Beyond Rome: Mapping gender and justice in the man of law's tale

Studies in the Age of Chaucer

Volumn 24, Issue , 2002, Pages 149-180

  Lavezzo, Kathy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF IOWA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949682188     PISSN: 01902407     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sac.2002.0022     Document Type: Review

References (180)

1. William Godwin, Life of Chaucer, vol. 2 (London: Richard Phillips, 1803-4), p. 468
2. Godwin's celebration of Chaucer's alterity reflects the interest in difference that inspired Romanticism's medieval revival. The romantic nationalism exhibited in the Life (at one point it celebrates Chaucer for rescuing English from the oppressive dominance of Anglo-Norman) clearly reveals how Godwin had retreated from the radical, pro-French stance he had assumed ten years earlier in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness. Thanks belong to Julie Carlson for enlightening me regarding. Godwin's gothic interests and his vexed political history
3. All quotations are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). While Chaucer's description of Becket's national following may distinguish the Canterbury shrine from the "straunge" and "ferne" destinations of medieval palmers, his decision to introduce Canterbury so closely on the heels of these sites also suggests that the Becket shrine carries with it the cachet of difference
4. On the use of an Arthurian past in the construction of a British national history in Middle English romance (excluding The Wife of Bath's Tale), see Patricia Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001)
5. On Chaucer's desire to situate the Franklin's Tale within a nativist English literary-historical tradition, see Kathryn L. Lynch, "East Meets West in Chaucer's Squire's and Franklin's Tales," Speculum 70 (1995): 530-51
6. On Chaucer's interest in things strange, see Christian K. Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976)
7. David Raybin, "distance and History: Woman as Outsider in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale," SAC 12 (1990): 69-70
8. See, for example, Morton Bloomfield, "The Man of Law's Tale: A Tragedy of Victimization and a Christian Comedy," PMLA 87 (1972): 384-89
9. On Custance's isolation from her culture as opposed to the social integration of Gower's Constance, see Winthrop Wetherbee, "Constance and the World in Chaucer and Gower," in John Gower: Recent Readings, ed. R. F. Yeager, Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture 26 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1989), pp. 65-93
10. Susan Schibanoff, "Worlds Apart: Orientalism, Anti-Feminism and Heresy in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale," Exemplaria (1996): 59-96
11. See also Christopher Bracken, "Constance and the Silkweavers: Working Woman and Colonial Fantasy in Chaucer's The Man of Law's Tale," Critical Matrix 8 (1994): 13-39
12. Nicholas Birns, "Christian Islamic Relations in Dante and Chaucer: Reflections on Recent Criticism," in Proceedings: Northeast Regional Meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature, ed. Joan F. Hallisey and Mary Anne Vetterling (Weston, Mass.: Regis College, 1996), pp. 19-24
13. Kathleen Davis, "Time Behind the Veil: The Media, the Middle Ages, and Orientalism Now," in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), pp. 105-22
14. Kathryn L. Lynch, "Storytelling, Exchange, and Constancy: East and West in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale," ChauR 33-3 (1999): 409-22
15. Brenda Deen Schildgen, Pagans, Tartars, Moslems, and Jews in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001)
16. See Nicholas Trevet, excerpt from Les Chroniques ecrites pour Marie d'Angleterre, fille d'Edward I, ed. Margaret Schlauch, in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, ed. W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (New York: Humanities, 1958), pp. 165-81
17. John Gower, The Complete Works of John Gower: The English Works, ed. G. C. Macaulay, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), lines 181-206. Page citations of Trevet and line citations of Gower will appear in the text
18. The lawyer's emphasis on geography here qualifies Edward A. Block's claim that Chaucer is "less definite" than Trevet on such matters ("Originality, Controlling Purpose, and Craftsmanship in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale," PMLA 68 [1953]: 580)
19. V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), p. 319
20. On T-O maps (as well as the other principal type of medieval world map, the zonal or Macrobian map), see David Woodward, "Medieval Mappaemundi," in J. B. Harley and Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, Vol. 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 286-370
21. On the relationship between world maps and another Canterbury tale, see Sylvia Tomasch, "Mappae mundi and the Knight's Tale: The Geography of Power, the Cartography of Control," in Literature and Technology, ed. Lance Schachterle and Mark Greenberg (Lehigh, Penn.: Associated University Presses, 1992), pp. 66-98
22. On the manner in which mappae mundi reflect a fascination with alterity of which Chaucer was acutely aware while writing the Canterbury Tales, see Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage, esp. p. 146
