Tag: Middle English

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Chaucer’s Hidden Iberian Influence

Scholars have long investigated the French, Italian, and English influences on the work of Geoffrey Chaucer. However, they have largely neglected the impact of authors and texts from the Iberian Peninsula.

There are several routes by which Chaucer could have been exposed to Iberian sources. First of all, he may have come into direct contact with Spanish and Catalan texts during his time in the Iberian Peninsula. In 1366, Chaucer travelled to Castile, receiving a safe conduct from the king of Navarre en route, and he may have been in the Iberian Peninsula for over a year. Some scholars have even hypothesized that Chaucer was at the battle of Nájera on April 3, 1367, with his future companions Thomas Percy, William Beachamp, John Devereaux, and Guichard d’Angle.

Chaucer could also have encountered Spanish texts through his connection to John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster and one of his principal patrons. In 1372, John of Gaunt married Constance, the oldest surviving child of Pedro I of Castile. This marriage allowed the duke to claim the throne of Castile in the name of his wife following her father’s overthrow and death. It also led to his palace at the Savoy becoming a type of Castilian court in exile. Given his relationship with John of Gaunt, as well as his wife’s position as one of Constance’s attendants from 1372-1387, it is likely that Chaucer would have come into contact with Castilian exiles while visiting the Savoy. Although John of Gaunt was ultimately unsuccessful in gaining a crown for himself, he did arrange for one of his daughters, Philippa, to become queen of Portugal, and another, Catherine, to become queen of Castile.

Chaucer’s interest in the Iberian Peninsula is clear throughout his work. Chaucer mentions “Spain,” or things Spanish in ten of the stories of the Canterbury Tales (Yeager 194-195). Chaucer also mentions Petrus Alfonsi in the Tale of Melibee, and he provides a detailed account of Pedro I’s death in the Monk’s Tale.

The mention of Alfonsi is particularly evocative because it suggests one possible area of Iberian influence. In the early twelfth century, Alfonsi wrote the Disciplina Clericalis, which was the first instance of a frametale – a popular literary structure in Arabic and Middle Eastern literature that embeds various discrete stories within a larger framing device – being composed in Latin (Wacks 25). Around a century and a half later, Alfonso X had the Arabic frametale Kalila wa-Dimna translated into the Castilian Calila e Digna. In the following decades, the frametale became a popular vernacular literary structure in the Iberian Peninsula. For instance, Ramon Llull, Don Juan Manuel, and Juan Ruiz all composed frametales in the early fourteenth century. This development in the Iberian Peninsula may have had an important, although indirect, influence on the composition of Chaucer’s own frametale, the Canterbury Tales.

Some scholars have also argued for a more direct influence. John Barker, for instance, argues that the many textual similarities between the Libro de Buen Amor and Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale could not have been accidental (609). Although he admits that both texts could have used the same source, Pope Innocent III’s De contemptu mundi sivi de miseria condicionis humane, Barker claims that the shared details in both texts – such as drunkenness, taverns, and gambling – suggests that the Libro de Buen Amor was the immediate source for the Pardoner’s Tale (610).

Another scholar, Thomas Garbáty, argues that Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato was not the only source for Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (459). Instead, he posits that Chaucer was also influenced by the twelfth-century Pamphilus de Amore and the Libro de Buen Amor. In addition to being a re-telling of the story from the Pamphilus, Garbáty claims that Chaucer’s Criseyde bears a strong resemblance to Juan Ruiz’s Doña Endrina, that Pandarus matches the traditional stereotype of a Spanish “trotaconventos” (a Spanish term for a go-between), and that Boccaccio’s Troilio was far too bold to have been the inspiration for Chaucer’s Troilus (468-469).

Additionally, Eugenio Olivares Merino has shown that Chaucer may have based his account of Pedro I’s death in the Monk’s Tale on Pero López de Ayala’s history of the king (492). In particular, the second stanza includes a clear criticism of Bertrand du Guesclin, which is included by López de Ayala but not found in contemporary accounts of the event composed in French, Catalan, or Latin.

One final area where Iberian influence may be seen in Chaucer’s work is in his figure of the Pardoner. Among the reasons that the Pardoner is such a fascinating character is that he is a religious figure who is open and unrepentant about his own misdeeds. Although anticlerical literature was fairly common in the Middle Ages, it is difficult to think of another religious narrator who presents himself in such a negative way, except for one: Juan Ruiz’s pseudo-autobiographical narrator of the Libro de Buen Amor, the Archpriest of Hita.

