Making a Legend

It is possible to write about the Legend of Good Women as a series of negatives, absences, or denials. We might say that the Prologue is not one, because at nearly six hundred lines it is far too long for a prologue; that it is too self-sufficient—indeed, that it is a fully developed dream-vision narrative, which the legends appear to accompany almost as an afterthought or appendix; that its blatant fictionality fails to provide any of the factual, occasional, or analytical material normally expected in a prologue. We might speak of a heroine who is not one: Alceste, absent from the lives (although admittedly the text is incomplete), and in any case badly compromised, as I shall argue later, by her association with the God of Love. We might speak of a gallery without portraits, for not one of the women included in the Legend is given a physical description. We might speak of a hagiography without saints, and of good women who are far from unequivocally good. We might mention

the denial of poetic worth that is co-opted into the poem itself by its fictional critics. And finally there is the absence—not absolute, of course: perhaps "diminished presence" would be a better phrase—of the Legend itself in the received Chaucer canon, as discussed in the Prolocutory above.

I want to concentrate here on one of these negativities, which forms a juncture of reading and writing: the hagiographical matrix deprived of saints. Chaucer was not the first to compose a collection of lives or portraits of legendary or even real women. He had been preceded in this by Ovid, whose Heroides (c. 10 B.C.E.), aside from being the generic model, also provides a possible model for ironic treatment of the subject. He was preceded too by Boccaccio (De mulieribus claris, 1361), and by the authors of Nonnenbücher, collective biographies of the members of a convent, usually written by one of their number. Curiously, though, no one had compiled a collection of lives of female saints, nor would this be done until Osbern Bokenham assembled his legendary nearly a half-century after Chaucer's death. Chaucer's Legend is thus a curious sport in the evolution of the hagiographical genre. Not itself hagiography, it is nonetheless generated by hagiography and the secular gallery of women. It borrows enough from hagiography to provoke a fifteenth-century clerical reader, Bokenham, to model his own (at that point unique) all-female hagiography on the Legend, yet its courtliness recommended it to the noble and middle-class reader of the day.

That Chaucer had substantial respect for hagiography is evident from the fact that he has Alceste cite, in her list of the Narrator-poets, exculpatory achievements, a life of Saint Cecelia (the Second Nun's Tale ) and a translation of a homily, thought to be by Origen, on St. Mary Magdalene (F 426–28).^[21] There is also the child-martyr legend told by the Prioress, which has a good deal in common with hagiography, particularly with the lives of Sts. Hugh of Lincoln,

[21] The translation is lost, but John McCall notes the resemblance of Mary in the homily to the heroines in the Legend: "She is the faithful woman, of course, true and piteous, forsaken and ready to die at the sepulchre of her beloved Lord—less violent but with no less resolution than Cleopatra at the shryne [sic ] of Anthony" ("Chaucer and the Pseudo Origen," 501). He also suggests that the flexible, vivacious, and sympathetic Narrator of the homily "may have been as valuable a model for the later Chaucerian narrators as Mary Magdalene was for the later heroines" (502). See, too, Janet Cowen, "Structure and Tone," on the hagiographical matrix of the Legend.

William of Norwich, and Herbert of Huntington, all of them adolescent victims, supposedly, of Jews. In the Merchant's Tale, Proserpina adduces Christian martyrs among the good women who confute traditional misogyny (IV.2283). The same tale may also contain verbal echoes of particular lives. The departure of wedding guests recalls a similar passage in some versions (although not Chaucer's) of St. Cecelia. In the unforgettable wedding night scene, the young May is "broght abedde as stille as stoon" (1818), while in the South English Legendary, St. Lucy is tied to a bed in a brothel where a thousand men rape her: "& evere heo lai as stille as stoon" (line 110). The Miller promises to "tel a legende and a lyf" (1.3141), his cynical abuse of generic terminology falsely reassuring the Host that his story will be fitting and proper. Laurel Braswell has shown that some anti-fraternal material in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale and the Summoner's Tale can be traced to Jacob da Voragine's immensely influential thirteenth-century Legenda aurea, possibly via the South English Legendary or via liturgical readings (for which both the Legenda and the Legendary were often substituted). And of course there is St. Thomas à Becket looming silently over the Canterbury Tales as éminence grise and (as an Aristotelian would say) final cause of the pilgrimage. In Troilus, when Pandarus comes to his niece with love tidings and bids her dance, she replies that she ought rather to pray in a cave and read "holy seyntes lyves" (2.117–18); and if Criseyde's hyperbole here sounds slightly sanctimonious, the irony redounds less against hagiography than against herself. In the House of Fame, the Eagle swears "by Seynte Clare" (1066), a disciple of St. Francis and founder of the Poor Clares, perhaps introduced to hint at the parody of Franciscan super-rationalist scientism that is offered in the Eagle's lecture on natural philosophy.^[22]

