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Women could wield influence over their reputation, their position, and their wealth.
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By Dr. Melissa Ridley Elmes
Associate Professor of English
Lindenwood University
Introduction
Participating what Ivy Schweitzer terms the “affective turn” in feminist studies,1 medieval feminist historians have painstakingly mapped out the existence and theorized the significance of the social networks of secular women for whom historical records exist, including their friendships, kinships, and other various alliances brought about by marriage, childbearing and rearing, fostering, and patronage activities.2 Scholars examining such women’s age practices have demonstrated their influence on books and book-making and, more broadly, on material culture and its social influence throughout the medieval period.3 Bringing these ideas of women’s networks of influence and patronage into conversation with one another, this essay considers how representative late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English authors work-ing beyond the scholastic and religious traditions wrote in a sociohistorical milieu in which a profound cultural shift in women’s visibility and significance was being realized through these avenues.4 The audiences of such authors—namely, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and Sir Thomas Malory—included women who could wield influence over their reputation, their position, and their wealth. Subsequently, these writers needed to ensure that their work found favor with those audiences.5
Where earlier English writers sought to record, preserve, and disseminate a patristic worldview in service of their religion and were supported in this textual program by pious and literate women and men, later medieval authors writing for a secular audience within an ever-expanding cultural system that emphasized social over religious status were concerned with attracting, entertaining, and pleasing patrons. Earlier writers working within a more insular and religiously inflected sociocultural framework for a relatively finite and homogenous readership rarely strayed from a traditionally male-centric worldview, a point attested by the relative scarcity of women’s relationships in the early English literary corpus.6 But late medieval English audiences were more diverse and expected greater variety in their choice of texts; indeed, as Alfred Thomas has shown, this expectation was heightened by the arrival of Richard II’s wife Anne of Bohemia, who came from a tradition of highly educated women renowned for their piety and patronage and whom, per Thomas, Chaucer imagined as his ideal patron and reader.7 Rather than faithful adherence to scholastic traditions, successful writing in this more cosmopolitan climate required the translation and adaptation of texts originally written in Latin or in continental vernacular languages into English, original invention, and circumspection on the part of writers concerning engagement with antagonistic materials like those involved in the ongoing querelle des femmes, or “woman question.”8 I argue that it is in their translations and adaptations that we can locate evidence for greater late medieval English authorial awareness of and attentiveness to their audiences’ sociocultural experiences and interests, in a bid to attract the attention of possible patrons. Whether undertaking translation or adaptation work, or some combination of the two, these writers alter their source texts to revise misogynist language, offer scenes of women’s networks not present in the original versions, and, within those scenes, expressly invent moments of women’s friendship, appealing to the specific experiences of their female readership.
As case studies for this claim, I analyze scenes in which alteration of source materials to privilege women’s friendship has been undertaken in texts by three of the later medieval period’s most well-known English authors: Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, translated and adapted from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Italian Il Filostrato; John Gower’s Albinus and Rosamund, adapted into his Confessio Amantis from Paul the Deacon’s Latin chronicle Historia Langobardorum; and portions of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur derived from his French sources. While all these texts include the classic Aristotelian and Ciceronian ideals of men’s friendship grounded in the scholastic tradition in which these authors were educated,9 the later English translations and adaptations also mediate the earlier texts’ blatant misogyny. Their authors introduce and develop what can best be described in philosophical terms as communally supportive, epicurean friendship networks more in keeping with lived, observed, and recordable experiences of human, and more specifically women’s, relationships than Aristotle’s limited view of friendship as being between men of equal status, or Cicero’s idealized view of friendship as being more than a practical and mutually beneficial relationship.10 Thus, despite remaining steadfastly masculine in their point of view, Chaucer, Gower, and Malory inscribe women’s friendship into their stories, recording a pivotal shift in English literature that stems from the cultural influence of women’s literate activity.
Translation, Adaptation, and Incorporation in Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ and ‘Franklin’s Tale’
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Scholars have struggled to understand Chaucer’s views on women. The tensions that arise between the antifeminist tradition surrounding the Roman de la Rose,11 Chaucer, himself, both participating in the negative representations of women with his Wife of Bath modeled on La Vieille,12 and berating himself for doing so in the Prologue of the Legend of Good Women;13 the portrayals of women as lewd and adulterous figures in some of his Tales14 juxtaposed with the admiring representation of secular women like Griselda15 and saints like Cecilia16 and Virginia,17 and Pertelote’s18 and Prudence’s19 wisdom and support of their respective husbands; his abandonment mid-composition of the Legend of Good Women, ostensibly commissioned by Anne of Bohemia and unfulfilling to him as a male writer;20 and his personal history of alleged sexual assault,21 combine in a literary petri dish that thwarts efforts to view Chaucer either as proto-feminist or misogynist, as a champion of women or a rapist.
