Michael is now back from sunny Michigan, and will doubtless be posting some delightful tidbits from his time there - boozing, mainly, but perhaps he had some revelations about medieval studies?
Next Wednesday, at 4pm in King's Manor, the Anglo-Norman Reading Group will collaboratewith the POSTMEDIEVAL and meet to discuss Medieval Disability Studies (via Chris Baswell's article 'King Edward and the Cripple' and Lennard J Davis' seminal book Enforcing Normalcy) in two different versions of the life of Saint Edward the King. The almost-already-nearly-arrived field of medieval disability studies is one of the most exciting things to emerge in critical trends in recent years, combining ideas from Posthuman, Psychoanalytic, Feminist and Queer discourses - if you fancy a taster, our 'friends' over at ITM have put up some very interesting bits and pieces on the subject.
Karl Steel's recent short splurge should get you going, but just try searching 'disability' on the site and seeing where that leads...
http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2010/03/disability-in-medieval-corporal.html
Tom O'Donnell will be performing stunning sight translations of keys passages, and there will be CMS funded nibbles. Reading is available in the usual spots at King's Manor.
Meanwhile, another recent essay. You should comment and Enjoy!
Frendes, beth nought squoymous,/ This is the maner off myn house: Table Manners in Richard Couer de Lion and Sir Gowther
So it is indeed the master, the one who invites, the
inviting host, who becomes the hostage—and who really
always has been. And the guest, the invited hostage,
becomes the one who invites the one who invites, the
master of the host. The guest becomes the host’s host.
The guest (hôte) becomes the host (hôte)of the host
(hôte).
Dr. Lecter’s obscene joke that closes the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs – “I’d love to chat longer, but I’m having an old friend for dinner” – certainly suggests that his hospitality is always tied up with hostility. King Richard, of the eponymous Middle English romance, decides that like Lecter he will consume those who are or have been incarcerating him: whilst Lecter selects the sadistic psychiatrist (Dr. Chilton) who tormented him in captivity, Richard’s dinner guests are the Saracens laying siege to Acre, those who “forbarre oure vytalle” [l.5334]. There is a complex economy of need and control at this moment: King Richard executes and consumes his hostages, and turns his dinner guests into frightened hostages (they are held hostage to “the maner off myn house”, and their politeness, as much as anything else), though Richard is himself in turn held hostage by his besiegers (as a foreign intruder), and his appetite. Jacques Derrida’s Of Hospitality is essentially the philosophical expansion of Lecter’s joke, and presents us with a potentially useful description of the fragile axis along which such inversions of guest and host take place in the romance.
This paper will consider the ways in which Richard Couer de Lion plays with the discourses that are used to organize the medieval table in courtesy manuals – specifically drawing on Stans Puer ad Mensam and The Babees Book amongst others. The two key dinner tables of Richard will be explored in order to think about medieval notions of hospitality and alterity – this discussion will draw on the work of Jacques Derrida and his 2000 book Of Hospitality, though by framing Derrida’s work in a medieval context. Analysis of Richard will also focus more specifically on the use of bread in his eating, the manner of his eating, and the status of the salt-cellar on the medieval dining table. The ways in which the enjoyment of eating has to be codified, and organized, and the way that its obverse of excessive, uncontrolled eating appears in Richard Couer de Lion and Sir Gowther will be considered as indicative of an anxiety about oral-sadistic impulses in these texts. The discussion of Sir Gowther will essentially, to ‘cannibalize’ a term from Nicola Macdonald’s analysis of Richard (‘Eating people and the alimentary logic of Richard Couer de Lion’), consider the ‘alimentary logic’ of the text and the integration of such an oral sadistic impulse into masculine identity. The kinds of discourses of eating that touch Richard Couer de Lion allow us to frame our analysis of Sir Gowther, a text in which eating and oral-sadism profoundly structure the narrative. In this way, the paper hopes to uncover and articulate medieval fantasies of incorporation in these romances.
