Notes

Introduction

Epigraphs: Latin biblical quotations are from Biblia Sacra Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. Roger Grayson et al.; English ones are from the Douay-Rheims translation.

1. Luke 2:15: “the shepherds said to one another: [Let us go over to Bethlehem, and let us see this word that is come to pass, which the Lord hath shewed to us].” Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Piers Plowman are from Piers Plowman: The C Version. Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better and Do-Best, ed. Russell and Kane (hereafter Russell and Kane).

2. The allegorical character who speaks these lines is Imaginatif; in medieval cognitive theory, the imagination is the faculty of the mind that deals with images. See Minnis, “Literary Imagination and Memory”; Karnes, Imagination, Meditation and Cognition in the Middle Ages. It is activated in dreaming and memory-work but also in the processing of figurative language, such as metaphor. For more on this passage, see pp. 105–15, below.

3. I am thinking in particular of the work of Nicholas Watson (“Conceptions of the Word: The Mother Tongue and the Incarnation of God”) and David Aers (Salvation and Sin; Aers and Staley, The Powers of the Holy), who in very different ways have persistently engaged with the theology. On Langland, the work of Sister Mary Clemente Davlin is of particular note, for example, The Place of God in Piers Plowman and Medieval Art. Others who have championed the significance of the Incarnation include Elizabeth Kirk (“Langland’s Narrative Christology” and The Dream Thought of Piers Plowman); Vincent Gillespie (e.g., “Postcards from the Edge”); Marion Glasscoe (English Medieval Mystics); Anne Howland Schotter (“Vernacular Style and the Word of God”); A. V. C. Schmidt (e.g., “Langland and the Mystical Tradition”); Del Chessell (“The Word Made Flesh”); and P. M. Kean (“Langland on the Incarnation”).

4. While Julian’s A Revelation (sometimes called the Long Text) was likely completed in the early fifteenth century, it was probably begun in the 1390s. A Vision, her earlier text (sometimes called the Short Text), dates from perhaps the mid-1380s. See The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins, 1–2 (hereafter Watson and Jenkins). As Julian notes in the text itself, A Revelation is the result of extended thought over time. In this respect, it is more a product of the intellectual climate of the late fourteenth than of the early fifteenth century, whatever its ultimate date of finalization. For the possibility that Julian wrote a version of her showings between A Vision and A Revelation, a postulated “B-text,” see Newman, “Redeeming the Time,” 18–24. Newman builds on an earlier suggestion by Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, eds., A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich (hereafter Colledge and Walsh), 1:24–25. For a contrasting view postulating a clerical amanuensis, see Riddy, “Julian of Norwich and Self-Textualization.”

5. Zeeman, “Imaginative Theory,” 222.

6. Ibid. See also p. 252, n.81, below, on Anne Middleton’s work-in-progress on Langland’s imaginative incorporation of form-based argument derived from school texts.

7. They thus capitalize on the Word’s extraordinary property: two natures in one substantial reality. Cf. Aquinas (Summa Theologiae, 3a.2.4): “The person or hypostasis of Christ can be viewed in two ways. As it is in itself, it is completely simple, just as is the nature of the Word [natura Verbi]. But considered under the aspect of person or hypostasis, which means subsisting in some nature, the person of Christ subsists in two natures. Hence, although there is a single subsisting reality [unum subsistens] there, the style of subsisting is double.”

8. Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Julian of Norwich are from A Revelation of Love, ed. Glasscoe, rev. ed. I cite by chapter and line number, including the headnotes in the line count (please note that the line count is slightly different in the 1993 Exeter edition). For a detailed exploration of the word mene in Julian’s work, see Gillespie and Ross, “The Apophatic Image,” 61–64, 67–68; Gillespie, “Postcards from the Edge,” 159–60 n. 54, 164–65. On Christ as mediator, cf. Aquinas (Summa 3a.26.1): “The distinctive function of a mediator is to bring together those between whom he acts as mediator; for extremities are united in the middle point. Now to unite men with God in the manner of a self-sufficient agent is the office of Christ, through whom men are reconciled with God, God was in Christ reconciling the world with himself” (2 Cor. 5:19).

9. In 1995, in response to widespread critical focus on the Passion spurred in part by Caroline Walker Bynum’s work on women’s body-based devotional practices (e.g., Holy Feast and Holy Fast), David Aers argued against a tendency to think of Christ’s humanity only in terms of the suffering, bleeding body. He asserted that more than one way of understanding the humanity of Christ was engaged by late medieval thought and that scholars should recognize the range of medieval views (“Christ’s Humanity and Piers Plowman”). While medieval studies has moved on from that initial affective emphasis (the recent “affective turn” is of rather a different sort), his point is still well taken. Aers expanded and updated his argument in his three chapters of Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, esp. 15–19.

10. By “scheme” I mean a figure that relies on the arrangement of words; a “trope” brings a “figurative” sense into play.

11. The static/hypostatic wordplay is Nicholas Watson’s; personal communication, April 23, 2008.

12. I use the term figurative here in its common modern literary critical sense of language that conveys a meaning other than its literal sense. Not all theories about language, or indeed thought, will accommodate this “literal” versus “figurative” divide, however, and the medieval writers who are the subject of this study for the most part do not make use of the dichotomy, even though it was available to them. See further pp. 31–34, below. Figurative language is not necessarily “supereffable,” although it may be.

13. 1 Cor. 12:12–27: “For as the body is one, and hath many members; and all the members of the body, whereas they are many, yet are one body, so also is Christ. /. . . / Now you are the body of Christ”; see also Col. 1:18; Rom. 12:4–5; Eph. 4:15–16.

14. OED Online (hereafter OED), s.v. “gestalt”: “A ‘shape’, ‘configuration’, or ‘structure’ which as an object of perception forms a specific whole or unity incapable of expression simply in terms of its parts (e.g., a melody in distinction from the notes that make it up).”

15. The same principle of gestalt underlies the Trinity: one God in three Persons.

16. Quoted by Auerbach, “Figura,” 32. Auerbach is quoting De resurrectione carnis (now more commonly called De resurrectione mortuorum), chap. 20. See also PL 2:821B: “Nam et virgo concepit in utero, non figurate; et peperit Emmanuelem, nobiscum Deum.”

17. In theological terms, substance is the divine nature or essence, in which the three Persons of the Trinity are united as one; in philosophy, it is a thing that exists distinct from other things, the thing itself.

18. Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England,” 826.

19. Gillespie’s “Vernacular Theology” offers an excellent starting point on this topic.

20. Watson, “Cultural Changes,” 130.

21. Benson, “Salvation Theology and Poetry in Piers Plowman,” 103, 104.

22. The monumental volume of essays that began as papers for the Oxford 2009 “After Arundel” conference offers a striking range of possibilities for thinking about developments in vernacular theology in fifteenth-century England (Ghosh and Gillespie, After Arundel). In many cases these essays move away from a tight focus on Arundel and the Constitutions, and in particular they shift away from prevailing scholarly thought that has more and more constrainingly perceived the Constitutions as shutting down vernacular theological discourse. The volume’s authors seek to escape from the sort of myopia that may result from dwelling too long in even the most productive of scholarly constructs. Too rigid an adherence to one view of “vernacular theology” can lead to a dangerous “reduction of complexity,” in Berndt Hamm’s term, which he applied to the dangers incumbent on his own scholarly construct of “normative centering” (The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety, 2).

23. Capgrave, The Life of St. Katherine, 4.34.2194–96.

24. “For that Almighty God cannot be expressed by any philosophical terms, or otherwise invented of man . . . we do ordain and specially forbid, that any manner of person, of what state, degree, or condition soever he be, do allege or propone [sic] any conclusions or propositions in the catholic faith, or repugnant to good manners (except necessary doctrine pertaining to their faculty of teaching or disputing in their schools or otherwise), although they defend the same with ever such curious terms and words.” John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 3:246, quoted in Watson, “Censorship,” 828, n. 14.

25. Winstead, John Capgrave’s Fifteenth Century, 60.

26. Middle English Dictionary (hereafter MED), s.v. “plainli(e)”; OED, s.v. “plainly, adv.2,” derived from Latin plene (“fully, wholly, completely, thoroughly, largely”: Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. “plene” 2, in “plenus”), in addition to OED, s.v. “plainly, adv.1,” derived from Latin plane (“plain, clear, distinct, intelligible”: Lewis and Short, s.v. “plane,” in “planus [1]”). Nicholas Watson notes John Lydgate’s similar use of “pleyn” in that poet’s Fall of Princes, where “to tell the story ‘pleynli’ is less to clarify it than to elaborate it into something grander than its auctor or patron can have imagined” (“Theories of Translation,” 85). Shannon Gayk offers an intriguing reading of the plainness of Capgrave’s prologue that usefully complements mine: “‘Ete this book’: Literary Consumption and Poetic Invention,” 92–93.

27. Watson has argued that Incarnation theology was a particularly thorny topic specifically because “In some contexts, discussions of the status of the vernacular and the implications of using it for written expression became so involved with theological questions whose roots were in the doctrine of incarnation that language politics and incarnation theology became coterminous” (“Conceptions,” 90).

28. Whether Capgrave actually had an English source such as he claims remains unknown. Auvo Kurvinen argues that Capgrave had at least one source, whether in English or Latin—a source derived from an earlier Latin version of Katherine’s vita: “The Source of Capgrave’s Life of St. Katharine of Alexandria.”

29. See also Minnis, Translations of Authority, 104.

30. See n. 21, above.

31. Katherine Zieman’s work, for example, or Gayk and Tonry’s volume on the fifteenth century.

32. That debate is anticipated, in some respects, in Seth Lerer’s 2005 survey of formalist criticism, “The Endurance of Formalism in Middle English Studies,” which singles out medieval lyric as a genre that “demands [to] be read formally,” and argues that “The formalist approach to Middle English studies . . . should not be limited to classroom close reading or mere appreciation” but should “reveal ways in which our current overarching historicism still contends with the legacy of formalism.” See, further, his follow-on article, “‘Dum ludis floribus’.” Lerer’s views are sympathetically acknowledged by D. Vance Smith, “Medieval Forma,” on which see further pp. 209 and 282, nn. 2–3 below.

33. Cannon, “Form,” 178.

34. Ibid., 179.

35. Nolan, “Beauty,” 208.

36. Sacks, ed., On Metaphor, [n.p.].

Chapter 1. The “Enigma” of Signification in “Figurative” Language

Epigraphs. When quoting from Piers Plowman, I give the C-text citation first and the equivalent B-text citation following a tilde. Unless otherwise noted, B-text citations and quotations are from Piers Plowman: The B Version. Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better and Do-Best, ed. Kane and Donaldson, rev. ed. (hereafter Kane and Donaldson). English quotations from Augustine’s De Trinitate are from On the Trinity: Books 8–15, trans. McKenna, ed. Matthews; Latin quotations are from De Trinitate Libri XIII-XV, ed. Mountain. Quotations from Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection are from Bestul’s edition; I have silently reduced initial caps on pronouns that refer to God.

1. 1 Cor. 13:12: “Videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate: tunc autem facie ad faciem” /“We see now through a glass in a dark manner; but then face to face.”

2. Christ’s humanity itself is key to his role as mediator, cf. Aquinas:

We can distinguish two elements in a mediator: firstly, there is the fact of his being an intermediary; secondly, there is his office of bringing together. Now the fact of being an intermediary implies being set apart from both extremes; while, in order to bring these together, the mediator bears what belongs to one over to the other. Neither of these elements is realized in Christ in so far as he is God, but exclusively in so far as he is man. For as God he is not distinct in nature and lordship from the Father and the Holy Spirit; nor do the Father and the Holy Spirit possess anything which the Son does not possess and which, as belonging to them and not to himself, he might bear to others.

But both elements are realized in Christ as man. (Summa 3a.26.2)

3. 1 John 4:8–9:

He that loveth not, knoweth not God: for God is charity.

By this hath the charity of God appeared towards us, because God hath sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we may live by him.

4. A summary of neurological work on metaphor up to 2006 may be found in Lakoff, “The Neural Theory of Metaphor.”

5. Descartes’s thought was, of course, a post-medieval development.

6. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. Shaw, 2:535.

7. It is a happy circumstance that, linguistically speaking, singling out any word in this exemplary fashion (i.e., “the word ‘word’”) is hypostasis.

8. Of course, in late medieval England this language would be the vernacular (English or French), explicitly opposed to Latin. Augustine’s distinction among languages is essentially philosophical rather than nationalistic, political, social, or ecclesiastical; the issue carries additional ramifications in late fourteenth-century England, implications not addressed here by Augustine, but ones Capgrave would certainly have recognized.

9. Cf. De Doctrina Christiana: “In what way did He come but this, ‘The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us’? Just as when we speak, in order that what we have in our minds may enter through the ear into the mind of the hearer, the word which we have in our hearts becomes an outward sound and is called speech; and yet our thought does not lose itself in the sound, but remains complete in itself, and takes the form of speech without being modified in its own nature by the change: so the Divine Word, though suffering no change of nature, yet became flesh, that He might dwell among us” (On Christian Doctrine 1.13.12).

10. In De Trinitate he defines allegory as “a trope in which one thing is understood from another” and enigma as an allegory that is particularly difficult to interpret (15.9.15–16).

11. The Holy Name passages do not occur in all textual witnesses, being one important factor in making a stemma to map out the textual tradition. Once the formidable project of editing the entire Scale is completed (now underway by Michael Sargent for EETS), there will be better evidence on which to base arguments about Hilton’s engagement with this devotion. For the complicated textual history of the Scale, including the Latin translation written by the Carmelite Thomas Fishlake, perhaps in Hilton’s lifetime and certainly by 1400, see Clark and Dorward, trans., The Scale of Perfection, 53–57; Bestul, ed., The Scale of Perfection, 9–11; Sargent, “Walter Hilton’s ‘Scale of Perfection’”; Hussey, “Latin and English in the Scale of Perfection”; Hussey, “The Text of ‘The Scale of Perfection,’ Book II.”

12. Or, possibly, depicted graphically, as in an image of Jesus.

13. “. . . not only before it sounds, but even before the images of its sound are contemplated in thought” (De Trinitate 15.10.19, quoted above, p. 22). “For the thought formed from that thing which we know is the word which we speak in our heart, . . . when we have to bring it to the knowledge of those to whom we are speaking, then some sign is assumed by which it may be made known. And generally this is a sound, but at times also a nod. . . . . . . But letters have also been invented by which we can also speak to those who are absent; but the letters are the signs of words, while the words themselves in our speech are signs of the things of which we are thinking” (De Trinitate 15.10.19).

14. “. . . right as a schadwe is maad [made] of a light and a bodi, right so this goostli schadwe is maad of the blissid unseable light of the godhede [Godhead], and of the manhede ooned [united, “one-ed”] therto, and is schewed [shown] to a devoute soule” (2.30.2028–30). See further my discussion at p. 177.

15. Lewis and Short: “Figurativus, a, um, adj., pertaining to the figurative mode of speaking, figurative (late Lat.) . . . subst.: figurativa, ae, f., figurative mode of speaking . . ..” R. E. Latham notes the occurrence of figurativus in British Latin for “figurative, significant” c. 1115 and c. 1363: Revised Medieval Latin Word-List from British and Irish Sources, s.v. “figur/a.”

16. MED, s.v. “figure,” the source of all definitions cited or quoted in this paragraph; see also OED, s.v. “figure.” Latin figura had a long and complicated history in philosophical and linguistic usage, as the Lewis and Short entry suggests, where the word ranges over “a form, shape, figure (syn.: forma, species; tropus)” to include in its literal senses “Concr., a sketch, figure, drawing” (I.1.A.2) and “Poet., a form, shade, phantom of the dead” (I.1.B.2); in its figurative senses, “quality, kind, form, species, nature, matter” (II), “Gram. t. t., form of a word, inflection” (II.B.1), and “Rhet. t. t., a figure of speech” (II.B.2), “Esp., one which contains hints or allusions” (II.B.2.b). Erich Auerbach’s classic essay on “Figura” is still worth consulting on this issue, as is de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis.

17. For example, Jonah in the belly of the whale for three days “prefigures” Christ’s body buried in the earth for three days. Matt. 12:40 provides scriptural justification for the technique: “For as Jonas was in the whale’s belly three days and three nights: so shall the Son of man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights.”

18. General Prologue, The Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, ll. 499–500. Further citations from Chaucer are from this edition.

19. James Simpson has persuasively argued that Langland must have known the very passage from De Trinitate I have been considering (“‘Et vidit deus cogitaciones eorum’”).

20. Close readings of Piers Plowman must take into account the complications caused by its transmission. The A-text (probably composed in the 1360s), at around 2,500 lines, is considerably shorter than B (c. 1370s, about 7,300 lines) or C (c. 1380s, about 7,340 lines). Most critics believe the three versions are successive redactions (from A to B to C); for the argument that A is an abridged version of B and intended for a lay audience, see Jill Mann, “The Power of the Alphabet.” Piers Plowman is extant in 52 manuscripts plus a further 11 fragments or post-medieval copies, of which 18 are of the A-text, including 7 with C-text passages; 16 of the B-text; and 18 of the C-text. The knotty problem of distinguishing scribal variants from authorial revisions has occupied Piers editors and critics for decades. The archetype for all extant B manuscripts and, to a lesser extent, the B-text manuscript used as the basis for C, are both thought to have suffered from severe scribal contamination. B and C share the same two final passus, indicating, perhaps, that Langland might have died before he completed C, although for a different explanation that, like Mann’s argument, challenges the A-to-B-to-C hypothesis, see Warner, The Lost History of Piers Plowman.

21. See pp. 66–72 on Langland’s complicated treatment of “secte” and “sute.” Jill Mann has thoughtfully and subtly drawn out the nuances of Langland’s imagery of leading and following, in “Power of the Alphabet,” 44–46.

22. Cf. Matt. 18:20: “For where there are two or three gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

23. In contrast, Chaucer’s Parson explicitly practices what he preaches: “Cristes loore and his apostles twelve / He taughte; but first he folwed it hymselve” (General Prologue, ll. 527–28). Chaucer neatly reinforces the Parson’s “following” of Christ by enjambing the line; both “taughte” and “folwed it” follow on from “Cristes loore and his apostles twelve” without stop.

24. The use of “figure” as “face” can take on a plaintive, intimate tone in Middle English, as in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, where the Sowdan learns to love Custance without having met her, only from hearing the merchants (who did see her) tell about how lovely she was (184–89):

Thise merchantz han hym toold of dame Custance
So greet noblesse in ernest, ceriously,	fame/worthiness; in detail
That this Sowdan hath caught so greet plesance	Sultan; desire
To han hir figure in his remembrance,	image
That al his lust and al his bisy cure	desire; desire
Was for to love hire while his lyf may dure.	last

While it is not clear whether the “figure” he sees is full body or face only (and indeed perhaps it is both, at different times), the syntax parallels her second husband’s wistful recollection of the face of the wife he thinks is dead, called to mind as he gazes, for the first time after a long separation, on the face of their child (1030–35):

Now was this child as lyk unto Custance	like
As possible is a creature to be.
This Alla hath the face in remembrance
Of dame Custance, and ther on mused he
If that the childes mooder were aught she
That is his wyf, and pryvely he sighte . . .	privately; sighed

In conjunction with the description of the Christ-like Custance led to what she thinks will be her death, these passages taken together remind me of the face-to-face encounter promised in 1 Cor. 13:12 (note that “face” appears four times in these seven lines; the masculine pronoun makes the Christ comparison stronger) (645–51):

Have ye nat seyn somtyme a pale face,	seen
Among a prees, of hym that hath be lad	crowd (‘press’); led
Toward his deeth, wher as hym gat no grace,
And swich a colour in his face hath had	such
Men myghte knowe his face that was bistad	beset
Amonges alle the faces in that route?	crowd
So stant Custance, and looketh hire aboute.	stood

Another such in-a-mirror face in Middle English is Crisseid’s, in Henryson’s Testament, when Troilus does not recognize her because of her leprosy, but her face calls to mind the “figure” of his beloved Crisseid; here the potential resonance of 1 Cor. 13:12 combines, perhaps, with 1 Cor. 15:52, “in the twinkling of an eye,” except that in Troilus’s instant of genuine recognition, intellectual comprehension is conspicuously lacking. The incident is the more startling for the revelation, available to the reader but not to Troilus, that he has in fact identified her correctly, although he is not aware that he has done so:

Than upon him scho kest up baith hir ene,	she cast up both her eyes
And with ane blenk it come into his thocht	one blink; thought
That he sumtime hir face befoir had sene,
Bot scho was in sic plye he knew hir nocht;	such a plight
Yit than hir luik into his mynd it brocht	look
The sweit visage and amorous blenking	sweet face; glances
Of fair Cresseid, sumtyme his awin darling.	own
Na wonder was, suppois in mynd that he	No
Tuik hir figure sa sone, and lo, now quhy:	recognized; immediately; why
The idole of ane thing in cace may be	one; perhaps
Sa deip imprentit in the fantasy	so deeply
That it deludis the wittis outwardly,
And sa appeiris in forme and lyke estait	so appears; similar condition
Within the mynd as it was figurait.
(Testament of Cresseid, in The Poems of Robert Henryson, ll. 498–511)

Both cases rely on a medieval understanding of the image-processing faculty of the mind, the imagination, which governs both sight and recollection, and can (as Troilus wrongly supposes here) deceive by means of fantasy.

25. “Unless you [be converted and] become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3).

26. “. . . is not puffed up; / Is not ambitious, seeketh not her own’” (1 Cor. 13:4–5).

27. See Middleton, “William Langland’s ‘Kynde Name’.”

28. Or, possibly, “but, to tell the truth, I never saw him [Christ] except as [I see] myself in a mirour.”

29. Context is increasingly an important concept in cognitive studies. One basic outline of issues intrinsic to context may be found in Ungerer and Schmid, An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics, 45–58; a semantics-based argument with an extensive bibliography is Stern, “Metaphor, Semantics, and Context.”

30. Morton Bloomfield quotes Donald Stewart using this same example but for a different purpose (“Allegory as Interpretation,” 315).

31. This view of metaphor is supported by a psycholinguistic study designed to test whether priming participants with the precise words used as tenor or vehicle would make processing a metaphor easier: “[the results suggest] that the understanding of metaphor involves the emergence of features that are salient characteristics of neither metaphorical term.” Blasko and Connine, “Effects of Familiarity and Aptness on Metaphor Processing,” 304.

32. Riehle, Middle English Mystics, 104.

33. Morton Bloomfield situates the problem of “literal” versus “figurative” with regard to metaphor solidly within the literal sense itself:

From a historical point of view, the literal sense is changeable in different degrees, depending on the words used, whether they are still understandable and whether they have changed significantly or not. What was once metaphorical may become literal and vice versa, but all this verbal movement happens within the literal sense. Metaphors belong to the literal sense if they are clearly presented. They differ from the simple literal sense in the fact that they paraphrase only asymmetrically. That is—to take an example given by Donald Stewart—we can say that “Richard is a lion” means “Richard is brave,” but not vice versa. A metaphor’s meaning is very open, and it is determined largely by context. We hesitate to say that “Richard is brave” means “Richard is a lion,” because the metaphor can mean other things out of context. Yet both sentences are on the literal level. (“Allegory as Interpretation,” 315)

34. See, e.g., Colledge and Walsh, 2:336.

35. MED, s.v. “pointe n.1.” The notion of “point” as “a small portion of time, an instant, a moment” comes from the Latin punctum (Lewis and Short, s.v. “punctum,” sense I.2.c).

36. Watson and Jenkins (162, n. to 11.1) privilege this sense: “A point in space, not time, as line 16 makes clear.” They additionally offer the observation that “A ‘point’ is also a subdivision in an argument or a full stop in a sentence.”

37. Patience, in The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, l. 35. Laurence Eldredge explores the scholastic philosophical controversy over the nature of a point (whether a continuum could be infinitely divisible or not), claiming, “The poet insists that patience is a point, not merely by means of the repetition in the first and last lines of the poem, but also by stressing its place as the last of the eight beatitudes and thus the point with which the line of beatitudes ends” (“Late Medieval Discussions of the Continuum,” 110). The philosophical context underscores how aptly the word “poynte” suits Julian’s purpose: the Pearl-poet erases the distinction of beginnings and endings, since as both beginning and ending of blessedness, patience is an indivisible state of being and a foundational virtue.

