A Concise Companion to Middle English Literature E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Concise Companions to Literature and Culture
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 510

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This concise companion examines contexts that are essential to understanding and interpreting writing in English produced in the period between approximately 1100 and 1500. The essays in the book explore ways in which Middle English literature is 'different' from the literature of other periods. The book includes discussion of such issues as the religious and historical background to Middle English literature, the circumstances and milieux in which it was produced, its linguistic features, and the manuscripts in which it has been preserved. Amongst the great range of writers and writings discussed, the book considers the works of the most widely read Middle English author, Chaucer, against the background of the period that he both typifies and subverts.

• An accessible resource that examines contexts essential to understanding and interpreting writing of the Middle English period
• Chapters explore the distinctiveness of Middle English literature
• Brings together discussion and analysis by an international team of Middle English specialists, incorporating fresh material and new insights
• Includes analysis of Chaucer's writings, and considers them in relation to the work of his Middle English predecessors, contemporaries and successors
• Incorporates discussion of issues steering the perception of Middle English literature in the present day

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I: Key Contexts

Chapter 1: Signs and Symbols

Sign Systems

Signs of Devotion

Following the Signs

‘The token of synne is turnyd to worshippe …’

Chapter 2: Religious Belief

The Teaching of Scripture

Chewing on Visions

Engaging with the Teachings of the Church

The Teachings of the Church and Writing in England in the Fifteenth Century

Chapter 3: Women and Literature

Change and Constancy

Patience and Protest

Virgins and Wives

Woman and Women

Identity and Community

Women Readers and Women Writers

Chapter 4: The Past

A Culture of History

Past and Present

The Individual in History

Women and the Idea of History in Late-Medieval Literature

Part II: The Production of Middle English Literature

Chapter 5: Production and Dissemination

Methods and Means of Textual Production and Dissemination

Religious Contexts: Books in and beyond the Cloister

Secular Contexts (1): Courtly Texts and their Dissemination

Secular Contexts (2): Texts in Urban Spaces

Clerkly Writers, English Authors

Chapter 6: The Author

Ideas about Authorship

Challenging Convention (1): Chaucer’s House of Fame

Challenging Convention (2): Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde

Self-Authorizing Strategies

Part III: Writing in Middle English; Writing in England

Chapter 7: Language

Defining Middle English

Latin, French and the Functions of English

Forms (1): The Lexicon

Forms (2): Grammar

Forms (3): Writing- and Sound-Systems

Dialect Issues

Function and Form within the Middle English Period

Chapter 8: Translation and Adaptation

The Problems of Translation

The Bible and Devotional Translation

Secular Adaptation

The ‘Great Translator’ Geoffrey Chaucer

Homage and Challenge

Chapter 9: Contemporary Events

Event as Text

Rhetoric and Power

Writing for the Powerful

Writing for a Cause

Writing by the Disempowered

Writing as Social Practice: The Pressure of the Contemporary Moment

Part IV: Middle English Literature in the Post-Medieval World

Chapter 10: Manuscripts and Modern Editions

Changes by Editors

Reproducing Variation among Manuscripts

Variation in Manuscripts

Reproduction despite Change

Reproduction and Reception

Chapter 11: The Afterlife of Middle English Literature

The Sixteenth Century: Survivals

The Seventeenth Century: Decline

1700–1870: Revival

1870 to the Present: Expansion and Consolidation

Index

Concise Companions to Literature and Culture General Editor: David Bradshaw, University of Oxford

This series offers accessible, innovative approaches to major areas of literary study. Each volume provides an indispensable companion for anyone wishing to gain an authoritative understanding of a given period or movement’s intellectual character and contexts.

Published

Modernism

Edited by David Bradshaw

Feminist Theory

Edited by Mary Eagleton

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Postwar American Literature and Culture

Edited by Josephine G. Hendin

The Victorian Novel

Edited by Francis O’Gorman

Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Edited by Stephen Fredman

Chaucer

Edited by Corinne Saunders

Shakespeare on Screen

Edited by Diana E. Henderson

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Milton

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American Fiction 1900–1950

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Edited by Jon Klancher

Postwar British and Irish Poetry

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Middle English Literature

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Edited by Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton

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Edited by Shirley Chew and David Richards

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Edited by Matthew Beaumont

This paperback edition first published 2014© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2009)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A concise companion to Middle English literature / edited by Marilyn Corrie.          p. cm. – (Blackwell concise companions to literature and culture)    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-1-4051-2004-3 (hard back : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-118-65253-4(pbk. : alk. paper)1. English literature–Middle English, 1100–1500–History and criticism.2. Great Britain–Civilization–1066–1485. I. Corrie, Marilyn.    PR260.C665 2009    820.92001–dc22

2008044519

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Detail of knights jousting from The Luttrell Psalter, c.1325–1335.© British Library, Add. 42130, f.82.Cover design by Design Deluxe

List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1

Woodcut from The Art of Good Lywyng and Deyng, printed in Paris, 1503.

Figure 6.1

Title page of the 1527 edition of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, printed by Richard Pynson.

Figure 9.1

The Westminster Abbey portrait of Richard II (1390s).

List of Contributors

Helen Barr is Fellow and Tutor in English at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, where she teaches Old and Middle English literature, the history of the English language, and Shakespeare. Her books include Signes and Sothe: Language in the Piers Plowman Tradition (D.S. Brewer, 1994) and Socioliterary Practice in Late-Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 2002). Her primary research interest is in relationships between textualities and cultural practices.

Helen Cooper is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. Her books include The Canterbury Tales in the Oxford Guides to Chaucer series and The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2004).

Marilyn Corrie is a lecturer in English at University College London. She has published essays on early Middle English literature and manuscripts, Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, and the history of the English language in the medieval period. She is currently writing a book about Malory’s Morte Darthur and religion in the late Middle Ages.

Andrew Galloway has taught in Cornell University’s English Department since receiving his PhD (UC Berkeley) in 1991. He has written numerous essays on Middle English poetry, especially that of Chaucer, Gower and Langland, and on medieval chronicles. Recently he completed The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman: Volume One (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) and Medieval Literature and Culture (Continuum Press, 2007).

Alexandra Gillespie is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She specializes in medieval and early Tudor literature and book history, and is the author of Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books, 1473–1557 (Oxford University Press, 2006), and the editor of John Stow (1525–1605) and the Making of the English Past (British Library, 2004) and a special issue of Huntington Library Quarterly, Manuscript, Print, and Early Tudor Literature (2004).

