Arts, Faculty of
English, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Bergen, Richard Angelo
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
This dissertation offers an analysis of spatial tropes, amounting to an explication of geographic symbolism in allegorical narratives. In the past, the genre-defining trope of allegory has overwhelmingly been personification, which involves metaphors of psychic interiority or abstraction made into characters. However, topographical metaphors are at least as frequent and arguably as prominent in these stories. If allegory is best defined as extended metaphor, the key trope of these stories involves spatial extension for the metaphor of the way or the road in these narratives, with their various sites of instruction and conflict. This work of research proposes and analyzes seven morphogenetic topologies in allegorical narratives: 1) the use of abstract labels for places, 2) distribution of the fragments of a self throughout a series of places indicating psychic inflection in landscape, 3) references to the “book of nature” in tandem with narrative moments or digressions for the application of hermeneutical methods to topographical structures, 4) indexical symmetries or contraventions of normal spatial scale (mimesis), 5) the tying of abstract topic to differentiated topography, 6) the embodiment in space of significative temporalities, 7) and spatial disorientation vis-à-vis gestures toward a sub specie aeternitatis. The basis for these tropes can be found in habits of mind developed in allegorical interpretations of epics and the Bible, cosmological encyclopedias and medieval works of De Natura Rerum, as well as arts of memory. This dissertation also aims to show that although allegorical works constantly subvert “realism”, they still reveal intense interest in “local”, “literal”, and “historical” concerns of a topographical or architectural nature. A majority of the analysis of this dissertation is done in primary consideration of several key authors (William Langland, Stephen Hawes, Edmund Spenser, and John Bunyan), whose works represent different instantiations of allegory in the Late Medieval and Early Modern eras.
THE NATURE OF ALLEGORY: SPATIAL TROPES IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALLEGORICAL NARRATIVES by Richard Angelo Bergen A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) December 2022 © Richard Angelo Bergen, 2022 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled: The Nature of Allegory: Spatial Tropes in Medieval and Early Modern Allegorical Narratives submitted by Richard Angelo Bergen in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Examining Committee: Elizabeth Hodgson, Professor, English, UBC Supervisor Robert Allen Rouse, Associate Professor, English, UBC Co-Supervisor Jennifer Vaught, Professor, English, University of Louisiana at Lafayette External Examiner Patricia Badir, Professor, English, UBC University Examiner Patrick Moran, Associate Professor, French, UBC University Examiner Additional Supervisory Committee Members: Dennis Richard Danielson, Professor Emeritus, English, UBC Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract This dissertation offers an analysis of spatial tropes, amounting to an explication of geographic symbolism in allegorical narratives. In the past, the genre-defining trope of allegory has overwhelmingly been personification, which involves metaphors of psychic interiority or abstraction made into characters. However, topographical metaphors are at least as frequent and arguably as prominent in these stories. If allegory is best defined as extended metaphor, the key trope of these stories involves spatial extension for the metaphor of the way or the road in these narratives, with their various sites of instruction and conflict. This work of research proposes and analyzes seven morphogenetic topologies in allegorical narratives: 1) the use of abstract labels for places, 2) distribution of the fragments of a self throughout a series of places indicating psychic inflection in landscape, 3) references to the “book of nature” in tandem with narrative moments or digressions for the application of hermeneutical methods to topographical structures, 4) indexical symmetries or contraventions of normal spatial scale (mimesis), 5) the tying of abstract topic to differentiated topography, 6) the embodiment in space of significative temporalities, 7) and spatial disorientation vis-à-vis gestures toward a sub specie aeternitatis. The basis for these tropes can be found in habits of mind developed in allegorical interpretations of epics and the Bible, cosmological encyclopedias and medieval works of De Natura Rerum, as well as arts of memory. This dissertation also aims to show that although allegorical works constantly subvert “realism”, they still reveal intense interest in “local”, “literal”, and “historical” concerns of a topographical or architectural nature. A majority of the analysis of this dissertation is done in primary consideration of several key authors (William Langland, Stephen Hawes, Edmund Spenser, and John Bunyan), whose works represent different instantiations of allegory in the Late Medieval and Early Modern eras. iv Lay Summary This dissertation explores the way places are represented in medieval and Early Modern allegories. The genre of allegory has usually been understood in terms of personification (abstractions like Love or Despair made into characters). However, this project argues that some of the best-known authors of allegories including William Langland, Stephen Hawes, Edmund Spenser, and John Bunyan drew on metaphorical meanings that they found in architecture and topography (“Gardens of Love” or “Castles of Despair”) as readily as personification. For this metaphorical understanding of place, they drew on different forms of nonfiction writing that provided them with a basis for metaphorical understandings of place: books interpreting biblical places, encyclopedias about nature, and handbooks on memory. Allegory is often associated with abstraction and dematerialization, but my work demonstrates that the genre actually has a spatial-material fascination that touches ideas of nature and the social world. v Preface This dissertation consists of original, independent research by the author, Richard Angelo Bergen. An abridged version of chapter 5 (“The Word and the World: The Nature of Allegory in The Pilgrim’s Progress”) is being published in the academic journal Bunyan Studies this year (2022). vi Table of Contents Abstract ..........................................................................................................................................iii Lay Summary .................................................................................................................................iv Preface .............................................................................................................................................v Table of Contents ...........................................................................................................................vi List of Figures ...............................................................................................................................vii Acknowledgements......................................................................................................................viii Dedication .......................................................................................................................................x Introduction......................................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: The Seven Spatial Tropes of Allegorical Narratives...............................................18 Chapter Two: Piers Plowman’s Kyndely Places: The Field of Vision and the Vision of the Field in the B Text……………………………………………………………………………………..67 Chapter Three: Stephen Hawes and the Sententious Poetics of Place: Morality, Memory, Astrology…………………………………………………………………………………….....110 Chapter Four: Mutability and the Genius Loci: Spatial-Spiritual Change in Edmund Spenser’s Fairyland..................................................................................................................................... 148 Chapter Five: The Word and the World: Allegory and the “Nature” of The Pilgrim’s Progress…………………………...............................................................................................195 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................228 Bibliography................................................................................................................................240 vii List of Figures Figure 1 Misty Malvern Hills…….………………………………………………………..82 Figure 2 Worcester Beacon trig pillar at sunset…………………………………………...82 Figure 3 William Parron’s Liber de optimo fato nobilissimi domini Henrici Eboraci ducis, 1502. BL Royal MS 12 B VI……………………………..…………………….129 Figure 4 Table of Contents for The Example of Vertue……………………………….... 142 viii Acknowledgements A majority of my influences and mentors have been books, and deceased authors, whose thought I have in some real sense “digested”; but it has always been in the context of institutions I am happy to call my homes: especially the University of British Columbia, and formerly Trinity Western University. In my attendance at more than 20 conferences, with organizations like the Renaissance Society of America, the International Congress of Medieval Studies, the Sixteenth Century Society, and the International John Bunyan Society, hundreds of conversations with numerous scholars have been bricks and mortar in my intellectual foundations. I want to extend my gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Robert Rouse for helping me formulate my project in the initial days, and for asking me so many excellent, probing questions during my directed studies and classes, all the way to the present with the final form of this dissertation. I would also like to extend equal gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Elizabeth Hodgson for being an assiduous reviewer of my work from the beginning to the end of this project. She has had an enormous influence on my capacity to formulate arguments and to look at Early Modern texts critically. Thank you to Dr. Dennis Danielson for revolutionizing my perspective on intellectual history by putting cosmology at the forefront of my intellectual investigations. Thank you to my early mentors from Trinity Western University, Dr. Holly Nelson and Dr. Monika Hilder, for giving me some initial opportunities to publish my scholarship, and for prompting and assisting me in my early investigations on allegory. ix Another thanks should be accorded for Dr. Miguel Mota, my teaching assistant supervisor, for being both a warm mentor and an inspiration as a great university lecturer on concepts of spatiality to university freshmen. Thank you to Dr. Patricia Badir and Dr. Adam Frank, Department Head and Graduate Head, for your support. I have much gratefulness for the help of Christie MacLeod for always being available and helping so promptly with a variety of administrative and logistical tasks. My brother Thomas Bergen, a scholar in his own right, has been an excellent interlocutor at the worst moments of writer’s block along my journey. My brother-in-law Dr. Grant Poettcker has similarly reviewed some of my work, and has helped me spot some of the ways my ideas might be communicated better. Dr. David Gay from the University of Alberta has been a friend and another academic mentor, whom I have worked with on the executive committee for the International John Bunyan society, and who has been a source of expertise and knowledge about allegory through the years. I am thankful for my family, parents and parents-in-law, brothers and sisters, who have been supportive and generous in their various ways. x Dedication I dedicate a loving thanks to my wife Carol, who has been a pilgrim alongside me during an extraordinarily “long road of study” and professional training. 1 Introduction This dissertation project utilizes spatial theories concerning the historical and literary representation of environments to interpret allegorical works; as a mirror and a complement, it also demonstrates how allegorical interpretation (or, “allegorical theory”) has a history of being applied to space and place. Places, topographical and architectural, are often treated as the afterthought to personification, which is normally considered the primary trope of allegory.1 However, spatial metaphors are at least as frequent and arguably as prominent in these medieval and Early Modern stories. In these eras in which place was already symbolically loaded with spiritual and political import, allegory served as an authoritative vehicle of didacticism, and therefore its spatial forms were not empty signifiers or aesthetic frills but indices of the authors’ most cherished ideas, hopes and anxieties, as well as sites of contestation for cultural legitimacy. Related theories, discussed below, serve as a background of concepts and vocabulary for discussing allegorical spatiality. This dissertation focuses its analysis on several of the more influential English allegorists from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries (Langland, Hawes, Spenser, Bunyan), and draws from a few dozen other English and Latin writers who helped to formalize allegorical tropes; the supporting allegories also sometimes help to furnish the characterization of salient spatial trends. The late medieval and Early Modern periods have been chosen because extended metaphorical narratives proliferated alongside its cousin genres and writing activities (the romance, works of 1 Works that could be included in this list are as follows: C. S. Lewis’s massively influential Allegory of Love, Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel, Angus Fletcher’s Theory of a Symbolic Mode, Gordon Teskey’s Allegory and Violence, Stephanie A. V. G. Kamath’s Authorship and First-person Allegory in Late Medieval France, the introduction of Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion, Katherine Breen’s Machines of the Mind: Personification in Medieval Literature, and shorter essays like Morton W. Bloomfield, “A Grammatical Approach to Personification Allegory”, Robert Worth Frank, Jr, “The Art of Reading Medieval Personification Allegory.” Rosemond Tuve’s Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their Posterity and the essays of Enlightening Allegory note the limitations of reducing allegory to personification, but do not offer alternatives, and ironically end up focusing much of their discussions on personification. 2 biblical hermeneutics, ars memorativa, emblem books, scientific works treating the liber natura in its symbolic aspect) during this period.2 This project marries genre studies with spatial theory, which is not an unheard-of critical synthesis. Recent spatial critic Robert Tally, Jr. maintains that the spatial analysis of literature (which he terms “Literary Cartography”), “necessarily involves a question of genre” (54). The literary cartographer primarily works to consider how an author “maps out” his/her text spatially/conceptually, and what the e/affect might be upon the reader, which amounts to a particular practice of genre study. Before Tally, Jr., Mikhail Bakhtin theorized that an analysis of space and time in a work of art has “an intrinsic generic significance” (84). The manner in which time “becomes artistically visible,” and “space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” produces genres that become available “in certain historical conditions” and are carried by tradition, to be imitated or transgressed (84-85). Hans Robert Jauss’s theory that genre constitutes a “horizon of expectations” is itself knowingly based on a spatial metaphor. Jauss states that “demarcation and identification of a literary concretization” should be based on the broader cultural understanding of “hermeneutic explanation of the preunderstandings of the experience” (210), concerning such matters as the spatial world. His seminal essay explicitly mentions allegory as a genre that deserves further study.3 Accordingly, I seek to analyze the common threads in a body of allegorical narratives, exploring how a hyper-symbolic “nature” in the hands of allegorists 2 There is a large body of related texts and intellectual endeavours that concur with John Steadman’s judgment that “[a]llegory remained, on the whole, as fashionable in the Renaissance as during the Middle Ages; and its appeal for the learned was enhanced by admiration for […] the book of nature as an emblem-book writ large, manifesting the invisible secrets of the spiritual world through visible but cryptic signs” (Renaissance Allegory 83). 3 Other critics that consider the connection between spatial criticism and genre tantamount include Mary Jo Reiff, who draws yet another fortuitous connection to the kinds of metaphors that furnish genres. Other critics dealing with newer genres, metaphoricity, and spatiality include Nedra Reynolds (Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Differences), and Dylan Dryer (“Taking Up Space: On Genre Systems as Geographies of the Possible”). Eric Hayot’s work on literary worlds characterizes genres as “particular types of form governed by restrictions in spatial arrangement or habits in conceptual pattern” (86). 3 produces a unique aesthetic and ontological take on material objects as well as spatial configurations, ultimately providing a counterpoint to the aesthetic-epistemic hegemony of the novel, in spatial studies and otherwise.4 Allegorical narratives, in a self-congratulatory way, offer themselves up as authorities on revelatory nature. It is no accident that Nature as a personification speaks in most Latin, French, and English allegories of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. “Allegorists” inscribed ethics and metaphysics in what Joël Bonemaisson calls “geosymbols”: “a group selects from a variety of natural elements in order to create a favourable life environment and build its culture”, amounting to a “genre de vie or lifeway” (17-23). Allegorical narratives, as a genre, attempt to instantiate the broader cultural genre de vie of medieval and Early Modern Europe, and its geosymbols are texts from the book of nature, an absolutely foundational conceptual metaphor to medieval and Early Modern authors. Spatial tropes are a deep part of the permanently valuable features of allegory. Recent linguistic work on metaphorical usages of landscape in a variety of writings, from Old English to the Seventeenth Century, has recognized two particular metaphors as being abundant, and the basis for many other conceptual linkages: “Life is a journey,” and “People are landscape.” Carole Hough writes on how the “Life is a journey” metaphor particularly impressed the scholars working on this project: “The extent and complexity of the contribution of landscape to the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor are striking, especially in view of the range of categories involved.” Further, she writes, “Even more remarkable is the way in which the PEOPLE ARE 4 As Northrop Frye points out, any genre study “is based on analogies in form” (95), but the analogies can run thin at times, the longer the timespan and contrariety of audience. This project perceives much similarity and difference in emphasis or omission of tropes, noting the “networks of partial resemblances” (Schaffer 175). Even as these authors share something of a similar intellectual-artistic heritage, they have diverse ideological and religious commitments, and these modulate otherwise shared tropological dynamics. 4 LANDSCAPE metaphor is evidenced by a large number of disparate links” (31). These two intermingled metaphors, alongside the book of nature, are the central conceptual metaphors that undergo a kind of ideaesthesia in extended metaphors.5 Nature is a mirror and a book in which allegorists, and the cultures they came from, read themselves. The roads of allegory are journeys on the Road of Long Study, as the anglicized title of one of Christine de Pizan's stories would have it. Judith Anderson astutely characterizes allegory as a “process” that combines “mind with matter, emblem with narrative, abstraction with history. . . . Basically [allegory] is continued, or moving, metaphor, as classical and Early Modern rhetoricians have described allegory itself” (Intertext 5). The “space” of allegories is the space for moving to the items of interest, studying the book of nature: rerum natura which are represented not as sensuous reality, but as tutelage on the imagined real. The places of allegory are also infused with the significative temporalities, mnemotechnical places: ordered times that “take place”, and as differentiated loci that represent individual and collective ideas of what is proper to memory. Movement takes place through these loci, and the “kinesis of allegory”, as Gay Clifford asserts, is part and parcel of appropriating the symbolic meaning of “object or event” (12). The figure moves from place to place as a purposeful homo viator.6 The ritual and economic patterns of ambulatory movement, in simple church ceremonies, arduous pilgrimages, military campaigns, repeated millions of times throughout English and continental territories, become the groundwork for metaphorical conceptualization, energizing the mutual feedback of 5 “Conceptual metaphor” is a term first popularized by Lakoff and Johnson in Metaphors We Live By and is now widely used by historians and linguists. 6 The books which are adjacent, but which I hesitate to place firmly in the genre of allegory is the “dialogue” with or between personifications: Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, or the late medieval Moral Interludes, which contain so little active momentum (i.e., minimal movement from place to place). 5 the tripartite division devised by Henri Lefebvre, of perceived, conceived, and lived space.7 Robert Beck writes, “As meaning is acquired, it clothes the perceptual world” (20). The authors of allegory endow their own geosymbols with epistemological and cultural legitimacy through the way they treat the places as metaphors that order the social and religious landscape. Several scholars have offered very brief characterizations of allegorical places or have offered a single trope in a broader theorization of how allegory functions, but there is much room for a fuller and broader discussion.8 Histories and theories of allegory have overwhelmingly focused on personification as the central trope that signals “extended metaphor” to the reader; but there are often many spatial metaphors that pervade these narratives as well. This dissertation proposes seven spatial tropes used in allegories, employed with varying degrees of self-consciousness and emulative representation across time. (1) Abstract Topology: The spatial tropes are centred in a self-conscious metaphoricity: authors represent narrative topologies often with a capitalized adjective followed by a noun corresponding to a place or structure, or a proper noun with a genitive predicate (e.g., Doubting Castle or The Slough of Despond). Alternatively, the place is explained as a metaphor (with supporting commentary) or comes from a popular biblical source. (2) Psychic Topoi: Allegorical narratives convey a distributed cognition, a feedback loop of interiority and the physical world or between microcosm and macrocosm, 7 The main discussion is in The Production of Space (32-41). The relationship is of social organization around production, to the regular conception of space in official documents to order the space, and to imaginative and symbolic settings overlaying the physical world. He discusses pilgrimage as one of the bases for the production of space in the Middle Ages (45-45, 266). Lefebvre in general says little about pre-Capitalist production of space, but he would almost certainly place the work of allegories more in the second group, with perhaps a few exceptions in the third. Representational space, Lefebvre suggests, has more to do with clandestine artists who seek to change and adapt the space around them. 8 Alvin Greenberg has characterized allegorical places as an “abstract vacuum” (363), Ruth Ronen emphasizes a neutralizing of physical details into abstraction (33), Angus Fletcher considers allegorical places as surrealistically individuated (101), Gay Clifford notes that settings in allegory initially show a tension of “elusiveness and familiarity” (2), and Maureen Quilligan’s work frequently suggests that “landscapes” emphasize their own textuality and punning, and therefore often have a kind of “horizontality” that returns to the physical page and away from an imagined world (28-33) 6 where the landscape has an intimate relationship to the psycho-spiritual processes of the characters involved in the story. (3) An Applied Book of Nature: These metaphorically-oriented narratives, produced in a “book” culture dominated by the Bible and its attendant hermeneutic methods (especially the quadriga),9 offer a good deal of evidence that the authors treat objects and settings as signs for understanding the self, the lover, or the cosmos more fully. (4) Allegorealism: The “Nature” in an allegory offers varying degrees of hyper-focus and abstraction to emphasize or de-emphasize sensuous detail, representing the relationship of places as starkly individuated topologies, and presenting a dialectic between open-ended space and conventional place. The purpose of an allegorical place is to illustrate an idea about the Real, not generate “realism”, and so the tendency of representation is often towards dissolution or provocative and attention-gripping subversion. (5) Topic and Topography: The intimate relationship between topic and topography, imbues allegorical narratives with a fortuitous sense of the relationship between abstract and place language, related especially to topical parsing. (6) Temporality and Spatial Metaphor: Several layers of temporality are self-consciously embodied in the movement of an allegorical world, spatially, instantiating ideas about individual and collective memory. (7) Cosmic Survey: In their pursuit of representation and terminal goal of “heavenly things”, allegorical narratives offer sub specie aeternitatis, with a transformative cosmological verticality causing a sense of mise en abyme. These seven tropes have mutual influence with biblical and epic exegesis, works on nature lore, and the arts of memory, as well as dream vision literature. No extant analysis highlights these tropes, which leads to misunderstandings of the texts; recognizing these tropes better places readers to comprehend 9 The quadriga is the idea first expressed by John Cassian (ca. 360-435 CE) that biblical passages should be read according to a few interpretive approaches, and passed down in a well-known mnemonic to the Middle Ages: “Litera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria;/moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia” (“the letter teaches about deeds, the allegory concerns belief, the moral concerns deeds, and the anagogy, what is to come” my translation). 7 authorial strategy and the intertwined purposes these narratives have with the discourses on time, memory, perception, dreams, morality, national identity, language, and transcendence. Spatial philosophy provides my project with (a) an ongoing conversation in which to inject a response to the allegations that allegories lack the mythical radiance of the novel and the romantic lyric which would make them more worthy of study; (b) a justification for my work, drawing from and providing insights about the variability of spatial representation and the perception of the good, the true, and the beautiful in nature and symbolic culture; (c) an extensive grammar and manner of discourse for interpreting space, place and movement, specific literary topologies as tropes and metaphorical tradition, thresholds and boundaries, and the religious construal of spatial categories such as the sacred land and the edifice of worship. This project’s chief theoretical underpinning comes from a mix of cultural and humanistic geographers, art historians, cognitive linguists, and of course some literary critics working in spatiality.10 Furthermore, the attention that spatial theorists have leveraged on metaphor, perception, spatial orientation, topographical lexicons, embodied temporality, and the mind and world, for decades, have undoubtedly influenced what I as a scholar perceive in these earlier dreamlands. The Spatial Turn and Humanist Geography Since the mid-twentieth century, both geographers and other scholars have introduced spatiality as an important category of analysis for the humanities and social sciences.11 There is 10 Primarily Yi-fu Tuan, Edward Casey, Edward Relph, Steve Malpas, Anne Buttimer, Joel Bonemaisson, Robert Tally, Jr. and Gail Kern Paster. See the “Bibliography” for further details. Some influential progenitors of spatial criticism (Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Manuel Castells, Doreen Massey) are firmly rooted in a Marxist tradition; this project draws on some of their ideas, particularly Lefebvre and Massey, but many other approaches to the spatial study of literature have arisen since. 11 Some have attributed this “spatial turn” to the post-war movements of people and capital, and the dramatic spatial restructuring involved in these processes (Barney and Arias 3-4). Of course, some early twentieth-century writers 8 fairly robust consensus among writers on the spatial turn that a preoccupation with progressivist history and time was imploded and replaced by a more ahistorical construal of experience. Michel Foucault is oft-quoted for asserting that the “present epoch of space” is such because “our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein” (22). Since Foucault’s statement in 1967, literary critics have exhibited a surging sensibility for spatiality, and have influenced the diverse discussions around geography in turn, especially scholars working in post/structuralism, semiotics, and cognitive linguistics (illustrated well by Trevor Barnes and James Duncan’s 1992 Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape).12 One particular school of spatial thought chose to ally itself to the study of literature early in its adolescence: humanistic geography.13 A key “geosopher” from this school of thought is Yi-fu Tuan, whose “Literature, Experience, and Environmental Knowing” (1976) clearly expresses the nature of humanist appreciation and appropriation of literature: literature directs attention to: “(1) the perception of absence, (2) the physiognomy of places, (3) the world of fleeting noises and have written occasionally on matters of place (e.g., D. H. Lawrence’s essay on the “vital effluence” of different regions in “Spirit of Place,” and Virginia Woolf’s essay on the critic’s motivations for looking into authors’ place of origin in “Literary Geography”). 12 However, major waves of change emerged when places increasingly became a matter of interpretation – became textualized. Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1965) was an important book that emphasized the interpenetration between literature and life, between imagination and realism, and between text and empirical reality, particularly in home contexts. Later, Michel de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life (1974) postulated on the ways in which looking down from a skyscraper onto a modern city is a manner of “totalizing the most immoderate of human texts” (92). Already in 1979 D. W. Meinig’s The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes made a hermeneutic stance in human geography almost an axiom. Beyond these explicit efforts to treat spatial arrangements as textual, there have been many critiques of self-styled natural and physical representations of space, with a movement toward treating space as a readable socio-cultural product, in terms of race, gender, cultural politics, religious structure, or otherwise. 13 Humanistic geographers were an important intellectual force in early critiques of empiricist physical geography during the 1960s and 70s. They emphasized dynamics of subjectivity in landscape perception and representation, and were intensely interested in self-reflexivity, imputed values, and the ethics of geographical inquiry, eschewing “a passive concept of man dutifully acquiescing to an overbearing environment” (Ley and Samuels 12). Humanist geographers produced the 1977 volume Landscape and Literature (Eds. Christopher Salter and William Lloyd) and 1980 Humanistic Geography and Literature (Ed. Douglas Pocock), and a large number of individual essays in volumes and journals on human and cultural geography. 9 light, (4) ambiguity in the interpretation of shared perceptions, and (5) the association of human emotion with events in nature” (263).14 Despite the sympathetic tone of this outlook, multiple geographical studies of literature from the humanist geographers patronizingly acknowledge allegory without providing an analysis or inquiry. For instance, Douglas Pocock makes the offhand comment in the introduction to Humanistic Geography and Literature that “a degree of isomorphism is no surprise when we know that authors visit locales of possible literary settings, or claim to need maps for the construction of stories no less than do generals for battles. Such a relationship is necessary for reasons of authenticity – otherwise we are in the realm of science fiction, fantasy or allegory – but it is not of the essence of literature” (10). Similarly, Salter and Lloyd admit that realistic genres of writing dominate studies of geography and literature, but nod towards “romance and allegory,” stating that one “need not ignore these less realistic modes of expression” (3). Leonard Lutwack’s The Role of Place in Literature asserts that “it is a mistake to discount [allegories]” simply because they are less realistic (31). However, none of these works pursue the matter further.15 Allegory, and the past it hearkens, is a foreign country to many humanist geographers and spatial theorists. Their critically dismissive attitude toward allegorical representation is itself based on a stereotyping propelled by a triumphalist (though 14 Notably, if one peruses the introductions to essay collections of a humanist bent (e.g., Humanist Geography: Problems and Prospects, Geographies of the Mind), one finds that they acknowledge as plenary source for their inquiries into landscape perception, items literary critics consider “their” terrain: diaries, poems, novels. One of the puzzling aspects of humanist geographers, however, is that they seem hung up on the novel and its more mimetic representations of space: this fact is a particular matter for dismay given that humanistic geographers have been so articulate in their critiques of modern pretentions to “verisimilitude” and mapping techniques. 15 One should note that this is not the exclusive fault of Humanistic Geography. There, in fact, have been no book-length studies of allegorical spatiality by any philosophical school or even any literary critic. Only very short and sporadic discussions of allegory and setting have ever been published. 10 dissolving) myth of the aesthetic superiority of the Romantic symbol and the genre of the novel.16 This dissertation will also address the unhelpful separation of allegoresis (allegorical interpretation) and allegoria. Notable exceptions like Jon Whitman’s Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique exist, but his book does not engage spatial issues at any length and reserves a vast majority of discussion for the pre-1000 CE period. This dissertation questions the de facto bifurcation of allegoria and allegoresis via a discussion of space and place and the ways in which the narratives take part in a cultural effort to interpret and order geosymbols. Marcus Nievergelt has written that, as the medieval period wore on, allegorical narratives display an increasing “emphasis on the role of the subject as a potentially flawed observer or reader – but also as an active maker of fictions, glosses, or interpretations” (“Allegory” 57). This observation is worth pursuing in relationship to the intra-narratorial glosses of setting. The landscapes of allegory are sites precisely where the extended quest – and its questions – unfold chronotopically, and where interpretation by the implied reader and the deictic pilgrim are prompted; or, frankly, often given a didactic commentary. 16 S. T. Coleridge and Wolfgang Goethe famously disparaged allegory as simplistic, aesthetically and cognitively. Coleridge’s contrast between allegory and symbol from the Statesman’s Manual, based on a mystical difference between “fancy” and “imagination” is perhaps most famous: Now an allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language which is in itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses; the principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike insubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot. On the other hand, the Symbol . . . is characterized by a translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, shades itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is a representative. The others are but empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates with apparitions of matter, less beautiful but not less shadowy than the sloping orchard or hill-side pasture-field seen in the transparent lake below. (30-31) One can see from the end of this quotation that Coleridge’s disparagement of allegorical representation touches on the topographical. Coleridge, however, famously equivocated on the utility and dignity of allegory throughout his work, and he even explicitly offers a geographical allegory in praise of his friend: “I could not help transcribing the following lines as a sort of allegory, or connected simile and metaphor of Wordsworth's intellect and genius.— ‘The soil is a deep, rich, dark mould, on a deep stratum of tenacious clay; and that on a foundation of rocks, which often break through both strata, lifting their backs above the surface’” (Biographia Literaria XXII). Ewan James Jones offers an important reading of Coleridge that probes into the oddity that, “for the writer who disparaged the mode more famously than any other, Coleridge came to entertain allegory a great deal” (124). 11 The project also addresses significant debates in contemporary critical discourse. First, there is a resurgence of interest in allegory at large, as the editors of the Cambridge Companion to Allegory (2010) note, based on a renewal of scholarly interest in rhetorical tropes as well as forays into allegorical modes within popular media. Moreover, the “spatial turn” in the humanities is still in full swing, with many works on spatiality and literature being published every year. However, these two important currents have not yet been put into conversation. Although many spatial studies of novelists have been authored, few studies of allegorical settings have been published to date.17 If one considers studies of well-known authors such as John Bunyan, once again, one finds only a handful of short discussions.18 Spatial theory provides an ability to recognize and understand the modes and functions of spatial tropes in literature at large, and allegory in particular. Though allegorical space and place have a reputation for being predictable and dull from the Romantics to the present day, authors of allegory in fact encoded many ideas about nature, spiritual reality, metaphor, and society in their topographical structures and edifices. Therefore, a serious historical investigation will discover aspects of the relation between spatial symbolism and social formation,19 as well as the fragments of the medieval and Early Modern self, in these spaces. 17 Robert Tally, Jr.’s Topophrenia (2019) offers a representative attitude: “I take the novel form to be perhaps the most important genre for literary cartography” for its proximity to the “rise of cartography,” “capitalist relations of production,” colonialism, and modernity (10). One might note as a counterpoint that serious cartography existed more than three centuries prior to the heyday of the novel – in fact, during times of popularity for allegory. 18 A few spatial studies in Bunyan criticism include Albert Foster’s parallels of Christian’s road to the road between Bedfordshire and London, Isabel Hofmeyr’s study of how categories like “evangelicalism” and “Englishness” coloured reader reception of landscape, and Dennis Turner’s essay on Bunyan’s strategy of dissolving a “sense of place” into words and concepts. The theoretical foundations of these discussions are undeveloped, with few citing spatial theoreticians and none comparing Bunyan’s representation of space and place to other allegories in a generic tradition. Moreover, some writers on Edmund Spenser have engaged with questions of space and materiality (ch. 4 details these). Christopher Burlinson’s Allegory, Space and the Material World in the Writings of Edmund Spenser is an extensive study of allegorical space. However, much of his well-argued book about class, materiality, and military conflict leaves questions about semiotics, genre, and Spenser’s own ideas about nature and revelation unaddressed. Past analyses of spatiality in allegory have raised a disparate archipelago of observations and questions, without connecting to a larger landmass of theory and genre, which I aim to do in my project. 19 This phrase is adapted from the title of Denis Cosgrove’s book Symbolic Landscape and Social Formation. 12 This dissertation is not directly a work of ecocriticism, although ecocriticism has obvious crossovers with spatial theory and criticism, as Tally, Jr. and Christine Battista explain: “While distinctive in meaningful ways, both ecocriticism and geocriticism share a concern for the manner in which spaces and places are perceived, represented, and ultimately used” (Ecocriticism and Geocriticism 2). As a form of literature, allegory in its symbolic profusion constantly adumbrates spatial forms from a total cosmological reality, a composite of social and natural forms. Without suggesting that allegory provides solutions to our present ecological crisis, or that its historical forms should provoke nostalgia for greater normativity of meaning, it is the case that allegory is a site of self-conscious legibility for analyzing the issues that J. C. Ryan notes are relevant to the Anthropocene today: In an age of uncertainty, we know that the Anthropocene renders sense of place and planet less legible. Contemporary ecological concerns exceed the capacity of localized awareness. . . . Yet, how do we transcend our blinkered spatiotemporal purview to acquire a deep-time disposition? As a medium for configuring consciousness and affirming interconnectivities, literature presents a multitude of possibilities. (165) The allegorical genre offers models of deep-time thinking, a kind of literature as a medium of consciousness and interconnectivities that concern challenges of place. Although the endurance of allegory to the twenty-first century is a matter of debate beyond the scope of this dissertation,20 the history of thought on nature and place should be relevant to readers hoping to understand the cultural milestones (and some less remembered cultural codes), that come down to the present. Spatial theorists and environmental philosophers might find interest in allegory, a 20 For pessimistic views of the status of allegorical production toward the present day, see Allegorical Quests by Nievergelt or The Veil of Allegory by Michael Murrin. For views that affirms thorough continuity, see, for example, Theresa Kelley’s Reinventing Allegory or Gary Johnson’s The Vitality of Allegory. 13 genre that speaks to the twenty-first century recognition of the problematic dichotomies of mind and world (Ingold 101, 206), and the “distinction between the social and the natural” which is dubious and “increasingly untenable as the twenty-first century wears on” (Tally, Jr. and Battista 3). Plan for the Work: The first chapter of this dissertation is an elaboration on the taxonomy of tropes noted above. This chapter will show the foundation of certain tropes developed through the habits of mind practiced in several non-fiction genres: works of hermeneutics on biblical and epic texts colour the approach to abstract topology and interiority; works on the “book of nature” such as De Natura Rerum texts and encyclopedias serve as a basis for “moments” of place-exegesis and the representation of a symbolic nature/reality; and the ars memorativa tradition with its religious transformations of the memory palace serve as the basis for allegory’s temporal themes and the genre’s division of topic with topography. This chapter argues that allegory should be understood as “extended metaphor”, and that this very notion implies a spatial dimension to the metaphorical vehicle. Examples of these tropes are offered from numerous allegorical works, and the implication of their presence is that the central metaphors of allegory are sometimes not personifications, but places – although most often the two aspects work together. The remainder of the chapters draw attention to how individual authors employ spatial tropes in more particular ways to address their local and historical contexts. The second chapter “Piers Plowman’s Kyndely Places: The Field of Vision and the Vision of the Field in the B Text” puns on William Langland’s reference to a “field ful of folk” and on the alternative title of Langland’s poem (The Vision of Piers Plowman). This chapter connects Langland’s 14 representation of topographies in the poem with emerging concepts from the Perspectiva school of optics, with its major texts full of allegorical glosses. The argument is that Langland employs their optical principles to his characters’ sight of the places throughout the various dreams. This chapter is particularly interested in the way that the character Will has a vision that “narrows” or “widens” in different sections of the poem, exhibiting a varied horizontality and verticality. Langland’s vision “expands” into the temporal reaches of past and shared history, and then to apocalypse; sometimes his “horizontal” view of society is wide and humane, and sometimes narrow and parochial. In particular, Langland aims to advocate for a transformed vision based on a cooperation between the intromission of God’s light, and the extramission of the human eye. The third chapter analyzes two allegories of Stephen Hawes (The Example of Virtue, and The Passetyme of Pleasure), a representative poet of the early Tudor court. Early in the Passetyme, the protagonist Graunde Amoure receives an extensive training in the liberal arts and their end: excellence in morals. The training his hero receives from the didactic personifications about how to speak rightly, write well, comprehend music and geometry, and read the Bible, becomes the basis for the way he reads natural scenarios, constructed objects and buildings. The heroes of both Hawes’ tales aim to find an interior “integrity” to match the “integrity” of aristocratic and fortified buildings. Astrology is another major variable explored in this chapter, as Hawes frequently remarks on a zodiac house before introducing a character or a setting. Each of Hawes’ protagonists needs to struggle against astrologically preponderant spaces of influence, instead of acquiescing to the determined affairs of the place, in order to exhibit himself as morally tutored. Finally, Hawes studiously insists on the connection that the memory arts make between topic and topography, between locus and idea, in a clear demonstration that the arts of 15 memory employ the “cloudy figures” of allegory, which are also intended to facilitate spatio-moral advancement and achieve psychic and political “stabylyte”. The fourth chapter, “Mutability and the Genius Loci: Spatial-Spiritual Change in Edmund Spenser’s Fairyland”, concerns the representation of transforming places in Edmund Spenser’s Complaints, and The Faerie Queene. Spenser often shows a connection between the mental state of a given character and the place they inhabit at a given moment in the “continued allegory.” However, it is erroneous to assume there is one mind being projected onto the places of any given legend of the Faerie Queene, from the author or the central knight, or otherwise: Fairyland is filled with genii loci. Although Nature and the Genius generate places throughout Fairyland, Mutability reigns above them. Spenser’s allegorical places change in various ways, according to which characters engage with spatial possibilities. The result of their engagement is an alteration in quality of spiritual presence or absence in that place. Throughout his writings, Spenser grieves loss and the depredations of time, but he also celebrates mnemonic (re)ordering, and the redemptive possibilities of change throughout the labyrinthine woods, winding roads, and Heraclitean rivers of an “exceeding spatious” Fairyland. The final chapter is entitled, “The Word and the World: Allegory and the ‘Nature’ of The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Bunyan is often characterized as an isolated genius, or the profound artistic exception among the Puritans and Non-conformists. However, through the backdoor of “spiritualized typology” and the affectively drawn emblem and similitude, Bunyan offers a large corpus of non-fiction works that reveal his interest in figurative edifices and the book of nature, such as Solomon’s Temple Spiritualized, The Resurrection of the Dead, “Ebal and Gerizim”, The Holy City, and “Discourse of the Building, Nature, Excellency and Government of the House of God”. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, nature and its “reality” are meant to inspire the fear associated 16 with the stakes inherent in spiritual trials. Bunyan’s affected “realism”, in this sense, is not a novelistic verisimilitude, but a hyperreal intensity that emerges from the pilgrims’ engagement with the perilous places of the journey. This chapter also shows the thematic clusters that emerge from Bunyan’s grouping of certain topologies throughout The Pilgrim’s Progress, partly informed by the artificial memory as tied in utility to a form of memento mori. By showing that spatial tropes are not only present but ubiquitous in allegories this dissertation shows the morphologies of the genre, which come from a mix of historicized concerns and philosophical emphases. Each chapter of this dissertation is attempting to indicate how a spatial analysis of any allegory could proceed. Chapter one offers a general framework, and the later chapters become more specific about how the tropes are used. Every chapter touches on all seven tropes, more or less, but each essay frames some issues more prominently. Chapter two focuses much more on the book of nature and temporality; chapter three engages mnemonics and cosmological rapture the most; chapter four most intensely engages representations of affective environments and the self; chapter five focuses on metaphoricity and its relationship to typology and Bunyan’s celebrated “realism.” The purpose of this dissertation is not to offer generalizations about how city and country, gardens, mountains, or forests functioned according to traditions that required each vehicle immediately to call forth its most typical tenor. There are “good” and “evil”, “masculine” and “feminine”, “conventional” and “bizarre” appropriations of each of these typologies across the corpus of allegorical works.21 Langland shows particular interest in the allegorical understanding of fields and mountains and 21 As Sophia Psarra writes of the storytelling dimension of architecture, narrative space sometimes can have a conservative “relationship of correspondence” with a stable, “strong geometrical message”, while sometimes “a lack of correspondence, coupled with the generative potential of space, can suspend cultural messages and generate unpredictable meanings” (239). Allegory often leans into one representational style in one context, and then the other when it gestures most toward the transcendent signified. 17 their prompts for thinking about humanity and charity, Hawes in castles and estates for their orderliness and stability, Spenser in rivers, woods, and large houses for their openness and potential for rapid transformation, and Bunyan in roads, hills, and valleys, for their representation of psychological trials and sanctuaries. Individual authors have a particular take on certain topologies according to their life experience and their discursive relationship to an audience. Though allegorical signification strains the bounds of representation, allegories are far from the disconnected dreamlands many critics assume them to be. 18 Chapter One: The Seven Spatial Tropes of Allegorical Narratives Introduction: In several strands of classical and medieval thought, spatial categories were understood as allegorical, and allegory frequently evoked spatial categories. The anonymous Rhetorica ad Herrenium (first century CE), long attributed to Cicero, states that one form of allegory occurs when “a similitude is drawn from a person or place (locus) or object” (345). Moreover, a commonplace metaphor for the instantiation of allegory is that it is an edifice.1 Henri de Lubac states that the exegetical architectural metaphor has “a place of privilege in religious literature, doctrinal and spiritual” (4.41).2 In reading allegorical narratives there are at least three traditions which offered habits of thought and gathered together clusters of tropes: 1) homiletic and theological works, which heavily engaged interpretations of biblical edifices and toponyms in a self-consciously allegorical manner; 2) the “Book of Nature” idea/conceptual metaphor that concurred with books of nature lore and encyclopedias, and which encouraged hermeneutical methods like the quadriga to be applied to aspects of creation; and 3) the tradition of spatial mnemonics, often called the ars memoratiua, which supplied allegorical narratives with a basis for dividing topical exploration by individuated loci, as well as an undercurrent of temporal themes and concepts. Fundamentally, there are at least seven tropes in allegorical stories that pertain to their figurative environments. The tropes proliferated alongside this hermeneutical energy in the traditions of the exegesis of biblical edifices, texts about the “book of nature”, and 1 Philo Judeaus states that the literal sense of Joseph’s dreams is a foundation, and “on this foundation let us raise up the rest of the building, following the rules of that wise architect, allegory” (On Dreams Being Sent by God 2.8). In Moralia, Gregory the Great talks about treating scripture like a river of discourse with adjacent valleys that should be filled with figurative edifices; and, he writes of the stages of interpretation as follows: “First lay the historical foundations; next by pursing the typical sense we erect a fabric of the mind to be a stronghold of faith; and moreover as the last step, by the grace of moral instruction, we, as it were, clothe the edifice with an overcast of colouring” (51). Hugh of St. Victor calls allegory the “superstructure” to the building of faith in the Didascalicon. In this work, Hugh compares “Divine Scripture” to a “building” in a “similitude” (139). 2 This same passage is quoted by Mary Carruthers in Craft of Thought (17), who first drew my attention to it. 19 the arts of memory. Individual stories draw from or contravene aspects of these tropes to furnish their artistic and ideological visions. A note on diction: allegory has a few terminological cognates that draw on different metaphors and therefore slightly different emphases. De Lubac has written at great length on this subject and demonstrates with a preponderance of examples that the second item of the quadriga was practically interchangeable with “mystical,” “inner,” and “spiritual” (2.83-125). Mystical refers to mysterium, the mystery that is elicited by the literal description or history, which begs clarification or an explanation according to doctrine. Dozens of authors use the term interchangeably with allegory, but it often refers to the moral sense as well. Inner refers to the way in which the “other-speaking” of the surface text has reference and applicability to the soul or the intellect. The sensus spiritualis might be described as the “proper” sense, the one most attuned to the catholic faith or the essence of the message, but understood nevertheless as a metaphorical extension or a deepening of the literal. Now the quadriga, traditionally formulated by John Cassian and which divides meanings into four categories (literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical) could have a “pliant,” variable, order, sometimes presupposing the historical sense, and would sometimes only be three (e.g., Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon conflates the anagogical and allegorical). The latter three were occasionally collapsed into allegory. For instance, Thomas Aquinas writes in his Summa that “[o]nly allegory is placed among those four to stand as a representative of the three spiritual senses” (1.10). With valence towards secular poetry as well, Dante’s letter to Can Grande asserts, “though these mystical senses are called by various names, in general all can be called allegorical, because they are different from the literal or the historical” (7).3 3 The editor of Bede notes that although he often mentions the traditional fourfold division, he preferred the encompassing term “spiritual,” and variously used the terminology of the “allegorical or mystical or figurative 20 The following discussions begin with a general outline of how the non-fiction genres involving allegorical interpretation relate to the seven spatial tropes listed in the introduction. The first section (A) adduces that works on the allegorical interpretation of biblical edifices informed tropes involving 1) abstract topologies and 2) psychic places. The second discussion (B) demonstrates the relevance of the “book of nature” concept for encyclopedias and books of nature lore proffering allegorical interpretation, and the way they 3) provided a model for allegorical narratives’ moments of interpretation on topologies and 4) the varying degrees of verisimilitude in the representation of “natural” reality. The third discussion is on the way the (C) arts of memory 5) encourage allegorical narratives’ organization of topic with topography, and 6) inform the temporal concepts embedded in some of the metaphors. The final trope emerges out of (D) dream vision literature, and 7) involves the spatial elevation to a God’s-eye view of the cosmos, re-viewing much of the material of the narrative and its applicability to the soul. A) Allegorical Exegesis and Topology The history of allegorical interpretation has an intimate relationship to narratives of the inner life, many of them trenchantly oriented toward places of religious authority. Most important for the history of allegorical interpretation are St. Paul’s ideas about God’s intent manifesting invisibilia in both events of history and in created things, animate and inanimate, especially in the Israelite places of worship.4 Early Christian writings, and even the first sense” throughout his extensive work of exegesis (Connolly xxix). Gregory’s preface to Moralia notes that he will use “the tools of allegory to make clear the moral sense” (51), which is just one example of how the terms were understood to be interrelated, even if certain terms were applied to discourses of slightly different emphasis. 4 De Lubac offers dozens of examples of writers in the first centuries of Christianity who assert that their practice of allegory has come from the apostle Paul, in vol. 2 of Medieval Exegesis. Perhaps the most significant cluster of relevant Pauline passages occurs in 2 Corinthians, beginning with the oft quoted “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (3.6). Paul’s obvious debt to Plato influences his subsequent exegesis of the Exodus tabernacle as something which relates to individual believers: “if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be 21 systematic theology (Origen’s Principiis) show marked interest in the allegorical comprehension of place, and in the broader questions about the created order.5 Origen’s homilies individualize biblical narrative, using etymology to order a set of coordinates, while spatial variables such as verticality, topographical diversity, climate, and general regional context function as figures in the warfaring and wayfaring narratives of the soul.6 Similarly, Augustine’s massively influential De Doctrina Christiana insists that readers must seek out the “figurative signs” in structures, cities and other “unknown places” (2.40), achieved “partly by the knowledge of languages, partly by the knowledge of things” (2.37).7 Some of the narratives corresponding with Origen’s and Augustine’s milieu also present notable allegorical approaches to place. The Shepherd of Hermas (composed by an anonymous author just prior to Origen) begins this trend by materializing a story out of 1 Peter 2.5, where spiritual stones need to have “their riches cut” into shape to be built into a spiritual house (3.5.6). The dreamer is lead by an imposing feminine personification to “a great tower being builded upon the waters, of glistening clothed upon with our house which is from heaven” (5.1-2). Paul refers to himself as a master builder, while the foundation is Christ, and lists several figurative materials (gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay) involved in construction (1 Cor. 3). The idea that structures can be analogically related to individuals can also be seen in passages like 1 Peter 2.5: “Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices.” 5 The Principiis demonstrates Origen’s deep desire to bring the particularities of the Hebrew Bible’s places to bear on all souls, i.e. to make them universal in their application to interiorities: “Nay, even when we read of the construction of the tabernacle, we deem it certain that the written descriptions are the figures of certain hidden things” (4.9). 6 Early in Origen’s interpretation of Joshua he lays out a few spatial variables. One of his first remarks is that “God tells them to cross over into the land, not the land Moses gave, but that which I am giving you,” and follows this quotation with v.3 after mentioning that the meek will inherit the earth: “Every place, to which you shall ascend with the soles of your feet, I shall give you” (Jos 1:3). He writes, “What are the places we ascend with the soles of our feet? The letter of the Law is placed on the ground and lies down below. . . . But if you are able to rise from the letter to the spirit and also ascend from history to a higher understanding, then you have truly ascended to the lofty and high place that you will receive from God as your inheritance.” Every place, understood spiritually, traversed in the act of interpretation corresponds to the allegorical signification, as he states in Homily 19: “Not that I wish at this time to make a catalogue of places, but so that we may ponder the images of the mysteries that are signified through them” (19.4). 7 Augustine specifically highlights “what Jerusalem signifies, or Sion, or Sinai, or Lebanon, or Jordan, and whatever other names in that language we are not acquainted with. And when these names have been investigated and explained, many figurative expressions in Scripture become clear” (2.39). 22 square stones?” (2.10.4).8 This marvel vexes the dreamer who asks, “what advantage is it to me to have seen these things, and yet not to know what the things mean” (3.11.1). The personification who is identified as Holy Church relates the dual signification of personification and place: the “tower, which thou seest building, is myself, the Church” (3.11.3). Prudentius’s Psychomachia (close in time to Augustine and maintaining enormous importance in England through the Middle Ages), similarly represents a number of imposing personifications, and presents an epic battle of the soul.9 The book has a long homiletic preface on Genesis 18 prior to the battle and concludes with a construction of a temple within the soul.10 Prudentius ties the construction of the temple in Jerusalem, and the “homeless Ark . . . established in its place on the marble altar” at the end of the war (ll..811-13). Lines 830-887 contain several biblical allusions that intertextually constitute the temple, the twelve gates (of both Ezekiel and Revelation), and include the seven pillars of wisdom (Proverbs 9), a pearl of great price (Matthew 13.45-46) that the character Faith purchases, as well as Aaron’s green rod (Numbers 17). Prudentius’ early allegorical narrative is filled with spectacle, and visual allegory takes the form of this accumulative sacred locus at the end – though his work is certainly not the end of allegorical temples in narrative or exegetical works. 8 The actors building this tower include personifications of Faith, Continence, Simplicity, Guilelessness, Reverence, Knowledge, and Love. 9 For instance, Mark Atherton demonstrates that although Prudentius lived in Iberia, “Anglo-Saxon readers were fascinated by [Psychomachia’s] themes,” as evidenced by many echoes in sermons and “four illustrated versions of the poem which were produced at English scriptoria in the late tenth or early eleventh centuries” (263-64), which depict the temple at the end of the poem. 10 Robert Babcock has indicated that the Psychomachia was used as a primer for students learning allegorical methods of interpretation; Rupert of Deutz, the owner of a major manuscript containing the poem, which was used for students learning exegesis (from ca. 1000 CE), considered “investigation of the poem . . . a serious theological pursuit, incorporating the study of patristic texts that deal with allegorical exegesis of the Bible” (177). 