GUILTY PLEASURES: PIETY, PROFANITY, AND INCONGRUITY IN THE LAND

OF COKAYGNE, THE MILLER’S TALE, AND THE KING OF TARS

by

Bethany Smith

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in English in the
Graduate College of
The University of Iowa

December 2018

Thesis Supervisor: Professor Jonathan Wilcox





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 Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

____________________________

PH.D. THESIS
_________________

This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of

Bethany Johnson Smith

has been approved by the Examining Committee for

the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy degree
in English at the December 2018 graduation.

Thesis Committee: ____________________________________________

Jonathan Wilcox, Thesis Supervisor

____________________________________________
Kathy Lavezzo

____________________________________________
Blaine Greteman

____________________________________________
Carol Severino

____________________________________________
Bluford Adams

!
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply indebted to the many people who have made this project possible.

Jonathan Wilcox has been a patient, encouraging, and unflappable thesis director, and I

am immensely grateful for his support. Kathy Lavezzo sparked many of the ideas at the

root of this project, and shaped their development. Claire Sponsler was a gracious early

reader and her presence on the committee is greatly missed. Carol Severino’s expertise

has informed how I approach both students’ writing and my own, and influenced the

orientation of this project. Many thanks, as well, to Bluford Adams for kindly agreeing to

serve as a committee member.

My gratitude extends to many others in the University of Iowa community and

beyond. I have benefited greatly from Megan Knight’s generous mentorship, which has

shaped me as a teacher, writer, and human. I am fortunate to have worked alongside

Annmarie Steffes, Chelsea Burk, Eliza Sanders, and Lisa Kammensjo, whose scholarly

examples, good advice, and warm comradeship have been invaluable throughout this

process; Ashley Ford and Haylee Ralston have also been faithful sounding boards.

Finally, I am deeply grateful to Dr. Patricia Condon for urging me to complete this

dissertation, and lending me her office to write it in.

Many thanks to Brenda, Henry, and George Johnson for filling my life, from the

start, with equal parts love and books. Last and most importantly, I am profoundly

thankful for the partnership of my spouse, Remington Smith, without whose financial,

emotional, and practical support I would not have written a word.

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 ABSTRACT

This project considers profane moments in three Middle English texts which use

an incongruous combination of religious elements and exaggerated misbehavior to

entertain the reader, as well as to critique, question, or mock established values and their

all-too-human representatives. Each text draws its form from popular, entertaining

genres, yet inserts learned and pious elements. The resulting collisions of cultural

registers including high and low, sacred and profane, create ludic and layered

explorations of those categories. In each text, undercurrents of incongruity and inversion

blur, invert, or exaggerate the shocking or entertaining effect of bad behavior. I read this

combination of contrasting influences as a carnivalesque and at times subversive form of

social commentary, and suggest that both the popularity and the religiosity of each text

are key to its provocative incongruity.

In addition to the transgressive elements that knowingly elicit a strong audience

reaction, each text has its unintentionally offensive aspects— passages likely be read

differently by readers today than in the fourteenth century. In each chapter, I consider

some of the pedagogical challenges and opportunities afforded by not only aesthetically

but ideologically shocking elements, and the tensions these moments stand to expose in

both their medieval context and the contemporary literature classroom. My approach

combines cultural studies and pedagogy to ask how abstract hierarchies of low and high,

profane and sacred, can be explored through the use of these entertaining, yet

challenging, texts in a college classroom setting, using moments of exaggerated

transgression to generate practical approaches to discussion with students.

iii"
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 PUBLIC ABSTRACT

This dissertation focuses on bad behavior by religious characters or in religious

settings in three fourteenth century texts. The characters’ vulgar jokes, illicit sex, and

skillful deceit not only shock and entertain the audience but also, I suggest, prompt

further reflection on the ideals we use to order society and measure human behavior. By

turning upside down categories like sacred vs. secular or high vs. low, these narratives

combine what is familiar with what is unfamiliar in mocking, allusive, and creative ways

that respond to tensions in medieval society and prompt the reader to notice, and perhaps

respond to, the gulf between what is ideal and what is real.

I will consider the possible meanings of these shocking moments in the

contemporary classroom, as well as in their original context. For today’s readers and

students, each text might prompt discussion regarding not only profane humor or daring

subterfuge, but also how the medieval attitudes toward sexual ethics and racial and

religious difference reflect and diverge from current ones. By considering potential

challenges and strategies related to reading, studying, and teaching the transgressions we

see in these examples, I will consider strategies for approaching each text both as a

historical artifact within its own context, and as part of a conversation that is active in our

own classrooms and cultures.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: ..........................................................................................................1
Medieval Texts and Modern Readers in the Contemporary Classroom ........................12

CHAPTER 1: GARDEN OF EATIN’: EXAGGERATION AND CRITIQUE IN

THE LAND OF COKAYGNE ......................................................................................18
Big Rock Candy Mountain: Cokaygne as Culinary Paradise ........................................28
“He that Slepeth Best:” Cokaygne as Critique ..............................................................37
“Ful grete penaunce:” Cokaygne as Parodied Eden ......................................................45

CODA: RESPONDING TO INCONGRUITY IN “COKAYGNE” .............................59

CHAPTER 2: “TURNE OVER THE LEEFE:” MISPLACED BELIEFS AND

MISDIRECTED KISSES IN “THE MILLER”S TALE” ..............................................69
“Lord Willin’ and the Creek Don’t Rise:” Prayers and Floods, Redirected ..................74
Old Husband, New Noah: The Flood, Told and Re-Told ..............................................79
Sunday Best: Sacraments and Supplications Profaned ..................................................85
“Set Your Mind on Things Above:” Prophecy, Strategized ..........................................91
“Consider the Lilies of the Field:” Sacraments and Squeamishness, Disregarded ........95

CODA: RESPONDING TO SHOCK AND THE LUDIC

IN “THE MILLER’S TALE” ......................................................................................105

CHAPTER 3: ENTERTAINING ANGELS: DIVINE DREAMING AND

DISSEMBLING IN THE KING OF TARS ................................................................114
“The flesche lay stille as ston:” Revulsion, Revelation, and the Lump Child .............123
Inside Out: Putting the “Con” in Conversion ..............................................................136
The Dream of Scipio and the Bride of Christ in The King of Tars ..............................145

CODA: RESPONDING TO DIFFICULTIES IN THE KING OF TARS ...................162

CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................169

WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................175

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 INTRODUCTION! !

The narrator of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales warns the audience, before

recounting the Miller’s story, to “turne over the leef and chese another tale” if they lack

the stomach for a churlish, ribald story and prefer something polite and edifying. The

speaker’s gesture preemptively counters the presumed expectation that a story ought to be

didactic or improving in nature—or at the very least, inoffensive. The tale that follows is,

famously, one of the most profane and humorous in the collection. It’s also a text whose

very crudeness is fed by learnedness and cosmopolitanism given that Chaucer was

widely-traveled and widely-read, and conversant with the classical and European fabliaux

traditions upon which the tale is built.

Like the Miller’s Tale, the texts to be considered here incorporate both learned

and lewd elements. They are given shape by moments in which ostensibly religious

settings or pious characters become the site of entertainingly transgressive behavior, and

in which elite cultural echoes inform a popular, even pulpy, narrative. The resulting

uneasy balance between shock and sensationalism, on one hand, and the (often distorted)

presence of the learned and didactic, on the other, both exaggerates and undermines the

divisions between these categories. “The Land of Cokaygne” is an exuberantly parodic

reworking of culinary and religious paradises; “The Miller’s Tale,” Chaucer’s famously

bawdy fabliau, is perhaps remembered more for its use of scatology than of theology, but

the two are intertwined; and The King of Tars is a romance whose most crowd-pleasing

dramatic moments are buttressed by respected religious and intellectual traditions.

The chapters to follow will consider three fourteenth-century Middle English texts

which incongruously pair the profane and the sacred, the edifying and the degrading; the

! 1!
high and the low. The discussion will employ a two-pronged approach: first, I will

explore the workings of incongruous influences within the texts, asking how each text’s

most rule-breaking moments rely on, subvert, or comment upon established medieval

cultural hierarchies and norms. Second, nested within this broader approach will be

parallel discussions of the texts in a contemporary context, and particularly of

pedagogical considerations involved in teaching these medieval texts with attentiveness

to both their shock or entertainment value, and their historical and literary significance.

Each text draws on multiple prior texts, traditions, and tropes—not only as

general influences or analogues, but as conversation partners whose interior presence and

reworking is essential, and often overtly alluded to. They incorporate the overarching

structure of medieval Christianity, as well as literary traditions informed by classical

antiquity, European thought, and emerging vernacular genres. They are also informed by

the cultural tides and concerns of a fourteenth century marked by famine during its first

decades and plague during the latter half; in addition, man-made disruptions included

costly Anglo-French and Anglo-Scottish warfare reliant on high taxation. The midcentury

population devastation of the Black Death was simultaneously a collective trauma and an

economic game-changer which worked to the laborer’s advantage despite legislation,

taxation, and sumptuary laws aimed at preserving the estates structure in the years of

unrest leading up to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Simultaneous intellectual and religious

shifts include turns toward vernacularization and increased emphasis on lay piety which

questioned institutional and individual worldliness and hypocrisy, often using satirical

forms to do so. Key moments of seeming (or actual) misbehavior occur, in each text,

against a changing social and religious backdrop; these incongruous acts’ possible

! 2!
meanings rely on, play with, and allude to, a swirl of vernacular literary conversation

regarding swift social change, economic hardship, and resistance to corruption and abuse

of power, both sacred and secular.1

In each text, these tensions are expressed via images that walk (or in the more

playful texts, dance) along a tightrope strung between the poles of the immaterial and

spiritual, and the somatic and corporeal. The exaggerations, misdeeds, and intentional

faux pas involved in these profanatory moments are arresting and incongruous in ways

that range from the ludic, to the threatening, to the abject—and they use networks of

literary reverberation to heighten their own effect, whether by legitimizing the behavior

portrayed on one hand, emphasizing its transgressiveness on the other, or ensuring that it

points beyond itself and to speak to broader cultural contexts.

To begin, I will discuss ways in which the (mis)behavior of the monks in the

fourteenth-century Anglo-Irish poem The Land of Cokaygne both draws on, and diverges

from, the tradition of the peasant’s dream of a culinary paradise, layering these elements

with more elevated visions of Eden and tropes of clerical critique to produce a hyperbolic

fantasy ruled by excess and bent on the parodic inversion and distortion of religious

tradition. A clear strain of anticlericalism underlies The Land of Cokaygne’s portrait of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
1
The New Cambridge Medieval History: Volume VI c. 1300-c. 1415, Ed. Michael Jones,
Cambridge UP, 2000. See also Alcuin Blamires, "Crisis and Dissent," pp. 139-147, and
S.H. Rigby, “English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Deference, Ambition, and
Conflict,” pp. 25-39, both in A Companion to Chaucer, edited by Peter Brown,
Blackwell, 2000. For accounts of satirical critique, including of the clergy, see Samuel
Marion Tucker’s Verse Satire in England Before the Renaissance. AMS Press, 1966;
Wendy Scase offers a legal and judicial account of “the literature of clamour” in
Literature and Complaint in England, 1272-1553, Oxford UP, 2007.

! 3!
monkish excess and rapaciousness; yet the critique is softened by a culinary fantasy

setting that distances and abstracts these abuses, and both exaggerates and trivializes the

idea of penance— and perhaps of justice itself. Sacred and profane, in the end, blur and

collapse into one indistinct category via the mingled cross purposes of genres obsessed

with hedonism and didacticism. Because the surrounding narrative is so hyperbolically

imaginary and unreal— obsessed with the concepts of overabundant food, sex, and

excrement, yet vague about the details and implications— its delivery of a moral message

is more pleasurable than pointed and it is the parodic combination of multiple popular

and pious traditions that is most memorable. The inversion of transcendent and abject

elements not only swaps their positions to privilege the latter, but disempowers both by

erasing their distinctions and self-consciously emphasizing the emptiness of

“Cokaygne”’s moral compass, leaving the most power in the hands of the ridiculous and

exaggerated imagery itself.

The next chapter veers from fanciful to truly fleshy, to offer a reading of

irreverent and grotesque moments in arguably the most concrete example of the three—

Chaucer’s "The Miller's Tale." The setting shifts from a dreamlike and perversely

monastic setting, to a secular city in which church bells serve mostly as a reminder of the

time of day or an excuse for characters to meet, and religious practice is a means to

hedonistic ends— yet its structures and trappings are more overtly present than in most

analogues. Here, too, the the sacred and profane, corporeal and incorporeal, are uneasily

fused as the structures of medieval Christendom are introduced, repeatedly and in detail,

into the relatively secular fabliaux structure and characters with ostensibly spiritual or

intellectual vocations, like cleric or scholar, seek to couple with the lusty Alisoun. "The

! 4!
Miller's Tale” pointedly exposes the mismatches between its characters’ religious,

romantic, and intellectual pretensions— but the sacred elements, in this case, serve to

heighten the audience’s sense of the profane ones. The consequences all three male

characters suffer are related less to their spirituality or morality, and more to their

mishandling of competing narratives and inability to function cannily within a profane (in

both senses— the merely secular and the overtly sexual) social network and a topsy-turvy

set of narrative and religious tropes. Whereas "The Land of Cokaygne" arguably

trivializes both the sacred and profane indiscriminately, "The Miller's Tale" trivializes the

former while elevating the latter, inverting their normal positions.

Finally, I will turn my attention to the idealized, yet duplicitous, heroine of the

fourteenth-century Middle English romance The King of Tars. This text is much more

earnest in tone, and much more aggressively structured around sacraments like marriage,

conversion and baptism, than the nominally-monastic Cokaygne or the fairly secular “The

Miller's Tale.” Yet despite The King of Tars’ investment in religious solemnities and

gestures toward hagiographic tropes, there is an incongruously bombastic edge to its

fantasies of bravery and gore, miraculous visions and grotesque transformations. The

heroine’s transgressive actions are excused—enlisted, even— in service of the pleasure

of the romance. In a narrative in which the battles and marriages of popular romance are

buttressed unexpectedly by allusions to erudite dream theory, religious tropes are

subsumed by the uncanny, fantastical symbolism of the poem. action, and even between

waking and dreaming, in a story that leans on allusions to dream theory and mysticism.

The incongruity of the heroine’s piety and dissembling is not resolved or even overtly

acknowledged; rather, it is transformed by the text’s genre-bending moves into a holy lie.

! 5!
The text unites seemingly disparate threads—the sacred and profane, pulpy and

didactic—to form a canny mixture of religion and romance. The resulting romance, rather

than inverting the opposites it contains, elevates both its popular and elite echoes and

subsumes the power of the latter to propel the former.

I suggest that both the popularity and the religiosity of each text are key to its

provocative incongruity. Each text is written in the vernacular and thus accessible to a

general English-speaking audience rather than requiring its audience to be French or

Latin-speakers; each is informed by elite tradition, but takes the form of a popular genre

rather than an overtly learned one. Though Christianity is arguably an inescapable

cultural context for medieval texts, none of the three narratives necessarily requires that

religious practice be foregrounded to the extent that it is; put in place, though, this

emphatic sacred overlay heightens the sense of incongruity. Ultimately each relies on

echoes of elite culture (sacred, secular, or both) in mimicked, distorted, and allusive form,

as a key element in constructing its most “low” or titillating plot points.

In many cases, the phrase “profanatory moments” aptly describes the instances of

incongruity, doubleness, and distortion, both moral and aesthetic, which will be the

project’s focus. Key passages describing the flying, fornicating, hedonistic monks in

“The Land of Cokaygne,” the mingled Biblical imagery and adulterous scatalogical

pranks in The Miller’s Tale, and the prayerful and duplicitous princess of The King of

Tars, pair familiar religious elements—settings, sacraments, characters’ vocations—with

outsized misbehavior and liberty-taking. Their blending of aesthetic and moral codes

highlights the gulf—or the slippage—between the sacred and the profane (“profane”

either in the sense of being actively desecratory or merely neutral, irreligious or

! 6!
areligious).2 All of the examples to be discussed here involve explicitly religious

settings—but in addition they concern other types of incongruity, to which the concept

can be adapted to apply. In Bakhtinian terms, likewise, the unstable throwing-together of

seemingly opposed elements demonstrates that the categories of high and low culture,

didactic and entertaining, learned and popular, are not necessarily one another’s mutually

exclusive opposites, but rather can be understood as mutually constitutive, with each

inversion, distortion, or unexpected pairing serving to displace, reconstruct, or reveal

seeming opposites to be not dueling, but conspiring, within the narrative.3

The concept of heteroglossia—that an utterance contains many types of speech—

is one. In The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin writes that “language has been

completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents.”4 He claims that

heteroglossic discourses lend themselves to particularly responsive, allusive forms

including “comic, ironic, or parodic discourse”and that in his view of the medieval period

especially, “certain types of texts were constructed like mosaics out of the texts of

others.”5 The “certain types of texts” considered inherently heteroglossic tend, especially

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
2
William Robins and Robert Epstein, “Introduction: The Sacred, the Profane, and Late
Medieval Literature,” Sacred and Profane in Chaucer and Late Medieval Literature,
University of Toronto Press, 2010, pp. 3-29. “If the sacred and profane are obverses of
each other,” the term’s originators write, “they are so in the way that two sides of a
Moebius strip are obverses: strictly opposed to each other yet occupying the same space,
they also turn into each other.”
3
Bakhtin, 410.
4
M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 1975, Edited by Michael
Holquist, Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press,
1981.
5
Bakhtin, 69, 324.

! 7!
in Bakhtin’s readings of medieval culture, to lean toward the carnivalesque, and to

feature the types of inversions, incongruities, and ludic distortions found in the the three

texts on which I will focus here— outsized acts that bring the spiritual into playful,

uneasy contact with the “material lower bodily stratum” and that highlight the swapping

and combining of high and low social and cultural positions.6

Bakhtin sees an underlying link between the ways in which heteroglossia lends

itself to ambiguity and distortion, intentional and unintentional, and the grotesquerie—

and ultimately, the power—of the carnivalesque. The doubleness and reversal of carnival

festivity, which momentarily alters a thing— one’s face; one’s language; one’s place in

the social hierarchy— into a distorted version of its opposite, is a quality he views not

only as an act of play but of fecundity and (re)creation. The disruptive inversions and

distortions of grotesque carnival imagery pursue an ambivalent fascination with opposites

like high and low, official and unofficial, body and spirit, by forcing each into the mask

of the other. Furthermore, in a vein which seems relevant to the popular, vernacular

genres of the texts discussed here, he also suggests that this particular doubleness is

somehow specific to folk culture and folk forms which uniquely combine the official and

unofficial, seriousness and laughter, in a way that both grants primacy to what is lower,

and contains that power through the unstable and ultimately ephemeral nature of

carnivalesque inversion.7 Building on Bakhtin’s thinking, Julia Kristeva (to her eventual

dismay) popularized the term intertextuality beginning in 1967, when her description of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
6
Bakhtin, 19.
7
Bakhtin, 96.

! 8!
the text as “a mosaic of quotations” caught the imaginations of critics worldwide and was

embraced as shorthand for the argument that meaning exists in the continuing

interpretation and reinterpretation of texts, within the frame of their fellow texts and

previous interpretations.8

Parody, in particular, inhabits a sizeable corner of the intertextual category; if,

according to Bakhtin and Kristeva, all texts are inherently multivocal, parodic texts are

explicitly so. They speak back to another text, context, person, or idea, and require the

audience to engage multiply and simultaneously with texts and discourses using

inversion, hyperbole, and laughter. In A Theory of Parody, Linda Hutcheon explains it

thus:

The prefix para has two meanings, only one of which is usually mentioned—that

of ‘counter’ or ‘against’…However, para in Greek can also mean ‘beside,’ and

therefore there is a suggestion of an accord or intimacy instead of a contrast…A

critical distance is implied between the backgrounded text being parodied and the

new incorporating work, a distance usually signaled by irony [which] can be

playful as well as belittling...the pleasure of parody’s irony comes not from humor

in particular but from the degree of engagement of the reader in the intertextual

‘bouncing’ (to use E.M. Forster’s famous term) between complicity and

distance.”9

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8
Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” The Kristeva Reader, Edited by Toril Moi,
Columbia UP, 1986; see also Neil Forsyth’s discussion of the range of uses for this term
and its various offshoots, in the introduction to a special issue of Nordic Journal of
English Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2010, pp. 2-8.
9
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms,
1985, University of Illinois Press, 2000, p. 32.
! 9!
In the readings to follow here, parodic moves often serve as somewhat paradoxical

meeting points for higher and lower registers. On one hand, parody necessarily depends

on a prior text, an original, and can therefore be seen as a lesser literary approach— if not

derivative, at least dependent. On the other, parody done well requires mastery of the

prior text, and perhaps the broader tradition, being parodied, and the ability to critique or

elaborate on them arguably claims a kind of authority and signals an inversion of their

positions--“a gameful but productive relationship with the past which…demonstrates the

persistence of critical distance” through the combination of repetition and distortion, self-

consciously done.10

Quite different in tone but each uniquely compelling, the three texts discussed

here represent an idiosyncratic range of vernacular narratives in which “intertextual

bouncing” puts very different texts, traditions, and cultural registers into sometimes-

unlikely conversation with one another. All involve an incongruous combination of

religious elements and exaggerated, hyperbolic imagery of misbehavior, with entertaining

results; all three draw from popular genres, yet allude to learned roots; and all, in

distinctively varying ways, deploy these allusions in a way that uses repetition, distortion,

and inversion to imagine the world ordered differently.

The texts essentially progress from most to least parodic, with the parodic edge

dwindling to none at all in the final chapter, and a marked difference in tone across the

three. “The Land of Cokaygne” offers exuberant parody based on reality, but set in an

otherworld and thereby distanced from its own parodic bite; its repetition and liberty-

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!

10
Hutcheon, 157

! 10!
taking with the tropes of paradise genres reads as perhaps the most purely playful of the

three. “The Miller’s Tale” brings us back to earth through its ties to a recognizable

Oxford, and even more so through the sense of grounding that comes from the meanness

of its characters’ tricks and the meticulousness with which their foibles are described—it

repeats Christian and fabliaux tropes in a way that has a fair amount of parodic bite. The

King of Tars constitutes an outlier, more earnest and self-serious than either of its

neighbors, and less overtly arch and knowing in its stance toward its own allusions. This

text comes alongside the others, then, as much for its differences as its commonalities—a

point of comparison, rather than a direct parallel. Yet despite its more sober tone, The

King of Tars includes heteroglossic genre and register-mixing; the inversion and

disruption of hierarchies; and a purposeful blurring of distinctions between elite and

popular. Though its literary liberty-taking is not overtly playful or pointed, it does belong

to a popular genre committed to the pleasure of the audience. Its manipulation of

seemingly-clashing tropes pushes toward a certain capaciousness—one that I read,

ultimately, as undermining its veneer of didacticism and deploying the tropes of

hagiography in a way that is, though not parodic, every bit as bent on entertainment as the

other two texts. I read this poem’s use of religious and didactic tropes—and ultimately,

its subjection of them in service of the sensationalized romance plot—as ground for

considering this third text, despite its earnestness, as not quite so different in aim from the

first and second as it initially appears to be.

If the overt interplay between parodic and parodied tends, in these texts, toward a

humorous, satirical, or knowing stance toward the referent, this dialogue is doubled over

again when the text enters the classroom; what was once earnest has been transformed by

! 11!
intertextual mimicry and distortion into something primarily entertaining, then

transformed yet again into an object of study.

Medieval Texts and Modern Readers in the Contemporary Classroom

The fact that these texts center around liberty-taking behaviors carries with it a

certain capacity to offend—their imagery is shocking now, and certain transgressive

elements are both key to the entertaining or humorous effect, and risk pushing beyond the

limits of the reader’s tolerance.

“Guilty pleasure” is a familiar oxymoron: something one enjoys without

admitting it—a book one consumes via e-reader rather than risk the cover being glimpsed

by fellow commuters. Phrasing notwithstanding, this kind of readerly sheepishness is not

true guilt— it’s at most a sort of affectionate self-consciousness, an attitude composed

more of fondness than shame over inferiority that is aesthetic, not moral. The specter of a

reader morally or intellectually at risk has largely grown faint. Arthur Krystal’s

formulation, in a New Yorker piece on such unspoken binaries of reading, that “one was

good for you, one simply tasted good” neatly juxtaposes the assumption of incorporeal

virtue and physical relish—that “good” is disembodied, spiritual or intellectual, and that

even though reading is an essentially abstract activity, somehow a text’s (mere) fun is

something perceived more directly, somehow even tasted, by the mind.11

The discourse of the literary guilty pleasure still contains echoes of a tension

between didacticism and delight. But today’s reader is perhaps more apt to feel a twinge

of self-consciousness over a text’s perceived “low” aesthetic qualities than over its

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
11
!Arthur Krystal, “Easy Writers: Guilty Pleasures Without Guilt,” The New Yorker, May
28, 2012.

! 12!
impure content; we are (outside of specific ideological subcultures) more likely to

castigate reading choices as sinning against the decrees of good taste than of a higher

power.

For premodern readers as well, alongside the importance of allegorical, profit-

oriented reading existed not only the capacity for amusement, but a discourse

surrounding it. D.W. Robertson famously describes a medieval process of exegesis by

which the reader remains un-dazzled by a text’s surface features, interpreting the “shell”

of these ornamental elements in order to get to the didactic kernel within.12 However,

amusing or entertaining elements were not universally to be ignored; rather, the medieval

storyteller might strive to provide the “best sentence and moost solaas”—the most

meaning and the most delight—as Chaucer’s pilgrims agree to do.13

The tense pairing of sentence and solas was, then as now, self-aware and

buttressed by well-documented structures of justification: Glending Olson, for example,

outlines various ways the effects of recreational reading and storytelling were thought to

be good for both mind and body; considered not an empty indulgence but rather a prudent

aid to digestion, stimulant to cheerfulness, and source of refreshment which promoted

renewed productivity and prevented the reader, imagined as a taut bowstring, from

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
12
D.W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives, Princeton
UP, 1962, p. 57.
13
For further discussion on medieval approaches to combining these elements, see
Robert Scholes, James Phelan, and Robert Kellogg’s The Nature of Narrative, Oxford
UP, 1966, 2nd Ed., 2006, Pp. 138-143.

! 13!
breaking under constant intellectual strain.14 This line of thinking implies a moral

dimension less prominent in the not-quite-guilt of unimproving reading today. Moreover,

it’s clearly a significant factor—the very number and variety of justifications listed

suggests an attitude hovering uneasily between embracing, excusing, and allowing, the

fusion of didactic and ludic literary elements and modes of reading.

A similar ambivalence regarding the relative merits of feeding the soul vs.

tickling the funnybone is evident in critical conversations surrounding the texts discussed

here. Partly because of their exaggerated, rude, and shocking moments each text has, in

various ways, prompted questions and uncertainty regarding whether, when, and how a

text is read for moral or intellectual formation, for pleasure and entertainment, or a

complicated combination of both. What belongs to a “high” cultural category because it

is venerable, rare, precious, and relatively inaccessible may also register as “low” for

various reasons— humor, especially if it is rude, profane, or scatalogical; sexual content;

churlish characters or even a frivolous or “lewed” implied audience rather than a learned

and respectable one.

Despite some areas of continuity, some of the texts’ implications have shifted

drastically over time. Impiety of various stripes looms large in all three, with spiritual

transgression paradoxically treated seriously even through un-serious literary means;

bodily sins like gluttony and sexual escapades are treated as shocking as well, winkingly.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
14
Glending Olson’s book Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Cornell UP,
1983) offers an extended discussion of the medical, moral, and therapeutic justifications
for entertaining texts and recreational reading.

! 14!
Meanwhile, mistreatment of the Other is gendered, racialized, and incorporated with little

comment— a point on which I reflect further in a turn toward the classroom following

each chapter, which considers approaches to handling these texts via a pedagogy that

views them as historical and literary artifacts which are reflective of their milieu, and

which prompt reflection on our own as well.

In some cases the shock value of a medieval text goes beyond rudeness or even

obscenity, and is rooted not in matters of taste but of ethics. Though the antiquity and

historical cache of a manuscript preserved for several hundred years lend a certain

Benjaminian halo of authenticity and rarity, medieval texts are not immune from

complicated value judgements which have long affected how (and whether) they are read

and taught. Via a cultural studies-tinged pedagogical orientation, this project considers

the ways in which the entertaining and alluring, as well as the problematic or offensive,

aspects of the three texts are key to their import—and how these aspects both remain the

same and change between contexts. This aspect of the texts complicates the necessity of

juggling the audience’s reception of and response to the text both as historical artifact

with and in its own context, and one that is active in ours today.

Twenty-first century readers may be working within cultural norms that are fairly

secular, egalitarian, and individualistic, and accordingly may not be deeply perturbed by

portrayals of impious or insubordinate behavior. Though some undergraduate audiences

may be shocked by irreligious behavior, and most are aware enough of the history of

Christendom to detect the impropriety of characters’ sexual escapades and other

behaviors, these are likely to be noted in relatively abstract ways, with little

squeamishness about reading accounts of a skipped evening mass or relatively

! 15!
straightforward promiscuity. However, the troubling resonances of many other elements

in these texts have markedly increased in the centuries since they were first written; in the

classroom now, what might once have been understated or incidental comes completely

to the fore. Students’ readings can be expected to be emphatically colored by behavior we

would now characterize as immoral and unjust, and by objections to the gender dynamics

and racialized violence they find in these texts. Students and instructors stand to gain

from attending to what might have been the texts’ most striking incongruities originally,

and how these speak to tensions over religious practice, social structures, and national

identity. At the same time, they must navigate unintended incongruities which have

cropped up in the intervening centuries, making decisions as readers and writers

regarding ethical issues in a text that reflects a different set of ideological premises.

Following each chapter, then, is a coda which uses scholarship on teaching and learning

to reflect on the process of interrogating both the pleasure and the censure that

accompany reading these texts, and which seeks strategies to explore the links between

contemporary anxieties and non-contemporary texts.

The project’s focus on striking moments of paradoxically authorized transgression

reads into these moments layers of tension, division, and blurring between pious and

profane behaviors, and edifying and entertaining attitudes. It inquires into the

pedagogical implications of these same tensions, considering the stimulating and

sometimes-uneasy mix of enjoyment, challenge, and discomfort a contemporary

classroom reading of incongruity in these texts might entail. Ultimately, it seeks to

explore what can be gained from inquiry into moments that play with literary hierarchies

! 16!
of high and low— both moments of inversion and fusing that occur within the text, and

within which the text itself is experienced.

! 17!
 CHAPTER 1

GARDEN OF EATIN’: EXAGGERATION AND CRITIQUE IN

THE LAND OF COKAYGNE

The Middle English poem “The Land of Cokaygne” hails from a complicated

social and political milieu and makes reference to various points of fourteenth-century

Anglo-Irish politics as well as social and religious disputes of its day; it draws on not one,

but many, strains of oral and literary tradition, and employs symbolism that is not

immediately clear to the average 21st-century reader. Understandably, scholarship on the

poem tends to concur on some points (details of the manuscript’s provenance, for

example), diverge on others (the “true” tenor and target of its mockery) and agree only on

the difficulty of generating any interpretation that doesn’t consist at least partly of

guesswork.

At the same time, “Cokaygne” is an example of how even partial understanding

may yield full enjoyment. The reader of the poem vicariously travels to a fantasyland of

total excess and exaggerated wish-fulfillment; enjoys novel and outlandish imagery; is

pleasurably shocked by monkish misconduct; and is carried along by an underlying

current of good humored levity and playfulness which seems to keep the text perpetually

fresh even now. A 2015 edition of the Harley 913 manuscript, edited by Thorlac Turville-

Petre, offers an especially helpful and complete look at the poem and its surrounding

texts, and undergirds a chapter in Karma Lochrie’s 2016 book on medieval Utopian

thought.15 Outside academia, “Cokaygne” has appeared in the online news and pop

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
15
Thorlac Turville-Petre, Poems from BL MS Harley 913 ‘The Kildare Manuscript,”
Early English Text Society, 2015. Karma Lochrie’s book is Nowhere in the Middle Ages,
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
! 18!
culture site Slate.16 The post appears in a sub-blog devoted to “the world’s hidden

wonders” and refers to the land of Cokaygne as “strange” four times, including once in

the article title— an approach which fairly transparently assumes it’s possible to get

general readers interested in a medieval text, provided that the text has the curb appeal

that springs from unusual or sensational elements. The appealing exaggerations at the

root of this poem not only reward the efforts of the reader, whether student or scholar; in

addition, the hyperbolic imagery allows the poem to establish a ludic relationship

between its sacred and profane connotations, one that points toward the tensions between

the behavior required, and the rewards promised, by the medieval Church and the

realities of Anglo-Irish life in practice.

The imaginary island of Cokaygne is a fantasy-land “fur in see bi west Spayngne”

(1) whose pleasures surpass those of the Christian Paradise, and which offers its

inhabitants lives of total abundance, pleasure, and ease while eliminating all afflictions

and annoyances, from mortal illness to irksome insects. Cokaygne is a feast for both the

eyes and the belly, featuring rivers running with “oile, melk, honi and wine” (46) as well

as buildings made of pastries, spices and gemstones. Work is verboten, as are pests, bad

weather, disagreements— and most importantly shame, itself.

This promised land contains an abbey of monks whose pieties are described in far

less detail than their misbehaviors. Under the monastic rule—or rather, misrule—

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!

