THEMATIC CLASS UNIT

Click a unit below:

1. BEOWULF AND THE ANGLO-SAXON HERO

  1. The Poem and the Translator: Seamus Heaney on Beowulf
  2. The Heroic Ideal

2. LEGENDARY HISTORIES OF BRITAIN
  1. Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Legendary History of Britain
  2. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Context
  3. Malory's Morte Darthur

3. CHAUCER'S CANTERBURY TALES
  1. "Estaat" and "Degree" in the General Prologue
  2. The Wife of Baths Prologue and Medieval Antifeminism
  3. The Wife of Bath's Tale and Arthurian Tradition

4. POETRY AND REBELLION
  1. Piers Plowman's Vision of Social Justice
  2. Voices of Rebellion
  3. Beast Fable and Representations of the Uprising of 1381

5. "HOLY DALLIANCE": JULIAN OF NORWICH AND MARGERY KEMPE
  1. Rules for Holy Women
  2. The Material Visions of Julian of Norwich
  3. What Sort of Woman Was Margery Kempe?

6. STAGING MIRACLES
  1. Religion and the Stage
  2. Reading the Location of the Mystery Plays
  3. The Allegory of Everyman


BEOWULF AND THE ANGLO-SAXON HERO

Texts:Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney
 The Dream of the Rood
 Judith
  
Contexts:Seamus Heaney's Introduction to Beowulf
 Linguistic and Literary contexts of Beowulf
 Exile of the Sons of Uisliu
 Cædmon's Hymn
  
Topics:The Poem and the Translator: Seamus Heaney on Beowulf
 The Heroic Ideal
 Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Epic Tradition

The oldest long poem in English, Beowulf looks back on a still more ancient era, before Christianity came to the warlike Germanic tribes of northern Europe. The world and the values it describes seem almost unimaginably different from our own. Yet as the poem's translator, the poet Seamus Heaney, argues, its themes of heroic struggle and dignity in the face of disaster remain "oddly contemporary."

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The Poem and the Translator: Seamus Heaney on Beowulf

Beowulf has been translated for The Norton Anthology of English Literature by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. Much of Heaney's original poetry deals with the question of memory and the relation of the past to the present. In one famous poem, he compares the craft of the poet to "Digging," delving into the earth and into the past. His "bog poems," including "Punishment," are meditations prompted by the discovery of the bodies of ancient men and women preserved in the bogs of northern Germany. For Heaney, the "bog is a memory bank." Heaney's interest in the ancient cultures of northern Europe lies behind the decision of this Irish poet to translate what is usually regarded as an "English" poem, Beowulf. At the same time, he remains acutely aware of how national and linguistic divides impact every aspect of writing and of life.

Heaney explores these complex questions of language and nationality, memory and belonging, in his introduction to his translation of Beowulf. This introduction provides an excellent starting point for the study of Old English literature, for it explores with great subtlety and power the question of how and why this literature remains relevant today, even to those who would not describe themselves as "English." Heaney declares that Beowulf is "part of my voice-right." As you read his introduction to the translation, and then the translation itself, consider the meaning and implications of this phrase. What is or should be the relationship between the English language in its various forms, dialects, and permutations, and an individual's cultural identity? How would you define the scope of your own "voice-right"?

Introduction to Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000). Reprinted by permission. We include the complete text of the Introduction in Norton Topics Online. The second half, About This Translation, is linked above.

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The Heroic Ideal

Beowulf is one of a number of Old English poems that give powerful expression to the Anglo-Saxon heroic ideal. To understand this ideal, which the Beowulf poet treats with a mixture of reverence and tragic irony, it is best to begin by studying how heroism is depicted in shorter and simpler poems of the Anglo-Saxon era.

Among the most moving and forceful statements of the heroic ethic is found in the late Anglo-Saxon poem The Battle of Maldon. (Listen to a reading of the poem here.) The poem, which recounts a disastrous defeat of the English by Viking invaders, is an excellent example of how poetry can transform historical humiliation into moral victory. The kind of heroism the poem's doomed English warriors embody is not based on superhero-like invincibility, but rather on their unswerving courage and loyalty in the face of inevitable defeat:

Purpose shall be the firmer, heart the keener, courage shall be the more, as our might lessens. Here lies our lord all hewn down, good man on ground. Ever may he lament who now thinks to turn from war-play. I am old of life; from here I will not turn, but by my lord's side, by the man I loved, I intend to lie.

