Pulp fictions of medieval England

Essays in popular romance

Nicola McDonald

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719063190
• eBook ISBN: 9781847795571
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Pulp Fictions of Medieval England demonstrates that popular romance not only merits and rewards serious critical attention, but that we ignore it to the detriment of our understanding of the complex and conflicted world of medieval England.

1
Incorporation in the Siege of Melayne

Suzanne Conklin Akbari

In the debate concerning precisely what constitutes a medieval ‘romance’ the Siege of Melayne occupies a special position. As a number of readers have noted, this poem participates in the conventions both of romance (understood as a genre fundamentally concerned with the deeds of knights) and of hagiography. The focus of such cross-generic readings is usually the character of Archbishop Turpin who, as Barron puts it, has ‘as much of the saint as of the soldier in his nature’.¹ The cross-generic status of the Siege of Melayne is also in evidence in the dramatic scene which takes place in the chamber of the sultan Arabas, when a crucifix is cast by the Saracens into a great fire and, miraculously, does not burn. Elsewhere in the poem, too, as I will illustrate below, religious and even eucharistic imagery plays a vital role in the unfolding of the narrative. Yet I do not wish to argue that the generic distinctions of romance and hagiography are collapsed in the Siege of Melayne, or for that matter in any other medieval romance, for such efforts have not met with success. Diana Childress has suggested that the overlap between romance and hagiography can be best understood by defining a new category of ‘secular legend’: ‘From romance the secular legend borrows settings, style, and many story motifs … But instead of entertaining their audiences … the authors of the secular legends aim to teach moral lessons.’² Andrea Hopkins has found, however, that this is not the case in a group of texts which she identifies as ‘penitential romances.’ Like Childress’s ‘secular legends’, these romances feature a hero who ‘does penance for his sinfulness or who may patiently undergo physical hardship and deprivation and who is rescued or rescues others by divine miracles’.³ Yet Hopkins concludes that these romances were not thought ‘to constitute a fundamentally different kind of literature from other romances which do not deal with predominantly religious or didactic subject-matter’. The penitential romances are also found in conjunction with didactic penitential manuals, which ‘suggests that the two types of composition were not seen as incompatible with each other, but instead answered different needs in their medieval readers’.⁴ The shared manuscript context of penitential manual and penitential romance illustrates the interdependence of two genres that, in modern scholarship, have too long been considered separately. Instead, as Jocelyn Wogan-Browne suggests, the overlap both of content and of audience in romance and hagiography should impel us not to dismiss these categories entirely, but rather to move ‘beyond the modern literary-critical model of romance priority to a refocusing of romance and hagiography in their shared medieval contexts’.⁵ Such an effort requires that we look at the manuscripts in which these texts appear in order to find out how medieval writers and compilers identify the works, and to consider what such identification tells us about reading practices.

In the following pages, I will explicate the religious content of the Siege of Melayne, exploring how hagiographic, devotional, and eucharistic themes are used to depict a Christian community characterised by strength in the face of adversity, and wholeness in the face of efforts to fragment the community. The body of Turpin, the image of the crucified Christ, and the Host each represent the Corpus Christi, the body of Christ which stands for the community of Christian souls.⁶ What is peculiar about the Siege of Melayne, however, is that this community is not merely unified, but so full that it cannot accept any more members: here, incorporation in the body of Christ has a finite limit. In the poem, the wholeness of the body signifies both inclusion (of the Christians who are already its members) and exclusion (of the Saracen converts who might seek to join). Having outlined the religious content of the Siege of Melayne, I will suggest that it can be seen as representative of what one might call ‘devotional romance’ (that is, a chivalric narrative with pronounced spiritual or theological content), and will briefly compare some examples. While the category of ‘devotional romance’ may be useful to modern readers, it is nonetheless crucial to note that the manuscript context shows the extent to which medieval readers were unfettered by generic constraints. The combination and juxtaposition of texts within medieval manuscript collections illustrate the interpenetration of genres more than their distinct identity. As Paul Strohm has observed, while ‘a concept of romaunce was generally shared and the term was used to classify and describe actual narratives’, nonetheless ‘the term is used in some strange ways’, that is, used to identify texts which modern readers would not call ‘romance’.⁷ I will conclude by showing that the Siege of Melayne, along with other texts in the same manuscript, illustrates the fluidity and variability of genre, which functions less as a consistent category than as an interpretive tool. Genre is, at least to some extent, not given by the writer but imposed by the reader, established not in a single creative moment but repeatedly, in a series of interpretive acts.⁸