Richard’s consumption of the raw heart after his escape from prison is one of the most striking moments in the text – we can see there an inversion of host and guest. Though he starts as a prisoner, his violation of the ‘normal’ use of the salt (salt is transferred to the trencher and meat from the cellar, not the meat to the salt) circumvents the formal structure of eating at the medieval table. The extortionate cost of salt of course renders it a privileged product, and it is on the whole to be treated as something to be protected:
loke þy salte be sutille, whyte, fayre and drye,
and þy planere for thy salte / shalle be made of yverye /
þe brede þerof ynches two / þen þe length, ynche told thrye;
and þy salt sellere lydde / towche not thy salt bye.
The importance of the purity of the salt, taken here from John Russell’s Boke of Nurture, certainly makes clear the extremity of Richard’s transgression. In The Babees Book too, we are told: “The salte also touche nat in his salere/
Withe nokyns mete, but lay it honestly/ On youre Trenchoure, for that is curtesy.” Though, the language used and the emphasis on purity and contamination certainly reminds us of the key characteristics of the romance heroine’s body: “whyte, fayre…made of yverye”. Unfortunately, we are not treated to a full physical description of the King’s daughter in Richard Couer de Lion, only as far as being told she is a “lady brighte” [l.890]. The hermetically sealed virgin body, pure and uncorrupted, is ‘lidded’ in much the same way Russell’s salt cellar is (“the salt sellere lydde / towche not thy salt bye”) – a container whose opening and closing is carefully controlled. We should note, too, the “kerchofe…that was of silke,/ that was als white als mores mylke” [ll.1031-1032] that Richard demands of Margery – the white of her token metonymically linking it with the white of the salt he later stains. When Richard ties her veils around his arm before fighting the lion (“abowte his arme he theym wande” [1064]), we must presume that they become stained, as he rips out the lion’s heart, in much the same way as the saltcellar does later on. The way that Richard ends his enforced starvation in captivity is perhaps just as shocking and as disruptive as his seduction of the king’s daughter, and there certainly seems to be some kind of congruence between these acts. Richard’s appetites – both sexual and alimentary – are totally intertwined in this section: the satisfaction of his sexual desire (something prohibited, illegitimate, the “dishonoure” [l.971] the King notes) violates normal sexual codes just as his eating violates the rules of the table. The bloodstained salt, and cloth, enact the violence of the illegitimate violation of the King’s property, in both his saltcellar and daughter.
This scene can also be seen in a different light when looking at a potential definition of host in Middle English. The MED offers, amongst more obvious statements (“One who entertains guests in his own home, one who invites guests to a feast”) a description of the host as “An animal offered for sacrifice, a sacrificial victim; also, any sacrificial offering, a sacrifice”. The King, as Richard’s host, sends the lion as the agent of his hostile intent, his wish to kill and, in a sense, consume Richard (something he cannot do himself, of course, because “Men schall no kyng the dede do” [l954]). The lion is starved for three days (“withaldis hym his mete/ Thre dayes that he noghte ne ete” [999-1000]) in order to whet his appetite – his starvation strangely paralleling Richard’s – and the king’s court relish the thought of eating Richard up. (In this scene, as later, eating people is the way in which royal authority is exercised). What happens presents us with a curious inversion – rather than being the agent of Richard’s demise, the lion becomes the source of his nourishment, his satisfaction, an unwitting sacrifice offered up to a stranger. Richard’s subversion of the king’s hostility (host, in Middle English, can also refer to an armed, hostile force – the latin hostis means enemy) into a version of hospitality that certainly allows our Derridean epigraph to reenter the picture here: “the guest, the invited hostage…here becomes the host’s host”. Richard as a disruptive outsider deconstructs and destabilizes the authority of the King’s high table (the “desse”) and the authority of the father in normal sexual politics – the host becomes the hostage – transforming through bodily incorporation his weapon against Richard into much needed relief from hunger. Indeed, it is worth noting the injunction of the courtesy manual As the Good Wife Taught her Daughter on the treatment of guests, as here Richard is implicitly provided for:
But weelcome faire þi neiboris þat comen to þee warde
With mete, drinke, & honest chere, Such as þou maist to hem bede
Richard’s table manners in this scene are also marked by his method of eating. The mediator for eating at the medieval table – the bread of the trencher – is eschewed by Richard here (“withowtten brede the hert he ete” [1105]) and along with his excessive appetite alienates him: the King noting “this is a deuyll and na man” [1108], with a certain “awoundrede” [‘marvelling’] that Richard eats the raw heart with “so gud will” [1111]. But Richard’s alterity is more complex than it seems – despite being the subject of an absorbed gaze (“the kyng and his men alle thay behalte” [1104]) he is described as a “Crystyn kyng and moste of renown,/ Strong Richerde” [1113-1114], a figure who is simultaneously a terrifying “deuyll” and a “crystyn kyng”.
