Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature: A Casebook (Garland Medieval Casebooks)

Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature

ROUTLEDGE MEDIEVAL CASEBOOKS Christopher Kleinhenz and Marcia Colish, Series Editors The Chester Mystery Cycle A Casebook edited by Kevin J.Harty Medieval Numerology A Book of Essays edited by Robert L.Surles Manuscript Sources of Medieval Medicine A Book of Essays edited by Margaret R.Schleissner Saint Augustine the Bishop A Book of Essays edited by Fannie LeMoine and Christopher Kleinhenz Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam A Book of Essays edited by John Victor Tolan Sovereign Lady Essays on Women in Middle English Literature edited by Muriel Whitaker Food in the Middle Ages A Book of Essays edited by Melitta Weiss Adamson Animals in the Middle Ages A Book of Essays edited by Nona C.Flores Sanctity and Motherhood Essays on Holy Mothers in the Middle Ages edited by Annecke B.Mulder-Bakker Medieval Fatnily Roles A Book of Essays edited by Cathy Jorgensen Itnyre The Mabinogi

A Book of Essays edited by C.W.Sullivan III The Pilgrimmage to Compostela in the Middle Ages A Book of Essays edited by Maryjane Dunn and Linda Kay Davidson Medieval Liturgy A Book of Essays edited by Lizette Larson-Miller Medieval Purity and Piety Essays on Medieval Clerical Celibacy and Religious Reform edited by Michael Frassetto Hildegard of Bingen A Book of Essays edited by Maud Burnett Mclnerney Julian of Norwich A Book of Essays edited by Sandra J.McEntire The Mark of the Beast The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature edited by Debra Hassig The Book and the Magic of Reading in the Middle Ages edited by Albert Classen Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities Men in the Medieval West edited by Jacqueline Murray Imagining Heaven in the Middle Ages A Book of Essays edited by Jan Swango Emerson and Hugh Feiss, O.S.B. Anna Komnene and Her Times edited by Thalia Gouma-Peterson William Langland’s Piers Plowman A Book of Essays edited by Kathleen M.Hewett-Smith The Poetic Edda

Essays on Old Norse Mythology edited by Paul Acker and Carolyne Larrington Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe A Book of Essays edited by Melitta Weiss Adamson The Italian Novella edited by Gloria Allaire Christine de Pizan A Casebook edited by Barbara K.Altmann and Deborah L.McGrady Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature A Casebook edited by Albrecht Classen

Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature A Casebook Edited by

Albrecht Classen

ROUTLEDGE NEW YORK & LONDON

Published in 2004 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Copyright © 2004 by Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Violence in courtly medieval literature: a casebook/edited by Albrecht Classen. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-415-97101-2 (acid-free paper) 1. Literature, Medieval-History and criticism. 2. Violence in literature. I.Classen, Albrecht. PN682. V55V58 2004 809′. 933552-dc22 2003027719 ISBN 0-203-34132-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-97101-2 (Print Edition)

Contents

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Introduction: Violence in the Shadows of the Court Albrecht Classen Authority, Violence, and the Sacred at the Medieval Court Leo D.Lefebure Brutality and Violence in Medieval French Romance and Its Consequences Raymond Cormier Turnus in Veldeke’s Eneide: The Effects of Violence William C.McDonald Violence and Pain at the Court: Comparing Violence in German Heroic and Courtly Epics Scott E.Pincikowski Violence Stylized Siegfried R.Christoph Violence at King Arthur’s Court: Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Perspectives Albrecht Classen Violence in La Queste del Saint Graal and La Mort le roi Artu (Yale 229) Nancy B.Black Violence and Communication in Shota Rustaveli’s The Lord of the PantherSkin Gijsbertus Koolemans Beynen Constructive and Destructive Violence in Jean d’Arras’ Roman de Mélusine Stacey L.Hahn The Violent Poetics of Inversion, or the Inversion of Violent Poetics: Meo dei Tolomei, His Mother, and the Italian Tradition of Comic Poetry Fabian Alfie Violent Magic in Middle English Romance Corinne Saunders Why Is Middle English Romance So Violent? The Literary and Aesthetic Purposes of Violence Jean E.Jost Destruire et disperser: Violence and the Fragmented Body in Christine de Pizan’s Prose Letters Marcella L.Munson Mimetic Crisis in the Medieval Mass: A Sequence for the Feast of St. Thomas of Canterbury and Its Liturgical Function, ca. 1230 Julia Wingo Shinnick Violence in the Spanish Chivalric Romance Michael P.Harney

1 37 65 80 93 110 121 159 175 193 209 223 249 269 274 300

Contributors

318

Index

321

Introduction Violence in the Shadows of the Court

Violence in the Past and Present: Theoretical and Literary Investigations1 ALBRECHT CLASSEN Love, hatred, aggression, and ultimately violence are such ever-present and yet amorphous forces in human society that it might seem almost superfluous to subject them to close scholarly examinations. As Hannah Arendt comments in her famous essay On Violence, “no one questions or examines what is obvious to all. Those who saw nothing but violence in human affairs, [were] convinced that they were ‘always haphazard, not serious, not precise’ (Renan) or that God was forever with the bigger battalion, had nothing more to say about either violence or history.”2 Most of us know about violent conflicts and hatred, have had experience with them, and accept them, even if grudgingly, as constants in human existence. Our history books are filled with accounts of the brutal consequences of these emotions and actions, and whereas their manifestations have changed over time, depending on the cultural, social, economic, and religious conditions of each period, their nature and impact on us have not. Murder, rape, theft, adultery, and slaughter have always met with severe criticism and condemnation, if there was a public authority to do so.3 And love, the ever-elusive phenomenon, is today as much “in the air” as many centuries ago, although each culture approaches and defines it in its own terms.4 Love and crime have been the topic of endless discussions and historical investigations, but suffice it here to be mindful of this quixotic relationship. Crimes committed by people from different time periods have sometimes been regarded with approval if they were carried out in the name of a victorious tribe, people, or country against another social group or entity, which, however, would depend on how a chronicler reported it, coloring our opinion about the justification of this or that act of violence accordingly.5 In other words, crime and violence have not always been identified as such, and this very ethical relativity requires us to approach them anew from a discursive perspective with the faint, but invincible conviction that violence can, no, must be overcome for good. Undoubtedly, violence, love, hatred, and aggression are fundamental features of human life and require a critical analysis in the first place without validating them. In this regard, the psychologist is called upon to provide the necessary insights, considering interpersonal and environmental antecedents, the social context, outside sources of influence, individual differences, and physiological, chemical, and biological factors.6 Equally powerful, perhaps even much more insightful, prove to be literary and historical documents that provide distinct examples of violent behavior, of the consequences of passionate love, and of the results of hatred and aggression. For instance, Hildebrand in the Old High German Hildebrandslied or Roland in the Old French Chanson de Roland, could easily be viewed with considerable suspicion, as the “heroic action” tends to trigger more destructive behavior than constructive performance.7 The same applies to the world of medieval courtly literature where the glorified heroes behave much more violently

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both against the courtly ladies, including the queen, and their fellow knights than the myth of King Arthur might imply.8 As Jean E.Jost, Corinne Saunders, and Michael Harney in their contributions to this volume demonstrate, medieval courtly poets often succumbed to the temptation and incorporated incredible forms of violence in their texts without reflecting on their devastating consequences for the well-being of courtly society at large. Likewise, once Tristan has fallen in love with Isolde, his passion for her overwhelms all his previous hesitation to do harm to others in order to serve his mistress. King Mark, for instance, although slightly ridiculed by the narrator in Gottfried von Strassburg’s version (ca. 1210) for his blindness to the adultery committed right before his eyes, proves to be a tragic figure, deeply suffering from Tristan and Isolde’s cruel treatment, forcing him to take harsh countermeasures, meting out punishments against the two people whom he loves most in the world.9 To talk about violence in the past and present, and by almost the same token about love as well, requires a highly dialectical approach. Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that “everything evil, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and snakelike in humanity serves just as well as its opposite to enhance the species, humanity,” adding: “all this violence, arbitrariness, harshness, terror, and anti-reason has shown itself to be the means through which strength, reckless curiosity, and subtle agility have been bred into the European spirit.”10 According to Heinz-Horst Schrey’s definition of violence, power that meets the voluntary agreement is transformed into authority, but power that is imposed on others against their will is considered violence.11 One of the most expanded definitions of violence comes from Robert McAfee Brown who identifies it in the following manner: “Whatever ‘violates’ another, in the sense of infringing upon or disregarding or abusing or denying that other, whether physical harm is involved or not, can be understood as an act of violence. The basic overall definition of violence would then become violation of personhood…. There can be Violation of personhood’ quite apart from the doing of physical harm”.12 Barbara Whitmer adds the pertinent remark that “[p]ersonal and institutional overt physical destructive behavior against another would be considered acts [sic] of violence.”13 For our purpose it will not matter whether we are talking about innate aggression erupting into external violence, or about culturally conditioned aggression. After all, the academic question does not do away with violence, and the victims of violence do not care whether they suffer because of an instinctual drive on the part of the aggressor or because of cultural conditions inviting the hostile individual to express his or her anger in a violent manner, or whether the individual is conditioned by religious fervor, erotic passion, or simply material greed. Even if we agree with many Social Darwinists who claim that human aggression is part of our nature, this does not obviate the absolutely pressing need to examine violence (and love) as a highly volatile, dangerous, sometimes constructive, most times, however, deconstructive force, which is determined as much by nurture as by nature.14 Human history is deeply embedded in violence, whether justifiable and legitimate, or whether it is an act of brute force without any justification. Idealistic views toward a past where the Catholic Church dominated and the people obeyed, where knights upheld social and ethical ideals, where peasants peacefully plowed their fields are nothing but nostalgic, hence highly deceptive myths.15 For instance, even if it might be problematic to parallel the long history of Viking attacks on Western and Northern Europe during the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries with the devastating attacks against the New World by

Introduction

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Christian Europeans since the late fifteenth century, the ultimate historical evaluation would be the same. Violence in every sense of the word occurred on a large scale, although each time there was one side that considered its actions justifiable and acceptable whereas the other cried “foul play!” In other words, in the first case the attacked Europeans considered themselves innocent victims of pillaging and barbaric hordes, whereas they themselves turned into robbers and murderers when they started to look for gold in South and Central America and justified their violent actions with Christian ideals some six hundred years later.16 In other words, violence in its negative connotation is very much a matter of perspectives, as it depends on the beholder and on how much power the beholder has to document his or her suffering or to identify what happened as violence. The defeated person, tribe, or country experiences outright aggression, whereas the victorious opponent defines it as a necessary punitive action, although the outcome always proves to be pain and even death. This is impressively documented by the Old High German Hildebrandslied (ca.800–820), where father and son battle against each other because the

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Fig. 1.1 Polycrates Hanged by Boucicaut Master, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Laurent de Premierfait. 96.MR.17 (Ms. 63), folio 106. son does not wish to recognize the father, and the old warrior feels forced to defend his honor against the young man’s accusations that he is a cowardly Hun who falsely claims family ties. Although this epic song has come down to us only in fragmentary form, we

Introduction

5

know that the fight has begun, and it seems highly certain that Hildebrand will kill his son.17 Despite his desperate efforts to reach out to his son Hadubrand, the father’s anger is aroused by his son, which subsequently forces him to defend his warrior’s ethic, overriding all personal feelings.18 Undoubtedly, when we examine love, violence, hatred, and aggression, we are exploring fundamental elements in human life that have proved to be both highly constructive and deconstructive if left all to themselves.19 In fact, all these outbursts of impulses and emotions—especially love, which can be violent and destructive—are uncannily related to each other, insofar as they all can lead to death, yet also can create new life. Violence often results from unrequited love, whereas love can transform the person acting most violently into a constructive member of society.20 Likewise, aggression and hatred have been strangely instrumental in the development of culture, and have also contributed to the demise of culture, not to mention the people and country that were the defeated objects. Fictional treatments of these aspects have been the cornerstone of Western and Eastern literature, both in the past and in the present, yet none of them has ever been fully fathomed by either scientists or psychologists, or by either literary scholars or art historians.21 Fortunately, modern interdisciplinary research has led to a much better understanding of all these passionate forces in man (here and throughout understood as gender-neutral), but our new knowledge has not had, as it seems, any significant impact on them as we are far from having gained true control over them or from having learned how to deal with them in a constructive manner. In fact, most problems in human society are the results of these forces, which have had at once highly destabilizing and also stabilizing effects.22 Both medieval and modern literary and artistic entertainment reflect the everlasting relevance of these passions and emotions, as they are admired and detested, deliberately espoused and rejected, feared and idealized. The medieval knight in shining armor aimed for manly self-confirmation and erotic acknowledgment. Military leaders and dictators in the modern world desire both as well—love and respect—and yet they often tend to carry out tremendous acts of violence on behalf of both. Rape and other forms of physical, sexual violence were criminal acts that the authorities and especially the clergy sharply criticized and condemned in the Middle Ages, as they do in modern times.23 This criticism, however, did very little to contain this kind of violence, much less eliminate it. In fact, violence might even have increased on a global level since the Middle Ages as we have lost much of the ritual knowledge that characterized medieval society to a large extent, often allowing for surprisingly peaceful settlements of deadly conflicts. Nowadays, massive carnage is perpetrated without a glimpse of conscience, as the press is kept from the immediate battlefields, and histrionic assaults on dwarf-size countries without any capable military forces blind us to the actual warfare waged behind closed doors on much larger batdefields.24 Although medieval society was greatly shaped by violence, both internally and externally, both in public and in private, many military and personal conflicts were handled with surprisingly constructive forms of ritual, which provided mutually acceptable strategies to stop violence and to allow both partners in the conflict to save face.25 Undoubtedly, the early Middle Ages, a time often identified—even if somewhat incorrectly—as the “barbaric age,”26 witnessed a much higher level of violence than later centuries, that is, violence without any or very little legitimacy, which subsequently led to

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the emergence of feudalism as a global countermeasure with the aim to establish political, military, and religious infrastructures that served as control mechanisms and guarantors of some kind of peaceful social construct. It was a time of barbarism because of the “absence of standards to which appeal can be made,” to quote Ortega y Gasset’s noteworthy formulation.27 To some extent we would be justified in identifying that era as more chaotic and violent because of the loss of a centralized state authority after the disappearance of the Western Roman Empire in 476, at least in formal terms (Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus), leading to a multitude of competing tribal entities claiming legitimacy for their own actions. Concomitantly, the Christian Church made serious efforts to control violence within its sphere of influence, but its chroniclers might have overstated the excesses and number of occurrences to justify the establishment of clerical authority.28 In his “Sermon 302: On the Feast of St Laurence,” St. Augustine (354–430) tackles the question of violence and clearly states that even violence done in the name of revenge engenders new violence. He asks his audience, “Why do you treat those who are bad violently?” and immediately responds himself: “As soon as you treat them violently, you add yourself to them.”29 Augustine was not so naive as to believe that goodness would automatically lead to goodness in other people as well, and he refers to the martyrs as an example of tragic death of good people. Those who have to die an unjust death gain praise and admiration from posterity, whereas those who are considered evil will find their own judge.30 True Christians should refrain from any bloodshed, even when the person on trial proves to be extremely evil, as the accused would face double punishment: “You should grieve for him twice as much, because he is dead twice over, once in this temporary life, and once in eternal life.”31 In a way already anticipating Mahatma Gandhi, Augustine appealed to his listeners: “I urge you, please, by the Lord and his gentleness, to live gently and peaceably; and to allow the authorities to do their job in peace.”32 Almost a thousand years later, Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1175), following Augustine’s and also Seneca’s teachings, observed that only a few people display a natural tendency toward virtue, whereas the majority requires external discipline and education to combat their “evil disposition” and “vice,” requiring the authorities to impose penalties and punishments to instill fear in them: “When they are thus kept from doing evil, a quiet life is assured to others; and they are themselves led eventually by force of custom to do voluntarily what once they did only from fear and thus to practice virtue.“33 Deeply distrustful of human nature, Thomas Aquinas supports the use of strict laws to combat the dangers resulting from the human monster in man: “Man, if perfect in virtue, is the best of animals; but if he becomes separated from law and justice, he is the worst of animals. For man, unlike other animals, has the weapon of reason wherewith to exploit his base desires and cruelty.”34 Thomas was obviously not blind to the real conditions of human society and explicitly warned against the dangers of unchecked violence by the individual. Moreover, he raised his voice even against unjust wars and wanted the authority to launch any military action limited to the legitimate rulers. Those, in turn, had to have a just cause, a mainstay of theological arguments since the days of St. Augustine, whose sermon, “Against Faustus XXIII,” 73, Thomas quotes as corroboration: “To maintain peace within the natural order of men, rulers require the power and decision to declare war”35 Moreover, parallel to the teachings of John of Salisbury (ca. 1115– 1180), tyranny is condemnable and could justify an entire people to rise up against its

Introduction

7

ruler: “Therefore the overthrow of such government is not strictly sedition, unless perhaps when accompanied by such disorder that the community suffers greater harm than from the tyrannical government.”36 By the same token, violent actions that aimed at the defense of Christendom, of women and children, and of other people in need were always considered justified and received the Church’s blessings. This finds particularly good expression in the many Arthurian and Grail romances, two of which Nancy Black discusses in her contribution to this volume (La Queste del Saint Graal and La Mort le roi Artu).37 In his seminal study The Civilizing Process, first published in German in 1939, Norbert Elias assumed that the emergence of the absolutist state with its monopoly on violence and the development of highly ritualized forms of courtly life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created innovative control mechanisms and imposed heretofore unknown levels of shame. These in turn considerably reduced the degree to which affective impulses could dominate human behavior,38 which then led to a notable decline in aggression and violence. This optimistic perspective of historical progress from the early to the High Middle Ages, and from there to the Renaissance and the Baroque, has undergone dramatic reversals, and a more realistic evaluation of human relationships seems to indicate the pervasiveness, continuity, and regular reemergence of violent phenomena because of love, hatred, and aggression.39 As has been pointed out by many sociologists, however, especially by representatives of the Chicago school of sociology, the breakdown of family and community, the rise of mass society, the emergence of modern industrialization with its subsequent features of mass alienation, the new development of a capitalist class structure, and, above all, unprecedented degrees of aggression by the state against its citizens led to unforeseen levels of violence in modern times. We are obviously faced with two contradictory paradigms, built on very different sets of criteria regarding the evaluation of violence. Nevertheless, we still need to ask whether Elias’s theories can be supported in light of these phenomena in modern times?40 Julius Ruff, among others,

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Fig.1.2 The Death of the Roman Consul Marcus Atilius Regulus by Boucicaut Master, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Laurent de Premierfait. 96.MR.17 (Ms.63), folio 140v.

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argues that nowadays people naively assume that violence has dramatically increased over the last hundred years, but especially since the end of World War II. A careful comparison, however, of late-medieval society with the modern world would demonstrate, as Ruff suggests, a rather remarkable decline in violent crimes. Indeed, by “the mid-nineteenth century, in fact, the collective violence…was an anachronism in much of western Europe.”41 Even if this observation holds true, violence as such both on an individual and on a state level has not abated, even if its targets and strategies might have shifted, especially as state violence has tremendously multiplied worldwide. As an aside, although equally important for our larger issue at stake here, many scholars have assumed that the world of the courts and of the corresponding twelfth- and thirteenth-century literature represented a world of fictional utopia, free of violence and aggression. Quite the contrary, it appears instead to have been dominated by a quest for chivalry and love regularly involving a high degree of brutality, force, and violence on a global level.42 Michael Harney identifies much of this violence as “graphic violence” of the most gruesome kind not only in late-medieval Spanish romances, but also both in the Homeric Iliad and in modern-day TV cartoons and movies. One of the reasons for the audience’s delight in such horrifying scenes might be, as Harney suggests, a desire for escape mechanisms and primordial justice in a highly rigidified world where male roles have been marginalized and require certain types of compensation through literary or cinematographic discourse.43 According to Will Hasty, who takes a radically opposite position both to the sociologist Norbert Elias and the literary scholar Joachim Bumke: “Close scrutiny of the court poetry demonstrates that the relationship of courtliness to aggression and dominance is one of complicity rather than contrast or opposition. The courtly mode of (inter)action, and extra-courtly modes of (inter)action in which aggression is more overtly expressed, are like variations on the same basic theme, describable according to recurring, variable patterns, but not opposable on the basis of essential differences.”44 If not even the courtly world had achieved a minimum of civilization, but instead had covered up the actual degree of violence behind a screen of courtly ideals expressed in literature and the arts, could we then hope for an actual improvement of human society and the limitation or control of violence, aggression, and hatred? The development of modern weapons, especially of weapons of mass destruction, has outdated our need for many of the social rituals employed by medieval people, as they trigger much more dangerous and violent forms of interaction between people; whole populations can be dealt with en masse, instead of as vulnerable, bleeding, hurting, and dying individuals. This process, however, started with the development of the longbow and the crossbow in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.45 Although all world religions preach, in one form or another, nonviolence, openness, peacefulness, and harmony, if not even tolerance,46 in many cases throughout time religious fanaticism, zealotry, and the belief in the righteousness of one religion over all others have led to the worst forms of violence, such as in the case of the Crusades against the Muslims and even against Christians, for example, the Albigensian Crusade (1209– 1255).47 Surprisingly, many medieval thinkers and poets explicitly advocated the path toward peace and condemned military conflicts, even if their words seem not to have had a significant impact on their contemporaries.48 The massive religious wars and violent conflicts in the Age of the Reformation, ultimately leading to the Thirty Years War

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(1618–1648), the many local conflicts among individual territories, the multitude of violent struggles between peasants and the aristocracy during the Peasant War (1524– 1525), and the endless fights and wars between individual cities and territorial dukes, if not with the king himself, quickly dismantle the simplistic belief that the civilization process created a more peaceful, harmonious, hence less violent early-modern society. Some scholars naively assume that the Middle Ages, because of its heavy reliance on knighthood as the basic defense system, was violent through and through.49 Certainly, medieval forms of execution were often highly cruel and tantamount to extreme torture, but could we safely argue that modern death penalties are much more humane?50 Is civilization truly identified by a reduction of violence and the development of a legal and penal system, handing the right to punishment and military actions to the state or the king? Richard W.Kaeuper convincingly demonstrates that widespread violence as a result of medieval chivalry came to an end by the late Middle Ages when the modern state emerged, powerfully equipped with standing armies, prohibiting individual lords to stage their local wars and preventing them from instigating violence for personal motives.51 Nevertheless, violence as such did not disappear, instead might well have increased tremendously because of the existence of centralized governments that were less bound to individualized honor and personal obligations to the people.52 As the contributors to a volume on Conflict in Medieval Europe indicate, medieval societies knew many different forms of conflict resolution by means of various types of courts, rituals, punishments, and reconciliations. Consequently, we might go so far as to argue that the many accounts of violence and military conflicts during the Middle Ages represent a solid and constructive concern about containment of criminality and violence.53 C.Stephen Jaeger localizes the decisive forces of this civilization process in the courts of the German imperial bishops thriving during the tenth through twelfth century, whereas Charles Radding insists that the crucial mental shift toward a global and better mental self-control and management of emotions occurred during the twelfth century.54 By contrast, Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Peter N.Stearns now claim that the fundamental paradigm shift did not occur until before the eighteenth century when “the anger-control effort constituted an important shift in emotional values, a new effort at emotional restraint.”55 Edward Muir, on the other hand, believes that we have to turn to the sixteenth century as the crucial period when “one of the great transformations in the history of emotions [occurred]…, a transformation from externalizing anger …to internalizing it by adopting the self-control of good manners.”56 In light of twentieth-century violence, perpetrated by states, communities, and individuals, however, and considering the enormous proliferation of weapons among countries all over the world and among individuals (particularly in the United States), which all has continued unabated well into the twenty-first century, it seems almost hypocritical to argue that modern man has acquired better control mechanisms against violence and truly knows how to manage hatred and aggression. Even if brutal and open violence seems to be a matter of the past (what past?), to follow some of the arguments, violence in its myriad manifestations continues to be as present in human society as ever before. Percentage-wise we might be well justified to argue that more people are murdered or physically attacked in modern Western societies than in the Middle Ages. As Will Hasty now suggests with regard to the evolution and impact of medieval courtliness

Introduction

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on Western civilization, it might be “viewed as an important part of a very different history, that of Europe and the West’s ever more effective control and refinement of aggression in the interests of dominance.”57 This, however, would not imply a reduction of violence through time, but instead only a reformulation of the public justification of violence in the name of an abstract concept, such as a city, territory, or the state. One of the best examples of this drive toward “dominance” by means of sheer military might can be found in the Nibelungenlied, which Hasty discusses in greater detail.58 We could easily add the entire genre of the chanson de geste where Christians and Arabs fight a mortal battle against each other in the name of their gods, such as in the anonymous Old French Chanson de Roland or the Middle High German Rolandslied by Priest Konrad. Miniatures artists did not shy away from depicting the goriest details, almost reveling in the horrors of warfare.59 Turning to Wolfram of Eschenbach’s Willehalm epic (ca. 1218) and considering the implied Crusade ideology, Hasty concludes that “the great scope of material wealth and power held forth by participation in the crusades, a scope that matches in material terms the spiritual power that is obtainable by dying in a divinely inspired undertaking.”60 In other words, greed and lust for power, perennial elements in human behavior, easily lurk behind the religious screen, which quickly finds its sad corroboration in the multiple travelogues and accounts of the conquest of the New World several hundred years later.61 In the name of God just too many people have been killed (murdered) over time, undermining any church’s claim that it pursues its religion and proselytizing efforts peacefully and in a tolerant manner. If we consider the most deplorable history of the Jewish-Christian relationship from the Middle Ages to the present, not many positive changes can be observed.62 Although it amounts to a grotesque distortion of historical facts to claim a direct teleological link between medieval pogroms (such as in the wake of the First Crusade in the Rhineland in 1096) and the Holocaust,63 violence and hatred have always been one of the major features characterizing this relationship.64 The optimism regarding improving conditions for Jews, and the hope that people of different religion and races can live together peacefully, continues to be a dream, although it might have become a tenuous reality in some countries today.65 Our modern society might be much better off than the past worlds, but the reminder of the Holocaust is just too fresh and painful to believe in the historical betterment and evolution (in ethical terms) of man. Anti-Judaism in its myriad forms and in its more virulent and murderous manifestations (anti-Semitism), subsequent pogroms, for example, continues to show its ugly face in many parts of the world. Innumerable wars have been fought since the end of World War II, weapons production and the sale of weapons are at an all-time high, the prison population in the United States has reached unheard of proportions, and violence, man’s ancient and perhaps endless evil, continues to hold us in its grip. In general, violence seems to find ever-new outlets and is, if suppressed by laws and law enforcement officers, compensated for through other, by far not less aggressive means. Ultimately, however, we do not need to determine whether the medieval world was more, or perhaps less, violent than modern times, insofar as violence as such has always been a pervasive factor in human existence. The point is to address violence as such and to challenge its basic premises if we want to hold any hope for mankind. As Donald J.Kagay and L.J.Andrew Villalon poignantly elaborate, “[t]he bequest of Cain, which leads humankind routinely to place members of its own species outside the

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pale of humanity, is simply too ingrained for law or religion to overcome.”66 Ortega y Gassett might be right in his claim that “[c]ivilization is nothing else than the attempt to reduce force to being the ultima ratio,”67 but how effective has our Western society been over the last two thousand years in achieving this goal? In Ortega y Gasset’s words, “‘direct action’ consists in inverting the order and proclaiming violence as prima ratio, or strictly as unica ratio. It is the norm which proposes the annulment of all norms, which suppresses all intermediate process between our purpose and its execution. It is the Magna Carta of barbarism.”68 This Magna Carta will not help us much at all if we do not provide it with teeth to realize the ideals formulated by philosophers, statesmen, writers, and artists over the centuries. One concrete and productive step forward will certainly be achieved when we begin to examine the causes and consequences of violence, and also explore many of the related emotions, such as love and hatred, as reflected in medieval texts. This will allow us to establish a significant platform to explore the nature of violence and to reflect upon appropriate means to deal with it constructively. One of the most prominent institutions that has always publicly argued for peace and civilized cohabitation, the Catholic Church, was the key proponent of the Crusades, including the Albigensian Crusade, among other military conflicts, and also had to cope with massive internal problems involving clerics who were guilty of outrageous violent acts against their parish.69 In fact, despite its own ideals, the Christian Church has never been free of internal weaknesses, but what religious institution has ever been? Nevertheless, late-medieval criticism against clerical misdeeds, including physical and spiritual violence, rape, simony, gluttony, theft, and warfare, reached an unforeseen pitch.70 Considering the massive wave of child molestations committed by Catholic priests during the last decades of the twentieth century, to mention just one aspect negatively characterizing the Catholic Church, the discrepancy between ethical and moral ideals allegedly upheld by the clergy and the violent reality has obviously not been resolved. Unfortunately, erotic love, one of the loftiest emotions and ideals, has often been intimately connected with violence, probably because it leads too easily to possessiveness and is marred by dangerous elements of self-centeredness. Why does love not lead to simple forms of happiness realized through marriage or comparable forms of partnership? Would not true love be a form of absolute acknowledgment of the other person, and produce a tremendous source of altruism, creating free space for the individual? To ask this question is to answer it negatively, as most people in this world have not been able to acquire or to give true love anyway, although most lovers, I dare say, strive for it. The more love is compromised by egotistical instincts, the more this love can lead to aggression and violence. However, love would be only one element explaining the eruption of violence, insofar as any sociological, religious, philosophical, and economic analysis would produce many more indicators for why human beings and whole societies suffer from violence.71 Women seem to have been the preferred victims, at least in most societies, but this does not imply that violence is gender specific.72 It would be particularly erroneous to accept Andrea Dworkin’s radical thesis that violence is inherent to sex, and that sex “is a reductive force in that it relegates women to the status of objects to be penetrated.”73 Why can violence not be contained, if not eliminated altogether? People in most societies and at most times have recognized its dangerous consequences for the well-

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being of society, if we disregard some of the nomadic people from late antiquity and the early Middle Ages when the breakdown of two major empires, the Western Roman Empire and the Sassanid Empire in the Near East, opened a huge vacuum exposing the civil populations in the various regions to enormous violence?74 In other words, violence is recognized as a universal and timeless problem, especially if it affects the stability of social structures, that is, when violence is directed against members of the same social group. Ironically, some of those countries in our modern world that fight against violence and injustice on a global level are characterized by some of the highest levels of violence within their own society, such as the United States of America. Almost by contrast, in the European Middle Ages, violence from external forces (Huns, Saracens, Vikings, Magyars, Mongols, etc.) and internecine feudal warfare, not to mention the massive military conflicts between kings or emperors and the higher nobility, led to remarkable forms of political and economic structures, and allowed medieval societies to develop highly sophisticated forms of internal stability such as feudalism, early forms of parliamentary representation (English Parliament), guild organizations in cities, and a highly hierarchical church structure. Easy solutions remained elusive, however, as both “crime” and the individual’s relationship to the administrative authorities, personal honor, and poverty were extremely difficult to define. Moreover, literary texts that appealed to courtly society often seemed to have a considerable impact on the legal system. As Barbara A.Hanawalt and David Wallace point out, “[s]ince the literate men who were formulating laws and administering justice were reading and hearing imaginative literature as well as studying legal cases, literature and law were subject to strong, reciprocal influences.”75 However, let us avoid projecting a naive utopianism back into the past and examine more carefully what violence in the Middle Ages might have meant. After all, Marc Bloch bluntly stated that violence was “deep-rooted in the social structure and in the mentality” of the Middle Ages, whereas Peter Haidu reminds us that modern violence and medieval violence share many common elements.76 To begin our critique of and fight against violence, however, we must, to quote Jody Enders, expose “the pervasive linguistic and ideological foundations of violence.”77 This requires us, as the contributors to this volume do, to turn to the past, here specifically to the Middle Ages, and investigate the nature, sources, elements, impact, and consequences of violence. There was, after all, much crime to be feared, both from within society in the form of individual murderers, rapists, sodomists, and burglars, and from outside in the form of hostile armies.78 But what do we mean by violence? In Middle High German, for instance, we face serious linguistic problems with the term gewalte (Gewaltin modern German), as the term could imply both “violence” and “aggression” or “authority” and “political power” (potentia in Latin).79 Old French does not even know of an equivalent term; instead there are a variety of expressions for “violence.”80 Some early medieval societies, such as the Vikings, the Vandals, or the Huns, probably regarded military violence as a form of selfconfirmation and as a legitimate means to acquire wealth. Their victims had, of course, a very different opinion, if they were still alive to voice it. The essays in this volume are specifically addressed toward the first semantic component with its explicit negative connotation, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary: “The exercise of physical force so as to inflict injury on, or cause damage to, persons or property; action or conduct

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characterized by this; treatment or usage tending to cause bodily injury or forcibly interfering with personal freedom.”81 In English documents from 1290, 1303, 1340, and 1380, for instance, we come across clear statements about the physical element of “violence” in the sense of hurting somebody bodily or destroying an object. Paradoxically, we also find references to violentia in medieval mystical texts, such as Richard of St. Victor’s (d. 1173) De quattuor gradibus violentiae caritatis, here meaning the “most sensitive sign of love,” which goes through four stages of weakening, wounding, binding the soul until it is annihilated and “dies in God.”82 The image of physical violence also plays a significant role in the didactic dialogue poem Die Winsbeckin (ca. 1220)83 and in the allegorical love imagery, such as in Guillaume de Lorris’s part of the Roman de la rose (ca. 1237) where the young man is brutally attacked and maimed by the God of Love:

He quickly chose an arrow; nocking it, He pulled the cord back to his ear. The bow Was marvelously strong, and good his aim, And when he shot at me the arrow pierced My very heart, though entering by my eye. Then such a chill seized me that since that day I oft, remembering it, have quaked again Beneath a doublet warm. Down to the ground I fell supine; thus struck, my heart stopped dead; It failed me, and I fainted quite away.84 Nevertheless, our focus will rest on the manifestation of mostly physical violence as understood by the modern (and medieval) sense of the word, that is, as violence that leads to the harm or even death of another person, to the destruction of an object, an institution, or a political entity. Violence also could be connected with the inappropriate application of magic, which gave is practitioner dangerous influence over others, as many Arthurian narratives indicate.85 Violence, however, requires even further discrimination, as there have always been forms of “legitimized” violence, such as in the Crusades, or the decimation of the Albigensians, in the various massacres of Jews throughout Europe both in the Middle Ages and in modern times, and, not to forget, the violence exerted by the state, the government, the king, or any other authorities trying to fulfill the role of a judge, which eventually led to the ignominious witchcraze of the early-modern period.86 Let us quickly jump forward in time and raise the complex question, whether the death penalty as practiced in the United States is violent and inhumane, as most Europeans would claim, or is it justified in the name of justice and the laws?87 It seems easier to talk about the plethora of manifestations of violence in concrete terms than to identify violence as such, and it is likewise considerably easier to examine the legal means chosen by a state, kingdom, the Church, and other political powers to combat violence through its judicial system, than to investigate how or whether violence was discussed as a force affecting individuals and social groups.88 Moreover, violence could also be exerted

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through psychological means, such as through the projection of images of Hell, instilling profound fear in most European Christians throughout the Middle Ages and far beyond, although Christ’s teachings as recorded in the New Testament had signaled that all believers would be saved from eternal condemnation if they believed in Him.89 If we turn to individual manifestations of violence, we easily realize that throughout time, parents, teachers, governments, church administrators, dukes, barons, kings, and other rulers have, in the name of God, justice, the commonwealth, or even love (see the spanking of children), exercised a tremendous amount of violence. Curiously, especially love itself has too often led to destruc-

Fig.1.3 A Massacre of Family Members by Eneas Silvius Piccolomini. 2001.45 (Ms.68), folio 21.

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tive, violent behavior, be it because of jealousy, envy, possessiveness, desperation, or frustration, as we hear, for example, in the early thirteenth-century dialogue poem Die Winsbeckin.90 Even religious forms of love, such as in mystical discourses, are quite often associated with violence, as the union of the mystical soul with the Godhead can only be achieved by penetrating through the physical body into the heart of the beloved divine.91 Both public and private discussions about love and violence have never successfully achieved a containment, control, moderation, or subjugation of the excessive manifestations of these emotions, and it might well be that these aspects constitute, to a large extent, human existence in the first place. Nevertheless, the need to examine anger, love, hatred, and violence and to talk about these emotions has never ceased. In fact, the more we hear about love and violence, for example, in literary and art historical documents, the more these forces seem to be in effect, and the more we are obligated to approach them in a constructive manner, analyzing and discussing their basic features and functions. In this sense, literary studies carry much more significance for the wellbeing of modern society than traditionally assumed, as scholars examine highly relevant documents of love, hatred, aggression, and violence, study the background of these emotions and actions, and illustrate the causes and consequences.92 Human beings are characterized by, among other things, their communicative abilities. The breakdown of communication, however, may quickly lead to violence.93This phenomenon can be observed both in past and in present societies, especially as it allows considerable insights into the causes of conflicts. Gijsberg Koolemans Beynen introduces such a case in his study of the late-twelfth-century Georgian epic poem The Lord of the Panther Skin by Shota Rustaveli.94 When love, for instance, is not reciprocated, or does not receive enough breathing space for the individual, tensions arise and the emotions turn upside down, suddenly erupting in the form of violence. To combat violence, then, requires an intensive analysis of human communication and its essential features. This leads to another observation. Violence is not to be tolerated and must be fought at every possible level. Uncontrolled violence quickly spirals into something monstrous, inviting each side to take a higher degree of revenge for acts of violence, and the resulting blood feud, to mention one specific form of medieval and also modern violence, eventually will engulf both sides and destroy the entire community. Paradoxically, however, an absolutely peaceful system has never existed, neither in the Middle Ages nor in modern times. Violence, if exerted by a government or a ruler, in the name of the commonwealth, be it through the force of the laws, be it through a penal system, has often succeeded in maintaining and subduing rampant violence. In other words, violence per se is not necessarily an evil force—nor is love and all other human emotions, especially if violence is resolutely tied with rational communication.95 Literary and historical texts have often explored the issues of violence, and have served as powerful narrative platforms to examine in greatest possible detail the causes of violence, its development, and catastrophic outcome. To gain a solid understanding of these elements and their strategies, we need to establish an objective distance, which the historical dimension offers in the first place.96 Certainly, the Middle Ages is far removed from us today; yet its influence on us moderns in ideological, mythical, and religious terms has not abated at all. On the contrary, the fascination in that distant culture and history has reached unforeseen levels, documented by novels, movies, tournament performances, merchandise, and music.97 But whereas many people find the Middle Ages

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simply intriguing and attractive because of chivalry and the myth of King Arthur, the kingdom of the Grail, and also because of the amazing phenomenon of mysticism, a close analysis also reveals many aspects of violence, torture, destruction, aggression, and hatred.98 Considering these negative aspects of an allegedly glorious past, we find surprising parallels with our modern world. In other words, when studying current issues of violence, aggression, and love, either separately or as a complex aggregate, medieval examples of how these emotions and actions were dealt with by medieval society might serve well as analytic tools today. The fascination with courtly love reveals a utopian dream on the part of medieval and modern audiences, as a close analysis of a surprising majority of medieval poems and narratives that deal with courtly love mostly reveal a negative development. Lovers are rejected, mistrust rules, rape proves to be a rampant problem, marriage does not emerge as a significant alternative, and hatred and aggression quickly surface whenever love does not achieve its desired goals.99 Often lovers are subject to severe envy and hatred, and their parents or society at large try to prevent their getting together. As the examples of Erec’s treatment of his wife Enide/ Enite in both Chrétien de Troyes’s and Hartmann von Aue’s courtly romance Erec indicates, the relationship between husband and wife was at best tenuous, and only rarely do we hear of a happy marriage that lasts over time. More often than not, the knightly husbands demonstrate that they have learned disappointingly little of the ideals of chivalry; brutality and violence characterize the relationship with their families.100 Passionate lovers such as Moriz von Craun in the eponymous verse novella (ca. 1220) ultimate resort to rape because they are so deeply frustrated by their mistresses.101 Love can also be a highly destructive force, as experienced by Apollonius of Tyre, protagonist of the eponymous romance, first composed in late antiquity, then translated and adapted many times in numerous languages throughout the European Middle Ages. After having first realized that King Antiochus, whose daughter he was trying to win as his wife, is guilty of incest, Apollonius undergoes a life of suffering, with occasional moments of happiness, but he loses his family because love and violence are intimately intertwined and almost condition each other.102 Certainly, there is a happy end, but this does not significantly alter our observation. Violence, however, that is directed against the own family—patricide, matricide, fratricide, infanticide, sororicide—ultimately destroys the family altogether, as the various versions of the Mélusine narrative in Medieval Latin, Old French, and Early New High German indicate.103 Many female writers specifically addressed the problematic correlation of love with violence, expressing their fear of losing their lover or husband, their fear of being hurt by society in political, ethical, and spiritual terms, and their fear of physical violence as well, as witnessed by the twelfth-century troubairitz poetry, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century women’s trouvère poetry, and by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century German women’s love poetry.104 Not surprisingly, as medieval law books, romances, and short narratives demonstrate, “domestic violence” was not at all unknown in the Middle Ages and represented a severe problem, which women could fight with only very limited resources because the biblical teachings assigned absolute power to the father/husband.105 The authorities, especially the Church, disapproved of brutal and unjust treatment of wives and children, but were not at all opposed to (severe) physical punishments if a person allegedly deserved it in retribution for any kind of transgression of the father’s rules.106

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The fifteenth-century Italian friar Cherubino of Siena illustrates this general attitude most drastically: When you see your wife commit an offense, do not rush at her with insults and violent blows: rather, first correct the wrong lovingly and pleasantly, and sweetly teach her not to do it again…. But if your wife is of a servile disposition and has a crude and shifty spirit so that pleasant words have no effect, scold her sharply, bully and terrify her. And if this still does not work, take up a stick and beat her soundly, for it is better to punish the body and correct the soul than to damage the soul and spare the body.107 In her Lais, Marie de France poignantly addresses the problem of violence resulting from unhappy marriages or catastrophic love relationships that could lead to the wooer’s death, as in Yonec and Les deuz amanz; to the death of the adulterous couple, as in Equitan, to the physical mutilation of the distrustful wife, as in Bisclavret; or to the death of various male wooers, as in Chaitivel.108 But violence, as discussed by medieval philosophers, writers, and artists, was not necessarily gender specific,109 as the examples of Brünhild in the Old Norse Edda and in the Middle High German Nibelungenlied indicate, by presenting a woman who both exerts brutal force and is victimized by force as well.110 Mai’s mother in the thirteenth-century verse romance Mai und Beaflor displays blatant signs of violent intentions when she attempts to have her hated daughter-in-law burned at the stake for alleged adultery during her son’s absence in a Crusade. Her strategy to falsify crucial letters announcing the birth of Beaflor’s son and to have them state that she delivered a wolf’s child because of her sexual union with two priest backfires, as Mai finds out the truth and stabs his mother to death.111 Although his matricide could have severe consequences for the young count, his mother’s actions are deemed so evil as to justify the execution. Nevertheless, Mai deeply grieves because he also believes he has lost his wife due to his mother’s machinations, and he welcomes his own death. All these commotions and tragic events, however, ultimately culminated in a happy end as Mai and Beaflor find each other again and resume their marriage As far as we are concerned, however, Mai’s mother’s devious plan is characterized as an act of violence, whereas her son’s matricide is regarded as just punishment.112 Consequently, the dead woman is buried far away from the court, and an epitaph relates her misdeeds (174, 31–38). Finally, the notorious Wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (ca. 1400) both resorts to physical violence and receives a solid beating as well through which she loses part of her hearing. Only when she feigns death and scares her fifth husband Jankyn into obedience, does the war between them come to an end and she gain the upper hand in her marriage.113 There are many other examples of domestic violence specifically criticized by medieval authors, although throughout the Middle Ages the legal conditions gave husbands the privilege of exerting their absolute authority over their wives.114 Surprisingly, some of those medieval texts containing descriptions of the most violent actions indicate the very opposite evaluation. Both in the ninth-century Hildebrandslied and in the early-thirteenth-century lament epic Diu Klage—basically an epilogue to the Nibelungenlied—violence is regarded as a highly negative force to be condemned and avoided as its escalating consequences are death and far-flung destruction.115 Jan-Dirk Müller identifies the outcome of the Nibelungenlied as a fundamental crisis in which an

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entire people, or specifically the Burgundian army, has been transformed into a horde of barbarians who know no other way out of their desperate situation at the Hunnish court but to kill everybody and to die themselves in the final battle.116 Nevertheless, as Scott Pincikowski observes, the anonymous poet was not blind to these dangers and obviously composed this epic poem as a dire warning about the possible Armageddon.117 Similarly, in his highly remarkable allegorical verse narrative Der Ring (ca. 1401), the Constance lawyer and writer Heinrich Wittenwiler projected the catastrophic consequences of violence erupting at a wedding party because of a peasant’s amorous approach to one of the village girls. When he tries to signal to her his attraction, he foolishly scratches her palm, making it bleed, which quickly provokes one of her relatives to threaten him with severe punishment. One word leads to the other, followed by violent actions that draw the entire community into the brawl, and soon a devastating war breaks out in which the village of Lappenhausen is destroyed and all its inhabitants are killed. Only by the male protagonist Bertschi survives; even his fiancée and all her family and neighbors find their death.118 Wittenwiler’s peasant satire offers a gloomy picture of human society and its ability to cooperate in a constructive manner. Lack of communication, uncontrolled erotic emotions, undisciplined interactions, and a strong tendency to respond to all outside challenges with military measures result in catastrophic violence, which engulfs the entire population. In fact, much of medieval literature was deeply concerned with the establishment of law and order, as documented by many literary and legal texts addressing these issues. Some of them examined the impact of violence and breaking of laws only indirectly; others, such as the early Middle High German poem Vom Rehte, targeted the issue headson and explored ways to terminate rampant violence and to install legal measures to keep public peace and to pursue justice for all. The author states, for instance:

wan swelhir den gewalt hat unde er daz unrehte begat unde erz ubir einen anderen dolot, da mit hat er verscholot den ewigen lip. (Whoever has the authority/power, and commits injustice and allows this to happen against somebody will have lost the eternal life).119 Knighthood, innumerable times idealized in courtly romance and courtly love poetry, was, to say the least, a highly bloody and gory affair, as knights, both in historical reality and in courtly fiction, often proved to be little but simple killing machines without any emotions for their victims. Ramon Llull (1235–1316) raised his voice in criticism of knights and their highly violent actions: “Who is there in the world who does as much harm as knights?”120 In addition, the strategy of the scorched earth, the terre gaste, was already practiced in the Middle Ages, as reflected both in Chretien de Troyes’s Perceval and in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival121 The thirteenth-century author Wernher the Gardener highlighted another dimension of violence in his social satire, Meier

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Helmbrecht. Here violence is carried out by robber knights who are not acknowledged or integrated by the nobility, yet reject the peasant class themselves. In their desperate efforts to create at least a pretense of an aristocratic lifestyle, they turn to abject violence and rob from their own class. Young Helmbrecht refuses to listen to his father’s warnings and continues with his life of crime until he is apprehended by judges and severely punished, losing his right arm, left foot, and eyesight. A year later, when the same peasants whom he had attacked and robbed before, get hold of him, they brutally lynch him in revenge for the egregious violence that he had committed against them before.122 Violence begets violence, and civilization is the only thin wall that separates human beings from falling into barbarism. To quote Ortega y Gasset, “[a] man is uncivilized, barbarian in the degree in which he does not take others into account. Barbarism is the tendency to disassociation. Accordingly, all barbarous epochs have been times of human scattering, of the pullulation [sprouting, germination] of tiny groups, separate from and hostile to one another.”123 Fortunately, violence and barbarism are not unchecked forces, and we could go so far as to claim that the entire process of civilization has been supported by the constant struggle against these evil forces. In fact, and this is the silver lining, violence, or rather the energetic opposition to it, has been one of the key constitutive elements in human civilization. Not surprisingly, the great Middle High German poet Walther von der Vogelweide (ca. 1190–ca. 1220) formulated the general complaint about the downfall of society because of violence and injustice in his meditative gnomic song “Ich saz ûf eime steine”:

stîg unde wege sint in benomen: untriuwe ist in der saze, gewalt vert ûf der strâze: fride unde reht sint sêre wunt. diu driu enhabent geleites niht, diu zwei enwerden ê gesunt. (The paths and roadways lie all blocked./Deception in ambush is always plotting;/Violence is in the streets marauding;/Peace and Right are sorely beset,/And if these two don’t soon get better,/The other three/Will have no franchise to be free.)124 His argument also aims for the well-being of soul and body, as he initially refers to the aporia of bringing together worldly honor, material wealth, and love of God (“Rich Goods, Good Repute, and Grace,” 10–12). Moreover, as long as neither Peace nor Right can be brought together, the other three aspects will also prove to be elusive as a unit. Walther does not offer final answers, and he does not seem to know how to overcome the human dilemma of striving both for the spiritual and the material at the same time, especially as peace and justice are undermined on a daily basis. What matters, however, is not how to identify the solution for this problem. Instead, Walther illustrates how important it is to embark on a critical discussion of these issues, instead of ignoring violence as a daily occurrence that cannot be suppressed.125 Many other writers, such as

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Chrétien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach, simply illustrate the issue by demonstrating the disastrous effects of violence in the military, specifically in the chivalric context, without, however, explicitly examining it in a critical fashion.126 By contrast, Walther raises his voice condemning violence outright and calls for the establishment of a strong legal system that would guarantee the realization of justice and peace. Many chroniclers joined in the chorus of critics who bitterly complained about violent, criminal activities, especially by members of the higher aristocracy who often utilized a convivium or festive meal with their “former” enemy to murder them surreptitiously.127 Obviously, the medieval world was certainly not a more peaceful and more nonviolent society than ours. The opposite, however, was also not the case, as I have argued above. Aggressive acts against women, such as rape, found negative mention in many literary texts, chronicles, and law books. Robbery and murder were rampant, and military threats from foreign people belonged to the common experience. Nevertheless, the existence of a fairly large number of law books documents that medieval society made great strides toward betterment of the social interactions and toward establishment of peace and justice.128 Despite constant threats of new riots, military actions by individual groups, and lawlessness oppressing not only the weak within society, but soci-ety at large, beginning in the early Middle Ages the Peace-of-God movements instilled hope and established concrete forms of control on violence.129 As Tomaû Mastnak observes, “The connection of the image of a peaceful and unitary Christian society with the ecclesiastical rethinking of violence was of crucial importance. The ideal of peace and oneness rested on the imperative that all violence among Christians must cease. Insisting on this led to recommendation that Christian violence be diverted to the non-Christian outside world and to justification for this diversion of Christian violence.”130 The price, of course, that this artificially imposed peace cost for the outside world was tremendous, which nobody in medieval Christendom ever took into account since “the others” were the pagans, Jews, and heretics. One of the most famous scholars, Peter Abelard, experienced physical violence firsthand when he was castrated on behalf of his wife’s uncle, Fulbert, because he did not want to make his marriage public and allegedly brought shame to the family for having impregnated Heloise. He reports in his Historia calamitatum: [O]ne night as I slept peacefully in an inner room in my lodgings, they bribed one of my servants to admit them and there took cruel vengeance on me of such appalling barbarity as to shock the whole world; they cut off the parts of my body whereby I had committed the wrong of which they complained. This treatment was severely condemned both by the public and the authorities, as the subsequent punishment meted out matched the nature of the crime: Then they fled, but the two who could be caught were blinded and mutilated as I had been, one of them being the servant who had been led by greed while in my service to betray his master.

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Abelard, however, did not have to suffer all by himself; instead the entire community was involved, especially his students and the clerks whose weeping and wailing “tormented with me…until I suffered more from their sympathy than from the pain of my wound, and felt the misery of my mutiliation [sic] less than my shame and humiliation.”131 The bodily violence committed against him, however, led to a public outcry sharply reflecting the degree to which twelfth-century Parisian society revolted against this kind of aggressive behavior and the breaking of the laws affecting the most famous love affair. Moreover, insofar as Abelard felt free enough to discuss this attack on his person in such a dramatic and public fashion, he succeeded in appealing to a wider audience to stand firm in its opposition to violence. However, in typical medieval manner, he also reports that his students requested him to consider the mutilation as a sign of God to free himself “from the temptations of the flesh and the distractions of the world so that I could devote myself to learning, and thereby prove myself a true philosopher not of the world but of God.”132 Violence is condemned and rejected, but when it cannot be avoided, most medieval writers attempt to find some explanation for its happening, identifying it as a sign of God. The tenth-century Gandersheim abbess Hrotsvit, along with many other medieval women writers, underscored this aspect with her account of martyrdom, which allowed the suffering individual to find at least some meaning in the seemingly absurd and paradoxical emergence of violence.133 Others, in their religious fervor, tried to impose as much suffering upon themselves as possible without directly committing suicide so as to pass out of this world quickly and to join with the beloved Godhead. As Jane Tibbetts Schulenberg has discovered, “[i]n fact, according to the literature of the period, one of the specific purposes behind the adoption of these rigorous austerities was to hasten or encourage premature death among these ‘impatient angels’ or holy women.”134 Both chroniclers and poets contributed to the same goal: to discuss the phenomenon of violence and to work toward combating, if not eliminating it altogether. This goal, however, was highly elusive, because violence constantly threatens to break out at all corners of human society, as Konrad von Würzburg demonstrates in his verse novella Heinrich von Kempten (ca. 1261).135 Although negative violence characterizes the first section of the narrative, with the steward at Emperor Otto’s court hitting a young prince, making his head bleed, and Heinrich von Kempten, the tutor of the prince, taking deadly revenge on the steward, the second part demonstrates that there is also positive violence. Here Heinrich serves in Emperor Otto’s army in a siege of Milan, although Otto had threatened him with death if he ever were to come near him. But when Otto is ambushed by the Milanese and about to be killed, Heinrich, who had just taken a bath in his tent set up farther away from the center of the military camp, comes to his rescue and saves him. Both performances by Heinrich reflect the intricate relationship between courtly manners and sheer physical violence. Curiously, the former cannot be maintained without the presence of the latter, as long as it is controllable by way of the laws and other forms of legitimacy.136 Violence—and by the same token love—stands at the crossroad of emotions, uncontrolled human feelings, physical actions, and their social and legal disciplining. This seems to be the most important point of all discussions about violence, both in the Middle Ages and today. Words, of course, cannot achieve anything concrete against violence, but they can initiate a thought process that will eventually lead to the

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establishment of specific institutional mechanisms and a code of laws with which violence can be effectively controlled. In this sense, the discourse of violence proves to be the very first and most important step toward this goal. Each person, each generation, and each people must move in this direction if they want to participate in the process of civilization. In this sense, my introductory comments about the impossibility of coming to terms with violence can now be retracted: it is important to talk about violence, as violence can exert its force only where the victims and the observers have been silenced or have not reached the point of understanding the meaning and significance of violence. In this sense the critical examination of violence, in whatever manifestation and from whatever culture and time period, offers hope for a better future as violence proves to be diametrically opposed to discourse and the communicative analysis of its roots, functions, and impact on society. From this perspective, the analysis of violence in the Middle Ages promises to help us solve our own problems with violence at large, as the rational discussion allows us to raise the consciousness against these destructive forces. This also would impose control mechanisms on the perennial danger resulting from love as one of the most passionate emotions in man. Contrary to modern expectations, many medieval writers spoke out against war and radically argued against the unhampered use of violence by the individual and the authorities to realize their political and material agendas. Radulf Niger, for example, argued against the Crusades in his De re militari (ca. 1187–1188), and Hugh of St. Victor, in his De institutione novitiorum, appealed to the disciplinary forces of the Church to guarantee the establishment of order and peace among the Christians.137 Nevertheless, the absolutely dominant public discourse, whether theological or courtlyliterary, idealized knightly combat as long as it followed the ethical codes of chivalry. Heinrich von Veldeke, for instance, in the portrait of Turnus in his Eneide, expressed clear criticism of knightly behavior that, based on the concept of revenge and rash decisions, resulted in the unjustified death of people and led to “unjust war.”138 Moreover, noncourtly outsiders such as giants, dwarves, monsters, and robber knights who acted according to their own value system to the detriment of the world of the Arthurian court were quickly condemned and cut into pieces as soon as their military prowess failed them, as in the case of Hartmann von Aue’s Erec and The Stricker’s Daniel von dem Blühenden Tal.139 In other words, violence was not considered to be violence when it was employed on behalf of the court, courtly ideals, and the well-being of society. Consequently, the swordfight and the joust became synonymous with an acceptable, if not idealized form of violence, whereas the use of the club by giants indicated monstrosity and lack of courtliness, making it permissible for the knights to attack the outsiders and kill them in defense of their political system.140 But even such simplistic categories of good and evil, of right and wrong easily proved to be opaque and required ever new definitions, as violence often occurred in the midst or in the shadow of the courts and undermined the traditional order; for example, the Green Knight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight challenged the very basic value system represented by King Arthur and his nephew Gawain.141 Even here violence is intimately connected with love, as the protagonist is tempted by Bercilak’s wife for three days to accept her seductive overtures. In that case, however, Gawain manages to resist the temptation and instead submits to the challenge of the violent Green Knight, who thus confirms Gawain’s outstanding honor and knightly virtue.

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The poetic and theological discourse on violence has continued since the Middle Ages, and our own times seem to be in the midst of highly divisive controversies regarding the value of properly employed, legitimized violence versus brute force, authority versus the individual’s privileges. Both from a medieval and a modern perspective, František Graus appropriately formulated: “Until now humanity has not been able to overcome the latent opposition of might versus justice—and will probably not achieve this goal in the near future.”142 This finds sad support in Hannah Arendt’s statement that “[t] he practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.”143 However, to raise the question regarding the validity and justification of violence both in the medieval world and in modern times offers hope for our future, as the discourse itself creates a superstructure that alone might be capable of truly limiting, channeling, and refunctionalizing violence for the betterment of humanity. After all, violence is a factor of life and we will not, despite all idealism, ever witness the disappearance of this most fundamental force of all existence—and perhaps we might not even want to see this happen as violence, just as love in its myriad manifestations, forms the basis of human culture. This also explains why some medieval poets such as Meo dei Tolomi resorted to highly violent language and vituperative images of their own mothers as a vehicle to fight against a literary tradition, to carve a personal niche as a courtly and urban poet; that is, according to Fabian Alfie, violence could be utilized as a poetic tool for some totally different purposes.144 In fact, as many of the contributors to this volume demonstrate, violence per se often did not necessarily reflect a particularly violent chivalric society; instead, violence functioned as a powerful vehicle for a wide range of functions within the literary discourse. As Hannah Arendt poignantly underscores: “Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate. Its justification loses in plausibility the farther its intended end recedes into the fature,”145 But from a cultural-historical perspective, we can agree with Peter Haidu: This is the aporetic basis of European civilization, as well as its American offshoot, incorporating an ideal of peace guaranteed by the State while remaining inexorably grounded in the incomplete control of State violence in the name of national and international peace. Ironically, as he adds, even the Church failed in its efforts to stop violence among individuals and on a more global level because [I]deology simply could not measure itself against the pleasures and perceived necessities of violence. We may go further, however. The economic base of the Church was the same socioeconomic system as that which produced the life, property, and profitability of lay manors. Its institutions reproduced the self-same structure of production, control, and abduction of surplus value from peasant forces of production, even when the latter were renamed “lay brothers.” The Church itself was caught in the aporia of producing an ideology that required violence.146

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Significantly, poets and artists have not failed in their effort to stand up against unjustified, illegitimate violence, and sometimes musical and textual elements of the Mass strongly lent themselves for inimetic desire and “scapegoat mechanisms” (terms coined by Rene Girard) aimed at criticizing vocally the use of physical violence within the Christian community, even at a time when the Church itself had turned into a Church militant.147 Not that the composers or writers were in charge of dealing with concrete, physical violence or could even intervene personally to stop meaningless killing. Literary and artistic reflections, however, such as in the outstanding late-thirteenth-century Icelandic Njal’s Saga, demonstrate the effectiveness of the discoursive strategy, either by illustrating the catastrophic consequences of murder or mayhem (such as in the anonymous Diu Klage, ca. 1210, and Heinrich Wittenwiler’s Ring, ca. 1400), or by exemplifying the constructiveness of peacefulness, lawfulness, justice, and a sense of community.148 Literary scholarship focused on the Middle Ages proves to be in an ideal position to explore the phenomena of violence, hatred, aggression, and also love, and to draw consequences for our present society. To conclude, the medieval world was not necessarily more violent than the modern world, but the historical mirror through which we perceive it makes it easier for us today to study the nature, function, and impact of all these human impulses and actions in a critical fashion. Certainly, it remains doubtful whether historical and literary studies on medieval violence might have any direct impact on containing violence today, but the subsequent contributions invite critical discussions, debate, investigations, and questions of timeless nature, especially as the term “violence” carries a myriad of different meanings, which forces us to be highly circumspect in the critical assessment of examples of violence in medieval literary texts. And it seems most pertinent to begin once again—or rather to continue—with this discourse as humanity has acquired the technological, chemical, and biological means to bring about the apocalypse of our own species. Tragically, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the boundaries between state terrorism and individual terrorism are dangerously blurred and endless numbers of people all over the world are suffering in physical, spiritual, religious, and material terms because of violence committed against them with no rational justification, research into the nature, origin, causes, and conditions of violence proves to be of greatest importance149. In this sense, I believe, medievalists have much to say about violence and how to cope with it and how to contain it today.150 Notes 1. I would like to thank Nancy Black, Brooklyn College, New York, and Raymond Cormier, Longwood University, Farmville, Virginia, for their valuable suggestions and comments regarding my introduction. 2. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (1969; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 8. She continues: “Anybody looking for some kind of sense in the records of the past was almost bound to see violence as a marginal phenomenon.” 3. See, for example, Eike von Repgow’s famous Middle High German lawbook, Sachsenspiegel, first composed in Latin shortly after 1220 and completed in 1235, later translated into Low German, The Saxon Mirror. A Sachsenspiegel of the Fourteenth Century, trans. Maria Dobozy. The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999)—the subtitle should read “Thirteenth Century.”

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4. For example, C.Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love. In Search of a Lost Sensibility. The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), focuses on the historical development of love from the early to the late Middle Ages. 5. See the insightful discussion of violence, justice, and human society by Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” Reflections. Essay, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 277–300. 6. One pertinent study among many others would be John D.Byrnes, Before Conflict: Preventing Aggressive Behavior (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Education, 2002). 7. Albrecht Classen, “The Downfall of a Hero: Siegfried’s Self-Destruction and the End of Heroism in the Nibelungenlied,” German Studies Review XXVI, 2 (2003): 295–314; see also the contribution to this volume by Scott E.Pincikowski, “Violence and Pain at the Court: Comparing Violence in German Heroic and Courtly Epics.” 8. Fanni Bogdanow, “The Evolution of the Theme of the Fall of Arthur’s Kingdom,” King Arthur. A Casebook. Ed. with an introduction by Edward Donald Kennedy. Arthurian Characters and Themes (1996; New York: Routledge, 2002), 91–103 (orig. published 1986). For further discussions of this highly disturbing phenomenon, see the contributions to this volume by Albrecht Classen, “Violence at King Arthur’s Court: Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Perspectives,” and Raymond Cormier, “The Consequences of Brutality and Violence in Medieval French Romance.” 9. Albrecht Classen, “Konig Marke in Gottfrieds von Straßburg Tristan: Versuch einer Apologie,” Amsterdamer Beitrage zur älteren Germanistik 35 (1992): 37–63; see also Tristan and Isolde. A Casebook. Ed. with an introduction by Joan Tasker Grimbert. Arthurian Characters and Themes (1995; New York: Routledge, 2002). 10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, ed. RolfPeter Horstmann and Judit Norman, trans. Judith Norman. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 41, 78. This observation finds uncanny confirmation in Jean E.Jost’s contribution to this volume, “Why Is Middle English Romance So Violent? The Literary and Aesthetic Purposes of Violence.” 11. Heinz-Horst Schrey, “Gewalt/Gewaltlosigkeit. I: Ethisch,” Theologische Realenzyklopadie, ed. Gerhard Müller. Vol. XIII (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1987), 168–78; here 168. 12. Robert McAfee Brown, Religion and Violence, 2nd ed. (1973; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1987), 7. 13. Barbara Whitmer, The Vioknce Mythos. SUNY Series, the Margins of Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 21–22. 14. M.F.Ashley Montagu, “The New Litany of ‘lnnate Depravity,’ or Original Sin Revisited,” Man and Aggression, ed. M.F.Ashley Montagu (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 3–17. He presents the convincing conclusion: “The myth of early man’s aggressiveness belongs in the same class as the myth of ‘the beast,’ that is, the belief that most if not all ‘wild’ animals are ferocious killers…. It is not man’s nature, but his nurture, in such a world, that requires our attention” (16). 15. Geoffrey Pearson, “Short Memories. Street Violence in the Past and in the Present,” The Violent Society, ed. Eric Moonman; foreword by Lord Scarman (London: Frank Cass, 1987), 13–46; here 39. 16. David Nicolle, Medieval Warfare Source Book: Christian Europe and Its Neighbours (London: Brockhampton Press, 1996), 8, highlights the significant fact that the European conquistadors still embraced the ideas of slavery and colonization both in the name of “civilization” and God. 17. Althochdeutsche Literatur. Eine Textauswahl mit Übertragungen, ed. Horst Dieter Schlosser (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1998), 60–63; for a discussion of the poem in English, see Marion E. Gibbs and Sidney M.Johnson, Medieval German Literature. A Companion. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, 1774 (New York: Garland, 1997), 34–36; now see also

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Scott Pincikowski’s article “Violence and Pain at the Court: Comparing Violence in German Heroic and Courtly Epics” in this volume. 18. See, for example, William C.McDonald, ‘“Too softly a gift of treasure’: A Reading of the Old High German Hildebrandslied,” Euphorion 78 (1984): 1–16; Albrecht Classen, “Why Do Their Words Fail? Communicative Strategies in the Hildebrandslied,” Modern Philology 93, 1 (1995): 1–22. 19. Robert A.Baron and Deborah R.Richardson, Human Aggression, 2nd ed. Perspectives in Social Psychology (1977; New York: Plenum Press, 1994). 20. The famous guidebook on love by Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love. With Introduction, Translation, and Notes by John Jay Parry. Records of Civilization (1941; New York: Norton, 1969), written about 1185/1190, insinuates that love serves as a key component in civilizing a young person: “Love causes a rough and uncouth man to be distinguished for his handsomeness; it can endow a man even of the humblest birth with nobility of character…O what a wonderful thing is love, which makes a man shine with so many virtues and teaches everyone, no matter who he is, so many good traits of character” (31). See also Jean E.Jost’s contribution to this volume, “Why Is Middle English Romance So Violent? The Literary and Aesthetic Purposes of Violence.” 21. Modern sociological research on aggression is legion; see, for example, Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973); Robert A.Baron and Deborah R.Richardson, Human Aggression, 2nd ed. Perspectives in Social Psychology (1977; New York: Plenum Press, 1994); Russell G.Geen, Human Aggression, 2nd ed. Mapping Social Psychology (1990; Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001). 22. For specific medieval perspectives, see Conflict in Medieval Europe. Changing Perspectives on Society and Culture, ed. Warren C.Brown and Piotr Górecki (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003). 23. Corinne Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S.Brewer, 2001); Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M.Rose, eds., Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 24. This was beautifully formulated by a young student at the University of Arizona, Bill Wetzel, writing a commentary for the Arizona Daily Wildcat, Jan. 24, 2003, “The art of a bloodless war” at: http://wildcat.arizona.cdu/papers/96/8l/03_3.html (last accessed on March 25, 2004). 25. Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter. Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt: Primus Verlag, 1997); see also the individual contributions by Althoff, Hanna Vollrath, and Philippe Buc in Medieval Concepts of the Past. Ritual, Memory, Historiography, ed. Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried, and Patrick J.Geary (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 26. Michael Richter, The Formation of the Medieval West. Studies in the Oral Culture of the Barbarians (New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1994); After Rome’s Fall Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History. Essays presented to Walter Goffart, ed. Alexander Callander Murray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). 27. Jose’ Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: Norton, 1960), 72. 28. See the well-informed introduction to Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West, ed. Guy Halsall (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 1998). Halsall raises the complex issues of when violence is considered legitimate and when illegitimate, the difference between public and private violence, and the problematic nature of feuds; for a broad overview of the early medieval period, see Roger Collins, Early Medieval Europe, 300–1000, 2nd ed. History of Europe (1991; New Yorfc Palgrave, 1999). 29. Augustine, Political Writings,. ed. E.M.Atkins and R.J.Dodaro (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 113. 30. Augustine, Political Writings, 114.

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31. Augustine, Political Writings, 117. 32. Augustine, Political Writings, 118. 33. An Aquinas Reader. Selections from the Writings of Thomas Aquinas. Ed., with an introduction by Mary T.Clark (Garden City: Image Books, 1972), 370, quoted from Summa Theology I-II, 95, a.l; for a detailed discussion of Thomas’s approach to cruelty, see Daniel Baraz, Medieval Cruelty. Changing Perceptions, Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period. Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 20–23.Thomas Aquinas, An Aquinas Reader, 371. 34. Thomas Aquinas, An Aquinas Reader, 371. 35. An Aquinas Reader, quoted from Summa of Theology II–II, q. 40, a.1. 36. An Aquinas Reader, 382, quoted from Summa of Theology II–II, q. 42, a.2, c.; John of Salisbury, Policraticus: of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of Philosophers, ed. Cary J. Nederman. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 37. Nancy Black, “Violence in La Queste del Saint Graal and La Mort le roi Artu (Yale 2290.”) 38. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott. 2 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); orig. published in German in 1939. 39. See the contributions to this question in Anger’s Past. The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. Barbara H.Rosenwein (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998); for a critique of Elias’s theory, see Gerd Schwerhoff, “Zivilisationsprozefi und Geschichtswissenschaft. Norbert Elias’ Forschungsparadigma in historischer Sicht,” Historische Zeitschrift 266 (1998): 561–605; see also Norbert Elisas und die Menschenwissenschaften. Studien zur Entste-hung und Wirkungsgeschichte seines Werkes, ed. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 1149 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996). 40. Eric A.Johnson and Eric H.Monkkonen, “Introduction,” The Civilization of Crime. Violence in Town and Country since the Middle Ages, ed. Eric A.Johnson and Eric H. Monkkonen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 5. 41. Julius R.Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 213. 42. This is powerfully demonstrated in Raymond Cormier’s contribution to this volume, “The Consequences of Brutality and Violence in Medieval French Romance.” 43. Michael Harney, “Violence in the Spanish Chivalric Romance,” in this volume. 44. Will Hasty, Art of Arms. Studies of Aggression and Dominance in Medieval German Court Poetry (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Carl Winter, 2002), 12. 45. Pamela Porter, Medieval Warfare in Manuscripts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); Weapons and Warfare, ed. John Powell. 2 vols. Vol. 1: Ancient and Medieval Weapons and Warfare (to 1500) (Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2002). 46. For a collection of relevant texts from late antiquity through the modern age, see Wege zur Tokranz. Geschichte einer europäischen Idee in Quellen. Edited, introduced, and explained by Heinrich Schmidinger (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002); for a critical examination of medieval manifestations of tolerance, see Cary J.Nederman, Worlds of Difference. European Discourse of Toleration, c. 1100-c. 1550 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); see also Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York: Routledge, 2002), with contributions by Cary J.Nederman, Alexander Sager, David F.Tinsley, and others. 47. See the excellent web page created by the Société de l’Oriflamme, last revised on 11 August 2001: http://xenophongroup.com/montjoie/albigens.htm (last accessed on March 25, 2004); for a historical overview, connecting religion with violence and courtly values, see Leo D. Lefebure’s article in this volume, “Authority, Violence, and the Sacred at the Medieval Court.”

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48. Albrecht Hagenlocher, Der guote vride. Idealer Friede in deutscher Ltteratur bis ins frühe 14. Jahrhundert. Historische Wortforschung, 2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1992); Stefan Hohmann, Friedenskonzepte. Die Thematik des Friedens in der deutschsprachigen politischen Lyrik des Mittelalters. Ordo, 3 (Cologne: Bohlau, 1992); Peace and Negotiation: Strategies for Coexistence in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Diane Wolfthal. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 4. (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000); Tomaz Mastnak, Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 49. For excellent illustrations, see Pamela Porter, Medieval Warfare in Manuscripts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); The Circle of War in the Middle Ages: Essays on Medieval Military and Naval History, ed. Donald J.Kagay and L.J.Andrew Villalon. Warfare in History (Rochester: Boydell Press, 1999); Richard W.Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 50. Cf.Mitchell B.Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel Pain and the Spectade of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); see also the still valuable study by Franz Heinemann, Der Richter und die Rechtspflege in der deutschen Vergangenheit. Monographien zur deutschen Kulturgeschichte, IV ([Leipzig: E. Diedrichs], 1900). 51. Richard W.Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe, 302–6. 52. For a critical examination of violence as part of the major problem in the establishment of the early-modern state, see Marcella L.Munson’s discussion of Christine de Pizan’s prose letters in her contribution to this volume. 53. Conflict in Medieval Europe. Changing Perspectives on Society and Culture, ed. Warren C. Brown and Piotr Górecki, (Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2003). 54. C.Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939–1210. The Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); Charles M.Radding, A World Made by Men: Cognition and Society, 400–1200 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). 55. Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Peter N.Stearns, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 30–31. 56. Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirrings: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), xxvi; see also the insightful concluding article by Barbara H.Rosenwein, “Controlling Paradigms,” Anger’s Past, 233– 47. 57. Will Hasty, Art of Arms, 10. 58. Jan-Dirk Muller, Spielregeln für den Untergang. Die Welt des Nibelungenliedes (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998), 443–50, drawing his theoretical model from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, describes the Burgundians in their final battle as a “Meute” (pack of hounds). 59. One of many examples can be found in the Spiegel Historiael from Ghent, ca. 1310–1330, where three episodes from the battle at Roncesval are shown on fol. 215r. In Martine Meuwse’s words, 235: “Blood drips from swords and gaping wounds are inflicted. Loose heads and horrifically mutilated corpses lie all over the battlefield” (235). Medieval Mastery. Book Illumination from Charkmagne to Charles the Bold, 800–1475 (Leuven: Davidsfonds and Brepols, 2002). For further examples, see http://www.gened.arizona.edu/aclassen/new_page_36.htm (last accessed on March 2004). 60. Will Hasty, Art of Arms, 10. 61. Jose Rabasa, Inventing America. Spanish Historiography and the Fortnation of Eurocentrism. Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993). 62. As Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law. Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), informs us, however, the relationship

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between both religious groups in medieval Europe underwent considerable change, from the doctrine of Jewish witness (Augustine) to Judaism as heresy (Franciscans and Dominicans). 63. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1997). 64. David Nirenberg, “The Rhineland Massacres of Jews in the First Crusade: Memories Medieval and Modern,” Medieval Concepts of the Past Ritual, Memory, Historiography, ed. Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried, and Patrick J.Geary (Washington, D.C./Cambridge, U.K.: German Historical Institute/Cambridge University Press, 2002), 279–309; see also Religious Violence between Christians and Jews. Medieval Roots, Modern Perspectives, ed. Anna Sapir Abulafia (Houndsmills, U.K.: Palgrave, 2002). A very negative picture is also drawn by Leonard B. Glick, Abraham’s Heirs. Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999). 65. See the famous speech “I Have a Dream” by Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr.,delivered on August 28, 1963: http://www.usconstitution.net/dream.htm; or http://www.mecca.org/~crights/dream.html; or http://www.ukans.edu/carrie/docs/texts/mlkdream/html (last accessed on March 25, 2004). 66. Quoted from the introduction to The Final Argument. The Imprint of Violence on Society in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Donald J.Kagay and L.J.Andrew Villalon (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 1998), xv. 67. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: 1960), 75. 68. Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt, 75. 69. See, for example, James R.King, “The Friar Tuck Syndrome: Clerical Violence and the Barons’ War,” The Final Argument, 27–52. 70. Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter A.Dykema and Heiko A.Oberman. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, LI (Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1993). 71. Pierre Rousselot, The Problem of Love in the Middle Ages, a Historical Contribution. Trans. with an Introduction by Alan Vincelette; reviewed and corrected by Pol Vandevelde. Marquette Studies in Philosophy, 24 (1907; Milwaukee, Wisc.: Marquette University Press, 2002). 72. Violence against Women in Medieval Texts, ed. Anna Roberts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998). 73. Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: The Free Press [Macmillan], 1987); here quoted from Corinne Saunders, Rape and Ravishment, 7. 74. Brent D.Shaw, “War and Violence,” Interpreting Late Antiquity. Essays on the Postclassical World, ed. G.W.Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 130–69. 75. Medieval Crime and Social Control, ed. Barbara A.Hanawalt and David Wallace. Medieval Cultures, 16 (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1999), x. 76. Quoted from Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty. Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 11. 77. Enders, 10. In her conclusion, Enders also observes: “there is a more universal aesthetics of cruelty that rhetoric helps to identify because so much of cruelty is indigenous to rhetoric” (232). 78. Claude Gauvard, “Fear of Crime in Late Medieval France,” Medieval Crime and Social Control 1–48. 79. L.Vones, “Potestas,” Lexikon des Mittelalters. Vol. VII (Munich: LexMA-Verlag, 1995), 131–33; K.Rottgers, “Gewalt,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter. Completely new edition by Rudolf Eisler. Vol. 3 (Basel-Stuttgart: Schwab, 1974), 562–70; see also the discussion of the terminological ambiguities by Siegfried R.Christoph in his contribution to this volume, “Violence Stylized.” 80. Ralph Paul de Gorog, Lexique Français Moderne-Ancien Français ([Athens]: University of Georgia Press, 1973), see “violence.”

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81. Here I refer to the online version: http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/00277885?query_type=word&queryword=violence&edit ion=2e&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&search_id=mdu6-rRa5wD12680&hilite=00277885 (last accessed on March 25, 2004). 82. Quoted from Hildegard Elisabeth Keller, My Secret Is Mine. Studies on Religion and Eros in the German Middle Ages. Studies in Spirituality, Supplement 4 (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 241. See also Richard von St. Viktor, Über die Gewalt der Liebe. Ihre vier Stufen. Einfuhrung und Übersetzung von Margot Schmidt. Münchener Universitäts-Schriften. Theologische Fakultat, Neue Folge, 8 (Munich: Ferdinand Schoningh, 1969), 66–68: “In tertio itaque gradu quodammodo mortificatur in Deum, in quarto quasi resuscitatur in Christum.” 83. Winsbechische Gedichte nebst Tirol und Fridebrant, ed. Albert Leitzmann. 3rd, newly revised ed. by Ingo Reiffenstein. Altdeutsche Textbibliothek, 9 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1962), stanza 38. 84. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose. Translated into English verse by Harry W.Robbins; edited and with an Introduction by Charles W.Dunn (New York: E.P.Dutton, 1962), 1686–95. 85. See the contributions by Corinne Saunders (“Violent Magic in Middle English Romance”) and Stacey L.Hahn (“Constructive and Destructive Violence in Jean d’Arras’ Roman de Mtlusine”) to this volume. 86. See, for example, Ketzer, Zauberer, Hexen. Die Anfange der europäischen Hexenverfolgungen, ed. Andreas Blauert. edition suhrkamp, 1577 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990); Gerhild Scholz Williams, Defining Dominion. The Discourses of Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern France and Germany. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Civilization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 87. Many discussions about the death penalty can be found on the Internet: http://www.ncadp.org/; http://www.aclu.org/DeathPenalty/DeathPenaltyMain.cfm; for arguments in favor, see http://www.prodeathpenalty.com; see also http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~critcrim/dp/dp.html (last accessed on March 25, 2004). 88. Neither the Lexikon des Mittelalters nor the Dictionary of the Middk Ages offers a specific entry on “violence.” Instead, they provide information about criminality and the laws. See, for instance, the various authors W.Schild, H.Ehrhardt, et al., discussing “Verbrechen,” Lexikon des Mittelalters. Vol. 8 (Munich: LexMA Verlag, 1997), 1485–94. In the Dictionary (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982–1989), criminal justice is diffusely considered in many different areas. 89. Clifford Davidson and Tom Seiler, Iconography of Hell Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph Series, 17 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992); Peter Dinzelbacher, Angst im Mittelalter. Teufels-, Todes- und Gotteserfahrung: Mentalitatsgeschichte und Ikonographie (Munich: Ferdinand Schoningh, 1996). 90. Winsbeckische Gedichte, see the mother-daughter dialogue, Die Winsbeckin, stanzas 27–29, 38. 91. Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 151–69; see also Hildegard Elisabeth Keller, My Secret Is Mine, 240–45. 92. For a brief survey of the relevant research literature on “violence in the Middle Ages,” see Yael Even, “Introduction,” Fifteenth-Century Studies 27. A special issue on Violence in Fifteenth-Century Text and Image, ed. Edelgard E.DuBruck and Yael Even (Rochester: Boydell/ Brewer, 2002), 1–6. 93. Some of these aspects I have examined in greater detail in my book Verzweiflung und Hoffnung. Die Suche nach der kommunikativen Gemeinschaft in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters. Beihefte zur Mediaevistik, 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002).

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94. See his contribution to this volume, “Violence and Communication in Shota Rustaveli’s The Lord of the Panther-Skin.” 95. Ibid. This point proves to be central to Gijsberg Koolemans Beynen’s chapter in this volume. 96. In this sense, Barbara Wertheim Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (New York: Knopf, 1978) offers an ideal metaphor for our own approach: the investigation of the past sheds considerable light on the present because of the hermeneutic distance. For further arguments supporting this approach, see http://www.gened.arizona.edu/aclassen/why_history.htm (last accessed on March 25, 2004). 97. Horst Fuhrmann, Überall ist Mittelalter. Von der Gegenwart einer vergangenen Zeit (Munich: Beck, 1996); Medievalism in Europe II, ed. Leslie J.Workmann and Kathleen Verduin. Studies in Medievalism, VIII (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S.Brewer, 1996); The Future of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Problems, Trends, and Opportunities for Research, ed. Roger Dahood. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 2 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1998). 98. Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty. Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999). 99. Stephen J.Kaplowitt, The Ennobling Power of Love in the Medieval German Lyric. University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures, 106 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Pierre Rousselot, The Problem of Love in the Middte Ages, 169–88, discusses the phenomenon of violent love in a spiritual, ecstatic context, in contrast to the element of physical love. 100. See Raymond Cormier’s article in this volume, “The Consequences of Brutality and Violence in Medieval French Romance.” 101. Moriz von Craun. Modern German translation from Middle High German, notes, and epilogue by Albrecht Classen (1992; Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 2000). 102. Elizabeth Archibald, Apollonius of Tyre. Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations. Including the text of the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri with an English translation (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S.Brewer, 1991); see also her study on incest in medieval literature: Incest and the Medieval Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). 103. See Stacey L.Hahn’s contribution to this volume, “Constructive and Destructive Violence in Jean d’Arras’ Roman de Mtlusine.” 104. Angelika Rieger, Trobairitz. Der Beitrag der Frau in der altokzitanischen höfischen Lyrik. Edition des Gesamtkorpus. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, 233 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991); Songs of the Women Trouvères. Edited, Translated, and Introduced by Eglal Doss-Quinby, Joan Tasker Grimbert, Wendy Pfeffer, and Elizabeth Aubrey (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001); Albrecht Classen, Late Medieval German Women’s Poetry. Library of Medieval Women (Woodbridge, U.K.: D.S.Brewer, forthcoming [2004]). 105. St. Paul to the Ephesians 5:22–33; to the Corinthians 14:34–35; in I Timothy 2:8–15; 3:8– 13; 5:1–5, 9–14; and to the Galatians 3:26–28; see Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe. A Sourcebook, ed. Ennlie Amt (New York: Routledge, 1993), 19–23. 106. Domestic violence can also be found sometimes affecting husbands, as a number of peasant satires implicate, but in those cases the narrator regularly expressed highly negative opinions about women and used the example of their aggressive behavior as a warning to men not to allow women to dominate them. For an analysis of such cases in medieval German literature, see my contribution to this volume, “Violence at King Arthur’s Court: Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Perspectives.” 107. Quoted from Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts, ed. Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), 7. 108. Suzanne Klerks, “The Pain of Reading Female Bodies in Marie de France’s ‘Guigemar,’” Dalhousie French Studies 33 (1995: Winter): 1–14; see also R.Howard Bloch, The

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Anonymous Marie de France (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), 51–82; there are, however, many readings that seem inaccurate and too generalizing here. 109. Sandra P.Thomas, ed., Women and Anger (New York: Springer, 1993). 110. Theodore M.Andersson, A Preface to the Nibelungenlied (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 115–17; see also the examples of violent women in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptamdron, Margaret Harper, “Violent Remedies: Feminine Aggression in the Heptaméron.” Martine Debaisieux and Gabrielle Verdier, eds., Violence et fiction jusqu’ à la la Rtvolution. Etudes Littéraires Françaises, 66 (Tübingen: Narr, 1998), 155–63. For a modern case study, see Patricia Pearson, When She Was Bad: Violent Women & the Myth oflnnocence (NewYork: Viking, 1997). 111. Mai und Beaflor. Eine Erzählung aus dem dreizehnten Jahrhundert. Dichtungen des deutschen Mittelalters, 7 (Leipzig: G.J.Göschen’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1848); Albrecht Classen, “Kontinuitat und Aufbruch: Innovative narrative Tendenzen in der spätmittelalterlichen deutschsprachigen Literatur. Der Fall Mai und Beaflor? Wirkendes Wort 48, 3 (1998): 324–44. 112. For an extensive study of the topic, see Nancy B.Black, Medieval Narratives of Accused Queens (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003). 113. Eve Salisbury, “Chaucer’s ‘Wife,’ the Law, and the Middle English Breton Lays,” Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts, 73–93. 114. Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times. Kinship, Household and Sexuality, trans. Richard Southern. Themes in the Social Sciences (1976; Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 122–25; see also my contribution to this volume, “Violence at King Arthur’s Court: Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Perspectives.” 115. For a discussion of the implied criticism in the Hildebrandslied, see my Verzweiflung und Hoffnung, 2002, 1–52; for Diu Klage, see the introduction to the English translation, The Lament of the Nibelungen (Div Chlage). Translated and with an Introduction by Winder McConnell. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994); see also my study “Trauer müssen sie tragen: Postklassische Ästhetik des 13. Jahrhunderts in der Klage,” Ostbairische Grenzmarken. Passauer Jahrbuch für Geschichte, Kunstund Volkskunde XLI (1999): 51–68. 116. Jan-Dirk Müller, Spielregeln für den Untergang, 1998, 443–55. He identifies the outcome of this epic as “Epidemie der Gewalt” (epidemics of violence), 443. 117. Scott E.Pincikowski, “Violence and Pain at the Court,” in this volume. 118. Heinrich Wittenwiler, Der Ring. Frühneuhochdeutsch/Neuhochdeutsch. Nach dem Text von Edmund Wießner ins Neuhochdeutsche übersetzt und herausgegeben von Horst Brunner (Stuttgart: Reclain, 1991); see my study “Wort und Gemeinschaft: Sprachliche Apokalypse in Heinrich Wittenwilers ‘Ring,’” Jahrbuch der Oswald von Wolkenstein Gesellschaft 8 (1994/1995): 141–57; from a communicative perspective, see my monograph Verzweiflung und Hoffnung, 401–35. 119. R.W.Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages. Middle Ages (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953), 118–69; Robert G.Sullivan, Justice and the Social Context of Early Middle High German Literature. Studies in Medieval History and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001), 161. With regard to the wide variety of texts from that time period, Sullivan states: “these passages indicate that both strict justice and love should be exercised.” Text quoted from “Vom Rechte”//“Sul Diritto,” a cura di Claudia Handl, traduzione dall’altotedesco medio e note di Paola Spazzali. Medioevo Tedesco. Studi e Testi, 2 (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 1998), 54–58. 120. Quoted from Richard Kaeuper, “The Societal Role of Chivalry in Romance,” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L.Krueger (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 97–114; here 110. 121. Kaeuper, “The Societal Role,” 103.

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122. Wernher der Gartenaere, Helmbrecht, ed. Friedrich Panzer and Kurt Ruh. 10th ed. by HansJoachim Ziegeler. Altdeutsche Textbibliothek, 11 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993); for a critical study of the treatment of criminality and violence, see Anton Schwob, “Das mittelhochdeutsche Märe vom ‘Helmbrecht’ vor dem Hintergrund der mittelalterlichen ordoLehre,” Geistliche und weltliche Epik des Mittelalters in Österreich., ed. David McLintock, Adrian Stevens, and Fred Wagner. Goppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 446 (Goppingen: Kümmerle, 1987), 1–16. 123. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, 76. 124. Lyrics of the Middle Ages. An Anthology, ed. James J.Wilhelm (New York: Garland, 1990), 214, v. 20–25; see also Die Gedichte Walthers von der Vogelweide, ed. Karl Lachmann. 13th ed. by Hugo Kuhn (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965), 10, or L. 8:23–27. 125. See the article by Siegfried R.Christoph, “Violence Stylized,” in this volume. He rightly argues that violence within the courtly context served as a catalyst to create disillusionment, shock, disapproval, and ultimately a courtly disciplining of the individual protagonist. 126. Elisabeth Lienert, “Zur Diskursivitat der Gewalt in Wolframs ‘Parzival,’” Wolfram-Studien XVII (2002): 223–45; here 241; she reaches the refreshingly critical perspective that “[t]here is no coherent treatment of violence against women. Non-aggression is expected from women, and women only. Violence against women ends up in reconciliation of female autoaggression. Utopian concepts of reconciliation come at the cost of the female victims of violence…. Preferably, violence against women (and their suffering) is sexualized and ridiculed; so women’s status as victims is perpetuated in and by the text itself” (245). See also my contribution to this volume, “Violence at King Arthur’s Court: Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Perspective.” 127. A number of examples are cited by Gerd Althoff, “Der frieden-, bündnis- und gemeinschaftsstiftende Charakter des Mahles im früheren Mittelalter,” Essen und Trinken in Mittelalter und Neuzeit. Vorträge eines interdisziplinären Symposions vom 10–13 Juni 1987 an der Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, ed. Irmgard Bitsch, Trude Ehlert, and Xenja von Ertzdorff (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1987), 13–25; here 22–24. 128. See, for example, the famous Sachsenspiegel written by Eike von Repgow between 1225 and 1235: The Saxon Mirror. A Sachsenspiegel of the Fourteenth Century, trans. Maria Dobozy. The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); for a critical study of how medieval states imposed law and order, see Alan Harding, Medieval Law and the Foundations of the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 191–251. 129. The Peace of God. Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000, ed. Thomas Head and Richard Landes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992); Dominique Barthémy, L’an mil et la paix de dieu. La France chrétienne et féodale, 980– 1060 (Paris: Fayard, 1999). 130. Tomaû Mastnak, Crusading Peace. Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 34. 131. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Translated with an Introduction by Betty Radice (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin, 1974), 75. 132. Abelard,77. 133. See especially her drama Duldtius; Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, A Florilegium ofher Works. Translated with Introduction, Interpretative Essay, and Notes by Katharina M.Wilson. Library of Medieval Women (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S.Brewer, 1998); see also Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex. Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500–1100 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 393–401. 134. Tibbetts Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex, 397; surprisingly, many of these ascetic women lived much longer lives than they actually wanted, 401. 135. Rudiger Brandt, Konrad von Würzburg. Ertrage der Forschung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987), 117–22; Beate Kellner, “Der Ritter und die nackte Gewalt. Rollenentwiirfe in Konrads von Würzburg ‘Heinrich von Kempten,’”

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Literarische Leben. Rollenentwürfe in der Literatur des Hoch- und Spätmittelalters. Festschrift für Volker Mertens, ed. Matthias Meyer and Hans-Jochen Schiewer (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002), 361–84. 136. Beate Kellner, “Der Ritter,” 383; see also Hartmut Kokott, Konrad von Würzburg. Ein Autor zwischen Auftrag und Autonomie (Stuttgart: Hirzel, 1989), 94–100. 137. Udo Friedrich, “Die Zähmung des Heros. Der Diskurs der Gewalt und Gewaltregulierung im 12. Jahrhundert,” Mittelalter. Neue Wege durch einen alten Kontinent, ed. Jan-Dirk Muller and Horst Wenzel (Stuttgart: Hirzel, 1999), 149–79; here 158, 161–62. 138. See William C.McDonald’s contribution to this volume, “Turnus in Veldeke’s Eneide: The Effects of Violence.” 139. Hartmann von Aue, Erec. Translated with an Introduction and Commentary by Michael Resler (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987); Der Stricker, Daniel of the Blossoming Valley (Daniel von dem Blühenden Tal), trans. Michael Resler. Garland Library of Medieval Literature, Series B, 58 (New York: Garland, 1990); see also Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 140. This was often expressed in parody literature; see Kathryn Gravdal, Vilain and Courtois. Transgressive Parody in French Literature of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Regents Studies in Medieval Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). 141. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. A Dual-Language Version, edited and translated by William Vantuono. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, 1265 (New York: Garland, 1991); see the contributions by Jean E.Jost (“Why Is Middle English Romance So Violent? The Literary and Aesthetic Purposes of Violence”) and Corinne Saunders (“Violent Magic in Middle English Romance”) to this volume. 142. František Graus, Gewalt und Recht im Verständnis des Mittelalters. Basler Beiträge zur Geschichtswissenschaft, 134 (Basel: Helbing and Lichtenhahn, 1974), 20. “Bisher hat die Menschheit den latenten Gegensatz von Macht und Recht nicht zu meistern vermocht—und wird es wohl in absehbarer Zeit auch nicht können” (20). 143. Hannah Arendt, On Violence, 80. 144. See his contribution to this volume, “The Violent Poetics of Inversion, or The Inversion of Violent Poetics: Meo dei Tolomei, His Mother, and the Italian Tradition of Comic Poetry.” 145. Hannah Arendt, On Violence, 52. 146. Peter Haidu, The Subject of Violence, 201, 202; surprisingly, Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 435–36, was inspired by a deeply rooted optimism regarding human violence: “It is legitimate to imagine that man will complete the full circle and construct a society in which no one is threatened…. To achieve this aim is tremendously difficult for economic, political, cultural, and psychological reasons…; but the empirical study of all data shows that a real possibility exists to build such a world in a foreseeable future if the political and psychological roadblocks are removed.” See also the contribution by Leo D. Lefebure to this volume, “Authority, Violence, and the Sacred at the Medieval Court.” 147. See the contribution to this volume by Julia W.Shinnick, “Mimetic Crisis in the Medieval Mass.” 148. Njal’s Saga, trans. Magnus Magnusson and Hermann. Pálsson (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1960), 159, 175, 208–09; now see also the new translation by Robert Cook (London: Penguin, 1997). 149. Wendell Berry, “A Citizen’s Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” Orion (March-April 2003), now available online at: http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/03–2om/berry.html (last accessed on March 25, 2004). 150. Michael Harney, in his contribution to this volume (“Violence in the Spanish Chivalric Romance”), draws powerful parallels between late-medieval Spanish romances and modern-

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day TV cartoons and movies. The repellent delight in graphic violence both then and today can be explained by surprisingly similar motives on the part of the viewers/readers.

1 Authority, Violence, and the Sacred at the Medieval Court LEO D.LEFEBURE The legitimation of governing authority and of certain uses of violence was central to the life of the medieval court. Since ancient times and throughout the Middle Ages, religion played the dominant role in either authorizing or challenging the exercise of authority and violence. During the early Middle Ages, Christianity came to shape and eventually dominate more and more of the life of Europe outside of Muslim-ruled Spain and Sicily.1 While pre-Christian cultic practices often lingered among the lower classes, by roughly 1000 C.E., the rulers of Western and Northern Europe had largely embraced the Christian faith and used Christian symbols to buttress their authority. Early medieval Christian missionaries used a “trickle-down” approach to conversion, focusing attention on kings and nobles and trusting that other classes of society would follow their lead. The conversion of the early medieval courts was the gateway to establishing a Christian culture. Since ancient times religions had proclaimed paths of peace and visions of harmony; nonetheless, the history of religions, including Christianity, is steeped in violence and bloodshed, often justified in the name of God’s will. Religious beliefs and practices often have had a powerful force in shaping society for both better and worse. Indeed, sociologist Rodney Stark has argued that the social effects of monotheism are among the most powerful in all of human history, leading both to missionary impulses and to violent conflicts.2 One of the most striking characteristics of medieval courtly culture is the religious valorization of military service and the selective authorization of violence. Often candidates for knighthood passed a night vigil in church, went through a ceremonial bath reminiscent of baptism, were knighted with the sign of the cross, and had their swords blessed for holy use.3 Medieval crusaders went into battle wearing the sign of the cross with the motto, “Deus vult!” (God wills it). Violence can be defined as “the attempt of an individual or group to impose its will on others through any nonverbal, verbal, or physical means that inflict psychological or physical injury.”4 From at least the dawn of recorded history, religious traditions have played a major role in justifying violent attacks on others. Religious symbols are profoundly ambiguous: they can mediate the power of healing love and foster healthy communities, and they can serve to foment hatred and warfare and to buttress unjust social, economic, and political structures. The medieval court inherited a complex and conflicting heritage of perspectives on legitimate authority and violence from the Bible and early Christianity. The Bible both praised kings as the specially chosen representatives of God and excoriated them as sinful products of a disobedient people. In different settings, the Christian tradition variously

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forbade all violence as contrary to the will of God or directly commanded it as the will of God. Medieval kings and knights looked to biblical models such as Abraham, Gideon, David, and Judas Maccabeus, who were believed to have fought and triumphed through God’s help. Statues of the kings and queens of Israel looked down on those entering medieval cathedrals, offering venerable precedents for the sacred exercise of royal power. The sacralization of religious violence at the medieval court has its roots in the complex and conflicting relationships that have connected and divided the three Abrahamic traditions from the beginning. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam present themselves as paths of peace with visions of reconciliation and harmony for the entire human community. The three traditions intertwine in many important ways. Christianity has an internal relationship to Judaism because Jesus and his first followers were themselves Jews and because Christians accept the Jewish scriptures as part of their own Bible. Nonetheless, the New Testament frequently criticizes Jewish leaders and, at times, “the Jews” in very harsh terms. Islam has an internal relationship to both Judaism and Christianity because the Qur’an accepts many Israelite leaders and Jesus as genuine prophets sent by God. The Qur’an harshly attacks Jews and Christians for distorting the earlier revelations given by God to Moses and Jesus and for rejecting the message delivered by Muhammad. From the beginning, the relationships among these three traditions have been troubled. Each tradition has at times viewed the others extremely negatively and has understood God’s will to justify and even demand violent attacks upon other religious traditions. Medieval Christians believed that the Jews were condemned by God to continued existence in misery in punishment for the crime of killing Christ, and they saw Muslims as enemies of God and representatives of the Antichrist who were to be resisted and, in many cases, put to death. Muslim attitudes were ambivalent. On the one hand, the Qur’an urges Muslims to have good relations with Jews and Christians; on the other hand, certain passages forbid friendship or contact with them. Even though each tradition clearly rejects attacks on civilian populations, all three traditions have at times violated their own best moral principles and invoked God’s will as support for indiscriminate violence. This chapter begins by examining various models for viewing kingly authority and violence in the Christian Bible and the history of early Christianity. It will then explore perspectives on sacred governing authority and violence in early medieval Europe. The Gregorian Reform of the eleventh century profoundly transformed Western European understandings of both authority and violence, secularizing the rule of emperors and kings, sacralizing the wars against Muslims, introducing a new era of persecutions of Jews, and preparing the way for Pope Innocent III’s unprecedented exercise of power over earthly courts. This chapter closes by examining some aspects of the ideal of chivalry that developed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Perspectives on Authority and Violence in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures The Hebrew Bible is profoundly ambivalent about human kings. The earliest traditions of Israel viewed God alone as king; and the prophet Samuel, who anointed the first monarchs, was very skeptical concerning the prospects of kingship in Israel, When

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Israelites asked him to select a king, he warned them that kings would draft their sons as soldiers, take their daughters to be servants, confiscate their fields and orchards for his courtiers, and steal their slaves and livestock (1 Sam 8:11–18). Samuel interpreted the people’s desire for a king as a direct rejection of God’s rule over them (1 Sam 8:7–8). One trajectory of the Hebrew Bible views kings as a concession to human sinfulness, a necessary evil in a world in which the Israelites refused to be ruled directly by God. A long line of prophets, from Samuel to Nathan, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, and Amos, stood up to earthly monarchs and denounced their conduct. The biblical view of monarchy as the result of sin and pride would echo centuries later in the perspectives of Augustine of Hippo and Pope Gregory VII, fornishing the most powerful biblical critique of the sacred claims of medieval emperors and kings. In sharp contrast, another strand of the Hebrew Bible delights in kings as the specially chosen representatives of God’s power in this world, as mediators between YHWH and Israel who are to bring about order and justice.5 The psalms repeatedly echo the praises of God and the king together. God proclaims: “I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill” (Ps 2:6). The king in response rejoices: “I will tell the decree of the Lord: He said to me, ‘you are my son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession’” (Ps 2:7–8). Sigmund Mowinkel noted that ancient Israel oscillated between the older ideal of a desert chieftain who ruled because of his corporate identity with the tribe and the Canaanite and Mesopotamian view of the king as a ruler with a special relation to God or the gods.6 The desert ideal was relatively more democratic, viewing the king as a representative of the people; the Canaanite and Mesopotamian ideal saw the king as representing the gods and in some way as divine. Long before there were human kings in Israel, there was a strong sense that God alone was king, a mighty warrior who fought on behalf of the Israelites. The roots of sacralized violence in the Abrahamic traditions reach back to earliest accounts of the history of Israel. Early Israelite attitudes to violence were shaped by the tradition of the holy war, which was common throughout the ancient Near East. It was widely believed that as human kings and warriors marched out to battle on Earth, gods and heavenly armies also participated in the conflict.7 The victors ruled through the good pleasure of their gods. Ancient Israelites believed that YHWH went to war on their behalf (cf. Judg 5:19–20; Is 14:21). Biblical hymns often praise God’s victorious power in battle (Deut 33:2–3; Num 10:35–36; Ps 24; Isa 35; Hab 3:3–60). Ancient Israel saw God as a warrior who intervened in historical events, shaping the outcome of human struggles.8 Immediately after the deliverance of the Israelites at the Sea of Reeds, Moses and the Israelites sing: “The Lord is a warrior; the Lord is his name. Pharaoh’s chariots and his army he cast into the sea” (Exod 15:3). It is characteristic of the early holy war tradition that God intervenes directly, fighting for the Israelites and striking Israel’s enemies with terror (Exod 15:4–16). In later generations, God is said to call forth judges like Gideon (Judg 6:11–18) and to have supported them in battle. When Gideon protested that his clan was the weakest in the tribe, God responded: “But I will be with you, and you shall strike down the Midianites, every one of them” (Judg 6:16). Gideon and his army later triumphed against overwhelming odds (Judg 7). God also reportedly instructed the prophet Samuel on the anointing of Saul and David as kings (1 Sam 12:6–25; 16:1–13).

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Centuries later, Judas Maccabeus led the Jewish army against the Syrians. When his soldiers were dismayed by the overwhelming might of the Syrian army, Judas Maccabeus told them: “It is easy for many to be hemmed in by few, for in the sight of Heaven there is no difference between saving by many or by few. It is not on the size of the army that victory in battle depends, but strength comes from Heaven…. He himself will crush them before us; as for you, do not be afraid of them” (1 Macc 3:18, 22). In this struggle God no longer intervenes directly in the fighting as in Exodus, but the soldiers are confident of God’s support.9 They meet in a solemn assembly, put on sackcloth and ashes and fast; they study the scriptures to learn the will of God (1 Macc 3:46–60). Strengthened by the memory of the victory over the Egyptians at the Sea of Reeds, Judas Maccabeus led his forces to victory, slaughtering thousands along the way (e.g., 2 Macc 12:17–28; 15:25– 30). According to the Hebrew Bible, at least some ancient Israelites believed that in holy wars God demanded the complete or near complete extermination of enemy tribes. Susan Niditch has described the variety of attitudes toward war in the Hebrew Bible.10 Sometimes the slaughter of enemies was justified as a sacri0ce pleasing to God (Deut 2:34–35; Josh 6:17–21; 8:2, 24–28; 10:28–40; 11:14). At other times the members of the enemy tribe appear as sinners deserving of death, for example, because they were idolaters who would tempt the Israelites to worship false gods (Deut 13:12–18; 20:16– 18). The Book of Deuteronomy orders the Israelites to slay all the inhabitants of the Promised Land “so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God” (Deut 20:18). The priestly tradition of ancient Israel saw the enemy tribe as unclean and thus deserving of death, although sometimes there were a few exceptions. According to the Book of Numbers, Moses demanded that all males of the Midian tribe of whatever age be killed, along with all women who have known sexual intercourse; only female virgins were to be spared (Num 31:17–18). Presumably, these could be purified, made strictly clean, joined in marriage to Israelite men, and thereby incorporated into the people. Meanwhile, the bardic tradition of Israel glorified war as beautiful and noble, honoring the courage and heroism of warriors (1 Sam 17:1–54; 2 Sam 2:12–16; 2 Kings 6:22–23; 2 Chron 28). In this perspective war appears as a game that must be played according to the rules for the sake of glory and honor. Instead of the mass slaughter of the holy war tradition, prisoners were allowed to return home. There was the beginning of a code of a just war emerging in this tradition (Gen 14; 1 Sam 30). Aspects of this model would reappear centuries later in medieval ideals of chivalry. Historical evidence strongly indicates that the wholesale massacres described in the Bible never took place, at least on the scale claimed.11 Jewish Scholar Jon D.Levenson describes some of the conquest narratives as “a genocidal Blitzkrieg”; he comments that even though the accounts are not historically accurate, the vision they present “is not a pleasant ideal to contemplate.”12 The later rabbinic tradition of post-biblical Judaism would view the wars of conquest as a unique situation that offered no precedent for later wars, and some later Jewish commentators would interpret the struggle against the Amalekites as a symbolic metaphor for fighting genocidal evil.13 Nonetheless, the narratives of violence remained for later generations of Christians as powerful models of divine aid in battle and even for the mass murder of defeated foes, a practice that would be gruesomely reenacted in the conquest of Jerusalem by the First Crusade in July 1099.

