (1980): 207-229. 57 the Prologue is both “extrinsic” and “intrinsic,” with neither holding priority over or diminishing the other, Minnis allows for an amalgamation of wisdom and ethics that can arguably be called a composite model that includes both antique and medieval poetic traditions of rhetoric, commentary, auctorité, exempla, and confession.103 Consequently, unity is held at bay for the remainder of the poem, division is brought to a liminal space of betweenness that resists polarization, and Man becomes the site of inquiry towards remedy.

If Man serves as the “middel weie” in this poem, Gower can move ideologies and discourses out of the focus of the investigations into corruption and decay, focusing instead on affect and the apparatuses surrounding the production of affective fear. He concludes the Prologue with a precise focus on internal processes that merge into an amalgamated state of emotional tensions that culminate in fear: “Bot wher that wisdom waxeth wod,/ And reson torneth into rage,/ So that mesure upon oultrage/ Hath set his world, it is to drede;/ For that bringth in the comun drede,/ Which stant at every mannes

Dore” (Prol.1078-1083). Fear is the exact emotion that Gower needs Amans to embody going into the confession in order to set up the strategies of secrecy that Amans and

Genius variously deploy throughout the entire confession and its aftermath.104 Indeed, the four Latin verses throughout the beginning of Book I carry tones of irresolvable tension, doubt, despair, and fear. For example, Latin verse i notes that Love is a bellicose

103 Minnis states, “The beginning of the Confessio resembles a commentary on a Sapiential Book, which first treats of the ‘extrinsic’ aspects of the book in the context of a discussion of wisdom in general, and then moves on to discuss the book itself under such ‘intrinsic’ headings as intentio auctoris, nomen, materia, and utilitas:” Minnis, “John Gower, Sapiens in Ethics and Politics,” 222. 104 I argue this point about fear going into confession later in this chapter when I discuss strategic secrecy shaping a text. 58 construct, strained by opposition: “Est amor egra salus, vexata quies, pius error,/ Bellica pax, vulnus dulce, suaue malum,” [Love is an empty salvation, a troubled quiet, a devout delusion,/ A war-like peace, a sweet would, a pleasant evil] (I.i.7-8).105 Latin verse ii sheds doubt on efficacious moral instruction by noting that “Deuius ordo ducis temptata pericla sequentem/ Instruit a tergo, ne simul ille cadat” [The deviant path that leads one into subsequent dangers will not fall away at the same time for one who follows at his back] (I.ii.5-6).106 The third Latin verse questions Venus’ holistic qualities and anticipates ineffective pastoral care by her priest, Genius:

Confessus Genio si sit medicina salutis

Experiar morbis, quos tulit ipsa Venus.

Lesa quidem ferro medicantur membra saluti,

Raro tamen medicum vulnus amoris habet. (I.iii.1-4)

[Having confessed to Genius, I will try to discover whether that is the

healing medicine for the diseases that Venus herself has transmitted.

Even limbs wounded by the knife may be brought to health by treatment;

yet rarely does the wound of love have a physician.]107

Completing the quartet framing the affective response of fear to his impending confession leading into Genius’ first exempla, Latin verse iv sets the tone and reveals Amans’ decision for secrecy as he utters (or thinks), “Verba per os timide conscia mentis agam”

105 Translation mine. I return to this verse shortly. 106 Translation mine. 107 Translation Andrew Galloway, John Gower Confessio Amantis, edited by Russell A. Peck with Latin translations by Andrew Galloway, Volume 1 (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 105. 59

[I will fearfully urge words from my mouth feigning my thoughts ] (I.iv.7-8).108 Already within the first three hundred lines of Book I, fear constructs Amans’ subjective position, and as these first four Latin verses suggest, the entire confession will be clouded with doubtful sincerity by the penitent, would-be Lover.

Additionally, Amans’ fear throughout the poem remains unremedied and the reactive impulses created by this primacy of fear enable a triadic relationship between desire, will, and affect that further underscores Gower’s continued integration versus segregation. This triadic relationship also allows the interplay of ideologies and discourses without resolution until the end of the poem in Book VIII when Venus and

Genius leave Amans (who is now called “Gower” at this point in the poem after his letter to Venus when she asks him his name109) and also leads to the clarity, wisdom, and insight this subjective Lover gains when presented with his reflected image in the mirror given to him by Venus. In this end section, Gower begins to pull his blended constructs apart and allow them to prioritize into hierarchies of importance, but not necessarily into binarily opposed ideas carrying the simplistic values of positive and negative. For example, Reason and prayerful, virtuous living overtake serving Love and Fortune as the

“rihte weie” for self-governance not only for the common man (i.e. - Amans/ would-be

Lovers), but for the king as well:

Fro this day forth to take reste,

That y nomore of love make,

108 Translation mine. I discuss this verse in its entirely below in the section on Strategic Secrecy. 109 For clarity’s sake, I will continue to refer to the lover figure as “Amans,” the narrator as “the narrator/poet figure,” and to the poet as “Gower” while discussing the poem in its entirety and past the point at which the self-nominalization occurs in line 2321 of Book VIII. 60

Which many an herte hath overtake,

And ovyrturnyd as the blynde

Fro reson in to lawe of kynde;

Wher as the wisdom goth aweie

And can nought se the ryhte weie

How to governe his oghne estat,

Bot everydai stant in debat

Withinne him self, and can nought leve. (VIII.3142-3151)

Once Venus dismisses Genius and bestows the black beads “for repose” around Amans’ neck, Love and Fortune are pulled from the liminal space in which Gower first sets them with the first Latin verse introducing Book 1 immediately following the Prologue:

Sunt in agone pares amor et fortuna, que cecas

Plebis ad insidias vertit vterque rotas.

Est amor erga salus, vexata quies, pius error,

Bellica pax, vulnus dulce, suaue malum. (I.i.5-8)

[Love and Fortune are equal in the contest, and by which

to ensnare people in ambush, each turns her wheel.

Love is a bitter salvation, a disturbed rest, a holy error,

a warlike peace, a sweet wound, a delightful evil.]110

Notice the tension that Gower creates, however, through the “equal” contestation in which Love and Fortune engage as well as the diverse state he constructs of oppositional

110 Translation mine. 61 forces that compose Love. Subtly infused in these paradoxes is the discourse of sin in a perfect triangulation of desire, will, and affect. Temptation to indulge in the enticing delights of Love pushes against the confessional need for salvation. Because this is the first introduction to the confession following the Prologue, Gower cleverly places these oppositional ideas together, blending them rather than separating them, as he sets the tone of the confessional framework to follow. It is noteworthy as well, that here he conflates

Love and heresy through inferring the former to be a “holy error.” Throughout the course of the poem, Gower continually puts the discourse of orthodoxy into question by pressing heterodox models and mixtures of piety and heresy into the confession. As Christine

Caldwell Ames posits, the dual function of heretical pursuit and pastoral care ultimately leads to a composite function, as “angel and demon,” or “the mandorla created by their

[inquisitor and preacher] overlap [leads to] a curious marriage of apostolate and repressing heresy.”111 Gower encapsulates this composite in the figuration of Genius, and adds further such composites, subjective (as in Genius) and figurative (as in Love and Fortune). In creating a fused state of Love and Fortune at the beginning of the confession, Gower ensures that Amans will have to negotiate both of their snares and turnings if he is to successfully be shriven to serve in Venus’ (and thus, Love’s) court.

As we come to see, though, Amans’ willful dissembling and strategic secrecy born of and enforced by fear makes him impervious to learn effectively from Genius how to negotiate these paths. Yet, the course Genius plans for Amans is toward serving Venus, not toward

111 Christine Caldwell Ames, Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 6-7. 62 a Christian salvation even though the framework of the confession follows a Christian discursive penitential model.

Towards the end of Book I, Gower tucks clues to a Christian salvation into the

Latin verses x and xi, both of which should serve as a warning to Amans that he is seeking direction on the wrong path from the wrong pastor. The premise of the dream- vision and the Lover’s confession insists that Venus and Genius will serve as the end and the means for Amans’ desire – that of serving in Love’s court. Through the Latin verses that punctuate the poem and turn the pages of the catalogue of sin, so to speak, Gower offers a second path – one towards salvation for the soul – that he stresses in the Prologue is the path to unity; in other words, a unified Christian soul rather than a servant of Love is a more fitting subject by whom England’s divisions might become unified. But the poem’s audience and figurations actively dwell in the confession and in the exempla, spending little time or attention on the seemingly parenthetical Latin verses. Latin verse x identifies the nature of the exempla as “songs” of love’s laws, which Genius then mixes with moral didacticism to construct a mixture of profane love and moral (or sacral) virtue:

Et tamen ornatos cantus variosque paratus

Letaque corda suis legibus optat amor. (I.x.9-10)

[And nevertheless decorated songs and varied ornaments

and deadly hearts Love selects for its laws.]112

112 Translation mine. I differ in my translation of the phrase “Letaque corda” from those of Andrew Galloway (CA,I.x, 10) who translates it as “cheerful hearts” and of Siân Echard and Claire Fanger who translate it as “light hearts:” Siân Echard and Clare Fanger, The Latin Verses in the Confessio Amantis: An Annotated Translation (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, Inc., 1991), 9. Leta is adjectival and can 63

Here, there is an undertone of darkness and deception in the quality of the objects that

Love selects for her laws. Because Amans hopes to serve these laws, his confession reveals his penchant for superficiality, so that the “decorated” words are what he hears and speaks. Yet, these are the kinds of things that he should fear as false trappings. Latin verse xi cautions that one should fear such base impulses towards carnal and earthly

“laws”:

Motibus innumeris volutat fortuna per orbem;

Cum magis alta petis, inferiora time. (I.xi.5-6)

[Countless motions of the mind revolve through Fortune’s wheel;

When desiring greater secrets, you should fear the inferior ones.]113

Following this verse, Genius immediately begins to narrate the tale of “Nebuchadnezzar’s

Vainglorious Punishment” as an exemplum to illustrate pride through vainglory. He shifts the emphasis to vanity and pride in this tale from the more discrete emphasis in the

Latin verse of fearing mis-desire for baseness, although one could argue that seeking

be either “light, cheerful” from Lætus, or, as I’ve translated it, “deadly, fatal” from Letibus, -um where the 3rd declension agreement with corda would be leta. I believe that Gower is pointing to the hidden dangers of Love that must be uncovered (i.e. - through confession) in order to move towards a Christian salvation. I pick up the threads of this argument in my discussion of privitée in the exemplum of “Nebuchadnezzar’s Vainglorious Punishment” a few lines following. 113 Translation mine. Here again, I differ from Galloway and from Echard and Fanger in translation choices. Scholars acknowledge the insistent ambiguity in Gower’s Latin verses and marginal commentary in the Confessio. See especially Winthrop Wetherbee, “Classical and Boethian Tradition in the Confessio Amantis,” A Companion to Gower, edited by Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004): 181- 196. Consequently, where Galloway translates “alta petis” as “seeking heights” and Echard and Fanger offer the phrase as “seek the heights,” I believe there is a more esoteric feel to the Latin verses, and as such, my own readings of the verses reflect that flavor of secrecy infusing the heart/ mind/ soul connection of fear of a penitent towards the acts of confession (i.e. - recognition, concealment, volition, desire, fear, and revelation). To that end, I chose to translate “alta” in a transferred or metaphorical meaning given in Cassell’s under the heading for “altus –a -um” used by Tacitus and by Vergil: “Trans: . . .b, of thoughts and feelings, secret, deep-seated ...:” Cassell’s Latin Dictionary: Latin-English, English-Latin, by D. P. Simpson, M. A. (New York: Wiley Publishing, Inc., 1968), s.v. “altus.” 64 greater heights (as “magis alta petis” can also be translated in line 5 of the verse) is akin to vanity and pride.

However, Genius inserts an interesting parenthetical comment a few lines into the tale that suggest he is cautioning Amans against deliberately holding secrets in his heart or that he is advising Amans that God surveils men so that regardless of what they say, as in confession or in exempla, He sees and hears heart secrets anyway. Just before concluding that God took vengeance on Nebuchadnezzar’s “pride of prosperity,” Genius says of God, “’Til that the hihe king of kinges,/ Which seth and knoweth alle thinges,/

Whos yhe mai nothing asterte – / The privetés of mannes herte/ Thei speke and sounen in his Ere/ As thogh thei lowde wyndes were’” (I.2803-2808). With this simple insertion into the confession, Genius ushers in one of the few instances in the poem where Gower creates and maintains an oppositional division that he refuses to break or to blend into a merged ideal. Secrecy and privitée are held apart even though Gower tests their divisive strength through subsequent confessional inquiries and exempla. Although Gower returns again and again to the word “privitée” and its various cognates (e.g. - “prively,”

“privé), he usually keeps it in the realm of interactivity and dialectics. Secrecy is reserved for personal, psychic spaces, most generally those of desire, will, and the affective consequences of strategic deployments of secrecy throughout the poem; fear, though, is the dominant affective consequence and progenitor of secrecy. Notably, the word “secret” is only used twice in the poem, and both times it veers into a blending of

God’s work and Love’s law. The first instance occurs in Latin verse iii of Book III in reference to hatred, the oppositional force preventing knowledge of Love’s laws:

Demonis est odium quasi Scriba, cui dabit Ira

Materiam scripti cordi ad antra sui.

Non laxabit amor odii quem frena restringunt,

Nec secreta sui iuris adire sinit. (III.iii.1-4)

[Hatred is a sort of demon’s clerk to whom wrath will give

the matter written to the heart’s cavern itself.

Love will not relieve him on whom hatred’s reins tighten

Nor will it permit him to come to the laws of its secrets.]114

The second instance of the word “secret” comes in Book VI in the section on Sorcery and

Witchcraft. In the “Tale of Ulysses and Telegonus,” we see a strange blending of

Fortune’s imprint on penetrating God’s secrets. Gower sets up this moment with an allusion to Bernardus Silvestris in The Cosmographia on man’s lack of self-knowledge.

Knowledge, then, becomes the liminal space for the amalgam of Fortune’s agency and

God’s work which keep secrecy impenetrable:

‘Men sein, a man hath knowleching

Save of himself of alle thing;

His oghne chance noman knoweth,

Bot as fortune it on him throweth.

Was nevere yit so wys a clerk,

Which mihte knowe al goddes werk,

Ne the secret which god hath set

114 Translation mine. 66

Ayein a man mai noght be let.’ (VI.1567-1574)

It would seem that Gower is suggesting that Man, himself, is God’s secret. Being so clouded with uncertainty and so subjected to Fortune’s whims, Man may not be admitted to knowledge of secrecy even through the intercession of a clerk who might know all of

God’s work. Even if Genius is the most learned clerk, he can not possibly fully confess

Amans because he cannot penetrate the secret that is Amans essentially. Gower diverts attention from this impasse by emphasizing Genius’ learnedness in Book VII through a tour-de-force of educational history presented as a lesson for kings. Only at the end of

Book VIII does Gower return to the impossibility of Amans’ being effectively shriven by

Genius because of the impenetrability of secrecy regardless of its composite modeling or its diverse segregations. Thus, although Gower allows for heterogeneousness within the concept of secrecy, he maintains a rigid division between secrecy and privitée that holds throughout the poem. And while division might seem to strain against Gower’s premise towards unity that he sets in play in the Prologue, it is necessary to keep fear, through secrecy, as an active agent separate from privacy and hidden knowledge as a means to underscore the lesson to live in unity through “kynde” love, grace, and remembrance found in the Epilogue.

Heterodox Confession and Heretical Pastorality

Confession, whether in secular or sacral discourse, presumes the willful admission of truth through specific dialectical interrogation. The desire to reveal truth only comes after an internal decision by the confessant. Leading up to this decision and prompting

67 this desire to reveal, is a chain of events that sets up the subject positions of the constant -

“confessant”- and the variable - “confessor” or “inquisitor” depending on the information sought in the confession. With medieval pastoral care, the information is the admission of willfully enacted sins. With medieval heretical inquiry, however, the information is the acknowledgement of knowing secrets about suspected heretics, of believing secrets held by heretical sects, or of participating in unorthodox practices, misbeliefs, or willful dissemblance.115 Henry Charles Lea makes a useful distinction between orthodox confession and heretical inquiry from the view of the subject under interrogation. He writes, “[Orthodox] auricular confession had been the spontaneous act of the sinner, anxious for reconciliation with God,” and further, as a notably enlightening distinction, “Aquinas recognized the full import of the Lateran canon [regarding enforced confession] in his argument to prove that it is heresy to deny the necessity to salvation of confession.”116 A further distinction between orthodox and heretical confession is that as pastoral care works towards “tending spiritual ills” for the former and as “accusation, inquisition, and denunciation” towards uncovering crimes against orthodoxy for the latter.117 Secrecy is inherent on the part of the penitent, confessant, or deponent because

115 The emphatic point about secrecy in relation to heretical and unorthodox beliefs is that secrecy in all its operations holds and enables power, or as Sissela Bok argues (noted above) secrecy allows a kind of liberty to move around and within an ideology safely or even subversively. Knowledge of dissent can be dangerous for the dissenter and a weapon of power for the one gaining that knowledge. Michel Foucault’s model of power/knowledge is apt here. Bok further notes that orthodox confession can be an attempt to align oneself with a community and/ or an ideology along the lines of the outsider (i.e. - sinner/ transgressor) desiring to become or return to an insider status: Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 76. 116 Henry Charles Lea, L.L.D., A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, Volume 1, Confession and Absolution (Philadelphia: Lea Brothers & Co., 1896), 227-228. 117 The first citation is from Peter Biller, “Confession in the Middle Ages: Introduction,” in Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages, edited by Peter Biller and A.J. Minnis (York: York Medieval Press, 1998), 68 it is the ultimate object of investigation. Secrecy is inherent on the part of the pastor, confessor, or inquisitor because it is the ultimate desire of the investigator to discover. In a sense, then, secrecy penetrates orthodoxy and heterodoxy, challenging the former and infusing the latter, and always defines heresy with the distinction coming in the psychological or internal interplay of the two subjects.

In the Confessio, Gower inverts the paradigm of secrecy within confession and uses confessional discourse to draw out secrecy in Book II. Genius begins this book by declaring this part of the confession will deal with Envy and moves into the sins of false speaking (Malebouche) and of false seeming (Falssemblant). Both sins bear antecedent allegorical significance through their figurations in Le Roman de la Rose. Gower turns them to his own purpose by emphasizing the idea of strategic secrecy. In turn, this emphasis on strategies by which to willingly dissemble, mis-speak, and consequently, mis-desire, anticipates heresy and heretics, which themselves may be defined as “false speaking” and “false seeming.” In the exchanges between Amans and Genius surrounding the sins of false-speaking and false-seeming, we see the merging of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, but particularly in the fourth Latin verse sitting in the middle of Book II and separating Malebouche from Falssemblant. Amans is remarkably quiet through the tales of False-speaking, and he responds with a cursory acceptance that he will be guarded against such a sin. Genius recognizes Amans’ attempt to deny this sin and immediately defines what Falssemblant entails, layering his first instructions with thinly veiled accusations of false-speaking towards Amans. The Latin verse, like so

3-33. The second citation is from Henry Angsar Kelly, Inquisitions and Other Trial Procedures in the Medieval West (Aldershot, Hampshire, GB: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2001), 407. 69 many others throughout the poem, reveals the emphatic points in this section: not that false-speaking and false-seeming, as end products of volition, are the sins, but that a lover must understand the nuances that distinguish covert and overt words and actions and to be guileful in order to be a well-formed lover:

Nil bilinguis aget, nisi duplo concinat ore,

Dumque diem loquitur, nox sua vota tegit.

Vultus habet lucem, tenebras mens, sermo salutem,

Actus set morbum dat suus esse grauem.

Pax tibi quam spondet, magis est prenostica guerre;

Comoda si dederit, disce subesse dolum.

Quod patet esse fides in eo fraus est, que politi

Principium pacti finis habere negat.

O quam condicio talis deformat amantem,

Qui magis apparens est in amore nichil. (II.iv.1-10)

[Nothing sickens the double-talker unless he is in double harmony with

the lower depths.

And while he talks in daytime, the night conceals his sacred vows.

His visage holds daylight, his mind holds darkness, his speech greets,

but his actions give grave malady.

The peace that he promises to you is foreknowledge of a greater war;

if he should give favor, know that cunning is underneath it.

What manifests to be faith is in itself deceit,

so that the ending of a crafted truce denies having a beginning.

Oh, how such a condition deforms a lover,

who while appearing to be greatly in love, is not at all.]118

Here, binarily opposed forces surround the intentions of guile and the secret intentions driving the lover’s actions and words. So, “day” and “night” and “light” and “darkness” encompass secret intentions while “peace” and “war” are constructed verbally through double-speaking (“bilinguis”). Notice, though, how Gower conflates the distinct ideas of

“faith” and “deceit” into a melded formation of a “crafted truce” (“pacti”). Herein is the essence of secrecy both orthodoxically and heterodoxically; fraudulent faith is heterodox or heretical, while any modification to absolute faith reduces it to non-orthodoxy. Sissela

Bok discusses the various definitions of secrecy and notes that secrecy is “rooted in encounters with the powerful, the sacred, and the forbidden.”119 Bok also explains that

“at the heart of secrecy lies discrimination of some form” and “[the preservation of] liberty.”120 To be compliant with an ideology, such as orthodoxy requires, limits liberty and tempers discernment. As such, compromise, secret deviation, or overt dissent take faith, fraud, and some form of truce as foundational elements. “Pacti” bears so many multiple, nuanced meanings in Latin (e.g. – truce, covenant, agreement, bargain, contract), it is the perfect choice to place as the kernel in the midst of secrecy surrounded

118 Translation mine. 119 Bok, Secrets, 5. 120 Ibid, 28. 71 by strategies of secrecy such as False-speaking (as in confession) and False-seeming (as in heretics).121

The line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy is hardly static, especially when we consider the oftentimes complacent, or at least impotent, response to heretics prior to the

Blackfriars Council of 1382 and the rise of Wycliffism in the late-fourteenth-century.122

Along with penitential and pastoral manuals, we see inquisitorial practices moving into

England with the Dominicans as well.123 The first movements of mendicant preachers into England introduced pastoral guides such as Credenda, Decreti, and several Summae

Confessorum that go beyond simple steps towards pastoral care or confessional procedures. It is the nature of the contents of these specific compendia that suggest pastorality was influenced by the inquisitorial practices stemming from the fall-out from the Languedocian Inquistion that extended from the Thirteenth through the Fourteenth

Centuries. The Fourth Lateran Council decreed the composition and transmission of

121 In Lewis and Short’s Latin Dictionary, “pacti” is defined as “a bargain, contract, covenant, agreement, treaty” and especially as “a fraudulent or collusive agreement” (Lewis and Short, s.v. “pacti,”1287). 122 For a detailed background on the Council at Blackfriars and the ensuing responses to potential Lollardy in late-fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century English literature, see Andrew Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Cole raises the argument that the binary between heterodoxy and orthodoxy is “rigid,” but that affectivity “can overcome the binaries of heterodoxy and orthodoxy,” using Margery Kempe as the exemplary representative for this deconstructive possibility of these binaries (Cole, Literature and Heresy, 171). Acknowledging that Cole does not refer to Gower in this work, I would suggest that his argument that heterodoxy and orthodoxy are rigidly held binaries for the poets he does reference is overly reductive and strains against his argument that only affect can permeate the liminal boundary holding them apart. 123 For a thorough discussion of Dominican preachers and the sacerdotal manuals they used first on the Continent and then in England, see G.R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscripts of the Period c. 1350-1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926). Owst cites several foundational manuals used in mendicant preaching, particularly the Dominican preachers although the Franciscans were also preaching in England in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-centuries. However, the Franciscans were more centered in the universities, especially Oxford, and were less mobile than the Dominicans in England. Among the English manuals most widely known and used were Myrk’s Festiall, William of Pagula’s Oculus Sacerdotal, and John Bromyard’s Summa Prædicantium. See also M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). 72 manuals and formal guide-lines to ensure uniformity in confessional practice.124 The sub-dean of Salisbury, Thomas of Chobham, finished his guide, the Summa Cum miserationes domini, circa 1215 and brought it with him back to England from his years of study in Paris. This guide was the most widely copied and used of the summae confessorum and manuscripts of it circulated widely through the end of the Fifteenth

Century.125 As Katherine C. Little has argued, Gower would have had extensive knowledge of penitential manuals and pastoral handbooks because both the Vox

Clamantis and the Confessio Amantis respond to the debate over lay instruction and the

Wycliffite heresy.126 We see that Gower walks the line between orthodoxy and

124 I do not wish to divert this chapter into a historical background of sacramental confession and the ecclesiastical doctrinal history following its formal admission to Church doctrine as a sacral ritual by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. However, in the centuries leading up to and immediately following this Council, the papal decretals and the legates sent from Rome to investigate heresy in the Southern counties of Languedoc, offer a clear link between the Dominican friars sent as inquisitors in this region and those sent to England in the mid-Thirteenth Century for using the same formulae, prescripted inquiries, and investigative techniques used by Bernard Gui, Jacques Fournier, Bernard Caux, and Jean St. Pierre. Rainerius Sacconi, a Dominican friar and inquisitor, was formerly a heresiarch himself before converting to orthodox Catholic belief. His Summa de Catharis et Pauperibus de Lugduno set forth Catharist beliefs as well as doctrinal refutations of these beliefs and was used by Dominicans into the later fifteenth-century in friaries at Oxford and Cambridge in England for pastoral guidance in heretical inquiry and in confessions. Moneta of Cremona’s Summa against Cathars (Monetae Cremonensis adversus Catharos et Valdenses) was used as well in Oxford and Cambridge to prepare Dominican preachers for sermonic instruction and confessional inquiry. For more in-depth discussion on these inquisitors and their writings on heretical inquiry and orthodox confession, see especially Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Peter Biller, “Confession in the Middle Ages: Introduction,” in Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages, edited by Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (Suffolk: York Medieval Press, 1998); and Leonard Boyle, Pastoral Care, Clerical Education, and Canon Law (London: Variorum Reprints, 1981). See also Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Movement to the Reformation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). 125 The Revd. F. Broomfield cites manuscript history of the Summa dating as late as 1485 in England and two late fifteenth-century printed editions as evidence of its value and popularity. Broomfield notes, “On the evidence available, we may conclude that it must have been one of the best guides for confessors produced during the medieval period:” Thomas de Chobham Summa Confessorum, Analecta Mediaevalia Namurcensia 25, edited by The Revd. F. Broomfield M.A., Ph.D. (Louvain: Éditions Nauwelaerts, 1968). 126 Little discusses the secular poetic response to Wycliffism using the invocation of “lolleres” in late- fourteenth and early-fifteenth-century texts with a particular focus on Chaucer’s and Gower’s divergent calls for clerical reformation. She argues that while Chaucer does not distance the Parson in The Canterbury Tales from Lollardy, Gower emphatically separates his ideal clergy from Lollard ideals although he follows traditionally Wycliffite models of priesthood. To this end, Little writes, “In this way, 73 heterodoxy in the Prologue to the Confessio as he criticizes ecclesiastical division that enables heresy, specifically Lollardy, and then a few lines later, hints at endorsing

Wycliffism. He compresses these sentiments together as he works to expose and to propose solutions to the ills caused by clerical division and corruption by first condemning the heretics:

And so to speke upon this branche,

Which proude Envie hath mad to springe,

Of Scisme, causeth forto bringe

This newe Secte of Lollardie,

And also many an heresie

Among the clerkes in hemselve. (Prol.346-351)

He then immediately points to a composite proposal with echoes of Langland’s Piers

Plowman, which seems to favor a Wycliffite impulse towards vernacular theology: “It were betre dike and delve/ And stonde upon the ryhte feith,/ Than knowe al that the bible seith/ And erre as somme clerkes do./ Upon the hond to were a Schoo/ And sette upon the fot a Glove/ Accordeth noght to the behove/ Of resonable mannes us” (Prol.352-359).

The key phrase in this passage is “ryhte feith” because faith is the ground of contention on which rectitude is fought. The lines following “standing upon right faith” appear to challenge Wycliffe’s calls for Biblical vernacularity, stressing that faith over total knowledge of the Bible is accordant to reasonable men. But the insertion of clerks erring

Gower himself shows his reader that his ideal is no longer timeless but reflects the specific debates over priests’ duties in late-fourteenth-century England:” Katherine C. Little, Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Medieval England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 84. 74 coupled with the first line – better to dig and delve – seems to suggest prioritizing personal responsibility for “ryhte feith” over intercessionary misguidance. Gower knew of Wycliffe’s theological goals, having been a correspondent with Arundel and a witness to the Blackfriars procedurals; consequently, Gower understood that the Lollard sect may have championed the teachings of Wycliffe, but that Wycliffism stopped far short of the reformational goals of the Lollards.127 Within these two cited passages, then, we can see the distinction Gower makes between the “newe secte of Lollardie” as heretical and the sermonic calls for vernacularity and personal piety as well as the tension between these two ecclesiastical concerns. Towards the end of this section on the breakdown of the

Church, Gower allows that the potential remedy is in a middle space between orthodoxy and heterodoxy that relies on a composite, not a division or either word or works: “For if men loke in holy cherche,/ Betwen the word and that thei werche/ Ther is a full gret difference” (Prol.449-451). Gower clearly knows the ecclesiastical history of heretical inquiry and of the contemporary debate over lay instruction as potentially heretical either through Lollardy, Wycliffism, or both.128 I would argue, then, that Gower purposefully keeps Genius as necessarily a fusion of heterodoxy and of orthodoxy so that he, Gower, might keep his poem as continually in motion rather than allowing it to settle in place towards supporting either orthodox or heterodox belief. In this way, Gower allows the

127 See Andrew Cole for a longer discussion on Gower and Wycliffism (Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer. See also Katherine Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). 128 Katherine Kerby-Fulton offers a full discussion on the movement of heretical and inquisitorial manuscripts, mysticism manuscripts, and lay instruction into England, particularly in the mid- to late- Fourteenth Century. She makes an excellent argument about “literary” authors and the question of heresy by suggesting the “academic life had its own ‘free space’ for theological speculation and its own preferred mode” and by acknowledging and expanding Barbara Newman’s argument that “medieval heresy was a juridical concept, and that books or beliefs only became heretical when authoritative churchmen bothered to pronounce upon them” (Books Under Suspicion, 24-25). 75 entire poem to unfold towards reformation on multiple levels, not solely on the level of ecclesiastic reform. Yet, in keeping Genius a merged figure, Gower must also keep

Genius secretive. As I will argue later in this chapter, he cannot be fixed subjectively.129

Yet, neither can he be fixed as either an orthodox pastor or a heretical one.

Particularly in the heretical investigations of the Cathars in twelfth-century

Languedoc, the nature of heresy is always in the realm of secrecy; heretics themselves embody secrecy and are subjectively always secret. Karen Sullivan argues for a new paradigm in conceptualizing heretics in which she posits an amalgamation of desire and will in terms of truth so that a heretic should not be seen as lying on one side of an oppositional force between truth and falseness or orthodoxy and heresy. Rather, she reads the heretic as neither singular nor static, but shifting multiply as needed in order to maintain his secret beliefs and evade discovery as deviant. I suggest that Gower uses this same kind of shifting subjectivity with both Amans and Genius. This slipperiness creates figures motivated by desire and will to be secretive instead of subjects drawn without or with suppressed desire and will towards a reliably stable subject position. As Sullivan notes of heretics and their communities, “People’s perception of themselves ceased to be based on their external acts, as perceived by others, and began to be grounded in their internal intentions, as perceived by themselves alone; increasingly aware of the potential discrepancy between act and intention, people began to suspect that unscrupulous individuals could take advantage of this gap to trick others . . . because the heretic constitutes not one type of dissimulator among others but, rather, the incarnation, in this

129 For a fuller discussion of Genius’ subjectivity, see below. 76 culture at this time, of the dissimulation at the heart of literary writing.”130 In the

Confessio, Amans feels tricked by Genius into revealing too many heart-kept secrets and consequently, spends much of his confession dissimilating and guarding his secret intentions in much the same way Sullivan explains here. Amans moves between revealing and concealing so often that we are left to read him in the liminal space he creates in his deliberate obfuscations and feigned ignorance towards Genius’ confessional examination.

Liminality dominates the Confessio Amantis from the structure to the characters to the very language of the poem itself. Such betweenness works against the bi-polarity of a medieval world shaped by ideological ecclesiastical oppositions such as virtue and vice, penitent and sinner, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and secular and sacral. Extending bi-polarity into the secular realm allows for subjectivities defined by affirmation and negation: courtly lover/ impotent would-be lover; poet/ audience; and chivalric hero/ non-chivalric other (i.e. - Saracen or villainous knight). The influence of the Neoplatonic and Cartesian models on modern readers underpins the difficulty in reading a text that insists on moving away from polarity and continually re-centers itself in its liminality.131

Gower explicitly identifies the poem’s centrist position in the Prologue as the narrator/speaker states he will write, “Somwhat of lust, somewhat of lore” and “Betwen

130 Karen Sullivan, Truth and the Heretic: Crisis of Knowledge in Medieval French Literature (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2005), 121. 131 Although I recognize that the Neoplatonists believed in the oppositional nature of ideas, it is useful to refer to the Cartesian model. While Gower obviously worked from the Neoplatonic model, I believe the more absolute “either/or” binarism of Descartes offers a more concise model for his thinking in this case. The Neoplatonic oppositions work on a dual level of affirmation and negation in creating the binarily opposed values (i.e. - “Goodness is the absence of evil and evil is the absence of good.”), which cause a less rigid or absolute binary. 77 the vertu and the vice” (Prol.19 & 79). Nowhere in the poem does the narrative voice change the poem’s direction in spite of Gower’s frequent use of juxtaposed ideas and his insistent refrain that unity is the salve for humanity’s ills. In spite of such authorial hermeneutic and reading instructions and clues, modern critics return again and again to polarizing arguments trying to account for the poem’s difficulties fitting into set generic, linguistic, or even subjective categories. The last quarter of the Prologue alone, in which the narrator recounts Nebuchadnezzar’s dream and Daniel’s interpretation of it, offers over three hundred lines on division and the polarity caused by man’s sin: “And in this wise, as I recorde,/ The man is cause of alle wo,/ Why this world is divided so”

(Prol.964-966). Yet, if we read the poem as Gower’s narrator suggests, “go the middel weie” (Prol.17), allowing the binaries to collapse and the poem’s language, action, and characters to move freely in between things, then the poem itself turns into more than a reflection and critique of, but a remedy for, the late fourteenth-century turmoil of division in England.

Indeed, against the historical considerations of heretical inquiry particularly robust in Ricardian England, Gower’s project certainly can be considered to fall alongside, if not fully inside the pale, of theological texts and commentaries. As

Katherine Kerby-Fulton argues, there is a space created through quodlibetal and ecclesiastical writings that allows for “ambitious vernacular texts” to freely discuss and purposefully “seek out knowledge of truth” regarding challenges to ecclesiastical and political authority.132 While Kerby-Fulton limits her focus to revelatory writings, she

132 See Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion, prefatory and introductory chapters. 78 does allow and discuss vernacular writings as operating within this liminal space she delineates between “tolerance” and “intolerance” of authority so that potentially dangerous texts (or orthodoxically “suspicious” texts) such as those of Marguerite Porete,

Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and William Langland may co-exist relatively unimpeached with emphatically non-ecclesiastical texts such as those of Chaucer and of

Usk.133 I would suggest, though, that Gower’s Confessio precisely belongs to this liminal space as well because of its insistent impulse towards questions of heterodoxy and orthodoxy both in the realm of the political and the ecclesiastical discourses.

Translating Orthodoxy and Challenging Hegemony

Instruction is a primary mode in the Confessio. Obviously, as a confessional poem, there is an inherent model of pastorality and instruction from Genius to Amans.

But Gower offers instruction to his readers/ audience, as well, through his narrative frame, the narrative voice in the Prologue and Book I, and finally, through Amans’ voice and actions. In the first lines of Book I, the narrator figure, as yet unidentified as the confessing lover Amans, positions himself as an instructor offering his own tale as an

“ensaumple” for men so that others may go forth and teach using this tale as a model exemplum: “For in good feith this wolde I rede,/ That every man ensample take/ Of wisdom which him is betake,/ And that he wot of good aprise/ To teche it forth, for such emprise/ Is forto preise” (I.78-82). The narrator invests himself with pastoral power,

133 While I generalize Chaucer here to be a secular writer, I recognize his several theologically-themed tales, such as “The Parson’s Tale” and portions of “The Pardoner’s Tale” and the heavily satirical, yet doctrinally challenging, “The Summoner’s Tale” and “The Friar’s Tale” may be argued as ecclesiastical in nature. The majority of his writings, however, bear a secular nature. 79 although his stated aim is not for salvific purposes, but rather to instruct men in love’s law. Immediately, however, Gower sets his narrator in a liminal space between orthodoxy and heterodoxy that encompasses several levels: ecclesiastical doctrine, secular poetics, and heretical discourse. The narrator purposes to make an example of

“thilke unsely jolif wo” (I.88), referring to his forthcoming narrative about his torment and failure in love.134 As he does beginning with the first Latin verse before line 1 of

Book I, Gower creates multiple juxtaposed phrases that keep the poem’s language in a state of ambiguity with words often shading into paradox or ambivalent meanings. With

“unsely jolif wo,” Gower brings the poem into an edgier realm by introducing the language of sin or transgression into the secular. The Middle English Dictionary allows

“unsele” to mean “unhappy, miserable” and “evil, wicked.”135 The phrase “jolif wo” comes from troubadour poetry as a standard trope for the pain of love and pervades

Petrachan consolatory poetry (i.e. - Il Canzoniere) and can be translated as either “joyful woe” or “amorous pain.”136 Gower’s use of this poetic contrast is not remarkable in that the Confessio incorporates several reverdie tropes found in dream visions and allegorical courtly love poems. What is notable, though, is his pairing of the sacred and the profane throughout the Prologue and Book I. This is the kind of contradictory moment, this precise linguistic mixing of the religious and the secular in “unsele jolif wo,” that Sarah

134 Gower returns to the phrase again at the end of Book VIII when Venus dismisses Amans/ Gower from petitioning to serve her court because he is too old and this is against “kynde.” Venus tells Amans, “’Bot if my conseil mai be lieved,/ Thou shalt ben esed er thou go/ Of thilke unsely jolif wo,/ Wherof thou seist thin herte is fyred’” (VIII.2358-2361), which adds even more ambivalence and edge to this phrase. That Venus will ease his misery by releasing him is not problematic, but she puts the onus onto Amans for feeling this pain; she makes it clear that his suffering this pain is only a given because he says his heart hurts, not that she has enabled him to feel the authentic amorous pains that are reserved “for al onliche of gentil love” and not for faitours (VIII.2345). 135 Middle English Dictionary, http://quod.lib.umich.edu.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/m/med/, s.v. “Unsele.” 136 Middle English Dictionary, Ibid, s.v. “Jolif.” 80

Kay points to as needing attention rather than glossing or attributing to tropical convention because it should “[draw] our attention to dangerous areas of experience” in order to look inward for remedy.137 In a sense, then, Gower borders on a heretical stance, or at least a heterodox one by pushing an interior remedy for love’s pain and by extension, then, for the world’s ills. Because heresy and interiority both imply secrecy and require inquiry and revelation to expose truths, they create a ready space for hiding and fear in defense of predatory pastorality and governance. Within the first three sections of the Prologue after the “Incipit Prologus,” Gower breaks down the ills of the three English social estates. In the Latin introductory verses to the critique of the Church,

Gower writes:

Nunc tamen assiduo gladium de sanguine tinctum

Vibrat auaricia, lege tepente sacra.

Sic lupus est pastor, pater hostis, mors miserator,138

Predoque largitor, pax et in orbe timor. (Prol.iii.7-10)

[Yet now, as avarice brandishes a sword stained with blood,

sacred laws grow mild.

Thus the wolf is the shepherd, the father the enemy, death the merciful,

the pirate the giver, and fear is the peace on the earth.]139

In this passage, we see how Gower conflates and inverts pastoral care and governance, turning them into composite states so that the contradiction calls attention to the ills at

137 Sarah Kay, Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 301. 138 Emphasis mine. 139 Translation mine. 81 hand more emphatically through the implications of mis-used will and the dominance of affect over reason or faith. If the “pastor” is a wolf and fear is the only peace, then traditional pastorality has failed and needs remedy. As orthodox confessional practice turns pastor into predator and sacral doctrine weakens, we see Gower crafting a scenario analogous to that of a heretical one in including the occasional use of language from the inquisitorial manuals for Genius’ examination of Amans rather than solely from the confessional manuals prescribed for effective pastoral care instead of for ferreting out heretics and secrets.

Gower further complicates the ideas of orthodox confession and heterodox inquisition including the presumed subject positions inherent in both ideas in the first lines of Book I when the narrator subtly invokes the language of orthodox confession that interpellates the audience or reader into the subject position of confessor to the narrator.

Placing the onus on the auditor to listen to the ensuing confession “The which me liketh to comune/ And pleinly forto telle it oute” (I.70-71) before introducing the formal confessor figure, Genius, enhances the liminal structure of the poem and enables Gower to move his characters between multiple subjectivities. The audience is charged with taking remembrance of the wisdom of the following confession and then converting that wisdom into praiseworthy teachings:

That men mowe take remembrance

Of that thei schall hierafter rede:

For in good feith this wolde I rede,

That every man ensample take

Of wisdom which him is betake,

And that he wot of good aprise

To teche it forth, for such emprise

Is forto preise; (I.76-83)

Such a task might seem innocuous at first, and particularly if the “ensample” will be about love. However, the language the narrator is using in this early section of Book I before the introduction of Genius and the formal naming of the narrator as Amans should give the audience pause before accepting such a task. Looking closely at the first 96 lines leading up to the narrative events introducing the lover’s tale, one notices a tension in the language between a secular poetic and an ecclesiastical formula. The lines follow the language of orthodox confessions and the models of the confessional manuals while simultaneously insisting on a vernacular authority imposed on the audience. If we look at transcriptions of heretical inquisition, we see a similar linguistic tension.140

The unsettled ambivalence of language crosses into the subjectivity of the poem’s central figures Genius and Amans, and this interstice is where the greatest interplay of secrecy takes place. Before the subject positions of confessor and penitent are established in Book I, the Prologue suggests the poem and its characters will shift subjectivity just as the incipit narrator figure shifts allegiance between Richard II and

Henry IV in the dedicatory material. In Book I, Venus identifies “faitours” to love,

140 The three texts I look at primarily here for confessional manuals and for heretical inquiry are an English translation of Bernard Gui’s manual for inquisitors (Practica officii Inquisitionis heretice pravitatis), Jacques Fournier’s register of heretical inquisitions, and Thomas of Chobham’s confessional manual: The Inquisitor’s Guide: A MedievalManual on Heretics by Bernard Gui, translated and edited by Janet Shirley (Wellwyn Garden City, UK: Ravenhall Books, 2006); Le Registre d’Inquisition de Jacques Fournier, traduit et annoté par Jean Duvernoy (Paris: Mouton Editeur, 1978); and Thomae de Chobham Summa Confessorum, edited by Revd. F. Broomfield, M.A., Ph.D. (Louvain: Éditions Nauwelaerts, 1968). 83 although the primary figures of Genius and Amans are faitours in their multi-faceted roles as well: “’Ther is manye of yow/ Faitours, and so may be that thow/ Art riht such on, and be feintise/ Seist that thous hast me do servise’” (I.173-176). Interestingly,

Gower again incorporates the specific language of heresy here with “faitours,” a term used extensively in the Languedocian Inquisition of Cathar heretics, and particularly of the Perfecti.141 Venus seems to be the sole figure in the poem’s initial framework who does not waiver from either her stated or her implied subjectivity; she is the goddess of love in her first appearance in the poem in Book I and remains in the same subject position at the end of the poem in Book VIII. Perhaps one way to understand the shifting subjectivity of Genius and Amans is to look at the specific strategies of secrecy that each uses in their confessional exchanges. Karen Sullivan states that the heretic is always secret, and I suggest that Amans and Genius should be read in the same way.142 Heresy is an overt manifestation, yet the heretic must hide, be hidden, or somehow negotiate a secret posture in order to continue functioning in his ideological subject position.

141 Faitour is a term used throughout the heretical inquisitions and trials of the Cathars, the Manicheans, and Waldensians in the 12th- and 13th-century Languedocian Inquisition . The word is of Provençal origin (autre or autor), although it is loosely related to the Latin word auctor, meaning “an originator, causer, doer” (Cassell’s Latin Dictionary, 66). Emil Levy shows the linguistic stem change of the Provençal from “Fau-[tour]” to “Autour” and offers the translation into Modern French as “garant, témoin, agent, auteur” (guarantor, witness, agent, author) in Petit Dictionnaire Provençal-Français, Troisième Edition, par Emil Levy (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1961), 185 & 24. These definitions express an undercurrent of volitive agency toward influencing others. The word takes a more secular note as it moves into England and the Anglo-Norman regions. Robert Kelham’s A Dictionary of Norman or Old French Language; Collected from such Acts of Parliament, Parliament Rolls, etc. compiled in 1779 offers four variant definitions from legal texts: “Faitures – ‘evil-doers’,” “Faitours – ‘slothful people’,” ‘Fautours – ‘abetters’,” and “Faytours – ‘vagabonds’” (pp. 100 – 102). The Middle English Dictionary shows “faitour” having ambiguous dimensions: “Faitour (n.) 1) a deceiver, imposter, cheat, esp. a beggar or vagabond who feigns injury or disease; ‘False faitour’ – often used as a term of abuse; 2) a partisan, adherent” (MED, [faitour]). The final trajectory of the word is in the Oxford English Dictionary, where the word takes on a meaning infused with intention to fool others: “Faitour – ME. [AN (= OFr. faitor, doer, maker) f. L. Factor n. see –our] An imposter, a cheat; esp. a vagrant shamming illness or pretending to tell fortunes:” The New Shorter O.E.D., A-M, edited by Lesley Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 909. 142 Sullivan, Truth and the Heretic, 2-3. 84

Similarly, both Genius and Amans negotiate their positions in a kind of cat-and-mouse game of hide-and-seek; neither stays within the conscripted boundaries of confessor and penitent, instead offering challenges to the other to reveal knowledge whether towards pastoral instruction, towards penitential confession, or strategic maneuvers to divert or dissemble from the dialectic mode at hand.

Strategic Secrecy: Will, Affect, and Desire

I position my argument to look at processes surrounding secrecy, not the local or the nominal secrets themselves, whereby affect and subjectivity emerge from strategic secretive deployments. Confession in the Middle Ages focused on interrogation of a penitent by his pastor. Similarly interrogated were the secular heroes of certain medieval narratives, although the foundation of these interrogations lay in the earthly realm rather than the sacred and frequently involve a female lover rather than a spiritual pastor. For example, courtly lovers and chivalric knights undergo verbal inquiry often at the hands of an advisor, instructor, or quasi-priest figure in Ricardian poetry. We see Arcite and

Palamon, the imprisoned knights who vie for Emelye’s hand in Chaucer’s “The Knight’s

Tale” from The Canterbury Tales, undergo examination from Theseus before he banishes them from Athens, and they later offer confessional revelations and plead to Mars and to

Venus in their temples.143 A more complex example lies in Sir Gawain and the Green

Knight in which Gawain is advised, instructed, and questioned by four disparate characters: King Arthur, Bertilak’s wife, Bertilak himself (presenting a conflated

143 Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Knight’s Tale,” The Canterbury Tales, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition, edited by Larry D. Benson and others (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), 37-65. 85 figuration of orthodox modes of confessional discourse while simultaneously subjectively portraying a sorcerer-type figure that would be unquestionably heretical), and the unnamed priest whom Gawain seeks to hear his confession and shrive him before his final meeting with Bertilak.144 These different scenarios share a power dynamic of an interrogating subject verbally investigating a confessing or revealing subject. The focus in the texts centers primarily around the construction of identity in the subject under inquiry, with additional identifications forming from the questioning subject. The emphasis lies in revelations and discoveries being made external and brought out into the open, either as movements towards absolution, as personal recognitions of identity and relationships, or as knowledge by which a community will embrace or shun the subject under inquiry. However, the internal processes behind these emergent revelations are often overlooked or subsumed by the more emphatic need to place the heroic or penitential figure in a fixed subject position. Underlying the internal processes is the idea of secrecy as a seemingly innocent or innocuous container for information that is yielded up through desire and full volition without intentional withholding. Hidden knowledge revealed with full volition through inquiry and response takes precedence in constructing medieval subjectivity and over the interpretive actions resulting from such inquisition and strategic maneuverings in the interrogations.

Yet, secrecy can be the very thing that shapes a text. In Book I of Gower’s

Confessio Amantis, Amans, the confessing lover, professes sincerity and contrition to

144 The Pearl Poet, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, 5th edition: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Greek Knight, edited bt Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008), 207-300. 86

Venus and to Genius, his confessor, as well as a desire to be fully subjected as Venus’ servant. Venus requires Amans to be shriven by her “priest” Genius, to which requirement Amans willingly agrees, earnestly entreating Genius, “’Bot if thou wolt my schrifte oppose/ Fro point to point, thanne I suppose,/ Ther schal nothing be left behinde’” (I.225-227). In essence, Amans contracts with Genius to make a true and contrite confession in exchange for instruction and shrift. However, immediately following the explicit expectations of this confession set forth by Genius for Amans, the truth of the ensuing confession comes into question in the fourth Latin verse after line

288:

Visus et auditus fragilis sunt ostia mentis,

Que viciosa manus claudere nulla potest.

Est ibi larga via, graditur qua cordis ad antrum

Hostis, et ingrediens fossa talenta rapit.

Hec michi confessor Genius primordia profert,

Dum sit in extremis vita remorsa malis.

Nunc tamen vt poterit semiviua loquela fateri,

Verba per os timide conscia mentis agam. (I.iv.1-8)

[Vision and hearing are fragile entrances to the mind,

which no vicious hand is able to halt.

There is a large road by which the enemy steps towards the cavern of the

heart,

and upon entering, seizes excavated treasure.

These beginnings the confessor, Genius, reveals to me,

while in return, my vexed life is in deadly peril.

But now so that half-living speech might possibly be confessed,

I will fearfully urge forth words from my mouth feigning my privy

thoughts.]145

This verse seems to be an affective response to the act of confession in which the penitent professes fear at the process of pastoral investigation. I suggest, though, that there is a more subtle and subversive response at hand here. The penitent, Amans, reveals fear that his confessor will be an insistent “enemy” who will penetrate the safe enclosure of “the cavern of the heart,” essentially stealing treasured memories of transgressions poorly guarded in the mind by the “vicious hand.” Amans further reveals two different strategic actions concerning secrets (disclosure and dissimulation), both of which are used in an attempt to protect himself from the “deadly peril” of his “vexed life” and from the violent seizure of his “privy” thoughts. The pastoral power relationship between confessor and penitent is destabilized at once by distrust, fear, and the reluctant emission of words that the penitent “fearfully urges forth” in “half-living speech” that conditionally “might possibly be confessed” or might not, depending on the will of the penitent. If Amans has pledged to make a sincere, contrite confession, why does Gower modify, through affective markers such as fear and vexation, the integrity of the anticipated confession?

Further, how do these strategies of secrecy shape subjectivity within the confessional act?

145 Translation mine. 88

Both external and internal figurations of subjectivity follow a model based on the questio method in medieval confession whereby the subject positions are clearly defined and held static; the subjects behave in a conscripted fashion following behavioral codes for their given subjectivity, and the examination of the subject is externally driven by the polity’s or the ecclesiastical community’s need for obedient, orthodox subjects fulfilling their set roles. Any interrogation of the subject follows the modes of inquiry set out in the confessional manuals developed by the medieval Church hierarchy in an effort to bring conformity to pastoral confession. Scholars have read secular romances, Ricardian poetry, and their antecedent French texts using this religious, sacral model of inquiry as the template for constructing the medieval subject. However, some of these secular texts seem to resist such an ecclesiastical stamp. Subjects such as Amans in Gower’s

Confessio Amantis and Troilus in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde slip out of the mold for

146 Katherine C. Little, Confession and Resistance. 147 Corrine Saunders, “Desire, Will, and Intention in Sir Beves of Hamtoun,” in The Matter of Identity in Medieval Romance, edited by Phillipa Hardman (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002).

89 the confessing subject set forth in the confessional manuals. Scholars attempt to reconcile the ill-fitting subject to a confessional subjectivity by recalling the twelfth- century French secular romance Le Roman de la Rose along with Boethius and Augustine as antecedent model texts. I would suggest, however, that conflating the religious with the secular is part of the problem in ill-fitting subjectivity. What if we turned, instead, to a similar mode of inquiry, yet removed the external and focused on the internal motivations of the subjects? I believe the inquisitorial manuals of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Languedocian inquisition offer a neater analogy, if you will, for the confessing subject because these manuals presume secrecy as the first tenet of heresy or the heretical subject.

