4—
Different and Same

My indecision is final.
Samuel Goldwyn

In earlier chapters I have written about how Chaucer's poem uses the first two terms of its title, "legend" and "good." Chapter 1 proposed that the hagiographical legend is parodied (but not ridiculed) as hypotext to the Legend's hypertext, present as a foil against which the Chaucerian personae play out their parts. Goodness, I suggested in Chapters 2 and 3, is problematized as a relative and temporal phenomenon, ever falling short of any absolutely ideal expression.

It is now time to turn to the third term in Chaucer's title, "women," and observe its treatment in the lives narrated in the main body of the poem, which, because of the length, richness, and intrinsic interest of the Prologue, tends to appear as an appendage to the Prologue. Formally, the collection of portraits is incomplete, breaking off in midsentence, and after only nine tales. Rhetorically, it might also be seen as incomplete because it lacks physical description of any lady whose misfortune is narrated (except Lucrece, who is said to have "yelwe her" [1747], as she does in Ovid's Fasti 2.763). To be sure, these ladies were generally not described in the traditional representations either: they are, after all, exemplary figures with moral and situational resonance irrelevant to specific appearance (other than general beauty). This is already, therefore, an imperfect and somewhat disappointing literary corpus, perhaps in its very imperfection formally miming a male, Catholic, and courtly writer's understanding of both women and language. It remains only to add that my metaphorization of text as body is no gratuitous modernism but has its precedent in medieval Ovid commentary and elsewhere. "Enides, id est Meleager, filius Enei ¼ hanc fabulam require in corpore," advises one commentary on the He -

roides ("Oenides: that is, Meleager, son of Oeneus ¼ look for this story in the body"). The lemma is from the epistle of Phaedra (Her. 4.99); the directive—similar to Chaucer's directives—sends the reader to "Ovidius maior, Metamorphoses 8.260 ff." (Hexter, 245 n. 54). The Ovidian text, then, is already a body in the commentary tradition, and some Christian instances of the text-as-body metaphor have been gathered by Carolyn Dinshaw. Yet whether Chaucer found the metaphor or reinvented it, it is one he was able to turn most effectively to his own investigation of gender, language, and morality.

Difference: The Balade

One way in which the Legend of Good Women reshapes the tide term "women" is by refusing rigid gender demarcation: blurring the lines, exchanging the roles. Chaucer's massive debt to Ovid in this poem has been acknowledged by virtually every scholar who has written on it, and Ovid does a good deal to even up the odds of gender. This is particularly true in the Ars amatoria, of which the third book aims at a female audience, and which, even in its first two books, stresses the importance of female desire and female pleasure, including foreplay and orgasm (e.g., 2.679–732). Woman may be the hunter and man the prey (3.558–60, 591, 669) as well as the more typical reverse. The Remedia amoris, sequel and palinode to the Ars, ends with the assurance that its therapeutic lessons will have cured both man and woman: "Carmine sanati femina virque meo." As for Heroides, not only are three of the epistles uttered by men, but portraits of female desire and initiative are prominent, and one of the epistles (9, Deianeira to Hercules) concentrates on the hero's adoption of woman's dress and labor.

Of the many formats through which Ovid was known to the high and late Middle Ages, one was the commentary on his works. We have already encountered (Chapters 2 and 3) prose and verse commentaries on the Metamorphoses in the Ovide moralisé and in the work of Pierre Bersuire, but all of Ovid's other works were commented on as well, and these texts tell us a good deal about medieval Ovid interpretation. They are all, for example, agreed that in the Heroides , Ovid, as self-defined praeceptor amoris ("love's instructor" [Ars 1.17], and not—as context makes clear—what Philip Roth might call a

"professor of desire") expresses an intention that is genuinely moral and didactic: "per hanc monere ne qua stulte et illicite diligat, ne propter similem culpam similem penam incurrat" ("to warn [one] lest [one] love foolishly and illicitly, so that because of the same fault [as the characters, one] might not incur the same pain"). While this statement is from a comment on Epistle 17 (Helen to Paris),^[1] the accessus , or introductions, to the commentaries make the same point. The scholia are equally sure that Ovid's moral was intended for men and women alike:

Ethice supponitur: loquitur enim de moribus tam heroum heroidibus, scribentium quam heroidum, idest matronarum, heroibus, idest viris, scribentium.^[2]

This is the ethical application: it tells as much about the behavior of heroines writing to heroes, as of heroes (that is, husbands/men) writing to heroines (that is, wives).

Intentio huius operis est reprehendere masculos et feminas stulto et illicito amore detentos. (Huygens, 29)

The intention of this work is to censure men and women enthralled by foolish and illicit love.

Nor is the Christian literary corpus without cross-dressing, so to speak. As Caroline Bynum has shown, the use of female imagery to describe God, Jesus, and even abbots was a well-established practice in high-medieval devotional writing, particularly among the Cistercians and including such authors as Anselm of Canterbury and Bernard of Clairvaux. Moreover, as James A. Brundage points out, canon lawyers from the twelfth century on "flatly rejected the postulate of female inferiority and insisted instead that men and women had precisely equal rights and obligations ¼ both within marriage and outside of it" (67). Whatever Chaucer's textual in-

[1] Hexter, 286, from the T2 (Tegernsee) commentary on Epistulae Heroidum ; my translation, in which I have deliberately reproduced the genderless quality of the original. Further on Ovid commentaries and their literary influence, see Desmond's special issue of Mediaevalia on "Ovid in Medieval Culture," especially articles by Frank T. Coulson, Ralph Hexter, and Barbara Nolan.