Jane Griffiths is a lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. Her book John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak was published by Oxford University Press in 2006, and she has also published essays on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English poetry and poetics in Huntington Library Quarterly, Mediaevalia & Humanistica, Renaissance Studies and The Yearbook of English Studies.

David Matthews is a lecturer in Middle English at the University of Manchester. He is the author of The Making of Middle English 1765–1910 (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Recently, he has coedited Medieval Cultural Studies (with Ruth Evans and Helen Fulton) (2006) and Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (with Gordon McMullan) (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He is currently working on political verse of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Catherine Sanok teaches in the English Department at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Her essays on Middle English literature have appeared in Exemplaria, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, New Medieval Literatures and Studies in the Age of Chaucer.

Jeremy J. Smith is Professor of English Philology at the University of Glasgow. His publications include An Historical Study of English (Routledge, 1996), Essentials of Early English (Routledge, 2005, 2nd edn) and Sound Change and the History of English (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Daniel Wakelin is a lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ’s College. He has published a book on Humanism, Reading and English Literature 1430–1530 (Oxford University Press, 2007) and articles on Middle English manuscripts, the history of reading, carols and early Tudor writing. His current research concerns corrections and correctness in Middle English books and literature.

Barry Windeatt is Professor of English at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. His books include a paralleltext edition of Troilus and Criseyde (Longman, 1984) and a Penguin Classics edition of Chaucer’s poem (2003); the Oxford Guides to Chaucer critical introduction to Troilus and Criseyde (1992); an annotated edition of The Book of Margery Kempe (Longman, 2000) together with a Penguin Classics translation (1985); and also an edition of English Mystics of the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1994). He has created the ‘Medieval Imaginations’ website of images of medieval English visual culture (http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/medieval/) and is writing a study of text and image in later medieval England.

Acknowledgements

I would like, first and foremost, to thank all of the contributors for their tolerance of my often considerable demands, and for their patience in waiting for the book to appear in print. I would especially like to thank Andrew Galloway for his help and encouragement from the inception of the project to its very last stages.

A number of my colleagues in the English Department at University College London have helped me in a variety of ways. I am very grateful for advice provided by Rosemary Ashton, John Mullan and Henry Woudhuysen, and for the continuous help and encouragement of Susan Irvine. I could not have completed the project without the kindness and support of Neil Rennie. Anita Garfoot sorted out many issues that I was unable to sort out myself. I would also like to thank Nicola McDonald at York, Francis O’Gorman at Leeds, Corinne Saunders at Durham and Marion Turner at Oxford for invaluable assistance with different aspects of the book. Thorlac Turville-Petre gave generous and useful feedback at an early stage; Elisabeth Dutton and Christina von Nolcken provided crucial and greatly appreciated help much later in the day. Emma Bennett at Wiley-Blackwell has been a kind and astute editor, and I have benefited too from the expertise and patience of Annette Abel and Sue Leigh. Lastly, I would like to thank my friends for both practical help and moral support. I am especially grateful to Emma Barker, Georgia Brown, Gordon McMullan and Melanie Mauthner, and to Clarence Liu and the Barbican, London for providing ideal working conditions.

Much of the research for Daniel Wakelin’s chapter was conducted with the aid of a Francis Bacon Foundation Scholarship at the Huntington Library, San Marino in 2006.

Introduction

It has become fashionable for literary studies to blur the boundaries that have traditionally been used to distinguish one period of literature from another. Scholars of medieval literature have explored both the transmission of Old English literature in the period of Middle English and its study in the Middle English period by people who could no longer read it with ease (see, for example, Franzen 1991). More recently scholars have blurred the boundaries between the Middle English and the ‘early modern’ periods, examining the transmission and presentation of the writings of late fourteenth- and fifteenth- century English authors – especially Chaucer and Lydgate – in the sixteenth century, after printing had become firmly established (Gillespie 2006), or the continuing interest in medieval romances as late as the early seventeenth century (Cooper 2004). Interests and ideas that have been thought to be new in the early modern period have also been discerned in writing and in manuscripts that were produced in the fifteenth century (Strohm 2005; Wakelin 2007). As David Matthews discusses in this volume, recent literary histories that treat the medieval period have chosen as their starting point the midfourteenth century, and have continued their surveys well into the sixteenth century – or have begun their surveys in the Old English period and continued them up to the mid-fourteenth century. There are reasons for splitting the period of Middle English in two, as such surveys do: in particular – as has long been recognized – it is in the second half of the fourteenth century that the English language becomes widely used for great literary writing, including the works of Chaucer (and William Langland’s great dream vision poem Piers Plowman, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the other works in the manuscript in which that poem has been preserved). But there are reasons too for preserving the traditional ‘fence’ placed around the Middle English period, usually loosely defined as the centuries between 1100 and 1500. Those reasons are the subject of this book.

The subjects covered in the various chapters of the volume, which are by different authors, have been chosen with a view to elucidating issues that are likely to be unfamiliar to people approaching Middle English literature for the first time, or who have only limited experience of that literature. Those issues need to be appreciated if Middle English texts are to be understood on their own terms. At the same time, each of the chapters offers new insights on its subject, and the contributors consider material that will be unfamiliar even to experts in Middle English literature, or look at more familiar material from new perspectives. This is a book, therefore, for more advanced readers of Middle English texts as well as new ones.

Chaucer, the best-known Middle English author, figures prominently in the volume as a whole, and is discussed in detail in many of its essays. But Chaucer’s writings are considered in the context, and the light, of other writing of the period: an approach that enables readers to appreciate both how Chaucer is typical of the age in which he was writing and, in a number of important respects, how he departs from, and sometimes implicitly queries, many of the conventions of writing in the Middle English period (see in particular the essays by Catherine Sanok, Andrew Galloway, Alexandra Gillespie, Jane Griffiths, Helen Cooper and Helen Barr; compare also Daniel Wakelin’s and David Matthews’ chapters).

