LIFELINES: TRACING ORGANIC VITALITIES IN SACRED AND SECULAR BIOGRAPHY A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Patricia Rochford Har August 2011 © 20ll Patricia Rochford Har LIFELINES: TRACING ORGANIC VITALITIES IN SACRED AND SECULAR BIOGRAPHY Patricia Rochford Har, Ph. D. Cornell University 2011 This dissertation aims to find the life in hagiography. That is, this project breaks with traditional readings of medieval saints‘ lives in order to examine what constitutes ―life‖ in these narratives. While medieval hagiography has been mined by contemporary scholars for political, social, and ecclesiastic content, little attention has been paid to the genre‘s relationship to philosophical and organic categories of life. I argue that not only do these lives engage in philosophical wranglings about ontology but that their literary inclinations also attach hagiographic forms to a kind of presence that resists transcendence while still acknowledging a theological tradition. Although the vast corpus of medieval life-writing seems potentially universal in scope and content, this study organizes around the idea that medieval life narratives prove flexible enough to permit speculation about living energies and bounded enough by genre, convention, and doctrine to develop the idea of vitality carefully and intentionally. The first part of this project addresses the living being through a literary-historical lens that endeavors to trace the evolution of this concept as it is connected to a trajectory of holiness in post-Conquest England. The injunctions and caesurae of monastic living highlight the medieval sense of the instability both of the living being and of a working understanding of it. The lives of saints native to the British Isles whose legends feature encounters with animals reveal how animal lives can map spaces in the vita for other living beings. Studying next the means by which Geoffrey Chaucer and the Pearl- poet attend to the difficulties in locating and representing the space and dynamism of life, I explore how vital objects, landscapes, and minerals affirm the place of nonhuman life in the human life. Finally, a look at Piers Plowman illustrates that the later fourteenth-century life grows through its connections to the problems of knowledge, imagination, and spiritual histories to create a type of ecological entanglement. The medieval life, I conclude, is not merely concerned with exemplary living, but rather imagines the living being as constituted in a network, as patched together with materials, nonhuman beings, other human beings, ideas, and histories. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Patricia Har was born in Princeton, New Jersey, on February 28, 1977. She graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts in 1995 and Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut in 1999, earning a B.A. in the College of Letters. Tricia was awarded the Sage Fellowship at Cornell University in 2003. She currently lives in Byfield, Massachusetts with her husband, Aaron Mandel, two-year-old son, Willem, and an eternally young dog. iii For Aaron and Willem with love iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project has benefited from the support, suggestions, and wisdom of many people at Cornell and elsewhere. I am especially grateful to Masha Raskolnikov, my committee chair and mentor, for her endless encouragements, her incisive, multiple readings, her copious commentaries, and her abiding patience for my wanderings, both personal and academic. Masha has taught me how to be a scholar and a teacher. This dissertation owes its completion to her. I am also deeply indebted to the other members of my dissertation committee, Andy Galloway and Cary Howie, who have guided this project from its genesis in the classroom to its most recent version. Andy has offered counsel, enthusiasm, and compassion at every stage; his intellectual generosity has helped me to see myriad new approaches to my research and ideas. Cary not only shaped the core principles of this project but also asked me hard questions which allowed me to glimpse the outside of my own work. Many other people have supported my studies and my dissertation, and I would like to express my gratitude, in particular, to Alice Colby-Hall, Steve Donatelli, Tom Hill, and Pete Wetherbee. My thanks also to Katherine Groo, Leigh Harrison, Nicole Marafioti, Jessica Metzler, and Misty Urban, scholars and friends who encourage, inspire, and humble me. For two decades, Ariel Rogers has shared with me her intellect, her work, her passion, and her v confidence; this project and I would be so much less without her. For their advice, sympathy, proofreading, and cheerleading, I would like to thank my friends and colleagues outside of Cornell: Seth Bardo, John Bird, Stephanie Curci, Jeff Domina, Mary Fulton, Karen Gold, Tasha Hawthorne, Maud Hamovit, Gary Hendrickson, Amanda Jones, LaShonda Long, Xander Manshel, Steve Ogden, Emily Raymundo, Paul Tortorella, Flavia Vidal, and Paul Wann. I thank my family for all their love and forbearance. Special thanks to my mother, Judy James, who, in addition to championing my education all these years, proofread an entire draft with only a day‘s notice, and to my beautiful boy, Willem, who reminds me every day of the joy of discovery and the shock of the new. Finally, endless thanks to my dearest friend and my most constant partner, Aaron; his certainty, solidarity, sacrifice, and love have kept me going. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 ANIMATED ATTACHMENTS: KALEIDOSCOPIC LIVING IN WALTER DANIEL’S LIFE OF AELRED OF RIEVAULX 23 “MORE LIFE”: ANIMAL ENCOUNTERS IN THE SOUTH ENGLISH LEGENDARY 74 THING POWER IN LITERARY LIVES: VITAL MATERIALS IN PEARL AND THE SECOND NUN’S TALE 127 ENTANGLEMENTS: THE MONK’S TALE, PIERS PLOWMAN, AND THE MESH 175 AFTERWORD 231 REFERENCES 237 vii Introduction Augustine of Hippo in the eleventh book of De Trinitate writes, ―[W]e are not bodies but intelligible beings, since we are life‖1. At first blush, this statement seems definitive and peremptory: humans, in particular ―we‖ humans, find our essence not in bodies, just in spirit, in a vaporous cognitive impulse, in an implied soul. This tract that imagines Trinitarian doctrine as a universal and immanent principle sets up in this sentence, maybe out of habit, maybe on purpose, maybe as an accident of syntax, maybe with a nod to immanence, another trinity: body, sentient being, and life. Augustine‘s causal qualification, ―since we are life,‖ does not offer an elucidation of the properties of life, nor does it define life against intellect or spirit, identify it as an earthly or divine spark, but rather life in Augustine relies in this ontological parsing on a big and hazy category. But life is an important concept, for Augustine and for later medieval writers whose works this project examines, and not just a throw-away term, a catch-all notion, or a flexible genre. While it is hard to define, to locate, and to visualize, neither Augustine nor medieval hagiographers or secular poets like Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland could keep from doing so. My question is not ―what was it like to live in 1 Augustine of Hippo, On the Trinity, trans. Stephen McKenna, ed. Gareth Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 61. 1 medieval England?‖, but rather ―what does a genre that comments on methods for proper living reveal about medieval ideas of the fact of being alive?‖. What this project delivers, then, is not a definition or exposition of a concept of life or being, but rather a map of the branches of a medieval conception of vital energy that charts the diverse means by which the problem of life is approached in the genre that purports to inscribe it. If life is the anchor, this project endeavors to reveal it by tracing its attachments, by unbinding life from the spiritual, corporeal, and psychic processes to which it can be found fastened. I attempt to pause at the textual interstices where something vital and dynamic comes into focus and especially where vitality becomes the focus in narratives that assume the mantle of sacred biography or that confront the question of lived experience. This study attempts to enter into the trinity that Augustine posits in order to explore the life side of the equation, to consider medieval vitalities as a concept separable from spirit and body, as separable even from human bodies. One approach to thinking through vitality is to look at the accounts of the lives of those people who seem to have an extra helping of life. While other types of biographies certainly do appear occasionally in medieval literature, the lives of saints achieve a prominence and popularity that implies an exceptional felicity of 2 expression when it comes to the concept of life. An acute interest in the notion of life – the living energy that is held in common and is always strange, demanding, and strangely pleasurable – dominates the Latin life of Saint Catherine of Siena. As a Dominican Tertiary active during the second half of the fourteenth century, Catherine was not compelled to remain within the precinct of a convent, but rather was permitted to engage in public acts of charity and devotion, which even led to Catherine‘s involvement in the political intrigues of the Great Schism. Yet, in his account of her life, Raymond of Capua, the holy woman‘s confessor and first biographer, devotes only a handful of chapters to her ambassadorial endeavors, and omits entirely many of Catherine‘s more distinguished public successes which came toward the end of her life2. According to Raymond, his subject‘s social and civic accomplishments beyond a particular date bear little significance because Catherine‘s living purpose had been fulfilled well before her physical death.