[2] Hexter, 223, from accessus to Epistulae Heroidum. Hexter comments that "from the very first words of the manuscript, students were presented with the idea that Ovid's purpose in the Epistulae heroidum was to castigate both men and women involved in foolish and illegal love affairs" (154).

spiration, I shall argue that his practice reflects both the medieval academic understanding of Ovid as ethical poet and the mixed messages about women contained in orthodox Christian doctrine.

Already in Troilus we have had a hero who, despite his valor on the field, becomes almost pathologically passive in his relationships with male friend and female lover. He is manipulated by both of them; he is seduced and abandoned; it is he who weeps and laments. In the Legend, commissioned by its fictional sponsors as a palinode to Troilus, Eros and Alceste require that this role allocation be reversed, back to what Eros defines as the "correct" version, and in five of the lives it is. These are the tales of Dido, Hypsipyle, Medea, Ariadne, and Phyllis, all abandoned. Of the remaining five heroines, two are raped—Lucrece and Philomela—while for three—Cleopatra, Thisbe, and Hypermnestra—there is no question of abuse or abandonment. In its self-reported genesis, then, gender role-reversal (from male to female suffering, from female to male malfeasance) is the intended point of the Legend, and if the issue is power, masculine power is shown at work in seven of the ten stories. Yet there is in the tales, as in the Prologue, a fragile and continually oscillating balance between the assertion and the undercutting of masculine prerogative, or between sexual equality and sexual hierarchy.

It makes little sense, I think, to try to decide whether Chaucer was or was not "woman's friend" (as the Scots poet Gavin Douglas put it in the early sixteenth century); I prefer here to look at the systems within which a late-medieval courtly writer was permitted to be women's friend, and the systems within which he was not so permitted. My argument will be that Chaucer both "is and is not" the friend of woman. I borrow the phrase "is and is not" from Salman Rushdie, who himself borrowed it from ancient Arabic storytelling. I use it in order to articulate a deep-rooted ambivalence about women that is a structural feature of late-medieval culture, providing a terminus ad quem beyond which even the most well-intentioned writer, male or female, cannot pass.

That the culture itself was divided on "the woman question" is evident from social fact and ideological theory. Socially, women were integrated into the work force in rural and urban communities, contributing their labor to the burgeoning European economy of the high Middle Ages and benefiting from the wealth they

helped to create. At the same time they were excluded from important arenas of social activity and influence: from universities, the priesthood, and (with a few exceptions) government.

Ideologically, Christian myth performed a similar double take on women. On the one hand, Christian ethics maintained the equality of men and women with respect to grace, free will, and salvation. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Jesus Christ," Paul admonished (Gal. 3:28). On the other hand, the story of Eden specifies several sorts of difference as permanent consequences of the Fall. One is the difference between human beings and animals; as Jahweh says to the serpent, "I will put enmity between ¼ your brood and hers. They shall strike at your head, and you shall strike at their heel" (Gen. 3:15). Another is labor, and with it (according to Catholic theologians) implicitly class difference, for Jahweh destines Adam to "gain your bread by the sweat of your brow". And there are also differences of sex and gender—that is, both biological and social differences between men and women—for to Eve, Jahweh says, "I will increase your labor and your groaning, and in labor shall you bear children. You shall be eager for your husband, and he shall be your master." These differences are not correctable historically, according to Catholic doctrine; hence utopianism, which would erase the consequences of the Fall, is potentially heretical.

My discussion begins with the apparently gender-blind balade that is one of the poetic high points of the Prologue and appears to adumbrate the question of gender role shortly to be raised by Eros. The lyric praises a lady ("My lady" in F, "Alceste" in G); its catalogue of ladies surpassed by the object of praise includes eight of the ten figures treated at greater length in the poem proper (omitting Medea and Philomela), as well as nine more ladies who are not written about (but who might have been in a fuller version).

It is curious, therefore, that at the head of this catalogue of women there stand two men. They are Absolon and Jonathan, in the first and third lines of the poem. Two more men, Demophon and Jason, are introduced in stanza 3, balancing the two men of stanza 1 with approximate formal symmetry. What are these male figures doing here, and how do they affect our response to the lyric? They do so, I suggest, in two different and competing ways, de-

pending on our method of interpretation. One effect of their presence is to minimize gender difference; this occurs in a semantic register. The other is to reaffirm gender difference and female subordination; it occurs on the level of syntax. I shall begin with the former as the more usual way of reading a lyric.

Absolon, the son of David, is adduced as an exemplar of beauty for his "gilte tresses clere" (F 249; cf. 2 Sam. 14:25–26), and Jason was also distinguished for his golden hair, as Medea will later note (1672). In stressing the physical beauty of men—and particularly their golden hair, a primary desideratum for the aristocratic woman—the balade reverses conventional expectations. It makes a gender-blind point, reminding us that since physical beauty is not limited to women, neither are the attendant difficulties. Men have to take responsibility for their sexual attractiveness, to ensure its proper use, and to resist exploiting the power it confers: these are not merely the problems of femininity.

As for Jonathan, David's intimate friend, he embodies "frendly manere" (F 251; cf. 2 Sam. 18:1), again a quality that, while not exclusively feminine, tended in the courtly tradition to be associated with women largely through the example of Bel Acueil (Fair Welcome), one of the Lady's most important personified qualities in the Roman de la rose. The friendship of Jonathan to King David was both personal and political. It transcended family, for Jonathan has constantly to resist instigation to treason by his father, Saul. The example of Jonathan shows that loyalty, like beauty, is not the property of either sex, and therefore neither is disloyalty. (The legends themselves will amply demonstrate these principles.)

