Guest Post: The Rich and Strange: Women Working Sea-Changes in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale

by Dr Daisy Black (University Of Wolverhampton)

‘Diverse men diverse thynges seyden.’ (The Man of Law’s Tale, l. 211)

‘All of us know that I can’t tell a tale of days long ago that Chaucer hasn’t already told. If he hasn’t said them in one book, he has said them in another.’ (Broken Shells)

Stories hold a political power that can even surprise their tellers.

The Man of Law. San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, EL 26.C.9, Ellesmere MS, fol. 50v. http://www.digital-scriptorium.org

In Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, a group of Syrian merchants return home with a story of a Roman woman, Custance. She has beauty without pride; youth without foolishness; and humility without tyranny.

On hearing this story, the Sultan of Syria declares he will die unless he have Custance as his wife. To make this happen, he decrees he and his people will forsake the laws of Mohammed, and convert to Custance’s religion – Christianity. This decision causes great division. The Sultan’s advisors are flung into heated debate – about conversion, the foreign, and the ‘other’. ‘Diverse men’, Chaucer tells us, ‘say diverse things’.

And in this way, a story traded by men merely hoping to win favour with their ruler escalates into a massacre.

I was commissioned to devise Broken Shells – a one-woman storytelling performance of Chaucer’s Tale – for the 2016 symposium ‘Women at Sea’ at Swansea’s National Waterfront Museum. The Man of Law’s Tale is the sole text appearing in the second fragment of The Canterbury Tales as ordered in the Ellesmere manuscript (c. 1400-1410). The tale reworks the ‘princess/virgin at sea’ narratives of popular contemporary hagiography and romance together with the trope of the accused queen. In many ways, Chaucer’s heroine Custance is the ultimate ‘woman at sea’, as she has the bad fortune to be repeatedly placed in a rudderless boat and set adrift.

I knew as I began adapting this story for a modern audience, that Chaucer’s story would accrue loaded political connotations. My adaptation was told at the end of a long year filled with distressing reports of the plight of refugees in the Mediterranean, Syria, Greece, Turkey and at Calais. These reports simultaneously formed the daily horror stories of the news channels, yet were repeatedly erased in political discourse through ever-more virulent anti-immigrant dialogue of the Brexit campaign.

I knew my story would be performed at the end of a day of a symposium which had been opened by a roundtable panel of writers – all of whom were refugee women now living in Swansea. These women shared stories and poems about their experiences of being dislocated from their homes and former lives and forced to seek asylum in a new land. In telling Chaucer’s tale, I wanted to honour these women, but not eclipse their own stories.

As it happened, the story took on a meaning I could never have predicted. It was performed only a few days after the Brexit vote, right at the end of that uneasy week in which established political figureheads crumbled, the pound plummeted and, for many, the very values of what it meant to be ‘British’ had been caught in a tidal wave of confusion. As a result, Broken Shells, along with the academic papers of several colleagues, took on an urgency and painful directness that it had not had during my months of rehearsal.

More importantly, when juxtaposed with the personal narratives of real ‘women at sea’, the heroine of my, and Chaucer’s story, emerged in a rather different light to the heroine I thought I had lived with through rehearsals. By the afternoon telling, my vision of Custance as a brave, but essentially passive victim of prejudice had entirely dissolved. She became an indomitable woman whose strength lay, not in passivity, but in survival. This reassessment of survival and strength also opened up more sympathetic ways of reading some of the other women in the Man of Law’s Tale – in particular, Custance’s female antagonists, who consciously use storytelling to manipulate both the men around them and the political climate.

In that opening performance of Broken Shells, the female characters’ desire to tell, or to refuse to tell, their stories, had become a political action.

Surviving the Story

‘What she was she wolde no many seye, For foul ne fair, thogh that she sholde deye.’ (ll. 524-5)

In The Man of Law’s Tale, the narratives around Custance are primarily constructed by, and for, men. Custance first enters the story as a figure constructed entirely by narrative, masculine ideals and misogynist hyperbole. In many ways, the Syrian merchants’ stories construct Custance, not as extraordinary, but as the utterly commonplace, familiar heroine of medieval romance: the ideal woman. As such, they tell us absolutely nothing about Custance as a character.

The merchants’ report is part of a storytelling economy in which tales are exchanged as part of the trading process, or used as currency to gain favour with political leaders. The men who become Custance’s husbands – the Sultan of Syria and, later, King Alla of Northumbria – are primary receivers of stories about Custance, and yet they know very little about her. The Sultan is an idealist: like an avid consumer of today’s ‘fake news’, he takes all stories as the truth and makes decisions based on them. King Alla attempts to be a more critical reader. Yet while he demonstrates a healthy scepticism of the narratives told about and against Custance, he nevertheless bases his decisions on narratives told about a silent woman.

As the story progresses, Custance continues to be presented as a surface against which men project their own stories. This storytelling is often violent. A Northumbrian knight tries to frame Custance for the murder of her host and friend, Hermengyld. He almost succeeds even though many others swear that Custance loved Hermengyld ‘right as her lyf’ (l. 625). A castle steward boards Custance’s stranded ship in the middle of the night, subverting the chivalric romance form when he tells her he will be her lover ‘wherso she wolde or nolde’ (l. 917).

Literary criticism dealing with Custance has, until recently, examined her, either as the sum of the stories told about her or as a relentlessly unchanging entity – even though her presence demands change of all those she encounters. Yet translating Custance’s narrative into a story crafted for modern audiences, I noticed that none of these stories ‘stick’. While male acts of storytelling in The Man of Law’s Tale aim to change Custance – through marriage, murder or rape – the roles these stories cast her in never last. Whenever Custance is set adrift, her voyage erases these projected identities – of wife, murderer, lover and victim. Whenever she arrives in a new land, she never tells those she encounters her name, who she is, or her status. In maintaining her silence, Custance makes the male storyteller impotent.

