Women and Disability in Medieval Literature (New Middle Ages)

The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren

The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries edited by Ellen E. Kittell and Mary A. Suydam

Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350–1500 by Kathleen Kamerick

Charlemagne’s Mustache: And Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age by Paul Edward Dutton

Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England by Elizabeth Scala Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul by Bonnie Effros Representations of Early Byzantine Empresses: Image and Empire by Anne McClanan Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects,Texts, Images edited by Désirée G. Koslin and Janet Snyder Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons Isabel La Católica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays edited by David A. Boruchoff Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century by Richard E. Zeikowitz Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, and Politics in England 1225–1350 by Linda E. Mitchell Eloquent Virgins: From Thecla to Joan of Arc by Maud Burnett McInerney The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture by Angela Jane Weisl

Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image edited by Emma Campbell and Robert Mills Queering Medieval Genres by Tison Pugh Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism by L. Michael Harrington The Middle Ages at Work edited by Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel Chaucer’s Jobs by David R. Carlson Medievalism and Orientalism:Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity by John M. Ganim Queer Love in the Middle Ages by Anna Klosowska Performing Women in the Middle Ages: Sex, Gender, and the Iberian Lyric by Denise K. Filios Necessary Conjunctions:The Social Self in Medieval England by David Gary Shaw Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages edited by Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Jeremy duQuesnay Adams,Volumes 1 and 2 edited by Stephanie Hayes-Healy

Capetian Women edited by Kathleen D. Nolan

False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature by Elizabeth Allen

Joan of Arc and Spirituality edited by Ann W. Astell and Bonnie Wheeler

Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages by Michael Uebel

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Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: New Essays edited by Lawrence Besserman

Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk edited by Bonnie Wheeler

Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages edited by Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers

Medieval Fabrications: Dress,Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings edited by E. Jane Burns

Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England by Frank Grady

Was the Bayeux Tapestry Made in France?:The Case for St. Florent of Saumur by George Beech

Byzantine Dress: Representations of Secular Dress in Eighth- to Twelfth-Century Painting by Jennifer L. Ball

Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages by Erin L. Jordan

The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the “Work” of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350–1500 by Kellie Robertson

Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

The Dogaressa of Venice, 1250–1500:Wife and Icon by Holly S. Hurlburt Logic,Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard, and Alan of Lille:Words in the Absence of Things by Eileen C. Sweeney

Medieval Go-betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus by Gretchen Mieszkowski The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature by Jeremy J. Citrome Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in the Canterbury Tales by Lee Patterson

The Theology of Work: Peter Damian and the Medieval Religious Renewal Movement by Patricia Ranft

Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing by Lara Farina

On the Purification of Women: Churching in Northern France, 1100–1500 by Paula M. Rieder

Odd Bodies and Visible Ends in Medieval Literature by Sachi Shimomura

Writers of the Reign of Henry II:Twelve Essays edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones

On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages by Valerie Allen

Lonesome Words:The Vocal Poetics of the Old English Lament and the African-American Blues Song by M.G. McGeachy

Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity edited by Sara S. Poor and Jana K. Schulman

Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries by Anne Bagnell Yardley

Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema edited by Lynn T. Ramey and Tison Pugh

The Flight from Desire: Augustine and Ovid to Chaucer by Robert R. Edwards

Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages by Noah D. Guynn

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England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th–15th Century: Cultural, Literary, and Political Exchanges edited by María Bullón-Fernández The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process by Albrecht Classen Claustrophilia:The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature by Cary Howie

Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language: An Edition,Translation, and Discussion by Sarah L. Higley Medieval Romance and the Construction of Heterosexuality by Louise M. Sylvester Communal Discord, Child Abduction, and Rape in the Later Middle Ages by Jeremy Goldberg

Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature by Heather Blurton

Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century edited by Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown

The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture by Christina M. Fitzgerald

Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature by Tison Pugh

Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood by Holly A. Crocker

Sex, Scandal, and Sermon in FourteenthCentury Spain: Juan Ruiz’s Libro de Buen Amor by Louise M. Haywood

The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women by Jane Chance Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature by Scott Lightsey American Chaucers by Candace Barrington Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature by Michelle M. Hamilton Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Studies edited by Celia Chazelle and Felice Lifshitz The King and the Whore: King Roderick and La Cava by Elizabeth Drayson Langland’s Early Modern Identities by Sarah A. Kelen Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages edited by Eileen A. Joy, Myra J. Seaman, Kimberly K. Bell, and Mary K. Ramsey

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The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages edited by Catherine E. Léglu and Stephen J. Milner Battlefronts Real and Imagined:War, Border, and Identity in the Chinese Middle Period edited by Don J. Wyatt Wisdom and Her Lovers in Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Literature by Emily C. Francomano Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: Maria de Luna by Nuria Silleras-Fernandez In the Light of Medieval Spain: Islam, the West, and the Relevance of the Past edited by Simon R. Doubleday and David Coleman, foreword by Giles Tremlett Chaucerian Aesthetics by Peggy A. Knapp Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama by Theodore K. Lerud

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Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape by Alfred K. Siewers

Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics by Susan Signe Morrison

Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and Political Women in the High Middle Ages by Miriam Shadis

Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones

Julian of Norwich’s Legacy: Medieval Mysticism and Post-Medieval Reception edited by Sarah Salih and Denise N. Baker

The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance by Seeta Chaganti

Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer by Mary Catherine Davidson

The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages: Power, Faith, and Crusade edited by Matthew Gabriele and Jace Stuckey The Poems of Oswald von Wolkenstein: An English Translation of the Complete Works (1376/77–1445) by Albrecht Classen Women and Experience in Later Medieval Writing: Reading the Book of Life edited by Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker and Liz Herbert McAvoy Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature: Singular Fortunes by J. Allan Mitchell Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature by Kathleen E. Kennedy The Post-Historical Middle Ages edited by Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico Constructing Chaucer: Author and Autofiction in the Critical Tradition by Geoffrey W. Gust Queens in Stone and Silver:The Creation of a Visual Imagery of Queenship in Capetian France by Kathleen Nolan Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art edited by Cynthia Ho, Beth A. Mulvaney, and John K. Downey

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The Letters of Heloise and Abelard: A Translation of Their Complete Correspondence and Related Writings translated and edited by Mary Martin McLaughlin with Bonnie Wheeler Women and Wealth in Late Medieval Europe edited by Theresa Earenfight Visual Power and Fame in René d’Anjou, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Black Prince by SunHee Kim Gertz Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog: Medieval Studies and New Media by Brantley L. Bryant Margaret Paston’s Piety by Joel T. Rosenthal Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis by Theresa Tinkle Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature by Roger A. Ladd Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music edited by C. Stephen Jaeger Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Objects in Global Perspective: Translations of the Sacred edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Jennifer Jahner

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Late Medieval Jewish Identities: Iberia and Beyond edited by Carmen Caballero-Navas and Esperanza Alfonso Outlawry in Medieval Literature by Timothy S. Jones

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Women and Disability in Medieval Literature by Tory Vandeventer Pearman Heloise and the Paraclete: A Twelfth-Century Quest (forthcoming) by Mary Martin McLaughlin

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WOMEN AND DISABILITY IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

Tory Vandeventer Pearman

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WOMEN AND DISABILITY IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

Copyright © Tory Vandeventer Pearman, 2010. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10511–9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pearman, Tory Vandeventer, 1980– Women and disability in medieval literature / Tory Vandeventer Pearman. p. cm.—(The new middle ages) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–10511–9 (alk. paper) 1. Literature, Medieval—History and criticism. 2. Women in literature. 3. People with disabilities in literature. I. Title. PN682.W6P43 2010 809⬘.93352042—dc22

2010018390

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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For Gram and Marina

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction: Medieval Authoritative Discourse and the Disabled Female Body 1

2

3

4

xiii

1

(Dis)pleasure and (Dis)ability: The Topos of Reproduction in Dame Sirith and the “Merchant’s Tale”

19

Physical Education: Excessive Wives and Bodily Punishment in the Book of the Knight and the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue”

45

Refiguring Disability: Deviance, Punishment, and the Supernatural in Bisclavret, Sir Launfal, and the Testament of Cresseid

73

Embodied Transcendence: Disability and the Procreative Body in the Book of Margery Kempe

113

Conclusion

151

Notes

155

Bibliography

187

Index

201

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T

he personal and professional assistance of many people has shaped the conception and development of this book. Edward Wheatley’s attentive and thoughtful comments were essential for not only this project to take form, but also my own professional growth as a scholar. I am thankful for his patience and persistence in pushing me to produce my best work. Thanks to Pamela Caughie, for the painstaking care with which she read my drafts was invaluable for the development of my own critical voice. I am grateful to Dorsey Armstrong who forcefully, yet supportively, challenged me to rethink and revise my work. I appreciate the constructive comments provided by an anonymous reader for the New Middle Ages. I am thankful, also, to Bonnie Wheeler, editor of the New Middle Ages Series, for her support throughout the project. Discussions and collaborations with my fellow members of the Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages have been both inf luential and enjoyable. The assistance of interlibrary loan staffs of both Loyola University Chicago and the University of Southern Indiana was invaluable throughout all stages of this project. I wish to thank Andrew Higl, Shelly Jarenski, and Ann Mattis for their encouragement and companionship throughout this project. I also extend my gratitude to Stephanie Lundeen, who provided invaluable support in the form of careful readings, engaged and lively discussions, and unwavering friendship. I am grateful to the Arthur J. Schmitt Foundation for the generous financial support that made this project possible. Portions of the introduction and chapter 1 appeared previously as “ ‘O Sweete Venym Queynte!’: Pregnancy and the Disabled Female Body in The Merchant’s Tale” in Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations, edited by Joshua Eyler (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). Part of chapter 3 was published as “Refiguring Disability: Deviance, Blinding, and the Supernatural in Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal” in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability 3.2 (2009). Both the published

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portions are reprinted with kind permission respectively from Ashgate and the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability. Lastly, I offer a very special thanks to my parents, siblings, and extended family, without whom I would not have made it this far. To Jordan, Gram, and Marina, I send all of my love, for thanks would never be enough.

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INTRODUCTION MEDIEVAL AUTHORITATIVE DISCOURSE AND THE DISABLED FEMALE BODY

A

s a good amount of academic scholarship in the field of medieval studies has shown, the Middle Ages was a time in which the body was an important site of spiritual, scientific, philosophical, and epistemological questioning. Scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum have documented the increased emphasis on the intersection of the spiritual and the bodily in the later medieval periods, an emphasis Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury term “an incarnational aesthetic.”1 This incarnational aesthetic, which informed the spiritual and secular lives of medieval people, has also governed the last decade of medieval scholarship, especially with contemporary theories of identity formation, including feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and queer theory, gaining widespread use. More recently, medieval scholars have considered disability theory in their analyses of the connections between bodily difference and the formation of cultural, ethnic, gendered, and sexual identities.2 However, no one study succeeds in both combining disability studies with poststructuralist interrogations of the relationship between the body and culture and directly considering how discourses on the female body intersect with those on impairment. In this book, I use a feminist disability perspective to examine the social production of gender and disability in the literature of the high and late medieval periods in order to argue that the conf lation of the female body, femininity, and disability that arises in the authoritative discourses of the Middle Ages—such as biblical, patristic, and medical writings— often succeeds in frustrating the teleological narrative drives of literary works read in England that feature disabled female characters. Primarily, this project proposes that viewing disability through what I call the gendered model, or a historicized consideration of the links between the

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sociocultural production of gender and bodily ability, is essential to any study of embodied difference, an element that remains generally lacking in most studies of disability. In addition, I contend that literary representations of femaleness, femininity, and disability—though they do not provide exact accounts of the lived experiences of women or those with disabilities—are central to uncovering the social anxieties surrounding such Othered figures. In order to investigate the construction of sexual difference and ability in late medieval discourses of authority, it is important to use the work of contemporary feminist, gender, and disability theories of the body. However, I do not mean to argue that medieval authors intended to present particular notions of sex, gender, and bodily ability. Instead, I contend that these discourses work together to produce and even demand a particular understanding of the sexed body and how it is interpreted in terms of its gender and physical ability. With this in mind, I would like to brief ly examine the prevalent issues at stake in the field of disability studies and demonstrate how their conjunction with feminist theories of the body is necessary to a more complete—and even political—understanding of the female body and the disabled body not only today, but also in the late medieval world. Disability studies in academia has f lourished only recently. Following attempts in the early twentieth century to construct a “history of disability” and the political movements of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, scholars have begun to investigate the material, psychological, cultural, and historical components of disability as well as theorize disability as an identity category.3 Current theorists of disability studies situate disability within a sociohistorical context in which disability is a social process that does not denote a deficient body but results from the interaction between bodily difference and society. Other models of disability, such as the medical and rehabilitation models, focus on the “restoration” of a disabled body to a socially constructed “norm,” whereas the constructionist, or social, model posits disability within “a social process in which no inherent meanings attach to physical difference other than those assigned by a community.”4 Erving Goffman’s book on stigma is an important early contribution to the social model. Stigmatization, Goffman notes, occurs in the interactions between those with visible physical difference and those without when there is a discrepancy between one’s actual identity (how one sees himself or herself ) and one’s virtual identity (how others view him or her).5 Goffman’s study, though important for its acknowledgment of stigmatization as a process, is problematic in its suggestion that the interpretation of difference remains negative in cultures and histories. Mary Douglas, in her application of an anthropological

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perspective to stigmatization, contends that responses to embodied difference are based on a collective view of bodily perfection, a notion that has led the way to analyses of disability that consider cultural change.6 Indeed, the social model provides a more complete assessment of disability because it allows scholars to place disability within its sociohistorical milieu. As Irina Metzler argues, “The notion of the social construction of disability [ . . . ] permits historical investigation and analysis—of what is and what is not disability,” whereas the medical model positions impairment and disability as equal and thus natural and unchanging.7 In other words, current scholars of disability distinguish between a person’s physical impairment and the social construction of disability, or the interaction between the impairment and one’s sociohistorical context. It is this distinction between impairment and disability that allows for a medieval understanding of the physically impaired. In this book, I view disability as a process wherein cultural standards for normalcy dictate whether those who do not fit such standards can fully participate in their societies. As such, I use the terms disabled, disability, and people with disabilities to describe people whose physical or mental faculties do not adhere to the sociocultural norms of their historically located societies. When focusing specifically on the bodily or mental faculty without regard to its social connotations, I use the terms impaired, impairment, and people with impairments. In keeping disability and impairment separate, I follow other disability scholars in uncovering the social construction of disability by focusing on the “linguistic conventions that structure the meanings assigned to disability and the patterns of response to disability that emanate from, or are attendant upon, those meanings.”8 Moreover, I adopt Susan Wendell’s understanding of “disability as difference” in which she views disability “as a form of difference from what is considered normal or usual or paradigmatic in a society.”9 Wendell’s more general understanding of disability as difference dramatically opens up the category for what may be considered a disability while still maintaining its status as socially constructed. Wendell adds that labeling disability as difference allows for a valueneutral description, “while recognizing that both stigma and being ‘the Other’ are aspects of the social oppression of people with disabilities.”10 Through her reclassification, Wendell seeks to overturn the presentday stigmatizing social understandings of disability by abandoning its categorization as a lack and recasting those with disabilities as sources of valuable knowledge and experience. Following Wendell in defining disability as difference in a study of disability in medieval literature, I let considerations of what constitutes disability remain f luid and leave open the question of value, two important elements in an analysis of

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representations of disability in a society in which no identifiable definition of disability existed, and yet one in which those with physical impairments were often stigmatized. Only recently medieval scholars such as Edward Wheatley and Irina Metzler have begun to directly incorporate disability studies in their investigations of embodied difference in the Middle Ages, jointly decrying the lack of a historical emphasis in contemporary studies of disability. The first full-length account of medieval disability, Metzler’s Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Physical Impairment in the High Middle Ages, c. 1100–c. 1400, examines theoretical and medical notions of the impaired body as well as the important role of impairment in establishing a saint’s singularity.11 Ultimately, Metzler concludes that there is no fully delineated concept of disability in the high Middle Ages; instead, medieval people were concerned mostly with impairment. Wheatley offers the first medieval-specific model for disability, the religious model, which illuminates the church’s power to maintain control over how disability and the disabled were discursively constructed.12 Drawing from the New Testament construction of Jesus as a healer of both spiritual and physical maladies, Wheatley finds that medieval notions of disability were tied to the linking of inward sin with outward appearance in religious doctrine. In fact, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 directly associates the cause of bodily illness to sin, explicitly asserting that divine intervention was important in the treatment of such ailments.13 Current issues at stake in the newly forming field of medieval disability studies include attempts to locate and define disability in a period that offers no linguistic equivalent to the term and questions of how to provide a medieval definition of ability in order to better understand who does not fit within that category and whether to keep separate or combine notions of mental and physical impairment. In addition to struggling with the “problem of definition”14 in medieval disability studies, I have also noticed an innate desire on the part of scholars to “rescue” the Middle Ages from assumptions that construe medieval society as intolerant of and even cruel toward people with physical and mental impairments in recent discussions of medieval disability. This desire follows a trend in some recent scholarship on medieval disability that seeks to nullify older analyses that draw a distinct connection between an outward physical impairment and inward spiritual deficiency.15 While these scholars rightly bring to light the ability of people with disabilities to function and even thrive in medieval society as well as the frequently benign reactions of others to their impairments, their drive to describe the premodern era as devoid of a concept of the social process of disability

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ignores medieval discourses—religious, medical, and literary—that do stigmatize physical and mental impairments as markers of sinfulness and/ or Otherness and comes dangerously close to supplanting a monolithic view of the Middle Ages as intolerant with an equally monolithic view that borders on nostalgic. In response, my project refuses to polarize the Middle Ages as either inherently intolerant or entirely accepting of those with embodied differences. Rather, I hope to take both views into account, conceding the sometimes negative connotations surrounding the impaired body in the Middle Ages while also acknowledging medieval society’s frequent acceptance of and care for the impaired. It is from within these conf licting views that my project takes shape. Specifically, my project’s turn to medieval literature allows me to analyze the literary representations of disabled women that expose the sometimes misogynist and ableist discourses that link the disabled female body to sinfulness, while also demonstrating the often subversive power such bodies have to challenge those discourses. My gendered model seeks to build upon Metzler’s and Wheatley’s work by contributing to a medieval understanding of disability. However, the gendered model, in its positioning of gender and disability as social processes intricately connected by the body in medieval culture, uncovers the links between medieval notions of femaleness, femininity, and disability produced by religious and medical discourses and then traces how those links function within and even profoundly shape the narrative structure of medieval literature. When biblical, medical, and literary representations of the female body merge with the Aristotelian construction of the female body as a deformed male body, a web of embodied Otherness begins to surface, demonstrating the intricate bonds between discursive notions of embodied identity categories such as gender, sex, sexuality, ability, and ethnicity. Medieval scholars of disability, or of any bodily difference, must consider these bonds in order to politicize our understanding of disability in the Middle Ages. As Wheatley has shown, “the church’s control over discourses related to disability” operated “in a manner analogous to the way modern medicine attempts to control it now.”16 However, medical discourses held a great amount of power in determining how particular bodies were interpreted and represented. The gendered model allows for an analysis of how multiple discourses—biblical, religious, medical—work together to link the female body, femininity, and disability. It is therefore important to focus on the understandings of the body produced by medieval medical texts, particularly in the later medieval period. The “science” that these texts assert, however, differs greatly from our

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modern notion of science as unquestionable proof. First of all, there was no easy distinction between medicine and religion, and, in the early Middle Ages, religious communities studied, copied, and translated many medical texts. Moreover, the dissemination of these texts allowed particular notions about the body and particular authors with whom such notions were associated to gain authority. Thus, medieval medicine describes and demonstrates popular medical notions of the body and its functions, but does not categorically prove such assertions. Though medieval medical texts did not wield the kind of discursive control over the body and disability that medical discourse does today, the authority that such texts and authors achieved had the ability to inf luence the interpretation of bodies and thus the ability to produce certain bodies as intelligible or unintelligible. In her defense of the power of such a small component of medieval society, Metzler explains that the institutionalization of medical knowledge and its resultant exposure to popular culture led to a “ ‘medicalisation’ of later medieval society” that indeed provides evidence for common medieval understandings of and treatments for physical impairments.17 An increased interest in medical knowledge and practice led to a growth in centers for systematic medical study throughout Europe in the mid-twelfth century and, in turn, to an expansion in the translation and dissemination of classical medical texts.18 The “medicalisation” of the late medieval period resulted in the creation of authorities on the body and, in turn, patients who were expected to go to such authorities in order to seek advice and treatment. In other words, the creation of authorities simultaneously results in the creation of “docile bodies,” or bodies that “may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved.”19 The authority granted to medicine and medical practitioners—although not absolute in the late medieval period—undoubtedly affected the representations, treatment, and experiences of those with bodies deemed in need of improvement. As Wendell remarks, “The cognitive and social authority of medicine to describe our bodies affects how we experience our bodies and our selves, how our society describes our experiences and validates/invalidates them, how our society supports or fails to support our bodily sufferings and struggles, and what our culture knows about the human body.”20 The effects of such authority over the body, though inf luential to every body, “are compounded for people who have little cognitive or social authority of their own, and for people who are routinely treated as though they are without such authority, such as women, and many men who are poor, old, disabled, and/or subjected to racism.”21 In conjunction with biblical and religious discourses on such Othered bodies, medical discourse links the unintelligibility

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of such bodies to biological sexual difference and its cultural interpretations, laying the groundwork for later representations of the female body and the disabled body. The Female Body as Disabled in Medieval Authoritative Discourse The use of the gendered model makes evident the connections between discursive productions of the female body and the disabled body in both contemporary and premodern medical and social interpretations. By studying the female body produced by such discourses, we not only can examine the challenges able-bodied women faced in medieval culture, but also can better historicize what some authors have called the “double defect” or “redundancy” of the disabled woman. 22 According to Rosemarie Garland Thomson, the female body and the disabled body are inescapably joined in the patriarchal order, a connection she describes as “the cultural intertwining of femininity and disability.” 23 The notion of women as inferior to men begins in male discourses on physiology. A medieval understanding of women’s bodies is rooted in the theories of scholars such as Hippocrates, Aristotle, Soranus, and Galen, which, though often conf licting, collectively indicate that women are the inverse of men and are therefore subordinate. 24 In such discourses, a woman is, essentially, a defective man whose genitals are reversed. 25 Despite Thomas Laqueur’s assertion that male and female bodies were considered to be variations of one overarching paradigm for sex, 26 it is clear that most medieval medical authorities clearly identified anatomical sex difference between the male and the female. In Katharine Park’s study of human dissection, she notes that medical discourse and anatomical illustrations demonstrate the “homology of the male and female genitals” by presenting the female genitals as the inverse of a man’s: “If men’s genitals were folded inward, they would resemble women’s with the scrotum corresponding to the uterus, the male testes to the female ones [ . . . ], the vagina to the penis, and the foreskin to the labia.” 27 In conjunction with a humoral understanding of women’s colder natures, as Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth explains, “[t]hese formulations naturally led to the supposed notion that if a woman only became hot enough her penis would fall out and she would reach perfection and become a man.” 28 However, as Park and Hellwarth both make clear, the proliferation of such evidence in medieval medical texts does not prove Laqueur’s “one-sex” model to be true to a medieval understanding of sexual difference. 29 In fact, Joan Cadden’s research, which situates

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it sel f i n opposition to Laqueur’s, does not uncover an essentialist binary notion of sex or gender, but rather “a cluster of gender-related notions” that results from the evolution and accumulation of medieval medical, philosophical, and theological understandings of sex and gender differences. 30 In other words, medieval understandings of sex and gender emerge from a complex “process by which a network of gender constructs was negotiated and sustained.”31 Ultimately, it is an oversimplification to argue that the Aristotelian notion of woman as man’s inverse prevailed as the only way in which medieval medicine understood the female body. However, it is certain that this notion garnered significant attention and use in the medieval period (and, indeed, throughout history) and has contributed considerably to the social interpretation of the female body and femininity. As both Monica Green and Helen King demonstrate, the general notion of sex difference in the later medieval period holds that the male and female bodies are unequal, particularly with respect to physiology. 32 Aristotelian writings, which inform most medieval medical texts from the twelfth century on, deem the woman herself an imperfect man whose matter was not “concocted” long enough during prenatal development. A woman is, in fact, an undercooked male, or “a deformity, though one which occurs in the ordinary course of nature.”33 Such qualities cast the female body as incomplete in relation to the male body, or norm, and subsequent medical writings iterate these valueladen notions. 34 Moreover, conf licting theories concerning the function and action of the womb construe the female body as imperfect. Despite the Hippocratic “two-seed” theory, which granted agency to the female body in the act of conception, Aristotelian writings posit female “seed” as passive and inferior to the male’s.35 The womb itself was presented as having active and passive qualities. Though Aristotle’s work does not focus on the womb, Galen, following Hippocratic scholars like Soranus, depicts the womb as an active organ capable of some movement. Some scholars even believed that such movement was independent and could result in various maladies. According to Plato, the womb has autonomous feelings; it is “an indwelling creature desirous of childbearing.”36 When a woman is unable to conceive, the womb “is vexed and takes ill; and by straying all ways through the body and blocking up the passages of the breath and preventing respiration it casts the body into the uttermost distress, and causes, moreover, all kinds of maladies.”37 This phenomenon, known as the wandering womb, was not accepted by all theorists. While Soranus and Galen oppose those who credited complete independence to the womb, their texts still reveal latent belief in the womb’s animalistic

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nature.38 Moreover, Galen writes of womb suffocation, a defect of the womb resulting in loss of appetite, dizziness, weakness, and troubled breathing; this condition was considered serious enough to warrant several remedies in various medical treatises. 39 The theories of Aristotle and Galen ref lect the nuanced and sometimes conf licting notions of sex difference that came to the medieval West in the eleventh and twelfth centuries via Latin translations and through their use in the works of Arabic scholars such as Avicenna and Averroes. For instance, Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s thirteenth-century text Women’s Secrets espouses the Aristotelian notion that the male produces the seed while the female acts as a vessel to collect that seed and relies heavily on the theories of Galen when constructing his explanation of womb suffocation.40 Even the eleventh-century Trotula, sections of which are attributed to a female author,41 evokes similar notions about the f lawed female body.42 Notions of the womb, thus, situate it as both the passive vessel that receives male seed in the act of reproduction and an active organ capable of independent movement that seeks sexual intercourse. Moreover, some medical scholars such as Avicenna comment on the physical inferiority of the uterus, noting that it is the last organ to be formed and, hence, the weakest.43 Considered both a weak, passive vessel and a strong, active, even animal-like organ, the womb undoubtedly mystified medieval medical scholars. Although these views seem oppositional, Cadden explains that “they share the underlying suggestion that women are empty, void, lacking” and that “each placed limits on the feminine” that could result in antifeminist notions of the female body and, in turn, woman herself.44 Despite such nuanced and sometimes conf licting views of bodily difference between the sexes, one constant seems to be the assertion that the female body is indeed different from the male body in both its anatomy and physiology. Consequently, this physical difference, though deemed a part of the natural order, is devalued. The devaluation of the female body becomes strikingly clearer when classical medical understandings of the body come together with biblical and patristic discourses on women. The Aristotelian classification of the female body, however, did not reach medieval Europe until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when it came via translations of Arabic medical texts that incorporated Aristotelian and Galenic medical views.45 Thus, biblical and patristic writings were the first to iterate the female body’s difference in the medieval period. The creation story of Genesis not only classifies the female body as a deviation from the male body—Eve is, of course, fashioned from Adam’s rib— but also codes that difference within social structures: due to her inferior physical embodiment, Eve must bear and raise children and remain

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subjugated to Adam. Moreover, subsequent writings link Eve’s implication in the Fall with the mental and physical inferiority that supposedly stems from her bodily difference. Isidore of Seville’s seventh-century encyclopedia of knowledge Etymologies demonstrates the combination of biblical and medical discourses on the female body in its commentary on women, noting that “[w]oman [mulier] gets her name from ‘softness’ [mollitie]” because “the two sexes are differentiated in the strength [fortitudine] and weakness [imbecillitate] of their bodies.”46 In addition to noting the physical weakness of the female body, Isidore links feminine qualities to Eve: Eve is both “life” and “disaster” since she is both “the origin of being born” and the “cause of dying. But some say that Eve is called ‘life’ and ‘disaster’ because woman is often the cause of man’s welfare, and often the cause of his disaster and death.”47 Moreover, patristic writers such as Jerome and Augustine synthesize these notions in their literature on sexuality and marriage, marking the female body as f leshly, sexually excessive, and threatening.48 Medieval medical texts combine biblical and patristic writings and Aristotelian views with Galenic, or humoral-based, medicine. As noted above, later texts like the eleventh-century Trotula and Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’ thirteenth-century Women’s Secrets reveal the common perception of a woman as a defective man; while men could effectively “cook” wastes within their bodies, thereby decontaminating the wastes, women, because of their colder bodies, were unable to generate enough heat to decontaminate their bodies. As a result, menstruation was viewed as the primary method by which women eliminated excess waste. Two conf licting discourses concerning menstruation emerged in the Middle Ages. Menstruation was often referred to as a woman’s “f lowers.” These “f lowers,” if pollinated, would lead to fruit, or children.49 Though the Trotula offers a fairly benign view of menses as a woman’s “f lowers” that produce the fruit of children, other contemporary views categorize menstrual f luid as dangerous. This relatively positive view of menstruation intersected with the prevailing notion of menstrual blood as poison. Pliny’s second-century work Natural History, another major inf luence on medieval medical texts, claims that menstrual blood had the power to tarnish metals, wither plants, and madden dogs.50 His views were perpetuated in varying degrees in the works by Galen, Soranus, and PseudoAlbertus Magnus. The male fear and anxiety over the unclean nature of menstrual blood most likely stems from biblical views on women’s (un) cleanliness in Leviticus as well as from the idea that menstruation was one punishment for Eve’s sin.51 Green identifies a proliferation of these “misogynistic views” about menstruation occurring in the thirteenth century and impacting perceptions of gender from then on.52 Notably,

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Hildegard, though she employs the “f lower” metaphor when describing menstruation and reproduction in Scivias, links menstrual blood to Eve’s sin, prohibiting men from having intercourse with a menstruating woman.53 The uterus and menstruation, then, prove to be the determining factors that situate the female body as unequal to the male body. Thus, despite the common perception that a female’s sexual organs are essentially the opposite of a male’s, Laqueur’s “one-sex” model does not hold. These two bodily differences, viewed to be the physical signs of the female body’s inferior and even deformed status in relation to the male body, demonstrate the female body’s link to the impaired body. In such primarily male-authored medical, biblical, and patristic literature, the female body arises as the original bearer of embodied difference, but one with potentially threatening powers in its excess and in its ability to produce and destroy life.54 Because of the pervasiveness of such discourses, especially during the institutionalization of medical culture beginning in the twelfth century, it is probable that subsequent representations of both womanhood and impairment in literature ref lect similar notions. As Metzler affirms, the expansion of medical culture undoubtedly produced interactions between medical and popular culture; therefore, “the growth of ‘bookish’ medicine was not just due to its promotion by learned practitioners, but also due to public enthusiasm for learning and public expectations of the medical profession.”55 If the “medicalisation” of the later medieval period results in the production of widespread notions of the female body and the disabled body, then these notions will surface in the literature of the period. The synthesis of medical views on the female body in religious discourse and the increased number of vernacular translations of classical medical texts in the late Middle Ages attests to the predominance of such views in medieval culture and their inf luence on and in literature. For instance, Geoffrey Chaucer, whom I examine in chapters 2 and 3, references medical scholars throughout his work, including Galen and Trotula.56 The Gendered Model: Toward a Medieval Feminist Disability Perspective The medical and biblical categorizations of the female body as a defective male are important to contemporary studies of gender and disability in Western cultures. In fact, it is often cited as the sole evidence for the link between the cultural productions of the female body, femininity, and the disabled body, and it is clear that these socially produced categories are indeed closely related.57 Moreover, feminist disability scholars often

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refer to biblical and spiritual discourses on Eve in their discussions. Felicity Nussbaum, in her study of deformity and femininity in the eighteenth century, describes “Eve’s prototypical defects” and their effects on the interpretation and representation of women’s bodies.58 As Rosemarie Garland Thomson asserts, the female body and the disabled body are inevitably linked: “A firm boundary between ‘disabled’ and ‘nondisabled’ women cannot be meaningfully drawn—just as an absolute distinction between sex and gender is problematic. Femininity and disability are inextricably entangled in patriarchal culture.”59 In particular, a feminist approach to disability studies demonstrates that disability—indeed, any embodied difference—cannot be considered without acknowledging its ties to the female body and femininity. Feminist approaches to disability, however, often neglect to consider the premodern era in their analyses.60 Though I am indebted to these scholars for including gender in their studies of disability, I must also critique their neglect of the Middle Ages. By relying on the Aristotelian understanding of the female body in conjunction with biblical depictions of women but neglecting the sociohistorical milieu within which these discourses were disseminated, these scholars not only base their investigations of disability and gender on an incomplete understanding of the historical construction of the female anatomy, but also further obscure the experiences of impaired women in the premodern era. The recent conjunction of feminist theory and disability studies has allowed for an investigation of intersections between the social constructions of gender and disability. Notably, the work of Susan Wendell stresses the importance of bringing together these two fields by highlighting their shared characteristics, chief ly the struggle of both fields to define their central objects of analysis. Just as feminist theory grapples with its “problem” of defining what it means to be female, feminine, or feminist61 so too do disability scholars “encounter the problem of definition as soon as [they] take an interest in disability.”62 Feminist theory asks what is a woman; disability discourse asks what is disability and who is disabled. Both fields question who gets to make these definitions and for what purposes. Garland Thomson, in her juxtaposition of feminist theory and disability studies, or what she terms feminist disability studies, notes that the two discourses challenge existing social relations; [ . . . ] resist interpretation of certain bodily configurations and functions as deviant; [ . . . ] question the ways that particularity or difference is invested with meaning; [ . . . ] examine the enforcement of universalizing norms; [ . . . ] interrogate the politics of appearance; [ . . . ] explore the politics of naming; [and] participate in positive identity politics.63

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Despite the similarities between the two fields, however, Garland Thomson finds that the two can positively inf luence one another by challenging the theoretical tenets of each other. For instance, feminism pushes disability discourse to acknowledge the embodied experiences and political and social issues of disabled women, while disability discourse compels postmodern feminists to interrogate the materiality of the body in their examinations of identity and subjectivity.64 Ultimately, Garland Thomson calls for a feminist disability discourse that incorporates “standpoint theory and the feminist practice of explicitly situating oneself when speaking” in order to “insist on disabled women’s particularity and identity even while questioning its sources and its production.”65 Feminist disability studies, thus, challenge the sociocultural representations of gender and disability, question the association of women and the disabled with the body, and acknowledge that identity categories such as “disabled” and “woman” are fictions while also recognizing the extent of their power.66 My project’s main objective is twofold: by using the gendered model, it theorizes the ways in which medieval authoritative discourse produces the categories of “woman” and “disabled” as inevitably linked, and it examines how those links function within and even shape the production of literary texts. It is important, at the outset, to note that disability demands a story. In other words, having an impairment necessitates that one must narrate to others how one incurred the impairment; difference, thus, creates a gap that narration must fill. Similarly, the production of literary narrative hinges on the differences, which are often embodied, that its characters seek to resolve. Although I acknowledge that literary representations of disability do not accurately portray lived experiences of disability, I nevertheless contend that they reveal the ways in which readers (of texts and of bodies), who may consider themselves “normate,” make meaning of disabled figures, both literary and actual.67 Literary representations of the disabled, thus, expose shared social anxieties about threats to communal and individual identity formation that embodied Others epitomize. Literary scholars of disability have already demonstrated how disabled literary characters profoundly affect narrative and, in turn, the real-life experiences of and social reactions to those with disabilities. For instance, Leslie Fiedler asserts that readers’ responses to disabled characters in literature reveal a latent ambivalence about “real-life” people with disabilities. This ambivalence bespeaks the readers’ fears about their own bodily integrity.68 Garland Thomson argues that literature f lattens disabled characters by reducing them to their visible physical f laws; this f lattening not only serves the ends of the plot, but also simultaneously exposes and even creates cultural stereotypes about those with disabilities.69

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As Garland Thomson suggests, the plot depends upon the difference that disabled characters embody. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s later work fully analyzes this dependency by not only examining how disability operates within narrative to allow authors to metaphorically present social ills through the aberrant bodies of their disabled characters, but also asserting that narrative itself depends upon disability in order to function.70 Their theory of narrative prosthesis, or the notion that disability creates a gap that narrative seeks to explain and then close, is a cornerstone of this project. Though Mitchell and Snyder apply their theory to modern narratives, it is a useful starting point for considering medieval literary representations of disability. By construing narrative as a teleological drive to close the gaps opened up by disabled literary figures, my project questions what happens when the disabled female characters I consider frustrate that drive. Thus, this project mainly focuses on instances in which prosthesis of the narrative fails, despite an apparent narrative urge to close down the deviancy that a disabled character creates. First, I demonstrate that medieval texts frequently construct socially unruly female characters as the deviance that prompts narrative, often by basing that unruliness on the defectiveness of the female body. Thus, the narrative busies itself with attempts to control that deviance. In other words, female behaviors rooted in a medieval understanding of the female body as imperfect take the place of disabled bodies in Mitchell and Snyder’s schema. Texts that couple this social unruliness with physical impairment ultimately thwart a teleological narrative drive toward closure. What this study finds is that, though some texts, such as Geoffroy de La Tour-Landry’s Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry, effectively silence disabled female characters, often, a female character’s disability results in the creation of new narratives that run counter to a master narrative that would seek to limit the social and physical deviancies of the disabled female body, as we will see in texts like Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Prologue.” In cases like these, disability becomes imbued with transgressive, even enabling power. The literary analyses I offer in the chapters that follow represent only a starting point into the discussion of gender and disability in medieval literature. In order to narrow a seemingly infinite array of possible choices, I have limited my texts to those produced or widely read in England. In order to get a fuller sense of the medieval literary depiction of female disability, I have chosen a wide variety of kinds of texts from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, including fabliaux, romance, conduct manuals, and spiritual autobiography. All of the texts I have selected feature female characters with physical disabilities. Undoubtedly, maleness, masculinity, and disability are important elements of the gendered

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model, but men with disabilities are not the focus of this project. The disabilities of the female characters I examine here, furthermore, are often linked to the procreative body, and I do not examine in detail the disabilities of young girls, nuns, saints, virgins, or women with samesex desires. This is not a deliberate attempt to elide procreation with femaleness; I think it reveals, instead, the pervasive connections between medieval authoritative notions of the female body, sexuality, and disability that surface in the literary depictions of disabled women I analyze here. Of course, this only represents the beginning of the discussion of medieval literary representations and gender; there is certainly much more work to be done. In its analysis of two Middle English fabliaux, “(Dis)pleasure and (Dis) ability: The Topos of Reproduction in Dame Sirith and the ‘Merchant’s Tale’ ” explores how the fusion of gender and disability in authoritative discourse thematically and formally affects literature. Primarily, I argue here that, through a topos of reproduction that focuses on the reproductive abilities or inabilities of their female characters (Dame Sirith’s Margery and Chaucer’s May), the Bakhtinian carnival moments of these fabliaux simultaneously restate and invert medieval notions of bodily and gendered norms. Engaging David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis, my project considers the notion of the norm in medieval society. Although, as this chapter shows, a statistical norm did not exist in the Middle Ages, bodily norms were reiterated by newly formed communities who “monsterized,” or exaggerated the bodily aberrancies, of various cultural Others in the hope of shoring up their own collective identities, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has noted. Already aligned with the monstrous in its complete comingling of the self and Other, I contend that the maternal body (here conceived as the pregnant body and the body in childbirth) is central to this process of identity formation, for, in this process, one must abject the Other in order to present a unified self. Using Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, I investigate the nuances between monstrous, disabled, and procreative bodies and assert that Margery and May exploit medieval notions of each in order to construe female disability not as stigmatizing, but life-affirming. “Physical Education: Excessive Wives and Bodily Punishment in the Book of the Knight and the ‘Wife of Bath’s Prologue’ ” examines punishments against women that result in physical impairment in the Book of the Knight and the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” exposing the gendered aspects of both the bodily deviance that prompts narrative and the narrative drive to limit such deviance. In order to question how physical punishments that result in impairment function in narrative, I consider several examples of bodily punishment in one of the medieval era’s most violent

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conduct books, the Book of the Knight, and thus reveal the uncomfortable double-bind of medieval women: texts like the Knight’s interpret unruly behavior as evidence of the female body’s inherent defects and simultaneously align ideal femininity with disability. As my examples from the Knight’s Book demonstrate, this text exemplifies narrative prosthesis; here, each punished wife conforms to ideal wifely conduct and remains within the limits of the masculine narrative drive that ultimately silences her. Conversely, in the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” Alisoun’s disability, the partial deafness that she incurs from a blow to her ear by her fifth husband Jankyn, does not deter her social and physical unruliness. In this chapter, I examine not only Alisoun’s deafness, but also her excessive sexuality in terms of disability, arguing that it is her sexuality that serves as the text’s narrative-producing deviance and her punishment that demonstrates the narrative’s desire to curb it. While chapter 2 examines texts in which human agents, mostly husbands, punish socially unruly women with physical impairments, “Refiguring Disability: Deviance, Punishment, and the Supernatural in Bisclavret, Sir Launfal, and the Testament of Cresseid” analyzes texts in which supernatural agents are the punishers. The element of the supernatural in these texts, I assert, creates a space within the narrative for an overt critique of common medieval notions of the body and identity. As with the texts studied in chapter 2, the masculine narrative drives of Bisclavret, Sir Launfal, and the Testament of Cresseid construct female social deviancy as a feminine problem in need of a solution. Instead of solving the problem of feminine deviancy, however, the impairments that the female characters incur at the hands of supernatural agents actually produce counternarratives that challenge the very basis of each text’s deviancy. In Marie de France’s Bisclavret, I argue, the narratives that are created by the noselessness of Bisclavret’s wife and her female progeny signify an infinite sexual/ textual reproduction of femininity and disability that upends not only a narrative desire for closure, but also the compulsory demands of gender and bodily ability. Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal, I contend, offers a similar challenge to received notions of gender and ability in the blinding of Gwenore by the fairy Tryamour. By investigating the narrative’s mirroring of Gwenore and Tryamour, I demonstrate that the text represents two versions of the female body, one disabled and the other disabling. In the narrative slippage in between, I find, lies a challenge to misogynistic and ableist views of the female body. Finally, I consider Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, whose heroine is divinely punished with leprosy for her infidelity. I side with feminist readings of the tale that highlight the importance of Cresseid’s punishment and exclusion to the perpetuation of an illusory unified masculine identity (and the neat conclusion of a

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masculine narrative drive). However, I assert that Cresseid’s punishment does not merely exclude her. Rather, it reveals the potentially transgressive power of the disabled female body to disrupt cohesive identities and narrative structures. “Embodied Transcendence: Disability and the Procreative Body in the Book of Margery Kempe” analyzes how disability functions within narratives that feature autobiographical elements. Going against a large body of scholarship that seeks to medicalize Kempe’s physical and mental conditions, this chapter explores how Kempe’s disabilities operate within and even drive the production and structure of her text. Using contemporary studies of life writing and disability, I first argue that Kempe’s text both produces and is a product of her gendered and disabled body, noting that her text presents a counterstory for disability: for Kempe, disability does not signify sinfulness but instead enables her spiritual growth. Next, I examine the connections between Kempe’s disabilities, primarily her miraculous fits of tears, and medieval medical notions of the female procreative body, finding that Kempe carefully redefines female bodily deficiency as a site of spiritual excess by connecting it to Christ’s experience of the Passion. Moreover, in linking her fits of tears to childbirth, Kempe aligns herself with the Virgin Mary and recasts the painful and often dangerous experiences of earthly pregnancy and childbirth as painless and spiritual. Kempe demonstrates her newfound spiritual maternity, I argue, through her care for the impaired throughout her Book. As with her own experiences with disability, Kempe’s interactions with people with disabilities further her spiritual singularity. Ultimately, this chapter contends that Kempe’s redefinitions of disability throughout her text allow her to characterize the disabled female body not as deficient, but as imbued with spiritual possibilities.

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CHAPTER 1 (DIS)PLEASURE AND (DIS)ABILITY: THE TOPOS OF REPRODUCTION IN DAME SIRITH AND THE “MERCHANT’S TALE”

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he antifeminism of many medieval fabliaux presents women as shrewish, deceptive, and unfaithful, and often women are bodily punished for their misdeeds, especially when their social and sexual behaviors exceed gendered standards.1 For an example, the Anglo-Norman Chevalier a la Corbeille, which is found in Harley 2253, a manuscript celebrated for containing the largest surviving collection of Middle English lyrics, features a young, adulterous couple who wishes harm the wife’s mother-in-law in the form of physical impairments. When the motherin-law gets in the way of the couple’s illicit sexual escapades, the young lover tells the wife that he would like to cripple, render mute, deafen, and blind his mother. Although the lover does not act on his threats, the threats are made manifest at the end of the tale in the form of bodily harm the mother-in-law receives when she topples from a window, lands in the lovers’ basket (the vehicle the lover uses to enter the wife’s bedchamber), and crashes to the ground.2 Though many fabliaux punish women in some form, and often that punishment is physical, two fabliaux in particular, the Middle English Dame Sirith and the “Merchant’s Tale,” depict women who use physical disability as a source of empowerment. While the physical impairments of men spur the narrative of both tales (Wilekin’s lovesickness in Dame Sirith and January’s blindness in the “Merchant’s Tale”), the disabilities of Dame Sirith and May supplant them after the men have been “cured.” In addition, in both cases, the women’s disabilities connect to female reproductive ability or inability. As this chapter will show, in the carnival moment of these fabliaux, such disability becomes a renewing,

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cultural inversion that subverts common assumptions about not only the body, but also narrative structure. Disability and Text: Narrative Prosthesis and the Problem of the Norm Despite the relative invisibility of disability as a category of analysis in literary studies, many literary texts feature characters with disabilities. Indeed, some scholars argue that narrative itself demands a difference that it then seeks to normalize or bring to a satisfactory conclusion and that, often, this difference takes the form of mental or physical disability. In his critique of the construction of normalcy, Lennard J. Davis asserts that plot seeks to replicate the normal; thus, “[t]his normativity in narrative will by definition create the abnormal, the Other, the disabled, the native, the colonized subject, and so on.”3 Ato Quayson extends Davis’s work to suggest that the “deformations” that produce narrative “emerge from the intersection of a variety of vectors including gender, ethnicity, sexuality, urban identity, and particularly disability.”4 This intersection reveals not just a relationship between the abnormal and the normal, but also a “dialectical interplay between unacknowledged social assumptions and the reminders of contingency as ref lected in the body of the person with disability.”5 As Quayson notes, such a dialectical interplay affects every level—narrators, characters, literary motifs—of not just the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels that Davis emphasizes, but “all literary texts.”6 A foundation of Quayson’s project is David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis, which provides a term for narrative’s dependency on difference. As Mitchell and Snyder outline, “Narrative prosthesis (or the dependency of literary narratives on disability) forwards the notion that all narratives operate out of a desire to compensate for a limitation or to rein in excess.” 7 Mitchell and Snyder base their literary theory on David Wills’s notion of prosthesis, or that which negotiates between the literary and the bodily. Wills notes that the norm is elusive; any body—whether considered normal or deviant—is always already deficient in relation to it. Thus, a prostheticized body becomes the norm, or, in other words, pure artifice, thereby dismantling any notion of a perfect or perfectly normal body. Wills compares the body to words: just as our unruly bodies cannot fit artificial ideals, words remain illusory to the material objects they name.8 A bodily prosthesis means to complete or fix an incomplete body, and a textual or narrative prosthesis means “to resolve or correct—to ‘prostheticize’ [ . . . ]—a deviance marked as improper to a social context.” 9

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According to Mitchell and Snyder, literature’s pervasive reliance on disability is twofold: disability defines a character and serves as a metaphor for greater social ills that are in need of reform. Though literature frequently depends on the disabled to function, it seldom explores the social or political ramifications of the disabled body’s lived experiences. Instead, a narrative may use a character’s disability as an impetus to the storyline, but never engage the social construction of the disability. Because disabled bodies are outside of the norm, literature often uses these bodies to represent social problems in need of amelioration, often at the expense of those who are disabled. For instance, gluttonous, overweight characters signify abstract notions of greed, deformities or scars indicate evil intent, peptic disorders imply a discomfort with the body politic, and physical blindness serves as evidence of a voluntary turning away from absolute truths. These abstract notions, made material by the disabled body, become reinscribed upon the bodies of those with disabilities. Specifically, “Disability proves an exceptional textual fate in that it is deployed in literary narratives as a master metaphor for social ills; thus the characterization of disability provides a means through which literature performs its social critique while simultaneously sedimenting stigmatizing beliefs about people with disabilities.”10 Some scholars may question the validity of investigating literature as a means to theorize disability, arguing that literary representations are severed from the “real-life” experience of people with disabilities, that they show us nothing of the “real” struggles of living with disabilities. Irina Metzler, for instance, in her recent study of disability in the Middle Ages, focuses on medieval medical, religious, and hagiographical texts, only brief ly examining literature as a subject of analysis.11 In his study of the representation of Jews and blindness in medieval drama, however, Edward Wheatley has shown that literary texts can represent and parallel certain lived experiences of those with disabilities and also reveal a society’s collective anxiety about particular social groups.12 As Mitchell and Snyder suggest, it is obvious that literary representations of the disabled do affect the social understanding of and, in turn, the lived experiences of those with disabilities, often in negative ways. However, literary discourse’s proliferation of the disabled body allows for a complex interrogation of the social, historical, and cultural understandings of the construction of the body and its race, sex, gender, class, and ability that does not exist in other discourses. Mitchell and Snyder list a number of “contemporary classics” in American fiction—including Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which showcases mental illness, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which features a main character whose limp shapes her identity—from which readers “learn perspectives on disability [ . . . ] more than from policies

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or personal interactions.”13 Thus, it is imperative that disability scholars mine these literary representations of the disabled not to formulate an understanding of lived experience based on literary representation, but to theorize the complicated ways in which the body takes on meaning in a particular culture and historical moment. Literary representations of the disabled can provide cultural “commentaries on the status of disability in other disciplines” while also exposing the power of literary discourses to shape cultural notions of the body.14 Thus, by examining literature that portrays disabled women, we can learn more about the attitudes and anxieties about disabled and able-bodied men and women latent within the culture that produces the literature. In order to understand how literature produced in a particular sociohistorical moment seeks to normalize that which is aberrant in its narrative, we must first examine how that culture constructs normalcy. As Davis explains, the concept of normalcy in relation to an average is a mid- to late-nineteenth-century concept. Davis links the emergence of disability as a social process to the industrialization of western Europe, noting that premodern cultures held a notion of the “ideal” human body, a bodily notion connected to the divine and unattainable by humans.15 Davis demonstrates that the rise of the field of statistics in the nineteenth century generated the “average man,” who then took the place of the ideal and became the “norm.” The notion of the norm, in contrast to the ideal, “implies that the majority of the population must or should somehow be part of the norm.”16 This average man, then, is a fiction, one that no human can hope to attain, but which all humans desire. Karma Lochrie, in her study of normalcy, heteronormativity, and heterosexuality in the later Middle Ages, agrees that normalcy is a historical construct and questions how this formulation affects normalcy and deviancy in premodern cultures. If one becomes normal through the statistical mathematics of the nineteenth century, how do we discuss normativity in the Middle Ages? And, why is there an overarching perception—in both popular culture and academia—of the premodern past as fiercely normative? Lochrie notes that “[t]he modern is construed as modern in part through its construction of a heteronormatively intransigent past.”17 Thus, reading the past through modern concepts of the norm actually produces the notion that the modern is somehow able to break free of normativity and that the past remains hopelessly caught up in it. The problem with using a modern concept of normativity to interpret the past is that any variations on that norm become obscured and thus remain uninvestigated. Though the concept of a statistical norm did not exist in the premodern era, medieval peoples certainly sought to define notions of collectivity,

