Abstract
Once Augustinian consolatory figurai narrative comes into focus, Abelard’s Historia calamitatum and Langland’s Piers Plowman are natural texts in which to find it. Not only do their stories of the self trace a generic heritage back to the Confessions, but those selves live against backgrounds of sacred history, monasticism, and the philosophy and psychology of personal identity: the categories of medieval intellectual culture where Augustine was most influential. More surprising is how a theological concern with history, manifested as Augustinian figurai form, infiltrates the Arthurian myth, that narrative authorizing medieval state politics and chivalric desire. Chivalry was perhaps the most deliberately secular ideology of the Middle Ages, sometimes commensurate with but never identical to medieval religious orthodoxy. This chapter documents Augustinian figurai form’s colonization of the secular, a conceptual near impossibility manifested in the violent Arthurian shape the form takes, strewn with deaths and reduced to elegy.
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Notes
Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Civilization 400–1500, trans. Julia Barrow (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), p. 171, traces the concept of translatio imperii to Orosius’s fifth-century exegesis of Nebuchadnezzar’s vision in the book of Daniel; its origins are, remotely, biblical.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin, 1966), pp. 74–87, carefully provides a series of Biblical cross-references for relevant events in his British history; for instance, Brutus wrote his law code while Eli was judging Judea (p. 74). Even the papal office constructed its own version of the translatio imperii upon the Donation of Constantine, in which Constantine allegedly conferred temporal power over Rome to its bishops;
see J. G. A. Pocock, The First Decline and Fall, vol. 3 of Barbarism and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 127–30.
Sarah Kay, Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century, Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 306, links the “gradual erosion of the categories of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’” in twelfth-century romance and hagiog-raphy to the Western-wide “gradual humanization and secularization of culture” ever since.
R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 10, identifies as one of his monograph’s central claims that passion heretofore reserved for God becomes secularized in the High Middle Ages.
Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 59–63, argues that the Queste Christianizes the bellicosity of Arthurian knighthood, but Keen does not extend that argument to the knightly love of women, a justifiable omission in my view.
R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), for example, pp. 133, 178–86; and Christianity and the Secular, Blessed Pope John XXIII Lecture Series in Theology and Culture (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).
For a notable rejoinder to Markus that Augustine cleared no such secular space, see Oliver O’Donovan, “Augustine’s City of God XIX and Western Political Thought.” Dionysius 11 (1987): 89–110.
Stanley P. Rosenberg, “Forming the Saeculum: The Desacralization of Nature and the Ability to Understand it in Augustine,” God’s Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World, ed. Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon, Studies in Church History 46 (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2010), pp. 1–14, reviews the scholarship since Markus’s Saeculum and uses Augustine’s late understanding that nature and human reason are in important ways conceptually distinct from the divine to explain his late understanding of a similarly distinct political space.
I have never seen an argument for dating the Stanzaic Morte, only unexplained assertions. Brian Stone in King Arthur’s Death: Alliterative Morte Arthure and Stanzaic Le Morte Arthur, trans. Brian Stone (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 169, says it “was probably written in about 1350.”
Edward Donald Kennedy, “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur: The Adaptation of a French Romance for an English Audience,” in Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend: Essays in Honor of Valerie M. Lagorio, ed. Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley, SUNY Series in Medieval Studies (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 91, calls it “late fourteenth-century.”
Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 5, assumes a date after 1380.
Helen Cooper, “The Lancelot-Grail Cycle in England: Malory and His Predecessors,” A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, ed. Carol Dover, Arthurian Studies 54 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), p. 151, believes “probably around 1400.”
Its authoritative editor, Larry Benson, in King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, ed. Larry D. Benson and Edward E. Foster, The Middle English Text Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994), p. 4, dates it to mid-century but calls that date a guess. Understandably the lack of consensus on dating makes the poem difficult to historicize, perhaps one reason why commentary on it remains scarce.
The Stanzaic Morte carries what we would today call an elegiac tone, but it is not an elegy, at least not in literary-historical or generic terms. Jamie C. Fumo, “The Consolations of Philosophy: Later Medieval Elegy,” The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 120, denies the existence of a medieval elegiac genre and points out, “According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘elegy’ is not recorded in English until 1514.”
