“Fawty and Falce”: Sin, Sanctity, and the Heroics of Devotion in Late-Medieval English Literature

274 Pages·2016·1.623 MB·English

by  Benjamin Daniel Utter

“Fawty and Falce”: Sin, Sanctity, and the Heroics of Devotion
in Late-Medieval English Literature

A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
BY

Benjamin Daniel Utter

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Rebecca Krug, Advisor

APRIL, 2016
© Benjamin D. Utter, 2016
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Acknowledgements
“Youre bounte may no man prayse halff unto the valew”
-Morte Darthur, I.ii.64

I must say that I have been hampered somewhat in my ability to
commiserate with those fellow academics whose dissertation process experience
was negative, because my own thesis committee has been outstandingly
responsive and supportive. Siobhan Craig, Andrew Scheil, and John Watkins,
models of patientia all, have endured draft after draft of my work and responded
swiftly with encouraging, improving insights. Needless to say, any infelicities,
errata, or outright howlers that persist in the following pages are probably things
they advised me against retaining.
My advisor, Rebecca Krug, has “causyd [me] to lokyn meche good
scriptur and many a good doctor, which [I] wolde not a lokyd at that tyme, had
sche ne be.” More than that, she has humbled me repeatedly with her intellectual
generosity and patience. She has talked me down off the ledge a time or two, but
for the most part her humane groundedness and wicked wit have kept me safely at
street level. How can I thank her enough? She has been a mentor, counselor,
friend, and reliable guide to Dinkytown’s better Chinese restaurants.
Graduate school can feel like an endless journey. What luck, then, to have
found myself among such endlessly delightful fellow pilgrims in both the MFA
and English PhD programs at the University of Minnesota. Members of MEMRG
and the participants at the Friday Writing Workshops helped me flesh out my
ideas, as did members of the Rivendell Discussion Group, and the BABEL
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Working Group. BABEL’s conferences and causes continually renew my
gladness that I am part of the community of medievalists.
The University of Minnesota’s Center for Medieval Studies provided a
nexus in which my obsessions converged with those from other disciplines,
leading to collaborations and friendships. I am especially proud and grateful to
have been able to help bring the visual beauty of medieval art into local
classrooms, thanks to the Center’s community outreach project, Making a
Medieval Book in the K-12 Classroom. Basit Qureshi, Amanda Taylor, and
“Lady” Louise Rogers were my co-consipirators, with help from Sharon
Fischlowitz. I think we did well.
During my time at the university, I taught under the guidance of Eric
Daigre, Tom Clayton, Rebecca Krug, John Watkins, Joe Hughes, and Andrew
Elfenbein. Their intelligence, charisma, and care for students have, I hope, helped
to shape my own pedagogy. My students, too, have been a reliable source of
energy, pleasure, and inspiration (and not only for the chapters concentrating on
sin). Thanks to them, I have been one of the lucky instructors who not only
“teche,” but do so very “gladly” indeed.
I am grateful to the University of Minnesota for provided not only
teaching stipends and travel grants, but also a full year of funding in the form of
the Departmental Dissertation Fellowship. I must also acknowledge Karen
Frederickson: English department secretary, curator of lore, and guardian of
procedural esoterica. Without her calm assistance to my helpless queries at nearly
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every stage of my coursework and doctoral candidacy . . . well, it doesn’t bear
thinking on.
My parents read to me early and often, so that hearing stories came to feel
like being loved. Thanks to a series of extraordinary and caring English teachers