Storytelling in The Man of Law’s Tale often causes religious and political strife, miscarriages of justice, false accusations, and it facilitates violence against the female body. However, Custance’s refusal to tell her own stories disrupts this masculine story-economy. Her denial of the role of storyteller keeps her identity apart from those seeking to define her, and allows her to survive.

Stories as Cultural Past 

While Custance uses silence to control her identity in diverse societies determined to project identity upon her, two of the tale’s antagonists – the Sultan’s mother and Donegild, mother of King Alla, seek to wield narrative to their own political advantage.

Chaucer presents both of Custance’s mothers-in-law as uncomplicatedly, thoroughly evil. He calls the Sultan’s mother a ‘cursed krone’ (l. 433) and Donegild is ‘ful of tirannye’:

‘The kynges mooder ful of tirannye. Hir thought hir cursed herte brast atwo […] Hir thoghte a despit that he sholde take So straunge a creature unto his make.’ (ll. 696-700)

The malicious mother-in-law was often used in medieval literature to exemplify a fear of supersession or transition. Christine M. Rose has argued that the mother-in-laws’ fear of change in The Man of Law’s Tale might be linked to an anti-Semitic Christian polemic which figured Judaism as hostile, yet necessary prior: a representative of the Old Law is supplanted by a New Law as the mother is supplanted by her son’s bride.(1) The narrative of supersession – the replacement of one law by another – was central to medieval Christian theology, and appears in many different guises, from artwork juxtaposing Eve and the Virgin Mary to the spectacular performances of pagan conversion to Christianity in the late fifteenth-century Digby Mary Magdalen play. In performing her generic role as the prior ‘other’, the Sultan’s mother therefore objects to her son’s abandonment of their holy laws:

‘But oon avow to grete God I heete: They lyf shal rather out of my body sterte Than Makometes lawe out of my herte!’ (ll. 224-6)

She successfully takes steps to prevent the mass conversion she fears by slaughtering her son and his supporters at the wedding feast, and sending Custance to sea in a rudderless ship. While constancy in Custance is lauded by Chaucer’s poem, constancy to a non-Christian religious law is condemned.

The Sultan’s mother and Donegild caused me a number of challenges in devising Broken Shells – not least, in my need to deal sensitively with the story’s portrayal of Christianity and its anti-Islamic elements yet remain true to Chaucer’s original story.

This process was made a little easier by the fact that, despite Chaucer’s attempt to cast both the Sultan’s mother and Donegild as unproblematic, ‘evil’ characters set in opposition to the Christian Romans (a Muslim and a pagan, respectively), both nevertheless perform one of the key roles ascribed to early medieval English women.

Elisabeth van Houts has argued that early medieval women performed a central role in the preservation of community memory: ‘women were crucial links in the chain of traditions binding one generation to another’.(2) The female promotion of social and familial memory became particularly important after traumatic historical changes (for example, in maintaining historical rights to land post-invasion). It also performed more subversive functions – for example, when Anglo-Saxon women preserved their pre-conquest traditions for several generations after the Norman Conquest by giving their daughters Anglo-Saxon names. Where these kinds of memory are ‘approved’ by a new regime, the woman’s role, or constancy, is lauded. Custance’s retention of her Christian faith through all trials is therefore what makes her the heroine of Chaucer’s story. However, when a woman’s cultural memory works against, or threatens a new regime, it is too often cast as unruly, or divergent.

The Sultan’s mother as I have characterised her in Broken Shells is therefore very much aware of her own intertextual nature. As a Syrian woman, she has grown up hearing the stories of Troy, and the ashes of that city cling to her adult soul:

‘a shrewd survivor of state politics, and knows all too well what happens when a bride is plucked from a distant land’ (Broken Shells)

The cultural currency this kind of collective narrative is fully exploited by Chaucer’s Man of Law, who lists Ovid’s classical, cross-national lovers – Dido, Helen and Ariadne – in the introduction to his tale. The Sultan’s mother – and Donegild’s – resistance to a new narrative being superimposed over their own therefore ties into their roles as both keepers of cultural memory and as creative readers.

Stories as Weapons 

Custance’s second mother-in-law is similarly associated with regression. Even her name provides a subtle echo of the word Danegeld: the tax the Anglo-Saxons were obliged to pay the Vikings in the years after they lost the Battle of Maldon (991). As such, Donegild’s character is shaped by the memory of economic coercion and the ongoing war her son, King Alla, is embroiled in. But while the Sultan’s mother is associated with the past by acting as both repository and retainer of cultural and religious memory, Donegild seeks to maintain constancy through becoming a storyteller.

While Alla is absent, Custance gives birth to their son. Donegild intercepts a letter informing her son of the birth, and sends a counterfeited letter in its place. This letter tells her son that Custance is an elf, and has given birth to ‘so horrible a feendly creature’ (ll. 751) none in the castle dare stay in the room with it. Donegild’s letter self-consciously taps into medieval medical writings about women giving birth to monsters.(3) It also equates Custance’s ‘straungeness’ with monstrosity. In doing so, Donegild enters the masculine economy of storytelling in an attempt to get rid of her rival.

While the Sultan, and to some extent, King Alla, are passive receivers, the Sultan’s mother and Donegild are producers, retainers and manipulators of stories. They are fully aware of the political power of the story, and they use this power to direct their own narratives. In doing so, the Sultan’s mother and Donegild challenge the tale’s underling value of constancy. Like Custance, these two female antagonists remain constant to their own pasts. Yet this constancy also prevents them from accepting the foreign, and the new. Ultimately, it also prevents them adapting, as Custance does, in order to survive.

Stories as Cities

‘Joye of this world, for tyme wol nat abyde Fro day to nyght it changeth as the tyde.’ (ll. 1133-4)

Almost a year after the first performance, I’m preparing to tell this tale once again as part of the University of Manchester’s Middle Ages in the Modern World (MAMO) conference. Revising this story after a divisive and inconclusive election campaign, and where news of the refugee crisis has been almost entirely dropped by the mainstream press, I am finding different pressures being brought to bear on Chaucer’s narrative. On the 30th of June, this story will be told in front of the medieval rood screen in Manchester Cathedral – a building that was ransacked during the civil war in 1649, hosted Thomas Clarkson’s famous speech against the slave trade in 1787 and which still bears the scars of the 1940 blitz. It will be told in a city where violence has been so recently seared into the memories of many in my audience. As I rehearse, piles of flowers and toys are being cleared from St Ann’s Square. Manchester remembers violence aimed at the city as a whole, but, more specifically, aimed at its young girls and women.

