Beyond Rome: Mapping Gender and Justice in The Man of Law's Tale

Beyond Rome: Mapping Gender and Justice in The Man of Law’s Tale Kathy Lavezzo Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Volume 24, 2002, pp. 149-180 (Article) Published by The New Chaucer Society DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2002.0022 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/587046/summary Access provided at 28 Apr 2019 05:24 GMT from The University of Iowa Libraries Beyond Rome: Mapping Gender and Justice in The Man of Law’s Tale Kathy Lavezzo University of Iowa W ith charming audacity, William Godwin fulfills in his Life of Chaucer (1803) the longing of many a critic to know what the poet and Petrarch would have made of each other had they ever met and, in doing so, gives his readers a startling lesson in premodern cartography. While Petrarch’s status as the literary heir of classical Rome fascinates Chaucer, the English poet, Godwin writes, was interesting to Petrarca for a different reason. He came from the ultima Thule, the penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos (Virgil, Bucolica, Ecl. I); that country which the wantonness of more genial climates had represented as perpetually enveloped in fogs and darkness. To later times the literature and poetical genius of Britain is familiar; no tongue so barbarous, as not to confess us the equals, while in reality we are in intellectual eminence the masters of mankind. But this was a spectacle altogether unknown in the times of Petrarca. The discovery he made was hardly less astonishing than that of Columbus when he reconnoitred the shores of the Western world. . . . [Petrarch] embraced the wondrous stranger from a frozen clime, and forsaw, with that sort of inspiration which attends the closing period of departing genius, the future glories of a Spencer, a Shakespear and a Milton.1 By writing that, from Petrarch’s premodern perspective, Britain was penitus toto divisos orbe or wholly sundered from the entire world, Godwin troubles his readers’ sense of normative Englishness. While for Godwin Versions of this essay were delivered at the University of Iowa and New York University. Special thanks belong to Aranye Fradenburg, David Hamilton, Nicholas Howe, Lynn Staley, Susie Phillips, Harry Stecopoulos, and the anonymous readers at SAC for comments on earlier versions of this essay. 1 William Godwin, Life of Chaucer, vol. 2 (London: Richard Phillips, 1803–4), p. 468. 149 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER the English are the intellectual ‘‘masters of mankind,’’ for Petrarch as for Virgil, the English were mankind’s Others, the backward inhabitants of an isle ‘‘enveloped in fogs and darkness.’’ Yet even as Godwin raises the problem of English geographic isolation, he also turns it, through a figure of Roman ‘‘classical greatness,’’ into a sign of English ‘‘future glories.’’ The marginality of England sets the stage for an ‘‘astonishing’’ discovery: the Italian finds on this isolated isle no savage alien, but a ‘‘wondrous stranger.’’ Chaucer’s geographic isolation ultimately signifies not his brutality, but his magnificence.2 In imagining Petarch’s ‘‘astonishing’’ discovery, however, Godwin ignores what is perhaps a still more remarkable characteristic of early English literary history: Chaucer’s consciousness of the premodern reputation of England as an island on the edge of the world. While Godwin displays his own investment in the alterity of the ‘‘father of English poetry,’’ he neglects Chaucer’s own considerable interest in the relationship between strangeness and Englishness. The Wife of Bath’s Tale, for example, uses a character possessed of a fourfold otherness (the ‘‘foul, and oold, and poore’’ hag) to relate an Arthurian legacy to British national identity (line 1063); The Franklin’s Tale allows the pilgrims to imagine ‘‘Engelond’’ as a foreign country (line 810); and The General Prologue depicts Canterbury as a site both identified with the ‘‘straunge’’ and the ‘‘ferne’’ and capable of attracting a national gathering of England’s populace, ‘‘from every shires ende’’ (lines 13–15).3 Chaucer’s most 2 Godwin’s celebration of Chaucer’s alterity reflects the interest in difference that inspired Romanticism’s medieval revival. The romantic nationalism exhibited in the Life (at one point it celebrates Chaucer for rescuing English from the oppressive dominance of Anglo-Norman) clearly reveals how Godwin had retreated from the radical, proFrench stance he had assumed ten years earlier in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness. Thanks belong to Julie Carlson for enlightening me regarding Godwin’s gothic interests and his vexed political history. 3 All quotations are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). While Chaucer’s description of Becket’s national following may distinguish the Canterbury shrine from the ‘‘straunge’’ and ‘‘ferne’’ destinations of medieval palmers, his decision to introduce Canterbury so closely on the heels of these sites also suggests that the Becket shrine carries with it the cachet of difference. On the use of an Arthurian past in the construction of a British national history in Middle English romance (excluding The Wife of Bath’s Tale), see Patricia Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). On Chaucer’s desire to situate the Franklin’s Tale within a nativist English literary-historical tradition, see Kathryn L. Lynch, ‘‘East Meets West in Chaucer’s Squire’s and Franklin’s Tales,’’ Speculum 70 (1995): 530–51. On Chaucer’s interest in things strange, see Christian K. Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 150 BEYOND ROME important engagement with English otherness, however, emerges in the focus of this essay, the most geographic of The Canterbury Tales, that told by the Man of Law. The figure of alterity in The Man of Law’s Tale, of course, is a familiar topic in critical work on the poem, though the prime Other interpreted by Chaucerians is not England, but Custance. As David Raybin has pointed out, Custance herself is geographically marginalized in the tale; she typically appears in the poem either exiled from the world upon a boat, or as a foreigner in the cultures she encounters ashore.4 For Raybin and other scholars, Custance’s alterity illustrates a Christian ideal of living in, yet being not of, a fallen world.5 More recently, literary critics such as Susan Schibanoff have linked Custance’s alterity both to her gender and the ethnic difference represented by Syria in the tale.6 Yet Custance and the Syrians hardly constitute the only outsiders in the poem, as the second part of the tale makes clear. After having transported his fellow pilgrims on an imaginative journey from Syria to Rome and back, the Man of Law takes his auditors to more familiar ground, as Custance journeys in a divinely navigated ship to Britain (lines 463– 508, emphasis added): Yeres and dayes fleet this creature Thurghout the See of Grece unto the Strayte Of Marrok, as it was hire aventure . . . 4 David Raybin, ‘‘Custance and History: Woman as Outsider in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,’’ SAC 12 (1990): 69–70. 5 See, for example, Morton Bloomfield, ‘‘The Man of Law’s Tale: A Tragedy of Victimization and a Christian Comedy,’’ PMLA 87 (1972): 384–89. On Custance’s isolation from her culture as opposed to the social integration of Gower’s Constance, see Winthrop Wetherbee, ‘‘Constance and the World in Chaucer and Gower,’’ in John Gower: Recent Readings, ed. R. F. Yeager, Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture 26 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1989), pp. 65–93. 6 Susan Schibanoff, ‘‘Worlds Apart: Orientalism, Anti-Feminism and Heresy in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,’’ Exemplaria (1996): 59–96. See also Christopher Bracken, ‘‘Constance and the Silkweavers: Working Woman and Colonial Fantasy in Chaucer’s The Man of Law’s Tale,’’ Critical Matrix 8 (1994): 13–39; Nicholas Birns, ‘‘Christian Islamic Relations in Dante and Chaucer: Reflections on Recent Criticism,’’ in Proceedings: Northeast Regional Meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature, ed. Joan F. Hallisey and Mary Anne Vetterling (Weston, Mass.: Regis College, 1996), pp. 19–24; Kathleen Davis, ‘‘Time Behind the Veil: The Media, the Middle Ages, and Orientalism Now,’’ in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), pp. 105–22; Kathryn L. Lynch, ‘‘Storytelling, Exchange, and Constancy: East and West in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,’’ ChauR 33.3 (1999): 409–22; Brenda Deen Schildgen, Pagans, Tartars, Moslems, and Jews in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001). 151 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Er that the wilde wawes wol hire dryve . . . into oure occian Thurghout oure wilde see, til atte laste . . . Fer in Northumberlond the wawe hire caste. . . . While Chaucer’s sources, Nicholas Trevet’s Chroniques (ca. 1334) and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (ca. 1390), do not mention the specifics of Custance’s long journey to England, the Man of Law includes geographic details such as the eastern Mediterranean and the straits of Gibraltar that make palpable the space traversed by Custance.7 As V. A. Kolve puts it, ‘‘the tale creates a residual image that is geographical: a map of Europe with a boat moving upon its waters.’’8 But since Custance’s journey begins in Syria, the cartographic territory evoked in the tale in fact extends beyond Europe and, more accurately, suggests a mappa mundi or a map of the world as it was known in the middle ages. The structure of mappae mundi varied, though the majority of them constituted variations of what is known as the Noachid, wheel, tripartite, or T-O form: An ‘‘O’’-shaped ocean defining a circular earth (orbis terrarum), divided by a ‘‘T’’ representing the trio of waterways (the Don, Nile and Mediterranean) believed to divide the three continents of the earth (Asia, Africa, and Europe).9 When it appears in these typically 7 See Nicholas Trevet, excerpt from Les Chroniques ecrites pour Marie d’Angleterre, fille d’Edward I, ed. Margaret Schlauch, in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (New York: Humanities, 1958), pp. 165–81. John Gower, The Complete Works of John Gower: The English Works, ed. G. C. Macaulay, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), lines 181–206. Page citations of Trevet and line citations of Gower will appear in the text. The lawyer’s emphasis on geography here qualifies Edward A. Block’s claim that Chaucer is ‘‘less definite’’ than Trevet on such matters (‘‘Originality, Controlling Purpose, and Craftsmanship in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,’’ PMLA 68 [1953]: 580). 8 V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), p. 319. 9 On T-O maps (as well as the other principal type of medieval world map, the zonal or Macrobian map), see David Woodward, ‘‘Medieval Mappaemundi,’’ in J. B. Harley and Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, Vol. 