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particularly with respect to religious, cultural, or geographic interests and conditions. The vast cultural, communal, and economic changes brought on by medieval conquest meant that peoples from different religious, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds were coming together to forge new collective identities. For instance, after the Norman Conquest in 1066, Anglo-Normans and Anglo-Saxons struggled to define themselves as discretely English. As boundaries of communities, cultures, nations, and power structures began to expand, contract, and blur, communal groups sought to endure the changes by bolstering their own collective identities through the process of abjecting those considered to be “Other” than the group. Jeffery Jerome Cohen has noted that the deciding factors of who belongs and who is Othered from the group are largely corporeal. In his study of community formation in the twelfth century, Cohen finds that communal groups are distinguished by “such embodied phenomena as social comportment, table manners, bathing habits, bodily modification, clothing, self-adornment, hairstyle, [and] grooming.”18 In the formation of such “racial” identities, twelfth-century “English” communities abjected difference onto foreign peoples. As a result, Irish, Welsh, and Jewish peoples were “monsterized” in the act of bolstering an English national identity.19 Though Cohen focuses specifically on twelfth-century England, this act of “monsterizing,” or Othering, peoples of different ethnic, social, or religious groups occurred throughout the medieval period—and continues today—especially during times of social upheaval when new national, communal, domestic, or individual boundaries are being drawn. Often, medieval depictions of other races presented different non-European peoples in strikingly physical ways. For instance, the widely circulated Mandeville’s Travels specifically emphasizes the embodied differences of non-European races, detailing groups of peoples that are hermaphrodites; cannibalistic giants; headless, lipless, or mute; or have large ears or only one foot. Mandeville also describes such monstrous races as the cynocephali, or dog-headed men.20 Bodies of (Dis)pleasure: the Monstrous, the Grotesque, the Disabled Discursive representations of the strikingly visible physical aberrancies of those with embodied differences—such as monsters and the physically impaired—relegate such figures to the margins. As a result, I contend that one cannot disentangle medieval discourses on the monstrous21 from those on the impaired. As Henri-Jacques Stiker observes, the monster— both the racial and the fantastic—and the disabled person demonstrate the physical consequences of breaking taboos. Such figures answer the

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question, “how would we be if we were not the way we are?”22 Despite such similarities, Stiker cautions against an easy conf lation of the monstrous and the disabled, noting that behind such figures as “the beggar, the monster, the criminal” resides “the silhouette of the disabled, borrowing features from the other three all at the same time or successively, and yet sharply contoured.”23 While a monster is not analogous to a person with disabilities, the social construction of monsters certainly shares overlapping characteristics with the social construction of disability and, I would add, femaleness and femininity. The monster, itself a “deformed” and excessively physical creature composed of human and unnatural characteristics, is directly analogous to the female body in its Otherness and its sensuous f leshliness, a quality that my introduction demonstrates is intricately linked to the defectiveness of women in male-authored discourses. This is not to suggest that all women are disabled or that all women who procreate are monstrous but to demonstrate the linked social processes whereby the fictions of “woman,” “disabled,” and “monster” as deviant or dangerous are produced. As Cohen asserts, the monster “is a defiantly intermixed figure that is in the end simply the most startling incarnation of hybridity made f lesh.”24 However deviant such figures seem to those who label them Other, they are all simultaneously familiar. In particular, scholars like Cohen resist earlier scholarship that assumes a distinct opposition between the human and the monstrous. Working with the Lacanian notion of extimité (extimacy), Cohen reads monstrous figures as both familiar and Other to humans, as integral to the process of constructing individual and collective identities. For instance, he reads the giant as central to the construction of the human in Anglo-Saxon culture, a culture marked by shifting definitions of borders and communities. In his analysis of medieval individual and group identity formation, Cohen incorporates Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection, or the process wherein subjective and group identity are formed through the exclusion of that which threatens the subject’s or group’s borders. In the process of abjecting the Other, that which is abjected gets internalized. Consequently, the Other becomes part of the self: the line between hero and monster is blurred. In later historical writings, as Britain scrambles to buttress its identity as a nation, the giant becomes vital to notions of domestic, political, national, and familial roles, while late-medieval romances situate the giant even closer to the human so that heroes like Sir Gawain must use the giant in the formation of their individual, masculine identities. The space of the giant in these works, moreover, becomes a queer space of possibility that escapes the law of the Symbolic.25

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What Cohen omits in his discussion is the relationship between the abject and women, maternity, and femininity and, thus, the strong link between the social production of Others and the female procreative body. As Kristeva explains, the main threat to the notion of the self is one’s dependence on the maternal body; one must, then, abject the maternal body in order to become an individual subject. That which is abject, for Kristeva, is always connected to that which is considered female or feminine in culture. In effect, Kristeva maintains, the fear of the female body is a “fear of her generative power.”26 The pregnant body, with its unstable borders between subject and Other, represents the subject-in-process; the birthing body, when it expels the child—or, more aptly, when the child separates itself from its mother—demonstrates abjection. The fear of the generative body is ultimately a fear of collapsing boundaries between the self and Other. Kristeva follows Mary Douglas in asserting that cultures use rituals of defilement in order to keep boundaries clear from polluting bodies, or “dirt,” as Douglas labels them.27 Not surprisingly, such rituals revolve around f luids that are excreted from the body, including menstrual blood, the physical f luid necessary for female reproduction.28 If the disability of the female body hinges on the reproductive parts, then one can clearly see the intersection of the social construction of monstrosity, disability, femaleness, and femininity in the abject figure of the procreative woman. In addition to considering the prejudicial ramifications that a disabled mother or mother of a disabled child faces,29 it is important to note that a woman who is pregnant also fits widely accepted notions of disability: her “abnormal” body often prevents her from fully participating in her society. On the f lip side, one may also consider the infertile or postmenopausal woman disabled, for she cannot fulfill the socially constructed reproductive duties of her sex. Thus, as this chapter will explore, the reproductive woman remains in a persistent double-bind. Already connected to the monstrous through its designation as Other in the classical medicine I outline in my introduction, the female body is further linked to the monstrous in pregnancy. The pregnant body is capable of creating both “monsters” and the monstrous itself in its dramatic physical changes. Rosi Braidotti notes, “The woman’s body can change shape in pregnancy and childbearing; it is therefore capable of defeating the notion of fixed bodily form, of visible, recognizable, clear, and distinct shapes as that which marks the contour of the body.”30 Tanya Titchkosky adds, “[W]oman blurs and confounds the clear cut categories of self and other especially in matters of maternity.”31 The pregnant woman, then, makes manifest the confusion of extimité, for her body perpetually intermixes self and Other. Though she does not directly engage disability theories,

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Margaret Shildrick extends the connection between the monstrous and the female to disability: “[T]he pregnant body is [ . . . ] actively and visibly deformed from within.”32 She concludes, “All these elements—corporal disorganization, lack of resemblance, ontological impropriety, and the link with the feminine—form a shifting epistemological pattern that is likely to emerge in our contemporary society’s response to disabled people as it is in periods when the concept of the monstrous was uncritically applied to a range of bodily differences.”33 As I suggest above, this pattern is present already in the medieval response to those with physical impairments. In fact, in some medieval fabliaux, the reproductive (in) abilities of the female body are closely linked to and even conf lated with physical impairments. Ultimately, Kristeva advocates for a revaluation of the abject (and, thus, the maternal) as a site of potential jouissance, a sensual pleasure that celebrates multiple identities and sexualities and exploits excess, similar to the queer space of Cohen’s monsters. The jouissance of the abject echoes the victorious laughter of Bakhtin’s grotesque figures. As this chapter will show, two comedic women of medieval fabliaux delight in the subversive laughter that their excessively deviant bodies produce. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, the theorist offers the Kerch terracotta figurines of laughing “senile pregnant hags” as exemplars of the grotesque body that populates carnivalesque literature. These hags, Bakhtin explains, represent the incomplete body of the grotesque: “They combine a senile, decaying, deformed f lesh with the f lesh of new life.”34 In Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque, the grotesque body becomes central to carnivalesque’s literature’s ability to upset sociopolitical hierarchies through humor. Manifestations of carnival, including public feasts, parodies, and, oaths, were moments of a “temporary suspension” of hierarchies wherein the social order became topsy-turvy and allowed for a “liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order.”35 Popular medieval culture becomes, for Bakhtin, continually renewing and open, while the “official” culture of the church remains inherently closed and unchanging. As a result, Bakhtin perhaps too easily divides medieval folk culture and “official” culture, ultimately dividing them into two disconnected worlds and ignoring the intertwined nature of the two in medieval culture. As Arthur Lindley notes, “The proper relation of the two orders is not oppositional but dialectical, each supplying forms to the other.”36 Despite his somewhat generalized portrayal of medieval culture in his description of carnival, Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque, or those topsy-turvy moments in literature, remains quite productive to literary studies. As such, I adopt Lindley’s use of the

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concept by considering “the ways in which social practice (‘carnival’) is refracted and reimagined in literary texts (‘carnivalesque’).”37 Literary carnivalesque employs the human body as the primary means through which carnival is re-presented in literature, a concept that Bakhtin names grotesque realism. In grotesque realism, the body renders all that is “high, spiritual, ideal, abstract” into that which is low, material, and degraded.38 The Bakhtinian grotesque body is a body in the process of becoming. Images of the grotesque body concentrate on the lower strata of the body and the mouth—it is through the mouth and out of the bowels that the grotesque body is able to take in and expel other “bodies,” thus signifying its incompleteness. Everything about the grotesque body centers on excess; in fact, the grotesque body itself can never be considered to be simply one body: “Actually, if we consider the grotesque image in its extreme aspect, it never presents an individual body; the image consists of orifices and convexities that present another, newly conceived body. It is a point of transition in a life eternally renewed, the inexhaustible vessel of death and conception.”39 As such, images of the grotesque body focus on eating, drinking, defecating, giving birth, and dying. The fecundity and excess of the grotesque body align the grotesque with the female body. The female body is able to produce and expel another body in pregnancy and childbirth and, as I describe in the introduction, is firmly associated with sexual excess in religious and medical discourse. Natalie Zemon Davis, in her chapter on carnival and gender in the early modern period, cites this alignment of the grotesque and the female, noting The image of the disorderly woman did not always function to keep women in their place. On the contrary, it was a multivalent image that could operate, first to widen behavioral options for women within and even outside marriage, and second, to sanction riot and political disobedience for both men and women in a society that allowed the lower orders few formal means of protest.40

For Zemon Davis, then, grotesque female bodies, like those of Bakhtin’s Kerch hags, can signify powerful social change. Though Zemon Davis sees the possibilities that the grotesque bodies like those of the hags can suggest and Bakhtin considers them ambivalent, Mary Russo notes that the alignment of the grotesque with the female body is not always positive or neutral, citing “the connotations of fear and loathing associated with the biological processes of reproduction and aging.”41 Russo has been the first to note Bakhtin’s failure “to acknowledge or incorporate

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the social relations of gender” in his description of the hags, “and thus his notion of the Female Grotesque remains, in all directions repressed and undeveloped.”42 Russo calls feminists to consider the association of the female body with the grotesque and use it productively in order to challenge social concepts of gender by asking what Bakhtin never does: “Why are these old hags laughing?”43 In this chapter, I take up Russo’s challenge, but I do so not simply by investigating the social relations of gender inherent in the female grotesque, but also by exploiting the connections between female bodies, the grotesque, and the disabled. Disability scholars have examined the link between the grotesque body and the disabled body. Davis, for example, notes that “the use of the grotesque had a life-affirming, transgressive quality” that could transform the norm while “the disabled body [ . . . ] was formulated as by definition excluded from culture, society, the norm.”44 Davis laments that the modern notion of disability robs the disabled person of such subversive potential. Garland Thomson, however, finds that the disabled and the grotesque intersect in such a way as to disrupt and reform the social order. She contends that Bakhtin’s carnivalesque body is “perhaps his version of the disabled figure,” an embodied Other when viewed as “a challenge to the existing order suggests the radical potential that the disabled body as sign for difference might possess within representation.”45 Indeed, such a revision of the usual interpretation of the disabled literary figure indicates “the possibility of interpreting both dirt and disability not as discomforting abnormalities or intolerable ambiguities, but rather as the entitled bearers of a fresh view of reality.”46 As my examples of the disabled women of medieval fabliaux demonstrate, the disabled figure, particularly the disabled female figure, can challenge and even restructure cultural and social standards. The Reproduction of the Aging Female Body: Dame Sirith Bakhtin lists the medieval fabliau as a prime example of carnivalesque humor in its comic reversals of hierarchical roles, particularly those played by husbands and wives. One of the earliest examples of fabliau in English is the late thirteenth-century Dame Sirith. Along with the Interludium de clerico et puella, Dame Sirith represents the presence of the fabliau genre in English before Chaucer. This particular tale centers on the ability of an old woman known for her “crafftes” and “dedes” to trick a young wife, Margery, into cheating on her merchant husband using a cleric named Wilekin.47 By feeding her dog mustard and vinegar, Dame Sirith is able to convince Margery that her “weeping bitch” is in fact her

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own daughter who has been transformed into a dog for rebuking a clerk’s sexual advances. Afraid of facing a similar fate, Margery bribes Dame Sirith to find Wilekin and essentially pays to become an adulterer. As Eve Salisbury notes, Dame Sirith represents the epitome of the carnivalesque moment of fabliaux, taking the “absurdity” of adultery “to a new level in the intricacy of plot, character development, and the addition of a ‘weeping bitch.’ ”48 Scholars of medieval drama even suspect that the tale may have been performed by a single jongleur and a performing dog or even by multiple actors during courtly feasts or festivals, thus heightening its ties to carnivalesque: in addition to demonstrating literary carnivalesque, the tale may have been orally performed at a carnival.49 The manuscript itself (M.S. Digby 86) includes what may be speech markers at the beginning of each speaker’s lines.50 Dame Sirith undoubtedly portrays the social relations of an official world gone topsy-turvy. Like many satires on religious men, the cleric becomes the lusty lover, willfully straying from his vows.51 In a direct reversal of the usual Ovidian metamorphosis, the young and true wife becomes the eager adulterer in order to save her own body from transformation. Most significantly, perhaps, Dame Sirith blurs the line between the “official”—religion—and the “folk”—magic. The clerk, who should be a principal symbol and practitioner of official religious culture, actively seeks out the services of a well-known witch. When Wilekin approaches Dame Sirith, he indicates that her notoriety for working “crafftes” is widespread, noting that a friend bade him to visit her: “He saide me, withhouten faille, That thou me coutheste helpe and vaile, And bringen me of wo Thoru thine crafftes and thine dedes And ich wile geve thee riche mede, With that hit be so.” (187–92)

Dame Sirith, however, vehemently denies her association with the occult, asserting “Ich am on holi wimon, / On wicchecrafft nout I ne con” (205–6) and proclaiming her penchant for repeating her “Pater Noster” and her “Crede,” the successful completion of which was often used to determine the innocence of accused heretics and witches. After some prodding and the promise of a swift and adequate payment, Dame Sirith promises to fulfill Wilekin’s wish, on the condition that he take an oath of absolute silence. Though Dame Sirith vehemently denies an association with witchcraft, her knowledge of the tests and punishments for heretics and witches reveals that her anxiety may be more to do with being caught than actually conjuring spells.

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Dame Sirith further blurs the line between religion and magic in the trick she plays on Margery. To Margery, Dame Sirith weaves the story of a rebuked clerk working witchcraft on her daughter. Thus, it is the clerk who actively does the conjuring and transforming of her daughter into a dog: “Thenne bigon the clerc to wiche, / And shop mi douter til a biche” (353–4). Though the audience knows Dame Sirith’s trick is a trick and not witchcraft at all, in her story, it is the cleric who has the power to actually transform her daughter. With the roles of religion and magic, husbands and wives, and daughters and dogs turned upside down, one element remains steadfastly central to the fabliau: the grotesque body of Dame Sirith. Though the scant scholarship available on Dame Sirith focuses on the tale as performance or the hideous figure of the weeping bitch, none specifically considers Dame Sirith’s body. However, the tale does provide evidence that suggests that Dame Sirith’s body ref lects the grotesque realism of carnivalesque literature, and the grotesqueness of her body directly intersects with disability. Although the text does not expressly depict Dame Sirith’s body, she presents herself as poor, old, and physically impaired. For instance, she describes herself to Wilekin as “old, and sek and lame” (199). Though Dame Sirith does not specify the particularities of her lameness, it is clear that it affects her ability to control her body. Later, she tells Margery that she is a “poure wif ” who has fallen “in ansine” (306). Salisbury notes that the Middle English “in ansine” signifies “ ‘decline or fail in appearance.’ ”52 While this may simply suggest that her facial features have changed due to age, I argue that Dame Sirith’s body itself has declined. Consequently, the focus remains on the abnormal status of her body. Not only can she not stand nor sit (308), but, due to severe dehydration, she has lost control of her extremities: “Ich ne mai mine limes on wold” (311). One can easily picture the old woman hunched and limping, her limbs wildly askew. It is important to emphasize that it is Dame Sirith who describes her disabilities; consequently, the reader or listener only experiences her lameness through the hag’s own depiction. Even if we consider that the narrative may have been performed by a player or group of players, vocal intonations, body language, and/or costumes would have emphasized the performance and, in turn, ambiguity of Dame Sirith’s lameness. By leaving ambiguous the reality of Dame Sirith’s physical impairments, the text exposes the very real social anxiety of those who feign disability for financial gain. Although medieval social interpretations of lameness were often mixed—Old Testament scriptures link lameness to sin (Deuteronomy 28:35 and Leviticus 21:17–20), while the New Testament showcases the curing of lameness to demonstrate

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Christ’s and his followers’ divine powers (Matthew 15:31 and Acts 3:2, for example), a trope echoed in saint’s lives53 —one constant concern, especially in the later Middle Ages, was the authenticity of impairments that hindered one’s ability to work. Wheatley describes the processes by which institutions such as hospitals and churches attempted to distinguish those entitled to charity from those who feigned impairment out of idleness; those with legitimate impairments were demarcated by separate dress, segregated living spaces, and/or limited freedom of movement throughout cities and countries.54 In his initial vision of the world in is prologue to Piers Plowman, William Langland deems those who shirk labor through false pretenses “wastours.” These wasters include able-bodied men and women who beg instead of working for their financial survival. In Passus VI, Langland describes how some of the “wastours” feign disability in order to evade hard labor in the fields: “Tho were faitours afered and feyned hem blynde; / Somme leide hir legges aliry, as swiche losels kenneth.”55Considering how the narrative fully establishes her reputation as a liar and a trickster, it is possible to read Dame Sirith’s disability as feigned, merely a ruse to gain entrance into Margery’s home. Indeed, it is directly after the old woman rues her pitiful physical and economic states that Margery opens her home to her and decides to offer her food and drink. Though Dame Sirith stresses the physical consequences of her disabilities, Margery mainly focuses on the economic ones, such as her shabby dress: “Ich have reuthe of thi wo For evele i-clothed I se thee go, And evele i-shoed. Com herin, ich wile thee fede. God Almightten do thee mede, And the Louerd that wes on Rode i-don, And faste fourti daiis to non, And hevene and erthe haveth to welde. As thilke Louerd thee foryelde, Have her f les and eke bred, And make thee glad, hit is mi red; And have her the coppe with the drinke; God do thee mede for thi swinke.” (318–30)

Margery here demonstrates that her desire to help Dame Sirith is based on her faith, particularly in her comparison of the old woman’s woes to Christ’s suffering on the cross. As disability historians like Stiker and Metzler have shown, the poor and disabled played an important role

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in the spiritual lives of the able-bodied.56 Didactic works of the later medieval period categorized charity, or the Works of Mercy, into two divisions: the Seven Corporal Works and Seven Spiritual Works. As their titles suggest, the Seven Corporal Works focused on bodily acts of charity like feeding, clothing, and giving shelter to the needy, caring for the sick and imprisoned, and providing proper burial for the dead, while the Seven Spiritual Acts concentrated on contemplative acts like teaching others, reproving sinners, praying, patiently enduring personal injuries and forgiving those who inf lict them, and providing comfort to those who are grieving. Laypeople particularly focused on the Corporal Works, whereas clerics were more prepared to complete the Spiritual Works. The disabled were, consequently, an integral part of the economy of charity and salvation. P. H. Cullum, in his essay on Margery Kempe’s participation in acts of charity, notes that the existence of hospital almsboxes allowed townspeople to donate money “as a way to fulfill all of the Corporal Works of Mercy in one go.”57 As a result of this spiritual economy, the poor and the disabled, though excluded and marginalized—in fact, because of their exclusion and marginalization—became sites of access to salvation through charity. Additionally, through their ties to Christ in the Franciscan view of the less fortunate, these groups became associated not only with wretchedness and poverty, but also with the promise of divine redemption. New Testament depictions of Christ’s miraculous cures of the sick and disabled further linked divine reward to helping those in need, and medieval hagiographers often employed this construction of the physically impaired as a figure in need of divine charity in order to demonstrate the saintliness of their subjects. Dame Sirith takes full advantage of her role in the spiritual economy, knowing Margery will help her not only in order to grant “mede” to the old woman, but also to gain her own spiritual “mede.” Dame Sirith’s physical impairments are productive to not only Margery’s spiritual gains, but also to the carnival inversion that the tale exhibits. Bakhtin affirms that a body like that of Dame Sirith is undoubtedly the body of the female grotesque, noting that in genres such as fabliau, the female body “debases, brings down to earth, lends a bodily substance to things, and destroys; but first of all, she is the principle that gives birth. She is the womb.”58 In the comedy of the fabliau, this ambivalence is less distinct, thus rendering the woman “a wayward, sensual, concupiscent character of falsehood, materialism and baseness.”59 As a result, she begins to represent the unraveling of all that seems complete or static. Thus, Bakhtin surmises, the prevalent motif of cuckoldry in fabliaux like Dame Sirith demonstrates “the

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uncrowning of the old husband and a new act of procreation with the young husband.”60 The cuckoldry of the old husband inverts traditional hierarchies and results in a privileging of a new order, here signified by procreating with a younger man. In this tale, Dame Sirith facilitates the cuckolding of Margery’s husband with the young clerk; the old, crippled, grotesque body of Dame Sirith produces change, transforming the old into new. The young and beautiful Margery contrasts starkly with the aged and crippled Dame Sirith. Effectively, the two become polar opposites on a sort of continuum of age and ability; in fact, the two could easily be the same woman at different times of her life. As disability scholars have noted, the aging body is, in effect, a disabled body, and the youthful body is only a TAB (temporarily able-bodied). Janet Price and Margaret Shildrick affirm that refiguring “normal” bodies as TABs highlights “the material vulnerability of the healthy body, not least in the process of aging.”61 In medieval discourse, the menopausal female body is particularly defective, as it is not only unable to produce children, but also capable of harming them. Because the menopausal woman does not menstruate, she does not effectively f lush the wastes from her body. Consequently, those wastes accumulate in her body and escape through other orifices, such as the eyes. Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s Women’s Secrets reports that “old women who still have their monthly f low, and some who do not menstruate, poison the eyes of children lying in their cradles by their glance.”62 Pseudo-Albert further stresses that, though menstrual f luid is poisonous in and of itself, “non-menstruating women are even more seriously infected, because the menstrual f low has a purgative function.”63 Although Dame Sirith’s decidedly excessive body is central to the tale, the narrative does not succeed in prosetheticizing it, for, despite its centrality, the difference of Dame Sirith’s body is not what first propels the narrative forward. In the beginning lines, the narrator informs us of Wilekin’s symptoms of lovesickness caused by his desire for Margery. He is sad, unable to sleep, and later admits he will “wakese wod / Other miselve quelle” if he’s unable to have her (7–15, 182–3). Thus, Wilekin’s illness sets the tale in motion, but Dame Sirith intrudes upon the text, supplanting his deficiency with her unruly body.64 Mitchell and Snyder explain that narrative attempts to close the gap that a deviance produces in a number of ways: through cure, removal from social condemnation, death or annihilation, or the reassessment of the difference as socially acceptable.65 While Dame Sirith effectively cures Wilekin of his lovesickness, the tale never suppresses the subversion that its title character personifies.66 Instead, her body actually exceeds the narrative at the end

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of the tale when she turns and offers her “services” to the audience: “And wose is onwis And for non pris Ne con geten his levemon, I shal, for mi mede, Garen him to spede, For ful wel I con.” (445–50)

Considering the possibility that the text was either meant to be read or enacted complicates how we interpret Dame Sirith’s concluding words to the audience. As a read text, Dame Sirith presents a narratorial contract of sorts to its readers that stipulates that the narrator who begins the narrative should comment on and conclude the narrative. Moreover, Dame Sirith ultimately surpasses her fellow characters: she not only displaces Wilekin from the center of the text, but also becomes its title character, despite the fact that Margery is the tale’s protagonist. In the same ways in which bodily boundaries are breached in the acts of menstruation and birth, Dame Sirith violates the boundaries of the text. Just as that which is part of the self becomes the Other in such reproductive functions, Dame Sirith crosses the boundaries of her text and becomes both part of and outside of the narrative. If we read the text as a performance, however, no such narratorial contract exists. If a single player or group of players performed the drama, then there would be no expectation of a narrator’s conclusion. However, having Dame Sirith turn to the audience and speak would extend the dialogue to the audience and bring them into its carnival moment of subversion;67 the old woman’s final words would transport the audience into the performance and also evoke the transgressive laughter characteristic of carnivalesque literature. Actors could also disrupt gendered and bodily boundaries through the use of costumes and voices. A male actor performing as Dame Sirith might augment his voice, stature, and body in order to appear as an old disabled woman. For example, at one of Edward I’s Round Tables, a male actor performed an interlude as a “loathly lady, with foot-long nose, donkey ears, neck sores, a gaping mouth, and blackened teeth” that ordered the knights to retrieve lost territories.68 The performance of both gender and disability here attests to the powerful subversion an able-bodied male actor playing Dame Sirith could enact. While such a performance indeed draws attention to the social anxiety surrounding feigned disabilities, it simultaneously reveals the illusory nature of both gendered and bodily norms. Ultimately, in her final actions, Dame Sirith completely exceeds the

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narrative, and the tale concludes with this senile hag, pregnant with subversion and laughter. “O Sweete Venym Queynte!”: Pregnancy as (Dis)ability in the “Merchant’s Tale” I next move to another fabliau that features a woman who uses her disabled body in order to gain power: Chaucer’s “Merchant’s Tale.” Thus, we move from the aging, defective female body of Dame Sirith to the young and fertile May. Though these women reside on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of age and reproductive ability, I plan to demonstrate that both are subject to—and ultimately exploit to their advantage—the same discourses that link femaleness, femininity, and disability. While most studies of disability within the “Merchant’s Tale” focus on January’s metaphoric and physical blindness, none has focused specifically on May’s participation in his blinding. However, it is important to note that Chaucer deliberately posits May in relation to January’s metaphoric blindness and that May’s excessively physical body usurps January’s sight. Thus, though January’s disabilities begin the tale, the focus of disability shifts onto May’s potentially dangerous female body. Chaucer’s depiction of May’s body as dangerous echoes medieval antifeminist authorities within biblical, patristic, and medical texts and, subsequently, renders her both disabled and capable of disabling others. Particularly, the pregnant body, which is interwoven throughout the tale’s subtext and finally literalized in May’s possible pregnancy at the end of the tale, represents both the threat and the disruptive possibilities of the disabled female body. As I demonstrate in the introduction, medieval male-authored discourses, particularly in conjunction with medical discourses, link female reproductive organs and feminine qualities to disability. In particular, medical texts often emphasized the ability of the vagina to harm men. For instance, Women’s Secrets reports ejaculation moistens the woman’s body, but dries up the man’s insides, resulting in illness and subsequent death: “This is the reason why those who have a great deal of sexual intercourse do not live for a long time because their bodies are deprived of their natural humidity, and this drying out is the cause of death.”69 The act of sexual intercourse and, in turn, the drying up of the man’s f luids is similar to a sucking action: “[During the sex act] the man feels his penis drawn and sucked into the closure of the vulva.” 70 Bettina Bildhauer links the portrayal of the vagina’s ability to “suck” the life out of men to vampirism. She writes that “unchecked, insatiable female desire [ . . . ] jeopardizes this guarded contact and encroaches upon the masculine subject, both physically and by usurping his active, dominant position.” 71

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Moreover, medieval instantiations of female monsters are most often connected to fears of uncontainable female sexuality. For example, the Sheela-na-Gig possesses an oversized, gaping vagina, and the vagina dentata exhibits its insatiable sexual appetite by devouring a man’s sexual organs with its jagged teeth.72 The explicit association of female desire with the destruction of male bodies reveals an anxiety about the female body’s capability of not only destroying men, but also usurping established structures of male power. The reproductive function of the female sexual organs, however, contradicts the notion of the dangerous female body. As such, the vagina embodies both destructive and productive qualities: it can devour the old and give birth to the new. Bakhtin links the gaping mouth of the grotesque body to the vagina, both sites that reinforce the open and penetrable qualities of the grotesque body: “This image [of the gaping jaws] is organically combined on the one hand with swallowing and devouring, on the other hand with the stomach, the womb, and childbirth.” 73 Both the open mouth and the vagina signify an entrance into the body that is productive: “The bodily depths are fertile; the old dies in them, and the new is born in abundance.” 74 May’s destructive yet reproductive vagina not only is able to deplete enough f luid and spiritus from January to diminish his eyesight, but also to dismantle traditional gender hierarchies through its procreative abilities. May’s pregnant body at the end of the tale, thus, stands in as the manifestation of the disabled female body’s ability to destroy and produce. In accordance with Mitchell and Snyder’s theory of disability in narrative, embodied difference launches the “Merchant’s Tale.” The tale begins with a wealthy, aged Lombard who, due to his age, seeks a wife with whom to produce his heirs. In addition to his advanced age, January’s body bears other marks of difference: his Lombard status situates him as greedy, prone to sexual excess, and metaphorically blind.75 Consequently, January’s disabilities open the first section of the tale and are ref lected in his misguided approach to marriage, but the female reproductive body remains just under the surface of the text. After spending “sixty yeer” (1248) indulging in sexual pursuits, he decides it is time to marry so that he may produce an heir and enjoy his own “paradyse terrestre” (1272, 1332).76 January’s decision to marry is thus rooted only in the material world; he is concerned merely with the earthly delights his wife will provide and the economic longevity that the heir she will produce signifies; the female body is the vehicle by which he will receive sexual and economic profits. Despite his old age, January seeks a wife “nat passe twenty yeer” (1417); predictably, the text presents such a union as undoubtedly unnatural.77 January’s search for a bride prompts a marriage debate

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between his two brothers, Placebo and Justinus. While Placebo does just what his name suggests and indulges January by agreeing with his plan to marry a young woman, Justinus, by recalling his own experience as well as antifeminist discourse, urges January to reconsider, noting that he will never be able to “plesen [a young wife] fully yeres thre” (1562). January, however, eschews Justinus’s advice and continues his search for a young and beautiful wife. He decides instead to follow his “owene auctoritee; / For love is blynd alday, and may nat see” (1597–8). The old man’s disregard of Justinus’s counsel highlights his metaphoric blindness; he is unable to see that his intended marriage to May will not work. Allusions to January’s Lombard ties to blindness and greed continue when he begins his search for his future bride. In his mind, January views “many fair shap and many a fair visage” as if someone had placed a bright mirror in a “market-place” (1580, 1583). January’s focus on the appearance of the women in his fantasies emphasizes his reliance on outward appearances and materialism as well as his inability to see properly. Moreover, he imagines his search for a wife occurring in a marketplace, which exhibits his Lombard ties to economics. To him, a wife is a “thyng,” a “disport,” and a producer of heirs (1278, 1332). Later, after he has selected May as his product and producer of choice, he declares that the “heven in erthe” of his marriage has been “boght so deere,” clearly locating his marriage decision within the secular, economic realm (1647, 1648). Not only does the text present January as disabled, but it also highlights his “unnatural” marriage. In addition to the obvious differences between the appearance of the “fresshe May” and the “hoor and oold” January with his bristly beard and wrinkled neck, the two are sexually incompatible (1822, 1400). January must rely on aphrodisiacs in order to sexually perform for his young wife; nevertheless, regardless of his herbally induced “corage,” May “preyseth nat his pleyying worth a bene” (1808, 1852). While the first section of the poem fully establishes January’s greed, lecherousness, and metaphoric blindness, it is not until after his marriage to May that January’s physical disabilities (other than his old age) come to the forefront. In fact, it is “[a]mydde his lust and his prosperitee,” those particularly Lombard characteristics, that January “is woxen [physically] blynd” (2070, 2071), suggesting that the text implicitly attributes January’s physical blindness to his Lombard connections, an obvious reference to the Lombard-Jew link. However, the text also locates January’s physical blindness within medieval medical discourse, adding a physiological element to the religious and social constructions of Judaism and Lombardy that already mark January as metaphorically blind. As Carol Everest explains, January’s loss of physical sight is directly linked to his old age and sexual excess.78 Particularly, medieval medical texts associate “loss

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of sight with excessive sexual indulgence and with a perilous physiological decline.” 79 In such medical discourse, young male bodies are warm and sufficiently moist; conversely, with age, such warmth and moisture decline. Sexual activity further threatens the loss of this humoral balance because it was thought to deplete moisture from the male body through the passing of semen. As Everest explains, this depletion in moisture leads to blindness because in medieval physiology “the eyes, the brain, and the genital secretions are closely connected.”80 Moreover, engaging in excessive sexual contact diminishes a second bodily element called spiritus, “the mysterious life-giving breath which permeates all living things,” a vital component of the eyes and, in turn, vision.81 While aging naturally depletes moisture and spiritus, sexual intercourse compounds the loss. As a result, January’s physical condition renders him particularly susceptible to losing his vision. In a general sense, January’s lecherous nature leads to the loss of his eyesight. But, it is specifically through sexual intercourse with May that January “contracts” his physical blindness. Chaucer directly relates May to January’s eyesight before he loses his vision. As noted above, January’s search for a wife is explicitly rooted in appearances; he even “purtrey[s] in his herte and in his thoght” the image of his fantasy wife (1600), an image that focuses on his future spouse’s young and shapely body (1601–2). Moreover, during his marriage feast, “January is ravysshed in a traunce / At every tyme he looked on [May’s] face” (1750–1). By establishing a relationship between January’s eyesight and May, Chaucer not only draws upon the common medieval tradition that stipulates that love begins with sight, but also lays the groundwork for situating May as a direct cause for January’s blindness. Indeed, Chaucer emphasizes sight much more than his probable source text, the Italian Novellino tales. While Chaucer has Damian and May communicate via hand signals, the lovers speak to one another through a long, thin tube in the source text.82 Moreover, Chaucer’s Damian exaggerates his love-sickness, which has been caused by the sight of May. Chaucer overtly implicates May in January’s blindness in the Merchant’s apostrophe to the audience that occurs just before January is struck blind: O sodeyn hap! O thou Fortune unstable! Like to the scorpion so deceyvable That f laterest with thyn heed whan thou wolt stinge; Thy tayl is deeth, thurge thyn envenymynge. O brotil joye! O sweete venym queynte! O monster, that so subtilly kanst peynte

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Thy yiftes under hewe of stidefastnesse, That thou deceyvest bothe moore and less! Why hastow Januarie thus deceyved, That haddest hym for thy fulle freend receyved? And now thou has biraft hym both his yen, For sorwe of which desireth he to dyen. (2057–68)

Notably, Everest draws a link between the narrator’s allusion to Fortune’s stinging tail and May’s dangerous vagina.83 Everest relates the biblical tradition of likening a scorpion to sexually excessive women to the Merchant’s allusion to Fortune’s “tayl” of “deeth” and the subsequent interjection, “O swete venym queynte!” (2059, 2061). Thus, “the Merchant may despise January for senile lustfulness, but in this passage he equally condemns May as the agent of her husband’s disability.”84 Although here he uses queynte as an adjective to describe venom’s “curious” properties, Chaucer is clearly punning on the term’s sexual connotations. The Riverside Chaucer glosses queynte’s noun form as an “elegant pleasing thing” or “sexual favor,” and Chaucer uses the term in both the “Miller’s Tale” (3276) and the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” (608) to refer to a woman’s external genitals. Paired with swete and venym, May’s vagina becomes both pleasing and poisonous. Bildhauer’s notion of the vampiric vagina comes to mind here, as does Bakhtin’s devouring yet life-giving womb. May’s vagina is not only able to “sting” January, but also to “suck” the sight and, potentially, the life out of him. While Everest does suggest that the tale implicates May in the physical disabling of January, her study mostly focuses on the aging male body and its vulnerability to blindness. However, medical texts of the Middle Ages provide valuable insight into how medieval people perceived the female body. Just as the Merchant’s pun on Fortune’s tail recalls May’s venomous “queynte,” medieval medical texts depict the female body, specifically the vagina, as potentially dangerous to men. The “Merchant’s Tale” effectively draws on these conf licting discourses about women’s bodies by using garden imagery in conjunction with the image of the poisonous scorpion’s tale. Scholars like Cynthia Kraman have noted May’s connection to the hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden that January has constructed, which marks May’s body as both desirable and fear-inducing. January wants to possess May’s body, but in linking her body to the landscape, Chaucer presents the female body as something “possessable” by men as well as “effectively disembodied” and marginalized.85 As stated above, January explicitly declares that he desires a wife to be “the fruyt of his tresor” upon which he hopes to beget a male heir (1270). Moreover, he frequently deems May an earthly “paradyse”

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and even constructs an enclosed garden in which he may “taken [ . . . ] disport” in the hopes of impregnating his wife (2147). Chaucer most clearly makes this link by setting May’s sexual escapade with Damian in the pear tree of January’s garden. May’s sudden craving for pears, the ruse she employs in order to deceive January, suggests May’s later pregnancy, as I will discuss in detail below. Additionally, the pear tree itself both suggests the potential fruitfulness of the female body and serves as the site where May’s scorpion-like “tayl” further deceives January; though the tree produces fruit, the fruit may not be legitimate, effectively terminating his familial line. Just as May’s body is linked to a garden wherein January may plant his seed so that she will bear fruit, the Merchant’s allusions to Fortune’s venomous, scorpion-like tail locates May’s vagina as poisonous and deadly; thus, it is both fruit-bearing and destructive. Within a gendered model of disability, it is possible to read both the inability to reproduce (as demonstrated by Dame Sirith) and the ability to reproduce (as evidenced by May) in relation to disability because medieval discourses on femaleness and femininity root the defective nature of woman/Woman in the dysfunctions of their reproductive organs. Just as medieval medical texts describe the menopausal woman as f lawed in her inability to purge wastes or bear children, such discourses portray pregnancy as a physical condition that hinders a woman’s participation in everyday life. As noted above, medieval medical, biblical, and patristic discourse link the female body to the disabled body in its f lawed nature and its ability to threaten and potentially destroy male bodies. Male thinkers and writers find further evidence of the female body’s danger to men in pregnancy. The pregnant body, itself excessive—swollen belly and breasts, uncontrollable physical and emotional changes—serves as tangible evidence of sexual intemperance and the transgression of gendered societal norms. In the thirteenth-century didactic text Hali Meidenhad, the author provides a detailed description of the pregnant body in order to discourage young women from marriage: Þi rudie neb schal leanin, ant ase gres grenin; Þine ehnen schule doskin, ant underneoðe wonnin, ant of Þi breines turnunge Þin heaued aken sare. Inwið i thi wombe, swel in Þi butte the bereð Þe forð as a weater-bulge, Þine Þearmes Þralunge ant stiches i Þi lonke and i Þi lenden sar eche riue; heuivesse in euch lim; Þine breostes burÞerne o Þine twa pappes, ant te milc-strunden Þe Þerof strikeð. Al is wið a weolewunge Þi wlite ouerwarpen [ . . . ]. [F]orwourðest a wrecche. [Your rosy face will grow thin, and turn green as grass; your eyes will grow dull, and shadowed underneath, and because of your dizziness your head will ache cruelly. Inside, in your belly, a swelling your womb which bulges out like a water-skin, discomfort in your bowels and stitches in your

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side, and often painful backache; heaviness in every limb; the dragging weight of your two breasts, and the streams of milk that run from them. Your beauty is all destroyed by pallor [ . . . ]. [Y] ou are reduced to a wretch.]86

The text’s obsessive focus on the unpleasant side effects of the pregnant woman’s changing body emphasizes the very real physical impairments that a woman endures in pregnancy. Additionally, the pregnant body threatens the promulgation of male lineage in the dangers it poses to its unborn fetus. In order to restrain the excessiveness of the pregnant body and reduce the harm it may impose on the fetus, restrictions on the pregnant body abound in medieval medical texts. In effect, the medicalization of pregnancy deems pregnancy a disability in an effort to control it. For instance, medieval medical discourse restricts the pregnant woman’s movements, diet, positions, and frequency of sexual intercourse, and even emotions. Classical texts like Soranus’s warn, “One must oppose the desires of pregnant women for harmful things [because] the damage from [them] harms the fetus just as it harms the stomach; because the fetus obtains food which is neither clean nor suitable, but only such food as a body in bad condition can supply.” 87 A body in such “bad condition”—in other words, the pregnant body—could effectively kill an unborn child through its monstrous appetite. The eleventh-century Trotula presents an anxiety about the pregnant woman’s appetite in relation to her disordered imagination: “care ought to be taken that nothing is named in front of [the pregnant woman] which she is not able to have because if she sets her mind on it and it is not given to her, this occasions miscarriage.”88 May’s declaration that a “womman in [her] plit” must have unripe pears signals to January that she is already pregnant with his heir (2335). Such a craving is indicative of pica, a condition that medieval medical authorities knew and commonly affects pregnant women, causing them to experience nausea, digestive troubles, loss of appetite, increased appetite for certain foods, general malaise, and vomiting.89 However, Milton Miller and Everest note that it is improbable that May is actually pregnant at the moment of her request due to numerous factors, including January’s advanced age, apparent impotence, and, as Everest explains, the widely accepted “two-seed” theory, which stipulates that a woman must have an orgasm in order to conceive.90 According to the two-seed theory, both the man and the woman must emit seed, an act that only occurs during orgasm, in order for conception to take place. May’s own pronouncement of her displeasure in January’s sexual performance suggests that she has not achieved orgasm during her “disport” with January.91 It is probable,

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then, that May’s craving functions as a deceptive ploy that allows her to mislead January only to betray him. Similar to Dame Sirith’s ambiguous disabilities that gain her entrance into Margery’s home, it is unclear whether May is indeed pregnant and suffering from pica or simply feigning the condition in order to get what she wants. May’s “disabled” body succeeds in figuratively and literally turning the roles within her marriage upside down. January, in his delight at his wife’s condition, stoops over and allows her to step on his back in order to climb up into the tree, thus implicitly consenting to his own cuckolding (2348). May’s “disability” allows her to escape the sexual advances of her husband and procreate with a more suitable partner. Just as the validity of her pica remains ambiguous, the “fruitful” triumph of her union with Damian remains uncertain.92 Ultimately, I side with Miller and Everest in reading May’s allusion to her pregnancy after her tryst with Damian as probable. Not only is the medical evidence convincing, but January’s early fear that his “heritage sholde falle / In straunge hand” (1439–40) becomes literalized in May’s actual illegitimate pregnancy, which fits the tale’s structural pattern of setting up metaphors and then literalizing them. The pear tree itself alludes to Damian’s probable impregnation of May: the “peres” function as phallic images and simultaneously evoke the French term père, or father. Though January’s impotence will not allow May to bear fruit, in this “père” tree, May will find a father for the heir January so desperately wants. In addition to literalizing January’s fears about promulgating a legitimate lineage, May’s pregnancy reinstates his figurative blindness. Though Pluto restores January’s physical sight, he is still unable to “see,” for he believes his wife’s excuse and accepts her unborn child as his own when he “stroketh” her belly “full softe” (2414). January regains his physical sight, but this miraculous act of healing is not complete, for his disability transfers onto May in the form of her pregnancy. In addition to fearing a pregnant woman’s imagination and appetite, male authorities also feared the pregnant woman’s ability to produce and carry defective or monstrous births to term. Hali Meidenhad warns virgins not to marry and procreate not only due to the pain and physical impairment of pregnancy and labor, but also the chance that they may give birth to impaired children: For ȝef hit is misboren, as hit ilome ilimeoð, anti wonti ei of his limen, oðer sum misfeare, hit is sorhe to hire ant to al his cun scheome, upbrud in uuel muð, tale bimong alle. [For if it is born handicapped, as often happens, and one of its limbs is missing or has some kind of defect, it is a grief to [its mother] and

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shame to all of its family, a reproach for malicious tongues, and the talk of everyone.]93

Many medical texts refer to “monstrous” deliveries of dead children, mole births, babies with physical defects, hermaphrodites, two-headed beings, creatures that are half-human and half-animal, and creatures with rotted f lesh. Of particular concern were mole births: blackened, shapeless masses of tissue that bore no resemblance to a “well-shaped” child.94 Though experts were conf licted on the causes for mole births, some maintained that lack of sexual intercourse triggers an overabundance of sexual desire and, hence, seed in the womb. This surplus of seed results in pollution, which produces the mole.95 Most medieval medical authorities blame such monstrous births on the parents’ sinful behavior, such as sexual deviancy or drunkenness. Monstrous births, thus, were tangible, visible signs of parents’ subversion of natural law.96 Though we do not know whether May’s illegitimate pregnancy will result in a literal monstrous birth, the child necessarily damages the purity of January’s lineage. Furthermore, the child itself, as well as its unorthodox conception, will come to tangibly represent the couple’s unnatural pairing and their own physical disabilities. May’s body is thus capable of producing a “monster” that will demonstrate, or serve as a sign of, the couple’s shared disabilities. However, because May’s body is the body that will produce the “monster,” she assumes the role of the disabled and the disabler. In this sense, disability not only hinders May, but also grants her a sort of power: May knowingly terminates January’s male line, and only she knows the true father of her child. As May remarks at the end of the tale: “He that mysconceyveth, he mysdemeth” (2410). May’s statement not only alludes to January’s physical and metaphoric blindness—he “mis-sees” by witnessing his wife’s adulterous behavior and misjudges by accepting her excuse anyway—but also emphasizes January’s inability to get her pregnant (he literally “misconceives”) and his misguided belief that he has, in fact, fathered a child. Just as in Dame Sirith, the hierarchical roles of the “official” world become topsy-turvy in the “Merchant’s Tale.” The old husband is overthrown so that the young and fertile wife can mate with the young lover, and Proserpina triumphs over Pluto by granting May an excuse for her actions. Even Chaucer’s replacement of the Novellino tale’s God and St. Peter with Pluto and Proserpina suggests the reign of the “unofficial” over the “official.” Though both Pluto and Proserpina use biblical examples to support their arguments for and against women, the use of the pagan gods allows for female commentary on Christian doctrine, and, ultimately, Proserpina maintains the last word in the debate and provides

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May with an excuse for her adultery.97 Moreover, May’s subsequent adoption of the role of January’s miraculous healer when she claims that her adulterous actions have restored his sight (2388) completely undermines the notion of miraculous cure that populates Christian hagiography. In this parody of hagiographic convention, May’s “saintly” suffering is a tussle with her lover in a tree. Thus, in this tale, it is the pregnant body that takes the place of the grotesque body: her “pregnancy” facilitates her coupling with Damian. Whether May is truly pregnant is irrelevant; what matters is that she performs the part of the incomplete, changing, pregnant body that undermines all that is static and transgresses all that is defined. While the narrative attempts to prostheticize January’s blindness, it simply supplants his blindness with May’s pregnancy, effectively leaving the conclusion insufficiently concluded, the “deviation” inappropriately prostheticized. Thus, May’s pregnant body signifies what the grotesque female body is capable of: destroying (causing January’s blindness) and creating (procreating with Damian). Although Chaucer allows May to have the last word, her body, pregnant with an illegitimate child, functions as a corporeal reminder that the female body remains inextricably linked to the disabled body. As both Dame Sirith and May show, the carnival moment of some fabliaux allowed for some women to use the discourse of disability in order to gain power. By exploiting the disruption of boundaries that disability causes, these women demonstrate that the “defect” of the female body can effect change. However, not all of the women of medieval literature are able to use the discourse and fact of disability in such productive ways. As my next chapter will demonstrate, the unruly women of much medieval literature endure physical punishment that results in impairment in an attempt to contain their unruliness.

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CHAPTER 2 PHYSICAL EDUCATION: EXCESSIVE WIVES AND BODILY PUNISHMENT IN THE BOOK OF THE KNIGHT AND THE “WIFE OF BATH’S PROLOGUE”

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eoffroy de La Tour-Landry’s Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry (the Book of the Knight) and Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” feature socially unruly female characters that are punished by male agents, usually husbands, in order to normalize their excessive behavior. In each of these texts, able-bodied wives face violent castigation that results in physical impairment for their sinfulness, thus demonstrating a direct link between inward corruption and outward physical appearance.1 Each text explicitly positions physical impairment as a threat to excessive women, furthering this link and thereby demonstrating the disabling effects of femininity. Moreover, both of these texts demonstrate that the unruly able-bodied woman was already socially interpreted as disabled prior to incurring her punitive physical impairment. These texts, consequently, place women in an uncomfortable predicament by marking unruly women as deviant, yet aligning ideal femininity with disability. If, as I will show, the physical violence in each text seeks to enforce narrative closure while also disciplining the already excessive female bodies that the narratives attempt to textualize, then, as a result, the bodies of the texts’ female characters make outwardly manifest their inward sins. Thus, the creation of a new deviance—the physical impairment the woman incurs—attempts to normalize the original “problem” of the narrative—the unruly woman. In these cases, disability becomes prosthesis; essentially, the texts attempt to use difference (the physical impairment that the punishment causes) to normalize difference (the deviancy of the socially unruly woman). While this punishment can result in the complete

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silencing of women, as in the Book of the Knight, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath stands as a woman who cannot and will not be limited by her disability. The “Domestication of Violence”: Physical Violence and Marriage in Medieval Society Before discussing my texts of study, I would like to outline brief ly the role of violence against women in medieval society as ref lected in canon and secular laws.2 I must emphasize that my study of literary depictions of physical violence against women that result in impairment does not seek to classify medieval society as overtly and distinctively violent toward women. Rather, I hope to examine the ways in which violence against women in medieval literature ref lected, reinforced, complicated, and even inf luenced the lives of medieval women. As Anna Roberts contends, texts that feature violence against women reveal “strategies through which violence against women was naturalized and sanctified by particular, gendered constructs of heroism, nationalism, domestic space, [and] memory.” Thus, while violence may not be “the ‘subject’ of [such] texts [ . . . ], nonetheless, the habits of thought ‘normalizing’ violence against women persisted, inscribed in narratives whose popularity withstood the trial of many centuries.”3 Eve Salisbury, noting the oft-studied link between medieval laws and literature, finds that “a body of literature endorsed by authors and poets conversant with the laws of late medieval England” added to the “normalization of domestic violence” in the later Middle Ages.4 Angela Weisl, in her study of violence against women in the fabliaux of the Canterbury Tales, notes that literary representations of violence both ref lect and affect the gendered power structures of medieval society: “Man’s need to control women through violence, doubly revealed in literature and life, becomes a kind of quiting of them for the sins of Eve, a continuous justified abuse that goes primarily unquestioned through a long and varied tradition.”5 Due to her representation as the sinful and weak descendant of Eve in religious discourse, the medieval woman often faced physical punishments for her indiscretions. Violence in marriage did occur and was even encouraged: in her study of erotic violence in the Middle Ages, Marilynn Desmond notes that Christian marriage after the fourth century became an institution built upon the notion of the “conjugal couple,” which was held to “new standards of conduct, including fidelity for both partners,” the violation of which could be punishable through violence.6 In later medieval society, Desmond claims, medieval discourse justifies violence as a way to uphold such standards, thereby linking marital love and violence. She explains, “Legal texts, sermons, conduct literature, and literary texts all

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assume a certain level of violence to be normative in marriage.” 7 Though Barbara Hanawalt contends that violence against women in medieval society was not as prevalent as we may expect, she does concede “that corporal correction of the wife by the husband was a generally accepted social custom.”8 As Christian marriage became increasingly institutionalized in the West, ideologies for proper marital conduct began to materialize, which delineated a gendered hierarchy. Husbands frequently maintained this hierarchy through violence.9 Desmond contends that eros and violence intermingle in medieval marriage: “The nature of marital affection that emerges in Christianity depends on the proper hierarchical arrangement within the household and the exemplary husband will perform his hierarchical role through violence and the threat of violence,” resulting in what Desmond calls the “domestication” of erotic violence.10 Both canon laws and secular laws allowed husbands to “correct” wives through physical force. Hanawalt finds that, though both lay and ecclesiastical courts punished husbands who took abuse too far, ecclesiastical courts had a “broader definition of reasonable correction” and were thus more lenient against accused husbands.11 James A. Brundage observes that the fundamental bodily difference between the sexes as outlined in scripture directly inf luenced canon laws dealing with violence in marriage. Genesis asserts that different materials compose male and female bodies— God forms Adam from dust and Eve from Adam’s rib—and scriptural writings like the letters of Paul imply that woman is inferior to man. As a result, canon laws follow this line of thinking, granting a husband powers similar to those of the Roman paterfamilias, which included corporeal punishment against women and children. Brundage notes that under canon laws, a husband has “the legal right to enforce his commands and that he could do so, when necessary, by force.”12 Despite a husband’s freedom to “correct” his wife’s behavior through physical force under such laws, canonists often attempted to restrain the amount or degree of physical force used, though these efforts were limited. For example, the twelfthcentury Summa Parisiensis decreed that husbands could use violence as long as it did not result in the wife’s death.13 Brundage concludes that, while canonists did attempt to limit domestic violence and even acknowledged it as a viable cause for some marital separations, they ultimately “possessed few means to repress, or even to discourage, domestic violence.”14 Physical Education: Medieval Conduct Literature for Women In order to teach young women the proper ideology of wifely conduct, medieval conduct literature for women often portrays “unruly” wives

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receiving violent physical punishments from their husbands or other authoritative male figures. I adopt Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark’s definition of conduct literature as “written texts systematizing a society’s codes of behavior,” including texts such as the Book of the Knight, Christine de Pizan’s Livre de trois vertus and the Ménagier de Paris, and poems such as “The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter” and “How a Wise Man Taught His Son.”15 The production of these texts for both young men and women burgeoned in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Diane Bornstein, whose analysis of conduct literature for women was the first to take seriously medieval conduct literature as an important object of literary and historical study, notes that “the encyclopedic impulse to classify and define, the insistence upon hierarchy in political and social theory, the actual social mobility and instability of the time, the attempt of the aristocracy to affirm their position, and the rise of the middle class” of the later Middle Ages led to a proliferation of conduct literature all across Europe.16 Notably, conduct literature for women most frequently adopts the threat of physical violence as a pedagogical tool. The turn to bodily violence in these texts ref lects the medieval medical/scientific understanding of the female body as f leshly. According to Clarissa Atkinson, medieval patristic thinkers believed that “the education of women ought to be completely unlike the education of men because their destiny was different, and the goal was not to overcome but to recognize and affirm the essential (biological) division.”17 Since men viewed women as inferior in body, mind, and social position, much of women’s education was informal and vocational. Anna Dronzek theorizes that conduct books addressed to males and females exhibit gendered rhetoric that is rooted in a medical understanding of the sexed body. Because medical and religious discourses deemed the female body itself as defective, they also cast female intellect as inferior to male intellect. Consequently, teaching methods ref lect this gender bias. In her study of late-fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century conduct books, Dronzek discovers that the texts consistently demonstrate that their authors “expected boys and girls to learn in different contexts, to absorb information in different ways, to require different uses of physical correction as an educational tool and to possess honor grounded in different principles,” and contends that the medical understanding “of women as more rooted than men in the physical world” underscores such gendered expectations.18 Dronzek observes that conduct literature for girls that is written in verse contains more repetitive refrains than that for boys does. These refrains often mark the change from one stanza to another or occur after the central speaker or character teaches a lesson and is about to teach another. Dronzek concludes

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that these refrains may be aural devices that would allow young girls to memorize the poems as they were read aloud. While poems for girls rely on these mnemonic aural devices for memorization, the poems for boys include visual cues that suggest the poems were read upon the page: “In short, authors appear to have expected boys to read their texts, perhaps as they would study in a schoolroom, but anticipated that girls would listen to another person read the texts to them.”19 In addition to its aural organization, conduct literature for girls expresses its content differently than that for boys. Namely, conduct books for girls focus more on experience, while the conduct literature for boys uses more abstract concepts. For instance, conduct literature for boys catalog “lists of duties” that are “devoid of examples or illustrations.”20 Conversely, due to the medical notion of the female body as physically and therefore mentally inferior, conduct literature for girls incorporates familial figures, physical symbols, and concrete examples to define abstract concepts. Elizabeth Robertson has found that a similar understanding of the female body and female learning inf luences earlier medieval prose written for young women. Her analysis of devotional prose such as Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meidenhad demonstrates that such educational treatises for women, though centered on female spiritual growth, incorporate practical, concrete examples that remain focused on the quotidian, domestic, and bodily lives of women.21 The focus on the body and experience in educational literature for women echoes its focus on what Droznek calls embodied honor. While conduct literature for young boys taught the transcendence of the body and the pursuit of the abstract qualities of logic, rational thought, and social standing, it thoroughly confined young girls to their bodies by admonishing them to fulfill domestic roles and remain sexually chaste. Most significant is Dronzek’s finding that female conduct literature uses more examples of physical violence to teach lessons compared to that written for boys. Although medieval educators did use physical chastisement in the classroom, textual examples of violence against young women in female conduct literature far outnumber those against young men in male conduct manuals. Dronzek finds that in textual depictions of violence against women “violence to the women occurs upon their mistakes, in the same way that a schoolboy’s mistake would incur violence upon him.”22 Whereas educators may physically punish young men in the classroom for their mistakes, conduct literature for young women textualizes the violence: in a direct reversal of Mitchell and Snyder’s narrative prosthesis, a woman’s deviance is not prostheticized through a cure or remediation of the deviance, but rendered even more deviant by an inf liction of violence that sometimes results in a visible physical impairment.

