Reading Spatially

To take a spatial approach to the study of medieval texts is to emphasize the importance of reading texts in place; a critical practice of context-driven interpretation which places an interpretive weight upon the geography of the place in which a text is consumed, producing what one might call an emplaced reading of a given text. This chapter is an experiment in just such a practice of reading: an attempt to reconstruct what a particular narrative may have meant to a community of readers in a particular place at a particular time. What I am interested in attempting here is to consider how the material context of a place might affect the reading of a text. How might the physical urban landscape of early fifteenth-century London provide a hermeneutic frame for understanding the urban reading contexts of the Middle English narratives of St Erkenwald, The Siege of Jerusalem, and Titus and Vespasian?

A Literary City: Writing London, Reading London

In this chapter I examine late-medieval London, home of a burgeoning audience for Middle English popular literature, and a resonant site of anxieties surrounding geographically-defined notions of English identity. London is a complex site of identity negotiation within the developing national fantasy of Englishness: the porous nature of the cosmopolitan port-city as a liminal contact-zone, contaminated by contact with and the presence of the other in the form of merchants and other foreign contaminants, whether human or as material commodities. The problematic nature of the heterogeneous medieval city was such that civic authorities regularly sought to regulate the nature of the urban populace. Here I wish to interrogate the role that popular narrative may have played in the construction of a fantasy of a homogeneous urban Englishness in late-medieval London, both through acts of writing and through acts of reading.

Scholarly assessments of Chaucer's fabliaux seldom acknowledge that these tales are erotic as well as funny; even less frequently do such investigations delve into why fabliaux are a source of pleasure. As Tom Hanks and W. W. Allman note in their article ‘Rough Love: Notes toward an Erotics of The Canterbury Tales’, scholars seem ‘to have averted their gaze when Chaucer's characters leap into bed’. Allman and Hanks, as their title implies, study an erotics of violence, mostly of men doing violence to women, and they focus in particular on the Merchant's Tale and its ‘erotics of stabbing’. A more positive erotic reading of the Merchant's Tale appears in Andrew Taylor's 1996 essay ‘Reading the Dirty Bits’. Taylor notes the lingering gaze of another scholar, E. Talbot Donaldson, upon a description of young May's body:

Donaldson writes, ‘the Spring of pretty young girls is a permanent thing, and that May in their personas will always warm the masculine heart’. Taylor suggests that pleasure taken in this description and in Donaldson's gloss of it is mimetic: ‘For the young college man to share Donaldson's and Chaucer's pleasure in May is to become, like them, a connoisseur of both good writing and pretty girls, a master of ironic detachment and well-modulated heterosexual desire’.

As Roger Ascham famously observed, Malory's Morte Darthur is primarily concerned with ‘open manslaughter, and bold bawdry’. I would not disagree; in fact, I would say that these themes are not only dominant but are inextricably interwoven. Male sexuality, in Malory, is consistently portrayed as potentially violent and disruptive, dangerous not only to individuals but to the whole structure of society, and therefore in need of controlling measures. The medieval world did not, of course, often portray any form of sexuality positively. Sexual desire leads both men and women to sin: both directly in committing fornication, incest and adultery, and indirectly in committing treason or disregarding their duties. It could easily be assumed that this is a divide between the clergy on the one side, themselves compelled to live in celibacy and thus suspicious of sexual desire, and the more relaxed nobility and commons on the other, cheerfully ignoring the rules when it suited them. However, this is too simple a dichotomy. Malory himself, despite the bold bawdry, shares in the suspicion of unregulated desire, in his nostalgia for a chaster time,

In her seminal 1980 essay Pouvoirs de l'horreur, Julia Kristeva identifies ‘the abject’ as the human reaction to a breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of distinction between the subject and the object, the interior and the exterior, or the self and the Other. Her classic example of a site of abjection is that of the human corpse, which although a continuation of the dead person's corporeal presence also becomes simultaneously a marker of his or her spiritual absence, and thus must be rejected or repressed, causing the subjective experience of ‘horror’. Kristeva argues that human rationality necessarily involves a series of such repressions, and that the association of the human with the unrepressed thus becomes a site of potential tension. ‘The abject confronts us’, she suggests, ‘with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal’. This borderland between the acceptable and the unacceptable thus becomes the site of the carnivalesque, the comedic and the socially transgressive, as attested by post-medieval writers from Rabelais to Bakhtin and beyond.

In the first decade of the sixteenth century, the abject was also a major concern for the poet William Dunbar, writing at the court of King James IV. Dunbar's poems are critically regarded as some of the most brilliant – and, frequently, the most offensive – writings produced in late medieval/ early modern Scotland. Many of his satirical pieces depict the court of James (who would later go on to lose his life at the disastrous Battle of Flodden) at play, simultaneously parodying and affirming the excesses of late medieval/Renaissance aristocratic culture.