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 286–370. On the relationship between world maps and another Canterbury tale, see Sylvia Tomasch, ‘‘Mappae mundi and the Knight’s Tale: The Geography of Power, the Cartography of Control,’’ in Literature and Technology, ed. Lance Schachterle and Mark Greenberg (Lehigh, Penn.: Associated University Presses, 1992), pp. 66–98. On the manner in which mappae mundi reflect a fascination with alterity of which Chaucer was acutely aware while writing the Canterbury Tales, see Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage, esp. p. 146. On mappae mundi and pilgrimage, see also Iain Macleod Higgins, Writing 152 BEYOND ROME Eastern-oriented maps, England lies not within the orbis terrarum but outside it, in the lower left-hand corner of the map signifying the northwestern angle of the world ocean (figs. 1, 2). By representing Custance travelling from Rome to Syria through the threshold of Gibraltar into the English channel and finally Northumbria, the Man of Law evokes nothing less than England’s geographic marginality. Full analysis of The Man of Law’s Tale requires our consideration of Custance’s alterity neither in and of itself, nor as it intersects with Syrian difference, but as it 1. Drawn facsimile of a T-O map illustrating a manuscript copy of Sallust’s works, Leipzig University Library, taken from Konrad Miller, Mappaemundi: de ältesten Weltkarten, vol. 3 (Stuttgart: J. Roth, 1895), p. 112. East: The ‘‘Travels’’ of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). 153 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER 2. Drawn facsimile of a world map illustrating a manuscript copy of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, Edinburgh, Advocates Library, taken from Konrad Miller, Mappaemundi: die ältesten Weltkarten, vol. 3 (Stuttgart: J. Roth, 1895), p. 98. 154 BEYOND ROME relates to the national geographic alterity of the English people whom she converts to Christianity. Through Custance’s movement ‘‘far’’ from Rome, into ‘‘wilde’’ English seas, the Man of Law, in a move similar to Godwin’s toward his readers, makes his pilgrim auditors strangers to themselves. And just as Chaucer’s romantic biographer binds geographic marginality with English magnificence, so too does Chaucer’s medieval lawyer. In what follows, I demonstrate how, through Custance’s providential journey, Chaucer’s lawyer endeavors to affirm the best implications of English geographic isolation: how the English are set apart from the world as God’s chosen people. This reading counters a long tradition of viewing The Man of Law’s Tale as a narrative primarily identified with universal Roman Christian values.10 In Chaucerian Polity, for example, David Wallace describes the Custance story as ‘‘a tale that ‘‘affirm[s] the Romecentered authority of emperors and popes,’’ while Kolve, whom Wallace cites, asserts that ‘‘Rome is the center of the poem’s gravity, its geography, and its moral and spiritual meaning.’’11 In contrast, I suggest that it is in fact the Man of Law’s interest in distinguishing England from Rome as a sovereign territory that drives much of this Canterbury tale. Rome certainly has its attractions in The Man of Law’s Tale, but so too does England.12 10 See, for example: Alfred David, ‘‘The Man of Law versus Chaucer: A Case in Poetics,’’ PMLA 82 (1967): 217–25; A. S. G. Edwards, ‘‘Critical Approaches to the Man of Law’s Tale,’’ in Chaucer’s Religious Tales, ed. C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson (Cambridge: Brewer, 1990), pp. 85–94; Kolve, Imagery of Narrative; David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); John A. Yunck, ‘‘Religious Elements in Chaucer’s ‘Man of Law’s Tale,’ ’’ ELH 27 (1960): 249–61. 11 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 182; Kolve, Imagery of Narrative, p. 350. 12 Nationalism has been classified as a post-medieval phenomenon in such important texts as Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), and Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Yet the evidence of the Canterbury Tales suggests otherwise. The Tales, after all, foreground the question of whether vernacular stories can unite or create the horizontal ties discussed by Anderson between a cross-section of the English populace, ‘‘from every shires ende’’ (1.15). Narrating the journey of a band of English people, ostensibly bound by both their religious destination and the literary manner in which they wend their way toward Canterbury, the Tales urge our consideration of Chaucer not only as man who wrote in English, but also as a man who wrote for England. On nationalism in Chaucer’s work, see: Donald R. Howard, Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World (New York: Dutton, 1987), pp. 406–9; Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), p. 216; and the essays by John M. Bowers, Kathleen Davis, and Sylvia Tomasch in Postcolonial Middle Ages. 155 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER That this narrative of geographic exceptionalism is told by a lawyer is no accident; as his portrait demonstrates, the Man of Law himself bears an exceptional relationship to the land: ‘‘So greet a purchasour was nowher noon’’ (line 318). Chaucer insinuates here, as Jill Mann points out, a personal investment in the land on the part of lawyers that is made more explicit in other texts on that estate where, for example, Gower writes on the lawman ‘‘Agrorum fines longos extendere queris.’’13 English lawyers’ investment in territory, however, extended well beyond their own relation to the land to that of their nation. Due to debates regarding spatially charged issues such as jurisdiction and sanctuary—debates that intimately related to juridical conflicts between England and the church—English lawyers spoke powerfully to questions of geography and nationalism in the Middle Ages.14 The particular legal perspective on English geographic isolation offered by The Man of Law’s Tale is twofold, and intersects with the Man of Law’s decision to tell a tale featuring the geographically isolated and ‘‘hooly’’ Roman princess Custance. For our lawyerly narrator, the patriarchal image of a sovereign England he espouses is faced with the linked challenges of the Christian ‘‘empire’’ of Rome on one hand and, on the other, the imperial maternity of woman. Situated often at the heart of mappae mundi, possessed of an imposing classical juridical heritage, and recognized as the home of canon law, Rome links geographic centrality with global juridical supremacy. As the home of western Christendom, the Roman ‘‘mother church’’ threatened to engulf the English edge of the world Important contributions by medieval scholars on the question of the rise of a national sensibility in medieval England and Europe include C. Leon Tipton, ed., Nationalism in the Middle Ages (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972); Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984); Felicity Riddy, ‘‘Reading for England: Arthurian Literature and National Consciousness,’’ Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society 43 (1991): 314–32; Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson, and Alan V. Murray, eds., Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, Leeds Texts and Monographs ns 14 (Leeds: University of Leeds Printing Services, 1995). 13 John Gower, Vox Clamantis, vi 357–58, cited and discussed in Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 87–88. 14 See F. Cheyette, ‘‘Kings, Courts, Cures and Sinecures: the Statute of Provisors and the Common Law,’’ Traditio 19 (1963): 295–344; W. R. Jones, ‘‘Bishops, Politics and the Two Laws: The Gravamina of the English Clergy, 1237–1399,’’ Speculum 41 (1966): 209–43; W. R. Jones, ‘‘Relations of the Two Jurisdictions: Conflict and Cooperation in England during the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,’’ SMRH orig. ser. 7 (1970): 79–210; Alan Harding, The Law Courts of Medieval England (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1973); J. A. Watt, ‘‘Spiritual and Temporal Powers,’’ in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c. 350–c. 1450, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 367–423. 156 BEYOND ROME within its canonical jurisdiction. To be sure, in the centuries immediately after 1066 the canon law served as a kind of nourishing mother to the system of common law so cherished by English lawmen such as Chaucer’s lawyer (as evinced by his knowledge of ‘‘caas and doomes alle / That from the tyme of kyng William were falle,’’ (GP 323–24). Yet by Chaucer’s time English lawyers strove to extricate themselves from what had become a suffocating mother church not unlike the notoriously ‘‘suffocating mothers’’ represented by the Man of Law in the characters of the Sultaness and Donegild. Just as those notorious mothers endeavor to stifle their respective sons’ efforts to move beyond their immediate family, the universal church sought to squelch efforts to liberate the English common law from canonical authority.15 The imaginative resolution the lawyer offers for those linked problems of empire and maternity emerges in the figure of Custance. As a geographically isolated woman, and a figure whose radical holiness distances her both from her Roman origins and her own female sexuality, Custance figures England’s juridical sovereignty. Through Custance, that is, the Man of Law absorbs and reconfigures the charged difference of woman so that she may be imagined to bear the word of the privileged geographical alterity he claims for England.16 As we shall see, though, the lawyer’s celebration of the English margin of the world is bound up with his attachment to global centers. The eventual emergence of Custance’s suppressed physicality in the tale demonstrates how the lawyer’s national desire to embrace geographic isolation is troubled by his imperial desire to appropriate on England’s behalf the global domination of the mother church. Et mulier fugit in solitudinem From the advent of its classical period in the twelfth century onward,17 canon law came to be a system, according to Pollock and Maitland, 15 Carolyn Dinshaw analyzes the incestuous character of both the Sultaness’s and Donegild’s attachments toward their sons in Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 88–112. The other Canterbury tale that engages closely with Rome is The Second Nun’s Tale. On topography, Rome, and the Second Nun’s Tale, see Jennifer Summit, ‘‘Topography as Historiography: Petrarch, Chaucer, and the Making of Medieval Rome,’’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000): 211–46. 16 My use of the phrase ‘‘bear the word’’ refers to Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 17 And the woman fled into the wilderness,’’ Revelation 12:6. Quoted in William W. Capes, ed., Registrum Johannis Trefnant, Episcopi Herefordensis, Canterbury and York Series, vol. 20–21 (London: Canterbury and York Society, 1916), p. 294. 