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Ultimately, the literary depictions of violence against women “inscribe” the lesson “upon the fictional woman’s body.”23 The literary depiction of violence, then, grounds both a young woman’s improper behavior and the resulting punishment for that behavior in her “defective” body. Dronzek continues her analysis by outlining specific examples of violence against women in conduct manuals. Though Dronzek links the use of these examples to a medical understanding of the female body and the way that body learns, she does not investigate the effects of the violence upon the fictional female bodies of the texts she examines. What happens to these women after they are punished? How do their resulting physical impairments function in the narrative? What happens when a woman reciprocates or even desires such violent punishment? In my next section, I turn to the most violent of instruction manuals for young women, the Book of the Knight, in order to explore these questions and examine further the intersections between femaleness, femininity, and disability that occur in literary depictions of women with disabilities. Broken Bodies, Ideal Wives: The Book of the Knight of the Tower A well-known conduct book of the late fourteenth century that portrays violence against women in its exempla is Chevalier Geoffrey de la TourLandry’s Book of the Knight of the Tower. I turn to the Book of the Knight here not simply because of its popularity in fifteenth-century England, but because of its incredibly violent depictions of punishment against women that results in their physical impairment. Written in the late fourteenth century, this widely circulated text was available in two English translations by the fifteenth century. Geoffrey de la Tour-Landry (known as the Knight of the Tower, or simply the Knight) originally wrote this text for his daughters in the hope of providing them with examples of proper behavior for young ladies. William Caxton later translated and printed the French text into English in 1484 at “the request & desire of a noble lady which hath brouȝt forth many noble & fayre douȝters which ben virtuously nourished & lerned.”24 Thus, both the original French text and Caxton’s translation were published on demand from parents who hoped to offer their daughters proper social instruction. Caxton even suggests that other parents show their daughters the text: “I aduyse euery gentilman or woman hauying such children/ desyryng them to be virtuously brouȝt forth to gete & haue this book to thende that they may lerne/ hou they ouȝt to gouern them virtuously in this present lyf ” (3). As M. Y. Offord explains, the book “is largely a compilation of moral precepts, with advice on religious and social conduct, supported by stories

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illustrating how women should and should not behave.”25 The Knight’s compilation includes biblical stories, well-known tales and myths, and personal stories from his own life. He provides examples of the conduct of “good” women as well as “bad” women. The Knight also stresses the embodied aspect of female honor by emphasizing the importance of female chastity and detailing horrific bodily punishments that unchaste or dishonest women endure due to their indiscretions. While other conduct manuals for young women may brief ly mention or allude to the threat of bodily punishment for unchaste women, the Knight’s text is almost obsessed with enforcing moral conduct upon women through the use of corporeal penalties. Dronzek has noted that women in the text do not have to commit sexual indiscretions in order to be punished. In fact, “remarkably few cases result from straightforward sexual misbehavior on the woman’s part [ . . . ]. More frequently, the Knight demonstrates how simply the hint of impropriety, even when the woman in fact did nothing wrong, can ruin a woman’s reputation.”26 The Knight’s emphasis on complete moral propriety implies a fear of female sexuality; consequently, he details gruesome punishments for unchaste and dishonest women, literally attempting to terrify them into proper behavior. The Knight begins his book with an emphasis on religious piety. Women must first serve God at all times (14). As the book progresses, we find that women are then subject to obeying their fathers, and afterwards, their husbands. Indeed, all of the Knight’s examples of “bad” women depict young women who disobey the rules established by God, their fathers, or their husbands. The Knight’s formula, thus, places women under constant patriarchal control. And, as we soon discover, any transgression of that control results in grave penalties. While the text presents several exempla of “good” women who are rewarded—such as the daughter of the King of Denmark who is rewarded for her meek behavior by winning the hand of the King of England (Chapter XII)—and “bad” women who are punished—such as the vain woman who is paralyzed by a gust of wind (Chapter XXVI)—I will be focusing here on the episodes in which “bad” women are punished with violence by male figures that causes visible, physical impairment. The Knight clearly roots the potential deviance of women in their defective bodies, noting that “by cause she is of lyghter courage than the man is/ that is to saye that the woman was fourmed and made out of the mans body/ And in so moche that she is more feble than the man is/ And yf she resisteth agenynste the temptacions of the deuylle/ of the world/ and of the f lesshe/ the more worthy to haue gretter meryte than the man” (157). Mark Addison Amos, who notes that the Knight’s book seeks both to educate and “gentrify” his daughters, finds that the Knight gives his

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daughters the method of fasting as means to restrain their lustfulness. By connecting a woman’s abstinence from meat to the control of her sexual desires, the Knight “makes explicit [fasting’s] connection to lechery and its purpose in regulating sexual desire.”27 As Caroline Walker Bynum has shown, fasting was frequently used in the Middle Ages in order to hasten access to the divine. In particular, Bynum contends that women used self-starvation in the hopes of controlling the f lesh and exploiting it to enact imitatio Christi.28 The Knight emphasizes that fasting is particularly useful for women in his chapter entitled “How good doughters ought to faste till they be maryed,” in which he stresses to his daughters that fasting will “adaunte youre f lesshe” in order “to kepe yow more clene and holyly in the seruyce of god” and “to kepe clene youre vyrgynyte and youre chastyte” (19, 20). Here, he directly associates the control of the body’s appetite for food to the control of the female body’s sexual appetites. In later chapters, the Knight continues to emphasize the importance of controlling what one eats and drinks through exempla that reward some women for fasting and punish those who indulge in feasting.29 Amos connects the Knight’s focus on women’s temperance in sexuality and food to the Bakhtinian grotesque female body that possesses a devouring mouth and vagina that threaten to erode stable identity boundaries. Amos writes that the Knight’s obsession with female sexual and bodily appetite alludes to “the potential for transgression and violation of the socially-constructed bodies of women through their orifices.”30 Amos notes that, in the Book of the Knight, women’s mouths impart the same dangerous boundary-crossing as their vaginas imply: “For the text, female mouths are dangerous not only because of what women might (unwisely) choose to put in them, but for what might come out of them in the form of speech.”31 As chapter 1 demonstrates, the grotesque female body closely aligns with literary depictions of both the unruly and the disabled female body. In these depictions, the deviance that visible bodily impairment produces only increases the already transgressive female body’s potential power to disrupt and violate boundaries. And yet, while physically abusing women and causing impairment potentially heightens the women’s powers to disrupt, in the Knight’s book, this is not the case. Instead of bestowing these women with increased power, the trauma to their bodies renders them completely silent. The exemplum that occurs just before the Knight’s chapter on why women should fast directly links a woman’s disorderly eating habits to her deviance and ensuing bodily punishment. Though this exemplum does not represent direct man-on-woman violence, it does demonstrate how physical violence could serve as proper punishment for an unruly woman. The Knight narrates the story of two sisters. The eldest remains steadfast

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in her prayers and fasting, while the youngest secretly feasts on “soupe or somme lycorous thyng” while “her fader and moder were a bedde” (18). Soon, the youngest marries a man who tries to change her ways. One night, her husband awakens and feels for his wife only to find her gone from bed. Upon searching for her, he finds her feasting with other men and women in a wardrobe. Suddenly, the husband sees one of his servants “had embracid one of the wymmen of the chambre” and angrily strikes the man with his staff, breaking off a splinter: “a splynt sprange out of the staf in to the one eye of his wyf/ which was by hym/ in suche manere/ that by mysauenture her eye was smeton oute/ and loste her eye” (18). The husband soon abandons his blind wife and marries another. When the father of the two daughters comes to visit them, he is thrilled by his eldest daughter’s happy and richly adorned home. However, when he visits his youngest, he finds her and her house “all oute of arraye And how she had gouerned her nycely and wantonly” (19). He returns home and scolds his wife for allowing their youngest daughter to eat whenever and whatever she wanted. In this exemplum, the Knight associates the young woman’s immoderate eating habits with the groping that occurs in the wardrobe; thus, bodily appetite blurs with sexual desire. Though the narrative remains ambiguous on whether the woman who is groped is the wife or someone else, the husband’s actions imply his wife is to blame, and, ultimately, it is she who endures the brunt of the punishment by being blinded. Notably, it is only after his wife’s impairment that her husband decides to leave her: “And thus her husbond had her in suche hate. That he tooke his herte fro her/ and set it in another” (18). The Knight, then, makes clear that her injury is the reason for the husband’s leaving, but he is quick to add that her impairment is a fair punishment for her excessive eating: “And [the blinding] happed by the euyl gouernaunce of his wyf/ whiche was acustommed to lyue dyssolutely and disordynately/ bothe on mornynges and on euenynges/ werof the grete part of the harme was heres/ by cause she lost her eye/ and the loue of her hosbond” (18). Thus, in serving his duty as the man of the house by attacking a male servant for inappropriate behavior, the husband fortuitously punishes his wife for her misbehavior. In other words, he inadvertently, yet fittingly, causes her outward appearance to match her inward imperfection.32 In one wave of a staff, the wife loses her eye, “her houshold and menage wente all to nought and to perdicion,” and her husband abandons her, causing her to fall “in an euyll astate & moche lassed and lesse sette by of al men that knew her” (19). The Knight here stresses that the woman’s physical injury impairs not only her vision, but also her ability to function as a “proper” wife, a role played perfectly by the older sister.

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When the sisters’ father comes to visit them, he sees his eldest daughter’s well-managed, lavish home and his younger daughter’s disorganized, messy home. The youngest daughter, now husbandless and one-eyed, is presumably unable to keep the household in order, the primary responsibility of a noble wife. According to Bornstein, “a medieval wife played an important economic role. As head of her household, she was practically a business manager. If she was a noblewoman, she had to supervise a larger staff of ladies-in-waiting, pages, and servants.”33 The Knight explicitly suggests that this wife and her husband are of a noble status and that the company in the wardrobe consists of members of their staff; the husband finds his wife with “his clerk and two of his seruauntes” (18). At the loss of her eye, however, she becomes unable to maintain her economic role as household manager. Her house is not only in disarray, but it is also in “perdicion” (18). The Knight, thus, closely aligns poverty with disability, a connection shared by his contemporaries. Henri-Jacques Stiker explains that the poor and the disabled often intermingled in medieval society.34 Those with disabilities who were unable to work often had to resort to begging, which sometimes allowed them to act as important sites of access to eternal life (although this clearly is not the case for the wife of this exemplum).35 In France, where the Knight was writing, blind people were directly linked to the poor because of aveugleries that sanctioned begging, such as Louis IX’s Hospice des Quinze-Vingts. In addition, city-wide expulsions of mendicants that included the blind throughout Europe helped to lump together the blind and the poor in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.36 The blind wife, her home now unkempt and impoverished, has lost not only her husband and vision, but also her ability to manage her home, a distinct marker of her upper-class status. By grouping the older and younger sisters together, the Knight is able to portray the ideal young woman and her counterpart, effectively demonstrating how “good” women are rewarded and “bad” women are punished. Amos contends that the “good” women of the text, those who remain under the control of their fathers or husbands, represent Bakhtin’s classical body, while the “bad” women take the shape of the grotesque body. An ideal wife remains “circumscribed by her marriage,” her body “accessible only to her rightful husband in their private space.”37 Conversely, an imperfect wife “violates that regulatory system” and becomes the incomplete, public body of the female grotesque.38 In this particular exemplum, the older sister fits the schema of the classical body: she follows her father’s orders and later remains steadfast in both her appetitive and sexual desires after her marriage. Her body remains closed, private, and the property of her husband. The younger sister, however, defies both her father and her husband by indulging her appetites. By

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hosting a public feast in the private space of her wardrobe, the wife demonstrates the boundary-crossing that her grotesque body produces. In the wardrobe, her body is not merely her husband’s; while he “groped” for his wife, presumably to access her body in the privacy of their bed, she was “synging and crienge, iaping, and plaieng, [and] making suche noise that unnethe thei haue herde the thunder” with several men and women (8, 9). The public, carnivalesque space that the wardrobe becomes underscores the wife’s grotesque body and appetite. Bakhtin contends that banquet and feasting scenes clearly depict the clashing of boundaries that the grotesque body represents. He writes, “Eating and drinking are one of the most significant manifestations of the grotesque body. [ . . . ]. [T] he body transgresses here its own limits: it swallows, devours, rends the world apart, is enriched and grows at the world’s expense.”39 By engaging in feasting and sexual exploits with her staff in her wardrobe, the wife brings the public sphere into the domestic space of her home, completely undermining the hierarchy of her marriage and household. Her husband, in an attempt to turn the topsy-turvy right-side up, violently punishes her, albeit indirectly, causing both her body and the body domestic (her household) to take on the outward appearance of her grotesque actions. Whereas the women of chapter 1 were able to use their disabilities to disrupt, the world of the Knight’s exempla prohibits the wife from accessing such power. Her accidental punishment leaves her completely silenced, left only with a ramshackle house, one eye, and her father’s deep disappointment. The exemplum ends with the father blaming his own wife for his daughter’s misdeeds and misfortunes. His wife, heretofore unmentioned, assumes the burden of the blame for her daughter’s fate and, like her daughter, remains silent. While the exemplum above depicts the unintentional disabling punishment of a woman by a man, it is important to my study because it demonstrates three important elements of the entanglement of violence, femininity, disability, and the female body in the text’s milieu: the exemplum shows the simultaneous intertwining of female misbehavior and proper femininity with physical disability, demonstrates that the rejection of a physically disabled woman is a suitable response, and makes evident that physical violence against the female body serves as an appropriate teaching tool for female readers. The following exemplum, which depicts direct man-on-woman violence, demonstrates these three elements by portraying the sometimes harsh punishment that a woman may receive for speaking out of turn. In Chapter XVII, the Knight asserts that “a woman in no maner wyse ought stryue ageynst her husbond/ ne answere hym so that he take therby displaysyre” (35). The Knight then tells of a woman who foolishly spoke for her husband in public “so noiously. And

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shamefully to fore the peple/ that he bicam angry and felle to see hym self so relyed to fore the peple/ that he had therof shame” (35). Despite the husband’s pleas for her to discontinue her insults of him in public, the woman persists. Finally fed up with her verbal insults, the husband “smote her with his fyste to the erthe. And smote her with his foote on the vysage so that he brake her nose/ by whiche she was euer after al disfygured. And soo by her ryotte and ennoye she gate her a croked nose” (35). The Knight ends the tale with an assertion that the wife’s punishment was warranted, for a wife should remain silent and let “the hubonde haue the hyhe wordes” (35). Whereas a husband can speak “to fore the peple,” a wife should only “reprehende hym and aduyse him” when she finds “hym alone” (35). While the wife in the previous exemplum receives punishment for making a spectacle of her eating habits in front of others, this wife receives punishment for speaking ill of her husband in public. The Knight clearly delineates public speech as the husband’s responsibility—as only a husband should “haue the wordes”—and only grants the wife the ability to verbalize any disagreements with her husband in the privacy of their home. The public setting of the wife’s speech thus lends to the carnivalesque moment of the tale and the potential disruptive power of her speech. What’s even more threatening than the setting of her speech, however, is the kind of speech she presents. Bakhtin notes that curses, insults, and oaths “are the unofficial elements of speech. They were and are still conceived as a breach of the established norms of verbal address; they refuse to conform to conventions, to etiquette, civility, respectability.”40 The wife completely inverts the hierarchical roles of her marriage by hurling insults against her husband in public. Such an action marks the wife as unwomanly, and the Knight emphasizes the gender boundary-crossing of her actions by labeling her a “chydar” and a “rampe” (35). The Middle English Dictionary (MED) defines rampe as “a virago,” or a woman with manly qualities “who usurps a man’s office.” By speaking against her husband in front of a public audience, the wife steps out of her prescribed social role as the manager of the private, domestic sphere and attempts to assume a masculine role. As in the previous exemplum, the boundaries of public and private, masculine and feminine blur as a result of a woman violating gender norms. Because of the wife’s deliberate violation of her prescribed social role, her husband violently punishes her. Again, the male authority of the tale uses physical violence in an attempt to limit the threat that the grotesque female body suggests. This time, the wife’s face is permanently disfigured when her husband breaks her nose with his foot. As Bakhtin suggests, as a feature of the grotesque body, the nose “always symbolizes the phallus.”41

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Thus, by breaking her nose, the husband essentially “castrates” his “virago” wife, rendering her body—already viewed as lacking because it is female—even more incomplete. With this in mind, we can thus characterize such punishments—those that leave the female body even more deficient—in the text as acts of castration that seek to take power away from women who have transgressed their gendered social roles. The double-bind of femininity and disability emerges here when the husband, unhappy that his wife has overstepped her gendered bounds, “castrates” his wife, causing her a disfigurement that destroys her physical beauty. At first glance, facial disfigurement may not seem like a blatant physical disability; presumably, the wife retains physical mobility, the classic marker of physical ability, after her injury. However, the visibility of the wife’s disfigurement compounds the severity of the deformity, causing it to become a true disability for her. As I discuss in my introduction, the movement from impairment to disability is a process that involves the reaction to and interpretation of the impairment by others. Erving Goffman’s theory of stigma is helpful here: when one possesses a visibly different physical attribute, the negative reactions of others who do not possess such a difference result in discrediting the one who possesses the difference as deviant. When this “discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity” occurs, the impairment moves from a nonnegotiable physical reality to the social perception of the impairment.42 Though the Knight does not say whether her husband leaves her after she is impaired, the tale that occurs just before Chapter XVII suggests the reaction a husband may have to such a facial defect. In this tale, a wife becomes jealous of another woman and instigates a fight. The rival grabs a staff, hits the wife, and breaks her nose, leaving it permanently crooked. The Knight declares that such a blemish is particularly injurious, “which is the moost syttyng membre that a man or woman may haue/ as it that stondeth in the myddes of the vysage” (32). Ultimately, the husband leaves his wife because, “by the dysfyguryng of her nose and myschaunce/ her husbond myght not loue her soo parfytely after/ as he dyde to fore/ as he woned to doo/ And other whyle took other” (32). Although we do not know whether the previous wife loses her husband after her disfigurement, it is clear that she loses her ability to speak in public. In fact, the wife becomes so ashamed of her looks that she never again shows her face in public. Consequently, her husband succeeds in fully relegating her to the domestic sphere, and her castration is complete. In both of the exempla described above, a wife reveals her unruliness through actions that center on her mouth: the first wife eats immoderately, and the second wife speaks ill of her husband. As Amos suggests, the Knight focuses on the transgressive capabilities of women’s orifices.

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In the tale of the roper’s wife (Chapter LXII), the Knight extends that focus to another female orifice, the vagina, by depicting a sexually insatiable wife who cheats on her husband with a prior. In this tale, a roper’s wife follows the advice of her “gossip,” who both persuades her to cheat and helps her to cover up her actions. On two separate occasions, the husband almost catches his wife, but each time, the gossip concocts an excuse for the wife, and the roper accepts it. After seeing his wife enter the priory alone, he warns “her vpon payne of losynge of her eye/ that neuer she sholde be so hardy to goo ne conuerse in the hows of the sayd pryour” (89). The wife, however, cannot contain her temptation, and she again goes to the prior. The husband follows his wife into town and watches as she enters the priory. After he sees the illicit couple together, he “brought her ageyne/ and told her/ that euylle she had kepte his commaundement” (90–1). Angry, he goes into town and makes a “couenaunt with a Cyrurgyne to hele and sette ageyne fast to gyder two broken legges,” returns home, and breaks both of his wife’s legs with a stamper, declaring, “ ‘At the lest shalt thou hold a whyle my couenaunt/ and shalt not go ageynst my deffence there as it pleaseth me not’ ” (90). The wife is then crippled and bedridden for some time. However, her punishment is not enough to contain her voracious sexual desires; she soon goes back to her adulterous ways: “Whan she was amended of her legges/ came the Pryour secretley to her” in bed (90). Due to the commotion in his bed, the roper wakes to find the couple together, explodes in anger, and takes out his knife and slays the lovers. When the authorities arrive, they absolve him of his crime, noting that the sinful actions of the wife and the prior “made them bothe to receuye deth vylaynysly” (91). The husband calls his neighbors over, who, observing the ugliness of the prior, compare the wife to “the she wulf/ that is the female of the wulf/ whiche taketh and cheseth to her loue the most fowle and lothly wolf ” (90). Like the wives in the previously discussed tales, the roper’s wife steps out of her prescribed role as a wedded woman. While the other two transgress boundaries with what they put in or what comes out of their mouths, the roper’s wife takes her unruliness a step farther by engaging in sexual activity with the prior. By having the roper’s wife commit adultery with a prior, the tale completely upsets the hierarchical structure of not only marriage, but also religion. The Knight asserts that “by cause he was a man of Relygyon/ and the woman wedded was the synne gretter” (90). In effect, the world of this tale becomes topsy-turvy, and the closed, classical body of a “good” wife becomes the grotesque body of a “bad” wife, open to all including men-religious. The Knight further underscores the carnivalesque atmosphere of the tale and the grotesqueness of

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the female body by aligning female speech with female sexual misconduct. In implicating the wife’s gossip in her misdeeds, the Knight directly intertwines the potential dangers of the female mouth and vagina. The gossip plays the roles of instigator and enabler by persuading the wife to cheat on her husband and then providing her with explanations for her suspicious actions. Accordingly, the Knight cautions his own daughters against the dangers of women like the gossip, warning, “wherfor the sage sayth/ She that taketh [a gossip] selleth her self ” (87–8). The wife’s punishment for her indiscretions is to lose the ability to walk by having her legs broken by her husband. Just as she “broke [his] commaundement,” he will break her legs. Before doing so, however, the husband interestingly forges a covenant with a surgeon to heal two broken legs. This seemingly superf luous detail shows that the roper, unlike our other two husbands, does not intend to make his wife’s punishment permanent. The impairment is to only temporarily confine the wife to the house—to keep her within the domestic realm—so that she can no longer break her husband’s commandment. When her legs are broken, the commandment remains intact; however, when the wife’s legs begin to heal, she again breaks her husband’s commandment. Nevertheless, the roper’s punishment does not have its desired effect because of the temporary nature of the punishment. The Knight surmises, the wife “wente ageyne to the pryours hows/ as ye hed to fore/ And ouermore as the grete anguysshe and dolour that she had suffred of her legges was past/ yet she ne wold chastyse ne kepe her self clene of tht fowle synne of lechery” (91). With her body whole, the wife is again capable of violating her husband’s laws. The wife’s predicament nicely sums up what happens to the wives of the Knight’s book: an unruly woman whose body is broken will stay within the limits of proper wifely conduct. Physical punishment that impairs women works to keep wives within their prescribed social role by either restricting them to the domestic sphere (the disfigured wife can’t go out in public; the roper’s wife is confined to her bed) or deeming them unfit to remain within it altogether (the one-eyed wife loses her husband and the ability to manage her home). It is clear that, within the logic of the Knight’s book, an unruly woman’s body must be broken in order for her to be silenced. The husbands of the Book of the Knight thus attempt to curtail the unruliness—the deviance, in Mitchell and Snyder’s terms—of their “bad” wives by making their bodies physically deviant. While it would seem that the text’s constant displacement of deviance might be disruptive and empowering, ultimately, violence only succeeds in stif ling all of the potentially unruly women of the text. In fact, the roper’s wife, the one wife that comes the closest to countering her husband’s control

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through her direct disregard of his rules, ends up paying for her disruptiveness in the most extreme fashion: she loses her life. Deafness and (Dis)ability in the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” Though the women of the Book of the Knight become silenced by their physical chastisement, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath remains undeterred by the corporal punishment that her excessive behavior prompts. The Wife of Bath, thus, functions as the ultimate example of the “good” wife gone bad. Several scholars have turned to conduct literature like the Book of the Knight when analyzing the behavior of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. For instance, Mary Carruthers’s foundational feminist essay “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of the Lions” notes that Alisoun’s “primary attack in both the prologue and the tale is directed at a body of marital lore held commonly by her own class and articulated most fully in the deportment books written to foster ‘gentilesse’.”43 Bornstein adds that Chaucer may have been directly drawing from conduct literature for women, specifically The Good Wyfe Wold a Pylgremage, when detailing Alisoun’s intemperance in dress and behavior in the prologue.44 Margaret Hallissy even labels Alisoun the definitive “archwife,” or the polar opposite of the ideal wives constructed in conduct manuals.45 Juliette Dor suggests that Alisoun embodies a subversion of the prototypical “good” wife that the women of the Book of the Knight represent. Dor finds that Alisoun’s “wandering by the weye” (469)46 suggests not only her participation in pilgrimage, but also her drifting outside of the physical and moral spaces designated for women in conduct literature.47 In particular, Alisoun deviates from the virtues of modesty, chastity, silence, and sobriety that conduct manuals prescribe for women in her ostentatious dress, overt sexuality, outspokenness, and love for wine. As a result of her purposeful deviation from the social norms of wifely behavior, Alisoun suffers violence from her fifth husband that first results in bruises and culminates in the partial loss of her hearing. While the Wife of Bath’s partial deafness is immediately highlighted in the second line of her portrait in the “General Prologue,” little scholarship directly explores the significance or implications of her disability. Most readers gloss over the feature, noting that it serves only as yet another reminder of Chaucer’s attention to detail .48 However, as Melvin Storm rightly notes, we cannot ignore the significance of Alisoun’s deafness, for it both opens her portrait and closes her prologue.49 Moreover, Chaucer singles out Alisoun’s deafness by making it the only bodily defect he describes in both the “General Prologue” and the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue.” Although Chaucer informs us of the Cook’s ulcer, the

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Friar’s lisp, the Miller’s wart, and the Summoner’s pustules, none of these bodily defects surfaces in the prologues and tales of the pilgrims.50 Though Storm views Alisoun’s deafness as a marker of her spiritual ignorance and her ability to “turn a deaf ear” to spiritual truths, he fails to investigate the gendered elements of her disability. Furthermore, Storm limits Alisoun’s disability to her partial deafness. Keeping in mind the connections between femininity, femaleness, and disability that I outline in my introduction and chapter 1, I contend that Chaucer’s text enmeshes Alisoun’s body in the discourse of disability before Jankin strikes his blow. As Alisoun informs her audience, women are defective in both mind and body simply because of their sex: “For al swich wit is yeven us in our byrthe; / Deceite, wepynge, spynnyng God hath yive / To wommen kyndely, whil that they may lyve” (400–2). Alisoun thus blames her “continueel murmur” and “grucchyng” on the natural predisposition of her sex, demonstrating her belief in (or awareness of ) the linking of stereotypically negative feminine attributes to biological sex (406). As I will show, in the view of Mitchell and Snyder’s narrative prosthesis, what spurs the narrative of the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” is not her deafness; it is her excessively sexual body, overtly masculine behavior, and her presumed childlessness and postmenopausal infertility.51 Her deafness, thus, is her punishment, an attempt to restore order to her unruly state and to normalize the difference that her excessive female body represents. Alisoun is one of three women—including the Prioress and the Second Nun—that populate Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the “General Prologue” only profiles her and the Prioress. Notably, as Priscilla Martin has suggested, though both women are defined in terms of their sexuality (either the lack or excess of it), it is the excessive sexual nature of Alisoun that is threatening; though the Prioress is feminine and perhaps sexually attractive, Alisoun eagerly acts on her lustful desires.52 It is obvious that Alisoun deviates from the prescribed social roles for wives: she has had multiple sexual partners, may not have had children, and is presumably unable to bear children at the moment of her prologue. Thus, her sexuality is not productive; it is, as Martin succinctly notes, potentially “destructive and insatiable.”53 The Wife of Bath materializes as a particularly bawdy and bodily figure, and certain features of her body correspond to her moral indiscretions. Well versed in “that art of the olde daunce,” Alisoun is “gattothed” and has “hipes large,” two physical characteristics that allude to her overt sexuality (468, 472). While Alisoun’s wide hips accentuate her shapely body, her wide-set teeth most likely suggest her lecherousness. According to “medieval physiognomy such teeth indicated an envious, irreverent, luxurious, bold, faithless, and suspicious nature.”54 Later,

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in her prologue, Alisoun draws attention to her teeth, noting that they were an asset to her pursuit of her twenty-year-old fifth husband (603). Alisoun also mentions that she has “the prente of seint Venus seel” as well as the “Martes mark upon [her] face” (604, 619). The Riverside Chaucer glosses these as birthmarks that symbolize sexuality: the “Venus seel” appears most frequently on the “ ‘loins, testicles, thighs, or perhaps on the neck,’ ” while the “Martes mark” refers to one born with Mars ascending, an astrological sign that a woman will be unchaste.55 Karma Lochrie finds that these birthmarks are not birthmarks at all, but instead imply Alisoun’s hypertrophied clitoris, a female defect documented by medieval medical texts that was thought to cause same-sex desire in women. Though Lochrie does not label Alisoun as disabled and does not directly engage disability theory, it is evident that a hypertrophied clitoris was indeed considered to be a bodily defect in medieval culture. For instance, in the medical writings of Soranus and Avicenna, an enlarged clitoris was thought to be dangerous, for it not only appeared penis-like, but it also actively sought out sexual pleasure from other women. Soranus claims that “ ‘those possessed of the tentigo [clitoris] assume an appetite resembling that of men and they engage in the venereal act,’ ” while Avicenna links another disorder, ragadia of the womb, or a large finger-like growth that results from a prolapsed uterus or an ulcer in the womb, to tribadism: “Sometimes there arises additional f lesh in the mouth of the womb, and sometimes there appears on a woman a thing that is just like the penis aroused in coitus. And sometimes it occurs to her to perform with women a coitus similar to what is done to them with men.”56 Lochrie finds evidence that Alisoun not only possesses an enlarged clitoris, but that she is also a medical virago, a woman “whose physiological assimilation to masculinity through the retention of menses” causes “exorbitant sexual desire and masculine strength.”57 Citing the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” as an example of the wife’s use of “lengua queynte,” Lochrie explains that Alisoun’s references to her “queynte,” “bele chose,” “pith,” and “bren” suggest her clitoris and grant her sexual desire a “masculine” agency that seeks sexual domination (444, 447, 475, 478). Ultimately, Lochrie asserts that Alisoun’s status as an overly masculine “hypertrophied clitoris-wielding woman” exposes “male masculinity as prosthetic.”58 In the same way, I argue, Alisoun’s hypersexual body that must be physically disabled in order to be controlled reveals the prosthetic of the “normal” female body. Alisoun’s prologue delineates her deficient status as a sexually active woman far before her hearing impairment comes into play. Alisoun begins the “Prologue” by speaking of her experiences with marriage and her desire to “bistowe the f lour of al [her] age / In the actes and in fruyt

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of mariage” (114–15). The social standard that defines Alisoun, and other wives like her, is a standard set forth in scriptural, patristic, and deportment literature: that “greet perfeccion” of “virginitee” (105). In what we might call her “dissertation” on the perfection of virginity (lines 105–61), Alisoun does not measure herself up to the Virgin, the female representation of perfection. Instead, Alisoun identifies Christ as the ideal example of virginity when she explains, “Crist was a mayde and shapen as a man” (138). Designating Christ as the embodiment of virginal perfection perhaps emphasizes Alisoun’s knowledge that even virgin female bodies are seen as lacking in relation to male bodies. All other bodies that fall outside of Christ’s “perfeccion,” then are inferior and imperfect. Within a gendered model for disability, we can examine the intersection of disability and gender as on a continuum. On one side, we see the “norm,” or the male, heterosexual, nondisabled, virgin body. In the middle rests the female, heterosexual, nondisabled, virgin body, and on the other side exists the female, disabled, sexual body. The female body differentiates from the perfect, male body, while the sexual female body distinguishes from the virgin female body, ultimately rendering the sexually active female body, in its excess, as imperfect. In other words, the perfection of the male virgin body mitigates the perfection of the female virgin body, which, in turn, relegates the sexual female body into the position of Other. As my introduction suggests, medical and scriptural discourse implicitly link the overly sexualized woman and the disabled person. Arguing that the female sexual body is imperfect does not imply that the married woman had no place in medieval society. Some medieval patristic discourse on marriage, however, outlines a distinct hierarchy of sexual purity. According to religious writers like Jerome, virginity, celibacy, and chaste marriage were clearly the purest options for medieval women. Other writers like Augustine upheld the notion that celibacy was a purer state than marriage, but contended that if such states of perfection were too difficult to attain, sexual intercourse within marriage was the next best option, for it would produce good (i.e., children) out of evil (i.e., lust).59 Consequently, a sexual marriage was by no means condemned, but it was imperfect in relation to virginity or even chaste marriage. Furthermore, the appropriateness of multiple marriages was an apparent source of anxiety and debate, as the antifeminist discourse that Alisoun alludes to in her prologue evidences. Alisoun’s support of multiple marriages and fondness for sex as a means of pleasure, not procreation, designate her body as deviant and, in turn, potentially dangerous. As such, the prologue marks her deviant body as in need of discipline. Acting as a deviance that generates discourse, Alisoun’s disruptive, sexual body initiates her narrative, and the narrative itself attempts to limit it.

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Unlike the women depicted in chapter 1, who are able to transcend the limiting effects of the narrative, Alisoun’s body is rendered deaf in order to contain her excessiveness. Just as the “bad” wives of the Knight’s book suffer punishment, the difference that Alisoun’s excessive body represents leads to her punishment, which creates further bodily difference. In contrast to the Knight’s “wives,” however, Alisoun’s impairment does not hinder her behavior; she continues to enact her sexual deviancy. It is Alisoun’s sexual body that generates the narrative of her prologue; in this narrative, she recounts the experiences of her multiple marriages. At the same time, her prologue acknowledges the narratives that the sexual female body has generated among patristic writers. Specifically, through her own life story, Alisoun demonstrates the (male) desire to bring unwieldy bodies like hers under control in her synthesis of antifeminist discourse. In the first part of the prologue, Alisoun manipulates patristic texts, particularly Jerome’s Adversus Jovinianum, in order to ref lect on her own views of marriage. By questioning patristic interpretations of the superiority of virginity to marriage, she is able to defend her multiple marriages and her affinity for sex. Later, as she narrates the accounts of her five marriages, she weaves throughout it antifeminist writings by such authors as Jerome, Theophrastus, Walter Map, and Deschamps that attempt to restrain or reform the excess or disorder of the sexual female body. Antifeminist, protofeminist, historical figure, battered wife—Alisoun morphs into an endless procession of roles within critical discourse. The contradictory nature of these multiple roles emphasizes the potentially subversive ambiguity that Alisoun represents; however, scholars often ignore Alisoun’s ambiguity in favor of searching for the one “true” reading of her. As Arthur Lindley remarks, such scholars assert “she’s good or she’s bad, she’s smart or she’s dumb, Chaucer’s for her or against her” when they should embrace that she’s not simply the Wife of Bath, “she is the Wife of Both.”60 Some scholars find that Alisoun’s use of antifeminist discourse is evidence of her adherence to her own imprisonment in the patriarchal system: she must use male authority as her own.61 Others, like Jill Mann and Carolyn Dinshaw, contend that she reworks male authorities in order to allow multiple readings of their discourse—including readings that highlight a woman’s perspective.62 Though Alisoun rehearses such antifeminist diatribes as “we wyves wol oure vices hide / Til we be fast, and thane we wol hem shewe— / Wel may that be a proverebe of a shrewe!” (282–4) and “For half so boldely kan ther no man/ Swere and lyen, as a womman kan” (227–8), she makes no apologies for her actions. Instead, she uses the discourse to indict her former husbands by claiming they spouted such verbal abuse while they were drunk (380–2). Her simultaneous resistance and adherence to male authority in

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both her prologue, which details her intellectual and physical opposition to her husbands, and her tale, which recounts a female-based intercession into a rape case, invite scholars to praise her as an activist against domestic violence63 or condemn her as a “a proper wife who not only enjoys being beaten up but who is also an incurable romantic.”64 Instead of resorting to an “either/or” methodology that attempts to limit Alisoun as a figure of her text and of the discourse on her text, I follow Lindley in resisting a “true” reading of Alisoun as either protofeminist activist or oppressed wife. Rather, I seek to exploit her complexity by adding another potential role to her list: disabled woman. Chaucer, the narrator, begins his portrait of Alisoun by identifying her deafness: “A good wif was ther of biside Bathe, / But she was somdel deef, and that was scathe” (445–6). Describing her deafness as “scathe” labels her deafness as both a pity (as the Riverside glosses the term) and as a punishment. The MED defines scathe as a “matter of regret, a pity,” but also explains that the term can signify “harm, injury, loss, damage” and can specifically indicate “harm or injury resulting from battle or war” or “harm resulting from punishment.” Chaucer here calls attention to both the misfortune of her impairment and the impairment’s status as a punishment. Though Jankin intends the impairment to teach Alisoun a lesson, it is apparent that she does not heed to the message. Instead, like a battle scar, Alisoun’s deafness serves as bodily evidence of her involvement in and survival of a very real battle of the sexes. It is clear that readers are to interpret the injury as a punishment for Alisoun’s excessive behavior when Alisoun reports that, like the husbands in the Knight’s book, at least one of her husbands resorts to physical violence in an attempt to control her unruly behavior: Now of my fifthe housbonde wol I telle. God lete his soule nevere come in helle! And yet was he to me the mooste shrewe; That feele I on my ribbes al by rewe, And evere shal unto myn endyng day. But in oure bed he was so fresshe and gay, And therewithal so wel koude he me glose, Whan that he wolde han my bele chose; That thogh he hadde me bete on every bon, He koude wynne again my love anon. I trowe I loved hym best, for that he Was of his love daungerous to me. (503–14)

That Alisoun admits to feeling the painful bruises that Jankin leaves on her body makes evident his sometimes violent treatment of her; her

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body becomes the text that documents the material effects that antifeminist discourse and unreliable laws can have on women. Eve Salisbury explains, “By verbally unveiling her bruised and battered body Alisoun discloses a heretofore hidden body of evidence; she indicts legislation that in theory claims to protect women while in practice it more often brutalizes them.”65 However, despite his violence towards her, Jankin remains Alisoun’s favorite husband, especially in the bedroom. Indeed, one can read Alisoun’s representation of the violence Jankin imposes on her as thoroughly entangled in her sexual pleasure. As Elaine Tuttle Hansen has shown, the Middle English lexicon allows for Jankin’s “daungerous” love to be both “standoffish,” as The Riverside Chaucer glosses it, and “domineering,” “overbearing,” and “risky.”66 Earlier in the prologue, Alisoun describes her own sexual desire as “daungerous” when she asserts her plan to marry as many men as possible: “in wyf hod I wol use myn instrument / As frely as my Makere hath it sent. / If I be daungerous, God yeve me sorwe!” (149–51). Though the Riverside glosses this use of the word as “grudgingly,” thus describing her intent to use her “instrument” liberally, the other medieval denotations of the word undoubtedly underscore Alisoun’s own penchant for erotic violence. Alisoun’s entanglement of sexual desire and violence demonstrates Desmond’s notion of the “domestication of violence,” or the “conceptual link between eros and violence” in medieval marriage.67 Indeed, throughout her prologue, Alisoun clearly connects sex to violence, claiming to have made her first three husbands “swynke” until their deaths (202) and bragging that she tortured her fourth husband for cheating on her (494). Her tale explicitly fuses the link between sex and violence that her prologue implies by recounting the rape of a nameless maiden. Salisbury further analyzes Alisoun’s ambivalent stance on erotic violence, noting that Alisoun’s ultimate act of resistance to male authority—her defacement of the “book of wikked wyves” (685) from which Jankin religiously reads—may actually signify her obedience to male mastery and her desire for a physical reaction from her husband: “[The destruction of the book] is precisely the action that provokes a violent response from Jankyn; he is willing neither to listen to her homily on appropriate reading materials for husbands nor to tolerate her spontaneous editing of the book she finds so reprehensible.”68 The book, a compilation of antifeminist texts that profiles the evils of historical, mythological, and biblical wives, is the tangible evidence of the patriarchal discourse—like the Knight’s conduct manual—that sets out to regulate the disobedience of women. She violently damages the narrative of such antifeminist discourse by ripping out three of the book’s pages. The violence of her action is crucial: she wounds the very narrative

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that her deviant body produces and that produces her body as deviant. The antifeminism of the book lambasts marriage by rehearsing the innate evils of women. One of the authors included in the book is Trotula, the eleventh-century physician who contributed to the medical treatise known as the Trotula. While most scholars remain puzzled as to why the female author, who offers tempered views on the female body and its functions, is included in a list of antifeminist texts,69 they fail to point out that the physician wrote only part of the text. Subsequent sections, as my introduction outlines, root stereotypically negative feminine qualities in the imperfect anatomy of the female body.70 Hansen adds, “Jankyn’s and the Wife’s fight, summed up by her claim that she was ‘beten for a book’ (712), represents what modern feminist critics have repeatedly alleged, the real power of mere words and stories to do material damage to women.” 71 Thus, Alisoun’s violence to the book anticipates Jankin’s violence to her body, which ultimately results in her physical impairment. After tearing out the pages, she hits Jankin on the cheek, knocking him to the ground. He then arises and strikes the blow that leaves her deaf in one ear (788–96). As Irina Metzler shows, examples of literal deafness abound in medieval medical textbooks and the miracle stories of saints. Authorities differentiated between congenital and acquired deafness, and though treatments existed, medical experts frequently found deafness to be incurable.72 Medieval people metaphorically interpreted deafness in a similar fashion as blindness. The ears, like the eyes, were necessary portals through which to receive important spiritual information. Hearing often symbolized knowledge, while deafness signified a restricted ability to comprehend. Storm reports that, in patristic writings, deafness signifies “the sickness of disobedience and ignorance.” 73 Moreover, he finds that biblical writers frequently used the metaphor of deafness, noting that, in such writings, the ears become “the internal hearing of the soul, obedience to God’s precepts, the hearing of faith, or understanding.” 74 Some writers even linked deafness, like blindness, to non-Christians who purposefully turn away from the truth of Christianity.75 Because of the many connections between the social interpretations of deafness and blindness, it is probable that the same excessive bodily and sexual deviances assoicated with blind people may have become linked to those who were deaf. Chaucer’s Alisoun certainly embodies many of those deviances—excessive sexuality and bodily aberrance to cite a few. Storm reads Alisoun’s deafness as a metaphor for her imperfect spiritual state. Because the ear would be the portal through which Alisoun would learn spiritual doctrine, its blockage would then signify her inability to process such teachings. Storm cites Alisoun’s “misunderstanding”

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and “distortion” of religious texts in the prologue as evidence for her deafness to spiritual authority and, in turn, her f lawed spiritual state.76 Storm’s reading of Alisoun’s deafness corresponds to Mitchell’s theory of the “materiality of metaphor” brought about by the disabled body, which states that narrative relies on the disabled body to represent greater social maladies; in this case, physical deafness demonstrates the defective spiritual state of sexually voracious wives. Storm fails to read Alisoun closely enough, however. Her use of antifeminist discourse clearly does not ref lect one who “takes her authorities [ . . . ] out of context, fails herself to understand and interpret them aright, and distorts them in the recounting.” 77 While the literalness of Alisoun’s disability is indeed clear-cut—both Chaucer as narrator and Alisoun speak of her deafness (446, 668)—its metaphoric significance is not. Though Alisoun may in fact “distort” her male authorities, she demonstrates a solid understanding of them in the process of that distortion. She is not completely “deaf ” to such teachings; on the contrary, she is fully aware that she must understand the rules in order to know why she breaks them. Many scholars have already noted Alisoun’s vast knowledge of scriptural, classical, and patristic texts, as her close adherence to them demonstrates.78 Consequently, Alisoun’s use and exclusion of such writings is a matter of choice, not ignorance. For instance, she deliberately cites biblical passages that support her outlook on marriage and omits those that do not.79 Additionally, as noted above, she manipulates antifeminist discourse to represent not an argument against women, but one against men who abuse their power over women. In a sense, Alisoun’s reworking of her male authorities represents the woman-authored discourse that she so desires (and that her own sexual body produces) when she states, By God, if women hadde writen stories, As clerkes han withinne hire oratories They would han written of men moore wikkednesse Than al the mark of Adam may redresse. (693–6)

Even though the teachings and language of male “auctoritee” may confine Alisoun, she demonstrates how a knowledge of the rules of her oppressors permits her to manipulate the rules into something less disabling: Jankin burns the book and grants her sovereignty over their relationship and his estate (813–22). Jankin’s gift of sovereignty after his physical abuse of her seems to suggest that Alisoun is actually rewarded by her physical impairment instead of being punished. However, as is everything associated with the Wife of Bath, her sovereignty remains ambiguous. Despite earning dominion over

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Jankin’s estate, Alisoun ultimately submits to him, remaining “kynde” and “trewe” for the rest of their marriage (823, 825). This uncharacteristic obedience to Jankin conf licts with the freedom Alisoun claims to have won, leaving readers to question whether she has dominated her husband or has been dominated by him. The tale she tells her fellow pilgrims is no exception. The rapist-knight marries an old hag—frequently presumed to be an alter ego of Alisoun herself 80 —after receiving from her the answer to what women most desire. After the knight grants the loathly lady sovereignty, she comes into line with the values of the court, transforming into a young, beautiful woman who is deferential to her husband’s command. In both instances, a husband grants the freedom of choice to a wife whose body is imperfect; thus, in both the prologue and the tale, a woman’s imperfection leads to her own reward. However, such reward is quickly tempered, for, in each case, the wife relinquishes her newfound freedom to the husband. Though Alisoun’s sovereignty in her marriage is tempered by her obedience to her husband, the physical punishment she endures does not silence her in the ways that the abuses in the Book of the Knight silence women. While the wives of the Knight’s book lose their beauty, status, voices, and even their lives, Alisoun’s physical disability does not immobilize her in any way. As the “General Prologue” explains, Alisoun enjoys a successful position as a skilled cloth-maker (447–8), thwarting any notion that her impairment may impede her ability to contribute to the labor force. In addition to being able to work, Alisoun is a seasoned pilgrim, having traveled to such famous pilgrimage sites as Jerusalem, Rome, Boulogne, Spain, and Cologne (463–6), and she presumably travels without the company of Jankin.81 Thus, at first it seems that Alisoun travels in spite of her impairment, but is equally possible that she travels because of her impairment. In fact, in accordance with Mitchell and Snyder’s narrative prosthesis, the entire narrative of the Canterbury Tales hinges on the imperfect bodies of the pilgrims. As Chaucer reveals, each of his pilgrims is making the trip in order to thank St. Thomas for his help during an illness: “[ . . . ] to Caunterbury they wende / The hooly blissful martir for to seke, / That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke” (16–8). Thomas á Becket’s shrine was a well-known site for miraculous cures at the time Chaucer was writing. By 1275, Jacobus de Voragine included St. Thomas in his compilation of the lives of the saints, The Golden Legend. Voragine reports that at his tomb “our blessed Lord hath showed many miracles” and that it would be impossible to recount them all.82 Despite their vast number, Voragine does list some of the miracles, including cures for blindness, muteness, and lameness. Notably, the saint is known to grant “the deaf their hearing.”83 This begs the question, is Alisoun

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traveling to Canterbury—and has she traveled to other shrines—in search of a cure for her deafness? As Metzler has shown, medieval medical textbooks generally treat deafness, especially congenital deafness and deafness longer than three years, as incurable.84 Though Chaucer does not specify how many years have lapsed since Alisoun lost part of her hearing, it is possible to infer that more than a few years have passed, especially when Alisoun speaks in the past tense of their reformed relationship: she reminisces of the time “after that day” when they stopped fighting and reports that she “was to hym as kynde / As any wyf from Denmark unto Ynde, / And also trewe, and so was he to me” (822, 823–5). Moreover, while Alisoun’s deafness is acquired and partial, medical practitioners would most likely consider it irreversible since it was caused by an injury and not a disease of the ear.85 As a result of the existence of few reliable medical treatments for her hearing loss, Alisoun may have resorted to seeking out a miraculous cure. However, as always, nothing is straightforward when it comes to Alisoun. Because she declares that her intentions to go on pilgrimages are not devout, we cannot conclude irrefutably that she is searching for a miraculous cure. On her own admission, Alisoun asserts that her love of pilgrimages is based on “leyser” and seeing and being seen (551–3): Therefore I made my visitaciouns To vigilies and to processiouns, To prechyng eek, and to thise pilgrimages, To pleyes of miyracles, and to mariages, And wered upon my gaye scarlet gytes. (555–9)

Thus, perhaps the more interesting question here is whether Alisoun is using her deafness as a rationale for going on pilgrimages, or, in other words, taking vacations under the guise of pilgrimage. Could she, like Dame Sirith and May, be exploiting her disability for personal gain? It is certainly not unwarranted to think so. Alisoun has no qualms about feigning bodily infirmity in order to get what she wants from Jankin; after he hits her ear, she falls to the ground, pretending to die. Immediately remorseful, he kneels at her side, and she quickly strikes him back, which leads him to relinquish his land and estate to her (796–821). Nevertheless, in the process of becoming enabled through the physical abuse her husband doles out, Alisoun’s body becomes permanently altered. But, unlike the silent wives of the Knight’s book, Alisoun fights back, not only by striking Jankin but also by gaining temporary “governance” of his “tonge” (814–5). In a mutual act of violence, corporal punishment disciplines both Alisoun’s deviant body and Jankin’s abusive

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body. Only Alisoun’s body, however, remains permanently impaired; though Jankin may feasibly escape from his wife’s control (and perhaps has, as her prologue and tale imply), Alisoun’s deafness is likely to be never reversed. Alisoun’s story, thus, begins and ends with disability. Her disability produces her narrative, which is a response to the antifeminist discourse that seeks to limit disorderly female bodies like her own. Therefore, the prologue directly hinges on her sexual body, and the antifeminist discourse woven throughout constantly threatens to limit it. By examining these texts through a lens that considers gender and disability, we find that narrative drive takes on a “masculine” role that seeks to control “feminine” deviance. What happens to the wives of the Book of the Knight and Alisoun, then, demonstrates that narratorial control over unruly female characters is inscribed in the text, and, often, that control takes the form of disabling physical violence. Alisoun, however, attempts to resist such masculine control by turning the violence upon her husband and his book. But, when she crosses the line by attempting to disable a man and his text, she bears the mark of her punishment on her body. We are left asking whether Alisoun breaks free from male authority by exploiting her impairments, or whether she simply reiterates the cycle present in texts like the Book of the Knight: woman deviates from man, man physically abuses woman, and woman defers to man. We will continue this exploration in the next chapter by considering women who are punished by supernatural sources.

