“Knights in Disguise: Identity and Incognito in Fourteenth-Century Chivalry.” In The Stranger in Medieval Society, ed. F.R.P. Akehurst and Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Pp. 63-79.

The Stranger in Medieval Society * F. R. P. Akehurst and Stephanie Cain Van D'Eiden, editors Medieval Cultures Volume 12 M IN NE SO TA University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London CHAPTER 5 * Knights in Disguise: Identity and Incognito in Fourteenth-Century Chivalry Susan Crane M y subject is how romances and historical imitations of romance define identity in moments when knights disguise themselves or dress up in the badges and regalia of orders of knighthood. Literary characters express chivalric ideology through the poetics of a genre; historical knights who imitate them are similarly engaged in a rhetoric of gestures and appearances, in a metonymic self-presentation that depends for its meaning on literary and social conventions and precedents.1 It is on this rhetorical plane of self-dramatization that I will associate a few historical and literary instances of chivalric behavior. Initially, I suspected that the knight who chooses to disguise himself seeks to conceal a part of his identity from scrutiny and judgment, to make himself a stranger to his own chivalric community. For this conference on strangers in medieval society I planned to claim that chivalric disguise estranges the knight by removing him from public view, making him an outsider even as he engages his peers in tournaments or fights alongside them in war. I have come to believe, however, that chivalric incognito, as a motif of romance and as a historical practice, amounts to a peculiar kind of self-presentation, a self-dramatization that invites rather than resists public scrutiny. This function of incognito becomes clearer when placed in relation to other means by which knights display their identity, in coats of arms, badges, and the insignia of orders of chivalry. All these gestures, I believe, construct an identity that calls persistently on the chivalric community's recognition in order to constitute itself, but that retains as well a suppressed and threatening potential for alienation from that community. My reading of chivalric dress and disguise reconsiders a familiar dispute about medieval and modern selfhood. Renaissance scholars have long characterized the Middle Ages as the time before individuality. Stephen Greenblatt writes that in the Renaissance, people began to fashion individual identities self-consciously, to choose and value "a distinctive personality, a characteristic address to the world, a consistent mode of perceiving and behaving." 2 Jacob Burckhardt much earlier argued that in the Middle Ages "man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation — only through some general cate63 Susan Crane gory."3 That "only/' that dichotomy between identity conceived independently of others and in terms of others, has also conditioned medievalists' counterclaims that individuality is a medieval phenomenon as well as a modern one. With regard to romance, my primary interest, Robert Hanning argues that the driving tension of the genre is between the striving hero's private desires and his social commitments. The protagonist's sense of self precedes encounters with the world: "The great adventure of chivalric romance is the adventure of becoming what (and who) you think you can be, of transforming the awareness of an inner self into an actuality which impresses upon the external world the fact of a personal, self-chosen destiny, and therefore of an inner-determined identity." 4 Peter Haidu, in contrast, argues that the opposition between inner self and external world is an entirely modern conception: "Le Moyen Age nous lisant ne peut que s'emerveiller ä la vue d'un systeme social produisant des sujets s'opposant, aux meilleurs moments de la vie, ä la societe et au systeme de valeurs encodees qui les fondent en tant que Sujets." Looking specifically to Chretien de Troyes's Yvain, Haidu argues that the choice that text offers is between a fully integrated social identity and no identity at all.5 For both sides of this debate, a division, indeed an irreconcilable opposition, distinguishes the individual from society: medieval subjectivity is either determined by social forces or confronts them in a dialectical struggle over that determination. But this oppositional conception itself has a history, one moment of which is articulated with particular clarity in the work of John Locke. Locke and his contemporaries convinced the architects of the American Revolution that each and every "man" had a primary duty to question "received Opinions" on every matter of importance to his daily conduct; each man's reason was his means to liberation from "the secret motives, that influenced the Men of Name and Learning in the World, and the Leaders of Parties" to further their own interests. 6 Locke is the first theorist to propose that everyone, not just the philosopher, must take a dialectical stance to social precedent and authority, and that to resist and interrogate is the essence of liberty: "He is certainly the most subjected, the most enslaved, who is so in his Understanding." 7 Students of the novel will recall Ian Watt's argument that Locke's version of the autonomous individual in confrontation with the social world is crucial to the generic shift from romance to novel in the eighteenth century. 8 Locke's skeptical, questioning relation between the self and the world is so natural to us that it may constrict our ability to imagine other moments in the complex history of subjectivity. 9 Indeed, my argument concerning chivalric identity should not be taken to propose a globally "medieval" self. A particular fascination of chivalric literature for me has been that it appears to imagine identity quite differently from the learned religious writing on which medieval studies tend to ground general claims 64 Knights in Disguise about premodern self-conception. 