23 Jessica Weiss summarizes the primary structures bound together in the exegetical tradition that would follow from the symbolic freight of the Hebrew Bible, the Christian scriptures, and the Patristic approach to both: The Tabernacle in Exodus 25ff, Solomon’s temple in 1 Kings 6, the Temple and its platform in Ezekiel’s vision (Ezekiel 40ff), the Heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation 20, and Noah’s Ark (Genesis 6). All these structures including the Ark, were analyzed as avatars of one another, and of Christ and the Church, following the statement in Hebrews 8:2-6 that Christ is the true tabernacle, the pattern of the structure revealed to Moses. (42) Gregory the Great’s homilies on the temple of Ezekiel are some of the most famous exegetical works of the Middle Ages (ca. 592 CE). Among his works, these homilies most explicitly connect place to allegory.11 The Venerable Bede’s (672-735 CE) work on rhetoric and tropes gives allegory a standard classification as “a trope which means something other than what it says” (205), and he uses the temple of Solomon as his example (207). Two of the primary works that Bede is renowned for are his exegetical works on both the tabernacle and the temple of Solomon. The prologue to the latter work, he states that it is a work “in the allegorical style on the construction of the temple of God” (3). The opening of his book on the tabernacle dwells at considerable length on the question of topography and its figurative import, indicating a more sophisticated and intertextual layer of possibility for figuration than just the isolated description of the tabernacle.12 Many of the details throughout are psychologized or spiritualized.13 An 11 Gregory expects symbolic meaning in every phrase, and he argues that it is not possible to accept the building of the city according to the letter, since the volume contained in it exceeds the breadth of it, spatially. A few highlights of his exegesis: the gate signifies faith in Jesus, and chambers are the hearts of believers; the windows are of contemplation, looking on a porch of humility. 12 Bede writes, “First we ought to examine and attentively consider the topography of the place and the circumstances that obtained when these things were commanded to be made. For all these things, as the apostle says, happened to them in figure but were written down for us” (1). 13 For his allegorical exegesis of Solomon’s Temple, his attention to the ekphrasis of pictures and representations covering the panels of walls in the halls of allegorical narratives will become a commonplace in later literature: 24 abundance of works on structural exegesis appear again in the twelfth century, especially in the community of St. Victor in Paris. An influential writer, Hugh of St. Victor (1096 –1141 CE) wrote several books on Noah’s Ark, one of which is entitled Libellus de formation Arche. Notably, the “allegory of the ladders” is very close indeed to an allegorical narrative: it is peopled by personifications that navigate the rooms and ladders, and are imagined as actors in the soul’s movement toward beatitude.14 Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173 CE), originally from Scotland, one of Hugh’s successors at the abbey, wrote a few important works connecting spatiality, narrative, and allegory. His work Benjamin Minor treats the twelve offspring of Jacob as figurative types that traverse lands signifying interiority.15 Richard theorizes that the sense of the signification in scripture may be determined “by place, at another time by action” (145). He ponders the ark of the covenant and the tabernacle, but also “mountains and hills, fields, and valleys” as different creations that imply “there will be a difference of knowledges” (133). By the twelfth century, biblical places and structures elicited some of the crowning achievements of exegesis, and these extended beyond Origen, Bede, Hugh, and Richard to dozens of others. However, this exegetical practice was not limited to biblical texts, but was also used to interpret epic poetry like Virgil’s Aeneid. Thomas Maresca describes Bernard Silvestris’ twelfth-century commentary on the Aeneid as the “most important literary critical document of “cherubim and palm-trees in them, and various representations, as it were, in relief and protruding form the wall” are virtues in the soul (54). At one point in his book on the tabernacle, when he transitions to making some observations on the Solomonic Temple, Bede provides a theoretical comment on the imperative that the soul has to treat structural and physical details as spiritual metaphors: “unless we imitate the material ornamentation of the tabernacle or temple by the devout and pure adornment of heart and body, there cannot apply to us that word of the Apostle in which he says, ‘for you are the temple of the living God’” (46-47). 14 In his discussion of the warmth of the east, “Moderation is drawn in the likeness of a man of substance sitting at the table, eating and giving alms, like someone who uses the world as is permitted. On the second ladder Wisdom is drawn, in the likeness of a pilgrim walking, like one who flees the world” (23). 15 Ruben, fear; Simeon, grief; Levi, hope; Judah, love; Dan, judgment; Naphtali, comparison; Gad, abstinence; Asher, patience; Issachar, joy of interior sweetness; Zabulon, hatred of vices; Dinah, shame; Joseph, discretion or moderation; Benjamin, ecstatic contemplation. 25 the Middle Ages for what it tells us about poetry and the way it was read” (xx). Throughout Bernard’s commentary we see the allegorical interpretive habits used on biblical texts used to interpret Virgil’s Aeneid. Sometimes his interpretation of loci is as simple as listing a place, and immediately offering an immaterial referent as in “Domos, minds” (66), or a rapid succession in the commentary on lines in Book VI: “Terram: firm and fruitful virtue”; “Portus: the beginning of salvation for the libidinous” (81). One part of his commentary on Book VI reflects on the multiplicity of possible interpretations and draws in biblical thought to furnish his epic reading: “A montibus: from divine substances. For the mountains are sometimes interpreted as the vices of pride, as in the ‘mountains melted like wax” (Ps. 96.5; Mich. 1:4), and sometimes as the rational and divine substances, as in ‘the mountains around Jerusalem’ (Ps. 124:2)” (62).16 Bernard directly proposes that “Virgil sets forth topography which allegorically describes philosophy when he says that the Sibyl called Aeneas to her. Latus Euboice rupis excisum in antrum: ‘the flank of the Euboean rock carved out into a cave’ – a certain part of philosophy is set apart in profundity” (41). Here Bernard’s comment has bearing on the entire spatial context of his commentary on Book VI of the Aeneid, which is a descent into the underworld. The line between exegesis, homiletics, and narrative was further blurred in a significant number of the early Middle English prose works, which is the immediate context for allegories like Piers Plowman. These works are framed entirely by a relationship of allegorical places; many of them figure personifications and offer more or less narrative, but the foundation for each text is a figurative edifice. Sawles Warde, an elaborate early thirteenth century sermon, primarily consists of a dialogue of personifications that discuss the virtuous maintenance of the body, 16 Early in his commentary, he writes “one must pay attention to the diverse aspects of the poetic fictions and the multiple interpretations in all allegorical matters if in fact the truth cannot be established by a single interpretation” (11). 26 figured as a domestic house (warde). Three fourteenth-century texts, the “Eight Ghostly Dwelling Places”, The Abbey of the Holy Ghost, and The Charter of The Abbey of the Holy of Ghost also represent the soul in structures. The first text is brief and descriptive, with a variety of places that are taken to signify aspects of the soul, “ghostly” being the Middle English rendering of the sensus spiritualis of place.17 The Abbey of the Holy Ghost similarly makes an analogy between a well-ordered ecclesiastical structure and the soul, although there are anti-mimetic descriptions in the course of the work, such as the “Reuer of teris” that runs through the interior of the soul-cloister. This text presents the abbey as soul analogy centering the conceit, but focuses on the behaviour and character of personifications as they relate to the various idea-chambers of the Abbey.18 The Charter work follows the original Abbey text in several manuscripts and is more a narrative on founding, dissolution, and then a redemption of the structure, but focuses its figurative representation of the threshold, how it is breached, and how this causes chaos. Beyond these anonymous prose works, several more early Middle English poems focus their title and action on a single building, such as the translations of Robert Grosseteste’s works, Chasteau d’Amour and Templum Domini. The Chasteau begins with descriptions of the structure, and two hundred lines later, returns to the meaning of the castle’s features: the “four toures gret and strong” were “gastlye strength and soberness rizt and sutilte” (615-16). The seven barbicans are seven virtues, the four streams fill the son, and flow to 17 The brief text offers typical abbey components, and pairs them with Christian ideals of behaviour and mindset: Thow schalt vndirstone that eueri religious soule hath viij goostly dwelling placis. The fferste is a temple of deuout preier; the secunde is a scoule of sothness; the thridde is a cloister of scilence; the fourthe is the chaple of rigtful correccion; the fifthe is a fraitir of sobirnes; the sixte is a doritir of reste and pees; the seventhe a fermori of pitee and pacience; the eizthe is a hostage of charite and largeness. . . . Therefore who that hath these viij placis goostly in his soule and outward in hise werkis, his religioun is perfizt, for other bodily placis ben impartyment. The author “moves” through a variety of the architectural elements of an abbey in this primer for meditation. 18 Personifications take care of different areas: “Deuocione es celeresse,” “Penance saƚƚ be kychynnere,” “Sobirnes redis at þe borde the lyues of the haly Fadirs,” “Mercy hir syster saƚƚ be ambynowre, þat gyffes to aƚƚe,” and the “lady Drede es portere.” 27 mankind, cleaning “synne that is past” (640-44). Templum Domini presents a clearly figurative edifice that engages the mental and practical aspects of life, rather than viscera, as the primary subject: the “tymbre is in mannys thought / To haue gud hope with otyn were / that he sall in to blisse be broght / With goddis seruyce & vertuus sere (389-92). Faith is the ground, the walls are “hope to com to blisse,” and the roof is charity (520-25), among numerous other ways this text unfolds the comparison of inuisibilia to structural components. The movements in space and in perspective, shifting from one res or locus to others, are tantamount to the conceptual exploration and the parallel didactic insistence. The spaces of these homiletic and theological works are expressly a psycho-spiritual mix, inviting personifications and biblical types as denizens. Trope #1: Abstract Topologies As in the works discussed above, allegorical places tie a concept, virtue, or vice to a structure or topography. This is the first item to point out about allegorical places, as well as the most intuitive and simplest. In an allegory, one finds places with titles like the Garden of Love, the Mount of Contemplation, the Dungeon of Despair, the Castle of Perseverance, the House Beautiful, and Sin Wilderness; or, these narratives might have historical places with layers of figuration like Jerusalem or Babylon; or, the story will offer an authoritative guide or a narrative digression to indicate “how the commentary should proceed” on an unnamed place in question (Frye 91). Allegorical places are not peculiar for being proper nouns, but for pressing the reader to acknowledge the immaterial valence of a material site. Generally, the topos for much allegorical topography involves a capitalized adjective followed by a noun, or a definite article followed by a proper noun with a genitive predicate (e.g., Doubting Castle or The Slough of Despond). With such clear linguistic signals – this “distraction toward abstraction” (20), as 28 Stephen Barney puts it – allegorical settings manifest themselves as metaphors for ideas, emotions, or even transpositions of the body. Not all places in an allegory have to be places with immediate abstract reference. In Piers Plowman, the County of Covetousness is hard by Westminster, and as a consequence the “moral sense” bleeds the symbolic boundaries of the literal world. Allegories are environments that offer the modal codes of exceptional intelligibility that usually announce the way they will provide a connotative basis to the action. It is the allegorical genre that most painstakingly and transparently takes the metaphors of landscape and edifice that more mimetic kinds of literature might also use (inadvertently or otherwise) and embodies them in narrative in self-conscious ways.19 Notably, many allegories (like their homiletic counterparts) are named after a central topology, and this feature is a tremendous and widespread genre code for premodern and Early Modern authors and audiences. This feature of allegories should remind modern critics that, although personification is of course a prominent trope in allegories, quite often the clearest metaphorical signal of these stories, to readers, is place-based. Christine de Pizan’s allegories, Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405 CE) and Le Livre du Chemin de Long Estude (1403 CE) are both named after the main allegorical topology. Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame (ca. 1380 CE), the anonymous Castle of Perseverance (ca. 1425 CE), the anonymous Court of Sapyence (ca. mid-fifteenth century), Gavin Douglas’ Palis of Honour (ca. 1500 CE), William Neville’s 19 Consider Lutwack’s lengthy chapter on setting and the body in his general book on literature and place: he fishes for texts that can illustrate his point with maximum clarity, and selects Spenser’s House of Alma in Book II of the Faerie Queene and Phineas Fletcher’s The Isle of Man, both texts that present obvious, though complex and wide-ranging analogies between a particular imaginative setting and the human body. His discussion of “Place and Character” returns several times to the idea that novelistic authors “put an allegorical construction on place as a ‘landscape of difficulty’ of the sort found in Pilgrim’s Progress” (70). J. Hillis Miller laconically mocks the common-sense view that topographical elements in novels are (“of course”) there to provide verisimilitude to narrative, but in fact are characterized by the unmappable, metaphorical, and political (8). 29 Castell of Pleasure (1518 CE), and Richard Bernard’s Isle of Man (1627 CE), to name a handful. Some works like King Hart (ca. 1500 CE) tie the titular character intimately to the main place of the story: Castle Hart, in this case. From a central place or arterial route, allegories mix metaphors and allow for what cognitive linguists call “conceptual blending” in the manners of interaction. But an allegory provides what one might describe as a “common ground”, “foundation”, or “groundwork” in how it facilitates narrative kinesis and the relationality of ideas. In John Bunyan’s allegories, The King’s Highway (The Pilgrim’s Progress) and the City of Mansoul (The Holy War) are the metaphorical frame, and contain dozens of figurative characters and places within, while also serving as metaphorical topologies in their own right. An allegory necessitates what Yi-fu Tuan presents as space of possibility (openness, without definite boundary, exploration), which gives rise to places (more definitive boundaries, simultaneity) and specific ideas.20 One of the key points of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their highly influential Metaphors We Live By is that “[b]ecause so many of the concepts that are important to us are either abstract or not clearly delineated in our experience (the emotions, ideas, time, etc.), we need to get a grasp on them by means of other concepts that we understand in clearer terms (spatial orientations, objects, etc.)” (115).21 Allegory involves what might be called an extended spatial orientation toward semiotic objects, and is doubtlessly trying to solve the communicative difficulty explored by Lakoff and Johnson. The problem informs much of literature and plods its 20 Tuan discusses these definitions all throughout Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (esp. 161-62). Geosopher Robert Sacks suggests the term simultaneity to delineate the ontology of place (161-77). 21 Also, much of their following work continues this trend (i.e., Philosophy in the Flesh, Metaphor and Thought). 30 way into landscape portrayal. Space and place are consequently saturated with human interest and features that render them into potential or latent metaphors for ideas or psychic experience.22 In books of rhetoric, allegory is defined as “extended metaphor.” This definition takes seriously the writings of late antique, medieval, and Early Modern writers, many of whom consistently state that allegory is “metaphora continua,” beginning with Cicero and then Quintilian (8.6.4), all the way to Henry Peacham (1593): “[allegory is a] terme of speech which expresseth one thing in words, and another in sense. In a metaphore there is a translation of one word onely in an Allegorie of many, and for that cause an Allegorie is called a continued Metaphore” (25). The etymology of allegory, moreover, comes from allos (other) and agoreuein (to speak in public), and can be translated as “other-speaking.” Agoreuein is taken from the Greek word denoting the place of the exchange of ideas: the marketplace, the agora. It is a social and rhetorical place, but notably as well, an open place, as in agoraphobia (“the fear of open places”). This etymological clue hints that spatiality is a foundation for allegory, a literary mode that speaks other in open places. The allegorist uses metaphor in narrative not simply to regurgitate ideas fully accepted in the cultural fabric, but to perform a social-symbolic function with its attendant questions (and varying priorities of value), acting out an exploration of difficult and unresolved matters. Paul Ricouer notes that every culture wrestles with its cherished metaphors, structures that necessitate spatial configurations.23 If allegory is best characterized as extended metaphor, the metaphorical basis of these narratives involves spatial extension, the way or the road of the story, with its various sites of instruction and conflict. 22 Tuan implies that all places that are “talked about” tend toward the allegorical: “Place-names seem to be pure nouns, meaningless and difficult to remember, until they become adjectives, each capturing not only a distinctive quality of sight, sound, and smell, but also a distinctive historical association” (Humanist Geography 93). 23 This issue is among the key discussions throughout his Rule of Metaphor. 31 Trope #2: Psychic Topoi This dissertation will feature stories using metaphors of outward travel to travel through what is also an inward journey. As was mentioned, allegory is almost synonymous with “inner”, and the genre’s authors, generally make what Paul Piehler characterizes as “a deliberate attempt, dependent on both the intuitive and the rational operations of the mind, to reinvest the external world with this lost internal dimension, in order to gain access to and participate in the acquisition of important spiritual truths” (10). Olivier de La Marche’s allegory (1482) ends by noting that the “quest was begun / In the marches of my mind / And in the land of Look to Yourself” (337). Explicit in many allegories, and implicit in others, is this idea, expressed also in the Pilgrimage of the Life of Man (1426 CE) that “thylke Enmyes in secre, / Wych off thy sylff ycausyd be” (7909-10). Another of Lydgate’s works, Reason and Sensuality (ca. 1408 CE) states “And by oure desert oure habitacion chaungeth / Fro ioy to peyne & woo perpetually” (2094-95). Arduous landscapes and adversarial characters are represented as caused, in some sense, by the conditions pertaining most immediately to the central character. Thus, allegories are rife with the language of passions and patterns of behaviour inscribed on landscapes. Bernard of Clairvaux’s “Story of the King’s Son” (ca. 1130 CE) is a retelling of the parable of the prodigal son, almost entirely in terms of a catalogue of psychological topoi. After “Man” leaves his Father’s guardians of the Law and Prophets, he begins to “wander through mountains of conceit and valleys of curiosity; through fields of indiscipline and woods of sexual excess; through the dark groves of fleshly delight and through the rough seasons of worldly cares” (18): but he is crushed in a Prison of Despair, covered in the dirt of Sin, until Fear prompts a return. Such a story is typical of the approach in English allegories. 32 The term psychomachia (battle of the soul/mind), is taken from the title of Prudentius’s poem and is sometimes synonymous with allegory. Of course, the forces that wage battle in the soul are ideas and passions in the mind and body of the characters; but characters are not the only matter to consider. According to the psychoanalytical approach to allegory of Angus Fletcher, the constituent parts of allegories (characters, objects, and places) all correspond to a fragmented psyche in search of reintegration and a restoration of order. James Paxson’s well-regarded Poetics of Personification identifies one of the six common tropes of allegorical literature to be “topification,” which is the translation of an abstraction or psychic force into a geographical locus (40). One of the aesthetic consequences of this sensibility is that places in allegories frequently exhibit what John Ruskin termed the “pathetic fallacy” in Modern Painters: that is, putatively natural elements which have human pathos attributed to them. Allegorical place is an exceedingly important part of characterization in the genre. Barney asserts that in some allegories, the landscape functions as a mirror of the protagonist: “[w]e observe change in a central character in an allegory [...] but we seldom enter him [or her] to see the process of change itself because so much of his interior is expressed by the persons and the landscapes which surround him [or her] in projected reifications which cannot change” (36). Allegorical landscapes in this way provide the “background” for psychodrama. Sometimes the land functions as a mirror: the Arch-weeper of the Architrenius (1184 CE) spends a chunk of the narrative in the Sea of Grief, where “fresh weeping renews the sunken water-level” (115). But sometimes characterization is emphasized through buffers and the difficulty of traversal. In the Romance of the Rose, Ease allows Amans into the Garden of Love; Jealousy orders a tower to be built that imprisons Bialacoil, a place that must be “jealously” guarded from Amans; Fals-Semblant is cunning and deceitful, and thus has a more porous spatial distribution and access to 33 the otherwise buffered structure. In King Hart, the castle is a mirror of the character, and it is almost impossible to distinguish the character from his heart-castle, and the most significant tonal shift occurs when Youthead leaves, and Dame Pleasance throws the main character into the dungeon. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian ends as a “scholar” who can “pick out the meaning” (105), but early on his capacity to travel and interpret is downright regressive, at least until he proceeds through the Interpreter’s House; he does not successfully interpret any landscapes prior to this episode, and his emotional condition in the City of Destruction, Slough of Despond, and Village of Morality is destructive and despondent, to say the least. Accordingly, most allegories reward an incessant probing of what the topos means about the protagonist remaining or shifting hither and thither. In making these statements about psychodrama, it is erroneous to reduce the landscape simply to a projection of the protagonist’s psyche. Allegorical protagonists, even when they seem to correspond with the author him/herself (De Guileville, Dante, Boethius, Usk, Christine), usually stand for a broad class of humanity (often with a masculine bias in characters like Hart, Youth, Everyman, Mankynde, Humanum Genus, anonymous dreamers); or sometimes authors opt for a representation of psycho-spiritual synecdoche (Architrenius, Will, Amoure, Amans, Will, Desyre, Vertue, Christian). Only a clumsy hermeneutic would maintain that the landscapes are transient, subjective, and insubstantial because they are in a dreamland or have some thematic correspondence to a character’s disposition. It would be more accurate to state that allegorical landscapes (ambitiously) purport to represent the potential psycho-spiritual state of all or any persons in the given environmental, psychological, theological, astrological, and humoral conditions being enacted. I think this point approximates what C. S. Lewis means when he writes that allegory is the “subjectivism of an objective age” (30). Gail Kern Paster has written about 34 the “ontologically coextensive” emotions of characters “with the particular social and physical environments in which those emotions arise” (27), in works like the Faerie Queene.24 Allegories are extended metaphors, but the “nature” of these stories is expressed in “integumental” physical environments.25 Bernard Silvestris’ Cosmographia (ca. 1140 CE) has two sections, one entitled “Macrocosmos” and the other “Microcosmos.” The creation of the cosmos is distinct from the creation of the human body and mind, but they mirror each other; and the humors enter the senses, which impact the heart that “imparts to the brain the source of its vitality” (122).26 Allegories demonstrate a concourse of mind and world; the landscape is not totally inner or outer, and the degree to which a character should or should not identify with a place is often central to the ethical substrate of the narrative. The Redcrosse Knight overwhelmingly identifies with the Cave of Despair (1.9), but must divest his identity from that place and enter into the House of Holiness, where he can express the traits of the Mount of Contemplation and its connection to becoming a Christ figure: like that sacred hill, whose head full hie, Adornd with fruitfull Oliues all arownd, Is, as it were for endlesse memory Of that deare Lord, who oft thereon was fownd. (1.10.54) 24 She emphasizes humoral thought and its cosmological correlatives. 25 Integumentum is a cognate for allegory that emphasizes a marriage of the literal and metaphorical, something emphasized by Van Dyke in The Fiction of Truth (205-13). 26 Several intellectual historians like Bruno Latour (We Have Never Been Modern) and Charles Taylor (A Secular Age)) have noted that the premodern world offers greater porousness of body and mind than Cartesian or early Enlightenment thought. Some prominent Renaissance historians noting a commensurate historical insight, and who connect the matter in varying degrees to allegory, include Judith Anderson (Allegorical Intertext), Miranda Anderson (Renaissance Extended Mind) and Michael Schoenfeldt (Physiology and Inwardness). 35 Spenser reveals the alternative in Malbecco, who transforms into another creature to fully identify with a melancholic cave. If the journey of allegory is in part a psychic journey, then the beneficent and adverse environments are both “inside” the journeyers and outside them. B) The Real Book of Nature The Bible (the “Book”) is filled with places of spiritual import; and so it is with the Book of Nature, which shares the same author. Among pre-modern and Early Modern Christians, the doctrine of the Book of Nature is crucial background to the way space is read.27 The metaphor of nature as a book, Ruth Groh explains, “was only possible in a book religion” (49), a religion with some degree of a sign theory applied to revelation, in conversation with phenomenal nature. Dieter Groh offers an adroit account of how Stoic concepts of the world soul expressing its intelligible Logos in all parts of the earth, and the Aristotelian concept of things in nature all possessing a proper teleology, as well as “the struggle against the Gnostic heresies and their devaluation of creation” (23), all led fortuitously to a creation theology which would underpin the “book of nature” idea.28 Augustine is the first known writer to use the liber natura metaphor at the level of the phrase; the metaphor is used in Contra Faustum, which addresses the Gnostic denial of spiritual dignity to the material world. Augustine argues that the dematerializing Manichaeans must also use nature to think of spiritual matters: “But had you begun with looking 27 Some key scholars demonstrating the hermeneutical conversation between the book of nature and the allegorical interpretation of the Bible include Clarence Glacken (Traces on the Rhodian Shore), Dieter and Ruth Groh (The Book of Nature in Antiquity and the Middle Ages), Jitse M. Meer (Nature and Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions), Kellie Robertson (Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy), Mary Franklin-Brown (Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age), and Rebecca Davis (Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature). 28 Gerhart Ladner argues that creation theology amounted to a cosmological apologetic for both Latin and Greek writers for whom “all of creation and each of its parts were admirable” with the “symbolic structure of the Hellenistic cosmos, according to which the sky with its stars and weather, and the earth with its lands and mountains, its oceans and other waters, formed with animals and plants a system of relationships of manifold symbolic meanings” (80-81). 36 on the book of nature as the production of the Creator of all, and had you believed that your own finite understanding might be at fault wherever anything seemed to be amiss, instead of venturing to find fault with the works of God, you would not have been led into these impious follies” (32.20). Augustine does not call for a straightforward sensual appreciation of nature but a semiotic interpretation.29 Notably, Augustine’s desire to elucidate the signs to be found in nature is not meaningfully distinguished from meaning discovered “in” Scripture, as a separate exegetical territory.30 Some of the foremost usages of liber natura among medieval writers connect place and allegory. Hugh of St Victor, one of the most articulate proponents of the book of nature metaphor, lays out the divine attributes that can be discerned from creation in De Diebus Tribus. His discourse amplifies what can be learned from the “utility, magnitude, and beauty” of created things, and sharply distinguishes between a carnal mode of reading and spiritual one: For this whole sensible world is a kind of book written by the finger of God, that is, created by divine power, and each creature is a kind of figure, not invented by human determination, but established by the divine will to manifest and in some way signify the invisible wisdom of God. . . . [A] spiritual person can discern all things. . . . [I]n one and the same writing, one person notices the color or shape of the figures, whereas another praises their meaning and signification. (4.3, 63-64) 29 Reflecting, later in life, on the contents of this book he acknowledges that he had connected allegorical interpretation of Scripture and the natural world: “When I wrote the two books on Genesis against the Manichees, I interpreted the words of Scripture according to the allegorical meaning, not venturing to expound the deep mysteries of nature in the literal sense, that is, to explain the text according to its proper historical meaning” (Retractiones I.XVII). 30 Peter Harrison argues that allegorical interpretation of the Bible became closely tied to the allegorical discernment of nature because such interpretation presupposes the ability of words to signify objects in the natural world, and for those natural objects to communicate meaning, or even divine intention (26-28). 37 These “creatures,” whose spiritual meaning can be comprehended, include places. Hugh continues with a discussion of how composition and disposition display beauty through structure and has a separate discussion of “[t]he Disposition of Places.” He writes, “divine providence distributes its causes from each and every place, time and thing,” and sees providentia revealing herself in her diverse endowments to differing regions (4.9-12, 70-73).31 Another influential reference to the metaphor from a few generations later, comes from St. Bonaventura’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum: the “book of creation clearly indicates the primacy, sublimity and dignity of the First Principle and thus the infinity of his power” (67). This book treats the beginning of the ascent to God in the “valley of tears” (60) and an ascension of contemplation “step by step until we reach the height of the mountain where the God of gods is seen in Sion (Ps. 83:8)” (63). He takes two kinds of spatial progress as his metaphors for enhanced reading of the book of nature, from the sensible to the invisible: one must ascend Jacob’s ladder, “presenting ourselves the whole material world as a mirror” (63), also being like the “true Hebrews passing over from Egypt to the land promised,” analogized to “passing over with Christ from this world to the Father (John 13:1)” (63). In books about nature lore, one finds various levels of interpretation, sporting ubiquitous biblical glosses of the res and loci there. Physiologus, the prototype and the most circulated of medieval bestiaries and tomes of nature lore operates at many ethical and theological levels of signification, sometimes in the discussion of a single creature.32 The authors of the early Middle 31 Wanda Czieswski asserts that the later parts of Hugh’s book move from the littera into the sensus, the “deeper intention of the ‘text’ of creation” (79). 32 Michael Curley explains: “Nor did the word Φυσιολόγος ever mean simply ‘the naturalist’ as we understand the term . . . but one who interpreted metaphysically, morally, and, finally, mystically the transcendent significance of the natural world” (xv). Although the book is primarily about beasts, there are a number of references to the topographical features, and these are routinely given allegorical interpretations. Mountains are the place where the beaver, who represents the citizens of God, is hunted by the devil; and in another the mountain where the adamant stone is found signifies God in glory inaccessible. At one point in Physiologus, during the discussion of the ibis, 38 Ages did not divide scientific knowledge or the exercise of reason from “spiritual” or “mystical” knowledge. For instance, Isidore (ca. 560-636 CE) wrote De Natura Rerum in order to combat superstition and reaffirm faith, which was counter to the meaning that Lucretius had accorded to his much earlier work of the same title (De Natura Rerum, ca. 50 BCE), a work that critiqued the idea of the immortality of the soul. Rabanus Maurus (ca. 780–856 CE) is especially worthy to highlight as part of the story of allegorical spatiality. His entire encyclopedic work is about nature and etymology, entitled De Rerum Naturis, and draws out allegorical interpretations of different parts of the universe. For Maurus, the res of many names are topographical, and many proprietates are spatial.33 Book XII deals with regions and lands, XIII with mountains, hills, valleys, woods and around a dozen and a half other topographical features, while XIV discusses the mystical properties of buildings. He never claims to offer a single canonical interpretation of a text from the book of nature, and constantly offers a variety contrasting possibilities for how names and places might be interpreted.34 Some of the foremost Anglo-Latin encyclopedias promulgating the study of nature, like the Opus Maius of Roger Bacon (ca. 1220-1292), implore readers to study localities of the world: deep water signifies the place of the “spiritual and intelligible,” and elsewhere, in his entry on the frog, it is dryness that is used to signify abstinence cleanliness and water that signifies worldly desires and the unclean. 33 Names were aspects of things, as David del Bello explains in his work Etymology and the Allegorical Mindset: But the things created by God and signified through these words have a different language, codified by the natural and formal properties (proprietates) with which each res was endowed. [Roswita Klinck] rightly notes that “one of the pre-requisites for probing the meaning of a thing was the exact knowledge of its properties, and these were often warranted by etymology.” Yet, unlike a word, an object was perceived as inherently polysemous and could have as many meanings as exterior or interior qualities (its visibilis forma or its invisibilis natura), all of which were catalogued and studied by the quadrivium. (100-101) Del Bello makes it clear that names are a way of engaging and revealing rather than exhausting the potential ideas inherent in aspects of the created order. 34 E.g., his introduction to “mountains”: “‘Mountain’ has many meanings. Sometimes it signifies the Lord Savior, sometimes the holy Church, and sometimes the apostles, prophets, and holy men, because of the height of their virtues. On the other hand, sometimes heretics, sometimes the devil himself” (36). Maurus invites his reader to creative interpretation, so that when his explanations are incomplete, his reader can find them suggested in the name or in the experience associated with the toponym: “There are found, in divine books, place names which are not without mystical significance, but we think it would take too long to tell what they all mean allegorically. And so, we leave to the wise reader to investigate their mystical meaning, while we put down merely their names and historic explanation” (43). 39 for the one who has gained a good idea of places, and has learned their location, distance, height, length, width, and depth, and has tested their diversity in heat and dryness, cold and humidity, color, savor, odor and beauty, ugliness, pleasantness, fertility, sterility, and other conditions, will be pleased very greatly by the literal history, and will be able easily and admirably to gain an understanding of the spiritual meanings. (204) Bacon is another instance of how the scientia of a subject pertaining to nature had the utmost “utility” and spiritual gravitas. Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s extremely influential De Proprietatibus Rerum (translated to Middle English by John Trevisa in the late fourteenth century) represents another book on the properties of creation.35 The Prohemium explaining the purpose of the work reminds the reader to use the book for allegory: “to undirstonde redels and menynges of scriptures and of writings” because “diuynyte vsith holy informacioun and poesies that myistik and dirk vndirstondinge and figuratif speches” (41). Trope #3: The Sensus of Place in the Book of Nature It is no coincidence that, for instance, so many of Maurus’ idea pairings for places and buildings find later expression in allegories: from the field that “expresses the human race” (95), and the field full of folk in Piers Plowman to the sea of “the present world, which dashes itself with the tumult of business activities and the corruptible waves of life” (51), which contains almost identical elements to the Sea of the World in The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man. Maurus theorizes that caves express the “dark hearts of sinners”, and Spenser’s Caves of Despair and Mammon in The Faerie Queene are good examples of similarly conceived topology. An 35 Book fourteen is primarily devoted to the features and diversity of important mountains, and he includes sections on valleys, fields, lowlands, downs, ditches, caves, caverns, and other topographical features, such as height, temperature, or standout feature. 40 anchorage or harbor “can be taken as the firmness of faith” (51), as it is treated in the Voyage of the Wandering Knight; pavement is the humiliation of the soul as in George Herbert’s “Church Floore”; the viae as the road of this present life, or as Christ, or as divine precepts, all of which find expression in the Pilgrim’s Progress, as well as open plains and the “relaxation of discipline” corresponding with the Plaine of Ease; the castellum is for Maurus the habitation of faithful souls, as it is likewise in The Castle of Perseverance, and so on. As a point of corroboration, the four core authors of this dissertation (Langland, Hawes, Spenser, and Bunyan) all mention the book of nature idea in their writings, a matter to which each of the later chapters will turn. But much more vitally, the idea of the book of nature is “applied” to topographies in allegories. Many such stories feature a personification of nature; the language of “kynde” and “nature/natura” smother many allegorical narratives, even dramas like the Castle of Perseverance,36 and works like The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man that reveal a strong preference for biblical revelation supervening over natural theology.37 It is frequently the case in an allegory that the dreamer is asked to interpret a topographical scene, which goes back to at least the Shepherd of Hermas where a dreamer is prompted to interpret twelve unusual and idea-rich mountains. Piers Plowman begins with a prompt to interpret a tower, a dungeon, and a field, which variously pertain to the allegorical and the moral sense; the developing comprehension of the “field” begins quite literally in the prologue, and moves through tropology in Passus 6, toward allegory and apocalypse in the later visions. Allegories pick up on elements of place involving what Steve Malpas enumerates in his philosophy of place, including “the natural landscape, the pattern of weather and of sky, the human ordering of spaces and resources, 36 At l.2513, the author refers to the Bok of Kendys, which is another phrase for “book of nature.” 37 Kellie Robertson offers an extended discussion of this issue in Nature Speaks (177-224). 41 and also those individual and communal narratives with which the place is imbued” (185), in order to perform layered readings (or misreadings). The language of the quadriga applied to topologies appears without attenuation in Stephen Hawes’ Example of Vertue. The protagonist, Youth, begins in a literal, unnamed garden. After proceeding to the Royal Mansion of Nature, he is instructed by its proprietress, and admonished to read Bartholomew’s work before being led into a wilderness to be tempted. After staying “among thornes sharpe and bestes wylde,” enduring the darkness of night, fleeing Lechery, he complains with a “mone” to dame Sapyence, and “likened the wyldernes by morall scence / Unto wordily trouble by good experience” (1188-90). Later in the narrative, he approaches a castle made of black marble, and a narrow bridge leading to it. The pilgrim reads the bridge as follows: I sawe there wrtyen this lytteral sense No man this bridge may ouer go But he be pure without negligence And stedfast in goddess byleue also. (1275-78) The “literal sense” here refers to that which is written, “according to the letter” – but Hawes puns on the word to convey the sense of crossing and drowning with the biblical allusion and allegorical extension of “goddess byleue”, which is inscribed on the place. Near the end of the text, he is taken to “a place of pleasure for you to repayre,” and here he learns that through prayer he can perceive the “other gardyn” that “is celestyall”; there is an immediate anagogical movement afterwards to a “chapel gayly gloryfyed” that has obvious resemblances to the biblical description of the New Jerusalem (1646, 1660). The spatial and ideological movement through the various classes of place show a clear procession through the categories of the quadriga. 42 In the Court of Sapyence, cited by Hawes as a sententious, nobly “derk and mysty” (i.e., allegorical) text, there is a section in which Wisdom offers a discourse on the study of nature as a collaboration of “[o]ure wyttes five” and “[i]ntellygence”, which “must yeve us than counsayle” (1702-04). The author cites many of the authorities mentioned above, such as “Denyse, Bernard, Bede, Barthilmew, / The good cardinal the swete Bonaventure” as those who offer “pryvy counceyl of the first nature” but which also stand as “clerkes whiche that were contemplative” (1709-14). The anonymous writer emphasizes that these authors are those who study nature, and “loke on books clene”, while also aiming to inspire an allegorical vision, “hevenly thing with eye mental to see, / Al erthly joye it passeth in degree!” (1720-22). This passage emerges in the context of the narrator of the court providing interpretations of its towers, dungeons, courtyards and gardens, filled with the trees, stones, and animals of encyclopedic works. The allegorical sense, then, emerging from the study of nature provides the import of discourse about the places of the narrative. The Court of Sapyence evidently sees itself as expressing precisely the tradition discussed above – representing and ordering nature in one sense, and offering the allegorical sense in another. Some general conclusions may be adduced about allegorical narratives: a) the natural landscapes and objects are treated as texts to be interpreted; b) the “meaning” of these texts are not perspicuous, with traditional associations and archetypes serving as a horizons of expectation, but requiring interpretation; c) strategies of biblical interpretation, a saturation of biblical allusions and antecedent images taken from the Bible, and especially the fourfold method employed on the Bible are routinely used on the texts that make up the res of “nature” in a given allegorical narrative. Nature is one of God’s books, and it is to be interpreted as a similar 43 way that the Bible is meant to be taken. The connection of this concept to spatiality may be seen all throughout allegorical narratives. Trope #4: Allegorealism [Allegory] does not accept the world of experience and the senses; it thrives on their overthrow, replacing them with ideas (323). Walter Benjamin, The Origins of the German Trauerspeil Allegory emphasizes the overall dual-realm nature of reality by focusing on the divide between the actual and the virtual, becoming and being, the necessary and the ideal (3-4). Don Adams, Alternative Paradigms of Literary Realism Nature as understood in the representation of reality is not necessarily sensuous, or casual to all contemporary modes of perception, or even “naturalistic” according to materialist works like Lucretius’ De Natura Rerum. Nature in the Bible, in bestiaries, in encyclopedias, and in books about nature lore is so often drawn to the liminal categories of natural entities and marvels. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, writes that art properly imitates nature, but both, in their rather minimal distinction, are ordered to their ends “by an intellectual principle” (Commentary on Physics 2.4).38 This kind of “Nature” is not, Ananda Coomaraswamy writes, “whatever is presented by our own immediate and natural environment” but a “Nature ‘to find which,’ as Meister Eckhart says, ‘all her forms must be shattered’” (9). Allegorical 38 The more complete quotation is as follows: “The reason art imitates nature is that knowledge is the principle of artistic activity. But all our knowledge is received through the senses from sensible and natural things. Hence our procedure in artificial things is similar to that in natural things. Natural things are imitable by art because the whole of nature is ordered to its end by an intellectual principle.” 44 representations of landscape or edifices are often accused of seeming uninteresting, overly conventional, or mundane.39 The didacticism might have a reputation for dullness, but classically the “teachable landscape” is supposed to be facilitated precisely by means of marvels and enargeia: didacticism about spiritual things militates viciously against the mundanity of allegorical landscapes. Allegories often obsessively engage the question of Reality, and they have a peculiar form of realism to engage the question, which one might call “Allegorealism”: this realism is indexed to a reality other than that of the mundane or conventional. Allegories employ varying degrees of hyper-focus and abstraction to emphasize or de-emphasize sensuous detail; they represent the relationship of places as a mosaic of forms; they present a synthesis of deictic and non-deictic forms; and finally, they present space-place dialectics. Alan of Lille, an oft-quoted expressor of the “Book of Nature” idea,40 wrote an allegory called Anticlaudianus,41 which represents the failure of nature to manifest perfectly in the terrestrial world. In one remarkable passage, Nature explains the failure of pictura to signify God 39 Literary studies on spatiality typically judge allegory with a critical silence, addressing the entirety of a volume to the novel or the Romantic lyric. Some make offhand comments acknowledging allegory’s existence, like Douglas Pocock or Christopher Salter, but proceed only to address other, newer genres. Those that do discuss allegory are often explicitly derogatory. In a general volume on The Role of Place in Literature, Leonard Lutwack proclaims that “allegories . . . depend upon a conventional stereotypy of place to advance their elaborate ideologies” (31). Alvin Greenberg, in an attempt to maintain a strong distinction between authentic modern protagonists and old Everymans, rebuffs allegorical landscape as an “abstract vacuum” in which persons are lifted from a “real world” (363). Elena Liotta’s book on the “psychic value of place” dismisses the value of allegory entirely since its landscape “maintains a linear, almost flat or planimetric, thought structure, and a simple representation of space, even on the symbolic level,” making “no impact on the psychological level” (94). James Mellard’s theory of reading landscape tropes paints “allegory,” “allegorical,” and “allegorization” as the “naïve” and “primitive” trope opposed to the more complex forms of synecdoche and irony (474-5, 84). Ruth Ronen’s aesthetic complaint is that the reader of allegory can recognize alternating ontological planes in the fictional horizon, so “the concreteness of the world is to some extent neutralized by a level of abstract signification” (33). Elizabeth Salter and Derek Pearsall’s excellent book on medieval landscape has a strangely unsympathetic set of accusations about allegory, which, they assert, involves “an arbitrary rearrangement of nature in the interest of transcendental truth” (18). Even Angus Fletcher, one of the great defenders of allegory in the twentieth century, still winces when he writes of the “surrealistic isolation” of places in allegories, where the visual clarity of allegory “is not normal; it does not coincide with what we experience in daily life” (102). 40 An oft-quoted reference to the Book of Nature idea comes from his poem “De Miseria Mundi”: “The whole created world / Like a book and a picture, / Serves us as a mirror” (Otten, “Nature and Scripture” 283). 41 In the preface to this text, he specifically calls for readers to discern the allegory. 45 fully, while noting that God's universal “tropes” still afford a large degree of revelation throughout the places of the world: “[L]anguage, since it fails to reach the essence of God, grows senseless when it tries to express things divine […]. However, he conceives everything by means of a trope and by way of a figure and assumes the unadulterated name without the object . . . directing all things without movement, filling all places while free of all places” (141). Alan singles out place as one of the tropes of God expressed in nature, but rather imperfect and fragmented, in the moulds of mutability and multiformality. Stephen Perkinson has characterized the attitude of medieval people to a bare mimesis as that which has a “limited, contingent” relationship to the truth as opposed to a studious symbolic profundity (19). The precise function of mimesis does not guarantee an absolutely normal and stable access of the senses to a substrate of nature in common-sense terms, or “what we experience in daily life.” The anthropologist-psychologist Pascal Boyer has theorized a fascinating concept, strongly confirmed by later scholarship, called the “minimally counterintuitive,” which asserts that “[r]eligious claims take their attention-demanding quality, which is crucial for acquisition and transmission, precisely from the fact that they are not entirely compatible with ordinary intuitive expectations” (59). A cave might be naturally dark and deep, but an allegorical cave might reach down to hell, as several of Spenser’s caves do. Dionysus the Areopagite (“Denyse”), in Celestial Hierarchies 1.2, has a highly sophisticated discussion of how objects in nature can reveal divine mysteries through beauty and analogy, but he hastens to qualify that shocking images can call the mind to contemplate divine mysteries through unlikeness: “holy Mysteries are set forth in two modes: one, by means of similar and sacred representations akin to their nature, and the other through unlike forms designed with every possible discordance and difference.” Thus, the formulaic tropes that often fit the features of allegories alternate with 46 contraventions and major disruptions. The less novelistic sense of perspective in allegories does not mean that representation is unimportant to the ideas embedded in the aesthetic strategy, the representation of space, time, and nature. The nature of perception has not been static across time.42 For example, Leonard Goldstein has suggested that the Renaissance provided an initial economic background that caused “space” to begin to be seen in “linear perspective”: i.e., space as (1) continuous, isotropic, and homogeneous; (2) quantifiable; and (3) perceived from the point of view of a single, central observer and owner (88). This more mechanical view of space, particular in the post-Newtonian West, is now the “common sense” perspective, the space that “we experience in daily life,” and it requires some work to orient to an alternate “natural” way of seeing. Allegory is often picturesque but “unrealistic” in the sense in which this term is usually understood, looking retrospectively from the novel. Allegories often take place in a dream vision, and thus self-consciously attenuate their self-location in relation to a waking world.43 But the dream vision is its own “real” world, and concerns itself with Real things, in the “older definition of the real, not as the imitative and commonsensical, but as the substantial, in Platonic terms” (Barney 23). Of course, the relationship between places in the dream world is far from cartographic and quantitatively consistent, and corresponds to what Robert Rouse writes of 42 David Lowenthal presents a phenomenology for the apprehension of geography as follows: The surface of the earth is shaped for each person by refraction through cultural and personal lenses of custom and fancy. We are all artists and landscape architects, creating order and organizing space, time, and causality in accordance with our apperceptions and predilections. The geography of the world is unified only by human logic and optics, by the light and color of artifice, by decorative arrangement, and by ideas of the good, the true, and the beautiful. (260) Furthermore, texts like Active Perception in the History of Philosophy (eds. Jose Filipe Silva, Mikko Yrjonsuuri) and N. J. Wade’s Perception and Illusion: Historical Perspectives have shown how artists, philosophers, and scientists have, in a sense, taught us what to see, and the way that worldview is an important shaper of the ethics and quality of sight. 43 Constance Hieatt’s The Realism of Dream Visions argues that dream vision narratives are “realistic” in the sense that they mimic some psycho-analytic characterizations of dream patterns, such as the blending of images, the non-causal relationship between events, and images that recommend multiple meanings. 47 medieval literature more generally: “The medieval world is textually represented as a series of sequentially related individual places, with little or no interest in establishing a sense of realistic distance between them” (18). In this programme of representation, allegories are arranged as a mosaic of forms. Anne Buttimer argues that the “mosaic of forms” was in fact the governing metaphor for thinking about geography before the modern era (87-120). The landscape in this metaphorical scheme was made up of dispersed objects, and each was a delineated whole. Aristotle’s philosophy of the teleology of individual objects distributed throughout nature underpinned the aesthetic sensibility. Accordingly, Pearsall and Salter’s deep analysis of both visual and literary art discusses the “characteristic medieval tendency to picture nature in terms of identifiable ‘things’ rather than in broad impressions of scenery. The eye refuses the large panorama of sky and mountain and vegetation, and concentrates instead on detail, often fragmentarily realistic but usually formalized, of sun and star, rocky outcrop and dwarf tree” (30). This style of presentation persists in Renaissance allegories, although there are undoubtedly transformations that blend in from proximal genres and innovations in visual art. Allegories are often very rich in detail, even while they are filled with marvels and impossibilities. The best way to characterize Gavin Douglas’ Palis of Honour is an excess of images. The pre-somniac garden and the difficulties in the infernal swamp once he is dreaming contain hundreds of lines of description, which together do not even take as much as the description of the Palis in the final part of the book; one of the images in that section involves the impossibly expansive and hyperbolically positive “plane of peirles pulchritude / Quharein abondyt every thingis gude” (1414-15). And, not long after, a supernatural mirror shows him “All thinges gone lyk as they wer present, / All the creacion of the angeilys brycht” (1495-8). Subsequently the “tour” which displays to him the exploits of nations and heroes, is not possible 48 to picture fully, and there is a wonderful series of lines which indicate something like Douglas’ awareness of this: Throw cuntreis seir, holtis and rochys hie, Ovir valys, planys, woddis, wally se, Ovir fludis fare and mony strate montane We wer caryit in twynklyng of ane e. (1081-84). Douglas uses a topos of inexpressibility close to a dozen times, and eruptions exist alongside the picturesque mix of mundane objects, emblematic interventions, and marvels. Douglas clearly has a view that human sense, and the relationship of terrestrial language bearing to the intelligibility of objects does not “go all the way”. The anagogical impulse from the hellish swamp has led to a dizzying excess of unapproachable light, resulting in impossible images. Scenes like this would pose difficulties to, say, cinematic depiction. Dialectically, as Douglas grows in excitement for the (R)eality of the spatial situation at hand, his commitment to terrestrial mimesis has worn down to the point of total linguistic skepticism: “Bot tyl discryve this matter in effek / Impossibll wer till ony erdly wicht. / It transcendes sa far abone my micht” (1407-409). An episode from The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man offers a helpful case study of allegorical titles as jostling between the universal and the particular, the concrete and the abstract. Lydgate’s seemingly offhand reference to the “sea of the world” coalesces and enlarges to become the Sea of the World, and a collection of pilgrims proceeding down the main road of life are caught in the waters. The contemplatives, unrealistically, have wings and “fflowe fful hyge allofte” (19082), while some, “by the ffet were bounde stronge / With knottys, off herbis lone” (19085-6). Although we learn that it is a “greete large see” (19115), much is left to the imagination: does it have a rocky shore or a sandy one? What is the climate? Do mountains 49 surround the sea? The phrase “The World” in “the Sea of the World” is the ideal property, not “the Sea.” And yet, the Sea of the World has reference to an unlimited number of “proper” and “common” seas in “the world.” Carolynn Van Dyke’s central claim about the genre of allegory is that it involves the synthesis of deictic and non-deictic codes: “If the ordinary narrative agent is an ‘ideal proper noun’ without properties, the Realistic agent is an ideal property that generates unlimited proper (and common) nouns” (40). Normally, when one observes “the” in the name of a sea, as for any proper noun, one assumes it is particular, local, and unique (e.g., The Baltic Sea, The Red Sea, etc.). Similarly, in one sense, the Sea of the World is absolutely unique, the only of its kind, and only encountered once in the narrative; but in another sense, it could look like any sea of the world which it is taking as an image to allegorize. In terms of direct and indirect articles, it is “the sea,” but its appearance is emphatically that of “a sea.” Allegories mix the general and specific, and they mix place and space, in the famous typology laid out by Yi-fu Tuan. Tuan writes that place takes on meaning as “one’s eyes rest upon something long enough to distinguish it as a concrete presence within an undifferentiated sweep of scenery” (Space and Place 161-62). In literature the concrete presence takes place via narrativization or description. A place is usually recognized as a named, “calm centre of established values” (54). The authors of allegory present places as abstract, eventually known; and even if hostile, often potentially conquerable. However, many allegorical places are in the wilderness and are part of the conspiracy against the protagonist, representing the irrational, chthonic, or demonic forces at odds with the rational and the good. Movement is incessant throughout allegories, and the traverse is often across landscapes Tuan associates with space: the forest, the plain, the sea (56). He writes that “[f]reedom implies space; it means having the power and enough room in which to act. . . . Fundamental is the ability to transcend the present 50 condition, and this transcendence is most simply manifest as the elementary power to move” (54). There is what might be called a dialectical relationship between space and place in allegories, based on the fact that the relationship between known-unknown, inside-outside, safe-unsafe, good-evil, is constantly jostling throughout the narrative. Allegories subvert literalistic imaginings of place, and make tectonic shifts and additions to the landscapes, which may turn something familiar into something unfamiliar. Indeed, some allegories elaborate the very theme of the deceptive potential of appearances, and accordingly aim to dis-place the reader. In The Voyage of the Wandering Knight, the Palace of Worldly Felicitie is vividly pictured, and even gets its own narrative interruption just for several pages of straight description, but then vanishes in practically an instant when the knight falls into a ditch representing sin. Allegorists zero in on aspects of a place to provoke particular ideas or to associate the predictable or abnormal picture with a concept fitting or conspicuously discomfiting to its form. Accordingly, the best way to describe the aesthetic quality of allegorical places is that they invest in a dialectic between space and place, nature and super-nature, concept and materiality, tradition and individuation, mimetic and unreal representation. C) Making Metaphorical Memories Those aspects of the lived-world that we distinguish as places are differentiated because they involve a concentration of our intentions, our attitudes, purposes and experience. Because of this focusing they are set apart from the surrounding space while remaining a part of it. Places are thus basic elements in the ordering of our experiences of the world; Max Scheler . . . wrote: ‘To find one’s place in the world, the world must be a cosmos. In a chaos there is no place.’ (43) Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness. 51 Topic is tied to topography etymologically, and the “writing of natural landforms” concerns the way place gives rise to ideas in the nonfiction genres of dialectic and mnemonics.44 Cicero’s De Oratore sets some ground rules for cultivating the memory according to place differentiation. The aesthetic features he proposes have significant bearing on the history of allegory: one must employ a large number of places which must be well lighted, clearly set out in order, at moderate intervals apart; and images which are active, sharply defined, unusual, and which have the power of speedily encountering and penetrating the psyche. . . .What I have spoken of as being done in a house can also be done in public buildings, or on a long journey, or in going through a city, or with pictures. Or we can imagine such places for ourselves. (2.358) Well-lighted, clearly set out in order, at moderate intervals apart, involving unusual images which are sharply defined, and taking place in public buildings, long journeys, houses, and cities. Here are elements of the aesthetics that frequently take place in allegorical settings. These capacious and adaptable locales are often what the extended metaphors of allegories are built out of (and one might add the medieval introduction of the “public building” of castle to the list). 44 The Latinised “Topica” relates to an entire genre of philosophical writing devoted to the questions of specification, delimitation and propositional order, and it was often called dialectic. Boethius’s Topica contains a section indicating the way that the metaphor is being used: …propositions that are both universal and maximal are called Topics since they are those which contain other propositions and by means of them the consequent arises and the conclusion becomes ratified. And as a place (locus) contains within itself the quantity of a body, so these propositions which are maximal contain within themselves the whole force of secondary propositions and the deriving of the conclusion itself. These maximal propositions are the starting point rather than the end point for exploring arguments; working down and within each topic and between them, differentiation is one of the core dialectic methods. Aristotle’s work on dialectic (Topica) raises the question of place at several junctures, but one of the notable sections concerns memory as well. The philosophical orientation of dialectic strongly appreciated the metaphor of place to convey idea exploration and differentiation. 