3—
The Naked Text

Dieser Einfall für den Schluss ist geradezu entsetzlich, verzeihen Sie mir, lieber Dr. Strauss—, Sie haben diesen Brief in keinem guten Moment geschrieben. Denken Sie die Höhe der Stimmung, die mühsam erkommen ist, vom Anfang des Vorspiels an, immer höher, in die herrliche Oper hinauf, dann im Kommen des Bacchus, im Duett eine fast mystische Höhe. Und nun, wo die nötige Coda nicht mehr als ein Moment sein darf ¼ nun soll solcher Quark wieder sich breitmachen (auf dem breitliegt der Ton).
Hugo von Hofmannsthal to Richard Strauss, 1916^[1]

This inspiration for the end is truly atrocious, if you will excuse me, dear Dr. Strauss—, you did not write this letter in any fortunate moment. Consider the lofty atmosphere that we have been striving so hard to reach, rising ever higher from the beginning of the overture to the glorious opera, then the entrance of Bacchus, reaching in the duet almost mystical heights. And now, where the necessary coda need not last more than a moment ¼ now this bilge is to be spread out again (the emphasis is on spread).

In 1969 an anthology of "recent American poetry in open forms" was published under the title Naked Poetry. The phrase, borrowed from the Andalusian poet Juan Jiménez (1881–1958), was intended, wrote the editors, Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey, to express "what we feel about the qualities of this poetry as no technical label could do." The qualities—or at least the formal features—of the poetry chosen for the collection are that it generally neither rhymes nor "move[s] on feet of more or less equal duration" (xi). Further, what interested the editors more than formal features were the "dreams, visions and prophecies" of the contributors, "the shapes

[1] Letter from Hugo von Hofmannsthal to his collaborator Richard Strauss about their opera Ariadne auf Naxos, in Forsyth, 104—5; translation based on Forsyth's with some modification by me.

of their emotions." In short prose accounts accompanying their poems, the contributors found various ways to describe their work: Denise Levertov wrote of "organic" poetry, Robert Bly of "association," Robert Creeley (following Charles Olson) of "returning to poetry its relation with the physiological condition," Allen Ginsberg of "native sensibility" and "personal breath," Gary Snyder of work that communicates "straight from the deep mind of the maker to the deep mind of the hearer. This is what poets call the Poem."

The "nakedness" in the title refers, then, to two related things: a freedom from traditional formal and technical restrictions, and a more intense, sincere, or revelatory language than is believed possible in structured verse. The assumption appears to be that less structure enables a more honest revelation of feeling. It is a romantic aesthetic, and an essentially lyric (rather than narrative) aesthetic, but what interests me here is the shared conviction that a "naked" poetry is possible. For none of the contributors contemplate the idea of the rhetoric of their own stance, of its temporally conditional and conditioned nature, indeed of its artificiality. Even Ezra Pound acknowledged all this, while apparently rejecting it, in his "Salutation the Second," which appeared in Poetry magazine in April 1913. "Here they stand," he wrote of his poems,

without quaint devices,
Here they are with nothing archaic about them.
Observe the irritation in general:
"Is this," they say, "the nonsense that we expect of poets?"
"Where is the Picturesque?"
 "Where is the vertigo of emotion?" ¼
Go, little naked and impudent songs,
Go with a light foot! ¼
 greet the grave and the stodgy,
Salute them with your thumbs at your noses.
 ¼  go! jangle their door-bells!
Say that you do no work
and that you will live forever.

Pound's naked verses, supposedly devoid of archaic devices, exhibit at the very least envoy, apostrophe, anaphora, personification, enargia, irony, and pun ("foot").

Taken for granted by the modern poets cited here is an idea of the

natural as hitherto latent beneath a centuries-old accretion of poetic form, but now able to emerge in its pristine glory. And this unstated premise perpetuates one very ancient idea about language, while opposing another. It denies that rhetoric, form, and style are coterminous with language itself, and that they assist in expression; it asserts that they impede expression, serving as cover-up for emotion or truth. The interplay of these conflicting ideas about language, already adumbrated in Chapter 2, is what this chapter will explore, with Chaucer's Legend as its field.

Nakedness

For a medieval writer, the desire for naked text is even more problematic than for a modern, complicated as it is by the intertextual nature of medieval poetic production. Nowhere is this more the case than with the medieval posterity of Ovid, Chaucer's major source for the Legend. "What difference does it make who is speaking?" Samuel Beckett's question, used by Michel Foucault to problematize the notion of authorship, can scarcely be more aptly applied than to the medieval conception of "Ovid"—a name designating not only a large number of texts by the Roman poet, but texts not even claiming to be composed by Ovid, texts known to be written by others, and yet constituting in their ensemble the "author-function" (to use Foucault's term) called "Ovid." If we limit ourselves to the Meta-morphoses alone, the range includes the manuscript of a long classical Latin poem, usually transmitted with medieval marginal and interlinear glosses; Latin prose commentaries on the poem; a moralized condensation of the poem in Latin verse; excerpts from the original in florilegia; scattered episodes inserted as exempla in many Latin and vernacular poems or embedded in scientific treatises and encyclopedic compilations; a substantially amplified French verse translation of the original with naturalistic, euhemeristic, and Christian allegories added; and a Latin prose redaction incorporating several of the preceding, which in turn incorporate one another.^[2] Such was the intertextual embarras de richesses confronting the late-medieval English poet in search of Ovid.

[2] Because there is a vast bibliography on medieval Ovid, I refer the reader to the partial list in Delany, "Naked Text," 290 n. 2.

Small wonder, then, that in introducing his collection of tales drawn largely from Ovid's Heroides and Metamorphoses, Chaucer should attempt to clear a space for himself, a territory just wide enough to accommodate a narrative stance:

For myn entent is, or I fro yow fare,
The naked text in English to declare
Of many a story, or elles of many a geste,
As autours seyn; leveth hem if yow leste.
.                                (G 85–88)

What the "nakedness" of a text might mean to the Chaucerian Narrator is not necessarily a simple thing, as I have indicated in Chapter 2. Here I would like to come closer to this "nakedness" in order to feel its meaning to Chaucer, to derive some sense of the poetic project he seems to set for himself, and thence to observe the operation or non-operation of the concept in the legends.

"Naked" is the past participle of a transitive verb: to naken or to nake an object, meaning to make bare, to expose, to strip someone or something of covering or protection. It carries therefore a sense of agency: nakedness is a produced condition, requiring an act of intervention. This transitivity suggests further that nakedness is not necessarily a usual condition, still less a desirable one. Both aspects of the word appear in the Prologue, when in spring the earth forgets "his pore estat / Of wynter, that hym naked made and mat" (F 125–26), and the sun reclothes all "That naked was" (F 129). One might indeed nake oneself, but this would be an exceptional, even a deplorable circumstance, as in Chaucer's translation of Boethius:"O nice men! why nake ye youre bakkes? (as who seith, 'O ye slowe and delicat men! whi flee ye adversites, and ne fyghte nat ayeins hem by vertu, to wynnen the mede of the hevens?')" (Consolation of Philosophy 4. m. 7, 60–70). More typical is Hoccleve's usage, in his "Letter of Cupid" (1402), in which Eve is relieved of direct responsibility for having "made al man-kynde lese his lyberte, / and naked yt of loye" (stanza 51). So that we need first to sense the verbness of "naked," to hear that a naked thing is a thing that has been rendered naked, it has been impoverished, stripped of what had properly covered or adorned it.

Yet, paradoxically, nakedness is a natural condition: the pristine condition, after all, of the human race and the human individual. In

the sense of originary nakedness, we find the images "naked as a needle," "naked as a worm" (Romaunt of the Rose, 454), "naked as my nail."^[3] There seems, then, to be a certain multileveled quality to the word and the concept, a quality revealed in other Middle English usages. A "naked bed," for instance, is not a bed stripped of bedding but rather a bed in which one sleeps naked, the attribute of the occupant transferred to the bed; one might, with similar poetic license, speak of a "sorrowful" bed as one in which sorrow is experienced. And to be in one's "naked shirt" (Romaunt, 5446) is not to be entirely naked but to be naked under one's shirt, clad only in one's shirt. Here the almost-perceptible attribute of the wearer is transferred to the garment. But this creates a logical conundrum, for since it is a garment worn by the wearer, the wearer is no longer naked, and this disqualifies the qualifier.

In connection with language or textuality, the word has a long and equally complicated history. Rather than compile a lengthy list of references from classical and medieval literatures, I shall offer a few examples that best illustrate ambiguities particularly relevant to my argument about the Chaucerian project in the Legend of Good Women.

In dedicating A Treatise on the Astrolabe (1391) to "Lyte Lowys my sone," Chaucer promises to give the work "under full light reules and naked wordes in Englissh, for Latyn canst thou yit but small, my litel sone." Further on in the dedication he seeks pardon from a more "discreet" audience for his "rude endityng" and "superfluite of wordes," justifying both by the fact that the recipient is a child. Nakedness of language here refers first to the vernacular, secondarily to a simple and repetitive instructional style. Rhetorical simplicity was also, apparently, what Richard de Bury had in mind when, in Philobiblon, he wrote of poetry and its enemies:

All the various missiles by means of which those who love only the naked Truth attack the poets are to be warded off with a double shield, either by pointing out that in their obscene material a pleasing style of speech may be learned, or that where the material is feigned ¼ , a natural or historical truth is enclosed beneath the figurative eloquence of fiction (in Robertson, Chaucer's London, 181).

[3] John Nichols notes (169) the pre- and postlapsarian connotations of female nudity in medieval art. He also observes that while the female nude is usually a negative sign, this does not include scenes of nursing, parturition, or sleep (170–71).

