Space, Gender, and Memory in Middle English Romance

Architectures of Wonder in Melusine

Jan Shaw

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137456502
• eBook ISBN: 9781137450463
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Literature

This book offers a much-needed consideration of Melusine within medieval and contemporary theories of space, memory, and gender. The Middle English Melusine offers a particularly rich source for such a study, as it presents the story of a powerful fairy/human woman who desires a full human life—and death—within a literary tradition that is more friendly to women's agency than its continental counterparts. After establishing a "textual habitus of wonder," Jan Shaw explores the tale in relation to a range of Middle English traditions including love and marriage, the spatial practices of women, the operation of individual and collective memory, and the legacies of patrimony. Melusine emerges as a complex figure, representing a multifaceted feminine subject that furthers our understanding of Middle English women's sense of self in the world.

© The Author(s) 2016

Jan ShawSpace, Gender, and Memory in Middle English RomanceThe New Middle Ages10.1057/978-1-137-45046-3_2

Begin Abstract

Chapter 1 An Epistemology of Wonder

Jan Shaw¹

(1)

University of Sydney, Department of English, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

End Abstract

There are many discourses at work in the tale of Melusine; historical, political, and clerical discourses operate alongside the discourses of literature of the imagination. It is the discourse of wonder, however, that takes center stage, drawing the reader into the work from the opening paragraphs, dominating the making of meaning in the text. All other discourses play second fiddle to the discourse of wonder. Most notable is the treatment of clerical discourse, which if left untended might suggest biblical readings of Melusine’s hybrid form, particularly her serpentine tail. Instead, religious discourse is tackled head on, reworked and incorporated into the discourse of wonder. Wonder is legitimized through an alignment with God and His marvels; it is explicitly elevated above knowledge as merely human. The result is an overarching epistemology that privileges Melusine’s ontological ambiguity not only as wondrous but also as “close to God,” while human knowledge is grounded firmly in the mundane. This chapter teases out the construction of this epistemology through a close examination of the taxonomy of being, outlined in the first paragraphs of the intrinsic prologue, and a consideration of the episode of the Boar Hunt. No fairies or other marvelous creatures are present in the Boar Hunt, and yet wonder prevails over the apparent certainties of human knowledge. It is evident, therefore, that the operation of wonder is not rarefied within the realm of God’s marvels; it spills over into the higher reaches of privileged human knowledge. The Boar Hunt demonstrates that wonder precedes all other ways of knowing, whether human or divine. This is the only certainty in the tale of Melusine and one ignores it at one’s peril.

Prologues, the Habitus, and Magical Objects

There is a long rhetorical tradition that grants prologues significatory weight. Since classical times they have been used as a way to engage the reader through appeal and exhortation, even banter and innuendo. ¹ These persuasive and attention-getting devices were often coupled with legitimating techniques such as reference to a person of high status, perhaps an auctor or illustrious patron. As part of the extrinsic prologue, these techniques focused outside the text; the intrinsic prologue, on the other hand, turned its attention inward, offering justification for and explanation of the text. ² The intrinsic prologue might include a statement of the purpose of the text, an introduction to the subject matter, and a breakdown of content in an orderly and systematic manner. Consider, for example, the opening lines of “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue”:

Experience, though noon auctoritee

Were in this world, is right y-nough for me

To speke of wo that is in mariage (ll. 1–3) ³

These first words signal to the reader the key issues in the Prologue itself and the following Tale: traditional modes of knowledge production will be challenged, and the main topic under consideration will be gender relations within the married state. In the text that follows the Wife destroys books, a court of women tries a man for rape, and the overarching question throughout is “what do women want?” The answer to this question, in both the Prologue and the Tale, is the same, and it is found at the end of the first line of the Prologue: “auctoritee.” ⁴

The prologue builds a relationship between the text/narrator and the reader; it positions the reader in relation to the text, asserting legitimacy and authority for the narrator and establishing a particular mode of engagement with the text that follows. In his discussion of academic prologues, Alastair Minnis finds that the intrinsic prologue was designed “to lead” the reader into the text. ⁵ While the extrinsic prologue introduces the science or art that provides the context of production of the text, the intrinsic prologue describes the details of the process of the science or art as it is to be enacted upon a particular text. As such, the intrinsic prologue can set an epistemological trajectory for the work, establishing frameworks of interpretation to guide the reader to the preferred reading.

While to the modern reader this approach might seem unduly structuralist or predictory, it does represent a certain medieval habitus. In his influential work Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Erwin Panofsky proposed that, in the High Middle Ages, there existed a collective “mental habit” within the learned community, including “almost every mind engaged in cultural pursuits,” that betrayed a passion for system and order. ⁶ This mental habit, honed in the treatises of Scholasticism (Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica being the exemplar) and disseminated through the schools and universities, had two “controlling principles” (30). Panofsky identified the core feature of the first, manifestatio, as “clarification for clarification’s sake” (39). The second was concordantia: “the acceptance and ultimate reconciliation of contradictory possibilities” (64), particularly through dialectical reasoning. Panofsky found evidence of this mental habit in architecture, music, painting, and throughout cultural production. His connection between Scholasticism and Gothic architecture has attracted some criticism, particularly in art history circles; ⁷ but these criticisms are usually based upon a search for concrete evidence, from drawings or commentaries for example, that medieval architects used Scholastic models. ⁸ At a theoretical level Panofsky’s work has proved less problematic, being taken up outside the discipline and developed into a semiology of space by Jesse Gellrich, and—most significantly for my argument—Panofsky’s notion of the “mental habit” was integral to Pierre Bourdieu’s articulation of the habitus. ⁹ For Bourdieu Panofsky’s “mental habit” instantiates a higher level of cultural operation, in which cultural products become part of a system of meaning that reproduces itself through individuals with a high level of cultural literacy. The resultant products and the methods of composition can both be understood as “cultural symbols.” Transmitted through formal education, Scholasticism was a mental habit that produced a collective unconscious, or subconscious, that self-replicated throughout learned medieval culture.