52 The purpose in raising these places of the mind is to improve memory, but the images are clearly metaphors according to his definition, and extended metaphors at that. A later rhetorical treatise entitled Ad Herrenium quotes this Cicero passage at length, and furthermore employs that word so often used to discuss allegory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: similitudo (English, symylitude/similitude): “We ought, then, to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in memory. And we shall do so if we establish similitudes as striking as possible; if we set up images that are not many or vague but active (imagines agentes); if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness” (qtd. in Yates 25-26). Again, the shocking and aesthetically striking (because marvellous) aspects of personifications and topifications in allegories conform to these suggestions about creating similitudes. Another absolutely central text of the rhetorical tradition, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, written around a century after Cicero, reaffirms a similar principle of memory, but develops the theme, specifically, of the idea-bearing house: “it is an assistance to the memory if localities are sharply impressed upon the mind.” This involves “symbols” “with reference to the subject,” and often “in some particular word,” filling the difficulty that “thoughts do not call up the same images as material things, and a symbol requires to be specially invented for them, although even here a particular place may serve to remind us, as, for example, of some conversation that may have been held there” (11.2.17-25). Quintilian demonstrates that different rooms have different spatial-ideal content, but that they interconnect with one another. The memory structure is crafted out of metaphor. At another point in his work, he exhorts the orator to look in different metaphorical places to generate rhetorical content: “just as all kinds of produce are not provided by every country, and as you will not succeed in finding a particular bird or beast, if you are ignorant of the localities where it has its usual haunts or birthplace . . . so not every kind of argument can be derived from 53 every circumstance” (5.10.20-22). The discovery of the bases for argument is part of the rhetorical project of inventio,45 which involves the creation of new places for new conceptual exploration. Jody Enders notes that the medieval rhetorical tradition, developed after the Roman writers, intimately tied inventio to memory images, and authors composing allegorical narratives used these rhetorical concepts in tandem to incarnate and then illuminate what would otherwise remain invisible.46 As Hawes would write in the Passetyme of Pleasure, those who “[p]ronounced trouthe vnder cloudy fygures” were “so wyse and so inuentyfe” (717, 19). Mary Carruthers argues in a number of places that some monastic practices of meditation which aimed at a spiritual dimension of memory (memoria spiritalis), encouraged setting oneself in the context of a biblical scene or an ecclesiastical structure, and clearly took insights from the memory arts into consideration.47 Christiana Whitehead concurs that the idea of “ordering information around the interior of a building” finds resonance “with didactic aims” in allegorical works (37). Albertus Magnus’s De Bono was an important text in the revitalization of memory arts in the high Middle Ages, and this work basically counsels the composition of allegorical texts in service of memory. One might wish to remember immaterial things from the imagination, things apprehended by reason, but which cannot “exist in corporeal images.” Therefore, Magnus explains, one needs to generate mental loci with “likeness and translation and metaphor, as, for example, for ‘joy’ the most similar mental ‘place’ [locus] is a cloister garth, and for ‘feebleness’ an infirmary or hospice and for ‘justice’ a courtroom, and so for the rest. And Tullius talks about ‘backgrounds’ in such a way” (356). In Albertus we see the tying of 45 Inventio is explained this way by Carruthers in Craft of Thought (11-13). 46 As discussed in ch.3, authors like John Lydgate and Stephen Hawes connected these concepts explicitly. Douglas Kelley basically concurs with this insight in Medieval Imagination (23-44). 47 Her works, including Craft of Thought, “The Poet as Master Builder,” and “Rhetorical Memoria in Commentary and Practice” all demonstrate, confirm, and build on this connection. 54 large-scale metaphor, place, and memory, the pairing of immaterial ideas with sites of pertinacious association. Trope #5: Topic and Topography Indeed, many allegorical narratives embody Ciceronian and Herrenian principles. Susan Hagen’s study of De Guileville, Allegorical Remembrance, argues that the stages of the Christian life (the House of Grace Dieu, the forked road divided by Penance’s hedge, the Sea of the World, the Ship of Religion, the Rock of Contrition, the Castles of Monks, and the gate of the Heavenly City), are the “ordered context” and the “clear, memorable mental” images which spark in memory (124-26). An example of an allegory fruitfully studied in terms of memory by modern scholars is Chaucer’s House of Fame. T. S. Miller’s more recent work examines Chaucer’s “accumulative form of the catalogue—which for Chaucer tropes the memory palace” in an orderly interior space, but “leaves the reader with the burden of continuing the efforts of the internalization and spatialization of its overflowing content” (490). Chaucer’s work obsesses over the many “ymages” strewn throughout the House of Fame, and he even applies much diction in common with exegetical works: “Ymageries and tabernacles” (l.1190), temple, windows, towers, chambers, “pilgrymage” through the places, and multiple moments highlighting the cardinal directions. Chaucer implies a book of nature to be read in his probing of the workings of memory, which nevertheless proves to be elusive when the dreamer reports in the desert space, “Ne no maner creature / That ys yformed be Nature / Ne Sawgh I, me to rede or wise” (ll.489-91). While part of his dream features orderly mnemonics, his personification of collective memory (Fame), distorts space and perception: so much that the “lengthe of a cubite / Was lengere than she semed be,” and “with hir fet she erthe reighte, / And with her hed she 55 touched hevene” (1369-75). These later spatial distortions to what should be well-ordered memory thematize the broader difficulties of the proper practice of memory in art and in the reading laity. No allegory makes the connection of topic and topography more explicit than Lewes Lewkenor’s Resolued Gentleman, which proffers mnemonic principles as the itinerary to more elevated spiritual awareness of material reality. This narrative presents Memorie as the princess of the Palace of Reading, a palace that has a large catalogue of ordered places that must be proceeded through to gain access to contemplation. Memorie is the guide who artfully leads the reader through an art of memory, a Ciceronian similitude that follows a rapid succession of such textual loci: The Portal at which you entred, figured foorth nothing but Pleasure. The Dytches were secure, deepe, and well trenched, curiously wrought in great conformitie by Good Exercise. The Chappel was of Zeale, the Windowes of Charitable Loue, the Gate, wherein was the entrance and going foorth, of Heedefulnesse, and the Bridge of Industrious Trauaile. The Vanes and Streamers of the house were of Pleasure, which glystering aloft, shewed all the passers by, that there was the schoole and practise of Vertue and Learning. (22) This passage represents a marvellously brief and perspicacious memory palace. But as the narrative deepens, Lewkenor proceeds to show his protagonist overwhelmed with the complexities of memory. Memorie the guide brings her understudy from the “opening therewith a Posterne gate” from the Palace of Reading, into “a great immense and spatious playne, called the Vniuersal Sepulcher of mankind open and discouered on euery side, without eyther Rocke or Mountaine, so that there was no limit nor restraint to the eye, but that it might boldly and frankly 56 throw his view so farre, as the sharpenesse thereof coulde pearce or discerne” (52). The “sharpness” of focus and moderate intervals of division counseled by the Roman rhetoricians are here cast aside in a rather sublime and undifferentiated view. Both the first passage and the second demonstrate the author’s interest in the function and causes of crisis, for memory. Lewkenor was an admirer of Spenser. Generally, the four main authors analyzed in this dissertation all employ and sometimes interrogate mnemonic principles: Langland uses them most studiously in the pilgrimage to Truth and Manor of Mercy sections of Passus 5 and 6 of Piers Plowman. Practically every “House” in the Faerie Queene (Pride, Holiness, Busirane, Venus, Isis), but especially the House of Alma (which is coded directly to be a house crowned by Eumnestes, in a legend which declares its aim to instill “iust memory”) functions partly as a memory palace, with sometimes greater and sometimes lesser epistemological trustworthiness. The individual emblematic rooms of the Interpreters House and the House Beautiful of The Pilgrim’s Progress are clearly embodiments of Bunyan’s aim to make his “Similitude” “fill” “the Memory […] / With what doth our Imagination please” (6). But of the four authors, Hawes represents the entirety of both his narratives with a thick use of mnemonics, and especially the Tower of Moral Doctrine, which divides the seven liberal arts into separate towers. While learning the Seven Liberal Arts, each in its respective tower, the hero Graunde Amour is taught the art of memory by Dame Rhetoric. She addresses him concerning the “clouds derke and termes eloquent” (1274), the categories Hawes elsewhere uses to describe allegory. She counsels that in order to nurture memory, it “behoueth [the poet] to have respeccyon / Vnto the tale, and the veray grounde / And on what ymage he his mater founde” (1244-46). The emphasis is on images more broadly, but memory refers to the importance, or “respeecyon,” of the “veray grounde,” or the place for the composition. Stephanie Moore writes on the thematic contiguity 57 that made memory arts and “pilgrimage allegories” like Hawes’ have common cause: “learning, reminiscence, and the struggle to keep one's final reward in sight are so central to the narrative of Christian life”, while at the same time “memory arts’ techniques” could also “explore the limits and paradoxes of memory” (16). The spatial layout of Hawes’ print medium, for his index, his woodcut images, and his emplotment via new technologies for mnemonics collude with new possibilities he inscribes for the place of his text in the broader cultural efforts of memory improvement. If normal categories of geographical distance between places and the physical effort needed to get from “here” to “there” do not exist normally in allegorical narratives, this does not mean that allegorical place is somehow blurry and undifferentiated. Quite the contrary: allegorical places focus the intentions, attitudes, purposes and experience with particular intensity. The different matters to be discussed are spatialized in the narrative into corresponding topics/topographies: benchmarks that satisfy the sense of a conceptual goal, which Gay Clifford describes as being the basis for allegories’ “strongly kinetic quality” (3-20). Allegories dramatize progress toward an ideal, be it celestial or amorous. Along the way, division of space into places makes the story memorable, and helps to differentiate concepts and topics of discussion. Sarah Kay connects the Aristotelian understanding of place in relation to French allegorists of the Middle Ages, asserting that “[p]lace defines the really existing singular body in the physical realm much as intellection makes sense of it in the mental world. This background informs the poets’ own experiments with configurations of bodies and ideas as they seek to mold, form, or coerce the thinking of their readers” (8). This fact is recognized rather directly by Roger Bacon, discussed above, for whom “corporeal roads signify spiritual roads and the similitude to spiritual 58 places, since place has the quality of terminating local motion and furnishes the reason for stopping” (204). Trope #6: Temporality and the Layers of Spatial Metaphor The memorial arts organize ideas into separate places (using topography for topics) and provoke the theme of temporality: Magnus states that the aim of the art is to address the “problem concerning time” – since all things remembered are past in time, time by itself does not serve to classify things-worth-remembering and thus does not automatically lead one to order the priorities of one item more than another. Any overarching discussion of spatial representation eventually touches time.48 In the literary realm, and even down to the level of abstract argumentation, W. J. T. Mitchell explains the interdependency of time and place with the centrality of spatial metaphors as follows: We cannot experience a spatial form except in time; we cannot talk about our temporal experience without invoking spatial measures. Instead of viewing space and time as antithetical modalities, we ought to treat their relationship as one of complex interaction, interdependence, and interpenetration. . . . Space is the body of time, the form or image that gives us an intuition of something that is not directly perceivable, but which permeates all that we apprehend. Metaphors are at the core of imagining time, its implications, its effects, its ontology, and allegories offer themselves and their places as “readings” of time: that is, places with 48 Geosopher Robert Sacks, for instance, theorizes that time has to be considered for an ontology of place, because place necessitates simultaneity, insofar as the delineations essential to a place being such can be altered through time. For narratives, Ina Habermann and Daniela Keller note that the relationship of space and time “define our existence”, with the cultural vocabulary of the two tending “to be conceived in terms of each other, space often being defined by the time it takes us to cover it, and time being understood in terms of containers and expanses” (1). 59 semiotically temporal attributes.49 If allegorical narratives have a peculiar manner of charting the course of time, it is that times are turned into places, and allegories imagine journeys and spatial shifts as temporally inflected. There are probably no narratives as explicit as Olivier de La Marche’s Délibéré and Stephen Batman’s Travayled Pylgrime (an adaptation/translation of de La Marche) which actually label the main road and field of action Time, writ large. Almost the entirety of Book III of Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias involves temporal structures such as the “The Pillar of the Word of God, The Stone Wall of the Old Law, and the Tower of the Church”, which Barbara Newman describes as “tracing the successive ages of salvation history from creation through the last judgment” (23).50 Langland, Hawes, Spenser, and Bunyan all represent pilgrimages down roads of life in their various ways. There are other recurring temporal structures that seem endemic to the genre: for instance, often a body of water that must be crossed in death, a mountain or lookout that serves as a position from which to see multiple times, a house or a dwelling that serves as the place where aging happens, and the passing of a threshold into a city of reward and/or eschatological triumph. Allegories play with a lot of different metaphors of position and movement in relation to temporal possibility. Kevin Moore’s The Spatial Language of Time enumerates 12 spatial formulations taken from four languages that amount to core metaphors for communicating about 49 The qualities of the “reality” of time are by no means self-evident, and the modern debate over time even provoked a book entitled The Unreality of Time, written by J. M. Mctaggart over a hundred years ago (1901). As Robin Le Poidevin observes in Images of Time, “metaphysical theory is typically underdetermined by the ordinary data of experience” (5): hence the need for literature to imagine models of significative temporality. 50 A notable narrative moment is when Patience and Longing stand opposite the Tower of Anticipation of God’s Will. The first of these figures, Hildegard explains, “stands on the floor of the building, in a niche of fiery splendor whose inside is painted with pictures of various evil spirits and which is across from the tower,” while the other “stands next to this niche but is outside it and has no niche of its own” (352). The progress and position of souls in temporal and moral flux are creatively depicted in dynamic states through angles, treading into the place of the “devil’s orbit” or on the “path of justice.” 60 time.51 The master metaphor, so to speak, involves the “path,” and the straightforward, parallel, or oppositional movement of an entity along a visual field. Time is a path in Batman’s allegory Travayled Pylgrime, and temporal “events” take the form of locations, as when/where the reign of Mary I turns the road of time into blighted wasteland. The central spatial metaphor of the House of Fame is that the names of the famous are etched on a pillar of ice, which is shaded by the House, adding the metaphor of time as place to “sequence as relative position on a stack.” A very common trope in allegories is for the journeyers to forget about the quest and to experience moral-temporal-spatial stasis in the journey, as when Goodyear’s Wandering Knight gets trapped under the jurisdiction of Folly in the Palace of Worldly Felicitie, or when Will in Piers Plowman gets trapped in the Land of Longing for forty years. And, for all of their movement, allegories often have marked moments of stasis. These often occur at spatially elevated vantage points that point to other temporalities which look as though they might be possibilities. The “Mutability Cantos” gather a divine council above Arlo Hill, to look on an Ireland before what he imagines as “civilization” and what might eventually be the redemption of things on the “pillars of eternity” (7.8.2), at the end of time. Kathleen Haney has written that allegorical time involves an “other-speaking” about multiple temporalities being given expression together (79-92). If allegories involve anonymous dreamers and “Everyman” types that engage conceptual problems which are personal, national, and sometimes cosmic, the way through allegories involves temporalities that are autobiographical, collective, and sometimes apocalyptic. The time of allegory is often 51 The twelve metaphors are Moving Ego, Now is a mover, Time is a mover, A situation is a mover, Ego-centred Moving Time, Other-centered Moving Time, Temporal Ego-opposed, Temporal Ego-aligned, Sequence is a relative position on a path, Sequence is relative position on a stack, Times are locations, and Ego-centered time is visual perspective. 61 incredibly palimpsested in the way it presents material place, in many of its edifices and cities.52 The Faerie Queene’s House of Ate is made up of “riuen walls […] / With ragged monuments of times forepast” (4.1.21) These types accumulate from history, legend, biblical time, and present sight: “There was the signe of antique Babylon, / Of fatall Thebes, of Rome that raigned long, / Of sacred Salem, and sad Ilion” (4.1.22).53 Allegories allow for any significant past and future invisible figures to enter the story, co-exist together, and suggest conceptual connections between disparate times. These moments gather up any significant person or place from personal, biblical, or national history. The kinds of characters in an allegory also transfigure the places they inhabit. Spenser calls the well that Redcrosse falls into the “well of life” (1.11.29), but the background invocation to the “nourse of time” (1.11.5), the duration of three days he remains there, along with his function as a type of Christ in his battle with an eschatological dragon, and the connection he makes with numerous other famous waters throughout the earth (1.11.30), transform the well into an overwhelmingly complex symbol. In The Parlement of Thre Ages, Youth, Middle Eld and Eld stand across an oneiric river, and their conversation, which reaches back into ancient history, transfigures the water into a River of Time. The Pilgrim’s Progress’s “Way” involves seventeenth-century vagabonds, and reaches back to the first man, an “Adam” who attacks Christian. The Architrenius is able to satirize a number of his contemporaries by placing them on the Mountain of Ambition alongside personifications, biblical types, Greco-Roman examples, and more recent predecessors, all dwelling among the same structures. Even the work that some have called “pure” allegory (the Psychomachia) contains Job as a character 52 The phrasing for time as palimpsest is inspired by Jonathan Harris’ Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare. 53 Jacques Le Goff writes on how the exemplum involves a “story precisely located in recent historical time, unfolded in narrative but invariably pointed toward eternity” (80). This characterization is germane to allegory as well, a close cousin to the exemplum. 62 exemplifying patience, and, as Van Dyke points out about the narrative, the character of Faith “opposes Worship-of-the-Old-Gods in the individual soul but also in biblical history and in fourth-century Spain” (40). The varied spatial centres in allegories have a corollary to the manner in which space relates to time as a shifting deixis. The deictic centre is the window into the story world of a given narrative, the represented consciousness who sets the nature of the pacing, view, and focalization. David Zubin and Lynn Hewitt note that a deictic centre can be maintained by the choice to use adverbs like here and there and verbs like come, go, bring, take, and demonstrative words like now, already, and this (129-58). A chronometric passage of time is instantiated by a regular deictic centre for a narrative. Allegories employ these typical, temporally grounding deictic words often enough, but it is also extremely common for the author to make radical departures from a deictic and temporal centre. Consider this comment of shifting verb tense and typical identification by Bunyan’s Christian, to the porter of House Beautiful: “My name is now Christian, but my name at the first was Graceless; I came of the race of Japheth, whom God will persuade to dwell in the tents of Shem” (47). There is the chronometric level of an allegory that follows the life of a single character (sometimes all the way from youth to old age), but there is also what might be thought of as the “kairometric” level of analysis.54 The Cosmographia prefaces its representation of Natura’s journey with the following meditation: The instant present, the flowing away of the past, the anticipation of what is to come are the movements of time, and it moves through these channels in a perpetual ebb and flow. And though it shall have traveled these same roads over and over again in the course of 54 Kairos is “an existential reality, qualitative and teleological, experienced as occasion or event and always pointing beyond itself, always gathering up the significance of past and present into the generative fiat of a providential whole” (J. Hill 77). Kairos is allegorical – “always pointing beyond itself” – or, “other-speaking”. 63 eternity, still striving and forging ahead, it neither strays from the path nor turns back. And because the point at which journeys end is the point from which they are renewed, it remains an open question whether the events of time past are not seen again in the same sequence. (89) This open question finds expression again and again in allegorical narratives. “The pilgrimage of life” proceeds, but figures from the “course of history” appear on the road to meet and interact with the main character, in a meeting of horizontality and verticality, synchronicity and diachronicity. The time is always kairos and aevum, and the “due time” invites “due figures.” D) Dream Literature and Trope #7: Cosmic Survey The ascension through the heavenly spheres to a God’s-eye view is not peculiar to the most famous example of Dante’s Paradiso, but is amazingly common in the narratives where a lower road of metaphor gives way to what Fletcher calls vision and myth (354-55). Sometimes there is a council in heaven seen by a narrator, as in The Court of Sapyence, but sometimes there is a genuine journey to the stars. Whatever the case may be, the concepts and experiences of the earlier or later parts of the narrative are seen sub specie aeternitatis.55 The trope derives in large part from Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, which Macrobius’s widely admired Commentary on the Dream of Cicero amplified in authority and desirability for emulation. Macrobius himself notes that one kind of dream is called “universal”, which takes place “in the sun, moon, planets, sky, or regions of the earth” (10-11). The original Dream of Scipio involves a vision of the heavens, but Macrobius emphasizes that Cicero’s dream is combined with dreams that are of a lower and more personal order. With the twelfth-century Neoplatonist allegories involving visions of the 55 E.g., The Holy War and The Court of Sapyence both have their heavenly councils before the narratives around their central places. 64 spheres, the traversal to an almost unimaginable verticality became a trope vital to medieval and Renaissance allegories. The five main allegories studied in this dissertation have this feature (Piers Plowman, Example of Vertue, Passetyme of Pleasure, The Pilgrim’s Progress – and multiple legends as well as the “Mutability Cantos” of The Faerie Queene), and it is significant for some of the other allegories mentioned earlier (Chaucer’s House of Fame, Lydgate’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man and Reason and Sensuality, Christine de Pizan’s Book of the Path of Long Study, Douglas’ Palis of Honoure, and others). The trope carries a good deal of aesthetic and conceptual freight in these narratives. In Piers Plowman, Will’s perception of the vice-ridden folk on the field is transformed to a God-like love for the field of humanity, after he is raised to see all of history with Anima and spends time witnessing a heavenly council’s deliberation. The Faerie Queene makes constant cosmological references and has moments of access to the “True” places of the heavens, as on the Mount of Contemplation, the top of the House of Alma, the Garden of Adonis, the celebration of marriage between Thames and Medway, the Summit of the Graces, and the heavenly council in the “Mutability Cantos”. In The Passetyme of Pleasure, the narrative is lifted up to a higher contemplative plane, and suddenly the understanding of the hero’s ethical standing as one who chose the path of the Active Life, is trenchantly criticized, subsequent to the narrator having valourized his chivalric actions for the preceding narrative. Even Bunyan might be said to exercise something like this cosmic spanning with his celestial conclusion to the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the potential that he, like Talkative who is condemned, has only produced a linguistic, talkative artefact. This seventh trope is, in a way, an asterisk to all of the other six: 1) Abstract topologies made in self-conscious metaphoricity give way to heavenly places framed in metaphysical tradition; 2) the self is absorbed into a new category of being as expressed in the greater place, or 65 is terminated in a place of death; 3) revelation in a real and physical super-nature terminates the need to read the Book of Nature, and elides the obstacles that would require spatial traversal; 4) without the technology of flight, the authors writing allegories probably understood this trope as involving the most unrealistic “place” and sight of place, possible; 5) all the carefully differentiated spaces of the preceding or proceeding narrative are blurred in light of the way they point to their ultimate destination, which supersedes them, “literally”; 6) the perspective of eternity can see all temporalities, and enact reversals of the “immediacy” of experience for passed/past timespaces. These cosmological or anagogical moments are when the places at hand become more real than metaphors. This feature of allegories disrupts the perspective of experience in the narrative with unbounded concentric “zooming” (producing a mise en abyme effect), and it retrospectively raises questions about astrological, humoral, providential or soteriological “influences” that were present on the landscape and in the self throughout the narrative. Conclusion Genres of writing on dreams, the interpretations of edifices, books of nature lore, and arts of memory all firmly recognized the allegorical potential of place and used the diction of allegory and its cognates. These forms of writing and habits of thought furnished the basis for the variety of spatial tropes in the allegorical genre, which in turn often refer back to these encyclopedic, memorial, and biblical works in the narratives themselves. It is not unreasonable to consider these spatial tropes as equal in importance to, and complementary with, personification. Allegorical topoi of architectural and topographical varieties do not merely serve the purposes of descriptive colour but are core metaphors at the heart of the didacticism (and at times the 66 critique) of whatever ideology is at issue in the narrative. The horizon of expectation for readers of medieval and Early Modern allegory includes the titles that straddle the particular and universal, a psycho-spiritual land, a topographical-textual representation of nature, an ebb and flow of intensity/focus and abstraction toward the verisimilitude of a given place, a division between places that could be expected to express the fundamentals of the idea, a sense that places could signify the core aspects of key temporalities, and the sub specie aeternitatis. These tropes function differently in every author but serve as a basis for their unique meditations and grapplings on the self, on society, on interpretation, on time, and on metaphor itself. 67 Chapter Two: Piers Plowman’s Kyndely Places: The Field of Vision and the Vision of the Field in the B Text Introduction This chapter places medieval theories of optics and dreams in conversation with the allegorical representation of spatiality in Piers Plowman. From the fourth line of the prologue, when the dreamer travels “wide in þis world wondres to here,” to six lines from the end, when Conscience resolves to “walken as wide as þe world lasteþ” (20.382), the spatial element is prominent in terms of the narrative search, the diction of scope and clarity of perception. Will’s vision exhibits various dynamics of focus in different topographical and oneiric contexts. This chapter aims to connect how these dynamics are informed by allegorical glosses from optical treatises. Although numerous scholars have been tempted to dismiss the narrative importance of Langland's representation of place in favour of his personifications, there are solid grounds to believe that how his protagonist wills to look at various loci and spatial schemes corresponds to his quest for reading a “book of kynde” with deepening contours of spiritual charity. Will’s “field of vision” puns on the “field ful of folk” from the opening vision, and the alternative title of Langland’s poem (The Vision of Piers Plowman). Medieval discourse on the allegorical interpretation of optical phenomena furnishes the spatial disposition of Langland’s work. Will reads the field of folk without charity; his “Kynde Wit” “comeþ of alle kynnes siȝtes” (12.128), but is at first not illuminated by grace, which in perspectivist writings is spiritualized as the extramission of the physical eyes without the proper intromission of light rays. The “kynnes” sights are related to the “many kynnes places” (8.15). The early visions focus on Langland's proximate context and a more explicitly narrow temporal scope – a field that represents the social world most immediate to the author. The poem tracks what seems to be a more capacious 68 and humane perspective recommended to, but not immediately absorbed by, the dreamer, as he turns inward and then upward, before returning to the field below. His spiritual perspectiva must change before he can properly comprehend that “Crist is in alle places” (15.161). Allegory, Dream Vision, and Perspectivism One of Piers Plowman’s most important semiotic systems is spatial, so it is worth dwelling for a moment on the fact that it has been fashionable enough to dismiss Langland’s settings as fragmentary, inconsistent and dematerializing and to construe him as the aesthetic antipode of Chaucer, the Pearl Poet, and Dante. What Rosemary Woolf considers most surprising and peculiarly “non-medieval” about the poem is its “bewildering indifference to time and place” (90). Pietro Cali likewise perceives what seems to him something like a lost opportunity to make Piers Plowman’s spatial framework more spectacular (like Dante’s), with “the almost complete absence of background, of a visible environment surrounding the action or echoing the discourse” (63). Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter’s introduction to representation in Piers only contains the dismissive point that the places are merely “diagrammatic” (13-16). Lavinia Griffiths has written about how Langland discusses “things which lie outside the scope of logic,” which is perhaps why the places and persons of the story have a “disconcerting habit of appearing in different guises or of collapsing back into terms” (22).1 Gillian Rudd’s main point about place in Piers Plowman is that God cannot be fixed in one locale, with holy places standing as inadequate and approximate (157). John Bowers similarly states that when Langland is “dissatisfied with the fitness of an image,” he substitutes it with another (e.g., pilgrimage to 1 However, she does return to the matter to admit that the “change in representational style, a version of the movement from scheme to example, involves changes not only in the portrayal of the figure itself, but also in the whole composition. It requires a spatial dimension rather than an idealised background, and this sort of continuum is afforded by the employment of perspective” (58). 69 plowing), highlighting the dissolution of provisional place representation (33). Dee Dyas writes at length about Piers Plowman’s skeptical stance toward “place pilgrimage,” and its strong valorization of interior pilgrimage, which should downplay any kind of spatial coordinates. Charles Muscatine’s famous essay, “The Locus of Action in Medieval Narrative” gives substantive consideration to Piers Plowman, characterizing its “locus of action” as “surrealistic,” claiming that its “piling of tiny scenes” retains “no coherence,’’ which overall shows a nervous dread of “impending ruin” in contrast to Dante’s confidence in a “stable structure” (120-22). Undeniably, Langland constantly shifts the setting, but it is notable, for instance, that the most rapid shifts in setting occur in the first seven passūs, where moral obscurity, a lack of reason, and a distorted vision of society are part of the “sprawling epistemological critique” (Johnson 79). Langland’s narrative “gaze” is cast differently here than in the later visions. It is not the present intention to rehabilitate Langland’s aesthetics of place, but to indicate that the shifting dreams are not reflections of a disorganized “surrealistic” aesthetic (as in the vein of Angus Fletcher, Bowers, and Muscatine), or a panicked mind, but serve to illuminate broader conceptual changes in tenor as the poem progresses. Dreams allow for considerable spatial variation, and the context of medieval and patristic dream theories inform Langland’s work. Dream theorists connect spatial projections with the nature of perception, which varies in its degree of veridical light. Steven Kruger has written of the vested medieval interest in revelatory possibility in dream places – with the simultaneous acknowledgment that dreams are often meaningless or evil in orientation: “Dreams can thus explore a wide range of human and universal experience, from the most exalted to the most debased. The purely mundane dream is locked into the realm of earth, while the dream of divine revelation soars to the heavens” (34). He points to numerous texts from the eleventh through the 70 thirteenth century, which show that authors composing dream visions were overwhelmingly familiar with three authorities in particular: Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Macrobius.2 These authors discuss dreams in the context of theories of perception. Macrobius’s Commentary of the Dream of Scipio is perhaps the most discussed Ur-text of medieval dream visions in more recent times.3 Macrobius provides a fivefold division of dreams, an attractive categorization to medieval writers for their clarity and for their similarity to Gregory’s later scheme: Insomnium, Nightmare or troubled dream; visium, apparition or hallucination; somnium, ordinary or enigmatic dream; oraculum, oracular or prophetic dream; visio, visionary dream. The causes of dream types range from the external, to the internal, to the supernatural; the revelatory and deceptive potential of dreams is as present for Macrobius as it is for Gregory. Piers Plowman arguably represents all five of Macrobius’ types, and at least provokes the question that he might be doing so.4 Now, Macrobius offers the most attention to the somnium, the enigmatic dream of “strange shapes” that “veils with ambiguity the true meaning,” which requires “an interpretation for its understanding” (2.3.90). This is, of course, the dream type that corresponds most to the term allegoria,5 and most of the poems of the 2 Langland elevates the former two to the dignity of tilling Truth’s crops in the penultimate passus of the poem (19.271-2). The Christian and Neoplatonic distinction between these authors did not seem to divide their status as influential dream theorists, as Thomas de Chobham’s (thirteenth-century) comment illustrates: “the tradition of the catholic doctors does not differ greatly from this philosophical opinion” (qtd. in Kruger 68). Gregory only provides a brief schematic based on the six sources of dreams. His scheme does address the nature of perception, but his two predecessors did much more. Reuelatione, revelation by God or angels, cogitatione simul et reuelatione, revelation mixed with thought, uentris plenitudne and uentris inanitate, a full stomach or an empty stomach; cogitatione simul et inlusione, illusion by evil spirits mixed with thought; and inlusione, illusion by evil spirits. 3 A. C. Spearing’s important book, Medieval Dream Poetry has framed the discussion this way. 4 Macrobius notes that the primary dream of his interest (Cicero’s Dream of Scipio) embraces three types itself (2.3.12, 90), showing that they are intentionally porous categories. 5 Macbrobius calls one kind of narrative a narratio fabulosa, which “rests on a solid foundation of truth,” while “treated in a fictitious style” (9). It involves a “decent and dignified conception of holy truths, with respectable events and characters, is presented beneath a modest veil of allegory. This is the only type of fiction approved by the philosopher who is prudent in handling sacred matters” (11). Macrobius adds, further, that these narratives are employed “when speaking about the Soul, or about spirits having dominion in the lower and upper air, or about gods in general” (13). According to Kruger, it closely resembles “the middle dream, the somnium” (133). 71 Middle Ages, Piers Plowman included. He offers five varieties of the somnium that correspond to different loci: It is called personal when one dreams that he himself is doing or experiencing something; alien, when he dreams this about someone else; social, when his dream involves others and himself; public, when he dreams that some misfortune or benefit has befallen the city, forum, theater, public walls, or other public enterprise; universal, when he dreams that some change has taken place in the sun, moon, planets, sky, or regions of the earth. (10-11) The resemblance of these characterizations to different dreams of Piers is irresistible, and the terminology will be borne in mind throughout the following discussion. The somnium, in its varied ways, has spatial implications according to sub-types, and here Macrobius imagines the shapes being cast in the more immediate eyes of the dreamer or beyond, into the social world and into wider public places, and finally into the vaster regions of the earth and the cosmos. Augustine was a contemporary of Macrobius, and he adds further context to the cultural pretext about visual perception in dream writings. The final book of De Genesi Ad Litteram is about the nature of sight, as he tries to unravel the mystery of St. Paul’s statement about “seeing” a vision, but not being certain whether he was in the body or not (2 Corinthians 12.2). Augustine differentiates between three kinds of vision: corporeal sight, spiritual vision, and intellectual vision.6 Augustine often uses the spatial metaphor of intellectual sight being “on a higher plane” (10.21), with spiritual sight also standing “higher” than corporeal sight. In the purview of “spiritual sight” are many activities of perception, from ecstatic visions, to daydreams, to simple 6 He schematizes that the three kinds of sight can be perceived in the verse “you shall love your neighbor as yourself”: one sees a neighbour with corporeal eyes, one remembers them in absence or conjure them in imagination, and one “sees love” as a matter understood. 72 memories, to imaginings, to evil illusions. Augustine proffers a connection of “spiritual vision” and the nature of metaphor, dreams, and time: “I consider all these phenomena similar to dreams. Now dreams are sometimes false and sometimes true, sometimes troubled and sometimes calm; and true dreams are sometimes quite similar to future events or even clear forecasts, while at other times they are predictions given with dark meanings, and, as it were, in figurative expressions” (12.40). Augustine does not insist that dreams are epistemologically noteworthy or revelatory, only that they exist on an expansive spectrum of moral goodness or evil. Augustine assumes that dream guides will discuss past or future events in the spiritual visio, which resonates deeply with Langland, who himself uses this Latin terminology. Augustine does not provide a taxonomy of dream types, but allows that one with more expertise than himself could differentiate “many grades [of dreams] […] distinguished according to a progression of revelations under the influence of more or less illumination” (29.57). Augustine grounds his concerns on metaphor and sight here, as he also does in De Anima, and the valence of these matters becomes eminently spatial in the dreams of Piers Plowman.7 Langland shows clear affection for Augustine as a thinker (even making him one of the oxen that plows the Field of Truth in Passus 19), and Piers Plowman is a poem that tests many kinds of dreams for their “grades of revelation under the influence of more or less illumination.”8 There are no less than 10 individual dreams in the B text. Morton Bloomfield, who so thoroughly schematized the ways in which Piers Plowman incorporates generic elements of sermons, 7 In De Anima et Eius Origine, Augustine provides a notable discussion on the “large forms of bodily substances in its scope of thought, and in the spaces of its memory”; he adds that in dreams, the soul “in the very similitude of its own body it runs here and there through known and unknown places, and beholds many sad and joyous sights” (4.17.25). 8 Allison Peden cautions that although classical and patristic sources “legitimized the use of dream and vision to convey philosophical, religious and moral truths,” the actual dreams and visions were “only rarely located in a theoretical classification” (63). Langland’s work does track in these categories, which nevertheless seem to be exceedingly skeletal in their prescriptions. Chad Schrock argues that Langland reproduces a paradigm present in Augustine’s writings (of prospect, fulfilment, and interpretive retrospect), in Piers Plowman’s various dreams. 73 dialogues, satires, complaint, and commentaries, argued that what makes Piers Plowman utterly unique in European literature is the fact of its enormous multiplicity of dreams. Langland’s poem reflects on its dreams in a self-conscious passage in Passus 7. After the Vision of Dowel ends Langland offers a retrospective on the events in Will’s dreams, which have temporarily ended: “Many tyme þis metels haþ maked me to studie / Of that I seiȝ slepynge–if it so be myȝte” (7.144-5). This phrase amounts to an invitation to the reader, as well as an assessment of his own work as an object of symbolic study. Langland momentarily hesitates that he has “no savour” of the dream book, or “songewarie,” “for I se it ofte faille” (7.149). However, immediately afterwards he turns to a theological counterargument for the revelatory potential of dreams: Ac for the book Bible bereþ witnesse How Daniel diuined þe dremes of a kynge That was Nabugodonosor nempned of clerkes . . . Daniel seide, ‘Sire Kyng, þi dremels bitokneþ That unkouþe knyȝtes shul come thi kyngdom to cleyme; Amonges lower lordes thi lond shal be departed.’ And as Daniel diuined, in dede it fel after. (7.152-58) The allusion to Daniel mirrors the justification of dream interpretation from the most popular of such books in the Middle Ages, the Somniale Danielis.9 A later comment in the C text also 9 The Somniale Danielis, and its Middle English translation, The Bok of Swevening, open with a very similar passage on the biblical origin for the authority of dream commentaries. Overall, this book and its variants offer a basic scenario for a dream with a metaphorical connection of vehicle to tenor. Many of these dream interpretations portray a central topographical image that is “seen,” with the Latin videre often as the “action” of the dream, including but not limited to the following: Q116: “To see or to cross a troubled or tempestuous river signifies fear and anxiety.” Q117: “To see ditches or to fall in them signifies trickery or being in sin.” Q227: “To ascend a cliff signifies honor with great labor.” Q259: “To see or to walk a muddy road signifies danger.” The Somniale Danielis and the Bok of Swevening versification both refer to a wide range of dreams with good and ill implications that bespeak the concerns of Langland. Quite a few of them colour the circumstances of an individual 74 shows more confidence with enhanced perception in dreams enabled by God: “Slepynge hadde Y grace / To wyte what Dowel is, as wakynge neuere!” (13.217-18). The extent of influence and the degree of aesthetic continuity between Langland and these works of dream interpretation, are tenuous, but they do share the discursive interest in images ripe for metaphorical gloss. Furthermore, the orientation of the language of sight and perceiving metaphor with spiritual wisdom indicates shared cultural resources and conceptual metaphors. It is no surprise, perhaps, that the dream vision is considered a central trope of the allegorical genre, and that, likewise, mirrors almost always appear in allegorical plots, and that seeing things in a “spiritual” or “gostly” way is a central theme of many medieval allegories. An important allegorical narrative to consider alongside Piers is Guillaume de Guileville’s Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine (composed ca. 1332 and translated by John Lydgate ca. 1426 CE), which shares a fascination with different qualities of sight. He provides a similar exhortation to the dream books on the importance of paying heed to what “men ha seyn” in their dreams, which can unfold in their waking life, “the veray trouthe fynde, / Of euery thyng they sawe to-forn” (186-91). He posits that the truth of dreams is shown “by maner of a dyrked syhte” (204). Lydgate’s prologue to the English translation states that the book’s purpose is so that pilgrims “may the Ryhte weye se” (74), and look “as in a merovr. . . . What ys holsom, the sovle for to save” (86-89), and the pilgrim initiates his journey because of a dream vision seen in a spiritual mirror (315-22). All throughout the text, there is a distinction between natural sight and spiritual clarity, as when Grace Dieu disputes with Nature “Vndoth your Eyen dyrk & blynde, / The Eyen of yovr entendement” (3742-43). At first the pilgrim only sees “wyn and bred” (3244), which become a “wonder syht” of Rawh fflesshe, torrid bred” because “Grace Dieu ordeynede yt life, but some concern kings and even the fate of the whole polity, based on the appearance of the sun and the stars (e.g., “The sonne derk whose may se: / Peril of kynges that wol be,” 286-87). 75 so” (3263). He is dazzled when “Ladde . . . in-to a place” a filled with “many a ffayr Iowel,” where he “leyde” his eyes (6235) but learns that observations which seem clear can be deceptive when fixed on too narrow a sight, and should cooperate with spiritual ears for a deeper alignment concerning the spiritual meaning, “Intellect or entendëment” (6358). Further teaching that “ghostly Eyen” see best when not obstructed by the dark body (9656), is provided by Grace Dieu, before she takes the pilgrim up into the air, to teach about the “sowle” having “so cler a syht / at o look, fro the orient / to sen in-to the occident”: “my beholding was so cler, / that I sawh both fer & ner, / Hih & lowe & ouerall” (9643-44, 9859-61). The range of vision here is given the allegorical meaning of a breadth of personal spiritual comprehension, but Langland extends this idea of the clarity of sight between Orient and Occident also to have a moral and a humane application in Passus 15 and 18 of Piers Plowman. Likewise, Dante is clearly fascinated by the connection between the scope of spiritual sight, dreams, intellectual vision, and the ways in which these categories cross the physical and metaphysical worlds.10 As Dante the pilgrim approaches the Inferno, he states that the descending sight showed itself as “It was so dark, so deep, so filled with cloud, / That, when I fixed my eyes upon the bottom, / I could not there discern a single thing” (IV.10-12). The shades of the Inferno, we learn, see with “imperfect sight / . . . things which are a certain distance” from them (X.100-101).11 In the final Canto of Purgatorio, Beatrice admonishes Dante to stop speaking “as if [he was] dreaming.” Rather, he should strive to “transcend his intellect / Made of 10 Dino S. Cervigni argues that the three dreams of Purgatorio relate to an ascent in the quality of revelations that are both diurnal and nocturnal and evince “some of the basic qualities of the Commedia as a visio” (24). Lino Pertile highlights that the dreams are nine cantos apart, each, and the “three dreams are also perfectly spaced topographically, as the first takes place just before the gate and the first terrace of Purgatory, the second on the central and fourth terrace, and the third on the seventh and last” (16). 11 If they are not told, even things that “are closer or actual” are unknown to their intellect (X.103). Near the end of the Inferno, when Dante looks at the procession of wounded souls, Vergil admonishes him for his sight “so fixed down there among / Those miserable, mutilated shadows” (XXIX.5-6). 76 stone . . . / So that the light” may dazzle him (XXXIII.73-75), following her to a spatial and conceptual distance, where Dante may see that his “way has been / As far from the divine way, as the earth / Is from the heaven” (XXXIII.86-88). Much of the Paradiso is about the nature of vision, and the increasing capacity of Dante to comprehend and see new things is one of the most rehearsed issues in the book. Dante learns about how “vision must grow clearer” through “accession of that light / Which is freely given us by the highest good, / Light which enables us to see him” (XIV.46-49). In Canto XXIII, the speaker praises God for granting him more capacity to see wonders he was incapable of before: “You had raised yourself in order to give place / To eyes which were not able to behold you” (86-87). Notably, the “scope” of God's sight and mercy towards non-Christians is provoked in a discussion about Trajan the virtuous pagan, just as it is in Piers. The full visual sphericity, encompassing verticality and horizontality is here part of the vision of the pilgrim soul’s sense of intellectual and virtuous quality. These brief discussions about Dante and De Guileville/Lydgate indicate how narrative journeys through places, meant to be understood allegorically, show an upward movement where scope of vision and greater illumination are tied to spiritual sight and spatial awareness. These artistic productions were in turn influenced by developments in optical theory. Dante reflects greater interest in the mechanics of light and optics,12 which had become central to the arts curriculum of the medieval university in a staggering surge of what Mark Smith terms “optical literacy” (276-81). Piers Plowman indicates optical literacy as well. The twelfth century's influx of Arabic texts, such as Alhacen's De Aspectibus, which fuelled widespread optical literacy and became the pretext for its more involved treatments in narrative texts like Dante's and De Guileville’s. These writings emphasize intromission (the mechanical function of light optics 12 Dante was an educated layperson of the thirteenth century with substantial understanding of optics, as evidenced by his familiarity with the equal angles law of reflection reference in Canto XV of the Paradiso (Gilson 114). 77 outside the eye), over extramission (the casting of lines from within the eye to the outside world). But the so-called “perspectivist science” of the thirteenth and fourteenth century was intent on reconciling with classical models and aimed to continue accounting for both intromission and extramission. At the same time, they provoked many questions about how seeing subjects might err in their vision. Suzanne Akbari explicitly connects narrative allegories’ aesthetic and thematic innovations with interest in analogy, verisimilitude, and most notably introducing “point of view into the work's visual imagery” (23).13 Piers Plowman shows familiarity with perspectivism in its descriptions of both extramission and intromission, its extensive recourse to light and sight diction, and in the frequent appearance of mirrors in the narrative dreams. Most importantly, he manifests many allegorical concomitances with the perspectivists Roger Bacon and Peter of Limoges. Two of the most notable books in the thirteenth-century Latin proliferation of perspectivist writings are Roger Bacon's Perspectiva and Peter of Limoges’ Tractatus de Morali Oculi. Bacon's work primarily concerns optical anomalies and distortions, angles, and the nature of reflection and refraction in mirrors. Noting the superlative frequency of references to light and the eyes in Scripture, the final book of Bacon’s Perspectiva states concerning the study of optics that “nothing is more essential to [a grasp of] the literal and spiritual sense than the certitude supplied by this science” (321). Throughout his work, he highlights the merger of principles of extramission with traditional Platonic intromission, requiring both for vision: “Similarly, spiritual vision requires not only that the soul should be the recipient from without of divine grace and powers, but also that it should cooperate by its own power. For consent and the exercise of free will are required, along with the grace of God, if we are to see and gain the state 13 Her work is on The Romance of the Rose, The Divine Comedy, and Chaucer’s writings. 78 of salvation” (325). A sizeable portion of Book One concerns the conditions that need to be met for sight: proper light, distance, situation, sensible magnitude, density, rarity, and duration (1.8.1-1.9.4). Piers represents many failures of perception arising from these optical phenomena, and especially the concerns itself with the spiritual necessity of intromission and extramission. If Peter of Limoges derives some insights from Bacon, it is still the Tractactus, “and the alacrity with which it was mined for sermons during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance,” that is most important for the story of optics and its connection to allegory because of the overwhelming notoriety and astounding number of surviving manuscripts: 219 (Smith 279). While Bacon only devotes the concluding section to spiritual interpretation, most of Peter’s widely circulated book is devoted to allegorical interpretation of core principles from the new perspectival sciences: Now, the eye is doubled in number; each one being exactly like its companion; varied in color; spherical in shape; covered by eyelids; located in the head; receptive to visible species; able to perceive another object, but not itself; able to gain knowledge of visible things in different ways according to variations in their distance; able to establish the direction for the entire body; indicative of the secrets of the mind; and drowsy after being awake for a long time. (45) Each one of these visual requirements is afforded an allegorical gloss by Limoges. Although Langland does not dwell particularly on the eyes’ fact of being paired, coloured, or covered in eyelids, he gives studious attention to some of Peter’s principles: the perception of visible species in the book of nature, variation in distance, the incapacity of self-perception, the secrets of the mind, and the slothfulness of the eyes. The magnitude of spatial and conceptual distance of 79 the field of folk from the Tower of Truth is the framing epistemological metaphor of Piers Plowman. In terms of the specific sins obtruding vision, sloth is given special attention in both texts.14 Peter writes, “The sluggishness of spiritual sloth makes not only the internal eye of the soul sleep with laziness, but also the external eye. For there are some churchmen who sleep in their bed chambers during the hour for the morning office, or fall asleep in the choir of the church, if they even happen to be present” (87). This sin specifically manifests in Langland’s character of Sloth who is figured as a priest, and Will himself falls asleep in the choir of a church. Langland represents clerical deceit in numerous characters (including Will) from the prologue to the end, and Limoges shares the apocalyptic sentiments with a similar accent, that “in this waning twilight of the world we see that the prelates of the church have fallen away from their original state of perfection more than the laity has” (158).15 This is an exceedingly partial catalog that serves as an index of Piers Plowman’s place in the allegorical inflections of the Perspectivist tradition, and will be elaborated on in later subheadings of this chapter. Will experiences visions, but he must adopt core principles of perspectiv(a) to use the proper capacity of “se-well” (a quality of the Castle of Kynde); for the nature of things, for himself, for the temporal framework he earnestly desires to comprehend: in short, he seeks “kynde knowynge” but he has none (8.57). But kynde wit “comeþ of alle kynnes siȝtes” (12.128), and he needs to be taught the matter of spiritual perspectiva. Whatever the ultimate degree of obduracy in Will, which is a matter of debate, he does at least bear witness to the 14 John Bowers centers much of his convincing reading of the “crisis of will” in Piers Plowman on acedia in Will, the character. 15 Important scholarship exists on Langland’s “anticlericalism” and “antifraternalism,” especially Peter Szitzya The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature and Wendy Scase’s Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism. Even Lawrence Clopper’s Songes of Rechelesnes, which convincingly argues for Piers Plowman’s investment in the Franciscan order as an “insider”, does note the forceful reformist tendencies and critiques of the poet. 80 evolving spiritual truths. The developing symbols come in spatial form. Envy, nature, charity, mercy, and the church are all represented as personification, and emerge later as places. The semiotic ecology is at first misunderstood, then is treated in shifting, limited, moralistic ways, before expanding its signification into the Vita, where we learn “þat Crist is in alle places; /Ac I seiȝ hym nevere sooþly but as myself in a mirour” (15.161-2). To clinch the point, “Truthe” appears as a discursive concept, as a location in the heart of every person, as a Tower, as a Castle, as a masculine representative of the divine, as a daughter of God, and as the crops that Grace spreads throughout the field of the earth. The entire poem is concerned with theophany, and the accurate perception of divine purpose in time, saeculum and aevum.16 As Rebecca Davis has shown, Piers Plowman does not make a subsidiary divinity of nature like other popular poems, but represents God as Kynde: “kynde knowynge” is Will’s great pursuit, and he surveys for it high and low through landscapes as well as persons. Theophany is part of the poem’s discourse on land as well as people: i.e., God may be found in Piers the Plowman, as well as in the “field ful of folk.” The Misty Perspectiva from Malvern Hills Mystically, ‘mist’ signifies either obscurity in the scriptures, or the darkness of error. Hrabanus Maurus, De Universo Remember, reader, if ever in the mountains You were caught in a mist, through which you could see No better than a mole through his skin. (XVII.1-3) 16 Karma Lochrie prefers the term “chialism” which refers to a trajectory more utopian than eschatological. Both categories are compatible with my reading. 81 Dante, Purgatorio The prologue and the first passus set out the coordinates that become the thematic images and topics that the whole poem progressively illuminates. The poem opens with some of the “mistiness” of Malvern Hills: a dreamer who seeks “wondres,” but dons a “habite as an heremite unholy of werkes” (Prol.3), and falls asleep in the light of the sun, as one viciously slothful (Bowers 141). Just as he locates himself, he displaces the narrative into a “merveilous swevene” (Prol.11). There is an intractable connection to the place where Langland is known to have lived, at the same time that he transposes himself from it. Karma Lochrie asserts that “[t]he dreamscape features the familiar hills and dales of Herefordshire, and yet the dreamer calls it “a wildernesse, wiste I nevere where,” (‘a wilderness, nowhere that I knew,’ Prol.12)” (137). Notably, the Malvern Hills were long used as a strategic vantage point: Iron age forts were constructed at the crests of various hills in the region, for their panoramic lookouts afforded by geographical prominence. In Langland’s time and afterward, these hills functioned as beacons, with the Herefordshire Beacon and Worcestershire Beacon as the highest.17 17 As a literary illustration, Michael Drayton’s Renaissance poem Poly Olbion distinguishes the Malvern Hills fort as an exceptional lookout: And how the fertill fields of Hereford doe lie. And from his many heads, with many an amorous eye Beholds his goodlie site, how towards the pleasant rise. . . . The Mountaines euery way about him that doe stand, Of whom hee's daily seene, and seeing doth command; On tiptoes set aloft. (102) 82 For all their visual acuity, the hills’ scouting utility was often compromised by the thick mist to which Langland refers after the dream vision begins: “Thow myghtest bettre meete myst on Malverne Hilles / Than get a ‘mom’ of hire [a lawyer’s] mouth til moneie be shewed!” (215-16). The speaker highlights the visual faculties in his perception of three basic points of verticality, suggestive but not at first treated with an allegorical gloss: a “a tour on a toft trieliche ymaked” (14), bathed in the light of the morning, under the sun “beheeld into the eest” (13-14). Next, “A deep dale byneþe, a dongeon þerinne, / With depe diches and derke and dredfulle of siȝte” (15-16). Afterward, the dreamer writes of “A fair feeld ful of folk fond I þer bitwene– / Of Figure 1, Misty Malvern Hills, photographed by Dave Bradley, 11 February 2015. BBC Hereford and Worcester. https://www.bbc.co.uk/herefordandworcester/content/image_galleries Figure 2, Worcester Beacon trig pillar at sunset, photographed by Dan Grant, 28 November 2015. Ordnance Survey. 83 alle manere of men, þe meene and þe riche, / Werchynge and wandrynge as þe world askeþ” (17-19). The remainder of this vision - and each denizen – fixes its gaze at and within this field, as Langland surveys the estates of medieval England, with perplexed disappointment, for they seem to live in a misty myopia. There are labourers, “swonken ful harde” (21), as well as “wastours” who undo some of the labour; there are ordinary minstrels, and “jangeleres, Judas children” (35). Traders, too, who “semeþ to oure siȝt” that they “þryveþ.” The bishops, who by definition should supposed to be “overseers,” encourage pardoners to manipulate people’s emotions with indulgences: a pardoner, in the vision, “blered hire eiȝen, / And rauȝte with his rageman rynges and broches” (75). The speaker hopes for a different visual display of “the power that Peter hadde to keep,” because the cardinals have the responsibility to open the gates to Christ’s kingdom for the people, “and heuene blisse shewe” (100-5). The people maintain an overwhelming attention to the affairs precisely in front of them, in the field, not at all noticing the angel or the dark dale or the tower, which gives way to cacophony that concludes the prologue: the flirtatious “dykeres” exclaiming “Dieu save Dame Emme!” The cooks yelling, “Hote pies, hote!” and the taverners yelling “Whit wyn of Oseye and wyn of Gascoigne!” (225-29). Langland might have Limoges’ ideas in mind here, that “sinners fall and have descend to temporal matters by their love for them (for their eyes are wide open to worldly things, but closed to heavenly ones), they look on God as if from afar, and therefore they despise him, not judging him according to his greatness” (65-66).18 In Passus 1, the narrator promises the reader that he will “faire shewe” what “this mountaigne bymeneþ and þe merke dale / And þe feld ful of folk, I shal yow faire shewe” (1.1- 18 The conclusion of Langland’s prologue corresponds to the parable of the rats, which is told just after the “gloton of words” ignores the angel’s warning. The rats keep their proverbial heads down: “For doute of diverse dredes we dar noȝt wel loke” (152). They cannot contemplate heavenly concern, only thinking about how to overthrow or pacify the “cat” in the city of London. 