What is Richard, “moste of renown”, renowned for exactly? When tormenting his Saracen dinner guests, Richard remarks, that “I ne wolde, for nothyng,/ that wurd off me in the world schulde spryng,/ I were so euyl off maneres/ That I wolde mysdoo messangers” [3513-3515]. The “renown” that is associated with Richard earlier is very much to do with the cultivation of some pretty “euyl maneres”, and his statement here obviously seems very wry, a parody of this reputation. This curious ambivalence about Richard’s anthropophagi can also be seen in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, in the account of the baby-eating giant of Mont Saint Michel. The children that the giant consumes are “broched in maner lyke birdis”, and he eats them with “pykyll and powder with many precious wynes” – framed by the practices and condiments of medieval dining.
Richard too enjoys “pyment, clarre and drykes lythe” [3501] and “white wyne and and rede, pyment and clarre” [3621] with his meal of human flesh. The “pykyll” enjoyed by Malory’s giant with the babies – bodies that end up no better than, and just as delicious as, roasted birds – is, according to the MED, “a spicy sauce or gravy served with meat or fowl”. King Richard, too, also reduces human flesh to yet another foodstuff when he eats “thereof ryght faste I schall,/ As it were a tendyr chyke” [3432-3433]. The introduction of a sauce to the dish Malory’s giant is enjoying here changes the register of the roasting of meat (human or otherwise) from mere savagery to the bourgeois feast. The “powder” that the giant uses to season his meat returns us to Richard – the Saracen heads are served with “salt…but no bred” [3443].
This lack of bread provides the most tangible link between his anthropophagi here and his consumption of the Lion’s heart earlier in the poem, also crystallizing the link between, and inversion of, ‘host’ and ‘guest’ that Richard toys with. When Richard serves up the boiled heads, we are told “No bred brought forth, whyt ne sour, / But salt and non other licour” [3577-3578], and around one hundred lines earlier, “Salt was set on but no bred” [3443]. This version of eating, which evokes Richard’s breadless consumption of the heart earlier in the poem, is transformed from a highly individualistic performance (Richard’s assertion of his difference in the earlier scene) to the “maner off myn house”, an organizing rule for foreigners and hosts alike. Richard’s enjoyment is elevated to a universal principal that organizes eating, and therein organizes alterity – “but youre maner I ne knewe” [3509]. The perversity of Richard’s table manners is accompanied by the obscene Lacanian superego injunction to ‘Enjoy!’, an injunction that demands the same unreasonable, excessive pursuit of enjoyment that we see in Richard’s speedy consumption, as well as the ridiculing of his guests’ failed attempts to ever meet this demand:
For my loue, bes alles glad
And lokes ye be weel at eese.
Why kerve ye nought off youre mese,
And eetes faste as I doo? [3486-3489]
There is also another dimension of Richard’s breadless eating. The conspicuous lack of bread in both the heart-eating and in the anthropophagi scene reminds us of a further complication of the middle English ‘host’ – “The bread consecrated in the Eucharist, the Eucharistic wafer before or after consecration” (MED). Richard’s devilishness is evidently something to do with the eschewing of bread, a semantic dismissal of the body of Christ. Richard’s incorporation of the lion’s flesh into his body, rather than the bread of the Eucharist certainly complicates any description of him within the text as a “Crystyn kyng” – no wonder both the Saracens (“this is the deuelys brodir” [3480]) and the Germans see him as infernal. This form of incorporation in the middle ages – the body of Christ – is in theory a more acceptable form of anthropophagi than eating your guests, and it is in Sir Gowther, as we shall see, that this socially sanctioned version of eating people is deployed to discipline Gowther’s oral impulses. It is perhaps even more striking then, that Richard eschews the Eucharistic bread – Richard’s eating is undisciplined, infernal, and unremittingly violent, and is nourished by heathen flesh rather than the sacrament.