Noticeable in all these instances is an element of irony associated with the hagiographical reference.^[23] This is so despite, indeed alongside, the obvious devotion indicated by the Origen translation

[22] Several other hagiographical oaths, from the Tales, are briefly discussed by Ruth Cline, showing that "the choice of oaths was not entirely haphazard."

[23] This is consistent with Ann S. Haskell's observation that, in the Canterbury Tales, "the saint is often used for Chaucerian irony" (2), particularly when its incongruity functions as contrast with the narrative. She correctly adds, though, that each hagiographical reference demands a separate and contextual study.

(and, of course, by numerous places in the Canterbury Tales, most explicitly the Retraction). In fact, I would maintain about these references or allusions, as I shall argue about the Legend itself as a whole, that the hagiographical matrix frames Chaucer's ironic project, that the notion of holiness stands as foil to the events and persons he portrays. It is not disrespect for hagiography but, on the contrary, precisely respect that enables the secular poet to use the genre as a touchstone, albeit a distant and unobtrusive one.

To be able to incorporate the apparently alien hagiographical consciousness into a courtly, classicizing work, a work moreover informed by contemporary issues in skeptical philosophy, is no Chaucerian perversity but rather the product of real familiarity with hagiography. When we understand the nature of hagiography, we may come to view it as after all less alien to Chaucer than we might have thought, for there is within hagiographical tradition ample room for both conscious invention and skepticism. High-medieval hagiography was a profoundly intertextual genre, to which Oriental and Western folktale, classical myth and legend, travel and adventure story, romance, political propaganda, doctrinal instruction, history, and biography all contributed. If the broad plot outline of a given life was fixed, its treatment was not, and successive compilers, editors, translators, and redactors felt free to add their version of incident, character, dialogue, description, and local color. They often did so quite overtly, justifying their creativity and poetic license with an aesthetic firmly based in an otherworldly notion of truth. One instance of this aesthetic occurs in the Life of St. Gregory, written by a ninth-century monk at Whitby:

It should offend no one at all that the ordering of these events is irregular, for in that I am governed by the clear light of Holy Scripture¼ . And neither should anyone be offended if any of these deeds were actually done by some other of the saints, since the holy apostle, through the mystery of one body with its members the saints, by comparing it with the living body has so brought them into union that we should attribute to each member the works of the other in turn ¼ . Therein we know that all of the saints are through charity of the body of Christ, whose members are in common. Hence if any of these things which we have written were not of that man ¼ we should little doubt that they too should be in so great a man; for that holy man in his foreordained wisdom clearly teaches that with all

living things what is discovered in one should always be attributed to others. (Trans. C. W. Jones, 118)

A similar justification appears in the twelfth-century metrical Life of St. Malchus by Reginald of Canterbury, who, acknowledging discrepancies between his account and that of St. Jerome, urges the reader to believe the earlier version. Yet, he continues, since all things are common in the body of holy faith, what belongs to one belongs to all and vice versa. It would be wrong to believe the saint anything other than full of virtues, so that however much virtue we have attributed to Malchus himself, we do not deviate from truth (C. W. Jones, 214). Nor has this criterion been forgotten in our own day, for as Laurel Braswell observes, "the Bollandists still maintain after three centuries of hagiographical research and publication, [that] the ratio of saints' lives is the presentation of a sublime ideal in the sense that legend, like poetry, discloses a higher degree of truth than history itself" ("Chaucer and the Art of Hagiography," 210).