84 2). The hermeneutical problem of the poem is not at first about the meaning of the people’s activities, or “who” Dowel and Piers the Plowman are. Rather, the poem’s interpretive problem begins expressly as a question about the meaning of places, and the extent to which they are seen. The heavenly Holy Church delivers on this promise, offering the start of an allegorical gloss to these sites/sights: “The tour vp the toft, quod she, Truþe is þerinne” (1.12). The opposite vertical coordinate of the vision is the “dongeon in the dale that dredful is of siȝte,” the habitation of “Wrong […] / Fader of falshede” (1.59-64). Truth is figured as a lofty tower, inaccessibly high on a mountaintop, but might be seen in other spaces if a special “triacle,” an eye salve called love is used to negate the darkening effects of sin (1.148-49). Holy Church effusively preaches that love is in fact omnipresent, diffusing to the finest “point of a nedle” (1.157), and able to reach over “heiȝe walles” (1.158), expressing itself in the extreme proximity of the heart. This is a spiritual quandary articulated by the perspectivists, with Bacon explaining that moderate distance is needed, just as “remoteness” of God due to many sins “destroys spiritual vision,” as does the “the presumption of excessive familiarity” (327). The paradox of divine nearness and distance, with the problematics of spiritual vision based on sheer ignorance and presumption is perhaps the most basic question of Piers Plowman set out in the first vision. But it seems to be the problem of the poem rather than its “triacle.”19 The simple fact of Holy Church’s orthodox allegorical explanations of the places do not clear up any of the mists here, though she is clearly presented as a figure of authority. Will blurts his plea of ignorance, repeated several times throughout Piers Plowman: “I have no kynde knowynge” (1.138). He also requests of Holy Church, “kenne me kyndely on Crist to bileve” (1.81), which has a disturbing stasis. Eleanor Johnson explains “to anyone fluent in Middle English, it would 19 Catherine Martin highlights that the poem begins rather than ends here, asking “questions after the answers have been given, to disappoint our need for pattern and finality, to assert the gulf between field and tower” (13). 85 be apparent that to be ‘kenned’ any ‘kynde’ understanding is logically contradictory. How is it possible to be ‘taught knowledge that, by definition, is natural, inborn, and familiar?” (78). The suggestion proposed here and which will receive further elaboration is that Will desires for his extramission, the natural powers of his eyes, to grant him charity and truth, but the way that Limoges and Bacon explain the problem is that this is impossible, and requires the light of God’s intromission. The most prominent Latin quotation in all of Piers Plowman, and repeated three times in the first seven passūs is “Domine, quis habitabit in tabernaculo tuo” (2.38), words that highlight spatio-moral challenge which envelop the dreamer and the field full of folk still caught in the mist. The poem returns to this question most pertinently in Passus 10 and 11, when Scripture the character calls up several texts that all discourage Will from judging others in light of his own sins: “Thouȝ þow se yvel, seye it noȝt first–be sory it nere amended” (11.104). The vision expands, at the idea mercy is “above” (super) all the other works of God: “Misericordia eius super omnia opera eius” (11.139). The very next line belongs to Troianus (Trajan), one “broken out of helle” (11.140). The spatial shift from the heights of mercy to hell is as abrupt as the brazen “b” alliteration of “baw for bokes!” As Trajan explains that God had mercy on him only because of “love and leautee [honest integrity] and my laweful domes” (11.145), he notes the difficulty of reconciling the church’s teaching to this matter: “This matere is merk for many of yow, ac men of holy chirche” (11.159). The diction concerning knowledge being connected to imagery of darkness hearkens discussions about allegory and its dark figures not being understood without effort. Will’s preceding theological argument is based on its ungracious misapprehension, a failure to take the earlier lesson to heart: “Why mevestow thi mood for a 86 mote in thi brotheres eiȝe, / Sithen a beem in thyn owene ablyndeth thiselve?” (10.261-62). The light of love is needed to “clear up the mists,” as is implied by the lesson from Study: Ac Theologie haþ tened me ten score tymes: The moore I muse therinne, þe mystier it semeþ, And þe depper I deuyne, þe derker me it þynkeþ. lt is no science, forsoþe, for to sotile inne. A ful leþi þyng it were if þhat loue [þerinne] nere. (10.182-86) One might say that the misty sight from the Malvern Hills is akin to the spiritual eyes of those seeking to discern the mysteries of the church’s teachings. If the dale is dark, and sin brings darkness to the eyes, so is theology’s meaning clouded. The mystery of allegory shares the language of darkness. Henri de Lubac has written of the aesthetic at length in his history of the language used in Patristic and medieval exegesis: “Shadows, darkness, night, thick batches, clouds: such, then, were the words that were used to designate the allegories contained within the texts. The obscure mysteries of allegory” (2.126). But the mysteries of allegory can be cleared with the help of God: Bernard’s descriptions is that the commenter on Scripture is to be a “cloud full of light.” Langland’s poem engages concepts of allegory and its aesthetics with a suggestive vision about conduct toward poor Christians and non-Christians, anchored to the diction of sight as a function of love. Trajan talks about how Jesus exemplifies the correct style of vision: “[He] lokeþ on us in hir liknesse and þat wiþ lovely chere, / To knowen us by oure kynde herte and castynge of oure eiȝen” (11.186-87).20 20 This essay noted that Dante’s conversation with Trajan in the Commedia concerns the scope of God’s mercy, as an act of divine, loving sight. The analogy to St. Erkenwald, another alliterative poem written around the time of Piers Plowman, is fortuitous. In this poem (perhaps composed by the Pearl writer), a virtuous pagan judge - a clear Trajan figure - of pre-Christian Britain is found undecayed during a church construction in London. Where the clerks of London stand afar in suspicion, the pious bishop Saint Erkenwald “turns to the toumbe” (l.177), and descends the “helle-hole” (307) to touch the eyelids of the judge and weep on him. The poet of course invokes the imagery of darkness as the judge laments about his condition in Limbo, and especially denotes the moral and 87 Extramission is so colourfully described by the phrase “castynge of our eiȝen,” and the intromission offered by divine source is stated in the line before, all in the vein of the spiritual gloss offered by both Bacon and Limoges: the moral eye has its own power, but for sight to be successful it must cooperate with grace from without. Much of the poem’s epistemological drama seems to stem from Will casting his eyes without cooperation with spiritual intromission. The Fallen Visual Mede-ium [T]he eye of the church, i.e. a prelate, is deceived not only by an evil advisor […], but also sometimes by the acceptance of bribes, which in a certain manner knock the eye of reason from its place. (22) Peter of Limoges, Tractatus While the description of Holy Church is exceedingly simple, focused on her point of origin, the description of Mede overwhelms Will’s sight for over ten alliterative lines devoted to accoutrements, after he has been warned to “[l]oke upon “Fals and Favel” on his “left half” (2.5-6). In Passus 3, a confessor dressed up as a friar solicits Mede’s help to fund the new windows of his church; she offers him her services if he is indulgent to the lecherous nobles. The visibility of the window, and the church that houses it is immediately stressed in Mede’s effusive bid to be associated with the perception of religious life in the name of social performativity: And I shal covere youre kirk, youre cloistre do maken, Wowes do whiten and wyndowes glaȝen, charitable extramission of the eyes: Erkenwald “balefully bere don his eghen” (311), “to þe tome lokyd” (313), his “wete eghen / Þhe teres trillyd adon & on þe toumbe lighten” (321-22), and “Þe bryȝt bourne of thin eghen, / my bapteme is worthyn” (329-330). The love of God, and by proxy the love of the bishop are at stake: “Þen was louying of our Lord with loves up-halden” (349). 88 Do peynten and portraye and paie for þe makynge, That euery segge shall see I am suster of youre house. (3.60-63) The window’s visual aspect stands as a spectacle, but this passage is also a spatial medium for the question of perspectival mediation as a moral question. The windows do not call forth the heavenly subject matter of Holy Church, and the “eye of reason” that Limoges writes of, is cast low. So, for the second vision, the fundamental spatial orientation of the low “horizontality” of moral matters, and a short temporal framework. If Holy Church had asserted that love was in the middle, between earth and heaven, it is Mede “in the middes and alle thise men after” (2.185).21 The particular geo-political term that is repeated most in reference to Mede’s influence, and begins as a reference to earthly governance, is “reaume,” and implies the realm of England.22 Will enters these “reaumes” of governance when he is left by Holy Church to fall asleep again to have “metels” (a dream vision), about Mede’s marriage to False, in the midst of “alle manere of men, þe meene and þe riche” (2.56). It is in this context, that Langland offers a list of allegorical wedding bequeathals to Lady Mede: And þe erldom of Envye and [Ire] togideres, Wiþ þe chastiIet of cheste and chaterynge out of reson. 21 I believe that this is one of the reasons that Langland concludes the first visions with a prayer that “Marie [Jesus’] moder be oure meene bitwene” (7.197), as an alliterative counterpoint to Mede. 22 These passages include the following: Ther [Mede] is wel with the kyng, wo is þe reaume. (3.153) That is þe richeste reaume þat reyn overhoveþ. / It bicomeþ to a kyng þat kepeþ a reaume. (3.208-9) I, Conseience, knowe þis, for Kynde Wit it me tauȝte– / That Reson shal regne and reaumes governe. (3.284-85) And over lordes Iawes [led]eþ þe reaumes. (3.298) For he shal rule my reaume and rede me þe beste. (4.9) For I seiȝ þe feld ful of folk þat I before of seide, / And how Reson gan arayen hym al þe reaume to preche. (5.10-1) Most of the places mentioned from the beginning to Passus V are either quite close to the Malvern Hills (Wye 5.201, Hertfordshire 5.356), in London (Chepe 5.315, Chauncelrie Pro. 93, 4.29, Bromholm 5.227, parlement 4.47), or close to London (Buckinghamshire 2.110, Essex 5.92, Walsingham Pro. 54, 5.226). Nearly all of the other places mentioned offhand are also within England, such as Rutland (2.111), Canterbury (5.558), Winchester (5.201), and Northfolk (5.235). Mary Clemente Davlin has catalogued the rest of them in The Place of God (176). 89 The countee of Coueitise and alle þe costes about– That is usure and avarice–al I hem graunte In bargaynes and in brocages wiþ al þe burghe of þefte, And al þe lordshipe of Leccherie in lengþe and in brede– As in werkes and in wordes and in waitynges with eiȝes (2.84-90) If Envy, Wrath, and Lechery, the personifications that appear in Passus 5, are representatives of the sensuous and wrathful folk in the more rural context, they also take the form of loci in Passus 2. Envy and Wrath are the holdings and positions of the aristocracy, in their more central, and evidently less reformable condition. These territories of vice neighbour literal London, with activities that accrue benefits to a select few rather than the body politic. Langland highlights that the activities are rife in England, “in lengþe and brede” across the fiefdoms of the land.23 In Passus 5, various personifications come from the field to manifest their namesake vice. In almost every case, Langland highlights a malady of eyesight to signify and accord with the moral perception gone awry: Wrath awakes “wiþ two white eiȝen, / And nevelynge wiþ þe nose, and his nekke hangyng” (5.134). Although Covetise is so disfigured and “holwe,” the speaker observes that the figure was “bitelbrowed and baberlipped, wiþ two blered eiȝen; / And as a leþeren purs lolled hise chekes” (5.188-89). After the Gloton gorges himself, he “dymmed hise eiȝen” causing him to trip on the “thresshfold” of the door, and “threw to the erthe” (5.350-51), but “waked he of his wynkyng and wiped hise eiȝen” (5.362), before his conflicted confession. Sleuthe comes “al bislabered, with two slymy eiȝen” (5.386), and is made capable of repentance 23 Prosperous and broad in one sense, they are also socially destabilizing and unsustainable in another. Despite their short-term benefits, Simony and Civil Law declare that the married parties will have go about “yelding” their “soules to Sathan” at “one yeres ende” (2.105-6). The sense of ethical prerogative symbolized by the year also continues to the end of the early visions. On Piers’ half-acre there are several references to the “yere” and “lyfe’s yere,” with a harvest that is annual, in the kairos sense of the proper time: “For þow shalt yelde [your soul] ayein at one yeres ende” (6.43), and Piers’ daughter is named “Werch-whan-tyme-is” (6.78). 90 only when Vigilate the veille “fette water at his eiȝen” (5.443). Several commentators, including Muscatine, have observed that Langland does not commit to the clear setting of a place here, and it is true that this passage has a dizzying movement. Still, even though the narrative flits to and fro--from Envy’s church visits to Wrath’s kitchen and convent to Greed’s cloth shop to Glutton’s ditch--there is no obscurity that these scenes emerge from the background of the Field Full of Folk that frame the scene just before. None of the people of the field can find their way to St. Truth in the right time-space, including the priest who appears on the cue of Piers’ suggestion to take up the proper kind of pilgrimage. Langland suggests that travel is not necessarily pious, and the results of this pilgrim’s travels to Rome, Sinai, the Sepulchre, Bethlehem, Babylon, Armenia, Alexandria, and “manye oþere places,” are just the ridiculous “siȝnes that sitten on myn hatte” (5.529). The catalogue of mnemonic places that finish Passus V of Piers Plowman is meant to stand in stark contrast to the catalogue of places the priest has visited, the metaphorical places functioning as something more real, and “closer” to the truth, which “[t]how shalt see in þiselve . . . sitte in þyn herte” (5.606).24 The destination is “a court as cler as the sonne” with the “moot” being of Mercy “þe manoir aboute” (5.586). The journey described is easily picturable at one level, using traditional English midlands imagery and keeping to the standard of horizontality for the third somnium of Piers Plowman: a stream, a ford, a field, two tree stumps, a hill, another place, a castle with walls, pillars, a moat, and a gate. However, the places are constructed out of ethical imperatives and parts of the 10 commandments that are striking, aesthetically, in their awkwardness as place names. For instance, the “croft” is called “Coveite-noȝt-mennes-catel-ne- 24 Some of the mnemonic places are themselves embodiments of the clarity of vision which will accompany progress in the journey. Bathing in the water of the stream, “Beth-buxom-of-speche” and “Honora patrem et matrem,” he says, will enable you to see the next place: “Swere-noȝt-but-if-it-be-for-nede- / And-nameliche-on-ydel-the-name-of-God-Almyȝty’” (5.566-70). 91 hire-wyves- / Ne-noon-of-hire-servaunts-that-noyen-hem-myȝte” (5.573-74). The short topifications catalogued in Piers’ map for pilgrimage are highly playful for their striking portmanteau constructions out of long-form ethical imperatives – and for the fact that no one obviously even tries to traverse them in order to arrive at the castle. The simple people of the field need Piers to simplify the courtly topos to something more homely. The manor house is ornate but inaccessible, a place that the people declare they would never find unless they had a guide “that myȝte folwen us ech a foot” (6.2). Moral considerations must be appropriate to the vision of the actors; Piers the Plowman therefore brings them to the “half acre . . . by the heiȝe weye” (6.3). This landscape is the moral crux of the vision after the prologue. It is not the blurry field, or the distant estates of debauched nobles, but a place that is small, focused, and has a clear moral injunction embedded in it. It differs from the difficult commandments not attended to on the journey to St. Truth, but nonetheless reveals divine purpose through its “kynde” It thereby eases closer to the paradox of divine proximity and distance set out in the beginning. This is partly clarified through the allegorical meaning of the “half,” which in medieval numerology corresponds to ethical matters.25 The people, under the sway of Mede, suppose that clergy, pilgrims, and the legal experts, found in the chapels, Westminster processions, the consistory courts, and the Holy Land can see further, and are the “locus” of the moral life, but Langland hearkens once again to the allusion: “Domine, quis habitubit in tabernuculo tuo?” (7.51). The fragment of the passage that Langland quotes is not explained much in the immediate context, although the entire vision personifies, topifies, and acts out the remainder of the biblical passage: “Lord, who schal dwelle in thi tabernacle; ether who schal reste in thin hooli hil? / He 25 Gregory the Great’s commentary on the temple vision in Ezekiel notes this association. 92 that entrith with out wem; and worchith riytfulnesse. / Which spekith treuthe in his herte; which dide not gile in his tunge” (Wycliffe trans., Ps. 14.1-3). Truth can be discovered and “cultivated” in the heart of each person; Truth is also the owner of the Half-Acre (6.38). The paradox of the first seven passūs of Piers Plowman, is that God, as Truth, stands on a hill far away, but one point of access and proximity is simply to see that which is in front of oneself clearly at the proper distance, with Conscience and Reason as the eyes (the two main “good” personifications in the early sections of the B-Text), and to act ethically.26 Kyndely Judgment Holy men do not judge others rashly, but know how to judge themselves carefully. . . . [T]he wise man demonstrates that a person is capable of seeing himself, but he cannot see the secrets in the hearts of others. (64) Peter of Limoges, Tractatus The somnia of the first seven passūs begin with Will falling asleep on the Malvern Hills, looking out onto a field full of folk. In terms of optics, Will consistently fails to be charitable in the way he “cast[s] [his] eiȝen” (11.187), so he needs the grace of intromission to learn about himself and his own lack of charity. Will even provides an allegorical interpretation of a traditional exegetical structure, Noah’s Ark in support of his argument, an Arca Noe Morali that is nevertheless exclusive and “narrow” to a fault, in sharp contrast to Hugh of St. Victor’s wide and cosmologically optimistic work. The quality of knowledge that Will exhibits here is 26 “Soþenesse” can “seiȝ [Gyle] wel”. At one point, the king calls for Conscience and Reason, and “recordede þat Reson hadde rightfully shewed; / And modiliche upon Mede with myȝt the Kyng loked” (4.172-73). The diction of this passage clearly indicates that the king utilizes reason and conscience as the foundation on which he “loked” with “myȝt.” 93 condemned with the aphorism, “Multi multa sciunt et seipsos nesciunt.”27 Accordingly, the third vision offers two very different topologies that “frame” the move from what Macrobius would term the social or the public somnium to the personal somnium: the Sea of the World, and the “Uncultivated Region.”28 The retreat into the natural world becomes a journey into the nature of the self. The use of the word kynde and its forms saturate the following vision, materializing into the Castle of Kynde, the personification of Kynde Wit, and culminating of course in Kynde as Theophany and instructor of Will. “For more kynde knowynge I coveite to lerne” (8.111), Will blurts to his interlocuter Thought. Prior to the dream sequence that starts the fourth vision, there are further reminders of the dreamer’s halting spiritual progress; he still wants to travel “widely,” even though the virtues “ben noght fer to fynde” (8.80). In the beginning of the poem Will is dressed in the habit of a hermit “unholy of werkes” and seeks wonders. Here he roams far and wide for a summer season; he approaches two Franciscan men and hopes that their “wide” travels will help him discover dowel: “For [ye] be men of þis moolde þat moost wide walken, / And knowen contrees and courtes and many kynnes places” (8.14-15). The friars remind him of the traditional symbolic topology, that the world is like a raging and unpredictable sea, where men sin seven times each day, but dowel can at least keep people afloat. Will receives little comfort from this insight: “‘I have no kynde knowyng,’ quod I, ‘to conceyve alle þi wordes, / Ac if I may lyve and loke, I shal go lerne bettre’” (8.58-9). Will’s wide travels lead him away from the Field, and the diction, if symbolic, suggests a firm departure from more explicitly social ties: “And þus I wente widewher, walkyng myn one, / By a wilde wildernesse, and by a wodes side” (8.63-64). Will’s ability to “loke” is connected to his learning, but immediately he learns that he 27 “Many know much who know nothing of themselves” (111, Schmidt translation). 28 This is the term that A. V. C. Schmidt uses in her Oxford World Classics translation (84). Note the explicit move away from the cultivated Half-Acre. 94 cannot recognize the man “lik to myselv” (8.71), a sort of failure to see himself in the mirror. Thought asks Will, “seye thow me no rather?” (8.76). Will’s inability to recognize a fragment of himself is of course indicative of just how much more he must learn to see. Will proves to be a poor pupil, and must look at the man in the mirror. Fortune brings Will into a “lond of longynge,” holding a “mirour that hiȝhte Middelerthe” to his eyes, with a promise, once again, to “se wondres” (11.8-10). The Perspectivists likewise highlight that earthly vision at its worst is akin to a reflective mirror instead of direct vision (Bacon), or “mirror-like” (Limoges 12). Fortune only brings the intoxicated perspective of the worst parts of Will’s human nature to his rapt attention. One of Fortune’s daughters, notably, is named “Coveitise of Eiȝes.” The purpose of the foray into the Land of Longing is temporal disorientation, with the temptation that Will is “yong and yeep and hast yeres ynowe” (11.18). This passage is a complement to the one in which Will puns on the spatiotemporal reference of his own name: “I have lyved in londe,’ quod I, ‘my name is Longe Wille / And fond I nevere ful charite, bifore ne bihynde” (15.152-53). From the year being the focus of the previous visions, here the concern is a lifelong myopia, where Covetous of Eyes follows him “fourty wynter and a fifte moore” (11.47). Fortuna does not enable Will’s spiritual vision, and even his encounter with God in the form of Kynde is incomplete. Will is “fet forþ by ensaumples to knowe,” on “a mountaigne that Myddelerþe hiȝte / Thorugh ech a creature, Kynde my creatour to lovye” (11.323-25). In this context, “hiȝt” of course means “called” or “named,” but the dimension of “height” is part of the pun. This mountain is on a middle place between heaven and the field. Langland does seem to lead his readers on to surmise that this is a mountain where the dark allegories will be illuminated, through the proper medium of love, especially since the narrative locus is hopefully a little closer to the Tower of Truth (which was also on a mountain). The notion of the mountain 95 as an optical medium especially strengthened when one considers that in the C text, Langland makes the mountain into a mirror (which nevertheless has a vector of height enhancing it): And in the myrour of Mydelerþe made [Clergie] efte to loke, / To knowe by ech a creature Kynde to louye. / And Y bowed my body, bihelde al aboute” (C 13.132-34).29 The saturated diction of apperception under this “lighting” initially promises revelation: “I seiȝ þe sonne and þe see and þe sond after” and of birds, “Man and his make I myȝte se bothe /. . . Blisse and bale -- bothe I seiȝ at ones” (11.332). He sees Reason “sooþly” in all beasts (11.334). From the sun and flying creatures, he looks down to see creatures as low as worms: “And siþen I loked on þe see and so forth on þe sterres” (11.362). 30 His field of vision is high as well as wide, until he muses on the field of folk (11.333). His mood “chaunged” (11.368), because he notices Reason’s lack of jurisdiction over the people. Reason’s rebuke results in the end of the vision, castigating Will’s presumption (“rule þi tonge better”) reminding him that all men have faults, and God who is perfect endures all people’s sins without destroying the world: “Who suffreþ moore than God?” (11.379). The theophany of Kynde seems to “suffer” Will’s accusations of the providential order mutely: Kynde simply allows the creatures – mountain, vegetation, stars, and animals – to speak for on its behalf. At one level, kynde, understood by itself, without the illumination of Kynde, is like seeing without See Well, or Wit without Inwit. Davis invokes Hugh of St. Victor’s concept of the vir insipiens, “the foolish and carnal man who is unable to ‘read’ nature correctly.” Will’s “spiritual illiteracy” affects “the limits of what he is prepared to learn from ‘kynde’” (155-56). 29 Joseph Wittig asserts that this connection between topographical high points and mirrors is used in literature about contemplation: “the world as mirror for the disciplined and awakened Christian soul can be connected with the world seen from the mountain of contemplation or from the watchtower of the contemplative” (240). 30 Klassen highlights the “thoroughly naturalistic” interest that Langland has in sight and its relationship to knowledge, and notes that there are differing, “negative or positive” uses of this relationship between passus 11 and 15 (153). Klassen does not himself elaborate much on this observation. 96 However, Will awakens and exclaims that he understands the lesson: “‘To se muche and suffre moore, certes,’ quod 1, ‘is Dowel.’” (11.410). Ymaginatif helps Will strengthen this specific connection: of seeing and suffering, rather than providing an ars poetica or a summary of medieval thought on the faculties of the vis imaginativa. It is really quite striking that Ymaginatif is granted such an authoritative role in the vision’s finale, though this is foreshadowed in Dame Study’s promise that Ymaginatif will make things clear. Ymaginitif’s passus from the B text (12) strongly resonates with the Perspectivists and especially Peter in his emphasis on the optical basis of moral insights.31 The “siȝte of diverse peple” comes from “kynde wit,” parallel with the knowledge of the clergy (“a konnynge of hevene”), which comes from a common “grace” as a “gifte of God, and of greet love spryngeþ” (12.66-68). Both Clergy and Kynde Wit in their ideal form are “kin” to Christ himself, and “bothe [as mirours ben] to amenden oure defautes” (12.95). Langland clearly highlights the faculty of vision as analogous to “reading” (12.100-102), and as a companion of moral discernment: “And riȝt as siȝt serveþ a man to se the heiȝe strete, / Riȝt so lereþ lettrure lewed men to reason” (12.103-4). Imagination offers a rather traditional allegorical interpretation of the peacock, a part of res of nature’s book; but the allegorical teaching extends integumentally further than this brief bestiary-esque reading. Imagination asserts that “kynde wit cometh of alle kynnes siȝtes” and that even pre-Christian people deemed “selkouþes [unusual things] þat þei seiȝen, hir sones for to teche” (12.128-136): but “nevere no soule ysaved” (12.134). Innate capacities within people do not save them. Kynde Wit comes from seeing all kinds of things, but should cooperate with heavenly sight, looking down to the places on earth, rather than an attempt 31 Imagination, indeed, discusses ethics at length, in his cautions against wasting time; in his praising of diligence in study; in his esteem for people choosing poverty and chastity; in his direct assertion that St. Paul “preveþ what is Dowel” (12.29). 97 by people simply with kynde wit to achieve salvation for themselves. The Castle of Kynde, “Caro it hatte” (9.49), is not simply the flesh, which the prologue passages suggest act in concert with the devil, but is “man with a soule” (9.50). The personification inside is not simply the sense of sight, but “Se-wel,” a perception of nature with a little spiritual inflection. The governing personification Inwit itself might be translated “spiritual understanding,” emerging nevertheless from the literal four elements, made from the “erthe,” which God can dignify. Much of Piers Plowman is about the importance of “grace as intromission” and the wideness of God’s love and mercy, after having been about the “failures of extramission.” The “lowe erþe” is the locus of human action and the object of God’s affection (12.141), revelation and presence, which was already alluded to by Holy Church (1.150-55). If Ymaginitif emphasizes “dowel,” he adds some shocking theological suggestions that the love and charity (“dobest”) of God meet moral effort to achieve salvation on the low earth. God’s ability to look down with love, rather than simply “looking down on” mortals, corresponds to a “descent” “noȝt depe in helle / That Oure Lord ne hadde hym liȝtly out, so leve I [by] þe þef in hevene” (12.210-11). The Widening Field [Bodily vision] is the lowest, and it is weak. Since it is constrained, it cannot comprehend very large things, and since it is blunt, it cannot discern very small things. Since it is slow, it cannot reach things that are far off, and since it is not keenly attentive, it cannot penetrate hidden things. In sum, this mode does not contain anything of mystic significance. (344) Richard of St Victor, In Apocalypsim Joannis The mind's range of vision cannot extend further than its range of love. 98 Robert Grosseteste, De Artibus Liberalibus To adapt the adage from Graham Greene: hatred just might be a failing of Ymaginatif.32 The scandalous implication, as Will sees, is that non-Christians can also be saved: “‘Alle þise clerkes,’ quod I tho, ‘that on Crist leven. / Seyen in hir sermons that neither Sarsens ne Jewes / Ne no creature of Cristes liknesse wiþouten Cristendom worth saved’” (12.275-77). Ymaginitif cries “Contra” and states that truth never “trespassed never ne traversed ayeins his lawe” (12.285). Truth is able to “trespass” outside of Christendom, without trespassing its own law, in the same way that hell is no bar to the presence and activity of God (Trajan), even if heaven remains the original locus of divine habitation. If much of Piers Plowman is an exercise in futility and misapprehension, an extramissionist look into the refractive and aenigmate mirror of the self, Passus 15 to 18 are a “sooþly” look into the mirror of a divine Ymaginitif (15.161). Each vision is part of the rise to a widening capability of sight from a higher vantage, at the same time that every vision takes pains to show human nearness to God, within and without Christendom. All throughout the poem, Langland warns of divine judgment, but the references are mostly local to England and to the span of individual human lives. The dreams themselves do not fully cross over into the realm of the oraculum or the visio, until the temporal references widen to consider the distant past and the future.33 Langland even changes his diction to describe the new character of vision by the Tree of Charity as a “love dream.” Anima’s broad history refers to the progress of Christian missionaries in the distant and more recent past, as well as the examples of saints recorded in the Aurea Legenda, down to the New Testament apostles. 32 “Hatred is a failure of imagination.” 33 As a parallel, Will’s first nap just goes from the morning to the afternoon; the cycle after his next dream is all the summer season; then he awakes to cry that he has been wandering “wonder longe” (15.1). 99 Subsequently, the visions reach to Abraham, and ultimately to the spiritual intent for all “Adames kynde.” In Piers’ description of the fruit of charity, he refers to the harvest with the phrase “Til plenitudo temporis tyme comen were / That Piers fruyt floured and felle to be rype” (16.93-94). Langland’s fantasy is expressly that the fruit of charity, which was ripe in Jesus’ time, might be harvested in his present, so he incarnates liturgical time. If the folk, and Haukyn the Active Man, and Will himself ignore Lent (and the church calendar) in their ethics, it is because they have not yet met Faith “a myd-Lenten Sonday” (16.172). Langland’s representation of Jesus enacts the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Harrowing of Hell, and the resurrection after “þre daies” (17.111). Barbara Nolan neatly parallels how Passus 15-18 is “a moving gloss for the Lenten liturgy” with Piers following “the liturgical patterns of Lent in teaching Will about Old Testament prophecy and New Testament fulfilment” (250). Representation itself clearly changes in these later visions, and scholars have noted a number of different formal changes. Stephen Barney states that “many readers have seen in Piers a movement from an obtrusive narrator in a highly ‘moralized’ landscape toward an increasingly voiceless narrator in an increasingly apocalyptic, typological world . . . a movement that constitutes a return to the ancient prophetic way of telling the truth” (130).34 Will behaves with much more exuberance and humility, finally 34 Jill Mann highlights the fact that poem introduces typological figures to introduce hope that “New Testament virtues” that might be abstract can be “thus adumbrated in Old Testament history,” implying the connection to the present as “historical embodiments of a supra-sensible reality” (75). Mary Carruthers and Gillian Rudd have noted the better integration of Latin with the Middle English in individual lines, a more direct intervention of divine logos in contrast with the flawed verbum which has dominated the poem to this point. The numinous “mountayn” in the prologue, and the exemplarist Mountain of MyddleErde in the middle of the poem are now overshadowed by the “mount of Synay”, where Hope/Moses is given “maundement” to “rule alle reames therewith” (17.1-3). The “reaumes” in England and the simple moral level of analysis at the beginning of the poem become all the realms of the world, seen from the vantage of the law that all three Abrahamic faiths share. The retelling of the Good Samaritan story also mixes typology of place with simple topification. Augustine has a well-known, succinct, and colourful explanation of the geography of the parable: […] [T]hough Jerusalem is a visible and earthly place, it nonetheless spiritually signifies the city of peace, and though Sion is a mountain on earth, it signifies contemplation, and this name is often transferred in the allegories of Scriptures to understand spiritual things. Thus the one who went down from Jerusalem to 100 bringing his family to church instead of wandering aimlessly. The characters and places are generally different in the “Love Dreams.” Before Abraham, Moses and Jesus appear, there is already a hint that history and the ideal can coincide, where martyr kings, early saints, apostles, leaders of religious orders, and missionaries are all mentioned (Steiner 161), whereas to this point human characters, and even most of the personifications show, primarily, exhibitions of sinfulness.: “For I have seyen [Charity] in silk and som tyme in russet, / Boþe in grey, and in grys, and in gilt harneis” (15.220-21). Anima’s history is generally an imperative to look wider, with an even more explicit spatial framework, and references to toponyms from Spain to the far east. From Anima being in the Castle of Kynde, “noȝt a day hence,” he highlights that he is ubiquitously “Cristes creature . . . and Cristene in many a place, / In Cristes court yknowe wel, and of his kyn a party” (15.16-17). Anima intentionally blends categories, and provokes the question of where these “many” places are. In contrast, Will continues to focus on the narrower framework of Christendom when he asks “What are ye called? . . . in þat court among Cristes peple?” (15.22). Anima’s rhetorical highly memorable copia, and rightly one of the best-known parts of the poem: ‘The whiles I quykne the cors,’ quod he, ‘called am I Anima; And whan I wilne and wolde, Animus ich hatte; And for that I kan and knowe, called am I Mens; And whan I make mone to God, Memoria is my name’ (15.23-6). Anima continues, adding Reason, Sense, Conscience, Love, Spiritus, and playfully invites that Will “now . . . miȝt chese / How thow coveitest to calle me” (15.38-39). Anima’s catalogue is not Jericho, as the Lord says, and was wounded on the way and left injured and half-dead by the thieves clearly demands that those places of the earth be understood spiritually, although in accord with history they are found on earth. (De Genesi Contra Manichaeos 2.10.13) 101 confined to English, but includes Latin names. From interior variability to geographical multiplicity, he concerns himself with Islamic and Jewish peoples, the implication strengthening that Anima is similarly “Christ’s creature” among them, even if under different names. It is at this juncture that Will partially connects omnipresence with interior presence, though he states the matter not as a point of conviction or faith: “Clerkes kenne me that Crist is in alle places / Ac I seiȝ hym nevere soothly but as myself in a mirour” (15.161-62). Christ is in all places, and he should be so perceptible in Christendom; but the people have little charity, and the clergy have led them astray. If Bishops have the title of “Episcopus” (15.43), they should be “overseeing” places where they hold titles, the places where, in fact, mostly non-Christians live: “Nazareth, of Nynyve, of Neptalym and Damaske” (15.492). One of the poem’s most pertinent connections to Peter of Limoges is this commentary on the optical distortion of sin and the failure of witness, particularly in connection with the “overseeing” capacity of the “bishop”. Peter writes, “what is considered a great injury to the eyes is occasionally thought to be only moderate when it happens to other bodily members. So, too, one and the same sin is greater in a prelate and a priest than in a member of the laity” (166). The Holy Spirit, for Langland, oversees and alights on all creatures, not just Christians: “The liȝt of al þat lif haþ a londe and a watre, / Confortour of creatures” (16.189-90). This phrase updates the idea in Passus 12, that the Holy Spirit does not primarily bring the burning fire of judgment but the light of clarity, in the Latin phrase used for the Pentecost antiphon: “Advenit ignins divinus non comburens set illuminans” (12.287). This idea carries into the great comparison of the Holy Ghost to the flame of a candle in Passus 17, where Christians “unkynde to þyn euencristene” (17.251) quench spiritual light that could be conveyed further through the world: “Ye brenne, but ye blasé noȝt, and þat is a blynd bekene” (17.264). Will does not himself 102 extend charity to outsiders of Christendom, as shown again when he asks whom Jesus shall “juste wiþ . . . Jewes or scrybes?” (18.27). The opponent, however, is not an ethno-religious group, but the devil. The Tree of Charity is closer to them and to him, than he initially understands, as someone pledging to travel “this tree to se, twenty hundred myle” (16.10). The Tree of Charity in the “herber” of Heart, in the land of Liberum Arbitrium: a land is as wide as the anthropic world, and interior to every human soul. In Passus 16, as in a discussion near the end of the Tractatus, a core allegorization is sight in the four cardinal directions, as well as verticality from the appointed vantage, and as connected to the Apocalypse of St. John, with a view to all time.35 Passus 18 is the “emotional climax” of the poem, undoubtedly, and in the same way it represents the embrace of Mercy and Justice, it brings together north and south, east and west, up and down, left and right, darkness and light, heaven and earth, allegory and typology, as well as past, present, and future.36 35 The four directions could be allegorized in a variety of different ways, and Limoges’ treatment is not identical to Langland’s, although there are some striking resonances on the temporal valence, and the signification of east as eternal reward and north as judgment: A person should turn his attention most often to these four things, namely the filthiness of his own iniquity, the hardship of another person’s misfortune, the bitterness of everlasting punishment, and the recompense of a blessed life, so that in this way he is fitted with eyes for every direction like the living creatures John says he observed in Revelation 4. . . . As an image of this matter, Moses is told in Deuteronomy 3: ‘Go up to the summit of Mount Pisgah, and scan with your eyes to the west and to the north, to the south and to the east, and look.’ By the east [is meant] the eternal rewards that will, as it were, forever rise anew; by the west [he means] the everlasting punishment in to which all temporal happiness sinks and is extinguished; by the south [is meant] the heated passion of sin; by the north, the misfortune of one’s fellow human being. Thus, each and every person ought to be fitted with multiple eyes, so that he not only looks at present circumstances, but diligently considers the future. (170) 36 Douglas Bertz convincingly argues that the four personifications echo Revelation chapter 7, where angels appear “on the four corners, holding the four winds of the earth” (7.1) in order to “inflict pain upon the earth,” with one other angel asserting that “a remnant must be saved” (323). Notably, the biblical and commentary tradition of the four cardinal directions as corresponding to the cruciform shape, which relates to Will’s worship in a church at Pentecost after the vision. The four directions appear in passages like Luke 13.29, where Jesus articulates an eschatological and soteriological sentiment that is a little more hopeful than Revelation 7, and which concerns the human “subjects” of the four daughters’ debate: “And thei schulen come fro the eest and west, and fro the north and south, and schulen sitte at the mete in the rewme of God.” What begins as the meeting of the four daughters from the corners of heaven, on the occasion of Easter, ends up concerning the meeting of all humankind. 103 In Will’s vision, he descends to see Jesus’ tournament against the devil, “þat darkness to descendit ad inferna” (18.11). The conversation between the daughters of God, and the discussion that follows all centre on “what þis liȝt bymeneþ,” that comes from the heights of heaven, “but overhoveþ helle þus” (18.169-70), dispersing in the four cardinal directions to illuminate all people: “þis grete wonder / Of þe dyn and of þe derknesse, and how þe day rowed, / And which a liȝt and a leme lay bifore helle” (18.122-4). Here, Mercy appears “[o]ut of þe west coste,” and “helleward she loked” (18.114). Truth appears “out of the est, and westward she lokede” (18.118). Riȝtwisnesse (Justice) comes “[o]ut of the nyppe of the north” (18.163), and Peace comes from the “sowthe” (18.166). The four daughters of God are all fragments of the Godhead – theophanies taken from the biblical verse (Ps 85), amplified in the consciousness of medieval writers by a famous sermon of Bernard of Clairvaux and from the allegorical Chasteau D’Amour: Langland adumbrates his own representation of the geographical symbolism. The various personifications debate on the nature of illumination and its implications, with the dispute primarily between Mercy and Peace, against Justice and Truth.37 Peace’s allegorical interpretation of the light corresponds to her intention to bring salvation in the widest possible field of vision, spatial and temporal: “‘My wil is to wende,’ quod she, ‘and welcome hem alle / That many day myȝte I noȝt se for merknesse of synne’” (18.175-76). Justice argues that hell is shut, and is skeptical that “yond liȝt unlouke myghte helle / And save mannes soule?” (18.188-89). Justice uses the cold logic from the “nyppe” of the north; she is similarly committed to the straightforward canons that confine souls to hell, based on precedent and echoing Will’s earlier judgements. However, Truth gazes eastward from the west, rather than “helleward” like Mercy. 37 Peace states that “Mercy, my suster, and I mankynde sholde save, / And that God hath forgyven and graunted me, Pees, and Mercy / To be mannes meynpernour for everemoore after” (18.182-4). Justice says “I, Rightwisenesse, record thus with Truthe” (18.198). 104 That North and West are not simply metaphorical points should be evident from context, and stems from the whole tradition of regarding the literal as the foundation of the allegorical. Langland lives in the Northwest part of Christendom, but the personifications that come from the South and East, who want to extend salvation to those in Limbo and to all of Adam’s kynde, “win” the debate based on the sealed letter of Love, sent to Peace. Good action, Dowel, Langland writes, is to “see much and suffer more”, and here, God sees everything, and suffers everything. The light itself speaks as it approaches Satan and the “[d]ukes of this dymme place” (18.315-20). The light, as an expression of divinity, in this Passus illuminates the same three “kynde” places that Jesus enters to save Adam’s kynde in the broadest sense: And siþþe he suffred hym synne, sorwe to feele To wite what wele was, kyndeliche to knowe it. And after, God auntrede hymself and took Adames kynde To wite what he haþ suffred in þre sondry places, Boþe in hevene and in erthe–and now til helle he þenkeþ, To wite what alle wo is, þat woot of alle joye. (18.219-224) Will has sought “kynde knowynge” since his first lesson, the very one in which he sees and does not comprehend the three places that are overseen by Kynde: the heavenly tower, the field of folk and the natural earth, as well as the dark dungeon in the pit. He had desired that he would comprehend “Alle the sciences under sonne and alle the sotile craftes / I wolde I knewe and kouthe kyndely in myn herte” (15.48-49). To this end, he seeks “[a]fter Piers the Plowman” in “many a place” (16.171), and he asks in the vision of the Harrowing, “Is Piers in this place?” (18.21). If the answer is affirmative, Will does not find it through his “wide wandering,” but has 105 to be shown through a rather direct, theophanic manifestation of Christ resembling Piers: intromission through the light of Grace. It turns out that it is God’s movement through places and comprehension of Will’s kynde, and God’s “grace” growing “ay gretter and wider” (18.363), in this way that is of most notable consequence.38 Conclusion: Barns on the Borders The field of vision becomes a vision of the field, although this time, there is a sense of heavenly commerce, with the beneficent Grace descending from on high to assist the people, and Kynde sending judgment “out of the planetes” (20.80). The field itself does not look the same, and Piers here is so clearly a Christ figure rather than just an ethical man. The enthusiastic worship offered by Will and his family inside the church morphs very quickly into a different vision of the church, this time as a figurative barn. So much of Passus 19 and 20 are about the question of boundaries within and without the church, as well as the boundaries between heaven and earth. The theme of how “wide” one must travel to find dowel or St. Truth, how “wide” Will wanders in confusion, how “wide” Christendom is, how “wide” the scope of God’s mercy is, how “wide” in history God’s work extends, and how “wide” the light shines, all come to the fore and climax in the last two dreams. The poem ends in social failure, with Unity the place disrupted. But (Will’s) individual Conscience resolves to “bicome a pilgrym, / and walken as wide as þe world lasteþ” (20.381-2). This pledge recalls Truth’s light that spread widely and the 38 Langland’s perspective is rather more radical than many of his contemporaries. Natanela Elias states regarding Langland’s inclusion of non-Christians as beneficiaries of salvation as “a problematic idea according to orthodox theology but a sensible one based on the poem’s premise” (115). I would probably say “a sensible one based on the poem’s aesthetics.” Michelle Karnes also highlights the poem’s suggestions about broader soteriological inclusion: “At first he guarantees salvation only to those people securely within the church’s sacramental system, his ‘hole breþeren, in blood and in baptisme’ (B.18.377), but, before his speech concludes, he brushes aside previous qualifications and proclaims that at the end of time his mercy shall rule ‘al mankynde . . . in heuene’ (B.18.39)” (404). 106 crops of truth that were tilled as wide as the world is. Christ is in all “kyndes” of places, and the Grace that Conscience promises to “gradde after” (20.387) has promised to meet humanity halfway with its own torchlight (17.204-36). This insight about (G)race is a key to the interrelationship between the discourses of place and sight in Piers Plowman: grace is intromission, half of the equation for proper spiritual perception. The two spatial poles of the last two interconnected visions pertain to the Barn of Unity (which takes crops from throughout the world) and the field of the world (which nevertheless is not very successfully cultivated throughout). Grace conspires with Piers, who by this time in the poem represents something like the authority of true religion, to create an interchange between the two places: And þerwith Grace bigan to make a good foundement, And watlede it and walled it wiþ hise peynes and his passion, And of al Holy Writ he made a roof after, And called þat hous Unite–Holy Chirche on Englissh. And whan þis dede was doon, Grace devysede A cart hiȝte Cristendom, to carie home Piers sheves, And gaf hym caples to his carte, Contricion and Confession; And made Preesthod hayward, þe while hymself wente As wide as þe world is, wiþ Piers to tilie truþe And þe lo[nd] of bileve, þe lawe of Holy Chirche. (19.327-336) From the parochial Malvern Hills, the considerations of social ills and religious mysticism have extended “as wide as the world is.” The vision we see back on the field is not the stakes of a parliament of rats maintaining a pragmatic peace with their “cat” political rulers, but a general 107 order concerning peace at the level of polity and the soul, with the people actively engaged in a fight against Anti-Christ. Anima had offered a short discourse on the etymology of “heathen” as those on the heath, not yet brought into the fold: “‘He þen’ is to mene after heeþ and untiled erþe” (15.457). The consecration of the land is not merely the act of naming a bishop who nevertheless resides in England, but a local spiritual toil.39 Christendom is no longer a consolidated “lond” looking to straightforward expansion in the uncultivated “heths”, but a moving vector: a cart that moves geo-spiritual dirt and sheaves to a place where good crops can be gathered. The land of belief does not amount to the radii of the parishes or the courts under canon law jurisdiction, but Langland suggests that “the lawe of Holy Chirche” should be the “lawe of love” that Trajan espoused (11.227). The pope at Avignon, who is willing to hire mercenaries to slay other Christians (let alone people in the Orient), is the subject of a painful rant on the literally decentralized, but allegorically central structure of the poem’s end: Unity. If salvation and long-suffering are extended to all mankind, it is still true that Langland is obsessed with corrupting influences, which take the side of the forces of Antichrist at the present and future of the Oraculum. The last two visions are in search of diagnosing key problems, literally and allegorically instantiated in the illness that strikes the people in the Barn of Unity, when Hypocrisy strikes. Therefore, the last two visions are in search of limiting principles – moral, conceptual, spatial – after casting aside boundaries so “widely”.40 Jill Mann brilliantly explains that between 39 He represents the “heavenly perspective” on Constantine’s donation of “londes and ledes” as a travesty: “An aungel men herden an heiȝ at Rome crye, / ‘Dos ecclesie þis day haþ ydronke venym, / And þo þat han Petres power arn apoisoned alle!’” (15.557-9). If the most geographically Christian place, in the “heart” of Christian kingdoms has compromised health, then the poem’s crisis is partly to find new loci of Truth. 40 This partly accounts for the numerical concerns that anxiously jut up in relation to persons in heaven. Conscience insists that friars not be allowed simply to call themselves such unless they are registered: “Monkes and moniales 108 “the Castle of Kind in Passus IX, and the attack on Unity in Passus XX, Langland places a carefully structured and dramatic reversal of their picture of virtue on the defensive: he reclaims movement for morality, showing virtue on the attack, breaking open the closure and confinement to create a sense of release and freedom” (204). However, as the floodgates of light open in the eighth dream, many shadows enter in the ninth and tenth. Peace was the daughter of God who extended the invitation of salvation to the souls in Limbo and the earth. If Peace is the main figure extending the invitation to all people, it is also crucial that Peace is chosen as “porter to pynne þe yates” of Unity (20.299). She represents the main limiting principle. The incredible optimism that stems from the transcendent daughter of God in aevo, and manifesting in salvation and geo-political peace return to a world where in order to be maintain peace, she may have to act in a way that compromises her allegorical ideal. Several scholars have highlighted how Need and Conscience represent crises of allegorical representation,41 and the same is true for Peace because she must act in ways that are not peaceful (in accident rather than substance) to keep the peace. The same might be said for the Field of Truth, which the Antichrist turns into a field of battle by spreading “gile” throughout (20.51). Peace maintaining the border of these failing structures degenerates into Good Manners, who allows in the most successful villain of the attack on Unity: Sire Penetrans-Domos. What carries over from earlier is that the threat to the Church – the Barn of Unity – is not those geopolitically outside of Christendom, but a particular festering from the attacks of Hypocrisy, false religionists who infiltrate what is at first a relatively successful defence of the structure. and alle men of religion / Hir ordre and hir reu1e wole to han a certein noumbre. . . . Hevene haþ evene noumbre, and helle is wiþoute noumbre” (20.264-5, 70). 41 Stephen Barney observes that Conscience is an unstable category at the end of the story, it not being clear if Conscience belongs only to Will, or if Conscience is still operating in the culture at large. Kathleen Hewett-Smith argues that Nede destabilizes allegory because the personification brings the concerns of the poem back to the literal sense of indigence, hunger and the contingencies of poverty, rather than an elevated ideological concern. 109 It is “intro-spection” most needed by the members within the church, a piercing vision that has preventative medicine and stops Penetrans-Domos from compromising spiritual integrity, as the perspectivists would agree. Langland represents Piers Plowman’s earlier failures as referring to several core teachings of the perspectivists on the necessity of optical extramission and intromission: that perception of spiritual matters will be distorted without the intromission of God’s grace. Langland resonates with writers like Bacon and Limoges further on his sensitivity to clerical abuses, and to his desire to faithfully assess the paradox of divine distance and proximity. Will constantly shows a faltering will, and fails to recognize the mnemonic value of the places, as well as the very presence of God within them. More broadly, Langland’s poem engages concepts of the book of nature with a reserved optimism, sought after in the epistemological category “kynde knowynge,” and tied to the places that Kynde creates and leads Will through, enabling greater but imperfect sight. Central to the poem is a representation of the gradual revelation of the meaning of the three cosmic topologies, with upward movement and higher vantage points. A deep implication of the poem’s treatment of space and place is its view of “humanism” – the view of the “field of humanity,” as it grows from a tiny half-acre in England to a vision of hope for all humanity, and as a critique of a Christendom that treats the world with strict adversarial boundaries, unlike the generous light of the sun. A widening vision sees a widening field.110 Chapter Three: Stephen Hawes and the Sententious Poetics of Place: Morality, Memory, Astrology Introduction Stephen Hawes, frequently regarded as an obsequious, dull, and inconsequential Tudor poet, is nevertheless a representative author of the early sixteenth century, a time when allegory was a “dominant form” of English literature,1 and he provides a glimpse into this period’s cultural script for the representation of allegorical space and place. While Hawes should not be immune from charges of poetic mediocrity, he demonstrates a self-conscious approach to topographical metaphors, cosmological presentation, and mnemonics, in a rather fraught and fascinating political context. Hawes’ unfashionableness to current sensibilities might be regarded as a parallel to the fate of the word “sententious.” Today, he might be charged with being “heavily sententious and totally impersonal” (Kratzmann 242). This contemporary condemnation Hawes would have taken to be an overwhelming compliment. Stephen Hawes is cited as a reference in the first Oxford English Dictionary entry about the word: †1. Full of meaning; also, of persons, full of intelligence or wisdom. Obsolete. Places can be allegorical for Hawes, because they can be sententious: full of meaning, This chapter will investigate three sites of Hawes’ “sententious” poetics of place in his two main allegorical narratives, The Example of Vertue and The Passetyme of Pleasure: astrology, memory, and the moralization of the book of nature. Interpreting the moral implications of nature’s book, spatializing mnemotechnics, and canvasing planetary influences are all in the service of combatting variance, stabilizing meaning in the context of structures of 1 A reasonable précis of this dominance is outlined by C. S. Lewis in The Allegory of Love (289-370). More recently, Mark Rankin has pointed out that this period remains understudied: “the literary milieu at the early Tudor court, particularly the court of Henry VII (1485-1509), awaits exhaustive treatment” (272). 111 state. Hawes repeatedly draws on the language of biblical exegesis as he treats topologies as “sententious” texts; as the personification of Grammar teaches in her statements about the relationship of texts to God’s intention in nature: “To the world the worde is sentencious iugemonte” (Passetyme 606). Hawes draws from the discourse of the “moral sense” to interpret natural and architectural scenarios, with a theological overtone on a secular appropriation for the ends of order. The focus is on socially cautious and productive “Vertue” in The Example of Vertue, and on the road of the Active Life in the Passetyme of Pleasure. Moreover, Hawes represents many unbalancing effects of the planets, which must be combatted by his heroes in various spaces, in order to come out an “example of virtue.” Saturn and the Moon, as well as some constellations and dominant zodiac houses threaten disaster at various sites, but Youth and Graunde Amoure’s caution do allow them to maintain their moral virtue in the face of planetary influence. One of the ways that this virtue is maintained is through a memory trained well in the ars memorativa. Hawes’ work is sometimes considered the first major work in English to expound the Ciceronian art of memory – and indeed, he embodies as well as explicates the relationship of topic to topography. Both The Example of Vertue and The Passetyme of Pleasure have multiple public houses of memory, as well as other mnemontechnics in the preface and in the woodcuts. A well-trained memory is the way to regard “tyme and space” (a phrase unusual for his time, but common in his work) in an orderly and moral way. The Stabilizing Moral Sense in The Example of Vertue and The Passetyme of Pleasure [F]or he [the king] hath no defence of his owne except his castels and fortresses Sir John Fortescue The Governance of England, 1470 CE 112 Stephen Hawes’ longer allegorical romances are dotted with overtures to the “moral sense” of architectural and natural structures, as well as comments about the depredations of fortune, the variability of fate, and the stability of the kingdom. The historical and biographical context is that in the first years of the sixteenth century, Hawes’ job was to serve as “somtyme grome of Henry’s chamber.” This work was mostly menial, but meant that Hawes had a place close to Henry’s ear, even if Hawes did not hold a high rank in court.2 Moreover, his position was itself precarious, and his later poem The Conforte of Lovers shows that he did not find favour with Henry VII’s successor.3 But when Hawes wrote The Example of Vertue, he praised the reigning king, and tried to gain money and standing through his regime-friendly poetry. But the time was sensitive indeed. The Example is stated to have been written in the “xix year” of King Henry’s reign, which puts it between 1503 and 1504 CE. Even considering Henry VII’s birth during the wars of the roses, his exilic childhood in Brittany, and his contested coronation, the king suffered a disproportionate amount of tumult and loss between 1502 and 1503 that had everything to do with the stability and even survival of his dynasty4: in 1502 his firstborn and highly favoured son Arthur, who had already married Catherine of Aragon, died suddenly and unexpectedly. Early in 1503, his cherished queen died shortly after giving birth to another child (who also perished within days), and these events sent King Henry into a period of utter emotional desolation, during which he isolated from his court for several weeks following.5 2 Alistair Fox makes much of the fact that Hawes’ Conforte of Lovers likely relates some analogies to a courtship that could never be consummated between Hawes and Henry’s sister Mary, due to the discrepancy in rank between them. 3 Raymond Southall characterizes the typical Tudor court poet as formally anxious because of the social world in which his or her writing functioned. 4 Terry Breverton especially highlights this period in his discussion of the “Tragedy of the Final Years” (404-18). 5 Biographer Sean Cunningham’s account is as follows: “Henry was disconsolate at Elizabeth’s death, and remained alone with his grief for some time. He paid for masses at various shrines. . . . He was unable to eat or drink for six days following contraction of a throat infection, or quinsy.” Furthermore, the “coincidence of this incapacitation with the sudden vulnerability of his crown suggests that this unhappy and trying time had a direct physical effect on Henry’s abilities” (107). 113 Meanwhile, the adolescent Prince Henry, who was not raised in the heart of the court as much as his celebrated brother Arthur had been, became the heir-apparent on which stable succession depended. Biographer Thomas Penn explains how Hawes’ poem recognized that Henry’s son “was absorbed by chivalry, and by his own place in it” (185), and that [W]hile The Example of Virtue was dedicated to Henry VII, it also had one eye on his son. . . . On closer inspection, moreover, The Example of Virtue was entirely about the prince, for it was written specifically with his education in mind. . . . Sugaring the educational pill, he wrote his poem in courtly rhyme royal, and cloaked his sententious advice in a chivalrous romance, in which a horsebacked Youth goes on a quest. (184) The Example of Vertue begins and ends happily, and the protagonist traverses only a few landscapes of genuine threat, which are all overcome by proper understanding of the moral perils and the overbearing guidance of Dyscrecyon. Hawes shows Youth deftly cut down the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, the same forces that entice the youthful Will in Piers Plowman’s Lond of Longing. However, Hawes’ Youth cannot afford such indulgences. Even if Hawes was not necessarily naïve about how peaceful Henry’s life was going to be, his tactful wish for the prince reads as follows: “famous bud full of benygnyte / I pray to god well for to increase / Your hyghe estate in rest and pease” (2099-2101). With Arthur having perished, prince Henry was betrothed against his will to Catherine of Aragon. “Clennes”, “rest”, and “pease” were desperately desired, but a rather distant dream vision. Both of the chivalrous protagonists in Hawes’ Example of Vertue and Passetyme of Pleasure, Youth and Graunde Amoure, adventure in pursuit of allegorical spouses, Clennes and La Bell Pucell, and defeat large monsters before their wedding feasts; but in fact, over half of both journeys involves sitting at the feet of moral and philosophical tutors. Hawes wants his 114 characters and his reader(s) to be moral; he seems almost incapable of representing a vicious character without making them monstrous, and Hawes could scarcely be more explicit about his didactic aims. Therefore, he rarely passes up the opportunity to make each place a site of moral bearing. For Hawes, the importance of virtue and the moral sense has everything to do with a material social order under incessant threat, which provokes the representation of a countervailing descriptive orderliness, in spatial items. In the Passetyme’s Tower of Rhetoric, Graunde Amour is taught about the Ciceronian principle of Disposition. Poets “ordre [the story] for to be ryght stable” and “gyveth the place after the degree” (850, 864). The appeal of poetic ordering holds the dignity of having inscribed laws and upholding the legacy of good kings: Before the lawe in a tumblyng barge The people sayled without parfytenes Throughe the worlde all aboute at large They hadde none ordre nor no stedfastnes Tyll rethorycyans founde Iustyce doubtles Ordenynge kynges of ryghte hye dygnyte Of all comyns to haue the souerainte. (876-82) Here is the social work in which Hawes sees himself as participating. If Hawes’ contemporary Skelton wrote a mocking poem a few years prior (ca. 1499 CE), about the leaky and precarious Bowge of Court, Hawes himself has a dead-serious representation of Discretion’s ability to hold the ship together: to be the sea-captain and engineer of his protagonist, sailing soundly over the Passage of Vaingloriousness and crossing the bridge over the waters of the world.6 6 Seth Lerer highlights that Skelton and Hawes traded barbs in their poems, while sharing the same printer of Wynkyn de Worde (who appears not to have taken sides) (381-403). 