The book is, first and foremost, about Middle English literature – but several of the subjects with which it deals also inform medieval literature in languages other than English. I have grouped those subjects of which this is especially true at the start of the volume, under the title ‘Key Contexts’. The chapters here consider such issues as the compulsion to read symbolic significance into the phenomena of this world in the Middle Ages, evidenced, as Barry Windeatt discusses, in Middle English writers ranging from the female visionaries Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich to Sir Thomas Malory, the author of Le Morte Darthur, as well as in the Middle Scots writer Robert Henryson; the responses of medieval people to the religious beliefs that they were taught to hold, scriptural, doctrinal and otherwise, exemplified strikingly, but far from exclusively, in writing by the Gawain- poet and Langland; ideas about women in the Middle Ages, which infuse writing both by men and by women themselves, and which are one of the most conspicuous ways in which Chaucer engages with debates that were, by his day, traditional (although they remained current); and thinking about the past in the period, which was regularly seen, especially, not as something separate from the present, but as something that was, in fact, inseparable from it, as was apparent to the anonymous playwrights of the mystery cycles that were performed in prosperous English towns in the late Middle Ages, amongst other people. There is an important exception to the applicability of the points made in this part of the book not just to Middle English literature but to medieval literature more generally, and that concerns the response to religious teaching that prevails in Middle English literature in the fifteenth century. This is the product of circumstances that were particular to England, the result of the backlash of the Church in England and the English state towards teaching that had already been branded heretical. Discussion of this issue is included in the second chapter of the book, on ‘Religious Belief’.

The second group of chapters discusses issues that distinguish the production of Middle English literature from the production of writing in other periods. The first of the chapters in this part considers the contexts in which Middle English literature was both produced and disseminated – orally and in writing, in (and from) religious milieux, especially monasteries, and secular milieux too, including the royal court, aristocratic households and, late in the period, the environment of the administrative centre of England at Westminster and the adjacent city of London. The second of the chapters discusses the engagement of Middle English literature – including, again, Chaucer’s writings – with the distinctive medieval ideas surrounding the role of an author in the production of a text. By the end of the medieval period something resembling many of the ideas about authorship that prevail today had emerged; and yet even then traditional medieval thinking about authorship can be seen to linger in the ways that the authors of texts represent themselves.

The third part of the book covers subjects that are of particular relevance to writing in England in the medieval period. The first chapter here discusses the features of the Middle English phase of the English language. As Jeremy Smith points out in the chapter, it is to nineteenth-century historians of the English language that we owe the term ‘Middle English’; they perceived that between the Norman Conquest of 1066 and the introduction of printing technology to England in 1476, English showed certain characteristics that set it apart from Old English on the one hand and early modern English on the other. The chapter explores what the characteristics of Middle English are, and how they are related to the functions that English performed in the years between the Conquest and its début in print. The second chapter in the section discusses the fact that a great deal of the Middle English literature that survives to us, from religious treatises to romances, is translated or adapted from writing in other languages, particularly French and Latin. Chaucer’s works show a conspicuous and recurring interest in the issue of translation, and a more sophisticated attitude towards its practice than his famous branding as a ‘grant translateur’ by one of his French contemporaries may suggest. In the final chapter of the section, the historical ‘background’ to Middle English writing is discussed, and particularly the specific events in England and concerning England with which that writing engages. Middle English texts are vehicles – sometimes the only vehicles we have – for telling us about those events, and yet, as Helen Barr explains in the chapter, their presentation of them is far from objective: if Middle English literature is informed by certain events, it also ‘produces’ those events in various ways when it gives them textual shape.

The final part of the book addresses issues relating to the ways in which Middle English literature is perceived in the present day. The chapter ‘Manuscripts and Modern Editions’ discusses how the media in which Middle English literature is usually read now change the experience of reading it in important ways from the experience that people in the Middle Ages would have had when they read it. Modern printed editions of Middle English texts both add things to the manuscript forms in which Middle English texts circulated in the Middle Ages and take things away, and it is essential to be aware of the changes that they impose on the texts if we are to have a sense of the distinctive ways in which they were read, and the ways in which they circulated, in the Middle Ages. The book concludes by discussing how present-day perceptions of Middle English literature have been shaped by the changing ways in which it has been thought about and commented on since the Middle Ages. The chapter also ponders the future of Middle English literature, suggesting the appeal of its ‘difference’ from the literature of other periods and regretting some aspects of the current trends in academic scholarship that obscure that difference.

If the book deals with issues that define the distinctiveness of Middle English literature, it does not obscure heterogeneity in approaches to those issues amongst writers of the period, nor changes and developments across the four hundred years in which the literature was produced. The essays draw attention, for example, to the rise of the concept of ‘poesye’ in the late fourteenth century (see Andrew Galloway’s chapter); the changes in the dissemination of Middle English texts that took place at around the same time (see Alexandra Gillespie’s chapter); the appearance in Middle English writing of the late fourteenth century of new ideas relating to the role played by an author in the production of a text (see Jane Griffiths’ essay); and new attitudes towards the copying and the presentation of Middle English texts in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries (see Daniel Wakelin’s chapter). Within the world of writing and the copying of that writing in England, various changes were taking place more or less simultaneously around the end of the fourteenth century, a parallel to the many changes that were taking place in the wider world at the same time (compare, for example, Staley 1996; see also my own chapter and Helen Barr’s below).

It will have been evident from the above summary of the subjects covered by the book that, within the concise format necessitated by the demands of the Concise Companion series, the volume aims to provide a comprehensive (if not, of course, exhaustive) guide to the study of Middle English literature; it can also, however, be dipped into for consultation on specific topics. Each of the chapters aims to offer comprehensive coverage of its particular subject, again within a concise format. In all of the essays, contextual information about the subject that is being addressed is combined with the critical (or linguistic) analysis of a range of texts. The aim of the volume as a whole, then, is to offer a guide to its subject that is both useful and illuminating. If it is a concise companion to Middle English literature, it hopes, nonetheless, to be an authoritative and a stimulating one.

References

Cooper, Helen (2004). The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Franzen, Christine (1991). The Tremulous Hand of Worcester: A Study of Old English in the Thirteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gillespie, Alexandra (2006). Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books, 1473–1557. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Staley, Lynn (1996). ‘Julian of Norwich and the Late Fourteenth-Century Crisis of Authority’. In David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (pp. 107–78). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Strohm, Paul (2005). Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

Wakelin, Daniel (2007). Humanism, Reading, and English Literature 1430–1530. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Notes on the contents of bibliographies; references; and abbreviations

The bibliography at the end of each chapter is divided into two sections: ‘Primary texts’ and ‘Secondary sources and suggestions for further reading’. Primary texts are generally listed under the names of the editors whose versions of the texts the contributors have used; references within the text of each essay specify whose edition has been consulted. The possibility of including extensive bibliographies for each subject has been precluded by the demands of the Concise Companion series; where they have thought it appropriate, the contributors have, however, added some titles to the list of works that they reference within their chapters in order to indicate reading that they consider essential to their topic.