10 All positions in this debate recognize that the forms self-conception takes are ideologically conditioned; one implication of ideology's role is that identity might be multiform even in one era, differently configured, for example, in clerical and secular circles or in popular and elite ones. These circles interpenetrate, of course, in chivalric literature itself, where authors' clerical or reformist impulses cannot be fully disentangled from their representations of an ideology specific to chivalric practice. But something of that ideology can be recovered by cross-reading the more clerically oriented works, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, against more secularly invested ones, such as Geoffroi de Charny's Livre de chevalerie and the statutes of chivalric orders. In considering chivalric identity, we might imagine Locke's premises stood on their heads — or, from the medieval perspective, righted from their postmedieval inversions. Precedent and social consensus become reliable measures of merit rather than dangerously misleading "Opinions/ 7 and the relation between the self and those measures becomes largely mutual and interpenetrating rather than oppositional. Independent selfhood is not the goal of social life but a threat to it, a state of alienation that is to be avoided rather than sought out. And the isolated self does not precede confrontation with the world—is not the starting point for building an identity—but is rather an effect, and a largely negative one, of the quest for renown. My argument contrasts with the two current kinds of argument on chivalric behavior specifically. Louise Fradenberg's analysis of tournaments brilliantly exemplifies the position that personal identity is threatened by external perception; for her the jousting knight is involved in a continuous process of self-dramatization through which he attempts to match up his own self-perception with public measures of honor. 11 In contrast, on the issue of chivalry Lee Patterson argues for an undifferentiated, publicly defined subjectivity: "It is essential to grasp, as our initial premise, that chivalry entailed a form of selfhood insistently, even exclusively, public. It stressed a collective or corporate self-definition and so ignored the merely personal or individual." 12 In my view, Fradenberg's City, Marriage, Tournament and Patterson's Chaucer and the Subject of History are superior to other recent studies of the literary and historical intersections that determine subjectivity, and their virtually diametric conclusions on the nature of chivalric identity are the more striking for the many consonances of approach they share. I will argue here for a third view, that an individual identity can be founded in renown in this period when the individual had not yet become the questioning opponent of social precedent. Accorded by the chivalric community, this individuality derives from, rather than precedes, public judgment. I will first outline several cases that locate identity in renown, in the estimation of the community, and then go on to argue that chivalric ideology sustains 65 Susan Crane a peculiar kind of individuality based on one's capacity to win renown. A brief third section points to the risk in this identity system that misjudgment may produce a premodern version of the alienated self. Incognito and Renown Literature, and especially romance, begins to inspire chivalric behavior extensively in the later thirteenth century, for example, in Edward I's Round Table celebrating the conquest of Wales (1284) and in the Picardy tournament (1278) presided over by a Dame Courtoisie and a Queen Guinevere who welcomed to the lists a "Chevalier au Lyon," a suite of damsels he had rescued, and his lion.13 The Knight of the Lion imitates Chretien de Troyes's disguised hero Yvain, in disgrace and attempting to remake his reputation as the "Chevalier au l y o n . . . / qui met sa poinne a conseillier / celes qui d'aie ont mestier [£>e knight with J)e lyown: / He helpes al in word and dede, / t>at unto him has any nede]."14 The historical impersonation of Yvain's impersonation illustrates the double attraction that the motif of incognito holds for the late medieval audience: literary disguises not only stimulate the creation of similar disguises in imitation of romance, but inspire as well the direct imitation of literary figures by historical persons. "Incognito" in its many fourteenth-century manifestations encompasses both concealed identity modeled after romance plots and fictive identity borrowed from them. A striking instance of the latter, if we accept Juliet Vale's compelling interpretation of the records, is provided by Edward III: having participated in the 1334 Dunstable tournament as "Mons r . Lyonel" (a Round Table knight and cousin to Lancelot, chosen perhaps for the "lions"—actually leopards—on the royal coat of arms), Edward extended the impersonation of Lionel in so naming his third son in 1338. Vale further suggests that the green hangings ordered for Lionel of Antwerp's betrothal recall the green ground on which the "arms of Lionel [schuchon' de armis Lyonel]" were embroidered on hangings of 1334, and that those tournament arms were perhaps passed on to Lionel of Antwerp at his birth. 15 Edward continued to participate incognito in later tournaments, as a simple knight bachelor at Dunstable in 1342 and in the arms of his followers Stephen de Cosington and Thomas de Bradstone in 1348.16 And at least one English knight of the period, Sir Thomas Holand, used adopted arms reminiscent of those in romance: although he bore his family's coat of arms in his early twenties, his later armorial seals of 1354 and 1357 as well as the Antiquaries' Roll (no. 106, c. 1360) record his use of a plain sable shield.17 Perhaps Holand used his plain arms only in tournaments, but in any case they seem likely to refer to the plain arms often used by disguised knights in romances. The kind of disguise at issue here is the most common of all in romance: protagonists adopt plain or fabricated arms in combat, often just for the space of a decisive tournament. The narrative pretexts for such Knights in Disguise disguises are various. Chretien's Cliges and Hue de Rotelande's Ipomedon are new knights seeking to prove themselves as they enter adulthood; Partonope of Blois and Chretien's Yvain have committed offenses against their lovers that they are striving to redress. In all these cases, chivalric incognito is a public act, one of definition and redefinition that speaks to onlookers. Incognito does conceal information, but does so only temporarily in order to focus attention on the judgment of present actions without regard for lineage, past achievements, or past failures. Winning renown (los, pris, name, renommee) requires submitting to a semiosis of performance and display. The protagonist of the fourteenthcentury Ipomadon uses multiple disguises, yet his layered self-presentation, which the English redactor attributes to his perpetual sense that he is not yet worthy of his lady, culminates in major scenes of revelation linking his screen identities together. For example, after a three-day tournament designed to find a husband for his lady, Ipomadon intends to "wend my way / To gette me more worshipe, yff I may," but he sends his burgess host to court with the red, white, and black horses he used in the tournament and two more horses won from two rivals there. 