This would not be, however, the primary meaning for many of Chaucer's contemporaries. The translator of the C fragment of the Romaunt of the Rose (who may or may not have been Chaucer) has Fals-Semblant send his audience to "The nakid text, and lete the glose" (6556) in order to determine whether there is scriptural antecedent for mendicancy. The text is Holy Writ, most likely in Latin, and its nakedness refers to the absence of interpretive glosses. It is interesting that in the corresponding French passage, Jean de Meun does not use the imagery of nakedness, although he does have Faus Semblant emphasize the literality of his interpretation (la lestre [11262]; selonc la letre [11336]) and the image was available in Latin texts very likely to have been known by Jean.

The English translator has therefore inserted the image, and this usage is consistent with that of the Wycliffites or Lollards, concerned as they were with the direct apprehension of Scripture in vernacular translation and without accumulated exegetical glosses (see Chapter 2). Since the Lollards believed that truth does not inhere in one language more than another, and used this principle to justify their translations, they did not see the vernacular as any more inherently "naked" than Latin. A Lollard tract on translating the Bible shows that the absence of gloss, rather than the language itself, is the important thing. If, the tract says, a priest can no longer preach, one remedy is as follows:

recorde he in the woke [week] the nakid tixt of the Soundaie Gospel that he kunne the groos story and telle it to his puple, that is if he understonde Laytne, and do he this every woke of the yeer and forsothe he schal profite wel ¼ If for-sothe he understonde no Latyn, go he to oon of his neightboris that understandith, wiche wole charitabily expone it to hym and thus edifie he his flock ¼ [for] if it is levefful [lawful] to preche the naked text to the pupel, it is also lefful to write it to hem & consequentliche, be proces of tyme, so al the Bibil.^[4]

It was exactly this lack of gloss that the opponents of scriptural translation opposed, because of its subversive potential. This is why, as Anne Hudson observes, "The naked text in the ploughman's hand was a much more dangerous and a much more readily

[4] Buhler, 175. This translates a sermon by Grosseteste, who uses the phrase nudum textum euangelii. The tract is also printed in Deanesly, Lollard Bible, 439–45, with the cited passage on 442.

available weapon" (Lollards, 155) than a sermon explained by the preacher. In several tracts, Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, argued that such translation would be likely to sow heretical deviations. If the Bible "were badly translated or presumptuously understood, contrary to the exposition of holy doctors[, it] would be better to be completely ignorant of the matter." The "sowers of heresy, and enemies of truth" have already, he complains, infected England, Scotland, Prague, Germany, "and even, shameful as it is to admit it¼ , France." About 1415, in his tract On Communion, Gerson wrote: "Now this use of holy scripture by modern men, as if holy scripture should be believed in its bare text without the help of any interpretation or explanation, is a kind of use which is attended by grave dangers and scandals" (Deanesly, Lollard Bible, 104–6).

Nor were the British authorities unaware of the dangers of textual nakedness. When, about 1397, the Herefordshire squire John Croft was forced to renounce his heretical opinions, his renunciation included the promise to neither read nor own "English books extracted from holy scripture according to the bare text [secundum nudum textum ],with evil intent, by certain persons commonly called Lollards, who oppose the Catholic faith and the doctrine of the Roman church" (ibid., 288). Another document (possibly as early as 1380 and possibly by Wyclif himself) attacks vain men who cite Scripture in the service of pride:

And Poul seith, Kunnynge makith a man proud, that is nakid kunnynge withoute goode werkis, whanne it is medlid with pride veyn glorie and boost. Sich men semen to do goostli avoutrie with the word of God, for there thei schulde take of the Hooli Goost trewe undirstandyng of hooli writ by gret meknesse and hooli praier, to brynge forth very charite and goode werkis. Thei taken the nakid undirstondynge bi presumcidon of mannes witt, and bryngen forgt pride veynglorie and boost, to coloure here synnes and disceive sutilli here negebours. (Ibid., 447)

Particularly interesting in this passage is the author's artful extension of the nakedness metaphor into a mini-allegory of adulterous engendering.

Nakedness, then, can be a good thing or a bad thing. It can connote simplicity, straightforwardness, honesty, naturalness, and eroticism; or it can connote unattractive lack or weakness, suffering,

degradation, poverty, or improper exposure. There is the nakedness of the lover in one's arms (Romaunt, 2571) and the nakedness of the beggar on a dunghill (Romaunt, 6496). It is with the sincerity and vulnerability of "my naked herte" that the narrator of Troilus invokes Venus (3.43); while Philosophy assures Boethius that evil people are "naked of alle strengthes" (4. pr. 2, 10).

Such ambiguities in the word "naked" and its uses, the fact that it is able to partake of meanings not only varied but contradictory, makes it a sliding or polysemous signifier, linguistically in the same arena as the puns discussed in the previous and present chapters. Nor is it coincidental that in its Chaucerian uses this problematic word should contain within its referential range the trio of nature, women, and language discussed in Chapter 2, for the multiple possibilities of the word, its very ambiguities, lead us again to the ideological malaise noted there: the coexisting acceptance of, and discomfort with, temporality in its various versions. In the Clerk's Tale, Griselda's story combines the two axes of nakedness. As a bride, she brings "feith, and nakednesse, and maydenhede" (IV.866) to Walter; as a rejected wife, she is left nothing but her smock:

"Naked out of my fadres hous," quod she,
"I cam, and naked moot I turne agayn ¼ ."
                                  (871–72)

Her first nakedness is positive, her second negative; echoing the Book of Job (1:21), Griselda aligns her trajectory to that of the human condition both individual and collective. There was a time, "th'estaat of innocence" (X.325) as the Parson reminds his pilgrim audience, when nakedness was no cause of shame. On one level this could be the moment of birth, on another, the prelapsarian condition, to which Augustine devotes a chapter, "Of the nakedness of our first parents" (14.17) in The City of God. At either of those originary points, "nakedness" would have only a single meaning; it would be a univocal signifier. Such a condition will recur, Christianity promises, in the resurrection of bodies. Until then, the nakedness of bodies can only be ambivalent at best, the nakedness of nature temporary, and the nakedness of texts impossible, an infinitely deferred utopian wish.

Whatever the phrase "the naked text" may have meant to Chau-

cer—whether a doggedly literal translation, or a work devoid of rhetoric, or a work so transparent in meaning as to require no interpretation—it must have been obvious to him even as he wrote it that he neither would nor could produce such a text. Few texts have come into a poet's hands, or left them, as elaborately appareled as Ovid's did Chaucer's. The wish is a quixotic gesture, and my use of this adjective is not accidental, for, like Don Alonso, Chaucer (or his poet-Narrator) is the willing victim of literary tradition, inspired and bound by it at once. His "credence / To bokes olde" is a leap of faith, and the Legend, like Don Quixote, chronicles (albeit on a different level) the collision between literary imagination and the exigencies of natural and social reality. Just how surely the desire for "the naked text" remains a pious but futile wish, a utopian wish, the rest of this chapter will show.

Clothing The Text: Thisbe

More prominently than other Chaucerian works, the Legend of Good Women foregrounds the carrying over of learning (translalio studii ). In its opening lines and throughout, the poem poses the question of how the modern poet can or ought to use ancient material transmitted through a filter of grammatical and moral glosses, rhetorical amplification, and conflicting interpretation. What is the truth of such a mixed tradition, the weight of any given authority? What is it possible to know, and how may the maker judge? Although we are given no explicit answers, the answers are implied in Chaucer's poetic practice, which opts for heterogeneity of sources and multiplicity of meanings, hence suspended judgment: the very reverse, we may note, of a "naked text." I shall begin with the legend of Thisbe as my paradigm, and then turn to the other legends.

The Thisbe material came to Chaucer by way of Ovid's Metamorphoses (4.55–166) and a vernacular intermediary, the Ovide moralisé, a fourteenth-century French verse translation of, and moralized commentary upon, the Metamorphoses. The latter does not, however, give a straightforward translation of Ovid's tale of Thisbe. It offers instead a twelfth-century text, the Old French lai of Pyramus and Thisbe, inserted into the later work by its anonymous clerical compiler. It was not the only insertion, for as Paule Demats shows (ch. 2), this massive syncretic text also includes the lai of Philomela

by Chrétien de Troyes, material from other Ovidian works (particularly the Heroides ), material from earlier commentaries upon, or biographies of, Ovid, together with a variety of other sources such as Dares and Dictys, and Benoit's Roman de Troie.

For subsequent generations, the Ovide moralisé was a key text in translatio studii: a text located at the intersection of Latin and vernacular literatures, as Joseph Engels has remarked (81). Guillaume de Machaut transcribed whole sections of the Ovide moralisé into his Voir dit and other works. Christine de Pizan plundered it, especially for her Epistre Othéa; indeed, Campbell points out that for Christine, and doubtless for others, "Ovid" meant the moralization rather than the original Latin text. Chaucer too knew and used the Ovide moralisé, drawing on it, as I have shown elsewhere, for his distinctive portrait of Fame, as well as for several of his legends of good women.

In choosing the story of Thisbe, Chaucer joined an illustrious company of predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. A lai of Thisbe is one of the pieces performed by Gottfried's Tristan during his first appearance at King Mark's court, and a lai of Thisbe is mentioned in the thirteenth-century Provençal romance Flamenca (line 621). Either of these might refer to the extant text. A Latin prose version of the story was attributed to the influential grammarian Matthew of Vendôme.^[5] Boccaccio includes Thisbe among his famous women, drawing from her fate the enlightened moral that parents ought not to interfere too rashly in their children's love. (There is evidence he too knew the lai. )^[6] Several English poets, including Chaucer's friend John Gower, tell or refer to the story.