Quotations from Chaucer’s works have been taken from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) unless stated otherwise; the line numbering of The Riverside Chaucer has also been used in the essays. References to quotations from The Canterbury Tales (or CT) are to the number of the fragment from which the quotation is taken, followed by the line numbering within the fragment, again as identified in The Riverside Chaucer. References to editions of texts and quotations from editions are given in the form (for example) ‘(ed. Vinaver 1990)’ and ‘(ed. Vinaver 1990: 850)’ respectively; references in the form (for example) ‘(Vinaver, ed., 1990: 10)’ are to a statement made, or material contained in, an edition that is not part of the edited text itself. Unless otherwise indicated, references are to page numbers in the specified works. Italics in quotations identify material expanded from abbreviations in manuscripts, or material underlined in manuscripts; square brackets identify material supplied by editors or contributors themselves.

‘EETS’ stands for the Early English Text Society; ‘OS’ stands for the Ordinary Series of volumes within the publications of the Society, ‘ES’ for the Extra Series, and ‘SS’ for the Supplementary Series.

Part I

Key Contexts

Chapter 1

Signs and Symbols

Barry Windeatt

Omnis mundi creaturaquasi liber et picturanobis est in speculum;nostrae vitae, nostrae mortis,nostri status, nostrae sortisfidele signaculum.(Alan of Lille, ed. Raby 1959: 369)

[All creation, like a book or a picture, is a mirror to us – a true figure of our life, our death, our condition, our lot.]

To the medieval mind symbolic significance might be read into almost anything, when all creation was a mirror, figure and script that pointed beyond itself, reminding of an otherworldly dimension that offered the only true and abiding perspective. In the variety of his works the fifteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson can represent – by way of introduction to this chapter – the sheer range of uses of signs and symbols in medieval writings. His Garmont of Gud Ladeis reads moral conduct in terms of the symbolism of female attire, and in his Testament of Cresseid the disfiguring leprosy that punishes Cresseid for defiance of the gods draws on traditions that see sickness as an outward sign of inner moral condition. In his Orpheus and Eurydice Henryson plays his own variations on medieval traditions of moralizing classical mythology to expound a Christian moral. Here the hero and heroine symbolize intellect and desire respectively: when Eurydice flees through a May meadow from a would-be rapist shepherd, is stung by a venomous serpent and is summoned to hell, she flees from ‘good vertew’ (perhaps surprisingly to the modern reader) through the world’s vain delights, and so descends into hell through excess of care for worldly things. Henryson’s Fables include the grimly schematic symbolism of ‘The Paddock and the Mouse’, where a mouse (man’s soul), in seeking to cross a river (the world) to reach better things, has no option but to be tied to a frog (man’s body) that tries to drag her under and drown her, before both are seized by a kite (sudden death). Yet Henryson’s interpretations may also signify challengingly, as in ‘The Cock and the Jasp’, where a cock finds a jewel (which betokens perfect wisdom and knowledge) but hankers instead for something edible (sensibly enough, for a chicken?) – only to be roundly condemned as an ignoramus on the basis of the otherworldly perspective that unifies the medieval reading of signs.

Sign Systems

You can make a cross on the meal-table out of five bread-crumbs; but do not let anyone see this, except your wife….

        (Instructions for a Devout and Literate Layman, trans. Pantin 1976: 398–422)

As St Augustine had remarked in De doctrina Christiana (‘On Christian Teaching’), ‘A sign is a thing which of itself makes some other thing come to mind, besides the impression it presents to the senses’ (trans. Green 1997: 31). In the Middle Ages, the natural world, the human body, or society and its constructions all had their symbolism and were full of signs to be interpreted. Most human experience could be read as symbolic: the successive ages of man; the powers or defects of the senses (vision or blindness, deafness, sweetness); the sleep of sin; illness, medicine and healing, which were seen as signs of moral failing and regeneration. Conduct was often evaluated symbolically in terms of conflicts between vices and virtues (personified in morality plays and innumerable allegories). As for the natural world, there was a long tradition of ‘bestiaries’, illustrated texts that expounded the moral symbolism discerned in the behaviour of animals and birds, as one preacher explains:

The Lord created different creatures with different natures not only for the sustenance of men, but also for their instruction, so that through the same creature we may contemplate not only what may be useful for the body, but also what may be useful in the soul … For there is no creature … in which we may not contemplate some property belonging to it which may lead us to imitate God or … to flee from the Devil. For the whole world is full of different creatures, like a manuscript full of different letters and sentences, in which we can read whatever we ought to imitate or flee from …

(Thomas of Chobham (d. 1236?), Summa de arte praedicandi (‘Manual of the Art of Preaching’) (ed. Morenzoni 1988: 275))

The symbolism in plants, flowers, herbs and trees (and by extension in gardens and springs, and the character of the seasons) was also the focus of moralizing interpretations, while a science of astrological signs decoded the stars, and, as in Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice, the ingenuity of medieval mythography read Christian symbolism into classical mythology. Analysed in texts called ‘lapidaries’, precious stones were credited with powers of healing and safeguarding, and gained symbolic meanings, as did both colours and also numbers, the subject of elaborate numerological symbolism (on all of which traditions the Gawain-poet draws). With their colours and gems, medieval clothes and jewellery, and above all ecclesiastical vestments, made symbolic statements, as did such accoutrements as armour and weapons. Heraldry developed a sophisticated lexicon of signs and signatures of kinship and descent. The regalia of kingship – crown, orb and sceptre – were replete with a symbolism of authority invested by coronation ritual, the most solemn amongst a system of symbolically charged ceremonies that included swearing of homage, and the dubbing and arming of knights, as also the observances and insignia of chivalric orders and the conduct of tournaments. In grander households some principal pastimes – hunting, jousting, feasting, dancing – were invested with symbolism, as were games and gift-giving, and all inform romance literature with its symbolic testings and questings. The quest draws meaning from a larger symbolism of movement and space: symbolic readings of journeys, and of the way taken, are especially resonant in the concept of the pilgrimage, as in romance, while architecture interprets built space in symbolic terms, in secular as well as ecclesiastical contexts.