38. Minnis and Scott, “Scriptural Science and Signification: From Alexander’s Sum of Theology to Nicholas of Lyre,” in Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–c. 1375: The Commentary Tradition, esp. 239–43, 266–76. As Aquinas puts it (242, Summa 1a.1,10):

But because the literal sense is that which the author intends, while the author of Holy Scripture is God who comprehends everything all at once by His understanding, it seems consistent with this that, as Augustine says in the twelfth book of The Confessions, there should be several meanings in one passage of Scripture, even when interpreted literally.

39. “. . . even in these instances, some words are used figuratively, as for example, ‘the wrath of God’ and ‘crucified.’ But these are not so numerous, nor placed in such a way as to obscure the sense, and make it allegorical or enigmatical, which is the kind of expression properly called figurative” (On Christian Doctrine 3.11.17).

40. Gibbs, “The Fight over Metaphor in Thought and Language,” 114.

41. Nevertheless, the same linguists continue to distinguish “literal” and “nonliteral” usages.

42. Sweetser, From Etymology to Pragmatics, cited in Gibbs, The Poetics of Mind, 158–61.

43. See, for example, Searle, “Metaphor”; Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean”; Grice, “Logic and Conversation.” However, psycholinguistic studies are increasingly demonstrating results incompatible with Searle’s model. See, e.g., Frisson and Pickering, “The Processing of Familiar and Novel Senses of a Word”; Brisard, Frisson and Sandra, “Processing Unfamiliar Metaphors in a Self-Paced Reading Task”; Blasko and Connine, “Effects of Familiarity”; see also further studies cited in Blasko and Connine, 296.

44. The Cloud of Unknowing, 61.30–35, ed. Hodgson, 63.

45. As Tony Spearing has remarked, this phrase is difficult to say without the speaker becoming excessively aware of the physicality of his own tongue (The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, xxviii).

46. The Cloud-author’s purpose in pointing out the dichotomy is quite specific to the practice of contemplative exercise; he considers the nature of language only insofar as he needs to in order to make his points. While Vincent Gillespie’s endorsement of Denis Renevey’s suggestion that “a goostly conseyte of a bodely þing” could be the Cloud-author’s term for metaphor is intriguing (“Postcards from the Edge,” 150), it seems to me that the Cloud-author wants metaphor to operate in both directions (“goostly” to “þing” explains characteristic features of the Cloud-author’s language and style (“Fantasy and Language in The Cloud of Unknowing,” 292ff.).

47. This interpretative problem is similar to the one I discussed in regard to Julian seeing God in a “poynte”: in an instant or in a (mental) place (see p. 37).

48. Rubin, Corpus Christi, 14–35; see also Macy, “The Dogma of Transubstantiation in the Middle Ages”; Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period.

49. I have drawn the phrase “language of religion” from Miri Rubin’s introduction to her important work on the feast of Corpus Christi (body of Christ). Rubin explains that her project evolved from what she thought would be a social history to a larger cultural investigation requiring her to interpret the development of thought over time as if it were a sort of “language of religion.” An especially compelling aspect of the shift she perceived is the increasing focus on “that language, the system of meanings”: “Inspired by the diversity of such utterances and the ubiquity of eucharistic symbols within the medieval culture, we must attempt to expound the language of religion in order to understand the variety of its expression. This book aims to penetrate that language, the system of meanings within which the eucharist possessed so central a position” (Corpus Christi, 5). By “language of religion,” of course, Rubin points toward a way of thinking she is interested in. More significantly, however, she chooses to get at that concept by highlighting its systematic quality, calling it “language.” With the Eucharist at the heart of her study, perhaps it is not surprising to find that Rubin would envision the unfolding nature of her project as inherently language-based.

50. Alexandra Barratt has drawn attention to the Dixit Dominus-style Trinity in the Ormesby Psalter, which was on display in the choir of Norwich Cathedral during Julian’s lifetime. Barratt argues that Julian’s warning about how not to envision the Trinity might have been a response to an illumination such as this one (“‘No such sitting’: Julian Tropes the Trinity”).

51. For the Cloud-author’s interpretation of spatial terms, particularly “in” and “up,” see Burrow, “Fantasy and Language.”

52. For the theory that different types of metaphor are processed in various ways and complex metaphor is processed like analogy, see Kintsch, “The Mind Computes the Meaning of Metaphor.”

53. By comparison, the problem of “up” and “down” is one of the first examples Peter Stockwell advances in his introductory-level text on cognitive linguistics. He explains GOOD IS UP by recourse to embodied experience:

Most simply, we think in the forms that we do and we say things in the ways that we do because we are all roughly human-sized containers of air and liquid with our main receptors at the top of our bodies. Our minds are “embodied” not just literally but also figuratively, finally clearing away the mind-body distinction of much philosophy most famously expressed by Descartes. To give a simple example (suggested by my colleague Tony Bex), one possible cognitive reason why we chop trees down but we chop wood up is that trees are bigger than us but are on the ground below us once they have been felled. Another cognitive solution sees these directional features as deriving from underlying metaphor in which “good is up” and “bad is down.” Trees are unified “good” wholes when they are upright, and firewood is more usefully “good” when it is chopped from fallen trees. (Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics, 4–5)

Stockwell’s explanation for why good is up is based on an unconvincing premise with respect to chopping trees up versus chopping them down, however, because the “up” in “chopping up” is not a spatial term. “Up” is a marker of finality or completion here, as it would be in “break up” or “seal up” or even in cases such as “button up” and “beat up [some eggs]” or “beat up [a person],” as the OED entry for “up, adv1” makes clear: “18. To or towards a state of completion or finality. (Frequently serving merely to emphasize the import of the verb.) a. With verbs denoting consuming or destroying. . . . b. With other verbs, denoting progress to or towards an end.” Stockwell’s error, however, demonstrates all the more clearly how committed this strain of cognitive linguistics is to embodiment as a basis for metaphor and metaphor as a basis for thought. Physical experience of the world, not abstract thought alone, really counts here. Spatial orientation is just one aspect in which it counts.

54. For an extended discussion of how Hilton and Julian differ in their treatment of Augustine’s thought, see Baker, “The Image of God,” 35–60.

55. Denise Baker’s investigation of these terms is helpful (Julian of Norwich’s Showings, esp. 119ff.). For an excellent concise synopsis of the Augustinian background of these terms and a comparison of Julian’s use with that of Walter Hilton, see also Baker, “The Image of God,” esp. 44–49, 52–53. I disagree, however, with her assertion that “Julian uses the terms substance and sensuality to refer to the two parts of the soul corresponding to Augustine’s higher and lower reason” and her further conclusion that “paradoxically, the soul is both enclosed by and enclosing God”; “Julian of Norwich and the Varieties of Middle English Mystical Discourse,” 61, 62. Nicholas Watson works through substance and sensuality as a hermeneutic tool in combination with the structures encoded in misogynistic discourse: “ ‘Yf wommen be double naturelly’,” 20–29, 32. David Aers discusses the consequence for Julian’s soteriology of “her doctrine that our souls have a higher and lower part with two distinct wills”: Salvation and Sin, 168, 156–71.

56. Margaret Ann Palliser is more precise in her wording on this point than are many Julian scholars: “In his own person, Christ unites sensuality (that part of the human structure which constitutes our separateness from God but which, therefore, allows for the possibility of separatedness, i.e., sin) to substance (the truth of our being which is never separated from God).” Palliser, Christ, Our Mother of Mercy, 45. See also her clarification in n. 147, p. 50, an attempt to explain Julian’s characterization of Christ’s soul as “fullest substance” (53.59).

57. See also 44.16–17: “man soule is a creature in God, which hath the same propertyes made.”

58. She does, however, refer to Christ’s soul, e.g.:

Wherfore he will we wettyn [know] that the noblest thing that ever he made is mankynd, and the fullest substance and the heyest vertue is the blissid soule of Criste. And furthermore he will we wettyn that his derworthy [“dear-worthy”] soule was preciousley knitt to him in the makeing; which knott is sotil [subtle, ethereal] and so myty that is onyd into God; in which onyng it is made endlesly holy. (53.58–63)

59. E.g., “so arn we, soule and body, cladde in the goodnes of God and inclosyd” (6.41–42); “he should be save in body and soule” 10.26–27); “And what tyme that our soule is inspirid into our body” (55·19–20); “the worshipfull onyng that was thus made of God betwix the soule and body” (55.47–48). See also my “The ‘Soule’ Crux in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love.” I read the famous “excretion” passage in chapter six as describing death, the release of the soul from the body, as opposed to the reading most recently championed by Watson and Jenkins, who argue “. . . ‘soule’ is probably a spelling of ‘saule’/‘sawlee’ (French saulee), food or meal, a common word in late Middle English” (142). For an extended argument that this passage describes excretion, and moreover “reinscrib[es] the female upon what is ostensibly an image of the universal male body, and assert[s] the equal value of the female as an expression of, and a means of accessing, the divine,” see McAvoy, “‘. . . a purse fulle feyer’,” 100.

60. An exception is Kittay and Lehrer, “Semantic Fields and the Structure of Metaphor.”

61. See, for instance, Coulson and van Petten, “Conceptual Integration and Metaphor”: “When the metaphoric interpretation of a sentence has adequate contextual support, metaphors are read no more slowly than literal language”; “readers take longer to reject statements that are literally false but metaphorically true than to reject nonmetaphoric false statements”; “following metaphors rated as apt (viz. readily interpretable), lexical decisions for target words related to figurative meanings were made just as fast as those for targets related to literal meanings”; “In contrast to the standard model, current processing models of metaphor comprehension all assume that literal and nonliteral language comprehension invoke the same mechanisms” (958–59); see Coulson and van Petten for the relevant studies.

62. Frisson and Pickering, “Obtaining a Figurative Interpretation.” See also Pickering et al., “Underspecification and Aspectual Coercion”; Frazier and Rayner, “Taking on Semantic Commitments.”

63. Frisson and Pickering, “Obtaining a Figurative Interpretation,” 159.

64. Weller Embler’s notion of the fuzziness of ordinary discourse complements this view of language processing by offering an analogue from the writer’s (or speaker’s) side:

In everyday life when we are not making an effort to be lucid and to put our thoughts into scrupulously logical order, they seem indeed to be vague, mere guesses or sighs or phatic sounds that vanish like puffs of smoke in the air. Yet we manage, roughly, to get along. Indeed, this gossamer obscurity at the border between thought and vacuity, this vagueness at the margin, may be a kind of protection against mental rigidity, against making up our minds too soon, indulging in over-simplified evaluations. (Metaphor and Meaning, 30–31)

65. Clark and Gerrig, “Understanding Old Words with New Meanings,” 606; see also Frisson and Pickering, “Processing of Familiar and Novel Senses,” esp. 606–7; Rapp and Gerrig, “Eponymous Verb Phrases and Ambiguity Resolution”; Gerrig, “The Time Course of Sense Creation.”

66. Frisson and Pickering, “Obtaining a Figurative Interpretation,” 159.

67. Kelly and Keil, “Metaphor Comprehension and Knowledge of Semantic Domains,” 43–44.

68. Allbritton, “When Metaphors Function as Schemas,” 41.

Chapter 2. Elisions of Abstract and Concrete, Epitomized in a “True-love”

Epigraph: (1) Fein, ed., Moral Love Songs and Laments, 68.

1. In my discussion, I will use “true-love” for the plant, “Truelove” for the tradition, “true love” for the concept invoked in a poem where what is signified is ambiguous, and “trewe loue” or other Middle English spellings for a specific reference (taking the spelling from the source I cite).

2. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Following the theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, for example, eros may be seen to underlie the emanative flowing forth of God’s love (proodos) and its return from created to Creator (epistrophe).

3. Cervone, “Langland and the Truelove Tradition.” This article examines two passages in Langland’s C-text that mention “true love,” arguing that the passages’ botanical and Incarnational contexts suggest that Langland’s references should be considered in light of the “Truelove tradition.” Portions of the “Truelove” section of this chapter that explain the nature of the Truelove tradition previously appeared in this article.

4. Again we might recall Capgrave’s “straunge doubtes” and his interest in the signifying potential of the vernacular (see p. 9).

5. “Sermon S-07, Amore langueo,” 226–27 (boldface in quoted text, emphasis mine).

6. “Crux Christi” is first attested in the thirteenth century; the leaves of the plant form a cross shape: von Schroff, Historische Studie über Paris Quadrifolia L, 1:3–6. The plant is also known as four-leaved grass, one-berry, herb Paris, Paris quadrifolia, true-love knot, and true lover’s knot, among other things. Although he primarily concentrates on other areas of Europe, for an extensive discussion of the plant’s various names, see von Schroff, esp. 1:3–48. He treats “true-love” only briefly (1:40). On Mary exemplifying and carrying “true love” bodily, consider the brief but hauntingly evocative Annunciation lyric “At a sprynge wel vnder a þorn,” no. 130 in Brown, ed., Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century and frequently anthologized (229, ll. 5–6):

Ho-so wol seche trwe loue,

yn hyr hyt schal be founde.

Does Mary herself exemplify true love, or will she carry it bodily in the form of her child, or both?

7. In “Truelove,” for instance (ll. 40–67), “In a Valley of this Restless Mind” (ll. 1–3), or “At a sprynge wel vnder a þorn” (for a useful reading of this poem in this context, see Gray, Themes and Images, 92–94).

8. The lover-knight motif draws on chivalric love conventions, casting Christ as the wooing knight who loves a besieged or disdainful lady, man’s soul. To attain her hand, he fights a formidable opponent and wins but is slain. The lady gathers and treasures his bloodied knightly gear. This well-known topos has received extensive treatment in critical literature; see, e.g., O’Mara, ed., Four Middle English Sermons, 66, 154–55, 190; Woolf, “The Theme of Christ the Lover-Knight”; Gray, Themes and Images, 131–43; le May, The Allegory of the Christ-Knight. The chanson d’aventure offers a narrative framework in which a usually aristocratic and sometimes dreaming subject wandering through nature encounters an authoritative didactic figure (not always human—frequently a bird).

9. Caroline Walker Bynum called attention to the trope of Jesus as mother in the early 1980s, sparking a flurry of critical interest, particularly in discussions of Julian’s Revelation. For a brief background of the relevant treatments of the theme in writings of the early Church, see Bradley, “Patristic Background of the Motherhood Similitude.”

10. This beautiful poem is frequently anthologized under various names, including “Quia amore langueo” (not to be confused with the similarly lyrical Marian poem with the same refrain but otherwise called “In a Tabernacle of a Tower”). I quote here from Fein’s edition in Moral Love Songs, 71.

11. Gray, Themes and Images, 58; the Latin reads “lament of Christ languishing for love.” The poem he quotes is no. 110 in Brown, Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century.

12. Political, Religious, and Love Poems, 262.

13. This is much like a variant of the “figure” and “ground” relationship I described with reference to the lily crucifixion, only here neither predominates. See p. 17, above.

14. See, for example, “Sermon S-07, Amore langueo”; “The Lily with Five Leaves,” no. 19 in Brown, ed., Religious Lyrics of the XIIIth Century; “Truelove”; Fasciculus Morum, 198–99, 614–15. In “The Lily with Five Leaves,” the plant whose leaves are numbered is the lily, not the true-love. However, as in other Truelove poems, the leaf scheme enumerates types of charity. In this case, the first leaf is associated with “treve loue” which springs from loving the Lord “vid word vid horte vid al þi mist” (8, 7).

Instruction on how to make a proper confession was an important aspect of educational programs for laity and clergy alike undertaken after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, such as Archbishop John Pecham’s Lambeth Constitutions of 1281 and Archbishop William Thoresby of York’s similar legislation of 1357. Such efforts were aimed at making sure that parish priests instructed the laity in fundamental elements of the faith at least once a year; the regulations placed particular and new emphasis on the sacraments of penance and Eucharist. If priests were to instruct, they must themselves be instructed; an important component of the reform recognized that priests’ training and literacy were not always adequate to the new requirements. As one way to remedy the situation, the reform effort promoted the widespread promulgation of penitential manuals, such as The Book of Vices and Virtues, Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne, and more general instructional works such as John Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests. The penitential manuals outlined the steps for the fullest possible confession in extensive detail, spiced with exempla (exemplary stories, usually derived from Gregory’s Dialogues or other common stock) to add interest (Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale is a useful example). They also enumerated fundamental elements of the faith, which priests were to explain from the pulpit at least once a year (e.g., the seven sacraments, the ten commandments). Most of these manuals were intended for clergy rather than laity. The treatment of penance in such didactic works makes an explicit delineation of its stages instantly recognizable even when couched in metaphor, as in the true love passage of the “Long Charter.” On penitential manuals, see Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 53–77; Owst, Preaching in Medieval England, 281ff.; Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century, 191–234; Arnould, Le Manuel des péchés, 1–59.

15. The four stages enumerated on the leaves in the “Long Charter” are somewhat unusual: open confession, contrition, determination not to repeat sin, and fear of God. Yet, as Chaucer’s Parson demonstrates, the sacrament requires some form of “satisfaction” that makes amends for or repairs the offense: “Now shaltow understande what is bihovely and necessarie to verray parfit Penitence. And this stant on three thynges: Contricioun of Herte, Confessioun of Mouth, and Satisfaccioun” (ParsT, 106–7). Piers Plowman highlights satisfaction with particular insistence by emphatic treatment of Redde quod debes, “pay what you owe” (B.19.187, 259, 390; C.6.315, 21.187, 193, 259, 390). Cf. Rom. 13:7–8: “Render therefore to all men their dues. Tribute, to whom tribute is due: custom, to whom custom: fear, to whom fear: honour, to whom honour. / Owe no man any thing, but to love one another. For he that loveth his neighbour, hath fulfilled the law”. Although it seems strange that the “Long Charter” does not include satisfaction as one of the stages, the text as we have it may be corrupt here: the A-text manuscripts show considerable variations among these lines. The fourth leaf as it stands in the A-text also appears to have confused the B-reviser, who regularizes it to substitute penance for fear of God, e.g. (B-text, l. 206) Camb. Ff.2.38 (Spalding’s MS “B” of the B-text): “The fourþe do þy penaunce mekely þerto.” Whether A.124 is corrupt or not, it is difficult to explain the true love passage as anything but a poetic transformation of instructional materials on penance, a transformation that adds the singularly appropriate exhortation to seek the true-love in Christ’s wounds. Unless otherwise noted, quotations from the Charters of Christ are from Spalding, The Middle English Charters of Christ (hereafter “Spalding”). Except where noted, “Long Charter” quotations from the A-text are from BL Add. 11307 as printed by Spalding, 18–42, confirmed or corrected by reference to the manuscript itself.

For the possibility that the original A-text of the “Long Charter” was written by someone with close ties to the preaching guides and penitential manuals associated with the thirteenth-century instructional programs, see Cervone, “Love’s Leap,” 76–86. A key issue is the combination of charter and clothing imagery in devotional poems such as Franciscan William Herebert’s early fourteenth-century lyric Þou wommon boute uere (“You, woman without equal”). As C. Meier-Ewert has shown, Þou wommon boute uere draws on imagery from two Anglo-Norman poems attributed to another Franciscan, Nicole Bozon (Le mel de ceel, for Christ’s flesh as garment, and Douce dame pie mere, for the charter); see Meier-Ewert, “The Anglo-Norman Origin of Thou Wommon Boute Uere,” 424–28.

Douce dame pie mere is embedded in a prayer to the Virgin in Book IX of the Manuel des Pechiez; that prayer is missing from only two of the twenty-five extant manuscripts, all of which were written out between 1275 and 1325 and circulated widely throughout England, from Durham to the Isle of Wight; see Sullivan, “Readers of the Manuel des Péchés,” 233, 241–42. Although the Manuel des Pechiez was translated into Middle English by Robert Mannyng and enjoyed wide circulation in England as Handlyng Synne, Mannyng did not translate Book IX. On the complicated textual history of the Manuel de Pechiez, its authorship, and audience, see also Sullivan, “A Brief Textual History of the Manuel des Péchés”; Sullivan, “The Author of the Manuel des Péchés”; Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background; Legge, Anglo-Norman in the Cloisters; Laird, “Character and Growth of the Manuel des Pechiez”; Arnould, Le Manuel des péchés; Allen, “The Mystical Lyrics of the Manuel des Pechiez”

16. When Julian of Norwich describes Christ’s wound as “large enow [enough] for al mankynd that shal be save to resten in pece and in love,” she prefaces the image with a characterization of the wound as “a faire delectabil place” (24.6), a direct translation of locus amoenus; she does not, however, press the garden or meadow imagery, as does the “Long Charter” poet.

17. In 1814, William Bateman published the medieval parchment roll in codex form; from this, we can infer the text and, perhaps, some illustrations that may have accompanied the original roll (some pictorial aspects of Bateman’s edition are clearly nineteenth century in origin). The text (only) is reprinted by Axon, “The Symbolism of the ‘Five Wounds of Christ’,” 71–75. Axon’s version contains several errors of transcription even beyond those that can be attributed to Bateman, who attempted to reproduce his original’s abbreviations but evidently overlooked quite a few; Bateman occasionally also appears to have misread the Middle English. Nevertheless we are extremely fortunate to have his limited edition of only forty copies, notable in and of itself as an interesting later representation of a medieval manuscript roll reformatted as a printed codex. See Billyng, The Five Wounds of Christ.

18. Kail, Twenty-Six Political and Other Poems, 73–79; also printed in Barr, ed., The Digby Poems, 241–51. “Loue that god loueth” and the “Long Charter” share not only the enumeration of the leaves of the true-love but also the charter trope; their treatment, however, differs sharply.

19. My thinking on social personhood has been influenced by Fowler, Literary Character.

20. The Jesse Tree depicts the genealogy of Christ visually; the imagery usually entails a recumbent Jesse with the tree growing from his body; various ancestors of Christ are shown on appropriate branches, with the Virgin and Child at the top. As Gertrud Schiller notes, “the Tree of Jesse, [is] itself a symbol of God’s Incarnation.” Iconography of Christian Art, 1:20.

21. Greene, The Early English Carols, no. 175a.

22. Thomas D. Hill has convincingly argued that while these events may at first suggest the Five Joys of Mary, the more probable scheme is the leaps of Christ. “‘Mary, the Rose-Bush’ and the Leaps of Christ.” On the leaps, see Chapter 3.

23. Often Jesus also is called a rose. Where Mary is a rose, Jesus may be a lily, and vice versa, as, for example, in this late fifteenth-century example, “A roose hath borne a lilly white, / The whiche floure is moost pure and bright” (Greene, The Early English Carols, no. 174, ll. 11–14):

As the sonne beame goth thurgh the glas	goes through
Thurgh this roose that lilly did pas	pass
To save mankynde, as his wille was,
The whiche floure is moost pure and bright.

24. “Maiden Mary and her Fleur de Lys,” in Brown, Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century, no. 112. Because the editorial punctuation is occasionally misleading, I reproduce the pointing from The Vernon Manuscript: A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Eng. poet. a. 1.

25. The “segge” appears to be God the Father, or perhaps the Trinity.

26. In lines 19 and 20, does the poet mean, “the most praiseworthy blossom had to have been one of you two, because you both were so beautiful that neither was the more excellent and both were more excellent than any other lily flower”? Or, “was truly that [familial relationship] between you two”? Or, perhaps, “was truly that [which] was [brought about] between the two of you,” i.e., salvation?

27. Elizabeth Salter has pointed out a visual image that appears to illustrate such a concept, “a single manuscript painting [that] may elucidate some of the processes which went to the making of [Langland’s] famous metaphor of love as the ‘plant of peace’.” This illumination, in a fifteenth-century prayerbook made for the Talbot-Beauchamp family, depicts both Virgin and Child within the large bell of an open lily flower springing from a stalk; two closed blossoms spring from either side of the stalk, lower down. Salter, “Piers Plowman and the Visual Arts,” 264 and plate 8.

28. Among the relevant definitions are these, from the MED: s.v. “sect(e)”:

1. (a) A class of people or things, sort, kind; (b) a species, race; (c) a bodily form, likeness; in oure ~, in our likeness, in human flesh; (d) those of a certain way of thinking or acting, esp. as parties in a controversy or lawsuit . . . 2. . . . (b) a group within an organized religious body which adheres to a special set of doctrines and practices, a branch of a religious faith; (c) a religious order within the Christian church; the body of members of such an order; a body of clerics, as clerks, canons, etc.; also, one of the broader categories of believers within the Christian church, as the clergy, laity, etc. . . . 3. (a) A body of followers, a train, retinue; a faction, party . . .

s.v. “sute”:

1a. (a) A set of garments or liturgical vestments meant to be worn together, an ensemble; a livery . . . (b) a set of matching garments worn by different persons; a matching livery, matching garb . . . (e)fig. the human flesh; in oure ~, in the flesh. . . . 2. (a) A band of followers; a retinue, company . . . 3. (a) Pursuit, chase . . . 6a. Law. (a) A lawsuit; a legal action undertaken to redress a wrong . . .

