Okay, I feel more accomplished today. One whole book and the remainder of Shakespeare's Sonnets (later!) down. It was 223 pages, too, no small feat even if I suspect the type is smaller in today's books (it was published in 1964).
Overview
C.S. Lewis calls this book an introduction to medieval literature spun from his lectures. He does this by invoking (constructing?) a medieval Model of how the world worked, and then demonstrated how the authors of the medieval world (a) got the ideas and (b) used them. The first couple of chapters give a general overview of the medieval situation, followed by detailing the most important sources for medieval literature outside the Bible, Ovid, and Virgil. Then he details the medieval conception of the universe, including the Spheres, the Longaevi (fay), living creatures, reason, history, and so on. Then he closes by stating how the Model functioned, particularly in comparison to the model we have now.
Observations
1. The Model is an example of the most accessible view of medieval life that we possess. It is an intellectual view that is present even in such works as the South English Legendary. Lewis acknowledges its limits (I think in the Reservations chapter, Chapter 2). The best poets often were aware that the model could be defied, and the most common ones often didn't concern themselves with the model much at all.
Yet it is important to state the limits of the model anyhow. Lewis constructs it around the high cultured man, either of the aristocracy, the church, or the bureaucracy that was robust by the 15th century. Of course he does, since Lewis's project is a literary one, and the literary even in this period is rooted in the written tradition, which has a traceable trajectory that Lewis studies very well. I could clamor for the alternative viewpoints to be uncovered, those of the commoner, but that road is difficult and usually small in scope, delving in traces that often have little that can firmly be placed. It's like trying to find references to the Peasants' Rebellion in Chaucer. Oh, maybe that's one! That sounds like it, but maybe he's just good at describing a clamour in Troilus!
The other option is that perhaps there was not as much unity as the Model proposed. Here the criticism of late Lewis is the same as early Lewis - taking a tendency, making it into a rule, and failing to acknowledge that any exceptions could form a separate school. This isn't to blame him. I love his work, I think he gets the rule right, and he does as much with the rule as he conceivably could have. But he misses the other traditions and other lines of influence that I think are there. I don't know, for example, how the model would address the Christian mystics. Or the seemingly independent tendency in France and England around 1400 to start the querelle des femmes. Again, Lewis is excused, since he was going for a general view. I don't challenge the view, but only ask, as a career-long question, what other eddies of influence might characterize the medieval period, and why we imagine that Lewis's model is the true medieval quintessence? The first question is firmly medieval, and the second will have to take recourse in the Renaissance, to the 19th century, and beyond. That is, for example, my reason for delving into the 15th century, because something changes there (is changing?), or becomes manifest (manifests?), that leads to the rupture of the Renaissance, but which still feels continuous with what came before.
2. I love his summaries of selected materials that got adapted by the medievals. His summaries of the philosophers is particularly useful, since I doubt that I'll have recourse to return to Chalcidius, Macrobius, or Pseudo-Dionysius before my exams.
3. I should pay close attention to his discussion of the Longaevi, since this is the bit that gets at the pagan tradition from a classical angle. Perhaps the angle is more the way that they could have been explained, while the folk influences adopted the mode of the fay. Would it be too obvious to say that something magical happens here through the influence of the popular tale and the romance? This would be a second Model, or the rudiments of one.
4. On p. 142 and following, there's a discussion of maps and conceptions of geography.
5. On p. 162, Lewis lays down the distinction between the five senses and the five wits. I'd heard of the wits, and later today ran across the Shakespeare sonnet (141) that mentions them:
"But my five wits, nor my five senses can / Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee." (9-10)
The wits incline inward, and are Memory, Estimation, Imagination, Phantasy, and Common Wit. Estimation detects the practical parts of a situation (it's intentiones). Phantasy and Imagination are similar, though Phantasy is the higher faculty of the two. Imagination retains what is perceived, according to Albertus Magnus. Phantasy separates and unites it. Finally, Common Sense (Wit) is that which tells us we are sensing, and puts together the senses so that judgments and other conceptions can then be judged. It's the moderator of senses.
6. I would find 185 interesting in studying temporality, since Lewis deals with the ways of looking at time. The view then - that things were once better. I'd challenge that this was the only view, but would agree that the views are more optimistic than are often construed.
7. Look to 191 and following for an introduction to rhetoric.
8. p. 214 - I leave this, as a definition of literature: "Literature exists to teach what is useful, to honour what deserves honour, to appreciate what is delightful. The useful, honourable, and delightful things are superior to it: it exists for their sake; its own use, honour, or delightfulness is derivative from theirs. In that sense the art is humble even when the artists are proud; proud of their proficiency in the art, but not making for the art itself the high Renaissance or Romantic claims."
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
The Allegory of Love
Well, my summer has most definitely been a summer break. Anyhow.
C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love. 1936. Amazing what a memory will conjure up.
This book is a tour de force through the history of allegory, starting about as early as it could (Greek and Roman writings) and continuing through Spenser's The Faerie Queene.
There are probably three centers where the book is of key importance or interest to me. The first is in its focused study of The Romance of the Rose. Here, Lewis is best at demystifying the process of allegory. Instead of looking at it as some sort of double-step, where an extra veil is drawn on one's eyes or an extra level of interpretation is required (as with a symbol), I should read working allegory as a story that functions on two levels of action - what literally happens, and what is represented by the action. The personifications are real versions of abstract qualities. For The Romance of the Rose, the characters can be regarded as figures of the lover, figures of the loved, or figures of both. Fair Welcome is a figure of the loved, as is the castle itself, and the other people there. My interest in Fair Welcome is partially relieved and partially revitalized. It isn't significant that the lover treats with Fair Welcome as a substitute for the Rose, because Fair Welcome is a part of that loved woman. I still think there is something going on with gender assignation, but it isn't as simple as, to use a quote I've overheard, "There's something gay going on there."
Two is the interstitial period, and particularly figures like Chaucer and Langland that tend to fill the middle line of allegory, where it develops and gets adapted to other genres (like the romance), or where it is developed enough to become a mere veneer for other work (rather like the 19th century Gothic architecture as compared to its 12th century roots). One point that is laughable here - how Lewis judges poems and poetry. Besides his other humorous disparagements and praises, he frequently draws the distinction between a poet and poetry (from Shelley or Wordsworth, for instance?). I think he struggles here with a form of the intentional fallacy that would soon emerge. What is best - a poet that realizes his talents and produces the greatest art intentionally, for intended meaning is more poignant (if not more meaningful) than accidental meaning. What many poets (and non-poets, in his parlance) produce - poetry, that which can delight and excite both the intellect and its sentiments, which has rhythm, structure, and intangible ectasy. I think I could learn from him how to judge quality in writing. At the same time, I see how silly such pursuits sound now. This is a day where we demonstrate the worth of a text through more subdued means. (I realized that the spots I observed were between poems and poetry, but both differences abound. His bias in the latter case is between what qualifies a full poem structurally, and the bits that strike him as good in any work.)