18 Presenting each major figure in the narrative with one of these equine tokens of achievement, the burgess claims the renown for Ipomadon that Ipomadon is reluctant to claim for himself. At this point Ipomadon's three tournament disguises and two of his court personae come together, but his name and lineage remain concealed: his chief rival, Cabanus, tries to find out "where he was borne & what he hatte," but in the absence of that information he must still concede that "a wortheer knyght J)en he is one / Vnder the cope of heyven is none." 19 Ipomadon's merit in arms is the more firmly established for its independence from his lineage, although his lineage, discovered much later, consolidates his meritorious performances. As each disguise is changed for another, reassumed, and ultimately lifted, Ipomadon seems less to conceal himself from others than to articulate his construction of an identity fully constituted in renown, in the perception and judgment of his society. Incognito serves Partonope much as it does Ipomadon, concentrating the public eye on the moment of action in order to establish an identity independent of affiliations with the past. In contrast to Ipomadon, Partonope is afflicted with failure when he attends the three-day tournament that will determine Melior's husband: he has disobeyed Melior's magical interdiction, exposing their love to public shame, and must now appear in disguise because, he believes, Melior has rejected contact with him forever. His plain silver shield becomes the metonymy for his superior performance: in the bon mot of a participant praising one of his victories, "The white shelde fcinketh not to dey / At £>is tyme [The white shield isn't thinking of dying just yet]."20 Where a past fault is the motive for disguise, there is a refashioned identity concealed beneath the incognito, but the strategy of romances is typ67 Susan Crane ically to externalize both the fault and the penance. Yvain's recollection that he has forgotten to return to his wife coincides exactly with a public reproach for his oversight, transforming what could be an occasion for private guilt into a public scene of shame. The Middle English adaptation of Chretien's work Ywain and Gawain does away more thoroughly than its source with Ywain's prior identity by insisting that his fault negates it altogether. His wife's messenger calls into question his knighthood and his lineage: It es ful mekyl ogains \>e right To cal so fals a man a knight Sertainly, so fals a fode Was never cumen of kynges blode, £>at so sone forgat his wyfe. 21 No wonder this "unkind cumlyng [unnatural little upstart]" runs maddened from court and later declares, "I am noght worthi to be sene... I was a man, now am I nane." 22 Ywain, like Partonope, reconstructs his manhood in deeds of chivalry, disguised as the Knight of the Lion. These literary instances clarify Edward Ill's adoption of a chivalric disguise when his city of Calais was in danger of being recaptured by the French. Edward's exploit is noted in several chronicles, but Jean Froissart's most fully elaborates the interactions between English and French combatants. 23 When Edward learned that Geoffroi de Charny had offered money to the captain of the garrison at Calais in return for access to the city, the king (together with the Black Prince and certain reinforcements) came in secrecy from England to Calais, instructed the garrison captain to appear willing to admit the French, and fought against the French force "sans cognissance de ses ennemis, desous le baniere monsigneur Gautier de Mauni" [without the knowledge of his enemies, under the banner of Sir Walter Manny]." 24 Froissart makes much of this incognito, pointing it out repeatedly in the course of his account; the Rome version adds the comment, "Bien monstra la li gentils rois Edouwars que il avoit grant desir de conbatre et amour as armes, qant il s'estoit mis en tel parti et tant humeliies que desous le pennon mesire Gautier de Manni, son chevalier [There the noble King Edward showed well that he had a great desire for combat and love of arms, when he took part in such an action and so humbled himself under the banner of his knight Sir Walter Manny]." 25 Edward fights hand to hand particularly with Eustache de Ribemont; again Froissart insists, "Mesires Ustasses ne savoit a qui il se conbatoit; mais li rois le s^avoit bien, car il le recongnissoit par ses armes [Sir Eustache did not know with whom he was fighting, but the king knew him well, for he recognized him by his arms]." 26 Edward's disguise works, like those of romance, to concentrate attention on his chival68 Knights in Disguise ric skill and courage independent of his established status as sovereign and military leader. The initial effect is paradoxical—the leader now a follower, the sovereign on a footing with the soldier—but Edward integrates his disguise with his kingship by staging a scene of revelation and judgment to follow the scene of incognito, inviting the captured knights to a dinner on the night of their defeat at which he mingles with them, wearing not a crown but a chaplet of silver and pearls. In Froissart's text, Edward reproaches Geoffroi de Charny and praises Eustache de Ribemont: Adonc prist li rois le chapelet qu'il portoit sus son chief, qui estoit bons et riches, et le mist et assist sus le chief ä monsigneur Ustasse, et Ii dist ensi: "Messire Ustasse, je vous donne ce chapelet pour le mieulz combatant de toute la journee de chiaus de dedens et de hors, et vous pri que vous le portes ceste anee pour l'amour de mi. Je s^ai bien que vous estes gais et amoureus, et que volentiers vous vos trouves entre dames et damoiselles. Si dittes partout lä oü vous venes que je le vous ay donnet. Et parmi tant, vous estes mon prisonnier: je vous quitte vostre prison,- et vous poes partir de matin, se il vous plest." 27 [Then the king took the chaplet that he was wearing on his head, which was fine and rich, and put it on Sir Eustache's head, and said to him, "Sir Eustache, I give you this chaplet for being the best combatant of the entire day of those within and those without, and I beg you to wear it this year for love of me. I know well that you are gay and amorous, and that you willingly find yourself in the company of ladies and maidens. So say wherever you come that I gave this to you. During this time you are my prisoner,- I excuse you from imprisonment, and you may leave in the morning if you please."] Edward reconstitutes the military encounter as a festive occasion, an event very like a tournament, of which he is the judge in apportioning the honors. War and tournament reveal here their close allegiance, their shared preoccupation with honor (versus Charny's attempt to suborn) and with testing and measuring participants. 