Towards a New Paradigm

In the Prologue to the Confessio Amantis, the poet/narrator says he “wolde go the middel weie” between “lust and lore” in writing his book. Gower constructs his central character, Amans, the penitent/ lover, in an interstitial way as well between the states of sinfulness and absolution and between his tormented desire for the pleasures of love and either the profit of being shriven or the relief of love’s pain. A more subtle figuration comes with Amans’ confessor, Genius, who vacillates between vice and virtue so that his mobility complicates his function as Amans’ salvific pastor and remedial physician of

Cupid’s wound. As a confessor, he is presumably virtuous or should be the embodiment of virtue. Yet, Genius distances himself from ecclesiastical investiture and orthodox pastoral power when he reminds Amans that he is Venus’ priest, a servant to a pagan

90 goddess who traditionally inspires and embodies the vices of the flesh and love’s gluttony inherent in courtly love. As with the poem, Genius, too, goes the middle way between

“somwhat of lust, somewhat of lore” (Prol.19) throughout the entire confession with an affective consequence of this liminality standing “betwene ernest and game” (VIII.3109) as the poet, Gower, admits his undertaking has been at the end of the poem. Joining the ideas of “lust” and “lore” suggests a more complex figuration for Genius than an entertaining instructor. In Middle English, “lust” means “desire” as well as

“entertainment,” which suggests that Genius has and exercises a will independent of his confessor role or of Venus’ priest.148 “Lore” means both “preaching,” appropriate to

Genius’ priesthood and pastoral function in the poem, but “lore” also means “loss.”149 If the poem moves between desire and loss, then Amans is consigned to fail as Love’s penitent. But what of Genius? As a confessor, he fulfills Venus’ mandate that he confess and shrive Amans, a task he completes in Book VIII although with remarkably few words and only after Amans implores Venus’ permission to ask Genius to complete the confession before Amans leaves and after Amans has been given the mirror of truth by

Venus: “The Prest anon was redy tho,/ And seide, ‘Sone, as of thi schrifte/ Thou has ful pardoun and foryifte;/ Foryet it thou, and so wol I’” (VIII.2894-2897). Genius removes his pastoral mask here and reveals he has no intention to store this in his memory, nor does he intend to linger with Amans to tend his future pastoral needs; he is “redy” to finish this task, charged by his mistress, without any signs that he has performed through his own agency or will throughout the confession or his interchanges with Amans.

148 Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “Lust.” 149 Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “Lore.” 91

Several lines later, Amans reveals a sense of longing or desire for Genius to stay with him and offer him more help, much as one would expect a pastor to provide one who has been through such a shameful dismissal and a brutal schooling in self-truth. He says,

“Hire prest, which wolde nought abide,/ Or be me lief or be me loth,/ Out of my sighte forth he goth,/ And y was left with outen helpe” (VIII.2948-2951), indicating that

Genius’ subjectivity has changed completely from any kind of pastorality as well as showing a complete imperviousness to affective desire. Back in Book V, he shows further cracks in holistic subjectivity when he refutes Venus, his clerical superior and the goddess whom he serves, as Amans asks him to include “the godd and the goddesse of love” (V.1377) in his teaching against the “false” religions. While Genius acknowledges that he will tell Amans the truth about Venus because it is his duty in shriving him to tell him truths, he strangely admits to feeling ashamed by her lechery. He tells Amans the reason he does not speak of Venus: “’Mi Sone, / I have it left for schame,/ Be cause I am here oghne Prest;/ Bot for thei stonden nyh thi brest/ Upon the schrifte of thi matiere,/

Thou schalt of hem the sothe hiere’” (V.1382-1386). I would argue, then, that Genius modifies his subjectivity and claims a form of self-hood at these revelatory points in the poem, and with that subjective change, he affectively changes the confession at hand.

The canonical tenets of confession lose any power once Amans is completely dismissed as a penitent and petitioner to serve in Love’s court, and the dialectic between Amans and

Genius changes from deposing and inquiring to imploring and ignoring.

The narrative structure of the Confessio works on multiple levels that are further complicated by the characters’ shifting subjectivities. The framing of mostly profane

92 allegorical exempla with an orthodox confessional model strains the texture of the poem as it moves between pagan auctorité and Christian doctrine. Consequently, Amans’ confession falls into a tension between the secular and the sacred that informs the dialectic and the narrative exempla, which, in turn, creates an awkward interfusion for the poem as either allegory or as a court poem. Arguably, Genius’ exempla and the vices they illuminate misalign, influenced by the ambiguities of Genius’ function. For example, in illustrating the Vice of Wrath, Genius offers “The Tale of Canace and

Machaire,” infamous as an incest tale, yet the emphatic lesson of this tale here is not to caution against lechery or mis-placed desire but rather to warn that wrath destroys nature’s law of kinde: “’Let nevere thurgh thi Wraththe spille/ Which every kinde scholde save’” (III.342-343). At times, though, Genius’ exempla suggest new avenues to sin previously unknown to Amans, such as in Book VI on Gluttony regarding the sin of

“the devil’s art” (sorcery), that ultimately position Genius as a tempter figure, inculcating his ignorant penitent into vicious knowledge and behaviors as much as guiding him toward absolution. After a lengthy exposition by Genius on the craft of divination and artificial crafts to win love and affection, Amans admits to having no understanding of this sin: “’I wot noght o word what ye mene’” (VI.1364). However, he immediately says, “’I wol noght seie, if that I couthe,/ That I nolde in mi lusti youthe/ Benethe in helle and ek above/ To winne with mi ladi love/ Don al that evere that I mihte/ . . . So that I wonne and overcome/ Hire love, which I most coveite’” (VI.1365-1373). Clearly here,

Genius’ demonstration of a previously unknown sin stirs Amans’ desire to do whatever he could to win that love that he most covets regardless of cost or consequence. The

93 would-be warning instead serves as a temptation for the penitent with this failed moment of pastoral guidance.

Scholars have long debated the Confessio’s merits and Gower’s poetic artistry for the very ambiguities and unresolved tensions stemming from these awkward subjectivities and misaligned exempla. C.S. Lewis, Donald Schueler, and Denise Baker have variously argued that the primary difficulties with the Confessio stem from the duality of Genius as pagan priest and pastoral confessor.150 While scholars point to the antecedent figurations of Genius and trace the nominal understanding derived from the etymological basis and function of the word “genius,” the recurrent critical arguments insist on a resolvable Cartesian model for Gower’s Genius. Lewis identifies a kind of tripartite Genius as “Genius the god of generation and Genius, the good genius and the evil genius,” whereby a classic Cartesian polarity exists: “good and evil.”151 Baker adds a complexity to the duality of Gower’s Genius by dividing him into the priest of natural law or kinde (Venus’ priest) and the priest of the law of reason (orthodoxy’s priest); however the model is still a polarizing either/or figuration.152 It is understandable, of course, to seek a stable subjectivity for Genius, particularly because his role as the confessor in this quasi-penitential poem is crucial for the pastorality and ultimate remedy

150 Several critical works have been written on Genius and his function in the Confessio and in medieval literature. C.S. Lewis examines the varied figurations of Genius emerging from a philological study in “Genius and Genius,” The Review of English Studies 12, no. 46 (Apr., 1936): 189-194. Donald G. Schueler specifically looks at Gower’s use of Genius as an allegorical figure in “Gower’s Characterization of Genius in the Confessio Amantis,” Modern Language Quarterly 33, no. 3 (Sep. 72): 240-257. Denise N. Baker studies the pastorality of Genius through three primary medieval works, Alain de Lille’s Plaint of Nature, Jean de Meun’s section of Le Roman de la Rose, and Gower’s Confessio Amantis, in “The Priesthood of Genius: A Study of the Medieval Tradition,” Speculum 51, no. 2 (Apr., 1976): 277-291. 151 Lewis, “Genius and Genius,” 191. 152 Baker, “The Priesthood of Genius,” 287. 94 for the shriving of Amans, the unsely lover petitioning for Venus’ grace. Gower’s antecedent models for confessors and for Genius specifically begin with Prudentius’ psychomachic construction and move through polarizing constructions from Bernardus

Silvestris to Alain de Lille to Jean de Meun, with secondary considerations given to the confessional complaints in Boethius and in Ovid’s Amores. More recent critical work by

Alastair Minnis and James Simpson argue for more amalgamated readings of Genius’ dual roles and of the inconsistencies between the Prologue and the actual confession of the lover as well as between the secular and sacred discourses fighting for primacy.153 It is from Simpson’s arguments that my own arguments regarding amalgamation in this chapter evolve.

Briefly, Simpson suggests two crucial strategies for reading the Confessio that attempt to offer a more satisfactory reading and a reconciliation of the poem’s critically marked problems. The first major argument suggests that Gower turns the onus of creating poetic meaning onto the audience, and more specifically, onto individual “man” himself as a kind of anticipatory humanistic maneuver by Gower.154 Such a bold argument attempts to explain the problematic misalignments of the vices and their accompanying exempla presented by Genius to Amans as well as to account for the poem’s vague purpose and purported audience; is the poem intended as a mirror for kings, a moral guide for the common man, a criticism of a corrupt church, a caution

153 Alastair Minnis studies Genius in Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001). James Simpson’s book, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus and John Gower’s Confessio amantis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) is foundational in breaking Genius and Amans out of static, one-dimensional subject roles into more fully-dimensional and actively interior agents. 154 Simpson, Sciences and the Self, 135. 95 against Wycliffism, or some or all of these? Simpson’s argument removes the burden of poetic intent from Gower by shifting the work of creating meaning to the audience, and in doing so, he clears a space for a more-focused reading by which the characters and the exempla have more mobility. Secondly, by enabling Genius and Amans’ mobility and pushing them from a static subjectivity, Simpson begins the process of destabilizing the rigid binary subject positions of Confessor and Penitent Lover. Ultimately, Simpson argues that Genius is actually the imago of Amans, in other words that he is not separate from but integrated into Amans as Amans’ own ‘genius’ or imagination, so that the poem is essentially a psychological allegory or foray into man’s individual soul.155 This second argument completely breaks the rigid polarity between Genius and Amans by conflating the two subject positions into one divided self.

While Simpson’s argument is refreshing in that it disables the Cartesian impulse towards oppositional poles, I would argue that it strips away the delightful nuances of vice and virtue that Gower so carefully builds into Genius. It is the essential unity, the vicious virtuousness embodying Genius that opens up the Confessio into a masterful synthesis of traditions and genres. More interestingly, though, is that Gower’s synthetic subject positions – pagan/confessor and concupiscent/ penitent – enable his poem to work on many levels beyond the courtly poetic tradition to broader political, ecclesiastical, and social concerns.

I turn back now to the Confessio itself in order to explore how Gower opens up his poem to a broader scope. Fusion essentially shapes this poem whether on the level of

155 Ibid, 254. 96 form, antecedence, subjectivity, or language. Gower punctuates the poem with Latin headings and glosses that serve as frames themselves for the vices and sins under discussion. It is unclear whose voice narrates these commentaries, yet this ambiguity underscores the compilatio effect enriching the poem’s multiplicity. Whether the voice is a distanced poet/narrator, Amans, Genius, or Gower inserting himself into the poem, the glosses and headings complicate the discourse at hand and cause the reader to question the veracity of both the commentary and the surrounding dialect between Genius and

Amans. Indeed, Gower entwines the relationship between Genius and Amans with strategic maneuvers of secrecy – the careful revelations, concealments, and uncovered professions of covert and overt desires – that further intensify the destabilization of the subjectivities and of the poem. This kind of conflation and mobilization creates suspicion in the reader as to the efficacy of Genius’ inquisition and instruction as well as of the sincerity and truth of Amans’ contrition and confession. If the rigid boundaries of the confessional act (i.e. - contrition, examination, confession, and penance) come under suspicion, then, with these movements toward instability, what is Gower’s intention in creating such compilations?

No doubt the historical events in late fourteenth- century England give clues to discovering or at least, attempting to satisfactorily answer this question on amalgamation.

Much critical work focuses on the Prologue and on Book VII for the political tenor particular to those portions of the poem. Books I through VI and Book VIII obviously engage in religious discourse, although Gower insistently binds the poetics of antiquity

(rhetoric, ethics, auctorité) onto the allegorical lessons of vice and virtue. While political

97 and religious concerns are certainly a large part of this poem reflecting the challenges faced in Ricardian England, I would argue that Gower’s use of interfused models and subjects stems from a different focus – that of social reform and secular empowerment.

In this sense, I think James Simpson is right when he posits Gower’s anticipatory humanism. A more cogent argument concerning Gower’s secular focus comes from

Katherine C. Little in which she argues that Gower uses the confessional model as a means to examine the potential dangers of self-definition and lay instruction stemming from the threat of Wycliffism. Little notes that Gower uses the “rhetoric of penitential submission to demonstrate Amans’ subjectivity to Genius,” which enables the interplay of self-definition towards two ends: first, through self-examination and consequent self- definition, one understands his relationship to another, thereby externalizing the exploration of sin, which is counter to Wycliffite interiority; and second, the subjective interplay between penitent and confessor encourages readers to identify with the penitential act, and by extension, self-define their sacral lives through an orthodox model all the while supporting love as a “unifying force” as opposed to the divisive social, political, and religious forces at hand in fourteenth-century England.156 To return then to my earlier question regarding Gower’s intention in blending multiple layers of discourse,

I suggest that Gower is absolutely holding his poem and its disparate parts in a constant betweenness or “middle way” in order to suggest a new social movement for reform both on the communal and on the individual level. Gower sets forth his dissatisfaction with the state, the church, and social body in the Prologue of the Confessio in a call-to-action

156 Little, Confession and Resistance, 104. 98 and a mirror for princes/ mirror for man complaint. Heretical sects such as the Lollards and the Hussites presented similar potential for corruption and disruption. Lancastrian politics were too new to offer remedial reform. The nascent strands of Humanism were only just emerging in secular writing, but presented a tension with vernacularity against

Latinity. Emergent commodity culture and class tensions, as attested by the Peasant’s

Revolt of 1381, challenged personal ethics and moral codes. While Gower posits reformation, he has no immediate ideological or institutional models to effect reform.

Consequently, he only offers the discourse of reform and personal change at the end of the Confessio.

Of course, to posit such an intention toward reformation depends on fairly stable subject positions from the two central figures in the confessional act: the penitent and the confessor. Amans does maintain a subjective stability throughout the confession to the point of inefficacy. He “seems” to be an earnest penitent at the beginning of Book I when he implores Venus to relieve his suffering, and he emphatically tells Genius he has been “plein” to him in confessing and to his lady in love. But we know that Amans has not been “plein” to love because Venus and Cupid are suspicious of his complaint and of his veracity as a lover in the beginning of Book I. Indeed, Amans’ false-seeming leads

Venus to set up the whole confession with her priest, Genius, because she disbelieves his claim to be a truly heart-sick lover. Further, Amans is not “plein” to Genius in the confession as he ultimately admits when he tells Genius that he hears but doesn’t attend his words at the end of Book VII (on the teachings of Aristotle) “’Do wey, mi fader, I you preie:/ Of that ye have unto me told/ I thonke you a thousendfold./ The tales sounen in

99 myn Ere,/ Bot yit myn herte is elleswhere’” (VII.5408-5412). While Amans is unreliable because he misidentifies himself and his actions, he remains static in his subjectivities as a penitent sinner and as a would-be lover.

If Amans is a stable subject, though, I would argue that Genius is anything but stable. Rather, I suggest his subjectivity is so grossly mobile that his pastorality, whether as a courtly poetic device or as an orthodox figuration, completely subverts, and he becomes a true composite of pastor and tempter at once. In any confessional mode, there exists the possibility that the confessor’s examination might actually excite temptation in the penitent. As Henry Charles Lea notes, “In warning against too curious an investigation into carnal sins, [Bishop Guido de Monteroquer] speaks of the frequent instances in which both men and women have been led by it into guilt of which they had previously known nothing. The teachers of the [medieval] period admit that there were authorities who objected wholly to interrogation on this account; but, as perfect confession could be had in no other way, it had to be allowed, and they can only urge the greatest caution not to convert it into a source of infection for the innocent.”157 I agree that Genius’ instruction may indeed be an inculcation to sin only by virtue of Amans’ self-professed ignorance. However, Genius’ examination and instruction in Book II on

Falssemblant (false-seeming) under Envy and his exchange with Amans regarding

Avarice and lovers’ jealousy in Book V suggest that he is always already a conglomeration between vice and virtue and therefore cannot be a stable figuration of confessional orthodoxy or as an ambassador for love. Since Genius is a kind of

157 Henry Charles Lea, LL.D., A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, Volume I. “Confession and Absolution” (Philadelphia: Lea Brothers & Co., 1896), 379. 100

Falssemblant himself, seeming to be an orthodox priest but actually one who serves a pagan god, he is fully vicious in terms of Envy (that is, in terms of Gower’s definition of

Envy in the Confessio). He asks Amans if he has ever used “’Falssemblant and coverture/ To wite of eny creature/ How that he was with love lad’” (II.1939-1941), yet this is precisely what he, Genius, does, albeit in the service of Venus. He has just said of one who is false-seeming, “’Thogh men him se, thei knowe him noght’” (II.1920), which again fits Genius’ figuration in his dual roles. More revealing of Genius’ composite nature between pastor and tempter perhaps is the section on Avarice in Book V when he instructs Amans about religions and the Greeks’ “foule” misbeliefs in particular. He condemns Venus for the many acts of lust she inspires and initiates, and in doing so, he acknowledges his own sinful state, his “’shame/ Be cause I am here oghne Prest’”

(V.1382-1383). It is not always in the particular details of minutiae of his words that we come to recognize Genius as a hybrid, but rather in the larger portrait of his different subjectivities married to his words and deeds; Gower creates Genius through mis- lookings and mis-hearings that he, Gower, cleverly uses Genius to caution Amans against. Indeed, Genius’ first exempla to Amans in Book I before he even begins the confessional examination are quick tales of mis-looking and mis-hearing, both actions being thieves to love. The tales of Acteon and of Medusa caution how looking amiss is the most perilous action in love while the tales of Aspidis and of the Sirens emphasize how good governance of the senses safe-guards wisdom and leads to virtue. The irony here is that Amans is such an insincere penitent and oblivious to the poignancy of these first teachings that he mis-looks and mis-hears Genius throughout the entire proceeding

101 confession.158 Only at the end of Book VIII when Venus gives Amans the mirror to correctly see himself and turns him away as her servant do we understand fully how

Genius’ multiplicity is necessary to maintain; Genius cannot be fully vicious or his instruction and pastorality are impotent. Nor can Genius be fully virtuous or his role as a pagan priest to the goddess embodying the seventh vice, Lechery, is impossible.159

Instead because he is both vicious and virtuous, Genius can move both Amans and ultimately Gower’s audience into modes of self-examination, self-definition, and finally, self-reformation. Amans anticipates this turn into self-examination and reform at the end of Book VII on the Education of the King when he petitions Genius to ask anything that has been left out of the confession up to this point, “’If that ther be oght overronne/ Or oght foryete or left behinde/ Which falleth unto loves kinde,/ Wherof it nedeth to be schrive,/ Nou axeth, so that whil I live/ I myhte amende that is mys’” (VII.5425-5429).

Genius assures Amans that he will complete the penitential investigation of Amans’ transgressions, but Amans has only asked for shriving for that “which falleth unto loves kinde.” He makes it clear that he will amend those sins against Love involving misdeeds, and this is where Gower moves into a sermonic mode transitioning into Book VIII that

158 Here, I completely differ from Peter Nicholson in my understanding and reading of the Confessio, the movements and subjectivities of Amans and Genius, and affect and effect of the exempla offered not only in the whole poem, but especially in these early exempla regarding mis-looking and mis-hearing: Peter Nicholson, Love & Ethics in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1984). 159 It is noteworthy that Gower does not treat this vice, Lechery or Lust, in full as he does the other Seven Deadly Sins beyond the deviant desire of Incest in Book VIII’s “The Tale of Apollonius of Tyre.” As Venus’ servant, it can be argued that Genius holds his mistress’ secrets, in effect guarding her privitée, by avoiding full confessional examination and instruction on this vice. Furthermore, Genius would understand that incest is a sin far from Amans’ purview since the would-be Lover is being shriven for the purpose of entering Love’s service and is presumably childless. The exemplum offered concerning incestuous desire and action concerns the father/daughter relationship, which is not a relationship apparently particular to Amans. 102 echoes Genius’ sermon to the barons towards the end of Le Roman de la Rose. The emphatic point that Gower puts forth from Genius to Amans, however, is that even after so many points of shriving, exempla, and questioning, Amans still has not reformed:

“’Full wel, mi Sone, nou I see/ Thi word stant evere upon o place’” (VIII.184-185). He notes that Amans still has “grace,” which should bring him to correction, contrition, absolution, and ultimately, salvation. Yet, Gower does not allow Genius to dwell on grace as the beginning and end of self-reform; instead, he moves quickly into more of

Love’s “mis-“ sins -- misbegotten pre-Christians, “mistimed” lust, and the mis-desire of incest -- that culminates in the lengthy exempla, “The Tale of Apollonius of Tyre.” In this movement away from orthodox sermonizer into taking up Amans’ intense focus on

Love’s “kynde,” Genius slips into a mimicry of Amans’ desire to know Love’s laws under the guise of amending his “mis”-deeds.

While Amans’ attempts to enter Venus’ service and learn Love’s laws shapes the framing for self-examination, self-definition, and self-reformation such as through an orthodox confession, I believe that too often, scholars look past these syntheses of Genius and of Amans as well as ignoring the mis-behaviors underscored or pointed to in the exempla. For example, Peter Nicholson argues that Gower is primarily creating a poem about love and subsequently, that everything that follows in the whole of the Confessio serves as ways to support Gower’s creation of “som newe thing” as the subject of his poem and his style. Where Nicholson insists on Machaut as Gower’s primary model for his love poem, I believe that Gower uses a lover figure and the trope of courtly love as a means to critique external ideologies, and further, that Gower’s primary models are found

103 beyond Machaut’s various dits amoureux in a mixed realm of ecclesiastical heretical inquisition, non-Christian models of subjectivity, and the more critically biting Le Roman de la Rose.160 While Nicholson’s extensive critical analysis of each book, exempla, and dialogic exchange of the poem supports his premise that the poem is insistently about love, I would argue that he fails to account for the apparent and recurrent anomalies that he tidies up rather than pushes against. For example, in noting that the first exempla that

Genius narrates in Book I regarding mis-looking, the tales of Acteon and of Perseus,

Nicholson simply ascribes their seeming mis-alignment as tales that are “least typical in the poem” and further, “Not ‘exemplary’ in the ordinary sense, they provide no literal illustration of either good or bad conduct and its consequences, but instead depict in allegorical form the harms that may come by way of sight.”161 I would argue that such a simplistic approach to the difficulty of the seeming gap between tale and lesson further enforces the static categorization and polarization of the poem and the poet that I noted in the beginning of this chapter.

The Confessio Amantis is a huge poem, a beastly pastiche itself. Traditionally, it has been read as an allegory for love and/ or as a courtly love poem tempered with

Ricardian political, clerical, and social concerns. Critics tend to read these concerns on a communal or regnal level as Gower’s advice to either Richard II or to Henry IV as a

160 I would suggest a more plausible Machauvian model is Le Livre du voir dit, in which Machaut uses an epistolary framing device to satirize would-be courtiers who are too old to be in Love’s service. Machaut also brings together the secular and the sacred in unusual fusions in this text, written ca. 1364, offering a complex amalgamation similar to what Gower does with secular and sacred discourse in the Confessio. For an excellent discussion and bi-lingual (Old French/ English) translation, see Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre du voir dit, edited by Daniel Leech-Wilson, translated by R. Barton Palmer (New York: Garland, 1998). 161 Nicholson, Love and Ethics, 128. 104 caution against corruption, dissent, and unrest. Yet, this kind of meta-level reading paints the poem and Gower’s artistic reputation into a critical corner of sorts: the poem is scrutinized as awkward, the frame narrative as uncomfortably ambivalent between antiquarian and Christian impulses, and the poet as scattered and almost manic. I suggest, however, that we read the poem heeding the caveat that Genius gives Amans against mis-looking and mis-hearing. Amans fails as a lover and a penitent because he turns to the wrong authorities for pastoral care and remedy. I would argue Gower uses

Amans’ failure as a mirror for the individual – king, noble, and clergy alike – and to caution England against corrupt authorities who cannot offer social salvation or remedy.

I am not suggesting that Amans is metonymic for England or that Gower is championing the individual in the humanistic vein. I do believe, though, that the Confessio deserves to be read using a new paradigm, one that breaks the relentless rigidity of a Cartesian model of vice versus virtue and allows a fusion of vice and virtue to be the new lens and auricle by which we see and hear the poem.

Mis-seeing and mis-hearing threaten the efficacy of both courtly and ecclesiastical power. Heterodoxy threatens stability; I believe, however, that for Gower and the

Ricardian poets, particularly, such cross-application is necessary. Merging terms to break the boundaries between secular and sacred opens the liminal space in which reformation through redefined self-hood and subjectivity begins. Only through such reform can the divisions Gower so carefully delineates be remedied into the unity he so earnestly pleads for at the end of the Confessio.

105

Inquisition: Heretical Instruction and Exemplary Secrecy

In my introductory chapter, I suggest that the texts I examine in this study use a confessional framework informed by the inquisitorial manuals and transcriptions of heretical inquisition trials from the Dominican legates investigating Languedocian heresies in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Rather than take the guidelines for pastoral care specifically compiled for the sacrament of confession by the orthodox

Church, I argue that the court poets turn to a mode of inquiry suited for heretical investigation instead of for salvific pastorality in order to highlight the corruption and deviances in the sacral and the profane institutions and ideologies of late-fourteenth- century England. As I noted earlier in this chapter, much of Gower’s Confessio relies on instruction as well as inquisition and confession, and as such, the poem follows the questio mode for framing the exempla he uses for instruction. The exchanges between

Genius and Amans move between dialectic and discourse, between examination and explication, and between temptation and temperance. The consistent thread in these vacillating constructs is secrecy itself.162 Something either needs to be uncovered, revealed, concealed, or diverted in order to form the basic components of the confessional, questio framing device. In addition, the subjectivities of the confessor and the confessant fluctuate depending on the strategic need in probation and revelation.

162 While I discuss this idea more fully later in this chapter, in this instance my understanding of secrecy is informed by Sissela Bok’s work on secrecy and by Michel Foucault’s work on power and knowledge as it relates to confession and secretive strategies surrounding confessional discourse. See Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (New York: Vintage Press, 1989), 73–88, for more on confession. Bok writes about the soul-searching (examining one’s conscience in penitential discourse) one undertakes, “In this search the speaker experiences not only the insider’s conflict between concealing and revealing but also that of the outsider between probing and desisting – between the chance for self-knowledge and remaining a stranger to oneself” (Secrets, 83-84). See Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980) 194-228, for more specific discussion of secrecy in relation to confession and inquiry. 106

Consequently, Gower turns to manuals specifically designed to ferret out secrets: the inquisitorial manuals used in heretical inquiry and the confessional, penitential manuals used in pastoral guidance towards absolution.163 In turning to these manuals along with the penitential, preaching, and pastoral guides already circulating in England, Gower brings together modes of inquiry in a composite manner, resulting in an amalgamation of pastoral care and heretical challenge. Genius’ multiple modes of confessional inquiry trigger strategic secretive protective actions from Amans and widen the scope of exempla that Genius uses in his own strategies infused by secretive impulses.

Initially, Genius begins with traditional confessional discourse using formulae from penitential and preaching manuals circulating in fourteenth-century England. Until

163 The specific inquisitorial manuals I believe Gower incorporates as his models for inquiry are Bernard Gui’s Pratica officii inquisitionis heretice pravitatis (1323-1324), Rainerius Sacconi’s Summa de Catharis et Pauperibus de Lugduno (1250), and Moneta of Cremona’s Adversus Catharos et Valedenses libri quinque (1241-1244). There are few formal inquisitorial manuals composed as such for the Dominican inquisition in Languedoc. To that end, I suggest that Gower extracts formulas for heretical inquiry that either come directly from these primary manuals or from the registers of heretical interrogation and trials such as those of Jean Fournier in the early fourteenth-century in Pamiers and Montaillou, in the Foix region near Carcasonne in the Southwestern region of France. R. F. Yeager notes Gower’s familiarity with preaching manuals, such as the Summa casuum poenitentiae, the Fasciculus Morum (ca. 1300), and The Book of Vices and Virtues, an English translation of the thirteenth-century Somme le Roi by the Dominican friar, Lorens d’Orleans: R. F. Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 189. Of course, Gower knew the political and ecclesiastical challenges in Ricardian England with respect to vernacularity, Wycliffism, and Lollardy. Several of the penitential and inquisitorial manuals, specifically in regard to Wycliffites and Lollards were held at the British Library in London, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and at the Corpus Christi College Library, Cambridge. See especially Jean-Pascal Pouzet who discusses Gower’s access to penitential and inquisitorial manuals and transcripts at Cambridge and to Wycliffe’s writings held at Oxford: Jean-Pascal Pouzet, “Southwark Gower: Augustinian Agencies in Gower’s Manuscripts and Texts – Some Prolegomena,” in John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition, edited by Elisabeth Dutton with John Hines and R. F. Yeager (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010): 11-25. See also John H. Fisher who covers Gower’s Westminister connection (where the Wycliffite trials took place in 1382) as well as discussing Gower’s correspondence with Archbishop Arundel of Canterbury, a prime figure in heretical inquisition in Ricardian England: John H. Fisher, John Gower Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York: New York University Press, 1964). Finally, see John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A Translation of the Principal ‘Libri Poenitentiales’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), for information on manuscript provenance and holdings and excerpts from penitential manuals located in England in the Fourteenth Century. 107 he offers his first exemplum to illustrate to Amans the nature of the sin he is probing,

Genius presents as an orthodox, Christian pastor. Immediately with Genius’ first point of shrift, though, Gower complicates the subjective nature of his confessor as well as the nature of the confession itself. Following this beginning part of Amans’ confession,

Genius turns to tales that rarely embody Christian lessons. On their basic level, exempla are moral tales; the Oxford English Dictionary defines exemplum as, “an example; an illustrative or moralizing story.”164 The first exemplum, “The Tale of Acteon,” is not apparently problematic because Genius says he will tell a tale about mis-looking.

However, if we look at the dialectic exchange leading up to the tale, we begin to see that

Genius has shifted from his orthodox pastoral subjectivity to a strange blend of orthodox and heterodox pastorality, confessor and tempter, and Ovidian tale-teller and sermonizer.

Consider the moral lesson that Genius imparts in this first exemplum, though.

Concluding his recitation of “The Tale of Acteon,” Genius advises Amans:

‘Lo now, my Sone, what it is

A man to caste his yhe amis,

Which Acteon hath dere aboght;

Be war forthi and do it noght.

For ofte, who that hiede toke,

Betre is to winke than to loke.’165 (I.379-384)

In telling Amans it is better to “winke” than to “loke,” Genius infuses his capacity for moral instruction with several layers of ambiguity; not only is his advice far from

164 The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Volume 1, A-M, s.v. “Exemplum”. 165 Emphasis mine. 108 pastorally corrective, but it suggests a more deviant course of action to take rather than the directly agentive looking or mis-looking as he introduces as the vice at hand at the start of the tale, being “’[an] Ensample touchende of mislok’” (I.334). On the surface, it seems that Genius is merely cautioning against a willful act of looking based on desire – a voyeuristic gaze in which Acteon willfully indulges.166 However, if we look at what

Genius advocates instead of looking, we get a more obfuscatory picture: often, if you are already hiding, it is better to “winke” than to look. Turning to the Middle English

Dictionary for a clearer sense of what “wink” might mean, we see that Genius advocates something more complicated than directly mis-looking: “v. 1. (a) to close one’s eyes, have the eyes closed; (b) to shut one eye, esp. in taking aim. 2. (a) to sleep, doze; nod with sleepiness.”167 Compare these additional meanings gathered from the Oxford

English Dictionary specifically pertaining to the usage of “wink” as a verb in Middle

English: “ME 2 v.i. Give a significant glance, as of command, assent, invitation, collusion, etc. . . .5 v.i. Have the eyes closed in sleep . . .LME 6 v.i. Avoid acknowledging or noticing something faulty, wrong, or improper.”168 Both etymological sources show

“winke” to be a directly agentive action, not an incidental act of sight. Moreover, the

OED’s definitions point toward an action tinged with vicious impulse or desire, whether

166 For a complete examination of voyeurism and the transgressive gaze, see A. C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Spearing argues that voyeurism and secrecy work along the same lines of erotic pleasure as well as along a Freudian model of desire. Spearing emphasizes the erotic in terms of secrecy: “More important, perhaps, is the value attached to secrecy itself in a world where privacy was difficult to achieve. Secrecy may be seen specifically as a means of heightening erotic pleasure” (20). I position my argument on secrecy in this project away from a sexual or eroticized space and towards an internal volitive and strategic space in which self-preservation, not pleasure, is the fundamental impulse. 167 Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “Winke.” 168 The New Oxford Shorter English Dictionary, Volume 2 N-Z, edited by Lesley Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), s.v. “wink.” 109 willfully aiming a gaze with one eye intently focused on the object or avoiding the sense of improper gazing. Genius’s pastoral guidance, then, advocates a kind of strategically secret gaze, a volitive mis-looking, that compromises his pastoral power to effectively shrive Amans as well as revealing his first nature as the dualistic figuration of both good and evil.169

The exempla offer essential clues to the secretive strategies Genius works with because they are miniature composites themselves. While the basic working definition of

“exemplum” allows for multiple interpretive levels similar to allegory, the pastoral definition of “exemplum” traditionally ascribed to exempla limits the boundaries of their scope to a spiritually instructive level (again, similar to allegory).170 Yet, Genius, and

Gower by extension, deliberately returns to secular, classical tales again and again, all the while avoiding sacral, biblical, or exegetical narratives.171 Thus, we see a

169 The Oxford English Dictionary succinctly delineates this duality in Genius in its nominal definition of “genius” specific to the late Middle English usage: “LME b Esp. as good or evil genius. Either of the two mutually opposed spirits or angels supposed to attend each person. Hence a person who or thing which for good or bad powerfully influences another:” New Oxford Shorter Dictionary, A-M, s.v. “Genius.” 170 See G. R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscripts of the Period c. 1350-1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), for a comprehensive discussion of exempla, friars, and especially, sermon manuals. 171 A number of scholars have written on the secularity of the exempla in the Confessio. On the poetics of the exempla, see R. F. Yeager, who makes several key arguments about the exempla in this work, such as his point that Gower’s artistry is enhanced by his modifications of the exempla, especially those classical tales from Ovid, in which he makes “internal transformations” of the tales in order “to render them psychologically and artistically satisfying as stories” (Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic, 157). Mostly, Yeager suggests that Gower’s handling of the exempla is geared to teaching Christian lessons regardless of subject or source text. For a radically different discussion about Gower’s seeming clumsiness or mishandling of the exempla, see J. Allan Mitchell, Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004). Mitchell argues that regardless of the poetic or rhetorical flaws in Gower’s application and implications in the exempla, his intention remains steady: vis, that Gower writes the exempla for an “ethical reception” by the reader, “or reading for the moral, [that] requires an improvisatory decision about the applicability of one or more cases to lived experience” (Mitchell, Ethics, 59). Mitchell essentially argues that Gower’s “middle weie” follows the form of the Aristotelian ethical “doctrine of the mean,” through which Gower applies “casuistic ethics” to “the phenomenon of exemplarity” (Ibid, 59). See also Russell A. Peck, “John Gower: Reader, Editor, and Geometrician,” in John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts, edited by Malte Urban (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009): 11-37; here, Peck 110 disproportionate number of exempla from secular antiquity and myth, and pagan leaders’ lives, such as those tales of Nero and of Nectanabus in Book VI, rather than Christian hagiographies or those exempla readily found in the Old Testament.172 However, the earlier uses of the biblical verses fall in significant parts of the poetic structure and in

Amans’ confession. One such instance is “Nebuchadnezzar’s Vainglorious Punishment” coming second to last of the exempla in Book I just as Genius begins a discursive journey in which he emphasizes the strategic uses of secrecy in the following tale, “The Tale of

Three Questions,” and in which Gower punctuates the confession with Latin verses laden with modalities of secrecy and hidden things that need penetration. The Latin verse immediately following Nebuchadnezzar’s tale is remarkably ambiguous, seeming at once both to extract God’s law from love’s law and to exalt love’s law as attainable only by the humble:

Est virtus humilis, per quam deus altus ad yma

Se tulit et nostre viscera carnis habet.

Sic humilis superest, et amor sibi subditur omnis,

Cuius habet nulla sorte superbus opem:

Odit eum terra, celum deiecit et ipsum,

Sedibus inferni statque receptus ibi. (I.xii.1-6)

suggests that the Confessio is “essentially an exercise in the phenomenology of reading as cultural therapy – a book written for our (the readers’) sake, particularly in Gower’s encyclopedic use of exempla (Ibid, 18). 172 There are only fifteen exempla directly from Biblical verse in the whole poem. Interestingly, the bulk of these (eleven) come toward the end of Book VII, on the Education of the King, in Genius’ instruction on Pity. However, the earlier instances of Biblical verse fall in significant parts of the poetic structure and in Amans’ confession, such as at the turn in Book V on the Sacrilegiousness of Lovers when Amans declares he will continue to sin in this way: “’Such Sacrilege I holde a grace./ And thus, mi fader, soth to seie,/ In cherche riht as in the weie,/ If I mihte oght of love take,’” (V.7156-7159). 111

[It is a humble power by which high God carried himself to the depths,

and held to Himself the inner most part of our flesh.

Thus the Humble remains, and Love subjects all to herself,

of whom none has Fortune’s higher help:

Earth hates him, and Heaven prostrates itself,

and Hell’s thrones withdraw from where he stands.]173

This verse is not only remarkably ambiguous, but it is nearly impenetrable as a commentary turning the narrative from pride and vainglory to wisdom through careful inquiry. My own reading of this verse differs significantly from other translations in that some of the words in the nominative case can also be adjectival (e. g. - “humilis” and

“virtus”), and it is difficult to discern what is the subject and what is the object when both are implied rather than overtly supplied. In this way, Gower requires his reader to actively work at uncovering hidden meanings and penetrating subjective inferences. This works as a diversion of sorts from Genius’ intention to teach humility and turn from pride because we have a commentary that blends the concepts and seems to place Love’s and

Fortune’s help as higher powers than God’s empowerment of the Humble; in this verse, if

God holds the flesh, then who holds Man’s soul, heart, and mind? This verse suggests that the Humble hold these unseen, hidden parts of Man, in which case, Genius’ counsel following the tale of wisdom (“The Tale of Three Questions”) becomes a strange advocacy for the power to embrace the hidden desires driven by Love and Fortune under the guise of Humility and for the sublimation of the external actions of the flesh under the

173 Translation mine. 112 aegis of Pride. This counsel feels unsettled with tones of ambiguity, just as the preceding

Latin verse does as Genius preaches:

‘Where every vertu schal be weyved

And every vice be received.

Bot Humblesce is al otherwise,

Which most is worth, and no reprise

It takth ayein, bot softe and faire,

If eny thing stond in contraire,

With humble speche it is redresced.’ (I.3411-3417)

Herein, we begin to see how Genius’ didactic and confessional strategies are infused by secretiveness. His tales are predominately exempla without Christianized morals although he applies them to vicious instruction. The vices he purports to teach, caution against, and uncover in Amans are modified by diversions back to the five senses, in the dialectic and in the tales, rather than by relativity to actions based on will, desire, and affect. To understand Genius’ teaching and shrift in every case requires careful uncovering, discovering, and penetration much in the same way a confessor examines a penitent; but Gower told us to expect this very dynamic in the first Latin verse cited above in which the narrator figure (possibly Amans, but not absolutely so) reveals fear at the moment of inquiry into secrets of the heart. Yet, given the nature of the pastoral guides informing the later sections of Book VI, it should not be surprising that the exempla get progressively more esoteric in nature, more infused with cautions about privitée and considerations of prophetic knowledge against the sapiential writings of

113 antiquity until Book VII, in which a catalogue of Man’s concrete knowledge is laid forth instructively.

Furthermore, the exempla further move away from cautions against mis-seeing and mis-hearing that pepper Books I and II and against mis-understanding love predominant in Book III to more subtle behavioral warnings against mis-imagining in

Book IV, mis-valuing in Book V, mis-believing and mis-learning in Book VI, and ultimately, against mis-desiring that we see so infused throughout Book VIII in “The Tale of Apollonius of Tyre.”174 The movement of the exempla toward more discrete sins of the heart such as those inculcated by mis-desiring also aligns with the increased degree of esoteric teachings and lessons to be extracted from the exempla. Privitée itself implies a mis-desire to understand secrets that should remain uncovered. The etymology of privitée diverges in the late Middle Ages from secrecy in that the former implies a level of privacy without a sense of potential audience; in other words, things held privately do not enter a liminal space in which a decision must be made to conceal or reveal as do those things held secretly.175 Privitée, then, functions apart from acts of will or desire to wield and manipulate private knowledge or esoterica in strategic ways within a confessional model. Secrecy relies on strategic maneuvering that is based on the interrelations of desire, will, and affect. This subtle distinction is not trivial in the Confessio,

174 What I suggest here by the cautions against a catalog of “mis” behaviors throughout the entire Confessio including the Prologue and Epilogue is that the seeming mis-alignments of the tales or exempla with the sin they purport to illustrate to Amans in order that he can analogize the behaviors within the exempla with his own behaviors. Rarely do the exempla offer an obvious correlative between the sin under inquiry and the actions within the exemplum. Rather, Genius offers cautionary tales that probe the realm of will, desire, and affect that precede the choice to act more than the resultant action itself. Underlying all the exempla, then, is this amalgamation or blending of desire, will, and affect even though the exempla are not overtly “about” this internal triangulation. 175 See the Introduction, Chapter 1, for a more detailed discussion on the etymologies of “secrecy” and of “privitée.” 114 however, because the triangulation of desire, will, and affect drive the subjectivities of

Amans and of Genius. Frank Kermode describes a hermeneutical model that serves well to understand the nuanced difference between secrecy and privitée specifically in terms of the exempla and the way Gower shifts Genius’ subjectivity in the latter part of Book

VI into Book VII from confessor figure to didactic counselor for the English monarchy.

Kermode notes how parables and exempla require interpretive mediation by the narrator of the tale through a Midrashic process that enables the interpreter to bridge “the gap between an original and a modern audience.”176 More pertinent to Genius as interpreter,

Kermode offers that “the word [midrash] derives from dārash, to probe or examine; however, the work is done, whether by fictive augmentation and change or by commentary, its object is to penetrate the surface and reveal a secret sense; to show what is concealed in what is proclaimed.”177 The idea of Midrash is poignant in the shift of

Genius’ subjectivity and the shift in exempla tone to the private and the esoteric because it pertains to the Hebraic tradition of exegetical instruction by which the esoteric is revealed from a spoken, orally transmitted form to a written, translated text; once fixed, the esoteric loses its mystical power and moves into a kind of merged secret – knowledge infused and influenced by the apparatus of hermeneutics.178

176 Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), x. 177 Kermode, Genesis of Secrecy, x. 178 For a thorough discussion of esotericism and the particulars of the Midrash, see Moshe Halbertal, Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Though and its Philosophical Implications, translated by Jackie Feldman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). For a useful discussion about the distinction between desire and will as it relates to privacy versus secrecy, see James A. Diamond, Converts, Heretics, and Lepers: Maimonides and the Outsider (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). See also Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, translated by M. Friedländer (London: Routledge, 1928). 115

Consider how Gower structures the trajectory of Genius’ teachings against his inquiries into Amans’ sins. For example, in Book II regarding the vice of Envy, Gower conflates pagan and Christian ideals in “The Tale of Constance.” Particularly at the end of this tale, Genius reminds Amans that mis-belief causes the events of the tale to unfold as they do; Constance is lost through her husband’s heretical beliefs and found through the remedy of Christian faith: “’Which ferst was sent of goddes sonde,/ Whan sche was drive upon the Stronde,/ Be whom the misbelieve of Sinne/ Was left, and Cristes feith cam inne/ To hem that whilom were blinde’” (II.1567-1571). The infusion of Christian faith here seems to confirm an orthodox impulse at the end of this tale that is particularly cloaked in ecclesiastical discourse and piety. Yet, Constance’s death is narrated sparingly over four lines (out of a fifteen-hundred line exemplum) and with an unusual turn; against expectations, Constance does not enter heaven, but is taken by fairies instead. Perhaps even more jarring is that God ordains this abduction: “’And afterward the yer suiende/ The god hath mad of hire an ende,/ And fro this worldes faierie/ Hath take hire into compaignie’” (II.1591-1594). This strange blending of Christian and pagan influences is only one of several instances where Genius’ narration of the exemplum at hand somehow stretches either the Christian into the pagan or vice-versa. By punctuating

Books II through V with such disparate conflations, Gower begins to lay the foundations for the culmination of heterodox and orthodox amalgamations that we have at the end of

Book VI leading to the essential “pastoral” instruction of Book VII, the Education of the

King.

116

As Gower works through the vices, he increasingly gives Genius more room to narrate and sermonize, moving him from a position of either confessor or inquisitor to an auditor and ultimately, to a confessant himself at the end of Book VI. Although this book begins with Genius confessing Amans about Gluttony, the relationship between the two subjects changes dramatically following the sections of the Drunkenness of Lovers and on the Delicacy of Lovers. After Genius introduces these sins or “conditions,” Amans begins a two-hundred line discursion on how these sins shape his love and of his true reluctance to accept them as being vicious for each condition. He declares a particular appetite for feeding these forms of gluttony to which Genius responds with a rather empathetic consolation:

‘Lo, thus togedre of felaschipe

Delicacie and drunkeschipe,

Wherof reson stant out of herre,

Have mad full many a wisman erre

In loves cause most of alle.’ (VI.1235-1239)

Genius, too, is a “wiseman” who serves love’s cause, but he is also a clerk, a priest of

Venus, whose knowledge certainly goes beyond satiety. His discussion on Sorcery and

Witchcraft begins the showy catalogue of knowledge that emphasizes necromancy, divination, and pagan crafts. Genius identifies a generic pronominal figuration, “He,” to whom Genius ascribes desire and will for each point of sorcery. The metrical pace in this section of the poem picks up speed and moves into repetitive constructions and an intense feminine rhyme scheme. Of note, as well, is that the sequence of the catalogue follows

117 almost exactly the sequence of questioning that Bernard Gui writes in the Practica

Inquisitionis heretice pravitatis179. The first (and only) point of shriving that Genius makes towards Amans following his discourse on Sorcery and Witchcraft is directly related to this inquisitorial question from Bernard Gui’s manual relating to sorcery and divination: “[Re:] Sortilegus aut divinator aut demonum invocator interrogetur. . . item, a quibus talia didicit vel audivit” [[Re:] sorcerers or diviners or invokers of demons he should ask. . . also, from whom did he learn of such kind or did he hear];180 Genius tells

Amans, “’Mi Sone, if thou of such a lore/ Hast ben er this, I red thee leve’” (VI.1358-

1359). Amans replies much as a heretical figure would reply, as we see written through

Inquisitorial trial transcripts from Bernard Gui and from Le Registre d’Inquisition de

Jacques Fournier specifically in relation to the Cathar Perfecti.181 Amans simply denies knowledge of anything that Genius just exhaustively enunciated and replies:

‘Min holi fader, be youre leve

Of al that ye have spoken hiere

179 Sorcery and divination were of particular concern to the Church and trial transcripts of suspected sorcerers deemed heretics abound in Dominican pastoral handbooks, such as were found in the Corpus Christi College Library at Cambridge and in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, as well as in the various monasteries and friaries throughout England and the Continent. For specific inquisitions against sorcery, see Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, Heresies in the High Middle Ages, and also Thomas de Chobham, Summa Confessorum. See especially Henry Angsar Kelly, “English Kings and the Fear of Sorcery,” in Inquisitions and Other Trial Procedures in the Medieval West (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2001), 206-238. 180 Bernard Gui, Manuel de l’Inquisiteur, édité et traduit par G. Mollat, avec la collaboration de G. Drioux (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2007), 20 &24. 181 See Bernard Gui, Manuel de l’Inquisiteur and Jean Duvernoy’s editions of Le Registre d’Inquisition de Jacques Fournier (Évêque de Pamiers) 1318-1325, traduit et annoté par Jean Duvernoy, Tomes 1, 2, 3 (Paris : Mouton Editeur, 1978), for heretical trial transcriptions. See also Karen Sullivan, Truth and the Heretic and “Disputations, Literary and Inquisitorial: The Conversion of the Heretic Sicart of Figueiras," Medium Ævum 73.1 (2009): 58-79, for more a detailed discussion on heretics and inquisition. See James B. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, & Resistance in Languedoc (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), for a thorough treatment of Languedocian inquisition and inquisitorial methods. 118

Which toucheth unto this matiere,

To telle soth riht as I wene,

I wot noght o word what ye mene.

I wol noght seie, if that I couthe,’182 (VI.1360-1365)

Just as heretics would hold their beliefs or their knowledge secret from their inquisitor, so, too, Amans “confesses” that he does not know one word of what Genius means, and even if he could tell Genius that he knows of, understands, or even practices sorcery, witchcraft, or divination, he “wol nought seie.” Bernard Gui affirms this kind of dissembling, concealing response in his caution to inquisitors, cautioning inquisitors to anticipate “falsity, cunning, and malice” from which the heretic (or subject under inquiry) is “rendered more crafty.”183 Gui’s instructions in his preface illustrate the potential of both inquisitor and deponent to use Scripture strategically to manipulate the other into affirming or disavowing guilt, much as Amans has done in this passage:

“Notandum autem quod, si aliquis contra fidem aperte et manifeste

disputaret, rationes et auctoritates quibus consueverunt inniti heretici

inducendo, talis faciliter per fideles Ecclesie litteratos convinceretur

hereticus, cum eo ipso jam hereticus censeretur quo errorem defendere

niteretur. Set quia moderni heretici querunt et nituntur latenter palliare

errores suos magis quam aperte fateri, ideo viri litterati per scientiam

Scripturarum non possunt eos convincere, quia per fallacias verborum et

per excogitatas astutias dilabuntur; et ideo potius confunduntur ab eis viri

182 Emphasis mine. 183 Bernard Gui, Manuel de l’Inquisiteur, 6. 119

litterati, et ipsi heretici gloriantes per hoc amplius roborantur, videntes

quod viris litteratis ita illudunt quod de manibus eorum per suas vulpinas,

versutias, et tortuosas responsionum ambages callide celabuntur.”184

[It should also be noted that if anyone should contend against the faith

openly and manifestly, bringing forth the reasons and the authorities on

whom heretics rely, such a person might easily be convicted of heresy by

faithful, learned ecclesiasts, because one may already be judged of heresy

by the very fact that he strives to defend error. But because present-day

heretics seek and secretly endeavor to cloak their great errors rather than

confess them openly, it is not possible therefore even for learned men with

Scriptural knowledge to convict them, because through verbal tricks and

through cunning contrivances, they will escape. Thus learned men are

rather confounded by them, and therein heretics, boasting of this, are more

strengthened by seeing that through the fox-like, subtle, and tortuous

twisting of their replies, they may cunningly conceal their responses.]185

In the passage noted above from Genius’ inquiry of Amans, Amans displays the kind of

“verbal trickery” and “contrived subtleties” to which Gui refers here as he feigns ignorance and then invokes silence on the subject. Interestingly, even though Genius is not one of the orthodox “learned sons of the Church,” Gower consigns him to mimetic subjectivity as if he were one when Amans strives to defend himself from the “error” of

184 Bernard Gui, Manuel de l’Inquisiteur, 4-6, citing the Practica Inquisitionis heretice pravitatis, auctore Bernardo Guidonis O. F. P. (Paris: C. Douais, 1886). 185 Translation mine. 120 sorcery. Quickly though, Genius’ subjectivity markedly shifts towards a heterodox position as if the burden of an orthodox role were too awkward to bear. In response,

Amans is thrown into a confusion similar to those of “learned men” tricked by heretics.