Symbolism remained readable at different levels of understanding, education and literacy. Written explanations were provided even for medieval viewers of the ‘typological’ schemes of stained glass at Canterbury Cathedral, in which certain Old Testament episodes (‘types’) are read as prefigurations of New Testament episodes (‘anti-types’), and hence as signs that each episode in Christ’s life fulfils a divinely ordained pattern (Michael 2004: 13, 25; see also Henry, ed., 1987). Since Jonah’s three days in a whale’s belly were understood to prefigure Christ’s three days in the tomb (Matthew 12:40), Jonah’s being spewed up by the whale offered a memorable symbol of Christ’s resurrection, as did Samson’s carrying off the gates of Gaza where he was captured and imprisoned (while visiting a prostitute, but typology often seized on parallels regardless of context). In The Tale of Beryn – a fifteenth-century sequel to The Canterbury Tales in which the pilgrims reach Canterbury – lower-class pilgrims ‘counterfeting gentilmen’ try interpreting images in the cathedral windows and squabble ignorantly over their significance (ed. Bowers 1992: 64). However baffled they appear, these humble pilgrims’ conviction of symbolic meanings to be discovered reflects the wider typological awareness mirrored in the structure of mystery play cycles and throughout medieval visual culture.

Signs are for remembering: symbolism might prompt devout memorization by organizing knowledge, through pattern and tabulation, of core tenets of faith and cues for devotional observance, with no sign more central than Christ’s body. Analysis of sins and virtues might be set out in the form of diagrammatic trees or wheels or other visual mnemonics. Always there is the structure lent by numerical pattern: the seven sacraments, seven works of mercy, seven deadly sins; Mary’s joys and sorrows (variously, five, seven or fifteen); and Christ’s five wounds, object of a fragmenting devotional attention that disassembled Christ’s body into fetishized parts for veneration, focusing on separate images of wounded hands, feet and gaping side. Henry VI’s confessor records how the king

made a rule that a certain dish which represented the five wounds of Christ, as it were red with blood, should be set on his table by his almoner before any other course when he was to take refreshment; and contemplating these images with great fervour he thanked God marvellously devoutly.

(trans. James 1919: 35)

The wounds become the ‘Arma Christi’, or ‘Arms of Christ’, quasiheraldic badges of pain and shame ironically signifying glory, sacred insignia often conjoined with the ‘Instruments of the Passion’ – the emblematic objects and implements of torture that, by a kind of visual shorthand, prompt devout memories to recall man’s ingratitude to Christ. Blazoned on bench-ends, screens, roof-bosses, in wall-paintings and external decoration, images of the Wounds and Instruments might be displayed dispersedly throughout churches. ‘His body hanging on the cross is a book open for your perusal’, declares a fourteenth-century contemplative, the Monk of Farne, likening Christ’s body to a text, and for a contemporary mystic, Richard Rolle, Christ’s bloodied body is ‘lyke a boke written al with rede ynke’ (ed. Farmer 1961: 76; Ogilvie-Thomson 1988: 75).

Since their influence was so potent, the role of devotional images could not go unexamined, although the traditional orthodoxy – that images ‘been ordeyned to been a tokene and a book to þe lewyd peple, þat þey moun [can] redyn in ymagerye and peynture þat clerkys redyn in boke’ – continued to be a mainstream view, and images were defended because: ‘ther ben mony thousand of pepull that couth [could] not ymagen in her hert how Crist was don on the rood, but as thei lerne hit by sight of images and payntours’ (ed. Barnum 1976–2004: Vol. I, Pt. 1, 82; Erbe 1905: 171). Written for advanced contemplatives, the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing deplores how some will form distracting mental images of a God richly attired and enthroned ‘fer more curiously þan euer was he depeynted in þis erþe’ (ed. Hodgson 1944: 105), but the Cloud’s contemplative contemporary Walter Hilton justifies images in a pastoral context because they prompt desirable devotional sentiments –

Amongst which signs the Church sets up images of Christ crucified … in order that the Passion and also the martyrdoms of other saints may be recalled to memory by looking at these images; and thus slow and carnal minds may be stirred to compunction and devotion.

(ed. Clark and Taylor 1987: Vol. I, 188; compare Figure 1.1)

Churches, therefore, in design, contents and adornment, came to present highly developed sign systems available to be read at different levels by different observers.

Signs of Devotion

And þen anon is taken to hir a tabil [painted panel], ful wel depeynte with an ymage of oure Lorde crucifyed: and holdyng that open and vncouerd wiþ booþ handys, ful deuoutly she lokiþ … in þe same ymage with alle þe intente of hir mynde. And … sche is rauesched and waxes [grows] alle starke, holdynge þe tabil … And oþere-while þe same tabil is lenyd vpon hir breste, and some-tyme abouen her face, after dyuerse holdynges of þe tabil in þe bikumynge [attainment] of euery

Figure 1.1 From The Art of Good Lywyng and Deyng (printed Paris, 1503): an angel bids the dying man turn his soul away from impatience. Reproduced by courtesy of The Master and Fellows of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

The image shows (left to right): Christ with the instruments of his scourging; God the Father with scourge and arrow; and four saints bearing the emblems of their sufferings – St Barbara with the tower in which she was imprisoned, St Lawrence with the gridiron on which he was roasted to death, St Catherine with the wheel on which she was tortured and the sword that beheaded her, and St Stephen with the stones with which he was pelted to death.

rauishynge…. And soo she durith a good space, wiþ incres of swetnesse, as semes to hem þat se right as she didde, in biholdynge of ymage, wiþ oþere hy3 tokens of deuocyone … but her countenance is stedfastly sette in consideracyone of þe ymage; so þat she byholdith no body nor noon oþere thinge but the tabil allonly… Whan alle this is doon, mykel moor solempnely and moor merueylously þan I can or maye write, sche keueriþ [covers] and closeþ þe same tabil and takith it to som body bisyde hir.