28 Edward adopts the role of sovereign observer of the day's events (as if despite his participation in the field he was nonetheless aware of all the action "dedens et de hors"), but he simultaneously enhances his exploits in the field by choosing his own adversary as the best combatant. Eustache, in heralding his reward, will publish as well the exploit of Edward and the victory of Edward's party.29 Froissart, and presumably Edward before him, seems to have in mind not only the semiosis of disguise in tournaments but also its roots in romance. Edward conceals his identity in combat as do Ipomadon and others, but, as in those cases, the incognito is ultimately lifted and renown 69 Susan Crane credited to the unknown knight. In Froissart's account the crucial revelation to the French, noble adversaries, has a romantic resonance with the transnational pursuit of chivalric renown; the "dames et damoiselles" who are to be the audience for Eustache's narrative recall the feminine associations of romance: beyond as well as within the genre, women are said to have a special susceptibility to romance and tend to be invoked for an audience in fact more mixed. Edward's imitation of literary incognito provides a second level of disguise for the English king as a hero of romance, and his exploit's literary origins prepare for its return to narrative in the accounts of Eustache de Ribemont and Froissart. The pivotal function of chivalric incognito, then, is to establish or revise the perception of others concerning the disguised knight's merits. That is, incognito is not significantly self-concealing and self-protecting, but the reverse: the disguised knight draws the curious and judgmental eye and stands clear of his past to be measured anew. Moreover, the full semiosis of incognito requires that the knight complete his adventure by giving up the disguise and incorporating the renown he has won into his earlier identity. As Ywain and Gawain summarizes, "j^e knyght with J)e liown / Es turned now to Syr Ywayn / And has his lordship al ogayn."30 This trajectory toward revelation echoes that of adventures in general in romance: the wandering knight, isolated from the court's view, fully achieves his adventures only when they are reported—whether by himself or by his captives and emissaries—back to the courtly audience. Limitations of Renown By reading chivalric disguise as a language of self-presentation rather than as a means of self-concealment, it becomes clear that incognito is only the end point on a continuum of visible signs through which knights perform and manipulate their identities. Now I will turn from disguise to other adopted marks of identity on that continuum, and extend my argument from the claim that the chivalric self is first of all in the gift of the community to claim as well that this selfhood is ultimately divided—indeed, estranged—from the community that established it. The public nature of chivalric identity does not do away with tensions analogous to those that complicate the modern struggle between "individual" and "society." A kind of individuality—though I would mark it off from modern individuality—comes into play at the point of opposition between the ideology of chivalric brotherhood and that brotherhood's charge to each knight to distinguish himself. The chivalric community both asserts its seamless accord and demands differentiation. The Order of the Garter, for example, represents the equivalence of its members in their shared regalia and a nonhierarchical organization. Yet it also institutionalizes its members' difference from those knights not admitted to the order and further from each other, in that their original seating arrange7n Knights in Disguise ment in the choir of St. George's chapel seems to reflect two tournament teams of twelve members each, one under the Black Prince and the other under Edward III.31 In founding the order in part to declare the unity of interests among his most loyal supporters and in part to foster contests among them, Edward followed the design of tournamenting confraternities generally, and perhaps specifically that of the Order of the Band, whose statutes require each new member to run two courses against two members of the order at the first tournament held after his initiation. 32 The regalia worn by members of Jean II's Order of the Star unites them visibly in the colors vermillion, black, and white, which probably carried the significances contemporaneously ascribed to them in Geoffroi de Charny's Livre de chevalerie for the dress of squires about to receive knighthood: white for sinlessness, vermillion for the blood a knight is prepared to shed, black for mortality. 33 The order's robes and the colors of investiture urge a spirit of common purpose and shared identity. Yet each member was charged at the order's annual feast to recount his "aventures, aussy bien les honteuses que les glorieuses [adventures, the shameful as well as the praiseworthy]" for the purpose of designating "les trois princes, trois bannerez et trois bachelers, qui en l'annee auront plus fait en armes de guerre [the three princes, three bannerets, and three bachelors who during the year have accomplished the most in the arms of war]."34 Charny's Livre similarly posits both a universal "ordre de chevalerie" made up of all true knights and the principle "qui plus fait, miex vault [he who accomplishes more is more worthy]," which becomes the refrain of his opening pages.35 The Orders of the Garter and the Star established in midcentury by Edward III and Jean II overtly imitate Arthur's Round Table, implying their founders' imitation of Arthur and their members' imitation of his knights. The Arthurian inspiration for the orders of chivalry licenses a turn to literature for some insight into the paradoxical relation between injunctions to chivalric fellowship and to individual distinction. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, particularly because it ends with the founding of an order of chivalry, might be expected to comment on this double imperative. Throughout the poem, Gawain is declared the paradigm of knighthood. His pentangle illustrates the virtues to which all knights might aspire. To Bertilak's courtiers he is "{)at fyne fader of nurture"; in Bertilak's assessment, "As perle bi £>e quite pese is of prys more, / So is Gawayn, in god fayth, bi o{>er gay kny3tez." 36 Both metaphors assert relation as well as superiority; Gawain is comparable to other knights but also excels on all the scales of commitment and achievement implicit in the pentangle's mathematics. In Charny's terms, he surpasses the preux and the souverainement preux to count among les plus souveraine.37 When Arthur's courtiers adopt Gawain's green girdle on his return, they honor Gawain's superiority in the same gesture that strives to reintegrate him into the "ordre de chevalerie" in general and this new order in particular. 