The heroes of The Battle of Maldon are Christians, while their Viking enemies are described as "heathen," but the epic spirit is still the same one that motivates warriors in Beowulf. Christianity did not do away with Germanic heroic poetry but "converted" and transformed it—and was itself transformed in turn. Thus in the religious poem The Dream of the Rood, Christ is represented as a "young Hero," the Crucifixion as a "great struggle," and the personified Cross as a loyal retainer who "must stand fast" with his lord and undergo death and burial with him. The language and motifs of the heroic ethic are applied to teaching a new doctrine whose lesson is to suffer and endure rather than take vengeance. Yet the poem ends on a note of triumph with its reference to the Harrowing of Hell as a warlike rescue mission: "The Son was victorious in that foray, mighty and successful."

Judith is an equally remarkable example of the blending of Biblical history with Anglo-Saxon tradition. Many of the qualities that are in Beowulf ascribed to a heroic leader like Hrothgar are assigned in Judith to the monstrous enemy general Holofernes. He is "the gold-giving friend of his men" who displays his generosity by feasting them into a drunken stupor. Yet Judith, the resourceful and courageous heroine, also embodies certain aspects of the older heroic ideal. In reading Judith, consider to what extent the poem critiques traditional notions of heroism, and to what extent it finds a way of continuing to celebrate them?

These Anglo-Saxon poems can be interestingly compared with the Old Irish tale of the Exile of the Sons of Uisliu. There were many cultural similarities between the Anglo-Saxons and various Celtic-speaking peoples of the British Isles, and all followed a version of the heroic ethic. (This point is emphasized in Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, which incorporates a number of words derived from the Gaelic language.)

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Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Epic Tradition

The earliest epic poems were relatively short works celebrating the deeds of heroes in a warrior society. The Finnsburg episode in Beowulf—a minstrel's lay about the defense of a hall and vengeance for a slain king-are examples of Anglo-Saxon epic in the classic tradition. Before such epics were ever written down, they were composed extemporaneously by professional bards or singers, who drew on a stock of traditional verse formulas. (See the introduction to Cædmon's Hymn, for a discussion of oral-formulaic poetry.) The Beowulf poet has inserted several scenes in which Hrothgar's scop (minstrel) performs in the meadhall. The Old English word scop derives from the verb sceapan, to create. As the etymology indicates, these minstrels were not only the recorders but the creators of history. In a pre-literate society, they preserved the past and gave it a heroic shape.

Beowulf is a much longer as well as a more complex and reflective work than any other surviving example of Anglo-Saxon epic. Although the Christian poet has preserved the oral-formulaic style and incorporated much primitive material from the pagan era, he portrays the heroic world of his pre-Christian ancestors as flawed and vulnerable. The evils that threaten this world are represented not only by the monsters the hero fights and overcomes but also by the code of blood vengeance that underlies the never-ending feuds among the tribes. Although he is profoundly sympathetic to the noble and selfless heroism of Beowulf, the poet hints in many ways at the limitations of the heroic ideal. For example, the allusion to the flames that will ultimately destroy the great hall Heorot, and the description of the funeral fires that consume the corpses at Finnsburg and finally Beowulf's body are a reminder of the apocalyptic fate that awaits the world and all heroic endeavor.

The translator Seamus Heaney argues that the description of Beowulf's funeral pyre retains a powerful resonance and relevance today:

[T]he inexorable and the elegiac combine in a description of the funeral pyre being got ready, the body being burnt and the barrow being constructed-a scene at once immemorial and oddly contemporary. The Geat woman who cries out in dread as the flames consume the body of her dead lord could come straight from a late-twentieth-century news report, from Rwanda or Kosovo; her keen is a nightmare glimpse into the minds of people who have survived traumatic, even monstrous events and who are now being exposed to the comfortless future. We immediately recognize her predicament and the pitch of her grief and find ourselves the better for having them expressed with such adequacy, dignity and unforgiving truth:

On a height they kindled the hugest of all
funeral fires; fumes of woodsmoke
billowed darkly up, the blaze roared
and drowned out their weeping, wind died down
and flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house,
burning it to the core. They were disconsolate
and wailed aloud for their lord's decease.
A Geat woman too sang out in grief;
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament, her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.
(lines 3143-55)

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LEGENDARY HISTORIES OF BRITAIN

Texts:Legendary Histories of Britain
 Marie de France, Lanval
 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
 Sir Thomas Malory, Morte Darthur
  
Contexts:Gerald of Wales, The Exhumation of Arthur's Body
 The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle
 William Caxton, Preface to Morte Darthur
 Geoffrey Chaucer, "Complaint to His Purse"
  
Keywords:Arthurianism; Chivalry; Irony
  
Topics:Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Legendary History of Britain
 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Context
 Malory's Morte Darthur

Throughout the Middle Ages and ever after, the story of King Arthur has been used by rulers, historians, writers, and painters to articulate and comment upon issues of their own times and places. In this unit you will explore the relation of the Arthurian tradition to contemporary culture and politics in medieval Britain.