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The Hebrew Bible also presents a prophetic vision of a peaceful community of nations, a world from which violence is banished. Isaiah proposed a moving vision of peace, of beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks (Isa 2:4). Isaiah proclaimed the hope that the wolf would live with the lamb, that nations would live in peace, and the poor and oppressed would find justice (Isa 11:1–9). Although never realized, this utopian vision remained a constant challenge to any easy acceptance of the violence of history. It provided an alternative to the dominant worldview, which would inspire early medieval monks, Francis of Assisi, and other medieval church leaders who struggled to limit or end violence. In the New Testament Jesus issued a startling command to love one’s enemies, to pray for one’s persecutors, and not to retaliate against evil (Matt 5:44–45).14 On the night he was taken prisoner, Jesus refused to allow his followers to defend him by the sword (Matt 26:51–54). Like the vision of Isaiah, Jesus’ own teachings inspired some medieval Christians but for the most part were not taken seriously as practical wisdom for a violent world. For medieval Christians, the teaching of Paul generally proved much more influential: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore, whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment” (Rom 13:1–2). Much of the New Testament draws upon the apocalyptic literature of contemporary Judaism, which saw history as a bitter struggle between the forces of good and evil. The Book of Revelation continues in a new context the ancient tradition of the Israelite holy war, viewing the Roman Empire as the power of evil in the world and looking forward to Jesus Christ, the divine warrior who will come to destroy its pride (Rev 19:11–21).15 This image would inspire generations of medieval Christian warriors who went to battle in the name of Christ. The Legitimation of Authority and Violence in Early Christianity Early Christians differed over the question of whether violence and the use of military force were ever justified and whether Christians could participate in armies and wars. The teaching of Jesus on nonviolence in the Sermon on the Mount and the example of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane were decisive for some. Justin Martyr in the second century rejoiced at the military victories of Israel in earlier times (Dialogue with Trypho 139); but he told his Jewish interlocutor, Trypho, that Christians have turned away from war and every form of slaughter and, following the instructions of Isaiah, have turned their swords into plowshares and their spears into farming tools (110.3). Tertullian and Origen understood the Gospel to call Christians to avoid all forms of military activity.16 Origen interpreted the mass murders of ancient Israelite wars as allegorical accounts of inner spiritual battles against evil. What was crucial for Origen was that Jesus had forbidden killing of any kind (Against Celsus 3.7–8). There were, nonetheless, Christians who served in the Roman Empire’s armies (see Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.5.3–4); Tertullian, Apology 37, 42; On Idolatry 19), including the armies of Constantine. The victory of Constantine at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in Rome in 312 led to a profound change in the relation of Christianity to the Roman Empire, which would shape

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the entire Middle Ages. Even though Constantine was baptized only at the end of his life, he exercised care for the church, convoking a synod of bishops at Arles in 314 and a general council of bishops at Nicaea in 325. Eusebius of Caesarea described Constantine’s role prior to and during the meeting at Nicaea: “He exercised a peculiar care over the church of God: and whereas, in the several provinces there were some who differed from each other in judgment, he, like some general bishop constituted by God, convened synods of his ministers. Nor did he disdain to be present and sit with them in their assembly, but bore a share in their deliberations.”17 Eusebius presented Constantine as “the image of Christ,” that is, the representative of God in the world, as the friend of God and of the Logos. Constantine for Eusebius was an almost divine figure taking the place of the Logos on Earth: “This is He who holds a supreme dominion over this whole world, Who is over and in all things, and pervades all things visible and invisible: the Word of God. From Whom and by Whom our divinely favored emperor, receiving, as it were, a transcript of the Divine sovereignty, directs, in imitation of God himself, the administration of the world’s affairs.”18 Constantine assembled bishops from across the empire to his palace at Nicaea for the first ecumenical council. Eusebius presented the concluding banquet as almost a dream, an image of the kingdom of Christ, now already present in the emperor. For Eusebius and Constantine, the Roman Empire, under the leadership of a Christian ruler, was the great external sign of divine providence. The Christian Church and the Roman Empire, united together in harmony, offered an earthly image of the celestial court. Indeed, Church and Empire were nearly identical. In the last years of his reign, Constantine called himself Isapostolos, “equal of the apostles.”19 In effect, Eusebius and Constantine continued in a new context the ancient Mesopotamian and Israelite ideal of rule by a monarch with a special relation to the gods. This perspective would have a powerful influence on the imperial court in Byzantium throughout the Middle Ages and on early medieval understandings of empire in Western Europe. Eusebius’s model did not go unchallenged, however. About a century later, the young Augustine of Hippo reflected hopefully upon the providential significance of the Roman Empire for the church; as he grew older, however, he became more aware of the ambiguity of power. On the one hand, he praised Constantine and Theodosius as model Christian emperors, and he set forth the criterion for truly Christian rulers: Rather we say that they are happy if they rule justly if they are not lifted up by the talk of those who accord them sublime honours or pay their respects with an excessive humility, but remember that they are only men; if they make their power the handmaid of His majesty by using it spread His worship to the greatest possible extent.20 On the other hand, the mature Augustine fiercely undercut the soaring confidence of Eusebius in the virtues of a Christian Roman Empire. Augustine saw the new alliance of church and empire as a source of “greater danger and temptation.”21 Augustine doubted the possibility of a fully Christian state and questioned whether the Roman Empire was in any way directly linked to God’s plan. He believed that most of human history, with the partial exception of ancient Israel and the Catholic Church, is dominated by the power of fallen angels.22

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In practice, Augustine had extremely low expectations for earthly rulers and saw any empire as a tragic necessity because of the fall of Adam and Eve. Secular states, he thought, are not directly willed by God. They were not necessary in Paradise; because of the fall, they are now necessary to restrain evil through coercion. Augustine believed that no form of government could assure true justice in this world, and he questioned cynically: “Justice removed, what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers? What are bands of robbers but little kingdoms?”23 He quoted with approval Cicero’s story of the challenge of a captured pirate to Alexander the Great. When the great emperor asked the pirate how he dared to infest the sea, the captain replied boldly: “The same as you do when you infest the whole world; but because I do it with a little ship I am called a robber, and because you do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor.”24 For Augustine, the Roman Empire, far from being the ultimate work of God’s providence, was one more human empire, which could fail and probably would. Rome’s destiny was at best only marginally connected to the City of God. Its virtues had come at too high a cost, and it had accomplished little good with its wealth and power (City of God 5.17; 217–18). Augustine noted pointedly that earlier empires had often lasted far longer than the Roman Empire had to date and challenged: “But to wage war against neighbours, and to go on from there against others, crushing and subjugating peoples who have done no harm, out of the mere desire to rule, what else is this to be called than great robbery?”25 Rejecting the hope that any human society could be a direct model of the heavenly court, Augustine proposed a radically different vision of church and empire from that of Eusebius. The church for Augustine is not the body of the saved but a corpus permixtum, a mixed body, a field of both wheat and tares, of saints and sinners. Humans cannot discern who is in the City of God and who is not. Augustine came to see all history outside of scripture as opaque and ambivalent in relation to its ultimate meaning. Outside of the Bible, Augustine found no sacred signs to interpret the meaning of history. What we do know of history teaches us more about original sin than about providence. For Augustine, there are two forms of love: caritas, the self-giving love centered on God, and cupiditas, the love centered on a fragmentary, divided, conflicted self, which is out of control and tends to self-destruction. Each type of love builds a city, either the City of God or the City of the Devil: Two cities, then, have been created by two loves; that is, the earthly love of self extending even to contempt of god, and the heavenly love of God extending to contempt of self. The one, therefore, glories in itself, the other in the Lord; the one seeks glory from men, and the other finds its highest glory in God, the Witness of our conscience. (City of God 14.28; 632) The true meaning of each person’s history is the internal story of the effect of God’s love on human lives; the true meaning of world history is the struggle between the two cities throughout history. This struggle, however, is in large measure beyond our knowledge or ability to control. The decisions of human hearts are evident fully to God alone, and only God’s grace can transform human hearts, implanting caritas within. As a result, Augustine viewed the particular form of government with relative indifference. Since

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earthly life is soon over, Augustine questioned, “[W]hat difference does it make under what rule a man lives who is soon to die, provided only that those who rule him do not compel him to do what is impious and wicked?” (City of God 5.17; 217). Confronted with the question of whether war can ever be justified, Augustine proposed the theology of the just war that would be accepted for centuries. Augustine argued that the righteous could be forced to oppose the wicked (City of God 19.7). The aim of seeking peace is not by itself justification for war, for every belligerent seeks peace through conquest. To be just, wars must be declared by a just authority, involve a just cause, and be waged with right intention and with proper means. Just causes include defense of one’s nation and customs, and recovery of what has been unjustly taken. Right intention means that there is no ulterior motive and that war is the only way of resolving the problem. The criterion of proper means forbids attacks on unarmed civilian populations. At times, Augustine would argue, one has a positive duty to fight to defend one’s community. When Count Boniface, the Roman governor of Africa, wished to retire from military life and political administration and become a monk after the death of his wife, Augustine wrote to him, urging him to follow God’s will by serving as a soldier. Augustine noted that David was praised by God for being a soldier, that Jesus lauded the centurion for his faith, that Cornelius was converted, and John the Baptist had told Roman soldiers to be content with their pay; he did not tell them to leave the army (Letter 189.4).26 Citing Paul’s advice to stay in one’s own condition (1 Cor 7:7), Augustine urged Boniface not to retire from military activities but to continue the struggle: “Thus others [monks] fight for you against invisible enemies by praying; you work for them against visible barbarians by fighting” (Letter 189.5). Later medieval commentators would teach that a soldier in a just war could kill without sin.27 It was also Augustine who established the theology of repression that would dominate a millennium and more of Catholic practice.28 As we have seen, Augustine’s application of the two forms of love, caritas and cupiditas, to the history of the world in The City of God led him to secularize history and the Roman Empire. This perspective could have led Augustine to deny any religious role to the state. However, when confronted by the Donatist heretics in North Africa, Augustine turned to the power of the state to persecute his opponents, imprisoning them and destroying their churches.29 He justified the persecution of heretics through an allegorical interpretation of the parable of the wedding banquet. Jesus said, referring to the unwilling guests: “Force them to come in” (Luke 14:23).30 Augustine took this as a divine mandate for the repression of heretics by the Christian emperor. Ironically, Augustine concluded that Christian charity itself demands coercion. He advised Christian emperors to study attentively the examples of Old Testament Kings Hezekiah and Josiah destroying the idolatrous high places, the example of the Persian Darius destroying idols, of the king of Nineveh decreeing penance for all, and of Roman Emperor Theodosius throwing down the statues of Jupiter.31 Even though Augustine himself did not call for the use of torture or execution and in fact forbade it, he set an important precedent for medieval Christian rulers who would not always be so restrained. Sacred Authority in the Early Middle Ages

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In the century after Augustine’s death in 431, popes increasingly asserted their authority over the church in Western Europe and began relating in new ways to kings and emperors. Pope Leo I (440–461) argued that the pope and the emperor should restrict themselves to their own respective area of responsibility and competence, and he complained when the Byzantine emperor tried to interfere in doctrinal matters. Throughout Western Europe, Pope Leo I strongly asserted his role as successor and vicar of St. Peter. Some decades later, Pope Gelasius I (492–496) proposed a dualistic model of church and empire, instructing the Byzantine emperor: Two things there are indeed, August Emperor, by which this world is principally ruled: the consecrated authority of priests and royal power…. But if emperors fear to essay these things [ecclesiastical concerns], and recognize that they do not pertain to the measure of their power, because they are permitted to judge human affairs alone, and are not also given preeminence in divine affairs: how then do they presume to judge these men, through whom divine affairs are administered?… Thus He [Christ] differentiated the functions of each power by its appropriate activities and separate dignities.32 For Gelasius, neither the pope nor the emperor is supreme over the other, and neither should interfere with the other’s decisions. Byzantine emperors did not, however, accept Gelasius’s model and continued to play a strong role in church affairs. Clashes between the papal and imperial courts could be fierce. While acknowledging the magisterial and spiritual authority of the bishop of Rome, Emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565) saw himself as the divinely chosen ruler of both church and empire, legislated for both church and empire, and called the Second Council of Constantinople on his own authority to serve his agenda. At one point, when Pope Vigilius (537–555) did not follow Justinian’s will, the emperor had the pope kidnapped by Byzantine police officers during Mass on November 22, 545, and taken as a prisoner to Constantinople. Some years later, after more bitter controversies and attempts at reconciliation, Justinian and Vigilius agreed to call an ecumenical council. Vigilius wanted the ecumenical council to meet in Sicily so a larger number of Western bishops could be present; when Justinian insisted that it meet in Constantinople, the pope refused to attend. For a time, the pope did not accept the council’s decision to condemn church leaders long since dead; eventually, however, after persecution of the Latin clergy by Justinian, the pope reconsid-ered and reluctantly accepted the emperor’s and the council’s will. For centuries, the emperors in Constantinople saw themselves as divinely appointed to care for empire and church together. While Justinian’s great attempt to reunite the Eastern and Western portions of the Roman Empire would fail after his death, the Byzantine views on the role of the imperial court would have a great influence on ideals of kingship and empire in the following centuries in Western Europe. Popes, however, reasserted their own claims with increasing effectiveness in the West. Some decades after the death of Justinian, Pope Gregory I (590–604) would write respectfully to the Byzantine emperor, but would address Western European kings as his sons and subjects, expecting them to follow his will. Gregory pointedly cited the Old

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Testament example of David’s respect for Saul’s life as teaching that subjects should be obedient to their superiors even if the superiors deserve blame. “For indeed the deeds of superiors are not to be smitten with the sword of the mouth, even when they are rightly judged to be worthy of blame.”33 Gregory prudently refrained from issuing orders to the Byzantine emperor. In the West, the authority of the see of St. Peter, represented by his vicar the bishop of Rome, would be increasingly accepted as willed directly by Christ. Western courts in the eighth through eleventh centuries were strongly influenced by the ancient and Byzantine model of sacred kingship. During this period, church society interpenetrated, with little sense of separation between ecclesia (church) and mundus (world).34 Secular rulers nominated bishops and installed them with the signs of their ecclesiastical office, the ring and crozier. Charlemagne hoped to implement in Western Europe the type of imperial rule exercised by Byzantine emperors, including care for the church. He modeled his palace chapel in Aix-la-Chapelle after the chapel built by Justinian in Ravenna. Charlemagne acknowledged the dogmatic authority of the pope, but he took responsibility for implementing reforms of the church and its liturgy in his empire. Pope Leo III (795–816) crowned Charlemagne emperor on Christmas Day, 800, and the congregation acclaimed him “Emperor of the Romans,” implicitly challenging the emperor in Constantinople.35 Charlemagne reportedly was not pleased at the pope’s action; and in 813 Charlemagne took the initiative of crowning his son Louis I as emperor in Aix-laChapelle, clearly rejecting the pope’s implicit claim to appoint and crown the emperor. However, in October 816, two years after Charlemagne’s death, Pope Stephen IV would anoint Louis I as emperor in Rheims, calling him “a second David.”36 Anointing would become a regular feature of imperial coronations and marked a significant departure from Eastern ceremonies and conceptions. By anointing the new emperor, the pope claimed to mediate God’s grace and approval, legitimating the empire through papal declaration and ritual. In contrast, the Byzantine emperor was not anointed, and the coronation of the emperor by the patriarch of Constantinople was never decisive in constituting the emperor’s claims. The ceremony of anointing followed the precedent of the Hebrew prophets, who had anointed the kings of ancient Israel. Anointing was sometimes viewed as a sacrament that conferred a sacred character on its recipient. In 823, Pope Paschal I (817–824) crowned Emperor Lothair and invested him with his sword, symbolizing the emperor’s obligation to use military force to defend the church and the empire. From this time onward, Western Europe increasingly accepted the pope’s right to crown the emperor. Pope John VIII (872–882) went so far as to say that the grace offered in the imperial coronation gave to the emperor what Christ possessed by nature. The king came to be seen as a sacred, quasi-divine figure, Christus Domini. The oldest German account of the liturgical installation of a king, a coronation ordo from Mainz, ca. 960, states that the king is “believed to bear the name and to be the representative of Jesus Christ.”37 After the Carolingian Empire disintegrated, Europe passed through a difficult period of internal disorder and external invasions from Norsemen, Saracens, and Magyars. In the middle of the ninth century, Otto I revived the ideal of the Christian Roman Empire, going to Rome in circumstances similar to those of Charlemagne in 774 and having himself crowned emperor by Paul John XII (955–964) in Rome on February 2, 962.38 This inaugurated the Holy Roman Empire, which would last until 1806. Mindful of Eastern imperial precedents and prestige, Otto I married his son to a Byzantine princess,

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Theophano.39 His grandson Otto III was raised by a Byzantine princess who taught the young boy the Byzantine model of sacred kingship. After Otto II was killed in 983, Otto III acceded to the throne as a child; and his mother ruled the empire for a time. Inspired by the Byzantine ideals of a Christian empire, Ottonian rulers regularly intervened in the affairs of the papacy, dismissing some popes and installing others for about a century. The Ottonian emperors understood their responsibilities to include the reform of the church according to the model of sacred empire.40 In the eleventh century, Emperor Henry III saw his earthly power as a sacred responsibility entrusted to him by God and saw himself as having received a sacramental character because he had been anointed with holy oil.41 As the Holy Roman Emperor, he convened the synod of Sutri, Italy, in 1046 to depose three claimants to the see of Peter (Sylvester III, Benedict IX, and Gregory VI) and to appoint a worthy successor to Peter, who would rule as Clement II.42 Before his death in 1056, Henry would appoint three more popes, including Leo IX, who would inaugurate a period of reform and tremendous upheaval, and Victor II, the last German pope and, more significantly, the last pope to be successfully installed by a Holy Roman emperor.43 Later papal candidates appointed by emperors would receive little recognition or support; and the Lateran synod of March 1116, led by Pope Paschal II, declared it heretical for a layman to invest a cleric, thereby upholding the excommunication of Holy Roman Emperor Henry V for appointing AntiPope Gregory VIII.44 Holy War in the Early Middle Ages Attitudes toward war during the period of transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages were shaped in large measure by monastic ideals, which continued the predominant pacifism of the early church. Monks saw themselves as the true militia Christi, and they saw secular knights as driven by greed and envy. Early medieval penitential books often imposed a penance of forty days for killing a soldier in battle.45 As time went on, there also emerged the beginnings of a Christian theology of holy war in the context of repeated threats from Muslim warriors since the seventh century and from Norse and Magyar warriors in the ninth and tenth centuries. The rise of Islam in the seventh century posed new challenges for Christian society. Muslims had their own theology of war, which was based on the Qur’an, the example of Muhammad, and an early speech by Abu Bakr, the first Sunni caliph selected after the death of Muhammad.46 The Qur’an commands: Fight for the sake of Allah those that fight against you, but do not attack them first. Allah does not love the aggressors. Kill them wherever you find them. Drive them out of the places from which they drive you…. Fight against them until idolatry is no more and Allah’s religion reigns supreme. But if they mend their ways, fight none except the evil-doers (2:190–91, 193).

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Jihad in Arabic means “struggle,” or “effort,” or “striving.” It refers primarily to the internal struggle to do God’s will and extend the Muslim community by peaceful means. Jihad also includes military action in defense of Islam, but not offensive action. Abu Bakr established the principles for jihad in a speech that cited many sayings of Muhammad. These sayings command those who fight: He who fights so that the word of God may prevail is on the path of God. He who dies fighting on the frontier in the path of God, God protects him from the testing of the tomb…. The best thing a Muslim can earn is an arrow in the path of God…. Swords are the keys of Paradise…. Every prophet has his monasticism, and the monasticism of this community is the Holy War in the path of God.47 The sayings of Muhammad forbade looting and mutilation, the killing of women, old men, and children, and ordered all booty to be brought to the community. Within a few years of Muhammad’s death in 632, Muslim armies swept through the richest provinces of the Byzantine Empire and crushed the Sassanian Empire in Persia.48 Before long, Muslim armies were marching across North Africa, invading Spain, and pressing into France, where they were turned back by Charles Martel in 732. For over a millennium, from the 630s to the second siege of Vienna in 1683, Christians repeatedly encountered Muslims as a powerful military threat. Century after century, Christian and Muslim armies went to battle, each side believing that God was fighting on its side. The threat of Muslim warriors transformed Christian attitudes toward war. The attacks on Christian Europe by Saracens, Norsemen, and Magyars convinced church leaders that Christian warriors were crucial for the defense of the church. In 853, several years after Saracen forces had sacked Rome and pillaged St. Peter’s, Pope Leo IV (847–855) urged Frankish nobles to fight boldly against the church’s enemies, and he held out the hope of a heavenly reward for those who died in battle. Reversing the earlier monastic theology that saw killing in battle as sinful, Leo IV promised: “He who dies in this battle will not be denied the heavenly kingdom, for the Almighty will know that he died for the truth of our faith, for the salvation of the patria, and the defence of Christianity.”49 Leo promised an indulgence for soldiers who died fighting for the faith. While this was not a formal statement of doctrine, it did effectively proclaim the struggle against the Muslims to be a holy war. Later, in 878, Pope John VIII granted absolution to those who died in battle against the enemies of Christianity, promising them the same reward that the good thief had received from Christ on the cross.50 Church leaders sought, with limited success, to limit the rule of violence through the Peace of God and the Truce of God. In light of the invasions by non-Christian warriors, Churchmen appealed to Christian knights to limit their fighting against other Christians. The Gregorian Reform The Gregorian Reform of the eleventh century transformed the Christian legitimation of governing authority and furthered the sacralization of violence, changing both the understanding of kingly rule and of papal authority and introducing a new epoch of holy

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war. A series of strong reforming popes, from Leo IX (1049–1054) through Gregory VIII (1073–1085), launched a major assault on the received notion of sacred kingship, challenging the right of secular rulers to invest bishops with the signs of ecclesiastical office, the ring and crozier. Later popes, especially Urban II (1088–1099), issued a call to arms in the name of Christ on an unprecedented level. The Gregorian Reform launched the papal court on a trajectory of increasing power and sacralized violence on an unprecedented level. For nearly a century, Ottonian emperors, claiming divine authority to lead the church, had repeatedly come to Rome to rescue the papacy from corrupt Roman noble families. A reformed papacy, beginning with Leo IX, turned against the religious claims of the emperors and called for a major world revolution.51 The Gregorian Reform, named for its most famous leader, Gregory VII, transformed the nature of the medieval court and the relation of the Western church to the bishop of Rome; it also led to the lasting schism between Eastern and Western Christianity and to centuries of Crusades against Muslims. Popes adopted the battle cry of reformatio, challenging long-accepted practices in church and society and questioning the fundamental nature of the relation between secular and ecclesiastical offices. In addition to condemning clerical abuses that were recognized by all, the papal court attacked the age-old custom of lay rulers investing religious authorities with the symbols of their ecclesiastical responsibility. The Gregorian reformers came to see the practice of lay investiture as a symptom of a broader and deeper problem involving the fundamental relation of ecdesia and mundus. In response, they developed a model of a new world order in which the pope would claim the supreme power to intervene in imperial and royal affairs and in which earthly rulers would not have the right to intervene in ecclesiastical matters. In 1059, Pope Nicholas II (1058–1061) issued a decree on papal elections. When the pope died, the cardinal-bishops would summon the other cardinals, and the consistory of cardinals would elect a new pope and would turn to the clergy and people of Rome for their assent. The emperor had a very vague and limited role: he could give approval, but this was not absolutely necessary, and this prerogative could be forfeited if it was abused. Meanwhile, the papal court sealed an alliance with the Normans to strengthen its position. Robert Guiscard pledged loyalty to Nicholas II in a feudal formula, pledging to assist in the election of a new pope according to the cardinals’ choice. The year 1059 also saw the first papal decree against lay investiture. This began a systematic struggle that would result in a clearer distinction between sacred and secular functions at medieval courts. Many who had thought that lay investiture was legitimate in principle were taken by surprise by the intransigence of the papal agenda.52 At the papal court itself, Peter Damian saw no harm in lay leaders investing clerics with their ecclesiastical symbols of office. However, Cardinal Humbert argued successfully against Peter Damian that lay investiture was itself sinful, indeed the source of all the corruption in the church. Humbert understood the relation of the pope to the emperor on the analogy of the soul to the body, and this would become a favorite analogy of later papal theologians.53 The crucial figure in the Reform was Gregory VII, who as Archdeacon Hildebrand had been a member of the reforming party since the time of Leo IX. He was a forceful leader and an able administrator with ruthless persistence and a tremendous conviction of his own justice. His program for society was iustitia Dei (the justice of God), a polemical

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term designed to create a society under papal leadership. In Gregory’s vision, the papal court would dominate all aspects of society. He was either hated or loved and was labeled “the holy Satan.”54 After some early attempts to compromise with Emperor Henry IV (1056–1106), Gregory launched stronger attacks on lay investiture in 1075 and issued the Dictatus Papae, a collection of statements largely taken from earlier canon law. The cumulative impact of these statements was to buttress very strong claims for papal authority. The document bluntly asserted the following principles. The Roman Church was founded by God alone, and only the papal office is universal in its authority. The pope alone can depose bishops, reinstate them, or transfer them from one see to another. The pope alone may use the imperial insignia (in effect, the pope hereby claims to be the true successor to Constantine; the Donation of Constantine, a forgery that claimed Constantine had given the original papal states to the pope, gave the pope the right to wear the imperial insignia).55 Most important, the Dictatus Papae asserted that the pope could depose emperors and release subjects from fealty to unjust superiors. The pope himself, however, is beyond the judgment of any human being; his actions are to be judged by God alone. Moreover, the document asserts, no one can be a true Catholic unless he or she agrees with the pope: “That he should not be considered as Catholic who is not in conformity with the Roman Church.”56 This was not only a reordering of the church, but a declaration of a revolution in society. The effect of the Dictatus Papae was sensational and radical. According to this new model of Christian society, God gives all authority directly to the pope, who then rules the church directly and the empire indirectly through the emperor. The basic principle of the new vision is that papal authority alone is universal and plenary; all other powers in the world, whether emperors, kings, nobles, or bishops, are particular and dependent. Despite its precedents, the document was revolutionary in its comprehensive character, its intransigent papal absolutism, and its direct challenge to the prevailing world order. It amounted to a direct reversal of the Constantinian/Eusebian and Byzantine vision of a united Christian society with the Christian Roman emperor in charge. It also set aside the Gelasian model of a dualism of powers given directly by God to the pope and the emperor, respectively. Gregory accepted the complete interpenetration of ecclesia and mundus characteristic of the earlier Middle Ages, but he asserted a strong claim to be the ultimate leader of a unified Christian society. The papal court would reign supreme in a way the world had never seen before. In a letter to Herman of Metz, “In Defense of the Papal Policy toward Henry IV,” dated March 15, 1081, Gregory set forth his vision, reviving Augustine’s view of kings as thugs and murderers: “Who does not know that kings and princes derive their origin from men ignorant of God who raised themselves above their followers by pride, slander, treachery, murder—in short by every kind of crime—at the instigation of the Devil, the prince of this world, men blind with greed and intolerable in their audacity?”57 In the letter Gregory claimed the right to decide the eternal salvation of kings and princes, exalting the role of ecclesiastical authority to an extreme: “Does anyone doubt that the priests of Christ are to be considered as fathers and masters of kings and princes and of all believers? Would it not be regarded as pitiable madness if a son should try to rule his father or a pupil his master and to bind with unjust obligations the one through

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whom he expects to be bound or loosed, not only on earth but also in heaven?”58 According to this letter, the only legitimate power in the world resides in the Catholic priesthood, in particular in the bishop of Rome. It ominously warns that the few kings who escaped damnation found salvation through subservience to the Church (a strong warning to Henry IV). The letter circulated as a public pamphlet, traveling throughout the royal, noble, and ecclesiastical courts of Europe. This dramatic struggle was acted out on a stage before all of Europe. In 1075, the archiepiscopal see of Milan was vacant. Traditionally, the archbishop of Milan was the main representative of the Holy Roman emperor in Italy, and the emperor had the prerogative of selecting the candidate. Gregory VII forbade Henry IV to appoint a candidate, but Henry installed his own choice anyway. Gregory condemned Henry’s action as an attack on the papacy. Early in 1076, Henry deposed Gregory, as earlier emperors had repeatedly done in the past. However, later in 1076, Gregory, claiming to act personally on behalf of St. Peter, excommunicated and deposed Henry IV, absolving all nobles from their oaths to Henry. This was unprecedented and had a tremendous and powerful effect.59 Henry’s enemies in Germany supported Gregory and invited the pope to come to Germany and elect a new emperor. As Gregory went north, he was delayed by the snow and paused in Canossa at the last castle in the Apennines. In January 1077, a desperate Henry came to Canossa dressed as a penitent with just a handful of attendants. For three days he stood in the snow asking to receive absolution and penance for his sins. Politically, Gregory knew it would be a catastrophe to reconcile Henry. Pastorally, however, a priest must offer absolution to a penitent who expresses contrition and resolves to amend his or her life. Gregory absolved the repentant emperor, lifted the excommunication, and returned to Rome.60 Henry was able to regroup his own forces, defeat his German opponents, and return to Rome with an army to chase the pope into hiding and install an anti-pope. In the short run, Henry won. However, in the long run, the image of the Holy Roman emperor doing penance before the pope for three days in the snow may have been more powerful. This image shattered the credibility of the Constantinian/Eusebian model of sacred kingship in the West.61 Even though Henry himself likely did not intend any concession regarding imperial authority by his act of penance,62 never again would the imperial or royal courts exercise the type of sacred leadership they had wielded in the early Middle Ages. After 1055, later emperors would not be able to depose and appoint popes in the way the Ottonian emperors had done.63 Despite his later military victories over Pope Gregory, Henry and his apologists would have to use new arguments to defend his authority. Gottschalk of Aachen, one of Henry’s leading intellectual supporters, appealed to Gelasius’s distinction between the two swords to defend imperial autonomy from ecclesiastical interference. The pro-imperial Book Concerning the Preservation of Ecclesiastical Unity (1091–1093) distinguished between the spiritual order and the secular and restricted the pope’s authority to the former.64 In an earlier age, popes had used Gelasius’s principle to resist imperial initiatives in church affairs; now emperors used it to oppose papal interventions in imperial matters. Even though Gregory VII died in defeat in Salerno in 1085, his successors continued the struggle, often with more modest aims but with greater practical results. The final resolution transformed both secular and ecclesiastical courts across Europe. Pope Urban II (1088–1099) continued the fight against lay investiture, holding reforming synods in

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France and southern Italy and wielding tremendous influence over Northern Europe. Urban shrewdly used the system of papal legates to increase papal influence and power at other courts. During Urban’s pontificate, canon lawyers began to distinguish a bishop’s sacerdotal responsibilities from his secular responsibilities.65 This would have been unthinkable in the earlier medieval system and opened the way to a compromise solution. In time, local compromises were worked out. In the Concordat of London in 1107 and the Concordat of France of 1110, the kings of England and France surrendered the right to lay investiture but continued to receive feudal homage from bishops and abbots. Germany would eventually accept this model at the Concordat of Worms of 1122 under Pope Callistus II (1119–1124).66 The Concordat of Worms allowed the emperor to be present at episcopal consecrations and to give the candidate the symbols of civil office as ruler of a territory owing feudal dues and knights.67 However, the emperor was not allowed to invest the candidate with the religious symbols of episcopal or abbatial office, the ring and the crozier that bind the bishop to his diocese and the abbot to his monastery. This was the first clear distinction between sacred and secular realms at medieval courts. Gerd Tellenbach commented, “The lay princes were driven out of the ecclesiastical sphere, and from now on their power was purely secular.”68 This development paved the way for subsequent, more thoroughly secular views of the state that would be shaped by Aristotle’s philosophy in later centuries.69 From then on, the Holy Roman emperor was not a sacred figure, religiously superior to the pope. The compromise at Worms allowed the popes to subordinate the Latin Church to themselves in an unprecedented way.70 Popes shifted their focus from dominating the world to dominating the church. At the same time, papal influence would increasingly spread to the other courts of Europe through the developing system of canon law. In fact, during the course of the next 150 years the papal court would become the most influential in Europe. The high point of the power of the papal court would come with Innocent III (1198–1216), who was able to depose kings in Western Europe and appoint a Venetian as patriarch of Constantinople. Innocent was more nuanced in his claims than Gregory VII had been, but he came closest to accomplishing the Gregorian dream of dominating Christian society. He had more vassals than any other European power, holding as papal fiefs England, Bulgaria, Aragon, and Portugal. (France was already pledged to St. Dennis, who was safely in heaven.) He intervened in successions to the throne in Norway, Sweden, Bohemia, and Hungary; intervened in the selection of the emperor; and served as guardian of the young Emperor Frederick II.71 The Sacralization of Violence: The Crusades The Gregorian Reform also transformed Christian attitudes to war, ushering in a new form of sacralized violence that would shape medieval courts for centuries. Pope Leo IX, the son of a German count, was the first pope to lead troops into battle in the name of the church.72 Gregory VII radically transformed earlier medieval attitudes toward war, reviving the ancient notion of war as a holy obligation pleasing to God.73 Gregory repeatedly used the image of the sword in his theological and political discourses, and he developed the idea of a Christian army and a Christian knight. During the eleventh century, there are the first recorded blessings of swords, which placed knights under

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ethical and religious obligations such as defending the poor and the weak.74 Gregory VII hoped to lead a holy war first against the Muslim Turks and later against his archrival Emperor Henry IV. Perhaps most important, he seems to have believed that those who died fighting on behalf of the church, including in aggressive actions for the papacy, would be freed from their sins and receive a heavenly reward.75 Muslim warriors had a similar hope that if they died fighting in a jihad for the defense of Islam, they would enter paradise at once. The Qur’an promises: “Let those who exchange this present life for the Hereafter fight in the way of God. Whoever fights in the way of God, be he killed or victorious, to him we shall assuredly give a great reward” (4:74, 76).76 Umar, who would later become the second caliph, reportedly asked Muhammad about this matter and Muhammad replied, “Know that paradise is under the shade of swords.”77 In 1095, Pope Urban II gave one of the most influential speeches in all of history at Clermont, France. As reported by Baldric, archbishop of Dal, the pope said: Under Jesus Christ, our Leader, may you struggle for your Jerusalem, in Christian battle-line, most invincible line, even more successfully than did sons of Jacob of old—struggle, that you may assail and drive out the Turks, more execrable than the Jebusites, who are in this land, and may you deem it a beautiful thing to die for Christ in that city in which He died for us…. [T]he possessions of the enemy too, will be yours, since you will make spoil of their treasures and return victorious to your own; or empurpled with your own blood, you will have gained everlasting glory.78 This Crusade has been called “the foreign policy of the reformed papacy” because it “set the pope, in place of the emperor, at head of Europe, and assured the papacy a moral leadership.”79 Guibert of Nogent (1055?-ca. 1125) explained the implications of this change: In our own times God has instituted a Holy War, so that the order of knights and the unstable multitude who used to engage in mutual slaughter in the manner of ancient paganism may find a new way of gaining salvation; so that now they may seek God’s grace in their wonted habit, and in the discharge of their own office, and no longer need to be drawn to seek salvation by utterly renouncing the world in the profession of the monk.80 Crusaders marched to battle with the blessing and encouragement of the Church, following sacred banners and wearing the sign of the cross. Urban II offered an indulgence, which remitted all temporal punishment for sins that had already been confessed and forgiven. From the beginning, this offer was popularly understood to mean a complete absolution from all guilt for sins, whether confessed or not. Even though this was technically an error, church leaders did little to correct the misunderstanding, and the indulgence proved to be a powerful incentive. The indulgence was later extended to those giving needed aid to crusaders.

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One of Urban’s most significant actions was to propose the crusaders’ vow, which added permanent commitment and legal obligation to the enthusiasm of the crusader.81 The vow increased the seriousness of the crusader’s promise and added a stronger religious dimension, binding the crusader directly to God. The symbolic initiation into the status of a crusader involved “taking the cross.” Wearing the cross was the outward sign that one had vowed to join a crusade. Urban II commanded that crusaders attach a cross to their clothing. Preaching the Second Crusade, Bernard of Clairvaux is said to have sown crosses among the masses, and the pope sent King Louis VII of France a cross as an invitation to crusade.82 Not all observers were enthused about the new form of holy war. The great canon lawyer, Bishop Ivo of Chartres, was personally doubtful of the spiritual value of the First Crusade. He did, nonetheless, note the variety of attitudes toward violence in the scriptures and the Christian tradition. Ivo was aware that many earlier authorities thought that Christians should not shed blood or resort to violence at all, but he noted that God had authorized legitimate authorities such as judges and kings to shed blood. Ivo taught that kings and their armies had the right to wage defensive wars for their realms or wars for the protection of the church. According to Ivo, ecclesiastical leaders were obliged to encourage Christian warriors to fight against heretics and infidels. Wars undertaken to defend the Christian faith were just and pleasing to God. As chief shepherd of the flock, the pope had a special responsibility as a warrior to protect his people from aggression by non-Christians. Those who fought and died in such wars can hope for a heavenly reward.83 The medieval notion of a holy war went beyond the Augustinian argument that violence could be justified in certain circumstances and claimed that participating in a holy battle was itself spiritually uplifting and beneficial. Those who died fighting for the Christian faith were often described as martyrs for the faith. In time, sacred orders of knights emerged, which united military prowess and religious devotion. From 1095 on, the ideology of holy war was a regular part of papal policy and a dominant force in shaping the ideals of chivalry. The First Crusade transformed the relation of the medieval court to both Jews and Muslims, setting a precedent that would later be applied, with varying degrees of success, to wars against other Christians in Europe as well. Tragically, the first victims of the First Crusade were Jewish communities in France and Germany. Conflicts between Jews and Christian dated back to the origins of Christianity itself, when some Jews, who accepted Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah and Lord, were opposed by other Jews who rejected these claims. The New Testament often uses bitter polemical language to describe the opponents of Jesus, as was characteristic of Jewish polemical literature of the time.84 Later generations of Christians who were not Jewish usually interpreted these criticisms as applying to all Jews at all times and places.85 In the Gospel of Matthew, the crowd in Jerusalem that calls for the crucifixion of Jesus shouts: “His death be upon us and our children” (Mt 27:25). In the original context, the evangelist understands this to refer to the crowd and their children, who would suffer in the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E.86 Later generations of Christians throughout the Middle Ages would understand this statement as inviting punishment upon all Jews at all times and places if they did not convert to Christianity.

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In the patristic period Christians began to vilify Jewish worship and practice. St.Augustine, the most influential of the Latin church fathers, shaped later church and court policy in medieval Europe, declaring that the Jews should be allowed to live, but kept in a state of misery because of their crime of killing Jesus. This principle was accepted by Pope Gregory I and set the main outlines of papal policy toward Jews for more than a millennium.87 For the first millennium of Christian history, the mistreatment of Jews by Christians did not involve widespread physical violence.88 In the early Middle Ages, Jews usually suffered from discrimination in law and occasionally from attempts at forced conversion, despite repeated papal prohibitions on the latter practice. Jews were generally forbidden to hold public office or to exercise any form of authority over Christians, although the law of the Carolingian Empire gave greater rights to Jews and removed many of the old restrictions on Jewish life. In many places in the ninth century, Jewish communities prospered and spread despite the restrictions. There were some limited levels of ritual violence against Jews in sacred contexts in the early Middle Ages. In particular, there were annual ritual expressions of the belief that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus; indeed, in the early Middle Ages, the celebration of Good Friday often became an occasion for violence against the Jews. In the ninth century in Toulouse, the custom began of striking a Jew on the face on Good Friday as punishment for the crucifixion of Jesus. In Beziers, France, Christians would listen to a sermon by the bishop on Palm Sunday and would then proceed to stone the houses of the Jews; this custom lasted until 1160. There were, however, no widespread outbursts of violence against Jews in the tenth century.89 The eleventh century marked a watershed. Norman F.Cantor comments, “The dividing line in the history of Jews in Christian Europe comes in the mid-eleventh century. The new militancy of Latin Christianity and the growth of popular piety contributed to a tremendous increase in Judeophobia, which was dramatically expressed in the pogroms committed by the crusades in the 1090s.”90 After the preaching of the First Crusade, the atmosphere changed dramatically. Christian knights were now taking up arms with a new religious fervor to attack the enemies of Christ. Often, they had to borrow money from Jewish moneylenders to equip themselves for the long journey. To many crusaders, it seemed sacrilegious that they should go into debt to the people who had killed Christ so that Christians could fight the Muslims. Guibert of Nogent tells us that crusaders in Rouen stated: “We desire to combat the enemies of God in the East; but we have under our eyes the Jews, a race more inimical to God than all the others. We are doing this whole thing backwards.”91 There followed attacks on French Jews. In May 1096, Count Emich Leisingen and his crusading army attacked the Jews in Speyer. The bishop of the town gave the Jews shelter, and only a small number were killed. But the army went on to plunder and kill many Jews in other places in the Rhineland. In Worms and Mainz hundreds of Jews were murdered. It is estimated that as many as ten thousand Jews in France and Germany were killed between January and July 1096 in connection with the First Crusade.92 Violence against the Jews would be a repeated feature of later Crusades. These attacks paved the way for other assaults in other contexts as well. For example, when the Black Death swept through Europe in the fourteenth century, Christians accused Jews of poisoning the wells and killed many of them despite papal pleas.93

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The sack of Jerusalem by Christian crusaders on July 15, 1099 was merciless and bloodthirsty. The crusaders fighting in the name of Christ and wearing his cross as their emblem breached the walls of Jerusalem about 3:00 P.M., the very hour when Christ had died. After routing the Muslim defenders, the crusaders engaged in a general massacre of the Muslim and Jewish populations and confiscation of their property. According to one crusader historian, seventy thousand people were slaughtered in one part of Jerusalem, and ten thousand in another.94 The survivors were put to work hauling away the bodies. When the crusaders had finished their bloody business, they washed themselves and sang hymns of praise and thanksgiving to a merciful God. One eyewitness commented: “So let it suffice to say this much at least, that in the Temple and porch of Solomon men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies. The city was filled with corpses and blood.”95 Fulcher of Chartres reported that one could still smell the stench of the dead six months later at Christmas: “Oh what a stench there was around the walls of the city, both within and without, from the rotting bodies of the Saracens slain by our comrades at the time of the capture of the city, lying wherever they had been hunted down!”96 The Crusades are still remembered in the Muslim world as horrendous atrocities. Shaikh Muhammad al Ghazali (1917–1996), a prominent Egyptian Muslim leader, notes that before the Crusades Christians in Muslim-ruled lands were peacefully converting to Islam and comments bitterly: “However this [the process of conversion to Islam] was brought to a halt by the vicious and relentless Crusades waged against Muslims. They started over one thousand years ago, and do not seem to have come to an end yet. These wars have shaken the very foundations of the world of Islam and have done incalculable damage to the spirit and the unity of the Muslims.”97 Medieval Christians generally saw violence as a constitutive element of Islam and a proof of its falsity. Many Christians responded by sacralizing their own violent attacks. Humbert of Romans, who preached the First Crusade, saw the entire Muslim people as directly responsible for the conquests of Christian lands by Muslim armies. Muslims were both heretics and rebels, threatening Christian souls through heresy and Christian bodies through violence. Because of this double threat, Humbert argued, the church had the responsibility of using both its swords against them. Humbert delighted in the description of the savage slaughter in Jerusalem by the First Crusade.98 Benedict of Alignan claimed that Muslims did not deserve the courtesy of a reasonable discussion or debate but should be “extirpated by fire and the sword.”99 Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote so eloquently of Christian mystical love, declared: “A Christian glories in the death of a pagan (i.e. Muslim) because Christ is glorified.”100 Steven Runciman, the distinguished historian of the Crusades, concludes his study with a lament: In the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident out of which our civilization has grown, the Crusades were a tragic and destructive episode. The historian, as he gazes back across the centuries, must find his admiration overcast by sorrow at the witness that it bears to the limitations of human nature. There was so much courage and so little honour, so much devotion and so little understanding. High

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ideals were besmirched by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost.101 Chivalry The flourishing of the ideal of chivalry in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries drew upon the preceding developments. Heroes of the Old Testament like Gideon, Moses, David, and Judas Maccabeus furnished models to knights. The ideal of the crusader was a powerful force in shaping the model of the chivalrous Christian knight.102 The word chivalry could mean a variety of things. It could refer to a group of knights or a particular deed of prowess. It could also signify a set of virtues, including courage, courtesy, generosity, loyalty, fidelity, and humility. The term could also mean an order, comparable to a religious order or a social class.103 Chivalry offered lay Christians of the noble class a structure and path for living Christian ideals in their concrete daily struggles in the world. German historian Adolf Waas called the ideal of chivalry Ritterfrommigkeit (a knightly form of piety).104 The clergy clearly have a privileged role in this worldview. In the literature of chivalry, knights repeatedly turn to clerics to mediate God’s grace through the sacraments. As Perceval embarks to his adventures, his mother urges him to hear Mass regularly.105 Arthur, fearing he is close to death, shouts: “Oh God! Confession! The time has come!”106 Knights express their religious devotion by giving alms, by defending widows and orphans (as had been the responsibility of the ancient Israelite kings), and by seeking the prayers of monks and priests. On the battlefield knights pray to God for assistance, sometimes even offering summaries of Christian doctrine. Knights repeatedly go forth on crusade. Knights like William Marshal in the late twelfth century and Geoffroi de Charny a century later set a model for others by going on pilgrimage and founding religious houses. They believed that God explicitly approved of their vocation to live by the sword as holy knights. Richard W.Kaeuper comments, “For in one of its essential dimensions chivalry rested on the very fusion of prowess and piety; it functioned as the male, aristocratic form of lay piety.”107 For the devout, knighthood was be a form of imitatio Christi; the “Song of Aspremont,” an anonymous late twelfth-century poem, urges knights that just as Christ died for them, so they should be willing to die for Him.108 The ancient imagery of Israelite holy war appears repeatedly in the chansons de geste. In the Chanson de Roland the archangel Gabriel guards Charlemagne as he sleeps and supports him in battle against Emir. Gabriel also carries away Roland’s soul and encourages Charlemagne in his fight with Amiral. The early Middle Ages had contrasted the militia Christi, the monastics who offered true service to God, to the militia secularis, the secular warriors whose perpetual feuds ravaged the lands and spread suffering and who were often accused of being militia diaboli (the devil’s soldiery). From the end of the eleventh century, there was a radical change in usage of language, as knights and lords who went forth to fight for the church were now called milites Christi (soldiers of Christ).109 Gregory VII had referred to his allies fighting the enemy as the militia sancti Petri (the soldiery of St. Peter). In

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proclaiming the First Crusade, Urban II himself used this image: “Let those who have long been robbers now be soldiers of Christ.”110 While chivalry encompassed a broader range than the Crusades, the crusading ideal zhad a powerful formative impact on the development of chivalry. In the twelfth century, John of Salisbury set forth the ideal of the Christian knight, whose duties included “protecting the Church, fighting heresy, honoring the priesthood, eliminating injuries to the poor, pacifying the land, shedding one’s blood for one’s brothers (as the formula of the oath teaches), and, if necessary, giving up one’s life.”111 The most explicit fusion of the ideals of piety and knighthood came with the military religious orders. French crusaders under Hugh of Payens stayed in the Holy Land in 1118–19 to safeguard the way of pilgrims going to Jerusalem, and they accepted the Augustinian rule at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Bernard of Clairvaux endorsed and shaped their dual commitment to religious devotion and military service in his Book to the Knights of the Templars in Praise of the New Knighthood.112 He stressed above all that they should be both knights and monks, living simply, renouncing luxury, and eating modestly. The crusading orders took vows of obedience and chastity modeled on monastic orders and followed a strict rule of religious practice under church guidance.113 Even though this lifestyle of combining military and monastic discipline was too demanding and ascetic to be followed by most knights, these ideas proved to be a powerful force in shaping the broader vision of Christian knighthood. Knights underwent a rite of initiation that drew heavily on the symbolism of Christian faith and worship. The Ordene de Chevalerie describes the ceremony of knighting and its religious symbolism. The context is a fictitious narrative of Sir Hugh de Tabary, a Christian knight who is reportedly taken captive by the Muslims and held for a high ransom, which he cannot pay. However, Saladin is reportedly so impressed by the noble conduct of his Christian opponents that he offers to free Sir Hugh on condition that Hugh confer knighthood on the Muslim leader. Sir Hugh warns Saladin that the order of knighthood would not help the Muslim because he is not baptized. Hugh worries that he himself would be blamed sorely for such a deed. However, when threatened with prison, Hugh relents and instructs Saladin in the procedure. Hugh compares the ritual bath before being knighted to baptism; the candidate is to come forth from the bath “free from felony and be fulfilled of courtesy.”114 Then Hugh sets before Saladin a beautiful bed, spread with white linen, symbolic of the bed of Paradise, which gives eternal blessed rest. Hugh clothes Saladin in a scarlet gown, representing the blood he should be willing to shed for God and the church. He gives the initiate brown and black shoes as a reminder of death and of the earth to which all humans return and as a protection against pride. A white belt admonishes Saladin to keep his flesh clean and pure. Two spurs represent the willingness to serve God all one’s life. A two-edged sword represents the combination of right and loyalty, suggesting the knight’s obligation to defend the poor against the heavy hand of the rich. A white headpiece expresses the hope that its bearer will remain clear and clean, winning the delights of Paradise. After clothing Saladin, however, Hugh still refuses to knight the Muslim ruler with the ceremony of dubbing, which is the climactic symbol of the rite.115 More than a century later, Ramon Lull offered a similar description of the religious symbolism of the initiation to knighthood.116 In Lancelotthe Lady of the Lake explains in

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similar fashion the duties and weapons of the knight as laden with religious symbolism.117 Maurice Keen notes the twofold significance, secular and religious, of the ceremony of dubbing to knighthood. The ceremony drew upon the Germanic initiation rite of delivering arms to a young man and also upon ecclesiastical rites for blessing the sword of a warrior. Early rites for the blessing a sword were directly related to early medieval religious coronation rites of kings.118 Keen notes that the church succeeded in playing a crucial role in crowning kings, but churchmen never gained a comparable monopoly on initiating knights, partly because there were simply too many knights. On occasion princely bishops did initiate knights, such as the bishop of Orleans knighting Amaury, son of Simon de Montfort, in 1214; but this was explicitly noted as an exception.119 For the most part lay leaders performed the ceremony of dubbing in church, and the most important bond of the average knight was to the lord who had knighted him. Here, as elsewhere, the ambitions of Gregory VII were never completely achieved. While on Crusades knights were under ecclesiastical patronage in a sacred cause, at most other times they generally accepted the post-Gregorian distinction between secular and ecclesiastical authorities and saw their primary allegiance as to their secular lord. The compromise at the Concordat of Worms, distinguishing secular from ecclesiastical authority, had repercussions for knights as well as kings and emperors. How much the ideal of chivalry was ever realized is difficult to judge. There were skeptics who doubted it. Bruno’s report on the efforts of Emperor Henry IV to increase his power through building new castles revived the ancient prophecy of Samuel regarding the effects of kingship: “But after the garrisons that were quartered in the castles had begun to sally forth in search of booty, to harvest for themselves what they had not sown, to force free men into servile labor, and to make a sport of the daughters and wives of others, then the Saxons finally realized what a threat these castles were.”120 There were repeated criticisms of robber knights. The didactic Middle High German poet Freidank pointedly charged: “Castles are built for one purpose: to strangle the poor.”121 Nonetheless, at its best, the ideals of chivalry challenged knights to use their power to defend the innocent and helpless in society, to oppose forces of evil, and to strive to follow the ideals of justice and honesty in a fallen world. Conclusion The medieval court developed in a world of rivalry dominated by struggles for power, saturated by both religion and violence. Christian faith and symbols proved profoundly ambiguous. At its best, Christianity challenged emperors and kings to follow the ideals of the kings of ancient Israel, to use their power for the good of their subjects, to allow justice to flourish, and to seek the fullness of peace. Some monarchs, like Louis IX of France, took such admonitions to heart, sought to establish peace within Christendom, and were revered as “most Christian,” at least by their supporters.122 For many others, the ideals proved a hollow cover for brutal power plays and greedy conquests. Most tragic of all was the sacralization of violent attacks on Jews and Muslims. Popes, bishops, monks, and crusaders often sanctioned such actions in holy wars that sought to spread the reign of Christ. Patterns of exclusion, scapegoating, and persecution

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dominated the treatment of Jews by Christian courts for centuries. Generations of medieval Christians harbored the most vicious negative stereotypes of Muslims and nurtured vengeful dreams of conquest. Christian animosity toward both Jews and Muslims poisoned the atmosphere in Europe and beyond for centuries, with repercussions lasting to the present day. Nonetheless, the memory of the nonviolent love of Jesus never died, as witnessed by the example of Francis of Assisi and others who turned away from military arms to seek peaceful forms of Christian service. According to Bonaventure, Francis of Assisi, “the intrepid knight of Christ,” journeyed to the East during the Fifth Crusade. Unarmed and accompanied by a single friar, Francis approached the Muslim battle lines and was seized, beaten, and taken away in chains. Francis met with the sultan to proclaim the gospel in peace. According to Bonaventure, the sultan did not convert but admired the poverty and courage of Francis and offered him many gifts, which Francis declined. The sultan sent him back to the Christian lines with respect and honor.123 Notes 1. On this process, see Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1997). 2. Rodney Stark, One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). 3. See Joachim Bumke, Courtly Culture: Literature and Society in the High Middle Ages, trans. Thomas Dulop (1986; New York: Overlook Press, 2000), 235–40. 4. Craig L.Nessan, “Sex, Aggression, and Pain: Sociobiological Implications for Theological Anthropology,” Zygon 33 (1998): 451. 5. Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress), 600–21. 6. Sigmund Mowinkel, The Psalms in Israel’s Worship, trans. D.R.A.P-Thomas, 2 vols. (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1977), 52–57. 7. See Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 91–194; on the development of this belief in Israel, see Gerhard von Rad, Holy War in Ancient Israel, trans. and ed. Marva J. Dawn (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991), 41–73. 8. See Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel, vol. 1, Social Institutions., trans. John McHugh (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 261–62. 9. Ibid., 265–66. 10. Susan Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 11. Donald B.Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 264–69. 12. Jon D.Levenson, “Is There a Counterpart in the Hebrew Bible to New Testament Antisemitism?” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 22 (1985): 242–60. 13. Reuven Kimelman, “Working Warfare and Its Restrictions in the Jewish Tradition,” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 9 (2002): 43–44. 14. See Willard M.Swartley, ed., The Love of Enemy and Nonretaliation in the New Testament (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992). 15. Adela Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of Apocalypse (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984), 130. 16. John Helgeland, Robert J.Daly, and Patout Burns, Christians and the Military: The Early Experience, ed. Robert J.Daly (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 21–30, 39–44.

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17. Eusebius, The Life of Constantine; in Norman F.Cantor, The Medieval World: 300–1300 (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 6. 18. Ibid., 7. 19. John Julius Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium (New York; Knopf, 1997), 18. 20. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, 5.24, ed. and trans. R.W.Dyson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 232; see also F.Van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop: Reli-gion and Society at the Dawn of the Middle Ages, trans. Brian Battershaw and G.R.Lamb (1961; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 163; and Augustine, The Political Writings of St. Augustine, ed. Henry Paolucci, interpretative analysis by Dino Bigongiari (1962; Chicago: Gateway Editions, 1987), 1–117. 21. Augustine, De Perfectione. Iustitiae 18, 35; see Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 338. 22. Eugene TeSelle, Augustine the Theologian (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 270. 23. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans 4, 4, 147. 24. Ibid., 4, 4; 148; Augustine is quoting Cicero, De republica 3, 14, 24. 25. Augustine, City of God 4, 6; 150. 26. See Helgeland et al., Christians and the Military, 76–78. 27. James A.Brundage, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 19–21. 28. Van der Meer, 95. 29. See Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 234–43. 30. Augustine, Letter 185, 6, 24; Van der Meer, 96. 31. Letter 185, 5, 19; City of God 5.26; 234; Van der Meer, 97. 32. Gelasius I; quoted in Cantor, 97–98. For a survey of the range of interpretations of this document, see Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State 1050–1300 with Selected Documents (1964; Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 10–11. 33. Gregory I; quoted in Cantor, 115. 34. See Norman F.Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages: A Completely Revised and Expanded Edition of Medieval History, The Life and Death of a Civilization (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 205–23. 35. See Walter Ullmann, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1972; reprint, 1982), 83. 36. Ibid., 87. 37. I.S.Robinson, Henry IV of Germany: 1056–1106 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 14. 38. Boyd H.Hill, Jr., Medieval Monarchy in Action: The German Empire from Henry I to Henry IV (London: George Allen and Unwin/New York: Barnes and Noble, 1972), 33–34. 39. Odilo Engels, “Theophano, the Western Empress from the East,” in The Empress Theophano: Byzantium and the West at the Turn of the Millennium, ed. Adelbert Davids (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 28–33; Adelbert Davids, “Marriage Negotiations between Byzantium and the West and the Name of Theophano in Byzantium (Eighth to Tenth Centuries),” in The Empress Theophano, 99–120. 40. Stefan Weinfurter, The Salian Century: Main Currents in an Age of Transition, trans. Barbara M.Bowlus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 26. 41. Gerd Tellenbach, Church, State and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Contest, trans. R.R.Bennett (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1959), 87. 42. Hill, 86–88. 43. See Tellenbach, 87–88; and Ullmann, 127–34. 44. Ullmann, 170. 45. Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), 46. 46. See W.Montgomery Watt, “Islamic Conceptions of the Holy War,” in The Holy War, ed. Thomas Patrick Murphy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1976), 141–56.

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47. Al-Muttaqi, Kanz 2:252–86; quoted in Bernard Lewis, ed. and trans., Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 210–11. 48. On the early history of Muslim-Christian conflict, see M.J.Akbar, The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict between Islam and Christianity (London: Routledge, 2002), 1–66. 49. Leo IV; quoted by Keen, 46. 50. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader, 22–23. 51. See Tellenbach, 89–125. 52. R.W.Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953), 130–31, 155–56; Cantor, Civilization of the Middle Ages, 245, 255. 53. Tierney, 35. 54. On his personality and character, see Southern, 139–43. 55. For the text of the Donation of Constantine, see Tierney, 21–22. 56. Tierney, 49–50. 57. The Correspondence of Pope Gregory VII: Selected Letters from the Registrars, trans. Ephraim Emerton (New York: W.W.Norton and Co., 1932; reprint ed. 1969), 169. 58. Ibid., 169–70. 59. Weinfurter, 148. 60. Tierney, 57–73. 61. Cantor, 271; Tellenbach, 161. 62. Weinfurter, 149; Robinson, 163–65. 63. The last pope appointed by an emperor who was accepted as legitimate was Victor II (1055– 57). Ullmann, 134. 64. Weinfuter, 153–55. 65. Ullmann, 164–65. 66. Tierney, 86, 91–92. 67. Ullmann, 170–72. 68. Tellenbach, 125. 69. Ullmann, 163. 70. Geoffrey Barraclough, The Medieval Papacy (New York: W.W.Norton and Co., 1968), 93. 71. Tierney, 127–38; Cantor, 417–33; Ullmann, 206–26. 72. Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World: Europe 1100–1350, trans. Janet Sondheimer (New York: New American Library, 1963), 127. 73. H.E.J.Cowdrey, “The Genesis of the Crusades: the Springs of Western Ideas of Holy War,” in The Holy War, ed. Thomas Patrick Murphy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1976), 19–20. 74. Heer, 127. 75. James A.Brundage, The Crusades, Holy War and Canon Law (Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum/ Aldershot, U.K.: Gower Howse, 1991), X, 105. 76. Watt, 144–45. 77. Akbar, 11. 78. Quoted in Edward Peters, ed., The First Crusade: The Chronide of Fulcher of Chartres and Other Source Materials (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 9. 79. Barraclough, 91. 80. Quoted by Keen, 49. 81. Brundage, Crusades, Holy War and Canon Law, VI, 77. 82. Ibid., VII, 290. 83. Ivo of Chartres, Decretum 10; Panormia 8; quoted in ibid., IX, 181–82. 84. See Luke T.Johnson, “The New Testament’s Anti-Jewish Slander and the Conventions of Ancient Polemic, Journal of Biblical Literature 108 (1989): 419–41. 85. Miriam S.Taylor, Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity: A Critique of the Scholarly Consensus (Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1995), 47–196.

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86. Donald Senior, “Matthew’s Story of the Passion: Theological and Pastoral Perspectives,” Chicago Studies 40/3 (2001): 283–85; Raymond E.Brown, The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave, A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels, vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 830–39. 87. William Nicholls, Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate (Northvale, N.Y.: Jason Aronson, 1993), 221. 88. Edward H.Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Anti-Semitism (New York: Macmillan/London: Collier-Macmillan, 1965), 89–90; Paul Johnson, A History of the jews (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 205. 89. Heer,310. 90. Cantor, 365. 91. Guibert of Nogent, De Vita Sua 3.5; quoted by Flannery, 90–91. 92. Flannery, 90–92. 93. Nicholls, 245–47; Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York: Ballantine, 1978), 109–116. 94. Quoted in F.E.Peters, Jerusalem: The Holy City in the Eyes of Chroniclers, Visitors, Pilgrims, and Prophets from the Days of Abraham to the Beginnings of Modern Times (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 284–85. 95. Ibid., 285–86. 96. Fulcher of Chartres: A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem 1095–1127; trans. F.R.Ryan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969), I, xxxiii; in Peters, 286. 97. Shaikh Muhammad al Ghazali, A Thematic Commentary on the Qur’an, Vol. 1 (Surahs 1– 9,), trans. ‘Ashur A.Shamis (Herndon, Va.: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1999), 105. 98. Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (1960; reprint ed., Oxford: Oneworld, 2000), 135. 99. Ibid., 136. 100. Ibid. 101. Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, Vol. 3, The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 480; cited by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Indian Religions (New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1979), 16–17. 102. Sidney Painter, French Chivalry: Chivalric Ideas and Practices in Mediaeval France (1940; reprint ed., Ithaca, N.Y.: Great Seal Books, 1962), 65–94. 103. See Keen, 1–2. 104. Adolf Waas, Geschichte der Kreuzzüge, 2 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1956), l:33ff; see alsoKeen, 51. 105. Chretien, Perceval, 7; see Richard W.Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 45. 106. Lancelot, Part III; quoted by Kaeuper, 45. 107. Kaeuper,47. 108. Song of Aspremont, lines 9380–81; cited by Kaeuper, 233. 109. Ibid., 290–91. 110. Fulcher of Chartres, Historia Hierosolymitana; quoted by Bumke, 293. 111. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Book 6; quoted by Bumke, 292. 112. Bernard of Clairvaux, Liber ad milites templi de laude novae militae, ed. Jean Leclerq and H.M.Rochais. Opera, vol. 3 (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses) 205–39; see Bumke, 297. 113. Alan Baker, The Knight (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, 2003), 158–90. 114. Ramon Lull’s Book of Knighthood and Chivalry and the Anonymous Ordene de Chevalerie, trans. William Caxton, revised by Brian R.Price (Union City, CA: Chivalry Bookshelf, 2001), 111. 115. Ibid., 115. 116. Ibid., 1–105.

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117. SeeKeen, 81. 118. Ibid., 72–73. 119. Ibid.,75. 120. Bruno, Saxonicum bellum; quoted by Bumke, 122. 121. Freidank, Bescheidenheit, quoted by Bumke, 123. 122. See William Chester Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). 123. Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God; The Tree of Life; the Life of St. Frands, trans. Ewert Cousins (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 268–71.

2 Brutality and Violence in Medieval French Romance and Its Consequences1 RAYMOND CORMIER For Rupert T.Pickens May 2003—Con amistat More than a few recent studies of courtly society have emphasized its chivalrous character and courteous profile—noble, polite, and softened manners—compared with the much less cultured values articulated in the “undomesticated” and “tumultuous” First Feudal Age, an era portrayed further by Georges Duby as one of uncouth and hurtful swordplay, as a world of male warriors whom the Church forever tried to civilize. Refined, humanistic, and feminine values enter the European stage around 1100.2 The new social ideals have been authoritatively captioned in Stephen Jaeger’s important analysis, The Origins of Courtliness, in which, for the formative period under his review (939–1210, and even earlier), he identified a number of courtly, that is, ethical and behavioral values such as discretion, compassion, moderation, humility, patience, affability, urbanity, and gentleness of spirit.3 The present argument, drawing partly on Joachim Bumke’s distinction between the ideal and the reality of courtly society, will demonstrate a revisionist view, namely, that numerous brutal and bloody episodes in midtwelfth-century French romance reveal an unrepentant and unreformed taste for violence, aggression, and revenge.4 By corroborating the “historiographical myth” of that nineteenth-century social construct called “chivalry,” as Barthelemy put it recently,5 I contend that these violent elements, very broadly speaking, reflect a certain reality— perhaps by trickle down—into poetry and letters, of the worst features of “the military side of aristocratic knighthood.”6 The heroic-minded warrior class, imbued with a shame culture, was not eclipsed with the emergence of the courtly vernacular.7 That paragon of peaceful chivalry, Sir Gauvain, the new “ladies’ man,” was doubtless overshadowed by legions of hawkish warmongers like Wace’s old Cador.8 I should have liked to draw my examples from numerous texts that are considered foundational for the new twelfth-century genre, namely, four “antique” romances and tales and five Arthurian romances (Piramus et Tisbé, Roman d’Eneas, Roman de Troie, Philomena, and all of Chrétien de Troyes’s romances—Erec et Enide, Cligés, Yvain, Lancelot, and Perceval). One might call to mind such instances as: the physical abuse of a fasting Enide by the Count of Limors (vv. 4765–804); the beating and martyrdom of Fénice at the hands of the physicians in Cligés (“Fausse Morte” episode, w. 5900–48); or Kay’s forceful slap and irate kick, respectively, of the Laughing Maiden and court jester in Perceval (vv. 1017–42).

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However, limited space permits analysis of only a portion of this sampling, but even a limited and rapid survey of just the first five texts listed above will reveal well more than a score of scenes of cruel and vicious brutality. I consider several typical passages from Old French romance (including, for example, wartime murder, suicide, beheading, and mutilation); propose a quasianthropological explanation for the episodes; and suggest finally how the consequences of this literary brutality will result in either a societal reverse trend toward lyrical gentleness (St. Francis) or a fictional movement toward mysticism and allegory (La Quête du Graal, Le Roman de la Rose). Piramus et Tisbé Butchery and mutilation prevail as the anonymous author of this mid-twelfthcentury tragic love story retains all the gruesome elements of Ovid’s account.9 When Piramus discovers Tisbé’s wimple covered with (he believes) her clotted blood, he proceeds to lament and then takes his own life with his sword (w. 791–801): …Tresperce soi parmi le flanc,/Tresque de l’autre part du cors/Fait aparoir l’espee fors./Et quant il meurt, baise la guimple./Si fait’amors a la mort simple!/Sor les branches raie li sans:/Noircist li fruis, qui estoit blans./Tous tens avoit esté la more/Blanche, dusques a cele ore; /Adont reçut noire colour/En testimoine de dolour. (He stabs himself in the side; right through his body the sword cuts. And it protrudes. As he gasps for his breath he kisses the garment. How easily Love causes death! Over all the branches the blood ran; the white fruit turned dark. Heretofore the mulberry had always been white, but now it was changed in color—as sorrow’s witness.) Here we have the graphic description of Piramus’ first self-imposed death rattles as well as the Ovidian metamorphic rationale or aitiology of the story. Reaching to a dramatic conclusion, the author describes the next few moments, when a frightened Tisbé reappears and finds her dead lover in a pool of blood (w. 916–32): Cele lesse toute esmarie./Cil est mors et cele est pasmee./Diex, quele amor est ci finee!/La pucele s’est acesmee,/A ses deus mains a pris l’espee,/Parmi le piz, souz la mamele/S’en referist la demoisele./ D’ambe parz raie li sans fors,/Et ele chiet desus le cors./Le cors acole et si l’embrace,/Baise les iex, baise la face,/Baise la bouche par grant cure,/Tant com sens et vie li dure./Tant con li dure sens et vie/Se demoustre veraie amie./Ici fenist des deus amanz,/Con lor leal amor fu granz. (Alone, she was distressed. He is dead. Tisbé faints. God, what love comes to an end here! The girl revives. She takes the sword in both hands and beneath the bosom pierces her chest. Blood gushes out from both sides. She falls on his body, entwines and embraces it, kissing his eyes

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and face. Lovingly she kisses his mouth, as long as her sense and life endure; as long as there remain to her sense and life, she proves herself thus a true lover. Here end the two lovers. How great was their loyallove!) Tisbé’s necrophilia and suicide recapitulates that of Dido but accentuates the tragedy because of the vivid Romanesque emotional-physical actions involving her lover (Dido had no body to fall on). The powerful image of gushing blood augments the impression of the scene’s tragical violence. The young lovers’ desperate self-maiming can hardly harmonize with the context of “loyal (and courtly!) love.” Roman d’Eneas In the Ninth Aeneid, Virgil introduces the tragic episode of Nisus and Euryalus, whose love is characterized as Unus…pariterque (IX. 240: “their minds and hearts were one”). The pathos of this warrior camaraderie—they are linked as if by a “mystic bond”—is in fact evoked by the Latin poet only in passing (IX. 425–30, 511–19). But in the hands of the anonymous twelfth-century Norman French adapter, who composed the Roman d’Eneas, ca. 1160, the story of their nocturnal expedition is considerably amplified and filled with horrific savagery.10 It will be recalled that after the carnage of the Latins, Nisus’s comrade Euryalus is surprised by the Rutulian warrior Volcens in battle and becomes lost. Nisus realizes this and laments his missing companion before rushing to the attack, even while blaming himself for having abandoned his young friend. Confused and saddened and in a speech full of emotion and fear, he wishes for death (cf. Aeneid IX. 377–401; Eneas, w. 5110– 55). Within this moment, Nisus realizes the Latin enemy has captured Euryalus and now pleads with Volcens and his men to let Nisus go free; the price of that prayer will be a sorry payment, as he offers his head in place of his partner’s, and Volcens will take his offer literally (w. 5225–26): “Di va,” fait il, “ne le tochiez,/mais moi prenez, si vos venchiez./Cil n’a ne po ne grant forfet,/mais ge sols ai tot le mal fait,/toz seuls espenoïr le doi;/laissiez l’aler, si prenez moi./Molt a dur cuer quel tochera,/quil velt ocire onkes n’ama;/onkes de buene amor n’ot cure /ki tochera tel criature;/ge metrai mon chief por lo sien,/se muir por lui, molt par m’iert bien.”/Volcens n’ot soin de quant qu’il dit,/molt l’en tochot al cuer petit,/al damoisel trencha le chief./Nisus lo vit, molt li fu grief,/un espié vit gesir a terre,/il Fa saisi, sel vait requerre, /grant cop li dona en Fescu,/que del col li a abatu,/et perça li un des costez;/mais ne fu pas a mort navrez;/et puis a trait le branc d’acier/ por son ami qu’il velt vanchier;/dis en a morz en molt poi d’ore./De totes parz li corent sore,/il l’ont enclos, entr’als Pont pris,/tant i fierent qu’il l’ont ocis./A son compaignon l’ajosterent,/les chiés ont pris, ses an porterent,/et lor seignor en ont porté/en une biere, un po navre.

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(“Hold, now,” he said, “Do not touch him, but take me and avenge yourself! This man has done no wrong, small or great, but I alone have done all the evil, and I alone should pay for it. Let him go, and take me. Whoever would touch him has a very hard heart; whoever wishes to kill him has never loved; whoever would touch such a creature has no care for true love. I will offer my head for his: if I die for him it will be most agreeable to me.” Volcens paid no heed to what he said; it touched his heart very little. He cut off the youth’s head. Nisus saw it: it was most painful to him. He saw a javelin lying on the ground, seized it, and went after Volcens. He gave him a great blow on the shield, knocked it down from his neck, and pierced one of his sides, but did not wound him to the death. And then he drew his steel sword for his friend, whom he wished to avenge. He killed ten of them in a very short time. But they ran upon him from all directions, surrounded him, together seized him, and there dealt him such blows that they killed him. Thus they reunited him with his companion. They took their heads and carried them off. They carried their lord on a stretcher, a little wounded.) Once back in the Rutulian camp, Turnus hung the bloody heads “in front of the gate”—to frighten and dismay the Trojans (vv. 5279 ss.). In the present crucial sequence, we have ruthless and savage behavior on the part of the Latins, a bitter, sadistic, and pathetic aside in the struggle to establish an empire.11 Roman de Troie For some, Benoit de Sainte-Maure’s Troy romance embodies a kind of ne plus ultra of courtly romance. One may think of the “Mirror of Courtesy and Courtliness” in the “Chamber of Beauties,” where, among many other wondrous features, Benoit has placed one of his sly ripostes to the Eneas text.12 Or, during a truce after the Eleventh Battle, Benoit spins a complex and highly courtly tale of the Greek hero Achilles who falls passionately and hopelessly in love with Polyxène (vv. 17489–8472). But focusing on the emotional episodes illustrating courtly love belies the numerous violence-laden and epiclike descriptions that abound in Benoit’s story (ca. 1175). As Emmanuele Baumgartner observes: La guerre occupe une place très importante dans le Roman de Troie, beaucoup plus importante que ne laissent voir les extraits ici édités. Cette dimension du texte de Benoit n’est peut-etre pas la plus séduisante pour le lecteur moderne.13 A few examples will suffice here. For the second battle (of twenty-three!), the romancer’s realistic account of Patrocle’s death borders on the grisly: Hector’s lance pierces the young man’s shield, and as his saddle shatters, the weapon goes right through, penetrates his chest, and “cuts his heart in two” (Le cuer lipart en dous moitiez—vv. 8337–49). A little later (vv. 9569–83), Ulysses attempts to avenge the death of his cousin at the hands

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of Paris, but Troïlus intervenes, strikes Ulysses on the helmet, and breaks it open “with such force that [the sword] breaks through the frontal mail into the skull, now all stained with blood” (Fent e quasse, plie e deront I Que les mailles davant le front/Li a enz el chef enbarrees, I Del sanc de lui ensanglantees—vv. 9571–74). Ulysses, now riding aimlessly and covered with blood and in great pain, mightily strikes Troïlus on the nose, which bursts and bleeds from the shock (vv. 9577–81). The Tenth Battle brings Diomedes face to face with Troïlus, whose lance perforates the Greek’s shield and hauberk, and although the blood squirts out, the wound is not serious enough to keep the Argive warrior from using his sword or lance (Mes Troïlus ne refautpas,/Ainz leftert si, en es lepasy/L’escu li a del cors sevré…/Si que legros del cors li raie;/Mes ni a mie mortel plaie,/Ne qui li face grant nuisance/A ferir d’espee e de lance—vv. 15647–52). My last illustration from Benoit exhibits more a kind of heroic frenzy than mere blood–oozing depictions. Here is Hector in a hero’s rage, before a horrible scene of “carnage and disaster,” as the Greeks push back the Trojans behind the gates, unable to keep himself from entering the final fray against Achilles: His face turns all purple and his heart swells in his breast. Hector is so overwhelmed by fury that no one dares go near him (Li sans li est montez el vis /E li cuers del ventre engroisiiez;/Tantparfu desvez e iriez/Que riens ne s’ose trere a lui—vv. 16014–17).14 Philomena et Procné Chrètien’s Ovidian tale survives in the thirteenth–fourteenth century work known as the Ovide moralisé. Adapted from Book Six of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (vv. 426–674), the Philomena episode is indeed a pure gem of atrocity. With Chretien, the telling becomes, although amplified at length, slightly modified, with a heavy use of psychological analyses of interior states. Ovid’s 248 hexameters are expanded to nearly 1500 octosyllables in Chretien’s hands.15 Dating from the early 1160s, the work has been recently been attributed by most to Chretien de Troyes and belongs in his canon.16 The retelling follows the broad contours of Ovid’s plot, but the medieval adaptation emphasizes Tereus’s evil (and noncourtly) will (volanté) to ravish his sister-in-law Philomena. Once in a forest not far from home, Thracian Tereus first approaches Philomena in a rather friendly way, far from civilization still, but, nevertheless, he does at least attempt courteous behavior. The beautiful Philomena, even before Tereus manages to take his pleasure of her, once realizing his intentions, utters a long series of anaphora, an apostrophe to the monster (vv. 835ss.). Chrétien omits the Ovidian motivation for Tereus’ shameful act of cutting out her tongue afterward. In the Old French it is done more arbitrarily. Indeed, Tereus appears more blameworthy in Chrétien’s eyes (cf. esp.vv.900 ss.) because of his traitorous deception of and bad faith toward King Pandion (with regard to his real reason for removing Philomena from Athens)—and toward his spouse Procne (regarding the truth about Philomena’s where-abouts—he tells her she is dead). Tereus’ violent and mindless rape is an act of violence visited upon Nature’s beauty, Philomena. As is the case with Chrétien’s other fine creation Enide: “Car Nature s’an fu penee/Plus que de nule autre rien nee,/S’i ot tot mis quanqu’ele pot”—vv. 167–69 (“Nature had taken more pains with her than with any other living creature, and had

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outdone herself with this maiden”). Tereus, the quintessence of commonness, sterility, and especially hypocrisy, tries to co-opt, then destroy that perfect image. In his paroxysm, this beast would seize from the beauty her power—perhaps a metaphor for vetera sapientia, all the acculturated wisdom transmitted to and through antiquity and here revitalized. In this view, infanticide and cannibalism are justified. The “Wild Justice”—the revenge episode—is not strong or graphic enough!17 To my mind, it stands for the artist who would destroy in turn those bent on eliminating his creativity and imagination. Most recent criticism of this “tale of antiquity” has centered on explicating the text further, or on its feminist content, or on its embedded Chaucerian relevance. Amsler’s study, for example, focuses on the rich mythographic tradition, especially as reflected in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and in Christine’s de Pizan’s handling of the Ovide moralisé material.18 Another researcher has attempted to exonerate Tereus’s shockingly frenetic and passionate behavior.19 Two feminist views appeared in 2001:20 Jane Burns, by means of an extended feminist dissection of the text, views the two women as “violent and creative” (156), while at once providing a whole new meaning to the concept of motherhood. On the other hand, Nancy Jones engages in a deep analysis, both intellectual and philological, to demonstrate how courtly literature here plays the role of “aestheticizing sexual violence” (161). In feudal- historical terms, she writes, the “male social psyche,” ever “deeply fearful of women,” causes “blood guilt” to be projected “onto the women at the end of the myth”—which would appeal to the patriarchalecclesiastical mentality (169). However, of greatest interest to readers of this volume no doubt is the lengthy and graphic rape and mutilation scene. Once love-mad Tereus has Philomena completely alone, he proclaims that he shall take his full pleasure of her, whether she resist or not. She is forced and cries out, then repels with all her might; she pales and trembles, saying she is deeply shamed by his actions (vv. 807–59): “[…]“Ha,” fet ele, “fel de put’eire, /Fel enuieus, que viaus tu feire?/ Fel mauves, fel desmesurez,/Fel traitres, fel parjurez,/Fel cuiverz, fel de pute loi,/Fel, don ne plevis tu au roi/Que tu enor me porteroies/ Et que a lui me ramanroies/Sainne et heitiee an mon pais?/Tu li juras et sel trais!/Traitres, mes pere te crut,/Qui ta traison n’aparçut,/Por ce que devant lui ploroies/Et por ce que tu li juroies/Sor toz les deus an cui tu croiz./Ou sont li deu? Ou est la foiz?/As les tu ja mis an obli?/Ou sont les lermes que je vi/Quant tu ploroies devant lui?/Ha, lasse, por quoi ne conui/Ta feintise et ta traison/Fel, por quoi fes tel mesprison/Qu’einsi forsanes et esrages?/Repan toi, si feras que sages, /Tant come il te loist repantir,/Sanz parjurer, sanz foi mantir.” (“Ah,” she cries, “traitor of stinking birth, hateful scoundrel, what is your desire? Wicked scoundrel, scoundrel immoderate, treacherous scoundrel, perfidious scoundrel, wretched fraud of stinking morals, perjurer—did you not just promise the king that you would treat me honorably and that you would bring me home healthy and happy to him? This you swore and now you betray him! Traitor! My father trusted you and perceived not your betrayal, because you solemnly swore on all the

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gods you believe in. Where are the gods now? Where is your faith? Have you forgotten them already? Where are the tears I saw as you wept before the king? Alas, why didn’t I detect your lying fraud? Fiend, why are you acting so wrongfully? It will drive you to a raging madness! Repent now, that is the wisest course, as long as repentance still remains possible, without perjury or fraud”) At this point, Philomena, overwhelmed and vanquished, pleads for mercy on bended knees, but Tereus will commit still more evil (vv. 844–59): Tereus ancor ne recroit/Qu’apres ce mal ne face pis./Un canivet tranchant a pris,/Et por ce que cele ne puisse/Conter a home qu’ele truisse/Ceste honte ne cest reproche,/Dist que la langue de la boche/Li tranchera tot a un fes,/Si n’an sera parlé ja mes./Cui avient une n’avient sole:/La langue li tret de la gole,/S’an trancha pres de la meitié./ Or a il mout mal espleitié/Et de ce et de l’autre chose./An la meison la let enclose,/Ou cele plore et crie e bret. (But Tereus could not admit that after this evil he might have done worse. Yet he took a sharp knife, and so that she might not relate how she suffered this disgrace and shame, he said that at a single stroke he would cut out her tongue from her mouth: never would any of this story be told. [One misfortune leads to another.] He yanks her tongue from her mouth and cuts off nearly half. Now he has behaved very badly, both in this act and in the other. He leaves her locked up in the house, where she weeps and cries and shouts.) Inhuman and insane with passionate love, Tereus will be punished severely in the end for these ghastly and transgressive actions. In other words, the poets (both Ovid and his French counterpart) very specifically speak out against this violence. Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide Eastertime brings the contestatory Hunt for the White Stag to Arthur’s court. On the second day, although Erec and Guenevere are not participating, they are confronted in the “adventurous forest” by an armed knight, Yder, his lady, and his dwarf.21 The apparently unmotivated whipping of both Guenevere’s maiden and Erec with skin-flaying blows by the dwarf incites Erec to seek revenge for these insults—genuine “violations of personhood.” The excruciating violence of the extensive scene belies the courtly mood evoked in the first part of the romance. Upon encountering the handsome knight with his lady, and, out of curiosity, Guenevere asks her attendant to go and ask the two to come forward to the queen so she can meet them, but it is rather the accompanying dwarf s whip the maiden will meet (vv. 159–91):

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La pucele vet l’anbleüre/vers le chevalier a droiture./Li nains a l’ancontre li vient,/qui sa corgiee an sa main tient./“Dameisele, estez!” fet li nains,/qui de felenie fu plains./“Qu’alez vos ceste part querant?/Ça n’avez vos que fere avant!”/“Nains,” fet ele, “lesse m’aler:/a ce chevalier voel parler,/car la reine m’i anvoie.”/Li nains s’estut en mi la voie,/qui molt fu fel et de put’ ere:/“Ça n’avez vos,” fet il, “que fere./Alez arrieres!/N’est pas droiz/qu’a si boen chevalier parloiz.”/La pucele s’est avant trete;/passer volt oltre a force fete,/ que lo nain ot an grant despit/por ce qu’ele le vit petit./Et li nains hauce la corgiee,/quant vers lui la vit aprochiee./Ferir la volt par mi le vis,/mes cele a son braz devant mis;/cil recuevre, si l’a ferue/a descovert sor la main nue./Si la fiert sor la main anverse/que tote an devint la mains perse./La pucele, quant mialz ne puet,/voelle ou non, retorner Pestuet./Retornee s’an est plorant:/des ialz li descendent corant/les lermes contreval la face. (The maiden rode apace,/straight toward the knight./The dwarf came to meet her,/holding his whip in his hand./“Damsel, halt!” said the dwarf,/who was full of evil./“What are you looking for here?/ You have no business in this direction!”/“Dwarf,” said she, “let me pass:/I wish to speak to that knight,/for the queen sends me there.”/ The dwarf, who was very evil and baseborn,/stood blocking her way:/ “You have no business here,” said he./“Go back! It’s not right/for you to talk to such a fine knight.”/The maiden moved forward;/she wanted to force her way past,/for she felt great contempt for the dwarf /because she saw how little he was./But the dwarf raised his whip/ when he saw her approaching him./He tried to strike her in the face,/ but she protected herself with her arm;/then he took aim again, and struck her/openly on her bare hand./He struck her on the back of her hand/so that her hand became all blue./The maiden, since she could do no more,/was obliged to turn back, whether she wanted to or not./She came back weeping:/tears were running from her eyes/ down her face.) The queen, puzzled, and perceiving the attendant’s treatment and especially her bloody wounds, calls over to Erec for help, but he does not succeed in passing by the dwarf either (vv. 205–11; 217–31): Erec cele part esperone,/des esperons au cheval done,/vers le chevalier vient tot droit./Li nains cuiverz venir le voit;/a l’ancontre li est alez:/“Vasax,” fet il, “arriers estez!/Ça ne sai ge qu’a fere aiez…”. Erec bote le nain an sus./Li nains fu fel tant con nus plus:/de la corgiee grant colee/li a par mi le col donee./Le col et la face ot vergiee/Erec del cop de la corgiee:/de chief an chief perent les roies/que li ont feites les corroies./Il sot bien que del nain ferir/ne porroit il mie joir, /car le chevalier vit armé,/molt felon et desmesuré,/et crient qu’asez tost l’ocirroit/se devant lui son nain feroit./Folie n’est pas vaselages…

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(Erec spurred in that direction,/put his spurs to his horse,/and came straight to the knight./The despicable dwarf saw him coming/and went to meet him:/“Knight,” said he, “stay back!/I don’t know what business you have here./I advise you to withdraw.”/“Be gone,” said Erec, “bothersome dwarf!/You’re very nasty and hateful./Let me pass!”—“You wont pass!”/“Yes, I will!”—“No, you won’t!”/Erec gave the dwarf a shove./The dwarf was as evil as could be:/with the whip he struck Erec/a great blow on the neck./Erec’s neck and face were striped by the blow:/the welts raised by the strands of the whip/ appeared from one end to the other./Erec knew full well that he could not/have the satisfaction of striking the dwarf,/for he saw the armored knight,/ruthless and arrogant,/and he feared that the knight would very quickly kill him/if he struck his dwarf in his presence./Folly is not prowess…) *** As surveyed briefly then, in the world of courtly love and courtly literature, all is not tender and sweet. Like Yder’s vicious dwarf, not every wild and untamed youth of the period embraced the sweet-mannered courtly lifestyle.22 From Troubadour William DCs hot cats clawing at his back, to the cruel verbal abuse in Conon de Bethune’s misogynist poem, very uncivilized brutality and violence appear to gainsay the chivalrous code of delicate courtliness that most admirers esteem. Flagellation, poisoning, smacking and buffeting (Old Testament “smiting”), acts of dominance, transgression, rape, mutilation, sadism, masochism, and physical abuse—these are the types of uncontrollable violence frequently encountered in the literary texts associated with the beginnings of courtly culture. Women and children, widows and orphans do not always receive the liberating treatment expected in such quarters. As we have seen, the role of brutality contrasts sharply to the tender and sweet, beauteous and harmonious elements associated with courtly romance. Indeed, the presence of such abjection seems to exaggerate the positive essentials. The human paradox embodies at once both exquisite kindness and superb cruelty. However “pure” the form of “chivalry” (doubtless a nineteenth-century construct, asserts Barthélemy),23 the literary expressions of brutality and violence we have reviewed—in a Christian context—raise the perennial question: What is the relationship between violence and human nature in the context of medieval French culture? The methodological problem of the representation of violence in medieval literature and the stylistic choices by authors formed the framework for two courses taught at American universities recently. The courses raised questions about depictions of savagery as regards narrative functions or about the interaction of art and its potential to transform violence.24 These viewpoints are complemented by a collected volume that argues for the problematics in the representation of violence, in both sacred and profane domains.25 In a much broader setting (Versailles under Louis XIV), it was sociologist Norbert Elias who illuminated so persuasively the subject of the ubiquitous sparks and tensions in court society.26 Walter Map, writing at the very Angevin court eulogized in the coronation scene of Chrétien’s Erec,27 likened Henry IFs courtly milieu to Hades, with all its attendant and searing torments, wretched coveters and wicked scourges.28 A recent scholar, Dominique Barthelemy, has evoked the reforming Bernardine damnation cum

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praise of the “new orders” of chivalry, referring to the militia as an entity that can easily fail and fall into malitia.29 Living peacefully and in gentleness, as Augustine counseled in a sermon, clearly offered a real challenge to those in knighthood’s sphere.30 But, indeed, it was historian Kaeuper’s original and wide-ranging 1999 volume, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe, that demonstrated how chivalry itself paradoxically begat violence in medieval Europe, instead of ideally internalizing restraint in knights. Chivalry’s societal ambiguity made matters worse especially in the era of dynamic expansion. Kaeuper’s close reading of chivalric literature (not just romance and chronicle but song and epic poetry as well) substantiates how much heroic violence was glorified by knights, and how brutality in jousts and tournaments, for example, was alloyed to displays of prowess by means of qualities like honor, piety, high status, and attractiveness to women.31 St. Bernard was not off the mark in referring to most knights as “impious rogues, sacrilegious thieves, murderers, perjurers and adulterers.”32 Kaeuper reviews such essentials as the near decade of peace that reigned because of Arthur’s nurture (118–19); describes the war, gore, and bloodshed of fierce battles (146– 47); points out the contradictions of evidence regarding mounted and armed warfare encounters, as depicted in the romances and in manuscript illuminations, as opposed to the historical accounts of battlefield practice of fighting on foot (174–76); uncovers the pattern of savage fighting followed by respect and reconciliation—as seen especially in the moving Guivret-Erec joust (w. 3629–889)—that highlights the “primacy of prowess in chivalry” (216), as well as its major role in the defense of honor (219); reassesses the “chivalry topos” (“prowess inspires love and love inspires prowess,” 220); and devotes several pages of analysis to sexual violence, an issue he sees directly related to knightly honor (225–30). As the African proverb puts it, the lion taught the antelope speed. A more recent thematic study of the “cultural issue” of cruelty in the Middle Ages (Baraz, Medieval Cruelty) argues for an “intercultural polemics” (102), and demonstrates also how Abelardian intentionality comes to define cruelty as an anthropological category (102), most often attributed to “the other” (viz., pagans, Jews, Mongols, Muslims, and later, Amerindians, and, during the Reform, Roman Catholics!). Virtuous historical martyrdoms, Baraz reveals, give way over time to thicker, epic ones, with ever more wicked, irrational, and frenzied persecutors. Viking atrocities, for example, “become more lurid…with each passing century” (67, n.150). As for cannibalism, during the early modern period, the subject became more topical as it was (reportedly) practiced by New World peoples (175).33 *** To elucidate and explicate now the various gruesome and bloody textbased scenes invoked thus far, I wish to contextualize them by referring to a classic of literary anthropology, namely, Rene Girard’s study of violence, in which he observes that stains of blood pollute with impurity: Spilt blood of any origin, unless it has been associated with a sacrificial act, is considered impure. This universal attribution of impurity to spilt blood springs directly from the definition we have just proposed: wherever violence threatens, ritual impurity is present. When men are enjoying peace and security, blood is a rare sight. When violence is unloosed, however, blood appears everywhere—on the ground, underfoot,

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forming great pools. Its very fluidity gives form to the contagious nature of violence. Its presence proclaims murder and announces new upheavals to come. Blood stains everything it touches the color of violence and death. Its very appearance seems, as the saying goes, to “cry out for vengeance.”34 Certainly highly relevant to the Piramus and Thisbe tale, in the Eneas and Troy romances, and virtually re-enacted and elaborated in Erec et Enide, Girard’s thesis seems to match perfectly the outcome of the Philomena et Procné story: the infanticide actions committed by the two sisters cry out for vengeance, which is exactly what Tereus seeks. Confronted with all the grotesque and abominable, repugnant and loathsome details, such as those we have seen in just a few selected texts, one should note that French literature will continue to reflect the uncertainties and indefiniteness of the subject, but I think, after the twelfth century, one utopian turn will take it in general toward the simplicity, the empathetic (with his stigmata), and the deep suspicion of book learning of a St. Francis of Assisi, the other toward dream allegory and personification, wherein violence is sublimated and truly “aestheticized”—to conjure up Nancy Jones’s perceptive term. Let me explain. On the one hand, by the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth, the didactic medium of abstract allegory and extended metaphor was thriving in vernacular dress, a “protean device”35 illustrated best perhaps by the Le Roman des eles in which Raoul de Houdenc describes the “seven feathers of liberality” and the seven feathers of courtesy.”36 This idealistic, distinctive, and probably noble mode amalgamated Ovidian allusions, Troubadour love-lyric personification, and elements from Arthurian romance, and clearly breaks from the aggression and cruelty we have noted above. Conversely, St. Francis’s “new miracle”—the impression of Christ’s five wounds— first appears also at the end of the twelfth century and at the beginning of the thirteenth.37 What were the prevalent counterfoils to brutality? Ecstatic union with the divinity and highly wrought and enthusiastic spiritual phenomena all emphasize for the laity at this time the humanity of and personal closeness to Christ.38 The childlike and pentecostal foolishness of Francis and his followers revolutionized Christianity, especially with their emphasis on evangelical poverty and disdain for rank and worldly possessions. Along with this came a stress on humility that repudiated the pride born of book learning and letters.39 Besides the concurrent weight of implicit peace and harmony in all this (i.e., nonviolence), Francis’s “biological and esthetic paradigm,” as Karl Morrison might call it (in his complex study, “I Am You”),40 there is the empathetic understanding inherent in the stigmata, whereby one might say the ubiquitous violent behavior of the era is turned upon itself in an act of supreme mystical mimesis or identification with the crucified Christ’s five flesh wounds. In closing, I will only paraphrase Georges Duby’s sketch of twelfth-century love in France, commenting on the Roman de la Rose, which, he asserts, initiated a wave of discovery aimed at youth, joy, generosity, and aristocracy. No doubt, the twelfth-century Renaissance ushered in a “kinder, gentler” world for some, in which the feminization of culture began to influence imaginative literature, thus (as suggested here) mitigating aberrant violence and brutality to an extent in courtly texts. But to temper these human

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aberrations remains a challenge even today, for all humans, men and women alike, whether passive resistor or suicide bomber.41 Notes 1. Georges Duby, Mâle Moyen Age: De l’amour et autres essais (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 80, 86–87. See also his earlier The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). Cf.Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), a useful and insightful monograph.

For his thoughtful reading of an earlier draft of this chapter, I am beholden to my fellow French teacher, Peter Camm (Miami Valley School Dayton, OH). My colleague, Professor Thomas Herron (Hampden-Sydney College), whose lucid, principally “Foucaldian” remarks (in littera, 12 June 2003) have strengthened my argument, has urged me to take greater account “of the figurative manipulation of violence in the classical tradition.” Further development of this angle, linked to the sublimation of warlike violence in a patriarchal culture, would obviously draw on (as Herron points out) Susanne Wofford’s wide-ranging monograph The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). 2. Stephen C.Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals—939–1210 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 35–48; and idem, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), esp. 82–106, on “Women.” Cf.Joachim Bumke, Courtly Culture: Literature and Society in the High Middle Ages, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); idem, The Concept of Knighthood in the Middle Ages, trans. W.T.H.Jackson and Erika Jackson; introduction by W.T.H.Jackson (New York: AMS Press, 1982), 96–106. Jaeger’s antecedents were the pioneering studies by Aldo Scaglione, Knights at Court: Courtliness, Chivalry and Courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), and Charles T.Wood, Age of Chivalry: Manners and Morals, 1000–1450 (New York: Universe Books, 1970). See also Constance Brittain Bouchard, “Strong of Body, Brave and Noble”: Chivalry and Society in Medieval France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), for an interpretation of medieval literature as mirroring and censuring the role of the nobility and its conduct. A quick search on the Internet for “violence medieval” at Google.com (accessed 5 May 2003) yielded 193,000 hits. Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), another work to deal with the subject, studies, from a different angle, the countless scenes of torture and spectacles of pain in medieval drama, concluding that the ideology of theatrical violence involved both aesthetic and dramatic elements of “verisimilitude, pity, fear, and catharsis to fabricate truth” (24). Note also that for R.A.Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003), violence was viewed perhaps as Renaissance entertainment in the Bard’s early plays, while its role in the his later works is analogous to the phenomenon in nature. 3. Bumke, Courtly Culture, 311–25.

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4. See Will Hasty, Art of Arms: Studies of Aggression and Dominance in Medieval German Court Poetry (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C.Winter, 2002), 10, 145, referred to in Albrecht Classen’s introduction to this volume, for insights into the possible complicity between the “edele herzen” (of Gottfried) and the dominant Christian authorities. In this more realistic context, Joachim Bumke, Courtly Culture, 415–17, under the rubric “criticism of courtly life,” reports on John of Salisbury’s influential Policraticus, in which treatise wanton profligacy and unrestrained impulses among the aristocrats were censored; extravagant court life was fraught, wrote many late twelfth-century observers, with the usual human qualities—“flattery,” “ambition,” “hypocrisy,” “mendacity,” “slander,” and “intrigue.” 5. Dominique Barthelemy, “Modern Mythologies of Medieval Chivalry,” The Medieval World, ed. Peter Linehan and Janet L.Nelson (London: Routledge, 2001), 214–28; here 215. 6. Joachim Bumke, The Concept of Knighthood, 81. Thomas Herron has reminded me that brutality motifs in the aristocratic and military context do not necessarily apply to certain nonwarlike episodic examples included here, e.g., the Piramus and Tisbé and Tereus and Philomena stories; nevertheless, the latter do make the point about contradictory brutal violence in a courtly mode. Perhaps the best definition of violence comes from Robert McAfee Brown, who emphasizes the expression “violation of personhood” (see Classen “Introduction” to this volume, 3). 7. See John G.Peristiany, Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. The Nature of Human Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966). 8. Jean Frappier, “Vues sur les conceptions courtoises dans les litteratures d’oc et d’oïl au Xlle siècle,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 2 (1959): 135–56 (reported in Amour courtois et Table Ronde [Geneva: Droz, 1973], 1–31). For Cador, Maistre Wace de Caen, Roman de Brut: A History of the British, ed. and trans. Judith Weiss (Exeter, U.K.: University of Exeter Press, 1999), vv. 10737–64. 9. Text from Piramus et Tisbé in Three Ovidian Tales of Love (Piramus et Tisbé, Narcisus et Dané, Philomena et Procné), ed. and trans. Raymond J.Cormier (New York: Garland, 1986). See W.W.Kibler’s article, “Piramus et Tisbé: A Medieval Adaptor at Work,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 91 (1975): 73–291, for a thorough analysis of the translator’s strategies. 10. See Philippe Logié, L’Énéas, une traduction au risque de l’invention. Nouvelle Bibliothèque du Moyen Âge, 48 (Paris: Champion, 1999), for pertinent comments on the “hypotexte” as opposed and in relation to the “hypertexte.” Also, Raymond Cormier, “Le Lien mystique: Topos classique virgilien adapté de l’épisode de Nisus et Euryale,” Les Études classiques (Namur, Belgium), 61 (1993): 309–15. 11. For Philip R.Hardie, Virgil: Aeneid Book IX (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 25, the last four books of the Aeneid interlock and solidify all the essentials of the poem, and it is particularly the Nisus-Euryalus episode in Book IX that “sets the tone for the whole of the narrative of the war in Italy.” 12. Benoit de Sainte-Maure, Le Roman de Troie. Extraits du manuscrit Milan, Bibliothèque ambrosienne, D 55. Lettres Gothiques, ed. Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Françoise Vieillard (Paris: Livre de Poche/Librairie Générale Française, 1998), w. 14529–958; for the riposte, w. 14798–800, and Eneas, w. 537–39, cited from this edition: Eneas: Roman du Xlle siècle, ed. J.-J.Salverda de Grave. 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1925–1927); and John A.Yunck’s standard translation: Eneas: A Twelfth-Century Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974). 13. Baumgartner, introduction to her partial ed. (above), trans. of the Troy romance, 13. 14. See further Raymond J.Cormier, “Metaphor and Sign in Beowulfi The H(e)art in Heorot,” Language and Style 22,4 (1989 [Summer 1994]): 387–94, for observations on the “berserker” motif sketched here. 15. Philomena et Procné, cited from Three Ovidian Tales of Love, 1986.

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16. See Elisabeth Schulze-Busacker” Philomena: Une révision de l’attribution de l’oeuvre,” Romania 107 (1986): 459–85; and Marie-Claire Gérard-Zai, “L’auteur de Philomena,” Revue de Istorie si Teorie Literara (Bucharest) 25 (1976): 361–68; for recent arguments on authorship, the former using a philological approach, the latter by appealing to charters from Champagne in which “Legouais” is mentioned. 17. See Susan Jacoby, Wild justice: The Evolution of Revenge (New York: Harper and Row, 1983, 1988), esp. 183–232 on “sexual revenge.” 18. Mark Amsler, “Rape and Silence: Ovid’s Mythography and Medieval Readers,” Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M.Rose (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 61–96; here 85–93. 19. See Raymond Cormier, “Térée, le pecheur fatal dans Philomena de Chrétien de Troyes,” Dalhousie French Studies 24 (1993): 1–9. 20. E.Jane Burns, “Raping Men: What’s Motherhood Got To Do With It?” Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, 127–60; and Nancy Jones, “The Daughter’s Text and the Thread of Lineage in the Old French Philomena,” also in Representing Rape, 161– 87. Daniel Baraz, Medieval Cruelty: Changing Perceptions, Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 156, captions a fifteenthcentury Latin play (Progne) on the subject, in which cruel Tereus feeds human flesh to his horses. 21. Chrétien de Troyes. Erec et Enide, ed. and trans. Carleton W.Carroll (New York: Garland, 1987). For romances cited above, see also Chretién’s Cligés, ed. Stewart Gregory and Claude Luttrell (Rochester, N.Y.: Brewer, 1993), and The Story of the Grail (Li Contes del Graal), or Perceval ed. Rupert T.Pickens; trans. William W.Kibler (New York: Garland, 1990). 22. Cf. Georges Duby, MAle Moyen Age, 94–122. On this, Albrecht Classen has passionately commented (see his “Introduction” to this volume, 14), “violence is recognized as a universal and timeless problem, especially if it affects the stability of social structures, that is, when violence is directed against members of one’s own social group.” 23. Barthelemy, “Modern Mythologies of Medieval Chivalry,” 215. 24. Mathilda Bruckner, “Violence: Medieval French Responses” French literature course offered at Boston College (http://www.be.edu/bc_org/avp/enmgt/stserv/acd/courses/RL/rl41300.html. Accessed 5 May 2003); Daniel Baraz, “Representing Violence in the Medieval Period,” University of Pennsylvania (http://humanities.sas.upenn.edu/00–01/course_yiolence.htm. Last accessed on March 25, 2004). 25. La Violence: Représentations et ritualisations, ed. Myriam Wathée-Delmotte (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002). 26. Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 76. 27. Richard Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 103. 28. Walter Map, De nugis curialum (Courtier’s Trifles), ed. and trans. Montague Rhodes James; rev. C.N.L.Brooke and R.A.B.Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 500–13. 29. Barthélemy, “Modern Mythologies,” 223. 30. Cf. Classen, “Introduction” to this volume, 6. 31. Albrecht Classen’s observation relates to this point, drawing on The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus: “Violence often results from unrequited love, whereas love can transform the person acting most violently into a constructive member of society. Likewise, aggression and hatred have been strangely instrumental in the development of culture, and have also contributed to its own demise, not to talk of the people and country that were the defeated object.” (“Introduction,” 5). 32. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence, 76.

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33. Daniel Baraz, Medieval Cruelty. See also, “A Great Effusion of Blood”: Interpreting Medieval Violence, ed. Mark D.Meyerson et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 34. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 33–34. 35. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970), 1; cf. also Jeanette M.A.Beer, “Allegory, French,” Dictionary of theMid-dle Ages, ed. Joseph R.Strayer. Vol. 1 (New York: Scribner’s, 1982), 188–89. 36. Raoul de Houdenc, Le Roman des eles, and L’Ordene de chevalerie, ed. Keith Busby. Utrecht Publications in General and Comparative Literature, 17 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1983), 35–45 (text), 162–67 (trans.). See also the standard Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. F.Lecoy (Paris: Champion, 1965–1970). 37. André Vauchez, “Les Stigmates de Saint François et leurs détracteurs dans les derniers siècles du Moyen Âge,” Religion et société dans l’ocddent médiéval (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1980), 597 ss. See also Johannes Jörgensen, Saint Francis of Assisi: A Biography, trans. T. O’Conor Sloane (Garden City, N.Y.: 1955). 38. Vauchez, “Les Stigmates de Saint François,” 598. Thomas Herron, in his reading of my chapter, encourages a different view, namely, that of the milites Christi, on the one hand; and, even more significantly, one must ask (he writes) if “the adoration of Christ […could] ever be removed from the understanding of oppressive state power enforcing its rule through occupying soldiers?”—or, one might add, of an oppressive patriarchy! 39. Walter Nigg, Warriors of God: The Great Religious Orders and Their Founders, ed. and trans. Mary Ilford (London: Secker and Warburg, 1959), 219–27. 40. Karl F.Morrison, “I Am You”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 36, 140–41, 353. 41. As an epiloque, I note that Scott McLemee has recently observed how “[p]eople are endlessly inventive in developing techniques for wounding and destroying one another—but also in finding explanations for why doing so is […] a form of self-defense,” New York Times Book Review March 7, 2004, 12.