Later, in its best-known post-medieval incarnation, the story would become the subject of the "hempen homespuns" playlet in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Arthur Golding—"Shakespeare's Ovid" and a prolific translator of French texts—seems to have known the lai, for at one point (Met. 4.84; Golding's

[5] See Branciforti. On Matthew and academic uses of the Ovidian material, see Glendinning.

[6] As in the lai, but not in Ovid, Boccacio stresses the extreme youth of the protagonists and the fact that they fell in love as children. Also corresponding to the lai rather than to Ovid, Boccaccio attributes motivation to the parents, and has luna monstrante niam ("the moon showing the way") to Thisbe as she leaves the house rather than when she sees the lion.

line 104) he uses a word ("covenant") that appears both in the lai and in Chaucer's Legend but has no equivalent in Ovid. Shakespeare himself would have encountered the material through a verse translation published in the Elizabethan miscellany A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions, as W. G. van Emden points out. The twelfth century French version is surely the most touching of these medieval and Renaissance incarnations, for its author transformed the rather dry Ovidian narrative into a high-medieval Romeo and Juliet: a rhetorically extravagant tale of hot-blooded adolescent sexuality thwarted by parental obtuseness and culminating in a pathetic double death.

Chaucer's use of the French material in his version of Thisbe offers a revealing view of the poet at work, the ways in which not only his words but his attitudes, his conceptualization of the story, might be affected by its multilayered garments. The lai appears in all but one of the nineteen extant manuscripts of the Ovide moralisé. It also exists as an autonomous work in three anthology manuscripts. But since Chaucer is known to have used the compilation elsewhere in his Legend, I shall follow the principle of Ockham's razor in arguing for it rather than an autonomous version of the lai. Besides demonstrating verbal appropriations, I shall also suggest what use Chaucer made of the French moralization of Ovid's text.

Ovid's version is nothing if not succinct. In narrative terms we might call it bare, although it is far from "naked" rhetorically, as we shall see. Ovid opens with extreme narrative economy and rapid pace.

"Pyramus et Thisbe, iuvenum pulcherrimus alter,
altera, quas Oriens habuit, praelata puellis,
contiguas tenuere domos, ubi dicitur altam
coctilibus muris cinxisse Semiramis urbem.
notitiam primosque gradus vicinia fecit,
tempore crevit amor; taedae quoque iure coissent,
sed vetuere patres: quod non potuere vetare,
ex aequo captis ardebant mentibus ambo.
conscius omnis abest; nutu signisque loquuntur,
quoque magis tegitur, tectus magis aestuat ignis."                                       ( Met. 4–55–64)^[7]

[7] Text from Loeb Classical Library edition. Translation based on that of Frank J. Miller in that edition, with my alterations.

"Pyramus and Thisbe—he the most beautiful young man,
she most desirable of girls the Orient had—
occupied adjacent houses where, it is said,
Semiramis encircled the city high with baked brick wall.
Proximity made the first steps of their acquaintance, and
in time love grew. They should have come together under the marriage torch,
but their parents forbade what cannot be forbidden:
with equally inflamed spirit both of them burned.
There was no accomplice; they spoke by nods and signs.
But the more it's covered, the more a covered fire heats up."

In ten lines the hero and heroine are named, described, located, brought to young adulthood, and placed in a complicated relationship with each other and with their parents. A great deal is left out: the city is not actually named; there is no social context; the parents do not exist except far offstage as obstacles; no motive is offered for their resistance.

By contrast, the French author is at pains to establish a convincing social and psychological context for the story, and in this Chaucer follows him. The lai characterizes the fathers as "dui home renome / Dui citeain de grant hautesce" (4.230–32); Chaucer, borrowing narrative strategy and a key word, makes them "Two lordes, which were of gret renoun" (711). The lai also motivates parental opposition and, in quite a complex scenario (307–37), gives a realistic social setting for the action. A serf or servant notices the young people's behavior and reports it to Thisbe's mother, who promptly confines her daughter indoors. Simultaneously the fathers quarrel, ending communication between their offspring. Chaucer's scenario, less elaborate, nonetheless provides other characters, a social setting, and a motive for the parents' interference:

The name of everych gan to other sprynge
By women that were neighebores aboute.
For in that contre yit, withouten doute,
Maydenes been ykept, for jelosye,
Ful streyte, lest they diden som folye.
                                   (719–23)

The class thrust of the French text (pinpointing a servant as the killjoy) is modified in favor of practical common sense and conser-

vative morality. Sympathy for the lovers also begins to be modified, for the parental motive is not, by medieval standards, unreasonable. The danger of impetuosity is thus introduced as a theme in the Chaucerian text.

Ovid specifies no age for his lovers, but the French poet does, in order to deepen the pathos of his material. Love first touches his protagonists when they are only seven years old (301–4), and at the time of the action they are just fifteen. As their age increases, so increases their love: "Croist lor aiez et croist lor sens¼ / Croist lor amour, croist lor aez" (348–51). Chaucer too raises the question of age, imitating the French poet's parallel construction:

And thus by report was hire name yshove
That, as they wex in age, wex here love.
And certeyn, as by resoun of hire age,
There myghte have ben bytwixe hem maryage¼
                                      (726–29)

Ovid's narrative continues with the image of the cracked wall through which the lovers can speak:

fissus erat tenui rima, quam duxerat olim,
cum fieret, paries domui communis utrique.
                                   (65–66)

Split it was by a narrow crack that had formed long ago when the wall common to both houses was built.

This crack becomes the path of love, but only for voice (vocis¼ iter [69])—the only form of intercourse available for the moment. Whether or not Ovid intended the hint of an obscene pun in his image of the narrow crack that is the path of love, it was certainly taken this way by other classical and medieval poets. It would not be unusual for the archpoet of urbane dalliance to signal in this way the erotic urgency propelling his characters: we have already got the idea from the repeated imagery of fire and cooking in the first ten lines. Whatever Ovid's intention (and I do not doubt for a moment it was playful), Juvenal appropriated the narrow crack as a symbol for female genitalia when he described Roman mimes who impersonate women so skillfully that "Vacua et plana dicas / infra ventriculum et tenui distantia rima" (you would guess that every-

thing was empty and flat between the belly and that further narrow crack [3.97]),^[8] while Alanus de Insulis, deploring the prevalence of homosexuality, incorporated Ovid's image into a triple homophonic sexual wordplay in the De planctu naturae:

Non modo per rimas rimatur basia Thisbes Pyramus, huic Veneris rimula nulla placet. (metrum 1.53–54)^[9]

No longer does Pyramus search out Thisbe's kiss through the cracks; the little crack of Venus no longer pleases him. (My trans.)

The lai poet amplifies Ovid's economical but suggestive statement about the wall in two directions. First, the crack becomes virtually another personage in his story: synonyms for it (crevasse, pertus, creveure ) appear numerous times, it is apostrophized at length by both lovers, much is made of Thisbe's finding it and stuffing her belt through it as a signal, and the lovers salute the crack for the last time before they elope. Similarly, but with considerably more restraint, Chaucer dwells gently on the crack, giving us the word "clyfte" three times in seven lines (740–46) and once again (776).

Second, the French poet takes up the idea of sexual wordplay. This was, of course, a widely used rhetorical device in classical and medieval literature, not least in the troubadour lyric, with which this poet shares many other features of language and thought. Several examples follow. The first two are true puns, or significatio, making literal and grammatical sense on two levels of meaning. One comes from Piramus's lament of frustrated desire:

"He Diex, come est la vie [vit] dure Cui longuement tel mal endure." (586–87)

[8] This line is cited by J. N. Adams, who does not, however, give Ovid as a contributing source, although he does mention numerous other sexual uses of fissa, rima, and tenui rima. Nor does Elizabeth Thomas note this locus, although she adduces other of Juvenal's debts to the Piramus story. G. Karl Galinsky discusses humor in the Metamorphoses, including wordplay and other forms of wit (ch. 4), but he does not mention the "crack."

[9] The image is long-lived, reappearing in Colette's Claudine at School: "'Do you think it's wide, the crack?' asked Marie Belhomme innocently. Such guilelessness gave me a spurt of laughter. What could those two crack-observers be up to? The gawky Anais had opened her atlas and was interrogating me: 'What is known as a crack? A fissure, sometimes called in French a lézarde or female lizard. This lizardshould normally be found in a wall, but it is sometimes met with elsewhere, even in places completely sheltered from the sun'" (67–69).

"Oh God, how hard is the life [cock]
Of one who long endures such ill."

The other, using the same pun, is in Thisbe's speech urging Piramus to meet her outside the city walls:

"Se trouverai le vostre cors.
(Amis, ta vie [vit] est mes tresors.)"
                             (812–13)

"So I will find you/your body.
(Friend, your life [cock] is my treasure.)"

The homophony of vie/vit enables another wordplay, not a true pun but nearly, when Piramus lists the symptoms of his unsatisfied desire:

"Tisbe, por vos despent ma vie [vit]
En plour¼ "                         (425–26)

"Thisbe, for you I waste/empty my life [cock] in tears¼ "

Here the image latent beneath that of tears is that of the weeping vit: "the expense of spirit," as Shakespeare put it. A last example again combines homophony and suggestive image, when Thisbe describes her sexual anguish:

"Ains plus ne jour ne nuit ne fui
Sanz plaie,
Qui con plus dure plus s'esgaie."
                       (763–65)

"So neither night nor day have I been without a wound, which the longer it lasts the wider it spreads."