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CHAPTER 3 REFIGURING DISABILITY: DEVIANCE, PUNISHMENT, AND THE SUPERNATURAL IN BISCLAVRET, SIR LAUNFAL, AND THE TESTAMENT OF CRESSEID

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o continue our discussion of medieval texts in which violence against women results in physical impairment, this chapter will examine texts that portray women punished by both divine agents and humans (both male and female) under supernatural enchantment. In Marie de France’s Bisclavret, Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal, and Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, a woman behaving subversively soon suffers a violent punishment that causes her to incur a physical impairment at the hands of a supernatural agent. The effect of incorporating a supernatural agent into the narrative is twofold. First, supernatural agents of punishment create an opening in the narrative that allows for a critical assessment of discourses that present women as inherently defective in both body and character. Second, the supernatural punishments represent an intrinsic narrative drive to control the deviancy that the unruly female character creates. However, instead of neatly concluding the narrative, the bodily impairments caused by the punishment of the character end up producing alternative narratives that challenge common medieval notions of femaleness, femininity, and disability. As a result, these alternative narratives work against the fundamental narrative drive to control textual deviancy—represented by unruly women—by critiquing the very notions of femininity and disability upon which the text’s deviancy is based. The supernatural elements, thus, provide a space in each text for a critical analysis of dominant representations of women and ablebodiedness.

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Textual/Sexual (Re)production in Marie de France’s Bisclavret Considered the earliest known female French poet, Marie de France probably wrote for the Norman-ruled British court in the twelfth century.1 Little is known about Marie except for her name (which she identifies in Guigemar, St. Patrick’s Purgatory, and the epilogue of her Fables) and her works—a collection of Breton Lais, a collection of Fables, and the moral tale St. Patrick’s Purgatory.2 Marie’s lais, from which Bisclavret comes, are short, rhymed tales of Celtic origin that often contain chivalric and/or supernatural elements. In her Prologue to the Lais, Marie claims to be converting the original oral Breton tales into written text (33–40). Scholars have often commented on whether Marie’s status as a woman writing for a male-dominated court could have affected her narrative style. Although evidently educated (in addition to writing in AngloNorman French, she demonstrates knowledge of Breton, Latin, and English in her translations), Marie takes great pains to prove not only her ability, but also her suitability as a woman writer. Stephen Nichols notes, “Perhaps, as woman, because she could not enjoy the advantages of a clerkly education, her prologue [to the Lais] takes rather more pains than others of the period to spell out the nature of her knowledge and how she intends to use it.”3 For instance, in the Prologue, she asserts that one who is gifted at writing should not hide her talent from others: Ki Deus ad duné escïence E de parler bone eloquence Ne s’en deit taisir ne celer, Ainz se deit voluntiers mustrer. (1–4) [Whoever has received knowledge And eloquence in speech from God Should not be silent or secretive But demonstrate it willingly.]

Thus, instead of secreting away her skill, Marie chooses to continue to preserve the oral tales she has heard by transforming them “into word and rhyme” for public consumption even though such labors have kept her awake at night (40, 41). Marie’s hard work into the night demonstrates her commitment to perfecting her craft. Moreover, as Nichols has surmised, Marie’s labors into the night suggest the economic value of her writing and her desire for patronage.4 Diana Faust adds that her nightly writing may have been more than a vocation; it may have been more akin “to an obsession” that “preempted even sleep.”5 Perhaps most intriguingly, Faust suggests that Marie’s gender may have compelled her to take

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the precautions of composing “her written narratives in secret, hidden away from the eyes of others.”6 Faust links Marie’s writing in the night to several of her female characters’ propensity for creating secret narratives in the Lais. I note, however, that Marie’s desire not to “secret away” her writing skills, her secret night writing, and her prominent announcement of her authorship illustrate several contradictions that uniquely demonstrate her vexed position as a female court poet. In addition to demonstrating Marie’s need to defend her marginal position as a female court poet, Marie’s narrative techniques in her Lais often reveal a particular form of writing that several scholars attribute to the medieval understanding of women. Nichols links Marie’s conversion of oral folk tales into written texts not just to the hybrid culture of Anglo-Norman England but to her own status as a woman as well.7 He argues that Marie’s meshing of oral culture and literacy forms “an inversion of the usual medieval hierarchy where Latin represents identity and power [ . . . ] while the folk culture figures as a marginalized other.”8 This technique allows her to connect the masculine discourse of “authoritative institutions” with folk traditions commonly “associated with the domestic labor of women—the spinning song (chanson de toile)—so-called because it was long assumed that women sang such songs while working.”9 Because it straddles the line between elite and popular culture, Marie’s poetry demarcates a f luid space that both acknowledges the changing Anglo-Norman culture and includes women in the literary audience. Michelle Freeman’s earlier article anticipates Nichols’s findings. Freeman finds that Marie’s narrative structure—particularly her use of narratorial beginnings, such as prologues, etymologies, and origin stories—represents Marie’s desire to gender the (male) literary tradition by rewriting male-authored discourses from a gendered perspective that relies upon notions of textual production and female reproduction.10 Using what Freeman calls a “poetics of silence,” Marie purposefully omits elements crucial to the production of her text (i.e., she does not quote or translate her sources), thus revealing a “feminine” poetics that may be viewed as a “paradoxical absence-presence that brings forth, that gives birth to and speaks the poem before us.”11 Similarly, Rupert Pickens links Marie’s narrative style to female (re)production by asserting that Marie’s use of violence and sexually ambiguous characters in the Lais exploits the connections between creative and procreative fruitfulness in order to portray “the nature of womanly writing.”12 Pickens focuses on Marie’s frequent use of the “body poetic,” a sexually ambiguous body that both produces and is the product of discourse, a body that is “the locus ofproductive textuality born in pain.”13 Marie’s sexually ambiguous

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characters, who are often subject to violent acts, create textual and/or oral discourse as a result of enduring bodily violence. Pickens aligns these characters and the often painful processes they endure in order to create their own discourse not only with Marie’s sexually ambiguous narrator, but also with Marie herself, a woman author who Pickens claims must present herself as androgynous so that her texts are accepted by a maledominated court. Pickens’s theory that bodily violence produces discourse resembles David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis, or the notion that literary discourse depends upon a deviance—one that is often represented by a physically impaired character—that must be “corrected” by the text’s narrative drive. In other words, a disabled body is always already both the producer and the product of narrative. As chapter 2 demonstrates, frequently this narrative drive presents itself as a masculine force that employs male agents that use crippling physical violence in order to restrain the feminine deviance—usually represented by an unruly woman—in the text. Readers may wonder why a female author like Marie, whose narrative style may be called “feminine,” also uses corporal punishment that results in impairment in order to temper unruly women. This is not a question I seek to answer here. Unlike scholars such as Pickens and Freeman, I do not wish to make an issue of Marie’s sex; rather, I hope to explore how texts that employ supernatural elements such as Bisclavret—whether written by men or women—produce alternative representations of the female and/or disabled body that frustrate the closure demanded by dominant narrative drives. The supernatural elements of the romances this chapter examines represent what we may call a “feminine” form of writing that challenges the “masculine” narrative drive toward closure that is often present in textual representations of female and/or disabled bodies, for it allows for the presence of slippages that contradict dominant notions of gendered and disabled bodies. As a result, such a form of writing is not dependent upon the sex of the author since it is not a product of authorial intention. By keeping in mind the discursively productive violence in Marie’s Lais and the ways in which that violence relates to female (re)production, both textually and bodily, I argue that Marie’s representation of disability, gender, and textual production in her lay Bisclavret simultaneously ref lects and challenges medieval religious, medical, and social notions of the female reproductive body as concomitant to the disabled body. In Bisclavret, Marie recounts the tale of a well-respected nobleman whom she calls Bisclavret, who just happens to turn into a werewolf for three days every week, and his wife, who just happens to be terrified of werewolves. After puzzling over her husband’s unexplained absences for

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some time, Bisclavret’s wife, suspicious that her husband may be cheating on her, seductively cajoles Bisclavret into revealing his secret. After he tells her his secret, Bisclavret’s wife, terrified of having to sleep with a werewolf, hides her husband’s clothing, his key back into his human form, and runs off with a former love interest. Meanwhile, Bisclavret, in his werewolf form, befriends the king and becomes a beloved pet of the court. When he sees his wife sometime later, he viciously attacks her, tearing her nose from her face. She faces further torture by the court, which believes in the werewolf ’s rational abilities, until she confesses to her crime and her husband’s clothing is returned. The king then exiles the wife and many of her female offspring are born without noses. In studies of the poem, scholars most frequently focus on Marie’s use of lycanthropy both metaphorically and etymologically or the poem’s portrayal of the fragility of the human–beast binary, noting that bestial status is only a garment away.14 Often, scholars note that the narrator’s explicit sympathy for the wolf-husband, despite beginning the poem with a detail of the viciousness of werewolves, leads readers to discover that the real beast in the tale is Bisclavret’s disloyal wife and that her mutilated face serves as external evidence of her internal sinfulness. Some scholars, however, choose to examine the poem more fully from the wife’s perspective, questioning why a female author would portray her only female character in the lay as an unpardonable traitor. Kerry Shea, drawing on Eve Sedgwick, finds that the text centers on the bonding of male characters, particularly Bisclavret and the king, “at the expense of the only woman in the text,” thus forcing the animal–human dichotomy setup at the beginning of the poem to become male–female.15 Ultimately, Shea affirms that Marie’s tale (and its Old-Norse redaction) demonstrates how the male court must unify itself through the exiling of a woman. Some scholars who focus on Marie’s sex, such as Paul Creamer, remain troubled by a text written by a woman that features a narrator who voices overt compassion for Bisclavret (and, in turn, the male court) and blatant censure of his wife and even accuse Marie of creating an “insidious womanhating universe.”16 While Shea and Creamer rightly expose the gender biases in the text, neither considers whether Marie’s tale may hinge on such contradictions in order to make visible that which is silenced when one remains “faithful to a unified vision which sees and rejects the threat of Woman [or any other marginalized figure or group].”17 Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner challenges scholarship that condemns Marie for the lay’s perceived misogyny by postulating that the author’s negative depiction of the wife allows for commentary on the existence of a dual nature (animal–human) within men and women. By examining the situation from the wife’s point of

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view, Bruckner finds the wife’s intense fear of sleeping with her husband “neither unwise nor unrealistic” particularly with respect to scriptural, historical, and folkloric understandings of werewolves throughout Europe in the Middle Ages.18 With this in mind, Bruckner questions traditional readings of the lay by asking, “Is Bisclavret simply a tale invented to explain a line of noseless females? Should we read this ending straight or can we discern a note of subtle irony in Marie’s tone, which problematizes the wife’s fate?”19 Bruckner ultimately contends that Marie juxtaposes the general and the specific in order to demonstrate that all humans, male and female, are “responsible for controlling the animal part of [their] natures”: the specific example of Bisclavret’s logic and rationality contrasts with the ferocity of the werewolves at the beginning of the poem, whereas the specific case of the wife’s unruliness contrasts with the possible virtuousness of her female progeny, whose variable noselessness suggests that not all of the wife’s descendants have a share in their ancestor’s misconduct.20 Like Creamer and Shea, I acknowledge the apparent misogyny of Marie’s tale: Marie’s narrator makes clear that the punishment Bisclavret inf licts on his wife is justified. However, I also side with Bruckner in detecting a paradoxical undercurrent in the tale that, I argue, exposes the illusory nature of both the perfect body politic—the unified, all-male court—and the perfect female body (which, ironically, must be rendered imperfect in order for the male bonds of the court to survive). I contend that the supernatural elements of the text produce this double meaning through the vehicles of Bisclavret’s and his wife’s aberrant bodies. Marie’s text follows Mitchell and Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis by beginning with the “problem” of Bisclavret’s lycanthropy. She begins the tale by describing the horrific nature of werewolves as a group: Garvalf, ceo est beste salvage; Tant cum il est en cele rage, Hummes devure, grant mal fait, Es granz forez converse e vait. (9–12) [A werewolf is a savage beast; While his fury is on him He eats men, does much harm, Goes deep in the forest to live.]

In her study of the history of the lycanthropic motif in ancient and medieval folklore, scripture, legal discourse, and literature, Kathryn Holten explains that the wolf often takes the form of an “evil beast” that is untrustworthy, dangerous, and even taboo.21 The werewolf myth, then, reiterates these connotations while also accentuating the thin line

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between humanity and beastliness: “The ability to change from man into animal is only part of the terrifying power of the werewolf. The real violence of the metamorphosis is in the loss of humanity, the transformation into not only the other, but the opposite.”22 As Holten observes, in his loss of humanity, the werewolf loses his ability to communicate through language, the most important identifying factor of humanity. Moreover, Holten notes that the wolf was commonly associated with criminals, sexual deviants, and even lepers, all of which, because of their physical aberrancies, were frequently exiled from their communities.23 Here, Holten emphasizes the werewolf ’s Otherness, but she does not link explicitly the werewolf ’s deviant form to disability. However, in the werewolf ’s muteness and physically deviant body, he suggests the physically impaired human. Jean Jorgenson further exposes the link between the werewolf and the physically impaired, noting that a widespread ancient belief stipulated “that eye contact with a wolf causes muteness.”24And, like the physically impaired, Bisclavret takes on a feminized role throughout much of the tale by being dominated by his wife and serving as a pet to the king.25 It is only after the curing of his “ailment” that Bisclavret is able to recuperate his masculine state and rejoin the masculine realm of the court. Important to our understanding of Bisclavret’s lycanthropic status in particular is the distinction between voluntary and involuntary werewolves. While voluntary werewolves choose to take on their bestial forms at will, involuntary werewolves are victim to their lycanthropic states. Holten explains that only involuntary werewolves possess the ability to successfully repent and thus be restored to their human forms.26 With his uncanny ability to convey his humanity and rationality despite his muteness, Bisclavret undoubtedly falls under the category of an involuntary werewolf. The voluntary–involuntary distinction also recalls one common medieval belief that congenital (or involuntary) impairments did not necessarily suggest a person’s inward sinfulness.27 On the other hand, physical impairments incurred later in life may have signified a divine punishment for sinful behavior and could, consequently, be considered a voluntary impairment. In some saints’ lives, for example, unrepentant folks are actually punished with further impairments instead of being cured.28 By beginning her tale with Bisclavret’s physically deviant body, Marie sets up Bisclavret as a “problem” in need of a solution—or a deviant body in need of restoration to a norm—a narrative structure quite similar to those in other werewolf tales. Holten explains that many werewolf tales require a “substitution” of one victim for another in order for the first werewolf to be restored to his human form.29 In this case, Marie’s text systematically animalizes Bisclavret’s wife, until her deviancy surpasses

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that of her husband. Through her betrayal of her husband by, first, hiding his clothing and, second, seducing a former lover, Bisclavret’s wife takes on the characteristics of the truly bestial, and she incurs the physical equivalent of her moral sins when Bisclavret bites off her nose. The wife’s punishment uncannily resembles the effects of leprosy, as William Sayers has found: “When she fails in her effort to keep her husband permanently exiled from the human state, she is appropriately punished by banishment and a physical disfiguration, the loss of her nose to the wolf ’s bite, strikingly similar to the effects of leprosy.”30 Medieval thought often associated the leper, outcast from society due to his or her physical deviance, with sexual transgression and moral corruption and frequently cast leprosy as a divine punishment for sin.31 Due to her disfigurement, Bisclavret’s wife not only would have an appearance similar to that of a leper, whose face would be covered in open wounds, but also would be subject to the same treatment: banishment from society. Holten adds that, “on an etymological stratum, the Latin lupa, for she-wolf, was slang for prostitute, and lupanda, the word for brothel. Lupa/lepra associations are frequent and numerous enough to unify the traditional belief in werewolf metamorphosis with associations between the wolf and outlaws, sexual abandon, and leprosy.”32 In his “supernatural” state, Bisclavret is not merely a monster; he’s also feminized. It is only through the maiming of his wife’s body that he can retrieve his masculinity. Bisclavret’s wife, the voluntary wolf, thus supplants her husband, the involuntary wolf, and aids in his restoration to his human body and the body of the court. The punishment of Bisclavret’s wife aligns her, in both social and legal understandings, with criminals, heretics, prostitutes, and other outcasts often associated with unruly bodies. In fact, the removal of one’s nose was a common punishment for adulterous women in medieval laws and for traitors in the chanson de geste (song of heroic deeds), and, consequently, in the logic of the tale, becomes a fitting fate for the wife.33 Marie herself refers to the punishment as particularly horrific, exclaiming, “Que li peüst il faire pis? (What worse thing could he have done to her?)” (236). As chapter 2 notes, the removal of a woman’s nose by force can be a particularly debilitating punishment, for it not only mars a woman’s beauty, but also serves as a sort of castration of a dominant woman. In his study of blinding and castration as punishment in medieval law, Klaus van Eickels finds that cutting off a woman’s nose corresponded to male castration: “Cutting off the genitals was a punishment that could only be conveniently inf licted on men. The closest female equivalent consisted in [sic] cutting off the nose. Based on the assumption that a woman—unlike a man—could not force sexual intercourse but had to rely on her physical attractiveness in order to procreate, disfiguring a woman’s face could be

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considered tantamount to castration.”34 With Bisclavret fully feminized by his deviant physical state and his wife’s betrayal, Bisclavret’s wife takes on an overtly masculine role that is only brought in check when her “phallus” is removed. Pickens notes, “[T]here . . . lies in the lady’s mutilation the suggestion that, in avenging himself, the werewolf deprives his wife of a phallus–like appendage, a monstrously unnatural sign of her aggression and treachery—a horrific castration.”35 While it might seem that the wife’s punishment defeminizes the lady because it renders her unattractive, the loss of her nose actually reinstates the lady to her feminized state and reiterates the “deformed” status of the female body in relation to the male body. Shea affirms that the lady’s castration through the loss of her nose only reaffirms the “no-thingness,” to borrow Luce Irigaray’s term, of the female body: “[H]er ‘castration’ symbolized through her body is in relation to the entire male social system which finds unity through its alienation of her.”36 Because Bisclavret attacks his wife as a werewolf, the necessity of his wife’s punishment to his rehabilitation becomes clear: Bisclavret can only retrieve his masculinity, humanity, body, and economic status after he demonstrates his ability to “violently, visually dissociate himself from the sexual difference of Woman.”37 With Bisclavret restored to his former state and his wife exiled by the male-dominated courtly community, it would seem that Marie’s narrative has achieved closure, or filled the narrative gap that the werewolf ’s deviance produced; however, the tale does not end in the literary present of Bisclavret’s rehabilitation. Instead, the narrative projects its readers/ audience into an indeterminate future by focusing on the hereditary nature of the lady’s disfigurement: Enfanze en ad asez eü; Puis unt esté bien cuneü E del semblant e del visage: Plusurs des femmes del lignage, C’est veritez, senz new sunt neies E sovent ierent esnasees. (309–14) [She had several children who were widely known for their appearance: several women of the family were actually born without noses, and lived out their lives noseless.]

Bisclavret’s wife, like Eve, passes on the mark of her punishment to her female progeny. It is the lady’s improper actions, her resultant physical difference, and her potential for producing deviant offspring that make

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her especially threatening to the masculine culture of the tale. As such, she must be “alienated and branded both because of her visible difference and her ability to reproduce beings like herself.”38 The fear that the lady and her disfigured descendants generate underscores the inherent connection between the female body, with its attendant (albeit stereotypic) feminine qualities, and a woman’s ability to infinitely (re)produce physical deviance. While it seems that Marie’s tale simply reiterates misogynistic notions of femininity and the female anatomy, I propose that the tale’s ending suggests a challenge to such notions. If we consider both Freeman’s and Pickens’s claims that Marie’s writing expresses a “feminine” poetics, particularly in its ties to both female textual and sexual (re)production, we can re-examine the seemingly antifemale realm of Bisclavret. As Pickens suggests, bodily violence produces text in the lai. Indeed, it is the werewolf ’s ability to threaten violence against humans that generates the lai itself. Moreover, due to Bisclavret’s inability to communicate his own story through language, the king demands the lady be tortured, which results in her retelling the events. Pickens explains, “What is most meaningful in the violence wreaked upon the lady in Bisclavret, as her body is violated by an executioner’s ministrations, is that it brings forth text, her confession under torture.”39 Female textual production caused by violence is a common element in Marie’s lais. Diana Faust finds that Marie’s female characters frequently create narratives “because of masculine actions, usually violent ones, inf licted upon the women.”40 Some of these narratives assume forms beyond the written or spoken word, such as Laustic’s embroidered cloth and Guigemar’s mural, when women either lose or are denied the ability to write or speak. In a similar fashion, I contend that we can read the end of the tale as an example of feminine text produced through violence. Though Bisclavret’s wife does not speak for the rest of the poem after her torture, she remains able to communicate the infinitely subversive power of feminine text through her offspring that bear the sign of her story. Each daughter born noseless possesses a physical deviance that is sure to generate narrative, the explanation for the origin of the defect: “Presumably this speech act [the lady’s confession] will perpetuate itself in repetitions, since her and her daughters’ wolf-like appearances will require explanation.”41 The lady, thus, in her procreation of noseless women, produces her own body as discursive and reproduces other discursive bodies that speak a narrative of both femininity and impairment. Although Freeman calls the “text” produced by the lady’s female descendants “a matrilineal narrative of dishonor,” I assert that the narrative

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does more than simply shame Bisclavret’s wife and condemn women in general. According to Mitchell and Snyder, the gap created by a deviant body produces narrative that seeks to close the gap, usually through the cure, expulsion, or elimination of that body. However, the limitless future that the end of the tale posits suggests that each subsequent generation of female descendants will endlessly repeat the lady’s narrative history. Thus, the narrative cannot conclude; it must infinitely repeat. As Judith Butler has explained in her study of gender, endless repetition does not have to be repressive. On the contrary, it can be liberating in that repetition leaves room for “mistakes,” or exceptions to the rule. These exceptions allow space for subversion that calls attention to the arbitrary and illusive nature of particular identities. Butler writes: The subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects. In a sense, all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat; ‘agency,’ then, is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition. If the rules governing signification not only restrict, but enable the assertion of alternative domains of cultural intelligibility, i.e., new possibilities for gender that contest the rigid codes of hierarchical binarisms, then it is only within the practices of repetitive signifying that a subversion of identity becomes possible.42

Specifically, Butler focuses on parody’s ability to make public the illusory nature of gender identity. Here, the lady’s noseless descendants expose the artifice of the “normal” body and, in particular, the “normal” female body. Marie herself suggests the variations within repetition in her disclosure that some of the lady’s descendants were born with noses, some without (312–14). While some bear the mark of their ancestor’s subversion of gender norms and, in turn, the mark of physical deviance, others lack any overt sign of that subversion and may be able to “pass,” thereby avoiding the process of stigmatization that their other relatives must endure.43 The noseless daughters, then, represent the “necessary failures” produced by the compulsory demands of gender and physical ability, whereas the daughters with noses uphold those demands.44 Ultimately, the inevitable deviancies within the repetition of the lady’s female lineage and, in turn, her history expose the inauthenticity of both a copy and its supposed origin. Marie’s textual/sexual (re)production, then, simultaneously ref lects and subverts medieval codes of gender and ablebodiedness, implying that the notions of woman as castrated (or disabled) man and woman in need of castration (or disabling) are merely artifice.

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The Female “Counter court” in Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal As my discussion of Bisclavret demonstrates, Marie’s tales often ref lect negative social stereotypes in order to subvert them. Heather Arden agrees, warning scholars against casting Marie’s “apparent failure to directly challenge the social structures of her time, or her portrayal of the destructive qualities of some women” as representative of a misogynistic view.45 Freeman adds that Marie’s use of villainous female characters “might appear to stem from the clerkly misogyny so prevalent in the medieval romance narrative,” but the author “in fact uses the cliché to point out the dangers and the fallacies of such facile stereotyping.”46 Another of Marie’s lais that depicts a “wicked” female character but ultimately questions the oppressive social codes that result in such misogynistic views of powerful women is Lanval. In this tale, Lanval, one of King Arthur’s men, rejects the unfaithful queen’s sexual advances. The queen then attacks his sexuality for rejecting her: ‘Lanval,’ fete le, ‘bien le quit, Vus n’amez gueres cel delit; Asez le m’ad hum dit sovent Que des femme n’avez talent’ (277–80). [‘Lanval,’ she said, ‘I am sure You don’t care for such pleasure; People have often told me That you have no interest in women.’]

In response, Lanval boasts that he has a female lover much more beautiful than the queen, a move that breaks the vow of secrecy he has made to his lover, who is a fairy. Lanval is brought to trial for insulting the queen’s beauty, but his fairy lover shows up, proving her beauty to the court. Lanval leaves the court with his lover, ultimately rejecting the court for the fairy world. As this short summary suggests, Marie’s protagonist discards the court—a masculine space that unites itself through the objectification of women like the queen—for an alternate space that celebrates rather than excludes Otherness. As Sharon Kinoshita finds, “In Lanval, [Marie] imagines an outside to the feudal order that relegates women to the status of objects of exchange underpinning the patriarchal system.”47 Jacqueline Eccles objects to Kinoshita’s labeling of Marie’s writing as feminist, but agrees that the poet’s “challenge to the social make-up of her society certainly proves that she was more than conscious of her power to effect change through her writing.”48 Marie’s Lanval,

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then, like Bisclavret, ref lects a subversion of the masculine courtly realm through the use of sexually excessive female characters. Though Lanval does not explicitly incorporate female physical impairment in the way Bisclavret does, its fourteenth-century English redaction Sir Launfal makes it central. Written by Thomas Chestre, of whom little is known because he, like Marie, exists almost solely as a name in a poem (he announces his authorship in line 1039), Sir Launfal is a version of the Lanval tale, probably based on the Middle English Sir Landevale, a more direct translation of Marie’s text, and the Old French Graelant, an analogue of Marie’s tale.49 While Chestre makes several changes and additions to his sources, perhaps the most striking is the fairy lover Tryamour’s blinding of Queen Gwenore. As in Bisclavret, a supernatural agent here punishes an unruly woman through physical violence that results in permanent impairment. Chestre’s depiction of the punishment of a female body by a supernatural figure, as my discussion below will demonstrate, allows for unconscious slippages that reveal not only the ability of oppressive societal strictures to produce powerful discourses on gender, class, and ability, but also the inefficacy of the human system of justice at work in Chestre’s tale and society. As several scholars have noted, the changes Chestre makes to his sources in both form and content ref lect the new middle-class consciousness characteristic of the end of feudalism in the late fourteenth century. Chestre uses the less aristocratic tail-rhyme form, the same form Chaucer parodies in his “Tale of Sir Thopas;” incorporates popular folkloric elements such as the fairy lover and the giant Sir Valentyne; and spends more time developing Sir Launfal’s individual status as a romance hero by emphasizing his chivalric and economic successes and hardships. Although some have concluded that Chestre’s “popular” version of the tale is inferior to Marie’s (i.e., A.C. Spearing’s declaration that the poem is a “disaster”50), Myra Tokes emphasizes that though Chestre’s tale makes use of a less aristocratic poetic form than Marie’s, his version is certainly not “low brow.”51 Myra Seaman calls Chestre’s retooling of the tale “Englishing” and notes that scholars must consider Chestre’s particular sociohistorical position when comparing his work to Marie’s.52 The tale clearly mocks the courtly realm through its portrayals of King Artour as an inept and passive figure and Gwenore as promiscuous, petty, and domineering and, like Marie’s version, presents what we might call a “countercourt” in the fairy world that Launfal ultimately chooses to join.53 Most important for my discussion here is Chestre’s emphasis on the negative effects of having an “outsider” status in relation to Arthur’s court, his much harsher depiction of Gwenore, and his inclusion of her physical punishment by blinding. As my discussion will show, all three

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of these elements, which Chestre uniquely elaborates on or adds to his version, are closely interrelated. Readers have often mentioned Chestre’s accentuation of Launfal’s poverty and, thus, further exclusion from the court. Spearing comments on the shame that Launfal must endure after he falls out of favor at the court: Chestre portrays “not just poverty but a descent from wealth, a social fall involving humiliation before others.”54 After Launfal leaves the court, he attempts to take up residence at the mayor’s home. Because of his fall from royal favor, however, the mayor can only offer Launfal a shed outside of his home (85–126).55 Launfal’s movement from the court to the mayor’s home to finally a lowly shed spatially demonstrates his fall from wealth. Launfal’s status as outside the “normal” human realm is compounded when he realizes he cannot even enter a church because of his poor dress (199–204). Launfal is only able to reconcile his status as an outsider among other outsiders, the fairy women of the forest. Here, in a space outside of the court, Launfal finds wealth, love, and acceptance. In addition to emphasizing Launfal’s status as an outsider, Chestre marginalizes Gwenore by casting her as the tale’s villain. Haughty and manipulative, Gwenore actively subverts her proper gendered role and at times seems more powerful than her husband, whom Chestre casts as passive. While Marie begins her tale with Arthur and his men forgetting to give “femmes et tere” (17) to Lanval, Chestre states that Gwenore purposefully leaves him out of the gift-giving ceremony at her wedding: The Quene yaf yftes for the nones, Golde and selver and precious stonys Her curtasye to kythe. Everych knight she gaf broche other ryng, But Syr Launfal shce yaf nothyng— That grevede hym many a sythe. (67–73)

Gwenore probably excludes Launfal because of his disdain for her. Chestre tells us that Launfal and the other knights dislike the queen because of her unfaithfulness to the king: “the lady bar los of swych word / That sche hadde lemmannys under her lord” (46–7). Significant to our understanding of Chestre’s Gwenore as sexually excessive is her Irish heritage, a detail Chestre reveals at the beginning of his poem. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has noted, the need to produce a unified English identity in the twelfth century led to the “monsterization” of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish peoples. In other words, inhabitants of lands outside of what was considered England became associated with negative physical and social characteristics. For instance, Cohen notes that, before and after the English

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conquest of Ireland, English writers often portrayed the Irish as sexually excessive and bloodthirsty barbarians or even likened them to werewolves.56 Though English rule in Ireland was waning at the time Chestre was writing his romance, it is probable that such connotations still carried weight in the popular medieval consciousness. Due to Chestre’s harsh portrayal of Gwenore, her punishment, though cruel, appears justified to many readers. Some argue that the blinding operates on a metaphorical level. For instance, Spearing finds that Gwenore’s blinding fulfills the tale’s emphasis on appearances, such as Launfal’s appearance in front of others and the fairies’ bodies on display throughout the poem.57 Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury agree that the blinding appropriately punishes the queen’s sins despite its severity, for it makes manifest Gwenore’s indiscretions.58 Other scholars contend that the punishment suits the tale’s fixation on the law. Tokes notes that, as a tale transforms into a more popular form, it often becomes focused on guilt, the law, and the proper punishment of guilty parties. Thus, the tale’s emphasis on Gwenore’s punishment ref lects the moral polarity common in popular medieval romances.59 Dinah Hazell, in the only full-length study devoted to the blinding episode, reads the punishment as a “pivotal metaphor” to the overall tale that helps to expose the failures of the court and its judicial systems in Chestre’s society.60 Hazell positions Gwenore’s punishment—or, more aptly, Gwenore’s impaired body—as “the axis of Chestre’s moral and social observations, and the absolute condemnation of Arthurian society; rather than gratuitous violence or superf luous appendage, the punishment of Gwennere recalls all of her sins and, by implication, the weaknesses of Artour and his culture.”61 While I agree with Hazell that the punishment is pivotal to Chestre’s tale, I find that Hazell’s essay neglects to consider fully why the punishment of a female body through blinding should serve as the central metaphor for Chestre’s social commentary on the all-male realm of the royal (and legal) court. If Chestre wanted to undercut the power of the court, then why is the queen punished? Why not Artour? And, just why is Gwenore punished by Tryamour, a supernatural figure, instead of by the court leaders? One reason why Gwenore is punished with impairment instead of Artour may be because Gwenore’s adulterous actions render him defective. Once “doughty” and generous (1, 28), Artour is now frequently controlled by the whims of his adulterous wife. Though Artour himself is not directly challenged, Laskaya and Salisbury contend that the tale’s contrast of the marginal with the dominant succeeds in casting the courtly realm as ineffectual and even “unmanly.”62 In this sense, we may view Artour and his court as feminized, especially in relation to Gwenore’s unruliness, which borders on overly masculine, and Launfal’s macho acts of knightly

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prowess. In particular, Launfal’s attack on and defeat of Sir Valentyne and his knights directly criticizes the ethical values of nobles like Artour. After being rewarded with money, a horse, and an assistant, Launfal wins a prominent joust and garners the envy of Sir Valentyne, a Lombard knight who stands at “fyftene feet” (512). At the request of Sir Valentyne, Launfal travels to Lombardy and, with the help of his assistant Gyfre, slays the giant and all of his lords (565–600, 610). Launfal’s annihilation of the Lombard knights may be a not-so-subtle comment on the frequent lending of money to nobles throughout Europe by Lombards. As noted in chapter 1, Lombards, like Jews, were money lenders, a practice deemed unnatural by Christian law. As such, medieval Christians sometimes viewed Lombards derogatorily—both in character and in body. Moreover, because Jews were associated with blindness, sexual promiscuity, femininity, and bodily excess, Lombards could be subject to similar stereotypes.63 In this text, Sir Valentyne’s giant body, a common medieval image that combines masculine hypersexuality and feminine Otherness,64 aptly signifies—and perhaps exaggerates—these stereotypes. Launfal’s destruction of the giant and his knights criticizes the methods by which nobles obtain money and even suggests that the middle class has the ability to achieve noble largesse by wiping out those who fund the nobility. By asserting his masculinity over the Lombards, Launfal further feminizes Artour and his men. If the text already deems Artour ineffectual, then, as a consequence, the body politic that he heads is rendered incomplete. Without a fully functioning body, Artour and his kingdom are imperfect. As such, in the logic of the text, it does not seem effective to punish Artour; impairing Artour will only further impair the kingdom. On the other hand, Gwenore, who has eschewed her femininity in favor of blatant masculinity, comes to represent the force within the kingdom that must be extracted in order to restore the kingdom to its proper status. As in Bisclavret, here an unruly woman must be excluded in order to cement male unity. Let us now consider why Gwenore is blinded in the first place. After losing all of his fortunes, Launfal chances upon Dame Tryamour, a beautiful fairy who offers her body and her money to Launfal as long as he keeps their relationship secret. When Artour learns of Launfal’s newfound wealth, he invites him back to the court to serve as a steward for a feast. Gwenore soon sets her sights on procuring Launfal as her lover. However, Launfal refuses her proposition, prompting Gwenore to accuse him of not loving women and, by implication, loving other men: Sche seyde, “Fy on the, thou coward! Anhongeth worth thou hye and hard! That thou ever were ybore!

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That thou lyvest, hyt ys pyté! Thou lovyst no woman, ne no woman the— Thou were worthy forlore!” (685–90)

Angered by her retort, Launfal boasts of the beauty of his lover, breaking his vow. Gwenore informs Artour of the insult to her beauty, and Launfal is brought to trial and forced to produce Tryamour in order to prove his boast. It is at the trial that Gwenore utters the oath that seals her fate: “ ‘Yf he bryngeth a fayrer thynge, / Put out my eeyn gray!’ ” (809–10). As Hazell suggests, Gwenore’s oath, while impulsive, becomes a legally binding contract due to its placement in the text: The stanza in which she makes her oath is preceded by the judges’ medial verdict on Launfal, and followed by the setting of the date on which he must make his wager. The queen interjects her oath between Launfal’s pledge to produce his love or lose his head, the finding of his guarantors; her oath is therefore bound to Launfal’s wajowr (811), which is agreed to by the court, and her “rash promise” is transformed into a legal agreement.65

Gwenore, thus, sets the parameters of her own punishment in exact terms and unknowingly seals her own fate. Throughout the history of the medieval West, the use of blinding as punishment has been linked to a demonstration of power over an inferior person or group. Early Christians often suffered blinding as a penalty for their beliefs, and the punishment became a symbol of martyrdom.66 In fact, many saints’ lives include episodes in which a saintly figure endures blinding, such as when St. Lucy’s torturers tear out her eyes. Other saints’ lives recount instances in which a saint’s relics punish a sinner with blinding. For instance, The Book of Sainte Foy reports that the saint repeatedly punished a man with blinding in one eye when he sinned and then restored his eyesight when he repented.67 In the medieval world, kings used blinding as a punishment for crimes against royal power, such as treason, attacks on the king’s person, and political or religious apostasy.68 As Geneviève Bürhrer-Thierry’s study on the social valence of blinding as punishment in the early medieval West affirms, the use of blinding as punishment by a king or other powerful leader began as a symbol of the leader’s abuse of power. In later centuries, when a king subjected a criminal to blinding in place of death, blinding became a signifier of a leader’s mercy: “If the punishment of blinding [due to revolts against the king] took on a clearly political character, we should note that it was directly tied to the person of the king. Only the

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king might commute the punishment; and blinding was no longer a result of his fury but, on the contrary, an effect of his piety.”69 Blinding as punishment was thus a political punishment that demonstrated a king’s authority, power, and clemency. If the blinder’s actions showcased his forceful, yet merciful, control over his subjects, the newly impaired body of the victim was likewise a powerful signifier. As Edward Wheatley has found, social understandings of physical blindness often became comingled with stereotypical notions of the Jews as metaphorically blind due to their purposeful “inability” to “see” and accept Christian beliefs. As a result, the public often considered both groups in physically deviant terms, linking them to greed, sexual impropriety, sexual impotence, femininity, and willful ignorance.70 Combined with the political significations that followed blinding as punishment, visual impairment was a multilayered construct rife with meaning and thus open to multiple interpretations. Van Eickels adds that blinding was often linked to castration and, in turn, emasculation, in medieval Norman and Anglo-Norman society due to the “laws of William the Conqueror,” which decreed that leaders should enact blinding and castration in lieu of death against traitors and criminals convicted of sexual sins.71 Such laws were based on the notion that a crime that threatened the body politic was similar to an attack on the body of the king, and, consequently, was subject to a similarly harsh punishment. Van Eickels notes that leaders frequently used such punishments in order to assert their political and physical power over their political enemies, effectively “unmanning” them.72 Blinding and castration, as a result, became tightly linked, causing blindness to be associated with sexual and political impotence and emasculation. Though such bodily punishments were rare in later medieval England, it is likely that their literary depictions would evoke the dense subtext of both the punishment and the crime: the literary depiction of a punishment like the blinding in Sir Launfal “would make a strong impression, and the motif may also have carried connotations of the severity of the crimes, particularly to folk who may have witnessed or recalled the punishment.” 73 While Van Eickels’s study focuses on the use of blinding and/or castration as a punishment for crimes committed by men, Chestre’s tale punishes Gwenore, a move that keeps intact the connections between blinding and castration. Due to Chestre’s overt portrayal of Gwenore as socially deviant and even overly masculine, her blinding, like the mutilation of Bisclavret’s wife, suggests her castration, or the rendering impotent of the threat that her unruly behavior represents. Just as the disfigurement of Bisclavret’s wife serves as a physical punishment

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for her sexual indiscretions, the blinding of Gwenore underscores her sexual promiscuity. As Eve Salisbury observes, Gwenore’s punishment ref lects her sexual sins: Chestre’s “Guenevere exhibits a threatening sexual libido that challenges not only the legal parameters of marriage but the entire social order,” and, despite her crime’s status as “a lesser offense than rape,” Gwenore endures a punishment often reserved for rapists and other sexual offenders.74 As I note above, legal authorities used blinding to punish not only sexual criminals but also those who threaten the king or his kingdom. Significantly, Gwenore’s “crimes” are both sexual and politically traitorous in nature. Because of her well-documented adultery, Gwenore directly jeopardizes the legitimacy of Artour’s lineage and, as such, poses a threat to the stability of the body politic, a crime akin to an assault on the king’s body and, consequently, punishable by blinding. In Sir Launfal, Gwenore’s inability to ensure the production of a legitimate royal heir is perhaps her greatest offense. Gwenore’s adulterous tendencies are part of a complex characterization of Guenevere in the Arthurian literary tradition. By the time Chestre was writing, Guenevere’s literary reputation as simultaneously promiscuous and childless caused her to be depicted as “a lascivious daughter of Eve and the primary cause of the fall of Camelot.” 75 Though she is sexually active with multiple partners, Guenevere’s sexual escapades are almost always cast as unfruitful in medieval romance. In her study of the adulterous body of the queen in medieval French romance, Peggy McCracken notes that romances figure an adulterous queen’s barrenness in two ways: she is either physically unable to produce children, or, following Georges Duby, she is metaphorically barren, for an adulterous coupling would result in an illegitimate heir.76 McCracken explains, “Many romances represent kings who father children outside of marriage, but the separation of marriage and childbirth is impossible for the queen. Any child of the queen is a child of her marriage, and an illegitimate child in the royal family subverts the proper succession of the crown and opens the possibility of political chaos.” 77 As a result, the “unproductive” womb of an adulterous queen is always already barren whether or not the queen suffers from physical infertility. The bodies of Guenevere and her literary successors like Gwenore thus simultaneously take on the mutually exclusive but equally threatening conditions of infertility and the ability to bear illegitimate offspring. According to McCracken, the queen’s body operates doubly, as a site of the potential disruption of political, marital, and social unity and as a site of the immediate removal of that potential power to disrupt. By rendering her adulterous, medieval romance takes away the

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potential political power of the queen to serve as the “inf luential office of mother of the king’s heir” and replaces it with the passive position of love-object between two men.78 I contend that this removal, however, does not erase the adulterous queen’s equally inf luential office of mother of an illegitimate heir. McCracken finds that romance often erases the latent power of a queen’s maternity and instead focuses on her adulterous and, as a result, “unfruitful” couplings. Consequently, the queen’s promiscuity supplants her important role as the producer of rightful heirs: “As the condition of the queen’s fidelity subsumes the goal of proper succession, reproductive sexuality, through which the queen is empowered, is displaced by a transgressive sexuality, through which she loses status and inf luence at the court.” 79 While McCracken reads a queen’s physical and metaphorical “barrenness” as a stumbling block to her potential power as a mother to a king’s sons, I contend that such “conditions” are themselves quite powerful.80 In chapter 1, for example, I consider the ways in which barrenness—whether it be the result of an impaired reproductive system or adultery—can be simultaneously hindering and enabling in medieval literature and that some female characters exploit the very discourses that produce stereotypic notions of women for their own gain. In my discussion of Chaucer’s May, I found that her purported disability, an illegitimate pregnancy, actually granted her the power to disrupt medieval notions of social, marital, and bodily unity, whose cohesion can only be formed through the exclusion of the feminine. In the same way, Gwenore’s simultaneous potential for failing to produce a legitimate heir and actually producing an illegitimate heir threatens the political and social unity of the court, a fear that surfaces in Launfal and his fellow knight’s complaints about the queen’s fidelity. Gwenore’s crimes, then—her promiscuity, jealousy, and unruliness—become focalized in her “unfruitful” womb, the site of her doubly transgressive capability. Her punishment of blinding symbolically castrates the power that her promiscuous sexuality represents. Significantly, it is an outsider to the court that squelches the threat that Gwenore poses. After Tryamour and her company of ladies have paraded into the court and Tryamour’s superior beauty is confirmed, Tryamour blows into Gwenore’s eyes, blinding her: “Wyth that Dame Tryamour to the queen geth, / And blew on her swych a breth / That never eft might sche se” (1006–8). Tryamour’s intercession into the court’s system of justice is noteworthy, for it was within the legal parameters of the court that Gwenore made her oath; thus, the court itself should administer the punishment. As many scholars have noted, Tryamour’s position as the text’s “minister of justice” drastically

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undercuts the power of the court to enforce the law.81 For instance, Hazell finds that the intrusion of a supernatural agent into human justice exposes the problems of the court not only in Chestre’s text, but also in his time: “Launfal ref lects an ingrained wariness and suspicion by the populace, formed over a long period of time and succession of reigns. The tension between monarchical and feudal interests, corruption at all levels of judicial administration, and the threat of mistreatment and exploitation undergirded an established antagonism towards the king, his royal representatives, and local enforcement officials.”82 Citing Edward III’s notoriously “corrupt” legal officers and Richard II’s “f lagrant misuse and abuse of the law,” which included the bribing of judges, Hazell notes that Chestre and his audience would warily regard judicial proceedings and officials.83 It is with the use of a supernatural agent that Chestre is most effectively able to assess critically the monarchical system of justice. Tryamour, as a member of the realm of the “countercourt,” is able to do what Chestre’s human characters are not: punish Gwenore within the precise parameters of human law while simultaneously critiquing those parameters. Tryamour’s intervention thus showcases the court’s incompetence and its need for an alternative administrator of justice. The folkloric connection between blinding and fairies also makes Tryamour the ideal choice as Gwenore’s punisher: according to folk tales, humans who catch sight of the fairy world are frequently blinded, sometimes by the breath of a fairy.84 Tryamour not only serves as the tale’s minister of justice, but also as Gwenore’s opponent. Chestre clearly sets up the two as literary foils when he emphasizes each woman’s “eeyn gray” (810, 935) and royal ancestry (Gwenore is the daughter of an Irish king and Tryamour the daughter of the Fairy King). Like Gwenore, Tryamour is beautiful and aristocratically adorned: Chestre describes her majestic purple dress (937–48), majestic horse, and saddle (949–60), and even her luxurious “pavyloun,” which is richly decorated with jewels and lush fabrics (265–78). Though the two are clearly connected, they are also decidedly different. Chestre emphasizes Tryamour’s generosity, trouthe, and kindness, which contrast starkly with Gwenore’s greediness, duplicity, and cruelty. As I note above, Gwenore’s blinding is intricately tied to her excessive sexuality. It would seem, then, that, since Tryamour assumes the role as Gwenore’s antithesis, she should represent the pinnacle of medieval female sexuality, chastity. On the contrary, Tryamour is as hypersexual as Gwenore. When Launfal enters her tent upon their first meeting, she is naked to the waist, lounging in bed: “For hete her clothes down sche dede / Almest to her gerdylstede / Than lay sche

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uncovert” (289–91). Tryamour’s suggestive positioning upon her bed overtly displays her sexuality. Chestre even tells us that because of the lovers’ “play” later that evening, “lytll they sclepte that nyght” (349). Later, Tryamour again displays her unabashed sexuality when she enters the court, drops her cloak, and allows the men to eye her: “Sche ded of her mantyll on the f let, / That men schuld her beholde the bet, / Wythoute a more sojoure” (979–81). The difference between Gwenore’s and Tyramour’s sexuality lies within the potential (re)productivity each possesses. While Gwenore’s sexual liaisons are “unfruitful” because they are adulterous, Tryamour’s sexuality is explicitly linked with productiveness. In exchange for his love and keeping their affair secret, Tryamour will provide Launfal with a bottomless purse: “I wyll the yeve an alner Ymad of sylk and of gold cler, Wyth fayre ymages thre. As oft thou puttest the hond therinne, A mark of gold thou schalt wynne In wat place that thou be.” (319–24)

Here, Chestre unequivocally equates Tryamour’s sexual reproduction with monetary gain, thus, conf lating Tryamour’s productive purse and her reproductive organs. As Laskaya and Salisbury note, Chestre makes use of the traditional descending catalogue technique in his descriptions of the fairy-women’s bodies in the tale.85 Conventionally, medieval poets guided readers’ eyes over beautiful bodies (usually women) by using a descending catalogue technique that begins with a description of the head or face and descends to the feet. Frequently, writers like Chaucer manipulated the technique in order to draw attention to particular body parts. For instance, in the “Miller’s Tale,” the poet lingers on Alison’s mid-section, emphasizing her belted purse (3250–1). While Chaucer’s emphasis on Alison’s waist highlights her sexualized body, as some critics like H. Marshall Leicester, Jr. have acknowledged, his description of the purse itself may allude to the vagina, with its “tassled silk” and “latoun” signifying pubic hair (3251).86 Tryamour’s “purse,” a bag as equally decorative as Alison’s but endowed with the capacity to infinitely produce, becomes an unambiguous contrast to Gwenore’s womb, whose potential for producing illegitimate heirs has the power to destroy a kingdom’s political and material riches. Tryamour, thus, appears to effectively accentuate Gwenore’s wrongdoings; to this end, Tryamour seems to aptly fulfill the position of the

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agent of Gwenore’s punishment. As Gwenore’s punisher, however, Tryamour does more than simply undercut the power of the court and its queen: she offers an alternative system of social, political, and sexual values. That the human realm in Sir Launfal punishes Gwenore’s excessive sexuality demonstrates the threat of uncontrolled female sexuality to the stability of the human court. The tale, however, presents Tryamour’s open sexuality as productive, generous, and even ethical. For example, Launfal uses the funds from Tryamour’s purse to participate in the Seven Corporal Acts of Mercy, or the physical acts of kindness one can do to demonstrate Christian compassion, including feeding and clothing the sick and the poor (421–32).87 Far from being destructive, Tryamour’s sexuality becomes generative and restorative, even pious. Sir Launfal, thus, proposes a female-centered countercourt that not only critiques the human system of justice in both Chestre’s tale and culture, but also recasts female sexuality (and thereby bodiliness) as an enabling force.88 Indeed, Launfal finds Tryamour’s countercourt so attractive that he rejects the human realm in favor of residing with his lover, a detail unique to Chestre’s version on the tale. Although Launfal may periodically reenter the courtly sphere in order to joust with other knights, our narrator asserts that he is rarely, if ever, seen or heard from: Thus Launfal, wythouten fable, That noble knight of the Rounde Table, Was take ynto Fayrye; Seththe saw hym yn thys lond noman, Ne no more of hym telle y ne can, For soothe wythoute lye. (1033–8)

The prominence of the Other and the other-world that the tale highlights in its beginnings is here re-emphasized as a worthwhile alternative to the conventional courtly sphere. In Chestre, Artour’s kingdom is corrupt, unjust, and led by an equally inept king, whose failings become personified in the impaired body of his blind wife. Chestre’s use of a supernatural figure as Gwenore’s punisher allows for her action to represent both a critique the human system of justice and a proposal of an alternative to that system. Here, two female bodies, one disabled, one disabling, work together to demonstrate two drastically different interpretations of the female body. The tale, thus, simultaneously asserts and transgresses misogynistic views of female sexuality and the female body that ultimately situate Tryamour’s fairy world as a liminal but powerful space where social and political notions as well as concepts of bodily and sexual norms are refigured and reassessed.