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Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Legendary History of Britain

No historian had a greater impact on how the peoples of Britain saw themselves in the Middle Ages than Geoffrey of Monmouth—in spite of the fact that almost all of Geoffrey's history is pure fiction. Though Geoffrey claimed that his history was translated out of "a very old book in the British language," his real sources are more likely to have lain in Welsh oral tradition and his own fruitful imagination. Out of these materials he forged an epic vision of British antiquity that would hold sway for almost five centuries. Geoffrey of Monmouth's fabricated history lies behind the grand tradition of King Arthur, as well as Shakespeare's King Lear, and even that nursery-rhyme monarch, Old King Cole.

In his History of the Kings of Britain, Geoffrey describes how refugees from the fallen city of Troy eventually settle in Britain, having been directed there by the goddess Diana (in the passage included in your Norton Anthology). The longest part of the work (more than 20 percent) is devoted to the birth and reign of King Arthur. In the first part of Arthur's reign, he defeats and drives out the pagan Anglo-Saxon invaders. At the end of his reign, the Saxons return at the invitation of the traitor Mordred, and, though defeated again by Arthur in his last battle, they ultimately triumph over his successors. The surviving Britons continue to live in Wales, and become known to the English as the Welsh. Geoffrey's history concludes with a prophecy that the Britons will one day rule the island again. This prophecy soon became associated with the belief that King Arthur himself would return from Avalon to lead his people to victory.

Geoffrey of Monmouth was of Welsh or Breton descent, and he moved in a world dominated by powerful Normans. In his history, he shows little sympathy for the English, who are depicted as treacherous killers. (The only words of English to appear in Geoffrey's Latin History are "Nimet oure saxes"—"Grab your weapons!"—spoken as the signal to massacre the unsuspecting Britons in the middle of a peace conference.) But in spite of Geoffrey's pro-Welsh and anti-English biases, his history was retold and adapted by a host of Anglo-Norman and English writers, beginning with Wace and Layamon. Also in the twelfth century, Marie de France drew on British, Anglo-Norman, and Breton traditions to create an image of Arthurian Britain full of chivalry, mystery, and magic.

Fifty years after Geoffrey of Monmouth introduced Arthur to the Anglo-Norman world, the body of the legendary king was "discovered" at Glastonbury Abbey. This surprising development is an indication both of Arthur's enormous cultural significance, and of the need of England's rulers to convince both themselves and the Welsh that Arthur was really dead. You can read about the discovery of Arthur's tomb in the account of Gerald of Wales, who saw the king's enormous bones displayed at Glastonbury.

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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Context

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the finest English romance of chivalry, the aristocratic medieval ideal that evolved out of the older heroic ethic found in Beowulf. A comparison between the two heroes highlights the similarities and differences between the early Germanic and late-fourteenth-century heroic ideals. Beowulf and Gawain both belong to a ruling military caste, both are courageous warriors, both are zealous for their personal honor, and both risk their lives for their liege-lords and for others. But there is a tremendous difference in their conduct. Whereas the beot, or boastful speech, is part of the heroic code of the Germanic warrior (see Beowulf's description of his swimming feat, lines 529-81), the Christian warrior represented by Gawain is bound by a code of courtesy and humility. Gawain, moreover, is bound not only to an earthly lord but also to a heavenly one.

At the same time, among Arthur's knights, Gawain had a reputation for charm and expertise in the art of love. (This is the reputation the lady in the castle will remind him of, and which he must strive not to live up to.) Gawain's amatory adventures were recounted in many popular stories, including The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle. Here, as in Gawain and the Green Knight, the hero faces his greatest test not on the battlefield, but in the bedroom.