157 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ‘‘even more cosmopolitan than the imperial [system]; the sway of the Roman Church was wider than that of the Roman empire.’’18 To be sure, Pollock and Maitland do misstate the case somewhat; to use James Brundage’s words, the ‘‘jurisdictional imperialism of the canonists’’ was a matter at times more of theory than of practice.19 Yet even on a rhetorical register, the canonists’ juridical internationalism was notably pervasive. As Brundage points out, ‘‘medieval churchmen claimed authority over virtually every aspect of human beliefs and actions’’; canon law extended in theory to all levels of private and public life and applied equally to everyone, ‘‘regardless of gender, class or social standing’’ and, most importantly for Chaucer’s lawyer, nationality.20 Canon law, in effect, then, aimed to function as the key device through which the church leveled its members within a single universal Christian siblinghood headed by Rome. Premising that juridical universalism was Rome’s understanding of the relationship between the three components into which the law was divided: divine law, natural law and human law. According to the church’s hierocratic perspective on the law, divine law prevailed over the human and natural, themselves mere figures of God’s law. Claiming a monopoly on divine law, the church sought to bring England and other nations well within its canonical jurisdiction, with secular lawyers subject to their spiritual counterparts.21 By Chaucer’s time, English resistance to the church’s hierocratic vision of the laws divine, natural and human had had a long history, extending as far back as Bracton’s De legibus and Henry II’s Clarendon 18 Frederick Pollack and Frederick William Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, 2d ed., vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 113. Pollack and Maitland’s assessment of the universal impulses of the canonists has been affirmed by more recent work on canon law. See, for example, R. H. Helmholz, The Spirit of Classical Canon Law (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1996); James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London and New York: Longman, 1995). On the transmittal of canon law to the laity, see H. A. Kelly, Love and Marriage in the Age of Chaucer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press: 1975), pp. 163–201. 19 Brundage, Medieval Canon Law, p. 72. 20 Brundage, Medieval Canon Law, pp. 70; 3. 21 On the medieval threefold understanding of the law, in which all laws figure God’s divine law, see Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. For a discussion of the way Chaucer queries the notion of divine justice in the Man of Law’s Tale, see Patricia J. Eberle, ‘‘Crime and Justice in the Middle Ages: Cases from the Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer,’’ in Rough Justice: Essays on Crime in Literature, ed. M. L. Friedland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), pp. 19–51. It is worth noting that the very source of much of the Man of Law’s rhetoric in his tale, Pope Innocent III, authorized Peter of Benevento’s Compilatio tertia, the first official collection of papal decretals during the classical period of canon law. 158 BEYOND ROME Constitutions.22 However, as members of a profession that was the first to be laicized (in 1341) and the first to use the vernacular (in 1361), and which also was, as Michael Bennett has shown, markedly careerist, fourteenth-century English lawyers resisted canonical impingements on their authority in a manner that distinguished them from their predecessors.23 Asserting that, as Alan Harding puts it, ‘‘the eternal [i.e., divine] principles of law were nowhere better expressed than in the customs of England, as declared by the judges,’’ late medieval English lawyers sought to consolidate their power through their own rhetoric of English religio-juridical exceptionalism.24 Providing potential support for English lawyers’ cause was the fact that, since the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Avignon papacy and, later, the Great Schism made the Roman church not quite the formidable rival it once was. This was true despite the fact that England officially endorsed Urban VI, a decision that had as much or more to do with anti-French feeling than Roman allegiance.25 English support for the Roman curia by no means 22 Of course, the response of the English State to the legal claims of the Church (and vice versa) was one of both resistance and cooperation. As the careful work of R. H. Helmholz has demonstrated, the legal relations of church and state are remarkably complex during this period, rendering it impossible for us to make any sort of straightforward claim about actual practice. What I am emphasizing here, however, is the imperial or international ‘‘will’’ of the Church, its official universalist rhetoric. And even as the crown acquiesced to that universalist rhetoric, English lawyers by and large contested it. R. H. Helmholz, Canon Law and the Law of England (London and Ronceverte: Hambledon, 1987). See also works cited in note 14. 23 Edw. III Stat. 2. c xv, Statutes of the Realm, vol. 1 (1810. Reprint. London: Dawsons, 1963), pp. 375–76; Michael J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 192–203. Since the time of the Magna Carta, clerks along with laymen had upheld the common law. But, with the union of the bench and the law at the start of the fourteenth century, where ‘‘no one could become a justice of the central courts of law . . . unless he had previously been a sergeant at law,’’ the benches of the civil courts began to be staffed solely with laymen (G. O. Sayles, ‘‘Introduction,’’ Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench under Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V, ed. Sayles, vol. 7 Selden Society [London: Quaritch, 1971], pp. xxviii–xl). The laicization of the common law benches during Edward I’s reign, together with that of the King’s Bench by 1341, produced a real separation between the civil and canon law. As William Searle Holdsworth puts it, ‘‘we can no longer expect to find royal judges who can show an accurate knowledge of papal legislation; nor will ideas drawn from canonical jurisprudence be used to develop our law. On the contrary, it is coming to be a rival—almost a hostile system’’ (A History of English Law, vol. 2 [London: Methuen, 1956], pp. 305–6). Indeed, W. R. Jones writes that this period ‘‘witnessed the culmination’’ of English impingement upon the legal powers of the Church (‘‘Relations of the Two Jurisdictions,’’ p. 210). 24 Harding, Law Courts, p. 122. 25 See Margaret Harvey, Solutions to the Schism: A Study of Some English Attitudes 1378– 1409 (Gesamtherstellung: EOS Druck, 1983) and John Holland Smith, The Great Schism 1378 (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970). 159 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER precluded English resistance to canon law. In De ecclesia, for example, the foremost fourteenth-century theorist of the supremacy of English law, John Wyclif, upholds the reformer Urban even as he offers his most striking claim for the preeminence of English law over canon law.26 Yet if the contemporary splitting of the rock of Peter may have aided the nationalistic rhetoric of England’s lawyers during the fourteenth century, the past achievements of the Roman church radically challenged that discourse. And, for Chaucer’s lawyer, foremost among the historical obstacles that the church posed for the idealization of English law was the undeniable fact of the Roman source of England’s original acquisition of divine law. How, that is, could England enjoy a relation even more proximate to God’s law than canon law, when it was a Pope—Gregory the Great—who authorized England’s Christian conversion in the first place?27 The interrelation between England’s religious conversion and its juridical identity is made clear throughout the tale by the lawyer’s juridical conception of faith: all questions of conversion in the tale hinge on the willingness of barbarians (whether Syrian or Anglo-Saxon) to accept a ‘‘newe lawe’’ (line 337; cf. line 572). By emphasizing the status of Christianity as a law—the very eternal law understood in the Christian west to be essential to the work of justice— the Man of Law reveals his keen awareness of how the Gregorian mission haunts the Christian exceptionalism espoused by medieval English jurists (line 236). As Marcel Mauss’s work on the aggressivity of the gift has taught us, Rome’s bestowal of Christianity upon England supports the subordinate role that canon lawyers allocated civil lawyers.28 More26 That claim appears in Wyclif ’s commentary on the 1378 Hawley-Shakell sanctuary incident, in which he opposes the jurisdictional rights of the abbots who housed these fugitives from the King’s justice by claiming that they had offended ‘‘In legem Dei, ecclesie et in legem regni.’’ See De Ecclesia, cited in Edith C. Tatnall, ‘‘John Wyclif and Ecclesia Anglicana,’’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 20 (1969): 28; cf. Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, pp. 50–53. Here as elsewhere in his work, Wyclif urges the theological validity of adherence to English law against canonical authority (Tatnall, ‘‘Wyclif,’’ pp. 27–31). On Wyclif ’s support for Urban in De Ecclesia and elsewhere, see Harvey, Solutions, p. 31. 27 Celtic missionaries, of course, also engaged in the work of conversion during this time. But it was the Roman Gregory the Great who constituted nevertheless the official father of Christianity for the Anglo-Saxons and, after the Whitby Synod (664), it was Roman doctrine, not that of Celtic Christian, that prevailed on the island. 28 ‘‘To give is to show one’s superiority, to show that one is something more and higher, that one is magister. To accept without returning or repaying more is to face subordination, to become a client and subservient, to become minister.’’ Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (London: Cohen and West, 1954), p. 72. 160 BEYOND ROME over, in the geographic terms crucial to The Man of Law’s Tale, by locating the origins of eternal law in England’s Christian conversion by Rome, the mission produces the English edge of the world as a pagan and lawless backwater. The alienation of a pagan Anglo-Saxon England from divine law is raised by the Man of Law himself, through his implicit comparisons of England and Syria in the tale. Above all, through his uncanny evocation of the God of Islam in the name of the Northumbrian king ‘‘Alla,’’ Chaucer’s lawyer suggests how Anglo-Saxon England, like Syria, constitutes a ‘‘Barbre nacioun’’ outside of Christendom (line 281).29 Yet England is not simply another Syria in The Man of Law’s Tale. For one thing, in marked contrast to the Holy Roman ‘‘imperialism’’ that lies behind Custance’s journey to Syria, ‘‘Goddes sonde’’ or providence directs the rudderless ship that transports Custance to England (lines 523, 439). Directed by a Pope and an emperor intent on the ‘‘encrees of Cristes lawe deere’’ (lines 235–37), Custance’s earlier journey produces Syria as the heathen object of Roman spiritual conquest. The divine navigator of Custance’s trip to England, however, suggests that there is something extraordinary about her isolated destination that sets it apart from Syria as a land bound not to Roman authority but directly to God Himself. The aggression toward Rome evinced by our lawyer’s revision of Anglo-Saxon conversion history emerges not only in Custance’s divine navigator, but also in the identity of Custance herself, as the Man of Law denudes his protagonist of her Roman ties during the English section of the tale. Claiming amnesia, Custance never admits her Roman identity to her English hosts. Rather, the only ‘‘family’’ with which Custance affiliates herself is the holy family. The tale inserts Custance into a broad typological Judeo-Christian ancestry (Jonah, Judith, Susannah, and so on) through which her literal Roman genealogy is overshadowed by the nonbiological structure of descent that typology offers (lines 473, 486, 500, 639–939).30 Custance, certainly, does bring Roman Christian law to England; yet by rendering his heroine less a Roman emperor’s daugh29 Alla and the Sultan also are paired through the exchange of Custance between them. The king and his Syrian counterpart’s respective wicked mothers, the Sultaness and Donegild, also are linked in their respective acts of aggression against Custance. 