Anne Clark Bartlett
Near the beginning of her Book, Margery Kempe describes the violent trauma that accompanies the birth of her first child. She reports becoming ill during her pregnancy, experiencing a difficult labor, and then suffering what many have suggested was a severe postpartum depression. She claws her body with her fingernails, reviles her husband and friends, and beholds terrifying visions of demons and hehfire. One day, however, while she is alone, an incident occurs which restores her to emotional and physical health: "[Christ] appeared to this creature which had forsaken him, in the likeness of a man, the most seemly, most beauteous, & most amiable that ever could be seen, clad in a mantle of purple silk, sitting upon her bedside, looking upon her with so blissful an expression that her spirits rose, and he said to her: "Daughter, why have you forsaken me, when I remained faithful?"1 After uttering these words, her visitor ascends slowly, gracefully, majestically, and disappears into the parted heavens. After this encounter, Kempe is able to speak, eat, and drink; and she is released from her restraints. Although she claims in hindsight that at this point "she did not understand the power of our Lord,"2 which reveals the non-ahegorical nature of her initial understanding of this incident, the sudden appearance of a handsome and courtly Christ does function redemptively for Kempe. As the representative of an omnipotent and invisible Father, the courteous son reassimilates her into the cultural economy of language, desire, and subjectivity from which her traumatic childbirth and subsequent madness had exiled her.3 She returns once more to her daily activities: "she knew the friends and acquaintances who came to her, and afterwards ... did all of her daily occupations."4
Readers of courtly literature will readily recognize the appearance, manner, and dress of a courfly hero in this occurrence; they may also find familiar the structure and logic of the incident itself. Such episodes of visitation, disguise and recognition, and rescue appear frequently in Middle English romances.5 Yet many modem readers of Margery Kempe exhibit considerable skepticism about her evident appreciation for courtesy, preferring to isolate in her Book the discursive strains of religion and romance. Similarly, virtually all extant analyses of devotional literature for women focus only on the figural or doctrinal significance of their use of courtesy and romance conventions. Rosemary Woolf and Elizabeth Robertson have argued that the "Christ as courtly wooer" motif functions allegorically, teaching women readers to redirect their amorous desires,
The conflation of these discursive registers in Middle English devotional literature is the central problem that this essay examines. I will argue that the literary and social conventions of courtesy--which include stock episodes and characterizations from the romance genre, models of gender relations from the literature of courtly love, and conventional notions of feminine decorum deriving from conduct manuals--provide a compensatory and sometimes conflicting counter-discourse alongside the traditional ascetic didacticism circulating in devotional texts for women and within medieval culture in general.7 This convergence of devotional and courtly discourses is not simply a matter of theological truths offered up in a pleasing allegory. The pleasure of the literal sense of these courtly conventions offers to women a heuristic fantasy of erotic love and aristocratic power. In the context of a religious ideology that sought to subdue what it viewed as the sinful tendencies of Woman, the tropes of feminine courtesy validate (though ambivalently, to be sure) female beauty, power, and agency.8 This essay treats three major aspects of courtly discourse found in devotional literature: 1) courteous feminine ideals, 2) representations of Christ as a courtly lover, and 3) a paradoxical tendency to critique the very conventions of courtesy that these texts exploit.9
Middle English devotional treatises written for women represent several aspects of courteous femininity, including humility, chastity, beauty, patience, meekness, and domesticity.10 For example, Richard Rolle's The Commandment reminds its female audience that as the lovers of this Christ, they must "be courteous and meek to all men ... Decorate your soul beautifully, and erect in it a tower of love dedicated to God's son .... For his joy is that you be attractive and lovely in his eyes ...."11 This address to female readers clearly shares the conventions of femininity found in medieval courtesy books. Although Rolle glosses this advice by stating that it is the reader's spiritual rather than physical beauty that arouses Christ's desire for her, his use of the ornate language of courtesy presents a clear alternative to the didactic conventions of traditional ascetic piety.
Likewise, many devotional treatises conspicuously present the Virgin Mary or female saints as courteous personages. For instance, Pore Caitif calls "the mirror of maidens," and urges female readers to "look therein."12 The text elaborates: "she was never gluttonous, nor a wine-drinker, a flirtatious woman, a game-player, a joker, nor a dancer and singer."13 Similarly, Nicholas Love's Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jhesu Christ holds up the Virgin Mary as a model of courteous conduct for female readers.14 Like courtly romance heroines, Mary is physically attractive (Joseph "coveted her shape and her beauty"),15 and she also possesses all of the feminine virtues found in courtesy manuals, including meekness, silence, and humility. Love urges his readers to "learn from her example."16 Osbem Bokenham's fifteenth-century hagiographic narratives also use these courteous ideals of feminine conduct. For example, Saint Margaret comes from a noble (though pagan) family, and she is virtuous and chaste,
After Margaret refuses his affections, she is gruesomely tortured, but manages to remain courteously deferential throughout the entire ordeal, praying at her death for the forgiveness of her persecutors and for deliverance for all "oppressed by pain or grief," particularly women in childbirth.18 To the end, her humility, charity, and even her physical appearance epitomize the medieval ideal of feminine courtesy.