29. See pp. 51–54, above.

30. The prayer comes relatively early in the narrative. The poem, a dream vision, begins with a prologue in which the dreamer perceives the corrupt state of the world, in which the whole range of humanity is represented in the “field full of folk,” where self-interest seems to drive most actions. The same corruption is seen in civic government at Westminster and in ecclesiastical government. Lady Holy Church appears, then explains what the dreamer is seeing and answers his question, how can he save his soul? Her answer expands on the nature of charity, with specific reference to governance of an individual, the monarchy, and the Church. The dreamer next perceives a complicated allegorical vision of corruption exemplified by Meed the Maid, whose character and lineage are debated before the king. The king’s advisors, Conscience and Reason, are unable to counsel him in a way that will resolve the dispute. The king calls for reform, but governmental reform is not enough. Reason admonishes the folk to repent their sins and search for Truth. The Seven Deadly Sins are the first to confess. Then Repentance calls on the people to kneel, and speaks the prayer that is the passage in question here. In C, Verbum caro factum est also occurs in the grammatical analogy of passus 3.

31. Among the many useful critical treatments of poverty in Piers Plowman are Crassons, The Claims of Poverty; Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 99–156; Scott, Piers Plowman and the Poor; Kim, “Hunger, Need, and the Politics of Poverty”; Shepherd, “Poverty in Piers Plowman”; Pearsall, “Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman”; Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature; Aers, “Piers Plowman and Problems in the Perception of Poverty”; Adams, “The Nature of Need in ‘Piers Plowman’ XX.”

32. Critics have disagreed over whether to take Need’s argument at face value or to consider his opinion potentially specious, given that he represents neediness itself. The range of critical positions is examined most recently by Barney, The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, 5:187–97. See also Galloway, “The Economy of Need in Late Medieval English Literature”; Green, “‘Nede ne hath no lawe’”; Zeeman, Piers Plowman and the Medieval Discourse of Desire, 276–83; Mann, “The Nature of Need Revisited”; Hewett-Smith, “‘Nede ne hath no lawe’”; Adams, “The Nature of Need.”

33. Russell and Kane choose “seute” for “secte”: “seute] YP²D²UDTH²ChRQZGN; altered to secte another hand X; secte PEVAF; assent W.” The B-text has “sute” in all manuscripts.

34. For “secte” Russell and Kane report: “secte] sexte corrected H2; sette YCh; sute W.” For the B-text, Kane and Donaldson record only one variant: “secte] sewte is F.”

35. The key to generating such diffusion appears to lie in pronouns that surface without a direct antecedent. This process is similar to the way linguistic dilations take on a certain agency and then resubsume themselves in the text; see below, pp. 80–84 and especially 117–23.

36. E.g., Mann, “Power of the Alphabet,” 44; Baird, “Secte and Suit Again,” 117–19; and Russell and Kane (see n. 34, above). But see Schmidt, ed., Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition, 2:542 (hereafter “Schmidt”).

37. “Oh happy fault, oh necessary sin of Adam.”

38. John 14:10–11: “I am in the Father, and the Father in me”; John 14:9: “he that seeth me seeth the Father also.”

39. Gen. 1:26: “Let us make man to our image and likeness.”

40. 1 John 4:16: “he that abideth in charity, abideth in God, and God in him.”

41. Eph. 4:8, quoting Ps. 67:19: “[Ascending on high], he led captivity captive.”

42. Matt. 9:13: “I am not come to call the just, but sinners [to repentance].”

43. My thanks to Carl Schmidt for discussing this line with me.

44. See also the entries for “secte” (140–41) and “sute” (150) in Alford, Piers Plowman: A Glossary of Legal Diction. Recall, too, that “secte” is importantly implicated in Langland’s use of “figuratively” (see p. 29, above).

45. On “love deed,” see pp. 86–91, below.

46. For the Pauline body, see pp. 6–7, above. For indwelling in 1 John, see p. 219, n. 3, and p. 233, n. 40.

47. Unlike Piers Plowman, Julian’s A Revelation (Long Text) survives in only two complete manuscripts, neither from the Middle Ages. Her earlier work, A Vision (Short Text), is extant in only one manuscript, which is medieval; where A Vision and A Revelation coincide, A Vision can provide valuable clues to the text. Both full manuscripts of A Revelation are seventeenth-century copies: British Library MS Sloane 2499 (Sloane) and Paris Bibliothèque Nationale MS Fonds Anglais 40 (Paris). An excerpted version is in the fifteenth-century Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4 (Westminster). On the textual tradition and for descriptions of these manuscripts, see Watson and Jenkins, 10–12, 24–49; Glasscoe, “Visions and Revisions”; Colledge and Walsh, 1:1–33.

48. Glasscoe, 5.6–10, p. 5 (underlining and braces mine).

49. Colledge and Walsh, 5.3–8, p. 299 (underlining mine).

50. Watson, Jenkins, and Kempster, in Watson and Jenkins, 419 (underlining mine).

51. Amy Appleford has linked the phrase “wrappeth vs and wyndeth vs” with medieval death culture by noting that Julian’s language here is quite similar to language from the Ordo ad visitandum infirmum and Visitation of the Sick, wherein being wrapped in a cloth implies enclosure in a burial shroud; in Julian’s usage, she notes, the language further suggests swaddling clothes. Appleford, “The ‘Comene Course of Prayers’,” 203–4.

52. See, further, Chapter 1, pp. 47–50.

53. Compare Charles d’Orléans’s transformation of the noun, shirt, into a verb, shirten, to express his emotional state by an intimate comparison with his own skin (The English Poems, 17):

Madame a trouthe not wot y what too say	in truth I know not what
Nor bi what ende that y shulde first bigynne	by
The wofulle lijf vnto yow to biwray	life
Which shertith me more nerre than doth my skyn (ballade 10, ll. 491–94)	shirts; near

54. E.g: “And our substance is our fader, God almyty, and our substance is our moder, God al wisdamm, and our substance is in our lord the Holy Gost, God al goodnes; for our substance is hole [whole] in ilke [each] person of the Trinite, which is on [one] God. And our sensualite is only in the second person, Crist Iesus, in whom is the Fader and the Holy Gost . . .” (58.61–66).

55. By comparison, when the Cloud-author and Hilton take up the theological possibilities of skin-as-cloth, they have a different end in mind. In his Book of Prive Counseling, for instance, the Cloud-author also describes being clothed in divine embrace, in this case as a desirable outcome of the work of contemplation:

For þof al I bid þee in þe biginnyng, bicause of þi boistouste [earthy nature] & þi goostly rudenes [spiritual lack of skill], lappe [swaddle] & cloþe þe felyng of þi God in þe felyng of þiself, 3it schalt þou after whan þou arte maad by contynowaunce [perseverance] more slei3 [adept] in clennes of spirit, nakyn, spoyle [strip] & vtterly vncloþe þiself of al maner of felyng of þiself, þat þou be able to be cloþid wiþ þe gracyous felyng of God self.

& þis is þe trewe condicion of a parfite louer, only & vtterly to spoyle hymself of himself for þat þing þat he louiþ, & not admit ne suffre to be cloþed bot only in þat þing þat he louiþ, & þat not only for a tyme, bot eendlesly to be vmbilappid þerin, in ful & fynal for3etyng of hymself. Þis is þe werk of loue þat none may knowe bot he þat feliþ it. (The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Hodgson, 89, ll. 8–19)

Whereas Julian emphasizes permanence, with no evident beginning or ending to the divine embrace, the Cloud-author describes a progression in the perfection of the soul, a two-layered “felyng of þi God” and “felyng of þiself,” the latter of which must be stripped away before the former can be put on. Hilton, too, draws on the Pauline texts that require Christians to “[strip] yourselves of the old man with his deeds, / And [put] on the new, him who is renewed unto knowledge, according to the image of him that created him” (Col. 3:9–10; Rom. 13:14: “put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ”):

And clothe yow in a newe man, that is schapen aftir God in rightwisenesse, holinesse, and soothfastnesse. . . . Thus seith Seynt Poul: Exspoliantes veterem hominem cum actibus suis; induite novum, qui renovatur in agnicione dei, secundum ymaginem eius qui creavit eum (Col. 3:9–10). Spoile yoursilf of the oolde man with alle his deedis; that is, casteth fro yow the love of the world with alle wordli maneris. And clothe you in a newe man; that is, ye schullen be renewed in the knowynge of God aftir the liknesse of hym that made yow. (2.31.2131–40)

While Julian also connects knowledge of one’s soul with knowledge of God, her lack of emphasis on stages of knowing, or progression, is characteristic of her positive approach to a God who “er that he mad us he lovid us” (53.37–38). She reverses the Cloud-author’s priorities, making God the means of knowing the soul: “God is nerer to us than our owen soule; for he is ground in whom our soule stondith and he is mene that kepith the substance and the sensualite to God [P and W: togeder] so that thai shall never departyn; for our soule sittith in God in very rest and our soule stondith in God in very strength and our soule is kindly rotid in God in endles love. And therfore if we wil have knowlidge of our soule and comenyng and daliance therwith, it behovith to sekyn into our lord God in whom it is inclosid” (56.14–21). See also Baker,Julian of Norwich’s Showings, 109.

56. Liber sententiarum ac dictorum memorabilium, PL 210:233c–234b; translation mine.

57. See also 23.48–49: “he browte us up into hevyn and made us for to be his corone and endles blisse.”

58. The “medlur” of Christ’s transformed human flesh is additionally linked to humanity by its association with the Creation, when God “tooke the slyppe of erth, which is a matter medlid and gaderid of all bodily things, and therof he made mannys bodye” (53.45–46). In chapter sixty, Julian further describes Christ’s incarnate body as a garment suitable for the work of mothering:

for he wold al holy become our moder in althyng, he toke the ground of his werke full low and ful myldely in the maydens womb. . . . in this low place he raysid him and dyte [dressed] him ful redy in our pore flesh, himselfe to don the service and the office of moderhede in allthyng. The moders service is nerest, redyest and sekirest, for it is most of trueth. This office ne myte, ne couthe, ne never non don to the full but he alone. (60.10–20)

Her implication is that Christ’s mothering could only be done in the flesh, in mother’s clothes.

59. “[T]he langor and desire” recalls the imagery from the Song of Songs I examined in considering the Truelove tradition: quia amore langueo [because I languish for love] (Cant. 2:5, 5:8).

60. He reigns in the passage 81.13–14. For the theological background to the soul as city, see Riehle, Middle English Mystics, 131–32.

61. For kingship, see, e.g., 7.36; 14.23; 20.9; 21.34; 50.40. The theme of kingship holds an important place in the Advent liturgy. During the Advent season, the Church expectantly awaits the coming of the savior (this season being analogous to Mary’s pregnancy). On kingship in some thirteenth-century sermons for Advent, see O’Carroll, A Thirteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook, 261–71; J. Leclercq, L’Idée de la royauté du Christ.

62. Cf. Skeat: “Metropolitanus was formerly commonly used as synonymous with archiepiscopus . . . . It here seems to mean ‘chief bishop of all the world’; Jerusalem being the original Christian metropolis.” The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman in Three Parallel Texts together with Richard the Redeless, 2:233, note to C.18.267 (in Russell and Kane, this is C.17.267). The passage occurs in the B-text (15.516) only in witnesses R and F.

63. As Haimo of Auxerre explains (“In Zachariam Prophetam,” in Enarratio in Duodecim Prophetas Minores, PL 117:230a–d, translation mine; Migne incorrectly attributes this work to Haymo of Halberstadt):

By mitre, that is, the diadem of a priest, is understood the dignity of the priesthood, i.e., that with the filth of sins removed he should be granted a pure priesthood. Mystically Jesus is that high priest to whom it is said, “You are a priest forever” (Psal. 109.4). . . . He who stands before the angel of the Lord is himself mediator between God and men, God and man Christ. . . . In Christ are the different substances [diversae substantiae] God and man in one person. He was dressed in soiled garments, because he carried our sins. . . . These soiled garments were removed from him, when he blotted out our sins. . . . The clean mitre on his head signifies the splendor of his divine majesty. “The head of Christ in fact is God” (I Cor. 11.3). He himself therefore is God, he himself is also man; and by the clothes is understood humanity, by the mitre the brightness of divine majesty. . . . Christ and the Church are head and members.

64. Isidore of Seville, De Ecclesiasticis Officiis (2.4), 55–56, translation mine.

65. This connection was also a common one, e.g., Clement of Alexandria: “The crown the Lord wore is a figure of ourselves who were once barren, but now encircle him as a garland through His Church, of which He is the head.” Christ the Educator, 2.8.73, 156. See also H. Leclercq, “Tonsure”; Trichet, La Tonsure, 150–53.

66. In her chapter seventeen, with its well-known passage noting her concern that the skin on the very top of Christ’s head, above the crown of thorns, would sag so much from its weight that it could fall off painfully, she describes Christ as “hangyng up in the eyr [air] as men hang a cloth to drye” (17.38–39). In chapter twenty-eight she understands that “Gods servants, holy church, shal be shakyn in sorows and anguis [anguish] and tribulation in this world as men shakyn a cloth in the wynde” (28.8–10). Both images depend for their effect in part on our knowledge of the flexibility and weight of cloth: that when cloth is wet and sags the fibers pull against each other but do not release, and that a strong wind snaps a cloth viciously because of the cloth’s structural integrity. Once again, she uses the same concrete prompt (cloth) for an individual (Christ) and a collective (Christ’s body, the Church).

67. Margaret Ann Palliser calls “we be his corone” one of Julian’s “most original insights.” She does not, however, note the symmetry of “we be his corone” and “he is our clotheing,” confining her remarks to the “theology of oneing” only. Palliser, Christ, Our Mother, 138.

68. While I note that Jill Mann uses “linguistic dilation” fleetingly in Langland and Allegory in discussing the same rhetorical phenomenon I describe here, she does not mean the technical sense I have described, and she does not take up the term for systematic use. See further n. 72, below.

69. Here “made sensual” seems to mean “begin to perceive by means of sensation,” directly linking “sensuality” with a physical body.

70. As Colledge and Walsh point out (2:525, n. to l. 139): “the personification here may reflect some of the literature dealing with the debate of the ‘Four Daughters of God’.”

71. In this particular instance, Julian may have in mind God’s immanence rather than the more mundanely human action of dwelling, or the less particularized action of remaining.

72. Jill Mann discusses other critics’ theorizing about this phenomenon in Langland and Allegory (14–15; 26, n. 16):

Richard Glasser similarly distinguishes what he calls the “abstractum agens” in such phrases as “fear gripped me,” “grief overcame me,” “folly led me astray” from allegory proper; it is not until such abstractions become the actors in an autonomously developing narrative that we can speak of allegory. But the strength of Langland’s allegory is precisely that he realises the allegorical potential of these simple linguistic formulae. His writing is full of “abstracta agentia” which can at any moment turn into large-scale personifications, stepping forward to take a role in the allegorical drama.

Marc-René Jung notes a similar (though less vividly realised) “flottement général entre l’abstractum agens, la personnification et l’adjectif nominal” in the Miserere of the Reclus de Moilliens (Etudes sur le poème allégorique en France au moyen âge (Bern, 1971), 265. Lavinia Griffiths uses Inge Crosman’s term “brief conceits” for these short-term transformations of abstracta agentia into personifications. (Personification, 12)

73. E.g., keeping: “and to this our lord answerid: ‘I kepe the ful sekirly’” (37.10–11), “in which endless love we be led and kept of God and never shall be lost” (53.52–53), “for he made us and kepith us in him” (54.23); drawing: “in this stondyth the poynt of the gostly thrist, which is lestyng in hym as long as we be in nede, us drawing up to his blis” (31.50–52), “we folowen hym and he drawith us into hym be love” (43.38), “he is with us in hevyn, very man in his owne person us updrawand” (52.39); working: “for his werkyng is privy, and he wil be perceivid” (10.97–98), “he toke the ground of his werke full low and ful myldely in the maydens womb” (60.11–12), “for he in al this werkyng usith the office of a kinde nurse” (61.71–72). Morton Bloomfield similarly locates the personifying force for count-nouns in the governing verb (“Personification-Metaphors”).

74. For the theory underlying “literal-first,” see pp. 34–36, above.

75. Clark and Gerrig, “Understanding Old Words,” 592.

76. Ibid. Even the OED does not offer these culinary senses alongside its definition of the crustacean itself. To these examples, I would add two from personal experience. When I was traveling by train from Albany to Erie, Pennsylvania, the conductors were announcing which cars passengers bound for specific destinations should choose, because some cars were being uncoupled partway along. Most passengers were going to larger cities (Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester); no one mentioned Erie. When I asked the conductor which car I should use, she shouted down the line to the head conductor, “Where are we putting the E-ries?,” an example of sense creation all three of us immediately understood [passengers bound for Erie], although her intonation and the similar sound of another word (eerie) made poor passenger me, when described this way, sound particularly undesirable. In another case, my sister found that the phone system at work kept hanging up instead of allowing her to leave messages for colleagues. The problem, tech support told her, was the pitch of her voice: “You’re a zero,” they said [someone whose voice sounds like the digital tone indicating zero]. In another context, she might have thought they were rudely calling her a loser [someone worth only zero] or a failure [a student who scored a zero, opposed, for instance, to a “ninety” or an “eighty-eight”].

77. Ibid.

78. “Your interpretation is built entirely around elements from your knowledge of Napoleon’s life. These elements are not part of the designation of Napoleon, regardless which theory of proper names one accepts. You are dealing with elements in your biography of Napoleon, not entries in your mental lexicon. The process is one of sense creation without sense selection” (ibid.).

79. As Clark and Gerrig note, the fact that Napoleon was not posing for a photograph but rather in a painting does not impede participants’ ready association of his pose in the painting with a pose for the camera.

Chapter 3. Agency: When Christ as “Doer” Is Also the “Love Deed”

1. Watson, “Conceptions of the Word,” 101.

2. Current critical nomenclature for the Charters tradition is misleading. Because scholars speak of the “Long Charter of Christ” and the “Short Charter of Christ,” the “Charter of Christ” sounds like a single poem, revised over time, in short and long versions. In fact, the Charters exist in six forms, one with three successive sub-forms; in three languages (Latin, English, and Irish); in prose and in verse; and are attested in at least seventy-four manuscripts. Manuscript contexts vary widely, from theological to historical, medicinal, diplomatic, devotional, or literary, and some witnesses incorporate Latin mottoes, visual elements, or music. Though all are commonly referred to as “the Charter of Christ,” each is a distinct literary work: the so-called “Short Charter” is not an abridged “Long Charter,” nor are the long and short Latin versions translations of the English or vice versa.

The corpus of the Charters tradition was defined by Spalding, whose Middle English Charters of Christ remains the standard text. English language witnesses, including those unknown to Spalding, are listed in Boffey and Edwards, A New Index of Middle English Verse within index numbers 4184 (“Short Charter”), 1828 (“Kent Charter”), 1718 (“Long Charter,” A-text), 4154 (“Long Charter,” B-text), and 1174 (“Long Charter,” C-text). Boffey and Edwards include witnesses not previously listed for index numbers 4184 and 4154 in Brown and Robbins, The Index of Middle English Verse and Robbins and Cutler, Supplement to the Index of Middle English Verse. However, they also replicate an error from IMEV and its Supplement, whereby the “Short Charter” entry correctly lists BL Stowe 620 but incorrectly additionally lists it as BL Sloane 620. Laura Ashe notes that IMEV incorrectly indicates that Cambridge University Library Add. 6686 contains both the “Long Charter” and the “Short Charter”; she argues that the text is “a two-part continuation of the ‘Short Charter’ (previously identified as separate poems, IMEV 3745 and 1740), making up a poem of ninety-six lines divided into three parts by Latin headings.” Ashe argues that this poem, attested only in this manuscript, is worth considering in its own right (this version was unknown to Spalding). Ashe, “The ‘Short Charter of Christ’,” 37.

Spalding notes one Irish translation of the “Long Charter” B-text; two unknown to her are Dublin, King’s Inns 10, fol. 26r–28r, and Dublin, Royal Irish Academy 3 B 22, pp. 33–38; see Mac Niocaill, “Carta Humani Generis” and Breeze, “The Charter of Christ in Medieval English, Welsh and Irish”; Mac Niocaill includes an edition of the Irish text and its English exemplar, BL Harl. 2382. Julian Luxford notes a sculpted figure of Christ (c. 1500–1520) he believes to be “Christ as the Man of Sorrows, holding the Charter of Human Redemption,” making his identification on the basis that “there is no other context available for a standing figure of Christ holding a sealed document”: “More on the Sculptural Iconography of the West Front of Bath Abbey,” 303, fig. 2; 307. Emily Steiner’s careful and illuminating discussion of the Charters is the most extensive to date: Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature, esp. 193–228. See also Ashe, “The ‘Short Charter’”; Keen, The Charters of Christ and Piers Plowman; Green, A Crisis of Truth, 261–63, 276–77; Rubin, Corpus Christi, 306–8.

3. The B- and C-texts differ from the earlier A-text chiefly by accretions of doctrinal or devotional material, particularly regarding the Eucharist and the Marian planctus. They also demonstrate an increasing degeneration of the twinned lordship metaphors, as the legal and theological underpinnings are less carefully worded or drop away.

4. The Short Charters lack the narrative framework telling about Christ’s life.

5. While the grant is the same in all versions of the Charters of Christ, the required rent differs; in the A-text (and elsewhere) it is framed in terms of penance, while in other cases Christ asks for love of neighbor and self, etc.

6. Such affective appeal is particularly strong in writings derived from the Franciscan Meditationes Vitae Christi, e.g.: “oure blessed fadir of heuene spared not his owen sone but suffrede hym to be streyned on the harde cros, moore dispitously & greuously þan euer was schepys skyn streyned on the wall or vp-on þe parchemyn-makeris harowe a3ens þ sonne to drye,” Meditation of the Five Wounds of Christ, in Horstman, ed., Yorkshire Writers, 2:440; “he was thus sprede o-brode one þe crosse more straite þan any parchemyne-skyne es sprede one þe harowe,” The Privity of the Passion [ME version of chapters 74–92 of the Meditationes Vitae Christi; however, the parchment reference is not in the Latin original (Spalding, xlvi)], in Yorkshire Writers, 1:206; “þi bodi is streyned as a parchemyn-skyn upon þe harowe,” Richard Rolle, “Meditations on the Passion (2),” in Yorkshire Writers 1:100; “Mawdleyn—‘Cum hithere, Ioseph, beholde & looke, / How many bludy letters beyn writen in þis buke, / Small margente her is.’ Iosephe—‘Ye, this parchement is strichit owt of syse. / O derest lorde! in how paynfull wise / Haue ye tholit this!’,” “Christ’s Burial,” in Furnivall, ed., The Digby Plays, ll. 271–76, also printed in Baker, Murphy, and Hall, eds., The Late Medieval Religious Plays, 149.

7. Stephen Nichols explains this doubled quality of the active sufferance of Christ’s passion particularly well in his discussion of the late tenth-century Clermont-Ferrand La Passion du Christ, a macaronic Franco-Provençal passion poem:

“Pax vobis sit,” dis a trestoz;

“eu soi Jhesus qui passus soi:

vedez mas mans, vedez mos peds,

vedez mo laz, qu’i fui plagaz.”

“Peace be with you,” he said to all, “I am Jesus who suffered: look at my hands, look at my feet, look at my side which was wounded.”

. . .

Passus supplies the key to understanding the concept of cruciform language as text production. From patior, “to suffer, endure,”passus also bears the connotation of “consent” or “acquiescence” or “to be in a state of mind.” In short,passus connotes intentionality in the act of suffering, voluntary commitment to this state. . . . But passus was also an adjective formed from the past participle of pando, pandere, with the sense “stretch out, reveal, lay open,” and having the complementary meaning, “spread out to dry.” For a culture in which writing was done on skin that had been stretched out to dry, to which marks would then be added to reveal truth, the aptness of Christ’s metaphor would have been immediately apparent. The text has him say, in effect, that he acquiesced in the suffering which caused his skin to be stretched out on the cross to reveal him as the Messiah—just as he had predicted in the Conversation with Nicodemus—thereby signing himself as a text written in the flesh in which the Passion could be read and reread. (Nichols, Romanesque Signs, 121–22)

The Clermont-Ferrand Passion is printed by Gaston Paris as “La Passion du Christ”; this stanza (109) occurs on 312.