The resulting inversion of subject roles further complicates Genius’ true nature as an orthodox figuration as we see in the lines following Aman’s deflections, so that Genius performs as if he were the suspect heretic with “sly cunning” and “tortuous ambiguity” in his immediate responses to Amans. The intensity of the exchange between them climaxes in a self-reflexive list in which Genius lists the very things he himself originates:

‘He makth ymage, he makth sculpture,

He makth writinge, he makth figure,

He makth his calculacions,

He makth his demonstracions;

His houres of Astronomie

He kepeth as for that partie

Which longeth to thinspeccion

Of love and his affeccion;

He wolde into the helle seche

The devel himselve to beseche,

If that he wiste forto spede,

To gete of love his lusti mede.’ (VI.1343-1354)

121

Genius’ list here reflects those things he engenders in others as the Genius “A” figuration delineated by C. S. Lewis and similar to the qualities noted in Jean de Meun’s Le Roman de la Rose in which Genius serves as Nature’s Confessor.186 Yet, in the frantic lines of this section, we see Genius’ own “lusti mede” to attain knowledge against natural law in contrast to Amans’ desire to get love against “kynde.” The emphasis on misplaced desire underpins Gluttony and carries forth from the previous realms of mis-looking and mis- hearing I argued earlier. I would argue that these final sections of Book VI offer an excellent glimpse into Gower’s multiple foci; they are seemingly far afield from exempla or instruction regarding Gluttony as well as being the center of an incredibly long portion of the poem in which Amans is conspicuously quiet, or one might even argue, absent. To what end, then, would Gower have Genius hold center stage in a lengthy discourse on necromancy, temptation, and privitée?

Looking at Genius’ instruction to Amans outside of the tales at the end of Book

VI brings several seemingly ambiguous and problematic pieces of the Confessio towards a clearer resolution. Here, I believe, the threads Gower has been pulling out and letting dangle awkwardly apart from the narrative of the poem begin to knit together. Instead of a tidy narrative about a lover being shriven by a priest, however, Gower infuses a much more synthetic blending, creating interfusion at nearly every turn of the poem.

Underlying the whole structure, though, is the notion of privitée or secrecy. At this point in the Confessio at the end of Book VI, Gower brings together all of Genius’ previous

186 See C. S. Lewis, “Genius and Genius,” in which he qualifies Genius A as being exclusively generative. See also Le Roman de la Rose, particularly sections 79-94 (ll.16249-20682) on Nature’s confession to and discourse with Genius and his ensuing sermon to Love’s barons: Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, traduction par Armand Strubel (Paris: Lettres Gothiques, 1992). 122 instructions and lessons from the exempla in terms of misunderstanding and misuse of the senses and extends it out of the particulars of poetic character, form, and mode towards his education of the king that comes to fruition in Book VII. Gower blends kingship with society and politics with secular spiritual instruction by building towards the climactic turn from the heretical misplaced desire for secrets and all they entail to

Genius’ recounting of the Secreta Secretorum, a widely heralded model for instruction.

Combining wildly disparate models so tightly in a confined space of several hundred poetic lines and placing them in the mouth of a composite pastor/ tempter figuration truly expands the Confessio out of a solely framed-narrative dream-vision poem and into a mirror for princes, a conduct manual, a secular moral guide, and a kind of penitential manual of sorts itself.187

Turning to the point by point examination that follows the guide of the penitential manuals that begins the confession of Book VI, we see Genius turning the discourse of the poem from Amans’ potential vicious transgressions towards a more suggestive mode of exciting potential desire. While Gluttony is the over-arching category of sin, Genius brings Amans to the idea of delicacy and metaphorizes love’s desires and satiations with the sensual joys of food and consumption. Here, we see the idea of mis-seeing and mis- desiring beginning to conflate into a union of will, affect, and desire, which in turn, leads to Amans’ emphatic dissemblance and purposeful diversion from revelation into secrecy.

In an exchange directly inverse of their previous ones, Amans and Genius switch roles, in

187 The idea of what I call here “secular morality” is similar to what J. Allan Mitchell calls “vernacular ethics:” J. Allan Mitchell, Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004). 123 a fashion, when Amans goes into a lengthy discourse of instruction on the sin of delicacy in which he chronicles each memory of his senses in consuming his love’s indulgence for his would-be lover. Amans inter-relates each sense with its impression on his heart and each of his lover’s physical features back to his specific consumption of it. His repetitive strains of “lusti fode” and “loves fode” spanning two hundred or so lines is encapsulated here, prefaced by a Latin marginal comment (“Qualiter cogitatus impressiones leticie ymaginatiuas cordibus inserit amantum” [How impressions from thoughts sow imaginations of pleasure in the hearts of lovers]:188

‘This lusti cokes name is hote

Thoght, which hath evere hise pottes hote

Of love buillende on the fyr

With fantasie and with desir,

Of whiche er this fulofte he fedde

Min herte, whanne I was abedde;

And thanne he set upon my bord

Bothe every syhte and every word

Of lust, which I have herd or sein.’ (VI.913-921)

Of course, this is metaphorical consumption and gluttony, desire driving every word that culminates in a frenzied admission of his transgressive lust through thought, hearing, and seeing. His confession here is one of the few times he actually acknowledges that he understands the sin at hand or admits that he has committed it. After two-hundred lines

188 VI, marginal commentary, Macaulay, Confessio Amantis, 192. Translation mine. 124 of recounting, delineating, and affectively performing the particulars of his gluttonous lust, he admits his sin is based in desire, but he tries to qualify his guilt by denying the physical consummation of his desires. He reveals to Genius:

‘Lo suche ben mi lustes thre;

Of that I thenke and hiere and se

I take of love my fiedinge

Withoute tastinge or fielinge:

And as the plover doth of Eir

I live, and am in good espeir

That of no such delicacie

I trowe I do no glotonie.’ (VI.939-946)

Even though Amans attempts to distance himself from physically acting on his desires,

Genius reminds him that the sin of delicacy is a sin of the soul, not of the flesh. After recounting two tales of men who fall through mis-governance of their appetites, the “Tale of Dives and Lazarus” and “Nero’s Sensuality,” Genius counsels Amans that the moral to be gleaned from these tales and the way to avoid the sin of delicacy and drunkenness is to turn from a course of peril and instead, conquer fear. This is an odd pastoral moment because Genius turns the confession to an instruction apparently meant to caution against sorcery and witchcraft, but in effect, he does the opposite; he offers sorcery and the quest for privitée as media for conquering fear and in turn, for realizing carnal desires. The marginal gloss at line 1267 in the beginning of Genius’ discussion on Sorcery reveals the bent of Genius’ instruction: “Hic tractat qualiter Ebrietas et Delicacia omnis pudicicie

125 contrarium instigantes inter alia ad carnalis concupiscencie promocionem Sortilegio magicam requirunt. [Here he discusses how Drunkenness and Delicacy, inciting against all virtuousness, among other things to seek out carnal desire through magic by the promotion of Sorcerers.]”189 If Genius really intends to show Amans that Delicacy is sinful regardless thought or deed, then why does he begin to instruct Amans on the particulars of Sorcery since, as the marginal note suggest, sorcery leads to the advancement of carnal lust? I suggest the answer lies in a new way of understanding

Genius that allows for a blending of confessor and tempter as I discussed above; further, we ought to consider that Gower invests Genius with multiple facets not only of intention, but of technologies of secrecy as well. For as soon as Genius enters the discourse on Sorcery, he moves from confessor to tempter to inquisitor to teacher of secrets, prophecies, and portents, all the while being constructed as a mimetic figuration of Aristotle imparting the Secreta Secretorum to Alexander, which Gower interlaces with the “Tale of Nectanabus.”

Further, we see Genius taking on even more ambiguity as he becomes the transmitter of the lessons of the ultimate teacher to his most important student – Aristotle to Alexander. This is a strange modality of translatio studii and translatio imperii as well as an outward extension to Richard (or to Henry190) as a cautionary instruction. In other

189 VI, marginal commentary, Macaulay, Confessio Amantis, 201. Translation mine. 190 For the purposes of this project, I follow Macaulay’s very thorough discussion and conclusion regarding the poem’s dedicatory, dating, and recension debate in his introduction to the Confessio in which he defers proclaiming the poem as either pro-Ricardian or pro-Henrician. Interestingly, Macaulay challenges the critical charge against Gower as being “timid” and “obsequious” in vacillating between dedicating the poem to Richard II or to Henry IV and ascribing those manuscripts with the Ricardian dedication as meant for public circulation and the manuscript with the Henrician dedication as a private “presentation” copy for Henry himself. Macaulay writes, “The author [Gower] probably did not feel called upon publicly to affront 126 words, what Genius conveys to Amans, so he conveys to England’s king, yet thoroughly cloaked behind the removals of a retelling of the Secreta Secretorum that is stripped to an exemplum against appetite. Remember, though, that the figuration and the form of inquiry change to mimic almost identically, the language of inquisition from Bernard Gui and from Jacques Duvernoy in the section on Sorcery and Witchcraft. The Latin verse iii introducing the topic in Book VI displays the markers of heretical inquisition as well with strains of removing fear and suggesting “sinister” things that ought not be tempted or attempted:

Dum stimulatur amor, quicquid iubet orta voluptas,

Audet et aggreditur, nulla timenda timens.

Omne quod astra queunt herbarum siue potestas,

Seu vigor inferni, singula temptat amans.

Quod nequit ipse deo mediante parare sinistrum,

Demonis hoc magica credulus arte parat.

Sic sibi non curat ad opus que recia tendit,

Dummodo nudatum prendere possit auem. (VI.iii.1-8)

the king [Richard] by removing his name and praises, either at the beginning of the end, from the copies generally issued during his reign. Whether or not this conduct justifies the charge of time-serving timidity, which has been made against Gower, I cannot undertake to decide. He was, however, in fact rather of an opposite character, even pedantically stiff in passing judgement [sic] severely on those in high places, and not bating a syllable of what he thought proper for himself to say or for a king to hear, though while the king was young and might yet shake himself free from evil influences he was willing to take as favourable a view of his character as possible. Probably he was for some time rather in two minds about the matter, but in any case ‘timid and obsequious’ are hardly the right epithets for the author of the Vox Clamantis:” Macaulay, Confessio Amantis, xxvi. Although I would go so far as to argue that Gower blends disparate positions in his dedicatory prologues and epilogue as he does throughout the entire poem, I believe for the limited scope of this project, a more thorough discussion of the recension debate is prohibitive. 127

[While Love is incited, whoever she commands, proceeds from sensual

pleasures; she dares, and approaching her, none fear fearing.

All manner of stars and plants can enable power,

if the force of hell excites the lover.

He who is unable to equalize this power, divides himself from the left

hand of God; he designs through demonic magic a credible skill.

If he cannot manage the work himself, he spreads out nets until he is able

to catch the naked bird.]191

This entire verse is infused with markings of heresy from the idea of conjuring demonic magic to the use of hellish forces to control nature to the lover dividing himself from

God. Moreover, the trope of setting a net to catch a “naked bird” is one used by Bernard

Gui in his Inquisitorial manual and is used again frequently in inquisitorial discourse up through the Wycliffite trials.192 Gower has cunningly placed all these heretical markers in this verse, not only for the overt purpose of “flagging” the section on Sorcery and

Witchcraft immediately to follow as one dealing with heresy, but also to set Genius’ subjectivity in motion; he is in what Slavoj Žižek calls an “empty place correlative to antagonism.”193 In other words, Genius is in a liminal space between pastor and heretic at the point in the Confessio where Gower sets the poem itself into the same kind of

191 Translation mine. 192 Henry Angsar Kelly cites several inquisitorial transcripts, procedurals, and decretals in which the trope of a snared bird is used in various ways. The general metaphor refers to hunting birds in their “muwe,” which is also used as a word for a private space or secrecy (see Chapter 4 on Chaucer and his use of “muwe”). Inquisitors associated birds with the devil, believing he had the power to shape-shift into several animals, most often birds (Kelly, Inquisitions and Other Trial Procedures in the Medieval West). 193 Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005), 259. 128 motion moving from a poetic narrative with a confessional, dream-vision framework towards a mirror for princes and remedial call for healing a dystopian England.

However, the end of Book VI shifts Genius back again to his first role, that of

Venus’s servant, but only after Amans presses him to teach what the “secrets” of the

Secreta Secretorum were. Amans clearly has mis-heard or willfully ignored Genius’ warnings about seeking knowledge, and consequently gaining love, through necromancy as he says to Genius:

‘Bot this I wolde you beseche,

Beside that me stant of love,

As I you herde speke above

Hou Alisandre was betawht

To Aristotle, and so wel tawht

Of al that to a king belongeth,

Wherof min herte sore longeth

To wite what it wolde mene.’ (VI.2408-2415)

Here, Amans’ desires have been exchanged from sensuous desires for his lover to gluttonous desire for privitée that appear be the exclusive realm of Genius as a cleric in this confession. This knowledge, though, would speak to Genius’ heretical nature in spite of his attempt to quickly turn Amans away from seeking to learn “thinges strange” from him. Similar to the heretics and the Cathar Pefecti who deny any knowledge or discussion of beliefs, Genius tells Amans, “’Bot touchende of so hih aprise,/ Which is noght unto Venus knowe,/ I mai it noght miselve knowe,/ Which of hir court am al

129 forthdrawe/ And can nothing bot of hir lawe’” (VI.2424-2428). This denial of knowledge is modified to an exculpatory move as he attempts to limit his aucorité and divert it back to authors past as Genius says a few lines later at the conclusion of Book VI, “’For thogh

I be noght al cunnynge/ Upon the forme of this wrytnge,/ Som part therof yit have I herd,/

In this matiere hou it hath ferd’” (VI.2437-2440). Gower allows Genius to be insistently secretive, moving from subjectivity to subjectivity and from heretical impulse to authoritative denial as we see so clearly in Book VI.

However, Gower does not limit Genius’ models to a particular heretical sect or belief, but rather, he conflates them into a general heterodox discourse. In this way, he constructs a penultimate heretical amalgamation that Amans cannot recognize nor can

Genius condemn. Because both Amans and Genius serve as sites of secrecy themselves,

Amans as dissembling confessant and Genius as fictive confessor, neither falls within the realm of orthodoxy, but along the lines of heretics instead. By nature, heretics are always already secret; they cannot be “known” if they are to remain devoted to their heretical beliefs or they risk persecution. Similarly, once one is revealed to be a heretic, he is no longer a “secret” figuration and vulnerable to removal from the community (either through imprisonment or banishment). Thus, any impulse or willful action towards heterodoxy suggests a deliberate strategy to remain outside orthodoxy and to subvert prescribed subjectivities. Genius reveals a strategic secret about his slipperiness as a

“sincere” confessor to Amans coming off the cautionary exemplum, “The Tale of

Apollonius of Tyre.” The sheer length of this tale along with the repetitive strain of the dangers of loving against kynde lulls the reader and Amans into a complacent belief that

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Genius is truly wise and pious. After all, Genius leads into the tale by cautioning Amans against lusting after love and against mis-loving and mis-desiring: “’Bot forto loke of time go,/ Hou lust of love excedeth lawe,/ It oghte forto be withdrawe’” (VIII.262-264).

Yet, following the tale, Genius recognizes that Amans hasn’t learned Love’s lessons correctly because Amans insistently acts with will and desire, not with reason. Genius says to him, “’For I can do to thee nomore/ Bot teche thee the rihte weie:/ Now ches if thou wolt live or deie,’” which clearly shows there is no middle way in Genius’, or by extension Venus’, “lust or lore”/ desire or teaching (VIII.2147-2149). Genius calls

Amans to task for his insistent desire to love:

‘Thou art toward thiself unwis.

And sett thou myhtest lust atteigne,

Of every lust thende is a peine,

And every peine is good to fle;

So it is a wonder thing to se,

Why such a thing schal be desired.’ (VIII.2094-2099)

While these lines might seem to be a concluding emphasis of “The Tale of Apollonius of

Tyre,” they follow immediately upon Genius’ own quasi-confession about his true intent towards his task to shrive Amans. When Amans implores Genius to counsel him and especially after he reiterates fear as his driving force, pleading, “’Bot that is al my moste fere./ I not what ye fortune acompte’” (VIII.2040-2041), Genius strangely removes any hint of pastoral integrity and instead counsels a form of strategic secrecy – slyness:

‘Mi Sone, unto the trouthe wende

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Now wol I for the love of thee,

And lete alle othre truffles be.

The more that the nede is hyh,

The more it nedeth to be slyh194

To him which hath the nede on honde.’ (VIII.2060-2065)

Ten lines later, though, the truth about Genius as a faitour is revealed; he admits to speaking only the words his role as a priest required. His subject position as a pastor is merely performative and following scripted and conscripted forms. In essence, we see here that Genius is not only heterodox, but heretical as well. He says:

‘For I behihte thee that yifte195

Ferst whan thou come under my schrifte,

That thogh I toward Venus were,

Yit spak I suche wordes there,

That for the Presthod which I have,

Min ordre and min astat to save,

I seide I wolde of myn office

To vertu more than to vice

Encline, and teche thee mi lore.

Forthi to speken overmore

Of love, which thee mai availe,

Tak love where it mai noght faile.’ (VIII.2075-2086)

194 Emphasis mine. 195 I.e. – Genius’ promise to counsel Amans per his need. 132

Genius might appear to be offering good counsel here, but these lines point toward a constructed performance rather than confirming a sincere pastorality. The rhetorical

“thogh” and “yit,” functioning much like a Latinate construction of “if/then,” indicate duplicity between his allegiance to Venus and his promise to Amans. He speaks “suche words” that come from his priestly role, yet the word “such” modifies the integrity of these words and casts instability on the veracity of pastoral intent or of the words themselves. Further, “suche words” not only recalls Amans’ admitted fear about letting

Genius penetrate “to the cavern of his heart” to dig out the “words privy to [his] thoughts” noted earlier about the anticipated affect of Genius’ probative methods for the confession, but the manipulative strategies Bernard Gui advocates that inquisitors deploy to “ensnare” those who have strayed from “the purity of the faith.” Of significant note,

Gui sets out a similar analogy that Gower uses here between rapture-like penetration by the inquisitor and the hidden truths dwelling in an abyss of sorts:

“ . . . set sic freno discretionis hereticalium astutias circumducat ut,

favente Domino, de sentina et abysso errorum obstetriciante manu

educatur coluber tortuosus.”196

[. . . But thus with a bridle of discretion he may enclose the slyness of the

heretic as, through the Lord’s favor, with the hand of an obstetrician, he

may draw forth the twisting serpent from the dregs and abyss of error.]197

Genius’ admission that he is inclined to teach virtue more than vice only because of his

“ordre,” “astat,” and “office” also alludes to his performance lacking volition or desire,

196 Bernard Gui, Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis, 8. 197 Translation mine. 133 whereas “I seide I wolde of myn office” correlates to a desire to save his disguise of his priestly or orthodox order. Finally, Genius’ concluding counsel is problematic in that it can be read either as virtuous advice or as vicious suggestion. In telling Amans to “take love where it may not fail,” Genius might be advocating a safe path that avoids the pain of mis-placed desire doomed to failure. However, given the nature of “The Tale of

Apollonius of Tyre” concluding just a few lines earlier, Genius might be encouraging

Amans to take love forcefully; rapt “love” controlled by a ill-suited lover, counseled clearly to be sly when the need is at hand, may also be fail-safe.

Forging a New Troy

Late twentieth-century medieval scholars take up the idea of a New Troy as a political ideal in Ricardian England as confirmation of the impulse towards London, and by extension, the Court, bearing an urban identity.198 London assumes a kind of subjectivity itself as a site of translatio imperii et studii as well as a quasi-salvific figure.

If only Richard and the nobility could purge corruption and truly heed political criticism and counsel from various arenas including secular texts, then Troynovaunt was a plausible model for social, political, and ideological reform. Or so the scholarship

198 My use of the term “New Troy” herein is built from the scholarship of Sylvia Federico, New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Russell A. Peck, John Gower Confessio Amantis, edited by Russell A. Peck (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003); Marion Turner, Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). I understand New Troy to mean the utopian ideal of reformation and rebirth of the city of London specifically, often championed by Richard II, following the grandeur and greatness of ancient Troy before the Trojan War. The ideals embodied in ancient Troy merge with the progressive ideals evolving from fourteen centuries of Christian doctrine, empirical monarchy (such as that descending from Charlemagne through French rule), and a relatively nascent feeling of Anglo-Norman aristocratic supremacy. 134 implies. From Lee Patterson to David Wallace to Marion Turner, medieval literary scholars reference Gower and Chaucer’s satiric and poetic challenges to the political, the social, and the ecclesiastical order through the lens of New Troy as a model to account for division remedied through a unified vision.199 It seems, however, that such a neat way of looking at literary writers in London fails to take the actual language of these poets into consideration. In either of the dedicatory passages in the Prologue to the

Confessio, it can be tempting to read a call for the kind of political and social translation that a Troynovaunt might offer. In the Henrician dedication, Gower champions English as a locus for linguistic authority, commenting, “And for that fewe men endite/ In oure englissh, I thenke make/ A bok for Engelondes sake” (Prol.22-24), that, in turn, will authorize his book, the Confessio, as a remedial site for England’s woes. In a different vein, the Ricardian dedication of the first recension of the Confessio prioritizes the physical character of London itself as the kind of self-authorizing locale for curing

England’s ills by overtly nominalizing London as New Troy (“Under the toun of newe

Troye”) and invoking Richard as the authority calling for Gower to write a book for

England.200 Yet, in neither dedication does Gower call for envisioning London as a

Troynovaunt invested with the kind of social, political, or cultural identity that infers hegemonic stability or remedial power. To read these dedicatory lines in isolation or

199 See Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), for a discussion of New Troy as a propagandistic model. See David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), for a discussion of the Continental models of New Troy, particularly from Latin models, such as Vergil’s The Aeneid, more so than from Greek models. Wallace usefully differentiates that a model of New Troy served as a “reference point, not an end point” for Richard and for Londoners. See Marion Turner, Chaucerian Conflict, for a discussion of London as Troynovaunt being a “mixed metaphor” for a perfect, fantasized city while also a fragmented, divided city; in other words, London as Troynovaunt is simultaneously both idealistically unified and realistically divided. 200 Prol.37 (1st recension). 135 removed from their contextual nest reduces the entire compilation of the Prologue, and by extension, of the Epilogue, to a grossly simple call for a new civic paradigm as a way to rectify corruption and strife. But this kind of reduction suggests a polarization of either present London or past Troy as the exclusive, hyperbolic model in which Gower situates his poem.201 I believe a more useful lens to view Gower, at any rate, is with the

Foucaultian archaeological model whereby knowledge is uncovered through excavating discourses and reading the way the discursive layers coincide, diverge, or blend.202 Thus, the Confessio does not read as Gower’s attempt either as a translatio studii or as a translatio imperii; rather, the poem’s framework and its recurrent exemplary dips back to antique tales point toward a layered, not a linear, construction. In this way, Gower avoids the whole notion of looking back to Troy to find structure and ideological unity to bring forward to London and to England in the manner his contemporaries might have done in championing London as Troynovaunt.203 In constructing a layered poem, then, Gower allows for a diachronic model, one that is inherently composite in its multiplicities and relational flexibilities. As I argue in this chapter, Gower creates human models to complement his re-envisioning of an amalgamated Troynovaunt through the reforming and continually changing subjectivities of Amans and Genius.

201 In my fourth chapter discussing Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, this idea of simple polarity is even more evident. 202 See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). 203 I use the conditional here because in the absence of specific declarations by Ricardian authors for Troynovaunt, it seems more appropriate to keep a speculative distance from definitive poetic or rhetorical intentions. I agree, however, that it is evident in Chaucer’s case with Troilus and Criseyde especially that he looks back to Troy as a social and political model. I don’t know if we can push this argument further to say Chaucer looked to Troy as a model to remedy corruption and fragmentation in London/ England, in the English people, or in the monarchy. 136

Conclusion

What I am suggesting here is that through Gower’s Confessio with its interfusing insistencies and its conflations of orthodox and heterodox models, we are presented with a new lens by which to read and experience medieval literature. Gower himself provides the framework for multiplicity through his careful exposure and uncovering of strategic secrecy, whether in relation to the internal poetic subjects or to the external realm of

Ricardian England. Past critical approaches seeking to read Gower with a Neo-Platonic lens or to categorize him and the Confessio in particular with a Cartesian model of primacy, fall short and lead to a weak conclusion that Gower is somehow less skillful, more boring, or accidental than are either Chaucer or Langland. However, if we ignore the inclination to categorize, limit, and frame the Confessio with traditional critical lenses

(such as those readily made for formalist, deconstructive, and structuralist theoretical arguments) we open both the Confessio and Gower up to more diverse, enlightening, and creative hermeneutic approaches. Instead of a primarily New Historicist reading of

Gower and late medieval English literature, I would argue that imposing conflated, inclusionary, and flexible lenses by which to read these texts opens up the poetry, the poets, and Ricardian England to a more holistic insight into Gower and the Confessio

Amantis.

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Chapter 3 – Partonope of Blois: Secrecy, Inversion, and Revision

In this chapter, I turn to the early-fifteenth-century English romance, Partonope of

Blois, a translation of the twelfth-century Old French poem, Partonopeu de Blois.204 The antecedent text’s poet and the English text’s translator are anonymous.205 Both the Old

French text and the Middle English version use secrecy and inversion as foundational tropes, and each poet infuses various secret strategies into his text by which he challenges political and religious institutions and suggests social reform. The fifteenth-century poem carries several arguable constructions of heresy or at least, pushes the limits of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, albeit in a purely secular romance genre framework. Unlike

Gower’s Confessio Amantis but similar to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Partonope of

Blois presents a straight narrative style framework using frequent references to the

204 Unless otherwise noted, all citations from the fifteenth-century English version of Partonope of Blois are taken from A. Trampe Bödtker’s edition: The Middle English Versions of Partonope of Blois, edited by A. Trampe Bödtker (London: The Early English Text Society, 1912) ((Unaltered reprint 2002 by Boydell & Brewer Ltd.)) and are noted by line number. The random italicizations and font symbols follow Bödtker’s editorial transcription that he attributes to Furnivall’s first paleographic work, to scribal deviations, and to the multiple manuscripts used to compile a “best-text” edition. I do not examine the twelfth-century French version in this project beyond important points of comparison and by way of introduction to the English poem. However, any citations noted from the French version are taken from Partonopeu de Blois: a French Romance of the Twelfth Century, edited by Joseph Gildea (Villanova, Pennsylvania: Villanova University Press, 1967) and are noted by the abbreviation PdeB followed by line numbers. 205 In a special issue of the journal Mediaevalia, editors Catherine Hanley, Mario Longtin, and Penny Eley note that this Old French romance “was translated into more languages than almost any other romance,” citing known versions in nine Germanic and Indo-European languages of the Middle Ages (xii). For further discussions on the antecedent Old French version and its various adaptations including the notable and somewhat controversial issue concerning the dating of the Old French text, see Mediaevalia, Vol. 25.2, Special Issue (2004). See also the electronic edition: Partonopeus de Blois. An Electronic Edition prepared by Penny Eley, Penny Simons, Mario Longtin, Catherine Hanley, Philip Shaw, University of Sheffield, Online HRL: http://hrionline.ac.uk/partonopeus/. 138 antecedent French text and its auctor. Yet, for all its formal simplicity, this text bursts with conflated ideologies, mutable subjectivities, heterodox confessions, and inversions of typical gender roles, behavioral codes, discourses, and figurations that place it squarely in line with the kind of secretive and affective inquiry that this project seeks to investigate.

In spite of its poetic simplicity, however, this poem was extremely popular in the

Fifteenth Century and its translation into several languages and the evidence of its transmission suggest its popularity hinges on other qualities of poetic value. The poem is imaginative, adventurous, and bold in its characters and plot on a basic level. On a more complicated level, the poem aggressively pushes and challenges social codes and institutional efficacy by stretching the limits of generic conventions to insistently challenge the audience/ reader to engage in reformation of these very codes under scrutiny. The poet either refuses to restore inversions to their expected norms or he holds the inversions in suspense until the poem’s conclusion through clever expansions of the narrator’s discourse that deviate from the antecedent French text. Further, he alters the qualities of stereo- or arche-typical figurations (knight, king, lover, heroine, bishop, mother, Saracen) so that the audience/ reader is forced to redefine social codes and institutional ideologies himself by re-envisioning what these subjectivities should be.

Herein, I propose to look at the various inverted and subverted subjectivities, the way that confessional discourses reveal and challenge these subjectivities, and the affectivity unfolding from the dialectical exchanges within various confessional moments. Further, I consider the way the figural “flowers of chivalry” (i.e. – Partonope,

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Gaudin, Sornegour, and the Sultan) not only blend Christian and heathen beliefs and allegiances, but also inform and shape subjectivity, calling into question the translation and mis-translation of auctoritas. Finally, in tying this chapter firmly to the overarching investigation of secrecy in this project, I intend to demonstrate the ways secrecy upholds and surreptitiously shapes this text whether through the particular secrets held and revealed or through the strategic maneuvers to cover and uncover and thus, to wield and cede power. Essentially, I suggest that these various components -- subjectivity, affectivity, confessional dialectic, figurations, discourse and authority, and strategies of secrecy -- are deliberate poetic maneuvers by which to refocus political and social ideologies and reform personal governance in late medieval England.

The length and episodic nature of this poem limits my investigation of the aforementioned components; these components interfuse with each other and shape each episode of the narrative in varying degrees. Consequently, I will examine the most complex episodes along with narrative and translation disruptions in which all of these components (mutable subjectivity, fear, secrecy, and confessional exchanges) pull the poem out of a stable narrative sequence that follows generic form and rigid subjectivities.

I begin with a discussion of the narrative framework and way the translator deviates from the antecedent French text in order to give the narrator figure a more subjective role in the Middle English poem by enabling a perverse authority in the narrative commentaries.

Throughout the text, the translator maintains an insistent interest in the narrator figure veering from an objective reporting of the tale, similar to Chaucer’s narrator figure in The

Canterbury Tales or in Troilus and Criseyde, although the Partonope narrator engages in

140 frequent exculpatory maneuvers beyond the conventional tropes of oral transmission.

Next, I specifically identify those places and episodes in the text where strategic secrecy, privey spaces and utterances, and confessional discourses bring the poem into a fusion of secular and sacral moments. In these moments particularly, we see the interstitial space opening between concealment and revelation that turns on fear and affect as I discussed in the previous chapter on Gower’s Confessio Amantis. I then consider the way in which the translator deals with necromancy and the marvelous along with the attribution to women of an otherness that is able to enchant, manipulate, and influence the heroic figures – knightly and monarchal. Alongside these ideas of marginality, other- worldliness, and inverted figurations, I examine the ways that the visual (looking/ mis- looking) and will and desire influence the overarching concern with self-governance. I believe these final ideas not only shape the poem beyond a typical romance, but arguably bear on the more intriguing parts of the poem as the bulk of critical arguments written on this poem attest. Secrecy is the primary lens with which I examine these relationships rife with fear, revelation, dissemblance, and confessions, as well as with which I explore the remedial restoration of the love relationships that is commanded by medieval romance conventions.

The Tale: Inversions and Deviations

The poem is a re-telling of the tale of Cupid and Psyche using inverted gender roles, in which the as-yet unknighted hero, Partonope, becomes the unwitting lover of

Melior, who is both a necromancer and the ruler of a large kingdom. Partonope is of

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Trojan lineage and the nephew of the King of France. In an act of youthful impetuosity while boar-hunting with his uncle, Partonope becomes hopelessly lost in the forest while continuing his pursuit of a wild boar even though the evening bell has sounded.

Partonope wanders through the forest on his horse, spending a restless night, until he comes upon an empty ship, fully-decked at the sea’s edge. For want of shelter and from sheer exhaustion, Partonope guides his horse onto the ship and falls into a solid sleep below deck soon after. When he awakes, Partonope finds the ship in full sail on the sea, but devoid of any visible crew or persons. The ship arrives at an unnamed and unmanned port, and Partonope rides his horse off the ship and up through the empty city to a fully-lit castle. The gate is open, yet no one can be seen. Partonope continues into the castle itself and finds a fully-lit hall with a table service and meal already laid-out, and as with the ship and the city, he sees no one. Famished, he partakes of the meal, following which he sees torches beckoning the way to a private sleeping chamber provisioned with a luxurious empty bed. He strips off his garments, climbs into bed in the dark chamber, and falls asleep. He awakes to the sensation of a presence in bed next to him, and he senses that he has been joined by a naked woman, although he cannot see her. Through an unusual scene of love-making, the two figures enact both reluctance and desire.

Afterward, the female figure reveals to Partonope that she is Melior and has arranged everything, from the ship to the bedroom, in order to bring Partonope to be her secret lover. She sets a strict prohibition, though, that he may not attempt to “see” her through

“any crafte,” for she is invisible (currently) and will only reveal herself to him when she chooses. In a typical romance tradition of a rash boon, he agrees to this condition without

142 question, and they live in contentment for some time. Eventually, he returns to France to see his uncle and his mother again, but he promises to return to Melior shortly and pledges his fidelity. Melior seeks a more unusual pledge than his troth, though; she insists as before that he do nothing to enable him to see her against her will, especially warning him not to use engin, “crafte,” or necromancy of any kind; indeed, she cautions him four times on this point, the most stern warning equating an attempt of “mis-looking” with treason, which sets up an odd inversion of service to Love and service to a sovereign: “’And o thyng, my loue, y praye yowe/ That yn no wyse ye ne besy yow howe/ By craffte of nygromansy me to see’” (2423-2425). The suggestion that Partonope might seek necromantic craft should be disturbing to the audience, particularly since these lines follow Melior’s entreaty that while in France if he loves “God and owr lady,” that Partonope must work, “louytħ welle God and holy chyrche,” and not “fayle of hye cheualrye” (2420-2422). These tasks are tall orders for a novice in chivalry, and we come to know Partonope is not knighted yet. The conflations in these few lines along with the inverted gender roles and subjectivities (i.e. - Melior as sovereign over

Partonope, lewd squire commanded to uphold chivalry, and Christian possibly seeking necromantic arts and arcane knowledge) begin to expose the ideological fault-lines in orthodox belief, in chivalry, and in courtly love.

On his return to Chef d’Oire, Melior’s secret city, Partonope carries a magic lantern enabling him to see her that his mother, who is also skilled in necromantic arts, presses upon him to use for his own protection. As with the Cupid and Psyche tale, the transgressive looking with the magic lantern reveals Melior’s great beauty to Partonope;

143 but his actions cause her to lose her magic powers, and Melior reveals her identity, lineage, and learning to him in a confessional act of anger and despair. Remarkably for a woman, she is superlatively educated, learning necromancy along with the seven arts, medicine, and divinity. The Middle English text offers a forty-line confessional discourse from Melior to Partonope in which she reveals how and where she has practiced her magical “crafte,” emphasizing the secret nature of her cunning as she practices it “preuely” in her chamber. The Middle English translator laces the words

“necromancy,” “prively,” “knowledge” and “crafte” throughout these lines, emphasizing again and again the fusion of Melior’s learning/ cunning, secrecy, and covert spaces, although he tempers the darkness of necromancy by removing the words “sorcery” and

“magic” that are found in the antecedent French text. Her initial confession to Partonope encompasses this triadic blend of knowledge, strategic secrecy, and concealment, and she does not reveal any affective response (e.g. - shame, guilt, fear, pride) to her Christian transgressions, although she admits to purposefully working covertly: “’In my chamber often preuely/ I dyde craftes fułł meru[el]osly;/ For oponly I wolde no-þynge done,/ My konynge shulde haue be kydde a-none’” (5936-5939). Notably, though, she only allows two lines for her schooling in divinity, the least amount of dialectic given in her account of her education: “’After þys I lerned Diuinite,/ To knowe þe personys of þe trinite’”

(5928-5929). The vagueness of this admission casts Melior’s figuration into a suspicious light in the Middle English text. Did she seek “to know” the persons of the Trinity to devoutly serve them in an orthodox Christian mode, or did she seek to know the secrets of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in other words, privitée, to serve her own desires?

144

Adding complexity to these questions, the Old French text treats this section of

Melior’s revelatory discourse to Partonope quite differently from the Middle English text.

Melior does acknowledge her education is comprised of the seven liberal arts, medicine, divinity, and necromancy, but her reasons for learning divinity carry a fairly ambitious, yet ambiguous, non-spiritual intention: “’Puis apris de divinité/ Si que j’en seuç a grant plenté/ Et la viés loi et la novele/ Qui tot le sens del mont [chaele]’” [‘Then I learned

Divinity/ And learned a great deal concerning/ the Old Law and the New/ Which direct all the meaning in the world’] (PdeB. 4591-4594).206 Further, Melior’s confession of her knowledge of necromancy, containing repetitions of sorcery and magic arts, appears more confident and ambitious, immediately preceding her rather startling statement that she practices the same craft or “deceit” that Mohammad does for which he is considered a deity:

‘Cil qui tant puet fair d’esfors

Qu’il sace bien a[r]gus et sors

Et fisique et astronomie

Et nigrmance lor aïe, 4604

Tant seroit sages et poissans

Qu’il en feroit mervelles grans.

Par ço fist Mahons les vertus

Dont il fu puis por deus tenus; 4608

Et j’en ai tant fait maintes fois

206 Translation mine. 145

Et mervelles de tels endrois

En mes cambres priveement.

Que se ce fust devant le gent, 4612

Par tot en fust la renomee,

Mais n’en vuel estre decriee.’ (PdeB. 4601-4614)

[‘Whoever strives to

Master spells and sorcery,

Medicinal arts and astronomy,

And the resources of necromancy,

Could be so wise and powerful

That he could accomplish great marvels.

That was how Mohammad accomplished the miracles

That made people consider him a god.

I have done such things many times,

Marvels of precisely this sort,

In the privacy of my chambers.

If I had done them in public,

Word of it would have spread everywhere

But I wanted to avoid the notoriety.’]207

Melior’s confession here strikes a discordant note particularly because she professed earlier to Partonope that she believes in God and the Son of Mary as if reciting the tenets

207 Translation by Sarah-Grace Heller. 146 of Christian faith: “’Je croi en Deu, le fil Marie,/ Qui nos raienst de mort a vie,/ Et por

Lui pri que vos m’amés/ Se por el faire nel volés’” [‘I believe in God, the son of Mary,/

Who redeems us from death to life/ And to Him I pray for your soul’] (PdeB. 1535-

1538).208 The Middle English text expands her profession of faith from four lines to twenty lines, as if the Middle English translator understood the heretical risks in this confessional passage on necromancy. This recitation of sorcery, necromancy, and the marvelous mixed with antagonist beliefs to Christian doctrine in the Old French text encapsulate the potential spiritual dangers of secular learning and heretical temptations on one level, but more so, Melior’s confession here bears the undertones of pride and the absence of fear. The passage illuminates the concerns of the church regarding heterodoxy and heresy, although the inquisitorial manuals specifically addressing the deviant actions found in Melior’s confession do not appear until the early-thirteenth century, notably Bernard Gui’s manual for inquisitors. Walter L. Wakefield and Austin

P. Evans offer a salvation of sorts for reading Melior’s character here; she has not crossed into demonic worship and according to penitential books contemporary with the Old

French text, she would not necessarily be in danger of heresy for necromancy, only for her pursuit of Saracen understanding. Wakefield and Evans note, “Innumerable stories of demonic activity, and learned explanations of how spirits were permitted to operate within the providence of God, attest that magic and sorcery were given wide credence at every level of society . . . Yet not until the middle of the thirteenth century did the Church

208 Translation mine. 147 adopt the position that all dabbling with occult powers involved demon-worship.”209

Until Pope Gregory IX clarified in the mid-thirteenth century that inquisitors should only concern themselves with persecuting diviners and sorcerers who specifically committed the heresy of demon-worship, Melior’s knowledge and practice of necromancy, sorcery, and magic would not be problematic. However, the Middle English translator of the poem was faced with the heretical question, particularly as late medieval concerns about witchcraft and Lollardy intensified following Archbishop Arundel and the Wycliffe trials of the late-Fourteenth Century. Modifying the words from overt nominations of sorcery to covert implications of privitée suggests the poet’s dissemblance or a strategic move towards keeping Melior’s practices secret from his audience while allowing Partonope to understand the full impact of her confessed learning and activities. But to what end should the Middle English translator want to shield Melior from heretication?

Conversely, did the Old French poet prioritize a heretical figuration for Melior, positioning Partonope as a quasi-inquisitor figuration? If either poet paints Melior sympathetically, yet unapologetically cunning, then what is the purpose of this particular scene between Melior and Partonope transitioning them out of their secret love-nest and interstitially holding them apart from the world?

Both texts conclude this scene with Melior lamenting her loss of her magical powers, suggesting that this is a crucial confessional moment overshadowed by the narrative of the rupture of the lovers’ secret world and their break-up. But this moment of inversion being remedied and restored should be more important for the audience to

209 Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages: Selected Sources Translated and Annotated (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 250. 148 attend than the superficial love story. A woman educated far beyond the norm, controlling a Christian nobleman through dark arts, and ruling her country while invisibly entertaining a secret lover that compromises her honor and reputation should invoke fear in the audience on many levels, not elicit sympathy for her or her lover’s plight. While some scholars argue that Melior’s loss of magical powers serves the love story and champions codes of courtesy and chivalry, I would argue the path towards good governance holds a more important service at this point in the text. For instance, Joan

M. Ferrante argues that Melior’s loss of magical power indicates “the superior powers of love” over “her extraordinary education,” and so, the audience grows in sympathy with her.210 I believe Ferrante overly simplifies the loss of Melior’s powers because love does not win over knowledge and/or necromantic powers in either version of this poem.

Moreover, I disagree with Amy N. Vines’ assessment that “the truth behind Melior’s choices, the enactment of her sexual desires, and the record of her significant education might only be revealed in private, but she operates within that private space to enact public change, to influence the course of politics, and to secure the hand of a worthy knight.”211 Vines argues further that Melior’s loss of power enables her to become a teacher and patron of Partonope, exchanging social and cultural knowledge for sexual knowledge and carnal desire. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, on the other hand, argues for a correlative among knowledge, power, and invisibility in which she suggests that Melior’s loss of power leads to a new form of invisibility in which she hides her emotions rather

210 Joan M. Ferrante, “The Education of Women in the Middle Ages in Theory, Fact, and Fantasy,” in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past,” edited by Patricia H. Labalme (New York: New York University Press, 1980, 9-42), 32. 211 Amy N. Vines, “A Woman’s ‘Crafte’: Melior as Lover, Teacher, and Patron in the Middle English Partonope of Blois,” Modern Philology 105, no. 2 (Nov2007): 245-270, 262. 149 than hiding her education and powers and in which emerges a correction, a “mutatis mutandis – between the female use of invisibility specific to Partonopeu and the male use of incognito.”212 Bruckner’s argument for mutation certainly accounts for inversion, as well as connecting power, knowledge, and spiritual rectitude in this confessional exchange between the lovers. I suggest, however, that Melior’s “secret” love keeps her from ruling honorably or reputably, and in coercing her people, perhaps unknowingly, into invisibility to indulge her personal desires, she proves to be a poor and corrupt ruler.

By turning Melior’s world inside-out and disabling her magic powers, both the Old

French and the Middle English poets begin the steps of correction and rectitude that inversion necessitates, whether the inversion is fully heretical or more in the realm of heterodoxy. Indeed, Laurence Harf-Lancner argues that for Melior, “une fée et une enchanteress,” the loss of her powers “se réduisent de même à ceux d’un illusionniste”

[are reduced even to those of an illusionist], and thus, Melior may “offre à son public un spectacle de choix” [offer a spectacle of choice to her public] at the poem’s ending

212 Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Shaping Romance: Interpretation, Truth, and Closure in Twelfth-Century French Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 134-135. Bruckner’s argument of a mutatis mutandis (i.e. – “those things having been changed that need to be changed”) is important and resonates in several areas of this poem, not the least of which are the myriad inversions and the underlying necessities for strategic secrecy. In a kind of modification of Bruckner’s thesis of change, Carolyn Walker Bynum sets out a very useful distinction, particularly applicable to this text with Melior’s “crafte” and the various instances of necromantic powers, between “hybridity” and “metamorphosis.” She writes, “Hybrid and metamorphosis reveal or violate categories in different ways. Hybrid reveals a world of difference, a world that is and is multiple; metamorphosis reveals a world of stories, of things underway. Metamorphosis breaks down categories by breaching them; hybrid forces contradictory or incompatible categories to coexist and serve as commentary each on the other.” Walker Bynum notes Bernard of Clairvaux’s use of hybrids as exemplars because of their unity and Ovid and Marie de France as working with metamorphic metaphors for the rich possibilities of narrative and identity. With this distinction, Walker Bynum underscores Bruckner’s mutation process as an effective narrative tool, especially in terms of subjectivity. See Carolyn Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 31. 150 tournament that she is capable of good governance, both of self and of her kingdom.213

The narrative events may seem to dominate the poem at this point (and far before the ending tournament), but the inversions and confessional discourse here set the idea of good governance in an interstice that the poets repeatedly turn to throughout the poem.

Following Melior’s revelation and confession, Partonope again returns to France where he soon removes himself from the court to wander the forest, withering away to the point of death from heart-break. Melior pines for Partonope, but refuses to consider the counsel of her sister, Urake, to forgive Partonope and take him back. Urake then sails to the forest to find Partonope, and with the aid of her attendant, Persevis, nurses him back to health. Eventually, Urake tricks Melior into knighting Partonope and championing him at the tournament held by Melior’s male counselors to find a husband for her. The Middle English tale ends with Partonope winning the tournament and marrying Melior, while the Old French version yields three variant continuations in which chivalry and courtesy play on with the return of the Sultan, war, and resolution through Love.214

Interspersed through this story-line of courtly lovers are several episodes testing

Partonope’s chivalric prowess and interfacing with superlative knights and counselors, both Christian and Saracen. The narrative of Partonope’s encounters with the Saracens,

213 Laurence Harf-Lancner, Les Fées au Moyen Âge: Morgane et Mélusine, La naissance des fées (Genève: Editions Slatkine, 1984), 424. Harf-Lancner raises the argument that fairies are often synonymous with necromancy and with enchantment, and it is only when the suspicion of devilry attaches itself to the marvelous, that the literary figuration veers into the dangerous mode of non-Christian functions, whether the actions are ornamental magic or not (Harf-Lancner, Les Fées au Moyen Âge, 414). 214 For further discussion on the Old French continuations and the redactions and adaptations of Partonopeu de Blois, see Penny Eley, Partonopeus de Blois: Romance in the Making (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012). 151 his growth in the art of chivalry, and his interactions with his mother, the king, the bishop, and a potential French wife, is prioritized completely over poetics, with events following a linear, episodic trajectory much like the early Anglo-Norman romances, such as Ipomedon and Guy of Warwick, or the Old French romances of Chrétien de Troyes.215

Like those romances, this tale does not marginalize women as do the later Middle English or the Charlemagne romances, while following the male hero’s maturation into knighthood and inculcation into the codes of courtesy and chivalry. Five women not only play important roles in this poem, but function dynamically, portrayed beyond their physicality, as complex and against generic expectations. Unlike the Anglo-Norman romances, however, the Middle English translator infuses challenges to these aristocratic social and cultural codes with scathing commentary on the church, sovereignty, and culture.216

Narrative Secrecy: Subverted Translatio, Heterodox Auctoritas, and Vernacularity

215 See, for example: Hue de Rotelande, Ipomadon, edited by Rhiannon Purdie (London: Published for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 2001); Guy of Warwick, 3d. from the Auchinleck ms. in the Advocates’ library, Edinburgh and from ms. 107 in Caius College, Cambridge by Julius Zupitza (London: Published for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 1966); and Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, translated by W. W. Comfort (London: Dent, 1975). 216 See Susan Crane, Ruth J. Dean, and M. Dominica Legge, especially, for further insight on Anglo- Norman romance and its thematic concerns: Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) and The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing and Identity during the Hundred Years’ War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Ruth J. Dean, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Literature (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society Occasional Series 3, 1999); and M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963).

152

In comparison to the poetical richness of Gower and, as we will see of Chaucer in the next chapter, Partonope of Blois falls far short of any measure of poetic mastery. To be fair, the translator does not pretend to offer an aesthetic composition; through his narrator, he clearly states he is solely transmitting a story from the French to the English by the command of his “sovereign,” although he does not name the sovereign nor does he offer any dedicatory comments towards him or her; whether this is a monarch or simply a patron who is given an elevated title through deference, form, satire, or jest is also unclear:

For y am comawndyt of my souereyne

Thys story to drawe fulle and playne,

Be-cawse yt was ful vnkowthe and lyteł knowe,

Frome frenche ynne-to yngelysche, that beter nowe

Hyt myзtħ be to euer-y wyзthte. (2335-2339).217

We see several contemporary fifteenth-century English concerns within these few lines, such as translation into the vernacular and writing fully and plainly, without rhetorical embellishment or allegorical modes. Alastair Minnis raises a point that pushes against this very passage in terms of translator intent and vernacularity, arguing that

“vernacularity” is a far more complex issue than “the narrow sphere of language- transfer.” He suggests that the term “vernacular” can and should “be recognized as

217 The introductory material in this edition consistently refers to the fifteenth-century English poem as having a “translator” rather than a “poet.” Throughout this chapter, I use both terms to refer to the author of this poetic manuscript. However, I generally refer to this author as “translator” in relation to the poem’s transmission, its authorial self-reflexivity, and the exculpatory maneuvers to deflect and defer responsibility for the poetic affect and effect that emerge from his narrative digressions, when he shifts the focus from narrating the poem’s events to his own plaints, his opinions, and most intriguingly, his confessions. 153 encompassing a vast array of acts of cultural transmission and negotiation, deviation and/or synthesis, confrontation and/or reconciliation.”218 Interestingly, the argument here in the Middle English text for vernacular translation differs from late-fourteenth-century concerns about carrying Latinity into vernacularity as Wycliffism brings up, but rather prioritizes translation from one vernacular tongue into another – French into English – so that every man might better know “thys story.” French and Latin were still quite important languages of court and church; the aristocracy, courtiers, and clergy would certainly have no difficulty with this story in its Old or Middle French language. The narrator’s focus on understanding by every man suggests that this poem was translated particularly for an emergent middle class audience, unschooled and/ or unlearned in languages of church and state. It would seem, too, that the translator turns from the politically charged arguments surrounding vernacularity, especially in light of the ecclesiastical reformists and associative heretical or heterodox complaints of the Fifteenth

Century, in England and on the Continent, choosing instead to follow the lines of a language-transference mode of translation. And while Alastair Minnis observes that “the translatio studii ideal was tainted by the Lollards” in the swirling controversy over vernacular hermeneutics, Anne Hudson, on the other hand, argues that language- transference is a kind of codified linguistic cue for Lollards and Wycliffites, working as a kind of secret strategy to deflect criticism and divert attention from the very issues that

218 Alastair Minnis, Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 18. 154

Minnis notes surrounding vernacular translations.219 Because the emphasis in these cited lines point to a shift in power suggesting that the unnamed “sovereign’s” command for this story diminishes against the weight of a larger audience’s need for plain English stories, the Middle English translator manages to neutralize anticipated criticism about the act of transmitting the story from French to English. Yet, his word choices and exculpation movements here suggest a more strategic plan is at work. In allowing the narrative to take priority over the form, the poet uses the lack of formal elegance or rhetorical prowess to suggest that his target audience shifts from courtier to city dweller.

In this way, the poet may actually imbue social, political, and cultural criticisms for which vernacularity opens an avenue.

Similar to Gower’s poet/narrator, the Partonope narrator not only comments that he writes under command of his sovereign, but he also comments on the importance of reading “olde stories” as teaching tools to discern good from evil. And similar to the more explicit ending to Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest’s Tale220 and the arguably implicit

219Alastair Minnis, “Absent Glosses: A Crisis of Vernacular Commentary in Late-Medieval England?” in Essays in Medieval Studies 20 (2003): 1-17, 12. See also Anne Hudson, Lollards and their Books (London: Hambledon Press, 1985) and R. N. Swanson, “Literacy, heresy, history, and orthodoxy: perspectives and permutations for the later Middle Ages,” in Heresy and Literacy, 1000-1530, edited by Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 279-293. 220 After the moralization in which Chaunteclere gets his just punishment for being “undiscreet of governaunce” in believing flattery, the narrator implies that men should comport themselves with a higher morality than farm animals regardless of their rhetorical prowess and knowledge of “auctorite” by hearing this tale correctly. He also repeats “taketh” in the space of three lines emphasizing the command to and responsibility of the reader to act as the use of the imperative verb case requires. Here, though the narrator prioritizes Church teaching over Latin authors, where the Partonope translator does not restore Christian authority over pagan models until the end of the poem, and arguably, not even then. Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest Tale’s narrator says, “But ye that holden this tale a folye,/ As of a fox, or of a cok and hen,/ Taketh the moralite, goode men./ For Seint Paul seith that al that writen is,/ To oure doctrine it is ywrite, ywis;/ Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille” (NPT, 3438-3444). I discuss this issue of audience responsibility further in the following chapter on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the narrator figure. 155 challenge by the narrator of Troilus and Criseyde, the narrator of Partonope puts the onus of reading and learning to separate wisdom from folly onto his audience/ reader:

Eke euery man may at the eye See

The fly wycħe ys callud the bee,

Hys hony he drawetħ be hys kynde

Off bytter erbes, and the wyse can ffynde

In folys tales sum-tyme wysdame.