Of course, the primary referent of the wound is love. Yet the image of this ever-present wound that spreads wider with time is strongly suggestive of the female genital. This association is helped by the homophony com/con (m and n are often interchangeable in Old French manuscripts, and com plus¼plus is an idiom, but con also

means cunt). The play is also supported by the physical resemblance between a con and a wound, and by the partial homophony—certainly not lost on medieval poets schooled in Latin—of vulnus and vulva .^[10] This wound, with its multiple erotic associations, ironically counterpoints the real and fatal wound that Thisbe will later deal herself. Examples of sexual wordplay could be further multiplied, but these will suffice to indicate the French poet's sensibility.

These puns were not lost on Chaucer either, for he adopted the rhetorical tactic of sexual wordplay to his own presentation of the Thisbe material, starting with the versatile crack. Its versatility is taken even further, for the Chaucerian association is not genital but anal. In nine lines describing the wall, we find the following cluster: "clove a-two ¼ fundacioun ¼ clyfte ¼ clifte ¼ clifte" (738–46). "Clyfte" meant distinctively the crack or cleft of the buttocks (see Summoner's Tale III.2145), while "fundacioun" (founding) is partially homophonic with "fundement" (anus); in combination with "clove a-two," it is hard to avoid the suggestion of buttocks here. The same association appears in a medieval French text that anticipates our bumper-sticker lore about which occupations "do it" where and how. The miller, it says, does it where the water spurts; the leatherworker does it where the skin cracks; and "le maçon sure le fondement."^[11]

Further on in this passage appears the mini-cluster "thy lym and eke thy ston ¼ ston" (765–68), in apostrophe to the wall. The primary meaning is "your lime and also your stone": the masonry kissed by the separated lovers. Yet "lym" is homophonic with the word we now spell "limb"—a well-documented synonym for the male genital,^[12] and "stone" is a common euphemism for a testicle

[10] The resemblance was turned to blatant comedy by Rabelais (Pantagruel 11.15) in an episode that, like the tale of Thisbe, juxtaposes a woman and a lion. Shakespeare also belabors the metaphoricity of the wound in "The Passionate Pilgrim," 9.

[11] Gaignebet and Lajoux, 52, citing N. Dufail, Propos rustiques et contes d'Entrapel (Paris, 1842).

[12] The Middle English Dictionary refers to the circumcision of a child's "limb" and to Adam and Eve hiding their "limbs"; see also Piers Plowman 20. 194–95: "the lyme that she loved me for. and leef was to fele, / On nyghtes namely. whan we naked were." Chaucer surely relies on this sexual meaning when he has January boast that his limbs are able "to do al that a man bilongeth to" and that despite his white head his limbs are green [MerchT IV.1458–59, 1465); one notes further that the usualcounterposition to white head is, as the Reeve reminds us, a green tail (Reeve's Tale 3878), and that the Latin cauda means both tail and penis.

(cf. Nun's Priest's Tale VII.3448). The phrase thus carries the latent meaning of "your genital and your testicle," and the kissing of stones becomes an obscene allusion to oral-genital contact. Lydgate, of all people, is able some three or four decades later to use a "lym and ston" pun to very nice theological effect, in, of all places, his Life of Our Lady . God, planning the creation of Jesus as a means of redemption for mankind, will build this palace "nother of lyme ne stone" but in a virgin (2.317). His creation, that is, will be not of masonry, and also not generated sexually.

A last cluster of possible obscene wordplay occurs in Thisbe's suicide speech:

Thanne spak she thus: "My woful hand," quod she,
"Is strong ynogh in swich a werk to me;
For love shal yeve me strengthe and hardynesse
To make my wounde large ynogh, I gesse."
                                           (890–93)

I read here a latent allusion to masturbation, an activity commonly treated in penitentials, confessional manuals, and some medical treatises (Jacquart and Thomasset, 152, 176). Now at this moment in the narrative, Ovid has Thisbe refer to her hand, to love, to strength and a wound:

est et mihi fortis in unum
hoc manus, est et amor: dabit hic in vulnera vires.
                                                     (149–50)

I too have a hand strong for one thing, and that is love (or: I too have love). This shall give me strength for the wound.

To observe that the phrase "lime and stone" was a common one for masonry does not remove the possibility of Chaucerian pun. On the contrary, the "legitimate" usage would make obscene use of the phrase all the more comical. Moreover, the limitations of strictly dictionary-authorized interpretation are evident in the MED' s naïve gloss of "lym of love" as "the binding power of love" (p. 1055).

It is interesting to note that medieval sexual theory did not imagine the vagina as an absence. This is supported by the Medieval Woman's Guide to Health, ed. and trans. Rowland, which calls for a suppository to be "putte in her prevy membre," and by the Wife of Bath's reference to her "bele chose." In fact, medieval medicine saw male and female genitalia as reversals of each other—that is, as basically the same thing, but in mirror image. T. W. Laqueur traces the history, implications, and modern overthrow of this view.

The passage is full of possible sexual innuendo, but it says nothing about enlargement. The French does, in the passage cited above and elsewhere (463–64), and so does Chaucer, so that Chaucer's lines evidently conflate the Latin and French versions. It is interesting to note, too, that in another place Chaucer preserves the connection of Thisbe with "large woundes wyde" (MLT II. 62–63).

In the last portion of the narrative, we again find Chaucer combining his sources. Where Ovid says that the lovers statuunt ("agreed," "decided" [84]) to elope, the lai has "Ensi ferment lor convenant" (280), which appears in Chaucer as "This covenant was affermed" (790). In Ovid, the lovers agree to meet ad busta Nini ("at Ninus's tomb" [88]). The French poet rephrases this as "la ou Ninus fu enterrez" (819), a formulation that Chaucer virtually translates as "There Kyng Ninus was grave" (785). In Ovid, Thisbe wears a cloak or ample garment; the French text changes Thisbe's covering to a guimple, or small throat veil (901ff.), a detail imitated by Chaucer. In Ovid, Thisbe does not swoon on seeing her dying lover; she does in the lai (1052) and in the Legend (872).

Ovid's tale ends with the metamorphosis of pale mulberries into dark, and with the fulfillment of Thisbe's wish that the lovers' ashes rest in a shared urn. In the Ovide moralisé, though, the end of a tale is never the end of the story, for interpretation is required in order to achieve closure. The naturalistic exposition need not detain us—it is an etiological fable about why the mulberry darkens as it matures—but the moralization poses as starkly as possible the full problematic of translatio studii. It combines ethical, doctrinal, and tropological readings of the fable, taking as its point of departure the joint burial of the two corpses. This is interpreted as a figure of Jesus's dual nature (OM 4.1178–96), and there follows a long amplification of Jesus's suffering and that of martyrs, whom we must imitate if we wish to be saved at the Second Coming (1197–1246). The marauding lion who frightens Thisbe is the devil, which threatens the pure soul; God, like the lovers, without flinching suffers death to rescue his beloved mankind (1147–67). In this way, a narrative that appears ad litteram to be a cautionary exemplum about rashness and lust is ingeniously transformed into a parable of holiness. The errant young couple become a symbol, first of humanity and divinity joined in Christ, then of humanity at large redeemed in Christ.

What might such an ending have offered Chaucer? I propose that the absence of obvious verbal parallels, such as can be shown for the tale itself, does not disqualify the moralization from a position of influence upon Chaucer's treatment of the Thisbe material. The relevance of the moralization lies in the opening it creates for tone and treatment—an opening already hinted at in Ovid, and enlarged in the Old French lai. It is the possibility of comic irony, of an antisentimental approach to a sentimental story.

The Franciscan moralist who composed the Ovide moralisé was doubtless innocent of ironic intention: I have no wish to implicate him in that regard. Nonetheless, the comically painful ingenuity of his interpretation—transmogrifying a pair of lustful adolescents into the figure of the Savior—can hardly have escaped the attention of an ironist like Chaucer. The inadvertent comedy of the moralization is well exemplified in large and in small: not only in the overall interpretations, but in a passage as short as the few lines telling us that the devil, disguised as a lion,

defoloit
Et coloit la vie et la guimple
De la belle jouvente simple.
                   (1257–59)

trampled
and tore up the life and the wimple
of the lovely girl so simple.

This is, of course, unfaithful to the tale just narrated, for the lion does not attack Thisbe. Moreover, it is rhetorically ridiculous to link life and wimple in zeugma, as absurd an anticlimax as any to be found in The Rape of the Lock. The difference is that Pope uses zeugma masterfully, to expose the trivializing consciousness of his characters and the superficiality of their social life, while the compiler of the Ovide moralisé uses it awkwardly, to eke out his line and produce a rhyme.

The gap between text and interpretation looms so large here, the text so readily escapes its Procrustean bed, that the sophisticated reader can but smile. Are we, after all, to avoid or to imitate? And what, exactly, would we imitate? The interpretation tells us to imitate patience and chastity, but the fable shows us something else. To be sure, the compiler of the Ovide moralisé, like many other Ovid

translators and commentators before and after him, had his own agenda, his own ideological aesthetic, which governed his procedures. John P. McCall observes that although such interpretations "may seem strained and capricious, they are based on an old tradition¼ Their real kin is the exemplum or fable of late medieval homiletics in which moral or spiritual lessons were freely and ingeniously developed without any real concern for the obvious meaning of a story or text" (Chaucer, 13–14).

