A Handbook of Middle English Studies

Marion Turner

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780470655382
• eBook ISBN: 9781118328767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A Handbook of Middle English Studies

"This sharp-minded, coherent set of essays both maps and liberates: not only does it map the intellectual territory of contemporary cultural debate; it also liberates the extraordinary texts of later medieval England to move across that contemporary cultural terrain."
James Simpson, Harvard University

"Marion Turner has skilfully choreographed an exciting ensemble of fresh accounts of the English Middle Ages. We see the period in a new light that shows with compassion and imagination, as well as thoughtful scholarship, how the literature of the past speaks to contemporary preoccupations."
Ardis Butterfield, Yale University

"Strikingly original: theory-literate and materially-grounded ways of reading Middle English texts."
David Wallace, University of Pennsylvania

A Handbook of Middle English Studies presents twenty-six original and accessible essays by leading scholars, analyzing the relationship between critical theory and late-medieval literature. The collection offers a range of entry points into the rich field of medieval literary studies, exploring subjects including the depiction of the self and the mind, the literature of conquest, ideas of beauty and aesthetics, and the relationship between place and literature. Topics that have long been central to the field, such as authorship, gender, and race, feature alongside areas only recently coming under critical scrutiny, such as globalization, the environment, and animality. Collectively, the essays demonstrate that the manuscript culture of late medieval literature raises key theoretical issues concerning the relationship between authors, texts, and readers. A Handbook of Middle English Studies models diverse approaches to medieval texts and stakes a claim in debates about topics ranging from class to the canon, from imagination to nationhood, from sexuality to the public sphere.

Part 1

Selfhood and Community

Chapter 1

Imagination

Aranye Fradenburg

Imagynacion is a might thorow the whiche we portray alle ymages of absent and present thinges.

The Cloud of Unknowing

Two things cannot be rightly put together without a third; there must be some bond of union between them.

Plato, Timaeus

According to conventional wisdom, medieval understandings of the imagination lack imagination by comparison with Hamlet's “king of infinite space” and the Romantic sublime. It would take centuries, so the old story goes, for Coleridge's Biographia Literaria to elevate the imagination to the status of “the living Power and prime agent of all human perception.”¹ But this narrative has problems. The dependence of thought on perception and imagination was axiomatic for premodern writers: the mind retained sense impressions in the form of images that could be further abstracted into concepts and propositions.² Experiences and things did not enter the mind directly; “but the images of the perceived objects are available to the thought recalling them” (Augustine, Confessions, X.viii (13)). But while the insubstantiality of images was often lamented, it was by no means simply lamentable. It gave images their plasticity. The imagination had “thirdness”; it formed links between different kinds of mental phenomena.³ Without this plasticity the mind could not learn, hope, decide, and plan; it could not anticipate a future time. Augustine thought it marvelous: “I [can] combine with past events images of various things, whether experienced directly or believed on the basis of what I have experienced; and on this basis I reason about future actions and events and hopes, and again think of all these things in the present” (X.viii (14)). Not only did the imagination play a significant role in the process of thought; it was a sine qua non of our ontology, especially the qualities and dimensions of our sentience. It had a crucial role to play in our salvation and God's providential order.

Nicolette Zeeman describes Langland's allegorical character Ymaginatyf as a “capacious inner sense,” “a distinctive inclusiveness, with…inbuilt, etymological allusions to images, imaginative functions, and ‘seeing,’ as well as to hypothetical and speculative forms of cogitation” (84).⁴ The generosity of this conception does not lag much behind Coleridge's “living Power and prime agent.” True, Coleridge's further specification of the secondary imagination as “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” would have sounded a bit heterodox to premodern ears; and Piers Plowman is chiefly about psychological travail and the threat posed to salvation by the limitations of human understanding—a concern regarded by some scholars as consistent with the distressed fourteenth century's interest in negative theology and accompanying critiques of knowledge (Utz 129–130). Capacious though Ymaginatyf may be, Langland's poem is full of false starts and frustration. The Romantic imagination suffers little from frustration; however tiny the human figure standing on the verge of the abyss, its mind contains the very thing (the “eternal act of creation”) that seems to outstrip it. Arguably, the medieval imagination only translates “ineffable and therefore unknown forms of sentience” into truth tolerable by the human mind (S. Langer 39); it transmits divinity, rather than secreting it. But the notion of composition as re-creation of Creation was known to the Middle Ages; “high medieval authors…sometimes…stylize[d] themselves as werltgot (i.e., Lord of the fictional world created by them)” (Utz 131). Exceptionalist understandings of the imagination have a very long, if erratic, history. But even humbler notions of the imagination gave it reach; the medieval imagination mediated between different kinds of minds, powers, and worlds, between the past and the present, here and there. If not divine creativity, it was divine connectivity, responsible for extraordinary states of mind. How could we know God without solitary contemplation of the “ymages of…absent thinges”?