Ther-fore fulle ofte the wyse manne

Wolle here the fole and eke the wyse,

Where-thorowe he can þe better deuyse

To drawe wysdam owte of ffoly,

Where-fore y Sey yow sykerly:

In thys boke shalle ye fynde wrytte

Botħ goode and euelle. I do yow to wytte:

The good taketħ, the euelle leve,

For ałł goode moste welle preve. (50-63)

Within this passage, too, we see the challenge to “see” correctly as well as to “hear” correctly, much as Gower challenges his audience/ reader to avoid mis-seeing and mis- hearing. What is quite different from either Chaucer or Gower, however, is an unusual exculpation move by the narrator immediately following his denial of inventio or his impulse to tell the tale with the sense of ingenuity that he proclaims in the previously cited lines of the poem’s Prologue in which he claims that he is only serving his king’s

156 command. He leads into the “my sovereign made me do it” passage by attempting to insert himself in the poem as a subjected figure – that of a spurned and heart-sick lover – as he responds to Partonope’s plight, saying that at least Partonope has enjoyed the carnal delights of his lover whereas he has not: “And y stonde euen in contraryys case” (2318).

The narrator catches himself falling into the text, so to speak, but not before he inverts his position as a reporter of events to a participant in the same courtly arena as Partonope. In a brief interstice between the poem’s events and the narrative exculpation on translation, the narrator confesses to the reader/audience:

[I] Have the euyl and [he] the gode,

Where-fore me thynkytħ myn herte-bloode 2324

Fulle offte tyme away dothe mylte.

I fare thenne as y ne felte

Gode ner hylle, but lye ynne a trawnce.

Thys hathe ffortune caЗthte me ynne a chanse 2328

Vppon hys dyce thatt neuer wylle turne.

Thus muste y euer yn wo soiorne.

Butte playnely excusytħ me,

I am noзth in thus in-firmyte. (2323-2332)

Indeed, the narrator admits he lies in an interstitial state, neither good nor ill, in line 2327, and perhaps more poignantly, he complains that Fortune holds him in a state of betweenness, with a wheel that will never turn (lines 2328 and 2329). The narrator inverts Fortune here as well by using the pronominal “hys” rather than “her” and

157 attributes rolls of the dice as the determinant that makes Fortune turn his/her wheel.

While this inversion and misrepresentation seems innocuous or an emphatic declaration about how any or all modes of chance hold this figuration in limbo from realizing either an actual place in the narrative or his lustful desires for his lover, I suggest the translator intentionally sets these out to mimic Partonope’s movement from a known and orderly world to the invisible, enchanted world with Melior. Just as the narrator moves into an interstice and his markers of Love, Fortune, and virtue/vice begin to meld, so too does

Partonope in his new-found secret life and interstitial space with Melior. Once the narrator resumes his reporting tasks, he remarks that Partonope has forgotten everything in his pre-Chef d’Oire world and can only think of hounds, hawks, and his lover: “Thys hatħ he broзtħ the зere to зende,/ That canne remebraunce put hum in mynde / In wat pleyte he ys broзthte ynne./ He hath for-зete alle hys kynne” (2355-2358). Where

Partonope loses his memories of the past, the narrator has set the stage for the place of memory and understanding as they relate to the whole notion of governance, not only of the self, but interestingly, of the acts of translation and of invention.

The trajectory of this narrative digression from the story-line to the narrator’s confession begins with the inversion and interstitial placement of the narrator into the story, slides into the conflation of Fortune and Chance, moves through the narrator’s comments that he is merely noting what his sovereign has commanded (although emphasizing plain speech and full accessibility of the translation to all men), and ends with the narrator’s denial of understanding his material. He insists he doesn’t even

158 understand his auctor’s intent of the tale he is telling and that his wits are too dull to learn them:

There-fore y do alle my myзthte 2340

To saue my autor ynne sucche wyse

As he that mater luste devyse,

Where he makytħ ynne grete compleynte

In frenche so fayre thatt yt to paynte 2344

In Engelysche tunngge y saye for me

My wyttys alle to dullet bee.

He tellyth hys tale of sentament,

I vnder-stonde noзth hys entent, 2348

Ne wolle ne besy me to lere. (2340-2349)

Several key lines complicate these nine lines that fall between the sovereign’s commandment to translate the story from French into English and Partonope’s memorial lapse. If the narrator neither understands nor will bother to learn the intent of “tale of sentament,” what is the translator actually saying about the efficacy of translating from one vernacular tongue to another? Further, is the narrator unwilling to learn the intent because the French is so “fayre” that it is too difficult to understand the transmitted material except for those who are not dull-witted? If this is the case, then who are witty enough to understand this translation? Or does the narrator mean that the intent of a poem of “sentament” is too hard to understand because affectivity does not transmit in a translation? Perhaps a more subtle meaning is unveiled here for if the poem and its affect

159 is to remain a mere vehicle of recitation for a narrator figure, then the poem’s “fayre” language in the vernacular (in other words, not Latinity) and the intent discernible only to those who are cunning suggest something subversive, deviant, or unorthodox is being translated in the whole poetic process. The narrator’s rather petulant refusal to engage with his material is similar to Criseyde’s complaint in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde about the “paynted proces” of artificially induced love; the discourse of “love” only paints over and hides the true action of bartering sex under the guise of courtesy.221

Criseyde’s complaint to the goddess Pallas comes during a confessional dialectic exchange with Pandarus who pushes her to accept Troilus as her lover, although she reads (or translates) his secret intent to pimp her out to his friend. Although the genders are inverted in Partonope, at this point in the poem, Melior has lured Partonope into her bed through necromancy and cunning, similar to Pandarus’ cunning and engin to lure

Criseyde into Troilus’ bed. In this analogy between poems and figurations, the narrator serves as the analogue to Criseyde, in a sense, but translated words have taken the place of sexual transaction. This passage appears to be a digression mimicking a complaint poem; however, the translator/ poet infuses enough markers of subversive complaints about vernacularity, authority, cultural transmission, literacy, learning, and the role and responsibility of a reader/ auditor that the passage acts as a kind of strategic secret and medium for dissent within the translated poem.

Further, this is a particularly strange passage following the narration of the initial coupling of Partonope and Melior and the introduction of Melior’s prohibitions to

221 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, II.424. 160

Partonope to avoid breaking his vow of secrecy and to forswear the use of necromancy to try to reveal and to see Melior’s invisible body. Such a narrative deviation both within the text itself and from its antecedent source invites inquiry into why the English poet/ translator first prioritizes translatio and later limits inventio. Robert R. Edwards defines inventio:

The poetic strategy of investing symbols and characters within the text with the

power of aesthetic creation. This is, of course, the strategy of a highly self-

conscious literary tradition that locates poetic creation within its own products,

and it offers a commentary on the ways in which poets conceived the problems of

representation. In the High and late Middle Ages, this strategy permits not only a

dramatization of the poet’s act of composition but also a portrayal of invention

solely within an economy of imagination, and so it proposes a radical origin for

narrative poetry.222

In relation to my overall argument about poetic creation as a medium for social reform through strategies of secrecy, Edwards’ statement that “the continued rewriting of the story reaches a limit when the topics of poetic invention reveal the social and political contradictions within the poet’s historical situation” again speaks to the Middle English poet’s diversionary or strategic narrative secrecy that I discuss above in relation to vernacular translation.223

222 Robert R. Edwards, Ratio and Invention: A Study of Medieval Lyric and Narrative (Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 1989), 115. 223 Ibid, 115. 161

This narrative digression is further noteworthy in its deviation from the French text, which omits the narrator’s displacement of authorship for the text onto a sovereign, and indeed, the French text does not concern itself with issues and concerns of translatio or with vernacularity as political or clerical problems in the same way that the Middle

English text does. The French narrator does insert a complaint about his own love woes in the context of Partonope’s happiness with Melior, but he never veers into a subjective position as a figure competing, in a sense, with Partonope for success in love. He offers a very limited, succinct summation, “Je voi la moie et n’en faç rien;/ J’en ai le mal et il le bien” [“I see what is mine [my lady] and I can do nothing;/ I have the bad situation and he has the better”] (PdeB. 1879-1880).224 The tone of this passage differs significantly from the Middle English text because the narrator remains on the margins of the story looking in, offering commentary, but still retaining his subject position as a reporter of events. He moves quickly into the next section on Partonope’s lack of memory for his past and the emergent nostalgia that spurs his desire to return to France. For example, where the English narrator only mentions “his kin,” the French narrator lists the specific things Partonope has forgotten that have cultural and social meaning to the reader/ audience as well as to the novice knight:

Al cief de l’an s’est porpensés

De soi qui est et dont est nés

Et qu’il a mis le siecle si

Ariere dos et en obli.

224 Translation mine. 162

Ne li menbroit de son païs,

De ses parens, de ses amis,

Ne de rien nule ne pensoit

Fors de s’amie qu’il amoit. (PdeB.1885-1892)

[After a year he recollected

Himself who he was and of his birth

And how he put all his earthly existence

Behind him and forgot.

He neither thought about his country,

Nor his kin, nor his friends,

Nor did he think of anyone or anything

Except for his mistress whom he loved.]225

This portion and the previously cited lines of this intermediary passage between Melior’s gifts of hunting, hawking, and loving and Partonope’s break from the enchantments of actualized desires illuminate a significant variation between the antecedent text and the

Middle English version. Where the French text focuses on the affective response to unlimited satiety of desires and removal from the real world to an ideal world so lacking in responsibility that it is interstitially located and invisible, the English text focuses on the responsibility of the audience to “learn” the imputed messages for themselves, discarding nostalgia and affect. In other words, the French text threads emotion through this passage, from bliss to woe to nostalgia and fear; the English text pairs emotion with

225 Translation mine. Emphasis in line 1888 is Gildea’s. 163 the narrator when he attempts to insert himself in the text and then pulls affect from the passage when the narrator returns to the task of reporting at the command of his sovereign. In refusing to take responsibility for understanding, knowing, or learning the

“intent” of his auctor in this passage, the English narrator shuts down affect and moves into the section on absent memory, recall, and yearning with apathy and absence. In this way, the French text encourages nostalgia and memory in order for Partonope to grow as a chivalric hero whereas the Middle English text insists that the reader/ audience move

Partonope into his chivalric tests (when he returns to France and faces the Saracens) with ratio and personal authority to construct the hero. Consequently, Partonope’s subsequent deeds in France will be evaluated by the reader/ audience because the narrator declares himself devoid of affective interest. The French text, though, feels more human because the narrator keeps and enhances affect as he sends Partonope off on his chivalric journey from his nascent attempts at courtesy. But because Partonope and Melior follow courtly love in an inverted mode – in total secret and in removal from the real world – there can be no visual affirmation to the community that their love follows the codes of courtesy.

Therefore, Partonope must leave the secret city and learn the cultural and social codes correctly before his love with Melior can be remedied.

Another important point of departure from the French text comes in the final

Prologue section before the translator moves into the history of Partonope’s Trojan lineage in which he attributes the creation of the tripartite division of the world to God rather than attributing it to the auctorité of translatio verbum. Through the voice of the narrator, the translator says, “In thys boke ye may lere,/ And ye lyste hyt rede and here,/

164

Howe God hatħ departed on thre/ Thys worlde in wycħe we ałł be” (64-67). Several things are noteworthy in these few lines. First, the narrator places the burden of learning the virtuous profit to be derived from this poem onto the audience, whether through reading or hearing, as he does several more times throughout the poem. Second, the narrator summarizes the poem as an exemplum not only of how God parted the world into three parts, but he also insinuates that the world of man is a unified place in spite of cultural, social, and ideological division, such as Gower sets forth in the Prologue to the

Confessio Amantis. The premise of equality rather than division commands the focus of these lines, although the narrative events to come in the poem strain this premise by consistently dividing and removing the figurations from their kin, their kingdoms, their lovers, their reason, and their faith. In this way, inversion sets out the beginning ideal of unity inverted to division until correct and good governance can remedy and correct the divisions and restore the figurations to their proper places, appropriate lovers, mental and spiritual health, and orthodox belief. Setting the poem into a model of exemplarity right away proves particularly deceptive or unusual given that the the Saracen heroes who prove themselves to be “flowers of chivalry” as well as virtuous men in the conflicts with the French army and with Partonope and that three of the female figures – Melior,

Partonope’s mother, and Urake – serve their desires through necromancy, enchantments, dissemblance, cunning, and secrecy. It would seem that the Middle English translator covertly sets forth heterodox impulses and influences in a text that his narrator infuses from the beginning with Christian authority and didactic declarations to the audience.

165

To what end, though, would the English translator choose a didactic approach with his narrative variations and tone rather than maintaining the lyric tone of the French text, as Roberta Krueger notes, or follow a Chaucerian narrator figuration by maintaining a consistently sympathetic narrator throughout the entire translation?226 Sandra Ihle suggests the didactic tone is a necessary distancing tactic by the translator to keep the audience at bay with such things as “apostrophes and references to Fortune and her wheel” so that the poem itself maintains a self-conscious effect of a repeated narrative from antiquity to its own compositional time.227 Ihle’s point is that the English text works on the level of didacticism, not exemplarity or lyric modality, in order to drive home the lesson of proper governance and social integration. However, the narrator is not consistently distant nor is the lesson from such a lengthy romance so simple as proper governance. I would argue that the narrator is quite integrated with the audience in light of his confessional moments and shared secrets with the reader/ audience by which he/they are forced to participate in the construction of the “re-telling” and the translation, not only of learning and empire, but of cultural history, of the power of vernacularity, and of reformational impulses along the spectrum of church, state, and society. To effect such translatio studii, translatio imperii, and translatio verbum, I believe the English poet infuses multiple modes of tonality and narrative figuration, and further, the true sense of exemplarity courses through the entire translation from the narrator persona to

226 See Roberta Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 227 Sandra Ihle, “The English Partonope of Blois as Exemplum,” in Courtly Literature, Culture and Context: Selected papers from the 5th Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, Dalfsen, The Netherlands, 9-16 August, 1986, edited by Keith Busby and Erik Kooper (Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1990): 301-312. 166 the lessons and inversions to the translation variations, rescissions, and deviations.

Indeed, a very useful and cogent discussion of exempla is offered by Nigel F. Palmer who states, “The exemplum offers an authoritative historical precedent that will command belief and persuade the audience or reader,” and specifically in terms of

“rhetorical exempla” (which I believe Partonope presents). Palmer notes that such exempla “do not simply have an illustrative function (exornatio); they may also be employed as facts to be interpreted and accorded a particular place within an argument, or as an aid to the solution of problems.”228 Here, it is possible to fuse Palmer’s definition of the exemplum as a tool by which to problem-solve and Ihle’s argument of didacticism to allow for the possibility of a poetic vision of a tale with exemplary moral lessons meant to preach a reformist agenda towards social and personal correction. In this way, the English text bears more of an instructional flavor, almost as a kind of conduct literature, than does the French text.

A further complication in the variations between the French and the English texts lies with the Old French Continuation of the poem, a several thousand line poem using a different meter, that ties up the loose ends of the love motif and serves up a “happy ending” for the audience. Of course, Saracens convert, marriages are blessed by community, counsel, and orthodox clergy, and the expectations of a narrative “lyric” love poem are satisfied through the resolutions upholding romance conventions. Yet, the

English text distinctly ends with the marriage of Partonope and Melior, leaving the

228 Nigel F. Palmer, “Exempla,” in Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, edited by F. A. C. Mantello and A. G. Rigg (Washington D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press): 582- 588. Emphasis mine. 167 audience to “invent” or imagine the next chapters, by concluding, “And þus Endeth þe

Romans of Partonope” (12195). The French text concludes the Epilogue with affirmations of love, restorations of gender roles, and pleadings of mercy by the narrator/translator if he has forgotten or omitted anything in the service of telling the tale; more pertinent, the final line in the French text concludes with the narrator dedicating his soul “a unir” (to unite) with the souls of all the women who have been or who ever will be. He acknowledges that there is more of the story to tell leaving a sense of a poem in medias res rather than a finite text with a specific ending. In abruptly concluding the romance, the English translator has effectively turned over the work of translation and inventio to the audience, and markedly, he draws a faint portrait of himself as a cleric wearing the guise of a would-be lover. Within the span of the last fifty lines of the

English poem, the narrator reveals his secrets interspersed with subversive hints

(emphatically not nominating kings) and heterodox leanings (charging higher clergy as traitors). He says he is in a figurative hell because he longs to love and only sorrows so that he cannot effectively narrate the joys of Partonope and Melior in the married state:

þus in endlesse blisse baþed thei be,

The good hertes of þes lovers two.

Ya, who can tełł þo Ioies now

That they bene In? forsoþe not I.

But þe sorowe and þe care fułł truly

That longeth to love, þat can I tełł.

Thei are in heven, and now I in hełł. (12137-12143)

168

The implication here is that the narrator is a failed lover but further, that he is jealous of the figurations of whom he has reported, and he places himself in a binary opposition that conflates the discourse of courtly love with a religious discourse of virtue and vice (i.e. – heaven and hell). Twenty lines following this subtle turn towards religious discourse, he summarizes Partonope’s fate by inferring that a king’s duty is to be faithful in loving, which is itself a subtle turn from secular notions of ethical rule towards a Christian overtone of love. Particularly with Melior’s inverted sovereignty at the poem’s beginning where she prioritizes her desire for a secret, illicit love over rightly ruling her kingdom, the narrator’s assessment that a sovereign should be “true” in loving conflicts with notions of good secular governance that Melior must learn in order to remedy her private love and restore her kingdom to correct governance:

And þus hath now Partonope

Receyued the dignyte of a kyng.

Lo, what it is to be true in lovyng.

He is a kyng, and she also a queen,

Knytte to-gedre in Goddes lawe they ben. (12159-12163)

It would seem that the narrator diminishes political, secular power in pointedly premising

God’s law; however, only thirteen lines later, he chastises clerical law and sacral power as treasonous. He practically rants that he will not name clerical leaders in this text either, just as he refuses to do of secular rulers and the greater nobility engaged in chivalry, because “Of patriarkes and Erchbisshoppes also./ I lete bisshoppes, abbotes, and priours go./ What nedeth it to speke of trechetours?” (12176-12178). Finally, he says he

169 cannot narrate what happens in the newly-married lovers’ bed chamber, “how þat nyght her life they ledde,/ And in what Ioy then they be” (12185-12186) and ascribes his impotent pen to his lack of experience or to his virginity: “But þis [connubial joy] may not be declared for me,/ Ne what her Ioy was, ne her delite,/ For I was neuer yite in þat plite” (12187-12189); however, we grow suspicious of the stability of his subjectivity as a narrator/ would-be lover/ and transmitter of this romance since he has spent hundreds of lines in the early part of the poem recounting the details down to the affective states, the fears, and the slightest physical movements of the inverted rape scene in which Partonope first encounters Melior. When the translator allows his narrator to remove himself from the task of translatio by praying that God will allow Partonope and Melior to “stonde in

þe same case” of grace as he, he essentially shifts the narrator’s subject position to that of a cleric, but one cut from the same cloth as Gower’s Genius, a priest of Love: “But in hye plesaunce I lete hem be,/ And pray to God of love þat he/ His seruaunte departe so of his grace,/ That they may stonde in þe same case” (12190-12193). The narrative bookends of the English text stand in a kind of binary opposition of their own between the Prologue authorizing Latinity and vernacularity in translatio, a definitively heretical proposition in late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth century England in terms of clerical instruction, and the Epilogue’s bitter condemnation of ecclesiastical corruption and premising a heterodox servant of the God of love as the instructor of virtue in this moralistic re-telling of the antecedent French love lyric.229 Andrew Cole argues that the

229 See, for example, R. N. Swanson who argues that “passive literacy,” by which he means “orality, auditory reception, and with both the use of memory for textual transmission,” was just as frightening to Church officials as was misinterpreting sermons or vernacular writings. Swanson notes, “The vernacularity of late medieval literacy, increasingly evident from c. 1300 onwards, has its own ramifications for the 170 impact of Wycliffism, literarily and intellectually, “must be central to our sense of

English literary history because it was on the inside, not outside, of the literary and interpretive communities of late medieval England” so that orthodoxy and authority are not necessarily tenets of late-fourteenth, early-fifteenth century aesthetic, secular writings.230 The binary does not align neatly between vernacular authority and heterodox instruction, and both positions tease the boundaries of heresy. In creating such a wobbly opposition, I would argue that the translator actually brings the poles together in an amalgamation of heretical impulses, heterodox priorities, and reformed authority. The constants that the narrator exhibits, though, throughout his entire recitation are fear and strategies of secrecy, manipulations of concealments and revelations that insistently punctuate the poem with his own figuration so that his ultimate subject position seeps into the text as a character interacting with and against the characters in the text. The

connections, if any, between heresy and literacy and the processes for the transmission of the former. Among other things, the equations must incorporate developments in the vernacular languages, especially their permeation by Latinate theological terms which would affect a language’s ability to address theological debates” (297). And just as importantly to transmission errors, Swanson points out that “to stress connections of literacy and heresy is to overlook the connections between orthodoxy and literacy” because “the very acquisition of literacy was often the part of the acquisition of orthodoxy” (287): R. N. Swanson, “Literacy, heresy, history, and orthodoxy: perspectives and permutations for the later Middle Ages,” in Heresy and Literacy, 1000-1530, edited by Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 279-293. See also Clayton J. Drees on authority and dissent in late- fourteenth, early-fifteenth century England. In discussing the intersection of ecclesiastical and secular authority in terms of literacy and heterodoxy or heresy, Drees comments that as a result of the Lollard trials and Oldcastle’s rising in 1414, English laws, secular and sacred, stepped up efforts “to crush heresy and control the political unrest” wherever they might lie; literary poems, narratives, and other vernacular writings were included in these investigatory efforts, because as Drees summarizes, “Religious non- conformity and political sedition were now unequivocally linked in the minds of ecclesiastical and secular lawmakers alike” (39): Clayton J. Drees, Authority and Dissent in the English Church: The Prosecution of Heresy and Religious Non-Conformity in the Diocese of Winchester, 1380-1547 (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1997). For a more specific focus on the tension and potential danger between Latinity and vernacularity, see Henry Angsar Kelly, Inquisitions and Other Trial Procedures in the Medieval West (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Variorum, 2001), and especially Alastair Minnis, Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature. 230 Andrew Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 186. 171 narrator fears being a failed lover and participates in a quasi-confessional discourse of his own using his audience as his confessor. The narrator’s inverted subjectivities ultimately lead to a reformist position of serving love, stripped of orthodox intercession and of impotent sovereignty, so that through the narrator, the English translator/ poet constructs a call to self-reform in the face of corruption and mis-governance.

To what purpose, though, does the English translator veer so dramatically from the antecedent French text in his narrator figure and in the deletions, focus, and tenor of the poem’s Prologue? And why does his narrator change the catalogue of celebrants (and animals as well) in attendance at Partonope and Melior’s wedding festivities found in the

French text into a condemnation of ecclesiastical treachery before quickly concluding the poem and emphasizing that he won’t describe their connubial bliss because “I was neuer yite in þat plite” (12189)? The difference in the catalogues is striking. The French text bears a tone of inclusive joy and overt happiness; the English text lists categories of nobility, of “gestours,” and those of lower estate who entertain and serve at feasts, but declares that there is no need to “make reheresynges/ Of þe names þat ben þe[r] of kynges,/ Ne of dukes, Erles, n[e of baro]nny,/ Ne of þe nombre of grete ch[i]valry,”

(12172-12175) suggesting that names of kings, nobility, and courtiers are insignificant; nature is also pointedly absent from this list as is the marvelous.

Indeed, the removal of the marvelous and those in disguise from the antecedent source by the English translator seems remarkable given Melior’s implied nature as fairy

(more overt in the French text) as well as the abundance of necromanctic moves by the women in this text, from Melior to Partonope’s mother to Urake, as they maneuver

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Partonope and manipulate nature. John Finlayson argues that the marvelous is only an incidental motif in romances and that the English translator includes it because it is a

“transliteration” rather than a necessary function of the narrative. He summarizes the marvelous here as “a property rather than an essence” of romance.231 If this were the case, I would suggest that the translator would then keep the elements of marvel and of necromancy intact in the female characters rather than specifically “correcting” them or excluding them from his translation since the French text retains these elements through the entire text. Gretchen Mieszkowski suggests that the marvelous must be removed from Melior in order to restore her proper gender role (inverted to a large degree by her necromantic practices, her education, and her association with the marvelous), and that with her gender role restored to a passive female ruled by men, the kingdom strengthens and Partonope completes his education into full knighthood; all, then, become correctly governed232 James Wade correlates Melior’s power and her fairy-like marvelous propensities (he actually identifies her as a fairy) with Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the

“state of exception,” which “does not constitute the chaos that precedes or necessarily excludes order, but rather it is ‘the situation that results from [that order’s] suspension.’”233 Wade goes on to suggest that “fairies, as adoxic figures of sovereign power existing neither inside nor outside established orthodoxies, create similar states of

231 John Finlayson, “The Marvellous [sic] in Middle English Romance,” in The Chaucer Review 33, no. 4 (1999): 363-408, 405. 232 Gretchen Mieszkowski, “Urake and the Gender Roles of Partonope of Blois,” in Medievalia, 25.2 (2004): 181-195. 233 James Wade, Fairies in Medieval Romance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 76. Within this cited passage, Wade cites Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 17-18. For further reading on Agamben’s theory of the state of exception as a governmental paradigm, see the sequel text to Homo Sacer: Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, translated by Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 173 exception within worlds of their texts, where the law – the general rules of the human world – is no longer in force, and where these fairies generate and constitute their own arbitrary ‘non-law’ (the force of law that is not law) that takes its place.”234 While

Melior’s “fairy” essence is never blatantly stated in either text, she does arguably bear markers of fairyness in her some of her actions. What is more apt, though, is that Melior inhabits an interstitial place between orthodoxy and heresy and that she must be brought to orthodox belief and compliance in order to restore her kingdom to a state of rectitude.

Thus, as she leaves the interstice of disorder and inversion, Melior’s kingdom,

Partonope’s prowess, and the restoration that conclude medieval romances also leave

Agamben’s “state of exception” and establish a new state of correction, peace, and good governance.

Yet, the conclusion of the tournament and wedding celebration at the poem’s end is quite a contrast from the Prologue where the translator chooses to follow the French text’s lengthy account of Partonope’s lineage through detailed patronymics. The French text catalogues joyous members of the first two Estates along with entertainers, composers, and exotic animals in a grand display:

De rois, de dux et d’almaçors,

Ne d’altre grant chevalerie

Dont tote la terre formie,

Ne des faiz as enchanteors,

Ne des desduis as jugleors,

234 Wade, Fairies, 76. 174

Des lions ne des elefans,

Ne des liepars ne des ors grans,

Ne des merveilles ne des gius235 (PdeB.10560-

10567)

[{A number} of kings, dukes and emirs,

and others of great chivalry,

Those abundant in all the world,

Not to mention the enchanters,

Nor to ignore the jogleurs,

the lions, nor the elephants,

nor the leopards nor the grand bears,

nor the marvelous nor the jesters.]236

No taint of social, political, or especially ecclesiastical criticism pervades the French text; the only adjectival modification to the list of clergy, nobility, performers, and animals is

“grant/ grans” [great/grand]. Interestingly, though, the French Continuation begins with a seventy-line catalogue of various figures of evil that set up Partonope, the virtuous, against the multiple progeny of Lucifer including werewolves, dragons, sons-of-whores, and unicorns “a fenme iriés” [enraged at women] all of whom are drawn from

235 As Gildea notes in his foreword to the Old French text, there are ten extant manuscripts from which he works in order to provide a “best-text” edition. He comments that his focus in this edition is towards “the romance proper” and is less concerned with prioritizing one manuscript over another. The passage cited here deviates in line number from the B-text used by Penny Eley and Penny Simons in the online edition; however, Gildea uses the B-text, Bern MS 113 (held in the Burgerbibliothek) as his base text for this passage cataloguing the celebrants at Melior and Partonope’s wedding. Gildea, Partonopeu de Blois, vii. 236 Translation mine. 175 malevolence and are ill-born.237 The English text, on the other hand, purposefully fuses the secular and the sacral in several instances that begin and end with the narrator figure.

We see an example of this fusion in the narrator’s concluding commentary, where he replaces the lengthy catalogue of wedding celebrants with his disdainful refusal to name either secular or sacred hierarchical rulers because they are traitors.

Previous scholars focusing on the problems of the narrator either cite the deviations between the French text and the English text, discuss the strategies of translation and transmission, comment on the different personas of the two narrators, or ascribe voyeuristic pleasure to the figuration by which the audience/ reader might

“translate” the private spaces in the poem.238 Only Robert R. Edwards focuses on the deliberate actions in the double-bind of translation and invention through a translator/ poet re-telling a tale using a narrator figure who dips into and out of the narration as a subjectified characterization himself. Edwards explores the nature of invention by

237 This catalogue bears the resemblance of an allegorical parade of vices such as we will see in the later French poem, Le Roman de la Rose. Here, it is not constructed as allegory, in part, because the moral and ethical qualities of the figures adjectivally modify the nominal entity (e.g. - ferocious wolves, cunning foxes, and villainous bastards). The catalogue also includes disorders of nature – tempests at sea, war on land – and interestingly, includes revolutions by the people against the seigneury under the natural disorder category. See PdeB. 10763-10834. 238 Craig Thorrold discusses the notable toponymic differences between the antecedent French text and its English translation through the perspective of the narrator in “Mistranslation or Modification? Toponymical Transformation in Partonope of Blois,” in Medievalia 25.2 (2004): 1-24. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner discusses translation strategies in “Repetition and Variation in Twelfth-Century French Romance,” in The Expansion and Transformation of Courtly Literature, edited by Nathaniel B. Smith and Joseph T. Snow (Athens, GA.: The University of Georgia Press, 1980), 94-114. Roberta L. Krueger discusses how the two texts are transmitted in terms of narrator performance and audience expectation in “Textuality and Performance in Partonopeu de Blois,” in Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts, Volume III, edited by Peggy A. Knapp (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), 57-72. Sandra Ihle compares the personas of the two narrators and what each one’s purpose is in relation to the provenance of the texts in “The English Partonope of Blois as Exemplum.” A. C. Spearing goes into great detail about the voyeuristic function of the narrator as a medium between the medieval poet and the aristocratic audience in The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love- Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 176 arguing that emblems or symbolic artifacts within the poem, both the French text and the

English translation, serve as miniature analogues to the text itself so that the process of inventing enables an affective creation through mimesis. In other words, Edwards argues that poetic emblems, such as the invisible feast at Chef d’Oire and the boar hunt in the forest, “represent the artifice of poetic construction, and they re-create, in the ambivalence that Partonopeu shows toward them, the moral ambivalence that the author prescribes for all writing.”239 Edwards calls this relationship between “the product and the process of creation” a self-reflexivity of invention in which the narrator figure is called to function subjectively as a mediator between inventio and artifact. Essentially, then, the narrator in the Middle English text occupies a mediatory interstice, indicating a mobile subjectivity that is not true of the narrator of the Old French text who remains in the margins of the story. The replacement of the narrator from outside to insider enables the poet to comment and criticize, to respond affectively to and with the text and figurations, to form strategic secrecy, and to interpellate the reader/audience into a confessional discourse with his figuration. The Partonope translator joins his poetic precursors, Gower and Chaucer, in moving his narrator to an insider status. With the various maneuvers such insiders can deploy, late medieval English writers authorize a new power for themselves to dissect cultural, social, ecclesiastical, and institutional codes and practices in order to open new paths for critical discourse and reformational dialectic.

Self-examination, contrition, complete disclosure, and remedy constitute the basis for orthodox confession. In narratives using confessional discourse, the foundation shifts

239 Robert R. Edwards, Ratio and Invention, 118. 177 to the strategic actions surrounding confession, oftentimes removing or altering the four sacramental elements. Interiority and careful dialectic, or strategic revelation and concealment, replace these four sacral elements in the secular narrative. The idea of a self-heuristic exercise that the Fourth Lateran Council decretals built into the act of confessing one’s sins, that is the examination of conscience in order to trigger the necessary impulse towards contrition and the subsequent confession and shriving, necessarily follows the actions of will and desire. As I argue throughout this project, fear as the affective aftermath of confession compels new modes of will and desire to enact strategic secrecy in order to preserve the subjective self. The singular self is all- important here because the actions towards virtue must necessarily begin with one individual: a community enacts laws and regulatory behaviors ensue from these laws, yet the community cannot initiate virtue if virtue comes from God.240

Foregrounding the idea of the individual through the focus of the insider versus the outsider complicates critical approaches to the narrator figure and to the translator/ poet as transmitter of culture and tale; it is crucial, however, in order to reconcile the problems that the narrator figure in Partonope presents as well as those in later medieval

English narrators. From the outset of the English translation, the narrator figure deviates significantly from the antecedent French text, shifting his subjectivity as a textual

240 See Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault regarding the regulation of behaviors and laws: Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” from Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by B. Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1979). See Augustine and Aquinas for medieval understandings of virtue: Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Confessiones (English/Latin) (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1977), and Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). See also Alasdair MacIntyre for a full discussion of virtue in relation to medieval culture and morality: Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981). 178 transmitter and oral performer between various figurations as social commentator, would- be or failed lover, and recitative courtier. The French narrator begins with a Christian emphasis, thanking God and “li rois Jhesus” [Jesus, the King] for His blessings and largess, for the narrator’s health and riches, and for the grace of peace and joy. He then immediately launches into a reverdie, or more encompassingly, a début printanier trope, conventional to Old French lyric and troubadour poetry of Occitania, establishing the expectation that the ensuing poem he will present is dedicated to Love as well as his self- inclusion and self-nomination in the celebratory joy of Spring and as a servant to the god of Love:241

Tote verdors se rafrescist

Et tos li mons se rejoïst;

Por la saison qui tant est bele,

Joie et jovente renovele.

Et je sui jone et engignos,

Sains et delivres et joios,

Si me somont joie et jovens

Que je no soie uisous ne lens. (PdeB. 61-68)

[All verdure would be refreshed

And all the world would rejoice;

For the season that is so beautiful

241 Reverdie is a more limiting term referring to the re-greening of the world following winter. The term début printanier more widely includes the whole action of the beginning of Spring in the world. See Simons and Eley for a fuller discussion of the Prologue and the romance tropes deployed by the French poet in “The Prologue to Partonopeus de Blois: Text, Context, and Subtext,” French Studies, XLIX, no. 1(January 1995): 1-16. 179

Renews in joy and youth.

And I am young and imaginative,

Healthy and free and joyous,

If joy and youth counsel me

Then I am neither lazy nor slow-witted.]242

Notice the use of the word engignos relating to engin. The narrator self-identifies as one who uses that sense of political cunning along with overtones of secrecy and ingenuity that the word engin embodies.243 In this way, then, the subjectivity of the French narrator broadens complexly beyond a mere reporter of a courtly, chivalric poem or a static transmitter of an oral tale of Trojan ancestry and descent. Furthermore, the narrator introduces a component of translatio into his Prologue by grounding and authorizing his poem in historical and geographical tradition: “Li livre griu et [li] latin/ Nos devisent de fin en fin/ Trestot le mont en trois parties,/ Sis ont par nom bien escharies:” [The Greek book and the Latin book divide the entire world from end to end for us into three parts,

The are located and divided well by name] (PdeB. 135-138).244 Switching from an oral tradition of courtly love to a historical literary tradition enables the French poet to figure his narrator multiply as an auctor versed in Latinity as well as a creator through engin fully invested in the vernacular tradition and secularity of Love and chivalry.

Remarkably, the English translator omits the entire reverdie trope, the acknowledgment of God’s grace, and the thanks given to Him by the narrator. Instead,

242 Translation mine. 243 See Chapter 1 on the lexicography and etymology of engin. 244 Translation mine. 180 the English text begins in a similar way to Gower’s Confessio Amantis and to Chaucer’s

The Legend of Good Women by situating the poem firmly in a written tradition devoid of lyric conventions. Instantly, the English poem begins, “Hoo so luste olde stories to rede/

He shalle ffynde, wyth-owten Drede,/ Meruellys and wonders mony and ffele/ Off myrtħe, ioye, dyssese, and wele” (1-4).245 The narrator figure insistently identifies himself as a reporter, truly a narrator of events grounded and translated through literacy, not orality. He invests himself with authority as a good counselor because of the efficacy and veracity of translatio verbum:

For be wrytinge we moste lere

How we moste gouerned be

To worshyppe Gode in trinite.

And ther-fore Stories for to rede

Wolle I conselle, wyth-owten drede,

Botħe olde and yonge þat letteryd be. (15-20)

245 Compare the Prologue to Gower’s Confessio in which Gower foregrounds his poem in exempla of old ways by exhorting his audience to embrace vernacularity in writing of new matters: “Of hem that writen ous tofore/ The bokes duelle, and we therfore/ Ben tawht of that was write tho;/ Forthi good is that we also/ In oure tyme among ous hiere/ Do wryte of newe some matiere,/ Essampled of these olde wyse/ So that it myhte in such a wyse,/ Whan we ben dede and elleswhere,/ Beleve to the worldes eere/ In tyme comende after this” (CA, Prol.1-11). And compare the opening lines to Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women in which he specifically turns from the limitations of ecclesiastical authority to embrace old books as examples of experience and authority for secular power in knowledge and learning and championing vernacularity: “For, God wot, thing is never the lasse sooth,/ Thogh every wight ne may it nat ysee./ Bernard the monk [St. Bernard of Clairvaux] ne saugh nat all, pardee!/ Than mote we to bokes that we fynde,/ Thurgh whiche that olde thinges ben in mynde,/ And to the doctrine of these olde wyse,/ Yeve credence, in every skylful wise,/ That tellen of these olde appreved stories/ Of holynesse, of regnes, of victories,/ Of love, of hate, of other sondry thynges,/ Of which I may not maken rehersynges./ And yf that olde bokes were aweye,/ Yloren were of remembraunce the keye./ Wel ought us thanne honouren and beleve/ These bokes, there we han noon other preve.” (The Legend of Good Women, F-text, 14-28). 181

Although he does acknowledge the past practice of oral tradition, “And to socħe folke olde þynge ys new,/ Whanne hyt ys in gestes songe,/ Or els in prose tolde wytħ tonge”

(25-27), the narrator immediately reestablishes the authority of the written word, reprioritizing language and tales, by inculcating Saint Paul and the authority of “wordes playnly y-wrytte.” For the next fifty lines, the narrator discusses wisdom through scripture and clerical teaching, and how through the written word, men can distinguish good from evil. The nod to auctors and authority is far from unique or new to this poet/translator. Gower uses the trope of authority to create a frame-within-a-frame in

Confessio Amantis and melds it with vernacularity. Chaucer infuses his poetry with the auctorité trope repeatedly from The Wife of Bath’s Prologue in The Canterbury Tales to

The Parliament of Fowls to Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer sprinkles calls to and citations of auctorité using a more prudent and skilled hand than does the Partonope translator, offering a small taste, for example, at the end of Book V of Troilus and

Criseyde rather than a repetitive feast hundreds of lines long: “Lo here, the forme of olde clerkis speche/ In poetrie, if ye hire bokes seche.”246 The simplicity and paucity of these lines carries even greater weight in relation to the entire length of the poem itself; the

Partonope translator presents a surfeit of the trope so early in the Prologue that he runs the risk of diminishing his point of variance from the French text. Barry Windeatt argues that the English Partonope poet/translator certainly knew of and followed Chaucer’s narrator persona figuration, particularly as he constructs the narrator’s subjectivity.

Windeatt offers, “Chaucerian allusions in the preface to the English Partonope suggest

246 Troilus and Criseyde, V.1854-1855. 182 that it is the poet’s awareness of the way that Chaucer’s poems ask questions about poetry which has educated him to be self-conscious about his own role as the translator of a romance.”247 In the case of the English translation, the Partonope poet uses the narrator figure as the point of authority or of reporting for several discourses, such as confession, self-governance, and to a large degree, Christianity on a secular level. While specifically arguing that the origination of such narratorial power comes from Chaucer, Windeatt brings up an important point about the medium of the narrator voice for moral values and affective resonances in the poem: “It is the model of Chaucer’s poems which has given the translator a vein of expression in English in which his romance characters can voice their distress and their values, in which they can talk about and analyze their love.”248 If the poem enables a subjective connection between the audience and the poetic figurations, then the narrator effectively translates more than the tale or knowledge or models of empire; he also translates moral rectitude and values for good self-governance through the affective responses generated by the poem onto his audience. The French text does not bear the same level of affective resonance as the English translation, nor does the narrator focus so insistently on reformational self-governance.

Heretical Impulses: Fusing and Challenging Secular and Sacred

The Middle English Partonope of Blois and its antecedent French text rely on inversions, sight and insight, and good counsel to overcome the obstacles Partonope faces

247 Barry Windeatt, “Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Romance: Partonope of Blois,” in Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, eds. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990): 62-80, 64. 248 Windeatt, “Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Romance: Partonope of Blois,” 75. 183 on his way to full chivalric knighthood, to win Melior’s hand in proper courtly fashion, to vanquish and convert the Saracen threat, and to restore the French kingdom to dominance and correct governance. While I have focused my investigation of this text on secrecy, fear, and challenges to religious and political orthodoxy, the scope of this project prevents inquiry into many inversions that merit equal space and thorough inquiry.

In fashioning his translation into a kind of hermeneutic for reform of personal and monarchal governance, the English poet/ translator allows the text to work on several levels, which can demand, depending on the desire and will of the audience, a kind of exegetical excavation. On a primary level, the text reads as an Anglicanization of a very popular Old French romance. It entertains and excites the imagination in several ways, for both its medieval and its modern audiences; whether through the inverted gendering of the Cupid and Psyche myth, or through the dynamic imaginative dialectic between audience and text from invisible lovers to magic boats to necromantic spells with which to uncover secrets, this poem fully embodies the tropes and conventions of the best medieval romances. On a deeper level, however, the text that initially deceives its audience/ reader as a straight-forward narrative gradually reveals the same kind of reformational calls for governance and rectifying corruption as well as ideological challenges to corrupt authorities and institutions that English court poetry and twelfth- century French poetry cloak in interstitial spaces within the narratives. Rita Copeland offers a useful question to bear upon the Middle English translation in her discussion on

William Thorpe, a Lollard preacher who underwent inquisition by Archbishop Arundell in 1407. She asks of the text, Examination of William Thorpe, “What is the role that such

184 a text might play in the fashioning of a historical consciousness of dissent?” and offers a potential answer: “The text offers his [Thorpe’s] historicized identity as a paradigm for constructing a dissenting subject.”249 Indeed, the English Partonope was written during a time of dissent in which political enmity might spring from a simple sermon advocating clerical reform and vernacular transmission of orthodox belief, from affective piety performed by a lewd woman, or from secular poetry straddling the line between an overt political criticism and courtly love complaint.250 Fears of heresy and heterodox belief slipping out of church and monarchical control and political dissent bubbling under the social veneer of stability only served to inspire more covert, subversive, and secretive strategies by which to transmit calls for reform and open new venues for critical discourse. Perhaps, then, a more cogent set of questions arising from this particular translation of a popular French romance is “why this text?,” “why anonymously translated?,” and “why now?”. If the fifteenth-century poet/translator is so well versed in

Chaucerian narrative style and poetics, as Barry Windeatt and Derek Pearsall among others argue, then why does he not embellish this translation in a self-consciously enhanced way?251 If fifteenth-century England witnessed a new discourse of dissent with the upheaval from Ricardian to Lancastrian rule along with the intense scrutiny of

249 Rita Copeland, “William Thorpe and his Lollard Community: Intellectual Labor and the Representation of Dissent,” in Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England, editors Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996): 199-221, 203. 250 See, for example, Wycliffe, Kempe, and Usk, respectively: John Wycliffe, The English Works of Wyclif: hitherto unprinted, edited by F. D. Matthew (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, distributed for the Early English Text Society, 1998); Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, edited by Barry Windeatt (New York: Longman, 2000); and Thomas Usk, The Testament of Love, edited by R. Allen Shoaf (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998). 251 See Barry Windeatt, “Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Romance: Partonope of Blois,” 62-80, and Derek Pearsall, “The English romance in the fifteenth-century,” in Essays and Studies, 29 (1976), 56-83. 185

Wycliffe and of Lollardy, then this translator might cleverly be embedding his challenges to orthodoxy in a romance that already deploys inversions and challenges to orthodoxy with sorcery and Saracens and conversions gone awry as well as with suicidal desires and sinful volition. As Barbara Hanawalt and David Wallace note about the Fifteenth

Century in England, there are repetitive themes to “emphasize the regulation and control of the human body, the need to establish community standards, the increasing concerns about identity of self and of community, and anxieties over religious orthodoxy.”252 The

English Partonope encompasses all of these themes, following the antecedent text.

Interestingly, the French text avoids the external fears that affect the audience because from the outset, the French poet follows generic convention more precisely beginning with the début printanier trope253 and the exaltation of the Trinity. In the English text however, fear de-stabilizes the poem because it first sets in motion the various events and discursive maneuvers towards secrecy, such as the magic ship, the apparently empty castle, and the invisible lover who confesses her desires and actions in bringing

Partonope to her kingdom, and then continues intertwining fear with Partonope’s encounters with the unknown, with unorthodox or heretical others, and with deceptive ruses and practices. Yet, buoying up the affectivity of fear are strains of dissent towards orthodox faith and the clergy, of political corruption and mis-rule, and of moral disorder.

For example, Partonope’s mother and uncle insist that he confess to the Archbishop while

252 Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace, “Introduction,” in Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England, edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), ix-xii. 253 The trope, debut printanier or “The beginning of Spring,” celebrates courtly love ideals through images and figures of re-birth, generation/ reproduction, youth, and pristine love untainted by corrupt motives or vicious desires. 186 he is back in France because they suspect Melior is not only an enchantress, but a demon imperiling Partonope’s soul. The confession proves to be completely ineffective, tainted, and inverted as the Archbishop actually counsels heretical action and offers no absolution. Moral disorder runs rampant through the French and Christian armies, while the Saracens, heretics of the worst order and the hyperbolic enemy of Christendom, show themselves to be morally sound, ethical, and virtuous. While the French text does not overtly, intentionally, or emphatically play on its audience’s fears, it does allow fear to flow organically through the narrative. In other words, the Middle English translator purposefully manipulates the audience’s affective response, while the Old French poet allows fear to emerge and unfold as a result of the events. This difference is important because both poets use diversionary tactics to address contemporary critical concerns

(political, social, ecclesiastical, cultural), but their critical methods are tailored to their specific audience/ reader. Although both texts emerge from turbulent times, France in the High Middle Ages faced different political, institutional, and cultural complaints than did England in the Late Middle Ages. The French monarchy in the late-Twelfth Century was land-poor, coveting the power that the French aristocracy held along with their great wealth and land-holding; city and court held less power than did the feudal system over the political and clerical concerns of the realm. The English monarchy of the late-

Fourteenth and early-Fifteenth Centuries struggled with divided loyalties, a largely impoverished aristocracy, and challenges to Christian orthodoxy within the scope of the court and the city. The Old French poet fuses politically subversive challenges to the

Plantagenet monarchs, such as lineage and land-holding, education (in light of the rise of

187 the university and scholasticism), and heretical secrecy, while simultaneously criticizing the generic conventions that will not sustain a political and cultural commentary in the guise of a romance. Penny Eley and Penny Simons, French vernacular scholars who work primarily on Partonopeu de Blois, suggest that the poet weaves comic and political subversion into the fabric of the poem in order to call for “something new” in terms of the romance genre and to challenge the monarchy of Henry II. In arguing that the subtexts of this poem include deliberate deviations from the history of Troy, rather than upholding Troy as a model of superior culture and polity, Eley and Simons re-imagine the poem as a political weapon of sorts, cloaked in shrouds of courtliness, chivalry, and the marvelous; they comment, “It is most persuasively suggested by the political and literary subtexts to the poem which, as the poet seeks to topple the monarch Henry

[Henry II] from his self-constructed pedestal, gives rise to well-judged moments of humour that make this a most entertaining and rewarding text to study.”254 Their summary offers a plausible answer to the set of questions I posed regarding the English translator’s choice of the Partonope romance in a somewhat dangerous political and ecclesiastical period for such insistent vernacularity and a celebration of the Troy motif, a favorite of Richard II, but questionably deployed under Lancastrian rule. Like Henry II, the Lancastrian kings of England won the crown dubiously and wore it contentiously.

The Middle English translator, as I’ve argued above, shows semblance of clerical knowledge or at least markers of critical reprobation of the higher clerical offices. It is not such a stretch to believe he chooses the French Partonopeu de Blois as an effective

254 Penny Simons and Penny Eley, “The Prologue to Partonopeus de Blois: Text, Context, and Subtext,” 14. 188 vehicle for his own political dissent against fifteenth-century English ideological, social, and cultural corruption. Karen Sullivan’s work on Cathar heresy and conversion points to the possibility of textual subversion as a mode to criticize heretical inquisition and orthodoxy itself. She writes regarding the literary text of a disputation and trial of a heretical convert, “La novas del heretje remains of interest today because it illustrates how a literary text can express criticism of an office like the Inquisition when such criticism was not, in general, possible . . . By allowing Sicart’s [the Cathar] voice into the text and by refraining from commenting upon that voice, the text subverts itself and offers a criticism of the Inquisition despite itself.”255 In this sense, then, we can postulate a correlative between thirteenth-century Cathar heretical inquisition and challenges to orthodoxy and fifteenth-century English fears of institutional collapse and reform at the hands of heterodoxy, Lollardy, and vernacularity.

Consequently, the Middle English translation of the Partonope romance functions as a strategy of secrecy itself, responding to the fears of the effects of corruption and the disruption that vernacularity, in all its tentacles, might bring to English culture, society, and institutional ideologies. Traditional critical discourses fell short or perhaps on deaf ears. Fusing alternative discourses, such as a non-secular confessional model, into vernacular, non-religious poetry opens new venues for complaint and reformational calls to action, whether on a broader social level or on a narrower personal level. In experimenting with shifting subjectivities in the English text (more so than those subject positions figured in the antecedent French text), the poet/translator constructs a binary

255 Karen Sullivan, “Disputations, Literary and Inquisitorial: The Conversion of the Heretic Sicart of Figueiras,” Medium Ævum 73.1 (2009): 58-79, 73. 189 tension through metaphor between the insider and the outsider, between social and religious conformity and intellectual and spiritual honesty. As such, the infusion of secrecy with disclosure and concealment enclosed in exempla or parable, in order to transmit knowledge and belief in a metaphoric fashion, serves as a useful description of the Middle English Partonope. In calling for self-reform to reconstruct a greater polity, society, and religiosity, the translator imparts an esoteric modality, implying his narrative holds privitée to tempt the reader into the work of discovery; as such, he addresses the single listener rather than a mass audience in order that self-heuristic exercises, such as those undertaken by Partonope and Melior towards self-reform and good governance, will start with the individual and virtue will “emerge from private spaces.”256 In this way, the poet allows for remedy from affective fear through the deployment of strategies of secrecy in order to refocus desire and will towards a reformational and external vision rather than more transgressive and internal lusts, despairs, and viciousness.

Confessing Desire: Narrative Mimesis and Secrecy

Earlier, I noted the confessional discourse with which the narrator figure engages the audience/reader. I have argued that there evolves a confessant/ confessor relationship that encompasses a revelation of the narrator’s secrets in which the audience is immediately a participant in this interdependent relationship of subject roles. The translator forges the discursive dynamics that reflect a confessional interchange. We see

256 James Diamond, Converts, Heretics, and Lepers: Maimonides and the Outsider (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 3. 190 a similar pattern in the exchanges between Genius and Amans in the Confessio in which

Amans slowly reveals some of the secrets hidden in his heart that he so desperately fears to unveil.257 Likewise, the narrator figure in the English Partonope reluctantly reveals his failures in love and the transgressive behaviors in which he has indulged towards conquering his love interest – either emotionally or physically; the translator keeps both possibilities in play. In this sense, the narrator mimics Partonope’s desires and oftentimes, his will, but he diverges completely from affective mimesis. For example, when narrating the section where Partonope’s uncle, the French king, and his mother trick him through poisoned wine and “crafte” into marrying his (the King’s) niece, the narrator pointedly repeats “hys will” and “þys folly” in condemning Partonope as an unworthy lover while offering commentary on how he differs from Partonope. For even though the narrator exonerates Partonope’s actions as caused by trickery, ruse, and necromancy (his mother’s), he strangely holds Partonope accountable for willful transgression against Melior’s love while elevating his own rectitude:

Thus was grette merveyle, for trewly I

Shulde neuer haue be brougtħe in þat plygħte,

Off ony oþer to haue Ioye or delyte

257 Derek Pearsall remarks on the similarities between the narrator figure and Gower’s Amans, while also reflecting a poetic debt to Chaucer: “The whimsical, petulant and timorous [narrator of the English Partonope] is partly derived from Chaucer . . . but is even more influenced by Gower’s Amans” (Derek Pearsall, “The English Romance in the Fifteenth Century,” 74). Pearsall goes on to acknowledge the quality of active engagement that the translator instills in the poem through the narrator, “What distinguishes the English poem is the quality of its literary self-consciousness” (Ibid, 78). Brenda Hosington suggests that through omissions, changes in point-of-view (first person to third person), and disclaimers as well as through “no means negligible qualities of the work,” the English translator “introduces a sophisticated double perspective of the kind found in other medieval works:” Brenda Hosington, “Partonopeu de Blois and its Fifteenth-Century English Translation: a Medieval Translator at Work,” in The Medieval Translator II, edited by Roger Ellis (London: University of London, 1991), 252. 191

Butte of my lady, þat ys my souereyne;

I telle yowe trowþe, I can not feyne. (5269-5273)

It is interesting here, too, that the narrator refers to his lady as his “sovereign,” inferring that he serves her dutifully, yet he has confessed to his audience just eight hundred lines previously, “Butte alle þat me luste she doþe for-sake” (4473). If he is impotent in the pursuit of love, then his conditional denial of having joy or delight except from his own lady severs any affective ties with Partonope’s affective and willful experience. The difference is in desire. The narrator would act full willingly on desire for joy and delight.