23. On mappae mundi and pilgrimage, see also Iain Macleod Higgins, Writing East: The "Travels" of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997)
24. See, for example: Alfred David, "The Man of Law versus Chaucer: A Case in Poetics," PMLA 82 (1967): 217-25
25. A. S. G. Edwards, "Critical Approaches to the Man of Law's Tale," in Chaucer's Religious Tales, ed. C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson (Cambridge: Brewer, 1990), pp. 85-94
26. Kolve, Imagery of Narrative
27. David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)
28. John A. Yunck, "Religious Elements in Chaucer's 'Man of Law's Tale,' " ELH 27 (1960): 249-61
29. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 182
30. Nationalism has been classified as a post-medieval phenomenon in such important texts as Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991)
31. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983)
32. and Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992)
33. Yet the evidence of the Canterbury Tales suggests otherwise. The Tales, after all, foreground the question of whether vernacular stories can unite or create the horizontal ties discussed by Anderson between a cross-section of the English populace, "from every shires ende" (1.15). Narrating the journey of a band of English people, ostensibly bound by both their religious destination and the literary manner in which they wend their way toward Canterbury, the Tales urge our consideration of Chaucer not only as man who wrote in English, but also as a man who wrote for England. On nationalism in Chaucer's work, see: Donald R. Howard, Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World (New York: Dutton, 1987), pp. 406-9
34. Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature and National Identity, 1290-1340 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), p. 216
35. and the essays by John M. Bowers, Kathleen Davis, and Sylvia Tomasch in Postcolonial Middle Ages
36. Important contributions by medieval scholars on the question of the rise of a national sensibility in medieval England and Europe include C. Leon Tipton, ed., Nationalism in the Middle Ages (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972)
37. Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984)
38. Felicity Riddy, "Reading for England: Arthurian Literature and National Consciousness," Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society 43 (1991): 314-32
39. Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson, and Alan V. Murray, eds., Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, Leeds Texts and Monographs ns 14 (Leeds: University of Leeds Printing Services, 1995)
40. John Gower, Vox Clamantis, vi 357-58
41. cited and discussed in Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 87-88
42. See F. Cheyette, "Kings, Courts, Cures and Sinecures: the Statute of Provisors and the Common Law," Traditio 19 (1963): 295-344
43. W. R. Jones, "Bishops, Politics and the Two Laws: The Gravamina of the English Clergy, 1237-1399," Speculum 41 (1966): 209-43
44. W. R. Jones, "Relations of the Two Jurisdictions: Conflict and Cooperation in England during the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries," SMRH orig. ser. 7 (1970): 79-210
45. Alan Harding, The Law Courts of Medieval England (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1973)
46. J. A. Watt, "Spiritual and Temporal Powers," in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c. 350-c. 1450, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 367-423
47. Carolyn Dinshaw analyzes the incestuous character of both the Sultaness's and Donegild's attachments toward their sons in Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 88-112. The other Canterbury tale that engages closely with Rome is The Second Nun's Tale
48. On topography, Rome, and the Second Nun's Tale, see Jennifer Summit, "Topography as Historiography: Petrarch, Chaucer, and the Making of Medieval Rome," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000): 211-46
49. My use of the phrase "bear the word" refers to Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)
50. And the woman fled into the wilderness," Revelation 12:6. Quoted in William W. Capes, ed., Registrum Johannis Trefnant, Episcopi Herefordensis, Canterbury and York Series, vol. 20-21 (London: Canterbury and York Society, 1916), p. 294
51. Frederick Pollack and Frederick William Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, 2d ed., vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 113
52. Pollack and Maitland's assessment of the universal impulses of the canonists has been affirmed by more recent work on canon law. See, for example, R. H. Helmholz, The Spirit of Classical Canon Law (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1996)
53. James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London and New York: Longman, 1995)
54. On the transmittal of canon law to the laity, see H. A. Kelly, Love and Marriage in the Age of Chaucer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press: 1975), pp. 163-201
55. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law, p. 72
56. On the medieval threefold understanding of the law, in which all laws figure God's divine law, see Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae
57. For a discussion of the way Chaucer queries the notion of divine justice in the Man of Law's Tale, see Patricia J. Eberle, "Crime and Justice in the Middle Ages: Cases from the Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer," in Rough Justice: Essays on Crime in Literature, ed. M. L. Friedland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), pp. 19-51. It is worth noting that the very source of much of the Man of Law's rhetoric in his tale, Pope Innocent III, authorized Peter of Benevento's Compilatio tertia, the first official collection of papal decretals during the classical period of canon law
58. Of course, the response of the English State to the legal claims of the Church (and vice versa) was one of both resistance and cooperation. As the careful work of R. H. Helmholz has demonstrated, the legal relations of church and state are remarkably complex during this period, rendering it impossible for us to make any sort of straight-forward claim about actual practice. What I am emphasizing here, however, is the imperial or international "will" of the Church, its official universalist rhetoric. And even as the crown acquiesced to that universalist rhetoric, English lawyers by and large contested it. R. H. Helmholz, Canon Law and the Law of England (London and Ronceverte: Hambledon, 1987). See also works cited in note 14
59. Edw. III Stat. 2. c xv, Statutes of the Realm, vol. 1 (1810. Reprint. London: Dawsons, 1963), pp. 375-76
60. Michael J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 192-203
61. Since the time of the Magna Carta, clerks along with laymen had upheld the common law. But, with the union of the bench and the law at the start of the fourteenth century, where "no one could become a justice of the central courts of law . . . unless he had previously been a sergeant at law," the benches of the civil courts began to be staffed solely with laymen (G. O. Sayles, "Introduction," Select Cases in the Court of King's Bench under Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V, ed. Sayles, vol. 7 Seiden Society [London: Quaritch, 1971], pp. xxviii-xl). The laicization of the common law benches during Edward 1's reign, together with that of the King's Bench by 1341, produced a real separation between the civil and canon law. As William Searle Holdsworth puts it, "we can no longer expect to find royal judges who can show an accurate knowledge of papal legislation; nor will ideas drawn from canonical jurisprudence be used to develop our law
62. On the contrary, it is coming to be a rival - almost a hostile system" (A History of English Law, vol. 2 [London: Methuen, 1956], pp. 305-6)
63. Indeed, W. R. Jones writes that this period "witnessed the culmination" of English impingement upon the legal powers of the Church ("Relations of the Two Jurisdictions," p. 210)
64. Harding, Law Courts, p. 122
65. See Margaret Harvey, Solutions to the Schism: A Study of Some English Attitudes 1378-1409 (Gesamtherstellung: EOS Druck, 1983)
66. and John Holland Smith, The Great Schism 1378 (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970)
67. That claim appears in Wyclif's commentary on the 1378 Hawley-Shakell sanctuary incident, in which he opposes the jurisdictional rights of the abbots who housed these fugitives from the King's justice by claiming that they had offended "In legem Dei, ecclesie et in legem regni." See De Ecclesia, cited in Edith C. Tatnall, "John Wyclif and Ecclesia Anglicana," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 20 (1969): 28
68. cf. Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, pp. 50-53
69. Here as elsewhere in his work, Wyclif urges the theological validity of adherence to English law against canonical authority (Tatnall, "Wyclif," pp. 27-31)
70. On Wyclif's support for Urban in De Ecclesia and elsewhere, see Harvey, Solutions, p. 31
71. Celtic missionaries, of course, also engaged in the work of conversion during this time. But it was the Roman Gregory the Great who constituted nevertheless the official father of Christianity for the Anglo-Saxons and, after the Whitby Synod (664), it was Roman doctrine, not that of Celtic Christian, that prevailed on the island
72. "To give is to show one's superiority, to show that one is something more and higher, that one is magister. To accept without returning or repaying more is to face subordination, to become a client and subservient, to become minister." Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (London: Cohen and West, 1954), p. 72
73. Alla and the Sultan also are paired through the exchange of Custance between them. The king and his Syrian counterpart's respective wicked mothers, the Sultaness and Donegild, also are linked in their respective acts of aggression against Custance
74. The most important work on typology and literature remains Erich Auerbach's essay "Figura" in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)
75. on nonbiological family ties and typology, see Cristelle L. Baskins, "Typology, Sexuality, and the Renaissance Esther," in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 31-54
76. Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, Women-Nation-State (London: St. Martin's, 1989)
77. See also Anne McCIintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995)
78. Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: the Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985)