115 The idea of sententious poetics is intimately connected to the metaphor of good construction, of character and of literal and metaphorical edifices: To make vs lerne to lyue dyrectly Theyr good entent and trewe construccyon Shewynge to vs the hole affeccyon Of the waye of vertue welthe and stablenes And to shyt the gate of myscheuous entres. (1116-20) Steadfastness and stableness are the moral goods that Hawes prizes most highly in both stories. Similarly the discourse of love and lovers likewise has everything to do with establishing stability of feeling: Pucell complains that among men, “harde it is to fynde one full stable” (2158), but represents herself as the ideal lover: “My heart shall be without variacion / Wyth you present, in perfite sykernes, / As true and stable without doubleness” (2280-82).7 Venus’ “charge” to Graunde Amoure is “[t]o fyxe your love, for to be true and stable / Upon your lady, and not to fle at large / As in sundry wise for to be variable” (3931-33). Varyaunce is the name of one of the heads of the second giant that Graunde Amoure has to slay after this commission. The narrative of The Example similarly states that its aims are, at all turns, to inculcate “stabylyte.” The connection to steadfast and stable allegorical edifices is treated in a similar manner by Alexander Barclay’s contemporaneous allegory, The Castell of Labour.8 The 7 Later, Councell tells Graunde Amour that “[n]o doubte it is she is true and stable” (3190). 8 Barclay connects the stability of the mind with the capacity of Wisdom to teach builders to make good castles, all in the context of a metaphorical castle concerning the stability of state: Wisdom: I make townes & castelles stronge of walles I make Iestes storyes and comedyes I made the seuen artes lyberals With poemes and many tragydees I haue made many omelyes Whiche vnto man are full profytable Wherby he may auoyde all folyes And of his mynde be ferme and stable. (50) 116 architectural metaphors of interior “integrity” pervade the entire narrative, a conspicuous theme to resonate with the regime that had expressly focused so much of its efforts on demonstrative military and ecclesiastical monumentalism.9 Before Henry VII took the crown, the culture of court life and expectations of kingship had already been accruing a culture of studied “magnificence.” David Starkey asserts that “the Yorkists and still more the Tudors elevated themselves unapproachably above even the greatest of their Lords” (3), and this cultural elevation often took the form of edification. Sir John Fortescue’s treatise on The Governance of England (ca. 1470) states that the king should haue such tresour, as he mey make new bildynges whan he woll, ffor his pleasure and magnificence; and as he mey bie hym riche clothes, riche furres . . . riche stones . . . and other juels and ornamentes coneuenyent to his estate roiall. And often tymes he woll bie riche hangynges and other apparel ffor his howses . . . ffor yff a king did not so, nor might do, he lyved then not like his estate, but rather in miserie, and in more subgeccion than doth a priuate person. (125) Henry VII and other members of his family were active builders, regularly meeting with architects in their active construction and renovation projects, especially Westminster, Sheen, Greenwich, and Windsor Castle, residences which “formed the spine of his existence” (Thurley 36). Neither is it an idle point that Henry’s master architect (who worked on Greenwich from 1499-1504) was named Robert Vertue. Hawes’ relationship to Vertue does not have documentary substantiation, but it is likely they met, and certain that Hawes knew of him. Furthermore, it was not foreign to the king to take part in the allusive wordplay so amenable to 9 Simon Thurley’s summary in Houses of Power is as follows: “While he never became a builder on the scale of his son, expenditure on domestic construction totaled around £28000 between 1494 and his death in 1509. Meanwhile, he spent another £40,000 on pious building works, often associated with his houses” (46). 117 allegory in his architectural commissions. Kent Rawlinson connects some of the major building projects and characteristics to the “magnificence” of the royal family’s name: “The ubiquitous portcullis adopted by Henry VII as a royal badge was a visual pun on the name of his mother’s family, Beaufort (a good or well-guarded fort), while his rebuilding of Sheen Palace and his decision to rename it ‘Richmond’ involved a similar pun, identifying this new building not only with his ancestral dynasty, but praising it as a ‘rich mount’” (95). Hence the richly dighted castles, fortified buildings, towers, and opulent estates, that make up the lion’s share of topologies in both allegories. Hawes writes of these places as sites of moral stability. The Example’s noble Youth can only be worthy of Clennes, the daughter of the king of love “fer hens in a fayre castell” (1080), if he can “withstand” “flattery and grete temptacyon / That shall brynge hym in tribulacyon” (1091-97). The Example begins with a journey that averts disaster in the “daungerous passage of vayne glorye” because youth is first “reformed by” the “prouerbes” of Dyscrecyon. Dame Hardynes’ dwelling is “[s]et in a valey so strongely fortefyed / So gentyll compassed and well edefyed,” with towers “high of adamond stones” (209-11). From the vantage of hardiness, F/fortune is seen with “no stablenes / This worlde also is but a vanyte / A dreme a pompe nothynge in stedfastnes” (269-71). Dame Sapyence’s dwelling is “Bylded in the place soth of fastnes”, punning studiously on the connection between structural and moral integrity (333).10 Youth is assured that her place is one of pleasantness, “Without ony stormy trybulacyon” (348), and obedience to her without variation will result in social advancement, better fortune in the higher aristocratic towers of the world, and a “moche better rome” (406). 10 Maureen Quilligan considers the fact of allegorical punning to be the most important aspect of the genre. Such puns in Hawes conform to what she says about allegory as “the generation of narrative structure out of wordplay” (22). 118 When Youth approaches a bridge over “stormy, troublous & wawy” waters, he learns that only those “stedfast in goddes byleue” can cross (1260-80), while the others drown with no hope of rescue. In other words, the pilgrim must take on the attributes of the bridge, and must be “stedfast”, and must be capable of holding together. Hawes offers nothing like the grace for doubt and shakiness that is extended to Redcrosse, which is especially highlighted when the hero, now named “Vertue,” is given the tour of hell by an angel, and is told: If ye had loued dame sensualyte The whiche with you dyd make a brayed Ye had ben dampned by right and equyte In to this pytte full of all iniquyte. (1900-03) The threat of instability is the context for the paradox of narrative serenity and aversion toward disaster, in The Example of Vertue especially; a volatile anxiousness pervades the narrative, even as its protagonist always keeps Discretion by his side, and never slips up.11 In an aside to detractors during Dame Rethorike’s speech in the Passetyme, she states that poetry will be misunderstood by the “dull and rude,” those who “can not moralyse the semelytude” (806-808).12 Hawes sees the convention of moralized space in allegorical narrative as most aptly employed by John Lydgate, the master that Hawes adulates as his model for imitation in each of his works as the “vertuous” and “moche sententious” poet (Example 26). In 11 Marco Nievergelt explains a related matter, which is the tension between the secular aims associated with the “consolidation of an institutional and political machinery” and another genre with eschatological aims, “in the ontologically expanded perspective of eternity that he inherits from Deguileville’s allegorical pilgrimage tradition” (91). 12 Ryan McDermott’s Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350-1600 argues convincingly that because the moral interpretation of scripture had the imperative of generating material for study of the self, artists were impelled to take up the rhetorical, mnemonic, and ethical “invention” of literature (11-13). The Ship of Fools (1494), a German allegory translated into English by Barclay and printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1509, invites its readers to consider its “morall sence” four separate times. This trend continues to the end of the sixteenth century, when Spenser opens his poem with the declaration, “Fierce warres and faithfull loues shall moralize my song” (1.1.1). 119 one of his minor poems, The Conversion of Swearers, Hawes praises Lydgate’s composition and translation of “vertuous bokes” that touched “the trouthe well and sentencyously,” just before asserting that “[a]monge all thynges nothynge so profitable / As is scyence with the sentencyous scripture” (29-30).13 In context, Hawes’ reference to science corresponds best to the total domain of knowledge in the liberal arts, learning from the best of poets like Lydgate, and instilling the kind of reverence that prevents a soul from being an immoral “swearer”. In Lydgate’s best-known narrative, The Fall of Princes, he offers a “science” of how representation of place in allegory should be used for moral and virtuous ends. “Poetys,” he writes, have as their “cheef laboure,” the combat of vices, “With a maner couert similitude”: they should take the material of nature, “[w]alke by ryuers and wellys cristalyne / To hye mounteyns amorowe their cours dresse / The myst diffied whan phebus first doth shyne,” transforming the res of nature by “newe Inuencion” and in conjunction with “[s]tudye in bokys of morall discipline” (77). Hawes echoes Lydgate’s thoughts on invention as he writes that the poets “so wyse and so inuentyfe / Theyr obscure reason fayre and sugratyfe / Pronounced trouthe vnder cloudy fygures” (717-19). Hawes’ regimen for the proper comprehension of morality and nature is founded on grammar. Grammar, the first part of rhetoric, is treated with several metaphors of the (morally and structurally sound) edifice, and Hawes proclaims the providential unfolding of the universe and its allegorical interpretation, related subtly to the ordinance of kingship via the “hye Kynge”: And gramer is the fyrst foundement Of every science to have construccyon: Who knewe gramer wythout impediment Shoulde perfytely have intelleccion 13 Wynkyn de Worde put out a book by Lydgate in 1498, The Interpretation of the Names of Goddis and Goddesses, which calls itself a “lytyll moralized treatyse.” 120 Of a lytterall cense and moralyzacion. To construe every thynge ententifly, The worde is gramer wel and ordinatly. By worde the world was made orygynally, The hye Kynge sayde, it was made incontinent; He dyd commaunde, al was made shortly. To the world the worde is sentencious judgemente. (596-606) To Hawes, poets participate in God’s order as they represent the world through the word. God has the highest social station, operating as an architect as well as a poet, who spoke the world into being; moral inscriptions may be found in God’s “lytterall” works, in a similar way to the letter of inscriptions that could be found in the physical archways, doors, and cloths of English noble houses. Knowledge of language is tantamount to knowledge of nature, so a proper understanding of Hawes’ brand of logocentrism implies a moral hermeneutics of Nature.14 Words have creative power in the kind of superordinance that God has to nature, which according to Hawes’ understanding, humans participate in this. Nature and words have intimacy, although they do remain distinguishable. The unique way that Hawes and his woodcut collaborator understood the relationship of word to text may have contributed to the creation of the first emblem books, which arrived a little over two decades later, in the innovative way they portrayed an image with interpretive gloss below. Pauline Reid writes that Hawes’ employment 14 Allegory straddles nature and culture, topography and architecture. As is common in allegorical narratives, one of the characters is named Nature. This character recommends the “boke of barthelmewe” – the same book discussed in ch. 1, with a substantial portion on topography, and which declares its utility on the basis of the revelation of nature’s “derk” meanings. Nature is overwhelmingly if not completely enmeshed with culture, complete with stylized Tudor dress, an aristocratic mansion, and canonization in a book. 121 of the visual woodcuts in conjunction with the textual has to do with his understanding of word and world: “The reflective imprint of word and world on one another, in addition to the material imprint of the world’s images through “fantasye” in cognition and rhetoric, again authorizes meaning through visual invention and impressed images. Invention is produced through the visual reading process and through the imprint and engraving of images on the book, eye, mind, and world” (285).15 For Hawes, Nature is a book of images, and has “merueylous werke and sytuacyon” (EoV 509), which needs accompanying text. The objects that constitute the structures also can have a sententious “operacyon”. Particularly, the carbuncle functions as a stabilizing force in a number of Hawes’ moralized buildings. If the stone is natural, it nevertheless has a moralization by which Hawes appears enamoured. In the Passetyme, while Hawes compares the eloquence of poets to rivers, he writes, For the fyrst ryver is Understandyng; The seconde ryver Close-concluding; The thyrd ryver is called Novelry; The fourth ryver is called Carbuncles. (1056-1059) In other words, the first three rivers are conventional allegorical topologies, but the fourth one calls a body of water after a stone, relying on his reader to understand the stone’s associations. Hawes clearly considers the illuminating quality of carbuncles to have a pregnant sententiousness and extraordinary dignity. Later in this discourse, he states that poets’ “cententious verses are refulgent” like “[c]arbuncles in the most derke nyght,” which “shyne fayre wyth clere radiant beames” (1128-33). Clennes is herself called a “fontayne of welth and carbuncle of clernes” (EoV 1628), and La Bell Pucell is called “[t]he fayre carbuncle, so ful of 15 Importantly, Reid also highlights that Caxton’s encyclopedia declares this maxim in similar phraseology (284). 122 clerenes” (PP 2507). But more importantly, carbuncles physically bedeck the otherwise allegorical buildings. In Hawes’ mind, it seems that carbuncles have an inclining property of clarifying moral vision following from its virtue of effulgence. In the Example, The Triumphant Estate of Dame Hardynes has at its center, a “carbuncle there was that all aboute / Enlumyned the chaumbre both day and nyght / My thought it was an heuenly sight” (292-94). It is a significant detail that implies moral clarity will follow from Hardiness’ advice. In the Passetyme, Dame Correction’s hall contains a “carbuncle that was large and great, / Whose vertue clere in the hall so bryght / About did cast a great mervaylous light” (4167-69). This description hits just after Dame Correction clarifies who Godfrey Gobelieve “actually” is: False Report. Accordingly, Hawes suggests that the virtue of the carbuncle’s illumination has a moral sympathy with perceiving error. Before Graunde Amoure becomes a knight, he walks across a crystal floor, and his sense of purpose is clarified in the context of a place built with “carbuncles” that “did gyve a mervaylous lyght” (3297). The book of nature in its geomancy is itself an “example of virtue,” which Hawes shows several times in the connection of carbuncles to moral meaning and even poetic worth.16 In a closer reading of the two allegorical narratives, one may point to numerous events which show a scheme of spatial representation followed by moralization. The Passetyme of Pleasure has fewer topologies in ratio to story length, and the paradigm follows instructive areas in the first part, to combative areas in the second, to celebrative, and finally to eschatological places. The story opens in the common dream vision opening of a meadow, but Graunde Amoure 16 The Court of Sapyence, which Hawes ascribes to Lydgate’s virtuous works, contains a large section on lapidaries, with a note on the luminescent virtues of the carbuncle, “that hath his soveraynte / When derknes is” (971-72). There are other aspects of geomancy that indicate this principle further. It is worth noting, for instance, that the gardens featured in both stories always have “aromatike” properties, and “vapors,” with “vertuous” influence – most often quite literal sites of restoration and a rebalancing of the humors. Other natural stones have prominence of place with a signifying presence, such as the margarete, and beryl, as well as the seven metals that make up the dragon in the Passetyme. 123 reveals something about his ignorance and vulnerability to the fortune that will be his chief enemy for the journey: My chaunce or fortune I nothynge refused But in the pathe forthe I went a pace, To knowe whyther and vnto what place It wolde me bryng by any symylytude. (75-78) Shortly after, he refuses the way of contemplation and chooses the “waye of worldly dygnyte / Of the actyfe lyfe” (93-94). The instructive phase of the narrative takes place in the “tower of famous doctrine,” which, tellingly, is also called the Royal Tower of Moral Document (348). Each personification of the seven liberal arts has a place in the tower of doctrine. Graunde Amour meets these personifications in “scoles” “chambers,” “romes” or other “towers” in these auspices. Daniel Wakelin writes that “the key moments of academic or moral instruction in The Passetyme of Pleasure are staged with the sighting of an ‘ymage’ of some sort adorned with precise architectural and optical luxury” (66). Many aspects of the progression have a metaphorical valence, as when he goes to see Rhetoric, he climbs a staircase implying greater moral utility.17 When Graunde Amour visits Arsmetrike, he is impressed likewise by the “lady pure and of great worthynes” in the place “replete with rychesse,” sporting a “rofe paynted with golden beames, / The wyndowes cristall clerely claryfyde” (1411-16). Arsmetryke is visited in the middle of Graunde Amoure’s education, the fourth of seven, and this is fitting because “in the myddes of the scyences all / It is now sette ryght well and parfytely” (1430-31). The position, wealth, and “clarefyed” windows corresponds to the value of the subject, and the clarity of understanding it brings to the world at large. Similar descriptions of high towers and clear 17 Lois Ebin’s reading of the Passetyme states that Hawes shows a “triple stance” of “poet, lover, and knight” (136), but she emphasizes that Hawes gives disproportionate attention and dignity to being a poet. 124 windows pervade the description of Geometry’s tower, with the encomium that to understand “length and brede” is tantamount to someone, who “to vertue hath inclynacion” (2586, 2616). He makes the rather reaching statement that the one “[w]ho loveth mesure can not do amys”, and this in the context of those who use geometry to build (2612). In the Tower of Music, we learn that music brings “unite” to “discorde thynges whiche are variable,” and that music is like “perfite physyke,” which sets the interior human system “in ordre,” “sharping the wyttes” and “confort[ing] the brayne” (1569-82). Pucell provides a foreshadowing of the skills that will be required to traverse the way “hard and daungerous” past the giants guarding her: the counsel not to give into melancholy (remembering Astronomy’s lessons about considering planetary influences), a retentive memory of the lessons learned, a sense of the proportions of the landscape with the numerical values of the steps and height of the monsters, a sturdy moral character with capacity to read/moralize the textual and natural aspects of the beasts, inner unity and good health of the body from music: all skills that amount to moralizations taken from the various liberal arts. Her suggestion ultimately takes the form of a spatial hint: “Whan you that way do take the passage, / To attayne my love by hye advauntage” (2288-89). This suggestion becomes indispensable to Graunde Amoure’s victory over the second giant, who first takes a thorough look at “Every thynge” regarding the spatial situation and the giant’s body, “his heed and of his hye estate” (4797): The giant “above . . . had suche altitude / That [Amoure] at him coulde have no ful stroke,” until he “spies” 12 steps “[o]n the rockes syde” by a wall so that they “were bothe about one stature,” and he cuts off the first six heads (4823-36). After the battle, the seven maidens who meet the hero mention this high way once again, making much of it without moralizing it.18 In context, Hawes invites 18 The maidens tell him the following: “But we were glad when ye had forsaken / The lowe vale, and up the craggy fayre / For your advauntage the hye waye had taken” (4861-63). 125 readers to suggest their own moralization, after preparing them with hermeneutic tools from the earlier phase of the narrative, as a kind of test. There are all kinds of possibilities, such as maintaining “the moral high ground,” not sinking into the “lowe vale” of despair, or not being intimidated by the “hye estate” of the lady of his affections (4797). The Example also has several episodes focused on the hero’s recognition of “a lytterall cense and moralyzacion” of various items. Youth listens to the debate of the four dames, Hardynes, Sapyence, Nature, and Fortune, and garners the lessons to stand steadfast in the face of challenges. In other words, a good summary of the book might be: Youth uses wisdom to interpret the book of nature in order to maintain hardiness in the face of fortune. Some of the applications of the lessons focus on personifications and their paraphernalia: for instance, when Youth sees the King of Love, he is promised that Sapyence “wold shewe me the sygnifycacyon / Why he so sate by shorte rekenynge / Accordynge to a morylyzacyon” (1311-13), during which she explains the meaning of his blindness, his nakedness, his wings, and his dart. Most of the moral scenarios that require interpretation are based on topology or involve a significant topological element. Youth then enters into a wilderness of great darkness, where he is approached by Pride in a moving castle, and Sensuality in the “herber of pleasaunce.” After he succeeds in the two trials, Youth makes a “full grete mone” to Discretion, “And lykened the wyldernes by morall scence / Vnto worldely trouble by good experience” (1188-90). Hawes directly uses the term from biblical traditions of tropology; furthermore, his use of “sense” hearkens etymologically to the “sentence” of a judgment and the “sententious” quality of an image, which is a synonym of the “dark and cloudy” figures of true poetry. Afterwards Youth trundles “[n]ow here now there and so rounde about” through the maze of “worldely fastyon” (1208-11), before being taken to the bridge of the Vanity of the World. 126 The bridge is narrow, “ouer the water on a lytell bridge / Not halfe so brode as a hous ridge” (1245-46). Several spatial variables are moralized here: the river under the bridge, the narrowness of the bridge itself, the castle on the other side and reaching it. Youth says, I sawe there wryten this lytterall sence No man this brydge may ouer go But he be pure without neglygence And stedfast in goddes byleue also Yf he be ignoraunt and do not so He must nedys into this water fall Ouer the heed and be drowned with all. (1275-81) “lytteral sence” here means something closer to the definition of “literal” that corresponds to “according to the text,” or “the sense of what is written.” The literal sense here, then, expresses the moralization, and the fact that he verges into the fate of the soul and question of belief, means that it is also part allegorical interpretation. However, one of the later topographical allegories in the story tests the reader’s capacity for moralization by delaying, although Hawes uses almost an opposite signification for the hill/valley polarity from the Passetyme. A hill leads to the culminating trial of the serpent, we are told; this hill leads to “hyghe heuen so fressh and gay,” however “that dragon lette theym theyr wyll / And by the way he dyd theym kyll” (1418-20). Youth’s approach from the dale, by the stinking dungeon turns out to be correct, but we are not told the moral reasoning until over 50 lines later, when we learn that God’s favour depends on a “humble herte full of contrycyon” (1468), rather than a proud position. Now, the point about humility does seem a little out of place. The uneasiness of sacred and secular values and pursuits do not sit easily, spatially or otherwise. The precious stones that 127 smother the kingdom of love do not fit stably, even if St. Jerome sits among them for the wedding feast. The stones allude to the heavenly city of Revelation 19-22, but the wedding feast involves a terrestrial couple who live sixty literal years in this world. Nievergelt observes that the poem “situates this scene inside an allegorical palace that certainly exploits the familiar iconography of Deguileville’s celestial city, but overlays these eschatological echoes with more specific and local references to the physical space of Henry VII’s court” (76). Clennes turns out to be a clean earthly wife and Vertue just a virtuous husband. The poem then discusses the world to come, and awkwardly highlights the inherent instability of the pursuits of acquisition in the world, or what might be described as the limitations of the socio-moral level of interpretation in the face of the anagogical.19 A dissonant spatial example occurs when Pride appears to Youth as a lady “[s]yttynge in a castell both fressh and gay / On an olyphauntes backe in strength so stable” (1163-64). She rides as “[t]he quene of welth and worldely glory,” adorned with “perles right many,” exuding “noblenesss,” and promising she “would promote” her subject (1169-76). As per Nievergelt, wealth is not really disparaged in the narrative, and the invitation to noble “company” and advancement also befit Hawes’ aristocratic readers. Sapyence also promises propitious promotion. Discretion (59), Justice (546), and Clennes herself (1787), are all adorned with pearls – “stones of vertue” (1692), as Hawes phrases it elsewhere – and the chapel in which Clennes and Vertue are married is the very picture of opulence, far beyond this scene of Pride. Like the four esteemed sister-personifications, and the king of love, and even Vertue, Pride’s abode is a castle. In fact, it is a castle with the coveted quality of stability(!). But the signal for a 19 Nievergelt highlights that some of the discourse on wealth has a particular moral tension: “If the whore of Baylon is ‘quene of welth and wordily glory’ [my italics] (EV 1171), it is problematic to praise economic undertaking in the following terms ‘For without marchauntes can not be / No realme vpholden in welth & pleasure’ [my italics] (EV 628-9)” (83). 128 moralization which could steer clear of royal Tudor ire is just the Orientalist detail of the elephant that even the woodcut artist thought critical enough to draw. In Hawes’ coronation poem for Henry VIII, Hawes acknowledges that “some holde oppynyon / That to auaryce [Henry VII] had entendement” (72-73). The pretext on which the pomp of Henry’s court was said to be moral, was that it gathered up immense riches in order to be able to contend with the Turks: “Of mortall warre our faith to stablysshe / Agaynst the turkes theyr power to mynysshe” (86-87). The irony is acerbic putting the two texts in conversation. If the English Youth of the Example encounters the offer of courtly pride and pompous riches, the extension of the suggestion is that this exemplum is what Homi Bhabha might call the casting of an evil eye to displace a moral malady on the cultural object of discourse using “shared symbolic and spatial structures . . . articulated within different temporal, cultural, and power relations” (79); in other words, the episode is a moral mirror to the English court, whose pride has marched right to the center on an elephant’s unstable back. Moral Hardiness Under the Mutable Moon No writer has yet explored the implications of astrological matters in Hawes beyond a passing comment; the editor of the 1974 Minor Poems avers there is “no real reason for [The Example] to start in autumn, and no astrological information is conveyed by the introduction, apart from the time of year” (xxxvii). This statement is erroneous, and there are several astrological data in the introduction, as well as other points in the story. Both the Example and the Passetyme collect many scenes of season and time of day, situated in a thoroughly Ptolemaic cosmos. Both of them begin with a stellar orientation in small meadows, and both narratives reach to the end of human life and consider eternity, dwarfing the human subjects and their 129 significance by the end. The astrological discussion is in large part just an extension of the issues of variance and stability discussed above. Hawes' concern over the “literal sense and moralization” of planets shows wariness about maintaining balance and virtue in the face of intensified planetary influence.20 This was a critical issue in the Tudor court. Henry long patronized a court astrologer named William Parron, who in a 1502 horoscope had predicted Elizabeth of York’s long life (to 80); but she died on 11 February, 1503, at 36, and he left court immediately after, the same year 20 Astrology is not to be understood purely in terms of materialist “influence.” Bartholomew’s book, discussed earlier, concludes its discussion of astrology by reiterating that the insights on the stars just provided, are for the purpose of spiritual interpretation. Figure 3: From William Parron’s Liber de optimo fato nobilissimi domini Henrici Eboraci ducis, 1502. BL Royal MS 12 B VI. British Museum Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts. 130 Hawes wrote the Example.21 Henry More’s Lamentation of the Death of Queen Elizabeth records the following lines, that year: “Lo! Whereto comes your blandishing promise / O false astrology and devinatrice / Of God’s secrets making yourself so wise? (25-27). In spite of More’s condemnatory comments about Parron’s specific “prophecy,” or judicial astrological prognostication, it is unlikely that anything like a repudiation of astrology at large was at stake. As Terry Breverton writes (quoting Janina Ramirez): “Henry’s patronage included the sculptures on the ceilings at Merton College, where Bishop Richard Fitzwilliam’s ‘astrological symbols were next to the royal arms of Henry VII, demonstrating that Henry was ruling not just England but the cosmos’” (357). Graunde Amoure’s lesson from astronomy confirms an uncontroversial astrological bent: Astronomy asserts that it is “by good reason the phylosophres prove, / That the planettes and sterres instrumentes be / To natures werkynge in every degre” (2882-84). J. D. North explains that no matter the degree of skepticism and condemnation of the more occult aspects of astrology (e.g., its judicial, horoscopical, and magical expressions), there was still absolute consensus that the basic premise of celestial influence was correct, and it was completely fused, at least, with mainstream medical practice (243-300).22 Elizabeth Hurren explains the medical connection to Henry VII’s son: On the sinister side of his mother’s heraldry and bloodline there were said to be favourable family attributes. Henry would inherit a cheerful, frivolous and flirty disposition, growing into a man of action. On his father’s dexter side, however, the soothsayers forewarned of excessive personality traits. [The court soothsayers] saw a 21 He did not necessarily flee, as Hilary Carey explains: “We do not know why Parron left the court of Henry VII, but his position was inherently vulnerable and he may have wisely decided it was a good time to seek patronage elsewhere” (700-701). 22 Notably, Parron claimed he was a Doctor of Medicine, and Henry VII’s personal physician, Lewis Caerleon, was a practicing court astrologer (Carey “Book of Astrology”, 661-710). 131 short-temper, someone over-sensitive to personal criticism, a person inclined to over-eat and drink too much alcohol. The prince would be troubled in adulthood by restless sleeping patterns, excessive wet dreams, inclined to blinding headaches, painful constipation and a tendency to worry from his paternal line. These predictions proved to be remarkably prescient. Henry’s ‘maladies of the mind’, described by the soothsayer, were above all to trouble his romantic history. It was for this reason that music would be his chief medicine, a traditional cure for love sickness and melancholy. (72-73) Therefore, far beyond the issues of political stability, Dame Music’s lessons on health, and the choice to take the road of the Active life, amplify the Passetyme’s pertinence to prince Henry’s natal horoscope in an unsubtly salient way. The perennial debate about the relationship of astrology and its relative merits always relates to free will and determinism,23 and Hawes is deeply invested in the notion that “Hardiness” should be maintained in the face of planetary influence. Rethorike’s lesson on Disposition sets the record straight when she acknowledges the planets’ “course and myght”, but sternly warns that it is no excuse for immoral behaviour: “what for that? be it good or yll, / Them for to folowe it is at mannes fre wyl” (831-33). Planets do not determine the course of a life, but they do incline terrestrial creatures; moral consternation is appropriate because planets quite literally have an influence over bodies and places, and people should prepare: “Who knew astronomy at every maner ceason / Might set in ordre every thing by reason” (2687-88). But essentially, Hawes’ narratives, and especially the Passetyme, represent a conflict of the will against the planets. Hawes’ poem on the coronation of Henry VIII, published the same year as the Passetyme addresses the planets as characters, inviting the “fortunate” planets to bless the 23 Pico de Mirandello’s widely circulated arguments about the matter appeared just a few years before the Example. D. C. Allen’s Star-crossed Renaissance dwells at length on the debate, as does Lewis’s Discarded Image. 132 kingdom. However, in his address to Dyane (the moon), the planet associated most strongly with mutability, he pleads for her to turn misfortune on the enemies of the king, and so “[e]ncourage the hertes [of England] by in warde hardynes” (143). Concerning Mars, this planet did have some positive associations particularly fitting for Hawes’ poems, such as journeys, nobility, and fortitude, and Hawes conspicuously avoids all discussion of Mars’ malignancy.24 In the coronation poem, he calls Mars the “flambynge honour of euery hardy herte / . . . Vs to encourage that we do not sterte / But by hardynes that we may subuerte” (114, 16-17). In the Passetyme, Mars is a tutor, and a planet, and a personification with a temple. When Graunde Amoure enters this temple, he calls on Mars as “god of the warre! / The gentyll lodesterre of an hardy herte” (3039-40), requesting assistance to strike down the “sturdy grauntes with famous chyualry” (3045). Instead of having a personification of Hardiness, like in the Example, the Passetyme brings in the planet that – apparently, in Hawes’ slightly unorthodox scheme – most exemplifies and influences hardiness.25 This god-character denounces the personification of Fortune as insubstantial, without a dwelling place in heaven or earth, but merely the figment of the poets, rather than something to fear: “Sythen thou art the dedes of his chaunce / Thou to rule man, it is a thynge not true” (3215). Even though Mars is a planetary influence, he curiously emphasizes that hardiness comes from within, and characterizes forces from without as the pretext for poor moral excuses. 24 This approach to Martian influence probably had to do with the fact that it was the dominant planet in both Henry VII and VIII’s natal horsoscopes. By consensus, Mars was considered a planet with mostly bad influence (Infortuna Minor), associated with belligerence, contradiction, accusation, violent death, and strong heat and hot passions. This is using Richard Kay’s work (Dante’s Christian Astrology 137-86). The following is Kay’s summary of the pre-Dantean writers on Mars: “for John of Sevile, Mars is ‘the star of evils (malorum),’ and for Alcabitius it is just plain ‘bad (malus).’ Rabbi Ibn Ezra makes the same point, but with greater force: ‘it is altogether bad (malus) in its entirety [and is] absolutely deprived of good.’ Still [Michael] Scot can improve even on this by elaboration: ‘the planet is also untrue, unlucky, and good for nothing (nequam).’” (177). 25 Notably, the Example also has a passage that treats Hardiness like an astrological entity: “O worthy hardynes the shynynge sterre” (694). 133 If Mars has a desirable association for Hawes, the moon is tied to much of the deleterious discourse of instability, mutability, variance, fortune, and change, and for Hawes these are partly astrological problems – though definitely surmountable with a strong moral character, love for a beloved, and the grace of God. That lovers change their affections is a common issue in allegories, from the Romance of the Rose to Hawes. But in the specific discourse of the Passetyme, the unruly character of Godfrey Gobelieve accuses women that “be not stedfast, but chaunge as the mone” (4112), and on the other hand, Pucell complains to Graunde Amoure that “The minde of men chaungeth as the mone” (2129). The second great trial of Graunde Amoure is to slay great “giaunt lunatyke, / Whose name truely was called Variaunce” (4458-59), a monster who in all seven heads is the very embodiment of lunar associations in bad lovers. After Graunde Amoure’s victories, he is received into Pucell’s presence, her “rethoryke” being couched in the astrological and humorous terms of “swete influence” with aromatic and “[d]egouted vapoure”: “My courage reformed, that was so lunatyke; / My sorowe defeted, and my mynde dyde modefy, / And my dolorous herte began to pacify” (5264-70). The Example similarly has a moment when Clennes is called the “sterre of excellence” (1253), and later in the text, Youth cries that “[t]he sight of her dyd my herte bynde / Euer her to loue with percynge influence” (1256-57). Astrology connects to many spatial contexts in both poems, because the various places are often pervaded by astrological forces, and moral virtue often requires timely action and awareness of planetary virtue. Astrological language is often the frame for a chapter, and it is especially important for Hawes to note the “lighting,” which has moral implications in large part due to the question of bodily influence. Both poems, but especially the Passetyme, has a deeply skyward orientation, and this fact is set right at the beginning, contrasting with the small meadow and the unsuspecting protagonist: “When Phebus entred was in Geminy, / Shynyng above in his 134 fayre golden spere, / And horned Dyane then but one degre” (1-3). Hawes is most certainly a “poet of light,” and so often takes the time to describe a scene’s light, and describes “Phebus” and its position or rays 26 times (with around 10 additional references to the word “sunne” and its variations). Bartholomew’s encyclopedia highlights that the sun gives many things in conjunction with its light: “sonne is welle of inwit and mynde and [of] resoun”; it “reneweth and fedith and maketh plenteous”: “he hath virtue of vnite and acorde; he hath virtue of comforting”; the sun also distinguishes times and cleanses (484-88). Hawes takes time to represent the healing properties of his sun in the part of the Example after the conquest of the dragon, when Virtue enters a very special garden “depryuynge the noxyall derkness,” a place “[b]righter than phebus a thousand folde,” and therefore perfect for “recreacyon,” the mind’s “comfort after study,” prayer, pleasure, and “delectatyon” (1654-74). Phebus’ rays are connected to Graunde Amoure’s education and enlightenment in several of the towers of the liberal arts. After fighting a giant in the darkness, Graunde Amoure is led to a chamber “that was very bryght, / […] for to take myne ease” (4452-53). He always proceeds to the next leg of his journey when Phebus makes things “clear,” and when the night has past, without “Saturnus blacke encombremente” (341). There is one setting and event in particular that is almost unintelligible without a sense of its astrological resonance. Graunde Amoure’s love for his lady first registers on him as a melancholy sickness rather than as a spur to Fame and virtue: “Myne inwarde sorowe ye begyn to double” (1653). Counsel meets him, and although he brings a little relief though his speech “so grounded on reason” (1710), he is unable to cure Graunde Amoure on a “wete and also tenebrous” night (1907). They speed on their way to a garden by the Tower of Music, where they see Pucell at six in the evening; this is the first reception of Graunde Amoure by his desired love, and it is not particularly warm. The first clue comes from what is above the Tower of Music: 135 And eke [increasing] Dyane, ful of mutabilite, Entred the Crab, her propre mancyon, Than ryght amyddes of the Dragons hed; And Venus and she made conjuncyon. (1968-71) The zodiacal sign of Cancer (“the Crab”) is the moon’s dominant house, which means that Diane’s planetary influence will only increase and come to its very strongest; the conjunction of Venus and the moon means that lovers will naturally incline toward excessive mutability. Moreover, the “dragons hed” is a constellation that only adds more malign influence on an already bad conjunction. The night is already wet, and the garden has a great fountain of water, intensifying its lunar situation, which curiously contains “many dragons of marvaylos likenes” (2014): sculptures that sit unpropitiously with the astrological referent to the Caput Draconis and the dragon that Amoure has to fight later. The conversation between the two lovers is not particularly pleasant, with Pucell expressing her skepticism at the ugly effect of “love” on Graunde Amoure: “What sodayne love hath you so arayde / Wyth so great payne your heart to embrace?” and complaining that the “minde of men chaungeth as the mone” (2060-61, 2129). When Amoure exclaims that they should be joined in marriage at once, Pucell says that her “herte shall be without varyacyon” (2280) only after Amoure takes his lesson from Astronomy, after he visits the temple of Mars, and slays the monsters (one of whom is called Lunatyke, and one who is made of astrological magic): all astrologically-inflected, moral tasks. Graunde Amoure’s final trial also involves a battle under “dissolute” darkness, while the moon is “in the Scorpion” at “whole opposition” with the sun, a 180° relationship, which was firmly understood to be malign in astrological theory. This is an aquatic trial, all taking place in a storm, sailing through a “tempestuous flode.” The combat with the dragon occurs “as the planettes reygned” 136 (4998), and the heavenly bodies “[w]ente retrograde” (5002), “[w]ith dyuers quartyls” in “the dragons tayle” (5003-4).26 This is the prime opportunity for the “cursed witches” Straungeness and Disdayne to use “nygromancy” (4959) and “magykkes arte” (5134) to construct the dragon named Malyce. The Cauda Venenum involves a lunar phase, which relates to a bad sexual fate, and Hawes notes that it is “to let a lovers lust” (5004). Now, this dragon is not a representation of the devil like the serpent in the Example, but has a face “full lyke a mayde” (4997), and the witches are personifications that relate to a psychomachia within Graunde Amoure and his relation to Pucell, but the passions are heavily in-formed by planetary influence. This trial is Saturnine as well as Lunar in that both planets were often connected with illness and darkness; but the specific issues of bad odour, black bile, magic, darkness, and metals are more Saturnine. The coronation poem summarizes many of the trenchant concerns about Saturn that arise continually throughout Hawes’ corpus of works: Fy on the saturne with thy mysty fume Replete with fraude treason and wyckednes To shewe thy beames thou darest not presume So cursed thou arte withouten stablenes Deuoyde of grace fulfylled with doblenes Thy power to Englonde was neuer amyable But alwayes euyll vntrue and varyable. (99-105) The dragon that Graunde Amoure faces is made of “the false root of doloure” (4993), seven metals, and is heavy, which are Saturnine traits (because Saturn is the seventh planet, lover of metals); and when the dragon is slain, its “smoke was derke, full gretly domageable” and made it 26 Oppositions and quartiles were both thought to be malign relations between the planets (Bartholomaeus 465). 137 so that “all the ylond was full tenebrous” (5127, 5148).27 The Example also has two Saturnine ordeals. In the wilderness of moral trials, Phebus falls “Vnder a blacke and mysty clowde” “[w]herfore we walked in grete derkenes / The whiche to me was a grete heuynes” (1131-34). The moon is “horned” and enters “the sygne of caprycorne” (1136), which is its sixth astrological house, relating to feebleness. The encounter with the dragon is a theological test, a confrontation of the three heads of the world, the flesh, and the devil, but these all have astrological inflection as well. Youth approaches the lair in “merueylous trauayle of sorowe and bale” when “the daye right fayre was spent,” descending “into a dale / Wher we felt the sauer of a dungeon / Of the foule and stynkynge dragon” (1410-15). Some traditions associate prisons with Saturnine places, as the important astrologer Al-qibisi does.28 Hawes’ heroes do not need to make recourse to white magic, or appeal to the fortunate influence of Jupiter to win their battles. But that does not mean astrological forces are trivial, for they must be understood and overcome before the weddings can be consummated. It is not the stars and the planets that must be the most fundamental basis of heroic action and proper pilgrimage, but things like love for the “sterre of excellence” (Example 1253), Clennes, or “[t]he gentyll lodesterre of an hardy herte” (PP 3040), or the principle of “mesure” which “is the lodesterre of all grace” (2639). Virtue defeats the world, the flesh and the devil. But “the world” contains powerful malign influences, the flesh and its humors may be set to concupiscence through astrological virtues, and the devil might use malign influences to cause people to sin. Even the memory can turn “retrograde” (2861), if one is not careful. 27 These traits correspond to Bartholomaeus’ characterization that Saturn is “an yuel-willid planete, colde and drye, a nyȝt planete, and heuy. . . . And he greueȝ more what he goot) acwarde than whanne he goth forthri3e. . . . he tokenteth sorowe and wo and elyngenes. His colour is blak, and ledy, and false” (479). 28 His name in Middle English is translated to Alcabitus/Alkabucius, and North shows that he was referenced by Chaucer, and was translated into English by the fifteenth century. North points this out about dungeons (200). 138 Passetyme and Space: The Art of Memory in Print Whan thou hast time, take tyme and space – Remembraunce from the Passetyme One of the few direct written details that we have of Hawes’ life is John Bale’s comment that Hawes was distinguished for having a “prodigious memory.” If Hawes is generally remembered as a forgettable, bad poet, historians of rhetoric have at least recognized an uncontestable value in him as the author of the first art of memory in English, preceding Leonard Cox’s Art or Craft of Rhetoryke (1532) by more than two decades.29 The Passetyme is an allegory, at the same time that it is a kind of art of memory. Hawes’ discussion on the art occupies only a small section of the Passetyme, but he faithfully explains the Ciceronian connection of the “locational memory,” of place to idea, of topic to topography, decisively amplifying the allegorical connection in his particular explanation. For one thing, the discussion is nestled within an allegorical narrative; but in fact, there is good reason to believe that Hawes wants to signal his understanding of memory and its employment of place as being at the heart of tales using moralized similitudes. Furthermore, in the Passetyme, Hawes remembers past poets, his hero is often asked to remember lessons, and Fame is one of the key characters of the story.30 29 Beyond English, Frances Yates has said that the Romberch’s 1520 Art of Memory is “of importance to the student of artificial memory” because it “proves the point that personifications, such as the familiar figures of the liberal arts, when reflected in memory, become memory images” (260). Hawes should have this honour, rather than Romberch, with topifications alongside those personifications. 30 The story contains numerous directives and pledges to remember across the variety of sites. Before Graunde Amoure learns the seven liberal arts, Fame connects the lessons to come with the chivalric conquest: “Ye shall . . . atayne the victory / Yf you wyll do as I shall to you saye / And all my lesson retayne in memory” (295-97). After Dame Logic’s speech, he asserts that Logycke’s “wyse doctryne I marked in memory” (645), and his diction contains a hint of mapping practice. Counsel tells Graunde Amoure to remember three things about how to cope with sorrow in the Temple of Counsel, and Graunde Amoure later tells him “I shall retayne you in my memory” explicitly connects Counsel’s role as one to help him travel better in the landscape: “By whose counseyle grounded in wysdome, / To the entent I should spede the better” (2354-69). Graunde Amoure “regestered well in [his] remembraunce” the sight of Pucell when he first sees her. When he takes his lesson from King Melyzyus, donning the knightly apparel that St. Paul recommends in Ephesians, and setting off down the “goodly playne” (3431), he states that he “dyd well register in my remembraunce” the moral lessons of the visit (3396). At the end of the journey, Dame Memory is one of those who receives Graunde Amoure into La Bell Pucell’s presence. But most 139 Hawes offers connective tissue between allegory, place, and memory, in concert with the overarching goal of ordering “time and space.” Hawes was the author of the first art of memory in vernacular English. However, there was a clear surge of interest in arts of memory throughout the fifteenth century, and two notable texts were printed in Italy: Jacobus Publicius’ Art of Memory (1482), and Peter of Ravenna’s Phoenix (1491), translated into English by Robert Copland in 1548. Hawes had access to royal libraries, had facility in French and Latin, and could very well have taken in continental ideas about memory. Before Hawes, formal productions of the ars memorativa were almost entirely in Latin from the twelfth-century recoveries of Aristotle, Cicero, Pseudo-Cicero, and Quintilian. But beyond treatises on rhetoric, allegorical narrative is a key site of mnemonic practice, as demonstrated in Ch.2. Jody Enders argues that romance, and especially personification-rich French allegories absorbed and expressed the notions of the “storehouses of thought” suggested by the aforementioned Roman authors (52-57). Memory and invention were intertwined with allegory by virtue of their combined effort in making “absent things present” (60). There are certainly more explicit connections of allegory and the ars memorativa in English authors, too: Thomas Bradwardine produced an art of memory in the fourteenth century with remarkable resonance toward specific places in Chaucer’s House of Fame.31 The Chaucerian connection to the art of memory and to Hawes is fortuitous, both because Hawes generally acknowledges Chaucer’s poetic position before him, and uniquely singles out the House of Fame in the Passetyme as “sentencyous” (1324), Hawes’ favoured term for allegorical quality.32 After noting importantly, as has already been discussed, Graunde Amoure uses lessons from all seven liberal arts to defeat the giants and the dragon, in addition to the equipment and devices from the Temple of Mars. 31 Beryl Rowland lists parallels between the two texts, which includes shared references to a temple of glass, a desert, the starry upper hemisphere, a hill of ice, a castle of beryl, and a whirling, creaking house of twigs (162-71). 32 Fame is an important character in both narratives. Both stories associate Fame with a “horn,” and in Hawes, it is “blowen / After the death of many a champion” (192-93). 140 the sententious nature of Chaucer’s work, he adds that Chaucer “drewe hymselfe on hys own inuencyon” (1325), the terms that Hawes (and Cicero) suggest for the construction of personal, memorial loci. After Chaucer there are several other important generic connections to Hawes from the fifteenth century, which are almost certain influences. Several of Hawes’ “mayster” Lydgate’s works and translations have memory as a personification, leading the traveler through idea-places.33 The enormously influential allegorical romance Le Chevalier Délibéré by the Burgundian Olivier de La Marche involves its hero riding through the Field of Time, up the Mountain of Middle Age, through stations of historical monuments, with “Fresh Memory” as one of the main characters. The anonymous Court of Sapyence, which Hawes attributes to Lydgate (Passetyme 1357), also has structured repetitions of division formulae, based on subject changes with a manifestly didactic tone.34 These texts all contain public houses and journeys, following Herennian principles on the artificial memory. The role of memory in cognition is observable within the allegories that precede Hawes. It is not a coincidence that the first English vernacular art of memory allows itself for a more spatialized design at the level of the physical page, the placing of emblematic images, and the layout of the text. Writing about the status of memory arts after the advent of the printing press, Daniel Beecher characterizes the “openly allegorical bases” of memory that encouraged “multiple strata of meaning as markers of the wit and imagination of the observer” (380). Not mentioning Hawes specifically, he adds that “[l]iterary works conceptualized in mnemonic terms 33 Susan Hagen’s book entitled Allegorical Remembrance, claims that de Guileville/Lydgate’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man is structured much like an art of memory. Hawes praises Lydgate specifically for his translations. 34 After the survey of natura rerum, the narrative of the Court of Sapience comes to the mansion of Sapience, where various virtues and the Seven Liberal arts are said to have their own towers. The author makes breaks in the narrative to indicate, “Incipit processus de prima curia,” “Incipit processus de secunda curia” (56, 57), from the “fyrst court” with Dame Scyence (1654), to the “second court” of Dame Intellygence, with a distinctly new “halle, chambres, with toures” (1688-90); and so on. 141 follow a number of strategies, some emphasizing an ‘architecturalized’ design, others featuring symbolic paintings, tapestries, vivid images, while others move allegorically through emblematic landscapes” (383). Hawes’ work is not primarily a work of visual art, but his printer certainly does show an unusual effort in commissioning elaborate woodcuts, and he does present a striking amount of narrative ekphrases that draw from Beecher’s list. In particular, his two longest poems have an obstreperously architectural design in much the same way that the Court of Sapyence has, with emphatically divided movements between distinct didactically-named (“emblematic”) rooms, chambers, temples, towers, estates, castles, bridges and gardens. Lina Bolzoni’s work on the art of memory also highlights that “[t]he perception of words and mental faculties in terms of space and visualization is enormously expanded by the phenomenon of the printing press. . . . Among other things, the printing press helps to expand that sense of the mirroring relationship between the mind and writing […], between mental places and textual places, between inner experience and the external world” (xviii). Hawes was an early adopter of the print medium, and Edwards highlights how unusual it was for a writer of his time to produce writings almost entirely in print (20-25). But as an early adopter of print, Hawes certainly uses it to enhance the various aspects of localized memory, and this is at least as true for the Example as it is true for the Passetyme, which has an explicit discourse on mnemotechnics. In particular, the Example’s opening pages offer an extraordinarily organized division of episodes and topics for the chapters, almost purely based on the “emblematic landscapes”.35 35 Even where the toponym does not have an abstract adjective accompanying the “capitulo” title (e.g., the “meadow”), the chapter still relates the generic place to the habitation of the personification encountered there. Even though Hell does not require an adjective or genitive noun to highlight the specifics of discussion within, Hawes employs the term “dyvysyon” to signal to the reader that s/he should understand individual lessons within. The punishments discussed there relate to the sins of sensuality, pride, and treason that correspond notably to the poem’s earlier parts. Vertue’s eschatological visits to the higher garden, hell, and heaven, are cursory, but they have a suggestive relationship to a growing number of commentaries on hell and the heavens. Yates has shown that increasingly, in the writings of sixteenth century commentators on Dante, “The Divine Comedy would thus become the supreme example of the conversion of an abstract summa into a summa of similitudes and examples, with 142 Memory is not just an art to Hawes, but, as for many of his contemporaries, central to the theory of mind as it relates to the whole liberal art of Rhetoric. In the Passetyme’s lesson on invention, the pupil hears how the images of nature are taken in by the “v. inward wittes.” The first three are common wit, imagination, and fantasy, and these generate stories by means of “reason sentencious / Clokynge a trouthe wyth colour tenebrous” (710-11). Memory is the glue that holds images together in the mind and retains stories after they are read. Estimation, the fourth wit, sets a standard between “long” and “brevyate” along the “perambulat waye, full of all Memory as the converting power, the bridge between the abstraction and the image” (96). The chapters of the Example center “topical” discourse on single places, or the movements between them, as the verbal diction highlights (“sayled,” “ledde,” “mette”). Figure 4: The Table of Contents for The Example of Vertue. From Early English Books Online. 143 varyaunce” (740). The length or brevity of a “sentence,” which Hawes puns with sententious, is compared to the traverse of a journey. Hawes argues that writers should portray “space as is convenient” and sett proper proportions to an allegorical journey; or, “The parfyte nombre of every similitude” (737-49). Memory “must ever agregate / All maters thought to retayne inwardly” (751-52). But Hawes teaches that memory should not remain within the mind, but be inscribed in the external world afterward to facilitate a feedback loop of good order and intelligibility. What the reader must track in the narrative itself, Hawes offers as a memorial similitude by naming and glossing, corresponding to the paradigm he anticipates: “scripture wyll make demonstrate / Outwardly accordynge to the thought” (754-55). Thus Hawes introduces the role of memory in cognition of the material world and the beginning of the poetic enterprise, which involves the inscription of immaterial thought into metaphor. As he moves into his discussion of memory, Hawes recognizes a distinction in emphasis, but sees the parts of rhetoric not as separate projects, but a scaffolding for sententious stories. He writes that the “memoryall arte of rethoryke defuse” is a “science” expressed “[u]nder cloudes derke and termes eloquent” (1269-74): that is, memory involves the operation and terms of allegory. Dame Rhetoric teaches on invention, and then the other four elements of rhetoric as taught by Cicero, which include disposition, elocution, pronunciation, and memory. Hawes mentions orators interchangeably with storytellers,36 and he effectively transfers Cicero’s ideas about orators onto narrative poets, which Hawes sees as meritorious communicators. Any poetic project worth its salt, according to Hawes, will have a fitting “elocution,” or an approach to writing that “cloke[s] the sentence under mysty figures” – that is, with the “morall sense” cloaking the story “full subtyly”. The stories are represented with a hat constantly tipped to the 36 In one stanza, he writes that the “oratour doth take full properly” the images of memory (1260), and in the next stanza, he writes “In the poetes scole [the orator] must have intres” (1267). 144 tropological sense so that reason can “theyr fables . . . well moralyse” in order to show the “the way of vertue, welth, and stableness” (932-1119). Hawes does use many of Cicero’s fundamental insights in his account of the value of the art of memory. Cicero states that images should be set sufficiently apart in different places of the large building or journey, and chosen carefully to express their subject. Hawes relays these ideas stating that “sundry images” should be set “[o]ne after other” each “for a mater he doth than well holde” appropriate “to the tale he doth than so beholde” (1248-51). These images are each set with a “sygnyfycacyon” in “due order, maner and reason” when recalled inwardly (1255-58). Hawes asserts that the artist wanting to make the story memorable “behoueth to have respeccyon / Vnto the tale, and the veray grounde / And on what ymage he his mater founde” (1244-46). Hawes focuses on the appropriateness of an idea to the visual aspect of place, and his reference to the “veray grounde” seems to refer to the literal and metaphorical site chosen for each image and its “sentence.” The art of memory is an aesthetic, but mostly a moral, project, which extends through the events and places of the whole poem. Hawes advocates that “eche ymage” show a “moralazacyon” (1253). In context, the images are spatial in nature, divided carefully into memorial loci. It is explicitly the hero Graunde Amoure, and implicitly the reader who must order “Eche” image “after other wythouten varyaunce” (1264) – variance, which Hawes understands as an existential threat to the orderliness and integrity of the kingdom. Therefore, the capacity to order places properly, and understand their “moral sense,” is an important aspect of the educative process, and a process that the reader shares with Graunde Amoure in imagining the succession of images throughout the Passetyme. The moral imperative of the art of memory chapter culminates in a rant on the proper “pastime” of poetry, during which Hawes blends his voice with the assumed authority of Dame Rethorike. The “synne of avaryce” holds sway over 145 many poets’ projects (1275-81), which contrasts the old poet type, “That worthy is to be in memory,” who “morally dyd so nobly endyte, / Reprovyng vyce, praysyng the vertue” (1232, 1286-87). In the past-time, one might say, poets wrote according to the science of the art of memory, with more moralized places. This is the same nostalgic section that mentions Chaucer’s House of Fame, and what he thinks is Lydgate’s “courte of Sapyence”: books that clearly follow the paradigm of memory loci. After the conversation with Dame Rethorike, Hawes carefully divides the palace of the seven liberal arts into towers with separate conceptual-spatial rooms and personifications offering their lessons. The process, of course, starts before, when Graunde Amoure relates that he “went to Doctryne, prayenge her good grace, / For to assygne me my fyrst lernynge place” (504). Hawes wants his learning places to be orderly, you see. The Passetyme is itself written as a memory in the mind of Graunde Amoure, but also as a memorial record set against the background of Fame’s promises. The tension between a memorial of a famous man and the moral act of “remembraunce” is a tension of the poem, especially the end that reflects back on the way of the Active Life and the contemplative “road not taken.” Fame exhorts remembrance of “the noble paynyms all” (247), but the end of the poem suggests that their “noblenesse” will pass away, with “tyme and space,” in favour of the Christian values inherent in Eternity. Anthony Hassler argues that a possible reading of the poem’s “simple past, punctuated by present-tense” is the implication “that the entire narration has been delivered by Amoure from a purgatorial present uneasily suspended between time and eternity” (125). The story is not unusually told in the simple past tense, but at the outset of his lessons in the Tower of Doctrine, Graunde Amoure hears a synopsis of his own story: “And other adventures shall unto you fall, / Whiche Fame shall cause to be memoriall” (4710). Fame’s role in the story suggests that she may have been the herald of a story that has already transpired. 146 But the Fame of Chaucer’s story, with her house’s foundations made of melting ice, add yet another layer of veniality to the “success/succession” of Graunde Amoure, and a sense that not all forms of memory are of equal virtuousness. The personification of Time who appears after Graunde Amoure’s death, suggests an even wider perspective on temporality than Fame, but distances human perception from “goddes syght” (5651), of “tyme was, tyme is, and the tyme future” (5629). Tyme responds to the place that Fame has occupied in the story, and asks about more first-order questions: “Coulde the nyne worthies so victorious, / Do all their actes without tyme or space?” (5670-71). In this way, he alludes to the presumption of Fame and her promise to secure the future of her champion: “For onely of [God] it is especiall, / The hye power and godheade in finall, / The future tence to knowe directly / Unto whome it appeareth openly” (5659-62). But most importantly, Graunde Amoure reflects on his own death, and melds with the personification Remembraunce, using a memento mori of his own life to counsel against the seven deadly sins: And my selfe called La Graunde Amoure, Seking adventure in the worldly glory, For to attayne the riches and honour, Did thinke full lytle that I should here lye, Tyll deth dyde marke me full ryght pryvely. Lo what I am! and wherto you must! (5481-86) The ending is a rude awakening, because Time, and then Eternity proffer a Solomonic temper (vis-à-vis Ecclesiastes) about the vanity of the world in the context of Fortune’s variability. Eternity represents a new position and a form of sententiousness spatially removed from the lower road of the Active Life and Amoure’s pursuit of fame and erotic love. 147 Conclusion Throughout his two allegories, Hawes aims to make his places sententious, which for him refers to moral meaning that enables existential and political stability and hardiness in the face of variance. His places involve discourses that concern reading strategies about the book of nature as applied to edifices and topographical structures, the influence of planets on particular situations, and the orderly memory as embodied in places of moral education. The moralization of place, astrology, and the arts of memory frame how Hawes conceives of the allegorical quality of his places. That Hawes succeeds in demonstrating stability to his readers is another question. The last gasp of the poem returns to an assertion of the value of memory and the deserved fame of Lydgate, which Hawes obviously desires to ride: Besechyng God for to geve me grace Bokes to compyle of moral vertue; Of my maister Lidgate to folowe the trace, His noble fame for laude and renue, Whiche in his lyfe the slouthe did eschue; Makyng great bokes to be in memory[.] (5810-15) Some things, for Hawes, are still worth remembering; he aims to regird the temporal ambitions he destabilized. He desires stability for his moral aims, but the foundations of the House of Fame are still made of melting ice. The planets move along and nature waxes “retrograde” over the poem’s place and time (5343).37 37 The planets reappear at the end of the Passetyme in this ominous way. Katherine Smyth shows that Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes frames its tale with unpropitious astrological prognostications, especially with respect to Saturn and its various connotations with memory and aging (137-56). 