71 Susan Crane The court's response, however, is problematic. Gawain asserts that the green lace is the bend of his blame and the token of his transgression, but the courtiers laugh loudly and found a brotherhood whose members will each wear this "bende abelef hym aboute of a bry3t grene" (2517). Are the courtiers overestimating Gawain's success, carelessly laughing and failing to recognize the spiritual fault he sees emblematized in the "token of vntraw^e" (2509)? Or are they rather underestimating Gawain's success, presumptuously adopting as their own this "pur token / Of J)e chaunce of £>e grene chapel" (2398-99) to which only Gawain's extraordinary adventure can give the right? Even if they are perceptively asserting their own inferiority in adopting the baldric, thereby declaring their aspiration to become as "imperfect" as Gawain, they are reinterpreting his own version of his achievement. The interpretive impasse that Gawain— and each reader—faces in this scene foregrounds the problem of interpretation itself that is the weak link in a system of individual honor dependent on public recognition. Misrecognition is always possible. The court's perhaps insightful, perhaps ignorant judgment and Gawain's contrasting judgment of his performance raise questions about how accurately deeds get translated into renown. It is immediately tempting to attribute the gap between Gawain's and the court's assessments of his adventure to a fundamental alienation of the private self known only to itself from the ignorant outside world. Casting Gawain's predicament as a dichotomy of "inner" and "outer" identities is natural to the modern view of selfhood, but I believe Gawain throughout the romance is identified with his public reputation alone, and that the sense of interiority arising at the work's end derives from the conflict over what measure of renown to accord his most recent exploits. The tests of courage and courtesy Gawain undergoes in his adventure were, according to Bertilak, designed "to assay {>e surquidre, 3if hit soth were / J?at rennes of J>e grete renoun of J)e Rounde Table" (2457-58), echoing his declared motive at the poem's outset (258-64) and his taunt, "Now is J>e reuel and £>e renoun of t>e Rounde Table / Ouerwalt wyth a worde of on W3es speche" (313-14). As the Round Table's representative, Gawain even in his intimate conduct with Bertilak's wife is subject to constant measurement against the standards of—and his own prior reputation for—courteous and chivalric behavior, " t o u art not Gawayn" is the persistent reproach of Gawain's male and female challengers as they demand that he live up to the ideals of his court (1293, 1481, 2270). His challengers speak as if "Gawain" were simply metonymic for an ideology of knighthood. His identity is articulated and judged by others,- his task is to perform the chivalry and courtesy imputed to him as perfectly as possible. The signs of identity Gawain bears further emphasize its public nature. The pentangle on Gawain's shield blazons his virtues in a visible calculus of fives and in a narrative register that appears to be beyond counterinter15 Knights in Disguise pretation. Many critics have noted the firmness and stability with which the pentangle's "endeles knot" (630) of interlocked virtues is "harder happed on ^at hat>el t>en on any o]3er" (655) and the contrasting mobility with which the green girdle is draped, knotted, and interpreted. 38 1 have not seen commentary on the heraldic resonance of Gawain's final way of wearing the girdle "Abelef as a bauderyk bounden by his syde, / Loken vnder his lyfte arme" (2486-87). The pentangle has made a muted but I think unmistakable return in Gawain's second arming, when he completes his preparations for meeting the Green Knight by donning "his cote wyth ]3e conysaunce of t»e clere werkes / Ennurned vpon veluet" — his badge or cognizance having been the pentangle at his first arming (2026-27).39 In this period, armed knights typically bore their coats of arms on their surcoats as well as their shields.40 When Gawain arms for the second time, the girdle maintains something of its character as a belt, wrapped twice around Gawain's waist, but after he comes to see in it the "syngne of my surfet" (2433) he takes to wearing it crosswise. It is possible that for a fourteenth-century audience the "bende abelef" that Gawain ties across his "cote wyth J)e conysaunce" would have recalled a heraldic bend, a deliberate revision Gawain has blazoned on his earlier "bytoknyng of trawt>e" (626).41 That Gawain blazons a new identity reflective of his adventure breaks the pentangle's "endeles" stability and reasserts the performative nature of chivalric identity. But the difference between the meaning Gawain attributes to the girdle and the meanings urged by Bertilak and Arthur's courtiers mark the point where Gawain is, finally, estranged from his community. The text's focus on renown ends in a crisis of renown, as Gawain's sense of shame divides him from both his past position as the Round Table's best representative and the present "bro^erhede" of knights in green baldrics (2516). My argument is that Gawain's differing sense of self does not precede but rather derives from his participation in a chivalric economy of identity conceded in return for deeds. His trajectory from an identity fully constituted in renown toward an identity unavailable to public understanding exactly reverses the narrative, familiar to us from a thousand novels, of an independent youth at odds with tradition. For modern sensibility, the kind of estrangement from social consensus that Gawain experiences on his return to court is the universal precondition of individuality; for chivalric ideology, Gawain's estrangement amounts to a failure in the system of renown that has generated his individuality. Identity beyond Renown Marked and overwritten with the colors and symbols that convey his identity, Gawain makes himself available to the reading of others, and his own words of shame carry little weight with them. That Gawain's new token is a feminine garment invites Marjorie Garber's thesis on the 73 Susan Crane transvestite: he/she is one who doesn't fit, who embodies a problematic not just of gender but of other classifications—here of the imperfect coordination between exploits and renown. 42 The crisis of interpretation with which Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ends could contextualize the motto of the Order of the Garter, "Honi soit qui mal y pense," which appears (possibly in a later hand) at the end of the unique manuscript of Sir Gawain.43 The order's motto recalls a number of parallels between Gawain's experience and the account, perhaps spurious but widely attested, that the Order of the Garter began with Edward III retrieving a garter fallen during a dance at court from a woman's leg. When his courtiers' reactions suggested that such an action was beneath a king, Edward is said to have responded with the order's motto, "Shame to him who thinks evil of this," turning unfavorable interpretations of the act back onto the interpreters and further forestalling criticism by founding an order in which the worthiest men of England and Europe would go about wearing the emblem of the incident. 