He reads the poets quite well, and I'll have to return to him when I'm done with Chaucer. He also gives a brief travel through the 15th century that is more a light skip, but which may be useful for summaries when I don't want to read a 24,000 line poem once, let alone twice.
Three is The Faerie Queene. He provides a diligent allegorical reading for each book, while being careful to distinguish those elements that do not cleanly fit his allegorical reading well. For Lewis, there is an allegorical core to every book, and then the spiraling adventures that can serve as examples or exemplars of the central theme but which cannot be read in the allegorical manner - they are fantasy, or romance, without much superstructure. Mutabilitie is the core without the dressings. Lewis is also good at distinguishing between the Italian epic tradition, with works like Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, where Spenser borrows obviously in great volume, and the English allegorical tradition, from which Spenser borrows a less provable mood and intention.
My discussion thus far must include one other factor, the role of courtly love. He traces that through ancient writing like Ovid, through early medieval Latin texts, and to Andreas Capellanus. Helen Cooper's criticism of Lewis here is fresh in my mind, of how he hallowed Andreas's exemplification of adulterous love as a rule by which to read other books by. I think, contrary to Lewis and with Cooper, that love can (and did) happen frequently in marriage in the romantic tradition, so that FQ, with its frequent marriages and the figure of amorous marriage, isn't the glorious exceptional endpoint to courtly love's common practice. At the same time, Lewis chose his texts well, and there seem to be these two parallel discourses of love, depending on whether one is reverent of or irreverent of marriage. Certainly marriage is no necessity for love, but the lack of it is not a necessity either.
Now for my notes:
(116) - Good explanation of allegory - the two realms of action here are the inner and the outer world. If I can distinguish between the two using the significatio, I can read the allegory.
(140) - The most relevant treatment of Fair Welcome in RotR. He depicts the breakdown in allegory, where Fair Welcome is treated as a young woman by the Old Woman, rather than a young bachelor as he appears. Lewis, typically, attributes this slip to clumsiness.
(142, 222, prior) typical places where poem/poetry dichotomy occur.
(163) A still relevant critique of Chaucerian study - we look too much to the "mocking" Chaucer, and not the serious Chaucer.
(185) He reads Criseyde spot-on here. Criseyde is driven by fear from the start, and seeks above all protection. All her actions can be read in this way, including her betrayal of Troilus.This makes her out to be a sympathetic character, one who ultimately fails the test of courtly love but gains pardon in a court of human emotion.
(220) tergiversation - the act of turning one's back on another.
(233-4) Lewis can only justify studying the 15th century by looking forward, though at points he shows that medievalist glint of really liking what he reads.
(247) He uses Occam's razor to determine that the author of a poem is a woman because the speaker is. While such a process is rather generous, it lies uneasily with me, because women will frequently write narratives for men (Marie de France the first to leap to mind), and men will write in women's voices (The Earl of Surrey the first to mind this time.) I suppose, if one must use an author's gender for any purpose, it is better that it is female?
(270) - Ah, this point made me wonder about age and bad intentions and gender. That's really all I have to say - why are aged women so often the evil party?
(297) Here's where the italian epic (in reference to FQ) comes up.
C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love. 1936. Amazing what a memory will conjure up.
This book is a tour de force through the history of allegory, starting about as early as it could (Greek and Roman writings) and continuing through Spenser's The Faerie Queene.
There are probably three centers where the book is of key importance or interest to me. The first is in its focused study of The Romance of the Rose. Here, Lewis is best at demystifying the process of allegory. Instead of looking at it as some sort of double-step, where an extra veil is drawn on one's eyes or an extra level of interpretation is required (as with a symbol), I should read working allegory as a story that functions on two levels of action - what literally happens, and what is represented by the action. The personifications are real versions of abstract qualities. For The Romance of the Rose, the characters can be regarded as figures of the lover, figures of the loved, or figures of both. Fair Welcome is a figure of the loved, as is the castle itself, and the other people there. My interest in Fair Welcome is partially relieved and partially revitalized. It isn't significant that the lover treats with Fair Welcome as a substitute for the Rose, because Fair Welcome is a part of that loved woman. I still think there is something going on with gender assignation, but it isn't as simple as, to use a quote I've overheard, "There's something gay going on there."
Two is the interstitial period, and particularly figures like Chaucer and Langland that tend to fill the middle line of allegory, where it develops and gets adapted to other genres (like the romance), or where it is developed enough to become a mere veneer for other work (rather like the 19th century Gothic architecture as compared to its 12th century roots). One point that is laughable here - how Lewis judges poems and poetry. Besides his other humorous disparagements and praises, he frequently draws the distinction between a poet and poetry (from Shelley or Wordsworth, for instance?). I think he struggles here with a form of the intentional fallacy that would soon emerge. What is best - a poet that realizes his talents and produces the greatest art intentionally, for intended meaning is more poignant (if not more meaningful) than accidental meaning. What many poets (and non-poets, in his parlance) produce - poetry, that which can delight and excite both the intellect and its sentiments, which has rhythm, structure, and intangible ectasy. I think I could learn from him how to judge quality in writing. At the same time, I see how silly such pursuits sound now. This is a day where we demonstrate the worth of a text through more subdued means. (I realized that the spots I observed were between poems and poetry, but both differences abound. His bias in the latter case is between what qualifies a full poem structurally, and the bits that strike him as good in any work.)
He reads the poets quite well, and I'll have to return to him when I'm done with Chaucer. He also gives a brief travel through the 15th century that is more a light skip, but which may be useful for summaries when I don't want to read a 24,000 line poem once, let alone twice.
Three is The Faerie Queene. He provides a diligent allegorical reading for each book, while being careful to distinguish those elements that do not cleanly fit his allegorical reading well. For Lewis, there is an allegorical core to every book, and then the spiraling adventures that can serve as examples or exemplars of the central theme but which cannot be read in the allegorical manner - they are fantasy, or romance, without much superstructure. Mutabilitie is the core without the dressings. Lewis is also good at distinguishing between the Italian epic tradition, with works like Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, where Spenser borrows obviously in great volume, and the English allegorical tradition, from which Spenser borrows a less provable mood and intention.