Chaucer was not only influenced by French, Italian, and English texts, but also by works coming out of the unique political and cultural milieu of medieval Iberia. One of the most important Iberian contributions was the development and transmission of the frametale literary structure to Europe, first in Latin translations, and eventually in original vernacular compositions. In addition to this indirect influence, however, there are strong arguments suggesting that Chaucer was exposed to and directly influenced by specific Iberian authors and texts, although further study is needed.

Bretton Rodriguez, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Humanities
Boğaziçi University

 

WORKS CITED

Barker, John. “Influencia de la literatura española en la literatura inglesa.” Revista de cultura y vida universitaria 23.4 (1946): 593-610.

Garbáty, Thomas. “The Pamphilus Tradition in Ruiz and Chaucer.” Philological Quarterly 46 (1967): 457-470.

Olivares Merino, Eugenio. “Juan Ruiz’s Influence on Chaucer Revisited: A Survey.” Neophilogus 88 (2004): 145-161.

Wacks, David. Framing Iberia: Maqamat and Frametale Narratives in Medieval Spain. Brill: Leiden. 2007.

Yeager, R.F. “Chaucer Translates the Matter of Spain.” In England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th-15th Century: Cultural, Literary, and Political Exchanges. Edited by María Bullón-Fernandez. Palgrave Macmillan: New York (2007): 189-215.

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In Defense of Chaucer’s Astrolabe

Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe has not, historically, won the hearts of many academics—much less the hearts of undergraduates making their first forays into medieval literature. The text is a manual supposedly meant to explain the construction and use of the astronomical tool known as the astrolabe. Most interest in Chaucer’s Astrolabe has focused on its preface, where the author professes to write for his ten-year-old son “Lyte Lowys” (“little Lewis,” l. 1) but also speaks to a much more highly educated audience. In this preface, Chaucer makes claims about medieval education, science, and languages that help us piece together a medieval worldview. Few have ventured beyond these opening lines, however, to understand the mechanics of the astrolabe itself. The task is well worth the effort—Chaucer’s Astrolabe, for all of its technicality, can help us understand the role of science in more traditionally “literary” works like The Canterbury Tales.

The “Chaucer” Astrolabe, England, c. 1326 © The British Museum
The “Chaucer” Astrolabe, England, c. 1326 © The British Museum

The medieval astrolabe was used by teachers, students, travelers, and astrologers to locate themselves in time and space. The legendary (but likely spurious) story goes that Ptolemy’s camel stepped on his celestial globe and, seeing it flattened on the ground, the Greco-Egyptian polymath was struck with the idea that the celestial sphere could be mapped in two-dimensional terms (Hayton 4). In actuality, the astrolabe developed gradually over the course of centuries—it is a testament to the mixture of ancient Greek, Jewish, and Islamic thought that created the intricate texture of medieval Western science. The astrolabe made particular strides under the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, for instance, where it was used to schedule Islam’s five daily prayers. Using geometric principles, it can calculate the time, the date, the position of the sun, and the spread of constellations that the user can expect to see on any given night.

The last of these functions, I like to think, contributed to the intricate sequence of astrological references that threads through The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer frequently matches up a point in time he mentions in his text with the location of the corresponding zodiac sign. The most famous example comes in the initial lines of the Tales’ “General Prologue”: “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote/ The droghte of March hath perced to the roote” (“At the time that April’s sweet showers have pierced March’s drought to the root,” l. 1-2). Chaucer gives us the approximate date, and follows up soon after with the time of day and the corresponding sign: “and the yonge sonne/ Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne” (“and the young sun has traveled halfway through the Ram [that is, Aries],” l. 7-8). One can imagine Chaucer using his astrolabe to map out the astrological scenes that matched up with the settings of his text.

The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, MS. Rawl. D. 913, fol. 29r
The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, MS. Rawl. D. 913, fol. 29r

The surviving manuscripts of Chaucer’s Astrolabe show that its early readers experienced it alongside not only scientific texts by astronomers like Abu’Mashar, but also intermingled with poems like the popular French Romance of the Rose—the Astrolabe therefore challenges us to reconsider the divide between the “literary” and the “technical.” In a future post, I will walk step-by-step through my students’ saga to build and use astrolabes this semester. In the meantime, suffice it to say that the experience helps the modern reader to imagine medieval texts within the spatial, visual, and cosmological terms with which their initial audiences would have understood them.

My thanks to Amanda Bohne and Juliette Vuille for their stellar insights and advice.

Erica Machulak
PhD in English
University of Notre Dame
Founder of Hikma Strategies

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry D. Benson. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Curry, Walter Clyde. Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences. New York: Oxford University Press, 1926.