44 Historians are suspicious of this account of the order's inspiration, preferring to attribute it to Edward's claim to the French throne and specifically to the Crecy campaign.45 Yet the earliest surviving accounts of the Garter's origins offer instead the story of the woman's garter. Tirant lo Blanc, whose author, Martorell, was in England from March 1438 to February 1439, has it that the dancing woman was of little standing and that the king wore her garter for several months before the protests of courtiers and displeasure of the queen led him to utter the (mangled) motto "Puni soit qui mal y pense" and to found the Order of the Garter to consolidate the merit of his action. 46 In 1534, Polydore Vergil, a reliable historian who spent much of his adult life in England, endorsed the "popular tradition" that the Order of the Garter began with the king's retrieval of "a garter from the stocking of his queen or mistress"; Vergil comments, "English writers have been modestly superstitious, perhaps fearing to commit lese-majeste if they made known such unworthy things; and they have preferred to remain silent about them, whereas matters should really be seen otherwise: something that rises from a petty or sordid origin increases all the more in dignity." 47 The scribal notation in the Gawain manuscript, which makes best sense in terms of the "popular tradition" about the Garter, may indeed be that tradition's earliest trace — earlier by a few decades than the English material published in Tirant lo Blanc. Here I am arguing neither that the Garter foundation story is necessarily true, nor that the Gawain poet alludes to it, but rather that the Garter motto written at the end of the Gawain manuscript suggests a contemporary perception of similarities between the foundation stories of the two brotherhoods. According to these stories, both orders begin with interpretive crises in which Edward and Gawain understand the feminine token differently from their courts. Both men can be said to id Knights in Disguise cross-dress, although not simply because they transfer a woman's garment to their own bodies. Edward's and Gawain's gestures recall the common practice among knights of wearing bits of feminine clothing as love tokens. Such tokens do not disturb the gender binary but on the contrary assert the knight's heteronormativity, signaling even on the battlefield that he is actively engaged in courting a woman. 48 In contrast, the garter and girdle narratives carry a potential for shame: Edward stoops to retrieve an intimate garment as his courtiers titter,- Gawain succumbs to cowardice as he accepts the lady's girdle. At the point where shame still inheres in the action and the garment, Edward and Gawain could be said to cross-dress, with all the loss of status that represents for men in the heterosexual paradigm. 49 As Gawain explains his plight to himself, "wyles of wymmen" have brought down mankind from the first (2415). The potential shame is suppressed as the feminine garment becomes a token of honor for a new chivalric brotherhood. It is this trajectory from shame to honor that involves the adopted garments in the gender hierarchy and invites the notion of cross-dressing. In that moment when they can be described as cross-dressing, Edward and Gawain dramatize the risk of submitting to public judgment and the gap where their interiority might be distinguished from their renown. But the pressure of chivalric ideology is against such interiority. According to Polydore Vergil, Edward "showed those knights who had laughed at him how to judge his actions" by transforming a sexually charged situation into an affair of state that actively defends against illicit interpretation. 50 Stephen Jaeger cites Vergil's account of the Order of the Garter in a compelling argument that medieval courts persistently fabricate a public, asexual discourse from the language of sexuality and intimate interactions. 51 In support of Jaeger's argument, I would point out that Edward's two most durable mottoes, "Hony soit qui mal y pense" and "It is as it is," embroidered again and again on his tournament costumes and hangings, his beds and tents, assert control over interpretation and deny that multiple interpretations might have merit. 52 Similarly, Gawain's apparently private interactions with Bertilak's wife, as noted above, are immediately generalized by reference to courtly standards and turn out to be not a genuine seduction but a test of treupe that Gawain goes about confessing and signaling with the girdle. The court's reading of his adventure, and the Garter motto appended in the manuscript, deny the shameful potential in Gawain's interactions with Bertilak's wife. Yet this is not to say that the potential was never there at all. The feminine associations of the two garments are not completely erasable— they persist at least in the foundation stories of each order—and their persistence dramatizes the more visibly how powerful the court's ability to suppress and redefine can be. In the garter and girdle narratives the illicit holds an important role as that which is repressed and denied 75 Susan Crane in order to establish that which constitutes noble identity: the illicit is the trace of a potential for private identity that the court quickly rejects in favor of a public identity constituted in renown. Gawain's green baldric, blazoned over his pentangle, represents a belated interiority that amounts to the difference between his sense of shame and his court's admiration. Edward's and Gawain's situations differ in that the king asserts sovereign control over his court's interpretation, whereas Gawain finds his self-assessment overridden by Arthur's and the court's approval of his performance. The private sense of self his adventure has produced in him is marginal, and perhaps fleeting as well, as he faces the court's conclusion that the green baldric is to represent "J)e renoun of t>e Rounde Table" (2519). The semiotics of chivalric dress and incognito insist first of all that measures of honor and dishonor, renown and infamy, are in the gift of the community. Far from negotiating a tension between private self-perception and a potentially contradictory public perception, chivalric dress and disguise seek to move from one public estimation to a higher one,- far from valuing and sheltering an inner self from misestimation, the disguised knight generates a public dialectic concerning his two or several identities. But where there is conflict within the community's judgment, or between the adventuring knight's selfassessment and the assessment of his peers, a space opens up for an identity that is beyond the reach of public determinations. Notes I am grateful to Tom Hahn, Richard Kaeuper, and David Wallace for helpful comments on this essay. 