Notes
1. This account is found in Letter Book G, circa A.D. 1352-1374, 7: 306 of the Calendar of the Letter Books of the City of London, A-L (1275-1497), 11 vols., ed. Reginald R. Sharpe (London, 1899-1912), hereafter cited as Letter Book. The incident is also cited in Memorials of London and London Life, A.D. 1276-1419, ed. Henry Thomas Riley (London, 1898), p. 368; hereafter Riley's Memorials.
2. Oxwyke variously is called a grocer (as in the account of the kidnapping), a spicer (Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1327-99 [London, 1891-1916], hereafter CPR), and CPR, 1391-96 , p. 267), and a citizen and apothecary (CPR, 1388-92, p. 65). Although Oxwyke is identified by different trade associations in the records, there is no real confusion. Apothecaries sold medicines as well as herbs and spices, and the apothecaries and spicers joined the pepperers in the early fourteenth century to begin the Grocers Company (John Benjamin Heath, Some Account of the Worshipful Company of Grocers (London, 1854), pp. 40-41). Oxwyke also was a collector in Dowgate Ward for the office of petty customs beginning in 1369 (Martin M. Crow and Clair Olsen, eds. Chaucer Life Records (London, 1966), p. 173; Letter Book G, p. 252), and in June 1377 he was appointed to the office of controller of the petty customs for the port of London, an office that provided him with a handsome income (CPR, 1377-81 , p. 5). He is also listed as a member of the Common Council from Cripplegate during the 1380's factionalism between Brembre and Northampton (Letter Book H , pp. 281 and 333). Not only was Oxwyke connected to a wealthy trade guild and to prestigious positions within the city, the records also suggest contact with Chaucer, for they were both controllers in the port of London during overlapping tenures. When Chaucer was controller of the wool custom in the port of London beginning in 1374, Oxwyke was a controller in the office of petty customs from November 1375 (Chaucer Life Records, pp. 153-54). The city records are largely silent about Oxwyke until the end of his life, when he was murdered "in his mansion-house at Westchepe" by John de Thorp of York, who was pardoned by the king on May 10, 1393 (CPR, 1391-96 , p. 267). After Oxwyke's death the guardianship of his son Thomas and the money due to his daughter Petronilla (who was fifteen years old) was entrusted by Mayor John Shadworth to Richard Donyngton, a draper and their stepfather (Letter Book H , p. 405-06). Although Margaret Oxwyke is not mentioned again directly in the city records, we find in this same account that Petronilla was "apprenticed to Thomas Lucas, mercer, and Margery his wife." Given that city orphans were often entrusted to relatives, it is possible that Margery Lucas is the Margaret Oxwyke of the 1373 kidnapping.
3. Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Toward A Reflective Sociology, trans. Matthew Adamson (Stanford, 1990), p. 78.
4. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984), p. 140.
5. The phrase is from Teresa de Lauretis, "The Violence of Rhetoric: Considerations on Representation and Gender," in Violence and Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (London, 1989), p. 240.
6. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, "Introduction: Representing Violence, or 'How the West Was Won,'" in Violence and Representation, p. 2.
7. For examples of legitim, see the Calendar of Wills Proved and Enrolled in the Court of Husting, London, A.D. 1258-A.D. 1688, 2 vols., ed. Reginald R. Sharpe (London, 1890).
8. See Sue Sheridan Walker, "Common Law Juries and Feudal Marriage Customs in Medieval England: The Pleas of Ravishment," University of Illinois Law Review (1984), 705-18.
9. For the Court of Orphans, see Charles Carlton, The Court of Orphans (Leicester, 1974). Wardships and orphans were usually entrusted to family members in socage wardships (that is, non-feudal wardships). In the event that such wardships were abused, the mayor and aldermen could transfer the wardship to a respected London citizen. Elaine Clark's two recent articles, "City Orphans and Custody Laws in Medieval England," American Journal of Legal History 34 (1990), 168-87, and "The Custody of Children in English Manor Courts," Law and History Review 3 (1985), 333-48, detail the quite considerable arrangements made for (usually wealthy) children in the city and in the rural manor.
10. Jerome Kroll, "The Concept of Childhood in the Middle Ages," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 13 (1977), p. 387. There were some protections for wards. Canon law, for example, did not recognize coerced marriages, and wards who married against their guardians' wishes often could pay a fine to avoid further prosecution. For a survey of such issues, see Sue Sheridan Walker, "Wrongdoing and Compensation: The Pleas of Wardship in Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century England," American Journal of Legal History 9 (1988), 267-307.