This horrifying “maner off myn house”, is an obscene inversion of the measured and mediated eating of the Stans Puer ad Mensam and The Babees Book into an injunction to consume faster and more greedily, with grinding of teeth and animalistic gnawing. This ‘maner’ relies on enjoyment itself to organize the categories of Saracen and Christian – for all Richard’s monstrosity, and the ambivalence about his weird transgressions and insistence on manners, he insists, “I am kyng, Crysten and trewe” [3510]. The line that this follows, quite tellingly, is Richard’s admission that “youre maner I ne knewe”, as if it is ‘maner’ itself that decides difference.
Apart from his use of condiments, there are two things that typify Richard’s ‘maner’ in his eating. One of these is the peed at which he consumes food: “he eet faste” [3603] we are told, and the knight serving him must “karff off the hed” “in haste” [3603-3604] in order to keep pace with him. Again, earlier, when it is the Saracen meat that lifts Richard from his illness, we learn “he eet faster than he kerve myghte” [3108], his appetite vastly outpacing the normal alimentary rhythm. We can, and will, compare Richard’s appetite that exceeds the ‘normal’ limits of consumption to Sir Gowther’s draining of his wet nurses’ breasts and the dismemberment of his mother’s nipple later in the essay. Richard’s injunction to the Saracen guests, too, is to “ete faste/ And kerue your mese” [3489]. Indeed, the number of references for this short section is startling – when planning his monstrous banquet Richard imagines that when the head is set down he will “ete thereof ryght faste I schall” [3432].
This speed, of course, is very uncivilized, and the courtesy manuals certainly attest this. The Stans Puer ad Mensam notes that one should “Drinke not bridelid for haste ne necligence”, this “bridelid” (according to the MED, the past participle of ‘bridelen’, “Of persons: to strike a posture of a horse on parade, i.e., with head reined in and chest thrown out.”) suggesting that such aggressive consumption reduces one to the level of an animal. The Babees Book offers a slightly different, though no less pertinent, possibility for what excessive appetite might signify:
Kutte nouhte youre mete eke as it were Felde men,
That to theyre mete haue suche an appetyte
That they ne rekke in what wyse, where ne when,
Nor how vngoodly they on theyre mete twyte
It is the appetite of the “felde men” (‘wild men’) that disrupts their sense of propriety – “they ne rekke in what wyse” – as if their desire could be responsible for the breakdown of civil society, their “vngoodly” nature. Indeed, appetite itself disrupts a sense of place, and a sense of occasion – “they ne rekke…where ne when”. This wildness, or animality, in eating is crystallized in Richard too when he “grond the flesch ful harde,/ As a wood lyoun he fared” [3605-3606]. Richard’s animal appetite here obviously mirrors the starved lion of our other key scene – his incorporation of the lion’s heart into his body there has obviously had a more profound effect than simply sating his hunger. This incorporation also invokes the breakdown of the Middle English host as an enemy, or a hostile force, and the host as “one who entertains guests in his own home, one who invites guests to a feast” (MED) – Richard and the lion become inseparable when he integrates the lion’s (and the king’s) hostility into his own hospitality.
The grinding of Richard’s teeth -“the kyng eet the flesh & gnew the bones” [3201] – and “gnawen here flesch to the bones” [3219] is worthy of note, and also that which eventually ties Richard and Sir Gowther together. Like Malory’s giant, Richard’s “gnawyng” tells us a lot about the way he eats – according to the courtesy manuals, gnawing is something that is quite frankly not done. Richard Weste’s School of Virtue notes that “to gnaw the bones belongeth chiefly to dogs”, and we are told in another part of The Babees Book that “gnawing the bones as it were dogs” is “beastliness”.
Richard’s beastliness is more to do with lions than with dogs (unlike Sir Gowther of course), though the association of such poor table manners with the bestial asks us to see Richard’s un-mannerliness as un-manliness, a ‘Becoming Inhuman’ of his own. At the conclusion of Levi-Strauss’ book on table manners, the body is the site where “nature is unleashed”, the opposite of the “social person”. Malory’s giant, Richard and Gowther are all isolated, in one respect or another: the “gnawyng” giant “sate at his soupere alone”; Gowther is banished from the Emperor’s table to sit amongst the dogs; Richard is made monstrous by his devilish alterity. In this gnawing on bones, there is no intervention between Levi-Strauss’ two poles – of “the social person” and their body – by “insulators or mediators” which in this context would be the carving knight or the bread of the trencher that “prevents the occurrence of the threatened catastrophe”. The catastrophe here is an excess of appetite (or indeed, appetite as excess) that threatens the stability of the social itself.