With respect to reception of the material by its transmitters, many a monastic hagiographer was willing (or his critics were) to question or dispute some of the more lush extravagancies of tradition. In the twelfth century, Guibert, abbot of Nogent, constructed a theological argument to refute the claim of the monks at St. Medard to possess the Savior's tooth (Pal. Lat. 156). Another text, Walter Daniel's life of Aelred of Rievaulx (1167) was attacked by some members of its first audience for the improbability of some of its material.^[24] That St. Margaret of Antioch was swallowed and regurgitated by a Satanic dragon, which she then killed, is challenged by Simeon Metaphrastes^[25] and by Jacob da Voragine (c. 1230-c. 1298), archbishop of Genoa, who called the episode "apocryphum et frivolum" (401). The compiler of the South English Legendary provides an apologia for his doubt about the motif:

Ac this netelle ich noght to sothe • for it nis noght to sothe iwrite
Ac wether it is soth other it nis • inot noman that wite
Ac aghen kunde it were • that the devel were to dethe ibroght

[24] See discussion of Walter Daniel in Heffernan.

[25] The skepticism of Metaphrastes is mentioned in Francis Mack's Introduction to the thirteenth-century Seinte Marherete. Metaphrastes was once thought to be a source for The Second Nun's Tale, but Sherry Reames has proved otherwise.

For he nemai tholie nanne deth • i nemai it leve noght
And also i neleove noght • that is mighten were so stronge
A so holy creature • inis wombe avonge
Ac to sothe it is iwrite • that in a monnes like
The devel to this maide com • and fonded hure to swike.
                                                (165–72)

But I don't relate this as truth, for it isn't written (intended) as truth. Whether it is or isn't true, I know no one who knows. But it would be against nature for the devil to be killed; because he can suffer no death, I can't believe it. Also I don't believe that his powers were sufficient to swallow such a holy creature [as Margaret] into his belly. But it is written as truth that the devil shaped like a man came to this maid and tried to tempt her.

It seems, then, that Chaucer might have found the saint's legend another case in point demonstrating the inextricability of "fals and sothe compouned" (HF 2108). As text, it is as subject as any other to the vagaries of textual transmission. But "God forbede but men shulde leve / Wel more thing then men han seen with ye!" (F 10–11): the letter is not the last word, nor is literality the final meaning.

What is a "legend"? Most literally, it is that which is to be read (legenda ). This will seem pointlessly obvious—mere translation—unless we recall the context in which the material so designated was to be read.^[26] It was to be read aloud, in church, as part of liturgy during the nocturnal office in an annual mass commemorating the anniversary of a holy person's death. The "legend" was originally a tributary biography or memorandum compiled by the local archivist from community memory and testimony as to the gesta, signa et virtutes (deeds, signs, and powers of holiness) of the deceased. If the saint grew more famous, the church or abbey more prosperous, then the service might become longer and more elaborate, the "legend" more fully detailed. The word was in no way opposed to history, in no way implied fictionality. A collection of martyrs' lives would be a "passionary": a collection of non-martyrs' lives (e.g., holy hermits, church functionaries, or unusually pious women) would be a "legendary," but this distinction collapsed fairly early on.

[26] This and the next paragraph summarize material in Charles W. Jones, Aigrain, and Vauchez.

In the early Christian era—the period of persecution (through the third century)—with the exception of the scriptural saints the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, and the Apostles, only martyrs were venerated as saints. Nor were these martyrs officially, that is, juridically, canonized. Holiness was manifested in the martyr's perseverance, death, and miracles, which were proclaimed by the martyr's community and local church. Canonization—the word first appears early in the eleventh century—was a privilege appropriated to itself by the papacy for the first time only in the late tenth century. Subsequently, it became an important aspect of Gregorian centralization, and in the twelfth century the papal bureaucracy began to assert that its approval was a necessary precondition to public veneration. Naturally, papal control of canonization extended to the accompanying liturgy and devotion. Equally naturally, the procedure of inquiry became very lengthy, very bureaucratic, very politicized, and very costly. Although there was a tradition, especially in England, of sanctifying clerical opponents of royal power, England's candidates for sainthood never managed to succeed under Pope John XXII (1316–34). During the Great Schism, though, the rival popes were quite generous in granting favors to their allies, so that England fared much better at the hands of Rome; and, as observed earlier in this chapter, such ecclesiastical politics were the medium in which the diplomat Chaucer swam.