On a semantic level, then—considering only the associative or historical meaning of the men's names—the presence of these names in the balade minimizes sexual difference in the interest of moral egalitarianism. Far from "feminizing" the male figures by including them in this catalogue, the effect is, rather, to deconstruct gender (the social mediations of sex) by suggesting its irrelevance as an ethical category. This procedure is consistent with Christian ethics and eschatology.

But how gender-blind really is the balade? The moral life may well be gender-blind, but social life is not, and the balade manages to convey both aspects of that dialectic simultaneously. Looking now at the structure, or syntax, of naming in the balade, we find that it reasserts hierarchies that limit the moral egalitarianism of its

references. This is because the names constitute a referential network, analogous to the acrostic sometimes concealed in the initial letters of the lines of a medieval poem and revealing the author's or translator's or recipient's name. In this case, we have a syntax, not of letters, but of names, whose relations within standard medieval theories of classification, both social and historical, carry the structure of repressive ideology in this short and apparently innocent lyric. Let us first consider historiography, specifically the profoundly influential Augustinian representation of history.

One notes, first, that there are seven names in stanza 1. I shall attach a significance to this number only because it seems contextually justifiable to do so. Seven is the number of historical periods in one of Augustine's historical schemes, the one he borrowed from hexameral millennialism: it represented history as a week of ages paralleling the week of creation. This theory appears throughout The City of God, most prominently and most dramatically in its final paragraph:

The first age, as the first day, extends from Adam to the deluge; the second from the deluge to Abraham¼ . From Abraham to the advent of Christ there are ¼ three periods ¼ . There are thus five ages in all. The sixth is now passing¼ . After this period God shall rest as on the seventh day, when He shall give us ¼ rest in himself¼ . Suffice it to say that the seventh shall be our Sabbath, which shall be brought to a close not by an evening, but by the Lord's day, as an eighth and eternal day, consecrated by the resurrection of Christ, and prefiguring the eternal repose not only of the spirit, but also of the body. (22.30)

Not only did Nicolas Trevet and Thomas Waleys comment on The City of God during the fourteenth century, but Ranulf Higden employed the six-ages scheme as the organizing principle for his immensely popular and influential encyclopedic world-history, the Polychronicon : "In the whiche work, by the ensaumple of the firste worchere, that wroughte alle his werkes in sixe dayes and reste in the seventhe (for his doynge is oure lore), this werke I departe and dele in sevene bookes" (1.3). It was a common topos, and there can be little doubt that Chaucer was well aware of it. Despite these antecedents, this would be a weak argument were it not for other evidence that Augustinian historiography was very much on Chaucer's mind here, as evidenced in the positioning of the seven names.

In accordance with its title, a second historical scheme structures

Augustine's great book. This is the parallel alignment, imitated from Eusebius, of the cities of God and man. The development of the city of God can be traced in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, while the city of man is manifested mainly in pagan/classical history, each phase of which is contemporaneous with and antithetical to a phase in the city of God. We have, therefore, three major cultural traditions to reckon with in the Augustinian periodical schema: Hebrew, pagan/classical, and Christian. This periodization is incorporated in the structure of the "nine worthies" topos, which always includes three Jewish, three classical, and three Christian heroes; it can be seen in Chaucer's Monk's Tale as well.^[3]

This is the progression followed in the first stanza of Chaucer's balade. We begin with three Old Testament figures; there follow two classical ones; last come two Christian romance heroines, Isolde and Helen. There is no reason to assume, as scholars have always automatically assumed, that this "Eleyne" is Helen of Troy. I propose that we think of her instead as "la belle Hélène" of Constantinople, eponymous heroine of an extremely popular French romance of the fourteenth century.^[4] The work exists in verse and prose versions in several languages; it had, according to A. H. Krappe, "un retentissement très considérable." Helen's story is a variant on the suffering-queen saga, of which Chaucer's tale of Constance is another instance. We might think of "La Belle Hélène" as the hyper-Christian version, for it is framed in the struggle of Catholicism against the Saracens; it features papal politics and, besides the pope, includes hermits and priests as characters. The heroine is daughter to a Roman emperor and niece to a pope; she is named after the St. Helen, Constantine's mother, who found the true cross, and her sufferings (which include the loss of a hand)

[3] Lucifer provides an archetypal prologue to the series; Hercules (grouped with Adam and Sampson) was often seen as a type of Sampson; the middle or pagan section mixes "Assyrian" and Latin figures; and the modern instances should come at the end, as Donald K. Fry has cogently argued. This is their placement in the best group of MSS, including the Ellesmere.

[4] A. H. Krappe gives a summary and discusses problems of origin and filiation. He characterizes the tale as "un de ces interminables romans qui caractérisent le déclin du moyen âge" (324) and concludes that "le poète inconnu était ¼ un loyal sujet des rois angevins, maîtres de l'Angleterre et de la plus grande partie de la France" (353). A much more detailed resumé appears in the comparison of MSS by Rudolf Ruths. As far as I am aware, the romance has not yet been edited. On the evolution of the Helen cycle, see Linder, 84–85; and Mulligan.

equal those of many a saint. Her twin sons are Martin and Brice; the former becomes archbishop of Tours, while Brice becomes father to St. Brice, another archbishop. Given the unsavory reputation of Isolde, we might see the two heroines—courtly adulteress and saintly progenitor of holy men—as representing unredeemed and redeemed versions of womanhood in Christian literature.