79. Nuala Johnson, "Monuments, Geography, and Nationalism," in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1995 (13): 51-66
80. Elsbeth Probyn, "Bloody Metaphors and Other Allegories of the Ordinary," in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms and the State, ed. Norma Alarcon, Caren Kaplan, and Minoo Moallem (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 47-63
81. For an acute analysis of the dynamics of gender, sexuality, and nationalism at work in Lady Liberty, see Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 22-28
82. On the special identification of Mary with England in the Middle Ages, a linkage that partly can be accounted for by the shrine at Walsingham, see Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 137-47 and 212-13 n. 3
83. See IX.iv of Geoffrey's History and lines 2869-72 of the Alliterative Morte Arthure
84. See John Lydgate, "Ave Regina Celorum," in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS ns 107 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1911-34), pp. 291-92
85. See Capes, Registrum trefnant, pp. 294-95
86. On Brute's testimony, see Penn Szittya, "Domesday Bokes: The Apocalypse in Medieval English Literary Culture," in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 396-97
87. See Edith C. Tatnall, "Ecclesia Anglicana," pp. 24-31
88. Anne Hudson, "Lollardy: the English Heresy?" in Religion and National Identity: Papers Read at the Nineteenth Summer Meeting and the Twentieth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Stuart Mews, Studies in Church History 18 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982) pp. 261-284
89. The Chronicle of England, ed. F. C. Hingeston, Rolls Series vol. 1 (London, 1858), line 2668. Yet another link between Chaucer and Brute's texts is their accounts of the history of the Christian faith in England. The Anglo-Saxon land in which Custance arrives, we are told, is not simply pagan: though the Vikings had driven the Christian Britons into Wales, a remainder of Christianity was left covertly behind after Britain's heathen reterritorialization: "In al that lond no Cristen dorste route/ Alle Cristen folk been fled fro that contree/ Thurgh payens, that conquereden al aboute/ The plages of the north, by land and see/To Walys fledde the Cristyanytee/ Of olde Britons dwellynge in this ile:/ But yet nere Cristen Britons so exilde/ That ther nere somme that in hir privetee/ Honoured Crist and hethen folk bigiled" (lines 540-49). The logic of the supplement deployed by Chaucer here distinguishes pagan England from Moslem Syria by attaching to England a residue of Christianity
90. In a similar vein, Brute insists that "Britones pro fide Cristi permanserunt quod de nullo cristiano regno sic reperietur" (p. 294)
91. Justinian, Institutes I.i
92. cited and discussed in Joseph E. Grennen, "Chaucer's Man of Law and the Constancy of Justice," JEGP 84 (1985): 511-12. Many other readers have analyzed the presence of specific aspects of the law in the tale
93. On the representation of the canon law of disparitas cultus, see Paul E. Beichner, "Chaucer's Man of Law and disparitas cultus," Speculum 23 (1948): 70-75
94. On Chaucer's representation of the Anglo-Saxon judicial inquest, see Marie Hamilton, "The Dramatic Suitability of the Man of Law's Tale," in Studies in Language and Literature in Honor of Margaret Schlauch (New York: Russell and Russell, 1971), pp. 153-63
95. On the tale and the use of rhetoric in the courts, see Walter Scheps, "Chaucer's Man of Law and the tale of Constance," PMLA 89 (1974): 285-95
96. On the manner in which the tale represents the legal procedures for appealing felony, see Joseph Allen Hornsby, Chaucer and the Law (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim, 1988), pp. 145-48
97. On the patriarchal nature of English law and the prohibition on incest, see Dinshaw, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics
98. On Chaucer's engagement with the role of torture in the late medieval English legal system, see James Landman, "Proving Constant: Torture and the Man of Law's Tale" SAC 20 (1998): 1-40. While all of these readings demonstrate the suitability of the tale to a lawyer, they have produced radically different arguments about what the tale says about both the attitudes of the Man of Law toward his legal profession and Chaucer's toward this Canterbury pilgrim. While, for example, Eberle finds the lawyer to be a credible narrator who queries the notion of eternal law that he has inherited, Grennen claims the lawyer is devoted laudably to a juridical ideal, and Scheps claims the lawyer unsuccessfully celebrates his profession. In what follows, I hope to show how we can reconcile some of these claims through a look at English lawyers' vexed relationship to their profession, given their own corruption and their own national impulses
99. Rot. Parl., vol. 3, 50
100. Cf. Grennen, "Constancy of Justice," 511-12
101. On the status of the law as an object both of Utopian desire and social criticism, see J. R. Maddicott, Law and Lordship: Royal Justices as Retainers in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century England, Past and Present Sup. 4 (Oxford: Past and Present Society, 1978), pp. 65-67