My discussion thus far must include one other factor, the role of courtly love. He traces that through ancient writing like Ovid, through early medieval Latin texts, and to Andreas Capellanus. Helen Cooper's criticism of Lewis here is fresh in my mind, of how he hallowed Andreas's exemplification of adulterous love as a rule by which to read other books by. I think, contrary to Lewis and with Cooper, that love can (and did) happen frequently in marriage in the romantic tradition, so that FQ, with its frequent marriages and the figure of amorous marriage, isn't the glorious exceptional endpoint to courtly love's common practice. At the same time, Lewis chose his texts well, and there seem to be these two parallel discourses of love, depending on whether one is reverent of or irreverent of marriage. Certainly marriage is no necessity for love, but the lack of it is not a necessity either.
Now for my notes:
(116) - Good explanation of allegory - the two realms of action here are the inner and the outer world. If I can distinguish between the two using the significatio, I can read the allegory.
(140) - The most relevant treatment of Fair Welcome in RotR. He depicts the breakdown in allegory, where Fair Welcome is treated as a young woman by the Old Woman, rather than a young bachelor as he appears. Lewis, typically, attributes this slip to clumsiness.
(142, 222, prior) typical places where poem/poetry dichotomy occur.
(163) A still relevant critique of Chaucerian study - we look too much to the "mocking" Chaucer, and not the serious Chaucer.
(185) He reads Criseyde spot-on here. Criseyde is driven by fear from the start, and seeks above all protection. All her actions can be read in this way, including her betrayal of Troilus.This makes her out to be a sympathetic character, one who ultimately fails the test of courtly love but gains pardon in a court of human emotion.
(220) tergiversation - the act of turning one's back on another.
(233-4) Lewis can only justify studying the 15th century by looking forward, though at points he shows that medievalist glint of really liking what he reads.
(247) He uses Occam's razor to determine that the author of a poem is a woman because the speaker is. While such a process is rather generous, it lies uneasily with me, because women will frequently write narratives for men (Marie de France the first to leap to mind), and men will write in women's voices (The Earl of Surrey the first to mind this time.) I suppose, if one must use an author's gender for any purpose, it is better that it is female?
(270) - Ah, this point made me wonder about age and bad intentions and gender. That's really all I have to say - why are aged women so often the evil party?
(297) Here's where the italian epic (in reference to FQ) comes up.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Cleanness
I sometimes wonder why a lot of people treat medieval poems as structurally inferior, as if the structure just isn't there. I suppose part of it might be that a lot of it has a paratactic structure, a term that is often bandied about by my mentors and other scholars as a prime structure of oral literatures. Short, simple sentences are combined with simple conjunctions, with a larger structure that might appear to be a list of events.
Perhaps in justification, to preserve the idea that many of these works are far more enriched than the generalization might imply (since "simple" too often becomes the one-word prescription for it, when one is being generous and not using the collocation "bad"), I like searching for deeper structures, or alternately finding deep ambiguities even at the surface, to use an opposition that implies that there is a depth to explore. (Deleuze is on my mind.) This is why I play with puns often, or revert to close reading to make a point. I'm very good with these methods. It's making the large, grand claim where I could use some development.
I say these two paragraphs because my first reaction on finishing this is that it was tough to see the structure. Maybe this was due to the language. I have been reading middle english for a while now, but sometimes alliterative poetry just defeats me. I understood the bulk of it, but a few passages, and several shorter units were very difficult to make out. I chose to read on rather than spend a significant amount of time consulting different dictionaries. My edition has a helpful glossary, but there were a few times when my curiosity would have taken it way further than that.
The poem has what I would call four main parts.
1. Introduction and the Feast Parable
2. Noah
3. Abraham and Lot
4. Babylon
The basic message, to condense it in a trite sentence, is: "God likes cleanliness of body and spirit, and abhors anyone who allows themselves to become impure." Homilies are easy like that.
There are some tentative connections between this poem and the others. For example, between the third and the fourth part, the transition features a pearl, which stands for the purity and salvation that the poem is trying to communicate, and may draw on the prior poem Pearl for much of its power. The form is similar to the later poems, being an alliterative verse with four beats per line. There is no stanza form here. I can't comment much more until I've read Patience, but I expect the two to be similar.
A few things that interested me:
So much about Cleanness relies on having proper sexual relationships. Note that sex is not dismissed outright - it is proper with one's wife, in private (esp. 697-708). God taught it to people. In contrast, the men in Sodom insist on having the two angels come out, in a passage that is rather more gruesome than the Bible, if I recall correctly. Cleanness also concerns itself a lot with pride, especially in the last story, but it is interesting that the two biggest sins here seem to be that and lechery.
The word (yogh)yender as a variant to yonder. I found it quite interesting when used because it looked at first like it could be a corruption of gender, a word already in use at the time in the Latinate sense of genus, generis. The passage is at line 1617; reading it again, it clearly makes sense with yonder, a delightful misunderstanding would give this modernization: "And though the matter is murky that is marked gender..." Har. Doesn't make as much sense.
The reason it doesn't seem to at first hold together well, at least for me, is the event in the beginning, the dinner party. That combined with the emphasis on one's appearance strikes me, someone who has always learned that what's on the inside matters far more than what's on the outside, strange. I think part of the emphasis comes from class structure (oh, of course it does). The entire poem is preoccupied with the relationship between lords and servants. The word wyg(yogh) recurs many times, as do others, sometimes for Lot's servants (890s) and sometimes for the servants of the queen of Babylon (1587), just to give a few examples. If one dresses appropriately for one's position, and one's worth is reflected in the quality and station of the clothing available to her, then appearing slovenly before a lord when one could dress better is a strike against her. Then again, does this mean that peasants are worth less morally because they are unable to dress up? Perhaps the causation isn't there, but the general point remains - one unable to afford such clothes would be morally suspect as compared to the honor of a lord. So what does this poem say about those relations, and how does the emphasis on lord and servant translate here when the preoccupation with clothing is so important? What's the likely theological message? How does it converse with other theologians, whether Thomas Aquinas or Julian of Norwich?
Perhaps in justification, to preserve the idea that many of these works are far more enriched than the generalization might imply (since "simple" too often becomes the one-word prescription for it, when one is being generous and not using the collocation "bad"), I like searching for deeper structures, or alternately finding deep ambiguities even at the surface, to use an opposition that implies that there is a depth to explore. (Deleuze is on my mind.) This is why I play with puns often, or revert to close reading to make a point. I'm very good with these methods. It's making the large, grand claim where I could use some development.