16
“Exploring the Strange Pleasures of Cockaigne, a Medieval Peasant’s Dream World,”
Atlas Obscura: Your Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonder, Slate, 23 Nov. 2016,
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/exploring-the-strange-pleasures-of-cockaigne-a-
medieval-peasants-dream-world.

! 19!
practiced in Cokaygne, the monks enjoy sumptuous feasts and ignore the authority of

their superior. They take flight like birds and play airborne games instead of heeding the

call to mass, and sexual liaisons with the neighboring nuns are referred to as “prayer”

(163). Rather than prizing an ethos of working diligently, “He that slepeth best” (173) can

hope to someday become abbot.

After describing this topsy-turvy religious community in which various sins of the

flesh are prized, not censured, the poem takes a pseudo-instructional turn, informing

readers how they may join the fun. The poet wishes readers well in reaching Cokaygne in

order to enjoy its pleasures—but warns that the way there involves the ability to “fulfille

that penance,/ þat ye mote that lond i-se” (186-187).17 The penance in question is wading

through chin-deep pig dung for seven years; having traversed this barrier the “penitent”

becomes worthy of admittance. Cokaygne operates based on its own internal rules which

expel all labor, hardship, filth, and pests, replacing them with beautiful sights and

delicious morsels, free for the taking; it also seemingly suspends moral judgement for

those inside Cokaygne, and reverses the norms of morality and penitence for outsiders

wishing to enter.

The sole surviving copy of this poem occupies a manuscript containing forty-

seven other texts in English, French, and Latin whose content and tone vary, ranging

from satirical and parodic poems to memorials, hymns, sermons, and other devotional

aids. “Cokaygne” can be considered and taught, then, as both an individual text and as

one component of a larger interrelated group within a shared religious, political, and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
17
“Fulfill that penance/In order that you might see that land.” (All quotations are taken
from Turville-Petre’s 2015 edition, cited above; modern translations are my own).
! 20!
social context. Although original foliation has been disturbed, manuscript pagination

suggests that “The Land of Cokaygne” at one time “had pride of place in the manuscript,”

although (or because) it is less earnest than some of its companions, and very local in its

concerns and references.18 Many of the texts are relatively didactic and free of levity—

sermons, proverbs, even recipes. Scattered amongst these are a series of disparate texts

which evince a recurring interest in corruption and which depict, with varying degrees of

raillery or critique, scenarios involving scandalous behavior incongruous with the faith or

station of those involved. One text satirizes the townspeople of Kildare and their trades,

but in general the clergy take more raillery than laypeople, featuring prominently in

liturgical parodies including a drinkers’ mass, a Latin office in praise of sleep, and even

a letter from the Devil, satirically praising the cupidity and self-indulgence of one

religious order after another.19

The collection’s thematic and tonal breadth, Turville-Petre suggests, gives “the

impression...that the compiler jotted down information that he thought interesting or

useful as it came into his hands,” adding, “his interests extended quite widely, and it may

be misleading to try to pick out particular agendas.”20 Nevertheless, certain concerns

occur across the various texts, satirical, devotional, and historical alike. These areas of

overlap reflect increasing instability in complaints about corrupt, greedy, and tyrannical

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
18
For a reading of these references which uses historical data to place the text in
conversation with the monastery at Inislounaght, see P.L. Henry, “The Land of
Cokaygne: Cultures in Contact in Medieval Ireland,” Studia Hibernica 12 (1972), pp.
120-141.
19
Turville-Petre, Poems, xx.
20
Thorlac Turville-Petre, Poems, p. xxi.

! 21!
rulers; the building of a town wall in New Ross apparently intended to quell a spat

between Anglo-Norman rulers, but which also specifically mentions Irish natives as a

threat; another recounts the brutal exploits of Pers of Birmingham toward Gaelic

neighbors resistant to Anglo-Irish rule.21 Such texts hint at their provenance within a

colonial society isolated from England, geographically and otherwise, and subject to

English and Anglo-Norman entities who considered the Anglo-Irish “English in

constitutional terms, yet...rejected them by calling them ‘Irish.’”22 Writes Turville-Petre,

The destruction and disorder that resulted from the Bruce invasion of 1315-18,

coupled with the effects of the disastrous famine of those years and the economic

collapse, are reflected in the statutes of the Dublin parliament of 1320. These

describe how the rule of law had collapsed to such an extent that the common

people are robbed by the rich, who travel around the country...extorting money

and demanding bribes from those who can least afford it.”23

The supposed barbarism of the Irish resulted in what Terence Dolan calls a kind of

“political, cultural, linguistic, and literary apartheid” in which political and administrative

power rested in the hands of settlers who questioned the immorality of killing an

Irishman and prompted, in 1317, an Irish complaint to the Pope regarding the situation.24

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
21
“Song on the Times,” pp. 62-68 in Turville-Petre’s edition of poems form MS Harley
913; “The Walling of New Ross,” pp. 76-83; “Pers of Bermingham,” pp. 69-73.
22
Turville-Petre, England The Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity,
1290-1340. Clarendon Press, 1996, p. 156.
23
Turville-Petre, England the Nation, xxxvi.
24
Terence Dolan, “Writing in Ireland.” Cambridge History of Medieval English
Literature, Edited by David Wallace, Cambridge UP, 1999, pp. 208-28; Turville-Petre,
England the Nation, 15-156.
! 22!
In terms of the depiction of clerical misbehavior in “Cokaygne,” the sense of general

monk-friar antagonism is likely intermingled with the particular consternation of a

Franciscan spokesman, from an order relatively newly-established in Ireland, whose

fictional perspective echoes both intra-order discord regarding the ethic of poverty, and

stereotypes about Irish Cistercian excesses and laziness.25 The manuscript comes, in

short, out of an environment destabilized by both Scottish incursions and internal discord

between Gaelic lords and English and Anglo-Norman resident magnates, in which,

furthermore, parallel tensions regarding monastic orders meant an overall ethos alert to

authority and corruption in both political and clerical spheres.26

“The Land of Cokaygne” has often been treated as a minor work, perhaps owing

to its brief length or its uneven and humorous tone. Although it shares some similar

themes to the neighboring texts described above, “The Land of Cokaygne” features a

uniquely exaggerated mix of allusions and images. It remains puzzling for many of the

same reasons it is striking and entertaining—its combination of the monastic and the

fantastic; its hyperbolic, at times racy, imagery of excess without labor or consequences.

In addition to its internal riot of imagery, criticism of the poem is complicated by

its external influences. Criticism that focuses on the text’s monastic influences tends to

lend itself less to interpretation and more to dating and situating the poem based on

scrutiny of the historical evidence available. “The Land of Cokaygne” can be read as

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!

25
Turville-Petre, England the Nation, xli.
26
See also Robin Frame, “Ireland.” The New Cambridge Medieval History: Volume VI c.
1300-c. 1415. Ed. Michael Jones. Cambridge UP, 2000, and Colonial Ireland, 1169-
1369, 2nd Edition, Four Courts Press, 2012.
! 23!
emerging from and speaking to inter-clerical disagreement between neighboring houses,

skewering the propensity of this paradise to cater to a particular set of clerics’ wishes at

the expense of their own vows and of others’ well-being. There is also a case to be made

that it addresses broader sources of unrest, including the history of colonialism in Ireland

and the attending political, religious, linguistic, cultural, and class tensions which made

gaelicisation of the English threatening and may have prompted interest in ridiculing or

satirizing the local population.27 Turville-Petre merges these, considering the poem as

taking on the voice of an Anglo-Irish Franciscan whose satirical descriptions are

informed by both rightous indignation and anti-Irish stereotypes. There is, finally, fodder

for reading “Cokaygne, instead, as a rebellious critique that targets inequality and abuses

perpetrated based on national or class allegiances.”28

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
27
Brenda Garrett, for instance, reads “Cokaygne” as emerging from colonialist discourse,
with the seeming stylistic Irishness serving as window dressing for anti-Irish messaging,
written (tellingly) in English: “England, Colonialism, and ‘The Land of Cokaygne,’”
Utopian Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1-12. John J. Thompson takes a more equivocal
view, emphasizing linguistic similarities indicative of colonization and exchange between
Ireland and the south and west Midlands of England, and calling for less emphasis on
images of Irish alterity and more on the cross-referencing and complexities of Middle
Hiberno-English writings and relations: “Mapping Points West of West Midlands
Manuscripts and Texts: Irishness(es) and Middle English Literary Culture,” Essays in
Manuscript Geography: Vernacular Manuscript Books of the English West Midlands
from the Conquest to the Sixteenth Century, Edited by Wendy Scase, Brepols, 2007, pp.
113-128.
28
For example, Adelaide Hardy’s “Nicholas Bozon and a Middle English Complaint,”
which reads the text more emphatically as part of a larger whole in which components of
MS Harley 913 are united by a common thread of complaint against oppression and
oppressors, including clerical authorities more generally (Notes and Queries, vol. 12,
1965, pp. 90-91). Meanwhile, Richard J. Kelly’s “Land of Cokaygne: Contexts” (Journal
of Irish Studies, vol. 16, 2001, pp. 58-75) reads, in the themes of labor and order vs. the
idleness and chaos of Cokaygne, an Anglo-Norman critique of supposed Irish
waywardness. A reading of the poem as primarily interested in juxtaposing content
(portrayals of monastic excess) and context (contemporary unrest, deprivation) in a way
that, he suggests, may hint at a Franciscan attention to the gulf between poverty and
! 24!
 More abstractly, some approaches to “Cokaygne” have taken it as fairly

straightforward, even Utopian, escapism—a reflection of deprivation whose imagery of

abundance draws on folklore and strains of religious belief to mockingly bemoan or

deflect injustice and want. Or perhaps it is instead a reaction against this kind of

fantasizing—even a critique of human nature itself, and of the impulse toward wish

fulfillment, with the poem functioning as a satirical gesture that mimics popular escapist

fantasies of abundance and escape, only to point out their emptiness.29 Related to this is

the view that the poem’s vague, casual, and inconsistent treatment of abbey life,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
wealth, can be found in Terence Dolan’s “Writing in Ireland” in the Cambridge History
of Medieval English Literature, edited by David Wallace, Cambridge UP, 1999, pp. 208-
28. Finally, Marc Caball emphasizes a less geographic or sectarian, and more linguistic,
context, pointing toward the influence of Gaelic notions of the Otherworld and
English/Irish linguistic power struggles, in “The literature of later medieval Ireland,
1200-1600: from the Normans to the Tudors,” Cambridge History of Irish Literature,
Edited by Margaret Kelleher and Phillip O’Leary, Cambridge UP, 2008.
29
Irene Howard, in “The Folk Origins of the Land of Cokaygne” (Humanities
Association Review, vol. 18, no. 2, 1967, pp. 72-78), connects the poem’s imagery with
pagan symbols of abundance and heavy-laden trees. A.L. Morton, similarly, emphasizes
the folk elements in the text’s depictions of culinary abundance, reading Cokaygne as a
proto-socialist Utopia and literary expression of insurrection, hopeful but somewhat
neutered by its fantastical nature; see his book The English Utopia, Lawrence and
Wishart, 1978. Meanwhile, Wim Tigges argues persuasively that the folksy, even crude,
content of the poem, paired with its sophisticated diction and evident sense of irony,
suggest a gently satirical stance toward the type of clearly unrealistic fantasizing
embodied by this text (“The Land of Cokaygne: Sophisticated Mirth,” Companion to
Early Middle English Literature, Edited by. H. Aertsen, Free UP, 1988, pp. 97-104).
Finally, Louise O. Vasvari’s “The Geography of Escape and Topsy-Turvy Literary
Genres” focuses on temporal questions, placing Cokaygne “far away” in neither a past
Golden Age nor a future Utopia, but rather a paradoxical, nebulous Neverland. Because
of this, and because the exaggerated language shatters the poem’s ability to fit in as a
traditional travel narrative, the poem embodies a carnivalesque anti-genre which
combines many intersecting forms but empties them of meaning. (Vasvari’s piece is in
Discovering New Worlds: Essay on Medieval Exploration and Imagination, Edited by
Scott D. Westrem, Garland, 1991, pp. 178-192).

! 25!
composed more of hints than description proper, points toward a deliberately imaginary

abbey, rooted in reality but not literally present, nor meant to be read as such, any more

than the speaking geese or flying monks are.30 This orientation defangs the critique

somewhat, and instead emphasizes the undeniably entertaining nature of the text.

Building partially on this latter vein, Karma Lochrie usefully cautions us to build

on prior scholarship in a way that uses its exploration of text and context without

imposing reductive categories which neglect the “layers of irony” present in the poem.31

Lochrie’s larger argument concerns Cokaygne as a “utopia whose satire has turned in

upon itself.”32 Perhaps, she affirms, there is a level at which “Cokaygne” is a “parodic

interpretation of monasticism that avoids satirical critique...in favor of a wholesale

inversion of that institution in carnival mode,” targeting “not monastic turpitude” but

“monastic life itself by rhyming itself with the ethos of pleasure, sexual license, leisure,

and unlimited pursuit of one’s desire.” In other words, she suggests reading the text as

emptying out the structures being transgressed, rather than pointing the finger at who is

transgressing them; reading Cokaygne not as a disciplinary slap, but as the knock that

makes audible the hollowness of the rules themselves.

This sort of interpretive permission to consider Cokaygne not (or not solely) as a

satirical hit piece, but as a parodic text whose surrealisms are meant not only to point

fingers but also to be enjoyed for their own odd sake, is a particularly useful foundation

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30
For example, Peter Dronke’s article “The Land of Cokaygne: Three Notes on the Latin
Background,” Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature, Edited by Christopher
Cannon and Maura Nolan, D.S. Brewer, 2011, pp. 65-75.
31
Lochrie, 60
32
Lochrie, 67
! 26!
for contemplating the poem’s multilayered meanings and textual co-presences, and its

place not only within Harley 913 but within a wider network of narratives and analogues.

The text’s nods toward its fellow Cocaignes, Paradises, and otherworlds across various

cultures and languages underscores the wide array of traditions it absorbs, participates in,

and takes liberties with. I am interested in reading it as less about “Cokaygne” than a host

of Cokaygnes, in the sense that this text wades into several genres and playfully deploys,

alters, and combines their various tropes in a way that both amuses the reader and

generates something different and new.

I will begin with a reading that attempts to find points of continuity, as well as of

change, in Cokaygne’s reflections of a broader culinary paradise tradition made up of oral

accounts, from a peasant perspective, of otherworlds packed with abundance and

idleness. This is perhaps the least pointed use of textual layers or echoes, evincing little

interest in overtly parodying culinary paradise tropes, but in its own way the poem

distorts those tropes through what it ignores or omits in terms of describing (or rather,

neglecting) the victuals themselves in Cokaygne. I will also read the poem for what has

been often treated as its more overtly satirical content, inquiring to what degree its

portrayal of galloping clerical corruption is earnest, ironic, or something in between, and

how it can be read as an example of, or exception to, the tradition of literary complaint.

Finally, I will consider the poem as a result of, and response to, another paradise

narrative—the Biblical paradise, and its medieval echoes, and the poem’s ambivalent,

even flippant, treatment of the traditional Eden narrative. Across the multiple categories

of narrative and tradition, the one true consistency is perhaps the text’s ebullient parodic

stance, which reverses the poles of elevation and degradation with boldness and glee.

! 27!
Big Rock Candy Mountain: Cokaygne as Culinary Paradise

There are some points of overlap between the culinary paradise and the imrama,

an Irish brand of otherworld journey narrative, which (because they are voyages and not

visions) involve no separation of body and soul and therefore tend to involve descriptions

shot through with intense physicality and somatic descriptions of the type we see in

“Cokaygne.33 The poem’s intense sensory imagery delivers the core image of Cokaygne,

a land of abundant food, drink, and pleasure which has gone by many names. Among

them are the classical myth of Lucian’s blessed isle, the Goliardic Cucania of Carmena

Burana, the German Schlaraffenland, the Flemish Luilekkerland, an early modern

English myth known as Lubberland, and even the twentieth-century American Big Rock

Candy Mountain. There are many points of continuity between Cokaygne and these

companions in the edible-otherworld tradition. Herman Pleij suggests that the surviving

manuscripts contain tales rooted in oral tradition, which must have made their way

through Europe orally for generations before being recorded in various languages and

versions.34 No two are quite alike—each culinary paradise has taken on different

embellishments over time and according to location and culture—yet a certain level of

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33
Eileen Gardiner, Medieval Visions of Heaven and Hell: A Sourcebook, Garland
Publishing, Inc., 1993, pp. xxii-xxiv; see also Gardiner’s of Heaven and Hell Before
Dante. Italica Press, 1989, pp. xxi-xxiii.
34
Herman Pliej, Dreaming of Cockaigne, 1997, Translated by Diane Webb, Columbia
UP, 2001, p. 3. In addition to Pleij, for an overview of European culinary paradises, see
Frederick B. Jonassen (“Lucian’s ‘Saturnalia,’ the Land of Cockaigne, and the
Mummer’s Plays,” Folklore, vol. 101, no. 1, 1990, pp. 58-68), which traces the Cokaygne
motif through poetry and drama, designating the Harley 913 poem as the earliest English
iteration and emphasizing not only its popular or folk roots, but classical ones..

! 28!
consistency in the wishes, desires, and aversions they express makes it clear that at some

level, they all draw from the same well.

Across classical tradition and folklore, the broad strokes of the “poor man’s

paradise” include an abundance of food and drink—a landscape made of it, in fact—and

an inverted work ethic where toil is unnecessary, even frowned on, and idleness and sleep

are rewarded. Pleij links this outsized craving to consume more and work less to periodic

or prolonged scarcity and dietary monotony.35 “The Land of Cokaygne” embraces these

culinary paradise tropes, participating exuberantly in the genre’s tradition of inverting

hallowed principles of moderation and order. It does so, moreover, with some additions

of its own, including a comparatively heightened emphasis on the sexual dimensions of

the land’s indulgence, and the addition of a fairly elaborate monastic setting. To the

essential imagery of wish fulfillment, it adds competing imagery of the contrasting sacred

and profane.

The poem dazzles with fantastical descriptions of overabundance; in Cokaygne,

we are told,

…is met and drink

Wiþvte care, how, and swink;

þe met is trie, þe drink is clere,

To none, russin, and sopper.

Ic sigge forsoþ, boute were,

þer nis lond on erþe is pere;

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35
Pleij, 101.

! 29!
 Vnder heuen nis lond, iwisse,

Of so mochil ioi and blisse. (17-24)36

Here categories like “met and drink” are used in a way that is more suggestive than

descriptive, gesturing toward entire categories with a non-specificity that conveys, but

does not catalog, the land’s abundance and possibility:

Al of pasteiis beþ þe walles,

Of fleis, of fisse and rich met,

þe likfullist þat man mai et.

Fluren cakes beþ þe schingles alle

Of cherche, cloister, boure and halle,

þe pinnes beþ fat podinges,

Rich met to princez and kinges.

Man mai þer-of et ino3

Al wiþ ri3t and no3t wiþ wo3. (54-62) 37

The pastry walls and edible shingles are fairly standard tropes of the culinary paradise,

enumerated in much more detail (or at least, at greater length) in many versions. Here,

though, such descriptions of Cokaygne are syncopated, interrupted frequently with

reminders of the excellence of everything on offer and the complete, guiltless entitlement

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
36
In Cokaygne there is food and drink/Without care, distress, or work;/The food is
excellent, the drink is clear,/At the noonday meal, afternoon snack, and and supper./I tell
the truth, without a doubt,/There is no land on earth like this one,/There is no land under
heaven, certainly,/Full of so much joy and bliss.
37
All the walls are made of pies/Of meat, of fish, and rich food,/The most delightful that
man may eat./All the shingles are cakes made of flour/On the church, cloister, room, and
hall./The pegs are fat sausages/Rich food for princes and kings./Man can eat enough of
it/All by right and without blame.
! 30!
with which one is welcome to (over)consume. The first mention of food and drink is

followed swiftly in the next line by an enthusiastic testament to their quantity and quality

(16-18); the edible buildings are immediately declared to be “Rich met to princez and

kinges,” to which everyone is entitled “wiþ ri3t,” and the roasted fowl are not just

delicious, but supremely so-the best anyone has ever seen (107). Whereas some

analogues are lengthier and more obsessed with conveying the range and exact nature of

the food items themselves, here exhaustive description gives way to repeated general

superlatives, and these interjections serve as a reminder that the baked-good buildings are

less important than the overarching ethic they represent.

Fantastical as its architecture is, the consumable nature of Cokaygne does not end

with inanimate objects: cooked geese fly through the air carrying garlic and announcing

aloud their readiness to be eaten, and larks land, pre-spiced and sauced, in the

inhabitants’ mouths. Roasted fowl with the power of speech are another recurring image

in culinary paradises, perhaps because the far-fetched image is so striking; in

Luilekkerland they are joined by pigs who stroll up to greet inhabitants pre-roasted, with

knives in their backs.38 In the Middle English Cokaygne, though, the culinary

voluntarism is confined to geese and larks:

þe gees irostid on þe spitte

Flee3 to þat abbai

God hit wot,

And grediþ: ‘Gees al hote, al hote!’

Hi bringeþ garlek gret plente,

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38
Pleij, 90.
! 31!
 þe best idi3t that man mai se.

þe leuerokes þat beþ cuþ,

Li3tiþ adun to man is muþ

Idi3t in stu ful swithe wel,

Pudrid wiþ gilofre and canel. (104-110)39

As if contemplation of a garlic-laden or well-spiced morsel isn’t appealing enough, the

animals’ eagerness to be consumed reinforces the absence of both effort and inhibition in

Cokaygne. Gifted with the miraculous power of human speech, the one purpose the geese

and larks choose to use it for is wishing diners bon appetit; their eagerness combines the

fantastic and domestic, the powers of an enchanted creature with the urging of the most

hospitable host. Allotted several lines of description, the speech-enabled fowl are treated

as a wonder—yet in the end even they are used in service of what is consistently treated

as the poem’s greatest wonder of all, the indulgence of man’s appetites without physical

labor, or even the emotional labor of hesitating over whether to wonder at, rather than

devour, the miraculous fowl.

Although Cokaygne’s culinary imagery overlaps significantly with analogues, it is

less single-minded in its depiction of pleasure and excess, encompassing not only the

pleasures of the palate but sexual appetites as well. Its food imagery is so memorable that

it’s easy to overlook the fact that the Middle English “Cokaygne” includes only a couple

dozen lines of direct alimentary description, all told. With some structures composed of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
39
The geese, roasted on the spit,/Fly around the abbey, God knows,/And cry out, “Geese,
all hot! All hot!”/They bring a great plenty of garlic,/The best prepared that one may
see./It is well known that the larks/Land in one’s mouth,/Prepared in sauce very
well,/Powdered with cloves and cinnamon.
! 32!
precious stones (88-94) and featuring windows of crystal (68, 116), and others made of

fragrant spices (73-76), Cokaygne seems composed nearly as much of jewels and flowers

as of food. The poem is content to offer relatively general assurances that everyone eats

and drinks well in Cokaygne, and to save its most gleeful detail for other types of excess.

This light-handed approach to the imagery breaks with other culinary paradises

such as the German Schlaraffenland, the Middle Dutch Cocaigne texts, and

Luilekkerland. These culinary paradises tend to spend a great many lines enumerating

delicacies and focusing on the corporeal and sensory aspects of the paradise to the

exclusion of bothersome ethical or cosmic questions; they spend much more time

cataloguing food and idleness, and much less time creating unsteady intersections

between their fantasylands and religious otherworlds.

For example, in the much lengthier, and somewhat earlier, Irish analogue Aislinge

Meic Conglinne or “Vision of MacConglinne, ” certain foods (especially cheeses,

custard, and the like) are mentioned at great length—even, as Lahney Preston-Matto puts

it, “ad nauseam.”40 This 12th-century text recounts, in alternating prose and verse, the

adventures of a monk-poet named MacConglinne who, on his way to cure a king of a

gluttony-demon, receives poor hospitality from a monastery. Imprisoned for complaining

about his comfortless lodgings, he experiences a vision of a culinary paradise where one

can sail in “a lardy coracle all of lard” across “New-milk Loch,” to buildings made of

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40
Aislinge Meic Conglinne: The Vision of Mac Conglinne, Transl. Lahney Preston-Matto,
Syracuse UP, 2010. Emily K. Yoder also discusses MacConglinne, as well as the popular
Latin prose narrative Navigatio Sancti Brendani, about a 6th century Irishman who
searches for 7 years for the Land of Promise, in “The Monks’ Paradise in The Land of
Cokaygne and the Navigatio Sancti Brendani,” Papers on Language and Literature, vol.
19, no. 3, 1983, pp. 227-238.

! 33!
custard, butter, bacon, and curds. MacConglinne later recounts his vision to lure out the

gluttony-demon that is afflicting the king; the culinary tale-spinning proves irresistible to

its infernal audience, and the ruler is cured. The two texts seem to share an interest in

“transgressive eating,” though in somewhat different ways. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne asserts a

strong thematic link between the two poems’ versions of culinary paradise, but notes that

the foods mentioned in the Middle English Cokaygne are almost all different from those

which occur in MacConglinne’s journey, pointing out that “MacConglinne” focuses

heavily on dairy, meat, and honey, while the Middle English poem lists almost

exclusively exotic imported foods, as well as more intricate spices and cooking

techniques. She suggests that the differences between the two texts are rooted partially in

the two-century gap between their composition, and the effect of Anglo-Norman invasion

on Irish foodways, resulting in the introduction of new foods, even if only for the elite.41

Between the inhospitable abbey’s guesthouse and the compulsively-consuming

king, MacConglinne’s vision skewers multiple important institutions for the degree and

type of consumption they practice. Cokaygne, however, seems to put forward no

similarly strong or pointed censure of gluttony.42 It seems just as valid a reading to say

that, like any other form of excess, gluttony is applauded for its excessiveness. Perhaps it

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41
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, asserts a strong link between “Cokaygne” and “MacConglinne”
and regards these poems as reasonably useful non-factual sources of clues about medieval
Irish food practices. (“‘The Land of Cokaygne:’ A Middle English Source for Irish Food
Historians.” Ulster Folklife 34 [1988] 48-53).
42
Although Dolan (1999) and Hardy (1965) take this view based on the presumed
likelihood that the medieval audience would filter their reception of the poem through
their awareness of real-world deprivation, and in the absence of a gluttony-demon like the
one in MacConglinne’s vision, would be inclined to cast the monks as monstrous figures.

! 34!
makes a difference that MacConglinne’s culinary land appears as a vision, then retold as

a story, within the larger narrative; whereas Cokaygne is a fantasy voyage away, from

start to finish. In any case, those who may be harmed or deprived by others’ indulgence

do not appear on the scene in this poem and ultimately practitioners of gluttony are

encouraged, not despised. Whereas analogues like the story of MacConglinne’s voyage

imply a more morally earnest parodic aim, this iteration of Cokaygne seems content with

a relatively neutral, winking portrayal of alimentary indulgence.

In fact, acts of gluttony are not even directly depicted. No one in Cokaygne is

actually described eating; descriptions of the food are addressed to the reader, and so

remain both vivid and a bit hypothetical. Whereas MacConglinne’s vision, like many

analogues, includes lavish moments of alimentary description—equivalent to a long,

lingering shot in a film— “The Land of Cokaygne” seems satisfied with fewer, briefer,

and less comprehensive culinary description, balanced with about the same amount of

general assurance of plenty, and that “Man mai þer-of et ino3/Al wiþ ri3t and no3t wiþ

wo3 (61-62).”43 Ultimately it is the idea of guiltless gluttony that is important here, not so

much the physical reality of it.

The misbehaving monks’ consumption occurs offstage, so that the reader arrives

just after or before it happens; the brothers go out to play “aftir met” (122) and eventually

return “hom to drink,/And goeþ to har collacione” (144-145). They return unhurriedly

and seem overall less interested in eating or drinking—in a culinary paradise—than in

other pleasurable activities like flying and fornicating amongst the edible local terrain and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
43
A person may eat a great deal of it, all by right and without judgment.

! 35!
architecture. Lahney Preston-Matto, in his translation of MacConglinne’s vision, likewise

notes the medieval symbolic relationship between gluttony and lust, with the former

being seen as a gateway to the latter and, conversely, fasting frequently used to “cure”

other types of sin.44 Here, the opposite seems to happen—the monks are shown neither

fasting nor feasting, but their appetites for rebellion and indulgence exercise free reign

and the possibility of excessive eating is part of conveying that total latitude. The act that

seems the milder sin—overeating—is the one most elided, while the acts most unfit for

public consumption (insubordination to the abbott, and rampant fornication in violation

of normal monastic vows), are described in comparative detail.

The fact that the poem recycles, but doesn’t particularly emphasize, its culinary

paradise tropes highlights the referential and parodic nature of the world being

constructed through glancing allusions to culinary paradise tropes. Reading “Cokaygne”

as a straightfoward exercise in wish-fulfillment that never challenges the established

order seems to run the risk of underestimating the text and neglecting its moments of

irony; “Cokaygne” as a subversive exercise in carnivalesque inversions that satirize

monasticism as a source of inequality is compelling, but also perhaps incomplete. This

latter reading applies more thoroughly to some culinary paradises than to others, in part

because it hinges on a certain idea of the text’s relationship to the material—a sense that

the food does, in fact, represent food, and is expressive of material anxieties rooted in the

scarcity of an unequal society.

Instead, in this case, there is room to read the poem as untethered (despite its

somatic imagery and fixation on pleasures of the flesh) from the material world. The

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44
Preston-Matto, xlii.
! 36!
anomalousness of the Middle English version of “Cokaygne” compared to other culinary

paradises—its relative lack of interest in sustained alimentary description or depictions of

actual gluttony, despite its indulgent attitude toward these things in theory—leaves open

the possibility that “The Land of Cokaygne” puts on the trappings of the culinary

paradise in an allusive way, using the imagery of the genre for color and imaginative

“flavor,” while freely combining it with bits of other traditions in new and interesting

ways. This poem’s counterparts offer extended, even monotonous, descriptions which

risk slipping from overwhelming the reader’s senses, to understimulating them through

repetition.

What the Middle English Cokaygne loses in thoroughness, meanwhile, it gains in

novelty; its version of the island’s culinary delights is more sketched-out than fleshed out,

yet still succeeds in producing a recognizable culinary paradise on its own terms. The

poem’s playful echoing of culinary paradise tropes, and its relaxing of the insistence on

an encyclopedic approach to sumptuousness, are key to the success of “Cokaygne” as a

pleasurable text that uses the culinary paradise tradition as a starting point, rather than

an endpoint, relying on the audience to recognize both what is being referenced and what

is being distorted or elided.

“He That Slepeth Best:” Cokaygne as Critique

If it is less interested in food and drink than might be expected, this version of

Cokaygne is much more concerned with the clergy than other examples of the culinary

paradise. This fixation reorients the culinary fantasy by giving it a monastic setting—and,

according to some, an anticlerical bent. The frequency with which surrounding texts

censure or satirize religious practice near Kildare invites a similar interpretation of “The

! 37!
Land of Cokaygne.” Although the poem is conversant with the spirit of satirical critique,

its relationship to that tradition is yet another instance in which it borrows freely from the

genre’s conventions without being entirely bound to them. Such critique might range

between “a number of distinct, but often related, polemical stances and mentalities: anti-

papalism, clerical self-criticism, and controversy between different clerical

orders...Dissenters and orthodox alike were particularly haunted by the example that they

believed to have been set for them by the apostolic Church” and questions about “what

constituted a properly evangelical priesthood” often took parodic or satirical form.

Certainly “Cokaygne” can be read as an anticlerical complaint—it has much in common

with texts which use pointed satire to skewer clergymen too much given to pride,

spiritual corruption or the pleasures of the flesh.45

Adelaide Hardy sees the poem as a lay complaint against oppressive authorities,

and as inverting hierarchies to displace and degrade these figures by skewering their

gluttony and moral error.46 Others see in the poem’s references to grey and white abbeys,

whose coloration corresponds to the garb of the orders, fodder for reading it as an

expression of squabbling between friars and monks, or Franciscan and Cistercian

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45
Mishtooni Bose, “Writing, Heresy, and the Anticlerical Muse,” Oxford Handbook of
Medieval Literature in English, Edited by Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker, Oxford UP,
2010, pp. 276-296. Bose , quoted above on p. 276, discusses various iterations of
anticlerical sentiment, from internal self-critique and reform to inter-order controversy, to
lay hostility and anti-fraternalism. See also John Van Engen, “Late Medieval
Anticlericalism: THe Case of the New Devout,” in Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and
Early Modern Europe, Edited by Peter A. Dykema and Heiko A. Oberman, Brill, 1994,
pp. 19-52. With regard to the influence of Wycliffite thinking on lay critiques and calls
for clerical reform, see Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation, Clarendon Press,
1998.
46
Hardy (1965) 90-91.

! 38!
houses.47 Neil Cartlidge suggests that criticism has been overly-focused on identifying

the poem with a particular order of monks and with monk/friar rivalry, and posits that the

manuscript could even be a self-satire, assuming that “the Franciscans’ use and

appreciation of satire did not depend on its being directed away from them.”48 What’s

clear is that the text intentionally depicts the exaggerated inversion of traditional

expectations for virtuous clerical conduct, in particular with regard to services and

sacraments, authority and monastic rule, and sexuality.