102. The year 1346 witnessed an intensification of the oath required of justices for which, as G. O. Sayles relates, "we have many variant forms, but which all stress that justice must be done to rich and poor alike and that no gift should be accepted for any reason." "Introduction," Select Cases, p. xx
103. See May McKisack, The Fourteenth Century: 1307-1399 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 207
104. As Harding (Law Courts [p. 119]), W. M. Ormrod (The Reign of Edward III: Crown and Political Society in England 1327-1377 [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990], p. 154), and Bennet (Community) all point out, the motives behind such corrupt practices very likely were related to the status of the law as the first bona fide "profession" in England and the opportunities maintenance and other practices offered careerist members of England's "middling" classes
105. Mann, Estates Satire, p. 89
106. See also Muriel Bowden, A Commentary on the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 171
107. Henry Knighton, Knighton's Chronicle 1337-1396, ed. and trans. G. H. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), p. 372
108. Maddicott, Law and Lordship, pp. 65-67
109. On the ambivalence of geographic borders of civilization such as the desert or forest in Western thought, see George H. Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought: The Biblical Experience of the Desert in the History of Christianity and the Paradise Theme in the Theological Idea of the University (New York: Harper, 1962), pp. 3-64
110. Antoine Guillaumont, "La conception du désert chez les moines d'Egypte" Revue de l'Histoire des Religions 188 (1975): 11
111. Alison Goddard Elliott, Roads to Paradise: Reading the Lives of the Early Saints (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1987), pp. 83-180
112. Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 47-59
113. Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). The ambivalence of global borders emerges in, on the one hand, the positioning of the Plinian or monstrous races on the edges of the world and, on the other hand, the location of Paradise on the eastern borders of mappae mundi (along with the placement of the blessed and wondrous islands of classical mythology, such as the fortunate isles and the Hesperides on the western and northern margins of the world)
114. John Gower, Vox Clamantis, Book 6, chap. 1; Book 1, chap. 20
115. Translations are by Eric W. Stockton in The Major Latin Works of John Gower (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962)
116. See also the lament of the macaronic verse "On the Times" that while "Englond sum tyme was / regnorum gemma vocata; . . . Now gon ys that honowr" due to certain immoral social practitioners - including those who "justum damnificabit." Calls for reform that will return England to its former national glory follow
117. T. Wright, Political Poems and Songs, vol. 1 (London, 1859-61), pp. 270-71
118. The notion that the lawyer's performance constitutes a kind of complaint isn't new to Chaucer studies. As readers such as Robert Enzer Lewis and Ann Astell have shown, the Man of Law's use both of Innocent III's De miseria condicionis humanae and those colors - indignatio, conquestio, exclamatio - that recall the classical rhetorical roots of monitory pieces, render him a Boethian personage lamenting the pattern of "joye after wo" that marks life generally and appears in a remarkably intense form in the story of Constance (2.1161). Yet while such readers have documented the presence of a universal brand of complaint in the tale, they have not considered the possibility that the lawyer also offers a particularized social complaint that uses issues of gender and geographic difference to engage with the Utopian potential and notorious corruption ascribed to his profession. Robert Enzer Lewis, "Chaucer's Artistic Use of Pope Innocent II's De miseria humane conditionis in the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale," PMLA 81 (1966): 485-92
119. Ann Astell, "Apostrophe, Prayer, and the Structure of Satire in the Man of Law's Tale" SAC 13 (1991): 81-97
120. On the ambiguity of "trouthe" in this passage, see Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 29
121. In Trevet, Alle only determines the knight's punishment (688), while in Gower Allee only learns of and ponders secretly the meaning of Constance's divine litigator (890-95)
122. For Eberle, Custance's trial displays how "often and how easily the practices of actual courts can lead to unjust convictions, when, as is more often the case, a miracle fails to occur" (Rough Justice, p. 33)
123. By "national fantasy," I refer to a particular style or technique of approximating a communal ideal. As Gellner and Anderson have taught us, all communities are imagined - they involve the impossible translation of a multitude of strangers into fellows, of aliens into kin (Anderson, p. 6). Yet in linking fantasy with nationalism, I go beyond Anderson's point about the literal impossibility of all the members of a community experiencing face-to-face contact
124. Fantasy in this essay also refers to how national discourses articulate impossible individual psychic desires, and how these forms respond imaginatively to sociohistorical circumstances. My thinking here reflects both Fredric Jameson and Kenneth Burke's understanding of art as an imaginative resolution to historical events (The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981]