Partonope has not acted on a desire towards infidelity, but rather the opposite is true; his volition is removed through sorcery and trickery. On hearing the truth from the king’s niece of this ruse to trick him, though, his proper desire for Melior awakens as does a heart-breaking guilt that “I am vntrewe/ To hur þat ys my souereyne ladye” (5295-5296), and he immediately secrets himself away in his chamber, refusing to engage with anyone.

Soon after, he disguises himself and secretly leaves in the night to return to Chef d’Oire seeking forgiveness from Melior. This narrative digression begins a sequence of events in which secrecy and concealment shape Partonope’s desires even further and catapult the narrative into the realm of the marvelous and Melior’s own necromantic creations along with several confessional episodes. The transition between spaces (i.e. – Partonope’s home in France with the King to Melior’s Chef d’Oire) depends on the removal of the visual and excites the desire to see both from Partonope and from the audience. The narrator disappears back into his function as an objective reporter of events after the

192 translator has drawn him out of the narrative so that the narrator figure serves as a catalyst propelling the story into the realms of affect and secrecy.

The antecedent French text’s narrator is more stable in his personal revelations; he is not drawn by the poet as an external character participating in the tale other than narrating it with occasional aside comments meant to suggest empathy and authorizing his performance as sincere as well as engagingly entertaining. He does not interact with or deliberately inculcate an affective camaraderie with his audience or with Partonopeu.

In narrating the scene above in which the English narrator comments that he serves his

“sovereign” lady, the French narrator says rather simply:

Certes si est trop novelliers,

Bien sai que jo ne cangeroie

Por tot le mont, que ne poroie:

Tant sui a m’amie enterins,

Ne puis vers autre estre joilis. (PdeB. 4047-4052)

[Truly, it is so very fickle

that I well know that I would not be so inconstant

for all the world, nor would I be able to.

I am so devoted to my love,

I could not find joy with another.]258

This personal interjection by the French narrator is a fairly neutral commentary on the situation, rather than a comparative judgment about the different levels of virtue between

258 Translation mine. 193 himself and Partonopeu, and lacks the affective qualifications that the English narrator’s digression inserts. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner qualifies the French narrator’s persona quite clearly and posits his function as a “bridge that connects his world and our own.”259

Bruckner argues that this figuration of the narrator as lover persona is in part due to conventional forms of lyric poetry and the romance genre (i.e. - translating the art of rhetoric into vernacular lyric) and in part due to a kind of inclusionary didactic mode that joins him to his audience. She states, “This combination of narratorial personae has a significant impact on the triangular relationship between author/ narrator, the story narrated, and the vernacular public,” that opens a mirroring mode between the poet and the audience.260 Where this mirroring opens between author and audience in the French text, I would argue that the English text turns the mirror inwards to the subjects within the text rather than in a mimetic relationship with the audience. As such, the French text enables a universal subjectivity amongst the poetic figurations, including the narrator, and the audience. The English text inverts subjectivity through the narrator figure so that the individual, particular experience emerges, not a universal one. In this way, the

English poet/ translator establishes a foundation for reformation: that individual actions against particular corruptions, inversions, and/or cultural disruptions (e.g. - subversive, dissenting, or heretical writings and practices) must first begin with re-imagining and reforming one’s subjective position within the community. Ineffective ideologies, corrupt institutions, and mis-envisioned social values cannot be remedied unless and until

259 Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Shaping Romance, 112. 260 Ibid, 111. 194 the individual turns from fear and secrecy just as he must do in an orthodox confession if he is to be absolved towards salvation.

Necromancy, Vision and Re-Vision, and “Privey” Places

On its most basic level, the romance of Partonope of Blois and its antecedent

French text are re-tellings of the Cupid and Psyche tale with inverted gender roles. That tale turns on desire, will, and the conception of sight in all its permutations, such as the modern notions of insight, fore-sight, hind-sight, and fetishized vision. Cupid’s prohibition to Psyche not to look at him drives her mad with the desire to “see” the forbidden sight and sets in motion her plot to capture Cupid’s visage in lantern light in a ruse to trick him and defy his conditions of love. Two things are at play in the Cupid and

Psyche tale that are translated into the French romance and that are enhanced in the

English version through fusions between the spectacle of the forbidden and the sacral elements of transgressing the forbidden. The first enhancement concerns the amalgamation of forbidden knowledge and the desire to know the unknown or to learn the purposely concealed and protected secrets of another who has set this boundary as the condition of the relationship. The second enhancement in the English version of

Partonope correlates medieval ideas of the senses with confessional discourse. I’ll return to discuss the first enhancement more fully, but it is necessary to set out the general concepts informing the senses and the way they penetrate medieval confessional and inquisitorial practice in order to understand the complex interrelations among forbidden knowledge, transgressive desire, and secrecy.

195

Primarily, the medieval understanding of the five senses was similar to modern conceptions in that they are the gateway to experience and knowledge. In addition, medieval clerical literature includes descriptions and qualities of holiness that were defined in various ways by the five senses. C. M. Woolgar notes that vernacular English understandings of the senses most probably were transmitted through the thirteenth- century Anglo-Norman poem, La lumere as lais, in which the senses were defined as things “by which the wicked would suffer unremitting torment in Hell.”261 The medieval sensorium, then, consisted of physical experiences as well as apparatuses concerned with operations of the soul. As such, medieval confessional manuals came to include examination of the sensate experiences as well as volition and action. Woolgar notes that because “the senses were the gateways between the external body and the internal soul,” sermonic literature of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England as well as heretical inquisition during the same period focused as much attention to the actions of sensing as to the actions of sin.262

In terms of the Partonope romance, vision and sight take on added levels of meaning for the various subjective roles of the characters and for the audience itself. The

Cupid and Psyche tale offers a ready-made medium for challenging vision through desire, will, fear, and secrecy. Beyond that, though, the inversions and the modifications that the poet and the translator bring to the tale, such as the gender role inversions and the manipulations through necromantic knowledge and sorcery, lay greater emphasis on

261 C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2006), 6. 262 Ibid, 11. 196 vision and re-vision for the subject positions and for the audience. These, in turn, encourage re-imagination and reformation towards personal rectitude and governance.

Because Melior yields no visible, ocular proof of power to Partonope, and by extension, to the audience, when she is first introduced into the poem, she continually is held apart from such visible confirmation of her potency and of her realm throughout the rest of the poem. The male advisers who take over the governance of her choice of husbands, and consequently, disable her self-governance never accede or acknowledge her power or status as a ruler. Her visual exposure by the magic lantern not only abrogates her necromantic powers, but alters her ability to govern her realm. As her physical self is revealed in the lantern light, she decries Partonope for breaking his oath and for his transgressive desire: “’Ałł þys connynge and ałł þys crafte/ Ye haue clene fro me be-rafte./ Thys ys þe cause and þe skylle,/ For ye haue sene me a-yen my wyłł’”

(5977-5979). More problematic in relation to the push for vernacular authority outside the text is the instant that she becomes visible to Partonope through his trickery; her education appears to be rendered null as well. Earlier, she boasts to Partonope that her power comes through her rather privileged and remarkable education, at least as far as women are concerned, because it is a complete education in the seven liberal arts and in divinity along with tutelage in the necromantic arts and in the mastery of nature. This education is on par with Alexander the Great through his teacher, Aristotle, as known through the Secreta Secretorum in late Antiquity and into the Middle Ages. Melior tempers the heterodox or heretical nature of necromancy by qualifying that she practices her “crafte pryvely” alone in her chamber, and that “’when hyt lyked þe Emperowre/ To

197 se my craffte, þen In a towre/ Or In a chamber þus preuely/ Hym to dysporte þen wolde I/

And my mastres at hys commawndemente,/ Pley craftes þorowe wycħ mony man was blynte’” (5940-5945) as if she were merely serving her father, the Emperor of

Constantinople, as a dutiful subject. She further reveals that her purposeful use of the

“craft of nygromauncye and such gynne” is the means by which she has lured Partonope and kept him “’fułł preuely/ Wyth-owte knowynge of any wygħte,/ And do yowe plesaunce wyth ałł my mygħte’” (5973-5975). Throughout these few lines, the correlation among cunning/ knowledge, engin and crafte (specifically necromantic artistry), and sight becomes inextricable particularly as they stem from vision, yet they insist on sites of secrecy and on matters of privitée. Melior’s powers that can blind a man, removing his vision through sorcery, ultimately are stripped through Partonope’s vision through his use of sorcery, albeit handed-down to him by his mother. In this way, the tale of Cupid and Psyche is not sufficiently infused with double-binds and actions of secrecy or things that should remain secret to simply transmit the story, and so the retelling of the tale in the Partonope romance takes on more levels of cautionary advisement against revealing secrets best left hidden as a requisite for proper self- governance. The effectiveness of Melior’s self-governance, then, proves dubious in spite of her vast education and privileged position as the ruler of her kingdom. Even her city,

Chef d’Oire, and the castle within it shows no visible signs of governance or ordered service other than that things appear through invisible means, such as the feasts laid out for Partonope and the prepared bed chamber. The question arises in terms of governance and efficacious wielding of power whether a kingdom needs visual markers of service in

198 order to be strong and well-governed. Further, without visible means of counsel or social and religious institutions, is a monarch capable of right-rule?

In Melior’s case, both the French poet and the English translator construct her power as interdependent on her ability to control vision, whether it is a repeated prohibition against desiring and volitionally acting on that desire to see her and to reveal her corporal form or to invoke blindness in men who fell prey to witnessing the plying of her craft of necromancy. The correlation between transgressive sight and corporeality ventures into a strange amalgamation of pagan myth, as in the myth of Acteon, and of

Christian orthodoxy.263 Both texts of this romance repeatedly link Melior’s prohibitions to Partonope not to try to see her, oddly including by means of charms, craft, cunning, and necromancy (which, of course, is exactly how he does manage to see her, although through a spell generated by his mother). The English translation sprinkles Christian discursive allusions throughout her interdiction and makes a great point of her declaration that she is Christian regardless of the necromantic practice. Indeed, the translator goes to great lengths to temper the affective responses of both lovers in the rape scene with a strange combination of fear, guilt, sadness, and dismay alongside the comforts of orthodox belief. Soon after they take each other’s “maydenhede,” Partonope asks to see her as fear of his actions and lack of self-control start to creep in, along with the fear that he has fornicated with a demon, imploring her, “’I am ryghte gladde þat I may knowe and see/ þat ye truste and loue Gode almygthe./ But sory I am I may not haue þe syghte/

Off yowe þat ben my souereyn lady dere’” (1908-1911). Melior answers with a

263 In my previous chapter on Gower, I briefly discuss Gower’s treatment of The Tale of Acteon in the Confessio Amantis as an exemplum for mis-looking incorporating mis-desire and transgressive will. 199 dissemblance, not really addressing why she won’t allow him to see her, but rather diverting their exchange to commanding him to save her honor and his honor as well.

She clearly recognizes the power of sight, but deploys a strategy to keep her honor intact by insisting on her visual secrecy and by negating the potential power of words; by subtly threatening Partonope with his honor, too, Melior manages to control his governance through a deceptive ruse. She answers his pleading, “’Speketħ not of syghte, let ałł þes wordes be./ I pray yowe fully ye wołł haue mercy on me,/ And byse yowe ałł-way myne honowre to saue,/ And saue your-selfe, þat ye no harme haue’” (1915-1918).

Interestingly, too, Melior controls the emotional aftermath of their mutual rape by stating the terms of their accord: he can stay at Chef d’Oire with everything his heart desires, including prowess and fame as a great knight in the world, provided to him by Melior as long as “’hyt shalle so ordenyte be/ þys loue be-twyn vs shałł be kepte preve’” (1825-

1826) and so long as he controls his desire:

‘And goode, sw[e]te herte, beþe nowe of myn a-corde,

And be not heuy, thowe ye may notte se

As yet my persone; for trewly hyt shałł not be

Here after-warde owre botħes beste.

Lette no socħe þoзtes reve yowe of your reste,

And loke here-after ye neuer desyrious be

Be crafte of Nygromansy to haue þe syghte of me,

Vn-to þe tyme þe day be come and goo

þat we mowe openly showe vs botħe too.

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For yeff ye do, trewly ye shalle be dedde.’ (1866-1875)

Not only is Melior cautioning Partonope here against desire or use of necromantic craft to see her, but she also insists on their mutual secrecy in keeping her hidden from his sight and keeping his desires under control by overtly threatening his life should he attempt to breach these mandates. As Laurence Harf-Lancner notes, these prohibitions follow each time on the heels of the couple’s love-making, “Tout au long de la première partie du roman, chaque recontre des amants est ponctuée par la répétition pressante de cet interdit.

En countrepartie du serment qu’elle exige, Mélior, comme la fée des contes mélusiniens, comble son amant de riches dons” [All through the first part of the romance, each meeting of the lovers is punctuated by the insistent repetition of this interdiction. In return for the oath she demands, Melior, like the fairy of the Melusine stories, showers her lover with rich gifts].264 Harf-Lancner also reminds us that the prohibition against willful vision is also repeated by the knight escorting Partonope back to Blois from Chef d’Oire.265 The English translator expands the knight’s reminder into a forty-line caution to Partonope to keep his oath to Melior interspersed with pleadings to the Christian God:

“’Ye schulde be worchyppfułł, and of Charmes/ Be Ryзghte ware, the зe ne be/ Wythe

[hem] be-gyled’”(2538-2540), and, “’And kepe yow welle for God-ys sake/ That by no

Craffte Eny man yow make/ To se yowr lady er tyme be’” (2553-2555). Thus, even within the liminal spaces and through the intercessors between Melior’s world constructed through engin and crafte and the world of reality of Partonope’s realm, Blois, the strict interdiction not to desire to see through transgression, notably through sorcery

264 Laurence Harf-Lancner, Les Fées au Moyen Âge, 325. Translation mine. 265 Ibid, 325, fn 16. 201 beyond the vices of orthodoxy, becomes the sole law of order. The English translator makes a point, however, to include an addendum to these proscriptions against transgressive vision by the knight’s exhortation to Partonope to do well visibly as a knight-in-training, and in return, Melior will knight him in plain sight: “’Wythe yowr swerde anone wolle sche/ Yow gyrde yn all pepułł syзthte’” (2550-2551). This enjoinder is absent from the French text, which calls into question the English translator’s purpose in adding visual displays of prowess and of chivalric ceremony within a section bridging the two worlds of opposing visibility.

Notably, too, the English translator heightens affect throughout the romance where his antecedent text hardly veers into the interiority of either the subjective figurations or of the audience.266 In a sense, then, the English translator constructs an external “privey” space for affective response along with delineating “privey” spaces within the text that become sites of shifting subjectivities. Fear is the primary affect emerging in the first three-quarters of the romance and is only tempered, and then replaced, by the emotions and affect of hope and joy once the tournament to win Melior’s hand begins. Interestingly though, the translator enables the affective response of fear to develop before the actions are revealed that do and should invoke such response. To a medieval audience, fear would be a correct or unremarkable affect in tales filled with

266 As a reminder, I follow Rei Terada’s definition of “affect” in distinction to “emotion:” “By emotion, we usually mean a psychological, at least minimally interpretive experience whose physiological aspect is affect:” Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001), 4. Terada later notes the affective transition between fear and hope insists upon a liminal space in which the figuration moves between affective responses: “The space between thinking and being – the self-difference that keeps experience short of subjectivity – fills up with fear and reassurance” (Ibid, 23). Although I follow her theoretical framework and definitions to understand affect particularly in terms of subjectivity, Terada purposefully avoids arguing subjectivity because she is responding to Marxist and postmodernist theorists (i.e. – Jameson, Althusser, de Man, Žižek, and Deleuze) and the death of subjectivity. 202 necromancy and the marvelous as well as those in which secrecy and “privey” spaces abound. As John Finlayson argues in his discussion on the deployment of the marvelous in medieval romance, such “malice of demons” as the use of sorcery and magic is necessary in order to restore Christian orthodoxy and thus, restore society and the polity to moral order. Finlayson cites Aquinas’ reasoning in the incorporation of magic and sorcery in secular and sacred works: “Aquinas, that is, acknowledges the "reality" of magic by rationalizing it and, partially, de-mystifying it, just as modern science both creates "marvels" by its exploitation of the occult properties of natural objects, and removes their "mysterious" or "marvelous" quality.”267 Finlayson further notes that Duns

Scotus allows for a dualism of good and evil in sorcerers and necromancers because on one hand, the magus is an “evil-doer,” and on the other hand, “he is wise in the secrets of nature.”268 Note, though, that Duns Scotus limits this kind of secrecy to the realm of nature and not the realm of the Divine. In this fashion, then, the medieval audience and authors might read necromancy as a way to authorize and privilege orthodoxy over deviant beliefs and practices. I would suggest, however, that in Duns Scotus’ bifurcation of the subjectivity of a magus, he verges quite close to the heretical beliefs of the Cathars and the Waldensians who believed in two equal powers of divine knowledge and of creation: a good deity synonymous to the orthodox Christian God and an evil deity, who, unlike Satan, is not hierarchically below God, but who is co-existent to and co- omnipotent with the good deity. Both entities are responsible for earthly creation and the concept of privitée absolutely applies to both.

267 John Finlayson, “The Marvelous in Middle English Romance,” 367. 268 Ibid, 367. 203

However, Melior is an avowed Christian, in spite of her practice of necromantic arts. She affirms her status as a “trewe crysten woman” as she attempts to reassure

Partonope out of a state of affective fear; remarkably, though, her reassurances come immediately after her insistent proscription against desire or against attempts to see her and her implied threat that he will die if he should try. She uses secrecy as a weapon of status and dominance here, all the while invoking Christian discourse as a means to keep her from being “read” as a an “Illusione / Off þe deuylle and of conivrysone” (1284-

1285). Melior pleads with Partonope to be assured of her veracity and of her virtue:

‘Mi fayre loue, my goode, swete herte dere,

Off my persone haue ye no ffere.

Demytħe me not to be an euełł þynge

That shulde be crafte yowre sowle In synne brynge,

Hytte to departe frome heuen blysse.’

And wyth þat worde she can hym kysse,

Wyth wepynge, and sayde: ‘For soþe I am

Borne and broghte for-þe a trewe crysten woman,

And my lefe ys fully In Crystes lore,

And euer haþe ben setħe I was bore.’ (1881-1890)

She goes on for several more lines in a catechetical display of orthodox belief, which should ease Partonope’s, and the audience’s, fears. Yet, in heretical inquisitorial depositions, in trial transcriptions, and in Bernard Gui’s Practica officii Inquisitionis heretice pravitatis, the inquisitors caution that a heretic’s first move to prove his or her

204 orthodoxy and innocence is to recite the basic tenets of orthodox faith as well as deflecting attention from discourses of secrecy and knowledge.269 In a less subversive vein, Hugh B. Urban premises that the deployment of secrecy sets in motion a “dialectic of dissimulation and partial revelation in the effort to understand the other.”270 It is perfectly logical that such dialectic unfolds at this point in the romance because neither

Melior nor Partonope know the other. Melior acknowledges that she has “seen” and followed Partonope through his initial entry into chivalry and man-hood, although she does not reveal how she has acquired such vision or come upon such knowledge of him.

Partonope, on the other hand, has no knowledge of Melior at all with the exception of the sense of touch from their sexual encounter in the dark and from her self- reporting of her identity and purpose in bringing him to Chef d’Oire, all the while remaining invisible to him. A. C. Spearing fleshes out these ideas of looking and telling more completely, but argues the opposite of what, in fact, happens in the narrative.271 Spearing notes that male desire in medieval romance is based on sight while female desire is based on touch.

Spearing further problematizes the actual events of the narrative by suggesting that both the Middle English and French Partonope romances actually challenge Andreas

Capellanus’ rules for courtly love because Partonope and Melior fall in love in the dark

269 For greater discussion of the heretical inquisitorial procedures, see especially Peter Biller, Inquisitors and Heretics in Thirteenth-Century Languedoc: Edition and Translation of Toulouse Inquisition Depositions, 1273-1282, edited by Peter Biller, Caterina Bruschi, and Shelagh Sneddon (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2011); Henry Angsar Kelly, Inquisitions and Other Trial Procedures in the Medieval West (Suffolk: Ashgate Variorum, 2001); Thomas of Chobham, Thomae de Chobham Summa Confessorum, edited by Revd. F. Broomfield, M.A., Ph.D. (Louvain: Éditions Nauwelaerts, 1968); and Bernard Gui, Manuel de l’Inquisiteur, édité et traduit par G. Mollat avec la collaboration de G. Drioux (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2007). 270 Hugh B. Urban, “The Torment of Secrecy: Ethical and Epistemological Problems in the Study of Esoteric Traditions,” History of Religions, 37, no. 3, (Feb., 1998): 209-248. 271 A. C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 205 and that Andreas posits that sight is the crucial factor in falling in love. Where I diverge from Spearing’s reading of Partonope and Melior’s love is in his initial exposition of where and when they fall in love; he suggests that the two fall in love immediately upon recovering from their first sexual union, whereas I would suggest that their love develops over time. Melior must prove herself in other ways to Partonope because she insistently holds her body as a visual secret before he fully gives in to her advances; granted, this process doesn’t take long, but it does not occur simultaneous to their mutual rape. Urban offers a further clarification of how we might understand Melior’s strategy towards holding herself visually absent from her lover: “Secrecy is a discursive strategy that transforms a given piece of knowledge into a scarce and precious resource, a valuable commodity, the possession of which in turn bestows status, prestige, or symbolic capital on its owner.”272 In the case of Melior and Partonope, vision is the scarce and precious resource with all the full investment of drinking in the other through the sense of sight and thereby, fully knowing the other.

Secrets in the Night: Diverting and Correcting Audience Desire, Will, and Affect

Tropes of lightness and darkness fill medieval romance as well as serve as exegetical metaphors in religious allegory and exempla. Inquisitors as well as pastoral curates and confessors infuse their inquisition, examination, and instruction with various models of illuminations and diminishments all turning on corrective vision, desire, and will in order to replace fear and despair with hope and love. The lantern by which

272 Urban, “The Torment of Secrecy,” 210. 206

Partonope tricks and sees Melior works on several levels of metaphor, exemplum, and allegory. On a simple level, the lantern follows the myth of Cupid and Psyche as the requisite tool by which Psyche gazes and then recognizes Cupid as the god of love, setting in motion the course of their parting and eventual reunion. In the Partonope romance, the lantern takes on multiple meanings. As in the original myth, it is the tool by which the lover transgresses and breaks his vow to maintain the requisite secret. On a deeper level, the lantern acts as a mediator between Partonope’s mother and Melior in a kind of necromantic power struggle to claim and hold Partonope in place: his mother would hold him in Blois and France; Melior would hold him in Chef d’Oire. The lantern works by a spell from Partonope’s mother through her necromantic craft. In this way, the lantern is a site of mimetic secrecy for crafte and engin. On a contextual level, the lantern of the English text calls to mind the Lollard tract, The Lantern of Light, written circa 1410. Rita Copeland notes that this tract in particular offers “polemical responses to official accusations and restrictions and which must reconstruct, by extratextual reference, the coercive force of law.”273 Although not widely circulated in the early

Fifteenth Century, The Lantern of Light was circulated and held in high esteem by the

Lollards, particularly following the deaths of Wycliffe and of John Oldcastle. The text was considered dangerous in large part due to its vernacularity, but also because it challenges corrupt pastoral care and the kind of dissemblance that heretics and sorcerers use in diverting attention from anti-Christian ideals of self-governance. The tract devotes several sections to identifying the anti-Christ through such means as the sins of

273 Rita Copeland, “William Thorpe and his Lollard Community,” 205. 207 presumption by which one follows no proper lordship and bears the guise of false mendicancy, or of despair by which one is blinded by the ignorant governance of another.274 While it is wrong to suggest that the lantern used in the story is solely an analogue connecting the Middle English translation to this Lollard tract or that the metaphor of the lantern only denotes a connection with contemporary heretical concerns in England in the early Fifteenth Century, I would suggest that the English translator used the trope of lightness as a means to express ideological criticisms for the church and governance through the ready-made metaphor of the lantern, and as we see later in the poem, through Partonope’s mendicant posturing as he wanders the forest of Ardennes in despair. In other words, I believe the contemporary concerns with heretical belief and fears of vernacularity offered the translator a convenient poetic vehicle through which to address disruptions in court, ecclesiastical, and personal governance as well as to explore the insights emergent from the heretical trials (i.e. - Wycliffe, Thorpe, Oldcastle) in terms of the power of language.

At this point, the uncovering of secrets and understanding the strategic implementation of them might be served best by considering the nature of literary language and the theories of insight. Here, I offer a grossly truncated synthesis of Paul de

Man’s argument to account for the multiple layers of the vision metaphor and of the lantern that grows exponentially in this romance. De Man argues that insight grows diachronically in literary language because it is ontologically figural, not mimetic

274 Writings and Examinations of Brute, Thorpe, Cobham, Hilton, Pecock, Bilney, and Others; with The Lantern of Light, written about A.D. 1400 (London: Printed for The Religious Tract Society; and sold at the depository, 56, Paternoster-Row; also by J. Nisbet, 21, Berners-Street; and by other booksellers., 1831) 146. See especially the Lollard Society website for more information on Lollard tracts and the metaphors of light, illumination, blindness, and lanterns: lollardsociety.org, 30 April 2012, http://lollardsociety.org/. 208 because mimesis assumes “a stability of meaning that does not exist.”275 Further, de Man suggests that metaphors of blindness and marvel stand for the actual affective state of the subject, primarily the affect of fear. Taken in relation to the Partonope romance, both the

French and the English versions, the blindness trope serves as a necessary point of departure and entry into the text itself, ironic or seemingly paradoxical as that might seem; as de Man notes, “If the literary text itself has areas of blindness [in this case, both figural and literal], the system [of critical reading] can be binary; reader and critic coincide in their attempt to make the unseen visible.”276 I would augment this assertion to include the poet/translator along with the narrator/subject in these kinds of attempts in order to fully grasp the multiple fusions and nodes that surround the recurrence of vision, blindness, invisibility, re-vision, voyeurism, and revelation that bind the entire story and subjectivities of the various figurations.

Confession and Conversion: Bending Orthodox Discourse

The Middle English translator takes the idea of vision and correction a step further into a figural realm, particularly in two scenes that begin with orthodox Christian rituals and turn towards heterodox subversion of faith and practice. These scenes take

275 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edition, revised (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 133. This portion of de Man’s theory on blindness and insight is in relation to Derrida’s reading of Rousseau in terms of critical reading of literary language. De Man offers a profound argument about the idea of contradictory understandings or ideas at impasse, which sheds a useful light on the understanding of the way strategic secrecy works in the various discourses, such as those of confession and dissent, in the Partonope romances. He writes, “No contradiction or dialectical movement could develop [i.e. - between assertion and understanding] because a fundamental difference in the level of explicitness prevented both statements from meeting on a common level of discourse; the one always lay hidden within the other as the sun lies hidden within a shadow, or truth within error” (Ibid, 103). 276 Ibid, 141. 209

Christian vision and cloud it through fear, which in turn, corrupts the orthodoxy into a blindness of spirit and will. The two scenes involve Partonope at crucial junctures at which he must decide the correct course to follow, especially as a Christian learning the cultural and social codes required for his full entry into knighthood and manhood: the first instance is his confession to the bishop at the insistence of her mother and his uncle; the second scene is more complicated and involves the attempted conversion of his servant to Christianity in exchange for Partonope’s vow not to commit suicide. Both scenes blend virtuous and vicious actions with moments in which Partonope takes on clerical qualities that displace his penitential figuration, and more importantly, both scenes use fear as the foundation through which orthodoxy is tested and comes up short.

By expanding the vision trope from the actual to the figural, the translator challenges the efficacy of Christian learning, doctrine, and practice; consequently, he uses the very discourse he criticizes as the medium by which to illuminate corruption and mis- application of the tenets of faith.

The confession scene comes after Partonope’s first return to France following his year-long sojourn with Melior in their secret hide-away at Chef d’Oire. After successfully helping his uncle defeat Sornegour and the Saracen invasion, Partonope yearns to return to Melior and resume his education in the arts of love and aristocratic pastimes. Partonope’s mother and his uncle, the king of France, bring the bishop to

Partonope in order to exorcise Partonope’s love for Melior. Both the king and the mother insist that Partonope has been infected by “the devil’s dance,” and Melior has entrapped him for demonic purposes, most likely in a move to control his soul. The bishop takes

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Partonope aside and begins an orthodox examination of a penitent, fully acting in the role of an untainted, uncorrupt pastor. Yet, Partonope’s subsequent confession collapses in inefficacy and in volition, in part because fear of damnation and of Melior’s potential devilry is absent from Partonope’s affective being. Since he does not feel threatened or that he has anything at stake to keep hidden, Partonope does not acknowledge that he is sinful, so he has no contrition. His mother and his uncle are the ones who call in the bishop for a confession, but the dialectic follows the pattern of inquisition, rather than confession, because they are seeking to discover heretical indoctrination by Melior on

Partonope or some form of heterodox belief instead of desiring that he be shriven towards his soul’s salvation.

In the second scene testing Partonope’s orthodoxy, he is shown to be anything but morally sound or virtuous. At this point in the tale, he is as far away from being a properly courteous lover, a superlative knight, or an effective ruler as is possible to be.

This scene takes place after Partonope has wandered the forest of Ardennes in despair and in woe following his banishment by Melior and his self-removal from the court at

France. He is accompanied by a boy named Furnis, the nephew of the Saracen Sornegour who recently has faught against the king of France and Partonope. Sornegour lost the battle ultimately, but the long episode draws him in a favorable light; he is truly every bit a “flower of chivalry” as any Christian knight and behaves more in line with Christian virtue and chivalric ideals than do any of the French knights except for Partonope. Furnis is first given a Christian moniker, Gilamour, by Partonope, and then he is renamed

Ancelot upon his conversion, although the narrator does not give a reason for these

211 changes other than that he has promised Partonope in the past that he will convert to

Christianity. Between Melior’s banishment of Partonope and his self-removal to the forest, the English narrator goes through a progression of narrative diversions in which he comments on the falseness of mendicant friars, the inconstancy of the clergy, and the futility of conversion. Before leaving the court, a desperate Partonope prays to God, to

Mary, and finally to Death for help in committing suicide. These prayers are horribly unorthodox and full of the worst sins possible to the orthodox Church. The death-wish motif is also in the French text, but the particulars of the conversion exchange are notably expanded in the English text. While engrossed and obsessed with his death-wish,

Partonope is drawn in similar ways to a hermit figure, although he does not remove himself for contemplative practice or for edification of his soul. Rather, he removes himself from the court because he indulges his despair, dwelling on his heart-sickness to the point of madness and suicide. To what purpose, though, does the poet/translator insert subjective shifts towards a marginal, sacral figure who inverts his potential orthodoxy by tainting the veracity of his servant’s conversion through his manipulation of ideologies and faith?

With the reiterative criticisms towards ecclesiastical clergy and corrupt institutional practices woven throughout the poem, I would argue that shifting Partonope into the multiple subject positions touching orthodoxy allows the translator to create interstitial spaces by which to visually demonstrate the inefficacy of orthodox Christian care towards good governance and ultimately, towards salvation. When his sojourn in the wilderness comes to an end as Urake rescues him through magic craft of her own, he

212 is visually unidentifiable and mis-names himself as “traitor.” Of course, he comes into his desperate condition because of his treason to Melior; however, he also proves to be a traitor to God and to himself, which we see gradually revealed in the confessional discourse, the conversion scene, and his death-wish in this section of the poem.

Partonope’s prayers leading into his removal into the wilderness begin the turn from governance by necromancy, proven dangerous and destructive, and by chivalric prowess, proven empty by the Saracen Sornegour’s superior governance and moral bearing. The prayer sequence begins with Partonope wasting away in his agony not to be able to see Melior with his eyes and unfolds in a dual fashion: the prayers articulate orthodox Christian belief and follow ritual forms of address to God and to Mary, and further, they act as a confessional link between Partonope and the reader/ audience so that we see his internal processes towards his death-wish. He begins, “’Meliore, my Ioy,/

Allas, shałł I neuer se þe with Ee?’” (6665-6666). At first glance, it does not seem unusual that he should wish to see his lover again, but given the circumstances leading to his banishment in which he looked at her through the machinations of sorcery to fulfill his transgressive desire, his plaintive cry to desire to see her again with his eye, shows he is not contrite about breaking his vow to her and mis-serving his lady correctly. He then turns to imploring God for comfort from his distress: “’Sende me comforte for þi mekenesse,/ And let me not perysshe in þis distresse,/ Comforte me by thy holy goste./

What is me beste, lorde, þou wele woste’”(6681-6683). Again, this prayer seems correctly orthodox and sincere, but what Partonope is actually asking (i.e. - comfort and what is best for him) is not what he actually wants. He is seeking a way to either see

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Melior or to die in order to end his suffering. We see this covert intention in the next section of prayer to the Virgin Mary. Partonope addresses Mary with a recitation of her virtuous qualities and acknowledging her role in the birth of Christ. Yet, he shifts the focus of his pleading very subtly towards pain and death, hinting at an analogous relationship between her pain in childbirth and his own in love-sickness as well as between Christ’s death for the salvation of Man and his own death to deliver him from the same suffering that “robbers and traytours” endure in their “cursednesse.” He first asks Mary, “’With ałł my hert I beseche þe/ In my diseace haue mercy on me!’” (6697-

6698). He then launches into a confession of his despair and suicidal desires to Mary, and this is a the first time he actually reveals his heart-secrets in the poem. Previously, he has admitted his desires, but he has not uttered his actual secrets either to his mother, to his uncle, or to Melior. Within this confessional prayer passage, Partonope equates himself with felons, revealing sinful desires that move beyond bodily lusts or passions, but delve into the realm of spiritual darkness and dangerous despair:

‘Of my life, lady, I am fułł wery,

For ałł to longe lyved haue I.

To longe liveth he þat doþe felony;

Therefore my Ioy were forto dey.

I wolde fayne dey, and I wist how.

But þe wey toward as nowe.

I can not fynde, so God me save;

For I ne haue with me yeman ne knave

214

That in my possescion wole leve a knyve,

Wher-with I myght vndo my lyfe.’ (6699-6708)

Although it appears that he is only complaining that he would rather die, and that since his servants won’t leave a knife with him, he cannot “undo” his life, the prayer turns suddenly from a plea to Mary for comfort to a complaint to Death for sparing the false and killing the good. He equates himself once again with felons, and the prayer shifts into a heterodox mode of commanding Death to kill the vicious instead of enhancing them:

‘Allas deþe, what ayleth the?

Why delyuerest þou not þe worlde of me?

The false folke þou haste Ioy to save,

Ałł the good þou wilt haue. 6712

Robbers, traytours þou levist on lyve,

And such as caste hem neuer to pryve,

Swych þou suffrest to haue longe life

That sette her neghbores euer in strife, 6716

And lede her lyfe euer in Cursednesse,

They be suffred to haue þe swetnesse

Of þis worlde; þe toþer þat good be,

Fro þi swerde they shułł not fle. 6720

The good þou shuldest suffre on lyve,

The false þou shuldest sle as blyve.

215

Ladies þat fayre ben and vertuose,

To hem þou fiers arte and dispituose, 6724

And ouer hem redy to take vengeance.

The foule, þe viciouse þou doste enhaunce;’ (6709-6726)

Packed within this apostrophic prayer to Death, we see several inversions of governance as well as fusions of the secular and the sacred: Death rewards bad governance while abusing good governance, and virtue is despised while vice is enhanced. More particularly, though, Partonope brings up a skewed logic that Death should suffer the good to live, but that the false should be slain according to belief. This chastisement from line 6722 is far from clear. Who constitute “the false” and if their sin is being untrue – perhaps lying, dissembling, or willfully concealing – then why such an extreme punishment? Further, what ideological “belief” is being referenced? Is it falseness to the codes of courtesy, as in a secular transgression, or is it falseness to chivalric prowess, as the French nobility have just been exposed as being by the ideal “good” performed and displayed by Sornegour? I suggest that the ambiguity of this line – of falseness and belief

– proves to be a strategic secret on the part of the translator at this crucial point in the poem. For immediately following this series of prayers, increasingly edgy and dark,

Partonope sets off for the forest of Ardennes in hopes of being slain by a wild animal, and moreover, the narrator offers a conflated digression that is a scathing anti-clerical reproval of the Church’s and its servants’ posture towards women. The narrator accuses the clergy of misgovernance, lechery, heresy, and indoctrinating men to fear all women.

The narrator authorizes this transgression by attributing it to his “auctour in ffrensshe” as

216 well as alluding to a long line of auctors holding these indicting sentiments against “þes prestes.” The primary message the narrator conveys is that women who are well ruled are not “lemans” or “paramourse” of the clergy, nor are they written of by clerks and scribes of yore. This passage insistently repeats that women have been mis-written at the hands and pens of the clergy, who are taught to fear and mistrust all women; those clerks who think favorably of and do not fear women will not translate this pro-feminine ideal:

“But þese clerkes þat wele ruled be,/ Of hem shałł [ye] neuer know ne se/ In speche, in dede, ne be writyng,/ Any þing þat myght be reprovyng/ To women þat wele ruled be”

(6783-6787). It seems, then, that the translator through the narrator suggests that well- ruled clerks and women, or those who are correctly governed and self-governed, are not translated through narratives, but more so, they will remain unknown, covert, or secret.

The digression is long, running some forty lines, and opens an interstice in the narrative between Partonope’s intention to kill himself (or be killed by a beast) and the intervention by and conversion scene of Fursin/ Gilamour/ Anselot, the boy who serves

Partonope and seeks him out in the wilderness to help him. This interstitial transition is necessary to temper the affective response of fear that the audience/ reader feels upon the revelation of Partonope’s intention to kill himself and as a result of the unsettling sequence of prayers from orthodox through potentially heretical beliefs. The translator moves Partonope into the forest by discursively contrasting visual proofs of joy in the city with Partonope’s internal despair. For example, just as Partonope is leaving Blois

(his home in the French kingdom), the narrator describes the scene of the city through

Fursin’s eyes as he sets his master, Partonope, onto his horse, readying him for the

217 journey into the privacy and secrecy of the forest. Notably, Fursin has no idea of

Partonope’s death-wish, so this passage is even more intense with his hopes for his master and conversely, with fear from Partonope’s resolution to die along with the reader’s anticipation of the coming events:

And in the sadyłł softely he hym sette.

And right anoone a sporre he fette, 6856

He sette it on his lordes hele,

And thought that ałł þing was wele.

In herte he was Ioyfułł and gladde,

And forþe his lordes horse he ladde, 6860

Wenyng that ałł þing shuld be right wele.

He maketh grete Ioy and levyth ałł dole.

But ałł day at Eye men mow se

They Ioyen of þing þat wil not be. (6855-6864)

Notice the repetition of Fursin’s hope that “ałł þing was wele” and of his demonstration of “grete Ioy.” The sense of joy is muted by the last line with the negation of joy through the visual absence of Partonope’s, and perhaps Fursin’s, future joy (the “þing þat wil not be”). This negation begins Partonope’s departure from the city and Fursin’s entry into an interstitial space that the narrator opens for him in which to hold his religious beliefs up for negotiation for Partonope’s life and soul.

Fursin occupies a liminal space in several ways as Partonope’s servant, helper, salvation, and foil. The narrator tells us he is the nephew of the Saracen king, Sornegour,

218 and his “name was Fursynne in his contree” (6887). Partonope changes his name to

Gilamour because he found the name Fursin to be “right straunge.” The complexity of naming and renaming should be tied to orthodoxy, but in Fursin’s case, his renaming begins ostensibly with a conversion attempt while he still serves Partonope in Blois:

For Fursyn was his name right straunge,

And Gilamour was a grete dele light.

For Partonope did ałł his mygtht

To maken hym leve his hethen lay.

His answere þerto was euer nay. (6890-6894)

However, Partonope’s renaming him does nothing to change Fursin’s allegiance to

“heathen law” and so seems to be more related to xenophobic fears rather than towards sincere desire to help his servant find salvation and the path toward good self- governance. The poet paints Fursin as a sincerely good and virtuous boy; he desires to and serves Partonope well, with joy, and without failure or complaint. When Fursin says he will guide Partonope through the wilderness of the forest of Ardennes, he does so to give Partonope comfort and care, not for any personal gain. Partonope refuses to accept

Fursin’s guidance into the depth of the forest revealing his death-wish and desire for solitude. Fursin refuses to allow Partonope to proceed into the forest without him, saying, “’þan, sir, wole I/ Into Arderne, with you wole I go,/ And take my dethe with you also’” (6910-6912). Here, Fursin claims pastoral care as well as shoving it onto

Partonope in a remarkable type of spiritual blackmail that tests the true value of

Partonope’s Christian values: if Partonope willfully goes to his death, he will then be

219 responsible for Fursin’s death as well. But Partonope fails the test of charity and grace by repeating his refusal to take Fursin farther, and ups the ante, so to speak, of spiritual salvation by commanding Fursin to return to Blois and tell his uncle, Sornegour, that

Partonope is “loste for euer- more” because of his “false treasone.” Again, we have an ambiguity of meaning with the concept of his false treason: is Partonope saying he is a traitor to his Christian faith and so sends Fursin, a Saracen, to a Saracen king to declare so? Or does Partonope mean he has been false to Melior and thus a traitor to Love’s service? The ante for orthodoxy or heresy ups again with Fursin’s response that he swore service to Partonope, not to Sornegour, and therefore, he will accept Christian conversion

“in trust and eke in chierte” (6930). The remarkable tension between values and ideologies hangs in the balance here, awaiting Partonope’s response. As a Christian knight, he should make a sincere commitment to guide Fursin through such a significant

“correction” to his soul, and Fursin is already using the discourse of Christian faith (i.e. - trust and charity): “’If þou wilt convert and cristenyd be,/ I wole þe trust a-bove ałł þing/

And be right glad of þi dwellyng,/ For departe wole we neuer./ This covenaunte I make with þe for euer’” (6944-6948). However, Partonope dissembles and diverts the sincere offer into an Old Testamentary covenant, using cunning to slip away from Fursin once the pact is agreed upon and Fursin’s baptism is enacted. The reader/ audience of the

French text will recognize the political and ecclesiastical significance of the church that

Partonope and Fursin come upon once they are past the “Reaume of Fraunce;” the church is called the church of Albigis, a strong suggestion that Partonope and Fursin have ridden far out of the French realm and into the Albigensian region. They hear mass and Fursin

220 is baptized with the Christian name Anselot, also chosen by Partonope as was his interstitial moniker, Gilamour. But the poet uses the exculpatory “myn auctour” device to remove himself from the subversive sentiments underlying the place-name so that the reader/audience should be cautious about the efficacy of the conversion and of the veracity of the orthodox status of the church:

And forþe they ride boþe twoo

In grete sighyng and hevynesse.

And so it happenyd þat to a messe

At chirche they herde rynge.

Partonope þerwith maketh no lettyng,

But þider rideth, as I devyce,

Ther to here devyne servyce.

Myn auctour telleth þis chirch hight

The chirche of Albigis, þer it light. (6976-6984)277

Even though the heretical flourishing of Catharism in the Albigensian region of

Languedoc is far removed from the fifteenth-century English translator’s experience, it aligns quite well with his own contemporary experience of Wycliffism, Lollardy, and the

Hussites causing the Orthodox Church much disruption and fear. As if to underscore the efficacy of orthodoxy and to throw doubt on the sincerity of conversion, the poet

277 For further information on the Albigensian heresies, the Crusade, and the political tensions in the Languedoc region, see variously, John H. Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); James B. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997); and Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992). 221 concludes this section of the poem with Partonope’s second treachery – his lie to trick

Fursin into converting – and Fursin’s remarkable response to the discovery that

Partonope has duped him. Partonope sneaks off in the night while Anselot/ Fursin sleeps, and upon awakening and realizing Partonope is gone, he instantly changes from joy and good governance to the same desperate desire to die. Further, he laments his conversion, concluding that he must forsake all laws since he has turned from his own first “god.” He is just as angry at himself for falling victim to the cunning lure of salvation, more of

Partonope’s life than of his own soul’s, and offers an important commentary on personal governance and false belief as he utters a prayer-like lament to the absent Partonope:

‘My maister now hath be-trayed me.

[What is þi cause, Partonope?] 7024

What is þi cause of my deserte?

But now I wote wele þe peynes smert

Of deþe in shorte tyme I mote fele.

But forsoþe, now wote I wele 7028

Ye brought me hidder for þis fyne

My god to forsake, Apollyne.

O þis is a coynte pilgremage,

For I haue forsake in þis vyage 7032

My god for þi love, Partonope,

And yelde me a cristen man to be,

And greed me fully to þin acorde.

222

But now haue I noþer frende ne lorde; 7036

For to my frendes wole I neuer drawe,

I haue forsaken now myn owne lawe.’ (7023-7038)

By putting this sharp criticism and illumination of spiritual endangerment and orthodox impotence into Fursin’s speech, the poet amplifies the corrupt nature of the orthodox

Christian church and its rituals. He further highlights the flawed codes of chivalry by positioning Fursin to follow Partonope’s footsteps in a death-wish, violating the sense of apprenticeship of good service towards good governance to which a truly chivalric figure should aspire in mentoring his yeomen and in performing himself.

Inquisition was the ecclesiastical response to both heretical outbursts, and both poets toy with heretical and heterodox beliefs and actions in the figurations of Partonope,

Melior, and especially Fursin. However, all the figurations to some extent are shifted subjectively through tests of faith and governance, just as we see magnified in this conversion and death-wish passage of Fursin and Partonope.

Conclusion

Medieval poets infuse varying degrees of shifting subjectivity of the chivalric hero figure in French romances, in Ricardian Middle English court poetry, and in the earlier Middle English romances dealing with the Matter of Bretagne and the chivalric romances (i.e. - Jaufré, Chrétien de Troyes’ The Knight of the Cart, Sir Gawain and the

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Green Knight, and Sir Tristrem).278 In the same vein, the female lover figurations show less subjective shifting, but they initiate strategic modes of secrecy and fear that underscore and magnify the affective response to the texts. These romances also intertwine ecclesiastical and political critiques layered into the romance plots – a mixing of sentence and solas or of lust and lore, if you will – so that the romanciers are infusing their entertainments with traces and flavors of instruction; the connecting thread seems to be the edification of the hero and of the community through a journey or quest of self- governance and corrections of false beliefs, of following bad counsel, of ideological struggles, of dissemblances, and of secrets revealed. Strangely in this poem, Melior’s secret is not physically or psychologically disabling, but instead, its power lies completely in the visual. She is more beautiful than any other woman; she is as beautiful as she is learned, rich, and politically powerful. So why does she need to hold her looks secret from Partonope, and why is her appearance such an important secret for her to maintain until she marries? She wields power over Partonope, her lover, and in a sense, over the heritage of her kingdom because she only desires Partonope as her husband, through this particular secret, but her secret carnal trysts with Partonope at the beginning of the romance are potentially more potent and dangerous. Communal knowledge of these transgressions, of an unmarried female ruler with an untried, apprentice knight, would instantly compromise Melior’s power. Moreover, the stability of her kingdom and

278 See respectively: Jaufré: roman arthurien du XIIIe siècle en vers provençaux, publié par Clovis Brunel (Paris, Société des anciens textes français, 1943); Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier de la Charrete, edited and translated by William W. Kibler (New York: Garland, 1981); The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, edited by Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2002); and Sir Tristrem, edited by George P. McNeill (Edinburgh, London: Printed for The [Scottish Text] Society by William Blackwood and Sons, 1886). 224 that of Partonope’s (as the Duke of Blois and as the nephew and male heir of the king of

France) requires her to be morally sound and virtuous.

The English translator sets up in great depth the patronymics and lineage of

Partonope, going into greater depth in tracing Partonope’s ancestry than does the French poet. Partonope loses himself, physically and subjectively, when he leaves France on the magic ship and crosses into the Melior’s magical realm. And while Melior knows full well who he is and tells him she loves him because of his lineage, Partonope continually errs in judgment and self-governance so that he no longer remembers his kin, his lineage, or his realm; more frighteningly, he loses his heroic compass, exchanging orthodox

Christian values and chivalric prowess for a life of indulgent desires and inverted governance. In setting out a pervasive, remarkable heroic lineage, then, the translator works to correct Partonope’s mis-desires and vicious actions that divert him from taking his rightful place in the succession of heroic rulers, noblemen skilled correctly in chivalry, in courtesy, and mostly, in good governance.

Before he can remedy and correct his transgressions, Partonope must reach the limits of poor governance, facing loss of name, prowess, and hope. Consequently, both the French and the English poets allow him to engage in his transgressive love with a necromancer, which is in essence heretical behavior or at least heterodox activity. He continues, then, to be a heretic in plain sight, which is the exact opposite of what he needs to visually perform in order to take over the rule of Melior’s kingdom when they marry and to continue strengthening the French realm as his uncle’s heir. Again, the trope of vision comes into play here. Considering Melior is not in plain sight until she is tricked

225 by Partonope’s mother’s necromantic ruse, the idea of heretics pushing the limits of orthodoxy and of orthodox knights (correctly named and familiarly traced in the narrative) moving into moments of heterodoxy and heresy, the inverted subjectivities in this romance appear to work as a caution towards self-reformation for social stability rather than as individual condemnations of mis-placed beliefs. Only when Partonope proves his chivalric prowess effectively, without necromantic interference, through good counsel can the tale end with celebrations of good governance, restored correct subjectivities, and ideal courtly love. As if to emphasize inner visions of beauty over external affirmations of it, the best counsel that Partonope receives comes from his new- found friend, Gaudin, who seconds him in the tournament for Melior’s hand and kingdom. As a figure of correct inversions, Gaudin embodies superlative self- governance and reformational efficacy from heterodox belief, from social disorder, and from corrupt cultural codes. A former Saracen who is correctly and completely converted to Christianity, upholding the tenets of faith and virtue, Gaudin marries

Melior’s sister, Urake, for her exceeding virtue and knowledge rather than for her visual beauty. Consequently, the tale of Partonope concludes with a visual display of remedied disorders and inversions, reminding the audience/ reader that self-reform comes through good governance rather than through pastoral intercession, necromantic machinations, or empty cultural codes.

Issues of vernacularity, political tensions, cultural disruptions, and religious reformation carry across in the transmission of this poem from the antecedent Old French text of thirteenth-century France to its Middle English fifteenth-century translation. Both

226 poets manipulate interstitial spaces and strategic secrecy in order to challenge institutions, ideologies, and ideas of good governance through the figurations of Partonope and

Melior. The subjectivities of these central characters shift accordingly, starting from points of inversion such as mis-desiring and mis-ruling, and through a series of loss, correction, and remedy, the poets rectify the subjects into positions of orderly self- governance, good counsel, and upholding social and cultural codes. The politics of vernacular writing and transmission, interpretation, and the power of the individual reader/ auditor emerge as the poets illuminate the affect of fear – personal, societal, institutional – in order to open a venue for critical discourse of these issues. Confessional discourses throughout the poem, both the French and the Middle English texts, suggest that the influence of heretical inquisition and challenges to orthodoxy permeate narrative and figurative subjectivities so that calls for social, cultural, and institutional reformation can be interwoven through the safety of aesthetic invention (i.e. - poetic inventio) under the guise of authority. As such, fear and secrecy become the driving forces through confessional moments and narrative digressions, and Lancastrian and Henrician poets take full advantage of the opportunity to self-authorize their critical challenges through the media of translatio and auctorité.