(The Life of St Elizabeth of Spalbeck, ed. Horstmann 1885: 110)

In her rapt engagement with this painting the holy woman Elizabeth of Spalbeck exemplifies just how intense was the stimulus to devotion – and potentially to visionary experience – provided by images. In England The Book of Margery Kempe – the self-account of a Norfolk housewife and visionary – presents itself as recording the vivid experience of a comparably suggestible respondent to contemporary signs and symbols of devotion. (Indeed, Kempe’s extravagant weeping is compared with the conduct of another Low Countries holy woman, Mary of Oignies, whose paramystical life appears in English translation alongside that of Elizabeth of Spalbeck). Kempe came to have God so constantly in her thoughts that she ‘behelde hym in alle creaturys’ (ed. Windeatt 2000: 320), and saw everything as a sign: nursing mothers and young children put her in mind of his Nativity, while witnessing animals or children being beaten reminds her of his Passion (164). Kempe’s Book ignores or merges traditional dualisms – body and spirit, literal and symbolic – less because she is naïve or literal-minded than because inclusion matches better with experience. Moreover, Kempe acts out a medieval devotional tendency to see any one aspect of Christ’s life as present in all others: she might have seen Annunciation images showing a beam of light descending to Mary – representing her sinless conception – while a small crucifix or a baby clutching a cross slides down the sunbeam towards her, encapsulating Christ’s redeeming future death even at the instant of his conception (compare King 2006: plate I 2a). Or again, Kempe probably encountered the iconography of the ‘Lily Crucifixion’, an image which, in depicting Christ crucified on a lily flower, superimposes his anguishing death on to the lily identified with both the Annunciation and his mother (see Woodforde 1950: plate XXII). Everywhere repeated would be an Annunciation image where the dove of the Holy Spirit flies down towards Mary’s ear when the Word is made flesh. One lyric confidently identifies which ear (‘Blessed be, Lady, thy richt ere: / The Holy Gost, he liht [alighted] in there, / Flesch and blod to take’; ed. Horstmann 1892: 126); Kempe hints at identification with Mary when recalling how she heard the Holy Ghost like a robin redbreast ‘that song ful merily oftyntymes in hir ryght ere’ (197). Imagery of Christ’s conception as a beam of light was represented – according to stage directions – very literally and concretely in one mystery play cycle, probably East Anglian and now entitled The N-Town Play:

Here þe Holy Gost discendit with iij bemys to our Lady, the Sone of Godhed next with iij bemys to þe Holy Gost, the Fadyr godly with iij bemys to þe Sone. And so entre all thre to here bosom …

(ed. Spector 1991: 122)

Incarnation of the triune God in Mary’s womb was represented highly concretely in such ‘vierge ouvrante’ images as ‘The Lady of Boulton’, once in Durham Cathedral, where the belly of an image of Mary, like a cupboard, ‘was maide to open … from her breaste downward’, to reveal the Trinity enclosed inside, with an image of God the father

holding betwixt his handes a fair & large crucifix of Christ all of gold … and every principall [major feast] daie the said immage was opened that every man might se pictured within her the father, the sonne, and the holy ghost, moste curiouselye and fynely gilted.

(Rites of Durham, ed. Fowler 1903: 30)

Just as a lyric hails ‘Marye, mayde mylde and fre, / Chambre of þe Trynyte’ (ed. Brown 1924: no. 32), so Kempe records herself being thanked by Christ for receiving and seating the Trinity in her soul (373). Above all, Kempe exemplifies how meditative devotion encouraged the contemplative to ‘Make the in thy soule present’ at the Gospel scenes (as one of the most popular vernacular texts of the fifteenth century, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, advises). In her mind’s eye, Kempe steps through the frame and inside the devotional image. In her meditations she assists at the births not only of Christ but also of the Virgin and John the Baptist, relating as mother of fourteen children to these three differently miraculous births, and inserting herself into such devotional scenes as the Visitation and the early life of Mary. When in contemplation she wraps Jesus in his swaddling clothes (77), addressing the Christ Child while tearfully ‘havyng mend [mind] of the scharp deth that he schuld suffyr’, Kempe acts out her own performance of those English lyrics that take the form of lullaby exchanges between Mary’s fears and her child’s prophecies to her of his eventual death, so that Nativity and Passion images are superimposed into a kind of double exposure.

When Kempe records seeing in a Leicester church a crucifix ‘petowsly poyntyd [piteously depicted] and lamentabyl to beheldyn’ (228) and is prompted to ‘pity and compassion’ at the thought of Christ’s Passion, her response exemplifies the effect of images that Hilton had endorsed. Similarly, in his Testament the monk John Lydgate recalls how as a boy of under fifteen ‘holdyng my passage, / Myd of a cloyster, depicte vpon a wall’, he saw a crucifix ‘with this word “Vide” [Behold!] wrete there besyde’, which moved him to write a poem in which Christ guides observers in contemplating his Passion (ed. MacCracken 1911: 356). Moreover, Kempe’s other recorded reactions to artefacts, as well as her visions, reflect developments in devotional focus and the images that led and served this. In a Norwich church Kempe recalls seeing a ‘pete’ – a pietà, or image of Mary with the dead Christ across her lap – ‘and thorw the beholdyng of that pete her mende was al holy ocupyed in the Passyon’ (286); equally, one poem by Lydgate was evidently planned to accompany an image of a ‘pyte’ (‘looke on this fygure … My bloody woundis, set here in picture …’) and guide meditation upon it (‘Whan ye beholde this dolerous pyte …’: 250–1). In another poem Lydgate tells how, during a sleepless night, he ‘Vnclosyd a book that was contemplatiff’ and found a ‘meditacioun’ preceded by ‘an ymage ful notable / Lyke a pyte depeynt’ (268), which moved him to pen the ensuing work. Some lyrics narrate how what appears at first sight the painted and carved artefact of a pietà turns into the lamenting Mary herself (‘In a chirche as I gan knele … / I saw a pite in a place … / Ofte she wepte and sayde “Alas” …’, cited in Woolf 1968: 257). In De arte lacrimandi (‘On the Art of Weeping’), while kneeling before a pietà, the poet’s spirit is ravished from his body to see a vision of Mary, whose autobiographical account is punctuated by the refrain ‘Who can not wepe, come lerne att me’ (ed. Garrett 1909: 269–94). In one lyric the speaker, confronted with Mary cradling the dead Christ, confesses ‘I said I cowd not wepe, I was so harde hartid’, and is sharply reproved by Mary ‘with wordys shortly that smarted … “Thyne owne fadder þis nyght is deed!”’ (ed. Brown 1939: no. 9). To the priest who dryly reproaches her for weeping (‘“Damsel, Jhesu is ded long sithyn”’), Kempe’s riposte may represent her performance of the situation dramatized in such poems, where the pietà is a challenge to tears and compassion: ‘“Sir, hys deth is as fresch to me as he had deyd this same day – and so me thynkyth it awt to be to yow and to alle Cristen pepil!”’ (286). The thrust of Kempe’s retort is that Christ’s life and death should be concurrent with our experience. As potent a focus for devotion as the pietà was that of the ‘Imago Pietatis’ or Man of Sorrows. In this image, the wounded post-Crucifixion body of Christ usually stands visible from the waist up in a tomb chest, surrounded by the instruments of the Passion. It is a version of this image that Kempe apparently describes in her vision of Christ appearing ‘with hys wowndys bledyng as fresch as thow he had ben scorgyd beforn hir’, as in succeeding visions of his body looming over her (368–70). Kempe’s vision reflects trends to objectification of Christ’s body in devotion. The ‘Imago Pietatis’ is a kind of freeze-frame picture abstracted from the Passion narrative without corresponding to any particular moment in it: a posed and arranged composition, selecting from both Crucifixion and entombment, which becomes the cue for innumerable poems and images (and may colour representations of the resurrected Christ as Man of Sorrows, as in the Wakefield Play of the Resurrection).