Hayton, Darin. An Introduction to the Astrolabe. © 2012

Lindberg, David. The Beginnings of Western Science. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

North, J.D. Chaucer’s Universe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

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Reading the Z-text of Piers Plowman

Answering the who, what, where, when, and why of a medieval manuscript can be like trying to solve a who-done-it without that convenient answer key supplied by the author. Imagine then, that the same who-done-it exists in fragments. Such is the case of the 14th century work Piers Plowman, composed by William Langland in several successive stages and extant in not one, not two, not three, but four versions which vary significantly in length and sometimes content: the A-, B-, C-, and Z-texts. Scholars have been debating the relation between the first three versions of the text for well over a century, and with the discovery of the Z-text in the 1980s the conversation became even more complex.  The Z- text is of greatly contested authorship and complicates our understanding of Piers Plowman as a radical, reform-minded text.

British Library, Harley MS 2376, f.1r; England, 1st half of the 15th century. Opening page to William Langland’s C-text of Piers Plowman, the final revision of this work.

The A-, B-, and C- texts (c. 1370, 1378-9, and 1386 respectively) are widely regarded as the work of a single author, William Langland, who appears as the main character Will in the text. Will falls asleep in the Malvern Hills, lulled by the sweet trickle of a nearby stream, and enters the world of Christian allegory. As the work unfolds, we can see Langland’s deep concern for the state of Christianity and the corruption which could destroy its true tenets. Many scholars view Piers Plowman as a work highly appealing to the followers of John Wyclif, an Oxford philosopher and theologian who called for Church reform, arguing against what he regarded as the worldliness of the medieval Church and notably denying the doctrine of transubstantiation as his views progressed; Wyclif also argued for lay access to vernacular scripture, condemned the papacy and the Church hierarchy (particularly monasticism), and denied the validity of the cult of the saints.  He highly esteemed evangelical poverty and criticized the Church’s failure to adhere to this ideal. In Piers Plowman, William Langland displays a great concern for the plight of poor, hard-working Christians who often suffer because of the opulence and corruption of the higher classes of aristocrats and clerics.

Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.14 fol. 1v; 14th century; image of ploughing from William Langland’s Piers Plowman.  Unlike most contemporary images of peasants which portrayed their subjects as grotesque, the faces and disposition of these are pleasant and wholesome.

 Within the Z-text of Piers Plowman, found in MS Bodley 851, we can find an inscription which identifies the manuscript as the property of Brother John Wells, a Monk of Ramsey. We have a likely candidate for the identity of this John Wells, namely, an Oxford scholar and opponent of Wyclif. To add another layer of intrigue, Wells is also the satirized subject of a pro-Wycliffite macaronic verse published on a broadside in 1382 which appears to refer to Piers Plowman (see Kerby-Fulton, “Confronting the Poet-Scribe Binary,” 498-499).  What is an active opponent of Wyclif doing with a manuscript of Piers Plowman included in his personal anthology?

MS Bodleian 851, fol. 124r; England, 15th century. This image is from the sole manuscript of the Z- text.

In fact, recent scholarship has pointed to the author of the Z-text as an enthusiastic imitator of Langland rather than Langland himself. Significantly, the Z-text contains several passages portraying very orthodox views on the sacraments which are less prominent in other versions of Piers Plowman. For example, in a very orthodox move, the Z-text uniquely contains these lines highlighting the importance of the mass and the Eucharist:

[God’s word] maketh the messe ant the masse that men vnderfongeth / For Godus body ant ys blod, buyrnes to saue
(Passus Quintus, ll.37-38).

Lines such as these may point to the creator of the Z-text as one who greatly admired Langland’s work, but who sought to add moments into the text which reinforce the orthodox view of the centrality of sacraments in the medieval church.   Analyzing moments such as these may bring us closer in solving this medieval who-done-it, and I hope to explore this issue in future work.

Maj-Britt Frenze
PhD Candidate
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

Works for Further Reading:

Fuller, Karrie. “The Craft Of The ‘Z-Maker’: Reading The Z Text’s Unique Lines In Context.”    The Yearbook of Langland Studies 27 (2013): 15–43.

Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. “Confronting the Scribe-Poet Binary: The Z Text, Writing Office     Redaction, and the Oxford Reading Circles.” In New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honor of Derek Pearsall, edited by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, John J. Thompson, and Sarah Baechle, 489–515. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014.

Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. “Piers Plowman.” In The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, edited by David Wallace. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Rigg, A.G. and Charlottes Brewer, Ed. Piers Plowman: The Z Version. Toronto: PIMS, 1983.