There is, moreover, a specifically English component to the story, for Helen, like Isolde, marries an English king (Henry). Her son Brice also becomes king of England and of Constantinople, after making a crusade to Jerusalem. The progression of names thus asserts both ecclesia and patria, orthodox Augustinian historical periodicity culminating in a subtle compliment to the English monarchy. It is a stance, as Chaucer well knew, not always so easy to maintain as in the structure of a short lyric.

Of course there is no explicit textual assertion about how to interpret this Helen, Hélène, or even Elaine: all depends on our interpretive grid. If the Augustinian historical schema is granted, then Hélène fits. Two considerations persuade me of the validity of that schema in connection with the balade. One is the pervasive presence of Augustinian ideas and references throughout the Legend. The other is that the schema holds for six of the seven names, so that it seems to me the burden of proof is on those who would propose any other Helen than the one suggested here. Nevertheless, indeterminacy of this sort serves to highlight the role of interpretation, the necessary subjective activity of the reader. This becomes a prominent theme in the legends to follow, so that the balade is again paradigmatic of what it precedes: not only in content but in method.

Besides chronological structuring, a hierarchy of social values may be discerned in the placement of names in the balade. This social syntax reaffirms gender relations as a kind of subset to the doctrinal hierarchies already posited in the historical periodicity of the names. I used the metaphor "headed" earlier on, and I now want to literalize that metaphor, suggesting that the positioning of male and female figures at the start of the poem represents a "correct" organic structure resembling that of the traditional descriptive blazon of the human (not only the female) body. The blazon always begins with the head and works systematically downward. This is because what is highest is most important and therefore comes first.

In the human organism, the position of physical and conceptual primacy is filled by the head, seat of reason, the highest intellectual capacity. As in the body biological, so in the body politic: what is highest rules. As the head rules (or should rule) the body, so reason rules the passions, king rules state, and man rules woman.

Hence the balade opens with a man, expands to a man followed by a woman, and then gives a pair of men enclosing—constraining, if you will—a woman. The cluster of three names thus offers a tiny linguistic image of proper leadership and proper control. The poem opens also with the image of a head—Absolon's head of gilt tresses—as does the traditional blazon. It opens with three Old Testament figures representing temporal priority; they are, moreover, inseparably linked to monarchy, or headship of state. This power-packed opening movement is immediately followed by two examples of marital fidelity (Penelope and Marcia Cato), which extend the political principle into the domestic sphere.

The image of Esther is especially rich in this context, touching as it does all three areas of concern: state, marriage, and individual self-control. (Here I revert to a semantic mode of analysis.) The Book of Esther opens with an act of disobedience: Queen Vashti refuses to come forth at the command of her husband, King Ahasuerus. This misconduct carries potentially disastrous results:

For this deed of the queen will be made known to all women, causing them to look with contempt upon their husbands¼ . This very day the ladies of Persia and Medea who have heard of the queen's behavior will be telling it to all the king's princes, and there will be contempt and wrath in plenty. (Esther 1:17–18)

The insubordination feared here is at once domestic and political: not only will other women follow Vashti's example against their husbands, but princes may do so against their superior the king. Royal advisors therefore urge that a "better" queen be found so that "all women will give honor to their husbands, high and low." The successful candidate is the Jewish maiden Esther, a paragon of obedience, tact, and modesty. Esther does assert herself eventually on behalf of her people, but always using feminine wiles: food, wine, appearance, tears. She achieves a writ of indulgence, the promotion of her deserving relative, and the death of her people's enemies. On every level—political, marital, ethical—Esther is rep-

resented as a model of proper female conduct. Her story reasserts the importance of gender-role difference (that is, of specifically feminine behavior); it reaffirms authority both sexual and social. Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and Man of Law's Tale adopt a similar narrative strategy of sexual politics.

If the first stanza of Chaucer's balade gives us images of headship, rule, and rational behavior, the second stanza shows what is to be ruled. It opens with the image of a body:"Thy faire body, lat yt nat appere, / Lavyne" (F 256–57). At its heart—that is, in its central line—passion appears: just where it ought to, for the heart is, in medieval medical lore, the seat of passion and particularly, though not only, of sexual passion. (We recall the opening of the Canterbury Tales with its birds pricked by nature in their "corages.") The "passyoun" here is that of Cleopatra, one of the most negatively charged figures in all medieval history and legend, as Taylor shows conclusively. Playing on the hagiographical matrix and the passio (suffering) of martyrs, Chaucer also avails himself of the already-acquired (and now predominant) subjective meaning of "passion" (cf. OED , s.v.). Death dominates this stanza as it does the natural body, for of the five ladies named, three were suicides and one was killed as a sacrifice. Moreover, all five are closely associated with warfare or family feud. One might add further that all these ladies are pagans, but I would not want to lean too heavily on the "spiritual death" notion. The figures in stanza 2 therefore lead us to consider the ways of irrational or excessive behavior both personal and social. In doing so, they contrast with the heavily charged onomastics of control in stanza 1.

Stanza 3 adds nothing to the dialectic of control and subversion already established, but illustrates it in a fairly pedestrian way: the feet, I suppose, of this small literary body whose structure does, after all, mime that of the conventional courtly blazon. (Nor is it necessary to apologize for etymological wordplay, a standard rhetorical device in classical and medieval literatures.)

In such subtle ways does the balade introduce the legends to come, not simply by naming several of the heroines to be represented there, but by showing, in its miniature poetic practice, the stress-ridden and paradoxical relations of men and women, reason and nature, eschatology and social life, form and content, syntax and semantics.