At this juncture, with appreciation for these earlier scholarly efforts at understanding Chaucer as a writer of women, I suggest returning to the texts themselves with an eye to where, and how, his inclusion of women’s interactions yields important new insights, particularly where we can definitively claim that the presentation of women is his invention. This is possible for works that we know Chaucer translated and adapted, such as Troilus and Criseyde. While scholars of this text have written at length concerning the friendship between Troilus and Pandarus,22 Criseyde is typically discussed in terms of her friendlessness. However, comparison of Chaucer’s adaptation with Boccaccio’s original reveals that the changes Chaucer makes to his source material both mediate Boccaccio’s misogynistic tone and meaningfully alter the representation of the women surrounding Criseyde and her interactions with them. In Boccaccio’s version, women are presented as ridiculous, annoying, and noisy, the narrator openly mocking them. In Chaucer’s version, women are readily viewable as friends in the epicurean sense—their affiliation based on fellowship with beneficial intent—and their friendship is an important aspect of Criseyde’s development as a sympathetic and psychologically complex character, rather than contributing, as in Boccaccio’s version, to an ongoing program of narrative misogyny. Significantly, Boccaccio’s text is dedicated to an unidentified, likely fictional woman (called Filomena to the narrator’s Filostrato), whereas Chaucer dedicates his to two men, John Gower and Ralph Strode. That Boccaccio’s text is dedicated to a woman yet is unselfconsciously misogynist in tone, while Chaucer’s is dedicated to men, yet diligently modifies that misogynist tone, indicates different audience expectations regarding representations of women.
In Troilus and Criseyde, composed sometime in the mid-1380s, Criseyde, widowed daughter of the prophet Calchas, who foretold the fall of Troy and subsequently fled into exile to avoid being charged with treason, fields suspicion and general ill will in the wake of her father’s fall from favor.23 Criseyde thus appears to be “friendless” according to the narrator’s early description of her—“For bothe a widewe was she and allone / Of any frend to whom she dorste hir mone” (I.97–98)—and this line is Chaucerian, rather than stem-ming from his Boccaccian source, a point critics have discussed in making the claim that Chaucer paints her as friendless.24 However, I suggest that this line has been misconstrued; it is not that Criseyde is wholly friendless but rather that she has no family members to advocate for her and also no friends to whom she can reveal her fears or express her emotions so that they are understood.25 She certainly has women she knows from many years’ acquaintance, who engage her in conversation and activities to pass the time and distract her from her troubles; what this line signifies is that she does not find among them someone to whom she dares open up entirely about her feelings, given the emotional environment of the city and general suspicion surrounding her father’s recent actions. That she does not spill forth her innermost fears and desires to others is not automatically evidence of a friendless state, as the model of epicurean friendship alerts us. In the medieval era as today, the notion that only people to whom one’s innermost soul can be bared count as real friends was recognized as an idealized view of friendship, and as Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo points out, “in different types of sources produced in Western Europe throughout the medieval period, the lexicon of friendship defined a wide and varied range of relationships,” among these, friendships based on a shared sense of belonging to a community.26 Criseyde does have this type of relationship—friendship brought about by the circumstances of where one lives and who one has to associate with, what we might term a “friendship of convenience”—with the townswomen (IV.680–735). Further, as evidence from medieval women’s wills demonstrates, widows often enjoyed many significant friendships following their husbands’ deaths.27 Chaucer demonstrates awareness of this type of friendship, utilitarian and pleasurable in the Epicurean rather than idealized in the Ciceronian sense, in his characterization of Criseyde passing her time with other women in the absence of a husband and children.
These women’s misunderstanding of Criseyde’s tears, and Criseyde’s growing tired of their company and wishing they would leave, has been presented as evidence that they are not truly friends, but this interpretation ignores that the narrator outright classifies them as such: “But as men seen in towne and al aboute / That wommen usen frendes to visite, / So to Criseyde of wommen com a route, / For piteous joie, and wenden her delite” (IV.680–83). This explicit use of the term frendes is not found in the source text. In Il Filostrato, this passage appears as “But as we see that it happeneth that one woman goeth to visit another at some new happening, if she bear her affection, thus many came to pass the day with Cressida, all full of piteous joy . . .”28 Significantly as well, Chaucer smooths out the less flattering characterization of these ladies scattered throughout the Filostrato; he retains the description of them as “thilke fooles sittynge hire about” (IV.715) [“these stupid ladies, who encircled her” (70.84)] but omits, for instance, the description of their conversation as “a deal of foolish cackling, such as most women make” (70.86), demonstrating a more even hand in his characterization of women’s conversation among themselves than does Boccaccio.
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That Criseyde is preoccupied and does not want to participate in the small talk does not negate that these women visit her expressly to cheer her up, an act of friendship. In fact, it is their efforts to cheer her up that reduce her to tears, revealing her true emotional state to them: “[. . .] she felte almost hire herte dye / For wo and wery of that compaignie. / For which no lenger myghte she restreyne / Hir teeris, so they gonnen up to welle, / That yaven signes of the bittre penye / In which her spirit was [. . .]” (IV.706–11). When the women see her crying, they misconstrue the reason, believing she is sad to be leaving them. We are told that those who knew her earlier in life respond to her distress in kind: “they that hadde yknowen hire of yore / Seigh hire so wepe and thoughte it kyndeness, / and ech of hem wepte ek for hire distresse” (IV.719–21). Despite their misunderstanding of her tears, the women feel an affective bond with Criseyde—a bond of friendship born over time in their community. They visit her not out of a sense of duty but in fellowship; they give their time and energy over to cheering her up; they weep with her when she is emotionally overwhelmed; and they comfort her by distracting her with small talk, even as they, themselves, feel sorrow in the face of her impending departure. The temptation to read this scene solely in terms of Criseyde’s feelings is great, and certainly we are guided in that direction by the narrative. When we do so, we read this scene as one in which Criseyde is alone in a crowd, isolated and miserable in her lovesickness—and this is true from her perspective at the moment. But stepping back from a central focus on her point of view to consider everyone in the room, we are clearly observing a tableau of female friendship; Criseyde not wanting these women’s company because she is pining for her lover doesn’t erase its presence. In fact, the emotional crux of the scene, and the larger emotional program of the romance, hinges on her continued personal suffering from lovesickness even in the presence of such friendly support.