James Simpson, 1350–1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution, Oxford English Literary History 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 121–90, identifies a medieval elegiac subject matter based upon an Ovidian “unfulfilled lover turn[ing] away from public affairs” (p. 121) and experiencing a tragic break with the past: “The self-divided complainant of elegy is, by virtue of being divided from himself, equally and painfully cut off from a remembered but irrecuperable history” (p. 148). The Stanzaic Morte is elegiac but not tragic; Lancelot’s and Gaynor’s final rituals of memory recall the love they shared, the court they embodied, and the king they respected, retaining some contact with the past. The emphasis in this poem is on a redemptive continuity, not a tragic division; what remains, not what has been irrecuperably lost.
Robert H. Wilson, “Malory, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, and the Mort Artu,” Modern Philology 37 (1939), pp. 125–38, is an early argument for this sequence of the story’s transmission.
Wilfred L. Guerin, “The Tale of the Death of Arthur: Catastrophe and Resolution,” Malory’s Originality, ed. R. M. Lumiansky (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964), pp. 240–4, is an authoritative treatment.
K. S. Whetter, “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Medieval Tragedy,” Reading Medieval Studies 28 (2002), p. 101.
John B. Beston and Rose Marie Beston, “The Parting of Lancelot and Guinevere in the Stanzaic ‘Le Morte Arthur,’” AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 40 (1973), pp. 252–3, 255.
Dieter Mehl, The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (London: Routledge, 1968), p. 189.
Carole Weinberg, “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” The Arthur of the English, ed. W. R. J. Barron (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), p. 103.
Velma Bourgeois Richmond, The Popularity of Middle English Romance (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1975), pp. 132–3, 139–40.
Flora M. Alexander, “‘The Treson of Launcelote du Lake’: Irony in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” The Legend of Arthur in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to A. H. Diverres by Colleagues, Pupils, and Friends, ed. P. B. Grout et al. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983), pp. 26–7.
Lee C. Ramsey, Chivalric Romances: Popular Literature in Medieval England (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1983), pp. 127, 130.
Jennifer Sutherland, “Rhyming Patterns and Structures in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” Arthuriana 12 (2002), pp. 1–24. Her programmatic statement is on p. 3: “Rhyme in the Stanzaic Morte functions as a structuring device … mnemonically preserving all of the meanings associated with each rhyme set at the same time as it thrusts the narrative forward through interlocking echoes and expectations.” The temporal vocabulary of “interlocking echoes and expectations” recalls the shape of figurai form in artistic time, reaching backward and forward, repeating the past with a difference. Not all of Sutherland’s analyses of individual rhyme sets are convincing, but she helpfully draws our attention to the repetition of rhyme sets as a significant formal phenomenon, not an accident of incompetent minstrelsy.
Roger Dalrymple, Language and Piety in Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 82–102.
Sharon L. Jansen Jaech, “The Parting of Lancelot and Gaynor: The Effect of Repetition in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” Interpretations 15 (1984), p. 60; the wider argument occupies, pp. 59–67.
Sherron E. Knopp, “Artistic Design in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” ELH 45 (1978), p. 566.
Valerie Lagorio, “The Apocalyptic Mode in the Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian Romances,” Philological Quarterly 57 (1978), p. 2; Douglas Kelly, “Interlace and the Cyclic Imagination,” A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, p. 63.
Lagorio, p. 12, and before her Frederick W. Locke, The Quest for the Holy Grail: A Literary Study of a Thirteenth-Century French Romance, Stanford Studies in Language and Literature 21 (New York: AMS Press, 1967, c. 1960), pp. 33–9, 43–64, see Galahad as a Messianic figure fully implicated in figurai patterns of expectation and fulfilment.
Elspeth Kennedy, “The Figure of Lancelot in the Lancelot-Graal,” Lancelot and Guinevere: A Casebook, ed. Lori J. Walters, Arthurian Characters and Themes (New York: Garland, 1996), p. 87, describes Galahad’s relationship to his father, Lancelot, as one of supersession. The Mort directly compares Lancelot to Christ (p. 67). All citations from the French Mort are taken from The Death of Arthur, trans.
Norris J. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation 1 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), and will appear parenthetically within the text.
E. Jane Burns, Arthurian Fictions: Rereading the Vulgate Cycle (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 1985), pp. 55–77, characterizes the Queste as treating “the biblical epoch, the era of Joseph in Britain, and the time of Arthur … as thematic analogues” (p. 61) and interpreting events on one of these historical planes in terms of another, not in terms of allegorical abstraction.