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Chapter 4 – Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: Fear and Secrecy in the Interstices

In this chapter, I turn to Geoffrey Chaucer’s late- fourteenth-century poem,

Troilus and Criseyde, a tragic tale focusing on ill-fated lovers caught in the political machinations of the Trojan War. More precisely, though, Chaucer uses the Trojan War as the backdrop of his narrative of lovers whose wills and desires are proven impotent in the wake of political and social conflicts and largely, by the grotesquely devious manipulations of a treacherous intermediary. Although the poem is comprised of five distinct books, I focus mainly on Books I and III in which the lovers, Troilus and

Criseyde, and the Go-Between, Pandarus, interact most predominantly. Fear and secrecy underpin and shape the actions, dialectic, and narrative discourse in these books more than in the other three books, although there are moments in Book II in which Chaucer infuses fear and secrecy within confessional discourse to further complicate and complexly layer the relationships among these three figures.

Briefly, this poem translates and reworks Boccaccio’s poem Il Filostrato, an early-fourteenth century poem loosely based on Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s twelfth- century poem Le Roman de Troie. The story takes place during the Trojan War with

Greece and within the city of Troy. The Trojan warrior, Troilus, having prided himself for avoiding Love’s snares suddenly finds himself a victim of Cupid’s wicked aim and falls desperately love-sick for Criseyde, whom he sees in a temple at a festival

228 celebrating the Palladium (a foundational effigy to Pallas and part of the origination myth of Troy). Troilus’ friend, Pandarus, notices Troilus’ lethargy and sorrowful nature and eventually pries the secret of his illness from him. Criseyde happens to be Pandarus’ niece, and he immediately goes to work to bring the would-be lovers together.

Criseyde’s father, Calkas, is a traitor who deserts Troy for the Greek camp, and so,

Criseyde lives in a precarious position within Troy. Shortly after the lovers come together and find happiness, the Trojan parliament decides to exchange prisoners with the

Greeks: Criseyde for the captured Trojan warrior, Antenor. While Troilus cannot act to save Criseyde in order to preserve the secret of their love and her honor, Criseyde promises she will return to Troy to be with him again. However, through the course of the war, she pledges herself instead to the Greek warrior Diomede and turns from

Troilus’ pleas and pursuit. Troilus falls into a deathly heart-sickness from which he never recovers in spite of Pandarus’ suggestion that he find a new love.

Chaucer’s translation is itself less of a translation than a reinvention of a tragic love story. Barry Windeatt describes Chaucer’s translation process a “trans-valuation” of

Boccaccio’s work noting a “shifting of perspectives, an intensification, a ‘thickening’ of the texture of the language and idea” from the original.279 By intensifying the story rather than solely translating it across languages, Chaucer seems to prioritize poetic construction

279 B. A. Windeatt, Geoffrey Chaucer Troilus and Criseyde: A New Edition of ‘The Book of Troilus’ (London: Longman Group Limited, 1984), 4. Windeatt’s comparative, side-by-side edition of Troilus and Criseyde in which he places Il Filostrato alongside Chaucer’s work with annotations on the front-face offers an enormously rich critical examination of Chaucer’s translation process and his poetic artistry in working from source texts, re-imagining the tale, and revising themes. Windeatt suggests Chaucer blends those ideas of translatio studii and imperii with contemporary medieval English concerns so that his poem is not a translation but instead, a “paynted proces” layered with artistry as well as critical immediacy. Unless otherwise noted, all citations from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition, edited by Larry D. Benson and others (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987) and are noted by book number and line number. 229 and textuality in showcasing rhetorical and creative aspects of inventio, translatio, and auctorité.280 The terms translatio (“transference”) and auctorité (“authority”) hold particular importance to English vernacular writing because one begs for the other in the process of translating a secular work; moving from Latin into English implies a kind of self-imposed authority on the part of the English translator/ poet/ author as well as acknowledging an inherent authority in the original writer. Late fourteenth-century

English poets, in a remarkable blossoming of poetics for aesthetic and commentary purposes, added inventio (“invention”) to the mix of vernacular authorship. Robert R.

Edwards points out that the infusion of inventio from a Ciceronian perspective with ratio

(“reason”) from an Augustinian model broadens and deepens – in other words, intensifies

– late medieval poetics.281 This mixture, then, of authoritative translation with creative reason enables multiple avenues for poets such as Chaucer to reach new heights of

“sentence and solas” (“meaning and entertainment”). Additionally, blending Ciceronian and Augustinian impulses (i.e. - the political and the spiritual/aesthetic, respectively), allows poets to experiment with form and function, to integrate challenges to discourse and to ideologies, to raise ethical and moral questions, and to posit new “truths” in their historical translations. In essence, late fourteenth-century English poets, enfolding these strains of the political, the spiritual, authority, and transference into their poetry, use vernacularity as a medium of commentary on and reformational calls against the

280 See A. J. Minnis for a fuller discussion on auctorité and on translatio: A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship (London: Scolar Press, 1984). See Robert R. Edwards on inventio and its intricate relationship to ratio in vernacular medieval writings: Robert R. Edwards, Ratio and Invention: A Study of Medieval Lyric and Narrative (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1989). 281 Edwards differentiates the Ciceronian from the Augustinian as such: “the musical aesthetic of Augustine” and the “Ciceronian notion of rhetorical invention that shaped the medieval poetics of narrative” (Edwards, Ratio and Invention, xiii). 230 antagonistic political, social, and clerical cultures of Ricardian England.282 James

Simpson summarizes the reformational quality of late medieval culture and literary forms as a necessity born of “a cultural field characterized by a diverse and highly segmented set of jurisdictions” that, in turn, grants an authoritative status to the poets and writers of the period.283 As such, auctorité is as much invented as it is translated by the very act of vernacular writing. A. J. Minnis posits an extension of this idea in his work on translating authority, what he calls the “politics of translatio auctoritatis when he notes,

“’Vernacular’ will be deployed in its fullest, richest sense, to encompass acts of cultural transmission and negotiation (in which translation from one language to another may play a major part, but not inevitably). By such a procedure I hope to access some of the ways in which authority was ‘translated’, appropriated, disposed, exploited, and indeed challenged by Middle English literature.”284 Part of my intention in this chapter is to demonstrate that Chaucer not only establishes his authority in his treatment of his source material, but that he inculcates his audience into the immediate construction of his authority while they are actively consuming the text because he brings the additional dimension of afffectivity into his poetry. In this way, Chaucer as poet takes on a mobility much like the shifting subjectivities enabled by medieval poets that I have argued throughout this project; in essence, Chaucer opens an interstitial space for the poet in

282 See, for instance, Marion Turner and Sylvia Federico for in-depth discussions on the interrelations of Ricardian court politics, Chaucer and the Troilus, and the utopian ideal of Troynovaunt in late fourteenth- century England: Marion Turner, Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth- Century London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Sylvia Federico, New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 283 James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 2/ 1350-1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 2. 284 A. J. Minnis, Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1. 231 which he may further explore strategic secrecy and the affect of fear via the focus on poetic, vernacular, and translatio auctoritatis.

Simpson opens this window of poetic mobility further in his reassessment of translation and authorship. He suggests that “authority accrues to authors not by identification, but rather by representation: authors impersonate the authority of their source texts and patrons,” and further adds that “because writers must impersonate different authorities, they cannot be restricted to maintaining the discursive posture of their profession” or to one single authoritative voice.285 Two key concepts dominate

Simpson’s argument here specifically in relation to Chaucer and the Troilus: authorial impersonation and discursive shifts. Which leads to an important question about

Chaucer’s poetics, vis. why does Chaucer go to such lengths, almost hyperbolically, to

“translate” a source text with his overlapping conflations of ratio, inventio, and vernacular authority? Moreover, is he leading his audience away from interpretive fixity purposefully through his recurrent ambiguities along with amalgamated poetic translation, and if so, why?

Of course, these questions might just be rhetorical in terms of the nature of a skilled poet tackling an epic project in a historically turbulent time. Yet, such a dismissive answer too easily brushes aside the affective response that this poem and this poet invoke as well as pulling remedial binaries (i.e. – translation vs. invention) into a liminal space to account for poetic ingenuity. Ultimately, what I am suggesting is that

Chaucer intentionally blends oppositional or discordant ideas, modes, and discourses in

285 Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 65. 232 order to call attention to them and their deficiencies for the purpose of reform. Further, as David Aers argues that Chaucer effectively subverts absolute oppositions as a strategy to underscore the affectivity of desire and will, he comments, “His poetic exploration of the complex and fluid interaction between individual and circumstances, his grasp of the real contexts and processes of human choice, makes it impossible for an attentive reader to go on repeating conventional formulae about unambiguous vices and virtues . . .

[which] was inevitably disturbing to traditional and seemingly uncomplicated certainties as it works to subvert all absolutes and static finalities.”286 Intensification, mobility, and liminal amalgamations, then, prove a highly effective tool to champion vernacular authority and more importantly, to open the channels for critical discourse and self- reflection particularly in times that are institutionally corrupt, culturally turbulent, and politically unstable. Ann W. Astell allows that political allegory is Chaucer’s weapon of choice for this reformational call and argues that inventio and “allegorical materia” further Chaucer’s embedded political and social critiques beyond the limits of translation by investing a kind of moral authority to the poet. She writes:

The use of allegory can endow a poet with a prophetic ethos that enhances his or

her moral and spiritual authority. It can win poets the admiration of their auditors,

who see their artistry and are dazzled by it. It can serve to unite and empower the

members of an inner audience, who gain their identity and sense of belonging, on

the one hand, by being divided off from others and, on the other, by being

mutually ‘in the know.’ Finally, it can effect moral change in an auditor through

286 David Aers, “Chaucer’s Criseyde: Woman in Society, Woman in Love,” in Critical Essays on Chaucer, edited by Thomas C. Stillinger (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), 215. 233

the self-awareness that comes when one suddenly discovers one’s very self

allegorically represented.287

Astell encapsulates the essence of a reformational agenda, such as I argue Gower, the

Partonope translator, and Chaucer put forth in the works discussed in this project. In

Chaucer, especially, we see the push for a self-awareness towards a reformational goal deployed through affect more emphatically than in the former two poets.

For the purposes of my project, however, I believe the intensification that

Windeatt suggests and these other scholars expand upon also allows for the affective heightening of fear both for the characters and for the audience. Because Chaucer intensifies and thickens the story through affect and playful language (i.e. - ambiguities and rhetorical aesthetics), secrecy and its various deployments in the poem take on heightened emphases, such as in Book III where Troilus and Criseyde consummate their love. I include a discussion of the emphatic importance of fear and secrecy later in this chapter as well as an examination of Chaucer’s acts of translation and of invention. I would argue that Chaucer integrates secrecy and fear in the narrative framework of this poem in addition to embedding them as foundational tenets to Troilus and Criseyde’s relationship. The various attempts by Pandarus to penetrate the intimate spaces of fear and secrecy set up several confessional models that point to Chaucer’s complex amalgamation of invention and poetics within the act of translation. I will return to these questions of translation, poetic authority, and fusion at the end of this chapter, but first, it is necessary to separate out the threads of the tapestry that is Chaucer’s Troilus and

287 Ann W. Astell, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 42. 234

Criseyde. As such, I will begin by examining the subjective figurations – Troilus,

Criseyde, Pandarus, the narrator, and the poet – with an eye towards the ways Chaucer treats secrecy and fear within the interstitial spaces he opens through confessional moments and through the correlative actions among desire, will, and affect, all of which bring the Troilus far away from its primary antecedent text.

Oblique Narration and Affective Subtlety

A key aspect of Chaucer’s invention that sets the Troilus distinctly apart from

Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato is his narrator figure, which, in itself, has been the focus of much scholarship. Thus, I begin this chapter with a discussion of the narrator figure and his unusual relationship to Criseyde. Where a majority of scholars examine the subjectivity of the narrator or the complexity of the figuration so that it becomes as much a character in and of the poem as the lovers themselves, I argue that Chaucer places complex ideological criticisms and challenges within the narrator’s commentary, making this figure an interstitial narrative agent whereby the poem extends out of the single genre of epic romance into a fusion of complaint poem, social and political critique, confessional and inquisitorial mimesis, and moral exemplum.288 The narrator seems to work as a go-between himself, much as critics deem Pandarus, mediating the audience’s anticipated affective response to the tale itself and his own emotional investment in the

288 See, for example, Lisa J. Kiser regarding the narrator as a character within the context of the poem itself: Text and Textuality in Chaucer’s Poetry (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1991). See also Jennifer Summit, who brings a sexual and gendered approach to the narrator figure in her essay in which she argues that “sexuality and textuality” are interlinked in Troilus and Criseyde: ‘Troilus and Criseyde’, in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, edited by Seth Lerer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 213-242. 235 characters and events. Further, he interprets the social codes of courtly love and chivalry for the audience even when these codes twist and become subverted within the characters’ and the poem’s actions. Rather than re-telling the story of Troilus and

Criseyde and translating from his declared auctor, Lollius, the narrator intercedes in response to Pandarus’ maneuvers in the first three books and then strives to remedy the fall-out from the private actions and secret strategies set apart from the basic storyline in the latter two books. Unlike the figurations of the lovers, Troilus and Criseyde, and of the intermediary Pandarus, the narrator does not function solely on a level of subjectivity; rather, he works as a kind of affective expression while serving as a gate-keeper of secrecy and privitée. Hence, my focus is not so much on the subjectivity or the characterization of the narrator figure, but rather on the ways the narrator and the poet figures contribute to strategic secrecy and imply the affectivity of the confessional discourses surrounding their punctuated appearances in the poem.

When the narrator willfully turns from his task of objective narration, his actual subject position, and refuses to “endite” the details of the lovers’ story after their very detailed and deliberately narrated report of their first sexual meeting, he shifts his own subjectivity, which only creates more auras of secrecy. As such, the narrator avoids the primary task at hand of actually reporting the poet’s translation, dissembling and diverting from moving the narrative along and revealing the contents of their love letter, although earlier, he had no such dilemma or diversions from reporting every nuance or the writing process (including their various fears):

For sothe, I have naught herd it don er this

236

In story non, ne no man here, I wene;

And though I wolde, I koude nought, ywys;

For ther was som epistel hem bitwene,

That wolde, as seyth myn autour, wel contene

Neigh half this book, of which hym liste nought write.

How sholde I thanne a lyne of it endite? (III.498-504)

Several stanzas earlier, we learn that Criseyde finds comfort in the secrecy she shares with Troilus, a point the narrator repeats within the same stanza. He adds further that

Troilus’ secrecy relieves her fear, which we see throughout the poem in nearly every thought and action leading up to the consummation scene and those following her relegation to the Greek camp. The narrator reveals,

For whi she fond hym so discret in al,

So secret, and of swich obëisaunce,

That wel she felte he was to hire a wal

Of stiel, and sheld from every displesaunce;

That to ben in his good governaunce,

So wis he was, she was namore afered –

I mene, as fer as oughte ben requered. (III.477-483)

Notice how the narrator couches the declaration that Criseyde is finally “namore afered” by inserting a modifying condition to her new-born fearlessness caused by Troilus’ “good governaunce” suggesting that good governance is something that needs to be conditionally modified “as oughte ben requered.” In the previously cited stanza, the

237 narrator champions the lovers in upholding their secrecy and joins the lovers in holding them in an interstitial space apart from Pandarus’ meddling desires and from the audience/ reader’s penetrative desires – both whom desire to hear and see the detailed revelations of their love letter. In this sense, there is an inverse or heterodox confessional discourse that breaks down when the narrator declares, “How sholde I thanne a lyne of it endite?” as if he were fearful of exposing truths. Moreover, his retort mimics those responses of interrogated heretical suspects seen in inquisitorial depositions and found in pastoral guides for inquisition of heretics, sorcerers, and Jews.289 Further, it is not

289 For specific trial depositions of heretical inquests from the Languedocian Inquisitions and from the more contemporary late-fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century English investigations of Lollardy, see Michael Haren, “Confession, Social Ethics and Social Discipline in the Memoriale Presbiterorum" and “The Interrogatories for Officials, Lawyers and Secular Estates of the Memoriale Presbiterorum: Edition and Translation,” in Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages, edited by Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (York: York Medieval Press, 1998), 109-122 & 123-164. See also Fasciculus Morum: A Fourteenth- Century Preacher’s Handbook, edited and translated by Siegfried Wenzel (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989); Thomas de Chobham. Summa Confessorum, edited by The Revd. F. Broomfield M. A., Ph.D. (Louvain and Paris: Éditions Nauwelaerts, 1968); William, of Pagula, Oculus Sacerdotis. MS Codex 721 – William, of Pagula, ca. 1290-1332 –[Oculus Sacerdotis]. http://dla.library.upenn.edu/; and Jean Duvernoy, traducteur, Inquisition en Terre Cathare: Paroles d’Hérétiques Devant Leurs Juges (Toulouse: Éditions Privat, 1998) & Le Registre d’Inquisition de Jacques Fournier (Évêque de Pamiers), 1318-1325, Tomes 1, 2, 3 (Paris: Mouton Éditeur, 1978). See also Henry Angsar Kelly on the prosecutorial maneuvers of Wycliff’s followers beginning in 1382 in England at Blackfriars, the same time-frame in which Chaucer set forth this poem: Henry Angsar Kelly, Inquisitions and Other Trial Procedures in the Medieval West, Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2001. See also Lynn Staley, Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II (University Park, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 118-147, on Wycliff’s Tractibus de regibus and on the Secreta secretorum for a fuller discussion on the relationship between vernacularity and secular calls for reform and political criticism. While I do not intend to argue or suggest that Chaucer was himself a follower of Wycliff, he was indeed aware of Lollardy and theological debates regarding Okhamism. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton adeptly handles the connections between Chaucer’s audience and his exposure, if not adherence, to heterodox theology. See especially her discussion on Chaucer’s Retraction and his “coterie of Lollard knights” in chapter entitled “Two Oxford Professors Under Inquisition I:” Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 324-257.

238 necessarily coincidental that Criseyde’s father, Calkas, was charged with sorcery and necromancy as well as being a prophetic visionary and a traitor. Might not Chaucer be playing with heretical moments inserted in these recurrent interstices that he purposefully exposes only to fill with levels of secrecy and surround with affective fear?

Throughout the poem these digressions by the narrator occur around the times in which he acts on the urge to moralize secrecy and fear; in this way, he stumbles through his objective pretense while mis-guiding the reader/ audience away from a natural affective response to the events of the story. For instance, just as Pandarus is setting

Troilus up in the closet of the house to secretly meet with Criseyde, the narrator admits to being complicit in keeping secrets about the lovers, and more importantly, from his audience. He refuses to narrate the details of “som epistel” between the lovers remarking that since it is so long, how could he possibly “endite” a line of it (III.504), and then further, he reports that Pandarus would rather suffer like Tantalus being punished in hell than to fail in upholding Criseyde’s honor and in violating her trust (which we come to see is exactly what he does even so far as declaring his “hatred” for her in Book V):

And seyde hym, “Em, syn I moste on yow triste,

Loke al be wel, and do now as yow liste.”

He swor hire yis, by stokkes and by stones,

And by the goddes that in hevene dwelle,

239

Or elles were hym levere, soule and bones,

With Pluto kyng as depe ben in helle

As Tantalus – what sholde I more telle? (III.587-593)

Tantalus is a poignant analogue here because his egregious sin (or perhaps hubristic error is a more apt term for a pagan figure) was telling the secrets of the gods – in other words, translating privitée as a kind of auctour. The narrator ascribes this comparison to

Pandarus, but he himself has been dancing around spilling the secrets of Criseyde’s and

Troilus’ private feelings, fears, and physical intimacy under the guise of transmitting the story. He pulls back, though, just at the point of completing the analogy between

Pandarus and Tantalus by coyly invoking secrecy himself: “what shold I more telle?”

The narrator seems to deploy strategies of secrecy or divert the narration when he verges on revealing truths about Criseyde that might remove control of her figural subjectivity from him. In this example, he avoids revealing what Criseyde truly thinks of Troilus and the potential to be his lover by shifting the focus onto Pandarus’ declarations of sincerity, which the audience knows are clearly false. Invoking Tantalus and then immediately stopping the narration casts suspicions onto the narrator at least in terms of his ability to narrate Criseyde effectively. Yet, Tantalus embodies the superlative interstitial figure as well as a superlatively vicious figure of desire, will, and affect; he is always between the water and the fruit in his eternal punishment in Tartarus. More importantly, he is punished for his mis-desires by being held eternally in the interstice between desire and actualization. Pandarus, too, is constructed as a mimetic Tantalus, always desiring the forbidden but held apart from attaining it. Indeed, in the bedroom scene in which he

240 brings Criseyde to Troilus in bed, he pulls up a seat by the fire to watch the unfolding events of Troilus and Criseyde consummating their desires. The narrator comments on the scene that unfolds before Pandarus referring to it as an old romance, an apt metaphor where go-betweens and duennas find pleasure in the fulfillment of others’ desires through their meddling and machinations: “And with that word he drow hym to the feere,/ And took a light, and fond his contenaunce,/ As for to looke upon an old romaunce” (III.978-

980). Significantly, though, Chaucer tucks Pandarus away as a silent spectator to the action, rather than removing him from the lovers’ chamber, reviving him some six hundred lines later with the narrative conclusion to the lovers’ tryst, “Whan tyme was, hom til here hous she wente,/ And Pandarus hath fully his entente” (III.1581-1582). It is as if the narrator has forgotten Pandarus, focusing instead on the unfolding intimacy between Troilus and Criseyde, rather mimetically enacting Pandarus’ role as a voyeur himself as well as indulging his own secret desires in narrating the actualized desire being played out both before Pandarus and the audience/ reader. Jennifer Summit argues that this scene works as an overt and covert narrative (what is said and what is left to the imagination) in which “storytelling creates webs of complicity between readers and writers that here are implicitly identified with the unsavory machinations of Pandarus.”290

But, noting what A. C. Spearing argues about voyeurism, audience, and imagination in this scene from the Troilus, the narrative deflection, along with Pandarus’ penetrative desire, extends the onus of will, affect, and desire out of the text and onto the reader so

290 Jennifer Summit, “Troilus and Criseyde,” 231. 241 that he, too, is responsible for moral and social corruption and bears the burden for reformation of these ills:

Thus the responsibility for imagining further details of the lovers’ play becomes

ours; and this is a point Chaucer re-emphasizes a few lines later, when he tells us

we should do as we please with any words he may have added to what he found in

his source291 . . . We cannot really alter Chaucer’s wording, but we respond

imaginatively to such appeals, entering into the scene described and filling the

gaps he leaves. Thus we too become pandars; and in the strange episode when

Pandarus comes to his niece’s bedside after Troilus has left her, if we imagine that

Pandarus has intercourse with her [i.e. - incest], then that too is our

responsibility.”292

Consequently, the narrator’s digression and sudden dissemblance throughout Book III and the bedroom scene actually reveal more to the reader about himself and about the three primary figures than a simple translation of the story’s events would.

Evan Carton makes a very insightful argument about the narrator’s frequent digressions and exculpations, which are especially applicable to the narrator’s odd relationship with Criseyde. Carton writes, “The narrator’s disclaimers of control and responsibility, like Pandarus’ equivalent self-extrications, are the increasingly desperate evasions of a character who recognizes his deep complicity in a series of events that

291 Ellipsed here,Spearing cites Troilus and Criseyde, III.1331-1336: “For myne wordes, heere and every part,/ I speke hem alle under correccioun/ Of yow that felyng han in loves art,/ And putte it al in youre discrecioun/ To encresse or maken dymynucioun/ Of my langage, and that I yow biseche.” A. C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 136. 292 Ibid, 136. 242 features seduction and culminates in betrayal.”293 Carton goes on to argue that the narrator “assumes the role of the reader,” and of “a partner in the polygamy of speaking and hearing that at once makes up the poem and constitutes its main subject;” thus, the narrator “seeks to construe or manipulate language and linguistic relationships to attain maximum control over events and over others, with minimum responsibility for the consequence; and each [partner in the polygamy] discovers that personal control is always incomplete and that responsibility is always shared.”294 While I agree that the narrator is complicit in trying to control the events of the tale, I disagree that he tries to evade responsibility for the consequence because I don’t believe that the narrator thinks that far through his attempts to control the readers’ reactions to Criseyde in particular.

For we cannot ignore the very important nugget of truth in the narration leading to the closet/ bedroom scene whereby the narrator reveals a manifesto for self-governance in terms of Troilus that we come to understand he also ascribes to himself:

But Troilus, though as the fir he brende 425

For sharp desir of hope and of plesaunce,

He nought forgat his goode governaunce,

But in hymself with manhod gan restreyne

Ech racle dede and ech unbridled cheere,

That alle tho that lyven, soth to seyne, 430

293 Evan Carton, “Complicity and Responsibility in Pandarus’ Bed and Chaucer’s Art,” in Critical Essays on Geoffrey Chaucer, edited by Thomas C. Stillinger (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1998), 219-243, 223. 294 Ibid, 223. 243

Ne sholde han wist, by word or by manere,

What that he mente, as touchyng this matere.

From every wight as fer as is the cloude

He was, so wel dissimilen he koude. (III.425-434)

If dissemblance is the crux of good self-governance, then the narrator, skilled as he is with words and slippery language, can divert responsibility from any consequence he might face. More to the essential point, the narrator might try to penetrate the story, its events and its figurations, but he is always outside the story, so he cannot really control the events. His power is limited to guiding the reader/ audience, dissembling where he feels warranted, or tempering the affective response or trying to shape the moral lessons from the tale.

Outsider or Insider: Pandarus as an “In-Between”

Next, I consider the character Pandarus, the intermediary figure who works subjectively as a go-between bringing Troilus and Criseyde together as fully engaged lovers. The go-between figure, as the name indicates, primarily functions as a liaison to enable lovers to realize their amorous desires whether on the level of lust or on the level of idealized love. While perhaps not as prevalent as more typical stock characters in fabliaux, allegories, and romances (such as jealous husbands, vicious bawds, and courtly lovers), the go-between is generally a self-less, good-intentioned character whose love for and loyalty to a friend, mistress, or ward impels his/ her intermediary actions. As

Gretchen Mieszkowski notes of Pandarus, however, his mediation in this poem is

244 perverted.295 While I agree with Mieszkowski’s argument that Pandarus does not fit the traditional mold of the go-between figure (she argues that he works instead as a “double go-between” caught in an impossible amalgamation of lust and idealized love),296 I would suggest that Chaucer intends Pandarus to fill a different subjectivity than a go-between.

Rather, I argue that in spite of his movement between Troilus and Criseyde and his work as a messenger for their missives and their responses to his pressured inquiries, Pandarus serves as a fusion of outsider figures pushing against the rather stable lover subjects in order to penetrate their secrets, create their desires, and subvert their wills much as social outsiders and institutional authorities push against the individual in order to ensure compliance and guard against potential deviance. As such, Pandarus acts as a confessor, an inquisitor, a faitour, a would-be lover, a clerk to Venus, a heretical pastor, and a vicious guardian, all of which are subject positions of an outsider seeking to cross into the space of intimacy, community, and knowledge that an insider already inhabits.297 When he finally manages to access that space and status of an insider, he loses interest in the quest for knowledge and power as if the absence of a friend’s secret or the lack of intimate spaces to be insistently penetrated and wills to be manipulated were beyond banality. We recognize his shocking apathy and salacious desires when he goes to visit

295 I discuss Mieszkowksi’s work on go-between characters and on Pandarus later in this chapter: Gretchen Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 296 Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens, 3. 297 See Chapters 1 and 2 for full discussions of my understanding and distinctions of confessors, inquisitors, faitours, and heretics. Summarily, though, the confessor figure follows an orthodox intention for pastoral care towards the confessant’s salvation; the inquisitor also follows an orthodox mode of questioning towards rectitude of belief and towards orthodox compliance in belief and action; the faitour is one who falsely poses, creates, and/or adheres to heterodox beliefs, actions, and influences – perhaps even verging on the heretical – without the cloak of clerical office; and the heretic is one whose beliefs, preaching/ teachings, and actions specifically refute orthodox Catholic belief and practices while adhering to tenets of faith distinct from Catholicism and who further threaten (subversively, overtly, covertly, or through simple ecclesiastical fear) the power of the the orthodox Church as a singular ideology to effect salvific care. 245

Troilus immediately on hearing of Criseyde’s banishment from Troy in Book IV.

Pandarus performs a tearful show of sorrow for Troilus’ loss, blaming Fortune’s fickleness for the situation before pushing for another confession: “’But telle me this: whi thow art now so mad/ To sorwen thus? Whi listow in this wise,/ Syn thi desir al holly hastow had,/ So that, by right, it oughte ynough suffise?’” (IV.393-396). Reducing

Troilus’ and Criseyde’s love to a satiated desire reveals Pandarus’ continual outsider status, in spite of his efforts to truly penetrate the secret, interstitial space – the privitée – of their intimate love. His next statement to “console” his broken friend completely pushes him to the margins and out of any service to Love, although it reveals he is an insider to the kinds of vicious, carnal appetites that this society expects and upholds:

‘This town is ful of ladys al aboute;

And, to my doom, fairer than swiche twelve

As evere she was, shal I fynde in som route –

Yee, on or two, withouten any doute.

Forthi be glad, myn owen deere brother!

If she be lost, we shal recovere an other.’ (IV.401-406)

In line 406, Pandarus cannot even name Criseyde, even though she’s his niece and supposedly dear to him; “she” is the same as “an other” in his eyes, which suggests that he is really not a go-between as much as he is a self-serving manipulator and/or a mouth- piece for the social values of Troy. This devaluation of women by reducing them to pronominals instead of specifically named individuals directly contrasts with Hector’s remarkably pro-feminist sentiments only two hundred lines earlier when he decries the

246 commoditization of women as he urges the parliament not to exchange Criseyde for the war prisoner, Antenor: “’We usen here no wommen for to selle’” (IV.182). Pandarus’ speech throws suspicion onto Hector’s sentiments so that the audience/ reader is forced to question the sincerity and veracity of either figure, which in essence, is what Chaucer intends. Gretchen Mieszkowski brings Roberta L. Krueger’s argument about Old French courtly fiction into her work on Pandarus and Chaucer stating, “The process Krueger identifies here [inviting the audience to participate in questioning cultural conventions] is perhaps the fundamental function of the double go-between tradition in Troilus and

Criseyde: the interrogation of cultural conventions, codes, and norms, prompting a culture’s ‘self-reflective scrutiny.’”298 Through Pandarus’ obscene callousness and seeming misogyny, Chaucer opens a space in which social values and behavioral codes in terms of women, love, and commerce must be negotiated by the reader/ audience. The word “recovere” in line 406 also adds to the complexity of the valuation of women because it implies a covert strategy – covering and then re-covering women. Of course, it might simply mean to obtain as in recovering something that was lost, but in this sense too, there is a definitely undertone of objectification instead of specification: a lost item may be recovered, but a lost lover, fully named and subjectively loved, cannot be.

Following this first dialogue between Pandarus and Troilus after the revelation of

Criseyde’s exchange with Antenor, the narrative moves fully into the tragic aftermath of the lovers’ plights while Pandarus becomes increasingly disinterested and less eager to

“confess” Troilus or pick at his secrets. Pandarus’ change in subjectivity from an

298 Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens, 183. 247 outsider to an insider correlates with Criseyde’s removal from Troy to the Greek camp and with Troilus’ stasis stemming from being inside a defunct and doomed love. As she leaves Troy, so, too, does idealized love; lust takes its place with Pandarus as its primary spokesman. Scholars rightly note Pandarus’ oblique intentions, struggling to pin down what exactly motivates his intercessions and meddling.299 Frequently termed a lecher, incestuous, a voyeur, a gossip, and a manipulator, Pandarus seems to go between subjectivities rather than between lovers. It would seem that Chaucer resists making

Pandarus’ intentions clear, but rather uses Pandarus as a highly effective touchstone with which to try the efficacy and value of social codes and ideologies.

Chaucer clearly knew the French fabliaux tradition; indeed he pens one of literature’s most famous and endearing models of this genre several years after the

Troilus in “The Miller’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales. Stock or conventional figures in fabliaux, as I mentioned above, include the significantly older husband insanely jealous of his lovely, young wife, who cuckolds him with her randy, crafty young lover, and often with the help of a go-between figure (i.e. – a nurse, a gossip, a cleric, or a hermit) who sets about to enable the young lovers to meet. Scholars have labeled

Pandarus as a go-between so much so that he takes on an archetypal figuration of the go- between. He does fit the markers of a go-between in his exaggerated, intense, and urgent efforts to first ferret out the “truth” of Troilus’ love for Criseyde, next, to insistently urge

299 See, for example, Lee Patterson, “Troilus and Criseyde and the Subject of History,” Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 84-164; Holly A. Crocker and Tison Pugh, “Masochism, Masculinity, and the Pleasures of Troilus,” in Men and Masculinities in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, edited by Tison Pugh and Marcia Smith Marzec (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 82-96; and Henry Angsar Kelly, Law and Religion in Chaucer’s England (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Variorum, 2010). 248

Criseyde to accept Troilus as her lover, and finally, to arrange for their secret meeting in which they spend the night confessing and making love. Pandarus does not cease his manipulations to keep the lovers together even after Criseyde’s deportation to the Greek camp, albeit to a much lesser degree of desire and of effort. Yet, if Chaucer were truly deploying Pandarus as a stock figuration of a go-between character, why does Pandarus continually linger in-between the lovers, especially on the very night of their first physical intimacy? He not only lingers, but he sits to the side, quietly watching and eaves-dropping in a grotesque moment of voyeurism – of mis-looking and mis-hearing akin to what I noted earlier in this project in discussing Gower and his cautions through the figure of Genius on mis-looking. Chaucer weaves so many strands of criticism and commentary on society and on the individual into this scene, which actually becomes the turning point in the poem towards the collapse of the relationship and of Troilus’ destruction. In a sense, Pandarus’ insertion in this scene is a kind of rape of the lovers’ privitée and certainly a vicious penetration of their strategy and Criseyde’s desperation to maintain secrecy. Consequently, in this particular section of the poem, Pandarus acts as an inverse confessor and inquisitor, both, as well as disabler of secrecy. In this way, then, I would argue that Pandarus only serves as a subjective go-between in his initial actions to carry information back and forth between Troilus and Criseyde and to arrange their meeting, under false pretense, at Deiphebus’ house. Further, go-between figures in fabliaux are lesser characters, ones who tangentially appear in the tale as adjuncts: they hold knowledge of the lovers’ past or whatever is crucial to help the lovers; they dwell in the margins – politically, socially, physically – and open a space of privacy for the lovers;

249 and they divert attention from the lovers so that a communal or individual (e.g. - the jealous husband) gaze will shift from the transgression and/or characters at hand. In

Pandarus’ case, he fills all these roles to a superlative level. However, he is not at all a lesser character; if anything, he is the primary character in this tale. He is an outsider to the private thoughts of his friend and his niece in spite of his insistent efforts while not being privileged to insider status although he effects a voyeuristic gaze that is arguably incestuous and highly prurient. Only through his familial role as Criseyde’s uncle can he infiltrate her home and attempt to access her thoughts and fears, imagining himself to be an insider to her privitée just as he is an insider to her home and to her garden.300 She does not grant him the insider status he so desires, however, because she realizes he has pimped her out to Troilus in an attempt to become an insider to Troilus’ inner life. He is

Troilus’ friend, but hardly a confidant or he would not have to pry and chastise and threaten to get the information out of Troilus. Similarly with Criseyde, Pandarus pushes insistently against the barrier of uncle to niece (and notably, Pandarus is not her guardian nor is Criseyde his ward because she is widowed and has established a household) and at times, violates the boundaries of familial relations.301 For instance, he thrusts Troilus’

300 Much scholarship has been devoted to the medieval garden as a private space, sometimes to the extent of arguing the garden as a metonym for the female genitalia. The scope of this project limits this strain of argument towards Pandarus penetrating his niece’s personal and private space, although it is certainly a line of inquiry worth pursuing in another venue. 301 The narrator shades Criseyde’s exact position to an extent so that the reader does not actually hear her full circumstance other than that she lives in a precarious position as the daughter of the traitor, Calkas, and that she is widowed. One of the most notable sections of the poem giving insight into her position in the city of Troy comes from Hector’s address to the Trojan parliament in which he defends Criseyde against others’ suspicions of her presumed alliance to and/or with her father. This is a remarkable testament to Criseyde’s integrity and reputation in the city because Hector is the essential embodiment of Trojan social, cultural, and ideological beliefs. He addresses the parliament: “’Syres, she nys no prisonere,’ he seyde;/ ‘I not on yow who that this charge leyde,/ But, on my part, ye may eftsone hem telle,/ We usen here no wommen for to selle’” (IV.180-183). 250 letter into her chest, but denies bringing harm to her through Troilus’ letter. Criseyde has rejected this letter because she fears it will dishonor her and her estate, which Pandarus should be protecting. She calls Pandarus to account for serving Troilus’ lust, rather than reproving her for guarding her reputation when he pushes Troilus’ letter on her:

Ful dredfully tho gan she stonden stylle,

And took it naught, but al hire humble chere

Gan for to chaunge, and seyde, ‘Scrit ne bille, 1130

For love of God, that toucheth swich matere,

Ne bryng me noon; and also, uncle deere,

To myn estat have more reward, I preye,

Than to his lust! What sholde I more seye?

‘And loketh now if this be resonable, 1135

And letteth nought, for favour ne for slouthe,

To seyn a sooth; now were it convenable

To myn estat, by God or by youre trouthe,

To taken it, or to han of hym routhe,

In harmyng of myself, or in repreve?

Ber it ayein, for hym that ye on leve!’ (II.1128-1141)

Crisedye rightly challenges Pandarus’ solicitation of her body at the cost of her “estat” and refutes his actions just as if God had done the same (line 1138). By thrusting the letter into “hire bosom,” Pandarus reveals that she has correctly assessed his intentions in

251 manipulating both hers and Troilus’ desires as well as trading her reputation for the actualization of his friend’s lust. When the narrator cautions the reader at the very beginning of the poem that this is a tale of the “double-sorrow” of Troilus, might he not be identifying the unfaithfulness of Criseyde as well as the machinations of Pandarus?

Doubly Sorrowful: Troilus’ Subjectivity and the Narrators’ Equivocal Words

I turn now to a discussion of Troilus and his subjective roles in the poem and the ways in which Chaucer inverts and challenges the codes of courtesy and chivalry along with pastoral efficacy through Troilus’ figuration.302 At the beginning of the poem,

Chaucer draws Troilus as a rather one-dimensional figure embodying the prowess and reputation of a chivalric hero, although one who does not by any means subscribe to the art of courtly love (i.e. - devoting himself to a lover and experiencing the pains, jealousies, and joys that such elevated love includes).303 The narrator, with questionable objectivity, describes Troilus as a hunter of women, indiscriminately scanning for one who looks appealing and says of Troilus leading his knights into the temple for the

Palladium:

This Troilus, as he was wont to gide

His yonge knyghtes, lad hem up and down

In thilke large temple on every side,

302 By “pastoral efficacy” here, I mean the secular, non-religious spiritual care such as one might receive at the hands of an advisor, teacher, guardian, or mentor without the specific ecclesiastical Christian emphases the word “pastoral” can imply. See the Oxford English Dictionary for further clarification and expanded definitions: The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Volume 2 N-Z, edited by Lesley Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), s.v. “Pastoral.” 303 See, for example, Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, with introduction, translation, and notes by John Jay Parry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960). 252

Byholding ay the ladies of the town,

Now here, now there; for no devocioun

Hadde he to non, to reven hym his reste,

But gan to preise and lakken whom hym leste. (I. 183-189)

Clearly the Troilus portrayed here avoids emotional connections, but relies solely on visual appeal although he mocks lovers for being “blynde.” I use the term “questionable objectivity” in terms of the narrator’s reporting of Troilus because on the surface, he seems to be objective and portrays Troilus moving about the temple as if he were indeed stalking his prey once he “sees” Criseyde. The narrator uses this word “blynde” repeatedly, however, (e.g. – “blynde world,” “blynde entencioun,” “blynde lust”) in this first introduction to Troilus as if it were an oppositional concept to pride or a disdainful flaw that invokes a subjective feel of judgment by the narrator.304 When Cupid hears enough of Troilus’ cynical mockery of lovers, he looses an arrow full force into Troilus:

“For sodeynly he hitte hym atte fulle --/ And yet as proud a pekok kan he pulle” (I. 209-

210). Up until this point in the poem, Troilus’ figuration has remained static and conventional with little if any interiority revealed other than disdain towards love; his figure lacks subjectivity in its flatness because he does not interact with or perform any function relevant to others. Chaucer opens Troilus’ figuration into full subjectivity quite subtly, yet quickly, upon his receipt of Cupid’s intervening shot; he is instantly a hyperbolically “proud peacock” suddenly plucked blindly out of his arrogance and thrown into humility: “For kaught is proud, and kaught is debonaire” (I.214). Michel

304 I discuss the narrator’s non-objectivity and his impulses to protect Criseyde throughout this chapter. Additionally, I discuss Troilus and blindness in further detail below. 253

Zink offers a very important conceptualization of literary subjectivity that we find demonstrated by Chaucer in this construction of Troilus’ subjectivity.305 Zink argues that the introduction of the doctrine of confession in the Thirteenth Century (from the Fourth

Lateran Council of 1215) increased the interiority and introspection of individuals so much so that it led to secular literary inclusion of “the passion for the individual;” this passion is best seen in heroic romance figures “through adventures that revealed him to himself and, at the same time, were a sign, a materialization (once again), at times almost a symbol of inner adventure, discovery of himself, which he arrived at after facing moral conflicts in which values like honor and love were at stake.”306 Zink further notes that

“literary texts of the Middle Ages can be read as attempts to fix in language – and, it must be acknowledged, possibly on language – a subjectivity’s desire, and its representations.”307 What Zink suggests here about subjectivity – desire, language, and confession – become hallmarks of Troilus’ figuration through his journey into interiority and reflection, secret-keeping and revelation to Pandarus, desire for and confession to

Criseyde, and his ultimate humiliation that leads to his death. In this opening passage in which Troilus is first introduced, desire proves to be the first layer of Troilus’ emergent subjectivity and comes alive, literally, as quickly as an arrow’s shot. Once Troilus is

305 Although Michel Foucault’s concept of subjectivity emerging from the inception of confessional practice in the Church offers the most prevalent understanding of literary subjectivity, I believe Zink provides a more discreet and fuller understanding of it as it pertains to Troilus. See Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978); “Technologies of the Self,” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, translated by Robert Hurley and others, Vo1. 1 of The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984 (New York: New Press, 1997), 233-251; and The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-1982, edited by Frédéric Gross, translated by Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2006), 365. 306 Michel Zink, The Invention of Literary Subjectivity, translated by David Sices (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 9. 307 Ibid, 11. 254 moved and falls into love-sickness by this desire, language and confession fall into play when Pandarus discovers him alone in his chamber and pushes him to tell what is wrong and then to tell by whom he has been captivated; this continual mode of dialectic exchange between Troilus, the confessant, and Pandarus, the confessor, carries through the five books.

A final note from Zink’s work on subjectivity illuminates Troilus’ downfall, what the narrator calls his “double sorrow.” Zink remarks that in a confession (either orthodox or literary confessional discourse), as the confessant’s contrition is increasingly driven by sorrow, the confessor’s role becomes more limited and “the humiliation caused by admission” during the confession initiates a form of monody or mourning in the confessing subject and in any audience to the confession (i.e. – the confessor or the reader/ audience).308 Through Troilus’ continual confessions to Pandarus and through

Pandarus’ frequent inquisitions of Troilus (although less frequent once Criseyde leaves

Troy), the level of Troilus’ sorrow deepens to the point of despair. The affective response and mood turns to deep mourning not just for the loss of a lover, but also for the many losses overt and covert within the poem: the loss of faith in idealized love, the loss of Criseyde’s honor, the loss of Troilus’ chivalric prowess, the loss of potential truth in

Hector’s entreaty to parliament that women are not commodities, and correlatively, the loss of social justice and political integrity. Chaucer opens an interstitial space for the revelation of these latter two lost ideals -- social and political ethics – in the unprecedented speechlessness of Pandarus at the end of Book V. When he finally does

308 Ibid, 169. 255 gather his tongue, Pandarus simply moves the reader/ audience to a true state of disgust and mourning as he declares his hatred for Criseyde, his formerly “beloved” niece whom he should have protected, in response to Troilus’ plaintive cry to her absent self that he cannot “unloven” her. The narrator reports the culminating sorrow and mourning:

This Pandarus, that al thise thynges herde,

And wiste wel he seyde a soth of this,

He nought a word ayeyn to hym answerde;

For sory of his frendes sorwe he is, 1726

And shamed for his nece hath don amys,

And stant, astoned of thise causes tweye,

As stille as ston; a word ne kowde he seye.

But at the laste thus he spak, and seyde:

‘My brother deer, I may do the namore.

What sholde I seyen? I hate, ywis, Cryseyde;

And, God woot, I wol hate hire everymore!’ (V.1723-1733)

Interestingly, Pandarus shifts the shame and humiliation he should rightly feel for instigating his friend’s “sorwe” and his niece’s misdeeds onto Criseyde in line 1727.

Troilus no longer confesses to Pandarus; instead the confessor turns confessant, but he puts his sins onto his victims. Pandarus goes through a very brief examination of his conscience in the small time in which he is speechless. His final prayer for contrition in which he offers Troilus comfort is as fully vicious as are his other acts. He tells Troilus

256 he “wolde amende” Troilus’ mourning if he knew how, and further that he prays that God will “delivere” Criseyde from this world soon: “’Right fayn I wolde amende it, wiste I how,/ And fro this world, almyghty God I preye/ Delivere hire soon! I kan namore seye’” (V.1741-1743). In essence, this final confession proves futile. It is neither orthodox nor sincere, but it does point to the flaws of the confessional act with corrupt confessants and ineffective pastors. Furthermore, this last exchange between Troilus and

Pandarus challenges the audience/ reader to consider the intentions of intercessionary figures, both secular and sacred. Ultimately, Pandarus’ equivocations and verbal turns underscore the push for vernacularity in Ricardian England because Chaucer uses

Pandarus’ subjectivity as an intercessionary, pastoral figure to illuminate how dissemblance and self-interest as good governance actually bring about social disintegration, personal despair, and ethical deviance. In a sense, Chaucer embodies sentiments of Wycliffism in the figuration of Pandarus. The Prologue to the Wycliffite

Bible, ca. 1380, entreats translators to “studie wel þe sentence boþe bifore and aftir, and loke þat suche equiuok wordis acorde wiþ þe sentence. And he haþ nede to lyve a clene lif and be ful deuout in preiers and haue not his wit ocupied aboute worldli þingis . . .”309

While Pandarus is clearly not subjectively positioned as a translator, he essentially functions as an intermediary figure occupying the interstices between the lovers, transferring Troilus’ and Criseyde’s words to each other, in delivering their letters, and probing for secrets as a confessor figure, albeit one who woefully mis-translates grace and forgiveness through vicious desires.

309 Anne Hudson, editor, “Prologue to Wycliffite Bible, Chapter 15,” Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 67-72. 257

In addition, seducing lovers to reveal secrets, fueling desires, and indulging equivocality further complicate the interstitial role that Pandarus plays. Chaucer hints at the possibility of Pandarus as a sorrow of Troilus in a clever play on words in the section in Book III in which the narrator is complicit in enveloping Troilus and Criseyde in the comfort and fearlessness of their private secret. Immediately following the lines in which the narrator acknowledges Criseyde’s affective change from fear to comfort as emergent from Troilus’ “good governaunce” and secret-keeping, he turns the focus towards

Pandarus and his actions in the aftermath of his rape-like penetration of the private space of intimate exchange at Troilus and Criseyde’s first sexual encounter, which he,

Pandarus, has orchestrated and participates in voyeuristically. The narrator reports that

Pandarus still busies himself with the lovers’ affairs and inserts himself in their lives to serve his own desire. Intriguingly, and I would argue, profoundly, Chaucer chooses the word “prest” and deploys it in an ambiguous syntactic position so that the entire meaning of the sentence is so vastly disparate depending on the reader’s/ audience’s interpretive handling of the word. The narrator allows:

And Pandarus, to quike alwey the fir,

Was evere ylike prest and diligent;

To ese his frend was set al his desir.

He shof ay on, he to and fro was sent;

He lettres bar whan Troilus was absent;

That nevere man, as in his frendes nede,

Ne bar hym bet than he, withouten drede. (III. 484-490)

258

If Pandarus is “like a priest,” then he is certainly a heterodox one at best and potentially a heretical one who violates the primary ordinance of pastorality in confession to keep secret: “Let him keep secret – as if it were his own crimes – the sins of the guilty/ Let him be slow to punishment and quick to compassion, Lamenting as often as he is forced to be severe;/ He should pour out a mixture of oil and vinegar,/ At times like a father chastising with the rod,/ at times like a mother proffering her breast.”310 If, instead, the word “prest” means “prepared, eager, willing”311 or “prompt, ready, swift, quick,”312 then his desire for intrusive penetration into the lovers’ secret and their relationship moves toward the hyperbolic. Either way, the word “prest” pushes Pandarus’ subjectivities into even greater slipperiness; he will not be fixed or static. Yet, the narrator adds no particular declarative or unambiguous descriptions to his narration of his figuration as if the narrator were afraid that Pandarus will turn his gaze and his desire outward, now that he has positioned himself as an insider. The overall effect of the narrator’s response to

Pandarus is fear; the narrator performs through word play and ambiguities the essential markers of fear that he continually reports of Criseyde. Of special interest is the narrator’s admission in the line previous to this stanza in which he detaches himself in a cagey fashion and evoking a sense of having said too much or to have revealed a truth not his to tell; in other words, the narrator bears the impulses of heterodox dissemblance or heretical denial when under inquisition: “So wis he was, she was namore afered --/ I

310 Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 96. Tentler notes this poem is from the “Poeniteas cito” in the Penitentiarius magistri ilhannis, A3a (Ibid, 96, fn4). 311 Middle English Dictionary, http://quod.lib.umich.edu.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/m/med/, s.v. “prest,” (accessed on May 24, 20120). 312 The Riverside Chaucer, “Glossary,” 1279. 259 mene, as fer as oughte ben requered” (III.482-483). Using “I mene” suggests that perhaps the narrator should not have revealed that Criseyde is no longer afraid, in part, because we’ve come to hear through his own reports that fear is paramount in Criseyde’s life. The return of fear in line 490 above, albeit indicating that “drede” (“fear”) is absent, reminds the reader that fear actually is fully present in this triadic relationship among these three characters, but as is his wont, Chaucer has carefully exposed it and then tucked it back into the interstitial space that it holds in Criseyde’s heart and in Pandarus’ power. It appears that Troilus alone is immune, inured, or just oblivious to fear because he is cloaked in “good governaunce” (cf. III.481) all the while that this ever-present affect, that is fear, permeates Pandarus and Criseyde. But if Chaucer is using a vernacular poem as a medium to call for self-reform through good self-governance, what should the reader/ audience affectively experience in order to move towards this reform?

Is Chaucer asking us to fear as with the more flexible subjectivities that he instills in the figurations of Criseyde and Pandarus? Or is he asking us to turn from fear and find comfort in self-secrecy like Troilus as a means to self-reform and consequently, adopt good governance as a remedy for social, political, and ideological institutions?

Doubly Bound: Criseyde, the Narrator’s Exemplar and Valueless Commodity

Criseyde similarly serves as a figural means by which Chaucer examines social and cultural codes, conventions, and more importantly, ideas of desire, will, and consent.

Her subjectivity is much more fluid than are Troilus’ or Pandarus’, and the narrator’s relationship to her entails secrecy that verges on the concept of privitée as well as

260 manipulating the audience’s/ reader’s affective experience of the “tragedye.”313 Like

Troilus, Criseyde’s first full appearance in the poem is one-dimensional, so much so that she really is just the object of Troilus’ gaze; she simply attends the Palladium festivities in the temple and stands still in her black widow’s habit: “And yet she stood ful lowe and stille allone,/ Byhynden other folk, in litel brede,/ And neigh the dore, ay undre shames drede,/ Simple of atir and debonaire of chere,/ With ful assured lokyng and manere”

(I.178-182). Notably, Criseyde is drawn here in a parallel, yet diverse way to Troilus; she is both humble and confident, yet always under the fear of shame, whereas he is confident and arrogant, but has humility thrust upon him only when Cupid shoots him.