1. Michael Herzfeld bases his work on the rhetorical nature of behavior in The Poetics of Manhood: Contested Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985); also of interest to medievalists are some intriguing similarities between Cretan manhood as Herzfeld analyzes it and medieval chivalric masculinity (for example, a self established in competitive performance that is also invested in the community—"One has egohismos on behalf of a collectivity"; 11). 2. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 2. 3. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. O. Middlemore (London: Phaidon, 1965 [I860]), 81, quoted in Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 7. See also Patterson's discussion of subjectivity in relation to Chaucer and his work (3-46). 4. Robert W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), 4. Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050-1200 (London: S.P.C.K., 1972), holds a similar view, although he finds that the "self" is a more accurately medieval concept than the "individual" (e.g., 64-95). 5. Peter Haidu, "Temps, histoire, subjectivite aux XIe et XIIe siecles," in he Nombre du temps: en hommage a Paul Zumthoi, ed. Emmanuele Baumgartner et al. (Paris: Champion, 1988), 120. For similar views, see Douglas Kelly, The Art of Medieval French Romance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 54-58, tracing rhetorical and philosophical pressures against individuality; and Paul Zumthor, Essai de poetique medievale (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972), 351: "Une exigence profonde de la mentalite de ce temps et de la 7A Knights in Disguise societe courtoise en particulier" determines that "les valeurs de l'individu n'ont d'existence que reconnues et visiblement manifestoes par la collectivite." 6. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 718-19. 7. Ibid., 711. 8. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). Michael McKeon urges the continuing indebtedness of the novel to romance in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 9. The shaky fortunes of postmodern attempts to reimagine identity as a social construction or a deconstructed nonidentical field testify as well to the effectiveness of the modern paradigm. I plan to treat postmodern theories of the self in an expansion of the third section of this essay; see also my Gender and Romance in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). 10. For example, Patterson's proposition that, in general, medieval identity is grounded in a "dialectic between an inward subjectivity and an external world that alienates it from both itself and its divine source" (Chaucer and the Subject of History, 8) contrasts with his view of chivalric identity (see note 12, below). 11. Louise O. Fradenberg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), e.g., 205-7. 12. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 168. 13. Sarrazin, Roman de Ham, in Histoire des dues de Normandie et des rois d'Angleterre, ed. Francisque Michel (Paris: Renouard, 1840), entry of Yvain, 315-16. On thirteenth-century engagements with literary models, see Juliet Vale, Edward III and Chivalry: Chivalric Society and Its Context 1270-1350 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1982), 4-24. 14. Chretien de Troyes, Le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain), ed. Mario Roques, C.F.M.A. 89 (Paris: Champion, 1960), 11. 4810-12; Ywain and Gawain, ed. Albert B. Friedman and Norman T. Harrington, EETS, o.s. 254 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 11. 2804-6. In order to concentrate on the English fourteenth century, where they exist I will cite Middle English versions of romance texts, many of which have French or Anglo-Norman antecedents. 15. Vale, Edward III and Chivalry, 64, 68-69. 16. Juliet R. V. Barker, The Tournament in England, 1100-1400 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1986), 86; Adam Murimuth, Continuatio Chronicarum, in Adae Murimuth Continuatio Chronicarum. Robertus de Avesbury De gestis mirabilibus Regis Edwardi Tertii, ed. E. M. Thompson, Rolls Series 93 (London, 1889), 123-24. 17. Gerald Brault, Early Blazon: Heraldic Terminology in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries with Special Reference to Arthurian Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 3132, 36. For an instance of a family adopting arms from romances, see Max Prinet, "Armoires familiales et armoires de roman au XVe siecle," Romania 58 (1932): 569-73. 18. Ipomadon, in Ipomedon in drei englischen Bearbeitungen, ed. Eugen Kolbing (Breslau: Koebner, 1889), 11. 5044-45. 19. Ibid., 11. 5189, 5200-5201. J. A. Burrow, "The Uses of Incognito: Ipomadon A," in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), 25-34, argues that Ipomadon engages in a "curious honorific calculus" whereby unclaimed glory continues to accrue to his merit (30). 20. The Middle-English Versions of Partonope of Blois, ed. A. Trampe Bödtker, E.E.T.S., e.s. 109 (London: Kegan Paul, 1912), 11. 9868-69. A courtier in Ipomadon similarly subsumes the protagonist into his disguise by announcing to his lady, "The blake baner hathe brought you blis" (1. 8682). On the moral implications of colors chosen for heraldic incognito, see Michel Pastoureau, Figures et couleurs: Etudes sur la symbolique et la sensibilite medievales (Paris: Leopard d'or, 1986), 193-207. 21. Ywain and Gawain, 11. 1611-12, 1621-23; compare Yvain, 11. 2718-75. 22. Ywain and Gawain, 11. 1627, 2096, 2116. 77 Susan Crane 23. Long versions by Froissart are Chroniques, ed. Simeon Luce et al., Societe de l'Histoire de France, vol. 4 (Paris: Renouard, 1873), 70-84; and Chroniques: Derniere redaction du premier livre. Edition du manuscrit de Rome Reg. lat. 869, ed. George T. Diller (Geneva: Droz, 1972), 861-76. Another long account is Geoffrey le Baker de Swynbroke, Chronicon, ed. E. M. Thompson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1889), 103-8. The episode is briefly mentioned in William Worcestre, Itineraries, ed. John H. Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 346-49; Thomas Walsingham, Historia anglicana, ed. H. T. Riley, 2 vols., Rolls Series (London, 1863-64), 1:273-74; and Robert de Avesbury's De gestis mirabilibus Regis Edwardi Tertii, in Adae Murimuth Continuatio Chronicarum. Robertus de Avesbury De gestis mirabilibus Regis Edwardi Tertii, ed. E. M. Thompson, Rolls Series 93 (London, 1889), 408-10. 