Julian of Norwich similarly makes use of the painful image of stretching and drying human skin when she moves from the image of cloth drying in the open air (“[he was] hangyng up in the eyr as men hang a cloth to drye,” 17.38–39) and Christ’s word from the cross, “sitio,” “I thirst” (John 19:28):

Blodeleshede and peyne dryden within and blowyng of wynde and cold commyng fro withouten metten togeder in the swete body of Criste. And these iiii, tweyn withouten, and tweyn within, dryden the fleshe of Criste be process of tyme. And thow this peyne was bitter and sharpe, it was full longe lestyng, as to my sighte, and peynfully dreyden up all the lively spirits of Crists fleshe. Thus I saw the swete fleshe dey, in semyng be party after party, dryande with mervelous peynys. And as longe as any spirit had life in Crists fleshe, so longe sufferid he peyne. This longe pynyng semyd to me as if he had bene seven night ded, deyand, at the poynt of out passing away, sufferand the last peyne. . . . And methowte the deyeng of Crists flesh was the most peyne, and the last, of his passion. . . . And in this deyng [Paris: drying] was browte to my mynde the words of Criste: “I threst”; for I saw in Criste a doble threst: one bodely, another gostly . . . (A Revelation, 16.18–17.6)

The horror of what Julian sees turns, in her mind, to a hopeful comprehension: she associates the drying of the flesh (a bodily thirst) with Christ’s longing to save humanity (a spiritual thirst); the two coexist in one person, and the promise of the second mitigates the pain of the first. Christ’s thirst, as she sees it, is an active desire enabled by the passivity of sufferance. In the “Long Charter,” “I thirst” becomes a request for “a loue drynk” (167), imagistically and conceptually complementary to Julian’s use of sitio.

8. The plot action indicates that “And streyte y-streyned vpon þe rod” (78) means, strictly speaking, “and pulled taut, flattened, upon the cross” (MED, s.v. “streinen” [v.1, 2c]: “to stretch (Christ on the cross); stretch (Christ’s body) on the cross”). The verb streinen, however, can also carry the sense of “to seize (property) in order to enforce an obligation,” something close to our modern distrain but in a particularized sense pertaining to land tenure (MED, s.v. “streinen” [v.2, 2b–c]).

9. MS: “was.”

10. Lam. 1:12: “O all ye that pass by the way, attend, [and see if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow: for he hath made a vintage of me, as the Lord spoke in the day of his fierce anger].” On the use of this verse in the tradition of the “complaint of Christ” and the liturgy of Holy Week, see Gray, Themes and Images, 141; Woolf, The English Religious Lyric, 36. On this line in the context of the “Long Charter,” see Chapter 4, p. 151.

11. Or, “in order to show all of you my love deed” (or, perhaps, both).

12. The spelling in BL Add. 11307 connects this “rede” with the “rede” of two lines back, the color of Christ’s bloody wounds, although the rhyme scheme makes it clear that in line 92 “rede” must be the infinitive of reden (“to read”), not the color red: “rede” must rhyme with “dede” [in Present Day English, “deed”]. Note for comparison “rad,” not “rede,” in lines 227 and 228: “Sore may þeyer ben a drad / Whan þis chartre shal ben rad.” It is entirely possible, of course, that the scribe of BL Add. 11307 mistakenly copied “rede” from line 90 when he came to line 92, adjusting the verb to match.

13. “Four leued gras” is another name for the plant, the true-love. I discussed this part of the charter in Chapter 2, pp. 62–64, q.v.

14. Ps. 21:15: “My heart is become like wax melting [in the midst of my bowels].”

15. A. V. C. Schmidt has written compellingly about Langland’s imagery of Christ’s “herte-blod” that connects B.1.164–65 with B.15.515–17 and B.18.85–86, well worth thinking about alongside the “cor meum” in the “Long Charter”: “The Sacramental Significance of Blood in Piers Plowman,” 218–20.

16. For this technique with regard to “O vos omnes,” see pp. 151–52, below.

17. Cf. Piers Plowman B.14.186–95 (not in C).

18. The “Long Charter” poet’s incorporation of the sacrament of the Eucharist into his charter metaphor is worth considering alongside Walter Hilton’s analogy likening the sacrament of penance to the security a charter gives one who has committed an offense against the king:

For yif a man had forfeted his lif agens a kynge of this erthe, it were not inow to hym as ful sikernesse [security] for to have oonli forgyvenesse of the kynge, but yif he have a chartre, the whiche mai be his tokene and his warant agens alle othere men. Right so mai it be seid goostli, yif a man have forfeted agens the kyng of hevene his lif thorugh deedli synne, it is not ynow to hym to ful sikirnesse for to have forgyvenesse of God oonli bi contricion atwix God and hym, but yif he have a chartre maad bi Holi Chirche, yif he may come therto. And that is the sacrament of penaunce, the whiche is his chartre and his tokene of forgevenesse. For sith [since] he forfeteth bothe agens God and Holi Chirche, it is skilful [reasonable] that he have forgevenesse for that oon and a warant for that othir. And this is a skile [reason] whi that confession is nedeful. (Scale, 2.7.276–85)

On the “Long Charter” poet’s interest in original sin as treason—an offense against the king—see p. 270, n. 13, below.

19. Spalding, xciv.

20. Hughes, “ ‘The Feffement That Fals Hath Ymaked’,” 132, n. 24.

21. Phillips, “The Quatrefoil of Love” 257.

22. Another verse charter not embedded in a larger work is attributed to King Æthelstan; it exists in two forms, IMEV 3300 (to St. John of Beverley; “Rimed Charter Called Æthelstán’s”) and IMEV 4183 (to the Abbey of Ripon; “King Athelstan’s Charter”)..

23. The poem is engraved on twelve enameled copper plates tacked to the eastern tower of the outer gatehouse. An additional copper plate reproduces the Cobham seal displayed as if affixed to the “legal document” (the poem) by a striped cord. John, third lord Cobham, had the castle crenellated in 1381; it is situated in Kent. The poem was probably commissioned after the rising in June of that year, most likely between the September resurgence in Kent and the completion of the castle’s outer gatehouse in September 1382. For historical circumstances surrounding this poem’s singular presentation, its probable connection with the rising of 1381, and conclusions to be drawn from its unusual presentation, see Cervone, “John de Cobham and Cooling Castle’s Charter Poem.” The poem appears to represent one influential member of the elite’s response to the rising, a response that indicates he thought the rebels were capable of a sophisticated sort of reading. It might be the only surviving record contemporary to the rebellion that represents an elite assessment of the rebels’ reading ability.

24. Except where otherwise noted, I quote the “Short Charter” from BL Add. 37049 as printed by Spalding.

25. I approach these questions by way of the linguistic concept of deixis, the aspect of language that delineates a relationship between the speaking subject and a given word. Such relationships are defined along one of three axes: subjectivity, time, and space. These axes intersect at the origo, or the speaking subject itself; a deictic marker, or word encoding a deictic relationship, points out some distance from or closeness to the origo. The closest (proximal) relationships are expressed in the words I (proximal subjectivity), here (proximal space), and now (proximal time). More distant (distal) relationships include you (distal subjectivity), there (distal space), and then (distal time). Mary Galbraith gives a particularly helpful summary of deictic theory in “Deictic Shift Theory and the Poetics of Involvement in Narrative.”

26. For the full argument, see Cervone, “Cooling Castle’s Charter Poem,” esp. 913–16.

27. In a nonpoetical charter, the “I” of the document is the donor of the gift and the charter itself is written to stand in for the donor at a future time and place when the terms under which the gift was made may be challenged. As Bracton explains in his authoritative thirteenth-century legal compendium:

A gift in writing is made in these words, “Know all men, present and future, that I, such a one, have given, granted, and by this my present charter confirmed to such a one, for his homage and service, so much land with the appurtenances in such a vill etc.” as below. By saying, “I, such a one,” he indicates the donor and names him specifically in the gift. When he says, “I have given” he makes clear his intention that the thing given be made the property of the donee. . . . By saying “by my present charter I have confirmed,” he intimates that his will, by which the thing is transferred to the donee and which must be firm, be confirmed by the present charter authenticated by his seal, for to confirm is but to reaffirm what before was firm. (Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England, 2:111)

28. While some theorists would disagree with the idea that writing presumes an author, for our purposes we may at least perhaps agree that writing postulates a scribe. With today’s technology, we might be quick to anticipate the possibility that a monkey playing with a computer will eventually produce or reproduce a Hamlet. In the Middle Ages, when all writing was directly produced by hand through laborious effort over time, readers, many of them also writers, must have been even more keenly aware of a hand and mind behind each word on a page.

29. See also Steiner, “Medieval Documentary Poetics and Langland’s Authorial Identity,” 94–95:

Letters and documents were perhaps thought to represent their makers more convincingly than other texts because they were written in the first person singular or plural and seemed to impersonate the voice (and, by extension, the authority and even physical presence) of the author or actor (e.g., “Henry by the grace of God King of England sends greeting to the archbishops, bishops, etc.”). This effect is heightened by the transhistorical fiction of most legal documents in which the historical speaker continually exhorts present and future readers by means of the ever-present charter (e.g., “I have given, and conceded, and with this present charter confirmed . . . ”). . . . Yet legal documents are even more intimately connected to their makers than letters because they are necessarily autobiographical.

30. Spearing, “Prison, Writing, Absence,” 91–92; Camargo, The Middle English Verse Love Epistle, 53–65. Most medieval letters were written with the expectation that they would be read not only by the person to whom they were addressed but also by others. Even some modern letters are written with an eye toward a wider audience, perhaps even an audience that would include the yet unborn, and with self-conscious awareness of their legacy to posterity, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”; such letters may approach self-reflexivity even without directly acknowledging their textual situation. Medieval letters patent, which were circulated unsealed, retain this quality, as do proclamations, legal acts, and even prologues to written texts. On the distinction between letters close (sealed) and letters patent (open), see Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 90–91. In the Middle Ages, the two testaments of the Bible were allegorized as letters close (Old Testament) and letters patent (New Testament) or the Old and the New Covenant. Both Ancrene Wisse and Piers Plowman make effective allegorical use of letters patent as a vehicle for salvation. On the link between letters close and patent in Ancrene Wisse and Piers Plowman, see Steiner, Documentary Culture, 115–18, 158–63.

31. In BL Harley 116, for instance, the line corresponding to BL Add. 37049’s “My awne seal þerto I hynge” reads “Myselfe þerto forsoth j hynge [truly I hang]” (Spalding, 9). With the versions side by side, the line of thought that might have led to the Harley 116 reading seems evident. Even without the benefit of such a comparison, an observant reader could still work out that, according to Harley 116, Christ’s body hangs on the Cross just as a pendant seal hangs on a charter; the seal, however, is not actually mentioned in this manuscript until the following lines: “And for the more sikernesse / My herte wounded the sele it is.” The “Short Charter” does not explicitly equate Christ’s pendant body with a seal; in fact, the image of wounded heart as seal would seem to preclude such an identification, the seal being metonymically confined in this case to a specific body part rather than applied to the body as a whole.

32. The parts of a charter and their purposes are helpfully enumerated in Fleta, a compendium and explanation of English common law written around 1290, which follows Bracton on this issue but in a simplified form. According to Fleta, notification of intent marks the beginning of a charter: “Gifts are made by these words: ‘Know all men present and to come that I, so-and-so, have given and granted [Sciant presentes et futuri quod ego talis dedi et concessi] and by this my present charter have confirmed to so-and-so for his homage and service such-and-such an amount of land with appurtenances in N.” This is followed by a clause that can specify conditions of the gift, “To have and to hold [Habendam et tenendam].” Next the rent clause tells what the recipient must do for the charter to remain valid: “rendering therefor annually so much at such-and-such terms [reddendo inde annuatim tantum ad tales terminos].” The warrant clause, “and I and my heirs will warrant to so-and-so and his heirs [et ego et heredes mei warantizabimus tali et heredibus suis],” details the responsibilities of the donor. Finally, in testimony and proof of his act the donor will affix a sign by adding this clause or something similar: “In witness whereof I have affixed my seal to this writing [In cuius rei testimonium huic scripto sigillum meum apposui]. And to this witnesses ought to be summoned . . .” (Fleta, 3:28–31). The chapter concludes with warnings about the proper use of seals and their authentication.

Except in the case of a few witnesses that begin with a scribal couplet or two by way of explanation or admonish the reader to listen, the “Short Charter” adds nothing at all to the charter format; the spareness of its form focuses attention on the content. Christ announces to all souls, present and future (“Nouerint presentes & futuri”) that he died on the Cross, then gives and grants (“Dedi et Concessi”) to all repentant souls eternal bliss as long as (“Habendum”) he is king of heaven, keeping for himself (“Redendo”) the rent of true love of God and neighbor. If anyone does not believe he died for humanity, he will do it again (“Warrantizatio”). He sets his seal (“In cuius rei testimonium”), dates the charter (“Datum apud Hierusalem”), and gives his witnesses (“Hijs testibus”). This, in summary, is the “Short Charter,” which adheres to charter format both by its overall form and by its Latin tags that explicitly outline that form in those witnesses that retain the Latin.

The text of the Short Charter cited above is that of BL Sloane 3292, printed by Spalding (4). This manuscript has the fullest delineation of clauses by their Latin equivalents and is the only witness she prints that identifies the rent clause with the Latin rubric of Redendo, although all witnesses do include a rent clause. The brief emblematic verse at the top (not cited here) varies or is omitted in other manuscripts. Hubert Hall notes that by the end of the thirteenth century, “noueritis” frequently replaced “sciatis” (Studies in English Official Historical Documents, 239). Other manuscripts of the Short Charter use “sciatis” as in Fleta or write out the phrase in English (Spalding 5–16).

33. On the complex issue of what “in help of the cuntre” might mean, see Cervone, “Cooling Castle’s Charter Poem,” 891–93, 897, 910–13.

34. Ibid., esp. 915–16.

35. A similarly ironic acknowledgment of Christ’s nature and power may be found in the York Crucifixion play, where the workmen raising the cross attest to more than they appear to realize.

36. Spalding, xxxix–xl.

37. For the Truelove tradition, see Chapter 2.

38. For the imagination’s role in thought, according to medieval theories of cognition, see p. 215, n. 2 above.

39. Luke 2:15: “the shepherds said to one another: [Let us go over to Bethlehem, and let us see this word that is come to pass, which the Lord hath shewed to us].”

40. Matt. 2:1: “there came wise men from the east [to Jerusalem].”

41. For further discussion in the context of other passages, see this chapter’s section on linguistic dilation in Langland’s writing, pp. 117–23 below. On the verbal quality, see p. 255, n. 99.

42. Spearing, Readings in Medieval Poetry, 229.

43. As Kaske has demonstrated (“Gigas the Giant in Piers Plowman”), Langland made use of this same verse for B.18.252. In C it occurs at 20.261–63:

For iesus as a geaunt with a gyn cometh 3ende

To breke and to bete adoun all þat ben agaynes hym

And to haue out of helle alle þat hym liketh.

44. Others include the leap into the cradle, into the Jordan (Christ’s baptism), into the sepulcher, into hell, back to earth (before the Ascension), and back to earth (Judgment). The most thorough scholarly accounts of the leaps of Christ are by Alejandro Olivar, who includes a useful chart of which leaps occur in the writings of selected early exegetes (“‘Los Saltos del Verbo’”), and Cook, ed., The Christ of Cynewulf, 143–44. See also, more recently, Marchand, “The Leaps of Christ and The Dream of the Rood,” 80–89; Twomey, “Christ’s Leap and Mary’s Clean Catch”; Breeze, “The ‘Leaps’ That Christ Made”; Hill, “Mary, the Rose-Bush”; Haas, “Der Lichtsprung der Gottheit”; Kaske, “Eve’s ‘Leaps’ in the Ancrene Riwle.”

45. His original is now lost but the commentary survives in three fragmentary early translations (Georgian, Syriac, and Armenian) and a later Greek paraphrase. For a Latin translation of the Georgian, see Hippolytus, Interpretatio Cantici Canticorum. The Syriac is in Pitra, ed., Analecta Sacra Spicilegio Solesmensi, 4, 36–41, 306–10. The Greek paraphrase is in Richard, “Une paraphrase grecque résumée du commentaire d’Hippolyte.” For a German translation, see Bonwetsch, Hippolyts Kommentar zum Hohenlied auf Grund von N. Marrs Ausgabe des Grusinischen Textes. Olivar further translates Bonwetsch’s German into Spanish (4–5). See also Marchand, 87, n. 11.

46. In fact, his commentary appears to have been unknown to most writers in the Latin West, who relied primarily on Ambrose’s account (derived from Hippolytus) or Gregory the Great’s (derived from Ambrose). Ambrose, De Isaac et Anima 4.31, PL 14:513b–c, Expositio Psalmi CXVIII 6.6, CSEL 62, 111–12; Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia 29.10.226–37, CCSL 141, 253–54. See, for example, Bede, In Cantica Canticorum 6.127–35, CCSL 119b, 362; Alcuin, Compendium in Canticum Canticorum 2.8, PL 100:646d–647a; pseudo-Cassiodorus, Expositio in Cantica Canticorum 2.8, PL 70:1064a–b; Glossa Ordinaria, Canticum Canticorum 2.8.56–57, CCCM 170, 160–61; Honorius Augustodunensis, Expositio in Cantica Canticorum 2.9, PL 172:389d, Sigillum Beatae Mariae ubi Exponuntur Cantica Canticorum 2, PL 172:502d, “De Ascensione Domini,” Speculum Ecclesiae, PL 172:957b–c; Richard of St. Victor, In Cantica Canticorum Explicatio, 23, PL 196:475a. On the issue of derivation, see further Olivar, esp. 1–4. It is possible that his commentary might have come to England with Theodore of Tarsus, who was consecrated as archbishop of Canterbury on March 26, 688. For Archbishop Theodore’s life, see Lapidge, “The Career of Archbishop Theodore,” 26–29.

47. Lit., “nephew.”

48. Garitte, Traités d’Hippolyte, 41; my translation of Garitte’s Latin version of the Georgian. My thanks to Kevin Hughes for working through this passage and thinking about Hippolytus with me.

49. Some continental writers do as well, e.g., Walter of St. Victor (d. c. 1180), who offers the leaps as seven descents and three ascents:

Vt autem competentius ipsius ascensionem prosequamur, descensionem eius, immo descensiones, plures enim sunt, ad memoriam reuocemus. Prima igitur descensio eius naturae nostrae susceptio fuit, quam notat Apostolus, dicens: Qui cum informa Deiesset, non rapinam arbitratus est esse se aequalem Deo, sed semetipsum exinaniuit, formam serui accipiens. Secunda descensio eius fuit nostrae mortalitatis et passibilitatis susceptio, quam consequenter notat idem Apostolus, dicens: In similitudinem hominum factus, id est passibilis, mortalis, sicut ceteri hominum; et haec secunda maior prima: maior enim humilitas fuit poenam suscipere quam naturam. Tertia descensio fuit actuum susceptio, quam insinuat Apostolus, subiungens: Et habitu inuentus ut homo, id est sic conuersatus inter homines ut uerus homo, quia esuriuit, sitiuit et fatigatus est ex itinere, et sedit super puteum; et haec maior prima et secunda. Quarta autem fuit ipsa mors, unde sequitur: Factus est oboediens usque ad mortem. Quinta fuit in genere mortis, quod significat Apostolus, supponens: Mortem autem crucis. Sexta notatur in eo quod sepultus. Septima et ultima quod ad inferos descendit.

. . .

Vnde ex quo fuit perfecte humiliatus, statim ascendere coepit. Primo de inferno ad sepulchrum, deinde de sepulchro in mundum, de mundo in coelum, praebens nobis exemplum ut sequamur uestigia eius. (Sermones ineditos triginta sex, CCCM 30, 130–31)

A brief listing also occurs in William Durandus’s Rationale divinorum officiorum (1286), where Durandus describes the actions of a bishop in circling an altar seven times as he consecrates it:

Tertio, per septem circuitus septem uie Christi significantur, prima fuit de celo in uterum, secunda de utero in presepium, tertia de presepio in mundum, quarta de mundo in patibulum, quinta de patibulo in sepulcrum, sexta de sepulcro in limbum, septima de limbo in celum. (Rationale divinorum officiorum, 1.7.17.114–48, CCCM 140, 88)

My thanks to Bella Millett for directing my attention to these passages.

50. Ambrose, “Isaac, or the Soul,” trans. McHugh, 28–29. See also his homily on Psalm 118:

“See how he comes,” says the Bride, I have always sought for him, and now he comes; I have for ever prayed that he would come to me and now he does. I want my love to be roused; I think that I have received the wound of love. Now love itself comes running to me. I said: “Come,” and he leaped and bounded. . . .He leaps over lofty places so as to reach the Bride. . . . He leaps over the Church, he bounds over the Synagogue. He leaps over the nations, he bounds over the Jews. Let us see him leap. He leaped from heaven to the Virgin; from her womb to the crib; from the crib to the Jordan; from the Jordan to the cross; from the cross to the tomb and from the tomb to heaven. David, give witness to him, I pray, as he leaps and runs, for you once said: “He comes exulting like a hero to run his race. He has his rising on the edge of heaven, the end of his course is its furthest edge, and nothing can escape his burning heat.” (Homilies of Saint Ambrose on Psalm 118 (119), 73)

For Latin originals of these two texts, see n. 46, above.

51. Number 29 of his Homiliarum in Evangelia, cited in n. 46, above.

52. Allen and Calder, Sources and Analogues of Old English Poetry, 80.

53. As is well known, the entire second section of Christ is based closely on Gregory’s sermon; Cynewulf is not merely extracting the Leaps topos.

54. Albert Cook suggests Wis. 18:14–15 as a source, in part because of its suggestion of military conquest (144) but also because of its use in the Divine Office for the third and fourth weeks of Advent.

55. Christ II, 28, ll. 720–43; translation mine.

56. The latinate words form and figure are not available in English until after the Norman Conquest (forma, in OE, means “first, earliest,” = L primus; it may be seen in the first line here quoted from Cynewulf). In Old English, hiw must stand in for both, as well as for species and schema. Hiw, then, encompasses the Present Day English words “Shape, make, form, fashion, species, kind, appearance, symbol, hue, colour, beauty,” embracing a much wider range of meanings than does PDE hue (Bosworth and Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, s.v. “forma,” “hiw”). That range includes what we normally term “figurative language,” such as metaphor. The word hiw therefore in and of itself calls attention to a broad scope of craftedness, both physical (human form) and linguistic (verbal or poetical form), making the vernacular, in this case, an especially intriguing option for talking about the Incarnation. The conceptual possibilities latent in Cynewulf’s vernacularity stand out when the passage is compared with its known Latin source: the closest Gregory comes to mentioning “form” in the context of the leaps of Christ is “manifestata per carnem Veritas,” “the Truth, manifested in flesh” (quoted above, p. 109), an expression that does not emphasize the signifying power of language.

57. Ambrose’s hymn portrays the extreme height and depth of the leaps in concise, densely packed verse, emphasizing verticality and the disparity between the height of heaven and the depth of hell rather than offering the leaps as a series. The key stanza from Veni

Egressus eius a Patre	he proceeds from the Father
regressus eius ad Patrem	he returns to the Father
excursus usque ad inferos	runs forth as far as hell
recursus ad sedem Dei.	runs back to the seat of God

In the stanza preceding this one, a stanza not quoted by the Trinity homilist, Ambrose adapts one of the base texts for the Leaps topos, Ps. 18:6 (exultavit ut gigans ad currendam viam suam), to highlight the hypostatic union (“twinned substance”) in a striking visual image that defies visualization:

geminae gigas substantiae	giant of twinned substance
alacris ut currat uiam	eagerly he runs the way

(Hymnes, ed. Fontaine, 275; translations mine). Fontaine lists Veni redemptor gentium as Intende qui regis Israel, with its additional initial verse.