I say these two paragraphs because my first reaction on finishing this is that it was tough to see the structure. Maybe this was due to the language. I have been reading middle english for a while now, but sometimes alliterative poetry just defeats me. I understood the bulk of it, but a few passages, and several shorter units were very difficult to make out. I chose to read on rather than spend a significant amount of time consulting different dictionaries. My edition has a helpful glossary, but there were a few times when my curiosity would have taken it way further than that.
The poem has what I would call four main parts.
1. Introduction and the Feast Parable
2. Noah
3. Abraham and Lot
4. Babylon
The basic message, to condense it in a trite sentence, is: "God likes cleanliness of body and spirit, and abhors anyone who allows themselves to become impure." Homilies are easy like that.
There are some tentative connections between this poem and the others. For example, between the third and the fourth part, the transition features a pearl, which stands for the purity and salvation that the poem is trying to communicate, and may draw on the prior poem Pearl for much of its power. The form is similar to the later poems, being an alliterative verse with four beats per line. There is no stanza form here. I can't comment much more until I've read Patience, but I expect the two to be similar.
A few things that interested me:
So much about Cleanness relies on having proper sexual relationships. Note that sex is not dismissed outright - it is proper with one's wife, in private (esp. 697-708). God taught it to people. In contrast, the men in Sodom insist on having the two angels come out, in a passage that is rather more gruesome than the Bible, if I recall correctly. Cleanness also concerns itself a lot with pride, especially in the last story, but it is interesting that the two biggest sins here seem to be that and lechery.
The word (yogh)yender as a variant to yonder. I found it quite interesting when used because it looked at first like it could be a corruption of gender, a word already in use at the time in the Latinate sense of genus, generis. The passage is at line 1617; reading it again, it clearly makes sense with yonder, a delightful misunderstanding would give this modernization: "And though the matter is murky that is marked gender..." Har. Doesn't make as much sense.
The reason it doesn't seem to at first hold together well, at least for me, is the event in the beginning, the dinner party. That combined with the emphasis on one's appearance strikes me, someone who has always learned that what's on the inside matters far more than what's on the outside, strange. I think part of the emphasis comes from class structure (oh, of course it does). The entire poem is preoccupied with the relationship between lords and servants. The word wyg(yogh) recurs many times, as do others, sometimes for Lot's servants (890s) and sometimes for the servants of the queen of Babylon (1587), just to give a few examples. If one dresses appropriately for one's position, and one's worth is reflected in the quality and station of the clothing available to her, then appearing slovenly before a lord when one could dress better is a strike against her. Then again, does this mean that peasants are worth less morally because they are unable to dress up? Perhaps the causation isn't there, but the general point remains - one unable to afford such clothes would be morally suspect as compared to the honor of a lord. So what does this poem say about those relations, and how does the emphasis on lord and servant translate here when the preoccupation with clothing is so important? What's the likely theological message? How does it converse with other theologians, whether Thomas Aquinas or Julian of Norwich?
Thursday, July 1, 2010
The English Romance in Time: More Thoughts
When I had initially typed it up, I lacked my notes. Now I have a few, mainly a list of points where I was particularly interested and wanted to later return.
Women and the quest
I had some disagreement with the claim that Cooper makes on page 53, in the midst of discussing the quest and pilgrimage. She dismisses the female quester: "The outside world is masculine space, where few women venture willingly. ... Apart from a few women warriors - Grisandol in the prose Merlin, the eponymous Silence, Yde in Huon of Bordeaux, Ariosto's Bradamante and Spenser's Britomart - women who find themselves in a situation analogous to the hero's quest in romance are most often victims rather than agents, compelled to leave the safety of their own homes and at other people's mercy. The lone woman at large in romance is more likely to be cast adrift in a rudderless boat than to choose to follow the call of adventure" (53). Now, Cooper has undoubtedly read more romance than me. That was a frustrating point of this book, that I didn't have the context to always be able to knowingly agree with the generalizations. Sometimes I granted it to her on faith.
But, and maybe I've read the romances that are exceptional to this, I think the opposition between agent and victim is a false one. Women are often empowered through the quest, and often undertake a line of action that can be considered a quest. I think of the frequent times that women accompany and initiate quests in Le Morte Darthur. If the space they traverse is dangerous, it is not masculine, since they often show themselves to be better at reading the landscape than the males are. Reading women's journeys as quests in fact alleviates the interpretive problems with some romances, since it allows one to recover senses of motive and development that remain lost when the assumed quester remains a man.
For example, The Weddynge of Sir Gawayne and Dame Ragnell only became fruitful for my studies when I realized that the questing figure here is as much Dame Ragnell as King Arthur. Choice isn't a qualification for questing either - neither Dame Ragnell, Arthur, nor Gawain choose the situations they find themselves in. Instead, a quest is about seeking an end that might be unknown, which promises development and worship to the successful pursuant. Ragnell seeks a reversal of the curse that renders her sexuality into a lewdness that then gets displayed in all of her features. To do this, she must find a husband that will grant her her own sexual autonomy, what women in the poem really want. The curse is perhaps a reflection of the common claim that women could not be trusted or virtuous if they were unchaste, and the related claim that no woman can be unchaste in spirit. The hag is the feared reflection of this paranoia, the representative of unrestrained sexuality improperly applied. Gawain is offered the choice of whether she should be ugly during the day or ugly at night. When her own choice is respected, her sexuality is not a cause for lewdness at all, and she is no longer subject to the misogynistic claims that her sexuality is both inevitable and dangerous. Because she is trusted with the decision by her husband, she is truthful, and her beauty shows for Gawain and for everyone at court. The quest logic forms an instantiation in this case of a querelle des femmes debate that relates indirectly to Christine de Pisan and directly to Chaucer, particularly his Wife of Bath, who tells a similar tale after a lengthy prologue that refutes many misogynistic claims. Where the Wife of Bath walks the line of sincerity and parody (though a flawed character could be right in sentiment and wrong in action), Weddynge strikes me as supporting the women's side of the debate.
That's an easy example, because the question is built right into the poem. I think that the woman's quest is often obscured because it is conflated with magic. Quests often get defined by the tools that are used in them, sword and shield and lance and horse and helm and armor and the rest. Magic also forms an important tool, though one that too easily falls into the background. Magic often gets treated as a suspected art, which is used to support or hinder a knight's quests, often without motivation outside of mischief. Think of Morgan le Fay in Malory, showing up to entrap Lancelot randomly. Lyonet is not remembered for her sagacity in guiding Gareth towards the proper way to be a knight, but for the weird magic she pulls that preserves her sister's and his chastity. When women are involved in a quest, they are often wielders of magic. If we interpret their concerns as the material for a quest though, I think that magic and enchantment combine with a more general skill, that of knowledge and sagacity in general. Reading, even reading a situation, is after all a form of magic - grammar, glamour, and grimoire all having the same root.