Alcuin Blamires’s contentions that “Chaucer reveals little interest in projecting women engaging in strong friendships with each other”;29 that there are no “substantial personal alliances between women” in Chaucer’s works;30 and that “Chaucer [. . .] did not much represent women as women’s friends”31 are not technically wrong. However, in Troilus and Criseyde friendship between women is part of the social program of Chaucer’s imagined world and, although it is filtered through his (male) gaze, he turns the same observant eye to it as he does to the rest of the social order. The narrative result of this effort at giving attention to women’s lived experiences is greater emotional impact tied to the women’s relationships with one another. No such effort is present in his source text, indicating that it is important for Chaucer’s audience to see such relationships represented in ways that it was not for Boccaccio’s. Chaucer does not make these crucial changes in how the women interact with one another solely in his adaptation of Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato; he goes on to incorporate such scenes, and with a firmer touch, in later works as well.
In Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, one of the Canterbury Tales penned after Troilus and Criseyde, the relationship between Dorigen and her friends is similar in presentation to that between Criseyde and her friends. When her husband, Arveragus, “shoop hym to goon and dwelle a yeer or tweyne / In Engelond, that cleped was eek Briteyne, / To seke in armes worshipe and honour” (809–11), Dorigen grows heartsore; we are told that “For his absence wepeth she and siketh” and “she moorneth, wayleth, fasteth, pleyneth; / Desir of his presence hire so destreyneth / That al this wyde world she sette at noght” (817–21). Like Criseyde, Dorigen is presented as a woman heartsick over the absence of the man she loves. As with Criseyde, Dorigen’s friends arrive on the scene to support her; however, this time, the friends are on the same page as she, well aware of Dorigen’s situation, her thoughts and feelings, and why she is so distraught:
Hire freendes, which that knewe hir hevy thoght,
822–29
Conforten hire in al that ever they may.
they prechen hire, they telle hire nyght and day
That causelees she sleeth hirself, allas!
And every confort possible in this cas
They doon to hire with al hire bisynesse,
Al for to make hir leve hire hevynesse.
They convince her to go out for walks and seek to distract her (841–44), and, when walking by the seaside serves only to remind her of her woes, they take her to other locations and engage her in various pastimes, intent on helping her overcome her depression and fear that her husband is lost at sea:
Hire freendes sawe that it was no disport
895–900
To romen by the see, but disconfort,
And shopen for to pleyen somwher elles.
They leden hire by ryveres and by welles,
And eek in othere places delitables;
They dauncen and they pleyen at ches and tables.
Ultimately, her friends’ sustained efforts to cheer her up lead Dorigen to Aurelius, resulting in the tale’s strange and amusing happily-ever-after denouement. Without her friends, Dorigen would have languished alone; and typically in medieval literature when a woman in love languishes alone, without some divine intervention she winds up dead, often by her own hand, as is the case with many of the women in Chaucer’s earlier Legend of Good Women.32 Chaucer avoids that deadly conclusion in the Franklin’s Tale by surrounding Dori-gen with friends who bring her solace and force her out of the house and back into the community she would so willingly set aside if left to her own devices.
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Of all of Chaucer’s tales, this is the one that showcases female friendship in its most conventionally recognizable form33—not simply a friendship born of convenience and proximity but one evincing clear and genuine affection for one another—yet scholars have historically neglected that aspect, focus-ing rather on the tale’s “rash promise” motif, its role in the marriage debate, the possible sources of the tale and of the miracle of the vanishing rocks, and Chaucer’s preoccupation (or not) with the ideas of gentillesse and troth.34 It is worth noting that although Decameron 10.5 does feature a scene in which Madonna Dianora, a character potentially analogous to Dorigen, joins other city women walking in a garden,35 none of this tale’s currently known sources or analogues includes a similarly significant relationship between the woman at the center of the story and her friends,36 suggesting either that there is a missing source with such scenes or that Chaucer developed this friendship for the tale. If it is original to Chaucer, then here he is paying more attention to women’s friendships and writing them with more sensitivity to how women’s communities function as systems of potentially life-saving emotional support than in any other of his works. Chaucer has moved from translating Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato with an eye to adapting it for his audiences through the mediation of Boccaccio’s misogyny and the establishment of a clearer sense of friendship between Criseyde and her friends to incorporating female friendship as an essential element in his narrative program. In a literary world where the patronage of their audiences dictated much of what was produced by writers, this evident shift would not have happened without audience approbation. Although Chaucer’s dedicatees for Troilus and Criseyde were men, and we do not know for whom (if anyone) the Canterbury Tales were written, we do know that at least one of his patrons was a woman, that his audiences included women, and that women wielded increasing influence over literature and culture in his time, perhaps leading to this more intentional incorporation of such scenes of women’s experiences of friendship into his writing as an effort to please his readership and attract patrons.