Devotional texts also incorporate the convention of the dominant lady developed in courtly literature. For example, a Middle English translation of Aelred of Rievaulx's De Institutione Inclusarum describes Christ as a handsome paramour whom the reader has selected: "Behold now the spouse and friend you have chosen. Indeed, he is handsomer in appearance than anyone every born, fairer than the sun, surpassing without measure the beauty of the stars. His breath is sweeter than any honey, and his lineage surpasses honey and all sweetness."19 Similarly, the Ancrene Riwle addresses its audience with remarkable directness, urging its female readers to, "stretch out your love to Jesus Christ. You have won him! Touch him with as much love as you sometimes feel for a man. He is yours to do with all that you will .... So exceedingly does Christ love you that he makes [you] His equal. I dare to say even more--He makes [you] His sovereign and does all [you] command, as if from necessity."20 Rather than castigating Woman as the lascivious and depraved descendant of Eve, the courtly version of the gospel seeks to arouse desire, hailing the female reader as one whom Christ seeks out, actively and humbly, as a lover. This text positions female readers as active and desiring subjects, rather than passive objects of male desire. Christ becomes the acquiescent partner, the gentle yet sensual knight who can be won by an aggressively eligible courtly female reader.
Other devotional texts offer readers similarly active, even masculine, roles within the ideology of courtesy, which overturn the conventional medieval religious hierarchy of God, man, and woman. The Pore Caitif, for example, holds up Saint Katherine as an example of virtuous courtly conduct for its female readers; it reminds its audience that "she was not afraid, and took up the strife of knighthood, on behalf of the Lord."21 Similarly, The xii frutes of the holy goost advises its female readers that the struggle against evil is like a tournament. This text likens its audience to "a famous and worthy knight who
At the same time, even where the medieval discourse of feminine courtesy might prove most attractive to women, its conventions would ultimately reinforce the misogyny pervasive in much medieval religious discourse.24 Like the romance plots that endow women largely with passive or peripheral roles, the tropes of feminine courtesy in devotional texts cultivate a highly gendered spirituality, in which women readers are instructed to submit silently to men as well as to God. As the representative of a divinely-authorized patriarchal social order, the courtly Christ validates female desire only in order to contain it, direct it toward sanctioned imaginative targets, and construct it as reactive, responsive not only to the call of the Father/Son, but also to the human (male) author. As R. Howard Bloch has recently argued, "Courtliness is a much more effective tool than even misogyny for the possession and repossession of women."25
Illustrating this double submission is the quintessential courtesy trope in devotional literature: the parable of Christ as a distant king, seeking the female reader's love through his letters. The Tretyse of Love, for example, asserts, "Right dear beloved friend in God, now take heed carefully and with great devotion to the following story ... wherein you shall find 'delicious matyr,' for Jesus the king of glory has done for your soul, which is his love, as a faraway king does, who loves a distant lady, and sends his messengers before him with letters of love ....26 This courteous version, a romance gospel, is undoubtedly designed for what a male author believes are the tastes and capacities of a female audience. The woman reader is figured as a beautiful and reticent lady, the passive love object who is forced to rely on the messengers (and the author) as intemediaries and interpreters of the heavenly message. Even when the author discards this courteous conceit, he continues to position readers as submissive and dependent, consistently--even intrusively--guiding them through the minute details of the narrative, questioning them on their reactions, and supplying what he feels are appropriate responses to the events that he recounts. Richard Rolle's Ego Dormio supplies a rather unusual version of this general theme (although a scenario familiar to readers of Chaucer's Troylus and Criseyde). He informs his readership that "because I love you, I woo you, so that I might have you as I wish, not for myself, but for my lord. I will become his agent, to bring you to his bed ....27 In assenting to and internalizing this metaphor, the female reader is invited to play a doubly inactive role, envisioning herself as the target of the authorial seducer's attentions as well as those of the Lover-Knight.28
Taken to its logical extreme, this motif, what I call "salvation through seduction," reveals the misogynistic assumption that women are incapable of freely assenting to the invitation of grace that stands at the heart of Christian theology. That the metaphor of Christ the wooer of the soul can easily become Christ the abductor is illustrated by the Ancrene Riwle's version of the amorous king parable. As in courtly seductions in general, the disdainful female partner is not expected to acquiesce readily to the lover's advances, necessitating a
The assumptions of the author about women, spirituality, and sex are clarified at the close of the parable, in which the Lover Christ vehemently addresses the lady (whose point of view-significantly-has merged with that of the reader). The exclamation of the Ancrene Riwle's courtly Christ is well worth quoting at length:
This representation of the Lover Christ resembles the boasting heroes of the chanson du geste or epic more than it does the humble but courageous knights of courtly romance and the suffering savior of passion narrative. Yet it is consistent with conventional medieval assumptions about female sexuality, especially the notion that women always desire sex, and that male compulsion to surrender merely bends the female will that is always already compliant.30 When Christ boasts extravagantly and then threatens the reticent lady with his sword, he illustrates this text's foundational logic that women must be seduced--whether to bed or to the gospel--by an appeal either to their physical appetites, fears, or to their materialistic desires. Then, if the woman in question still refuses, she must be brought into conformity with male objectives and patriarchal social structures through the use of physical or psychic force.