George Ripley, in his apostrophic preface to God in the Compound of Alchemy, claims to have ‘renounced … fleshly lust’ and asks God to provide him (and, presumably, other worthy alchemists) with His ‘secret treasure’: ‘Shew us thy secrets and to us be bounteous’ (21.4). Throughout the Compound, Ripley guides readers away from worldly pleasures, urging them instead to focus their desires on God-granted alchemical secrets and ‘our stone of great delight’ (37.2). Likewise, Thomas Norton, in his prologue to the Ordinal of Alchemy, warns of avaricious would-be alchemists who ‘in fyre / Of brennyng couetise haue therto desire’ (27–8). Norton emphatically shuns ‘wordly werkis’ in favour of alchemical ‘connyng’, advising his reader to ‘sett fully his trust’ in God and ‘in connyng be fixid al his lust’ (509, 517, 535–6): ‘For above all erthlye thynge / I mooste desire & love connynge’ (2595–6). Desire or lust, in both the Compound and the Ordinal, is thus redirected from the physical body and material world toward the divinely inspired knowledge of the alchemical corpus. Moreover, as I will illustrate, Norton and Ripley both direct their reader to focus on the text's rhetorical structures in order to achieve desired alchemical objectives.

The hit HBO cable series Game of Thrones (2011–14) – the fantasy-medieval saga based on George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire novels – has provided more than its fair share of salacious sex scenes. Rape, marital rape, attempted rape, prostitution, group sex, sodomy (of both heterosexual and homosexual forms), incest, sex leading to castration, sex leading to leech-application, and even – occasionally – vanilla consensual sex, have appeared on the screen in the first four seasons of the show. The show, while generally well reviewed, has come under sustained criticism from certain sectors of the media for its depiction of a brutal medieval sexuality, a misogynous sexual culture replete with the threat of violent coercion. This popular (mis)representation of sex in what passes for the Middle Ages in the popular mind is, of course, far from a new phenomenon, and can be traced back through a long genealogy of such representations. One much dissected recent moment in this genealogy is found in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), where the African-American gangster Marsellus (Ving Rhames), having been saved from looming sodomitic rape by Bruce Willis's character Butch, vows his own distinct form of violent sexual revenge: ‘What now? Let me tell you what now. I'ma call a coupla hard, pipe-hittin’ niggers, who'll go to work on the homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch. You hear me talkin’, hillbilly boy?

In her 2007 essay ‘“Wordy vnthur wede”: Clothing, Nakedness and the Erotic in some Romances of Medieval Britain’, Amanda Hopkins examines the interplay of clothing and nudity in creating erotic moments, noting the connection of eroticism with female aggression on the one hand, and the erotic link between female nudity and passivity on the other. Lancelot's encounter with Elaine at Corbyn in Malory's Morte Darthur is marked by erotic moments featuring female nudity that appear emblematic of the latter. The eroticism of the moment when Lancelot rescues the ‘dolerous lady’ (2.791) from the boiling water by taking her by the hand, ‘naked as a nedyll’ (2.792), depends both on her total nudity and her status as victim – that is to say that the moment is erotic not just because she is naked, but because that nudity is not of her own making. Later, when Elaine ‘skypped oute of her bedde all naked’ (2.795) and kneels at Lancelot's feet to beg for her life, both her nudity and her vulnerability work to produce an erotic effect. Certainly Lancelot quickly changes his mind and turns from threatening her to embracing her. Yet to view Elaine as completely passive is a mistake – at the least her passivity is manipulated and Lancelot's presence in her bed is the result of machinations in which Elaine plays a willing part.

Sir Thopas's resolution to forsake human women in order to seek out an elf-queen as his lover satirizes one of the most well-known romance motifs: the fairy mistress who offers herself to the human protagonist of the narrative. It is characteristic of this motif that, with relatively few exceptions, the fairy offers sexual intercourse to the hero without any demand for the commitment of marriage and without stipulating any directly connected negative consequences. The motif's origins are a good deal earlier than those of romance – it features in several early medieval Irish narratives – but it is with romance that the motif is most particularly associated. It is noticeable that this extramarital sex is generally not explicitly condemned in the romances. Of course, romance authors are not prone to sermonizing digressions, so this might be passed over as merely a reflex of the genre; however, condemnation need not be overtly stated to still be clear and, in this respect, romance differs markedly from fabliaux, the other genre which frequently portrays extra-marital sex.