Yet this tradition was already on the wane in Chaucer's day, for the allegorical sensibility had come under attack from several directions, not least—for Chaucerian purposes—from the Wycliffites.^[13] Fausto Ghisalberti reminds us that such "intransigent pietism" was destined to fail as a method of interpreting the classics; indeed, it was already a lost battle in the fourteenth century, for the Church would meet the challenge of reform by co-opting humanism, asserting itself as the continuator of the Latin literary and historical tradition. A little more than a century after Chaucer's death, Erasmus wrote in a letter: "No one raises loud protests against the work of a certain Dominican"—he means Bersuire—"crassly stupid though it is, which gives a Christian adaption—distortion, rather—of all the myths in Ovid."^[14] In his well-known Prologue to Gargantua (1534), Rabelais would ridicule "the allegories squeezed out of [Homer] by Plutarch" and other scholars, "For I believe them to have been as little dreamed of by Homer as the Gospel mysteries were by Ovid in his Metamorphoses." I think it likely that the hermeneutic difficulties of the method would have been evident also to Chaucer even a century and a half before.

With its contradictions, its puns and rhetorical excess, the Ovide moralisé—lai and moralization together—strongly reinforces the subtle comic potential of the original Ovidian narrative. But if Chaucer was open to a comic interpretation of the material, it is because of his own aesthetic purpose in the Legend. As the next section of this chapter will show, the tale of Thisbe is not the only one in which irony, comedy, or wordplay appear. The general function of comic

[13] But see also my "Undoing Substantial Connection" and "The Politics of Allegory" in Medieval Literary Politics, and Smalley, Study of the Bible, 281ff

[14] Erasmus, letter to Maarten Lips, 1518, in Correspondence, ed. Mynors, 23–24. Bersuire was not a Dominican but a Benedictine.

technique in the legends is to undercut the directive of Eros and Alceste, and to prove the fallibility of any effort to portray human beings as entirely good. The idealization of women proposed by Eros requires to be deflated. Humor, particularly the humor of subtle obscenity, is an effective way to do it—not least because it can always be disavowed by an "innocent" Narrator, blamed on faithfully followed sources or even on the reader's own interpretive bent (or bent interpretation).

The God of Love's rigidity and his monomaniacal inadequacy of critical method find their duplicate in the Ovide moralisé. In the fissure between lai and moralization lies the confrontation of twelfth-century courtly poet and fourteenth-century Franciscan ideologue, of the Ovidian spirit and the Catholic Middle Ages. Complacently and with utter lack of self-consciousness, the Christian moralization of classical fable slices through the question that occupied Chaucer throughout his creative life: how can one derive truth from contradictory texts? Chaucer's retraction to the Canterbury Tales shows that he never completely resolved that dilemma: despite the fideistic stopgap, he attained no permanent sense of the full autonomy of fiction such as would have exculpated his "endytynges of worldly vanitees." Nor was he able, by way of the allegorical exegesis practised by some others, to reduce those "vanitees" to subordinate status and explain away their moral difficulties. Those difficulties, inherent in human discourse of "fals and soth compouned" (HF 2108), mean that for anyone other than a single-minded allegorist, there is no "naked text." (If I might digressively add another unverifiable subjective hypothesis to the discussion about which Prologue antedates which, I would opine that Chaucer's use of the term in G bespeaks the younger poet willing to risk a phrase later discarded because of its patent incompatibility with the legends, and indeed with any literary production.) It is not only translation that is the problem, but the original text, itself draped in rhetoric, cultural context, intention. Or if we are to imagine text as a naked body, we can only think of it as Protean, capable of infinite incarnations. But as I wrote above in commenting on Cixous, such essentialist metaphors propose some pure meaning preexisting any concrete embodiment. We can do without them, and I suspect that Chaucer too had felt their limita-

tion, although for other reasons than ours: his impulse would not be to write them off because they are metaphysical, but to defer them until the metaphysical can come properly into its own.

As the epigraph I have chosen for this chapter suggests, the problem did not disappear, although it certainly dwindled. Some scholars think the irony or ambiguity in Ariadne auf Naxos is the product only of an ill-fitting collaboration, but I see in its jarring juxtaposition of styles—heroic opera framed in commedia dell'arte—rather the problem of translatio studii in a nineteenth-century perspective. The work is an opera within an opera about the difficulties of producing serious art in a philistine age. A theater company are commissioned to perform a short classically based opera at the palace of an official, but at the last minute are required to render the opera more entertaining by mixing into it elements of their more frivolous repertoire. This specific self-referentiality strikes me as quite consistent with the stylistic mix. We know now that the conflict of ancient heroic versus modern cynical values already represents a distortion of classicism, which was far from univocally committed to the heroic outlook. Nonetheless that conflict, the perceived incompatibility of cultures, is built into the opera, which elevates irony into a compositional principle. The partners may have feuded about whether their piece should end on a serious or an ironic note, but the damage was already done.

For Chaucer, too, dissonance would register the collision of the tectonic plates of his intellectual world, and the form of dissonance I want to turn to now is sexual wordplay within the pathetic tale. This is a particularly difficult phenomenon for many modern critics to accept, particularly those reared in the German-influenced Romantic school of thought that emphasized "organic unity" and "harmony" as prime criteria for aesthetic value. The rupture of tone created by the presence of wordplay, especially sexual wordplay, in a serious moral work or an elegant romance (e.g., Chaucer's Troilus ) constitutes unacceptable tonal ambiguity for some scholars, causing them to reject the cultural and textual evidence for wordplay in works of the highest moral intention and aesthetic achievement (cf. my article "Anatomy of the Resisting Reader" on this problem). Nonetheless it has become a commonplace, particularly since Robert Jordan's contribution, that medieval aesthetics was precisely not organic and harmonious in method but rather architectural,

juxtapositional, accumulative. Moreover, our rigid separation of "high" and "low" cultures was not always valid in the Middle Ages, as has been shown by modern scholarship on the audience of the fabliaux, bawdy stories enjoyed by nobles, bourgeois, and artisans alike. Mary Carruthers points out that interlingual pun was essential to the medieval visual artes memoriae (137 and elsewhere): not only was wordplay shared by elite and vulgar, it was, as a habit of mind, especially cultivated by the elite. In short, therefore, modern standards of "consistency" ought not to be imposed on medieval texts; it means that the medieval author might expect an educated audience to operate on several cognitive levels during a reading (or listening) experience. These are some of the principles brought into play in considering the rhetorical method and ideological purposes of sexual wordplay in the Legend.

The Logic of Obscenity

In the Remedia amoris, Ovid writes that certain of his contemporaries have attacked his work, censuring his muse as a wanton (proterva [365]). The poet's response is to accuse his critics of envy, for even the greatest poets have suffered the attacks of the envious, but every poet knows the importance of fitting style to sense. By way of Alceste, Chaucer too accuses some of his critics of envy, "lavendere of the court alway" (F 358). The irony is, though, that Chaucer would respond to his critics precisely with wantonness, indeed, with obscenity, using it to administer a salutary moral lesson as to the nature of nature.

Obscenity has as ancient and continuous a pedigree as wordplay does, and in fact is one of its commonest forms.^[15] Obscenity appears in classical tragedy. It was a prominent feature in Attic comedy, whence it was later transferred by Ovid to erotic elegy. It had an important place in Roman comedy and mime and in the poetry of Ovid, Catullus, Martial, and others. During the so-called "Dark Ages," anality and involuntary nudity appear as stock motifs in Merovingian literary humor. There is the fabliau-like short prose

[15] Again, because of the wealth of material, I refer the reader to the list in my "Logic of Obscenity" (200 n. 3) and to more recent material documented in "Anatomy of the Resisting Reader."

narrative of Liutprand, bishop of Cremona, offered in Erich Auerbach's discussion of late-Carolingian mannerism; there is what Peter Dronke calls "bawdy double-entendre in Samson's efforts at milling" in the ninth-century didactic poem De sobrietate, and the tenth-century dialogue-poem on Jezebel, with a theme of sexual depravity and language to match (78–80, 126); there are the plays of the German nun Hrotswitha, with their occasionally risqué plots. Latin "elegiac comedy" of the twelfth century was frequently obscene. Homosexuality, often treated comically, was a frequent topos in medieval clerical lyric and other genres, as Chaucer was aware from his reading of the De planctu naturae of Alanus de Insulis. One of the best-known debates on homosexual versus heterosexual love, the Anglo-Latin debate of Ganymede and Helen, survives in many manuscripts, including one at Cambridge University where it is bound with the rhetorical treatise by John of Garland. Some troubadour poets used obscenity: it might be crude and overt as with William of Aquitaine, or indirect and punning as with Arnaut Daniel. Andreas Capellanus used obscene imagery and pun in De arte honesti amandi, and French popular literature is full of obscene humor in its fabliaux, songs, riddles, and jokes. The Roman de la rose was considered by some contemporaries of Chaucer to be pornographic in its forthright defense of vulgar anatomical terms and in its allegorical representation of coitus. Even the French epic does not escape the occasional grossity.