Yet stories hold political powers that can even surprise their tellers.

Modern popular culture relentlessly depicts its heroes as story-makers – (frequently) male, rebellious, impetuous, and often violent. But Chaucer’s Custance offers a very different model of what it is to be strong. Violence and cultural fear are repeatedly directed towards Custance again and again – through military action, murder, exile and rape. Yet Custance refuses to take part in this narrative cycle by repeating these stories. Rather, she demonstrates the strength it takes to survive – again, and again, and again.

Broken Shells will be performed at Manchester Cathedral at 5.30pm on the 30th June. It is a free event, but donations raised will go to Sheffield Donations for Refugees and the Booth Centre. Click here to book tickets.

Notes

(1) Christine M. Rose, ‘The Jewish Mother-in-Law: Synagoga and the Man of Law’s Tale’, in Sheila Delany (ed.), Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 3-23

(2) Elisabeth van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe 900-1200 (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press Inc, 1999), p. 147

(3) See Dana Oswald, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010), pp. 1-26

Further Reading

Christine M. Rose, ‘The Jewish Mother-in-Law: Synagoga and the Man of Law’s Tale, in Sheila Delany (ed.), Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 3-23; Elisabeth van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe 900-1200 (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press Inc, 1999); Dana Oswald, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010): Robert B. Dawson, ‘Custance in Context: Rethinking the Protagonist of the “Man of Law’s Tale”’, The Chaucer Review 26:3 (1992), 293-308; Melissa M. Furrow, ‘The Man of Law’s St Custance: Sex and the Saeculum’, The Chaucer Review, 24:3 (1990), 223-235; Laurel L. Hendrix, ‘“Pennannce profytable”: The Currency of Custance in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale’, Exemplaria 6:1 (1994), 141-166

About the Author

Dr Daisy Black is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Wolverhampton. She specialises in medieval religious drama, with a particular interest in time and gender and food in performance. Recent works include articles on the hortus conclusus in Cornish religious drama, on the nails used to crucify Christ in the York ‘Crucifixion’ pageant, and on domestic arguments between Mary and Joseph in the N-Town plays. She also works as a freelance storyteller, theatre director, arts advisor and writer, and has produced creative work for bodies including the Royal College of Physicians, Manchester Cathedral and Swansea’s National Waterfront Museum. Broken Shells was her first one-woman show, and she is currently working on her next major storytelling project, The Bayeux Tapestry: The Full Yarn.

Guest Post: Magic, Witches and Devils in the Persian Book of Kings

by Dr Stephen Gordon

Belief in devils and witches was a central feature of the medieval and early modern worlds. From Ars Moriendi texts that taught the dying how to avoid the clutches of the devil, to treatises on the machinations of witches, interactions with malign, evil entities were an accepted − if unwelcome − part of everyday life. While much has been written on the Occidental traditions of supernatural belief, it should also be noted that the Islamic world shared the same concerns about the agency of evil spirits. The epic Persian poem, the Shahnama, or ‘Book of Kings’, contained numerous stories involving magic, witches and demons. The historic John Rylands Library in Manchester is home to a fine selection of meticulously illustrated copies of the text.

Written between c.982−1010 CE by Abu’l Qasim Firdousi of Tus (‘Ferdowsi’, d. 1025CE), who took over the project from Abu Mansur Daqiqi (d. 976CE), the Shahnama charts the history of the Persian people from the beginning of the world to the fall of the Sasanian Empire (642CE). As well as being the longest poem ever written by a single author, the Shahnama is notable for the purity of its written Persian, with very few Arabic loan words included in the text. Structurally, it is divided into three main parts, the mythical, legendary, and historical eras, and covers the reigns of forty-seven kings and three queens. Almost two-thirds of the text is devoted to the legendary section of Iranian history, of which the adventures of the hero Rustam (see below) are given particular prominence. The Shahnama places great emphasis on the differences between good and bad kingship, providing moral lessons to entertain and edify its noble readership. Demons and witches – that is, evil incarnate – provided the ideal obstacles for ‘good’ kings and heroes to overcome. The increased commercialisation of manuscript production in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, focused mainly on the city of Shiraz, meant that the Ferdowsi’s masterpiece began to enjoy a much wider circulation, able to be read, copied and patronised by royal and non-royal audiences alike.

The storming of the castle of Bahman is one of the most visceral supernatural encounters recorded in the Shahnama. Following a long and eventful reign, the Shah Kay Kavus decided to abdicate his throne, but could not decide whether his successor should be his son, Fariburz, or grandson, Kay Khusraw. Thus he announced that whoever vanquished the demon-filled castle of Bahman would become the new ruler. Fariburz’s assault failed after the ground surrounding the castle magically burst into flames, forcing him to retreat. When Kay Khusraw approached the castle, he commanded one of his retainers, Giv, to attach a letter to the walls proclaiming the castle would fall to the rightful king. Almost immediately the ramparts began to crumble. Kay Khusraw wasted no time in ordering his archers to fire, killing many ‘Divs’ (demons) in the process. Those that weren’t killed in the initial onslaught died after falling from the battlements. Kay Khusraw returned home in triumph and accepted the Persian crown. This page from Persian MS 910, written in 1518 but not illustrated until much later, showcases the aftermath of the collapse of Bahman’s walls (fig. 1).