Not until line 113, a little over halfway through the text, is there any attempt to

address what the monks in Cokaygne do with their days in paradise, or to describe the

sort of monastic rule they keep—or rather, flout. The first practice mentioned is the

monks’ daily attendance at church services:

Whan þe monkes geeþ to Masse,

Al þe fenestres þat beþ of glasse

Turneþ into cristal bri3t,

To yiue monkes more li3t.

Whan þe Masses beþ iseiid,

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47
See Dronke (2011). The poem’s early editor, W. Heuser, linked the Cokaygne monks
to Kildare because of the poem’s references to the grey and white abbey; Thomas Jay
Garbaty suggests Athlone because of political squabbling there between adjacent
communities of Franciscan and Cistercian clerics (149), with the manuscript making its
way to Kildare only after “royal support was withdrawn from Athlone since the house
was by that time completely Irish” (“Studies in the Franciscan ‘The Land of Cokaygne’
in the Kildare MS,” Franziskanische Studien vol. 45, 1963, pp. 139-153).
48
Neil Cartlidge “Festivity, Order, and Community in Fourteenth-Century Ireland: The
Composition and Contexts of BL MS Harley 913,” Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 33,
2003, pp. 33-52.

! 39!
 And þe bokes up ileiid,

The cristal turniþ into glasse,

In state þat hit raþer wasse. (113-120)49

Although the liturgical tradition means that the elements of Mass, even now, are

predictable and recognizable in Catholic settings the world over, this passage ignores the

well-known liturgical sequence, omits any mention of scriptures, homilies, or the host,

and seems almost entirely concerned with non-sequiturs. The spectacle of the miraculous

crystallization of the windows and their return to glass evokes imagery of light and dark

that is almost aggressively literal—yet its wonder seems more directed at the superiority

of crystal over glass, than of light over darkness. This approach to chapel drowns out the

metaphorical resonances of the monks’ need for “more light” during Mass and subsumes

the spiritual to the tangible.

Having dispensed with a mass concerned more with crystal than communion,

lines 120 and following take a more explicitly perverse parodic turn. Upon their release

from the divine service, the monks fortify themselves for recreation and set out:

The yung monkes euch dai

Aftir met goþ to plai.

Nis þer hauk no fule so swifte

Bettir fleing bi þe lifte

þan þe monkes hei3 of mode,

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49
When the monks go to Mass,/All the windows made of glass/Turn into bright
crystal/To give the monks more light./When Mass has been said,/And the books put
away,/The crystal turns back into glass,/Back to the state it was in before.

! 40!
 Wiþ har sleuis and har hode” (121-126).50

If fowl are endowed, in Cokaygne, not only with the fantastic ability to fly while already

cooked but also with human characteristics such as speech, then the opposite is also

true—the monks take on animal qualities as they take flight. They are literally elevated as

they become airborne, but also inverted and brought low by the use to which they put this

power. The monks-in-flight are compared to hawks, ostensibly because of their swiftness,

but also because of the predatory speed with which they eventually capture their “prei” at

the nearby nunnery:

...euch monke him taketh on

And snellich berith forth har prei

To the mochil grei abbei,

And techith the nunnes an oreisun

With iambleue vp and dun.

The monke that wol be stalun gode

And kan set a-right is hode,

He schal hab, with-oute danger,

Twelve wiues euche yere,

Al throgh right and noght throgh grace,

For-to do him-silf solace. (161-171)51

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50
The young monks, each day,/After eating go out to play./There is no hawk or bird so
swift,/Better at flying through the air,/Than these high-spirited monks,/With their sleeves
and their hoods.
51
Each monk takes one [nun] for himself/ And quickly carries forth his prey/ To the great
grey abbey,/ and teaches the nuns a prayer/ with legs lifted up and down./ The monk that
! 41!
As Brenda Garrett notes, the image of the monks spying the nuns bathing in the river of

milk and hurrying to swoop down and carry them away neatly parodies tropes of flight-

as-transcendence, turning this metaphor literal by setting the monks aloft, and turning its

meaning inside-out as well by making them not only unchaste and unpious, but actively

predatory:

In medieval symbolism, monks were often represented as songbirds, not only

because both live together in supposed harmony, but also because both sing and

because a bird's flight was seen to parallel a monk's transcendent contemplation.

In "Cokaygne," the symbol conflates, as the monks are not only represented by

birds, but become bird-like...Cokaygne's monks are not harmonious songbirds,

but rather chivalric raptors. Since these monks fly, prey on the nuns, and are

recalled to the monastery by the easy prey of the Abbott's captive girl, they are

most likely being represented as hawks.52

The monks’ pursuit of their “easy prey” flies in the face of monastic rule by being

unchaste (in ways that we would now consider not just unseemly but violent and

predatory). It is also, in a sense, inappropriately acquisitive— these flights are the only

time the brothers are depicted leaving the abbey, and they go out into the neighboring

communities not to give but to violently take.

Unlike the poem’s other fowl, the talkative cooked geese and larks, the airborne

clerics are not in danger of being consumed. But they are depicted here, albeit jokingly,

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wants to be a good stallion/ And can set his hood rightly,/ He shall have, without any
objection,/ Twelve wives each year/ All by right and not by grace,/ To enjoy himself.
52
Garrett (2004), 6.

! 42!
as “fleeing” something— the earthbound abbot’s authority— in an exaggerated form of

inverted discipline. The abbot seems torn between the task of retrieving his flock and the

desire to indulge their flight; he calls them back, but explicitly does so in spite of his own

pleasure at seeing their defiance of both his orders and the laws of gravity:

Whan þe abbot seeþ ham flee,

þat he holt for moch glee.

Ak naþeles al þer amang,

He biddeth ham li3t to euesang” (127-130).53

He ultimately ends the airborne revels only by way of a sexually-charged signal that

brings his underlings back not out of obedience but titillation; this inversion cheerfully

replaces clerical rule with rule-breaking:

þe monkes li3tith no3t adun

Ak furre fleeþ in o randun.

Whan the abbot him iseeþ

That is monkes fram him fleeþ,

He takeþ maidin of the route

And turniþ vp hir white toute,

And betiþ the taburs wiþ is hond

To make is monkes li3t to lond.

Whan is monkes þat iseeþ,

To þe maid dun hi fleeþ

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53
When the abbot sees them fly,/He considers it very entertaining,/But nonetheless,
meanwhile,/He bids them land for vespers.

! 43!
 And geþ the wench al abute,

And þakkeþ al hir white toute.

And siþ aftir her swinke

Wendiþ meklich hom to drink,

And goeþ to har collacione,

A wel fair processione. (131-146)54

Although earlier lines imply the abbot actually called the monks back “to euesang,” they

proceed not to the chapel but to the table, to drink and eat; any ostensibly sacred reason

for their obedience is buried and forgotten beneath the sensory indulgence of their

incentive and reward for returning home. The parodic religious house serves as a

winking, pseudo-sacred backdrop for their glee.

The abbey scenes lend themselves more to carnival than to critique; monastic life

is aggressively material instead of spiritual, and gleefully reverses every possible

expectation for appropriate behavior, replacing poverty with abundance, celibacy with

lechery, and asceticism with indulgence. Whereas a critique presumably aims to reinstate,

or at least point toward, an ideal order, carnivalesque inversion destabilizes that ideal,

allowing its reinstatement without working for or endorsing it. Rather than being

reinforced by the power of satirical critique, sacred symbols turn themselves inside out in

order to simultaneously suggest virtue and represent vice, and the distinctions between

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54
The monks do not land/But fly further at a great speed./When the abbot sees/That the
monks fly away from him,/He takes a maiden from the crowd,/And turns up her white
buttock,/And beats the drums with his hand/To make the monks land on the earth./When
the monks see that,/They fly down to the maid/Gather around the maiden,/And all smack
her white buttock./Then after their work,/Meekly make their way home to drink,/And go
to their evening meal/A very fine procession.
! 44!
the two disappear. The poem takes on a “geography of escape” that allows for unchristian

literary revelling as, through mocking, inverted mimicry, “the ideal, the spiritual, and the

abstract are all deflated to the level of material reality.” 55

Clerical rule in Cokaygne seems less an imposition of holy order on base matter,

than an inversion of that: an extension of the land’s internal order, in which hedonism is a

natural force akin to gravity and the cloister becomes a chamber or various pleasures. The

poem draws on the echoes of monastic rule and the audience’s awareness of norms for

what monastic order looks like, but it does so not in order to uphold, or even to

contradict, those rules—if anything, it’s in order to ostentatiously perform forgetting

about them, while simultaneously reminding us of what is being forgotten. The result is a

thorough and even-handed mockery of both rule breakers and rule makers; the

predictable patterns of both liturgy and nature are either upended or blithely ignored, and

the high is brought low by parodic inversion.

“Ful grete penaunce:” Cokaygne as Parodied Eden

“The Land of Cokaygne,” finally, echoes not only other iterations of the culinary

paradise and highlights clerical misbehavior, but also incorporates thickly-layered

references to Biblical imagery. “þo3 Paradis be miri and bri3t,” Cokaygne is “of fairir

si3t” still, we are told.56 The abbey is surrounded by rivers of milk and honey (45-46),

“mani maner frut” (49) and beautiful flowers, and a general atmosphere of joy and bliss;

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55
Louise O. Vasvari, “The Geography of Escape and Topsy-Turvy Literary Genres,”
Discovering New Worlds: Essay on Medieval Exploration and Imagination, Ed. Scott D.
Westrem, Garland, 1991.
56
Though Paradise is fair and bright, Cokaygne is a fairer sight.

! 45!
it’s inhabited by the Biblical patriarch Enoch and the prophet Elijah; it’s even explicitly

compared with “Paradise.” These references are enough to signal what is being echoed—

and just as quickly, dispensed with—as the poem opens:

Fur in see bi west Spayngne

Is a lond ihote Cokaygne.

þer nis lond vnd' heuen riche

Of wel, of godnis, hit iliche.

þo3 Paradis be miri and bri3t,

Cokaygn is of fairir si3t.

What is þer in Paradis

Bot grasse and flure and grene ris?

þo3 þer be ioi and gret dute,

þer nis met bote frute;

þer nis halle, bure, no bench,

Bot watir manis þurst to quench.

Beþ þer no men bot two

Hely and Enok also;

Elinglich mai hi go

Whar þer woniþ men no mo. (1-16)57

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57
Far out to see, to the west of Spain/Is a land called Cokaygne./There is no land under
the kingdom of heaven/ Like it, so blessed and excellent./Though Paradise is merry and
bright,/ Cokaygne is a fairer sight./What is there in Paradise,/But grass and flowers and
green twigs?/Although there is joy and great delight,/There is no food but fruit;/There is
no hall, no bedroom, no bench,/Nothing but water to quench man’s thirst;/There are no
people except for two,/Elijah and also Enoch;/Miserably they live/Where no other men
dwell .
! 46!
By locating Paradise on the earth—but “Fur in see bi west Spayngne” and not in the

traditional East—this poem inverts tradition and signals an association with medieval

tropes of religious spaces, while making clear that Cokaygne is a ludic response to

Paradise, not a representation of the place itself.58 It can be described relative to a real

country, but at the same time is far beyond Spain, holding real places and fantastical

voyages in tandem. Likewise, the four rivers mentioned in line 46 are analogous to

Edenic tradition—but layered atop this is the fact that they run with “oile, melk, honi and

wine,” a characteristically indulgent innovation. Assigning an inverted and distorted

geography to Cokaygne is hardly the only example of liberty-taking; in fact, the poem

upends Eden repeatedly through other cockeyed echoes of well-known Biblical and

extrabiblical accounts of paradise.

The poem details the land’s flora and fauna in ways that echo, and alter, the tropes

of paradise. The garden’s abundant fruit is supplemented by every other foodstuff

imaginable; other than as well-prepared and cooperative entrees, though, animals go

unmentioned except to emphatically point out their absence. Of Genesis 1’s account of

creation, day six with its “creeping things and beasts of the earth” (1:24) is elided, and

only the avian half of day five is of interest—there’s no mention of creatures that swim

(1:21). The animals the poem names—in a negatory sense, not a wonderment-filled

catalog of creation—include domesticated beasts like sheep, goats, pigs, cows, and oxen

(whose absence, the passage is quick to note, means there is no dung to be dealt with);

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58
For some associations of paradise with the East, see History of Paradise: The Garden
of Eden in Myth and Tradition, Jean Delumeau, Transl. Matthew O’Connell. Univ Illinois
Press, 2000, p. 56.
! 47!
dangerous or predatory ones like snakes, wolves, and foxes; troublesome creatures like

fleas and lice; repugnant ones like worms and snails (31-40).59

The only animals who do appear, in other words, are fantastical ones: deliciously

non-threatening because they are untainted by labor (and in some cases, flavored instead

with a hint of transgression—the list is fairly heavy, P.L. Henry observes, on animals

“such as serpent, fox, and swine which had acquired an unfavorable allegorical

significance by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as representatives of particular

vices”).60

Also touted in the poem’s reverse-catalogue of Creation is the absence, in

Cokaygne, of various earthly burdens including bad weather, pests, physical maladies,

and interpersonal strife—things which are missing not because Cokaygne is prelapsarian,

but because it is immune. Finally, we are told,

þer beth riuers gret and fine

Of oile, melk, honi and wine.

Watir seruiþ þer to noþing,

Bot to si3t and to waiissing

þer is mani maner frute,

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59
Ther nis serpent, wolf no fox,/ Hors no capil, kowe no ox,/ Ther nis schepe, no swine,
no gote /Ne non horwgh, la, God it wote./ Nother harace nother stode./ The lond is ful of
other gode:/ Nis ther flei, fle no lowse/ In cloth,in toune, bed no house/ Ther nis dunnir,
slete no hawle,/ No non vile worme no snawile.
60
Henry, 129.

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 Al is solas and dedute. (45-50)61

“Waissing” could potentially mean household washing or cleaning, personal bathing, or a

more symbolic or ceremonial purging.62 Recreational bathing seems the most in keeping

with Cokaygne’s ethos—it is equally difficult to imagine either chores or cleansing

rituals being meant. The use of water for baptism is, unsurprisingly, not mentioned at all.

In order to work, the parody depends upon the prior existence, and the audience’s

knowledge of, the object being distorted. As Cokaygne’s conversation with Eden unfolds,

the poem marks this facet of its own intertextuality via gestures that ensure the audience’s

awareness of the back-and-forth involved. These first sixteen lines of the poem set up

explicit parallels between Eden and Cokaygne—one paradise real and one imagined, to

most medieval audience members—but both, perhaps, equally out of sight and out of

reach. The opening passages not only draw on the presence of external texts to enrich

Cokaygne, but use them to generate an interior “original” to which the poem’s parodic

voice can respond via what Linda Hutcheon defines as “repetition, with a critical

distance,” foregrounding parodic elaboration and distortion of a text or cultural narrative

in dialog with its own distorted imitation.

The poem emphasizes absence rather than abundance; negativity rather than

excess, in comparing Eden and Cokaygne. The query “What is þer in Paradis/Bot grasse

and flure and grene ris?” (7-8) introduces a diminutive “but,” the first of several which

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61
There are rivers, great and fine/of oil, milk, honey, and wine./Water serves no purpose
there/Except to look at and for washing./There are many kinds of fruit,/All is pleasure
and delight.
62
Middle English Dictionary: Hyperbibliography of Middle English. University of
Michigan Digital Library Production Services, 1998.

! 49!
comedically underscore a sense of austerity, rather than abundance, that inverts

expectations of paradise.63 The subsequent complaints that “þer nis halle, bure, no bench,/

“Bot water mainis þurst to quench” and none of the social pleasures necessary to a

pleasant life, only “Hely and Enok,” “no men bot two” create a sense of incongruity that

depends on the audience’s familiarity with paradise as the ultimate symbol of bliss and

abundance (10-14).64

Furthermore, Paradise is described as a profoundly utilitarian place, piously

focused on needs rather than on pleasures. In fact, its underwhelming “ioi and gret dute”

(9) are somewhat disembodied, and set up a contrast with the earthy abundance of

Cokaygne.65 This Paradise is a place that is good without being enjoyable, in large part

because it encourages—even mandates—disengagement from the pleasures of the

flesh.spiritual hunger and thirst are met with “nis met bote frute” and “bot water” which,

we are specifically informed, is meant “to quench” (and, the implication is, not to provide

enjoyment).66 The appetites addressed in Paradise move down the body and back up

again, progressing from the eyes (what is there to see “Bot grasse and flure and grene

ris?”), to the mouth and stomach (“þer nis met bote frute”), to the communal pleasures of

the heart and mind (“þer nis halle, bure, no bench...Beþ þer no men bot two”). In each

instance, the passage paints a picture of a paradise where, rather than having every

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63
What is there in Paradise, except grass and flower and green twig?
64
There is no manor, no chamber, no bench; nothing but water man’s thirst to
quench...no men except two (Elijah and Enoch).
65
Joy and great delight.
66
No sustenance but fruit; only water.

! 50!
imaginable comfort except the forbidden fruit from one tree, the inhabitant has only

minimal comforts—the prohibition of Eden is reversed, seemingly. These lines sketch an

austere land where almost everything is forbidden, ripe for comparison with the alternate

paradise of Cokaygne, where nothing is. As a sort of preface for the richly somatic

imagery and sensuous pleasures of Cokaygne, the poem paints an Edenic land that

functions as a “Before” version of paradise—and the corresponding “After” is the made-

over and glammed-up Cokaygne.

The Biblical Paradise’s flattened, muted attendance to the sensory world gives

way to a hyperbolically heightened sense of the material in Cokaygne. This language is

hyperbolized rather than constrained, and plays on on tropes of Edenic perfection by

exaggerating or inverting them:

I Cokaigne is met and drink

Wiþvte care, how, and swink;

þe met is trie, þe drink is clere,

To none, russin, and sopper. (17-20)67

This abundance and indulgence are entirely effortless, occurring “Wiþvte care, how, and

swink.” In Paradise, presumably, a perpetual Sabbath-rest might likewise reign, but

neither the presence or absence of work are mentioned (perhaps piety itself is considered

wearisome and laborous, or perhaps even without work idleness is not enjoyable, since

we know from the passage above that there are no pleasures to fill it with). In Cokaygne

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67
In Cokaygne there is food and drink/Without care, distress, or work;/The food is
excellent, the drink is clear,/At the noonday meal, afternoon snack, and and supper.

! 51!
freedom from work is explicitly emphasized, and there it seems a natural part of its

capacity to cater to the pleasures of the individual who reigns supreme.

The distortion of the Eden narrative is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the

last section of the poem, which concerns the penance required for entry to Cokaygne.

Here the entrance is not guarded by cherubim with flaming swords, awesome emissaries

of divine judgment. Rather, it is kept by an inanimate and abject barrier: a vast expanse of

pig dung:

Whose wil com þat lond to,

Ful grete penaunce he mot do:

Seue yere in swine is dritte

He mote wade, wol ye iwitte,

Al anon vp to þe chynne,

So he schal þe lond winne.

Lordings gode and hend,

Mot ye neuer of world wend,

Fort ye stond to yure cheance

And fulfille that penance,

þat ye mote that lond i-se

And neuer more turne a-ye.

Prey we God so mote hit be,

Amen, pur seint charite. (177-190)68

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68
Whoever wishes to come to that land/Must do a very great penance: /Seven years in pig
dung/He must wade—understand it well, /All the way up to the chin/In order to win that
land./Gentlemen good and noble,/May you never depart from the world,/Before you try
! 52!
Although the poem seems obsessed with consumption, it is not entirely single-minded. A

scatological turn, at the end of the poem, reveals the presence of not only food but

excrement—the lucky visitor will encounter neither filth, vermin, nor sickness in

Cokaygne, but must wade through a vast expanse of pig dung to get there. In some ways

this closing section is the perverse fulfillment of the feasting imagery. Up until this point,

the materiality around which the poem is built has been oriented toward aesthetic

pleasure—the allure of visions of plenty and hyperbolic physical indulgence. These

closing lines are brief, but form a final, lasting image: Cokaygne does not, after all,

entirely insist on excess without waste, ingestion without excretion. Although the land

itself is free from these, they still haunt its borders.

The poem’s final discussion of how to “winne” entrance into Cokaygne mixes

notions of merit and chance. The entrant is instructed both to fulfill “ful grete penaunce”

and to “stond to yure cheance” in order “þat ye mote that lond i-se.”69 This barrier of

filth, and the challenge to traverse (and be immersed in) it, complicates the poem’s

portrayal of paradise. It is questionable whether the imagery departs from its focus on

hedonistic pleasure; continues in the same vein, adding to the reader’s amusement by

making yet another hyperbolic joke, the most extreme one yet; or something in between

(continuing the pattern, yet twisting it).

The insistence on the extreme presence of pleasure and food and the utter absence

of ugliness and waste is undermined by the fact that the poem closes with vivid

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your luck/And perform that penance/So that you may see that land/And never turn away
from it./We pray to God it may be so,/Amen, for Saint Charity.
69
Fulfill that great penance and try your luck, so that you might see that land.

! 53!
description of the way into Cokaygne; its seemingly utopian essence turns out to be a

bait-and-switch maneuver. Pleij and Lochrie suggest slightly different things—that the

penance is all a somewhat futile, yet enduring, way of mitigating existential fear through

mockery; or, slightly more optimistically, a way of undermining and inverting the entire

monastic ethos in carnival mode. It seems a classic carnival image, occupied as it is with

the uttermost grotesque reaches of the lower bodily stratum, but also with fecundity, in

the sense that this moat of dung leads to the land of abundance. Bakhtin’s grotesque

realism, with its exaggeration, hyperbole, and excess, is innately tied to the “material

lower bodily stratum,” and unites as a whole” the cosmic, social, and bodily elements”—

certainly a trio present in “The Land of Cokaygne.”70 Cokaygne can be read as rooted in

an ethic of carnivalization, characterized by inversion, rule, and misrule—and ultimately,

subverting the status quo temporarily only to restore it, allowing the land of plenty to

remain unreachable to the common man.

The passage contains a mix of hyperbolic intensifying language, emphasizing the

arduousness of the task, and a sense of flippancy regarding the whole endeavor—first,

because it is actively chosen by the competitor for the prize; second, because it is self-

consciously fictional and the passage contains not only constant reminders of the paradise

and penance at stake, but also constant reminders of the fiction at the root of these stakes.

"Whose wil com þat lond to" implies both openness and choice; anyone may attempt it,

and doing so is freely chosen. The penance metaphor plays word games with the reader,

and aptly juggles two contrasting images: the somber, arduous journey of the penitent,

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70
Bakhtin, 19

! 54!
and the freewheeling self-assigned, consequence-less task of the player. The reference to

"ful grete penaunce he mot do," again, plays with a doubleness in describing the penance

almost casually, so that the ostensibly intensifying phrases undermine their own delivery,

becoming ironic even as they are uttered.

Several times in the passage "he mote" is used, but the "mot," the language of

compulsion, becomes ironic and hollow given the voluntary, and deeply imaginary,

nature of the task. There is also an all-important interjection, here—at the peak of this

description, the poem suddenly pauses to act out dialog between poet and audience,

reminding the reader of its own artifice. Just as the imagery is at its most abject and vivid,

the poem shifts focus away from the act being described, and toward the act of

describing, itself. From this point on, the poem never returns to the nameless "he" who

has been descriptively abandoned in the act of penance; he is poetically left suspended

there, while the poem takes another self-aware turn toward addressing hypothetical

audience members, and wishing them glib success before closing with a pat piety or two.

The closing warning that aspirants must wade through dung, and a rather glib

wish that they do so successfully, once again upends and distorts one of the primary texts

it echoes. Not for this audience, a slow redemption via the sweat of one’s brow (as

proscribed in Genesis 3). Access to Cokaygne is won not by purification but by

contamination; the ability to embrace disgrace and emerge from the journey filthier than

before. There is a humorous dimension, and a parodic one, to this. The poem’s

hedonistic, fantasy-driven escapism pokes fun at the tropes of medieval Christendom and

its expectations of morality and moderation as paths to fulfillment.

! 55!
 The penance scenario, like the abundant meals and laborless existence of

Cokaygne, involves exaggeration rooted in familiarity. As Bayless points out, excrement

can be equated, in medieval thought, with both pigs (an emblem of foolishness and

sinfulness) and sin itself.71 One must undergo, then, an un-cleansing or reverse-baptism,

by spending time immersed in dung in order to go forth and immerse oneself in gluttony,

sloth, and lust.72 Read this way, the penance embellishes the Biblical story of exile from

Eden by inverting it and implying that one can re-enter this version of paradise, if one is

only diligent about being bad enough. It is a direct and enthusiastic reversal of yet

another sacramental image. The dung-wading entrance exam can be taken as having

simultaneous—or rather, layered—implications. It suggests sin and filth and all manner

of moral squalor. More importantly, when placed alongside the poem’s flippant

depictions of mass and monastic (dis)order and (mis)rule, the final penance is one in a

long string of sacred symbols that are parodied and emptied of meaning.

The introductory fault-finding subversively taps into the Biblical narrative of

man’s fall being caused by a desire to consume the one fruit available, but not offered;

it’s a story that hinges upon total abundance being somehow not enough. The ending,

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71
Martha Bayless, Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture: The Devil in the Latrine,
Routledge, 2012, pp. 80-81.
72
Both Davidson and Garrett discuss the underlying “iconography of the hog as an
emblem of both lechery and gluttony, and that the seven years work in pig dung
represents a complete saturation in these sins, preparing the penitent for life in this sinful
world of over-eating and sexual promiscuity” (Garrett, 11). Davidson reads this
abstractly, and fairly earnestly, as a critique of the sins of the flesh themselves, portrayed
via the descent through various mortal sins (sloth, gluttony, lust) into swine form. Garrett
concludes that the comparison with swine is meant to apply not to sinners, per se, but to
the Irish, from an Anglo-Norman perspective.

! 56!
meanwhile, parodies the idea of penance by positing a task so extreme it cannot help but

be taken lightly. The poem’s finale is neither a solemn nor a didactic final word; the

playfulness of the poem seems almost to present the notion of sin, judgment, and penance

as one oddity among the many featured in Cokaygne. Generic pieties authorize what is

arguably the real pleasure of the narrative: living vicariously through the transgressive

indulgence being depicted. Cokaygne represents human desire as being directed toward

excess itself, in every way and seemingly as an end in itself. The result is a portrait of an

upturned world where religion, pursued via flippant gestures, as the set up to a joke; the

inhabitants’ impressive level of commitment to hedonism is the punchline. By

mimicking, but ludically elaborating upon, the tropes of culinary paradise; inverting

expectations of monastic rule regarding order, moderation, and sexual abstinence; and

finally donning a distorted mask based on biblical accounts of paradise in a way that not

only skewers monkish misbehavior but parodies, perhaps even dismisses, the ideas of

virtue and penance, reward and punishment.

Since the culinary paradise is a prominent echo that informs the poem, and one

based squarely in a peasant perspective and which necessitates a foundation of inequity

and want, there are hints of a ludic take on a dark reality, grounded in unofficial oral and

literary tradition. Popular analogues and echoes are, for the most part, drawn upon and

discarded, rather than critiqued or satirized— even what is not found to be useful or

interesting enough to fully imitate is ignored, rather than skewered. “Cokaygne” also

bumps up against a very official tradition, that of religious paradise— and it is this more

elevated set of influences that are most aggressively subjected to its Carnival treatment,

in which the delightful is made dim, holy men become hellions, authority is degraded,

! 57!
and tradition is profaned by the fairly insulting picture of penance. The poem’s

hyperbolic parody of established order and lofty creeds neither castigates nor corrects the

type of abuses of secular and religious authority that loom large during the unrest-riddled

period of its composition. Rather, it recreates them in an exaggerated form that echoes

contemporary concerns and, in addition to profaning monastic imagery, hints at the

absurdity of a closed loop in which one must escape from an underwhelming paradise or

world of want, into an ideal land that is revealed to be full of dung that mirrors, in literal

and hyperbolic form, the degradation the imagined traveler left behind.

! 58!
 CODA: RESPONDING TO INCONGRUITY IN “COKAYGNE”

In addition to further scholarship, it seems likely that “Cokaygne” would reward

circulation in classrooms. The poem’s humorous tone and outlandish content offer useful

footholds for drawing students in; its many-layered allusiveness offers a gateway for

exploring various aspects of its medieval context; its mockery invites a larger exploration

of the work of parody, satire, and other genres of responsiveness.

Though the bizarre imagery and events in the text provide a natural entry point for

discussion and are likely to ensure enjoyment and engagement, they do not necessarily

ensure interpretive boldness. In fact, somewhat paradoxically, the very incongruity that

draws a class in as readers may cause intimidation or puzzlement regarding what’s

appropriate when the time comes for them to not only enjoy, but respond.

At least in the case of non-English majors taking General Education Literature,

the setting into which I have introduced this text, readers generally arrived with relatively

buttoned-up expectations for medieval literature, and for the idea of Literature more

generally. This learned earnestness can prove a bit hard to shake, even when confronted

with the merrily lecherous flying monks of “Cokaygne.” The clerics’ antics initially

prompted responses consisting of variations on one student’s comment, “I don’t know

what I was expecting, but it was not that.” In unpacking their responses, discussion

participants were quick to pick up on various incongruities—the disconnect between the

poem’s diction and its content, came up frequently in remarks which referred to the

language as “formal,” “flowery,” or the multilayered all-purpose descriptor “old,” and

expressed a bemused sense of having been pranked by the poem once the beautiful

imagery took a profane turn. The dissonance between recognizably “literary” language

! 59!
and scenes of bottom-drumming and dung-wading were noted with cautious

amusement— but in the end, little more.

This group of students surprised me, in fact, with the extent to which they clung

to interpretations that forebore fun and emphasized didacticism. This was the case even

for individuals who showed evident enjoyment of the text, and it was more marked in the

transition from oral to written discussion (in the form of a brief reading response). Even

though both formats were explicitly informal, many readings and this one in particular

highlighted for me the way putting pen to paper (or keys to keyboard) can imply a

permanency and formality that is hard to shake, and which guided responses away from

the more imaginative offhand remarks made in class, and toward responses that were

both interpretively neater, and stylistically more formal, than unwritten responses to the

same material.

Some essays read the poem as tricking, or laughing with, the reader, but most

acknowledged the incongruities and playfulness, only to back away from the idea that

they were intended to be enjoyed. Responses tended to go one of two routes: either

stalling out at the point of confusion, throwing up the interpretive hands, and concluding,

as one student did, “I don’t know the point of this weird poem,” or retreating into the

safety of didacticism and claiming (visibly halfheartedly) that “Cokaygne” only seems to

be an outlandish place, but its outlandishness strictly reinforces normalcy by implying

judgement of the behaviors depicted (or, as another student suggested, encouraging

readers to live good lives now so they can one day live just like the residents of

Cokaygne).

! 60!
 In some ways the direction of the discussion (like so many things about the

mandatory reading and writing that take place in a required course) seemed guided by

haste—an eagerness, or sense of pressure, to reach an interpretive destination as

efficiently as possible and to make sense, even if that sense is forced, of the elements in

play. Another part of this initial interpretive hesitancy seemed to spring from lack of

context—unfamiliarity with this specific poem, but also a general self-consciousness

about a lack of authority to engage with pre-twentieth-century texts. Emphasizing the

intertextual and parodic nature of the poem turned out to be one helpful way to counter

this and encourage riskier, more playful, and ultimately more satisfying contributions to

discussion. It hardly takes a catechist to note the transgressiveness of the monks’

behavior; most students in the class had some experience or awareness of what monks

are, and some knowledge of the Catholic tenets that would ostensibly be guiding them

toward contemplation and celibacy. From this useful, familiar starting point, the same

questions explored by critics—degree of earnestness or pointedness, the differences and

links between parody, satire, and nonsense—can be explored. The text’s setting in an

abbey makes it easy to begin cultivating a sense of the poem not only as a message but as

a reply, in this case to a larger religious context.

In addition to historical background about monasticism, in this case a brief

overview of literary contexts including traditions of paradise (culinary or religious) and

the tropes therein became fodder for a discussion that moved from what the poem says, to

the various things it might mean or be influenced by. Sheridan Blau describes

competence as the shift between textual, intertextual, and performative knowledge—what

! 61!
the text says, what it means, and what it matters.73 This poem, because it juggles so many

outside referents, offers rich opportunities to complicate class discussion by emphasizing

not only what the poem describes, but what is behind the imagery and to what it speaks—

the text’s engagement in a conversation of its own, with the literary and social traditions

it mimics and parodies.

Finally, in addition to considering the text as parody, in a future course I would

likely foreground assignments with a parodic or ludic edge, as a way to access more

confident and creative interpretations. Combining pedagogy and parody can serve as an

entry point for challenging texts or concepts; enrich scaffolding approaches by

encouraging complex, intertextual thinking; offer students practice at critically examining

culture and context; and harmonize with technology-rich pedagogical approaches. Linda

Hutcheon notes “the didactic value of parody in teaching or co-opting the art of the past

by textual incorporation and ironic commentary,” an irony she views as peculiarly

modern and postmodern.74 But as Siân Echard points out, parodic self-reflexiveness

applies more broadly to medieval intellectual contexts of “enormous, self-conscious

literary creativity and experimentation” in which creating new texts meant “fashioning

the new from the old and creating in the process both a literature and a sense of

themselves as literary artists;” the idea that “modern artists engage in parody in order to

‘refunction’ the forms of their predecessors to their own needs” need not be seen as a

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73
Sheridan Blau, “What Do Students Need to Learn? The Dimensions of Literary
Competence,” The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers, Heinemann,
2003, pp. 203-217.
74
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Form,.
1985, University of Illinois Press, 2000, p. 27.