It is Richard’s animalistic gnawing that brings us to Sir Gowther, who literally “gnofe” like a dog, and with the dogs:
Ther come a spanyell with a bon,
In his mothe he hit bare,
Syr Gwother hit fro hym droghhe,
And gredely on hit he gnofe
The pope, in Sir Gowther, demands that the semi-monstrous knight eats only food from the mouths of dogs – in a sense, he is organizing Gowther’s eating along the lines that would seem to suit him best, a penance that excludes from the medieval aristocratic table. Gowther’s hosts, in this “far cuntre”, are also instrumental in organizing a certain kind of table manners of their own, so that he can be integrated into their banquet hall – their ‘conditional hospitality’ requires the stranger to be tamed, and to adopt what King Richard would probably call “the maner off my house”. The violence of the steward against Gowther – he attempts to beat him with a stick, like a dog – enacts the authority by which host must secure himself as host. As Jeffrey Cohen notes in his analysis of the romance, Gowther’s body “is completely closed from social intercourse: his food prechewed, his mouth an organ that receives and ingests rather than reacts and interacts”. My argument here, following on from though also digressing from Cohen, is that it is the disciplining of Gowther’s oral sadism (and the disciplining of his eating) that is key to his incorporation into the social order. Gowther’s mouth, in Jeffrey Cohen’s analysis, is passive – it “receives and ingests” – when he is amongst the dogs, and this particular moment in the romance should be compared with the orally aggressive infant Gowther of earlier. The violence of the infant who “wax breme and brathe” is crystallized in his treatment of his wet nurses that the Duke sends for:
And aftur melche wemen he sende,
Tho best in that cuntré,
That was full gud knyghttys wyffys.
He sowkyd hom so thei lost ther lyvys,
Sone had he sleyne three! [ll.110-114]
Gowther eventually suckles twelve wet nurses to death. In much the same way that Richard eats faster than a Knight can provide for, baby Gowther suckles beyond the physical limits of the human body – he is, quite literally, insatiable. Whilst Richard at least waits for his meat to be carved, the infant Gowther decides to take matters into his own hands (or mouth), when he tears his mother’s nipple away whilst feeding:
His modur fell afowle unhappe,
Upon a day bad hym tho pappe,
He snaffulld to hit soo
He rofe tho hed fro tho brest [ll.127-130]
There is something potentially infernal about Gowther’s eating, just as there is about Richard’s – his mother first “cald a prest” when he attempted to dismember her. We should not forget, of course, that Richard’s taste for raw meat also leads to him to be referred to as a “deull”. In Cohen’s analysis, Gowther’s mouth is deprived of its potentially destructive agency, his “prechewed” food representing a domestication of its violent impulses. Indeed, the “flesch full gud” that Gowther receives from the mouth of one of the greyhounds later in the romance is a more mediated version of his taste for raw meat that he pursues with his mother’s breast – appetite, it seems, is ok, but only if it can be disciplined correctly. Melanie Klein, one of the key theorists of oral sadism, writes in her paper Love, Guilt and Reparation that “when a baby feels frustrated at the breast, in his phantasies he attacks this breast…he wishes to bite up and tear up his mother and her breasts”, and her developmental story can perhaps shed some light on this peculiarly medieval one. The Eucharistic dimension of this scene – the maiden washes the dogs’ mouths with wine before one passes bread to Gowther – is certainly an attempt to integrate Gowther into a socially acceptable fantasy of oral incorporation. Klein’s notion of introjection, in which the baby unconsciously takes into its psyche the mother’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’ breasts is itself a form of incorporation that mediates the early aggressive phantasies “of a definitely cannibalistic nature” – in short, the baby finds a way to incorporate an object without physically annihilating it. In Sir Gowther, and indeed, in the middle ages, the situation is perhaps slightly different – Gowther does not just fantasise about eating his mother’s breast, but actually does it, and the Eucharist is literally consuming the body of Christ. The function of the Eucharist though, similarly to Klein’s notion of ‘making reparation’, is spiritually and psychically restorative, and Gowther’s religious penance at the hands of the pope, his guilt (“his hert ful sare”), and his “mony odur meracullus” are in much the same register as Klein’s penitent baby:
“If the baby has, in his aggressive phantasies, injured his mother by biting and tearing her up, he may soon build up phantasies that he is putting the bits together again and repairing her”
We do not have to look very hard in Sir Gowther to see that his miracles are precisely those that restore the body to its wholeness and correct the damaged parts. Perhaps the romance of Sir Gowther is articulating a developmental story of its own about what has to happen with the oral sadism of little boys, and the difficulties in integrating their appetites into something socially useful, and presents the institutions of the church and the family as a potential solution to this problem of aggressivity:
For he garus tho blynd to see
And tho dompe to speyke, pardé,
And makus tho crokyd ryght,
And gyffus to tho mad hor wytte
The priest that his mother calls for earlier on is answered it seems, by the figure of the pope – “his first gesture of submission” Cohen notes, when Gowther kneels before him – and his organization of Gowther’s oral excess. We can nuance Cohen’s analysis further – “Gowther’s body receives a ‘domesticating’…imprint” – by suggesting that the form of this domestication, and the precise part of his body that it focuses on, is his mouth. Gowther’s reconciliation and reparation towards the end of the romance is marked by a “mangeyre”, a ‘wedding feast’, a situation that indicates a kind of developmental achievement, that he has been returned to the ‘civilized’ banqueting table, and can eat with a woman without eating a woman. The daughter’s newfound voice sanctions Gowther to “Eyte and drynke and make mery.” Cohen’s analysis of Gowther’s white armour also suggests that his aggressive oral impulses have been sublimated and socialized fully into a ‘correct’ form – killing Saracens: “Gowther is as white as the alimental milk that he drained from his wetnurses along with their lives; only no trace of the monster now remains”. Perhaps the alimentary logic of Sir Gowther is about restructuring this monstrosity and shares a similar anxiety, though a particularly medieval one, to the Kleinian baby:
…The unconscious fear of being incapable of loving others sufficiently or truly, and particularly of not being able to master aggressive impulses toward others: they dread being a danger to the loved one.
In Richard, eating together can turn into eating each other, where there is an ever-present threat of taking recourse to animality. King Richard’s poor table manners assert an unruliness that belies and disrupts the disciplining of the body that is entailed in becoming male in the middle ages. Sir Gowther, on the other hand, is precisely a developmental story that culminates with successful integration, a picture of precisely how this disciplining of the oral operates in knightly culture. Richard and Sir Gowther are certainly at different stages on the same trajectory – whilst Gowther is domesticated, his oral sadism tamed, King Richard represents the experienced obscene cynicism that undermines these disciplinary mechanisms – the Eucharist, the dinner table – that socialize Gowther in the first place, and highlights the instability of such systems. In a powerful sense, Richard’s obscenity undermines the possibility of making reparation that the narrative in Sir Gowther hopes for.
Bibliography
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Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Furnivall, Frederick James, ed. The babees book, Aristotle's A B C, Urbanitatis, Stans puer ad mensam, etc. London: The Early English Text Society, 1868.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, ed. Becoming Male in the Middle Ages. London: Routledge, 1999.
Klein, Melanie. Love, Guilt and Reparation and other works 1921-1945. New York: The Free Press, 1984.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Origin of Table Manners. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Malory, Thomas. Complete Works. Ed. Euguene Vinaver. 2nd Edition. Oxford University Press, n.d.
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trans., Edith Rickert and L.J. Naylor. The Babees Book: Medieval Manners for the Young. Cambridge: In Parentheses Publications Middle English Series, 2000.
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9) York - the city of York is a beautiful place to live, and a wonderful place to study. I feel really quite privileged (sap that I am) to have been able to be here for four years. The city really is beautiful and, coming from Essex, where the vast majority of towns and cities are the victims of post-war development and expansion, I will miss the city greatly. I don't think, on a medievalists' blog, I really need to extol the virtue of the city, but suffice it to say, if you've yet to visit, you really should.