Fig. 1: The demon castle of Bahman, Persian MS 910, fol. 139a (c. 1518) (copyright of the University of Manchester)

Rustam is considered the greatest of the Shahnama’s heroic characters. In the tradition of other such legendary heroes as Herekles, Cu Chulainn and Beowulf, Rustam was a larger-than-life figure who, from an early age, performed many feats of strength, daring and courage. His most famous quest concerns the seven labours, or ‘courses’, undertaken to rescue the previously-mentioned Shah, Kay Kavus. Having been persuaded by a div disguised as a minstrel to invade the realm of Mazandaran on the Caspian Sea, the Shah and his army were captured and blinded by the infamous White Div (div-i safid), who had come to the aid of Mazandaran’s king. On hearing of the Shah’s predicament, Rustam determined to slay the Div, the blood from whose liver was the only substance that could restore the Shah and the army’s sight. In sequence, Rustam’s challenges included fighting a lion, finding a spring in the desert, defeating a dragon, a witch, the hero Ulad, the demon Arzhang and, finally, the White Div himself.

The fourth labour, the slaying of an evil witch, provides a fascinating insight into Persian conceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ magic. Following his defeat of the desert-dwelling dragon, Rustam entered a valley populated by ‘sorcerers’ and came across a banquet that had been set up beside a stream. Noting that it was a “sorcerers’ meal” and that the participating divs had fled at the sound of his approach, Rustam sat down, picked up a lute and began to sing. His melodies reached the ears of a nearby witch, who approached Rustam in the guise of a beautiful young woman. Not knowing that she was a witch, Rustam offered her a glass of wine, invoking the grace of God as he did so. The witch recoiled at the mention of God’s name, an insult that prompted Rustam to ensnare her in his magical lasso. Ordered to “speak and show thy proper favour”, the witch transformed back into a hideous, wrinkled old hag. Rustam promptly stabbed her with his sword before continuing with his journey. While this illustration from Persian MS 9, produced in India, does not depict Rustam’s lasso, nor the witch’s hideous appearance, it clearly shows the moment when he is about to behead his adversary (fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Rustam and the Witch, Persian MS 9, fol. 78a (c. 1450s) (copyright of the University of Manchester). An inscription at the beginning of the manuscript states that it was once part of the collection of Sir Gore Ouseley (d.1844), the British diplomat who helped broker the Treaty of Golestan between the Persian and Russian Empires in 1813

Rustam’s quest ended when he arrived at the White Div’s underground lair, the setting of the seventh and final labour. Entering the pitch-black cave and finding the demon asleep, he roused his opponent with a fierce roar and cut off the Div’s hand and foot before he had time to react. Following a brief but violent struggle, Rustam killed the Div by throwing him upon the ground, after which he removed the demon’s liver. As expected, the blood from the liver magically cured Kay Kavus and his army of their blindness. This illustration from Persian MS 932 shows Rustam stabbing the White Div’s torso after having already sliced off its limbs (fig. 3). The animated, violent nature of the scene suggests that the Div has not yet been killed. This, then, is the middle of the fight rather than its aftermath. The image itself is defined by the contrast between the frenetic action occurring within the cave and the consternation of the human and demonic characters without. The figure at the very right of the page can be identified as Ulad, who was captured by Rustam during the fifth labour and made to act as his guide through the lands of Mazandaran. Rustam tied Ulad to a tree before entering the White Div’s cave. The horse at the lower right side of the page is Rustan’s faithful steed, Rakhsh.

Fig. 3: Rustam and the White Div, Persian MS 932, fol. 87b (c. 1542) (copyright of the University of Manchester). According to a handwritten note on the reverse of the title page (fol. 1a), the book belonged to the library of the Kings of Oudh (Awadh, India) and was written in 1542. The note goes on to claim that this was one of the manuscripts consulted by Turner Macan (d. 1836), the first European editor of the Shahnama

Within the cave itself Rustam is depicted with his usual accoutrements of a leopard skin helmet and tiger skin robe. According to legend, the tiger skin was said to afford Rustam superhuman powers. As embodiments of chaos and social disorder, the divs are appropriately hybridised, a mixture of both animal and human parts. Their feral semi-nakedness also contrasts with the finery of Rustam and Ulad’s own clothing. Interestingly, the poem describes the White Div as being ‘a mountain that blotted all within, with a sable face and hair like a lion’s mane’. Thus, while the nomenclature ‘White Div’ would seem to refers to the demon’s hair colour rather than its skin complexion, the artist − perhaps aware of the difficulty of depicting a dark body on a black background − has chosen to make the creature entirely white. With Rustam representing the known, cultural world and the White Div representing the Other, the seventh labour can be read as a broad allegory of the fight between good and evil.

Demons and witches were an integral component of pre- and post-Islamic Persian folklore. Where the Shahnama is concerned, evil entities were a threat to the very coherence of the Persian court. The destruction of the castle of Bahman and the killing of the White Div ensured the maintenance of divine order. The Shahnama’s portrayal of magic is, however, much more ambiguous. White or ‘good’ magic seems to have been the sole property of heroes, seen especially in the positive connotations associated with Rustam’s lasso and leopard-skin helmet. More often than note, female magic was characterised as ‘bad’ and possibly demonic. Heroes could use magic for their own noble ends; females, by contrast, were shaped by the supernatural forces they wielded. As noted in Rustam’s fourth labour, the innate ugliness of the witch was concealed beneath a false, seductive glamour. Such beliefs find a corollary in Western conceptions of witchcraft. The ability to seemingly change shape and deceive the senses is considered, for example, in Part I, Question Ten of Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum (‘Hammer of Witches’, c.1487). Whether to entertain (Shahnama) or instruct (Malleus), to amuse or provoke fear, tales of the supernatural had a strong emotional impact on Eastern and Western audiences alike.