24. Froissart, Chroniques, ed. Luce, 79. 25. Froissart, Chroniques, ed. Diller, 870. Peter F. Ainsworth comments on revisions to this episode in fean Froissart and the Fabric of History: Truth, Myth, and Fiction in the Chroniques (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 299-300. 26. Froissart, Chroniques, ed. Diller, 870; compare the briefer version in Chroniques, ed. Luce, 80: "non qu'il le cognuist, ne il ne savoit ä qui il avoit ä faire [not that he (Eustace) recognized him (Edward), or knew with whom he was dealing]." 27. Froissart, Chroniques, ed. Luce, 83. 28. Richard Kaeuper has pointed out to me that Edward's use of the terms dedens and dehors contributes to the analogy with tournaments. See Vale, Edward III and Chivalry, 6: "The notion of two teams, dedens and dehors is, of course, common in the late thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries." 29. Froissart, Chroniques, ed. Diller, 875, further emphasizes the renown accrued by Edward's strategy: Eustace tells the French king and lords "sen aventure" and his wearing of the chaplet produces "grandes nouvelles en France et en aultres pais." 30. Ywain and Gawain, 11. 4020-22. 31. Vale, Edward III and Chivalry, 86-91; Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), 196-97. 32. Vale, Edward III and Chivalry, 91; Keen, Chivalry, 185-86; D'Arcy Jonathan Dacre Boulton, The Knights of the Crown: The Monarchical Orders of Knighthood in Later Medieval Europe 1325-1520 (New York: St. Martin's, 1987), 109. 33. Geoffroi de Charny, Le Livre de chevalerie, in Jean Froissart, Oeuvres, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, vol. 1, pt. 2 (Brussels: Victor Devaux, 1873), 514-15; see also Charny's probable source for this passage in L'Ordene de chevalerie, in Raoul de Houdenc: Le Roman des eles; The Anonymous Ordene de chevalerie, ed. Keith Busby (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1983), 11. 137-88. 34. Leopold Pannier, La Noble maison de Saint-Ouen, la villa Clippiacum, et l'Ordre de l'Etoile d'apres les documents originaux (Paris: Aubry, 1872), 90, 93n ; Malcolm Vale, War and Chivalry: Warfare and Aristocratic Culture in England, France and Burgundy at the End of the Middle Ages (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), 54. 35. Charny, Livre de chevalerie, 464-72, 513-19. 36. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2d ed. rev. Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 11. 919, 2364-65. Subsequent line references appear in the text. 37. Charny, Livre de chevalerie, 502-5. 38. For me the most illuminating discussion of the pentangle and girdle in relation to questions of identity is Geraldine Heng's "Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," PMLA 106 (1991): 500-514; and the most useful discussion of chivalric identity as a performance in Sir Gawain is Carolyn Dinshaw's "A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," diacritics 24 (1994): 205-26. 39. Ipomadon uses conusaunce in this sense when a young knight recognizes an adversary by his coat of arms: "Jasone wold no lengur byde, / To the knyght can he ryde, / He knewe his conusaunce" (11. 4417-19). 7« Knights in Disguise 40. The effigy on the Black Prince's tomb and the Luttrell Psalter's image of Sir Geoffrey Luttrell are two familiar examples. Compare "be pentangel nwe / He ber in scheide and cote," Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 11. 636-37. 41. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 11. 2517, 2026, 626. Altered arms were a regular feature of tournaments: knights used blank and fabricated arms, quartered their arms with those of a leader, or adopted a label or difference marking allegiance (Barker, Tournament in England, e.g., 87); Gawain's gesture recalls more closely an augmentation such as might be adopted or granted to commemorate particular feats of arms (A. C. Fox-Davies, A Complete Guide to Heraldry, rev. ed. J. P. Brooke-Little [London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1969], 456-64). 42. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London: Routledge, 1992), e.g., 36-37. 43. The motto "Hony soyt qui mal pence" at the end of the manuscript is "possibly by a later scribe," according to Israel Gollancz, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, E.E.T.S., o.s. 210 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 132n; other scholars tend to assume the hand is not that of the scribe, although of approximately the same period. 44. Like the order sketched in Sir Gawain (2515-18), the Order of the Garter initially included women members, "lordes and ladis," though it was always understood as a "brofierhede." 45. In this interpretation, the blue garter may appropriate the blue ground of the French royal arms, the French motto may recall Edward's lineal claim to the throne, and the garter's design as a small belt (rather than the knotted strips of cloth that both men and women used in the period as garters) may imitate the knight's sword belt, one of his insignia of rank: e.g., Vale, Edward III and Chivalry, 79-85. Michael Packe, King Edward III, ed. L. C. B. Seaman (London: Routledge, 1983), 170-74, adduces evidence that may sustain the fallen garter story; the color blue would then indicate loyalty (to women or to sovereign), a significance much attested in the later fourteenth century: Stella Mary Newton, Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1980), 46; Boulton, Knights of the Crown, 246 (use of blue by Order of the Sword, with motto "C'est pour loiaute maintenir"). 46. Joanot Martorell and Marti Joan de Galba, Tirant lo Blanc, trans. David H. Rosenthal (New York: Schocken, 1984), ix-x, 121-23. 47. Quoted in Richard Barber, Edward, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine (New York: Scribner, 1978), 85. Barber also quotes the 1463 comment of Mondonus Belvaleti that "many assert that this order took its beginning from the feminine sex, from a lewd and forbidden affection" (86). 48. Eliduc wears a girdle sent to him by Guilliadun: Marie de France, Les Lais de Marie de France, ed. Jean Rychner, C.F.M.A. 93 (Paris: Champion, 1983), Eliduc, 11. 380, 407-10. 49. Vern L. Bullough, "Transvestites in the Middle Ages," Journal of Sociology 79 (1974): 1381-94; Michele Perret, "Travesties et transsexuelles: Yde, Silence, Grisandole, Blanchandine," Romance Notes 25 (1984-85): 328-40. 50. Quoted in Barber, Edward, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine, 85. 51. C. Stephen Jaeger, "L'Amour des rois: structure sociale d'une forme de sensibilite aristocratique," Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilisations 46 (1991): 547-71. 52. On appearances of the mottos, see Vale, Edward III and Chivalry, 57-91; Newton, Fashion, passim.