3 Turnus in Veldeke’s Eneide: The Effects of Violence WILLIAM C.McDONALD Heinrich von Veldeke (ca. 1150–1200), epic and lyric poet, occupies a peculiar place in the history of German literature. Although he is recognized, in Frank Tobin’s words, “by his contemporaries as the father of courtly literature,”1 the work on which Heinrich’s pride of place rests, the lengthy verse-romance Eneide, a version of Virgil’s story of classical antiquity, is comparatively little studied in our time, having brought forth research very narrow in scope. Kristine K.Sneeringer sums up scholarship on the poem: “The most widelydiscussed critical topics concerning the Eneasroman include the romances of Eneas with Dido and Lavinia, and the comparison of these to the Old French versions [esp. the Roman d’Eneas] and to Virgil [Aeneid]…. The love theme… blends with the notion of governing (Herrschaft und Liebe), and finally modulates until notions of peace and of rulership prevail.”2 Without denying that the dominant areas of research are important (i.e., Heinrich’s literary sources, his intellectual influences, as well as his treatment of the classical nexus of love and proper governance), one must register surprise that a promising area of scholarly inquiry, violence—or to put it in the words of the religious scholar Gene Outka, “harming others”3—is a lacuna in scholarship on Eneide. In a word, Eneide is a study in violence, at the center of which stands the legendary Aeneas, whose fervid, murderous rage has become proverbial: “furiis accensus et ira terribilis.”4 Heinrich hesitates not at all to depict his Aeneas as beset by violent emotions. The narrator says of the hero, for example: “Eneas was erbolgen/swen her mohte ervolgen/und mit dem swerde erlangen,/des leben was ergangen” (12109–12; in a fury Aeneas killed everyone he could bring within reach of his sword).5 Violence is everywhere in a story framed by conflict and struggle. Our scholars, in truth, read past the strife as self-evident and unworthy of consideration, making the present chapter to our knowledge the first to explore the theme of force and violence concretely in the deeds of one of the characters in Heinrich’s Eneide, Turnus, King of the Rutulians (Rutuli), whose story is related both by Virgil and Ovid (Met. xiii, xiv). Not surprisingly, the tale begins, in medias res with the narrator’s comments on violence: “Ir habet wol vernomen daz/wi der kunich Menelaus besaz/Troien die richen/vil gewaldechlichen/do er sie zefuren wolde” (1–5; you have indeed heard how King Menelaus besieged the mighty Troy with a powerful force when he wanted to destroy it). A wedding festival closes the poem, but only after Aeneas decapitates his rival, the heathen Prince Turnus following a graphically brutal single combat. To this warrior Turnus, opponent of Aeneas and the Trojans, King Latinus of Latium had promised both the hand of his beautiful daughter Lavinia and his kingdom. Latinus, responding to the will of the gods, changes his mind, however, now

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offering both the betrothed and his kingdom to Aeneas. The ruler thus initiates a concatenation of violence that Turnus embraces, instead of striving to avert. The deadly rivalry of Turnus and Aeneas is as bloody as it is instructive regarding Heinrich’s perspective on the ethics of war and peace.6 The poet views vis (force, power, strength, might, influence) from a traditional Christian perspective (soon to be codified under the rubric: ethica Thomistica), according to which violence is an external impulse forced upon someone, without personal concurrence, and requiring someone to act contrary to personal choice.7 Conflict is the last resort in Eneide. And where violence erupts, it can only be tolerated for right intention, for legitimate military objectives, and when declared by appropriate (public) authority. Aeneas enjoys authorial approbation so long as he obeys the sanctioned patterns regulating violent action. These include the rationale for warfare, proper consultation (including diplomacy), the protocol of the commencement of hostilities, and approved tactics on the battlefield. By no means does Heinrich countenance the spirit, or letter, of the Latin proverb Inter arma silent leges. Aeneas conducts a just war, properly conceived, proportional, and constrained in execution (ius in bello). Violence itself is thus not at issue in Eneide, but rather the compass of violence—the premises of warfare and failed constraints on conflict. Heinrich’s exemplar of inordinate violence is Turnus, around whom are clustered three contentious issues: first, the grounds for resorting to force (ius ad bellum); second, laws governing conduct during warfare; and finally, weighing costs and benefits of military action—not least in respect to one’s own soldiers. It is therefore Turnus who illustrates, through example, the ethics of the unjust war. Despite the importance of his violent acts for Heinrich’s ethical schematic: legitimate violence versus illegitimate violence, Turnus has attracted surprisingly little scholarship. This is all the more perplexing in that, as an exceptionally vivid and fully drawn character with negative potential, he anticipates Hagen of the Nibelungenlied. In Turnus (and Hagen), to cite Shakespeare on Brutus, “the elements [were] mixed” (Julius Caesar 5, v). However, to quote the same Shakespeare passage, one decidedly cannot say of Turnus that “his life was gentle.” Quite the opposite is the case. One of the earliest descriptions of the prince in Eneide is of a man assembling a fierce fighting force: “michel here her gewan” (4516; he gained a countless host of warriors). Introduced to the reader as “ein ritter gemeit/unde ein stolzer jungelink” (3, 994–95; a handsome young man and a fine knight). Turnus has many laudable qualities. In combat, he is “ein helt gût/und het eines lewen mut” (12457–58; a noble warrior with the heart of a lion). But at bottom, he is a person not only at war with others, but with himself, and a man ruled by intensely felt and ultimately self-destructive emotions (amativeness, rashness, fury, vindictiveness), all these battling for the upper hand in him. He departs our vision as violence personified, and a man who brings about his own death: “daz houbet her im abe slûch” (12606; Aeneas then cut off his head). It was the great medievalist Helmut de Boor who materially shaped the critical image of Turnus by branding him a fully negative type. De Boor numbers the prince among those in the work exemplifying destructive emotion; like Dido, Lavinia’s mother, and the friends Nisus and Euryalus, Turnus cannot tame his drives and passions, and fails to exercise “maze” (measure, correct measure, propriety, moderation, temperance, selfrestraint). According to de Boor:

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Turnus geht an seiner unmâze zugrunde, die schon mehrfach in ungezügelten Zornausbriichen hervorgetreten war und in dem Raube eines Ringes von der Hand des toten Pallas zu einer ehrlosen Handlung, zu Leichenraub, geführt hatte…. Turnus’ unmâze spiegelt sich aber im Verhalten seiner Leute, die den beschworenen Frieden des Zweikampfes brechen und über die Trojaner herfallen. Wenn Veldeke ihr Verhalten als homoet [Kartschoke: hômût] unde nît (11815) bezeichnet, so ordnet er es damit unter die schwerste Sünde, die teuflische superbidy ein.8 Turnus fails because of his unmâze (lack of moderation), which has already surfaced several times in his uncontrolled rages and when he took the ring off dead Pallas’s hand. This last in itself was an act of dishonor, robbing a corpse…. Turnus’ unmâze, however, is reflected in the behavior of his men who break the sworn peace instituted for the duel and who attack the Trojans. Characterizing their behvior as homoet [Kartschoke: hômût] unde nît (11815 [hubris and envy]), Veldeke counts it [unmâze] as belonging to the worst sin, devilish superbia. The danger of this kind of black-white analysis, reductive in the extreme, is that it degrades Turnus to a kind of allegorical figure: the personification of the vice of lack of measure (“unmâze”). Without doubt, Turnus is deficient in moderation and restraint, and commits a surfeit of sins, first among which is ira. But he is certainly no devil figure, and Heinrich von Veldeke betrays no little ambivalence about the man whom he accords many sterling qualities. I would argue that, because Heinrich paints in shades and hues, no figure in Eneide is unblemished. For example, Aeneas himself shares Turnus’s aggressiveness and proclivity to violence: he plunders and burns, and literally foams at the mouth with rage (cf. 5430ff. and 12109). No single flaw can therefore hope to contain Heinrich’s characters, nor can the exercise of force in itself serve to sunder Aeneas and Turnus. What bring poetic censure over Turnus and set him apart from Aeneas are, first, his willful disregard of peaceful resolution to conflict in favor of discord and, second, his recourse to illegitimate violence to attain his ends. If violent conduct within the domain of war (fatally) separates Turnus from Aeneas, Heinrich is at pains to draw parallels between these two suitors of Princess Lavinia…. This he accomplishes, in one important way, by means of stylistic parallelism, choosing identical, or very similar, epithets for each man. Each is, for example, “lussam” (attractive, pleasing, charming).9 Advancing the theme of their co-equivalence is, in addition, the extraordinary eulogy sounded at the death of Turnus, which is drawn equally from the tradition of the Mirror of Princes and the conventional dirge.10 Turnus, warrior, the narrator argues, might just as well have killed Aeneas, instead of the reverse: Dô Turnus lach erslagen,/do wart daz weinen und daz klagen/von sînen frunden vile grôz./wande nehein sîn genôz/mêr tugende nie gewan,/wie her wâre ein heidensch man./doch daz her dâ was belegen,/her was des lîbes ein degen,/kune unde mahtich,/wîse unde bedahtich./getrouwe unde wârhaft,/milde unde êrhaft,/ein adelar sînes gûtes,/ein lewe sînes mûtes,/ein ekkestein der êren,/ein spiegel der hêren./her hete wol getânen lîb,/vil lieb wâren im diu wîb,/si wâren ouch ime holt:/daz waz sîner

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tugende scholt./her hete in sîner jugende/ûz erwelder tugende/wol zehener sîner gnôze teil,/ wan daz klagelîch unheil,/daz her des tages veige was/unde das her Eneas/sîn lîb danne solde tragen,/Turnûs het anders in erslagen. (12607–34) (Turnus’s friends wept and lamented bitterly when he was slain, for, despite, his being a heathen, none of his peers had excelled him in valor and, although he lay there dead, he had been a warrior through and through. He had been bold and powerful, shrewd and prudent, dependable kind and honorable, an eagle of generosity, a lion of courage, a cornerstone of virtue, and a model for noblemen. He was handsome and liked the women, who, because of his many fine traits, were also fond of him. In his youth he had ten times as much ability as his peers. Had it not been for the regrettable misfortune that he was destined to die that day and that Aeneas was fated to take his life, Turnus would have slain the Trojan.) Immediately before this inventory of excellence, the narrator sums up Turnus’s life: he was “ein edel vorste wol geboren,/ze allen tugenden ûz erkoren” (12565–66, a highborn prince who excelled in every manly virtue). And as holder of “alle tugende,” which Rodney W.Fisher well translates as “blessed with every good quality,” Turnus bestrides Heinrich’s epic stage.11 Embellishing Virgil’s characterization of Turnus as a powerful heir of renowned family (“avis atavisque potens,” vii: 56), Heinrich accords him the full palette of knightly heroic epithets: he is “snel” (nimble, 12357), “balt” (brave, 12409), “rîche” (mighty, 7701), “kune” (bold, 7612), der “helt lussam” (4997, the handsome warrior), “gemeide” (5525, proud), “wolgitân” (handsome, 5535), and “mâre” (famous, 12519). Endowed with noble lineage, animated by stoutheartedness, enjoying riches and renown, and cast as Aeneas’ virtual shadowbrother, Turnus seems a poor candidate indeed for literary opprobrium. This is the man in whom de Boor wants to see satanic pride? The mixed character that Turnus manifests makes tenuous any definitive interpretation. On the one hand, he is the embodiment of classical virtus, while on the other he is the personification of self-blinding vengefulness, making him the nemesis of Aeneas. Ultimately, Turnus’s dark side triumphs. He finds ruin at the narrative conjunction of rage and recklessness, each of these nourishing the other. Wrath beclouds his critical faculties to the degree that his ire induces overbold action; the result is an acte violent sanctioned neither by narrator nor poet. Bringing low the highborn, brave, and manly man whom Virgil calls “heros” (xii, 723) is thus his own fury—as motus animi. Had Turnus been able to master his anger, he could have avoided, or greatly mitigated, strife with Aeneas. Complicating the explanation of his deeds, however, is the numinous realm in Eneide, which participates in his downfall. It would therefore be inaccurate simply to label Turnus author of his own doom. The narrator, directing attention to the super-mundane, observes that the armor of Aeneas, son of Aphrodite, issues from the smith- and forge-god Vulcan; hence: “hern mocht sîn niht verwunden./her noch dehein man/der ie den lib gewan,/ne mochtes niht zebrechen,/dorchlahen noch dorchstechen./des verlôs Turnus sîn leben” (12390–95, [Turnus] could not do him harm. Turnus lost his life

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because neither he nor any man who ever lived could break through this armor with either spear or sword). Too, we learn that Turnus was destined to perish on the day he met Aeneas in mortal combat: “daz her des tages veige was/unde daz her Eneas/sîn lib solde tragen” (12630–33, Aeneas was fated to take his life). However, it would be false to assume on the basis of this kind of statement that the dramatis personae are mere agents of forces beyond their ken. Turnus is absolutely no automaton. The many opportunities he has to influence his own fate work against a purely “providential” reading of his course of action. Doubtless, unheil (misfortune, calamity, ruin) has some (dark) part to play in the Eneide; and Aeneas is blessed by fortunate circumstance. But the reader cannot hope to know the full impact of Providence. What is certain is that Heinrich constructs a complex worldview, according to which forces outside the reach of human control actively vie with those within the realm of human volition. One of these latter forces is violence, which, when explicitly expressed in the term gewalt, has a range of meaning extending from acts of violence and power to force, dominion, and tyranny. Violence, as Heinrich is able to show by means of the story of Aeneas and Turnus, is not inevitable, requiring as it does individual discretion. And it is precisely in the area of volition that Turnus is conspicuous. He is by no means an agent of a mechanistic fate, as when he decides to besiege the forces of Aeneas—in the face of wise counsel to the contrary. Repeatedly, the narrative imputes to him the power to decide, the free will to alter the course of violent action. That he does not grasp the opportunity at hand, instead submitting to the rule of revenge and falling into discord without due consideration, is an indictment, both of his rashness and of his beclouded appraisal of the lineaments of force—especially in time of war. In pointed asides, the narrator urges the reader to recognize that Turnus holds his fate in his own hands; his failure to ameliorate the situation is the doom he brings upon himself. Mont Albane, the city that Aeneas has fortified in case of attack, is the place where Turnus must come face to face with the violence he can choose to wreak or forgo. Turnus stands at a figurative, and tangible, crossroads, and Heinrich masterfully shows him in the process of decision. The prince confronts two stark options, peace or war, each articulated by a court advisor. Lord Mezentius, “ein forste hêre,/der het michel êre: (5417–18; noble and highly esteemed prince), represents the force of law—and pure reason—as he reminds Turnus of his legal and ethical obligations if deciding to choose violence. From his lips comes legal vocabulary, for example, “von rehte” (rightly, by right), when he concedes to Turnus that King Latinus had wronged him (5420ff.). But Mezentius counsels against simplistic distinctions between right and wrong, urging Turnus to choose the path of peace with Aeneas. Mezentius fears—correctly it turns out—that Turnus will act hastily, that he will reject direct negotiations with his rival, and that he will shun legal procedures to settle their dispute. Violence, Mezentius counsels Turnus, is the last resort, only: “ir solt im tagedingen /an ûwern hof vor ûwer man,/so ich allerbeste gedenken kan,/und solt in lazen mit frede,/unze ir in gesetzet ze rede/umb alle sine missetat” (5444–49; I think you should summon him [Aeneas] to a hearing at a given time in your court before your vassals and should leave him in peace until you have called him to account for his crimes). Next to speak is Prince Messapus, “der vorste riche” (5467; the mighty prince), who refutes Mezentius’s entreaty to leave Aeneas in peace (5447; “mit frede”), calling the very idea of avoiding violence “wunderliche/…gerâten” (5468–69; strange counsel). Messapus serves as an example of

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brute force to achieve geopolitical ends. To win the heart of Turnus, this counselor plays to his sense of wounded feelings and to his growing impatience. Messapus rehearses the crimes of Aeneas (plunder, arson, murder) and advises force, reasoning: “daz ist vile baz getan,/daz man in dannen tribe,/denner da belîbe/mit gewalde unser unsern dank” (5506– 9; it is much better to drive [Aeneas] away than to have him remain there against our will). As to the legality of these moves, Messapus professes unconcern. For him, incredibly, the main concern is the duration of the legal process: matters of law are in his eyes too long and drawn-out. In truth, Messapus negates the role of law entirely, supplanting it with emotions of raw revenge. His advice might be summed up in the proverb cited above, pronouncing jurisprudence mute in time of war: inter arma silent leges. He asserts that Turnus has no need to declare a feud against Aeneas (5482) that he should accept neither reparations nor trial (5473ff.), and that he flatly reject negotiations for reasons of time: the legal process is too protracted (5510ff.). In sum, Messapus argues that violence is a law unto itself; licit is, what force can achieve. Turnus now has to decide between brute force and the accepted system of law. He quickly chooses the former, overcome as he is by thoughts of settling scores with Aeneas. To the very letter he follows the advice of Messapus: “sine mogen sich nimmer des bewaren,/wir solen zû der borch varen” (5501–2; they cannot keep us away from the city they hope to fortify). The implications of his decision to advance on Mont Albane are great. By rejecting legal action and embracing violence, Turnus has done no less than turn his back on wisdom itself. This Mezentius had told him plainly, when laying out his options: “nû her tumblîch hât getân,/nû solt ir wîslîch ane vân” (5439–40; you must respond wisely to his [Aeneas’s] senseless deeds). The sage counselor had here presented Turnus’s choice in nuce: he could show himself wise, that is to say, nonviolent, by canceling out the senseless, that is to say, harmful deeds of his adversary. To oppose unwise behavior, so the narrative logic goes, one nullifies folly with its opposite, sagacity. To choose violence is thus not only to reject judicious counsel, but is to transform oneself into a fool—worse, a fool of one’s own volition. Like a madman (so Heinrich von Veldeke encourages us to interpret Turnus’s behavior) the brave warrior mimics, and thus repeats, the errors of Aeneas. And, even more foolishly, he resolves to besiege Mont Albane. Consumed by thoughts of violence, Turnus harbors the design that “ob her sich vermâze/mit den sînen holden/daz si sich weren wolden,/daz man si drûffe vienge/und marterde oder hienge:/des wâren sie wole wert./ des hete lange gegert/…wande im vile leide/Ênêas der Troiân,/dâ vor habete getân:/daz wolder gerne rechen” (5518–29; if Aeneas and his men dared defend themselves, to capture and kill them by hanging or torture, as they deserved. Turnus had long wanted to do this, since Aeneas had brought him much trouble, for which he wanted revenge). Revenge is plainly his ruling emotion, and the desire to repay blow for blow and measure for measure constrains his rational faculties. The battlefield now moves to the mind of Turnus. Casting himself in the role of avenger and claiming to the very end of his life that Aeneas and his men deserved whatever hostilities they might face, Turnus imprudently rushes off to war. Animated by anger (6477; “mit zorenlîchen dingen”), Turnus recapitulates the very acts of pillage and conflagration for which he had condemned the Trojans. Turnus’s decision to besiege Mont Albane is, plain and simple, the incautious act of a lunatic. And this Heinrich makes plain, both by the disastrous effects of the attack and by the censorious, sharp words of his narrator. The castle lies in a perfectly fortified

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position, protected by nature to be safe from attack. The mountain, the narrator says, “was stechel uber al,/niwan ein hals der was smal,/den heten sie dorchhouwen” (5555– 57; rose steeply on all sides except for a narrow ridge, which had been cut through). It is plainly impregnable. That the place is so well fortified is thanks to the shrewd Aeneas, who has the power of foresight and rational calculation. Too, he had received advance warning about the siege of Turnus and knew to act upon it. To repulse the attack, Aeneas gathered together weapons and food; he resolved to put up a spirited defense (5540ff.). It is no accident that Aeneas’s epithet in this episode is “der wîse” (5539; the wily one), a word that must remind the reader of the recent disputation at the court of Turnus over the wisdom and folly of violence. Aeneas is experienced, a wise man and leader who uses wiliness to achieve his ends. Turnus is neither wily nor wise and, as one ruled by passion, is unable to exhibit sagacity to any degree. This brave fighter, moved by anger and the wish to settle old scores, consistently underestimates Aeneas, allowing unreason to bring two portentous miscalculations to bear: the decision to besiege Mont Albane in the first place; and his disdain for Aeneas as adversary. As Turnus moves to bring about his own doom, the narrator does not wait for events to speak for themselves, instead censuring the actions of the warrior. To point up the flawed perception of a man under violent delusions, the narrator repeatedly associates the verb wœnen with Turnus. Ranging in meaning from “think” and “believe,” to “surmise,” to “expect” and “hope,”12 wœnen offers a kind of aperture on the mind of Turnus—and a kind of epistemology highlighting the human capacity for self-deception. It soon emerges that he operates from a reservoir of hope that has no connection to reality: “die borch wander zerbrechen” (5530; he believed he could destroy the city). But this very presumption, the narrator clearly states, brought him disaster: “des gewan her michel arbeit” (5532; he was to suffer great distress because of it [the besiegement]). Then, why does he blindly go ahead? To understand the actions of Turnus is to explore the limits of human knowledge. Buoyed by an abiding hope that feeds his self-deception, he convinces himself he can defeat Aeneas within a single day!13 Consequently, as Turnus approaches Mont Albane, the narrator calls him to task: “Turnus was des betrogen,/des her gewis wolde wesen,/daz si nimmer mohten genesen/ûf der borch einen tach” (5548–61; Turnus was deceived in his belief that they could not hold out a day in the city). “Believedeceive-suffer”: this is the sequence that Turnus activates of his peculiar volition. The choice is his, to engage Aeneas on another terrain, and not at Mont Albane, or to avoid combat entirely. But he impetuously fails to heed the sage counsel of Mezentius to exhaust legal remedies. Had he been less eager to pay Aeneas back in his own coin, the narrator makes plain, Turnus would not have succumbed to the violence exacting the punishment of his own life. It must be stressed here that the struggle between Turnus and Aeneas at Mont Albane is the result of injudicious, catastrophic human judgment—for which innocent lives of combatants are needlessly, and heedlessly, sacrificed. Interpreted as a landscape of inane violence outside the realm of reality, Mont Albane is a case study of the flawed percipience of Turnus in thrall to phantasmal assumptions. Heinrich sketches the path of his ultimate delusion, using the verbal pair wœnen and betriegen—believe and deceive, then contrasting these with reality: “dô her die wârheit gesach,/dô was her vil unfrô” (5552–53; he was unhappy when he learned the truth). Turnus thinks and fancies that reality is thus and so; but his expectations, based on illusion, invariably are dashed. For

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example, believing that Aeneas has fled the country, Turnus gives his army the order to attack the fortress: ”ê danner ihr âze,/ wander sie gewinnen” (6318–19; he thought he could capture it without even pausing to eat). His imaginings fail to materialize, however. When his brutal military charge fails, Turnus, now angry, circles the castle on his horse. “Betrogen het in sîn wan,/wan der berch was so getân,/sô veste und sô werehaht,/des her hete gedaht/des ne mohte niht geschehen” (6377–81; his hopes had deceived him: the mountain was much more defensible than he had believed possible). One now expects reality to settle in, causing Turnus to alter his ruinous course of action. But failure, rather than serving as a corrective, promotes self-deception, pulling him deeper into the violence of an unjust war for which he is both engineer and victim. The irony is deep. Not only does the disorder that he promotes ultimately consume him, but Turnus never comes to full awareness that his undoing is his lack of prudence. Each of Turnus’s decisions brings disaster. His choices never call into question his bravery; they do, however, raise doubts about his powers of discernment. The narrator, to enlighten the reader on the error and futility of Turnus’s judgment, gives pointed, running commentary during the siege of Mont Albane. In a great fury, Turnus, realizing he cannot take the castle by storm, and having found no unfortified place in the structure, ignores common sense and orders his shield-bearers to attack anyway. This assault is hopeless and a suicide mission, inasmuch as Aeneas, the brilliant military engineer, had had two extensive moats built to prevent the very strategy that Turnus conjures up. Now the narrator intervenes to judge the deeds of the raving Turnus: “des hete Turnûs grôzen zoren,/des erbalch sich der wîgant, /daz her da niht envant/dehein unvested stat,/die schiltknehte her dô bat, /daz si ze storme wolden gân,/daz was doch angestlîch getän” (6406–12; enraged because he could find no weak place, Turnus asked the warriors with shields to attack. This was perilous). The narrator’s foreshadowing both provides an augury of violence easily averted by common sense and depicts a Turnus who is about to experience the very submission he seeks to force on others. Obediently, his soldiers carry out his orders to the letter, springing down into the moat, an open space where they stand fully exposed to attack from above. Every last man loses his life in a hail of stones and arrows: “vil ubel es die genozzen,/die dâ ze storme giengen/wand sie den tôt enphiegen” (6440–42; those who took part in the assault had to pay dearly, for they lost their lives). But the narration claims more for itself than mere battle reporting, or foreshadowing: the storyteller condemns Turnus openly, citing the specific legal term unrehte (unjustly, wrongly, improperly), which reflects directly on the legitimacy of his actions in wartime: “Turnûs tet unrehte,/daz her die schliltknehte/zû deme storme treib,/dä ir vile tôt beleib,/wandez enhalf niht ein bast,/want der grabe was sô vast” (6413–18; it was wrong for him to send them forward, because it did no good; the moat was too strongly defended). The narrator follows up this denunciatory observation with a negative assessment of Turnus’s retreat from Mont Albane. Recognizing that his tactics in storming the battlements are faulty and futile, an assault for which he had sacrificed hordes of soldiers, the warrior finally orders his troops to turn back. It was, however, “ze spâte” (6450; too late). Two narrative intrusions make the sympathies of the storyteller clear. First, he blames Turnus for having squandered much effort and many lives (6466–67), and he laments: “daz hers niht was ê bedaht,/wan si waren unzalaht/die dâ lagen erslagen” (6451–53; he should have done so [turned back] sooner, for vast numbers lay dead). As

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uncounted corpses stretch over the battlefield, lying slain in grotesque posture, Turnus’s characteristic mood returns: he is angry. So, too, is the reader. Told repeatedly that Turnus has exercised poor judgment, the reader holds him responsible for the wanton loss of life. To emphasize the slaughter he has wrought by foolishly attacking impregnable fortifications, the narrator pauses over the gruesome battle scene: “die ne mohte nieman dannen tragen/die beliben in dem graben:/si âzen gîren unde raben/und swaz si ezzen wolde/ …sie masten manegen grôzen worm/mit fleische und mit blûte” (6454–63; since no one could carry them [the dead soldiers] away, they remained unburied and were devoured by crows and ravens, hawks and vultures, and a host of other scavengers. Their flesh and blood fattened many worms). Surreal as this military description is, it has a core of realism that works to counter any would-be “literary violence.” When Turnus and Aeneas do battle, actions have consequences, and bad decisions carry hideous results. This, Heinrich seems to say, is the actual face of violence. In the light of the sharply critical musings of the narrator regarding the consequences of the flawed judgment of Turnus, it is warranted to ask, as Rodney W.Fisher does, whether Turnus’s whole strategy is in error. Calling the episode of besiegement a hopeless and ill-conceived attack by Turnus at “terrible cost to the foot soldiers,” Fisher contends that Heinrich stresses Turnus’s “total failure to grasp the tactical needs of the situation (6413ff., 6450ff.),”14 I want to argue, however, that the siege of Mont Albane is less about tactics than it is about the greater rationale for violence itself. Doubtless Turnus, an experienced, brave commander—note the narrator’s reference to his having accomplished “manlichiu dink” (12508; deeds of valor)—is capable of forging and executing sound military tactics. That he here foolishly assaults an impregnable military objective, thus forcing his soldiers to pay in blood for his hatred for Aeneas, is reflective more of deficient prudence and destructive passion that demand the sacrifice of military men in a hopeless cause than of a simple battle plan gone awry. His actions are the very opposite of tactical; instead, they are a toxic combination of anger, lust after revenge, irrational decision making, grave overestimation of his chances for success, and disregard for the processes of the just war. Much more is at stake here than authorial critique of faulty military strategy. Heinrich reveals the dangers when, in wartime, emotion triumphs over rationality. It is only during the futile siege of Mont Albane that one appreciates the full contours of the failings of the brave Turnus. These shortcomings result from his fury at Aeneas, a personal feud made public in the worst possible way, namely, at the cost of much innocent life. His inborn excellence can save him neither from blunders nor from the aftermath of violence he has wrought. He is not a type, not a devil-figure, but a man who abandons patient wisdom under the influence of unbridled passion, the cost of which is humiliating defeat—and violent death. Violence, which both guides and consumes him, becomes his leitmotif. And medieval illustrators make of Turnus an emblem of brute force. For example, there he stands in the Berlin Manuscript, his face concealed behind a helmet while he decapitates an archer and leads his troops against Aeneas.15 The violence he creates, we stress, is both self-inflicted and self-destructive, shifting the object of his odium inward, as Turnus extracts payment from his faithful men and from himself. Seen theologically, his suicide-mission at Mont Albane exemplifies harmful, inappropriate violence per se: Turnus injures both its defenders and his own soldiers. He compels both friend and foe, through the application of physical (and psychological) force, and without

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concurrence on their part, to act contrary to their volition. He thus provides, in his violation of foreign and domestic troops, a warning example of the improper exercise of force in wartime—in truth, for violence at any time. War itself is insufficient to justify all manner of hostilities, the Eneide tells us; nor is personal revenge a sound reason to send troops into battle. But just as important, as the story of Turnus illustrates, violence is a choice, dependent on a sapient volition that heeds voices of compromise or confrontation. Notes 1. Frank Tobin, “Middle High German,” A Concise History of German Literature to 1900, ed. Kim Vivian (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1992), 28–29. Tobin gives this valuable description of Eneide: ”[It] follows Aeneas from the fall of Troy to Dido’s Carthage, from there to the underworld, and, finally, to his triumph in Rome and marriage to Lavinia. The direct source for the story was not Virgil, but rather a recently completed French romance. Besides showing courtly refinement in language, Heinrich’s narrative displays courtliness in the behavior of its heroes. The poet’s chief concern throughout is to glorify exemplary knightly behavior and the irresistible power of love” (29). On the relationship of Virgil and Heinrich von Veldeke, see Wolfgang Brandt, Die Erzahlkonzeption Heinrichs von Veldeke in der “Eneide”: Ein Vergleich mit Vergils “Aeneis.” Marburger Beiträge zur Germanistik, 29 (Marburg: Elwert, 1969); and Willi Erzgraber, ed., Kontinuitat und Transformation der Antike im Mittelalter: Veröffentlichung der Kongressakten zum Freiburger Symposium des Mediäevistenverbandes (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1989). Cf. Raymond J.Cormier, “The Present State of Studies on the ‘Roman d’ Eneas,’” Cultura neolatina 31 (1971): 7–39. 2. Kristine K.Sneeringer, “Heinrich von Veldeke (ca. 1150–1200)” Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia, ed. John M.Jeep (New York: Garland, 2001), 335–36. See the brief discussion of Heinrich’s work by Alfred Ebenbauer, “Antike Stoffe,” Epische Stoffe des Mittelalters, ed. Volker Mertens and Ulrich Müler (Stuttgart: Kroner, 1984), 246–89; here 254–55. Those who do discuss Heinrich have a scholarly agenda. For example, W.H.Jackson, in Chivalry in Twelfth-Century Germany. The Works of Hartmann von Aue (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S.Brewer, 1994), is interested in the poet both for his employment of the vocabulary of knighthood and as a foil for Hartmann von Aue (fl. 1200), 210. See also Renate Kistler, Heinrich von Veldeke und Ovid (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993); and Karen Opitz, Geschichte im höfischen Roman: Historisches Erzählen im “Eneas” Heinrichs von Veldeke. Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, GRM-Beihefte, 14 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1998). Paul Salmon, in Literature in Medieval Germany (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), suggests both the appeal and limitation of scholarship when, in analyzing Virgil’s Aeneid as source text, he notes: “The story of Dido’s love for Aeneas…is one which is perennially effective, as Aeneas’ predicament can be presented as the choice between two courses of action, neither of which can be adopted without disaster” (54). 3. Gene Outka, “On Harming Others,” Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology, 34 (1980): 381–92. 4. These words are Virgil’s final characterization of Aeneas, v.12945, as cited by Werner Suerbaum, Vergils “Aeneis”: Epos zwischen Geschichte und Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999), 148. 5. All medieval German citations in this chapter are drawn from the edition Heinrich von Veldeke: Eneasroman, ed. and trans. Dieter Kartschoke (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1986). English translations follow Heinrich von Veldeke: Eneit, trans. J.W.Thomas (New York: Garland, 1985). I have also consulted Rodney W.Fisher, Heinrich von Veldeke, “Eneas”: A Comparison with the “Roman d’ Eneas” and a Translation into English (Bern: Lang, 1992). Cf. the edition Heinrich von Veldeke, Eneasroman: Die Berliner Bilderhandschrift mit

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Übersetzung und Kommentar, ed. Hans Fromm (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992). 6. On the classic struggle between Turnus and Aeneas, see Cornelia Renger, Aeneas und Turnus: Analyse einer Feindschaft. Studien zur klassischen Philologie, 11 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985). See also Peter Schenk, Die Gestalt des Turnus in Vergils “Aeneis” Beiträge zur klassischen Philologie, 164 (Königstein/Ts.: Hain, 1984). 7. The seminal Christian texts are found in St. Augustine’s The City of God (Book xix) and in the Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas (Secunda Secundce Partis, Quest. 40). On the latter work which, in considering war, treats the question whether it is always sinful to wage war, see A.C.Grayling, “Fighting Is a Last Resort,” New Statesman 15 (12 August, 2002), 10–12. For a summary of medieval views on war, see Anselm Hertz, “Die thomasische Lehre vom bellum justum als ethischer Kompromifi,” Die Wahrnehmung und Darstellung von Kriegen im Mittelalter und in der Fruhen Neuzeit, ed. Horst Brunner. Imagines medii aevi: interdisziplinare Beitrage zur Mittelalterforschung, 6 (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000), 17–30. See also Terence Wise, Medieval Warfare (New York: Hastings House, 1976); Robert Vacca, “The Theology of Disorder in the ‘lliad,’”Religion and Literature, 23 (1991): 1–22; Jean B. Elshtain, ed., Just War Theory (New York: New York University Press, 1994); Malcolm Hebron, The Medieval Siege: Theme and Image in Middle English Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Terry Nardin, ed., The Ethics of War and Peace (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); “Resources on Just War Theory,” http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/j/justwar.htm (last accessed on March 26, 2004). See also the entry on “Violence,” New Advent: The Catholic Encyclopedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15446a.htm; last accessed on Sept. 2, 2003); Richard W.Kaeuper, ed., Violence in Medieval Society (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2000); Maurice Keen, ed., Medieval Warfare: A History (Oxford: University Press, 1999); and Gerd Althoff, “Schranken der Gewalt: Wie gewalttätig war das ‘finstere Mittelalter’?” Der Krieg im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit: Grunde, Begründ-ungen, Bilder, Bräuche, Recht, ed. Horst Brunner (Wiesbaden, Reichert: 1999), 1–23. See the fundamental articles: P.Thorau, “Krieg,” in Lexikon des Mittelalters. Vol. 5 (Munich: Artemis, 1991), 1525–27; Harald Hegermann, “Krieg III,” Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. G. Müller. Vol. 20 (New York: de Gruyter, 1990), 25–28 (see the entire collection of articles on war, 11–55); and HeinzHorst Schrey, “Gewalt/Gewaltlosigkeit I,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. G.Müller. Vol. 13 (New York: de Gruyter, 1984), 168–78. Useful for orientation, and bibliography, is the essay by Richard Maxwell Brown, “Violence,” The Oxford History of the American West, ed. C.A.Milner II, et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 393–425. 8. Helmut de Boor, Die höfische Literatur: Vorbereitung, Blüte, Ausklang 1170–1250. Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfangen bis zur Gegenwart, 2. 7th ed. (1953; Munich: Beck, 1966), 47. Cf. Gustav Ehrismann, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters. Vol. II, 1 (Munich, 1965), 89–90. 9. Regarding the fine line between the proper exercise of aggressive force (= virtue) and recourse to improper conduct (= vice), see Vacca (as n.7) who, in treating Homeric epic, makes a distinction between alké and eris: “Aggressive power would be directed against the enemies of one’s household and community. Socially justified in this way, the display of strength and violence is called alké and is considered a virtue. But when the exercise of violent force occurs in a context judged inappropriate, as in internecine fighting or fruitless stalemate, it is called eris” (2). Viewed in this light, Turnus in Eneide is the incarnation of eris. See Michael Nagler, “Toward a Semantics of Ancient Conflict: Eris in the ‘lliad,’” Classical World 82 (1988): 81–90. 10. Noteworthy is Heinrich’s use of the etymon for the genre, and literary topos, of the “Mirror for Princes,” whose purpose is the guidance and instruction of leaders in society, speculum. He writes: “ein spiegel der hêren” (12622; a model for nobleman). Cicero, Seneca, and Suetonius are three authors advancing behavioral guides, De bono regimine principis. See B.

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Singer, “Fürstenspiegel,” Theologische Reaknzyklopädie. Vol. 11 (1983), 707–11; P.J.Eberle, “Mirror of Princes,” Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. J.R.Strayer. Vol. 8 (New York: Scribner, 1987), 434–36; and H.H.Anton, “Fürstenspiegel,” Lexikon des Mittelalters. Vol. 4 (Munich: Artemis, 1989), 1040–48. 11. Fisher (as note 5), 189. 12. The verb wcenen (cf. Wahn, eitler Wahn, Wahnsinn) means: meinen, glauben, vermuten, ahnen, erwarten und hoffen. See Beate Hennig, Kleines Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 313. Turnus, in his construction of reality, borders on insanity. 13. On the theme of self-delusion in Germanic literature, see Alan Renoir, “The Self-Deception of Temptation: Boethian Psychology in ‘Genesis B,’” Old English Poetry, ed. Robert P.Creed (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1967), 47–68. One example of the theme is the fall of Icarus, which, combining false perception and pride, communicates a clear and present warning. 14. Fisher (as n.5), 53. “Turnus,” Fisher observes, “is…the figure whose mistakes are most clearly identified: the blind insistence on an assault on the Trojans’ well-fortified position which costs so many lives (6410ff., 7240ff.; the criticism is directed as much at Turnus’s tactics as at his cruel disregard for his troops’ welfare), the moment of thoughtless greed when he robs the dead Pallas of a trophy (7612ff.), perhaps also his ignominious retreat before a rampaging Eneas near the end of the hostilities (12079ff.)” (18). Notwithstanding these offenses, Fisher recognizes that Turnus is a figure of human complexity, holding the capacity for both harm and good. But he goes too far in speculating that Heinrich von Veldeke “sees him as an—albeit flawed—model for contemporary knights, a shining example of both the best and the worst elements of the ideal” (18). In my view, Turnus’s illconsidered choices certainly make him no “model for contemporary knights.” Instead, the man is a warning example of the wages of flawed perception. In the words of Dietmar Wenzelburger in his monograph, Motivation und Menschenbild der “Eneide” Heinrichs von Veldeke als Ausdruck der geschichtlichen Kräfte ihrer Zeit. Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 135 (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1974): “Turnus kennt nur den einen Weg, mit Gewalt zu versuchen, die Wirklichkeit zu korrigieren” (210). The further question is whether Turnus ever adequately recognizes reality—in any of its manifestations. That Virgil conceives of Turnus as insane, Debra Herschkowitz suggests in her book, The Madness of Epic: Reading Insanity from Homer to Statius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 15. Concerning the artistic depictions of Turnus, highlighting arson and murder, see Dorothea and Peter Diemer, “Die Bilder der Berliner Veldeke-Handschrift,” in Fromm (as n.5), fol. 42v, Turnus läβt die Schiffe der Trojaner verbrennen (919); also fol. 52v, Turnus tötet den Schützen (961–62). The second illustration depicts an archer who had shot at Turnus, and missed; the enraged hero then sought him out and cut off his head (7635ff.).

4 Violence and Pain at the Court: Comparing Violence in German Heroic and Courtly Epics SCOTT E.PINCIKOWSKI Comparing the portrayal of violence and how it results in bodies in pain in German heroic and courtly epics reveals a profound change in attitude toward violence in the High Middle Ages.1 Violence in heroic and courtly epics is quantitatively and qualitatively different. These differences are characterized by unrestrained and graphic violence in heroic epics versus restrained and idealized violence in courtly romances. This observation does not suggest that combat during the High Middle Ages was not violent. Rather, through the idealization of violence, the courtly poets attempt to distance the refined image of civilization they were propagating from a Germanic past marked by a violence that led to social upheaval and endangered the political status quo. However, the differentiation of heroic and courtly violence is not always as simple at it seems. This difficulty arises from the fact that the heroic epics do not simply glorify violence. Upon closer analysis there is evidence that they are as critical of violence as in the courtly romance. Moreover, the courtly poets could not or do not always hide or condemn the negative effects of violence, indicating that violence is as fundamental to the nobility in courtly literature as it is in heroic epics.2 When this paradox of violence occurs, the body in pain appears amidst the idealized world of the court. Suddenly, grave injuries and blood disturb the image of the refined knight in shining armor, creating a recognizable and interpretable iconography of pain, and suggesting that the court is not purely defined by vreude, “joy.”3 Subsequently, the question we will pose in this study is: What information about the meaning of violence within courtly society can we derive from motifs of bodies in pain? Norbert Elias’s theory concerning the process of civilization is useful to turn to when considering this question.4 However, with any theory that considers civilization to be a progressive development, viewing the past as inherently less civilized and therefore more violent, we must approach Elias with some caution.5 We can do so by analyzing medieval attitudes toward violence as moments within the process of civilization instead of standing in contrast to it. Rather than polarizing the social figurations of today with those of the High Middle Ages, we should consider the meaning of violence within its own sociocultural context. Such an approach is productive because each age considers itself to be civilized and the Middle Ages was no different. These observations explain why Elias’s work has rightfully gained in favor with medievalists after years of neglect, raising important questions regarding the role of violence in medieval society.6 Indeed, Elias’s concept of Selbstzwang, “self-restraint,” provides a valuable framework for analyzing the relationship among violence, the body in pain, and civilization.7 According

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to Elias, a highly civilized society results from self-restraint, the internalization of strict social mores by the individual, including the restrained use of violence. From the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance, self-restraint contributes to Verhöfli-chung, the gradual transformation of warriors into courtiers, which Elias ascribes to the formation of everlarger monopolies of power.8 This term refers to the physical force or the threat of violence that medieval secular powers possessed to enforce social control and regulate any unwanted violence primarily resulting from conflicts between fragmented monopolies of power.9 With the centralization of power in the Middle Ages, and the development of courtly life and the pacification of warrior classes into courtiers, the emphasis on the expression of power shifted from physical force to public displays of bodily control and refined mannerisms, decreasing the need for physical violence. Thus, social status no longer purely depended on physical prowess in battle, but rather rested more and more on the individual’s ability to contribute to courtly life. While Elias locates the culmination of this civilizing process in the Renaissance,10 its existence in courtly literature of the High Middle Ages is already observable. This argument is particularly compelling when we consider C.Stephen Jaeger’s hypothesis that the concept of courtliness existed long before it was portrayed in courtly literature, attributing the development of a “courtly ethic” to the wide-reaching influence of secular clerics in the European cathedral schools.11 The courtly poets, belonging to the section of society influenced by the cathedral schools, draw on this preexisting ideal to propagate a concept of a chivalric civilization based on attitudes about the physical body that, among other social mores, include self-restrained violence.12 It is therefore productive to compare the depiction of unrestrained and restrained violence in conjunction with body motifs of pain in heroic and courtly epics. This comparison reveals that violence holds an uneasy position in courtly literature. In fact, the wide semantic range of the Middle High German, gewalt, meaning physical violence and force, but also justice, injustice, and the nobility’s political authority and power (Latin potestas), reflects just how complex, differentiated, and contextual is the meaning of violence.13 Furthermore, as Guy Halsall has shown in the context of analyzing violence in the early Middle Ages, it is important to distinguish between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” violence. The legitimacy of violence is dependent on what the ruling powers, in our discussion the social body of court, deem to be acceptable forms of violence—those instances in which violence appears to possess a justifiable or just purpose.14 Conversely, illegitimate violence can be understood as violence that undermines the authority of the court or endangers its monopoly of violence—those cases that appear to possess no positive function for courtly society. The difficulty of examining violence in courtly literature is further complicated by the fact that the courtly poets rarely use language that clearly states whether violence is legitimate or illegitimate, wishing not to overtly criticize the nobility for whom they were writing. This might explain why courtly literature did not reform the use of extreme violence in medieval society as much as we would expect. However, the dilemma of analysis can be overcome, especially if we turn to nonverbal signifiers, the communicative function of the courtly body and its symbolic possibilities.15 In fact, we will see that the courtly poets turn the multivalent nature of pain, using body motifs of pain to signal legitimate violence and the negative consequences of illegitimate violence.

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The distinctively medieval signification system of pain that ensues creates an almost irresolvable tension, quite likely a subversive critique of the very culture the courtly poets are creating.16 By analyzing the important and contradictory position of violence in courtly literature, we will observe that as the courtly poets depict a new image of civilization, they explore the difficulty of maintaining a courtly and civilized society founded on the exclusive right of the nobility to wield the power of violence.17 The earliest example for the heroic epic in German, the Old High German Hildebrandslied (ca. A.D. 830), a text fragment consisting of sixty-eight lines, is a good starting point for this discussion because it demonstrates the unrestrained use of violence that Elias observes in less-civilized societies.18 Written down in the famous Benedictine monastery in Fulda, this tragic tale tells how Hildebrand must battle his son, Hadubrand, to the death because they are both bound by the unrelenting social norm of violence common to Germanic warrior culture based on feudal loyalty. This norm calls for the warrior not to retreat from the challenge of battle or the threat of death, lest he decrease his honor and social status. It is this code that motivates Hadubrand to challenge Hildebrand to battle; he refuses to admit that Hildebrand is his father and to accept his ring as a gesture of peace, while also eyeing the prize that will increase his social standing at the cost of his opponent’s life, Hildebrand’s armor.19 The poet undoubtedly highlights the tragedy of this social norm overriding even close familial ties, but Hildebrand’s knowledge that Hadubrand is his son and his choice to continue with the battle even at the cost of his son’s life show how important victory and honor in battle is to the warrior’s identity.20 The resulting mortal battle also reveals that the legitimate form of violence in warrior culture, unrestrained violence, actually limits the warrior’s actions, vastly reducing the possibility for resolving conflicts peacefully. Even though Hildebrand laments this limitation, he believes only a coward would back out of the battle now: “‘der si doh nu argosto [quad Hiltibrant] ostarliuto,/der dir nu wiges warne, nu dih es so wel lustit,/gudea gimeinun’” (58–60) (“Only the most coward of men from the east” [Hildebrand said] “would refuse you a battle now, since you desire so much to engage in combat” [my translation]). What first appears simply to be a reflection of the violent reality of the early Middle Ages may actually be an early critique of unrestrained violence. As Albrecht Classen points out, the breakdown in communication between father and son in the Hildebrandslied, resulting in death, is good evidence for such an interpretation of the lay.21 The epic poem Waltharius (A.D. 950), probably written by a monk in St. Gallen22, is an even clearer example for an early critique of unrestrained violence. Unlike the Hildebrandslied, which abruptly ends as the battle between father and son is beginning, the Waltharius contains many instances of graphic violence. The poet’s intention behind his portrayal of unrestrained violence is most certainly didactic and Christianizing; blood and carnage appear just as the breakdown of self-restraint occurs. Moments of restraint are discernible: Having witnessed Walther’s prowess in battle in the past, Hagen attempts several times to dissuade Gunther from demanding all of Walther’s treasure and attacking him (W 511–31, 572–80, 617–31), but the bloody conflict Hagen foresees is unavoidable. And Walther displays his prowess as a warrior with epic efficiency. He decapitates loyalty-driven opponent after opponent, holding the golden-haired head of one knight pleading for mercy before striking him, disemboweling one, and gouging another in the chest with a spear (W 749–53, 773–79, 906–11). Certainly, the lack of Eliasian

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selfrestraint is evidenced by the combatants’ willingness to kill and die, and is underscored by the extreme body mutilation. However, there is more information about the attitude toward violence in heroic culture than the didactic entertainment of monks with cutting humor, as David Townsend has suggested.23 Even as the poet criticizes Germanic warrior culture in a visceral and ironic manner, it is clear that he is playing with the preexisting notion that violence and pain inform the warrior’s identity and express the power of violence associated with his social status. A case in point for this Germanic attitude toward violence is when the heroes settle their dispute, renewing friendships around the campfire while joking about their debilitating wounds:

Postquam finis adest, insignia quemque notabant: Illic Guntharii regis pes, palma iacebat Waltharii nec non tremulus Haganonis ocellus. Sic sic armillas partiti sunt Avarenses! (W 1401–4) (The battle is ended; marks of honor branded each: King Gunther’s foot was lying there, and Walther’s hand was lying there, and also Hagen’s twitching eye. Thus, the men have shared the treasure of the Avars!)24 This passage conveys an impassive attitude toward extreme pain.25 In addition, the narrator emphasizes the incapacitating wounds suffered by Gunther, Walther, and Hagen, humorously and ironically describing the injuries as “marks of honor.” These two elements reveal that warrior culture considers unrestrained violence to be a legitimate means to prowess, honor, familial and liege triuwe, and blood revenge. Whereas Waltharius depicts the individual consequences of adhering to a heroic and therefore unrestrained attitude toward violence, the Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200) illustrates the societal consequences that legitimate violence can cause.26 Moreover, this heroic epic stands out during the time when the courtly romance was blooming in Germany, partly because heroic and chivalric values exist side by side in the work, suggesting it may represent a transitional moment within German cultural expression. The coexistence of the courtly and heroic worlds in the Nibelungenlied expresses itself in the tension between restrained and unrestrained violence. A decisive scene in which heroic and courtly collide is when Siegfried, the prototypical heroic warrior, arrives at the court in Worms, stating unequivocally he will take the Burgundian’s lands by force (NL 108–10). Siegfried uses the threat of violence and his well-known prowess in battle to intimidate Gunther’s court. Unlike in the Waltharius however, Gunther is willing to avoid a violent conflict by using self-restraint; he and the members of his court, led by Gernot’s advice to approach this potentially explosive situation mit zühten, “in a courtly manner,” decide to parlay with their more powerful adversary, offering Siegfried their service (NL 120).27 The self-restraint exhibited here is reluctant at best, something the narrator stresses by poking fun at Hagen’s and Ortwin’s warrior sensibility, asking why they do not throw themselves into battle after such a challenge (NL 125). Even though the warriors at Gunther’s court can hardly refrain from entering battle with Siegfried, the significance of self-restraint in this scene cannot be overestimated. It

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provides us with a moment for conflict resolution we do not find in the Hildebrandslied or the Waltharius. What is more, this moment of civility stands in stark contrast to the unrestrained and destructive violence that defines the end of the Nibelungenlied, suggesting the poet is critical of violence used to legitimate a feud.28 In fact, the Nibelungenlied is even more powerful in its admonishment of the unrestrained violence so characteristic of warrior culture than the earlier epics we have discussed thus far.29 The stark presence of blood and body parts is similar. We need only recall the Burgundians throwing their opponents’ bodies (some still living!) from the hall and drinking their blood to strengthen themselves (NL 2014, 2114). While these examples show how uncivilized the Burgundians become,30 what really separates the Nibelungenlied from our previous examples, however, is the tremendous amount of death that concludes the work. Not one Burgundian is left alive, leaving no doubt that this epic is anything but a glorification of violence. In fact, the futility of blood revenge is underscored by the antiheroic ending; the decapitation of Gunther, Hagen, and the slaying of Kriemhild (NL 2366–76).31 Unlike the heads in the Waltharius, there is no playfulness intended by the poet when Kriemhild mockingly holds Gunther’s head in front of Hagen; the audience is left with a stark and shocking image of warriors being slain by a woman, and a woman being slain by a warrior. Moreover, the chain of events leading to this tragic ending implies the poet of the Nibelungenlied is commenting on the dangers of the demonstrative use of violence. Because Siegfried could use his strength to claim the kingdom as his own and represents a political threat to Gunther’s court, Hagen kills him, thus setting into motion the unstoppable violence of Kriemhild’s blood revenge. Whether or not Siegfried’s death and the ensuing tragedy point to an anticourtly sentiment remains difficult to ascertain.32 What we can defmitively conclude, however, is that when a society values and legitimates violence as an expression of power, this not only leads to unnecessary but socially acceptable deaths, it also has the potential to escalate violence to tragic and societal proportions. The courtly poets were well aware of this problem and the negative consequences of violence to society. The many courts and kingdoms under siege and the many individuals afflicted by suffering portrayed in courtly literature attest to this fact. The courtly poets do, however, portray a different attitude toward the infliction of pain, depicting violence in a more ritualized and restrained manner. This observation does not mean to imply that battle rituals did not exist in earlier medieval culture. We only need to call to mind the importance of the challenge to the battles in both the Hildebrandslied and the Nibelungenlied. Rather, the emphasis in courtly literature is on ritual restraining instead of unleashing violence. This innovation points to the attempt by the courtly poets to depict violence in a more-civilized manner. This shift in the paradigm of violence has been attributed to both religious and secular reform movements: the Peace of God and Truce of God in the late tenth century, and the Landfrieden in the twelfth.33 These accords intended to channel violence, control feuding, protect property and noncombatants, reduce robbery, murder, and pillaging, and create conventions limiting battle. These agreements coincide with the increasing social influence of the ministeriales in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who also benefited from the channeling of violence and stabilization of everyday life.34 It is no surprise then, that the courtly poets, especially Hartmann von Aue (A.D. 1160– 1220), himself a dienestman, “ministerialis,” emphasize selfrestraint.35 Middle High

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German analogues to Eliasian self-restraint are found in the terms zuht, “discipline,” mdze, “measure,” and hövescheit, “courtliness,” and are supported by the equation of the courtly lady’s and knight’s beauty and refmed mannerisms with guote, “goodness,” stœte, “steadfastness,” triuwe, “loyalty,” and vreude, “joy,” moral ideals worthy of the civilized society the courtly poets were portraying. Significantly, courtly literature suggests that members of the nobility were born with the potential of carrying out these ideals. But first they had to learn them, a lesson Wolfram von Eschenbach (ca. 1170–ca. 1220) demonstrates through young Parzival’s lack of self-restraint when he kills the knight, Ither. In an uncourtly fashion, Parzival pierces Ither’s head through his visor with a javelot, and similar to Hadubrand’s goal in the Hildebrandslied, he takes his fallen opponent’s armor as his own (P III, 155, 1–11).36 Although it was common to take armor as a prize in the courtly context,37 Wolfram is clearly criticizing this Germanic tradition; he emphasizes Parzival’s uncourtliness through his unnecessary killing of Ither, his use of an unknightly, if not childish, weapon, and his humorous inability to remove the armor from Ither’s corpse by himself. Without the necessary socialization at the court, young Parzival remains ignorant to the guidelines for courtly behavior. In fact, it is only after Parzival comes under Gurnemanz’s tutelage that he learns the importance of courtly conventions, including the measured use of violence affecting his social status:

Lât derbärme bî der vrävel sîn. sus tuot mir râtes volge schîn. an swem ir strîtes sicherheit bezalt, ern hab iu sölhiu leit getân diu herzen kumber wesn, die nemt, und lâzet in genesn. (P III, 171, 25–30) (Let mercy go along with your daring. There will be the test of my counsels. Once a man gives you his oath of surrender in battle, take his word of honor and let him live, unless he has done you such wrong as would burden your heart with grief.)38 Not only fictional accounts such as this scene in Wolfram’s Parzival propagate the importance of virtuous behavior by the nobility. Joachim Bumke has cogently shown how medieval education manuals, such as De institutione novitiorum by Hugh of St. Victor, or didactic Princes’ Mirrors and courtly etiquette manuals, such as the WäZlsche Gast by Thomasin von Zirclaria, also testify to the importance of self-restraint in the nobility’s physical training and socialization,39 However, courtly self-restraint does not decrease the significance of violence to the knight; rather, it attempts to control violence through the ritualization of the infliction of pain. The importance of ritual cannot be overstated, as ritual channels violence, acting as a form of restraint and limiting its negative consequences, while also justifying it, propagating the idea of sanctioned violence in the hands of those chosen to bear arms, the nobility.40 The prominence of the bûhurt, a mostly ceremonious competition in which groups of knights charged each other on horseback, and the more dangerous tournament

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in courtly literature attests to the checking of unrestrained violence. Waffenspiele, “knightly competitions,” with their strict rules of engagement, were meant to provide practice for more serious battle and took place under the prerequisite of a standing peace.41 But as the narrator in Hartmann’s Erec indicates, these were serious games that did not spare the knight’s body:

sîn lîp [Erec’s body] wart liitzel dâ gespart. dô der turnei stânde wart, dô sach man in sô dicke niender als in der dicke, dâ er muoste emphâhen unde geben. man sach in manlîche leben. (E 2624–29) (He spared himself little. Now that the tournament had begun, he was often seen nowhere else but in the mêlée, where he had to receive and give blows. He was seen fighting bravely.)42 As this passage shows, the brave knight throws himself into the tournament wholeheartedly. This attitude explains why there is much evidence that suggests that the fine line between genuine battle and friendly tournament was difficult to maintain. As William Henry Jackson has demonstrated, the tension created by the physicality of the bûhurt and the prowess connected to victory can boil over and lead to unrestrained violence.43 Death was a common if not an accidental occurrence to the tournament, as is evidenced in the anonymously written Moriz von Craûn (ca. 1220), in which the count who has organized the competition regretfully kills an opponent, causing him to remove himself from the melee.44 And yet, there is no doubt that knights strategically used unrestrained violence in the tournament, revealing the disturbing fact that ritual facilitates the escalation of violence and hides its unjust use behind legitimate practice.45 Participants most surely brought existing conflicts and feuds with them to the contest, continuing their disputes with other means.46 In the Nibelungenlied, Volker’s intentional gouging of the unsuspecting Hun at Etzel’s court with his lance represents a fictional account of such an incident (NL 1889). Clearly, Volker’s use of unrestrained violence is strategic, and politically motivated; he kills another in the hope of aggravating rather than settling the dispute Kriemhild wishes to unleash: “ez kunde niemen gescheiden; ez gât im an den lîp./jane ruoche ich, ob ez ziirne des künec Etzelen wip” (1886, 3–4) (No one can stop me; he is going to get it. I do not care if King Eztel’s wife is angered by this [my translation].) Even the more violent battle is ritualized in courtly literature, almost always beginning with a joust, followed by battle with a sword hacking away the shield and then sword against sword.47 While battles frequently involved bodily harm or ended in death, a victorious knight would often show mercy to his opponent if his combatant would promise to surrender and offer his allegiance. This act of granting mercy, sicherheit nemen, demonstrates the knight’s courtliness, his knowledge of the importance of mâze, “measure,” and zuht, “discipline,” to his social standing, as Erec does in the

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Sparrowhawk adventure (E 676–1017). Erec’s first inclination is to decapitate Iders. But as Erec tears off Iders’s helmet and holds onto his head, it becomes more a symbolic gesture of victory than true intention, such as we observed in the Waltharius. Instead, Erec restrains himself and allows Iders to beg for mercy (E 951–1017). This chivalric gesture demonstrates the weakening of retributive violence as found in heroic epics. Erec avenges himself and the queen in a righteous manner. Nevertheless, there is one very important similarity between the meaning of violence in Erec and the Waltharius; Erec’s actions in battle are as communicative as Walther’s. Acting within the accepted guidelines of battle, what we can consider to be the discourse of courtly violence, Erec demonstrates his prowess and skill through the measured use of legitimate violence. This chivalrous model of knighthood is supported by the idealization of violence.48 Graphic depictions of pain as a result of battle are almost always absent from such episodes, and the courtly poet takes great care to emphasize that the good knight would not strike another unfairly, below the shield, for example:

sîne geruochten des nie daz sî niderhalp der knie deheiner slege tæten war, dâ si der schilte wâren bar. (I 7139–42) (They did not try to strike any blows below the knee because they did not have any shields [my translation].) Just as the courtly knight fights fairly, he also knows how to use the authoritative and judicial power of violence justly, upholding his role as protector of the kingdom and those in need, and not undermining the Christian prohibition against killing.49 A case in point is Erec’s punishment of Maliclisier’s unzuht (1071), “indecency.” Instead of striking the dwarf with a debilitating wound, chopping his hand off, Erec lets himself be dissuaded by the social body of the court and punishes the dwarf appropriately; Maliclisier is whipped with a switch (1062–76).50 Thomas Bein has convincingly shown that idealization is furthered through the deflection of the intense effects of violence to the knight’s equipment, with motifs like shields hacked to pieces right down to the hand or bored through by lances and helmets full of gashes and dents.51 But idealization cannot hide the violent truth about knightly existence. When wounds and blood appear on the knight’s body, they indicate his inclusion in the social order of knighthood, sometimes signaling his noble effort and selfsacrifice in battle and sometimes starkly expressing that his social status has been violated by those not sanctioned to inflict pain. For instance, in Wolfram’s Willehalm (A.D. 1215), Vivianz demonstrates his courage and noble sacrifice when he is mortally wounded to his mid-section.52 Knowing he is dying, Vivianz calmly pushes his entrails back into his body, wraps the wound, and continues to fight valiantly (24–25). Conversely, in Erec the blood that covers Cadoc, his horse, and ground about him underscores the narrator’s criticism that the giants break with ritters reht (E 5408– 20), “knightly convention.” These stark signifiers for the illegitimate use of violence, in addition to Erec’s chastisement of the giants causing a knight unnecessary suffering,

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stress that the giants, in contrast to the courtly knight, are not empowered to inflict pain (5466–72).53 Nonetheless, even knights, who are trained in courtly convention and possess the right to inflict pain, find it difficult to adhere to the ideals of measure and discipline. The idea that violence is simultaneously a means to increase social status and a means to control violence is difficult to maintain. The resulting tension gives way to unrestrained forms of violence, revealing the paradox hidden behind the knight’s use of legitimate violence. Richard W. Kaeuper’s study concerning the depiction of violence in French and English courtly literature imbues this paradox of violence in German sources with more meaning. Kaeuper points out that the ambivalent position of violence in courtly literature can be attributed to the fact that the courtly poets’ attempt to channel the nobility’s use of violence is “prescriptive” rather than “descriptive,” promoting change in attitudes toward violence but not portraying historical reality.54 In other words, in their attempt to alter the image of knighthood, the courtly poets could not eliminate the importance of violence to the nobility’s position in society. If the courtly poets had done so, they would have undermined the very social group they were promoting. This strongly suggests that they are justifying the use of violence by the nobility, especially if we consider the type of critique, graphic depictions of violence, found in the Waltharius and Nibelungenlied. The courtly poets could, however, comment on the dangers of the demonstrative function of violence to the nobility, principally by turning to motifs of physical pain subtly to disrupt the idealized world of the court. Two examples suffice to demonstrate how the courtly poets critically dealt with this paradox of violence. Hartmann explores this problem when Iwein mortally wounds Ascalon through his helmet down to his waist. Surprisingly, it is not Iwein’s extreme use of violence that is Hartmann’s concern; he is critical of the manner in which Iwein hunts the half-dead Ascalon down without (Eliasian) self-restraint after the outcome of the battle has been determined: “her Îwein jaget in âne zuht” (1056) (Iwein hunts him without selfrestraint [my translation]).55 Iwein breaks with convention because he desires proof of victory on his return to Arthur’s court, which would silence Keie’s challenging and callous words. These uncourtly actions by a normally virtuous knight demonstrate the difficulty of remaining within the guidelines of courtly convention when using violence, especially when social status is based on victory and prowess in battle. In fact, the desire for victory and honor here foreshadows Iwein’s fall from grace when he breaks his oath with Laudine to return from tournaments and adventure within a year, thereby leaving her kingdom without a protector and in a precarious situation. Because the line between legitimate and illegitimate violence is so fine in courtly conflict, and the demonstrative function of violence is so crucial to the knight’s identity and social status, violence has the potential of becoming turned inward, a selfdestructive force to the social group that wields the power of violence to protect society.56 We can consider violence to be a negative and inward-turning force here, because the two knights are equals and Ascalon does not represent an uncourtly and morally depraved knight. Indeed, Iwein threatens the well-being of the very society to which he belongs; in his quest for social recognition and his desire to maintain his social status, he unintentionally destabilizes the harmony and future of Ascalon’s court when he kills him and then endangers the safety of the court by leaving it unprotected.

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An even more troublesome example of unrestrained violence is Mabonagrin’s decapitation of his opponents in the Joy of the Court episode in Erec:

hie was gestalt ein wîter rinc von eichînen stecken. des wunderte Êrecken. ir iegelîch was sus bedaht, ein mannes houbet drûf gestaht, wan einer der was lære. wâ von daz wære? dâ hienc ein grôz horn an. (8769–76) ([Here] a large circle of poles had been set up. That amazed Erec. Each of the poles was covered such that a man’s head was stuck on it. But one of them was empty. Why would that be? A large horn hung from it.) The fact that Mabonagrin retains his opponents’ heads is of great importance. It recalls Walther’s treatment of the severed heads in the Waltharius, the barbarian actions of Harpin in Iwein and the giants in Erec, and stands in stark contrast to the behavior of the civilized knight. Mabonagrin’s actions are also reminiscent of the Celts in ancient Europe, who collected the heads of their defeated opponents in the belief that the head possessed the warrior’s courage, and if the victor were to retain it he would also take his victim’s strength and courage and augment his own.57 Mabonagrin’s symbolic display of the decapitated heads in a ring shows he treats the heads as trophies. The heads possess a totemic quality; they embody Mabonagrin’s prowess as a knight and act as a warning to other knights who come to challenge him. The medieval belief that one of the locations for the soul was in the head may indicate that Mabonagrin was aware of the importance of the head and the power it possesses. Mabonagrin ignores the fundamental courtly convention of showing mercy to his opponents. His uncourtliness is contrasted by Erec’s actions leading up to this adventure. Erec repeatedly refrains from slaying his defeated opponents unless they commit actions that are not sanctioned by their social status or that break with convention, as with the robber knights and the giants who torture Cadoc.58 In the latter episode, Erec kills one giant by gouging its head with a lance and then decapitating it with his sword and the other by chopping his leg and then head off. The extremity of Erec’s actions suggest that he is using unrestrained violence, but the narrator’s comment that the höveschegot, “courtly God,” who is referred to only twice in all of Hartmann’s works, ordained Erec to kill the giants, removes any doubt that Erec’s actions are sanctioned by convention: “er stach in zuo der erde tôt,/als ez der hövesche got gebôt” (5516–17) (He thrust him dead to the earth as the courtly God required [my translation]). In doing so, Erec is fulfilling his societal role as protector of those in need. For Mabonagrin, Erec’s victory and mercy should prove to be an invaluable lesson that he has forgotten courtly convention. Erec’s behavior is clearly meant to provide the correct model for the knight undergoing adventure.59 But even then, unlike other episodes in which extreme forms of violence are

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unmistakably approved or condemned, after Mabonagrin is defeated there is pronounced silence. This silence reveals that it is not necessarily the form of pain that is inflicted that determines if the violence should be condemned or not, but rather the status of the perpetrator. Mabonagrin, as a member of the nobility, is allowed to exert his right to violence. His public display of the heads goes unchallenged by the social body of the court in Brandigan, suggesting he has broken no law. This acceptance of the exclusive use of violence is partly why the audience’s attention is quickly diverted from the issue of suffering embodied in the decapitated heads to the central message of the tale, the importance of actively taking part in courtly society: “wan bî den liuten ist so guot” (9438) (For it is good to be among people).60 Moreover, Mabonagrin appears to be free from guilt. He lays the blame on love, suggesting that violence arises out of one of the cornerstones of courtly ideology, the pursuit of a lady’s love. And he is more than happy to rationalize his unmeasured use of violence in this manner. As Mabonagrin explains to Erec, he had promised his lover to stay in the garden and battle any challengers until he was defeated. Mabonagrin thanks Erec for freeing him from committing any more violence to the surrounding riuwige lant (E 9607), “sorrowful land.” However, Hartmann is very subtle in his critique of unrestrained violence in this scene. The consequences of violence are brought to the foreground through Erec’s courtly behavior leading up to the Joy of the Court adventure and the way he treats the decapitated heads. While everyone celebrates the return of joy to Brandigan, Erec cannot rejoice until the eighty widows have been cared for and the heads have been given a Christian burial (E 9746–825). By concentrating on Erec’s rectification of Mabonagrin’s actions, Hartmann points to the suffering that the nobility’s sanctioned violence can cause, a message highlighted by the sadness embodied in the heads and the widows’ presence amidst refinement of such a wondrous court. It is in an instance like this that the courtly poets’ idealization gives way to didactically graphic depictions of violence. Hartmann brings together the image of the courtly knight and the decapitated heads so common to heroic literature to create dissonance, conveying the message that unrestrained violence does not belong to civilized society. 61 A signification system of pain specific to courtly culture contributes to this didactic message. Depending on the context, the courtly poets invert the meaning of the very same signs of pain used in heroic literature to portray legitimate violence, using the signs to show that the same type of violence is illegitimate in the courtly context. This meaningful use of signs of pain represents an attempt by the courtly poets to create historical distance between what they consider a more violent, Germanic past and the courtly present and future for which they hope, even as extreme and problematic forms of violence occurred around them in medieval society. In conclusion, the body in pain and violence do not entirely disappear from the ideological system of courtly literature, even with the emphasis placed on self-restraint. The infliction of pain constantly recurs because violence is fundamental to the maintenance of the ideals that inform courtly life: love, goodness, loyalty, discipline, and measure. Idealization cannot conceal the truth about the importance of physical violence to the nobility’s sovereignty. But as we have seen, violence was both a constant threat to the nobility’s hegemony and constant stabilizer of it. And it is the physical body, decapitated, covered in blood, and mutilated, that reveals the effects of both the violent power struggles that appear in the courtly world and the tension created through the

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evolution of a new image of civilization. Courtly literature suggests unrestrained violence stands in contrast to civilized life. And yet violence remains a prerequisite for the development of civilization; violence is an integral part of courtly society and a necessary tool used in various ways to legitimate the rule of those in power. Thus, the function of violence in the civilizing process can be thought of as an economy of violence. The various forms of the nobility’s exclusive right to violence, whether retributive, judicial, communicative, or demonstrative, at once contribute to the construction of the knight’s social status and to the maintenance of courtly society, but at the same time can overwhelm and destroy the individual and cause societal suffering. Certainly, courtly literature is most concerned with how violence causes the nobility to suffer; the majority of episodes involve people of noble standing such as Koralus’s marginalized existence in Erec. However, the courtly poets’ common use of the word pair arme and rîch (poor/weak and rich/powerful) to describe the social body of the court reveals they were also concerned with how people of lower social standing were affected by violence. Moreover, the suffering caused by illegitimate violence motivates the individual and society to create innovations that overcome such suffering.62 Following this observation, we can posit that the stylized portrayal of violence in courtly literature reflects one such innovation. Through the depiction of unrestrained violence, the courtly poets are proposing that, while violence is essential to the knight’s power struggles and to the maintenance of a peaceful existence, courtly conventions such as zuht, “discipline,” and mâze, “measure,” should guide courtly behavior, thereby contributing to the restraint of violence and regulation of the abuse of its power and infliction. Notes 1. This chapter builds on observations in a previous study and expands them significantly: Scott E.Pincikowski, Bodies of Pain: Suffering in the Works of Hartmann von Aue (New York: Routledge, 2002). 2. See Will Hasty, “Daz priset in, und sleht er mich: Knighthood und Gewalt in the Arthurian Works of Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach,” Monatshefte 86, 1 (spring 1994): 7–21; Otto Neudeck, “Das Stigma des Anfortas: Zum Paradoxen der Gewalt in Wolframs Parzival,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 19, 2 (1994): 52–75; here 65–66. Neudeck observes this paradox in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, pointing out that while violence is a means to an end for the nobility, its destructiveness is also ultimately directed at itself. 3. See Hans-Werner Eroms, “Vreude” bei Hartmann von Aue. Medium Aevum, 20 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1970). 4. Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation: Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen, 20th ed., 2 vols. (1939; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997); English translation by Edmund Jephcott, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom, and Stephen Mennell (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). 5. For a study that disagrees with Elias’s postulates, see Will Hasty, Art of Arms: Studies of Aggression and Dominance in Medieval German Court Poetry. Beitrage zur älteren Literaturgeschichte (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C.Winter, 2002). 6. Cf.C.Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939–1210. The Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); Richard W.Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (New York:

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Oxford University Press, 1999); and “Chivalry and the ‘Civilizing Process,’” Violence in Medieval Society, ed. Richard W.Kaeuper (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 2000), 21–35. 7. Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß, 1:265. 8. Norbert Elias, 2:151 and 2:364–65. 9. Jonathan Fletcher, Violence and Civilization: An Introduction to the Work of Norbert Elias (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1997), 31–32. 10. Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß, 1:195. 11. C.Stephen Jaeger, Origins of Courtliness, 173–75. Jaeger’s argument is compelling because he shows how the courtly poets draw upon preexisting Latin ethical terms like disciplina and elegantia morum, Middle High German zuht and schoene site, that is, “discipline,” and “chivalric behavior” to depict courtliness. 12. In contrast to earlier studies, Will Hasty, Art of Arms, 10, finds that courtliness actually contributes to violence and does not oppose it, suggesting that “courtliness might well be viewed as an important part of a different history, that of Europe and the West’s ever more effective control and refinement of aggression in the interests of dominance.” Also see Albrecht Classen’s comments regarding this issue in the introduction of this volume. 13. L.Jones, “Potestas,” Lexikon des Mittelalters. Vol. VII (Munich: LexMA-Verlag, 1995), 131–33. For a concise differentiation of the meanings of gewalt, see Otto Neudeck, “Das Stigma des Anfortas,” 67, n.53. 14. Guy Halsall, “Violence and Society: An Introductory Survey,” Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West, ed. Guy Halsall (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), 1–45; here 7–16. Suzanne E.Hatty, Masculinities, Violence, and Culture (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2000), 58; Hatty also observes an inherent duality in the meaning of violence stating that “violence may be understood as ‘good’ or ‘bad;’ good violence is deployed for a just cause. It may redress loss; it may avenge an incident of bad violence; or it may restore order and balance to the social system. Violence is viewed as good if there is consensus regarding the goals underlying it and the appropriateness of the means to achieve these objectives.” Also see Richard W.Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence. Kaeuper describes the duality of violence in terms of licit and illicit violence. 15. See Horst Wenzel, Hören und Sehen, Schrift und Bild: Kultur und Gedächtnis im Mittelalter (Munich: C.H.Beck, 1995); Joachim Bumke, “Höfischer Körper—Höfische Kultur,” Modernes Mittelalter: Neue Bilder einer populdren Epoche, ed. Joachim Heinzle (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1994), 67–102. 16. For a general discussion of the development of an anti-courtly attitude within courtly literature and especially by Hartmann von Aue, see Peter Wapnewski, Hartmann von Aue (Stuttgart: Verlag J.B.Metzler, 1979), 214–25. 17. Cf.Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L.A.Manyon. 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 127. Joachim Bumke, Hofische Kultur: Literatur und Gesellschaft im hohen Mittelalter, 2 vols. (Munich: DTV, 1992), 1:224. Bumke discusses how the sword became symbolic of social status. He points out that Emperor Frederic the First, in the Landfrieden of 1152, made it illegal for farmers to bear swords or lances. 18. Althochdeutsches Lesebuch, ed. Ernst A.Ebbinghaus, 16th ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1979), 84–85. 19. For a detailed discussion of the meaning of taking an opponent’s armor in a Germanic battle, see Ute Schwab, “Waffensport, Rauba und Dietrichs Schatten: Chud Chonnem Mannum— δóξαν έπι τωδραστηρίω δίαπκωç έχων (Prokop, Got. IV, 31),” Neophilologus 84, 4 (2000): 575–607; here 585–89. 20. Even though the Hildebrandslied is a fragment and breaks off at the point where father and son begin to battle each other, we know from another source, the Old Norse Asmundar Saga Kappabana, that Hildebrand kills Hadubrand. See Dieter Kartschoke, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur imfruhen Mittelalter (Munich: DTV, 1990), 126–27.

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21. Albrecht Classen, “Why Do Their Words Fail? Communicative Strategies in the Hildebrandslied” Modern Philology 93, 1 (1995): 1–22. Also see Classen’s discussion of the Hildebrandslied in his Verzweiflung und Hoffnung: Die Suche nach der kommunikativen Gemeinschaft in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters. Beihefte zur Medievistik, 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002), 1–52; see also the comments by Gijsbertus Koolemans Beynen in his contribution to this volume. 22. Waltharius, Ruodlieb, Marchenepen: Lateinische Epik des Mittelalters mit deutschen Versen, ed. Karl Langosch (Basel: Benno Schwab, 1956). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation W with line numbers. 23. David Townsend, “Ironic Intertextuality and the Reader’s Resistance to Heroic Masculinity in the Waltharius,” Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1997), 67–86. For a discussion of humor in medieval epics, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask. Bolligen Series, 36 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953), 429–31. For the meaning of humor in hagiography, legend, and the Schwank, see Max Wehrli, “Christliches Lachen, christliche Komik?” From Wolfram and Petrarch to Goethe and Grass: Studies in Honour of Leonard Forster, eds. D.H.Green, L.P.Johnson, and Dieter Wuttke. Saecula Spiritalia, 5 (Baden-Baden: Verlag Valentin, Koerner, 1982), 17–31. 24. Waltharius and Ruodlieb, ed. and trans. by Dennis M.Kratz (New York: Garland, 1984), 1401–4. 25. For a concise overview of medieval attitudes toward pain, see Esther Cohen, “Towards a History of European Sensibility: Pain in the Later Middle Ages,” Science in Context 8, 1 (1995): 47–74. 26. Das Nibelungenliedy nach der Ausgabe von Karl Bartsch. Edited by Helmut de Boor, 20th ed. (Wiesbaden: F.A.Brockhaus, 1972). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation NL with strophe numbers. 27. Cf.Peter Czerwinski, “Das Nibelungenlieck. Widerspruche höfischer Gewaltreglementierung,” Einfuhrung in die deutsche Literatur des 12. bis 16. Jahrhunderts, vol. 1, Adel und Hof—12./13. Jahrhundert, ed. Winfried Frey, Walter Raitz, and Dieter Seitz (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1985), 49–87; here 56–58. 28. The critique of violence in the Nibelungenlied is underscored by societal suffering evident in the thirteenth-century Div Klage. Mit den Lesearten samtlicher Handschriften, ed. Karl Bartsch (Leipzig, 1875); English translation by Winder McConnell, The Lament of the Nibelungen (Div Chlage). Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994). 29. Peter Czerwinski, “Das Nibelungenlied,” 79, suggests that the poet is attacking the development of courtly ideals. He attributes the ending to the older ideological system of the feudal world defeating the newer, courtly system: “Das, was sich im großen Kampf letztlich bewährt, ist noch einmal die alte Treue der Lehns- und Sippenbindungen, nicht mehr das höflich-formalisierte Verhalten gleichgestellter Dynasten. Im Untergang herrscht wieder die überkommene feudale Welt, ihre Gewalt-Orgie fegt die neuen, friedlichen Verkehrsformen hinweg und lafit sie als lacherlich erscheinen.” (That which finally stands the test in the great battle is again the old loyalty of liege and family ties, no longer the courtly and formalized behavior of equal rulers. The feudal world dominates again during the ruinous end; its orgy of violence sweeps the new, peaceful forms of interaction away and makes them appear ridiculous.) 30. Jan-Dirk Müller, Spielregeln für den Untergang: Die Welt des Nibelungenliedes (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998), 443–55, especially 445–46. Müller describes the unstoppable escalation of violence in the Nibelungenlied as an Epidemie der Gewalt (epidemic of violence), facilitated by a Meute (gang) mentality. This reading is innovative because it emphasizes how social hierarchy becomes irrelevant to the Burgundians over the course of the tale, becoming diffuse and then gradually reforming around the heroic figure, Hagen, who incites the

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warriors into action with the irrational force of unrestrained violence. Because Hagen has become the leader figure of this “gang,” the Burgundians are bound by his fate as the object of Kriemhild’s revenge, causing all of their tragic deaths. 31. For the commonly held argument that the ending of Nibelungenlied is heroic, see John L. Flood, “The Severed Heads: On the Deaths of Gunther and Hagen,” German Narrative Literature of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Studies presented to Roy Wisbey on his Sixty-fifth Birthday, ed. Volker Honemann, Martin H.Jones, Adrian Stevens, and David Wells (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1994), 173–88. 32. For a representative discussion of the anti-courtly elements in the Nibelungenlied, see C. Stephen Jaeger, Origins of Courtliness, 192–93. 33. Cf.Richard W.Kaeuper “Chivalry and the ‘Civilizing Process,’” 99–100; The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the year 1000, ed. Thomas Head and Richard Landes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992); William Henry Jackson, Chivalry in Twelfth-Century Germany: The Works of Hartmann von Aue. Arthurian Studies, 34. (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S.Brewer, 1994), 85–91; here 91. Jackson sees a direct connection between the peace accords and the development of courtly literature. He observes “a decisive stage in the transformation of an earlier, more violent warrior model into the restrained, ethically oriented figure of the knight as a defender of justice in the new literary genre of Arthurian Romance.” 34. For a discussion of the ministeriales, see Marc Bloch, Feudal Society. 35. Hartmann von Aue, Erec, ed. Albert Leitzmann and Ludwig Wolff, 6th ed., by Christoph Cormeau and Kurt Gärtner (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1985); Iwein, ed. G.F. Benecke and K.Lachmann, newly revised 7th ed. by Ludwig Wolf (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter and Co., 1968). Subsequent references to these works are cited in the text using the abbreviations E and I with line numbers. 36. Wolfram von Eschenbach, ed. Karl Lachmann, 5th ed. (Berlin: G.Reimer, 1891). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation P with book, strophe, and line numbers. 37. Joachim Bumke, Höfische Kultur, 1:350–51. 38. Parzival: A Romance of the Middle Ages. Trans. and with an introduction by Helen M.Mustard and Charles E.Passage (New Yorfc Vintage Books, 1961), 94. 39. Joachim Bumke, “Höfischer Körper,” 67–102. 40. Rene Girard, Vioknce and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 37. Gerard emphasizes the importance of ritual to the deflection of the negative consequences of violence: “The secret of the dual nature of violence still eludes men. Beneficial violence must be carefully distinguished from harmful violence, and the former continually promoted at the expense of the latter. Ritual is nothing more than the regular exercise of’good’ violence.” For a discussion of how ritual was strategically used to settle disputes without violence in the Middle Ages, see Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt: Primus Verlag, 1997). 41. See William Henry Jackson, “Zank und Zwist bei Waffenspielen,” “bickelwort” und “wildiu mære”: Festschrift für Berhard Nellmann zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Dorthee Lindemann, Berndt Volkmann, and Klaus-Peter Wegera. Goppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 618 (Goppingen: Kiimmerle Verlag, 1995), 408–23; Juliet Vale, “Violence and the Tournament,” Violence in Medieval Society, ed. Richard W.Kaeuper (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 2000), 143–58. 42. Arthurian Romances, Tales, and Lyric Poetry: The Complete Works of Hartmann von Aue, trans. Frank Tobin, Kim Vivian, and Richard H.Lawson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 84, w. 2624–29. Unless indicated, longer translations from Hartmann von Aue are from this source. Also note that the first line of this translation, “sîn

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lip wart liitzel dâ gespart” can be understood as “his body was spared very little there.” Middle High German lîp connotes both “life” and “self.” 43. William Henry Jackson, Chivalry in Twelfth-Century Germany, 409. 44. Mauritius von Craiin, ed. Heimo Reinitzer (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000), 899– 917. Modern German translation, notes, and epilogue by Albrecht Classen (Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 2000). 45. Guy Halsall, “Violence and Society” 18, differentiates between “strategic” and “tactical violence,” finding that strategic violence “draws attention to, but does not in itself resolve, disputes.” Conversely, tactical violence is “aimed directly at the achievement of ends.” 46. Joachim Bumke, Höfische Kultur, 1:350. 47. Joachim Bumke, Höfische Kultur, 1:227. 48. Cf. Martin H.Jones, “Chrétien, Hartmann, and the Knight as Fighting Man: On Hartmann’s Chivalric Adaptation of Erec et Enide,” Chrétien de Troyes and the German Middle Ages: Papers from an International Symposium, ed. Martin H.Jones and Roy Wisbey (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S.Brewer, 1993), 85–109; Thomas Bein, “Hie slac, dâ stich!: Zur Ästhetik des Tötens in europäischen Iwem-Dichtungen,” LiLi 28, 109: Kampf und Krieg (March 1998): 38–58. 49. For a discussion of how Christian ideals changed the manner in which the courtly poets understood suffering, see Friedrich Maurer “Leid”: Studien zur Bedeutungs- und Probkmgeschichte, besonders in den großen Epen der staufischen Zeit. Bibliotheca Germanica, 1 (Munich: Leo Lehnen Verlag, 1969). 50. See Körperverletzung, “wounding of the body,” Lexikon des Mittelalters. Vol. V (Munich: Artemis Verlag, 1980), col. 1447–48. During the High Middle Ages the practice of publicly wounding a criminal was common. The type of wound depended upon the crime, with bloodless wounds, bloody injuries, and debilitating punishments mirroring the offense. In Maliclisier’s case, he receives the second level of retribution. The marks on his back reflect the guilt embodied in the marks he caused on Erec’s and the handmaiden’s face (E 1033– 35). 51. Thomas Bein, “Hie slac, dâ stich!,”45–49. 52. Wilkhalm, nach der Handschrift 857 der Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen, ed. Joachim Heinzle. Altdeutsche Textbibliothek, 108 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1994). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation Wi with strophe numbers. 53. For a scene that conveys a similar message, see the Harpin episode in Iwein (4918–45, 5075–82). The narrator in this scene emphasizes how the giant treats the poor captives in an uncourtly manner: “an den het er begangen/grôze unhövescheit” (I 4918–19). (He had treated them in a most unchivalric way.) 54. Richard W.Kaeuper, Chivalry and Vioknce, 156. 55. For other studies that view the phrase “âne zuht” as a form of subtle courtly critique, see Peter Wapnewski, Hartmann von Aue, 75; Hendricus Sparnaay, Hartmann von Aue: Studien zu einer Biographie. 2 vols. (Halle/Saale: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1938), 2:48. More recently, W.H.Jackson, Chivalry in Twelfth-Century Germany, 241, has argued that this phrase does not have “a moral connotation, that it is applied by other others to actions, including pursuits in combat situations, without moral condemnation.” 56. For a discussion of the close connection of violence and noble identity in Wolfram’s Parzival, see Otto Neudeck, “Das Stigma des Anfortas,” 65–66. 57. Olivia Vlahos, Body: The Ultimate Symbol (New York: J.B.Lippincott, 1979), 113–15. 58. Martin H.Jones,“Schutzwaffen und Hofischheit: Zu den Kampfausgangen im Erec Hartmanns von Aue,” Spannungen und Konflikte menschlichen Zusammenlebens in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, eds. Kurt Gartner, Ingrid Kasten, and Frank Shaw (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1996), 74–90; Christoph Huber, “Ritterideologie und Gegnertotung: Überlegungen zu den Erec-Romanen Chretiens und Hartmanns und zum Prosa-Lancelot” Spannungen und Konflikte menschlichen Zusammenlebens in der deutschen

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Literatur des Mittelalters, ed. Kurt Gartner, Ingrid Kasten, and Frank Shaw (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1996), 59–73. 59. See Thomas Bein, “Hie slac, dâ stich!” 60. Cf.Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan. Nach der Ausgabe von Reinhold Bechstein, ed. Peter Ganz. Deutsche Klassiker des Mittelalters, 4 (Wiesbaden: F.A.Brockhaus, 1978), 17696– 705; English translation by Thomas Hatto, Tristan with the “Tristan” of Thomas (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, U.K.: Viking Penguin, 1987). Gottfried emphasizes Tristan and Isolde’s happiness at being able to retain their place in society after having been in the love grotto. 61. Joachim Schröder, “Zu Darstellung und Funktion der Schauplätze in den Artusromanen Hartmanns von Aue” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Marburg, 1972), 250. Schröder refers to the increased effect of suffering when it takes place in a location where joy is normally expected as the Gegensatzfunktion, “contrasting function.” 62. For a detailed discussion of the destructive and creative power of pain, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), especially 161–71.

5 Violence Stylized1 SIEGFRIED R.CHRISTOPH In 1998, under the directorship of Klaus Scherpe, an interdisciplinary postgraduate program was started at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin devoted to the topic of “Codierung von Gewalt im medialen Wandel.”2 One of the thematic concentrations includes “Asthetische Strategien der Codierung von physischer Gewalt.” The interdisciplinary nature of the program points to a renewed focus on some fundamental assumptions about the representation of violence.3 For the Middle Ages and its vernacular literatures, violence is every bit as pervasive a topos as love. Like courtly love, violence tends to be stipulated as a self-evident feature of medieval culture. I would like to approach the literary depiction of violence through some representative examples to see whether a more differentiated view of violence is either necessary or desirable. Although the focus will be on Middle High German courtly literature, it is hoped that some points will be relevant for other languages as well. Looking at the concept of violence from a historical and linguistic perspective alone, there is an important difference when referring to the English word violence and its modern German counterpart, Gewalt. In the case of English violence, we are fairly safe when we offer a general characterization of violence as “the use of physical or psychological force against people or things.” At the heart of this exercise of force is the sense that it is a violation against something sanctioned by rule, custom, or law. Hence, we often find the characteristic cause-and-effect relationship between lawlessness and violence in the Middle Ages. There are, then, some general questions to be addressed. First, the important issue is arguably not the exertion of violence as such, but rather the standards that determine whether or not there is an element of violation attaching to the deed. An act of violence may be sanctioned by law or custom and would therefore not be said to violate. Conversely, any act might be said to be violent if it violates some commonly accepted sanction, although no force is exercised, either physically or psychologically. This distinction made is at the spiritual level by St. Augustine in Book 3 of the Confessions: “Many a deed which in the sight of men is disapproved by men, is approved by Thy testimony, and many a one who is praised by men is, Thou being witness, condemned; because frequently the view of the deed, and the mind of the doer, and the hidden exigency of the period, severally vary.”4 Second, it seems helpful to distinguish the major arenas in which medieval literary violence plays out. Do we consider violence in military battle between armies in the same way as other displays of force?5 A competitive or recreational tournament at court, for example, or single combat between two knights? In the case of single combat, do we consider the varying motives, such as personal ambition, the favor of fair maiden, a prize, defense of self or property, âventiure (Middle High German for “adventure”), or

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revenge? The list of contexts in which violence figures, justifiably or not, to resolve conflict is long, pervasive, and enduring. The situation is a little different in German. English retains in most aspects of violence the singular sense of violation by force. German Gewalt, by contrast, reflects two quite different senses of the word, however. One is unsanctioned force, as in the sense of Modern German Gewalttätigkeit (violent act), vergewaltigen (to rape), or gewaltsam (violently). There is also, however, the sense of legitimate application of power and authority in the term, as in words like Verwaltung (administration), Schlüsselgewalt (authority), or seines Amtes walten (to exercise one’s authority).6 This is the sense in which its English cognate, wield, is still used to express “rule,” “command,” and “direct.” Middle High German already reflected this range of meanings, both positive and negative. Wolfram von Eschenbach offers examples of several usages. Gahmuret, Parzival’s father, is a “gewaldec künec übr driu lant” (a mighty king over three countries; Parzival 108,6). Belakane and her city are besieged by foreign troops “zornlîche mit gewalt” (angrily with violence; Parzival 26,5). Violation of custom is expressed in Gawan’s admonition to the love-struck Parzival: “hêrre, ir welt gewalt nu tuon,/sît ir mir grüezen widersagt” (sir, you commit a violation by denying me greeting; 300,24f.). Lîâze clearly refers to sexual violence when she tells Parzival that she would rather die than that her unbidden suitor, Clâmidê, should have “mit gewalt min magetuom” (my maidenhood with violence; Parzival 195,25). So what do the Middle High German classics of vernacular literature tell us about violence, and its pervasiveness, in accounts of and about medieval culture? We could cite the Nibelungenlied as a compelling example of how brutally conflict and old scores were settled. We could even cite the evidence of medieval hagiography to suggest that both spiritual and secular medieval society was characterized by a fascination with the causes and consequences of violence. In the chivalric romances there is an indication that the context in which violence is described, and specifically the conditions under which it is exercised, is very much a matter of style—even ritual. The meeting between the wild man of the forest and Kâlogrenant in Hartmann’s Iwein offers a good point of departure. When he is asked to explain what âventiure is, Kalogrenant answers:

nû sich wie ich gewâfent bin: ich heize ein riter und hân den sin daz ich suochende rîte einen man der mit mir strîte, der gewâfent sî als ich. daz prîset in, und sleht er mich: gesige aber ich im an, sô hât man mich vür einen man, und wired werder danne ich sî.7 (See how I am armed: I am a knight and have a mind to ride in search of a man who will fight me, armed as I am. It will win him praise if he defeats

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me; but if I beat him I will be considered manly and will be more praiseworthy, 522–42). Kâlogrenant essentially describes the context in which force may be exerted by two combatants without fear of violation. As to motive, there is nothing personal in engaging in battle, as both parties are presumed to be in search of adventure, in other words: they know what they are getting into. Success means overcoming by force of will and arms the will of another who is engaged in the same quest. In addition, there is a sense of a shared community of expectations and values, as both combatants are armed alike. The playing field is level; the contest is, as far as its stipulations are concerned, fair. There is a further control on the chivalric exercise of violence, namely, the assumption that the worst can be avoided in the community of shared values by surrendering oneself and offering parole. This is what happens, for example, to end the fight between Erec and Iders. Once Iders declares himself beaten by Erec, he seeks parole, and Erec—bound as he is by the convention of chivalric combat—grants it. There is a sense of predictability in this resolution, which underscores the chivalric community of shared values and constraints. That essential understanding is not violated by the combatants, whatever the nature of the forceful acts themselves may be. Gottfried provides a fine example of how the depiction of violence can become stylized to the point of losing track of the reality, the physical brutality of armed combat. The episode in Tristan where the young hero battles Morold takes up 551 lines.8 The breakdown of the episode into its constituent elements shows much about the stylized nature of violence. The first 187 lines are devoted to a description of Tristan’s armor and horse. In this part, aesthetic matters take pride of place. Much attention is lavished on the “edel werc” (“noble outfitting,” 6545), the “lobebære wâfenroc” (admirable armor; 6577f.), the “schoeneste unde der beste helm” (handsomest and best helmet; 6591–94), and the polished shield, “reht als ein niuwe spiegelglas” (just like a new mirror; 6617), all of which adds up to an image of unparalleled “schonheit” (handsomeness; 6634). Such a dashing figure deserves an equally dashing horse, and, indeed, “in Spanjenlant noch anderswâ/wart nie kein schœnerez erzogen” (neither in Spain nor elsewhere was a handsomer one ever bred; 6664–65). Thus properly outfitted, Tristan is presented to the crowd like a rhinestone cowboy at a rodeo: “die do wol kunden prisen/beidiu man und îsen,/die kâmen alle samet dar an,/daz beidiu, îsen unde man,/geworhten schoener bilde nie” (those who could praise both man and armor, they all agreed that both armor and man had never been shaped more handsomely; 6691ff.). This is not to belittle or trivialize Gottfried’s description of Tristan’s battle preparation, nor to suggest that this description somehow implies Gottfried’s indictment of violence or courtliness. Instead, the point is that so much attention is paid to the stylistic elements on which the preparations for violence are based. After the arena of battle has been selected, certain ground rules are established. No one but the combatants is to be allowed onto the island until the battle is over. Two boats, large enough to carry a horse and armored rider, are made ready to ferry Tristan and Morold to the island.9 Once there, Morold ties up his boat and rides some training laps until Tristan arrives. Tristan pushes his boat away from the island to signify that there can only be one victor in this battle: “sô hât ouch jener, der dâ gesiget,/an disem einen genuoc” (whoever wins will not have need for more than this one [boat]; 6808–9). This is

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a nice touch of youthful hubris that would certainly score style points in the macho-man category. There is some last-minute preliminary discussion about the grievance at hand and a pro forma invitation to surrender an unjust or hopeless claim. Finally, after almost 300 lines of preparation, the battle begins. For all the space that Gottfried eventually devotes to the battle itself, there is surprisingly little that actually takes place. Tristan and Morold ride a full-tilt assault, “daz sî diu sper zestâehen,/daz si in den schilten brâchen/wol ze tûsent stucken” (so that they splintered their lances against the shields into a thousand pieces; 6863ff.). After spending some 35 lines on likening the combatants to a whole host of warriors, “zwo ganze rotte odr ahte man” (two hordes or eight men; 6895), Gottfried moves the battle to its second crucial phase. Tristan’s defense against Morold’s powerful sword blows, which almost robbed our hero of “kraft unde sin” (strength and sense; 6912), is to cower “mit listen” (with innate wit; 6915) under his shield. We are told that neither helmet nor breastplate could have withstood the force of Morold’s blows. But then Tristan commits a near-fatal blunder; he holds his shield too high, and Morold undercuts him with a powerful “hezlîchen slac” (an ugly blow; 6929) to the hip. The result is given in gruesome detail: the blow cut through the armor, “daz ime daz fleisch und daz bein/durch hosen und durch halsperc schein,/und daz bluot ûf schraete/und after dem werde waete” (so that flesh and bone broke through leggings and armor, and the blood spurted out; 6931–34). At this point Morold takes time out from his busy hacking to inform Tristan that the wound is fatal since the sword has been poisoned. Tristan replies that the battle is still “ungeschieden” (undecided; 6978), although the assessment might well seem a bit optimistic in view of the facts. This is the kind of grotesque insouciance that underlies Monty Python’s astute reading of stylized violence in The Search for the Holy Grail, as in the scene involving the progressive dismembering of the Black Knight at the bridge. For a while, the battle progresses along fairly straight and arguably “realistic” lines. Tristan unhorses Morold and knocks off his helmet in the process. Morold struggles to recover the helmet and to remount his horse, all the while covering his back with his shield against Tristan’s attack, “als in sîn witze lêrte” (as his wits instructed him; 7034). Gottfried adds considerable detail here, describing exactly how Morold approached his horse, seized the reins, and moved “den linken fuoz” (the left foot; 7046) into the stirrup while grasping the saddle with his hand. Fortune is no longer smiling on Morold, however. Tristan severs Morold’s sword hand, hacking at the top of the saddle as Morold grabs it to mount, so that “swert,” “zeswen hant,” and “ringen” (sword, left hand, and mail; 7051–53) fall into the sand. Tristan follows up on what we can safely call an advantage to deliver a blow of such force to Morold’s head that, as he jerks, “zucke” (7059), back the blade a chunk of the sword blade remains embedded in Morold’s skull. This causes “sorgen” and “grôze not” (sorrow and great distress; 7063), but not to Morold, as we might reasonably expect. Instead, it is Tristan who will be betrayed by this missing fragment, when it is seen by Isolde to match the chunk missing from Tristan’s sword. Tristan takes time out for a little “trash”–talk at this point: “mich dunket, dû sîst sêre wunt;/ich waene, dîn dinc übele stê” (I think you’re badly hurt; I think things aren’t going well for you; 7072–73). As Morold is stumbling around, minus a hand and with a cloven skull, Tristan takes the sword “ze beiden sînen handen” (in both hands; 7087) and cuts off his head.

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The battle between Tristan and Morold illustrates the extent to which acts of violence, as exercises of physical force, are embedded within, indeed serve as a thematic context for stylistic embellishments, explication, reflection, and, not least, a celebration of almost ritualistic mannerisms. What we learn of tactics and relative skill in the use of weapons, the physical elements of battle, is almost as perfunctory as the battle itself, which is fundamentally an inelegant hack-’n’-slash affair. Before considering the battle between Erec and Iders, a brief aside on a couple of practical matters seems in order. Mounted combat inherently suggests that riding skill is one of the things that gives a potential edge in fighting. After all, the success of the Mongol raiders is still explained in large part as due to their superior horsemanship. Yet we learn little in chivalric romances about the relative skills or even instruction of riders.10 Then there is the matter of the sword. With a blade roughly three inches in length and weighing between 4 and 4½ pounds, this was not the kind of thrust-and-parry weapon that we associate with fencing. It requires tremendous strength and endurance to wield such a weapon, not to mention to endure the accumulation of recoil shocks as the blade hits a solid object. On the matter of endurance, Erec and Iders offer an arguably more realistic picture.11 The battle scene is considerably shorter, 195 lines, but the pertinent details are covered.12 They fight a total of five jousts until their stock of lances is exhausted. One of the blows drives Iders’ shield backward into his helmet, stunning him. The assault is so forceful, “daz diu ros hinder sich/an die hehsen gesâzen” (so that the horses were forced back onto their haunches; 775–76). The mounted sequence of the battle ends when the saddle straps on Iders’ horse break, “die darmgiirtel (brâchen)” (818–19). As they continue fighting on foot, Iders delivers a blow to Erec’s helmeted head which brings him to his knees, “daz er gie/von dem slage ûf diu knie” (848–49). The tide now turns: Erec swings the shield onto his back, grasps the sword in both hands, and hacks away at Iders’ shield until it literally disintegrates on Iders’ hand: “er machete in des schiltes bar/und hiu in im von der hant gar” (860–61). The exchange of blows and parries continues. Hartmann now takes time to explain the further progress of the battle as a game of chance in which stakes, winnings, and losses rose and fell, in which Erec and Iders “beide spilten ein spiel” (both played a game; 867). Hartmann does give due credit to the reality of such fighting. Having fought thus from sunrise to past noon, they have little strength left to fight vigorously: “si enmohten noch enkunden/ir gebot mit kreften niht gelegen/ noch die arme also geregen” (they neither could nor wanted to fight on, drained of strength and with weary arms; 887–89). Iders calls for a break, pointing out to Erec that “unser bloedez vehten/enzimt niht guoten knehten” (our mindless fighting does not suit good knights; 902f.). Erec “was der rede vro” (glad to hear this; 910), and they both take a break, removing their helmets. When they take up “ir altez spil” (old game; 916) again, Hartmann chooses to stick to his old gambling metaphor while the throw of the dice favors one or the other. In terms of action, Erec keep hacking away at Iders, who makes sure that Erec is not so far out of his own sword’s range as to allow him the advantage of a fully extended blow: “ern nie/ûz den slegen komen lie” (944–45). In the end, Erec has the best throw of the dice, “jener die besten wiirfe warf” (942), and Iders collapses. There is a final moment of suspense and impending violence when Erec removes Iders’ helmet band, “als er solde erslagen sîn” (as though to slay him; 953). The innate camaraderie of chivalry and its shared

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values triumphs, however. Iders offers Erec parole, and the taste of unconditional surrender is sweeter by far than that of annihilating a worthy opponent. All’s well that ends well. Again there is the sense that the violence is stylized, both in terms of how it is marginalized in favor of the author’s editorial intrusions, as well as in terms of how physical force is depicted as a sequence of stylized elements. The battle between Erec and Iders is also interesting for the several motives that underlie it. Ostensibly, Erec seeks revenge for the unprovoked, and highly unchivalrous, attack against a lady-in-waiting from Arthur’s court, an attack that Erec is honor-bound to avenge, both on behalf of the court and because he witnessed it. Because the attacker was not a knight but one of Iders’ retainers, Erec makes clear that he does not intend to hold the retainer to accounts, but rather the master: “iuwern herren sult ir mir nennen” (tell me the name of your master; 80). The rules of engagement dictate that satisfaction can only be exacted from a peer. The battle also involves a fair lady, however, as Erec has challenged Iders for the honor of championing the fairest lady. This contest provides Erec with a chivalric context in which to prosecute his case against Iders, and it proclaims publicly his role as Enite’s champion. In so doing Erec honors Enite’s noble but impoverished father, who has all but despaired of finding a noble suitor for his daughter. The tournament-like context of the open challenge adds a further dimension to the battle. Personal honor, feudal obligation, fair lady’s favor, and the ritual of tournament all play a role here. It is interesting to note that none of these impulses, individually or collectively, would have justified killing a worthy opponent after parole has been offered. Wolfram offers one of the most interesting examples of stylized violence and the notion of a shared community of values, which invests such violence with a kind of detached abstraction. When Parzival and his half-brother, Feirefiz,13 meet to do battle, most of the stylistic elements of chivalric violence are represented. Wolfram addresses at the outset the problem of stylized violence by drawing humble attention to his own lack of style as a storyteller: “Min kunst mir des niht witze gît,/daz ich gesage disen strît/bescheidenlîch als er regienc” (my talents are too paltry to describe this fight properly as it happened; 738,lff.).14 The question of motive is settled immediately by pointing out that Feirefiz, like Hartmann’s Kalogrenant, “reit nach âventiure” (for the sake of adventure; 737,7). With quarter neither asked nor given, the battle takes its course within its usual stylized context: Full mounted assault, broken lances and saddle straps, raining sword blows on helmets and/or lavishly described shields. Wolfram does permit himself a somewhat tongue-in-cheek editorial comment as he deplores such a display of violence: “ich muoz ir strît mit triwen klagen” (I am obliged to lament their fighting; 740,2). Wolfram indulges a couple of personal stylistic flourishes. He is fond of the image of sparks thrown off the helmet to underscore the force of a blow: “fiurs blicke ûz helmen sprungen” (742,12). He also enjoys a pedantic intrusion, as when he describes in detail the composition of the wood from which the shield is made upon which Feirefiz is raining blow after blow. It is made from asbestos, which neither rots nor burns (741,2f.). Since both parties are destined to survive the battle with their honor and reputation intact, the only question remaining is how the tie will be preserved in the end. Wolfram solves the problem deftly by having Parzival deliver a final, crushing blow to Feirefiz’s helmet,

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but in the process shattering his own sword. The battle ends with recognition, mutual admiration, and reconciliation. This is not to make light of the force and brutality that constitute the active elements of these encounters. It is also important to note, however, the emphasis on its stylized representation, the undercurrent of hyperbole, not to mention the tension between ruthless, single-minded determination and submission to the rules of the game. This stylized violence is characterized by an implicit division of body and mind, impulse and deliberation. Even in the heat of battle, there is time for rational discourse, even for negotiating civil intermissions. With the notable exception of Tristan and Morold, terms of surrender are transacted as gallantly as the battle was prosecuted savagely. Finally, I would like to offer some suggestions about what this view of stylized violence suggests within the larger context of “violence in the Middle Ages.” There is no doubt that violence was a constant in medieval life. We have only to check the chronicles for confirmation.15 With the exhortation of the miles dei in the Crusades against the heathen infidel, even the Church had to admit an uneasy relationship to violence.16 In fact, the very foundation of the Church was marked by a keen memory and sensitivity to violent persecution by tyrants and unbelievers. It is likely that the random, run-of-the-mill acts of violence were not committed in strict observance of courtesy or rules of the game. It is just as likely that most combatants, even members of the aristocracy, had neither the opportunity nor the physical stamina for long, extended hand-to-hand combat. On the other hand, however, the very ubiquity of real violence may help to explain the attention devoted to depicting stylized violence. What sets the stylized violence of the romances apart from real violence is the very fact that it observes certain rituals, that it is subject to the law of custom, that it does not, in actual fact, constitute violation. In addition, the literary depictions of chivalric combat flatter the vanity, or at least the idealized self-perception, of an elite warrior class whose members were born and bred to “schildes ambet” (knighthood, literally “the shield’s office”; Parzival 115,11). Judging again by the evidence of the chronicles about the frequent degeneration of the lower nobility into robber barony, Raubrittertum, reality more often than not fell short of idealized self-affirmation and assertion.17 Stylized violence in the romances is not, then, merely a fictionalizing of actual conduct, but rather a construction of custom and usage that binds the members of a community to constraints on their behavior. This code is invoked and held to be generally applicable to check irrational impulses, because those impulses would lead more easily to a capricious violation of order. One of the effects of differentiating stylized violence in this way is to look at certain behaviors that are not merely violent in the sense of brutal force, but violent in the sense that they constitute an implicit or explicit violation of the chivalric order and its shared community of values. When Hartmann tells us that Iwein pursued Laudine’s husband “ane zuht” (unrestrainedly), it refers not so much to the violence of death, but rather to the Iwein’s violation of implicit and explicit rules. Iwein succumbs to anger and vainglorious pride, because the opponent’s flight would deny Iwein the opportunity to flaunt a victory trophy before Keiî. Mind and body perversely become one as the violence of spirit violates

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Iwein’s responsibility to be mindful of right reason and drive him to an act of uncontrolled violence. When Iders’ dwarf whips Guinevere’s lady-in-waiting, it is the sudden, unprovoked, and arbitrary nature of the act that makes it literally violent, more so than the actual injury it causes. When Ither is challenged for his armor by the young Parzival, there is a fine juxtaposition of stylized violence and violence as infringement. Ither cannot bring himself to fight Parzival on chivalric terms, regardless of the young man’s audacious behavior. Consequently, he reverses his lance and whacks Parzival on the head with the butt. Parzival succumbs to rash anger and deludes himself by supposing that Ither might well be the Orilus who had cheated him out of his father’s inheritance. This violence of mind and heart compels Parzival to an act of violation. He slays Ither suddenly, unceremoniously, and decidedly unchivalrously with a gabilot through the eye. The brutality of the act produces surprise and outrage, but so does the context and premise of violation. Finally, and by way of encouraging more thought about a differentiated view of medieval violence, the example of rape, in its linguistic context of German Vergewaltigung and French viol illustrates how importantly the element of violation figured in the medieval perception of what constituted violence.18 Violence not only denoted an objective act of brutal physical force, but also very much an interpretation of that act, an interpretation that was steeped in affective considerations and cultural ideals. In the long run, the question is perhaps not whether the violence described is realistic, but rather how its stylized representation helps to affirm, or reaffirm, the legitimacy of an idealized social and moral order. Notes 1. An early version of this chapter was presented at the 2002 International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo. I am grateful to colleagues for their helpful suggestions. 2. For a program description, see the introductory page, Graduiertenkolleg: Codierung von Gewalt im medialen Wandel, http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/gewalt/gewdar.htm (last accessed March 26, 2004). 3. For recent discussions of violence in literature during the Middle Ages, see Richard Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Jean Jost, “The Role of Violence in Aventure: ‘The Ballad of King Arthur and the King of Cornwall’ and ‘The Turke and Gowin,’” Arthurian Interpretations 2 (1988): 47–57; Guy Mermier, “‘La Chastelaine de Vergi’ ou l’explosion de la violence dans un milieu courtois: 1’automne du Moyen Age déjà?” Studi Mediolatini e Volgari 34 (1988): 69–77; Patricia Demarco, Chivalry in Crisis: The Representation of the Subject of Violence in Late Medieval Literature (diss., Duke University, 1977). In addition, several collections have dealt with the subject of violence, including Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West, ed. Guy Halsall (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydel, 1998), and Asthetik der Gewalt: Ihre Darstellung in Literatur und Kunst, ed. Jürgen Wertheimer (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1986). Another of the Humboldt Universität program’s topics, “Gewaltformigkeit in der kulturellen Codierung von Differenz,” is addressed in David Nirenberg, Comtnunities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998). 4. The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. E.B.Pusey (New York: E.P.Dutton, 1950), 49–50.