Further Reading: Jerome W. Clinton and Marianna S. Simpson, ‘How Rustam killed White Div: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry’, Iranian Studies 39: 2 (2006), 171-97; C. P. Melville and Barbara Brend, Epic of the Persian Kings: The Art of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh (London: Tauris, 2010); Laurie Pierce, ‘Serpents and Sorcery: Humanity, Gender, and the Demonic in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh’, Iranian Studies 48: 3 (2015), 349−67; Basil W. Robinson, Persian Paintings in the John Rylands Library: A Descriptive Catalogue (London: Sotheby, 1980)

About the author: Dr Stephen Gordon is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on Jennifer Spinks’ Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project ‘Magic, Diabolism, and Global Religion in European Print Culture, 1500–1700’ (grant number AH/L015013/1). One of the major outcomes of the project will be the exhibition ‘Magic, Witches and Devils in the Early Modern World’ at the John Rylands Library, from late January to mid 2016. The exhibition will be co-curated by Jennifer Spinks and Sasha Handley, who both lecture in early modern history at the University of Manchester, and it has also been supported by the John Rylands Research Institute. It will feature Persian MSS 9, 910 and 932 alongside other works from the Rylands collection. Stephen’s work more often focuses upon Western traditions of supernatural belief. One of the aims of the exhibition is to situate a small selection of non-Western works from the collection in a dialogue with material from European contexts, partly in the hope of fostering future collaborative work with specialists in this area.

Guest Post: ‘Weaponed’ men, impotent men, and ‘not-men’: sex and manhood in Anglo-Saxon England.

by Dr Chris Monk

It’s a great pleasure to be invited to guest blog for the Manchester Medieval Society blogspot, for which I’d particularly like to thank the Treasurer, Hannah Priest. Hannah suggested I write something about my specialism – medieval sex – as a previous post with ‘sex’ in the title had proved rather popular. Well, I’ll do my best to hold your interest.

What I want to talk about is as much about gender as it is about sexual intercourse, and my idea was prompted by the title of next year’s MANCASS conference: ‘Manhood in Anglo-Saxon England’.




The Arundel Psalter (Canterbury, between 1012-1023), British Library, Arundel 155, fol. 93r
Detail of historiated initial: David slays Goliath
This image is identified by the British library as free from known copyright restriction.
What did it take to be a man? A big weapon, apparently.

So manhood ... umm. A rather loaded term, wouldn’t you say? Is it a status or an identity? A taxonomy, perhaps? Is it even a reality?

The Anglo-Saxons, as you may know, generally used the word mann, the etymological root of present-day English ‘man’, to mean a person of either sex; and the word had, from which ‘hood’ derives, had the sense of rank, status, or position, something that was conferred and indeed could be lost. So, for example, a priest or a monk who seriously strayed from his vow of celibacy could have his had removed.

Today, the word ‘manhood’ is distinctly gendered. We’re not talking ‘personhood’ here. But the idea of status – legitimate or otherwise – seems to be integral to the concept. However, we often question manhood, we challenge it, and we even laugh at it at times. We may see ourselves or others as either living up to or not living up to one’s manhood. And, of course, at times we link manhood directly to sexual performance, which is often where the humour creeps in.

So what about the Anglo-Saxons? Did they have a concept of manhood that shares any of our preoccupations? How important, for example, was sexual performance in defining manhood?

One of the most useful resources for understanding Anglo-Saxon ideas of sex and gender is the collection of texts known as the penitentials. These handbooks of penance contain lists of various sins with a corresponding ‘tariff’ of penance: usually specified amounts of fasting.

In the past, scholars were somewhat scathing of the penitentials, thinking of them, especially when they dealt with matters of sex, as prurient taxonomy, an obsession with categorising all sin, and therefore not representative of what medieval people actually got up to. This is rather a narrow perspective, I would suggest, and one which speaks more about mid-twentieth-century prudery than it does a desire to accurately understand the past.

I think it is fair to say that we can gain much insight into the Anglo-Saxon world by carefully considering what the penitentials have to say about sex. It is helpful to think of the penitentials as narratives of life, in the sense that they capture in condensed form the many interviews between confessor (priest) and sinner that took place for centuries in England, as well as in Ireland and on the Continent. In other words, though the penitentials are not actual transcripts of dialogue, their form and content evolved out of innumerable conversations between priests and laypersons.

During the tenth and eleventh centuries, vernacular penitentials were produced to reflect English needs to equip priests with usable pastoral tools (the priesthood at the time was not considered especially skilled in Latin). Earlier Latin penitentials were not simply translated but were adapted to meet indigenous needs. The following two judgements, or canons, reflect a particular Anglo-Saxon take on manhood.

The first canon is arguably not even about penance, as no fasting is prescribed. This canon explains what a woman may do if her husband is impotent:

Wer 7 wif gif hig geþeodde beoð 7 se wer mid hire hæman ne mæge, þæt wif hine mot forlætan 7 hire oþerne niman, gif þæt on þone ceorl cuð byð.

Man and woman, if they are joined [in marriage] but the man is not able to have sex with her, the woman may abandon him and take for herself another, if that is known about the man.

This canon may well be about unconsummated marriage, rather than about impotence after initial consummation, though this is not explicitly stated. The reason I say this is that Anglo-Saxon versions of Canon Law did not permit a man to leave his wife once they had sex, even if she was barren. (The presumption here was that barrenness was always seen as an issue of female infertility.) If the penitential statement above meant a woman could divorce her husband at any time that he was impotent, even if they had already had intercourse, then it would fly in the face of both Canon Law and Christian Scripture, which forbids divorce other than on the grounds of adultery. So it does seem that this penitential ruling anticipated later medieval laws in England that insisted on consummation as a requirement of marriage.

So what do we learn here about manhood? Well, imagine the scenario suggested by the language: if it is known about the man (here the word ceorl is used, by the way, meaning a freeman but not a man of nobility). A woman may well have had to prove somehow that her husband was impotent. A parallel canon in another penitential states just that – that the burden of proof was with the woman. How would she prove it? Would she have to subject herself to a physical examination of her hymen, for example? Whatever the case, the situation would have led to the husband’s status – his ‘hood’ we might say – coming under scrutiny. Since the Church’s model of marriage was that God created humans male and female, and that is why they were joined together, it is possible that an impotent man was not really seen as truly male. So it made no difference if the couple had been ‘joined’ in marriage: from the woman’s perspective the union was no longer viable or authentic. And as long as she could prove the man’s impotence, she would suffer no disapprobation from the Church should she choose to take another man as husband.