11. Riley's Memorials, p. 368.
12. The regulation of dress formed a primary means by which the law of late fourteenth century London operated upon bodies to create class and social distinction. A 1351 proclamation of Edward III in Letter Book F (fol. ccviii) prohibited "common lewd women" from assuming "the fashion of being clad and attired in the manner and dress of good and noble dames and damsels of the realm," instead requiring them to "go openly with a hood of cloth of ray, single, and with vestments neither trimmed with fur nor yet lined with lining, and without any manner of relief" (Riley's Memorials, p. 267). A 1393 proclamation that equated hucksters (women street vendors) and prostitutes likewise stipulates that "any such [common] women" be confined to the Southwerk stews or Cock Lane, London. If found outside those precincts, she risked the "pain of losing and forfeiting the upper garment that she shall be wearing, together with her hood" to the officer or sergeant who found her (Riley's Memorials, p. 534). The regulation of dress formed a discernible means both for identifying and controlling "common women," who, although they may have been legitimate vendors, were often identified with prostitutes. Although there is no indication of Alice de Salesbury's marital status, her identification as a street beggar or perhaps even huckster places her in the category of "common women" whose actions were closely watched and carefully regulated in London. A standard treatment of these and related concerns is Frances Elizabeth Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England (Baltimore, 1926).
13. Bourdieu, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 36.
14. The Liber Albus, trans. Henry Thomas Riley (London, 1861) specifies punishment at the thewe for being "a common courtesan," a "common receiver of courtesans or bawd," or "a brawler or scold" (pp. 395-96). See Riley's Memorials, pp. 319, 367, and 486 for additional accounts of punishment at the thewe.
15. Oxford English Dictionary, "Thewe," sb.1, 1. and 2.b and "Thewe," sb.2.
16. In discussing the seven virtues, The Lay Folks Catechism, ed. Thomas Frederick Simmons and Henry Edward Nolloth, EETS OS 118 (London, 1901), describes "the thre first [virtues], that er heued thewes," which are the heavenly or "cardinal or theological virtues" directed toward God (p. 78, line 382); "The tothir gode thewe and vertue is hope" (p. 78, line 394); and "The third vertue or thew is charite" (p. 80, line 406).
17. Bourdieu, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 134.
18. Louis Althusser's classic essay is "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation)," in Lenin, Philosophy, and Other Essays (London, 1971).
19. See Smith's "Notes on Terminology," in Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis, 1990), xxxiii-xxxv for a discussion of his very detailed and crucially precise definitions of "subject," "individual," "agent," "subject-position," and other key terms. I will indicate the page numbers from Smith parenthetically in the text.
20. My translation of Pearl, line 485 from The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. Andrew Malcom and Ronald Waldron, York Medieval Series, 2nd ser. (Berkeley, 1978).
21. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York, 1962); page numbers from Ariès are indicated parenthetically. Ariès's thesis has been challenged most effectively by Barbara Hanawalt in a series of articles and, most notably, in two books, The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (London, 1986) and Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (London, 1993). Legal historians Sue Sheridan Walker, Elaine Clark, and Richard Helmholz have also investigated the many protections offered children in late medieval England. In addition to Elaine Clark's and Sue Sheridan Walker's previously cited articles, see Walker's "The Feudal Family and the Common Law Courts: The Pleas Protecting Rights of Wardship and Marriage, c. 1225-1375," Journal of Medieval History 14 (1988), 13-31; "Free Consent and Marriage of Feudal Wards in Medieval England," Journal of Medieval History 8 (1982), 123-34; "Violence and the Exercise of Feudal Guardianship: The Action of 'Ejectio Custodia'," American Journal of Legal History 16 (1972), 320-33; and "Widow and Ward: The Feudal Law of Child Custody in Medieval England," in Women in Medieval Society, ed. Susan Mosher Stuard (Philadelphia, 1976), 159-72. A collection of Richard Helmholz's most important articles have been compiled in Canon Law and the Law of England (London, 1987).
22. Among the more notable literary treatments of children in Middle English literature are those of F. Xavier Baron, "Children and Violence in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales," Journal of Psychohistory 6 (1978-79), 77-103; D.S. Brewer, "Children in Chaucer," Review of English Studies 5.3 (1974), 52-56; Leslie A. Harris, "Instructional Poetry for Medieval Children," English Studies 74 (1993), 124-32; Thomas and Karen K. Jambeck, "Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe: A Handbook for the Medieval Child," Children's Literature 3 (1974), 117-22; Charles A. Owen, Jr., "'A Certein Nombre of Conclusiouns': The Nature and Nurture of Children in Chaucer," Chaucer Review 16 (1981), 60-75; Leah Sinangoglou, "The Christ Child as Sacrifice: A Medieval Tradition and the Corpus Christi Plays," Speculum 48 (1973), 491-509; and C.H. Talbot, "Children in the Middle Ages," Children's Literature 6 (1977), 17-33.