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specifically modern one at all, but could instead serve to link the temporal contexts of

text and student.75 Highlighting the overlapping nature of Cokaygne’s influences offers a

springboard for discussions of literary history as a complex and ongoing conversation, an

approach that simultaneously ponders the poem’s concrete contexts, while embracing its

abstract and fantastical qualities.

Meanwhile, the self-reflexivity of the parodic text is of a piece with current

cultural obsessions with mashups, pastiche, crowdsourcing, and remixing ideas online.

Students’ digital immersion lends itself to not only engagement with existing parodies but

parodic forms of response which empower the student and require consideration of how

best to prompt “anticipation, reflection and reaction” in a parodic milieu “wherein the

principle of the audience as spectators of the discourse transcends to a principle of the

audience as potential participants in the discourse.76 Parodic discourse invites careful

consideration of issues of audience, working as it does via familiarity with the parodied

material, as well as a range of other discourse in order to “get” the parody. Success

depends on accurately gauging and playing with reader expectations and comprehension,

as well as conveying an ironic familiarity with the parodied subject. These considerations

are particularly relevant for entry-level university students, for whom mastering

awareness of audience is a key step toward increasing competence and confidence in an

academic environment.

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75
Echard, Sian, “Of Parody and Perceval: Middle Welsh and Middle English
Manipulations of the Perceval Story,” Nottingham Medieval Studies vol. 40, 1996, p. 64.
76
Hutcheon, 14.

! 63!
 In experiments with digital assignments that tended to take on a parodic edge (not

with this poem but with other canonical and “old” texts— in this case, Dracula, A

Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Poe’s “The Raven”— perhaps tellingly, no one chose

Cokaygne) it seemed to be the case that the more parodic the project, the more

interpretive depth there tended to be.77 One project, for example, traced the unfolding of a

pivotal scene in Dracula via Twitter, using key quotes from the text and combining them

with images, hashtags, location information, links to music, and in some cases

deliberately incorrect grammar, to shape the profile of each speaker into something that

reflected Stoker’s characterization and the students’ interpretations, simultaneously. The

project focused on parodic portrayals of the novel’s characters as teens using music,

memes, and social media to achieve popularity and vanquish the undead Count.

In students’ own self-aware words, the success and satisfaction of their project

was partly because of the psychological freedom afforded by the task of “repetition, with

critical distance,” as Linda Hutcheon puts it—closely observing and interpreting a text’s

features in order to make something new, rather than for observation’s own sake.

Students seemed to feel they were not only demonstrating knowledge in order to meet a

requirement, but gaining confidence by working from a model and then making a ludic

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77
The assignment referred to here asked students to use a combination of visuals and text
to create a comprehensive digital version of a scene from one of the texts they’d read in
the course. Students could collaborate on a filmed performance, translate their chosen
scene to social media, or use another medium like music video, photo or video collage,
etc. Each project was presented to and discussed with classmates, and each was
accompanied by a written explanation explaining linking key project elements to specific
citations from the text, and explaining the interpretive significance of 12-15 of the
group’s choices regarding setting, tone, themes, characterization, symbolism, etc. Most
groups chose to present a filmed performance or translate their scene to social media
(either Facebook or Twitter).

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intervention of their own as they respond to a text that both enacts and elicits parodic

dialog. By incorporating the original text, which they viewed as inherently formal and

legitimate, they granted themselves greater license in the ways they built on it. Such was

the case for one student who wrote of a digital group project,

I understand the necessity of formal writings, but...I felt that I could not be myself

in them. The group project was more fun because of its informality...ours took on

a parody-like tone. We were more creative...and had fun with it, even if it was

difficult. My group...found a similar vibe [between the texts] and ran with it.

Another student agreed on the freeing effect of a “weird poem,” noting that texts like

Cokagyne are entertaining and moreover convey a sense of permission “to think, read,

and discuss the texts in more bizarre ways that were considered unorthodox and frowned

upon in prior classes.” The parody seemed to act as an opportunity to engage in the sort

of “ritual bluffing” David Bartholomae describes as part of learning to claim the authority

of academic discourse— an instance in which the student writer is explicitly authorized

to imitate, in a way that helps diffuse the knotty power structures in play, and from there

to claim a right to speak in a way that aspires to ownership and originality.78 Students

“try on” various discourses, appropriating and performing their still-alien sets of gestures

as a “necessary and enabling fiction at work” in the student’s adjustment to his or her

audience and position in the academy. Bartholomae frames this as a process of cultivating

the ability to “imagine and write from a position of privilege,” and I see parodic exercises

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78
David Bartholomae, “Inventing the University,” When a Writer Can’t Write: Studies in
Writer’s Block and Other Composing Process Problems, Ed. Mike Rose, Guilford, 1985.

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as taking this one step further, by requiring that the writer actually act out that

authoritative position in order to elaborate on it.79

In its sole departure from the overall humorous tone of the project, the group

translated Dracula’s predatory behavior from vampirism to attempted date rape. They

noted in their written explanation that they considered this to be straying from the overall

tone, but calculated amongst themselves that it would not completely derail the parody

(“While taking advantage of others is a serious matter, the incongruity of our well-known

and beloved characters at a high school party creates a humorous twist”), and apparently

felt it necessary to to leave one aspect of the story un-lightened-up rather than whitewash

what they saw as a disturbing and essentially rapacious act. Interestingly their articulation

above, in the essay describing their work, is much more euphemistic and vague than the

same scene as described in the project itself; their formal speech is reticent where their

parodic speech is bold.

Their project evinced frustration with the novel’s obsession with Mina Harker’s

purity and the injustice of the fact that she becomes a liability who recedes from the plot

following her involuntary defilement by Dracula; they translated the latter issue into the

form of the reputation-damaging effects of maliciously leaked incriminating drunken

photos, which they chose to portray as not damaging Jonathan Harker’s social standing.

These choices not only made interpretive sense, but also spoke to the students’

preoccupation with the links between gender dynamics in the novel and in their own

experience within a college culture dealing with crises regarding sexual violence and

issues of consent. Given how this project addressed such issues, I would be inclined to

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79
Bartholomae, 404-406.
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see The Land of Cokaygne as a potentially similar case in which contemporary readers

might be expected to pick up on, and disapprove of, not only monks’ sacrilegious conduct

but also the extent to which the text’s playful portrayal of it depends on the

objectification and dehumanization of the neighboring maidens. Whether the laughter of

the poem is satirical or complicit is a discussion of its own— a discussion best paired,

perhaps, with trust, or at least optimism, about students’ ability to think in complex ways

about ethical implications and to critique both the mores of a past era and of their own, all

within the scope of their own parodic recontextualizing.

Were I to teach this text again in the future, I would likely consider the

exaggerated nature of this text’s incongruities not only a selling point, but a starting

point; rather than assuming student readers would embrace Cokaygne’s many-sided and

rollicking portrayal of impossibilities and improprieties and its sometimes-unclear mix of

ludic registers, I would view those elements as requiring a more explicit framework for

discussion, one that highlights and dwells on perceived wrongness rather than trying to

resolve it. Peter Elbow suggests the usefulness of dwelling on the generative potential of

seemingly ill-fitting or competing parts, calling this part of the process “cooking, ” which

occurs through “the interaction of contrasting or conflicting material...the process of one

piece of material (or one process) being transformed by interacting with another: one

piece of material being seen through the lens of another, being dragged through the guts

of another, being mapped onto the other.”80 In the case of this class, surprising and

colorful imagery was not enough to draw out full engagement with the more ludic,

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80
Peter, Elbow, Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching, Oxford
UP, 1987.
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liberty-taking, and puzzling aspects of the poem. In addition, the structures of discussion

needed to provide license to venture out and allow the incongruities to “cook” through

discussion and reflection in order to push past interpretations that reach a bit too hard for

seemingly-safe and unironic readings of the poem, and into ones that that interrogate the

difference between what seems “wrong” or puzzling interpretively, and what they view

as wrong in weightier terms.

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 CHAPTER 2

“TURNE OVER THE LEEFE:” MISPLACED BELIEF AND MISDIRECTED KISSES

IN THE MILLER’S TALE

The next text turns the discussion from from flights of fancy to a more realistic

and earthbound, or at least earthy, text. Unlike The Land of Cokaygne, Chaucer’s "The

Miller's Tale" takes place in a realistic setting. Its climactic moments are utterly non-

miraculous, unrealistic only in the degree to which their slapstick and scatalogical humor

is exaggerated. Despite these differences in genre and imagery, though, there is some

common ground with the other two texts, in that “The Miller’s Tale” has a paradoxical

way of following, flouting, and toying with various rules and norms, and of alternately

(sometimes simultaneously) delineating and destabilizing the roles of spirit and flesh. It

possesses The Land of Cokaygne’s sense of gleeful, exaggerated transgressiveness in the

face of religious and social norms. It also overlaps with The King of Tars in its fixation

on the desired and marked flesh of its characters, which reflects aspects of their internal

(though not necessarily spiritual) states. The Land of Cokaygne and The King of Tars

concern flouted rules, simulated piety, and the inversion and en-fleshing of religious

structures; in a way this text seems a continuation in its use of incongruity, religious

liberty-taking, and significant— strategic— irreverence.

“The Miller’s Tale” is a fabliau involving a disgusted cleric, scalded scholar,

humiliated husband, and laughing wife. Because of its famously bawdy and intensely

sexual and scatalogical humor, it’s likely to be lauded as the most playful, rather than the

most pious, of the Canterbury Tales. Though “The Miller’s Tale” is not one of the

overtly “religious” contributions in the pilgrims’ storytelling game, I am interested in the

! 69!
presence of religious elements alongside—or perhaps at the center of—its other concerns.

These hints of spiritual or moral structure don’t read as particularly earnest, but do rely

on a degree of familiarity with religious traditions, in both the characters and the

audience. The interplay of sacred and profane texts and traditions is key to the plot and

the humor of the tale, and to the profanatory moments during which both the humor and

the obscenity of the plot reach an apex.

The Canterbury Tales are swapped by tellers grouped by a shared purpose that is

at least ostensibly devotional in nature—the journey to pay respect and make

supplications at a famous shrine. Naturally, then, the travelers include individuals whose

piety, both vocational and lay, seeps into their narratives so that the narratives sermonize,

critique, or exhort. The Prioress’ anti-semitic miracle tale is one example, as are the

Second Nun’s hagiographic portrait, the Man of Law’s hagiography-tinged romance, and

Parson’s penitential opus. As Chaucer dips into various devotional or didactic genres, he

tends to put the more reverent words in the mouths of speakers of a certain station, whose

religious vocation, or lay piety coupled with class position, are carefully calibrated. The

"The Miller's Tale," on the other hand, features a narrative voice that is not a cleric’s, or

even a pious layman’s, but that of a drunken lout; it pivots from higher social position

and stylistic features to lower, and its characters boast a rude, boozy haze rather than the

hagiographic glow that surrounds the pious exemplars we see in the tales of some of his

fellow pilgrims.

This is explicitly highlighted in a direct address to the audience within the tale,

which is doubly applicable and serves to address the audience reading it as well. This

surrounding narrative involves transgressing social, not spiritual, mores—the sacred-

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profane moebius dynamic is contained only within the tale itself. Robyn’s introductory

rant focuses on self-consciously directing the reader’s attention toward secular, social

forms of sin. In his prologue, Robin the Miller tipsily attempts to preemptively excuse all

that he is about to “mysspeke or seye” (3139).81 His uncouth demeanor prompts the

narrator, as well, to encourage the reader to “turne over the leef and chese another tale,”

or else “blameth nat” the writer for (gleefully) spinning a tale so fixated on sex and

scatology as the one to come (3177, 3181). The fact that this is a tale-within-a-tale

(rather than being seamlessly and omnisciently-narrated like The Land of Cokaygne or

The King of Tars) introduces an element of performance and licence.

Even the Miller’s portrait is reminiscent of a goliardic “mask of foolishness or

crudity,” in the broadness and ugliness of his features, complete with the large mouth and

facial wart often included in portrayals of Golais (552-561).82 To his loutish drunkenness

and uncontrolled, buffoonish behavior; this mask of crudeness or rusticity “does not

preclude complex biblical parody or wordplay” but in fact “is a license to take various

sorts of liberties with authoritative texts, courteous discourse, and other social

conventions and rules of conduct.”83 He inverts social norms, and in doing so necessarily

echoes them.

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81
All citations of the "The Miller's Tale" refer to The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D.
Benson, 3rd Edn., Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
82
Further detail, and visual examples, can be found in Laura Kendrick's chapter
"Disfigured Drunkenness in Chaucer, Deschamps, and Medieval Visual Culture" in
Chaucer: Visual Approaches, Ed. Susanna Fein and David Raybin, Penn State UP, 2016,
pp. 115-138.
83
For a discussion of stereotypes of the miller as a crude “jangler” (full of various kinds
of low talk [161]) who is gluttonous, rustic, and a cheat--and for ways Chaucer follows
and strays from the estates satire tradition in the General Prologue’s character
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 The Miller begins by interrupting his social superiors, and crafts this bombastic

yarn explicitly as an act of one-upmanship meant both to entertain as part of the tale-

telling competition (3119) and, more specifically, as a retort to the refinement of the

Knight’s preceding tale about nobility and high ideals. By doing so he re-orients the

game from one governed by hierarchy to “an internally generated and self-sustaining

principle of ‘quiting.’”84 His drunk and disorderly usurping of the Monk’s turn to speak

disrupts the social hierarchy (proving the tale a revolting act in more ways than one); at

the same time, the skill with which the narrative mirrors and distorts the patterns of its

genteel predecessor is that of a finely pointed narrative weapon, not just a drunken jest).85

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descriptions, see Jill Mann’s Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, Cambridge UP, 1973.
Mann argues that the General Prologue’s series of portraits belong to the estates genre
and are formally ordered to offer a satirical catalogue of various estates--positions in
society based on class or rank, as well as role or occupation including clerical or marital
status (3), stereotypes of which are both partaken of and perpetuated by the form. Also
helpful is the discussion of the Miller’s “big-mouthed, warty-nosed” appearance as linked
to the gluttonous Golias and to goliardic debauchery, in Laura Kendrick’s “Comedy” in A
Companion to Chaucer, Ed. Peter Brown, Blackwell, 2000, p. 109. Martha Bayless’
Parody in the Middle Ages (pp. 93-108) contains a detailed discussion of the Goliardic
tradition more generally, and of the association of liturgical parody with drinking and
drunkenness.
84
In Chaucer and the Subject of History (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), Lee
Patterson reads “The Miller’s Tale” as an explicitly class-based protest whose
interruption ultimately fails to dethrone hierarchical, externally imposed governance and
substitute affirmation of natural order because of Chaucer’s underlying ambivalence as a
figure with both mercantile and court connections. The Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale
are a corrective whose interruption works, because she is autonomous and free-floating,
an anomalous individual subject rather than one rooted (threateningly so) in an overt
class stance. This reading also, incidentally, suggests the Canterbury Tales resist more
than follow the estates satire structure. (245).
85
Helen Cooper, in Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Oxford UP,
1996), discusses several cues in the Miller’s language that indicate this oppositional
quality, including his phrasing in promising to tell “a legende and a lyf” (reminiscent of a
saint’s life, especially ironic given that he is interrupting Harry Baily’s intended ordering
of “the highest-ranking of the ecclesiastics...to follow the highest ranking layman” in the
! 72!
 In addition to “punching up” at the Miller’s social superiors, the tale can also be

taken as a laterally aggressive move, as we see from the hostile response and answering

vocational stereotypes lobbed by the Reeve.86 This continues as the actual tale goes on,

with the most direct intertext being “The Knight’s Tale,” which immediately precedes

Robyn’s out-of-turn performance, and whose loftiness he explicitly wants to quyt (and

which, in contrast to the Miller’s fabliau, is displaced both temporally and religiously by

a classical setting that, in some ways, neutralizes the sort of religious influences I am

considering here).

If the tale itself is an act of aggression and revolt, the Miller’s introductory words

(and the narrator’s) are at once an apology, a warning, and a brag. They alert the audience

that what follows will, for better or worse, be more grotesque than anything that has gone

before. Yet even in its extreme vulgarity, the tale is, paradoxically, socially appropriate,

since it is (in content, if not in its surprisingly adept style) so in keeping with its teller.87

In a way, the prologue makes explicit what is true, but goes unsaid, in the other

two texts: that the narrative portrays transgression because it takes place in a world

predicated on narrative pleasure in the form of comedy, fantasy, hyperbole. All actions

are authorized by this text (and by the prologue’s double-disavowal of its

transgressions)—yet this is not because it operates by the rules of a fantasy setting, the

way Cokaygne does. Rather, the tale is set in a realistic world, but transports different

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group), and the use of the two scholars Absolon and Nicholas to mirror the Knight’s
Tale’s Palamon and Arcite, and Alisoun as a rustic countertype to Emilye.
86
Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer, Harvard University Press, 1989.
87
Cooper, 94. The text displays a perverse “rhetorical decorum in being appropriate for
its teller” and for the expectations of a churl’s tale.
! 73!
rules into it, based on the demand of fabliaux for humorous, vulgar trickery at someone’s

expense. I will suggest that it is also a world whose profane humor relies, paradoxically,

on the crucial presence of voices in the text besides those of fabliaux: religious tropes

which are deployed in a skewed way that lends them new and unexpected meaning.

“Lord Willin’ and the Creek Don’t Rise”: Prayers and Floods, Redirected

This colorful, humorous tale seems at first the most secular possible treatment of

the events at hand; the relatively faint religious resonance of the Noah’s ark-themed farce

and thoroughly-quyted clerk (both common tropes in a genre reliant on parodic and

satirical depictions of the church), are easily elided. The presence of religious elements,

in this case, serves neither to endorse nor satirize piety, but to expose through contrast the

unreality of noble ideals of human behavior, and the reality and supremacy of animal

cunning.88

V.A. Kolve articulates this reading of pious practices that are shallow, vestigial,

representative merely of “plain man’s religion” consisting of “complacent superstition”

which “requires little comment; its function is local and limited.”89 Although Kolve

suggests that such religious set pieces are “not meant to bear [the] weight” of being taken

earnestly, he also speculates that “they constitute “the special challenge...Chaucer set

himself...the witty and difficult business of writing about a second Flood without

invoking, to any serious religious end, the meaning of the first.”90 The “radical

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88
Pearsall, 49.
89
V.A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales.
Stanford University Press, 1984. p. 159.
90
Kolve, 159.
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disjunction” Kolve notes between the type and tenor of the tale, and the seemingly

unnecessarily-inserted elements from an entirely different register, is what interest me—

the incongruity of a ribald narrative about sexual escapades and scatalogical jokes, which

depends, Kolve admits, on “two large narrative images...the one a ritual of religious

adoration, the other a rehearsal of the preparations for Noah’s Flood.”

These predominant narrative images of adoration and the flood simultaneously

carry sacred connotations and profane import. The religious elements of the tale, however

nominal or seemingly inert, have provided a safe focus for decades of Chaucer scholars

too squeamish to explicitly address the two window scenes, but too meticulous to entirely

omit the tale from consideration, and who have sought an underlying layer of moral and

religious meaning beneath the fleshy folly. If romance is predicated on assumptions of

human nobility, and hagiography of transcendence, comedy has been read, variously, as a

way of disrupting and making strange moral conventions and norms, only to reassert

them; of exposing foolishness and folly; of attaining refreshing, but inconsequential,

relief from the strain of seriousness. Often this type of approach detects an element of

readerly self-reflection, even sheepishness: Blamires suggests that Chaucer’s preemptive

disavowal of the tale is, itself, a means “to tease readers over their propensity for erecting

a cover of moralistic disdain under which to enjoy stories of ‘jape’ and ‘harlotrie.’”91

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91
Alcuin Blamires, “Philosophical Sleaze? The 'strok of thought' in’The Miller's Tale’
and Chaucerian Fabliau,” Modern Language Review, Vol. 102, No. 3, 2007, 621-640. See
also Laura Kendrick’s discussion of D.W. Robertson as emblematic of this view, in
Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in the Canterbury Tales, University of California
Press, 1988, 20-29.

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 From another point of view, however, the religious nature of this version of this

narrative is not incidental but integral. Religious elements and practices like church

attendance, prayer and oaths, and familiarity with Noah via mystery plays can be read as

a sort of backdrop—or rather, narrative accomplices—in service of the tale’s broad and

profane humor. Opposing poles like pious exclamations and obscene actions, or in

Absolon’s case purity (vocational and hygienic) and contamination, are more strongly

juxtaposed because they are projected against the ordering influence of the broad symbols

of Christendom. Twentieth-century scholarship, then, has often read the tale as

deliberately interweaving sacred and profane, with its most abject and scatalogical

moments also serving as its most symbolically rich ones.92 It is this intersection of

spiritual and (profanely) embodied that interests me—the chaotic moments of hypocrisy,

misguidedness, play, grotesquerie, and irreverence that neither clearly model nor critique

medieval piety, but rather portray with ludic relish all the ways such piety can be

distorted by and in the flesh.

Rather than reading the story as either secretly more moral and doctrinal than it

seems, or as exactly as amoral and frivolously disengaged as it seems, there is a third

option—that its religious resonances are neither unmoored nor didactically directed, but

redirected in a skewed way. In Chaucerian Play Laura Kendrick describes the interaction

between readers and text as a playful appropriation, a compromise between acceptance

and distortion. Writing and reading a text, she says (and in this case, the text’s use of its

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92
For example, see Nicole Nolan Sidhu’s Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and
Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016;
see also Peter Beidler’s “Art and Scatology in "The Miller's Tale,” Chaucer Review Vol.
12, No. 2, 1977, 90-102.

! 76!
biblical predecessors, echoes, paratexts, and themes) is a re-creational process akin to a

child’s exploration of a toy’s intended capacities, its unintended capacities, and play that

combines both.93 The ties of each of the four main players to religious elements, images,

or ideas can be read as appropriating and redirecting those traditionally Christian traces in

a way that is perhaps not what they were originally intended for, but is what Chaucer

intends them for— a strategy I find particularly useful in the pedagogical discussions

preceding and following this chapter.

The tale’s origins in fabliau underlie its tendency to be preoccupied more with the

bodily, hedonistic, and humorous than with the spiritual. Chaucer’s story incorporates

tropes of cuckoldry in May-December marriage that are a staple of fabliaux. Also

sometimes a feature is the use of a prophecy of disaster to trick the cuckolded husband

(which is done more elaborately, and arguably makes more sense, here in Chaucer’s

version than anywhere), and finally the inclusion of what is often euphemistically called

the “misdirected kiss” motif, which is found across French, German, and Italian comic

narratives, and here results in a painful branding.94

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93
Kendrick, Chaucerian Play, 3.
94
For suggested points of origin and influence, see Sources and Analogues of the
Canterbury Tales, edited by Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, D.S. Brewer, 2005. In
his chapter on "The Miller's Tale", Beidler places analogues along a spectrum ranging
from likely sources with striking parallels and external evidence suggesting Chaucer
knew them, to “hard analogues” containing strongly similar passages and features, and
which would have been available to Chaucer, and finally to “soft analogues” with similar,
but not identical, content, and which would likely have been unknown to Chaucer but
inhabit a related narrative tradition (249-50). See also The Literary Context of Chaucer’s
Fabliaux: Texts and Translations, Ed. Larry D. Benson and Theodore M. Andersson,
Bobs-Merrill, 1971. The editors include a number of “soft analogues” including Latin,
French, and German stories that contain cuckoldry along with another of the key features
of "The Miller's Tale" (a wooden tub; a misdirected kiss prank; a prophecy of disaster)
but seldom more than one of these elements at a time.
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 A Middle Dutch analogue called Heile of Beersele is so similar as to be a likely

influence; in it, a prostitute triple-books her visitors—a miller, a priest, and a smith—

whose arrivals overlap, leading to chaos. After his tryst the miller, seeking to avoid being

recognized by the arriving priest, hides in a trough hanging from the ceiling; he hears

(and is frightened by) the priest’s comment about the impending destruction of the world

in a great flood. When the blacksmith arrives, Heile tries to send him away, but settles for

tricking him into kissing the priest’s buttocks instead of her face. Like Absolon in "The

Miller's Tale," this smith returns with a hot iron, asks for another kiss, and strikes the

priest, who cries out for water. The miller, frightened by the exclamation, cuts himself

loose from the ceiling and falls; the startled priest staggers into a cesspit and goes home

burned and covered in excrement.95 The versions share central elements including a

promiscuous and prank-loving heroine; the overlapping advances of three men; the

prediction of a great flood; and the kiss-and-burn encounter at the window; but Chaucer’s

version of the tale is significantly longer and more detailed, and in the end it manages to

be both filthier and funnier.

It’s also, arguably, more permeated with religious symbolism. Many lines are

allotted to Alisoun’s church attendance and role as the recipient of Absolon’s Marian-

tinged adoration; John’s nonsensical prayers; Absolon’s questionable performance of his

duties; and especially the importance and complexity of the flood predictions, which

interweave religious and astrological traditions to predict an apocalyptic event that

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95
For more on this, see Peter G. Beidler’s The Lives of the "The Miller's Tale,"
McFarland and Co., 2014; see also Frederick M. Biggs, "’The Miller's Tale’ and Heile of
Beersele” in the Review of English Studies 56, 2005, 497-523. Biggs argues that
Chaucer’s version is the source, and the Middle Dutch version a retelling of it.
! 78!
echoes a familiar biblical story. Just as The Land of Cokaygne becomes more fantastical

through its inclusion of clashing religious and libertine elements and the liberties it takes

with both spiritual and physical rules, "The Miller's Tale" uses the contrast between

profanity and piety (whether earnest or not) to tease out latent layers of shock and

subversion in its plot. Familiar religious practices and structures—and the ways they are

followed, simulated, or flouted—paradoxically inform the grotesque, distorted, embodied

humor of the fabliau plot and its simultaneous movement toward a kind of highly-

structured chaos, within the tension between the competing ordering principles of

religion and genre.

Old Husband, New Noah: The Flood, Told and Re-Told

The prophesied flood, with its overt associations with the Biblical Noah and his

ark, is more emphatically present in Chaucer’s version than in otherwise similar stories—

in fact, it is the cornerstone of Nicholas’ plot to trick John, and one of the final images of

the tale. The image of John hiding in a barrel from the impending disaster recalls

depictions of the flood in mystery plays (it has even required him to build a “set”). In

medieval parlance, the deluge aligns him with popular portrayals of two Biblical

patriarchs represented in drama as having especially troublesome wives: poor henpecked

Noah in the Chester cycle cannot get his wife to leave her gossips and board the ark,

while St. Joseph the carpenter in the York Corpus Christi plays is mocked for being

divinely cuckolded.96

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96
For more on this, see John Ganim’s Chaucerian Theatricality, Princeton UP, 1990.
Ganim suggests that the tale’s echoing of mystery plays is a deliberate setup that prepares
the audience for the “water!” line; in addition, there is a larger overarching parallel
between the two mediums’ parodic treatments of their biblical content (38-39).

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 The apocalyptic flood described in Genesis was regarded as a harbinger of

judgement and disaster (an interpretation at which John immediately arrives) as well as

an instance of preservation for the righteous church father Noah and his family (a parallel

he also readily draws).97 In his earnest view, at once both gullible and presumptuous, of

himself as a new Noah, Alisoun’s hapless husband John reveals not only his own

credulity but also that, beneath the veneer of religious phrasing, his belief is incoherent

and shot through with ignorance, and reflects an overall lack of self-awareness that

causes him not only to make serious missteps, but also to miss every punchline that flies

past him.

By referring to events not described explicitly in this narrative, but assumed to be

a familiar part of the fabric of daily life and medieval culture, “Nicholas’ make-believe

reprise of Noah’s Flood plays off of an absent biblical context,” according to Lawrence

Besserman. Concrete, entertaining biblical events are fertile ground; not so the

abstractions of actual scripture: even the scholarly Nicholas, when quoting Solomon on

taking counsel, commits a misattribution (though it’s not clear whether this is because he

himself is mistaken about the line’s source, or whether as part of his game he makes the

error deliberately, secure in the knowledge that John will not catch it). Either way, his

scheme relies on playing fast and loose with the authority of scriptural tradition and

relying on familiarity with the subjects of mystery plays, delivered via what might today

be classified the infotainment of mystery plays.98

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97
See Benson’s note in The Riverside Chaucer, 847
98
Lawrence Besserman, Chaucer’s Biblical Poetics. University of Oklahoma Press,
1998, 14. In a way, the characters here are the opposite of the Chaucer Besserman
depicts, who is well-versed in both scriptures and paratexts and whose frequent
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 The carpenter is so lacking in understanding that his belief system is not a system

at all, just an incoherent jumble:

What! Nicholay! What, how! What, looke adoun!

Awak, and thenk on Cristes passioun!

I crouche thee from elves and fro wightes.

“Jhesu Crist and Seinte Benedight,

Blesse this hous from every wikked wight,

For nyghtes verye, the white pater-noster!

Where wentestow, Seinte Petres soster?” (3477-3486)

John’s rambling speech begins with a pious-sounding injunction to “thenk on Cristes

passioun,” but becomes less coherent from there. His subsequent namedropping of

Christian figures slips into something that sounds more like exclamation and oath.

Alongside these, seeming to make no distinction between belief structures, he places

elves and wightes and the saying of charms. Even the sign of the cross (“I crouche thee”)

becomes part of a series of protective incantations over the home. Heterodox though it

may be, this blend is not necessarily unusual for a layman of his station,99 though neither

the scholarly Nicholas nor the vain clerk Absolon would be likely to indulge in such

folksy syncretism. Yet it seems the carpenter’s problem is not theological unsoundness,

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(Besserman would say almost constant) references and allusions may be earnest or ironic,
but are always learned. In the "The Miller's Tale," by contrast, even the cleric Absolon’s
Biblical echoes are irreverent and inappropriate. On the attribution of
Ecclesiasticus/Sirach 32.24 (“my son, do nothing without counsel, and you will not
repent later,” see Benson’s note in The Riverside Chaucer, 847.
99
Nicholas Watson, “Christian Ideologies” in A Companion to Chaucer, 75-89.
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per se. It’s more that he is not clever enough to integrate his multiple, mismatched

allusions and registers in a cleverer way.

The same affliction dogs John in other areas of his life, including the marriage to

Alisoun, with its mismatch between her youth and his jealousy:

...she was wylde and yong, and he was old

And demed hymself been lik a cokewold.

He knew nat Catoun, for his wit was rude,

That bad man sholde wedde his simylitude.

Men should wedden after hire estaat,

for youthe and elde is often at debaat.

But sith that he was fallen in the snare,

He moste endure, as oother folk, his care. (3224-3228)

This is a common trope in fabliaux, whose humor comes often at the expense of the older

husband who is destined to be cuckolded as payback for his lack of self-awareness in,

essentially, dating “out of his league.” John fails to know not only Cato, but himself, in

other words, and his real flaw is not that he isn’t well read but that he cannot read the

room, and thereby pick up on the norms he’s transgressing by acquiring for himself such

an ill-matched wife.

Nicholas Watson suggests that John is punished not only for what he lacks

(knowledge, understanding, a healthy distrust of his fellow man) but also for what he

possesses unearned (a beautiful young wife; in his own mind, at least, a parallel position

with a Biblical patriarch). Beidler agrees, reading it as a matter of misunderstood genre

in which “John’s uncritical acceptance of all things religious-sounding, [and] his own

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role as a“new Noah” (with its implications of inflated self-opinion, since Noah is saved

from the flood because of how especially good he is compared to his peers), prove that

“John is not sufficiently literary, or not literary enough in the proper register, to see that

he is really playing a role in an earthy fabliau, not a biblical fable.”100 Read in such a

way, John’s aphorisms, and the entire tale, demonstrate his character flaws, (ranging from

embarrassing credulity to deluded self-regard, depending on the reading), and moreover a

misapplication of textual echoes and discourses, that allow him to accept the idea of

himself or anyone in this antediluvian role.101 In his compassionate response to his

lodger’s feigned fits of prophecy, and even his application of a motley assortment of

prayers and charms, John struggles to fill a role for which he is unfit, and proves that his

behavior looks conventionally “good” only because he lacks the imagination to be

naughty, and he has miscast himself in the story he has constructed.

Nicholas is able to take advantage of the carpenter’s rusticity to sell his own

astrological expertise as a more legitimate source of knowledge than John’s confused

references to sundry supernatural elements, and to use his reading of the stars and his

companion’s presumed non-reading of books, to perpetrate the ruse. Being Biblically-

literate would mean being aware, regardless of what the stars purportedly say, of the

Genesis 9:11 promise that such a thing would never again occur. But as in every other

instance in which he should know better, John fails to catch the ohter voices in the

conversation while focusing on the one of his choice, so he and his pious exclamations

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100
Beidler, The Lives of “The Miller’s Tale,” 17.
101
Watson, 83; Beidler, 16-17.
! 83!
are stuffed in a barrel and brought down, both figuratively and literally, by his muddle-

headedness and lack of savvy.

Despite his various positions of legitimacy and ostensible superiority—as

Alisoun’s actual husband and the relatively-prosperous owner of the house in which the

entire affair takes place—John is ridiculed:

The folk gan laughen at this fantasye;

...and turned al his harm unto a jape.

For what so that this carpenter answerde,

It was for noght; no man his reson herde.