Lisa Lampert-Weissig, “‘Why Is this Knight Different from All Other Knights?’ Jews, Anti-Semitism, and the Old French Grail Narratives,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 106 (2007), p. 246.
Amnon Linder, “Jews and Judaism in the Eyes of Christian Thinkers of the Middle Ages: The Destruction of Jerusalem in Medieval Christian Liturgy,” From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought, ed. Jeremy Cohen, Wolfenbütteler Mittelalter-Studien 11 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996), p. 115, reminds us that “‘Jerusalem’ was a theme frequently used by medieval exegetes to illustrate the four-fold [exegetical] system.”
Current scholarship is less unanimous on how widespread and consistent was medieval Christian hostility toward Jews in practice. Jonathan M. Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), is an important revisionist account.
Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
For patristic background, see also Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York: Doubleday, 2008), pp. 226–31, 261–2, 272–5, 314, who argues that early Christian writings contra Iudaeos aimed at rhetorical constructs of Jewishness for theological purposes, not directly at the Jews who may or may not have been physically their neighbors; Augustine increasingly valued the materiality of the Jews, the secularity they represented, but his own invective stands also in this rhetorical and theological tradition.
One French manuscript, Palatinus Latinus 1967, does relate a meeting between Lancelot and Guinevere, but even in this version the lovers do not speak of their spiritual vocations in language that recalls their earthly love for each other. Instead, both read their holy lives as a radical break from their former sins. In any case, the accounts in Palatinus Latinus 1967 and the Stanzaic Morte resemble each other so little that it has been difficult to confirm any relationship between them. See Jean Frappier, “Sur un remaniement de La Mort Artu dans un manscrit du XIVe siècle: Le Palatinus Latinus 1967,” Romania 57 (1931), pp. 219–22, and Beston and Beston, pp. 256–7.
Malory follows hard after the Stanzaic Morte, throughout the scene between Lancelot and Guinevere and the subsequent community of Arthurian knights-cum-hermits at Arthur’s grave; to it he owes his work’s own elegiac mood, although he returns the narrative to the wider context of the Grail Quest and its agon between religious and secular values. R. M. Lumiansky, “‘The Tale of Lancelot and Guenevere’: Suspense,” in Malory’s Originality: A Critical Study of Le Morte Darthur, ed. R. M. Lumiansky (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964), p. 217, definitively describes what Malory owes to the Stanzaic Morte’s streamlining of the French plot.
Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 71–2, aptly indicates the instrumental nature of tombs, meant to inspire the good work of continual intercession for the dead, a good work that accrues to the spiritual well-being of the praying survivor also.
Wertime, “Theme,” p. 1076, emphasizes the social construction of characters in the Stanzaic Morte at the expense of their individuality and self-awareness. Gaynor appears to be exercising a social conscience more than a personal one here, an option made possible by the Stanzaic’s lack of an individualizing Grail Quest. See Michael Masi, “King Arthur, the Grail Quest, and Late Medieval Spirituality,” Cithara: Essays in the Judeo-Christian Tradition 23 (1984), pp. 16–17, for a narrative of how the Grail Quest participated in the individualization of late medieval piety. Gaynor’s specifically social expression of guilt has led Beston and Beston, “Parting,” p. 253, and
W. J. Barron, Medieval English Romance, Longman Literature in English Series (London: Longman, 1987), p. 146, to believe that even at this apex of spiritual commitment Gaynor does not repent of her love for Lancelot, only of its consequences.
Lancelot’s frequent mentions of God in his resolve for penance contradict the insistence of Whetter, “Medieval Tragedy,” p. 100, that Lancelot’s motives are entirely secular throughout his scene with Gaynor. Soon afterward, once Lancelot finds Arthur’s tomb, the archbishop “shrove him there of his sin,/As clene as he had never done none” (3791–2). This particularly good and effective confession implies the necessary element of true contrition on the penitent’s part; see Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 104, 120.
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© 2015 Chad D. Schrock
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Schrock, C.D. (2015). Augustine and Arthur: The Stanzaic Morte and the Consolation of Elegy. In: Consolation in Medieval Narrative. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137447814_5
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