What all this suggests is some flexibility in the concept of sainthood as well as in the generic notion of the legend. Such flexibility may help to account for the ease with which some medieval poets appropriated the vocabulary of hagiography for their love poetry. The rhetoric of the religion of love certainly feeds into Chaucer's use of the legend; the title, after all, under which the work was evidently known and by which it is called by the Man of Law is "the Seintes Legende of Cupide" (61). The reader of Chaucer's Legend has already seen the rhetoric of the religion of love at work in Troilus. What he or she sees about it there is its inadequacy as a guide to conduct and, sub specie aeternitatis, its falsity. The Prologue to the Legend apparently sets up the work as a palinode to Troilus: according to the God of Love, as a corrective to the romance's portrayal of the faithless Criseyde. In fact, though, as I hope to show in later chapters, that apparent purpose is reversed,

so that the Legend winds up, in very winding ways to be sure, reasserting the same point about love that is proclaimed in the finale to Troilus.

The title of Chaucer's Legend, then, invites—even virtually forces—the reader to feel its daring and its dissonance. It is a parody, yet not one that depreciates the thing parodied. Rather, the thing parodied—a collection of saints' lives—is a silent presence by which the all-too-secular lives narrated in the poem may be measured.^[27]Parodia, we recall, means literally a song or reply sung to the same tune as the original, or in a similar manner, or with similar words. The terms coined by Gérard Genette in his study of transtextual relations are helpful here, specifically Genette's fourth category, hypertextuality and hypotextuality. Hypotext is anterior; hypertext, linked to it as a derivative text that is not commentary, can serve as a way of investing old forms with new meaning. Following Genette, Linda Hutcheon severs parody from comedy, ridicule, or humor. Parody, she argues, is repetition or imitation with a difference, a form of transcontextualization "characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the expense of the parodied text," "a method of inscribing continuity while permitting critical distance" (6–7, 20, 32). Such a concept of parody helps us to understand why there was a good deal of room during the high and later Middle Ages for levity apparently at the expense of ecclesiastical, liturgical, or even scriptural authority: I might cite the well-known belching-joke "cor meum eructavit," the feasts of the Ass and of the Boy Bishop, and the Middle English "Cockaygne" poem by way of illustration. These humorous phenomena are far from genuinely iconoclastic—Hutcheon comments that parody reinforces, "its transgression is always authorized" (26), and this is its central paradox. But they do indicate the sort of flexibility I have in mind.

There are, therefore, several ways in which the "legend" rubric is by no means sarcastic. One of them is that hagiography offers a

[27] A similar concept of parody is elaborated by Edmund Reiss, who distinguishes parody from satire in that "the ideal is not contained or fully reflected in the given, as in satire. Rather, when we call up the ideal, we are aware of the gap between it and the given¼ . [Parody] insists that we see [the given] in terms of something that is adequate" (27). Thus the Wife of Bath, for example, is a parody of the ideal of woman. Reiss goes on to take a scriptural-exegetic position that is both too narrow and not necessary to his concept of parody. Curiously, he does not mention the Legend of Good Women.

culturally normative array of exemplary women. In Chapter 2 I take up the question of why Chaucer wanted such an array. That he is asked for it by his own fictional character (the God of Love) is not, of course, an adequate answer, and I propose that his generic/formal choice relates to the moral and aesthetic purposes of the work as a whole (if we may speak of an apparently unfinished work as a "whole"). Another reason for hagiography is that it does show women suffering and dying as a consequence of love, and so does Chaucer. In basic plot, therefore, his stories do parallel those of hagiography, and open up the possibility of bringing into play different or competing concepts of love. Cupiditas and caritas are part of the Augustinian legacy that enriches the Legend of Good Women, and other aspects of that legacy will be discussed in later chapters.