58. Morris, ed., Old English Homilies of the Twelfth Century, 111–13; also quoted by Cook, 144.

59. This Donnchadh Mór Dálaigh would appear to be either the famous poet who died in 1244 or a more obscure one of the same name who lived in the fourteenth century, or possibly neither: because bardic poetry follows strict stylistic and metrical forms, it is difficult to settle the attribution definitively. The full poem and an English translation are printed in Dán Dé, ed. McKenna, 61–63, 126–27. Breeze reprints McKenna’s English translation of the leaps section of the poem only (“The Leaps,” 190–93). Katharine Simms has identified the poem as early thirteenth-century in the Bardic Poetry Database, http://bardic.celt.dias.ie/main.html; index number 195. The poem has received virtually no critical attention, though early lines on the creation are briefly mentioned in Salvador Ryan, “Creation and Recreation in Irish Bardic Poetry,” 72. Ryan further argues (“A Slighted Source”) that bardic poetry ought not to be taken too facilely as being entirely bound formalistically by rigid bardic conventions, particularly in devotional contexts, a view much in sympathy with my own. My thanks to Sìm Innes for calling my attention to Ryan’s work.

60. I print McKenna’s translation except where I indicate in footnotes that his readings diverge from mine. Where I retain his translation, I have also altered his capitalization, changed “thee”/“thy” to “you”/“your,” and adjusted archaic past tenses. Although McKenna prints his English translations as a prose paragraph for each verse, for my quotations, I write out each verse as four lines. I follow McKenna’s verse numbers, adding “a,” “b,” “c,” or “d” to denote the line within the verse. In his Irish transcription, he records the verses as two lines with puncti to distinguish “a” from “b” and “c” from “d.” I am indebted to Hugh Fogarty for discussing bardic poetry and traditions with me, and for his careful comparison of McKenna’s translation of the leaps passage with the Irish text. My thanks to Sìm Innes, too, for clarification of some important points, and for help with the Irish words in my footnotes.

61. Perhaps a theological comment on the lack of any change of substance in the hypostatic union as a concept difficult for human thought to comprehend (“rough the course”). McKenna: “Thy Generation (from the Father) was a bold speeding.”

62. = altus: both high and exalted.

63. This difficult line might be commenting specifically on the nature of Christ’s heavenly dwelling, anticipating his dwelling within the Virgin in the following line. The word “cin” (literally, “portion”) may carry a sense here of humanity as family, as “cuid” might similarly do in 22b, q.v.; see also note to 20b. McKenna: “joyous its appearance!”

64. McKenna’s note: “proverbial expression for ‘facing danger,’ etc.”

65. A word used to denote physical pain; note companion sense in 20d.

66. Indicative of address to an audience (rather than apostrophe to God, as elsewhere). McKenna: “The leap on to the Cross—sore journey!”

67. “Cloinn” = your family (collective) or an individual member. Since the leap into the tomb comes before the harrowing of hell, “family” cannot mean humanity imprisoned in hell. Perhaps this line emphasizes Christ’s sharing humanity with his forebears: as others have had their bodies entombed, so too does Christ participate in (“visit”?) the cultural ritual of burial? Does “visit” carry the sense of doing as his forebears did? Could this sense of “family” be related to “portion” in 19b (“cin”) and 22b (“cuid”)? McKenna: “The leap ’neath the Tomb—story for all time!”

68. Again indicative of address to an audience: “although harder to us [both collective sense (we the listeners) and individual sense (me)].” The word the poet uses for “step,” “céim,” rhymes with the word he has repeatedly used for “leap,” “léim.” McKenna: “yet sorer, I deem, was the journey to the Cross.”

69. McKenna: “most famous of all leaps.”

70. McKenna: “well it fitted Thee not to rest ’neath earth.”

71. This line makes use of conventional bardic terms of praise usually reserved for a patron, here applied to Christ.

72. “Your appearance and your portion/followers [or, that of your portion/followers] were bitter.” The “cuid” here would seem to denote the souls he is drawing out of hell, but whether they are his “ciud” because he is of their kinship or because he is rescuing them is unclear. McKenna: “dread Thy appearance and (that of) Thy followers (?).”

73. McKenna: “till Thou didst get the great booty (?).” McKenna’s choice of “booty” unhappily conjures up the image of pirates or freebooters in unlawful possession of chattels; perhaps he thought of this word as applied to the devil (“recaptured the devil’s booty from him”?) rather than to Christ. He has certainly correctly caught the sense of possession after contention, a resonance perhaps attributable to the third of the base texts for the leaps of Christ, Wis. 18:15 (“Thy almighty word leapt down from heaven from thy royal throne, as a fierce conqueror into the midst of the land of destruction”).

It would seem the next stanza (23) might possibly represent the final leap, the Ascension (“wondrously through the clouds”), which is otherwise mentioned only in line 18d but is required to make up the number of leaps to eight (the number mentioned in line 18a):

Do chonnac dá choinnil naomh	(23a) I have seen glorified by his torch
go soinnimh ó niúl do niúl	wondrously through the clouds
éasga is a doras riom riamh	the moon ever facing me
an ghrian fhionn sholas a shiúr.	and her sister the bright sun.

Perhaps stanza 23 is making use of Hab. 3:11 (“The sun and the moon stood still in their habitation”), which both Gregory and the Trinity homilist link to Cant. 2:8 (Gregory: “Who can be called the Sun except the Lord, and what the Moon except the Church?” Allen and Calder, Sources and Analogues, 80). In Donnchadh Mór’s verse, however, the sun and the moon are treated as elements of creation that testify to God’s power and worth, the topic of the remainder of the poem, as, for example, “The wind has made its song to you, / for it understood your work; / the sun has shone fiercely for thee, / these are the poet-band of the son of the king and queen” (25a–d).

74. Without knowing which Donnchadh Mór wrote the poem, or whether someone else did, we cannot even begin to guess whether the topos would have been in common currency among the laity in his day. Even if we could attribute the poem to the more famous, earlier poet, questions remain about whether he was a professed religious, perhaps the abbot of Boyle, or a layman trained in monastic fashion, as would be more common for a bardic poet. See further O’Donovan, ed., Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland, 3:308–9; O’Dwyer, Mary: A History of Devotion in Ireland, 76, 80; Douglas Hyde, A Literary History of Ireland, 466.

75. I have written elsewhere (“Christ the Falcon”) about the potential influence of the leaps on Langland’s image of Jesus coming to “perch” (iouken) in Mary’s chamber (18.125); on this passage, see also p. 132. The possibility seems the more likely, given the appearance of a series of leaps of Christ as flights of the falcon in an early fifteenth-century sermon for the dedication of an altar to St. Anne, preserved in British Library MS Harley 2268.

76. Luke 2:15: “the shepherds said to one another: [Let us go over to Bethlehem, and let us see this word that is come to pass, which the Lord hath shewed to us].”

77. Matt. 2:1: “there came wise men from the east [to Jerusalem].”

78. After he tells the Christmas story, Imaginatif explains what led him to think of it:

Why y haue tolde þe al þis, y toek ful gode hede	took; good heed
How þou contraridest clergie with crabbed wordes,	ill-tempered
That is, how lewede men and luythere lyhtloker were ysaued	unlearned; wicked; more readily
Then connynge clerkes of kynde vnderstondynge.	knowledgeable; natural
And thow saidest sothe of somme, Ac yse in what manere. (14.99–103 ~ B 12.155–59)	truly; see

In the C-text, as Pearsall points out, it was Rechlesnesse, not Will, who raised the objection to Clergy. Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition, n. to 11.295.

79. The phrase “þe plonte of pees” confused scribes. For the C-text: “þe] PER MQSFGN; om XJP2OLBUDVA. plonte] plente A; plentye R” (Russell and Kane); for B: “þe] om CF. plante] plant Cr; plente HmGOC2LF; plentee WC; pleente M; planetes Y” (Kane and Donaldson). Robert Adams has argued that Langland’s “plonte of pees” probably derives from Augustine’s sermon 47 in Sermones de vetere testamento, where Augustine quotes the Septuagint version of Ezek. 34:29 (“And I will raise up for them a plant of peace”) and then additionally “paraphrases ‘plantam pacis’ as ‘plantatione’ [Souter = ‘plantation’ or ‘plant’] caritatis.” Adams, “Editing and the Limitations of the Durior Lectio”, 13.

80. Many B manuscripts: B.1.154: “eten his fille”; so Schmidt, 1:44; see his note, 2:316. Cf. the expanded version of the “Short Charter”: “To alle cristen be it knawene / That þe seed of grace in erthe is sawne, / Be me Jhesus of Nazareth” (ll. 37–39, Ashe, “The ‘Short Charter’,” 43).

This line is worth thinking about alongside the second line of Erthe toc of erthe (IMEV 3939) in its earliest form, which admits of an Incarnational reading:

Erþe toc of erþe erþe wiþ woh	took from; woe
Erþe oþer erþe to þe erþe droh	dragged/enticed
Erþe leyde erþe in erþene þroh	tomb
Þo heuede erþe of erþe erþe ynoh.	had; enough

Murray, The Middle English Poem, Erthe upon Erthe, 1. This version is from MS BL Harl. 2253 (c. 1307), fol. 57v. “Droh” is an interesting word here, given its semantic range: drawen can mean to draw, pull, drag, carry, attract, entice, lure, turn someone or something into something, be inclined to (MED, s.v. “drawen”). The former side of its range pitches the poem toward a meditation on mortality; the latter end admits a reading not unlike that of Piers Plowman, but with more of an emphasis on the attraction humanity has for Christ in his human nature: he is drawn to earth/humanity because of that affinity. See also my article, “Christ the Falcon,” for imagery of humanity as a lure for Christ as falcon (277–78).

81. Bennett, ed., Piers Plowman: Prologue and Passus I–VII of the B Text, 113–14; Bloomfield, Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse, 59–61, 139; Heffernan, “Piers Plowman B.I.153–158”; Kean, “Langland on the Incarnation”; Lawler, “The Gracious Imagining of Redemption in ‘Piers Plowman’”; Ben H. Smith, Traditional Imagery of Charity in Piers Plowman, 26–34; Twomey, “Christ’s Leap,” 168.

Anne Middleton has kindly shared with me a portion of her exciting work-in-progress, which complements the points I am advancing here. Taking into account some school-text antecedents for some of Langland’s passages, including both the “plonte of pees” and love’s leap, she persuasively argues that Langland deliberately invokes not only the subject matter but also the form of such texts, and in doing so he intentionally and provocatively signals that poetics can make a sort of argument didacticism cannot match.

82. As Sister Clemente Davlin has noted, Langland’s active language not only draws the physicality of Christ’s body “in tension with” a focus on his divinity, but also in this passage heightens that tension by contrasting imagery of height and lowness in a way that merits comparison to the Johannine concept of Incarnation: “The extreme terms, ‘hevene . . . erthe,’ ‘loue . . . lowe erthe,’ are polar, like John’s terms for the incarnation which are unlike anything in the synoptics: ‘the Word was made flesh’ (1:14).” Davlin, “Piers Plowman and the Gospel and First Epistle of John,” 102. She comments here on the B-text.

83. As in Langland’s work, Christ’s ministry and the harrowing of hell are also associated with the spread of the Church in the botanical lyrics; see Chapter 5, pp. 181–97.

84. Although the Paris MS reads “in,” Sloane’s more daring “to” continues the dynamic action sequence. But see Glasscoe, “Visions and Revisions,” for her characterization of Paris as “a happier reading,” 111.

85. Although I have not been able to identify a specific source for the striking image of blood harrowing hell, it seems unlikely to me that the image was original to Julian; it has the sound of an established story about it. A synecdochic description of the harrowing of hell is not, in itself, atypical, given the episode’s source in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, where, in Johannine imagery, light calls for the gates of hell to be opened, and bursts their bonds. Compare, for instance, these lines from “The Dispute Between Mary and the Cross” (Fein, Moral Love Songs, ll. 244–47):

Thorwh stones in the wildernes,	through stones in the wilderness,
Men mihte better ha crepet, iwis,	men might better have crept, to be sure,
Then bored into hevene blis,	than bored into heaven’s bliss
Til blod brac up the yate	until blood broke up the gate

“It was more possible for people to creep between stones in the wilderness than to pierce the heavens to gain eternal bliss, until [the] blood [of Christ] broke up the gate [of hell].” Although Fein has associated these lines with both childbirth and sexual intercourse by reading “gate” as “vagina,” the context would seem to belie the former (because of “til”: i.e., even after “blod brac up the yate,” people would not be said to have “bored into hevene blis,” because access to heaven is granted or denied by divine providence), and the latter would not apply in any case to the virgin Mary. See Fein, note to ll. 243–47, and Fein, “Form and Continuity in the Alliterative Tradition, 108–13. Compare also this fifteenth-century sermon:

But . . . owre lord and aller sauiour ordaynid and wroght a worthy and gracius remedy thorow hys precius blode, þe qwylk [which] was made a gracius kay [key] to opyn þe 3atys [gates] of blysse þus sparid [closed] thorow owre synne; . . . Als anenis [regarding] þe fryst, þat þe precyus blode of owre lord God was made þe kay of blysse, wyttnesse þe haly profyte, Ysaye 22, Dabo clauem Dauit super humerum eius, et non erit qui claudat, et cetera, “I schal gyue,” says owre lord God, fadyr of heuyn, “þe gracius kay of Dauid apon hys scholdrys”—3a! to opyn þe .atys of blysse—“and þere schall be nane [no one] þat schal spare [close] þam,” þat is to say, to goode crysten men and wymen. Vpon þe qwylk says þe Glose þat be þis kay was vndyrstonde þe scharp crosse þat was layde vpon hys schuldere beryng yt hymself to hys passion; to þis acordys þe haly doctour, Seyn Ierom, Sanguis, inquit, Christi clauis paradisi est, “Þe gracius kay,” says he, “of blysse is þe precius blode of Cryst.” (O’Mara, Four Middle English Sermons, 83)

But see also Schmidt’s commentary on Piers Plowman C.7.133 (“Feddest tho with thy fresshe blood oure forfadres in helle”); Schmidt adduces examples from the visual arts showing Christ’s blood trickling down to Adam’s mouth, including one in which Adam receives the blood in a chalice (2:543).

86. The blood’s flowing engages what Vincent Gillespie and Maggie Ross have evocatively termed “a fluid word-knot” made up of “fill, fulfill, flow, overflow, beflow, overpass, passover,” clustering both sound and sense in a theologically meaningful way. “Apophatic Image,” 75.

87. The Pearl-poet does a similar thing by describing the Crucifixion in abstract terms as fluid generosity at a moment when God’s courteous and aristocratic largess is entirely the point, as the Pearl-maiden repeatedly calls attention to the baptismal water that enables salvation of infants:

Bot þeron com a bote astyt.	Nevertheless; remedy; immediately
Ryche blod ran on rode so roghe,	cross; rough
And wynne water; þen at þat plyt,	delightful/precious; plight
Þe grace of God wex gret innoghe. (ll. 645–48).	grew; enough

Wolfgang Riehle has noted that “Julian of Norwich . . . is the only English mystic to include in her work the neo-Platonic concept of the world as a divine emanation: God has made creation (‘alle kyndes’) ‘to flowe out of hym to werke his wylle’, and this creation is redeemed by the pouring out of divine grace, which in turn is illustrated with emanatistic imagery.” Middle English Mystics, 87.

88. Of course, because William Harvey formulated his argument about the circulation of blood early in the seventeenth century, Julian would not have understood the circulation of blood as we know it.

89. Increased devotion to relics of Christ’s blood had drawn attention to a crucial question: did the holy blood remain conjoined with the divine Word even after body, soul, and blood were separated? If it did, was it still conjoined in the relics, and if so, would that mean that Christ’s body was not intact in heaven? The Franciscans and the Dominicans held opposing views. In a mid-fifteenth-century continuation of the debate, the Franciscans took an approach based in synecdoche, citing scripture’s figurative character: the blood’s capacity to save refers to Christ himself, “and in this way whatever is said of Jesus’s blood should be ascribed to his death or to his life” (“et in hunc modum quecunque de sanguine Iesu dicuntur ad mortem eius uel ad vitam trahenda sunt”), Pius II, Commentarii rerum memorabilium que temporibus suis contigerunt, 2:659, l. 23, quoted by Holtz, “Cults of the Precious Blood in the Medieval Latin West,” 300, n. 97, trans. mine. For specifics of the debate, which began in 1351, see Vincent, The Holy Blood, 82–117; Holtz, “Cults of the Precious Blood,” 222–304; Rubin, Corpus Christi, 66–68; or Marie-Dominique Chenu’s brief account in the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (s.v. “Sang du Christ”). The fifteenth-century continuation of this debate is discussed by Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 112–31.

While Norwich Cathedral possessed a relic of the Holy Blood in the twelfth century, this relic does not appear to have been known in Norwich by the mid-thirteenth century. As Matthew Paris reports it, during the translation of a relic of Christ’s blood to Westminster in 1247, the solemn Mass was celebrated by Walter Suffield, bishop of Norwich, who seems unaware of the Norwich relic (Holtz, “Cults of the Precious Blood,” 60–61, 65). Its earlier presence raises the possibility that Julian’s description of Christ’s blood might have its roots in a local devotional cult of the sort that gained momentum in the fourteenth century. Other English sites with relics of the blood included Westminster Abbey, as well as the monasteries of Hailes in Gloucestershire and Ashridge in Buckinghamshire (Faber, The Precious Blood, 272; Holtz, “Cults of the Precious Blood,” 65, 79, 85–86; Vincent, The Holy Blood, 137–53).

90. “It was precisely the Precious Blood, and nothing but the Precious Blood, which was the chosen instrument of our redemption” (Faber, The Precious Blood, 281). “. . . both the Blood and the Cross were credited with powers to ward off evil, and both presented vivid images of Christ’s mediatory role for the needs of the human race. It was as a sign of Christ’s pleading in heaven before his Father, not his suffering on earth, which suggested the use of the Blood on these days of solemn and collective petition [in Rogation and Ascensiontide]” (Holtz, “Cults of the Precious Blood,” 95).

91. For a nuanced consideration of the poetic power of these lines, see Schmidt, The Clerkly Maker, 69–70, 115.

92. See Chapter 2, pp. 73–75.

93. E.g.:

Also I had in this more vnderstondyng: in that he shewid me that I should synne, I toke it nakidly to myne owne singular person, for I was none otherwise stirrid at that time; but be [by] the hey [high], gracious comfort of our lord that followid after, I saw that his menyng was for the general man, that is to sey, all man which is synfull and shall be into the last day; of which man I am a member, as I hope, be the mercy of God; for the blissid comfort that I saw, it is large enow [enough] for us all. (79.7–14)

. . . the threist of God is to have the general man into him, in which thrist he hath drawyn his holy that be now in bliss; and gettand his lively members, ever he drawith and drinkith, and yet he thristith and longith. (75.9–12)

94. Emmott, “Consciousness and Context-Building,” 94.

95. The effect is a reversal of cognitive figure and ground; see p. 17.

96. Emmott, “Consciousness and Context-Building,” 94.

97. “When a fiction fails to fulfill the expectations aroused by its form—we thought we were in Paris and here we are at the gates of hell—we look for a cause, and we look for allegory.” Barney, Allegories of History, 17.

98. For examples, see Chapter 2, pp. 80–83.

99. Scholarship examining this phenomenon is vast. A few especially helpful accounts include Jill Mann’s consideration of the examples of Lyer, Meed, and the search for Treuthe, in Langland and Allegory, esp. 3–12, as well as her observations on Wrath in “Eating and Drinking in ‘Piers Plowman’” (“Wrath’s rôle as cook, making ‘wortes’ out of ‘wordes,’ serves to introduce us to a major metaphorical use of the image of eating and drinking—the idea of eating words,” 34); and A. C. Spearing’s close reading of Wrath’s confession, where, as he describes it, in the B-text, “The nuns’ actual outbursts of angry words—‘You’re a liar!’ and ‘You’re another!’—are momentarily personified with sufficient energy to leap forth,” while in the C version of this passage,

“thow lixt” becomes “lady” over all the sisters: that is, becomes mother superior of the convent. . . . There is of course no character in the poem called “Thow lixt!”, though there is one called Lyere, who at B II 216 leaps as “Thow lixt!” does at B V 161. But even the dividing line between what does and what does not count as a character in Piers Plowman is blurred by the insistent tendency of Langland’s poetic idiom towards momentary humanizations, and the coexistent rapidity and fluidity of movement that leaves them behind as soon as they are created. (Readings in Medieval Poetry, 226)

More generally, Morton Bloomfield’s work on personification allegory examines the role of the verb in Langland’s work and elsewhere. Bloomfield, “Personification-Metaphors,” 292: “In the case of personification-metaphors, the verb, verb phrase, or occasionally the adjective or adverb forces us to regard the inanimate noun subject (or occasionally object) as metaphorically a person.” See also Bloomfield, “A Grammatical Approach to Personification Allegory,” 165:

The really characteristic part of personification allegory in terms of aesthetic effect lies not in what nouns the writer chooses but in what predicates he attaches to his subjects . . . Indeed we cannot even tell that “Truth” in the first sentence is a personification at all until we come to the verb.

100. Introduction, p. 9.

Chapter 4. Time in Narrative: The Teleology of History Meets the Timelessness of God “in plenitudo temporis”

1. Introduction, pp. 8–11.

2. Discussions of the Tree of Charity episode I have found especially helpful include Hanna, “The Tree of Charity—Again”; Zeeman, Medieval Discourse of Desire, 1–8; Cole, “Trifunctionality and the Tree of Charity”; Tavormina, “The Chilling of Charity”; Griffiths, Personification in “Piers Plowman”, 82–91; Aers, Piers Plowman and Christian Allegory, 79-109; Salter, Piers Plowman: An Introduction, 73–76; Donaldson, Piers Plowman: The C-Text and Its Poet, 180–96. Aside from Donaldson, scholars have tended to concentrate on the B-text.

3. Indeed, Galatians, with its interest in the law and Abraham’s faith, more fully informs passus 18 than may initially be apparent.

4. Chapter 1, pp. 26–31.

5. Mary Carruthers has identified this trope as pictura (“Allegory Without the Teeth”). David Aers called it a “picture model” (Piers Plowman and Christian Allegory, 89), while Elizabeth Salter termed it a “diagram” (Piers Plowman: An Introduction, 74, 75). See also my brief discussion of the differences between B and C: “Langland and the Truelove Tradition,” 37–39.

6. Like Derek Pearsall and A. V. C. Schmidt, I reject Russell and Kane’s emendation of 18.2: “Thow couthest telle me and teche me [in] charite [to] leue.” While Will does want to know how to live in charity, in response to his question Liberum Arbitrium leads him bodily to the Tree of Charity. On one level, showing the way may be equivalent to showing how to live; however, given the ensuing action of 18.3, Liberum Arbitrium’s answer makes more sense as the manuscripts have it, “teach me [the way] to charity.” See also Pearsall’s note to 18.2 (p. 296): “‘as Y leue’: the repetition (eliminated by emendation in RK) is taken here as an awkward overflow of politeness on the part of the newly deferential dreamer.”

7. This technique works much like underspecification in sense selection; see pp. 51–54.

8. Cf. Schmidt (2:660): “the smiles of a mother to a child before it has speech, or of lovers before they have first spoken.”

9. For a similar technique drawing on emanative growth and propagation in the botanical lyrics, see Chapter 5, pp. 181–97. See also D. Vance Smith on the verb setten (used in this passage by Langland for “planted”) in the Chester Cycle, where it “reaffirms the underlying idea that God’s essence is unchanged by creation”: The Book of the Incipit, 132. His treatment of Incarnational passages in Piers Plowman, with his focus on beginnings, offers a useful complement to my comments on time. See his pages 130 to 132 for Peace’s account of the Incarnation in B.18.212–15 (“god þat bigan al of his goode wille / Bicam man of a mayde mankynde to saue”) and Faith’s account in B.16.194–97 (“god, þat gynnyng hadde neuere but þo hym good þou3te, / Sente forþ his sone as for seruaunt þat tyme / To ocupie hym here til issue were spronge, / That is children of charite, and holi chirche þe moder”). See, further, my discussion of the Christological associations of “true love” in Chapter 2 and in “Langland and the Truelove Tradition.” On the “plonte of pees,” see pp. 115–17, above. On the graft, see Ben H. Smith, Traditional Imagery of Charity, 60.