30 The most important work on typology and literature remains Erich Auerbach’s essay ‘‘Figura’’ in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); on nonbiological family ties and typology, see Cristelle L. Baskins, ‘‘Typology, Sexuality, and the Renaissance Esther,’’ in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 31–54. 161 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ter than a kind of angel sent especially by God to bear His word to England, Chaucer’s lawyer paradoxically imagines England gaining the gift of divine law without the obligations to Rome it entails. The Man of Law’s capacity to affirm a sovereign English juridical identity thus hinges on his capacity to empty Custance of her materiality and physicality. Far from invoking the alterity associated with historical women, Custance offers a kind of radical hyper-marginality or divine otherness. That sublime alterity, in turn, suggests how Custance not only brings to England the national juridical identity claimed by English lawyers but also becomes herself a sign of England’s national geographic identity. The generation of a special English angle of the world, that is, emerges in the tale through the production of an angelically other Custance. The lawyer’s disembodiment and spectralization of woman should seem to familiar to us, since contemporary examples of that sort of nationalistic usage of woman abound in western culture. As such feminists as Nira Yuval Davis and Floya Anthias point out, when woman represents the national body politic, she tends to do so as a figure, symbol or abstraction such as Britannia or Lady Liberty.31 Custance indeed in a sense looks toward such national deployments of woman. In particular, both her geographic marginality and the virtue of constancy evoked by both her name and her actions render the lawyer’s heroine a kind of precursor to the Statue of Liberty.32 The Man of Law’s Tale, though, hardly offers us our earliest example of the use of an idealized woman to represent England in the Middle Ages, as the longstanding identification of the island with the Virgin Mary demonstrates.33 Arthur, for example devotes himself especially to Mary in na31 Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, Women-Nation-State (London: St. Martin’s, 1989). See also Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: the Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985); Nuala Johnson, ‘‘Monuments, Geography, and Nationalism,’’ in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1995 (13): 51–66; Elsbeth Probyn, ‘‘Bloody Metaphors and Other Allegories of the Ordinary,’’ in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms and the State, ed. Norma Alarcon, Caren Kaplan, and Minoo Moallem (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 47–63. 32 For an acute analysis of the dynamics of gender, sexuality, and nationalism at work in Lady Liberty, see Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 22–28. 33 On the special identification of Mary with England in the Middle Ages, a linkage that partly can be accounted for by the shrine at Walsingham, see Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 137–47 and 212–13 n. 3. 162 BEYOND ROME tional romances and chronicles from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain onward.34 And the Virgin calls England her ‘‘dower’’ and safeguards the island in John Lydgate’s plague poem ‘‘Ave Regina Celorum.’’35 Such medieval English rehabilitations of feminine difference intersect with an even older tradition, in which social structures are conceived of in terms of metaphors of ideal femininity. Biblical examples of this practice include the book of Jeremiah, in which the prophet longingly recalls how a pre-exilic Israel ‘‘as a bride’’ loved God and ‘‘was holy to the Lord’’ (Jeremiah 2:2–3). Of special interest to us is how Jeremiah’s blessed bride, like idealized women elsewhere in the Bible, is territorialized or bound to a space of holy wildness, whereby Israel is not only a bride sacred to God but also a ‘‘wilderness . . . holy to the Lord’’ (Jeremiah 2:3). That biblical linkage of the revered and pious woman with a space of holy wildness is appropriated for national ends by Chaucer’s lawyer insofar as ‘‘hooly’’ Custance symbolizes a blessed English world frontier. The Man of Law’s national deployment of the gendered and territorialized sublimity of both woman and the frontier as represented in the Bible isn’t unique to Chaucer, as the 1391 testimony of Lollard Walter Brute attests. In his learned response to the charges made against him during his inquisition by the bishop of Hereford, the (aptly named) Brute claims that the people of Britain, among all other peoples, have recognized the Antichrist in their midst, because theirs is the very kingdom prophesied by John. For Brute, since England, a land positus est extra climata (or placed beyond the climates) has long been considered a solitudo seu desertus locus (a wilderness of desert place), England must be that wilderness prepared by God into which the woman of Apocalypse 12 (that is, the church) flees.36 This is not to say that our lawyer is a Lollard, though the correspondences between Brute’s testimony and the Man of Law’s Tale do remind us of the role Lollards played in the English rhetoric of religio-juridical exceptionalism.37 What is worth emphasizing See IX.iv of Geoffrey’s History and lines 2869–72 of the Alliterative Morte Arthure. See John Lydgate, ‘‘Ave Regina Celorum,’’ in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS ns 107 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1911– 34), pp. 291–92. 36 See Capes, Registrum trefnant, pp. 294–95. On Brute’s testimony, see Penn Szittya, ‘‘Domesday Bokes: The Apocalypse in Medieval English Literary Culture,’’ in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 396–97. 37 See Edith C. Tatnall, ‘‘Ecclesia Anglicana,’’ pp. 24–31; and Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, pp. 50–53; Anne Hudson, ‘‘Lollardy: the English Heresy?’’ in Religion and National Identity: Papers Read at the Nineteenth Summer Meeting and the Twenti34 35 163 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER is how both Walter Brute and Chaucer’s lawyer use the spectralized or allegorical woman to interpret England’s positioning beyond the known world as a sign of that nation’s privileged relation to Christianity. It is on behalf of England that the Man of Law tells his story of the angelic Custance, whose spiritual elevation symbolizes what John Capgrave would call in his fifteenth-century Chronicle of England a ‘‘Blessed Inglond . . . of Angel nature.’’38 An English Jeremiad Of course, for a lawyer such as Chaucer’s justice, the primary legal ideal Custance represents would be, as Joseph Grennen has pointed out, the allegorical valence of her name, insofar as a constans et perpetua voluntas (or constant and perpetual will) was an essential component of justice.39 eth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Stuart Mews, Studies in Church History 18 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982) pp. 261–284. See also note 26. 38 The Chronicle of England, ed. F. C. Hingeston, Rolls Series vol. 1 (London, 1858), line 2668. Yet another link between Chaucer and Brute’s texts is their accounts of the history of the Christian faith in England. The Anglo-Saxon land in which Custance arrives, we are told, is not simply pagan: though the Vikings had driven the Christian Britons into Wales, a remainder of Christianity was left covertly behind after Britain’s heathen reterritorialization: ‘‘In al that lond no Cristen dorste route/ Alle Cristen folk been fled fro that contree/ Thurgh payens, that conquereden al aboute/ The plages of the north, by land and see/ To Walys fledde the Cristyanytee/ Of olde Britons dwellynge in this ile:/ But yet nere Cristen Britons so exilde/ That ther nere somme that in hir privetee/ Honoured Crist and hethen folk bigiled’’ (lines 540–49). The logic of the supplement deployed by Chaucer here distinguishes pagan England from Moslem Syria by attaching to England a residue of Christianity. In a similar vein, Brute insists that ‘‘Britones pro fide Cristi permanserunt quod de nullo cristiano regno sic reperietur’’ (p. 294). 39 Justinian, Institutes I.i, cited and discussed in Joseph E. Grennen, ‘‘Chaucer’s Man of Law and the Constancy of Justice,’’ JEGP 84 (1985): 511–12. Many other readers have analyzed the presence of specific aspects of the law in the tale. On the representation of the canon law of disparitas cultus, see Paul E. Beichner, ‘‘Chaucer’s Man of Law and disparitas cultus,’’ Speculum 23 (1948): 70–75. On Chaucer’s representation of the Anglo-Saxon judicial inquest, see Marie Hamilton, ‘‘The Dramatic Suitability of the Man of Law’s Tale,’’ in Studies in Language and Literature in Honor of Margaret Schlauch (New York: Russell and Russell, 1971), pp. 153–63. On the tale and the use of rhetoric in the courts, see Walter Scheps, ‘‘Chaucer’s Man of Law and the tale of Constance,’’ PMLA 89 (1974): 285–95. On the manner in which the tale represents the legal procedures for appealing felony, see Joseph Allen Hornsby, Chaucer and the Law (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim, 1988), pp. 145–48. On the patriarchal nature of English law and the prohibition on incest, see Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics. On the tale’s engagement with the ecclesiastical principle of right order, see Patricia J. Eberle, ‘‘Crime and Justice in the Middle Ages: Cases from the Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer,’’ in Rough Justice: Essays on Crime in Literature, ed. M. L. Friedland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), pp. 19–51. On Chaucer’s engagement with the role of torture in the late medieval English legal system, see James Landman, ‘‘Proving Constant: Torture and 164 BEYOND ROME Precisely what the constancy of justice signifies varies slightly from legist to legist. But, fundamentally, it refers to a jurist’s steadfast desire to give each his own due, a notion that resonates with the ideal, found in both fourteenth-century parliamentary records and the 1346 oath created for English lawyers, that ‘‘justice should be done equally for all men in the central courts and localities.’’40 Such utopian assertions of the law’s constancy in the fourteenth century, however, were belied by English lawmen’s infamous shortcomings. Through such practices as champerty (a second party’s promotion of a suit for personal gain), embracery (efforts to corrupt a jury via threats, promises, money, etc.), bribery, and most of all, maintenance (illegal support of another’s suit), English justices notoriously undermined the law.41 The troubling image of a lawless English backwater thus emerged during the period not only with regard to the juridical might of Rome but also with regard to the failings of England’s own legal officers. Juridical corruption hardly went unnoticed; as Mann points out, ‘‘charges of corruption are the most frequent and most fully developed items in estates treatments of judges and lawyers.’’42 Chaucer obliquely participates in such critique in the the Man of Law’s Tale,’’ SAC 20 (1998): 1–40. While all of these readings demonstrate the suitability of the tale to a lawyer, they have produced radically different arguments about what the tale says about both the attitudes of the Man of Law toward his legal profession and Chaucer’s toward this Canterbury pilgrim. While, for example, Eberle finds the lawyer to be a credible narrator who queries the notion of eternal law that he has inherited, Grennen claims the lawyer is devoted laudably to a juridical ideal, and Scheps claims the lawyer unsuccessfully celebrates his profession. In what follows, I hope to show how we can reconcile some of these claims through a look at English lawyers’ vexed relationship to their profession, given their own corruption and their own national impulses. 