So, summarily, I agree with most of Cooper's arguments in the book, but she touched a sore point here. I think that women are more agents than victims in many cases, and quite often a combination of both that really renders them worthy of neither name. In some cases, I would even say that the woman quester is the one that earns the most success and renown. (Perhaps Ragnell had to die so that Gawain would remain the most renowned unattached knight.)
Saint's Life and Romance
I liked her tendency on pages like 124, in the chapter on sea voyages, of comparing legendaries and hagiographies to the romance. I don't really have anything deeper to say here, except that I think the common points between the two are far more common than is typically allowed, particularly in the motifs they tend to trade. They might be somewhat restricted in the different context, but I feel like saints' lives are set aside because we want to mark a distinction between the miraculous and the fictional that may not have been a firm boundary back then.
Women and Enchantment
Whoops, guess I returned here again after getting a lot of my fire out at first. The page I noted (160) discusses perceptions of witchcraft before shifting to a history of Morgan. I wonder why here Cooper is perfectly willing to delve into heroines and their history, but elsewhere is reluctant to conflate such heroines with the quest as an archetypal narrative function. But when I do write on enchantment, I want to return here. Best point: "Witchcraft in the Middle Ages was taken to be an act, not a state, and it was an act that was at least as likely to be performed by men as by women" (160).
Rapacious Sexuality and Antifeminism
Okay, so my notes really did follow a common trajectory. I just liked the example given by Tom a Lincoln of disruptive sexuality on 391. I also liked the example of suspicion given a little later on 398, from The Knight of Curtesy and the Fair Lady of Faguell, except this time the husband's jealousy is unfounded, and ends when he makes his wife die after she eats her best friend's heart. And on that note...
One More Note: C.S. Lewis
Wow, the guy really doesn't get any favor in this book. Mainly it is his depiction of love that is at dispute, one that assumes that an affair must happen extramaritally for there to be a relationship of love. In other words, C.S. Lewis assumes that Andreas Capellanus is the normative influence int he medieval period, when that might not be the case.
Women and the quest
I had some disagreement with the claim that Cooper makes on page 53, in the midst of discussing the quest and pilgrimage. She dismisses the female quester: "The outside world is masculine space, where few women venture willingly. ... Apart from a few women warriors - Grisandol in the prose Merlin, the eponymous Silence, Yde in Huon of Bordeaux, Ariosto's Bradamante and Spenser's Britomart - women who find themselves in a situation analogous to the hero's quest in romance are most often victims rather than agents, compelled to leave the safety of their own homes and at other people's mercy. The lone woman at large in romance is more likely to be cast adrift in a rudderless boat than to choose to follow the call of adventure" (53). Now, Cooper has undoubtedly read more romance than me. That was a frustrating point of this book, that I didn't have the context to always be able to knowingly agree with the generalizations. Sometimes I granted it to her on faith.
But, and maybe I've read the romances that are exceptional to this, I think the opposition between agent and victim is a false one. Women are often empowered through the quest, and often undertake a line of action that can be considered a quest. I think of the frequent times that women accompany and initiate quests in Le Morte Darthur. If the space they traverse is dangerous, it is not masculine, since they often show themselves to be better at reading the landscape than the males are. Reading women's journeys as quests in fact alleviates the interpretive problems with some romances, since it allows one to recover senses of motive and development that remain lost when the assumed quester remains a man.
For example, The Weddynge of Sir Gawayne and Dame Ragnell only became fruitful for my studies when I realized that the questing figure here is as much Dame Ragnell as King Arthur. Choice isn't a qualification for questing either - neither Dame Ragnell, Arthur, nor Gawain choose the situations they find themselves in. Instead, a quest is about seeking an end that might be unknown, which promises development and worship to the successful pursuant. Ragnell seeks a reversal of the curse that renders her sexuality into a lewdness that then gets displayed in all of her features. To do this, she must find a husband that will grant her her own sexual autonomy, what women in the poem really want. The curse is perhaps a reflection of the common claim that women could not be trusted or virtuous if they were unchaste, and the related claim that no woman can be unchaste in spirit. The hag is the feared reflection of this paranoia, the representative of unrestrained sexuality improperly applied. Gawain is offered the choice of whether she should be ugly during the day or ugly at night. When her own choice is respected, her sexuality is not a cause for lewdness at all, and she is no longer subject to the misogynistic claims that her sexuality is both inevitable and dangerous. Because she is trusted with the decision by her husband, she is truthful, and her beauty shows for Gawain and for everyone at court. The quest logic forms an instantiation in this case of a querelle des femmes debate that relates indirectly to Christine de Pisan and directly to Chaucer, particularly his Wife of Bath, who tells a similar tale after a lengthy prologue that refutes many misogynistic claims. Where the Wife of Bath walks the line of sincerity and parody (though a flawed character could be right in sentiment and wrong in action), Weddynge strikes me as supporting the women's side of the debate.
That's an easy example, because the question is built right into the poem. I think that the woman's quest is often obscured because it is conflated with magic. Quests often get defined by the tools that are used in them, sword and shield and lance and horse and helm and armor and the rest. Magic also forms an important tool, though one that too easily falls into the background. Magic often gets treated as a suspected art, which is used to support or hinder a knight's quests, often without motivation outside of mischief. Think of Morgan le Fay in Malory, showing up to entrap Lancelot randomly. Lyonet is not remembered for her sagacity in guiding Gareth towards the proper way to be a knight, but for the weird magic she pulls that preserves her sister's and his chastity. When women are involved in a quest, they are often wielders of magic. If we interpret their concerns as the material for a quest though, I think that magic and enchantment combine with a more general skill, that of knowledge and sagacity in general. Reading, even reading a situation, is after all a form of magic - grammar, glamour, and grimoire all having the same root.
So, summarily, I agree with most of Cooper's arguments in the book, but she touched a sore point here. I think that women are more agents than victims in many cases, and quite often a combination of both that really renders them worthy of neither name. In some cases, I would even say that the woman quester is the one that earns the most success and renown. (Perhaps Ragnell had to die so that Gawain would remain the most renowned unattached knight.)
Saint's Life and Romance
I liked her tendency on pages like 124, in the chapter on sea voyages, of comparing legendaries and hagiographies to the romance. I don't really have anything deeper to say here, except that I think the common points between the two are far more common than is typically allowed, particularly in the motifs they tend to trade. They might be somewhat restricted in the different context, but I feel like saints' lives are set aside because we want to mark a distinction between the miraculous and the fictional that may not have been a firm boundary back then.