Gawain comes late in a tradition of Arthurian romances that is already more than two centuries old. The poem is complex because the poet loves chivalry but perceives its pretensions and human limitations with ironic and humorous eyes (an attitude in some respects like that of the Beowulf poet to the pre-Christian heroic ethic). Although the events of his poem take place in the distant past, the culture is clearly that of fourteenth-century chivalry. The costumes, the armor, and the architecture in the poem are all fourteenth-century, and so are the moral questions that the poem raises about the meaning of chivalry. In this period, the value of the armored knight on horseback was rapidly declining because of the tactical use of the longbow and the introduction of gunpowder. Yet as the practical utility of knighthood diminished, the cult of chivalry flourished in heraldry, ceremony, and spectacle. Edward III and his court were passionately fond of tournaments and of pageantry; the king vowed to reestablish King Arthur's Round Table, and eventually founded the Order of the Garter, the oldest and highest order of knighthood in Great Britain. The New Year's celebrations in Gawain are a reflection of—and perhaps a critical comment upon—contemporary events.

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Malory's Morte Darthur

Whereas the Gawain poet takes a mildly ironic view of contemporary chivalry, Sir Thomas Malory, three quarters of a century later, expresses nostalgia for chivalry as something belonging to a vanished age. Malory himself was certainly no chivalric hero. He was imprisoned on charges including rape, extortion, and the plundering of a religious house. In the Wars of the Roses he switched sides repeatedly, from Lancaster to York and back again. Yet it may be that the author's own failure to live up to the ideals of chivalry enhanced the enthusiasm with which he depicts the virtues of a bygone age, and the bitterness with which he laments their collapse. In the final destruction of Arthur's kingdom through the jealousy and treachery of his knights, Malory shows us a distant reflection of the Wars of the Roses. Having told of Mordred's betrayal, the author addresses a direct warning to his audience:

Lo, ye all Englishmen, see ye not what mischief here was? For he . . . was the most [greatest] king and noblest knight of the world, and most loved the fellowship of noble knights, . . . and yet might not these Englishmen hold them content with them. Lo thus was the old custom and usages of this land, and men say that we of this land have not yet lost that custom. Alas! this is a great default of us Englishmen, for they may no thing please us no term. (Book 21, Chapter 1, not in NAEL)

Malory believed strongly in the historicity of King Arthur, but he was skeptical about the myth of Arthur's return and, by extension, about the hope for a revival of chivalry. Malory's Morte Darthur seems both to celebrate and ring the death knell for the ideals embodied in King Arthur's court. At the same time, it completes the process that had been ongoing since Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain more than three hundred years earlier—the transformation of Arthur from a British hero, the scourge of the English, into a thoroughly English king.

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CHAUCER'S CANTERBURY TALES

Text:Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
  
Contexts:John Gower, Vox Clamantis
 The Romance of the Rose
 Aelfric, "Those Who Pray, Work, and Fight"
 Ramón Lull, The Book of the Order of Chivalry
 The Rule of Saint Benedict
 The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle
  
Keywords:Estates satire; Querelle des femmes
  
Topics:"Estaat" and "Degree" in the General Prologue
 The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Medieval Antifeminism
 The Wife of Bath's Tale and the Arthurian Tradition

Although Geoffrey Chaucer's works were not widely known in his own lifetime, later generations would recognize him as the preeminent poet of the Middle Ages. The Elizabethan Edmund Spenser dubbed him the "well of English undefiled," and John Dryden called him "the father of English poetry." While Chaucer's greatness is worthy of such praise, he was hardly the isolated and purely original genius these compliments imply. Instead, as you will discover in this unit, Chaucer's poetry developed out of and responded to an already rich literary tradition. Understanding the literary context of The Canterbury Tales is vital to appreciating the nature and scope of Chaucer's achievement.

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"Estaat" and "Degree" in the General Prologue

Near the beginning of the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, the narrator tells his audience that he will describe the "condicioun" of the pilgrims, their "degree" (social rank), "whiche they were," and also "what array that they were inne." At the end, he says that he has now told their "estaat" and "array" and apologizes if he has not arranged them in the "degree . . . as that they sholde stonde," that is, in their correct social order.

This professed concern for putting people in their proper place is obviously of great interest to the poet and his audience. It should also be a matter of interest and amusement to modern readers, especially if they realize that the poet's ostensible concern for propriety is a mask he puts on. What is interesting about Chaucer's Prologue is not that it portrays an archaic and closed social order but that it reveals that order in the process of breaking down. Most of Chaucer's pilgrims are by no means content to stay in their proper places and are engaged in the pursuit of wealth, status, and respectability. The conflict between the old and the new, between tradition and ambition, is evident not only in the General Prologue but throughout The Canterbury Tales in the individual pilgrims' prologues and tales.

Chaucer's General Prologue has been compared to works in the tradition of "estates satire," such as John Gower's Vox Clamantis and Mirour de l'Omme, and the Prologue to Piers Plowman. Yet as pointed out in the introduction to the General Prologue, Chaucer relies more upon gentle irony than upon heavy-handed satire to make his points.