In the late fifteenth-century Squire of Low Degree, the incompetent protagonist woos a Hungarian princess in a way that seems to subject the romance genre to derivative, almost parodic, excess. This excess, however, offers particular insight into the representation of wooing in Middle English romance more broadly. While many romance heroines assume their suitors will display knightly prowess to win their love, this princess seems so aware of the Squire's shortcomings that she explains to him precisely what he must do, focusing on the rather boy-scout-like logistics of riding ‘Over hylles and dales, and hye mountaines, / In wethers wete, both hayle and raynes’, and lodging ‘under a tre, / Among the beastes wyld and tame’. Reminiscent here of how a Sir Thopas might understand chivalry, the text continues its overzealous attempt to ape romance when the princess exhaustively details the accoutrements that she expects from a suitor (203–30), and it is equally unable to find the right register when she offers to bankroll his required adventures (251–5). The envious steward's attempts to ruin the Squire by exposing his amorous inclinations are predictable enough; the results, however, have been seen as uncharacteristic of romance, since the king does not object to the Squire courting his daughter, but rather instructs the steward:

Sometime between March and November 1481, William Caxton printed Godfrey de Bouillon or the Siege and Conquest of Jerusalem. Published some 190 years after the fall of Acre and the destruction of the last crusader state in the Levant, this text highlights the enduring attraction of crusade narratives – and of the crusader heroes contained within them – for late-fifteenth-century English society. As the first English translation of the First Crusade portions of William of Tyre's Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, the production of the text has been interpreted as the product of Caxton's canny awareness of the reading tastes of the English book-buying public. At the heart of the marketability of Godfrey as a text – and of Godfrey as a hero – lies his reputation as the European crusading hero par excellence. Despite the existence of other more specifically English crusader-narratives, such as that of Richard the Lionheart, Godfrey's appeal as a universal exemplar of a hero of unified Christendom seems to have won out. Celebrated in chronicle accounts and the legendary Chanson d'Antioche and the Chanson de Jerusalem, and elevated to the ranks of the nine worthies, Godfrey represents the epitome of a heroic model that takes on many forms in the literature and culture of medieval Europe. The late-medieval renown of Godfrey is emblematic of the long-held appeal of crusading figures in the medieval popular mind. From the late eleventh-century Chanson de Roland through to Caxton's Godfrey, we find a dizzying array of heroic crusaders brought to life within chronicle, romance and other forms of medieval narrative.

The true shape of Arthurian Britain was and remains a contentious battleground: even in our 'enlightened' modern age the search for sites and objects associated with Arthur continues, producing periodic 'amazing' discoveries - such as that of the 'Artognou' stone found at Tintagel in 1998 - that are met with a seemingly inextinguishable degree of enthusiasm from the contemporary media. However, for medieval writers, the locating of Arthurian geography within the actual landscape of the British Isles was not merely of antiquarian interest: rather, it was often a serious matter of political, cultural and institutional importance. Authors writing in numerous languages and hailing from a variety of courts looked towards Britain for indelible signs of that ancient conqueror who could validate the regimes of their own day, interpreting Arthur's actions through their own contemporary lens: for this was Logres, the legendary Britain of the past over which Arthur had once reigned so gloriously. The Arthurian tales of medieval Europe imagined this landscape as a place of marvels and conflicts, marked with tragic tales of loss and recovery, of the quest for the Grail and of the love of the French knight Lancelot for the British Queen Guinevere. The countryside of medieval Britain was littered with reminders of the past presence of Arthur and his knights, relics of a time of perfect chivalry and overwhelming imperial power. Tom Shippey has argued that 'England has a kind of mythical geography, a network of associations and oppositions, now dwindled largely to humour and tourism, but once a vital part of the country's being: a geography which accords special roles to Oxford and Cambridge, to Stratford and Glastonbury, to Wigan and Jarrow'.

Popular romance and medieval national identity

‘Who are the English; where do they come from; what constitutes the English nation?’ Such were the questions regarding Englishness that Thorlac Turville-Petre posed in 1994 when he observed that ‘the establishment and exploration of a sense of a national identity is a major preoccupation of English writers of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries’. Turville-Petre's work, which found its most expansive form in his seminal study England the Nation, established medieval English nationalism as a vibrant field of interest, and has led to the proliferation of studies of the development of medieval Englishness over the past decade or so. Important work by scholars such as Siobhain Bly Calkin, Geraldine Heng, and Kathy Lavezzo – amongst others – illustrates the degree to which the study of nationalism has become embedded within the practice of medieval scholarship.