Women and Enchantment
Whoops, guess I returned here again after getting a lot of my fire out at first. The page I noted (160) discusses perceptions of witchcraft before shifting to a history of Morgan. I wonder why here Cooper is perfectly willing to delve into heroines and their history, but elsewhere is reluctant to conflate such heroines with the quest as an archetypal narrative function. But when I do write on enchantment, I want to return here. Best point: "Witchcraft in the Middle Ages was taken to be an act, not a state, and it was an act that was at least as likely to be performed by men as by women" (160).
Rapacious Sexuality and Antifeminism
Okay, so my notes really did follow a common trajectory. I just liked the example given by Tom a Lincoln of disruptive sexuality on 391. I also liked the example of suspicion given a little later on 398, from The Knight of Curtesy and the Fair Lady of Faguell, except this time the husband's jealousy is unfounded, and ends when he makes his wife die after she eats her best friend's heart. And on that note...
One More Note: C.S. Lewis
Wow, the guy really doesn't get any favor in this book. Mainly it is his depiction of love that is at dispute, one that assumes that an affair must happen extramaritally for there to be a relationship of love. In other words, C.S. Lewis assumes that Andreas Capellanus is the normative influence int he medieval period, when that might not be the case.
Pearl
Introduction:
Pearl is a dream vision that is the first of four poems in the Pearl Manuscript. The other poems include the homiletics Cleanness and Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The manuscript was written in the late fourteenth century,and first prepared for print by Richard Morris in 1864. (Only Sir Gawain had been printed earlier.)
Pearl is only somewhat different from Cleanness and Patience, and of course Sir Gawain is different from all three. This poem is stanzaic, with each stanza having twelve lines with four stresses each, and rhyming ababababbcbc. It's pretty intricate. The stanzas are in groups of five, thus making each group 60 lines long. The last lines of one group are refrained in the first line of the following stanza, a technique known as concatenatio (Andrew, 34). So think of the structure as a sort of chain, both beginning and ending in the garden. Similarly, there is the Terrestrial Paradise, and then the vision of New Jerusalem at the two poles of the poem. The debate is sandwiched in the middle, and has its own logic of doubt and explanation, parable, and application. Because of the stanzaic regularity, this is a poem that rewards numerological study.
Breakdown of Sections:
Introduction
I. The mourning of the loss of the pearl - setting - connection with scent, Christ, and nature
Dream-Vision - Description of Dream-Garden
II. adubbemente = adornment - description of the dream-setting, complete with the waters of life, though unidentified as of yet.
III. Sees the river, tries to cross it to get to the other side. The crossing, however, is difficult. At the end, he sees a fair maiden resembling the pearl in description.
IV.Further description of the maiden and her adornment, the narrator's reluctance to approach - the supposition "Ho watz me nerre (th)en aunte or nece" implying she is the narrator's daughter or mother or sister.
Debate Part I - Clarification
V. The narrator asks whether she is who he lost, and she reproaches him for thinking the jewel lost when it is set in better surroundings. He is also reprimanded for wanting to cross the water, which he mayn't do.
VI. sorquydry(g)e = pride - She reproaches him for not believing the commandment of God and trusting only to his eyes. He doesn't understand why he must lose the pearl in this lifetime, now that he's found her. She upholds love of God.
VII. He asks forgiveness, and then she accepts it. She demonstrates her marriage to the Lord.
VIII. fonge = find, perceive, notice - He expresses surprise - isn't Mary the queen of heaven? Yes, she replies, but all are king and queen there, though she rules over even them.
Debate Part 2 - The Parable of the Vine
IX. Queen, he asks, but you've never done anything! She gives the parable of the vine, which is incomplete yet, but implies that keeping oneself busy in service is what matters, and he is quick to have more work.
X. She finishes the parable by demonstrating how those who worked were all paid equally, no matter hwen they came. She was late, as a child, but she came. He disagrees, assuming that serving longer implies salvation instead.
Debate Part 3 - Elevation
XI. She sets up the story of the fall of man, and then the salvation through the grace of God.
XII. God will save the rightwise and the harmless men. Followed by a description of the rightwise, and then a story about Jesus allowing the children to come to him despite his disciples.
XIII. She describes herself as coming forth as a child, and being given her might and beauty in mystical marriage. The narrator is still incredulous that she would have attained the top spot.
XIV. Maskelles = spotless, flawless. She claims she never did say she was the top queen, and cites the 140,000 (so it says in Apocalypse) other brides, before going into a description of Jerusalem and Christ's sacrifice, evoking also the spiritual city where the Pearl now resides.
XV. vus ~ eche. She works her way to answering his objection fully, again citing Revelations. It ends with a placated speaker beginning to state another question
Dream Vision - New Jerusalem
XVI. WHere does she live? Jerusalem, she replies, though there are two of them, the city of God and the city of peae, a distinction that must have confused the narrator. He asks to go there, but she says God would not permit him...except she gets the permission.
XVII. He sees the city, in a passage that repeatedly harps on the authority of the "apostel John." He especially sees the twelve gems used in its construction, its cubic shape, its size (12 furlonge space), and so on.
XVIII. More details - 12 gates, and so on. More details, more shock and awe.
XIX. The speaker sees the inhabitants, all glorious as described. They celebrate the Lord coming among them as the Lamb, the angels serving as heralds. The speaker sees the little queen and has "luf-longyng in gret delyt," language that echoes te spiritual tradition of longing for Christ and salvation.
Return to Earthly Garden
XX. Impetuously the speaker tries to leap the river, but fails and wakes up. Humbled by his lack of restraint, he resolves to live well and serve him as his pearls do.
Questions
Repetition of purpose - what does it mean? (185, 267, 508, etc.)
There are many other studies that could be done with particular words. More generally, what I wonder is how this fits in with other dream visions, and with similar genres. For example, a related genre to which this might be relevant is the lapidary, a description book of the powers of various gems. There nearly is a magic overtone to the pearl, and this is exacerbated when the city is described being decorated in twelve jewels, which are subsequently listed (group XVII).
Also the repetition of twelve is intentionally reduplicated in the form. But there are possible flaws. One group has six stanzas, XV. There are other points that one could pick on.
Pearl is a dream vision that is the first of four poems in the Pearl Manuscript. The other poems include the homiletics Cleanness and Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The manuscript was written in the late fourteenth century,and first prepared for print by Richard Morris in 1864. (Only Sir Gawain had been printed earlier.)