Like his other works, the Heroides of Ovid—a key source and model for Chaucer's Legend —poses a sharp challenge to literary decorum. Florence Verducci observes that "the wit and comic irreverence" in Ovid's treatment of his seduced and abandoned heroines have struck many readers as transgressive, obtrusive, or selfindulgent: "capricious violations of an obligatory decorum" (4, 6). Rather, Verducci proposes:

The rule of Ovid's Heroides is the rule of indecorum, or wit in conception no less than in language, a wit which is not his heroine's own but the token of the author's creative presence in the poem. Its dispassionate, intellectual, emotionally anaesthetizing presence is a constant reminder of how far we, in our sympathy for a heroine, have departed from the traditional view of her situation, and it is a constant goad to the dissociation of emotional appreciation from formal articulation. It is the medium by which our understanding of Ovid's

heroines becomes psychologized and historicized, the medium by which their speech becomes present as the empiric fact which inevitably overflows the confines of stable categories. (32)

My premise, like Verducci's, is that in the hands of an accomplished writer, rhetorical devices such as wit, wordplay, and obscenity have, like any other stylistic device, a logic of their own, an aesthetic reason for being. In the Legend of Good Women, that reason is to extend into poetic practice the aesthetic credo established in the Prologue to the poem. As a poet faithful to the contradictions inherent in nature, Chaucer has produced a series of legends perfectly integrated with the Prologue in their subversion of the reductive propagandistic task laid on the Narrator by Eros: to portray women as nothing but good. What the poet offers instead is a view of woman as no more and no less than a natural creature: a "maculate muse," to borrow Jeffrey Henderson's phrase. Slicing through the vapid formulae of courtly love with surgical astringency, dissolving the whitewashed version of womanhood that the Narrator has been ordered to produce, obscenity helps to reestablish what I believe Chaucer considered a healthier equilibrium: a more balanced, accurate, and "natural" view of women than could be provided by either courtly love or its inverse, clerical misogyny. Nature is not without its own balance; after all, the basis of medieval medical theory is the balance of humors in the body. We are reminded of this perspective when the Narrator cites the Aristotelian principle—"vertu is the mene, / As Etik seith" (F 165–66)—in describing the equilibration of danger (Daunger) and pity, mercy and justice (Ryght), innocence and courtliness (Curtesye) in the ultimately harmonious lovemaking and song of the small fowls. In this context, sexuality, sexual wordplay, and obscenity have their place. I am reminded of the paradoxically sanitizing function of Harry Bailly's anal and genital obscenities to the Pardoner (VI. 948–55), the effect of which is to annihilate the Pardoner's attempt to bilk his fellow pilgrims. If we may speak there of the morality of obscenity, in the Legend we must speak of its aesthetic.

Edmund Spenser was doubly wrong, then, in referring to Chaucer as "well of English undefiled" (Faerie Queene 4.2.32): wrong with respect to foreign vocabulary, wrong with respect to "low" humor. Haldeen Braddy also erred in asserting that Chaucer's obscenity is

"hearty and robust, without snigger or leer" (216), for there is, in the legends, plenty of snigger and leer. Perhaps Lord Byron had noticed this, for he considered Chaucer "obscene and contemptible: he owes his celebrity merely to his antiquity" (Spurgeon, 29). Fortunately, we can do better than Spenser's adulation or Byron's disdain by granting wordplay the honorable place it occupied among classical and medieval rhetorical devices. In extending to the rest of the legends the line of research begun in the previous section with Thisbe, I shall first briefly indicate my findings, then specify the "purple passages" in consecutive order through the legends (omitting Thisbe), and lastly suggest some conclusions.

I have not considered as obscene those cases where sex is clearly intended but coyly circumlocuted; therefore I shall not list such common euphemisms for sexual activity as "grace," "ease," "labor," "refreshment," "dalliance," or "play." What I have looked for is places where an anal or genital interpretation of a word, line, or image is clearly not the first level of meaning, but where a sexual innuendo is created alongside the literal and non-sexual sense, usually by the presence of a cluster of ambiguous words or suggestive images. In a few cases an actual pun is produced that makes coherent sense on two levels of meaning [significatio or paronomasia ). More often, though, the wordplay is homophonic (annominatio ): the sexual term has no coherent grammatical meaning in the sentence but constitutes instead a free-floating referent or gratuitous association, with the effect, more or less, of an elbow in the ribs. A third category relies less on language than on an image or situation that provokes erotic associations. In all these categories, the terms are primarily anal and genital, the latter referring to both male and female organs and activity. Homosexuality appears, but not prominently, although to be certain of this we would require more familiarity with the language of gay subculture in medieval England than is presently available. I found no outright scatology. This is somewhat surprising for a period when scatology was a staple of popular humor; but our text is not a popular but a courtly production.

Skeptics in the matter of Chaucerian obscenity will naturally welcome my assurance that not all occurrences in Chaucer (or in other authors) of the words or images discussed here are necessarily sexual puns. "A word is known by the company it keeps,"

Hilda Hulme remarked, writing of Shakespeare (100).^[16] All of my examples occur in clusters. Where we find one word isolated in a passage, there skepticism is at least legitimate, but where we find three, or ten, possible double entendres in a passage, we must perforce accept the probability of authorial complicity. There are also numerous non-sexual puns in the legends, which I shall mention in Chapter 5 in order to show that wordplay is very much part of Chaucer's deliberate rhetorical strategy.

In the first legend, that of Cleopatra, Chaucer devotes about a quarter of his brief narrative to a curiously detailed account of the battle of Actium. The passage contains these lines:

And from the top doun come the grete stones.
In goth the grapenel, so ful of crokes¼
                                       (639–40)

The stones will be used as weapons. Yet "stones" also means "testicles"; we recall Harry Bailly's words to the Nun's Priest: "I-blessed be thy breche, and every stoon!" (VII.3448). The grapnel, which is going in (to the water) is a small anchor with several "crokes." A "croke" is a curved segment or a bar with knobbed top; according to the Middle English Dictionary, the word is used "allusively" of the male genital.

Is it sheer coincidence that these two lines contain possible references to male genitalia? I think not. The context here is a military scenario sexually suggestive by virtue of its placement in the narrative, its verbal rhythms, its actual content of frenzied confrontational activity, and other aspects of its imagery. Nautical imagery, especially that of naval battle, is among the most enduringly popular images for sexual congress, from Attic comedy to Shakespeare and beyond.^[17] John Fyler remarks that Chaucer recounts the battle

[16] The same point about context is made by Archibald A. Hill, who attempts to establish some sensible guidelines for deciding what is wordplay. Yet a lot is left open to subjectivity, temperament, or interpretive bias in Hill's advice (adapting Ockham's razor) to multiply meanings only upon "need" and only when there is "contextual support." In "Anatomy of the Resisting Reader," I take up in some depth the questions of interpretive bias and tonal context.

[17] Jeffrey Henderson lists nearly five pages of nautical wordplay from Attic comedy (161–66); Molly Myerowitz provides another list of scholarly references for "sea imagery in erotic contexts," especially Ovid (207–8 n. 20); Eric Partridge gives numerous examples (36 and glossary).

"in place of the wedding" (100)—the wedding having been dealt with in an occupatio —and it is an ironically appropriate replacement because of its sexual imagery. Here is the complete passage:

And in the se it happede hem to mete.
Up goth the trompe, and for to shoute and shete,
And peynen hem to sette on with the sunne.
With grysely soun out goth the grete gonne,
And heterly they hurtelen al atones,
And from the top doun come the grete stones.
In goth the grapenel, so ful of crokes;
Among the ropes renne the sherynge-hokes.
In with the polax presseth he and he;
Byhynde the mast begynnyth he to fle,
And out ageyn, and dryveth hym overbord;
He styngeth hym upon his speres ord;
He rent the seyl with hokes lyke a sithe;
He bryngeth the cuppe, and biddeth hem be blythe;
He poureth pesen upon the haches slidere;
With pottes ful of lyme they gon togidere;
And thus the longe day in fyght they spende¼
                                          (634–50)

The ships meet, up goes the trumpet, out comes the big gun, down come the stones, in goes the grapnel with its phallic crooks, the men press in. There is a pouring forth—of peas;^[18] then a sticky white substance appears—lime, to be sure—and the opponents "go together." This last is a common synonym (says the MED ) for copulation; indeed it is a calque for the Latin coire, the root of our present word "coitus." We find a contextual illustration in Higden's portrait of the barbaric Irish, some of whose ancestors were "vitio coeundi cum bestiis consuetissimos" (1.35); the modest Trevisa does not translate but gives "coeuntes cum brutis." We might well translate "go together" as "come together," maintaining the pun. The episode is summarized this way: "And thus the longe day in fyght they spende" (650). "Fyght" (fight) is homophonic with "fyked," past tense of "fykken," "to fuck," and if Saussure was right in observing that "nothing enters language without having been tested in speaking" (168), then we may and ought to assume that the word "fuck"

[18] Scholars are not agreed whether peas or pitch would actually have been poured on deck in a medieval battle; both are called pois in French, and there is some precedent for both. See Riverside note to line 648.

(or a cognate), first attested in print in 1503, was already in oral circulation in Chaucer's day. While the secondary meaning would be ungrammatical here and so not a true pun, the homophony itself is the point, especially in context of the rest of the passage.^[19]

The story of Cleopatra ends with the cryptic remark by the Narrator, "I preye God let oure hedes nevere ake!" A similar comment appears twice in Troilus, both times connected with lovemaking. The first locus is a sentence that Pandarus puts into Troilus's mouth in the fiction he concocts for Crideyde's benefit. Troilus, he says, was sleeping; Pandarus wakes him with a reproach of dullness; Troilus is then reported to have replied, "Ye, frend, do ye your hedes ake / For love, and lat me lyven as I kan" (2.549–50). I note here that the word is "heads," plural; and that Troilus is clearly contrasting his (loveless) condition with that of his uncle: "for love" means "because of love" and not necessarily because of its absence, and indeed we already know that Troilus considers Pandarus an expert in love. The second locus is 3.1561, where Pandarus coyly remarks to his niece that "som of us, I trowe, hire hedes ake." He is speaking on one level about himself, who, because of the rainstorm, has been unable to sleep well, but on another level he is making a mildly obscene jest (as he had Troilus do in the first locus). When we realize that in medieval medical anatomy, the tip of the penis was called the caput virgae (head of the penis), the comments in both Troilus and "Cleopatra" take on another dimension: it is a genital ache, the result of overindulgence. This usage is amply documented in medical literature, and in connection with another sexual metaphor it makes up an interestingly complex piece of latemedieval sex-gender lore. If men can be said to have two heads,