With others grete he was so sworn adoun

That he was holde wood in al the toun;

And every wight gan laughen at this stryf.” (3489)

Religious elements and symbols, in his case, are a red herring that ultimately emphasizes

his failure to exemplify the tale’s true highest value—the cleverness and understanding

required to be behind, and in on, jokes. His humiliation in the form of being cuckolded by

his wife and lodger is one thing; his shame reaches greater heights and depths (literally

and figuratively) not through his misplaced belief in a faithless and ill-advised marriage,

but rather through misplaced belief in a fantastical flood and in his own ability to escape

it. He experiences a sudden descent in the literal sense of being physically dropped in the

suspended barrel (by a rope he cuts himself, in a moment that makes literal his tendency

to trip himself up at every turn through misunderstanding); in the ensuing public ruckus

he also descends socially, in the townspeople’s eyes, from the position of respectable

craftsman to supposed madman.

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 Were it not for the flood plot, and his vision of himself as a Noah figure, John

would be brought low only in the private sphere of his own household. One might expect

that carnivalesque inversion would elevate John, a simple man and one of “the folk” who

earns a living with his hands as a carpenter, rather than with disembodied words like

Nicholas or prayers and songs like Absolon. He is the only one in the tale who does not

tell falsehoods to others (though perhaps he does to himself) or pretend what is not true.

Yet he is punished because his lack of pretense arises not out of virtue, but out of

stupidity and inability to juggle traditions, genres, and knowledge sources successfully. In

the world of this tale, it’s clear that to be tricked is a far worse sin than to trick others.

This is less a profanatory moment than a carnivalesque one; nothing transcendent is

defiled, since it was never present in the first place, and John is less the misbehave-r than

the site of misbehavior, upon whom heteroglossic resonances act.

Sunday Best: Sacraments and Supplications Profaned

Absolon the lovelorn parish clerk misbehaves through his pretensions to positions

and advantages that are incompatible with his most defining characteristic, which initially

looks like vanity but ultimately proves to be a fundamental ambivalence about the

spiritual realities of clergy-hood and the physical realities of romantic love. He is too

physique-obsessed to be taken seriously as a clergyman, yet too body-phobic to be taken

seriously as a suitor. Thus he performs his roles, as both cleric and would-be lover,

without the self-awareness or commitment required to do so well, and his mixing of

tropes and misplacement of himself within them is inept and results in profanatory

moments that expose his character’s ambiguous location between between sacred and

sordid.

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 Absolon gives lip service to many things in this tale, the foremost being to the

spiritual since he is a parish clerk. In mystery plays he proudly puts his bleaty voice to

work playing Herod on a scaffold, a detail that tellingly suggests that he finds the

flashiest role, rather than the most virtuous one, aspirational.102 Piety is a serious pursuit

insofar as it puts him into contact with the young wives of the town via their attendance

at mass, to see him in all his splendor. We know that he is “of that chirche a parissh

clerk” and “a myrie child,” who goes about with carefully maintained shining golden hair

and immaculate clothing and and “with Poules wyndow corven on his shoos” in a nod to

his profession (a sartorial gesture, which perhaps, for Absolon, is one of the more

meaningful expressions of devotion) (3312-25). His daily supplications to Alisoun

constitute a ritual of visiting that make him seem for all the world like a supplicant to the

Virgin Mary except for one quite crucial component: the recipient of his prayers;

moreover, these entreaties use imagery that echoes the Song of Songs in ways that are

“inept and inappropriate at the least.”103

Absolon is also emblematic of anxieties about the division between the ideal and

real; what is seen vs. felt or desired or said vs. what is done; he has consistently, and with

good reason, been read as a focus for anxieties regarding masculinity and sexuality.104 He

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102
Ralph W.V. Elliott, “Chaucer’s Clerical Voices” in Medieval English Religious
Literature, Ed. Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson, D.S. Brewer, 1986, pp. 146-155.
103
Laura Kendrick, “Comedy” in A Companion to Chaucer, edited by Peter Brown,
Blackwell, 2000, 90-113. See also Peter G. Beidler’s “‘Now, Deere Lady:’ Absolon’s
Marian Couplet in ‘The Miller's Tale,’” Chaucer Review, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2004, 219-222.
104
For example: “Erotic Discipline...or ‘Tee Hee, I like my Boys to Be Girls’: Inventing
the Body in Chaucer’s ‘The Miller's Tale,’” in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, Ed.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, Routledge, 1997; Glenn Burger, “Shameful
Pleasures: Up Close and Dirty with Chaucer, Flesh, and the Word,” in Queering the
! 86!
miscategorizes himself in both romantic and religious ways, as a figure hailing from

popular religiosity and a romance hero; he makes himself “geometrically excessive” to

use Greg Walker’s phrase, to the erotic triangle between Alisoun, John, and Nicholas

through a fundamental lack of empathy made manifest through his symbolic

fastidiousness; this makes him prone to abstract himself and others, and to collapse when

this tendency toward abstraction bumps up against the realities of the Bakhtinian “lower

bodily strata” which, though grotesque, are also key to the ludic and sexual satisfactions

of the text.105

In this pursuit of Alisoun, Absolon idealizes and romanticizes physical desires

while attempting to self-deceive away the unpleasant reality that satisfying those desires

would involve engaging with the disgusting flesh. Absolon’s obsession with appearance

focuses specifically on changeable attributes like hair and clothing, which touch the body

but which, here, work to emphasize a sense of his separation from it, since clothing and

hair are very near the flesh, yet are not, themselves, actually flesh. We know that

regarding aspects of embodied existence he cannot control with a comb, Absolon is

ambivalent and “somdeel squaymous/ Of fartyng, and of speche daungerous (3387-88).”

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Middle Ages, Ed Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, University of Minnesota Press,
1999. Carolyn Dinshaw does not include a sustained discussion of Absolon in Chaucer’s
Sexual Poetics (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), but her analysis of the Pardoner
includes some salient points of comparison--Absolon is not read as “a geldyng/or a mare”
though he is described as effeminate in his appearance and manners; yet in Dinshaw’s
system he occupies a masculine role by branding (“writing on”) Nicholas with the hot
iron (not through conquest of Alisoun).
105
Greg Walker. “Rough Girls and Squeamish Boys: The Trouble with Absolon in ‘The
Miller’s Tale,’” in Reading Literature Historically: Drama and Poetry from Chaucer to
the Reformation, edited by Elaine Treharne, Edinburgh University Press, 2013, 61-92.

! 87!
He is never so preoccupied with matters of the heart that he forgets to attend to the

erasure of the flesh, attempting to groom even the air that enters and leaves his body as he

“cheweth greyn and lycorys,/To smellen sweete, er he hadde kembd his heer (2652-

2653).” The text’s extensive description of Absolon’s exacting habits is a multi-line setup

for a grotesque punchline, the moment when he kisses “not a miss, but amiss.”106

The two halves of the “flood” plot are connected by this scene, in which a

besotted Absolon comes to Alisoun’s window at night to implore that she give him a kiss,

and discovers too late that what she has offered is instead her “nether ye.” The gesture is

especially offensive to a character of such thoroughly established fastidiousness, who

spends even the moment before the expected kiss in grooming—as Alisoun begins her

prank, we are told, “This Absolon gan wype his mouth ful drie” (3730) in preparation.

Establishing passages have concentrated on Absolon’s looks, smells, and sounds—as

discussed above, we know that he is obsessed with his carefully-groomed golden hair,

beautiful clothing, and seemingly goes everywhere enveloped in a could of sweet-

smelling herbs and incense. Here, those somatic details take a very different turn—the

description remains just as vivid and evocative, but the effect it produces is the opposite

from before. His shining golden hair, evenly parted and carefully fanned out (3314-

3316), he feels “a thynge al rough and long yherd” (3738); in place of a kiss sweetened

by chewing “greyn and licorys/To smellen swete” (3690-91), he encounters what is

variously called Alisoun’s “hole,” “naked ers,” and “nether ye.”

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106
Peter G. Beidler, “Art and Scatology in The "The Miller's Tale",” Chaucer Review
Vol. 12, No. 2, 1977, 90-102.
! 88!
 The effect is electrifying in a very different way than expected—the passage does

not dwell on the moment of the misdirected kiss itself, but hardly needs to, having so

abundantly communicated that Absolon is “somdeel squaymous/of fartynge” (3337-

3338) and completely unequipped for a kiss whose abjection goes many steps beyond a

mere fart (and, in the end, subjects him to that too). Even without extensive description of

the act itself, the nature of the experience is made abundantly clear by the fact that

Absolon first “on his lippe...gan for anger byte” and then pauses in his contemplation of

revenge to attend to more urgent matters of cleansing in a dramatic and excessive attempt

at cleansing which continues the turn away from sensory descriptions of the carefully

smooth, shining, soft, and fragrant—qualities Absolon seems unable to regain after this

incident—and toward roughness, harshness, disorder, and frenzy. Absolon’s many

fastidious habits, barriers against corporeal corruption, cannot protect him from the one

only intense interaction with the body we see in the tale—the misdirected kiss at the

window, which is followed immediately by the attempt to escape or erase sensory

impressions:

On his lippe he gan for anger byte,

And to hymself he seyde, ‘I shal thee quyte.’

Who rubbeth now, who froteth now his lippes

With dust, with sond, with straw, with clooth, with chippes. (3745-3748)

Violently, he attempts to remove all traces of filth, even down to the flesh of the

contaminated lips themselves. This distress is clearly more than skin-deep; in fact,

Absolon even exclaims irreverently: “‘My soul bitake I unto Sathanas,/But me were

levere than al this toun,’ quod he,/ ‘Of this depit awroken for to be’” (3747-3753).

! 89!
Absolon’s “healing” in this case is being cured of lovemaking entirely, finding avoidance

the only acceptable alternative to the risk of another abject encounter. Unable to actually

remove the surface of his defiled lips, Absolon chooses absence, a vacuum that reflects

the equal hollowness of both his prayers and his lovemaking, revealing his spiritual and

his physical deeds to be only gestures. The aggressive incorporation of the “lower bodily

strata” is particularly incongruous given it’s applied to the character who is not only the

most squeamish, but the most closely associated with spirit over flesh. The misdirected

kiss at the window is perhaps only the culmination of his habitual lack of ease in adopting

narratives and registers.

The infamous “kiss-and-burn” scene exemplifies the “guilty pleasure,” prompting

an inevitable ambivalence. With its intensely sexual and scatalogical humor, The scene is

both the culmination of the Miller’s Tale’s plot, and the reason the tale has often been

viewed as a blemish on the career of a literary father figure, sanitized or outright excised

from the traditional Chaucer canon only to pop back up in pornographic adaptations, in

debates about censorship in secondary schools, and even a series of U.S. court cases

relating to the nature of obscenity.107 The shock of the bluntly-described affront is, on one

hand, potentially pleasurable because it befalls Absolon, an object who is deliberately

easy to read as ridiculous, hypocritical, or even unlikeable and in line for a

comeuppance. On the other hand, the graphic nature of the prank, heightened by

Chaucer’s insistence on its target’s squeamishness, can easily be found so excessively

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107
For a fascinating account of the U.S. legal history of using Chaucer as a yardstick for
what is or isn’t shocking or a corrupting influence, see George G. Shuffelton’s
“Chaucerian Obscenity in the Court of Public Opinion,” The Chaucer Review vol. 47,
No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-24.

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visceral and abject as to cancel out enjoyment and travel straight past pleasurable shock

and into the unappealing or unbearable. Furthermore, a modern audience is likely to be

offended not only by the sensory details of the scene, but by its other implications of

cruel sexual hoodwinking of an unknowing victim— troubling, especially in light of the

now-uncomfortable earlier passage in which Nicholas grabs Alisoun “by the queynte” to

demand her favors.!

“Set Your Mind on Things Above”: Prophecy, Strategized

Nicholas, Alisoun’s counterpart in both bed and in trickery, is another avid user of

“herbes swoote;” to freshen his chamber and himself (3205-3207). Though similar in

practice, this indicates a difference, rather than a parallel, with Absolon. For Nicholas,

this custom is clearly for the purpose of making himself as appealing as possible, rather

than for masking the unappealing odors of the world around him. Rather than insulating

himself, he desires contact with the physical, fleshy world, and the people and bodies in

it. He achieves this contact by playing on the credulity and hypocrisy of others, using his

knowledge of prevailing belief structures, and his strategic layering and deliberate

misapplication of them, to his advantage.

Even more so than sweet-smelling herbs, Nicholas’ chamber is characterized by

arcane, and often expensive, instruments of his studies: “His Almageste, and bookes grete

and smale,/His astrelabie...His augrym stones” (3208-3210). This “poure scoler” is not so

poor that “his freendes fyndyng and his rente” (3220) can’t support his enthusiasm for of

astrology and celestial predictions, and the tools of his readiness

To demen by interrogaciouns,

If that men asked hym, in certein houres

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 Whan that men sholde have droghte or elles shoures,

Or if men asked hym what sholde bifalle

Of every thyng... (3192-3198)

Perhaps these well-equipped quarters are an additional demonstration of his knack for

arranging to pursue his interests, romantic and otherwise, and confirm the text’s

declaration that he is “sleigh and ful privee,” and of aptitude for “deerne love...and of

solas” (3200). It’s clear that learnedness and cleverness, two related but not identical

qualities, go hand and hand in Nicholas.

Nicholas is the primary agent behind the plot to perform a prophecy, dazzle John

with esoteric knowledge and persuasive talk, and convince him of the impending flood

and the necessity of building vessels to preserve himself and his household. The same

thing that is a momentary source of suspicion for John ends up being what convinces

him—the powerful impression of Nicholas’ knowledge of astrological lore, which allows

him to read spiritual portents in the stars. The carpenter at first thinks his lodger is “falle,

with his astromye,/In some woodnesse or in som agonye./I thoghte ay wel how that it

sholde be!” (3451-3453). He even ventures an “I told you so,” reflecting on his own

superior state as an unlearned man who keeps a safe distance from the dangers of “God’s

pryvetee.”

But the scholar’s explanation, which in a dozen lines manages to return three

times to the idea of John’s heeding the advice he is given, and twice to warnings against

his following his own reasoning, eventually prevails (3525-2531). Chaucer would expect

the audience to know of the folk tradition that Noah was a skillful astrologer whose skills

played into his escape from watery judgment, and Nicholas likewise depends on John’s

! 92!
awareness of this characterization. Though not always without ambivalence, belief in the

age of Chaucer included a wide acceptance of the concept of superior conjunctions, with

major terrestrial changes attributed to various positions of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars. 108

Nicholas also leans on a broader acceptance of the intermingling of the signs to be read in

scriptures and stars, and on the astrological tradition of the Deluge, woven in with the

Biblical deluge, to convince John of the divine source of his knowledge; he constructs a

plot that combines what we’ve seen of his enthusiasms for performance, esoterica, and

clandestine romance.

In the end the trick, in all its complexity, seems to threaten to become an end in

itself, and provides no more than a day for the couple’s clandestine liason. "They erect a

barrier to the consummation of their desire" which Kolve compares to the tournament in

Knight's Tale, which implies that the "satisfaction" Nicholay must have is in fact not even

sex, but winning and trickery.Nicholas seems to get more pleasure from this

performance, and his role in the ploy than from the actual pursuit

of Alisoun.109

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108
Catherine Eagleton. “‘Chaucer’s Own Astrolabe:’ Text, Image, and Object.” Studies in
History and Philosophy of Science, vol. 38, no. 2, 2007, 303-326. See also Benson’s note
on the Noah-as-Astrologer tradition, The Riverside Chaucer, 847.
109
Kolve, 188. See also Edward Condren, “Transcendent Metaphor or Banal Reality:
Three Chaucerian Dilemmas,” Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 21 No. 3, 233-
257. Condren suggests that the affinity of “hende Nicholas” for his psaltery is not only a
musical image but an onanistic one: “His interest in astrology and music suggests a habit
of enhancing life by shaping it in artificial forms...Nicholas...takes more satisfaction from
himself and his cleverness than from nature. We are not surprised when, later in the tale,
a challenge to his ingenuity arouses him more than Alisoun's assurance of her love"
(237). Kolve also points out that the pair’s courtship contains preliminary steps which
seem so complex and arbitrary as to form part of a game, and that “Nicholas must prove
by his wit that he is worthy to lie with Alisoun, though simpler procedures lie readily to
hand” (188).
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 In an instance of failed parodic repetition, Nicholas’ reiteration of a joke without

changing it is his downfall. The scholar comes to grief when he parrots the trick Alisoun

has already played, assuming that he will be able to improve upon her original move (“he

thoughte he wolde amenden al the jape,” 3799). Nicholas’ thunderous fart, “as greet as it

had been a thonder-dent” (3807), does certainly escalate the joke, and thoroughly disgust

Absolon (again), but it doesn’t follow through on the promise of “amenden” by

elaborating or improving on the original.

Whereas Cokaygne uses somatic elements to heighten its flights of fancy, here the

somatic anchors—even burrows—the tale deeper into the earth. By provoking Nicholas’

pained cry of “water!” which causes John to panic, cut his rope, and fall from the ceiling

into ridicule, the fart serves as a hinge that connects the flood and kiss plots, romance and

trickery, heaven and earth. It also ensures that all five of Absolon’s senses are thoroughly

offended, so that the story lives up (or down) to the prologue’s warning for readers who

lack the intestinal fortitude to withstand the tale’s rudeness. Nicholas’ cleverness and

learnedness don’t stop him from misjudging the motivations behind Absolon’s return to

the window; though the carpenter proves an unworthy intellectual opponent, Alisoun and

even Absolon are quicker on their mental feet than John. Nicholas does not escape the

punishment Absolon has planned, albeit intended for Alisoun.110 Is his suffering perhaps

the consequence of his sudden switch from relying on his astrological expertise to trying

his hand at rude, physical, slapstick humor; from his silver tongue to his farting bum, and

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110
“...he ceases to be smart,” in this moment, according to Pearsall; “this is not the
behavior of a cunning animal, which is what the comic hero is expected to be” (42).

! 94!
a skill set that proves to be less in his scholarly wheelhouse? Further, perhaps his fall is

partially owed to the fact that he stops taking his cues from learned books and

instruments, and begins taking them from the unlearned Alisoun— introducing a new

voice into the heteroglossic conversation and disrupting the precarious misrule that has

been established.

“Consider the Lilies of the Field”: Sacraments and Squeamishness, Disregarded

His punishment highlights the ways Alisoun manages to both exist as the earthiest

presence in the tale, and rise above the other characters as all of them physically come to

grief. This text goes on to emphasize the way Absolon’s romantic notions bump up

against the (repellent and abject) realities of Alisoun’s bodily presence as a character who

stands ready to requite tenfold the unfortunate Absolon, who perceives her beauty but not

her cleverness. Alisoun is first described in enthusiastic detail via a lengthy blazon

effictio full of playful barnyard imagery applicable to every part of the young woman’s

body. She is “wylde and young,” a “prymerole, a piggesnye,” and a “gay popeolote.”

This flower-like creature has a sinuous figure like a “wezele,” a “likerous ye,” a softness

like “wolle of a wether,” a voice like a “swalwe,” and a playfulness like “any kyde or calf

folwynge his dame” (3232-3263). All of these flower and animal images do little to paint

a picture of subjectivity or interiority; they’re the product of a gaze, not a conversation

that penetrates into her “privitee.”111 She is portrayed as appealingly wild and free, but

also non-threateningly constrained. Interior life is hidden by exterior—shapeliness by

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111
Erzgraber, Willi, “The Origins of Comicality in Chaucer,” Chaucer’s Frame Tales:
The Physical and the Metaphysical, edited by Joerg O. Fichte, D.S. Brewer, 1987, 11-33;
Erzgraber suggests that this naturalistic imagery implies that Alisoun is “not to be judged
according to any social or moral norms” (25).

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elaborately-described layers of clothing; lasciviousness by matrimonial constraints that

hold her “narwe in cage” (3224), animal nature by housewifely exterior.112 Her “likerous

ye” (3244) holds the promise of paradise, and she wears “upon hir lendes, ful of many a

goore” beneath whose layers lurk both pleasure (for Nicholas) and punishment (for

Absolon).113

Her concrete, fleshly presence in the story translates into, and paradoxically

becomes less passive and inscrutable in, the realm of the intangible and incorporeal:

“…of hir song, it was as loude and yerne/as any swalwe sittynge on a berne” (3257-8).

This description of confident, full-throated music-making is consistent with Alisoun’s

other form of presence in the tale—not only as a sexual object but also as a lively, lusty

prankster. Her promise to grant Absolon’s request comes in the form of brusque

injunctions “make thee redy...I come anon” (3720) is firm, and her aside to Nicholas:

“’Now hust, and thou shalt laughen al thy fille,” (3722) conveys confident expectation

that she will deliver on her promise—her prank will be successful and enjoyable—and it

is followed by her famous “Tehee!” as the insulted suitor slinks away. Perhaps it is not

her attractiveness, but her playfulness—her understanding of the structures within which

she moves, and how those structures can be used in ludic ways—that puts her in the

power position.

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112
Kolve, 163.
113
Woods, William F. Woods follows the objectifying effect of the description to the
furthest conclusion, reading in this arrangement of extremities a parallel between the
house itself and Alisoun, in Chaucerian Spaces: Spatial Poetics in Chaucer’s Opening
Tales, State University of New York Press, 2008.

! 96!
 Alisoun’s path explicitly crosses streams with religious practice or expectations

only rarely, associating her more with a garden than a cloister. She attends a religious

service at the church where Absolon serves as cleric:

Thanne fil it thus, that to the paryssh chirche,

Cristes owene werkes for to wirche,

This goode wyf went on an haliday.

Hir forheed shoon as bright as any day,

So was it wasshen whan she leet hir werk. (3308-12)

This passage, in keeping with the poem’s first mention of Alisoun, seems much more

invested in her appearance than her practice, allotting nearly as many lines to her

Sabbath-day resplendence as to her actual actions or motivations. The emphasis on her

cleanliness seems a foreshadowed juxtaposition of the abjection that is to come—but

which will leave Alisoun, and Alisoun only, untouched.

The text notes in passing that she goes “Cristes owene werkes for to wirche,”

which, perversely, implies a connection between “Cristes owene werkes” and Alisoun’s

actions—which may in the moment referred to be prayer, but are soon to encompass

adultery, deceit, scatalogical pranks, and unbridled laughter.114 As Cooper notes,

“Christ’s works and the business of sex are closely interlinked” again in 3654-6, when

Alisoun and Nicholas spend the night “In bisynesse of myrthe and of solas,/Til that the

belle of laudes gan to rynge.” Rather than texts about Noah or astrological prophecy, the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
114
Cooper, 101.

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reminders of religion here tend more toward visual and auditory cues, in keeping with the

somatic nature of description when it comes to Alisoun.

Even though the pranks that occur for her sake and at her urging involve breaking

religious rules about truthfulness and marital fidelity, as well as every imaginable rule of

propriety, perhaps it is the case that Alisoun ultimately triumphs through being,

paradoxically, the best rule-follower in the room. She seems as motivated by the ludic as

the lusty, (or perhaps here they are one and the same), and this ludic sensibility means she

indulges her impulses in a way that displays a recurring awareness of her audience(s).

She is, of course, mindful that her “housbonde is so ful of jalousie” that Nicholas had

better “wayte wel and been privee” to have any chance of success. “I woot right wel I

nam but deed...Ye moste been ful deerne, as in this cas,” she declares, mindful that the

choices are to be secretive or suffer (3294-3297). She expertly uses sweet-talking,

persuasive, emotional speech to mislead John in the ways most suited to each particular

moment.

Even though she will eventually willingly acquiesce to Nicholas’ suit, when he

first seizes her “with hir heed she wryed faste awey,/And seyde, ‘I wol nat kisse thee, by

my fey!/…’Lat be, Nicholas,/Or I wol crie ‘out, harrow’ and ‘allas’!” (3283-3286). This

threat to cry for help cuts both ways, in its implication that in the tale’s urban setting,

there are always others nearby who could be seeing and hearing. Whether she protests out

of genuine reluctance or as a gesture toward propriety, either way there is an audience for

the cries. Even when feigning cooperation with Absolon’s request for a kiss, Alisoun’s

playacting incorporates this guardedness; “’Have do,” she tells him, “speed the faste,/Lest

that oure neighbores thee espie” (3728). Alisoun consistently demonstrates self-

! 98!
consciousness regarding who may see her actions (John, the neighbors), what they may

think, and what the consequences for her will be; this is key to her success in her plans,

and as a comedienne.

Beidler suggests that each character sees themself in a particular genre—heroic

patriarch in a Biblical narrative (John), clever hero of a farce (Nicholas), swooning lover

in a romance (Absolon). Alisoun, the only one who is entirely correct, “just charges

ahead in her role as fabliau wife” while understanding accurately her overall role as the

one “whom the three men think of as the luscious prize in their own plots,” while she

“manages to take charge of all three plots” as “the joyfully eager deceiver of the foolish

old John, a joyfully eager bed-partner of the bold Nicholas, a joyfully eager punisher of

the persistent Absolon.”115 Alisoun can be read as a trickster but not necessarily a

dissembler like the heroine in The King of Tars. But she does hew to and depart from the

rules of her various roles in ways that allow her to navigate every situation to her own

advantage. Whether religious or secular, nearly every setting in her life, at least from

what we see in the story, is tied to structures of expectation that she be acquiescent in

various ways based on her role as the more youthful spouse compared with John, the

layperson to Absolon’s cleric, and the object of everyone’s affections including those of

Nicholas, who at first is the actual initiator of the affair. Yet Alisoun inverts several of

these dynamics and gets the literal last laugh of the tale. She is not punished, only

rewarded—perhaps because she is the character who most accurately understands the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
115
Beidler, The Lives of "The Miller's Tale," 15-16

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situation, and most fully uses to her advantage both mind and body, uniting the

incongruous pairing of spirit and flesh, even in this very fleshy tale.116

The men in the tale come to various sorts of bad ends and all three, in different

ways, for different reasons, and with various levels of skill, mix the categories of

“church” and “churl.” The religious elements—Nicholas’ Flood, neither truly astrological

nor biblical and which does not cleans but swells, rather than stemming, the tide of

lechery; John’s inability to successfully inhabit the typological role of Noah or his more

realistic role in the sacrament of marriage; Absolon’s mismatched spiritual vocation and

sensual devotion—are key to the paradoxically rule-bound transgressiveness of the plot.

If the tale needed only to cause hilarious offense (to Absolon and perhaps to the reader),

the window scenes would be enough to do so—as Heile of Beersele proves. Instead,

added layers of incongruity, subterfuge, and distorted religious tropes play with the

distinctions between, and convergence of, the sacred and profane. The figure of Absolon

as a vain and hypocritical cleric, and of John as an embodiment of misguided and

misapplied belief, suggest the importance of being clever and clear-eyed (more so than

“good” or “bad”), and prioritize the pleasure of festive, carnivalesque inversion and

disruption.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
116
Alternatively, perhaps the lack of judgement or punishment is not celebratory, but
dismissive--founded on the view of women as amoral. Elaine Tuttle Hansen, in Chaucer
and the Fictions of Gender (University of California Press, 1992, pp. 223-244) offers a
reminder of Alisoun’s role not only as an object to be desired, but a relatively passive
object to be wooed, swyved, kissed, and (in Absolon’s original plan) violently punished
for rejecting and disrespecting him. Blamires also discusses how this passivity
complicates readings of Alisoun as an unpunished heroine, in a chapter on “Sexuality” in
Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, edited by Steve Ellis, Oxford University Press, 2005, 208-
223.

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 The tale’s end is followed by the Miller’s drunken injunction, to the protesting

Reeve, that while “Ther been ful goode wyves many oon,/ And evere a thousand goode

ayeyns oon badde,” (3154-3155),

An housbonde shal nat been inquisityf

Of Goddes pryvetee, nor of his wyf.

So he may fynde Goddes foyson there,

Of the remenant nedeth nat enquere. (3150-3153).

This play on the word “pryvetee” aligns Alisoun simultaneously—with a paradoxical,

carnivalesque, and arguably blasphemous simultaneity, in fact—with the incompatible

poles of sacred and profane, spiritual and sexual, intangible and embodied. The speaker

(literally the Miller, within the text; and clearly also Chaucer, whose presence is evident

behind the cunning doubleness of the drunk’s wordplay) plays on the associations of

“privete” with both secrecy and sexuality— private knowledge and private parts.117 This

speech closes out the tale, so the impressions still fresh in the reader’s mind are

dominated by bawdy, highly sexual escapades, and the explicit involvement of genitalia

in scenes of desiring, grabbing, and kissing. This placement of the passage ensures that

the reader is primed to associate Alisoun, and wives more generally, with the latter sense

of the word “pryvetee.” But the secrets of the wife are not the only ones mentioned in this

passage—or even in a single line; the tipsy Miller cautions his hearer to opt for blissful

ignorance concerning “Goddes pryvetee,” implying mysteries too high—or perhaps,

daringly, too low—for presumptuous inquiry.Though the passage achieves plausible

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
117
“Privē̆ ̣tē ̣ (n.).” Middle English Dictionary. University of Michigan, 2006,
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED34728.

! 101!
deniability through the careful doubleness of its phrasing, the reader finds both pleasure

and shock in the pairing of “of Goddes pryvetee” and “of his wyf” as parallel mysteries

too impenetrable to be undeservedly grasped (in either sense) by men.

This reading of “pryvetee” can be and has been read as concerning private, secret,

and mysterious knowledge; it also potentially constitutes a blasphemous allusion to

human--and even perhaps divine—genitalia. Laura Kendrick suggests, based on the work

of Leo Steinberg, that this fits into a tradition of “goliardic play [which]

involves...debasing interpretation of sacred images and signs—even to the extent of

taking the Holy Family and ‘Goddes Pryvetee’ in vain” and that the proverb is

deliberately equivocal in its phrasing, with the expectation that the content of the tale will

tip the scale in favor of the cruder interpretation via a reader influenced by “the churlish,

fabliau rendition of episodes of sacred history of the ‘Miller’s Tale,’ which takes

‘humanistic’ interpretive embodiment of religious texts and symbols to ridiculous

lengths, making game out of earnest.”118

There are Bakhtinian depths to the deliberately sinful and churlish “debasing,

materialistic...misappropriation of sacred signs” which, furthermore, aligns the two

“pryvetees” in question— God’s and the woman’s— as parallel and even equal, via the

connection established “between divine knowledge and the knowing of women’s secrets

which, Louise Bishop argues, suggests that “His [pryvetee] too might be feminine”

and/or “punningly elevates female genitalia to the level of the divine.”119 In addition to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
118
Kendrick, Chaucerian Play, 18-19.
119
Louise M. Bishop, “‘Of Goddes pryvetee nor of his wyf:’ Confusion of Orifices in
Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 44, No. 3,
2002, pp. 231-246.
! 102!
suggesting Alisoun is the superior reader and subject to a sort of law that comes more

naturally to her than the aspirational frameworks of religion and romance do to the other

characters, the closing lines privilege her via a carnivalesque elevation that inverts her

low hierarchical position (as a woman, tethered to the flesh) with that of God’s and offers

a final, ringing endorsement of the physical, the transgressive, and the funny in place of

the serious and sacred elements in the tale.

In this text there is no miraculous vision, wondrously dermatological

manifestation of belief, or suspension of the laws of physics. Yet sacred and profane

elements mingle in moments that are exaggerated and hyperbolized to the point of

seeming outsized and fantastical. Rather than pointing the reader toward a sense of

wonder and respect for some larger providential design, the elements of the plot

converge, paradoxically, in service of seeming chaos, with the tale’s whole universe less

toward an ultimate design but an ultimate punchline. Nevertheless, those who violate the

structure are punished. The important opposition isn’t between belief and unbelief, or

veracity and duplicity—a pair that The King of Tars also fails, or rather demurs, to

resolve. The incongruous presences of eschatological symbols—churches, stars, floods—

and scatalogical actions go unresolved, or perhaps converge, to point toward entertaining

cleverness as the ultimate justification and ordering principle. The most important

distinction or value is, in a way, a generic one—one must take care, above all, to be the

joker rather than the butt of the joke.

The ending neither restores the established order nor creates a new one—we leave

the characters swyved, scalded, disgusted, and ridiculed, and before the dust has settled

are told “This tale is doon, and God save al the rowte!” (3854). At the same time, one can

! 103!
read hints of carnivalesque disorder not only in the appropriation and vernacularization of

the fabliau (which, despite its focus on rustic characters and low humor, was a European

import accessible to Chaucer as a court-supported educated, and well-traveled figure) but

also in the grotesque exaggerations of the pranks and their heavy reliance on the “abject

lower bodily stratum.” Of particular interest, in terms of discussion with students, is the

question of whether and how Alisoun’s character wields power (sexual allure; cleverness)

in ways that carnivalize, or merely work within, the tale’s hierarchies.

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 CODA: RESPONDING TO SHOCK AND THE LUDIC IN "THE MILLER’S TALE"

The Victorian Chaucer scholar Mary Eliza Haweis, working in an era somewhat

ill-suited for appreciating the particular brand of humor deployed in “The Miller’s Tale”

yet unwilling to simply omit it from the corpus as most of her male contemporaries did,

published in a collection of translations “The Story of Alison.” It is a tale about a nice girl

who, with the help of her friends Nicholas and Absolon, plays a clever trick on her

jealous husband and punishes Absolon’s pleas for a kiss by smacking him in the face

with a broom. The story intimates that John had better learn to be kinder to Alison and

more prepared to look out for himself, and Absolon to be less impertinent in his requests

for kisses; and it closes by assuring the reader that in the end, “everybody had a good

laugh.”120 Attempting to sanitize the tale enough to sneak it into the schoolroom, but not

beyond recognition, involved some double-sided paraphrasing, Mary Braswell explains:

...for the initiate, Chaucer’s original version will occasionally resound: “Handy

Nicholas” has “many ways of making himself useful”; “he understood love

philters and all sorts of secrets.” Stripped of its salacious context, the line hangs

like a dead branch. And there is the ominous “broom,” to which we shall return,

and Absolon’s inordinate rage when he encounters it.