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Leprosy, Disability, and the Female Body in Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid Like Bisclavret and Sir Launfal, Robert Henryson’s late fifteenth century Testament of Cresseid portrays the bodily punishment of an unruly woman by supernatural forces. In this tale, Henryson reworks Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, revealing what happens to the oft-disliked heroine after her love affair with Diomede ends. Because Chaucer leaves Criseyde’s fate unresolved, Henryson attempts to bring her character to closure by “tying up” the loose ends of her narrative. In this way, Henryson affixes to Chaucer’s narrative a textual “limb,” or what we might call a “textual prosthetic,” that seeks to effectively conclude Criseyde’s narrative.89 Thynne’s printing of the tale as the “sixth book” to Chaucer’s poem underscores the text’s status as a textual prosthetic, for it here becomes literally grafted on to Chaucer’s corpus. Following Mitchell and Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis, Henryson’s poem hinges on the threat that Cresseid’s unruly body (here marked by her sexual promiscuity) produces, and the narrative thusly busies itself with limiting that threat. Henryson’s tale enforces the antifeminism that Chaucer’s version of the tale leaves ambiguous by depicting Cresseid as deserving of punishment and then describing how she is stricken with leprosy by the gods. Interestingly, Henryson chooses leprosy, a physically debilitating and deforming disease, as the answer to prostheticizing Cresseid’s unruly behavior. Though scholars remain divided on whether Henryson’s poem excuses or damns its heroine for her inconstancy and sexual excessiveness, I side with Felicity Riddy in contending that Cresseid’s bodily punishment highlights the instability of a unified, masculine self and its need to constantly exclude the feminine in order to produce the illusion of cohesiveness.90 However, I add that the tale’s condemnation of Cresseid does not simply confine her to “no-thingness,” but instead reveals the potential subversion of the disabled female body’s ambivalence. Henryson’s poem begins with the narrator, who suffers the torments of unrequited love due to his old age, bemoaning the cold of Scotland in April and turning to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde to chase away the chill. He then launches into a description of Cresseid’s fate after Diomede casts her aside, leaving ambiguous whether the tale he recounts is his own or is from the “uther quair” he takes from his study (62).91 After being dismissed by Diomede, Cresseid becomes a fallen woman, selling her body in the “court commoun” (81). She then f lees to her father’s house, where she laments her troubled state and blames her misfortune on Venus and Cupid. She falls to the f loor in a swoon and dreams of being brought to trial before seven gods (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Cynthia, Venus, Mercury,

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and Cupid) who must decide her fate. Saturn and Cynthia decide to punish her blasphemy with leprosy. When she awakens from her dream, she finds that she has indeed contracted the disease. Exiled from her father’s house and her community, she lives among the lepers, begging for charity, which she receives from Troilus when he enters the town. Upon her death, she writes her will, leaving a ring to Troilus. Troilus, saddened by her death, makes a stone monument for her. The poem ends with the narrator warning other women of Cresseid’s fate. Most studies of the tale focus on whether Henryson condemns or absolves his heroine, citing the narrator’s claims that he will “excuse” Cresseid’s “womanheid, . . . wisdome and fairness” despite his depiction of her punishment as just (91,92). As Lee Patterson has found, scholars who view the poem as essentially pagan view Henryson’s treatment of Cresseid as unsympathetic, whereas those who view the poem as Christian argue that Cresseid develops spiritual insight and, in turn, attains salvation.92 Feminist readings of the poem are similarly polarized. For instance, Marion Wynne-Davies asserts that, through her contraction of leprosy, Cresseid becomes a catalyst through which she and other women can gain access to a female form of piety. WynneDavies, thus, interprets Cresseid’s diseased body as a means through which a particularly feminine discourse of spirituality becomes validated in the poem.93 On the other hand, Susan Aronstein’s reading of the tale, which situates Henryson’s poem in the misogyny of the late fifteenth century, counters any notion that Cresseid finds spiritual or sexual redemption. Aronstein finds that Cresseid’s “redemption” places her firmly within the limits of male authority; by having her blame her female nature on her punishment, Aronstein argues, Henryson “closes down the dangerous ambiguities” that Chaucer leaves open in his depiction of the heroine.94 Riddy’s later contribution refuses to choose sides on the issue, preferring to leave intact—and even make central—the ambiguities of the poem. In my reading of the tale, I follow Riddy in “attending to the poem’s discontinuities and incoherences” by focusing on the ambiguity that Cressied’s diseased body produces and is produced by.95 In keeping with the theory of narrative prosthesis, the tale opens with a description of a disabled body that is in need of restoration or cure. Like Bisclavret’s werewolf and Sir Launfal’s ineffectual king and outcast knight, Henryson’s poem begins by describing an incomplete male body, the aged body of the narrator who is trying to keep warm during the “doolie sessoun” (1). While he was once a virile youth in the service of Venus, the narrator’s sexual prowess is now “doif and deid” (33), despite his turning to several medical remedies (35–6). According

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to Riddy, the poem’s beginning emphasis on the narrator’s deteriorating body establishes the continual threat to the cohesive illusion of a unified masculine identity.96 As I discuss in my introduction, medieval medicine characterized male bodies as hot and dry and female bodies as cold and wet. The poet’s emphasis on the heat of youth with its blood “f lowing in ane rage” (32) and the “froist” (19) of old age demonstrates the male body’s struggle to preserve its humoral balance. In medieval medical texts, the two main culprits behind the male body’s loss of heat are advanced age and excessive sexual intercourse with a woman. Like old age, too much intercourse was thought to deplete a man’s moisture, which could lead to disabilities such as blindness and even death.97 As an older man and a former servant to Venus, the narrator is particularly susceptible to losing his humoral balance, a key component of his maleness. The narrator’s imbalanced body, then, signifies an androgyny that marks his body and his character as contradictory. Thus, Riddy does not share the anxiety that many scholars have over his simultaneous pardon and condemnation of Cresseid, noting that, instead of “appealing to some conception of a stable, founding character,” readers “can pay attention to the contradiction and ambivalence in the ways [in which the narrator’s] language constructs Cresseid,” an ambiguity that Riddy links to Kristeva’s notion of the abject, a term that Cresseid uses to describe herself when she notes she is “clene excludit, as abject odious” (133).98 Riddy observes that Cresseid’s leprous body makes manifest the coming together of luxuria and vanitas. Described as “the f lour and A per se / of Troy and Greece” that becomes “maculait” with “f leshlie lust” and “giglotlike” behavior, Cresseid embodies the ambivalence of abjection, the process by which the self asserts itself in opposition to the Other (81–2, 84, 86). As chapter 1 mentions, boundaries between the self and Other blur in the process of abjection. Excluding the Other and marking it as polluted, then, assures the temporary cohesion of a unified subject; I note that this cohesion is temporary, for, as Kristeva insists, that which is excluded or repressed always resurfaces, threatening the self ’s illusion of stability.99 As Riddy suggests, the narrator presents his body and his identity as already endangered by something, and that something becomes manifest in the constantly inconstant Cresseid and her decaying yet redemptive f lesh. The threat to a unified masculine identity in the poem, then, is the feminine: “The problem that the poem is wrestling with is not a problem within femininity but a problem within masculinity: its own uncleanness, which is coded as feminine and rejected as polluting.”100 Corrupted masculinity, here symbolized by the narrator’s failing body, becomes marked as feminine

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and must be expelled in order to shore up the illusion of cohesive masculinity. Cresseid’s leprous body, as I will discuss in terms of disability below, comes to embody this corruption. Though the abject body and the disabled body are clearly connected, I contend that, in viewing Cresseid’s body as disabled, rather than simply abject, we can better investigate medieval representations of women, both disabled and ablebodied. Cresseid’s leprosy has been the topic of much academic study of the poem. Early explorations of Henryson’s use of leprosy find that his depiction of the disease is surprisingly realistic and detailed and that it closely corresponds to contemporary discussions of the disease in biblical, medical, astrological, and legal discourses.101 Later studies, as I discuss above, tease out whether Cresseid’s punishment is just or harsh and explore whether it leads to the character’s spiritual growth or simply punishes her. Though several scholars focus on the effects of the disease on Cresseid’s body (such as Wynne-Davies, Aronstein, and Riddy), none views her punishment through the lens of disability. This may be due to the uneasy boundary between disease and disability in the field of disability studies in the humanities and at large. In fact, Irina Metzler consciously chooses to exclude leprosy from her study on medieval disability “since it falls into a category of its own, with its own symbolism, meaning and aetiology.”102 Although I acknowledge that medieval leprosy has its own rich cultural history, I have to stress that leprosy crosses over into other physical impairments, particularly with reference to its social significance and some of its causes. I tend to side with Susan Wendell, who contends that the line between illness and disability is indistinct because many illnesses may disable a person just as some disabilities may result in illness.103 Similarly, the symptoms of leprosy, including skin lesions, throat deformities, erosion of the nasal cartilage, ulceration of the corneas, alopecia, and contracted limbs, certainly impaired the aff licted physically, and the effects of those symptoms on a person’s appearance were surely socially disabling, as Henryson’s depiction of Cresseid demonstrates, and the disease’s incurability would insure that such effects would be lifelong. Moreover, leprosy’s ties to sin and sexual impurity had a hand in the social treatment of lepers like Cresseid. Like Wendell, I find that “what matters most in identifying disability is identifying the difficulties people face in surviving and contributing to their societies.”104 Cresseid’s struggles in the poem—her exile from her home, her segregated dress, and the loss of her worldly goods to name a few—classify her disease as thoroughly disabling. When Saturn and Cynthia decide to strike Cresseid “with seiknes incurabill,” Cynthia recites Cresseid’s sentence over her sleeping body,

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describing both the physical and social effects that she will have to face: “Fra heit of bodie I the now depryve, And to thy seiknes sall be na recure Bot in dolour thy dayis to indure. Thy cristall ene mingit with blude I mak, Thy voice sa cleir unplesand hoir, and hace, Thy lustie lyre ovirspred with spottis blak, And lumpis haw appeirand in thy face: Quair thow cummis, ilk man sall f le the place. This sall thow go begging fra hous to hous With cop and clapper lyke ane lazarous.” (334–43)

Cynthia’s sentencing of Cresseid accurately describes the physical symptoms of the disease and the resultant social response others would have to the leper woman. In the Middle Ages, the notion of leprosy could indicate both the disease we know today as leprosy as well as skin lesions of any kind; thus, the medieval category of leprosy was much wider than our modern notion of the disease.105 Specific references to leprosy in Leviticus locate the disease as a sign of ritual uncleanness and stipulate that those suffering from it must be separated from the religious community (13:44–6 and 14). Biblical instantiations of the disease, however, refer to any wound or laceration upon the skin. Leprosy seems to have been most common in the high Middle Ages from around the eleventh century through the fourteenth century. Scotland, however, had large numbers of lepers until the eighteenth century, especially in the northern part of the country.106 While some historians have claimed that the disease reached the status of an epidemic, exact numbers are impossible to report. However, the high number of leprosaria in medieval Europe from the twelfth century on suggests that the disease was quite common.107 Moreover, religious and legal exclusions of the leprous from the healthy community indicate the disease’s frequency. The Third Lateran Council of 1179 specified that lepers should be separated from the uninfected, as we see with Cresseid, who must leave her father’s home and enter a leper hospital. As a result of these exclusions, medieval lepers not only suffered physical symptoms of their disease, but also became outcasts in their communities. Though many studies of the disease in the medieval era insist that lepers throughout Europe endured a process of exclusion deemed the “Last Mass,” wherein they were stripped ceremoniously of their legal identities, made to don a separate dress, and relegated to the “living dead,” Carole Rawcliffe’s recent book finds these reports to be grossly

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exaggerated. Rawcliffe finds no evidence to support that the mass ever occurred in England and only cites one “convincing case” from the sixteenth century.108 However, studies by Saul Brody , R.I. Moore, and Byron Lee Grigsby, which focus on the ritual’s stigmatization of the medieval leper, continue to be cited by literary, historical, and anthropological scholars despite the ritual’s dubiousness.109 As Rawcliffe notes, whether or not the “Last Mass” really occurred, its “morbid spectacle” certainly aroused the interests of authors and scholars of the past and present.110 Henryson’s literary depiction of the leper Cresseid participates in some of the more negative discourses on the disease. Although Cresseid does not endure a “Last Mass,” she does endure a process of social exclusion that is similar: after being secreted away from her father’s home in a hospital on the outskirts of town, Cresseid dons “ane mantill and ane bawer hat, / With cop and clapper,” the traditional “uniform” of the medieval leper (386–7). Segregated from her community by location and dress, Cresseid now fully takes the form of the “ ‘unworthie outwaill’ ” she complains of being after Diomede abandons her, and her exclusion is complete (129). Scholars have often linked Cresseid’s contraction of leprosy to her supposed sexual sins as at “the court commoun” (77). Brody notes that “Cresseid’s leprosy is a particularly suitable punishment for her promiscuity. Not only does it ravage her beauty, but what is more, because leprosy was commonly understood to be a venereal disease, a consequence of lust, it makes her past sinfulness apparent to her and to all who see her.”111 Beryl Rowland has even hypothesized that Henryson may have stricken his heroine with syphilis, a disease that shared symptoms with leprosy.112 Grigsby, however, refutes the possibility that Cresseid’s disease may have been syphilis, noting that syphilis was not identified in Scotland as a disease separate from leprosy until 1497, later than the assumed date of Henryson’s tale.113 Although, as Grigsby notes, “medical and theological communities interpreted [leprosy] through a moral filter that saw disease as a divine punishment sent to correct man’s sins,”114 Grigsby’s study finds conclusions that specifically link leprosy to excessive sexuality to be imprecise.115 While an increase in lust was viewed as a side effect of the disease, no sources directly state that leprosy is caused by or contracted through sexual intercourse. Thus, even though the disease was connected to sex, the medieval public often saw leprosy not as a punishment for a carnal sin, but as a punishment for such spiritual sins as envy, anger, or greed. As a result, readers must keep in mind the disease’s connections to sexual and spiritual sins while not emphasizing one over the other. Although most scholars mention Cresseid’s promiscuity as the cause for her punishment, the tale presents the reasons for Cresseid’s contraction of

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the disease as ambiguous. What is explicit is that the use of the gods as the agents who mete out Cresseid’s punishment adds a moral underpinning to the disease; she has surely done something wrong to deserve such a fate. Henryson implies that her sexual actions are linked to her acquisition of leprosy, but the gods clearly punish her for her blasphemy against Venus and Cupid. Despite this contradiction, it is clear that Henryson associates Cresseid’s promiscuity and her leprosy. As noted above, the lupa/ lepra connection closely aligns the leper and the prostitute. Furthermore, Henryson’s narrator laments his heroine’s fall from grace, specifically the way in which her “feminitie” becomes “with f leschelie lust sa maculait” (83, 84). The use of “maculait” directly recalls the “macules” of leprosy, thus implying that her excessive sexuality is at least partly to blame for her disease. Moreover, as also noted above, Cresseid finds herself an outcast in her home community even before she becomes a leper, probably due to her abandonment of Troilus and her rejection by Diomede: “ ‘[ . . . ] Quha sall me now convoy, / Sen I fra Diomeid and nobill Troylus / Am clene excludit, as abject odious?’ ” (131–133). She adds that the “seid of lufe” that was upon her face is now sown with “froist,” foreshadowing the nodules of leprosy that will soon appear on her face (144, 147). She even admits that her promiscuity may be partly to blame for her illness: “My mynd in f leschelie foull affectioun / Was inclynit to lustis lecherous: / Fy fals Cresseid; O trew knicht Troylus!” (558–60). Brody observes that, here, “[t]he nature of the malady brings home to Cresseid the justice of what the gods do to her. She recognizes that her sickness is the result of her lechery, not the gods’ capriciousness.”116 Brody’s insistence that Cresseid’s only sin is lechery is misleading, however. As Grigsby observes, “[M]edieval authors connected a great number of sins to leprosy. By reducing the number of sins to just one, lechery, critics fail to take into account the varied meanings medieval authors have tried to express.”117 Grigsby finds that the gods punish Cresseid’s blasphemy against them, especially her insults against Cupid and Venus. Mairi Ann Cullen agrees, noting “that it is simply the ‘wickit langage’ of her complaint against the gods that is blasphemy” and not her sexual behavior.118 Indeed, in the biblical tradition, leprosy was most often the punishment for sins of sacrilege. Old Testament stories particularly identify leprosy as punishment for spiritual sins that transgress divine hierarchy. For instance, in the book of Numbers, God punishes Aaron and his wife Miriam for envying God’s relationship to Moses by turning Miriam into a leper (12: 2–11). In the book of II Chronicles, God strikes Uzziah with leprosy because he burns incense in the temple despite the fact that only priests have the authorization to do so (26: 16–21). In both cases, God uses leprosy as a punishment for those

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who do not remain in their socially subscribed roles. Leprosy, furthermore, struck those who blasphemed or committed heresy or those who, through greed, wished to move up in the social structure.119 Rawcliffe adds that anxiety over verbal sacrilege manifested in tales of blasphemers who, after swearing on a part of God’s body, bled from the same part and in punishments for blasphemy, such as the branding of a blasphemer’s lips in France, which could result in a malformed face not unlike the leper’s.120 In effect, the disease revealed itself in those who dared to subvert “natural” religious or social law. The outward marks of leprosy on the body, thus, were thought to reveal the inward diseased soul and to identify the leper as sinful. Cresseid’s divine punishment with the disease undoubtedly reveals her moral failings, but the particular sin remains unclear: is it her desertion of Troilus, relationship with Diomede, participation in prostitution, or insults to Cupid and Venus? Like Riddy, I find it unnecessary to pinpoint one sin for which Cresseid is punished. It is enough to know that she has sinned and that, in the tale, her sins are clearly linked to her body, a body that is coded as inconstant and threatening to masculine stability. The use of the gods as the agents of her punishment makes unquestionable that her leprosy is meant to punish her for her sins. As Stearns and Parr have found, the choice of Saturn and Cynthia as those who decide her fate is particularly appropriate. According to Parr, the use of the two gods together coincides with medieval astrological understandings of the disease, noting that aff lictions of leprosy were thought to be numerous when the moon is in Saturn.121 Cynthia’s “spottis blak” and inconstant nature also make her a suitable choice as Cresseid’s punisher (260). Saturn, with his sunken cheeks, droopy eyes, and cold temperature, has both the features and humoral balance of a leper. Furthermore, Saturn’s melancholic complexion mirrors that which he imparts upon Cresseid: “ ‘I change thy mirth into melancholy, / Quilk is the mother of all pensivenes; / Thy moisture and they heit in cald and dry’ ” (316–18). In addition to sharing physical symptoms of leprosy with Cresseid, Saturn’s own physical deficiencies ref lect those of the narrator, whose youthful heat is being overcome by the coldness of old age. Riddy asserts that Saturn’s physical decline, plus the instability of Jupiter (171) and Phebus (201), reinforces the threat that feminine heterogeneity poses to masculine stability: “The male gods represent the symbolic order of prohibition and law, and yet even in them the boundaries of masculinity are under threat.”122 In order to expunge such a threat to masculine law, the gods make Cresseid a social and legal outcast by striking her with leprosy. Though religious, medical, and legal discourse excluded lepers from healthy society and even marked them as morally and physically polluted,

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they remained a visible presence. In addition, lepers depended on the healthy for survival. As noted above, leper hospitals were common, especially in urban areas. The existence of such hospitals functioned as a way for the general public to actively participate in acts of charity. As Catherine Peyroux notes, the leprous “remained a relentless presence in the social life of the West as participants in the sub-economies of institutionalized religious public charity.”123 The religious could donate money by placing coins in the hospitals’ alms-boxes. In addition, many lepers begged for alms in public, sounding their bells and clappers in an effort to warn the well of their advance. Thus, though actively excluded, the leprous were an integral part of a religious economy in which the act of charity was exchanged for salvation. As a result of this spiritual economy, lepers, though excluded and marginalized—in fact, because of their exclusion and marginalization—became sites of access to salvation through charity. Additionally, through their ties to Lazarus (though Lazarus is never directly identified as leprous), lepers became associated not only with wretchedness and poverty, but also with the promise of divine redemption. The leper figure was further linked to Christ in the depictions of his miraculous cure of a leper in Matthew, Mark, and Luke (8: 2–4, 1: 40–45, 5: 12–16). The leper’s associations with the divine, either as physical evidence of God’s punishment for sins or as the object of Christ’s miraculous cures, mark him or her as a particularly effective player in the spiritual economy. As suggested earlier, the Old Testament links leprosy to God through the disease’s status as a divine punishment. The New Testament connects leprosy to Christ through stories of Jesus’ ability to cure the illness, while later associations of lepers to Lazarus mark them as figures full of the promise of divine redemption. Later, the leper himself or herself begins to represent a Christ-like figure. The book of Isaiah associates Christ with the leprous, noting that his wounds will heal the sins of humankind (53). In addition, the leper’s poverty, exclusion from the community, and “wretched” condition mark him or her as meek and defenseless, qualities that further establish the leper as Christ-like. Medieval hagiographers often employed this construction of the leper as a figure in need of divine charity in order to demonstrate the saintliness of their subjects. Most frequently, medieval hagiographies employ the motif of the leper’s kiss, through which a saint elicits miraculous cure by kissing a leper. Though male saints partook of this act, by the late Middle Ages, female saints and mystics, including Angela of Foligno, Catherine of Siena, and Margery Kempe, participated in a piety that was much more bodily than many of their male counterparts, and this piety included caring for and even kissing

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lepers.124 As stated earlier, Wynne-Davies affirms that Cresseid’s disease allows for a female discourse on spirituality to exist in Henryson’s seemingly misogynistic tale. According to Wynne-Davies, Cresseid’s contraction of leprosy may cause her to suffer, but “the destruction of her f lesh appears to offer the possibility of redemption to others of her sex.”125 Indeed, Cresseid beseeches the “ladyis of Troy and Greece” to “ane mirror mak” of her and realize that their “roising reid to rotting sall retour” (452, 457, 464), offering up her diseased body as tangible reminder of earthly impermanence. The one who is able to find redemption through Cresseid, however, is not a woman at all but Troilus, Henryson’s paragon of true knighthood. Upon returning to Troy from the war, Troilus happens upon Cresseid and her “companie” of lepers, who beg the soldier give his “ ‘almous’ ” to them (491, 494). Without recognizing Cresseid, Troilus has “pietie” on the group and decides to “tuik heid” of “their cry nobill” (496, 495). It is only after Cresseid looks up at Troilus that he conjures up “the sweit visage” of his “fair Cresseid” (503, 504) and tosses “ane purs of gold” into the leper Cresseid’s skirts (521), as both an act of “knichtlie pietie” and a “memoriall / Of fair Cresseid” (519–20). Henryson here makes a clear distinction between the leper woman before Troilus and the “fair Cresseid,” Troilus’s one-time love. In Troilus’s conjuring up his lover’s face at the sight of the leper’s, the ambivalence that Cresseid embodies comes together; as Riddy states, “loathing of and desire for the feminine can be seen to collapse into one another.”126 Cresseid’s rotting body of the present and her beauty of the past work together to solidify not only Troilus’ manly prowess, but also his spiritual salvation. While his thoughts of his past love “kendliet all his bodie in ane fyre; / With hait fewir” (513–14), the humoral properties of a youthful, healthy man, his gift of alms to the leper Cresseid demonstrates his charity and, thus, his worthiness of salvation. The means through which Troilus is able to access both of these elements is Cresseid’s disabled body. Riddy puts it quite simply: “in order for him to do what he does, Cresseid has to be where and what she is.”127 Her body, disabled by her disease and human reactions to it, both sparks Troilus’s thoughts of his past love and prompts his generous act of charity. The exile of Cresseid, consequently, serves to stabilize Troilus’s reputation as powerful, “ ‘gentill and fre’ ” (536), and, most of all, “ ‘trew’ ” (546). Though Troilus recognizes or at least remembers his former lover, Cresseid only learns of his identity from a fellow leper.128 Most who read this scene take it at face value: Cresseid simply does not recognize Troilus. However, viewing the scene through the lens of disability

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allows us to question whether Cresseid’s inability to recognize Troilus is due to a resulting impairment caused by her disease. Even today, many victims of leprosy suffer eye ailments that might obscure their vision or lead to blindness. Because leprosy affects the nerves around the eyes, some lepers are unable to blink. Rawcliffe explains, “[T]he eyes [of a leper] may deteriorate so badly through corneal ulceration (caused by an inability to blink) as to induce blindness.”129 Moreover, medieval accounts of the disease frequently describe lepers’ eyes as “ulcerated and rheumy.”130 Henryson’s account of Cresseid’s illness stresses the ocular effects of the disease, for, when Cynthia pronounces her sentence on Cresseid, the goddess exclaims, “Thy cristall ene mingit with blude I mak” (337). Moreover, Henryson alludes to the wide, unblinking stare of the leper in the recognition scene between Troilus and Cresseid: Than upon him scho kest up baith hir ene, And with ane blenk it come into his thocht That he sumtyme hir face befoir had sene, Bot scho was in sic plye he knew hir noct; Yit than hir luik into his mynd it brocht The sweit visage and amorous blenking Of fair Cresseid, sumtyme his awin darling. (498–504, emphasis mine)

Henryson’s repetition of “blenk” recalls the commonly known side effect of leprosy, the inability to blink. When Cresseid, the leper, turns up her eyes to Troilus, it is with “ane blenk” that he remembers his lover Cresseid; however, Henryson leaves the reader ambiguous about who is doing the blinking. Does he blink and remember his former love, or does Cresseid blink, causing him to remember her? It is probable that Troilus is the one who blinks here, and Cresseid is unable to. Troilus’s memory of the “amorous blenking / Of fair Cresseid” supports this reading because it keeps intact the distinction already established between Cresseid, the leper, and Cresseid, the lover, in this scene. It is not implausible, then, that Cresseid does not recognize Troilus because her vision is obscured or completely gone. Cresseid’s obscured vision echoes the larger trope of impaired female bodies in the poem. Part of Cresseid’s blasphemy is that her insult to Venus deems her “the blind goddess” (142). Indeed, Cupid’s anger at Cresseid centers on this particular insult: “I say this by yone wretchit Cresseid, The quhilk throw me was sum tyme f lour of lufe, Me and my mother strklie can reprufe,

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Saying of hir greit infelicitie I was the cause, and my mother Venus, Ane blind goddess hir cald that mict not se, With sclander and defame injurious.” (278–84)

While tradition usually stipulates that Cupid is blind, here the female goddess of love takes on the mark of the impairment.131 Venus’s description, though it does not stipulate that the goddess is blind, focuses on her inconstancy, a trait she shares with Cresseid. While Venus’s body, with its humoral balance shifting for “hait” to “cauld” signifies the weakness of the female body and the humoral status caused by leprosy itself, it is the inconstancy that shows in her face that is most important for our discussion: Bot in hir face semit greit variance, Quhyles perfyte treuth and quhyles inconstance Under smyling scho was dissimulait, Provocative with blenkis amorous, And suddenly changit and alterait, Angrie as ony serpent vennemous, Richt pungitive with wordis odious; Thus variant scho was, quha list tak keip: With ane eye lauch, and with the uther weip. (222–31)

Henryson uses the term “blenkis amorous” to describe Venus’s coy glances, foreshadowing the “amorous blenking” that Troilus will remember of his former lover when he meets the leper Cresseid’s unblinking stare. Furthermore, Venus’s laughing and weeping eyes aptly illustrate the inconstancy of the goddess and “blind” love, while calling the reader’s attention to Venus’s alleged physical blindness and hinting towards Cresseid’s visual deficiency in the recognition scene. Henryson connects Cynthia, the other goddess in the poem, to Cresseid as well by focusing on her pale color and the “spottis blak” that cover her (260). Cresseid, “With bylis blak ovirspred in hir visage, / And hir fair colour faidit and alterait,” closely resembles Cynthia (395–6), and it is Cynthia herself who pronounces that Cresseid’s face should be covered in “spottis blak” like her own (339). As I note above, it is apt that Cynthia is partnered with Saturn to decide Cresseid’s fate, for Saturn’s melancholic nature suits leprosy and medieval astrology dictates that when the moon is in Saturn, the aff liction of leprosy is common. Moreover, the moon’s cyclical f luctuations and her reputation for

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inf luencing the fickleness of lovers align her with Cresseid’s characteristic inconstancy. Cynthia’s monthly cycles, in addition, implicitly suggest the female menstrual cycle. The etymologies of moon, month, and menses show the connections among the terms; the classical Latin mensis indicates month and/or moon, which ref lects the links between the time period of a woman’s cycle and the rotation of the moon. Medieval medicine purported that the moon inf luenced the start and f low of the female menses. As I discuss in my introduction and chapter 1, contradictory medical and cultural understandings of menstrual f luid often characterized the menses as important to reproduction yet harmful to the male body. A commentator in Pseudo-Albert’s Women’s Secrets expresses the male fear of menstruation and its ties to the moon: “The menstrual f low varies with the different quarters of the moon, and thus women can tell the state of the moon by their menses. Some women know how subtly to inf lict a wound on men when they have sexual intercourse with them in the last state of the moon, and from this wound many incurable illnesses arise if remedies are not taken immediately.”132 One common assumption was that excessive sexual intercourse with a woman could cause blindness in men. Menstrual f luid was thought to cause bodily injury to men not only through its excretion during sexual intercourse but also through its emission from the eyes, which could then travel through the air and infect susceptible victims, especially babies.133 Helen Rodnite Lemay explains that Aristotelian notions of menstrual f luid as poisonous, noting that the eyes and the object of the eyes can be infected: “If the object of the eyes is clean, such as a polished mirror or the eye of another person, it is immediately infected by the menstruous eye, because this eye infects the air, and then this air infects the adjacent air, and the infection continues to travel until it reaches the looking glass,” causing the formation of a mark on the glass.134 Cynthia, who Henryson explains is merely a mirror of her brother’s light (258–9), finds herself speckled in black spots. Similarly, Cresseid, who beseeches women to make a “mirror” of her (457), finds her face filled with the mark of her infection only after she examines herself in “ane polesit glas” (348). Even more telling, however, is Cynthia’s decision to make bloody Cresseid’s “cristall ene” (337). The bloody f lux in Cresseid’s eyes not only illustrates a common symptom of leprosy, but also recalls the fundamental element that renders the female body “defective”: menstrual f luid. Furthermore, as Rawcliffe explains, many popular and some medical understandings of the dissemination of leprosy ref lected the notion of menstrual f luid’s emission from the eyes, and claimed that those who inhaled the air emitted from the mouths, noses, or eyes of the leprous may fall sick.135 Cresseid’s bloody eyes echo

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the double-bind of the female body: they are at once disabled and capable of disabling others. Menstrual f luid, the element by which a female body is deemed disabled in medieval medical and scriptural discourse, is also a prime example of the abject since it is excreted by the body and therefore deemed as not part of the self. Thus, menstrual f luid signals the intrinsic connections between the female body, the disabled body, and the abject body. The disabling effects of Cresseid’s leprosy, which, as we see above, are linked to menstruation in the text, mark her as thoroughly abject; she is the exiled, the rejected, the Other. Though Henryson opens his poem with the weakening body of the narrator, the three female characters soon supplant him, as all the three are connected to disability in some way. Ultimately, what threatens the tale’s failing male bodies— exemplified by the narrator and Saturn—is the potential for instability in body and identity. The inconstancy that endangers this stability gets coded as femininity; the leprous Cresseid becomes the embodiment of this dangerous femininity. Riddy suggests that Cresseid’s disease renders her completely exiled, leaving no room for the potential jouissance that Kristeva asserts the abject can achieve. She interprets the final scene of the poem, Cresseid’s death and Troilus’s erection of a monument in her honor, as her “last exclusion,” for, in Cresseid’s “dissolution,” Troilus attempts to safeguard his own.136 What Riddy excludes, however, is the disruptive power of Cresseid’s grotesque body. In a carnivalesque inversion of patriarchal authority, Cresseid is able to make her own will, a right medieval lepers generally lost. As Jana Mathews asserts, Cresseid’s writing of her will is an act of speech that defies authoritative discourse. Because medieval law rendered the leper legally dead, Mathews theorizes, “the law simultaneously released him from legal subjectivity.”137 Consequently, “[t] his legal gap allows Cresseid to exist outside the law—to carve a space for herself in the narrative that is completely divorced from the feudal court system and set within her own prescribed (and self-controlled) boundaries.”138 In the “counter-space” of Cresseid’s will, she is able to overturn the (masculine) authority that deems her “no-thing”: “She manipulates established law in order to create a new law that in turn enables her to inscribe on herself an identity that no one can repress or eradicate.”139 In her will, Cresseid leaves her body to the “wormis and taids,” her clothing to the lepers, a ruby ring, a memento of her past love, to Troilus, and her spirit to Diana (577–88). In bequeathing her spirit to Diana, Cresseid not only validates “marginalized space[s]”140 by selecting “woddis and wellis” (588), over a courtly or heavenly location, but also honors the very goddess who had a hand in her sentence of

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leprosy. Taken in this sense, it seems Cresseid may now view her disease as a reward rather than a punishment. The question that we are left with, as a result, is whether the inconstant Cresseid ever really learns her lesson. Has the punishment that the gods inf lict upon her actually tamed her unruly body? It seems that Henryson’s narrator has his doubts. He ends the poem with a warning to women who decide to make a “mirrour” out of his heroine: Now, worthie wemen, in this ballet schort, Maid for your worschip and instructioun, Of cheritie, I monische and exhort, Ming not your lufe with fals deceptioun: Beir in your mynd this schort conclusioun Of fair Cresseid, as I have said befoir. Sen scho is deid I speik of hir no moir. (610–16)

By repeating the lesson Cresseid’s punishment was intended to teach, the narrator implies that the punishment may not have “taken.” This address to the “worthie wemen” of his audience is the third reference to them in the poem. Cresseid mentions them when urging them to use her as an example of earthly impermanence (452), and Troilus’s epitaph to Cresseid reads, “ ‘Lo, fair ladyis, Cresseid of Troy the toun, / Sumtyme countit the f lour of womanheid, / Under this stane, lait lipper, lyis deid’ ” (607–9). The repetition of address to this section of Henryson’s audience reveals an anxiety about the instability of these “worthie wemen” to his poem itself. They are first advised to look to Cresseid’s decaying body as not only an example to f leeting beauty, but also as an example of the punishment they may receive for “bad” behavior. Next, Troilus’s epitaph calls attention to Cresseid’s status as a dead “lipper” for much the same effect. Lastly, the narrator’s warning cautions them to not live a life of “fals deceptioun” like Cresseid. Though the narrative excludes her in every way possible, it also continues to conjure her up in an attempt to shore up masculine identity: Cresseid’s body must be repeatedly invoked in order for it to be excluded. That the narrative continues to address these “wemen” suggests the potential for transgression that Cresseid’s body represents. Perhaps the poem’s female audience members are the inhabitants of Cresseid’s “counter-space,” a marginalized realm of voices that, though excluded, has the potential to exploit male “instructioun” for its own ends. In reading Bisclavret, Sir Launfal, and the Testament of Cresseid through the lens of the gendered model of disability, one can find a similar surge of Other voices that ultimately challenge and refigure

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commonly held notions of what it means to be female, feminine, and/ or disabled in the Middle Ages. These voices—or counternarratives— are made perceptible only by locating the unconscious slippages that arise from the supernatural elements in each text. These slippages create a dissonance that not only produces counternarratives within the texts, but also allow for critical readings that contradict dominant medieval discourses of gender and ablebodiedness. Like Cresseid and her female audience members, perhaps feminist disability scholars have the potential to challenge the very notions of deviancy upon which “masculine” narrative drives—both literary and critical—are based, if only we take the time to listen.

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CHAPTER 4 EMBODIED TRANSCENDENCE: DISABILITY AND THE PROCREATIVE BODY IN THE BOOK OF MARGERY KEMPE

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n continuing my exploration of female disability in medieval literature, I turn next to a consideration of the portrayal of disability and its importance to narrative structure in the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe. The Book is a sprawling account of the spiritual journey of Margery Kempe, a wife and mother from the English city of Lynn, and has been the object of fervent scholarly attention. Now considered an important part of the medieval canon, the Book and its author occupy an uneasy position within medieval studies. Scholars have considered the text’s rambling structure as evidence of its artlessness as well as proof of a thoroughly vernacular and even feminine form of writing, while some have labeled Kempe a madwoman or cited her shortcomings as a visionary in relation to contemporary Julian of Norwich.1 Feminist medieval scholars, who have done much to bring Kempe and her Book to the forefront, hold similarly vexed views of the mystic and her work, finding her to transgress or uphold patriarchal authority through her spiritual actions.2 One constant in studies of Kempe, however, is a concentration on how her gender affects both her spirituality and her text. Due to her status as a wife and mother to fourteen children as well as her penchant for bodily displays of devotion such as her violent fits of tears, Kempe’s body figures prominently throughout her text. Though much scholarship on the Book has focused on the corporeality of Kempe’s spirituality—and, in turn, its feminine nature—including studies that emphasize her piety’s bodiliness or lack thereof, none has discussed both her practices of piety and the Book’s narrative structure through the lens of disability.3 In this chapter, I

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will examine the ways in which bodily difference prompts the narrative as well as how representations of physical aberrancies figure into Kempe’s journey throughout the text, particularly with reference to how such bodily differences intersect with Kempe’s gendered status. I will show that an understanding of the female body as physically and thereby socially defective conditions Kempe’s representation and performance of her spirituality. By examining Kempe’s body through a gendered notion of disability, I will be able to more thoroughly engage and question the social and political constructions of Kempe’s very physical experience of spirituality. As this chapter will demonstrate, female bodily difference is linked to sexual and textual (re)production throughout the Book. Kempe’s disabilities prompt the writing of her text, allow her to imitate Christ and his mother, and redefine the experiences of her body, specifically her reproductive and maternal abilities, in spiritual terms. Ultimately, I will argue that Kempe exploits the discourses of femaleness, femininity, and disability in order to produce her text and further her spiritual goals, particularly through a recasting of her own female bodily experiences not as disabling, but rather spiritually enabling. Autobiography and Disability: Kempe’s Body and Book Kempe’s body, which is presented as aberrant from the outset of the text, is uniquely tied to the Book’s own troubled production. Karma Lochrie’s important study of the Book concludes that Kempe’s text participates in a process through which the mystic’s bodily experience becomes a discourse, or the written text that articulates such bodily experience. Lochrie begins with the medieval theological separation between f lesh and spirit, noting that the female body becomes aligned with the f lesh, or excess. Combined with medical notions of the “leaky” female body, femaleness becomes associated with an attack on the boundaries of the sealed (male) body: “Woman, then, occupies the border between body and soul, the fissure through which a constant assault on the body may be conducted. She is a painful reminder of inf lux alienating body from soul.”4 The greatest defense a woman could take against the dangerous nature of her own body was to remain “sealed” bodily as a virgin or physically as an anchoress, thereby keeping the dual boundaries between the f lesh and the spirit intact. Mystical discourse, however, causes those boundaries to collapse by bringing together into language bodily acts, such as imitatio Christi, that draw on the powers of the f lesh and spirit. Because of Kempe’s gendered status, the medieval positioning of Woman as f leshly grants her a unique position from which to create her Book and, thus, translate her body into text: “By occupying

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and exploiting her position as f lesh, the woman writer has recourse to a power derived from the taboo which defines her and which she breaks with her speech.”5 As Lochrie finds, Kempe’s disruptive actions, such as her boisterous laughter and her violent tears, open “fissures” in the text; in other words, the “ruptures” of Kempe’s body lead to rapture.6 Though Lochrie does not employ the language of disability, it is clear in her study that the intimate connection between Kempe and her Book relies on bodily difference. As with many other medieval women-religious, it is after a bout of physical and mental suffering that Kempe comes to desire a spiritual life. Moreover, Kempe begins to have violent, physical reactions to images of Christ. As Caroline Walker Bynum has explained, praying for or even causing their own physical distress allowed women to participate in an act of imitatio Christi, to become the suffering body of Christ. Bynum notes that a desire to incur an illness or surround oneself with those who are ill is a highly gendered characteristic of religious women in the later Middle Ages: “[F]or the late Middle Ages, there is clear evidence that behavior and occurrences that both we and medieval people see as ‘illnesses’ are less likely to be described as something ‘to be cured’ when they happen to women than when they happen to men. Women’s illness was ‘to be endured,’ not ‘cured.’ Patient suffering of disease was a major way of gaining sanctity for females but not for males.” 7 The “incurability” of illness in women-religious, instead of disabling such women, works to enable them by allowing their suffering to simulate the suffering of Christ.8 For instance, Julian of Norwich prays for bodily illness in order to experience physical and mental suffering similar to Christ’s, and it is only after she is stricken with her illness, which leaves her paralyzed from the waist down, that she has a series of visions of Christ’s Passion.9 Like Julian’s religious visions, Kempe’s spiritual life begins with bodily illness. After the birth of her first child, Kempe suffers such a “sekenesse” that she fears for her life and calls for a confessor in order to reveal to him a past sin that she had never admitted.10 When she attempts to reveal her indiscretion, her confessor “gan scharply to undyrnemyn hir,” and she “went owt of hir mede and was wondryly vexid and labowryd with spyritys half yer, wekys and odde days” (1:54). Because of her violent physical reaction to her illness—seeing visions of devils, biting her hand, clawing her skin, and having suicidal thoughts—Kempe’s household had to forcibly restrain her. After she has suffered through her illness, Kempe sees Christ at her bedside “in the lyknesse of a man, most semly, most bewtyvows, and most amyable that evyr mygth be seen with mannys eye” (55) The vision stabilizes

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Kempe’s “wyttys” and “resoun as wel as evyr sche was beforn,” and she soon regains control of the buttery keys from her husband, despite protests from her servants (56). Later in the text, after visiting the sites of Christ’s Passion, Kempe begins to have violent, physical reactions to images of Christ. These fits, which I will discuss in detail below, cause her to fall down as she “walwyd and wrestyd with hir body, spredyng hir armys abrode, and cryed with a lowed voys as thow hir hert schulde a brostyn asundyr” (28:163). When she returns to Lynn, her neighbors react to the fits by trying to explain them away, calling them an illness, demonic possession, or the side effects of too much wine (165). Notably, “[s]um seyde that sche had the fallyng evyl [epilepsy] for sche, with the crying, wrestyd hir body, turnyng fro the o syde into the other, and wex al blew and al blow, as it had ben colowr of leed” (44: 143). Just as the inhabitants of Lynn attempt to rationalize their neighbor’s crying fits, scholars have often attempted to explain Kempe’s early illness, and later bodily reactions to Christ, generally through medical language. Early interpretations by scholars such as Herbert Thurston and David Knowles often categorize her as a hysteric, and some, such as Sigrid Undset, label her a psychopath.11 Despite attempts by feminist medieval scholars to close down anachronistic connections between medieval mysticism and modern interpretations of hysteria and other psychobiological diseases, some critics continue to “medicalize” Kempe. The modern English translation of the text even includes a lengthy footnote that recounts a “modern diagnosis” of Kempe that identifies her as having “a hysterical personality organization.”12 Richard Lawes, though he rejects hysteria as a diagnosis for Kempe, identifies her crying fits as bouts of temporal lobe epilepsy.13 Moreover, some recent feminist readings of the text label Kempe’s first bout of illness as a medieval account of the condition we now call postpartum depression.14 Though it is quite clear that Kempe suffers physical and mental aff lictions that disrupt her life and her text, I resist “diagnosing” her actions through modern medical or psychological views. I follow Bynum in observing that medieval notions of the body’s physical and mental responses to spirituality “are far more diverse than those implied by modern concepts” of psychobiological illnesses such as hysteria.15 While I do not wish to apply modern medical or psychiatric categorizations to a premodern text, I do hope to demonstrate that within the text’s fifteenth-century context, Kempe is indeed disabled by her physical and mental aberrancies and that these aberrancies profoundly shape the production and structure of her text. Furthermore, I hope to show that Kempe’s bodily differences and the resultant disabling that she endures

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are inextricable from medieval notions of the female body and its perceived defectiveness both in its physical and moral makeup. Just as Kempe’s body defies clear-cut definition, so too does the structure of her Book. The Book’s structure and production prove to be cumbersome, driven as they are by Kempe’s memories, twenty years after her experiences. Due to Kempe’s illiteracy,16 she has to dictate her story to three male scribes in order to get it written down, facing frequent obstacles along the way. The first scribe dies before finishing the text, but his corrupt form of German and English proves unreadable to the next scribe, a priest. A third scribe attempts to decipher the text, but is unable to, so Kempe takes the text back to the priest, who, through divine intervention, is finally able to read and transcribe the text. The priest informs his readers of the rambling and unwieldy structure of the book, noting that “[t]hys boke is not wretyn in ordyr, every thyng aftyr other as it wer don, but lych as the mater cam to the creatur in mend whan it schuld be wretyn” (Proem: 49). Wendy Harding finds that, in collaborating with a scribe, Kempe creates with her text a dialogic writing that blurs the boundaries between illiteracy and literacy, the bodily and the spiritual.17 Considered the first autobiographical text written in English, a hagiography of an exemplary woman’s journey to a spiritual life, and an elaborate fiction by a savvy author who exploits the “conventions of sacred biography and devotional prose [ . . . ] as a means of scrutinizing the very foundations of community,” Kempe’s Book certainly has resisted easy classification.18 Instead of selecting one category or the other, I acknowledge the dangers of adopting an either/ or understanding of the text’s genre. Calling the Book an autobiography is inherently problematic, as autobiographical writing as we define it today did not exist in the Middle Ages. However, Kempe’s text, shaped as it is by her memories (as well as other hagiographies, mystical treatises, and devotional texts), does represent her responses to her everyday activities, a textual impulse that may be considered “autobiographical.” Relegating the text to the status of a hagiography or a fiction erases such impulses, vacating Margery Kempe the historical woman from the text. Each choice seeks to limit the text, which does not neatly fit one category, and to close Kempe within a stable subject position as autobiographical writer, hagiographic exemplar, or creator of the fictional character Margery. Thus, like Julian Yates, I consider the Book a hybrid text that includes elements of autobiography. This consideration does not intend to present Kempe as a stable subject, but to draw attention to “details in the text which, while they contribute to the hagiographical impulse, enforce an awareness of Margery’s social and material position.”19

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As my project has suggested, female physical difference is often both a producer and a product of medieval narrative. Following Mitchell and Snyder, I have argued that, in medieval literature, the physical difference—or social difference rooted in the defectiveness of the female body—of a female character frequently produces narrative. Usually, the narrative drive of the text attempts to limit the deviance caused by an unruly body by curing or even eliminating characters with physical abnormalities. In some cases, female characters use their excessive bodies to enable their own desires. I would like to suggest that Kempe’s text itself is a product of her physical differences and that she exploits them in an effort to enable her own spiritual goals. If, as Lochrie contends, Kempe’s Book is the product of a translation of her body into discourse—that, literally, her body becomes her text and her text becomes her body—and her body, in its excessiveness, resists normalization, then what effects do her physical aberrancies have on the production and structure of her text? If fictional narrative remains profoundly dependent on difference, which can take the form of disability, then how does disability affect the narrative of a text with autobiographical tendencies? Lawes’s recent essay on psychobiological disorders and autobiographical urges of some medieval writers including Kempe is useful to our consideration of disability and textual production in the Book. Though I resist Lawes’s move to diagnose Kempe as an epileptic, I find helpful his contention that bodily disorder “may have been a stimulus to autobiographicality itself,” even in the Middle Ages.20 Ultimately, Lawes finds that an individual’s singularity, especially in conjunction with a bodily disorder, may create a split “between an individual’s inner experience and the cultural expectations of the outer world,” a split I have considered in terms of the social process of disabling throughout this project.21 In other words, Kempe’s very distinct behavior, which often goes against accepted expectations for worldly and spiritual women, and her atypical bodily sufferings, set her apart from conventional social roles for medieval women, thus creating a rift between Kempe’s personal experience (what Goffman calls the actual identity) and what her society expects of her behavior and body (what Goffman calls the virtual identity).22 This rift results in the stigmatization or disabling of Kempe. Lawes suggests that such individuals attempt to fill this split through a narrative “explanation” of the deviancy, an explanation that manifests itself in autobiographical writings: “Uncertainty about the nature of perplexing experiences, perhaps uncertainty of one’s identity, may generate a strong autobiographical impulse, and a need to recount one’s story, to persuade others of its value, explore it, make sense of it and psychologically ‘digest’ it.”23 Lawes points to both the Book’s impulse to justify Kempe’s behavior

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to male authorities and Kempe’s own self-scrutiny of her actions in her conversations with Christ as evidence of the urge to “explain away” her idiosyncrasies. Kempe’s incessant retelling of her experiences to scribes, priests, neighbors, and Christ is thus an attempt to bridge the gap between her inner self and the outer world created by her bodily aberrancies. Contemporary studies of autobiography, or “life writing,”24 and disability agree that the body not only affects but also prompts writing about the self. In his study of the ethics of life writing, Paul John Eakin notes that life writing establishes the writer’s identity as content (what a person does) and as act (the story a person tells). Moreover, life writing establishes individuals as persons worthy of study. These narrations, Eakin observes, “function as the mark not only of the free person but of the normal person as well.”25 Thus, such “master discourses” have the power to marginalize those who do not fit into the narrative or cannot, because of impairment, write their own narratives. On the other hand, life writing by marginalized groups such as those with disabilities has the power to “resist and reform dehumanizing models of self and life story that society would impose on [them].”26 Arthur Frank agrees, finding that life writing by those with disabilities has the power to expose “how socially constructed and legitimated master narratives of identity can demoralize people” and “resist assimilation . . . to such narratives.”27 Ultimately, Frank claims that “life writing about illness and disability upsets the conventional identities assigned to these groups.”28 The work of Eakin and Frank is helpful to our understanding of the role of Kempe’s body in the production of her Book. Kempe’s text certainly seeks to produce and maintain her identity as a spiritual woman. Unlike modern autobiography, however, the Book makes clear that its purpose is to glorify the works of Christ, not Margery Kempe: “this lytyl tretys schal tretyn sumdeel in parcel of hys wonderful werkys, how mercifully, how benyngly, and how charytefully he meved and stered a sinful caytyf unto hys love” (Proem: 41). Throughout the text, Kempe uses her own body to demonstrate Christ’s works. For example, her tears become a mimesis of his Passion, the ultimate “work” Christ did for humanity. In addition, as we will discuss in more detail later, her physical care of the impaired becomes, for Kempe, a way to display her love for Christ. However, Kempe herself frequently threatens to overshadow Christ throughout her Book. For instance, Windeatt finds that Kempe’s conversations with Christ, which Kempe purports to be most remarkable “are often among the least individual or lively parts of her work in both style and content, while other parts of her text may seem individual at the expense of authentic spiritual understanding.”29 And, while the text’s intended purpose may have been largely devotional, Caroyln Dinshaw

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adds that “the book is filled with incidental, everyday detail that now supplies much of its richness and fascination.”30 Consequently, although the Book intends to demonstrate the “wonderful werkys” of Christ, it simultaneously succeeds in showcasing the singularity of Kempe. If we consider Kempe’s Book in relation to related hagiographies such as the lives of contemporaries like St. Bridget, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and Mary of Oignies and past saints like St. Margaret and St. Mary Magdalene, then it becomes clear that at least one reason for its production may have been to establish Kempe’s exemplarity and thus bring about her own canonization. In addition to establishing her identity as a spiritual woman, Kempe’s text also succeeds in upsetting received notions of what it meant to be a wife, mother, and/or woman-religious in the later Middle Ages. In this way, we may view Kempe’s text as a “counternarrative” to the “master discourse” of the Church, which sought to keep the bodies of spiritual women “sealed” through physical enclosure (the anchorhold) and bodily confinement (virginity) and to keep worldly women such as wives and mothers confined to their roles by remaining subject to their husbands. Again, Kempe’s body plays a key role in the creation of this counternarrative. At the beginning of the third chapter of her Book, Kempe describes her feelings of disgust for participating in sexual intercourse with her husband, John. After hearing a sweet melody from heaven, “sche had nevyr desyr to komown f leschly with hyre husbonde, for the dette of matrimony was so abhominabyl to hir that sche had levar, hir thowt, etyn or drynkyn the wose, the mukke in the chanel, than to consentyn to any f leschly comownyng , saf only for obedyens” (3: 62). Her husband, however, is unwilling to have a chaste marriage with his wife at this point. Later, when he attempts to have “knowlach of her as he was wone befor,” Kempe cries out for Christ’s help, and John is suddenly struck with a paralysis that takes away his ability to touch her (8: 82). Finally, Kempe is able to finagle a business deal with John: she will pay his debts if he will allow her to remain chaste in their marriage (11: 89). Here, Kempe gains control over her body and her husband and upsets her conventional wifely role by evading her part in the conjugal debt. Despite remaining married to her husband and having had fourteen children, Kempe also begins dressing in white as a sign of her virginity and devotion to Christ, a decision that generates protest from her Lynn neighbors and Church authorities. Covering the same body that gave birth to fourteen children in white clothing makes tangible the profound contradiction of her spiritual status as a woman both in and outside of the world. Kempe’s text not only narrates a counterstory for laywomen who wish to lead spiritual lives, but also creates a counterstory about disability that

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casts it not as evidence of an inward sinful nature, but as a tool for spiritual growth. As noted above, her first major bout of disabling illness instigates her conversion to a spiritual life. Her conversion does not happen right away—Kempe attempts to remain completely in the world by continuing to dress ostentatiously and starting and failing at two businesses—but she soon learns the error of her ways and chooses to lead a spiritual life. Kempe’s early foray into a religious life depends upon doing bodily penance such as fasting and wearing a hair shirt. By denying or even causing injury to her body, Kempe is able to take part in the same kind of suffering that Christ endured on the cross. This bodily form of piety, often viewed as an orthodox practice for women, fits within spiritual practices of other female saints and mystics from the later medieval period who relied on the body as a means through which to access the divine.31 Later, however, Christ allows her to stop fasting and even take off her hair shirt, granting her “an hayr in thin hert that schal lyke me mych bettyr than alle the hayres in the world” (4:71). This progression from bodily to more spiritual acts of piety, including enduring the slander of her enemies, continues throughout the Book, but Kempe is never fully separated from her body. As Sarah Salih notes, “Contemplation may be her ideal, but her life and piety remain firmly located in the material world.”32 Even though her later acquirement of fits of tears corresponds to the more spiritual piety that Kempe’s Christ seems to prefer, the crying fits are intensely physical. Salih contends that Kempe reinterprets the bodily, feminine piety accepted as orthodox in England with the more spiritual practices she picks up abroad, ultimately reshaping those bodily practices to uphold the spiritual. Kempe’s fits of tears represent her most direct way of using bodily sufferings that many deem disabling in order to advance her spiritual goals. Kempe first acquires the fits when she is abroad, visiting the sites of Christ’s Passion. It is upon Mount Calvary, the site of Christ’s crucifixion, that Kempe has her first fit of tears: “sche fel down that sche mygth not stondyn ne knelyn, but walwyd and wrestyd with hir body, spredyng hir armys abrode, and cryed with a lowede voys as thow hir hert schulde a brostyn asundyr, for in the cite of hir sowle sche saw verily and freschly how owyr Lord was crucifyed” (28: 163). This fit of tears, “the first cry that evyr sche cryed in any contemplacyon,” soon becomes a sort of “aff liction” that strikes Kempe whenever she is reminded of Christ’s suffering (163). Upon returning to Lynn, Kempe brings her gift of tears back with her, as if they were a “souvenir” or even a “pilgrim badge.”33 While Kempe’s tears fit within a common female response to the sites of Christ’s Passion, Salih notes that it was “less usual” for women “to carry that reaction back home again.”34

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When her neighbors witness her tears, it is clear that they do not understand nor approve of their neighbor’s newfound spiritual expression. As I note above, witnesses to her fits often try to explain away their origin: “For summe seyd it was a wikkyd spirit vexed hir; sum syed it was a sekenes; sum seyd sche had dronkyn to mech wyn; sum bannyd hir; sum wished sche had ben in the havyn; sum wolde sche had ben in the se in a bottumles boyt; and so ich man as hym thowte” (28:165). The drive to medicalize Kempe’s fits strikes even those in positions of authority. For instance, when a famous friar visits Lynn, he prohibits Kempe from attending his sermons due to her intense sobbing. Despite entreaties from “a good preyste” and a few friends, the friar refuses to let Kempe back into the church unless she blames her fits not on a gift from God, but on “a cardiakyl, er sum other sekenesse” (61: 290). Though she denies she has a “sekenesse,” Kempe admits that she is unable to control the timing and intensity of her fits, noting that they would occur “sumtyme in the church, sumtyme in the stret, sumtym in the chawmbre, sumtyme in the felde [ . . . ] for sche knew nevyr tyme ne owyr whan thi schulde come” (28: 165). When she tries to control their intensity, their force only becomes greater: “And the mor that sche wolde labowryn to kepe it in er to put it awey, mech the mor schulde sche cryen and the mor lowder” (166). The excessiveness of Kempe’s tears causes her community to shun and even abuse her, spitting at her for her “sekenes” and comparing her roars and tears to the howling of a dog. Furthermore, those who had enjoyed her company before “put hir awey and bodyn hir that sche schulde not come in her placys for the schrewyd talys that thei herd of hir” (44: 220). Although some accept Kempe’s tears as an impairment—a difference that they do not consider “normal,” but passively tolerate—most participate in the social process of disabling Kempe by deeming her bodily impairment (what Metzler calls a non-negotiable reality) as evidence of her deficiency. The public’s often intolerant response to her physical difference ref lects Wheatley’s notion of the religious model; her physical problems are often explained as evidence of Kempe’s sexual promiscuity, her failure to conform to her gendered social roles as wife and mother, and her alleged heretical practices. Kempe’s cries, then, are often interpreted as outward physical manifestations of inward sinfulness. The very physical quality of her fits, her inability to control their timing and their intensity, and the negative reactions of her neighbors closely align Kempe’s crying fits with a physical disability. Demonstrating the late-medieval distrust of the sincerity of those with physical disabilities, two priests decide to “test” the validity of Kempe’s crying fits. Far from the city’s center, she succumbs to a crying fit, proving that her condition is not self-motivated (83: 360).