It is interesting that the word wæpnedman (literally, ‘weaponed man’) was not the choice of word by the writer of the penitential, but rather the basic word for man, wer, was selected. The euphemistic quality of wæpnedman (I assume I don’t need to spell out the euphemism) is important in another canon that relates to masculinity, where both virile men and ‘not-men’ are discussed:

Se þe mid bædlinge hæme, oþþe mid oþrum wæpned men, oþþe mid nytene, fæste x winter.

He who has sex with a bædling, or with another virile male, or with an animal, should fast 10 years.

This is one strange canon! First, what is a bædling? A number of scholars have discussed this very rare Old English word, for which there is no direct corresponding word in Latin. It may derive from OE bæddel which probably means ‘hermaphrodite’, thus making a bædling a descendent of a bæddel (the suffix –ing is used in Anglo-Saxon genealogies to mean ‘the son of’). The writer of the penitential above later explains that bædlings are ‘soft like a harlot’. The baedling thus seems to be considered effeminate in some way, which is the sense here behind ‘soft’ (OE hnesclic). David Clark considers bædlings as ‘not-men’, part of a continuum of gender including women, boys and effeminate men. There may be a clue of sorts to their identity in an earlier Anglo-Saxon text, Liber monstrorum (Book of Monsters), which refers to ‘the person of both sexes’ who looks physically more masculine than feminine in the upper body but loves feminine occupation (not specified), and who also goes around fooling ignorant men ‘in the manner of a whore’. Perhaps there is a link between this so-called ‘monster’ and the bædling.

I believe the bædling was probably understood as a person of problematic gender, one who didn’t fit into the Anglo-Saxon ideal of manhood but was not exactly a woman either. What we can say for sure is that the penitential canon above does not show the bædling to be a wæpnedman, a virile man.

The curious thing, however, is that the sinner under consideration here – the ‘he’ of the sentence – can have sex with ‘another wæpnedman’. Scholars, mistakenly I feel, often tend to emphasize that in terms of sexual sin this canon is about penetrator and penetrated. Yet here we are told about a ‘he’ having sex with another virile man, or with a bædling, or indeed with a beast. Confused yet? Well the canonist goes on to also speak about baedlings having sex with each other!

What are we to deduce? The point I want to make is that though this canon is about ‘deviant’ sex (deviant from the Anglo-Saxon Church’s perspective), it’s also as much about gender. I would suggest that in Anglo-Saxon society, there was a perceivable ‘virile man’, a kind of default figure of manhood but whose status was not entirely, or simply, determined by the one with whom he had sex. Two wæpnedmen could have sex together and still be men, we might say. However, there existed (in the mind of at least the writer of the penitential) another type of person who was effeminate or soft and probably thought of as promiscuous like a female prostitute. These bædlings, it may well be inferred, would have sex with virile men or with each other – it wasn’t their sexual acts per se that defined them.

So manhood? Anglo-Saxon manhood? Umm ... a difficult one, that. Perhaps I should sum it up like this:

If you couldn’t quite manage it on the wedding night, then from your new wife’s perspective – and perhaps from the local community’s perspective too – you were not viable as a ‘true’ man. But if you didn’t need the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of Viagra, and no matter with whom you had sex, you could still be viewed as He-man. However, if you happened to be ‘a son of a hermaphrodite’, then you weren’t to even bother applying for ‘manhood’!

Useful reading: David Clark, Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2009); R. D. Fulk, ‘Male Homoeroticism in the Old English Canons of Theodore’, in Sex and Sexuality in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Carol Braun Pasternack and Lisa M. C. Weston, pp. 1-34; Allen J. Frantzen, ‘The “Literariness” of the Penitentials’, in Frantzen’s The Anglo-Saxon Penitentials: A Cultural Database; Christopher Monk, ‘Framing Sex: Sexual Discourse in Text and Image in Anglo-Saxon England’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Manchester, 2012), esp. pp. 127-40.

About the Author: Dr Chris Monk is a freelance consultant, researcher and writer. He obtained his PhD at the University of Manchester in 2012, where until recently he also lectured on medieval literature and narrative art. His area of research is broadly Anglo-Saxon culture, and his specialism is the history of sexuality in early medieval England (c.700-c.1100). He is presently a consultant for Rochester Cathedral’s ‘Hidden Treasures, Fresh Expressions’ project, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, carrying out research on its great treasure, the twelfth-century manuscript Textus Roffensis. His monograph, Sex, Genesis and the Anglo-Saxons is presently under review at Manchester University Press. He also writes feature articles for magazines, most of which to date have not been about the Middle Ages, though he has a few medieval themed pieces in the pipeline. Over the next few months Chris will be producing ‘The Sex Lives of the Anglo-Saxons’, a series of video blogs for his website.

Guest Post: Rachel Yelding

We've been asked to take part in a blog tour for Impossible Spaces, a new anthology of short stories published by Manchester small press Hic Dragones. Given that the editor - Hannah Kate (aka Dr Hannah Priest) - is one of our committee members, and one of the contributors - Daisy Black - is a PhD student in Medieval English at the University of Manchester, we were happy to be involved in spreading the word about the book.

Today we welcome Rachel Yelding, one of twenty-one writers to be included in the book. Rachel has a BA in Music and Creative Writing from Roehampton University and an MA in Screenwriting from the National Film and Television School, and her story in Impossible Spaces ('I'd Lock it with a Zipper') is her first short story publication. Her fantasy screenplay, Paradise, recently reached the quarter finals of the Screenwriting Goldmine Awards. Rachel has a keen interest in folklore and myth, and so we asked her to talk about the traditions that have inspired her writing.