As you read the General Prologue, and the ensuing tales, ask yourself the following questions:

  1. How can the pilgrims be divided between those who conform to their estate and those who do not?
  2. How does Chaucer's narrator view those whose lives do not match their traditional roles? Does he seem more critical of those who challenge the social order or the social order itself?
  3. How can the poet's thoughts about the social order and the individual pilgrims be distinguished from those of the narrator?

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The Wife of Baths Prologue and Medieval Antifeminism

In the course of her Prologue, the Wife of Bath delivers a powerful retort to the male authors of antifeminist literature:

For trusteth wel, it is an impossible
That any clerk wol speke good of wives,
But if it by of holy saintes lives,
N'of noon other womman nevere the mo-
Who painted the leon, tel me who?
(lines 694-98)

The Wife's provocative question refers to Aesop's fable "The Man and the Lion." Here it is in full:

A Man and a Lion traveled together through the forest. They soon began to boast of their respective superiority to each other in strength and prowess. As they were disputing, they passed a statue carved in stone, which represented "a Lion strangled by a Man." The traveler pointed to it and said: "See there! How strong we are, and how we prevail over even the king of beasts." The Lion replied: "This statue was made by one of you men. If we Lions knew how to erect statues, you would see the Man placed under the paw of the Lion."

One story is good, till another is told.

As applied by the Wife of Bath, Aesop's fable demonstrates that if women were to write treatises on gender relations, they would produce something very different from the "book of wikked wives." The irony is that the Wife of Bath is herself the fictional creation of a male author, and many of her attributes are derived from the sort of books she describes. Even as she protests against it, she contributes to the tradition of male-authored misogynist literature.

The Wife of Bath bears a particularly close resemblance to the Old Woman in The Romance of the Rose, a hugely popular and influential French poem that Chaucer had translated into English. Chaucer borrowed extensively from this work for the Wife of Bath's Prologue as well as for the portrait of the Prioress in the General Prologue. Read the advice of the Old Woman from The Romance of the Rose and consider how Chaucer went about the process of adapting this work for his own purposes. To what extent did he modify or critique the misogyny of the original?

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The Wife of Bath's Tale and Arthurian Tradition

The Wife of Bath's Tale is a story of King Arthur's days, "many hundred yeres ago." She thinks of it as a time when "Al was this land fulfild of fairye," though "now can no man see none elves mo." Like many other Arthurian writers you have encountered, the Wife of Bath uses the Arthurian tradition to make a point about the time she lives in.

What seems to be the source of the Wife of Bath's information about King Arthur? Which of the Arthurian writers you have previously encountered—Geoffrey of Monmouth, Marie de France, Wace, Layamon, the Gawain poet, and Sir Thomas Malory—comes closest to the Wife of Bath's vision of the Arthurian age? Is the Wife simply telling a "fairy tale," or does she consider the events she describes to be part of national history? There is a particularly close parallel between the Wife of Bath's Tale and one of the popular tales about Sir Gawain, The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle. Both stories tell of a knight who is forced to marry a woman of repulsive appearance, and must then answer a very difficult question on his wedding night. Since The Wedding has come down to us only in a sixteenth-century manuscript (though it is certainly older than that), it is difficult to assess which of these two stories may have influenced the other, or if each of them relies on a common source. Reading them side by side, consider what similarities and what differences exist between them, in the representation of Arthur's court, of the knight at the center of the story, and of the nature of womankind.

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POETRY AND REBELLION

Texts:William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman
 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Nun's Priest's Tale
  
Contexts:Texts from the Uprising of 1381
 John Gower, Vox Clamantis
  
Keywords:Fable; Utopia; Propaganda
  
Topics:Piers Plowman's Vision of Social Justice
 Voices of Rebellion
 Beast Fable and Representations of the Uprising of 1381

In the lifetime of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, English society was shaken by the greatest rebellion of the Middle Ages. The anger of poor people subjected to wage controls and arbitrary and unjust poll taxes erupted in June 1381 in the rebellion often referred to as the Peasants' Revolt but more recently as the Uprising of 1381. The rebels moved through the countryside, breaking into houses of officials and burning documents. Admitted into London by sympathizers, they burned down the palace of Chaucer's patron, the duke of Lancaster, and captured and executed the archbishop of Canterbury and the lord treasurer. Eventually the government regained control, the rebels were dispersed, and their leaders executed. But the Uprising sent shockwaves through society and is reflected in many ways in the literature of the period.