40 Rot. Parl., vol. 3, 50. Cf. Grennen, ‘‘Constancy of Justice,’’ 511–12. On the status of the law as an object both of utopian desire and social criticism, see J. R. Maddicott, Law and Lordship: Royal Justices as Retainers in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century England, Past and Present Sup. 4 (Oxford: Past and Present Society, 1978), pp. 65–67. The year 1346 witnessed an intensification of the oath required of justices for which, as G. O. Sayles relates, ‘‘we have many variant forms, but which all stress that justice must be done to rich and poor alike and that no gift should be accepted for any reason.’’ ‘‘Introduction,’’ Select Cases, p. xx. 41 See May McKisack, The Fourteenth Century: 1307–1399 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 207. As Harding (Law Courts [p. 119]), W. M. Ormrod (The Reign of Edward III: Crown and Political Society in England 1327–1377 [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990], p. 154), and Bennet (Community) all point out, the motives behind such corrupt practices very likely were related to the status of the law as the first bona fide ‘‘profession’’ in England and the opportunities maintenance and other practices offered careerist members of England’s ‘‘middling’’ classes. 42 Mann, Estates Satire, p. 89. See also Muriel Bowden, A Commentary on the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 171. 165 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Man of Law’s portrait by, on the one hand, emphasizing how the lawyer ‘‘semed’’ to be an excellent member of his profession and, on the other hand, implicating the lawyer in bribery through his possession of an abundance of ‘‘fees and robes’’ (GP 313, 317). Lawyers also constituted a principal object of rebel aggression in 1381, the year that witnessed the greatest internal challenge to the welfare of the English body politic in the fourteenth century. As a justice of the peace and a member of the ‘‘Wonderful’’ Parliament of 1386, Chaucer witnessed firsthand public censure of the law. Parliament’s desire to end the abuses of ‘‘lez bonez leyes, estatutz, et custemes de nostre dit realme’’ manifested itself several times during this session, by the Commons’ call for the forbidding of maintenance and retaining, by their impeachment of Michael de la Pole, and by the Commission of Government’s outlining of tasks to a newly appointed parliamentary council.43 Chaucer’s parliamentary service certainly impressed upon him the troubled state of a realm whose ‘‘good laws’’ are spoiled by their practitioners. Custance’s name, then, calls out for what the law should be, an ideal English justices grossly failed to meet. The ambivalent positioning of the law in late medieval England finds its counterpart in the contradictory meanings of geographic marginality. Objects of idealization and derision, hope and dread; lairs of monsters and devils, angels and saints; geographic borders—whether macrocosmic or microcosmic—were rendered markedly ambivalent in the cultures of the premodern West.44 Hence Jeremiah not only celebrates Israel as a blessed wilderness but also warns the Israelites that ‘‘the land shall become a waste’’ (Jeremiah 7:34; 2:2). The biblical deployment of 43 Henry Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle 1337–1396, ed. and trans. G. H. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), p. 372; Maddicott, Law and Lordship, pp. 65–67. 44 On the ambivalence of geographic borders of civilization such as the desert or forest in Western thought, see George H. Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought: The Biblical Experience of the Desert in the History of Christianity and the Paradise Theme in the Theological Idea of the University (New York: Harper, 1962), pp. 3–64; Antoine Guillaumont, ‘‘La conception du désert chez les moines d’Egypte’’ Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 188 (1975): 11; Alison Goddard Elliott, Roads to Paradise: Reading the Lives of the Early Saints (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1987), pp. 83–180; Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 47–59; Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). The ambivalence of global borders emerges in, on the one hand, the positioning of the Plinian or monstrous races on the edges of the world and, on the other hand, the location of Paradise on the eastern borders of mappae mundi (along with the placement of the blessed and wondrous islands of classical mythology, such as the fortunate isles and the Hesperides on the western and northern margins of the world). 166 BEYOND ROME geographic borders such as the desert as a means of both social critique and social affirmation was taken up in the complaint literature of medieval England, a genre that often directed itself at the problem of justice. For example, Gower’s Vox Clamantis is spoken in deserto, from, that is, England, an isle inhabited by wild and lawless inhabitants, although, as a man tells a dreaming Gower, there would not be ‘‘a worthier people under the sun if there were mutual love among them.’’45 The Man of Law’s Tale offers us a version of the English jeremiad taken up by Gower and others.46 Through his geographically marginal heroine, the Man of Law both acknowledges how judicial corruption rendered late medieval England a savage frontier, and imagines the overcoming of that problem. The coupling of topographic isolation and forensic perfection in Custance suggests how her arrival in Northumbria sets the stage for an isolated England’s acquisition of its own utopian alterity. When the English meet Custance, that is, they encounter their own religio-juridical potential. Yet the Anglo-Saxons hardly embrace their visitor. In particular, during a crucial trial scene in the tale, the lawyer simultaneously references and resolves the shortcomings of his class of legal professionals by depicting Custance both as the potential victim of a flawed Anglo-Saxon legal system and the means by which that system achieves judicial supremacy. During that trial, not only does an English knight falsely accuse Custance of a murder he himself committed, but also the 45 John Gower, Vox Clamantis, Book 6, chap. 1; Book 1, chap. 20. Translations are by Eric W. Stockton in The Major Latin Works of John Gower (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962). See also the lament of the macaronic verse ‘‘On the Times’’ that while ‘‘Englond sum tyme was / regnorum gemma vocata; . . . Now gon ys that honowr’’ due to certain immoral social practitioners—including those who ‘‘justum damnificabit.’’ Calls for reform that will return England to its former national glory follow. T. Wright, Political Poems and Songs, vol. 1 (London, 1859–61), pp. 270–71. 46 The notion that the lawyer’s performance constitutes a kind of complaint isn’t new to Chaucer studies. As readers such as Robert Enzer Lewis and Ann Astell have shown, the Man of Law’s use both of Innocent III’s De miseria condicionis humanae and those colors—indignatio, conquestio, exclamatio—that recall the classical rhetorical roots of monitory pieces, render him a Boethian personage lamenting the pattern of ‘‘joye after wo’’ that marks life generally and appears in a remarkably intense form in the story of Constance (2.1161). Yet while such readers have documented the presence of a universal brand of complaint in the tale, they have not considered the possibility that the lawyer also offers a particularized social complaint that uses issues of gender and geographic difference to engage with the utopian potential and notorious corruption ascribed to his profession. Robert Enzer Lewis, ‘‘Chaucer’s Artistic Use of Pope Innocent II’s De miseria humane conditionis in the Man of Law’s Prologue and Tale,’’ PMLA 81 (1966): 485–92; Ann Astell, ‘‘Apostrophe, Prayer, and the Structure of Satire in the Man of Law’s Tale’’ SAC 13 (1991): 81–97. 167 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER king himself, who presides over the proceeding, nearly executing our holy heroine. Although Alla pities Custance, he also is taken by the treacherous knight’s testimony, and ‘‘caught a greet motyf / Of this witnesse, and thoughte he would enquere / Depper in this, a trouthe for to lere’’ (lines 628–30).47 The lawyer’s portrayal of the king as a judge is unique to Chaucer. While in the Chroniques and the Confessio Amantis, the king meets an already vindicated Constance, the Man of Law’s Tale depicts Alla as a justice dangerously close to making an unjust decision.48 The knight’s influence upon the king even prompts the Man of Law to lament Custance’s potential death, complaining that ‘‘but if Crist open myracle kithe, / Withouten gilt thou shalt be slayn as swithe’’ (lines 636–37).49 Alla’s initial doubts about Custance, however, vanish after the tremendous descent of a hand from above to strike the libelous knight’s neck, knock out his eyes, and decry his slander against a ‘‘doghter of hooly chirche’’ (line 675). That marvelous and terrible education leads to Alla’s juridical supremacy. During the trial and its immediate aftermath, the Man of Law’s nationalistic appropriation of Custance culminates, as Alla, the very lex animata in England, converts to the Christian law especially offered to his people, and unites in marriage with Justitia herself, as embodied by Custance. Spiritual Gifts, Corporeal Baggage Custance’s marriage to Alla points to the fundamentally incorporative goal of national fantasy.50 While England resists incorporation within 47 On the ambiguity of ‘‘trouthe’’ in this passage, see Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 29. 48 In Trevet, Alle only determines the knight’s punishment (688), while in Gower Allee only learns of and ponders secretly the meaning of Constance’s divine litigator (890–95). 49 For Eberle, Custance’s trial displays how ‘‘often and how easily the practices of actual courts can lead to unjust convictions, when, as is more often the case, a miracle fails to occur’’ (Rough Justice, p. 33). 