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The two priests, like some others throughout her Book, accept Kempe’s impairment as a divine test. Due to the slander and bodily weakness (57: 276) that her crying fits cause, it is clear that her tears are both socially and physically disabling. However, Kempe casts her tears, which so many view as an annoyance, as spiritually enabling throughout her Book. Kempe clearly places her fits of crying within a tradition of accepted medieval piety, pointing throughout her Book to her own connections to other saints and mystics who shared a similar gift of uncontrollable tears, including Mary of Oignies and Angela of Foligno. Her second scribe, deterred by his own doubts about her weeping, finally accepts the fits as evidence of her holiness after reading about Mary of Oignies: “Than he levyd wel that the good woman, whech he had beforn lityl affeccyon to, myth not restreyn hir wepyng, hir sobbyng ne hir crying, which felt meche more plente of grace than evyr dede he, wythowtyn any comparison” (62: 294). Kempe gathers even more support of her weeping from her contemporary, Julian of Norwich, who asserts that “ ‘whan God visyteth a creatur wyth terys of contrisyon, devosyon, er compassion, he may and owyth to levyn that the Holy Gost is in hys sowle’ ” (18: 122). Julian adds that the slander Kempe receives due to her weeping actually increases her merit in the eyes of God, “ ‘for the more despyte, schame, and repref that ye have in the world, the mor is yowr meryte in the sygth of God’ ” (122). Julian’s endorsement of Kempe’s fits of tears not only provides sanction by a respected religious authority, but also reveals the spiritual value of the abuse Kempe receives from the social disabling her fits cause. In a vision, St. Jerome echoes Julian’s sentiments, acknowledging the power of Kempe’s weeping to save others and noting its status as “ ‘a synguler and special yyft that God hath yovyn the—a welle of teerys, the whech schal nevyr man take fro the’ ” (41: 210). In addition to allowing Kempe to place herself among an esteemed company of religious women, her roars and sobs are also able to articulate emotions that do not easily fit into the parameters of language. Dhira Mahoney asserts that “her tears are beyond language; her sobs substitute for the words she cannot find. But they are also, at the same time, themselves language.”35 In contrast to the written language of the Church, Kempe’s tears are a “public language, an individual expression of separateness through bodily action in defiance of the prohibitions of custom and the ecclesiastical system.”36 Kempe’s crying fits not only give her a means through which to express her spiritual emotions, but also allow others to “read” the message her body articulates. Responses to her tears abroad are strikingly benign when compared with those she receives at home. As Harding suggests, “In Rome and Jerusalem, for example, her

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bodily discourse crossed the boundaries imposed by language, and her tears, cries, and writhings meet with acceptance and sympathy.”37 Kempe recalls several situations in which language becomes a barrier throughout her travels. For example, when she meets the maidservant of St. Bridget of Sweden in Rome, she is unable to converse with her without a translator (39: 203). When visiting Dame Margaret Florentyne, “neithyr of hem cown wel understand other but be syngnys er tokenys and in fewe comown wordys” until, miraculously, Kempe is able to express in Italian her impoverished state (38: 201). Despite a few instances in which Kempe is able to converse with those who do not know her language through divine intervention (33: 185; 38: 201; and 40: 207–8), she usually communicates with others through “syngnys er tokenys.” Soon, her white clothing and her fits of tears become “syngyns” that others can understand. After one particularly physical fit of crying, some women are moved to love her “meche the mor. And therfor thei, desiring to make hir solas and comfort aftyr hir gostly labowr—be syngys and tokenys, for sche undirstod not her speche—preyid hir, and in a maner compellyd hir, to comyn hom to hem, willyng that sche schulde not gon fro hem” (41: 209). While abroad, Kempe’s fits of tears, which are, on one hand, beyond language, become a powerful body language that compels much needed charity from others, usually in the form of food and shelter. Kempe’s tears, however, do not simply function as a means through which she receives spiritual favor and personal charity, for they simultaneously act as a catalyst to the conversion and spiritual growth of others. What is significant about Kempe’s crying fits is that they almost always occur in public. After Kempe suffers her first fit of tears, the Virgin appears before her and assures her that her tears are “gifts” from her son meant to cause “the world [to] wondryn of the” (29: 171). Christ goes on to inform Kempe that her tears are as much for others as they are for her, explaining, “ ‘Dowtyr, I schal makyn al the werld to wondryn of the, and many man and many woman schal spekyn of me for lofe of the and worshepyn me in the’ ” (172). Later, when Kempe begs Christ to allow her to cry in private, Christ explains that the purposes for her tears are fivefold: they allow Kempe to express her obedience to Christ, strike fear in the sinful hearts of others, demonstrate the Virgin’s grief, turn others toward redemption, and will reduce Kempe’s physical pain upon death (77: 332–6). Clearly, Kempe’s public crying fits affect others. The Book reports that witnesses to Kempe’s tears often wonder or even stare at her with “gret merveyl” (45: 223), and some are moved to convert or deepen their religious faith. One man in particular, Thomas Marchale, becomes so moved by Kempe’s tears that he begins to weep his own tears of contrition (223).

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Marchale thanks Kempe for helping him to remedy his “mysgovernyd” life by calling “hym fully to be a good man” (223). Later, a visiting priest asks to speak with Kempe. In the presence of him and his mother, Kempe begins weeping violently in reaction to a scriptural account of Christ’s own weeping. The priest and his mother, strangers to Lynn and therefore unaccustomed to Kempe’s weeping, are taken aback by her reaction. Nevertheless, instead of reacting with the usual animosity of her neighbors, the priest and his mother “joyyd and wer ryth mery in owr Lord” (58: 279). In fact, the priest is so moved by Kempe that he becomes her trusted friend, reading her spiritual texts and supporting “hir wepyng and hir crying” despite incurring the anger of others in the town (280). The priest’s relationship with Kempe not only bolsters her understanding of religious texts, but also leads to the “gret encres of hys cunnyng and his meryte” and, finally, his own benefice (280). Moreover, Kempe uses her tears to benefit others in need, weeping not only for her own sins, but also the sins of others: “Sumtyme sche wept another owr for the sowlys in purgatory; another owr for hem that weryn in myschefe, in poverte, er in any disese; another owr for Jewys, Sarazinys, and alle false heretikys” (57: 276–7). As Mahoney suggests, Kempe’s tears represent a “direct line to God” that “interlocks” her tears and prayers.38 Throughout her life, Kempe is called to the sickbeds and deathbeds of others and asked to pray or weep for their souls, “for thow thei lovyd not hir wepyng ne hir crying in her lyfetyme, thei desiryed that sche schulde bothyn wepyn and cryin whan thei schulde dyen, and so sche dede” (72: 321). On one particular occasion, Kempe’s neighbors find themselves pleading for her tears when a fire erupts in Lynne, burning down the Trinity Guildhall. Upset by the scene before her, Kempe begins to alternately cry and pray. The people of Lynne, afraid for their lives, “suffyr hir to cryen and wepyn as mech as evyr sche wolde, and no man wolde byddyn hir cesyn, but rather preyn hir of contynuacyon, ful trusting and belevyng that thorw hir crying and wepyng owr Lord wolde takyn hem to mercy” (67: 307). In between sobs, Kempe prays for “sum reyn or sum wedyr” to put out the fire (308). Soon, the town is hit with a snowstorm, which helps to contain the fire. At many points in the Book, then, even Kempe’s detractors must acknowledge the latent power of her tears. In addition to recasting an “aff liction” that may be disabling as powerful, Kempe’s text allows her to make tangible the Word of God through the aberrancies of her own body. Again, I turn to contemporary scholarship on life writing and its connection to the body. If, as Eakin and Frank suggest, the material condition of one’s body prompts life writing, it is also true that writing about the self makes the body material. Sidonie

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Smith asserts that the materiality of the body is essential to life writing: “If the materiality of our bodies makes it possible for us to tell stories about ourselves, to make selves in the telling, the very stories that we tell in turn become the lives that we live and the material bodies that we are.”39 In her consideration of autobiographies by writers with autism, Smith questions how a differently embodied subjectivity might affect narrative practices and finds that, often, writers with disabilities write to recover their bodies as well as their memories, thereby forging a connection between the body, its memories, and the narration of those memories. The link between the body and memory becomes manifest in life writing, for “acts of remembering and telling reform and rematerialize the embodied subject of narration.”40 Kempe’s Book, which her scribe makes clear is driven by her memories, not only documents her own memories and body, but also creates a record that serves as a remembrance of Christ’s suffering. Kempe’s body serves as the primary conduit through which this act of simultaneous remembrance occurs. As noted above, the impetus to Kempe’s first fit of tears is a visit to the sites of Christ’s Passion that causes her to envision Christ’s suffering as if it were occurring directly before her. At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a group of friars explains to the pilgrims the various acts of torture that Christ endured, which causes Kempe to begin weeping: “And the forseyd creatur wept and sobbyd so plentyvowsly as thow sche had seyn owyr Lord wyth hir bodyly ey sufferyng hys Passyon at that time. Before hir in hyr sowle sche saw hym verily be contemplacyon, and that cawsyd hir to have compassyon” (28: 162). Here, Christ’s suffering springs up from the past into Kempe’s present. She makes public his suffering by enacting it with her own body through her violent fit of tears, which causes her to writhe and twist upon the ground and spread “hir armys abrode” in her own performance of the crucifixion (163). As Christ makes clear, Kempe’s tears forge a direct connection between the two of them: “I schal make the buxom to my wil, that thu schalt criyn whan I wil, and wher I wil, bothyn lowed and stille, for I teld the, dowtyr, thu art myn and I am thyn , and so schalt thu be wythowtyn ende” (77: 333). As Beckwith has suggested, Kempe’s fits of tears, which align Kempe with Christ in a “maximal identification,” restore the historic moment of Christ’s death to Kempe’s present and continue to “reproduce and repeat that mimesis at every utterance.”41 Thus, each time Kempe weeps, she conjures anew the historic moment of the Passion. Kempe’s performance of Christ’s Passion and her description of that performance in her Book simultaneously create a remembrance of Christ’s death, one bodily and the other textual: “By approximating herself to Christ, misrecognizing herself in him, by living a life that is

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itself a mimesis and remembrance of the Passion, the female mystic may gain access to the Word, or to those more human expedients, words.”42 Consequently, Kempe’s tears bring the body of Christ from religious text into her own body, thereby causing her own body to function as text. The text of her body and of Christ’s then both prompt the recording of and get recorded by the text of her Book. Later in the text, as Beckwith has found, Christ directly connects Kempe’s tears with the written words of her Book, noting that her work on completing her Book is just as pleasing to him as her tears, for, just as by her tears many renewed their faith in Christ, “be this boke many a man schal be turnyd to me and belevyn therin” (88: 379).43 Beckwith surmises, “Kempe’s text, then, describes first a form of mimesis of Christ which makes of her body a text, and a form of internalized devotion that makes her written text itself the resource of sacramentality. Such an exchange can only operate through the symbol of Christ’s body, which is both body and word.”44 In this way, Kempe’s tears, which produce both her bodily identification with Christ and the text of her Book, function as a remembering and a re-membering of Christ’s body. Kempe’s tears also operate as a means through which Kempe may experience her own Passion and thus expand her own spiritual gains. Throughout her Book, Kempe casts the verbal abuse she endures from others as comparable to the torments Christ suffered during his arrest and crucifixion. During a period of arrests and trials for Lollardy, Kempe suffers much slander. Women shake their distaffs at her and call her a heretic, and “men of the cuntre” insult the life that she leads, commanding her to “go spynne and carde as other women don” (53: 258). Kempe responds to her attackers by comparing the insults she receives to the blows Christ received: “I suffir not so mech sorwe as I wolde do for owr Lordys lofe, for I suffir but schreweyd wordys, and owr merciful Lord Crist Jhesu, worshepyed be hys name, suffyrd hard strokys, bittyr scorgyngys, and schamful deth at the last for me and for al mankynde, blyssed most he be, And therfor it is ryth nowt that I suffir, in regarde to that he suffyrd.” (53: 259)

Though Kempe notes that her form of suffering is not as extreme as Christ’s, it is clear that she draws a connection between physical blows and verbal abuse. She later admits that the insults that she receives in response to her tears “etyn” and “knawyn” at her body (62: 297) and that they may even help to lessen her own sins. She states, “ ‘I pray God that al maner of wikkydnes that any man schal seyn of me in this world may stonde into remissyon of my synnys’ ” (63: 297). Christ even assures

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her that the more verbal abuse she endures, the brighter she appears in God’s eyes. After reacting to a particularly moving sermon with a fit of tears, Christ explains, “ ‘Dowtyr, this plesith me righ wel, for the mor schame and mor despite that thu hast for my lofe, the mor joy schalt thu have wyth me in hevyn, and it is rithful that it be so’ ” (78: 338). While the physical act of violently weeping allows Kempe to perform and recall Christ’s Passion, the negative responses she endures in reaction to her crying fits allow her to participate in her own Passion, one in which her spiritual merit is increased with every insult. The social disabling that occurs as a result of her bodily difference, then, actually succeeds in furthering her spiritual goals. Kempe’s “Welle of Teerys” and Medical Notions of the Female Body In addition to prompting the production of her text and leading to the enhancement of her singularity, Kempe’s bodily deviance is closely linked to medieval understandings of the female body that interpret it as defective. As my introduction outlines, medieval medical discourses construe the female body as a defective male body due to its colder, moister nature and its reproductive organs, which are often viewed as unformed, and therefore imperfect, male organs. In addition, biblical and religious writings frequently link the “wicked” nature of women—their tendency to give in to temptations and then lead men into sin—to their differently sexed bodies. Because of their supposedly defective bodies and characters, women are closely connected to those with physical impairments in literature throughout the Middle Ages, for, like those with impairments, a woman’s defective body was thought to provide evidence of her internal sinful nature. As I note above, women with spiritual aspirations had to go to great lengths to prove their spiritual worth, particularly by protecting their chastity and demonstrating their control over their bodily desires. Kempe, because she is a married mother in the world and unable to “seal” herself away in an anchorhold, struggles to present herself as spiritually devout; thus, she strives to procure a chaste marriage with her husband and dresses herself in white to represent her bodily purity, usually generating protests from those around her. Kempe’s fits of tears fall in line with medieval assumptions about the nature of the female body and show that Kempe may have exploited those assumptions to further her own spiritual ends. Medieval medical associations of the female body with moisture required the female body to seek out ways in which to purge excess moisture. Generally, medical texts assume that menstruation fulfills this

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need, allowing the female body to cleanse itself of excess wastes caused by its moist humor. Because of the moist and cold natures of women, the female body needed to balance itself by extracting heat from the male body during intercourse. Excessive intercourse with women, which depleted male bodies of a special life-giving f luid called spiritus, could lead men to blindness or even death.45 However, religious or devotional texts often construed the excessive moisture of the female body as a direct way in which a woman could enact imitatio Christi. As Elizabeth Robertson demonstrates, medieval medical texts often underscore the similarities among bodily f luids such as blood, tears, milk, semen, and other f luids that the body exudes. For instance, Galenic notions of blood stipulate that superiorly purified blood becomes semen, whereas menstrual blood becomes milk.46 The intimate connection between breast milk and blood allowed women to identify themselves within the bleeding body of Christ, whose blood was often depicted as nourishment to his children. Bynum notes that particularly later medieval literary and artistic images of men and women drinking from the breast or side of Christ “stressed blood more than milk as the food of the soul.”47 Bynum finds that miracles surrounding female saints often focus on exuding f luids that cured, comforted, or even nourished others: “Thus, the female body was seen as powerful in its holy or miraculous exuding, whether of breast milk or of blood or of oil.”48 Kempe’s tears, involuntarily exuding eff luvia that express her spiritual emotions and take the form of prayers used to aid in the spiritual comfort of others, fall within the tradition of other miraculous female bodily emissions. Kempe’s miraculous and uncontrollable tears fulfill two distinct purposes: they allow her body to purge its excess moisture and provide Kempe with a means through which to become the suffering body of Christ. Robertson contends [A religious woman’s] experience . . . was defined by Aristotelian ideas of her need for completion—for heat—and for the purging of excess moisture. In addition, the biological parity between blood, sweat, tears, milk, and urine meant that a woman’s contemplation of Christ’s blood was contemplation of her own blood, and further that her tears were equivalent to Christ’s blood. The suffering body of Christ thus allowed a woman not only to pity Christ but to identify in him her own perceived suffering body; moreover, union with his suffering body would allow her to realize her perceived biological needs.49

Kempe’s tears are thus grounded in a medical understanding of the female body as defective. At the same time, however, Kempe’s tears allow her unmediated access to God as well as the opportunity to become his body

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through imitatio Christi. Kempe’s most vivid account of her vision of the Passion sequence draws direct parallels between her uncontrollable f low of tears and Christ’s bleeding body. Robertson has found that Julian of Norwich’s descriptions of her visions of the Passion sequence emphasize the feminine aspects of Christ in a way that is conditioned by medical understandings of the female body. For instance, Julian’s emphasis on blood imagery connects Christ’s bleeding body to the excessively moist female body, which allows Julian to access the divine through her own body: “Christ’s blood is linked with all kinds of moisture, all redemptive of feminine excess. . . . Excess moisture is thus redemptive, and thereby so is femininity itself.”50 Though Robertson does not consider Kempe’s versions of the Passion in detail, she does assert that medieval medical views affect the visions, noting, “Told by theory that she can only experience God through the body, Margery recounts extreme bodily experiences in her quest for union with God. Told that she has too much moisture, Margery cries excessively. . . . The very excesses of her writing, her extremes of tears and sensual expressiveness, suggest a destabilization of those assumptions.”51 Kempe’s visions of Christ’s Passion, which only occur at two points in her text, not only connect Christ’s body with the female body, but also unite Christ’s suffering with the bodily effects of Kempe’s fits of tears. The supposed defective qualities of the female body—its excessive moisture and need to purge that excess—thus become redeemed and even exalted in its union with Christ’s body. Kempe’s first vision of the Passion occurs upon Mount Calvary and prompts her first fit of tears: Sche had so very contemplacyon in the sygth of her sowle as yf Crist had hangyn befor hir bodily eye in hys manhode. And whan thorw dispensacyon of the hy mercy of owyr Sovereyn Savyowr, Crist Jhesu, it was grawntyd this creatur to beholdyn so verily hys precyows tendyr body— alto-rent and toryn wyth scorgys, mor ful of wowndys than evyr a duffehows of holys, hangyng upon the cros wyth the corown of thorn upon hys hevyd, hys blysful handys, hys tendyr fete nayled to the hard tre, the reverys of blood f lowing owt plentevowsly of every member, the gresly and grevows wownde in hys precyows side schedyng owt blood and watyr for hir lofe and salvacyon—than sche fel down and cryde wyth lowde voys, wondyrfully turnyng and wresting hir body on every side, spredyng hir armys abroade as yyf sche schulde a dyde and not cowed kepyn hir fro crying and these bodily mevyngys, for the fyer of lofe that brent so fervently in hir sowle wyth pur pyte and compassyon. (28: 166–7)

Kempe here focuses on the fissured status of Christ’s body; it is torn to pieces, shredded by scourges. Kempe calls upon Richard Rolle’s

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description of Christ’s wounded body as similar to a dove-cote, or full of holes. In his Meditations of the Passion, Rolle writes, “swet Jhesu, thy body is like to a duf house, for a duf house is ful of holys: so is thy body ful of woundes. And as a dove ursued of an hauk, yf she mow cache an hool of hir hous she is siker ynowe, so, swete Jhesu, in temptacioun they woundes ben best refuyt to us.”52 In Christ’s wounds, Rolle affirms, believers can find refuge. Kempe’s allusion to Rolle allows her to contend that Christ’s fissured f lesh provides a means through which Kempe can unite with Christ, become his body, and find salvation. Kempe is able to identify with Christ because, like her body, Christ’s body exudes excessive moisture: rivers of blood stream down all of his limbs, and blood and water emit from a wound in his side. This moisture, Kempe emphasizes, is redemptive, for it is “for hir lofe and salvacyon.” If Christ’s fissured, moist f lesh can effect salvation, then so too is it possible for Kempe’s body to have salvific properties. Kempe’s second extended meditation on the Passion sequence occurs much later in the text during a church service. She describes coming to the site of Christ’s crucifixion, where she sees . . . the Jewys wyth gret violens rendyn of owr Lordys precyows body a cloth of sylke, the which was clevyn and hardyd so sadly and streitly to owr Lordys body wyth hys precyows blood, that it drow awey al the hyde and al the skyn of hys blissyd body and renewyd hys preciows wowndys, and mad the blod to renne down al abowtyn on every side. Than that precyows body aperyd to hir sight as rawe as a thing that wer newe f layn owt of the skyn, ful petows and reful to beholdyn. And so had sche a newe sorwe that sche wept and cryid ryth sor. (80: 347)

Kempe’s emphasis on the newly reopened wounds, which ooze and bleed down his body, cause Christ’s body to appear merely as f lesh dripping with blood, his skin “f layn” as if he were animal just brought home from the hunt. The image fully feminizes Christ by equating him with f lesh, even meat. Like the female body, Kempe’s crucified Christ emits excessive moisture and becomes food meant for the nourishment of others. Kempe confesses that images of wounded animals cause her to think upon Christ’s wounds, which, in turn, causes her to collapse into a fit of tears: “[ . . . ] yf sche sey a man had a wownde er a best whethyr it wer, er yyf a man bett a childe before hir, er smet an hors er another best wyth a whippe, [ . . . ], hir thowt sche saw owyr Lord be betyn er wowndyd” (28: 164). She also finds in her own body a direct link to Christ, for just as his wounded body becomes a spectacle in her mind, her body becomes a spectacle for those around her. While gushes of blood spill down the

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sides of Christ’s body, Kempe immediately weeps, tears streaming down her cheeks, so “that myche of the pepil in the chirche wondryd on hir body” (80: 348). Next, Kempe sees Christ’s tormentors lift up the cross and place it into the earth. The movement makes Christ’s body tremble and quake, “and alle the joyntys of that blissful body brostyn and wentyn asundyr, and hys precyows wowndys ronnyn down wyth reverys of blod on every side. And so sche had everymor cawse of mor wepyng and sorwyng” (80: 348–9). Here, the bones holding Christ’s body together burst apart, and his f lesh disintegrates into rivers of f lowing blood. Christ thus becomes pure moisture, while Kempe simultaneously melts into an effusion of tears. Kempe finds herself in Christ’s body then becomes his body. “The crucified body of Christ becomes Margery Kempe’s mystical primer,” Lochrie observes, “teaching her how to read his love, mercy, and grace in his humiliation and disfigurement.”53 At the same time, however, I contend that Kempe’s physical reactions to Christ’s body make her a text to be read by others that seeks to achieve redemption through her own bodily differences and the reactions of others to those differences. Rewriting Pregnancy and Childbirth: Kempe’s Fits of Tears and the Procreative Body Though Kempe does not reveal that she has carried fourteen children until she is brought to trial in Leicester in Chapter 48, her status as a mother is clear throughout her text (48: 235). Kempe’s allusions to pregnancy and childcare, such as her insertion into the births of Mary and Christ and her frequent references and comparisons to St. Margaret, the patron saint of pregnant women, figure prominently throughout her Book. Liz Herbert McAvoy’s recent work claims that Kempe’s text relies on the use of ideological and experiential representations of maternity in order to enact her own specific spiritual piety.54 Similarly, Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth notes that despite a “repression” of direct references to Kempe’s own children, her life and Book repeatedly turn to images of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering. The text’s use of such maternal imagery reveals what Hellwarth calls the text’s “reproductive unconscious,” or a textual drive to resolve the tensions between the procreative female body and the ideal virginal body.55 I add to Hellwarth’s reading an emphasis on the connections between disability and the reproductive female body in medieval religious and medical discourse. I contend that, in Kempe’s Book, a textual desire to work out the discrepancy between the procreative and virginal body comes together with its drive to close the gap created by Kempe’s deviant body, the difference that prompts the telling and recording of her

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story. Consequently, Kempe’s bodily differences are inherently linked to her reproductive organs, and the narrative desires of her text attempt to negotiate those differences. As I note in chapter 1, considering female infertility and reproductive ability through a gendered model for disability allows for a reading of reproductive inability as a form of disability since medieval medical, biblical, and religious discourses predicate the physical and moral imperfection of women on the perceived defectiveness of the female reproductive system. The pregnant woman, with her monstrously changing body and her potential for producing monsters, clearly connects to other abject figures whose bodily differences threaten the boundary between self and Other. The abject nature of the pregnant or birthing woman, moreover, holds the potential for jouissance, a powerfully disruptive celebration of the breakdown of boundaries and the proliferation of excess. Kempe’s text clearly reveals both the disabling and potentially powerful qualities of pregnancy and childbirth. The beginning of Kempe’s text highlights pregnancy’s disabling effects. After marrying and giving birth to her first child, Kempe suffers a bout of physical and mental illness. In fact, her illness begins not after the child is born, but just after conception and throughout her pregnancy: “And aftyr that sche had conceived, sche was labowrd wyth grett accessys tyl the child was born and than, what for labowr sche had in chyldyng and for sekeness goyng beforn, sche dyspered of hyr lyfe wenyng sche mygth not levyn” (1: 52). Kempe thus explains that she suffered a terrible sickness after conception; that sickness, in conjunction with the pain she experiences in labor, leads her to fear that she may be close to death. Indeed, Kempe’s fears are not unfounded; pregnancy and childbirth were dangerous endeavors in the Middle Ages, and painful labors, birth-related illnesses and complications, and even deaths were common.56 Furthermore, some medieval devotional texts for women, such as Hali Meidenhad and Fasiculus Morum, stress the uncomfortable and often painful physical side effects of pregnancy and childbirth, clearly casting pregnancy as a debilitating condition. Kempe confesses to the physically disabling effects of pregnancy and birth when Christ asks her to travel to Norwich soon after the birth of one of her children. Kempe hesitates, complaining of feeling “ ‘feynt and feble,’ ” and Christ promises to give her strength to make the journey (17: 113). Later, Kempe’s nursing the health of a woman suffering a similar response to childbirth evokes Kempe’s own early struggles while also emphasizing the very real potential complications of carrying and delivering children (75: 327–9). Highlighting the difficulties of Kempe’s first pregnancy sets the tone for the reader’s interpretation of her later pregnancies. Thus, though Kempe does not mention another pregnancy

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in such detail, readers may assume that she continued to experience difficulties with her thirteen other children. Having given birth to fourteen children, Kempe spends ten-and-a-half years of her life pregnant, an extensive amount of time to endure the disabilities of pregnancy. In addition to causing physically disabling symptoms that hindered a woman’s day-to-day activities, pregnancy also had the potential to hinder the spiritual progress of a woman bent on living a religious life. The sexual ideal for spiritual women was not compatible with the procreative female body. Pregnancy and the act of childbirth clearly dismantle the “sealed” body of the virgin, whose “seal” keeps its fissured f lesh together and its f leshliness from leaching out and corrupting itself and others. In fact, sermons and devotional literature distinctly oppose the ideal, virginal, and painless birth of the Virgin Mary to the imperfect, carnal, and painful births of Eve and her “daughters.” As a result, Monica Potkay and Regula Evitt explain, “Medieval culture delimits the value of the female body in ways that make it virtually impossible for f leshand-blood women to combine motherhood and sainthood.”57 Though there are records of mothers who turn to a spiritual life, those who are successful and earn respect and canonization, such as St. Elizabeth, often abandon their own children and family. The opening scene of Kempe’s Book identifies the uneasy links between childbirth and sinfulness. After explaining her painful “labowr,” Kempe recalls the wicked visions of devils she endures, stating that she “labowryed wyth spyritys” (1: 54). The use of the verb “labowr” for both instances aligns the experience of childbirth with her devilish visions and temptations. McAvoy finds that the devilish figures personify the supposed sexual nature of Kempe’s unconfessed sin, which, in turn, may allude to notions of filth and sin undergirding pregnancy: “Both literally in her childbirth labour, and in her struggle with mental and physical collapse, Margery labours to the point of death. In this way, birth and death become inextricably linked [ . . . ], and as a re-enactment of the punishment imposed upon Eve [ . . . ], motherhood necessarily carries with it the punitive subtext of damnation.”58 Hellwarth adds that “the image of ‘labowyrd with spyritys’ suggests both a sinful birth (that is, giving birth to the devil) and an otherworldly labor.”59 The devils, whose mouths are agape with f lames, recall the “the physical experience of birth,” insinuating a “dilated cervix” as well as the resultant burning pain.60 Later, we will see how Kempe continues using this verb to evoke the tensions inherent in her attempts to lead a spiritual life while very much a part of the secular world. Indeed, Kempe’s constant struggles throughout her text center on the public’s failure to resolve her status as a married mother with her

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unabashed displays of virginity, such as wearing white clothing. Kempe seems to fully understand the hindrances of being a mother to her spiritual goals. In a conversation with Christ, he reveals his knowledge that she is pregnant, asserting, “ ‘Dowtyr, thow art wyth childe;’ ” (21: 131). Kempe grudgingly confirms his statement and worries about how to care for her child now that she has embarked on her spiritual life. Christ comforts her, assuring her that he “ ‘schal ordeyn for an kepar’ ” for her child (131). In addition to demonstrating the very real logistical problem of finding childcare, this scene reveals the anxiety Kempe feels about her own inability to reconcile her sexual and spiritual statuses. Full of apprehension, she admits her unworthiness of her special relationship with Christ because of her marital status: “ ‘Lord, I am not worthy to heryn the spekyn, and thus to comown wyth myn husband. Nerthelesse it is to me gret peyn and gret dysese. [ . . . ]. [For] this maner of levyng longyth to thy holy maydens’ ” (131). Christ gently reassures Kempe that he “ ‘lofe[s] wyfes’ ” as well as maidens and that he wants her to “ ‘bryng me forth mor frwte’ ” (131). Despite Christ’s special sanctioning of Kempe’s pregnancies, her potential for carrying children remains a problem for those unable to resolve her marital status and her spiritual goals. Upon her return to England after traveling overseas (and after her procurement of a chaste marriage), a monk accuses Kempe of having just had a child. He asks her “wher sche had don hir chylde, the which was begotyn and born whil sche was owte, as he had herd seyde” (43: 216). Kempe responds to the accusation by retorting, “ ‘Ser, the same childe that God hath sent me I have browt hom, for God knowyth I dede nevyr sithyn I went owte wherthorw I schulde have a childe’ ” (216). The monk, however, has trouble believing that Kempe has not borne a child and, consequently, finds discomfort in her decision to wear white clothing.61 Despite the fact that the monk later asks to serve as her spiritual guide, it is clear that the disjunction between Kempe’s sexual and maternal status and her desire to display her chastity in her clothing (i.e., a disjunction between her actual and virtual identities) encumbers the monk’s acceptance of her spiritual nature. God eventually advises Kempe not to accept the monk as her guide. Although Kempe’s pregnancies present hindrances to her physical health and spiritual progress, her Book ultimately presents pregnancy as spiritually enabling through its revisions—or counternarratives—of the experience of birth. As Hellwarth contends, Kempe “shows through [mothering] metaphors a desire to simultaneously excuse herself from and control and liberate women’s procreative bodies generally. She draws to the center her procreative body, and she rewrites its history” by injecting herself into the sacred history of Christ’s birth and Passion as well as

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Mary’s experience of motherhood.62 I agree with Hope Phyllis Weissman that Kempe connects her fits of crying, those very bodily reactions that mark her as different and often lead to her social disabling, to the experience of birth, thus forging a link between herself and the Virgin that relies on their shared maternal experiences.63 In other words, Kempe’s tears allow her to imitate not only Christ, but also his mother. In fact, her imitatio Mariae is perhaps more pronounced and thus more central to her body and text than her imitatio Christi, for it allows her to recast her own painful experiences of childbirth as painless and spiritual. Kempe’s connection to Mary begins quite early in her Book, particularly in a vision in which Kempe serves as midwife to St. Anne and St. Elizabeth and as Jesus’s caretaker after Mary gives birth (6: 75–8). The two pregnancies that Kempe attends are devoid of the pain and illness that Kempe herself has recently suffered, while the Virgin’s birth is completely passed over. Kempe further connects her own procreative body to Mary’s in her fits of tears. Descriptions of Kempe’s fits of crying in her Book frequently align her cries, roarings, and writhings with the physical experience of childbirth. Indeed, her f lailing body and loud cries closely resemble a woman in the throes of labor, while the weakness she feels afterwards mimics the feebleness she describes after the birth of one of her children. Kempe’s fits of tears, however, allow her to participate in an act of birth that does not result in the very dangerous and even fatal effects of childbirth. Kempe herself calls her fits a “gostly labowr,” a phrase that recalls Mary of Oignies’s classification of her own cries as similar to those of a woman giving birth (28: 166).64 Like the “Passion” that Kempe endures due to the harsh reactions of others to her fits of tears, Kempe’s “birthing” through her tears is a spiritual one. Kempe thus not only recasts birth as a painless experience in her retelling of the labors of Anne, Mary, and Elizabeth, but also re-enacts her own experiences with childbirth, turning what were for her physically debilitating and potentially fatal experiences into a highly spiritual one. Despite her inclusion of the spiritual in the very physical act of childbirth, Kempe never lets the two collapse. Instead, she maintains a tension between the physical and the spiritual—the same tension we see throughout her Book—using her bodily deviance to call forth the spiritual, but never allowing one to take over the other completely.65 Other late-medieval mystical writings explore the link between the work of childbirth and Christ’s Passion, casting Jesus as a mother-figure who gives life to and nurtures his children.66 Notably, Julian of Norwich contends that, in taking on and dying in human form, Christ gives birth to humankind; consequently, Christ’s death is a labor that births humankind, situating him as the means through which people can embrace, not

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transcend, their human form: “for in oure moder Cryst we profit and encrese, and in mercy he reformyth us and restoryth, and by the vertu of his passion and his deth and his uprysyng onyd us to oure substannce.”67 In comparison, however, Kempe’s fits of tears figure herself, not Christ, as the one giving birth, and the “child” that Kempe gives birth to through her tears is Christ. Thus, Kempe’s fits of tears not only allow her to perform Christ’s Passion, to become Christ, but also to give birth to him, locating Kempe’s “ ‘gostly labowr’ as a simultaneous identification and parturition” with and of Christ.68 Through her fits of tears, then, Kempe is at once Christ and Christ’s mother. Kempe further forges the connection that she finds between Christ’s Passion and his birth when she follows up her second vision of the Passion with a description of her reaction to attending a church service during Purification Day. As Kempe observes the service, she begins to waver “on eche side as it had ben a dronkyn woman, wepyng and sobbyng so sor that unethe sche myth stondyn on hir feet for the fervor of lofe and devocyon that God putte in hir sowle” (82: 358). Kempe next reveals that seeing any women being purified after childbirth would result in her recollection of the Virgin’s purification, thus causing her to eschew “erdly thowtys and erdly syghtys, and sett al togedyr in gostly syghtys, whech wer so delectabyl and so devowt that sche myth not in the tyme of fervor wythstondyn hir wepyng, hir sobbyng, ne hir crying, and therfor suffyrd sche ful mech wondering, many a jape and many a scorne” (358). The very bodily act of childbirth, which is so polluting that it requires purification by the Church, gets supplanted by Mary’s spiritual experience of birth, which, in turn, causes Kempe’s own body to respond in such a way as to allow her to reenact birth and death in spiritual terms.69 Kempe ends this chapter by directly linking her fits of tears to her own spiritual fertility, describing herself during her brief periods without the ability to weep as “bareyn.” Her crying fits, once the source of anxiety and torment, are now cast as the cause of her happiness and spiritual expression: “And than, whan sche was so bareyn, sche cowed fynde no joye ne no comforte in mete ne drynke ne dalyans, but evyr was hevy in her and in cuntenawnce tyl God wolde send hem to hir ageyn, and than was sche mery anow,” noting that “sche thowt that sche cowed preyin” only when she could weep (359–60). As I note above, Kempe’s enacting of imitatio Christi creates a bodily remembrance of Christ that is read through the actions of Kempe’s body. Readers of Kempe’s Book, therefore, recall Christ’s body through their reading of Kempe’s. In the same way and at the same time, Kempe’s fits of tears allow her to imitate and thus remember/re-member Mary’s body by performing the Virgin’s grief at her son’s death, a violent and physical

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grief that, according to established doctrine, took the place of the physical suffering that Mary did not endure during childbirth.70 In her second vision of the crucifixion, Kempe stands with Mary, clearly imitating her weeping, sobbing, and crying (80: 350). At last, she kneels next to Mary and says, “ ‘I prey yow, Lady, cesyth of yowr sorwyng, for yowr sone is ded and owt of peyne, for me thynkyth ye han sorwyd anow. And, Lady, I wil sorwe for yow, for yowr sorwe is my sorwe’ ” (350). Here, Kempe willingly takes on the Virgin’s sorrow, using her tears to become Christ’s mother, and her fits of tears clearly exploit the more physical and emotional accounts of the Virgin’s response to her son’s death and their connections to the Virgin birth. Weissman contends that Kempe’s tears on Calvary allow her “to achieve a participation, both existential and metaphysical, in the act of the Virgin Birth” that rewrites the “sin of female sexuality, which labor in childbirth punishes” by recasting her experiences of birth in spiritual terms.71 As a result, Kempe moves “beyond Eve’s biological maternity to achieve a maternity suprasexual and faultlessly pure.” 72 In her rewriting of the physical experience of childbirth, Kempe also replaces the pain of earthly childbirth with the spiritual, effectively becoming the spiritual mother to Christian men and women that Christ requests she be: “[T]hu makyst every Cristen man and woman thi childe in thi sowle for the tyme, and woldist han as muche grace for hem as for thin owyn childeryn” (86: 140). In an essay that examines Kempe’s “transvaluation” of the bodily into the spiritual, Michael Campbell surmises that Kempe’s reassessment of the social roles of wife and mother makes her sensuality pure by tempering domestic, material roles with the spiritual.73 While Campbell’s essay mainly focuses on Kempe’s use of comparative syntax to highlight the rhetorical elements of her transvaluation, it offers an interpretation of maternal separation that is valuable to our reading of Kempe’s earthly and spiritual maternity. Campbell notes that death is inherent in birth; consequently, “for the mother, the pain of childbearing includes the realization that birth necessitates parting. The ultimate end and purpose of motherhood is [sic] loss.” 74 This notion of inevitable separation—both in the act of birth and in the act of death—allows Kempe to more closely align herself with Mary, whose grief at her son’s death invokes the pain she did not experience in his birth. Kempe, thus, through the pain of maternal separation, is able to transvaluate her own material experience of maternity to Mary’s spiritual maternity. Kempe’s own explanation of God’s command for procreation, “crescite et multiplicamini,” or “be fruitful and multiply,” ref lects her transvaluation of the act of bearing children from the bodily to the

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spiritual: “ ‘Ser, thes wordys ben not undirstondyn only of begetyng of children bodily, but also be purchasing of vertu, whech is frute gostly, as be heryng of the wordys of God, be good exampyl yevyng, be mekenes and paciens, charite and chastite, and swech other, for pacyens is more worthy than myraclys werkyng’ ” (51: 244). Kempe’s interpretation differentiates between bodily and spiritual fruit, explaining that God finds the two equally pleasing. Furthermore, the production of “frute gostly” leads to the proliferation of other Christian believers. Kempe’s words here, which represent her interpretation of the words of God, are a spiritual fruit that leads others to follow her: “And owr Lord, of hys mercy evyr he mad sum men to lovyn hir and supportyn hir” (244). Kempe’s supporters become her spiritual children, folks who often refer to her as “Mother,” care for her and receive care in return, and accept spiritual advice from her.75 The transvaluation from bodily to spiritual mother that Kempe undergoes, however, depends on her body. In imitating Christ and Mary through her fits of tears, Kempe revises the definition of the procreative body, moving it from the physical to the spiritual realm. By aligning herself with Mary, Kempe recasts herself as a spiritual mother who simultaneously brings others to Christ while also advancing her own spiritual status. The Labor of Spiritual Motherhood: Kempe’s Care for the Impaired Significantly, Kempe’s interactions with the physically and mentally impaired throughout her Book expressly articulate her capability as a spiritual mother. Primarily, Kempe provides charity and care to those with impairments, nurturing them with company, food, and even medical attention and thus demonstrating her motherly affection. Moreover, her treatment of such impaired figures succeeds in further demonstrating her singular spiritual reputation, both in the eyes of Christ and others. It is not only Kempe’s deviant body, then, that enables her spiritual growth; she also exploits others with embodied differences in her quest for spiritual development. One of the most prominent disabled characters of Kempe’s text is Richard, a poor Irish man with a hunched back who serves as a guide and source of comfort during Kempe’s travels in Venice. Recently abandoned by her fellow English pilgrims, Kempe bemoans her lonely state, and Christ assures her that her travels will be completed safely. Suddenly, Kempe turns to the side and spots Richard, “a powyr man” with “a gret cowche on hys bake” (30: 175), and she remembers that her confessor prophesied that a “ ‘broke-bakkyd man’ ” would lead her to safety after

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her “ ‘owyn felawsep hath forsakyn’ ” her (176). Kempe asks Richard to guide her to Rome, and despite his protestations of not having a weapon to protect her, he finally agrees when she assures him that Christ will look after them and she will compensate him for his efforts. Richard appears when Kempe is most vulnerable and marginalized. Her English companions have deserted her, annoyed by her newly acquired fits of tears. Kempe, thus, finds company with a fellow outsider, one that she makes clear is not only impaired, but also from a foreign country. Richard’s economic status marks him as marginalized, as well. Kempe makes reference to his tattered coat twice, and he must leave her each day in order to make his living as a beggar. While Richard perhaps “mothers” Kempe by providing her comfort “every evyn and morwyn,” his appearance leads up to an expression of Kempe’s spiritual maternity. While walking with him in the forest, Kempe encounters two Grey Friars and a woman carrying a chest that holds a doll in the shape of Christ. At each stop along their journey, the woman takes out the doll and allows “worshepful wyfys” to hold it in their laps, dress it, and kiss it as if the doll were “God hymselfe” (30: 177). While watching the women “mother” the Christ doll, Kempe is taken by a fit of tears and “hy meditacyons in the byrth and the childhode of Crist” (177–8). The passing of the Christ doll among the wives connects the women, forming a female community that unites both Christian devotion and the experience of motherhood.76 Kempe’s reaction, her fit of tears, calls forth Christ’s birth and death as well as her own experiences of giving birth, thereby bringing together earthly and spiritual motherhood. As Hellwarth explains, “Margery is unified with these women by an event, Christ’s birth, and its subsequent reenactment. The text here places the ritual of these women coddling and kissing the Christ doll as akin to the real birth and childhood of Christ.” 77 And, though the other wives participate in caring for the doll, Kempe clearly signifies the mother “who weeps, sobs, and loudly cries out in a rehearsal of birth and delivery.” 78 Hellwarth adds that the ending of the chapter continues to assert Kempe’s status as spiritual mother to the Christ doll, for the other women, overwhelmed by her physical response, serve as midwives to Kempe, helping her into “a good soft bed” and comforting her “as thei myth” (178).79 Richard’s appearance at the opening of this section is apt. His arrival, which occurs soon after Kempe acquires her fits of tears from which she suffers physical debility and social ostracism, draws attention to embodied difference in general and Kempe’s own marginalized status in particular. His acceptance of her companionship throughout her travels abroad emphasizes her continued exclusion from her home community and her acceptance by

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other “outsiders,” such as the Saracens (30: 174) and a group of impoverished travelers (Book II, 6: 407). Furthermore, their mutual comforting of one another establishes the importance of providing care for others who are marginalized.80 Consequently, though Richard’s care for Kempe sets him up as a maternal figure, Kempe soon supersedes him, demonstrating her capacity to mother Christ. As a result, charity, embodied difference, and maternity become closely connected in this scene. The doll, a representation of Christ, foreshadows the spiritual children that Kempe will care for throughout the rest of her text. If to care for the doll is to care for Christ, then to provide charity and comfort to others is also to serve Christ. As we will see, many of the figures Kempe provides care for are impaired. P. H. Cullum’s study of acts of charity in Kempe’s Book notes that, in Kempe’s time, performing the Seven Works of Mercy for the less fortunate “would be equivalent to doing them for Christ.” 81 The figure receiving the aid, then, takes the form of Christ, and doing for others becomes a way to directly serve Christ. These works were divided into Spiritual Works, such as prayer and forgiveness, and Corporal Works, such as feeding and clothing the poor and sick. Although Kempe participates in the Corporal Works, she clearly subordinates the physical to the spiritual. As a result, she spends the length of her Book attempting to transcend the physical, a feat that, as we have seen, proves difficult, if not impossible, for Kempe to achieve. Because bodily acts of charity were more accessible to laypeople (particularly laywomen) than spiritual acts, Kempe often fuses bodily works with the spiritual, such as when she provides physical care to Mary in the spiritual realm of her vision. Cullum writes, “Margery’s marked preference in doing the Works of Mercy was to do them spiritually and directly to the person of Christ or his mother.”82 In order to accomplish this, Kempe often casts her care of the impaired as a way to directly care for Christ, and, frequently, the care she offers mimics that of the work of earthly mothers. As McAvoy explains, the Spiritual Works of Mercy undoubtedly inf luenced notions of maternal duties: “To bring a child to maturity, a mother would spend much of her time teaching life and domestic skills, preaching to a child about dangers and modes of behavior, chastising misdemeanours, consoling when hurt or unwell, offering the benefit of experience, exercising patience, and praying for their safe delivery into adulthood.”83 Though Kempe offers much care to the sick and injured throughout her Book, I will focus on the few cases that occur just before her second vision of the Passion. Significantly, the scenes in which she provides care for others in this section of the Book reference disability more overtly

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than any others. I begin with Kempe’s desire to kiss lepers, which occurs in Chapter 74. Christ sends Kempe a vision of his Passion that causes her to be unable “to beheldyn a lazer er another seke man, specialy yyf he had any wowndys aperyng on hym. So sche cryid and so sche wept as yyf sche had sen owr Lord Jhesu Crist wyth hys wowndys bledyng” (74: 325–6). As I note in chapter 3, medieval discourses on the leprous were ambivalent, marking those with the disease as either sinful or Christ-like. Kempe here draws upon the common association of the leper as a Christlike figure. In particular, the leper’s wounds recall the wounds Christ incurred during his Passion. Consequently, Kempe begins “to lovyn that sche had most hatyd befortyme, for ther was nothyng mor lothful ne mor abhomynabyl to hir, whil sche was in the yeyrs of worldly prosperite, than to seen er beheldyn a lazer” (326). Kempe draws a clear distinction between her spiritual state at present and when she was more concerned with earthly matters. Her new love for the leprous body, then, signifies her spiritual progress; what was once disgusting is now desirable. Though Kempe identifies lepers with Christ, her text reveals conf licting discourses on the leprous. Fearing for her chastity, Kempe’s confessor insists that she only kiss leperwomen, an order that recalls both Kempe’s and the leper’s alleged sexual sins. Kempe must, in fact, counsel one of the women who is struggling to remain a virgin, for she “was laborwryd wyth many fowle and horibyl thowtys” (327). The woman’s horrible thoughts echo those Kempe suffered after failing to confess her sin at the beginning of the Book as well as those that haunt her after acquiring her chaste marriage (59: 281–2). Deviant female sexuality, thus, remains an undercurrent in the text’s depiction of the leperwomen, and it mandates Kempe’s interactions with them. Despite such conf licting discourses, Kempe primarily associates the leper-figure with Christ, which causes her to want to “halsyn and kyssyn” lepers “for the lofe of Jhesu” (74: 326). Thus, as with the Christ doll above, Kempe embraces and kisses the women, who function as substitutes for Christ. Moreover, Kempe offers comfort and counsel to the women, a form of care that further highlights her maternal affection for the women. Mostly, Kempe’s tenderness for the leperwomen showcases her spiritual singularity, however. Medieval hagiographies often employ the motif of the leper’s kiss, through which a saint elicits miraculous cure by kissing a leper. Catherine Peyroux traces the evolution of the leper’s kiss in saints’ lives from the fourth to the fourteenth century. She finds that early saints’ lives posit the kiss as a purely curative function that demonstrates the saint’s ability to perform miraculous cures. Later depictions of saints kissing lepers serve to demonstrate the saint’s humility and self-mortification; in effect, the leper’s kiss becomes redemptive