Thus far, I have argued that in translating and adapting Boccaccio’s earlier misogynist text into one demonstrating sympathy for women’s lived experiences and relationships with one another, and then incorporating similar instances of female friendship into his later texts, Chaucer’s writing records a shift in audience expectations of the depiction of women from Boccaccio’s time and place to his own. In what remains of this essay, I turn to the “Tale of Albinus and Rosamund” from John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, a work con-temporary to Chaucer’s writing, and the exchange of letters between queens in Sir Thomas Malory’s later Morte Darthur, to show that this sympathetic alteration of such relationships between women from source texts continues in vernacular writing produced throughout the later Middle English period. Because it is a phenomenon not unique to Chaucer’s writing, it can be viewed as an audience-driven trend in late medieval English literary culture.
Translation, Mediation, and Alteration in John Gower’s “Albinus and Rosamund”
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In Paul the Deacon’s Latin Historia Langobardorum (c. 720–99), which serves as the basis for John Gower’s “Tale of Albinus and Rosemund,” King Alboin is slain through a plot devised by his wife and two male co-conspirators:
After [King Alboin] had ruled in Italy three years and six months, he was slain by the treachery of his wife [. . .] While he sat in merriment at a banquet in Verona [. . .] with the cup which he had made of the head of his father-in-law, Cunimund, he ordered it to be given to the queen to drink wine, and he invited her to drink merrily with her father [. . .] Then [Queen] Rosemund [. . .] burned to avenge the death of her father by the murder of her husband, and she formed a plan with Helmechis who was the king’s squire [. . .] to kill the king, and he persuaded the queen that she ought to admit to this plot Peredeo,37 who was a very strong man. As Peredeo would not give his consent to the queen when she advised so great a crime, she put herself at night in the bed of her dressing maid with whom Peredeo was accustomed to have intercourse, and then Peredeo, coming in ignorance, lay with the queen [. . .] Then he learned the evil thing he had done, and he who had been unwilling of his own accord assented, when forced in such a way, to the murder of the king [. . .] unfortunately alas! This most warlike and very brave man [Alboin] being helpless against his enemy, was slain as if he was one of no account, and he who was most famous in war through the overthrow of so many enemies, perished by the scheme of one little woman.38
This passage, written by a Benedictine monk and from the point of view of the Lombards, a Germanic people occupying the Italian peninsula between the late sixth and eighth centuries, demonstrates the clerical bias against women as dangerous and inherently untrustworthy found in many early medieval religious texts. In this chronicle version of the story, the facts of Alboin’s death are laid out in straightforward fashion, with the author’s bias against Rosemund on full display. While her maid is mentioned in passing, Rosemund is the sole executor of the plot to seduce and coerce Peredeo to aid in her revenge. There is no suggestion that she and her maid collude in this effort.
In his c. 1390 retelling of this story in Book 1 of the Confessio Amantis under the thematic rubric of Pride, John Gower significantly expands the narrative, including extended scenes featuring Rosemund and her maid, now named Glodeside, plotting Rosemund’s revenge against King Albinus together following a more or less faithful translation of the feast scene. These extended scenes present Rosemund approaching “a maide which sche triste / So that non other wyht it wiste.”39 There is no explicit indication that this is Rose-mund’s personal maid and, therefore, a woman specifically beholden to her for her livelihood—this is “a” maid, not necessarily “her” maid—so that, rather than any hierarchic emphasis, the focus is on Rosemund’s trust in this particular maid’s discretion and willingness to help her. For Rosemund to trust this maid enough that she takes her into a plot to kill her husband, the king, their relationship must both be long-term and close. As with Chaucer’s Criseyde and her townswomen, there is the sense that Rosemund and Glodeside have spent a great deal of time in one another’s company and mutually benefited from this relationship enough that Rosemund turns to Glodeside in her hour of need. Glodeside does not disappoint; Gower’s emphasis throughout their scenes together is on their shared goal:
Thei felle in covenant,
ines 2586–90
That thei acorden ate laste,
With suche wiles as thei caste
That thei wol gete of here acord
Som orped knyht to sle this lord
These women work together to accomplish Rosemund’s aims, whereas in Paul the Deacon’s chronicle the maid’s role, if any, in aiding Rosemund is unspecified. Gower preserves the idea that their scheme is based in women’s wiles, but beyond this, he mediates much of the misogynist tone of his source materials. In addition to expanding the amount of narrative space devoted to these women as co-conspirators, Gower conflates the characters of Helmechis and Peredeo into one figure and lessens Rosemund’s guilt by erasing her affair with Helmechis, revising his material to bestow Helmechis’s attentions instead to her maid. Glodeside lures Helmechis—who, the narrator assures us, already loves and desires her: “Glodeside he loveth hote” (2595)—into her bed with promises of sexual satisfaction, gives him her body one night, then contrives for Rosemund to take her place on the second night (2596–604). After Helmechis and Rosemund conclude this tryst, she reveals her identity, telling him he either does her bidding in killing the king or suffers the consequences of having slept with the queen (2611–19).
