The Gawain-Poet and the Fourteenth-Century English Anticlerical Tradition

255 Pages·2022·1.644 MB·English

by  Ethan Campbell

Th e Gawain-Poet and the
Fourteenth-Century English Anticlerical Tradition
RESEARCH IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE
Medieval Institute Publications is a program of
Th e Medieval Institute, College of Arts and Sciences
WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY
Th e Gawain-Poet and the
Fourteenth-Century English Anticlerical Tradition
by
Ethan Campbell
Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture
MEDIEVAL INSTITUTE PUBLICATIONS
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo
Copyright © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of Western Michigan University
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
are available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 9781580443074
eISBN 9781580443081
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no
part of this book may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and
the author of the book.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Th e Sullied Sacrament 1
Th e Textual Environment of Fourteenth-Century English 33
Anticlericalism
Th e Anticlerical Poetics of Cleanness 91
Th e Reluctant Priest of Patience 149
Th e Late-Arriving Priest of Pearl 193
Th e Devilish Priest of Sir Gawain 207
Works Cited 223
General Index 233
Index of Bible Passages 237
“Th is page intentionally left blank”
Preface and Acknowledgments
SHORTLY AFTER OUR COLLEGE graduation, my sister and I
received a memorable gift from our father: a handwritten journal in
which he responded to various questions about his life and told stories
about his childhood in rural Nebraska, many of which we had never
heard before. To the question of when and where he had been baptized,
he wrote:
I was baptized when I was 18 years old, aft er I graduated from high
school. Th e baptism service was held at the Calamus River, on the
ranch operated by Guy and Mary Boller. Th e minister was Rev.
L—… Th e last time I knew, the Rev. L— was in prison for sexual
assault. I’m not sure—maybe my baptism doesn’t count!
Th is minister, it turned out, was a pedophile who had victimized young
girls in the church for many years before being caught. My father’s feelings
of betrayal were clearly still fresh decades later, as a man he’d once viewed
as a spiritual mentor had secretly lived a double life as a sexual predator.
But what most caught my eye in his description was its half-serious theolo-
gical question at the end. Is it possible, my father seemed to be asking, that
a baptism performed by such a man might not “count”? In other words,
can a pastor or priest who performs religious rituals as part of his offi ce
commit a sin so grave that those rituals become invalid? To phrase the
question more broadly, does the eff ectiveness of a sacrament rely upon the
virtues of the man performing it, or can the power of the offi ce or the ins-
titution overcome the failures of the man?
What seems especially striking in my father’s case is that the institu-
tion in question was the Church of the Nazarene, a relatively “low-church”
evangelical Protestant denomination with roots in the Wesleyan holiness
movements of the nineteenth century. Worship services in this denomina-
tion do not follow a set liturgical format, and members tend not to hold a
“strong” view of the sacraments, viewing baptism, for example, as primarily
viii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
a public commitment ceremony undertaken by adults and Communion as
a commemorative celebration. My father was planting his tongue at least
partly in his cheek, therefore, when speculating that any kind of action,
no matter how criminal or immoral, might invalidate what he viewed as a
purely symbolic ritual.
All the same, the fact that an evangelical Protestant could consider,
if only in jest, the possibility that a sacrament might not “count” if the
one performing it were guilty of a grave enough crime provides valuable
insight into the distress many contemporary Roman Catholics felt in the
wake of their church’s sexual abuse scandals in the early 2000s, as drama-
tized in the Academy Award-winning fi lm Spotlight. Th ese were betray-
als and disillusionments on a much grander scale, but also of a somewhat
diff erent kind, since Catholics, in keeping with offi cial church teaching,
tend to have a much stronger view of the sacraments performed by their
priests, particularly the Eucharist. A Catholic priest’s fall from grace, in
other words, means more to his parishioners than simply the loss of a once
trusted spiritual mentor, but represents a failure that could threaten the
practices that sit at the very heart of their faith.
Yet even the sacramental experience of contemporary Catholics is
only a shadow of the reverence medieval Christians paid to their church’s
sacraments, especially the Eucharist. In the early ninth century, the monas-
tic theologians Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus argued that the bread
and wine at the altar transformed into Christ’s literal body and blood at
the moment a priest spoke the words of consecration—the bread and wine
ceased to exist, and their underlying substance became fl esh and blood,
though they still retained the sensory properties (“accidents”) of bread and
wine. Aft er a few hundred years of theological debate on the subject, the
Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, convened by Pope Innocent III, codifi ed
the term “transubstantiation” to describe this miraculous phenomenon.1
By the end of the fourteenth century, the practice of observing the miracle
of bread and wine become Christ’s body and blood in the hands of a priest
had become, as the historian Eamon Duff y puts it, “the high point of lay
experience of the Mass.”2 Actually partaking of the elements, as opposed
to simply watching the priest elevate them over the congregation, was an
even more momentous occasion for most medieval churchgoers, as it typi-
cally occurred only once a year and involved fi rst undergoing the sacra-
ment of penance, a three-step process of confession to a priest followed
by prescribed works of penitential satisfaction, and finally absolution.
Any revelation that the priests who performed these miraculous tasks had
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
engaged in activities medieval Christians believed to be mortal sins could
not fail to be profoundly unsettling.
And yet the priesthood of the Western Christian church by the
late Middle Ages, according to contemporaneous accounts from a huge
range of writers, had become an outrageously corrupt institution. As the
opening chapters of this book illustrate, all categories of clerics in late
fourteenth-century England—parish priests, monks, friars, bishops, and
archbishops, as well as lay offi cers of the church—were subject to vicious
critiques from both parishioners and fellow churchmen, the latter oft en
the most strident. Just a glance at the works of English literature from
this period most oft en encountered by modern-day readers—the poetry
of Geoff rey Chaucer and William Langland—reveals a fi ctional landscape
teeming with lazy, gluttonous, greedy, lustful, even murderous clerics and
church offi cials.
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, to take the most famous example,
depicts a Pardoner who off ers absolution for sins in exchange for fees and
attempts to sell fake religious relics to his fellow pilgrims, a Friar who per-
forms hasty marriages for young women he has impregnated, a fat Monk
who prefers hunting and grooming his horse to praying, and a drunken
Summoner, grotesquely disfi gured by a disease caused by his lechery and,
in his vocation as an offi cer of the ecclesiastical court, exceedingly craven
and corrupt. Th e only exemplary fi gure among Chaucer’s rogue’s gallery
of church offi cials is the Parson, a parish priest, yet even he at one point is
accused by another character of heresy.
Langland’s critique, though less well-known to twenty-fi rst-century
readers, casts an even wider net, as he attacks every type of cleric with equal
relish, from absentee benefi ce-holders who refuse to take up posts they
have been assigned, to friars who angle for dishonest donations, to priests
who are too lazy and dim-witted to care about the corruption before their
eyes, represented by a lurid feast in which a friar devours mounds of sump-
tuous food while the allegorical character Clergie looks on. Parish priests
are uneducated, Langland complains, whereas friars are overeducated,
making the simple tenets of religion complex and leading youth astray; all
of them, priests and members of religious orders alike, should be forcibly
dispossessed of all worldly goods, to purge their venomous greed from the
church. Even popes are in danger of hell, he asserts, as they encourage the
practices of simony and pluralism among their fl ock. John Wyclif, perhaps
the most well-known anticlerical critic of the fourteenth century besides
Chaucer, took an even more extreme position—the contemporary papacy