50 By ‘‘national fantasy,’’ I refer to a particular style or technique of approximating a communal ideal. As Gellner and Anderson have taught us, all communities are imagined—they involve the impossible translation of a multitude of strangers into fellows, of aliens into kin (Anderson, p. 6). Yet in linking fantasy with nationalism, I go beyond Anderson’s point about the literal impossibility of all the members of a community experiencing face-to-face contact. Fantasy in this essay also refers to how national discourses articulate impossible individual psychic desires, and how these forms respond imaginatively to sociohistorical circumstances. My thinking here reflects both Fredric Jameson and Kenneth Burke’s understanding of art as an imaginative resolution to historical events (The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981]; ‘‘Literature as Equipment for Living,’’ in The Philosophy 168 BEYOND ROME the canonical ‘‘empire’’ of Rome, it also seeks to fulfill what Lauren Berlant calls ‘‘the nation’s utopian promise to oversee a full and just integration of persons’’ within its territorial boundaries.51 That ideal national inclusiveness emerges, as we have seen, in the Commons’ claim that justice should be done for all. The lawyer’s manipulation of woman as a sign of the judicial constancy that secures national unity no doubt reflects the law’s disinterest in incorporating within the space of the nation all sorts of historically disenfranchised groups, such as the poor. But, above all, the lawyer’s apparent celebration of national integration via a gendered other masks a deep antipathy to historical feminine difference. Contemporary work on feminist geography has emphasized how, as Elsbeth Probyn points out, ‘‘the movement of metaphorizing the nation in terms of woman would generally serve to displace actual historical women’’ and the discourse of medieval jurisprudence is no exception.52 Such scholars as Carolyn Dinshaw, Elizabeth Fowler and Shulamith Shahar have taught us how, even as juridical discourses on Justitia celebrated woman as goddess, the patriarchal legal system of medieval England sought to render historical women public outsiders. As Pollock and Maitland put it, ‘‘in the camp, at the council board, on the bench, in the jury box there is no place for them.’’53 The Man of of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 2d ed. [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967]), Anderson’s notion of the ways nations inspire love, as well as Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero’s thoughts on the reality and historical agency of fantasy in ‘‘Caxton, Foucault, and the Pleasures of History,’’ in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Fradenburg and Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. xiii–xxiv. 51 Berlant, Anatomy of National Fantasy, p. 21. 52 ‘‘Bloody Metaphors,’’ p. 52; See also Johnson, ‘‘Monuments’’; McClintock, Imperial Leather. 53 Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, p. 485; Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, p. 91; Elizabeth Fowler, ‘‘Civil Death and the Maiden: Agency and the Conditions of Contract in Piers Plowman,’’ Speculum 70 (1995): 760–93; Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages, trans. Chaya Galai (London: Methuen, 1984). Of course, this is not to say that women did not have any agency in the middle ages. Custance’s claim that ‘‘Wommen are born to thraldom and penance / And to been under mannes governance,’’ certainly, offers an oversimplified assessment of an extremely complex situation. Most notably, work over the last few decades has revealed the powers enjoyed by widows and queens. Indeed, scholars have shown how even ordinary Englishwomen of the lower and middling ‘‘classes’’ could take advantage of certain legal opportunities during the late middle ages. Judith M. Bennett, for example, has demonstrated how, while medieval brewsters lacked the contractual authority of men in England, they could serve as compurgators, a role generally denied women. See Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 90–91; 35–36. In her work on medieval prostitution, Ruth Mazo Karras has shown both how the law aimed at keeping the profession ‘‘accessible,’’ even as it sought to keep ‘‘its practitioners in its place’’ (Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England [New York: Oxford 169 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Law’s idealization of Custance—like most idealizations of woman in the official cultures of the premodern west—serves as a means of ironically imagining the gender excluded from his national culture as, to use Jonathan Goldberg’s formulation, a ‘‘trope of ideal femininity . . . that secures male-male arrangements and an all male history.’’54 Custance’s angelic qualities represent English lawmens’ desire to detach themselves not only from Rome but also from woman in all her materiality. It is worth noting, indeed, that during the trial episode, more than at any other moment in the tale, the lawyer’s claim on the primacy of Custance’s spiritual identity over her historical ties most forcefully resonates: Custance may be, as the lawyer reminds the pilgrims, of ‘‘blood roial’’ and an ‘‘emperoures doughter,’’ but it is only her affiliation with God as a ‘‘doghter of hooly chirche’’ that stands her in good stead during her judicial ordeal (line 657). Not long after her trial, however, our heroine’s physicality reemerges. In the space of three lines, Chaucer’s lawyer describes how Custance lays ‘‘a lite hir hoolynesse aside,’’ on her wedding night and soon gives birth to a baby boy (lines 713, 715). The lawyer’s assertion that Custance has set aside her spirituality refers directly to her sexuality, a comment that clearly resonates with the medieval elevation of a life of chastity linked most famously with Jerome’s letter against Jovinian and derided so humorously by the Wife of Bath. But it also extends to the biological outcome of that sexuality and the maternal role it implies. The notion that a woman’s maternity stands in inverse proportion to her spirituality probably wouldn’t have surprised the lawyer’s pilgrim auditors. As Clarissa Atkinson has shown, medieval mothers often considered their maternal function a hindrance to their own piety.55 And later in the University Press, 1996], p. 14). Marjorie Keniston McIntosh and other scholars have noted the active role played by women in social regulation, including ‘‘deciding when a case should be brought to the attention of male officials for formal prosecution’’ (Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], p. 24 n. 1). The presence of such opportunities for women, however, by no means suggests any sort of spirit of equality under the law in England. In the case of female social regulators, for example, while such women did enjoy a certain agency under the law, that power all too often was aimed at limiting the behavior of other, ‘‘dangerous’’ women. If the law at times made a space for certain women as public actors, its overall impulse was patriarchal. 54 Jonathan Goldberg, qtd. in Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yeager, eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 6. 55 Clarissa W. Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 170 BEYOND ROME Canterbury Tales, it is precisely the degree to which the Clerk’s Griselda demonstrates her holy steadfastness that determines the extent to which she strays from her maternal role (ClT 561–65). Feminists have long discussed the Christian west’s problem with woman’s procreative ability. What is most important for us is the manner in which, for Chaucer’s lawyer, the decline in holiness entailed by Custance’s maternity signifies how, above all, it is historical woman’s maternal power that opposes his geographic national fantasy. The threat posed by mothers, in effect, returns us to the larger territorial danger posed by canon lawyers’ efforts to extend their jurisdictional authority into England. Both Rome and mothers, that is, threaten to break down the territorial integrity of the nation and the child, respectively. Like the maternal empire, the imperial mother represents the supplanting of independence with union and indebtedness.56 The overbearing mothers of the Man of Law’s Tale, Donegild and the Sultaness, suggest how a mother’s power to bind the child can take a distinctly disabling, even deadly, turn for her offspring. While here the maternal bond turns lethal, in other medieval texts, the debt binding the child to the mother, while still burdensome, emerges as an effect of her capacity to nurture life. Marbod of Rennes thus asks in his Liber decem capitulorum, ‘‘who . . . makes up . . . with love to match’’ the ‘‘price of bearing a child which the careworn mother pays in bringing us into the light’’?57 The labor expended by the mother, like the work of conversion spent by the church, figures in Marbod’s text as the most burdensome gift of all, that which cannot be returned. And both of these kinds of potlatch converge in Custance’s maternity. The body that bears Alla his son Maurice also shores up the historicity of Custance, her status as, not the angelic converter of the Anglo-Saxons, 56 For a book-length treatment of the location of ‘‘the child’s vulnerability in the body of the nurse/mother’’ (6), see Janet Adelman. For a list of work in ‘‘contemporary object-relations psychoanalysis’’ that ‘‘locates differentiation from the mother as a special site of anxiety for the boy-child, who must form his specifically masculine selfhood against the matrix of her overwhelming femaleness’’ (p. 7), see Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, p. 244, n. 30. 57 Liber decem capitulorum, IV, trans. C. W. Marx, cited in Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: an Anthology of Medieval Texts, ed. Alcuin Blamires with Karen Pratt and C. W. Marx (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 229–30. The union entailed by motherhood emerges in the extent to which writers identified maternity supremely with breast feeding, as Bartholomaeus Anglicus does when he defines the mother as one who ‘‘puts forth her breast to feed the child’’ (On the Properties of Things, 5:34, 32, cited in Atkinson, Oldest Vocation, p. 58). 171 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER but a woman whose Roman ethnicity troubles the lawyer’s efforts to distinguish England from the universal Christian family.58 The geographic ramifications shared by both the maternal potlatch registered by Marbod and the gift of ‘‘Cristes lawe’’ offered by Rome emerge in the association in medieval world maps of world capitals such as Rome with biological femininity. Both ancient and premodern chorographic treatises describe the center of the world as an omphalos or navel. While the ancient Greeks, for example, refer to a stone at Delphi that signifies that ancient site’s status as the omphalos of the world, Jerome’s Commentary on Ezekiel supports the prophet’s confirmation of Jerusalem’s status as the umbilicum terrae.59 What does it mean to characterize the center of the orbis terrarum as a navel? This anthropomorphizing of the world, in part, simply reflects the medieval notion of the unity of nature. In the same way that, for example, medieval writers allotted man’s life various ‘‘ages’’ that accorded temporally with the number of seasons, months, days in the week, and so on, they also compared man’s body spatially with the world itself. Higden, for example, describes man as a microcosm of the world in the Polychronicon, which claims that God ‘‘prynted on’’ man or the ‘‘lesse world’’ ‘‘the lykenesse of the gret worlde.’’60 Thus, given its location, to cite Bartholomeus Anglicus, on ‘‘3e middil place of 3e body,’’ the navel was identified with world centers by medieval writers.61 58 We should note here as well how Custance’s sexuality shores up the power of canon law, given its considerable sway over issues of marriage and sexuality. See James A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and Sex, Law and Marriage in the Middle Ages (Aldershot and Brookfield: Variorum, 1993). 