Abstract
Is Hoccleve idiosyncratic, or even satirical when, reproaching the Lollard addressee of his “To Sir John Oldcastle” for the heresies which, he says, “un-man” him,2 he recommends that, instead of troubling over the gospels, John Oldcastle remake himself as a masculine knightly subject (especially as one who expresses his Christian faith in violent and martial terms) fortified by reading the historical and chivalric books of the Old Testament (ll. 201–08), Vegetius’s famous text on war strategy, and accounts of Lancelot and of Thebes and Troy?3 Hoccleve goes on to assure Oldcastle that to question the validity of the sacrament of the Eucharist when the officiating priest is in mortal sin is to express a transgressive curiosity: “to deepe yee ransake” (l. 328). The term “ransack,” denoting the exercise of an overcurious intellect in the context of a debate over “mak(ing) Crystes body” (ll. 326–27), also describes the medieval physician’s searching, or “ransacking,” of wounds, and figures Oldcastle’s inquisitiveness as interference with Christ’s own physical wholeness.4 Oldcastle had, furthermore, appropriated religious emblem; his battle standard displayed the eucharistic chalice and its contents.5 In his poem, Hoccleve genders feminine a lay curiosity about the divine, denounces those ignorant foolish women, “lewde calates” (l. 147) who seek knowledge of scripture, tells them to keep out of trouble, to sit at home and spin, and recommends literature other than the gospels as remedy for a probing into God’s mysteries, which latter inquiry can only be injurious to spiritual and—as Oldcastle’s heterodoxy is a political act—physical integrity.6
Bewar Oldcastel and for Crystes sake
Clymbe no more in holy writ so hie!
Rede the storie of Lancelot de lake,
Or Vegece of the aart of Chiualrie,
The seege of Troie or Thebes thee applie
To thyng Þat may to thordre of knyght longe!1
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Notes
Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall and I. Gollancz, EETS e.s. 61, 73 (1892, 1925). Rev. Jerome Mitchell and A. I. Doyle, in 1 vol. (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 8–24 (ll. 193–200).
On women in the Lollard community, see Margaret Aston, “Lollard Women Priests?” in Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon, 1984), pp. 49–70.
For historical evidence of the Lollard movement as in fact more attractive to men than to women, who were better served by the devotional practices (especially the cult of the saints) available to them through orthodox Catholicism, see Shannon McSheffrey, Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); McSheffrey cites Eleanor McLaughlin on the tendency of hostile accounts to represent heresies as predominantly female, for political reasons, pp. 138–39.
See James Gairdner, Lollardy and the Reformation in England: An Historical Survey, 4 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1908–13), 1: 85, cited by Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London: Routledge, 1993), who notes, p. 75, the Eucharist’s function here as “symbol() of political power.” Gairdner, Lollardy, p. 85, raises the question of how far Oldcastle’s images (other ensigns bore emblems of Christ’s Passion) were compatible with Lollardy.
Nicholas Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” Speculum 70 (1995): 822–64 (848–49).
From The Scholemaster, cited in Malory: The Critical Heritage, ed. Marylyn Jackson Parins (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 56–57. Parins cites divergent views, from Tudor historians and Renaissance scholars, pp. 52–59.
“The Body and the Struggle for the Soul of Romance: La Queste del Saint Graal,” in The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 1999), pp. 31–61 (p. 54).
Laurence N. de Looze, “A Story of Interpretations: The Queste del Saint Graal as Metaliterature,” Romanic Review 76.2 (1985): 129–47.
On the importance of intertextual reference—to Chrétien as well as to the Vulgate—to the Queste’s meaning and rewriting, see Andrea M. L. Williams, “The Enchanted Swords and the Quest for the Holy Grail: Metaphoric Structure in La Queste del Saint Graal,” French Studies 48 (1994): 385–401; Emmanuèle Baumgartner, “From Lancelot to Galahad: The Stakes of Filiation,” trans. Arthur F. Crispin, in The Lancelot-Grail Cycle, ed. Kibler, pp. 14–30.
John W. Baldwin, “From the Ordeal to Confession: In Search of Lay Religion in Early Thirteenth-Century France,” in Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages. York Studies in Medieval Theology 2, ed. Peter Biller and A.J. Minnis (York: York Medieval Press, 1998), pp. 191–209 (pp. 206–08).
Colin Richmond, “Religion and the Fifteenth-Century English Gentleman,” in The Church, Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century, ed. R. B. Dobson (Gloucester, UK: Sutton, 1984), pp. 193–208; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
On trends in the “devotional,” poised between public, liturgical, and private, contemplative, see Richard Kieckhefer, “Major Currents in Late Medieval Devotion,” in Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, ed. Jill Raitt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), pp. 75–108.