Before going further, read the discussion of the Uprising of 1381 in the section on "Middle English Literature in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries" in the "Introduction to the Middle Ages."

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Piers Plowman's Vision of Social Justice

For both Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, the humble Plowman serves as an ideal representative of the laboring class. In the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, the Plowman is described as "Living in pees and parfit charitee" (line 534). In Langland's Piers Plowman, the titular hero enters near the end of Passus 5 to show the pilgrims the way to Saint Truth. In the next episode, "The Plowing of Piers's Half-Acre," he explains to the knight the proper division of labor according to estates theory:

I shall sweat and strain and sow for us both,
And also labor for your love all my lifetime,
In exchange for your championship of Holy Church and me
Against wasters and wicked men who would destroy me.
(Passus 6, lines 25-27).

Langland's saintly Piers Plowman is clearly no rebel. At no point in the poem does he contemplate violating the natural order of estates by taking up arms against his betters. Yet Langland was nevertheless an indignant observer of injustice in his society, and Piers Plowman can be read as, among other things, a call for social reform. One simple and utopian solution to the unjust division of society into rich and poor is allegorized in the plowing of Piers's half-acre: everyone should work together to produce the resources consumed by all:

And all sorts of folk that feed on farm products,
Busily abet him who brings forth your food.
(lines 19-20)

As you read the assigned passages from Piers Plowman, consider the way social relationships and social systems are depicted. What does Langland appear to believe would amount to a just social order?

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Voices of Rebellion

The participants in the failed Uprising of 1381 did not, of course, write their own history. Most of what is known about the rebellion comes from clerical chroniclers, who wrote about it out of deep shock and outrage, and from judicial records of the trials of rebels. The rebels' own voices survive only in a chant attributed to them—"When Adam delved [digged] and Eve span, Who was then a gentleman?"—and in a series of cryptic utterances quoted in the chronicles of Henry Knighton and Thomas Walsingham. They are all that survives of what might be called a literature of protest. One scholar has suggested that they were letters or manifestos posted by the rebels in public places-for example, on church doors.

Two of these short texts make apparent reference to Langland's Piers Plowman. What do you make of this remarkable alliance between a largely illiterate popular movement and a literary character? What do the references suggest about the rebels' understanding (or misunderstanding) of the poem? Consider as well the status of these letters and statements as texts. How do they resemble and how do they differ from the works of medieval literature you have read in this course? Can these documents of the rebellion also be regarded as literature?

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Beast Fable and Representations of the Uprising of 1381

A beast fable is a story that represents animals acting like humans. The ancient master of this literary mode was of course Aesop, whose fables were widely known in the middle ages, just as they are today. (Remember the Wife of Bath's reference to the fable of the Man and the Lion.) Like dream visions, fables of this sort could be used as a means of commenting on moral problems or current events.

Perhaps the most famous and entertaining of all medieval beast fables is Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, which tells of Chauntecleer the rooster and his encounter with a hungry fox. Near the end of the tale, as a crowd of humans and animals are chasing after the fox, the narrator makes a remarkable allusion to the Uprising of 1381, recalling the terror and confusion of being in London at that time:

Certes, he Jakke Straw and his meinee
Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrille
Whan that they wolden any Fleming kille,
As thilke day was maad upon the fox . . .
(lines 574-77)

Chaucer's treatment of the events of 1381 may be compared with the more sustained treatment of the Uprising by his contemporary John Gower. The first book of Gower's Vox Clamantis is both a dream vision and a beast fable. The poet has a nightmare in which domesticated animals—the peasants—suddenly rise up against their human masters.

Can you think of ways in which beast fable is still employed by political commentators today?

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"HOLY DALLIANCE": JULIAN OF NORWICH AND MARGERY KEMPE

Texts:Julian of Norwich, A Book of Showing
 Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe
  
Contexts:Ancrene Riwle
 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath's Prologue
  
Keywords:Autobiography; Patriarchy; Simile
  
Topics:Rules for Holy Women
 The Material Visions of Julian of Norwich
 What Sort of Woman Was Margery Kempe?

Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe were contemporaries, and both lived in the same part of England. As Kempe records, the two actually met and spent many days together in "holy dalliance." Both women were intensely religious women, and both were authors of remarkable, soul-baring records of their devotional experiences. Yet in many ways, they could not have been more different. While Julian lived a solitary life as an anchoress "dead to the world," Kempe traveled widely and stood against the will of her husband and church authorities. These two writers reveal something of the breadth of experience open to English women in the last century of the Middle Ages.