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5. The journal, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, devoted an entire issue, 28.109 (1998) to the subject of Kampfund Krieg, which included articles by Albrecht Classen, “Krieg im Mittelalter und seine Kritik in literarischen Werken des deutschsprachigen Raums” (7–37), and Thomas Bein, “Hie slac, dâ stich! Zur Ästhetik des Tötens in europäischen Iwein-Dichtungen” (38–58). 6. The relationship between legitimate use and abuse of authority in the political sphere is discussed in Gadi Algazi, Herrengewalt und Gewalt der Herren im späten Mittelalter: Herrschaft, Gegenseitigkeit und Sprachgebrauch (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1996). See also Sacerdotium und Regnum: geistliche und weltliche Gewalt im frühen und hohen Mittelalter; Festschrift für Egon Boshof, ed. Franz-Reiner Erkens and Hartmut Wolff (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002). 7. All citations are from Hartmann von Aue. Iwein, vol 1, Text, ed. Georg F.Benecke and Karl Lachmann, 7th rev. ed. Ludwig Wolff (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968). 8. All Middle High German citations are from Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan. Dritter Abdruck mit einem durch F.Rankes Kollationen erweitereten und verbesserten Apparat besorgt und mit einem Nachwort versehen von Werner Schroder, ed. Karl Marold (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1969). 9. The scene of Tristan and Morolt sailing to the island was an especially arresting image and a subject for illustration. Several from the Munich Tristan, cgm 51, are included in Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden, “Discursive Illustrations in Three Tristan Manuscripts,” Word and Image in Arthurian Literature, ed. Keith Busby (New York: Garland, 1996), 284–319. The aesthetic aspects of violence in Tristan have recently been discussed in Karina Kellermann, “Und vunden vur ir herren dâ einen zestucketen man. Korper, Kampf und Kunstwerk im ‘Tristan,’” Der “Tristan” Gottfrieds von Straßburg. Symposion Santiago de Compostela, 5. bis 8. April 2000, ed. Christoph Huber and Victor Millet (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002), 131– 52. 10. For a critical reassessment of the horse’s role in medieval combat, see Matthew Bennett, “The Myth of the Supremacy of Knightly Cavalry,” Papers of the 1996 Harlaxton Conference, ed. M.Strickland (Donington, U.K.: Paul Watkins), 304–16. 11. For a recent discussion of violence in Hartmann and Wolfram, see Norbert Sieverding, Der ritterliche Kampfim “Erec” und “Iwein” und in den Gahmuret– und Gawan-Büchern des “Parzival” (Heidelberg: C.Winter, 1985). 12. All Middle High German citations are from Hartmann von Aue, Erec, ed. Albert Leitzmann, 5th ed. Ludwig Wolff. Altdeutsche Textbibliothek, 39 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1972). 13. The topos of battling friends or relatives is discussed in Will Hasty, “‘Daz prîset in, und sleht er mich’: Knighthood and ‘Gewalt’ in the Arthurian works of Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach,” Monatshefte 86 (1994): 7–21; reprinted in a revised and expanded version in his Art of Arms. Studies of Aggression and Dominance in Medieval German Court Poetry. Beiträge zur älteren Literaturgeschichte (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C.Winter, 2002), chapters 3 and 4. 14. All Middle High German citations are from Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival Studienausgabe, 6th ed. Karl Lachmann (1926; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965). 15. For recent studies see Christiane Raynaud, La violence au Moyen Age: XIII-Xve siècle: d’après les livres d’histoire en français (Paris: Leopard d’Or, 1990), and Philippa Maddern, Violence and Social Order: East Anglia 1422–1442 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). 16. See the contribution to this volume by Leo D.Lefebure, “Authority, Violence, and the Sacred at the Medieval Court.” 17. This phenomenon, however, has recently found quite different explanations, see Kurt Andermann, ed., “Raubritter” oder “Rechtschaffene vom Adel”? Oberrheinische Studien, 14 (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1997). 18. For a general discussion on violence and gender, see Dorothea Klein, “Geschlecht und Gewalt. Zur Konstitution von Mannlichkeit im ‘Erec’ Hartmanns von Aue,” Literarische

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Leben. Rolienentwurfe in der Literatur des Hoch- und Spätmittelalters. Festschrift für Volker Mertens zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Matthias Meyer and Hans-Jochen Schiewer (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002), 433–63. See also the collection of essays, Violence against Women in Medieval Texts–, ed. Anna Roberts (Gainesville: University of Florida Press). For a discussion of viol see Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law, New Cultural Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). For Middle English, see Corinne Saunders, “A Matter of Consent: Middle English Romance and the Law of Raptus,” Medieval Women and the Law, ed. Noel James Menuge (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 2000), 105–24; idem, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S.Brewer, 2001).

6 Violence at King Arthur’s Court: Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Perspectives1 ALBRECHT CLASSEN In the highly intriguing verse novella, Moriz von Craûn (ca. 1220), the central tournament organized by the protagonist begins rather badly and sheds negative light on the entire world of medieval knighthood and the idea of chivalry. Moriz had been asked by his beloved, Countess of Beamunt, to stage this tournament as a proof of his unwavering love for her. The excessive preparations seem to guarantee a smooth operation as no expenses have been spared, but at the beginning of the tournament the Count of Beamunt, who enjoys the privilege of being the first to joust, accidentally kills his opponent (v. 906). Deeply shocked about this misfortunate event, the count withdraws to his castle, lamenting the tragic outcome. At first, after the count has removed his armor, the entire company of knights and ladies assumes that this would signal the end of the tournament and all festivities, but Moriz appeals to them not to forgo all their enjoyment just because of one dead knight whose soul could be entrusted to Saint Michael (931–32). As soon as Moriz has made this announcement, all participants immediately forget the unfortunate victim and throw themselves into the excitement of the tournament, ignoring the count and his mourning.2 To be sure, a knightly game has turned sour, blood has been spilled, yet only the lone perpetrator fully realizes the tragic dimensions of his deadly action and draws the right conclusions, whereas everybody else disregards the accident and blithely focuses on the highly brutal sport event, the tournament, foolishly accepting the possibility of further deaths. Moriz proves to be the absolute champion, winning every competition, but at the end he himself clearly shows the marks of the physical stress; he is so exhausted in the evening that he falls asleep in the lap of the countess’s chambermaid while he is waiting for his lady in a secret apartment. The countess, however, once she arrives at the scene, suddenly rejects Moriz as her lover because he could not keep awake at this crucial moment, and returns to her bedroom. Soon after, having awakened from a nightmare and having realized his grave loss, Moriz forces his way into the bedroom of the Countess of Beamunt. Because of his terrifying appearance, his face still stained with dried blood and with tattered clothing—the narrator compares him to a lion covered with the signs of its bloody meal (1537)—he frightens the husband so much out of his wits that he faints. Finding the side next to his beloved now empty, Moriz lies down in the bed, and later joins his lady in lovemaking. But he is so disappointed with her previously cold and harsh behavior toward him when he was asleep that he afterwards returns the ring to her and departs for good.3 The ideals of courtly chivalry and of knightly tournaments are deftly satirized and criticized in this verse novella, raising the specter of an imminent decline of medieval

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knighthood altogether, as neither Moriz nor the Countess of Beamunt demonstrates the values traditionally associated with the nobility of the aristocratic class.4 The knightly tournament becomes a brutal struggle leading to the death of one participant, Moriz appears as a pompous opera star performing in front of his lady, the countess displays extreme expectations of her wooer, and her husband fails both in the basic chivalric abilities and in representing his court in an honorable fashion.5 Similarly grotesque elements casting medieval knighthood in a highly dubious light can also be found in many other thirteenth- and fourteenth-century romances, such as Tristan als Monch6 and the peasant satire Meier Helmbrecht.7 However, as Richard W.Kaeuper observes, ”[s]ince the greatest opportunity for exercising prowess was war, a delight in war becomes an important corollary to the worship of prowess at the centre of chivalric ideology.”8 Despite the ideological glory seemingly associated with knighthood, a close analysis of medieval historical and literary documents reveals, as Kaeuper also states unequivocally, “[c]hivalry brought no radical transformation in medieval warfare, as it touched the population as a whole; above all, it imposed no serious check on the looting, widespread destruction, and loss of noncombatant lives that seem to have been the constant companions of warfare”9—which modern military strategists callously call “collateral damage.” One of the most important Middle High German poets, Wolfram von Eschenbach (ca. 1190-ca. 1225) deserves to be taken to task for his concept of medieval knighthood and its concrete, physical impact on courtly society and the lower classes. He projected highly unusual and noteworthy images of knighthood that need to be studied in greater detail. Many things are wrong in the Arthurian world, as depicted by Wolfram, and so also in the world of the Grail (Parzival). The price for love has become death (Titurel), and Christian society only barely manages to fend off the massive attacks by heathen forces (Willehalm), especially because a lack of religious fervor for a long time prevents the French king from coming to Willehalm’s rescue. Nevertheless, Wolfram proudly introduces himself as a knightly poet: “schildes ambet ist min art:/swâ mîn ellen sî gespart/swelhiu mich minnet umbe sanc,/sô dunket mich ir witze kranc” (115, 11–14; my birth was to the knightly trade, and if my bravery is underrated by one who loves me for my poetry, I consider that she is weak-witted).10 On the other hand, what he really thought about knighthood and whether he supported its ideological basis along traditional lines prove to be highly legitimate questions, especially as all his protagonists are profoundly shaped by tragedy and sorrow and do not fare well in the world of warfare and chivalric quest.11 As Will Hasty now argues: “It is not a separation of public/exterior and private/interior that Wolfram is here proposing. The problem that has presented itself here is the establishment of a correspondence between the internal and the external in the name of court society. An internalization of courtly ideals cannot be a replacement for, but rather must be regarded as the completion of external, physical beauty.”12 But Hasty also concludes that “Wolfram, just as Parzival, has nothing in mind but the welfare of the court and of knighthood, and sets out to restore them in the only manner possible to him.”13 Both in his Parzival and in his more heroic Willehalm, written in the vein of a chanson de geste, but also in his dawn songs and in his fragmentary piece Titurel, Wolfram focuses on the nature and performance of chivalry in its myriad manifestations, both private and public. Interestingly, these not only involve a glorification of knightly

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violence, presenting the male hero as a champion of women and orphans in times of need and also fighting for the protection of Christianity, but they also imply a considerable critique, if not condemnation, of the knightly existence altogether. This does not imply that Wolfram would have been opposed to chivalry as such, especially as he himself was so concerned about demonstrating his own knightly status. But in all his works he raises highly critical questions regarding the use of brutish force and the lack of alternative communication strategies. Wolfram was one of the most influential Middle High German poets who enjoyed an impressive popularity, documented by the large number of manuscripts containing his texts and the endless stream of positive comments about his literary contributions.14 Consequently, his statements about condemnable, destructive, and unjustifiable violence allow us to gain a complex and detailed understanding of the dialectics and aporias of the nature of knighthood, which obviously had come as early as the eleventh and twelfth centuries with rise of the Peace of God Movement under attack.15 This in turn led, as Frassetto asserts, to the clear establishment of the “clergy as a distinct order” and had “the cumulative effect of providing a clearer definition of the responsibilities of the knights themselves.”16 Certainly, all his protagonists aspire for the highest goals of chivalry and never demonstrate any fear of fighting their enemies; they are, disregarding a number of individual idiosyncrasies and personal shortcomings, ideal knights or grow into their roles as the leaders of their countries, and so they regularly have to struggle hard to fight against the evils in this world.17 In Willehalm, however, the goriness of the bloody battle assumes unforeseen levels, perhaps only paralleled by the anonymous Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200) and, even earlier, Priest Konrad’s Rolandslied (ca. 1170).18 Wolfram also raises the question whether people of different religions and ethnic origins can live together or at least tolerate each other despite the highly militarized nature of their societies.19 In Parzivaly the eponymous protagonist achieves the highest glory as a knight, but in the course of his quest for the Grail and reunification with his half-brother Feirefiz, we also observe rather critical perspectives regarding the use of knightly violence, especially as Parzival has to learn that all his physical prowess does nothing to win him access to the Grail. In fact, the profound process of rethinking sets in only when his sword has broken during a deadly joust with Feirefiz, which then ends the fighting and leads to recognition of the universal familial bonds between these two half brothers.20 Parzival now learns the ultimate lesson in life and is subsequently invited to return to the Grail castle Munsalvaesche to ask his uncle the long-expected question. Finally, in his fragmentary piece, Titurel (ca. 1220), Wolfram takes the additional step and outlines an uncannily somber and melancholic scenario where death and the slow disappearance of an entire family take center stage as the result of unbridled and highly deconstructive knightly violence.21 Recent scholarship has evaluated Wolfram’s treatment of chivalry and knighthood from highly contrastive perspectives, either giving him conditional praise for his sensitive observation of the painful consequences of violence, particularly of violence directed against women, or charging him for rigidly defending medieval patriarchy and so men’s privileges in exerting violent acts against women. Helmut Brackert, representative of the first school of thought, observes that the existence of knighthood does not offer courtly ladies the necessary protection against personal violation at the hands of knights, some of

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whom also turn out to be nothing but crude and evil-minded rapists and murderers, such as Meljakanz (125,11). Even the worthiest knights continuously strive for their own glory and public recognition by seeking out highly dangerous adventures that do not necessarily bring peace and often tend to endanger the women involved.22 Indeed, both the scene where Parzival abuses Jeschute, without knowing how much pain he brings upon her, and the subsequent scene in which Orilus, out of a deep sense of insecurity and inferiority, lashes out against his lady and accuses her of adultery, paying no attention to any of her explanations, raise considerable concern on the part of modern readers. Brackert, for one, concludes that Wolfram explains women’s suffering in the world of the courts by specific references to the violent consequences of chivalry (150). Although Gurnemanz teaches Parzival that true knighthood would aim for the realization of compassion toward the defeated knight, his own experiences with his three sons prove that reality has little to do with his ethical ideals (152). Not surprisingly, the Arthurian world does not offer any practical alternative to the endless slaughter of knights in combat, and even in tournaments (see Moriz von Craûn). Only the Grail kingdom indicates a way out of this eternal dilemma: “nur durch die Aufhebung der väterlich-ritterlichen Kampfund Kriegswelt im Friedensreich der mutterlichen Gralswelt werden Voraussetzungen dafür gegeben sein, daß die für den Roman konstitutiven Leiderfahrungen der Frauen und deren Voraussetzung, die Erschlagung des Menschenbruders, aus der Welt geschafft werden können” (Brackert 158; only through the elimination of the patriarchal-chivalric world of wars and fights in the world of peace of the maternal kingdom of the Grail can new conditions be created which allow the removal of the fundamental experiences of suffering by women and of its precondition, the slaughtering of the fellow human being). Ultimately, however, as Brackert suggests, Wolfram projected a utopian world where man and woman can live together in peaceful harmony without fear of slaughter or rape at any moment because of knightly conflicts or lack of social controls and legal guarantees protecting the vulnerable from being victimized (161). This utopia, however, does not even seem to be the dreamed-of utopia for the main protagonist, Parzival, who, like his father Gahmuret, mostly stays away from his wife in the name of chivalry and only rarely remembers his dream of a life with Condwir âmûrs, filled with “triuwe” (loyalty) and “minne” (love) (161). Brackert, however, seems to ignore the radical changes that occur at the end of Parzival, when the protagonist returns to the Arthurian court, having gained his last lesson from his uncle Trevrizent, and then is invited back to the Grail to ask the longexpected question. Moreover, once Parzival has liberated Munsalvaesche and its King Anfortas from their suffering, he is reunited with his wife Condwîr âmûrs and his two sons Loherangrin and Kardeiz (799, 14–803, 16 et passim).23 The famous blood-drop scene only half-way through the romance proves to be most significant in the long-term process where the traditional knights Segramors and Keie miserably fail to defeat the daydreaming Parzival, and only the polite and chivalrous Gawan succeeds in inviting Parzival to the Arthurian court without resorting to violence (280–305). In fact, Gawan approaches him without any weapons (sunder swert und âne sporn; 299, 29) and quickly realizes that Parzival is in a trance, captivated by thoughts of love: “waz op diu minne disen man/twinget als si mich do twanc” (301, 22–23; what if love holds this man

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enslaved as it enslaved me then). The ensuing comradery and friendship between the two knights then indicates a new approach to knights’ interaction, especially as both share the common experience of love.24 According to Elisabeth Lienert, however, who represents the feminist school of thought, Wolfram projects only one basic paradigm of violence, which involves perpetrators and victims. “Gewalt wird immer von Männern ausgeübt—gegen Männer und Frauen” (224; violence is always exerted by men—against other men and women).25 In other words, she accuses Wolfram of supporting and even perpetuating a highly traditional paradigm that justifies men’s control over women who regularly suffer from “Minnekrieg, Frauenraub, Vergewaltigung” (227; war of love, rapture of women, rape).26 Moreover, Lienert has identified a fundamental structure of violence against women who are regularly forced to submit to their husbands and to accept their right to punish them at will: “Eheherrliche Gewalt und, daraus resultierend, die Mißhandlung der Ehefrau erweisen sich durch die Parallele mit einem vorbildlichen Artusritter wie durch das Sprechen auf der Ebene des Eherechts als ‘Normalfair” (233; patriarchal power and, as its result, the physical abuse of the wife prove to be, through their parallel with an ideal Arthurian knight and the discourse of marital laws as “normal cases”).27 In other words, Wolfram reveals, as Lienert argues, a highly problematic and deep-seated idealization of patriarchy, which is based on the deliberate violation of women and their subjugation to men’s rules.28 When, for example, the court steward Keie severely beats Cunneware, nobody at court intervenes on her behalf because her male relatives are absent, and only Parzival vows to avenge this transgression against a woman (234–35). Worse, however, as Lienert suggests, these violent acts are not dealt with through any legal procedures, but instead create counterviolence, as when Parzival fights against Orilus and forces him, after he has defeated him and threatens to kill him, to forgive his wife and to acknowledge her innocence (235). But is it true, as Lienert also claims, that Keie’s punishment of Cunneware would not even have been noticed by the court, in fact would have been considered within the purview of male authority over all women, if Cunneware’s laughter had not identified Parzival as the savior of the Grail world (237)? When the court steward in Konrad von Würzburg’s Heinrich von Kempten brutally beats the young prince who has taken a piece of bread from the dinner table before the festivities have begun, his tutor Heinrich von Kempten immediately steps in and kills the steward as punishment.29 By the same token, Keie’s beating of Cunneware is not simply passed over in silence; instead it provokes vehement criticism, although no one at Arthur’s court dares take any action (152, 13–22). Lienert also claims that for Wolfram—and by the same token also for his medieval audience—the reintegration of male perpetrators into courtly society was more important than the restitution of the female victims’ honor and their compensation for physical, psychological, and material damage to their body and mind (242). Lienert raises the charge that in Parzival women have little chance to pursue their rights in legal manners, and that marriages are regularly based on violence against the woman, leaving hardly any chance for the establishment of truly harmonious marriages and any public containment of violence (244).30 Lienert’s analysis proves to be highly thought-provoking and deserves to be carefully scrutinized against the actual textual evidence, which does not quite yield the same results as projected in her article. Is it indeed true that Wolfram’s text deceives us in its

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alleged quest for a peaceful solution to extreme forms of violent conflicts? Relying on a rather questionable reading of Walter Haug’s arguments in his article “Parzival ohne Illusionen” (1990/1995),31 Lienert suggests that Wolfram “only” projects the ideal of nonviolence, but in reality revealed it as an illusion (244). Haug, however, had limited himself to pointing out that Parzival’s approach to the Grail proved to be a highly idiosyncratic strategy based on an internal struggle that led him to a profound spiritual, ethical, and moral enlightenment. The new Grail world would not be available or realizable for mankind as the illusionary, Manichaean belief in a world radically demarcated into good and evil was already shattered.32 Lienert is willing to admit that Wolfram’s Parzival reflects an endeavor to limit violence and to prevent the escalation of violence, but she also believes that the ultimate prize for this endeavor has to be paid by (all?) women (244). This rather crude feminist reading of Wolfram’s Grail romance dramatically highlights the difficulties in coming to terms both with the medieval text and postmodern theory, especially with respect to the evaluation of violence.33 The problem also rests in the exclusive focus on violence against women, whereas other forms of violence are allegedly of minor significance (Lienert 226). But young Parzival experiences violence as a child, although he does not know how to cope with it because he does not understand its nature, purpose, or direction. After he has killed birds, he cries and tears out his hair in desperation as the wonderful music has stopped (118, 9–10). Naturally, the child runs to his mother and seeks consolation, but he does not know what has affected him so deeply and fails in explaining his feelings to her. But Herzeloyde finds out soon enough that Parzival’s own killing of the birds is responsible for his subsequent pain. Trying to intervene and control nature to protect her son from these emotions, she orders her men to kill all birds that they can catch until Parzival discovers their murderous actions and requests them to stop because he instinctively knows that the birds are innocent and deserve to be protected from human violence (119, 9–11). But he himself continues hunting and killing deer, which he brings home for his family to eat. Whereas the silencing of the singing birds had triggered profound sadness in his heart, the dead deer mean nothing to him. Parallel to his experiences in Soltâne, but in reverse sequence, Parzival witnesses the beating of Cunneware by Keie, which triggers pity and sympathy in him. But he mercilessly, with disregard for the value of human life, kills his uncle Ither without knowing his identity and without caring for a fellow human being. Cunneware had laughed about Parzival (151, 19), whereas Ither stabbed him in self-defense with the obtuse end of a lance (154, 27–30). Obviously, Parzival, in his almost astounding innocence and ignorance, judges each person’s behavior according to his own childish concepts. Whereas Cunneware appears to him as a helpless victim, just as the birds that were killed on the order of his mother, Ither simply serves a purpose—for Parzival to acquire the long-desired armor. In quick succession, the hero witnesses and causes violence, but whereas he laments about Cunneware’s suffering and would have liked to kill Keie if he could have hit him in the crowd without hurting anybody else (153, 14– 20), the death of Ither leaves him cold and brutish (155, 19). Violence, in other words, figures prominently in this romance, especially as it affects practically every member of courtly society, but it is also directly addressed and carefully examined regarding its justification and impact on the well-being of courtly society.

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Wolfram’s efforts and intentions with his romance are multifold, but scholarship has agreed that the way Parzival goes through life, more failing than succeeding in most of his efforts, but affecting many people around him in a constructive, rejuvenating manner, suggests that Wolfram aimed for control, if not elimination, of violence. The romance does not imply a critique of knighthood per se, but the almost negative presentation of chivalry as practiced by Parzival’s father Gahmuret, and most other knights at King Arthur’s court and elsewhere, signals that the narrator is opposed the use of unjustified, illegitimate military force against people. However, as the entire narrative frame indicates, Wolfram did not want to argue for a radical transformation of knighthood as such or the use of military might in the settlement of conflicts and disputes,34 especially in the existential confrontation between Christians and representatives of other religions, as reflected in Willehalm.35 The fight between Parzival and Feirefiz deserves to be studied in greater detail, as it offers a rather different perspective than the one suggested by Lienert, especially as she accuses Wolfram of deliberately subscribing to the principle of violence as the basic medium of human interaction within a chivalric society.36 Brackert, on the contrary, suggests that Parzival specifically implies the end of chivalric violence and hence also the end of the chivalric existence itself.37 Both rather extreme positions need to be qualified and evaluated in the larger context of all of Wolfram’s narratives. Here I begin with Parzival. Shortly before Parzival is invited to return to the Grail castle, he has an almost deadly encounter with his half-brother Feirefiz: their joust offers rather surprising perspectives on knighthood at large. Both heroes appear as most impressive in their physical prowess and in their chivalric equipment; both are fighting in the name of love (736, 1–8) and are deeply inspired by inner nobility (737, 15). The narrator characterizes these half-brothers as virginal and gentle as lambs, but also as wild and ferocious as lions (737, 20–21). Nevertheless, the aporia of knighthood, which Lienert poignantly brings to light in her article, also finds expression in the conflict between Feirefiz and Parzival.38 The joust assumes deadly dimensions, especially as both knights fight in the name of courtly love and loyalty (741, 21–24), probably the highest ethical values within the world of the courts. Moreover, both prove to be the best knights of their time, and both meet, for the first time in their lives, an opponent who cannot be simply overcome. Although Parzival firmly trusts in his God (741, 26), his main succor comes from his thoughts of his beloved wife Condwir âmûrs (743, 22–26). He even would have won the battle against Feirefiz, as one of his mightiest blows forces the opponent to his knees (744, 13), had not his sword, which he had taken from the murdered Ither, split apart. As the narrator specifically comments, Parzival’s guilt continues to have a bearing on him and needs to be atoned for at this moment (744, 14–18). God intervenes and forces the protagonist to terminate his knightly career and to turn all his attention to his divinely preordained destiny as the successor to the Grail throne.39 Parzival can no longer fight, and Feirefiz recognizes that something special has happened that forces him to change his own approach to knighthood as well. Instead of requesting Parzival to reveal his name to him—a clear sign of defeat and submission under the victorious knight—Feirefiz volunteers to identify himself first (745, 26) and thus breaks the vicious cycle of traditional knighthood, which does not know how to conclude because violence has always engendered further violence.40 Moreover, when Parzival asks to see his face,

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Feirefiz throws away his own sword to make his opponent feel safe, and then takes off his helmet (74713–16). As the heroes begin to realize how closely related they are, they completely disarm (748, 1–3) and kiss each other to signal the end of their enmity (748, 9)—another powerful communicative signal of peace and friendship, a “signum pacis.”41 As Gerd Althoff demonstrates, medieval society knew many forms of public communication, for example, rituals that allowed hostile partners to overcome their differences and to establish peaceful forms of cohabitation even after life-threatening military conflicts.42 Peace sets in for the entire world of King Arthur and the Grail, and violence ends. Symbolically, Parzival humbles himself by picking up Feirefiz’s sword and returning it to his sheath, as friendship has supplanted all their previous conflicts: “ern holte sînes bruoder swert: /daz stiez er dem degen wert/wider in die scheiden./dâ wart von in beiden/ zornlîcher haz vermiten/unt geselleclîche dan geriten” (754, 23–28; Parzival did not forget to go and get his brother’s sword, which he thrust back into that noble warrior’s sheath. Then they both dismissed all anger and enmity and rode off in comradely fashion). Once Feirefiz’s and Parzival’s fighting has ended, all other military conflicts, especially those between Christian Europe and the heathen world of the East are also terminated because Feirefiz accepts baptism and has his many peoples convert as well (822, 28–30).43 This gesture prepares the final effort on Parzival’s part to liberate the Grail and to establish a new kingdom where violence no longer seems to be necessary. Elisabeth Lienert, in obvious frustration with violence committed many times against women in Wolfram’s Parzival, sharply criticizes the medieval author for his patriarchal attitude toward women in general and for subscribing to violence as the fundamental method in dealing with political, religious, and social issues.44 The final scene with Feirefiz and Parzival, however, clearly signals the opposite approach and demonstrates that Wolfram’s ultimate goal was the containment, if not elimination, of violence by means of the reunification of the family, the combination of worldly with religious knighthood, and by recreating the basic communicative links between people of all races and genders.45 Repanse de Schoye, for instance, Anfortas’s sister and Feirefiz’s new wife, is fully accepted as ruler over the many countries in the East with no need to assert her rights by force: “âne strît” (823, 9). This does not mean that knighthood as such has come to an end, as illustrated by Parzival’s son, Loherangrin, who energetically defends the Grail once he has assumed its rulership, and this in the name of knighthood (823, 29). Similarly, the newly elected Prince of Brabant, Loherangrin himself, gains respect and honor through his powerful and judicial governance (826, 6–8). Law and order are maintained, and love and marriage have been reconstituted in their proper role. Ultimately, as far as violence is concerned, that is, violence which represents a perpetration and infringement of inalienable rights of an individual or a people, the Grail offers a guarantee and safeguard in the name of a religious form of knighthood.46 Many authors of chivalric romances blithely present gruesome scenes of knightly combat that commonly result in killing of the opponent without any regard for the dehumanizing quality of this activity. As Hermann J.Weigand observes: “A large proportion of Chretien’s combat scenes end with the victor’s cutting off his opponent’s head, just as heads off was the order of the day in the Roman de Thèbes” In remarkable contrast to these standard Arthurian accounts, Wolfram’s Parzival reveals significant differences: “In Wolfram’s Parzival, on the other hand, the crude primitive joy at the imagined sight of bloodletting is very much toned down.”47 Only once do we observe

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young Parzival brutally kill a knight, his own uncle Ither, who had provoked him to this action with violence on his own part, but on that occasion Parzival resorts to his javelin and does not even possess a knightly sword, and moreover does not know anything about the knightly code of conduct.48 This does not justify the killing, but it explains the circumstances, as Parzival proves to be entirely ignorant of the principles of human interaction, morals, and ethics. Having been kept in total isolation by his mother Herzeloyde, Parzival demonstrates the disastrous consequences of lack of education. As soon as the protagonist has begun his learning process, he progressively controls himself and ultimately finds a way of avoiding violence when dealing with other people. Without necessary socialization, as Arthur Groos observes, Parzival “can only engage in free association” once he encounters knights,49 as his “uncultured ignorance…makes him appear less than human, even beastlike.”50 Considering the young man’s impressive development throughout the romance, which certainly makes him realize the concrete consequences of violence, we may conclude that Wolfram specifically addressed this issue and illustrated ways to free knightly society from the bane of uncontrolled aggression. Significantly, with respect to Gawan, Weigand reaches the same conclusion: “There is all the fighting spirit anyone may wish for, but no longer bloody battery for bloody battery’s sake, like that the present-day movie audience is supposed to enjoy.”51 Although neither Parzival nor Gawain abandon their knightly ideals and turn to a fully clerical position of peacefulness, the ultimate message implies a fundamental criticism of violent interaction with the world. According to Weigand, “[Wolfram’s] Parzival ends on the note of synthesis: to live in such wise as not to end up with pawning the soul to God’s adversary and to enjoy the world’s commendation nevertheless—that is the good life.”52 Wolfram’s optimism, however, regarding the chances of his society to achieve these lofty ideals, seems to have faded over the years. In his Willehalm the existential threat of the Christian world at the hands of a huge heathen army assumes a global dimension, and can only be crushed after the entire French nation has been raised in the defense of Europe. However, irrespective of the religious conflict on the battlefield of Alischanz, the narrator in Willehalm clearly expresses grave misgivings, in fact objections, to the knightly actions as they lead, by necessity and irrespective of any formal justification, to brutal slaughter of human beings, hence murder: “ze Alitschanz ûf den plân./ dâ wart sölhiu riterschaft getân,/sol man ir geben rehtez wort,/diu mac vür war wol heizen mort” (10, 17–20; such chivalry was performed there that if one were to give it its proper name it could only be called “slaughter”).53 As Walter Johannes Schröder explains: “Gemeint ist der Kampf ohne Gnade, die morderische Schlacht, das Hinschlachten der Gegner” (the meaning is the fight without mercy, the murderous battle, the butchering of the opponent).54 Most disturbingly, after Willehalm has defeated the Persian King Arofel at the end of the first battle, their discussion seems to suggest the hope for mercy and a more peaceful settlement of the fundamental religious and military conflict. Arofel pleads with Willehalm for his life: “‘helt, dûne hâst deheinen prîs,/ob dû mir nimst min halbez leben./dû hâst mir vreuden tôt gegeben.’” (79, 22–24; “Noble hero,” he said, “you will gainno honor if you kill me now that I am half dead, and you have already slain my joy”). Arofel offers his opponent enormous treasures, the best valuables in all of Persia, but since the Christian can think only of the grievous losses that he had suffered, especially the death of his nephew Vîvîanz (79, 28), he can feel no pity and brutally slaughters Arofel without paying any further attention to his words, the cries of a miserable human

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creature: “daz nim und laz mich leben mit not!” (81,10; and let me go on living in my anguish). Then he robs the corpse of all of its armor, imitating Parzival’s action after the killing of Ither, which the narrator comments on with the ominous words: “dâ erschein der minne ein vliistic tac./noch solden kritenlichiu wip/klagen sînen ungetouften lip” (81, 20–22; thus had dawned a day of loss for Love, and even today Christian ladies should still be mourning this heathen man), which raises the profound question of Willehalm’s personal guilt.55 Not only does Wolfram question the justification of the military conflict per se, but he also opens intriguing perspectives toward love as the all-encompassing force bridging even the gulf between the religions.56 Significantly, Willehalm begins to learn his own lesson when he falls into a deadly rage at the court of the French king where his own sister tries to block all his efforts to obtain military support in his struggle against the heathens, disregarding her brother’s personal plight (147, 6–10). He would have killed her had not his mother intervened (147, 22–24), but his wrath can only be abated when his niece Alize appears to remind him of the love for his wife Giburc (156, 24–30) and of the fact that they all belong to the same family (159, 2–5). Strife and conflict come to an end, and violence is mastered by love for the courtly lady, the family, and the royal house, all three ideally represented by Alize.57 Her stepping onto the courtly stage helps Willehalm to overcome his lack of selfcontrol and his emotional imbalance, which in turn enables all present to rejoin the traditional communicative community.58 Curiously, the most important contributor to the defeat of the heathens proves to be a heathen himself, Rennewart, who, however, disappears at the end of the battle without any trace and who steadfastly had refused to consider conversion to Christianity as an option for himself.59 This also implies that the true military glory with all its highly problematic characteristics is connected with an outside figure, which in turn allows the narrator to focus on the victorious protagonist who establishes a truce at the end of all fighting. Willehalm triumphs over his enemies, but it quickly dawns on him that the price he had to pay was a horrendous loss of human life, both Christian and heathen, both friend and foe, both strangers and family members. Consequently, he tries to reach out to King Terramer and offers him a peaceful relationship, as long as this would not involve him giving up his Christian beliefs and his wife Gyburg (466, 8–15). But the fragmentary ending is determined by Willehalm’s lamentations and deep mourning (467, 18–19), casting a bitter shadow over man’s efforts to create and maintain a social community free of violence and strife. Uncannily, the same thoughts as developed in the prologue to Parzival resurface at this point, as the narrator reflects upon the danger of “doubt” and its challenges to Christian hope (467, 20–22).60 He does not question the traditional Crusade ideology and the absolute truth of the Christian religion, but Willehalm is also characterized by a highly sensitive apprehension of military violence that threatens to destroy the cohesion and cooperation among people.61 As Burghart Wachinger convincingly argues, “[e]s gibt…keine selbstsichere Humanitatsposaune in diesem Werk. Die Kreuzzugsideologie bleibt präsent, und die kühn sich vordrangende Frage nach dem ‘Recht des Andern’ steht in Konkurrenz zum Selbstbehauptungswillen der eigenen Partei, ohne daß eine Synthese in Sicht käme.” (There is no self-assured “trombone [proclamation] of humanity” in this work. The Crusader ideology remains present, and the boldly-developed question regarding the right of “the other” competes with the will for self-defense, without a synthesis coming into sight.)62

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At the time Wolfram composed his Willehalm, Christian Europe had long learned that the violent method of converting heathens to Christianity had utterly failed. Similarly, as the example of Saint Francis of Assisi demonstrated, who in 1219 left the Christian Crusader army in Damiette and tried to enter a public discussion with the Sultan al-Kamil about the true religion, crude forms of argumentation led only to increased hatred on the side of the heathens. As Carl Lofmark points out, “Ein Sieg des Christen, ob durch Waffen oder Worte errungen, muß den Heiden demütigen, und dagegen wehrt sich sein Stolz.”63 (The Christian’s victory, by weapons or by words, will mortify the heathen, and his pride will rise up against that.) By contrast, only love between man and woman offers a truly effective means of opening hearts and reaching out to the other person, bringing to an end the devastating consequences of violence. Carl Lofmark astutely observes, “Jedesmal ist es die Fähigkeit zur Liebe, die den Heiden zum wahren Gott führt. In religiöen Fragen ist er blind, doch der Liebe ist er aufgeschlossen, und gerade die Liebe ist der Kern der wahren Religion; der Heide weiß es nicht, aber Gott ist der wâre minnære.” (Every time it is the ability to love which leads the heathen to the true God. He is blind in religious questions, but he is open to love, and love, above all, is the core of the true religion; the heathen does not know this, but God, the true lover, does.)64 Most ominously, in his famous Titurel fragments, Wolfram seems to turn away from the optimism of his earlier work and open new, rather critical perspectives toward knighthood and the responsible use of physical prowess for the betterment of chivalric society. Although the fragmentary nature of this short piece makes it difficult to grasp the full inner meaning and intentions of the text, the discussion of chivalry per se in the introductory section, the deadly results of chivalry for the various protagonists, and the tragic development of Sigûne’s and Schionatulander’s love affair offer powerful perspectives.65 We would search in vain for any explicit condemnation of violence in Titurel, as the short narrative seems to be entirely embedded in the world of chivalry and knightly deeds. Nevertheless, a highly uncanny sense of tragedy permeates the entire account. Although Wolfram seems to focus on the budding love between Sigune and Schionatulander, both representing the last hope of the Grail and Arthurian world to create progeny and hence continuity of the ethical and spiritual ideals represented by both courts, the framework of their existence proves to be highly endangered. In fact, the Grail family is dying out, and many of the knights opt for an alternative life as a monk or hermit. With the death of King Titurel, the original recipient of the Grail (6, 1), slowly but certainly despair and hopelessness become noticeable. Titurel, while still among the living, had admonished his son Frimutel to fend for himself, as his own strength was fading fast (8, 4). Frimutel, indeed, was still capable of holding on to his family’s power (12, 4), and his son-in-law Kyot of Katelangen also enjoyed greatest respect for his jousting and fighting “durch der wîbe lôn” (16, 4; for the rewards of ladies). However, with his wife Schoysiane’s death in childbed, he loses his “rehten fröuden” and gains “immer mere an den sorgen” (20, 4; true joys and the lasting gain of sorrows). To the utter surprise of everybody, Kyot then puts down his sword and terminates his existence as a knight: “er begunde sich des swertes, helmes unde schiltes verzîhen” (22, 4; he proceeded to renounce sword, helmet, and shield). Out of sympathy, perhaps also because of a profound disillusionment, his brother Duke Manfilot follows his example, thus expressing his disapproval of knighthood and its implicit violent interaction with people.

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But the true trigger for their radical change of mind was Schoysiane’s death, hence the realization of life’s instability. Neither of the brothers comprehended the reasons the woman had to die to let her daughter live: “Die ir vater Kiot het vergolten mit dem tiuren koufe,/wan er wart ir muoter dur si âne” (24, 2–3; whom her father Kyot had purchased at so high a price since through her he had lost her mother). The narrator also emphasizes that Herzeloyde, a direct descendant of the Grail, later Gahmuret’s wife and Parzival’s mother, at that time also had to suffer from Castis’s, her first husband’s, death (26, 1). Sigiine grows up with King Tampunteire, the father of Parzival’s later wife, Condwir âmûrs, but this knight also passes away soon (28, 1), along with Kardeiz, the ruler of Brobarz. Although we are not informed about all the details as developed in Parzival, we know that Herzeloyde’s husband Gahmuret is killed while fighting in the service of an Oriental ruler (82). Sigûne’s young lover, Schionatulander, also grows up fatherless, her father apparently killed in some battle (41, 4), and it is only fitting that these two descendants of old but quickly disappearing families fall in love with each other, as their lives are deeply shaped by joy and sadness: “mit leide:/groziu liebe was dar zuo gemenget” (52, 2–3; they knew suffering. It was interlaced with great joy). In Parzival, however, Sigune is already presented as a pieta figure reflecting on the tragic death of her lover, signaling that the fulfillment of love is possible only after life—a most devastating criticism of chivalric society that denies its members the realization of their most fundamental desires for love and happiness.66 Nevertheless, despite all the deaths around her, Sigune insists that Schionatulander follow the footsteps of all previous knights, irrespective of the many dangers for his life: “du muost mich unter schiltlichem dache ê dienen: des wis vor gewarnet” (71, 4; you must first serve me with sword and shield: be warned of this). The text suddenly turns its attention from social and military issues toward the love affair and seems to have forgotten all the victims of knighthood, although the experience of courtly love appears to be related extremely closely to death. This proves to be an illusion, however, as Herzeloyde prophetically anticipates. Just as Schionatulander’s father Gurzgri gained much honor through knighthood, so he also met his death in battle (127, 4), which is not specifically indicated here, but can be deduced from a previous reference: “der lac tôt durch Schoy de la kurte” (41,4; he died at Schoydelakurt).67 Ironically, however, Herzeloyde recommends Schionatulander to Sigune particularly because of his alleged skills in knightly tournaments (130, 1), not knowing the tragic consequences of this observation. Not quite surprisingly, the second fragment takes us abruptly into the idyllic scene in the midst of the forest where the lovers have set up a tent and enjoy each other in this utopian arena, quite unprepared for the ominous messenger in the form of a dog who will signal impending death for both of them.68 The second fragment seemingly transports us into the world of Arthurian utopia, as the two young lovers spend time in a forest clearing, when they suddenly hear the barking of a hunting dog that is following the “blood-red spoor of a wounded animal” (132, 2). Schionatulander succeeds in catching the dog, but it is not the dog itself that causes such attention, but the luxurious leash on which, written with jewels, a lengthy account of lovers and their destiny has been embossed. The narrator immediately signals to us that the dog’s arrival—metaphorically speaking, the text’s arrival—signifies tragedy for the two lovers (132, 4), thereby throwing into question the entire concept of knighthood and

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courtly love, as the subsequent events unmistakably indicate. As Sigune learns through her reading, the Princess of Kanadic had sent this dog to her lover Ilinot the Breton, but when he tried to prove his love for her by way of knightly deeds, he met his death (148, 1). For the narrator, such a consequence seems unacceptable, as he bitterly complains about the catastrophic consequence of the joust (148, 2). Moreover, he also reports that his beloved Florie passed away out of grief over Ilinot’s death (148, 4). Without providing us with information about the concrete circumstances, there is a clear sense of knighthood intimately connected with death, especially as the series of deaths that had begun in the first fragment is continued here. Next the dog passed on to Florie’s sister, Clauditte, who sent it as a gift to her lover Duc Ehkunat de Salvasch Florien, and because of the highly symbolic nature of his name (Duke Ehkunat of the Wild Forest), it might well be that death also gripped this young man, especially because the dog ran away from him. Sigûne, however, blithely ignorant of the meaningful connection between the dog, the lovers reported about on the leash, and herself, continues reading and loses the knot with which the dog is attached to a tent pole (155, 1–2). Not surprisingly, the animal immediately stretches and frees itself, escaping Sigûne’s control, following the blood spoor into the forest. Although Schionatulander attempts to catch the dog even this time, he fails and returns to his beloved, his feet and ankles covered with wounds from the brambles and sharp tree stumps (161). But not only he is hurt and marked by blood. Sigune, when she tried to hold on to the leash when the dog raced away, hurt her hands badly, as the jewels scratched her skin and made her palms bleed (162). If we read both images symbolically, the two young lovers are marked by the signs of death, although neither of them makes an attempt or would even be able to decipher the bloody letters on their skin: “si klagt in, er klaget ouch si” (163, 2; she lamented for him, and he for her). Anticipating the consequences of Gardevia’s escape, the narrator announces that many battles would be fought for the dog’s possession: “diu flust muoz nu vil sper zerbrechen” (163, 4; this loss will now cause many lances to break). Even though Schionatulander attempts to downplay the significance and importance of the dog and its leash (164, 1–2), Sigûne clearly takes a firm stance with respect to his status as a knight, as she will never offer him her love unless he can catch the dog and return it to her because she wants to read the story on the leash to its full conclusion (165, 1). Sigune requires this crucial service from Schionatulander, and the latter firmly commits himself to her by pledging that he would retrieve the dog at all costs, including his own life (167, 2–3). Tragically, however, we already know that his quest will fail, as Orilus will kill him in their joust, as Wolfram had told us before in his Parzival (138, 9– 142, 2). There it is Sigune who, by then already transformed into a pietd figure, accuses herself for having withheld her love for Schionatulander too long: “in unser zweier dienste den tôt/hât er bejagt, und jâmers not/mir nach sîner minne” (141, 17–19; in the service of us two he gained death for himself and for me the grievous yearning for his love). Not only does she lament his early death, but she also criticizes herself for her inappropriate attitude in her relationship with her lover: “ich hete kranke sinne,/daz ich im niht minne gap:/des hât der sorgen urhap” (141, 20–22; what a fool I was not to grant him my love! Utter sorrow has cut my joy to pieces). Even though we can identify Sigune as the contrastive figure to Parzival, insofar as she has already left the world and turned to her private mourning when he is just about to

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enter the world of knighthood, both ultimately share their ultimate approach to life, death, and God.69 Both are forced to meet death before they are allowed to enter the world of the Grail. Parzival first has to battle against his half-brother, ready to kill him at the first opportunity in their brutal joust, and has first to lose his sword, which then allows Feirefiz to demonstrate to his Christian opponent what true chivalry means, before he finally sees through the dangers of purely secular knighthood, which is not determined by concrete social, ethical, moral, and religious obligations and functions. Sigûne, on the other hand, was not as lucky as her cousin Parzival insofar as her lover Schîonatulander is condemned to die early, as the bloodred marks on his legs after his failed chase of the dog indicate—after all, enigmatic words like those on the leash cannot be deciphered with physical force! Likewise, Sigûne also has lost her life when the dog ran away, as she can only await her approaching death, which the wounds on her palm anticipate as well (167). Even though she insists that she does not intend any evil for her lover, she requests his service, that is, his chivalry in the traditional sense of the word (171,3). Nevertheless, and in this sense uncannily close to the anonymous Moriz von Craûn (see my discussion at the beginning of this chapter), Sigûne has excessive, absurd, and ill-conceived ideas about the true meaning of chivalry; she dreams of the literary account and its miraculous decoding instead of analyzing the concrete situation of her love affair. Consequently, the tragedy will happen, at least in the way reflected upon by Sîgune. To conclude, Wolfram offers a highly complex spectrum of attitudes toward violence. Neither Parzival nor Willehalm ever fully rejects the use of military force or questions the fundamental concept of knighthood. However, as the example of Titurel demonstrates, ultimately the most fragile, yet most important phenomenon in human society will suffer from the privileging of violence on behalf of the chivalric ideology: love. Whereas Condwir âmûrs and Giburc guarantee the return of love in the world of their husbands, Sîgune is not so fortunate, especially because she makes the granting of her love contingent upon chivalric accomplishments. Consequently, Schionatulander has to die, and his beloved will have to suffer for the rest of her life mourning the death of her friend. In Parzival we can still recognize a certain degree of optimism as the blood drops immediately force the protagonist to reflect upon his wife and remind him of his true desire, to be united with her. In this sense, Parzival’s battle with Feirefiz is also a battle between violence and love, as both warriors gain new strength from thinking of their ladies. Only because Parzival’s sword breaks, however, which the narrator explains as God’s personal intervention, does love eventually triumph (744, 14–16). In Willehalm the relationship between love and war assumes much more problematic dimensions. Willehalm expresses his thankfulness and respect to Terramer and his family as he has received Giburc as a gift from them (466, 19–21). But he also admits that her love resulted both in happiness and sorrow for him (466, 22), implying that violence cannot be avoided, even in the face of love. Ultimately, in his Titurel, Wolfram problematizes the issues of love and chivalry to a point where the catastrophe sets in because the two young people do not know how to handle both aspects properly and fail to approach them in a careful and especially mature way. They do not yet know how to read the signals both in the text on the dog leash and on their own bodies.70 Not surprisingly, Wolfram resorts to an extreme image of violence in one of his stunning dawn songs, “Sîne klâwen” (No. III) to express the ominous relationship between love and violence:

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“‘Sîne klâwen durch die wolken sint geslagen: er stîget ûf mit grôzer kraft! “Its talons are thrust through the clouds, It rises up with great force.71 Pain is ever-present in Wolfram’s world, but he registers it carefully, contrasting it with possibilities of how it could be controlled, overcome, and, perhaps, even be eliminated. By demonstrating how the protagonists, above all, suffer from the consequences of knighthood, both legitimate and illegitimate, by discussing openly the consequences of rape of women, for example (Parzival 521, 19–528, 30), but also by explicitly commenting on the mercilessness of the battles between Christians and heathens in Willehalm, ultimately condemning the consequences of knighthood’s tragic need for violent means to achieve its ends, Wolfram forces his audience to examine the fundamental nature of violence, chivalry, and courtly love. Wolfram could not argue for an absolutely peaceful existence, as espoused by Trevrizent, for instance, who withdrew from knightly existence and became a hermit (Parzival 452, 13–502, 30). But he also condemns the use of violence if it is not employed in defense of one’s own people, women, children, or others in need of help, without, however, offering any viable alternative, as Willehalm tragically illuminates. Love regularly emerges as the crucial vehicle to control violence, but the same love could also, and very easily, lead to tragic conflicts of profound military nature (mass battles as in Willehalm or individual jousts as in Titurel). Wolfram’s most important contribution, then, was not a specific critique and condemnation of violence, but the creation of public discourse on violence in the context of courtly love and the religious conflicts of his time.72 He subtly pointed out strategies and concepts of how to deal with this monstrous phenomenon in human existence and how to establish some form of constructive countermeasures, as violence, particularly in the world of Wolfram’s narratives, threatens to engulf the entire world.73 Notes 1. I would like to thank Nancy Black and Raymond Cormier for their critical reading of this chapter and their constructive suggestions. 2. Mauritius von Craûn, ed. Heimo Reinitzer. Altdeutsche Textbibliothek, 113 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000); see also Moriz von Craûn. Modern German Translation from Middle High German, Notes, and Epilogue by Albrecht Classen (1992; Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 2000). 3. Still relevant today, Ruth Harvey, Moriz von Craûn and the Chivalric World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), outlined the essential thematic issues discussed in this novella; for a more recent, although excessively theoretical, interpretation, see Ricarda Bauschke, “Sex und gender als Normhorizonte im ‘Moriz von Craûn,’” Manlîchiu wîp, wîplîch man. Zur Konstruktion der Kategorien “Körper” und “Geschlecht” in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, ed. Ingrid Bennewitz and Helmut Tervooren. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für

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deutsche Philologie, 9 (Berlin: Schmidt, 1999), 305–25; for a critical perspective toward recent German research on Monz, see Albrecht Classen, “Moriz und kein Ende…Zugleich kritisch-provokative Gedanken über den wissenschaftlichen Betrieb in der mediävistischen Germanistik,” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 55 (2001): 75–93. 4. Christa Ortmann, “Die Bedeutung der Minne im ‘Moriz von Craûn,’” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (Tübingen) 108 (1986): 385–407; see also the bibliography in my translation. 5. For a number of related case studies on the decline of chivalry and feudalism, see The Rusted Hauberk: Feudal Ideals of Order and Their Decline, ed. Liam O.Purdon and Cindy L.Vitto (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994). 6. See the English translation by J.W.Thomas, Tristania XVI (1995): 104–44, here 115–16. For a brief critical introduction, see my comments to my German translation in Tristan als Monch, mittelhochdeutsch/neuhochdeutsch. Greifswalder Beitrage zum Mittelalter, 50. Serie l. Texte des Mittelalters, 12 (Greifswald: Reineke-Verlag, 1994). 7. Wernher der Gartenaere, Helmbrecht, ed. Friedrich Panzer and Kurt Ruh. 10th ed. by HansJoachim Ziegeler. Altdeutsche Textbibliothek, 11 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993); for an English translation, see Ulrich Seelbach, trans. Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 28 (New York: Garland, 1987); for a superb critical reading, see Anton Schwob, “Das mittelhochdeutsche Mare vom ‘Helmbrecht’ vor dem Hintergrund der mittelalterlichen ordoLehre,” Geistliche und weltliche Epik des Mittelalters in Österreich, ed. David McLintock, Adrian Stevens, and Fred Wagner. Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 446 (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1987), 1–16. 8. Richard W.Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 161. 9. Kaeuper, 185. 10. Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival. Studienausgabe. Mittelhochdeutscher Text nach der sechsten Ausgabe von Karl Lachmann. Übersetzung von Peter Knecht. Einführung zum Text von Bernd Schirok (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), 132, 6–7; for an English translation, see Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival. Translated and with an Introduction by Helen M.Mustard and Charles Passage (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 64. 11. Brian Murdoch, “Parzival and the Theology of Fallen Man,” A Companion to Wolfram’s Parzival, ed. Will Hasty. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1999), 143–158. 12. Will Hasty, Adventure as Social Performance. A Study of the German Court Epic. Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte, 52 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990), 73–74. 13. Hasty, Adventure, 76. 14. See Bernd Schirok’s survey of the manuscript tradition of Wolfram’s Parzival in his “Einführung” XXVII–XLVIII; for the rich reception of Wolfram’s Willehalm, see his Willehalm. Nach der Handschrift 857 der Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen. Mittelhochdeutscher Text, Übersetzung, Kommentar, ed. Joachim Heinzle. Mit den Miniaturen aus der Wolfenbiitteler Handschrift und einem Aufsatz von Peter und Dorothea Diemer. Bibliothek des MittelaIters, 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991), 1117–24; Dichter über Dichter in mittelhochdeutscher Literatur, ed. Giinther Schweikle. Deutsche Texte, 12 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 70), 7, 9, 10, et passim; see also Regina Unger, WolframRezeption und Utopie. Studien zum spätmittelalterlichen bayerischen “Lohengrin”–Epos. Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 544 (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1990). 15. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence, 73–81; for the early phase of this movement, see Dominique Barthélemy, L’an mil et la paix de Dieu. La France chrétienne et féodale, 980– 1060 (Paris: Fayard, 1999); for a detailed study of the intimate relationship between the Crusades and internal attempts to establish peace within Europe, see Tomaû Mastnak, Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

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16. Michael Frassetto, “Violence, Knightly Piety and the Peace of God Movement in Aquitaine,” The Final Argument: The Imprint of Violence on Society in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Donald J.Kagay, L.J.Andrew Villalon (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 1998), 11–26;here 17. 17. As Joachim Bumke, Wolfram von Eschenbach. 7., völlig neu bearbeitete Auflage. Sammlung Metzler, 36 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997), 45, observes, “Das Motiv der Gewalt gegen Frauen, das bereits bei der Belagerung von Patelamunt anklang, zeigt eine Deformation der hofischritterlichen Gesellschaft an” (The motif of violence against women, which surfaced already in the section dealing with the siege of Patelamunt, reflects a deformation of courtly-chivalrous society). See also Raymond Cormier’s contribution to this volume, “Brutality and Violence in Medieval French Romance and Its Consequence.” 18. George Gillespie, “Wolframs Beziehung zur Heldendichtung,” Studien zu Wolfram von Eschenbach. Festschrift für Werner Schröder zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Kurt Gärtner and Joachim Heinzle (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989), 67–74. 19. Will Hasty, Art of Arms: Studies of Aggression and Dominance in Medieval German Court Poetry (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Carl Winter, 2002), 123–45; David F.Tinsley, “The Face of the Foreigner in Medieval German Courtly Literature,” Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York: Routledge, 2002), 45–70; here 49–56; David A.Wells, “Religious Disputation Literature and the Theology of Willehalm: An Aspect of Wolfram’s Education,” Wolfram’s “Willehalm”: Fifteen Essays, ed. Martin H.Jones and Timothy McFarland. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2002), 145–65; Albrecht Classen, “Medieval Europe and Its Encounter with the Foreign World: Late-Medieval German Witnesses,” Medieval Cultures in Contact, ed. Richard F.Gyug. Fordham Series in Medieval Studies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 85–103. 20. Sylvia Stevens, Family in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm: mîner mâzge triwe ist mir wol kuont. Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature, 18 (New York: Peter Lang, 1997). 21. Albrecht Hagenlocher, Der guote vride: Idealer Friede in deutscher Literatur bis ins frühe 14. Jahrhundert. Historische Wortforschung, 2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1992), 52–62. 22. Helmut Brackert, “‘Der lac an riterschefte tôt.’ Parzival und das Leiden der Frauen,” Ist zwîvel herzen nâchgebûr. Günther Schweikle zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Rüdiger Krüger, Jürgen Kühnel, and Joachim Kuolt. Helfant Studien, S 5 (Stuttgart: Helfant, 1989), 143–63; here 153; for a most blunt realization of what knightly and heroic endeavors actually meant in medieval (Spanish) literature, see Michael Harney’s contribution to this volume, “Violence in the Spanish Chivalric Romance.” 23. Marli Schumacher, Die Auffassung der Ehe in den Dichtungen Wolframs von Eschenbach (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1967); Joachim Bumke, Wolfram von Eschenbach, 113–18; see now James A.Schultz, “Love Service, Masculine Anxiety and the Consolations of Fiction in Wolfram’s ‘Parzival,’” Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie 121, 3 (2002): 342–64. 24. For a detailed analysis of this significant scene, see Joachim Bumke, Die Blutstropfen im Schnee: Über Wahrnehmung und Erkenntnis im “Parzival” Wolframs von Eschenbach. Hermaea. Germanistische Forschungen, Neue Folge, 94 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001), 114: “Der Schwerpunkt liegt bei Wolfram auf der Frage, wie die Liebe auf Dauer bewahrt werden kann. Dabei geht es nicht in erster Linie um eine Sicherung des persönlichen Glücks, sondern um das Fundament für das Zusammenleben der Menschen” (The emphasis in Wolfram’s text rests on the question how love can be preserved for good. It is not a matter of safeguarding individual happiness, but a matter of how to create a basic foundation for the [successful] cohabitation of people). 25. Elisabeth Lienert, “Zur Diskursivität der Gewalt in Wolfram’s ‘Parzival,’” Wolfram-Studien XVII (2002). Wolfram von Eschenbach—Bilanzen und Perspektiven. Eichstätter Kolloquium 2000. ed. Wolfgang Haubrichs, Eckart C.Lutz, and Klaus Ridder (Berlin: Schmidt, 2002), 223–45, here 224.

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26. Monika Unzeitig-Herzog develops a very different perspective on Wolfram’s Parzival, emphasizing the interest of all protagonists in the establishment of a peaceful coexistence despite knightly threats and challenges: “Artus mediator. Zur Konfliktlosung in Wolframs ‘Parzival’ Buch XIV,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 32 (1998): 196–217; a broadly conceived analysis of conflict solutions in the Middle Ages is offered by Gerd Althoff, “Genugtuung (satisfactio). Zur Eigenart gütlicher Konfliktbeilegung im Mittelalter,” Modernes Mittelalter: neue Bilder einer populären Epoche, ed. Joachim Heinzle (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1994), 247–65. See also Thomas Mobius, Studien zum Rachegedanken in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters. Europaische Hochschulschriften. Reihe I: Deutsche Sprache und Literatur, 1395 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993). 27. The phenomenon of “domestic violence” is discussed in greater detail by the contributors to Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts, ed. Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2002), although none of them considers any examples from medieval German literature. 28. For theoretical and historical studies of this phenomenon, see Julie Hardwick, The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), R.Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 196, goes so far as to state in his conclusion: “courtliness…is a much more effective tool even than misogyny for the possession and repossession of woman in what Julia Kristeva terms ‘the eternal war of the sexes.’” 29. Konrad von Würzburg, Kleinere Dichtungen Vol. 1: Der Welt Lohn—Das Herzmære— Heinrich von Kempten, ed. Edward Schröder. With an Epilogue by Ludwig Wolff (1924; Dublin: Weidmann, 1970), w.144–55. 30. The same highly critical, basically cynical approach is taken by Jerold C.Frakes in his study of Middle High German heroic epics, Brides and Doom. Gender, Property, and Power in Medieval German Women’s Epic. Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). He also applies his radically feminist and Marxist reading to Parzival, 36, 37, 88, 125, 162, 190. 31. Walter Haug, “Parzival ohne Illusionen,” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 64 (1999): 199–217; see also the reprint in Walter Haug, Brechungen auf dem Weg zur Individualität: Kleine Schriften zur Literatur des Mittelalters (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995), 125–39. 32. Haug, here quoted from the 1995 reprint, states, 139: “Man faßt diese Sichtwende bei Wolfram deutlich in der Demontage der Wegmodelle, in der Idee des gemischten Menschentypus, im Sich-Durchringen zur Bereitschaft, sich die eigene Zwiespältigkeit einzugestehen und die Unmöglichkeit der Selbsterlösung zu akzeptieren.” Moreover, Haug emphasizes that the world represents a modus mixtus, and cannot be grasped by means of ideals of the absolute goods versus the absolute evil: “Und darum muß und kann auch mit einiger Heiterkeit gezeigt werden, wie die Welt jenseits davon ihr Spiel weitertreibt” (Therefore we can demonstrate with some cheerfulness that the world beyond [these extremes] continues with its game). 33. For an excellent study of this difficult relationship, even involving violence (although here in a different context), see Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text. Medieval Cultures, 26 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); for a critical discussion of domestic violence, see Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts, 2002. 34. Significantly, Gottfried von Strasbourg also expressed strong opposition to warfare as a wrong measure to settle conflicts and disputes. Whereas Rivalin eventually dies in battle, his son Tristan chooses a very different path through life. Although he is forced to battle against enemies as well, his ideals are grounded in the arts and, above all, love. 35. Gerd Althoff, “Wolfram von Eschenbach und die Spielregeln der mittelalterlichen Gesellschaft,” Wolfram-Studien XVI: Aspekte des 12. Jahrhunderts. Freisinger Kolloquium

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1998, ed. Wolfgang Haubrichs, Eckart C.Lutz, and Gisela Vollmann-Profe (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2000), 102–20. 36. Lienert, 241: “Verzicht auf Gewalt hat sich der ‘Parzival’ nicht auf die Fahne geschrieben” (to renounce violence is not Parzival’s motto). 37. Brackert, 159: “Wenn nun die Ritter…grundsätzlich nicht mehr tötende Menschen sind oder sein sollten, hören sie in gewisser Weise auf, Ritter zu sein” (If knights stop killing people or are not supposed to do so, they also stop being knights in a certain way). 38. For a religious and ethical interpretation of this scene, see Jutta Anna Kleber, Die Frucht der Eva und die Liebe in der Zivilisation: Das Geschlechterverhältnis im Gralsroman Wolframs von Eschenbach. Europaische Hochschulschriften. Reihe I: Deutsche Sprache und Literatur, 1374 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992), 86–102. 39. Alois Haas, Parzivals tuumpheit bei Wolfram von Eschenbach. Philologische Studien und Quellen, 21 (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1964), 163–64. 40. A drastic example for this gruesome phenomenon can be found in Heinrich von dem Türlin’s Diu Crône (before 1240) where Gawein and the rapist knight Gasozein fight against each other until total exhaustion prevents them from continuing the bloodbath. Every time they wake up from their unconsciousness, they resort to fighting, even after all their weapons have broken and they can do nothing but wrestle. Heinrich von dem Türlin, Die Krone (Verse 1–12271). Nach der Handschrift 2779 der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek nach Vorarbeiten von Alfred Ebenbauer, Klaus Zatloukal und Horst P.Pütz, ed Fritz Peter Knapp and Manuela Niesner. Altdeutsche Textbibliothek, 112 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 11854– 2256; for an English translation, see The Crown: A Tale of Sir Gawein and King Arthur’s Court by Heinrich von dem Türlin. Translated and with an introduction by J.W. Thomas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). 41. Klaus Schreiner, “‘Er küsse mich mit dem Kuß seines Mundes’ (Osculetur me osculo oris sui, Cant 1, 1). Metaphorik, kommunikative und herrschaftliche Funktionen einer symbolischen Handlung,” Höfische Repräsentation: Das Zeremoniell und die Zeichen, ed. Hedda Ragotzky and Horst Wenzel (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990), 89–132, here 113–29. 42. Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt: Primus Verlag, 1997), 185–98, et passim. 43. No doubt, here Wolfram projects, in full conformity with the general ideas prevalent at his time, religious-imperialistic ideas, although Feirefiz’s return home does not signal that European knighthood would occupy the East. For the myth of Prester John, see Wilhelm Baum, Die Verwandlung des Mythos vom Reich des Priesterkönigs Johannes. Tangenten (Klagenfurt: Kitab, 1999); see also Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perception of Other, ed. David R.Blanks and Michael Frassetto (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Marina Münkler, Erfahrung des Fremden. Die Beschreibung Ostasiens in den Augenzeugenberichten des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000). 44. Lienert, 241: “Die permanente Gewaltbereitschaft der Gralsgesellschaft scheint auch nach Parzivals Herrschaftsantritt zu bleiben” (The permanent readiness to exert violence on the part of the Grail community seems to continue even after Parzival has assumed the throne). 45. Albrecht Classen, Verzweiflung und Hoffnung: Die Suche nach der kommunikativen Gemeinschaft in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters. Beihefte zur Mediaevistik, 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002), 221–78. 46. For historical case studies regarding possible forms of peace-making in the Middle Ages, see Matthew J.Strickland, “Killing or Clemency? Ransom, Chivalry and Changing Attitudes to Defeated Opponents in Britain and Northern France, 7–12th Centuries,” Krieg im Mittelalter, ed. Hans-Henning Kortum (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), 93–122. 47. Hermann J.Weigand, Wolfram’s Parzival: Five Essays with an Introduction, ed. Ursula Hoffmann (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969), 161. 48. Weigand, Wolfram’s Parzival, 162.

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49. Arthur Groos, Romancing the Grail: Genre, Science, and Quest in Wolfram’s Parzival (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 52. 50. Groos, 54. 51. Weigand, Wolfram’s Parzival, 162; cf. the contribution by Jean E.Jost, “Why Is Middle English Romance So Violent? The Literary and Aesthetic Purposes of Violence,” to this volume in which she contrasts the violence displayed in modern movies with the various kinds of violence dealt with in Middle English romances; for a close examination of how peaceful settlements are reached and celebrated in Wolfram’s Parzival, see Elke Briiggen, “Inszenierte Korperlichkeit. Formen höfischer Interaktion am Beispiel der JoflanzeHandlung in Wolframs ‘Parzival,’” “Aüffuhrung” und “Schrift” in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Jan-Dirk Müller. Germanistische Symposien, Berichtsbände, XVII (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996), 205–21. 52. Weigand, Wolfram’s Parzival, 168. 53. Wolfram von Eschenbach, Willehalm, ed. Heinzle, 1991; for the English translation, see Wolfram von Eschenbach, Willehalm, trans. Marion E.Gibbs and Sidney M.Johnson (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1984), 22. 54. Walter Johannes Schröder and Gisela Hollandt, ed., Wolfram von Eschenbach, Willehalm, Titurel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973), 408; see also Werner Schroder, “Mort und riterschaft bei Wolfram. Zu Willehalm 10, 18–120,” Philologische Untersuchungen gewidmet Elfriede Stutz zum 68. Geburtstag, ed. Alfred Ebenbauer (Vienna: Braumüller, 1984), 398–407; for a linguistic analysis of this passage, see Reiner Hildebrandt, “Riter versus ritter?” Studien zu Wolfram von Eschenbach. Festschrift für Werner Schröder zum 75. Geburtstag, 1989, 33–49. 55. Werner Schroder, “Die Hinrichtung Arofels,” Wolfram-Studien II (1974): 219–40; James A. Rushing, “Arofel’s Death and the Question of Willehalm’s Guilt,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 94, 4 (1995): 469–82. 56. Christian Kiening, “Wolframs politische Anthropologie im ‘Willehalm,’” Wolfram-Studien XVII (2002): 246–75. 57. Corinna Dörrich, Poetik des Rituals. Konstruktion und Funktion politischen Handelns in mittelalterlicher Literatur. Symbolische Kommunikation in der Vormoderne (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002), 104–07. 58. Christa Ortmann, “Der utopische Gehalt der Minne: Strukturelle Bedingungen der Gattungsreflexion in Wolframs ‘Willehalm,’” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Literatur 115, 1 (1993): 86–117; John Greenfield, “Durh minne unminne (Wh., 27,26): Überlegungen zur Auffassung und Funktion der Liebe im Willehalm Wolframs von Eschenbach, Trivium 28 (1993): 38–51; for the concept of “communicative community,” see Albrecht Classen, Verzweiflung und Hoffnung, 2002, especially the fifth chapter. 59. Victoria J.Moessner, “Rennewart: Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Most Controversial Character,” Studies in Medieval Culture 8–9 (1976): 75–83; Carl Lofmark, Rennewart in Wolframs “Willehalm”: A Study of Wolfram von Eschenbach and His Sources. Anglica Germanica, Series 2 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1972); David N.Yeandle, “Rennewart’s ‘Shame’: An Aspect of the Characterization of Wolfram’s Ambivalent Hero,” Wolfram’s “Wilkhalm.” Fifteen Essays, ed. Martin H.Jones and Timothy McFarland, 2002, 167–90. 60. With regard to the philosophical and religious connotation of “zwivel” both in Wolfram’s Parzival and Hartmann von Aue’s Gregorius, see Peter Wapnewski, Wolfram’s Parzival. Studien zur Religiosität und Form. Germanische Bibliothek. Dritte Reihe: Untersuchungen und Einzeldarstellungen. Zweite, unveränderte Aufl. (1955; Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1982), 15–27. 61. See Joachim Heinzle’s commentary to his edition and translation, 1991, 801. 62. Burghart Wachinger, “Schichten der Ethik in Wolfram’s Willehalm,” ed. Michael S.Batts, Alte Welten—neue Welten: Akten des IX. Kongresses der Internationalen Vereinigung für

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germanische Sprach– und Literaturwissenschaft (IVG). Vol. 1: Plenarvorträge (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996), 49–59, here 52; see also Christopher Young, Narrativische Perspektiven in Wolframs “Willehalm” Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte, 104 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 171–75. 63. Carl Lofmark, “Das Problem des Unglaubens im ‘Willehalm,’” Studien zu Wolfram von Eschenbach: Festschrift für Werner Schröderzum 75. Geburtstag, 1989, 399–413, here 405. 64. Carl Lofmark “Das Problem des Unglaubens,” 406. 65. Wolfram von Eschenbach, Titurel. Herausgegeben, übersetzt und mit einem Stellenkommentar sowie einer Einfuhrung versehen von Helmut Brackert und Stephan Fuchs-Jolie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003); for an English translation, see Wolfram von Eschenbach, Titurel and the Songs. Texts and Translations with Introduction, Notes and Comments by Marion E.Gibbs and Sidney M.Johnson. Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 57 (New York: Garland, 1988). 66. Uta Drecoll, Tod in der Liebe—Liebe im Tod: Untersuchungen zu Wolframs Titurel und Gottfrieds Tristan in Wort und Bild (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000), 315–24; she argues, however, that the comparison with the pietà would be erroneous because Sigûne never hugs her dead lover, who, moreover, is presented as an ideal male figure, here 321. Nevertheless, whether pietà or “Liebesgeste,” Schîonatulander’s death represents a bitter indictment of chivalric society with its idealization of violence. 67. Wolfram might refer to the general experience of chivalry, which leads to courtly happiness, or he might have had the famous scene in Hartmann von Aue’s Erec in mind, where the protagonist has to fight against Mabonagrîn and defeat him in order to restore the “Joi de la curt.” In light of this, the entire chivalric ideology suddenly sounds stunningly hollow, and Wolfram as narrator begins to tear down the veil of the tragic impact of knighthood on all people’s minds—the death of the loved ones. 68. See my Utopie und Logos: Vier Studien zu Wolframs von Eschenbach Titurel Beiträge zur älteren Literaturgeschichte (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1990). 69. See Helmut Brackert’s and Stephan Fuchs-Jolie’s “Einleitung” to their Titurel edition, 7. 70. Albrecht Classen, “Reading, Writing, and Learning in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival,” A Companion to Wolfram’s Parzival, ed. Will Hasty. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1999), 189–202; see also my contribution, “The Book and the Power of Reading in Medieval High German Literature. Mystery, Enlightenment, Spirituality, and Love,” to The Book and the Magic of Reading in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen. Garland Medieval Bibliographies (New York: Garland, 1999), 61–97. 71. Quoted from Wolfram von Eschenbach, Titurel and the Songs, 76–77. 72. The late-twelfth-century didactic poet Heinrich von Melk formulated, although mostly from a moral-religious perspective, harsh criticism against the shortcomings and failures of chivalry and knighthood, “Von dem gemeinem Lebene,” Die religiösen Dichtungen des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts. Nach ihren Formen besprochen und herausgegeben von Friedrich Maurer. Vol. III (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1970), w. 290–372. 73. Similar interests in a discourse on knighthood can also be detected in Hartmann von Aue’s oeuvre, see W.H.Jackson, Chivalry in Twelfth-Century Germany: The Works of Hartmann von Aue. Arthurian Studies XXXIV (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S.Brewer, 1994), 282–90.

7 Violence in La Queste del Saint Graal and La Mort le roi Artu (Yale 229) NANCY B.BLACK The theme of violence in the last two works of the Vulgate Cycle has received surprisingly little attention from literary critics, despite that the last work in the cycle, La Mort le roi Artu (ca. 1230), is filled with descriptions of violent battles: Arthur’s knights, spearheaded by Gawain’s desire for revenge, pursue the followers of Lancelot; later, after the treachery of Mordred, both armies successively line up against the traitor, and battle follows upon battle until the Arthurian world has completely unraveled. Although the theme of violence is less obvious in the penultimate work in the cycle, La Queste del Saint Graal (ca. 1220), nonetheless its author distinguishes among several types of violence, rejecting some and authorizing others, thereby establishing a backdrop against which the subject of violence may be understood in both works. The white-robed priests, recluses, and hermits who continually intrude on the Queste teach the art of reading allegorically not only to the Grail knights within the work but also to readers outside the text. Although the religious figures are largely absent from the Mort, they have already fulfilled their function: to train readers, both medieval and modern, to read the new text allegorically and interpret its events against the backdrop provided by the former work. In this chapter I read the two works side-by-side and argue that modern readers can come closer to an understanding of medieval attitudes toward violence by reading them within the manuscript context of Beinecke Library’s Yale 229. The manuscript itself, whose digitalized images are now readily available to modern readers, leaves clues about how the text was understood and used in the Middle Ages.1 By selecting what and how to illustrate or even where to break the text into paragraphs, the compiler and/or artist joins the religious figures of the Queste in guiding readers to an interpretation of the two narratives. In adopting this methodology of integrating the study of art and text, I am following in the footsteps of a number of recent literary critics and art historians, who interrogate manuscripts for evidence of reader responses, sometimes finding the manuscripts themselves to be agents of literary interpretation or cultural change.2 Beinecke Library’s Yale 229 is an excellent choice of manuscript for the study of violence in Arthurian romances. Compiled in Northern France in the late thirteenth century, it contains only the last three works of the Vulgate Cycle (Agravain, the Queste, and the Mort).3 The likely patron was someone from the Flemish nobility, possibly Guillaume de Termonde (1248–1312), whose arms appear in the bas de page on three folio pages.4 The manuscript contains a rich supply of illustrations, many of which have already received attention from art historians.5 Text is carefully arranged on each folio page so that there are nearly always two ornamented initials in each column marking the beginning of paragraphs. The beginning of each major section of narrative is marked by

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the textual clue “Or dist li contes” and is accompanied by a large two-register illustration that often depicts major arrivals and departures in the narrative. Other ornaments include small miniatures, extenders, and marginalia. A point of departure for my analysis of the theme of violence is an episode in the Queste briefly discussed by Albert Pauphilet in his Etudes sur la Queste del Saint Graal attribuée à Gautier Map.6 Toward the end of the work, just prior to the healing of the Maimed King, the three Grail knights land at Castle Carcelois on the Scottish marches, a place inhospitable to Arthurian knights. A massive battle ensues, which turns into the medieval equivalent of a My Lai massacre. The Arthurian knights “les ocient come bestes mues” (kill the enemy like dumb beasts).7 Galahad fights with such fury that he seems to be “homs terriens. Mais vns anemis” (no earthly man. But a fiend).8 After the battle has ended, the knights look around at the bodies and “se tienent a pecheors & dient quil ont mal esploitie quant il ont ocis tant de gens” (judge themselves as sinners and say it was an evil deed when they killed so many people).9 Galahad is especially disturbed by what has occurred: “car sil ont mesfait a nostre signor li vengemens nen est pas a nous aprendre. Mes a celui qui atent tant que li pechieres se reconnoisse” (for if they sinned against our lord, the vengeance was not ours to take. Rather it belongs to him who waits until the sinner repents).10 Later, in a conversation with a white-robed priest, Galahad explains that he would not have worried if the inhabitants of the castle had been pagans, but that he feels especially guilty because they were Christians. Pauphilet identifies an attitude of gentleness or mildness of manner (“mansuétude”) in the military behavior of the Grail knights, which he ascribes to the Cistercian influence on the work. He cites the Carcelois episode, however, as an exception to this rule. Although, according to him, the episode “merite Fanalyse,”11 his own discussion is brief and his conclusion unsatisfactory. He writes: “il s’agit d’un cas si monstrueux qu’on sent bien qu’il vraiment ropinion de Galaad que l’auteur considère comme la regle ordinaire” (it concerns a case so monstrous that we can easily sense that it is really the opinion of Galahad that the author considers as the general rule).12 Much as I would like to agree with Pauphilet and privilege Galahad’s guiltridden view of the carnage he has inflicted, the white-robed priest who intrudes into the text immediately after the episode provides a different perspective. After overcoming his initial shock at viewing the carnage the Grail knights have inflicted, and after hearing Galahad’s account of what has just taken place, the priest explains that the slaughtered knights were, in fact, evil—“pieur que Sarasin” (worse than Sarasins)—and that the massacre was part of a divine plan.13 He explains further that the castle had originally belonged to Count Ernol whose three sons had committed incest with their sister and thrown their father into prison: “Si conmencierent a faire toutes les desloiautes du monde & a ocire clers & prestres & moines & fisent abatre.ii. chapeles qui chaiens estoient” (And they began to commit every crime in the world and to kill clerks and priests and monks and to raze two chapels that were within).14 Two prophecies delivered by the abused count prior to his death make the divine authorization clear. Just before the massacre (but unbeknown to the Grail knights), the count told the white-robed priest who had come to deliver last rites: “il me dist quil ne me chausist. car ma honte & la soie feroit vengie par les serians ihesu crist. Car ensi le ma mande li haus maistres” (he told me that I should not be upset: for my shame and his shall be revenged by three servants of Jesus Christ; for thus the high master commanded).15 Shortly after the

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massacre, the Grail knights go to the dungeon with the priest to view the dying count, who speaks directly to them, saying: “Ce te demande li haus maistres que tu las hui si bien vengie de ses anemis que la compaignie des chieus sen esioist” (The high master sends you word that you have revenged yourself so well upon his enemies this day that his companions in heaven rejoice).16 The Carcelois episode, then, ultimately privileges not Galahad’s abhorrence of violence but rather the priestly justification of violence in the name of ridding the world of evil. Galahad’s questioning of the morality of violence raises the larger issue of how violence is treated by the early-thirteenth-century author of the Queste in other portions of the narrative. Throughout the work, the reader experiences a bifurcated world: on the one hand, the Arthurian knights represent a world of continual military conflict whose spatial center is Camelot; on the other hand, monks, priests, hermits, and recluses represent a world of learning, stability, understanding, and peace. It is perhaps no coincidence that the initial words of the very first white-robed priest to appear in the Queste are “Pais sot o vos” (Peace be unto you).17 For the Arthurian knights, it would appear that successful completion of the search for the Grail entails leaving the temporal world of continual conflict and moving toward the atemporal world of peace and understanding associated with Sarras and a direct experience of the Divine. But why then include a problematic episode of massive violence involving the Grail knights and why locate it so close to the beginning of the culminating Grail experiences? What exactly are the views of the authors of the Queste and the Mort toward violence? To answer these questions, I first expand my discussion to describe the multiple forms of violence depicted in the Queste. Then I turn to the manuscript and show how the artist of Yale 229 interprets the violence in both the Queste and the succeeding work, the Mort. And finally I examine the text of the Mort and suggest a significant divergence between the artist and author’s understandings of violence in that work. Within the Queste, five different forms of violence occur, some of which are authorized, some not: (1) tournaments; (2) jousts between armed knights; (3) battles to banish cruel customs; (4) senseless violence (Gawain) and misadventure (friend against friend or brother against brother); (5) and, finally, war (viewed negatively, via the Wasteland concept). The knighting of Galahad at the start of the Queste admits him into Arthur’s martial, courtly world. His subsequent acquisition of sword and shield, deferred until after his knighting, establishes him as the superior knight who will dethrone both Lancelot and Arthur. He is the most skillful knight the Arthurian world has seen and more, for he will move beyond the temporal values of the court and inspire other knights as well to seek the spiritual world of Sarras, a city associated with Jerusalem. Hence, it is appropriate that Arthur holds only one tournament in the Queste, just prior to the departure of his knights in pursuit of the Grail. It is his last courtly appearance until the return of Bors to Camelot at the end of the work. Once the knights leave Arthur’s court, jousts between knights occur frequently. Sometimes they appear to be unmotivated and to occur by chance, simply testing the prowess of the adversaries. At other times they involve punishment for sins or criminal acts. When Galahad battles Lancelot and Perceval, he proves he is the better knight, but their defeat also suggests that both knights are imperfect, an interpretation confirmed by a hermit who speaks to Lancelot shortly thereafter.18 More obvious examples of jousts that

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provide punishment for sins are the defeat of Baudemagus and Melias. Baudemagus is wounded as punishment for his presumption in taking the shield destined for Galahad, and Melias is punished for his presumption in running off with the golden crown. The first of the battles to banish cruel customs occurs when Galahad defeats the seven brothers and frees the Castle of the Maidens from its curse. In contrast to the later Carcelois episode, which mirrors the action here, Galahad is told in advance that it is God’s will for him to do battle at the castle. During prayer, a voice announces: “O tu chevaliers auentureus. Va tent droit au chastel as puceles. & en oste les mauuaises costumes qui isont.” (Listen, you knight! Go straight to the Castle of Maidens and rid it of the evil customs that prevail there.)19 The evil customs involve kidnapping and rape of women, and Galahad’s defeat of the seven brothers frees the imprisoned and abused women. Significantly, however, Galahad restrains his violence, choosing not to follow the seven brothers when they flee. If Galahad restrains his violence, Gawain does not. He is the unrepentant sinner, the knight who has no mercy and who engages in excessive violence. Gawain seeks aventure, that is, the marvelous events associated with the search for the Grail, but he is continually frustrated by not being able to share in the company of the Grail knights and typically encounters mesaventure instead. Just after the Castle of Maidens adventure (in which Galahad frees the maidens from the castle’s curse and allows the seven brothers to retreat), Gawain appears (beginning of section 4), bemoaning the fact that he keeps missing Galahad. Shortly after, he, Gaheriet, and Owein meet up, by chance, with the seven fleeing brothers, whom they slaughter, an action that has no justification and for which Gawain is later reproved. Gawain is the polar opposite of the Grail knights: the one who is offered the chance to follow the spiritual path but who refuses; the one whose violence is mindless and unauthorized. Through him the author begins to establish the limits of authorized violence in the Queste. The other figure associated with excessive violence in the Queste is Lionel, the brother of Bors. Angered because Bors failed to rescue him from abusive captors, he forces Bors to a deadly battle. Despite attempts to make peace, “De quanque Bohort dist ne chaut a lyonel come cil qui li anemis auoit escaufe quil auoit volente docire son frere” (Lyonel was deaf to what Bohort said, as someone goaded by the fiend to kill his brother).20 When a hermit runs up and tries to make peace, Lionel “trait lespee du fuerre & fiert le preudome si durement quil li abat le hatrel. & cil sestent qui angoisse de mort destraint” (struck the hermit such a vicious blow that he split the back of his skull and his body stiffened in the throes of death).21 When Calogrenant happens upon the scene and tries to render aid to Bors, he too is killed. Just in the knick of time, before Bors himself is slain, divine intervention rescues him: Et maintenant descendi entrels vns grans brandons de fu en samblance de foudre & vient deuers le chiel & en issi vne flamme meruilleuse & si ardans que an doi leur escu enfurent brui & chairent a terre an doi & iurent grant pieche en pasmisons. (Immediately a ball of fire came down like a bolt of thunder between them, and a marvelous, searing flame issued forth, so that both their shields were burned and they both fell to the ground and lay there unconscious for a long time.)22

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A disembodied voice orders Bors to depart immediately and join up with Perceval by the sea. The divine intervention prevents brother from killing brother, and the episode further defines the limits of violence in the work. The shedding of blood and descent of avenging fire from heaven are two images associated in this episode with excessive violence. The allegorically minded reader cannot help but be reminded of the primal fraternal conflict, that of Cain and Abel. Although war is not depicted directly in the Queste, several past wars are alluded to, often without, however, the reader being able to form a clear judgment about the author’s view of them. Two wars appear justified: the war that Modrain waged against King Crudel and the war of Agaran against Vale.23 A third war appears more problematic: the inheritance war between the two sisters over King Love’s realm.24 However, the dominant image of war projected in the Queste is that which resulted in the Wasteland. Clearly, the reader is expected to have a negative view of the destruction caused by that war (King Libran against Perceval’s uncle). Perceval’s aunt (the Queen of the Wasteland) explains to Perceval that her life as a recluse is the result of fleeing the destruction of that war: “ce fu por paour de mort que ie men a fin” (it was for fear of death that I took refuge here).25 Because so much of the Queste turns on the restoration of health to the Wasteland and the Maimed King, the most prominent view of war to this point is a negative one, thus preparing the way for the direct depiction of war in the Mort. One might well ask how it is possible for Christian writers to authorize the violence of the Grail knights. How is it that the sixth commandment, “non occides” (Thou shalt not kill), is so easily ignored when the New Testament26 depicts Jesus of Nazareth not only reaffirming it but also extending it to prohibit the milder but allied behaviors of anger, abuse, and even sneering? Frederick Russell, in The Just War in the Middle Ages, tells us how early Christians “rejected worldly military service in favor of the Militia Christi, a pacific expression of their struggle against evil.”27 Maximilianus provides an example of just such an anti-war stance. Sometimes referred to as an early conscientious objector, Maximilianus was killed in A.D. 295 for refusing to join the Roman army.28 These early Christian evangelical ideas about violence do not, however, prevail in the later Middle Ages. Following the Toleration of Christianity in A.D. 313, Christians increasingly came under pressure to support the state and serve in armies. Russell charts a progressive movement among theologians and legalists to build a theoretical base for the concept of the “just war,” a movement that gains momentum with St. Augustine and Gratian and culminates in the work of St.Thomas Aquinas. The authorization of violence in the service of divine justice fits well with the Cistercian influence that Albert Pauphilet and Etienne Gilson posited for the Queste years ago. The Cistercians viewed the world as a battleground between good and evil and cast the Christian in the role of soldier, both literally as in the case of the Templars whom they supported,29 and metaphorically in describing the search of the monastic for union with God.30 The Cistercian Geoffroy d’Auxerre, in his On the Apocalypse, uses military terminology metaphorically, calling on priests “to contend with tongues afire rather than with rigid iron swords!” He continues: Would that they found armaments and shields fit for burning intolerable, and would prefer the dalmatic to the breastplate, the miter to the helmet, the pastoral staff to the military banner! The servants of God are to fight

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for God with spiritually powerful weapons, not with materials and physical ones, contending with prayer, preaching, supplication, and reproof. Is there any wonder that unclean demons and wicked people have so little fear of the sword of their mouths when they put their confidence in material arms?31 While priests generally were prohibited from engaging in war, the Cistercians supported the use of arms by knights in the service of the church to regain the Holy Lands. Bernard de Clairvaux’s military language is more literal than that of Geoffroy d’Auxerre. In Praise of the New Knighthood, for example, exhorts the Templars: The knight of Christ, I say, may strike with confidence and succumb more confidently. When he strikes, he does service to Christ, and to himself when he succumbs. Nor does he bear the sword in vain. He is God’s minister in the punishment of evil doers and the praise of well doers. Surely, if he kills an evil doer, he is not a man-killer, but, if I may so put it, an evil-killer. Clearly he is reckoned the avenger of Christ against evildoers, and the defender of Christians.32 Cistercians, then, were instrumental in authorizing the use of military force, especially against infidels and heretics. The late-thirteenth-century compiler and/or artist of the Yale manuscript understands well the Cistercian view of the world as a battleground between good and evil. If we look at how the artist treats sections 10 through 13 of the Queste, we can better understand the role of the Carcelois episode within section 12 and see how these portions of the narrative prepare the knights for their climactic experiences at Corbenic (section 14) and Sarras (section 15). In these sections we move from a view of individual knights seeking glory to a view of the Grail quest in the context of Christian history, beginning with the Garden of Eden and culminating in the Apocalypse. Section 10 concerns the discovery of Solomon’s ship by the Grail knights and the interpretations of it provided by Perceval’s sister. The ship, depicted twice in small miniatures in the section (folios 250r and 250v), is the vehicle that will move them from this world to their “other worldly” experiences. It is also an artifact that will be interpreted allegorically in such a way as to allow the author to present a capsule view of Christian history. Thus, section 11 contains the narrator’s so-called digression on the legend of the tree of life, which is really no digression at all but rather a means to recount biblical history, including the stories of the Garden of Eden and the murder of Abel by Cain (the latter illustrated in a small miniature on folio 255r). In section 12, just after the Carcelois episode, Perceval’s sister is sacrificed, in a scene that imitates the sacrifice of Christ, but whose purpose is to effect a cure of an evil woman. As a consequence, God takes vengeance, and the castle in which the sacrifice took place is destroyed. Section 13 stands out from all the other sections of the Queste on account of its brevity. It presents a moment of reflection by the Grail knights (mirroring that of Galahad following the Carcelois episode) as the knights assess the extent of the carnage and visit the sixty graves of innocent maidens who had earlier been sacrificed for “love of” the “wicked and sinful woman.”

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The Carcelois episode is illustrated by one of the smaller miniatures positioned within section 12 (folio 258v).33 The three Grail knights stand inside the castle, and the numerous murdered knights lie all around them at their feet. The moment depicted is the very one discussed at the start of this essay: that is, the moment just after the battle when Galahad reflects upon the carnage committed. The reader may be surprised that there is no visible blood, and that the scene does not dramatically evoke the sense of a massacre. But if the artist is not particularly interested in depicting violence here, it is, I propose, because he is more interested in the next episode, in depicting, that is, the vengeance of God taken on the castle in which Perceval’s sister is sacrificed. In fact, for the artist of Yale 229, the destruction of this castle at the end of section 12 represents the most dramatic depiction of violence in the Queste (fol. 262r). Its use of fire imagery reminds us of the ball of fire that descended from heaven and separated Bors and Lionel, the fire and brimstone God brought down upon Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 19:24), and the apocalyptic ending promised at the end of Christian history by the book of Revelation. To this point, the artist has generally glossed over violence in this work. As in the Carcelois miniature, dead knights appear prostrate, thrown from their horses onto the ground, but without visible blood. It is perhaps significant that one of the artist’s few previous depictions of blood in the Queste occurs in a small miniature depicting the first biblical murder, that of Cain against his brother Abel (fol. 255r). The red ink links this primal scene of violence to the fiery destruction of the castle. Blood and fire become important iconographical elements of violence, and both are used effectively by the artist to refigure the actions of the Grail knights from the perspective of providential history. In sections 10 through 13 the actions of the Grail knights have been reinterpreted in the context of God’s time, not human time. The ship that moves the knights to their Grail adventures also moves them into another spatial and temporal reality. By telling the history of the creation of Solomon’s bed, time is extended back to the events of the Garden of Eden. By telling the story of the sacrifice of Perceval’s sister and the subsequent destruction of the castle, time is extended forward. Read metaphorically, as readers of the Queste have been taught to do by the many white-robed priests, hermits, and recluses that constantly interrupt the Arthurian narrative, the destruction of the castle prefigures the end of the world promised in Revelations. By way of concluding my discussion of the Queste, I refer back to the words of the white-robed priest at the start of the work: “Pais sot o vos.”34 When I first read these words, I understood “pais” in the conventional sense in which the term is used today: the absence of war. However, after studying the text and illustrations, I conclude that the definition provided by Geoffroy d’Auxerre seems more likely to be operating here: “steadfastness in avoiding further sin.”35 Geoffroy wrote twenty sermons on the first three chapters of Revelation, and it is easy to see the similarity between his method of interpretation and that of the white-robed priests in the Queste. The concept of the end of the world colors all human choices. He concludes sermon 13: [F]aithfully fight a good fight for him, and happily end in a glorious victory. Meanwhile let us sample the promised sweetness of this spiritual sustenance as our military pay, but much more, let us wait expectantly in every prayer for the Lord’s promised good things which eye has not seen nor ear heard.36

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The way, then, to prepare for the final judgment is to turn from evil and follow the path of righteousness, a pattern we have seen the Grail knights imitating. In the last work of Yale 229, La Mort le roi Artu, the hermits, recluses, and whiterobed priests have departed, and readers are left to their own devices to interpret the events that follow: the destruction of the Arthurian world and the death of King Arthur. As suggested at the beginning of this essay, one way of reading the Mort is to assume that the many religious interpreters of the Queste succeeded in training not only the Grail knights within the text but also the readers outside it to interpret narrative events allegorically. The author has even left us a reminder inscribed in the text that allegorical reading is still required. Near the start of the war between Arthur and Lancelot, Lancelot sends a “damoisele” as messenger to King Arthur with a plan for averting war: Lancelot offers to put himself under King Arthur’s legal jurisdiction and prove his innocence by trial by battle. When, at the urging of Gawain, Arthur refuses this offer and promises war instead, the maiden speaks directly to Gawain, reminding him of what he should have learned earlier: Et voz fait ele mes sire Gauvain qui deuries estre le plus sage. certes voz estes le plus nices de tous les autres & asses plus que ie ne quidoie. car voz porcachies vosfre mort ce poes voz bien veoir tout apertement. Or esgardes ne voz souient il de ce que voz veistes iadis ou palais auenturez chies le roi pecheor a celui point que voz veistes la bataille de serpent & du liepart. Se il voz souenist bien des merueilles que voz ipeustes veoir & de la senefiance que li hermites voz deuisa ja ceste guerre ne fust comenciee tant com voz le peussies a vostre pooir destorner. Mais vostre grant mesauenture & vostre grant mescheance voz chace a ceste chose enprendre si voz en repentirez encore chierement quant voz nel pores amender. (And you, she said, milord Gawain, who ought to be the wisest, surely are the most foolish one of all, much more foolish than I had ever thought, for you seek your own death as you should to be able to see clearly. Now reflect: don’t you remember what you saw earlier at the Adventurous Palace of the Fisher King, at the moment that you saw the battle of the serpent and the leopard? If you had remembered correctly the marvels that you were able to see and the interpretation of them that the hermit granted you, this war would never have begun as long as you had it in your power to avoid it. But your misfortune and your bad luck force you to undertake this thing. You will repent ever the more dearly when you can no longer amend your ways.)37 The maiden’s view of things is this: marvels appear to the characters in the romance; hermits interpret their meaning; and the heroes should therefore heed their lessons. In this post-Grail period, marvels have disappeared from the land, but heroes should still remember the hermits’ lessons from former days. Reading this way, we note that the Mort emphasizes the actions of men and women in this world, in particular their sins and their lapses from a spiritual path. Gawain’s excessive violence during the Queste is openly rebuked at the start of the Mort.

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Lancelot’s relapse into sin with the queen is publicly revealed and leads first to the murder of one of Arthur’s knights in the queen’s bedroom, then to the ambush of Gawain’s brothers, and finally to an outright war that cannot be stopped, despite the noble efforts of Lancelot, the pope, and even Gawain on his deathbed. The destruction of the Arthurian world follows as a direct consequence of the sins of men and women. Or as Yeats put it 700 years later: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” The artist of Yale 229 follows this hermeneutic bent by accentuating the apocalyptic qualities of the Mort. In the large miniatures, the reader sees a dead knight on a bier (folio 277r), the wounded Lancelot with the Maid of Escalot (folio 282v), and Lancelot wounded by the hunter’s stray arrow (fol. 294r), three images that foreshadow the death and destruction to follow. In contrast to the twelve battles depicted by the artist in the Queste (eight of which are jousts), violent scenes of battle proliferate in both the large and small miniatures in the Mort. There are nineteen in all—three tournaments, one ambush, and the rest all scenes of war, whether engagement of divisions or one-on-one battles. The battle scenes do not begin until war has been declared on Lancelot (about mid-way through the work), and so their sheer number in such a concentrated space is impressive (although individual battle scenes are often quite conventionally depicted). The marginalia in the Mort provide commentary on the text and remind readers to utilize the allegorical interpretations introduced by the inscribed religious figures of the previous work.38 On the first folio of the Mort (folio 272v), for example, a charging knight on horseback announces the violence that is to follow. Two naked apes attacking from either side compound the violence and suggest the vulnerability of the chivalric military ideal. Michael Camille, who has discussed the symbolism of the arrow motif in the marginalia of Yale 229, offers the following interpretations: arrows may serve “as metaphors for God’s punishment of sinners,” as “signs of ‘evildoers who aim like arrows their bitter words, shooting…at the innocent man’ (Psalms 64:3–5),” or as “guides for the eye, pointing out, like N.B. marks, significant sections.”39 More numerous in this work than in the Queste, the marginalia present the reader with many “images of collapse.”40 A good example is found in the marginalia accompanying the large two-part illustration (folio 287r) of Arthur and his knights first losing their way in the woods, then flnding lodging in Morgan’s castle. The notion of losing one’s way should resonate with moral implications if we remember the numerous instances in the Queste when the knights were compelled to choose between right and wrong, between the lefthand and the right-hand paths. But does Arthur lose his way here or find a path to truth? While “losing his way” suggests a lapse in moral rectitude, it is also accompanied by discovery: the “accidental” reunion with his sister, and the revelation (through paintings on the wall of his bedroom) of Lancelot’s adulterous relationship with Guinevere. The marginalia on this page suggest the complexity of the emotional, moral, and social situation presented in the text. If the man with bow and arrow (facing left on the top extender) hits the creature in the left-hand top corner, this action will cause the creature to move his feet (in the right-hand corner), which hold an executioner’s sword. When the sword comes down, it will detach the devil’s head and the man dangling from it will drop to the foliage in the bottom right corner. Thus, the marginalia present a kind of “Rube Goldberg” contraption that expresses the theme of imminent collapse.41

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The artist’s consciousness of the apocalyptic events about to unfold in the Mort is evident also on a folio page near the important mid-point of the work (folio 308r).42 The upper register of the large miniature depicts Guerrehes and Mordred taking the queen prisoner; the lower register shows the queen standing by the flaming stake as Lancelot kills Agravain. The queen is “taken,” both literally and metaphorically, as if she were a piece in a political chess game. The ensuing battle over her body dominates the space and pushes her to the margin of the illustration. The precariousness of the situation is suggested by the knight who, God-like, is holding up the frame of the large miniature. Usually in Yale 229, the text is laid out in such a way that at least two lines follow an illustration; rarely is the illustration allowed to “sit” on empty space, but when it does, it is accompanied by marginal images that reiterate the theme of imminent collapse.43 At least one medieval reader then, the artist or compiler of Yale 229, understood well the interpretive techniques taught in the Queste by the white-robed priests. Analysis of the visual artistry of the Mort does not, however, answer the larger question of the attitude toward violence projected in the text of the Mort by the author. For the remainder of this chapter, I argue that the apocalyptic tone introduced in the Queste and highlighted by the artist in the Mort is tempered by an accompanying elegiac sense of regret for the loss of so many noble men and women. In the end, the reader cannot take satisfaction from the war between Arthur and Lancelot as divine retribution for the sins of Gawain, Mordred, Lancelot, and Guinevere. By juxtaposing the peacemakers (Lancelot and the pope) to the warmongers (Gawain and Mordred), the author draws the reader away from the apocalyptic stance and back to a tone of regret for violence done and the destruction of so many noble individuals. The author’s stance is ultimately one of ambiguity toward violence, closer to the dismay Galahad felt toward the destruction committed at Carcelois castle than to the Cistercian justification of violence against infidels and heretics. From the moment he learns he has unwittingly killed Gaheriet, Lancelot predicts the destruction that will follow: “car or coranencera la guerre qui iamais ne prendra fin a tout nostre viuant” (for now begins the war that will never end in our lifetime).44 This statement could, of course, be cited as evidence of the continued presence of the apocalyptic theme. However, it is spoken not by a detached observer but by Lancelot, one who will feel the most regret at the future unfolding of events. This change in narrative stance is crucial for understanding the tone of the Mort. The hermits, priests, and recluses of the Queste remain detached from the events they predict or explain, rarely showing empathy for the human struggle. In contrast, the events in the Mort take us inside the characters, allowing us to see the effects of the violence on the individuals involved. The intense grief that Arthur and Gawain feel for the deaths of Agravain, Guerrehet, and most especially Gaheriet, sets in motion their desire for revenge. Yet Arthur’s mood is less vengeful than Gawain’s. He is torn by a desire to avenge his shame on account of the adulterous affair and his love and admiration of Lancelot for past chivalric deeds. When Lancelot gives the king numerous opportunities to stop the war and make peace, the king views each as an example of Lancelot’s magnanimity. When Lancelot protects the king from a death blow in the battle at Joyeuse Garde, Arthur admires his chivalric gesture. When, at the pope’s insistence, Lancelot returns the queen to Arthur, the king again is impressed by this magnanimous deed. Each new chivalric gesture tempers his own desire for revenge. By contrast, Gawain insists on Lancelot’s exile and promises to continue the war on French soil. Gawain’s desire for revenge becomes a negative trait, an

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aspect of his injured pride, and an important cause of the destruction that follows. The more the author focuses on Gawain’s excesses, the less likely we are to view the dissolution of the Arthurian world as an apocalyptic event, an act of divine revenge. The sense of sadness and regret at the unfolding of events is concentrated in leavetakings. When Lancelot, as a farewell gesture, exchanges rings with Guinevere at Joyeuse Garde, we hear his formal farewell speech, but learn nothing about his feelings other than the narrator’s comment that “Cele nuit ot asses grant dueil ou chastel de la ioieuse garde par tout comunement” (That night there was much grief at the castle of Joyeuse Garde shared by everyone).45 However, at his departure from England, Lancelot “conmenca a muer color & a faire grans sospirs & parfons. & les ieux li conmancierent a lermer mout durement” (began to lose color and produce heavy, deep sighs, and his eyes began to pour forth abundant tears).46 His declamation (heard only by Bors) as the ship departed from England expresses both regret for leaving and a strong desire for peace: Ha! douce terre delitable & ioieuse & enuoisiee & pleine de toutes beneurtes & de toutes aises. terre en qui mes cuers & mes esperis & marme remaint. beneoite sois tu de la boute ihesu crist. & beneoit soient tout cil qui en toi remaignent. Pais aient 11. ioie lor doint diex sor tous lor anemis. (Ah! sweet land of delight, joy, and gaiety, full of all felicity and all ease, land in which my heart and my spirit and my soul remain, may you be blessed with the kindness of Jesus Christ. May all those who remain there be blessed! May they have peace! May God give joy there to friends and enemies!)47 As the land moves out of his sight, Lancelot, like a lovesick knight, “sala couchier en son lit. Et lors coranenca a faire si tres grant dueil & si meruilleus que nus ne le peust veoir qui tant eust dur cuer qui pitie nen deust a uoir” (went to lie down on his bed. Then he began sorrowing so very deeply and wondrously that no one had such a hard heart as to be able to see him and not feel pity at the sight).48 Lancelot’s love of Guinevere is thus displaced by his love of the country; his allegiance to Arthur takes precedence over his loyalty to the queen. His expressed desire for peace evokes the sympathy of the reader and makes him appear the victim of circumstances beyond his control rather than the sinner who caused the destruction of the Arthurian court. When Mordred’s treasonous actions are disclosed, the true root of evil in the kingdom is exposed, and Lancelot’s “sin” appears minor in comparison. In the presentation of the Queste and Mort in Yale 229, a dialectic, in the original sense of “establishment of a debate or discussion,” is established between the forces of love and peace and those of hatred and war. This dialectic may be understood in the context of the “new technologies of the self” that Suzanne Lewis, in Reading Images, analyzes in illuminated English Apocalypse manuscripts in the thirteenth century. She describes a relationship between image and text that goes beyond the merely mimetic to a “richly complex medieval experience of image-text reading as a dynamic transactional process involving author, text, compiler, scribe, designer, and reader-viewer.”49 By reading the Queste and the Mort within the context of Yale 229, we are carried into the midst of a similar dynamic process.