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Although it is not discussed explicitly, attentive readers are well aware that Helmechis has just (unwittingly) committed an act of high treason and faces death if this act is divulged; however, Glodeside has also committed an act of high treason, as has Rosemund herself. Glodeside and Rosemund are putting their lives on the line to achieve Rosemund’s revenge on her husband the king. Unlike his predecessor’s presentation of the story, which explicitly points to Rosemund as the female wrongdoer in comparison to Alboin’s noble martyrdom at her hands, Gower does not comment on the women’s actions as being treacherous. Rather, his focus throughout is on the sin of Pride: how Albinus’s inability to control his arrogance catalyzes these events, leading to the deaths of himself and, ultimately, of Rosemund and Helmechis. Rosemund, too, acts out of pride—but she also goes to the person she trusts most, and they plot together to achieve her aims. This moment where they agree unhesitatingly to put their lives on the line characterizes them as more than queen and maid; it constitutes an act of true and loyal friendship.
That Gower has intentionally mediated his source materials to emphasize Rosemund’s untenable situation and to mitigate her presentation as the villain in this tale is further underscored at the end of his version, where he emphasizes that Albinus met the fate of a man who is caught up in pride and omits entirely the final statement in Paul the Deacon’s version that Alboin’s fall was the fault of a woman’s scheming. That Gower has intentionally invented this representation of these women’s experience of friendship under duress and the lengths to which they go to help one another in the face of adversity and unfair treatment at the hands of their male counterparts is clear in the absence of any such scene in his source materials. Because versions of the Confessio Amantis were dedicated variously to King Richard II, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Henry of Lancaster,40 this alteration of his source materials to incorporate scenes of women interacting with one another in this way is not at the behest of a female patron. However, Gower must have viewed these alterations not only as acceptable to, but somehow necessary for, the tale’s positive reception by his audience, as their incorporation alters the story but in no way affects the message behind his adaptation of it as a discussion of the sin of masculine pride. Where earlier audiences such as those for whom Paul the Deacon’s works were penned expected women like Rosemund to be depicted as the villain in the stories of men’s downfalls because of their inherent sinfulness and wickedness, Gower’s audiences appear to have expected to see women interacting with one another in meaningful and supportive ways and to be treated with some degree of authorial sympathy, rather than straightforward and unmitigated misogyny. Like Chaucer, Gower understood himself as writing in a time and place where the representation of women’s complex socio-political and public experiences, and of their positive and nurturing personal relationships with one another, mattered to his readership. Such an expectation could arise in a time and place that featured increased visibility of women’s power as audiences and readers via the patronage system, to the extent that even when women were not directly involved in a text’s production themselves, it allowed for women’s influence and, thus, presence to be incorporated into literary works. Turning from Chaucer and Gower in the late fourteenth century to Sir Thomas Malory in the late fifteenth century, these early efforts at the incorporation of women’s experiences to please audiences evolve into an integrated approach to narrative development, with women’s relationships at the heart of the story and essential in successful world-building.
Sir Thomas Malor’s Queens: World-Building with Women
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Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur (completed 1469–70; published 1485) is the culminating medieval text of the Arthurian legend, pulling material from the English chronicles and French romance cycles41 together into a single, rambling narrative featuring Arthur’s various knights and their deeds. It is easy to assign women a secondary place in this narrative, so focused is it on the masculine exploits of its knightly characters; yet, as I have shown elsewhere, women are present in essential ways and participate equally in the “gritty realism” of Malory’s imagined world.42 While women do not typically interact with other women in the Morte Darthur, embedded within the “First Book of Sir Tristram of Lyones” are two short but telling passages featuring direct interaction, albeit from a distance, between two queens, La Beale Isode and Guinevere. Scholars focusing on this interaction do so primarily regarding its role in the depiction of adultery in the Morte Darthur, and, while this is certainly one of the reasons for its inclusion, Isode and Guinevere are more than merely adulterous women sharing and glorying in their illicit conquests.43 The way Malory represents their interactions suggests that they have known one another closely prior to and outside of the events described. Their interactions exhibit the characteristics of a female friendship characterized by scholars elsewhere as homosocial, born of shared social status and a shared female experience of the bad behaviors of beloved male counterparts that we see in, for example, the friendship between Canacee and the falcon in the Squire’s Tale.44 It is also epicurean, in the ways that these queens rely on their affiliations and networks to know one another socially and provide benefit to their communities and mutually aid one another through friendly support, advice, and encouragement.45 Further, Malory demonstrably tones down and omits the misogynist language applied to women and especially to Guinevere in his source materials, focusing instead on the effects of their actions and experiences and on the networks in which they participate. These choices emphasize women’s ultimate effect on the overall narrative rather than dwelling on their sinful wickedness as adulterers.46 In Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, the literary program of translating and developing women’s experiences from incidental or pointed meditations on their inferior and wicked nature into narratively meaningful scenes begun by earlier writers like Chaucer and Gower becomes even more clearly an effort to render visible the impact of women’s relationships within the overarching social program of the imagined world. I view the interactions between Guinevere and Isode, and the way they ripple through the plot to affect the other characters, as evidence of a successful holistic integration of women’s influence into literary invention, so that women’s experiences and relationships become required elements in a believable and culturally resonant narrative.