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Rules for Holy Women

In the later Middle Ages, some spiritually inclined men and women chose to live as hermits or recluses instead of joining religious communities. The women who took this course were known as anchoresses. The Ancrene Riwle (Rule for Anchoresses), was written for three English sisters, all of whom chose a life "dead to the world."

The Introduction to Ancrene Riwle may strike some modern readers as being stuffed with rather repressive moral advice. Remarkably, however, the author of this book counsels the anchoress not to worry too much about the outward regulation of their lives—that is the regulation of speech, clothing, diet, and behavior that was so important for both nuns in convents and laywomen in the secular world. Free from prying eyes and the obsession with surfaces, the self-entombed anchoress could open herself up to passionate internal experiences. The Norton Anthology of English Literature includes one story from the Ancrene, "The Parable of the Christ Knight," which compares the anchoress's relationship with Jesus to that of a lady sought after by a noble knight in a chivalric romance.

Ancrene Riwle serves as an introduction and companion to the works of Julian of Norwich, who was an anchoress, and Margery Kempe, who was not. As you read their works, consider how they might have read and interpreted Ancrene Riwle. What light does this manual for holy women shed on the personal and passionate Showings of Julian of Norwich? How does it help you understand the spiritual and social dilemmas of a woman like Margery Kempe who felt a religious vocation but was not in a religious order or an anchoress's cell? How would each woman have responded to "The Parable of the Christ Knight"?

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The Material Visions of Julian of Norwich

Much of the strange beauty and fascination of Julian of Norwich's Book of Showings results from the fact that her visions are simultaneously spiritual (or "ghostly") and intensely physical (or "bodily"). Some of the visual experiences she describes could strike the reader as horrifying—"I saw the red blood flowing down from under the garland, hot and freshly, plenteously and lively"—yet these visions open her heart to divine knowledge, and carry a message of "endless joy and our bliss." She is capable of describing a single vision as "quick and lively and hideous and dreadful and sweet and lovely."

Julian often invokes quite ordinary and "homely" images in order to express what she has seen in her visions. In one of her similes, the blood flowing from beneath the garland is "like to the drops of water that fall of the evesing of an house after a great shower of rain, that fall so thick that no man may number them with no bodily wit. And for the roundness they were like to the scale of herring in the spreading of the forehead." One reason for choosing images of this kind is that they will be instantly recognizable to all of her readers. What other reasons might there be? What does Julian herself say about the "great homeliness" of her visions?

Julian describes Christ not only as a martyr but as a mother. Although there are many precedents for this in medieval theology and in art, the physicality of Julian's imagination makes this image especially striking and provocative. What aspects of Christ make him maternal in Julian's eyes? What virtues does the anchoress—who is unlikely herself to have had any children—associate with the role of the mother?

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What Sort of Woman Was Margery Kempe?

Margery Kempe posed a challenge to her patriarchal society and to the religious establishment because she combined two roles that were generally supposed to remain distinct, those of holy woman and wife.

Kempe was not an anchoress or a member of a religious order. Yet as she records in her Book, she visited the anchoress Julian of Norwich and spent many days communing with her in "holy dalliance." (Kempe's record of this visit is our main source of information about Julian, aside from the Showings themselves.) There are many similarities between these two deeply religious women. Like Julian, Kempe developed an intense and intensely personal relationship with Christ. And like the anchoress, she had ecstatic religious experiences—her "cryings"—which mingled spiritual and physical sensations, leaving her weak and filled with "passing great sweetness of devotion." Arguably, the main difference between the two women is that Margery Kempe lived her life in the world, where her unconventional and extrovert piety often made her the object of distrust and contempt.

Margery Kempe also bears an intriguing resemblance to that much less saintly woman, the Wife of Bath. Like Chaucer's fictional character, Kempe engaged in a conflict with her husband over their sexual relationship (as recorded in Chapter I.11: Margery and Her Husband Reach a Settlement). She also shared the Wife's keen awareness of being the object of social hostility, emanating especially from the masculine religious establishment of clerks and priests. Moreover, both women undertook pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Are these parallels merely superficial, or do they point to a deeper similarity?

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STAGING MIRACLES

Texts:The York Play of the Crucifixion
 The Wakefield Second Shepherds' Play
 Everyman
  
Contexts:William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman
  
Topics:Religion and the Stage
 Reading the Location of the Mystery Plays
 The Allegory of Everyman

In the fifteenth century, the drama rose to a new prominence in England. Many towns took to showing off their prosperity through elaborate cycles of mystery plays, in which members of the city guilds reenacted Christian history from the Creation to the Last Judgment. In the same period, troops of actors were touring England with morality plays such as Everyman, featuring personified vices and virtues. Both types of drama seem to have been popular with people high and low in society. More than most kinds of medieval literature, they provide us with insight into how the common people spoke and thought, and how they were entertained.