My analysis of the "Absolon" balade proposes a more schematic and more ideologically conscious poet than Chaucer is often conceded to be: a more medieval Chaucer if you will. As Georges Duby has shown in The Three Orders —his meditation on equality and hierarchy in high-medieval social theory—the thematic elucidated here became, after the twelfth century, absolutely central to conservative thought of the period. If the Chaucer portrayed here is less like ourselves than we thought, less different from his scholarly—indeed, clerical—contemporaries and antecedents, his work is by the same token all the more capable of revealing some dominant intellectual concerns of his day. Other of Chaucer's poems could be analyzed to disclose a similar pattern of first undercutting and then reasserting gender difference. The Franklin's Tale begins by inverting the traditional relation of husband and wife, but ends by affirming it. The knight Arviragus at first swears never to exert social or sexual control over his wife ("he, day ne nyght, / Ne shoulde upon hym take no maistrie" [V.746–47]). In the end, he must not only resolve her dilemma about honorable behavior, but threaten her with death if she breathes a word of it (1481–83). The Wife of Bath's recital allows its speaker, in her Prologue, to offer a radical critique of male appropriation of cultural production and to seize that right for herself. Yet it also lets her reaffirm both traditional textuality and traditional masculine fantasies about and behavior toward women, with her quotations that turn against themselves and her tale of a rapist who beats the rap.

The themes I have discerned in the balade resurface in the individual legends, to which I turn now and in Chapter 5 in order to indicate how they carry the dialectic of same and different, equal and subordinate.

Geographies Of Desire: Orientalism In The Legend

The construction of woman as Other would seem the obvious target in a work as fitly titled for that purpose as the Legend of Good Women. I have argued that the socio-literary construction of gender is what Chaucer aims to deconstruct—but not necessarily to reject—in his Legend, through a variety of rhetorical means and in the service of an ultimate (that is, a historically unattainable but nonetheless "true")

genderlessness such as that offered by St. Paul in his remonstrance to the Galatians, or by Augustine in his vision of the Resurrection. Both have been cited above, but I repeat them here for the reader's convenience. The Pauline text says: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Jesus Christ" (Gal. 3:28). Augustine's statement, quoted in Chapter 2, is:

For my part, they seem to be wiser who make no doubt that both sexes shall rise [at the Resurrection]. For there shall be no lust, which is now the cause of confusion. From those bodies, then, vice shall be withdrawn, while nature shall be preserved. And the sex of a woman is not a vice, but nature. It shall then indeed be superior to carnal intercourse and child-bearing; nevertheless the female members shall remain adapted not to the old uses but to a new beauty, which, so far from provoking lust, now extinct, shall excite praise to the wisdom and clemency of God, who both made what was not and delivered from corruption what He made. (City of God 22.17)

What I want to propose here, though, is another target than woman for the construction of otherness in the Legend: the foreigner, specifically the Middle Eastern, non-European Mediterranean or northern African foreigner, inhabiting what was called in Chaucer's day, and is still often called, "the Orient." I am indebted in this portion of my project to the provocative work of Edward Said, who distinguishes three meanings for the term "Orientalism." The first, the academic study of the Orient from whatever disciplinary perspective, is relevant to my discussion to the extent that it provides evidence for my reading of Chaucer. The second or "imaginative" meaning—"a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident'" (Said, Orientalism , 2)—will accommodate most poets, including Chaucer. Further, I want to claim Said's third definition—"a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient" (ibid., 3)—for the fourteenth century, although Said (following Michel Foucault's notion of a discourse) locates the starting point of this meaning as the late eighteenth century. It is doubtful whether meanings two and three can really be separated: whether the ontological/epistemological uses of the Orient can exist without an accompanying and even generative material basis in colonialism (the Greeks in Asia Minor,

Romans in North Africa, etc.). The concept is "historically and materially defined" in the late Middle Ages—which, in the Crusades, certainly had its "institution for dealing with the Orient" (ibid.).

Although it is not possible here fully to display the medieval discourse on Orientalism, I hope at least to sketch its contours and to show its operation in a fourteenth-century English courtly poem about love and gender. As we shall see, the two versions of otherness—gender and geography—reinforce one another, although not necessarily in mechanical or predictable ways.

Let me begin with material and institutional definition: land, commodities, social organization.

Joshua Prawer has articulated the colonial character of the European military presence in Palestine—Outremer, the Holy Land, the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, won by Europeans in the First Crusade in 1099 and reconquered by the Muslims in 1291. This presence had broader motives than the desire to salvage heathen souls and save one's own, even broader than the ambition of nobles and of ecclesiastical administrators to acquire fertile estates abroad or of the servile to gain their freedom there. The Orient included, for example, numerous Mediterranean port cities that opened "the Moslem hinterland to European penetration and inversely [brought] ¼ a flow of Eastern wares to the European marts and fairs across the Alps" (Prawer, Latin Kingdom , 352) from as far away as India, Africa, and Southeast Asia. As a market, the Orient took textiles and clothing; furs and leather; pearls; timber; iron and tin; metalwork of various kinds, whether ornamental or armorial (along with wool, a British specialty for centuries); slaves (from non-Christian Slavic populations); and a great deal of hard currency. Pilgrimage was also, of course, major export business, especially lucrative for moneylenders, shipbuilders, seamen, hostelers, and suppliers. As resources, the Orient gave, as Lopez and Raymond show, oils; honey and wax; citrus and other fruits; wines; textiles (silks, brocades, cottons); ivory; glassware; dyes (used in painting as well as in the textile industry); grains; spices; and especially sugar.