Hello Manchester Medieval Society. My name's Rachel Yelding, I’m a writer and filmmaker based in Kent. Kent is quite a varied county; we have everything from coasts to marshes to miles upon miles of rolling fields (hence the nickname 'The Garden of England') all the way up to bustling cities. Our most famous city being the medieval gem, Canterbury. Due to this variety we have our fair share of folklore and traditions both old and new. We beat the bounds and look for any excuse to break out the Morris dancers. Find yourself in Romney Marsh, and you can take part in the Day of Syn to celebrate the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, Dr Syn. The Whitstable Oyster Festival is a combination of both the ancient and the modern, reviving the Norman tradition of giving thanks to the sea and the blessing and landing of the oysters whilst the 2007-born Whitstable giants Captain Sam and his wife are paraded through town. Prefer canals to fishing boats? Every other year in Hythe is the Hythe Venetian Fete. The list goes on and on but one thing is for sure, living in Kent has instilled in me a love for mythology and folklore.

My folklore hunger knows no bounds (you could play bingo with the amount of times an ancient Greek pomegranate appears in the grasp of one of my otherworldly characters), with my favourites being British and Japanese. In fact, my very first short script took characters from Japanese folklore, anglicised them and combined them with traditional British folklore. Because of this I would like to share with you my top five favourite characters and aspects from British and Japanese folklore.

British Folklore
I find it a terrible shame that a British person can tell you exponentially more about Roman and Greek folklore than they can the folklore of the land they are standing on, so I hope my five choices will inspire people to delve a little deeper into the mythical history of the British Isles.

Rowan
Rowan is a shrub with (usually) red berries found all across the UK. Everyone knows a rowan bush by sight even if they cannot name it, which is why I love that there is so much myth and folklore around this small tree. Some people even refuse to cut it down. I know I would be nervous too if I believed that the tree was where the Devil hung his mother from! A more positive folklore of the rowan is that if you carry a sprig with you or hang a branch from your door you will be protected from evil spirits and witches. Many aspects of British folklore are referenced in my work Paradise, including this aspect of the rowan. Should an evil spirit touch a mere leaf they will be turned mortal. A terrible fate indeed!

Jenny Greenteeth
Jenny is the English equivalent of a siren or Lorelei. She lurks in water, waiting to lure the young and elderly closer so that she can drown them in her long, winding hair and eat them with her sharp, pointy teeth. With her green skin, she is the embodiment of the treacherous pondweed that so often tangles itself around unsuspecting swimmers and was probably created to warn children away from lakes and rivers containing such weed. In my opinion nothing beats a seductive woman just waiting to drag you to your doom. As a female writer who uses it, I find it a classic and empowering trope.

Corn Dolly
If you’ve read my Impossible Spaces story, 'I’d Lock it with a Zipper', you may have guessed that at the bottom of my garden is a cornfield (though I’m pretty certain the farmer doesn’t hold to this tradition). Much like the Queen has Sandringham, a corn dolly is the corn spirit’s winter residence. In the autumn, after ploughing their field, the farmer takes some of the harvest and constructs the dolly (which can take many forms, not just that of a human) for the corn spirit to live in. The dolly is kept in the safety of the farmer’s house until spring when it is ploughed back into the field so that the corn spirit can give life to the new seeds.

Green Man
If you like your pubs then there’s a good chance you’ll have drunk in a pub called the Green Man. He also appears as leaf-covered faces carved into church lintels and on tombstones due to his association with nature and rebirth. He may sometimes also appear in more traditional Morris dancing tableaus completely covered in leaves, as Jack in the Green. I love that somehow today he is as much connected to alcohol as he is to being green, so maybe that is why in my world of Paradise he appears as the spirit hotel’s bartender, all tall and green and wearing nothing but an artfully positioned leaf.

Black Dog
There are many famous black dogs in English folklore, such as the Barghest and Black Shuck. You may know of black dogs thanks to The Hound of the Baskervilles or because Winston Churchill described his experiences with depression as a ‘black dog’ - and for good reason as the black dog is a spirit that literally hounds its chosen victim until their death. Much larger than normal dogs and with ink-black coats and glowing eyes, black dogs are wonderfully dramatic and (thanks to Churchill) also great visual metaphors. In Paradise Death takes the form of a giant black fox when hunting for spirits, combining the idea of the black dog with another of my favourite folkloric characters, which I will mention later.

Japanese Folklore

Japanese folklore is much more popular and well known in Japan that British folklore is in Britain, probably due to the fact that the majority if the characters are rooted in Shinto, a religion followed by around 80 per cent of the population. There is a shrine on nearly every street corner and most towns have special festivals. Characters from folklore appear in traditional Japanese writing as well as in modern film, computer games, anime and manga, and thanks to such international powerhouses as Studio Ghibli you may have seen references to Japanese folklore without even realising it.

Izanagi and Izanami
I love the tale of the gods Izanagi and Izanami, as it is a lesson that no matter how many bombs we drop on each other we are all related by being members of the same human race. Why? Because the tale is almost exactly the same as that of Persephone, despite the ancient Japanese having (as far as we know) absolutely no contact with the ancient Greeks. When Izanagi’s wife (and sister) Izanami dies after giving birth to the fire god Kagu-tsuchi, Izanagi goes to the underworld to bring her back with him; however, a terrible thing has happened, she has eaten the food of the dead and is trapped in the underworld forever.

Amefurikozo
The Japanese have a spirit for everything, and the amefurikozo is the spirit that makes it rain. He is usually a little boy carrying an umbrella either in one hand or as a hat and carrying a lantern in the other. I find it very apt that the rain spirit should be a little boy, as little boys love messing about in the rain. I can imagine him in galoshes or welly boots jumping in the puddles he has just made.

Hyakki Yagyo
Hyakki Yagyo means 'Night Parade of One Hundred Demons' and is most recognisable to westerners as the cat parade in Studio Ghibli’s The Cat Returns and Operation Poltergeist in Pom Poko. It occurs in summer nights where yokai (the general name for Japanese spirits and demons) parade through the Japanese streets by lantern light. Anyone who has attended a midnight parade will know just how strong an image this is, especially a Japanese parade such as the Takayama matsuris where percussion are beaten, dragon dancers bless the streets and elaborate, beautiful floats are carried about town.