59 On Delphi, see The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), s.v. ‘‘omphalos’’; and Henry George Liddel and Robert Scott, eds. A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), s.v. ‘‘μφαλος.’’ ‘‘This city of Jerusalem I have set among the nations, with the other countries round about her’’ (Ezek. 5:5). On Jerome, see Patrologia cursus completus . . . Series latina, v. 25 ed. J. P. Migne (Paris: Migne, 1844–55) Cols. 52b. For a translation and discussion of Jerome and other references to Jerusalem as navel, see Iain Macleod Higgins, ‘‘Defining the Earth’s Center in a Medieval ‘‘Multi-Text’’: Jerusalem in The Book of John Mandeville,’’ in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), pp. 34–35. For an overview of cultural representations of the omphalos, see Bruno Kauhsen, Omphalos. Zum Mittelpunktsgedanken in Architektur und Städtebau dargestellt an ausgewählten Beispielen (Munich: Seaneg, 1990). 60 Ranulf Higden, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi cestrensis, ed. Churchill Babington and J. R. Lumby, 9 vols. Rolls Series 41 (London: Longman, 1865–86), II: 177. 61 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Batholomaeus Anglicus’ De proprietatibus rerum: A Critical Text, ed. M. C. Seymour et al., two vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975–1988), I.260. 172 BEYOND ROME Yet the navel also is a charged site of maternal union and debt. As Elizabeth Bronfen puts it, the omphalos ‘‘functions as a sign of bondage’’ that distinguishes humankind anatomically from the angels.62 Even more than the breast, the umbilicus territorializes maternal power by memorializing the child’s imbeddedness in the mother’s uterus. Bartholomeus, for example, compares the umbilical cord to the root joining a plant to the earth when he writes that ‘‘a childe in 3e modir wombe fongi3 fedyinge by 3e nauel as treen and yerdes fongen priuey liche by morys and rootis humour of 3e er3e and ben ifed 3erwy3.’’63 To describe a world center as a navel, then, is to appropriate a graphic and spatialized emblem of the child’s ties to the maternal body, its biological dependence upon the mother. The status of Jerusalem—or, more pointedly, Rome—as omphalos naturalizes the nonbiological production of that capital; Rome becomes a source of the law (and all the other key elements of civilization) akin to the maternal source of humanity. Above all, Rome as omphalos signifies the enduring connection and subjection of all earthly territories to their religio-cultural ‘‘mother.’’ Just as all children are biologically indebted to the mothers who bore them, medieval England was burdened by its obligation to the mother church. Hence, not long after Custance decides to ‘‘leye a lite hir hoolynesse aside’’ and become a mother, she finds herself exiled from England and ‘‘fleteth in the see’’ once more (2.713; 2.901). It is Alla’s own mother, Donegild, who sends Custance and her newborn child Maurice away from England upon the very rudderless ship in which she had arrived. A xenophobic contempt for Custance, we are told, compels Donegild to sabotage her son’s marriage to ‘‘so strange a creature’’ (2.700). In her counterfeited letter to Alla, Donegild speaks to a nation’s blood anxieties over the foreign woman when she writes that Custance must be an elf, given her delivery of ‘‘so horrible a feendly creature / That in the castel noon so hardy was / That any while dorste ther endure’’ (2.750– 62 Elizabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 3. Offering the first sustained critical reading of this charged body part, Bronfen reads the navel as telling sign of subjectivity as it is understood along psychoanalytic lines. Bronfen is particularly interested in the navel not simply as a representation of bondage to the mother but also as a severing, an incision or wound evocative of the construction of the subject (and the symbolic castration it entails). This emphasis, in turn, reflects Bronfen’s desire to move ‘‘away from a gendered notion of hysteria’’ in her book (p. xii). By contrast, I emphasize the more straightforward relation of the omphalos to female power. 63 Bartolomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, I.260. 173 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER 54). An endogamous queen mother, Donegild suggests how, as feminist geographic work on nationalism observes, if there is a place for woman in the nation, it is firmly rooted within privatized domestic space.64 Insofar as its welfare can be said to depend upon the ‘‘proper’’ (that is, racialist and patriarchal) biological reproduction of its members,65 the nation embraces mothers of national stock grounded firmly within the home and rejects nomadic strangers such as Custance. Indeed, it is worth noting, with Roland Smith, that the ‘‘legitimacy had been in question’’ of the woman whom some readers of the tale and its sources have identified as the historical counterpart to Custance, John of Gaunt’s second Duchess, Costanza of Castille.66 Donegild’s aggression toward Custance as foreign queen of England also recalls the ill repute of some of her historical counterparts, such as the respective Isabellas of France married to Edward II and Richard II. For example, as AngloFrench tensions increased at the end of the century, Richard’s Isabella and her entourage became the object of a criticism that led to the deportation of ‘‘a dozen or more’’ ladies to France.67 Yet Chaucer’s nationalistic lawyer suggests otherwise—that it is not Custance as foreign queen but Donegild as native queen mother who proves problematic for England. The Man of Law censures Donegild for her behavior and proclaims its ‘‘un-Englishness’’: O Donegild, I ne have noon Englissh digne Unto thy malice and thy tirannye! And therfore to the feend I thee resigne; Lat hym enditen of thy traitorie! (lines 778–80) 64 Johnson, ‘‘Monuments’’; Sarah Radcliffe, ‘‘Gendered Nations: Nostalgia, Development and Territory in Ecuador,’’ Gender, Place and Culture 3 (1996): 5–21; McClintock, Imperial Leather. Two accounts of the medieval woman’s spatial enclosure are Joanne McNamara, ‘‘City Air Makes Men Free and Women Bound,’’ in Text and Territory, pp. 143–58; and Margaret Hallissey, Clean Maids, True Wives, Steadfast Widows: Chaucer’s Women and Medieval Codes of Conduct (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993). 65 Cf. the miscegenational rhetoric of the Brut, which blames civil strife during Edward II’s reign on the paucity of English blood circulating in the veins of the aristocracy, whereby ‘‘3e grete lordes of Engeland were nougt alle of o nacioun, but were mellede wi3 o3ere . . . nacions acorded nougt to 3e kynde bloode of Engeland,’’ The Brut, or the Chronicles of England, Part I, 1906, ed. Friedrich W. D. Brie, EETS OS 131 (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 220; discussed in Turville-Petre, England the Nation, pp. 6, 17. 66 Roland Smith, ‘‘Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale and Constance of Castille,’’ JEGP 47 (1948): 348. 67 See Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 457. 174 BEYOND ROME In this stanza of exclamatio, found only in Chaucer, Donegild’s aggression toward Custance and her child places Alla’s mother outside the vernacular, and hence only the devil, according to the Man of Law, can accurately articulate this evil mother’s actions.68 While her libelous predecessor, the English knight, emerges in the tale as an enemy of God, Donegild appears in this diatribe as the foe of both God and England; her treachery so opposes her homeland that its native tongue cannot even ‘‘speak’’ her crimes. By asserting his inability to describe Donegild in English, the Man of Law, in a sense, implies her alterity to England itself. The lawyer thus linguistically endeavors to do to Donegild what she literally does to Custance, when the menacing queen mother orders the constable to ‘‘croude hire fro the lond’’ (line 801). Indeed, the intractable Donegild, after having successfully ridden England of the foreign woman in its midst, ends up not only linguistically but also physically ejected from the nation as her son, playing again the role of judge, executes his mother as a traitor (lines 894–95). I would argue that, taken together, Donegild’s ejection of Custance and the aggression the Man of Law directs at Donegild display what we might call a strategy of occlusion in the tale, whereby an evil woman accomplishes the ‘‘dirty work’’ that, if acknowledged openly as desirable in the tale, would undermine its nationalistic appropriation of woman. Donegild’s aggression toward Custance, that is, is shared by the Man of Law. As we have already noted, Custance’s entry into the world—her laying ‘‘a lite hir hoolynesse aside’’—disturbs the Man of Law because it brings to light the linked threats of Rome and womanhood that challenge the territorial sovereignty cherished by his juridical class. Just as fourteenth-century lawmen sought to eliminate the church’s presence in England, so too does the Man of Law route through Donegild his masculinist aversion to ‘‘mother’’ Custance. That a repugnance toward all women lies at the heart of this national fantasy may be best seen, perhaps, when we consider the fact that all the native English women who 68 No counterpart appears in the Chroniques or the Confessio Amantis. While the lawyer’s consignment of Donegild to the devil has been loosely related to a somewhat similar moment in Inferno V (cf. Howard H. Schless, Chaucer and Dante: A Reevaluation [Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1984]), his linkage of that lack with the vernacular does not appear in Dante. Other Canterbury pilgrims, of course, do refer to the descriptive inadequacies of the vernacular. Such moments, as Vincent J. DiMarco notes in his explanatory notes to the Knight’s Tale in the Riverside Chaucer, may well constitute a kind of modesty topos or reflect a certain ‘‘concern about the state of literary English’’ (p. 832). The passage from the Man of Law’s Tale offers a nationalistic inversion, I would argue, of passages such as KnT 1459–60 and SqT 37–38. 