There is a saint in the Legend of Good Women, but it is not a woman. It is the daisy, the modest English flower that is prayed to as "the clernesse and the verray lyght / That in this derke world me wynt and ledeth," as "maistresse," muse, "gide and lady sovereyne," and "erthly god" (F 84–94). It is the daisy whose "blisful sighte" wins all the Narrator's "reverence." It is only the daisy whose name receives the etymological treatment popularized by Voragine's Legenda aurea and duplicated by Chaucer in the Prologue to his life of Saint Cecelia: for "wel by reson men it calle may / The 'dayeseye', or elles the 'ye of day'" (F 183–84; not in G). Even without etymology, however, the daisy's name carries hagiographical weight, or at least it does so in French, because its French name, marguerite, is that of a well-known saint much venerated in England, Margaret. This equivalency was acknowledged in the "marguerite poems" of Chaucer's French contemporary and influence (for Book of the Duchess particularly), Guillaume de Machaut,^[28] and in his stanzaic "Legend of Seynt Margarete" (1430), John Lydgate calls the saint "this daysye, with leves red and white." "Marguerite" also means "pearl," and in versions of St. Margaret that etymologize her name, this is the interpretation always given, for like the pearl, Margaret was little, round, and white: little in humility, round in perfection, white in purity. Of

[28] Wimsatt, 28, 60–61. Because of this inherent relation of the daisy with St. Margaret, it is gratuitous to look further afield to account for its intercessionary role, as do Lisa Kiser (Telling Classical Tales, 47) and Robert Burlin (40) in identifying the daisy with the Blessed Virgin Mary.

course, a daisy too can be described as little, round, and white, and this commonalty of qualities assists my argument. Besides his explicit etymology, Chaucer also avails himself of the traditional one, although he does so only imagistically, by giving Alceste a white crown made "of o perle fyn, oriental" (F 221).

The hagiographical treatment of the daisy is continued when the God of Love refers to the flower as "my relyke" (F 321: the image is not present in G). This is a technical term denoting a part of the saint's body, item of his or her clothing, or object touched by or associated with the saint.^[29] The relic is invested with such intense metonymic or synechdochic power that it is capable of miracles and becomes itself the object of veneration. During the high Middle Ages there was much dispute about the possession of relics. They were in demand by secular and ecclesiastical authorities alike; there was a significant international market in relics; and competition for relics led not infrequently to their theft from one establishment for pious transfer ("translation") to another. The remains of Margaret herself were believed to have been removed several times before arriving at their final resting place in Montefiascone, north of Rome. According to Osbern Bokenham, Margaret's foot was in a priory near his place of birth (he does not specify the town), while the great toe and heel to this foot were at Reading Abbey (Legendys, 135–43). Edward III was particularly devoted to relics. He was, in W. M. Ormrod's words (855), "heir to one of the largest relic collections in England," visited numerous shrines annually, and generously funded their coffers. Richard II has been described as "probably the most genuinely pious of the later medieval kings of England" (Ferris, 212). He was especially devoted to the cult of Edward the Confessor. He also strove mightily to have his great-grandfather Edward II canonized, but without success, despite the popularity of Edward's cult and shrine at Gloucester. Eros's possessive jealousy about relics thus reflects not only his tyrannical character, but also a genuine social phenomenon of religious life, one with special domestic and indeed courtly-political resonance for an English audience.

I wrote a few pages earlier that literalism is not the last word, but here I want to make it my last word. If legenda is that which is to be

[29] On relics, see Brown, Cult; Brown, "Relics," Hermand-Mascard, and Geary.

read, what better title could there be, what more modestly boastful title, for a text in which the poet asserts his talent, reputation, and independence? He knows that his work has been read and discussed and will continue to be read and discussed. In appropriating this generic title, he proudly tells us so.