Pearl is only somewhat different from Cleanness and Patience, and of course Sir Gawain is different from all three. This poem is stanzaic, with each stanza having twelve lines with four stresses each, and rhyming ababababbcbc. It's pretty intricate. The stanzas are in groups of five, thus making each group 60 lines long. The last lines of one group are refrained in the first line of the following stanza, a technique known as concatenatio (Andrew, 34). So think of the structure as a sort of chain, both beginning and ending in the garden. Similarly, there is the Terrestrial Paradise, and then the vision of New Jerusalem at the two poles of the poem. The debate is sandwiched in the middle, and has its own logic of doubt and explanation, parable, and application. Because of the stanzaic regularity, this is a poem that rewards numerological study.
Breakdown of Sections:
Introduction
I. The mourning of the loss of the pearl - setting - connection with scent, Christ, and nature
Dream-Vision - Description of Dream-Garden
II. adubbemente = adornment - description of the dream-setting, complete with the waters of life, though unidentified as of yet.
III. Sees the river, tries to cross it to get to the other side. The crossing, however, is difficult. At the end, he sees a fair maiden resembling the pearl in description.
IV.Further description of the maiden and her adornment, the narrator's reluctance to approach - the supposition "Ho watz me nerre (th)en aunte or nece" implying she is the narrator's daughter or mother or sister.
Debate Part I - Clarification
V. The narrator asks whether she is who he lost, and she reproaches him for thinking the jewel lost when it is set in better surroundings. He is also reprimanded for wanting to cross the water, which he mayn't do.
VI. sorquydry(g)e = pride - She reproaches him for not believing the commandment of God and trusting only to his eyes. He doesn't understand why he must lose the pearl in this lifetime, now that he's found her. She upholds love of God.
VII. He asks forgiveness, and then she accepts it. She demonstrates her marriage to the Lord.
VIII. fonge = find, perceive, notice - He expresses surprise - isn't Mary the queen of heaven? Yes, she replies, but all are king and queen there, though she rules over even them.
Debate Part 2 - The Parable of the Vine
IX. Queen, he asks, but you've never done anything! She gives the parable of the vine, which is incomplete yet, but implies that keeping oneself busy in service is what matters, and he is quick to have more work.
X. She finishes the parable by demonstrating how those who worked were all paid equally, no matter hwen they came. She was late, as a child, but she came. He disagrees, assuming that serving longer implies salvation instead.
Debate Part 3 - Elevation
XI. She sets up the story of the fall of man, and then the salvation through the grace of God.
XII. God will save the rightwise and the harmless men. Followed by a description of the rightwise, and then a story about Jesus allowing the children to come to him despite his disciples.
XIII. She describes herself as coming forth as a child, and being given her might and beauty in mystical marriage. The narrator is still incredulous that she would have attained the top spot.
XIV. Maskelles = spotless, flawless. She claims she never did say she was the top queen, and cites the 140,000 (so it says in Apocalypse) other brides, before going into a description of Jerusalem and Christ's sacrifice, evoking also the spiritual city where the Pearl now resides.
XV. vus ~ eche. She works her way to answering his objection fully, again citing Revelations. It ends with a placated speaker beginning to state another question
Dream Vision - New Jerusalem
XVI. WHere does she live? Jerusalem, she replies, though there are two of them, the city of God and the city of peae, a distinction that must have confused the narrator. He asks to go there, but she says God would not permit him...except she gets the permission.
XVII. He sees the city, in a passage that repeatedly harps on the authority of the "apostel John." He especially sees the twelve gems used in its construction, its cubic shape, its size (12 furlonge space), and so on.
XVIII. More details - 12 gates, and so on. More details, more shock and awe.
XIX. The speaker sees the inhabitants, all glorious as described. They celebrate the Lord coming among them as the Lamb, the angels serving as heralds. The speaker sees the little queen and has "luf-longyng in gret delyt," language that echoes te spiritual tradition of longing for Christ and salvation.
Return to Earthly Garden
XX. Impetuously the speaker tries to leap the river, but fails and wakes up. Humbled by his lack of restraint, he resolves to live well and serve him as his pearls do.
Questions
Repetition of purpose - what does it mean? (185, 267, 508, etc.)
There are many other studies that could be done with particular words. More generally, what I wonder is how this fits in with other dream visions, and with similar genres. For example, a related genre to which this might be relevant is the lapidary, a description book of the powers of various gems. There nearly is a magic overtone to the pearl, and this is exacerbated when the city is described being decorated in twelve jewels, which are subsequently listed (group XVII).
Also the repetition of twelve is intentionally reduplicated in the form. But there are possible flaws. One group has six stanzas, XV. There are other points that one could pick on.
The English Romance in Time, Helen Cooper
The whole subtitle reads, "Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare." To be clear, the motifs themselves are transforming with the shift in time. The book does not purport to change them.
Helen Cooper is an author I've seen a lot in medieval scholarship. I'm familiar with her Chaucer writings secondhand. I chose this book because it was written in the past ten years, and seemed to be a general, thematic treatment of the medieval romance, one that made nothing of crossing between the medieval and Renaissance (a linchpin I want to study in more detail).
I like her approach. It is a basic one - pick out several of the motivating memes of different romances, and trace them as they progress through time. How do they develop? For what reasons are they appropriated at a particular time? Do their valent associations change through time? Do the tropes cross genres, as for instance with tragedy and comedy? In other words, what is the convention developed with the audience, how is it regularized, and in what ways is it broken? (21-22). Finally, what does all this mean for the work and its audience?
She emphasizes the word meme rather than trope in order to get at the social significance I was hinting at in the last few questions. A trope can be interpreted as something that exists in the literature, that is primarily static and formal. A meme is more fluid, dependent on social currency and spreading rather like a virus. Certainly the terms are interchangeable in this case, but it changes the determination.
The memes/tropes she focuses on include (copped with paraphrase from the Table of Contents):
Pilgrimage and questing - think of motifs of traveling, with its parallels with interiority in direction, motivation, setting, and so on.
Providence and the sea - "So we set this ship into the water, gave it no means of orientation or propulsion, and let God sort it out."
Faulty magic - "I got this cool ring but never got to use it," or "I tried using this ring but it didn't work," or "I guess the magic worked, but it was totally incidental and misleading."
Fairy rulers and so on - What happens when you ride the liminal line between the benign supernatural and the diabolic?
Desirable desire - is women's desire a good thing in different works? How does its motif get treated?
Women on trial - Pretty much about what it sounds like, with particular focuses on alleged and proven adulteries, and the normally supernatural interventions that attest the truth.