10. The Christological implications of “trewe loue” point toward the planting as the Incarnation. Nevertheless, numerous other references point in the direction of Genesis and the Creation (not least of them the garden, the tree, the fruit [5, 29, 33, etc.], the fiend [43], apples [62]), in which case the planting looks more like the image of God in mankind. Such a line of thought eventually leads to a the-apple-does-not-fall-far-from-the-tree version of humanity (“Adam was as tre and we aren as his apples” [68]). Indeed, Liberum Arbitrium briefly tells Will the story of the Creation (90–93) and mentions Adam as being among the fruit on the tree (112). Liberum Arbitrium’s treatment of Adam demonstrates succinctly the fluidity of Langland’s allegory, which moves associatively and rapidly; there is no one-to-one correspondence of signification throughout, or it would seem strange for example that Adam is “as tre” but also among the fruit, which at line 12 signifies “good works” and at line 29 and following represents humanity hierarchically, arranged according to marital status. The potential overlay of the Fall and the Incarnation is very close to Julian’s treatment of time in her “example” of the lord and the servant, on which see more below.

11. In B, the Tree of Charity sequence is a dream within a dream that occurs after Anima describes the tree. The inner dream ensues because Will swoons when Anima tells him Liberum Arbitrium has leased the land from Piers Plowman (in B.16.45 Liberum Arbitrium is termed Piers’s “lieutenaunt”). Piers then appears to Will in vision (the inner dream). In C, Langland eliminates the beginning of the inner dream but preserves the waking from the dream here at line 178, so that Will appears to wake up from the same dream twice (here and at 19.336). On the structure of the dreams, see Schmidt, “The Inner Dreams in Piers Plowman.”

12. Given that C puts forward Liberum Arbitrium as the instructing figure (in B, the instructor is Piers Plowman), the problematical moment when Will asks to taste the fruit leads to a slightly (but only slightly) less perplexing result theologically in C than in B. I have written previously on the savagery of Will’s potentially cannibalistic desire (“Christ the Falcon,” 281–82).

13. Langland uses a similar technique in passus 8 when Piers calls on Hunger to motivate the workers who should be helping him plow his half acre (8.168ff.). In both cases, a character calls for help from a personification of a human experience that affects the body in strikingly physical ways (both in real life and in the narrative).

14. Yet, as Carl Schmidt reminds me (personal communication, August 8, 2011), in the synoptic Gospels Christ speaks of John the Baptist as the greatest of prophets, and as “one crying out in the desert” he is linked specifically to Isaiah’s prophecy (Matt. 11:9–10; Mark 1:2–4; Luke 1:76, 7:26–28; Isaiah 40:3).

15. The modern colloquial sense of “shake down” was not available to Langland, but there is something entirely appropriate, it seems, to thinking of Elde’s interaction with the fruit as a mugging—or worse! Langland certainly portrays Elde as a bit of a tough, here but especially in passus 22 (see n. 16). In B, Piers Plowman is the one who shakes the apples from the tree; Elde is not part of the scene in B.

16. With the possible exception of Elde, Langland does not explicitly invoke the topos of the Ages of Man in C, as he does at B.12.1–9 (in The Parlement there are three: Youth, Middle Age, and Old Age). One might perhaps hear an echo of Youth in Langland’s depiction of Lyf in passus 22 (22.152–79), just before Elde returns, with Death not far behind, and attacks Will in an usually personal moment presented with wry humor that nevertheless suggests pathos. In passus 22, Will is a bystander in a battle between Conscience and the forces of the Antichrist when Elde, chasing after Lyf and apparently not noticing Will in his way, runs over Will’s head and makes him bald. Will curses Elde, upbraiding him for his discourtesy. Will thus makes himself the focus of Elde’s new attack. Elde strikes at Will with old age, making him deaf and knocking out his teeth. Most bitterly for Will, Elde makes him impotent as well (22.183–203). John Burrow details various medieval schemes of the stages of life in The Ages of Man.

17. Ginsberg, ed., Wynnere and Wastoure and The Parlement of the Thre Ages:

“. . . noghte es sekire to youreselfe in certayne bot dethe nothing; certain; for sure except

And he es so uncertayne that sodaynly he comes” (ll. 635–36) unpredictable

Other poems written by Langland’s contemporaries further drive home the point that no one knows the hour of his own death, but we all know we will die (Pearl, The Book of the Duchess, The Awntyrs off Arthure); mortality’s equal-opportunity approach must have been especially apparent to and foremost in the minds of those living in the time of the Black Death. Langland vividly drives the point home at C.22.100ff. Furthermore, not everyone who desires death achieves his desire, as Will at C.22.203, the man in black in The Book of the Duchess, and the Old Man in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale remind us.

18. I use cognitive framework in the linguists’ sense of a story frame model in which known logic operates and predictable characters or props are to be expected. A detailed explanation of the concept may be found in Chapter 5, “Frames and Constructions,” in Ungerer and Schmid, Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics, 207–56.

19. It is worth noting that the hugely effective starkness of the clash between life and death first comes at a moment that looks back to this passage with Elde:

Deth saith a wol fordo and adown brynge	says he; annihilate
All þat lyueth or loketh a londe or a watre	who live or see [i.e., everyone]; on
Lyf saith þat a lyeth and leyeth his lyf to wedde,	he lies; offers his life as a pledge
That for al þat deth can do, withynne thre dayes to walke
And feche fro þe fende Peres fruyt þe plouhman	from; the fruit of Piers the Plowman
And legge hit þere hym liketh and lucifer bynde.	place; wherever
And forbete and adowne brynge bale deth for euere:	beat up; destructive
O mors ero mors tua. (20.28–3 4a)	Oh death, I will be your death (Hos. 13:14)

As Pearsall notes in his edition, the reference to “the fruit of Piers the Plowman” in line 32 may be explained by remembering that in B it is Piers, not Liberum Arbitrium, who tends the tree (B.16.20–89). See also Pearsall’s note to line 34 for a reason to prefer “forbite” to “forbete,” and lines 20.402 to 20.403 for the imagery of the “doctour of deth” versus the “lord of lyf.”

20. With the sonorous open vowels of “moued” and “moed” linking the will of God with God’s motion in bestirring himself into active engagement with the material world, perhaps Langland intended a reverberation here of the opening lines of Genesis, with the spirit of God moving over the waters to create light, then earth, then heaven, and so forth (Gen. 1:2). Although Langland does not explicitly invoke “in principio,” we might hear a distant echo of “in the beginning,” the incipit of the Gospel of John as well: “In the beginning God created heaven, and earth” (Gen. 1:1); “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). With the previous action so focused on the tree, and the coming action so metaphysically imagined, Creation and Incarnation are suitably linked by the deictic “Thenne”—“at that time,” or “it came to pass”—of line 117.

21. The Beowulf poet makes effective use of a similar time-oriented tactic to link a past time with the ongoing present, differentiating the story time of there/then from the (Christian) present day, yet maintaining continuity between the two and demonstrating the earlier time’s significance with respect to the present:

se wæs mon-cynnes mægenes strengest

on þæm dæge þysses lifes

“he [Beowulf] was the strongest of all living men at that time in this world” (emphasis mine; lit., “in those days of this life”)

Chickering, Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition, 60–61, ll. 196–97.

Dante does a similar thing, without the deictics “those” and “this,” by means of the inclusive “our life”:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

“Midway in the journey of our life”

Alighieri, Inferno 1.1; trans. Hollanders, 2–3. Cf. Macklin Smith on B.16.183 (“Þat oon dooþ alle dooþ and ech dooþ bi his one”) “What happens during the Tree of Charity and Abraham/Faith episodes happens, quite literally, all over the place, internally and externally, then and now, temporally and eternally” (“Did Langland Read the Lignum Vitae?”, 157).

22. Cf. 20.161–65a ~ B.18.158–62a:

And so shal this deth fordo, y dar my lyf legge,
	annihilate; put down as a wager
All [at deth and þe deuel dede formost to Eue
And riht as the gylour thorw gyle bigiled man formost
So shal grace þat bigan al maken a goed ende
And bigile þe gilour, and [at is goed sleythe:	ruse
Ars vt Artem falleret.	one stratagem deceives another

23. As Del Chessell notes (“The Word Made Flesh,” 115), “The quietness of that ‘And thanne’ makes one feel this once-in-all-time event as perfectly natural.” Schmidt (2:664) calls attention to the probable influence of Pange lingua, the same hymn in which “Ars vt artem falleret” occurs: “The ‘moment’ [of the fullness of time] is that of Christ’s death; but the pointed conjunction of this text with Iesus . . . chaumbre at 126 suggests the influence of Fortunatus’s ‘Pange lingua’, which was sung on Good Friday at the Adoration of the Cross: ‘And so when came the fullness / of the sacred time [sacri plenitudo temporis], / The Son who made the world was sent / down from his Father’s clime / And went forth clothed in flesh assumed / within a virgin womb’ (st. 4).”

24. Russell and Kane add a problematical period here. While the sense is difficult to determine, both “that” in line 127 and “that” in line 128 likely ought to be translated as “when”: “until the fullness of time’s time had come—when Old Age [would] fell the fruit again before it came to be ripe—when Jesus should joust to determine by judgment of arms who should fetch this fruit, the fiend or Jesus himself.” Both clauses beginning “that” appear to modify “Til plenitudo temporis tyme ycome were.” While it is possible that “that” in “that iesus” of line 128 is a demonstrative pronoun referring back to “oen Iesus” of line 125 (which Jesus? that Jesus!), or as a distinct reference to a person of the Trinity (MED, s.v. “that [def. art. & adj.],” def. 2a), these difficult lines are centered more on when than they are on which one.

25. Burrow, Langland’s Fictions, 63.

26. Luke delays a focus on Satan’s defeat at this point, reserving the subject for the Magnificat a few lines later (Luke 1:46–55).

27. See Chapter 2, p. 228, n. 6.

28. See also Pange lingua, quoted by Schmidt in my n. 23, above.

29. In addition to its Latin-derived sense of “to humble oneself, condescend” [MED, s.v. “demitten, v.)”], “demyt” is a technical term with significance for land tenure. See J. H. Baker, Manual of Law French, 87: “demettre, demitter, 1, to demise, to let. . . . [L. dimittere]”; Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, s.v. “dimissio” and “dimittere.”

30. For a fuller reading of the time sequence at work in this passage, see Cervone, “Christ the Falcon,” 281–82.

31. See especially Marx, The Devil’s Rights and the Redemption, 100–113.

32. While line 128 refers to the Crucifixion, the cognitive framework called up by the legalistic references to “fals biheste” (122), “a Iustices sone” (125), and “iugement” (128) suggests a judicial accounting. With great poetic economy, Langland has suggestively compressed his imagery so as to embrace the whole of salvation history, from Creation to eschaton.

33. My thanks to Ann Astell for the suggestion.

34. Perhaps the word “hy” here recalls the seasonal sense of time used in the Tree of Charity sequence. Cf. Pearl:

In Augoste in a hy3 seysoun,	[= harvest time]
Quen corne is coruen wyth crokez kene. (39–40)	when; grain; cut

If so, there might be a hint—but only a hint—of Christ’s coming death.

35. David Aers’s discussion of Augustine and the Good Samaritan episode, particularly with regard to Semyuif (the man to whom the Good Samaritan ministers), offers a useful complement to my comments on Christ the physician. In his reading, Aers is characteristically sensitive to Langland’s use of time (e.g., “As in the liturgy, time present and time past both become present,” 99), and to how the experience of sin is enacted allegorically in the ontological reality of Semyuif (Salvation and Sin, chap. 4, esp. 97–119). Earlier medicinal imagery in the poem includes Holy Church’s assertion that “Mesure is medecyne” (1.33), that “loue ys triacle [antidote for venom] to abate [reduce to nothing] synne / And most souerayne salue for soule and for body” (1.146–47, just before the Incarnational passage “Loue is þe plonte of pees”), and also her observation (anticipating 18.137) that “loue is lecche [physician] of lyf and lysse [relief] of alle payne” (1.199). In the Gospel, Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan to answer the question, “who is my neighbor?,” which follows from an earlier question, “what must I do to possess eternal life?” (Luke 10:25–33); cf. Will’s query of Holy Church: “Teche me to no tresor but telle me this ilke [same; i.e., ‘tell me this thing I ask:’], / How y may saue my soule . . .” (1.79–80).

It is also worth noting that in his discussion of the exegetical and homiletical background that parallels Langland’s emphasis on the speed of the Samaritan’s journey, Thomas D. Hill quotes Haymo of Halberstadt and Augustine, both of whom draw on the leaps of Christ to associate the Samaritan with the incarnate Christ, though Hill does not note the importance of the leaps scheme here (to be sure, neither Haymo nor Augustine calls these events leaps, but the scheme is unmistakable). Haymo (“Homilia 125, Dominica Decima Quanta Post Pentecosten,” PL 118, 673; quoted by Hill, “The Swift Samaritan’s Journey,” 188):

This Samaritan made a journey from heaven to the womb, from the womb to the Cross, from the Cross to the tomb, [and] from the tomb to heaven again.

Augustine (Enarrationes in Psalmos, “Psalmus 18, enarratio 2, par. 6,” CCSL 38, 109–10; quoted by Hill, 190):

Like a bridegroom coming out of his marriage chamber, he leaps up like a giant to run his course with joy: he pitched his tent in the sun. When the word was made flesh he was like a bridegroom who found himself a bridal chamber in a virgin’s womb. Once wedded to human nature, he came forth from that purest of all rooms, humbler in mercy than all others, stronger than all in majesty. What is meant by he leaps up like a giant to run his course, is that he was born, he grew, he taught, he suffered, he rose, he ascended; he ran his course he did not tarry on the way.

36. The Galatians passage that gives Langland plenitudo temporis also offers the notion of a son’s tutoring “until the time appointed by the father”:

Now I say, as long as the heir is a child, he differeth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all;

But is under tutors and governors until the time appointed by the father:

So we also, when we were children, were serving under the elements of the world.

But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law:

That he might redeem them who were under the law: that we might receive the adoption of sons.

And because you are sons, God hath sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying: Abba, Father.

Therefore now he is not a servant, but a son. And if a son, an heir also through God. (Gal. 4:1–7, emphasis added)

37. See Chapter 1, pp. 26–31.

38. There are many resonances of the Gospel and epistles of John throughout passus 19.

39. The B passage, for comparison (B.16.103–5):

And Piers þe Plowman parceyued plener tyme	full
And lered hym lechecraft his lif for to saue	taught; doctoring skills
That, þou3 he were wounded with his enemy, to warisshen hymselue	by; cure

While “the fullness of time” appears in B as “plener tyme,” C strengthens the link between the moment of the Incarnation and the lived life of Christ by reiterating the Latin phrase, plenitudo temporis. C also drops the notion of Christ learning to save his own life by healing himself.

40. See n. 10, above.

41. He also implies clerics might not be “clenneste” and “fayreste,” as they should be.

42. Some manuscripts omit “him.”

43. A few lines later Langland signals a similar sort of reading method when he tells the story of Jesus throwing the merchants out of the temple (18.155–62). We have already seen plenitudo temporis linked to the Crucifixion. Though lines 159 and 160 do not use the phrase “plenitudo temporis,” nevertheless they offer another version of the concept, with reference to the overthrowing of the temple (John 2:21: “he spoke of the temple of his body”): “And when [þat my will is [= the fullness of time?] y wol hit ouerthrowe / And ar thre dayes aftur edefye hit newe,” which Langland glosses typologically: “Ac þe ouerturnynge of the temple bitokened his resureccioun” (162). For comparison, “Flourdelys” uses similar language for the moment Christ leaves the tomb to harrow hell: “And whon god wolde [desired] · he went his way” (l. 55).

44. “Example” is the term Julian uses (51.6; 51.72; etc.), even though “parable,” the word now commonly used in scholarship on A Revelation, was available in her day as a word also signifying an exemplum (MED, s.v. “parable”).

45. Glasscoe: “as clene as holy as angelys.”

46. Appropriately, she calls it not just an “example” but a “mystye example” (51.72). Unlike a preacher’s exemplum, which would strive to clarify a difficult topic or offer a memorable narrative or image, her “example” is too deeply rich for its full implications to be entirely grasped. For my line of argument in this paragraph and the ones immediately following, I am indebted to Watson and Jenkins, note to 51.1, p. 272, which helped to focus my thought on what I am calling an “apt congruity.” Watson and Jenkins identify Julian’s example as a similitude, “in which divine truths are described in closely analogous human terms. Significance is generated not by the gap between vehicle and tenor, story and meaning—as is the case in some of Jesus’ parables, whose improbability is their point—but by their congruity.”

47. I want to say “aptitude” but only, I think, because it would yoke “aptness” and “pulchritude” to “capability”: in this sense, “aptitude” would be “beautiful aptness” that also demonstrates its maker’s cleverness (in this case, God’s).

48. On Rhetoric, 3.10.4–5. See my Chapter 1, p. 35. Cf. Geoffrey of Vinsauf (Poetria nova, trans. Nims, 4.946–49, p. 118): “Two elements combine here, the laudable and the laborious; to transpose a word aptly is laborious, to succeed in transposing it aptly is laudable. When meaning comes clad in such apparel, the sound of words is pleasant to the happy ear, and delight in what is unusual stimulates the mind.” Cf. also Augustine: “Nobody, however, has any doubt about the facts, both that it is pleasanter in some cases to have knowledge communicated through figures, and that what is attended with difficulty in the seeking gives greater pleasure in the finding” (On Christian Doctrine 2.6.8); Blasko and Connine: “a highly apt metaphor tends to be one in which the domains of the topic and vehicle are relatively distant but the within-domain features are relatively close in semantic space . . . . The between domain distance must be fairly large for the metaphor to be effective because close distances provide little interaction or surprise” (“Effects of Familiarity,” 296).

49. See Introduction, p. 17. The doubleness she sees in the servant is not spatial but conceptual.

50. She associates the first of these with her initial experience of the “example,” and the second with guided further understanding, or interpretation of it, within the vision itself (as opposed to when she mulls over the vision’s significance later, although she also reports an instance of having “techyng inwardly” nearly twenty years after the initial revelation, 51.88).

51. These do not replicate the earlier division into “gostly in bodily lyknes” and “more gostly without bodyly lyknes”:

The frest is the begynnyng of techyng that I understod therein in the same tyme; the ii is the inward lernyng that I have vnderstodyn therein sithen [since]; the iii al the hole revelation from the begynnyng to the end, that is to sey, of this boke, which our lord God of his goodnes bryngeth oftentymes frely to the syte of myn vnderstondyng. And these iii arn so onyd [united], as to my vnderstondyng, that I cannot, ner may, depart them. (51.76–83)

The first thus embraces both “gostly in bodily lyknes” and “more gostly without bodyly lyknes,” the second just “more gostly without bodyly lyknes,” and the third both again.

52. Here her attention is only on the servant’s human perspective, not the knowledge Christ would have in his divinity. Some aspects of the servant’s experience only apply to Adam or to Christ, particularly once she begins to consider Christ’s role.

53. Adam’s status as a pre-lapsarian gardener is indicated by Genesis 2:15: “And the Lord God took man, and put him into the paradise for pleasure, to dress it, and keep it.” God decrees Adam’s post-lapsarian physicial labor at Gen. 3:17–19: “cursed is the earth in thy work; with labour and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life. / Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou eat the herbs of the earth. / In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth, out of which thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return.” Also pertinent for Julian’s identification of the servant as a gardener is John 20:15, the verse in which Mary Magdalene mistakes Christ for a gardener (after his resurrection but before his ascension).

54. I would not wish to lean too hard on the wording of Genesis, which underpins Julian’s imagery but is not a source per se. Nevertheless, it is worth noting the conjunction in Genesis of ideas and imagery Julian draws together at this point, particularly the generative work of creation, agriculture, fruiting, irrigation, and the earth God uses to create Adam (Gen. 2:5–7):

And every plant of the field before it [the creation of the sun, the moon, and the stars] sprung up in the earth, and every herb of the ground before it grew: for the Lord God had not rained upon the earth; and there was not a man to till the earth.

But a spring rose out of the earth, watering all the surface of the earth. And the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth . . .

As chapter fifty-one progresses, Julian increasingly identifies the “tresor in the erth” with humanity itself. The earthy nature of humanity’s generation is suggested by Julian’s term “medlur” to describe the mingled or mixed quality of the cloth of the servant’s garment (on which see further below).

55. Watson and Jenkins retain the less technical reading from Paris, as do Colledge and Walsh. Sloane: “and than he shuld take this mete, with the drinke in the mete” (Glasscoe, 51.201, emphasis added); Paris: “and than he shulde take this met with the drinke” (Watson and Jenkins, 51.169–70, emphasis added). Watson and Jenkins are silent on the eucharistic overtones of Sloane. Colledge and Walsh call the following clause (“and beryn it ful worshipfully aforn the lord”) eucharistic, but do not address the eucharistic imagery of Sloane’s “with the drinke in the mete” (p. 531, n. to l. 200):

Again, the context becomes eucharistic, and the figure of the servant becomes the priest, whose forerunner is Melchisedech (Genesis 14.18), as is emphasized in Hebrews 7.1 e.s., and also in the Roman canon of the Mass: . . . et quod tibi obtulit summus sacerdos tuus Melchisedech sanctum sacrificium . . . (Missale Romanum 1474, 1 208).

56. I am thinking of fluid generosity of the sort the Pearl-poet taps into for “He lauez [pours out] Hys gyftez as water of dyche [from a ditch]” (607), which builds toward:

Bot þeron com a bote astyt:	remedy; soon
Ryche blod ran on rode so roghe,	cross; rough
And wynne water; þen, at þat plyt,	precious; plight
þe grace of God wex gret innoghe.	enough
Innoghe þer wax out of þat welle,
Blod and water of brode wounde	from broad
Þe blod vus bo3t fro bale of helle,	bought; sorrow/pain
And delyuered vus of þe deth secounde;	delivered; from
Þe water is baptem, þe soþe to telle,	truth
Þat fol3ed þe glayue so grymly grounde,	followed the spear
Þat waschez away þe gyltez felle	deadly sins
Þat Adam wyth inne deth vus drounde. (645–56)

(Of course Julian’s “example” does not have the Pearl-poet’s emphasis on baptism.) The fact that Julian sees the servant fall into a “slade” rather than simply on flat ground perhaps reinforces a distant echo of a channel such as may be carved out by rushing water. The servant’s digging seems to produce the ditch into which he falls, which makes more sense when one perceives the servant as Christ than it does for Adam.

57. Paris has “full holsomly”; Julian’s A Vision (her Short Text) has “fullye” (Watson and Jenkins, 394).

58. “[L]icor” is an interesting choice here: in Middle English the word is used for the water of baptism (MED, s.v. “licour (n),” 1a) as well as for blood, milk, sap, and bodily fluids that enable or sustain generative growth, both botanical and animal (MED, 1b; a well-known example occurs in the first lines of the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales: “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote [sweet] / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, / And bathed every veyne in swich licour / Of which vertu [power] engendred is the flour,” ll. 1-4). The word is also used for wine, including communion wine (MED, 2a), and medicine (MED, 3b), so it covers quite a range of ways in which the “blissid blode” might be “service[able].”

59. Julian’s vision of Christ’s blood begins in her chapter four and continues in chapters seven and twelve. See my earlier discussion of this passage in Chapter 3, pp. 118–20.

60. As with Pearl, the “swete flodes” might also evoke the river that flows from the throne of God (Rev. 22:1); Revelation is similarly a likely source for chapter twelve’s imagery of washing in the blood (Rev. 7:14) and for “fulfilling the noumber that failith” (Rev. 6:11).

61. See below, p. 153.

62. While the Middle English phrase “in time” here would more accurately correspond to Present Day English “at the appropriate time” than to “before it is too late,” the distinction is unimportant, since in this case “the appropriate time” would be “before the plants die,” or “not too late”! It is not surprising to find Middle English “in time” associated with Genesis, as here; see, for example, Piers Plowman, where the sense is clearly “at the appropriate time”: “3e þat han wyues ben war and worcheth nat out of tyme / As Adam dede and Eue, as y whil er [before] tolde” (10.288–89) [the result of their untimely intercourse was Cain].

63. See, further, n. 58, above.

64. E.g., “in al this our good lord shewid his owne Son and Adam but one man” (51.231); “in the syte of God al man is on man and on man is all man” (51.105–6); “in the servant is comprehendid Adam: that is to sey, all men” (51.213–14); “by Adam I understond all man” (51.222); “for the langor and desire of al mankynd that shal be savid aperid in Iesus; for Iesus is al that shal be savid and al that shal be savid is Iesus” (51.267–69).