23. Critiques of the Oedipal complex are numerous and important, particularly those that engage Freud from a feminist perspective. Standard treatments include Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, 1982), particularly pp. 56-79 and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990), particularly pp. 59-72. For a provocative article that engages feminist psychoanalytic theorizing about the Oedipal complex in relation to literary analysis, see Jerry Aline Flieger, "Entertaining the Ménage à Trois: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Literature," in Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof (Ithaca, 1989), pp. 185-208. For a recent reading of the Oedipal complex and its transmutation in Lacan, see Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, "The Oedipus Problem in Freud and Lacan," trans. Douglas Brick, Critical Inquiry 20 (1994), 267-82.
24. In recounting the analysis of Little Hans, or actually the analysis of Little Hans through his father, Freud summarizes the Oedipal dynamic succintly: " . . . it became evident that he [Hans] was struggling against wishes which had as their subject the idea of his father being absent (going away on a journey, dying). He regarded his father (as he made all too clear) as a competitor for the favours for his mother, towards whom the obscure foreshadowings of his budding sexual wishes were aimed. Thus he was situated in the typical attitude of a male child towards his parents to which we have given the name of the 'Oedipus complex' and which we regard in general as the nuclear complex of the neuroses," in Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York, 1950), pp. 128-29.
25. Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory is itself the subject of considerable recent controversy. The most publicized attack on Freud's theoretical turn, itself loaded with Oedipal implications, is Jeffrey Moussaief Masson's The Assault on Truth: Freud's Abandonment of the Seduction Theory (New York, 1984). For the argument that Freud actually oscillated between a belief in the actual abuse of children and a notion that narratives of abuse were the products of childhood fantasy, see Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok, "Questions to Freudian Psychoanalysis: Dream Interpretation, Reality, and Fantasy," trans. Nicholas Rand, Critical Inquiry 19 (1993), 567-94. Recent popular responses to the growth industry of "repressed memory syndrome" include Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters, Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria (New York, 1994) and Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (New York, 1994).
26. See especially Lacan's "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I," Écrits: A Selection (New York, 1977), 1-8.
27. For a discussion of the violent relationship of the dominant classes to various Others, see Lucia Folena, "Figures of Violence: Philologists, Witches, and Stalinistas," in Violence and Representation, ed. Armstrong and Tennenhouse, pp. 219-38.
28. Emphasis mine. Citations to the Northampton and the Brome Abraham and Isaac plays are from Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. Norman Davis, EETS SS 1 (London, 1970), pp. 32-42 and 43-57 respectively.
29. Chester 4, the Barbers' Play of Abraham, Lot, Melchysedeck and Abraham and Isaac, is an elaborate typological dramatization, and it marks the first appearance in the cycle of the Chester Expositor, who gives each of the three Old Testament episodes (Abraham, Lot, and Melchizedek; Abraham and circumcision; and Abraham and Isaac) a figural reading which foreshadows a New Testament fulfillment. The Expositor notes that Abraham's obedience in face of God's command to sacrifice Isaac is a "signification" of Jesus who "was sacrifyced one [sic] the rood" (lines 460-67). See R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills, eds., The Chester Mystery Cycle, EETS SS 3 (London, 1974).
30. Citations are from Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976); I have indicated page numbers parenthetically in the text. It is interesting to note that Derrida's brief but suggestive account of the relationship of language to violence occurs in the context of reading L‚vi-Strauss's account of teaching the Nambikwara children to write.
31. Although it is beyond the scope of the present paper to examine the "ages of man" material in detail, it is sufficient to note that even these highly emblematic treatments of the life span, which generally mark age in seven year increments, note that such schematization is often only approximate and is based more on physical, mental, and behavioral characteristics than on age per se. See, for example, the description of infants and children in "Liber Sextus" of On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa's Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum, A Critical Text, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1975), 1: 291-93.
32. "The Violence of Rhetoric," p. 251. In contrast, in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York, 1966), Freud writes, "The sexual interest of children begins by turning, rather, to the problem of where babies come from--the same problem which underlies the question put by the Theban Sphinx--and it is most often raised by egoistic fears on the arrival of a new baby" (p. 318).
33. "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Critical Theory Since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searl (Tallahassee, 1986), p. 210.
34. Citations from the Canterbury Tales are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987) and will be indicated in the text by fragment and line number.
35. "Introduction" to Violence and Representation, p. 25.