The Rightful Heir - inheritance, the Fair Unknown, the dangers of lacking an heir (ELIZABETH!!!)
Unhappy Endings - what happens when the typically happy romantic ending doesn't happen?
The book also comes with an extremely useful appendix listing the romances that were current in England after 1500. I don't trust the list as exhaustive, but it's sufficiently detailed that I've written down a lot of pertinent information from it.
To say one interesting focus that comes out of this, her approach to romances demonstrates something that I've thought to be true since I first sat down with Le Morte Darthur: one of the key subjects of romance, which one avoids only to the subtraction of one's work, is women. Women's place in chivalric order, in feudal order, in inheritance, in desire, in magic, in the quest, in trial (you can see I'm picking out the major memes of the book), all these are often far more progressive than one might expect, and are even interesting when they turn out to be antifeminist.
I can expand that to include gender. I think that the romance is a rather amorphous genre that often includes works due to superficial reasons like, "Well, the magic in that is kinda funny," or, "Well, she went on a quest of sorts, nevermind that it was spiritual and totally a pilgrimage." In its collection of memes or tropes, every romance has the parts that don't fit the others, the part that gives the whole renown because it defies expectations in a way that is nonetheless desirable. Now, one place where expectations can be played with is gender. There is the woman who wields a sword, whether or not she uses it. There is the trope of disguise, whether as a man or as a woman. One can also be mistaken, without intention, as is the case in Le Morte Darthur when Lancelot falls asleep in a pavilion only to have another man snuggle up with him, because he thinks that Lancelot is his beloved lady. Even in more general terms, the romance often struggles with the question, "What makes a man the ideal man? What makes a woman the ideal woman?" Virtue, faith, fidelity, reason - whatever the guidelines, what happens when they succeed? Still worse, what happens when they fail?
And an observation - many times the criteria for men and women are actually quite similar. To say that men quest and women are rescued is far too simplistic. To say that women are punished for unchastity and men aren't is likewise reductive. Now, perhaps these are just true enough to become generalizations, but the rules are often broken. Sometimes the markers of assumed gender fall away, in such a way that it would be worthwhile to study a few romances in parallel to see how gender might have functioned. A theoretical structure for such a work might be to figure out whether the romance was a place where one could experiment with gender, or whether such flexibility was inherent in the society? Is this flexibility, or is it simply that we see flexibility as compared to what we think the past would hold gender to be? Perhaps its boundaries are different, its intersections different.
Helen Cooper is an author I've seen a lot in medieval scholarship. I'm familiar with her Chaucer writings secondhand. I chose this book because it was written in the past ten years, and seemed to be a general, thematic treatment of the medieval romance, one that made nothing of crossing between the medieval and Renaissance (a linchpin I want to study in more detail).
I like her approach. It is a basic one - pick out several of the motivating memes of different romances, and trace them as they progress through time. How do they develop? For what reasons are they appropriated at a particular time? Do their valent associations change through time? Do the tropes cross genres, as for instance with tragedy and comedy? In other words, what is the convention developed with the audience, how is it regularized, and in what ways is it broken? (21-22). Finally, what does all this mean for the work and its audience?
She emphasizes the word meme rather than trope in order to get at the social significance I was hinting at in the last few questions. A trope can be interpreted as something that exists in the literature, that is primarily static and formal. A meme is more fluid, dependent on social currency and spreading rather like a virus. Certainly the terms are interchangeable in this case, but it changes the determination.
The memes/tropes she focuses on include (copped with paraphrase from the Table of Contents):
Pilgrimage and questing - think of motifs of traveling, with its parallels with interiority in direction, motivation, setting, and so on.
Providence and the sea - "So we set this ship into the water, gave it no means of orientation or propulsion, and let God sort it out."
Faulty magic - "I got this cool ring but never got to use it," or "I tried using this ring but it didn't work," or "I guess the magic worked, but it was totally incidental and misleading."
Fairy rulers and so on - What happens when you ride the liminal line between the benign supernatural and the diabolic?
Desirable desire - is women's desire a good thing in different works? How does its motif get treated?
Women on trial - Pretty much about what it sounds like, with particular focuses on alleged and proven adulteries, and the normally supernatural interventions that attest the truth.
The Rightful Heir - inheritance, the Fair Unknown, the dangers of lacking an heir (ELIZABETH!!!)
Unhappy Endings - what happens when the typically happy romantic ending doesn't happen?
The book also comes with an extremely useful appendix listing the romances that were current in England after 1500. I don't trust the list as exhaustive, but it's sufficiently detailed that I've written down a lot of pertinent information from it.
To say one interesting focus that comes out of this, her approach to romances demonstrates something that I've thought to be true since I first sat down with Le Morte Darthur: one of the key subjects of romance, which one avoids only to the subtraction of one's work, is women. Women's place in chivalric order, in feudal order, in inheritance, in desire, in magic, in the quest, in trial (you can see I'm picking out the major memes of the book), all these are often far more progressive than one might expect, and are even interesting when they turn out to be antifeminist.
I can expand that to include gender. I think that the romance is a rather amorphous genre that often includes works due to superficial reasons like, "Well, the magic in that is kinda funny," or, "Well, she went on a quest of sorts, nevermind that it was spiritual and totally a pilgrimage." In its collection of memes or tropes, every romance has the parts that don't fit the others, the part that gives the whole renown because it defies expectations in a way that is nonetheless desirable. Now, one place where expectations can be played with is gender. There is the woman who wields a sword, whether or not she uses it. There is the trope of disguise, whether as a man or as a woman. One can also be mistaken, without intention, as is the case in Le Morte Darthur when Lancelot falls asleep in a pavilion only to have another man snuggle up with him, because he thinks that Lancelot is his beloved lady. Even in more general terms, the romance often struggles with the question, "What makes a man the ideal man? What makes a woman the ideal woman?" Virtue, faith, fidelity, reason - whatever the guidelines, what happens when they succeed? Still worse, what happens when they fail?
And an observation - many times the criteria for men and women are actually quite similar. To say that men quest and women are rescued is far too simplistic. To say that women are punished for unchastity and men aren't is likewise reductive. Now, perhaps these are just true enough to become generalizations, but the rules are often broken. Sometimes the markers of assumed gender fall away, in such a way that it would be worthwhile to study a few romances in parallel to see how gender might have functioned. A theoretical structure for such a work might be to figure out whether the romance was a place where one could experiment with gender, or whether such flexibility was inherent in the society? Is this flexibility, or is it simply that we see flexibility as compared to what we think the past would hold gender to be? Perhaps its boundaries are different, its intersections different.
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