The first of these interactions occurs directly after Tristram wins his battle with Palomedes for Isode’s love; sending Palomedes into exile, Isode exhorts him to “take thy way [. . .] unto the court of Kynge Arthure, and there recom-maunde me unto Quene Gwenyvere and tell her that I sende her worde that there be within this londe but foure lovers, and that is Sir Launcelot and Dame Gwenyvere, and Sir Trystrames and Quene Isode.”47 Although this message seems to come out of nowhere, it makes no sense that Isode would, having never before met her, suddenly think of Queen Guinevere, decide that her new relationship is on par with the well-known one between Guinevere and Lancelot, and send a strange knight to Arthur’s kingdom to tell Guinevere that this other queen, far away in Cornwall, has determined that their loves are the greatest in the world. Isode requests that Palomedes recommend her to Guinevere, signaling prior acquaintance; the contents of the message are personal, suggesting more than general or passing familiarity. Isode reaches out to Guinevere in good-natured amity, not comparing their situations in some one-upwomanship concerning whose love is greater but conveying that she and Tristram have managed (however temporarily) to overcome their obstacles and come together in love. She is sending her happy news to a friend who she knows will appreciate it. That they have met and gotten to know one another in friendly fashion prior to this moment is not only possible but probable; after all, Isode is the daughter of the Irish king, and Sir Morhault, whom Tristram initially defeated to set into motion the events that have led to this point, was both her uncle and a knight of the Round Table (293.32–302.13). Malory does not make it explicit, but reading between the lines and with an awareness that Malory often drops narrative threads and significantly alters his source materials permits us to understand that Isode and Guinevere have developed a close prior bond.
The second of these queens’ interactions occurs shortly after Tristram has seemingly abandoned Isode by wedding Isode le Blaunche Maynes. Inconsolable, La Beale Isode writes a letter to Guinevere, who responds in kind:
[. . .] in this meane whyle La Beale Isode made a lettir unto Quene Gweny-vere complaynyng her of the untrouthe of Sir Trystrames, and how he had wedded the kynges doughter of Bretayne. So Quene Gwenyvere sente hir another letter and bade her be of good comforte, for she sholde have joy aftir sorow: for Sir Trystrames was so noble a knyght called that by craftes of sorsery ladyes wolde make such noble men to wedde them. “But the ende,” Quene Genyvere seyde, “shulde be thus, that he shall hate her and love you bettir than ever he dud.” (349.7–15)48
As with the message conveyed to Guinevere through Palomedes, it should seem to any critical reader absurd from both a psychological and a legal standpoint to imagine that Isode randomly sends Guinevere this single letter, out of the blue, detailing the failure of her adulterous affair with Tristram—informa-tion that would be viewed by unsympathetic eyes as shameful at best, treasonous at worst. Moreover, the contents of both letters suggest that the queens are familiar with the situation beyond this single discussion. While some scholars might claim an absence of evidence that Isode and Guinevere are friends, this letter and their prior interaction through Isode’s message to Guinevere are clearly part of a larger program of interactions between them that, for whatever reason, has not made it into Malory’s narrative. The nature of their interactions—Isode’s playful initial message, her letter unburdening her bro-ken heart to Guinevere, and Guinevere’s compassionate, comforting response assuring her that obviously, only sorcery could wrest Tristram’s affections from her, the other Isolde is a far lesser woman and lover than she, and it is only a matter of time before Tristram sees that—all exhibit the nature of friendship between women who share their deepest secrets and turn to one another for help and advice. Malory thus presents Guinevere and Isode as friends, however distant from one another geographically, and their friendship is the knot tying the Tristram materials into the larger pattern of networks and affinities developed in the Morte Darthur. While the knights are foregrounded throughout the narrative, these women’s experiences—their social, political, and economic activities, and the friendships they develop through these activities—provide a framework for that narrative. Malory adapts and transforms his source materials to privilege women’s roles in his imagined society, removing misogynist meditations and pointed criticism of women and developing their networks and affinities to showcase their influence in both private and public spheres, and, as Kenneth Hodges has shown, these alterations mirror the observable patronage networks of women in late medieval England.49 Thus mirroring the effects of women’s influence in observed reality, Malory’s world-building in the Morte Darthur reflects the sociocultural milieu in which he is writing, as much as it does his preoccupation with chivalry and treason.
Conclusion
Patronage in all its forms was a powerful force in the medieval era, and where it comes to vernacular literary production, successful writers understood their audiences. Throughout the later medieval period in England, their networks of influence and patronage rendered women both more visible and more visibly influential in their communities. Corresponding with this rise in their visibility and influence, authors began incorporating more, and more meaningful, scenes featuring women’s networks and affinities in their literary works. The evidence for this practice is clearest in texts that have been translated and adapted from other languages and earlier sources wherein women did not feature as prominently or in as positive a light. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Franklin’s Tale offer a case study in how one author adapts a non-English source to mediate misogynist language and include scenes of women’s friendship earlier in his writing career, before more concretely incorporating such scenes as meaningful aspects of the narrative in a later text. As does Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, John Gower’s “Albinus and Rosemund” showcases the circumspection with which authors writing for an audience that included powerful and influential women had to approach translating and adapting source materials that included deeply misogynist and openly critical depictions of women; these writers opted out of the ongoing “women’s question” in favor of quietly integrating sympathetic women’s relationships into their texts to mirror their audiences’ lived experiences and expectations. And Sir Thomas Malory closes the late medieval period in English literature with the Morte Darthur, a text that assumes the centrality of women’s relationships, and especially the friendship of two queens, to be essential in the overarching social program of his world-building. Their friendship is the crux from which ensue the networks and affinities that overlap and, ultimately, converge along the way to that text’s denouement, in literary mimesis of the similar networks and affinities of the powerful women in England’s ruling families.