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As I have demonstrated, the Queste author explores five types of violence present within the chivalric world and ultimately justifies violence when adopted in the cause of divine justice. This perspective, however, is contained within the larger context of a world bifurcated between chivalric and religious values and where the military world of Arthurian knights is contrasted to the nonviolent, peaceful world of hermits, priest, monks, and recluses. The artist of both the Queste and the Mort supports the hermeneutic message of the Queste by juxtaposing violent and nonviolent scenes, by sequencing scenes of violence, and by using the marginalia to emphasize the apocalyptic qualities of the wars in the Mort. By contrast, the author of the Mort focuses on the human emotions of regret and sadness experienced by the fictional characters, ultimately lending an elegiac tone to the work and leaving the reader with sympathy for Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and even Gawain. Readers today, with the help of modern technology, are able to recapture the dialectic established among author, artist, and fictional interpreters and so to understand some of the complexities of medieval attitudes toward violence and peace. Notes 1. All illustrated folio pages have been made available in digitalized format at the Yale University Web site. Easy access to the Web site is through my home page: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/black/.Scroll down to the link, MS 229, and click to obtain the description of the manuscript from Shailor’s catalog. Scroll down to the list of illustrations. Click on the underlined folio number to obtain the full page; double click to zoom in on the illustration. 2. V.A.Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1984); Sylvia Huot, The Romance of the Rose and Its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Suzanne Lewis, Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Andrew Taylor, Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 3. Barbara A.Shailor, Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, vol. 1 (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1984), 322–31; W.Cahn and J.Murrow, eds. “Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at Yale: A Selection,” Yale University Library Gazette 52 (1978): 173–284; see the description of MS 229, 197–99. 4. Folios 187r, 66r, and 260v (Shailor 331). 5. Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Lilian M.C.Randall, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966): Alison M.Stones, “Arthurian Art Since Loomis” Arturus Rex, vol. 2, ed. Willy Van Hoecke, Gilbert Tournoy, and Werner Verbeke (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1991), 21–78; “Aspects of Arthur’s Death in Medieval Illumination,” The Passing of Arthur: New Essays in Arthurian Tradition, ed. Christopher Baswell and William Sharpe (New York: Garland, 1988), 52–101; “Illustrating Lancelot and Guinevere,” Lancelot and Guinevere: A Casebook, ed. Lori J.Walters (New York: Garland, 1996), 125–57; “The Illustrations of BN, FR. 95 and Yale 229: Prolegomena to a Comparative Analysis,” Word and Image in Arthurian Literature, ed. Keith Busby (New York: Garland, 1996), 203–60; “Sacred and Profane Art: Secular and Liturgical BookIllumination in the Thirteenth Century,” The Epic in Medieval Society: Aesthetic and Moral Values, ed. Harald Scholler (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1977), 100–12; “Secular

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Manuscript Illumination in France,” Medieval Manuscript and Textual Criticism, ed. Christoper Kleinhenz (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1976), 83–102. 6. Originally published in 1923; reprinted in Paris by Champion, 1968. 7. The Old French passages cited in the body of my chapter are transcribed from Yale 229, here fol. 258va, l. 35. Expanded abbreviations are indicated by italics. To aid the reader, I also provide in this and subsequent footnotes a page and line reference for the corresponding passages from the critical edition by Albert Pauphilet, La Queste del saint graal: roman du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1984); when there are substantive differences, I also cite the corresponding passage, as here, “Si les vont ociant et abatant ausi come bestes meus” (230, 1. 16–17). All translations of the Queste are my own unless otherwise indicated. 8. Fol. 258va, ll. 38–39; “hons mortiex, mes anemis qui laienz se soit embatuz por aus destruire” (Pauphilet 230, 1. 20–21). 9. Fol. 258vb, l. 6–8; “se tienent a pécheors de ceste ovraingne, et dient qu’il ont mal esploitié quant il ont ocis tant de gent” (Pauphilet 230, 1. 26–28). 10. Fol. 258vb, ll. 16–20; “Si il meffirent a Nostre Seignor, la venjance n’en ert pas nostre a prendre, mes a Celui qui atent tant que li pechierres se conoisse” (Pauphilet 231, ll. 1–3). 11. Pauphilet, Études 34. 12. Pauphilet, Études 35. 13. Fol. 259ra, ll. 22–23; Pauphilet 231, 1. 31. 14. Fol. 259rb, ll. 8–12; “Et quant il orent ce fet, si comencierent a fere toutes les desloiautez del monde, car il ocioient clers et prestres et moines et abez, et firent abatre deus chapeles qui laienz estoient” (Pauphilet 232, ll. 17–20). 15. Fol. 259rb, ll. 25–28; “Ne vos chaille; ma honte et la vostre sera vengiee par trois serjanz Jhesucrist: car einsi le m’a mandé li Haulz Mestres” (Pauphilet 232, ll. 31–33). 16. Fol. 259va, ll. 8–11; “Galaad, ce te mande li Hauz Mestres que tu l’as hui si bien vengié de ses anemis que la compaignie des cielx s’en esjoïst” (Pauphilet 233, ll. 29–31). 17. Fol. 188vb, l. 28; Pauphilet 7, 1. 24; see also John 20:19, 26. 18. Pauphilet 56ff. 19. Fol. 201ra, ll. 8–11; Pauphilet 46, ll. 28–30. 20. Fol. 247ra, ll. 14–17; “De quan que Boorz dist ne chaut a Lyonel, come cil que li anemis avoit eschaufé jusqu’a volonté d’ocirre son frere” (Pauphilet 189, ll. 29–30). 21. Fol. 247rb, ll. 16–19; “tret l’espee dou fuerre et fiert le preudome si durement qu’il li abat le haterel par derriere. Et cil s’estent qui angoisse de mort destraint” (Pauphilet 190, ll. 22–24). 22. Fol. 248ra, ll. 37–40 and fol. 248rb, ll. 1–4; “Maintenant descendi entr’els deus uns brandons de feu en semblance de foudre et vint de vers le ciel, et en issi une flamme si merveilleuse et si ardanz que andui lor escu furent brui, et en furent si effreé qu’il chaïrent andui a terre et jurent grant piece en pasmoisons” (Pauphilet 193, ll. 8–12). Note that this key passage involving heavenly fire is emphasized in Yale 229 by having an entire paragraph devoted to it. 23. Pauphilet 84–85, 120–22; see also P.M.Matarasso’s translation of The Quest of the Holy Grail (London: Penguin, 1969), which is based on Pauphilet’s edition, here pp. 105–6, 138– 39. 24. Pauphilet 169ff; Matarasso 182ff. 25. Fol. 211 vb, ll. 15–16; “ce fu par poor de mort que je m’en afoï ça” (Pauphilet 80,11. 25– 26). 26. Matthew 5:21–22: “audistis quia dictum est antiquis non occides qui autem occiderit reus erit iudicio ego autem dico vobis quia omnis qui irascitur fratri suo reus erit iudicio qui autem dixerit fratri suo racha reus erit concilio qui autem dixerit fatue reus erit gehennae ignis” (you have heard it said of old, “do not kill; anyone who kills will be brought to justice.” But I say this to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be brought to justice;

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whoever says “Raca” to his brother will be brought to judgment; whoever says “Fool” will burn in the fires of hell). The translation is mine. 27. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1975, 7. 28. Gregory Fried, “Critiques of Violence, “Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, Conflict, ed. Lester R.Kurtz, 3 vols. (San Diego: Academic Press, 1999), I, 507–15. 29. St. Bernard drew up a rule for the Templars, based upon Cistercian order. See Peter Dinzelbacher, Bernard von Clairvaux: Leben und Werk des berühmten Zisterziensers (Darmstadt: Primus Verlag, 1998), especially 114–24, 284–89. 30. Pauphilet 61–63. 31. Joseph Gibbons, trans., Geoffrey of Auxerre: On the Apocalypse (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 2000), 135. 32. M.Conrad Greenia, rev. trans., In Praise of the New Knighthood: A Treatise on the Knights Templar and the Holy Places of Jerusalem (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 2000), 39. 33. At the beginning of section 12, the section in which the Carcelois episode occurs, is a large, two-part illustration (folio 257v): in the upper register, “Galahad, Perceval, and Bohort find the ship built by Solomon with the three staves fashioned from the Tree of Life”; in the lower register, “the three knights and the damsel sail away” (Shailor 328). 34. See n. 17. 35. Gibbons, 32. 36. Gibbons, 137. 37. The Old French texts of the Mort cited in the body of the essay have been transcribed from Yale 229; here, fol. 317rb, ll 19–40 and fol. 317va, l, 1. For the convenience of the reader, I also cite the corresponding page and line references in the notes, as found in the critical edition by Jean Frappier, La Mort le roi Artu: roman du XIIIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1996). When there are substantive differences, I also cite the passage from Frappier’s edition, as here: “Et vos, messire Gauvain, qui deüssiez estre li plus sages, estes li plus fox de touz les autres, et assez plus que ge ne cuidoie; car vos pourchaciez vostre mort, et si le poez veoir tout apertement. Ore esgardez: ne vos souvient de ce que vos veï’stes jadis el Palés Aventurex chiés le Riche Roi Pescheor, en celui point que vos veï’stes la bataille del serpent et del liepart? S’il vos souvenist bien des merveilles que vos i veïstes et de la senefiance que li hermites vos devisa, ja ceste guerre ne fust, tant com vos la poi’ssiez destorner. Mes vostre maus cuers et vostre granz mescheance vos chace en ceste emprise. Si vos en repentiroiz la ou vos ne le porroiz amender.” (Frappier 142–43, para 110, ll. 41–55). All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated. 38. Michael Camille, Image on the Edge, discusses the marginalia of Yale 229 and also believes that “in this manuscript the marginal ‘play’ glosses and provides an ironic commentary on the central action of the text and its illustrations” (106). He views the illustrations in the margins as self-referential and satirical of the knightly class. 39. Michael Camille, 106–07. Camille notes also that the image of the stag being shot in the neck by an arrow in the margin of folio 293r comments on the wounding of Lancelot by the huntsman’s arrow in the main illustration two pages later (folio 294r); see 108. 40. The concept of “images of collapse” emerged from discussion by participants in the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) seminar held at Yale University (summer of 2000) on La Mort le roi Artu in Yale 229. 41. I am indebted to Walter Blue, participant in the Yale NEH Seminar, for the “Rube Goldberg” analogy. 42. On the importance of the mid-point in medieval narratives, see Karl D.Uitti, “Le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain),” The Romances of Chrétien de Troyes: A Symposium, ed. Douglas Kelly (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1985), 207–08, 223; Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetic of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), 72.

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43. For another example, see folio 325, the departure of Lancelot from Joyeuse Garde and arrival at Benoye. 44. Fol. 310rb, ll. 27–29; “car or commencera la guerre qui jamés ne prendra fin.” (Frappier 125, para 96, ll. 14–15); cf. The Death of King Arthur, trans. James Cable (London: Penguin, 1971), 123. 45. Fol. 323ra, ll. 34–36; “Cele nuit ot grant duel a la Joieuse Garde” (Frappier 157, para 119, ll. 1–2). 46. Fol. 325rb, ll. 15–18; “commença a muer couleur et a giter soupirs de parfont; et li eill li commencierent a lermoier durement” (Frappier 162, para 122, ll. 15–17). 47. Fol. 325rb, ll. 23–30; “Hé! douce terre pleinne de toutes beneürtez, et en qui mes esperis et ma vie remaint outreement, beneoite soies tu de la bouche de celui qu’en apele Jhesucrist, et beneoit soient tuit cel qui en toi remanent, soient mi ami ou mi ennemi. Pes aient il! Repos aient il! Joie lor doinst Dex greignor que je n’ai! Victoire et honor lor doint Dex envers toz cels qui riens li voldront forfaire!” (Frappier 163, para 123, ll. 1–9). 48. Fol. 325va, ll. 4–10; “s’ala couchier en un lit. Si commença a fere si grant duel et si merveillex que nus qui le veï’st ne fust qui pitié n’en preïst” (Frappier 163, para 124, ll. 4– 6). 49. Lewis, 15.

8 Violence and Communication in Shota Rustaveli’s The Lord of the Panther-Skin GIJSBERTUS KOOLEMANS BEYNEN Introduction Shota Rustaveli’s epic poem was written around A.D.1200 AD in Georgia, in the Caucasus. Its Georgian title is vepxist’ q’aosani, which literally means “of the leopard” (vepxis) “in the skin” (nominative: t’q’avi, locative: t’q’aosani).1 The poem has been translated under various titles; the most easily accessible translation is R.H.Stevenson’s The Lord of the Panther-Skin.2 It will henceforth be referred to as LPS, even though Abaev has shown that the correct translation of Old Georgian vepxi is “leopard” and not “tiger” or “panther.”3 In this chapter I use the translation “leopard.” Although the contemporary Georgian word vepxvi indeed means “panther,” Abaev notes that Shota’s text actually uses a different word: vepxi. This word meant “leopard” in Shota’s time; translations of the title of Shota’s poem as The Man in the Tiger Skin or The Lord of the Panther-Skin are therefore not quite correct. Tschenkeli, however, lists both words as synonyms but indicates that vepxi is archaic.4 Shota is a common first name even today, and “Rustaveli” means “from Rustava.” There are several towns by that name; scholars generally assume that it refers to a town in Meskhetia.5 The poem is about 6,500 lines long and shows Persian influence in both style and subject matter.6 The action takes place in locales with names like “Arabia,” which do not refer to any actual country. Rather, “Arabia” and “India” refer to stages of mental development: inhabitants of the former are more rational while those of the latter are more emotional and impulsive. We know little about the author; tradition claims he was a high court official, possibly the treasurer of Queen T’amar, who in his old age retired to the Holy Cross Monastery in Jerusalem. In 1960, a Georgian expedition discovered there a fresco with an inscription with the name “Shota” in Old Georgian letters.7 The poem is dedicated to Queen T’amar, who succeeded her father Giorgi III as Tinatin succeeded her father in Shota’s poem. Shota Rustaveli is probably Georgia’s most outstanding and venerated writer, and his poem occupies in Georgian culture the place reserved for the Bible in other cultures: quotations are used as proverbs, characters have become role models, and ethical problems are decided on basis of Shota’s poem. Yet we know little about him and his society because the Mongol invasions started approximately 150 years after the poem was written and destroyed an unknown quantity of documents about that society. The LPS presents a clear image of several countries and towns, but they may be products of Shota’s imagination. These countries were violent; killing people in battle or individual combat was easy and frequent. We have to assume that Shota’s countries, imagined or real, shared the standards with which they judged violence and love with Caucasian

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mountain tribes, Persia, various other Islamic states, or maybe the Byzantine Empire, but not with Western Europe. This makes the LPS so interesting: we find an unusual interaction between love and violence, which culminates in the Lion-Leopard fight, a perplexing episode that commentators have avoided like the Black Death. This interaction takes place in one or more societies that, real or not, are different from our societies and that ask unexpected questions about love and violence: is it right to ask one’s lover to kill an innocent person? A wicked person? A competitor? Is love dangerous? How dangerous? How do we survive the dangers of love? We may laugh at the suggestion that love can be dangerous but the sorceress Medea, who helped Jason and his Argonauts obtain the Golden Fleece, was a Georgian princess, and her behavior vividly illustrates how dangerous love can become. Shota discusses these questions against the background of an exotic society that might have been medieval Georgia, Persia, or that might have been a product of his imagination. He dedicated his poem to Queen T’amar, who succeeded her father Giorgi III as Tinatin succeeded her father in Shota’s poem, which must have added a touch of realism for the medieval Georgian audience. The Poem’s Courtly Elements Scholars have generally assumed, without offering detailed evidence, that the LPS belongs to the corpus of courtly literature. Rayfield, for example, merely notices the poem’s courtly character but also the presence of noncourtly elements such as worldly— he might have meant “carnal”—love and altruism.8 Other scholars, too, have commented on the poem’s heterogeneous character without substantiating their claims. Bowra finds in the poem “a special heroic outlook” in addition to courtly elements.9 Zhirmunskii seems to agree with Bowra when he considers the LPS a transition between epic and courtly literature,10 as does Stevenson.11 Meletinskii, too, finds noncourtly elements in the LPS in addition to courtly ones and agrees with Bowra on the epic elements.12 He connects the LPS with the interest in individual personalities and amorous experiences he finds in Old Georgian hagiographies, which seems to indicate that these hagiographies already contained elements that became prominent in courtly literature.13 Khintibidze stresses the common elements between Dante and Shota but sees the poem’s characters, especially the two knights T’ariel and Avtandil, as free characters that can act outside the code of chivalry.14 Dronke emphasizes the presence of elements from popular poetry in the LPS,15 which Abaev had already discussed in greater detail.16 Karbelashvili in her critique of the articles by Nikolai I.A.Marr and V.F. Shishmarev on the LPS observed that the LPS and the works of European courtly literature must be related because of the prominence of their female characters. It is therefore strange, she points out, that both scholars argued for a Persian origin of the LPS, even though women dominate in the LPS, which is alien to Persian and Arabic literature.17 The above authors seem to agree that, although the LPS has much in common with the corpus of courtly literature, it does have some unique characteristics. Still, there are two arguments for classifying the LPS as a work of courtly literature. First, the two main male heroes, Avtandil and T’ariel, follow the orders of their socially superior beloved ladies to

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win their approval, which is typical for the literature of courtly love.18 Even though the two heroes are upper-class males—both are the commander-in-chief or amirbari of their respective countries—the females still rank socially higher since they are the new queen and the crown princess of their respective countries. The courtly hero usually wins the favor of his beloved with some remarkable accomplishment, for example, by producing a work of art in her honor or embarking for her on a quest for an object or a person. In the LPS we find several instances of this. First, Shota tells us in his introduction that the poem is an effort to please his beloved, Queen T’amar, who should be kept ignorant of both his love and the resulting poem (3, 5). Then, in the beginning of the poem, King Rost’evan’s hunt is disturbed by the sudden appearance of a mysterious knight in a leopard skin, and Avtandil, the king’s amirbari, sets off on a quest for the stranger’s identity on order of the new queen and his beloved, Tinatin (17). T’ariel, who many consider to be the poem’s real hero, acts on his beloved’s wishes twice; first when she, Nest’an-Darejan, the crown princess of the Kingdom of India, orders him to kill his competitor, the prince of Xvarazm. This is a rather dastardly deed that violates all rules of courtly behavior and Georgian and other hospitality (68). In his second act of obeisance T’ariel does not follow any actual directive but sets off on a quest for Nest’an-Darejan herself. Second, while the above quests classify LPS as a work of courtly literature, it is especially the overall tone of exaggerated emotions that provides a basis for attributing the LPS to courtly literature. Whether in love or friendship, the heroines and heroes of LPS shed rivers, nay, seas of tears and their fury results in similar quantities of blood. Such exaggerated emotions are typical for courtly literature.19 They may originate in the folktale’s way of expressing superlative qualities. When the hero in a folk tale or epic kills a nine-headed dragon, for example, this does not mean that the author wants his audience to think there was such a dragon. Rather, he wants to indicate that the hero is powerful because he defeats multiheaded and therefore extremely dangerous dragons.20 Similarly, when in the beginning of Shota’s poem T’ariel weeps rivers of tears and then, at the poem’s end, dry-eyed, frees Nest’an-Darejan, his dry eyes show that he has now become a hero with supreme control over emotions that ordinary mortals would not be able to handle (170). Khintibidze quotes the French scholar Jean Mourier in support of his observation that many non-Georgians are “irritated” by Avtandil’s “coldness and perfidiousness,” and defends Avtandil’s adultery, which he correctly sees as an ultimately altruistic and morally good action, because it facilitates Nest’an-Darejan’s rescue.21 The reason nonGeorgians are “irritated” by Avtandil’s decision may be that he takes the decision to commit adultery so easily. This is a difficult decision, it is clearly a choice between unattractive alternatives, and some readers expect him to agonize over it, but he does not. But Shota’s primary goal in the adultery episode is to describe Avtandil’s control over his emotions and not any aspects of his character. The issue here is his emotional selfcontrol. When Shota describes how T’ariel spends years moping in a cave, his purpose is not to describe a depressed teenager but to describe powerful emotions that almost lead a couple to their doom. The more powerful the emotions, the greater Tariel’s glory when he controls them. Shota uses Avtandil to describe controlled powerful emotions and Avtandil’s “coolness” shows the readers the complete control he has over them; Shota is not interested in describing Avtandil’s emotions during the adultery episode. He has dealt

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with them previously when he showed how concerned Avtandil was about finding the most sensitive way to tell King Rost’evan about his second departure (87–97). The reader therefore already knows Avtandil has strong emotions; in the adultery episode Shota tells us he can control them. Tinatin is yet another inhabitant of Arabia with strong emotional self-control. The modern reader will think that Shota exaggerates but, first, the exaggerated description of emotions is typical for courtly literature. New in Shota’s poem is that in Avtandil he depicts controlled exaggerated emotions. And, second, Propp based his explanation of exaggerations on the oral character of folk literature; the audience could not flip back to preceding pages to find out what the author meant. Exaggeration was necessary so that they could follow the story; and we assume that in Shota’s time and country, most people could not read, or read more slowly than today, or listened to one person reading to an audience. What seems exaggerated to today’s readers did not necessarily sound exaggerated to an audience around A.D.1200. The Poem’s Unique Features While the poem’s quests and strong emotions identify it as a courtly poem, it has some unique features that set it apart from other courtly works. First, the heroes have already won their respective ladies’ love. This might seem to deprive the poem of its courtly basis, however—and this is the second feature—the actions of the heroes shift now to pleasing not only their beloved but also a larger group of people and there is often a feeling that the action is good in itself, no matter who benefits from it. This development toward a larger group is illustrated by T’ariel’s actions: his first action—the murder of the prince of Xvarazm—ordered by his beloved pleases only her and for a short period only. Many suffer its consequences for a long time. However, when he embarks on his liberation of Nest’an-Darejan, his action is approved by all concerned and, most important, there is a feeling that the liberation of Nest’an-Darejan is a good action by itself. The people who suffer are the Kajis, evil wizards who hold her captive, and even if Nest’an-Darejan would not have survived, we are told indirectly narrative that liberating people and confronting evil are good actions in themselves and that both T’ariel and Nest’an-Darejan are therefore resigned to whatever outcome there will be. Third, in courtly works we often find a love relation between a male with a lower social status and a female with a higher social status who may be married to a second male with an equally higher social status. In the LPS, however, we find two love relations. The presence of a second female eliminates the competition for the first female and results in cooperation between the two males. It also eliminates the need for adultery, which results when the beloved is married to a socially higher-ranking male but returns the love of the male with the lower social status.22 Strangely enough, adultery does occur in the LPS, but in a completely different form. The heroes direct some extramarital activities not toward the lady they adore but toward lower-class women—Asmat and Pat’man—in what has been called a “comedy of class distinction.”23

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Violence in the Poem The LPS is a violent poem, which is not surprising as its two heroes are army commanders. One is reminded of the Japanese proverb that to the man with a hammer everything looks like a nail: T’ariel and to a certain degree Avtandil try to solve most of their problems by violence. Avtandil’s first meeting with Asmat is revealing: first he tries to get his information by force, and when that does not work he confesses he is a mijnuri, that is, someone driven by love (29–31). Then Asmat helps him. The poem starts with a prologue containing Shota’s dedication of the poem to Queen T’amar (3–6). This is followed by King Rost’evan’s abdication after which a three-day hunt follows, and it is clear that hunting is a type of violence that finds complete approval in the LPS (11–12). The abdication, by the way, reminds one of the beginnings of the reign of Queen T’amar, who succeeded her father in a similar way. The reason for the hunt is that after his abdication King Rost’evan suffers from what one could anachronistically call retirement depression: he complains that the younger generation is inferior to his. Avtandil, his amirbari and the secret lover of his daughter Princess Tinatin, organizes the hunt and proves the King wrong by outperforming him. The king cheers up, which shows the positive interpretation of this activity: hunting is in the poem’s culture a sport that kept the king and his army in fighting shape and probably had a value as source of meat as well. Additionally, the reader gets a feeling that hunting is a status symbol: the sport of the upper classes. War, violence in support of the state’s goal, is another type of approved violence. Early in their relationship Nest’an-Darejan asks T’ariel to subjugate the Xataians, probably the Chinese, although, again, ethnic names mean little in the LPS. The violence here is seen as positive, presumably because, first, Nest’an-Darejan asks for their subjugation as an expression of his devotion to her, and any request from her is a priori good in T’ariel’s eyes. Second, King Parsadan, Nest’an-Darejan’s father, is the de jure but not the de facto ruler over the Xataians and disciplining them seems to be an acceptable reason for violence (50–56). Self-defense is also acceptable: when pirates attack Avtandil and his accompanying merchants, this is clearly a good reason to massacre the former (125). There is a similar event when three travelers attack T’ariel. Although technically T’ariel kills them in selfdefense, there is also a feeling that the three youths have violated his privacy and that he kills them in order to be left alone (26, 36). There is a similar mixture of self-defense and defense of one’s privacy at the beginning of the poem when the mysterious knight in his leopard skin appears during King Rost’evan’s hunt. The king wants to meet the mysterious stranger, who, however, gruffly declines the invitation and then massacres the king’s men sent to make him accept the invitation (14). In each of these cases violence is presented as justified. Finally, the poem records two cases of violence against an individual and here we see a more detailed and more sophisticated analysis of violence. First, shortly after T’ariel and Nest’an-Darejan meet and fall in love, T’ariel is called to a meeting with King Parsadan and his advisors, and the king announces that Nest’an-Darejan is to get married. He has decided on a husband, the prince of Xvarazm, who will visit them soon. T’ariel is speechless, and Nest’an-Darejan is furious when he tells her about the meeting and the upcoming visit. She commands him to kill the prince, which he does unquestioningly, but

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when the dust settles she has disappeared and T’ariel has had to flee. The violence here is completely unexplainable and unforgivable: it violates the laws of hospitality, knightly behavior, Caucasian tribal law, and common human decency. Worst of all, the prince is killed in his sleep, which is cowardly and also unnecessary since the poem makes clear on several occasions that T’ariel can kill any enemy in any quantity. Nest’an-Darejan’s command and T’ariel’s killing are basically temper tantrums of immature people and the violence is here not approved because of the many laws it violates and because of its negative results (67–68). Last, violence against an individual occurs when Avtandil visits Pat’man, the wife of the dean of merchants of Gulansharo. Avtandil has arrived in Gulansharo on his search for Nest’an-Darejan and has concluded that Pat’man, the wife of the dean of merchants is the person with the most information and relations. When after their first meeting she writes him a love letter, he decides to reciprocate because he sees her as a source of information about Nest’an-Darejan. They agree to meet at her house, and on his way he encounters a slave who tells him not to come. Avtandil ignores him and finds Pat’man rather apprehensive at seeing him. They kiss, eat, and drink but are then interrupted by a stranger who is surprised by Avtandil’s presence and activities and leaves after dire threats. Pat’man is too distraught to offer any explanations, yet is clearly devastated and predicts a horrible death for her family. When she recovers, she gives Avtandil a choice: kill the visitor, or depart from Gulansharo immediately and leave her and her family to a terrible fate. Avtandil, who after all had come to Gulansharo to obtain information about Nest’an-Darejan, decides to kill the visitor. When he comes back after having murdered his victim in his sleep, Pat’man tells him that some time ago a beautiful stranger, who turns out to be Nest’an-Darejan, had sought refuge in her house. Pat’man hid her for a while; eventually told her husband, who one day, under alcoholic influence, told the king of Gulansharo about their guest and her beauty. The king decided to marry Nest’anDarejan to his son, which caused her to flee to an unknown destination. Saddened by Nest’an-Darejan’s sudden flight Pat’man unburdened her heart to the king’s ch’ashnagiri or wine taster who then blackmailed her into becoming his lover. The ch’ashnagiri is the mysterious visitor whom Avtandil murders in his sleep (136–42). The last two instances of violent behavior are case studies with a striking similarity: in both, an otherwise chivalrous male who can easily kill thousands of opponents in fair fights commits a cowardly, unfair, unchivalrous, and seemingly unnecessary deed—the murder of a sleeping and helpless opponent who hardly knows him. Yet the contexts make it clear that T’ariel’s murder is condemned but the one committed by Avtandil is viewed as a good deed. It has been noticed before that in the LPS the women tell the men what to do: Tariel and Avtandil follow the orders of women.24 The difference is that Avtandil knows whom to listen to and T’ariel does not. T’ariel follows the order of a teenage princess with whom he is in love, which results in one long series of disasters. Avtandil follows the advice of the experienced wife of an important merchant and court official because after an interview with an inhabitant of Gulansharo he had decided that she has the relations and experience he needs (127–28). Not only Avtandil thinks so: Pat’man has been trusted with her husband’s duties during his absence not only by himself, but also by the government of Gulansharo who has tacitly approved of his temporary replacement.

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In a previous paper I have argued that Avtandil could have found the information about Nest’an-Darejan by himself.25 However, Pat’man already has this information, as Avtandil will find out a few hours and one murder later. Obviously, time is of the essence here; Avtandil cannot run the risk of a delay, which is why he murdered the ch’ashnagiri. Defeating him in a fair and open fight could have resulted in a court case or an investigation that could have cost time. Keeping him alive would have jeopardized Pat’man’s value as a source of information on Nest’an-Darejan. The fact that the ch’ashnagiri is a despicable blackmailer makes Avtandil’s murder still more acceptable (145). Nevertheless, Avtandil commits adultery and murder. He was not absolutely sure that his transgressions would result in freeing Nest’an-Darejan but he was reasonably sure that Pat’man was a reliable source of information and that the risks involved in adultery and the murder were worth the possibility of returning Nest’an-Darejan. Again, there is no absolute certainty but that only serves to underline Avtandil’s expertise in judging characters and situations. On the basis of little information he makes a decision, and the decision turns out to be correct. Was Avtandil just lucky or is he an accomplished, although intuitive, judge of people? Shota leaves this question to the reader and this reader is inclined to give Avtandil credit for doing the right thing in a difficult situation, all the more since we have learned from Napoleon that luck is not an accident that happens but a personality trait. At least there is anecdotal evidence that he thought it was the most desirable characteristic for his generals. Shota’s attitude toward violence is therefore not simple. In hunting and in war violence is good, and there is no discussion in the poem of just wars. Selfdefense is also approved. Here Shota’s stand reflects the simpler values of feudal societies and Caucasian tribesmen. Shota’s attitude toward violence against individuals is pragmatic and sophisticated. He gives us two examples where a person is murdered in his sleep, a killing generally condemned, among others by the rules of fair play and the code of chivalry. What T’ariel did is clearly wrong, both because it violates the code of chivalry and because it has terrible consequences. Shota does not judge Avtandil but the facts he assembles make the reader sympathize with Avtandil: on the basis of his investigations Avtandil knows that Pat’man is a reliable source of information, and also that she is a good judge of people and situations. Hence, he must have concluded, following her advice and murdering the ch’ashnagiri must offer the best chances of rescuing Nest’anDarejan in time. Avtandil is hence “with his pragmatic mind,”26 and also with his ability to act independently,27 a utilitarian avant la lettre; he takes the decision that will cause the most happiness and the least unhappiness. The world is a better place without the ch’ashnagiri, and at the end of the poem Tinatin displays the victor’s magnanimousness toward Pat’man and the adultery. Symmetry of the Narrative A striking characteristic of the poem is its symmetry. There are two sets of characters: each is a king who will be or has been succeeded by his daughter and only child. In both sets the daughter has a lover, the country’s amirbari. Each set has its own country: one is located in Arabia, the other in India. These names have no connections with actual countries. The symmetry results in several pairs of events that mirror each other, this is,

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both heroes murder someone in his sleep and in both countries a king abdicates. The symmetry, however, also emphasizes the difference between the countries. There is indeed an important difference. The inhabitants of India cannot communicate and as a result their actions cause one disaster after another. The inhabitants of Arabia, on the other hand, are good communicators, and one of them, Avtandil, rescues the Indian hero and heroine on the order of another Arabian, Tinatin. Communications in India The murders do not only characterize T’ariel and Avtandil; they are also representative of a long list of actions by inhabitants of India and Arabia. “Arabs” Avtandil’s fellow countrymen, act wisely, but inhabitants of “India,” compatriots of T’ariel, commit actions that are rash and result in disaster. The first such action was King Saridan’s gift of his kingdom to King Parsadan. T’ariel tells this story to Avtandil who has finally found him and Asmat after a long search. One day King Saridan, king over one of India’s kingdoms, gave his kingdom to Parsadan, the king over the other six. No reason is given; all the author says is that Saridan was feared by his enemies and was “lonely” (39). The foolishness of this action is obvious: Saridan gave away the family’s source of income. Kings sometimes give away their realm, but in general they do so only to enter a monastery while keeping the realm in the family.28 Rarely, if ever, does the transfer of power take place at the expense of the descendants. King Saridan does not take religious orders; he stays in the same line of work when he accepts King Parsadan’s offer to be his amirbari. We are also told that King Parsadan, who is childless, said he would bring up Saridan’s son, T’ariel, “as my own son.” This is a vague statement, which, like King Saridan’s rash abdication, leads to disasters because nobody knows whether this is an enforceable agreement or not, and in what aspects exactly T’ariel will be “as [his] own son.” Then a daughter, Nest’an-Darejan, is born to King Parsadan (39). This, of course, raises the question of who will succeed King Parsadan: T’ariel, whom he considers after all “[his] own son” or Nest’an-Darejan? This question is ignored, which of course leads to yet another disaster. One day, after a hunt King Parsadan sends T’ariel to Nest’anDarejan with some partridges (41). We are not told why the king could not send a servant, but an obvious guess is that he wants to introduce the two so that T’ariel will be his son-in-law as well as “[his] own son.” The two immediately fall in love, which becomes obvious when T’ariel faints and then hovers near death for three days (42). Some time later King Parsadan calls T’ariel to a meeting with the queen and three royal advisors, announces a search for a crown prince, asks those present to suggest suitable candidates, and then suggests the son of the king of Xvarazm (64). Although the king may have been sincerely trying to find the best husband for Nest’an-Darejan from the government’s point of view,29 his actions seem to contradict his earlier plan to bring T’ariel up “as [his] own son” and they do not seem to agree either with whatever he had in mind when he had T’ariel bring Nest’an-Darejan some partridges. He also may have decided that the prince is a better husband than T’ariel or that T’ariel had no serious marriage plans and that the marriage announcement would force T’ariel to make up his

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mind: marry Nest’an-Darejan or let her be married to the prince. We’ll never know. In short, whatever King Parsadan’s plans are, he does not communicate them. T’ariel does no better; he does not promote his own candidacy, even though there is the earlier mysterious statement that the king will educate him “as [his] own son” (39). Also, he has just shown himself to be a superior amirbari by bringing the powerful Xataians back into the Kingdom of India (58), which compensates, at least partially if not totally, for the dynastic and governmental relations the prince of Xvarazm would bring to a marriage. Most of all, he should have mentioned that he and Nest’an-Darejan love each other. Shortly thereafter, the prince of Xvarazm appears. Nest’an-Darejan is furious at her father, Tariel, and the prince and rather than speaking up for her own rights and emotions, orders T’ariel to kill the prince. He does so, even though other, communication-based, means are available: explaining the situation to King Parsadan or even the prince of Xvarazm, who might have been sympathetically disposed to the two wronged and ignored lovers. After the murder T’ariel flees to a fortress. Tellingly, King Parsadan sends him a message with the question: “If you wanted my daughter, why did you not tell me so?” The king’s question points out the disastrous lack of communication between the two but, of course, the king is as much at fault as T’ariel. T’arie’s answer does little to clear up the issues. He claims not to be interested in Nest’an-Dare-jan—which is not true—but only in his claim to the throne of India (68). This claim is rather feeble. After all, his father ruled only one of the seven kingdoms and gave it up unconditionally. Hence, even if T’ariel retained some right to the throne his father had relinquished, this does not mean that he now has a right to all of India. Tariel uses his weakest argument, his claim on the throne of India, and omits the argument that is most important: Nest’anDarejan’s love for him. This exchange of half-stated, unfounded, and misunderstood communications continues. King Parsadan accuses his sister Davar, to whom he had trusted Nest’anDarejan’s education, without specifying what she did wrong.30 The sister—who unlike the queen has a name—is furious, understandably, but does not refute the accusation. She beats Nest’an-Darejan and gives her to two slaves with instructions to abandon her at sea. Then she commits suicide. The slaves sail off and all traces of Nest’an-Darejan are lost for a time (71). T’ariel roams the Earth in search of Nest’an-Darejan but without success and accompanied only by Asmat, Nest’an-Darejan’s maidservant. Asmat eventually introduces the two heroes. In short, in India we find that people do not interpret events or actions. More precisely, they look at an action as an isolated event and do not see it in its connection with other actions or events, goals, purposes, contradictions, or intended or unintended results. They do not have a critical attitude that makes them ask: “What does this event mean? What are the consequences or implications of this action or event?” They seem to think that all actions speak for themselves and, although in general some do, most do not. Most actions can be correctly evaluated only when seen in relation with other actions, for example, causes, goals, or results. Hence, the actions of the Indians are impulsive and lack a rational interpretation. Some actions seem to have no purpose, for example, King Saridan’s abdication. In other situations we can come up with several interpretations, each of which conflicts with interpretations of other events. For example, especially in view of the events that follow, King Parsadan’s decision to bring Tariel up “as [his] own son,” his introduction of T’ariel to his daughter, and his proposal of the prince of

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Xvarazm as a son-in-law. In quite a few cases the action seems nothing more than a temper tantrum aimed at hurting whoever happens to be around, for example, Nest’anDarejan’s order to murder the prince and the murder itself, the king’s accusation of his sister Davar, her decision to have Nest’an-Darejan killed, and her suicide. Tariel’s misinterpretation of Asmat’s delivery of Nest’an-Darejan’s first letter to him is another good example of how people in India do not seem to have a clue what is going on. He thinks Asmat is in love with him while actually she is delivering Nest’an-Darejan’s love letter (45). Communications in Arabia By contrast, the inhabitants of Arabia communicate effectively. Tinatin’s request to find T’ariel may seem an exception. She refers to her “sorrow” but other than that offers no explanation, probably because her request is an example of an event or action that speaks for itself: Tinatin’s instincts make her come to the rescue of a clearly miserable fellow human being (18). But other actions are clearly explained, for example, Avtandil deals with his king’s depression by showing him that the younger generation has competent hunters indeed and that the king therefore need not worry. Even the king himself, depressed as he is, tells us exactly what ails him. Then, when T’ariel has caused King Rost’evan’s second depression by refusing his invitation, his daughter Tinatin tells him with a few well-chosen words why he should not worry about the mysterious knight. When Avtandil finds the cave with T’ariel and Asmat, his first impulse—he is, after all, an amirbari—is to force her to bring about a meeting between him and T’ariel. This does not work and he finds a better way: he tells her he is a mijnuri, someone possessed by love and on a search ordered by his beloved. Asmat can identify with the emotion communicated to her, and soon Avtandil and T’ariel meet. T’ariel tells Avtandil his story and finally tells of a meeting with Nuradin-Pridon, the king of Mulghazanzar whom he met when Nuradin-Pridon was wounded after a run-in with enemies (72). T’ariel, uncharacteristically, is not interested in his own problems this time but asks NuradinPridon about the latter’s problems, which may indicate that T’ariel is maturing or that he is outside the sphere of influence of India. The two spend some time together and Nuradin-Pridon eventually tells Tariel about a strange meeting, which they interpret as a sighting of Nest’an-Darejan and Davar’s two slaves. T’ariel tries to follow her trail, but in vain (78). Avtandil now promises T’ariel that he will find her, even though Tinatin had initially directed him only to establish T’ariel’s identity. Avtandil therefore first goes home to make sure that everyone concerned is absolutely clear about his new plans and the reasons for them. Tinatin quickly approves of his expanded quest (85). Obtaining the king’s approval is less easy. He sends him a lengthy letter and asks the king’s vizier Shermadin to deal with him (87–99). It is typical of Avtandil’s careful approach to communication that he spends much time and effort—more than ten pages in Stevenson’s translation!—informing the king of his new plan and reasons, even though he does not dare to tell the king in person. Rost’evan, by the way. still has the title of “king” and most if not all of its influence, power, and prestige, which is slightly puzzling, as he has

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abdicated. Avtandil now travels to Mulghazanzar where he meets with Nuradin-Pridon who shows him where Nest’an-Darejan was last seen. When Avtandil starts searching for her, he begins what we can call anachronistically “networking.” First he attaches himself to a caravan and earns their gratitude by defending them against pirates (125). Then, when he arrives in Gulansharo, a trading center, he asks around and establishes who has the most influence and connections in town: the dean of merchants. He is temporarily absent but his wife Pat’man replaces him, and Avtandil decides to see her. After their meeting Pat’man falls in love with him and writes him a love letter. Avtandil is not happy with his conquest but decides to go along, as he recognizes she is a useful source of information. Above I have discussed how their first night together is interrupted by the ch’ashnagiri and when afterward Pafman tells Avtandil how the ch’ashnagiri blackmailed her, she mentions that Nest’an-Darejan had stayed some time in her house. They now locate Nest’anDarejan with the help of Pat’man’s connections, Avtandil contacts T’ariel and Nuradin-Pridon, and together they liberate Nest’an-Darejan. The liberation is facilitated by an exchange of letters, an additional indication of the importance of communication—something that would not have happened in India. This indicates that Nest’an-Darejan is learning to communicate. Then Avtandil marries Tinatin, Tariel marries Nest’an-Darejan, and all live happily ever after. The Violence of the Lion-Leopard Fight The importance of this haunting and visionary episode is evident from its location in the middle of the poem (109), from the prominence of the leopard imagery in the poem, and from the title, which refers to the skin in which T’ariel dresses after Nest’an-Darejan’s disappearance and which serves as a sign of his isolation from society. This fight is the only episode where the leopard is a character in its own right. When Avtandil returns to T’ariel after having gone back to Arabia to announce a change in plans, he finds T’ariel unconscious and severely wounded. He and Asmat nurse him back to health and Tariel informs them that he witnessed a meeting between a lion and a leopard.31 The two animals “were like lovers…seemed an enamored pair,” as T’ariel relates. Then something changes. The animals begin to perceive each other’s actions as aggressive, for no apparent reason. The absence of a reason or purpose reminds one of actions like King Saridan’s abdication, also an action that defies explanation. The leopard takes fright and flees with the lion in pursuit. T’ariel, who until now had been merely watching, intervenes and kills the lion. He then tries to comfort the leopard by embracing it, the leopard does not understand and fights back, and T’ariel ends up killing the leopard as well. The meaning of this episode is that it is difficult to tell whether an action is friendly or aggressive because they are so similar. The lion and the leopard are not the only ones with such a problem: Jerome K.Jerome, in his 1889 novel Three Men in a Boat, tells how, one day at the beach in Boulogne, his friend Harris was held under water until nearsuffocation. When he emerged and confronted his assassin, the latter stuttered: “I really beg your pardon…but I took you for a friend of mine.”32 Was the near drowning a friendly gesture? The “assassin” intended it to be but at first Harris thought otherwise.

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The point of the lion-leopard fight is that it is difficult to interpret actions as hostile or friendly. The poem, on the other hand, is about people from India whose actions are difficult to interpret in general. In his description of the lion-leopard fight Shota anticipates the observations of Charles Darwin and Konrad Lorenz. Darwin, in discussing the principle of antithesis, shows how animals express opposite emotions by similar body positions.33 Cats, for example, arch their back to seem bigger when in danger but also to express friendliness by rubbing their sides against a human’s legs, where arching serves no purpose.34 Darwin devotes several pages to humans who produce tears when crying but also when laughing.35 Lorenz took Darwin’s observation as the basis for his theory on aggression, which he understands as intra-specific—between members of the same species—aggression.36 This type of aggression results when members of the same species are too close to each other because closeness means an increased competition, for example, for a mate or for territory.37 Sometimes aggression is overruled, for example, by rules prohibiting aggression toward nest mates or a prospective spouse. In such cases we see an aggressive gesture, which becomes a friendly one, Lorenz claims, when it is re-directed toward another object or animal, usually a neighbor.38 Still, Lorenz informs us, aggressive and friendly gestures can be so similar that other members sometimes fail to see the difference and come to the “rescue” of a nest mate who is courting a possible spouse.39 Only very rarely does it happen that both participants, the one who makes the gesture and the one to whom it is directed, mistake friendly gestures for aggressive ones. Lorenz tells us that he has seen this happen only three times in his life; each time when the friendly gestures were very intense and, so to say, got out of control.40 Shota tells us through the lion-leopard fight that aggressive and friendly actions are difficult to tell apart. Darwin and Lorenz support Shota, so to speak, and Lorenz adds that very intense emotions may even cause friendly moods and gestures to change into aggressive ones. In analyzing the actions of the inhabitants of Arabia, Shota shows that their actions do not necessarily give us by themselves sufficient information for their interpretation. Events or actions do not come with their own interpretations; we have to find them. When we do not look for them, the result will be chaos, like in India. An abdication may be a wise decision—in King Rost’evan’s case—or the beginning of a series of disasters— when King Saridan gives up his throne. Some actions are self-explanatory: hunting is apparently such an activity: it is good, at least in Shota’s time and place. Also, when Tinatin tells Avtandil to establish the identity of the mysterious knight, no explanation is needed (17–18). But when a female orders the murder of a sleeping person, we have to base our interpretation of the murder not on the event itself but on many other items: on its cause, its goal, on the probability that its goal could be reached by murder, on the presence of other ways to reach the same goal and on additional foreseen and unforeseen results. The ethics of the LPS contrast with other systems of thought where at least some basic actions provide sufficient information for their evaluation. The rules of courtly love declare any action ordered by the beloved to be good; there is no need to look beyond the action itself. Similarly, the codes of Caucasian tribesmen and medieval knights declare the killing of a sleeping adversary to be wrong. Yet Shota has moved away from such simplistic interpretations and gives us two case studies to show that other factors have to be taken into account for a valid interpretation of some actions.

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But what is still lacking is an explanation why the leopard plays such an important part in the poem and not a different animal, for example, the lion, which epitomizes courage and strength, or the dog, mankind’s oldest and best friend. The Leopard in Georgia The leopard is also important in Georgian folklore where, as Abaev points out, it is seen as almost identical with humans; that is, it hunts the same prey and has the same hunting skills. Leopards used to serve as assistants to hunters, as our hunters today use dogs. Because leopards are so similar to us and, so to say, occupy the same ecological niche, the question of what is the difference arises? Abaev answers this by referring to a folk ballad reworked by the Georgian poet Vazha-Pshavela about a hunter and a leopard who both died in a fight with each other. Later, when the hunter’s mother laments the death of her son, she weeps for the leopard’s mother, who must feel a similar grief, she thinks. It is significant, says Abaev, that the leopard’s mother has no such feelings for the hunter’s mother. Abaev’s interpretation is that in Georgian folklore leopards are seen as identical with people, except for one feature: people can communicate, especially emotions, and leopards cannot; neither can other animals.41 The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss finds a similar relation in South American Indian myths where the South American Indians see the jaguar as almost human. The difference is, according to the myths, that people have fire, and use it as the basis for their civilization. Jaguars have no fire, and hence no civilization.42 Georgian folklore sees it differently: people can communicate and that makes them truly human and civilized. The people in India did not communicate, and there is no explanation of what went on in King Saridan’s mind, what were King Parsadan plans, and what did T’ariel think would happen when he murdered the prince. And without communication a person might as well be an animal or, at best, a leopard, Georgian folklore claims. The people in Arabia communicate. Avtandil takes great care to tell King Rost’evan why he will leave for a second time, and we also know why he decided to murder the ch’ashnagiri. Conclusion Animals may be mistaken in their interpretations of actions, Lorenz shows, because actions are not always self-explanatory. Friendly actions differ from aggressive ones only because friendly actions are aggressive actions that have been re-directed. The difference between friendly and aggressive actions is therefore small: the former have re-direction. If this re-direction is not noticed or is not carried out, the action is perceived as aggressive, no matter what the intentions of the actor might have been. Conversely, if a re-direction is noticed or imagined, the action is friendly, so that it looks indeed as if “violence depends on the beholder.”43 This explains then why love and violence are so closely related or, in Classen’s words, why “love itself has just too often led to destructive, violent behavior.”44If the re-direction is omitted or overlooked, the action is considered aggressive, which leads to defensive measures or violence. Lorenz points out

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that the most aggressive animals have the strongest bonds, which further illustrates the close ties between love and aggression.45 Although animals may be mistaken, people need not be, Shota adds, because they can communicate. Unlike leopards and other animals, people can explain actions that are not self-explanatory. Jerome’s friend Harris might have considered his fellow bather a murderer, but the stuttered excuse made the ambiguous action clear. It was a friendly gesture after all.46 Not everyone can communicate; it is a skill that most people have to acquire as they mature. Tinatin and Avtandil are born communicators; T’ariel and Nest’an-Darejan have to learn it the hard way. Avtandil goes to great lengths to explain to King Rost’evan his reasons for his second departure. True, the king throws a chair against the wall in his majestic fury but it could have been worse: Shermadin, Avtandil’s messenger, initially feared for his life. Avtandil is also a good listener and his conversation with a Gulansharo resident leads him to trust Pat’man. Inhabitants of India cannot communicate initially but they learn: Tariel progresses by first asking Nuradin-Pridon about his wounds and then by unburdening his heart to Avtandil. Finally, he shows he is now a skilled communicator when he leads the discussion about the best way to free Nest’an-Darejan (167–69). Immature human beings, for example, Nest’an-Darejan and T’ariel in the early stages of their life, are like animals in their lack of communication skills, which T’ariel expresses by dressing in a leopard skin. Communication is therefore a safety device that can prevent violence. Because actions are not always self-explanatory, it is often communication that has to tell us whether an action is aggressive or not. A breakdown in communication can therefore lead to violence,47 which was also the conclusion of the President’s Commission on Violence.48 We know now why: actions and events are not always self-explanatory and without communication they may be misread as aggressive. Notes 1. The Georgian alphabet does not have capital letters; hence titles transliterated from the Georgian will not have them. In our transliteration the letter x stands for the German “ichlaut” and the apostrophe following a letter indicates that the letter represents a glottalized or ejective stop. The letter q stands for a uvular “k” sound, and the letter k stands for an unvoiced velar stop. All unvoiced non-glottalized stops in Georgian are aspirated, which is not indicated in our transliteration since it is automatic for all such stops. The combination “gh” represents the sound of the Modern Greek gamma and the combination “ch” has the same sound as in English “church.” 2. Shota Rustaveli, The Lord of the Panther-Skin, trans. R.H.Stevenson (Albany: State University of New York Press). Trans. of vepxist’q’aosani. 3. V.I.Abaev, “O fol’klornoi osnove poemy Shota Rustaveli Vitiaz’ v barsovoi.shkure [On the Folklore Basis of Shota Rustaveli’s Poem The Lord of the Panther-Skin],” paper read at the College de France, February 19, 1966. Izvestiia AN SSSR, seriia literatury i iazyka, XXV, 4 (July—August 1966), 295–312. See Stevenson in Shota Rustaveli, The Lord of the Panther Skin, xxvi, note 1, also discusses the meaning of vepxi today and in Rustaveli’s time. 4. Kita Tschenkeli, Georgisch-deutsches Wörterbuch (Zurich: Amirani Verlag, 1966), s.v.vepxvi.

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5. Donald Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia. 2nd rev. ed. (1994; Surry: Curzon, 2000), 76; A.G.Baramidze, “The Lord of the Panther-Skin; a Georgian Perspective,” Shota Rustaveli, The Lord of the Panther-Skin, trans. of vepxist’q’aosani, 224. 6. R.H.Stevenson, “Epic: Georgian: VEPKHISTQAOSANI or THE MAN IN THE PANTHER SKIN,” Modern Encydopedia of Russian and Soviet Literature (Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Academic International Press, 1977–), 222; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 81; Baramidze, “The Lord of the Panther-Skin…” 226. 7. G.Shanidze, “Poezdka v lerusalim [Trip to Jerusalem],” Vestnik Akademii Nauk SSSR, XXXI, 8 (August 1961): 91–94. 8. Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 80. 9. C.M.Bowra, Inspiration and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1955), 57. 10. Viktor Zhirmunskii, “Literaturnye otnosheniia vostoka i zapada kak problema sravnitel’nogo literaturovedeniia [Literary Relations between East and West as a Problem in Comparative Literature],” Trudy iubileinoi sessii LGU: sektsiia filologicheskikh nauk (Leningrad: Leningrad State University, 1946), 153–78; here 167. 11. Stevenson, “Epic: Georgian,” 226. 12. Eleazar Moiseevich Meletinskii, Srednevekovyi roman [The Medieval Novel] (Moscow: Nauka, 1983), 208. 13. Meletinskii, Srednevekovyi roman, 198. 14. Elguja Georgievich Khintibidze, Srednevekovye i renessansnye aspekty poemy Rustaveli “vepxist’q’aosani”/Medieval and Renaissance Trends in Rustaveli’s “vepkhistkaosani” [The Man in the Panther’s Skin] (Tbilisi: Tbilisi University Press, 1993), 294. 15. Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric, Vol. I: Problems and Interpretations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 15–16. 16. V.I.Abaev, “Le Cheval de Troie.” Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilisations XIII (6), (November-December 1963), 1041–71; here 1059; Abaev, “O fol’klornoi osnove…” 311. 17. Mariam Karbelashvili, “Rustaveli’s Poem The Knight in the Panther’s Skin within the Context of Comparative Studies,” Bulletin of the Georgian Academy of Sciences, 153, 3 (1996): 474–77; here 476–7. 18. R.H.Stevenson, “Epic: Georgian,” 226; R.H.Green, “Courtly Love,” New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. 2003, 318–22; here 319. 19. C.S.Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 1. 20. Vladimir I.A.Propp, Istoricheskie korni volshebnoi skazki [The Historical Roots of the Magic Tale], 2nd ed. (Leningrad: Leningrad State University, 1986), 247. 21. Elguja Georgievich Khintibidze, “Lancelot and Avtandil.” The Kartvelologist: Journal of Georgian Studies 9 (Autumn 2002): 30–46; here 30–31. 22. Gijsbertus Koolemans Beynen, “Shota Rustaveli and the Structure of Courtly Love,” The Court and Cultural Diversity: Selected Papers from the Eighth Triennial Congress of the Courtly Literature Society, the Queen’s University of Belfast, 26 July–1 August 1995, ed. Evelyn Mullally and John Thompson (Woodbridge, U.K.: D.S.Brewer, 1997), 239–48; here 243. 23. R.H.Stevenson, “Epic: Georgian,” 228. 24. Gijsbertus Koolemans Beynen, “Shota Rustaveli and the Structure of Courtly Love,” 242. 25. Gijsbertus Koolemans Beynen, “Shota Rustaveli and the Structure of Courtly Love,” 244. 26. Shota Rustaveli, The Lord of the Panther-Skin, 214, note 39. 27. Khintibidze, Srednevekovye i renessansnye aspekty…, 294. 28. Harsha Ram, Personal communication. Second Chicago Conference on Caucasia, May 10, 2002. 29. Baramidze, “The Lord of the Panther-Skin,” 229. 30. Shota Rustaveli, The Lord of the Panther-Skin, 69. King Parsadan’s wife is mentioned a few times in the poem, but never by name; at least she gets more recognition than the spouses of

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King Saridan and King Rost’evan who are never mentioned at all. These spouses might very well have not been alive at the time of the narration but one would expect that that would have been mentioned. One expects inhabitants of India with their low communication skills to ignore or forget about spouses but the absence of Tinatin’s mother is very strange. The low level of attention and recognition the queens receive is striking in the light of the prominence of the princesses Tinatin and Nest’an-Darejan. This is very probably related to Queen T’amar’s ascension to the throne; she, like Tinatin, became a queen in her own right and not because she married a king. 31. The continuation of the story makes it clear that in this episode the lion is male and the leopard female, which is not obvious in Georgian, which has no grammatical gender. The pronoun is, for example, is translated into English as “(s) he” or “it.” 32. Jerome K Jerome, Three Men in a Boat; to Say Nothing of the Dog (1889; Hare, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1993), 155. 33. Charles Darwin, The Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals. Preface by Margaret Mead (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), 50–65. 34. Darwin, The Expressions of Emotions, 56–57. 35. Darwin, The Expressions of Emotions, 206–8. 36. Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), 29. 37. Lorenz, On Aggression, 30. 38. Lorenz, On Aggression, 169. 39. Lorenz, On Aggression, 185. 40. Lorenz, On Aggression, 214. 41. Abaev, “O fol’klornoi osnove,” 311. 42. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 132. 43. See Albrecht Classen in his introduction to this volume: “Introduction: Violence in the Shadows of the Court.” 44. Classen, “Introduction,” 17. 45. Lorenz, On Aggression, 216–17. 46. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, 155. 47. Classen, “Introduction,” 18. 48. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, a Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, June 1969 (New York: New American Library, 1969), 777.

9 Constructive and Destructive Violence in Jean d’Arras’ Roman de Mélusine STACEYL.HAHN As Albrecht Classen states in his introduction to this volume, violence is a ubiquitous force that has constantly shaped human history since time immemorial, and still shapes human history. One need only open to the first few pages of Genesis to observe that Cain, the very first soul born on Earth, committed the heinous crime of fratricide and that the end predicted for the human race in Revelation is that of fiery extinction. Although the specter of violence is not likely to disappear in the near future, as it circumscribes our past and present, we may perhaps better understand violence by observing how people in medieval times either engaged in what we might term violent activities or tried to mitigate the destructive consequences of violence. Attitudes toward the use of violence usually in the form of physical acts or harsh words may be positive or negative depending on who applies the violence, who becomes the recipient of violent acts, whether the violence is open or hidden, and to what purpose it has been wielded. As I will attempt to show in my chapter, violence can be both constructive and destructive depending on the variables mentioned above. When violence is applied in the name of human or divine law so as to maintain social order, right criminal wrongs, preserve one’s lands or the Christian faith, it is generally perceived as justifiable and beneficial. The recipients of such acts are outlaws, giants, or the Saracen other.1 In contrast, when violence is directed inward against family members, it generally has negative repercussions that threaten to dissolve the family or social structure, lead to personal exile and possible loss of salvation in the afterlife, menace the welfare of future generations, and snowball into a vicious cycle of reprisals. Familial violence, like molten lava, cannot remain hidden forever and the longer it smolders underground, the more violently it erupts; yet once brought to the surface, such violence can be expiated, and with a contrite and penitent heart, even the worst of sinners may find redemption. Violence is a predominant theme in Jean d’Arras’ Roman de Mélusine.2 In the beginning of the romance Mélusine’s act of vengeance against her father thrusts her from the Other World of the fairies to seek redemption among men through her marriage to Raymondin. Similarly, Raymondin’s involuntary slaying of his beloved maternal uncle, Aimery of Poitiers, makes him a social outcast until his liaison with Mélusine furnishes him with the material means to reintegrate himself into courtly society. Although their union is mutually beneficial, it is predicated on secrecy, in that Raymondin takes an oath never to see Mélusine on Saturday and therefore he is ignorant of her hybrid nature and she, in turn, is the sole person privy to Raymondin’s transgression. In their happy state of marital bliss and material prosperity where Mélusine’s will seems to dominate, neither one of them comes to terms with the enormity of his or her crime. The marks of their

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violence, however, cannot lie buried indefinitely and they erupt in the form of physical deformities that eight of their children bear and, as in other courtly romances where genealogy plays a key role, one child in particular inherits and intensifies the defect inherent in the lineage.3 Geoffrey Big-Tooth recapitulates and resolves the suppressed sins of his parents through two acts of homicide, the murder of his brother, Fromont, which resembles Mélusine’s suppression of her father in that it is an act of voluntary homicide, and of his uncle, the count of Forez, whose curiosity and jealousy prompted Raymondin to betray Mélusine, leading to his discovery of her hybrid nature. The latter death, although precipitated by Geoffrey’s rage, was in part occasioned by the count himself who slipped and fell to his death from a high tower. The element of chance, the slipping of the count’s foot (268), echoes the slip of Raymondin’s sword that killed Aimery (22).4 Raymondin’s horror upon learning of Fromont’s death forces him to reveal Mélusine’s secret, thus banishing her from human society and propelling him and his wife to engage on a course of penitence. Geoffrey’s blatant fratricide acts as the catalyst that strips away the veil of secrecy from violence, allowing it to be made public and finally exorcized. Like his parents, Geoffrey must also come to terms with acts of violence committed against family members and expiate those crimes through pilgrimage and penance. The violence described above, directed entirely against the family, forms one main thread of plot that radiates outward as one family member does injury to another. The violence is not limited to homicide: it can also take the form of speech. In fact, one may observe a snowball effect of destruction as one maligning tongue gives rise to a set of conditions that spark a chain of unhappy events. Mataquas betrays his stepmother, Presine, with words that prompt his father, Elinas, to break his oath to her, thus condemning Presine to exile.5 Presine’s expression of regret at her exile prompts Mélusine, together with her sisters, to punish their father by enclosing him within a magic mountain. Presine then punishes her daughters for this act with a malediction placed on each daughter. As a result, Mélusine’s redemption hinges on her marriage to a mortal contingent on an oath: her spouse must never attempt to see her on Saturday, for on Saturday she assumes the form of a serpent from the waist down. Like Mataquas, who uses words as weapons, the suspicious count of Forez utters doubts regarding his sisterin-law that compel Raymondin to break his oath, leading to his discovery of Melusine’s serpentine nature. Melusine forgives him this transgression until he betrays her a second time by reviling her in public and thereby condemning her to exile. Even though such acts of speech bring truth to light, their effects may be entirely destructive. There exist, however, other acts of violence that are just as raw and brutal, but these are considered entirely necessary and justified. Among them are the violent campaigns against the pagan Saracens in the name of Christendom and the vindication of seigniorial rights. This open, constructive, military, and legitimate violence reflects the avenging arm of human justice in defense of the court or the manifestation of the divine plan. In this context violence is viewed as a necessary evil, not a good in itself, but rather a means of establishing social order. Such violence falls within the public, rather than the interpersonal, familial domain, and reflects with some accuracy the social and cultural realities of the fourteenth century,6 whereas the destructive violence described above pertains to the mythic, supernatural realm that is reflected in Mélusine’s fairy, serpentine nature.

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As stated earlier, Mélusine has ten sons, eight of whom bear physical defects, often referred to as “mother marks” that reveal the supernatural origins of their mother.7 The eldest son, Urian, has one red and one green eye on an uneven face (48); Eudes, has one ear that is larger than the other; the third son, Guyon, has one eye higher than the other; Antoine bears a lion’s paw on his left cheek (78–79); the fifth son, Renaud, has only one eye; the most extraordinary of the sons, Geoffrey Big-Tooth, has an enormous tooth reminiscent of a boar’s tusk that juts out from his mouth; Fromont has a hairy patch on his nose like the pelt of a mole or weasel; and Horrible has three eyes (80). The last two sons, Remonnet and Thierry, are normal. According to Douglas Kelly, the normal physiognomy of the youngest sons attests to Mélusine’s change in nature toward a more fully realized humanity.8 As Presine ordained, Mélusine’s redemption hinges on her marriage to a mortal, a union that would allow her to lose her fairy nature and become mortal herself, thus giving her the opportunity to die a natural death and attain salvation. Mélusine does partake of human nature through her father, Elinas, but his premature death prevented his human nature from fully being passed on to her. As Gerhild Sholz Williams states: “had Elinas lived to a peaceful end, he would have passed on to his daughters his human nature [nature humaine]: he would have given them a soul.”9 We are never entirely sure of the extent to which she evolves toward human nature through her marriage to Raymondin; we can only make assumptions about her progress judging from the nature of her children. The theology regarding demons seems to take two directions. According to certain theologians such as Gregory the Great (540–604), who borrowed heavily from St. Augustine (345–430), and Isidore of Seville (570–636), demonic creatures were considered doomed to eternal damnation for lack of a material body that would enable them to attain salvation through suffering.10 If Mélusine were to become fully human, she could be subject to the salvation that Christ’s death made possible for humanity provided she atone for her sins. For Paracelsus (1493–1541), demons are without a soul; hence, according to this line of reasoning, Melusine’s marriage to Raymondin would eventually endow her with one, making her redemption possible.11 On the other hand, belief in the possible salvation of demons was considered heretical and so it is not surprising that Mélusine never attains this status in any definitive way.12 Mélusine’s sons are joined together in pairs which form a hierarchy: Urien/Guyon, Antoine/Renaud, Remonnet/Thierry, and Horrible/ Fromont, according to their personal affinities or, in the case of the latter pair, their contrasting traits, with the elder brother in each pair ranking slightly above his sibling.13 The first two pairs of brothers leave court in pursuit of adventure and marry foreign women: Urian proves more valiant than his younger brother Guyon and marries first, while Antoine outshines Renaud in battle and gives his brother permission to marry Aiglentine. Eudes, the second son, who stays settled close to home, marries a local girl, which enables him to become the future count of La Marche (145). Horrible and Fromont, both of whom are put to death, are paired as opposites. Horrible represents evil incarnate as he must be destroyed for having murdered four people while still a child, and Fromont, at the opposite extreme, represents the hallowed monk who is martyred for being the most spiritually minded of the siblings.14 Perhaps in keeping with their normal physiognomy, Thierry and Remonnet, the last two sons who are without physical blemishes or mother marks, stay close to home and they, like their brother Geoffrey, inherit their parents’ estates rather than obtain territory abroad

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through marriage or chivalrous exploits. The Roman de Mélusine fully substantiates Georges Duby’s observations regarding the activities of juventus (youth) born to aristocratic families.15 Among the trends noted by Duby consistent with our romance is the imperative for young men to travel in order to seek their fortunes abroad by serving foreign lords, which often included participation in the Crusades, and seeking brides far from home due to the scarcity of land and potential marriage partners at home, especially if an elder sibling has been designated as primogenitor. Duby also remarks how these youths were often engaged in violent and aggressive activity. Our romance poses one anomaly, however: it is the eldest sons who seek adventure abroad while the younger sons remain home to inherit the parental estates, an exception perhaps explained by the supernatural character of the elder sons whose demonic stature gives them added physical strength and a greater need to prove themselves due to their physical deformities, which could be interpreted as moral defects. As I will demonstrate later, Geoffrey Big-Tooth is clearly the most remarkable of the brothers, and the entire romance is centered on his adventures, the exploits of the former sons setting the stage for Geoffrey’s entry and eventual predominance over them. The distinction between the public and private sphere, that is, whether violence becomes a matter of protecting the social order by upholding the laws of the land against common criminals or pagan outsiders for the maintenance of order and justice or whether it is relegated to strictly family matters, seems particularly important in determining the acceptability of violence. In the public domain, Mélusine, much like her fairy predecessor the Lady of the Lake, becomes the mouthpiece of chivalry and proper conduct.16 She espouses generally accepted modes of behavior one typically finds in legal codes, courtly romance, and treatises for princes. She puts forth her moral discourse in two very similar monologues, the first one pronounced to Urian and Guyon before they sail off to combat the Saracens in Palestine (84) and a second, condensed version to Antoine and Renaud, just before their departure for the Kingdom of Luxembourg (152–53). In this speech, Mélusine outlines the accepted definition of chivalric conduct that we may use as a standard by which to judge the actions of her sons. In fact, the speech is a sort of template that patterns and foreshadows the way her sons will conduct themselves in military campaigns and as lords. What concerns us here are the first two items of her discourse: Enfans, je vous encharge que en tous les lieux que vous serez, que tous les jours vous oyez le service divin tout premierement que vous faciez autre chose. Et en tous voz affaires reclamez Faide de vostre Createur, et le servez diligemment, et amez et creniez comme vostre Dieu et vostre Createur. Et Nostre Mere Saincte Eglise soustenez, et soiez si vrais champions encontre tous ses malveullans. Et aidiez et conseilliez les vefves et les orphelins, et honnourez toutes dames, et confortez toutes pucelles que on vouldroit desheriter desraisonnablement. (84–85) (Children, wherever you go, I bid you attend holy mass every day before doing anything else. In all your endeavors ask the help of your Creator, serve him diligently, love and fear him as your God and Creator. Uphold our Holy Mother the Church, and be her true champion against all her enemies. Help and advise widows and orphans, honor all ladies, and defend all maidens whom anyone might wish to disinherit unreasonably.)

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Precisely these issues, the defense of the Church and questions of inheritance, particularly as they affect imperiled daughters who represent the sole heirs to their father’s estate, launch Mélusine’s first two sets of sons off on their adventures. These are also the standards that justify acts of violence and make them socially acceptable. Urian and Guyon leave court when two sailors returning from Jerusalem tell them of the king of Cyprus and his daughter, Hermine, against whom the Saracens have launched an assault. The young Lusignans depart, and motivated by a desire to rescue the king, gain honor, and acquire land through conquest (82–83). Potential friction between the brothers over land disputes is diffused by the social code of ethics that demands that knights set off on adventure to conquer territory abroad. Urien addresses this issue in his request to his parents for permission to travel: Car nous regardons que nous sommes ja viij. freres, et sommes bien tailliez d’estre encores autant ou plus, et a dire que vostre terre feust partie en tant de pars, cellui qui devroit tenir le chief de la seignourie ne pourroit pas gueres tenir d’estat, veu le noble et grant estat que monseigneur mon pere et vous tenez. (83) (For we see that we are already eight brothers and there may possibly be even more of us in the future, supposing your land were divided into as many shares, the one in charge could hardly maintain the noble and great estate that my father and you now hold.) Fraternal rivalry forms a major theme in other tales concerning brothers, such as the twelfth-century Roman de Thèbes and the well-known biblical examples of Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob, Joseph and his brothers, Absalom and Amnon, and as might be expected it does erupt between Raymondin and the count of Forez and his sons Geoffrey Big-Tooth and Fromont. However, such enmity plays a surprisingly minor role, given the potential for sibling rivalry among so many brothers and the premium the romance places on land and the protection of seigniorial rights. The open acknowledgment of this difficulty together with successful marriages abroad establishes the peace by keeping competition among the brothers to a minimum.17 The battles that do erupt between brothers appear to be based more on private jealousies than on land disputes or plays for power. Mélusine equips her sons for their adventure with supplies, ships, magic rings, and men. On their way to Cyprus they meet two of the king’s allies, the master of Rhodes and the captain of Limasson, who participate in the rescue mission and act as advisors. They inform the Lusignans that the long-established peace between Christians and Muslims has been broken because the king of Cyprus refused to allow Hermine to marry the sultan of Damascus. The king made a possible marriage between them contingent on the sultan’s conversion to Christianity, a proposition he rejected. Thwarted love is given as the motivation for the hostilities: “Et sachiez, puis que le soudant a ceste emprise encommencee par force d’amours, tant fait il plus a doubter, car amours a tant de puissance qu’elle fait aux couars faire grans emprises, et de telles que ilz n’oseroient penser” (94; And know, since the sultan has begun this campaign prompted by the force of love, he is all the more to be feared, for love has such power that it causes cowards to undertake great exploits they would not dare otherwise dream of). However, what started

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out as the private vengeance of a jilted lover soon becomes inflated into a full-fledged holy war. Not only are the Lusignans to avenge the king of Cyprus, but also the death of Christ: “Cilz qui ont devocion de vengier la mort de Nostre Createur et de essaucier sa loy, et de aidier au roy de Chippre, si se traye soubz ma banniere, et ceulx qui n’en auront devocion passent par dela le pont” (109; Those devoted to avenging the death of our Creator, defending his law and helping the king of Cyprus, move under my standard and those who are not so inclined, cross over the bridge). As news of the brothers’ heroic exploits against the Saracens are recounted at the court of Cyprus, Hermine falls in love with Urian, sight unseen, despite learning of his physical defects. This love from afar inspired by prowess attenuates the stigma attached to Urian’s physical defects by emphasizing his moral virtues and reinforcing one of the major themes of the romance, the power of love to redeem or overlook physical deformity. This, in turn, creates a link between Urian and Mélusine whose “otherness” demands the understanding of a compassionate spouse. During the hostilities, the sultan wounds the king with a poisoned dart, which leads to his eventual demise. The king takes his revenge by striking the sultan, but complete victory over the sultan is reserved for Urian who later slays him in hand-to-hand combat. Lacking a male protector, Hermine is left in a vulnerable position, as it was difficult for a woman to rule without the physical force and authority of a man. This is in contrast to Melusine whose leadership is never questioned because her supernatural powers and gift of prophecy make her equal or superior to men. In “Women and Power,” George Duby comments: By reason of their physical constitution, of the nature of their body, and the sex which defines them, women were deemed incapable of exercising the power of command, potestas. They nevertheless succeeded in participating in that power by using another power, that of immaterial order, which attached to their sex: the love which their sons bore them and which secured respect for them and the assurance of being heard in their old age; the desire they instigated in men, and which softened men: the fear also which they evoked, for men were persuaded that womanhood was invested with mysterious power, that women maintained touch with invisible forces [italics mine].18 It is precisely these womanly, invisible, and supernatural forces epitomized in the matriarch Mélusine that give her power over her husband and sons, a power that her daughter-in-laws cannot wield. After a series of battles where the Lusignans show their mettle, the Saracens are thoroughly defeated. On his deathbed the king of Cyprus asks Urian to marry his daughter in the guise of a don contraignant (120), even though it is obvious that Hermine and Urien have great affection for each other. The use of the boon is designed to enhance Urian’s chivalric valor, as the text is very careful to indicate that the Lusignans’ quest for adventure is not based on a thirst for material wealth, but rather for justice and right: “car nous ne sommes pas venus pour avoir du vostre, ne or, ne argent, villes, chasteaulx, terres, ne finances, mais pour acquerre honneur et destruire les ennemis de Dieu et essaucier la foy catholique” (118; for we have not come in order to possess your goods, nor for gold, villages, castles, land, and money, but to acquire honor, destroy the enemies

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of God, and defend the Catholic faith). The violence of war ends peacefully in the marriage between Urian and Hermine and the almost immediate conception of a son, Hervy. Urian now takes his father-in-law’s place and becomes the new king of Cyprus. The marriage between Guyon and Florie, the daughter of the king of Armenia, follows a similar pattern with a slight, but significant variation: this damsel falls in love having seen her champion, further mitigating any stigma attached to Guyon’s physical defects, which are not mentioned.19 Guyon, like Urian, battles fiercely against his foes. He sends two conquered pagan vessels and their crew of a hundred Saracen soldiers as booty to Florie and her father; yet according to his status as younger sibling, Guyon’s prowess plays a lesser role. Like the king of Cyprus, the king of Armenia dies leaving Florie as his only heir, but not without sending a letter on his deathbed to Urian asking him to arrange a marriage between Guyon and his daughter. The framework of an arranged marriage lessens any stigma of land grubbing that could possibly be attached to Guyon and the added spice of true love ensures the eventual success of the union. When Antoine and Renaud learn of the exploits of their elder brothers, they are eager to imitate them by setting off on adventure with the aim of aiding another damsel in distress, Chretienne, the heiress of the Kingdom of Luxemburg. This young woman is rendered even more defenseless than the previous damsels in that her father has already died. The duke of Alsace seeks her hand in marriage, but she spurns him because she does not want to be taken by force, nor does she relish marriage with a widower. Like the damsels mentioned above, she, too, falls in love with her champion despite his physical defects upon learning of his valor on the battlefield. After a series of battles, Antoine defeats the king of Alsace and hands him over to Chretienne, who eventually makes peace with him. The don contraignant motif is used once more, this time by Chretienne’s barons, as a means of establishing a marriage between Chretienne and Antoine, who becomes count of Luxembourg and, on the eve of the wedding, Bertran is conceived. The king of Alsace, now an ally, receives news that his brother, King Frederick of Bohemia, another king with a daughter as sole heir, has been attacked by Muslims in the city of Prague. He promises to make Renaud king of Bohemia should his brother die and if the Lusignans come to his aid. This launches the brothers on another bloody campaign that features Renaud as conquering hero. Before their arrival, King Frederick is killed by the Muslim King Selodus of Krakow. Renault avenges his death by slaying Selodos in hand-to-hand combat just as Urian previously avenged the death of the king of Cyprus, thus ending the hostilities. The duke of Alsace, after consulting first with Frederick’s barons and his niece, Aiglentine, asks Antoine to agree to a marriage between Renaud and his niece. The couple is soon married and a son, Olliphars, is conceived on the wedding night. The military campaigns of the Lusignans contain elements of both crusade cycles and romance: the exploits of the heroes are exaggerated; the Saracens are depicted as formidable, treacherous, and cruel enemies; the Saracens are amazed at the prowess of their adversaries; the Christians bring peace to the region even though the Saracens outnumber them; damsels fall in love with the heroes based on their military victories; the hero’s prowess demonstrates his worthiness to rule and his subsequent suitability as a husband; and the knight and future king forms alliances with his neighbors, often converting foes into friends whether they be Christian or Saracen. Male bonding or the ability of the hero to make a friend from a former adversary is another means by which

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violence may be contained. This occurs when Geoffrey Big-Tooth’s Saracen opponent, the sultan of Damascus, becomes a valued friend and ally after observing Geoffrey’s mettle on the battlefield at the moment the defeat of his own army becomes inevitable. The Saracen’s affection is so deep and loyal that he personally escorts Geoffrey on a tour of the Holy Land.20 Constructive violence, directed either at the pagan “Other” or social outlaws, is entirely sanctioned by the social order and leads to an eventual long-lasting peace as guaranteed by the hundred-year-and-one-day truce. Marriage plays an extremely important role in the romance. It marks the end of war and the beginning of peace, as the early military campaigns of the sons of Lusignan end in marriage and both Raymondin and Melusine find in marriage temporary happiness and a solution to their condition as social outcasts. With the exception of Melior’s nephew, who seeks to seduce her using force, there exists virtually no example of lust outside of wedlock or of incest, themes so typical of romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. All sexual desire seems to be contained within marriage. Presine and Melusine insist on marriage right from the beginning, and almost every wedding and even marriage bed of their descendants is sanctified by the presence of a bishop. The immediate conception of children further sanctifies the unions, as such conceptions were considered acts of divine grace. Although heiresses marry out of political expediency, they seem to do so happily and the specter of forced marriages is heavily condemned. The purpose of marriage for the males appears to be the acquisition of lands and the production of sons. For the females marriage offers protection and security, and in the case of Melusine, the hope of salvation. Although Melusine is somewhat forced into marriage by her mother’s malediction, she chooses her mate and her fairy nature gives her the upper hand in the management of the estates she brings to the union. It is true, nonetheless, that her salvation hinges on the compassion of her husband and by extension on the clemency of a patriarchal god. Oddly enough, the sons that remain to inherit the family estates, Geoffrey, Thierry, and Remmonet, do not marry and appear to have no offspring. Thus, any rivalry between these brothers arising from questions of succession is quelled. I must now turn to the most extraordinary member of the Lusignan family, Geoffrey Big-Tooth. Geoffrey’s first adventures are patterned after his father’s. Immediately after their marriage, Mélusine urges Raymondin to vindicate his father’s seigniorial rights to Brittany. Raymondin’s father, Hervy de Leon, lost his rightful claim to his inheritance when he fled into exile after having killed his lord’s nephew. As is the case in other romances where genealogy plays a strong role, the actions of the father often set the stage for the challenges his son will face insofar as the son must bring to fruition the unfinished family business. Therefore, the son will embark on roughly the same sort of adventures as his father.21 Both Raymondin and Hervy fall in love with a fairy mistress after committing an act of homicide and are reintegrated into courtly life through the magical powers of the fairy mistress, who allows them to acquire land independently of a lord. These acts of violence are not premeditated: Hervy kills his lord’s nephew in self-defense and Raymondin accidentally spears his uncle in an effort to kill a wild boar. Raymondin succeeds, however, where his father failed, for he vindicates Hervy’s honor and heritage by battling and defeating in a judicial duel the son of the man who betrayed him. In a similar vein, Geoffrey ventures to Ireland to vindicate his father’s rights by subduing a group of rebellious subjects led by the Sion brothers, Giron, Claude, and Clarembaut, who refuse to pay homage. These outlaws have terrorized, imprisoned, and robbed many

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of Raymondin’s subjects (197). The avenging arm of justice in these episodes concerns civil crimes against the court rather than crimes against Christendom and the purpose of Geoffrey’s campaign is to establish order and maintain justice rather than gain land through marriage. Gerhild Scholz Williams has noted how there appears to be two standards of punishment, a merciful and clement one reserved for the Lusignan family, who are allowed to atone for their crimes through penance (with the exception of Horrible), and a severe, more archaic one applied to those outside this family group, which results in immediate sentencing and death.22 Punishments reserved for the Saracens range from death by drowning at sea to burning. Those who engage in civil strife are often hanged (Josselin and Olivier de Pont de Léon, the Sion brothers). One exception to the harshness of this rule occurs when the lady of Valbruyant, with her children in tow, successfully intercedes on her husband’s behalf in order to spare his life. After this adventure has been completed, Geoffrey learns from a knight who has just arrived from the Middle East that his brothers Guyon and Urian are under attack by the Saracens. Geoffrey embarks on a crusade to rescue them and in doing so demonstrates his superiority over them in terms of chivalry, for only Geoffrey can restore a lasting peace to the region. The campaign also gives him the opportunity to renew ties with his brothers and to become acquainted with his sisters-in-law and their children. The adventure ends with a pilgrimage to Jerusalem led by one of his fiercest enemies, the sultan of Damascus, who has now become a staunch ally. Later on, in a parallel adventure, Geoffrey heads a campaign to bring a lasting peace to Luxembourg and Bohemia, therefore demonstrating his superiority over Antoine and Renaud and his ability to subdue two disparate foreign territories, the Middle East and Europe. This campaign ends in the marriage between Antoine’s son Bertrand and the duke of Alsace’s daughter Melide, thus making Bertrand the future king of Alsace. In keeping with his enormous proportions, Geoffrey’s next opponent upon his return to France is the giant Gardon, who has been unjustly demanding tribute from Raymondin’s subjects. With the giant, the romance brings us into the realm of the marvelous, which gives Geoffrey a privileged status, as he is the only son to deal with a supernatural foe. As the male double of his mother, Geoffrey participates in the supernatural order and he, rather than Raymondin, accomplishes Mélusine’s unfinished projects.23 After Geoffrey has proved his worth by defeating his adversaries using force in the name of justice, he commits an act of familial violence so savage that his father not only disowns him, but also feeling repulsed by the crime, which he associates with Mélusine’s serpent body, Raymondin breaks his oath to her by revealing her secret in public. This unpardonable crime is Geoffrey’s murder of his brother Fromont, along with all the monks of the Abbey of Mallezais. The exact cause of Geoffrey’s enmity seems to be a mixture of shame at having a brother for a monk and distrust of monks whom he calls “lecheor,” a term signifying a love of pleasure or perhaps a sin of a sexual nature.24 The episode might be a social commentary on the clergy whom the narrator perceives as grasping for revenues obtained from wealthy novices. Although it would appear normal that at least one son among ten enter the clergy, Geoffrey’s revulsion uncovers a latent hostility to the priesthood that seems to contradict the very Christian tone of the previous Crusades into Cyprus and Armenia. We must not forget, however, that this episode was probably inspired by the historical Geoffrey of Lusignan, viscount of Chatellerault, who

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did destroy and make amends before the pope for desecrating the Abbey of Maillezais.25 The episode reflects what Marina S.Brownlee has identified as “interference,” the juxtaposition of mythography and history, which permeates the text and renders its message ambiguous.26 Melusine justifies the carnage by stating that the monks deserved to die because of their illicit lifestyle. If Geoffrey embodies the masculine double of his mother, who critics generally accept as representing a mythic goddess of fertility,27 Fromont’s pursuit of the spiritual life and all that it implies, the rejection of temporal goods and celibacy, stands in direct opposition to the material wealth, progeny, and bounty that Mélusine provides. Fromont’s celibate vocation links him directly to the patriarchy, and Geoffrey’s extinction of this link to the father echoes Melusine’s extinction of Elinas and Raymondin’s involuntary homicide of his surrogate father, Aimery. By killing the monks, Geoffrey menaces the law of the father that embraces celibacy; yet both Geoffrey and Melusine are caught up in a double bind: they desire to free themselves from the law of the father, but need at the same time the mercy of a clement God for their salvation. Geoffrey’s act of fraternal violence echoes the discord between Raymondin and the Count of Forez who expressed doubts regarding Melusine’s Saturday absences. In both instances one brother imposes a higher standard, the religious life or scruples of a moral order, which disrupts the status quo. As Gabrielle M.Spiegel has remarked, Melusine’s hybrid nature represents a blurring of distinctive cultural categories that menace social order and hierarchy.28 The purported reason for the count’s suspicion hinges on a question of honor: Does Mélusine sequester herself because she is committing adultery or is she some sort of supernatural being doing penance? If the count of Forez represents social conscience or propriety, the voice of reason that wishes to make sense of Mélusine’s mystical powers, his inquiry into her true nature expresses anxiety regarding her powers. Another, more hidden reason might be the count’s jealousy over his brother’s material success, even though Raymondin obtained his goods independently of the family patrimony and therefore does not pose a direct threat to the count’s share of the inheritance. Or perhaps he reflects Raymondin’s own doubts, a sort of double who expresses Raymondin’s legitimate fears. In examining the German version of the tale by Thüring von Ringoltingen, Albrecht Classen states that suppressed anger stemming from an inferiority complex on the part of Raymondin, who is constantly overshadowed by his wife and her accomplishments, may have triggered Raymondin’s betrayal (439).29 Sylvie Roblin believes that Geoffrey must separate from his mother in order to reconnect with his father.30 Similarly, Raymondin must separate from Mélusine to reconnect with himself and his own crime. As long as Mélusine shields Raymondin from all adversity, he lives in a state of unreflective pleasure and remains blissfully ignorant of human evil. As Roblin has observed, the symbol of the boar signifies the social conscience of the Lusignans. Geoffrey’s brutal act, a fratricide leading to a symbolic matricide, serves as a catalyst, initiating both Raymondin’s and his own separation from Mélusine, which projects them all on a course of penance. In a sense, by killing his female double and precursor, Geoffrey usurps Mélusine’s power and takes her place. He does not, however, recognize himself as the author of her demise; he blames it instead on his uncle, the count of Forez, and avenges his mother’s death by killing him. As if in response to Geoffrey’s act of matricide, Mélusine commits an act of infanticide: she directs her husband to suffocate

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her monstrous son Horrible in a cave, for she believes he will destroy all the wealth that she has sought to establish. Raymondin, who was traumatized by the murder of Fromont, exhibits no horror at the expedient murder of this offspring who embodies the very worst of fairy nature. It is only after Mélusine has disappeared that Geoffrey will accomplish his third and greatest adventure especially designed for him by his maternal fairy grandmother, Presine. As is typical of genealogically oriented romances, the adventure concerns the discovery of family origins. Only one select member of the lineage, normally he who represents its highest virtues, is destined to accomplish it and bring the knowledge he has gained back to court. Before the secret can be learned, however, the knight must be worthy and pass through a series of trials. In this case, the people of Holland, impressed by Geoffrey’s defeat of Gardon, ask Geoffrey to protect them from Gardon’s brother, Grimaut, who demands they pay him tribute. The battle between Geoffrey and Grimaut is somewhat comic in that the giant is so huge he can barely perceive his adversary Geoffirey wounds the giant who disappears into a narrow hole in the Mountain of Northumberland. Within the mountain, at the site of his paternal grandfather’s tomb, Geoffrey learns he has a legitimate, human patriarch. Now that Mélusine has lost her human semblance, the land will be linked to an ancestral patriarch in order to restore legitimacy to the Lusignan family and allay anxieties created by links to demonic and female agency. This follows the trend that slowly unfolded over time of ascribing greater importance to the male bloodline to the detriment of female ancestry.31 The text expresses strong anxieties regarding landholding by women and there is a continual movement of land from daughters to husbands. Mélusine herself makes a special point of outlining her royal human ancestry before being exiled to the Other World. The rest of the romance attempts to tie up loose ends with respect to both constructive and destructive violence. Regarding the former, Geoffrey and five of his brothers make a final campaign to bring peace to the region of Luxemburg and Bohemia by imposing martial law. Later, Geoffrey acts as an intermediary who arranges family reunions as he moves between his father’s hermitage in Aragon and Lusignan and plays a major role in administering the family estates. In a final adventure, which appears to have been crafted by Melusine from the “other side” for the sake of reminding Geoffrey of his filial duties, a mysterious, supernatural knight demands that Geoffrey pay a yearly tribute for maintenance of an ornament atop a tower. He disputes the claim in a prolonged battle against the supernatural knight whom he defeats. The purpose of the adventure is perhaps to reconfirm Geoffrey’s suitability to rule and his free and independent right to the family estates. Through this act he is directed to establish a hospital and chapel for the salvation of his father, thereby linking his property to charitable Christian values and the hope of salvation in the afterlife. At the close of the romance, peace has been established in all regions where the Lusignans reign, both at home and abroad, and Geoffrey ensures that Thierry will succeed him. Destructive violence, that is, violence directed against the family, can only be atoned for through the Church by acts of penance. Raymondin goes on a pilgrimage to visit the pope in Rome to confess his sins and eventually becomes a hermit in Aragon as penance for the betrayal of his wife. Raymondin’s rejection of the world seems an apt atonement,

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although we might wonder why he never repents for the death of his uncle. According to Gerhild Scholz Williams: If one could accept that Conte Aimery has some foreknowledge, it might be easier to understand why Remond never really does penance for his uncle’s murder. The aura of sanctity that surrounds Remond at the very end of his life renders moot the question of his guilt. If the stars did not merely predict but also compel, Remond’s actions would have been beyond his control, and his sin—conforming to our judgment—would be one of impulse, not of deliberation.32 Geoffrey, following in his father’s footsteps, also confesses his sins to the pope and as penance rebuilds the Abbey of Mallezais. In the end, the salvation of most of the family members appears virtually assured except for that of Melusine, whose salvation hangs in the balance as she is condemned to suffer her serpentine nature until the Day of Judgment, her salvation dependent on a merciful God, the prayers of the human family she has left behind, and perhaps the prayers of the new tenants of the Poitou estates she continues to monitor. Mélusine’s true penance occurs only after she quits the human realm, when her body permanently takes on its serpentine form, as she never appears to suffer in her human form. When Raymondin spies on her as half-serpent, she seems to be enjoying herself, splashing water about with her tail, an image that suggests sexual pleasure.33 Melusine’s non-admission of guilt regarding the death of her father, her equanimity when facing tragedy, her lack of humility and compassion for the dead make her appear strangely inhuman. Her ethics are marked by expediency, for she never regrets the loss of Fromont, the monks killed at Maillezais (her main concern is Raymondin’s reaction), or expresses sorrow over the death of Horrible, even though we know she loves her other children dearly. Melusine lacks contrition of heart, one of the essential steps following the act of confession, which signifies true penance.34 She peacefully accepts all adversity as the will of God and views some acts of violence as divine justice, as in the case of the extinction of the monks and Horrible. It is precisely this lack of compassion together with the realization of the irrevocable finality of death that Raymondin laments when he publicly berates her, at the moment when the outrage of his grief overrides reason: “Hee, tres faulse serpente, par Dieu, ne toy ne tes fais ne sont que fantosme, ne ja hoir que tu ayes porte ne vendra a bon chief en la fin. Comment raront les vies ceulx qui sont ars en grief misere, ne ton filz qui s’estoit renduz au crucefix? Il n’avoit yssu de toy plus de bien que Fromont” (255; Ha, false serpent, by God, you and your deeds are nothing but illusions, and none of the children you have borne will ever amount to anything in the end. How will those who were burned in painful suffering and your son who has taken holy orders be brought back to life? The only good thing born of you was Fromont). In the face of violence, whether justified, accidental, or gratuitous, the image of the individual, lost forever and suffering, remains. By condemning Mélusine, Raymondin essentially condemns himself for having killed Aimery by evoking the haunting image of the dead whose loss of life must be accounted for. The story of Mélusine treats first and foremost lineage and family relations, where the family in question suffers from a fateful flaw. This flaw carries over from one generation

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to the next until it either destroys the family as it amplifies in severity or until a privileged member of the family finds a way to attenuate or redeem it. The fatal defect of the Lusignan clan is the deadly sin of “yre” or anger that takes the form of violence directed against family members, as they engage in almost every form of violence imaginable: parricide, fratricide, matricide, and infanticide.35 When the Lusignan family represents the body politic, that is, constructive violence either in defense of the Church or public order, the physical defects of the brothers become positive attributes of force and prowess, rather than symbols of moral depravity. The drama caused by these acts of violence does not lead to moral condemnation, for the heroes, although somewhat bizarre, bring about social harmony from chaos,36 and their defects seem to give them even greater ferocity in battle. Here, violence is safely directed at the miscreant “Other” and, as Williams has suggested, a double, harsher standard of punishment is inflicted on them, often in the form of hanging or burning. However, when violence is directed inward, toward family members, the consequences are always devastating, even though a path to salvation through penance is made available. Violence against family members brought Raymondin and Mélusine together, and the violence embodied in their son Geoffrey, who recapitulates their crimes through two murders, breaks the veil of secrecy, forcing Raymondin to come to terms with his own crime mirrored in his union with Mélusine. When sin remains hidden, there exists no possibility for redemption, as confession is the first step toward contrition. The breaking forth of family violence through Geoffrey forces Raymondin to ponder his union with Melusine, on whom he blames his son’s violence without seeing that his own act of violence made possible their relationship and prosperity. When Raymondin condemns Mélusine, he condemns himself, for his angry words have resulted in Mélusine’s loss of human life and once again he becomes an involuntary assassin. Raymondin’s harsh words violate one of the basic tenets of medieval marriage, the duty of a spouse to forgive, while at the same time patiently chastise, his or her mate for the purpose of moral edification. Ironically, when Raymondin goes to Rome to confess his sins to the pope and engage on a course of penitence, he refuses the goods of the world that Aimery’s death and Mélusine’s fairy magic made possible. The destructive violence pertains to the mythic, supernatural, Oedipal realm that circumscribes family relations. It is this violence that leaves its mark on the lineage with questions of salvation hanging in the balance.37 Notes 1. Regina M.Schwartz in The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) argues that the very construction of the other as a separate identity involves an act of violence in itself. “This book is about violence. It locates the origins of violence in identity formation, arguing that imagining identity as an act of distinguishing and separating from others, of boundary making and line drawing, is the most frequent and fundamental act of violence we commit. Violence is not only what we do to the Other. It is prior to that. It is the very construction of the Other,” 5. 2. Several articles in the following collection of essays treat the theme of transgression and the violence resulting from it. Mélusine of Lusignan: Founding Fiction in Late Medieval France, ed. with an introduction by Donald Maddox and Sara-Sturm Maddox (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); see Kevin Brownlee, “Mélusine’s Hybrid Body and the Poetics of Metamorphosis,” 76–99; Gabrielle Spiegel, “Maternity and Monstrosity: Reproductive Biology in the Roman de Mélusine” 100–24; Stephen G.Nichols, “Melusine between Myth

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and History: Profile of a Female Demon,” 137–64; and Marina S.Brownlee, “Interference in Mélusine” 226–40. Gerhild Scholz Williams devotes a chapter to transgression in Defining Dominion: The Discourses of Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern France and Germany. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Civilization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), “Magic and the Myth of Transgression,” 23–44. See also Ana Pairet, “Mélusine’s Double Binds: Foundation, Transgression, and the Genealogical Romance,” Reassessing the Heroine in Medieval French Literature, ed. Kathy M.Krause (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 71–86. 3. The Lancelot-Grail cycle, which often parallels the Roman de Mélusine in theme and structure, offers an example of this in both the lineages of King Arthur and Lancelot where the sin of luxuria seems to haunt both family lines from one generation to the next. In the case of the former, the sin intensifies and culminates in Mordred, leading to the extinction of the entire family line. We may trace luxuria first in Utherpendragon who engenders his son King Arthur in adultery, Arthur then engenders Mordred in incest with his half-sister, and finally Mordred engages in an act of symbolic incest by attempting to usurp King Arthur’s lands and wife. In the case of Lancelot’s lineage, luxuria intensifies as we pass form the platonic love Lancelot’s grandfather felt for a married woman, Ban of Benoic’s engendering of Hector des Mares out of wedlock, and finally Lancelot’s adulterous liaison with Guenevere. Galahad, as Christ figure, redeems the fatal flaw of his lineage. This pattern reflects its probable source, the biblical story of salvation where original sin infects the entire human race until it is redeemed through Christ. 4. “Mais le conte, qui moult doubta la mort, cuida saillir en une petite garite qui estoit prez. Et le pié lui failly, et tumba tout contreval le rochier, et fu tous desroez et mort avant qu’il venist aval.” (But the count who greatly feared death, thought he could escape by jumping onto a small garret nearby. His foot slipped and he fell downward and smashed against the rock, he died before he reached the ground; 268.) “Et il venoit de grand randon. La lemelle et l’espie eschappa en glissant sur le porc, et vint actaindre le conte qui estoit versez a genoulx, par my le nombril, de part en part.” (And he came forward at great speed. The blade of his sword got away from him and slid over the boar, striking the count who was kneeling, transpiercing him right through the navel from one end to the other; 22.) All references to the romance are based on the Stouff edition; translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. Jean d’Arras, Mélusine. Roman du XIVe siècle, ed. Louis Stouff (Dijon: Publications de l’Université, 1932); rpt. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1974. 5. Mataquas’ betrayal of his stepmother and his hatred of her, “Mais Mataquas, qui estoit filz du roy Elinas, la haioit moult” (9; But Mataquas, who was the son of Elinas, greatly hated her), can be explained by the threat her daughters pose to his share of his father’s inheritance and his fear of her influence over his father. Presine swears she will avenge herself on Mataquas and his descendants, but this threat is never carried out: “Quant Presine l’ouy, si respondi moult horriblement: Fauk roys, tu m’as failli de convenant, dont il te mesavenra, et m’as perdue a tousjours mais. Et scay bien que c’est par ton filz Mataquas. Et me fault partir soubdainement, mais encore seray je vengié de ton filz, ou de ses hoirs, par ma seur et compaignie la dame de l’Ille Perdu.” (9–10; When Presine heard him, she responded with great outrage: False king, you have broken my covenant and misfortune will befall you. You have lost me forever. And know that your son Mataquas is at fault. I must leave straightaway, but I will be avenged on your son or his heirs through my sister and the company of the Lady of the Lost Isle.) 6. For parallels between the romance and actual historical events, see Louis Stouff, Essai sur Mélusine: Roman du XIVe siède par Jean d’Arras (Dijon: Publications de l’Université, 1930); Emmanuelle Baumgartner, “Fiction and History: The Cypriot Episode in Jean d’Arras’s Mélusine,” Mélusine of Lusignan, 1996, 185–200; Jacques Le Goff and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Mélusine maternelle et défricheuse,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 26 (1971): 587–622.

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7. For a discussion of “mother marks,” see Douglas Kelly, “The Domestication of the Marvelous in the Mélusine Romances,” in Mélusine of Lusignan, 1996, 32–47. 8. Ibid., 44. 9. Defining Dominion 30. In a footnote, Williams cites the following passage: “La vertu du germe de ton pére toy et les autres eust attrait a sa nature humaine, et eussiés esté briefment hors des meurs, nimphes et faees, sans y retourner” (The virtue of your father’s seed would have granted his human nature to you and the others; and you would have briefly left the state of nymphs and fairies without returning to it; 12), 162. 10. Dyan Elliott devotes a whole chapter, “On Angelic Disembodiment and the Incredible Purity of Demons,” to this question in Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 127–56. Unfortunately, a detailed discussion of this fascinating topic exceeds the purview of this chapter. 11. On Paracelsus and Melusine, see Claude Lecouteux, Mélusine et le chevalier au cygne. 2nd ed. (1982; Paris: Imago, 1997), and Gerhild Scholz Williams, Defining Dominion. On Apuleius and the five qualities of demons with respect to Melusine, see Stephen G.Nichols, “Mélusine between Myth and History: Profile of a Female Demon,” Mélusine of Lusignan, 1996, 137–64. 12. Jean-Jacques Vincensini, applying the theories of René Girard, posits that the supernatural qualities of Mélusine, which blur the distinction between the profane and the sacred, pose a threat to the community and therefore she must be sacrificed. “Samedi, jour de la double vie de Melusine,” Mélusine continentales et insulaires, ed. Jeanne-Marie Boivin and Proinsias MacCana (Paris: Champion, 1999), 77–103. 13. A hierarchy, although somewhat different from the one I have indicated above, is made explicit when the brothers march off to Luxemburg: “La fut la joye grant que les freres s’entrefont. Et se mettent au chemin ensemble, deux et deux, tousjours les plus ainsnez devant, Oeudes et Anthoine vont devant, et puis le roy Regnault et Gieffroy, et après vont Remond et Thierry, et tout leur ost après, banniere desploiee.” (Great was the brothers’ joy. And they set off together two by two, with the elder brothers always ahead, Eudes and Antoine in front, followed by King Renaud and Geoffrey, and after them Remonnet and Thierry, followed by the entire army, banners unfurled; 281–82.) 14. For a comparison between Fromont and Horrible, see Elisabeth Pinto-Mathieu, “Fromont et Orrible: deux fils légendaires de la fée Mélusine,” Mélusine: Actes du Colloque du Centre d’Etudes Médiévales de l’Université de Picardie Jules Verne, ed. Danielle Buschinger and Wolfgang Spiewok (Greifswald: Reineke-Verlag, 1996), 135–47. 15. See Georges Duby, “Youth in Aristocratic Society: Northwestern France in the TwelfthCentury,” in The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 112–22. 16. For a comparison between the Lady of the Lake and Melusine, see Emmanuelle Baumgartner, “La Dame du Lac et la Mélusine de Jean d’Arras,” Melusines continentales et insulaires, 181–92. 17. See Georges Duby, “Lineage, Nobility and Knighthood” (59–80), “The Nobility in Medieval France” (94–111), “The Structure of Kinship and Nobility” (134–48), and “French Genealogical Literature” (149–57) in The Chivalrous Society. 18. Georges Duby, “Women and Power,” Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 84. 19. Questions of beauty and blemishes are treated in the following articles: Françoise Clier Colombani, “Le Beau et le laid dans le Roman de Mélusine” Le beau et le laid au moyen âge, Senefiance 43 (2000): 81–103, and Patricia Victorin, “Le Nombril de Melusine ou la laideur en partage dans la Mélusine de Jean d’Arras,” Senefiance 43 (2000): 533–46. 20. For a discussion of the ennobling nature of love and friendship between men and its salutary effect on politics and social life, see C.Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost

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Sensibility. The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). For a discussion concerning the relationship between Geoffrey and the sultan of Damascus, see Emmanuelle Baumgartner, “Fiction and History: The Cypriot Episode,” Mélusine of lusignan, 1996, 192–94; on male bonding, see Richard W.Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 215–19; on the Crusade motif, see Marie-Thérèse de Médeiros, “L’idee de croisade dans la Mélusine de Jean d’Arras” Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales (XIIIe-XVe s.) 1 (1996): 147–55. 21. This creates another parallel with the Lancelot-Grail cycle where Lancelot vindicates his father by winning his ancestral land back from Claudas, a feat his father was unable to accomplish. Galahad finishes many of the adventures Lancelot could not complete, such as the Adventure of Simeon’s tomb, the cooling of the boiling waters of a spring, and the remaining adventures of the Grail quest. 22. Gerhild Scholz Williams, Defining Dominion, 32. 23. See Gabrielle M.Spiegel, “Maternity and Monstrosity: Reproductive Biology in the Roman de Mélusine” Mélusine of Lusignan, 1996, 100–24. 24. In Frédéric Godefroy’s Lexique de l’ancien français (Paris: Champion, 1982), “lecheor” is defined thus: “homme livré à l’impudicité ou à la gourmandise, homme de plaisir; galant d’une femme mariée; terme d’injure en général,” 303. 25. Jacques Le Goff and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Mélusine maternelle et défricheuse,” 595. 26. Marina S.Brownlee, “Interference in Mélusine” Mélusine of Lusignan, 1996, 226–40. 27. Jacques Le Goff and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “mélusine maternelle et défricheuse,” 599–600. For further discussions of Mélusine as an agricultural fertility or mother goddess, see also Claude Lecouteux, Mélusine et le Chevalier au cygne, 1982/1997, 45–49, and Jean Markale, Mélusine. 2nd ed. Spiritualités. Espaces libres, 37. Spiritualités vivantes (1983; Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1993). 28. See “Maternity and Monstrosity: Reproductive Biology in the Roman de Mélusine” Mélusine of Lusignan, 1996, 100–24. 29. See Albrecht Classen, “Women in Fifteenth-Century Literature: Protagonists (Mélusine), Poets (Elizabeth von Nassau-Saarbrücken), and Patrons (Mechthild von Österreich)” Der Buchstab tödt-der Geist macht lebendig: Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Hans-Gert Roloff. I and II, ed. James Hardin and Jörg Jungmayr (Bern: Peter Lang, 1992), 431–58; ibid., The German Volksbuch. A Critical History of a Late-Medieval Genre. Studies in German Language and Literature, 15 (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), 141–62. 30. Sylvie Roblin, “Le Sanglier et la serpente: Geoffrey La Grant’ Dent dans l’histoire des Lusignan,” Métamorphose et bestiaire fantastique au Moyen Age, ed. Laurence HarfLancner (Paris: Ecole normale supérieure de jeunes filles, 1985), 247–85. 31. Georges Duby, “The Nobility in Medieval France,” The Chivalrous Society: “Appropriation of the power to command and to punish, exercised only by a male or transmitted to his son, together with those purely masculine heritages of honor, fief, title, family surname and coat of arms, and the gradual exclusion of married daughters from the paternal inheritance, had all without doubt helped to confer dynastic features on noble families, especially the more illustrious ones, while at the same time pushing the maternal line into the background and restricting its role in the transmission of the quality of ‘nobility,’” 103. 32. Gerhild Scholz Williams, Defining Dominion, 37. 33. For a Freudian interpretation of the myth of Mélusine as an expression of male anxieties regarding femininity, see Denyse Delcourt, “Métamorphose, mystère et féminité: Lecture du Roman de Mélusine par Jean d’Arras,” Le moyen français 33 (1993), 85–107. 34. For an analysis of the three elements of penance, penitentia, confessio, and satisfactio, in Christian doctrine as it operates in the romances of Jean Renart and Gerbert de Montreuil, see John Baldwin, Aristocratic Life in Medieval.France: The Romances of Jean Renart and Gerbert de Montreuil, 1190–1230 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000): 215–36.

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35. The word “yre” occurs in key passages dealing with Raymondin’s anger against Mélusine, Geoffrey, and his brother, the Count of Forez and the word is also used to describe Geoffrey’s hatred of monks. 36. The grotesque body and seemingly calamitous activities of Geoffrey Big-Tooth, who somehow brings about social stability from chaos, anticipates the outrageous yet noble antics of Gargantua and Pantagruel in Rabelais’ works. 37. For Sarah Sturm-Maddox’s insightful inquiry into the question: “Will Mélusine be redeemed, too?” see “Configuring Alterity: Rewriting the Fairy Other,” The Medieval Opus: Imitation, Rewritingand Transmission in the French Tradition: Proceedings of the Sympoisum held at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, October 5–7 1995, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, ed. Douglas Kelly (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1996), 125–38, and Sara Sturm-Maddox, “Crossed Destinies: Narrative Programs in the Roman de Mélusine” Mélusine of Lusignan, 1996, 12–31.