The adaptation centers on a well-known euphemism at the time by making Alisoun’s

weapon of choice a broom. In other versions Haweis refers to it as “a broom of no great

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
120
Mary Flowers Braswell,“‘A Completely Funny Story’: Mary Eliza Haweis and The
"The Miller's Tale",” The Chaucer Review, vol. 42, no. 3, 2008, pp. 244-268.

! 105!
purity,” a small alteration which underscores Haweis’ clever self-awareness, even in the

act of bowdlerizing.121

Haweis spent her lifetime studying Chaucer and writing on his work. In particular

she published numerous other versions of, and scholarship about, "The Miller's Tale,”

calling it “one of the most completely funny tales ever conceived.”122 Her determination,

in the version mentioned above, to not only discuss this particular Canterbury tale but use

enough double-sided paraphrasing to include it in a collection meant for the schoolroom

or nursery, is all the more surprising for a nineteenth-century female scholar whose work

on Chaucer was largely possible because of her clergyman husband’s support and

approval. Hawies chose "The Miller's Tale" because she saw something in it her

squeamish peers did not: complexity, incongruity, melodious poetry, and a story of a

“completely funny” prank with a moral Haweis interpreted squarely in the favor of

spirited wives. Coarseness, in her interpretation, was not an objection to the tale, just a

fact about it— and the key to its humor.

Over a century after Haweis wrote, controversy erupted over a different instance

of perceived “coarseness.” Some lauded Michelle Wolf’s set at the 2018 White House

Correspondents’ Dinner— which lambasted the current administration and its supporters

via pointed, caustic jokes about the many controversies engulfing it, and unflattering

allusions to The Handmaid’s Tale. Others took aim at the comedienne for humor that was

too “filthy,” too mean, too much, ultimately prompting an apology from the organizers of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
121
Braswell, 263.
122
Braswell, 244.

! 106!
the event.123 Some commentary focused specifically on the combination of rhetorical

nastiness and Wolf’s femininity, suggesting that wives and mothers should not be

subjected to criticism of their conduct at work, or that including female targets in her

speech was unnatural or contrary to womanly duty.124 Such criticisms made it clear that it

was not only the speech’s harshness that people found troubling, but a perceived

incongruity between aggressive humor and a female speaker.

These situations were treated as incongruous and controversial for the same

reason “The Miller’s Tale,” and especially Alisoun’s joke at the climax of the fabliaux

plot, have been: a kind of uncertainty provoked by portrayals of women embracing what

is considered rude, with specific intent to exploit the capacity of humor to carry a pointed

and critical message, or— perhaps more objectionably— to enjoy the pleasure of humor

as an end in itself.

In the public square such moves may be met with opposition and ambivalence. In

the classroom, they can be treated as opportunities to use the shock, and even

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
123
@realDonaldTrump, “The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was a failure last
year, but this year was an embarrassment to everyone associated with it. The filthy
“comedian” totally bombed (couldn’t even deliver her lines-much like the Seth Meyers
weak performance). Put Dinner to rest, or start over!” Twitter, 29 April 2018.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/ 990782291667488768; @WHCA, “WHCA
Statement to Members on Annual Dinner,” Twitter, 29 April 2018.
https://twitter.com/whca/status/990773612226412545.
For a range of responses to the set, see Emily Heil, “The Many Reactions to Michelle
Wolf’s Speech, From Trump Saying She ‘Bombed’ to Kumail Nanjiani’s Support,”
Washington Post, 29 April 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news /reliable-
source/wp/2018/04/29/ the-many-reactions-to-michelle-wolfs-speech-from-trump-saying-
she-bombed-to-kumail-nanjianis-support/?utm_term=.94d745d39d99.
124
Arwa Mahdawi, “Michelle Wolf has nothing to apologise for. Her critics do, though,”
The Guardian, 30 April 2018.

! 107!
squeamishness or resistance, evoked by texts like "The Miller's Tale" to prompt

discussion and probe assumptions. As one student in a past class commented upon

finishing the text, “It’s not the highest form of humor, but it certainly survives the ages. It

makes you stop and reread a line to make sure you read it right.” For many of us

developing a willingness, and then a compulsion, to “stop and reread a line” is essentially

the gateway to developing literary competence; the fact that Chaucer’s bawdy jokes

prompted this conscious impulse is significant in that it suggests the incongruity and

abjection of Alisoun’s bottom-baring trick at the window is not only (or merely) a

throwaway joke, but a potential pedagogical stepping stone whose very vulgarity proves

to be a motivating factor for closer reading.

Though most students reading Chaucer in today’s college classrooms are more

prepared than Haweis’ audience for what “The Miller’s Tale” entails, Nicole Nolan

Sidhu asserts that still today, its raunchy elements “wreak havoc with the seriousness and

sexual reserve that students expect from canonical British authors” and can thereby either

repel or (more likely, she implies) spark interest. In order to carry forward the momentum

of this initial readerly shock, she suggests pairing the tale with examples of visual

evidence for the nature of obscene imagery’s presence in medieval life:

Knowing that obscene scenarios and images appeared in mainstream venues like

churches and prayer books invites students to question the extent to which

medieval people perceived obscenity as anti-authoritarian and leads to discussions

about the ways that medieval obscenity supported the gender status quo. At the

same time, the fact that medieval obscenity is cordoned off into certain

! 108!
 genres...and spaces...shows students that these representations are not simply the

unselfconscious productions of a culture that lacked a notion of obscenity.125

Sihu insists that “more valuable than simply ignoring [students’] discomfort or

patronizingly excusing them from works they find difficult” or offensive, is the approach

of considering obscenity critically as a cultural discourse, and probing not only the

reactions it provokes but the way it works to transgress— and thereby define or

challenge— the boundaries of the polite, the normal, the educational.126

This is perhaps easier applied to some elements of the story than others. One

aspect of the tale where Sidhu’s suggested approach proves more challenging is the ways

in which the sexual nature of the tale intersects with scenes which in some ways are not

only obscene but tinged with violence. Were Alisoun’s and Absolon’s genders reversed,

students would perhaps be more likely to view the window trick as a form of harassment

or assault, rather than a prank. As noted above, they are likely to experience some unease

about the fact that Alisoun and Nicholas’ relationship is adulterous; even more unsettling,

to students in an era in which colleges are making a conscious push to promote consent

and make coercion taboo, is the fact that the lovers’ relationship begins with Nicholas

aggressively grabbing Alisoun’s genitals and her initially recoiling, protesting, and

threatening to sound an alarm before acquiescing to his persistent wooing.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
125
Nicole Nolan Sidhu, “Teaching Chaucer’s Obscene Comedy in Fragment 1,”
Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” Edited by Peter W. Travis and
Frank Grady, The Modern Language Association of America, 2014, pp. 80-83.
126
Sidhu, 80.

! 109!
 Responses to the rudeness of "The Miller's Tale”— whether those reactions

consist of amusement, alienation, or something in between— are a useful flash point that

can be used to probe assumptions about the textual and social narratives shaping what’s

acceptable and shocking, and on what grounds, in both the medieval and modern worlds.

Critically exploring medieval obscenity— literary, visual, even auditory— can be, as

Nicola McDonald points out, a chance to reflect on what might shock, titillate, offend, or

repel medieval audiences, and why; what does or doesn’t continue to evoke the same

reactions in us now; and what are the implications of the fact that “definitions of the

obscene are located at the juncture of what one group—usually the current dominant

group—identifies, at a given moment, as decent and indecent.”127

What this class did seem to find quite clear was the scatalogical nature of the

tale’s climactic prank, and their sense that the use of such intricacy for “laughable

intentions,” the window scene’s placement near the end of the tale, and the fact that

“once those jokes are out, the reading ends,” implied that the entertainment value of

obscene humor might be the point of the text, after all. This is the type of interpretive

indeterminacy the same class struggled to make peace with when discussing The Land of

Cokaygne—seemingly, the fact that in “The Miller’s Tale” it is easier to get the joke, also

made it easier to get the point(s).

The brief, breathless pause created in the moment when one is taken aback by

humor is, suggests Cris Mayo, a pedagogically priceless one—tension-creating, yet non-

threatening and open to the generative release of multiple meanings. “This is not the kind

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
127
Nicola McDonald, Introduction, Medieval Obscenities, York Medieval Press, 2006,
p. 12.

! 110!
of unsettling that creates panic but rather the sort that generates pleasure,” writes Mayo:

“as a way of rethinking, humor provides educators with examples of slippages and

enjoyment in unsettling meaning,” and that unsettled meaning “provides ways for

education to engage seemingly disparate groups of students, inviting them in with the

promise of enjoyment but shaking them up by initiating new ways of thinking and

interacting.” 128 With regard to Chaucer, Andrew Cole describes this as an invitation into

a trans-temporal inside joke, suggesting that “the poet always helps his readers by using

words riddled with innuendo, as if saying the word with raised eyebrows brings forth the

meaning just below the surface,” and rewards research and allusion-tracking by allowing

the reader the pleasure, satisfaction, and sense of achievement that comes with catching

“the ways in which the poet brilliantly juxtaposes and conflates the high and low to great

comedic effect.” The reader is prompted to consider “how the traditions and cultures of

humor change over time,” but also, through the visceral experience of laughing with

chaucer, achieve a momentary identification with the past.129

Humor, including profane humor like that in "The Miller's Tale,” may engage the

“diverse folk” of the classroom in generative discussion by lending a freeing,

carnivalesque dynamic through its winking at authority, disruption of established

hierarchy, explicit awareness of heteroglossia, and self-aware engagement with

incongruity and profanity. “To laugh with Chaucer, then,” writes Cole, “is not to simply

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128
Cris Mayo, “On Incongruity and Provisional Safety: Thinking Through Humor,”
Studies in Philosophy and Education ,Vol. 29, 2010, 509-521.
129
Andrew Cole, “Getting Chaucer’s Jokes,” in Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales, Edited by Peter W. Travis and Frank Grady, The Modern Language
Association of America, 2014, pp. 63-66.

! 111!
have a dirty mind or be comfortable speaking in academic tones about Chaucerian

vulgarity,” but to appreciate “the assembly of sources in an original fashion” so that

“making fun and ‘makyng’ are one and the same process.”130

In practice, the one opportunity I have had to see this text in the classroom yielded

results quite similar to those of Cokaygne—student responses leaned toward focusing on

Absolon as a flawed representative of the church, and on his punishment as being meted

out in retribution for lust (or as one student suggested, covetousness of Alisoun— though

this responder didn’t get into the objectifying implications of “coveting another man’s

wife” as a phrasing which hinges more on John’s possession of Alisoun). Outside of

identifying which behaviors did and did not accord with being a cleric, and professing

shock at the portrayal of adulterous dalliances (“not just sex, but ruining the sacrament of

marriage”), responses and discussion indicated little interest in the story from Alisoun’s

point of view, or appreciation for the complications, and potential powers and perils, of

her situation. These responses surprised me by appearing to acquiesce, in fact, to the

perception of Alisoun as a relatively inert object. The final passages, striking as they are,

seemed to supersede any memory of the descriptions and encounters, both entertaining

and problematic, leading up to them, and run the risk of circumscribing, rather than

provoking, further reflection or identification with the text’s sole female character and

arguable mastermind. This suggests a focus for future strategies to ensure a more even

distribution of interpretive energy. In a hypothetical future course, I would be inclined to

intentionally guide discussion in a way that takes its time getting to the window and the

flood, is more careful to confront, rather than shortchanging, the less-funny and even

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130
Cole, 63.
! 112!
disturbing events that come before, and, makes an effort to circle back to the various and

shifting positions and powers of each character and especially of Alisoun.

! 113!
 CHAPTER 3:

ENTERTAINING ANGELS: DIVINE DREAMING AND DISSEMBLING IN THE

KING OF TARS

The previous chapters have focused on a particular strain of appealing

incongruity. "The Miller's Tale" shocks with the crass and scatalogical nature of its

punchlines, yet these same characteristics, paradoxically, reveal its sophistication as the

complex machinery of the plot carries the reader along a trajectory that is simultaneously

obscene in some ways and elegant in others. The distortions one finds in The Land of

Cokaygne create a sense of alluring disparity, drawing the reader effortlessly into a

narrative that welcomes his or her attention, evokes incredulity and questions, and then

meets them with colorful flippancy and literary play. Both narratives mobilize

incongruity and inversion in a deeply ludic way, combining contrasting elements in a

carnivalesque way whose irreverence is shot through with laughter.

But what about other strains of incongruity— for instance, inconsistency that is

more tricky or puzzling than playful; more blurry than eye-catching; less prone to hook

than to alienate the reader? The 14th century romance The King of Tars ought, by all

rights, to be a sensationalistic thrill ride; it involves exotic travel, a brave princess, hordes

of fighting men, visions of monstrous beasts and shining knights, and the grisly spectacle

of a flesh-lump transformed to a child. Moreover, its protagonist is a reluctant bride who

pulls off an intangible hoax by going undercover as a convert, only to convert those

around her. Somehow, though, despite its moments of excitement and long roster of

romantic and fantastical images The King of Tars registers, overall, as more self-serious

and didactic than one would think a poem about a miraculously-transfigured “rond of
! 114!
fleische” could manage to be. Its interests in warfare and conquest, and in the heroine’s

piety and purity, are normal preoccupations for a popular romance, in a genre replete with

crusading and hagiographic influences and which treats violence and virtue not as strange

bedfellows but as necessarily contrasting ingredients.

The incongruities and odd pairings of the text— prayerfulness and deceitfulness,

popular romance and classically-influenced dream theory— are unexpected in a way that

is neither playful nor ludic. Yet I read these uneasily-fused elements as demonstrating

another form literary liberty-taking can take; one which, rather than necessarily inverting

the elements it pairs, uses their mutual echoes and reverberations to underpin the popular

with the legitimacy of elite. Such moves are both strategic and incongruous, taking place

within a genre with a history of reception as “the ugly duckling of medieval English

studies,” largely owing to romance’s explicit pursuit of the audience’s entertainment and

pleasure, and prone to vilification even in previous centuries as a degenerate form.131

The King of Tars enters into the conversation, then, less as a comparison with

“Cokaygne” and “The Miller’s Tale” than as a counterbalance. Its profanatory moments

and elements of incongruity are entertaining (or shocking), but not overtly humorous.

But these moments are still centered around a core of “guilty pleasure.” The narrative

titillates through imagery of the horrifying lump child and sensationalized nightmare-

having princess, in passages which mobilize, even while distorting and transgressing, the

religious infrastructure upon which the poem is built.

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131
!Nicola
McDonald, Introduction, Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in
Popular Romance. Edited by Nicola McDonald, Manchester UP, 2004, p. 14. !
! 115!
 The key moments I will discuss merge the tropes of religion and romance,

borrowing from Christian tradition to authorize transgressive acts. The story takes place

in an environment that is religiously-inflected by the rituals of marriage, baptism, and

conversion, and by various expectations of masculine and feminine piety and conduct.

When these expectations are countered, it is in a subtle, rather than an exaggerated and

overtly carnivalesque, way. For the most part these passages distort or thwart orthodoxy

as a means to an end, rather than reveling in the transgression itself in the way that the

other two texts do. Still, by insisting on unlikely, even impossible pairings which are

embodied in its heroine this text, too, includes profanatory moments that reveal the

relationships between sacred and profane, popular and learned to be ones of double-

sidedness and dependence.

The incongruous qualities and actions of the heroine blur lines of propriety in

ways that make the performing princess an understated, yet useful, vantage point for

considering the text’s precariously-balanced relationship to piety and sensationalism. She

embodies, in both her own dream-life and waking conduct and in her uncanny offspring,

this entertaining text’s undercurrents of contradiction and unease regarding identity. I am

particularly interested in her ostensible conversion— the dream leading up to it, and the

behavior that follows and which includes her religious practice, her marriage to the

Sultan, and her birth and baptism of the hideous lump child. This sequence of events

includes a depiction of monstrous imagery surrounding cultural boundary-crossing,

imagery that seems at odds with the text’s simultaneous embrace of her actions which

ultimately forge ahead in blurring boundaries, and deal with the (horrific) fallout later by

baptizing both the misshapen lump child and the threateningly-Other Sultan.

! 116!
 Though this text is more sober in tone than the other two texts, the most pivotal

events and pious characters in The King of Tars are ultimately filtered through a lens of

entertainment rather than holiness. The transcendent is subsumed by the thrilling, but the

poem’s earnest tone and clear anxieties leave even the most sensationalized passages with

lingering questions about race and national identity that even the most colorful scene of

dreamt-up hounds or malformed infants cannot entirely elide.

The King of Tars

The King of Tars, a Middle English verse romance, survives in three versions

including the 14th-century Auchinleck Manuscript, the lengthiest and most complete

(from which I will quote here). The manuscript emphasizes vernacular literary texts

across several genres; it contains saints’ lives, religious poetry, and general didactic texts,

as well as a fabliau and a large and varied group of eight verse romances. The King of

Tars, like the surrounding texts in the manuscript, is multifaceted and draws on the

narrative traditions of crusade and conversion stories as well as Middle English romance,

with its Norman influence and vernacular, popularizing spin on chivalric tropes; it

reshapes and secularizes its religious elements to suit the narrative. The surrounding

manuscript has been termed “the earliest example of book production in England which

was lay and commercial,” a “product of a distinctive London literary culture” assembled

around a theme of English nationhood which binds together the various genres contained

therein.132 Turville-Petre suggests that the entire manuscript was designed for the

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132
Alison Wiggins, Introduction., Auchinleck Manuscript: NLS Advocates Manuscript
19.2.1., Edited by David Burnley and Alison Wiggins, Version 1.1, National Library of
Scotland, 2003.

! 117!
household in which “if some...knew French or Latin, all understood English.” Although

the manuscript is elaborate and would have been expensive, “because the contents are in

English and often, to put it delicately, somewhat unsophisticated the suggestion is widely

made that the manuscript was put together for ‘the aspirant middle-class citizen” but he

argues that wealthy merchants would be quite likely to speak French, and suggests that

the use of English is a possible class marker, but a definite “expression of the very

character of the manuscript, of its passion for England and its pride in being English.”133

The romance tells the story of a Christian princess who is coerced, via the threat

of warfare, into betrothal to a Saracen king who has heard from afar about her beauty and

virtue. She resists pressure to convert to Islam, until a terrifying dream of attacking

hounds resolves itself into a vision of a knight who assures her that she can retain her

devotion to Christ—indeed, enhance it—by essentially going “undercover” as an ersatz

apostate. On waking, the bride pretends to convert to Islam but remains secretly Christian

at heart. Her betrothed is satisfied by her performance and the two wed, but the secretly-

interfaith marriage produces a shapeless, lump like child whose formlessness nothing can

cure. The princess talks her way into holding a Christian baptism, at which point the

lump of flesh miraculously receives limbs and human features. Impressed by this

transformation, the child’s father converts to Christianity and is also baptized, and his

dark skin immediately lightens. The tale’s “happy ending” consists of a family unit

unified by Christian faith and racial whiteness. A corresponding religious unity is

violently imposed on the kingdom as the Sultan orders the release of all Christian

prisoners in the land, and his Muslim followers convert at swordpoint.

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133
Turville-Petre, England the Nation, 138.
! 118!
 Early criticism of The King of Tars approached the romance textually and

historically, targeting manuscript conundrums and questions of origins, influences,

analogues, and historical inspirations. Lillian Herlands Hornstein laid early scholarly

groundwork with a series of articles that considered the romance’s relationship to

references in medieval chronicles, as well as Anglo-Latin and Italian analogues; reading

the text in light of the 1299 Tartar victory at Damascus, Hornstein sees the Saracen king

as a representation of the ruler Ghazan and the poem’s other events as responses to

English anxiety about Crusade-era tales of Tartar cruelty.134

A wave of criticism in the 2000s tends to take a postcolonial approach to the

romance’s depictions of racial and religious difference, interrogating the ways the text

makes visible its attitudes about race and culture through the transformations wrought by

baptism, which changes the formless lump into a baby and the color-changing Sultan into

a Christian, father, and white man.135 This ending, and the tale’s obsession with

conversion throughout, reflects common concerns in the wake of the crusades. “In the

late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,” Heng writes, “a dream of conversion and empire

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134
See Lillian H. Hornstein, “New Analogues to the King of Tars.” Modern Language
Review 36 (1941) 422-33 and “The Historical Background of the King of Tars,”
Speculum vol. 16, no. 4, 1941, pp. 404-414. For more on sources and analogues, ee also
Robert J. Geist, “On the Genesis of The King of Tars,” Journal of English and Germanic
Philology 42, 1943, pp. 260-268.
135
See Jane Gilbert’s “Putting the Pulp into Fiction: the lump-child and its parents in The
King of Tars,” Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance. Edited
by Nicola McDonald, Manchester UP, 2004, p. 106; Geraldine Heng’s Empire of Magic:
Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural History. Columbia UP, 2003; Lisa
Lampert, “Race, Periodicity, and the (Neo-) Middle Ages, Modern Language Quarterly
vol. 65, no. 3, 2004, pp. 391-421; and Mary Housum Ellzeay, “The Advice of Wives in
Three Middle English Romances: The King of Tars, Sir Cleges, and Athelston,”
Medieval Perspectives vol. 7, 1992, pp. 44-52.

! 119!
in the Latin West, and the prospective vision of an expansive, universal, Latin

Christendom reaching across the globe, made gestures of rapprochement toward the

Mongol empire...a worthwhile undertaking for pope and monarch alike and led to

aspirations in which evangelistic and colonialistic impulses mixed.”136 Of particular

interest was the figure of the thirteenth-century ruler Ghazan, whose politically-

advantageous ecumenism and hints at potential for conversion provided fodder for both

fictional and historical fantasies of conquest.137

Many read The King of Tars as wishfully portraying a reality in which spirit

shapes flesh, expressing an anxiety-driven wish for visible biological markers to make

legible the characters’ internal natures. This can take several forms—analysis that focuses

on racial, religious, or gendered identities, or which blends one or more of those

dimensions. In Empire of Magic Heng emphasizes the place of KT among the Constance

narratives, in which “Divine love simply functions as an authorizing fiction.” These

narratives apply dominant ways of thinking to a story that reveals “the power of religion

to transform culture and civilizations—enacting the will of one society upon another—is

presented in the Constance romances under the sign of conversion.”138 KT gives us an

“explicit exposition of racial thinking, and how race-and-religion—’race-religion’—

functions in medieval culture as a single indivisible discourse.”139 The princess’

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136
Geraldine Heng, “Jews, Saracens, ‘Black Men’, Tartars: England in a World of Racial
Difference.” A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c. 1350-c. 1500,
Blackwell, 2007, pp. 247-270.
137
Friedman, 55; Lampert, 406
138
Heng, 183.
139
Heng, 229, 234.
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whiteness, Heng suggests, vouches for the falseness of her conversion and the fidelity of

her Christianity.140 Such readings touch on the extent to which the romance’s events

embody fears about mixing and contamination, and the fact that the princess’ actions

make her a catalyst in the process of bringing others—some by choice, and some via

violence— into a fold that is uniformly Christian and white.

Recent strands of criticism seek less to resolve these tensions than to emphasize

them. In the past decade scholars have complicated readings of the text’s attitudes toward

racial and religious identity by suggesting that The King of Tars not only delineates, but

also blurs, the categories of East and West, Saracen and Christian, White and Nonwhite.

Jane Gilbert notes that “...the Auchinleck version...portrays the heathen court as a

repository of values not to be despised, and the Sultan...though initially outside the

Christian and paternal pale,...is not unworthy of ultimate redemption.” The broader

implications of this she extends even to the romance itself, with its underlying message

that “secular activities are not only compatible with pious pursuits but can cultivate

virtues which enhance them.”141 Cord J. Whitaker treats whiteness as

“secondary...suggestive, but not ultimately necessary” to the Sultan’s conversion, with

blackness and whiteness functioning not only literally but as metaphorical markers of

internal or external chaos, sin and self-regulation, which can and must simultaneously

cohere in both the Sultan and his counterpart the King of Tars.142 Jamie Friedman,

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140
Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Cambridge
University Press, 2018, p. 215.
141
Gilbert, 119.
142
Cord J. Whitaker, "Black Metaphors in The King of Tars," JEGP, Journal of English
! 121!
meanwhile, asserts that the text specifically constructs and maintains not only blackness

but whiteness, representing it as “not a priori” and in fact as a quality that can be

manifested on the same body, with the identities of Christian/Saracen, human/animal, and

black/white coded in the story as separate—but proximate—so that illuminating the

traces of a constructed white racial body draws whiteness into the text’s production of

racial-religious identities.143

Such readings tease out latent parallels between the two rulers, and suggest that

the text itself, the modern reader’s reception of it, or both, work to undermine the

boundaries between them in interesting ways. Both kings, for example, desire shared

religious belief in marriage—writes Calkin, “The poet deliberately highlights a Saracen

desire for married people to share one religious belief and points out how such a desire

traverses Saracen-Christian borders. The text thereby again attributes to the sultan some

resemblance to Christian men and complicates the task of differentiating individuals.”144

Both men, too, display symbolic anger; “the text presents us with two series of paralleled

expressions of rage emanating from both rulers, and the manner in which they are framed

and characterized—using the conventions regulating the emotion’s expressions as tools to

define its nature—announces a certain disruption of the dichotomy between religions”

and suggests that since the “righteous justified anger is a significant component of

crusading ideology and thus constitutes a necessary attribute to a (future) Christian

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and Germanic Philology, vol. 112, no. 2, 2013, pp. 169-193.
143
Jamie Friedman, “Making Whiteness Matter: The King of Tars,” postmedieval: a
journal of medieval cultural studies 6.1 (2015), pp. 52-63.
144
Calkin, 222.

! 122!
king...these displays of wrath also simultaneously unite them in such a way as to hint

toward a future association between the two kings.”145 Such readings highlight the ways

the Sultan’s conversion and alliance with his father-in-law was already prefaced by

various tendrils of similarity that call into question the black-and-white delineations put

forth at the surface of the poem. This awareness of how the poem’s characters, and even

nations, are less opposites than echoes of one another applies in very clear ways to the

transformations of the sultan and child, and to the princess’ feigned apostasy as well—the

most fantastical events in the poem not only unite clashing intellectual traditions, but

speak to the cultural clashes at the narrative’s center.

“The flesche lay stille as ston:” Revulsion, Revelation, and the Lump Child

Of particular interest, for this project, is the ways the poem translates these large-

scale, ideological concerns into a concentrated and grotesque physical form. In a text that

contains multiple touchstones for the desires and anxieties of crusading and romance, the

lump child stands out as a particularly sensational and exaggerated embodiment of the

text’s themes. A grotesque, fantastical object, the formless lump is simultaneously

repugnant and compelling; titillating and troubling; sensational in its day and offensive in

ours.

The lump child’s beginnings are, surprisingly, not entirely foreboding. Though

the reader has a strong impression of the dread that dogs the princess’ footsteps as she

approaches both the marriage ceremony and the marriage bed, her pregnancy is,

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145
Marcel Elias, "The Case of Anger in The Siege of Milan and The King of Tars,"
Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, vol. 43, 2012, pp. 41-56.
! 123!
physically at least, natural and easy in a way that belies the sense of unnatural horror that

is to follow:

That levedi, so feir and so fre,

Was with hir lord bot monethes thre

Than he gat hir with childe (562-564).146

Pregnancy is deeply intertwined with the idea of the Princess and Sultan as an unstable,

even monstrous marriage between two parents whose incompatible identity categories are

emphasized and concretized in the form (or rather, formlessness) of the identity-less

object they conceive in place of a child. As Heng points out, the heroine of the standard

Constance narrative remains childless in an unconsummated marriage— The King of

Tars is a “revealing variant,” unique in the fact that it seeks out, rather than eliding, the

possibility of consummation.147 In this respect, The King of Tars is bolder and more

concrete than its analogues—and, thereby, more shocking and profane in depicting the

union and its fruit as a physical reality, rather than an abstract threat. Given that the

monstrous birth implies an impossible or unthinkable union, it is interesting and perhaps

a bit counterintuitive that, via the diminutive “bot monethes thre,” (563) the poem

explicitly points out the rapidity with which conception occurs. The pairing is cast as

monstrous in some ways, yet fertile in others. It seems a stretch to read his fecundity as a

hopeful, even ecumenical, gesture; rather, the very ease of the lump child’s conception is

itself threatening when read as a quick and inevitable exposure of the mother’s deception

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146
!That
lady, so fair and so noble, was with her lord only three months before he made
her pregnant.
147
Heng, 182

! 124!
and the couple’s incongruity. The fruit of the union is an object of horror, the literal

result—or consequence—of this intermarriage, and is presented as not only monstrous,

but swift to follow (and punish, and then eventually redeem) the transgressive act of

disregarding racial, religious, and cultural boundaries. This depiction of the pregnancy

departs from the norm as it explores the taboo union of eastern Sultan and western

princess, and portrays their ambiguous offspring—subhuman yet poised for transcendent

transformation; inchoate yet deeply symbolic— in detail rather than euphemistically.

Though conception occurs with perhaps-troubling ease, the spiritual and

interpersonal fallout of the pregnancy is far more ambivalent than the physical. The only

hint of a bodily dimension to the pregnancy (aside from the fact that it occurs quickly and

easily) comes with the princess’ change of appearance (in either complexion or

expression), noted in the text’s declaration that she “chaunged ble” while carrying what

turns out to be an entity distorted in not just hue but in its entire form (565). More telling

than physical cues is the princess’ behavior--especially the fact that, while the overjoyed

father-to-be is “Jolif...and wilde,” (567), she apparently responds to the revelation of her

pregnancy by praying “to Jhesu ful of might/Fram schame He schulde hir schilde” (569-

570).

The princess is eventually “deliverd o bende/Thurth help of Mari milde,” (572-

573), only to find that when the infant emerges, it is unrecognizable, a horror that “repels

and fascinates by its very crudity.”148

...lim no hadde it non,

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148
Delivered from her confinement, through merciful Mary’s help; for quote, see Gilbert,
102

! 125!
 Bot as a rond of flesche yschore

In chaumber it lay hem bifore

Withouten blod and bon.

For sorwe the levedi wald dye,

For it hadde noither nose no eye

Bot lay ded as the ston. (576-582).149

There is an underlying warning at the root of the narrative’s use of the lump child, though

the story tends toward a pat and didactic redemption. The child’s presence in the

narrative is not only symbolic, however—it is also visceral and described in intensely

evocative, somatic terms. It’s also repeatedly and emphatically described using “flesh,”

which itself can be read as suggesting an inherent profanity at the heart of the child’s

existence. Medieval thought often assumed an association between women and the (sin-

tainted) flesh, rather than the spirit which was gendered masculine. To be associated with

materiality was to be, like the body itself, polymorphous, disordered, and in need of the

rule of reason, as well as particularly susceptible to sin.150

The horror of the child’s presence is at least as emphatic as, and more sensational,

than its spiritual significance. The portrayal of the limbless, lifeless lump manages to

make the ostensibly didactic into something a bit prurient, attaching a lesson about racial

and religious miscegenation to an image that threatens to overpower the orthodoxy of the

message with visceral horror. The uncanniness of the description lies partly in its

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149
!It had no limbs, but like a shorn-off lump of flesh it lay in the chamber before them
without blood and bone. Because of sorrow the lady wished to die, because it had neither
nose nor eye, but lay as lifeless as a stone.
150
!Biernoff,!13!
! 126!
indeterminacy—the image of the lump child focuses not on what the child is, or even

what it isn’t, because both of those questions are troublingly impossible to answer.

Instead, we are told in detail what specific attributes the mystery object lacks—

humanizing features the reader knows should be there, but aren’t. The “rond of flesche,”

is introduced from the start as limbless, before it is revealed that even this is not the full

explanation for why it “lay hem bifore,” still and unmoving. In keeping with the overall

patterns of the text, the passage moves from immediately identifiable external features to

what’s wrong internally, revealing that in addition to lacking appendages the lump child

is “withouten blod and bon” inside and “hadde noithernose no eye” to link external

sensory perceptions to any kind of consciousness. It is “ded as the ston” in a series of

unnatural ways that permeate the interior and exterior of (what should be) the body.

The featureless mass has an uncanniness that goes a step beyond the hairy, piebald, or

half-human children found in medieval folklore. These various anomalies involved in

monstrous births, some actual and some (depending on the analogue) only rumored, tend

to serve as the set-up for a miraculous resolution that is spiritual in nature. Hirsute or

half-human infants— and especially a shapeless one, which invites links with the idea

that bear cubs were born formless and must be licked into the shape of their species by

the mother—imply not only monstrosity but specifically a beast-like or subhuman

nature.151 This pattern is noted, as well, by more recent scholars like Sarah Star, whose

2016 examination of how medieval medical discourses on blood inform The King of

Tars’ use of the bloodless lump child casts the unfortunate object as a continuation of the

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151
Lillian Herlands Hornstein, “A Folklore Theme in The King of Tars,” Philological
Quarterly 20 (1941), 82-87.