[19] Ernst Curtius's section on annominatio, or homophony, shows that the device was highly recommended in the medieval artes and widely used in vernacular poetry (278–80). It is particularly profuse in Dante's Commedia. "Fuck" is rather a ghost word in Middle English. The 1503 attestation is from Dunbar, "Ane Brash of Wowing." The OED claims that the German word cannot be shown to be related to the English, yet it posits "a Middle English type, fuken, which is not found." The MED has several homophones with other meanings, one of which is "to flatter or deceive." If the obscene sense is admitted, this would produce a pun in Ballad 82 of Carleton Brown's English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932): "Wymmon, war the with the swyke / That feir ant freoly ys to fyke" (25–26). A last remark in this digression: the Latin word for a priest's concubine was focaria (from focus, "hearth," hence "housekeeper"); "fuck" could thus be a back-formation from focaria, "fucker." But this still would not account for the apparent absence of occurrences in Middle English.

women can be said to have two mouths and two tongues (vagina as mouth, clitoris as tongue); this explains why men are more reasonable than women, and women more loquacious than men (Pouchelle, 311–12).^[20]

The tale of Dido unfolds under the eye of Venus, the anti-hero's mother, and it is suffused with sexuality. All is "amorous lokyng" and "lusty folk," sighing and kneeling, pity and gentilesse. The bed is a primary locus dramatis and site for important conversations, confrontations, and laments. As if to underline the copulatory theme, the poet uses the word "prick" twice in the twenty lines just preceding the consummation of his protagonists' desire. Between these two occurrences appears the image of "the fomy brydal" (1208) of Aeneas's horse; so that the cluster is prick-foam-prick, with a possible homophonic play on bridle/bridal. Although "prick" as a noun would not come into documented literary use as a sexual term until the sixteenth century, nonetheless the verb—meaning to spur, prod, stimulate, or ride hard—was in Chaucer's day well enough known as a sexual metaphor to occur with obvious erotic meaning in the Reeve's Tale (4231) and in popular ballads (cf. Robbins, nos. 28 and 32). We may recall furthermore that if the word "die" were still current as a euphemism for orgasm (as it was in Chaucer's time), we would hear the heroine's name a little differently: "Die, do!"

Jason's treatment of Hypsipyle is both an economic and a sexual betrayal. The economic dimension is appropriate to this mythic hero whose quest was for the Golden Fleece—an item not only precious in itself, but glossed by at least one Ovid-commentator (whose work Chaucer knew) as divitias temporales .^[21] Chaucer is able to turn the idea into a little negative exemplum of masculine sexual

[20] The womb/mouth and "head" of penis are also profusely documented in Jacquart and Thomasset. For other uses of the head/penis image, cf. Thomas Gascoigne's mid-fifteenth-century "Theological Dictionary," 136. Here Gascoigne writes of the hideous genital effects of diseases caused by lechery; these include caput virgae abscindere. This is the well-known passage, incidentally, in which John of Gaunt is said to be a diseased fornicator. (There is no evidence he was diseased, and Gascoigne had political reasons to revile him.) Also cf. the fifteenth-century play Mankind, ed. Mark Eccles, The Macro Plays, EETS, o.s., 262 (1969), line 497.

[21] This is the phrase of Bersuire in book 7 of his Ovidius moralizatus, 109. Bersuire goes on to add et maxime divitias ecclesiae, with Jason as (among many other things) bonus praelatum who wishes ad ecclesias praebendas pervenire. He was a Benedictine, so this defense of ecclesiastical wealth is not surprising. The Ovide moralisé (7.69off.) gives quite a different interpretation.

economics. Jason bribes the queen's counselors so as to win her affection and her fortune; then he "tok of hir substaunce / What so hym leste" (1560–61). Now "substance" meant property or wealth, and Hypsipyle is a lady of substance. But the word also meant physical matter of a more intimate kind—semen, specifically—and this gives a true pun. As Michel Foucault points out, this equivalency, or "very pronounced ambiguity between the sexual meaning and the economic meaning of certain terms" (Care of the Self, 27) is already present in the Greek language; it would be carried forward in the medical works of Galen: "Thus, the word soma^[*], which designates the body, also refers to riches and possessions; whence the possible equivalence between the 'possession' of a body and the possession of wealth. Ousia is substance and fortune; it is also semen and sperm: the loss of the latter may mean expenditure of the former" (ibid.). In medieval times, the accepted medical and popular view of female sexual physiology was that female "semination" was required for conception to occur. This belief extended back to the Romans and would survive well into the sixteenth century.^[22] We know that the emission of substance has occurred in the Chaucerian case, for we are told that Jason begat two children "upon" (another pun) Hypsipyle. I might add that, in Troilus, Chaucer had already exploited the word "substance" in a magnificent multiple pun that plays on the propertarian, philosophical, and sexual senses of two words. When Troilus tries to persuade Criseyde to elope with him, he argues that "folie is, whan man may chese, / For accident his substaunce ay to lese" (4.1505): accident and substance as chance and wealth, as physical properties and ontological essence, as involuntary ejaculation and semen.

In the legend of Lucrece, there is some suggestiveness in two places. During the rape, Lucrece faints and therefore "feleth no thyng, neyther foul ne fayr" (1818). If it seems odd to imply, as these lines do, that had she not fainted she might have felt something "fair"—that is, pleasurable—we may recall that no less an authority than St. Augustine had accused Lucrece of possibly experiencing "the pleasure of the act" (City of God 1.19). Moreover, if we read the

[22] On woman's sperm, see Noonan, 337ff.; Duby, Knight, 43; Doherty, 62–73; and the mid-sixteenth-century Vicarie's Anatomie of the Body of Man, EETS, e.s., 53 (1888): 78. Chaucer refers to female semination twice in the Parson's Tale (X.577 and X.965).

cited line aloud, appreciating that "no" and "thing" are two distinct words, not combined into one as we pronounce it today, then "thing" emerges with a certain clarity and we recognize it as the common synonym for the genital.

Then, during her suicide, Lucrece carefully arranges her clothing as she falls, "Lest that hir fet or suche thyng lay bare" (1859). This covering is a classical topos, as Nicole Loraux points out (59). Chaucer imitates it from Ovid's Fasti (2.833–34), his main source for this tale, where Lucrece is careful to fall properly; he may have noticed it also in the Metamorphoses, where the sacrificed Polyxena takes care, while falling, to cover those parts that should be concealed and thus to conserve her chaste modesty (13.479–80). In the Monk's Tale, Chaucer has Julius Caesar cover himself while dying. There is nothing salacious in the passage, but there does not need to be, for the Narrator is quite explicit that Caesar covers "his hypes" in order to conceal "his privetee" (2715). With Lucrece, the heroine's impulse is modesty, but when the Chaucerian Narrator mentions first feet, then "or suche thyng," he sets in motion a train of upward associations in the reader's mind: associations not negated but affirmed in the Caesar treatment. Significantly, when Gower treats the Lucretia story, he clears up all such ambiguity, carefully specifying that when the heroine straightens her clothing it is so that nothing can be seen "dounward fro the kne" (Gower, Confessio amantis 7.5073).

I am able to locate only one outright sexual pun in "Lucrece": "The husbonde knew the estris wel and fyn" (1715). "Estris" means interior or hidden places, normally of a garden or courtyard, but figuratively perhaps of a human body. The same play appears in the Romaunt of the Rose, where Belacueil shows the lover "The estres of the swote place" (3626). The place is a hedged verger or little pleasure garden from which the lover has previously been excluded by Daungier (the lady's withholding of love). Now, however, he is given permission "overal to go" so that he is "raysed¼ / Fro helle into paradys" in the traditional courtly vocabulary of consummation or prolonged physical contact. The exegetical and lyrical tradition originating in commentary upon the Song of Songs would have prepared the way for such a parallel between lady and garden; Chaucer's understanding of this tradition is evident in the Merchant's Tale. The moralization of the Lucrece-story in Gesta Romanorum (#135), in which Lucretia is glossed as the soul "and the castle represents the heart, into which [Sextus, the devil] enters"

also, in its use of body allegory, opens the way to the potential duality of "estris." (Robert Frank has suggested this as a possible source for Chaucer's version; see Chapter 5 below.) The Florentine politician and humanist Coluccio Salutati—a contemporary of Chaucer's—also made much of secret places in his short Declamatio Lucretiae, an exchange of speeches between Lucretia and her kinsmen just before her suicide. Part of their dissuasion consists in assuring the rape victim that she has protected her chastity "non solum in nominum oculis sed etiam in secretis domus penetralibus" ("not only in the eyes of men but even in the most secret chambers of the house" [79]). Chaucer may well have known this popular early work by Salutati, but the interesting point here is rather his displacement of secret inner places into a context (husband's knowledge) especially susceptible of sexual interpretation.

Moving on to Ariadne, we pick up the thread again (if I may borrow an image central to that legend): anal and genital obscenity, with a hint of voyeurism. Theseus is imprisoned next to a "foreyne" (1962), or toilet, belonging to Ariadne and Phaedra. There is no dramatic reason for this detail—it is original with Chaucer—except perhaps to titillate: for if the princesses from their quarters can overhear Theseus lament, does it not follow that he in turn must overhear them when nature calls?