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to the saint.84 Kempe’s use of the leper’s kiss in her text clearly seeks to emphasize her singularity. Her actions clearly do not cure the leper women; instead, they reinforce her own ability to debase herself and, through such debasement, to receive spiritual reward. Kempe clarifies that before her conversion she found lepers to be “lothful” and “abhomynabyl” (326). By debasing herself through the act of kissing those with bodies that elicit repulsion and disgust, Kempe emphasizes her own humility and singularity; the kiss, consequently, benefits Kempe more than the leperwomen. In the chapter immediately following her kissing of the leperwomen, Kempe cares for a woman who suffers from physical and mental anguish after the birth of her child. As I note above, the scene undoubtedly evokes Kempe’s own struggles after her first child’s birth. While in the church of St. Margaret (who is, notably, the patron saint of pregnant women), the woman’s husband confesses to Kempe, “ ‘[My wife] knowyth not me, ne non of hir neyborwys. Sche roryth and cryith so that sche makith folk evyl afeerd. Sche wyl bothe smytyn and bityn, and therfor is sche manykyld on hir wristys’ ” (75: 328). Just like Kempe, the woman’s violent actions to herself and others necessitate physical restraint. Kempe accompanies the husband to his home and meets with his wife. Immediately, the woman finds a deep connection to Kempe, noting that her presence is a source of great comfort, for she sees “ ‘fayr awngelys abowte’ ” her (328). The woman, however, finds no such solace in anyone else. When others approach her, she, seeing “develys abowte hem,” cries and bares her teeth “as sche wolde etyn hem” (328). As with Kempe above, the woman’s demonic visions and her own gaping mouth conjure the sinfulness inherent in patristic understandings of pregnancy and childbirth. Moreover, the description of the woman’s actions and her neighbors’ reactions to them closely resemble the physical distress and social disabling that both Kempe’s own experience after her first child’s birth and her fits of tears cause. In addition to seeing visions of devils, the woman [ . . . ] roryd and cryid so, bothe nyth and day for the most part, that men wolde not suffyr hir to dwellyn amongys hem, sche was so tediows to hem. Than was sche had to the forthest ende of the town, into a chambyr, that the pepil schulde not heryn hir cryin. And ther was sche bowndyn handys and feet wyth chenys of yron, that sche schulde smytyn nobody. (328)

The woman’s roaring and crying recalls Kempe’s fits of tears, for they cause her neighbors to wish that she would not live among them. Similar

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to Kempe, then, the woman is excluded by her own community so that they will not have to “heryn hir cryin.” As with the troubled leperwoman Kempe counsels, there is a clear connection between the woman and Kempe. This doubling allows Kempe to rewrite her own difficult experience with childbirth. Instead of suffering herself, Kempe eases the woman’s suffering, visiting her at least twice a day, coaxing her to speak instead of cry. In addition, Kempe prays for the woman’s recovery every day, until, finally, “God yaf hir hir witte and hir mende ayen” so that she could be “browt to chirche and purified” (75: 329). Like Kempe, the woman recovers from her ailments through divine intervention. However, whereas Christ intervenes for Kempe, the most instrumental figure in the woman’s cure is Kempe herself. Kempe, thus, rewrites her initial experience, placing herself as mother- and Christ-figure to the woman in need. Rather than playing the role as patient, the mother who suffers the physical and mental anguish of childbirth, Kempe steps in as divine physician, the mother who is able to nurse her spiritual child back to health. The scribe even intervenes at the end of the chapter, underscoring the importance of Kempe’s actions. He calls the cure “a ryth gret myrakyl, for he that wrot this boke had nevyr befor that tyme sey man ne woman, as hym thowt, so fer owt of hirself as this woman was, ne so evyl to rewlyn ne goveryn, and sithyn he sey hir sad and sobyr anow” (329). Casting the woman’s recovery as a miraculous cure heightens Kempe’s singular status, highlighting her spiritual prowess by including miraculous cure to her list of spiritual abilities while also challenging dominant discourses on women’s bodies as aberrant. Kempe’s next chapter continues the trend of presenting herself as spiritual mother through her physical care for the impaired. In this chapter, Kempe must return to her husband’s home (they had been living apart so as to preserve their chaste marriage) to care for him after he becomes an invalid due to a fall. Kempe’s neighbors conclude that if John were to die, she would be responsible for his death, “for-as-meche as sche myth a kept hym and dede not” (76: 330). Kempe, fearing the town’s slander, prays that God will keep John alive for at least a year, so as not to give credence to the town’s claims. God agrees, noting that he has “ ‘wrowt a gret myrakyl’ ” in keeping him alive for her and adding that she must “ ‘take hym hom and kepe hym for my lofe’ ” (331). Kempe worries that the physical care of her husband will not please the Lord as much as her spiritual works, such as prayer and contemplation, but God assures her that she “ ‘schalt have as meche mede for to kepyn hym and helpyn hym in hys need at hom as yyf [she] wer in chirche to makyn [her] prayers’ ” (331). God asserts that Kempe’s care for her husband is equal to her care

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for him. At this, Kempe takes on the role of full-time caregiver for her husband. Kempe’s care for her husband most directly mirrors that of a mother’s physical care for her child. While Kempe embraces, prays for and counsels the leperwomen and the wife, she must feed John, wash him and his clothing, and clean up his excrement, all the while managing the household. Kempe depicts John as a child, noting his “childisch” mental state, which causes him to lose control over his bodily functions “as a childe” (76: 332). Moreover, Kempe twice uses the term “labowr” to describe the difficulty of having to care for him as if to connect the hard work of caring for John with the pains of childbirth (332). Such labor, she claims, impedes her from taking part in spiritual activities, such as “hir contemplacyon,” so “that many tymys sche schuld an yrkyd hir labowr” (332). Instead of loathing the physical work of caring for John’s body, however, she casts it as a punishment for her earlier lust for the same body, thinking on the “many delectably thowtys, f leschly lustys, and inordinate lovys to hys persone” she had in her younger years (332). Caring for John, then, becomes a way for Kempe to redeem her earlier deviant sexuality and serve Christ simultaneously: “And therfor sche was glad to be ponischyd wyth the same persone and toke it mech the more esily and servyd him and helpyd hym, as hir thowt, as sche wolde a don Crist himself ” (332). As with the debased bodies of the leperwomen and the woman who has just given birth, Kempe uses her husband’s abject body to bring her closer to the divine, again exploiting the body of an impaired figure in order to increase her spiritual merit and redefine her earthly status as mother in spiritual terms. It is significant that each of these scenes that describes Kempe’s encounters with impaired figures occurs in succession just before her second vision of Christ’s Passion. Moreover, the two chapters after Kempe cares for John and just before the Passion sequence center on Kempe’s tears, her own physical condition that elicits both socially disabling and spiritually enabling effects. In Chapter 77, as I note above, Kempe doubts the power of her tears, begging Christ to take them away from her. Christ, however, assures her that her tears are meant to cause others to repent for their sins and devote their lives to him (77: 332–6). The following chapter describes a series of fits of tears that Kempe falls into during a Palm Sunday service. Her violent sobs cause the rest of the congregation to wonder and curse at her actions, “supposing that sche had feyned hirself for to cryin” (78: 338). Christ promises Kempe that her tears are pleasing to him and that they will save many others. He states that he intends Kempe to be “a merowr mongys hem, for to han gret sorwe, that thei schulde takyn exampil by the for to have sum litil sorwe in her hertys for her synnys,

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that thei myth therthorw be savyd” (338–9). If Kempe’s is here to be a mirror to others, perhaps the impaired figures she encounters are mirrors for her, allowing her to find in them and rewrite her own sins. This section of chapters sets up Kempe’s ability to serve Christ through her spiritual mothering of impaired figures, establishes the divine merit of Kempe’s own physical aff liction, and ends with a detailed depiction of Kempe’s performance of the birth and death of Christ through her fits of tears. At the center of this section, then, is Kempe’s ability to use the disabled body—whether that of others or her own—to both connect to and represent herself as the body of Christ. Vital to this process is Kempe’s own deviant body, the body that allows her to redefine her own physical differences in spiritual terms. In the second book of Kempe’s text, her dual roles as earthly and spiritual mother come together in her experiences with the disfiguring leprosy-like illness of her own son, the only one of her (bodily) children that she describes in detail. Book II, which shows Kempe eschewing the physical for the spiritual with much greater success than any other section of her Book, begins with Kempe’s admonishments for her son to leave the dangers of the material world and join her in a spiritual life of contemplation. Her son refuses, and Kempe charges him, “ ‘Now sithyn thu wil not leevyn the world at my cownsel, I charge the, at my blissyng, kepe this body klene at the lest fro womanys feleschep tyl thu take a wyfe aftyr the lawe of the Chriche. And yyf thu do not, I pray God chastise the and ponysch the therfor’ ” (Book II, 1: 386). At first glance, Kempe’s counsel resembles a threat. Indeed, her son ignores his mother’s advice, travels overseas, and falls “into the synne of letchery,” which soon results in disease: “Sone aftyr hys colowr chawngeyd, hys face wex ful of whelys and bloberys, as it had been a lepyr” (386). In an act that mirrors the social exclusion enacted upon lepers in medieval society, the young man’s own master throws him out and others f lee his company because of his supposed leprosy (386).85 As with the other impaired figures that Kempe counsels and cares for, her son’s aff liction recalls some of her own past indiscretions. Like Kempe, her son begins his adult life in the secular world, later choosing to live a more religious life after experiencing a debilitating condition. Moreover, Kempe’s son commits sexual sins, which bring to mind Kempe’s past struggles with her sexuality. Consequently, it is significant that Kempe connects her son’s illness to female sexuality—she warns him of partaking in “womanys feleschep” out of wedlock. That Kempe’s son is physically punished for his sinful acts after his mother’s warning causes her son and her neighbors to suspect that she has used her spiritual powers to harm her child. Kempe, however, stands

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her ground, asserting that her son must seek out grace for himself. Soon, he sees the error of his ways: “he cam to hys modyr, tellyng hir of hys mysgovernawns, promittyng he schulde be obedient to God and to hir, and to amende hys defawte thorw the help of God” (387). Kempe, convinced of her son’s sincerity and “not foryetyng the frute of hir wombe,” prays for her son’s spiritual and bodily recovery (387). Her son is soon cured, marries, and has a child of his own. When she sees him a few years later, his outward and inward conditions are completely changed; he now wears modest clothing, lives a virtuous life, and even goes on pilgrimages to the Holy Land. This episode with her son brings together Kempe’s status as an earthly and spiritual mother. As McAvoy explains, “Representing herself as both clichéd nagging mother, and as divine agent, she simultaneously places herself back within the domestic sphere whilst inserting herself into sacred history. She is at once Margery the earthly mother, parabolic parent of Christ’s own exemplary narrative, and spiritual mother to the entire world—in essence, the neo-Virgin Mary.”86 It is notable that Kempe’s son can only access Christ’s forgiveness through his mother, and she must first forgive her son before she will call upon Christ. In this way, McAvoy observes, Kempe exhibits both maternal and Marian abilities and “stands in for the Virgin Mary and becomes her son’s mediator for divine forgiveness. Thus Margery’s son’s contrition is a triumph for Margery’s worldly and spiritual maternity,” demonstrating her simultaneous status as “dutiful earthly mother and privileged Mother of God.”87 As with the impaired figures discussed above, through her son’s aff licted body, Margery’s spiritual works shine. As if to demonstrate her movement from physical to spiritual piety, Kempe’s fits of tears fall away in Book II, supplanted by prayer, a contemplative act that, as I note above, is connected to her tears, but demonstrates a more sophisticated spiritual response (in the logic of the Book) because it eschews the body. Kempe’s adoption of the masculine language of prayer over her feminine, bodily fits of tears seems to indicate Kempe’s surrender of her body to patriarchal discourse. Kempe, however, continues to keep ambiguous any distinction between the bodily and the spiritual. In the prayer that ends her Book, Kempe mentions her fits of tears, asking God to grant her “ ‘a welle of teerys’ ” that will continue to “ ‘encresyn [her] lofe to the and moryn [her] meryte in hevyn, and helpyn and profityn [her] evyn-Cristen sowlys, lyvys or dedys’ ” (10: 422–3). Kempe, in addition, mentions her role as earthly and spiritual mother when she implores God to show mercy on “ ‘alle [her] childeryn, gostly and bodily,’ ” especially those who are ill, leprous, bedridden, and imprisoned (425). Ultimately, Kempe’s prayer

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sums up her Book’s desire to recast her position as a woman thoroughly immersed in the earthly and the bodily, a “ ‘woman that was takyn in the vowtre,’ ” as a woman able to stand with God, “ ‘ded to alle the joyis of this world, and qwyk and greedy to hy contemplacyon’ ” (427). Despite her aspirations for completely letting go of the bodily, Kempe continues to bring her experiences of femaleness, particularly maternity, to the forefront of her Book. As Harding notes, “Rather than writing the word, as the clerks do, [Kempe] give[s] birth to it, enunciating divine truths in the kinetic language of the maternal order.” 88 In her final act of mothering, Kempe produces her Book, a text born of, through, and upon her body. As I have shown, both the production of Kempe’s text and the performance of her spirituality depend upon her gendered body, a body deemed defective by male authorities. Such understandings of her body condition her very notions of what it means to be a spiritual woman in the later Middle Ages. However, instead of renouncing her body, Kempe turns to it, using it to demonstrate her singular status. By rewriting her own experiences with her body and casting them as painless and spiritual, Kempe redeems the female procreative body, positing it as a site of spiritual excess, not deficiency. At the end of her book on feminism and disability, Susan Wendell calls for a redefinition of the pain of disability, one that would allow people with disabilities to transcend the body, not in a way that would devalue the body by creating a mind–body hierarchy, but in a way that would allow for a revaluation of the suffering body. Wendell explains, “I think of [transcendence of the body] as a reinterpretation of bodily sensations so as not to be overwhelmed or victimized by them.” 89 One way in which Wendell re-imagines her own chronic pain is by accepting that she cannot change it; this allows her mind to focus on other, more important aspects of her life. By observing the pain of the body and disengaging from it, Wendell argues that she has awakened to “a changed identity, to a very different sense of myself, even as I have come to identify myself less with what is occurring in my body.” 90 If scholars of the body adjust their focus from bodily pleasure and awareness, they will be able to better theorize all kinds of bodies by exploring “how to live with the suffering body, with that which cannot be noticed without pain, and that which cannot be celebrated without ambivalence.” 91 The Book of Margery Kempe demonstrates this ambivalence by keeping in tension medical and patristic understandings of her body with her body’s potential for spiritual growth. Kempe’s rewriting of her own bodily experiences of birth and her fits of tears suggests that the

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disabled body can be a medium for spiritual empowerment. By considering Kempe through a gendered lens of disability, we can read her redefinitions of her embodied difference as an attempt to transcend her body in a way that does not simply subordinate the female body, but actually allows Kempe to realize her body’s possibilities.

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n her book Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, the first comprehensive analysis of disability studies as an academic discipline, Simi Linton specifically prescribes the humanities as needing a disability studies perspective. In fact, she asserts that a disability perspective is central to the curriculum of the humanities. In particular, Linton claims that the study of disability within the humanities may help widen the limited and often pathologized perceptions of disability within the social and applied sciences: “What is absent from the [sciences] curriculum is the voice of the disabled subject and the study of disability as idea, as abstract concept, and it is in the humanities that these gaps are most apparent. It is there that the meanings attributed to disability and the process of meaning-making could be examined.”1 Despite the ubiquity of representations of disability in literature, art, and history, the humanities fields are all guilty of often failing to critically consider it; consequently, Linton claims, “[d]isability has become . . . like a guest invited to a party but never introduced.”2 Linton notes that fields uniquely suited to examining questions of disability such as women’s studies, queer studies, and various organizations studying race and/or ethnicity have been slow to include disability in their scholarship. However, the incorporation of a disability perspective into these fields has the ability to open new lines of thinking about social and cultural diversity such as ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality because disability shares similar theoretical tenets with these identity categories.3 Moreover, studies of the representation of disability can lead to a social and political theorization of disability that would move from considering disability in relation to pathology and instead consider it in terms of its social production. Studying disability’s representation allows for a critical re-viewing of “the vast realm of meaning-making that occurs in metaphoric and symbolic uses of disability. These devices need to be analyzed in an array of cultural products to understand their meanings and their functions, and to subvert their power.”4 Linton notes that some literary scholars have already begun this important work,

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including Lennard Davis and Rosemarie Garland Thomson (and, I would add David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder and Ato Quayson),5 but that others must continue “to trace the patterns in the use of metaphors and in symbolic uses of disability to determine where and how they emerge, and how the function in various genres, cultures, and historical periods. Gender, race, and class analyses of these representations should be integral to this endeavor.”6 Throughout this project, I have attempted to take up Linton’s challenges and “claim disability” within medieval literary studies. By focusing on the representation of disabled women, this project seeks to fill a number of the gaps Linton finds within humanities scholarship and challenges other scholars both within and without medieval studies to realize and analyze the power that representations of gendered disability have to expose particular social anxieties about such bodied differences. Rather than attempt to provide a history of the experience of disability, this project has explored the cultural production of disability in many different kinds of medieval literature, a social process that, I argue, has a history and is as important to our understanding of medieval disability as are purely historical studies. At the same time, by uncovering how the trope of the disabled woman can disrupt and even create narrative, my project insists that “normal” and “deviant” identity categories are not always mutually exclusive or hierarchical. Like Linton, I stress here the importance of integrating disability studies into other fields of inquiry, particularly the bringing together of feminist and disability discourses. As a result, this study injects gender into studies of disability. This is not to make gender and disability (or any other related identity category such as ethnicity, race, or sexuality) interchangeable, but to highlight the shared social processes by which these embodied identity categories become intelligible or unintelligible at particular sociohistorical moments. The disabled figure in literature, as I have demonstrated throughout this study, often takes on the status of Other, and that status gets coded as abject, feminine, liminal, and ambiguous. As feminists have already shown, the continual exclusion of the Other in the hopes of shoring up notions of a masculine, unified self demonstrates the illusory quality of that unified self. Bringing disability into this formulation destabilizes any notion of a static bodily norm, forcing us to recognize who gets silenced and excluded by notions of normalcy. By focusing on how the “twinned deviance” of gender and disability operates in literature, I seek to upset traditional notions of teleological narrative drives in similar ways. Throughout this project, I have historicized gender and disability as objects of a related and complex social process by first noting their

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conf lation in medieval male-authored authoritative discourse. As these writings attempt to explain the “secrets” and posit static notions of the body, they inadvertently create master narratives of the body that mark those who may deviate from such narratives, such as women or the disabled, as deviant. In the Middle Ages, I have shown, this social process has its roots in male-authored religious and medical discourses that position women’s bodies as having the most hidden—and perhaps the most dangerous— secrets of all. The merging of such discourses creates not only the illusions of bodily normalcy and deviancy, but also of bodily authority and docility. As objects of this authority, docile bodies such as women with disabilities are thus acted upon through a process of exclusion that attempts to solidify illusory notions of identity. As my study of Middle English fabliaux suggests, the figure of the disabled woman can further destabilize an already volatile text whose use of humor turns traditional social hierarchies upside down. While male disabilities open the texts I discuss, an aberrant female body soon supplants the male’s, demonstrating the female body’s always already disabled positioning. By uncovering the fabliaux’s use of a topos of reproduction that undermines boundaries of identity, I reveal the interconnections between the procreative female body and the disabled body, a link that the remainder of the project turns to. The disabled woman’s body, which aligns with and magnifies the grotesque, expands the fabliaux’s inherent moments of carnivalesque subversion. Though the narrative force of each text would seem to demand a closure of the difference each woman introduces, the women resist and even exceed such closure through their bodily instabilities. As a result, the added instability of the disabled woman allows a physical difference typically conceived as a hindrance to produce an enabling power. In my study of literature that depicts punishments that result in physical impairments, I sketch out the double-bind implicit in the bringing together of gender and disability: while socially unruly women are considered deviant in both body and character, ideal feminine behaviors are also associated with disability. As I demonstrate, in the hopes of closing the gap that social unruliness creates, these texts cast the “misbehavior” of women as rooted in their defective bodies and then punish such behaviors with physical impairment. While this tactic sometimes succeeds, in other cases, the newly acquired physical impairment only serves to spur on alternative narratives that question common assumptions about gender and disability. Texts that include supernatural elements are particularly inclined to produce such alternative narratives, for their use of the supernatural creates an opening out of the text that allows for a critique of discursive power relations, whether legal, social,

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or literary. Despite narrative drives toward resolution, I find that the trope of female disability, in its production by and of discourse, results in the continuous deferral of closure. This continuous deferral provides a wealth of counternarratives to standard assumptions about femaleness, femininity, and disability and opens up new ways of thinking about such social categories in the Middle Ages. Lastly, my contention that Margery Kempe’s spiritual autobiography provides a means through which to narrate a counterstory of gender and disability reveals the woman-religious’s struggle to establish her spiritual nature in light of conf licting discourses on her procreative body. The autobiographical elements of Kempe’s text suggest that discourse’s dependency on disability is not only the result of textual drives, but also of a personal drive to repair a rift between an individual’s actual and virtual identity. In other words, bodily difference necessitates self-narration. Kempe’s self-narration, thus, shapes and is shaped by her bodily differences, which are embedded in a medical understanding of her body that roots her physical and moral deficiencies in her femaleness. By recasting the experience of maternity in spiritual terms, Kempe positions the procreative female body as evidence of spiritual excess, not its lack. Ultimately, my study of gender and disability in spiritual autobiography demonstrates that bodily difference is not only textually produced, but also produces text that can expose the illusory quality of the fictions that code such difference as deviant. Like the disabled female characters I study, this project resists any easy closure or neat conclusions. And, just as their unruly figures intrude upon, dismantle, and even create narratives, this project seeks to intervene not only in general studies of the body and identity, but also in medieval disability studies, a field that, as I explain in my introduction, is just now defining itself to the larger field of medieval studies. Perhaps this study can engender a “double vision” for medieval scholars of disability, one that concedes a discipline’s need for definitions but also remembers the fictive nature of such absolutes. Thus, instead of providing a definitive answer to the question of female disability in medieval literature, I hope that this project, a body of work that narrates my own counterstory of gender and disability, will provoke new lines of inquiry that question what it means to have and represent embodied differences like gender and disability—both in the Middle Ages and today.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, eds. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), viii. See also Caroline Walker Bynum, especially Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) and The Resurrection of the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 2. See Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), and Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2006); Stephen F. Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking About Physical Impairment in the High Middle Ages, c.1100–c.1400 ( New York: Routledge, 2006); Edna Edith Sayers (formerly Lois Bragg), Oedipus borealis: The Aberrant Body in Old Icelandic Myth and Saga (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson, 2004); and Edward Wheatley, “ ‘Blind’ Jews and Blind Christians: Metaphorics of Marginalization in Medieval Europe,” Exemplaria 14.2 (October 2002) : 351–82 and Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). 3. See Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, trans. William Sayers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). 4. Lennard J. Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 39. For more on disability studies, see Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1998) and “What Is Disability Studies?” PMLA 120:2 (2005): 518–22; Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: MLA, 2002). David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder discuss disability in a specifically literary sense in Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).

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5. Erving Goffman Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963). 6. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; reprint London: Ark, 1984). 7. Metzler, p. 21. 8. Linton, p. 8. 9. Susan Wendall, The Rejected Body (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 66. 10. Wendell, p. 66. 11. Wendell, p.184. 12. Wheatley, Stumbling Blocks, esp. pp. 10–13. 13. “Since bodily infirmity is sometimes caused by sin, the Lord saying to the sick man whom he had healed: ‘Go and sin no more, lest some worse thing happen to thee’ ( John 5:14), we declare in the present decree and strictly command that when physicians of the body are called to the bedside of the sick, before all else they admonish them to call for the physician of souls, so that after spiritual health has been restored to them, the application of bodily medicine may be of greater benefit, for the cause being removed, the effect will pass away.” Quoted in “The Medieval Catholic Tradition,” Darrel W. Amundsen, in Caring and Curing: Health and Medicine in the Western Religious Traditions, eds. Ronald L. Numbers and Darrel W. Amundsen (New York: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 88–9. 14. I borrow this phrase from Jane Gallop, Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Criticism (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 32. 15. Earlier works that emphasize sinfulness and bodily difference in the medieval period include Saul Brody, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974); and Robert I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1987). 16. Wheatley, Stumbling Blocks, p. 9. 17. Metzler, p. 66. 18. Nancy Siraisi notes that “by the middle years of the twelfth century, the process that provided western European medicine with a rich, specialized literature, renowned centers of learning, and f lourishing tradition of practice [ . . . ] was already well advanced. The essential groundwork for late medieval and Renaissance medical culture had already been laid.” Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 16. 19. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 136. 20. Wendell, p. 119. 21. Wendell, p. 119. 22. Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 25; and Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine, “Nurturance, Sexuality, and Women With Disabilities: The Example

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23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

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of Women and Literature,” The Disability Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 249. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 16. These views do not suggest a single tradition but a constellation of notions regarding the female body. See Hippocrates, On Intercourse and Pregnancy: An English Translation of On Semen and the Development of the Child, trans. Tage U.H. Ellinger (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952); Soranus, Gynecology, trans. Owsei Temkin (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956); and Claudius Galen, On the Natural Faculties, trans. Arthur John Block (London: Heinemann, 1963). See also Monica Green’s introduction in The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine, ed. and trans. by Monica H. Green (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 1–62; and Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. Matthew Adamson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). See, for example, Galen, “On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body,” in Woman Defamed, Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, ed. Alcuin Blamires, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 41[41–2]. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006), p. 186. Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth, The Reproductive Unconscious in Medieval and Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 2. Park, 186. Hellwarth cites differing understandings of the female body as presented in the Trotula, noting that it directly problematizes Laqueur’s model: “For example, there is a description of and a remedy for a prolapsed uterus in Trotula. One imagines that a prolapsed uterus might be the closest a woman could come to ‘turning into a man,’ and yet it is clear from this document that in the practical world of women, it was not experienced as such” (p. 2). Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 9. See also Cadden’s later essay, “Western Medicine and Natural Philosophy,” Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, eds. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 51–80. Cadden, Meanings, p. 277. Monica Green, “Bodies, Gender, Health, Disease: Recent Work on Medieval Women’s Medicine,” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History: Sexuality and Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. Philip M. Soergel, (AMS Press, 2005), pp. 1–46; and Helen King, “The Mathematics of Sex: One to Two, or Two to One?,” ed. Philip M. Soergel, pp. 47–58.

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33. Aristotle: Generation of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 97. 34. Galen asserts that “just as mankind is the most perfect of all animals, so within mankind the man is more perfect than the woman” and even describes the female body as a “mutilated” and “less perfect” male body (pp. 41–2). 35. Aristotle, p. 175. 36. Plato, “The Timaeus,” Plato, vol. 7, trans. R.C. Bury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 251. Plato’s Timaeus would have been available in a Latin version in the early Middle Ages. 37. Plato, p. 251. 38. Soranus writes, “Although the uterus is not an animal (as it appeared to some people), it is, nevertheless, similar in certain respects, having a sense of touch, so that it is contracted by cooling agents but relaxed by loosening ones” (p. 9). 39. For example, a commentator in Women’s Secrets suggests that if one should encounter a woman suffering from the wandering womb, “one should tie her tightly at her thighs and place some foul-smelling substance at her nose, such as manure or even the smoke from human hair from the soles of brute animals.” See Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, Women’s Secrets, trans. Helen Rodnite Lemay (Albany: New York State University Press, 1992), p. 134. This late thirteenth-century text, also known as Secrets of Women and De secretis mulierum, was written by an unknown follower of Albertus Magnus. 40. Pseudo-Albertus, p. 132. 41. For centuries, readers attributed the Trotula to an eleventh-century woman named Trotula from Salerno Italy. The text, which has circulated in many forms, took the woman’s name as its title. Some scholars doubt it is female-authored; see especially John F. Benton’s “Trotula, Women’s Problems, and the Professionalization of Medicine in the Middle Ages,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 59 (1985): 30–53. Benton argues a group of men authored the text. Beryl Rowland translated one manuscript, MS Sloane 2463, arguing that it represents the Latin Trotula that would have been read by a medieval audience, but Rowland does not reference other versions of the text. Monica Green classifies Rowland’s source as another gynecological text, not the source of the Trotula. In all, Green finds five versions of the Latin Trotula. The Trotula itself is divided into three books: “Book on the Conditions of Women,” “On Treatments for Women,” and “On Women’s Cosmetics,” each of which has roots in classical medical theories, but to differing degrees. See Beryl Rowland, Medieval Women’s Guide to Health (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1981), and Monica Green, Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West (Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk: St. Edmundsbury, 2000). 42. “Book on the Conditions of Women,” in The Trotula, p. 73. 43. Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth, The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation, rev. ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 47.

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44. Cadden, Meanings, p. 178. 45. Monica Green, “The Transmission of Ancient Theories of Physiology and Disease through the Early Middle Ages,” doctoral disseration, Princeton University, 1985. 46. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney, et al. (Cambridge,UK, Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 242. 47. The Etymologies, p. 242. 48. St. Jerome, “Adversus Jovinianum,” in The Principal Works of St. Jerome: Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, trans. W. H. Fremantle (Oxford: James Parker, 1893); and St. Augustine, De Bono Conjugali, De Sancta Virginitate, ed. and trans. P.G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 49. Monica Green finds references to a woman’s “f lowers” in several translations of the Trotula, indicating that “f lowers” was most likely a vernacular term for menstruation. She writes, “[T]he term ‘f lower’ ( flos) had been used systematically throughout the Treatise on the Diseases of Women (the ‘rough draft’ of Conditions of Women, which had employed frequent colloquialisms), and at least fourteen of the twenty-two different vernacular translations of the Trotula (including Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, and Italian) employ the equivalent of ‘f lowers’ when translating the Latin menses” (p. 21). Hildegard of Bingen also makes reference to a woman’s f lowers in Causae et Curae, ed. Paul Kaiser (Basel: Baler Hildegard-Geselleschaft, 1980), p. 105. 50. Pliny, Natural History, trans. H Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 549. 51. Specifically, biblical views on menstruation include the exclusion of a menstruating woman from her group, her church, and her husband’s bed in Leviticus 15.19–33; the punishment of Eve in Genesis 3.16; and the power of menstrual f luid to taint other objects in Genesis 31.35, Isaiah 30.22, and Esther 14.16. See Delaney, Lupton, and Toth, pp. 37–8. 52. Green, The Trotula, p. 22. See also Delaney, Lupton, and Toth. 53. Hilegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columbia Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press 1990), p. 83. 54. I write “primarily male-authored” texts here because, while scholars used to perceive the Trotula as a woman-authored text, Monica Green has recently refuted such claims. Although it is possible that Trota authored one of the text’s chapters, “Treatments for Women,” the other two chapters are most likely male-authored. Because Trota was a well known female Salernitan doctor, her name became associated with all three of the texts. See Green’s introduction in The Trotula, pp. 1–62. 55. Metzler, p. 66. 56. Chaucer mentions Galen in the “Knight’s Tale” (431), the “Parson’s Tale” (831), and the Book of the Duchess (572) and Trotula in the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” (677). 57. See, for example, Nussbaum, esp. pp. 23–57; and Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies.

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58. Nussbaum, p. 255. 59. Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, p. 27. 60. In addition to Wendell and Garland Thomson, Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch have done much work on disabled women; however, their work focuses on contemporary women. See especially their collection Women with Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988). 61. Gallop, pp. 21–40. 62. Wendell, p. 11. 63. Garland Thomson, “Feminist Theory, the Body, and the Disabled Figure,” in Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 281 [279–91]. 64. It should be noted that Butler’s Bodies That Matter explores the compulsory production of the body’s materiality, an insight I embrace throughout this project. Despite the work scholarship like Butler’s does to rehabilitate notions of bodily difference, I must acknowledge, along with Wendell and Garland Thomson, that such an approach often obscures or ignores the physical suffering of a bodily difference like disability. I hope to expose not only the cultural fictions that produce “the body” as a construct, but also highlight the very material experiences of one whose Otherness is embodied. In other words, I seek to bring the weightiness of the body back to “the body.” See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). 65. Garland Thomson, “Feminist Theory,” p. 284, 286. 66. Garland Thomson, “Re-shaping, Re-thinking, Re-defining: Feminist Disability Studies,” in Barbara Waxman Fiduccia Papers for Women and Girls With Disabilities (Washington, DC: Center for Women Policy Studies, 2001), pp. 1–24. 67. I use Garland Thomson’s normate, or “the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them,” to draw attention to the constructed nature of those who consider themselves “normal” by comparing themselves to those with embodied differences (Extraordinary Bodies, p. 9). 68. Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978). 69. Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, pp. 10–12. 70. See Mitchell and Snyder.

Chapter 1 1. For more on antifeminism in fabliaux, see Joseph Bédier, Les Fabliaux (Paris: Emile Bouillon, 1893); Per Nykrog, Les Fabliaux (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1957); Phillippe Ménard, Les Fabliaux: Contes á rire du moyen âge (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983). Ménard directly counters Bédier’s claim that all medieval fabliaux portray women

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2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

161

negatively, but he does concede that the texts demonstrate particular disdain for especially sexual women. For the text and translation, see Carter Revard, “Four Fabliaux from London, British Library Ms Harley 2253, Translated into English Verse,” Chaucer Review 40.2 (2005): p. 118 [111–40]. For more on this particular fabliau, see Barbara Nolan, “Anthologizing Ribaldry: Five Anglo-Norman Fabliaux,” in Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253 (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 2000), pp. 289–327; and Thomas Corbin Kennedy, AngloNorman Poems About Love, Women, and Sex from British Museum MS Harley 2253, doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1973. Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995), p. 42. Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 21. Quayson, p. 21, author’s emphasis. Quayson, pp. 21–2, author’s emphasis David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 53. David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). See also Mitchell and Snyder, pp. 7–8, 53. Mitchell and Snyder, p. 53. David T. Mitchell, “Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor,” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York: MLA, 2002), p. 24 [15–29]. Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking About Physical Impairment in the High Middle Ages, c.1100–c.1400 ( New York: Routledge, 2006). Metzler dismisses literary representations of characters with physical impairments as simply “parod[ies] of the courtly beauty ideal” and not comments on those with physical impairments (p. 53). I argue, however, that we cannot divorce social commentary from such literary representations, for the satire inherent in parody is social commentary. See Edward Wheatley, “ ‘Blind’ Jews and Blind Christians: Metaphorics of Marginalization in Medieval Europe,” Exemplaria 14.2 (October 2002): 351–82. Mitchell and Snyder, p. 166. Mitchell and Snyder, p. 1. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, p. 25. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, p. 29. Karma Lochrie, Heterosynchrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 24. Lochrie notes that scholars of sexuality after Foucault consider the Middle Ages as a monolithic model against which the “modern” is measured (pp. 1–2).

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18. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2006), p. 17. 19. Cohen, Hybridity. Cohen writes, “[B]y the end of the twelfth century, England envisioned itself as under siege at its borders by bellicose Welsh and Scots, and at its center by homicidal Jews” (p. 12). The standards used to define British Others as such were “inextricably somatic differentiations” (p. 13). 20. See The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley (New York: Penguin, 1983), especially Chapters 22 and 23. 21. Following Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, I here consider monsters “figures [that] embody the medialities precise language could not well express. Refusing the chaste solitude of singular categories, they [intermix] and [confound] all that [is] supposed to be held apart” (Hybridity, pp. 2–3). Such figures assume “forms seemingly beyond the borders of the humanly possible” (p. 3). 22. Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, trans. William Sayers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 70–1. 23. Stiker, p. 72. 24. Cohen, Hybridity, p. 6. 25. Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 26. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 77. 27. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966). 28. See my introduction for a discussion of common medieval taboos concerning menstrual blood. 29. Disability scholars like Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine have already noted that contemporary disabled women often face blatant discrimination in regards to their status as sexual beings and mothers. Doctors may refuse to prescribe birth control or educate disabled women on sexually transmitted diseases, while legal and child care authorities frequently prevent or hinder disabled women in the process of adoption, child custody cases, and applications for foster care (p. 248). Moreover, as Tanya Titchkosky has shown, medical discourse can construct mothers who knowingly give birth to disabled children as “not only derelict in their duty, but monstrously mistaken in their choices.” While these contemporary concerns for disabled women are indeed valid and should be investigated further, my focus here remains on the literary construction of women’s reproduction in medieval fabliaux. See Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine, “Nurturance, Sexuality and Women with Disabilities: The Example of Women and Literature,” The Disability Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 241–59; and Tanya Titchkosky, “Clenched Subjectivity: Disability, Women, and Medical Discourse,” Disability

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30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48.

49. 50. 51.

163

Studies Quarterly 25.3 (2005), Education Research Complete, March 23, 2007, http://search.ebscohost.com. Rosi Braidotti, “Mothers, Monsters, and Machines,” in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 64 [59–79], emphasis in original. Titchkosky, “Clenched Subjectivity.” Margaret Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (London: Sage, 2002) p. 31. Shildrick, p. 32. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helen Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968) p. 25, 26. Bakhtin, p. 10. Arthur Lindley, Hyperion and the Hobbyhorse: Studies in Carnivalesque Subversion (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996) p. 20. Lindley, p. 22. Bakhtin, p. 19. Bakhtin, p. 318. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 131 [124–42]. Mary Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 325 [318–59]. Russo, pp. 325–6. Russo, p. 333. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, p. 25. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 38. Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, p. 38. “Dame Sirith,” in The Trials and Joys of Marriage, ed. Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002) p. 35, l. 190 [29–52]. All subsequent citations will come from this edition and will be cited by line number. Eve Salisbury, “Introduction,” in The Trials and Joys of Marriage, p. 11. The “weeping bitch” motif dates back to such classical sources as Aesop’s Fables. See Eldegard DuBruck, “Aesop’s Weeping Puppy: Late-Medieval Migrations of a Narrative Motif,” The Early Drama, Art, and Music Review 22.1 (1999): 1–10 for a study of the motif ’s uses in late-medieval dramas. Salisbury, “Introduction,” pp. 11–12. Salisbury, “Introduction,” pp. 11–12; and “Dame Sirith,” 46n1. Jill Mann’s Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1973) details the rich tradition of

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52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

63. 64.

65. 66.

67.

68.

69. 70.

NOTES

anticlerical satire available to writers in Middle English. This anticlerical satire often depicts clergymen as gluttonous, greedy, and excessively sexual. “Dame Sirith,” p. 51n306. See Metzler, pp. 133–8. Wheatley, “ ‘Blind’ Jews,” pp. 363–5. For more on faked disabilities, see Sharon Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 62–3. William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, 2nd edn, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London: Everyman 1995), p. 2, l. 22, p. 100, ll. 121–2. Stiker, pp. 65–89 and Metzler. P. H. Cullum, “Spiritual and Bodily Works of Mercy,” in A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe, eds. John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2004), p. 180 [177–93]. Bakhtin, p. 240. Bakhtin, p. 240 Bakhtin, p. 241. Janet Price and Margaret Shildrick, Vital Signs: Feminist Reconfigurations of the Bio/Logical Body (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), p. 236. Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, Women’s Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’ De Secretis Mulierum with Commentaries, trans. Helen Rodnite Lemay (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), p. 129. Pseudo-Albertus, p. 129. Lovesickness as a physical illness dates back to antiquity. Its symptoms include physical wasting, paleness, lack of appetite, and insomnia. See Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The “Viaticum” and Its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990) for a cultural history of the disease. Mitchell and Snyder, pp. 53–4. I consider Dame Sirith to be the title character, for the MS begins with a French incipit: Ci commence le fablel et al cointise de dame siriz. See Salisbury, “Introduction,” p. 46. While some medieval dramas do have a character speak the epilogue, usually this task goes to an exemplary character such as God in several of the cycle plays, Anima in Wisdom, and the Bishop in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. Thomas Hahn, “Introduction to The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle,” originally published in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1995) March 26, 2007, http://www. lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/ragintro.htm. For more information on the performance of the loathly lady, see Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 252–4. Pseudo-Albertus, p. 147. Pseudo-Albertus, p. 121.

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71. Bettina Bildhauer, “Bloodsuckers: The Construction of Female Sexuality in Medieval Science and Fiction,” in Consuming Narratives: Gender and Monstrous Appetite in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, eds. Liz Herbert McAvoy and Teresa Walters (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), p. 106 [104–15]. 72. Juliette Dor, “The Sheela-na-Gig: An Incongruous Sign of Sexual Purity,” in Medieval Virginities, ed. Anke Bernau, et. al (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), pp. 33–55, notes that the image may have been used to encourage virginity by eliciting fear of the female body. For more on the vagina dentata, see David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster In Mediaeval Thought and Literature, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1996), pp. 164–8. 73. Bakhtin, p. 338. 74. Bakhtin, p. 339. 75. While scholars have noted the links between January’s wealth and lecherousness and his status as a Lombard, none has directly connected his Lombard origins to marginalization and disability. Of course, January would not have been marginalized in his home country where the tale takes place; however, to Chaucer’s English audience, January would assume the status of the marginal. The Lombard connection to disability—particularly blindness—stems from the association of Jews with blindness and the subsequent linkage of Lombards to Jews. Chaucer draws deliberate attention to January’s Lombard roots by clearly demonstrating January’s age and wealth, two qualities that his probable source text, an account of the fruit-tree deception in the late-thirteenth to early-fourteenth-century Italian Novellino tales, omits. See “The Merchant’s Tale,” Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. W.F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (New York: Humanities Press, 1958), pp. 341–52. For more on the link between Jews and blindness, see Wheatley, “ ‘Blind’ Jews.” For January as Lombard, see Paul Olson, “The Merchant’s Lombard Knight,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature III (1961): 263; and Emerson Brown, Jr., “The Merchant’s Tale: Why Was January Born ‘Of Pavye’?” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 71.4 (1970): 654–58. 76. Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Merchant’s Tale,” in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1987) l. 1245. All subsequent citations from this text will come from this edition and will be cited parenthetically by line number. 77. The “Miller’s Tale” similarly critiques the unnatural coupling of a young woman and an old man when the narrator denounces John, the carpenter, for not marrying “his simylitude” (l. 3228). The narrator suggests that this decision will lead to John’s downfall: “Men sholde wedden after hire estaat, / For youthe and elde is often at debaat. / But sith that he was fallen in the snare, / He moste endure, as oother folk, his care (3229–32). 78. Carole Everest, “Sight and Sexual Performance in the Merchant’s Tale,” in Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in The Canterbury Tales

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79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86.

87. 88.

89.

90.

91. 92.

NOTES

and Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Peter G. Beidler (Woodbridge, England: D.S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 91–103. Everest, “Sight,” p. 92. Everest, “Sight,” p. 96. Everest, “Sight,” p. 92, 101. “The Merchant’s Tale,” Sources and Analogue, pp. 341–52. Everest, “Sight,” pp. 92–5. Everest, “Sight,” p. 94. Cynthia Kraman writes, “[The tale] takes up the received idea that the body of woman is possessable and available, that it can be secured and shut away for personal enjoyment as one does to f lowers by building a garden with a wall, a door , a lock, and inevitable ‘clycket.’ ” See “Communities of Otherness in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale,” in Medieval Women in their Communities, ed. Diane Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 40 [138–54]. “Hali Meidenhad,” in Medieval English Prose for Women: Selections from the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse, ed. and trans. Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 30–33. Soranus, Gynecology, trans. Owsei Temkin (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), p. 54. “Book on the Condition of Women,” in The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine, trans. Monica H. Green (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001), p. 95, 97. Psuedo-Albertus Magnus’s Women’s Secrets presents a similar argument, but advises that one should give the desired unnatural substances to the pregnant women because “her appetite would weaken and kill the fetus” if it is not satiated (p. 141). For more on pica in the “Merchant’s Tale,” see Carol Everest, “Pears and Pregnancy in Chaucer’s ‘Merchant’s Tale,’ ” in Food in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. Melitta Weiss Adamson (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 161–75. See Milton Miller, “The Heir in the Merchant’s Tale,” Philological Quarterly 29 (1950): 439, and Carol Everest, “ ‘Paradys or Helle’: Pleasure and Procreation in Chaucer’s ‘Merchant’s Tale,’ ” in Sovereign Lady: Essays on Medieval Women in Middle English Literature, ed. Muriel Whitaker (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 63–84. Everest, “ ‘Paradys or Helle,’ ” p. 64, 66. Emerson Brown finds that conception cannot occur because of January’s sudden disruption of their activity. Peter Beidler, though he admits that Brown’s essay calls readers to question their quick assumption that the affair results in May’s pregnancy, finds Brown’s conclusions ultimately unconvincing, citing that it is too difficult to determine whether the union was completed or interrupted. Everest, whose study focuses on the “two seed” theory of medieval medical texts, concludes that the union must be fruitful due to the fertility of both Damian and May. See Emerson Brown, “Hortus Inclonclusus: The Significance of Priapus and Pyramus and Thisbe in the Merchant’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 4 (1970):

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93. 94.

95.

96.

97.

167

33; Peter G. Biedler, “The Climax in the Merchant’s Tale, The Chaucer Review 6 (1971): 39; and Everest, “Paradys or Helle.” Hali Meidenhad, pp. 30–1. Jacques Gélis, History of Childbirth: Fertility, Pregnancy, and Birth in Early Modern Europe, trans. Rosemary Morris (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1991), p. 259. Pseudo-Albertus, pp. 67–8. Gélis notes, “Midwives maintained that certain molas were capable of walking about the chamber when born, that there were f lying molas which could hang from the ceiling, and that others tried to hide and even to re-enter the womb they had just left” (p. 259). Soranus writes that in order for a woman to bear well-shaped children, she must “be sober during coitus because in drunkenness the soul becomes the victim of strange fantasies; this furthermore because the offspring bears some resemblance to the mother as well [as the father], not only in body but in soul” (p. 38). Furthermore, Pseudo-Albertus Magnus reports that “irregular” sexual positions that deviated from the missionary position could cause deformed children (p. 114). See “The Merchant’s Tale,” Sources and Analogues, pp. 341–52.

Chapter 2 1. I use the terms “unruly” and “excessive” throughout this chapter and the rest of the project to describe female characters whose behavior embodies the sins commonly attributed to women by medieval authoritative discourse, including “vanity, greed, promiscuity, gluttony, drunkenness, bad temper, [and] fickleness.” In contrast, a “good” woman “loves and serves her husband and brings up her children.” See Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 3. 2. In this chapter, I use the phrases “violence against women” and “domestic violence” to describe bodily force used by medieval men against women in order to teach them proper wifely conduct. I acknowledge, as Barbara Hanawalt has shown, that “the medieval use of castigation and correction did not imply ‘violence’ ” as we define it today and did not match our contemporary definitions of domestic abuse. See Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Violence in the Domestic Milieu of Late Medieval England,” in Violence in Medieval Society, ed. Richard W. Kaeuper (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), p. 199 [197–214]. 3. Anna Roberts, “Introduction,” Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts, ed. Anna Roberts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), p. 20 [1–21]. 4. Eve Salisbury, “Chaucer’s ‘Wife,’ the Law, and the Middle English Breton Lays,” in Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts eds. Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), p. 74 [73–93]. Specifically, Salisbury focuses on

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NOTES

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

late medieval literature that asserts a relationship to the Breton lay and depicts violence against women, including Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale. Angela Jane Weisl, “ ‘Quiting’ Eve: Violence Against Women in the Canterbury Tales,” in Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts, p. 117 [115–36]. Marilynn Desmond, Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 31. Desmond, p. 31 Hanawalt, p. 202n14. As paterfamilias, the medieval husband and father acted as master over his wife, children, and household. As a result, the husband could “correct” and “castigate” the members of his household through bodily violence. See Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price, “Introduction,” in Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts, pp. 2–9 [1–30]. Though this use of violence was legal, distinctions between standard and excessive castigation did exist. Take, for example, the case of Eleanor Brownynge, who was granted a divorce because of her husband’s numerous threats to stab her with a dagger. See Shannon McSheffrey, Love and Marriage in Late Medieval London (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 1995), pp. 82–3. Desmond, p. 30, 28. Hanawalt, p. 205. James A. Brundage, “Domestic Violence in Classical Canon Law,” Violence in Medieval Society, p. 184 [183–95]. Brundage, p. 187. Brundage, p. 195. Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark, “Medieval Conduct: Texts, Theories, and Practices,”in Medieval Conduct, eds. Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. x [ix–xx]. Diane Bornstein, The Lady in the Tower: Medieval Courtesy Literature for Women (Hamden, CT: Shoe String, 1983), p. 13. Clarissa W. Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 31. Anna Dronzek, “Gendered Theories of Education in Fifteenth-Century Conduct Books,” in Medieval Conduct, p. 136 [135–59]. Dronzek, pp. 141–2. Dronzek, p. 143. Elizabeth Robertson, Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990). Dronzek, p. 146. Dronzek explains that corporal punishment was common in the education of young schoolboys, citing images of physical discipline in the schoolroom and Edward IV’s household rule that young men should incur their beatings in privacy (pp. 144–5). Dronzek, p. 146.

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24. Chevalier Geoffrey de la Tour-Landry, The Book of the Knight of the Tower, trans. William Caxton, ed. M. Y. Offord (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 3. Offord notes that Caxton remains faithful to his French source, almost to a fault: “The translation itself, though often so literal as to sound quite un-English, is in general fairly accurate” (p. xxvii). Offord’s edition is the standard source used by scholars studying The Book of the Knight; therefore, it is the one I use here. All subsequent quotations come from this edition and are cited parenthetically by page number. 25. Offord, “Introduction,” The Book of the Knight of the Tower, p. xxxviii. 26. Dronzek, p. 147. 27. Mark Addison Amos, “The Gentrification of Eve: Sexuality, Speech, and Self-regulation in Noble Conduct Literature,” in The Word Made Flesh: Intersections of Sexuality and the Divine in Medieval Culture (Hampshire: Aldershot, 2005), p. 24 [19–36]. 28. Caroline Walker Bynum cites Mary of Oignies as one example of the many women who were “[i]ntensely literal in their imitatio Christi [and desired] to fuse with the physical body of Christ that they consumed. After succumbing to her desire for food following an illness, Oignies injured “herself in the form of Christ’s wounds.” She followed her act of self-harm with further fasting to continue her imitation of Christ’s suffering. See Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 119. 29. See The Book of the Knight, pp. 10–12, 12–14 for examples of rewards for fasting and pp. 22–3, 28–9, and 35–7 for examples of punishments for feasting. 30. Amos, p. 25. 31. Amos, p. 25. 32. The husband’s actions stride the line between violence against a woman by a male figure and violence against a woman by a supernatural agent. Though the husband does injure his wife, the attack is accidental since he directs his strike against the male guest, which then unexpectedly blinds the wife. The wife’s accidental blinding, then, may serve as a divine message to the husband that reveals his wife’s unruliness; her external deficiency may symbolize her internal sinfulness. In chapter 3, I will more thoroughly explore disabling violence against women by divine agents. 33. Bornstein, p. 47. 34. Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, trans. William Sayers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 65–89. See also, Sharon Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), especially pp. 60–70. 35. For my discussion of the position of disabled people in the spiritual economy, see chapter 1, pp. 31–2 and chapter 3, pp.104–5.