! 127!
“misforschapen þing” mentioned in other stories of intermarriage or problematic

maternity.152 Religious and biological categories are linked by not only racial and

cultural, but medical, discourse that reads formlessness as owing to a lack of blood that

indicates a lack of multiple kinds of life force, biological and spiritual significance,

resulting in something alien and inchoate whose bloodlessness equates to unreadability, a

biological silence. Informed by the didactic, proselytizing nature of The King of Tars, it’s

clear that the line between beast and human is not an arbitrary one, but rather one marked

by faith, conversion, and baptism (specifically, into Christianity and out of Islam which

is, both here and in descriptions of the adult Sultan, associated with beast-like qualities

and behaviors). The lump child’s visual indeterminacy and interpretive ambiguity allow

the lifeless lump to play host to a range of meanings. It vacillates uneasily between sides

of a medieval binary—the physical and spiritual, and ultimately the conjoined racial and

religious.

The lump child lends itself to readings of the romance as a story of failed

symbolic masculinity and paternity, contaminating femininity and maternity, or both at

once, always read and racialized along religious lines. Gilbert writes that “...the lump’s

inhumanity is not, as in the analogues, its father’s contribution, the direct transmission of

his paganism; here there is simply no paternal input at all. The particular monstrosity of

the lump results from the fact that it is exclusively its mother’s child” and the “wider

ideological implications of this paternal failure are clear” and based in Aristotelian and

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152
"Anima Carnis in Sanguine Est: Blood, Life, and The King of Tars," Journal of
English and Germanic Philology vol. 115, no. 4, 2016, pp. 442-462.

! 128!
Lacanian divisions between maternal and paternal contributions.”153 Alternatively,

emphasizing the maternal makes the lump child into a symbol of the transgresive and

shocking combination of parents from different faiths; “the physical embodiment of an

obscene marriage in which the Christian princess has done the unthinkable, either

because she pretends, outwardly, to convert to Islam, the infernal religion of her

husband...or because she joins with a Muslim without first converting him to her religion,

or both.”154

In addition to the critical readings regarding what principles or anxieties are at the

heart of the lump child’s significance, the text itself gives us a scene of its characters’

struggle to “read” the meaning of the monstrous birth. Rather than rejoicing at the birth of

an heir, those present are “wel sori” (575) to witness the arrival of a horror--the Princess,

closest to the situation, “for sorwe wald dye” (578) when faced with the spectacle of a

child that is both formless and uncannily inert, as the passage emphasizes by repeatedly

reminding us that the child “lay hem bifore” and “lay ded as the ston” (576, 582) rather

than offering onlookers the comfort of normal interaction to soften their shock, or any

evidence of familial bonds beneath its abnormal exterior.

The Sultan points to his wife of being the source of its lacks (a paradoxical

accusation), insisting that “The childe that is here of thee born/ Both lim and lith it is

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153
Jane Gilbert,"Unnatural Mothers and Monstrous Children in The King of Tars and Sir
Gowther." Medieval Women - Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for
Felicity Riddy, Brepols, 2000, pp. 329-344; see also Gilbert’s “Putting the Pulp into
Fiction: the lump-child and its parents in The King of Tars,” Pulp Fictions of Medieval
England: Essays in Popular Romance. Edited by Nicola McDonald, Manchester UP,
2004, pp. 106-123.
154
!Heng, 228

! 129!
forlorn/Alle thurth thi fals bileve!” (592-594).155 His charge implies that lack translates to

lack—“fals bileve” to unfinished form, an incomplete conversion to a muddled

conception. In response to her spouse’s laying of blame, the princess protests:

The levedi answerd and seyd tho,

Ther sche lay in care and wo,

“Leve sir, lat be that thought;

The child was geten bitwen ous to.

For thi bileve it farth so,

Bi Him that ous hath wrought! (601-606).156

Interestingly, this response, rather than eliding the father’s involvement or the

miscegenation involved, insists on it. She thereby counters his attempt to place blame on

her for faultily bearing their offspring. But at the same time, her counterargument invites

a different kind of blame by overtly pinpointing their cross-cultural and interfaith

marriage (the result of a choice of hers) as the source of, and reason for, this horror.

Furthermore, her exclamation about “Him that ous hath wrought,” even in the act

of emphasizing the difference between herself and her husband, also links herself and the

Sultan (and perhaps even their inhuman offspring) by placing them in the same category,

that of God’s creatures. On one hand this emphasizes the superiority of the Christian God

over believers and non-believers alike, and is thereby something of a power move. But on

the other, it can’t be performed without also aligning her with the very husband from

whom she is ideologically distancing herself. The doubleness of the lump child’s horror

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155
!This child of yours lacks both limb and bone, all because of your false belief.”
156
If you please, sir, put that thought aside; the child was conceived between the two of
us. It fares so because of your belief, by Him that has made us!
! 130!
makes the union of differences tangible, and in doing so reveals not distance but

doubleness and proximity and prevents an easy or complete resolution to the unease

evoked by the child.

Ultimately, then, the lump child embodies horror about the profanatory proximity

of religious categories (and bodies) in the text, which not only blends multiple genres but

fuses incongruous ideological elements. The lump makes visible the impossibility of

reading intangible traits based on physical appearance; religion and biology are indeed

intertwined in the text but the text reveals them both to be vulnerable, and the categories

for which they are the basis to be unstable. The dramatic color change upon the Sultan’s

conversion, then, is a “reactionary fantasy about the ways in which sociocultural

affiliations may be read from people’s bodies” and we should not shortchange the text’s

anxious acknowledgement of “the possibility of eluding such sociocultural

categorization,” even as it ultimately reasserts those categories.157 “The inescapable,

explicit lesson in this representational script of hideous birth,” according to Heng, is that

religion, which we had assumed to belong purely to the realm of culture, can shape and

instruct biology.” This complicates readings of the lump child as a symbol of the gulf or

mismatch between spouses, or of an Aristotelian conception of the child as consisting of

maternal matter bereft of paternal spirit.158 The reader is reminded that the princess has

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157
Siobhan Bly Calkin, “Marking Religion on the Body: Saracens, Categorization, and
the King of Tars,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology vol. 104, no. 2, 2005, pp.
219-238.
158
See Jane Gilbert’s "Unnatural Mothers and Monstrous Children in The King of Tars
and Sir Gowther." Medieval Women - Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain:
Essays for Felicity Riddy, Brepols, 2000, pp. 329-344; see also Suzanne Conklin Akbari’s
Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1400, Cornell
University Press, 2009.
! 131!
knowingly transgressed laws governing interfaith marriage, and has successfully “read”

as Saracen while doing so.159 A newly-created being, however, clearly can neither choose

to convert nor pass as a convert--concealment of the type practiced by the princess is

impossible for her son, upon whom cultural and racial divisions act.

Prompted by the Sultan’s alarm and desperation in the face of the horror child,

which create an opportunity for her to treat her Christian faith as a solution rather than a

liability or offense, the princess emerges from her simulated conversion to suggest to her

husband that the uncanny “rond of flesche” be baptized. After the father’s idolatrous

appeals in his own temple have failed, a Christian priest is retrieved from the dungeon.

Faced with the clergyman after months surrounded by practitioners of a faith foreign to

her, the princess does not make a confession or seek his wisdom, but rather instructs the

priest about what to do by declaring that he must baptize the lump and even giving

detailed directions regarding regarding his use of holy water and blessings, the tools of

his own trade. She predicts that together they “schul make Cristen men of houndes” by

performing a miracle. She even instructs him regarding precisely what to do with the

lump child:

Hali water þou most make,

& þis ich flesche þou take,

…& cristen it, wiþouten blame,

In þe worþschipe of þe Faders name. (742-762).160

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159
Calkin, 224.
160
For þurth þine help in þis stounde[s],
We schul make Cristen men of houndes.
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The princess may know what to do, but pious though she is she is not ordained (or male)

and must stop short of carrying out the acts; however, when the priest complies with her

plan, the effects are miraculous:

The prest toke the flesche anon

And cleped it the name of Jon

In worthschip of the day.

And when that it cristned was

It hadde liif and lim and fas

And crid with gret deray,

And hadde hide and flesche and fel…

...Feirer child might non be bore —

It no hadde never a lime forlore,

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God graunt it, ȝif it be his wille.’
Than seyd the soudan’s wiif,
‘Þou most do stille, wiþouten striif,
A wel gret priuete.
[Her is a child selcouþe discriif.
It haþ noiþer lim, no liif,
No eyȝen forto se.]
Hali water þou most make,
& þis ich flesche þou take,
Al for þe loue of me.
& cristen it, wiþouten blame,
In þe worþschipe of þe Faders name,
Þat sitt in Trinite. (742-756).
“Through your help on this occasion, we shall make Christian men of hounds. God grant
it,if it is his will...Here is a child, monstrous to look at; it has neither limbs nor life, nor
eyes to see. You must make holy water, and this my flesh you [must] take, all for love of
me, and christen it,without disgrace, in the worship of the Father’s name...if it were
christened rightly, it would have form to see by sight,and wake with limb and life.”

! 133!
 Wele schapen it was, withalle (766-777).161

Once baptised and named in the Christian tradition, the child becomes no longer

unnatural matter, but a recognizably human child who possesses the correct proportions

of flesh in balance with other elements, and whose composition is therefore not alarming

but appealing. The passage emphasizes proper form—limbs, face, life generally (as well

as a triple-assurance that its skin is just skin, an outer layer and not a core-deep

uninterrupted heap of bloodless flesh); behavior—crying like a normal child, with even

the loudness of the screaming serving as a reassuringly conventional mark of life and

vigor; and finally, beyond normalcy, appeal—with assurances that the child now has not

just regular human features, but ones that are shapely and pretty to look at.

When the baptism has triumphed by transforming the lump into a recognizable

child, the primary object of horror has been set to rights—but there remains something

the tale is almost equally leery of, in the lingering contrast between whiteness and

darkenss, indicative of Christianity and heresy, in the two parents.

The princess informs the Sultan that he is separated from his son by his religion;

the child is not his, nor is the mother, but that both will belong to him if he also agrees to

believe and be baptized.162 When he agrees to do so, she launches into an explanation of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
161
!Then the priest took the flesh and named it Jon in honor of the day. And when it had
been christened it had life and limb and face, and cried noisily, and had skin and flesh
[and skin]...Fairer child had could not be born— it had not lost any limb, moreover, it
was well shaped.
!
162
“Bot þou were cristned so it is
Þou no hast no part þeron, ywis,
Noiþer of þe child ne of me.
& bot þou wilt Mahoun forsake,
& to Ihesu, mi Lord, þe take,
Þat þoled woundes fiue,
! 134!
the Christian faith, educating him about the conversion he has agreed to undergo via a

lengthy recitation of the life of Christ (842-876). Likewise, when the Sultan wishes to

convert she does not respond, as one might expect, by sending the priest to educate him

in the tenets of the faith. Instead, she delivers the lecture herself. This sort of authoritative

piety seems a bit incongruous, propped up as it is with dreams containing romantic, fairly

secular imagery of hounds and knights, and with a reality that includes deceit and

seeming apostasy. Though it may be questioned by the reader, it does not seem to be

questioned by the narrative.

I will suggest that this is partly because of the other miraculous (though perhaps

less horrifying) occurrence in the text—the princess’ outlandish dream. Her fantastical

vision blends multiple genres and intellectual register with a fairly free hand. It gives

grotesque form to the religious and racial anxieties of the narrative, and the princess’

tripartite marital, political, and religious dilemma. Whereas the transformations of the

lump child into Jon, and the Sultan into a Christian man, occur post-baptism, the

princess’ conversion is false and alters her in ways that are incomplete and ephemeral.

However, the dream constitutes a kind of uncanny, fantastical symbolic baptism that is

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
[&] anon þou do þe Cristen make,
Þou miȝt be ferd for sorwe & wrake
While þat þou art oliue.
& ȝif þou were a Cristen man
Boþe were þine” sche seyd þan,
“Þi childe & eke þi wiue
(“Unless you are baptized you have no part, truly, neither of the child nor of me. And
unless you will forsake Mahoun and receive Jesus, my Lord, that suffered five wounds,
and make yourself a Christian, you must be afraid of sorrow and destruction while you
are alive. But if you were a Christian man, both would be yours,” she said, “the child and
also the wife” [814-825]).

! 135!
also transformative in that it changes her motivations and the course of her actions and

gives them a direction that unites the seemingly disparate and incongruous threads—the

horrific, sensational, and pulpy and the religious and didactic—into one holy lie.

Inside Out: Putting the “Con” in Conversion

It makes sense that the baptism and naming of the lump and the conversion,

baptism, and re-naming of the Sultan would serve as critical focal points—these scenes

are not only narratively pivotal but very colorful and sensational. They are also

“legitimate” conversions. The third conversion in the poem, the apparent apostasy of the

princess, is easily elided because the reader is conscious from the start that it is false; out

of sync with the other two conversions, hers is performed externally but not embraced

internally. Like the lump child and the Saracen king, the princess goes through a process

of religious (and perhaps to some extent, cultural) conversion. Unlike them, she retains

her original internal loyalties, and accordingly foregoes dramatic external change. In

keeping with the half-reality of the conversion, the moments surrounding it are only half-

sensational—lurid, but unreal, shocking to the senses but existing only in the abstract and

spiritual sense, not the physical and concrete.

The King of Tars’ reluctant bride is the only character who knowingly disrupts

the correspondence the text sets up between appearance and reality. Her performance of

conversion is convincing enough for the marriage to proceed; this leads to her monstrous

maternity and its miraculous resolution; and this, in turn, leads to individual and mass

conversion. For a time, she does seem to attain some measure of control over the

relationship between sight and identity, disproving the assumption that they will

correspond even as she uses that expectation to serve her ends. The princess’ subterfuge

! 136!
is voluntary and deliberate, but her control of the ruse is bookended by events that

undermine her agency.

Her feigned “conversion” mirrors the larger arc of the text, which questions the

stability of racial, religious, and cultural group identity not in order to complicate them or

open up new possibilities, but rather to exorcise anxieties about the boundaries it wishes

to reinstate. She hews to and skews, but ultimately reinforces, the patterns of conversion

and physical transformation in the text. Moments of contact between sacred and profane,

and moments that particularly draw together the physical and visible with the spiritual

and invisible, are flashpoints where genres and traditions mingle and set up for this more

sustained joining of seemingly contradictory creed and actions. The nature of this move is

neither particularly carnivalesque nor parodic, but does repeat, with alteration and with an

entertaining edge, tropes of conversion and transformation.

If, as many have suggested, this is a text about the correspondence between

religious belief, racial belonging, and physical appearance, the princess disrupts this

structure and reveals the correspondence to be only partial—or rather, perhaps, only

racial. It holds true in the ways it is manifested in the sultan and lump child, but is

unreliable when it comes to the princess (except perhaps while she is carrying the

“wunderlumpe.)”163 Her performance is an inverted and altered instance of this story’s

conversion pattern, in which an internal shift results in an external change; she makes

external changes that do not penetrate to internal conversion. Her transcendent moment

produces visible results, but they are both voluntary (unlike the sudden physical

transformations of her son and husband) and false.

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163
Star, 447
! 137!
 The princess’ miraculous nocturnal vision persuades her not to convert, but rather

to lie; and this course of action is recommended by a knightly Christ-figure as a virtuous

one, or at least as achieving virtuous ends—the romance needs it to be, paradoxically, a

holy sort of lie which textual echoes and allusions to learned and devout dreaming are

used to achieve. My interest is especially in how the heroine’s virtuousness, which in

many ways seems very much like transgression, is handled in moments which blend the

seeming opposites of spiritual and physical, and holy and deceptive behavior. The reason

seems to be, at least in part, that her physical and spiritual realities are blended and

redefined by her unique visionary visitation. Her performance seems to hinge on the

dream, which straddles multiple categories and genres, combines the tangible and

intangible, and acts as a sort of motivating crux that is absent in the other characters’

conversions. The dream not only instructs and encourages the dreamer, but also

legitimizes her actions, for the audience’s benefit by shuttling her character between high

and low, sacred and profane, registers and enjoying the narrative advantages of both.

Her betrothal and departure from her homeland to become a bride in the East is

accomplished only through the bloodshed of her father’s subjects: she finally agrees to

wed the saracen king after all, going to her father to offer, “lete me be þe soudans wiif,/&

rere namore cuntek no striif” (248-249).164 She promises,

y wil serue at wille

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164
Let me be the sultan’s wife, and bring about no more conflict and strife. (Auchinleck
Manuscript: NLS Advocates Manuscript 19.2.1, Edited by David Burnley and Alison
Wiggins, Version 1.1., National Library of Scotland, 2003; modern translations are my
own).

! 138!
 Þe soudan boþe loude & stille,

& leue on God almiȝt.

Bot it so be, he schal þe spille,

& alle þi lond take him tille,

Wiþ bateyle & wiþ fiȝt. (299-234)165

Her first major move here involves a blend of acquiescence and assertiveness that

perhaps forecasts the slippery mix of apparent agency and passivity that will characterize

the princess throughout the romance. She doesn’t quite say that she intends to be

duplicitous, but neither does she promise to serve “Þe soudan and his gods;” the fact that

her agreement to marry is flanked by reminders of both her father’s impossible military

position and her intention to continue believing in the Christian God means that her

speech not only states her plan to become the sultan’s bride, but reinforces her character’s

aura of piety and selflessness. Moreover, it can be read as suggesting that the soon-to-be-

bride is looking to somehow have it both ways— capitulating to the sultan’s demands,

while trusting that they will be ultimately trumped by a divinely-appointed loophole

which will give her more and better options in the situation than she currently has.

Her agreement ends the war around her, but sparks turmoil within her parents:

Her care was euer aliche newe;

Hem chaunged boþe hide & hewe

For sorwe & reweli chere. (371-72)166

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
165
I will willingly serve the sultan meekly at all times, and believe in God Almighty;
otherwise, he will kill you and take all your land for himself with battle and fighting.
166
Their distress was continually troubling; they changed in both complexion and
demeanor because of sorrow and sad countenance.

! 139!
These indications of significant internal struggle seem, again, like a harbinger of what is

to come—the parents’ increasingly wan appearances give the merest hint of an interior

state manifesting itself physically. Here it occurs in decidedly natural, not supernatural,

ways, hinting at a process that will take place even more vividly with each of the

heroine’s subsequent steps.

Upon arrival the princess undergoes a textile transformation, taking on the garb of

women in the place and culture which are to become hers:

Into chaumber sche was ladde,

& richeliche sche was cladde

As heþ(þ)en wiman were

...in riche palle. (382-385)167

Here the princess trades her own clothing for the attire of the east, so that visible markers

of culture and religion physically rest against her, but without permeating internally.

Although the reference to ““heþen wiman” gives the change in garments a religious edge,

the visible change is not a transformation; skin-adjacent, but not yet even skin-deep.

The sartorial shift progresses, manifesting itself verbally when, just after her

horrifying vision and just before her marriage and pregnancy, the princess speaks to the

sultan about her alleged desire to convert to his faith:

Sir, y nil þe nouȝt greue.

Teche me now & lat me here

Hou y schal make mi preiere

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167
She was led into a chamber and dressed richly like heathen women, in costly clothing.

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 When ich on hem bileue.

To Mahoun ichil me take,

& Ihesu Crist, mi Lord, forsake,

Þat made Adam & Eue. (483-492)168

As Roger Dalrymple points out, the faux convert’s words undermine her actions from the

start; formulaic verbal “tags” referring to doctrinal statements or the actions of God or

Jesus as creator are often used in romance, and especially in romance situations involving

dialogue with pagan characters, to signal “the solidarity of the imperilled Christian

protagonists with Christendom and...their ready access to a Christian deity through his

attributes.”169 In The King of Tars, “reflecting attachment to ‘mi Lord’” using the

possessive pronoun rather than a definite article, “might render her forsaking him

doubtful to a fastidious listener;” moreover, “‘Mahoun’ is described in isolation whilst

there is no denial by the princess of Christ’s traits,” which are reinforced even as she

discusses forsaking him, using references to creation that echo the knight’s very tangible

reminder of the Passion.170 Whereas the previous change remained external, these words

to the sultan mark an interesting shift since they emanate from within the princess (even

if they are not physical, or even sincere) in the form of speech that represents, yet

undermines, belief. Although the words are intangible, they represent an intensification of

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168
Sir, I do not wish to offend you; teach me now, and let me hear, how I should pray
when I believe in them. I will commit myself to Mahoun, and forsake Jesus Christ, my
Lord, who made Adam and Eve.
169
Roger Dalrymple, Language and Piety in Middle English Romance. D.S.
Brewer, 2000, p.104.
170
Dalrymple, 106.

! 141!
the princess’ performance, as well as a careful juggling of the East and West’s religious

narratives.

The facsimile of conversion soon progresses from speaking to kissing; the

heroine’s mouth serves as the locus of disembodied and embodied belief as it moves from

generating intangible to tangible expressions of her intended shift in religious loyalty:

Sche kist Mahoun & Apolin,

Astirot, & sir Iouin,

& while sche was in þe temple [þer]

Of Teruagant & Iubiter

Sche lerd þe heþen lawe.

& þei sche al þe lawes couþe,

& seyd hem openliche wiþ hir mouþe,

Ihesu forȝat sche nouȝt. (497-505)171

The passage is careful to draw a distinction between “learning,” “knowing,” even

“saying,” and believing or praying. To learn is not necessarily to endorse; somewhat

surprisingly, it seems that even asserting aloud is not to be taken as indicative of any

serious embrace of “ heþen lawe;” it is outweighed by private belief and prayerful

speech: “...when sche was bi hirselue on/To Ihesu sche made hir mon,/Þat alle þis world

haþ wrouȝt” (514-516).172 The implication seems to be that the saracen faithful may see

nothing amiss, but the Christian God has the ultimate insight into the princess’ interior

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
171
She kissed Mahoun and Apollo, Astarthe and Jove,...and while she was in the temple
of Termagant and Jupiter, she learned the heathen law. And though she knew all the laws,
and said them openly with her mouth, she did not forget Jesus.
172
...When she was alone, to Jesus she made her moan, [he] that made all this world.
! 142!
life, even to the extent of accessing her dreams, and that in waking life as well her true

convictions are hidden from everyone except Him. What’s visible is that she has changed

clothes, said the right words, and even kissed the right idols—all of these are actions that

can be seen, but they are temporary and voluntary, not actual alterations to her physical

substance. Her fidelity to the Christian faith takes on a paradoxically misleading form

that, even as it succeeds, highlights its own instability.

The initial move to the East was coerced, but all of the words and actions

occurring since have been voluntary. The next physical shift does seem entirely outside

the princess’ control: her change of complexion during pregnancy is less dramatic than

the Sultan’s later metamorphosis, but worth noting. The text says that upon falling

pregnant, “she chaunged ble” (568), and just after mentioning the change to her

complexion the narrative rushes to assure the reader that although she cannot maintain

physical consistency, she does retain piety and that throughout the pregnancy “Þerwhile

sche was wiþ child, apliȝt,/Sche bad to Ihesu ful of miȝt/Fram schame he schuld hir

schilde” (572-574).173 Most critics read this change in complexion as a loaded change

that indicates anxiety about the racial, religious, and cultural boundaries being violated by

the pregnancy and the intermarriage it represents.174 The alteration is an example of why

Calkin says of the princess that she “represents a substantive and serious case of category

confusion and exemplifies the challenges of determining individuals' religion from their

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173
While she was pregnant, truly,/she prayed to Jesus, full of might,/that he would shield
her from shame.
174
See Friedman (2015), Gilbert (2004), Heng (2003), Star (2016).

! 143!
physical appearance and deportment.”175

This moment is perhaps the one in which the princess is most similar to the other

characters in the poem who convert—the change to her visage is both physical and

spiritual, visible and symbolic. Yet it is not permanent, unlike the transformations of her

husband and child. The princess’ transformation is momentary and incomplete because of

the gap between two intangibles: what she professes externally and remains loyal to

internally. It’s a gap that no one else is authorized or able to detect, but about which the

reader is meant to take her word. The rules that apply to others do not apply to her, not

only because the situation is not quite the same but also, I would suggest, because she

herself is an outlier and/or an anomaly in the text.

Changes to the heroine’s clothing and behavior, and during pregnancy to her

complexion, are less sensational than a metamorphosis from formless to human, or black

to white. Nevertheless, these visible cues are worth considering for the ways they do and

don’t align with the “true” conversions of her husband and son. The princess’ actions

alternate between poles—involuntary or coerced actions are followed by voluntary ones,

and back again—and each of these major steps marks her in some perceptible way that

points to the tenuous balance and competing demands of the sacred and the profane,

religion and romance.

In a story about the horror of miscategorization the princess’ feigned conversion

is especially interesting because she is clearly presented as virtuous, a protagonist; yet she

is responsible, on various levels, for disrupting the visibility of identity and embodying

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175
Calkin, 219

! 144!
miscategorization, and for seemingly contradictory qualities. How can the princess be

both a saintly figure and a blatant liar? To perform this contortion requires alternating

between religious and romance tropes, performing fancy narrative footwork to evade

unhelpful further implications of hagiographic or visionary genre elements. The

permissiveness of the romance’s colorful imagery fuses incongruous pairings of spirit

and flesh, didactic and romantic, reconciling what seems like bad behavior through the

merging of tropes embodied in the princess’ false conversion.

The princess’ feigned conversion begins with what seems like an involuntary, but

internally transformative and externally motivating, event: her colorful vision about being

attacked by terrifying “houndes” and then counseled by a bright knight. The princess’

paradoxically disembodied, yet visible, dream vision begins as an inner reality but

eventually translates into the material world. The content of the spirit is not merely

indicated by what is seen, it is integrated with what is seen. At the same time, though, the

princess also embodies the impossibility of accurately perceiving identities and

affiliations, since her actions represent a conversion that both does and doesn’t exist—is

ostensibly true, in the eyes of her Saracen audience, yet the poem asserts it is false. At the

same time, perhaps the falseness itself is a bit ostensible, as the princess’ feigned

conversion is practiced in real, physical ways indistinguishable from sincerity.

The Dream of Scipio and the Bride of Christ in The King of Tars

This vision is a useful lens via which to consider the princess’ anomalous

behaviors, neither quite hagiographic nor quite romantic, because its liminal nature

accommodates her character’s in-between-ness as well as the indeterminacy of the

readers’ judgments about/reception of her actions. It’s also useful because in addressing

! 145!
these incongruities, it bridges the physical/ideological gap. The apparition’s fantastical

imagery has strong religious overtones, yet she is not counseled by a vision of Christ

himself, or an explicitly religious representative. Rather, she receives her directives from

a lay figure from a respected, but secular, position of prestige, and the knight is a spectral

one, rather than a flesh-and-blood authority figure—though his message is authorized by

Christ. These quirks could undermine his advice and the implied justification of her

actions. Instead, her conduct is reinforced because it is seen as a supernatural dream

springing from her and right conduct and desires; a holy dream peopled by relatively

secular figures, delivering a religious message. The dream blends the religious and

romantic, scientific and philosophical— were it not for the blend of allusions involved,

she would not be authorized to take the next steps which propel the plot. Religious

elements are at the service of entertainment, as in “The Land of Cokaygne” and “The

Miller’s Tale,” and their incorporation of echoes from secular (even profane, perhaps)

traditions softens the edges of piety sufficiently to enable her authorized transgression in

lying for a holy cause.

The pivotal dream is an interesting focal point for The King of Tars’ fascination

with separating and overlapping instances of the physical and spiritual. Medieval dream

visions could have highbrow associations—the learned, arcane nature of classical dream

theory and clerical conceptions of the religious dream are two examples; these are

blended with fantastic and entertaining romance elements so the text bends various rules

of doctrine, narrative tradition, and genre to accommodate the heroine’s orthodox

motivations carried out via incongruous actions.

Medieval scholarship on dreams was greatly influenced by Macrobius, likely a

! 146!
pagan fourth-century contemporary of Augustine and part of a “small but important”

group of thinkers through whose works classical learning was sustained in the Middle

Ages. Every chapter but one of his Commentary on the Dream of Scipio is quoted or

referred to by medieval writers and commentators, many of whom absorbed the work’s

interest in the subtle gradations of mental, emotional, and physiological influences on

dreaming. Stahl, in fact, calls Macrobius’ Commentary “one of the basic source books of

the scholastic movement and of medieval science,” and asserts that “next to Chalcidius’

Commentary, it was the most important source of Platonism in the Latin West in the

Middle Ages.”176 Lochrie writes that “the existence of hundreds of manuscripts of

Macrobius’ Commentary in the Middle Ages and numerous printed editions extending

through the Renaissance attests to its popularity. Everyone from Bede to Dante to

Chaucer to Thomas More probably read the dream with Macrobius’ Commentary, but its

cultural contributions were not exclusively literary either. Macrobius was a standard

source for medieval dream theory, astronomy, geography, and cosmography.”177

The Commentary glosses the original Dream of Scipio, Cicero’s political allegory

in which a Roman general dreams that he encounters his grandfather, with whom he

ascends to the heavens overlooking Carthage and all the earth. The older man foretells

the dreamer’s future, dispensing wisdom regarding empire and citizenship. For the

purposes of medieval dream theory, the most important element of Macrobius’

Commentary on the Dream of Scipio was less the dream itself than Macrobius’ theories

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176
William Harris Stahl, Introduction: Macrobius’ Commentary on the Dream of Scipio.
Transl. William Harris Stahl. Columbia UP, 1952, p. 10.
177
Lochrie, 495.

! 147!
on dreaming more broadly. For Macrobius, the mind and soul are not material, but

originate in heaven, descend through the lower spheres to earth, and are destined for, and

pulled toward, a re-ascent.178 His Neo-Platonist conception of the universe includes a soul

whose impulse is to detach itself from the terrestrial sphere and return to the celestial.179

The human essence is inherently linked to the immaterial music of the spheres, and on

some level out of harmony with the material housing of the body.

Dreams are a part of this system, which treats sleep as a state in which the

celestial and material touch, and the visions “seen” by closed eyes occupy a fertile middle

ground between thought and deeper reality. Macrobius categorizes dreams along a

hierarchy according to type and origin, with reliability and significance assigned

accordingly: the enigmatic, prophetic, and oracular dream Macrobius sees as worthy of

attention, and (significantly) as less influenced by the body; the nightmare and the

apparition he sets aside as unreliable and without inherent meaning, likely as they are to

be caused by relational distress (love, conflict) or—even more corporeally—by

indigestion. These two non-prophetic modes of dreaming “may be caused by mental or

physical distress, or anxiety about the future… they are noteworthy only during their

course and afterwards have no importance or meaning.”180 The hierarchizing of dreams

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178
Bruce S. Eastwood, Ordering the Heavens: Roman Astronomy and Cosmology in the
Carolingian Renaissance, Brill, 2007.
179
Stahl, 9
180
“All dreams may be classified under five main types: there is the enigmatic dream, in
Greek oneiros, in Latin somnium; second, there is the prophetic vision, in Greek horama,
in Latin visio; third, there is the oracular dream, in Greek chrematismos, in Latin
oraculum; fourth, there is the nightmare, in Greek enypnion, in Latin insomnium; and
last, the apparition, in Greek phantasma, which Cicero, when he has occasion to use the
word, calls visum” (88-89).
! 148!
according to their perceived degree of dependence on, or distance from, the flesh fits into

a wider cultural attitude of opposition or ambivalence between mind and body. This

Macrobian hierarchy of dreams would certainly have been familiar to the learned and

scholarly, and his ideas would likely have been accessible to at least some of those who

composed, performed, and recorded romances like The King of Tars, and to their

audiences.

The fact that the princess’ dream has religious valences allows it to draw on yet

another set of influences. While Macrobian dream theory emphasized the separation of

the physical and spiritual in dreaming, in KT they are united in ways that allow the story

to riff on Macrobius’ ideas as well as religious and gendered permutations, applicable by

a few degrees of separation, to the princess with her vaguely hagiographic aura that

surrounds her as a Constance figure.

The hierarchizing of dreams according to their association with the “lower” and

“higher” faculties persisted in sacred traditions of dream evaluation which Christianized

the Neoplatonism of classical thinkers and integrated it into theologies of dreaming.

While medieval ecclesiastics would look askance at dream interpretation as a form of

augury, or at reading dreams as specific portents, the acceptance of a dream vision as a

holy mystery was orthodox. Moreover, the precedent set by Old Testament patriarchs and

New Testament evangelists meant that Christian visionary tradition could even be more

accepting than classical of fantastic dream elements. As A.C. Spearing points out, St.

John’s vision was embraced, dragons and all, “taken as a type of mystical experience by

theological writers such as St Augustine and St Gregory,” and incorporated into

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subsequent scholarship via “frequent allusions…in medieval dream poems.”181 Christian

devotional dreamers might even attempt to emulate the saints by cultivating the prophetic

dream as a spiritual blessing through disciplines such as meditation.

As the frequency and popularity of visions increased during the High and Late

Middle Ages, “women especially, thought to be more bodily than men and more in need

of corporeal help, were encouraged to meditate on Scripture in a way that led to intense

visualizing of scenes from the lives of Christ, Mary, and the saints.”182 Eucharistic visions

in particular, argues Bynum, were a predominantly female phenomenon which “often

functioned to point an accusing finger at licentious and corrupt priests and were

frequently received when clergy withheld the sacrament or other sorts of spiritual comfort

from the women.” As social and religious upheaval during the thirteenth and fourteenth

centuries created a “vacuum in institutional authority,” some clerics became increasingly

motivated to prevent female spirituality from rushing in to fill the void.183 The visions of

women, part of a structure of female spirituality that Dyan Elliott refers to as “(‘always

already’ suspect),” were caught up in a web of larger reactions to burgeoning female

mysticism. Evaluations of dreams were made by “theological circles, the university,

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181
Spearing, 13.
182
Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late
Medieval Europe, Zone Books, 2011, p. 101. The resulting corpus of visions often used
highly somatic imagery; an interesting example is Mechtild of Magdeburg, whose
description rings with sensory metaphors and a sense of physical involvement: “I neither
wish nor am able to write anything, unless I see it with the eyes of my soul and hear it
with the ears of my eternal spirit, feeling in all the parts of my body the strength of the
Holy Spirit.”
183
Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitorial Culture in the
Later Middle Ages, Princeton UP, 2004, p. 268.