The Siege of Melayne survives in a single manuscript dated to the mid-fifteenth century, known as the London Thornton manuscript (British Library, MS Additional 31042). John Thompson has given an exhaustive account of the manuscript’s physical makeup and probable mode of production, with commentary on the significance of the combination and interrelation of texts in the manuscript.⁹ Since the Siege of Melayne survives in this single witness, and is not alluded to or cited elsewhere,¹⁰ the poem itself is almost impossible to date. A lost Anglo-Norman original was posited by the text’s first editor, Sidney Herrtage, at the suggestion of Gaston Paris. Though subsequent editors have repeated this assertion, no evidence of such an original has appeared. Herrtage dated the poem to the late fourteenth century, presumably on the basis of its relationship to the group of Ferumbras romances which he had also edited.¹¹ Though the Siege of Melayne does not include the figure of Ferumbras, a converted Saracen of great physical and chivalric stature, Charlemagne appears in both works as the emperor at the head of the Christian army. The poem’s more recent editors have dated the poem with comparable uncertainty: Mills and Shepherd c. 1400, Lupack, like Herrtage and Thompson, the second half of the fourteenth century.¹² The poem’s focus on the eucharist as a symbol not only of the Christian community but of the military host, and its emphasis on the inherence of the blood within the eucharistic host, supports a comparatively late date for the poem, when the debate regarding the simultaneous presence of both body and blood within the transubstantiated wafer was of increasing interest to lay readers – enough to merit clerical condemnation of the denial of concomitance in 1415 at the Council of Constance.

The religious context of the Siege of Melayne has long been noted. Childress observes that, in Archbishop Turpin, we find a hero who is more ‘like a saint who endures prodigious physical torture’.¹³ The poem’s latest editor, Shepherd, has drawn attention to a deeper level of theological engagement within the poem, agreeing with Barron that Turpin is ‘something of a Christ figure’ in the poem, and suggesting that the description of the desolate battlefield where Christian soldiers resort to drinking standing water stained with their own blood may ‘reflect the imagery of the Crucifixion and the Eucharist’.¹⁴ For the purposes of this discussion, I will schematise the religious content of the Siege of Melayne as follows: the hagiographic, seen in the character of Turpin; the devotional, illustrated in the dramatic scene in the Sultan’s chamber in which the crucifix, tortured by fire, miraculously refuses to burn; and the eucharistic, seen both directly, in the scene in which Turpin celebrates Mass for the weary troops before yet another battle, and indirectly, in the description of the bloodied (military) host itself. The wounds of Turpin, which increasingly become the focus of attention both within the narrative (for Charlemagne) and without (for the reader), serve to unify these disparate strands of religious content, so that the reader, like Charlemagne, becomes absorbed in the longed-for visual experience of Turpin’s hidden wounds.