65. See my discussion of “we be his corone” at pp. 75–79. The Son’s gift comes in chapter fifty-five:

and Criste in his body mytyly berith [us] up into hevyn; for I saw that Crist, us al havand in him that shal be savid be him, worshipfully presentith his Fader in hevyn with us; which present ful thankfully his Fader receivith and curtesly gevith to his Son, Iesus Criste; which geft and werkyng is ioye to the Fader and bliss to the Son and likyng to the Holy Gost. (55.5–11)

66. Her treatment of this concept is also very similar to Langland’s. See, e.g., the lines immediately following Langland’s “plonte of pees” passage (1.155–57 ~ B.1.159–61):

Forthi is loue ledare of þe lordes folk of heuene leader

And a mene, as þe Mayre is, bitwene þe kyng and þe comune; intermediary, “mean”; mayor

Ryht so is loue a ledare and þe lawe shapeth

I requote the “plonte of pees” passage in n. 72, below.

67. I discussed this passage, “And what tyme that he of his goodnes will shewin hym to man, he shewith him homley as man,” at p. 142, above.

68. On clothing as a Christian metaphor, see pp. 72–75, above.

69. Although Colledge and Walsh and Watson and Jenkins agree in glossing the “hymself” of “in hymself present” as referring to the lord (Colledge and Walsh: “in his (the lord’s) very presence,” p. 532, n. to l. 208; Watson and Jenkins, “into his own presence,” p. 282, n. to l. 176), “hymself” more likely speaks to the person of the Son as represented in the servant, rather than to the lord. The Son, as servant, prepares (transforms) humanity and brings the “mete”/“tresor” to the lord, an action that is at once eucharistic and generously aristocratic (like Malory’s Sir Gareth, Julian’s servant betrays his high lineage in his manner of serving). Like the phrase “with the drink in the mete,” “in hymself present” makes an important theological point, in this case referring to the material status of the Second Person of the Trinity appearing before the First Person at the Ascension, the Son having gone in person to hell to retrieve Adam and others and eventually appearing in the flesh before the Father. Julian is careful to insist on the importance of Christ’s (human) person elsewhere, e.g.:

he is with us in hevyn, very [true] man in his owne person us updrawand, and that was shewid in the gostly thrist; and he is with us in erth us ledand [leading], and that was shewid in the thrid, wher I saw God in a poynte; and he is with us in our soule endlesly wonand [dwelling], us reuland and yemand [ruling and governing] and that was shewid in the xvith, as I shal sey. (52.39–44, emphasis added)

Place and time are important in this passage, too: because of the hypostatic union, the Son is simultaneously substantially (materially) present in heaven, thirsting for all humanity to join him there and drawing humanity to him; on earth, leading each and all of “us” in a “poynte”; and within each soul, perpetually ruling and guiding the individual.

Julian is very technical and correct in her consideration of the distinctions to be drawn among Persons of the Trinity, yet is careful not to imply that the Persons are not united. See, for example, her precise qualification of the love the servant has for the lord: “in him was shewid a ground of love, which love he had to the lord was even like to the love that the lord had to hym” (51.174–76). The servant’s love is just like/equivalent to/of equal status with the lord’s love.

70. Much later, Julian reverses the image to emphasize indwelling and God’s eternal present: “And ryte the same we shall be withoute end, the same we were tresurid in God, and hidde, knowen and lovid from withoute begynnyng” (53.56–58). God has always cherished humanity and always will, as the loving gaze of the lord in the example demonstrates.

71. See, e.g., the language of place at 51.55–56: “an inward gostely shewing of the lords menyng descendid into my soule. . . .”

72. See pp. 115–17, above, esp. p. 252, n. 82, on height and depth in the Johannine understanding of the Incarnation. Like Langland, Julian links the action of Incarnation with a parallel and seemingly instantaneous reversal. For comparison (1.148–54 ~ B.1.151–58):

Loue is þe plonte of pees, most precious of vertues,
For heuene holde hit ne myghte, so heuy hit semede,	heavy; seemed
Til hit hadde of erthe y3oten hitsilue.	begotten
And when hit hadde of þe folde flesch and blode taken	earth
Was neuer lef vppon lynde lyhtere theraftur	leaf upon linden tree lighter
And portatif and persaunt as þe poynt of a nelde	agile; piercing; needle
That my3te non Armure hit lette ne none heye walles.	armor; stop; high

73. In the phrase “for whom he was sent,” “he” must be Christ and not Adam; the same must be true throughout the following sentence.

74. For “the grit rote,” Colledge and Walsh read “the great root,” linking the word to the Jesse tree, an image that emphasizes the genealogy of Jesus as a generative and binding force (Colledge and Walsh, 542, n. to 51.300). Watson and Jenkins read “the mighty company” (286, n. to 51.255). The local sense certainly points toward the latter rather than the former, but perhaps a distant echo of “root” applies (the same pun is at work in “Truelove”; see p. 184, below). Julian is concerned here with the theological point that humanity has been joined ever more firmly to God through the incarnate Christ (“was knyt to hym”), though she elsewhere emphasizes that God’s act of creation itself initiated the jointure, and indeed the coexistence of Adam and Christ in the servant reinforces that very point. Elsewhere she uses the verb “rooted” to reinforce the closeness of God and humanity, sometimes with special attention to the Second Person’s role, and almost always in concert with “and grounded,” a lexical choice that resonates with the agricultural, generative imagery from the “example” as well as with the Jesse tree. See, e.g.: “our lif is all groundid and rotid in love” (49.8–9; cf. Eph. 3:17–18: “that being rooted and founded in charity / You may be able to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth, and length, and height, and depth”); “our soule sittith in God in very rest and our soule stondith in God in very strength and our soule is kindly rotid in God in endles love” (56.17–19); “for the Trinite is comprehendid in Criste in whome our heyer partie is groundid and rotid, and our lower partie the second person hath taken, which kynd [nature] first [from the beginning] to him was adyte [prepared]” (57.24–26); “and the second person of the Trinite is our moder in kynde in our substantiall makeyng, in whome we arn groundid and rotid, and he is our moder in mercy in our sensualite takyng” (58.44–46); “Love and drede [fear] are brethren; and thei arn rotid [rooted] in us be the goodnes of our maker” (74.22–24).

75. See pp. 43–46. She does something similar in chapter fifty-two, to distinguish Adam’s work from Christ’s (52.94–99):

. . . for it is all one love; which on blissid love hath now in us double werking; for in the lower part arn peynes and passions [compassions], ruthes and pites, mercies and forgevenes and swich other that arn profitable; but in the higer parte are none of these, but al on hey love and mervelous ioye, in which mervelous ioy all peynis are heyly restorid.

76. Gen. 3:17: “And to Adam he said: Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat, cursed is the earth in thy work; with labour and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life.” Note Julian’s pronoun “our” in conjunction with “life,” cf. Dante’s “midway in the journey of our life” (n. 21, above).

77. See also Steiner, “Medieval Documentary Poetics,” 95: “Notice that the verse from Lamentations (O vos omnes), traditionally identified with Christ’s lament from the cross, is compared to the standard address of a charter (Sciant presentes & futuri) by way of the English translation: both the scriptural and legal quotation suggest that any reader may receive Christ’s revelation as if in the presence of Christ himself.” For O vos omnes in the tradition of Christ as lover-knight, see Woolf, English Religious Lyric, 36–44.

78. Cf. Piers Plowman 18.159–60 ~ B.16.131–32: “And when þat my will is [= the fullness of time] y wol hit ouerthrowe / And ar thre dayes aftur edefye hit newe.” See n. 43, above.

79. Paris: “new.”

80. See p. 17, above. “Simultaneous narration” in the visual arts refers to the practice of juxtaposing episodes from a narrative sequence, to be read in relation to one another. I do not mean “simultaneous narration” as narratologists use it, in Gérard Genette’s sense of a narrator telling a story precisely at the time it occurs: Narrative Discourse, 218–19.

81. See pp. 106–7, above.

82. Ridderbos, “The Man of Sorrows,” 178. Cf. Black (“More about Metaphor,” 22): “Tacit knowledge of such literal meaning [as may be discerned in a ‘literal’ statement] induces the characteristic feeling [when reading a metaphorical statement] of dissonance or ‘tension’ between the focus [of the metaphorical statement] and its literal ‘frame’.” Black asserts that “Enthusiastic friends of metaphor are indeed prone to various kinds of inflation, ready to see metaphor everywhere” (20), a stance he himself rejects. Nevertheless, he is firmly in the camp of those who, like Richards (see p. 32, above), perceive metaphor not as a rhetorical flourish but as a form that itself encodes meaning: “the available literal resources of the language being insufficient to express our sense of the rich correspondences, interrelations, and analogies of domains conventionally separated . . . metaphorical thought and utterance sometimes embody insight expressible in no other fashion” (33). (This is not the only place where Black speaks of the “embodiment” or “incarnation” of meaning in metaphor.)

83. Ridderbos, “Man of Sorrows,” 158. This way of thinking about the Man of Sorrows sounds quite similar to the way Julian of Norwich describes her understanding of the servant in her “example.”

84. Ibid., 178. In his readings of particular instances of the Man of Sorrows, Ridderbos describes the meaning of each iteration of the image as what he calls a “metaphorical statement.” For example: “The message of our image can be expressed as a metaphorical statement: ‘The image of the crucified Christ is the image of the Pantocrator.’ . . . Such an understanding and experiencing has to do with the meanings of both images. The Man of Sorrows is not a combination of the Pantocrator as an image ‘in which all moments are lacking’ and the Crucifixion as an image ‘in which moments of action dominate,’ but rather one of two images in which moments of action are lacking and in which theological concepts have been visualised” (158). Ridderbos derives the latter two quotations about “moments” from Hans Belting’s work on the Man of Sorrows, Giovanni Bellini—Pietà: Ikone und Bilderzählung in der venezianischen Malerei (Frankfurt am Main, 1985), 143, quoted in Ridderbos, 151.

85. Ibid., 179.

86. Ibid., 159.

Chapter 5. “He is in the mydde point”: Poetic Deep Structure and the Frameworks of Incarnational Poetics

1. See pp. 8–11, above.

2. See above, p.24.

3. See below, pp. 173–80.

4. See pp. 86–104.

5. Barbara Newman has written provocatively on Langland and Julian together, considering both their use of temporality and their revision processes. She thinks carefully about the form of their works. In her view, both texts’ “resistance to formal neatness” defines not only an “aesthetic of process rather than product” but also—and crucially—traces their interest in the intersection between visionary experience and daily life. Her thought productively overlaps with my own. “Redeeming the Time,” 8–9. See also p. 215, n. 4, above, for her argument that, like Langland, Julian wrote three (or more) versions of her text.

6. See, for example, Fideler and Mayer, eds., Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth; Tye, Hard Truths; Hogenson, “Archetypes”; Rosenberg, A Place for Consciousness; Wagner-Pacifici, “The Deep Structure of Surrender,” Chapter 5 in The Art of Surrender; Fleming, “Deep Structure,” Chapter 2 in Why Liberals and Conservatives Clash. This list is representative rather than exhaustive. While such works frequently use “deep structure” only as a vague organizing principle, they occasionally do draw on its origins in linguistics.

7. See pp. 144–50.

8. See also On Christian Doctrine 3.24.34 (emphasis added): “The chief thing to be inquired into, therefore, in regard to any expression that we are trying to understand is, whether it is literal or figurative. For when it is ascertained to be figurative, it is easy, by an application of the laws of things which we discussed in the first book, to turn it in every way until we arrive at a true interpretation. . . .”

9. Good stylist that he is, Augustine structures his Latin phrase with a happy aptness missing from my English translation: “verum verbum” reinforces its truth value through concordant sound, with only a “b” to distinguish its terms one from another.

10. Burrow, “The Audience of Piers Plowman,” 109. Cf. similar language for a different purpose in Newman, “Redeeming the Time,” describing Piers Plowman and A Revelation: “In fact, all these [structural] divisions impede the flow of revelation so little that both works convey a sense of urgent movement forward coupled, paradoxically, with a meditative wish to circle back and revisit earlier moments. Like eddies whirling counter to the main current, these musings slow the reader’s progress and offset the passage of linear time with a cyclical or spiral motion” (8).

11. Burrow, “The Audience of Piers Plowman,” 109. The lines he quotes are as follows (108):

The firste was a ferse freke, fayrere than thies othirs,	fierce man
A bolde beryn one a blonke bownne for to ryde,	man on a horse, intending to
A hathelle on ane heghe horse with hauke appon honde.	man; tall; hawk
He was balghe in the breste and brode in the scholdirs. (109–12)	stout; broad

12. E.g., Ashe, “The ‘Short Charter”; Steiner, Documentary Culture, 61–75; Keen, Charters of Christ; Gray, Themes and Images, 130; Woolf, English Religious Lyric, 211.

13. The extant witnesses disagree on the key issue of whether Adam and Eve were driven out of paradise with or without guilt. While the agent of this treason (an offense against the king) is unclear, it seems probable to me that the poet was thinking of the devil, not Adam (or Eve), as scholars tend to assume and later manuscripts appear to indicate. The best A-text manuscript, BL MS Add. 11307, is consistently more correct than most, particularly with regard to legal terminology and liturgical significance, giving real reason to consider whether its reading of this line (without guilt) might be the true one. If it is, the treasonous party could hardly be Adam. (For Spalding’s reasoning in preferring this manuscript, her witness “G,” see Spalding, xciii–xcvi, esp. xcvi.) To see Adam’s guilt as treasonous is a relatively easy reading, but this poet thinks deeply and imaginatively about his system of imagery; elsewhere he does not take the obvious or easy path. Much of the poem’s careful technical thought is misunderstood and smoothed out in later A-text manuscripts as well as in the Band C-texts. Spalding has shown that even the earliest extant witness is several generations removed from the original exemplar (Spalding, xxxix, civ–cv).

Like Julian in her example of the lord and the servant, Add. 11307 and two other manuscripts see no fault in humanity: “Of all ioye þou were out pult / with treson and wythoute gult” (5–6, emphasis added; MS BL Harley 2346 and MS Add. Bod.C.280 agree with this reading). Moreover, all witnesses consistently refer to the devil as humanity’s adversary (“your foe”), never Christ’s: “Wel gret envye hadde þanne þi fo” (26); “Ageyn þi fo ful of wrake” (40); “Man þou hast ouercome þi fon” (188); “To helle I wente þis chartre to shewe / By-fore þi fo sathanas þe shrewe” (189–90); “Thanne þar þe not drede of þi fo” (212). It is further worth noting that the “Long Charter” persistently calls attention to Christ’s kingship. Satan’s first clear action—putting Christ to the test—is described as “felonye” (29). It would be worth knowing whether the original of this poem was written before or after the definition of treason entered into the parliamentary record in 1352. In Edward III’s proclamation, killing the king or his first son and heir is considered treason, but riding armed against a countryman in order to kill, rob, or kidnap him in return for ransom—these actions are not treason but felony or trespass. One thing the parliamentary record makes clear is that the legal definition of treason was disputed. See Edw. III, 1352, January, 17.vii, Given-Wilson, The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England. On “treason,” see Green, Crisis of Truth, 206–47. For Spalding’s view that the line should instead read “with resoun and wythoute gylt,” see Spalding, cvi–cvii.

14. “Forty” is an important number for the poem’s structure, as it is liturgically for Lent and the Easter season. In the “Long Charter,” the gestation in the womb is given as forty weeks less five days (rather than being stated simply as thirty-five days) (l. 19), and the time from Easter Sunday to Ascension Day is forty days (l. 201). The temptation of Christ by the devil, told at ll. 25–33, also lasts forty days; although the number is not mentioned in the poem, it is so well known that the poet would surely expect his readers to make this connection (liturgically, this is Lent).

15. Julian uses the same word (“kirtle”) in her example of the lord and the servant (see pp. 76–79 and 149–54 above). Exegetes interpreted the “seamless garment” Mary wove for Jesus as Christ’s humanity, among other things, basing their thought on John (19:23–24:

The soldiers therefore, when they had crucified him, took his garments (and they made four parts, to every soldier a part), and also his coat. Now the coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout.

They said then one to another: Let us not cut it, but let us cast lots for it, whose it shall be; that the scripture might be fulfilled, saying: They have parted my garments among them, and upon my vesture they have cast lot. And the soldiers indeed did these things.

For other examples of “kirtle” as Christ’s “seamless garment,” see MED, s.v. “kirtel (n),” 1d and 3. In exegetical thought, the seamless garment is also an image of charity emphasizing the integral unity of the Church. The imagery of the seamless garment was reinforced by the apocryphal Protevangelium of James, in which Mary is engaged in spinning purple thread to “make a veil for the temple of the Lord” when Gabriel comes for the Annunciation. For the text, see Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament, 61. For a history of the seamless garment, see Aubineau, “La Tunique sans couture du Christ.”

16. “loue drynk”: cf. A Revelation, chapters 17, 31, 75 and p. 240, n. 7, above; Piers Plowman 20.403 ~ B.18.365: “For y þat am lord of lyf, loue is my drynke.”

17. Cf. Piers Plowman, “Liberum dei Arbitrium for loue hath vndertake / That this iesus of his gentrice [because of his noble birth] shal iouste in Pers Armes / In his helm and in his haberion, humana natura” (20.20–22 ~ B.18.21–23), and my discussion of “secte” and “sute,” pp. 66–72, above; A Revelation, chapter fifty-one, and my pp. 148–51, above. The “Long Charter,” Piers Plowman, and A Revelation coincide in some of their imagery more intriguingly than is initially apparent.

18. Like “demytted” in line 15 (see p. 260, n. 29) and “streyned” in line 79 (see p. 241, n. 8), the phrase “come and cleyme” is legal language, though its technical nature could easily be missed by non-lawyers. “CLAIMEN To demand (something) by virtue of a right or title; to affirm a right or possession”; “COMEN AND CLAIMEN To come into court and put forth a claim.” Alford, Piers Plowman: A Glossary of Legal Diction, 28, 31. “[D] mytted” confused later copyists, as the manuscript witnesses attest (for “demytted”: “ordeyned,” “demede to,” “meked”).

19. Richard Firth Green postulates that the Charter of Christ “may well have originated among the clerical dependents of a great estate, either ecclesiastical or secular, though whether its circulation was restricted to such milieu is far less certain” (Crisis of Truth, 261). Spalding does not speculate on an author, beyond locating the language of the postulated original as “Midland” (87). On the poet’s probable background, see also n. 23, below.

20. The poem is deeply invested in the liturgy for the Triduum, as its Latin quotations demonstrate (l. 62a, Holy Thursday; l. 66a, Good Friday; l. 96a, Holy Thursday and Holy Saturday; l. 164a, Holy Thursday). Even where there is no Latin to underline the liturgical connection, the poet’s careful choice of words recalls the liturgical texts (e.g.: ll. 167–68, Good Friday [“ego te potavi aqua salutis de petra: et tu me potasti felle et aceto”]; l. 222, Holy Saturday [“o mors ero mors tua,” Hos. 13:14]). Liber usualis, 644, 667, 631, 727, 737, 667, 641, 707–8, 733.

21. Two manuscripts (MS Bod. 89 and MS BL Harl. 5396, Spalding, 24–25) attest “feste” for “soper,” perhaps indicating that some readers desired to reinforce the parallel between the two passages even more strongly (“feste” occurs at ll. 197, 201, 203).

22. Luke 22:19: “[And taking bread, he gave thanks, and brake; and gave to them, saying: This is my body, which is given for you.] Do this in memory of me.” (I have used the translation current in the Roman liturgy rather than the Douay-Rheims’s.)

23. Cf. “soule(s) fode” at MED, s.v. “fode (n(1)),” 2a, a figurative sense meaning “Spiritual sustenance, comfort, or support.” I am not convinced that all of the quotations cited under this definition suit it, since the eucharistic ones are not figurative (but not all of these are eucharistic). Given how carefully the poet indicates that the “mete and drynk” are “flesch and blode,” the emphasis seems to be on the material reality of transubstantiation—Christ’s body and blood in the form of bread and wine.

The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 promoted confession as a natural preparation for the reception of communion; the bishops’ resulting educational efforts worked to promulgate this view, so that penance and the Eucharist were frequently both explained together and linked within such explication (Rubin, Corpus Christi, 84–85). Taken together with the careful exposition of the stages of confession as represented by the true-love plant, this passage’s doctrinally informed treatment of the Eucharist reinforces my view that the poet was familiar with instructional programs that also gave rise to the penitential manuals (see p. 229, n. 14, above).

24. See p. 224, n 48, above.

25. See pp. 95–98, above.

26. Cf. Pearl: “Þat in þe forme of bred and wyn, / Þe preste vus schewez vch a daye,” ll. 1209–10. It would be worth thinking further about the “Long Charter” and Pearl together for their treatment of sacrament and charity, especially in light of David Aers’s comments on sacrament and church in Pearl. “The Self Mourning: Reflections on Pearl,” 72–73.

27. See p. 243, n. 30. Christ repeatedly focuses attention on his open demonstrations of his power; his actions and demeanor can be read, just as the text on his body can be. E.g., “Wiþ my chartre here in present / I make heron confirmament / That I haue granted and y-3eue / To þe mankynde with me to leue / In my revme of heuon blisse” (107-11); “I cam of þe holy gost / In playn [open] power þi stat [estate, station] to make” (150–51; according to line 149, the fifth seal testifies to this fact); “By-twene to [two] þefes on hy y-py3t / In tokon þat I was man of my3t” (161–62); “Aparty [openly] þo men gonne knowe me / That I was man of gret pouste [pouste]” (199–200).

28. Humanity’s poverty: ll. 7, 12, 39, 56, 106; Jesus’ poverty: 48, 56, 70, 74, 175–79. Jesus’ kingship: ll. 1, 9, 11, 103, 111, 116, 117, 151–54, 158, 162, 200; the inheritance: 11, 41, 117, 134, 232.

29. Furnivall, The Minor Poems of the Vernon MS., 462–64.

30. Whitehead, “Middle English Religious Lyrics,” 114.

31. The most thorough discussions of Hilton’s style, including his contextualization of scripture, are Clark and Dorward, 34–35; Mueller, The Native Tongue and the Word, 55–67; Sargent, “The Organization of The Scale of Perfection” A more theologically oriented study is Kennedy, Incarnational Element in Hilton’s Spirituality.

32. For the complicated textual history of The Scale, see the sources listed at p. 219, n. 11, above. Although Scale 1 and 2 were written at different times, here I will consider both books together as a whole, following the authority of Hilton’s statement in 2.1 that Scale 2 expands on certain matters discussed in Scale 1. Nevertheless, Scale 2 stakes out theological positions that do not everywhere align with Scale 1, in part because Hilton appears to have evolved his thought in response to criticisms of Scale 1 leveled by the author of The Cloud of Unknowing; moreover, Scale 2 is directed at a wider, probably at least partly lay, audience, despite its opening lines, which suggest continuity with the project of Scale 1:

For as moche as thou coveitest greteli and askest it pur charité for to heere more of an image the whiche y have bifore tymes in partie discried to thee, therfore I wole glaadli with drede falle to thi desire; and helpynge the grace of oure Lord Jhesu Crist, in whom I fulliche truste, y schal opene to thee a litil more of this image. (2.1.3–6)

Whether the anchoress was a real person or a convenient fiction remains open for debate (see Clark and Dorward, 19–20). Scale 2 surprisingly holds out the promise that the laity, and not just the spiritual elite, might profitably engage in contemplation. Yet, as Clark notes, “It is a little ironic that Scale 2, in which ‘contemplation’ is boldly held out as a goal for all Christians, remains more a ‘theologian’s book’ than Scale 1 and Mixed Life, with their eminently straight-forward teaching on vices and virtues and the duties of one’s state in life.” J. P. H. Clark, “Action and Contemplation in Walter Hilton,” 274.

33. Watson, “‘Et que est huius ydoli materia? Tuipse’,” 102. Watson cautions against facilely classifying Hilton as merely conservative and traditional, arguing that “his thinking about the inner life evolved from an energetic body of imagery and ideas that in many respects belongs to the same thought-world as the Lollard radicalism he opposed” (97).

34. Hilton’s use of imagery of light and darkness is more complex than I can show here. For the theological underpinnings, see Minnis, “Affection and Imagination”; J. P. H. Clark, “The ‘Lightsome Darkness’.”

35. Hilton’s use of Psalm 138 here is not entirely original but follows Augustine and Gregory, as Clark points out. “Action and Contemplation,” 263, n. 20.