125. "Literature as Equipment for Living," in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 2d ed. [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967])
126. Anderson's notion of the ways nations inspire love, as well as Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero's thoughts on the reality and historical agency of fantasy in "Caxton, Foucault, and the Pleasures of History," in Premodern Sexttalities, ed. Fradenburg and Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. xiii-xxiv
127. Berlant, Anatomy of National Fantasy, p. 21
128. "Bloody Metaphors," p. 52
129. See also Johnson, "Monuments"
130. McClintock, Imperial Leather
131. Elizabeth Fowler, "Civil Death and the Maiden: Agency and the Conditions of Contract in Piers Plowman," Speculum 70 (1995): 760-93
132. Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages, trans. Chaya Galai (London: Methuen, 1984). Of course, this is not to say that women did not have any agency in the middle ages. Custance's claim that "Wommen are born to thraldom and penance / And to been under mannes governance," certainly, offers an oversimplified assessment of an extremely complex situation. Most notably, work over the last few decades has revealed the powers enjoyed by widows and queens. Indeed, scholars have shown how even ordinary Englishwomen of the lower and middling "classes" could take advantage of certain legal opportunities during the late middle ages. Judith M. Bennett, for example, has demonstrated how, while medieval brewsters lacked the contractual authority of men in England, they could serve as compurgators, a role generally denied women
133. See Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 90-91; 35-36
134. In her work on medieval prostitution, Ruth Mazo Karras has shown both how the law aimed at keeping the profession "accessible," even as it sought to keep "its practitioners in its place" (Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England [New York: Oxford University Press, 1996], p. 14)
135. Marjorie Keniston McIntosh and other scholars have noted the active role played by women in social regulation, including "deciding when a case should be brought to the attention of male officials for formal prosecution" (Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370-1600 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], p. 24 n. 1). The presence of such opportunities for women, however, by no means suggests any sort of spirit of equality under the law in England. In the case of female social regulators, for example, while such women did enjoy a certain agency under the law, that power all too often was aimed at limiting the behavior of other, "dangerous" women. If the law at times made a space for certain women as public actors, its overall impulse was patriarchal
136. Jonathan Goldberg, qtd. in Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yeager, eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 6
137. Clarissa W. Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991)
138. For a book-length treatment of the location of "the child's vulnerability in the body of the nurse/mother" (6), see Janet Adelman
139. For a list of work in "contemporary object-relations psychoanalysis" that "locates differentiation from the mother as a special site of anxiety for the boy-child, who must form his specifically masculine selfhood against the matrix of her overwhelming femaleness" (p. 7)
140. see Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, p. 244, n. 30
141. Liber decem capitulorum, IV
142. trans. C. W. Marx, cited in Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: an Anthology of Medieval Texts, ed. Alcuin Blamires with Karen Pratt and C. W. Marx (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 229-30
143. The union entailed by motherhood emerges in the extent to which writers identified maternity supremely with breast feeding, as Bartholomaeus Anglicus does when he defines the mother as one who "puts forth her breast to feed the child" (On the Properties of Things, 5:34, 32
144. cited in Atkinson, Oldest Vocation, p. 58)
145. We should note here as well how Custance's sexuality shores up the power of canon law, given its considerable sway over issues of marriage and sexuality. See James A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)
146. and Sex, Law and Marriage in the Middle Ages (Aldershot and Brookfield: Variorum, 1993)
147. On Delphi, see The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), s.v. "omphalos"
148. and Henry George Liddel and Robert Scott, eds. A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), s.v. "This city of Jerusalem I have set among the nations, with the other countries round about her" (Ezek. 5:5)
149. On Jerome, see Patrologia cursus completas . . . Series latina, v. 25 ed. J. P. Migne (Paris: Migne, 1844-55) Cols. 52b
150. For a translation and discussion of Jerome and other references to Jerusalem as navel, see Iain Macleod Higgins, "Defining the Earth's Center in a Medieval "Multi-Text": Jerusalem in The Book of John Mandeville," in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), pp. 34-35
151. For an overview of cultural representations of the omphalos, see Bruno Kauhsen, Omphalos. Zum Mittelpunktsgedanken in A rchitektur und Städtebau dargestellt an ausgewählten Beispielen (Munich: Seaneg, 1990)