On one level, Turpin’s depiction in the Siege of Melayne can be characterised as hagiographical; on another level, however, he appears to be both more than a saint and less. In keeping with earlier descriptions of Turpin (most famously in the Chanson de Roland), the Archbishop is a miles Christi in the fullest sense of the term: he throws himself into the heat of battle more passionately than any knight. While other nobles lead delegations of knights and soldiers, Turpin gathers around himself an army of priests; he has permission from the pope, says Turpin, to let them fight ‘Bothe with schelde and spere’ (619). Turpin seeks and receives permission to lead the vanguard, ‘Assemble[d] undire my banere’ (924). Turpin expresses his pastoral function in conventional terms, offering the sacrifice of the Mass on behalf of the disheartened troops (881–910), but he also acts as a rather aggressive shepherd in urging the troops to action. He does not hesitate to apply the pastoral rod even to Charlemagne himself, when the emperor’s resolve appears less than firm. Turpin accuses the hesitant emperor of heresy (673), and cries out, ‘here I curse the, thou kynge! / Because thou lyffes in eresye / Thou ne dare noghte fyghte one Goddes enemy’ (688–90). If the emperor does not apply himself whole-heartedly to the fight against the Saracens, declares Turpin, ‘I sall stroye the, / Bryne and breke downn thi cité’ (752–3). Threatened with utter destruction, both spiritual and physical, Charles gives in. The relentless devotion to God’s will displayed by Turpin, together with his patient endurance of the wounds he repeatedly suffers in battle, contribute to the picture of Turpin as a warrior-saint. As Barron and Shepherd have observed, however, the specific nature of Turpin’s wounds seem to hint at an even more exalted role: not merely warrior-saint, but figure of Christ. It might be argued that all saints are, in some sense, figures of Christ: what, after all, are the stigmata mysteriously acquired by some saints but the signs of the perfection of the saint’s ability to mirror Jesus’ suffering in the Crucifixion? Yet Turpin’s wounds seem to point to a more specific identification:

The bischoppe es so woundede that tyde,
With a spere thoroweowte the syde,
That one his ribbis gan rese.
Thurgh the schelde and the browne bare,
A schaftemonde of his flesche he schare:
Lordynnges, this es no lese. (1301–6)

Turpin himself compares his own wound to Christ’s; though I suffer ‘A glafe thorowte my syde’, says Turpin, ‘Criste for me sufferde mare; / He askede no salve to his sare’ (1345–7; cf. 701–2). Turpin refuses not only salve for his wounds, but also food, drink, and even rest: ‘I sall never ette ne drynke, / Ne with myn eghe slepe a wynke, / … / To yone cité yolden bee’ (1349–52). Turpin’s protracted suffering is extended over ‘dayes three’ (1579), evoking the period between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.

One peculiarity of Turpin’s behaviour detracts from the hagiographical motif so prominent in the general characterisation of the Archbishop: that is, the abuse he heaps upon the Virgin Mary. Following the news of the initial Christian defeat at Milan, Turpin throws down his staff and mitre, and rebukes the Mother of Jesus: ‘A! Mary mylde, whare was thi myght, / That thou lete thi men thus to dede be dighte? / … / Had thou noghte, Marye, yitt bene borne, / Ne had noghte oure gud men thus bene lorne: / The wyte is all in the’ (548–9, 554–6). The blame is all on you; strong words to apply to the Virgin, especially coming from a warrior-saint. On the one hand, Turpin’s rebuke of Mary can be seen as simply a manifestation of the same zeal which causes Turpin to disregard secular authority (as opposed to the Virgin’s divine authority) when he chastises Charles for cowardice and ‘heresy’. On the other hand, as Mills has pointed out, Turpin’s behaviour toward Mary associates him less with other heroic figures in the chansons de geste or medieval romances than with the enemy: the verbal rebuke of pagan gods, and even the physical destruction of their images, is a common scene in those texts.¹⁵ As Mills puts it, ‘here it is very difficult to avoid the feeling that he is being presented as a pagan’.¹⁶ It is important not to overemphasise the significance of Turpin’s action toward Mary since, as Patrick Geary has shown, ‘abuse’ of the saints – such as lowering an image in order to elicit more e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• A polemical introduction
• 1 Incorporation in the Siege of Melayne
• 2 The twin demons of aristocratic society in Sir Gowther
• 3 A, A and B: coding same-sex union in Amis and Amiloun
• 4 Sir Degrevant: what lovers want
• 5 Putting the pulp into fiction: the lump-child and its parents in The King of Tars
• 6 Eating people and the alimentary logic of Richard Cæur de Lion
• 7 The Siege of Jerusalem and recuperative readings
• 8 Story line and story shape in Sir Percyvell of Gales and Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal
• 9 Temporary virginity and the everyday body: Le Bone Florence of Rome and bourgeois self-making
• 10 Romancing the East: Greeks and Saracens in Guy of Warwick
• Index