The narrator endows her with full-dimensionality, even some degree of subjectivity, in that she is imbued with emotion and affectively relates to others in that she is “ful wel biloved, and wel men of hir told” (I.131) before Troilus ever comes into the story. As

Lisa J. Kiser notes, the narrator has difficulty remaining objective because of his inability to recognize that he “reflects every one of the interpretive failings of his characters” as well as that the “personal and social purposes that interfere with his reading of the tale he retells” further complicate his objectivity.314 Indeed, in his first description of Criseyde noted above (lines 178-182), we see him slipping into affectively judging her in the midst of simple description as he tucks “ay undre shames drede” between her location in the temple (“neigh the dore”) and her clothing and demeanor (simple and humble). The narrator gives awkward, anecdotal evidence on Criseyde’s life external to the text and the

313 See Chapters 1and 2 for discussions distinguishing secrecy and privitée and for the way the latter functions in romance and courtly poetry. 314 Kiser, Truth and Textuality, 71. 261 tale at hand, but he fails to give more important details that would serve to further the audience’s ability to understand her subjectivity more clearly. For example, the narrator comments, “But wheither that she children hadde or noon,/ I rede it naught, therefore I late it goon” (I.132-133), revealing several things about himself and very little of

Criseyde, which should be his purpose here; he shows that he has a subjective interest in the character beyond the scope of his text or that of his source text along with lingering just a tad bit too long over this empty fact that is anything but informative about

Criseyde, as if he were contemplating Criseyde’s life while pushing out the words and then deciding to “let it go” and move on. The narrator keeps an almost protective stance as if guarding Criseyde from the audience’s eventual negative judgment of her unfaithfulness and betrayal of Troilus, which of course, must come in order to fulfill the tragedy and align with the source text. Indeed, at the end of Book V when Criseyde is just about to betray Troilus and choose Diomede, the narrator describes her essential qualities of simple beauty and strength, emphasizing her virtues, in a sense pleading her perfection and state of grace to the reader/ audience, as if he were narrating a hagiographical portrait instead of the embodiment of one who will be known historically as an exemplar of female inconstancy and vice. He carefully narrates “that Paradis stood formed in hire yën,” and further:

And with hire riche beaute evere more

Strof love in hire ay, which of hem was more.

She sobre was, ek symple, and wys withal,

262

The best ynorisshed ek that myghte be, 821

And goodly of hire speche in general,

Charitable, estatlich, lusty, fre;

Ne never mo ne lakked hire pite;

Tendre-herted, slydynge of corage;

But trewely, I kan nat telle hire age. (V.817-826)

The build-up of her superlative qualities reads similar to the qualities of Amans’ lover that he confesses to Genius in Gower’s Confessio Amantis, although Amans’ lover is unreachable to him or rather, she will not (or cannot) accept his petitions for love. The narrator here in the Troilus acts as a would-be lover himself, mixing his subjectivity from objective outsider to a secret admirer, and the lines translate as a confessional discourse between the narrator and his auditor, whom he attempts to put in a subject position of confessor/pastor. He catches himself at the end of this description in line 826 when he quickly stops the list of virtuous qualities, fumbling to find a way to move out of the confessional box he has narrated himself into; consequently, he utters an insignificant fact – he cannot tell her age – in an attempt to recover his subject position as an objective narrator.

Strangely, the narrator protects Criseyde from the full force of the guilt and condemnation she will receive as the consequence of abandoning Troilus and fulfilling her father’s wish for her union with Diomede by peppering the word “fear” and its multiple variants throughout the whole poem in describing her reactions, thoughts, and actions. In discussing Criseyde’s fear, David Aers concludes that this emotional state is

263 not a flaw in her character, but the reasonable affect of her status as a woman in a society that commodifies women and devalues them akin to prisoners. Aers offers a very strong argument relating affect to social response and suggests Criseyde’s fear is far from a singular issue, but instead, “away from any idealising [sic.] literary conventions, Criseyde voices her real and justifiable social and sexual fears, fear of the Greek state, fear of rape.”315 The only time she is not fearful or trepid is in Book II when she rejects Troilus’ letter carried to her by Pandarus and she responds quickly and angrily, but with absolute truth:

‘And loketh now if this be resonable,

And letteth nought, for favour ne for slouthe,

To seyn a sooth; now were it convenable

To myn estat, by God and by youre trouthe,

To taken it, or to han of hym routhe,

In harmyng of myself, or in repreve?

Ber it ayein, for hym that ye on leve!’ (II.1135-1141)

Even when she is in Troilus’ arms in bed, sharing their first intimate encounter, she is desperately fearful that their love remain a secret in order to preserve her honor and reputation. Aers concludes that by Chaucer’s emphasizing Criseyde’s fear and the treatment of women in this society, he “developed a complex, profoundly dialectical grasp of the interactions between individual and society.”316 Aers further notes that to

315 David Aers, “Criseyde: Woman in Medieval Society,” The Chaucer Review 13, no. 3 (Winter, 1979): 177-200, 194. For a longer discussion of Criseyde and Chaucer’s treatment of women, see David Aers, Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination (London; Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). 316 Aers, “Criseyde: Woman in Medieval Society,” 197. 264 portray this interiority by which profound dialectic exchange may occur, Chaucer opens a great chasm through social and clerical polity that he leaves unfilled as the figuration of

Criseyde rather fades from the poem. Aers makes the case for inquisitorial probing in this poem without pushing farther into a complete dialectic exchange or discourse, but this incomplete argument towards ecclesiastical policing falls short in the absence of a correlative to Criseyde’s fear. He does argue that the lovers’ accedence to Eros

“transcends fear.” Yet, Chaucer does not allow fear to dissipate from the poem, the audience, the narrator, or the lovers themselves, particular not Criseyde; she has the brief moment when anger displaces fear as cited above (II.1135-1141ff.), but it reappears just as quickly and as strongly as it did before her outburst to Pandarus, although it entwines with secrecy for the remainder of the poem. Aers does not take into account the insistent desire for secrecy that comes from the surrounding players as well as from Criseyde, and so, his argument that Chaucer leaves an unfilled “abyss” at the point of social critique seems incomplete. In opening this “abyss” and others throughout the poem, Chaucer actually does fill these spaces with reformational suggestions. Rather than imagining the depth and grandeur of an abyss, I suggest interstices – brief intervening spaces between things – offer a more coherent conceptualization of inserted criticisms and commentary within a larger poetic, aesthetic project. Just as Criseyde is limited by her social status, so, too, is Chaucer. Robert W. Hanning summarizes the kind of poetic limitations or motivations that Chaucer and other “translators” writing under a watchful courtly and/or political gaze were left to negotiate: “Behind [the translated word] lies a question of potentially vital interest to any translator: To what extent can he (or she) be held

265 responsible for the content and perspectives of the work translated? Can allowance not be made for motives other than coincidence of viewpoint that might induce a poet to render in English ‘classic’ representations of desire’s peaks and perils?”317 And where

Chaucer has the mobility and adeptness to move in and out of potentially subversive statements or opinions in his poetry, Criseyde is limited by her subjectivity. Chaucer gives her protection, of sorts, from the narrator figure, and this narrative relationship becomes a remarkable poetic entwinement of insider/outsider, character/ narrator, and confessant/ intercessor.

As I alluded to above, Criseyde’s position is precarious politically because of her father’s treachery, and she is all the more wise in her caution and careful weighing of every word and action. The narrator also treats Criseyde carefully, cautiously guarding her figuration with a degree of dissemblance, diversion, and concealment. For example, at the end of the poem when Diomede pushes Criseyde to stay with him leading Criseyde to concede to his wishes, the narrator punctuates the narrative with exculpatory interjections and neutralizing the impact of the harshness of her gifts to Diomede – those previously belonging to Troilus. The narrator sets up her predicament that she is friendless and alone in the Greek camp so that Diomede’s great prowess does not appear to tempt her for its value, but for the safeguard it offers her:

317 Robert W. Hanning, Serious Play: Desire and Authority in the Poetry of Ovid, Chaucer, and Ariosto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 135. Hanning offers an excellent perspective from which to understand Chaucer’s “literary heritage” noting it encompasses “stories inherited from an earlier time, transmitted for both their moral and aesthetic worth – hence the role of learned men (‘clerkes’) as well as poets in the transmission – and designed not simply to be read for pleasure but to be stored away in the reader’s memory as an authoritative repository of truths, including truths about the correct objects of human desire – in this case, the natural law that should govern both emotions and behavior” (Ibid, 104). See also George Edmondson, The Neighboring Text: Chaucer, Boccaccio, Henryson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), for a complete and insightful discussion on Chaucer’s use of interstitial spaces in which to explore “conflicting aims,” ideologies, and symbols. 266

Retornyng in hire soule ay up and down

The wordes of this sodeyn Diomede,

His grete estat, and perel of the town,

And that she was allone and hadde nede

Of frendes help; and thus bygan to brede

The cause whi, the sothe for to telle,

That she took fully purpos for to dwelle. (V.1023-1029)

The narrator is careful to insert “the sothe for to tell” so that the reader/ audience will believe that Criseyde really has no choice in this matter; she needs help, and the “peril” of the town can provide it. But is this really the “truth” or is the narrator tempering the actual truth by insisting that her only real choice is to become Diomede’s lover? Might she be choosing Diomede in part because he has a reputation as being perilous? The next three stanzas hold the same kinds of narrative pleadings: “the sothe for to seyne”

(V.1035), “I fynde ek in stories elleswhere” (V.1044), and “But, trewely, the storie telleth us” (V.1051). With so many deflections from his own veracity as a narrator telling the

“sothe” of this tale, we begin to wonder what the narrator is hiding or attempting to keep secret. The narrator seems to hold off as long as possible from telling the truth that proves to be the damnable truth that seals every characters’ fate: Criseyde has given

Diomede her heart along with the steed, the brooch, and the pennon made from her sleeve. As such, he reports:

I fynde ek in stories elleswhere,

Whan thorugh the body hurt was Diomede

267

Of Troilus, tho wep she many a teere

Whan that she saugh his wyde wowndes blede,

And that she took, to kepen hym, good hede;

And for to helen hym of his sorwes smerte,

Men seyn – I not –that she yaf hym hire herte. (V.1044-1050)

The bookending phrases surrounding Criseyde’s care of the wounded Diomede show a narrator trying to embed important tales within a diversionary frame, although he really cannot change the truth of these remedial actions by Criseyde. Notice that the narrator does not recall Lollius, his auctor, here, but instead diffuses this account of her actions to

“stories elleswhere” indicating that they are nameless and non-localized, so they are not authoritative sources (i.e. - auctors) for him. The ending line brings into play

Chaucerian ambiguity with the word “not.” This line might read that although men say that Criseyde gave Diomede her heart, he, the narrator, does not say so (“I not” as in “I do not”). Or, it might read that the narrator notes men say she gives Diomede her heart, inferring that a notation is not as significant or authoritative as a first-hand statement or an auctor’s chronicle. In either case, though, the narrator defers the truthfulness of this account onto others and pulls away from judging Criseyde other than that she has no choice. He tries once more to narrate her in a favorable light following this condemning truth of her change of heart, trying to show her great sorrow in treating Troilus falsely, saying, “But trewely, the storie telleth us/ Ther made nevere womman moore wo/ Than she, whan that she falsed Troilus” (V.1051-1053), and just a few lines later reporting her confessional account of her falseness for which she realizes she will be denounced,

268

“’Allas, of me, unto the worldes ende,/ Shal neyther ben ywriten nor ysonge/ No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende./ O, rolled shal I ben on many a tonge!’” (V.1058-

1061). With such intense protection and buffering from the narrator, the question arises whether she or the narrator is the one who is actually worried about protecting her honor.

As the fall-out from her deliverance to the Greek camp shows, she seemingly is less concerned about her honor and reputation once she has been traded out of her social sphere, out of Troy, and out of her lover’s arms. Notably, though, she has not been expelled from Troilus’ heart, although she behaves as if that were her sole expulsion.

The narrator’s relationship with Criseyde, noted throughout this chapter and discussed by many scholars, presents a unique poetic strategy of secrecy infused with fear because Chaucer creates a quasi-confessional relationship between the narrator and

Criseyde in spite of their obvious removal from one another (i.e. – the narrator is always outside the tale even though he judges and values Criseyde subjectively, while Criseyde is of course, a fictive figure inside the tale whom the narrator and the poet controls). So, as Criseyde admits or confesses her infidelity to Troilus, the narrator intercedes in the tale trying to modify the vicious admission as if he were acting towards her pastoral care.

Further, the narrator turns toward the reader/ audience, cautioning them against subjective judgment or defensiveness in terms of political and social strain and antagonism as if he were again acting as a sermonic pastor. For example, following

Criseyde’s acknowledgement that she will be disgraced in word and song “on many a tonge” as cited above (V.1054-1061), the narrator offers an exculpation for her leaving

Troilus and pledging her troth to Diomede in an expansion of her belief, “I se ther is no

269 bettre way” (V.1069), that she is a sort of choiceless or consentless victim in the whole debacle. He covertly suggests the reader not be judgmental against her while he overtly declares he will “excuse hire yet,” much as a pastor would preach in a sermon on mercy and forgiveness:

Ne me ne list this sely womman chyde

Forther than the storye wol devyse.

Hire name, allas, is publysshed so wide

That for hire gilt it oughte ynough suffise.

And if I mygthe excuse hire any wise,

For she so sory was for hire untrouthe,

Iwis, I wolde excuse hire yet for routhe. (V.1093-1099)

The narrator reveals his affective response to Criseyde’s plight when he interposes “allas” within his assessment that the public spread of “hire name” as being “untrouthe,” along with the loss of her reputation and honor, should be punishment enough for her guilt. He furthers offers that he would excuse her “for routhe,” in other words, for compassion and pity. As we should remember, Criseyde’s most intense fear was to protect her reputation and her name, such that strategic secrecy was enacted at almost every turn in her relationship with Troilus. The narrator implicitly recalls her fear here in this passage, which, combined with the poetic simplicity of “allas,” of the narrator’s “iwis” (“indeed”), and of his “routhe,” makes this passage all the more heart-breaking for the reader/audience. In this way, the narrator takes on a quasi-pastoral subjectivity in narrating Criseyde’s final physical appearance in the poem, although she remains

270 verbally present through the words of her letter responding to Troilus and of course, ever- present in Troilus’ lingering sorrow. Four hundred lines later, after summarizing

Criseyde’s epistolary response to Troilus’ letter, the narrator offers a somewhat sarcastic comment towards Troilus and a quasi-prayer that seems pastoral in nature for the reader/audience and for Troilus: “But Troilus, thow maist now, est or west,/ Pipe in an ivy lef, if that the lest!/ Thus goth the world. God shilde us fro meschaunce,/ And every wight that meneth trouthe avaunce!” (V.1432-1435). With these lines, however, Chaucer has set the narrator firmly in an interstice between objective reporter and moralizing pastor, but we notice, too, that the narrator pulls away from his affective, protective stance from Criseyde. Similarly, Chaucer places Criseyde in an interstice as well, moving her from the unfaithful lover into a liminal space as a narrative exemplar, built in this mode primarily by the narrator, before she is allowed to leave the text through her final letter to Troilus. It is necessary for Criseyde to be held in this interstitial limbo so that the story may take precedence over affect again as the poem nears conclusion.

Troilus finally comes to realize the truth that Criseyde’s letter prompts him to see, pulling him out of his love blindness, but deepening his sorrow: “This Troilus this lettre thoughte al straunge/ Whan he it saugh, and sorwfullich he sighte;/ Hym thoughte it lik a kalendes of chaunge” (V.1632-1634). The narrator through these lines and through the following stanza shows a gentle, almost merciful, attitude towards Troilus, even though he has been rather biting towards him just two hundred lines earlier. And it is here that the narrator embodies the kind of compassion and pity that he has just called for in his final attempt to paint Criseyde with a degree of mercy. Notice the remarkable litotes and

271 simplicity of these lines, as if Chaucer were also affectively responding to his poetic figurations through the seams of his poem:

But natheles men seyen that at the laste,

For any thyng, men shal the soothe se;

And swich a cas bitidde, and that as faste,

That Troilus wel understod that she

Nas nought so kynde as that hire oughte be.

And fynaly, he woot now out of doute

That al is lost that he hath ben aboute. (V.1639-1645)

The narrator remarks that Criseyde is not “so kynde” as she should be to Troilus, whether he intends “kynde” to mean “natural” as is the customary Middle English usage or to mean “kind” as a behavioral mode of grace. The result is the same; the affect of sorrow has now displaced fear in the story, and the narrator seems to be so diminished by this sorrow, that he loses his passionate intensity to protect Criseyde further.

Sorrowful Troilus: Vision and Voice

From the first lines of the poem, Troilus’ “double sorrow” runs beneath the surface of events, and the audience grows increasingly anxious for the narrator to reveal what the double sorrows will prove to be. As I noted above, the corporeal senses shape

Troilus’ figure, and as Chaucer moves him into fuller dimensionality and subjectivity, his physicality diminishes right up until his death. Interestingly, the narrator exposes

Troilus’ emerging and shifting figuration through Troilus’ own voice. The displacement

272 of the senses and of physical action through orality correlates with confessional discourse as an orthodox mode of confession as well as in an inquisitorial mode meant to ferret out heterodox and heretical views. Here, though, Chaucer infuses ecclesiastical models into a model for idealized, courtly love, and through Troilus’ unfolding “double sorrow,”

Chaucer points to the impossibility of courtliness surviving the intrusions of social and political realities. In essence, part of the sorrow we come to understand in Troilus’ tragic love is the futility of trying to uphold false and/ or idealized ideological codes and beliefs, and as such, Chaucer enables the critical examination of such codes and beliefs in the spaces where Troilus’ voice falters. The impotence of Troilus’ will and desires once

Criseyde is traded for Antenor, his abandonment by Pandarus’ loss of interest in his secrets and by Criseyde’s desire for his love, and the affectivity that Troilus’ downfall produces on the reader/ audience all are performed mimetically in the increasingly diminishment and muteness of his voice. Yet, revelations, declarations of love and promises to keep secrets and uphold honor, and confessions depend on full vocality. As

Troilus gradually loses his voice, the affect of his sorrows gathers strength up to its apex when he is slain by Achilles and his “lighte goost” moves up to the “holughnesse of the eighthe spere” (V.1808-1809). With Troilus’ death, Chaucer returns to the vision trope he uses repeatedly in relation to Troilus as I briefly mentioned above. Interestingly, though, Chaucer allows Troilus to bear the final judgment on the events leading to his

“double sorrow” as his soul finally sees the truth of the heavens, privitée in a sense, although still unrevealed to corporeal man:

And ther he saugh with ful avysement

273

The erratik sterres, herkenyng armonye

With sownes ful of hevenyssh melodie.

And down from thennes faste he gan avyse

This litel spot of erthe that with the se 1815

Embraced is, and fully gan despise

This wrecched world, and held al vanite

To respect of the pleyn felicite

That is in hevene above; and at the laste,

Ther he was slayn his lokyng down he caste, 1820

And in hymself he lough right at the wo

Of hem that wepten for his deth so faste,

And dampned al oure werk that foloweth so

The blynde lust, the which that may nat laste,

And sholden al oure herte on heven caste; (V.1811-1825)

The importance of this shift from speech to vision should not be lost within the myriad ambiguities, sophisticated poetics, and textuality of the poem. Indeed, to a medieval audience, the movement from speech back to vision would be another degree in which to mourn Troilus and to understand his sorrow. Vision is fraught with sinful impulses; whether through improper gazing or transgressive desires for visual penetration of monastic privitée, for example, vision is grounded in the physical, which is always

274 already a sinful state. Figural blindness, such as Chaucer infuses frequently in the Troilus and particularly in reference to Troilus himself, implies a state of sin, immorality, and subversion of the natural order.318 Additionally, as Chauncey Wood notes, “Chaucer saw an opportunity to add to Boccaccio’s Filostrato the themes of Troilus’ subjection to both

Fortune and Cupid,” so that it is not particularly surprising that Chaucer does not significantly shift Troilus’ subjectivity away from the hapless lover whom Pandarus notes is Fortune’s victim.319 Wood makes explicit the connection between blindness and

Troilus because he is subject to two archetypal figures of blindness: Blind Cupid and

Blind Fortune.

Notably, speech reflects a progression from the physical to the spiritual, a turning away from corporeality, and determines the efficacy and power of confession. Thus, a penitent might understand the sins through the senses, but to complete the sacrament and be fully shriven requires an untainted speech act. Secrecy complicates and challenges this action, and as I’ve argued throughout this project, fear motivates one’s will to be absolved or to dissemble and conceal. In relation to Troilus, then, the progression towards muteness indicates his spiritual decline complementing his physical one. As C.

M. Woolgar discusses, the correlation between voice/ sound and spiritual exaltation structures the medieval Church so much so that song, communal prayer, liturgy, and sacrament require speech/ voice/ sound for their foundations.320 Woolgar further connects ecclesiastical dissent with deliberate mis-speaking, such as Cathars refusing to

318 See C. M. Woolgar on vision and sin for a fuller discussion of the visual sense: C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 319 Chauncey Wood, The Elements of Chaucer’s “Troilus” (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1984), 155. 320 Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England, 84-104. 275 take vows or make oaths, Wycliffites chanting psalms in English, and Lollards refusing to swear on the Gospels, so the line between heresy or heterodoxy and orthodoxy might be demarcated by a simple mispronunciation or a wrong note sung. Essentially, as

Woolgar says, “the tongue received the influence of the ‘animal spirit’ [anima]: it formed speech and told the meaning of the thoughts of the soul.”321 Chaucer not only diminishes Troilus’ speech as he moves further in despair, but the three Cantici Troili in the poem also mimic his desperate decline.322 I will return to discuss the songs of Troilus below; however, the powerful metonymy Chaucer creates between song/ voice and

Troilus’ holistic entity – completely separate from his subjectivity – underscores and enhances the power and aesthetics of the poem’s textuality. Further, this metonymic construction allows Chaucer to use Troilus’ figuration and his songs as casings to orally and visually demonstrate the non-sustainability of idealized social codes and the affective aftermath of political turbulence.

Troilus himself sings three times in the poem -- the Cantici Troili – in Books I,

III, and V, and the fourth song sung by Antigone in Book II serves as a kind of echo to

Pandarus’ exhortations to Criseyde to give herself to Troilus. Troilus’ songs mimic his interiority from equivocation on consenting to love (Book I) to an exaltation of the bond

321 Ibid, 84. Woolgar notes that this idea comes from John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum, edited by M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975-88). 322 There are two formally named Cantici Troili, in Books I and V. The third song I consider here is the aubade in Book III at the onset of dawn following the night shared by Troilus and Criseyde. While it is not specifically named a Canticus Troili, I agree with scholars who place it among the lyrics in the poem. See, for example, Clare Regan Kinney, “’Who Made This Song?’” The Engendering of Lyric Counterplots in ‘Troilus and Criseyde,’” in Studies in Philology 89, no. 3 (Summer, 1992): 272-292. Also see John V. Fleming, Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s Troilus (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), and Howell Chickering, “The Poetry of Suffering in Book V of Troilus,” The Chaucer Review 34, no. 3 (2000): 243-268.

276 between nature and love (Book III) to the brusque realization that Cupid will not restore

Criseyde to him (Book V). The last song is absolutely monodic in tone and theme; it is only seven lines long and repeats words and images of darkness towards death. The first song is sung immediately after he returns home from the temple having been “converted” to Love by Cupid. Following a series of strategies of secrecy that the narrator relates about Troilus’ immediate actions, this first song sets a narrative pattern of secrecy then fear (or fear then secrecy), revelation, and monody for Troilus so that his subjectivity moves in relation to secrecy and affective fear. For example, as soon as he realizes that he desires Criseyde against his usual nature, he emerges from the temple, repenting his past actions of mocking of lovers, while at the same time, fearing scorn, and fearfully scorning himself:

And after this, nat fullich al awhaped,

Out of the temple al esilich he wente,

Repentynge hym that he hadde evere ijaped

Of Loves folk, lest fully the descente

Of scorn fille on hymself; but what he mente,

Lest it were wist on any manere syde,

His woo he gan dissimilen and hide. (I. 316-322)

As Barry Windeatt points out, in this passage and others falling between these lines and the Canticus Troili beginning at line 393, Chaucer “has intensified the responses” of

Troilus using such superlative adjectives as “lesst fully” and “wel” in subsequent lines, and in so doing, he significantly deviates from Boccaccio’s Troiolo who “leaves [the

277 temple] pensive and enamoured,” but not impelled to conceal his secret.323 Within these following lines, we also see variations on concealment with words such as “wrey”

(“conceal”) and “fayned” and “feyneth” (“feigning”), intensifying and expanded Troilus’ affective response of fear to Love’s call to service, as well as Chaucer more intricately weaving secrecy and fear together as Troilus moves into full subjectivity. Sixty lines after he leaves the temple, he has accepted his unnatural desire to “purpos loves craft,” but only as something he can hide “pryvely” and in secret or until he might recover:

“Thus took he purpos loves craft to suwe,/ And thoughte he wolde werken pryvely,/ First to hiden his desir in muwe/ From every wight yborn, al outrely,/ But he myghte ought recovered be therby” (I. 379-383).324 Note the particular distinction Chaucer makes between “pryvely” and “muwe.” As I noted in the Introductory chapter, Chaucer is the first English writer to use the word “secret” as holding a distinctly different connotation than “privitée” (usually left to the realm of esoterica, natural or God’s secrets, or women as Chaunticleer notes in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales). Here,

“pryvely” still alludes to separating something from the ken of man; in this case, Troilus’ secret about burning in Love’s desire. In narrating that Troilus has an intense desire and need to suppress this secret, the poet begins the layering process of shaping Troilus’

323 Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde,107, note 316-7. 324 “Muwe” as a connotation for secret or hidden originates in 1375 in the romance, William of Palerne, with Chaucer holding the second recorded use of the word with this meaning in the Troilus. It is frequently used in the fifteenth-century, but not earlier than in 1425 and generally by Lydgate and Hoccleve. The Middle English Dictionary cites the third nominative meaning for “muwe” as: “a) a place of security or confinement; hiding place, shelter; cage, prison; in ~ in safety; in concealment or hiding:” Middle English Dictionary, http://quod.lib.umich.edu.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/m/med/, s.v. “Muwe,” (accessed on September 19, 2012). 278 subjectivity; it is noteworthy, then, that secrecy and the strategies to hide his desires are the first points of bringing Troilus into full subjectivity and into complex figuration.

Furthermore, the first Canticus Troili serves as an important narrative break creating a diversion from the fusion of the narrator and the poet figurations that immediately precedes the song in which we hear the nomination of Lollius as “myn auctour” and a deflective authorial commentary on translation:

And of his song naught only the sentence,

As writ myn auctour called Lollius,

But pleinly, save oure tonges difference,

I dar wel seyn, in al, that Troilus

Seyde in his song, loo, every word right thus

As I shal seyn; and whoso list it here,

Loo, next this vers he may it fynden here. (I. 393-399)

By moving into the song without further narration, Chaucer allows the song itself to function multiply as a foreshadow for Troilus’ death, as authentication that his poetic translation is veracious, as a monody substituted by the poet whose voice should be singing the dirge for the voice of an already monodic or mournful figuration (i.e. –

Troilus), and as a mimetic parody of penitential examination of conscience before the actual confession to a confessor.325 But within this stanza, Chaucer also manages to hide, or perhaps merely blend, into the narrator’s musings, the essential core of vernacularity

325 For a fuller discussion on the Petrarchan influence on Chaucer in this first song of Troilus, especially in terms of the sonnet form and philosophical disputation, see Warren Ginsberg, “Chaucer and Petrarch: ‘S’amor non è’ and the Canticus Troili,” Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, 1.1 (2011), http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/. 279 whereby “oure tonges difference” is enough to wobble the ideological underpinnings of theology and sacral auctorité.326 In this brief space of a stanza and the song, a total of forty-one lines, Chaucer conflates his narrator and poet, defers to the audience’s own authority to “hear” the song (i.e. – to interpret it in its vernacular), infuses the song with

Troilus’ nascent subjectivity as well as an incipient confessional discourse, and anticipates the events that will unfold to merit the narrator’s working title for the poem:

“the double sorwe of Troilus.”

In the ensuing exchange with Pandarus following the song, Troilus undergoes the remainder of the penitential ritual placing Pandarus in the role of pastor who significantly cannot (nor would not) shrive him. Unlike Amans in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,

Troilus falls completely into an unwanted service to the God of Love from which he will never recover. His figuration moves from a one-dimensional chivalric hero to a fully subjected courtly lover, but his destruction comes as he fails to perform his subjectivity in either code (chivalry or courtesy) correctly. Further, he fails to be shriven because he mis-identifies Pandarus as a pastoral figure even though he has dismissed Pandarus as being outside of love: “’Thow koudest nevere in love thiselven wisse./ How devel maistow brynge me to blisse?’” (I.622). Within the figuration and subjectivity of Troilus,

Chaucer integrates the triadic relationship among fear, secrecy, and desire as he positions

326 I will return to this discussion of vernacular authority and Wycliffism further in the chapter. For a challenging discussion on Chaucer and his relation to and potential heretication towards Wycliffism, see Andrew Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See also Katherine C. Little, Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). Finally, for an insightful background on the correlation between sermonic literature, preaching, and Ricardian court poetry, see G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England: A Neglected Chapter in the History of English Letters and of the English People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), especially Chapter V – The Preaching of Satire and Complaint: Part I. 280

Troilus to perform affectivity throughout his active subjectivity following his subjugation into Love’s service.

The second song of Troilus comes in Book III following the union of the lovers in the early moments of dawn. This song is an aubade that celebrates the correct service of both lover figurations to Love; Criseyde has left her fear in place of Troilus’ comforting strength and pledge to be discrete, and Troilus has given in to the joys of Love that he previously denounced and avoided so intently. But just as a song is ephemeral in its active utterance, so too, is the realization of ideal courtly love that Troilus and Criseyde finally engage. Ironically at the conclusion of the song, Troilus chides Titan, the sun, for bringing day to penetrate their secret interstice of desire fulfilled, ominously canting what he himself will become – a fool despised and full of sorrow, a diseased lover too soon turned out of his figurative bed of secrecy and desire:

And ek the sonne, Titan, gan he chide,

And seyde, ‘O fool, wel may men the dispise,

That hast the dawyng al nyght by thi syde,

And suffrest hire so soone up fro the rise

For to disese loveris in this wyse.

What, holde youre bed ther, thow, and ek thi Morwe!

I bidde God, so yeve yow bothe sorwe!’ (III.1464-1470)

In effect, Troilus’ song here predicts his own sorrow and the eventual sorrow that hangs as a pall over the story and over Troy itself. Troilus’ service to Love is just as momentary as is his prowess in battle as a Trojan hero. He eventually fails in both,

281 losing Criseyde to events beyond his control (in a sense, to the turns of the gods or Fate) and losing his life and reputation to Achilles in battle. Troilus’ final song in Book V completes the monodic tone that shapes the double sorrow of Troilus. His apostrophe is not to the sun, but to the stars, indicating that just as the stars offer dim light by night, so too, has his love lost its brilliance and fades. This canticle is only one stanza long, a mere seven lines in which Troilus’ despair overtakes his ability to correctly govern himself back to the heroic subject he should be. The narrator introduces this song simply, with a plain litotes of Criseyde’s absence from Troilus’ life and from Troy, but not from his heart. Further, the narrator insists on passing all interpretive guidance to the reader/ audience, allowing the “hearing” of the song to direct its translation and interpretation:

‘O sterre, of which I lost have al the light,

With herte soor wel oughte I to biwaille

That evere derk in torment, nyght by nyght,

Toward my deth with wynd in steere I saille,

For which the tenthe nyght, if that I faille

The gydyng of this bemes bright an houre,

My ship and me Caribdis wol devoure.’ (V.638-644)

Clare Regan Kinney suggests of the Cantici Troili “taken in sequence, they trace a regression towards, and ultimately beyond, the despairing and paralysed introspection of

Book I (when, we recall, Troilus could barely even name the object of his desire)” and further notes that Criseyde’s absences (in the first and third songs) and anticipated absence (in the aubade) diverts his attention inwardly to the craftings of his imagination

282 rather than to external actions by which he should reform his self-governance.327 She goes on to argue that Troilus's metaphor of the ship lost at sea “has already substituted trope for presence, turning her into the light that failed,” thus precluding her actual return ever being possible.328 The recurrent lightness/ darkness trope also plays a crucial role in

Partonope of Blois in the loss of his love, Melior, but unlike Partonope, Troilus holds himself in the dimness of a night-time sky, illuminated by stars, and so, he cannot correctly reform to his former self of good governance and of effective chivalric hero.

As I argue in this chapter, the dialectic exchanges between Troilus and Pandarus mimic confessional and inquisitorial discourse for the purpose of illuminating the affective responses to insistent, penetrative inquiry along with opening interstitial sites in which secrecy dominates as a space in which ideological, political, social, and institutional criticism may unfold and be examined towards reformational action.

Chaucer inserts the songs of Troilus as interstitial sites that summarize the effect and outcome of these discursive exchanges so that Troilus’ voice brings the reader/ audience to envision the aftermath of subverted pastorality, poor counsel, and flawed cultural codes.

Tell Me Your Secrets: Pandarus’ Inquisitione heretice amantis

Confessional discourse is one of the primary modes Chaucer deploys to enhance the tragic effect of this poem that enables and exposes fear and secrecy. Within this chapter, I look at several confessional exchanges, some more aligned with orthodox

327 Clare Regan Kinney, “”Who Made This Song?,’” 286. 328 Ibid, 288. 283 pastoral care, others more aligned with inquisitorial practice, as sites in which Chaucer first infuses fear and secrecy as tandem partners and next, opens as spaces for reformation. Such reforms address critical issues in late-fourteenth century England that fall along the whole spectrum including social, political, pastoral, personal, and even cultural and literary concerns. Using multiple subjectivities and conflated figurations,

Chaucer forces his audience/ reader to focus on the interstices he opens and illuminates through the dynamic exchanges of the three figurations – Pandarus, Troilus, and Criseyde

– along with the interplay among narrator figure, poet figure, and the audience itself.

Chaucer’s complexity as a poet pushes past a static container of “Father Chaucer” and a

Chaucerian tradition or identification of his laureation as one auctor along a synchronic line of poets reaching past and to the future.329 I believe scholars too often stop at placing

Chaucer as a court poet, defining him either through his satirical and parodic poems, through his allegorically-inspired dream frame-narratives, or as in the Troilus, through his effective translatio imperii et studii or even translatio historia amantis. By holding

Chaucer apart from his text, this kind of singular nomination of the poet deflates the very dynamic of creating a text in partnership with the audience/ reader, in a sense devaluing the remarkable quality and fluidity of inventio that Chaucer breathes into the Troilus. If we consider the holistic act of poetry or literacy in light of the social and cultural movements towards secular authority and vernacularity, then the compiler/translator/creator along with the texts, its subjectivities and figurations, and its

329 See Seth Lerer for a fuller discussion of the self-consciousness of the poet as a “subject of both political control and literary fiction” as he argues that “Writing like the Clerk [re: Chaucer/ Chaucerian authorial figuration] defines a complex set of literary relationships among author, source, and audience:” Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 25. 284 audience/reader work in tandem to create a venue for political and institutional discourse outside the arenas of the court and the ecclesiastical sees. Necessarily, then, fear seeps into the very fabric of the poetic creation, which in turn, becomes a site of secrecy itself.

Chaucer forces the reader/ audience to participate as a voyeur and an intrusive auditor in the “orthodox” secrecy of confessional exchange. Moreover, though, through the poet and narrator figurations and their subjective roles as inquisitor and as confessant

(deployed variously in shifting roles and punctuated throughout the story’s events),

Chaucer pulls the audience/ reader into the action of confessional discourse, as a dialectic partner, and thus, as a contributor to the strategic maneuvers of secrecy.

Pandarus embodies ideological and institutional traces in which Chaucer fuses strains of corruption with metaphoric figural subjectivities. For example, Pandarus subjectively serves as a male guardian of a widowed female relative alone in an urban center. As such, he represents the socio-cultural codes of Ricardian England. In pimping out his niece to his friend and remaining silent/ absent when parliament debates her equivalent value to the State, however, Pandarus enacts a breech of codes and a corruption of the ideologies supporting these codes.330 Further, his invisibility to the

State as a whole, points to the weakness of political institutions in which an aristocrat is so insignificant to the Body Politic as to manipulate an elite warrior into becoming a diminished shell and to pervert conventions of decorum unseen or discovered by any other members of the society besides the lovers themselves. Chaucer moves Pandarus into a variety of subject positions so that he works metaphorically as figural corruption.

330 By “State” here, I mean the Trojan polity, including the princes and court of Priam, the parliament, and the populace. 285

Notably, Chaucer uses fear and secrecy as the primary affective strategies that Pandarus engages in his multiple roles.

The dialectic exchanges with Troilus most clearly reveal these elements of fear, secrecy, and metaphoric corruption particularly in the discursive confessional moments between the two figures. In Book I, Pandarus comes to Troilus’ house and finds him sullen and quiet, not exhibiting the arrogance of the peacock the narrator first describes him to be. Pandarus begins a confessional exchange that mimics orthodox pastorality, yet it is Pandarus’ desire to indulge his own lust through his friend’s experience that begins the exchange and not a desire on Troilus’ part to be examined or to reveal anything about the secret he holds. When Pandarus first comes upon Troilus alone in his chamber, he questions him in an innocuous manner, apparently concerned with his friend’s “destresse and care.” He begins with a simple question, “’who causeth al this fare?’” and then equates Troilus’ mood with his role in the war with the Greeks. The line of questioning turns rather subtly into religious tones and the discourse of confession as he moves from the external possibilities of Troilus’ woe, the war, to the internal causes:

‘Or hastow som remors of conscience,

And art now falle in som devocioun,

And wailest for thi synne and thin offence,

And hast for ferde caught attricioun?

God save hem that biseged han oure town,

That so kan leye oure jolite on presse,

And bringe oure lusty folk to holynesse!’ (I.554-560)

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Pandarus raises the point of fear as the impetus behind Troilus’ distress and uses religious devotion and piety as a kind of an accusatory weapon by which to spur Troilus out of his woe. Troilus refuses to engage with Pandarus’ mocking and questioning and tells him to go away and to stop scorning him: “’ther is na more to seye’” (I.567). Troilus concludes his response to Pandarus by admitting that he is keeping something hidden from

Pandarus, although his intention to send Pandarus away only awakens his desire to uncover the secret. In saying, “’I hide it for the beste,’” Troilus actually starts the quasi- pastoral posturing that Pandarus assumes in order to ferret out the “gossipy” secret with the ensuing exchange moving through mimetic confessional inquiry and pastoral care.

Pandarus deploys several tactics to evoke the secret from Troilus, moving from the argument that friends share things with each other, that he should trust him, and that

“good counseil” can keep friends’ eyes open to good guidance. Each attempt to force

Troilus into disclosure only makes Troilus respond repeatedly that it is best to hide this particular secret. He even explains the potential danger to himself and to others if the truth were to be revealed, knowing well that his secret will spread through the town and compromise his reputation; however, he finally does admit that Love has assailed him much like a foe in war:

’Love, ayeins the which whoso defendeth

Hymselven most, hym alderlest avaylleth,

With disespeyr so sorwfulli me offendeth, 605

That streight unto the deth myn herte sailleth.

Therto desir so brennyngly me assaileth,

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That to ben slayn it were a gretter joie

To me than kyng of Grece ben and Troye.

‘Suffiseth this, my fulle frend Pandare, 610

That I have seyd, for now wostow my wo;

And for the love of God, my colde care,

So hide it wel – I told it nevere to mo,

For harmes mygthen folwen mo than two

If it were wist – but be thow in gladnesse,

And lat me sterve, unknowe, of my destresse.’ (I.603-616)

Again, Troilus insists on hiding his secret even though he has revealed the underlying cause of his woe; he still does not name the woman he desires. Pandarus turns to a different strategy to pull forth the name of Troilus’ love interest, working the relationship of trust between friends and insinuating that he, too, has a love interest, so they have a common complaint. As Troilus remains unmoved by the trust argument, Pandarus starts to lose his composure, and in his anger, he accuses Troilus of being akin to a dumb beast:

“’What! Slombrestow as in a litargie?/ Or artow lik an asse to the harpe?’” (I.731-732).

The narrator acknowledges that Troilus keeps good self-counsel and good self- governance, which is an inversion of a confessant figuration. In effect, Pandarus has moved into the inquisitor position with a deponent choosing to remain silent and keep what should be and remain secret to himself, so that Troilus takes on a heretical nature.

Indeed, Chaucer uses the word “secree” here in one of the few instances that it appears in

288 secular, vernacular writing in the late-Fourteenth Century. Troilus holds his tongue while the narrator expounds:

And namelich in his counseil tellynge

That toucheth love that oughte ben secree;

For of himself it wol ynought out sprynge,

But if that it the bet governed be.

Ek som tyme it is a craft to seme fle

Fro thyng whych in effect men hunte faste;

Al this gan Troilus in his herte caste. (I.743-749)

Just as Amans keeps his heart closed from inquisitorial probing in Gower’s Confessio

Amantis, so, too, does Troilus at this juncture in Pandarus’ probing for the revelation of his secret. Pandarus hits at the heart of the matter once again by chiding Troilus for keeping silent out of fear, repeating taunts of fear and implied cowardice for withholding the name. For example, Pandarus offers to talk to the unnamed lady on Troilus’ behalf since he is so full of fear to do it himself, “’Now knowe I that ther reson in the failleth./

But tel me, if I wiste what she were/ For whom that the al this mysaunter ailleth,/

Dorstestow that I tolde in hire ere/ This wo, sith thow darst naught thiself for feere,’”

(I.764-768). The barrage of questioning “who” and “why not tell” mimics the inquisitorial questioning used in heretical depositions and trials, not only in form, but in diverting tactics, challenges to values and beliefs, and in the building anger of the inquisitor at failing to uncover the truth (or at least the secrets held so defiantly and fearfully). Pandarus likens Troilus to Ticius if he won’t reveal the burden of what gnaws

289 away at his heart, although the metaphor is a poor exemplum for unending woe and misery. His anger builds and Pandarus begins to enact his metaphor, playing the part of the vulture continually pecking at Troilus’ core:

‘But oones nyltow, for thy coward herte,

And for thyn ire and folissh wilfulnesse,

For wantrust, tellen of thy sorwes smerte,

Ne to thyn owen help don bysynesse

As muche as speke a resoun moore or lesse,

But list as he that lest of nothyng recche.

What womman koude loven swich a wrecche?’ (I.792-798)

Finally, Pandarus finds the one weakness that collapses Troilus’ resolve when he argues that a chivalric hero cannot be fully heroic and will always be “recreant” until he will

“’serve and love his deere hertes queene,/ And thynke it s a guerdon hire to serve,/ A thousand fold moore than he kan deserve’” (I.817-819). Of course, Chaucer plays with convention here by challenging good self-governance with the ideal of complete compliance with the cultural codes of chivalry and courtesy. Troilus must shift from his static position of keeping his secret because it is the best course of action, and for all the right reasons to preserve reputations and self-governance, and so, Chaucer moves him to take the bait of fame for good service to a lady. Once he chooses service over self- governance, Troilus unknowingly seals his fate towards his double-sorrows, and he reveals Criseyde’s name to Pandarus who delights in his victory. Just several lines before

Troilus says her name, Pandarus declares his inquisition of Troilus to be a “game,”

290 although it is more of a blood-sport to him. The narrator sets this analogy with, “Tho gan the veyne of Troilus to blede,/ For he was hit, and wax reed for shame./ ‘A ha!’ quod

Pandare; ‘Here bygynneth game.’/ And with that word he gan hym for to shake,/ And seyde, ‘Thef, thow shalt hyre name telle’” (I.866-870). With this declaration, Pandarus shifts to the deponent position, revealing that Troilus’ plight is a game for him, and should Troilus refuse to play, he is a “thief” who steals the fulfillment of Pandarus’ desire for power and knowledge from him.

The truth of Pandarus’ vicious desire to manipulate Troilus and Criseyde through game-playing comes out in Book III when Pandarus arranges for Troilus to stay abed at

Deiphebus’ house in a crafty ploy to bring Criseyde and Troilus together. The echo of

“here bygynneth game” sounds across the lines of the poem and resounds when Pandarus admits to Troilus that he has worked to fulfill Troilus’ desire and will, “’For I have bigonne a gamen pleye/ Which that I nevere do shal eft for other,/ Although he were a thousand fold my brother’” (III.250-252). Further, Pandarus reveals that he has forged a plot against his own niece as part of the game, but also partly in earnest; he feels no contrition, but only pride, about being so fully engrossed in his vices. He sets out the beginning of his confession by recalling the game and shifting it with a more deadly purpose (or at least towards a spiritual death):

‘That is to seye, for the am I bicomen,

Bitwixen game and ernest, swich a meene

As maken wommen unto men to comen;

Al sey I nought, thow wost wel what I meene.

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For the have I my nede, of vices cleene,

So fully maad thi gentilesse triste,

That al shal ben right as thiselven liste.’ (III.253-259)

Chaucer finally gets to the heart of confession in this part of the poem, using Troilus as the confessor figure and Pandarus as the vicious confessant revealing his secrets and sins.

Notably, the second use of the word “secree” falls in this exchange centering around the

“game” as Pandarus challenges the idea of revelation or secrecy and bringing in fear as the driving force. The following three stanzas fully encapsulate the essential viciousness of Pandarus, but also, Chaucer extends these vices outward as common corruptions that need reform. Pandarus essentially twists the virtue of keeping lovers’ secrets to suit his own vicious acts of gossiping, pimping, and manipulating his niece and his friend through engin:

‘For wel thow woost, the name as yet of here

Among the peeple, as who seyth, halwed is;

For that man is unbore, I dar wel swere,

That evere wiste that she dide amys. 270

But wo is me, that I, that cause al this,

May thynken that she is my nece deere,

And I hire em, and traitour ek yfeere!

‘And were it wist that I, thorugh myn engyn,

Hadde in my nece yput this fantasie, 275

292

To doon thi lust and holly to ben thyn,

Whi, al the world upon it wolde crie,

And seyn that I the werste trecherie

Dide in this cas, that evere was bigonne,

And she forlost, and thow right nought ywonne.

‘Wherefor, er I wol ferther gon a pas, 281

The preie ich eft, althogh thow shuldest deye;

That privete go with us in this cas;

That is to seyn, that thow us nevere wreye;

And be nought wroth, though I the ofte preye

To holden secree seich an heigh matere, 286

For skilfull is, thow woost wel, my praiere.’ (III.267-287)

Herein, we see the strategies of secrecy pushed into the essence of Pandarus’ viciousness; in lines 281-287, he repeatedly “prays” that Troilus will not reveal their shared secret of

Pandarus’ treason against his niece in order to satisfy Troilus’ lustful desires. Privitée and secrecy work in tandem to maintain Pandarus’ hidden status as a heretic to his niece’s faith and to reveal Troilus’ true nature of failed self-governance and serving desire over serving Love. Although only three stanzas are cited here, within a span of eleven total stanzas, Pandarus offers a point by point confession of his sinful actions from gossiping to lying to boasting to maliciously preying upon people’s fear. He concludes with a veiled threat to Troilus that he needs to go along with Pandarus’ plot to allow

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Troilus to “fully undertake” the opportunity to act on his desire on lust or he will gossip, lie, and boast to destroy Troilus’ and Criseyde’s reputations.

The purpose of inquisition is to reveal secrets and to empower the inquisitor with knowledge through the secrets he uncovers. Whether the deponent is heretical or not is not as important as are the actions of inquiry and revelation or concealment. Desire underpins each subject’s will, and fear of failure or fear of discovery dominates the affective response of the subjects and in the case of a secular narrative, the audience’s/ reader’s response to the author’s discursive interplay.

Who Serves Whom: Displacing Narrative Authority

Scholars have long debated the narrative strategies and translation choices that

Chaucer makes in his telling of the Troilus tale. The fact that debate surrounds such a seemingly innocent process – re-telling a tale for a contemporary audience – points to the myriad levels on which we read Chaucer and understand his importance as a poet in terms of poetic creativity and of historical relevance to the Ricardian court and late- fourteenth-century England. Seth Lerer succinctly argues that Chaucer is “created” as an author, one worthy of laureation, as a result of a complex interplay of textual scribes, translators, and compilers and their reading/ listening audiences. Due to the complexity of these relations, Chaucer, the poet, has become inscribed and invested with authority, auctorité if you will, that shapes the reception and transmission of his work.

Consequently, Lerer suggests that investing too much attention on the apparatus surrounding Chaucer’s translation (act and product) diverts attention from the larger body

294 of textual construction and reception. Lerer says, “. . . what I find in the manuscript revisions and anthologies that transmit Chaucer’s verse, are evidences for the blurring of distinctions between author, scribe, compiler, and commentator. They are evidence for the social and collaborative nature of literary production and, moreover, for the historicity of that production in the moments of reception and transmission that transcribe it.”331

Lerer offers one of the few arguments about the whole process of translation, and I would argue, in doing so, he allows Chaucer more freedom to translate as well as to invent. In this way, Chaucer is not just enacting a translatio studii or imperii of Boccaccio’s Il

Filostrato or of Benoît’s Le Roman de Troie, nor even of a tragic love-story. Rather,

Chaucer creates, invents, and redefines the very essence of auctorité or at least of a medieval understanding of the scope of authorship.332 I’ll return to this point of

Chaucer’s innovative auctorité shortly, but I believe it is necessary to further explicate why exactly Chaucer’s treatment of the Troilus is not only remarkable in terms of the complexity of the poetic task, but further, how such a unique treatment of his project opens interstitial sites in which Chaucer exposes cultural, social, political, and institutional ideological flaws and corruption and challenges his audience to engage in reformational processes.

While the essential task that Chaucer undertakes is bringing Boccaccio’s tale to his fourteenth-century English courtly audience, his expansive treatment of this task

331 Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, 13. 332 Here, I specifically follow Minnis’ distinction for “medieval authorship” in secular poetry as following a Scholastic method of literary form as opposed to a Scriptural method or an Aristotelian method. Minnis offers that the Scholastic idioms influenced writers such as Chaucer and Gower “towards the moral and aesthetic value of their creativity, the literary roles and forms they had adopted, and the ultimate functions which they envisaged their works as performing” (Minnis, Medieval Theories, 6). 295 suggests multiple modes of creation and of intention. As discussed earlier, Seth Lerer offers a more encompassing view of Chaucer as a poet/author and of the multiple ways in which he maneuvers his material and own poetic stance. Lerer argues that the multiple categories that Chaucer inhabits as a poet – auctor, scriptor, compilator, commentator – work in tandem to create an “invented literary authority” or “the invention of a

Chaucerian subject that included both a ‘subject matter’ for the poetry and an authorial or reading subject who defined its social purpose.”333 We can see what Lerer suggests about a multiply “invented” poet exposing a social agenda in the following stanzas at the end of

Book V:

And if I hadde ytaken for to write 1765 The armes of this ilke worthi man, Than wolde ich of his batailles endite; But for that I to writen first bigan Of his love, I have seyd as I kan –

His worthi dedes, whoso list hem heere, 1770 Rede Dares, he kan telle hem alle ifeere –

Bysechyng every lady bright of hewe, And every gentil womman, what she be, That al be that Criseyde was untrewe,

That for that gilt she be nat wroth with me. 1775 Ye may hire gilt in other bokes se; And gladlier I wol write, yif yow leste, Penolopeës trouthe and good Alceste.

333 Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers, 11. 296

N’y sey nat this al oonly for thise men,

But moost for wommen that bitraised be 1780 Thorugh false folk – God yeve hem sorwe, amen! – That with hire grete wit and subtilte Bytraise yow. And this commeveth me To speke, and in effect yow alle I preye,

Beth war of men, and herkneth what I seye! 1785

Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye, Ther god thi makere yet, er that he dye, So sende mygth to make in som comedye! But litel book, no makyng thow n’envie,

But subgit be to alle poesye; 1790 And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.

And for ther is so gret diversite In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge,

So prey I God that non myswrite the, 1795 Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge; And red wherso thow be, or elles songe, That thow be understonde, God I biseche! But yet to purpos of my rather speche: (V. 1765-1799) Within these thirty-odd lines, Chaucer moves his narrator in and out of his subject position as story-teller (he who would “endite” the tales of battle noted in line 1767) and inserts his poetic figuration into and out of the text as a kind of punctuation of the narrator’s own digression from the “purpos of my rather speche.” Chaucer fuses the narrator and poet figures in a seamless transition from the first stanza cited above to the 297 subsequent four in a diegetic and exegetic interplay in which the narrator’s voice mingles with the poet’s voice towards a new amalgamated figure whereby narrator and poet are one and the same. Thus, the poet as scribe and as transmitter comes forth with the exculpatory comment in lines 1765-1770, reminding his reader/ audience that he set out to “write” of Troilus’ love, not of his battles, then quickly inserting a narrative posture as a reporter figure with “I have seyd as I kan” in line 1769. The following line brings in a moralizing aspect for the poet/ narrator figure in judging Troilus’ deeds as “worthi,” and further, the ambiguity of which “dedes” exactly the line references – his deeds in arms or his deeds in love – only enhances the complexity and instability of the subjectivity at hand: poet/ narrator reporting the deeds; poet/narrator as moralizer assessing value to the deeds; poet/narrator appealing to courtiers admiring a warrior’s prowess in deeds; poet/narrator as self-professed servant of Venus approving a lover’s deeds in her realm; poet/narrator as pastor or confessor figure absolving both the sins of the lover(s) and redirecting the audience’s desire to hear and learn the deeds and lessons from this moment and from these figures; and poet/narrator as the confessant asking the audience for absolution from the guilt of Criseyde being “untrewe.” The common thread binding these stanzas (and indeed, the remaining ten stanzas as well) is the discrete and scrupulous work in setting the poem apart as an independent creation abstracted from these multiple figurations and subjectivities of the creator. Chaucer’s deliberate slipperiness here does not allow for one definitive poetic hat to be donned.