The female friendships depicted within these later medieval texts adapted from earlier non-English sources demonstrate observable and realistic characteristics resonant with women’s lived experiences; namely, they are all epicurean, emphasizing community and mutually beneficial activity over the more masculine, dyadic friendship privileged in classical and medieval philosophy. These authors shaped their female characters into literary versions of the women in their audiences, emphasizing their influence on one another and within their communities. The ways these authors translate and adapt their source materials to develop more, and more narratively significant, representations of women’s experiences in tandem with a visible increase in women’s influence in the sociocultural milieu in which they were writing offer a means by which we might better—because more clearly and accurately—understand women’s friendship and thus, the representation of women’s culture, in later English medieval vernacular literature.
Endnotes
- Ivy Schweitzer, “Making Equals: Classical Philia and Women’s Friendship,” Feminist Studies 42, no. 2 (2016): 337–64, at 351–52. An earlier version of this chapter was delivered in the “Female Friendship I” session organized by Usha Vishnuvajjala at the 2017 International Congress on Medieval Studies. I am grateful to Usha, Karma Lochrie, Susanna Fein, David Raybin, and the session’s audience for insightful and supportive comments that have improved my study; thanks also to Kat Tracy for helpful feedback on an earlier draft.
- By “secular” I mean women living and working beyond cloisters and similar institutions. Much of this work mapping such women’s networks has centered on queens and noble-women; see, for example, Barbara A. Hanawalt’s classic study, “Lady Honor Lisle’s Networks of Influence,” in Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 188–212; Theresa Earenfight, Queenship in Medieval Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Linda E. Mitchell, “Joan de Valence and Her Household: Domesticity, Management, and Organization in Transition from Wife to Widow,” in Royal and Elite Households in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Theresa Earenfight (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 95–114. Representative studies on women’s networks in the mercantile sphere include Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives: Women, Law, and Economy in Late-Medieval London (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Kathryn Ryerson, Women’s Networks in Medieval France: Gender and Community in Montpellier, 1300-1350 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Scholars including Judith Bennett have also located and theorized country and peasant women’s experiences through manorial records; see “Public Power and Authority in the Medieval English Countryside,” in Erler and Kowaleski, Women and Power in the Middle Ages, 18–36.
- See, for example, Susan Groag Bell, “Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture” in Erler and Kowaleski, Women and Power in the Middle Ages, 149–87; Joan M. Ferrante, To the Glory of Her Sex: Women’s Roles in the Composition of Medieval Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Karen K. Jambeck, “Patterns of Women’s Literary Patronage: England 1200–ca. 1475,” in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed. June Hall McCash (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 228–65; Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practices in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); and Jennifer R. Goodman, “‘That wommen holde in ful greet reverence’: Mothers and Daughters Reading Chivalric Romances,” and Jennifer Summit, “William Caxton, Margaret Beaufort and the Romance of Female Patronage,” in Women, the Book, and the Worldly, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1995), 25–30; 151–66. Lydia Yaitsky Kertz extends discussion of women’s networks developed through material culture into the realm of sewing and embroidery in her study of Emaré’s “skill-based transnational community” in this volume.
- As Amy N. Vines documents in Women’s Power in Late Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), 8–10.
- As Larissa Tracy notes of Osbern Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen; see “Silence and Speech in the Female Lives of the Gilte Legende and Their Influence on the Lives of Ordinary Medieval Women,” in Women of the Gilte Legende: A Selection of Middle English Saints Lives, ed. and trans. Tracy (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 101–27, at 103–4.
- A phenomenon well documented in Old English literary scholarship, as noted in Clare Lees and Gillian Overing’s essay in part 3 of this volume and examined by Alexandra Reider in “Ic ane geseah idese sittan: The Woman and Women Apart in Old English Poetry,” The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe 19, August 13, 2019.
- Alfred Thomas, Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe: Anne of Bohemia and Chaucer’s Female Audience (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 10.
- For an overview of this debate, see David F. Hult, “The Roman de la Rose, Christine de Pizan, and the querelle des femmes,” in The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 184–94; many of the essential texts are located in Christine McWebb, Debating the Roman de la Rose: A Critical Anthology (New York: Routledge, 2013). Carissa Harris’s essay on alewife poems in part 3 of this volume addresses the extension of this misogynist literary tradition through the seventeenth century.
- For texts and discussion of the classical tradition on friendship see: Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics Books VIII and IX, ed. and trans. Michael Pakaluk (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Cicero, Laelius, On Friendship and The Dream of Scipio, ed. and trans. J. G. F. Powell (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1990). Reginald Hyatte offers an overview of medieval understandings and representations of (male) friendship based in these classical ideals in The Arts of Friendship: The Idealization of Friendship in Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1994).