and professors, this association did not subside, and it seems fitting to offer here
my affection and thanks to Julia Thompson, Janice Bremer, Janice Rhodes, Jerrie
Sears, Paula Levine, Dr. Jay Curlin, Dr. Tom Greer, Drs. Amy and Doug
Sonheim, Drs. Susan and Johnny Wink, Dr. Gail Sigal, and, crucially, Dr. Gillian
Overing, in whose Beowulf class I finally realized that I had been a medievalist all
along.
I have benefitted also from the examples and encouragement of numerous
learned aunts and uncles, whose models of diligent and ethical dedication to the
life of the mind, pedagogy, and intellectual service have taken numerous
admirable forms. I cannot overstate my appreciation for the loving support in
particular of Dr. Penny Giesbrecht, Drs. Ruth and Tarris Rosell, and Drs. Linda
and David Keller, who taught me at an early age—after I disgraced myself by
using their copy of Fellowship of the Ring as a convenient projectile, hitting my
little brother squarely in the head—that “books are our friends, and should be
treated well!” Presumably something was said about the care of one’s siblings,
too, but in any case, my brothers Joseph and Andrew have shown great care for
me and the work that I do. So too have my wonderful cousins (near-siblings, all),
and the rest of my extended family members and in-laws. I would add to this list
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of family the congregation and choir members of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in
St. Paul, the board members of Operation Dignity International, the community of
neighbors on Hague Ave., and the members and friends of Team Monicle
Multisport. All of these have abided with looks of admirably convincing interest
any number of my enthusiastic rhapsodies about various saints, poems, and
scholarly skirmishes. And my daughter, Serena, who brings me the most joy, has
borne without complaint the air of faint distraction I’ve worn for too much of the
time that she has known me.
I dedicate this project to my wife, Brandy Lee, who has shown astonishing
restraint in never once remarking that a dissertation focused on imperfection
ought not have taken nearly so long from one with as much direct experience of it
as she knows me to have. She is, to borrow Malory’s words, “the moste valyaunte
and fayryst that I know lyvyng, or yet that ever I coude fynde.”
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Abstract
This project makes the case for the narrative usefulness and importance of
imperfection, by exploring the relationship between saints and heroes in late
medieval English writing. It is easy to find examples of saints who are heroes (St.
George slaying the dragon) and of heroes who become saints (Malory’s Lancelot
dies with sweet smells emanating from his corpse, a sign of sanctity). But my
project looks behind simple narrative and character function to address a deeper
issue: what kind of hero/saint (or saint/hero) emerges from the later Middle Ages'
pervasive skepticism about human perfectibility? Given that every medieval
Christian was expected to grapple with knowledge of eternal accountability for sin,
what are the limits of individual “greatness” and how are the saintly heroic and
heroically saintly intertwined? My dissertation moves from knightly chivalry in the
courtly romances Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur, to the daringly nonconformist spirituality of a laywoman in The Book of
Margery Kempe, to the feats of the folk anti-hero Robin Hood, celebrated in
popular ballads, in order to trace the ways in which the heroic interpenetrates
literary and religious writing. I argue that the late medieval heroic is characterized
simultaneously by unity and rupture: it strives toward transcendent wholeness yet
derives its vitality from a sense of fragmentation and frailty.
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Table of Contents
Introduction ……………………………………………….………..…... 1

