1. All quotations from Sir Gowther are cited parenthetically by line number and
are taken from Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, eds., The Middle English Breton Lays
(Kalamazoo, 1995).
2. For comparisons of the two works, see Andrea Hopkins, The Sinful Knights: A
Study of Middle English Penitential Romance (Oxford, 1990), pp. 150-158 and Shirley
Marchalonis, "Sir Gowther: The Process of a Romance," Chaucer Review 6
(1971/2), 14-29.
3. Dieter Mehl, The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth
Centuries (London, 1968), pp. 125-128.
4. Maldwyn Mills, ed., Six Middle English Romances (London, 1973), p. xviii.
5. Lee C. Ramsey, Chivalric Romances: Popular Literature in Medieval England
(Bloomington, 1983), p. 219.
6. Hopkins, Sinful Knights, pp. 144-178.
7. Marchalonis, "Process of a Romance." Marchalonis argues that the "chivalric ethic
provides the major emphasis for Sir Gowther in its final form" (14).
8. Laskaya and Salisbury, eds., Middle English Breton Lays, pp. 263-64. Seeing
Royal 17.B.43 as largely concerned with the domestic relies in part upon reading Sir
Ysumbras, as Laskaya and Salisbury do, as a tale about the hero's loss of and subsequent
reunion with his family. Like Sir Gowther, Sir Ysumbras is the subject of a debate
about its status as romance, as it also is deeply concerned with contrition and repentance.
9. To summarize Sir Gowther's plot, the childless Duke and Duchess of Austria
are on the point of separating when the Duchess prays for a child. She is confronted in an orchard
by a man who appears to be her husband but is actually a fiend, and she becomes pregnant by him.
The child, christened Gowther, becomes progressively more wicked, raping women, burning
churches and murdering churchmen. Finally Gowther is confronted by an elderly earl who insists
Gowther must be a fiend's son. Gowther receives confirmation of this from his mother and sets
off for Rome to "learn another teaching." Gowther then begins the long process of repentance,
taking a vow of silence and eating food only from the mouths of dogs. On the fourth day of
wandering he arrives at a castle where an emperor is threatened by a sultan who wants to marry
the emperor's daughter. The daughter takes care of Gowther, rinsing the mouths of her
greyhounds with wine and placing meat and bread in them for Gowther to eat. Gowther prays
that he be equipped to defend the emperor and his daughter, and a black horse and armor appear
the first day, red the second, and white the third. Thanks to Gowther, the sultan is ultimately
defeated, but on the third day the emperor's daughter falls out of a tower at the sight of Gowther
being wounded in battle, and for two days lies as if dead. As the emperor prepares for her
funeral, she rises, tells Gowther that God has forgiven him his sins, and reveals to her father that
Gowther is the mysterious knight
start of page 77
who helped him in battle. The Pope pronounces Gowther God's child, and Gowther marries the
maiden. Gowther then returns to Austria, gives the old earl
his duchy, and marries him to the Duchess. He builds an abbey and a monastery and then returns
to Germany where he marries the emperor's daughter and inherits his kingdom. He reigns well,
heals the sick, and when he dies, is buried at the abbey he founded. This summary follows the
Advocates version of the poem, as it includes details of Gowther's violent behavior that the Royal
version, generally considered later and gentler, excludes. For facing page versions of the two
texts see Cornelius Novelli, Sir Gowther, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame,
1963.
10. In the Royal version, the Duke simply dies, so that Gowther's fatherlessness is just
another unfortunate circumstance that enables Gowther to be wicked. But in the Advocates
version,
Gowther actually causes his father's death. This difference is an example of what I see as the
Advocates version's closer attention to the struggles in the father/son relationship.
11. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York,
1977), p. 67.
12. The fundamental "no" of the symbolic father is its prohibition of the child's incestuous
desire for its mother.
13. Suspicion of Lacan's gendered terminology has sometimes left his work sidelined
where it might be most useful. Sarah Stanbury, for example, turns to models provided by such
theorists as Jane Flax and Kaja Silverman to circumvent what she sees as Lacan's privileging of
the masculine in the formation of sexual difference. See Sarah Stanbury, "Feminist Masterplots:
The Gaze on the Body of Pearl's Dead Girl," in Feminist Approaches to the Body in
Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia, 1993), p. 106. Or
similarly, Louise Fradenburg argues that Lacanian theory "tends to absolutize and universalize
what is in fact a production of a particular configuration of gender, loss, and language" (200).
See her "'Voice Memorial': Loss and Reparation in Chaucer's Poetry," Exemplaria 2
(1990), 169-202. But at the same time, H. Marshall Leicester's intriguing analysis of three of the
Canterbury Tales in his The Disenchanted Self (Berkeley, 1990) makes clear how
fruitfully Lacanian analysis can be employed to explore medieval representations of subjectivity.
And Gayle Margherita, in her recent work, The Romance of Origins (Philadelphia, 1994),
uses Lacan, among other theorists, to examine what she sees as the correlation between sexual
difference and our alienation from the past.
14. In the case of Little Hans, for example, "horse" comes to serve the paternal function.
For further explanation of this idea see Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language
and Jouissance (Princeton, 1995), p. 56.
15. François Regnault, "The Name-of-the-Father" in Reading Seminar XI:
Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein et al.
start of page 78
(Albany,
1995), pp. 65-74.
16. Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out
(New York, 1992), p. 125.
17. Text is from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston,
1987).
18. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1.51.3.6.
19. Hopkins, Sinful Knights, p. 146.