Later, when Phaedra plans to help Theseus, there follows a passage of twenty lines loaded with obscene imagery:

"Lat us wel taste hym at his herte-rote,
That if so be that he a wepen have,
Wher that he dar, his lyf to kepe and save,
Fyghten with the fend, and hym defende¼
If that he be a man, he shal do so.
And we shul make hym balles ek also
Of wex and tow, that whan he gapeth faste,
Into the bestes throte he shal hem caste¼
This wepen shal the gayler, or that tyde,
Ful prively withinne the prysoun hyde;
And for the hous is krynkeled to and fro,
And hath so queynte weyes for to go¼ "
                                (1993–2013)

The first line of this passage is, literally, "Let us taste him at his heart-root"; more idiomatically, "Let us test his character"—or feel or enjoy it. What is the object of this feeling, tasting, testing, or

enjoyment? Heart has a well-established connection with lust and genitality, not least because, as a fourteenth-century medical handbook points out, "the risynge of a mannes yerde cometh of a mannes herte" (Lanfranc, 174); and, as Chaucer reminds us in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, some such connection holds even for birds. For Shakespeare, Eric Partridge glosses "root" unhesitatingly as "either penis or penis erectus" (176), and this meaning seems the likely one when, in the Romaunt of the Rose, the lover feels his "herte rote" (1026) affected by the memory of his lady's "every membre." Clearly, then, Princess Phaedra's project has strong genital overtones, and she goes on to speculate about the ups and downs of penile virility. If Theseus had a "wepen," and "if that he be a man," they will discover whether "he dar ¼ Fyghten" in the place where "he shal descende." "We shul make hym balles" (2003), proclaims Phaedra—balls of wax and string, to be sure. But the word meant then exactly what it does now, its possible sexual referent providing the pun in a fifteenth-century lyric, "None but she my bales may bete" (none but she may amend my suffering / beat my balls / restore to health my balls).^[23] In any case, the new balls will be cast into the minotaur's throat: another hint of oralgenital contact. The princess describes the labyrinth as "krynkeled" (convoluted); it has "queynte" turns: the first adjective imagistically allusive of, the second a possible synonym or euphemism for the female genital.

Eventually Theseus does outwit the monster, thanks to "His wepne, his clewe, his thyng" (2140). The repetition here is suspicious, particularly since "weapon" and "thing" are well-known euphemisms for the male genital, and I suspect that, framed between them, "clew" (ball) shares their meaning. A riddle illustrates the popular understanding of the word "thing"; it is post-Chaucerian, but other texts demonstrate continuity of meaning:

Thus my riddel doth begin:
a mayde woulde have a thinge to putte in
and with her hande she brought it to:

[23] Robbins, no. 127. See also "For of my ploughe the beste stotte is balle" in Furnivall, Jyl of Breyntford's Testament, 36. Attributed by John Shirley (1366–1456) to Chaucer, the piece is an extended play on plowing as metaphor for sexual activity, with much emphasis on "ball."

it was so meek, it would not do,
and at length she used it so
that to the hole she made it go.
when it had done as she could wish
Ah ha! quoth she, I'm gladde of this.^[24]

The answer is "A maid went to thread a needle," but the point obviously depends on the audience assuming that "thing" refers to the male genital. It might, of course, in other cases refer to the female genital, as the Wife of Bath affirms in using the common French euphemism "bele chose" (III.447).

Philomela's appears to be the only story not undercut by irony, obscenity or tedious writing. To my mind it is written with genuine integrity and power. Perhaps Chaucer found this horrifying material too strong for irony, and in Chapter 5 I shall offer further discussion of it.

In Phyllis, several images suggest homoerotic and heterosexual copulation: Demophon is assaulted from behind by a wind that shoves so sore his sail cannot stand (2412); the sea pushes Demophon "now up, now doun" (2420), anticipating his later "doynge to and fro" (2471) with Phyllis; twice he is almost "at the deth," and Phyllis refers to "youre anker, which ye in oure haven leyde" (2501: cf. Cowen, "Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, Lines 2501–3"). There is also a syntactic ambiguity that lends a somewhat salacious tone to the following lines:

[Demophon] doth with Phillis what so that hym leste,
As wel coude I, if that me leste so,
Tellen al his doynge to and fro.
                                            (2469–71)

Here I do not want to pinpoint only the "doynge to and fro," with its reminder of the old sexual in-and-out, but also the double take required to understand that the adverbial clause "as wel coude I" applies not to what precedes it ("doth," etc.) but to what follows ("tellen"). Even with different punctuation (always an editorial option) or with "And" instead of "as" (as in Skeat's edition), the ambiguity holds.

[24] Furnivall found the riddle in an early seventeenth-century volume and printed it in Love-Poems and Humourous Ones, 21. The riddle is doubtless older than the volume.

In the last legend, Chaucer erroneously gives Hypermnestra's cousin and husband Lynceus the name Lyno, which is close to the Latin for whoremaster ("leno"). But since the reading "Lino" occurs in several Italian source manuscripts, and the Ovide moralisé has "Lynus" (2.4721 and elsewhere), we cannot assume this was other than an innocent mistake (although from his reading of Ovid, Chaucer would certainly have been aware of the meaning of the Latin word).

Probably the most obvious conclusion to be drawn from this brief study of sexual wordplay in the legends is that an interpretation of the Legend of Good Women that dismisses irony or humor simply ignores the linguistic facts. For too long the weighty authority of J. L. Lowes had a suppressive effect, encouraging scholars to see the work as little more than an occasional piece, a courtly jeu d'esprit. In the contest with Harold Goddard, whose monograph on the Legend Lowes aimed to refute, contemporary scholarship must, I think, belatedly offer the palm to Goddard. One might not accept all of Goddard's ideas on the poem—Eleanor Winsor offers a substantial critique (8ff.)—but his general interpretation and many specifics (e.g., the medieval ambivalence or negativity about several of Chaucer's "good" women) anticipated some of the recent scholarship on the poem. And to open the poem to irony—the play of language—is to open it to the play of critical theory, to treat it as a methodological field in which we can explore tradition and originality, textuality and the literary figuration of women.

I believe we also need to remember that Chaucer was a different kind of Christian than anyone can be today: a medieval Catholic. Between him and ourselves falls the long shadow of Calvinism, and even Catholicism has not been unaffected by it. The Puritan fact has decisively shaped many critics' notion of what it is to be a poet, a great poet, a moral Christian poet. But the universality for which Chaucer's religion names itself is not only geographical but also conceptual. Catholicism is large and inclusive (although in saying so I do not mean to exempt Chaucer or the clerical component of his culture from my own distrust of idealism and metaphysics). Catholicism makes a point of containing what look to us like impossible contradictions. Some of these are its basic mysteries, like the incarnation of Christ as Jesus, or the coexistence in one female body of virginity and maternity. With concepts like these at its base, small

wonder that Catholic culture in the Middle Ages generated a literary art so full of the verbal paradoxes and the disruptions of logic and syntax that are the special consequences of wordplay; or, for that matter, a sacred architecture that can incorporate images of common, vulgar, and even obscene behavior (see Chapter 5). Moreover, Catholicism had means of interpretation that, as we have seen, could turn nearly any text to the uses of instruction. This is why it is clear, as Ralph Hexter writes, "that in the monasteries and in the schools within their walls there was not the antipathy to eros with which contemporary imagination credits them, nor even the squeamishness many nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars have shown or felt compelled to show when dealing with certain aspects of the classics" (25).

It is desire—Cupid, the god of love—who commands Chaucer's Narrator to rewrite woman all goodness, patience, and faith. So might any of us wish it to be about ourselves or our partners and about love. Indeed, swayed by desire, we may well imagine it to be so. Yet we learn eventually that besides desire there is nature, there is experience, there is literary or rhetorical tradition, there is social custom. The obscene language in the legends reminds us of these other dimensions. Subtly, but stubbornly, it denies us the easy utopian formulas of blind desire. Paradise can be had—but not now. Adam and Eve went naked in the garden, but we do not. Our language must be as veiled with its history, and with our intentionality, as our bodies with the garments that bespeak—precisely by concealing—its history, its intentionality.

The desire for "naked text" has been explosively and notoriously brought to our attention by the death sentence meted out by Islamic orthodoxy to the novelist Salman Rushdie in retaliation for his examination of that very problem in The Satanic Verses (1988). Islam is far more strictly a textual religion than Christianity or Judaism. The latter consider the revelation contained in their holy books to be filtered through human perception and representation, hence receptive to, indeed, often requiring, interpretation of various kinds (whether numerological, allegorical, historical, etc.). This indeed was the problematic Augustine engaged in De doctrina Christiana, where he writes that Scripture was translated "for the salvation of peoples who desired to find in it nothing more than the thoughts and desires of those who wrote it and through these the will of God,

according to which we believe those writers spoke" (2.5.6). Islam, on the other hand, considers its holy book, the Qur'an, an exact transcription of God's revelation to the Prophet Muhammad through the words of the angel Gabriel, and the only correct copy of Gabriel's dictation: "nought i-write with manis ynke," as Ranulf Higden put it (quoting "Mahometus"), "but with angelis hondes" (5.14). As the speech of God, the Qur'an is eternal and uncreated in its essence and meaning (though created in its linguistic particularity of letters and sounds). The Prophet himself is perfect. Hence there is no possibility of error or interpretation or disagreement—a position that ups the ante considerably: all the way, in fact, as shown by the extremists' will to murder Rushdie or any other "blasphemer." Islam veils its women but strips its holy text naked. This may seem paradoxical, but the link is the refusal of reality and of nature. The life-threatening presence of this apparent paradox marks the inadequacy of our metaphorizanon of text as body or body as text. In the end, a body is not a text nor the reverse. To insist too far on metaphor is to occlude reality, hence to risk sentimentalism; and in its extremest forms, sentimentalism kills. If we had any doubt about that, the Rushdie affair must lay it to rest. Rushdie shares more than a name with the famous Cordovan Aristotle-commentator Averroës (Ibn-Rushd, 1126–1198). Yet the medieval rationalistic Muslim survived his writing quite peacefully, whereas the modern one has been condemned to death for no more than the sin of historicizing. Never can it have been less merely rhetorical to wish a man a long life.