The fourth stanza cited is often used as evidence for Chaucer’s ambition for notoriety and acclaim on the level of the very auctors he recalls, particularly as the poet

298 figure charges his work, “Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye,/ Ther god thi makere yet, er that he dye,/ So sende mygth to make in some comedye! (V. 1786-1788).” We can read “ther,” “god” and “yet” severally according to the MED, which only serves to obfuscate this line along with the surrounding lines and passage. “God” has four definitions: one adverbial (“well, fortunately, zealously”); one adjectival (depending on its relation to the noun being modified, “good, beneficial, desirable,” “righteous, pious, virtuous,” “”favorable, prosperous” and “excellent, fine valuable,”); and two nominative

– deistic: “God, the father or of the Trinity,” and “abstract goodness.”334 “Ther” also yields multiple definitions in the MED, mainly in adverbial uses (e.g. - as a demonstrative, a nonlocative conjunctive, existential, anticipatory, or an introductory adverb) although several definitions emphasize a nominative application. It can mean “in that place,” “then,” “because of,” “therefore,” “in which,” and “there” among many choices, all of which points to such instability in meaning that the onus falls on the reader to stabilize its meaning, particularly in relation to “god” and to “yet.”335 Finally, “yet” can be “either,” “even,” “additionally,” “still,” or an intensifier such as “beyond all others,” if the “y” actually is a “y” sound. If it is a “g” as with a “з” depending on the scribe and the subsequent transcription, the meaning changes quite drastically, even adding a sense of secrecy with the second nominative meaning, “trick, stratagem,” or simply meaning “fashion, custom.”336 Such a crucial line in a poem several thousand

334 Middle English Dictionary, http://quod.lib.umich.edu.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/m/med/, s.v. “god,” (accessed on April 2, 2012). 335 Middle English Dictionary, http://quod.lib.umich.edu.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/m/med/, s.v. “ther,” (accessed on April 2, 2012). 336 Middle English Dictionary, http://quod.lib.umich.edu.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/m/med/, s.v. “yet”/ “get,” (accessed on April 4, 2012). 299 lines long would seem to beg for poetic guidance, if you will, for fixity of meaning; as we see with “god,” “ther,” and “yet,” the only guidance to interpreting the meanings of these lines comes from the reader/ audience himself. Here, we see a narrative secrecy that ambiguity enhances and diverts attention from the poetic task of inventio in full aesthetic bloom. The lines within these several stanzas dart about in a kind of manic narration, moving from the logical linear narrative strain of telling the events of Troilus’ impending death to a staccato-like listing, melding narrator and poet into one voice: an excuse trope for choosing to write on this topic of Troilus – love, not battle; a command to read Dares

Phrygius for the historical account of Troilus’ deeds (presumably in battle); a pleading trope to excus the narrator for reporting on Criseyde’s transgressions; a deflection and an exculpation at once to absolve this poet from ascribing guilt to her because it can be seen in others’ books, not here; a quick proffering of poetic service to write of faithful lovers

(Penelope and Alceste); and an emphatic caution to beware of “false folk” who use “grete wit and subtilte” to betray others. At this point, the poem is no longer narrating events, but takes on a confessional as well as a sermonic tone as if the fusion of narrator/poet extends into a fusion of confessant and pastor. Immediately, the poem changes tack again with the apostrophe to the poem itself, clearly through a stronger poetic voice. Yet, this voice holds none of the deflective, defensive, and petitioning tropes that cover an underlying affect of fear. Instead, this poetic voice shifts to the contemporary poet, neither a figuration nor Chaucer self-nominating, who fully understands the “defaute of tonge” and of mis-reading vernacular texts in a multi-dialectic England. This poet bears the the same fears of misinterpretation that comes from vernacular authority as do the

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Church hierarchy specifically in relation to Wycliffe’s push for vernacular theology and an English Bible. And again, just as quickly as the voice jumps out of the poem into

Ricardian England, the narrator figure takes control once more, cutting off the last stanza cited above (lines 1793-1799) before the final line that awkwardly recalls the reader back to the narrator’s prior recitation (“yet to purpos of my rather speche”); in a sense, this abrupt interruption silences the contemporary poet’s voice as he implores God to let his poem be understood in whatever form it is transmitted – be it read or sung. In this very quick digression out of the story of Troilus and away from the poetic apologia, there is an underlying note of secrecy. We assume the “purpos” of the narrator’s “rather speche” means that he is returning to the task of narrating the story of Troilus’ “double sorwe.”

Yet, the quick, jarring turn and the very vagueness of this line (V.1799) plant seeds of suspicion about what the narrator is avoiding saying following his tangent into vernacular authority and the inference that to “myswrite” or “mysmetre” a “litel bok” is not so dangerous as the anti-Wycliffites would claim. But this diversion is so clouded with insignificant (i.e. - not signifying) and vague words (“purpos,” “rather,” “speche”) that questions arise, such as what is the narrator figure concealing and dissembling about and to what purpose is he truly referring? As Andrew Cole argues, Chaucer writes to “engage authorities,” and those authorities are Wycliffites. He also notes emphatically that

Chaucer’s “superfluity” is a codified marking of Wycliffism and becomes one of the tenets of the Prologue to the Wycliffite Bible.337 I agree that Chaucer clouds and intentionally obfuscates his text with ambiguities and further, that he moves freely around

337 Cole, Heresy in the Age of Chaucer, 87 & 89. 301 orthodox, heterodox, and heretical figurations and discourse. However, I believe Cole shows a bit too much eagerness and overly determined analyses of limited textual examples. Ambiguity could be a marker of heretication or it could merely be a poetic strategy to allow mobility in the textual language and figurations. In the case of these specific lines cited, though, Chaucer opens up a fissure in the language to push the ambiguity into a more deliberate realm of secrecy or volitive concealment. Thus, in these two stanzas in which the poet commands his “litel bok,” we see a kind of poetic privitée along with strategic secrecy. For, look at the essential lines, “Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye,/ Ther god thi makere yet, er that he dye,/ So sende myght to make in som comedye!” (1786-1788). If “ther” is not a locative adverb, but instead works as an existential adverb or a pronominal, then where is the poet commanding his book to go?

The reference to “som comedye” appears as a rhetorical construct to balance “myn tragedye,” in meter and in matter; however, the one auctor who does not share the

“steppes” on which walk those listed from antiquity is Dante, who indeed authored

(intentionally not given the Latin auctor nomination) “some comedye” that is truly worthy of envy, especially for Chaucer.338

Ambiguity, secrecy, and indeed, poetic privitée, further enhance Chaucer’s non- traditional authorship and set him apart from medieval conventions of auctorité. This is not to say, though, that Chaucer shunned convention; rather, the opposite is true. The fullness of his poetry, and of the Troilus in particular, emanates from his fusion of

338 Several scholars have noted Chaucer’s great interest in Dante. See, for example, Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson, editors, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism Volume II The Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Kiser, Truth and Textuality; and Barry Windeatt, Oxford Guides to Chaucer. 302 invention with convention. B. A. Windeatt argues that Chaucer follows naming conventions along with demonstrating fidelity in translation by invoking the names of

Virgil, Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan just as he finds in Boccaccio’s envoy in the

Filocolo.339 The lines immediately succeeding the entreaty, “Go, litel bok,” however, create the largest maelstrom regarding Chaucer’s intention to elevate his poem to the level of the great poets of antiquity. The poet cautions his “litel book” not to be envious, but to subject itself to all Poetry: “no makyng thow n’envie,/ But subgit be to alle poesye” (V.1789-1790). Instructing his poem to be virtuous and comply as a subject to

Poetry does not purpose to celebrate his (the poet’s) greatness; the analogue between the poem and a subject serving the tenets of compliance and not elevating itself or giving in to envy offers a coy, yet profound analogy between the poet figure and the world in which he writes. In other words, subjects in the Ricardian court and in England must behave in exactly the same fashion Chaucer’s poet figure exhorts his poem to do. The next two lines reveal the poet commanding his poem further to “kis the steppes where as thow seest pace/ Virgil, Ovid, Omer, Lucan, and Stace” (V.1791-1792). Kissing the steps on which “pace” the great auctors is vastly different from sliding onto the steps to join them. Would Chaucer truly allow his poet figure to possess such hubris as to claim a space alongside past poets particularly since he spends such a good deal of time infusing his poet as well as his narrator figures with humility beyond the conventional use of humility tropes? Consider the next stanza whereby the poet prays that his “litel book” will not be miswritten nor misunderstood due to the various tongues and diversity in

339 B. A. Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde: ‘The Book of Troilus’ by Geoffrey Chaucer, edited by B. A. Windeatt (London: Longman Group, 1984), 557. 303

English. The poet figure is keenly aware and acknowledges that the act of “poetry,” be it composition or recitation or transmission or translation, is uncontrollable once the poet’s hand leaves the page and is released to the ear/ tongue/ eye/ hand of the audience/reader.

Returning to my earlier suggestion of the importance of innovation and authorship, on a fundamental level of poetics Chaucer continues a tradition of storytelling through the Troilus in which modifications, creative investments, and emendations build the incipient tale into a historically constructed work through a layering of auctors’ and poets’ voices. This past and future enveloping of the poem gives it a life outside the scope of Chaucer’s oeuvre that suggests that the text bears its own tradition; in this way, calling the poem “the Troilus” invests it with a weight of auctorité itself and as Barry

Windeatt argues, “posterity.” Windeatt summarizes this idea of Chaucerian tradition by noting that Chaucer not only assembles a corpus of work, of which the Troilus is clearly an important part, but that in “collecting” and “recollecting” his corpus and particularly in his ending of Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer “envisages a future for his writing in relation to the past, when he bids his poem follow in the footsteps of the ancient poets, but also worries about textual transmission and future interpretation.”340 Lee Patterson takes the argument of posterity in a different direction by considering the Troilus as a “meditation on the nature of history” and further, that “the context of that meditation was, initially, the contest between Augustinianism, with its supervening transcendentalism, and the late- medieval counter-impulse to preserve and create a secular historiography.”341 While this

340 Barry Windeatt, “Chaucer Traditions,” Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honor of Derek Brewer, edited by Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1. 341 Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 84. 304 argument sets forth a binarily opposed tension between “Christian spiritualism” or the sacral realm and secularity, Patterson eventually argues that the poem falters in the contest between opposing realms and ultimately succeeds in conveying that Chaucer’s deeper message here is “not about the failure of any particular historical moment but about the failure of history, and of historical understanding.”342 Patterson, then, seems to place the Troilus’ posterity in the simple aphorism of cyclicity, “History repeats itself,” whereas Seth Lerer allows for Chaucer’s poem to work on a continuum of synchronic translatio. Sylvia Federico argues for a combination of Patterson’s cyclicity and of

Lerer’s synchronicity in suggesting that teleological concerns shaped Chaucer’s translation. She writes, “Rather than locating history in a purely linear, diachronic narrative, Troilus and Criseyde considers how individuals and empires might be able to move around in, or even transcend, the apparent fixity of the past. Within an etiological cultural enterprise that assumes Trojan origins for Britain, Chaucer’s text wonders about teleology: whether and then why the future must be what it was foredoomed to be.”343

Further, to suggest a Chaucerian tradition, such as John Bowers posits, implies that in terms of poetics, Chaucer bears an almost impossible weight of authority that would seem to ignore his playfulness and the affective impact of his poetry.344 Kevin Brownlee et al raise an excellent point about Chaucer’s paradoxical positioning at once invoking a

342 Ibid, 163. 343 Federico, New Troy, 65. 344 John M. Bowers states that Chaucer purposefully “places himself in the success of the great poets of antiquity” at the end of the Troilus in the line quoted above (V.1792) in which the poet figure instructs his book to kiss the steps whereon stand classical auctors: John M. Bowers, Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2007), 16. 305 humility trope that his “bok” is not worthy to share the veneration of classical auctors while omitting his actual main source auctor, Boccaccio:

And if a poet might join a tradition, this entails a decorum between himself and

other great poets. In the envoy to Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer enjoins his ‘litel

book’ not to ‘envie’ (‘compete with’) other poets, ‘but subgit be to alle poesye.’

Instead, Chaucer’s poem is to ‘kis the steppes’ where Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan,

and Statius walk (V.1789-92). At the same moment as he registers his humility

before such poets, he implicitly calls attention to the possibility that he might join

them. This is the mark of high-esteem by a poet who rarely mentions vernacular

authors, even when they are his real sources – the most striking example being his

refusal to give Boccaccio the credit for having provided the main source of

Troilus. Indeed, he goes so far as to disguise this debt by ostentatious reference to

‘myn auctour called Lollius’ (I.394), who sounds like an ancient and venerable

auctor, an impression reinforced by Chaucer’s claim that he is translating from a

Latin source (II.14). This strategy, along with the self-ironies of The House of

Fame, may be taken as revealing Chaucer as a writer standing at a cultural cross-

roads – from which he can view both the old and the new senses of poetship and

auctor-ship.345

Such an argument for a dualistic strategy by Chaucer – humble poet on one hand, hubristic auctor on the other – seems to negate momentum towards a “tradition” per se

345 Kevin Brownlee, Tony Hunt, Ian Johnson, Alastair Minnis, and Nigel F. Palmer, “Vernacular Literary Consciousness c. 1100-c. 1500: French, German, and English Evidence,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume II The Middle Ages, edited by Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 469. 306 because it implies that Chaucer is attempting to separate himself from the text, allowing it alone to broach laureation, while Chaucer, the poet, negotiates old and new poetic modes of translation and invention, particularly in a time of debate regarding vernacular authority. Is it fair or even appropriate to lay laureation on a poet solely for the accolade of tradition when his work appears more modest in its construction of authentic, fully human (i.e. – flawed, pathetic, “sorrowful” victims of consequence and politics) figurations who do not hold the weight of allegorical models and whose famous palinode at the poem’s conclusion suggest a framing for a moral exemplum? To be sure,

Chaucer’s poet and narrator figurations fully exhort humility tropes and deflect responsibility for “knowledge” throughout all five books of the Troilus. Laureation for inventio, for experimentation with form and trope, and for dexterous subjectivities, then, is more than appropriate to lay on Chaucer; yet, if the poetic crown comes only from holding a position in a line of skilled rhetoricians who transfer historical tales from Latin to the vernacular or from vernacular to vernacular, then the affective nature of Chaucer’s work is overlooked as are the myriad subtle turns, beyond tropes, that he so generously embeds in his poetry. David Lawton makes the case for a more commercial impulse driving Chaucer’s highly skilled vernacular translation, writing quite plainly,

“Translation is a form of luxury import, and was Chaucer’s business.”346 Lawton goes on to qualify this succinct summation of Chaucer’s authorial craft: “Translation needs to be understood in the broadest sense, not just the carrying over of texts in whole or part from one language to another (often with a major degree of adaptation), but also the carrying

346 David Lawton, “English Literary Voices, 1350-1500,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Culture, edited by Andrew Galloway (Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy Press, 2011), 244. 307 over of literary activity itself, often quite unpredictably . . . But his [Chaucer’s] activity, though more literal than most, cannot be seen in isolation: it is part of a much wider push to produce an English equivalent of the book cultures of other languages and places, both of modernity (France, and in Chaucer’s case, Italy) and of the past (Latin classics).”347

Whatever the particular driving force behind Chaucer’s vision for his translation of the tale of Troilus and Criseyde, the myriad arguments set forth about it and his poetic creation’s “posterity” point to a sophistication beyond transferring a tale or compiling a history. Clearly, the “luxury import” is not only the translation process, but in the case of this poem in particular, it is the resultant poem itself.

Acknowledging these multiple levels of sophisticated poetics, I would like to examine one particular area, albeit a complex one with several strands, that I find lacking in other scholars’ critical approaches to Chaucer’s translation process and to his narrator and poet figurations especially. The infusion of secrecy as a strategy by which to embed criticisms, to excavate ideological flaws, and to shine a light on the personal responsibility for action and reformation sets Chaucer’s translation far apart from a retelling of Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato as well as expanding it beyond generic, rhetorical, or formal boundaries. Beginning with his narrator and poet figures in the Troilus,

Chaucer intensifies and plays with tropic formulation through fissures in the narrator’s reporting and in the poet’s dissemblances. As Lisa J. Kiser notes, from the very beginning of the poem, Chaucer imbues the purportedly “objective” narrator with

“deluded assumptions about storytelling” so much so that he exudes a sense of secrecy

347 Ibid, 244-245. 308 similar to that of a confessant fearfully embarking on a confession he is not all that keen to make. Kiser argues, “Our ‘objective’ narrator, then, ends up having some unstated and oddly paradoxical hidden biases from the very start of his poem, and they will affect his narration throughout” [emphasis mine].348 Confessional manuals and inquisitorial manuals available in late fourteenth-century England, and those transmitted into England by the Dominican preachers via Languedoc as noted in the introductory chapter, warn pastors to be guarded and on watch for the kinds of shifts and diversions Chaucer’s narrator makes in his reporting. For example, the narrator modifies his servitude from a self-declared servant to the god of Love to a thrice-repeated kind of Christian obeisance within the first stanzas of Book 1. Notice the shift in language here, too, as the narrator diminishes his integrity as a secondary servant to Love and his “unliklynesse” to be a lover himself in the third stanza in a humility trope to a Christianized dedicatory trope in stanzas five, six, and the first three lines of stanza seven, followed by a hard contrition- like passage in the last four lines of stanza seven. Stanza three bears the narrator’s clear declaration, “For I, that God of Loves servantz serve,/ Ne dare to Love, for myn unliklynesse,/ Preyen for speed, al sholde I therfore sterve,/ So fer am I from his help in derknesse” (I. 15-18). Suspicions about the narrator already begin here: why the double- remove from serving Love, whose help is he so far from, and what are the implications of

“darkness”? As I argue in Chapter 2, Gower fully allows for Genius to serve Love and simultaneously to perform the orthodox pastoral care of a confessor. Amans does not serve Love or serve the servant of Love (in this case, Genius), but he proves to be an

348 Kiser, Truth and Textuality, 60. 309 unlikely lover. Unlike Chaucer’s narrator, Amans does not invoke darkness in his relationships with Venus, Genius, and Cupid. What is so striking is not that the narrator sets himself outside the realm of courtly love, but rather the confessional framework

Chaucer creates around the narrator’s confession that he “dare not Love” and further, that either he, the narrator, or the God of Love, lingers in “derknesse,” which ripples with tones of Christian discourse. Very soon after this narrator’s confession to the audience,

Chaucer sets up a modified parallel between Pandarus and the narrator, creating an analogous position of outsiders to love that will shape the figuration of Pandarus for the remainder of the poem. And, as Troilus discloses about Pandarus, the narrator, too, does not participate in Courtly Love. But, as Troilus rather snappishly questions Pandarus about his ability to shepherd Troilus to Love’s bliss, similar elements of confession, inquisition, and pastorality, whether heterodox or not, penetrate the dialectic: “’This were a wonder thing,’ quod Troilus;/ ‘Thow koudest nevere in love thiselven wisse./ How devel maistow brynge me to blisse?’” (I. 621-623). Here, we see the threading of confessional discourse within modalities of secrecy that Chaucer starts with immediately and carries through to the final stanza of the Troilus. The secrecy swirling around the narrator in these opening stanzas builds off the deflective maneuvers by the narrator to self-identify whom he serves as well as whose help he implores because he appeals for success from both the pagan God of Love and from the Christian God. Additionally, he resumes the strain of confessional language in the poem’s seventh stanza, but notice the remarkable resistance to a fixed subjectivity – pagan, Christian, or both – as he freely blends prayers and ideological tenets in an inverted dedicatory trope:

310

And biddeth ek for hem that ben at ese,

That God hem graunte ay good perseveraunce,

And sende hem myght hire ladies so to plese

That it to Love be worship and plesaunce.

For so hope I my sowle best avaunce,

To prey for hem that Loves servauntz be,

And write hire wo, and lyve in charite. (I. 43-49)

Yet, the qualities of fullness and expansion we feel from Chaucer’s Troilus, and indeed, from all his works, come from innovative strategies he uses beyond any one form of translation technique. Lynn Staley succinctly states, “. . . Chaucer’s habits of translation are almost always acts of invention” in her discussion on Chaucer’s precise strategies of language use and its relation to his audience and times.349 A. C. Spearing suggests that the audience participates as voyeurs to the romance of the Troilus in an

“almost intolerably complex fabric woven by Chaucer and his collaborating readers” in a tapestry of “private lives and the loves of others . . . brought under surveillance and reduced to narrative.”350 Additionally, Chaucer’s insistent inclusion of his audience, the self-conscious assumption that the reader/ auditor will and does participate in the construction of the poem, opens the Troilus into a dialectic mode beyond mimesis.

Frederic Jameson offers a useful amalgamated model by which to further tease out this idea of dynamic dialectic among audience, poem (including the narrated events and various figurations and subjectivities), narrator figure, and poet figure. Jameson allows

349 Lynn Staley, Languages of Power, 5. 350 A. C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur, 121. 311 for a “synesthesia” that responds both to a Hegelian dialectic (one based on a logical sense of interrelationships from an individual’s perception) and to a Marxist dialectic

(one based on on individual’s self-consciousness of his “position in society and in history”).351 By bringing the audience into the creation of the poem, enabling an affective response and experience of the work, Chaucer cleverly enacts a kind of strategic secrecy himself by allowing the poem and the figural subjectivities to embody a site of privitée; his audience attempts to penetrate this site because the narrator and the poet figures entice us to do so. Consequently, further levels of secrecy stemming from this first action of creating a covert space evolve along multiple veins: through the characters, the tale, and the holistic process of creating a text and its interaction with its reader/ audience. The confessional discourses throughout the poem, not only between characters but also between poet and audience, encapsulate this strategic mode most clearly.

“Paynted Proces”: Translatio et Inventio as Paternal Artistry

As Ethan Knapp argues of a Chaucerian tradition, the metaphor of Chaucer as a paternal figure in poetic succession is central particularly in terms of early fifteenth- century poets, and particularly Hoccleve, following in his literary foot-steps. Knapp asks,

“Could we imagine the field of literature other than as a succession of texts arrayed in time, locked together as a category by the influence of the earlier over the later and given

351 Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 340. 312 meaning by the dynamic interrelations among them?”352 In this sense, I argue a different mode of dynamic authorship; rather than focusing on the interrelations among others and texts, I suggest that Chaucer also emerges in a diachronic individualism, much along the lines of Foucault’s work on epistemic knowledge or discontinuities versus tradition. As I understand this poem, the dialectic Chaucer engages among his text, figurations, and his audience produces greater dynamism and continually vivifies his work, including the

Troilus, instead of the more static nature of a text produced and then left behind in a trajectory of continuum. In other words, the dialectic created within a dynamic self- contained text, textuality, and reading experience is greater and more edifying than one created with a series of authors adding and modifying their voices in response to a tradition. Foucault offers this useful (albeit lengthy) distinction between a tradition and continuity versus an epistemological act of discontinuity; because it carries the impulses of secrecy and speaks to the debate regarding Chaucerian translatio or compilatio, I find it is a more appropriate lens by which to approach my reading of Chaucer for this project.

Foucault notes:

There are the epistemological acts and thresholds described by Bachelard: they

suspend the continuous accumulation of knowledge, interrupt its slow

development, and force it to enter a new time, cut it off from its empirical origin

and its original motivations, cleanse it of its imaginary complicities; they direct

historical analysis away from the search for silent beginnings, and the never-

ending tracing-back to the original precursors, towards the search for a new type

352 Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University, 2001),107. 313

of rationality and its various effects. There are the displacements and

transformations of concepts: the analyses of G. Canguilhem may serve as

models; they show that the history of a concept is not wholly and entirely that of

its progressive refinement, its continuously increasing rationality, its abstraction

gradient, but that of its various fields of constitution and validity, that of its

successive rules of use, that of the many theoretical contexts in which it

developed and matured.353

Furthermore, A. J. Minnis asks a pertinent question regarding the self-consciousness of

Chaucer as an author in contrast to Gower and responds insightfully: “We must pose the question, did Chaucer ever think of himself as an auctor, of his work as possessing some kind of limited degree of auctoritas? My impression is that whereas Gower was interested in presenting himself as a ‘modern author,’ Chaucer was not. Chaucer was fond of assuming self-deprecating literary roles, and the role of compiler would have been particularly congenial to him.”354 Minnis distinguishes the two literary roles, auctor and compilator, as differing in authority and responsibility: “Whereas an auctor was regarded as someone whose works had considerable authority and who bore full responsibility for what he had written, the compilator firmly denied any personal authority and accepted responsibility only for the manner in which he had arranged the statements of other men.”355 I agree with Minnis’ first distinction regarding the auctor as bearing full responsibility, but it seems to me that a compilator also accepts full

353 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, translated from the French by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 4. 354 A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship (London: Scholar Press, 1984), 209. 355 Ibid, 192. 314 responsibility, not only for the manner of arrangement, but for the content as well. A compiler such as Chaucer chooses what to omit and what to include, what to amplify and what to diminish, and the tenor of criticisms or complaints that may be carried into his text. In this way, I would argue that a compiler along with an auctor or any literary role does not shy from responsibility for his text. He may, however, insert layers of exculpatory tropes and figurations such as I suggest Chaucer does with a poet figure separate from his narrator figure in the Troilus.

Imbuing his work with the onus of tradition works against the ever-changing ways to read this poem and stamps Chaucer with a marker that not only limits, but disables the efficacy of the flexibility of his multiple translation and creation modes. In other words, I would argue that the amount of ambiguity, playfulness, and multiple levels of rhetorical and poetic creation Chaucer infuses in the Troilus, and indeed, in his other poems as well, suggests an intention far from simply posterity or from a yearning to sit alongside auctors from an antique past. Rather, I believe Chaucer purposefully keeps his poems actively unsettled and remarkably loose so that he can emphatically call ideological corruption into focus and demonstrate the stultifying effects of corruption on the individual, whether that individual is a Trojan warrior caught in the god of Love’s capricious snare or a widowed woman caught in the politics of war and gender. George

Edmondson presents a keen argument that reconciles the antagonisms of court, city, and codes within the Troynovaunt/ Troy metaphor, as noted earlier in Sylvia Federico’s and in Marion Turner’s work on Troy as a metonym for London. He presents an overarching idea of “neighboring texts” as commonalities (i.e. - the Troilus and Il Filostrato

315 commonly locate the narrative in Troy, therefore, they are “neighboring texts”) by which contemporary authors might insert social and political criticism in an “identificatory” analogy; specifically, Edmondson notes that Chaucer “inters” Troilus doubly – on a symbolic and on a literal level:

Troilus’s symbolic interment starts to seem not only like an answer to the desire

in a neighboring text but also like a sly, ironic commentary on the desire for Troy

among Chaucer’s London neighbors . . . On the one hand, Chaucer seems intent

on dismantling the merely imaginary (that is, specular) identification between

Ricardian London and the lost city of Troy . . . Yet just when the poem seems in

danger of succumbing to the very lure it seeks to criticize, buying into the fantasy

of mere loss, the narrator will invoke a detail of “Trojan” life uncannily

reminiscent of Ricardian London: a place of war, parliamentary debate, political

squabbling, shortsightedness, human frailty, and ultimately, death.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, then, Chaucer’s poem sets out to inter Troilus,

the “Little Troy,” not in order to reiterate the loss of Troy but rather to deny

Ricardian London the consoling fantasy of loss that had distorted Il Filostrato.356

In any case, Chaucer opens multiple avenues of criticism – political, social, and even clerical, albeit in the wrappings of pagan antiquity here – by challenging behavioral codes and ever so subtly planting the seeds, if not all out calling, for reform on a personal level to effect change on a communal, political, ecclesiastical, and regnal level.

356 George Edmondson, The Neighboring Text: Chaucer, Boccaccio, Henryson (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2011), 151. 316

Ambiguities and Audience Responsibility

The complexities of the poem and of Chaucer as a poet are important to analyze in order to better grasp the multiple ways in which dialectic works in this poem. The

Troilus, as we see with such diverse and valid arguments about its construction as a translated narrative, moves interactively within and without the text. The audience/ reader is just as invested in the dialectic exchange as are the characters and the narrator.

The narrator reveals his affective involvement with Criseyde while the poet/translator turns his apostrophes on a dime from the pagan realm to the Christian ideological construct of the Trinity; Troilus, Criseyde, and Pandarus enact orthodox confessional motifs along with heretical inquisitions while the audience/ reader is pulled into a quasi- confessional mode by subtle questions put to him by the narrator.

As Seth Lerer argues, Chaucer was keenly aware of his audience and that the responsibility falls onto an audience/ reader once a secular work changes hands from scribe and poet to reader/ audience.357 The act of interpreting a poetic work, aside from the aesthetic response to the artistry of the piece, weaves affective experience and effect with intuition mixed with life experience. With this in mind, Chaucer’s deference to his audience/ reader to create meaning suggests a more astute poetic strategy on the poet’s part because no two readers will experience, respond to, and understand a text in the same way. The covert contract this deferral suggests is that Chaucer deliberately cedes the control of meaning to his audience/ reader, who in turn, accept responsibility to glean truths, antagonisms, aesthetics, and the many varied ideals that feed a reader’s desire

357 Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers, 11. 317 when consuming or experiencing a text. Paul Strohm offers excellent insight into the multiple relationships among Chaucer, his audience, and his text. He points to the concept that Chaucer’s contemporary audience had a “share” in “the social terrain” of a text, arguing that a “‘good reader’ . . . follows the instructions of the text.” 358 This theory of readership aligns with the contemporary arguments for vernacular authority and against intercessionary mediation between a text and its reader/audience by authorities adhering to proscribed ideologies. But if Chaucer resists controlling his text’s meaning and evades fixing its stability, then how can such poetic dissemblance give instruction to any reader, good or bad? I would argue that a resolution to this enigma lies in the text itself; the early exchange in Book II between Pandarus and Criseyde in which Pandarus reveals that Troilus loves her and Pandarus is pushing her to become Troilus’ lover exposes the crucial metonymy of language as a “paynted proces.” Through discursive dialectic mimicking both confessional and inquisitorial models, Criseyde as a quasi- confessor figure understands the essential truth of her plight as she hears the transgressions committed by Pandarus. Cunningly, though, Pandarus “mis-confesses” with a complete absence of contrition as well as wrapping himself in a shroud of heretical pastorality. In this way, Pandarus moves between positions as confessor and confessant and between orthodox and heterodox figurations.

Such dynamism of the text, its audience, and its figurations reflects the true artistry of Chaucer’s translation, both the action and the material. Lynn Staley offers a very important summation of Chaucer’s purposeful ambiguities, the dynamics of his

358 Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 175. 318 poetry, and his purposeful choices in translation far apart from infusing himself in tradition: “I position him [Chaucer] in the ambiguously defined space he appropriated for himself, suggesting that we can catch echoes within his works of conversations held on much higher levels of power than those he frequented. . . . He did more than record: he suggests that if acts of translation are attempts to appropriate the terms of empire, translators might think again. Empires dissolve and become acts of translation. Or, put another way, translation succeeds only by dissolving the past into a contingent present.”359 This last portion of Staley’s argument revolving around dissolving the past into a contingent present offers a rather remarkable analogy to Pandarus, Chaucer’s go- between figure in the Troilus. He is the ultimate figure of ambiguity in this poem, continually shifting and responding to the events of the moment. He neither embodies nor espouses a nostalgia for tradition or for translatio amicita or translatio amour. In this way, he performs multiple roles, subjectively shifting from auctor, compiler, translator, go-between, creator, enabler, confessor, and sinner in much the same way that Chaucer, the poet and the creator of this Pandarus, not a simple translation of Boccaccio’s Pandaro, performs his auctorité.

Conclusion: Fear Conquers All

I leave my discussion of Troilus and Criseyde with some observations about the poem’s entire tenor as well as the remarkable ending in which the narrator backs out of the poem and the poetic voice takes over with the transference of the matter of the poem

359 Staley, Languages of Power, 147. 319 to the material of the poem itself. Chaucer’s final two stanzas offer an unusual blending of the secular and the sacred with the apostrophes to Gower and to Strode directing his book for correction, morally and philosophically, immediately followed by a quick prayer to Christ. Notably, though, the emphasis of the final stanza is on the Trinity and underscoring the separation between the Divine and Man and acknowledging that all parts of the Trinity are omnipotent to protect and defend men against foes; yet, more subtly, the lines in this stanza affirm that the realm of privitée (i.e. - God’s secrets) allows men to defer knowing and conquering things “visible and invisible” to the Trinity in exchange for mercy, honor, and grace:

Thow oon, and two, and thre, eterne on lyve,

That regnest ay in thre, and two, and oon,

Uncircumscript, and al maist circumscrive,

Us from visible and invisible foon

Defende, and to thy mercy, everichon,

So make us, Jesus, for thi mercy, digne,

For love of mayde and moder thyn benigne. (V.1863-1869)

In essence, through the course of the poem, most evidently through the narrator’s digressions on auctorité and citing his author, Chaucer turns the poem from a purely secular work towards a more blended poem that pulses with dubious piety and performative affect along with vernacular authority. Desire and will prove insignificant and powerless in the face of the omnipresent force and tone of fear in this poem; strategic secrecy, whether through the narrator figure or through the various subject roles the three

320 primary characters fill, cannot temper or negotiate around the essential affect of fear that

Chaucer so deftly creates and sustains. Where Gower ends the Confessio Amantis on a hopeful note of reform and the translator of Partonope of Blois champions self- governance as the means to social order, Chaucer concludes Troilus and Criseyde with flavors of sadness and despair for the efficacy and abilities of men towards reform or worldly love. Instead, he brings the Troilus to the Trinity in a petition for God’s grace and the power of divine love. In essence, Chaucer leaves the poem at the steps of the

Christian God, returning the sorrows of this world and these figural representations of cultural, social, and spiritual faults to God’s privitée.

321

Conclusion

Secrecy and fear are the primary foci of this project. My first point of entry in exploring secrecy and fear is through moments of confessional discourse, whether formally orthodox, conflations of heterodox and sacral confessions, or personal prayers.

In all these confessional discursive scenarios, the interiority of the confessant as well as that of the confessor contour the confession and reveal potentially subversive cultural and political criticisms. Ultimately, I am suggesting that late medieval English poets use the very discourses of the institutions under scrutiny in order to challenge institutional corruption as well as cultural, social, and political corruption. By bringing an insular mechanism to challenge itself, such as confessional discourse to challenge confessional efficacy, poets enable a dual dialectic in order to illuminate the inefficacy of ideologies, social and cultural codes and structures, and institutional hierarchies; once having opened spaces in which to scrutinize these inefficacies, poets then position various subjectivities through mobile figurations in order to posit reformation on an individual level.

Reformational ideals also underlie the ways in which texts, ideas, and discourses are both translated and transmitted across and between cultural, political, and ecclesiastical boundaries and domains. The translation and transmission of subjectivities and of strategies to preserve self-hood, whether from external harm or internal investigations, significantly contribute to critical poetic challenges. Secular and

322 vernacular poetry from the late twelfth- to the early fifteenth-centuries bear witness to shifting subjectivities and strategies of secrecy emergent from fear. The three poems I examine in this project bend the discourse of orthodoxy towards a call for reform, whether a formal discourse of the Church, the social discourse of courtesy, or the political discourse of counsel and engin. At the fundamental level, the idea of good governance underpins the reformational calls to action; the poets herein discussed frequently interweave these calls through the medium of the confessional act, not only through the discourse but also through the interior strategies and subjective positions of the figurations who participate. Further, the poets construct interstices in their narratives in which they highlight critical charges, illuminate corruption or inversion, or mobilize subjectivities to shift in accordance with the inquiry, the correction, or the reform and remedy.

In late fourteenth-century England, the push for vernacularity in ecclesiastical ritual and instruction began to seep into the secular realm of court poetry. Further, poets moved away from celebrating the lineage and deeds of the aristocracy and the codes of chivalry and courtesy or courtliness towards integrating social, political, and ecclesiastical criticism into their poetry. This movement mimicked thirteenth-century

French romance poetry that embedded commentary and satire, often scathing and subversive, within Arthurian narratives and courtly dream-vision allegories. In particular, the Ricardian court poets, such as Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower, and those of the fifteenth-century , such as the Partonope translator, incorporated multiple antecedent models and tropes into their works, which reflect the tenuous and turbulent

323 climate of both Richard II’s reign and those of his Lancastrian successors into the

Fifteenth Century.

Fears of heretical movements carry over into England from the twelfth- and thirteenth- century French Inquisition that primarily focused on the Cathars, Beguines, and Waldensians in Southern France. In addition, the fourteenth- century English preacher John Wycliffe advocated for Church reform including the publishing of a vernacular Bible and the limitation of priestly intercession in pastoral care. Within secular poetry, the idea of a literary subject began to emerge as well, especially in the

Troubadour poetry of Southern France that focused on courtly and chivalric ideals with the reflexivity and volition of the poetic self. By the end of the Fourteenth Century in

England, secular poetry embodied markers of these three emergent social, ideological, and literary movements. Consequently, heretical persecution, clerical reform, the reformist push for vernacularity, and emergent literary subjectivities shape the poetry of

Chaucer, Gower, and the Partonope translator.

Further, challenges to static or conventional subjectivities underpin medieval

French and English court poetry. Oftentimes, poets integrate contrasting figurations such as necromancers, Saracens, Celtic elements of the marvelous (fairies, magic, controlling nature), and corrupt authorities, into the narrative to amplify ideal chivalric qualities of the medieval poetic hero while at the same time questioning the virtues and social values of aristocracy and court. The viciousness and grotesqueness of these contrasting figures sets up a polarity for ideals and values that prompt the medieval audience or reader to readily identify and embrace social, political, and sacral codes. Such absolute or simple

324 binaries and subjectivities strain against rigid limitations to mobility, particularly as the poets investigate the subjects’ interiority in terms of desire, will, and affect. As subjects come into dialectic exchanges with potential adversaries, lovers, or authorities, the impulse for self-protection beings to dominate the discourse, whether through confessional exchanges, prayers, or desperate pleadings. Fear, then, shapes the discourse and compels strategic maneuvers of secrecy into the subjects’ reactions and responses, and consequently, influences and determines the subjectivities at hand. Additionally, many courtly romances (by this I mean extended narratives of adventure toned by loss and reclamation) and frame-narratives are so long and unwieldy that the poets struggle to maintain static subjectivities for their characters as well as to uphold ideological tenets

(such as strict adherence to chivalric codes or to religious doctrine). The more skilled poets, such as Chaucer, Gower, and the thirteenth-century French poet, Chrétien de

Troyes, turn limitations imposed by social, political, and ecclesiastical codes and doctrines into sharp satire, subverted allegory, and mirrors-for-princes.

In this project, I have examined moments in three disparate texts from the late

Fourteenth and early Fifteenth centuries in which the subjectivities of the central figures shift noticeably in relation to challenges to orthodox behaviors and beliefs, both on a secular and a sacral level. I argue that conflation is not accidental in these poems, nor is it a polarizing force to elevate the normative or the orthodox. I suggest that these poets intentionally structure complex and heterodox characters, scenarios, and beliefs in these poems as a way to critique and challenge the political, social, and ecclesiastical culture of their times.

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Heresy also plays a large role in these texts, although it is usually associated with religious belief and ideology rather than with secular poetics. Yet, I find that in each text, the primary characters are drawn with heretical or heterodox figurations and through dialectic moments in the texts, these characters subvert orthodox or traditional roles and beliefs. For example, in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (the confession of the lover), the two central characters are Amans, a would-be lover confessing his sins who does not fit the generic requirements for either a penitent or a courtly lover, and Genius, the priest of

Venus who is pagan and who fails in his pastoral care as Amans’ confessor. Neither character fits a traditional, generic, or tropic figuration nor do they remain static in their literary subject positions. This slippage of figuration and subjectivity, I argue, is not only intentional by Gower, but underscores the larger message of his poetic mirror-for-princes: to go “the middle way” by Gower pulling binarily opposed ideas and values towards an integrated position, collapsing a Neo-Platonic insistence on “either/ or” into a new vision of “and/ and.” Heretical moves and unorthodox challenges using the language of the

Church in the confessional framework further emphasize Gower’s commitment to reforming political, social, and ecclesiastical culture and institutions.

Heresy, challenges to orthodoxy, and efficacy and power of language also dominate the fifteenth-century Middle English romance Partonope of Blois, a text translated by an unknown scribe working from the hugely popular thirteenth-century

French poem, Partonopeu de Blois. This antecedent French text is the focus of much recent critical debate centering around its dating and provenance. Previously thought to post-date Chrétien de Troyes’ poetry, which is often considered the foundational work for

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Arthurian romance, Partonopeu de Blois is a startling poem in which necromancy, the marvelous, inverted gender roles, and conflation of Christianity and Islam mix together in a wild tale. Fusions, inversions, and the unexpected are the rule in this poem, and the

English translator carries much of these unconventional elements over into his version.

English versions of French poems frequently attempt to purify heretical and unorthodox moments, scenes, and characters from their antecedents. In this case, however, the

English version bares much of its antecedent’s peculiarities. It begins with declarations of secrecy from the narrator figure, which continue throughout the poem. Literary subjectivities shift less often than in Gower or Chaucer, but the shifts are more emphatic and shape the poem’s direction oftentimes more than the narrator does. I examine the way the English translator challenges the idea of translation and the function of poetic heroes, chivalry, and courtesy as a means of social and political critique. Through inversions of subjectivities, fusions of orthodoxy and heresy, and the championing of secrecy as a subversive strategy to question authority and ideologies, the translator of the

Middle English Partonope of Blois turns a chivalric romance with foundational impulses

(the prioritized lineage to Troy throughout the poem) into an unorthodox, perhaps even heterodox, text critiquing social, political, and ecclesiastical institutions in late medieval

England.

Chaucer, too, works with strategies of secrecy in creating his moments of fusion, fissure, and heretical or heterodox figurations in his poem Troilus and Criseyde. In this poem, though, Chaucer shifts his characters’ subjectivities so much that it is hard to ascribe specific functions to them. For example, Troilus’s resistance to engage in courtly

327 love and codes of courtesy at the outset of the narrative collapses quite quickly and he moves to the subjective position of a heart-sick lover. Chaucer creates a sense of constant motion in the poem and from the poem itself, but in a sense, he mimics social compliance and cultural change. Pandarus’ insistent push to penetrate the personal space of privitée of Troilus and of Criseyde enables Chaucer to create an insider/ outsider motif against which he can challenge false, flawed, or untenable social codes and agendas. In so doing, Chaucer creates an interstitial space with the poem as a medium for social critique and as a literary concept that takes on a kind of subjectivity of its own. Further,

Chaucer plays with his characters’ figurations, imbuing them with qualities of heterodox and heretical beliefs and action, oftentimes turning their words into mimeses of heretical inquiry and beliefs. Yet, alongside these various criticisms and challenges, Chaucer’s narrator figure insistently penetrates the story and empathetically engages with the figures in the poem so that he models a reformational stance that one cannot and should not sit idly by and watch institutional and political corruption, moral and social decay, or cultural inversions without commenting on or advocating for change and social reform.

This project opens avenues for further inquiry so that we might better understand how medieval authors use their narratives as vehicles for cultural transmission, critique, and instruction. With the emerging emphasis on transnational medieval studies, coupled with inter-disciplinary approaches to medieval literature, language, and culture, projects such as this one become increasingly valuable in expanding our understanding of how institutions and ideologies respond to literary challenges and how diversity provokes affective change. Additionally, the world both expands and contracts as Western, Euro-

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Centric texts and cultures reveal commonalities with World cultures and literatures beyond the confines of proscribed generic or formal traditions. Secrecy and fear pervade every culture, from antiquity to medieval to modern societies. The dictum “history repeats itself” need not hold negative connotations as a saying of despair reflecting stasis, ignorance, or corruption. Reading the historical through the texts analyzed in this project shows a modification that disorder and corruption repeats themselves, but that individuals need not blindly comply with division and may begin the long task of reformation with good self-governance. Confessional discourse in these texts offers a point of entry into interiority from which reformational impulses may emerge following examination, contrition, and revelation – or through the willful concealment and deviance from contrition depending on the strategic needs of the subjects at hand.

Confession in the Middle Ages focused on interrogation of a penitent by his pastor. Similarly interrogated were the secular heroes of certain medieval narratives, although the foundation of these interrogations lay in the earthly rather than the sacred and frequently involve a female lover rather than a spiritual pastor. For example, courtly lovers and chivalric knights undergo verbal inquiry often at the hands of an advisor, instructor, or quasi-priest figure in Ricardian poetry. These different scenarios share a power dynamic of an interrogating subject verbally investigating a confessing or revealing subject. The focus in the texts centers primarily around the construction of identity in the subject under inquiry, with additional identifications forming from the questioning subject. The emphasis lies in revelations and discoveries being made external and brought out into the open, either as movements towards absolution, as

329 personal recognitions of identity and relationships, or as knowledge by which a community will embrace or shun the subject under inquiry. Yet, the internal processes behind these emergent revelations are often overlooked or subsumed by the more emphatic need to place the heroic or penitential figure in a fixed subject position.

Underlying the internal processes is the idea of secrecy as a seemingly innocent or innocuous container for information that is yielded up through desire and full volition without intentional withholding. Hidden knowledge verbally revealed takes precedence in constructing medieval subjectivity and consequently, the texts themselves, over the auricular actions of inquisition and the strategic maneuvers and interplays of power in the interrogations.

Interstitial sites within these texts enable the poets to deploy strategies of secrecy so that poets can examine subjectivity, challenge institutions and ideologies, and posit remedial courses for corruption in governance, using the layers of removal such interstices provide to excuse themselves from charges of subversion or dissent. Further, by propelling subjects’ actions through fear, both in terms of interior processes and external actions, these late medieval English poets provide affective motives that align with reformational calls. Desire and will contribute to the poetic challenges of textual transmission, vernacular efficacy, and cultural and personal reform. Balancing aesthetics, rhetorical form, and the politics of translation, the three poets examined herein similarly use confessional discourses to fully illuminate corruption and the ethics of governance.

They may differ in their formal approaches, but they all use shifting subjectivities,

330 strategic secrecy, and fear within confessional moments in order to extend responsibility for self-reflection, correction, and remedial reform onto their audiences.

It is tempting to read the medieval subject as static and constructed by his external, active role in a text. Contemporary scholars argue for a confessing subject constructed by his role as penitent or for a chivalric hero constructed by his role as courtly lover. These constructions focus on the external figuration of the characters in their relation to other similarly constructed subjects. As I have noted herein, recent scholars have argued for a different approach to medieval subjectivity by which the characters work to construct themselves through “self-definition,” through interior psychological processes, or through affective responses to their opponent and proponent characters. Both external and internal figurations of subjectivity follow a model based on the questio method in medieval confession whereby the subject positions are clearly defined and held static; the subjects behave in a conscripted fashion following behavioral codes for their given subjectivity, and the examination of the subject is externally driven by the polity’s or the ecclesiastical community’s need for obedient, orthodox subjects fulfilling their set roles. Any interrogation of the subject follows the modes of inquiry set out in the confessional manuals developed by the medieval Church hierarchy in an effort to bring conformity to pastoral confession. Scholars have read secular romances,

Ricardian poetry, and their antecedent French texts using this religious, sacred model of inquiry as the template for constructing the medieval subject. However, some of these secular texts seem to resist such an ecclesiastical stamp. Subjects such as Amans in

Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Partonope in Partonope of Blois, and Troilus in Chaucer’s

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Troilus and Criseyde slip out of the mold for the confessing subject set forth in the confessional manuals. Scholars attempt to reconcile the ill-fitting subject to a confessional subjectivity by recalling the Twelfth-Century French secular romance Le

Roman de la Rose along with Boethius and Augustine as antecedent model texts. I would suggest, however, that conflating the religious onto the secular is part of the problem in ill-fitting subjectivity. What if we turn, instead, to a similar mode of inquiry, yet removed the external and focused on the internal motivations of the subjects? I believe the inquisitorial manuals provide another option for poets to examine subjectivity, desire, will, and affect in the confessing subject because these manuals presume secrecy as the first tenet of heresy or the heretical subject.

Confessional acts in Ricardian poetry, secret identities in Middle English romances, and communal rituals of secrecy in courtly poetry carry significant formal, symbolic and discursive weight. By looking at specific strategies in the different uses of secrecy in medieval romance and in select examples of non-romance Ricardian poetry we see how secrecy functions severally in these texts, having distinct narrative functions, challenging ideologies, and constructing subjectivity. More intriguingly, secrecy works as a discrete power operation comprised of desire, will, and affect. Specifically in the liminal space between secretive concealing and revealing where the tense interplay between will and desire underpins and constructs subjectivity, identity, and ultimately, affectivity, these poets construct interstices in which to hold subjects and dialectic still in order to illuminate the figurations and ideas more emphatically. The individual, functioning first as an isolated self, must negotiate and define himself as a subject within

332 ideological boundaries, must reveal or discover his identity in both his name and in his function within or, at times, against his community, and must conceal or manage hidden knowledge in order to move into dialectical and dialogical engagement with other textual subjects. For example, a heroic figure in romance seeking absolution through confession, such as Amans or Partonope, is first constructed as an individual self and then is modified into a subject against whom the confessor interacts. The external desire and will of a subject’s community or of an inquisitorial “other” push the individual self into his specifically constructed subjecthood. However, within this transformative process, a liminal space opens in which the individual risks exposing himself as fully vulnerable to loss of dominion, or in a Foucaultian sense, he risks his potential subjectivity. In order to move from this betweenness, the individual self employs various strategies to configure and protect himself, exercising his own will and desire to either conform to his subjectified role or to negotiate a modified or different subjectivity, while finally becoming an affective and affecting subject. I use affectivity in a complex sense, here, to encompass an internalized emotional response of the subject and his dialectical “other” along with an external emotional effect on himself, others, and his community. Herein, I have examined how secretive strategies, such as concealing, dissembling, and revealing, inform confessional acts and identity, reform relationships between and among subject positions, and challenge generic presumptions about a subject who is under inquiry.

Heterodoxy similarly challenges confessional efficacy and modifies the interdependent subjectivity of penitent and confessor to a more nuanced co-dependency.

Inquisitorial and penitential manuals specifically focus on strategies by which to reveal

333 dissimulations and secrets in order to ferret out heretical impulses and egregious sins.

The difference between the inquisitorial manual and a confessional manual lies in the pastoral intent shaping each manual; the former offers strategies intended to catch secretive and strategic transgression in the non-penitent, where the latter offers guidance intended to instruct and lead the penitent out of secrecy into full disclosure. Within the inquisitorial depositional framework, the individual deponent takes on a metonymic role of alterity, standing outside the orthodox role of penitent and embodying the secrets of a heretical community. Traditional mimetic roles of a confessing subject and a pastoral salvific guide are altered under inquisitorial confessional models. Secrecy, then, inverts into a strategy with which to uphold ideologies by those who hold dominion within the orthodox institutions. Consequently, within heterodoxy, marginality and alterity infuse subjectivity in the heretical confessional subjects instead of the normativity and mimicry premised and required by orthodox confession.

I would suggest that at times, the inquisitorial manuals offer models of interrogation for secular purposes more fittingly than do the confessional manuals. It is the former model of inquiry that seems to fit the affectively charged passages in Gower’s

Confessio Amantis more comfortably than do the confessional manual models. As

Genius, the specifically non-clerical, unorthodox (perhaps even heterodox) priest of the pagan goddess Venus is the inquisitor of a would-be lover who is a heretic, in a sense, to

Love, it would seem that a manual for heretical inquisition is a more appropriate manual to use in secular poetry and romances than the sacral confessional manuals prescribed by the Orthodox medieval Church. I also consider the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century

334 inquisition of Lollardy in England to see what influence or effect this heretical inquiry may have on the three poems I examine in this project. The impact of Wycliffe’s trial, of

Arundell’s inquisitions, and of Lollard belief in clerical reform greatly impacted vernacular writing, not only in terms of Latinity being translated, but also in relation to secular vernacular translations. Transmittal of dangerous, heterodox, or political subversive ideas certainly influenced Ricardian and Lancastrian English poets as well as the kinds of texts, tales, and auctors that were chosen to be translated. Returning to two questions posed in the chapter on Partonope of Blois, I would argue the essential questions regarding any investigation of confessional discourse in vernacular, secular narratives, particularly those rife with fear and strategies of secrecy are rather secretive themselves and mimetically encapsulate the interstitial spaces that poets open for reformational challenges: Why this text? Why now?

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