Humanist and new-critical histories of art commonly assign the values of preservation, craftsmanship, and communal experience to the Middle Ages, and creativity, inspiration and individual experience to the Renaissance or the nineteenth century. Ullrich Langer, for example, argues that medieval poets “celebrated the survival of human culture, not its original reinvention by an individual” (22; Utz 129). It is true that medieval poets often saw themselves as “makars” (makers), but no one doubted that prophetic dreams and visions were mediated by the imagination. And the cosmological deterritorializations of Bernardus Silvestris or Dante Alighieri, the summa-style expansiveness of the Roman de la Rose, the historical sweep of La

amon's Brut, are hardly modest efforts. Translatio did not simply preserve the past; it made it new again. But the point of this essay is not to reverse the charges on presentism's timor mortis. It is to explore the interdependence of individual and community, and the consequences thereof for our understanding of the richness and complexity of medieval understandings of the imagination.

There are, of course, different cultural and historical articulations of this interdependence, and we ought to attend to them. But we should also take care not to overstate the salience of these differences, or neglect common elements. Tradition grows, and creativity emerges, from networks constituted by intersecting histories. The “I,” like its mutually constitutive webs of relationships, is a unique combination of genetic potentialities, traditions, and experiences, many of which are also parts of other such combinations. The psychoanalytic term “intersubjectivity” designates this paradoxical dependence of subjective experience on relationality. The theory of “mentalization” also builds on the idea that we come to understand our “own” minds only by interacting with the minds of others (Fonagy et al.). Subjectivity is a process that occurs when relationships beckon to, and thereby help to design, the minds of those linked thereby. The social bond, that is to say, depends on feelings of understanding and being understood. Relationality is not groupthink; it enables self-process. However much they may have longed to soar like skylarks and wander lonely as clouds, Romantic writers always had to grapple with the embeddedness of imaginative activity in relationships, with family, friends, lovers, books, “nature” (Carlson). Indeed, in Frankenstein, the temptations of aloneness lead to disaster. Contemporary neuroscience, moreover, confirms the importance of relationality to imaginative process. Nancy Andreasen, for example, argues that “genius” emerges within and from the very communities whose patient labors and inside-the-box innovations might seem incapable of predicting it.

William Dunbar's “Lament for the Makars” is both an ambitious poetic genealogy and a melancholy catalog of memory-images of dead or dying predecessors, to which “facultie” he is linked by fear: “timor mortis conturbat me,” “the fear of death confounds me.” Death has taken all his “brethren”; and since he is himself a maker, “On forse I man [Death's] nyxt pray be” (l. 95). Does Dunbar present himself as the therapon, the companion/survivor who addresses us when we are in the state “in which there is no other to respond” but him? In the end, only the therapon's loyalty matters; since he will not run away from us, or put us away, or leave us for dead, only his interlocution can restore our “freedom of speech” (Davoine and Gaudillière 209–210). But perhaps Dunbar is not the therapon but the subject maddened by fear, who has no others left to respond to him. Or perhaps we can't distinguish the one from the other. This is intersubjectivity in the form of identification: “He has tane Roull of Aberdene,/ And gentill Roull of Corstorphin/ Two bettir fallowis did no man se” (ll. 77–79). Dunbar already knew what Freud would later argue, that we learn of our own death only through the death of the other, that such knowledge as we have of the solitary experience of dying is ironically relational. If Dunbar's catalog is a humble medieval registration of creaturely vulnerability, it is also, gravely, singularizing: the commonness of death does not make it any less traumatic; it is when we feel the hand that has touched so many other shoulders touch our own that we are at once singled out, and subject(ed) to the law of nature.

The imagination's role in processing the transformations necessary to life and death is repeatedly foregrounded in medieval narrative, certainly as important a “source” for medieval conceptions of the imagination as are treatises on the soul or on dreams (Kolve). The dream-vision genre in particular—a long-attested form, but explosively popular in the fourteenth century—has attracted much attention from critics interested in medieval ideas about the imagination (Lynch). In Chaucer's dream-vision poem The Book of the Duchess, the apparently obtuse narrator—a therapon of the order of Sancho Panza—questions the melancholic Man in Black about the latter's lamentably lost “queen,” White. The two sift through the images of White stored in the Man in Black's memory, but the narrator doesn't understand how she was lost until the Man in Black finally exclaims, “She ys ded!” (l. 1309). But who is this mysterious Man in Black anyway? Is he John of Gaunt, whose duchess, Blanche, died in the course of the 1368 plague? Then again, the Man in Black says “y am sorwe, and sorwe ys y” (l. 597). Does he stand for an emotion? Is he an allegorical figure? Or is he (also) a reprise of the brooding noblemen in Chaucer's French sources? Perhaps he is part of the narrator's own melancholic mind—a figment of his “sorwful ymagynacioun” (l. 14)? But how does that help, since the narrator is, by his own account, a “mased thyng” (l. 12), uncertain of his circumstances and the nature of his being. Ontological indeterminacy once again accompanies the work of the imagination.