- Alexandra Verini’s essay on the nuns of Syon Abbey in part 1 of this volume also views women’s friendship through an Epicurean lens, arguing that “an Epicurean view of friendship, more than an Aristotelian or Ciceronian one, [. . .] anticipates the kinds of bonds that might have developed in cloistered female communities.” This view need not be constrained to cloistered women’s experiences. As Tim O’Keefe notes, Epicurus and his followers understood friendship as “primarily communal, a network of support that included women and some-times slaves more properly called ‘fellowship.’” O’Keefe, Epicureanism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 148. Epicurean friendship is based in mutually pleasurable and beneficial networks, affiliations, and communities. In a January 23, 2020, conversation, my colleague Nicole Torbitsky pointed out that this model of friendship is far more realistic and represents people’s, generally, and women’s, specifically, experiences of relationships, corroborating that rather than a Ciceronian or godly ideal, this more mundane, epicurean friendship is what I see in the representations of women examined in this study. My thanks to Dr. Torbitsky for suggesting this philosophical framework.
- Which Chaucer translated into Middle English as the Romaunt of the Rose sometime in the late 1360s to early 1370s, and which subsequently influenced many of his later texts; see Larry D. Benson, “A Brief Chronology of Chaucer’s Life and Times,” The Geoffrey Chaucer Page, July 27, 2000, http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/special/varia/life_of_Ch/chrono.html.
- See Ralph Hanna and Traugott Lawler, “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales II, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009), 353; 367–78.
- In the Prologue, Chaucer is confronted by the God of Love, who asks why he finds himself in the presence of a man who does not keep his laws (lines 237–60).
- For example, Alisoun’s adulterous affair in the Miller’s Tale, and May’s in the Merchant’s Tale; see The Miller’s Tale, 68–77, and The Merchant’s Tale, 154–68, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
- See The Clerk’s Tale, in Riverside Chaucer, 138–53.
- See The Second Nun’s Tale, in Riverside Chaucer, 264–69.
- See The Physician’s Tale, in Riverside Chaucer, 190–93.
- See The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, in Riverside Chaucer, 253–61.
- See The Tale of Melibee, in Riverside Chaucer, 217–39.
- See Caroline Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 87; Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, “The Legend of Good Women,” in The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 112–26.
- See “Introduction” in Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, esp. 11; Corinne J. Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 266–67; Christopher Cannon, “Chaucer and Rape: Uncertainty’s Certainties,” in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 255–79; and Kristin Bovaird-Abbo, “Is Geoffrey Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas a Rape Narrative? Reading Thopas in Light of the 1382 Statute of Rapes,” Quidditas 35 (2014): 7–28.
- See John Hill, “Aristocratic Friendship in Troilus and Criseyde: Pandarus, Courtly Love and Ciceronian Brotherhood in Troy,” in New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 165–82; Gretchen Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 139–42.
- Geoffrey Chaucer, “Troilus and Criseyde,” in Riverside Chaucer, 473–585: I.85–112. Hereafter, references are provided parenthetically in text.
- Neil Cartlidge writes of Criseyde’s friendless state, “Whereas both writers [Boccaccio and Chaucer] describe how Calchas left his widowed daughter in the lurch [. . .] and both emphasize that she was entirely innocent of any involvement in his treachery [. . .] it is only Chaucer who then chooses to focus on Criseyde’s friendlessness,” in “Criseyde’s Absent Friends,” Chaucer Review 44, no. 3 (2010): 227–45, at 228. Also, Alcuin Blamires, Chaucer, Ethics and Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 36; Nicky Hallett, “Women,” in A Companion to Chaucer, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 480–94, at 487.
- Per the Middle English Dictionary, “frend” can describe “a friend, comrade, an intimate” (definition 1) or a “kinsman” or “blood relative” (definition 4). I argue that Chaucer employs it here to convey both connotations. Chaucer’s playful deployment of words in multiple of their meanings is well attested; for example, his use of two meanings of the single word fals to characterize the argument between Palamon and Arcite in the Knight’s Tale, and his use of queynteas a double entendre in that same Tale.
- Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo, “Friendship in the Middle Ages,” The History of Emotions Blog, March 20, 2014.
- For example, in her 2003 chapter “Widows,” in Dinshaw and Wallace, The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, Barbara Hanawalt notes, “We must not assume that peasant widows lived lonely lives,” citing evidence from widows’ wills that include bequests to kin, servants, neighbors, friends, and clergy as proof of their often extensive networks (62–65). Chapter 2 of Kathryn Kelsey Staples’s Daughters of London: Inheriting Opportunity in the Late Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2011) also amasses evidence of women bequeathing items to friends.
- Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, trans. Nathaniel Griffin and Arthur Myrick (Cambridge, ONT: In Parenthesis, 1999), 69.80. Hereafter, citations are provided parenthetically in text.
- Alcuin Blamires, Chaucer, Ethics and Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 36.
- Blamires, Chaucer, Ethics and Gender, 37.
- Blamires, Chaucer, Ethics and Gender, 37.
- Each of the Legends of Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, and Phyllis ends with the heroine’s death following the abandonment or death of her lover. Indeed, Dorigen also contemplates suicide prior to her friends’ intervention.
- Karma Lochrie’s essay in part 3 of this volume also examines various forms of female friendship in the Man of Law’s, Wife of Bath’s, and Squire’s Tales.
- See Joanne Rice, “The Franklin’s Prologue and Tale,” explanatory notes in The Riverside Chaucer, 895–96.
- See Robert R. Edwards, “The Franklin’s Tale,” in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales I, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer 2002), 211–65, at 240.
- Edwards, “Franklin’s Tale.”
Chapter 7 (135-154) from Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature, edited by Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala (Ohio State University Press, 07.11.2022), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license.