Tsukumogami
Did you know that after 100 years even inanimate objects develop spirits? That is what tsukumogami are. I find that an absolutely magical idea. People would be so much more respectful of their objects if they thought they had lives of their own. Strangely though, the idea that objects such as shoes and lamps have spirits is harder for some westerners to understand than the idea that abstract concepts such as Death, Love and Jazz have spirits... weird. This difficulty is something to be aware when writing, but don’t be put off. The lead male in Paradise is the spirit of a whole hotel, but I haven’t met a single person who after a few pages has let that get in the way of enjoying him as a character.

Kitsune
Kitsune and foxes in general are my favourite folklore images of all time and appear in hundreds of tales across the world. I can understand why. I think they are absolutely beautiful and magical with their glowing eyes and silent scampering through the night. Kitsune are fox spirits with multiple tails (three for young kitsune and up to twelve for century old spirits), usually either silver or gold in colour, who have amazing magical abilities. Much like foxes in other countries’ mythologies, the kitsune range from tricksters to seductive murderesses. I think it is easy to understand why people would think a fox is a woman in disguise if you have ever heard their otherworldly shriek that sounds like a female screaming. Foxes and kitsune appear in all my writing which have night scenes in, from a cameo in The Automated Heart to three separate characters in Paradise. I don’t think I will ever get bored of the allure and mystery of the fox. When I visited Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari-taisha temple (famous for its thousand gates, as seen in Memoirs of a Geisha) I even brought back a stuffed fox (the temple’s guardian spirit) so that I would always have a kitsune with me.

For more information about Rachel and her writing, please visit her website.

For more information about Impossible Spaces, please visit the publishers' website.

GUEST POST: Carnal Delights: Sex, Food, Wolves and Women

We're pleased to be participating in the blog tour organized to coincide with the launch of a new collection of short fiction, Wolf-Girls: Dark Tales of Teeth, Claws and Lycogyny. Today's guest post is from Kim Bannerman, whose story 'A Woman of Wolves Born' is set during the Middle Ages and draws on both Crusade narratives and hagiography, as well as some of the medieval stories of werewolves.

Last night, after a particularly busy day, I went outside to watch the stars. As I sat in the cool evening with only myself for company, I became aware of a distant sound, a haunting call that echoed faintly between the mountains. "Ah", I thought with satisfaction, "The wolves have returned."

My small town, located on the west coast of British Columbia, is surrounded on all sides by vast rainforests. We're used to living in close proximity with nature. Deer eat my tulips, raccoons live in our attic, and black bears ramble through our streets almost every night during autumn - I have a ravaged, punctured 'animal proof' trash can to prove it.* However, the wolves rarely come into our community. They sing from the mountain tops when the summer comes. Late at night, when there's no traffic, I can catch their faint howling on the still air.

The sound, while beautiful, once struck fear into the hearts of medieval folk, and I understand their reaction. Those notes hold a primal quality. It reminds us, no matter how distant we believe ourselves to be from brute nature, that we remain a part of the natural world, and perhaps we are not as high on the food chain as we'd like to think. To those living in medieval Europe, the wolf had no practical uses; unlike deer or boar, it could not be eaten, and its hide was notoriously difficult to tan. However, wolves posed a constant threat to the security of home and livestock. The wolf was reputed to devour human flesh, and those haunting notes were a reminded to all who heard them that people were food to be eaten. The terrifying concept of being devoured, often forgotten in today's urban world, was ever-present in the medieval mind.

When it came to procreation, the wolf represented something more lascivious, too. Thomas Aquinas said that "in sexual intercourse, man becomes a brute animal". The copulation of beasts is "loud and noisy," said Albert the Great, while human coupling is "discrete, rational, prudent and bashful".** Placed against this ideal, the wolf was reputed for its insatiable lust. The wolf took what it wished, loved freely, and rejected any restrictions to its passion. Its carnal desires followed no rules. In a society which functioned on the constant suppression of desire, where man had been set apart from the animals by his reason and intellect, the wolf provided a poignant example of rampant sexuality.

The werewolf, then, represented the struggle between reason and impulse. Every transformation was the victory of mad desire over reason; what a horrifying thought to people who poured every resource into reaching a Heavenly ideal by rejecting earthly sin. It's easy to see why the female werewolf is rare in medieval lore, for she was truly a terrifying beast to consider: an aberration of unrestrained female lust, an insatiable nymph with a savage hunger for the flesh of reasonable men. If that most rational creature in God's creation, mankind, could barely contain his passion and took to the fields in the guise of a wolf, how much more untamable must the woman be who joins him?

Or, even worse, rejects him?

I'm thrilled to say that my short story, "A Woman of Wolves Born", appears in the anthology Wolf-Girls: Dark Tales of Teeth, Claws and Lycogyny, but it was originally written as a companion piece to my first novel, The Tattooed Wolf. I wanted to play with a powerful female character in a medieval world. I wondered, how can a woman remain true to herself in a place that so desperately strives to restrict her? It's a question that can be applied to women in many cultures and in many eras, but for me, the werewolf became the perfect symbol of an intelligent being trapped between two ideals: the role placed upon her by society and the freedom to be herself. For me, werewolves are not hungry monsters consumed with lust and blood; they’re creatures who have managed to straddle two worlds and have embraced their role in nature.

As I sat on my porch last night and listened to the wolves sing, my heart longed to be with them. That wild song, once responsible for making good medieval men tremble in fear like rabbits, spoke of dark glades and deep ravines far from the influence of church or state. I raised my voice, cupped my hands around my lips, and howled. At first, my voice wavered, but my notes grew stronger with each ardent breath. And unbounded by rules or ceremony or silly old notions of sin, the distant wolves howled back.

Photo Credit: Shawn Pigott

*Here, air quotes are necessary. I've watched the bears tip over my trash can, then bounce on it until the top pops off. The manufacturer wasn't specific about what kind of animal, I suppose, but it certainly isn't bears.

** Really, Albert? I bet you weren't exactly a hit with the ladies, were you...

Wolf-Girls: Dark Tales of Teeth, Claws and Lycogyny is edited by Hannah Kate, and published by Hic Dragones. For more information about the book, please visit the publisher's website. To find out more about Kim's work, please visit her blog.