10 The Violent Poetics of Inversion, or the Inversion of Violent Poetics: Meo dei Tolomei, His Mother, and the Italian Tradition of Comic poetry FABIAN ALFIE The topos of violence is pervasive among the comic literature of the Italian Middle Ages. Threats, imprecations, insults, and challenges were routinely hurled against adversaries and friends alike, and authors frequently depicted acts of violence committed against themselves and others. In the literary tradition of Italy, such language appeared in lyrics treating political topics (e.g., Rustico Filippi’s “A voi che ve ne andaste per paura”; Pietro de’ Faitinelli’s “Veder mi par già quel da la Faggiuola”) as well as occasional poems addressed to specific individuals (e.g., Cecco Angiolieri’s I non vi miro perzar, morditori”).1 In the 1950s, critic Mario Marti published some of the fundamental studies of the Italian comic movement in general, and of Tolomei in particular. To explain the motif of invective, Marti cited the example of Pietro de’ Faitinelli, who had penned a sonnet praising Death for taking his garrulous wife from him, but who historically was survived by her.2 Marti concluded that such violent language represents purely literary exercises, and not the actual expression of animus on the part of the poets. While Marti’s generalization about all Italian comic poets drawn from one particular case is problematic—particularly when dealing with sonnets of political insult where the issues literally had life and death consequences—it did shift the discussion away from the historical figures of the poets and their interpersonal relationships. In other words, Marti’s conclusions turned scholarship from the positivistic approach of analyzing the presupposed biographical veracity of the comic sonnets, and instead he induced critics to examine the literary and artistic motivations for such statements. This chapter addresses one such example of the literary representation of violence among Italian comic poets (a movement also labeled as “jocose” by some critics). In the case to be examined, the poet depicts the violent acts committed against him by a family member. It is my intention to demonstrate that his representations of violence serve broader ideological and artistic purposes, and raise social and cultural issues current in his age. Little is known about the life of the Sienese poet Meo dei Tolomei. The date of his birth into the powerful Tolomei family is unknown, but his name first appears in city documents in January 1279, alongside that of his brother, Mino. Because he acted as the spokesman for the Tolomei family in the transactions of January 1279, it is reasonable to suppose that he had already reached the age of majority, while Mino had not. The documents of January 1279 thus imply the date of Meo’s birth as ca. 1260. On May 7, 1285, Meo married Mita di Bindino, a member of the Salvani family, which was

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traditionally opposed to the Tolomeis; the marriage may have represented an overture for peace between the Tolomeis and the Salvanis. Meo participated in Sienese politics, three times acting as a member of the general council (1290, 1291, 1295). During the 1290s, however, Meo’s brother Mino surpassed the poet politically, becoming podesta of San Gimignano during the early years of the fourteenth century. On March 19, 1295, Meo sold a house and vineyard to Mino. The last documentation of Meo’s life is dated to June 3, 1310, when he named an attorney to defend him against some unknown accusations.3 The date of the poet’s death has not been ascertained. Meo composed some twenty sonnets and a longer, irregularly metered lyric, “A nulla guisa,” all in the style of Italian jocose poetry.4 Mario Marti identified some of the key thematics of the vernacular comic poetry of Italy as misogyny, poverty, the complaint against misfortune, money, satiric attacks against friends, and vituperative insults of enemies.5 Another influential scholar of such literature, Maurizio Vitale, furthermore, describes the language of such poetry as imitating verbal speech, for the writers appropriate dialogues, imprecations, and slang for their verse.6 The authors of comic lyrics also utilize an earthy lexicon, which directly denotes parts of the body, the plebeian classes, food, drink, everyday objects, and references to municipal life.7 Discussion of the history of Italian jocose verse, however brief, will shed some light on Tolomei’s poetry. The comic poetry of Italy was not born ex nihilo, but evolved out of the broader medieval traditions, having its roots in the Latin goliardic poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,8 and having connections to various vernacular literatures throughout Europe.9 In many respects, Italian jocose poetry follows in the broader European tradition studied by Mikhail Bakhtin, in that it too portrays its subjects in a distorted, “grottesque” manner.10 While the links between Italian jocose verse and the folk humor of the carnival are not always readily apparent,11 the poetry utilizes a similar aesthetics in representing a type of topsy-turvy world, where the body, bodily functions, and worldly matters are expressly denoted using coarse, realistic language. A member of the literary generation that preceded Tolomei, Rustico Filippi (ca. 1230– ca. 1295), the founder of the movement of jocose poetry in Italy, composed some fiftynine sonnets. Of those, almost half, twentynine sonnets, are written in close imitation of the amorous poetry of the late Duecento. In contrast, Rustico’s other thirty sonnets appropriate the poetics of vituperium (also known as improperium): the derision and insulting characterization of other individuals. By splitting his poetic corpus almost equally between comic and noncomic material, Rustico acknowledges his adherence to the general trend of literary theories of the Middle Ages. Following Hermann the German’s translations of Averroes, many medieval literary theorists defined the two styles, tragedy and comedy, according to two ethical functions: that of praising the virtuous, or of blaming the sinful.12 In his translation, Averroes positioned Aristotle’s Poetics in an ideological and moral framework, thus making it easier for the Scholastics to view literature in relationship to the other sciences and to theology.13The dialectic of praise and blame became so entrenched that even non-Averroistic writers incorporated it into their thought. Matthew of Vendôme, for instance, asserted that the authors’ ethical purposes could be found in the very descriptions of individuals, depending on their abilities to provoke admiration or condemnation (Book I, Paragraph 58).14 As V.A.Kolve writes regarding medieval comedies in general, “laughter was respectable in the Middle Ages partly because it could teach.”15 Rustico’s verse is almost evenly divided between

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literature that praises (the so-called tragic, or love poetry) and literature that blames (the comic examples of vituperium). Rustico’s example sets the tone for the vernacular comic tradition that will succeed him, for he establishes the oppositional nature of jocose poetry to the literature of the high styles. For centuries to follow, it will overturn the values of the greater culture as well as those expressed in the literature of noncomic writers. The general information about jocose poetry is relevant to understanding Meo’s sonnets. Marti characterizes Meo’s poetic style as focused on the technique of vitperium, that is, on insult and denigration.16 While reductive, Marti’s description of Tolomei’s poetics is not inaccurate, for like Rustico before him, Meo excels at the topos of improperium. The three main targets of Meo’s abuse are his mother, a former friend Ciampolino, and his brother, Mino, whom he also identifies by the nickname Zeppa. When writing about his brother, Meo emphasizes Mino’s cowardice. In one sonnet, for example, he describes Mino fleeing at the very sound of his enemies’ footsteps.17 He opens another sonnet by speaking directly to Mino, goading him to defend himself against offenses both physical and verbal, such as those cast at him by the poet himself.18 In his poetry, Tolomei also complains about his mistreatment at the hands of Ciampolino; Ciampolino was formerly a friend, perhaps a homosexual lover, to the poet. In one instance, he asserts that he will permanently sever his heart from Ciampolino, now becoming his mortal enemy, for his former friend too tries to deprive him of his possessions.19 Tolomei’s mother rounds out the trinity of his literary enemies. In several instances, he accuses her of conspiring with Mino Zeppa to rob him of his money. In one sonnet, the poet asserts that she has acted so that Mino’s bushel overflows with coins while his own is empty.20 In another poem, Meo claims that all three of his enemies collude together to rob him of his wealth.21 The poet’s treatment of his mother—or rather, her mistreatment of him—is examined more fully below. Suffice it to say at this point in the discussion that, in two cases, he portrays her as far more aggressive than in the citations above. It appears that Tolomei enjoyed some renown among the literati of his age. A marginalium in the manuscript Chigiano L. VIII. 305 asserts that Dante addressed to Tolomei the poem “Sonnet, if Meuccio [Meo’s nickname] appears before you” (“Sonetto, se Meuccio t’è mostrato”); the marginal note reads simply: “meuccio tolo. from siena” (f. 60r).22 Mario Marti suggests that Cino da Pistoia wrote the sonnet, “Meuccio, I bore the expression of a lover” (“Meuccio, i’ feci una vista d’amante”) to him as well (“Tolomei, Meo dei” 620). However, Meo enjoys far less posthumous renown than he did among his contemporaries. Studies specifically treating Tolomei’s poetry are few in number.23 Instead, his current fame is overshadowed by that of his more famous Sienese contemporary, the comic poet Cecco Angiolieri (ca. 1260–1312).24 Indeed, Meo’s name and reputation are usually linked to those of Angiolieri, and to a degree his poetry needs to be read by the light of Angiolieri’s. Meo wrote a redaction of Angiolieri’s sonnet, “I am so thin that I am transparent” (“I’ son sì magro che quasi traluco”), retaining the mqpif verse and changing the subsequent thirteen lines.25 But, perhaps unfairly, scholars frequently interpret Tolomei as an epigone, casting him as a second-rate imitator of the supposedly more masterful Angiolieri. Angiolieri, for example, makes repeated reference to Meo’s poetics in his verses as well.26 In an interesting twist of fate, the earliest editions of Angiolieri’s poetry confused and co-mingled his verse with that of Tolomei.27 As shall be shown below, the accidental editorial confusion of the two lyric productions, which

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took place in the early decades of the twentieth century, is not the only area of overlap between the two poets. The vituperative thematics of jocose verse frequently challenge even the strongest affective bonds.28 Vernacular comic poets commonly express hatred of wives (e.g., Pieraccio Tedaldi’s “El maladetto dì, che io pensai”) and of blood relations (e.g., Meo’s invectives against Mino Zeppa). Given the complex intertextual—and possibly interpersonal—relationships between Meo and Cecco, a brief discussion of Angiolieri’s anti-paternal poetry is warranted at this time. Among the various topics of Cecco Angiolieri’s literary production, some twenty sonnets are dedicated to the hatred he bears toward his father, the banker Angioliero Angiolieri. Cecco often depicts his father chastising and mistreating him. He writes, for instance, that his father’s punishment will not cause him to fall out of love.29 One of the frustrations of the poet’s existence, however, is the fact that his wealthy father remains alive, thereby denying him his inheritance. In fact, he believes, his father is so strong that he will only pass on when the oceans dry out.30 The poet frequently wonders aloud why Angioliero does not die.31 In another sonnet, the poet suggests that his octogenarian father, following alchemical prescriptions of the day, eats gold to stay healthy.32 In one poem, the poet directly asks Death to take either himself or his father. With either outcome, he writes, his situation will improve; either his torment will end or he will finally satisfy his desires.33 Angiolieri suggests elsewhere that his own cruel and terrible hatred might actually be the cause of his father’s extreme longevity.34 Later in the same sonnet, Cecco provides a short narrative to explicate his contempt for Angioliero:

l’altrier li chiesi un fiasco di raspeo, che n’ha ben cento cogna ’l can giudeo; in verità, vicin m’ebbe che morto. “S’i’ glil’ avessi chèsto di vernaccia?” diss’io, solamente a lui approvare: sì mi volle sputar entro la faccia” (vv. 6–11) (The other day I asked him for a flask of raspeo [i.e., inexpensive wine], for that Jewish dog [i.e., usurer] has more than one hundred barrels—in truth, he almost killed me! “And, if I had asked for vernaccia [i.e., a more prized wine]?” I said, only to test him—he tried to spit in my face!) It would be a mistake, however, to presume a biographical veracity underlying such statements. Rather, the ideological underpinnings of the poet’s opprobrium toward his father may be the ironic inversion of a topos of hagiographical literature.35 Holy individuals of the Middle Ages frequently encountered familial, often parental resistance to their callings to follow God. Angiolieri seemingly parodies that topos, casting himself as a type of anti-saint.36 Instead of incurring a parent’s wrath in obedience to God, Cecco curses Angioliero in the hopes of acquiring worldly possessions. Mario Marti describes Tolomei’s anti-maternal poetics as if in competition with Angiolieri’s anti-paternal poetry. The two poets, Marti states, tried to outdo one another,

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with each poet juxtaposing images, hyperboles, and curses to those written by the other.37 There is some validity to Marti’s perspective of seeing the two poets’ productions in light of each other. Both poets slander a parent, and the motivations of the two poets’ parents are similar. Angioliero prevents Cecco from taking possession of his patrimony (by not dying!); Tolomei’s mother, in contrast, tries to divert Meo’s inheritance to his brother, Mino Zeppa. Yet, Tolomei’s poetry does not constitute mere imitation of Angiolieri’s verses. Instead, while demonstrating indebtedness to Angiolieri, Tolomei fashions his sonnets according to his own artistic exigencies. Angiolieri, to be sure, makes mention of his father’s abuse, but Meo goes further in portraying his mother’s malevolence. He writes:

Su lo letto mi stava l’altra sera e facea dritta vista di dormire, ed i’ vidi mia madr’amme venire, empiosamente, con malvagia cera. E’n sul letto mi salì molto fèra, e man mi pos’a la gola, al ver dire, e solamente per farmi morire, e se non fosse ch’i’ m’atai, mort’era. Sicché non fu [co]tanto ria Medea che le piacqu’al figliuol la morte dare, che mie madre non sia tanto piu rea, ch’a tradimento mi vols’affogare perch’a Min dimanda’ la parte mea; là ‘nd’i’ lel queto, lassim’ella stare! (I was on my bed the other night and gave the impression that I was sleeping, and I saw my mother come to me pitilessly, with an evil expression on her face. And she, most wild, climbed in bed with me and put her hand on my throat—to tell the truth—only to kill me; and had I not saved myself, I would be dead! Thus, Medea, who wanted to give death to her son, was not as evil—no, my mother is even more evil! For she wanted to strangle me in betrayal, because I asked for my portion from Mino; but now I do not speak of it, so may she leave me in peace.) The poet constructs the sonnet skillfully, emphasizing its disturbing topic. Phonically, he structures the sonnet around off-rhymes. The rhyme words of the quatrains employ consonance in relation to one another, –eRa (A) and –iRe (B), while those of the tercets use assonance, –EA (C) and –ArE (D); moreover, the first rhyme of the tercets (C) is itself assonant with the first rhyme of the quatrains (A). The net effect of the similar, but not identical, offrhymes provokes in the reader a disquieting sensation similar to that felt by the narrator. The form of the sonnet follows its signification, as it is dedicated to the

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narration of a shocking discovery. In the first quatrain, the poet opens the sonnet by describing what could be, at first, mistaken for a Freudian situation; his mother, with a crazed look on her face, climbs into bed with him (vv. 1–4). The subsequent four verses, however, reveal that the subject matter of this sonnet is not sexual in nature, but violent. Tolomei’s mother tries to strangle him, and had he not already been awake, and had he not defended himself, she would have succeeded (vv. 5–8). In the first tercet, he contrasts his mother to the classical character, Medea (vv. 9–11). In Euripides’s play, Medea killed her children to avenge the betrayal of her husband, Jason. Tolomei, in contrast, appears to understand Medea according to the medieval literature of misogyny, which cited various classical, biblical, and historical women as exemplary of the sins of all women.38 For example, in the thirteenth-century Venetian poem, Proverbia quae dicuntur super natura feminarum, a compendium of women’s vices, the anonymous poet lists Medea among the most heinous, malice being her only motivation (vv. 112–20).39 Tolomei closes the sonnet by referencing a trope of his poetics, that of his mother’s participation in Mino’s usurpation of his patrimony (vv. 12–14). Collectively, the sonnet’s form and meaning come together to portray a decadent world, where sons cannot have faith in their family members, particularly their own mothers. In the poetry of Meo’s contemporary and occasional model Cecco Angiolieri, the poet foregrounds his poetic persona by speaking candidly of his hatred of his father; as shown in the examples above, he speaks openly about his sentiments, far more so than about the causes of his contempt. As Tracy Barrett notes, one of the main thrusts of Angiolieri’s poetry is the development of a consistent, instantly recognizable self-portrait in his verses.40 In the sonnet above, conversely, Tolomei simply recounts the events that occurred, while the self-presentation of the poet is almost nonexistent. He does not express any subsequent emotion provoked by this experience. Does he now hate his mother? Fear her? Is he saddened by the experience? Meo does not say and such an omission is significant. The poet utilizes the technique of objectively composing a small, exemplary narrative—a technique that plays a role in Angiolieri’s poetics—and expands upon it. The readers of Meo’s sonnet encounter only the narrative, which took place several days ago; but the sonnet lacks a poetic persona that might guide the interpretation of the events narrated. The slanderous intents inherent to the technique of improperium are only implicitly communicated in this sonnet. The poet simply allows the narrative to speak for itself, expecting the readers to draw their own conclusions about his mother’s reprehensible character. In this way, Tolomei closely follows Matthew of Vendôme’s prescription that the mere description of a character should provoke the readers’ praise or, as in this case, blame. In dealing with his anti-maternal sonnets, Tolomei crafts his own unique style, one that differs somewhat from that of Angiolieri’s anti-paternal lyrics. The above sonnet does not represent a singular case in Tolomei’s poetic production. Instead, in another sonnet, he describes his mother’s second attempt at murdering him:

Sì fortemente l’altrier fu’ malato ca tutt’avia perduto ’l favellare, e mie madre, per farmi megliorare, arrecom[m]’ un velen sì temperato, ch’av[e]ria non chemme, m’atossicato

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el mar, e disse:—Bei, non dubitare!— Ed i feci per cenni:—A me non pare!— Di non ber nel me’ cor[e] fui fermato. Ed ella disse:—Odi, che pur ber[r]ai, e questa prova perder ti faraggio!— Allor della paura terminai; e comincia a dir:—Nessun mal aggio!— Né bev[v]i da sua man, né ber[r]ò mai, né bevere’ se mmi facesse saggio. (I was so sick the other day that I had completely lost the power of speech; and my mother, to make me better, brought me a potion so tempered that it would have poisoned not only me, but also the sea. And she said: “Drink, have no doubt.” And I said by way of gestures, “I don’t think so,” for I was firm in my heart not to drink. And she said: “Listen, you will drink, and I will make you lose this contest!” So, because of my fear, I stopped, and I began to speak: “I have no sickness!” Nor did I drink from her hand, nor shall I ever drink, nor would I ever drink if I were wise.) As with the previous sonnet, Tolomei objectively constructs a narrative with virtually little commentary in the narrator’s voice. In the incipit verse, he reiterates a minor motif of his lyric production when he presents himself as ill. For instance, in the incipit line of a sonnet related to this one, he asserts that his mother teaches him about medicine.41 Similarly, in the opening verse of a sonnet of debated attribution, Meo writes that he was suddenly stricken with a nervous tick.42 In the case of the sonnet under examination, he was afflicted by a sickness that took from him the power of speech (vv. 1–2). His mother, under the guise of attempting to cure him, brings him a poisonous potion and urges him to drink it (vv. 3–6). Ironically, given the sonnet’s subject matter of the poet’s loss of speech, Tolomei dedicates much of the poem to relating in direct discourse the conversation with his mother (vv. 7–10). The technique of dialogue is common among comic poets, particularly Cecco Angiolieri. Angiolieri composes some six sonnets that relate his conversations, almost all of them parodies of the lover’s attempt to woo a lady. 43 Tolomei uses the poetic technique in a vituperative sonnet, thereby taking it out of its more frequent context of mock-amorous verse. He also appears to present the technique of dialogue itself in a ridiculous manner by casting one of the interlocutors as someone who simply cannot speak. As his mother insists that he imbibe the concoction, his fear causes the illness to lift, and he flatly refuses it (vv. 11–12). At this point, the poet comments on the situation in his own voice, asserting that if he is wise, he will never drink from her hand (vv. 13– 14). The last two verses of the sonnet represent the only break with his usual method of objectively representing the scene. However, the final couplet says nothing about his relationship to his mother, nor of the emotions provoked by her attempt at filicide. As in

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the sonnet previously studied, Meo appropriates techniques of other comic authors but expands upon them. He does not slavishly imitate the other writers but instead forms his own unique style. Many Italian comic poets wrote sonnets in which they hurled invective against a stereotyped old woman, a topos labeled by Paolo Orvieto and Lucia Brestolini as vituperium in vetulam.44 Writers such as Rustico Filippi,45 Guido Guinizzelli,46 Guido Cavalcanti,47 and possibly Cecco Angiolieri,48 all predecessors or contemporaries of Meo, composed such verse. It is possible, therefore, that Tolomei’s anti-maternal lyrics constitute his contribution to the thematics of vituperium in vetulam. He does not, however, describe his mother’s horrible nature, a commonplace of the poetry communicating vituperium in vetulam; indeed, Meo does not even state that she is advanced in years. Furthermore, as mentioned above, he does not inveigh against her in any way in his poems. Therefore, if Tolomei participates in the motif of the denigration of the old woman with these sonnets, it is only quite distantly. Instead, he seems to capitalize not on her status as an elderly female, but on her role as his mother. As previously discussed, the slander of family members by comic authors may not be inspired by personal animosity, but is often employed for literary and cultural critiques. Meo’s sonnets, which portray his mother’s acts of violence, are no exception. In both sonnets under examination, Tolomei foregrounds the culturally determined symbolic valences of the term mother. Clearly, by presenting her as murderous, he satirizes the biological role of the mother as the giver of life; in these instances, she intends to end the life of her offspring. Meo’s filicidal portrayal of her may have held special meaning for the readers of fourteenth-century Italy. By the last decades of the Duecento, the social and economic organization of the communes of central and northern Italy had caused the increasingly wealthy mercantile bourgeoisie to eclipse the aristocratic nobility in terms of power and influence. The culture did not keep pace, however, with the socioeconomic changes, as writers and theorists still valued the concept of nobility derived from familial bloodlines. Instead, those writers who addressed the new societal relationships did so either with a sense of nostalgic remorse over the loss of nobility (e.g., Folgore da San Gimignano’s sonnet-cycles of the days of the week and of the months of the year)49 or with the intent of satirizing the insolence of the rising merchants (e.g., Bindo Bonichi’s sonnet “Gli asin del mondo sono i mercatanti”).50 Johan Huizinga’s comments about fourteenth-century France and Flanders are pertinent to Italy as well: “the life form of the nobility still retains its relevance over society long after the nobility as a social structure had lost its dominant meaning.”51 The violent intentions toward family members depicted by comic authors may be interpreted according to the changes occurring in Italian medieval society. No longer were ancestors valued as the sources of family nobility, honor, and pride, but instead they were, in the case of Cecco’s depiction of Angioliero Angiolieri, bankers who amassed the patrimonies eagerly awaited by their children. Tolomei’s mother, rather than considering the poet the (presumably) first-born son who will perpetuate the family’s prestige, sees him as the competitor for the family’s wealth with her favorite, Mino Zeppa. And Meo, in his verse, publicly slanders her as a modernday Medea. In other words, the familial violence depicted by Meo and others may itself constitute the critique of the loss of traditional family consciousness wrought by the economic boom of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

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Both of Tolomei’s sonnets, furthermore, parody the concept of the mother as the provider of the first sustenance to the baby; Tolomei’s mother, as represented in these sonnets, embodies the diametrical opposite of lactation. Such an interpretation is obvious in the latter sonnet, where she encourages her son to drink not milk but poison. Yet the parody of the idea of the mother’s breast milk is also not alien to “Su lo letto mi stava Paltra sera.” At two key instances in that sonnet, the poet introduces notions of digestion when describing his mother’s actions. He first specifies that she placed her hand upon his throat (man mi pos’a la gola; v. 6; emphasis added). The lexeme gola (Latin: gula) denotes, of course, the poet’s windpipe, but in a broader cultural sense, it also connotes the digestive tract. Medieval treatises on vice, for example, speak of the sin of gluttony as related to the throat, gula (Casagrande and Vecchio, 3). Later in the sonnet, Meo returns to the semantic field of alimentation when he describes her attempted murder with the verb affogare (v. 12). In Italian, the term affogare means “to drown” implying that some form of liquid is instrumental in her attack.52 Thus, twice in that sonnet he portrays her behaviors with terminology containing undertones of ingestion. In the cultural context of early-fourteenth-century Tuscany, moreover, the semiological association of mothers and breast milk bore another connotation. In his unfinished literary and linguistic treatise, De vulgari eloquentia (ca. 1304), Dante attempts to justify the use of the vernacular language in literary texts, particularly poetry. As Gary Cestaro notes, Dante defines grammar (i.e., Latin) as an artificial construct that requires schooling to be mastered.53 But, Cestaro writes, for Dante the vernacular is the “idiom of the wetnurse,” naturally and effortlessly acquired by the infant while suckling at the breast.54 In other words, the mother—or more accurately, the woman who suckles the infant—also provides the first language to the child. Cestaro asserts that, in the De vulgari eloquentia, “[t]he vernacular is ‘nobilior’ (and thus worthy of scholarly/poetic attention) precisely because it is natural (‘naturalis est nobilis’).”55 Because of the naturalness of its acquisition, Dante insists, the vernacular is more worthy as a literary language than Latin. The vernacular should not be treated in the raw, so to speak, but needs to be refined by grammar into what Dante calls an “illustrious vernacular” (volgare illustre) (I, xvi).56 In fact, he criticizes those poets who adopt their municipal dialects rather than striving to transcend those dialects in a pan-Italian language (I, xiii, I). Although Dante does not specifically mention comic literature, such a statement could be viewed as a rebuke of the authors of jocose poetry.57 Comedies, as defined by literary treatises, were supposed to use the ordinary speech of everyday individuals. As Geoffrey of Vinsauf writes: “For comic material [i.e., subject-matters] rejects discourse reworked by art, and requires only plain speech” (Res comica namque recusa/Arte laboratos sermones: sola requirit/Plana; vv. 1890–92).58 Italian comic poets tended to use their local speech, although their verses cannot always be called rightly dialect poetry per se. To be sure, Dante’s treatise is an idiosyncratic text, which he intended as the justification of the poetry he had written thus far.59 Caution is required, in short, when applying its strictures to writers other than Dante. At the same time, however, careful use of it to illuminate aspects of Tolomei’s poetry is not reckless. In the De vulgari eloquentia, Dante synthesizes the thought of other theorists, including that of Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, John Garland, and Brunetto Latini.60 Thus, although strictly applicable only to Dante’s own lyric poetry, the treatise contains culturally relevant notions in Meo’s fourteenth-century Tuscany. Furthermore, as exemplified by Dante’s

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lyric, “Sonnet, if Meuccio appears before you,” Meo may have known Dante personally, although the extent of any informal communication between the poets cannot be ascertained in any way. The concept of the mother as the provider of language is present in Meo’s two sonnets under analysis. In the sonnet “Su lo letto mi stava Paltra sera,” the mother contradicts that role by trying to suffocate her son. In the lyric “Sì fortemente l’altrier fu’ malato,” the poet at first finds himself unable to speak (v. 2), but then the fear of his mother restores his abilities (vv. 11–12). In both instances, Meo parodies the symbolic role of the mother as the source of the offspring’s first language. While portraying her as filicidal, Meo depicts her stripping him of his language (although in the latter sonnet, his linguistic abilities return due to her actions). The poet’s praxis may represent more than the simple overturning of a cultural definition of motherhood. Meo’s sonnets may not present three different and distinct facets of motherhood, but instead may reflect a more unified conception. As exemplified by Dante’s analogy of language learned from the wet nurse, the connection between mothers and sustenance, on the one hand, and mothers and language, on the other, is not as unrelated as they might appear at first. During the later decades of the thirteenth century, some thinkers increasingly considered food and language to be in relationship to one another. According to Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, theorists of morality such as William Peyraut, Robert of Sorbonne, and the anonymous author of De lingua viewed the throat and tongue as the loci of certain vices, namely, of gluttony and of the so-called verbal sins.61 They drew links between the organs of the mouth and the sins of the mouth, those related both to eating and to speaking. Alimentation and language were not actions considered as distinct from one another, but were associated through the sinfulness of humankind. The reminiscences of food and of speech in Meo’s portrait, therefore, also underscore the cultural conception of certain sins that was current during the decades of his lifetime. Not only does Tolomei’s description of his mother suggest a cultural link between alimentation and speech, but it also establishes a sinful undertone to these sonnets beyond that of their subject matter. The sonnets, which relate food and language to violent actions, remind the readers of the sinfulness of treachery and of murder, of course. But the sense of sin generated by the reminiscences of culturally defined definitions of motherhood also reflects directly on Meo’s choice of poetic style itself. One of the many verbal sins found in such treatises—sins, like gluttony, conceptually related to the tongue—was contumelia, defamation, also known as improperium and vituperium.62 By drawing the connection between food and speech within the image of the wicked mother, Meo highlights, perhaps unintentionally, the accidental blurring of terminology from treatises on sin and those of literature, particularly of the comic style. Literary treatises could suggest vituperium as a literary topos; yet, vituperium was not at all sanctioned by moral theology nor by the ecclesiastical authorities of the day. It was, by definition, a sin. The connections between gluttony, idiom, and, on the other hand, poetry in these sonnets subtly indicate Tolomei’s own sinfulness to the readers. His mother does not succeed in preventing him from eating or speaking and therefore—as should be expected—he vituperates others. Making matters worse, Meo publicly slanders a parent in these sonnets. After all, the Fifth Commandment exhorts: “Honor your father and your mother” (Exod 20:12). As John Dagenais asserts, readers during the Middle Ages were expected to interpret texts wisely. The writers held the expectation that their readers would possess

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a common knowledge of Christian ethics and would judge the texts accordingly.63 Readers, according to Dagenais, were not supposed to simply accept passively the message of the texts, but were to actively interact with it to arrive at an acceptable signification. The readers should know that Meo does not engage in journalistic reporting in these sonnets, but instead he crafts objective-seeming narratives to provoke the condemnation of his mother. By recollecting a cultural association of nourishment and language, Tolomei subtly comments on his own poetry. When reading these sonnets, we may condemn Tolomei’s mother for her actions, but, the poet tacitly acknowledges, we also need to condemn Tolomei for composing these verses at all. The implication of sin in these sonnets serves to remind the reader of the comic practice of challenging and overturning the sanctioned values of the cultural order. In conclusion, the presentation of Meo’s mother directly reflects upon his own choice of poetics. Mothers, according to the linguistic and literary theories of the age, gave the vernacular idiom to their children; if those children did not use grammar to refine that language when they wrote, then their texts would be categorized as comic. But Meo’s mother almost denies that same vernacular—comic—language to her son that she had given him earlier in life. There is an almost meta-literary significance to her actions, for she is both responsible for, and at the same time, almost took from him, his poetry. Meo writes jocose verse relying heavily upon the masters of that style as models, while at the same time he distances himself from them. The satiric image of the murderous mother, who coincidentally nearly deprives her son of his native speech, mirrors that of the preceding and contemporaneous poets: both his mother and those poets provided him with a voice, but also nearly stifle his voice. To wit, Tolomei’s anti-maternal poetry can be understood through Harold Bloom’s concept of agon: an almost Freudian/Oedipal relationship of authors to their predecessors. Meo found himself struggling against a tradition, that is, against “strong” comic poets who had already established many of the characteristics of the comic style.64 He was able to invent his own poetic voice by taking some of the characteristics of those “strong” poets, from Angiolieri in particular, and developing them in his own way. He inverted the received, violent poetics of vituperium by selecting as a target his mother (as opposed to Angiolieri and his father). Instead of emphasizing his own poetic persona in his verse, he crafted seemingly objective narratives and dialogues from which the readers needed to derive their own conclusion. Thus, as the somewhat baroque title of this chapter suggests, Meo’s anti-maternal sonnets utilize both the poetics of inversion, subverting the culturally determined definitions of motherhood, and the inversion of poetics, borrowing and adapting other poets’ stylistic traits to arrive at his own voice. Notes 1. Rustico Filippi is cited from Giuseppe Marrani, “I sonetti di Rustico Filippi,” Studi di filologia italiana 57 (1999): 33–196; Pietro de’ Faitinelli is cited from Maurizio Vitale, ed., Rimatori comico-realistici del Due e Trecento (Turin: UTET, 1956); Cecco Angiolieri is cited from Antonio Lanza, ed., Cecco Angiolieri: Le rime (Rome: Guido Izzi, 1990). 2. Mario Marti, I poeti giocosi del tempo di Dante (Milan: Rizzoli, 1956), 12–13. 3. The biographical data about Meo is culled from Mario Marti, “Tolomei, Meo dei,” “Tolomei, Meo dei,” Enciclopedia dantesca, vol. 5 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1971), 619–20.

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4. Information about Meo’s lyric corpus is derived from Anna Bruni Bettarini’s “Le rime di Meo dei Tolomei e di Muscia da Siena,” Studi di filologia italiana 32 (1974): 31–98. All of Meo’s lyrics cited herein are from Bettarini’s study. Editorial interventions in the citation of Tolomei’s poetry—that is, all brackets and the material found therein—are Bettarini’s. Other lectiones of Tolomei’s verses can be found in the following authoritative anthologies of medieval Italian comic poetry: Mario Marti’s I poeti giocosi del tempo di Dante (253–85), and Maurizio Vitale’s Rimatori comico-realistici del Due e Trecento (457–510). All translations are mine. 5. Mario Marti, I poeti giocosi, 18–19. 6. Maurizio Vitale, Rimatori comico-realistici del Due e Trecento, 29–36. 7. Ibid., 45–48. 8. The Latin literature of the Middle Ages is extensive, and the criticism on it is equally large. For a basic overview of some of the topoi of Latin comic verse, see Francesco Novati, Carmina medii aevii (Florence: alla Libreria Dante, 1883). Novati enumerates therein some of the motifs of medieval Latin poetry as satires against women and against the third estate (i.e., peasantry), drinking songs, and the overweening power of money. Ernst Robert Curtius, in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R.Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 424, examines the theological and literary bases for humorous elements in medieval Latin literature. He explains that while literary theorists divided ludicra from seria, the mixture of comicity and seriousness was a norm among medieval poets. Moreover, over two hundred parodies of liturgical texts are extant, and the mock-clerical tradition has been studied by Francesco Novati in “La parodia sacra nelle letterature,” Studi critici e letterari (Florence: Loescher, 1889) and more recently by Martha Bayless in Parody in the Middle Ages. The Latin Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 9. Mario Marti, Cultura e stile nei poeti giocosi (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1953), 1–40. 10. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Throughout his work, Bakhtin refers to such literature as “grottesque.” 11. Much scholarship has examined the many learned elements in the verse of jocose poetry. Peter Dronke, for example, in The Medieval Lyric (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1968), 161, finds a strong connection between Cecco Angiolieri and the Roman satirists Horace and Terence. Peter Bondanella studied Angiolieri’s borrowings from the courtly love tradition in “Cecco Angiolieri and the Vocabulary of Courtly Love,” Studies in Philology 69 (1972): 55– 71. Elena Landoni analyzes Angiolieri’s sonnets as examples of self-negating literature in “Note su Cecco Angiolieri: antistilnovismo o antipoesia?” Testo (1989), 3–31. 12. Judson Boyce Allen, “Hermann the German’s Averroistic Aristotle and Medieval Poetic Theory” Mosaic 9 (1976): 67–81; here 68. 13. A.J.Minnis and A.B.Scott, eds., Medieval Literary Theory and Critidsm c. 1100-c. 1375: The Commentary-Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 279. 14. Matthew of Vendôme is cited from The Art of Versification, trans. Aubrey E.Galyon (Ames: lowa State University Press, 1980). 15. V.A.Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), 129. 16. Mario Marti, Cultura e stile, 81. 17. Tolomei writes: “El fuggir di Min Zeppa quando sente/i nimici passa ogni volare” (vv. 1–2). 18. Tolomei writes: “Par Die, Min Zeppa, or son giunte le tue,/or ti difendi, s’tu sai, d’esto motto:/che ti fu dato d’un matton biscotto/nel capo, chenne saria mort’un bue;/e tu com’uom che non volesti piue,/non ch’una pace n’hai fatta, ma otto” (vv. 1–6). 19. Tolomei writes: “Datte parto ‘l mie cor[e], Ciampolino,/e senno’ fum[m]o giamma’ dritt’amici,/or[a] sarem mortalmente nemici/perche del mie mi nieghi piu che Mino” (vv. 1– 4).

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20. In the sonnet “Mia madre m’ha ‘ngannat’, e Ciampolino,” Tolomei writes: “ché mie madre ha saputo ben sì fare,/che Mino colm’ ed io voti’ ho lo staio” (vv. 10–11). 21. In Meo’s sonnet “I’ son sì magro che quasi traluco,” he writes: “mia madre, Ciampolino e ‘l Zeppa tanto/per me guadagnan che non ho ch’a starmi./Or mi rendessen del mi’ pur arquanto!” (vv. 10–12). 22. The marginalium reads literally: “meuccio tolo. da siena.” This marginalium apparently possesses some authority, for Marti uses it to assert that Dante had a literary relationship with Meuccio (“Tolomei, Meo dei,” 620), and subsequent editors of Dante’s poetry echo Marti’s assertion. In their edition of Dante’s lyrics, Vita Nuova—Rime (Milan: Ricciardi, 1995), 343, Gianfranco Contini and Domenico de Robertis claim that Dante addresses this sonnet to Tolomei, as do Piero Cudini in Le Rime (Milan: Garzanti, 1979), 74, and Alberto del Monte in Opere minori (Milan: Rizzoli, 1966), 72. 23. In addition to those studies mentioned in the notes above, the bibliography on Tolomei is as follows: Adele Todaro, “Il caribetto ‘A nulla guisa’ di Meo di Simone dei Tolomei,” Bullettino senese di storia patria 4 (1933): 147; Mario Marti, “La tecnica del Vituperium’ in Meo dei Tolomei da Siena,” Cultura e stile dei poeti giocosi, 59–82; R.Wis, “Mito e leggenda in un sonetto di Meo dei Tolomei,” Aevum 54:2 (maggio-agosto 1980): 331–39; Fabian Alfie, “T son sì magro che quasi traluco’: Inspiration and Indebtedness among Cecco Angiolieri, Meo dei Tolomei and II Burchiello,” Italian Quarterly 35, 135–136 (WinterSpring, 1998): 5–28. 24. Biographical information about Angiolieri is culled from Alessandro d’Ancona, “Cecco Angiolieri da Siena, poeta umorista del secolo XIII,” Studi di critica e storia letteraria, 2nd ed. (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1912), 163–275. 25. For more information about the intertextual relationship between the two poets as regards the two sonnets “I’ son sì magro che quasi traluco,” see Alfie, “I’ son sì magro che quasi traluco,” 5–18. 26. For example, in the sonnet “Cosi potrei viver senz’amore” Cecco says that he could more easily be out of love than Ciampolino could live without gambling (vv. 3–4). In the sonnet “Dapo’ t’è ‘n grado, Becchina, ch’i’ muoia,” Angiolieri mentions Meo’s wife Mita (v. 12). 27. For instance, see Aldo Francesco Masséra’s Sonetti burleschi e realistid dei primi due secoli (Bari: LaTerza, 1940), 63–138; and Carlo Steiner’s edition, Cecco Angiolieri: Il canzoniere (Turin: UTET, 1928). 28. Mario Marti, I poeti giocosi, 16–17. 29. In the sonnet “Sed i’ avess’un sacco di fiorini,” Angiolieri writes: “or dunque, ‘n che ti provi, /babbo, di gastigarm’?” (vv. 6–7). 30. In the sonnet “Qual è senza danari ‘nnamorato,” Angiolieri writes: “c’ho un mi’ padre vecchissimo e ricco/ch’aspetto ched e’ muoi’ a mano a mano,/ed e’ morra quando ‘l mar sara sicco” (vv. 11–13). 31. See, for example, Cecco’s sonnets “I’ potre’ anzi ritornare in ieri” (vv. 1–12), or “Sed i’ credesse vivar un dì solo” (vv. 1–8). 32. Angiolieri writes: “Non potrebb’esser, per quanto Dio fece,/che babbo spesso non mangi de l’oro,/ch’e’ vive fresco e razza com’un toro/e ha degli anni ottanta, o ‘n quella vece” (vv. 1– 4). 33. Angiolieri writes: “Morte, merze, se mi’ prego t’è ‘n grato/che tu prend’un partito comunale;/…/che tu uccidi me o lo ‘ncoiato/ch’i’ non ne poss’andar altro che bene:/ché, se t’uccidi me, i’ ne guadagno,/ch’elli è vit’e non mort’uscir di pene;/e se t’uccidi ‘l ladro di Salvagno,/or vedi, Morte, quel che me n’awene:/ch’i’ starò ‘n Siena come ‘ricchi al Bagno” (vv. 1, 2, 8–14). 34. Angiolieri writes: “Il pessimo e ‘l crudele odio ch’i’ porto/a diritta ragione al padre meo/il farà vivar piu che Botadeo” (vv. 1–3).

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35. Fabian Alfie, Comedy and Culture: Cecco Angiolieri’s Poetry and Late Medieval Society (Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2001), 129–30. 36. Ann Marie Rasmussen in Mothers and Daughters in Medieval German Literature (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 4, sees a dynamic in mother-daughter relationships similar to that of saintly individuals. There too conflict erupted regarding the parental shaping of the young woman’s identity and vocation. 37. Mario Marti, Cultura e stile, 78. 38. R.Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 2–3. 39. Cited from Anonimo Veneto, “Proverbia quae dicuntur super natura feminarum,” in Poeti del duecento, vol. 1, ed. Gianfranco Contini (Milan: Ricciardi Editore, 1965), 521–55. 40. Tracy Barrett, “The Poetic Persona of Cecco Angiolieri,” Medieval Perspectives 3, 1 (Spring, 1988), 48–59; here 50. 41. He writes: “Mie madre sì m’insegna medicina” (v.1). Despite the obvious similarity between the incipit verse of “Mie madre sì m’insegna medicina” and the subject matter of “Si fortemente 1’altrier fu’ malato,” the former sonnet is not discussed at this time. The reason for omitting it is that, while Tolomei describes his mother’s recipes for cures therein, there is no overt reference to her trying to poison him. Therefore, it has no place in an analysis of the topos of his mother’s violence. 42. The author of this sonnet writes: “L’altrier sì mi ferio una tal ticca” (v. 1). Regarding the ascription of this sonnet, Marti and Vitale categorize it under Meo’s verses of dubious attribution. Bettarini does so as well, although she notes that it is most likely Tolomei’s. 43. Raffaella Castagnola, “Contrasti amorosi in Cecco Angiolieri” in Il genere “tenzone” nelle letterature romanze delle Origini, ed. Matteo Pedroni and Antonio Stäuble (Ravenna: Longo, 1999), 147–49. 44. Paolo Orvieto and Lucia Brestolini, La poesia comico-realistica. Dalle origini al Cinquecento (Rome: Carocci, 2000), 21. 45. Rustico Filippi wrote “Dovunque vai, conteco porti il cesso.” 46. Guido Guinizzelli penned “Volvol te levi, vecchia rabbiosa.” Guinizzelli is cited from Mario Marti, ed., Poeti del dolce stil nuovo (Florence: Le Monnier, 1969). 47. Guido Cavalcanti penned “Guata Manetto, quella scrignatuzza.” Cavalcanti is cited firom Guido Favati, ed., Guido Cavalcanti: Le rime (Milan: Ricciardi, 1957). 48. The authorship of “Deh, guata, Ciampol, ben questa vecchiuzza” has been debated. Mario Marti (Poeti giocosi, 249), Gigi Cavalli in Cecco Angiolieri. Rime (Milan: Rizzoli, 1959), 142, and Maurizio Vitale (Rimatori comico-realistici del Due e Trecento, 450) consider it to be of dubious attribution to Angiolieri; and Antonio Lanza attributes it outright to Niccola Muscia (257). 49. Folgore da San Gimignano is cited from Maurizio Vitale, Rimatori comico-realistici del Due e Trecento. 50. In the Divine Comedy, Dante takes both approaches, lamenting the loss of the old, noble families (Paradiso XVI, w. 88–154) and decrying the rise of the lowborn merchants (Inferno XVI, vv. 73–75). 51. Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J.Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (1924; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 61. 52. While the Lessico Universale Italiano, v. 1 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1968) offers a secondary meaning of affogare as “to suffocate” in contemporary usage, it explains that such a meaning is a generalization derived from the more specific denotation of drowning (220). Moreover, the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, v. 1 (Verona: Stamperia di Dionigi Ramanzini, 1806), a dictionary whose meanings were derived from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts, lists only the signification of “to drown” under affogare (65). Further adding to the connotation of breast milk to the verb, Cecco Angiolieri uses affogare with the meaning of “to choke” (e.g., on food) in the sonnet “E’ fu già tempo

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che Becchina m’era,” Angiolieri writes, in reference to having eaten a pear: “Cosi m’avess’ella fatt’affogone/o mi si fosse ne la gola posta” (vv. 9–10). 53. Gary Cestaro, “‘…quanquam Sarnum biberimus ante dentes…’: The Primal Scene of Suckling in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia” Dante Studies 109 (1991): 119–47; here 123. 54. Ibid., 125. 55. Ibid., 129. 56. The De vulgari eloquentia is cited from De vulgari eloquentia—Monarchia, ed. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo and Bruno Nardi (Milan: Ricciardi, 1995). 57. Dante intended to treat comic literature in the fourth book of the De vulgari eloquentia. The treatise, however, was left unfinished in the middle of the second book. Therefore, Dante’s opinions about comic literature can only be surmised by statements made elsewhere within the work. 58. All citations and translations of Geoffrey of Vinsauf are from Ernest Gallo, The Poetria Nova and Its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine (Paris: Mouton, 1971). 59. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, “Introduzione,” in De vulgari eloquentia—Monarchia (Milan: Ricciardi, 1995), 4. 60. Giovanni Nencioni “Dante e la retorica,” Tra grammatica e retorica. Da Dante a Pirandello (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), 108–31; here 111. 61. Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, I peccati della Hngua. Disdplina ed etica della parola nella cultura medievale (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1987), 141–58. 62. According to Casagrande and Vecchio, contumelia was also known by the names of convicium, opprobrium, iniuria, exprobatio, and calumnia (Ipeccati della lingua, 317). 63. John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de buen amor (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), xvii. 64. For examples of Harold Bloom’s notion of agon, a concept pervasive throughout his works, see his book Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), vii–ix.

11 Violent Magic in Middle English Romance CORINNE SAUNDERS* Violence occurs across all genres of medieval writing. Chronicles are constructed around accounts of wars, revolts, and crusades, as well as of the great tournaments that mark festivity. Romance narratives can seem to consist of catalogs of their heroes’ battles against one enemy after another, so memorably satirized by the Gawain poet in his account of Gawain’s foes: dragons, wolves, wild men, bulls, bears, boars, and giants, all in the space of four lines.1 Devotional literature too is full of violence: the blood and wounds and instruments of torture of Christ’s Passion, which is re-enacted in the graphic martyrdoms of the saints. And in a very different mode, fabliau tends to rely on slapstick violence of a distinctly uncourtly kind for its comedy—John the Carpenter’s broken arm in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, Simkin the Miller’s broken head in the Reeves Tale. We might perhaps be inclined to set against this emphasis on violence the other great subject matter of medieval writing, that of love, whether human or divine. Yet we only have to consider those narratives of martyrdom that so vividly portray the extreme forms that love for God may take, or the love for the romance lady that frequently underlies chivalric combat, to realize that love and violence cannot be separated, and that violence may occur within the most courtly context. Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale with its account of the two noble cousins, Palamon and Arcite, blood brothers, fighting “up to the ancle” in blood over Emilye, provides a powerful example.2 In the same way, it is easy to define magic in positive terms as offering a counterpoint within the romance genre to the violence of those frequent battles, single combats, jousts, and tournaments, much as the subject of love might. Magic, the other world, the fairy, the marvelous seem to belong to the mode of fantasy and the nonmimetic, and to represent a strand of exotic entertainment in romance, an aspect of play and delight within strange adventure. Yet magic is intrinsically bound up with ideas of violence, and is by no means restricted to the nonmimetic, fantastic aspect of romance. There is no doubt that the recurrent depiction of magic is in part connected to the pleasure of the exotic, of strange adventure, and wish-fulfillment (although the medieval other world is evidently not synonymous with Victorian fairyland, nor even with the fairy world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream). This delight in the exotic is most obvious in works such as Marie de France’s Lanval and its English versions (in particular Sir Launfal), which employ the archetypal figure of the fairy mistress. The narrative of a beautiful lady who comes from a far-off land to seek out her beloved, greeting him with the most opulent of banquets in her luxurious pavilion, and presenting him with untold wealth, provides an extravagant fantasy of desire and wish-fulfillment. The strange appeal of magic is evident in many other ways across romance: in the many magical objects, such as rings and swords with protective powers; in the prospect of magical healing, as, for instance, that practiced by the Lady of the Lake in Arthurian romance; in the powerful figure of Merlin; in the

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intriguing possibility of technological marvel, as with the gifts in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, which offer as well as the power of healing, the power of flight, the power to hear animals speak, and the power to foresee adversity. The role of magic in medieval romance is not so different in this sense from that of technology in science fiction stories, or of magic in the Harry Potter series.3 The popularity of the latter clearly demonstrates the continuing appeal of magic to adults and children alike—precisely because the kind of world it presents is exotic, surprising, full of possibilities beyond the natural, and thus liberating. But the matter is more complex. The other side of the marvelous, the violent, sinister, and deeply dangerous aspect of magic, is always present in medieval thought, and narratives play in different ways with this possibility. Even in Sir Launfal, for example, the lady Tryamour is capable of severely punishing her lover for betraying her existence and of blinding Queen Guinevere. This chapter considers first the writing of Chaucer, in which magic is treated seriously as a potentially violent art, but also as part of the courtly, intellectual world. His treatment of magic will be placed alongside the use of magic and the supernatural in chivalric romances, particularly Malory’s Morte Darthur, which offers an especially valuable overview of and retrospective on the vast range of Arthurian material and the many different facets of the otherworldly. Malory is not an intellectual in the sense that Chaucer is, and his work is revealing in terms of what the usual attitudes of the gentry to magic may have been in the late Middle Ages. Despite his generally matterof-fact, pared-down use of sources, it is notable that Malory often chooses to retain, enhance, or add otherworldly episodes, which contribute significantly to the characteristic world of the Morte, and exemplify the potentially violent side of magic. This violence is markedly evident across Middle English chivalric romance, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and in various Middle English Breton lays, in particular Sir Orfeo, SirDegarré, and Sir Gowther: in all these works, the function of magic goes far beyond merely entertainment. It is relevant to recall the complexity of definitions of magic in the Middle Ages and the ambivalence of medieval attitudes to it. The term magic is problematic in its generality. For the modern reader, magic encompasses many different meanings: charm and glamour, sorcery and witchcraft, the uncanny and supernatural. On the other hand, although distinctions are never absolute, magic in medieval thought conveys a more specific sense of the practice of magical arts. The term magic originally described the arts of the “magi,” the Zoroastrian priests or wise men of Persia, whose medical cures and occult practices the Greeks suspected of being demonic, a suspicion that was to linger on in attitudes to magic, and that underlies its violent associations.4 According to medieval thinkers, the practice of magic harnessed powers beyond nature, although these powers were likely to work upon natural forces. They could either be demonic or “occult,” arising “not from the internal structure of the object but from an external source: emanations coming from the stars and planets,” or from a “symbolic feature of the powerful object.”5 The practice of magic is without doubt an uneasy issue in the medieval imagination— fascinating yet threatening, potentially demonic, destructive, and violent. Those initiated in the magic arts may attract moral chastisement or more extreme punishment: the witch hunts of the early modern period provide ample evidence of the treatment of magic as a highly threatening, nefarious practice, condemned by secular law and the church, and

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punishable even with death.6 Yet magic is also a given in romance, often not remarked and rarely criticized. In part, this is because magic functions as a literary topos, but also because in the medieval period attitudes to magic seem to have been less clear-cut than they would later become. There is not agreement among theologians regarding the status of magic, although there is a general inclination to take its possibilities seriously. In literature too, magic is consistently treated in ways that suggest its potential danger and its possibilities, ways that often relate to, cause, or emerge from violence within the courtly world of romance. A highly intellectual writer like Chaucer is self-conscious and playful, but by no means wholly skeptical, in his treatment of magic, whereas the other world plays a serious and material role of a different kind in the Arthurian cycle, in the highly sophisticated Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and in the Breton lays. Magic cannot easily be separated from the more general notion of the “supernatural.” The thought world of late medieval England was made up of a complex blend of ideas relating to the supernatural: the notion of the classical gods, inherited from literary works and aligned with astrology to create a strong sense of the stars and planets shaping both individual character and destiny; faith in a Christian god and a sense of the numinous, of the age of miracles only just passed and the possibility of God’s intervention in the human world, as well as beneficent Providence; an inherited familiarity with, if not belief in, the world of fairy, rooted both in folk lore reaching back to pagan belief and in a very established literary tradition; and finally the sense of active magic, the practice of magical arts. It is not surprising that in a social context where faith in god and devil, and a spirit world between, was ready and natural, the possibility of magic should also have seemed ready and natural, for to some extent the notion of the practice of magic and belief in the supernatural or other world are interdependent. Magic often involves the summoning of demons or spirits; it is a kind of access to the other world, and in this respect has the potential to be highly threatening and violent. Early Christians interpreted all aspects of pagan belief and magic (divination, amulets, magical cures) to the work of demons, contrasting them to the miracles of God: Augustine stated categorically that magic was demonic, although the neo-Platonists continued to be interested in the occult, and some branches of this, as the wide popularity of Macrobius’ writing on dream theory attests, continued to be treated seriously.7 This interest perhaps underlies repeated statements by the Church Fathers against the practice of magic. Isidore of Seville, for instance, repeated Augustine’s dictate, listing various forms of divination (study of different elements, or the patterns of birds, or animal sacrifice), astrology, charms, and medical magic, and saying “All such things involve the art of demons….”8 Views shifted, however, around the thirteenth century, as a result of the rise of the universities, new intellectual interests in natural philosophy, and the cultivation of access to Arabic work, with its promise of new knowledge. A great number of texts were subsequently translated into Latin, including works on astrology and alchemy, and works associated with Hermes Trismegistus, mythical founder of magic arts, regarding “astral magic.”9 A crucial distinction could be made between the study of the cosmos and hence of destiny, and the desire actually to alter nature, although it is easy to see that the line could become blurred, and it was here that the occult sciences were most controversial. Although a conservative group remained who condemned magic wholeheartedly, later medieval thinkers such as William of Auvergne or Albertus Magnus accepted the possibility of magic as a science, not necessarily demonic, and closely related to

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astrology and alchemy. Aquinas accepted the occult powers of astrology and Roger Bacon too believed in the occult forces of nature. The use of natural magic might encompass medicinal healing: Chaucer’s Physician practices “magyk natureel” in his knowledge of how the stars cause maladies and humors, and his knowledge of drugs and medicines (General Prologue, 416). In Book III of the House of Fame, itself dedicated to Apollo, “God of science” (1091), Chaucer depicts, immediately after his description of the house itself and the musicians of diverse kinds that surround it, the practitioners of magic:

Ther saugh I pleye jugelours, Magiciens, and tregetours, Phitonesses, charmeresses, Olde wicches, sorceresses, That use exorsisacions, And eke these fumygacions; And clerkes eke, which konne wel Al this magik naturel. (1259–66) They include famous magicians and enchantresses from different traditions: from classical legend, Medea, Calypso, and Circe; from natural philosophy, Hermes Ballenus, disciple of the founder of magic, Hermes Trismegistus; from Biblical tradition, Simon Magus; and finally, it seems, an English magician, practicing at Orleans, “Colle tregetour” (1277), a certain Colin T. mentioned in a French manual of 1396. It is notable that these figures accompany musicians, for their arts share the power to entertain, but they also quite clearly go beyond the mechanical and theatrical: witches, sorceresses, and Phitonesses do not use machines but explicitly employ enchantments, spells, and the summoning of spirits of a potentially menacing and violent kind. In the inclusion of Phitonesses (a term originally referring to the Witch of Endor, who called up Samuel from the dead to prophesy Saul’s defeat), Chaucer also evokes the more dubious aspect of magic practices, that of calling up spirits. The earliest Christian commentators, such as Hippolytus, had argued that the apparent spirit of Samuel was in fact a demon, and the Witch of Endor was seen as the archetypal necromancer.10 Human knowledge and use of magic powers might or might not be linked to the demonic, and this potentially demonic aspect was taken very seriously, as the later witch hunts demonstrated. Thus, the Parson’s Tale explicitly forbids, although oddly as an aspect of swearing and hence of anger, “thilke horrible seryng of adjuracioun and conjuracioun, as doon thise false enchantours or nigromanciens in baciens ful of water, or in a bright swerd, in a cercle, or in a fir, or in a shulderboon of a sheep” (603–4). These practices go alongside divination, but also use of “charmes for woundes or maladie” (606)—which, the Parson argues, are not effective in their own right but only through divine intervention. The Parson’s depiction clearly places magic as powerful, and potentially dangerous when used to the wrong ends, to summon demonic forces rather than as a positive aspect of “science.” It is important that in the Franklin’s Tale Orleans is a place of “magyk natureel,” not of demonic practices, although the Franklin is suspicious even

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about these, “For holy chirches feith in oure bileve,/Ne suffreth noon illusioun us to greve” (1133–34). The distrust of necromancy perhaps relates to the reason why in Chaucer’s depiction of Medea in the Legend of Good Women, he does not pursue in any detail “the sleighte of hire enchauntement.” There is further uncertainty about magic, for it is not only the domain of the human magus, who may be corrupt and may summon dark forces, but also is characteristic of demons, who are themselves employed by the devil to bring about the fall of mankind. The “feend” in the Friar’s Tale describes how they may “swiche formes make/As moost able is our preyes for to take” (1471–72), and we are told in the Physidans Tale of the fiend running into Appius’ heart (130). The Friar’s Tale offers a detailed explanation of how devils may make “newe bodies…of elementz” (1505–6), but may also take on “dede bodyes” (1508) just as Samuel did for the Witch of Endor. The practices of witches and demons are thus directly linked. Chaucer consistently presents the wiles of the devil as a real possibility: the temptation to practice necromancy is one aspect of the more general allurement of sin, its potential glamour, and apparent power.11 In the Physician’s Tale, Appius gives in to demonic temptation, believing he will gain power and the fulfillment of desire through his false claiming of Virginia. The Summoner in the Friar’s Tale makes a more active pact with the devil: in true Dr. Faustus manner he is promised “gold and silver” and that “Al shal be thyn, right as thou wolt desire” (1400, 1402). That those who practice what we might loosely call magic may be either human or supernatural contributes considerably to the ambiguity of magic, and this is made more complex by the fact that not all supernatural beings are necessarily evil. They may be representatives of the “other-world,” neither demonic nor divine, but belonging to the world of “faery,” which finds its origins in myths of Celtic gods and goddesses, and is a familiar feature of romance. This other world is a parallel space of marvelous adventure, the provenance of the enchanters and enchantresses, and often of the marvelous or magical objects that recur in romance narratives. Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas famously satirizes the conventional use of the otherworldly: Thopas’ dream of an elf-queen, who alone is worthy to sleep under his cloak, his sudden entry “in a pryve woon” to “the contree of Faerye/So wilde” (801–3), his meeting with the giant who tells him of the “queene of Fayerye/With harp and pipe and symphonye/Dwellynge in this place” (814– 16) are recounted in such prosaic, doggerel terms that they become a ridiculous spoof on the worst excesses of metrical romances. Violence is comically displaced, for Thopas has left his armor at home and cannot fight the giant. Thopas’s elf-queen is a parodic representative of the world of “fayerye,” but the Wife of Bath’s Tale provides us with a different and much more serious instance, in which the fairy functions to correct the violence of rape, committed by an Arthurian knight:

And so bifel that this kyng Arthour Hadde in his hous a lusty bacheler, That on a day cam ridynge fro ryver, And happed that, allone as he was born, He saugh a mayde walkynge hym biforn, Of which mayde anon, maugree hir heed,

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By verray force, he rafte hire maydenhed….(882–88) The tale depicts rape as severely treated by the Arthurian court, in a realistic trial scene where the fitting punishment is stated to be death, but eventually the women are given the decisive choice of punishment. The closure of death is replaced by the pattern of the quest as the knight is sent out to find the answer to the riddle “What thyng is it that wommen moost desiren?” (905). The tale moves into a much more obviously romance world—the knight’s vision “under a forest syde” of a dance of “ladyes four and twenty and yet mo” (990, 992) cannot but suggest the marvelous and otherworldly. Their sudden disappearance, “he nyste wher” (996), and the conventional setting of the forest confirm the sense that this was indeed a fairy vision, yet the marvelous is undercut when the ladies’ place is taken by an old hag, “a fouler wight ther may no man devyse” (999). As so often in Chaucer’s writing, convention is rewritten. Rather than an enchantress or fairy mistress figure, we are presented with a “loathly old hag,” who combines transformative, conspicuously fairy powers with her highly philosophical, moral teaching on gentillesse, a didactic role that might seem more appropriate to a wholly different kind of otherworldly figure, such as Boethius’ Lady Philosophy—also so familiar to Chaucer. Yet at the same time, the hag’s role neatly aligns with the role of fairy in other romances, where magical practices tend to include a kind of amoral game-playing with humans, which most of all involves the pursuit of bodies. This is especially evident in romances like Sir Orfeo and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but also here in the Wife of Bath’s Tale as the loathly old hag who is left behind effectively gains the knight’s body for herself. Chaucer plays humorously on the notion of otherworldly force in the description of the hag’s first night in bed with the man she has forced to marry her:

Greet was the wo the knyght hadde in his thoght, Whan he was with his wyf abedde ybroght; He walweth and he turneth to and fro. His olde wyf lay smylynge everemo…(1083–86) This magical violence reverses the knight’s rape of the lady at the start of the tale and the narrative becomes a complex exploration of desire, force, maistrye, and mutuality, as the knight finally yields sovereignty to his wife when offered the choice between beauty and loyalty—and promptly finds her young, beautiful, and obedient. In the Wife of Bath’s Tale, we see directly the workings of forces beyond the human, and Chaucer plays again and again on this theme, through a complex set of variations. The classical gods arbitrarily decree human destinies in the Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde,and, on a more light-hearted note, in the Merchant’s Tale; the Christian God is the force behind Custance’s miraculous preservation in the Man of Law’s Tale; and in the Friar’s Tale, the power of the devil is manifest. The Physician’s Tale offers a disturbing portrayal of a mechanistic universe, where beneficent providence is missing, while in the Clerk’s Tale God does play a directive role, but one that makes God seem almost as callous as the gods in the Knight’s Tale.

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For Malory, like Chaucer, the forces of magic and the other world provide ways of exploring the issues of destiny, free will, and power, and cause complex moral questions. This is most immediately evident in the range of objects of power depicted in the Morte Darthur, which are by no means exclusively entertaining. The sword Excalibur, for example, is explicitly connected with the supernatural through the Lady of the Lake, and possesses a distinctive “bite,” while its marvelous scabbard prevents the loss of blood (see IV.9). As Helen Cooper has pointed out, such magic is often interesting for its loss or failure, so that Malory’s interest in Arthur’s sword and scabbard relates to Morgan le Fay’s theft of them, and to Arthur’s battle against Accolon when Accolon is armed with the magical objects. Here, magic skews the natural outcome of violence and thus presents Arthur with a superhuman challenge. Notably, Arthur regains Excalibur, a fitting gift for a king and symbolic of his great abilities in battle, but the scabbard is stolen again and irredeemably lost when Morgan throws it into deep water. Retaining its protection would destroy the suspense and tragedy of the story. Yet while it is often crucial to set aside magic objects for suspense, there is also a kind of ready, practical acceptability to them that surely does relate to the widespread belief in the medieval period in occult powers. They are not really very different from the healing herbs that, for example, Elaine places in Launcelot’s bath. Medieval medicine, indeed, spanned the natural and supernatural, for its cures included healing plants, balms, and potions, whose virtue might or might not be magical.12 In medieval medical thought, there is a strong sense that the healing plant may exist, which would restore the balance of the bodily humors, just as in natural philosophy there is a belief that the stone with the power to turn all to gold may exist. Such objects move in or out of imaginative writing partly because they were within the realms of human possibility. Much more complex is the issue of human manipulation of magic, and in the Morte the kind of use that is made of magic, and especially the use of magical violence—or violent magic—often defmes individual morality. Such magic can include the malicious wielding of magical objects not to heal or protect but as weapons against the forces of good, as when Morgan le Fay sends a destructive magic mantle and horn to Arthur’s court. The practice of magic also goes beyond this to the use of spells or enchantments, which could work in very physical terms as a kind of force. The love potions drunk by Tristan and Isolde and that given to Launcelot by Dame Brisen, causing him to mistake Elaine of Corbenic for Guinevere, provide interesting examples of the way that the medical notion of herbs or other substances with transformative qualities can intersect with the idea of enchantment in the form of the geis or love-curse. Like the various other magical objects in the Morte, the potions are portrayed with a realism that is crucial to the tone of romance. They are employed to evoke and explain a strange and extreme emotion in physical terms, but their presence also indicates familiarity with the possibility of magical powers that may be harnessed by humans or otherworldly figures. Malory, like Chaucer, engages with the question of the morality of such arts. Malory’s treatment of Merlin offers the prime example. Although Malory makes only a brief reference to Merlin’s origins, the audience is evidently expected to be aware of his ancestry as the child of the devil redeemed by God to work for the purposes of good. His gifts include the use of magical objects and enchantment, although he is characterized by two abilities in particular, shape-shifting and prophecy, most notably in the shape-shifting of Uther and his knowledge of the child conceived, and in his prophecy

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of Arthur’s end, first in the guise of a child, then of an old man, a scene the otherworldly elements of which Malory increases. It is interesting that, although Merlin is an agent of good, his shape-shifting involves a clear use of force, for it allows what is effectively the rape of Igraine to occur. Merlin is also a skilled military counselor, his perhapsmagical knowledge guiding Arthur and his men through the secret ways of the forest of Sherwood to victory. While Merlin’s powers are key to the construction of the Arthurian world, they also render him suspect. Malory’s own unease may underlie his omission of any narrative of Merlin’s origins. When Merlin reveals Arthur’s parentage, some of the kings laugh “and mo other called hym a wytche” (I.8, 12). The menace of Merlin’s possible link with the demonic is most dramatically evident in his enchantment by Nenyve of the Lake, who imprisons him in a rock because she fears him, “for cause that he was a devyls son” (IV.1, 77). Accolon raises the same fear of demonic violence when, after a journey on an enchanted ship, he wakes by a well “in grete perell of deth.” “[T]hes damysels in this shippe hath betrayed us. They were fendis and no women,” he says; they are “false damysels that faryth thus with theire inchauntementes” (I.8, 84). In fact, these enchantments are effected by Morgan le Fay, the central and most ambiguously portrayed practitioner of magic in the Morte, who also attracts the term “witch.” She is known as “the false sorseres and wycche moste that is now lyvyng” (VIII.34, 270). It is especially striking that Malory, rather than emphasizing Morgan’s own supernatural quality as “le Fay,” tells us that she “was put to scole in a nonnery, and ther she lerned so moche that she was a grete clerke of nygromancye” (1.2, 5). Malory makes clear that these are learned, human arts, but also connects them firmly with the dark, demonic side of magic through the use of the term “nygromancye.” Morgan possesses the arts of illusion and shape-shifting typical of the magician, changing herself into the shape of great stones when pursued, and creating the false sword and scabbard and the destructive gifts that she sends to the court. She is firmly associated with the Arthurian court. As well as being Arthur’s half sister, she has her own rival court, and is set up as the great opponent of Arthur. Whereas a male rival would use deeds of arms and military force, however, Morgan’s means are those of magic. Her enchantments are frequently extreme in their potential violence. They are most often aimed at orchestrating the downfall of the Arthurian world, although her jealousy can take other forms, as in her imprisonment of a lady “naked as a nedyll” in boiling water “many wyntyrs and dayes” because she is “the fayryst lady of that contrey” (XI.1, 478), or her desire either to gain Launcelot as her own lover or destroy him. The practice of magic is not portrayed as necessarily evil. It is made so through the intention of the user, and this often relates to the effecting of violence. Morgan finds her benign counterparts in the Lady of the Lake, who gives Arthur the sword Excalibur and its marvelous scabbard, and the Damosel of the Lake, Nenyve, both of whom appear as practitioners of white magic. Malory is careful to make this explicit with regard to Nenyve: “ever she ded grete goodnes unto kynge Arthure and to all his knyghtes thorow her sorsery and enchauntementes” (XVIII.8, 620). She preserves Pelleas from Ettard, marries him, and reveals the truth of the poisoned apple. While the practitioners of magic can be good, however, they are often partly ambiguous. Nenyve comes “into the felde” to assist Arthur in his battle against Accolon by returning Excalibur to him; yet we are reminded in the same sentence that she is the same damosel “that put Merlyon undir the

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stone” (IV.9, 85). Similarly, Dame Brusen, “one of the grettyst enchaunters that was that tyme in the worlde” and accused of “wycchecrauftys” by Launcelot (XI.2, 479; 3, 481), seems to use deeply unfair methods to orchestrate the conception of Galahad. Magical means allow deception to succeed, and magic becomes a form of violence against both male and female members of the court. While the Lady of the Lake, like Merlin, appears as an agent of destiny in her presentation of the sword to Arthur, and Nenyve’s role may be beneficent, the enchantresses of the Morte most often function to oppose individual will in a negative way. Their enchantments clearly comprise a form of violence. They complement the physical challenges encountered by Arthur’s knights, in particular Launcelot, who both spends much of his time serving women by fighting for them, and repeatedly becomes their victim. Thus, Morgan le Fay and three queens, having abducted the sleeping Launcelot to a “chamber colde,” require his love: “Now chose one of us, whyche that thou wolte have to thy peramour, other ellys to dye in this preson” (VI.3, 152). The scene provides a neat counterpart to the many abductions of damsels by villainous knights in the Morte. The power of enchantment allows women to employ force, to abduct even the best of knights. Nenyve’s entrapment of Merlin similarly replaces force with magic, turning his powers back on him when she imprisons him within the wondrous cave that he himself is showing to her: So by hir subtyle worchyng she made Merlyon to go undir that stone to latte hir wete of the mervayles there, but she wrought so there for hym that he come never oute for al the craufte he coude do, and so she departed and leffte Merlyon. (IV.1, 77) The enchantress, half-human, half-otherworldly, is most strikingly evoked in the rather extraordinary figure of Hellawes, not found in the French prose Lanceloty perhaps finding her origins in Perlesvaus, but very much Malory’s invention. Malory explicitly links her, like Morgan le Fay, to necromancy: she is “Hallewes the Sorseres, lady of the castell Nygurmous” (VI.15, 168). The strange otherworldly adventure of the Chapel Perilous turns out to be a complicated snare for Lancelot, who, if he had not refused Hellawes’ request for “one kiss,” would have lost his life, his corpse surrendered to the enchantress: “Than wolde I have bawmed hit and sered hit, and so to have kepte hit my lyve dayes; and dayly I sholde have clypped the and kyssed the, dispyte of quene Gwenyvere” (VI. 15, 168). Sex and death are equated in a highly threatening way, and the predatory woman is written as the enchantress who desires the body at all costs, even the cost of life itself. In both of these examples of attack on Launcelot by women, enchantment replaces physical force, and traditional gender roles are reversed, although unlike female victims, Launcelot is ultimately able to save himself. In fact, Malory, as so often, effects a rapid reversal. We learn that after all it is Hellawes who dies of unrequited love for Launcelot: despite all her powers of enchantment the woman becomes the victim.

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It is in Malory’s Grail narrative, his “Tale of the Sankgreall,” that the landscape of the Morte most obviously opens onto a violent, demonic world. This is especially striking in the narrative of the adventures of Perceval, who on his barren rocky mountain is tempted by “a jantillwoman of grete beauté” (XIV.8, 548), only to see her disappear into the winds and burning sea when he crosses himself: she was a manifestation of the devil himself. Bors undergoes a similar attempted seduction by a lady who disappears with “a grete noyse and a grete cry as all the fyndys of helle had bene aboute hym” (XVI. 12, 571). Literal and symbolic interweave as what appeared to be physical realities prove to have been demonic illusions: Perceval is told “that jantillwoman was the mayster fyende of helle, which hath pouste over all other devyllis” (XIV.10, 551). The enchantress here becomes the demonic temptress, illusory yet capable of the most extreme act of force, of sending the knights to eternal damnation. Magic and the supernatural again become the means of testing the human in ways that go far beyond the physical. They may allow for marvelous adventure, but they also provide sexual and moral challenges of the most severe nature, which may be formative in the making of the chivalric identity. Finally, they set in motion the enigmatic forces of destiny itself, whether through positive or negative intervention. These associations occur across Middle English romance, particularly in Arthurian romance and in the Middle English Breton lays. Like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight also plays with the notion of the otherworldly lady, but alongside the figure of the male shape-shifter. In this poem, violence, the courtly, and magic could not be more closely linked. The Green Knight is in part representative of a hostile, outside world. He bears a resemblance to the legendary wild man of the woods, and the “etaynez” (723) who challenge Gawain from the high fells. His size, his luxuriant hair and beard, his violation of courtly behavior by riding into the court, armed with an ax not a sword, and his rude challenge to Arthur’s court, “What, is þis Arþures hous?” (309), all place him as an outsider. Further, he is also clearly connected with the supernatural in his color, “oueral enker grene” (150), and his marvelous and terrifying ability to survive beheading. The awestruck silence and terror of the court reflect their sense that he is of “fantoum and fayr3e” (240). Yet he is also courtly and sophisticated, with his small waist and elegant limbs, his highly ornate costume and decoration, and his wonderfully ornamented horse—all described in the most sophisticated, fashionable manner. It is violence that places this ambiguous figure as genuinely threatening: his graphic beheading, the grotesquely surreal scene of the court kicking around his head, and the horrific image of the torso holding up the still-speaking, severed head. The beheading is especially uncanny in that it is violence against the self, for the Green Knight himself requests it. It also symbolizes the sinister power of this otherworldly figure, who is possessed of forces far beyond the natural, the force, it seems, of overcoming death itself and hence of causing death at will. The violence of this other world is notably affirmed by the three later and graphic hunting scenes, most memorably by the description of the dismemberment of the deer, but also by the detailed images of chase, capture, and death of the prey in the accounts of the hunts of deer, boar, and fox. Within the rarefied courtly world of Hautdesert, the repeated violent images of imprisonment, capture, and binding used by the Lady, who is in some sense the other face of the loathly old woman identified as Morgan le Fay, create a set of parallels with the world of the hunt. The courtly arts of love and of the hunt are shown to be intrinsically violent. The nick made by Bertilak in

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Gawain’s neck and the final images of severed flesh and gushing blood recall for the audience the very real threat to Gawain’s life and to the chivalric ideal represented by this strange otherworldly castle of Hautdesert with its rival court presided over by Morgan le Fay. The violent magic of Sir Gawain is echoed in various Middle English Breton lays, the genre most focused on the otherworldly. This is especially evident in Sir Orfeo and Sir Degarré.13 Again, this world of magic is by no means simply illusory and exotic, but rather inexplicable, sinister, highly threatening, with its inhabitants capable of enacting violence of extreme kinds. In Sir Orfeo, Orfeo’s wife Heurodis wakes to reveal that she has been bidden to accompany the King of Faery to his world: “thou shalt with us go/And live with ous ever-mo.”14 This command is marked disturbingly by Heurodis’ act of selfmutilation on awakening:

Ac as sone as she gan awake, She crid and lothly bere* gan make; (*cry) She froted* hir honden and hir feet, (*tore at) And crached hir visage—it bled wete. Hir riche robe he al to-rett* (*rent) And wasreveysed* out of hir wit. (*driven) (53–58) Orfeo’s depiction of her deathly appearance suggests her enactment on her own body of the living death foretold for her:

“Thy body, that was so white y-core,* (excellent) With thine nailes is all to-tore! Alas, thy rode,* that was so red, (*countenance) Is all wan as thou were ded! And also thine fingers smale Beth al blody and all pale!” (81–86) Despite the guard of Orfeo and a thousand armed knights, the King of Faery’s words are fulfilled: Heurodis is spirited away. The violence of the act is explicit in Heurodis’s madness, self-mutilation, and deathly appearance—although the purpose is left enigmatic. The King of Faery seems to want to possess, but not in sexual terms, bodies, and the Kingdom of Faery is eerily adorned with bodies all caught in the throes of violent death. It is interesting too that the King of Faery’s company is defmed by the action of hunting, although they catch “no best.” Sir Degarré similarly depicts an act of fairy taking, this time explicitly sexual: the rape of the unnamed princess by a fairy knight at the start of the romance. While the eponymous hero is conceived through this act, it is startling in its violence:

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þo no þing ne coude do3he But wep and criede and wolde fle; And he anon gan hire atholde And dide his wille, what he wolde. He binam* hire here maidenhod…(*seized)15 The distress and rape of the damsel are bizarrely at odds with the physical attractiveness of the fairy knight and the setting. The violence of the scene is heightened through contrast with the courtly language of the knight:

lich have i-loved þe mani a3er, And now we beþ us selve her; Pou best mi lemman ar þou go Weþer þe likeþ wel or wo. (105–8) The conflation of love and violence here is particularly striking. The fairy knight stands outside the laws and social and moral expectations of the human world, despite his familiarity with its language. His otherworldly nature is affirmed too in his statement that he is to beget a child on the woman. Such supernatural figures, finally, are ambiguous, as are their actions, and, like the Green Knight, are menacing on account of that ambiguity. There is no doubt, however, that the powers of the fairy world can be violent and lifethreatening, although they may also intervene in more life-enhancing ways. This will prove to be the case in Sir Degarré, where the child begotten is the eponymous hero, and where the tale will end in the encounter of Degarré and his father, and their reunion with his mother. It is only in a work such as Sir Gowther that the link between the supernatural and the demonic becomes explicitly demonic: in general, the violence of the fairy world is, above all, eerily “other.”16 In medieval romance, then, magic figures as a real and violent force, dangerous if misused by humans, but also in its way a learned, even “courtly” art. Yet equally it is a force that is “out there,” part of the unknown, potentially uncanny, world, which the knight enters and which may itself enter the court. What is especially striking is that the force of magic seems not to be wholly good or evil. It is tied up with destiny but not exclusively with the working of divine Providence. In the world of romance, a battleground is established, marked by gifts and challenges from both good and evil forces, in which free will can enact itself. The other world glimmers beyond the human; magical virtues in things may be harnessed by both good and evil; human and supernatural practitioners of magic exist—but they never wholly dominate. They influence but do not over-come free will. The force of magic, its potential violence, is not straightforwardly moral or immoral, and perhaps this is the root of its power. It forms, for better or worse, an essential element of the courtly world of romance, an element that by no means exclusively belongs to the exotic, fantastical, and escapist aspect of the romance mode. Rather, it is linked to very real practices, beliefs, and fears of occult and

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natural possibilities, of the strength of the divine and the demonic, and the sense that beyond the human world is a world of shadows, forces both good and evil that exist somewhere between heaven and hell, and possess the power to influence mankind in sometimes violent ways. Magic, indeed, formed a powerfal and menacing, although also intriguing, aspect of the violence accepted by medieval authors as part of the complex world in which they lived. Notes *I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Board for generously granting me a Research Leave Award, which allowed me to complete this chapter. 1. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron. Exeter Medieval English Texts and Studies. 2nd rev. ed. (1978; Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1996), 720–23. All subsequent references to Sir Gawain and the Green Knightare from this edition and are cited by line number. 2. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Knight’s Tale, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D.Benson. 3rd ed. (1987; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 1.1660. All subsequent references to Chaucer’s writings are from this edition and are cited by line number. 3. For a discussion of mechanical or technical wonders, see Lambertus Okken, Das goldene Haus und die goldene Laube. Wie die Poesie ihren Herren das Paradies einrichtete. Amsterdamer Publikationen zur Sprache und Literatur, 72 (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1987). 4. Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989, Canto ed., 2000), 10.1 am indebted to Kieckhefer for much of the following discussion of definitions. 5. Kieckhefer, 13. Other important studies include Valerie I.J.Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991); Karen Jolly, Catharina Raudvere, and Edward Peters, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Middle Ages (2001; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); and Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. 2nd ed. (1971; London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977). 6. For a history of legal and theological attitudes to magic, see in particular Edward Peters, The Magician, the Witch and the Law (Hassocks, Sussex, U.K.: Harvester Press, 1978). 7. See in particular Augustine, De Civitate Dei, viii–x, discussed by Kieckhefer, 38–39. For the following discussion of developing theological attitudes to magic, see in particular Kieckhefer, 10–12. 8. Isidore de Seville, Etymologies, ed. Peter K.Marshall et al. Vol 2, viii.9 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1986), quoted in Kieckhefer, 11. 9. For a discussion of astral magic, see Kieckhefer, 131–33. 10. See Kieckhefer, 33. 11. David Rollo treats these issues and their relation to court politics in Glamorous Sorcery: Magic and Literacy in the High Middle Ages. Medieval Cultures, 25 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 12. Monica H.Green, Womens Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Variorum, 2000). 13. See further Corinne Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S.Brewer, 2001), 218–28, 232–33, et passim; Michael Uebel, “The Foreigner Within: The Subject of Abjection in Sir Gowther” (96–117), and Jesus Montano, “Sir Gowther: Imagining Race in Late Medieval England” (118–32), in Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York and London: Routledge, 2002).

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14. Sir Orfeo, in Donald B.Sands, ed., Middle English Verse Romances. Exeter Medieval English Texts and Studies (1966; Exeter: University of Exeter, 1986), 185–200:ll. 143–44. All subse quent references to Sir Orfeo are from this edition and are cited by line number. 15. Sir Degarré, in A.V.C.Schmidt and Nicolas Jacobs, eds. Medieval English Romances, London Medieval and Renaissance Series, 2 vols. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1980), Vol.2, ll. 109–13. All subsequent references to Sir Degarré are taken from this edition and are cited by line number. 16. See the contributions to Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2002.

12 Why Is Middle English Romance So Violent? The Literary and Aesthetic Purposes of Violence JEANE.JOST One of La Tour Laundry’s cautionary tales…is of a husband who fetched his wife back from her parents’ house, where she had fled after a marital quarrel. While lodged overnight, the lady was attacked by a “great number of young people wild and infect with lechery” who “ravished her villainously,” causing her to die of shame and sorrow. The husband cut her body into twelve pieces, each of which he sent with a letter to certain of her friends that they might be made ashamed of her running away from her husband and also be moved to take vengeance on her ravishers. The friends at once assembled with all their retainers and descended upon the town where the rape had occurred and slew all its inhabitants.1 Violence reigns in the twenty-first century, as it did in Laundry’s tale. Recent media producers, particularly of TV, movies, and video games, have been accused of offering excessive violence to lure the young and impressionable. Parents throw up their hands in dismay, asking why cartoons or other programming targeted for children, or adults, for that matter, must feature so much violence. Producers sputter back, “Because it sells!” But why does it sell? Perhaps for several reasons: It offers a vicarious experience of danger, and all its heightened emotion, without actual risk. It provides an alternative, stimulating experience without real-world commitment, which can be visited temporarily, and interrupted for dinner. It shocks, disturbs, and upsets in a meta-reality, which can be entered and left at will. If teen horror movies such as the Friday the Thirteenth series are likened to sex in their emotional and physical thrill, as death is likened to sex in its powerful impact, its stimulating but mysterious nature, then vicarious violence, which similarly thrills, scares, revolts, titillates, and fascinates, generally without personal danger, will like-wise sell.2 But this vicarious, as well as actual, violence likewise desensitizes. Its danger is that it breeds further violence, requires more of the same to evoke an equally exciting “thrill,” as the person becomes inured to its power. And when children are raised amid this violence, fed it with their mothers’ milk, their characters and dispositions can be nothing else but hot-tempered. The vulnerability of children to this powerful magnet is both

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widely acknowledged and historically validated.3 Marjorie Curry Woods unearths a cogent reason for violence in the Middle Ages by exploring the nature of Latin exercises read by medieval youth: “These texts present an increasingly complex, some would say increasingly ‘realistic,’ depiction of rape, from Statius’ somewhat distant summary to Ovid’s arch advice about female psychology to the orchestrated rape scene in Pamphilus complete with the victim’s explicit vocal objections.”4 These influential texts read in the classroom for centuries thus offer a kind of unhealthy abnormality as the norm to the unsuspecting youth. Anne Schotter describes the twelfth-century audience influenced by these violent Latin texts: “young, clerical, male—for whom the poem was a school exercise, [who] would most likely have been amused by the rape…[and for whom] the poem may have truly been a comedy.”5 But, she cautions, “The later audience, extending through the fifteenth century and mixed in gender because it read the poem in vernacular versions as well as in Latin, would have responded to …Galathea’s strong voice [crying out against her rape].”6 Woods counters, however, rightly contending those young, clerical male students “are the most important and consistent audience of texts about rape read during the Middle Ages and one that the vernacular tradition supplants but does not displace.”7 The formative stages of young minds are thus weaned to the appetite of rape and violence from the twelfth century on by literary texts. The parallel, modern children drinking in brutality and violence in cartoons and stories, is painfully apparent; both generate a kind of wildness of personality detrimental to themselves and others. Popular culture of the Middle Ages, exemplified in that most prolific and widespread genre of courtly romance, is equally tarred with the brush of violence, both motivated and gratuitous, and for many of the same reasons. Indeed, it is difficult to find a medieval romance, or a modern film, whose plot is not steeped in violent action, or at least contains its measure of sex and violence, the Truce of God notwithstanding. What is the connection between influential violent media-classical textbooks for young boys, authoritative sources of epic battle tales for older males, softer romance verses perhaps for a wider audience, both French Breton lays and those recast in Middle English, and actual violent practices? Does exposure to others’ violence lead to practice of it oneself, in a kind of cause-and-effect relationship? Many attest to this theory. Michael Harney astutely points out the congruence of violence in modern media and Medieval Spanish tales, pondering “what we might call the explicit stylistics of violent depiction—the actual precision and detail of representations of violent encounters, events or processes. In other words, what is called graphic violence both in the Middle Ages and today.”8 Harney realistically weaves the two realms of violence, past and present, together because they have fallen from the same tree, and not far from it. The fluid concept of violence encompasses physical force used so as to injure, damage, or destroy another person or thing, or extreme roughness of action, with intense, often devastatingly or explosively powerful force or energy. Further, it may include an unjust or callous perpetration of force or power, warranted or not, accompanied by vehement or furious emotions. Victims of violence may be actual or perceived enemies within or outside the family, community, or larger environment, male or female, young or old, the self or other. Perpetrators may act for any number of reasons—jealousy, vengeance, power, competition, frustration, or insecurity—or for no reason whatsoever. They may be influenced in these responses by oral or written texts, or such texts may reflect the current social structure or the individual out of control. What function does

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this primordial violence have within Middle English romance then and in other popular venues now, and why is it so engrossingly all-pervasive? Is it essential to the romance genre per se? Who would have been the audience for such violence—what social class or classes, what genders and ages? Does it model or reflect its society? Where do ethical notions of prowess and violence meet? Douglas Kelly points out: [T]he Middle Ages did not have a theoretical conception of genre…. Although the characteristics of roman as romance were neither constant nor imposed, the word did identify and determine a class of writing…. These characteristics influenced what would be written as and designated roman, and fashioned public taste and expectations… [T]he elucidation of old matter and the discovery of chivalric truths in extraordinary marvels produced a kind of writing which united matter and truths in extraordinary narratives whose aristocratic heroes and heroines mirrored and exemplified prowess, love, or moral fortitude.9 The conjunction of these three forces, prowess, love, and moral fortitude, forms the core of romance adventure, in which are found what Kelly calls “the great actions of romance: quest, marriage, combat, celebration.”10 Sometimes one component dominates the others, creating subgenres such as the Breton lay. The moment prowess becomes violence is variably determined, perhaps by cultural mores and expectations, authorial attitude, and audience reception. Thus, a fine and floating line separates the romance notion of chivalry, defense of the weak, and its excess, violent combat. Even the most refined author, relating the most ennobling of tales, feels compelled to include his or her brand of comic, or in this case, violent relief, into a perfectly civilized story. Kelly points out the example of Dinaden who “raises legitimate questions about love and knighthood as ideals in the violent world of prose romance or even in the contemporary world of the romancer and his audience.”11 He is not the only one. Further, various authors treat these questions differently, depending on (1) the authors’ own historical and cultural experiences; (2) the ur-romance story they are recreating; (3) the sources they use or disregard; (4) the time and place of writing and re-creating; (5) the temperament of the author; and (6) the conception of romance commonly accepted at the time of writing. The difficulty in defming romance has been well documented. As Susan Crane points out: Genre was not an important concept for medieval theorists, nor did poets restrict the term roman/romaunce to one set of characteristics… observations about the generic nature of romance…must be fluid and contingent, seeking to clarify the nature of single works rather than to classifythem.12 However, at least two elements regularly recur: a courtly, amatory relationship between lovers, and a courtly code of fighting to protect the social context in zwhich it is carried out. In a genre often privileging its love interest, how has hatred—on occasion, even of one’s beloved—so taken over in many instances? Is it a case of “overkill”—too much protection of a good thing by a threatened, defensive perpetrator within a romance? Or is

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it survival of an individual against his social milieu collectively, or represented by a single enemy? Yet, as noted above, other motives—jealousy, vengeance, power, marital and other coercion (as in the head note to this chapter)—may generate highly volatile actions as well. How can romance, the popular genre of love relationships, admittedly often involving conflict, paradoxically recount violence against women who should be protected? Should not certain categories of knights, such as the unarmed or vulnerable also be cared for? One explanation for romance violence might be that the chaotic world of the late Middle Ages presented so much constant and insistent violence that both perpetrators and victims became inured to its extent and degree. Tuchman remarks that: Violence was official as well as individual. Torture was authorized by the Church and regularly used to uncover heresy by the Inquisition. The tortures and punishments of civil justice customarily cut off hands and ears, racked, burned, flayed, and pulled apart people’s bodies. In everyday life, passers-by saw some criminal flogged with a knotted rope or chained upright in an iron collar. They passed corpses hanging on the gibbet and decapitated heads and quartered bodies impaled on stakes on the city walls. In every Church they saw pictures of saints undergoing varieties of atrocious martyrdom—by arrows, spears, fire, cut-off breasts—usually dripping blood. The Crucifixion with its nails, spears, thorns, whips, and more dripping blood was inescapable. Blood and cruelty were ubiquitous in Christian art, indeed essential to it, for Christ became Redeemer, and the saints sanctified, only through suffering violence at the hands of their fellow man.13 Such shocking phenomena might well have blunted the sensitivities of those who lived under these social conditions and experienced these visions of blood and gore. Another answer lies in the widespread commonplace medieval paradox defining woman: as Eve—lecherous, disobedient, traitorous temptress—or as Virgin Mary— virginal, maternal, distant, elusive, docile, and nonthreatening. When perceived as the first, woman becomes the enemy, to be subdued, and as such is castigated or violated. As Angela Jane Weisl notes: Medieval women inhabited a violent world that often sought to maintain their subjugation by physical attacks on their bodies. In the secular world, women were at the mercy of laws which permitted them to be battered, the most notable of which was widely enough known to become a proverbial expression, the “rule of thumb being the width of stick a man was permitted to use to beat his wife.”14 The religious world was no more compassionate, placing women under the power and authority of their husbands who considered them “the offspring of evil, always ready to return to their dangerous nature.”15 On the other hand, as Corinne Saunders reminds us, “[t]he effects of rape, like its causes and legal ramifications, are addressed in medieval writing in ways that can closely parallel the modern emphasis on personal injury…. Indeed, rape is repeatedly depicted as so traumatic that it leads to the silencing of the

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woman.”16 It may be no accident, then, that the injured victim is often given no words in Middle English romance, but needs a vocal defender. Since brutality and rape within and outside marriage were so prevalent in life, not surprisingly these events were echoed throughout literature, particularly romance tales of love and war. Notably, the romance of Chaucer’s Wife’s Tale presents a vulnerable maiden raped, perhaps silenced by the crime, by an insensitive knight, totally unconcerned with his victim’s plight. The wide-spread occurrence of such a reprehensible, personally intrusive, heinous crime justifies severe legal censure, as the Wife recounts. The Wife’s offending knight (putatively Sir Gawain) faces a tribunal that sentences him to death, until the moderating voice of the courtly women propose educative rehabilitation: he must learn compassion, the nature of victimhood, equality, sovereignty, and gentilesse. Their mercy does nothing to minimize the seriousness of his offense. Indeed, numerous articles characterize the violence against the violated maid in the Wife’s Tale, but perhaps the most all-inclusive study is Peter Beidler’s fine collection, The Wife of Bath: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism.17 In this volume, Elaine Tuttle Hansen explains the Wife’s own personal history of domestic violence this way: The Wife’s marital experiences are grounded in domestic and sexual violence against women, and yet repeatedly her narrative serves two purposes: (1) it normalizes this violence by suggesting that men who are really attractive to women are just violent by nature, and anyhow women actually enjoy it; and (2) it erases this violence by suggesting that Jankyn actually loved her and stopped hurting her after that last big fight. Women are erotically aroused by the injuries done to them, according to the Wife, but the good news is that an abusive husband can be reformed if the blow he strikes is finally hard enough to deafen his spouse for life.18 The Wife’s “contradictory message” is unsettling. Tuttle Hansen concludes, “her text allows us to analyze the workings of antifeminism…. Chaucer was at least sensitive, if not opposed, to the ways in which women are oppressed by the dominant authorities and cultural conventions of his day.”19 The same cannot be universally claimed, for not all authors or tales, especially male-oriented stories extolling bravery, recognize the crime of the Wife’s Knight, or seek to redress his insensitivity in real or fictive life. Even the more feminized genre of romance paints a picture of abusive violence, which may or may not be exonerated by its final lines. But, not a genre to discriminate, romance levels equal or more animosity at competing knights or rivals. Thomas Malory, enduring tumultuous fifteenth-century social upheaval, recreates the violent clash of swords and systems between men and their factions in his Morte Darthur.20 The question remains: How has protection of the weak and chivalric ideals been transformed to raw and indefensible violence? In discussing Wolfram von Eschenbach’s work, Albrecht Classen and others note that knighthood and chivalry were no guarantee of protection against rape for women, because most knights preferred personal glory and public recognition to any other motive, including chivalry.21 Despite the tenth-century Truce of God “formulated to meet the craving for some relief from perpetual combat,”22 war and bloodshed still remain the hallmarks of this later era. Why is violence and victory superior to virtue in the minds of the perpetrators? Why have they

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not sought “constructive countermeasures,” but in Classen’s words, privileged that “monstrous phenomenon,”23 which so easily seeps into the literary depictions of heroic life, as valor crosses the line into violence? This chapter argues that violence, what Classen calls the “traditional paradigm,”24 is a natural human shortcoming imperfectly kept in check by those who temporarily or permanently lack self-discipline, rationality, or perspective. Violent people, in life and in literature, forget their social fimction, and operate as egocentric individuals, as if their claims alone were operative. The “naturalness” of violence in no way justifies this weakness, for all human beings are expected to curb their appetites—perhaps a primary definition of emotional maturity. On the other hand, is violence ever justified? At this moment in political history, when the United States has launched an offensive attack against a non-invasive nation, the question is very critical. On the other hand, was violence against Hitler justified? When does defense of victims justify violence? When one life, or six million, hangs in the balance? When the degree of violent force is “excessive”? Is that a relative or absolute determination? These concerns, and how unchecked “natural” human shortcomings of some threaten other human beings, will inform the following discussion. Four exemplary models of chivalric romance use violence as, or as a means to convey, a message: the anonymous Tale of Gamelyn (ca. 1350); Athelston (ca. 1350); Thomas Chester’s Sir Launfal (ca. 1375); and Book II of Malory’s Morte Darthur (ca. 1460s). All appear to subscribe to chivalric codes of behavior, yet all also defy them, violently transgressing norms. Fraternal conflicts often arise, knowingly in the first and second, and unwittingly in the last. No social class is exempted; the contexts of Athelston, Sir Launfal, and the Morte Darthur are aristocratic and that of the Tale of Gamelyn is less highly connected (the lands at issue were “verray purchas,” not inherited). All use threat as coercion. Gamelyn: The Heart of a Genre Selde ye see ony eir helpen his brother (40) This romance of family conflict utilizes spite and deception as its narrative core, ignoring any code of behavior regulating actions. In this early English outlaw tale, Stephen Knight finds “much violence and much legal activity, most of it corrupt…gaining property by your strong right arm.”25 John Scattergood points out that Gamelyn “deals in the politics and sociology of violence, in an uncondemnatory way. It describes, with evident approval and frequent relish, actions which would have been found unpalatable by many late medieval men and women, and which were evidently not to the taste of authors who adapted and re-used the story later.”26 Chivalry is hard to recognize. Although the pater familias John of Boundis “coude of norture y-nough and mochil of game”27 (4; knew enough of good breeding and much concerning sport), his sons did not inherit his disposition. First, his putatively wise knights refuse to distribute his lands as requested, thus violating the dying man’s request. Although he begs, “I biseke you gode men, that lawe conne of londe,/For Gamelynes love that my queste stonde”(62–63), eldest son John usurps Gamelyn’s territory, casts aspersions on his legitimacy, and neglects to care for the youth’s lands, thus provoking his hostility.

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Realizing the abuses, the boy erupts into anger, refusing to cook for his brother. “And therfor have thou Goddes curse, brother, by thy name” (100; brother in name only). As Scattergood notes, the poem [S]uggests that since John has behaved so badly towards Gamelyn in seeking to disinherit him and have him executed, Gamelyn is justified in the violent and illegal actions that he takes. It is at the same time, a criticism of the false administration of the law and a celebration of justifiable law-breaking. Where the positive law fails…one can legitimately resort to more basic forms of natural justice.28 No less volatile, John unleashes cruel words, and resorts to beating Gamelyn senseless with cudgels, “and lat him leren another tyme to answere me bet”(112). Gamelyn’s great strength, lightness of foot, and victory over his brother’s men further infuriate his brother. These instances of brutality appear motivated to the audience, albeit falsely, given their kinship and their father’s wishes. The unjust usurpation of the elder brother has begun the conflict; the young boy accepts his brother’s challenge, and learns hard-hearted vengeance as a means of survival. Having failed in the physical realm, John attempts to outwit Gamelyn with deception and treachery in the psychological one. Like Reynard, or Judas, John invites Gamelyn to reconcile, but “the knight thought on tresoun…and went and kisst his brother” (165, 166). The poet controls audience affiliation by crafting a clear-cut villain and victim. Readers and listeners become invested in the young Gamelyn whose virtues are made abundantly clear, and despise the manipulatively deceptive John who may have more power, but less virtue. And yet, Gamelyn displays surprisingly violent behavior, which the poet accepts without condemnation. Gamelyn’s next foray into combat seems justified, as he seeks to avenge the deaths of the sorrowful franklin’s two sons. His damage to the boys’ murderer, designated as “champion,” is three broken ribs and “his oon arm, That yaf a gret crack” (246), notably not death at this early stage. The audience is led to feel justice has been done, accepting Gamelyn’s vengeful retaliation because the poet does. Although the “champion’s” actions are clearly unethical, Gamelyn’s excessive, even jubilant response may not be objectively justifiable. Victory back at home is not so easily won, for when brother John locks him out for jealousy and spite, Gamelyn must kick in the gate to gain entrance. Speedily he avenges his anger on the porter by breaking his neck and throwing him in a well; thus he surrenders his father’s gentility, and partakes of his brother’s crassness and cruelty. Nurture here overcomes nature, or genetic gentility, as violence mounts. Both brothers lack self-discipline, rationality, and perspective, focusing on their own interests to the exclusion of others’. Although Gamelyn is still the injured victim, the audience must revise its evaluation of his character. The poet says: “When Gamelyn the yonge thus hadde plaid his play,/Alle that in the yerde were drewen hem away” (307–8). If murder is “play,” what are the rules of this game? After a week’s boisterous reveling with “all manner men” (312), consuming his brother’s supplies and testing his power, Gamelyn is caught, his hands and feet bound in fetters through John’s deception and vengeance. His physical condition may metaphorically represent his moral one: trapped by his physical desires or self-centered interests. Here also the psychological and physical are brought

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together. However, bribing servant Adam Spencer to free him and playing another combat “game” at the feast will lead to yet another conflict: “I woll sette goode strokes right on hir lendes” (458; I will set good strokes on their loins), he threatens. Initially, Gamelyn needed brutality to survive his ordeal, and it was perceived as justifiable; but with time, he becomes inured to violence; his anger and aggression become more gratuitous, part of his ordinary behavior. He seems to know no bounds. Although audience sympathy weakens, his brother is still seen as the villain, “the fals knight his brother, full of trechery” (463). Once again, at the banquet of abbots and priors, the violent word leads to violent action. John verbally abuses his brother and claims he is insane, so when Gamelyn begs for help, the banqueters join the fray, also hurling condemnation at Gamelyn. First Gamelyn retorts in kind verbally; next he leaps upon the guests with an oak staff, “and goode strokes yaf” (500), breaking arms and legs, pushing some into the fire, and knocking others unconscious. Then he strikes brother John’s neck, breaks his back, and binds him in fetters as he was bound. Finally, when the sheriff arrives to reestablish the status quo and reclaim the king’s peace, Adam and Gamelyn attack the posse: “Adam felde tweine and Gamelin felde three” (593). One might safely claim he is out of control in his overreaction, no matter how sympathetic one might be to his general plight, or how empathetically the poet might present him. When the comrades meet seven outlaw kings in the forest, the two call upon a chivalry they have yet to practice, claiming that the leader: [M]ay neither mete ne drink werne [deny] us for shame. If that he be heende and come of gentil blood, He woll yeve us mete and drink and doon us some good. (662–64) Ironically, Gamelyn rarely exhibits his own gentle blood in words or action, yet he presumes upon that of the outlaws, expecting courteous treatment. His introductory speech is a careful collage of braggadocio and deference, revealing his self-confidence without intimidating others: “Tho they herde by his word that might was in his arm,/Ther was non of hem alle that wolde do him harm” (653–54). His speech achieves its intended goal: respect of the seven, and a dinner invitation. Before long, he likewise receives the crown of all outlaws, and a confrontation with the new sheriff, his brother John, who indicts Gamelyn “for hate and for ire” (698). His response is brutally unchivalric: “Allas!” saide Gamelyn, “that ever I was so slak/That I ne hadde broke his neck tho his rigge brak! (711–12; “Alas!” said Gamelyn, “that ever I was so careless/That I had not broken his neck when I broke his back”). This seemingly excessive violence, a crisis stage, is narratively needed to propel the romance action to its final stage, and is comic in its extremity. It is no less offensive for this reason. The last complication, when Gamelyn is imprisoned, is the arrival of Sire Ote, the only brother accorded the title of “Sir”: “As good a knight and heende as mighte gon on foote” (As good a knight, and skillful, as might go on foot; 728). After a battle of words between John and Ote, the two agree on bail for Gamelyn. But Sir Ote, his surety, is in danger until the crafty Gamelyn returns, planning that: “Ther is noon in the halle shall bere away his heed (unbroken)…. On hem that been giltif I will be awreke” (820, 824). Mildmannered Ote gently chides Gamelyn for his delayed return, for Ote almost lost his life

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over the tardiness. Gamelyn roughly reassures his brother that his accusers, justice, and judge will die instead, seeming to know no other path of resolution but violence. In a romance literally built upon cumulative violence, Sir Ote would fail as hero, being too chivalric; a vengeance-seeker must further the violence. Gamelyn well fills the bill, as he “clevede his [brother John’s] cheeke bone…threw him over the barre and his arm tobrak” (850, 851, 852). Squeezing out the coconspirators’ names, he fettered them together, hanged them “faste by the necke” (882), and denied mercy to brother John: “For and thou were maister yit I shulde have wors” (876). The narrator ends with a lackluster conclusion positing vengeance as the romance theme: “Thus wan Gamelyn His londe and his leede [tenants]/And wrack him of his enemies and quit hem here meede [avenged him of his enemies and gave them their reward]” (895–96). Two anticlimactic lines note that he marries “A wif both good and fair” (899), a seeming inconsequentiality. Given the tumultuous and emotional struggle he endured to reach such a plateau, however, the message is clear: violence is the solution, and love a pleasant afterthought. The conclusion of this outlaw tale, then, sputters to an end: no one is redeemed, good does not overcome evil, gentilesse has no sway over violence, and nothing noble saves any of the characters who will continue living their vengeful lives. Much of this romance comprises violent episodic actions strung together, perpetrated justly at times, but more often without justification. In Scattergood’s words, This violent story of crime and retribution is described with a heartlessly sardonic relish. Its events are called sports, “gamen” (290, 342) or “gode game” (552). Gamelyn’s violence in beating John’s household servants, or killing the porter, or assaulting the clerics is termed “play” (130, 307, 526). His quasi-judicial hangings at the end are called a jest, “boude” (858).29 Other romance tales likewise focus on games, but generally the outcome of such “play” is innocuous. Although Gawain decapitates the Green Knight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight30 at the Green Knight’s behest, the victim stalks off very much alive, recalling their return engagement. When next they meet, that fully recovered (albeit by magic) Green Knight, now transformed into Sir Bercilac, continues the “game,” which concludes equally without damage—with a single nick on his neck—for the unharmed Sir Gawain. Only his pride is hurt! But wherein lies the blame in a tale of games distinctly dangerous? Does the author of Gamelyn condemn the blatant disregard for law, for authority established by social consensus, by those entrusted to uphold it? Or does the poet blame those who, seeing this transgression of social norms and expectations, a failure to uphold the law, establish their own kind of vigilante justice to right obvious atrocities? Despite a brutal presentation of the incidents, the Gamelyn poet sides with the vigilantes against the failed legal and administrative establishment. Gamelyn lacks the high drama of certain other romance tales, including Malory’s, the urgency and suspense of something greater at stake than local squabbling, the stylistic nuances of dialogues, and the emotional evocation of pity and fear. Violence is used to highlight conflict in one family of insensitive brothers, incapable or unwilling to compromise rationally. Although this literal level may be transcended to condemn a

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wider, more insidious lawlessness at the metaphorical level, the plot remains firmly ensconced in the concrete; the reader must make this leap. Like the sensational twentyfirst-century authors, this medieval writer used the sensational quality generated by violence to hold his audience’s attention, but also to criticize a failed legal system refusing to implement justice. No one is the nobler for the experience. Athelston: The Deceptive Word within the Genre Thorugh wurd oure werk may springe (87) This hadde he for his lye… Leve nevere traitoure have betere ending, But swich dome for to dye. (809; 811–12)

The primal fraternal conflict epitomized in the Cain and Abel story and rehearsed in Eglamour31 carries mythological and psychological weight; the mid-fourteenth-century, 812-line Athelston moves only one step beyond fratricide: four sworn-brothers from four nations and three estates who promise mutual fidelity are unable to keep their word, generating bloodshed and murder. If the Tale of Gamelyn utilizes violent action between brothers who seem inarticulate in their negotiations, Athelston prides itself on its civility of language interactions—until “a brother” betrays another. Then it becomes as undisciplined and uncontrolled, as irrational and lacking in perspective, as its cousin. As Sands remarks, the world of Athelston “is elemental, brutish, and bloody…. [The poem] hurdles along unchecked until its horrendous end.”32 Interestingly, however, the beginning is itself almost deceptive in its congenial and jovial atmosphere. Sworn brotherhood, friendship, sharing of good fortune, rosy-hued sons “as bright as blosme on brere” (72),33 and mutual affection establish a harmonious context. But, ironically King Athelston’s love for his sister Edif ‘s family instigates the jealous Wymound’s hatred, deception, and disloyal vow-breaking, bringing down their house of cards much like the House of Atreus and Thyestes.34 This forsworn brother Wymound concocts lies—that Edif ‘s family plans to poison Athelston for his kingship—in order “to don hem [the family] brenne and sle” (84). Wymound initiates verbal and physical violence of several types: he is jealous of King Athelston’s love for Edif ‘s family and so intends to “brenne and sle” them through the king’s auspices; he will lie about putative poisoning of the king to do so; and he will swear the king to silence for his own protection. The word is repeatedly being defiled; promises of loyalty are repeatedly being broken. Athelstan, believing Wymound’s claim that he will be poisoned by the family he so loved, seeks vengeance through verbal deception as well: a letter promising his nephews knighthood, a promise he does not intend to keep. Now the deceived Athelstan himself takes on the role of deceiver, luring the innocent family into his lair with disingenuous promises, a dramatic violation of the word. Once he has the family within his clutches, Athelston beats and throws the family into prison without benefit of discussion. He assumes they are guilty, and acts accordingly. Internecine conflict increases when the queen attempts to intercede. The

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now-furious Athelston turns his violence upon his pregnant wife, killing their unborn son. Refusing the boon of the crying queen:

With his foot he wolde nought wonde; He slough the child right in here wombe; She swounid amonges hem all. (282–84) This kind of violence again recalls classical Greek theater in which familial discord generates audience engagement: shock, pity, pain, fear, and recognition of hamartia. The violent beating of a pregnant woman until her unborn child is killed is here heightened, for the husband/father is the perpetrator of the crime. The narrator recounts, “His owne fadir him slough!” (293; His own father he slew!). One recalls Medea’s similar murder of her own children in vengeance for Jason’s new love Glauke, Creon’s daughter. Shockingly little is made of this atrocity in Athelston, as the story moves on with little comment, perhaps because other immediate dangers take preeminence. In contrast, the child-murders are the pinnacle and climax of the Medea, depicted as grotesquely as they indeed were. The queen’s distress motivates her letter to enlist help from another of the sworn brotherhood—the Archbishop of Canterbury—thus widening the family feud circle, and tapping the clergy. Now the three estates are represented: the newly arrived clergyman, the angry aristocratic king, and the imprisoned laity. Signifying independence, power, and oppression, all three estates offer an example of unchecked violence. Unlike the king’s interaction with his lay brother-in-law, in which a battle, but no words (so common in Gamelyri) ensue, Athelston listens to the archbishop’s reasonable plea:

Goode weddid brother, now turne thy rede: Do nought thin owne blood to dede But-yif it wurthy were (441–43) (Good brother-in-law, now change your mind:/Do not kill your own blood/Unless it were wurthy to do.) But Athelston nevertheless angrily and irrationally rejects the request for the prisoners’ justice:

Thanne the King wax wroth as winde; A wodere man mightee no man finde Than he began to be. He swore othes by sunne and mone, “They sholen be drawen and hongid or none.” (453–57)

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(Then the king became as angry as wind/A madder man might no man find/Than he began to be./He swore oaths by the sun and moon/[That] “They should be drawn and hung before noon”) In retaliation for denial of justice, the archbishop threatens to withhold Christian rites and rituals, to the peril of Athelston’s immortal soul:

Yif thou be ded that I may see, Assoilid [absolved] shalt thou never be; Then is thy soule in sorwe. (483–85) (Unless you are dead, that I may see/Absolved you shall never be;/ Then your soul will be in sorrow.) When he is ignored, the Archbishop first promises unappeased hunger, thirst, cold, drought, sorrow, poverty for the entire realm, and finally enacts his threat: spiritual withholding of Christian salvation. These words have more power than physical violence. But when all of England is interdicted or excommunicated, in yet another violent counterretaliation, the archbishop is denied symbols of his religious power: his cross, crozier, and wealth. In anger, the king announces his intent to retaliate with actions to counter the archbishop’s words:

Lay doun thy cross and thy staff, Thy mitir and thy ring that I thee gaf! (459–60) The power struggle between king and archbishop is greater than between king and brother-in-law, because the authority vested in their respective estates is more evenly matched. On the other hand, there is power in numbers; other knights rally around the archbishop, promise to capture the innocent family from prison, and regain the realm’s rights to Christianity. They proclaim:

We sholen drawe doun bothe halle and boures, Bothe his castelles and his toures. They shole ligge lowe and holewe. Though he be King and were the coroun, We sholen him sette in a deep dunioun. Oure Christindom we wole folewe. (525–30) Before the promised desolation of the king’s castle can be enacted, however, the king surrenders, seeking absolution; violence, for once, is averted. Is it virtue, or fear, that prevents this violence? Perhaps rationality, moderation, and a more distanced perspective, based on long-term needs, have finally won.