However, the validity of attempting to discern the origins of the English ‘nation’ within the literature of the medieval period has not been without its critics. Can one read the beginnings of English ‘nationalism’ – in the classic Andersonian sense – in such pre-modern texts? Views on the issue have been polarizing: while many scholars have been quick to take up the search for a nascent medieval English national identity, others have remained more cautious. Derek Pearsall, in a response to the profusion of identifications of medieval national sentiment appearing in the late 1990s, comments that ‘while particular circumstances produced a momentary surge in assertions of Englishness around 1290–1340 and again in 1410–20, there was no steadily growing sense of national feeling’. The debate seems – in essence – to be over what medievalists mean when they use terms such as ‘nationalism’ and ‘national identity’: are they implying ‘momentary surges’ or a ‘steadily growing’ sense of national identity? The question of whether nationalism can indeed be identified as a developing discourse in medieval English texts is further complicated by the postulated post-medieval origins of nationalism itself. Benedict Anderson, in his influential Imagined Communities, sums up the view that it was the Enlightenment that engendered nationalism: ‘in Western Europe the eighteenth century marks … the dawn of the age of nationalism’. In response to such periodized objections, medievalists have been quick to dismantle Anderson's temporally-constrained formulation, and have argued for studies on ‘the discourse of the nation’ to be extended back beyond the traditional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century origins of the modern nation state. Diane Speed, arguing the case for the presence of medieval nationalisms in romance, considers ‘that it could be reasonably taken back to the literature of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, especially to the early romances’.

The discourse of national identity in medieval England has been the subject of much critical debate in the past decade. The publication in 1996 of Thorlac Turville-Petre's England the Nation established the study of medieval English nationalism as a vibrant and important field of study, and numerous additions to the debate over the origins, development and nature of medieval notions of Englishness have appeared since. Important studies by scholars such as Siobhain Bly Calkin, Geraldine Heng, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Kathy Lavezzo illustrate the degree to which the study of nationalism has become embedded within the practice of medieval scholarship. This chapter seeks to examine the narrative of English identity found in Sir Bevis of Hampton, reconsidering it in the light of two important geographical foci of the romance – the region of Hampshire and the lands of the East – in order to highlight the complexities of identity that are suggested by Bevis’s continual geographical relocation within the romance.

Bevis is, as Turville-Petre has argued, a text that is deeply concerned with the construction of Englishness. In describing the Auchinleck MS ( Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates’ 19.2.1), the home of the bestknown and oldest extant Middle English version of Bevis, as ‘a handbook of the nation’, Turville-Petre argues that the manuscript's narrative of England, written in English, ‘does not simply recognise a social need but is an expression of the very character of the manuscript, of its passion for England and its pride in being English’. The individual romances within the manuscript contribute to the construction of the manuscript's idea of Englishness – as Heng's analysis of Richard Coer de Lyon has demonstrated. While the historical royal figure of Richard I is one embodiment of the English nation in the Auchinleck MS, in Bevis we witness another important narrative space in which Englishness is constructed. In this respect the Middle English Bevis differs from its antecedent, the Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone: as Susan Crane notes, ‘Sir Beues of Hamtoun undertakes an important development, whose beginnings are barely discernible in Boeve, from the perception of the baronial family as a political unit owing personal allegiance to rulers on the basis of reciprocal support, to a wider perception of national identity and the importance of national interests.’

The Middle English Guy of Warwick narrates a vita that is, even by the often outrageous standards of medieval romance, extraordinary. Guy's life leads him from somewhat humble beginnings as the son of a provincial steward – the very margins of chivalric society – to his predestined place as chivalric, Christian, and most importantly, English culture-hero. Along the way he obtains chivalric glory, a courtly paramour, and associated noble title (Earl of Warwick), he vanquishes Saracen threats both defensively (at the walls of Constantinople) and offensively (whilst on a one-man Crusade in the Middle East) – thus taking on the mantle of defender of European Christianity – before returning home to become England's saviour from invasion and to finally die, as the circle of his life completes, back in Warwickshire as a devout hermit. As an example of popular romance entertainment, Guy of Warwick has few peers either in terms of popularity or its impact on wider English culture. However, the romance's importance is not limited to its function as popular entertainment. Much recent scholarship has established the important role of medieval romance in the articulation of national and group identity, figuring romance as a genre that is of great interest to the literary scholar and cultural historian alike. In addition to the importance of Guy of Warwick in the discourse of identity politics, the figure of Guy also enjoys a powerful influence outside the romance, as he is appropriated for the promotion of family, civic, and national pride more widely within English culture. The narrative development of Guy as a medieval culture-hero – a figure who embodies a number of different identity groups – is the subject of this chapter.

Thorlac Turville-Petre has described Guy as ‘the model of the knight of England’. Implicit within this designation is an understanding of this romance as exemplary narrative: a vita that in some fashion was intended to be imitated by its audience, or at the very least was intended to inspire its readers through admiration of the hero's deeds.