148 Chapter Four: Mutability and the Genius Loci: Spatial-Spiritual Change in Edmund Spenser’s Fairyland Introduction For contemporary writers on cultural geography and the philosophy of space, a sympathy for the “local” is not uncommon. Edward Casey, philosopher and historian of space, explores this issue in his account of the shifting spatial ideas of the Early Modern period: Integral to the genius of Early Modern thinkers from Descartes to Leibniz is a disdain for the genius loci: indifference to the specialness of place, above all its inherent “power.” Where Aristotle took for granted the power of place – a special non causal power found in its containing character, its qualitative differentiation, its heterogeneity as a medium, and its anisotropy of direction – Western philosophers and scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries assume that places are merely momentary subdivisions of a universal space quantitatively determined in its neutral homogeneity. (133-4) Edmund Spenser, who wrote a little earlier than Descartes and Leibniz, arguably straddles between the two polarities concerning the specialness of place and universal space. He is clearly interested in “qualitative differentiation” in the way that he separates room, chamber, and topography, while at the same time he symbolizes universal applicability and geographic fluidity. Addressing the tension between the particular and universal in Spenser’s worldmaking, Brent Dawson ascribes to allegory “a sense of the world as a meaningful totality by analogically comparing the world to its own spatial order. But on the other hand, allegory's abstract and detached quality suggests the distance between the world and any one of its images” (177). In fact, Spenser’s representation of genii loci highlights this tension between location and dislocation, general and particular symbols in the genre of allegory. 149 This chapter is interested in Spenser’s understanding of place more broadly, but concerns itself primarily with the representation of the genius loci in Spenser’s 1591 Complaints and the first three books of The Faerie Queene.1 Throughout the writings of Spenser’s predecessors, contemporaries, earlier poems, and even the “Genius Cantos” of the Faerie Queene (2.12, 3.6), the ideas and the language of spiritual entities, spiritual presence, and the self, are linked to the genius – and, by extension, to the genius loci. It is of particular pertinence to Spenser’s poetic project that his places show a good deal of plasticity (i.e., “Mutability”), and that many places transform with the defeat of the given genius of a place. When Edmund Spenser represents place, ruin is on his mind: his poems “The Ruines of Time” and “The Ruines of Rome” are the clearest glasses of this phenomenon. There are historical and personal reasons for Spenser’s fixation on time, place, and ruin, based on his experience of living in the beleaguered Tudor colonies in Ireland, as well as his proximity to the Protestant Reformation and its paradoxical efforts to distinguish itself from and dignify itself with, the past, and reform other aspects of religious identity. Spenser’s “general intention” is to write a “continued allegory”, but the nature of continuity is complicated in Spenser’s allegorical representation. Spenser’s spatial metaphors, and his metaphorical places change in various ways, according to what characters engage with the place, and how they engage. In Spenser’s world, Time has a scythe, and it cuts down personifications, and topples topifications; however, time is also medium of God’s providence for reform, and the “space” in which mnemonic constructions abound. I aim to challenge, or at least complicate, one of the critical concepts that has been a keynote of Spenser criticism since C. S. Lewis wrote The Allegory of Love in 1933: the concept of the “allegorical core” as a stable 1 This chapter draws from examples all throughout The Faerie Queene, but with most of its attention on the genii of the first three books. After a handful of articles were published on some background to Spenser’s usage of the term “genius” in the early and mid twentieth century, the topic has been grossly neglected by Spenser criticism for at least the past half century. 150 location in each of the Faerie Queene’s six books. Allegorical places teach best when they reveal a dynamic, vivified spirit, and when they do their best to remove themselves from “ashie ghosts,” spirits of undeath and repetition. The Genius Loci in the Mutability Cantos, Hymns and Complaints: In-Dwelling and Out-Working For Spenser, the soul is form, and makes the body. These bodies are not just human bodies, but involve terrestrial formations more broadly. In the same breath that Spenser discusses souls inhabiting bodies within the “Hymn in Honour of Beauty,” he calls them “fleshly bower[s],” “palace[s],” “tabernacle[s],” and in some cases “stubborn ground” (117-45): Houses of Alma, all. The soul of nature, in this Platonist view, involves the formation and indwelling of place. One can “reed” in the “frame / Of this wyde vniverse” with its creatures and see the refulgent light of God’s beauty “as in a brasen booke, / To reade enregistred in euery nook” (“Heavenly Beauty” 30-31, 130-31). “Ensouling” is the basis for the idea of the book of nature and the genii loci within its pages. But, ignoring the term “genius” for now, one may see that Spenser has a broad view of how spirit and place comingle, preferring terms like “immortal Spright[s]” finding their place (107). The spiritual habitation of places affects their condition. Following this logic, the question of presence and absence (of a good or evil spirit) has everything to do with the edification or degradation of places. If Spenser’s “Hymn in Honour of Beauty” bears the optimism that “through infusion of celestial powre, / The duller earth it quickneth with delight, / And life-full spirits priuily doth powre / Through all the parts” (50-53), Spenser just as often represents places and their spirits falling into chaos. Time brings about ruin, and Mutability, its master, destroys flesh and building. 151 Mutable domination frustrates the degree to which places can be essentialist expressions of ideas, clear messages about God from the book of nature. Allegorical places are on this earth, not in heaven with “Idees on hie, / Enraunged be, which Plato so admired, / And pure Intelligences from God inspyred” (“Heavenly Beauty” 82-84). The earth’s places are in flux and contested by spiritual entities within – and impinging from without. This is one of the reasons that Spenser often represents the destruction or alteration of a place in conjunction with the defeat of its master. If souls are immortal, and if they have the infusion of celestial power, in their embodied form they remain subject to the Titaness Mutability. The Mutability Cantos echo prior sentiments in the poem, that “all this world is woxen daily worse” (7.6.6).2 Mutability leads the procession of personifications, Hours, Days, Months, and Seasons, and poses as the dominating force of the physical universe, victorious even in her debate with the planetary deities: “very sooth to say, / In all things else” besides “Heav’ns Rule”, she “beares the greatest sway” (7.8.1).3 Spenser symbolizes Mutability’s usurpation of the heavens as beginning with covetousness over the “goodly building of [Cynthia’s] Palace bright, / Made of the heauens substance, and vp-held / With thousand Crystall pillors of huge hight” (7.6.10). Mutability hopes for dominion over this “place” and uses the ambition in her “burn[ing]” spright: “Eftsoones she cast by force and tortious might, / Her to displace” (7.6.10). Mutability’s ambitious empire then possesses regions of the earth, “euery parts inholders to conuent” (7.6.17), “all “watry liuing wights” (7.6.21), the fish and fowl that need to make “their places vary.” 2 In the Proem to the Legend of Justice, Spenser laments that the “worlde is runne quite out of square,” and grows “daily wourse and wourse” (Proem 1.7, 9). Virtue and vice are exchanged, the heavens are shifting from their ancient position, and cause the “lower world” to move “toward his dissolution” (Proem 5.9). 3 She even dominates “Cynthia,” the deity most conventionally associated with Elizabeth herself, as discussed by William Blisset (254-62). 152 But is Time only a harbinger of destruction to places? The premise of Spenser’s poem is to “fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline” (“Letter to Raleigh” 15). Kingdoms and their denizens need not only get worse. The pessimism of Book 5’s Proem is cast aside for Artegall’s efficacy against Munera, and the foes of the commonwealth: he “vndid the euill fashion, / And wicked customes of that Bridge refourmed” (5.2.28), a bridge that represents the evils of extortionate practices. The Faerie Queene is written in the wake of ongoing, faulty, but not meaningless Reformation.4 There is something to be said for the abruptly “chearefull view” which Nature gives at the end of Mutability’s long and imperious speech. The children of Nature, who by nature are good, can “dilate” their being, can turn “to themselves at length again,” “worke their owne perfection”; and thus, “ouer them Change doth not rule and raigne; / But they raigne ouer change, and doe their states maintaine” (7.7.58). The “states” they maintain are the ones that bring them closest to God’s original, putative intention for them. In the Mutability Cantos, Spenser does not mention any authors by name, except Chaucer and Alan of Lille; these two writers present characters named genius that enable the hope of positive change. Alan’s De Planctu Natura, an important Neoplatonist allegory of the twelfth century, is a declaratively plaintive poem, a tonal and philosophical resonance toward the lamentations of Spenser’s Mutability. Its muted optimism, however, comes from the renewed intent to create, and instruct, expressed in the character of Genius. Alan’s poem asserts that “Genius gives the final form to the things of Nature” (60). Genius is the generative power of Nature, and not to be radically distinguished from Nature. Spenser’s “Epithalamion” recognizes such a characteristic power, and addresses one “glad Genius, in whose gentle hand, / The bridale 4 Jennifer Summit shows Spenser’s relationship to sixteenth-century writers struggling to position themselves with their medieval predecessors, in Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (101-35). Also, see Joseph Campana, The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity, and Linda Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic. 153 bowre and geniall bed remaine, / Without blemish or staine” who “[w]ith secret ayde doest succour and supply, / Till they bring forth the fruitfull progeny” (398-403). Closer to the end of Alan’s book, Genius is called Natura’s “other self” (206). If Genius is the personification of a Platonic idea, he does not distantiate a Platonic form in the world of ideas, but relates intimately with sexuality, the “annihilation of death”, and change most broadly, calling “others to life in a new birth and beginning” (216). Spenser conceives the individual genius of each human life, not as one of a distinct class of beings, but as an instance or manifestation of the “principle of life at work in the universe at large” (Ulreich, Jr. 328). In both De Planctu and in the Mutability Cantos, Genius is the basis for Nature’s cheering up, accepting that change can in some sense revert to proper form. Genius “writes” with a figurative and “obedient pen” by endowing species with “images of things that kept changing from the shadowy outline of a picture to the realism of their actual being” (216). The filling in of images, outlines, pictures, and reality are all sites of activity for the genius loci in these writings and beyond. Important though the largely benevolent principle of genius is to Spenser and Alan, the commonplaces of genius in the sixteenth century attest overwhelmingly to moral doubleness (with the most prominent synonym being “daemon” – qua demon), as well as the multiplicity of ambivalent cognates such as “spirit.” Thomas Elyot’s 1538 Dictionary states that genius was understood by pagans as the “spirite of a man,” which involved “two gouernours of the sowle, a god and an euylll, Bonus genius, & malus genius, whyche neuer departed from vs. sometyme it is taken for nature it selfe, or dilectation meued by nature” (Unnumbered page). One book entitled Ghosts and Spirites Walking By Nyght by Lewes Lauaterus (translated in 1572 by R. H.) states that the Genius “is the naturall god of euery place, of euery thing, or of euery man when we are borne, as it is written, we haue two Genii, wherof the one encourageth vs to doo well, the other 154 to doo euill” (3). Genii have a relationship to morality and to nature, to humanity and to place. The beginning of Thomas Langley’s 1546 translation of Polydore Vergil’s De Inventoribus states that according to the opinion of antiquity, not onely to every man, but also to every singular place and family, were allotted two Angels; Whereof the one went about to endamage them: the other with all its endeavour, studied to profit them. These invaded particularly every house, conveyed themselves into mens bodies, and closely in their entrails, imbezelled their health, procured diseases, illuded their hearts with phantasticall visions and dreams. (2)5 It is in the business of genii to “invade” places. The degree of credence in writers like Polydore, towards a “literal” belief in active and mobile genii, might seem slim at times, but the collapsing of the Latin term into “angel” and “spirit” allows similar ideas to the “opinion of antiquity” to flourish. Stephen Batman, who wrote an allegory called Voyage of the Wandering Knight (1569), also composed a commentary on Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De Proprietatibus, less than a decade before the first three books of The Faerie Queene were published.6 In this work, he provides a sizable discussion of Genius in the context of his explanation of magical properties, the virtues of natural things endowed by the Platonic world soul. He connects the presence of genii primarily with human persons, with the stars, and with places. The genii can strengthen or diminish under different conditions. He notes that “when we change places & countries” the “Demon or Genius 5 The degree to which such a passage is pertinacious to episodes of The Faerie Queene like the House of Alma is irresistible, given its concern over good diet and health, the invasion of its premises, and the unruliness of Phantastes and its illusions. 6 Jon Quitslund argues that Batman’s text, along with Marsilio Ficino’s work, has an extensive resonance with the Platonic representations of nature throughout the Faerie Queene. 155 shall haue greater power: or we shall get ther a stronger Demon of the same order” (170). So, he posits that “ye choice of ye place, countrie, & time, where a man doth exercise himselfe, according to the nature and extinct of his Genius, and also dwelleth and haunteth, doth very much auaile to the happinesse of his life” (170). Notably, Batman adds that names have an influence on the genius, for the “properties of names” declare “the conditions of theyr forms”; therefore, “names being altered, it hapneth oftentimes, that the things are altered” (170). The names of Spenser’s places and persons concur with Batman on this question of mutability and the quality of names. The ebullience and diminishment of the genii are, literally and metaphorically, profound to how places manifest in the world, as Spenser’s Complaints demonstrate. The bereavement or vanquishing of souls in the world is the operation of time, because the “wights” and “sprights” are embodied, in persons as well as places. Two of Spenser’s complaint poems, “The Ruines of Rome” and “The Ruines of Time” both narrativize faded Roman glory, physically and spiritually manifested in ruins. The poems are “ensamples” aiming to highlight that “all is vanitie and griefe of minde” (Time 582-3), that empires crumble, that piety and poetry are the primary human activities that have endurance. The first of these poems, based on a French work by Joachim du Bellay, begins by announcing the “heavenly Spirits, whose ashy Cinders lie / Under deep Ruines, with huge Walls opprest” (1-2). The place, certainly, is no longer the same, and Spenser puns on the name of “Rome” to probe if it is still deserving of the name.7 As the “Stranger” seeks to find “Rome in Rome,” there is “nought of Rome in Rome” to be perceived any longer, as “[t]hese same old walls, old arches, which thou seest, / Old Palaces, is that which Rome men call,” but is now the 7 A question explored again later concerning the British Isles before Albion in the Faerie Queene 2.10.2. 156 “prey of time” (29-36). In the end, “Rome now of Rome is th’ only Funerall” (37). Spenser analogizes the human body of Rome to its spiritual condition as a “Shade” – which, if it had a body would be a corpse “entombed” (65), a “Spirit” of “this great Mass . . . enwombed” (67). The speaker is overwhelmed with the tragedy of the “famous Sprights” that are of “Old Moniments,” and has a vexed sense of wanting to give “Honour” which to some extent “in Ashes do maintain” (87-88). However, Spenser concludes that the “Triumphant Arks, Spyres Neighbours to the Skye” (89), were Babel-like: Ye pallid Spirits, and ye ashie ghoasts, Which ioyning in the brightnes of your day, Brought foorth those signes of your presumptuous boasts, Which now their dusty reliques do bewray. (197-200) Spenser’s reference to dusty relics implies that the Vatican and the “Rom”ish church’s buildings and its reliquaries do not represent a new spirit of religion that redeems the pagan genius loci. He praises the hand of providence for conveying Rome’s “vertues” into the future, and suggests that it is Rome’s “great Sins, the Causers of their Pain, / Under these antique Ruines yet remain” (261-62). The implied theory is that Rome could have perhaps endured if the Roman spirit had reflected its best writers, better. But as Rome stands, it is fallen. Spenser is deeply unimpressed with the rebuilding of Rome “from Day to Day, / Repayring her decayed fashion” (373-74), with “buildings rich and gay,” which he tells his reader to “Iudge by” the “ruines vew” (369). The new Rome is doomed to failure, because it is just a “rear[ed]”, “pouldred corse”-like reincarnation of the “antique Pride,” of the “Romaine Daemon” (376-78): the genius loci. 157 In “The Ruines of Time”, like “The Ruines of Rome”, transformations to the urban and natural landscape are radically identified with the genius who is the main speaker of the poem. Spenser’s speaker encounters a woman by a riverbank, who wonders if she is a river nymph, one of the three “fatall Impes,” or “th' auncient Genius of that Citie brent” (15-19). Her indirect response allows for the possibility of all three, highlighting the shared mythological status of the genius with other categories. She ties her identity most intimately with the site of the ancient Roman city of Verulamium, the “Princesse” of the “small Northerne world” in proportion to the “Empresse” genius of Rome (83-84). She laments, I was that Citie, which the garland wore Of Britaines pride, deliuer'd vnto me By Romane Victors, which it wonne of yore; Though nought at all but ruines now I bee, And lye in mine owne ashes, as ye see: Verlame I was; what bootes it that I was, Sith now I am but weedes and wastfull gras? (36-42) If Verlame is a personification in this poem, she is a personification made of history, place, and association, rather than abstraction. She declares she is the city itself. Her emotional desolation is “reflected” in the reduction of the city to ashes, ruins, weeds, and “wastfull gras” (42). Verlame is a lone spiritual presence, a “shade” of her former glory, without the admiration of those who would look to her from “eu’rie where”; so that now, the spiritual presence has darkened into deep disorientation: “And of that brightnes now appeares no shade, / But greislie shades, such as doo haunt in hell. / With fearfull fiends, that in deep darknes dwell” (124-26). Formerly, her “high” spirits and sense of value were reflected in similar adjectival qualities of the buildings: 158 [h]igh towers, faire temples, goodly theaters, Strong walls, rich porches, princelie pallaces, Large streetes, braue houses, sacred sepulchers, Sure gates, sweete gardens, stately galleries. (92-95) The poem, and Verlame’s speeches, are acts of remembering, even as they assert the threat that ruins “shall in rustie darknes euer lie” (349), having “black oblivions rust” looming over them (98). Rebeca Helfer observes that Verlame offers “a poem in search of a place for memory, unaware that she already occupies that very place within her ruins”, and Spenser’s reader occupies a place removed, where s/he can engage “in re-edificaiton and remembrance” (140-41). If the poem supposedly represents a place that now is “[w]asted . . . as if it neuer were” (120), Spenser lingers on this aspect of the intensely material culture proper to empires: the weakening of metallic structures, which corresponds to their subjection to rusting waters of Lethe.8 Outside of Verulamium, there is the “huge Colosses,” Marcellus’ work “torne with thunder,” Lisippus’ craft that “is worn with raine,” all vulnerable to waters of change. Spenser writes of brasen Pillours, neuer to be fired, Or Shrines, made of the mettall most desired; To make their memories for euer liue: For how can mortall immortalitie giue. (410-13) 8 Emily Shortslef further notes how Verlame is disoriented and confused about history and location: “The Ruines of Time” reconfigures the historical Verulamium, dislocating it in space and time: the narrator’s location “beside the shore / Of siluer stream-ing Thamesis […] / Nigh where the goodly Verlame stood of yore” (1–3) is no location at all” (94). She elaborates that if the narrator is “indeed by the Thames, he cannot possibly be “Nigh where the goodly Verlame stood of yore,” and if he is near the site of Verulamium, then he is not “beside the shore / Of siluer streaming Thamesis” (94). Spenser manipulates time and space to make what might be called an allegorical point about mutability. 159 The metallurgy and architecture bespeak the absence of a population that was formerly in the city, which is now ruins. But beyond the “Arts” of the city, Nature was in full bloom, with the “mirthfull iollitee” of a “thousand Nymphes” (137), and the presence of blooming “flowrie bankes” (136). Bodies of water disappeared, for there is “now no lake,” and the Thames that supposedly used to flow through the city, which now, “for great griefe,” “no riuers course is to be seene,” and instead of flowers, “Moorish fennes, and marshes euer greene” (140). Every-where, Verlame is concerned with the vulnerability of the physical world to Time. As several scholars have highlighted, Spenser’s “Ruines of Time” takes its cues from William Camden, who is explicitly called the “nourice of antiquity” in this poem (169).9 Spenser’s genius is named after the Roman city Verulamium. However, an important part of the story of this place is its shift to being called St. Albans. Camden states that Verulamium is “famous for nothing so much as for bringing foorth Alban”. Stewart Mottram discusses Spenser’s omission, arguing that Spenser does acknowledge the martyrdom of Alban in his reference to “guiltles blood” being spilt in the river, but his coy refraining from using the word “Alban” pertains to a “legacy riven as much by confessional division as historiographical debate” (543). If Mottram is right that Spenser’s omission is motivated by a kind of irenic appreciation for aspects of what might otherwise be fought over as a religiously contested past, the omission of the name is incredibly significant to Spenser’s concept of place, based on other comments Camden makes about naming and genius. In another work, Camden states that Plato advised people “to be carefull in giving faire and happie names: as the Pythagoreans affirmed the mindes, actions, and successes of men to be according to their Fate, Genius, and Name” (31), 9 Camden even includes a thematically analogous prosopoieia that could fit in The Faerie Queene or one of the “Ruines”: “I would have the reader to remember that I have in the work wrestled with that envious and ravenous enemy Time” (233). Timothy Duffy notes that Camden’s design was to present a chorographical survey of Britain, dividing his discussion by chorography as much as by name (738-56). 160 and in “times of Christianity” names were intended to “stir vp men to the imitation of them, whose names they bare” (33). Camden discusses etymology and naming several times in Brittania. On two different occasions, Camden states that he would rather not speculate on the origin of the name of a place, because those dwelling there will have a better judgment on account of their relation to the genius.10 He does not always make much of the change of the name of a given place, but reaffirms several times that Alban and his fame as a Christian martyr replaced the Roman reference to the River Ver. Camden highlights that now “the old Verulam is turned into Cornfields, and St. Albans flourisheth, which rose up out of the ruins of it; a neat and large town”; and, in contrast to the old city, “The Church of the said Monastery is still in being” (300). He identifies the shift in name to the same time that Spenser seems to end Verlame’s account of herself: the shift from the pagan Saxon era to the time of Offa in CE 793. Spenser represents the genius of the “Ruines” as limited to the time before the place’s name change, which signifies a new era and new spirit: a new genius loci. It is obviously not just the genii loci that have influence on a place, but any spirit, because all creatures have a genius within. Spiritual brightness and darkness are felt more or less acutely in certain loci, under their special temporal conditions. By the same token, in the “Aeglogue,” the loss of Spenser’s friend Philip Sidney is felt in the drying of the fountains, “now desolate,” and the “floures which on thy graue we strew; / Which faded, shew the giuers faded state” (149-50). These affective environments are a marriage of spatial and spiritual – and poetic 10 In his discussion of a god named “Dui, “which the Britains call'd Diw, or the peculiar and local Genius of that City, may be decided by those who are better Judges” (707-8). In his discussion of the Cornabii or Cornavii, he writes, “‘Tis true, I could wrest it to this and that signification: but since none will either suit the nature of the place, or genius of the people, I shall not swell this Volume with them” (497). Camden’s tone does not suggest literal belief in the genius, but he is familiar with common understandings of the term. 161 – expression. In “Astrophel’s Death,” Spenser represents the impact of Sidney’s death on nature itself, as a “pathetic fallacy” of his darkening and contorting absence: This word (was slaine) straightway did moue, And natures inward life strings twitch, The skie immediately aboue, Was dimd with hideous clouds of pitch, The wrestling winds from out the ground, Fild all the aire with ratling sound. (181-6) In one of the epitaphs (“Another of the Same”), Spenser generalizes that “Place” as such, “pensiue wailes his fall, whose presence was her pride” (9). The spatiotemporal circumstance changes with death, and the “vital thread” is torn at an immaterial level that nevertheless has extraordinary material implications: “Time crieth out, my ebbe is come: his life was my spring tide, / Fame mournes in that she lost the ground of her reports, / Ech luing wight laments his lacke, and all in sundry sorts” (10-12). As Sidney’s genius leaves his body, the ensouled bodies, corporeal and topographical, remaining in and participating with time, feel the quake. Genii in the Gardens: General and Particular Places The Faerie Queene has two passages with characters named Genius: the Genius at the Bower of Bliss, and Old Genius in the Garden of Adonis. Spenser’s mode of presentation explores the “classic” disputes about genius as 1) “generally” the god of generation, but particular to each reasonable soul; 2) good, as the force spurring an individual creature on to good deeds and the creation ordinance, but potentially evil, as given to concupiscent pleasure and 162 potentially spurring a creature to evil deeds.11 These two genii are like many of the other sorts of doubles in the Faerie Queene, like Florimel and the False Florimel, or architectural ones like the House of Pride and the House of Holiness, or indeed the Bower of Bliss and the Garden of Adonis: similar structures that represent alternative ways of reading similar signs.12 The genii have spatial valence within their respective legends, and as setpieces in an allegory they highlight strategies of representation, reading, and ruin, in places. In the most conventional way, Spenser does associate these genii as the classical “spirits of the place.” These genii generate the places around them and exemplify the way in which a spirit inhabiting a place confers the qualities of a place and its spatial morphogenesis. These passages frame the way that Spenser’s edifices and landforms are so frequently altered, in structure or in name, at the introduction of a spirit to a place, or in the event of a conquest. Genii loci can decline, be constrained, or be replaced, and a place in question reads differently afterward. In all cases, the genius is the embodied expression of a spirit. The Genius at the Garden of Adonis is called “Old Genius,” a creature on “fruitfull soyle of old”, and residing in walls, one side of which is of iron, and “the other of bright gold” 11 Augustine’s City of God is a locus classicus of this dispute, and Juan Luis Vives provided a notable commentary on Augustine, which was translated in 1610 by John Healy: And what is (a) Genius? God of generation (saith he). Why tell me, hath any one that power, but the world, to whom it was said, High Ioue, full parent generall of all? Besides, hee saith in another place, that the Genius (b) is the reasonable soule, peculiar in each peculiar man. And that the soule of the world is a God of the same nature, drawing it to this, that that soule is the vniuersall Genius to all those particulars. Why then it is the same that they call Ioue. (c) For if each Genius bee a god, and each soule reasonable a Genius, then is each soule reasonable a god by all consequence, which such absurdity vrgeth them to deny, it resteth that they make the worlds singular soule their selected Genius, and consequently make their Genius directly Ioue. (271) 12 Jennifer Vaught provides a particularly astute example of spatial doubleness: “His soul is cleansed in this 'sad house of Penaunce' (10.32.8), which differs profoundly from 'that sad house of Pryde,' a set of nearly identical phrases leading the reader to compare these analogous dwellings (5.53.9)” (23). A. Bartlett Giamatti’s 1975 Play of Double Senses: Spenser’s Faerie Queene is the classic study on the more general dynamic of doubling in Spenser’s work. 163 (3.6.31), corresponding to the eternal and temporal aspects of human constitution.13 He is the tutor of the “first seminarie / Of all things” (3.6.30), bringing up the souls in his jurisdiction, and functions as mediation between physical and spiritual, formal and accidental causes. The souls, represented by the “thousand thousand naked Babes” that attend him, proceed out of the garden and into the world, till they “return back by the hinder Gate” in death (3.6.32). Emphasized here is that Genius is the basis for the life of the forms as they are embodied in nature; souls emerge from the Garden of Adonis in order to be planted in the world: “Infinite Shapes of Creatures there are bred, / And uncouth Forms, which none yet ever knew” (3.6.35). Richard Neuse states that the garden is something like a symbol of the Platonic idea of the Many, “the way it encompasses ever-larger classes of beings and areas of experience,” while the narrative around Canto 6 explores Ones becoming particularized (9). “All things,” the narrator states, do their first Being fetch, And borrow Matter, whereof they are made; Which, when as Form and Feature it doth catch, Becomes a Body, and doth then invade. (3.6.37) The “being” derived here, and the thousand thousand naked babes, are genii proceeding from Genius, taking on bodies to invade, human as well as spatial. Even as the Garden of Adonis offers a sight/site of “Eterne in mutability” (3.6.47), the place highlights the temporal subjection of all genii. Spenser uses the Garden as a meditation on the mutable world’s decay and the “formes [that] are variable . . . / By course of kind, and by 13 The Garden of Adonis is “called by [Venus’] lost Lover’s Name.” Adonis is arguably the genius loci in terms of his role as the principle of the generation of forms. Moreover, as soon as Amoretta is introduced to the story, the pretext for the Garden of Adonis, “So fair a Place, as Nature can devise” (3.6.29), is presented in order to provide a sense of her conceptual and spiritual presence, and the stakes of her being thralled in the house of Busirane. An intimate place is putatively made out of the genius of nature’s own energies, “not by Art, / But of the Trees own Inclination made” (3.6.44), with the branches and twines creating an inner sanctuary, a second paradise inside the first walled garden, to indicate another degree of removal from the mutable world, and its source. 164 occasion” (3.6.38). The “Great enimy”, also seen in Spenser’s Complaints, is “wicked Time, who with his scyth addrest, / Does mow the flowring herbes and goodly things” (3.6.39). The narrator takes an increasingly meta-view on change for the better and for the worse: But were it not that Time their troubler is, All that in this delightfull Gardin growes, Should happie be, and haue immortall blis: For here all plente, and all pleasure flowes, And sweet loue gentle fits emongst them throwes, Without fell rancor, or fond gealosie; Franckly each paramour his leman knowes, Each bird his mate, ne any does enuie Their goodly meriment, and gay felicitie. (41) There is such a strong contrast between what happens in the Garden of Adonis and what happens outside. The Busirane and Malbecco episodes manifest all the depredations of “fell rancor, or fond gealousie,” with paramours knowing almost nothing of each other, with mates exchanging, and with a mix of misery and lewd merriment, ominously foreshadowed here. Genius at the Bower of Bliss leads ill-fated characters to such places. Like Old Genius, the genius of youthful appearance at the Bower of Bliss is the porter, although the way he functions at the “double Gates” is a little different. The first person that Guyon encounters at the threshold of the Bower of Bliss is Genius, whom Spenser wryly refers to as the being “[t]hey in that place him Genius did call” (2.12.47). He is the spirit of the place which itself suggests deception; indeed, this character acts out the evil daemon that several of Spenser’s contemporaries and predecessors suggest about the perils of the human genius. Spenser writes, 165 “He of this Gardin had the gouernall, / And Pleasures porter was deuizd to be” (2.12.48).14 In one sense, genius has authority and governance, but the question of who “deuizd” him to be pleasure’s porter remains: is it Acrasia?15 Is it Guyon as an Everyman type? Is it Nature? Is it some principle of Art?16 Is it Spenser? Is it the reader?17 These questions collude with the physical feature of indefiniteness. The garden rises out of the water and concludes the naval part of Guyon’s voyage (“Goodly it was enclosed round about”), but the land melds with the surrounding sea. The gate is indistinguishable in colour and structure from the foam of the ivory-tinted waves, and invites numerous kinds of reading: “All this, and more might in that goodly Gate / Be read” (2.12.46). The extreme porousness of the gate is important to the category of place that is the Bower of Bliss, having a gate “that ever open stood to all” as an enticement rather than a boundary (2.12.46). Thus, Genius also entices, and is porous in category and appearance. He is referred to with a masculine pronoun but is wearing a dress-like “looser Garment,” and with shoes “[n]ot fit for speedy pace, or manly exercize” (46). Spenser describes the Genius at the Bower almost entirely in terms of effect: a “comely personage of stature tall, / And semblaunce pleasing, more than naturall, / That trauellers to him seemd to entize” (46).18 14 D. T. Starnes has noted that Spenser’s first readers would have been aware of some derivatives of genius, including geruli and genialis, which denoted porters, and mirth or pleasure, respectively, so that the “meaning of 'Pleasures porter' must have been well understood by Spenser's contemporaries and readers” (240-41). Notably, “well understood,” as a term, definitely does not mean perspicuous in Spenser’s representation. 15 “The Bower of Bliss” is never quite renamed, but it is referred to as Acrasia’s possession (2.5.27). 16 Nature and art are both oddly implicated in one of the narrator’s comments on approach: “A place pickt out by choice of best aliue, / That natures worke by art can imitate” (2.12.42). 17 The reader, because the narrator offers an indirect address about what “might be red” (2.12.46). 18 This Genius uses a “staff in hand for more Formality,” but formality is both the theory and practice of Spenser’s poetry. The Palmer is almost a foil to Genius in his similarity, as he makes a net that is “formally” framed (81), and has a staff that is not used idly, but is “vertuous.” Spenser’s reference to the genius’s “semblaunce pleasing, more than natural” (46), and “guileful Semblaunts, which he makes us see” (48) eerily echoes Spenser’s own intent to achieve education through a “Darke Conceit,” Philip Sidney’s theories about allegorical poetry as the lie that reveals the truth, and the centrality that George Puttenham gives to allegory as the “figure of the false semblaunt” (156). Genius as the purveyor of guilefulness is given a further layer of difficulty when one realizes that the option of the “good genius” is similar to the deeply flawed Phantastes from the House of Alma, who shares shadows of what might be seen in the future. 166 The cosmic and moral overtone of this boundarylessness is foreshadowed in the “grosse fog” that envelops Guyon so badly “[t]hat all things one, and one as nothing was, / And this great Vniuerse seemd one confused mas” (2.12.34). Spenser distinguishes the “evil demon” of the place from different potential understandings of Genius: They in that place him Genius did call: Not that celestial powre, to whom the care Of life, and generation of all That liues, pertaines in charge particulare; Who wondrous things concerning our welfare, And straunge phantomes doth let vs oft forsee, And oft of secret ill bids vs beware: That is our Selfe; whom though we do not see, Yet each doth in him selfe it well perceiue to bee. (2.12.47) One might notice that right away Spenser offers more visions of Genius. Even the “good” genii are double. Capital “G” Genius is here conflated with little “g” genius. This passage leads to Lewis’s famous appraisal “that Spenser was, in fact, confused” (363), because he brings together the idea of genius as the celestial power of generation and the cast of the individual genius. Roland Greene asserts that the “difficulty here” is based on the fact that “Spenser conflates different usages of the term ‘genius,’ such as the god of generation, the genius loci or presiding spirit of any place, and the particular genius within each self that prompts human beings toward good” (26). But it is quite clear from this passage that Spenser, at some level of textual query, interrogates the relationship between the gen-eral and the “charge particulare”. Greene further 167 elaborates that in Guyon’s rejection of the “evil genius,” there is “a significant preview of what will be Guyon’s approach to the Bower in large: refusing to read the figure’s appearance as self or other or both, Guyon simply overturns his bowl and breaks his staff” (27). The Bower of Bliss is in large part about the recognition of aspects of the self that one might be hesitant to reject, which is partly why the narrator dwells on images so sensuously and lavishly.19 Like Guyon, the captives are noble youths: gentil persons who are now captive of their genial (and genital) proclivities.20 The place itself is “commendable,” generally to those with bodies, but almost shows a subjectivity in its enticement specifically to Guyon (and the reader): There the most daintie Paradise on ground, It selfe doth offer to his sober eye, In which all pleasures plenteously abound, And none does others happinesse enuye: The painted flowres, the trees vpshooting hye, The dales for shade, the hilles for breathing space, The trembling groues, the Christall running by; And that, which all faire workes doth most aggrace, The art, which all that wrought, appeared in no place. (58) Pleasure’s porter has his invitation rejected, but in fact Guyon proceeds into the very place the Genius intended for him to go all along. The place’s very self, and its differentiated spatial 19 The Palmer exemplifying Reason chastises Guyon for having lustful eyes following a scene that Harry Berger, Jr. calls a “caricature of what it is ‘that men in women do require,’ the lineaments not of gratified desire but of men’s pornographic fantasy” (226). Harry Berger, Jr. has argued that the gaze is exceedingly androcentric, and the episode epitomizes male desire as well as misogynistic containment. Judith Anderson has probingly noted that the passage is obviously sensuous in dimensions and capacities that are constantly subject to transformations that do not necessitate maleness (“Outsides, Insides, Upsides, Downsides in the Bower of Bliss”, 77-91). 20 John Guillory discusses Spenser’s discourse of ideas about genealogy and genesis, making the point that “currents of significance that run in The Faerie Queene well below the level of the sentence. Here is the list: gens, genus, genius, generation, general, gentile, gentle, gentleman, generous, genealogy, gender, genesis, genital” (34). 168 attributes (“hilles for breathing space,” “trembling groves”) offer a variety of pleasing invitations, from the innocuous to the lewd. The briefly personified paradisal ground, and the trembling groves, offer themselves as sights and parts of the place – that appeared in “no place”, partly because Spenser equivocates on whether the Bower of Bliss is a psychic or a natural place (i.e., the function of the garden as a eutopia or a utopia). In another part of the garden, “Infinit streames” create optical illusions in a laver, “sweet and fair to see,” which gives a different sight of spatial scale: the “depth exceeded not three cubits hight”, but “a little lake it seemd to be” (2.12.62). This fountain and its waters are smothered in the diction of perception: “pure and shiny,” “one might se,” wrought with “curious imageree,” spread with “purest gold, “so coloured,” “That wight, who did not well auis’d it vew, / Would surely deeme it to be yuie trew,” “drops of Christall seemd,” etc. (60-62). This is the same fountain where Guyon watches two naked women wrestle, and where they become reflections of his “greedy eyes.” By hiding underneath the waves, making him “more desirous”, causing his “stubborne brest . . . secret pleasaunce to embrace,” and making the waters reflect his own inclinations (“through the Christall waues appeared plaine”), they reveal the fountain to be one of Narcissus. Guyon shows a potential for being absorbed into and identifying with the place, which represents his impulse to destroy the structures, “within,” at several planes of ontology, exterior and interior: But all those pleasant bowres and Pallace braue, Guyon broke downe, with rigour pittilesse; Ne ought their goodly workmanship might saue Them from the tempest of his wrathfulnesse, 169 But that their blisse he turn'd to balefulnesse: Their groues he feld, their gardins did deface, Their arbers spoyle, their Cabinets suppresse, Their banket houses burne, their buildings race, And of the fairest late, now made the fowlest place. Guyon invites the ravages of time and its pitilessness into the Bower of Bliss, a place that formerly had perpetual meeting of “Spring and Harvest.” Helfer explains that the ruined Bower of Bliss is like the ruins of Rome and Verulamium in its meditation on vanity (“emptiness”), and its forceful engagement with the violence of history. This episode and many that follow show places being emptied or ruined, only to be filled with a good or evil presence. Guyon wrenches the young men there that have lapsed into forgetfulness, who now need to edify their own mnemonic structures, the passage following closely on the heels of Guyon having gone to Eumnestes and having read Briton Monuments in the House of Alma. Spenser represents Guyon offering the hope of building them into “vertuous gentlemen” – their own carefully mortared Alma, rather than passive pawns of their own genius of concupiscence, “acrasia”. “Great Workmanship and Wondrous Power”: Spirit and Place in The Faerie Queene This chapter has been establishing that throughout the writings of Spenser’s predecessors, contemporaries, earlier poems, and the “Genius Cantos” of the Faerie Queene (2.12, 3.6), the ideas and the language of spiritual entities, spiritual presence, and the self, are linked to the genius – and, by extension, to the genius loci. This is important context for evaluating the representation of allegorical places in the Faerie Queene. The implication is not that every character and spiritual entity in the Faerie Queene is strictly a genius loci: but the implication is 170 that often the characters and allegorical places of FQ have a conspicuous relationship of exchange and material effect. Particularly pertinent to Spenser’s project is that his places show a good deal of plasticity (i.e., mutability), and that many places transform depending on the flag flying above it: that is, with the defeat or displacement of what one may plausibly call the given spirit of the place. In one remarkable passage from the Legend of Holiness, Spenser describes Fidelia as . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . able, with her words to kill, And raise againe to life the hart, that she did thrill. And when she list poure out her larger spright, She would commaund the hastie Sunne to stay, Or backward turne his course from heauens hight; Sometimes great hostes of men she could dismay, Dry-shod to passe, she parts the flouds in tway; And eke huge mountaines from their natiue seat She would commaund, themselues to beare away, And throw in raging sea with roaring threat. Almightie God her gaue such powre, and puissance great. (1.10) Spenser’s “Darke Conceit”, like Fidelia’s “sacred Booke . . . seald with blood, / Wherein darke things were writ” (1.10.13), are both able to “kill” and “raise” with words, show “larger spright[s]” moving floods and mountains “from their natiue seat.” With change to place comes potential presence, illumination and life, and potential absence, repetitive signification, and death. The broader understanding of Spenser’s world as infused with genii is a helpful addition 171 to the scholarly conversations around Spenser’s representation of the subjects and objects, or the “insides and outsides” of characters and places within Fairyland. The genius is a complementary and sometimes an alternative paradigm to the one which states that Spenser confuses or mixes incompatible or contradictory ontologies of material and immaterial. Genii loci allow eminent synergy with (at least, linguistically) real-world intrusions into the conceits of fairyland, and are forces that have, from their Platonic sources, a necessarily dual ontological status, being interior and exterior, material and metaphorical. One way to generalize about The Faerie Queene’s geography is that it is a domain of reification, a meta-place where the micro-places and characters correspond to the psycho-spiritual state of the centred character. Harry Berger, Jr. wrote in 1964 that The Faerie Queene is made up of “places of the soul” (106). A Coleridgean assessment of “mental space,” like this, was theorized further by Stephen Barney who considers “the characters” of Fairyland to “cause events and generate landscapes out of themselves” (117), and where the text offers itself up as a practice in “at-onement.” In particular, Barney reads Book One as an effort to show how the pursuit of holiness is also the pursuit of wholeness (or, at-onement), which explains why the diction of the book fixates on the self so much.21 Readings of this vein are designedly reductive, as even very early Spenser criticism acknowledged.22 At the same time, such readings are almost always possible, provisionally essential, and would almost certainly meet with Spenser’s own 21 Barney connects the Old English root “hal”, which means “hale,” “health,” “whole” and “holy” (135). Barney points out that Una asks Redcrosse, “when he is freed from Orgoglio’s dungeon, what evil star has frowned ‘That of your selfe ye thus berobbed are . . . ?’ (8.42). At the end of his soul-making at the House of Holiness, dazzled by the light Contemplation has shed, he comes to himself: ‘at last whenas himself he gan to find’ (10.68)” (138). 22 E.g., Lewis’ 1933 Allegory of Love, “Not everything in the poem is equally allegorical, or even allegorical at all. We shall find that it is Spenser’s method to have in each book an allegorical core, surrounded by a margin of what is called ‘romance of types’, and relieved by episodes of pure fantasy” (334). Chris Barrett has recently provided compelling work on the ways in which the “plain” of The Faerie Queene often resists metaphorical treatment as an “ecology of the unsignifying” (18). 172 approval of the virtue-oriented practice of reading, even in sections of the book that most deeply challenge the “reification” reading.23 A solution that has appealed to numerous Spenser critics is to assert the continuum of mind and world for Spenser’s paradigm of imagination and metaphor, based on the idea expressed by Pico de Mirandelo’s Heptaplus, that “all allegoric interpretation” relates to the celestial, mental, and physical plain being “held together by ties of harmony, all these worlds with mutual liberality exchange their natures as well as their names” (25).24 Isabel Macaffrey is perhaps the most notable writer theorizing the relationship of Spenser’s inner and outer worlds in The Faerie Queene. She explains that Spenser alternates between ontological models, where some are analogical rather than figurative, and that Spenser’s road in The Faerie Queene winds “not only ‘through places of the soul,’ but through fictive places that point toward or stand for actual locations in the macrocosm, to wit, Heaven, Hell, and the wilderness of this world” (180-85). Since then, the ideas of ecocriticism and Geohumoralism have influenced other commentators: Michael Schoenfeldt characterizes Spenser’s relationship to the Early Modern idea “of interior selfhood . . . which was based on an humoral equilibrium” (42) in the House of Alma, aiming to congeal spiritual and material ideas of interiority; Gail Kern Paster observes out how the Legend of Temperance shows an intimate relationship between the landscape and the selfhood of Guyon. Catherine Gimelli Martin demonstrates Spenser’s deep consonance with cosmological traditions of “Neoplatonic geography”, and shows how several writers in Spenser’s time were elaborating on the human analogy to parts of the earth, and explicating Guyon’s 23 Kenneth Borris’ reading of Book Six treats the book as a further route of “mental space” (86), and he shows numerous psychological, moral references and puns that seem conventionally allegorical, where other critics before him had suggested a breakdown of figurative modes in the Legend of Courtesy (145-82). 24 Thomas Roche, Jr. first quoted this passage in his 1964 book, Kindly flame (7-8). 173 struggles against earth, water, air, and fire in various stages of book two in this vein.25 Most recently, Jennifer Vaught connects medieval architectural allegory to Spenser, showing how he draws on a cultural vocabulary concerning “the world of things, from houses to hammers” as being “expressive of the body and mind”, noting his narrativization of “analogous characters, dwellings, and situations” which associate “personhood and the physical environments” (5-11). These scholars have demonstrated that Spenser does not imagine his extended metaphors as disembodied and unspirited, but the concept of the genius envelops, enriches, and clarifies more about this existing conversation. The spirit of the place provides crucial context to the meaning of Spenser’s representation of the transformation of place in the Faerie Queene. If Spenser explicitly brings up Alan of Lille’s cosmogenic narrative in the Mutability Cantos, and directly employs genius loci characters in the Faerie Queene and in the Complaints, it behooves critics to consider a connection for his other representations of topographical and architectural metaphors. While the places of The Faerie Queene are not always simple reflections of psychic interiority, places do morph according to the way Spenser “enregisters” ideas in the nooks of Fairyland. The places overwhelmingly appear in the genitive or the possessive: e.g., “Errours den” or the “House of Pride”, from early in Book I. At the end of Book II, Guyon’s capstone journey goes from Alma’s Castle, to the Gulfe of Greedinesse, the Rocke of Vile Reproach, the Whirlpool of Decay, the Gate of False Dreams, and the Bower of Bliss. The mirror of this 25 She points out a magnificent passage from Pierre de la Primaudaye’s French Academie that had its first English translation in 1586 CE (284). The universe is compounded of vnlike elements, of earth, water, ayre, and fire, . . . preserued by Analogie and proportion, which they haue together: and as we see in a mans body . . . : in a house, . . . politike body . . . and . . . euery body mingled with heate, colde, drie and moiste, is preserued by the same reason of analogie and proportion which they haue together: so it is in euery commonwealth, well appointed and ordered, which consisting of many and sundry subiects, is maintained by their vnitie, beeing brought to bee of one consent and will, and to communicate their workes, artes, and exercises together for common benefite and profit. (744) 174 formula appears in relation to characters when Caelia and Alma are called the “ladie of the place” for the House of Holiness and House of Alma, respectively (1.10.8, 2.11.16). However, the titles do not always correspond to the “first name”. The Bower of Bliss is the false “front” of what is actually the “cursed land” where “Acrasia does wonne” (2.1.51): the place name flaunting a propagandistic misnomer, much like “[t]he false Duessa” is “cloked with Fidessaes name” (1.7.1).26 Virtually the same point is made one canto after the Bower of Bliss episode, which involves Malecasta’s dominion over the Castle Joyous. Spenser utilizes several mapping options by showing a ruler of a place with a synonymous name (Errours Den), a complementary name (Phaedria and Idle Lake), or a contrary name (Acrasia and the Bower of Bliss). The House of Pride is governed by Lucifera, and not Pride, and this point is obviously not trivial for Spenser’s political or theological commentary. What critics now refer to as the “Cave of Despair” is never called this in Spenser’s text. Rather, it is the place “where that same wicked wight [Despaire] / His dwelling has, low in an hollow caue” (1.9.33). The same goes for what commentators call the Cave of Mammon, which the argument of the canto states, “Guyon findes Mammon in a delue” and a “secret store” (2.7). Even though many places in The Faerie Queene offer the basic formula of abstract topology, such as the “Idle Lake” (2.6), much more often the places are identified by their belonging to what sometimes functions as a genius loci, or to a proper “incarnate deuill” (i.e., Ate, 4.2.3) with more linguistic polysemousness, such as the House of Busirane, or Mammon’s domain, large places that have numerous spatial-conceptual rooms in capacity.27 26 “The cursed land where many wend amis, / And know it by the name; it hight the Bowre of blis. / Her blisse is all in pleasure and delight” (2.2.52). 27 Within Mammon’s realm, Spenser represents the association of sleep, death, riches and hell as having spatial proximity for his symbolic picture: “For next to death is Sleepe to be compard: / Therefore his house is vnto his annext; / Here Sleep, there Richesse, & Hel-gate the[m] both betwext” (2.7.25). Sleep and riches obviously exist on the surface of the terrestrial world, and while Spenser’s choice of representation is clearly influenced by Vergil, the point that hell has its domain touching both of these mundane items is a haunting image. 175 When a character has a sort of spiritual dominion over a place, s/he can affect its components, permeability and extent. The “houses forme” for Mammon’s dwelling, “within was rude and strong, / Like an huge caue, hewne out of rocky clift” (2.7.28). The place is both a house, and a cave, but really it is neither: a place of impossible scale connected to the entire surface of the earth as well as the breadth of Hades. The cave is not offered the abstraction formula for its title, but its possession under the “God of the world and worldlings . . . / Great Mammon, greatest god below the skye” conveys a sublime sense in which the setting of Canto 7 melds with Spenser’s suggestion that Mammon has power over all the world. Spenser writes, So soone as Mammon there arriu'd, the dore To him did open, and affoorded way; Him followed eke Sir Guyon euermore, Ne darkenesse him, ne daunger might dismay. Soone as he entred was, the dore streight way Did shut, and from behind it forth there lept. (2.7.26) The place is at one with Mammon’s will, including its lighting and its psychological effect of daunger. The door is generated and shifts its thresholds according to the dictates of its governing spirit who remains the true prince of his realm, basically unchallenged by Guyon. The Orgoglio Cantos (1.7, 1.8), similarly, tie numerous elements of space and place with the actions of the giant. He is “[b]rought forth” out of “this monstrous masse of earthly slime, / Puft vp with emptie wind, and fild with sinfull crime” (1.7.9), and his castle like him, is “builded strong and hie” (1.8.2), made of the same kind of stonework. When Arthur approaches and blows his bugle, the giant is “dismayed” at the same time that “all the castle quaked from the ground, / And euery dore of freewill open flew” (1.8.5). Spenser provokes a question if the doors are made of freewill 176 that open on account of a personage’s daunted pride, or if they are of such a mind-full substance as to open of their own freewill. The sense in which Fairyland is “mental space” corresponds to the frequent analogies between mind and world. The analogies, however, do not imply the simple reduction of landscape and edifice to the projection of one man or woman’s mind, even Spenser’s. It is sometimes ambiguous whether a character generates or discovers a place.28 This straddling of ontologies corresponds to the ambiguous status of the Genius that “is our self” and the “celestial powre, to whom the care / Of life, and generation of all / That liues, pertaines in charge particulare” (2.12.47). Timias, “Full of sad anguish, and in heauy case” finds a . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . fit solitary place For wofull wight, chose out a gloomy glade, Where hardly eye mote see bright heauens face, For mossy trees, which couered all with shade And sad melancholy: there he his cabin made. (4.7.38) The adjectives are interchangeably assigned to the place and to his affective condition; in this way, he partly discovers a place, and partly builds a place out of what Spenser offers of his immediate emotional condition. Before the Blatant Beast destroys her serenity, Serena is “[a]llur'd with myldnesse of the gentle wether, / And pleasaunce of the place, the which was dight” (6.3.23). Una lights segments of the Wandering Wood where she goes, bringing what might be allegorized as the illumination of Truth: though “[i]n wildernesse and wastfull deserts”, she makes “a sunshine in the shadie place” (1.3.3-4). Orgoglio’s stature and overwhelming 28 Judith Dundas argues that Spenser's use of the rhetorical device of topographia discussed in Renaissance textbooks, is a trope that recognizes “a sympathetic relation between man and his surroundings, a sense that man involuntarily seeks out a place in keeping with his state of mind” (67). 177 physicality impose on the surrounding imagery, but it is Ignaro who is said to be the “the auncient keeper of that place, / And foster father of the Gyant dead; / His name Ignaro did his nature right aread” (1.8.31). Ignaro is intimately tied and titled to the place, while readers might otherwise have suspected it to be Orgoglio’s stomping ground. Therefore, Spenser implies, it is ignorance that Redcrosse needs rescue from, and as Ignaro proceeds from the castle, so at last Redcrosse can too. Calidore rides “[t]hrough hils, through dales, throgh forests, & throgh plaines / In that same quest” (6.9.2) to spread civility and subdue the discourteousness of the Blatant Beast and its perverse diffusion of presence into all aspects of Fairyland, and what Spenser doubtlessly sees as a mirror to Elizabethan society, from the cities to the towns, and “into the countrie forsed, / And from the country back to priuate farmes he scorsed” (6.9.3). The Blatant Beast does not emerge from a “natiue seat” like a classical genius loci, but it is arguably always looking for a new place to call its own.29 If Spenser believes, at some level, in the astral or spiritual influence on place, which is manifestly the case, “presence” of a figure in a literary work stands as a narrative structure for the reader’s conceptual, but also real-world comprehension. Historical, literal, and immaterial presences all meet in Fairyland’s present.30 Places from all time become possible allegories in 29 Spenser’s understanding of a genius loci is certainly not the same as an ancient Roman, but he did believe in the actual presence of spirits that could inhabit and influence place. Jon Quitslund offers a reasonable account of Spenser’s representation of Greco-Roman deities was especially appropriate to his form and amplified the allegorical signals to his readers: “Classical lore and the conventions of romance freed Spenser from obligations to represent either facts or beliefs literally, which was convenient because both were recognized as being disputable and variable” (101). Quitslund acknowledges that the Old Genius of the Garden of Adonis might correspond to what Spenser understood as an actual cosmogenic force, but so does Adonis, who was clearly intended to provoke metaphorical reading. Genii themselves, as represented in the Complaints discussed earlier, straddle metaphor and literal or historical reality. 30 Kathryn Walls proposes that Spenser had no conceptual categories like “medieval”, but considered the Incarnation as the category of history, which divided processes, peoples, and kings as figures of spiritual states (38-57). One might add that spiritual states are more broadly incarnated, beyond just Christ figures. Wayne Erickson writes that Fairyland is “time-inclusive” or “transhistorical” with “seeming inconsistencies of time and space” reconciled “within a world that may include the whole of history, the total potential of mind and will, past mistakes, present desires, future glories” (62). Nohrnberg and Erickson note that there are biblical events, persons of the 178 Fairyland. Ate’s dwelling is decorated by the ruins of “Babylon, / Of fatall Thebes, of Rome,” “Ragged monuments of times forepast” (4.1.21-22), in the same way that her house is made of the spiritual principles that made the historic places as they were to be: “Such was her house within; but all without, / The barren ground was full of wicked weedes / . . . , The seedes of euill wordes, and factious deedes” (4.1.25). In the House of Ate, history is the consummate “grounds” for allegory. Arthur is Spenser’s main “ensample”, and Arthur is “historical” rather than the essentialist nomen “Magnificence”. Spenser further suggests that Arthur encapsulates all twelve virtues, having an impossibly expansive signification. Spenser’s understanding of allegory as including figures of history and enigmatic symbols is in this way consonant with his contemporaries George Puttenham and John Harington understand as allegory in their own important theories of poetry.31 The passage on British history is one of the clearest instances of the connection of spiritual presence leading to the naming of place: “The land,” Spenser writes, which warlike Britons now possesse, And therein haue their mightie empire raysd, fourth century, the sixth century, and the Elizabethan period, as well as a Golden Age, an age of classical myth, and a prophetic future, all brought together in Spenser’s pages. 