To relate the works of a period with practices derived from a school of thought is to give oneself one of the means to explain not only what they claim, but also what they betray in so far as they partake of the symbolics of an epoch and a society. (Bourdieu, 230)

The habitus is, therefore, not necessarily consciously reproduced. The presence or absence of documented evidence of Scholastic procedures in Gothic architecture is, therefore, less important than the identification of patterns in both the process and the product.

Bourdieu further elaborates upon Scholasticism as a cultural habitus, teasing out the role of the individual in this system. On the one hand, the cultural habitus is collective, necessarily manifesting itself in the individual. Individual creativity is thereby problematized to the extent that individuality and the community are codependent. On the other hand, Bourdieu argues that a “singular habitus” is still possible. This singular habitus is neither irreducibly individual nor a pre-determined cultural form but the result of a range of influences including education, the individual’s social location coupled with the cultural meanings of their experiences, and personal attributes, culminating in a potentially unique life story. The singular habitus is the “unification and explanation of this set of apparently disparate conducts that constitute a life as one…a systematic biography.” ¹⁰ The singular habitus remains circumscribed by the cultural habitus, but there is scope for difference within the community of individuals. My purpose here is to make explicit the habitus that guided the medieval reader into the text of Melusine: that singular habitus betrayed by the intrinsic prologue.

Of course the medieval habitus, both collective and individual, is not wholly described by the systems of order so valued by Scholasticism. As Bourdieu notes, such an approach would limit interpretation to the “methodological,” the “formal,” the “concrete,” the “face value of the phenomena.” ¹¹ It must be acknowledged, for example, that the splendor of the Gothic cathedral, even if it is the superlative instantiation of the Scholastic medieval habitus, is also evidence of superior aesthetic sensibility and extraordinary building skill. Further, the play of light, soaring arches, multiple chapels, colonnades, and complex processional spaces are more than a reflection of design and artisanship: they are a display of enormous wealth and power. While we can only imagine how medieval audiences would have experienced these complex forces, at the very least they must have induced the affective responses of wonder and awe. For Roland Barthes, Gothic cathedrals were

the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object. ¹²

For Barthes, this “magical object” is “perfection.” Outside genealogical history its passionate conception “transforms life into matter,” infusing the stone with chthonic residues. Simultaneously “a closure and a brilliance,” it has an inward orientation that contains as it bedazzles. It is “a silence which belongs to the realm of fairy-tales”: in other words, not a silence that is still, quiet, or at peace but one that is in almost fearful suspense, waiting to be filled, wanting to be satiated. The Gothic cathedral, in its intricate detail and fine tracery, in its magnificence, and verticality, has been carefully and deliberately built from the ground up (and up). For Barthes it has simultaneously “fallen from the sky.” In this way the triumph of medieval system and order is overlaid with wonder.

The singular habitus of the intrinsic prologue of Melusine is similarly an imbrication of system and order with wonder. The taxonomy of being, introduced in the intrinsic prologue as a systematic approach to knowledge, contains an internal paradox that problematizes that very knowledge. The result is the development of an epistemology of wonder that overrides the certainty that systems apparently provide. The text thereby evidences a medieval habitus that had ample room to celebrate order and wonder simultaneously.

The Intrinsic Prologue of Melusine

Dauid the prophete saith, that the Iuggements and the punysshinges of god ben as abysmes without bottom & without ryuage. And he is not wyse that suche thinges supposeth to comprehende in his wit/ & weneth that the meruaylles that ben thrugh the vniuersal world, may nat be true, as it is said of the thinges that men calle ffayrees/ and as it is of many other thinges wherof we may not haue the knowleche of alle them. Now thenne the Creature ought nat therfore for to traueille, by outrageous presumyng to knowe & to comprehende in his wit & vnderstanding the Iugements of god/but men oughten/ thinkynge/to be meruaylled of hym/and meruaylling/to considere/how they may worthily & deuoutly prayse and glorify hym that Iugith so, and ordeynith suche thinges after hys plaisure & wille without eny gaynseying. (p. 2, l. 21–p. 3, l. 3) ¹³

In this opening paragraph ¹⁴ four classes of being are presented: God, “Dauid the prophete,” the “Creature” that is man, and “ffayrees.” Reminiscent of a great chain of being, this apparently simple structure resonates with the Scholastic habitus, particularly in its finely tuned categorical delineations. Panofsky described three requirements for the manifestatio of Scholastic writing. The first was “totality”: an attempt to approximate “one perfect and final solution…with everything in its place and that which no longer found its place, suppressed” (44–45); the second, an “arrangement a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 An Epistemology of Wonder
• Chapter 2 Wonder and Love
• Chapter 3 Building Gender
• Chapter 4 Architectures of Memory
• Chapter 5 Problematic Pasts and New Beginnings
• Conclusion
• Backmatter