Kempe records being constantly at church when she had such visions reminiscent of the ‘Imago Pietatis’ (368–71), and the church fabric presented a system of such signs, serving the building’s central focus on the Mass. The moment when the miracle of Eucharistic transubstantiation was displayed to the laity at the elevation of the Host is the focus of many lyrics and carols (declaring ‘Thowgh yt seme whit, yt ys rede; / Yt ys flesshe, yt semeyth bred’, or, more daringly, ‘In Virgyne Mary this brede was bake, / Whenne Criste of her manhoode did take’; ed. Greene 1977: nos 319, 318). Like many visionaries, Kempe has her mysterious insight during Mass when she sees the Host fluttering at elevation, evidently suggesting the dove of the Holy Spirit, as the priest staggers under the miraculous manifestation of God with us (129). It was to celebrate how life thereby defeats and succeeds death that on Good Friday the Host was ‘buried’ symbolically in an ‘Easter Sepulchre’ (sometimes an elaborate tomb-chest), to be taken out again on Easter Sunday morning as a sign of the Resurrection, a ritual Kempe records witnessing with devout emotion (275–6). Near to an Easter Sepulchre was a favoured place for burial of the dead, mentioned in many medieval wills that plan for interment inside a church. The two-decker or ‘cadaver’ tomb – displaying above the deceased’s effigy in stately dignity of royal, noble or ecclesiastical robes while below is carved a naked skeleton or partly decomposed corpse prey to worms and toads – gave plastic form to the message of a widespread medieval cautionary exemplum of a son converted by gazing into his father’s grave. Another ‘memento mori’ was the theme of the ‘danse macabre’ (or Dance of Death), in which figures representative of various ranks and professions dance with their own skeletons (a motif overlapping with the ‘carole’ or dance-song symbolizing a courtly life of love and diversion, as in The Romance of the Rose). The Dance of Death famously depicted round the churchyard walls of the Innocents in Paris was imitated in St Paul’s churchyard and accompanied by Lydgate’s verses translated from the French poem inscribed at the Innocents. In Henryson’s The Thre Deid Pollis (‘The Three Skulls’) the death’s heads speak – with their fleshless skulls and hollowed-out eyes – reminding ‘wantone yowth’, fashionable ladies and ‘febill aige’ that all-devouring death makes a mockery of worldly distinctions (ed. Fox 1981: lines 43–4). In The Three Dead Kings – the one English poem treating the encounter of ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’ – three kings out hunting together come face to face with the animated but decomposing corpses of their dead fathers, who warn their sons to live so that they do not fear Judgement Day (‘Makis ʒour merour be me!’) (ed. Turville-Petre 1989: 148–57). The repentant kings build a minster on whose walls their encounter is recorded; such scenes – in which the three figures may represent different ages of man and estates of society – were a frequent subject of church wall-paintings. Indeed, it is into scenes of hunting – emblematic of courtly society at play – that signs and tokens of mortality impinge (as in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess). In the lyric beginning ‘In noontyde of a somers day’ the narrator ‘toke my hawke, me for to play’ and sets off delightedly to hunt, ‘My spanyellis renyng by my syde’ (ed. Gray 1975: no. 80). Yet, in the midst of pursuing a pheasant, the jaunty huntsman stumbles, his leg torn by a briar, and, looking down, notices how the briar ‘bare wrytyng in every leff – / This Latyn word, revertere [turn back]’. Forgetting pheasant and dogs, the hunter’s ‘hart fell down unto my to’ and he sighingly reflects how, since ‘This hawke of yowth’ leads astray, ‘than ys best revertere’. Also an admonishment, in the poem Somer Soneday (ed. Turville-Petre 1989: 140–7) the narrator, having become detached from the hunt in which he has been riding, encounters Dame Fortune rotating on her wheel the rising, falling and fallen figures of four kings – which might be captioned ‘I shall reign’, ‘I reign’, ‘I have reigned’ and (at the bottom) ‘I am without a kingdom’ – an image that also relates to wheel-like symbolizations of the ages of man’s life. Drawing together such tokens of mortality, the alliterative romance The Awntyrs off Arthure opens by refashioning a well-known tale of how St Gregory encounters his mother’s ghost who urges him to have Masses said for her soul. Isolated from their hunting party by a sudden storm, Gawain and Guinevere are confronted by a gruesome apparition of Guinevere’s mother as a corpse prey to toads and serpents and risen from the grave and purgatory to warn the Queen to amend her life, to have Masses said for her mother’s soul, and to warn Gawain of the coming downfall of the Round Table and its values (‘Your king is too covetous’; ed. Hanna 1974: 264).

Following the Signs

In the mysterious Corpus Christi Carol the speaker laments that a falcon ‘hath born my mak [mate] away’ and carried him ‘into an orchard brown’:

In that orchard ther was an hall,That was hangid with purpill and pall.

And in that hall ther was a bed:Hit was hangid with gold so red.

And yn that bed ther lythe a knyght,His wowndes bledyng day and nyght.

By that bedes side ther kneleth a may,   maidenAnd she wepeth both nyght and day.

And by that beddes side ther stondith a ston,‘Corpus Christi’ wretyn theron.