31 In the Arte of English Poesie, George Puttenham denotes allegory “a long and perpetuall Metaphore” much as Spenser writes of his story as a continued allegory. But most notably, Puttenham considers it proper to allegory for the author not to label the meaning of all vehicles: Ye haue another manner of Allegorie not full, but mixt, as he that wrate thus: The cloudes of care haue coured all my coste, The stormes of strife, do threaten to appeare: The waues of woe, wherein my ship is toste. . . . I call him not a full Allegorie, but mixt, bicause he discouers withall what the cloud, storme, waue, and the rest are, which in a full allegorie should not be discouered, but left at large to the readers iudgement and coniecture. (156) Similarly, John Harington, in his “Apologie for Poetrie” prefacing his translation of Orlando Furioso, writes that the “The ancient poets have indeed wrapped as it were in their writings diverse and sundry meanings, which they call the senses or mysteries thereof” so that “weaker capacities will feede themselues with the pleasantnes of the historie and sweetnes of the verse. Some that haue stronger stomackes will as it were take a further taste of the Morall sence, a third sort more high conceited then they, will digest the Allegorie” (4-5). Readers discover and appropriate the metaphorical senses. 179 In antique times was saluage wildernesse, Vnpeopled, vnmanurd, vnprou'd, vnpraysd. (2.10.5) Being empty, and even “desolate”, it did not have a name and it did not “deserue a name to haue”, till a mariner settles the island and names it Albion (2.10.6). Britain in the days of Arthur and Guyon’s present has a people that have “prou’d” themselves through being “warlike”. Spenser sees the people of Albion as most real when they most prove their allegorical nomenclature. Spenser connects London’s nickname of “Troynovaunt” to Brutus who comes from “royall stocke of old Assaracs line”, and who destroys the occupying giants who had “[p]olluted. . . the gentle soyle”, originated from “companing with feends and filthy Spright” (2.10.8). Brutus deprives them “of their vniust possession” (2.10.9). Spenser cares who the primary “spright” of influence on a given place happens to be at the time, and political jurisdiction is not at all a secondary issue. For instance, the faerie city of “Cleopolis” is called so because of Gloriane: it is the place “[i]n which that fairest Faerie Queene doth dwell” (1.10.58). On the other hand, absence, and the evil presence of sprights must be overturned, which is part of the background of why Spenser is so interested in preserving, for instance, a civilizing influence in Ireland, a garrison of English troops and the English plantation at Ulster, as expressed in A View of the Present State of Ireland. Julia Reinhard Lupton rightly connects Spenser’s representation of Ireland as a place of waste to establishing what he sees as a more legitimate presence: “Spenser’s tract defines Ireland as wasteland (desolate, depeopled, and unpossessed) in order to defend an active policy of further wasting followed by restorative ‘plantation.’” (212). In the “Hymn of Heavenly Love” God is said to see “a waste and emptie place / In his wyde Pallace, through those Angels fall,” and decides to install “A new vnknowen Colony therein, / […] from earths base Groundworke” (101-5). Questions of absence and 180 presence are clearly of moral importance to what Spenser hopes to see in “groundwork.” Names of import are just as often imported from the traces of history as they are from philosophical discourses.32 This episode in Cantos 10 and 11 of Book 5, though seemingly focused on history rather than theology or philosophy, reveals a receptiveness to the concept of the genius loci, in what could be mistaken as a univocal “political allegory.” This episode involves a conflict between Belge and Geryoneo. Belge, as the name suggests, is something like a personification of the Low Countries occupied by Spain (Geryoneo), which England was somewhat engaged in supporting militarily. Belge, Geryoneo, and Arthur (who supports Belge), might best be thought of as genii loci for their respective countries. Presence within the cities, ports, citadels, and the church is the central question of power in these cantos. The kingdom is nameless throughout the entire passage, and accordingly it changes hands between the genii. In the early part of the narrative, “two Springals of full tender yeares, / Farre thence from forrein land” look for help to cast out the “strong Tyrant, who inuaded has / [Belge’s] land” (5.10.6). The concentric circles of waning governance, result in a waning vitality of place, with a “Castle” that is said to be occupied in Belge’s “necke,” choking her (5.10.25). With the body politic deprived of “strength,” the city is “now ruinate”, with the historically legitimate ruler “into moores and marshes banisht […] / Out of the pleasant soyle, and citties glad, / In which she wont to harbour happily” (5.10.18). If Belge 32 Anne Ferry’s book on sixteenth-century naming notes that the names of places and creatures have an organizing and a magical or ritual valence, but there is a distinct sense in which the “rightness” of names “is measured by the signifying power of the creatures themselves” to follow “the divinely ordained pattern of subsequent history” (30). Alastair Fowler explains, with reference to English natal names like Scudamour, Ashes, Imago Saeculi, Free-gift, Reformation, Tribulation, Joy Again, how the “possibility of overlap between quotidian life and the realm of romance is one that Spenser appears to have taken a special delight in” (35). Spenser is also clearly fascinated with forces of nature filling places, too. Rivers are bearers of time-symbols and nourishment for cities. The Nile provides “Aegiptian slime” as the basis for the human body; but in Spenser’s general discussion of rivers during the marriage of Thames and Medway, he states that the sea gods, the river genii, are “famous founders . . . Of puissant Nations” (4.11.15); and, “what doe I their names seek to rehearse, / Which all the world haue with their issue fild” (4.11.17). 181 has fled to the “fennes” (5.10.18), it is because “all places [are] full of forraine powers” and “pallaces possessed of [her] foe” (5.10.23). Arthur arrives as a character who substantively shifts the spiritual and physical conditions of the place, as he is “[a]dmyr'd of all the rest in presence there” (5.10.15). A “Seneschall” rules the land on the face of things, with “new lawes and orders new / Imposd on it, with many a hard condition” (5.10.27). This particular term for a martial-political figure expressly refers to jurisdiction over a geographical region, but Spenser progressively reveals that he is a husk for a deeper possession of the land. Arthur handily defeats the Seneschall and leads Belge and her sons “into that Castle” (5.10.39). But greater than the generic “Seneschall” is Geryoneo, representing the ongoing presence of Spanish forces, which presents a much harder challenge for Arthur.33 When Arthur beats Geryoneo in combat, Belge frames the benefit as a revival of her spirit, “That earst was dead, restor'd to life againe,” (5.11.16), but still an incomplete conquest. Behind Geryoneo is the creature that is worshipped, forcing the people to give “the honour that is dew / To God, to doe vnto his Idole most vntrew” (5.10.27). Spenser in this way implies that the “underlying” problem for the low countries beyond Spanish rule, is the false religion that has corrupted the land beneath the political and martial placeholders. Though unseen, it “liues on earth” (5.10.29), indicating its spiritual sensitivity combined with its embodied effects.34 But when the beast is defeated, Arthur is able to get Belge “settled in her raine” (5.11.35). The episode deals in the currency of the discussions above: there is a mixed diction of spatial and spiritual effects. Spenser pictures a relationship of the alterable constructed world and 33 When Geryoneo attacks Arthur, he makes “him stagger with vncertaine sway” (5.11.11). 34 The creature has immense jurisdiction over the place, enabled by the mighty Seneschall with “a strong garrisone” (5.10.30), but the Seneschall is buttressed by the fierce jealousy of the spirit filling its territory: “And vnderneath this Idoll there doth lie / An hideous monster, that doth it defend” (5.11.20). The spirit of Belge herself, seems to have a conspicuous sensitivity to the blasphemies of the beast, which causes her “selfe” to be “therewith stonied sore” (5.11.30). 182 the natural world. He represents the relationship of a corrupt genius and a good one as occupying territory differently. These Cantos employ the language of the possession of place and violent control, indicating centers and peripheries of conceptual and political terrain with real-world valence. Spenser represents the causes and effects of presence and absence in accordance with the magical or mysterious relationship of language to the construction and maintenance of the place. Finally, he shows historical persons as “ensamples” that act as synechdoches for larger groups and their temporalities of interest. So, Spenser’s epic considers ruins, waste, wilderness, and absence to be problems, containers that require re-memberance, reformation, and requisition. But at the same time, he sees ruin as a fact of Mutability, and a necessary thing to bring to regimes of duplicity and false religion. It is notable that many of Spenser’s moralizing interludes come at the moment of architectural devastation, as in the Bower of Bliss. Gordon Teskey’s ground-breaking work on allegory and violence has noted the “moment of revelation” that come with an allegorical death: “when we read an allegory, and especially when we read Spenser, we have the uneasy suspicion that death is mysteriously, imperceptibly, disturbingly present in the working of the poetry itself. The very liveliness of the allegorical figures, their frenetic, jerky, galvanic life, makes us think of dead bodies through which an electric current is passed” (66). Teskey’s work restricts itself to characters, but the insight about what happens to the bodies of persons and personifications can certainly extend to the topifications. Spenser’s allegorical places occupy a strange liminality of conflicting desires for order and dissolution, part and parcel of his “endless werke.” The “good guys” and the “bad guys”, beneficent genii and evil genii, all share the psychomachian roles of constructing buildings, besieging structures, ruining them, or occupying them for temporary periods. When genii are destroyed or displaced from their locus, the place changes, or they 183 generate a new haunt. A concept that Lewis popularized is that of the “allegorical core,” which he identifies with various places at the “center” of the different legends. This chapter highlights that the “cores” are not so stable, which is not to discredit Lewis’s idea, but to complicate it by noting that it is precisely instability and plasticity of place that often most electrifies Spenser’s metaphors.35 The resonance of spiritual and spatial change in simultaneity should be understood as implied by the representations of Genii characters we see in Book 2 and Book 3, immediate context of the two most explicit genii passages of The Faerie Queene.36 Some of the notable neighbours to Genius and Old Genius that reveal Spenser’s ideas about the transformation of spirit and place include Alma, Maleger, Malbecoo, and especially Busirane. Alma’s House stands opposite to Acrasia and her associated Genius’. The odd thing about the parallel between the House of Alma and the Bower of Bliss is that the House of Alma is obviously similar to a castle or manor house, with all of its elements constructed by an architect: the height of Artifice. The Bower of Bliss, on the other hand, is mostly garden, field, grove, and fountain: largely natural environs with just adaptations for beautification. However, Spenser intends for the first place to be the prime example of Nature and God’s intent in creation, and the other of dissimulating Art.37 There are traditions for representing the seat of the 35 Spenser’s dynamic approach to metaphor is discussed in numerous parts of Rufus Wood’s Metaphor and Belief in the Faerie Queene, and is the theme of the recent book by Teskey (Spenserian Moments). 36 The Legend of Holiness is an exception that suggests the rule for many of the other legends, because places are not destroyed, and the characters do not really die. Redcrosse fails to defeat any genius loci substantially, with the exception of the dragon at the end, and only after he has become a type of Christ and St. George. The foes all live in an undeath whenever Redcrosse seems to have defeated them in arms, and he fails to destroy individual dwellings, while becoming the “errant knight” of the Wandering Wood (Quilligan 33-36). From Errours Cave he is told to “[f]ly, fly . . . this is no place for liuing men” (1.1.13), and while in the Cave of Despair, he is told, “Arise, Sir knight arise, and leaue this cursed place” (1.9.53). The triumph over Orgoglio involves removing Redcrosse from Ignaro, but the castle is not defaced. 37 This paradoxical representation of allegorical haunts is reversed with the Garden of Adonis and the House of Busirane in the next legend. 184 soul as a garden and as a castle,38 but Spenser’s distracting and paradoxical choice of allegorical place seems to stem from his interest in highlighting danger and the necessity of temperate maintenance. Ruinous transformation is threatened from the outset of the description of Alma’s house, is hinted at throughout, and is ultimately manifested in different aspects of the following Acrasia narrative: Of all Gods workes, which do this world adorne, There is no one more faire and excellent, Then is mans body both for powre and forme, Whiles it is kept in sober gouernment; But none then it, more fowle and indecent, Distempred through misrule and passions bace: It growes a Monster, and incontinent Doth loose his dignitie and natiue grace. Behold, who list, both one and other in this place. (2.9.1) The wording of this passage is ambiguous about what “one and other” are referenced: power and form, or the the monstrous and the beautiful energies within the house? The House of Alma shows enormous mutability, from the “Aegyptian slime” that make its walls, to Phantastes’ unstable condition in the Brain Turret. Michael Schoenfeldt expertly explains that “uncontrolled phantasy lies close the destructive savagery which lurks, similarly insubstantial and ‘dispersed thin’ without. The maintenance of the castle is more than a concerted defence of the ordered 38 Abigail Wheatley discusses the castle as soul trope in The Idea of the Castle in Medieval England (78-111) and the garden as soul idea is discussed briefly in a smattering of critics and encyclopedias like Maurus’ and the anonymous Allegoriae in Sacram Scripturam. 185 interior against the disorderly exterior. The interior, too, contains elements which are potentially destructive” (69). It remains true, however, that none of the characters within Alma, even during the siege, become monsters in this specific context – monstrous actors are only shown outside the house and in the Bower of Bliss episode that follows. What “governs” educable bodies is given refuge and is “built up” inside Alma. Again and again, Spenser’s narrator notes that it is Alma’s governance and presence that makes the House of Alma what it is. The House of Alma is, among other things, a memory house with “diuerse roomes, and diuerse stages” (2.9.47).39 It is, at the same time, a metaphorical description of the physicality of the aging brain, with its “worm eaten” aspects and “canker holes,” but still committed to “iust memory.” As the resident anima, Alma animates the people and the place, directing their movements with scrupulous orderliness, a stark contrast to Phaedria’s earlier allurements to “carelesse ease” in the Idle Lake, with the “wide” sea “easie for to stray; / The wind vnstable, and doth neuer stay” (2.6.23). When Guyon, Arthur, and Alma come to the main hall, all notice the change to the room itself: “at these straungers presence euery one did hush. / Soone as the gracious Alma came in place, / They all attonce out of their seates arose” (2.9.35-36). In the Aristotelian sense, multiple levels of soul, from the vegetative to the animal to the rational, reside in the House of Alma in Canto 9, and each has presence in its proper place, even though the meta-place and its power is Alma. From the outer walls to Port Esquiline, to the kitchen, to the porch, to the furnace, Alma is noted to have “led them right” 39 Amy Cooper highlights the mnemonic features of the Faerie Queene, with this passage among many others that reveal Spenser’s spatial mnemotechnic strategies that extend to the “wood” outside the allegorical houses: The mnemonic trope of the hunt, Carruthers suggests, “informs the common metaphorical extension in Latin of the word silva, ‘forest,’ to mean a mass of unrelated and disordered material.” By comparing the reader’s path through the Faerie Queene to the huntsman’s path through the forest and thus to the orator’s path through the forests of his memory, the proem to book 2 presents itself as a memory scheme, complete with “signes” or images “sett” in ordered locations or “sondrie place[s].” (799) 186 (2.9.33).40 Spenser presents a longer space of text representing the Brain Turret, which has “great workmanship, & wondrous powre” (2.9.47), a paired architectural and pneumatologic aptness of function. Spenser asserts it is the rooms themselves that are dignified with power, in conjunction with, but not only because of, their genius: “three the chiefest [rooms], and of greatest powre, / In which there dwelt three honorable sages, / The wisest men, I weene, that liued in their ages” (2.9.54). Eumnestes is the genius of a section of the tower, and his chamber is the expression of this otherwise mute personification: That chamber seemed ruinous and old, And therefore was remoued farre behind, Yet were the wals, that did the same vphold, Right firme & strong, though somewhat they declind; And therein sate an old old man, halfe blind, And all decrepit in his feeble corse, Yet liuely vigour rested in his mind, And recompenst him with a better scorse: Weake body well is chang'd for minds redoubled forse. (2.9.55) Spenser trades back and forth in the concourse between physicality and spiritual manifestation, showing that the place is constructed, and subject to some degree of change. He represents the fitness as well as the incongruity of the place as a metaphor for the materiality of the brain’s immaterial activity. A “liuely vigour” of the mind is the basis for the firmness of the walls, even though they are in a state of natural “decline”. The paradox here calls attention to the process of 40 The personifications, such as Diet and Appetite, give her courteous obeisance as she passes their areas: “They both attone / Did dewty to their Lady, as became; / Who passing by, forth led her guestes anone” (2.9.28). 187 the allegorical production of place and the capability of the mind to change bodies, re-emphasized again in the last line of the stanza above. Alma’s bodily, spatial, and spiritual presence is contrasted by the besieging foe Maleger, who is a form of evil genius that demonstrates Spenser’s concept of spiritual-spatial propriety under the threat of mutability. Where Alma is a figure of orderliness and the construct of poetry, history, and God’s design, Maleger is a figure of absence, rhetorical confusion, and of structural depredation. He emerges from the swamps around the “fort of reason” to bring the soul into “captivitie” (2.11.1). He is a “lifelesse shadow” and Arthur wonders “[h]ow to take life from that dead-liuing swaine” (2.11.44). Maleger is in some sense both physical and spiritual, but he is not quite a stable category of either, which becomes especially clear after Arthur plunges his sword into Maleger’s chest: “Flesh without bloud, a person without spright, / Wounds without hurt, a bodie without might” (2.11.40). In spite of being insubstantial, “As pale and wan as ashes was his looke, / His bodie leane and meagre as a rake” (2.11.22), Maleger does have a relationship to the substantial earth: “marked freshly to arize / From th'earth, & from her wombe new spirits to reprize” (2.11.44). Indeed, Maleger has a disturbing similarity to Alma in their common source from Mother Earth, but especially in the way she brings healing the closer she draws to the knights (2.11.49), while Maleger draws nearer in order to tackle and wound. It is telling that Arthur’s solution is to take Maleger far away from Alma, at least displacing his undead presence from Alma for a time: “Therefore to ground he would him cast no more, / Ne him commit to graue terrestriall, / But beare him farre from hope of succour vsuall” (2.11.45). In the House of Alma scenes, Spenser’s metaphorical body does not dematerialize or abstract, but actually emphasizes the goodness of its physicality, vulnerable if improvable.41 41 In contrast, as night falls, the knights encounter “raskall[s]” and “villeins” that are insubstantial as can be: “Hewing and slashing at their idle shades; / For though they bodies seeme, yet substance from them fades” (2.9.14). 188 Maleger is the prelude to Acrasia and her Genius, and another character with the unhappy prefix, Malbecco, is the postlude to the Old Genius of the Garden of Adonis. In the Malbecco episode of Cantos 3.9-10, Spenser uses spatial metaphor to explore the concept of “repetition.” The episode implies that the events of Troy, with Paris and Helen, repeat with Paridell and Hellenore, closer to Troynovaunt. Malbecco, the unwitting and unfortunate figure caught in the middle, perceives his wife is ready “to fly,” “In his disquiet mind”, so he is “distressed diuersly, / Ne wist he how to turne, nor to what place” (3.10.14). He leaves his house, and no place seems like home anymore. Malbecco considers his “search” for her while dressing “like a pilgrim pore” to involve genuinely changing his place and circumstance, and improving his sense of her whereabouts, “euery where that he mote vnderstond” (3.10.19). But Spenser winks that his psycho-spiritual presence is not really achieving change in these new places. The reality is that he brings his “treasure in close store” (3.10.19), and this treasure “was the dearest to his donghill mind” (3.10.15). Some of his treasure is buried in the ground, and he is soon to make his home in such a place. Spenser uses other metaphors to describe Malbecco’s state of mind, which come home to roost, so to speak. Malbecco has “waues of griefe and gealosye” that are “huge” (3.10.17). The waves of jealousy, sure enough, take him to the edge of the sea where he becomes Gealousie. His “selfe-murdring thought” makes it so that “all his substance was consum'd to nought” (3.10.57). His physical condition has “nothing left,” but “like an aery Spright / That on the rockes he fell so flit and light, / That he thereby receiu'd no hurt at all, / But chaunced on a craggy cliff to light” (3.10.57). With this simile here, Spenser’s rhetoric metamorphs into geo-spiritual condition. Malbecco becomes something like a crab with “crooked clawes”, which is the proper kind of genius for “a caue with entrance small” (3.10.57). Alma, on the other hand, is the “Ladie of the place” and Spenser realizes her place in all dimensions, with characteristics as substantial as he can manage in a story, given certain conditions. 189 It is Malbecco the Aery Spright who becomes another part of the ensemble of Spenser’s undead play, the “ensample” and the locus of jealousy: “he neuer dye, but dying liues, / And doth himselfe with sorrow new sustaine, / That death and life attonce vnto him giues” (3.10.60). It is under this cliff of self-murder that he resolves “to build his balefull mansion, / In drery darkenesse, and continuall feare / Of that rockes fall, which euer and anon” (3.10.58). He is, in a sense, unreal for his overwhelming simplification of humanity (which should be a microcosm of the whole world), to a personification with a narrow place and creaturely manifestation, paradoxically exhibiting some aspects of what Jean Baudrillard calls hyperrealism. His place is a permanent corner of the Saturnine, and his new body a partaker in the choicest aspects of bodily melancholia, standing as a “pasture poisonous,” a “cold complexion,” housing a being with “filthy bloud,” “humour rancorous,” which nevertheless transcends the spiritual and embodied divide: the “cureless care” in the “hart” and the “internall smart” that can “transfixe the soule” (3.10.59). This is the “scene” that Spenser sets for Malbecco, who undergoes the famous name change to Gealousie. The transformation is not just of a personification, or of a name. Spenser heavily hints all along that the spatial environment colludes to find a place with the dead-set mind of Malbecco. After Canto 10, Spenser crowns Book 3 with arguably the most direct discussion of metaphor, memory, spirit, and place in all of the Faerie Queene. The House of Busirane episode in Cantos 11 and 12 completes the 1590 version of the Faerie Queene, and this chapter concludes using the context of the above discussions to characterize “what fills the House of Busirane”? The gallery of Busirane’s house is “full” of portraits, idols, and statues with a seeming vitality. Britomart scans the many images on the wall that behave “as they liuing were: / A thousand monstrous formes therein were made, / Such as false loue doth oft vpon him weare: / 190 For loue in thousand monstrous formes doth oft appeare” (3.11.51). The forms are made, and are “there,” but the narrator adds that it is an “appearing” and that the forms are of a “false love.” As Britomart looks with “greedy eyes” and “beholding earnestly / The goodly ordinance of this rich place”, she marvels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . that no footings trace, Nor wight appear'd, but wastefull emptinesse, And solemne silence ouer all that place: Straunge thing it seem'd, that none was to possesse So rich purueyance, ne them keepe with carefulnesse. (3.11.53) Britomart walks alone in a gallery of images that confuse her, and that she can not read well. When she sees an image of Cupid and how “all the people in that ample hous / Did to that image bow their humble knee” she is “amazed” by the “fowle Idolatree” (3.11.49). However, Cupid does not come to life in Britomart’s presence. It is only in the inner chamber where Amoret is being held that Cupid appears, not as a statue, but “in the flesh.” The overwhelming Masque of Cupid, with Ease, Doubt, Daunger, Feare, Hope, Dissemblance, Griefe, Fury, Displeasure, Pleasance, Despight, Cruelty, proceeds before Britomart’s eyes; but Britomart never crosses the threshold through the door as the personifications process. Presence and perception are not identical categories, and thresholds between rooms sometimes separate different ideas. Britomart determines to confront Cupid the next day. She proceeds through the door, “But lo, they streight were vanisht all and some, / Ne liuing wight she saw in all that roome” (3.12.30). The quality of life and nature of the place changes with Britomart’s presence. In contrast, the Masque seems to have a spatial as well as a vital response to Amoret, since it is “With liuing bloud [Busirane] those characters wrate, / Dreadfully dropping from her dying hart” (3.12.31). 191 The undead cast of characters throughout Spenser’s works grows. It seems that many have a necromantic, analogical relationship to the buildings in which they live, and breathe, and have their being. In the context of these passages from Book 3, they are genii not from the height of Nature, the Garden of Adonis, but works of art whose life-form is curiously artificial. The Masque attendees share a relationship of common metaphoricity to the building, in that it is the topification, and they are the personifications. Thomas Roche, Jr. suggests that the House of Busirane comes from the word “abuse,” with the added meaning of rhetorical abuse to deceit. To this, Judith Anderson convincingly adds the observation that the name “Busirane” speaks to “the familiar Renaissance word for catachresis, here understood as a wrenching of metaphor or an extravagant use of it, in any case, a violent (mis)use of language, of which the masquers' dead likenesses strike me as being a prime exhibit. In this place, this house of rhetoric, abusio would indeed appear to reign, or ‘rane,’ supreme” (120-21). The House is itself deconstructed into its metaphorical fragments when Britomart defeats Busirane in combat. Britomart demands that Amoret be released, and Busirane begins to recite from his books: “Those cursed leaues, his charmes backe to reuerse; / Full dreadfull things out of that balefull booke / He red, and measur'd many a sad verse” (3.12.36). The verses are reverse-engineered, and their construction that produced the enchantment, which amounted to the “measur’d” house, was, in a sense “just words.” The house of rhetoric falls: Anon she gan perceiue the house to quake, And all the dores to rattle round about. . . . At last that mightie chaine, which round about Her tender waste was wound, adowne gan fall, And that great brasen pillour broke in peeces small. (3.12.37) 192 The brazen pillar falls and shows itself to be subject to Busirane’s brief incantations, rather than a Samson-like exertion of bodily strength. It is like the pillars strewn about the “Ruines of Time,” and the “Ruines of Rome”, monuments to a decadent genius, not one of the “pillours of Eternity, / That is contrayr to Mutabilitie” (7.8). And this earthquake is not the only one “in” the house. The Masque begins with “an earth-quake” that seems “as if it streight would lose / The worlds foundations from his centre fixt” (3.12.2). Spenser does not explain an allegorical meaning for the earthquake, but this event of displacement seems to be what materializes the masque. The allegorical masque might be said to wrench art from the foundations of normalcy in nature. Spenser does not clarify if the events in the House of Busirane are “purely rhetorical,” because, as the narrator admits, the names and natures I note readen well; So many moe, as there be phantasies In wauering wemens wit, that none can tell, Or paines in loue, or punishments in hell. (3.12.26) As the earth remains unstable the narrator is uncertain, and meanwhile allegory, spatial repercussions, and spiritual presence seem not entirely dissociable. But Spenser shakes places up all throughout The Faerie Queene. Although Spenser and Hawes are often compared, Hawes would probably be horrified by Spenser’s constant representation of ruination. Nothing is quite established on the Pillars of Eternity. Nor does Spenser raze the “House of Rhetoric” to the ground after the pillar shatters. Spenser includes two details that suggest the necessity of Busirane’s continued presence and influence: he cannot be killed because he is needed to heal Amoret, and he successfully stabs Britomart, at least superficially wounding her. When Britomart surveys the palace after freeing Amoret, 193 Returning backe, those goodly roomes, which erst She saw so rich and royally arayd, Now vanisht vtterly, and cleane subuerst She found, and all their glory quite decayd, That sight of such a chaunge her much dismayd. (3.12.42) The House of Busirane has clear value, glorious, “goodly rooms” even to Britomart, who has had to fight its demonic presence. The house is necessary to Spenser’s poetic, even though it is subject to “chaunge”. The many Ovidian stories that Britomart observes in the “empty” halls of Busirane do not have to be employed for Cruelty and Despight (the personifications that puncture Amoret’s heart) but can undergo metamorphoses in different directions. They are difficult to understand or regard as allegorical cores, which is why there are so many references to Britomart’s incomprehension. Conclusion What fills the House of Busirane? The answer at one level is: that depends. It is a metaphor built on an earthquake, and dismantleable. But at the same time, it is not just a place of vanity and emptiness; Britomart has to show trepidation at the inscribed doorways, must “be bold”, not “not too bold.” The place has power, and images that “strike pearce, [and] possesse, the sight of the soule” in the architected memory, which has substance, at the same time that it is a shadowy thing in Phantastes’ tower.42 Busirane is a genius with a domain, who appears a few cantos after Old Genius from the Garden of Adonis. Where one is Art, the other is Nature. But he 42 The phrasing derives from Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (222). In this passage, he refers to memory of a beautifully described “gorgeous palace the architecture” that nevertheless will not be as useful to “the imaginative and judging power, if they be not illuminated or figured forth by the speaking picture of poesy” (222). 194 is an evil genius, and an artistic genius, to pun on the modern parlance; more: an evil genius loci with an artistic genius. Old Genius and Busirane are both attended by a procession of characters that mimic their presence in a variety of domains. Busirane, is likewise remarkably similar to the Genius of the Bower of Bliss, in his deception, in his looser substantiality, in his sexual solicitation, in his mix of embodiment and idea, and in the way he generates the place that is both the physical and conceptual landscape of the allegorical moment. Busirane is like Verulam and the “Roman Daemon” of the “Ruines of Rome”, in their common construction of “wilde Antickes” (3.11.51), and in their “reigns” coming to a ruinous end. In a way, the “allegorical core” of places in Spenser’s writings is precisely their mutability: a sense of the genii loci and their shifting presences, with their moral and immoral, material and immaterial, living and unliving, the obscurity and illumination they bring to the “Darke Conceite” for the “bright blazing beautie” of the faerie queen (1.4.8).195 Chapter Five: The Word and the World: Allegory and the Nature of The Pilgrim’s Progress Introduction There are typically two ways to assess Bunyan’s relationship to allegory: the forward-looking approach, and the backward-looking approach.1 One of these models understands Bunyan through a “line of allegory,”2 which Bunyan inherits and appropriates in his fictions. The other approach is to see Bunyan as the end of an era, and the start of new forms: a proto-novelist who transcends allegory in a radical break from the past. Bunyan has always resisted easy acceptance into either loose school of thought; and while each approach to Bunyan has merits, it is advisable to find a centre position between these two. It is often noted that Bunyan is an expert portrayer of character, and his allegories have exceptionally vivacious personalities; but this perception has overshadowed the fact that Bunyan the writer shows a comparable regard for place and its didactic and imaginative potential.3 His recurring attention to spatial categories of biblical interpretation travels throughout his homiletic writings and fiction, informing the disposition of his “realism,” and the conceptual role that places play in revelation. Bunyan allegorizes extensively on the symbolic import of biblical places, and he disdains the notion that he is following authorities other than the Bible. He similarly valorizes a “Book of Nature,” but his nature does not have benevolent goddess-personifications or a supporting, orderly quadrivium: rather, his nature is a heavily spiritualized, anxious space of admonitory instruction and psychically distressing trials, where readers should consider the “fear of God” and the physical and spiritual death that is their imminent fate. In Bunyan’s nonfiction writings, he 1 Peter Crisp notes this historical issue in the framework of genre attribution (i.e., whether The Pilgrim’s Progress is a novel or an allegory, “Allegory or Novel”). 2 Part of the title of an important essay by Roger Pooley in The Cambridge Companion to John Bunyan. 3 In this way, the chapter at hand rejects the view that Bunyan’s landscapes are a “colourless wash” (Mullett 192), that for Bunyan “temporal-spatial forms . . . prove unable to contain the insights of Christian faith” (Fish 399), that his sense of place is characterized by a consummate “de-spatialization” (Turner 104-06). 196 considers place an important category of “similitude,” and Bunyan’s direct theological works on the typologies of biblical edifices and lands are the basis for what Bunyan considers to be psycho-spiritual interiority. Edification and the Edifice Indeed the holy Scriptures do make use Of many Metaphors, that do conduce Much to the symbolizing of the place, Unto our apprehension From “Ebal and Gerizim” There is a historical narrative that allegories and allegorical interpretation suffered a terrible blow with the Protestant Reformation and continued to decline steadily in importance afterward.4 Bunyan, in this view, is a curious outlier and an exception, writing Pilgrim’s Progress in what should be a properly Papist mode. But Bunyan’s other works, like Solomon’s Temple Spiritualized, Exposition on the First Ten Chapters of Genesis, and The Holy City, are veritable buffets of allegorical creativity, all on traditional medieval exegetical subjects. His longest poem, “A Discourse of the Building, Nature, Excellency and Government of the House of God,” is patently an allegorical edifice in a style like Robert Grosseteste’s works.5 4 Brian Cummings notes that a host of Reformers denounced allegory at some point in their writings (177-78), and so at first glance it is tempting to see the Reformation as the inception of straightforward and steady relinquishing of allegory, a dominant narrative told in the nineteenth century, and still very much present in influential theologians such as D. A. Carson (Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon). A recent literary scholar who still argues vehemently for this view is Vladimir Brljak (“The Satanic ‘or’: Milton and Protestant anti-allegorism”). 5 Bunyan’s Discourse is a witty poem on the essentials of what he imagines as an orderly and godly church, and the first few headings of the poem consider what immaterial ideas might be discussed by building materials: “The Builder’s God, Materials his Elect” (MW 6, l.1), with Christ as the foundation, ordinances as the tools, “Good 197 Specifically, what Bunyan sees as biblical formulations of space and place loom large in these hermeneutical and poetical writings and become the basis for what he conceives of as the best way to represent interiorities and provide “edification.” Bunyan’s nonfiction works attest to his fascination with spatial structures as spurs to the imagination to prompt fear of God, and this encompasses both biblical architecture and the Book of Nature. Rabanus Maurus, the author of an allegorical encyclopedia (De Universo, ca. 842 CE) is separated from Bunyan by many centuries, language, and literary kind, one having written a Latin encyclopedia and the other an English narrative. However, they see metaphorical meaning burgeoning from edifices and topographical structures in such breathtakingly analogous ways. Maurus characterizes the viae as the road of this present life, or as divine precepts, or as Christ (97-98), all of which find expression in Pilgrim’s Progress.6 For Maurus, the “[a]llegorical sense of ‘prison’ [carcer] signifies tribulation of the present life, where the elect are harassed for a time” (70-71). This tribulation is akin to the gaol at the outset of Bunyan’s narrative (10), as well as the dungeon at Doubting Castle (110-13). Maurus calls the allegorical sense of open plains [campus] the “relaxation of discipline” (42), which one may find correspondence to in “the delicate Plain, called Ease” (103). In De Universo the field (ager) “expresses the human race” (95), which corresponds to the spatially and soteriologically wide field by the City of Destruction at the beginning of Bunyan’s tale (11). Maurus considers Cities (civitas) to be types of Babylon or allegories of the wicked human race, or they might signify the heavenly country (55-63): all of these city types we also find in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Entrances (vestibulum, porta, or janua), Doctrine” as the mortar (l.9), and the Holy Spirit as the framing hand. As he often does elsewhere, he mixes type and anti-type, real-world and dream, realism and anti-mimeticism. 6 Brian Nellist explains Pilgrim’s Progress “way” as Christ well: “[The road’s] effects upon [Christian’s] personality are educative rather than instructional and Christian’s relation to it, his regret at leaving it, his joy on finding it again, his total, unanalytical acceptance of it, is like a loving relation with a person. As Christ said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’” (151). 198 in Maurus (81-82), signify faith and the cogitation of the mind, which roughly correspond to the religious motions at Christian’s entrance by the wicket gate (27-28). Devia, which one could translate as “by-paths” signify theological errors for Maurus (49). There is, likewise, a road called “by-path” in Pilgrim’s Progress, as Christian and Hopeful stray towards Doubting Castle. Convalles (valleys) signify humble people in Maurus, “since nothing is lower than they are, and they sink with a certain concavity. These lowly people ‘abound with grain’, that is, with spiritual teaching and virtuous work” (41). Bunyan’s Valley of Humiliation has a very similar momentum to a discussion of the spiritual fruitfulness of humility.7 Bunyan’s understanding of the spiritual implications of the spatial structures in nature clearly coincides with Maurus, and their capacity to perceive metaphor in the various categories above shows that the centuries and the Reformation do not divide their mindsets. A passage about spiritual conceptions of nature and edifices, well-known to modern critics of Bunyan, is from Solomon’s Temple Spiritualized. Here Bunyan approximates medieval thought on the Book of Nature conceptual metaphor, specifically, that elements of nature may be considered in a deeper way from the primary physical function: “Since it is the wisdom of God to speak to us ofttimes by trees, gold, silver, stones, beasts, fowls, fishes, spiders, ants, frogs, flies, lice, dust, & c., and here by wood; how should we by them understand his voice, if we count there is no meaning in them?” (94). He does not list place as one of the categories of revelation here, but the entirety of this volume is framed with place as the primary locus of understanding divine intent. In the “preface to the Christian reader,” Bunyan offers an extensive discussion of place that once again uses the panoply of terms about the theological-figurative language: “Yea, not only the Levitical Law and Temple, but as it seems to me, the whole Land of Canaan, the Place of their 7 Greatheart says he has “known many laboring men that have got good estates in this Valley of Humiliation. . . . Indeed it is a very fruitful soil, and doth bring forth by handfuls” (222). 199 Lot to dwell in, was to them as Ceremonial, or a Figure. Their Land was a Type of heaven, their passage over Jordan into it, a similitude of our going to Heaven by death” (MW 7, 5). Bunyan considers the spiritualizing interpretation of the Temple of Solomon to stand in context with numerous other spatial contexts and figures, a parallel importance to the characters from the stories: Again, the very Land it self was said to keep Sabbath, and so to rest a holy rest, even then when she lay desolate, and not possessed of those to whom she was given for them to dwell in. . . . Nor was this Land altogether void of Shadows, even of her Lord and Saviour. Hence, He saies of himself, I am the Roes of Sharon, and the Lilie of the Valleys; (Song 2.1). Also She, his Beloved, saith of him, His countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the Cedars, (chap. 5.15). What shall I say? The two Cities, Sion, and Jerusalem, were such as sometimes set forth the two Churches (Gal. 4) the True, and the False, and their Seed Isaac and Ishmael. (5-6) “The very land itself” has a kind of substantive character and is treated with the pronoun “she.” The Temple, Cities, churches, the Land of Canaan, the river Jordan, Sharon, Valleys, Lebanon, Sion, Jerusalem: these categories and particular sites are all treated as worthy of hermeneutical attention, and edifying to the soul. Based on this later work, when one looks back on The Pilgrim’s Progress, some of the biblical “Types, Shadows and Metaphors” that inspire Bunyan’s narrative method clearly pertain to place; the topography of the entire land of Canaan, as well as the Jordan River, which Bunyan explicitly connects to a figurative instantiation of the river of death from Pilgrim’s Progress. John R. Knott states that the topography of his story “is 200 determined largely by Bunyan’s experience of Scripture,” which is merged in a strange alchemy of Bedfordshire landscape and morphologically pliable dreamland (147). If it strikes one as odd that a non-conformist writing late in the seventeenth century should write an allegory like Pilgrim’s Progress, Solomon’s Temple Spiritualized should strike such a reader with even more poignancy for its similarity to precedents of medieval allegorical literature. There are, for instance, manifold similarities between Solomon’s Temple Spiritualized and the Venerable Bede’s De Templo. Both begin their works with a meditation on the importance of topography to understanding figurative pictures in the Bible.8 Both Bede and Bunyan see the situation of Mount Moriah to be important for its typology of the sacrifice of Isaac to prefigure the passion of Christ; and, both Bunyan and Bede emphasize again and again that the material temple and its constituent pieces are a figure of Christ and of believers.9 Even though Bunyan never had the formal education that would have exposed him directly to Bede and other Patristic and Medieval exegetes of allegorical architecture, others adjacent to Bunyan did have this education. In the seventeenth century, a number of books by “godly” authors established Solomon’s Temple as a particular typological subject.10 Especially notable is Samuel Lee’s sizable Orbis Miraculum, or the Temple of Solomon, pourtrayed in Scripture-light (1659) because it is highly conversant with the history of allegorical interpretation, and also pauses to 8 Bede opens with this passage “first we ought to examine and attentively consider the topography of the place and the circumstances that obtained when these things were commanded to be made” (1). 9 Both Bede and Bunyan write of the pillars and stones that need to be squared and fitted to be placed in the foundation of the temple (Bede 15, Bunyan 15). The comparisons are numerous, but another example of note is that both authors read slanting windows almost identically: that the mysteries of the church are known better by people within, that the windows face the sun (i.e., Christ) for maximum revelation. 10 William Guild’s 1620 Moses Unveiled: Similar to Bede and Bunyan, Guild writes that fixed pillars are like apostolic doctrines and the ornaments and instruments are like spiritual gifts (89), with “Cherubims and Palmes and flowers” representing victory, the work of God’s angels and gifts of grace (168). Thomas Taylor’s 1653 Moses and Aaron, or the Types and Shadows of our Saviour in the Old testament offers itself as an exposition on typology, but he adds that “[a]llegories and resemblances of the benefits of Christ, exhibited in the new Testament” are “testimonies of the promise and Covenant on Gods part” (4). 201 consider the typological nature of place. Lee’s energetic discussion of mystical meaning in the temple is fuelled by his interest in new trends in geographical scholarship, but still appropriated for mystical enjoyment.11 Lee writes, “The ancient stately structure no doubt was a compendious Map of the Terra Incognitato or the unknown land of the Gospell: It was Heavens Geographicall Table of those Countries” (166). He dwells at great length on the situatedness of the mountain, in what part of Jerusalem the temple was founded, and the meaning and etymology of Moriah. Like Bunyan, he designates the temple on the hill as a type of the “Evangelical Church in all ages” that is “set on a hill” and “cannot be hid” (183). He covers many of the details of Solomon’s Temple, and like Bunyan, they are furnishings for the interiority of the mind, and the pretext for comprehending the relation of the visible and invisible worlds.12 At various points in The Holy City Bunyan highlights that the imagery of Revelation 21 amounts to a similitude of place, useful for the same purposes as Pilgrim’s Progress, for spiritual illumination: “Indeed Similitudes, if fitly spoke and applied, do much set off, and out, any point, that either in the Doctrines of Faith or Manners, is handled in the Churches. Wherefore, because he would illustrate, as well as affirm, the Glory of this Jerusalem to life” (96). The various descriptive components of the city, especially the streets, the wall, twelve gates, the foundations, the equal height, breadth, and length, of the original city and St. John’s vision of them, are offered with extremely elaborate Christological and ecclesiastical interpretations (particularly of the twelve gates and their polysemous signification of apostles, doctrine, evangelism, Christ, and 11 Like Thomas Fuller’s ambitious and contemporaneous Pisgah-sight of Palestine, which also has an extensive section on the mystical import of Solomon’s Temple. 12 It is in these works that Bunyan shows some awareness of the past and a strong anxiety of influence, anticipating that his readers might try to find antecedents. In Solomon’s Temple Bunyan states, “I have not for these things fished in other mens Waters, my Bible and Concordance are my only Library in my writings” (MW 7, 9). At the beginning of Holy City, he insists “I have not given you, either in the Line, or in the Margent, a Cloud of Sentences from the Learned FATHERS, that have according to their Wisdom (possibly) handled these matters long before me” (MW 3, 71). 202 other topics). While The Holy City is on one chapter of Revelation, Bunyan provides so many allegorical interpretations in Exposition on The Ten First Chapters of Genesis that one must confine oneself to a few observations. Most importantly, he provides a detailed allegorical reading of Noah’s Ark, a traditional medieval exegetical subject. For Bunyan, the “Ark was a Figure of several things”: Christ and the Godly (similar to Hugh of St. Victor). The rooms signify all “ranks and qualities of Men” (MW 13, 201). Although he does not give an elaborate reading of the numerology of the Ark’s proportions, he reads the window and the door as types of Christ, and the stories of the ark as a mirror of Church structure. He is highly excited by the interpretation of hills and mountains, first as symbols of the hope of hypocrites, but later as a type of Christ with the Ark resting on Ararat, and eventually as “[t]ypes of the High and Mighty, which God used to stir up to deliver his church from the heat and Rage of Tyranny and Persecution” (227). His work on chapter 11 reads allegorical meaning in the orientation toward cardinal directions (toward/away from Christ and his commandments, based on a passage in Ezekiel where God’s glory proceeds from the east). This lengthy work on Genesis shows that Bunyan sizes up shoulders with many medieval interpreters who likewise see the multiple levels of Scripture, and interpret spatial details symbolically. Spiritual illumination from Scripture involves sensitivity to spatial details because Bunyan suggests that place enhances one’s capacity to imagine God’s judgments. The passage in the epigraph above comes from his poem “Ebal and Gerizim,” which is inspired by Deuteronomy 11. The mountain of Ebal is taken as a type of hell in Old Testament writ, and Bunyan employs various terms like “metaphor,” “symbol,” “similitude,” “words,” and “figures” to describe the spiritual import of such Old Testament places of reprobation (754-67). Specifically, Bunyan takes the mountain as one “[o]f many Metaphors, that do conduce / Much 203 to the symbolizing of the place, / Unto our apprehension” (754-56). Bunyan’s discourse is much in the vein of Robert Ferguson,13 who states that “the sublimity of the Subject . . . occasions Gods usage of Metaphors” so “the things themselves become more intelligible” (323), where Bunyan states that “[s]imilitudes are but a shade and shew / Of those, or that they signifie to you” (761-62). Typology in this poem does not substantively involve human characters, but rather founds its meditation on places and events of blessing and judgment, unequivocally indicating that Bunyan fixes place as one of the crucial categories of “Scripture metaphor” for admonition. Bunyan’s work on The Barren Fig Tree concerns a parable of warning, and shows more particularities of his attention to metaphors and to their spatial dimension. Parables there are two things to be taken notice of, and to be enquired into of them that read; First, The Metaphors made use of. Secondly, the Doctrine, or Mysteries couched under such Metaphors. (10) He parses the various metaphors from the immediate details of the gospel text, and his preface addresses the broader spatio-metaphorical context of the passage: “This is your case, the Jewish Land is Gods Vineyard, I know it; and I know also, that you are the Fig-tree” (12). Some of the imaginative muscles that are flexed in Pilgrim’s Progress are shown here: he pieces together a large number of biblical passages to paint a broader context, generating a vaster mosaic of 13 Ferguson was a fellow non-conformist, defender of allegory, and assistant to Bunyan’s personal friend John Owen. He published a work just three years before Pilgrim’s Progress (1675), with a title that is highly revealing of the controversies surrounding Bunyan: The Import and Use of Scripture-Metaphors: the vindication of the Non-Conformists, who are publickly charged for turning Religion into unaccountable Phansies and Enthusiasm’s, drest up with empty Schemes of speech; and for embracing a few gawdy Metaphors & Allegories instead of the substance of true and real Righteousness. 204 metaphorical images.14 Bunyan situates the fig tree on a semiotic vantage in typological Judea: “The Lord expects fruit becoming the Vineyard of God. The Vineyard, saith he, is a very fruitful Hill; witness the fruit brought forth in all ages: the most barren trees that ever grew in the wood of this world, when planted in this Vine-yard, by the God of Heaven, what fruit to Godward have they brought forth?” (28). This vineyard is made of the Vineyard on the hill in Isaiah 5, the Parable of the Sower, and the agricultural comparison between Cain and Abel, source texts which are all warnings to fear God. Bunyan reads nature according to the fear it can prompt, as well. The Book of Nature metaphor does not have exude the same energy and optimistic confidence about the revelatory potential of the entire cosmos for Bunyan as it does for Hugh of St Victor or St Bonaventura. The background to this certainly involves intellectual changes, the “new philosophy” that “calls all in doubt,” including the comprehension of authoritative metaphors.15 Peter Harrison delineates how, as the seventeenth century progressed, the metaphor of the Book of Nature started to be torn from its normally symbolic appropriation to becoming a book of numbers and shapes in the language of mathematics and specialized experimental science (7-24). Even as the models for thinking about nature were changing, the symbolic overtone of the Book of Nature was not mutually exclusive to new appropriations, and the metaphor itself remained popular.16 In recent years, Alexandra Walsham has pointed out that well into the Early Modern era, the idea of the Book of Nature “sustained the belief that the surface of the earth had been directly shaped by the deity and displayed the marks of momentous events described in the pages of Scripture” 14 He follows the procedure that Ferguson defends as being a legitimate strategy of non-conformist biblical expositors: “it is of great advantage towards the enlightning our minds in the sense of a Metaphorical Scripture, to consult other Scripture passages where the same Terms are Metaphorically used, especially where all things are parallel” (342). 15 From John Donne’s “Anatomy of the World.” 16 Early English Books Online shows that 224 volumes use the phrase “Book of Nature” between 1604-1680 CE, not including variations such as “Book of Creatures” or Latin equivalents. 205 (327). Even as some elements of the old-world picture was crumbling, and as some emphases about Providence’s revelation of itself were changing, a symbolic Book of Nature was still culturally important, and especially in emblem literature; Francis Quarles’ preface to Emblems (1635) asks, “are the Heavens, the Earth, nay every Creature, / but Hieroglyphicks and Emblemes of his Glory?” The emblematists’ works do not exclude emblems of place; closer in time and temper to Bunyan, William Spurstow’s Spiritual Chymist (1666) has a substantial subset of emblems on place.17 All emblem books involve meditations on ethics, and so it is unsurprising that Bunyan’s own such work, A Book for Boys and Girls, contains warnings. The style of presentation from emblem books is similar to the Interpreter’s House, Prudence’s Catechism and to vignettes throughout Pilgrim’s Progress.18 References to a variation on the idea of the “Book of Nature” appears in one of Bunyan’s earliest works, A Few Sighs from Hell (1656), where he talks about the various aspects of the “book of Creatures” standing in witness to the goodness of God and the ways in which humanity falls short in its recognition (338). The Resurrection of the Dead (1665) involves the “mystery of the Creatures” that “shew the power of God in themselves,” but also “teach” and preach “the Righteousness and Justice of God against sin” (255). Even as he highlights that many moral intuitions fail to understand godliness fully, he states that Book of the Creatures, “is the Book, that he who knows no letters, may read in,” standing moreover, as the “the Book out of which, both Christ, the Prophets, and Apostles, do so frequently discourse by their Similitudes, 17 E.g., Med. 9. On two Lights in a Room, Med. 10 On building after fires, Med. 11 On the Torrid Zone, Med. 25 On False Medians, Med. 35 On a Prison, Med. 49 Vpon a Spring in an high ground, Med. 56 Vpon going up an high Mountain. 18 Bunyan notes that Atheist fails to perceive the Celestial City from the Delectable Mountains because he has derelicted his capacity to interpret places as such with the proper prospect, and can only understand spatial progress, being “further,” in the narrow, literalistic way: “There is no such place as you Dream of, in all this World. . . . [F]inding [no place], (and yet I should, had there been such a place to be found, for I have gone to seek it further then you) I am going back again” (130). 206 Proverbs, and Parables” (258-59). The Book of Nature is the prelinguistic basis for symbolic communication that nevertheless furnishes the substance of the divine’s ability to reveal and warn. Similarly, he reprises that his reader is “now by the Book of the Creatures . . . adjuged guilty” (285). In Bunyan’s oeuvre, the phrase “book of nature” is used only in this treatise: “the natural proneness that is in all men to devotion and religion, that is, of one kind or another, doth clearly tell us, that they by the book of nature, which book is themselves, do read that there is one great and eternal God” (260). The book of nature reveals the self, and his notion is quite similar to John Jackson’s Booke of Conscience Opened and Read, which states, “The inward Booke of nature is this very booke, whose seales I have, in the ensuing Treatise, broke open, the Book of Conscience” (unnumbered page). Bunyan’s short posthumously published book, The Saints Knowledge of Christ’s Love connects the book of nature explicitly to more spatial allegorization.19 Bunyan understood the Book of Nature as that which would encompass topographical phenomena, and that it has a psycho-spiritual valence, which for Bunyan has greatest relevance to arousing the conscience: “There is a fear of God that flows, even from the light of nature” (MW 9, 22). The “Nature” of The Pilgrim’s Progress There lieth, even in many natural things, THAT, into which if we were instructed, would yield us a great deal of help to the understanding of spiritual matters; For in wisdom has God made all the World; nor is there any thing that God has made, whether in Heaven above, or on Earth beneath, but there is couched some spiritual mystery in it. The which 19 The treatise expounds Ephesians 3.18-19. In his discussion of depth, he compares God’s rescues to the scooping up out of mires, floods, wells, and dungeons (MW 13, 347). It is in the spatial frame of “breadth, length, depth, heighth that is here intended, comprehends the whole World . . . there is such a revelation of Him in His Word, in the Book of Creatures” (360). 207 men matter nor more, than they do the ground they tread on, or than the stones that are under their feet, and all because they have not this fear of the Lord, for had they that, that would teach them to think, even from that knowledge of God, that hath by the fear of him put into their hearts, that he being so great, and so good, there must needs be abundance of wisdom in the things he hath made: that fear would also to find out what that wisdom is, yea and give to the soul the instruction of it. Treatise of the Fear of God, 56 The places in Bunyan’s narrative, often profusely furnished by marginal references to the Bible, are not substantively distinct from the “[t]ypes, Shadows, and Metaphors” of the Bible, which Bunyan asserts, “[h]ath semblance with [the] method” of The Pilgrim’s Progress (5).20 Vanity Fair materializes out of Isaiah 40.17: “All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to him less than nothing and vanity”; the Slough of Despond is dug out of the “mirie clay” of Psalm 40.2; the Valley of the Shadow of Death is imagined in Psalm 23 and shaded by Jeremiah 2.6. His allegorical reading of the plain of Shinar as signifying “being filled with Ease and Plenty” (277), which comes from his commentary on Genesis, looks very much like the Plaine of Ease from Pilgrim’s Progress. Bunyan’s particular fixations on typology relate to psychology – his obsession with resolving his mental maladies, which he nevertheless perceives 20 Typology and allegory are interchangeable for Bunyan. Bunyan’s work on the Water of Life uses “type” in its discussion of the text’s features, but he also writes, “If any ask why I thus allegorize, I answer, The Text doth lead me to it” (MW 7, 216). Historians like Thomas Luxon and Roger Sharrock have shown that in the seventeenth century, typology among non-conformists became increasingly broad and applied to the individual experience. U. Milo Kaufmann’s magisterial work has demonstrated in detail how Puritan interpretive practices exhibit a profuse “talent for looking beyond event to word” (188), and a “need to press all Scripture into the mould of doctrine,” hermeneutical practices that encouraged allegorical reading (23). Graham Midgely adroitly explains the shift as follows: “No longer confined, as strict typology, to finding truths foretold of Christ and his Church, there develops this greater emphasis on the individual Christian, a stronger tendency to direct the interpretation towards an analysis and direction of the personal spiritual life” (xxvii). 208 as theological in essence. As in “Ebal and Gerizim”, places stand to admonish his readers about eternal punishment and waken them to matters of conscience: “Similitudes are but a shade, and show. . . By word and figures the extremity / Of such as shall within these burnings lie” (761, 767-68). Accordingly, the celebrated realism of The Pilgrim’s Progress is not one of novelistic mimesis but is more like a hyperreality of affect: an “extremity” in order to amplify a sense of urgency or respite concerning what he sees as the “fear of God” or the “tenderness of conscience.” Bunyan’s wave down the river of influence is distant and indirect, and Bunyan’s thought on nature and architecture is not precisely the same as past allegorists: Bunyan clearly has a narrower biblical logocentrism, with a more scrupulously buffered self, as Jason Crawford outlines (63-64). The Pilgrim’s Progress has no authoritative Reason or goddess Natura. There are no references to Ptolemaic astrology or a broader cosmology to be brought into harmony, which one may find in virtually every preceding allegorical work. Other allegorists are more comfortable bringing in other standards of truth in their encyclopedic peregrinations of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Bunyan’s treatise, The Saint’s Privilege and Profit, avers that “nature, as nature, is not capable of serving of God; no, not nature where Grace dwels, as considered abstract from that Grace that dwels in it” (242). Among well-known allegorists of the Early Modern period, perhaps only Bunyan would write a passage like this exchange between Ignorance and Christian: Ignor. What be good thoughts respecting our selves? Chr. Such as agree with the Word of God. Ignor. When does our thoughts of selves, agree with the Word of God? Chr. When we pass the same Judgement upon our selves which the Word passes. (138-39) 209 If the World is a source of truth and goodness, it must be glossed by the Word. Proper introspection into the nature of oneself must take the view that God necessarily has, which “can see sin in us when and where we can see none in ourselves” (139). The Book of Nature idea connects to The Pilgrim’s Progress’s emblematic meditations. The spider functions as a character and as the longest emblem in Bunyan’s Book for Boys and Girls, where its “Nature, Venom,” and “fearful Hue, / Both shew what Sinners are, and what they do” (MW 6, 220). The spider is one of the prime examples of the “mystery of the Creatures” taken from the book of nature in the treatise The Resurrection of the Dead: the spider “taketh hold with her hands, and is in Kings Palaces” (MW 3, 257). Finally, the spider appears in the second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress as a lesson in the Interpreter’s House for the pilgrim company, where they learn that they are like spiders in their wretchedness, but also in their inclusion in God’s house. General proverbs arising from observations in nature are a serious hermeneutical issue in the story, and all of them are admonitory.21 In Part 2, Prudence’s catechism of Matthew touches on a large number of items from nature, not glossed by biblical references or marginal notes: fire, clouds, rainbows, springs, candles, pelicans, and cocks. The emblem of the Spring in this scene is an explicitly topographical metaphor; Matthew asks, “Why do some of the Springs rise out of the tops of high Hills?” and Prudence responds, “To shew that the Spirit of Grace shall spring up in some that are Great and Mighty, as well as in many that are 21 As Thomas Luxon points out, it is only the last emblem in the Interpreter’s House that has any biblical intertexts, so Christian must develop wider catechetical skills (“Is there a Text” 438-39). The emblem of Passion and Patience provokes the Interpreter to lament that the “proverb, ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,’ is of more authority with them than are all the divine testimonies of the good of the world to come” (31). The Book of Nature is not a salvific force the in the proverbial hands of the World. The debate between Christian and By-ends in large part focuses on how the natural phenomena of “wind and tide” are to be interpreted, with Christian arguing that they are to be fought against, and By-ends arguing that they are to be accommodated and waited for, as is natural (99-100). Shortly after the visit to the Interpreter’s House, an unnamed “one” wakes Christian with the emblem of the ant in the arbor atop Hill Difficulty, which only causes further problems, because Christian drops his roll, which symbolizes the Bible. Christian in his hasty heeding of the Book of Nature, leaves behind the Bible which should have given him the better guidance. 