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ecclesiastical tribunals, or the papal curia…all patriarchal in nature,” and although pious

women might be chosen to serve as good examples for the church, they were never,

themselves, involved in the choosing.184

Visionary language tended to involve marital and even erotic metaphors, with

nuns even dressing as brides to take communion, in the case of Hildegard Von Bingen’s

followers.185 At times visions not only used marriage imagery but “curiously enough,

borrowed so many expressions from courtly literature,” with the noble soul accepting

God’s trials “just as the knight in courtly romance accepts all trials that are imposed on

him by his lady;” in these visions “the symbolism of courtly love mingles with the

metaphysical expression of union with God,” indicating the influence of “profane as well

as religious culture.”186 Fantastical, visionary imagery integrated the tangible and

intangible, undermining the bifurcation between profane flesh and sacred spirit which

placed women at a disadvantage, and reveling in imagery that suggested an intimate and

direct access to the transcendent. If visions could be spontaneously experienced by

laypeople, they could also become “occasions on which ordinary Christians…claimed to

come into unmediated and awe-inspiring contact with the holy, thus bypassing clerical

control.”187

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184
Elliott, 267.
185
Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the
Human Body in Medieval Religion, Zone Books, 1992.

186
Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, xxv
187
Bynum, 169

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 The reporting and recording of religious visions was shaped by the expectations

of confessors; authorities were inclined to look askance at visions that fell outside those

strictures—particularly when the visions being reported not only escaped the bounds set

by the confessor or by convention, but also ventured to censure those very sources of

authority. The visionary tradition was subjected to “a quasi-medicalized discourse that

tended to disparage women and pathologize some of the most characteristic aspects of

their spirituality.”188

The strategic application of categories and hierarchies that enforced separation of

the “imaginative” from the “intellectual” or even the “spiritual” endorsed or discarded

visions based on principles that bore some strong similarities to Macrobius’ dismissal of

the nightmare because of its fantastic imagery and supposed emotional or physical

sources. Although religious traditions could be more accepting than Macrobius of

prophetic dreams with somatic content, they were often no less suspicious of a dream’s

corporeal roots, and of the danger that its imagery might be contaminated by emotion,

excitement, and other supposed hazards of the (female) flesh.

But in romance, it could also be useful. There is an inescapable instability to these

common medieval delineations—of body and mind, matter and spirit, world and heaven,

present and future—which attempt to clearly demarcate the inherently slippery dream-

state. This slipperiness is what makes the princess’ dream a useful turning point in The

King of Tars; categories of dreaming attempt categorize and legitimize (or not) an

ephemeral, abstract object, in a way similar to how The King of Tars attempts to deal

with other intangible facets of identity. In both cases no number of words and no quantity

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
188
Eliott, 299.
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of pronouncements can make the idea at hand concrete enough to contain, or force it to

hold to a fixed and tidy shape. They can, however, place it within the framework of a

particular tradition that guides the reader, or attempts to do so, toward a legitimizing and

boundary-bending reading.

The dream in question occurs after the princess has left her home in Tars to be

married to the Sultan, but before the consummation of that marriage and the conception

of the lump child. The princess goes to bed alone and vividly dreams that she is beset by

a group of malevolent black hounds. The still-dreaming princess sets her thoughts on

Christ, who protects her from the bites of the hounds. A knight appears, clad in white, to

reassure her and urge her not to fear; at this point, the princess awakens but remains in

bed in prayer (418-468). The dream is visceral, and accompanied by frank

acknowledgment of the princess’ physical exhaustion, emotional distress, and visual

apparitions. The imagery of the dream is described in intensely somatic terms:

& als sche fel on slepe þore

Her þouȝt þer stode hir before

An hundred houndes blake,

& bark on hir, lasse & more. (420-424)189

These events blur the lines between disembodied thought and sensory perception, so that

the initial “þouȝt” becomes the sight of the hounds standing darkly before her (421) and

the sound of their barking (424), and then an intangible spiritual connection to Christ:.

Sche was aferd ful sore.

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189
And as she fell asleep at last/ She thought that there stood before her/ A hundred black
hounds, /And they barked at her, less and more.

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 On Ihesu Crist was alle hir þouȝt,

Þerfore þe fendes derd hir nouȝt,

Noiþer lesse no more. (435-438)190

The state implied seems to be a mixture of dream and prayer. The Middle English

Compendium gives a range of meanings and uses for þouȝt, including “that by which a

sensory impression is conveyed to the mind,” but also “a religious idea, vision, or fancy.”

The word can be an object, in a sense—an “idea,” a “notion,” or “the product of mental

activity. But þouȝt can also be a process: “an impulse rising from without the mind.”

Here it seems to be used to mean a mode of seeing or hearing, as well as a state of being,

somewhere between dream and prayer—the word flexes to suit the needs of the narrative.

Its fluid meaning muddies the waters and blends the scene’s romantic and religious

resonances into one. Barbara Newman writes of religious visions, “The usual tenor of

such accounts is to take visionary claims as assertions of spontaneous divine intervention,

resting on a strongly supernaturalist account of “I saw”: not “I dreamed,” “I imagined,”

or “I visualized”, but “there appeared to me.”191 This interpretation, taking þouȝt from a

Macrobian to a Christian framework, does not necessarily resolve the vagueness of the

word—but it highlights a way in which it might be a good thing, in the setting of a

popular romance, for þouȝt to be a nightmare, a divine visitation, a sight, a prayer, or all

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
190
She was sorely afraid./All her thought was fixed on Jesus Christ,/Therefore the fiends
did not hurt her,/Neither less nor more.
191
Barbara Newman, “What Did it Mean to say, ‘I Saw?’: The Clash between Theory and
Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture.” Speculum 80.1 (2005). 1-43. Web. November
26, 2012.

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of these at once.

That the dream occurs at the boundary between sleep and wakefulness means it

comes about just as described in Macrobius’ Commentary. The dream seems to play with

and blend together some of the philosopher’s rigid categorizations, as well as those of

religious hierarchies. The dream centers around the physical proximity and visual horror

of attacking hounds, which here function as both a viscerally threatening image, and an

echo of the racist trope “heathen hounds.” Macrobius writes that “the apparition

(phantasma or visum) comes upon one in the moment between wakefulness and slumber,

in the so-called ‘first cloud of sleep’.” He even describes virtually the exact experience

the princess has: “in this drowsy condition he thinks he is still fully awake and imagines

he sees specters rushing at him or wandering vaguely about, differing from natural

creatures in size and shape, and hosts of diverse things, either delightful or disturbing.”192

The apparition, like the nightmare, is one of the dream categories that Macrobius

disdains. The presence of fantastic beasts, and the influence of the dreamer’s own

distress disrupt the ideal state of classical moderation, reason and detachment, and doom

the dream of this sort to a “low” and devalued position, not least because of its

suspiciously corporeal source.

The scene emphasizes, rather than downplaying, the dreamer’s exhaustion in both

mind and body. The princess’ vision of hounds occurs amid circumstances that are

transitional in almost every sense. The princess is sleeping alone, as the poem tells us that

the couple has not yet married:

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192
Macrobius, 89.

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 Þe leuedi was to bed ybrouȝt;

Þe soudan wild com þerin nouȝt

Noiþer for fo no fre[n]de…

loþ was þat Soudan

To wed a Cristen woman. (402-405, 412-413).193

The dream comes to her just as she is poised at the temporal boundary between night and

day, and the psychosomatic boundary of sleep and wakefulness. “Þat miri maiden litel

slepe,” we are told in lines 418-420, “Bot al niȝt wel sore sche wepe/Til þe day gan

dawe” (421).194 The princess has her dream, then, just as “þe day gan dawe” (just as the

day began to dawn), at the edge between night and day. Although the princess has lain

awake most of the night, she does sleep, and the dream occurs “als sche fel on slepe

þore.”195

Rather than dismissing the apparition, the narrative folds it into the romance,

exercising a free hand in justifying it via what happens next—the appearance of a knight

who speaks to the princess about the protection of Christ:

ȝete hir þouȝt, wiþouten lesing,

Als sche lay in hir sweuening,

Þat selcouþe was to rede,

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193
The lady was brought to bed; the Sultan would not come therein, neither for foe nor
friend…the Sultan was reluctant to wed a Christian woman
194
That comely maiden slept little, but all night long she wept sorely, until day began to
dawn.
195
as she fell asleep after a long time

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 Þat blac hounde hir was folweing

Þurth miȝt of Ihesu, heuen-king,

Spac to hir in manhede,

In white cloþes, als a kniȝt,

& seyd to hir ‘mi swete wiȝt,

No þarf be noþing drede,

Of Teruagaunt no of Mahoun.

Þi lord þat suffred passioun

Schal help þe at þi need.’ (445-455)196

Rather than instructing her to perform a specific, concrete action, the knight tells the

princess to trust and refrain from fear; “no þarf be noþing drede” seems a wide-ranging

injunction—but also, in a way, one that assumes her preemptive power over fear (and

thereby over what is fearsome). His assurance that even “Teruagaunt no of Mahoun,” but

that Christ himself stands poised to “help þe at þi need” reads, likewise, as a sort of

spiritual “blank check” which invites the dreamer to act without trepidation and

according to her judgement (rather than any particular externally-imposed parameters or

instructions). Her situation does not change appreciably, and she still marries the Sultan

and remains in foreign climes; the most significant change occurs in the princess’ own

state of mind, a shift from fearfulness to pious confidence that affects the subsequent

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
196
Still she thought, without wavering, as she lay in her dreaming, miraculous to read,
that the black hound (that) was following her, through the might of Jesus, heaven-king,
spoke to her in human form, in white clothes like a knight, and said to her “my sweet
creature, dread no lack nor anything else, not Termagent nor Mahoun. Your lord who
suffered the passion will help you at your need.”

! 157!
unfolding of the plot, both in her strategic mimicry of conversion for as long as such

subterfuge is useful, and her surprisingly assertive approach to correcting and instructing

the priest and her husband.

I read the genre-bending dream as a pivotal moment because of the cause-and-

effect relationship implied by the fact that the next time the princess speaks, upon

awakening from her dream and proceeding to the Saracen temple, it is to declare her

supposed conversion to Islam. “To Mahoun ichil me take,” she tells her groom, “& Ihesu

Crist, mi Lord, forsake” (487-488).197 The audience knows that in secret, “Ihesu forȝat

sche nouȝt,” (507), but this is evidently a dramatic irony to which her Saracen in-laws are

not privy; the dream is at least as significant a difference in this conversion as the belief

is. Beginning here, the princess deliberately, knowingly deceives the Sultan about her

conversion.

Perhaps a decrease in reverence regarding dream visions led to their becoming a

more acceptable object of narratives meant for popular entertainment rather than religious

instruction. Alternatively, perhaps the rise of the female mystic in the late medieval

period, and the increased intermingling of courtly love imagery in expressing sacred

devotion, lessened the gap between the romantic heroine and the ecstatic devotee, and

suggested closer parallels between the two. Here the convergence of voices in a

conversation about dreaming—Macrobian theory, romance conventions, and religious

practices— gives the dream (and ultimately the princess’ character) a particular

heteroglossic latitude to act in ways that, while not ludic or carnivalesque per se, do

perform a narrative sleight of hand that allows a hierarchy-disrupting grasp at power and

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197
I will receive Mahoun and forsake Jesus Christ.
! 158!
legitimacy that would not otherwise be within reach.

Whereas The Land of Cokaygne transforms its spiritual elements into something

aggressively earthy, The King of Tars adds a whiff of the sacred to a motley assortment

of otherwise secular imagery. There is no abbey in sight, edible or otherwise, and the

princess is as far from cloistered as it’s possible to be— pious, but not vocationally so; a

bride, not a nun. Yet the romance approves and authorizes her deception and liberty-

taking as part of the narratology, rather than the theology, of what it’s useful for a pious

heroine to be. No matter how much flesh changes shape or hue, it’s not ultimately the

flesh that is in question, but the spirit, which means that the miracles ring a bit hollow if

examined too closely. But the princess’ dream, with its incongruous and fantastical

imagery, and her transgressive behavior as a religious double agent, are embraced in

service to the story, and elevated by their association with legitimized and learned texts

and traditions.

By using simultaneous echoes of both scholarly and religious dreaming alongside

actions spun as duplicitous-yet-heroic, the narrative creates a space for the miraculous

and hyperbolic to coexist and merge. Rather than using carnivalesque inversion to

demote or degrade, by way of the dream the text elevates both its popular and elite

echoes, simultaneously.

The King of Tars ends with a united marriage, family, and nations. The general

shape of a resolution is there.Yet he overarching wariness regarding religious and ethnic

blending has hardly been laid to rest— in fact, it is perhaps complicated by the princess’

performance of conversion. The tale travels in a circle, leaving us with a protagonist, one

of the “good guys,” who performs the spiritual and political subterfuge her side fears, and

! 159!
who subjects the Other to the very indeterminacy the English characters seek to avoid.

It’s interesting that in the end, the princess’ actions result in the coercion of others—all of

her husband’s subjects undergo forced religious conversion, the very thing she goes to

great lengths to circumvent. In fact, the deeds of all the romance’s heroes, and villains-

turned-heroes, result in the deaths not only of their enemies but of their own people.

Transgressiveness or incongruity is minimized and understated, rather than

amplified, despite the fact that many other episodes in the narrative are outsized and

exaggerated. The result is a narrative with interestingly recuperative resonances regarding

gender, but which remains troubling in its handling of race and religion, in ways that are

perhaps particularly poignant for current classrooms. For the contemporary reader there is

certainly a difference in what this story considers bad behavior and what is now

considered transgressive. Inasmuch as the text entertains, it also repels through imagery

of violent warfare and national anxiety. Moreover, its troubling resonances have only

increased in the centuries since the poem was first recorded, and the contemporary

reader’s pleasure in the story’s fantastical and bombastic moments is sure to be marred by

a troubling sense of conversion’s use in this story as a racialized and nationalistic gesture

of conquest and subjugation. The modern reader’s likely discomfort with the untenable

and troubling solutions offered by the narrative can perhaps serve as a vantage point from

which to reconsider the links between past and present, with the romance’s themes all-

too-pertinent in the current climate. These aspects of the text have been explored in an

increasing breadth of recent scholarship; they merit exploration in the medieval literature

classroom as well, and I will close by considering some of the possibilities for pursuing

this. While the primary focus of this chapter has been on the figure of the princess and the

! 160!
use of her dream, with references to other well-explored areas of scholarship on this text

playing a relatively tangential role, in the undergraduate classroom it would likely be

necessary to reverse, or at least equalize, these emphases, in ways the coda to follow will

explore.

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 CODA: RESPONDING TO DIFFICULTIES IN THE KING OF TARS

Many things can make a text seem difficult. Differences in language may drive

the reader to a dictionary or make her constantly pause to Google words on a smartphone;

differences in era may mean the reader must wade through a sea of contextual

information in order to understand; cultural differences may create a disjuncture, real or

perceived, between different ideas of how a text is constructed and what it even means to

be a “good” reader of that text. Reading can be a complicated act, and a challenging text

usually must compete with simpler, or easier, or less alienating routes available at the

turn of a page or the click of a button.

There are other difficulties besides the unfamiliarity created by temporal and

linguistic difference; there is “difficulty” in the sense of content that is uncomfortable or

distasteful for the reader. In addition to the many aspects of The King of Tars that are

entertaining, there are some major elements that are shocking or uncomfortable, as the

romance gives shape and voice to fourteenth-century racial, ethnic, and religious

violence. Appealingly lurid elements aside, this romance is, to the contemporary eye, not

necessarily easy to read and teach, in particular because of its symbolically charged

treatments of whiteness and blackness, conversion and intermarriage, nationalism and

empire, which convey attitudes likely to be, for today’s reader, impossible to accept and

difficult to engage with. Whereas a scholarly audience might be expected to be

conversant with these dimensions of “The King of Tars,” and a scholarly discussion in

written form can acknowledge them via footnotes even while maintaining another

primary focus, a classroom discussion takes place under different conditions and with

! 162!
different premises which, to my mind, require adjustments in terms of what is

emphasized and contextualized.

In thinking about best practices for preserving and circulating texts containing

troubling values, particularly in an undergraduate classroom, one area from which to take

some cues might be the fields of museum studies and memorialization; from work in

these fields we can see that carefully-constructed context is key, and can not only invite

the viewer’s response, but convey a sense of that response as a responsibility. As a field

and a practice, contemporary memorialization involves navigating what Roger I. Simon

terms “difficult knowledge” regarding histories of violence, loss, and death. The aim is

to preserve and make public these aspects of cultural memory through a “pedagogy of

remembrance” that makes present not only the events being memorialized, but also the

continuing “complexities, competing motivations and potential for aggression inherent in

human relationships.”198 Such curation “provokes viewers to move through and

beyond...the ‘who, what, where, and when’ indexed by an image” to “a dialectical

coupling of affect and thought, implicating the self in the practice of coming to terms

with the substance and significance of history.” Simon calls this “the terrible gift” of such

an exhibition, when “what is difficult about historical knowledge associated with

violence and conflict is not just that the materials exhibited elicit anger, horror and

disgust, and judgments that past actions were shameful and unjust,” but rather “how they

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198
Simon, Roger I. “A Shock to Thought: Curatorial Jugement and the Public Exhibition
of ‘Difficult Knowledge.” Memory Studies Vol. 4, No. 4, 2011, pp. 432-449.

! 163!
might inhabit the present ...[and] intertwine with the movement of one’s thoughts and the

concomitant possibilities one imagines for oneself and one’s community.”199

The undergraduate classroom is a very different environment from the ones

Simon describes—the literary, cultural, and historical encounters that take place there are

“curated” for an audience that is known and sustained long-term, rather than encountered

for the space of one or two self-contained visits. Yet perhaps there is some room for

crossover, with the classroom serving as another kind of setting in which a pedagogy of

remembrance attempts to construct an encounter that informs and implicates, challenging

the audience to attend to the continuity between past and present, and the possibilities

therein for both reproducing and countering historical patterns of aggression and

violence. A visit to a museum or memorial follows a carefully-constructed sequence

during which information is strategically revealed, transitions and pauses are carefully

timed, and the overall arc is constructed along not only experiential but pedagogical lines.

Jane Greer and Laurie Grobman write that translating historicized and

memorialized events into “public memory” in the form of objects or words “is an

important occasion of both public communication and civic engagement, and involving

students in the meaningful engagement of public memory can help them develop their

communicative capacities as engaged citizens.”200 If “history,” they write, “is concerned

about what happened, public memory is concerned with how and why

communities/publics choose to remember what happened and and what happens when

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199
Simon, 434, 437
200
Jane Greer and Laurie Grobman, Introduction, Pedagogies of Public Memory:
Teaching Writing and Rhetoric at Museums, Memorials, and Archives, Ed. Jane Greer,
Laurie Grobman, Routledge, 2015, pp. 1-34.

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they are presented with these choices at sites of public memory.”201 Perhaps the

classroom could be such a site—certainly the authors consider rhetoric and composition,

and the teaching of student writing, to be a part of this process and a way of examining

how an emphasis on subjectivity and audience responsibility guides our understanding of

past events a way that engages student voices, and shapes how those voices are used.

Rather than exalting, a “repulsive” memorial “exposes the origins and consequences of

our values and behaviors” and honors loss that has been “erased, denied, degraded,

suppressed, or projected onto others.”202 Through researching relevant historical and

political contexts and constructing such a memorial students journey through a process of

remembering an event for which they were not present, thereby, the idea is, taking on a

sense of responsibility for collective losses and the values that lead to them. A written

version of something similar could be done using some of the many digital resources to

create online repository of carefully layered text, images, and citations extending outward

from the project to link it to others.

Medievalists reflecting on the field offer various takes on how this remembrance,

reflection, naming, and implicating can and ought to be done. In the case of The King of

Tars, the fact that the narrative rests on a foundation of violence based on racial and

religious difference finds all-too-clear parallels in our current cultural moment. Teaching

this text with a eye toward both contexts—medieval and current—would offer an

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201
Greer and Grobman, 5.
202
“Teaching the Repulsive Memorial,” Barry Jason Mauer, John Venecek, Amy Larner
Giroux, Patricia Carlton, Marcy Galbreath, and Valerie Kasper, Pedagogies of Public
Memory: Teaching Writing and Rhetoric at Museums, Memorials, and Archives, Ed. Jane
Greer, Laurie Grobman, Routledge, 2015, pp. 171-184

! 165!
opportunity to address assumptions about the whiteness and Christianity of medieval

Europe, and counter assumptions of race as a modern category. Geraldine Heng, whose

newest book The Invention of Race in the Middle Ages tracks the “race-making power” of

medieval Christianity as both a social and “biopolitical force,” has also addressed how

this translates into the classroom via attention to the ways the issues which shaped

medieval society continue to echo in ours. In an essay on the movement of such

conversations from the scholarly publication to the classroom, she advocates for naming

names and exploring a range of now-troubling artifacts, literary and otherwise, as a way

to “push students to “understand that racial thinking, racial practices, and racial

phenomena can occur before there is a vocabulary to name them for what they are, and to

encourage them to “bear witness to the full meaning of acts and events in the medieval

past” rather than cloaking them in euphemistic language.203

The journal postmedieval devoted its entire Spring 2015 issue to the theme of

“Making Race Matter In the Middle Ages,” anticipating by a few months the

developments that have since focused increasing attention, especially in the form of

online essays and blogs where rapid-response publication is more feasible, on the

applicability—and urgency—of incorporating such approaches to teaching medieval texts

in the current political and academic climate. The rise of white supremacy in the U.S. and

elsewhere, and some of its adherents’ attempts to establish troubling links to medieval

studies, have prompted conversations within the field regarding the corrosive legacy of

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203
Heng, “Teaching Essay: Race in the European Middle Ages,” H-Net Humanities and
Social Sciences Online, 27 Feb 2018; Heng’s book is The Invention of Race in Medieval
Europe, Cambridge UP, 2018.

! 166!
what Cord Whitaker explains, in an interview with journalist Becky Little, as partly the

influence of post-Enlightenment distortions in texts representing medievalism in ways

thoroughly “bound up with modern British and other European forms of colonialism and

imperialism,” and with the project of “naturalizing the idea that Europe is an ancestral

homeland for Europeans...homogeneously European in heritage,” and a “rightful” seat of

global power.204

In an ongoing conversation responding in real-time to this climate, Dorothy Kim

and others have argued compellingly that teaching medieval texts carries with it the task

of explicitly attending to issues of race—that in the current historical moment, a

politically-oriented medieval literature classroom is not an option, but a responsibility.

Instructors must, Kim writes, respond to the urgency of “analyzing the past and present

while shaping the future” by ensuring that the study of medieval texts an endeavor that

“engage[s] meaningfully in the modern world of which it is a product, and in which it is

an agent.”205

Medieval scholarship has for some years been complicating our readings of issues

of race, religion, gender, and class in premodern texts, including considerations of how to

approach the medieval canon pedagogically in a way that incorporates texts that “shed

light on perspectives different from those represented by the culturally authoritative texts

of the canon...defamiliariz[e] traditional readings,” and encourage students to “query the

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204
Becky Little, “How Hate Groups are Hijacking Medieval Symbols While Ignoring the
Facts Behind Them, History, 18 Dec 2017.
205
Quotes are from Dorothy Kim’s blog post “Teaching Medieval Studies in a Time of
White Supremacy” on In the Medieval Middle, 28 Aug 2017.

! 167!
nature and limits of canonicity.”206 Moves toward canon expansion and a push for diverse

authorship on a syllabus “can look different in the medieval classroom” than in others

because of factors like “the historical remoteness of the Middle Ages, its tendencies

toward low literacy rates for women and laborers, anonymous authorship, and the

vagaries of manuscript transmission.” But instructors can “focus on the diversity of the

audience hailed by the text,” at the very least, and can carefully contextualize the voices

and audiences in play.207 The task of teaching and interrogating the racial valences of The

King of Tars, of disseminating the texts and an awareness of their historical and

contemporary significance, without inadvertently disseminating destructive

(mis)interpretations, is both a daunting and an urgent conundrum. Here I see the potential

for innovative collaboration, online and off, to be a powerful engine in helping to prevent

the ideologically (or literally) violent wielding of ideas about the Middle Ages.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
206
Nathaniel B. Smith and Gina Brandolino, “Introduction: Teaching Medieval Literature
Off the Grid.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Composition, and
Culture, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2013, 205-211.
207
Whitaker, 208.

! 168!
 CONCLUSION

The texts considered here offer opportunities to complicate assumptions regarding

literary pleasures and cultural tensions in the Middle Ages— and to carry those

conversations forward. Dwelling on the handling of literary and intellectual hierarchies,

and the simultaneous oppositions and dependence of sacred and profane elements,

highlights for readers the playfulness, intertextual allusiveness and refashioning, and

anxiety-revealing resonances of each text. They highlight the urgency of these issues to

14th century audiences, and prompt reflection on their continuing urgency in the 21st

century classroom, where revisiting premodern texts can be an opportunity for what is old

to produce what is new by prompting reflection on how we think about aesthetic and

moral transgression within the narratives we read, as well as in our own response as

readers or students of those texts.

In The Land of Cokaygne the imagery is relentlessly, hyperbolically bodily and

somatic; critique of gluttony and concupiscence is implied by the descriptions of

excessively appetitive behavior, yet undermined and perhaps even neutralized by the

intensity of the parodic. The critique implied is relatively hollow, not necessarily because

it fails to hit its mark, but rather because a caustic quality was not the aim in the first

place— instead, carnivalesque inversion replaces the high with the low, the orderly with

the disorderly, and the eternal and weighty with the timeless, weightless, and free-

floating. The text can be taken as (among other things) an example of a particular

medieval parodic mildness in which we can read a stream of “controlled and controlling

play” that amounts to comic relief in the face of structural instability, as well as a range

! 169!
of uses of grotesque exaggeration to indicate superiority over foolishness, exorcise

ontological dread, or take subversive or amoral pleasure in literary exuberance.208

Whichever facet becomes the focus, the poem can be readily enjoyed and taught less as a

model of aggressive critique directed outward, than of inward-turning and heteroglossic

literary pleasure and mastery via the construction of a parody that is both appreciative of,

and bold in refashioning, its sources. By indiscriminately trivializing both the sacred

traditions it profanes, and the profane actions it depicts, through applying a carnivalesque

mask of chaos and degradation, the poem deflects literary power, and the reader’s

attention, away from both and toward the pleasure of the allusive and hyperbolic imagery

itself.

If Cokaygne is exaggeratedly immaterial and its parodic critique gentled by the

ludic excess of its imagery, “The Miller’s Tale" journeys in the other direction to offer a

sharper, but no less exuberant, strain of humor that, rather than mocking foolishness,

crushes it beneath the heel of satirical cleverness. It trades the fantastical for the

comparatively familiar, and intensifies and exaggerates the realistic and the profane in a

way that drowns out anything less abstract than a vividly-described fart or searing burn.

The question of spirit versus flesh is seemingly resolved firmly in favor of the latter— yet

with a lingering defence of wit that suggests what’s important is less the soul or even the

body, than the mind. As echoes of the sacred are presented in a way that is flattened and

flippant, profane resonances are elevated as the more complex, enjoyable, and

meaningful ones. Sacred and even secular learnedness are brought low in painful ways

that compare them unfavorably to raw natural cleverness— yet paradoxically this is

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
208
Kendrick, Chaucerian Play, 156-157; Bayless, 209-211.
! 170!
brought about via an elaborate, cosmopolitan, learned-allusion-crowded plot.

Emphasizing the contradictory aspects of the tale’s status as one of the most rude and

obscene productions of one of the most esteemed pens in the canon offers an opportunity

for classroom exploration of whether and how abject humor is counterbalanced by a

careful and complex execution of the joke, and of the ways individual readers and

changing cultures approach the question of whether a text is to be reviled, discarded,

preserved, or revered.

Finally, one can read a type of subtle, even latent, subversion in The King of Tars’

insistence on locating authority within the heroine’s direct spiritual experience, rather

than in the priest who requires, or at least allows, her to instruct him in the sacraments. A

romance rather than a comic narrative, this text is less overtly ludic than its two

predecessors—yet it deploys its particular combination of earnestness and insistent

entertainment in a way that leverages the power of sacred structures and symbols in

service of romance rather than religion. The resulting narrative mobilizes the heroine’s

paradoxical position as a prayer of prayers and a teller of lies, pitting her role as a

representative of Western Christianity against her role as an inhabitant of romance tropes

and representative of feminine virtue, marriage, and family. The deftly-paired

combination of intellectual and religious esteem for dreaming, with the craving for

melodrama and monstrosity in popular entertainment, results in an unstable pairing that

does not read as ludic—yet I do read these aspects of the text as both necessitating and

depending on the interplay the didactic, mystical, and sensational, and between a fictional

genre from a popular, vernacular tradition, and theories of dreaming based in medieval

theological and philosophical thought. In combination with the other two texts, this one

! 171!
constitutes a meta-level incongruity occurring not only within, but between the texts

discussed here. Discussions of how the heroine’s narratively-authorized transgressions

respond to and reveal lingering crusade-era anxieties about nationhood, empire, and

religious and racial difference promise to constitute not only a historical lesson, but a

contemporary one.

Across the three examples, bringing these texts into the undergraduate classroom

is an opportunity to emphasize the ways the narratives shuttle back and forth between

popular and learned or pious traditions, playing diverse literary and cultural

reverberations against one another to create something new. The texts discussed here are

many-voiced and complex; they ask questions (earnestly, slyly, winkingly) about the

relationships between the sacred and profane, the serious and the un-serious, which

continue to reverberate. The treatment of incongruity can easily be read as existing on a

spectrum whose nature ranges from pointed satire to flippant parody, and whose purposes

range from didactic or reformatory to the “merely” entertaining or literary.

It is tempting to relegate this latter category to that of the guilty pleasure,

particularly when the incongruity and inversion of a medieval text are combined with

offensive elements—profane humor on one hand, and on the other more serious

trespasses against contemporary ethics regarding the treatment of women, sexual consent,

and racial violence. However, the scarcity of surviving medieval texts, as well as the fact

that the very aspects of these three apt to be the most troubling for instructors and

students, are likely to be so because they remain touchpoints for anxieties and even

violence even now, offer powerful reasons to continue grappling with and exploring the

texts that speak to us across centuries.

! 172!
 Perhaps, then, the spectrum of textual attitudes toward incongruity need not range

strictly from the reformatory to the “merely” literary; instead, the two cannot (or should

not) be separated. Literary understanding of incongruity is a working-through of

pleasures and anxieties, for the individual reader and for the wider culture; attending to

the ludic re-creations, distortions and echoes present in these texts, accepting the pause

for reflection that is prompted by shock and incongruity, can equip the reader or student

to approach this as a process that always contains within it the seed of response and of

making from the old something new.

Premodern texts hail from, and represent, times and places and ways of thinking

that seem distant and strange. This strangeness can be pleasurable; we need look no

further than the popularity of medieval trope-filled fantasy narratives in literature, film,

and gaming for evidence of this. Though medieval primary texts may be a harder sell for

undergraduate readers, they and we stand to gain from a reading philosophy whose

engagement with history, writes Lee Patterson in advocating for an “ironic history,”

works to cultivate “the recognition that the literary texts we seek to expound are governed

by the same social forces—whether they fall under the categories of class and gender or

should be understood in wholly other terms—that are operative, albeit in different terms

in our own lives” and to build a reading practice that can “acknowledge the mutual

claims that past and present lay upon each other.”209

As the academic landscape responds to approaches that interrogate high/low

distinctions and privilege the possibility of subversive implications, meanwhile digital

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
209
Lee Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval
Studies” Speculum, Vol. 65, No. 1, 1990, pp. 87-108.

! 173!
forms of scholarship increasingly make less-circulated texts more accessible and

discussable. Obscene or outlandish texts, and previously understudied genres like popular

romance, have been embraced as candidates for “serious” literary consideration—and, in

part because of their appealingly ludic elements, compelling potential entry points for

students new to literature from the medieval period and encountering such texts as

historical literary artifacts and as contemporary literary encounters.

Cultivating an awareness of textual echoes and incongruities and inviting students

to follow suit by taking cues from, and liberties with, prior texts, can be a way of

encouraging interpretive openness and emphasizing the possibility of dialog and critique

rather than passive reception. “Irreverence as a composition strategy” seems a promising

way to blend the critical and enjoyable in a literature classroom through efforts to

produce “artful deviation from the norm” through a potentially-empowering “ritual of

drawing from established conventions, value systems, and literacies to invent new

knowledge” by building on, recreating, and knowingly tampering with, an original

text. 210 Attending to how these medieval texts model irreverent composition can lend a

sense of ludic license, accessibility, and authority to student readers and writers of those

texts as they immerse themselves in medieval cultural narratives and draw distinctions

and connections with their own.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!
!Erin!Dietel0McLaughlin,!“Remediating!Democracy:!Irreverent!Composition!and!
210

the!Vernacular!Rhetorics!of!Web!2.0,”!Computers*and*Composition*Online,!2009,!20
25.
! 174!
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