175 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER appear in the tale are killed. The murder of Hermengild, the execution of Donegild (and as well the expulsion of Custance) each testify to a fantasy of emptying England of living, breathing women. Reflecting the patriarchal bias of his class of legal professionals, Chaucer’s lawyer imagines England as a fraternal collective, a site of, to quote Benedict Anderson, ‘‘deep, horizontal comradeship.’’69 The evacuation of women in the tale specifically suggests the wish that England could flourish without their reproductive work. As so often is the case in national fantasy, biological reproduction is replaced with a nonbiological, symbolic and masculinist production of England akin to Godwin’s creation of sublime English identity via Chaucer, Virgil, and Petrarch. Beyond England Throughout this essay, I have emphasized the desire of English lawmen to move beyond the forensic reach of Rome and exalt their isolated homeland. The ostensible project of The Man of Law’s Tale is to rehabilitate marginality in the name of English sovereignty. Yet the final turns of the tale suggest that our lawyer is not so confident about the benefits of the marginal, the isolated and the otherworldly as he seems. After his mother’s execution, Alla finds himself filled with ‘‘swich repentance’’ that he travels to Rome ‘‘to receyven his penance / and putte hym in the Popes ordinance’’ (2.989-92). The Northumbrian king’s journey from England to Rome suggests a certain English attraction to the world omphalos at work in this Canterbury tale. In particular, Alla’s pilgrimage reveals how any celebration of the marginal always entails an appreciation of the center. After all, the unique status of England as an isolated island appears not through maps of England alone but through mappae mundi that offer the global perspective of a Rome-centered world. Moreover, not only do the English need Rome to perceive their own geographic marginality in the first place, but also, as Godwin’s use of Petrarch suggests, the English also require Rome to authorize their otherness. Although Custance’s spiritual ties reflect the Man of Law’s desire to receive the gift of Roman Christianity without the Roman obligations it entails, it is nevertheless Roman Christianity that she brings to England. 69 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 7; quoted in Parker et al., Nationalisms and Sexualities, p. 6. See Schibanoff, ‘‘Worlds Apart,’’ on the Man of Law’s interest in producing a patriarchal bond between his male fellow pilgrims. 176 BEYOND ROME England’s ambivalent attraction, so to speak, toward Rome endangers national welfare, for, as we have seen, things Roman—like things maternal—risk the bursting of masculinist English boundaries and the dissolution of a sovereign English world margin. Hence the lingering attachment to his mother that makes Alla repent her execution results in him relinquishing his isolated homeland and submitting himself to a Roman Pope. The imaginary compensation of choosing centrality over marginality ultimately amounts to the ‘‘flip side’’ of English geo-national fantasy, that is, English geo-imperial fantasy. Even as our lawyer celebrates the English edge of the world, he also wishes, at some level, that the English were less the inhabitants of an isolated island than a global presence, possessors of the very universal dominance accorded Rome. That rivalry with Rome, in turn, speaks to a patriarchal envy of the mother’s potential power to obligate, bind, control and engulf her offspring.70 It is, of course, Custance’s son, Maurice, who evinces the lawyer’s imperial desires. The son also of Alla, and a man who ‘‘was sithen Emperour / Maad by the Pope,’’ Maurice represents the fantasy of a Roman Empire subject to an Englishman (lines 1121–22). To be sure, the tale attempts to squelch its Roman impulses, and this aspect of the tale is played down by the Man of Law. Trevet writes that ‘‘Cist Moris fu apele de Romeyns en Latin ‘Mauricius Cristianissimus imperator’ ’’ (181), a line Gower translates as ‘‘men him calle / moris the cristeneste of alle’’ (2.1597–98). The Man of Law, however, simply tells us that Morris ‘‘to Cristes chirche . . . dide greet honour’’ (lines 1121–23). Among these three versions of the Constance story, the Chroniques are most clearly invested in an English imperial blood fantasy, as Trevet’s version begins not with Constaunce but with her son, whose AngloSaxon paternity Trevet takes pains to clarify (165). While it appears that what is at stake in the Chroniques is less Constaunce herself than her generation of an English emperor of Rome par excellence, the Man of Law’s Tale professes its disinterest in imperial fantasy. Claiming that ‘‘Of Custance is my tale specially,’’ Chaucer’s lawyer tells the pilgrims, ‘‘In the olde Romayn geestes may men fynde Maurices lyf; I bere it noght in mynde’’ (lines 1125–27). 70 The lawyer’s tale exemplifies what Sheila Delany has described as ‘‘the deep-rooted ambivalence about women that is a structural feature of late-medieval culture, providing a terminus ad quem beyond which even the most well-intentioned writer cannot pass’’ (‘‘Difference and the Difference It Makes: Sex and Gender in Chaucer’s Poetry,’’ in A Wyf there was, ed. Juliet Dor [Leige, Belgium: Universite de Liège, 1992], p. 103). 177 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Yet perhaps the English justice protests too much. We may well draw this conclusion from the final criss-crossing territorial movements of Custance that end The Man of Law’s Tale. While, before her reconciliation with Alla, Custance already has trekked from Rome to England and back, after her eventual reunion with her spouse Custance’s travels between world center and world edge accelerate within the narrative space of the tale, whereby, in three stanzas, Custance returns to England and then, after Alla’s death, circles back to Rome. That delirious topographic ‘‘splitting’’ of Custance between England and Rome points to the instability upon which the Man of Law’s national fantasy is founded. At once attracted and repulsed by her maternity, alternately repudiating and embracing Roman authority, both proud of and anxious about his isolated homeland, Chaucer’s lawyer exhibits a version of the ideological vacillation and uncertainty that Homi Bhabha and other contemporary theorists associate with nationalism.71 The Man of Law’s Tale offers us a powerful example of the fraught spatial relationships, both national and international, that so often undergird fantasies of medieval Englishness. It is no accident, for example, that the first national tale told by a pilgrim in The Canterbury Tales also moves between the territories evoked by the stories it precedes. To be sure, the turn from first an aristocratic and then several peasant storytellers to one of the ‘‘new men’’ so well described by Anne Middleton also prepares us for a nationalistic performance.72 Yet mutually constitutive with the social stations of these pilgrims are the settings of the tales they tell. While the knight grandly transports his auditors to Athens, and the Miller, Reeve, and Cook modestly remain within the confines of England, the Man of Law straddles the line between the world’s English edge and its classical centers. It is not, significantly, stories set solely in England that first celebrate the nation as such in The Canterbury Tales; rather, England only emerges when it is positioned in relation to other (namely Roman) spaces. Literary critics’ need to analyze medieval England in relation to other, extra-insular, frames of reference has been emphasized recently by 71 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation’’ in The Location of Culture, ed. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 139–70. 72 Chaucer’s ‘New Men’ and the Good of Literature in the Canterbury Tales,’’ in Literature and Society, ed. Edward W. Said (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 15–56. 178 BEYOND ROME David Wallace. In Chaucerian Polity, Wallace’s comparison of political systems in both England and Italy provides an important and muchwelcomed counter to what he calls the ‘‘insurality of historicist criticism’’ in medieval studies. Wallace’s replacement of the typically insular gaze upon English medieval literature by literary critics with a look at the cultures of both England and the continent constitutes a crucial step in our understanding of Chaucer’s international dimensions. Yet Chaucerian Polity in fact has little room for space itself as an analytical category—for, that is, the multiple, politicized, and contradictory productions of the spaces of England and Italy in Chaucer’s literary corpus. One of my aims in this essay has been to demonstrate the benefits of such a cultural geographic approach to England and those national/imperial ‘‘others’’ through which Englishness was defined. Of course, as recent work on postcolonial England reminds us, the English anxiety over space and place within an imperial frame that we have witnessed in The Man of Law’s Tale also is very much a condition of modernity and postmodernity. The correspondences that obtain between an isolated medieval England’s vexed relation to Rome and a new millennial England’s problematic relation to the legacy of empire suggests the utility of post-colonial theory to the analysis of English medieval literature and culture. The nuanced understanding of English imperialism offered by post-colonial studies can help prevent medievalists from repeating the reifications of English nationalism found in past medieval scholarship. Scholars of post-colonial England, as well, may have something to learn from medievalists, given the important prehistory to contemporary nationalism that medieval English culture provides.73 In particular, the vexed positioning of geographic marginality in such texts as The Man of Law’s Tale complicates contemporary thinking on the role alterity plays in national fantasy in the west. If we typically understand nations as constructed against what is imagined as strange and different, the middle ages presents us with an example of how Englishness emerged from English writers’ self-conscious engagement with their own geographic otherness.74 Indeed, as the example of Cf. the essays in Cohen, ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages. See for example Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Homi K. Bhabha, ‘‘The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,’’ Screen 24.6 (1983): 18–36; and ‘‘DissemiNation’’; Paul Gilroy, ‘‘One Nation Under a Groove: The Cultural Politics of ‘Race’ and Racism in Britain,’’ in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (London: Hutchinson, 1987); and Slavoj Žižek, ‘‘Eastern Europe’s Republics of Gilead,’’ New Left Review 183 (1990): 50–62. 73 74 179 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Godwin suggests, English isolation persisted as a trope in English literature well after Chaucer. From Thomas More’s Utopia, to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, English literary history has engaged, with varying results, with the cartographic othering of premodern England.75 Both critics and defenders of English imperialism have been haunted by not only the ‘‘ghost’’ of Rome, but also the specter of an isle ‘‘enveloped in fogs and darkness.’’ 75 On Utopia and English geographic isolation, see Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America and Literature from the Utopia to the Tempest (Berkeley: University of California press, 1993). On Johnson and Conrad, see The Works of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1825), 5:21; Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), pp. 29–31. 180