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36. Edward Wheatley, “ ‘Blind Jews and Blind Christians: Metaphorics of Marginalization in Medieval Europe,” Exemplaria 14.2 (October 2002): 363–7 [351–82]. 37. Amos, p. 23. 38. Amos, p. 23 39. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1968), p. 281. 40. Bakhtin, p. 187. 41. Bakhtin, p. 316. 42. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), p. 3. 43. Mary Carruthers, “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,” in Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect, eds. Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 26–7 [22–39]. 44. Bornstein, p. 67. 45. Margaret Hallissy, Clean Maids, True Wives, Steadfast Widows: Chaucer’s Women and Medieval Codes of Conduct (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993). See especially pp. 163–84. 46. All quotations from Chaucer are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, MA: Houghton Miff lin, 1987) and are cited parenthetically by line number. 47. Juliette Dor, “The Wife of Bath’s ‘Wandrynge by the Weye’ and Conduct Literature for Women,” in Drama, Narrative, and Poetry in the Canterbury Tales (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mir, 2003), pp. 139–55. 48. One recent exception is a forthcoming article by Mikee Delony that reads Alisoun’s deafness as linked to her sexuality. Please see Mikee Delony, “Alisoun’s Aging, Hearing-Impaired Female Body: Gazing at the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” in Social Dynamics of Medieval Disability, eds. Wendy Turner and Tory Vandeventer Pearman (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, forthcoming), pp. 313–45. 49. Melvin Storm, “Alisoun’s Ear,” Modern Language Quarterly 2.3 (1981): 219–26. 50. Edna Edith Sayers, “Experience, Authority, and the Mediation of Deafness: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath,” in Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations, ed. Joshua R. Eyler (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), p. 84 [81–92]. Sayers’s essay is another important recent study of the Wife and deafness. 51. I write “presumed childlessness” because it is not clear whether Alisoun has had children; she simply does not state definitively in her prologue if she is a mother, and Chaucer the narrator does not mention any children in the “General Prologue”. Most scholars insist she is not a mother, but some assert that she could be. Carruthers goes as far as to label all such inquiries useless (p. 221n31). I prefer to leave the “problem” of her children ambiguous. For the purposes of this chapter, it is important

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52.

53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

60.

61. 62.

63.

64.

65.

171

to remember that, while she may have had the ability to have children earlier in her life, it is safe to assume that she is unable to at the moment of her prologue due to her age. See chapter 1 for more on age, infertility, and disability, pp. 25–6 and p. 33. Priscilla Martin, “Two Misfits: The Nun and The Wife,” in Chaucer’s Women: Nuns, Wives, and Amazons (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), pp. 30–9. Martin, p. 39. “Explanatory Notes,” in The Riverside Chaucer, 818–9n468. “Explanatory Notes,” in The Riverside Chaucer, 870n604, 870n613, and 870n619. Qtd. in Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 78, 80. Soranus: “ipse adfecte tentigine virorum similem appetentiam sumunt et in veneram coacte veniunt.” Avicenna: “Quandoque oritur in ore matrices caro addita et quandoque apparet super mulierem res que est sicut virga commouens sub coitu. Et quandoque aduenit ei vt faciat cum mulieribus simile quod fit eis cum quibus.” Lochrie, p. 89. Lochrie, p. 89, 91. See St. Jerome, “Adversus Jovinianum,” in The Principal Works of St. Jerome: Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, trans. W. H. Fremantle (Oxford: James Parker, 1893), and St. Augustine, De Bono Conjugali, De Sancta Virginitate, ed. and trans. P.G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Arthur Lindley, Hyperion and the Hobbyhorse: Studies in Carnivalesque Subversion (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), p. 47; emphasis mine. See, for example, Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley University of California Press, 1992), pp. 26–57. See Jill Mann, “Antifeminism,” in Feminizing Chaucer (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2002), pp. 39–69; and Carolyn Dinshaw, “ ‘Glose/bele chose’: The Wife of Bath and Her Glossators,” in Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 113–31. Mann cites the “double structure” of Alisoun’s speech: in it, readers can see both the complaints of disgruntled wives and the “bullying” of husbands (pp. 60–9). Dinshaw deems Alisoun’s use of patristic writings as “mimesis” with the aims to reform patriarchal law (pp. 115–17). See, for example, Julie Elaine Goodspeed-Chadwick, “Sexual Politics in ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’ and ‘Tale’: The Rhetorics of Domestic Violence and Rape,” in Readerly/Writerly Texts: Essays on Literature, Literary Textual Criticism, and Pedagogy 11.1/2 (2004) and 12.1/2 (2005): 155–62. Elaine Tuttle Hansen, “ ‘Of His Love Dangerous to Me’: Liberations, Subversion, and Domestic Violence in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” in The Wife of Bath ed. Peter G. Beidler (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996), p. 280 [273–89]. Salisbury, “Chaucer’s ‘Wife,’ ” p. 76.

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172 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79.

80.

81.

82.

83. 84. 85.

NOTES

Hansen, “ ‘Of His Love Dangerous to Me,’ ” p. 278. Desmond, p. 31. Salisbury, “Chaucer’s ‘Wife,’ ” p. 77. “Explanatory Notes,” The Riverside Chaucer, p. 871n677. See pp. 12–14. Hansen, “Of His Love Dangerous to Me,’ ” p. 279. Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking About Physical Impairment in the High Middle Ages, c.1100-c.1400 (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 102. Storm, p. 221. Storm, p. 220. Storm, p. 222. Storm, p. 223–4. Storm, p. 222. See Dinshaw and Mann. See also David Aers, Chaucer, Langlund and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 86; and Priscilla Martin, “The Women in the Books,” in Chaucer’s Women: Nuns, Wives, and Amazons, (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), pp. 189–217. Additionally, Martin notes that Alisoun rightly “senses a gap between the meaning of Christ’s words, which she always takes as binding, and the interpretation she has been taught” (p. 212). Martin contends that Alisoun consistently remains accurate when she quotes of the word of God; therefore, she does not totally dismiss authority, but instead uses it in conjunction with her own experience (pp. 216–17). See, for example, Helen Cooper, “The Shape-shiftings of the Wife of Bath, 1395–1670,” in Chaucer Traditions, Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, eds. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 168–84. Despite scholars’ usual assumption that Jankin is dead at the time of Alisoun’s prologue, she never actually says that he is. A prayer for God to “blesse his soule” (827) only suggests that he may be dead, leading scholars like Arthur Lindley to question whether he is alive or dead at the time of her pilgrimage. Whether we accept Jankin’s death does not change the fact that Alisoun is traveling alone to Canterbury. See Aruther Lindley, “ ‘Vanysshed Was This Daunce, He Nyste Where’: Alisoun’s Absence in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” ELH 59:1 (1992): 3 [1–21]. Jacobus de Voragine, “The Golden Legend: St. Thomas Becket,”in Internet Medieval Sourcebook. December 10, 2006. Fordham University Center for Medieval Studies. November 2007, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/ goldenlegend/GL-vol2-thomasbecket.html. Jacobus de Voragine. Metzler, p. 102. Metzler states that documentation of treatments and aides for hearing loss in medical texts occur most often in the cases of hearing loss caused by disease (p.102).

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Chapter 3 1. In the prologue to her Lais, Marie states that she writes for a “nobles reis” (noble king) who is most likely Henry II (l. 43). All French citations from Marie de France come from Les Lais de Marie de France, ed. Jean Rychner (Paris: Libraírie Honoré Champion, 1981) and will be cited parenthetically by line number. English translations of Marie de France are from The Lais of Marie de France, trans. Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1978) and correspond to the French citations in line number. 2. Recently, scholars have attributed the Vie seinte Audree to Marie. See June Hall McCash, “La vie seinte Audree: A Fourth Text by Marie de France?” Speculum 77.3 ( July 2002), 744–77. 3. Stephen G. Nichols, “Working Late: Marie de France and the Value of Poetry,” in Women in French Literature: A Collection of Essays, ed. Michel Guggenheim (Saratoga: ANMA Libri, 1988), p. 10 [7–16]. 4. Nichols, p. 9. 5. Diana M. Faust, “Women Narrators in the Lais of Marie de France,” in Women in French Literature: A Collection of Essays, p. 18 [17–27]. 6. Faust, p. 18. 7. Nichols notes that Marie’s writing reveals the drastic changes in culture brought about by the Norman Conquest in England, particularly “how the new aristocratic centers of power, the royal and seigneurial courts, replaced the Church as patrons for a new literature in the vernacular” (p. 10). I borrow the term “hybrid” from Jeffrey Jerome Cohen when describing Anglo-Norman culture in order to denote the complicated intermixing of Anglo-Saxon and Norman peoples after the Norman Conquest. This intermixture did not easily produce a stable “English” identity. As Cohen notes, the term “hybrid” signifies “a fusion and a disjunction; a conjoining of differences that cannot simply harmonize” (p. 2, author’s emphasis). While we may at first consider groups such as the Normans, Anglo-Saxons, and English as constant and unchanging, Cohen explains that these groups “were heterogenous solidarities that altered over time, both in composition and self-definition” (p. 4). The imposition of an invading culture upon the conquered, intermarriage between native and invading peoples, and the formation of new collective identities necessarily leads to an upheaval in notions of collective culture and values. See Cohen, Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles (New York: Palgrave, 2006). 8. Nichols, p. 15. 9. Nichols, p. 15. 10. Michelle A. Freeman, “Marie de France’s Poetics of Silence: The Implications for a Feminine Translatio,” PMLA 99 (1984): 860–83. 11. Freeman, “Poetics of Silence,” p. 865. 12. Rupert T. Pickens, “Marie de France and the Body Poetic,” in Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Jane Chance (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), p. 135 [135–71].

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13. Pickens, p. 35. 14. On lycanthropy: Jean Jorgenson, “The Lycanthropy Metaphor in Marie de France’s Bisclavret,” Selecta: Journal of the Pacific Northwest Council on Foreign Languages 15 (1994): 24–30, and Kathryn I. Holten, “Metamorphosis and Language in the Lay of Bisclavret,” in In Quest of Marie de France: A Twelfth-Century Poet, ed. Chantal A. Maréchal (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), pp. 193–211. On the human– beast binary, see Freeman, and Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, “Of Men and Beasts in Bisclavret,” Romanic Review 81:3 (1991): 251–69. 15. Kerry Shea, “Male Bonding, Female Body: The Absenting of Woman in’Bisclaretz ljóð,’ ” in Cold Counsel: Women in Old Norse Literature and Mythology: A Collection of Essays, eds. Sarah M. Anderson and Karen Swenson (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 245 [245–59]. 16. Paul Creamer, “Woman-hating in Marie de France’s Bisclavret,” The Romanic Review 93:3 (2002): 259 [259–74]. 17. Shea, p. 256. 18. Bruckner, p. 251. See Holten for a detailed history of werewolves in the Middle Ages. 19. Bruckner, p. 252. 20. Bruckner, p. 266–7. 21. Holten, p. 191. 22. Holten, p. 195. 23. Holten, p. 199. R. I. Moore has famously documented the links between lepers, criminals, and even non-Christians in his The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). Though acts of persecution may not be as linear or uniform as Moore makes them seem, groups of Others, such as lepers, Jews, and prostitutes were segregated from mainstream society either through dress or geographical location. See also William Sayers, “Bisclavret in Marie de France: A Reply,” Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 1 (1981): 81–2 [259–74]. 24. Jorgenson, p. 24. 25. Shea, p. 248. Pickens adds that the pronouns used to describe Bisclavret highlight his ambiguously gendered state. Because beste is grammatically feminine, the pronouns used to refer to Bisclavret are also feminine. Only the wise man who acknowledges the beast’s rationality uses a masculine pronoun when referring to him. See Pickens, pp. 138–9. 26. Holten, p. 196. 27. Often, congenital defects were thought to visually demonstrate the sins of parents. See Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking About Physical Impairment during the high Middle Ages, c. 1100–1400 (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 154–5. 28. For example, St. Foy, after curing a man named Guibert’s blindness, re-blinded him in one eye when he “relapsed” into sin. See Metzler, p. 195. 29. Holten, p.199.

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30. Sayers, p. 82. 31. Saul Brody examines the links between sin and leprosy in The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974). See pp. 99–105, for a more detailed discussion of the medieval understandings of leprosy. 32. Holten, p. 199; and Sayers, p. 81. Sayers cites evidence of these associations throughout the Middle Ages. 33. Sayers, p. 81. 34. Klaus van Eickels, “Gendered Violence: Castration and Blinding as Punishment for Treason in Normandy and Anglo-Norman England,” in Violence Vulnerability, and Embodiment: Gender and History, eds. Shani D’Cruze and Anupama Rao (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 104n5. 35. Pickens, pp. 139–40. See also Jean-Charles Huchet, “Nom de femme et écriture féminine au Moyen Age: Les Lais de Marie de France,” Poétique 48 (1981): 407–30. 36. Shea, p. 254. 37. Shea, p. 254. 38. Shea, p. 256. 39. Pickens, p. 145. 40. Faust, p. 21. 41. Freeman, p. 298. 42. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 185; the emphasis is Butler’s. 43. I use the term “pass” in Erving Goffman’s sense. Goffman notes that those with “stigmatizing aff lictions” that are not readily visible (which can be racial, physical, or behavioral) may be able to “pass” as “normal.” Those who “pass,” however, are frequently concerned with the threat of being “discredited” and, as a result, stigmatized by others. See Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), pp. 73–91. 44. Butler, 185. 45. Heather Arden, “The Lais of Marie de France and Carol Gilligans’s Theory of the Psychology of Women,” in In Quest of Marie de France, p. 214 [212–24]. 46. Freeman, p. 289. 47. Sharon Kinoshita, “Cherchez la femme: Feminist Criticism and Marie de France’s Lai de Lanval,” Romance Notes 34.3 (1994): 272 [263–73]. 48. Jacqueline Eccles, “Feminist Criticism and the Lay of Lanval: A Reply,” Romance Notes 38.3 (1998): 282 [281–5]. 49. The earliest source for Chestre’s tale is Marie de France’s Lanval. His primary source is most likely the Middle English Sir Landevale, a version of Marie’s lai. The Old French Graelant is another possible source for Chestre’s rendering of the tale. See Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, “Sir Launfal: Introduction,” in The Middle English Breton Lays (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1995), pp. 201–2.

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50. A.C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 106. 51. Myra Tokes, “Lanval to Sir Launfal: A Story Becomes Popular,” in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, Eds. Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert (London: Longman, 2000), p. 59 [56–77]. 52. Myra Seaman, “Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal and the Englishing of Medieval Romance,” Medieval Perspectives 15 (2000): 105–19. 53. I borrow this term from Shearle Furnish, “Civilization and Savagery in Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal,” Medieval Perspectives 3 (1988): 137–149. 54. Spearing, p. 113. 55. All citations for Chestre are from “Sir Launfal,” The Middle English Breton Lays, and are cited parenthetically by line number. 56. Cohen, Hybridity, pp. 86–90. 57. Spearing, pp. 97–119. 58. Laskaya and Salisbury, pp. 201–2. 59. Tokes, p. 75. 60. Dinah Hazell, “The Blinding of Gwennere: Thomas Chestre as Social Critic,” in Arthurian Literature XX, ed. Keith Busby (Cambridge, UK: DS Brewer, 2003), p. 123 [123–44]. 61. Hazell, p. 124. 62. Laskaya and Salisbury, p. 201. 63. See Chapter One, p. 92n75. 64. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 65. Hazell, pp. 124–5. 66. Geneviève Bürhrer-Thierry, “ ‘Just Anger’ or ‘Vengeful Anger’?: The Punishment of Blinding in the Early Medieval West,” in Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, Ed. Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 76 [75–91]. 67. See The Book of Sainte Foy, trans. Pamela Sheinghorn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 50–1. 68. Bürhrer-Thierry notes that these crimes fall under the notion of the lèse-majesté, or crime against the state or king. She cites several examples, including the blinding of those involved in the Thuringian revolt of 786 and Charles the Bald’s blinding of his son for rebellion in 873 (pp. 80–7). Klaus van Eickels cites numerous examples from Anglo-Norman England, including William II’s blinding and castrating William of Eu for treason (p. 100). 69. Bürhrer-Thierry, pp. 78–9. 70. Edward Wheatley, “ ‘Blind’ Jews and Blind Christians: Metaphorics of Marginalization in Medieval Europe,” Exemplaria 14.2 (October 2002): 351–82; and Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). 71. van Eickels, pp. 94–5. 72. van Eickels, pp. 94–108.

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73. Hazell, p. 141. 74. Eve Salisbury, “Chaucer’s ‘Wife,’ the Law, and the Middle English Breton Lays,” in Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts, eds. Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2002), pp. 73–93. Salisbury notes that lawmaker Henry Bracton includes blinding in his list of punishments for rape “since in Bracton’s view the rapist’s eyes were also culpable” (p. 81). 75. Salisbury, p. 81. 76. Peggy McCracken, The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 27. Duby states, “[A]dultery, though consummated, was barren” (qtd. in McCracken, p. 27). 77. McCracken, The Romance of Adultery, p. 27. 78. McCracken, “The Body Politic and the Queen’s Adulterous Body in French Romance,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, p. 40 [38–64]. 79. McCracken, “The Body Politic,” p. 40. 80. Chestre does not mention that Gwenore has children, nor does he state whether Gwenore is infertile. Thus, I read her “barrenness” as potentially physical and definitely metaphorical: her adulterous couplings would be “unfruitful” because they would result in an illegitimate child. In other words, I am not claiming that Gwenore is physically unable to have children, but I am acknowledging that that literary tradition certainly haunts the text. 81. See Furnish, p. 145. 82. Hazell, p. 135. 83. Hazell, p. 135. 84. Hazell, p. 140. See also E.S. Hartland, The Science of Fairy Tales: An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology, 2nd edn. (London: Methuen, 1925), pp. 62–9. 85. Laskaya and Salisbury, p. 202n n292–300. 86. H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., “Newer Currents in Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Difference ‘It’ Makes: Gender and Desire in the Miller’s Tale.” ELH 61.3 (1994): 484 [473–99]. 87. See David Carlson, “The Middle English Lanval, the Corporal Works of Mercy, and Bibliotheque Nationale, Nouv. Acq. FR 1104,” Neophilologus 72 (1988): 97–106. 88. That the productive sexuality of Tryamour can only exist within a supernatural realm further reveals the connection between femininity and disability in Chestre’s text and society. 89. I borrow this term from Andrew Higl, “Double Prosthesis onto the Corpus of Chaucer,” Chaucer After 1400: Makers, Editors, and Readers (42nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University), May 12, 2007. Higl’s notion of textual prosthesis is distinct from Mitchell and Snyder’s narrative prosthesis. While narrative prosthesis is a function of narrative meant to “normalize” the difference

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NOTES

90.

91.

92.

93. 94.

95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

102. 103. 104. 105.

106. 107.

disability creates, textual prosthesis refers to a secondary work of literature by another author that has been “grafted” onto an author’s corpus with intent to remedy a problem set forth in the author’s original work. Felicity Riddy, “ ‘Abject Odious’: Feminine and Masculine in Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” in Chaucer to Spenser: A Critical Reader, ed. Derek Pearsall (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 280–96. All citations from Henryson are from “The Testament of Cresseid,” The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Robert L. Kindrick (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1997) and are cited parenthetically by line number. Lee W. Patterson, “Christian and Pagan in The Testament of Cresseid.” Philological Quarterly 52 (1973): 696–714. See Mairi Ann Cullen, “Cresseid Excused: A Re-reading of Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” Studies in Scottish Literature 20 (1985): 137–59 for a reading in defense of Cresseid’s redemption. Marion Wynne-Davies, “ ‘Spottis Blak’: Disease and the Female Body in the Testament of Cresseid,” Poetica 38 (1993): 32–52. Susan Aronstein, “Cresseid Reading Cresseid: Redemption and Translation in Henryson’s Testament,” Scottish Literary Journal 21:2 (1994): 6 [5–22]. Riddy, p. 286. Riddy, p. 291. See chapter 1, pp. 37–9. Riddy, pp. 291–2. See chapter 1, pp. 24–5. Riddy, p. 292. Marshall Stearns finds that Henryson’s accurate representation of the disease and Scotland’s large number of lepers suggest that the poet may have had first-hand exposure to lepers. He even reports that Henryson’s description of Cresseid’s symptoms prompted nineteenth-century physician J. Y. Simpson to conclude that a form of the disease, Greek elephantiasis, existed in medieval Scotland. Johnstone Parr adds that Henryson’s apparent astrological understanding of the disease implies that he was well versed in medical lore on the disease. See Marshall W. Stearns, “Henryson and the Leper Cresseid,” Modern Language Notes 59:4 (1944): 265–9; and Johnstone Parr, “Cresseid’s Leprosy Again,” Modern Language Notes 60:7 (1945): 487–91. Metzler, p. 6. Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body (New York: Routledge, 1996), 20. Wendell, p. 22. See Susan Zimmerman, “Leprosy in the Medieval Imaginary,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38:3 (2008): 558–97 for a cogent analysis of medieval notions of leprosy. Stearns, p. 265. Catherine Peyroux suggests that there are 395 documented leper houses in Northern and Eastern France and at least 270 in England from the

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108.

109.

110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115.

116. 117.

118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

125. 126. 127. 128.

129. 130.

179

twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. See Peyroux, “The Leper’s Kiss,” Monks, Nuns, and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society, eds. Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 175 n12 [172–88]. Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), pp. 19–21, 20. See also François-Olivier Touati, Maladie et société au Moyen Age: La lèpre, les lépreux et les léproseries dans la province ecclésiastique de Sens jusqu’au milieu du XIVe siècle (Brussels: De Boeck Université, 1998) for a challenge to common notions of medieval leprosy. See Brody, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature; Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society; and Byron Lee Grigsby, Pestilence in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004). Rawcliffe, p. 20. Brody, p. 177. Beryl Rowland, “ ‘The Seiknes Incurabill’ in Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” English Language Notes (1964): 175–77. Grigsby, p. 98. Grigsby, p. 39. Brody notes that leprosy was specifically linked to sexual excess in medieval literature, but that this connection was complex; it in no way specified that the disease was sexually transmitted or that frequent sex caused it. Brody, p. 177. Grigsby, p. 101. For more on leprosy, sin, and salvation, see Nicole Bériou and François-Olivier Touati, Voluntate Dei leprosus: Le lépreux entre conversion et exclusion aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medievo, 1991). Cullen, p. 152. Grigsby, pp. 44–51. Rawcliffe, p. 101n247. Parr, p. 488. Riddy, p. 292. Peyroux, p. 176. See, for example, Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Women (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987). Wynne-Davies, p. 34. Riddy, p. 291. Riddy, p. 293. See Jane Adamson, “The Curious Incident of the Recognition in Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” Parergon 27 (1980): 17–25, for a discussion of the intricacies of the recognition scene in the poem. Rawcliffe, p. 3. Rawcliffe, p. 93.

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NOTES

131. As Howard Patch notes, Lady Fortune is most often blindfolded in order “to show that she has no regard for merit.” Fortune’s blindness may have transferred onto Venus because the two were often associated with one another in medieval literature as early as the eleventh and twelfth centuries. By the end of the fourteenth century, the two goddesses were often interchangeable. See The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (New York: Octagon, 1967), p. 40, 90–8. Catherine Attwood examines the effect of literary depictions of Fortune on late medieval narrative in Fortune la contrefaite: L’Envers de l’écriture médiévale (Paris: Champion, 2007). 132. Pseudo-Albertus Magnus. Women’s Secrets: A Translation of PseudoAlbertus Magnus’ De Secretis Mulierum with Commentaries, trans. Helen Rodnite Lemay (Albany: New York State University Press, 1992), p. 89. 133. See, for example, Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, p. 131. 134. Helen Rodnite Lemay, “Introduction,” Women’s Secrets, p. 48. 135. Rawcliffe, pp. 93–5. See also Zimmerman for connections between menstrual blood and leprosy. 136. Riddy, p. 293. 137. Jana Mathews, “Land, Lepers, and the Law in The Testament of Cresseid,” The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 63 [40–66]. 138. Mathews, p. 63. 139. Mathews, p. 65. 140. Mathews, p. 64.

Chapter 4 1. For a summary of criticisms on the text’s structure, see Maureen Fries, “Margery Kempe,” in An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 227–9; for a summary of criticisms on Kempe, see Nancy F. Partner, “Reading the Book of Margery Kempe,” Exemplaria 3.1 (1991): 31–33 [30–66]; for the text’s structure as proof of an oral, feminine form of writing, see Liz Herbert McAvoy, “ ‘Aftyr hyr owyn tunge’: Body, Voice and Authority in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Women’s Writing 9.2 (2002): 159–76. For Kempe as a madwoman, see Richard Lawes, “The Madness of Margery Kempe,” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, vol. 6, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 1999), pp. 147–67; for Kempe as inferior to Julian of Norwich, see David Knowles, The English Mystical Tradition (London: Burns and Oates, 1961), p. 139. 2. For Kempe as transgressive, see Elizabeth Petroff, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 152–7; McAvoy, “ ‘Aftyr hyr owyn tunge’ ”; and Janet Wilson, “Margery and Alison: Women on Top,” in Margery Kempe:

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NOTES

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

181

A Book of Essays (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 223–37. For Kempe as ultimately upholding male authority, see Sarah Beckwith, “A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe,” in Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Jane Chance (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), pp. 195–215. Works that focus on Kempe’s bodiliness are numerous. See,for instance, Beckwith “A Very Material Mysticism”; Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyvania Press, 1991); Wendy Harding, “Body into Text: The Book of Margery Kempe,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, pp. 168–87; McAvoy, “ ‘Aftyr hyr owyn tunge’ ”; and Sarah Salih, “Margery’s Bodies: Piety, Work, and Penance,” in A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe, eds. John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 161–76. Lochrie, Translations of the Flesh, p. 21. Lochrie, Translations of the Flesh, p. 4. Lochrie, Translations of the Flesh, pp. 174–5. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 199. It should be noted that depictions of the suffering female body are especially graphic in female saints’ lives, wherein women undergo unthinkable torture, and their battered bodies are publically displayed in order to demonstrate their sanctity and underscore the promise of resurrection. Metzler notes that unlike laypeople, whose impairments would be cured upon death, saints would retain the scars of their injuries in the afterlife as signs of their spirituality. See Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking About Impairment during the High Middle Ages, c. 1100–1400 (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 56–7, 63. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Elizabeth Spearing (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 44–5. The Book of Margery Kempe, annotated ed., ed. Barry Windeatt (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 1:52. All subsequent citations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically by chapter and page number. See Herbert Thurston, “Margery the Astonishing,” The Month (1936): 446–56; Knowles, The English Mystical Tradition; and Sigrid Undset, “Margery Kempe of Lynn,” Men, Women, and Places, trans. Arthur G. Chater (London: Cassell and Company, 1939), p. 93 [81–104]. See also Nancy P. Stork, who diagnoses Kempe with Tourette’s syndrome, “Did Margery Kempe Suffer from Tourette’s Syndrome?,” Mediaeval Studies 59 (1997): 261–300. The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. B. A. Windeatt (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 300n24. Richard Lawes, “Psychological Disorder and Autobiographical Impulse in Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Thomas Hoccleve,” in

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182

14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

NOTES

Writing Women Religious: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England, ed. Denis Renevey and Christiana Whitehead (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), pp. 217–44. See Clarissa Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: The ‘Book’ and the World of Margery Kempe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); and Monica Brzezinski Potkay and Regula Meyer Evitt, “Revaluing the Female Body, Reconceiving Motherhood: Mysticism and the Maternal in Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe,” in Minding the Body: Women and Literature in the Middle Ages, 800–1500 (New York: Twayne, 1997), pp. 166–88. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 5. It is important to note that medieval literacy was very different from our modern notion, which pairs reading and writing. Medieval literacy, on the other hand, was concerned with the ability to read Latin. Medieval laywomen, in particular, rarely came into contact with the written word. As Lochrie notes, we must consider Kempe’s illiteracy within this context. Lochrie contends, however, that Kempe’s Book demonstrates her exposure to Latin texts and rests it firmly within a Latin tradition. Thus, Kempe’s illiteracy may not be a clear-cut as we have believed. See Lochrie, Translations of the Flesh, pp. 97–127. Harding, “Body into Text,” pp. 168–87. For the Book as autobiography, see Janel M. Mueller, “Autobiography of a New ‘Creatur’: Female Spirituality, Self hood, and Authorship in the Book of Margery Kempe,” in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), pp. 155–72; and Sidonie Smith, “The Book of Margery Kempe: This Creature’s Unsealed Life,” in A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 64–83. Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 4. Julian Yates, “Mystic Self: Margery Kempe and the Mirror of Narrative,” Comitatus 26 (1995): p. 85n22 [75–93]. Lawes, “Psychological Disorder and Autobiographical Impulse,” p. 239. Lawes, “Psychological Disorder and Autobiographical Impulse,” p. 238. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), p. 3, 19. Lawes, “Psychological Disorder and Autobiographical Impulse,” p. 233. Life writing is the term used by scholars of autobiographical forms of writing to describe narratives of personal information, such as diaries, life stories, interviews, and personal web sites and blogs. Paul John Eakin, “Introduction: Mapping the Ethics of Life Writing,” in The Ethics of Life Writing, ed. Paul John Eakin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 6 [1–18]. Eakin, p. 11. Arthur W. Frank, “Moral Non-fiction: Life Writing and Children’s Disability,” The Ethics of Life Writing, p. 177 [174–94].

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28. Frank, p. 178. 29. Windeatt, “Introduction,” p. 23. 30. Carolyn Dinshaw, “Margery Kempe,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 224 [222–239]. 31. See Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast; and Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991); Lochrie, Translations of the Flesh; and Claire Marshall, “The Politics of Self-Mutilation: Forms of Female Devotion in the Late Middle Ages,” in The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture, eds. Darryll Grantley and Nina Taunton (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 11–22. 32. Salih, p. 167. 33. Salih, p. 173. 34. Salih, p. 173. 35. Dhira B. Mahoney, “Margery Kempe’s Tears and the Power over Language,” in Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Garland, 1992), p. 40 [37–50]. 36. Mahoney, p. 40. 37. Harding, “Body into Text,” p. 182. 38. Mahoney, p. 41, 43. 39. Sidonie A. Smith, “Material Selves: Bodies, Memory, and Autobiographical Narrating,” in Narrative and Consciousness: Literature, Psychology, and the Brain, eds. Gary D. Fireman, Ted E. McVay, Jr. and Owen J. Flanagan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 93–4 [86–114]. 40. Smith, 108. 41. Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 82. 42. Beckwith, “A Very Material Mysticism,” p. 212. 43. Beckwith, Christ’s Body, pp. 92–3. 44. Beckwith, Christ’s Body, p. 93. 45. See Chapter One, pp. 76–8. 46. Elizabeth Robertson, “Medieval Medical Views of Women and Female Spirituality in the Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich’s Showings,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, pp. 142–67. 47. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 271. 48. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 272. 49. Robertson, “Medieval Medical Views of Women,” p. 149. 50. Robertson, “Medieval Medical Views of Women,” p. 155. 51. Robertson, “Medieval Medical Views of Women,” p. 158. 52. Richard Rolle, “Meditations on the Passion,” in Richard Rolle: Prose and Verse, ed. S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson (Oxford: EETS, 1988), p. 74. 53. Lochrie, Translations of the Flesh, p. 171.

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54. Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 28–63. 55. Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth The Reproductive Unconscious in Medieval and Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 43–60. 56. Hellwarth, pp. 45–7. 57. Potkay and Evitt, p. 168. 58. McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, p. 37. 59. Hellwarth, p. 47. 60. Hellwarth, p. 48. 61. Scholars are also undecided on whether Kempe has had a child. While most accept that she has not given birth, some, like Laura Howes, contend that she has indeed delivered a child, her fourteenth. Though this argument is intriguing, for the purposes of this chapter, the existence of the child is not important; what is important is that Kempe’s spiritual status is threatened by the possibility of her having given birth. See Laura Howes, “On the Birth of Margery Kempe’s Last Child,” Modern Philology 90.2 (1992): 220–5. 62. Hellwarth, p. 44. 63. Hope Phyllis Weissman, “Margery Kempe in Jerusalem: Hysterica Compassio in the Late Middle Ages,” in Acts of Interpretation: The Text and Its Contexts 700–1600, eds. Mary Carruthers and Elizabeth Kirk (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1982), pp. 201–17. Weissman redeems Kempe from anachronistic accusations of hysteria by examining her actions in terms of her reproductive system, arguing that Kempe’s identification with the Virgin centers on the shared experiences of their wombs. 64. See also Chapter 28, p. 166n2259. 65. The Book features several instances in which Kempe’s fits of tears are clearly linked to pregnancy and childbirth. Some notable instances include her admission that the sight of male children brings on her tears (35:190–1) and her uncontrollable weeping for Christ’s Passion when she sees a mother nursing her son (39:202). 66. See Bynum, Jesus As Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 67. Julian of Norwich, A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich: Parts One and Two, ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1978), long text, p. 586. 68. Beckwith, “A Very Material Mysticism,” p. 209. 69. In much the same way, Kempe’s witnessing of weddings causes her to think of the marriage of Mary and Joseph as well as the “gostly joynyng of mannys sowle to Jhesu Crist” (82: 358). In both cases, Kempe redefines an experience from material life, recasting it as spiritual. 70. While biblical and some patristic accounts of the Virgin’s grief assert that she remained stoic due to her steadfast belief in the Resurrection, other devotional, literary, and artistic descriptions, which derive from Eastern accounts of the Virgin, describe her loud and tormented sorrow

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71. 72. 73.

74. 75.

76.

77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

185

upon losing her son. See Lochrie, Translations of the Flesh, pp. 179–91. Lochrie reports that the Virgin’s stoic or boisterous grief remained in debate throughout the Middle Ages and into the sixteenth century. This contrast threatened to undermine the Virgin’s perfection, for sorrow at her son’s death may indicate a doubt in the Resurrection. Despite this danger, representations of Mary’s sorrow abound. Weissman, p. 211, 215. Weissman, p. 215. Michael S. Campbell, “ ‘All My Children, Spiritual and Bodily’: Love Transformed in The Book of Margery Kempe,” The Journal of the Association for the Interdisciplinary Study of the Arts 1.1 (1995): 59–69. Campbell, p. 65. One such spiritual child is an English man who comes across Kempe while she is in Rome. Kempe accepts the man as her son as well as Christ’s, demonstrating that to be mothered by Kempe is to be mothered by Christ. Later, Kempe offers comfort to the man as they travel out of Rome, and he is “wel comfortyd wyth hyr wordys, for he trustyd meche in hir felyngys, and mad hir as good cher be the wey as yyf he had ben hir owyn sone, born of hir body” (42: 212). Kempe’s words, her “gostly frute,” become the means through which she expresses maternal love to the man. It should be noted that McAvoy calls attention to the importance of Kempe’s fears of rape just before this scene: “Here the outpouring of maternal feeling of the women and of herself—albeit ostensibly directed at a doll—is juxtaposed as a counterbalance to the specifically maleidentified violence of female rape, and it is significant that the Grey Friars and Richard are completely excluded from the female and maternal ritual performed by these women.” The female community that these women create thus serves as an “alternative” to the male threat of sexual violence. See McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, p. 56. Hellwarth, p. 56. Hellwarth, p. 56. Hellwarth, p. 56. Kempe takes over as comforter to Richard after she gives away his money to the poor. When he responds angrily to her actions, she comforts him by promising that God will provide her the means to pay him back, which she does (37: 199). P. H. Cullum, “Spiritual and Bodily Works of Mercy,” in A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe, p. 178 [177–93]. Cullum, p. 188. McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, p. 42. Catherine Peyroux, “The Leper’s Kiss,” in Monks, Nuns, and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society, eds. Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 172–88. Though the disease is not specifically identified as leprosy, the text directly describes it in similar terms. Keeping in mind the wider medieval categorization of leprosy, any person whose disease manifested itself

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NOTES

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

in marks or blisters upon the skin would be considered and treated as a leper. McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, p. 43. McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, p. 43. Harding, “Medieval Women’s Unwritten Discourse on Motherhood,” Women’s Studies 21 (1992): p. 207 [197–209]. Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 173. Wendell, p. 175. Wendell, p. 179.

Conclusion 1. Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 87. 2. Linton, p. 88. 3. Linton, pp. 90–92. 4. Linton, p. 125. 5. See Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995); Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); and Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 6. Linton, p. 129.

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INDEX

abjection, 15, 23, 24–5, 26, 98–9, 109, 133, 145, 152 actual identity, 2, 57, 118, 135, 154 Amos, Mark Addison, 51–2, 54, 57, 169n Ancrene Wisse, 49 Angela of Foligno, 104, 123 St. Anne, 136 Arden, Heather, 84, 175n Aristotle, 7, 8–9, 10, 12, 108, 129, 158n Aronstein, Susan, 97, 99, 178n Asch, Adrienne and Michelle Fine, 156n, 160n, 162n Ashley, Kathleen and Robert L.A. Clark, 48, 168n Atkinson, Clarissa, 48, 168n St. Augustine, 10 Averroes, 9 Avicenna, 9, 56n, 62 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 26–9, 32, 36, 39, 54–5, 56, 170n Beckwith, Sarah, 126, 127, 181n The Bell Jar, 21 blinding: and castration, 80–1, 90–1; and crimes against royal power, 89–90, 91, 176n; and fairies, 93; as punishment, 53, 87, 89, 90, 169n, 174n, 177n; and sexuality, 91, 92, 93; as symbol of martyrdom, 89 blindness: and Christianity, 67; caused by excessive intercourse, 37–38,

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44, 98, 108, 129; and Jews, 21, 88, 90, 165n; and leprosy, 106; and Lombards, 36–37, 88, 165n; as metaphor, 21, 37, 42, 43, 67, 169n; and Venus, 107 The Bluest Eye, 21 Book of Margery Kempe, see Kempe, Margery Book of Sainte Foy, 89, 176n Book of the Knight of the Tower, see Geoffroy de La Tour-Landry Bornstein, Diane, 48, 168n Bragg, Lois, see Sayers, Edna Edith Braidotti, Rosi, 25, 163n St. Bridget, 120, 124 Brody, Saul, 101, 102, 156n, 175n, 179n Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn, 77–8, 174n Brundage, James A., 47, 168n Bürhrer-Thierry, Geneviève, 89–90, 176n Butler, Judith, 83, 160n Bynum, Caroline Walker, 1, 52, 115, 116, 129, 155n, 169n, 181n, 183n, 184n Cadden, Joan, 7–8, 9, 157n Campbell, Michael, 138, 185n carnival, 26–7, 29, 34, 44 carnivalesque (literature), 26–30, 34, 55, 56, 58, 109, 153 Carruthers, Mary, 60, 170n Catherine of Siena, 104

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202

IN DEX

Caxton, William, 50, 169n Chaucer, Geoffrey, 11; Book of the Duchess, 159n; “General Prologue,” 60–1, 69, 170n; “Knight’s Tale,” 159n; “Merchant’s Tale,” 15, 19, 35–44, 165n, 166n; “Miller’s Tale,” 39, 94, 165n; “Parson’s Tale,” 159n; “Tale of Sir Thopas,” 85; Troilus and Criseyde, 96, 97; “Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” 14, 15–6, 39, 45–6, 60–71, 159n; “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” 65, 66, 69, 71, 167–8n Chestre, Thomas, 85; Sir Launfal, 16, 73, 84–96, 97, 110 Chevalier a la Corbeille, 19 childbirth, see pregnancy Christine de Pizan, 48 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 15, 23, 24–5, 26, 86–7, 155n, 162n, 173n conduct literature, 46, 47–8, 60; and gendered pedagogy, 48–9 counternarrative, 14, 16, 17, 111, 120, 135, 154 Creamer, Paul, 77, 78, 174n Cullen, Mairi Ann, 102, 178n Cullum, P.H., 32, 141, 185n Cynthia (goddess), 96–7, 99–100, 103, 106, 107–8 Dame Sirith, 15, 19, 28–35, 40, 42, 43, 44 Davis, Lennard J., 20, 22, 28, 152, 155n deafness, 67; and Bible, 67; congenital vs. acquired, 67, 70; curability of, 69–70; as metaphor, 61, 67–8; as punishment, 61, 65–6; see also Chaucer, Geoffrey, “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” Delony, Mikee, 170n descending catalogue, 94 Desmond, Marilyn, 46–7, 66, 168n Diana (goddess), 109 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 64, 119–20, 171n, 172n, 183n

9780230105119_10_ind.indd 202

dirt, 25, 28 disability: as difference, 3–4; defining, 3–4, 12; and disease, 99; and female body, 2, 5, 7–11, 12, 24, 36, 63, 96–111, 114–17, 128–9, 152; and femininity, 1–2, 5, 7, 11–12, 16, 45, 50, 55, 57, 153, 155–4, 177n; and gendered model, 1–2, 5–6, 7, 11–15, 40, 63, 110–11, 133; vs. impairment, 3, 4, 122; literary representations of, 2, 5, 13–15, 21–2, 151–2, 161n; and medical model, 3; and ‘medicalisation’ of late Middle Ages, 6–7, 11; and poverty, 54; and religious model, 4, 5, 122–3; and social model, 2–3; and spiritual economy, 31–2, 103–5; see also impairment disability studies, 151–3; feminist, 1–2, 11–14, history of, 2–3; medieval, 4–7, 152, 154 docile bodies, 6, 153 domestic violence, 46–7, 65, 167n, 168n Dor, Juliette, 60, 170n Douglas, Mary, 2–3, 25, 162n Dronzek, Anna, 48–50, 51, 168n Duby, Georges, 91, 177n Eakin, Paul John, 119, 125, 182n Eccles, Jacqueline, 84, 175n St. Elizabeth (biblical), 136 St. Elizabeth of Hungary, 120, 134 Eve, 9–11, 12, 46, 47, 81, 91, 134, 138 Everest, Carol, 37–8, 39, 41, 42, 166n extimité, 24, 25 Farmer, Sharon, 164n, 169n Fasiculus Morum, 133 Faust, Diana, 74–5, 82, 173n female body: as dangerous, 24, 35–6, 39, 52, 61–2, 114, 153; as disabled, see disability, and female body; medical notions of, 7–11, 128–32; as site of spiritual excess, 17, 128–32, 148, 154

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IN DEX

female countercourt, 84–95 Fiedler, Leslie, 13, 160n Foucault, Michel, 156n, 161n Fourth Lateran Council, 4, 156n Frank, Arthur, 119, 125, 182n Freeman, Michelle, 75, 76, 82, 84, 174n Galen, 7–11, 129, 157n, 158n, 159n Gallop, Jane, 156n Garland Thomson, Rosemarie, 7, 12–13, 14, 28, 152, 160n Geoffroy de La Tour-Landry, 14, 45; Book of the Knight of the Tower, 14, 15–16, 45–6, 50–60, 69, 71, 169n giants, 23, 24, 85, 88 Goffman, Erving, 2, 57, 118, 175n “The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter,” 48 The Good Wyfe Wold a Pylgremage, 60 Green, Monica, 8, 10, 157n, 158n, 159n Grigsby, Byron Lee, 101, 102, 179n grotesque: body (general), 23–8, 44, 55 109, 153; and disability, 23–8, 30, 153; female body, 27–8, 32–3, 36, 44, 52, 54, 56, 58; realism, 27 Guenevere: in literary tradition, 91 Hali Meidenhad, 40–1, 42, 49, 133 Hallissy, Margaret, 60, 170n Hanawalt, Barbara, 47, 167n Hansen, Elaine Tuttle, 66, 67, 171n Harding, Wendy, 117, 123–4, 148, 181n Hazell, Dinah, 87, 89, 93, 176n Hellwarth, Jennifer Wynne, 7, 132, 134, 135, 140, 184n Henryson, Robert, 96, 178n; Testament of Cresseid, 16–17, 73, 96–111 Hildegard of Bingen: Causae et Curae, 159n; Scivias, 11 Hippocrates, 7, 157n Holten, Kathryn, 78–9, 80, 174n Hospice des Quinze-Vingts, 54 “How a Wise Man Taught His Son,” 48

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203

impairment, 3–4, 122; authenticity of, 30–1, 34, 42, 70, 164n; as punishment, 15–17, 45–71, 73–111; see also disability infertility, see pregnancy Interludium de clerico et puella, 28 Irigaray, Luce, 81 Irish: and marginalization, 139–40; monsterization of, 23, 86–7 Isidore of Seville, 10 Jacobus de Voragine, 69, 172n St. Jerome, 10, 63, 64, 123 Jews: bodily stereotypes of, 88, 90, 162n; exclusion of, 174n; see also blindness jouissance, 26, 109, 133 Julian of Norwich, 113, 115, 123, 130, 136, 180n Kempe, Margery, 32; and autobiography, 117–28, 154, 182n; Book of, 17, 113–49, 154; and care for impaired, 139–48; and imitatio Christi, 114–15, 129–30, 136, 137; and imitatio Mariae, 136–9, 147; and lepers, 104–5, 142–3, 146; medical diagnosis of, 116–17, 118; and motherhood, 113, 134, 135–6, 138, 139–49; and pregnancy and childbirth, 132–9, 140, 143–4, 145, 184n; and sex, 120, 122, 134–5, 138, 142, 145, 146; and spiritual piety, 113–14, 120–1, 132, 147–9; and tears, 119, 121–8, 129–32, 136–9, 140, 143, 145–6, 147, 184n King, Helen, 8, 157n Kinoshita, Sharon, 84, 175n Knowles, David, 116, 180n Kristeva, Julia, 15, 24, 25, 26, 98, 109, 162n lameness, 30–1, 69 Laqueur, Thomas, 7–8, 11, 157n Laskaya, Anne, and Eve Salisbury, 87, 94, 175n; see also Salisbury, Eve

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204

IN DEX

Lawes, Richard, 116, 118, 180n Leicester, Jr., H. Marshall, 94, 177n Lemay, Helen Rodnite, 108, 180n leprosy: and Bible, 100, 102–3; and charity, 97, 104–5; and Christ, 104, 142; as disability, 99; and exclusion, 79, 80, 100, 146, 174n ; Last Mass, 100–1; leper’s kiss, 104–5, 142–3; leprosaria, 100, 104, 178n; lupa/lepra associations, 80, 102; medieval notions of, 100, 108, 185–6n; as punishment, 80, 101–3, 110, 146–7; and salvation, 104, 105, 179n; and sin, 80, 101, 102–3, 142, 146–7, 175n, 179n; symptoms of, 99–100, 103, 106, 178n; and vision, 105–6; see also Henryson, Robert, Testament of Cresseid life writing, 17, 119–20, 125–6, 182n Lindley, Arthur, 26–7, 64, 65, 163n, 172n loathly lady, 34, 69, 164n Lochrie, Karma, 22, 62, 114, 115, 118, 132, 161n, 181n, 182n, 185n Lombards: bodily stereotypes of, 36–7, 88, 165n; see also blindness Lomperis, Linda and Sarah Stanbury, 1, 155n lovesickness, 19, 33, 164n lycanthropy, 77, 78, 174n; see also werewolves Mahoney, Dhira, 123, 125, 183n Mandeville’s Travels, 23 Mann, Jill, 64, 163–4n, 171n Marie de France, 74; Bisclavret, 16, 73, 74–83, 85, 88, 90, 96, 97, 110; Fables, 74; and female textual production, 82; Guigemar, 74; Lanval, 84–5; and misogyny, 77–8, 82; narrative style, 74–6; St. Patrick’s Purgatory, 74 marriage, 46–7; and hierarchy, 54–6, 58, 91; and sex, 63–4, 66, 120,

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128, 135, 142; see also domestic violence St. Margaret, 120, 132, 143 Martin, Priscilla, 61, 171n, 172n St. Mary Magdalene, 120 Mary of Oignies, 120, 123, 136, 169n materiality of metaphor, 68 Mathews, Jana, 109, 180n McAvoy, Liz Herbert, 132, 134, 141, 147, 180n, 185n McCracken, Peggy, 91, 92, 177n menopause, 25, 33, 40, 61 menstrual blood, 10, 128–9; and Bible, 10, 159n; and disability, 11, 25, 108, 109; and eyes, 33, 108; and moon, 108; as poisonous, 10–11, 33, 108 Metzler, Irina, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 21, 31, 67, 70, 99, 122, 155n, 161n, 172n, 174n, 181n Miller, Milton, 41, 42, 166n miraculous cure (of impairment), 32, 44, 69–70, 104, 142, 144 Mitchell, David, 68, 161n; see also Mitchell, David and Sharon Snider Mitchell, David and Sharon Snyder, 14, 15, 20–1, 33, 36, 49, 59, 61, 69, 76, 78, 83, 96, 118, 152, 155n, 161n, 177n monsters, 23, 80, 86, 162n; and disability, 23–8; female, 36; monsterization, 15, 23, 86–7; and pregnancy, 23–8, 43, 133 Moore, Robert I., 101, 156n, 174n narrative prosthesis, 14, 15–16, 20–3, 49, 61, 69, 76, 78, 96, 97, 177–8n Nichols, Stephen, 74, 75, 173n normalcy, 3, 20–3, 152–3 Norman Conquest, 23, 173n normate, 13, 160n nose: and castration, 56–7, 80–1; as phallic symbol, 56; removal of as disabling, 57, 80 Nussbaum, Felicity, 12, 156n, 159n

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IN DEX

Offord, M. Y., 50–1, 169n Otherness, 2, 3, 5, 6, 13, 15, 20, 23, 24–5, 28, 34, 79, 84, 88, 95, 98, 109, 152, 160n, 162n, 174n Park, Katharine, 7, 157n parody, 44, 83, 161n Parr, Johnstone, 103, 178n passing, 83, 175n paterfamilias, 47, 168n Patterson, Lee, 97, 178n Peyroux, Catherine, 104, 142, 178–9n, 185n pica, 41, 42 Pickens, Rupert, 75, 76, 81, 82, 173n, 174n Piers Plowman, 31 Plato, 8, 158n Pliny, 10 Potkay, Monica and Regula Evitt, 134, 182n pregnancy: and abjection, 24–5; and disability, 25–6, 35–44, 133–4, 162–3n; infertility, 25–6, 33, 61, 91–2, 177n; and legitimacy, 41, 42, 91–2; medicalization of, 41; and monstrosity, 25; and monstrous births, 25, 42–3, 167n; see also, Kempe, Margery; grotesque, female body Price, Janet and Margaret Shildrick, 33, 164n; see also Shildrick, Margaret prosthesis, 20, 45, 62; see also narrative prosthesis; textual prosthesis Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, 9, 10, 33, 158n, 164n, 180n Quayson, Ato, 20, 152, 161n queynte, 38–9; lengua queynte, 62 Rawcliffe, Carole, 100–1, 103, 106, 108, 179n Riddy, Felicity, 96, 97–8, 99, 103, 105, 109, 179n

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205

Roberts, Anna, 46, 167n Robertson, Elizabeth, 49, 129, 130, 168n, 183n Rolle, Richard, 130–1, 183n Russo, Mary, 27–8, 163n Rowland, Beryl, 101, 158n, 179n Salih, Sarah, 121, 181n Salisbury, Eve, 29, 30, 46, 66, 91, 163n, 167n, 177n Saturn, 96–7, 99, 103, 107, 109 Sayers, Edna Edith, 155n, 170n Seaman, Myra, 85, 176n Sedgwick, Eve, 77 Seven Corporal Works of Mercy, 32, 95, 141 Seven Spiritual Works of Mercy, 32, 141 Shea, Kerry, 77, 78, 81, 174n sheela-na-gig, 36, 72n Shildrick, Margaret, 26, 163n Sir Gawain, 24 Smith, Sidonie, 125–6, 182n, 183n Soranus, 7, 8–9, 10, 41, 62, 157n, 158n, 167n, 171n Spearing, A. C., 85, 86, 87, 176n spiritus, 36, 38, 129 Stearns, Marshall W., 103, 178n Storm, Melvin, 60, 61, 67–8, 170n stigma, 2–3, 57, 83, 118, 175n Stiker, Henri-Jacques, 23–4, 31, 54, 155n, 162n, 169n Summa Parisiensis, 47 TAB, 33 textual prosthetic, 96, 177–8n Third Lateran Council, 100 St. Thomas á Becket, 69 Thurston, Herbert, 116, 181n Titchkosky, Tanya, 25, 162–3n Tokes, Myra, 85, 87, 176n Trotula, 9, 10, 11, 41, 67, 157n, 158n, 159n Undset, Sigrid, 116, 181n usury, 88

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206

IN DEX

vagina, 7, 35–6, 39, 40, 94; and mouth, 52, 58–9 vagina dentata, 36, 165n Van Eickels, Klaus, 80, 90, 175n, 176n Venus, 96, 97–8, 102, 103, 106–7: and Fortune, 180n virtual identity, 2, 57, 118, 135, 154 weeping bitch motif, 28–9, 163n Weisl, Angela, 46, 168n Weissman, Hope Phyllis, 136, 138, 184n Wendell, Susan, 3, 6, 12, 99, 148, 156n, 160n werewolves: and deviancy, 79, 86–7; historical notions of, 77–8,

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174n; voluntary vs. involuntary, 79; see also Marie de France; lycanthropy Wheatley, Edward, 4, 5–6, 21, 31, 90, 122, 155n, 161n, 165n, 170n, 176n Wills, David, 20, 161n Windeatt, Barry, 119, 181n, 183n womb, 8–9; ragadia, 62; suffocation, 9; wandering, 8–9, 158n Wynne-Davies, Marion, 97, 99, 105, 178n Yates, Julian, 117, 182n Zemon Davis, Natalie, 27, 163n Zimmerman, Susan, 178n, 180n

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