Socially, institutionally, the Crusades had a profound effect on European society; even for the Church, they were more than a spiritual exercise. Christopher Tyerman writes of the lucrative

crusade finance market, in which some ecclesiastical establishments had, by the thirteenth century, "emerged as major institutions of capitalist enterprise, acting as bankers and financiers as well as territorial empire builders" (206). The widespread desire to sell or mortgage in order to finance crusading created something like a real-estate boom in the thirteenth century, with what Tyerman calls "cut-throat competition" among lay and ecclesiastical purchasers to acquire available properties. The alienation of lands also created assorted problems for disinherited offspring and disendowered wives, who often had to pursue their rights in court.

There were other institutional consequences. A range of new taxes, with the necessary administrative apparatus (a layer of bureaucrats), came into being to support the Crusades. Privileges conferred upon the crucesignatus included exemption from interest, immunity from taxation and from court summonses, a debt moratorium, and protection for his family; neither were these privileges dependent upon immediate departure.

How important would or could the Orient be to an English courtier / civil servant of the late fourteenth century? Would it not seem remote to the point of utter irrelevance? And were the Crusades not already obsolete both as an ideal and as a military phenomenon? In fact, Aziz Atiya describes the fourteenth century as "the age of the later Crusade in its fuller sense ¼ the real age of propaganda for the Crusade" (92, 94). This is because the military expansion of the Islamic Ottoman empire was taken very seriously indeed in Europe. As Thomas J. Hatton observes, "Europe buzzed with plans, preparations and half-hearted efforts to launch still another great expedition to the Holy Land. The need was real." If England was not directly threatened by Islamic expansion, some of its allies were. Although the major confrontations were to occur in the 1390s, there was nonetheless plenty of concern and action during the preceding decades, when Chaucer played an active, if minor, diplomatic role in his country's international politics, and when the Legend was composed. Certainly a very keen sense of East-West dynamic is revealed in the Monk's Tale, which has four of the five uses in all of Chaucer's work of the word "orient" (the other is in the Knight's Tale, 1494). Moreover, all four occur in context of Roman colonialism. Cenobia arouses the wrath of imperial Rome by conquering many kingdoms

In the orient, with many a fair citee
Apertenaunt unto the magestee
Of Rome ¼ .
                   (VII.2314–16),

and Caesar's rival Pompey is no less than thrice characterized as a campaigner in the "orient" (2681, 2685, 2693), with Caesar himself "the conqueror, / That wan al th' occident" (2673–74).

Given the events of the day and Chaucer's role at court, it should scarcely surprise us that the poet incorporated into his work some consciousness of the East-West confrontation threatening Europe. Nonetheless, as is often the case with medieval authorial attitudes, and particularly Chaucer's, the question of specific response is not clear-cut.

Throughout the 1340s, there were battles against the Turks, chiefly by Italians. A key date in the Muslims' progress was 1353, when the Turks seized Gallipoli on the Hellespont and entered Europe. During the 1370s, they took control in the Balkans, and in 1389 they reached the Danube. All during the 1360s, there were appeals for military help from rulers directly threatened by the Turkish onslaught: from the king of Hungary; from Constantinople; from the king of Cyprus and Jerusalem, Pierre de Lusignan.

The latter toured Europe trying to organize a crusade; he visited the English court in 1363–64 (a time for which we have no records of Chaucer's whereabouts). Lusignan managed to organize a temporarily victorious attack on Alexandria in 1365, in which he was assisted by a company of English knights. This event was commemorated in La Prise d'Alexandrie by Guillaume de Machaut, whose poetry Chaucer knew well and often imitated. It appears also in Chaucer's own Monk's Tale , of which a stanza is devoted to

worthy Petro, kyng of Cipre ¼ . .
That Alisandre wan by heigh maistrie
                      (VII. 2391–98),

and again in Chaucer's description of his Knight, who has participated in this battle and numerous others, both with and against the Muslims, from the 1340s through the 1360s in Spain, Turkey, and Morocco (GP 51–66). We may note too, to extend the geographic range, that the Wife of Bath has traveled to Jerusalem thrice (GP 463).

Among Lusignan's strongest proponents was Philippe de Mézières, former chancellor of the kingdom of Cyprus and, after the assassination of Lusignan in 1369, tutor to the young Charles VI of France. For four decades Mézières propagandized for the regaining of Jerusalem, founding the Order of the Passion of Jesus Christ Crucified to that end. He circulated documents calling for international support of the Order in 1368, 1384, and throughout the 1390s, winning twenty-two members from England.^[5] Among them was Chaucer's friend and fellow-diplomat Lewis Clifford, who acted as intermediary between Chaucer and his admirer at the French court, Eustache Deschamps.

Another guest at the English court was Leo VI, king of Little Armenia (Cilicia). Expelled by the Mamelukes, who controlled Egypt and, intermittently, Palestine and Syria, Leo was in England in 1384–85; that is, just before the composition of the Legend. His aim was to forge a European alliance that would launch a crusade; hence Mezieres writes, in his Songe du vieux pelerin (1389), of "ladicte paix ¼ par le tresvaillant Lyon, roy d'Armenie diligemment traictee et poursuite" (1.78). Leo's visit provoked what May McKisack calls "a glaring example of royal recklessness," for Richard II bestowed on Leo "lavish gifts and entertainment and an annual pension of £1000." She adds that according to one chronicler, the king "was so liberal that he gave to all who asked him, dissipating the revenues of his crown so that he was forced to recoup himself by taxing his people" (441).