152. Ranulf Higden, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi cestrensis, ed. Churchill Babington and J. R. Lumby, 9 vols. Rolls Series 41 (London: Longman, 1865-86), II: 177
153. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa's Translation of Batholomaeus Anglicus' De proprietatibus rerum: A Critical Text, ed. M. C. Seymour et al., two vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975-1988), 1.260
154. Elizabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 3. Offering the first sustained critical reading of this charged body part, Bronfen reads the navel as telling sign of subjectivity as it is understood along psychoanalytic lines. Bronfen is particularly interested in the navel not simply as a representation of bondage to the mother but also as a severing, an incision or wound evocative of the construction of the subject (and the symbolic castration it entails). This emphasis, in turn, reflects Bronfen's desire to move "away from a gendered notion of hysteria" in her book (p. xii). By contrast, I emphasize the more straightforward relation of the omphalos to female power
155. Bartolomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, I.260
156. Sarah Radcliffe, "Gendered Nations: Nostalgia, Development and Territory in Ecuador," Gender, Place and Culture 3 (1996): 5-21
157. Two accounts of the medieval woman's spatial enclosure are Joanne McNamara, "City Air Makes Men Free and Women Bound," in Text and Territory, pp. 143-58
158. and Margaret Hallissey, Clean Maids, True Wives, Steadfast Widows: Chaucer's Women and Medieval Codes of Conduct (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993)
159. Cf. The miscegenational rhetoric of the Brut, which blames civil strife during Edward II's reign on the paucity of English blood circulating in the veins of the aristocracy, whereby "be grete Iordes of Engeland were nougt alle of o nacioun, but were mellede wib obere . . . nacions acorded nougt to be kynde bloode of Engeland," The Brut, or the Chronicles of England, Part I, 1906, ed. Friedrich W. D. Brie, EETS OS 131 (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 220
160. discussed in Turville-Petre, England the Nation, pp. 6, 17
161. Roland Smith, "Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale and Constance of Castille," JEGP 47 (1948): 348
162. See Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 457
163. No counterpart appears in the Chroniques or the Confessio Amantis. While the lawyer's consignment of Donegild to the devil has been loosely related to a somewhat similar moment in Inferno V (cf. Howard H. Schless, Chaucer and Dante: A Reevaluation [Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1984]), his linkage of that lack with the vernacular does not appear in Dante. Other Canterbury pilgrims, of course, do refer to the descriptive inadequacies of the vernacular
164. Such moments, as Vincent J. DiMarco notes in his explanatory notes to the Knight's Tale in the Riverside Chaucer, may well constitute a kind of modesty topos or reflect a certain "concern about the state of literary English" (p. 832). The passage from the Man of Law's Tale offers a nationalistic inversion, I would argue, of passages such as KnT 1459-60 and SqT" 37-38
165. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 7
166. quoted in Parker et al., Nationalisms and Sexualities, p. 6
167. See Schibanoff, "Worlds Apart," on the Man of Law's interest in producing a patriarchal bond between his male fellow pilgrims
168. The lawyer's tale exemplifies what Sheila Delany has described as "the deep-rooted ambivalence about women that is a structural feature of late-medieval culture, providing a terminus ad quem beyond which even the most well-intentioned writer cannot pass" ("Difference and the Difference It Makes: Sex and Gender in Chaucer's Poetry," in A Wyf there was, ed. Juliet Dor [Leige, Belgium: Universite de Liège, 1992], p. 103)
169. Homi K. Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation" in The Location of Culture, ed. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 139-70
170. Chaucer's 'New Men' and the Good of Literature in the Canterbury Tales," in Literature and Society, ed. Edward W. Said (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 15-56
171. Cf. The essays in Cohen, ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages
172. See for example Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978)
173. Homi K. Bhabha, "The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse," Screen 24.6 (1983): 18-36
174. and "DissemiNation"
175. Paul Gilroy, "One Nation Under a Groove: The Cultural Politics of 'Race' and Racism in Britain," in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990)
176. Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (London: Hutchinson, 1987)
177. and Slavoj Zižek, "Eastern Europe's Republics of Gilead," New Left Review 183 (1990): 50-62
178. On Utopia and English geographic isolation, see Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America and Literature from the Utopia to the Tempest (Berkeley: University of California press, 1993)
179. On Johnson and Conrad, see The Works of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1825), 5:21
180. Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), pp. 29-31