Although the discourses of courtesy and asceticism appear together in medieval devotional texts, their cohabitation is frequently less than harmonious. As the Ancrene Riwle explains, "courtesy in an anchoress has sometimes become a thing harmful to herself."31 Consequently, devotional treatises that incorporate the conventions of courtliness also regularly advise women to strip them away in order to expose what they label a very unromantic, even bestial female essence. Richard Rolle's The Conwwndment urges its female readers to renounce their desires for courtly dress and social status:
The Ancrene Riwle's advice on confession delivers a similar critique of courtly female speech: "confession must be naked, and stripped of all courteous adornment. The words should match the deeds... For example, when a woman says 'sir, I have had a lover'... it is not naked confession. You should say plainly: "sir, god's mercy, I am a foul stud mare, a stinking whore ....33 Evidently, while courtesy can constitute an appropriate vehicle for God (as Lover Knight) to reveal himself to women and for men to convey moral instruction to female readers, it does not provide an appropriate medium for women to reveal themselves to God or to priests. Even the Ancrene Riwle's expected audience of anchoresses--portrayed elsewhere as virtuous and chaste--are urged to begin a confession with the grotesquely misogynistic (and curiously metaphorical) "unadorned" assertion: "I am a foul stud mare, a stinking whore." In this way, the discourse of feminine courtesy in devotional texts resembles medieval characterizations of women themselves, who are often figured in theological and popular treatises as deceptive, sensual, artificial, supplementary. Ultimately, the inherent distrust with which religious authors regarded courtly discourse makes its pervasiveness in devotional texts for women (whom they obviously viewed with similar suspicion) doubly intriguing.
Consequently, women's devotional literature must be seen as the site of multiple, and sometimes conflicting social and literary meanings and functions. While identification with certain courtly scenes and characterizations may have had an empowering effect on women readers, the internalization of other aspects of feminine courtesy may have disabled readers, rendering them passive and subservient toward men, as well as toward God. If courtly discourse validates an inversion of the conventional medieval gender hierarchy under some circumstances, it simultaneously reinforces the silence and powerlessness of women.
The function of courtesy also varies in specific historical contexts. Bloch concludes that in late twelfth-century France, the courtly romance represents "above all, a usurping reappropriation of Woman at the moment she became capable of appropriating what had traditionally constituted masculine modes of wealth.34 Yet, as Kempe's Book illustrates, in late medieval England, the discourse of feminine courtesy in devotional texts could exert significant appeal and offer a model of conduct that could empower, as well as disenfranchise, women readers. During this period of economic and social change, these texts may well have encouraged a temporary, vicarious resolution of cultural anxieties about gender roles, inheritance practices, and women's work;35 they also allowed an initiation into a feminine ideal revered by men and marked traditionally as the domain of the aristocracy.
In fact, the proliferation of these courtly devotional texts during the late Middle Ages indicates that male authors sought to accommodate--rather than to resist--the desires of female readers and patrons. The discursive hybrids that I have discussed here must have offered to women an opportunity to satisfy both their taste for the literature of courtesy and their need for religious instruction, all while evading the commonplace clerical critique of "frivolous" romance reading. Moreover, these treatises contrast starkly with the misogynistic tirades contained in earlier devotional writing (for example the twelfth-century Latin De institutions inclusarum), addressed to women, but very likely actually intended for men.36 In the Middle English texts, representations of women begin to function as signs designed to be circulated among female readers, rather than solely as feminine figures intended to be exchanged between men in the absence of women.37 In conjunction with the multiple gender roles available for female audiences in Middle English texts and society, then, the conventions of courtesy in devotional literature simultaneously reflect, perpetuate, and contain larger conflicts in late medieval English culture about women's power, position, and essence.