Following hard upon Leo's stay in England was the well-known Scrope-Grosvenor trial of 1385–86, in which Chaucer was called to testify. This was an armorial dispute over who had the right to display a certain heraldic figure. Tyerman observes that "at least fourteen individual crusaders either testified or were mentioned,

[5] Coopland, Philippe de Mézières: Letter , Introduction, xxxiii–xxxiv. The letter in question, dated 1395, proposes peace between France and England as a necessary prerequisite to winning back the East. Another project of Mézières's, documented by William Coleman, was his campaign to have the Feast of Mary's Presentation in the Temple—long a major event in the Greek Church despite its apocryphal origin—included in the Latin liturgy. Coleman speculates that Mézières hoped to establish an ecumenical, then a military, alliance with the Byzantine Christians against the Turkish threat. The campaign included an anonymous sermon (dated about 1372) on Matt. 24:27: "Exit ab oriente et paret usque in occidentem" ("It [lightning] goes from the east and appears even in the west"), a scriptural citation enabling the preacher to expatiate on East-West relations on the theoretical rather than purely military level.

their exploits of the previous twenty-five years stretching from Egypt to Lithuania" (p. 259), and Maurice Keen has proposed this collective dossier as Chaucer's model for his Knight.

By and large, the official English policy toward the Crusades was not, in the 1380s, particularly supportive. Richard II was himself a crusade enthusiast, but his major plans in this area—an Anglo-French project to repel the Ottomans and recover Palestine—did not commence until the 1390s (that is, several years after the Legend was composed). In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, English kings had several times expropriated for their own use moneys raised by the papacy to fund crusades, and after 1336 no new mandatory crusade taxes were levied by the papacy in England (Tyerman, 253). It was consistent with the anti-papal and nationalistic policies of Edward III that, in contrast to the French, he declined to finance crusades, even though individuals were permitted to do so themselves; hence English crusaders of the fourteenth century were privately financed through loans, mortgages, or gifts, though by 1378 crusade bequests and legacies had virtually disappeared as a means of funding (Housley, 236). Indeed, Philippe de Mézières took the opportunity in his Songe (1.76–8) bitterly to denounce the English for (among other things) sabotaging French efforts to regain the Holy Land.

Yet despite the hands-off attitude of Edward III, and despite some criticism of the movement, recent scholars generally agree that both the theory and practice of crusade continued to enjoy a great deal of prestige in Chaucer's day:

The crusade was very much in men's minds in England, and it was a live issue in political society, among the highest and most influential in the realm, in the late 1380s and 1390s¼ . Plenty of men went on crusade. (Keen, 57)

Clearly it would be wrong to regard the crusade in the fourteenth century as an unpopular movement. There was a broadly based acceptance of the crusade ¼ though criticism of what was happening in practice continued to be vociferous. (Housley, 239)

Opposition to crusading was by no means widespread, and criticism of the ideal was even rarer. The crusade remained a practical and farfrom-amateurish concern throughout the century. (Tyerman, 288)

Indeed, it was extremely practical. England may have taken a less active role in regaining the Holy Land than could satisfy Philippe de Mézières, but it did nonetheless plan and launch two crusades of its own between 1382 and 1386, just preceding the composition of the Legend . These were quite similar campaigns, both of them opportunistically exploiting the Great Schism in the Church for ends of foreign policy and personal profit, both of them designated "crusades"—equally opportunistically—by the Roman Pope Urban VI because they targeted opponents of his who professed loyalty to the rival antipope in Avignon, Clement VII.

It is important to remember the decisive and disruptive impact on public life at every level of the proclamation of a crusade: sermons being constantly preached for the crusade, a multi-pronged national fund-raising effort, new taxes and levies, the diversion of commercial shipping, and recruitment of armies.

One of these campaigns was the May 1383 invasion of Flanders: the crusade of Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich. Nominally, its purpose was to ensure that the French did not force Flanders to support Clement. Richard Vaughan discerns an economic motive: to maintain free passage for English wool, which had been embargoed by the count of Flanders (28). J. J. N. Palmer sees instead a political motive: to use Flanders as a wedge against the French in the ongoing Hundred Years' War (21—22). A distinctive feature of this crusade was the gross abuse of plenary indulgence: in return for contributions to the crusade, Urban offered full remission of sins for both living and dead. This offer contributed to what McKisack calls "the prevailing mood of national hysteria"; she writes of "the avidity with which the credulous of all classes, men and more especially women, sought to buy the plenary remissions" (431). Paul Olson proposes that the abusive ecclesiastical practices of this campaign are reflected in the Pardoner's Tale ; he notes too that Chaucer's Squire—who has learned chivalry in Flanders—has evidently participated in it (203–7).

The campaign was a complete disaster, in which cowardice, indiscipline, and dysentery all played a part; Vaughan cites a chronicler who observed, "percussit eos Deus in posteriora" (29). Wyclif also fulminated against it in his polemic De cruciata. The commander, Bishop Despenser, was impeached by Parliament and several captains were tried for treasonous surrender.

The other crusade of the early 1380s was the political adventure in Castile planned for 1383 by John of Gaunt. It was not Lancaster's first attempt to intervene in the dynastic affairs of that region, for ten years earlier, in pursuit of his own claim to the Castilian throne, he had led a campaign there, which P. E. Russell describes "as one of the outstanding failures in Lancaster's chequered career as a military commander" (204). Lancaster's claim was based on his 1371 marriage to Costanza, daughter of Pedro I of Castile and Leon. Negotiations for settlement dragged on through the 1370s, and by the early 1380s there was significant support in Parliament for peace, despite Lancaster's intention to mount another expedition against Castile in 1383. In March of that year, Urban appointed Lancaster "standard-bearer of the Church in the coming crusade against the Trastamaran schismatics" (Russell, 348), for the Trastamaran ruler of Castile supported the Avignon pope and was thus guilty of "the Clementist heresy." Although the plan failed, nonetheless some English troops were dispatched to Spain, and it is not difficult to believe that the cynically political deployment of crusade rhetoric would have been evident to many observers.