        (ed. Greene 1977: no. 322A)

Inexhaustibly enigmatic, this image of a knight in a rich bed with his wounds constantly bleeding, and a kneeling maiden constantly weeping, summons up both a world of chivalrous endeavour and a suffering love and devotion, associating them with the Eucharistic sacrifice of blood and its mystery. For from ideas of Christ’s Passion as a combat – as in William Dunbar’s poem ‘Done is a battell on the dragon blak’ – waged out of God’s love for mankind, a pervasive imagery developed of Christ as lover-knight jousting at a tournament of the Passion for his beloved, man’s soul (see also Catherine Sanok’s essay below). Christ’s arms stretched wide on the cross could be viewed as a lover’s arms outstretched to embrace, as in this advice to a female recluse on devotional images:

And as touchynge holy ymages, haue in þyn awter þe ymage of þe crucifix … he is ysprad abrood to bykleppe [embrace] þe in his armes, in which þu schalt haue gret delectacioun …

(ed. Ayto and Barratt 1984: 35)

Even Christ’s assumption of human flesh in Mary’s womb at the Incarnation could be likened to a knight’s donning armour with the aid of a maiden, and his Deposition from the Cross to a disarming. St Paul’s allegory of putting on the armour of God generated narratives of knightly arming for a spiritual quest. It is within such traditions that Piers Plowman describes Christ coming to his Crucifixion to joust ‘in Piers armes, / In his helm and in his habergeon [coat of mail] – humana natura’ (ed. Schmidt 1987: XVIII.22–3)). In one poignant lyric Christ calls the Cross his horse (‘Mi palefrey is of tre / With nayles naylede þurh me’; ed. Brown 1924: no. 51), and torturers in the Wakefield Crucifixion play call on Christ to mount ‘apon youre palfray sone’, jesting about his being so tightly tied to his horse when ‘Ye must just in tornamente’ (ed. Stevens and Cawley 1994: 290). In some variations on this theme Christ speaks like a knightly lover, as in the lyric beginning ‘Mi love is falle upon a may, / For love of hire I defende this day’, where the narrator’s passionate love is not to be denied (‘Loue aunterus [daring love] no man forsaket; / It woundet sore whan it him taket …’; ed. Brown 1924: no. 73). In different tellings the lady’s response to the Christ-knight’s loving sacrifice may range from indifference to grateful treasuring of the knight’s blood-stained armour, shield or shirt – allegorically, the memory of the Passion – as in Henryson’s The Bludy Serk. Here a knight rescues a lady – abducted from her father and held captive in a dungeon by a giant – but is fatally wounded and begs his grieving lady ‘Tak ye my sark [shirt] that is bludy, / And hing it forrow [in front of] ye’ (lines 75–6). A concluding moralization likens ‘The manis saule to the lady, / The gyane to Lucefeir, / The knycht to Chryst that deit on tre’ (lines 99–101) and concludes ‘Think on the bludy serk’ (line 120).

To think on Christ’s bloodied body as our lover and knight might make any other knightly endeavour seem vain, and many Grail romances – like Malory’s ‘Tale of the Sankgreal’ – exploit the outward forms and conventions of a knightly narrative made up of adventures and quests, except that everything has been transposed and reordered to prompt discovery of otherworldly perspectives. Although Malory has radically pruned much commentary from his French source, La Queste del Saint Graal, retrospective explications by hermits and recluses still promote the reading of all events as signs within a symbolic narrative, with adventures for the successful Grail knights – Bors, Galahad and Perceval – determined by marvellous signs and tokens that transcend and critique conventional knightly adventures. When Perceval’s sister dies willingly, giving ‘a dysshfulle of bloode’ in order that another lady might be healed, this signals that the conventional way of abolishing such an oppressive ‘custom of the castle’ by male knightly challenge has been superseded by a Christ-like self-sacrifice of blood and life by a maiden (‘And therefore there shall no more batayle be’; ed. Vinaver 1990: 1002–3).

Leaving behind their horses (essential to conventional knighthood but also sometimes symbolic of male sexuality), Grail knights move about now on mysterious ships – without sail or oar, and seemingly uncrewed and unvictualled – one of which names itself by an inscription, ‘for I am Faythe’ (984), and contains a sword destined for Galahad, among other marvellous artefacts (including spindles carved from the Tree of Life brought by Eve from Eden). Most of the ships are white, in a narrative where symbolism of whiteness and blackness – as of youth and age, or lions and serpents – is a key to spiritual significance. Nearly carried off to perdition by the fiend in the form of a supernaturally swift black horse, Perceval, alone with wild beasts on a sea-girt mountain, sees a lion battling a serpent, slays the serpent and dreams a ‘mervaylous dreme’ of a young lady riding a lion (she foretells that tomorrow Perceval must fight the world’s greatest champion) and an old lady riding a serpent (she threatens ‘“I shall take you as he that somtyme was my man”’: 914). A priest-like old man on a ship covered in white samite interprets the young lady as the New Law of Holy Church and the old lady and serpent as the Old Law and the devil. After the white ship has gone away ‘he wyste nat whydir’, it is succeeded by a ship ‘coverde with sylk more blacker than ony beré’. Inside is a gentlewoman of great beauty – a shape-shifted Lucifer – who asks for Perceval’s assistance (‘“for ye be a felowe of the Rounde Table”’) because, she claims, the greatest man of the world has disinherited her perpetually as ‘“I had a litill pryde, more than I oughte to have had”’ (917). In sultry weather choice meats and potent wine are served ‘and therewith he was chaffett [heated] a lityll more than he oughte to be … and prayde hir that she wolde be hys’. But, as the naked Perceval is about to lie down beside the naked lady in a pavilion, ‘by adventure and grace he saw hys swerde ly on the erthe naked, where in the pomell was a rede crosse and the sygne of the crucifixe therin’. Making the sign of the cross on his forehead, he promptly sees the pavilion ‘chonged unto a smooke and a blak clowde’ as the lady and her ship go ‘with the wynde, rorynge and yellynge, that hit semed all the water brente after her’ (919). Declaring that since ‘“my fleyssh woll be my mayster, I shall punyssh hit”’, Perceval drives his sword into his thigh in a token self-castration, before the old man in the white ship returns to identify the gentlewoman with the old lady riding on a serpent and with Lucifer (‘“And that was the champion that thou fought withal …”’: 920).