Mervyn James, Society, Politics and Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 317.
See especially Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Sacrament in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and Beckwith, Christ’s Body.
See Shichtman, “Politicizing the Ineffable,” p. 173, on the breakdown in sign systems. John Plummer notes of Malory’s editing of the source’s explicatory material that “the text has become difficult of access”: “The Quest for Significance in La Queste del Saint Graal and Malory’s Tale of the Sankgreal,” in Continuations: Essays on Medieval French Literature and Language In Honor of John L. Grigsby ed. Norris J. Lacy and Gloria Torrini-Roblin (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 1989), pp. 107–19 (p. 117).
Valerie M. Lagorio adduces fifteenth-century English political deployment of St. Joseph as part of ecclesiastical history: “The Evolving Legend of St Joseph of Glastonbury,” Speculum 46 (1971): 209–31. Hardyng’s Chronicle embeds this tale in a complex of cultural configurations of knighthood, religious, and political issues. See Edward Donald Kennedy, “John Hardyng and the Holy Grail,” Arthurian Literature 8 (1989): 185–206; Felicity Riddy, “Chivalric Nationalism and the Holy Grail in John Hardyng’s Chronicle,” in The Grail: A Casebook, ed. Dhira B. Mahoney (New York: Garland, 2000), pp. 397–414.
Stephen Knight reads medieval Grail narratives as increasingly compensatory for the historical loss of land and power: “From Jerusalem to Camelot: King Arthur and the Crusades,” in Medieval Codicology, Iconography, Literature, and Translation: Studies for Keith Val Sinclair, ed. Peter Rolfe Monks and D. D. R. Owen (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 223–32.
Martin B. Shichtman charts this fully in “Percival’s Sister: Genealogy, Virginity, and Blood,” Arthuriana 9.2 (1999): 11–20: see also Maureen Fries, “Gender and the Grail,” Arthuriana 8.1 (1998): 67–79, on the whirlpool the companions encounter as “suggestive of sexual turmoil” (75).
For Philippa Beckerling, “Perceval’s Sister: Aspects of the Virgin in the Quest of the Holy Grail and Malory’s Sankgreal,” in Constructing Gender: Feminism and Literary Studies, ed. Hilary Fraser and R. S. White (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press), pp. 39–54, she is in both texts merely an adjunct. For Maureen Fries, “Gender and the Grail,” she is a “surrogate” for “male bonding” (77), an observation Martin Shichtman develops in “Percival’s Sister.” Ginger Thornton and Krista May, “Malory as Feminist? The Role of Perceval’s Sister in the Grail Quest,” in Sir Thomas Malory: Views and Re-views, ed. D. Thomas Hanks (New York: AMS Press, 1992), pp. 43–53, afford her a more positive role.
Aelred of Rievaulx’s De Institutione Inclusarum: Two English Versions, ed. John Ayto and Alexandra Barratt, EETS o.s. 287 (London: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 9: “remembrith” here translates 1 Cor.7, “cogitat,” “is mindful of.”
Robert W. Hanning, “Arthurian Evangelists: The Language of Truth in Thirteenth-Century French Prose Romances,” Philological Quarterly 64 (1985): 347–65 (360–61).
Stephen G. Nichols, “Solomon’s Wife: Deceit, Desire, and the Genealogy of Romance,” in Space, Time, Image, Sign: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. James A.W Heffernan (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), pp. 19–40.
Susan Aronstein, “Rewriting Peceval’s Sister: Eucharistic Vision and Typological Destiny in the Queste del San Graal,” Women’s Studies 21.2 (1992): 211–30. Jennifer E. Looper, “Gender, Genealogy, and the ‘Story of the Three Spindles’ in the Queste del Saint Graal,” Arthuriana 8.1(1998): 49–66.
On spindle imagery, see Frances M. Biscoglio, “‘Unspun’ heroes: iconography of the spinning woman in the Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 25.2 (1995): 163–84. On the meaning of “fuissel,” and on “spindles” as a marked translation (and part of a moral indictment of women) see James Dean, “Vestiges of Paradise: The Tree of Life in Cursor Mundi and Malory’s Morte Darthur,” Mediaevalia et Humanistica n.s. 13 (1985): 113–26 (118–21).
The Lanterne of LiƷt, ed. Lilian M. Swinburn, EETS o.s. 151 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1917 [for 1915]), p. 65. For the same gloss, see the Epistle Sermon 51 in English Wycliffite Sermons, ed. Pamela Gradon and Anne Hudson, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983–1996), 1:685–89 (p. 687). The Queste and Sankgreal imagery complements Paul’s combination of metaphoric armor and the appellation of the faithful as children of God in this passage.
See Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 102. Bynum is commenting specifically on the phenomenon of the stigmata. Barbara Newman discusses the thirteenth-century Guglielmite context for Perceval’s Sister’s story, in From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 214–15.
Richard Kieckhefer, “Holiness and the Culture of Devotion: Remarks on Some Late Medieval Male Saints,” in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 288–305.
Rosalyn Rossignol analyzes the Queste Grail as the masculine appropriation of metaphors of maternal nurture that shows the Grail knights to be at an arrested stage of development in their dependence on and submission to God the Father: “The Holiest Vessel: Maternal Aspects of the Grail,” Arthuriana 5.1 (1995): 52–61.
Catherine Pickstock, “Thomas Aquinas and the Quest for the Eucharist,” in Catholicism and Catholicity: Eucharistic Communities in Historical And Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Sarah Beckwith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 47–68 (p. 60).
Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1982), p. 23.
“On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” in Jacques Lacan, Écrits: a Selection, ed. and trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977).
Jane Flax, “Signifying the Father’s Desire: Lacan in a Feminist’s Gaze,” in Criticism and Lacan: Essays and Dialogue on Language, Structure, and the Unconscious, ed. Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), pp. 109–19 (pp. 115–16).
Gilbert D. Chaitin, Rhetoric and Culture in Lacan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Robert Con Davis, The Paternal Romance: Reading God-the-Father in Early Western Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 121.
Stacey L. Hahn, “Genealogy and Adventure in the Cyclic Prose Lancelot,” in Conjunctures: Medieval Studies in Honor of Douglas Kelly, ed. Keith Busby and Norris J. Lacy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), pp. 139–51.
See, for example, The Treatise of Perfection of the Sons of God, in The Chastising of God’s Children and The Treatise of Perfection of the Sons of God, ed. Joyce Bazire and Eric Colledge (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), which affirms that those who work according to the spirit of God are His sons (p. 243).
St. Thomas Aquinas, Knowing and Naming God, in Summa Theologice, Vol. 3, ed. and trans. Herbert McCabe (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), pp. 47–79 (pp. 69–71).
Dives and Pauper, ed. Priscilla Heath Barnum, 2 vols., EETS o.s. 275, 280 (London: Oxford University Press, 1976, 1980), 1: 304–59 (p. 313).
The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Part 1, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS e.s. 107 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911 [for 1910]), pp. 60–71 (ll. 123–36).
Grace Armstrong Savage, “Father and Son in the Queste del Saint Graal,” Romance Philology 31 (1977): 1–16 (16).
Malory is also here retelling the episode in the Mort (79–80; Lacy 4:111) in which a huntsman wounds Lancelot accidentally. On the significance of the episode for Launcelot, see Catherine La Farge, “The Hand of the Huntress: Repetition and Malory’s Morte Darthur,” in New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, ed. Isobel Armstrong (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 263–79.
The Sermons of Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester (1373–1389), ed. Sister Mary Aquinas Devlin, 2 vols. (London: Royal Historical Society, 1954), 1: 87–94, cited in Kieckhefer, “Major Currents,” pp. 87–88.
Gertrude d’Helfta: Œuvres spirituelles, ed. and trans. J. Hourlier, A. Schmitt, P. Doyère, and J.-M. Clément, 5 vols. (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1967–86), 2: 246–47.
Douglas Gray, “The Five Wounds of Our Lord,” Notes and Queries 208 (1963). 1: 50–51; 2:82–89; 3:127–34; 4:163–68.
“Ful ofte paramours he gan deffie, And weep as dooth a child that is ybete” (A, 3758–59). Bartlett Jere Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English writings, mainly before 1500 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), entry C223.3.
Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God, ed. Margaret Connolly, EETS o.s. 303 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 31–32.
Sigmund Freud, “‘A Child is Being Beaten’: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, gen. ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 17: 175–204.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Masoch / Lancelotism,” New Literary History 28 (1997): 231–60 (231).
On guilt, see Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms, p. 7. For Stephen C. B. Atkinson, Launcelot interprets God’s benevolence as “a stinging rebuke:” “Malory’s ‘Healing of Sir Urry’: Lancelot, the Earthly Fellowship, and the World of the Grail,” Studies in Philology 78 (1981): 341–52 (349). On nostalgia, see Mark Lambert, Malory: Style and Vision in Le Morte Darthur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 65.
Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 185–213 (p. 205).
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© 2002 Catherine Batt
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Batt, C. (2002). Spiritual Community, Gender, and Fatherhood in The Tale of the Sankgreal. In: Malory’s Morte Darthur. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-11183-8_5
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