Chapter 1 Obdurate Penance, Davidic Parallels, and the Problem of Sin
in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ……...…….………...... 20

Chapter 2 “mech tribulacyon for cawse of hys wrytyng”: Saint Paul and
the Apostolic Mission of Margery Kempe …………........….75

Chapter 3 Hallowed but Hollow: Perfection and the Aesthetics of Heroism
in Malory’s Galahad ………………………........................ 126

Chapter 4 “Thys ys bot ryght weke gere”: Dismas, Devotion, and Desperation
in the Early Robin Hood Ballads …………………………… 185

Conclusion ……………………………………………………….……. 248
Works Cited …………………………………………………………... 255
Utter 1

INTRODUCTION

“scriptum est sancti eritis quia ego sanctus sum.”
-1 Peter 1.16

“There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.”
-Leonard Cohen, “Anthem.”

In the popular Middle English romance Richard Coer de Lyon, King Richard wears his
crusader cross as a totem “intended to offer protection against both creditors and
assailants as [he and his knights] seek vengeance against God’s enemies in the Holy
Land.”1 This is a boisterously superlative hero, one who, the poet assures us, “nevere was
founde coward!” (4). Richard is, in short, a winner. He triumphs at an exchange of blows,
overpowers a lion with his bare hands and, once he has “prest out al the blood” (1106),
proceeds to devour its heart. He even maintains his vigor by feasting (at first unwittingly
but then unremorsefully) on the flesh of a defeated Saracen. The poem is a celebration of
these victories, as well as his capture of Acre and massacre of Muslim prisoners, all
performed in the service of and empowered by the cross he wears.
It is in response to poems such as these, which achieve what John Finlayson calls
the now “unmodish . . . blending of heroic action with militant, Christian, nationalism,”2
that the anti-hero has loomed large in recent studies of the medieval heroic ideal, to such
an extent that it has produced a reactionary lamentation at the decline in the status of and
interest in the hero qua hero, the “protector,” in the earliest sense of heros (ἥρω-ς), who
commands attention chiefly for his (almost invariably his) greatness, rather than for his

1 Peter Larkin, Richard Coer de Lyon, TEAMS Middle English Text Series (Medieval Institute
Publications, Western Michigan University, 2015), http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/larkin-
richard-coer-de-lyon Introduction. .
2 John Finlayson, “‘Richard Coer de Lion’: Romance, History, or Something in Between?,” Studies in
Philology 87 (1990): 180; qtd. in Larkin, Richard Coer de Lyon.
Utter 2

faults.3 But this scholarly interest in auditing the heroic ideal for its deficiencies,
constitutive of an ongoing effort to devalue the long-unchallenged merits of imperial and
patriarchal power, both predicated largely on masculine violence,4 has not yet taken full
account of the ways in which the anti-heroic reinforces the heroisms depicted in medieval
literature. The four “case studies” presented in my dissertation demonstrate that weakness
and error, far from limiting heroism, are in fact necessary conditions of late-medieval
Christian heroes, and, not incidentally, of the exemplars which these admirable figures
themselves either overtly admired or by which their literary depictions were more subtly
informed.
This project’s concerns are theology and stories, and the interplay between them
as they inform and reflect one another in the literature of late-medieval England. Jim
Rhodes writes, “If vernacular theology transformed fourteenth-century English society,

3 See, for example: Gloria Cigman, “The Medieval Self as Anti-Hero,” in Heroes and Heroines in Medieval
English Literature, ed. Leo Carruthers (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994), 161–70; More recently, this
collection of essays aims to call attention to how “morally ambiguous, antisocial or even downright
sinister” the protagonists of medieval romance can be. Neil Cartlidge, ed., Heroes and Anti-Heroes in
Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012), 1; Even before the publication of Cartlidge’s
collection, Robin Waugh and James Weldon had identified “antiheroism, both as a critical attitude and as a
preference for a type of protagonist,” as among the factors responsible for the “loss of status and a
generally unfavorable climate of reception for the warrior hero.” Waugh, Robin and James Weldon, ed.,
The Hero Recovered: Essays on Medieval Heroism in Honor of George Clark (Kalamazoo: Medieval
Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2010), 2.
4 Medieval studies first took up the question of the relationship between masculine identity and various
forms of violence, aggression, and domination, both of women and of other men, in an influential trio of
collections: Clare A. Lees, Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Dawn M. Hadley, ed., Masculinity in Medieval Europe (London:
Longman, 1999); and Jacqueline Murray, ed., Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the
Medieval West (New York & London: Garland, 1999); Not just literary scholars, but also medieval
historians looked to a variety of written sources, including popular romances, to try to assess how
competition and combat structured the pattern of masculine identity not only for knights, but also, as Ruth
Karras shows, for scholars and merchants. Ruth Mazzo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of
Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); For a notable
exception to these approaches, see Derek Neal’s attempt to decentralize violence from medieval
masculinity and show the inadequacy of “patriarchy” as an explanatory concept by arguing for a much
more nuanced medieval masculine self, one in which domestic and social virtues were of more normative
importance than concepts like martial courage and chivalry. Derek G. Neal, The Masculine Self in Late
Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).