Melancholy wounds our sentience, our (feeling of) aliveness. We know that our lives have happened to us, but we cannot claim them or even feel that we have experienced them. We can't tell whether we are alive or dead. If we shelter the images of lost objects inside our minds, we also take on their deadness. As courtly love knew, when existence is a doubtful matter, the smallest, most delicate of responses—a look, a shift in tone, a ring carelessly left behind—can call us back to a conviction of aliveness. The therapon is therefore a signifying fool (cf. the garrulity of both the narrator and Pandarus in Troilus and Criseyde). He embodies the responsiveness that calls us back to aliveness, and the promise, the oath of loyalty, implicit therein. How can “I” be dead if I can hear the friendly commentary of a “third” who is neither the lost object that walks now with her back to me, nor the ruined “I” that follows her? Sometimes epiphany is a flash of intersubjectivity, when what needs to be said can finally be said.

In BD, of course, epiphany is equivocal. Arguably, the poem's ending illustrates the problem of “other minds” (Austen) as much as it illustrates the dependence of understanding on the social link. But the narrator and the Man in Black have accompanied each other in a process of imagining, remembering, and wondering, while hovering ontologically over the borderline between life and death, as doubles, friends, ghosts, indeed as images. “She ys ded!” is the moment when the power of mutual attention stands out in sharp relief. Intersubjective imagining has given the Man in Black, as it would give Don Quixote, the liberty to be mad, to be undead, for as much time as he needs, without interference from uncomprehending others; and the attempt creates the sought-for link, the “third” (in BD, poetry itself) that links the one to the other, however perplexing the experience and uncertain the outcome. The pair buy time, and use it to affect (in all senses) each other. The ontological uncertainties of melancholia can enable as well as impede exchange; through conversation, even with “oneself,” the fixations associated with melancholia can be loosened up, plasticized, and brought into a new relationality in “present” time.

Galen, in the first century CE, fully somatized classical psychology, and medicine followed suit well into the seventeenth century. “Black bile” was thought to be the bodily “humor” responsible for melancholy. But even when somatic explanations of psychological distress dominated understandings of the mind, the imagination was thought to mediate the interactions between mind and body, and images were often used in healing. Premodern medicine was well aware both of the power of the placebo effect and its dependence on the quality of the relationship between healer and sufferer. In BD, the narrator refinds his mind by engaging with the Man in Black in the kind of friendly probing and conversation that had long been enjoined on physicians, even before the time of Hippocrates (Jackson). Imaginary doubling is the chief mode of affect transmission in TC also. The narrator is the servant of the servants of Love; Pandarus is a failed lover whose perplexities register on the comic rather than the tragic scale. Sustaining this double sensitivity, to the horror of desolation as well as its humbling prevalence, is essential to the finding of the addressee. Unlike the narrator of BD, however, Pandarus is a failed therapon. In Book V, he tries to take all the tragedy out of Troilus by urging upon him all the conventional remedies for melancholy (including socializing, and entertainment (Olson)), but in an attempt to evade rather than fully engage Troilus's madness.

Mysticism: The Therapon as Inhuman Partner

We are constantly changed by the minds of others; feelings are notoriously “contagious.” But the fact of our vulnerability to influence does not necessarily make its effects any less perplexing. We do not always feel close to other minds, let alone to the mind of the “Other”—whether that Other be God, or the Fates, or the ancestor. Sometimes we feel the Other knows us better than we do ourselves; sometimes we feel we can channel messages from the Real, sometimes we fear we will be shattered by them. The Cloud of Unknowing begins with a prayer to “God, unto Whom alle hertes ben open, and unto Whom alle wille spekith, and unto Whom no privé thing is hid” (Gallacher, ll. 2–3). This is intimacy indeed. But if our hearts are open books, who, or what, is reading them? The Cloud author warns us of the pitfalls of the contemplative life, especially for “newlings”:

For yif it so be that thei…here redde or spoken hou that men schuld lift up here hertes unto God, as fast thei stare in the sterres as thei wolde be aboven the mone…Thees men willen sumtyme with the coriousté of here ymaginacion peerce the planetes, and make an hole in the firmament to loke in therate. (Gallacher, ll. 1978–1982)

One thinks of Nicholas, the clerk in Chaucer's Miller's Tale, who “evere caped upward into the eir” (I 3473) while pretending to receive his “showing” of God's latest plan to destroy the world. But the Cloud author's sarcasm is a measure of his seriousness: newlings are in danger of mistaking images for spiritual realities, and thus forgetting the differences between their minds and God's.

For before the tyme be that the ymaginacion be in grete partye refreyni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Abbreviations
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Part 1: Selfhood and Community
• Part 2: Constructing Texts, Constructing Textual History
• Part 3: Politics and Places
• Index