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To enact final justice, the archbishop violates the word, lying to the traitorous Wymound. When the archbishop claims the earl of Egeland and his sons are slain and the king’s sister is serving a life sentence, Wymound thinks it safe to return, now having no rivals for the king’s affections. Lured back to the king’s castle, Wymound is forced by king and archbishop to undergo the same ordeal by fire as the family, but fares not so successfully:

He wente fro the lengthe into the thridde And doune he fell the fir amidde; His eyen wolde him nought lede. (786–88) A heightened denouement is presented as the king’s nephews run frantically into the blazing fire to demand the truth from the burning felon; he can utter only “He loved him to mekil and me to lite; Therfore envie I hadde”(799–800). While physical violence is encompassing the entire area, what matters to the aspiring knights, and seemingly the author, is the true word, admission of weakness, and acknowledgment of guilt. Why is so much violence utilized, and what does it “mean”? Donald Sands contends that “the poem appears to be the product of church-state friction with all sense and justice on the side of the church…to the audience of the time Athelston’ would appear chiefly as something directed against tyranny and not as what it might appear to us today—namely an apology for the secular power of the church”35 Apology or not, church-state friction is one further element compounding an increasingly chaotic social situation, as just laws are circumvented by those who should be enforcing them in both religious and governmental domains. Sir Launfal: An Alteration of Genre

As lyght as dewe he leyde hem doune [slew them]. (608) Does this description of Launfal’s actions represent the ideals of chivalry to which romance aspires, or for which the genre has been extolled? As Donna Crawford points out: In their rationalized and motivated presentations of knights at battle, chivalric romances of adventure portray a world in which violence may well lead to bloody consequences, but in which the narrative attempts to provide justification for those consequences. There is little such narrative justification in Sir Launfal36 The chaos of fifteenth-century society noted by Johan Huizinga and others37 has invaded Thomas Chester’s 1430 Breton lay with a vengeance, leading editor A.J.Bliss to comment that “there is an unpleasant streak of bloodthirstiness running through the

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poem.”38 Crawford concurs, noting “there is a certain blitheness of tone in the poem’s representations of violence, particularly in Launfal’s dispatching of his opponent Sir Valentine and of Valentine’s supporters, ‘Alle we lordes of Atalye’ (601).”39 Its immediate source, Landevalky itself redacted from Marie de France’s Lanval, has undergone transformations indicative of the changing social reality: more bloodshed and violence. The audience is not forewarned of, or prepared for, this unwarranted brutality from incidents early in this romance, making its later appearance all the more stark. First, unlike its French counterpart, the Middle English Breton lay subgenre is not known for bloodthirstiness, but is more light-hearted, employs magic and fairies, and usually concludes with a happy ending. Thomas Garbaty discusses one significant lay, claiming: “Sir Orfeo has been justly cited as the most outstanding of the Breton lays in English, always excepting Chaucer’s contributions in the Wife of Bath’s Taleand the Franklins Tale…. ‘Celtic magic’ transforms the plot into a fairy tale with a happy ending.”40 Joanne Rice concurs, defining “Breton lai” as “a brief narrative poem with idealized, romantic content.“41 Rice says of the best-known Middle English Breton lay: “In its brevity, apparent simplicity, idealism, and concern with love and the supernatural, Chaucer’s [Franklin’s] tale does resemble the ‘Breton lays’ written by Marie de France,“42 although hers often contain a darker, more dangerous side. Second, this particular Middle English lay begins innocuously and peacefully enough at Arthur’s Round Table, becoming unexpectedly callous by its end. Initially, all sojourned “[w]yth joye and greet solas…. Neuer noon better [knights] wer nas” (9, 12). Launfal’s generosity has merited him a tenyear stewardship in Arthur’s court, and all seems well until Arthur brings Gwenore home to wive. Chester reveals her dirty little secret—“Wat sche hadde lemmannys vnwer43 her lord,/So fele wer nas noon ende” (That she had lovers under her lord/So many that there was no end of them; 47–48)—to justify Launfal’s dislike, the kernel of some final violence. This hint of future trouble is all the warning the audience is given. He alone is excluded from her gift-giving at the wedding: “Wat greuede hym many a syde” (that grieved him many a time; 72). The seeds of violence have been sown in the natural weakness of the principals: Gwenore’s weakness, a desire for power and control, a lack of self-discipline, and no perspective regarding her role or actions as queen; Launfal’s weakness, an excessive vengeful streak, lack of control in his actions, and shortsightedness. Launfal soon departs to Caerleon with Sir Hugh and Sir Jon, ostensibly to bury Launfal’s deceased father; but this remarkable event is never mentioned again, as Launfal callously forgets or ignores his filial mission. He seems immature and irresponsible here, and in his financial dealings. Now lodging with the mayor, his prior employee, he lavishly spends his fortune, leaving him destitute. In both instances, thoughtlessness and lack of foresight mark this bachelor. Even his companions Hugh and Jon have returned to court, finding no source of rich garments with him. When the queen disdainfully inquires of the proud Launfal, her second insult against him, the audience realizes their relationship will spark future antagonism, although no violence has been suggested. Accidentally encountering Arthur at the hunt, Launfal lies about his torn garments, receives Arthur’s affection, and Gwenore’s still inexplicable bitterness:

For sche wold wyth all here my3t

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Wat he hadde be bowe day & ny3t In paynys mor & more. (178–80) His poverty, rather than failure or bloodshed, becomes a source of anguish, keeping him from tournaments and social intercourse. Thus, his poor economic status, albeit of his own making, and not his lack of prowess or ability, jeopardizes his reputation. He mourns:

Wre dayes wer ben agon, Mete ne drynke eet y noon, And all was for pouert. Today to cherche y wolde haue gon, But me fawtede [lacked] hosyn & schon, Clenly brech & scherte; And for defawte of clodynge Ne my3te y yn wyth we peple wrynge [press]— No wonwer dou3 me smerte! (196–204) At least his excessive tendencies are not allowed full play, as he has no financial means to engage in battle, at least not yet! But Launfat’s luck changes when delightful, richly attired fairies—“Gentyll maydenes two” (231)—continue the fiction of peacefulness; emerging from the underground, they invite him to visit Dame Tryamour, “wat lady gent” (286), Princess of Fairie, who calls him “Syr kny3t, gentyl & hende” (313). The description turns out to be an ironic misnomer. When the seductive charmer weaves her spell, offering him riches and a magically replenishing purse in exchange for monogamous fidelity and protection of her identity, Launfal succumbs to her love. Or is it her gifts? This fortuitous invitation is the stuff of Breton lai, fulfilling audience expectations, and undermining the previous hint of discord with Gwenore. The knight wastes no time squandering her money as he had his own by throwing great feasts and giving away horses, attire, and all manner of presents, to the communal joy. Until now, no overt violence or unrestrained actions indicate the final direction of the romance tale. Supposedly Launfal’s generosity has motivated the knights of Caerleon to arrange a tournament in his honor. Chester claims:

Alle we lordes of Karlyoun Lette crye a turnement yn we toun, For loue of Syr Launfel. (433–35) This sounds affirming, until we learn the real motivation: “To wyte how hym wold spede” (437). Testing a man is hardly gratitude. The ungrateful benefactors’ game is the turning point of the lay, and from an anachronistic psychological perspective, is sufficient

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motive to infuriate Launfal and unleash his rage. Further, the tourney generates surprisingly unmotivated furor by his putative friends and recipients of his gifts. Are they jealous of his new-found wealth? The audience must question the motivation of the rich constable who, riding out, “smot to Launfal, & he to hym;/Well sterne strokes, & well grym” (460–61). Likewise, “For wrewwe yn herte [the Earl of Chester] was wod, neigh [mad, nearly]” (470), smashing Launfal on his head.. Vast numbers of Welsh knights descend on the lone defender, not in playful jousting, but deadly combat. Why so, when these men claimed to give the tournament in Launfal’s honor? Despite these overemotionally bitter enemies, Launfal’s successful blows yield him the victory, and back at Caerleon he celebrates with another feast. Thus, the audience is misled into believing such violence was an anomaly, an aberration now concluded, with the lighthearted expectations of the lay reinstated. Soon, however, trouble breaks out again, as Sir Valentine of Lumbardie, himself known for valor and strength, takes exception to Launfal’s adulation, and jealously invites him to joust for “[h]e wold wyth hym play”(543)—much more innocuous sounding than what transpires. Valentine wheedles, pointing to the “loue of hys lemman” (523), who offers the ironic statement: “Dreed we nowing, Sir gentyl kny3t!/Wou schalt hym sle wat day!” (551–52). The deeds of a “gentyl kny3t” are to slay? Indeed, the author here uses gentyl as aristocratic, skilled in battle, not mild, but its double meaning resonates as he becomes distinctly “unmild “unrestrained, and irrational. After Launfal takes Valentine up on his challenge, his plight becomes progressively worse, first losing his helmet, then his shield, finally culminating in the loss of his horse. The word game takes on a significant connotation as well, for when Launfal slips from his horse, “Syr Valentyn logh, & hadde good game:/Hadde Launfal neuer so moche schame” (577–78). The unhorsed knight cannot find it much of a game. After another blow from the Lombard:

Syr Valentyne he smote so were Wat hors & man bowe deed were, Gronyng wyth grysly wounde. (598–600) Interestingly, the narrator’s chronological, and possibly significant, priority is the life of the horse rather than the man. With such a grisly death, violence reigns in this supposed tale of fairy-lightness and delight. Its violence appears unnecessary, and unjustified. The Italian lords’ emphatic vow of deadly vengeance in return, that before Launfal leaves Lombardy, “he be hongede & todrawe” (606), is thwarted, and Launfal is spared. In a single line, the narrator dismisses the lords’ deaths at Launfal’s hand, saying “[a] nd whan he hadde we lordes sclayn,/He wente ayen ynto Bretayn” (610–11). As Crawford points out, “in the cheerfully fatal results of the battle with Sir Valentine and his supporters, the poem discloses the immoderate cost of manhood, of issuing a knightly challenge: the bodies left behind in Lombardy are the price paid by others for Launfal’s mastery as a knight.”44 But that statement may be qualified for violence may be merely the magic of the fairy princess. Arthur rewards Launfal’s “noblesse” (615) for the Lombard deaths with a forty-day celebration. Surprisingly, given her prior treatment of Launfal, it culminates in Gwenore’s wooing of Launfal, whose malicious rejection after

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her admission of love, claiming “I nell be traytoure, way45 ne ny3t” (683), inflames more violence. Her wounded pride prompts her threat—“Anhongew worw wou, hye & hard” (686; You shall be hung high and hard) for you are worthy to be destroyed; you love no woman, and none loves you. Attacking his vanity so enrages the knight that he breaks his vow to Tryamour, vindictively acknowledging his lover whose, he says:

[L]owlokste mayde, wythoute wene My3te bet be a quene Wan wou, yn all wy lyue! (697–99) And so a second type of violence is revealed: the infuriated queen seeks revenge against the instigating knight who insulted her and slew the Lombards. Shaking in her bed for wrath, Gwenore initiates a five-day vendetta by claiming to Arthur that Launfal sought her love, thereby shamed her, and asserted his lover’s maid to be more fit queen than she. Her rationality, perspective, and maturity are all brought into question. The believing Arthur also swears vengeance—hanging and drawing—without any confirmation or explanation. His excessive overreaction, for a wife who is no wife, seems misspent devotion. This interpersonal psychological violence is as devastating to individuals and the court as physical killing, and may itself lead to death. But even more chaos results from Launfal’s vow-breaking: no lover, no gold, no knave, no horse. His frustration at losing the props of his existence by his own stupidity leads to personal self-inflicted violence, as he beats his head and body, curses his mouth, and falls swooning to the ground. When four attacking knights bind and bring him to Arthur’s judgment, his “doble wo” (758) of self- and legal/regal accusation begins, as psychologically as physically traumatic. Launfal’s angry retort to his inquest instigated by Gwenore’s lying heightens the emotional tenor of the court, whose twelve knights consider the queen’s reputation, Launfal’s straightforward story, and his understandable reaction to her taunting. His acquittal, however, is neither absolute nor without threat of violence, because evidence, in the person of the now-evaporated Tryamour and her court, is required to extricate him from being “hongede as a wef” (hanged as a thief; 803). The queen adds to the violent tone by exclaiming “3yf he bryngew a fayrer wenge/Put out my eeyn gray!” (809–10)—not a pretty picture. But suddenly without warning, the nature of the genre changes when the joyful, bright world of fairies usually spicing up the Breton lai come riding in. Violence is dissipated, anger is surrendered, war, death, and vengeance are forgotten, and the entire emotional tone of the lai has been transformed into some healing, reconciliation, and escape to fairyland. What has been the purpose of violence, then, in such a supposedly magical romance? Both physical violence and psychological stress lay the groundwork for their opposites, heighten the emotional tenor, raise the stakes, intensify the otherwise bland action, make things really matter, and depict their opposite as even more desirable. On the other hand, Gwenore does not escape her oath’s fulfillment, losing her blue eyes. Launfal fares better, however, for when Tryamour does not initially arrive in time to save his reputation for truth, the judges do not prepare the gallows for Launfal. And so violence is hovering there, ready, but not finally implemented. Only in its absence, in the hypothetical, does violence control the final mood. Real deaths do occur, however, as the

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Lombardy lords are brutally slain by the putative hero: a foil to pave the way for life. The end of the tale sees him transformed into a star-struck “mayde” (866), seemingly innocent, washed clean in the brightness of the parade of beauties arriving to save his reputation, and heralding his sweetheart. The elaborate description of the diamondbejeweled, crowned beauty in white ermine and rich royal purple, complexion glowing with radiant life, somewhat offsets the earlier haze of death. Carrying the softly peaceful gyrfalcon and escorted by sleek greyhounds as she slowly progresses through the town, she is the antithesis of death and war, an antithetical image of calculated, rational progression. Watching this otherworldly vision, Launfal is transfixed and transformed by her power. Although he has broken his oath to preserve her identity, she forgives him, returning his gifts, and transports him back to her fairyland of Orlioun. Gwenore is not so fortunate, for violence comes home to roost when Tryamour’s breath blinds her, fulfilling Gwenore’s promise to poke out her eyes in the face of beauty greater than hers. Nor does Launfal escape entirely unscathed when deemed “wat traytour ful of pryde” (873) despite his salvation by his supernatural fairy queen. Perhaps his early taste of bitter death is enough to eschew further violence, and instill a fuller appreciation of death’s temporary demise in a romance finally pulsing with life, vitality, beauty, and rejoicing. Donna Crawford, drawing on Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain,46 concludes: [B]y means of the referential instability of the body, [conflicts] juxtapose specific values with wounded bodies, and sort the combatants into binary categories of good and evil, true and false, honorable and dishonorable. These categories then provide additional justification for the injuries that were inflicted to begin with—and it is because such justification is lacking in Sir Launfal that its tournament episodes seem so unsettling.47 In other words, if most romances justify their violence by clearly establishing good and bad characters or actions that must be overcome, Crawford finds in Launfal no such extremes to justiiy violence or killing; she finds gratuitous and seemingly heartless killing unmotivated by justice or necessity, the claims of the Breton lay or romance in general. I would modify this claim to note that the always-wicked Gwenore is pitted against the beneficent Tryamour, and hence receives her just desserts; the ungrateful Lombard lords who forget his generosity are foils to Launval, truly appreciative of Triamour’s assistance and Gawain’s friendship; they receive their end at Launval’s admittedly brutal hands. Overall, some sense of justice can be discerned, with a strong concluding overlay of Celtic magic to whitewash the early, uncontrolled violence, for which Thomas Chester seems to have forgiven his hero of Sir Launval. Le Morte Darthur. The Culmination of a Genre Aftir the deth of Uther regned Arthure, hys son, which had grete warr in hys dayes (Il.i) Romance tales depict aggression between men and women as well as men and men, much instanced by Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. Representing the war-torn chaotic fifteenth century, this cinematic romance is one of the most violent, with Book II

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a remarkable symbolic indicator of the fraternal blood to be shed in the broader history of the Round Table. The stark, realistic, shocking details fail to allay future violent actions. While most graphically revealed here, later instances of brutality appear stylized, repetitious, overabundant, redundant. In this respect most like the Spanish treatment of violence so well recorded by Michael Harney, one can also say of Le Morte, “it is in the accumulation of wounds received by the heroes and his comrades that unreality insinuates itself.”48 As Arthur himself would be most affected in his youth, later becoming inured and insensitive in finding brutal acts less appalling, through sheer familiarity, so the narrator presents them as through his eyes. Book II finds the sword-girt maid, the Lady of the Lake, entrapped by her deadly weapon until a “clene knyght withoute vylony and of jantill strene of fadir syde and of modir syde rescues her” (II.i).49 Although she warns of its danger and forecasts his doom, Balyn insists on possessing the sword: “Ye shall repente hit within shorte tyme…for ye shall sle, with that swerde the beste frende that ye have and the man that ye moste love in the worlde, and that swerde shall be your destruccion” (II.2). Once again, violence is created through words as well as deeds; when those words of violence are prophetic, the audience lives it twice, the actual violence more horrific because predicted and anticipated. The same technique of double violence is thus early on evidenced in predicting Gawain’s future behavior: “Gawayne revenged the deth of hys fadir the ten yere aftir he was made knygyt, and slew kynge Pellynor [with] hys owne hondis” (II.10). Sharing the fate of Cassandra’s predictions, these likewise fall on deaf ears. Thus, not dissuaded or intimidated by the threat against him, Balyn bullheadedly appropriates the deadly sword. His weakness—imaturity, lack of perspective about the future—and his self-centered indulgence instigate the beginning of the end of all Arthurian violence. Pain, blood, and death here appear to have no impact on either the aggressor or Malory, who relates his gory tale with no affect. Deeds such as unthinking decapitation perpetrated most barbarically and blissful disregard for the loss of life appear normative and unremarkable. Such a mind-set is at odds with any chivalric ideal posited over the previous three centuries. At this point, Malory has not presented a contrasting viewpoint, but lets the morality of the actions speak for itself. An intruding dwarf warns that the Lady’s kin will pursue the murderer, but makes no comment on the morality or rightness of the action. On the other hand, Balyn’s brother Balan claims that the death of the damsel grieves him, dispassionately stating: “But ye must take the adventure that God woll ordayne you” (II.5). He ignores any notion of the romance ideal—protection of women, care of the vulnerable, but conveys a sense of the inevitable. The author uses suspense in deferring the final fraternal conflict until the book’s conclusion, interspersing other gratuitous deaths along the way. But when the ultimate devastation is wrought: “They fought ther togyders tyl theyr brethes faylled…went unto bataille ageyne and wounded everyche other dolefully…that all the place thereas they fought was blood reed…they had eyther smyten other seven grete woundes” (II.18). The final tragedy is revealed when, on the verge of death, the brothers discover that they have slain each other. As a tribute to the crucial role of this fatal encounter, the narrator breaks his tradition of speedily moving on. Rather, the brothers evaluate their tragedy and its import on those who hear of it, pity themselves and each other, arrange a double grave, receive the Holy Sacrament, die, and are buried, with Merlin engraving their tomb.

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Ultimate anguish and violence have here been achieved with the double deaths of the brothers, foreshadowing the similar brother-feuds through which the Round Table will collapse. The extended treatment of their deaths worthily portrays the tragedy, with pity and appreciation for its gravity. Here violence both causes and marks the epitome of the Round Table’s future demise. We may wish to exonerate the brothers, who seem not to know their siblings; but once again an element of unconscious knowing—as at some level Jocasta knew Oedipus was her son, and he knew she was his mother—must claim its ascendency. In both cases, a prophecy was levied, the word of truth, to which all players should have been attuned. Were they too arrogant, thinking they might escape their fate while others smoldered in theirs? Were they unheeding, overconfident, incredulous, nonbelieving? In both Oedipus Rex and Malory’s Balin and Balan, prophecy is foolishly ignored, and violence is indulged, through the weakness of the victims. The same book witnesses the Lady of the Lake’s harshness in her bloody demand for “the hede of thys knyght [Balyn] that hath wonne the swerde, othir elles the dameseles hede that brought hit” (II.3). She explains her reason—the blood feud in which the knight killed her brother and the “jantillwoman” her father. Such gory brutality, vengeance or not, is indicative of fifteenth-century mores. George Holmes reminds us: “It is doubtful if any century in the varied history of English monarchy has seen changes more remarkable than those which took place between 1400 and 1500.”50 Such catastrophic change and disorder breed violence in several domains. After Balyn encounters the lady, who we learn caused his mother’s death, he punishes her for seeking his head and taking his mother’s when “with hys swerde lyghtly he smote of hyr hede before kynge Arthure” (II.3). Arthur’s vehement response suggests his shock and rejection of this uncourtly act: “I am ryght wrothe with Balyne. I wolde he were quytte of the despite that he hath done unto me and my courte” (II.4). For the king, at least, this is not normative, acceptable behavior; perhaps he is youthfully naive. Perhaps he is yet to be corrupted. Expulsion and a second warning that Balyn shall repent his actions follow from the grim deed. The unsqueamish and undaunted knight, however, “toke up the hede of the lady and bare hit with hym” ordering his squire to “take thou thys hede and bere hit to my frendes and telle hem how I have spedde and…how my moste foo ys dede” (II.3). The head is not a human appendage to be treated honorably but a trophy to brandish. Reputation is all. Merlin also recounts other facets of the lady’s history: when her brother killed her lover, she “besought…of helpe to be revenged on hir owne brothir” (II.4)—appalling to Merlin. Perhaps this is meant to justify her death, although in fact the multiplying of violent incidents merely perpetrates the chaos of society, and desensitizes the audience to the evil power of that violence. While Balyn never regrets his decapitating of the lady, he would reclaim Arthur’s affection with more violence against Arthur’s enemy King Royns, now condoned by the king. But when he encounters Lanceor of Ireland, out to avenge Arthur’s disgrace for the lady’s decapitation, Balyn slays him with little ado. Death is short and unceremonious. When his sweetheart, Columbe, commits suicide on the same sword, dead bodies start to multiply. The descriptions are graphic throughout, as instanced by Columbe’s setting “the pomell to the grounde, and rove hirselff thorowoute the body” (II.6). Although Balin responds “me repenteth sore the dethe of thys knyght for the love of thys damesel, for ther was much trw love betwyxte hem,” he resolves his discomfort by evasion. He

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“turned hys horse and loked towarde a fayre foreste” (II.5). Violence is accepted and dismissed as almost inevitable, not counter-normative, despite its ugliness. The frame outside the double death, however, presents a sorrowing King Cornwall who displays much sympathy, providing a rich, fair tomb, engraved with a sensitive inscription. As foil to the callous murderer and narrator, this king offers another reaction to violence—sorrow and reparation, insofar as is possible for the dead. How has he preserved his purity in the face of violence and corruption? His deed is summarily dismissed as quickly as the villainous ones, however, and the action continues without pause. Other instances of casually treated deaths reinforce how little life matters. In one sentence, Malory offhandedly notes that “Kynge Arthure slew that day twenty knyghtes and maymed fourty” (II.10) without comment. The compiling of deaths has inured the audience to their horror. Once again, Merlin presciently forecasts Balyn’s retribution for not preventing Columbe’s suicide: “Thou shalt stryke a stroke dolerous that ever man stroke…thou shalt hurte the trewyst knyght and the man of most worship that now lyvith…three kyngdomys shall be brought into grete poverte, miserie and wrecchednesse twelve yere” (II.8). Confronted with such a fate, any knight would be wary of future conflict. But Balin denies the prophecy, claiming “I wolde sle himself to make the a lyer” (II.8). But he does not, evidently believing to evade his fate. Here the word and the deed are inextricably intertwined. With Merlin’s counsel, the brothers Balyn and Balan forcefully conquer King Royns to regain Arthur’s favor: “They slewe on the ryght honde and on the lyffte honde mo than fourty of hys men…. Than wente they agayne unto kynge Royns and wolde have slayn hym, had he nat yelded hym unto hir grace” (II.8). Currying favor seems sufficient justification. In Malory’s tale, violence may come instantaneously, without warning or provocation. As Balyn ushers Berbeus to Arthur’s pavilion, “ther com one invisible and smote the knyght that wente with Balyn thorowoute the body with a spere” (II.13). The man is dead. A second incident follows immediately, as “there com [Garlon] invisible and smote this knyght, Peryne de Mounte Belyarde, thorowoute the body with a glayve. ‘Alas,’ seyde the knyght, ‘I am slayne by thys traytoure knyght that rydith invisible’” (II.13). The audience has no preparation for these shocking events, and learns only that the treachery of Garlon is responsible. Speedily recounted burials lead to the next event with little introspection or thought, no guilt or social responsibility. When Balyn locates and stares intently at the black-faced Garlon, that knight “slapped hym on the face with the backe of hys honde” (II.14) initiating an encounter. Using the same truncheon with which Garlon killed Berbeus, Balyn takes his life. As quickly and unceremoniously as it began, the conflict is over. But not entirely, for King Pellam would avenge his brother Garlon, thus causing Balyn to make the dolorous stroke, razing the walls, roof, and whole house. Under it lie dead bodies. “So [Balyn] rode forthe thorow the fayre countreys and citeys and founde that peple dede slayn on every sidye, and all that evir were on lyve cried” (II.16). Despite the ravaged country, the event soon becomes insignificant, for the story progresses without a second thought. Three more deaths taint Book II, violent, quickly enacted, and as quickly forgotten by the narrator who seems capable of endlessly racking up deaths without emotion. When Balyn finds Garnysh of the Mownte sorrowing over his lady, the two travel to her abode,

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only to find her asleep with another. Garnysh’s reaction is immediate: “with his swerd he smote of bothe their hedes… [and] sodenly he roofe hymself on his own swerd unto the hyltys” (II.17). Balyn cold-heartedly rushes away “lest folke wold say he had slayne them” (II.17). Nothing suggests he was at all moved by the triple homicide-suicide. And the narrator is too engrossed in recounting adventures to spend time grieving. Balin offers further evidence of accepting the inevitable when he succumbs to the custom of the country demanding he joust before passing on, reluctantly saying: “Wel,…syn I shalle, therto I am redy” (II.17). Never does he perceive his own weakness in perpetrating or accepting deaths in an almost sociopathic mind-set. Never does he attempt to stop the mounting death count, appreciate its significance, or seek the greater communal good with any perspective on the deadly effects of the compounding murders. His self-centered immaturity is startling. How does Malory feel about this gruesome bloodshed? Without succumbing to the intentional fallacy, we might suggest that Malory’s treatment acknowledges the violence of his time, saw it as repulsive as did Arthur, or possibly compelling, or seductive, but also found no way to terminate it. As Classen rightly points out, “the Arthurian world does not offer any political alternative to the endless slaughtering of knights in combat, and even in tournaments…. Only the Grail kingdom indicates a way out of this eternal dilemma.”51 Malory’s tale is indeed a romance—of love, chivalry, protocol, and simultaneously of force, war, and aggression. The fluid romance genre is capable of juggling such contradictions, maintaining coherence despite alternating oppositions. Such oxymoron does not undercut this romance, but complicates it, perhaps precisely replicating fifteenth-century life. As Colin Richmond declares: If one thing is clear now and was clear then for Thomas Malory…it is that life was not straightforward: competing loyalties were a fact of that life, their lives. Literature had been a mirror to reflect that since at least the twelfth century. Yet…even in such brutish times men did not live either without humor or without hope.52 Nevertheless, recurrent brutality and friction most impress Malory’s readers, leaving humor and hope a distant memory. Angela Jane Weisl notes: “Holy tales valorize violence by giving it a transcendent result, while reveling in its detail, rather like a contemporary horror film” (117). Similarly, these romance tales glorify violence, albeit in different ways: Gamelyn portrays violence as normative, acceptable behavior; Athelstan shows it happens in the best of sworn-brotherhood families; Chester’s Launfal uses it for shock value, and then Chester emerges from it, finding greater fascination in the fairy world. Malory’s tale may indeed abhor the effects of violence, but simultaneously extols its power by revealing its potency—what violence can accomplish—and often dismisses death and destruction without comment, an inevitable feature of a failed sociojudicial situation. In these several romances, as Scattergood wisely points out, “The lawlessness of the gentry, and its contempt for the law and espousal of violence as ways of settling the problems have become part of a class stereotype.”53 Even in a genre devoted to love and right treatment of its fellow men, authors and their characters may forget the mission, and when proving their prowess, take violence beyond its legitimate justification.

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Notes 1. Barbara W.Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), 134–35. 2. Issues of influence, including transfer of attitudes or behavior patterns from the fictive environment onto life situations (such as accepting brutality as normal), emulation of fictive violence by impressionable children or adults (such as children hurting siblings or copy-cat crime), and real desensitization by exposure to virtual violence (such as no longer being affected by murder or brutality) are not insignificant problems, but are beyond the purview of this investigation. 3. See Michael Harney’s contribution to this volume (“Violence in the Spanish Chivalric Romance”) for another view of the influence of witnessing violence on behavior. 4. Marjorie Curry Woods, “Rape and the Pedagogical Rhetoric of Sexual Violence,” Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages, ed. Rita Copeland (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 58. 5. Anne Schotter, “Rhetoric Verses Rape in the Medieval Pamphilus,” Philological Quarterly 71 (1972): 243–60; here 257. 6. Schotter, 257. 7. Woods, 59. Woods points to two inherited, intertwined traditions from the classical world: “heroic rape” by a god or hero, conferring status and a semi-divine offspring on the victim; rape as seduction of willing participants in which the woman says “no” but means “yes” Further, “[i]f the protagonist is young, the rape signifies the onset of his manhood” (60). None of these rapes is presented as reprehensible. 8. Harney, “Violence in the Spanish Chivalric Romance,” 324. 9. Douglas Kelly, The Art of Medieval French Romance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 318. 10. Kelly, 177. 11. Kelly, 238. 12. See Susan Crane, Insular Romance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 10; other critics examining the fluid notion of the Middle English romance genre include Pamela Gradon, Form and Style in Early English Literature (London: Methuen, 1971); Richard Southern, Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953); and Paul Strohm, “The Origin and Meaning of Middle English Romaunce,” Genre 10 (1977): 1– 28. 13. Tuchman, 135. 14. Angela Jane Weisl, “‘Quiting’ Eve: Violence against Women in the Canterbury Tales,” Violence against Women in Medieval Texts, ed. Anna Roberts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 115–36; here 115–16. 15. Weisl, 115. 16. Corinne Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge, U.K., D.S.Brewer, 2001), 314–15. 17. Peter G.Beidler, The Wife of Bath: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1996). A bibliography of twenty-nine entries entitled “Feminist Approaches to Chaucer and the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale” offers various observations on the maid’s victimhood (269–71). 18. Elaine Tuttle Hansen, ‘“Of his love daungerous to me’: Liberation, Subversion, and Domestic Violence in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” in The Wife of Bath: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Peter G.Beidler (Boston: Bedford Books of St.Martin’s Press, 1996), 280. 19. Tuttle Hansen, 283. 20. See Corinne Saunders’s contribution to this volume (“Violent Magic in Middle English Romance”).

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21. See Albrecht Classen’s contribution to this volume (“Violence at King Arthur’s Court: Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Perspectives”). 22. Tuchman, 134, explains: “During the truce, fighting was to be suspended on saints’ days, Sundays, and Easter, and all noncombatants—clerks, peasants, merchants, artisans, and even animals—were to be left unharmed by men of the sword, and all religious and public buildings safeguarded. That was the theory. In practice, like other precepts of the Church, the truce was a sieve that failed to contain human behavior” (134). 23. Classen, Introduction to this volume, 19–21. 24. Classen, “Violence at King Arthur’s Court,” 132. 25. Stephen Knight, “‘Harkeneth Aright’: Reading Gamelyn for Text Not Context” Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, ed. Rosalind Field (Woodbridge, Suffolk, U.K.: D.S.Brewer, 1999), 20. 26. John Scattergood, “The Tale of Gamelyn: The Noble Robber as Provincial Hero,” Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M.Meale (Woodbridge, Suffolk, U.K.: D.S.Brewer, 1994), 160. 27. This and subsequent quotations from The Tale of Gamelyn are taken from Middle English Verse Romances, ed. Donald B.Sands (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966). 28. Scattergood, 175–76. 29. Scattergood, 176. 30. The anonymous fourteenth-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of a number of decapitation/transformation tales of magic and mystery from Celtic tradition. The Grene Knight, a later offshoot of lesser literary merit, lacks the sophistication, psychological motivation, clever versification, and unification of plot elements but represents another of the romance-game genre, here quoted from Syr Gawayne: A Collection of Ancient RomancePoems by Scottish and English Authors Relating to that Celebrated Knight of the Round Table, ed. Frederic Madden. Bannatyne Club Publications, 64 (London: R. and J.E.Taylor, 1839; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1971), 224–42. 31. Sir Eglamour of Artois, ed. Frances E.Richardson. Early English Text Society, 256 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). 32. Sands, 130. 33. This and subsequent quotations from Athelston are taken from Middle English Verse Romances, ed. Donald B.Sands (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966). 34. There are differences, however. No third party surreptitiously wedges a split in the Greek family myth; rather within the five-generation curse, the jealous Atreus deceptively kills and serves his brother Thyestes’s sons to that rival brother for dinner in vengeance for Thyestes’s affair with his wife Aerope. Brotherhood is nonetheless defiled in Athelston, albeit swornand not blood-brotherhood. 35. Sands, 131. 36. Donna Crawford, “‘Gronyng wyth grisly wounde’: Injury in Five Middle English Breton Lays,” Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M.Meale (Woodbridge, Suffolk, U.K.: D.S.Brewer, 1994), 35–52; here 36. 37. See Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought, and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIV and XV Centuries, trans. F.Hopman (London: E.Arnold, 1924); reprinted and re-translated as The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J.Payton and Ulrich Mannitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 38. Alan Joseph Bliss, ed., Sir Launfal (London: Thomas Nelson, 1969), 43. Subsequent quotations from Sir Launfal are taken from this edition. 39. Crawford, 35. 40. Medieval English Literature, ed. Thomas Garbáty (Lexington, Mass: D.C.Heath, 1984), 349. 41. Joanne Rice, “Explanatory Notes: The Franklin’s Prologue and Tale” The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D.Benson (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1987), 896–901; here 896.

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42. Rice, 895. 43. Sands has “under” here, namely, “under her lord’s nose,” which is the probable sense intended. 44. Crawford, 36. 45. One in a series of transpositions of d and th/w, here seen in way for day; this editor (Bliss) has chosen to keep these transpositions, although Sands has changed them to make more sense. 46. Elaine Scary, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 47. Crawford, 38. 48. Harney, “Violence in the Spanish Chivalric Romance,” 331. 49. This and subsequent quotations from Malory are taken from The Works of Thomas Malory, ed. Eugene Vinaver, one vol. ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). Quotations are located by standard notation of book and chapter. 50. George Holmes, The Later Middle Ages: 1272–1485 (New York: W.W.Norton, 1962), 227. 51. Classen, “Violence at King Arthur’s Court,” 131. 52. Colin Richmond, “Thomas Malory and the Pastons,” Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M.Meale (Woodbridge, Suffolk, U.K.: D.S.Brewer, 1994), 195–208; here 204. 53. Scattergood, 189.

13 Destruire et disperser. Violence and the Fragmented Body in Christine de Pizan’s Prose Letters MARCELLA L.MUNSON In 1407, at the height of Christine de Pizan’s literary career and just three years before she dispatches her prose letter Lamentacion sur les maux de la guerre civile, the Duke of Orléans was brutally assassinated by the Duke of Burgundy. The event plunged France deeper into political turmoil and underscored the great extent to which France as political state was organized into warring factions divided among individual branches of the royal lineage. Various political treatises and sermons of the day attempted to resolve the legal and political morass that the assassination had provoked. These sources have been well studied, but one that has not, and that nevertheless points up the extent to which France of the fifteenth century was not already united by linguistic or political forces but was instead a complex society undergoing the transformation from feudal to early modern state, is Christine de Pizan’s short prose letter entitled Lamentacion sur les maux de la guerre civile. In some ways, this letter attempts far more than contemporaneous fifteenthcentury legal treaties such as Philippe de Mézière’s Songe du vieil pèlerin, or even Jean Gerson’s Vivat rex, for it attempts to unite the French population under the notion of global responsibility to the political state. Indeed, all of Christine de Pizan’s political prose letters are an excellent lens through which to view the multifaceted fragmentation so visible in fifteenth-century French political structure, royal family, geographic territory, and legal practices.1 Christine’s Lamentacion evinces immense concern for political fragmentation drawn along family lines. Christine de Pizan witnesses this fragmentation first-hand and capitalizes on this aspect of political life for her own rhetorical purposes; while the Lamentadon is on the one hand a model prose letter that follows the traditional six-part epistolary structure, it is also a complex text in which Christine graphically invokes the suffering of all classes making up France. She does so not only through images of the bodies of French subjects (subjiez)—those who are lying, literally “deconstructed,” on France’s battlefields—but also through a complex list of interlocutors. This has the effect of implicating all in the political functioning of France. Such vivid, and fragmented, images are meant to serve as a reminder that France’s power resides partly in its populace and partly in its geographic reach: If citizens, as members of “la chose publique,” have a responsibility to the state it is clear that the state also has a responsibility to its citizens. Christine makes it clear that the bodies of French subjects carry the state’s mark on them, and their state of being can be interpreted as a sign of the health—or illness—of the larger France.

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This chapter examines three of Christine de Pizan’s prose letters, those known as her lettres de circonstance, to show how reference to violent acts unleashed upon physical bodies allow Christine to articulate a new image of French national unity.2 In specific, Christine plays upon two heavily coded elements (one the body of the woman, the other the body of France) in order to posit herself as a writer with enough authority to address the political elite. Throughout these letters—the Epistre ä la reine (1405), the Epistre de laprison de vie humaine (ca. 1415–1418), and the Lamentacion sur les maux de la guerre civile (1410)—Christine subverts the normal codes of the complainte in order to emphasize the demands of a new political subjectivity. While many critics have examined Christine’s strategies for self-authorization in the face of such highly placed interlocutors as Isabeau of France and the Duc de Berry, they have not examined Christine’s authorship in light of the specific qualities implicated in the metaphor of the “body in pain.” The first sections of the chapter offer a reading of the Epistre a la reine and the Epistre de la prison de vie humaine’, the third, a reading of the Lamentacion. The Politics of Female Pain: The Epistre a la reine and the Epistre de laprison de vie humaine Fortune fait et deffait a sa guise. Fortune makes and unmakes at will. —Christine de Pizan, La Mutadon de Fortune

Although many students are first introduced to Christine de Pizan as France’s “first professional writer,” critics have recognized the importance of Christine de Pizan’s literary career as a largely ideological one, indicative of a larger political reality, a radical shift in subjectivity. Bernard Cerquiglini, in a 1986 article, posits that “for a woman to take up writing at the end of the Middle Ages, prior to the example of Christine de Pizan, would have little import other than the obvious audacity of the act” (188). Specifically, Cerquiglini suggests it is not simply Christine’s overt manipulation of female linguistic codes but also her clear identification of the ideological ends to which she aims this literary practice which permit us to identify the importance of her literary career.3 Maureen Quilligan, for her part, terms Christine’s occupation of the place of professional author a “historical oddity” (5), a prolepsis that technically should not have been possible—and surely would not have been—had she not capitalized on her status as woman and as cultural Other.4 For Quilligan, Christine becomes an “accidental occupier of a theoretically possible social slot in part because, as a female, no other cultural model was available to her” (5). Quilligan recognizes Christine’s “first” as a largely ideological one, indicative of a larger political reality and of a radical shift in subjectivity. She cites Peter Stallybrass’s contention, itself a rewriting of Althusserian theory of the political subject, that in early modern history a collective political subjectivity to an “absolute authority” preceded a collective “enfranchised autonomous reality” (Quilligan 271).5 And yet we must recall that Christine is not addressing sovereign rulers who are firmly in charge of France; rather, she is writing to rulers whose political hold on France is tenuous, and whom she perceives as having long ago abdicated all political responsibility.

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Her goal therefore is not to maintain the political status quo—a situation dominated for decades by political uncertainty, shifting alliances, and massive bloodshed—but rather to encourage a return to peace and stability by means of a greatly strengthened state structure. As Kate Forhan has noted in her introduction to Christine’s Livre du corps de policie (The Book of the Body Politic), Christine “stresses not only interdependence but also obligation, both individual and collective…. The crisis of her time is not a tyrannical ruler, but a weak one” (49).6 That it is not enough merely to note the “contamination” of princely authority that pervades Christine’s authorial voice is by now obvious. Rather, we must analyze the ideological and rhetorical transformations through which Christine supplants an old image of the French state with a new image in which the state is linked to the body of its subjects (including the author). The novelty of Christine’s literary project lies in the explicit connection she establishes between her own politicized body and that of the state. Christine’s project will be not merely to fashion herself as an author worthy of auctoritas, but indeed to remake the image of the French state.7 She will refashion the French state in part based on her capacity as author, and pain will be the rhetorical language through which Christine will achieve this. One of her primary goals, as we shall see, is to put forth a model of France as a nation-state in relation to which all French citizens would read themselves as political subjects. By conflating the metaphor of the human body with the imagined space of France itself, Christine will achieve this goal. But basing a model of France as political state upon the model of the human body is not a new idea in the fifteenth century; indeed, the description of the “body politic” as human body was theorized in the twelfth century by John of Salisbury in Book Five of the Policraticus.8 What is new about Christine’s depiction of France is the way in which it interpellates both the author in his or her social role, and the reader in his or her social task. Christine’s works are filled with descriptions of human bodies subjected to immense pain and even mutation, and this will be shown to be an important part of her interpellation of the reader.9 Pain itself cannot, of course, be made apparent to a reader— or observer—without the presence of the body on which it is operating, as Elaine Scarry10 makes clear: “Ordinarily there is no language for pain; it, more than any other phenomenon, resists verbal objectification” (12). In other words, pain needs a referent thanks to its inherent invisibility. The most obvious of all pain referents is the human body itself, that which is experiencing pain. In Christine de Pizan’s works, not only are the bodies in pain presented in striking detail, but they are clearly inscribed in the political sphere and entail explicitly political consequences. This is not surprising, perhaps, given that the metaphor of the body can be extended with unnerving ease to other entities, including the social, the literary, the geographical, and the political. Yet it is precisely this fluidity of the body as metaphor that makes it so useful for Christine, and of interest to me. If the body carries symbolic exchanges between various codes, then the body has no meaning inherent in it, but rather speaks the codes that are inscribed upon it. The question then becomes: What are the codes inscribed on it? To begin answering this question, let us isolate a few texts from Christine’s corpus. Each of these works takes as a central focus the description of individual physical bodies marked by their painful experience. All of these bodies are presented in striking detail, and what is more, their transformations have explicitly political consequences.11

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Three brief chronological examples will help elaborate the scope of the body’s metaphoric reach in Christine’s texts. In the third part of La Cité des Dames (ca. 1404– 1405) we find Christine constructing her polis around numerous accounts of the torture of Christian female saints. The effect of this, as Maureen Quilligan has shown, is to inscribe her city in the sociopolitical space of the Roman Empire. Helen Solterer has added that establishing the context of a specifically Roman sociopolitical space is a vital element of Christine’s definition of the res publica, or la chose publique, that public realm in which all are to participate and bear personal responsibility. But although Christine grounds her initial texts (the Cité des dames and the Débat sur la rose) in the idea of the “chose publique,” Christine’s larger textual corpus does not limit pain to the Roman sociopolitical sphere, nor to the bodies of saints themselves—those whose very status as saint is conferred precisely by their divinely-motivated endurance of extreme physical pain. Next, the Lamentacion sur les maux de la guerre civile (1410) invokes the suffering of France’s lower classes during the Hundred Years’ War through images of the “deconstructed” bodies of French subjects (or subjiez)—those who are lying, literally “deconstructed,” on France’s battlefields. This vivid image is meant to serve as a reminder that France’s power resides partly in its populace and partly in its geographic reach. If citizens, as members of “Ia chose publique,” have a responsibility to the state it is clear that the state also has a responsibility to its citizens. Christine makes it clear that the bodies of French subjects carry the state’s mark on them, and their state of being can be interpreted as a sign of the health—or illness—of the larger French nation. Finally, the Epistre de la prison de vie humaine (1415), undertaken perhaps at the behest of the Duke of Berry, addresses all French noblewomen through its primary interlocutor Marie de Berry. The letter is a philosophical consolatio inspired by Boethius. In the letter, Christine explicitly addresses the issue of pain from two angles: the pain that these noblewomen feel at having lost fathers, husbands, and sons at the Battle of Agincourt, and the pain that these men must have endured before dying. By exhorting French noblewomen to rise above their pain and participate in national affairs, Christine effectively codes the bodies of French noble-women as political subjects precisely because they have been marked by pain. These three examples point to Christine’s awareness of a second corollary of pain: its relationship to sociopolitical power. Again we turn to Scarry: “The relative ease or difficulty with which any given phenomenon can be verbally represented also influences the ease or difficulty with which that phenomenon comes to be politically represented…. It is possible for the felt-attributes of pain to be lifted into the visible world but now attached to a referent other than the human body and presented as the attributes of something else (something else which by itself lacks those attributes)” (14). It is precisely this metaphoric aspect of pain that most attracts Christine. First, by using her “voix plourable” to enunciate the pain of others, she focuses her readers’ attention on the body undergoing pain. After accomplishing this she then exploits the body’s metaphoric power by creating an explicit correlation between the physical body and the “body” of France, which is to say, France as geographic, political, social, and literary entity. Indeed, the bodies mentioned in the previous examples all stand as signs of France’s imminent political disintegration. Ultimately, Christine conflates the human body with the imagined space of France itself in order that les Françoys might code themselves as participating in political space, as being subjiez.

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The Epistre à la reine and the Epistre de la prison de vie humaine as specific texts where the language of pain is pressed into the service of a new political ideology. Each of these epistles speaks repetitively, obsessively, about the human body and its travails. In the Epistre à la reine the queen of France is asked to imagine her children lying dead and in pieces on the ground, the better to recall her queenly duty to the polis. In the Epistre de la prison de vie humaine, pain becomes the metaphor for the loyalty that each noblewoman must have for France. I examine each letter in turn to understand how Christine uses the human body to establish the idea of political identity and mutual obligation. I also see how Christine inherently privileges the female body as site where the transformative power of pain is made manifest. In both of these works, Christine gives voice to women’s bodies under examination: that of Queen Isabeau de France, and those of French noblewomen like Marie de Berry. Not only does the pain of these bodies authorize her speech, but it also presents Christine with something even more important, a language with which to depict a nascent French nation-state. Here the concept of pain is extended broadly to incorporate bodily sensation, physical reality, rhetorical tool, object of literary creation, and tool for ideological creation and self-definition.12 Politics Fit for a Queen: The Epistre a la reine Christine de Pizan’s Epistre a la reine, written in 1405 and daringly addressed to Queen Isabeau of France herself, begins with the invocation of Christine’s own tears: “Très haulte, puissant et trés redoubtee Dame, vostre excellent dignite ne veuille avoir en desdaign ne despris la voix plourable de moy” (Most High, Powerful, and Revered Lady, may your Excellence not disdain or despise this tearful voice of mine; 71). Here, as elsewhere, Christine codes her authorial identity as residing primarily in an isolated female voice rather than in a specifically corporeal body. Indeed, throughout this letter she will continue to present herself as voice, or more precisely, a “voix plourable” (tearful voice), a sad, isolated voice that in speaking on behalf of the suffering French people (“les adouléz supplians Françoys”) will eventually merge her voice with theirs into one totalizing voice:

Pour ce, haulte Dame, ne vous soit grief oür les ramentevances en piteux regrais des adouléz supplians Françoys, a present reampliz d’affliccion et treteresse, qui a humble voix plaine de plours crient a vous, leur souveraine et redoubtee Dame. (72; 9–13) (For this reason, High Lady, do willingly hear the complaints and pitiful regrets of the suffering and suppliant French people now full of affliction and sadness, and who cry with tearful voices to you, their supreme and revered Lady.)13 In this letter, then, the pain and distress of the French people is only made visible once it is coupled with the author’s own pain. Only through the agency of Christine’s voice, and

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pain, can the French population find its voice; only through her voice can the pain of the French people even be made representable. This strategy, the joining together of voices, authorizes Christine to address the queen herself. Christine is requesting the queen’s intercession not just for herself but for all French people. But an even more interesting rheorical transformation occurs. In the next paragraph Christine, still in the guise of apologizing for her audacity in addressing the queen, turns to the metaphor of the sick and injured body:

Mais comme ce soit de commun ordre que toute personne souffrant aucun mal naturellement affine au remede, si comme nous veons les malades pourchacier garrison et les familleux courir a la viande, et ainsi toute chose a son remede. (70; 10–14) (But just as it is a natural thing for anyone who suffers from an illness to find a remedy, so can we see the sick look for recovery and the hungry run for food, and thus all things seek a remedy.) Just as “les malades” (the sick) run for “garrison” (healing), and the “familleux” (the hungry) run to “viande” (meat)], everything has its remedy. This metaphor suggests two things: first of all, it is only right that Christine address the queen; indeed, her very “body” requires it. Second, the queen is the obvious solution to the problem that France faces. Certainly, it is not uncommon to characterize emotional distress as a physical pain that manifests itself upon the body in the form of an illness.14 Further, that Christine casts Isabeau in the role of providing the ultimate solution for France is not unexpected. But Christine now integrates this into the letter’s language in a most ingenious way: by punning on the common expression “souverain remede”:15

Trés redoubtee Dame, ne vous soit doncques merveille se a vous— qui, au dit et oppinion de tous, povez estre la mededne et souverain remede de la garison de ce royaume a present playe et navre piteusement, et en peril de piz—ore se trait et tourne, non mie vous supplier pour terre estrange, mais pour vostre propre lieu et naturel heritaige a voz trés nobles enfans. (70–71; 15–21; emphasis added) (Most Revered Lady, do not therefore wonder if to you—who, according to everyone’s opinions and beliefs, can be the medicine and sovereign remedy for this kingdom now so pitifully wounded and injured, and in danger of worse—I turn and come, not to beg you on behalf of a foreign land, but on behalf of your own land and natural heritage of your very noble children.) Taken idiomatically, the phrase “souverain remede” means “a superior remedy” or “a most excellent cure.” But by using it to refer to the queen’s hopedfor intervention in

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matters of state, Christine succeeds in creating a linguistic pun; the queen is indeed the “sovereign remedy,” “la medecine et souverain remede de la garison de ce royaume” (the most excellent remedy and medicine for the healing of this kingdom). Whether read as “most excellent cure” or “sovereign power” the queen is one of the few “bodies” authorized to act on France’s behalf; indeed, the Queen is implicated as the only possible remedy, and even the most “natural” of remedies, for France’s political woes. Christine has also implicated a new body—that of France—into the equation, and she extends the suffering authorial “voix plourable” to this suffering body as well. But if France itself is the injured body for which Christine will speak, it is not invoked solely in terms of geographic space but also, in keeping with the pun on “souverain,” in terms of the relationship between it and the queen. Indeed, Christine urges the queen to embrace France in a double sense: both as her “naturel heritaige” and as her “propre lieu”—which is to say, as that kingdom which properly belongs to her through royal lineage, and also that physical space which she also has an obligation to serve. It is precisely this interrelation between the material and the maternal, between the “terre” and the royal family, that Christine seeks to invoke. Christine further elaborates the extent to which familial (physical, or “natural”) ties bind the queen to the French royaume: the Queen has five children, which were born on French soil. Just as Christine’s voice derives power from the peuple of France, so too the response that Christine seeks from the queen is framed in terms of the power of the mother’s voice. Christine requests the parolles (words) and the labour (efforts) of the queen (82); this is reflected in her choice of exemplum. Christine invokes Blanche of Castille, mother of Saint Louis, reminding Isabeau of how Blanche was able to stop the infighting among the barons of France by standing in front of them, holding Louis in her arms, and reminding them that they would not want to do anything for which he would later blame them. This exemplum points to an important truth about sovereign power: for it to work, the ruler must find a way to be present (through various means of representation) at various places, and at all times.16 Blanche of Castille, as mother of the soon-to-be King Louis, must temporarily embody his power until Louis is able to do so on his own. Seen in this light, Christine’s letter sends a pointed message to Isabeau: Because her husband, Charles VI, is in no condition to rule France, his power must be consolidated and properly represented by other members of the royal family—namely, the Queen. Christine asks that she embody the power and the voice of the king, as opposed to the dukes of Orleans and Burgundy, “ces. ii. haulz princes germains de sanc et naturelment amis, mais a present par estrange Fortune meuz a aucune contencion” (these two princes of the same blood and who are friends by nature but who are at present moved to quarrel by strange Fortune) (73; 13–16). The queen’s body is not only allied with, but intended to replace, the king’s. Indeed, Christine suggests that the queen must take her model for action not only from Blanche of Castille but also from Christine, a mother herself who has, in writing this very letter, raised her voice to recall to the nobility that their goal should be to unite the French kingdom under one leader. Toward the end of the letter, the violence being done to the “children” of France is not just reflected in the pain of the author’s voice and the voices of the French populace; it is also reflected inside the royal family. It is here that the description of violence becomes the most apparent:

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Trés haute Dame, mais que mon langaige ne vous tourne a ennuy, encores vous dis-je que, tout ainsi comme la Royne du ciel, mere de Dieu, est appellee mere de toute christienté, doit estre dicte et appellee toute saige et bonne royne, mere et conffortarresse, et advocate de ses sujbiez et de son peuple. Helas, doncques, qui seroit si dure mere qui peust souffrir, se elle n’avoit le cuer de pierre, veoir ses enfans entreoccire, et espendre le sang l’un a l’autre, et leurs povres membres destruire et disperser, et puist, qu’il venist par de coste aucuns estrangiers, qui du tout les persecytassebt et saisissent leurs heritaiges? (78; 1–11) (Most High Lady, although I hope that my words do not annoy you, I will also tell you that, just as the Queen of Heaven, Mother of God, is called mother of all Christendom, so must be said and called any wise and good queen, mother and comforter, advocate of her subjects and her people. Alas! Who could be such a harsh mother to be able to endure, if she did not have a heart of stone, to see her children kill one another, and spill each other’s blood, and cut and scatter each other’s limbs and then see foreigners come along who would pursue them to the end and seize their inheritance?) How is it possible, Christine asks, that the queen could tolerate seeing her children “entre-occire, et espendre le sang l’un a Pautre, et leurs povres membres destruire et disperser” (kill one another, and spill each other’s blood, and cut and scatter each other’s limbs)? Although Isabeau herself is not threatened with physical harm, Christine depicts her as being in danger of becoming just like any other citizen of France: one of the “voix plourables” who have lost their family members to war or famine. These “voix plourables” with whom Christine allies herself may not have the same political power that the queen does, but they do have power of another type. Christine warns that when raised in “piteous unity” they could, and undoubtedly would, spread the news of France’s failure to provide for its own citizens. France’s reputation would thus be undermined, and its position in the international community compromised. In Christine’s formulation, France truly is a voxpopuli in which the dominant vox is that of the woman. I now turn to the last of the three prose letters, the Epistre de la prison de vie humaine (1417), before discussing the Lamentacion, a text that paints a considerably more complex view of the “unmaking” of violence and pain, the ideological consequences of imposing violence on others, and the rebuilding of the human and political spheres after violence has torn them apart. The Epistre de la prison de vie humaine is preserved in only one manuscript, possibly prepared by Christine herself. There is no way of knowing for certain if it ever reached Marie de Berry, its formal dedicatee. It is in part presented as a message of condolence for Marie and other noblewomen who, like her, have lost their loved ones at the Battle of Agincourt (1415). Here Christine brings to bear many of her

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concerns from previous works. She will also invoke her literary persona of the seulette a part—the “lonely little woman on the sidelines” in Richards’ formulation—a persona which provides a link to Christine’s already-established authorial name and through which she could thereby address universal questions facing French society. Indeed, as Richards has shown, the hallmark of the Prison is the grounding of universal human questions in the context of sacred history. While men and women are on somewhat equal footing, her text is explicitly addressed to the entire community of French women, noble and other. This is, as Richards notes, a “stunning innovation” (Sacred History 29). How does Christine achieve her universal address through the particularized figure of the female? The answer lies in the role ascribed to the body, and the attention Christine pays to its capacity to suffer pain. The opening of the Prison combines several literary themes favored by Christine in earlier lettres de circonstance, including the search for consolation in the face of sudden death. The Pn’son, like the Epistre a la reine, begins with an evocation not of physical but of mental anguish, referred to as “maladie et enfermeté d’amertume de cuer et tristece de pensee” (severe malady and infirmity caused by a bitter heart and sad thoughts; 2; 13– 14). As with the Epistre a la reine, Christine seeks a “remede” that will help to stem the flow of tears depleting the physical force of the noblewomen of the kingdom. While the theme of mental suffering is the initial subject of the Pn’son, this mental anguish is tied directly to the physical suffering of the men of France on the battlefield. Therefore, despite the abundance of tears on the part of France’s women, this letter has “masculine” authorization. But while Christine takes as her immediate concern the current wartime suffering of the women of France, Christine frames it in the larger context of general pain and suffering that humans must perforce undergo while still trapped in their physical bodies. Following Saint Bernard’s De virtute obedientiae, et septem ejus gradidus, the metaphor of the body as prison dominates the text; this is not surprising in a consolatioy a genre whose purpose is to give hope and strength during difficult times. Nevertheless, Christine will use this distinction between body/soul to great effect.17 At the very beginning of the letter Christine outlines for Marie de Berry the duality of body/soul, and explains how the body oppresses the soul and can make it do things that are contrary to its nature:

[L]’ame raisonnable, qui la plus noble partie est de l’omme, sans la quelle le corps n’est fors terre et pourreture, est detenue emprisonnee et liee dedens le corps tant comme elle y est, voire si contrainte et empeschiee par la pesanteur et rudece du dit vaissel, qu’elle n’a povoir, fors en bien petite partie, d’user de ses propres inclinacions et vouloirs, ains lui convient obeir le plus des fois tout au contraire de la ou elle tent. (6, 41–44; 8, 1–4). ([T]he reasonable soul, which is the noblest part of man, without which the body is only earth and rot, is kept prisoner and bound inside the body as long as it is in it, and is even so constrained and prevented by the weight and the thickness of the said vessel, that it does not have the power, except in a very small way, to exercise its

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own inclinations and desires, and instead it has to follow most of the time the opposite of its own tendency.) The logical operation performed here is essential for the rest of the letter. Christine, by emphasizing that the body is in fact the prison in which the spirit is held, suggests that the women of France should not privilege the prison of the body but should instead concentrate on the soul. This is how, in fact, the Epistre de la prison de vie humaine will subvert the traditional topos of women’s tears and their rhetorical prominence. If in the Epistre a la reine they represented a political call to action for the queen, they will be depicted in the Prison as inhibiting political action; tears will become coded as the “prison” in which the women’s potential is locked away. As in the Epistre a la reine, Christine opens with an invocation of tears. But here the tears are not initially coded as those of the author, but rather as a communal “flus de lermes” (flood of tears), which has run and continues to run among the women of France. Christine writes precisely to seek a cure for this “flus de lermes”:

Pour aucunement trouver remede et medicine a la griefve maladie et enfermeté d’amertume de cuer et tristece de pensee, par quoy flus de lermes—le quel a l’ame a tel cause ne puet prouffiter, ne au corps valoir—peust estre restraint et remis qui tant a couru et encores, dont c’est pitie, ne cesse entre meismement les roynes, princesses, baronnesses, dames, damoiselles du noble sang royal de France et generalement le plus des femmes d’onneur frapees de ceste pestillence en cestui françois royaume. (2; 3–11) (In order somehow to find a remedy and a cure for the severe malady and infirmity caused by a bitter heart and sad thoughts, a remedy which might restrain and dry up a flood of tears that can benefit neither the soul nor be of value to the body, and that has run and runs still—which is a pity—even among the queens, princesses, baronesses, ladies, and young girls of the noble royal blood of France, and in general among most of the ladies-in-waiting, who have been stricken by this pestilence in this French kingdom.) The list of those women afflicted—“roynes, princesses, baronnesses, dames, damoiselles du noble sang royal de France,” even the ladies-in-waiting—is impressive, and underscores the need for the French nobility to unite in the face of political disintegration and war. Most of these women have been stricken by grief, after the Battle of Agincourt, at the death and/or imprisonment of their “maris, enfans, freres, oncles, cousins, affins et amis” (husbands, children, brothers, uncles, cousins, relatives, and friends). But if the “flus de lermes” is indeed communal, there is one person in particular to whom Christine addresses the letter: Marie de Berry, daughter of the Duke of Berry,

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whose cousins were killed in the battle and whose husband and son were taken prisoner by the English. Christine is in fact personally indebted to Marie for Marie’s help during difficult times: “les merites de ta large charité a moy estendue en cestui temps d’affliction presente ou amis sont faillis aient esté a mon petit estat vesval aidier a gouverner singulier secours” (the merits of your great charity, extended to me in this present time of affliction when friends are missing, have been helpful to my humble widowed state in providing personal assistance; 2; 22–25). Christine simultaneously isolates Marie’s voice and her own, thus personalizing the context. As in the Epistre a la reine, it is Christine’s personal experience with pain that will authorize her to hold forth on the topic of finding comfort at the death of friends. Yet there is also a major difference that we must note. If communal tears were what authorized Christine’s speech in the previous letter, here Christine will seek to halt their flow. From the very opening of the Epistre de la prison, she states that tears are not to be seen as an empowering force: “I’ame a tel cause ne peut prouffiter, ne au corps valoir” (these tears can benefit neither the soul nor be of value to the body). There is no reason to continue weeping, as she will explain. Christine therefore seeks not simply to comfort women but to encourage them to reflect, and ultimately to participate actively, in the life of the community. Christine begins her task by framing their suffering in the context of generalized human suffering. She asks Marie a simple question: Would she rather have those who died in battle be imprisoned and tortured for the rest of their lives? Christine is using conventional rhetoric to console Marie and reassure her that her loved ones are better off now than if they were imprisoned. But on the other hand, Christine also casts Marie de Berry as she who might determine how much pain someone else will suffer: will they live and suffer, or die and be released from their earthly bonds? Christine then hastens to change focus back to Marie’s own body as a case in point: “Certes, ma Dame, je ne doubte pas que plus chier aroies ce que pour toy meismes tu esliroies: c’est a savoir le derrain des susdis.ii. partis” (Indeed, my Lady, I do not doubt that you would prefer the course that you would select for yourself: that is, the second of the two; 6; 29–30). Christine is attempting to console Marie that those lost on the battlefield are in a far better place while at the same time reminding her that no one, not even those of noble birth, can escape pain, suffering, and death. Of course, Christine, in targeting the noblewomen of France, also writes with the goal of addressing France’s male political elite, and this can be seen on two levels. First, she invokes a series of vividly detailed exempla in which she refers to great military leaders (including Julius Caesar and Alexander) who suffered “paines et blescures” and who, although they conquered much of the world, were in the end violently assassinated or exiled by their own polis. In these exempla the “cruelle perversion” of which Nature is capable (and the pain she metes out) is reenacted in the context of the political body, and located specifically on the body of the ruler. Although sometimes pain is caused by Fortune’s vagaries—and in this case those of high social standing are as likely to suffer as others—most often a leader’s physical suffering or death comes about because of an oath to the collective good that was not kept. Indeed, Christine reassures Marie that death is not to be feared when a noble has upheld his or her social, political, and moral obligations: “la mort ne doit estre redoubtee pour bien faire, c’est assavoir aux chevaliers pour la deffence de leur prince et la chose publique” (death must not be feared when one does good: that is, by the knights when they defend their prince and their government). In

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fact, good noblemen must “pour soustenir droiture, exposoient leurs corps” (20; offer their very bodies to uphold justice). Second, Christine informs us that it was not Marie who asked that the letter be written; it was actually “par mouvement d’autre en feusse chargee” (at the behest of someone else that it was commissioned; 2, 29). While it is never clear who actually did commission the letter, Christine’s rhetoric provides us with a clear context in which to interpret her authorial strategy. As she says to Marie:

[A]vant que plus oultre je procede en ceste matiere, suppli humblement ton humaine debonnaireté, que n’ait a mal se en singulier je parle a toy, c’est assavoir par tu, ainsi comme meismement autrefois ay parle en mes petites escriptures et epistres a ton trés noble pere, Texcellent duc de Berry…suivant le stille en ceste partie des poëtes et orateurs. (4, 36–38; 6, 1–5) ([B]efore I go any further in this matter, I humbly beg your Goodness not to think badly of me if I speak to you in the singular, that is by tu, just as I once spoke in my little writings and epistles to your very noble father, the excellent Duke of Berry…following in this the style of poets and orators.) Not only is Christine justified in using the “tu” form with Marie de Berry, but it is also a sign of deference to the memory of her father. It has been suggested that the “autrui” (other) asking Christine to write the letter was the of Berry himself; in any event, Christine’s use of the “tu” with Marie invokes the close relationship that Christine—and indeed Marie herself—had with the duke. Ultimately, it is the Duke of Berry himself who serves as the letter’s guarantor. Christine is thus authorized to write the letter, but nevertheless, as she tells us, she has not been faithful in the commission of her appointed letter-writing duty. This causes her apparent discomfort. Yet Christine’s reason for deferring the letter is itself deferred until the end, as she says to Marie: “Fexcusacion de plus tost n’avoir achevé diray en la fin” (I will tell you the reason at the end why I did not finish it earlier; 4, 1–2). When we turn to the end of the letter to find out why Christine has deferred writing it, we discover that she has suffered from “tristes ymaginacions et pensees” (sad thoughts and ideas; 68, 1). Why might Christine avoid any mention of this in the opening? The answer, I believe, lies in her wish to discourage woman’s tears. At the beginning of the letter tears are not described as empowering, for they are not helping women in their present situation: “Pame a tel cause ne puet prouffiter, ne au corps valoir” (these tears can benefit neither the soul nor be of value to the body; 2, 5–6). It is not only desirable for the women of France to stop crying; it is in fact their very duty (“devoir”). Christine has no less of a duty than the women to whom she writes, but her duty is not merely to comfort Marie de Berry and the other women of France in their loss, but to encourage them to participate in the life of the community. Much as Christine presents a mirror of princes to the young dauphin in her 1404–1407 Livre du corps de policie, so too does Christine present a sort

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of mirror into which Marie and indeed all other women can look and be comforted, and from which they can gain understanding. One of the most important lessons that Marie must learn is that death is natural for all men, and furthermore, not to be feared—especially when the dead have upheld their political obligations:” [la mort] ne doit estre redoubtee pour bien faire, c’est assavoir aux chevaliers pour la deffence de leur prince et la chose publique”([death] must not be feared when one does good; that is, by the knights when they defend their prince and their government; 20, 22–25). Here, Christine’s emphasis on the term “chose publique” (the republic, or public space; literally, that which is the “public thing,” or the res publica) recalls her argument against the Rose, a work she deems particularly heinous precisely because it flouts the “public good.”18 Christine is again reminding us that the moral good is associated with communal good. In Christine’s view, all humans are capable of earning their salvation by doing good works and believing in God. Similarly, all humans will be called upon by God to suffer. Saint Basil in particular stands as testament to the universal nature of death and suffering; as Christine cites him, “tribulacions sont communes en tous les estas” (tribulations are common to all classes; 24, 7–8). And yet members of the noble class will, according to Christine, find themselves faced with greater adversity than those who have not been so blessed by Fortune. This increased adversity, seen upon their bodies, is in fact a sign of their increased social and political responsibilities and their need to participate to a greater extent in “la chose publique.” Christine invokes the allegorical figures of Patience and Justice to reinforce the idea that bodies, and noble bodies in particular, indicate their political engagement—or lack thereof—by physical signs manifested on the body itself. The person who is impatient is described as wearing horrible signs such as “effusion de sang” (flushing of blood), “les yeulx orribles en regars” (eyes casting horrible glances), “les mains debatans” (hands moving about), and “tout le corps tremblant” (a shaking body; 26, 38–41). The outward signs of impatience are not only quite fearsome, and enough to upset the natural balance of the physical body, but imply that the individual and his transgressive demeanor have the power to disturb the social balance. Interestingly, whereas Patience is a virtue, it is not always to be prescribed. Christine emphasizes that there are many situations where one should defend oneself: on the battlefield, in the courtroom if wrongfully accused, and when necessary to keep one’s rightful property. But again, the message is clear: communal justice often coincides with the individual’s rights. Fortune, on the other hand, is predicated as the opposite of patience. While Patience makes its presence in the body manifest by its calming influence and control of the limbs and face, Fortune itself is associated with that which lies outside the body and consequently cannot be controlled: “seigneurie, dominacion, puissance, richesces, noblece de sang, bonnes aventures, avoir escheu a bonne et belle partie, soit femme ou mary, belle ligniee d’enfans ou de haulx parens, et toutes telz choses qui sont dehorzsoy” (governance, domination, power, riches, nobility of blood, good outcomes, to have found a good and beautiful spouse be it husband or wife, a beautiful lineage of children or high parentage, and all similar things which are outside oneself: 34, 5–8; emphasis added). This last area is one where Marie herself has done quite well, Christine hastens to remind her. For Marie de Berry’s own body has been marked by Fortune, both good (seigneurie, dominacion, richesces, noblesse de sang) and bad (lermes, douleurs,

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plaintes), and is therefore presented as a feminine exemplum of how to uphold justice. It is in her role as exemplum, model citizen of France, and defender of “la chose publique,” that Marie must “see clearly” (voir clerement) what her duty is: she must not “plaindre la mort” of her loved ones; instead, they will “plus prouffiter aumosnes, oraisons et bienfais que ne font tes lermes” (they will profit more from alms, prayers, and good deeds than from your tears; 66, 29–30). Christine’s emphasis throughout the letter is here brought to bear: she ends the letter by reminding Marie that she must remain active, and in the world, instead of retreating into the world of tears, that world associated with female inaction in the traditional complainte. By remaining active, she will be doing right by the “chose publique”; further, through this political action she will obtain grace in the sight of God. In the res publica women are not to be silent; their power, and their own righteousness, lies in action. In the final analysis, then, the female sphere and its acute awareness of the effects of violence is that which provides an important link between the members of the larger French community. This is not just a letter of consolation; it is a letter in which women are held up as emblematic of universal human qualities and, further, as fully inscribed in the political realm. This is the power of the Epistre de laprison de vie humaine: the marks of grief on women’s bodies are the result of political conflict, and when acted upon will have transformative consequences for the French political state. Bodies Politic: The Lamentacion sur les maux de la guerre civile Finally, I turn to the Lamentadon. This letter represents the rhetorical peak of Christine’s epistolary prose, and is at heart a complex treatise on the ideological power that necessarily accompanies any transformation a body may undergo. If the rhetoric of the Prison was fixed primarily in the emotional suffering of France’s noblewomen, the Lamentacion will find expression in the population at large, and in specific those broken and displaced bodies of France’s civil war. The full title of this epistle, Lamentacion sur les maux de la guerre civile, clearly establishes the context in which she will present the figure of the human body.19 The war-torn body in particular presents a deep referential ambiguity; as the body itself does not speak “freely” of its own accord but rather must be coded in the language of the victor (or of the loser), it can function either as a sign of defeat for one side, or a sign of victory for the other.20 Christine reads this same ambiguity not just into the body of the war victim, but also of those who perpetrate war:

O, la trés deshonnoree victoire a qui que elle remaigne!…. Sera elle donc de lorier couronnee? Hé! Lasse my, maiz devra estre de trés noires espines honteusement bendee, soy voiant non pas vainquerresse, mais homicide de son mesmes sang. (86; 11–16) (Oh, how dishonorable victory may be to the one who has it!…Will victory be crowned with laurels? Ah me, it will have to be shamefully bound with black thorns when it sees itself not as victor, but as the very killer of its own blood.)

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Christine is here addressing the Burgundian nobles of France, those willing to go to war against the French crown to ensure their own interests. To make her point stronger, Christine emphasizes that these people have the potential to do both right and wrong; thus, they might become either victors (worthy of being called heroes since they will only fight against France’s common enemies) or homicidal killers (those who kill out of selfinterest, and who attack their own blood). In order for the potential for grace or condemnation to be there, the ambiguous quality of the body as referent must be readily perceptible. The ambiguous meaning of the body is reinforced by the Lamentacions strangely ambiguous opening. Unlike most of Christine’s other epistles, this one has no traditional salutatio, the official statement of address containing the intended recipient’s name.21 Instead, one finds an epigraph that is clearly meant to take the place of the traditional salutatio: “Qui a point de pitié la mette en oevre/Veez-cy le temps qui le requiert” (84; 2– 3; Whosoever has pity, let him [or her] put it to use/The time which requires it has come). On the face of it, this epigraph would seem to be a universal address, a call for help to everyone and anyone who fears for France’s future, to everyone who would read her text.22 Indeed, this might be a way of hedging her bets, and explicitly addressing multiple layers of her noble audience. However, when we begin to read the Lamentacion, we notice that Christine is actually undermining the initial globality of her call for help, for the Lamentadon in fact addresses itself to multiple groups and even to individuals. The Duke of Berry’s name at the end of the text is particularly noteworthy, and as Mary McKinley has noted, if the Duke of Berry were to respond to Christine’s plea as stated in the salutatio, he would thereby take his rightful place at the head of the letter, as the “qui” (he) who would put his pity to good use (McKinley 158). Letter-writing protocol would thus not be breached. But, we must realize, even if the duke were to respond by action, the vagueness of the epigraph does not lose its ambiguity. The vagueness of the “qui,” coupled with the multiple addressees inside the text of the letter, highlight the fact that might well not be one most powerful person to whom the letter could have been sent. The letter then stands as testament not to the unified political base of power of the Duke of Berry, but to the inherently fragmented structure of France as Christine witnesses it. The idea of putting thought into action has important parallels in late medieval concepts of royal justice. Jean Gerson and Philippe de Mézierès both considered that justice could not be carried out unless the legal system were to put it en oevre (in play). Read in this light, the epigraph carries an explicit political message to the nobles reading it: royal justice cannot be achieved until and unless laws are established that will assure its proliferation. Philippe de Mézières, author of Le Songe du vieil pelerin, provides a vivid example of the consequences of failing to enact a judicial and economic code that does not reflect the needs of the people: Whereas in the time of Philippe VI or Charles V the various états came to the aid of their kingdom in times of war by willingly paying the high taxes necessary to support the war effort, now they are no longer willing—for the simple reason that the funds are being put to bad use. According to Mézières, events taking place in France were visible proof that God had decided to block the path of peace until this imbalance was corrected (Songe III, 267). Not only did Mézières perceive his duty to lie in the political realm, but he felt his work would suffer if it didnot.23

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Christine, like Philippe de Mézières, has heard her call to action. As with the earlier Epistre a la reine Christine begins the Lamentacion with her own tearful voice, that of the much-discussed figure of the seulette a partwho can barely hold back the tears:24

Seulette a part, et estraignant a grant paine les lermes qui ma veue troublent et comme fontaine affluent sur mon visage, tant que avoir puisse espace de escripre ceste lasse complainte, dont la pitie de l’emi-nent meschief me fait d’ameres goutes effacier Tescripture, je m’esbahiz. (85; 4–9) (Alone, and suppressing with great difficulty the tears which blur my sight and pour down my face like a fountain, so much so that to be able to have the time [space] to write this weary lament surprises me, since my pity for the coming disaster makes me erase the writing with bitter tears.) Here, the literariness of Christine’s task (and her authority) is exhaustively underscored by the overt invocation of the genre known as the complainte with its attendant topos of “lermes” (tears) and the fountain (again, connoting tears due to unrequited love). And yet these tears are not the traditional tears of the complainte. Rather, they are a double-edged weapon of creation and destruction. They are what prompt her to pick up the pen; they are also that which makes it next to impossible for her to achieve her writing, as there are so many tears that she barely has “espace” to write. Her writing is thus constantly “sous rature” (under erasure). And they are also the outward badge of sadness, which announces Christine’s incursion into the world of political power.25 The written page and the literary precedents of social isolation and mourning (the seulette) become intertwined with the world of political power. The written text physically mirrors Christine’s sadness in her other two epistles as well. Christine’s tears serve to reinforce yet another trope in which isolation and political power are wielded. Christine insists on the terms “yeulx” (eyes) and “veoir” (to see) to draw a stark difference between the author who can see the truth and the French nobility whose eyes are “shut.” Thus, social and physical isolation implicate political isolation. Christine’s tears are the manifestation of a “blindingly” clear vision. Here, her first concrete invocation of her interlocutors arrives: she addresses the “princes trés haulx” (most noble princes) and commands them: “Ouvrez les yeulx par tel savoir, que ja vous semble veoir comme chose advenue, ce que les apprestes de voz armes prises pouront conclurre” (Let these facts open your eyes, and you may you see as already achieved what your military preparations will accomplish in the end; 84, 34–35; 86, 1–2). The grammar is of vital importance, for it leaves aside the present moment and introduces Christine’s visionary power. She asks not that they see merely the physical reality before them, but the vision Christine chooses to lay before their eyes, a vision of what might be coming, a vision of what will happen if nothing changes. As sole author of this vision, Christine continues to reinforce her authority to the end; after all, it is only through the unique vision of the “seulette” that the necessary political vision can be achieved.

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If her tears announce this incursion into the world of political power, they also create France itself as topographic space. The most striking invocation of France is achieved in the form of a personalized apostrophe to France itself:

Ha! France! France! jadis glorieux royaume! Helas, comment dirayje plus? Car trés amers plours et lermes incessables dechiient comme ruisseaux sur mon papier, si qu’il n’y a place seiche ou puisse continuer l’escripture de la complainte trés douloureuse. (88; 29–34) (Ah, France, France, once such a glorious kingdom! Alas, what more can I say? Because bitter and endless tears flow like streams on my page there is not a dry spot where I can pursue the writing of this very painful lament.) France as the “jadiz glorieux royaume” becomes a topographical map in the process of being created by Christine’s tears—and text. Because of her tears, the paper on which she writes is not covered with running “ruisseaux”—rivulets and rivers—perhaps an oblique invocation of France’s famous river system often used to delimit local territories. But Christine is also suggesting something else: there is not a geographic region in all of France that is “dry,” that is, a space that is not affected by recent events. Christine strategically elaborates a greater threat. Violence will destroy not just urban space (the city) and rural space (the battlefield and such areas of production as trade routes and farming land); more importantly, violence will also penetrate the kinship structure itself in a perversion thereof: “pere contre filz, frere contre frere, parens contre autres” (father against son, brother against brother, relatives against one another; 86, 8– 9). Further, destruction will reign not only at the family level but will strike the individual body, which will literally be cut “a glaives mortelz, couvrans de sang” (with mortal wounds, covered with blood; 86, 9–10) on the battlefield. Christine singles out one particular group, the “chevalerie et jouvente françoise”(French noble youths). This group was in the past “toute d’une nature, seult estre a la deffense de la couronne et la chose publique, comme un droit ame et corps” (all of one mind, alone considered to defend the crown and the public god, as one unified body and soul; 86, 4–7). Therefore, the young French men whose bodies are being taken apart on the battlefields of France (in an ironic inversion of their previously unified body) are the very same group who should be serving in defense not only of the crown but also of la chose publique, the public good. Yet the responsibility for this violence lies with everyone, and Christine will make this clear through the metaphor of the body. Rather than remaining at a certain abstract level, she anticipates a certain concern for individual territories: Where will all this violence occur? “En quel part? Ou droit nombril de France!” (In the very heart [literally, the belly button] of France; 86, 11–12). By placing the center of violent disorder at the “belly button” of France, Christine clearly equates the space of France with the human body. While certainly not a new idea, nor even a new turn of phrase (consider John of Salisbury’s Policraticus), Christine nevertheless touches upon an interesting strategy: By using the ambiguous expression “au droit nombril” Christine manages to localize the

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dangers to the greatest possible extent. Not only does each prince have his own strongholds and areas of greatest political interest, but each prince (and indeed, each “subjiez,” or subject) has a “nombril.” The “nombril” thus ceases to remain mere signifier of birth, or of the link between the mother and child, but instead turns into the signifier of one’s political identification with France. Christine therefore does not simply play on the general ambiguity of the body as a sign, but rather on the simultaneous specificity and ambiguity of one body part in particular: the belly button. As signifier of human origin, the nombril is possessed by, and relates to, all citizens. As signifier of political origin, France-as-nombril is not only relevant to all citizens, each citizen is marked equally by his or her affiliation to the nation-state. Christine has, in effect, chosen a universal referent—perhaps the most universally (and externally visible) shared referent—which points to both our collective and individual origins, and which implicates the role of individual and community, mother and child. Christine will now be able to suggest that it is only through individual loyalty to the “motherland” of France that her interlocutors will be “saved.” Importantly, Christine’s choice of the nombril as political signifier also underscores Queen Isabeau’s primacy over Charles VI in matters political—if the belly button simultaneously links polis and subject as well as mother and child, it also codes political authority as something explicitly contained in and transmitted through the body of the queen. Although Christine emphasizes the individual, this is not to suggest that the communal role is unimportant. Indeed, in other portions of the letter she privileges the power inherent in unity of lineage; France is distinguished from other, more “perverse” nations (namely, England) by its family unity. Christine indicates that if something is not done to make peace, France will be compared to those “estranges nacions” (strange/perverse nations) where “les freres germains, cousins et parens par faulse envie et convoitise s’entre-ocient comme chiens” (brothers, cousins, and kinsmen who, through misguided jealousy and greed, kill each other like dogs, 89, 39; 90, 1). As in the example given above, France will change into a land where the rules governing basic human conduct no longer obtain. This comparison is also important for what it tells us about Christine’s possible conception of nationhood; although these “estranges nacions” defined here are those in opposition to France, it is nevertheless kinship relations that define them. But it is not only the warring men of France that Christine implicates. The “dames, damoiselles et femmes du royaume de France” (noblewomen, ladies, and women of the Kingdom of France, 86; 37–38) are drawn in to the scheme because they are the ones who will be left mourning the dead. In this context, Christine invokes an explicit comparison between the women of France and the Sabine women as she interpellates the Sabines: “O, dames de la cite de Sabine, besoing eussions de vous en ceste besoigne!” (Oh, ladies of the city of Sabine, how we would have needed you in this matter! 86, 41; 88, 1). These women clearly present a special case; as former members of one sociopolitical group now inscribed, against their will, into another, they embody two cultures, and by choosing to act as a bridge between them, they thus permanently inscribe dual citizenship upon their bodies. Christine is asking noblewomen to become more like them, to become a second line of defense. Left widowed and kinless by the sword, Christine asks them to turn from passive objects into active subjects, and from representatives of one cultural faction to representatives of a unified France.26 The Sabine women are clearly offered as a specifically feminine model of conflict resolution, and, as

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such, strong reinforcement for Christine’s authority as mediator for the warring ducal parties in France. The Sabine women, as dual insider/outsiders, are also clearly meant to reinforce Christine’s privileged perspective on French royal politics. Like the Sabine women, it is Christine’s job to mediate between warring political factions. Women are in every way as beholden as men to political action. Christine follows her address of the Sabines with an address to the queen, the highest female noble whom she addresses: “He! Royne couronnee de France, dor-tu adés?” (Oh, crowned Queen of France, are you still sleeping? 88, 7). It is surprising not just because of its content (the suggestion that the queen is oblivious to what is occurring), but also because Christine uses the “tutoie” (informal “you”] form of address—as we saw in the Prison, Christine takes great pains to explain to Marie why she uses the “tu” form. The ironic use of the disrespectful “tu” comes further into play, as Christine’s argument underscores that the queen is powerful enough not to need anyone’s permission to protest the current events and infighting. As Christine laments, “Ne vois-tu en balance l’eritage de tes nobles enfans?” (Do you not see the heritage of your noble children at stake? 88, 9–10). Besides the queen, there is one last person to whom she can address her letter. The next paragraph follows immediately with an address to the Duke of Berry:

O! Duc de Berry, noble prince, excellent souche et estoc des enfans royaulx, filz de roy de France, frere et oncle, pere d’antiquité de la fleur de liz toute!…Quelle douleur a veoir le plus noble oncle qui aujoiud’ui vive, comme de trois roys, de six ducs et de tant de contes, en assemblee mortele contre sa propre chair, et les nepveux qui tant doivent de reverence a si noble oncle, si comme a pere, contre lui en bataille! (90; 12–14, 23–27) (Oh, Duke of Berry, noble prince, excellent father and scion of royal children, son of a King of France, brother and uncle, father of all the antiquity of the lily!…Alas, what a pity it is to see the most noble uncle alive, uncle of three kings, six dukes and as many counts, in a mortal confrontation against his own flesh, and the nephews who owe so much reverence to such a noble uncle, like a father, be in war against him!) This description concentrates explicitly on placing the Duke of Berry in his familial context. Thus, the duke is firmly placed in a social context whose exact dimensions and quality are delimited, indeed making the duke “le plus noble” (the most noble) uncle. But little by little Christine takes apart his social and genealogical context, just as she leaves the dismembered bodies on the field as one of the last images of her larger visio. Christine turns the body of the duke against itself:

Comment est-il possible que ton trés benigne cuer puist souffrir te veoir, a journee precise, en assemblee de bataille mortele a doulereuses armes contre tes nepveux? Je ne croy pas que la

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souvenance de la trés grant amour naturel…soufrrist a nature que lermes et pleurs ne decourussent comme fontaine tout au long de ta face, et que ton noble cuer ne feust de pitié si comme touz fonduz qu’a paines te soustendroies. (90; 14–18, 19–22) (How is it possible that your tender heart can bear to see you, on a given day, assembled in deadly battle array to bear painful arms against your nephews? I do not believe that the memory of great natural love …will not naturally allow tears to flow like a fountain down your face, and your noble heart not to break with pity so much so that it will barely support you.) The duke’s heart and eyes will turn against him; his entire body will rebel and prevent him from fighting. These tears are in fact becoming like the author’s: physical barriers which prevent the duke from seeing on the battlefield just as Christine is rendered almost incapable of writing due to the “ruisseaux” (rivulets) of tears on the page. In the end, the incapacitating power of tears is the only hope for peace. We have come almost full circle. The “lermes” streaming down Christine’s face to open the epistle are what make it possible and bring it to completion: because of her sadness, she is authorized to request concrete action. The very existence of her “voix” which cries in the “royaume” of France calls for action on the part of the nobility,; specifically, the Duke of Berry. Her address is not limited to the duke, however, despite the fact that she addresses him exclusively at the end. Christine in fact outlines a socially interrelated portrait of France. She achieves this by calling explicitly upon various segments of France: “les peuples,” “les dames, demoiselles et femmes,” “les chevaliers,” “les nobles princes françoys,” “les clercs,” “les peres de l’assemblee” “la reine couronnee de France” herself. Genealogical references abound. These familial webs paradoxically highlight the political power of the individual while simultaneously not allowing the individual to stand in isolation. Most important, however, is the depiction of France as a sort of blueprint onto which each person’s social and political coordinates might be mapped. The “national” entity of France is explicated in terms of physical space and social structures, which are then threatened with visions of destruction: the city that is destroyed, the town that is razed, the battlefields that bleed, the fields that lie fallow. Christine presents us with an overwhelming portrait of a fragmented France. Yet this is not a France totally divided: despite rifts between and among social groups, each segment is linked in logical fashion to the others. The priests who are unable to intercede will benefit from the prayers of the “peuples.” Men who are unable to keep themselves from involvement in war will benefit from women like the Sabines who have the power to do so. Christine’s textual France is therefore neither a solidified monarchy nor a totally fragmented space where groups have no relation to each other. It is an entity, figured literally as the body social, geographic, and politic, which must first be created in order to be saved. Christine’s role as author is clear: she is to detail this new vision of France. If the question of what defines France as national space is still uncertain, what is clearly

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present in the Lamentacion is a desired political outcome and the corresponding belief that writing such a text might make a difference. Let us turn one last time to a concept in the Lamentacion, which fully embraces the relativism and ambiguity of pain and its bodily referent: that of labeure, or work. If we return to the opening of the letter, we find that unlike a traditional medieval letter the Lamentacion has no formal addressee, no traditional salutatio. Instead, we find an epigraph clearly meant to take the place of the address: “Qui a point de pitie la mette en oevre/Veez-cy le temps qui le requiert” (Whosoever has pity let him or her put it to use/The time which requires it has come). This can be read in several ways. First, as noted above, the “qui” could refer to the Duke of Berry who is mentioned later in the text, in which case the letter stands as testament to the attempts made by the Duke of Berry to build political and military consensus. Second, the “qui” could be intended for the entire French nobility, thereby underscoring the inherently fragmented political structure that Christine accuses of causing the social ruin of France—and here we should note that the idea of the “oevre” has important parallels in contemporaneous concepts of royal justice. According to Philippe de Mezieres, justice cannot be carried out unless the legal system puts it “en oevre.” Indeed, his Songe du vieil pélerin provides a vivid example of what happens if a judicial code fails to meet the needs of the people. But there is yet a third way of interpreting the opening of the Lamentacion. By the fourteenth century the term oevre has also come to refer to a work of art. If we interpret it this way, it reads “Whoever feels pity must put it into action, into words.” In this context, Christine becomes the addressee of her own letter; she is interpellating herself. Her literature is her pragmatic response, her political duty to “la chose publique.” She has fulfilled her part of the bargain; now it is implicitly understood to be the princes’ turn. Through the language of pain, which invokes the metaphor of the body, Christine has shown them how the polis of France is relevant to all of its citizens; and how, through the language of pain each Françoys becomes a citizen, marked by the state. The radical ambiguity of the human body as symbol has been transposed onto the space of the nation so that it might be conceived of as an entity that both interpellates (which is to say, demands something of) its citizens and is in turn interpellated by (or shaped by the wishes and needs of) its citizens. In Christine’s Lamentacion we have an ideologically complex political entity, identified with the French sovereign state, which due to the threat of civil war is fully dependent on the author for its complete articulation. The correlate to this new entity is the professional author: she (or he) who in deploying representations of violence authorizes herself to speak for the state. Notes 1. This chapter grew from two different conference papers, one given at the 2001 SAMLA convention in Atlanta, Ga. and one at the 37th International Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. See Bernard Guenee’s Un meurtre, une société: L’assassinat du duc d’Orléans le 23 novembre 1407 (Paris: Gallimard, 1992) and Richard Kaeuper’s War, Justice and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) for excellent historical contextualization of Christine’s literary career. 2. Christine’s lettres de circonstance are all letters in which Christine explicitly addresses various members of the French nobility in order to bring about a certain historical response

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to pressing political concerns that France is facing. For a more detailed discussion of the historical development of the group of genres known as the oeuvres de circonstance, see Claude Thiry’s chapter “La Poesie de Circonstance,” Grundrifi der Romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters: La Litterature française aux XIVe et XVe sièdes 8:1 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1988), 111–38. 3. Bernard Cerquiglini, “The Syntax of Discursive Authoruty: The Example of Feminine Discourse,” Yale French Studies 70 (1986): 183–98. 4. One of the factors making Christine de Pizan such an interesting and important case study in the development of authorship is that she describes herself as an outsider, and to some extent situates herself outside the system of patronage. Clearly, her position as outsider is actually a precondition of her becoming the first professional author in France. For further reading on Christine’s literary authority in relation to varying forms of political authority, see Maureen Quilligan, The Allegory of Female Authority (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 11–68 and passim; Margarete Zimmermann, “Vox femina, voxpolitica: The ‘Lamentation sur les maux de la France,’” trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards, in Politics, Gender, and Genre: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan, ed. Margaret Brabant (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1992), 113–28; and Liliane Dulac’s “Authority in the Prose Treatises of Christine de Pizan: The Writer’s Discourse and the Prince’s Word,” ibid., 129–40. For further reading on Christine’s relationship to patronal authority, see Sandra Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s “Epistre Othea”: Painting and Politics at the Court of Charles VI (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1986); and Deborah McGrady, “What Is a Patron? Benefactors and Authorship in Harley 4431, Christine de Pizan’s Collected Works,” Christine de Pizan and the Categories of Difference, ed. Marilynn Desmond (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 195–214. For more on how the medieval author codes authority through distance (i.e., an interior distance from the “self” and exterior distance from the community at large), see Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet’s “Un Engin si Soutil”: Guillaume de Machaut et l’ecriture au XIVe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1985). 5. Quilligan, 271, summarizes Peter Stallybrass’s argument thusly:” [I]n early modern history, ideology does not interpellate the individual as a subject (to repeat Althusser’s famous formulation) so much as, historically, the subject precedes the individual. That is, the political experience of being the subject of an absolute authority predates in the collective historical experience of Western Europe the collective experience of enfranchised autonomous individuality. Subjection to an absolute sovereign was, historically, the precondition in all Western European nations for the development of the notion of the free individual.” For further discussion, see the rest of Quilligan’s Chapter Five, “The Practice of History,” Allegory, 246–84. 6. For an excellent and detailed analysis of the Livre du corps de politie, see Kate Forhan, The Political Theory of Christine de Pizan (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2002), 45–75 and passim. 7. Here I invoke the term auctoritas deliberately. Benveniste tells us that the etymology of the term implies that it represents not just power or authority in its own right, but also that which has the capacity to confer power. It thus describes the authorship of power. See Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-europeennes, vol. 2 (Paris: Minuit, 1969), 148–51. This etymological reading of auctoritas echoes A.J.Minnis’s conception of medieval authorship as outlined in Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). 8. As Jacques Krynen suggests, John of Salisbury’s Policraticus has the effect of making visible the extreme proliferation of socio-professional categories and activities in the later Middle Ages: “la metaphore du corps permet aussi de rendre compte de la diversification contemporaine des activities socio-professionnelles” (the metaphor of the body also allows us to recognize the contemporaneous diversity of socio-professional activities). See Krynen’s L’Empire du roi: Idees et croyances politiques en France, XIIIe-XIVe siecle (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 244. Although the comparison of the political body in terms of the

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natural body was fully elaborated by John of Salisbury in the twelfth century—here, see the edition established by Cary J.Nederman (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990)—it was also theorized in late medieval French culture by Jean Gerson in his Vivat Rex (1405); see the Oeuvres Complètes VII (2), ed. Palemon Glorieux (Paris: Desclee, 1968). 9. Here I choose the term mutation because of its obvious resonance with Christine de Pizan’s literary corpus. In one of her central works, entitled La Mutacion de Fortune (The Changes of Fortune), Christine presents the reader with the theme of mutation as it affects both her literary career and her physical body. Fortune, which “fait et deffait a sa guise” (makes and unmakes as she pleases) recalls quite neatly the definition of pain as a political force used to effect an ideological change. For Elaine Scarry, pain is that which is used to “unmake” a person’s world, only then to “remake” it in a different image and with a specific ideological goal. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). As Andrea Tarnowski has pointed out, Christine uses “the ambiguity of her sex and gender…to raise the larger issue of her evolution as an author”—and in particular the roles played by her parents in her intellectual development. For more on the question of gender mutation and Christine’s conception of authorship, see Andrea Tarnowski, “Maternity and Paternity in ‘La Mutacion de Fortune,’” The City of Scholars: New Approaches to Christine de Pizan, ed. Margarete Zimmermann and Dina De Rentiis. European Cultures, 2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994), 116–26. 10. Both Elaine Scarry and José Gil write on the ideological power of the body as figure and as floating signifier, and what this implies in politico-philosophical terms (Scarry) or in anthropological–“force” terms (Gil). It is the very capacity of the body to become a floating signifier that allows symbolic thinking to be operated upon the body. The implications for the body as floating signifier are substantial: if the body carries symbolic exchanges between various codes, then the body has no meaning inherent in it, but rather speaks the codes that are inscribed upon it. See Jose Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, trans. Stephen Muecke (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 11. Lori J.Walters has recently analyzed Christine de Pizan’s transformative rhetoric in light of the body and its organs, showing how Christine herself posits her literary task as that of a translator whose vital political and ethical tasks are articulated through the action of key organs such as the hand, lips, tongue, and mouth. See Lori J.Walters, “Christine de Pizan as Translator and Voice of the Body Politic,” Christine de Pizan: A Casebook, ed. Barbara K. Altmann and Deborah L.McGrady (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 25–41. 12. For an excellent study of the political utility of expressions of anger and painful loss in the Middle Ages, see Stephen D.White, “The Politics of Anger” Anger’s past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. Barbara H.Rosenwein (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 127–52. 13. All citation from Christine’s texts and their translations are taken from Josette Wisman’s edition, “The Epistle of the Prison of Human Life” with “An Epistle to the Queen of France” and “Lamenton the Evils of Civil War” (New York: Garland, 1984). 14. See Scarry, 55–70 and passim. 15. “Souverain,’ defn. 4, Larousse Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (Paris: Larousse, 1992). 16. Christine will discuss this explicitly in her Livre du corps de polide (1407–09); she is quite aware that for royal power to work, the ruler must be embodied in the figure of various government officials. For an excellent transalation of the policie, see Kate Forhan, ed. and trans., The Book of the Body Politic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 17. For more on the body/soul split and the embodied nature of woman’s spirituality—and especially the role of woman as “seer”—see Dyan Elliott, “The Physiology of Rapture and Female Spirituality,” Medieval Theology and the Natural Body, ed. Peter Biller and A.J. Minnis (Rochester: York Medieval Press, 1997), 141–73. Elliott’s work is valuable for continuing the naunced work started by Carolyn Walker Bynum in the soul/body “split” in theological texts realting to rapture and the female body; see Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy

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Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Both critics in fact show that the body and soul are not strict binary opposites, and that the easiest place to “read” this is the famale enraptured body. 18. See Helen Solterer, The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture (Berkely: University of California Press, 1995), especially Chapter 6, “Christine’s Way,” 151–75. 19. For an excellent discussion of the vast metaphorical reach of the human body in later medieval culture, see Michael Camille, “The Image and the Self: Unwriting Late Medieval Bodies,” Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchaster and New York: Manchaster University Press, 1994), 62–99. 20. See Scarry, 215–277 and passium. 21. Christine was most likely using Brunetto Latini’s popular and wide-ranging treatise entitled Li Livres dou Tresor as her reference on letter protocol and correct rhetorical structure. See Sections 1–4 of Book III (“De bone parleure”) in the critical edition established by Francis J. Carmody (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), 317–90. 22. The Duke of Berry, after remaining neutral for some time, had just openly declared his allegiance to the Duke of Orléans by joining the League of Giens on April 15, 1410. The goal was to liberate the king, who was being held hostage by the Duke of Burgandy, and to restore the Dukes of Berry and Orléans to their rightful spots. In August 1410 the Duke of Berry moved his headquarters to Poitiers and was ready to march on Paris. While this is the particular crisis to which Christine’s letter responds, we must not forget that Christine’s entire writing career occurs during the Hundred Years War and that therefore her writings must be contextualized in light of the severe fragmentation—familial, political, geographic, cultural, and legal—affecting France. 23. For more on the political context of Meziere’s writings, see Jacques Krynen, Ideal du prince et pouvoir royal en France a lafin du Moyen Age, 1380–1440: Etude de la litterature politique du temps (Paris: A.et J.Picard, 1981). Krynen finds that many late medieval authors were driven by this same goal; they were “[d]ésireux d’atteindre les coeurs et d’éveiller les sensibilités” [hoping to reach people’s hearts and awaken their sensibilities] and for this reason “c’est de volonte délibérée qu’ils se placent sur le terrain de la morale” [it was through deliberate action that they established themselves on moral ground] (198). 24. The seulette is a term frequently used by Christine to identify herself as an author; she first used the term in a ballad written after her husband’s death entitled “Seulette suis, et seulette veuil estre” [Alone am I, and alone I wish to be]. The term implies social and physical marginalization; when one considers Christine’s status as widow who fought fruitless legal battles just to have access to the pension due to her after her husband’s death, we can also add economic marginalization. Many critics have done compelling studies of the figure of the seulette and the way that political, cultural, lingustic, and social isolation play into Christine’s literary strategy. For more on the seulette, see Earl Jeffrey Richards, “Seulette a part’—The ‘Little Woman on the Sidelines’ Takes Up Her Pen: The Letters of Christine de Pizan,” Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre, ed. Karen Cherewatuk and Ulrike Wiethaus (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1993), 139–70; and Mary McKinley, “The Subversive Seulette,” Brabant, ed., Politics, Gender, 157–70. 25. McKinley, “Seulette” 161. 26. The Sabines also appear in the cité des Dames (II. 33) where Christine notes that they “firent cause de sauver pays, villes et cités” [were responsible for saving their homeland(s), cities and towns]. For the standard modern French edition of La Cité des Dames, See the edition established by Eric Hicks (Paris: Seuil, 1988). For the standard Middle French edition, see Maureen Curnow’s 4-volume edition (Ph.D. Dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1975).

14 Mimetic Crisis in the Medieval Mass: A Sequence for the Feast of St. Thomas of Canterbury and Its Liturgical Function, ca. 1230 JULIA WINGO SHINNICK Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, murdered in his own cathedral by four knights of King Henry II’s court, became one of the most revered saints of the High Middle Ages. The story of Becket’s violent death is familiar to modern readers from stage and film productions of T.S.Eliot’s play,1 and from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, built on the narrative framework of a pilgrimage to Becket’s shrine at Canterbury. Becket’s martyrdom in 1170, followed quickly by his canonization in 1173, inspired the creation of numerous liturgical works in the Middle Ages. Hagiographical offices, homilies, and musical compositions for the liturgy flowed from the quills of clerics creating works to ornament the celebration of the feast of St. Thomas of Canterbury, observed annually on the date of his death, 29 December. One of these compositions, Sponsa virum lugeo, a piece for the Mass written in Reims in about 1230 by an anonymous poet-composer, survives with its musical setting as an unicum in the Latin manuscript, Assisi, Biblioteca del Sacro Convento, ms. 695 (Assisi 695).2 (Figure 14.1 through Figure 14.3 present in facsimile the manuscript folios containing the piece.) The poetic text of this striking literary work relates the historical events leading up to Thomas’s murder, the violent martyrdom of the saint, and, appropriately for a liturgical text, the apotheosis of Thomas and his role in the history of the church.

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Fig. 14.1 Assisi, Biblioteca del Sacro Convento, ms. 695, fol. 120, opening of the sequence, Sponsa virum lugeo with initiale champie ‘S’ and rubric De Beato Thoma martyre. Photograph by

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Pater Gerhard Ruf, O.F.M. Used by permission of the Sacro Convento, Assisi. The thought of René Girard provides an illuminating analytical means for unpacking the dense complex of symbols, allusions, and historical facts found in Sponsa virum lugeo. Girard, a socioliterary critic and scholar of comparative literature, is perhaps best known for his 1977 work, Violence and the Sacred, a treatment of the roots of societal violence from an anthropological point of view.3 Although no brief explanation of Girard’s “mimetic theory” can do it justice, an attempt is nonetheless a necessary prelude to its use in examining

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Fig. 14.2 Assisi, Biblioteca del Sacro Convento, ms. 695, fol. 120v, continuation of the sequence, Sponsa virum lugeo. Photograph by Pater Gerhard Ruf, O.R.M.Used by permission of the Sacro Convento, Assisi. both Sponsa virum lugeo and the liturgical context in which the work was performed.4

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After an initial explanation of the mimetic theory and an exploration of some of its manifestations in the conflict between Henry II and Becket, I provide a summary of the sequence genre’s form and the challenge this posed for

Fig. 14.3 Assisi, Biblioteca del Sacro Convento, ms. 695, fol. 121, closing of

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the sequence, Sponsa virum lugeo. Photograph by Pater Gerhard Ruf, O.R M.Used by permission of the Sacro Convento, Assisi. medieval poet-composers, as well as the significance of the position of the sequence within the Mass. Next, I examine the poetic means by which the text of Sponsa virum lugeo succeeds in expressing the chaos of mimetic crisis, and the way the musical setting interacts with the text in the liturgical representation of the violent events of Becket’s martyrdom. Finally, I attempt to explain the effect of this piece within the larger context of the liturgy of the medieval Mass, in terms of both a medieval theological understanding of liturgy and time and a modern understanding of the mimetic theory. Girard’s theory of culture, religion, and the violent mechanism that maintains them is based on a mimetic model of what he calls “interdividual psychology.”5 According to Girard’s mimetic theory, because we are mimetic, acquisitively based creatures, human beings are prone to rivalry and conflict that often lead to violence. Our desires, whether for objects, ideas, or prestige, are based on and mediated by the desires of others, our models. Eventually, as I imitate the desires of someone close to me (a process Girard calls “internal mediation”), I will inevitably come into conflict with my model in my attempt to achieve or acquire that which we both desire. Revered models can thus become rivals or obstacles when we begin to compete with them for the objects we desire in emulation of their desire. During such a conflict, I can become obsessed with my model, and my model likewise with me; the two of us would appear to an outside observer to be quite similar in our actions and demeanor, while my model and I would each claim that great differences exist between us, especially with regard to which of us is “at fault” in the conflict. Thus, ongoing reciprocal rivalry and violence finally render, to an outside observer, the individuals (or groups) in conflict no more than mimetic doubles of each other. We can see something of this process in the friendship and, later, the conflict between Henry II and Thomas Becket. Prior to their conflict, Becket was the ideal courtier and chancellor for his friend Henry II, quickly becoming the king’s boon companion, entrusted with the disbursal of large sums of money and even with the king’s son and heir.6 Thinking to retain Becket’s loyalty to the crown, Henry engineered his friend’s election as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162. This irregular elevation scandalized many of the clergy, for Becket was considered too worldly for the archbishopric, and only once before had the office been given to a royal clerk.7 In addition to the enmity of his fellow clergy, Becket also bore ill feeling from the court as his behavior began to change, reflecting a growing loyalty to the church. In Girard’s terms, Becket’s position as an outstanding individual could have made him a potential scapegoat in any case, but his belonging to both realms, court and clergy, constituted at a basic level a type of undifferentiation, a blurring of the hierarchy of distinction upon which the social order depends, and made his role as scapegoat even more likely.8 Becket, taking his role as archbishop seriously, resisted the king’s efforts to reform the law in favor of the “ancient customs of the realm,” a change that increased the power of the secular jurisdiction over that of the Church.9 Thomas at first seemed to accept the Constitutions of Clarendon, the formal name given to the codification of these

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reforms, but later rejected them, further enraging the king. Called to trial, Thomas refused to accept the judgment of the court, abruptly exited the hall amid jeers and insults, and managed an immediate escape.10 Three weeks later he fled across the channel to the continent for what became an exile of six years, a “goat cast out” by his own departure from his homeland. According to Girard, in group interactions mimetic desire leads to acts of scapegoating, which unify the members of the group against scapegoated individuals, who carry the negative projections of the group and who become scapegoats for many reasons. Often scapegoated persons carry what Girard has called the marks of the victim, meaning they are vulnerable in some way. The very old, the young, the ill or infirm, or people on the margins of the group are most usually scapegoats, but powerful individuals can also become scapegoats by virtue of their outstanding position in society. As mimetic conflicts build, a group can reach a point of mimetic crisis where hierarchical and functional differences, what Girard terms “the very foundation[s] of cultural order,” are threatened.11 Scapegoating thus functions as a nonconscious mechanism that releases the energies of mimetic crisis, but keeps the group intact.12 Elements of scapegoating are clearly present in the events leading to Becket’s exile. Although royalist bishops “maintained that Thomas had never been in danger” and “had not been pursued,” and Henry himself “always protested that Thomas had simply bolted,” there is no denying that before Thomas’s escape, “rumors of intended violence were rife,” and that at one point “the king had threatened him with imprisonment or death,” according to Frank Barlow.13 Thomas had seen good reason to flee, prudently exiling himself from obvious danger. During the long exile, Thomas was in contact with the pope and with Henry. After a superficial peace was finally effected by means of protracted negotiations, Thomas returned to England in 1170, where the conflict resumed when Archbishop Thomas, followed by Pope Alexander III, excommunicated the bishops involved in the crowning of the young Prince Henry as co-king, an act that brazenly defied the rights of Canterbury and flagrantly disobeyed the pope. Henry’s angry remark (“What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born clerk!”)14 was interpreted as an order for action by four leading knights of the court, who confronted and murdered Thomas in his own cathedral. Soon after the murder, miracles were reported at the tomb, and after his canonization, his feast was celebrated annually throughout the church.15 One of the myriad liturgical works written for use on Thomas’s feast day, Sponsa virum lugeo, is a good example of the sequence, a genre of chant sung after the Alleluia, and a standard part of the proper of the Mass from the eleventh century well into the sixteenth.16 The genre’s form presented particular compositional challenges, and an exploration of its characteristics yields an appreciation of the poet-composer’s achievement in creating Sponsa virum lugeo. The form of a typical sequence consists mainly of what are called double versicles. Each double versicle contains two different textual units and one melodic unit; the melodic segment is repeated for the second textual unit of the pair. Sponsa virum lugeo contains six melodic units, diagrammed in Figure 14.4. Each of the first five melodic units (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) is subject to immediate repetition and each comprises five double versicles (1a 1b; 2a 2b, and so forth). The sixth melodic unit, sounded only once, provides the concluding single versicle.