210 poor and low” (218). Notably, shortly after this discussion, as the pilgrim company descends into the Valley of Humiliation, Greatheart speaks to them concerning the meaning of hills and valleys. Hills have their prototype in Hill Difficulty as varieties of short trial, and at least three episodes besides the one above that contain theoretical discussions about the psycho-spiritual meaning of hills and their counterparts in valleys.22 When descending through the Valley of Humiliation, Greatheart speaks to the pilgrim company about how some “have wished that the next way to their Father’s house were here, that they might be troubled no more with either hills or mountains to go over; but the way is the way, and there’s an end” (223). Later, in a conversation with Contrite, Mr. Honest states that for “wayfaring men,” sometimes their “way is clean, sometimes foul; sometimes up hill, sometimes down hill” (256). At Mount Marvel, the pilgrim company sees a man named Great-grace at a distance “that tumbled the hills about with words” who can teach them about “how to believe down, or to tumble out of their ways, what difficulties they should meet with, by faith” (266). This passage does not suggest that Bunyan believes that all the places are just despatialized “literalizing of semantic associations” as Turner suggests: this passage, in fact, is a highly self-conscious affirmation of Bunyan’s intent for his places to represent particular challenges. Each topology, while in a sense reflective of an individual’s intent and psycho-spiritual condition, has a deeply reflective applicability to 22 The Heavenly Footman, which is almost certainly the piece about the “race of the saints in this our gospel-day” (Pilgrim’s Progress 3), and implied to be the metaphorical base and inspiration for Pilgrim’s Progress, has a passage that mixes considerations of typology, metaphor, topography, and spatial progress: Because the way is long, (I speak Metaphorically) and there is many a dirty step, many a high Hill, much Work to do, a wicked Heart, World and Devil to overcome. I say there are many steps to be taken by those that intend to be Saved, by running or walking in the steps of the Faith of our Father Abraham. Out of Egypt, thou must go thorow the Red Sea; thou must Run a long and tedious Journey. (MW 5, 150) The only time in this treatise that Bunyan self-consciously highlights his employment of metaphor (“I speak Metaphorically”) is when he is explicating what he would call a similitude of the way and the difficulty of the “high Hill,” which are fittingly mixed with a typology of the peregrination of the Children of Israel. 211 him/her. Further apart from the false pilgrims from urban or broadly regional topologies, The Pilgrim’s Progress delves into “natural” topographies, which explore more aspects of the psycho-spiritual self. Mountains, as topological types, are first foreboding heights and dangers that look down at Christian (the volcanic Mt. Sinai, the “wide field full of Dark mountains”, the always-distant Mount Zion), but later Mountains are vantages of enlightenment upon which Christian stands and can anticipate future challenges. Atop Hill Difficulty, by the House Beautiful, Christian speaks with the porter about the distant Delectable Mountains, which are visible “if the day be clear” (54). From the tops of the Delectable Mountains, Christian and Hopeful learn from the shepherds, looking down from the hill of Error, and Caution, and on the mountain with the door leading to hell. The metaphor of panoramic scope is used most fortuitously here, in terms of the ad-vantage of the pilgrims, which becomes especially clear when they climb atop Clear and look through the perspective glass (119). In Part 2, there is also Mount Marvel, Mount Innocence, and Mount Charity; here mountains are treated as the simple divisions of topics of psycho-spiritual aspiration, in “stages set” (269), as the capping poem versifies. Generally, though, in the range from mountaintops to the depths of valleys, Bunyan constantly exploits the vectors of upwardness and downwardness to represent mental improvement or decline, “high points” and “low points”: as Matthew remembers, “namely, that the way to heaven is as a ladder, and the way to hell is as down a hill. But I had rather go up the ladder to life, than down the hill to death” (204). The “pathetic fallacy” pervades Pilgrim’s Progress. Part 2 emphasizes very much that the landscape changes with the spiritual decisions of the travelers: there is a long explanation from Greatheart that Christian’s dire experience in the Valley of Humiliation is “the fruit of those slips 212 that he got in his going down the Hill” (222), but that they “need not be afraid of this Valley: For here is nothing to hurt us, unless we procure it to our selves” (222). Greatheart states that he has been through the valley many times. Some pilgrims, like Mr. Fearing, are liable to spend much longer at certain sites, such at the Slough of Despond, get little benefit at the Palace Beautiful, and even miss the Delectable Mountains. Bunyan includes three comments about the psychological projection moulding the landscape in relation to this character. Greatheart narrates that Mr. Fearing had “a Slough of Despond in his mind, a slough that he carried every where with him” (235). At the Valley of Humiliation, we learn, “there was a kind of sympathy betwixt that Valley and him; for I never saw him better in all his pilgrimage than he was in that Valley” (236). At the river of death, the water is lower than ever, “not much above wetshod” (236). Mr. Fearing has a greatly different experience from Christian and Christiana at all of the places he encounters, but his disposition of faith seems to shift the places themselves. “Realism”, one might say, is conditioned by the degree of fear in the pilgrim. Bunyan shows that the Book of Nature, which “is thyself” (260), has many heights and depths to explore, and when brought to bear on the spirit, they are paradoxically more palpable than for the flesh. The Holy War indicates the depth (and breadth) of the self in a remarkable passage, which sets the grandeur of the soul in an inestimably large city within Universe, set as “the mirror and glory of all that he made, even the top-piece, beyond anything else that he did in that country” (8). This assertion that Mansoul is the “mirror and glory” of creation is in fact demonstrated by the extensive ways in which the places and structures of the beleaguered city represent states of mind and mental faculties. The “spacious” interiority of Mansoul is indeed the mirror of the exterior creation, which also communicate an “unspeakably great” loss. Bunyan seeks to amplify precisely this connection in his The Greatness of the Soul and the Unspeakable 213 Loss Thereof, which considers a deep analogy between the physical person’s senses and the inner soul’s senses (which are not more “immaterial,” but in fact much more intense): “the Soul by its Senses, its spiritual Senses, for so I call them: for the body hath Senses pertaining to it, and as it can see, hear, smell, feel and tast, so can the Soul” (MW 9, 195). Nature is the raw material that makes up the figures of the Interpreter’s House and the clouds holding the “darker lines” of the self (6): “Would’st read thyself, and read thou know’st not what / And yet know whether thou art blest or not, / By reading the same lines” (9).23 Bunyan hopes for his reader that the “soul” is the truly “solid” aspect of reality, and this colours what he understands as mimesis. In the “Apology” Bunyan writes Solidity, indeed, becomes the pen Of him that writeth things divine to men; But must I needs want solidness, because By metaphors I speak? (5) To Bunyan, metaphors are more affecting than the “plain” speech of those who would claim that “metaphors make us blind” (5). Such passages bring us to a crucial area of consideration: the degree and manner of Bunyan’s approach to realism, so important to critics because Bunyan is often considered a progenitor of the realistic genre of the novel; Rudyard Kipling long ago extolled Bunyan as “[t]he Father of the novel, / Salvation’s first Defoe” (ll.51-52). The aesthetics associated with characterization have dominated discussions of Bunyan’s realism,24 but there 23 Ferguson also expounds how the Book of Nature is a revelatory source that has a mutual interchange with the figurative images in the Bible, showing “an analogy between the invisible world and the natural world” (317). 24 Most of the critical attention and praise given to Bunyan has focused on his personifications, not his topifications. Coleridge, a Romantic disdainful of allegory, praised Bunyan, stating that “his piety was baffled by his genius,” and remarks that the story can be read “as a novel,” since “we go on with his characters as real persons, who had been nicknamed by their neighbours” (255). The Victorian critic Thomas B. Macaulay wrote that Bunyan was exceptional for the “strong human interest” he imbued in his characters, “personifications” that “when he dealt with them, became men” (317-20). Across the twentieth century and beyond, this consensus is easy to trace: novel historian Walter Allen hails Bunyan as “original as anything in literature can be,” having set the standard “in storytelling, 214 have certainly been other critics that have highlighted Bunyan’s pictorial Englishness, and in particular, his representation of Bedfordshire topography.25 The notion that Bunyan’s portrayal of landscape is realistic and characteristically Midlands-English continues straight to the present day. As recently as 2020, Martha Lynn Russell has argued that The Pilgrim’s Progress’s realism stems from Bunyan’s representation of building projects and cultural activities: the fact that fairs in the Early Modern period were most common in the south and central regions of England, from the reality of the Great North Road being built with its tributaries, tolls, and gates, as well as seventeenth-century swamp drainage projects (243-53). These critics do identify a common-sense thread of visuality between Bunyan’s art and life.26 vivid characterization, and natural dialogue” (17). Wolfgang Iser’s analysis of Puritan theology in the genesis of the novel states that “mere allegory is surpassed through the sheer aliveness of the characters” (87). Paschal Reeves admits that The Pilgrim’s Progress is predominantly an allegory, but it is in characterization “that Bunyan transcends the bounds of allegory” (67). Michael McKeon’s important history of the novel also draws attention to Bunyan’s unique style of characterization. Leopold Damrosch’s work on the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century has laid out that what “[d]raws The Pilgrim’s Progress most toward the novel is not so much the presence of ‘novelistic’ details that might equally be found in Chaucer or Malory, but the way in which its characters are allowed to be characters when one might have expected them to symbolize interior states” (176). Margaret Olofson Thickstun writes that Bunyan’s male and female characters are realistic models that can be emulated, rather than Virtues or Vices: “When Bunyan presents his allegory of the spiritual quest, he chooses his characters from working-class English life” (23). 25 Nineteenth-century writer C. H. Firth highlights the “[w]oods and green fields, rich meadows and softly-sliding hills” of “his native Midlands” that attract his “imagination most” (xxxv). Charles Kingsley similarly highlights Bunyan’s “thoroughly naturalist” in his representation of “the monotonous midland” and its “pastures and brooks, the towns and country houses” (ix-xiv). Perhaps most significant is Albert J. Foster’s Bunyan’s Country, which avers that Bunyan “reproduced in the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress, scenes and localities which were familiar to him,” and proposes to “give to each its local habitation and name” (18). Foster makes a detailed and intuitive argument that the road to London tracks virtually all of the sites of The Pilgrim’s Progress. The correspondence he draws between some parts of the story and the road are more compelling than others: the fact that Houghton House is the only magnificent estate from seventeenth-century Bedfordshire, and that it stands atop the sharp incline of Ampthill, suggests inspiration for the Hill Difficulty-House Beautiful episode. On the other hand, the slight topographical dip of Millbrook Gorge is unlikely to have been any more than a marginal inspiration for The Valley of the Shadow of Death. The tourism sector of Bedford and its surrounding towns rely on extremely specific sites related to episodes in The Pilgrim’s Progress, particularly Houghton House, which authorities and curators have directly called the inspiration for House Beautiful. See, for instance, the English Heritage website: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/houghton-house/history 26 For example, Bunyan is one of a very few allegorists who does not use oceans, lakes, or seas, for at least some of his topifications – not even the traditional mare mundi – and this is surely informed by the distance of Bunyan’s home county from the ocean, and even from significant lakes. 215 However, the critics who emphasize that Pilgrim’s Progress is an extended metaphor also have merit.27 James Turner is among the most articulate advocates of this view. He aims to prove his assertion by outlining Bunyan’s most shocking contraversions of Euclidean realism such as the mixing of building interiors and exteriors in the Interpreter’s House.28 The basic impetus of his argument resonates with Isabel Hofmeyr’s model for thinking about realism as located primarily in “a series of evangelical reading strategies that applied the texts to a range of circumstances . . . to produce the illusion of an abundant spatial realism” (145). Both essays have concord on the notion that Bunyan’s topographical mimesis and descriptive detail is extraordinarily limited, if present at all. To my estimation, the effect of realism is not reducible to reading communities; Bunyan employs a measure of evangelical writing strategies which perform an affectation of psychological hyper-realism. Readers have historically been drawn to the way that his protagonist has such a psychologically intense reaction to the places of the story, which themselves alternate between a symbolic canvas and more verisimilar details. Bunyan is deeply invested in the extent to which he wants his readers to feel the urgency of the similitude, with all of his characteristic, exhortative beseeching: “[T]he things signified by Parables, are wonderful realities. O what a glorious reality was there signified by that Parable!” (MW 1, 246-47). It is precisely when Bunyan writes of spiritual, invisible things that Bunyan 27 Stanley Fish argues that Christian’s understanding of “way” obviously “refers to an inner commitment of the spirit,” but it is at this moment that the reader must “interpret the language of spatial configuration in such a way as to deny its claims to referential adequacy” (228). Thomas Luxon remarks that “Virtually the entire plot of Bunyan’s allegory is generated by a string of occasions in which the pilgrim characters temporarily forget the allegorical status of their experience in this world” (160). Carolynn Van Dyke notes episodes that involve a “narrow empirical perspective[s]” that opens “suddenly into the wider metaphoric one that was available all along” (179). 28 In another notable part of his essay, he enumerates several other notable contraversions of realism: The mouth of Hell is small enough to appear at a particular spot halfway through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, but we are also told that it is several miles long. Mount Calvary and the sepulchre could not be made to fit into the narrow fenced road where Christian encounters them; Mount Sinai must be placed ‘hard by’ Legality’s house, and in bulk seems more like a steeple than a mountain; ‘a wide field full of dark mountains’ is something to stumble among rather than pant up. (94) 216 becomes most affective and exclamatory. N. H. Keeble astutely observes that one of Bunyan’s most detailed and affective descriptions in Pilgrim’s Progress is of the non-Bedford-like River of Life: “The image of spiritual liberation from sublunary circumstances is not . . . couched in terms of insensate and artificial immobility” (262). Further characterizing Bunyan’s burdensomely meaningful writing, Cynthia Wall cheekily describes Bunyan’s world as “physiogoricall”, through which “the everyday world presses threateningly upon writer and character, too thick, too close, too hostile, too much” (176). The spiritual implications that Bunyan sees in the plainness of landscape also comes through in his representations. In the preface to Some Gospel Truths Opened, Bunyan writes of a “spiritual sence and feeling” that rejects “high-flown aerie notions,” and which is rather “sound, plain,” and “common” (MW 1, 10-11). Bunyan’s idea of “spiritual sence and feeling” often feels like it could hurt. There is indeed a sense (of place) in which Bunyan’s representation of realism is different from the earliest allegorists’: Bunyan is prepared to allow a place to be described plainly in the narrative, relying on a simple marginal note indicating its biblical intertext. The limited omniscient narrator conveys Christian’s thoughts as he descends the Valley of Death, without externalizing them into Apprehension and Resolution, as previous allegorists might: The pathway was here also exceeding narrow, and therefore good Christian was the more put to it; for when he sought, in the dark, to shun the ditch on the one hand, he was ready to tip over into the mire on the other; also when he sought to escape the mire, without great carefulness he would be ready to fall into the ditch. Thus he went on, and I heard him here sigh bitterly; for, besides the dangers mentioned above, the pathway was here so dark, and ofttimes, when he lift up his foot to set forward, he knew not where or upon what he should set it next. (63) 217 Bunyan’s narrative descent into the Valley of the Shadow of Death is realistic not because it is detailed or highly descriptive, but because it follows Christian’s extreme agony into the ominous topographical glimpses of deepening darkness.29 Bunyan’s allegorealism in this way is a mode in which the places are felt to be of extreme gravitas, and to have a visceral hyperreality. While Turner suggests a “de-spatialization” that emerges from visual inconsistency and non-mimetic interchanges of exterior-interior space, the reality is that Bunyan’s aesthetics of place follow a pattern. He frontloads a preponderance of physical details before revealing metaphorical implication and allowing that meaning to alter the original details. The spaces and places of Pilgrim’s Progress initially seem like a wood, a bog, or a net, before they are the Wood of Destruction, The Slough of Despond, and The Flatterer’s net.30 At the foot of a hill (unrecognized as Hill Difficulty by Christian), is a refreshing spring of water (not explicitly allegorized), and Christian realizes that the straight and narrow road goes up a daunting, towering hill. The narrator’s gaze turns to Christian and sees that he “fell from running to going, and from going to clambering upon his hands and his knees, because of the steepness of the place” (42). That the hill is Hill Difficulty and that the arbour at the top is an “award of grace” is only told in the margins, after the fact of having traversed the narration of physical effort and relief. While Turner is deeply impressed by the disorientation and lack of scale that Bunyan presents in some cases, it is also the case that Bunyan very frequently re-orients the deictic centre of the reader with his moving pilgrim, as he very much does on the Hill Difficulty. On the Enchanted Ground, Christian’s remark is almost gratuitously to scale, that they have “not now above two miles further to go” before they converse over a period that agrees mimetically to a 29 Richard Greaves suggests that the power of the narrative, especially in this episode, comes from the extent to which the agony of Christian is palpable, informed by Bunyan’s ongoing battle with mental illness (238). 30 A similar point is made in Van Dyke, (179-85). 218 pace of walking that distance (142). Gaius’s comment that Slay-good is “about a mile from hence” is similarly realistic in its intuition of scale (251). The Slough of Despond is first just a “Miry Slow that was in the midst of the Plain” (16). Christian becomes “bedaubed with dirt,” and is “left to tumble in the Slough of Despond alone: but still he endeavoured to struggle to that side of the slough that wass still further from his own house, and next to the wicket-gate; the which he did, but could not get out, because of the burden that was upon his back” (16).When Help subsequently explains the significance of the place to Christian, the language remains quite visceral: “It is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run” (17). Bunyan makes use of a large diversity physical details, the effect of the weather on perception, the dirt residual on the characters, with a pun on “bemired” that brings together the physical and theological thrust of the episode together (17). Christian reflects on this episode as having put him “musing in the midst of my dumps” (28), a simple and relatable feeling. From By-path Meadow to the pit of the Vain-glorious, to the high waters stranding Christian and Hopeful, to their capture and imprisonment in the castle grounds of Giant Despair, there is a tremendous number of spatial details leading all the way to the dark dungeon, but it is the effect on Christian within this place that is most terrible and engrossing: here Christian is “without one bit of bread, or drop off drink, or any light, or any to ask how they did. . . . [Giant Despair] falls upon them, and beats them fearfully, in such sort, that they were not able to help themselves, or to turn them upon the floor. . . . what shall we do? the life that we now live is miserable: for my part, I know not whether is best, to live thus, or to die out of hand” (111-12). When Christian heads to the town of Morality, he does not know that the ominous mountain by Legality’s house is Mount Sinai; when he is “hard by” it, it seems “so high . . . that side of it that 219 was next the way side, did hang so much over, that Christian was afraid to venture further, lest the Hill should fall on his head” (20). Although it is not verisimilar that a mountain overlooking an English town would have “flashes of fire” erupting, or that a traveller should fear a mountain falling on himself, Christian’s intense fear is gripping. Christian’s feeling before the mountain, as he “stood still, and wotted not what to do”, when his burden suddenly “seemed heavier to him,” and as he “swet, and did quake for fear,” shows aspects of psychological believability – in response to what is otherwise an unrealistic volcanic sight (20). Bunyan offers topographical mimesis to a degree, but the emphasis is on the effect on the pilgrim, who is sometimes more affected by the “doctrine under the metaphor” than the physical details. Part of Bunyan’s aim seems to be to present his readers with a reminder to ponder their deaths and eternal destinations. Bunyan’s work is an artificial memory that functions in part as a memento mori. The original title of Bunyan’s book extends to this concept (The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to That Which is to Come), and Bunyan composes places and their relationships to one another, as well as the travel between them, as heuristics for a reader to consider their eternal fate: “whether thou art blest or not” (9). He makes extensive usage of differentiated place to gloss concepts or colour discussions, to provide context for character actions, to unfold thematic clusters, and to enhance reader affect and memory. As Heinrich Plett writes, “The House of the Interpreter is undoubtedly a religious memory building […] divided into a multitude of rooms which are shown one after the other: ‘a private room,’ ‘a very large Parlour,’ ‘a little room,’ ‘a place,’ ‘a pleasant place where was builded a stately Palace,’ ‘a very dark Room with an iron cage.’” (224). In the same way that Bunyan probably did not read Bede, he probably did not read Cicero or Quintilian, and the allegorical tradition of memory finds 220 Bunyan through the cultural DNA of other writers.31 Bunyan himself offers a smattering of his theory on the mnemonic and didactic potential of his story in the prefatory poem: that a story like his “[p]leases the understanding, makes the will / Submit, the memory too it doth fill / With what doth our imagination please” (6). Bunyan asks his reader, “would’st thou see a truth within a fable? / Art thou forgetful? Wouldest thou remember” (8). In the dialogues of the characters, memory and forgetfulness appear as themes, and it is always in conjunction with maintaining appropriate fear. The conclusion to the Interpreter’s House ends with the man in the Iron Cage who states, “God hath denied me repentance”, and with the Interpreter summarizing, “let this man's misery be remembered by thee, and be an everlasting caution to thee” (35). As for Christian, he states that the visions have left him in “hope and fear” with the Interpreter instructing him to “keep all things so in thy mind that they may be as a goad in thy sides, to prick thee forward in the way thou must go” (36). Christian and Hopeful encounter the pillar of salt and are exhorted “to fear” and “always to remember Lot’s wife” (105). The pair forgets the lessons of the Shepherds when they had need to put them in practice, even after “the remembrance of that last thing that the Shepherds had shown them, made their hands shake” (119). At the House Beautiful, Piety tells Christiana that she has drawn up a “scheme of all those things that thou hast seen at our house, upon which thou mayest look when thou findest thyself forgetful” (221). The Shepherds tell Christian and Hopeful that the Delectable Mountains are a place not to be forgetful (117), and Bunyan develops the theme 31 Ferguson, a writer relatively close to Bunyan’s reading community indicates that he is familiar with the connection between allegory and the art of memory. Referring to allegory and its related rhetorical terms analogy and similitude, he writes that such “[m]odes of speech are found advantageous to relieve the Memory, and to render it more tenacious of what is committed to it. Next to the ranging things in a natural Order, that the one may help to the remembrance of the other by the connexion they have together” (362). Shortly thereafter he points to the art of memory, and its spiritual utility of making transcendent ideas more relatable and memorable, before citing Cicero, “than whom no man could either speak better, or judg what was well spoken, being himself inimitable both in the art of moving and instructing, as knowing not only all the Topicks both of convincing and perswading, but also throughly understanding the philosophy of the Passions” (364-65). 221 considerably in Part 2, where the Delectable Mountains contain many smaller, didactically organized topologies. The poem reflects on the episode as follows: Behold, how fitly are the stages set For their relief that pilgrims are become! . . . What novelties they have to us they give, That we, though Pilgrims, joyful lives may live; They do upon us, too, such things bestow, That show we Pilgrims are, where'er we go. (269) This mnemonic verse confirms Bunyan’s intent to render careful divisions of Mount Innocence, Mount Marvel, and Mount Charity “in stages.” Like much of The Pilgrim’s Progress, and allegories in general, the purpose is to present novelties that facilitate thought, but that also “orient” readers toward the distance and difficulty of eternity. This poem is given just before the pilgrim company learns of Turn Away from the Town of Apostasy. This same pair of character and place is met in Part 1, where Bunyan implies some of his predestinarian theology when he synthesizes origin and destination: the false pilgrim Turn-away from Apostasy, contrasted by Little-faith from the town of Sincere (121). Not every pilgrim or personification has an explicitly denoted town or country of origin on the King’s Highway, but most of them do. In the sign system that makes up the dreamland, Bunyan employs conceptual topography constantly, and the trope of attaching characters to a given place colours most of the episodes and character demonstrations in the book. When Greatheart first meets Honest, he says, “pray let me crave your Name, and the name of the Place you came from?” Honest responds, saying, “My Name I cannot, but I came from the Town of Stupidity; it lieth about four Degrees beyond the City of Destruction” (232). If a certain pilgrim expresses a faulty 222 interpretation of reality, Bunyan indicates further insights about the general tendency or the common ideological origin of a type of error. The title of a character represents whether he or she will travel with a correct vector, while the place of origin reveals the kinds of error that must be overcome in order for the character to become a true pilgrim (Christian himself is called Graceless prior to beginning his journey). Stasis and regress imply remaining in or movement toward the City of Destruction. All true pilgrims originate from the City of Destruction, and the coastline of affiliated cities, with Valiant-for-Truth hailing from Darkland and Mr. Honest from the Town of Stupidity. Their extreme distance from the Celestial City shows them all to be firmly damnable places. That true pilgrims should come from so far is an idea that corresponds with Bunyan’s Treatise Of the Fear of God, published closely on the heels of Pilgrim’s Progress. It emphasizes that an extreme fear of damnation in tandem with the fear of God is the “beginning of knowledge,” the “beginning of Wisdom,” the basis for departing on the journey of faith (MW 9, 35-54). Accordingly, Pilgrim’s Progress records the weeping, crying, sighing, lamenting Christian who fears sinking to hell, crying out “what shall I do?” (10). The origins of the false pilgrims still offer a modicum of respectability and religiosity. Complacency is the sign of reprobation, and Bunyan implies this partly through the mocking titles of many places. The implication is that all of the pilgrims must recognize their ignorant and/or hopeless state and proceed with the help of God through the action of Christ. Mr. Worldly Wiseman and his affiliate, Mr. Legality, hail from the towns of Carnal-Policy and Morality, which as a rule treat a problem of divine origin to a mundane cure (18-19). When Formalist and Hypocrisy (who are rule-breakers of the spatial vehicle conveying Bunyan’s theology) jump the fence to join Christian, he immediately pins the motivation for such establishment-religion 223 characters by stating that they were “born in the Land of Vainglory, and are going for praise to Mount Sion” (39). Although their destination is correct in one sense, their “way” expresses an unwillingness to tackle the psychological verticality at Hill Difficulty, and therefore they tumble downwards. Adam the First hails from “the Town of Deceit” (69), which is part of the way that trust in the self (constituted by psychologized “daughters”, lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, pride of life) is to be discouraged. Christian assumes Talkative is a true pilgrim precisely until he learns that he learns that Talkative is from “Prating-row” (76). Vanity Fair has a large Cabal of personifications, from Judge Hategood, to Envy, Superstition and Pickthank, to the motley jurists: the behaviour of all of these is predicated on the long description of Vanity Fair’s founding by Beelzebub, Apollyon, and Legion, and his satirical tone concerning the many “Houses, Lands, Trades, Places, Honours, Preferments, Titles, Countreys, Kingdoms, Lusts, Pleasures . . . and what not” (86). The sarcasm of the writing, and the flippancy of the characters correspond with what Bunyan imagines as the spatial immobility inherent in their spiritual place of origin, which all set their sites/sights on Augustine’s City of Man. These pilgrims do not come from the fearful wilderness, but all of them hail from towns, fairs, villages, and cities, and these become the basis for this characterization. When Christian and Hopeful first encounter By-ends, he says that “he came from the Town of Fair-speech, and he was going to the Coelestial City, (but told them not his name.)” (97). The most important thing to know about By-ends, is the general ideological “region of error” from whence he hails: i.e., Fair-speech. Bunyan primes the reader for the topic at hand (of the relationship of pragmatic language to social advancement), to be discussed by means of a variety of the proximate interlocutors: Mr. Hold-the-World, Mr. Mony-love, and Mr. Save-all. Bunyan does not even allow for Christian and Hopeful to respond to the conversation these false pilgrims have amongst 224 themselves: the “pit-falls” of their approach to religion are punned upon and dramatized by the manner in which they are enticed, and are led to fall from, the cliff at Hill Lucre (105). The first thing the reader learns about the false pilgrim Ignorance, who gets the most extensive expository treatment in the narrative, is that he is from the town of Conceit, connected to the road via a tellingly crooked lane (i.e., a devia). After Christian and Hopeful have their first encounter with him, the narrator puns that Christian “saw that the man was wise in his own conceit” (120). Connecting places to other places, Bunyan employs what might be called “thematic clusters” all throughout The Pilgrim’s Progress: objects, discussions, and places that differ from one another, but eventually reveal a conceptual connection, through their representations of linked tenors or vehicles. The damned man in the iron cage of despair from the Interpreter’s House has some of his ideas revisited in Doubting Castle, under the jurisdiction of Giant Despair. The departing pilgrims come against an “Iron gate” with a lock that is “damnable hard” (114). Thematic clusters take more spatial forms several times: The “meadows green” beside the River of Life, inspired by Psalm 23, are explicitly parallel to the King’s Highway; the comfort of By-path Meadow is titularly divergent from the main path, and this episode appears just a few paragraphs after the previous meadow’s appearance. The landscapes at the beginning of the story are all “burdensome” and exacerbate the sense of Christian’s burden: the muck and mud of the Slough of Despond weigh him down further, Mr. Worldly Wiseman’s recommendation concerning the Town of Morality all pertains to alleviating the burden, and Mt. Sinai threatens to crush Christian; at the Interpreter’s House Christian has a proverbial “burden of interpretation,” and up toward the Cross and Sepulcher “did burdened Christian run, but not without great difficulty, because of the load on his back” (37). 225 I wish to provide some commentary on one thematic cluster that has drawn critical attention for some time. The Victorian Thomas Babington Macaulay levies his foremost aesthetic complaint about Bunyan’s work on the spatial inconsistency of the River of Death: The Pilgrim’s Progress undoubtedly is not a perfect allegory. The types are often inconsistent with each other; and sometimes the allegorical disguise is altogether thrown off. The river, for example, is emblematic of Death; and we are told that every human being must pass the through the river. But Faithful does not pass through it. He is martyred, not in shadow, but in reality, at Vanity Fair. (18) Setting aside the fact that Bunyan never seriously contrasts shadow and reality in his story, Death is perhaps the most prominent thematic cluster in all of Pilgrim’s Progress, and Macaulay’s criticism might be answered by showing that there are, in fact, many landscapes of Death in the story. Beyond Faithful’s death at Vanity Fair, and the pilgrim companies’ end at the River of Death, there are numerous other pilgrims who actually die, and their demise is met in a few loci that the characters and margins highlight as sites of mortuary signification (Apollyon even exclaims of past pilgrims, “How many of them have been put to shameful deaths?”). For instance, Vain-glorious falls into his eponymous pit, Formalist and Hypocrisy die in the woods and fields of Destruction and Danger, By-ends and his company are rumored to die, or suffer maiming, falling from the cliffs of Hill Lucre. But in a bigger way, the diction surrounding Mt Sinai involves Christian’s ominous sense that he is about to die, in accordance with Bunyan’s ideas about spiritual movement from the Law to the Gospel, inspired by the passages from Romans 7 that smother the margins of this episode. Christian tells Evangelist, he has “turned aside to go in the way of death,” and Evangelist sternly notes that the direction of Mr. Worldly Wiseman’s commendation is the “way that leadeth unto the administration of death”; the focal 226 mountain of that way “has been the death of many, and will be the death of many more” (23-24). The Valley of the Shadow of Death is another pellucid landscape of death in the allegory, and the quality of the valley is not intended by Bunyan merely to mean “the lowest point of despondency”, even if the protagonists of Part 1 and 2 do not perish here: the narrator assures that substantive spiritual death has been wrought through the “Ditch” where the “blind have led the blind in all ages, and have both there miserably perished” (62), as well as the Quagg into which many including “King David once did fall” (63), and the “blood, bones, ashes, and mangled bodies of men” at the end of the valley, close to the cave of Pope and Pagan (66). Doubting Castle likewise contains gruesome remnants of the deceased, and a core of Christian and Hopeful’s discussion is on suicide. One of the emblematic visions of the Delectable Mountains is the stile that leads to the tombstones where victims of Despair “wander in the congregation of the dead” (118), embodying Proverbs 21.16. Death is always imminent, and Bunyan tries to give an affectation of suspense, as when Evangelist gives the ambiguous prophecy that “one or both of you must seal the testimony which you hold, with blood” (84). Not all pilgrims need to die at the River of Death, for consistency. Bunyan covers his landscapes with allegorical corpses as an art of memory with a memento mori accent: the allegorical landscapes themselves serve as thematic topologies reminding pilgrims of death in order to instil the fear of God. Conclusion John Bunyan’s celebrated realism comes from the way that he writes of the “Book of Nature” and biblical edifices as mirrors to the soul, spurs to the imagination that arouse the conscience and provoke fear. Fundamentally, Bunyan considers metaphors of place (taken from 227 the two other books and transmuted into his) to be the basis for what he considers to have the greatest “solidity” – the memory of death and eternity, a comprehension of the psycho-spiritual undertone of reality, and the basis for representing the soteriological nature and vector of the characters (true and false) with their signifying properties. Bunyan draws from categories of assumed revelation in order to amplify his particular sense of what will make his writing authoritative, and what will most imaginatively impress his psychological fixations on the fear of God and the memory of what matters most – the pilgrims’ progress from this life to that which is to come. 228 Conclusion This dissertation has surveyed edifices and topographies in narratives that signal a metaphorical framework, and that span the medieval and Early Modern eras, exploring the ways that the places recognize and represent temporality, realism, cosmology, and theories of rhetoric. There is enormous structural, generic diversity among the main authors studied in this dissertation, but one category that does bring them together is the thread of spatial representation. Genre, etymologically speaking, is meant to recognize similarity within difference, and most often a piece of literary art draws tropes from many genres. What groups Piers Plowman, The Passetyme of Pleasure, The Faerie Queene, and The Pilgrim's Progress, and dozens of other stories mentioned throughout this dissertation, together is that they are all allegories – but they emerge as allegories among a variety of other genres. Piers Plowman is, in large sections, quite sermoneque; Hawes' poems sometimes play the part of liberal arts textbook; Spenser's work is a sprawling “epic romance”; and The Pilgrim’s Progress is part emblem book, part autobiography, and part pious dialogue.1 The politics of these texts also vary widely. Langland and Bunyan, although White European males, produce perspectives more on the “fringes” of centralized London power, as trenchant critics of the established religious and legal authorities. The moral indignation of their works often bleeds from a “moral sense” that imbues their satirical approaches to aristocratic and stately topographies and edifices. Even if Hawes and Spenser were not the most wealthy or powerful men, they did share an incredibly extensive involvement with the “center”, with the Tudor monarchs in power during their time of writing (Henry VII and Elizabeth I, respectively). Hawes’ programme for allegorical places meant an attempt at stabilizing and quivering base 1 As a note of interest, the “sequel” to The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, is virtually all pious dialogue, with a minimal, retrospective narrative of said life. 229 around London; he represents sententious spatial forms with firm aristocratic structures to undergird the political sands shifting in the late years of Henry VII’s reign. Spenser on the other hand, represents dispersal, instability, and dissolution with much more experimentation and confidence in a future of expanded political influence. Elizabeth’s reign distributes light across the British Isles, to the Low Countries, and beyond, with Spenser’s allegorical places revealing anxiety about threats of mutability, but optimism in England’s colonial project and in providence to continue with spiritual renewals across the world. Throughout the corpus of works across the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, one may find aesthetic and conceptual commonplaces as readily as one may find contrasts and disjunctions among their cities, gardens, pasture, forests, seas, rivers, castles, palaces, hills, mountains, caves, and other toponyms. It is a point in common that the main authors offer poems, though the poetic styles are utterly divergent (alliterative poetry, Chaucerian rhyme royal, Spenser’s particular stanzaic style, Bunyan’s occasional simple couplets). They all quote the Bible regularly and reverently, although some emphasize the reshaping of cornerstones with prophetic social critique, while others emphasize a more rigid ideological superstructure. There are numerous romance elements in each of their works. And, while each of these books use personification tropes, these are not the only signals to the reader to recognize metaphor. The embodiment of abstraction, or the use of history as a source of potential figures to be recognized figurally, frequently takes topographical form. In referring to the influential paradigm of theorists Judith Anderson and Carolynn Van Dyke, the “synthesis of deictic and non-deictic codes” (Van Dyke 40), are sometimes primarily spatial.2 The stories discussed in my work all share overarching plots of journey, education, and warfare that instigate movement through the world. 2 Anderson expands on Van Dyke’s ideas in Reading the Allegorical Intertext, and implicitly I also aim to extend their argument to spatiality. 230 But “the world” is not to be taken literally: the phrase is meant “allegorically.” These moving stories all engage interpretive questions that rise out of the roads, the forests, the seas, the “book of the world.” This dissertation has been an exploration of the “poetics of topification,” as complement and corrective to the many critical works exploring the trope of personification, and the studies of the allegorical genre that lean into them.3 Morton Bloomfield writes that it is perhaps “because allegory is considered by many to be personification (as it is indeed in part) there has been a strong tendency in modem English literary and rhetorical thinking from Coleridge on to consider ‘allegory’ a minor and tiresome trope” (329). Genre studies of allegory are mostly founded on ideas about metaphor, and this generalization stands: that these theorizations have too narrowly focused on personification. Bloomfield does not delve into issues of spatial representation, but this dissertation has partly aimed to expand and complicate discourse on allegory beyond personification as he suggests. Each of my chapters has shown ways that the authors composing allegorical narratives themselves clearly understood that places are part of the project of metaphoric representation. This dissertation has taken Mikhail Bakhtin, Robert Tally, Jr. and Mary Jo Reiff’s contentions to heart, that understanding the representation of place is part and parcel of under-standing the genre at hand. And so, this dissertation is a theory of the genre of allegory, with place at the conceptual center. While some theorists have allowed for place to be drawn on for the periphery of the discussion of the allegorical genre, it has never occupied any (topical) “place” of importance. 3 “Poetics of topification” plays off of the title of James Paxson’s Poetics of Personification. See n.1 from the introduction for reference to some of the main works of this nature. 231 Seven tropes were raised in the introduction to this dissertation, which amount to key “chronotopical features”, the conspicuous morphogenetic topologies in allegorical narratives: the use of abstract labels for places, distribution of the fragments of a self throughout a series of places through indicating psychic inflection in landscape, an applied approach to the “book of nature” in tandem with narrative moments or digressions for the application of biblical hermeneutics to topographical structures, alternating use of concreteness and abstraction with indexical symmetries or contraventions of normal spatial scale (mimesis), the tying of abstract topic to differentiated topography, the embodiment in space of significative temporalities, and spatial disorientation vis-à-vis gestures toward a sub specie aeternitatis. It should be reiterated that this taxonomy of tropes is not definitive or comprehensive; but this work has aimed to demonstrate that the tropes are useful for interpreting individual authors and their more particular concerns. This paradigm is usable in a number of further contexts: for more authors and allegorical works, for comparisons across texts and eras. In laying out this theory in chapter 1, the characterization of tropes has been left broad in order to allow for difference and to recognize the extent to which deviations from generic norms facilitate semiotic possibility. This seems appropriate to a characterization of metaphor, and particularly the “other-speaking” of allegory, rhetorical devices that by definition involve indirection. Many authors of medieval and Early Modern narratives were probably familiar with Pseudo-Dionysius’ idea that symbols from the book of nature teach best through incongruity and dissimilarity; and one may take Philip Sidney’s later theory that allegorical poesy must have surprises that strike and pierce the soul, must have enargia. Even within the same text, a single author will alternate on how they use mimesis in different sections. A study of allegorical place can be interesting, first of all, and more importantly, can lead to enriching readings of the 232 various authors who composed such works. The chapter on Langland demonstrates the connection between allegory, optics, and dreams, and the ways in which issues of perspective, ethics, and even theophany are so richly informed by the metaphorical comprehension of place. The chapter on Hawes points to many issues not yet explored by critics concerning his deep investment in the discourse of architectural stability, astrological portraiture and moral hardiness, and spatial mnemonics, all as political vouchers. The chapter on Spenser points to the tropes of place transformation that span much of the Faerie Queene and illuminate his discourse on the topic of genius, which appears numerous times across his and his contemporaries’ writings on spiritual presence. The chapter on Bunyan clarifies his relationship to the medieval past and explicates the long tradition of allegorical interpretation and representation of place that is partly transmitted and partly discarded, with his unique and dramatically affected descriptions of land and edifice. On a broader scale, the study of allegorical place is an intimate mirror to the cultural practices of interpreting the book of nature and the biblical exegesis of sites. Of course, other theories can be hybridized with a spatial analysis. The chronotope of allegory has a ready relevance to New Historicism and to Post-Colonialism. These metaphorical stories do regularly draw from a representation of cultural difference between a spatially inter-related - while differentiated - Orient and Occident, cursorily treated in chapters 2-4. It is absolutely true that these British writers entrench their works in key biblical topographies that are based on associations with the Levant, or broadly with the “East,” sometimes to highlight sacrality and sometimes difference. But the mixing of temporalities in the various works inevitably draws contemporary concerns back to the present day of each author; so, in Spenser, Saracens and Souldans take from Tasso’s temporality of the crusades, and are brought to his cities, houses, and gardens, but bring in contemporary politics of religious difference from 233 “Western” Spain. Langland in particular provokes the fourteenth-century and biblical associations with conflict in Palestine. Each of the four case study chapters include references to the new Jerusalem, and to paradisal gardens that obviously take their cue from chorographies within and without European Christendom.4 Palestine is a contested concept, aesthetic, and place in the minds of allegorists, as one example among other sorts of places. Generally, allegories certainly reveal many of their most notable limitations and prejudices in the stock ways that they satirize or oversimplify complex structures and topographies of the Orient, and represent sieges and violence toward outsiders in morally overconfident ways. Spatial theory and allegory can certainly be integrated with insights from discourses on sexuality and gender as well. Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies (translated and printed in English quite early) is one of the most remarkable medieval usages of allegory as a narrative “place” to defend against anti-feminists.5 Masculine characters, good and evil, constantly beleaguer and ruin feminine structures, from the Barn of Unity to the House of Alma. The indirection of the allegorical form, and its displacement from identifying too quickly with societal strictures, also allows for more sporadic latitude in the feminine characters to manifest traditionally masculine traits, which becomes evident already in Prudentius’ gory gladiators. Even though allegories are populated by disempowered feminine characters, each of the main texts looked at in this dissertation contains at least one prominent feminine character who traverses the allegorical landscape at some length: from Holy Church in Piers Plowman, to Discretion in The Example of Vertue, to Christiana in the second part of the Pilgrim’s Progress. 4 Julie Scott Meisami writes eloquently of how “[a]llegorical gardens” with lessons for the soul “abound throughout the literatures of the world but especially in medieval literature, both Western and Islamic.” She notes that “Christianity and Islam share the idea of the Book of Nature, ‘written’ by God” with “the Augustinian view that ‘beauty is not mere spectacle but God's rhetoric in the book of creation’ echoed in the Islamic world” that "Nature is a fabric of symbols, which must according to their meanings” (230). 5 Maureen Quilligan’s book, The Allegory of Female Authority provides some scholarly work on this issue. 234 Britomart is the “Alice in what is otherwise pure wonderland,” to borrow Josephine Bennett’s felicitous phrase, and generally her actions throughout the city of the Amazons and Isis Temple are transcendent of a more narrowly feminine framework. Spenser realizes at some level that his meditation on Britomart in the Legend of Justice has some valence to establishing a new order for the feminine in a polity, and his choice to have a powerful and rather free female knight change “all that forme of common weale” so that the “liberty of women [she] did repeale” (5.7). Some authors that have been touched on in this dissertation are excellent “ground” for a more extensive study of allegorical place: Chaucer's works, and especially the House of Fame, had such a proximate influence on two centuries of allegorists. Lydgate wrote many allegorical works besides his translation of Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, and these remained in fashion for some time. I have included brief comments on numerous allegorical romances between Hawes and Bunyan, anticipating or imitating Spenser, and conversing with allegories written on the continent (especially Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, de Guilleville’s La Pélerinage de Vie Humaine, and Olivier de La Marche’s Le Chevalier Délibéré). It should go without saying that spatial theory such as understood in this dissertation could be applied in some fashion for allegories in other European languages, as well as Arabic ones. Beyond the long narratives analyzed throughout this book, the theory here would apply perhaps equally well to some short poems that are “about” an allegorical edifice or land: Thomas Wyatt’s “Sonnet XIX,” George Herbert's “Church Floore,” and John Donne’s “Third Satire” all come to mind. Furthermore, works that have occasional forays into allegorical representation might have their places analyzed, such as the pastoral poems and romances of Philip Sidney and Mary Wroth. The allegorical places of John Milton’s Paradise Lost would benefit from such an analysis. Generally, the approach of Kenneth Borris and Mindele Ann Treip, to look for 235 possibilities of allegoresis in all 12 books, from hell to heaven and in between, are not erroneous, but end up minimizing the very special representational shift that Milton presents in and around the Chaos, Sin, and Death episodes of Book 2 and Books 10-11. These passages do not just have fresh personifications, but have allegorical topologies with common cause to the tropes explored in this dissertation, the “distraction toward abstraction,” the most striking shifts in spatial mimesis, in the meditations on temporality, in the way that Raphael's “book of nature” changes its moral, humoral, and aesthetic qualities, and the cosmological context above and below it. Furthermore, speaking of (D)eath, entire books have been written about death the personification,6 but there are numerous deathly toponyms that have interesting roles in allegorical books. This fact may be complemented with the fact that the memory arts are frequently connected with the memento mori.7 There are many directions that studies of allegorical place can go “from here.” The work is worth doing. Evidence that allegorical place needs to be thought about more follows from the reality that thinking about it is so sparse and adversarial. Even if Coleridge’s judgment – that allegorical narratives are a simple-minded, aesthetic dud – has stuck, it should be kept in mind that historically speaking, the authors themselves did not intend for allegorical places to be boring. This commonplace dislike, which I gave numerous examples of in chapter 1, would probably shock some authors of allegory.8 In the pages of bestiaries, common pigeons stand 6 Phoebe S. Spinrad The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance Stage, Judith Humphries The Personification of Death in Middle English Literature, Steven Knapp Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge. 7 John Manning’s book (The Emblem) notes this connection of the memory arts to the memento mori, and to the emblem. William Engel’s books connect some of these concepts, but not spatiality (Mapping Mortality: The Persistence of Memory and Melancholy, Death and Drama in Renaissance England: Shades of Memory). 8 Which is not to say that such a judgment could never be accurate in individual cases. Even Sidney, who advocates for allegory, states that when “the force of a similitude not being to prove any thing to a contrary disputer, but only to explain to a willing hearer” then “the rest is a most tedious prattling, rather overswaying the memory from the purpose whereto they were applied, then any whit informing the judgment, already either satisfied of by similitudes not to be satisfied” (247). 236 beside smoldering phoenixes for allegorization; and similarly, in allegorical narratives, common fields of mundane tomfoolery sit next to apocalyptic ones of streaming comets and bloody combat, as in Piers Plowman. In numerous writings on the book of nature concept, there is a deep attention to what Pseudo-Dionysius calls mystical teaching through dissimilarity and incongruity. Moreover, allegorical places are deeply influenced by the arts of memory, the Roman and medieval rhetoricians who argued that if one wishes to convey a concept that might be retained in memory, one should represent a journey down a road or through a large house – and should use shocking, distinctive, and colourful language that defies mimesis. These two long-standing approaches – the book of memory and the book of nature – both inform the abstract and unrealistic, but mystically inflected, places that range through the palaces, castles, forests, plains, and seas of allegorical travel. Another common misconception is that allegorical places are too disconnected or divorced from real-world places, as opposed to, say, novels.9 Photographic realism, cartography, and many other modern understandings of spatial perspective and representation are clearly separate paradigms from allegorical space and place. Some readers will look for things they will not find. However, allegorical places always have a “literal” and “historical” foundation on which to build metaphor, as premodern authors like Hugh of St. Victor strenuously maintain. The story-worlds also have a spatial relationship to the political and moral concerns of the author, in a curious meeting of intent and unconscious design deriving from literary tradition and local geographic influence. John Sutton has written about how English authors of the Renaissance show a “dynamic” and “reciprocal” relationship to “culturally” and “naturally constructed” places that accrue their own histories, but still act as sites for the inscription of 9 Alvin Greenberg is one example among many who disparage allegory in this way. Other examples are noted on p.44, n.39. 237 memorial and “conceptual activity” (122-23). This statement definitely applies even to the dreamlands of allegorical worlds. Although the connection between places does not have an ordinary status of linearity on a three-dimensional continuum, the connection between allegorical places has a cosmological logic as well as a target audience that would be “positioned” to recognize the qualities of admixture between general and local “topics.” The various chapters of this dissertation showed that Langland treats Malvern and London as places of particular optical sensitivities; explored how Hawes’ treatment of aristocratic and courtly Tudor settings treat architectural associations with stability; noted Spenser’s particular interest in English and Irish cities and rivers, and his representation of England’s military actions in the low countries; and finally, how Bunyan melded biblical places with intensely pedestrian Bedford features. One of the take-aways of this dissertation is that the works on arts of memory and the book of nature are intimately tied to the fate of spatial representation in allegorical narratives. Aspects of all seven tropes emerge out of these two traditions. The authors often go out of their way to mention the figurative connections to memory and nature. The arts of memory, in their medieval and Early Modern forms, were consummately allegorical. However different Bunyan’s compositions are from the allegories that came before him, and however many challenges in the late seventeenth century were prominent against the older authorities of allegory, Bunyan shows recurrent interest in all three of these metaphorical paradigms. The allegories looked at throughout this dissertation are the “storehouses” of memory suggested by the Roman and medieval rhetoricians.10 The narratives themselves valorize constant references to the utility of memory, and include characters that embody memorial invention. It is logical to tie the decline of the production of allegorical narratives to the decline of the locational art of memory. 10 The “storehouse” metaphor is given by Cicero in Institutio Oratoria and explored by Mary Carruthers throughout Book of Memory. 238 “Ramist” logic and Enlightenment mnemonics were based on different principles. The ars reminscendi changed in the long eighteenth century, being less and less tied to narrative mnemonics, and more tied to mathematics.11 Although cartography might be said to have a mnemonic quality, one may notice that references to “maps” by authors of allegory are metaphorically rather than literally cartographic.12 Cartography is a mirror to how the “book of nature” was increasingly understood in the twilight of the Early Modern Period: read not as symbols for moral or religious education or as “things in themselves”,13 but as mathematical items and more comprehensive quantities for practical utility. It is just so fortuitous that as the concept of the book of nature shifted from its symbolic signification, and memory arts suffered a similar fate, allegory as a narrative form also fell into Neo-classic censure. Notably, Emblem books, which take their inspiration from the book of nature idea and owe aspects of their form to arts of memory, suffered a similar fate on a similar timeline.14 One suspects that the fates of all these genres are tied together. If the main narratives investigated in this dissertation use the book of nature idea across the board, a generalization that can definitely be made is that the topographical iterations of the book of nature “live by” this conceptual metaphor for exploring the self. In the words from John Bunyan, “the book of nature . . . is thyself” (MW 3, 260). This phrase is not an affirmation of a 11 Seth Long catalogues the popularity of spatial mnemonic systems in England, which remained popular throughout the sixteenth century, but notes that “as Ramist treatises […] began to circulate widely” the seventeenth century shows tremendous decline of the “raw publication counts” in Herrenian styles of memory arts (97). 12 Spenser’s offers a few references to the “cards” of Guyon and Britomart (2.7.1, 1 3.2.7, 3.8.31), and Bunyan’s Greatheart in the second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress has an allegorical “Map” that Bunyan implies to be the Bible (277). Spenser’s character Irenius actually uses cartography in a much more “modern” way in his View of the Present State of Ireland, as he pulls out his map to lay out the process of subjugation. 13 Anne Ferry’s book on The Art of Naming highlights that comprehending and relating to entities in nature involved considering their names and properties, until more quantitative methods came to dominate. 14 Emblem book production declined massively by the first decades of the eighteenth century. Rosemary Freeman marks the demise of the emblem book with, in fact, Bunyan’s late seventeenth-century Divine Emblems, arguing that the subject matter had lost its cultural centrality and was now a more fitting subject for children (212). 239 psycho-analytic theory about the fragmentation of a personality into separate entities in space, nor does it affirm that authors of allegory were proto-panpsychists. It is not a denial, either. It is, however, evidence of the profound cognitive dependence on spatial structures that permeate this western genre with metaphoric transference at its heart. Alfred Gell has written that humans have a “distributed personhood” which involves our presence concerning “everything in our surroundings which bears witness to our existence, our attributes, and our agency” (37). Accordingly, the story this dissertation is trying to tell is the story of persons and communities trying to “find their place” through narrative. While acknowledging that the depth of our biographical knowledge of the respective authors differs, it is obvious enough that they all led markedly complicated and turbulent lives, with many (allegorical) hills and valleys. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
English
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Hodgson, Elizabeth, 1962-
Rouse, Robert Allen, 1971-
The nature of allegory : spatial tropes in medieval and early modern allegorical narratives
Text