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Religion and the Stage

Both morality plays like Everyman and the mystery plays attempt to deliver religious doctrine through a dramatic structure. Popular religious drama of this kind bore a complex relation to the medieval church. The mystery and morality plays reflected Christian teaching, generally without heresy. Their authors were in fact usually priests or friars. But churchmen did not produce or act in these plays. Instead, the mystery plays were performed by the craft and trade guilds of the town; the moralities were performed by troops of strolling players. Their language was not the Latin of the liturgy, but the vernacular tongue (English, Welsh, or Cornish) of the common people. Though the church generally approved of such productions, there was always anxiety that the players might stray from orthodoxy into heresy, or that their vulgar antics might bring religion into disrepute.

As you read these plays, take note of the different strategies they employ to educate the audience about the truths of Christian doctrine and Christian experience. Does everything in these plays contribute to that educational project, or are some episodes included solely for entertainment or dramatic effect? Are religious values harmonized with dramatic values, or do they pull in opposite directions?

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Reading the Location of the Mystery Plays

The introduction to the mystery plays emphasizes the festive and communal character of the plays, which dramatized episodes in the Bible. In performance, the town itself became an extension of the stage. This manner of staging broke down the historical and psychological distance between the far-off biblical event and the audience surrounding the pageant. The shepherds of Bethlehem (in the Wakefield play) and the grumbling workmen who carry out the crucifixion (in the York play) share the language, outlook, and preoccupations of late-medieval English laborers. They, like the amateur actors who played them, could be recognized as the audience's friends and contemporaries.

In The Wakefield Second Shepherd's Play (1.391-419), the shepherds Coll, Gib, and Daw speak in the broad Yorkshire dialect of Wakefield. So, as far as we can tell from their short speeches, do the Angel and Mary. Significantly, the only character in the play to adopt a different accent is the comic villain Mak. On his first appearance, Mak pretends to be a messenger of the king and speaks arrogantly in a southern English accent until Coll tells him to "take out that Southern tooth" (1.400, line 311).

Strange as it may seem, people in northern England in the late Middle Ages felt close to the people of the Bible—closer, perhaps, than they did to their southern English neighbors. The Wakefield shepherds' hostility toward a speaker with a "Southern tooth" is not altogether surprising. In an age when travel was difficult and uncommon, the only southern English accents most Yorkshire people might ever hear would be those of arrogant royal emissaries demanding money or soldiers for the king in London.

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The Allegory of Everyman

Everyman, like other morality plays, is an allegorical drama. The particular form of allegory employed is known as personification. Personification involves the attribution of individual human qualities to something other than a human individual. Personification can be applied to an abstract quality (such as Beauty or Knowledge in Everyman), to an inanimate object (such as Goods), or to a collection of persons (such as the character Kindred). All or almost all of the characters in Everyman are personifications, and through their behavior and interactions they expound the play's religious doctrine. Yet many readers feel that the play's dramatic success depends less on the way it unfolds the steps leading to the soul's salvation than on the realistic—and very human—behavior of the friends who abandon Everyman when they learn what "journey he is about to take."

The use of personification allegory in Everyman can be instructively compared with its use in Langland's Piers Plowman, especially in the episode "The Plowing of Piers's Half-Acre" .The personifications in this episode include Hunger and Waster:

Then Hunger in haste took hold of Waster by the belly
And gripped him so about the guts that his eyes gushed water.
He buffeted the Breton about the cheeks
That he looked like a lantern all his life after.
(1.332, lines 174-77)

This allegorical event is easily interpreted as describing the fate of everyone who consumes without producing: they will suffer the pangs of starvation and appear obviously emaciated. Yet there are also details in this episode that seem to exceed or be irrelevant to the allegory. This Waster is a Breton (a man from Brittany in the north of France)—but this surely does not mean either that only Bretons are wasters or that all Bretons are. Moreover, the Plowing episode also includes characters such as the knight and Piers Plowman himself, who are not necessarily personifications in a strict sense.

More generally, we can conclude that many forms of medieval literature—including morality plays—require us to be able to read allegorically. However, awareness of the allegory should not lead us to dismiss what else may be happening on other levels of the text. Personification allegory may provide one key to interpreting a medieval literary work, but rarely if ever is it the only key.

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