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Fig. 14.4 Form of Sponsa virum lugeo. Each textual unit within a double versicle contains several lines paralleling its partner in rhyme scheme and syllable count, as seen in double versicle 1a/ 1b of Sponsa virum lugeo:17 1a. Sponsa virum lugeo planctum18 sub funereo, lugeo raptum mater filium, saucia remedium, stupida consilium.

1b. Res est casus unici, regis scelus Anglici; impius patrem mactat filius, nec dampnavit sevius Xpisti19 Dei Pontius.

Each five-line textual unit of double versicle 1a/1b contains ten syllables in line 3 (“lugeo raptum mater filium” and “impius patrem mactat filius”) and seven syllables in all other lines; each follows the same rhyme scheme, x-x-y-y-y, although the rhyme sounds in the two parts of the double versicle differ. These formal characteristics are typical of the thirteenth-century sequence, a genre that simultaneously presented a challenge and an opportunity to composer-poets who were constrained by its rather rigid poetic form for their texts, but for whom the melody, changing with each double versicle, afforded opportunity for musical contrast and additional affective expression. As early as the eleventh century, the sequence held a secure position in the Mass proper. Sung between the Alleluia and the recitation of the Gospel, the central text of the first part of the Mass, the sequence enjoyed a dramatic location in the liturgy. The Gospel text (Reims, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 224, fols. 166–166v), which followed Sponsa virum lugeo on the feast of Saint Thomas of Canterbury in Reims was John 10:11–16, beginning: “Ego sum pastor bonus. Bonus pastor animam suam ponit pro ovibus suis” (I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep). In relation to Sponsa virum lugeo, this reading would have functioned as the final, authoritative thought concerning the drama that had just taken place in the sequence. It would thus have been experienced as the “last word” on Saint Thomas of Canterbury as a successful emulator of Christ, the model “good shepherd.” Similarly, the text (Reims, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 224, fol. 166) that precedes the sequence is the Alleluia verse from the Common of Martyrs: “Beatus vir qui suffert tentationem quoniam cum probatus fuerit accipiet coronam vitae” (Blessed the man who suffers the trial, because when he has been tested he will receive the crown of life). This effectively sets the stage for the relating of the details of the saint’s martyrdom in the sequence. Like the other elements of the Mass, the sequence not only fulfilled the familiar functions of glorifying God and celebrating the sacrament, but also often served a

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didactic purpose similar to that of other texts specific to a particular liturgical occasion, such as homilies or scriptural readings. The sequence had a wide range of possible functions; it could be used to disseminate hagiographic information, to promote piety, to state or explicate doctrine, to glorify God through ecstatic singing, and to provide a vehicle for prayerful petitions. Sponsa virum lugeo functioned in several of these ways. Conveying information about the life of St. Thomas of Canterbury, the piece promoted piety, and glorified God. In the light of Girard’s ideas, we can ascertain an additional role for Sponsa virum lugeo and perhaps for other sequences as well: it afforded the assembly implicit education and direct experience of the workings of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism as understood today in Girard’s mimetic theory. Although the musical setting of Sponsa virum lugeo is inseparable from its text, the more obvious means by which the piece fulfills its roles in the liturgy is the poem, a dramatic narrative of the martyrdom of the saint containing significant reflections of the mimetic theory in its portrayal of the breakdown of the hierarchy—the loosening of the psychological boundaries of societal differences in the face of the mimetic crisis culminating in Thomas’s murder. The opening of this text, cast in the first person singular, “Sponsa virum lugeo” (I, a bride, mourn my husband)—something very unusual in the sequence genre as a whole—would have immediately had a disorienting effect on its listeners.20 The personification of a particular church, rather than the Church (Ecclesia), is likewise quite rare in the large body of extant sequences, and the strained image of a heart giving birth as it gushes forth tears of lamentation (versicle 2b) expresses a confusion of the natural order within the human body: 2b. Fontem fundo lacrimis, iam intimus {fletibus}21 cor scaturit et parturit merorem.

2b. I pour out a fountain of tears deep within; now the innermost heart gushes forth (with weeping) and gives birth to lamentation.

This confusion is appropriate in the context of a depiction of mimetic crisis and would have resonated profoundly within each listener, setting up an expectation of something unusual to come. The chief structural means of conveying the mimetic conflict and crisis in Sponsa virum lugeo is an extended allegory depicting the societal hierarchy in disruption. The shocking nature of the crime portrayed in the phrase “impius patrem mactat filius” (the ungodly son slaughters the father; versicle 1b) relates to the fact that Thomas, an ordained priest, or Pater, was some fifteen years older than Henry II. A son slaughtering his father violates the rules of hierarchical order and presents one of the most extreme threats to the collective and/or individual psyche hypothesized in the modern era, the Oedipal crisis. Such patricide is also a negative mirror image of the relation between God the Father and God the Son, a truly disturbing (inverted) image in the context of the Mass. Following the introductory stage-setting of versicles 1a/1b and 2a/2b, double versicles 3a/3b and 4a/4b form the core of the text, relating in partial allegory Thomas’s betrayal and inartyrdom. The confusion inherent in the identification of the actions and allegorical figures contributes to the sense of a loss of differentiation, the hallmark of the mimetic crisis, according to Girard.22 At first glance, one might think that the kiss mentioned in

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versicle 3a possibly refers to the kiss of peace promised (but never actually given) by Henry II to Thomas as a symbol of reconciliation: 3a. Regni furor Siculi mitius exasperat, nec post fedus osculi quicquam sevum imperat.

3a. The raging of the Sicilian kingdom23 grows less harshly provoking, nor does it command, after the alliance of the kiss, anything cruel.

But, neither the kiss mentioned in versicle 3a nor the kissing related in versicle 3b can refer to Henry’s promised kiss, as Henry avoided the gesture at every point of contact during the protracted negotiations spanning Thomas’s exile.24 3b. Canit Judas osculans patris vite sospiti,

3b. Judas, kissing, sings for the unharmed life of the father,

Thus, Henry cannot fulfill the allegorical role of Judas in this text, and the character Judas must represent someone else who betrayed Thomas.25 Additional confusion appears in the reference to the “abominable trinity” in line 3 of versicle 4a: 4a. Prodiit iniquitas ex adipe, cum nefanda trinitas a principe fex exivit procerum [opus]26 iurans scelerum, ut Herodes gaudeat, lux et gemma pereat sacerdotum.

4a. Iniquity sets forth from corpulence when from the abominable trinity, from the leader, the dregs of the nobles goes forth vowing the work of crime so that Herod may rejoice, so that the light and gem of priests may perish.

The archbishops of York, London, and Salisbury were understood as the allegorical equivalent of the chief priests of the Sanhedrin, the “court of chief priests and elders in Jerusalem, which, according to the Passion narratives in the Gospels, judged Jesus”27 prior to turning him over to Pilate; indeed, alluding to the heretical writings of Gilbert of Nogent, Pope Alexander III referred to these three archbishops as the Gilbertian trinity,28 accusing them of spurning the papal prohibition of the coronation of Henry II’s son and of advising and planning Thomas’s murder.29 Even the syntax of the text in versicle 4a reflects the confusion inherent in mimetic crisis; because there were four nobles who went out to kill Thomas, the word trinitas (clearly a nominative) cannot be placed in apposition to fex (versicle 4a, line 5). Herod is obviously the allegorical equivalent of Henry II in versicle 4a, but this in one sense contradicts the striking image of son slaughtering father in versicle 1b, because the Herod of the Nativity was older than Jesus, the infant Son of God. In another sense, because of Thomas’s status as priest (Pater) and because of the unity of essence in the Triune God, “Herod” could be seen as slaughtering “the Father,” another image of impiousness echoing the slaughter mentioned in versicle 1b. At any rate, the confusion generated by these contradictions and by the paradox of the Trinity furthers the sense of a world turned upside down in heightened mimetic crisis.

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Contributing to the sense of confusion and crisis by bringing into the story a loss of distinctions of historical era are two striking references to Greek mythology. Versicle 3b likens Thomas’s return to England to that of Diomedes to Argos, stressing a betrayer in the role of Judas, who kisses the returning figure, “reluctantly pretending peace to the guest, Diomedes” (Egre pacem simulans hospiti Diomede). Returning home from the Trojan War, Diomedes found not a Penelope, but a false welcome from his unfaithful wife, Aegiale, and soon discovered that his claims to the throne of Argos were threatened. Thomas, having been restored to royal favor, heard of more opposition to his return and sent by messenger copies of papal letters imposing sentences on the adversarial bishops. Upon landing he was met by armed royal officers and troops, complaining that Thomas wanted to uncrown the young king and had punished the bishops who crowned him. Further negotiations and disagreements followed, and it is clear that his title was not yet secure. Another indirect reference to classical mythology, the command to Canterbury to rave like the Bacchants, conveyed in the single imperative bacchare (versicle 5a, line 8), presents a disturbing image of disorder: Fusum bibe sanguinem in hominem; unto man;30

Drink the blood poured out unto man;30 bacchare!rave like the Bacchants!

Here a Christian church is likened to the maenads (female devotees of Dionysus), who were thought to have engaged in wild ritual dancing during which they tore apart and ate their victims. This image conveys another inversion of Christian ritual, this time of the Eucharist itself, for the Bacchants engaged in their savagery after drinking wine. The murdering barons’ disregard for the sacredness of the cathedral and for the liturgy of monastic vespers taking place in the cathedral during the murder (versicle 4b) is another example of a loss of the differentiations upon which civilization is ordered. 4b. Nam loci religio, non ordinis mora vel dilatio fit criminis; morti se pro patria vivens offert hostia; sanguis sacer funditur; caput ense petitur tam devotum.

4b. There is no delay on the part of the troop because of the religious practices of that place, nor any postponement of the crime; for the benefit of the Fatherland, the living sacrifice offers himself to death;31 sacred blood is poured; the so-devoted head is assailed by the sword blade.

And, true to Girard’s theory, the crisis seems to be resolved only by an act of murderous violence. The murder is compromised by one fact, however. At the final moment, Becket, a martyr (in imitation of his model, Christ), did not oppose his assailants. Not reciprocating in kind, not imitating the violence of his murderers, Thomas, like his model, paradoxically submitted to his persecutors and emphasized his innocence of any crime.32 This relating of Becket’s willing death further confounds any remaining sense of the order of the expected, and after a sudden shift in point of view, this time to the second person singular in double versicle 5a/5b, it takes a few lines (or moments) for the reader (or listener) to understand who is being addressed.

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5a. Flere, pium, felix humani generis et vitium cuius vita posteris obprobrium, fusum bibe sanguinem in hominem; bacchare! 5b. Vivit tamen spiritus; vivit martyr inclitus, (fol. 121) te fortior: sponsi Cantuaria, de gloria latere!

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5a. You, fortunate one, weep for this holy man whose life is a reproach to the human race; and weep for the guilt of the human race; drink the blood poured out unto man; rave like the Bacchants! 5b. Nevertheless the spirit lives; the celebrated martyr lives, braver than you: Canterbury, hide your face from the glory of your bridegroom!33

The one addressed in the second person singular is Canterbury, Thomas’s church, who spoke in the first person in the opening two double versicles. Direct address in the form of petitions or praise to the deity or various saints is not uncommon in the sequence genre. Such an admonishment as this, and to a particular church, however, is highly unusual and would have caught the attention of clerics familiar with the typical sequence. This exceptional construction would have further emphasized the text’s portrayal of chaotic confusion as well as its depiction of the mimetic crisis.34 In versicle 6 the point of view shifts suddenly once again, and the disoriented reader or listener encounters a concluding statement in the third person singular, the point of view to be retained by the assembly in the portions of the Mass that follow the sequence. 6. Sol extinctus Angliam suo priva[t]}35 lumine, sed Deus ecclesiam novo lustrat numine; cuius vita nomini Xpisti gloriosa in conspectu Domini mors pretiosa. Amen.

The sun, snuffed out, robs England of its own light, but God illuminates the church with the divine spirit whose life [was] glorious for the name of Christ and whose death [was] precious in the sight of the Lord. Amen.

This more distanced point of view sums up the events of Thomas’s murder with a metaphor of light and illumination appropriate to the relating of the saint’s apotheosis. An examination of the text of Sponsa virum lugeo reveals its appropriateness for analysis by means of the mimetic theory. When one considers the music, however, a natural question arises: What kind of melodic setting is appropriate for such a hyperemotional text, one that careens through three abrupt shifts in point of view? Not surprisingly, the melody neither careens through several changes of mode nor includes large numbers of expressive melismatic gestures, for a text like Sponsa virum lugeo needs a melody able to contain rather than emphasize its wild emotionality. (Appendix B provides a complete transcription.) In keeping with this idea of containment, the modality of the piece never wavers; all six versicles conclude on the final (d) of the mode protus,36 and the only part of the sequence in which the range of pitches extends upward beyond the plagal portion (A–a) of the mode occurs in double versicle 5a/5b and in the concluding single versicle 6.37

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Conventional, stepwise motion predominates in the entire melody, with few leaps larger than a third.38 In versicle 5a (Example 1) an octave leap stands out at the word felix; it is so conspicuous that at first we might think it a mistake. The leap is no mistake, however, for the music scribe clearly indicated a new clef at the word felix. (In Figure 2 this new clef occurs toward the center of the eighth staff.) Furthermore, the pitch d1 in versicle 5a, the beginning of the climactic portion of the sequence, marks the first use in the piece of a pitch higher than the pitch a. This is the only occurrence of outright emotionality in the melody, the only incidence of “raving” grief. Fittingly, it appears following the imperative flere pium (weep for the holy man), four syllables (marked as w, occurrence in the piece of two or more successive syllables set to multiple x, y, and z in Example 1), each set to a short melisma, which provide the only pitches.39 It is as if at this point all of the horror and confusion contained by the low-lying, dark melody of the first four double versicles suddenly burst forth into the higher range of the mode. The four short melismas add more tension to the melodic line just prior to the octave leap, and could be

Example 1: Melodic transcription: Sponsa virum lugeo, Versicle 5a/5b

interpreted as a last attempt at control of the rising emotions expressed in the text. Indeed, because melismatic singing “encourages the members of the community to participate more actively and cooperatively in its production and contemplation,” Eric Gans has attributed much significance to the medieval melisma, stressing its role as a “formal

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elaboration that functions as a means of deferring crisis or avoiding group conflict.”40 Because the octave leap immediately follows the four successive melismas in versicle 5a, the outburst in range would suggest, in Gans’s terms, that a final effort at deferral of crisis has failed. In versicle 5b, the second half of this climactic double versicle, the composer shows his skill further, rising to the challenge of the sequence form and straining the limits of its melodic conventions. While retaining the double versicle form through using a portion of the same melody and the same text scansion of versicle 5a, he omits the opening melismatic, four-syllable line as well as the third line of versicle 5b. Thus, versicle 5b is shorter than versicle 5a and begins at the zenith of the melody, the pitch d1. The octave leap is still present, however, between the final note of versicle 5a (on the concluding syllable of the word bacchare) and the first pitch of versicle 5b (at the word vivit). The use of the higher, authentic portion of the range of the mode—occurring only in this versicle pair, and coinciding with the appearance, in versicle 5a, of the word felix (fortunate one) and, in versicle 5b, with vivit tamen (nevertheless, he lives)—thus serves a double purpose. It not only conveys the feeling of grief bursting out of control, but also emphasizes the paradoxical triumph of life over death. In this double versicle the appearance of the higher part of the range, the use of the octave leap, and the straining at the limits of the form through omission of two lines in versicle 5b coincide with the textual irregularities of the imperative admonishment and the striking reference to the Bacchants, with its threatening allusion to an inversion of the Eucharist. Here the piece, and perhaps even the sequence form itself, has reached a breaking point in the face of the mimetic crisis it depicts. The poet-composer, however, manages to resolve this outburst of emotion, concluding his piece in a single versicle of only eight lines. He begins the final versicle on the melodic nadir, A, recalling the opening pitch of versicle 2a/2b, and providing balance for the high pitches used in versicle 5a/5b. From this point the melody proceeds through a series of melodic ascents, marked as s, t, and u in Example 2.

Example 2: Melodic transcription: Sponsa virum lugeo, Versicle 6

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After reaching its highest pitch (c1) on the second, accented syllable of the word ecclesiam, the melody of versicle 6 traces a pattern of six melodic descents (marked as a, b, c, d, e, and f) alternating with five ascents, marked as

Fig. 14.5 Melodic Ascents and Descents in Versicle 6 of Sponsa virum lugeo.

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v, w, x, y, and z in Example 2 and shown graphically in Figure 5.41 The first three ascents (v, w, and x) attain successively lower apexes—the pitches b, a, and g—while the last three repeat the lowest apex, g. This passage of alternating ascents and descents in versicle 6 resolves the climactic double versicle (5a/5b) through a significant interaction of text and music. Following the textual and melodic explosion of grief in versicle 5a/5b, the text of versicle 6 shifts abruptly to a conventional image expressed in the traditionally objective, third-person point of view. In the melodic line, however, order is restored gradually, without a sense of abruptness or disorientation, through the series of ascents and descents that carefully folds up the melody until it comes to rest on d, the pitch center and modal final, indicated in Figure 5 by a horizontal line.42 Here within the ordered events of the medieval Mass—a ritual with clear boundaries and distinctions between its component liturgical actions, readings, and chants—the assembly has just experienced a strong evocation of the chaos of mimetic crisis. The music’s gradual, ordered re-transition from the confusion of crisis back to the ritualized hierarchy of the Mass channels the violence of the text and resonates with the ideas of Jacques Attali, who emphasizes music’s “participation in social regulation,” asserting that music’s “fundamental fimctionality is to be pure order.”43 Successfully restoring order through his skillfully constructed melodic line in versicle 6, the poet-composer thus concludes a work whose dizzying shifts in point of view, strained metaphors, confusing allegories, and unsettling paradoxes provide an experience of a mimetic crisis. The emotions stirred by the sequence at the time of performance would have evoked for the thirteenth-century assembly of Rémois clergy and laypersons the affective response of Thomas’s twelfth-century followers who either witnessed the archbishop’s murder or heard the news and tried to make sense of it in light of the hope and promise of future resurrection. An affective union was thus accomplished between the grieving twelfth-century followers of Thomas and those who sang or listened to the sequence some sixty years later. This union took place in a liturgy whose main purpose was to unite through the sacrament Christ’s followers with Christ, a liturgy that participated in the timeless, spaceless plane of the “eternal today” described by the twelfth-century theologian, Gerhoch of Reichersberg.44 Gerhoch’s theories resonate with those of modern scholars of liturgy who propose as one effect of successful ritual the creation of a liminal space outside of time in which past, present, and future paradoxically coexist—a notion already formulated by Boethius in his De consolatione philosophiae. In view of its fulfillment of Gerhoch’s criteria, the sequence Sponsa virum lugeo can be adjudged a significant liturgical work. When considered in light of René Girard’s mimetic theory, the piece provides a significant example of how the medieval liturgy educated its performers and participants. The commonly held ideal of the Imitatio Christi was explicitly reinforced for the assembly in the outline and events of the narrative itself. At the same time, telling details of both text and music provided implicit, experiential instruction in the workings of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism, here confounded and thrown into sharp relief by the willing, self-sacrificial gesture of Thomas, the intended victim of the courtiers and their king.

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Notes 1. T.S.Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935); Murder in the Cathedral, directed by George Hoellering (Great Britain: Classic Pictures, 1951). 2. See Julia W.Shinnick, “The Manuscript Biblioteca del Sacro Convento, Assisi, ms. 695: A Codicological and Repertorial Study” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1997), for details concerning this manuscript and its probable date. 3. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); originally published as La Violence et le sacré (Paris: Grasset, 1972). 4. See René Girard, “Mimesis and Violence: Perspectives in Cultural Criticism,” Berkshire Review 14 (1979): 9–19, for the most compact summary of the mimetic theory. The article has been reprinted in James Williams, ed., The Girard Reader (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 9–19. 5. Rene Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World: Research Undertaken in Collaboration with Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort, trans. Stephen Bann (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), 283–305; originally published as Des Choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde: Recherches avec Jean-Michel Oughourlian et Guy Lefort (Paris: Grasset, 1978). 6. Frank Barlow, Thomas Becket (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), 44. 7. Barlow, 66. 8. Girard, Scapegoat, 22. 9. Barlow, 96. 10. Barlow, 113–14. 11. Girard, Scapegoat, 15. See also Girard, Violence, 208–110, for an explanation of the way culture is eclipsed as it becomes less differentiated. 12. In order to avoid confusion with the Freudian or Jungian meaning of the term unconscious, Girard does not use it, preferring the formulation non-conscious instead. 13. Barlow, 112–15. 14. These are the words reported by Edward Grim, William of Canterbury, William fitzStephen, and Herbert of Bosham as cited in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. J.C.Robertson (i–vi), and J.B.Sheppard (vii) (Rolls ser., 1875–85); quoted in Barlow, 235. 15. Within the first ten years after the death, 703 miracles were reported. Representations of Thomas’s martyrdom appeared rapidly all over Europe, and Canterbury became a popular pilgrimage destination. Only a few days after his death, his tomb became a place of pilgrimage. Given the widespread devotion to Saint Thomas of Canterbury, it is not surprising to find an original, unique sequence for the saint’s feast in a manuscript from Reims. Indeed, in Assisi 695, Sponsa virum lugeo is one of five items honoring Saint Thomas of Canterbury. Why such a plethora of sequences for the English martyr in a Reims manuscript? Perhaps the answer to this question lies in one of several different historical facts. The fifty-first archbishop of Reims, Guillaumeaux-Blanches-Mains (d. 1202), had been a strong supporter of Becket against Henry II during Guillaume’s earlier tenure as archbishop of Sens. During the archbishopric of Guillaume at Reims, no fewer than five churches dedicated to Saint Thomas of Canterbury existed in the diocese of Reims, and there were also eighteen sanctuaries and four altars (autels). John of Salisbury, one of Becket’s clerks, an eye-witness to all but the final scene of Thomas’s last day and the first hagiographer of the saint, spent his exile (1164–1170) mostly at the abbey of Saint-Rémi in Reims. The cathedral of Notre-Dame-de-Reims possessed no special relics of the saint, but according to Marlot, the Hospital of Notre Dame in Reims counted a belt of Saint Thomas of Canterbury among its relics. See Raymond Foreville, “Le Culte de Saint Thomas Becket en France,” Thomas Becket: Actes du Colloque international de Sédières, ed. R.Foreville (Paris: Éditions Beauchesne, 1975), 169; Barlow, 130; 238; and Guillaume Marlot, Histoire de la

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ville, cité et université de Reims (Reims: Chez L.Jacquet, Imprimeur de l’Academie, 1843– 46), 2,404. 16. Written from the ninth to the sixteenth century, the repertory of surviving sequences is enormous. Some 5,000 sequence texts were edited by Henry Marriott Bannister and Clemens Blume. These texts are contained in the thirteen volumes dedicated to the sequence genre in the fifty-five volumes of the Analecta hymnica medii aevi, published in Leipzig from 1886 to 1922. 17. See Appendix A for the complete text and translation. 18. Underlining in the Latin text represents the expansion of common Latin abbreviations. Letters that are underlined are not in the manuscript for that particular occurrence of the word. 19. The orthography of Assisi 695 sometimes presents the Greek characters in an abbreviation, and at other times spells out Xpistus or its declined forms. Here, the abbreviation Xpi is used in the manuscript. The underlining represents an expansion of the abbreviation. 20. I have not examined all 5,000 sequence texts edited in the monumental publication Analecta hymnica, but I have examined quite a few, including all 179 in Assisi 695. I do not recall seeing the first person singular used in any sequence, except occasionally in a direct quotation. 21. Clemens Blume and Henry Marriott Bannister, Sequentiae Ineditae, Liturgische Prosen des Mittelalters Siebente Folge, Analecta Hymnica medii aevi, vol. 40 (Leipzig: O.R.Riesland, 1902), 301, suggest fletibus. The manuscript has no lacuna here; however, the scansion of the text line does not match line 2a, 2 without the addition of three syllables. The musical line is accommodated to the shorter text line, however. 22. See Girard, Violence, 49–50. 23. In 1163, at the Council of Tours (called by Pope Alexander III) sentences of excommunication were read against William I, King of Sicily, and in 1169, Henry intrigued with the king of Sicily in order to threaten Alexander III. Barlow, 86. 24. Barlow, 194–201. 25. Allegorizations of the murder narrative abounded in the weeks and months after Thomas’s martyrdom. Judas was the character represented either by Geoffrey Ridel, archdeacon of Canterbury who betrayed Thomas by meeting with the archbishops of York, London, and Salisbury toward the beginning of December, or by Reginald fitzJocelin, Thomas’s former clerk who after the murder played an active role on Henry’s behalf in negotiations with the pope. See Barlow, 252. 26. Blume and Bannister suggest the word opus to create a seven-syllable line matching line 4b, 6. Again, the manuscript does not have a lacuna here. 27. The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary, s.v. “Sanhedrin.” 28. Gilbert, Bishop of Poitiers from 1142 until his death in 1154, was accused of heresy with regard to his book (a commentary on Boethius) on the Trinity. His unusual views were based on his principles of speculative grammar; among other things, he was accused of asserting that no divine Person can be made the predicate of a sentence. He was examined in a hearing at the Council of Reims in March 1148. The pope commanded Gilbert to correct in his book any statements that were in conflict with the profession of faith drawn up by Saint Bernard specifically for the hearing. Gilbert concurred and was acquitted of all charges; however, he made no changes in his commentary. For details on the trial of Gilbert, see Otto I, Bishop of Freising, The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa by Otto of Freising and His Continuator, Rahewin, trans. Charles Christopher Mierow, Records of Civilization, Sources and Studies, 49 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), 88–101. For Gilbert’s views on the Trinity, see Nicholas M.Haring, S.A.C., “The Commentaries of Gilbert, Bishop of Poitiers (1142–1154), on the Two Boethian Opuscula Sacra on the Holy Trinity,” Nine Medi-aeval Thinkers: A Collection of Hitherto Unedited Texts, ed. J.Reginald O’Donnell, C.S.B., Studies and Texts 1 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1955) or Michael E.

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Williams, The Teaching of Gilbert Porreta on the Trinity as Found in His Commentaries on Boethius, Analecta Gregoriana 56 (Rome: Apud Aedes Universitatis Gregorianae, 1951). 29. Barlow, 251 and 259. 30. There was quite a lot of blood; onlookers collected it and applied it to their bodies. According to Barlow, 265, after the murder, “at the heart of the cult of Thomas was the blood of the martyr,” which worked many miracles of healing. 31. According to eye-witnesses who described Thomas’s last day, when Thomas realized he was close to death he adopted a submissive pose with his head bent forward. Barlow, 247. 32. See René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 198–212; originally published as Le bouc émissaire (Paris: Editions Grasset et Fasquelle, 1982), for a discussion of the phenomenon of scapegoating violence against martyrs. 33. As the church is the Bride of Christ, so Canterbury, Thomas’s church, is the bride of the Christ-like martyr, Thomas. 34. While admoznitio is prevalent in the para-liturgical conductus genre, such rhetoric is highly unusual in the sequence, a genre that was an established part of the liturgy. For more on the characteristics of the conductus, see Robert Falck, The Notre Dame Conductus: A Study of the Repertory (Henryville, Pa.: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1981). 35. Both Ulysse Chevalier, Sacramentaire et martyrologe de l’abbaye de Saint-Rémy: Martyrologe, Calendrier, Ordinaires et Prosaire de la Metropole de Reims (VIIe–XIIIe siede) Publies d’aprés les manuscrits de Paris, Londres, Reims et Assise, Bibliothèque liturgique, vol 7 (Paris: Alphonse Picard Libraire, 1900), 374, and Blume and Bannister, Sequentiae Ineditae, 301, suggest privat, although the manuscript clearly has priva. 36. In this chapter c1 signifies the pitch middle c, while c signifies the pitch an octave below middle c, and C indicates the pitch two octaves below middle c. The pitch d1 in this system is a major second above middle c, while the pitch A is a major sixth above the pitch C. These pitches are understood not as absolute, but relative, depending on the voices of the ensemble performing the piece. The melodic range of Sponsa virum lugeo covers an octave plus a fourth, whether the ensemble sings at the notated pitch (A–d1), or in a higher or lower tessitura. I use the older modal designation Protus, encompassing both its plagal and authentic portions, since the melody of Sponsa virum lugeo, while mainly traversing the plagal mode known as Hypodorian or Mode 2, contains a section of the authentic Dorian (Mode 1) as well. See Richard Crocker, The Early Medieval Sequence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), for a discussion of the problems of classifying the modes of sequences. 37. Among the sequences in Assisi 695, melodies lying this low in range are relatively rare, so this in itself would have marked Sponsa virum as significant in some way to the assembly and choir. The range (A–a) of another unicum in Assisi 695, the troped Kyrie Alpha et Ω is also unusually low, suggesting a close relationship to Sponsa virum lugeo. Furthermore, the text of Alpha et Ω contains the trope lines Xpiste, sponse tue voces attende, clamat tibi. Si non audis quare, dilecte meus, sanguis tuus fusus pro me? (Christ, attend to the voice of your bride, she cries to you: have mercy, have mercy. Wherefore, if you do not hear, beloved of mine, why was your blood poured out for me?). Here the use of personification of the church does not clearly represent a particular institution such as Canterbury, but these lines echo strikingly the language of Sponsa virum lugeo. 38. Of the 456 articulated pitches in the melodic line of Sponsa virum lugeo, approximately 83% of the intervals sounded are seconds or repeated pitches and approximately 14% are thirds. Leaps larger than a third consist of nine occurrences of fourths, one occurrence of a sixth, and the two octave leaps in versicle 5a/5b. These totals represent the melody as sounded, with each melodic unit of the double versicles sung twice, and intervals between the end of each versicle and the beginning of the next taken into account.

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39. In addition to the four melismas in versicle 5a, Sponsa virum lugeo contains only nine other melismas of three or more notes, none of which occurs successively, except for the threenote figure on the first syllable of the concluding Amen. For a discussion of how medieval composers were motivated by the meaning of the words they set and sang, see Leo Treitler’s article on troubadour song, including his analysis of Can vei la lauzeta by Bernart de Ventadorn. This song contains another strong melodic gesture, a downward leap of a fifth, associated with a significant word expressing grief. Leo Treitler, “The Troubadours Singing Their Poems,” The Union of Words and Music in Medieval Poetry, ed. Rebecca A.Baltzer, Thomas Cable, and James I.Wimsatt (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 15–48. 40. Eric Gans, “The Beginning and End of Esthetic Form,” Perspectives of New Music 29, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 17. 41. It may also be significant that at the first syllable of the word ecclesiam the pitch noted is a b with no added flat, since all three previous occurrences of the pitch b were noted with flats. At this point in performing the sequence, one feels a definite awareness of the half step difference, and a certain sense of the appropriateness of the b-natural occurring on the first syllable of ecclesiam, the church that is being described as illuminated (lumine). 42. The wide range (A–c1) and the many ascents and descents in versicle 6 contrast strongly with the melodic contour of the first four versicles, within which the pitch slowly rises to the pitch a. The sudden expansion of range in double versicle 5a/5b (to the pitch d1) presents a challenge for the composer, who must find a way to return to the final of the mode (an octave below d1) in the space of the single versicle remaining in his poem. 43. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi, Theory and History of Literature, 16 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 30–31; originally published as Bruits: essai sur l’économie politique de la musique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1977). 44. Gerhoch of Reichersberg, Tractatus in Ps., 18:11, Opera inedita, ed. Damian Van den Eynde and Oduloph Van den Eynde, vol. 2, 2 Spicilegium Pontificii Athenaei Antoniani 10 (Rome: Apud Pontificium Athenaeum Antonianum, 1956), cited in Karl F.Morrison, “The Church as Play: Gerhoch of Reichersberg’s Call for Reform,” Popes, Teachers and Canon Law in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 127–29.

Appendix A: Sponsa virum lugeo: Text and Translation 1a. Sponsa virum lugeo planctum sub funereo, lugeo raptum mater filium, saucia remedium, stupida consilium.

1a. I, a bride, mourn my husband lamented under the funeral rite; I, a mother, mourn my son; I, injured, mourn the remedy, I, confounded, mourn the plan, (all) taken away.

1b. Res est casus unici, regis scelus Anglici; impius patrem mactat filius, nec dampnavit sevius Xpisti Dei Pontius.

1b. It is an event of unique misfortune, the wicked deed of the English king; the ungodly son slaughters the father; nor did Pontius (Pilate) more cruelly condemn Christ God.

2a. De profundis clamito, nec solido ductu se nox exierit, vox desierit dolorem.

2a. Out of the deep I cry aloud; yet not without the strong guidance upon which I depend, will night have left me and my voice have ceased from its grief.

2b. Fontem fundo lacrimis, iam intimus {fletibus}21 cor scaturit et parturit merorem.

2b. I pour out a fountain of tears deep within; now the innermost heart gushes forth (with weeping) and gives birth to lamentation.

3a. Regni furor lacrimis, mitius exasperat, nec post fedus osculi quicquam sevum imperat.

3a. The raging of the Sicilian kingdom23 grows less harshly provoking, nor does it command, after the alliance of the kiss, anything cruel.

3b. Canit Judas osculans patris vite sospiti, egre pacem simulans Diomedes hospiti.

3b. Judas, kissing, sings for the unharmed life of the father, reluctantly pretending peace to the guest, Diomedes.

4a. Prodiit iniquitas ex adipe, cum nefanda trinitas a principe fex exivit procerum [opus] 26 iurans scelerum,

4a. Iniquity sets forth from corpulence when from the abominable trinity, from the leader, the dregs of the nobles goes forth vowing the work of crime

ut Herodes gaudeat, lux et gemma pereat sacerdotum.

so that Herod may rejoice, so that the light and gem of priests may perish.

4b. Nam loci religio, non ordinis mora vel dilatio fit criminis;

4b. There is no delay on the part of the troop because of the religious practices of that place, nor any postponement of the crime;

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morti se pro patria vivens offert hostia; sanguis sacer funditur; caput ense petitur tam devotum.

for the benefit of the Fatherland, the living sacrifice offers himself to death;31 sacred blood is poured; the so-devoted head is assailed by the sword blade.

5a. Flere, pium, felix humani generis et vitium cuius vita posteris obprobrium, fusum bibe sanguinem in hominem; bacchare!

5a. You, fortunate one, weep for this holy man whose life is a reproach to the human race; and weep for the guilt of the human race; drink the blood poured out unto man; rave like the Bacchants!

5b. Vivit tamen spiritus: vivit martyr inclitus, (fol. 121) te fortior: sponsi Cantuaria, de gloria latere!

5b. Nevertheless the spirit lives; the celebrated martyr lives, braver than you: Canterbury, hide your face from the glory of your bridegroom!33

6. Sol extinctus Angliam suo priva[t]}35 lumine, sed Deus ecclesiam novo lustrat numine; cuius vita nomini Xpisti gloriosa in conspectu Domini mors pretiosa. Amen.

The sun, snuffed out, robs England of its own light, but God illuminates the church with the divine spirit whose life [was] glorious for the name of Christ and whose death [was] precious in the sight of the Lord Amen.

Appendix B: Melodic Transcription of Sponsa virum lugeo, (AS, fols. 120–121)

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15 Violence in the Spanish Chivalric Romance MICHAEL P.HARNEY The Spanish chivalric romance, among the most popular fictional genres in the first two centuries of the printing industry, is characterized by frequent scenes of violence.1 For the purposes of this chapter, violence is not used in its more attenuated or abstract meanings, as in the discourse of political science, which invokes such concepts as “force,” “power,” “domination,” “authority,” “terror” in addition to “violence,” in the definition and analysis of political and economic structures and relationships. The concept of violence in this abstract sense, as in the consideration of the state as defined by its monopoly of the means of violence, has been thoroughly discussed by, among many others, Anthony Giddens (summarizing and referring to Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and others).2 Nor does this chapter focus on the psychological or criminological aspects of violence and its representation in literary genres and entertainment, although this too is a very rich and variegated topic.3 David E.Morrison and his co-authors, studying the responses of a sizable group of informants, distinguish, in a recent study of media violence and audience responses to it, types of media violence according to intensity (playful or unrealistic; realistic or graphic; authentic, i.e., involving violence recognizably close to the viewer’s reality, such as domestic violence), or along the contrastive lines of fictional versus actual (e.g., as in news footage or documentaries), or in terms of artistic or journalistic technique and social and artistic context.4 Theoretical analyses and literary representations of violence can range from the very abstract and detached to the very specific and meticulous. For instance, in a somewhat abstract discussion of the significance of violent imagery and incident in ancient Roman literature, Robin Bond refers to numerous examples of violence (e.g., induced suicide, torture, etc.), but does not go into the same detail as his literary sources (see esp. 110– 13). We may take his mode of representation as the “dry,” that is, minimalist end of a depictive spectrum whose “wet,” or maximalist extreme would be the minutely detailed descriptions in, say, a medical text, a forensic report, a late-twentieth-century horror film, or an early-modern chivalric novel.5 While such theoretical approaches are not entirely irrelevant to the present discussion, they cannot be resolved or even discussed here in any detail. What this chapter ponders is what we might call the explicit stylistics of violent depiction—the actual precision and detail of representations of violent encounters, events, or processes. In other words, what is called graphic violence existed in the Middle Ages as it does today. Hypothetical or abstract deliberations such as those just referred to, and vaguer, more euphemistic or elliptical representations in literature, drama, cinema, TV, or video games, would be called “long-shot.” What we focus on, with respect to the medieval Spanish chivalric romance, is very much “close-up.” We contemplate variations in the style of representing

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violence among certain authors, genres, and historical periods, with a particular focus on this historically significant type of romance. Saturated in blood and guts, the late-medieval Spanish novel of chivalry is a genre in which violence is not represented as institutional. Combat most frequently occurs between individual men, or between single men and beasts or monsters, although from time to time we do find scenes of unilateral violence, including torture. But institutions, including the state, are seldom the perpetrators. Warfare is portrayed in terms of a series of individual confrontations. Virtually every scene of knight-to-knight combat and warfare between clans in Amadís (1508)—to cite the most prominent and influential text—is characterized by graphic descriptions of wounds inflicted, of organs and parts affected.6 “La espada alcanzó en el hombro, de guisa que con la punta le cortó la carne y los huesos” (the sword pierced through the shoulder, so that its blade cut through flesh and bones; I, 4); “encontróle tan fuertemente que dio con él en tierra y le quebró un brazo” (he collided with him so fiercely that he hurled him to the ground, breaking his arm; I, 8); “El rey Perión…dio a Daganel con su espada tal herida que lo hendió hasta los dientes” (King Perion…gave Daganel such a blow with his sword that he clove right through his very teeth; I, 8); “lo derribó en tierra y el caballo sobre él” (he threw him to the ground, with the horse on top of him; I, 11); “la lanza entró por el un costado, y salió por el otro el hierro con un pedazo de la asta” (“the lance pierced through on one side, and came out the other, so that the blade and part of the shaft were visible; I, 11); “alcanzó con la punta en la cabeza al caballero y hendiólo hasta las quijadas, así que cayó muerto” (the point of the blade smote the knight on the head and clove through to the jaws, so that he fell down dead; I, 12). Amadís, although normally mild-tempered, is capable of terrible violence when aroused to wrath, as we see in his treatment of a dastardly opponent: “herióle en el yelmo so la visera, y cortóle dél tanto que la spada llegó al rostro; assí que las narizes con la meytad de la faz le cortó…mas él, no contento, tajóle la cabeza” (he smote him on the helmet, underneath the visor, and sheared away so much of it that the sword reached through to the face, in such a way that the nose and half the face were sliced off …but he, still not satisfied, cut off his head; I, 225). Although most violent scenes in Amadís involve man-to-man confrontation, some prefigure the grotesque and gruesome scenes of modern horror and science fiction, as in the episode of the Endriago, a hideous mutant born of the incestuous union of an evil giant and his wicked daughter. When a wet nurse dares to suckle the monstrous infant, she pays for her temerity: “diole la teta y él la tomó, y mamó tan fuertemente que la hizo dar grandes gritos; y quando se lo quitaron, cayó ella muerta de la mucha ponçoña que la penetrara” (she gave him the breast and he seized her and sucked so hard that he made her shriek; and when they pulled him away from her, she fell down dead from the great quantity of poison that had infected her; III, 796).7 When, after a year’s unnaturally rapid growth, the Endriago catches sight of his mother, he instantly pounces on her: “echóle las vñas mamo al rostro y fendióle las narizes y quebróle los ojos” (he buried his claws in her face, split her nose wide open, and gouged out her eyes). Her father/husband fares no better: seeing his daughter/mate killed by their offspring, he draws his sword with such haste that he cuts off his own leg, dying shortly thereafter (III, 797). The hero’s encounter with the monster (III, 801–2) is reminiscent of Odysseus’s combat with the Cyclops in the graphic detail of its violence. Amadis lances the monster right in the eye; the beast grabs the lance, smashing it to pieces, with the blade of the

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lance and part of the shaft “metido por la lengua y por las agallas” (stuck in the tongue and protruding from the creature’s gills). After further dire combat, the hero finishes off the tenacious monster, first stabbing it through a nostril until the sword penetrates into the creature’s brain (“llegó a los sesos”), then stabbing it repeatedly through the roof of its mouth until it finally dies. The hero barely survives the encounter, for the monster does terrible damage before its demise: “rompióle todas las armas de las spaldas, y la carne y los huesos fasta las entrañas” (it shattered all the armor on his back and tore through flesh and bone right into his bowels).8 Esplandián, Amadís’s son and the hero of the first of many sequels to Amadís de Gaula, shows a similar disposition to engage in harsh violence when angry. In a typical encounter, he raises an axe to strike at an opponent’s head. When the opponent tries but fails to evade his blows, Esplandián hurls the opponent to the ground and immediately kneels to cut off his head (fue luego sobre él de rodillas por le cortar la cabeza; I, 39). In another, similar encounter, Esplandián again aims for the adversary’s head: “le pudo prestar ninguna cosa que la espada no cortase fasta el caxco de la cabeza” (nothing availed him to prevent the sword from cutting right through to the skull; I, 42). Later, Esplandián slices and stabs with such righteous potency that his opponent’s blood makes the paving stones run red (las piedras blancas eran coloradas de su sangre; I, 46). Shortly after, his foe expires, his head dreadfully wounded, his leg almost severed (I, 47). Yet another adversary will suffer a similar fate, bleeding profusely from twenty or more wounds as the hero hacks away (I, 65). Not all deaths are caused by swordplay and conventional weaponry. The vicious Amazons of Esplandián’s later chapters feed captured men and male children to carnivorous flying griffons. Those that are not devoured immediately are carried away into the air, or dropped from a height to be dashed to pieces (II, 741). So savage are these monsters that they cannot tell friend from foe, attacking and devouring equally the Christian defenders of Constantinople and their Turkish attackers (II, 745–46). Palmerín de Olivia (ca. 1511), the first of a series of chivalric novels imitating Amadís and its sequels, contains numerous comparably violent moments. In a duel, Florendos, the father of the hero, strikes so fiercely at his opponent’s helmet that “gelo fendió e fízole una gran llaga en la cabeça, tal que luego cayó tendido en el suelo” (he split it wide open, hacking a great wound in his head, so that the fellow collapsed to the ground; 27). In another episode, a dragon tears men to pieces, while those who escape it are devoured by other savage beasts (53). Later, the same monster, attacked by Palmerin himself, seizes the hero in its claws, smashes his cuirass, and slashes open deep wounds. Palmerin deals so mighty a stroke that “aunque ella tenía el cuero muy duro fue tal el golpe que los sesos le fizo saltar” (although it had a very tough hide the blow was such that it made the creature’s brains spew out; 61). Later, Palmerín, with a sole companion, slaughters a town’s attackers to the last man (72). Still later, he skewers an opponent on his lance, “que el fierro de la lança le sacó por las espaldas” (so that the blade of the lance came right out through the fellow’s back; 81), then hacks off the arm of the opponent’s companion (82). In a particularly vivid scene, Palmerin does battle with a fierce giant. The description forebodes the back-and-forth style of modern-day sports announcers as it describes first how the hero lances the giant in the chest, so that the blade becomes stuck deep in the adversary’s body; how the enraged giant pulls the weapon out and hurls it at the hero; then how the latter catches the lance and, making his horse throw all its weight

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against the giant, drives the weapon deep back into the foe’s body; how, as the giant sheds a torrent of blood from his wounds, Palmerín hacks off his arm so that it falls, sword still in hand, to the ground; how, finally, the giant is beheaded by one of Palmerín’s allies, while the hero kills and wounds numerous of the giant’s friends (87). Shortly thereafter, fighting against yet another giant, Palmerín stabs his opponent’s horse in the belly, throwing the animal into a kicking frenzy. The befuddled giant, thrown by the dying horse, then has his skull split wide open by a blow from the hero’s sword (89)9 In its depiction of combat between a Moorish potentate and the Hermit King, the Catalonian romance Tirant lo blanc (ca. 1490) describes how the latter “li tirà un gran colp que li tallà lo braç, e mes-li Pespasa tota dins lo costat” (he struck a mighty blow that hacked off the other’s arm, and thrust the sword all the way into the opponent’s side; 147–48). In another scene, the Hermit King obliges a recently knighted youth to slay a captured Moorish warrior: E lo fadrí ab gran ànimo li donà tants colps ab l’espasa fins que l’hagué mort. Com lo Rei véu mort lo moro, pres al petit infant per los cabells e llançà’l damunt lo moro, e fregà’l fort, que los ulls e la cara tot estava ple de sang, e les mans li feu posar dins les nafres, e així lo enconà en la sang d’aquell moro. (158) (And spiritedly the youth struck him many blows with the sword, until he had killed him. When the King saw the Moor was dead, he seized the boy by the hair and threw him on top of the Moor, rubbing the lad’s face vigorously against the body until his eyes and face were covered with blood, and he made the lad put his hands into the wounds, thus immersing him in the blood of the Moor.) In yet another of many similarly graphic scenes, the hero stabs an opponent in the eye with his dagger (Tirà la daga e mès-li la punta en l’ull), then smites him a mighty stroke on the head with the dagger, “que la hi féu passar a Paltra part” (so that he made the weapon pierce clean through the skull; 215). In a later episode, Tirant’s ally, the marquis of St. George, the hero having refused to execute a prisoner, grabs the captive by the hair and cuts his throat (536).10 The mere catalog of such descriptions, culled only from the Amadis, its immediate sequels, and its closest imitators and congeners, would constitute a separate text of very respectable dimensions. Suffice it to say that Spanish chivalric romance is a pervasively violent genre. The depiction of violence in this genre is precisely realistic on the one hand, bizarrely surreal on the other. Don Quijote, whom we may cite as a prominent if delusional critic of the chivalric romances, is aware from the very first of the mayhem that pervades his favorite kind of fiction. “No estaba muy bien,” we are told (I, 1), “con las heridas que don Belianis daba y recebia, porque se imaginaba que, por grandes maestros que le hubiesen curado, no dejaría de tener el rostro y todo el cuerpo lleno de cicatrices y señales” (He was concerned…about the wounds that Don Belianis gave and received, because he imagined that, however great the physicians might have been who cured him, he could not fail to have his face and whole body covered with scars and marks).11

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While the violence depicted in the romances is not necessarily unrealistic—in fact, generally has the ring of medical and anatomical authenticity—it is in the accumulation of wounds received by the heroes and their comrades that unreality insinuates itself. Although Amadis and his followers inflict most of the mayhem and butchery, they themselves survive a substantial amount of damage, from which they recover with generally remarkable alacrity. Even a preternaturally gruesome encounter such as that undergone by Amadís with the dreaded Endriago, in Book III—which leaves the hero gravely wounded, so that he must rely on the miraculous curative powers of the renowned physician Elisabat—nonetheless leads not to the more plausible death or permanent disability, but rather to a surprisingly short convalescence and startlingly brisk return to action. Don Quijote’s puzzlement at the implausibility of the fictional knight’s injuries, perceived with droll detachment by Cervantes’s reader, highlights a feature ripe for parody and burlesque. One of the few ways in which the Quijote is unrealistic (in terms of the verisimilitude of conditions and single events, as opposed to the comic entanglements of the book’s plot) is in its depiction of violence. The protagonist and his squire undergo horse-throwings and blanket-tossings, broken bones and teeth, contusions and near-mutilations, pummelings, punches, and kicks, all of which invite comparison to the preposterous ferocity of Punch and Judy shows, the surreal barbarity of “Tom & Jerry” cartoons—or chivalric romances. The notable blackness, even sadism, of the humor conveyed in this riotous cavalcade is pointed out by Vladimir Nabokov in his commentary—itself hilarious—on “cruelty and mystification” in the Quijote.12 Nabokov remarks on the brutality of a work described by some critics as a “fun” book. Nabokov describes the Quixote’s narrator as putting a “ridiculously vulnerable hero” into “ingenious and cruel hands.”13 In its tale of cruelty toward “madmen and animals, subordinates and non-conformers,” contends the Russian author, Cervantes’s story is no worse than much other Spanish and European literature. This “veritable encyclopedia of cruelty” flagrantly confutes later, “mellow-minded commentators,” talking through “academic caps or birettas” of the “‘humorous and humane’” atmosphere of the book, “gushing experts” who must have been “reading some other book” or “looking through some rosy gauze at the harsh world of Cervantes’s novel.”14 Among very numerous instances Nabokov mentions the sardonic mockery of the innkeeper in I, 3; the flogging of Andrés by his master, followed by the muleteer’s trouncing of Don Quijote (I, 4); the beardpulling and kicking of Sancho by the monks’ servants (I, 8). “What a riot, what a panic!” exclaims Nabokov, going on to mention the “excruciating pain” of Sancho in I, 15; his master’s loss of half an ear, “wallops with packstaves,” punches taken in the jaw, “sundry blows in the dark “a “bang on the pate with an iron lantern,” the loss of most of his teeth “when stoned by shepherds.” Cervantes, “positively rollicking” in his pandering to the sadistic bent of his readership, then subjects Sancho (I, 17) to the famous blankettossing (“as men do with dogs at Shrovetide”), both master and man to the outgush of each other’s vomit (I, 18), the galley slaves to the tortures undergone before they meet their deliverer, and Quijote and Sancho to their stoning by the ungrateful Ginés de Pasamonte and his fellow escapees (I, 22). Don Quijote is suspended (I, 43) for two hours, hands tied, “despairing, bewildered, and bellowing like a bull,” observes Nabokov. The mad protagonist is afterward (I, 52) “tied up and put into a cage on an ox cart” (55), then beaten by a goatherd, while the onlookers—including the canon, the curate, the

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barber, the troopers of the Hermandad—cheer the combatants on “as men do at a dogfight.”15 This overabundance of sadistic incident is complemented by Part II’s lengthy exposure of the protagonist and his sidekick to the “torture house” (70) of the duke and duchess (I, 30–57). Nabokov concludes his consideration of the pranks of the ducal sequence— characterized, in its protracted maintenance of deception and sham, as much by psychological as physical cruelty—with a remark on the staginess of Cervantes’s storytelling: “One is under the impression that the author thinks that the more pageantry there is on the stage, the more supers, costumes, lights, kings, queens, et cetera, the greater the adventure will seem to the reader (as to today’s moviegoer).”16 While Cervantes’s treatment and perception of violence confirm, perhaps, the receptivity of Spanish audiences to explicit depictions of violence, Spanish chivalric romance, of course, is not alone in its excesses. We could compare the explicit brutality of Amadís and its congeners to any number of literary analogues: Senecan tragedy, Shakespearean theater, Grand Guignol, contemporary video games, etc. Jody Enders speaks of the kind of graphic violence discussed in the present chapter in terms of “special effects” whose intention and effect are eclectic and perhaps, at times, equivocal. Examining the history of popular theatrical genres in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (the heyday, we recall, of the Spanish chivalric romances), Enders notes the “extensive repertoire of fake blood, soft clubs, dummies, dolls, and mannequins” available to the production staff of theaters. The preoccupation of theatrical stage managers and artisans was with the detailed and realistic portrayal of “violence, torture, and death.” The “laundry list” of special effects included all manner of props and devices (e.g., fake weapons, dyes, and paints) for believably rendering the free flow of blood from wounds, the enactment of “multiple stonings, beatings, stabbings, and scourgings.” 17 Numerous analogies to violent depictions in chivalric romance, in terms similar to those advanced by Enders, may be drawn from folklore and the history of literary and entertainment genres. We may take the detailed descriptions in literary texts as the verbal analogue of the visual special effects sustained by the material apparatus of theater and film production. A comprehensive discussion of such verbal special effects awaits a longer study. For the moment, we may note that two moments in the history of literature and entertainment seem particularly comparable to the Spanish chivalric romances. The adventures of Amadís and other knights-errant are recounted in ways comparable, with respect to graphic and formulaicly repetitive violence, to Homeric epic, which gives very numerous passages, such as the following: “The pitiless stone crushed utterly the two sinews and the bones” (Iliad IV); “Diomedes smote him on the midst of the neck, rushing on him with the sword, and cut through both the sinews, and the head of him still speaking was mingled with the dust” (Iliad X); “the spear in his entrails very piercingly quivering unstrung his limbs” (Iliad XVII); “we seized the fiery-pointed brand and whirled it round in his eye, and the blood flowed about the heated bar. And the breath of the flame singed his eyelids and brows…as the ball of the eye burnt away, and the roots thereof crackled in the flame” (Odyssey IX); “Odysseus aimed and smote him with the arrow in the throat, and the point passed clean out through his delicate neck, and he fell sidelong and the cup dropped from his hand as he was smitten, and at once through his nostrils there came up a thick jet of slain man’s blood, and quickly he spurned the table from him with his foot” (Odyssey XXII); “cast him into the chamber, and close the doors

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after you, and make fast to his body a twisted rope, and drag him up the lofty pillar till he be near the roof beams, that he may hang there and live for long, and suffer grievous torment” (Odyssey XXII).18 We might assume that the Spanish chivalric romances are violent because they imitate Homeric and Virgilian epic, or the indigenous Poema de Mio Cid. In other words, the chivalric romance might be graphically specific in its violence from adherence to a literary convention. This hypothesis does not bear close scrutiny. Virgil, to be sure, exerts an undeniably great influence on all literate authors of the Middle Ages and early modern period. The thesis of stylistic influence might work for Virgil himself; he clearly imitates Homeric models in his violent scenes (e.g., Book II of the Aeneid, the devouring of Laocoon and his sons, the slaughter of Priam in the same book) that are both highly explicit and very reminiscent of Homer at his goriest. However, if there is mere literary influence at work in the chivalric romance’s graphic violence, it does not derive from the Cidian epic (late twelfth century). The latter work’s violence is decidedly long-shot and summary, as in such moments as the siege of Valencia by the Cid and his men, where the suffering of the inhabitants is poetically summarized in an image of starvation: “Mala cueta es, señores, aver mingua de pan,/fijos e mugieres verlo[s] murir de fanbre” (It is grave suffering, my lords, to be deprived of bread, to see one’s children and spouse die of hunger; ll. 1178–79). The description of the Cid’s forces routing Moorish enemies is conveyed in a few lines of terse reportage: “sácanlos de las huertas mucho a fea guisa,/quinientos mataron d’ellos conplidos en és día” (they drive them from the pasturelands, with reckless ferocity/they kill a full five-hundred of them on that day; ll. 1677–78). The scene most akin to chivalric encounters, the duels between the Cid’s champions and his dastardly enemies, the Infantes de Carrión, is similarly understated. There is some graphic description, for example, “metiól la lança por los pechos” (he drove the lance into his chest; l. 3633), but far less than in countless dueling scenes in the romances. In short, the Poema de Mio Cid, the only Spanish epic text to come down to us in more or less complete form, is more elliptical and suggestive than the romances in its representation of violence, and contains far fewer violent scenes relative to its length. In terms of graphic description, Amadís is much more violent than the Poema de Mio Cid, although both works are about war and affairs of honor. In the latter work, we see frequent confrontations and battles, but the work does not present the profusely gruesome detail of the later romance. Nor can it be said that graphic violence is invariably characteristic of the Spanish chivalric romance. The earliest extant work of the genre, the Libro del caballero Zifar (early fourteenth century), has very many scenes of confrontation and battle, but is much more succinct in its violent moments than Amadís and the other romances cited here. In a representative scene, the unarmed protagonist is attacked by an arrogant opponent: E finco las espuelas al cauallo e dexose venir para el, e el Cauallero Zifar para el otro. E tal fue la ventura del cauallero armado que erro de la lanca al Cauallero Zifar, e el fue ferido muy mal, de guisa que cayo en tierra muerto. (And he spurred his horse and charged against him, and the Knight Zifar charged at the other. And such was the luck of the armored knight that his

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lance missed the Knight Zifar, and the armored knight himself was struck so hard that he fell dead to the ground.)19 Is violence something that develops in the genre over time? This possibility is refuted by the fact that the Zifar and Amadís, which differ greatly in their treatment of violent themes, both figure as widely read works in the middle of the fourteenth century. Although the version of Amadís that we know is a reworking that dates from the very end of the fifteenth century, it is probably very similar to the original text of the previous century.20 Amadís, in other words, was always graphically violent. In chapter 6 of the Quijote, the famous scrutiny of the protagonist’s library prominently discusses Amadís, its sequels, and its many imitations. Of the Zifar, by contrast, there is no mention. Of the two chivalric romances popular in the fourteenth century, the more violent one, Amadís, prevails in the emerging popularity contest of the early printing industry, which, as the industry has ever since, seeks the best seller, the blockbuster, as a mainstay of its business.21 Could the chivalric romance’s graphic violence perhaps result from a certain distance from warlike reality? Could we say that the viewpoint of its readership, apparently so receptive to explicit ferocity, is, as it were, that of the spectators rather than that of the gladiators? According to this notion, the effect, if not the aim, of graphic representations of violence is titillation. Audiences that knew the savage actuality of war and tournaments had no need of such graphic stimulation; might even have found them a repugnant reminder of unpleasant or disturbing or tragic circumstances. By contrast, those temporally, spatially, and socially far away from violent reality might well have been morbidly captivated. If we follow through with this idea, we might point out that the earliest Spanish chivalric romance, the Zifar, was almost certainly composed well before Amadís, in the early fourteenth century, although the two works shared a wide circulation later in that century. The Zifar was composed, like the Poema de Mio Cid, during the Reconquest, albeit in a later phase, and was read by audiences intimately familiar with the tension and danger of warfare. Might we therefore say that the violence of those earlier works was elliptical, euphemistic, while the works and audiences more remote from Reconquest strife tolerated, even demanded, a more graphic approach? Pursuing this line of analysis, one might be tempted to establish a parallel comparison of Saving Private Ryan (1998) with the war films closer in time to the conflict it portrays, especially with The Longest Day (1962), dealing with the same historical event, the DDay invasion, but made only eighteen years after. Those earlier war films were far less graphic—one might even say, were more euphemistic—in their depiction of the necessary violence of war, than the very graphic Spielberg film. Saving Private Ryan, especially in its opening sequence devoted to the invasion, does not stint in its rendering of the blood and guts of the event. It is the director who never saw war, making a movie for audiences with only a minority of real combat veterans, who makes the much more graphic film.22 This idea, although not without a certain plausibility, is difficult to demonstrate with regard to chivalric romance. The principal author of Tirant, Joanot Martorell, was a soldier, duelist, and jouster who was very familiar with the bloody violence of real-world warfare and chivalry. His book is as graphic as Amadís in its descriptions. Montalvo, the author or reworker of the version of Amadís known to us, was a magistrate and sometime

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soldier. The different lives of the two authors, it could be argued, perhaps situated them at greater or lesser distance from the reality of battle and tourney. Yet both produced works similarly graphic in their penchant for violent detail.23 We cannot, therefore, explain the explicit violence of Amadís and its congeners on the mere basis of their bellicose themes, or according to notions of literary influence or imitation, or as a mere reflection of their authors’ biographies. We must look to the chivalric romance’s specific generic nature to determine the reason for its distinctive characteristics. The chivalric romance is what is currently termed an escapist genre, more specifically, an action genre. Its twentieth-century affines, in terms of explicit, recurrent violence— comprehended as nonrealistic because of the intensity of their violence and the mildness or transience of its effect on heroes—are the western, the hard-boiled detective yarn, the martial arts film, the spy movie, the police-procedural thriller, the superheroic comic book, cartoon, TV series, and film. In these genres and forms, the hero often survives nasty or even gruesome violence. The equally formulaic and explicit action, horror, and science fiction genres of our day present scenes of graphic and formulaic violence very similar to those of the chivalric romances. A deranged and vengeful killer stalks and kills numerous people in grisly fashion (Halloween, 1978); an alien larva bursts from a man’s chest (Alien, 1979); a hockey-masked demon graphically strangles, skins, skewers, and disembowels numerous youthful campers (Friday the 13th, 1980). Generally speaking, the horror film, which once conveyed extreme violence by means of quick-cutting, discreet camera angles, and other bits of technical legerdemain (e.g., the famous shower scene in Psycho, 1960), now shows things in shots of longer duration, and with the camera pointed steadily. Examples are Night of the Living Dead (1968), with its image of a zombified child consuming her mother’s flesh; The Evil Dead (1981), with its scenes of dismemberments, bludgeonings, and eviscerations; A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), with its burning alive of the villain, its slicing of limbs and piercing of chests and bellies. A popular trilogy of novels and of films based on them depicts the exploits of a gleeful cannibal whose depredations are depicted in loving and grisly detail (as in the scene in Hannibal, 2001, in which the title character slices off the top of an anesthetized man’s skull and serves him his own brains as a culinary delicacy). Action heroes routinely slit throats, gouge eyes, and pulverize limbs, crush and spike and slash torsos (e.g., Excalibur, 1981, and its mock-Arthurian predecessor, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 1975). They throw adversaries from heights, hurl them into crushing devices or helicopter blades (the Bruce Willis film The Last Boy Scout, 1991), burn them alive (the Mel Gibson film Lethal Weapon, 1987), drown, knife, or throttle them (the Steven Seagal movie Under Siege, 1992). Action heroes themselves, like Don Quijote’s perplexing Belianís, like Amadís and his many friends and congeners in other romance series, undergo all manner of mayhem and torture: broken limbs, beatings, electric shock, neardrowning, and countless contusions, cuts, and wounds.24 The chivalric romance, as we can see from its similarity to such present-day entertainments, is an escapist genre. Such genres presumably provide evasion from burdensome social reality. What was the nature of the reality from which readers of the chivalric romance would have wanted to escape? While it is true that the Peninsula became much less warlike with the closure of the Reconquest era and the imposition of a regime of law and order under a centralized

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monarchy, this does not signify that the new, post-Reconquest Peninsular society was not a violent one. It was, after all, a culture of inquisition, censorship, torture, executions, tournaments, banditry, urban crime, economic depression, fiscal deficits, and widespread poverty, with all that these imply in the way of social crisis and conflict.25 The Spanish chivalric romances circulated during a time of stagnant or depressed economy, in contrast to the plunder and economic redistribution of the Reconquest period. The latter era, as Michael Nerlich has demonstrated, fostered the ambitions of knights, burghers, and peasants by offering the possibility, if not the guarantee, of upward mobility. This period of economic expansion and social advancement lasted far longer in the Peninsula than in other European regions. Furthermore, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the development, in Spain as in the rest of Europe, of nation-states whose police and judiciary apparatus, along with developing international trade and capitalist expansion, combined to marginalize the hidalgo class, while bringing the era of the “pillaging adventure, once commonly practiced as a means of livelihood,” to a defmitive end. This deterioration in the status of the Peninsular hidalguía (chivalric nobility) transpired exactly at the time when the chivalric romance achieved its greatest popularity.26 Among the symptoms of this socioeconomic rigidification was a general tendency of propertied families to rely on so-called strategies of heirship in controlling wealth and maintaining or competing for status. This explains why sexual and matrimonial themes in the chivalric romances imply a legal and social empowerment of women, a marginalization of males. The genre’s typical confrontation, between fathers and daughters, between suitors and possible fathers-in-law, and between suitors and their beloved, reflects the fact that the principle of marital consent was, in real-world society as in romance plots, no mere legalism. Elopement and clandestine marriage, endemic themes in the romances and chronic concerns of case law and in the decretals, reveal the repercussions of the ecclesiastical model of marriage.27 Women’s contention with their male kin was further expedited by what R. Howard Bloch refers to as “the power of women to dispose.” The growing influence of the Church in matters of family and marriage supported a legal, economic, and social empowerment of women, particularly with regard to inheritance, dowry, and marital consent. While patriarchal and feudal dominion over property was at first infringed upon by this ideological development, most families of property and status came to rely on women in the transmission and retention of property. Female control of estates is confirmed by the frequent use of matronymics, and by abundant documentary evidence of transfers of property to women.28 The romances provide escape for readers of both sexes, in that they represent a world in which young women can outmaneuver their fathers in the selection of a mate, and in which fathers might even be made to see reason. The appeal for male readers lies in the genre’s telling stories of heroic youths who win the hand of fair princesses by virtue of martial valor and heroic achievement—stories, in short, of men who are not beholden to women for social advancement. Do harsh economic conditions and social solidification explain the graphic violence of a literary genre? While it is true that current-day action and horror genres are more explicitly violent than their generic predecessors of earlier decades in the modern entertainment industry, this does not necessarily result from sociological evolution. As

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with the chivalric romance’s divergence of the restrained and euphemistic Zifar and the unbridled and ferocious Amadís, the contrast cannot be readily explained in terms of mere chronology. A recent illustration of this problem is the remake of the film The Thing(1951). This film, while based on the same tale of thwarted alien invasion as its 1982 remake, is much more understated in its depiction of violence. The remade version of John Carpenter is one of the goriest films of all time. Yet one could not readily say that the early film, made shortly after World War II and during the Korean Conflict, was of a kinder, gentler era. Going back in time to the Homeric parallel, to cite another case, we cannot readily demonstrate that the societies of Homeric audiences were necessarily more or less violent than earlier phases of their development.29 The Reconquest and earlymodern periods of Spanish social history had their violent and peaceful aspects whose complexities make it difficult to compare the two eras as more or less violent overall. The twentieth century saw more violence, mayhem, and torture, and general human suffering, in terms of frequency, intensity, and numbers of persons affected, than all previous centuries. It would consequently be difficult to prove that the later twentieth century and the early twenty-first are more or less violent than periods of war, revolution, and repression in the period between, say, the late 1890s (the time of the Boer and Spanish-American wars), and the first decade of the present century. The difficulty of characterizing periods as more or less violent makes correlation of social and economic evolution with escalations in literary explicitness problematic. Again, the latter phenomenon is verifiable: one has only to tabulate phrases and scenes. It is the relationship between society and style that is more readily intuited than explained. There are three principal considerations to bear in mind in analyzing the problems delineated so far. If, to mention the first such consideration, we assume a passiveaggressivity of readers within a stagnant economy and closed stratification system, it might be reasonable to expect at least a heightened appreciation of, if not an outright demand for, graphic violence. This assumes that such expression provides a cathartic acting-out of rage and frustration felt by readers (or viewers) with respect to their social reality. We will return to this issue presently. The other two considerations have to do with graphic violence as a social issue on the one hand, and that of historical determinism of literary forms on the other. We cannot address the problem of the effect of literary violence on the behavior of readers. There was a centuries-long critique of the chivalric romances and their supposedly nefarious influence on the behavior and morals of their readers, particularly their youthful readers.30 This anti-chivalric tradition could be compared, in broad terms, with other determinist critiques of popular genres, as in the Platonic assessment of epic poetry’s negative literary and social influence (prominently expounded in Book X of The Republic), or in the modern political and public policy debate concerning the sociological impact of violence in entertainment genres. Plato’s criticism of poetry focuses on poetry’s inauthenticity of representation; the present-day behaviorist approach to media violence assumes that violence-saturated media discernibly incite to social violence.31 This chapter cannot hope to resolve the controversy surrounding such questions. At the same time, our critical scrutiny of chivalric romance, or of any other genre, must avoid a facile psychological or sociological determinism that is in many ways the mirroropposite error of overeager Platonism. Such an approach attributes features such as graphic violence to aspects of society defined as causal influences on textual content. To

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ascribe the characteristic violence of chivalric romance to the presumed social rage of its readers is to assume that the literary work merely reflects or incorporates aspects of society.32 Can we then say that the chivalric romance is graphically violent because it is a popular genre, specifically an action genre, and that such genres tend, in the modern era of capitalized entertainment and mass markets, to be explicit in their violence? Perhaps this is all we can say, in the way of explanation. At the same time, we might hazard that Amadís and its congeners of the early decades of printing have perhaps leveraged, by the example of their popularity, the very notion of how modern action genres should handle the problem of violent representation. Chivalric romance is violent because that is the nature of the genre. We might also add that it is a violent genre because of the type of hero that defines it. Amadís and his ilk are not just knights; they are knights-errant. This makes them differ from their apparent feudal and Arthurian forebears. In their trappings, Amadís and his brethren are medieval knights. But in their motives and comportment, they are the first modern superheroes. Umberto Eco contrasts the traditional mythic hero, with “immutable characteristics and an irreversible destiny,” whose history “has taken place and can no longer be denied,” and the pop-cultural hero epitomized by Superman. The latter type, the superhero, is “typical” rather than mythical. Embodying “the totality of certain collective aspirations,” he performs in a narrative sequence in which adventurous incidents “proliferate as much as possible ad infinitum”33 Inevitably, the superhero’s exploits take place as recurrences within the framework of a “set scheme” in which “each event takes up again from a sort of virtual beginning, ignoring where the preceding event left off.” This “device of iteration” is attractive, asserts Eco, as a result of to its very predictability. The constant reappearance of stock figures and episodes is “an essential condition of…reading pleasure.”34 The superhero’s tale is “a refutation of the development of events,” a “withdrawal from the tension of past-present-future to the focus on an instant, which is loved because it is recurrent.” Superheroic narrative and the myth it originates express the predominant popular taste for “a narrative of redundance.” This appetite for familiarity is differentiated from high narrative art’s preference for “schemes in evolution, grammars which mutually eliminate each other, and codes of continuous alternations.”35 The superhero is to be understood by contrasting him to the foundling-savior hero (e.g., Theseus, Oedipus) and the founder-hero (e.g., Moses, Robin Hood). Unlike those types, the superhero is a solitary performer, the savior despoiled of his country, the founder bereft of his charisma. The superhero’s smoldering fury, and therefore, perhaps, the excessively graphic precision that frames his exploits, comes from his political futility. This last attribute, in turn, may be the fantasy analogue of the economic marginalization of readers most likely to identify with him. The first modern superhero, a figure very reminiscent of Amadís, is Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan. Not surprisingly, this hero’s adventures are punctuated by innumerable instances of graphic violence. A typical example is Burroughs’s description of a great ape’s murder of a hapless female of its own species. The male, we are told, struck the victim “viciously upon her head and shoulders with a broken tree limb until her skull was crushed to a jelly.”36 Tarzan himself is capable of similar ferocity, as we see in his avenging murder—by strangulation—of the African who has slain his ape foster

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mother. In later episodes, he strangles another African, throwing the dead body into the village in order to terrorize the inhabitants; in a climactic confrontation with the same tribe, he dispatches yet another victim by strangulation, yet again throwing the body into the village. In an almost casual encounter with a vengeful native, Tarzan effortlessly cripples his opponent: “steel muscles gripped the black wrist of the uplifted knife-hand, and a single swift wrench left the hand dangling below a broken bone.”37 In The Return of Tarzan the hero terrorizes a band of slave traders, picking them off one by one with his “pitiless arrows,” or seizing their sentries, strangling them, and hurling the bodies among the terrified survivors.38 In a later novel, Tarzan reeks vengeance on the Germans he thinks have killed his beloved wife Jane, embarking on an orgy of mayhem and torture, at one point releasing a starving lion into a crowd of hapless soldiers, who are torn apart by the beast. Tarzan at times shows himself a trickster whose cruelty borders on sadism, as we see in that scene in which he strangles then beheads an African mercenary, then leaves the severed head to be found by the dead man’s comrades: “impaled upon the end of a broken branch the head of their companion was propped behind the tree so that it appeared to be looking out at them from the opposite side of the bole.” In another sadistic episode, he strands one of his enemies, the one he blames for Jane’s death, in a tree to be starved or to fall into the jaws of the same lion.39 A great many more such examples could be cited, from the books of Burroughs himself or from the volumes of his numerous imitators. Suffice it to say that Tarzan, the first and most paradigmatic of the modern superheroes, of whom Superman and Batman are prominent later examples, is a figure very analogous to Amadís. Both are foundling princes or nobles raised in obscurity, fated to engage in endless episodic adventures in righteous furtherance of a narrowly conceived, highly apolitical notion of primordial justice.40 It is not that the brutality of Burroughs’s turn-of-the-century world compelled him to write with any particular regard for lurid violence. He wrote for money, and therefore incorporated elements he thought would be crowdpleasing.41 His notion of the crowdpleasing, while not untinged by personal stylistic preferences, necessarily represents a deliberate confection, a synthesis based on what we might call a rough Aristotelianism, according to which one placates angst while appealing to prurience. The same might be said, of course, of Homer himself. If we assume analogous motives in the storytelling that produced the chivalric romances, we may begin to understand why they seem so modern and yet so Homeric in their depiction of violence. Notes 1. On the popularity of the Spanish chivalric romances in the late early sixteenth century, see Keith Whinnom, “The Problem of the ‘Best-Seller’ in Spanish Golden Age Literature,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 67 (1980): 189–98; here 189 and 194–95. 2. Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 18–20. 3. For a very usefül survey of contemporary American public policy controversies and debates on the question of media influence, see Cynthia A.Cooper, Violence on Television. Congressional Inquiry, Public Criticism and Industry Response: A Policy Analysis (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1996), 27–45, 55–61, 79–90, 99–105, 27–133.

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4. Morrison, et al., Defining Violence. The Search for Understanding (Luton, U.K.: University of Luton Press, 1999), 3–5. For a further sorting-out of analytical terminology on questions of violence in media, see 6–9, and on questions of violence and entertainment, 123–32. 5. “‘Fearful Friendships’: Terror in the Historiography, Drama and Satire of First Century CE Rome,” Terror and Text: Representing Political Violence in Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Mark Williams (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2002), 103–118. 6. Editions of chivalric romances referred to in this essay are Amadís de Gaula, ed. Edward B. Place, 4 vols. (Madrid: CSIC, 1959–1965); “A Critical Edition of Las Sergas de Esplandián,” ed. Dennis George Nazak (Ph.D. diss., 2 vols, Northwestern University, 1976); Tirant lo blanc, ed. Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: Ariel, 1969); Curial e Guelfa, ed. R.Miguel y Planas (Barcelona: Biblioteca Catalana, 1932); Palmerín de Olivia, ed. Giuseppe di Stefano, Istituto di Letteratura Spagnola e Ispano-Americana, Studi, vol. 11 (Pisa: Università di Pisa, 1966); Crónica de Palmeirim de Inglaterra, ed. Geraldo de Ulhoa Cintra, 3 vols. (São Paulo: Ediôtra Anchieta, 1946); Crónica do imperador Clarimundo, ed. Marques Braga, 3 vols. (Lisbon: Livraria Sá da Costa, 1953). The dates of these works are Amadís, 1508 (date of first known ed.); Sergas and Palmerín, third decade of 16th c.; Tirant, 1490; Curial, ca. 1460; Crónica de Palmerim and Clarimundo, mid-16th c. 7. For a similar motif involving violence against a wet nurse in Middle English romances, see Michael Uebel, “The Foreigner Within: The Subject of Abjection in Sir Gowther,” Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 96–117; the same text is discussed by Jesus Montaño, “Sir Gowther: Imagining Race in Late Medieval England,” ibid., 118–32. 8. Additional scenes involving similarly explicit mayhem may be found in Amadís, I, 48, 58, 59, 69–70, 73, 90, 102–3, 106, 113, 138, 191, 194, 220, 237, 299, 307, 347, 350–51. The pattern continues in the remaining three books. 9. Harry Sieber underscores the influence of Amadís as the “father of the Spanish romances of chivalry,” and of a “monstrous progeny” of sequels and imitations. The success of Amadís, early in the history of the Peninsular publishing industry, established a paradigm for fictional knight errantry, both in terms of themes and plots, and in the tendency toward sequels and spinoffs. See Sieber, “The Romance of Chivalry in Spain. From Rodríguez de Montalvo to Cervantes,” Romance: Generic Transformation from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 203–19; here 204–6. Without engaging in the aesthetic controversy engaged in by the priest and the barber in their famous appraisal of Don Quijote’s library (Don Quijote, chap. 6), we note the similarity of violent depictions in the Portuguese con-tinuation of the Palmerín adventures, Palmeirim de Inglaterra (I, 34, 43–44, 45, 49–52, and passim). The Portuguese romance Clarimundo (I, 83, 131–32, 142, 146, and passim) shows a similar pattern. We might hazard that violent depictions in the Portuguese works are perhaps a bit less frequent, a bit less detailed. This impression, upon which one might establish or disprove a stylistic contrast between Castilian and Catalan romances on the one hand, Portuguese romances on the other, is matter for another essay. 10. Cf. the scenes of combat, in tournaments as well as in warfare, in another romance written in Catalan, Curial e Guelfa (87–88, 109–13, and passim). 11. Don Quijote, ed. Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: Editorial Juventud 1969), 37. All references are to this edition. The translations are my own. 12. Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Lectures on Don Quixote, ed. Fredson Bowers, 1st ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Bruccoli Clark, 1983), 51–52. 13. Nabokov, 51–52. 14. Nabokov, 52. 15. Nabokov, 53–56. 16. Nabokov, 74.

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17. Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty. Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 192–93. 18. The editions/translations cited are The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper and Row, 196); The Odyssey, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). 19. El Libro del cauallero Zifar (El libro del cauallero de Dios), ed. Charles Phillip Wagner (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1929), 43. Many additional examples of this work’s characteristic understatement in the rendering of violent action may be found at 57– 59, 61, 124, 141–42, and passim. 20. See Maria Rosa Lida de Malkiel, “El desenlace del Amadis primitivo,” Romance Philology 6 (1953): 283–89; here 285–88. See also my Kinship & Marriage in Medieval Hispanic Chivalric Romance. Westfield College Publications in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 11 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), 12, where I discuss the emergence and parallel reception of these two important chivalric works. 21. The Zifar, as far as we know, was printed only twice: once in 1512, once in 1529 (Wagner, ed., intro., vii–viii). Amadís, by contrast, saw many reprintings, as did its sequels and the original and sequels of the Palmerín series (Whinnom 193–94). 22. The Longest Day (Twentieth Century Fox, 1962), produced by Darryl F.Zanuck, directed by Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, and Bernhard Wicki, screenplay by Romain Gary, James Jones, et al.; Saving Private Ryan (Paramount, 1998), produced by Steven Spielberg, et al., directed by Steven Spielberg, screenplay by Robert Rodat. 23. See Martin de Riquer, introduction to Tirant, 7–23. Montalvo, apparently far more the bourgeois than Martorell, was a member of one of Medina del Campo’s most prominent families; was an alderman of that town; served in the army of the Catholic Kings in the Grenadine war (1482–1492). See Juan Batista Avalle-Arce, Amadís de Gaula: el primitivo y el de Montalvo (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990), 12–23; William Thomas Little, “Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo (circa 1450?-before 1505),” in Castilian Writers, 1400–1500, ed. Frank A.Domínguez and George D.Greenia, Dictionary of Literary Biography, 286 (Detroit, Mich.: Thomson-Gale: 2004), 127–41 (129–30). 24. A list of all films relevant to this discussion would be longer than the present chapter in its entirety. The same could be said for a scene-for-scene description of all relevantly gruesome moments in film. Nor is there space in a chapter of this size to address the problem of multiple venues for graphic violence, including horror comics, video games, television shows, cartoons, etc. In this chapter, I can refer to only a few select examples of graphic depictions. The films chiefly referred to here (most launching or figuring in strings of sequels) are The Thing from Another World (RKO, 1951), produced by Howard Hawks, directed by Christian Nyby, screenplay by Charles Lederer, et al.; Psycho (Universal, 1960), produced by Alfred Hitchcock, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, screenplay by Joseph Stefano; Night of the Living Dead (Anchor Bay Entertainment, 1968), produced by Karl Hardman and Russell Streiner, directed by George A.Romero, screenplay by George A.Romero and John A.Russo; Jaws (Universal, 1975), produced by Richard D.Zanuck and David Brown, directed by Steven Spielberg, screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb; Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Python Pictures, 1975), produced by Mark Forstater, directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, screenplay by Graham Chapman, et al.; Alien (Twentieth CenturyFox, 1979), produced by Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter Hill, directed by Ridley Scott, screenplay by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett; Halloween (Anchor Bay Entertainment, 1978), produced by Debra Hill, directed by John Carpenter, screenplay by John Carpenter and Debra Hill; Friday the Thirteenth (Paramount, 1980), produced by Sean S.Cunningham, directed by Sean S.Cunningham, screenplay by Victor Miller; Excalibur (Warner Bros., 1981), produced by John Boorman, directed by John Boorman, screenplay by Rospo Pallenberg and John Boorman; The Evil Dead (Anchor Bay Entertainment, 1981), produced by Robert G. Tapert, directed by Sam Raimi, screenplay by Sam Raimi; The Thing

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(Universal, 1982), produced by David Foster and Lawrence Turman, directed by John Carpenter, screenplay by Bill Lancaster; A Nightmare on Elm Street (New Line Studios, 1984), produced by Robert Shaye, directed by Wes Craven, screenplay by Wes Craven; Robocop (Orion Pictures, 1987), produced by Arne Schmidt, directed by Paul Verhoeven, screenplay by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner; Predator (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1987), produced by Lawrence Gordon, et al, directed by John McTiernan, screenplay by Jim Thomas and John Thomas; Lethal Weapon (Warner Studios, 1987), produced by Richard Donner and Joel Silver, directed by Richard Donner, screenplay by Shane Black; The Last Boy Scout (Warner Studios, 1991), produced by Michael Levy, directed by Tony Scott, screenplay by Shane Black; Under Siege (Warner Bros., 1992), produced by Arnon Milchan, et al., directed by Andrew Davis, screenplay by J.F.Lawton; The Long Kiss Goodnight (New Line Cinema, 1995), produced by Rennie Harlin, et al., directed by Rennie Harlin, screenplay by Shane Black. Of the four films based on Thomas Harris’s novels featuring the anthropophagous Hannibal Lecter, I refer to the one that shows the most outrageous commitment to graphic visuals: Hannibal (Universal, 2001), produced by Dino de Laurentiis, et al., directed by Ridley Scott, screenplay by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian. 25. See, on the problem of the permanent crisis of what he calls “the baroque culture,” José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran. Theory and History of Literature, 25 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 22–26; also, on economic crisis and social unrest, Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1972–73), II: 741–46. 26. Michael Nerlich, The Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750, trans. Ruth Crowley, 2 vols. Theory and History of Literature, 42, 43 (Minneanapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), I, 27, 29. 27. See my Kinship & Marriage in Medieval Hispanic Chivalric Romance, Westfield College Publications in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 11 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), 109–11. See also, for specific references to the social impact of church policy on social practice, James A.Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 189–90; 239–40; 276–77. 28. R.Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 186–93. 29. See M.I.Finley, The World of Odysseus (London: Chatto and Windus, 1956), 83–84, 88–89. 30. See, for a survey and discussion of the long tradition of anti-chivalric-romance critiques on grounds of moral terpitude and aesthetic frivolity: Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, Amadís de Gaula: el primitivo y el de Montalvo (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990), chap. 1, passim, and Martín de Riquer, “Cervantes and the Romances of Chivalry,” Don Quijote. The Ormsby Translation, Revised. Backgrounds and Sources. Criticism, ed. Joseph R.Jones and Kenneth Douglas, Norton Critical Editions (New York: W.W.Norton, 1981), 895–913; here 901–4; see also his Estudios sobre el Amadís (Barcelona: Sirmio, 1987), 13–37, for an expanded discussion of the same topic. 31. For discussion of the problems of defining and measuring the intensity and frequency of violent contents in the media, see, among many possible works: James T.Hamilton’s introduction to Television Violence and Public Policy, “Media Violence and Public Policy,” ed. Hamilton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 1–12. Defining television violence as a kind of “pollution” (3), Hamilton affirms that such media representations can promote “desensitization,” “a callous view toward real-world violence,” and, in short, do great harm “for both child and adult viewers” (5). While the collection of studies edited by Hamilton assumes a straightforwardly definable and measurable impact of violence on an assumed population of passively receptive operands, the study authored by Barrie Gunter and Jackie Harrison, Violence on Television. An Analysis of Amount, Nature, Location and Origin of Violence in British Programmes, Routledge Progress in Psychology, 3 (London:

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Routledge, 1998), points out the the lack of consensus, among media research scholars, regarding the possibility of empirical demonstration of a correlation of media violence and real-world psychology and behavior (280–81). See also the later study by Gunter, Harrison, and Maggie Wykes, Violence on Television. Distribution, Form, Context, and Themes (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003), 154–57, 222–24. 32. The critical practice in question is discussed, and at the same time somewhat exemplified, by Leo Lowenthal. See his “Sociology of Literature in Retrospect,” Literature and Social Practice, ed. Philippe Desan, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, and Wendy Griswold (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 11–25. Lowenthal argues, for example, that the social content of the Quijote can be explained by Cervantes inclination to serve as “the spokesman for the collective of outcasts…excluded from profits and privileges.” This reflects the intention “to inspire uneasiness on the part of those who have profited by the prevailing order” (17). 33. See Umberto Eco, “The Myth of Superman,” Contemporary Literary Criticism, ed. Robert Con Davis (New York: Longman, 1986; rpt. from Diacritics 2 [1972]: 14–22), 330–44; here 331, 332, 333. 34. Eco, 338–39. 35. Eco, 340–41. 36. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (Chicago: A.C.McClurg, 1914), 32. 37. Tarzan of the Apes 32, 58, 106, 142. 38. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Return of Tarzan (Chicago: A.C.McClurg, 1915), 136,151. 39. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan the Untamed (1919; New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1922), 45, 86, 102. 40. See my “Mythogenesis of the Modern Super Hero,” Modern Myths, ed. David G.Bevan. Rodopi Perspectives on Modern Literature, 10 (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1993), 189– 210; here 198–202. 41. Erling R.Holtsmark, Tarzan and Tradition (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 9– 33, 39–56.

Contributors Fabian Alfie is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Arizona, Tucson. His specialization is in the comic poetry of Italy during the Middle Ages. He has published a book on Cecco Angiolieri, Comedy and Culture: Cecco Angiolieri’s Poetry and Late Medieval Society (Leeds, U.K.: Northern Universities Press, 2001). He has also written numerous articles on various comic poets of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Gijsbertus Koolemans Beynen has been working at the Des Moines Area Community College in Ankeny, lowa, as an adjunct philosophy instructor and the evening librarian since 1995. Before coming to DMACC, Bert taught Russian language courses at Emporia State University, Fordham University, the University of Rochester, the University of South Africa, and lowa State University. He has a Ph.D. in Slavic linguistics from Stanford University and is currently working on the Georgian writer Shota Rustaveli and his place in courtly literature. Nancy B.Black, Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, is the author of Medieval Narratives of Accused Queens (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003) and The Perilous Cemetery (L’Atre Périlleux) (New York: Garland, 1994). Her articles have appeared in Romanic Review, Studies in Iconography, French Studies, and Fifteenth-Century Studies. Siegfried R.Christoph is a native of Berlin, Germany. He received his Ph.D. in Older Germanic Literatures from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (1980). He is currently Professor of German and Chair of the Modern Languages Department at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside in Kenosha. He has published widely on the works of Gottfried von Straßburg, Hartmann von Aue, and Wolfram von Eschenbach. His monograph, Lemmatisierter Index zu den Werken des Strickers (Tübingen: Niemeyer), was published in 1997. He is currently completing a study of honor and shame in Middle High German literature, as well as an English translation of Konrad von Stoffeln’s Gauriel von Muntabel. Albrecht Classen is University of Arizona Distinguished Professor of German Studies, Tucson. He has published more than thirty scholarly monographs, edited volumes, translations, textbooks, medieval text editions, and also a volume with his own poetry. Most recently, he published a monograph on the communicative community in medieval German and Latin literature, Verzweiflung und Hoffnung (Frankfurt aM: Lang, 2002). In 1999, he edited the volume The Book and the Magic of Reading in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland), followed by a volume on Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 2002). Currently he is preparing a new study on marriage tracts, marriage poetry, and marriage sermons in late-medieval German literature for publication (Münster, New York: Waxmann, 2004). A volume with latemedieval German women’s poetry is forthcoming as well (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S.Brewer). He serves as editor of Tristania and co-editor of Mediaevistik.

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Raymond Cormier serves as Visiting Professor of French (and “First Gent”) at Longwood University. He has taught at Harvard, Stanford, Tufts, Virginia, and Temple, all universities, as well as at several colleges, namely Wilson, Gettysburg, Dickinson, and Dartmouth. He has published seven books and numerous articles. One of his recent studies was on the Judgment of Paris episode, which appeared in the Miscellanea Bibliothecae Apostolicae (2001). Cormier’s current research focuses on the problem of anachronism in adaptations. Stacey L.Hahn is Associate Professor of French at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Her research interests center on medieval prose romance, particularly the Lancelot-Grail cycle and Jean d’Arras’ Roman de Mélusine. She has published articles on genealogy, family relationships, and love in the Prose Lancelot. Michael P.Harney is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Texas-Austin. He teaches courses on medieval and Golden Age Spanish literature and on a variety of topics in comparative literature. He has published books on kinship and political structures in the Spanish epic (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1993), and on kinship and marriage in the Spanish and Catalonian chivalric romance (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001). He has written articles on a number of topics in Peninsular literature: kinship and marriage, social mobility, caste and social class, historical geography, and travel literature. A member of the Comparative Literature faculty, he has also published articles on such cultural-historical topics as the origins of the superhero, the movie remake, the economics of utopian literature, and social banditry. Jean E.Jost is Professor of English at Bradley University, Peoria, Illinois, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Chaucer, Arthurian literature, Old and Middle English surveys, medieval drama, and Middle English romance. She has published Ten Middle English Arthurian Romances: A Reference Guide (Boston: G.K.Hall, 1986) and edited a collection called Chaucer’s Humor: Critical Essays (New York: Garland, 1994). Currently she is editing the Southern Recension of the Pricke of Conscience. Her last National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar (2003) on the Old French Fabliaux has provided a new interest, which she is pursuing. Leo D.Lefebure is Associate Professor of Theology at Fordham University in New York City. He received his doctorate in Christian theology from the University of Chicago and is the author of four books, including The Buddha and the Christ (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993) and Revelation, the Religions, and Violence (Orbis Books, 2000), which received the Pax Christi U.S.A. 2001 Book Award. He is a member of the Midwest Regional Muslim-Catholic Dialogue and Mid-Atlantic Regional MuslimCatholic Dialogue. He served as editor of Chicago Studies from 1999 to 2003. William C.McDonald is Professor of German at the University of Virginia, where he teaches graduate courses on Arthurian literature. In monographs he has investigated the literary reception of King Arthur and Tristan in German literature of the later medieval period (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1990 and 1991). He has published widely on the German Middle Ages, having treated the subjects of literary patronage (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1973), Michel Beheim (Goppingen: Kiimmerle, 1981), honor, heraldry, gender, manuscript emendations, Gottfried’s Tristan as Arthurian romance, and the Grail. Recently, he has devoted several scholarly articles to the Erec romance of Hartmann von Aue.

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Marcella L.Munson is Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. She specializes in medieval narratives and theories of medieval authorship. Her current research interests include the development of prose and discourses of political subjectivity in medieval France. She has dedicated several articles to Marie de France and Chretien de Troyes, and is currently finishing a book project on Christine de Pizan’s political prose. Scott E.Pincikowski is Assistant Professor of German at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. He specializes in German medieval literature. He has published a book on German courtly literature, Bodies of Pain: Suffering in the Works of Hartmann von Aue (London: Routledge, 2002). He has also written articles dealing with the depiction of pain in the German High Middle Ages. Corinne Saunders is a Reader in Medieval Literature in the Department of English Studies at the University of Durham, England. She specializes in medieval literature, in particular romance, and the history of ideas. She also has interests in the history of gender and sexuality, and in the history of medicine. Her publications include The Forest of Medieval Romance (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S.Brewer, 1993), Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S.Brewer, 2001), and a Blackwell’s Critical Guide to Chaucer (2001). She is currently working on a study of magic in medieval romance. Julia Wingo Shinnick is Visiting Assistant Professor (2001–2004) at the University of Louisville. Her dissertation, “The Manuscript Assisi, Biblioteca del Sacro Convento, ms. 695: A Codicological and Repertorial Study” (1997, The University of Texas at Austin), addresses this thirteenth-century manuscript in terms of its musical repertoire, physical characteristics, and use in the liturgy of the cathedral of Reims. Shinnick also holds master degrees in both English and Music and serves as treasurer and member of the advisory board of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R). She has published entries on Martin Luther, Mass, and Trope in the Reader’s Guide to Music, and on Violence in the American Musical in Violence in America: An Encyclopedia (New York: Scribner’s, 1999).

Index A A Nightmare on Elm Street, 333 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 226 Abel, 192, 251 Abelard, 23 Abrahm, 38 Absalom, 192 Abu Bakr, 49 Aeneid, 69–70, 83, 330 aggression, 7 Albertus Magnus, 228 Albigensian Crusade, 10, 12, 15 Alexander the Great, 44, 281 Alexander III, Pope, 302, 306 Alien, 333 Amadís de Gaula, 324ff. Amaury de Montfort, 62 amirbari, 171, 174, 177–78, 180 Amnon, 192 Amos, 39 anger control, 10 Angioleri, Angiolero, 216 Angiolieri, Cecco, 207, 210–15 anti-Judaism, 12 anti-Semitism, 12 Apollonius of Tyre, 18 Arendt, Hannah, 1, 26 Aristotle, 209 Arthur, King, 18, 60 Athelston, 247ft. Augustine of Hippo, 6–7, 39, 43–45, 57, 116, 156,190, 228 Averroes, 209 B Bacon, Roger, 228 Baldric, 55 Balin and Balan, 262 barbaric age, 6 Battle of Agincourt, 278, 280 Becket, Thomas, 297ff. Benedict IX, Pope, 48 Benedict of Alinan, 59

Index Benoît de Sainte-Maure, 71 Bernard of Clairvaux, 56, 59, 61, 157, 278 Bisclavret, 19 Blanche of Castille, 276 Boethius, 231, 273, 313 Bonaventure, 63 Bonichi, Bindo, 216 brutality, 67ff. C Caesar, Julius, 281 Cain, 192, 251 Callistus II, Pope, 54 Cavalcanti, Guido, 215 Cervantes, 328 ch’ashnagiri, 175–76, 180 Chaitivel, 19 chanson de geste, 11 Charlemagne, 47–48 Charles Martel, 49 Charles VI, King of France, 285 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 20, 72–73, 225, 228–29, 297 Cherubino of Siena, 19 Chester, Thomas, 247, 255 chivalry, 10, 59ff., 67ff. chose publique, 287 Chrétien de Troyes, 18, 21–22, 68ff. Christ’s Passion, 225, 245 Christine de Pizan, 73, 269ff. Cicero, 44 civilization, 24 Clement II, Pope, 48 comedies, 217 comic poetry, 208, 217 Concordat of Worms, 54 Confessions (Augustine’s), 116 conflict resolution, 10 Conon de Béthune, 76 Consolatio philosophiae, 313 Constantine, 42–44 Count Boniface, 45 courtly love, 18 Crusades, 10, 12, 15, 41, 55–57 D Damian, Peter, 51 Daniel von dem Blühenden Tal, 25 Dante, 210, 216–18 Darwin, Charles, 181 David 38, 40, 59 De institutione novitiorum, 25

322

Index De quattuor gradibus violentiae caritatis, 14 De re militari, 25 De virtute obedientiae, et septem ejus gradidus, 278 De vulgari eloquentia, 216–17 Débat sur la rose, 272 defense, 7, 25 Dictatus Papae, 52 domestic violence, 19 Don Quijote, 328, 331 Donation of Constantine, 52 Duke de Berry, 273, 280–81, 285, 289–90 Duke of Burgundy, 269 Duke of Orléans, 269 E Edda, 19 Eglamour, 251 Elias, Norbert, 7, 9, 77, 98ff. Eliot, T.S., 297 Emich Leisingen, Count, 58 Eneide, 25, 83ff. Epistre à la reine, 269ff. Epistre de la prison de vie humaine, 269ff. Equitan, 19 Erec et Enide, 18, 74ff. Esau, 192 Euripides, 213 Eusebius, 42–43 Excalibur, 333 execution, 10 Ezekiel, 39 F fabliaux, 225 fairy, 225 father and son, 5 Filippi, Rustico, 207, 209, 215 Folgore da San Gimigniano, 216 Francis of Assisi, 41, 68, 78–79, 138–39 Franklin’s Tale, 229, 255 Frederick II, Emperor, 54 Freidank, 62 Friar’s Tale, 230, 232 Friday the 13th, 333 Fulcher of Chartres, 58 G Gandhi, Mahatma, 6 Garland, John, 217 geis, 233 Gelasius I, Pope, 46

323

Index gentilesse, 231 Geoffroi de Charney, 60 Geoffroy d’Auxerre, 157 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 217 Gerson, Jean, 269, 285 Gewalt, 14 Gideon, 38, 40, 59 Gilbert of Nogent, 306 Giorgi II, 170 Girard, René, 27, 298ff. gluttony, 216, 218 Gottfried von Strassburg, 2, 118–19 Gottschalk of Aachen, 53 Gratian, 156 Gregorian Reform, 39, 50 Gregory I (the Great), Pope, 57, 190 Gregory VI, Pope, 48 Gregory VII, Pope, 39, 47, 51–55, 62 Gregory VIII, Pope, 48, 50 grief and music, 312–13 Guibert of Nogent, 55, 58 Guillaume de Termonde, 152 Guillaume de Lorris, 14–15 Guinizelli, Guido, 215 gula, 216 H hamartia, 252 Hannibal, 333 Hartmann von Aue, 18, 25, 103ff., 117, 120–21, 123 hatred of wives, 210 Heinrich von Veldeke, 25, 83ff. Heinrich von Kempten, 24 Hell, 15 Heloise, 23 Henry II of England, 77, 297ff. Henry III, Emperor, 48 Henry IV, Emperor, 51–55, 62 Henry V, Emperor, 48 Hermann the German, 209 Hermann of Metz, 52 Hermes Ballenus, 229 Hermes Trismegistus, 228 heroes, 2 Hezekiah, King, 45 Hildebrandslied, 2–5, 20, 99–103 Historia calamitatum, 23 Holocaust, 11–12 Homer, 9, 329–30, 338 Hosea, 39 Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, 24

324

Index Hugh of Payens, 60 Hugh de Tabarie, 61 Hugh of St. Victor, 25, 103 Humbert, Cardinal, 51 Humbert of Romans, 59 Huns, 13–14 I idealized violence, 25 Iliad, 9, 330 imitatio Christi, 313 industrialization, 7 Innocent III, Pope, 39, 54 Isabeau, 276 Isaiah, 39, 42 Isidore of Seville, 190, 228 iustitia Dei, 51 Ivo of Chartres, 56 Iwein, 117 J Jacob, 192 Jason, 170, 213 Jean d’Arras, 187ff. Jeremiah, 39 Jerome, Jerome K., 181 Jihad, 49, 55 Jocasta, 262 John of Salisbury, 7, 60, 272, 288 JohnVIII, Pope, 48 John VIII, Pope, 50 John XII, Pope, 48 Joseph, 192 Joshia, King, 45 Judas Maccabeus, 38, 40, 59 just war, 45 justice, 283 Justin Martyr, 42 Justinian I, 46–47 K Kamil, al-, Sultan, 139 Klage, Diu, 20, 27 Knight’s Tale, 225, 232 Konrad, Priest, 11, 130 Konrad von Würzburg, 24 L La Tour Laundry, 241 La Morte le roi Artu, 7, 151ff.

325

Index La Cité des Dames, 272 La Queste de Saint Graal, 7, 151ff. Lamentacion sur les maux de la guerre civile, 269ff. Lancelot, 61, 235 Landfrieden, 102 Lanval, 226 Laocoon, 330 Latini, Brunetto, 217 Le Songe du vieil pèlerin, 269, 285, 291 Legend of Good Women, 230 Leo I, Pope, 46 Leo III, Pope, 47 Leo IV, Pope, 50 Leo IX, Pope, 48, 50, 55 Les deuz amanz, 19 Lethal Weapon, 333 Libro del caballero Zifar, 331ff. liturgy, 313 Livre du corps de policie, 271, 282 Llull, Ramon, 21, 61 Lord of the Panther Skin, 17, 169ff. Lorenz, Konrad, 181–82 Lothair, Emperor, 48 Louis I, Emperor, 47 Louis VII, King of France, 56 Louis IX, King of France, 62 Louis XIV, King of France, 77 love, 13 love and violence, 1 love potion, 233 M Macrobius, 228 magic, 225, 227 Magus, Simon, 229 Magyars, 13 Mai und Beaflor, 19 Malory, 226, 232ff., 246, 247 Man of Law’s Tale, 232 Map, Walter, 77 Marie de Berry, 273, 280 Marie de France, 19, 226 Marshal, William, 60 marvelous, 225 mass society, 7 Matthew of Vendôme, 209, 217 Maximilianus, 156 Medea, 170, 213, 230, 252 Meier Helmbrecht, 21 Mélusine, 18, 187ff. Meo dei Tolomi, 26, 207ff.

326

Index might versus justice, 26 mijnuri, 173 militia Christi, 49 Miller’s Tale, 225 mimetic theory, 298ff. Mino dei Tolomei, 208 Mita di Bindino, 208 modern media, 241 Mongols, 13 monotheism, 37 Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 333 Moriz von Craûn, 18, 104, 127–28 Morte Darthur, 226, 232ff., 247ff. Moses, 40, 59 Muhammad al Ghazali, Sheik, 58 Muhammed, 38, 49, 55 mysticism, 18 myths of the Middle Ages, 3 N Nathan, 39 New World, 3 Nibelungenlied, 11, 19, 101ff., 116, 130 Nicholas II, Pope, 51 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2 Niger, Radulf, 25 Night of the Living Dead, 333 Njal’s Saga, 27 O occult, 227 Odoacer, 6 Odyssey, 330 Oedipus, 262, 337 Ordene de Chevalerie, 61 Origen, 42 Ortega y Gasset, 6, 12, 21 Other, 195 Otto I, Emperor, 48 Otto II, Emperor, 48 Otto III, Emperor, 48 Ovid, 69, 72, 78, 84, 136, 242 P Palmerín de Olivia, 326ff. Paracelsus, 190 Parson’s Tale, 229 Parzival,21,128ff. Paschal I, Pope, 48 Paschal II, Pope, 48 Paul, 42, 63

327

Index Peace-of-God movement, 23, 102 PeasantWar, 10 Perceval, 21, 60 Perslesvaus, 235 Philippe de Mézière, 269, 285, 291 Philippe VI, King of France, 285 Philomena, 68ff. Physician’s Tale, 230, 232 Pieraccio Tedaldi 210 Pietro d’Faitinelli, 207 Piramus et Thisbé, 68ff. Plato, 335 Poema de Mio Cid, 330ff. pogroms, 11, 15, 58–59 Policraticus, 272, 288 popular culture, 242 R Raoul de Houdenc, 78 rape, 5, 18, 241 Reeve’s Tale, 225 Reformation, 10 religion justifying violence, 38 Return of Tarzan, 337 Richard of St. Victor, 14 Ring, Der, 20, 27 ritual performance, 5 Roland, Chanson de, 2, 11, 60 Rolandslied, 11, 130 Roman Empire, 13 Roman des eles, 78 Roman d’Eneas, 68ff. Roman de la Rose, 14–15, 68, 79 Roman de Thèbes, 136, 192 Roman de Troie, 68ff. Romulus Augustulus, 6 Rustaveli, Shota, 17, 169ff. S sacred kingship, 48, 50, 53 Saint Louis, 276 Saladin, 61 Salvani family, 208 Samuel, 39, 40, 62 Saracens, 13 Sassanid Empire, 13 Saul, 40 Saving Private Ryan, 332 scholastics, 209 scorched earth (see also terre gaste), 21 self-defense, 283

328

Index

329

Seneca, 6, 329 Shakespeare, 85, 329 shame, 7 Simon de Montfort, 62 Sir Degarré, 227, 237 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 25, 227, 231, 236, 251 Sir Gowther, 227, 237–38 Sir Launfal, 226, 247ft. Sir Orfeo, 227, 231ff. Sponsa virum lugeo, 297ff. Squire’s Tale, 226 Stephen IV, Pope, 47 Stricker, The, 25 Sylvester III, Pope, 48 T T’amar, Queen, 170 Tale of Gamelyn, 247ft. Tale of Sir Thopas, 230 terre gaste, 21 Tertullian, 42 The Evil Dead, 333 The Last Boy Scout, 333 TheLongest Day, 332 Theaphano, 48 Theodosius, 43, 46 Theseus, 337 Thirty Years War, 10 Thomas Aquinas, 6–7, 156, 228 Thomasin von Zirclaria, 103 Thüring von Ringoltingen, 199 Tirant lo blanc, 327, 332 Titurel, 128ff. tolerance, 195 Tristan und Isolde, 2, 118–19, 233 Troilus and Criseyde, 232 Trypho, 42 U Umar, 55 Under Siege, 333 unjust war, 25 Urban II, Pope, 50, 54–56, 60 V Victor II, Pope, 48 Vigilius, Pope, 46 Vikings, 3, 13–14 Virgil, 69, 83–84, 330 vituperium in vetulam, 215, 218 Vivat rex, 269

Index

330

Vom Rehte, 20–21 W Wace, 68 Wälsche Gast, 103 Walthariuslied, 100–02, 104 Walther von der Vogelweide, 21–22 weapons production, 12 Wernher the Gardener, 21 Wife of Bath’s Tale, 20, 230–32, 236, 245–46, 255 Willehalm, 11, 106, 129ff. William of Auvergne, 228 William IX, troubadour, 76 Winsbeckin, Diu, 14, 17 witch hunt, 227 Witch of Endor, 229 Wittenwiler, Heinrich, 20, 27 Wolfram von Eschenbach, 11, 21–22, 103, 116,121–22, 127ff., 246 World War II, 9, 12 Y Yonec, 19