36. “Redynge of Holi Writ mai thu not wel use, and therfore thee bihoveth more occupye thee in prayer and in meditacioun” (1.15.334–35).

37. I do not mean to imply that Hilton thought first in Latin and then translated that thought into English. Cautioning against unexamined or knee-jerk invocations of “vernacular theology,” Alastair Minnis constructively points out that

English clerics moved easily from Latin into one or other of the vernaculars of fourteenth-century England. Walter Hilton could just as readily have written his De tolerandis imaginibus in English or his Treatise on the Mixed Life in Latin (though it made practical sense to issue the latter in English, to ensure the widest possible readership among the layfolk who were its target audience). While The Cloud of Unknowing makes powerful use of the resources of Middle English, it is a highly elitist text with a learned—and recondite—Latin theological tradition behind it. (Translations of Authority, 104–5)

His point is well taken, and I would only want to emphasize further that when a masterful prose stylist such as Hilton thoroughly inhabits more than one language, the results can be particularly beneficial for emergent vernaculars.

38. Moralia 19.11.18. See Clark and Dorward, 174, n. 202.

39. Alastair Minnis points to the Pseudo-Dionysian treatment of Jesus as the Light that conveys access to the Father as the source of light (De caelesti hierarchia):

The supremely divine ray cannot illuminate us mortals except through sacred veils and shadows, which are disposed for our benefit by divine forethought. For Hilton, the human nature of Christ was the major shadow by which the divine light is mediated to men, and imaginative meditation on “þe schadwe of His manhede” was a major step toward eventual vision of the divinity behind the humanity. (“Affection and Imagination,” 356; see, further, n. 41, below)

40. As Elizabeth Salter has noted, Hilton’s allegorical strategies are similar to Langland’s, particularly with respect to his handling of the pilgrimage metaphor, even though the Scale is a very different sort of book, in many ways, from Piers Plowman. Salter, Piers Plowman: An Introduction, 80, 85–89. J. P. H. Clark points out that “The image of the pilgrim, with its biblical overtones (cf. I Peter 2:11) derives from St Bernard’s seventh sermon for Lent, echoes of which (with other sources too) abound in this section of the Scale” (“Lightsome Darkness,” 106).

41. Christ’s manhood is also allegorized as his shadow in the Ancrene Wisse; Geoffrey Shepherd points to Gregory’s Moralia and Bernard of Clairvaux, noting that the idea was “a development of Lam. 4:20, ultimately.” Shepherd, ed., Ancrene Wisse: Parts Six and Seven, 42, n. to 2ff. In the Ancrene Wisse, the leaping Bridegroom’s shadow passes over and covers the hills: “His schadewe lanhure ouergeað & wrið ham hwil he leapeð over ham, þet is, sum ilicnesse he leið on ham of his lif on eorðe, as þah hit were his schadewe; ah þe dunes underuoð þe troden of him seoluen & schaweð in hare lif hwuch his liflade wes . . .” (Shepherd, 17, ll. 28–33).

42. Yet elsewhere “shadow” comes closer to the type prefigured by an antitype, as in chapter thirty-two, where a particular practice of prayer leads to a momentary experience that prefigures what heaven will be like:

That is to seie, this man schal bi hooli psalmes, clene thoughtes, fervent desires, norische the fier of love in his herte, that it goo not out noo tyme. This reste oure Lord geveth to summe of hise servauntis, as it were for a reward of here traveyle and a shadwe of the love which thei shullen have in the blisse of hevene. (1.32.810–14)

Much as Augustine does in De Trinitate, Hilton takes this prefigurement yet further by linking it via the incarnate Christ to the Trinity:

Neverethelees though this be sooth of the endelees merci of God unto thee and to me and al mankynde, we schullen not therfore in trust of this be the more rekles wilfulli in oure lyvynge, but more bisi unto plese hym, nameli now, syn we aren restorid agen in hope bi this passioun of oure Lord to the dignité and to the blisse whiche we hadden lorn by Adammys synne. And though we myghten nevere geete it here fulli, yit we schulde desire that we myght recovere here lyvand a figure and a likenesse of that dignité, that oure soule myght be reformed, as it were in a schadewe, bi grace to the ymage of the Trinité, whiche we hadden bi kynde and aftir schullen have fulli in blisse. For that is the lif that is veri contemplatif, unto bigynne here in that felynge of love and goosteli knowynge of God bi openyng of the goostli iye, whiche schal nevere be loste ne bi taken awey, but the same schal be fulfilled othirwise in the blisse of hevene. (1.45.1279–89)

43. On eroticism in The Scale, see Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire, 57–58.

44. In the section following this quotation, Hilton includes the common monastic concept of mastication—chewing over of texts—but also the shocking image of the bloody teeth of heretics.

45. Hill, “Mary, the Rose–Bush,” 479–80. Similarly, Susanna Fein has suggested that “The Four Leaves of the Truelove” and “The Dispute Between Mary and the Cross” “are probably less important to mariological or lyrical traditions than they are significant demonstrations of incarnational impulses prevalent, but seemingly underrecognized, in the body of alliterative verse.” Fein, “Form and Continuity,” 123.

46. See p. 248, n. 57.

47. Greene, Early English Carols, no. 175a.

48. Out of context, it might appear that the third springing is the leap into the manger, but the second branch is so clearly the nativity as to preclude this interpretation.

49. Rudd, “ ‘Sweit Rois . . . Delytsum Lyllie’,” 397. Rudd’s focus is different from mine; nevertheless, her line of thought here is pertinent to my project as well, particularly the idea of doing away with a strict boundary between a literal sense and a figurative sense.

50. See, for example, Rapp and Gerrig, “Eponymous Verb Phrases,” 618:

The study of sense creation weakens faith in the existence—or necessity—of fully formed “entries” in a mental lexicon . . . .

What we are suggesting, in summary, is that the distinction between sense selection and sense creation is both useful and misleading. This distinction is useful because it makes plain that not all—and, perhaps, very few—instances of meaning recovery constitute circumstances in which meanings can be selected ready-made from the mental lexicon. However, this distinction may be misleading, because it suggests that the processes of “selection” and “creation” apply to different categories of words or phrases—for example, ordinary lexical items versus contextual expressions. Our results support the contention that the form of a phrase does not specify what types of processes are required for ultimate understanding: We suggest that “selection” and “creation” operate quite broadly in the full range of instances of comprehension.

While Rapp and Gerrig did not consider novel metaphors of the “God is a leaf” kind, they were prepared to extrapolate from the results of their and other studies to make this claim. See also p. 227, n. 62, above, for corroborating later studies.

51. For the underspecification model, see pp. 51–54, above.

52. Swets et al., “Underspecification of Syntactic Ambiguities,” 203.

53. Rapp and Gerrig, “Eponymous Verb Phrases,” 618.

54. Quotations of “Truelove” are from Susanna Fein’s edition in Moral Love Songs. While Israel Gollancz edited this poem as “The Quatrefoil of Love,” Fein calls this title “demonstrably wrong” (“Quatrefoil and Quatrefolia,” 28), basing her editorial title (“The Four Leaves of the Truelove”) instead on Wynkyn de Worde’s c. 1510 printing of the poem (for the relevant bibliography, see Moral Love Songs, 173–79).

55. Isaiah 11:1: “And there shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a flower shall rise up out of his root.”

56. Cf. A Revelation: “and whan he was there he reysid up the grit rote out of the depe depenes” (51.303–4); see p. 150, above.

57. Phillips, “The Quatrefoil of Love’,’ 250.

58. Fein, “Form and Continuity,” esp. 113–22; see also her introduction to her edition of the poem in Moral Love Songs, 161–73.

59. London, BL Add. 31042, fols. 98r–101v. Fein, “Quatrefoil and Quatrefolia,” esp. 30–34.

60. The fourfold symmetry of the Trinity and Mary similarly may be seen in an illumination depicting the coronation of Mary as Queen of Heaven in Huntington Library HM 1157, a Flemish book of hours from the late fifteenth century (f. 111v, the Advent Office, described in the library’s catalog as “Coronation of the Virgin, who kneels before the Father and the Son, both wearing the same cloak while the Dove hovers between them”; Dutschke, Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Huntington Library, 2:491, also available online through the Digital Scriptorium, http://sunsite3.berkeley.edu/hehweb/HM1157.html, accessed August 19, 2011. To be sure, this illumination positions Mary at the bottom of the cruciform design, carefully not elevating her above any person of the Trinity.

61. “Pale,” with a pun to “fellow” and a sound cluster that would include “fallen”; Mary is “fellow” to woe because she is part of the “lufe” fellowship and the second leaf has withered and fallen.

62. Pun to “leafed,” here perhaps also comparable to the moment of fullness, plenitudo temporis.

63. Perhaps with a pun to “white,” making the first leaf “fellow” to the fourth in color and in an even more hopeful spirit. The petals of the true-love flower are greenish-white.

64. See pp. 65–66, above.

65. The medieval Latin poem Macer Floridus De Viribus Herbarum, attributed to Odo Magdunensis, exists in a Middle English translation. In the late Middle Ages it may have been thought to derive from a Latin poem by Aemilius Macer (d. 16 b.c.) but the earlier poem, which is now lost, was probably known only by its name, as cited by Ovid and Quintilian. “Flourdelys” is not derived from Macer Floridus, a medicinal herbal containing no moralizations nor any mention of Mary or Jesus. Perhaps the “Flourdelys” poet had a different herbal in mind, one also associated with Macer, which did include the lily metaphor. While the poet states that Cato taught Macer (ll. 11–12), such a relationship is not indicated in the Middle English text of Macer Floridus. On the history of the Latin text and its vernacular translations, see A Middle English Translation of Macer Floridus De viribus herbarum, ed. Frisk, 13–17. On the possibility the author of Macer Floridus “may have been a Frenchman who lived near Meung somewhere between 1070 and 1112,” see Flood, “The Medieval Herbal Tradition of Macer Floridus,” 63.

66. Cf. Piers Plowman 18.117: “Thenne moued hym moed in magestate dei,” p. 131, above.

67. See p. 234, n. 51, above.

68. MED, s.v. “subget (n.)”

69. Cf. “Long Charter”: “To haue & to holden withouten mysse” (112). In “Flourdelys,” this language reinforces the polyvalence of “subject.” The phrase survives even today in the wording of some marriage vows, though to many moderns “to hold” is more likely to suggest a physical embrace than land tenure.

70. Cf. Julian on “geynmakyng”; see p. 48, above.

71. A carol attests to a similarly ambiguous use of the “flowre-de-lice”:

Synge we all, for tyme it is:

Mary hath born the flowre-de-lice.

Greene, Early English Carols, no. 48. This issue also arises when the flower is the true-love, as I discussed in Chapter 2:

Ho-so wol seche trwe loue

yn hyr hyt schal be founde.

See p. 228, n. 6, above.

72. Cf. Piers Plowman 20.298: “And where he wol is his way.”

73. While “star” is likely correct, the sound cluster of steer/steere/steeresmen suggests “rudder” as a possible reflex.

74. Line 53 is particularly difficult, with “feyntysenes” attested only in this poem. While the MED glosses the word as “deceit,” declaring it to be “[f]rom feintise n.,” the governing imagery here is of steadfastness, or cleaving to a rule or a way, and “feyntysenes” seems to be the opposite of that. (MED, s.v. “feintisenes (n.)”). I think the derivation from “feintise” is correct, but rather than the MED’s first sense (“1.(a) Deceit, hypocrisy; treachery, guile; faithlessness, untruthfulness”), the second is more apt: “2.(a) Lack of spirit or courage; faint-heartedness, flinching from danger, cowardice; (b) lack of energy or will to act; slackness or flagging of will; sluggishness, sloth . . . .”

75. John 14:6: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father, but by me.”

76. I am indebted to Tony Spearing for this suggestion. Enjambment across stanzas seems more natural when one views the manuscript witnesses, Vernon and Simeon, which do not mark verse paragraphs consistently and do not indent lines to indicate rhyme patterns but present all lines as flush left. In Simeon, no paraph distinguishes the beginning of this verse, an unusual omission.

77. For witen, in figural use, the sense “to depart” may imply death. MED, s.v. witen (v(4)). Or, perhaps, “It was to have firsthand knowledge of the place to which he went.” Compare Piers Plowman:

And aftur god auntred hymsulue and toek Adames kynde	endangered
To wyte what he hath soffred in thre sundry places,
Bothe in heuene and in erthe, and now to helle he thenketh
To wyte what al wo is þat woet of alle ioye. (20.231–34 ~ B.18.222–25)	experience; knew

Witen may also mean “bequeath,” important for the connection between “tau3te” (64) and “bitau3t” (78) (see below). MED, s.v. “witen (v.(2)).”

78. Or, “by blood,” i.e., the Crucifixion.

79. “In that way”? Or, “þat wyse” may be appositive with “he,” i.e., Christ. I am indebted to Nicky Zeeman for pointing out this possibility.

80. John 20:17: “Jesus saith to her: Do not touch me, for I am not yet ascended to my Father.”

81. Cf. “Truelove,” l. 281, quoted above.

82. Cf. Virgil’s last words to Dante (Purgatorio, 27.139–42; trans. Hollanders, 606–7):

Non aspettar mio dir più né mio cenno;	No longer wait for word or sign from me.
libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio,	Your will is free, upright, and sound.
e fallo fora non fare a suo senno:	Not to act as it chooses is unworthy:
per ch’io te sovra te corono e mitrio.	over yourself I crown and miter you.

83. Or possibly, “yearned for a long time ago.”

84. The reference is to two angels who inform the apostles that Christ has risen (Acts 1:10–11).

85. Cf. l. 58.

86. MED, s.v. “birde (n.(1)).”

87. Derek Pearsall has compared the poem’s alliterative style to that of Pearl, calling “Flourdelys” “intellectually sophisticated in a quite new way” (Old English and Middle English Poetry, 142).

88. Cf. Gen. 1:1–2: “In the beginning God created heaven, and earth. / And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters”; John 1:1–3: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. / The same was in the beginning with God. / All things were made by him: and without him was made nothing that was made.”

89. The “Flourdelys”-poet’s “mon” lacks the self-conscious anxiety Langland’s Will demonstrates over whether or not writing can be defended as a legitimate pastime. In the B-text of Piers Plowman, Imaginatif challenges the dreamer for writing poems, and the dreamer appears to acknowledge the validity of the criticism:

“And þow medlest þee with makynges and my3test go seye þi sauter,	writing; psalter
And bidde for hem þat 3yveþ þee breed; for þere are bokes ynowe	pray; give; enough
To telle men what dowel is, dobet and dobest boþe,
And prechours to preuen what it is of many a peire freres.”
I sei3 wel he seide me sooþ, and somwhat me to excuse	saw; the truth
Seide, . . . (B.12.16–21; these lines are not in C)

On this passage, see Middleton, “Narration and the Invention of Experience,” 110–19; Schmidt, Clerkly Maker, 14–20; Zeeman, Medieval Discourse of Desire, 247–49. It is possible that the “mon” is not the “Flourdelys” poet himself but rather “Maacer,” the poet’s ostensible source who also “her-of made in his Mynde” (11); perhaps the “Flourdelys” poet is intentionally ambiguous, implicating either himself or “Maacer,” or indeed both writers, by the phrase.

90. The catalog is as follows (in roughly chronological order):

1. National Library of Wales: (Annunciation) illumination, Llanbeblig Hours (Add MS 17520A), ff. IV-2r (Figure 4)

2. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: painted wooden (Jesse Tree) ceiling, Lady Chapel, St. Helen (Figure 7)

3. Long Melford, Suffolk: stained glass window, Holy Trinity Church (probably originally part of an Annunciation described in a seventeenth-century account of the church) (Figure 6)

4. Victoria and Albert Museum: carved alabaster (Annunciation with Throne of Grace Trinity) panel (Figure 8)

5. Tong, Shropshire: carved wooden (Annunciation) misericord (master’s stall), St. Bartholomew

6. Nottingham: carved (Annunciation) alabaster panel, tomb of John de Tannesley, St. Mary

7. York Minster: stained glass (Annunciation) window (“Bowet” window, probably by John Thornton and his workshop)

8. Oxford: stained glass window, lily crucifixion (with pot), St. Michael at the North Gate (Figure 5)

9. Wellington, Somerset: tracery sculpture on four-light east window, Wellington Parish Church

10. Victoria and Albert Museum: painted wooden (Annunciation) panel

11. Westwood, Wiltshire: stained glass window, lily crucifixion (with pot), Westwood Church

12. South Kilworth, Leicestershire: carved stone (Annunciation), tomb of Richard de Whitenhall, South Kilworth Church

13. Lambeth Palace Library: (Annunciation) illumination, Lewkenor Hours (MS 545), f. 164b

14. Godshill, Isle of Wight: wall painting, lily crucifixion (with pot), All Saints

15. Oxford: stained glass (Annunciation) window, Queen’s College

16. West Wittering, Sussex: carved stone (Annunciation), tomb of William Earnley, SS Peter and Paul

17. Kenn, near Exeter: painted wooden (Annunciation with Trinity) screen, St. Andrew possibly a lily crucifixion:

18. Winchester: silver Annunciation with gold lily crucifixion (?), listed in two inventories (from the reign of Henry VIII) of plate given to Winchester College

19. Gresford, Denbighshire, Wales: carved wooden misericord, Annunciation(?) with broken corbel that may have supported a lily crucifix

I have not yet been able to examine all these examples in person. Evidently at South Kilworth and Wellington, the plant cannot positively be identified as a lily.

W. L. Hildburgh’s original article on the lily crucifixion is the most comprehensive resource to date, supplemented by his follow-up article: “An Alabaster Table of the Annunciation with the Crucifix”; “Some Further Notes on the Crucifix on the Lily.” Reproductions and descriptions may also be found, among other places, in Duggan, “Notes Concerning the ‘Lily Crucifixion’ in the Llanbeblig Hours” (Llanbeblig); Warner, Descriptive Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts in the Library of C. W. Dyson Perrins, 59–61 (Llanbeblig); Hulbert, “Conservation of the Fourteenth-Century Ceiling at Saint Helen’s Church, Abingdon” (Abingdon); Hulbert, “The Recovery of the Jesse Tree Sequence of Panels” (Abingdon); Preston, “The Fourteenth Century Painted Ceiling at St. Helen’s Church, Abingdon” (Abingdon); Borenius, “An English Painted Ceiling of the Late Fourteenth Century” (Abingdon); Woodforde, The Norwich School of Glass-Painting, 77, 91–92 (Long Melford); Cheetham, English Medieval Alabasters, 167, color plate iv (V&A); Remnant, A Catalogue of Misericords in Great Britain, 55–56, plate 1c (Tong), 193–94 (Gresford); Harrison, The Painted Glass of York, 87–89, plate facing p. 88 (York; the window has been altered since this picture was taken); Edwards, “Lily-Crucifixions in the Oxford District,” 44 (St. Michael at the North Gate); Kemp, “The Annunciation and the Lily Crucifixion” (Wellington and South Kilworth); H. Clifford Smith, “An English Fifteenth-Century Panel” (V&A); Edwards, “The Lily-Crucifixion and Other Medieval Glass at the Church of St. Mary, Westwood, Wiltshire” (Westwood); Crossley, English Church Monuments, 126b (West Wittering, drawing); Rushforth, “A Lily-Crucifix and an Unidentified Saint in Kenn Church, Devon” (Kenn); Gunner, “Inventories of Plate, Given to the College of Winchester” (Winchester). My thanks to Suzanne Foster, archivist for Winchester College, for providing me with a scan of the relevant section from a Winchester inventory roll similar to the one Gunner transcribed (21869, a note on the roll indicates 13 Henry VIII), which she tells me is dated to c. 1521. According to the inventory, the lily crucifixion was given to the College by Robert Thurbern (warden between 1413 and 1450). The inventory calls it “two images, that is to say, the Blessed Mary and Archangel Gabriel and a silver pot gilded with a lily and an image of the Crucifixion.” The College has no other reference to a lily crucifixion among its silver collection; it is not mentioned in the College’s other inventories of a similar date, and none of the College’s medieval silver survives (personal communication, April 28, 2006). Yet Gunner’s inventory cannot be the same as 21869: he does not include the names of donors, but does give the weight of each item (152 ounces, in the case of the lily crucifixion). Although 21869 confirms there were at least two pieces (“they were sold”), it is unclear what sort of objects they were (sculptures? a diptych? the “pot” mentioned in the inventory would seem to be part of the scene, not the main item).

91. Media of known examples:

1 carved alabaster panel

3 carved alabaster or stone tomb panels

1 (or 2) carved wooden misericord(s)

2 manuscript illuminations

1 painted wooden (Jesse Tree) ceiling

2 painted wooden panels or screens

1 wall painting

5 stained glass windows

1 tracery sculpture on a window

now lost: 1 silver and gold Annunciation (sculpture? diptych?)

92. Except for the (very late) Godshill wall painting, the isolated examples are all in notoriously fragile stained glass.

93. The lily crucifixion at St. Helen, Abingdon, occurs within the extraordinary Jesse Tree ceiling (Figure 7); the culmination of the tree in this case quite unusually includes both Joseph and the Annunciation; more commonly, the Virgin holds the infant Jesus on her lap. On the Jesse Tree, see p. 231, n. 20, above.

94. See p. 156, above.

95. This window has been moved to the chantry chapel from its earlier location in the upper lights of the nave. Hildburgh, “Some Further Notes,” 24–25; Woodforde, Norwich School of Glass-Painting, 91–92.

Conclusion

Epigraph: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 26, f. 202^v; no. 12 in Greene, Early English Carols, 6 (IMEV 29).

1. In the realm of Passion meditation, Michelle Karnes has recently made a similar point in arguing that intellect, and not just affect, is key to works of the sort exemplified by James of Milan’s Meditationes vitae Christi and the pseudo-Bonaventurean Meditationes vitae Christi (Chapter 4 of Imagination, Meditation and Cognition).

2. D. Vance Smith, “Medieval Forma,” 71; Smith’s reading of Erthe toc of erthe brilliantly elucidates how poetic form may enact meaning. His characterization of the “work” of the poem as “a kind of sophisma, a logical problem that can be resolved, or understood, only by registering how words do not just signify but enact experience” (75) is much in sympathy with my own view.

3. Cf. Smith, “Medieval Forma,” 78: “The poem’s apparent simplicity allows us to see clearly, however, how medieval readers and writers read for form in complex ways even against, and within, poems whose forms could seem monolithic.” Smith is speaking of Erthe toc of erthe, a poem in which the word “earth” occurs three times on each of four short lines, and conforms uniformly to a single rhyme. For the text of Erthe toc of erthe, see p. 251, n. 80, above.

4. Brown, Religious Lyrics of the Fifteenth Century, no. 120, p. 187. From MS. Rawlinson B.332, fol. iiv. Brown also prints three versions of the poem ascribed to Bishop Reginald Pecock, from which these lines appear to derive (IMEV 4181; Brown, no. 119):

Witte hath wondir that resoun ne telle kan,

How maidene is modir, and God is man.

Leve thy resoun and bileve in the wondir,

For feith is aboven and reson is undir.

5. MED, s.v. “leven (v.(1)).”

6. Cf. Langland’s use of “figuratively,” with his evocation of 1 Cor. 13:4–5 (“non inflatur, non est ambiciosa”; see pp. 28 and 30, above.

7. Herbert, The English Poems, ed. Wilcox, 254.

8. Here, as in “Redemption” and “The Collar,” it is tempting to think carefully about the word “suit” in Langlandian terms. See pp. 66–72, above.

9. “Quiddity” was originally a scholastic term that in its expression of the “thingness” of something was caught up in discussions of the substantial and human nature of Christ himself; consider Aquinas, for example, arguing that the hypostatic union took place in the person [in persona], not the nature [natura] of Christ:

And since the termination of the generative process within what is generated is the essence of the species as expressed by the definition, that essence is accordingly termed a “nature” [natura]; Boethius defines nature on that understanding when he writes, Nature for each thing is what gives it form through the specific difference, i.e. the completive of the definition of the species. Here, therefore, we are discussing nature as meaning essence [essentiam], or the “what-it-is” or “whatness” of a species [vel quod quid est sive quidditatem speciei]. (Summa 3a.2.1; the person part of the proof comes in 3a.2.2)

Herbert’s original title for the poem was simply “Poetry.” Of course, he also plays on quiddity’s post-medieval sense as “A subtlety or nicety in argument; a quibble. In later use also: a witticism; a quip” (OED, s.v. “quiddity,” 2a).