Yet this was not the end of the matter, for once again, in 1385, the "chemin d'Espaigne" was brought to Parliament. This time the project was unanimously accepted, and by February 1386 "vast and widely publicized preparations were being made" (Russell, 408). These included official propagation of crusade in England; fundraising; a tournament at Smithfield, at which Richard II presented John of Gaunt with a golden crown in anticipation of his coronation in Spain; and the arrest of commercial ships for diversion to military purposes. (One can imagine the indignation of an experienced customs officer like Chaucer, whose twelve years in that position ended in 1386.) This invasion took place in July 1386; it ended two years later when Lancaster abandoned his claim to the Castilian throne in exchange for a large compensatory payment and the betrothal of his daughter Catalina to his former enemy. "Nor," Russell remarks, "apparently, was his conscience greatly troubled by the thought that his daughter would be the bride of a heretic" (509), although the irritated pope did eventually revoke all acts performed under his sponsorship of the ill-fated "crusade."

Crusade was thus a rather complex phenomenon in England just before 1386, composed as it was of grandiose schemes proposed by

foreigners against the infidel in distant Arabic lands, and cynical adventures against other European Christians, which had little effect besides draining the national treasury, already stressed by the war against France. That, at least, is how an ironically minded civil servant might have seen it, and I want to suggest that in the Legends, Orientalism becomes a rhetorical device enabling Chaucer to do two things: to create a moral structure in the poem and to offer a veiled commentary on some aspects of English foreign policy. It becomes his negative pole, for certain qualities associated with Easterners become paradigmatic of flaws and vices that, while not confined to Easterners, are nonetheless seen as most dramatically exemplified in them, certainly most memorably exemplified, inasmuch as these figures are the stuff of Western literary tradition.

As such, might not their presence in the Legend represent nothing more complicated than the poet's fidelity to his classical sources? Perhaps, but there are strong arguments to the contrary. Chaucer's freedom in altering his sources for political or other purposes is well known. Moreover, some of these stories—those of Dido, Cleopatra, and the Roman Lucretia—already had blatantly political purposes, whether colonial or domestic. Finally, the prominence of Orientalist and crusade concerns at the English court during the few years just preceding the composition of the Legend, and especially the "crusades" of the magnates Despenser and Lancaster, precludes, I believe, a merely innocent or coincidental choice of "Oriental" figures and themes.

As will be evident from what follows, the Oriental theme does not run consistently from start to finish of the work. I have not found it in the Prologue in any substantial way, for instance, even though some of the ladies named there in the balade—Helen, Lavinia, Cleopatra—did come to Chaucer from literary works heavily laden with colonialist intent. The theme tends rather to surface intermittently in several of the legends.

Cleopatra

To begin his series, as Chaucer does, with Cleopatra is, first, overtly to undercut his numenous sponsors' demand for "good" women. Second, it displaces the called-for theme of love with that of politics and the social order, specifically of colonialism gone soft. Antony,

the "senatour" who is sent "For to conqueren regnes and honour / Unto ¼ Rome" (584–85), scarcely advances the Roman values of manly valor. The flaws in his character become all too obvious in Egypt, where, after adultery and bigamy, all that remains to him as a public person is his courage in battle. This will be lost with his defeat at the sea battle of Actium—the "endlessly exemplary Actium," as Michel Foucault calls it (Language, 172)—after which he commits suicide.

Of what is Actium here exemplary? Here and elsewhere in the Legends , it is the debilitating or depoliticizing effect of foreigners, Orientals, that I want to notice: their ability to distract a hero from his (in this case explicitly colonial) mission, generally through sensual and erotic pleasures. This sensuality could even corrode empires, according to Augustine, for just when "the Romans lived with greatest virtue and concord," the proconsul Manlius "introduced into Rome the luxury of Asia, more destructive than all hostile armies. It was then that iron bedsteads and expensive carpets were first used; then, too, that female singers were admitted at banquets, and other licentious abominations were introduced" (City of God 3.21). The image of an enervating, effeminizing Eastern sensuality set against a properly masculine Western energy, already ancient by the high Middle Ages, was reinforced when the Crusaders encountered Eastern habits such as frequent bathing, the wearing of perfumes and makeup by men, the heavy use of spices in cooking, and an abundance of jewelry worn by both men and women (Prawer, "Roots").

The story of Cleopatra is thus the other side of the coin to the romantic exoticism represented in the Squire's Tale . The Orient is no longer a realm of fantasy fulfilled, but one of hope and ambition undone, for the Chaucerian version is a cautionary tale if ever there was one. But what does it caution against, or for?

Different possibilities exist. Terry Jones argues, correctly, that crusade was not officially approved of in England despite the participation of English knights in exotic campaigns. The reason, he suggests, is that the major focus of English foreign policy was the war against France, and then the defense of England's Scottish border. Perhaps, then, the Knight's adventures abroad show a less than patriotic commitment. Similarly, Alison's gadding about, even

to holy places, might be suspect: need one go so far to show one's faith? It is a question the Wycliffites posed continually in their critique of pilgrimage. By this token, Antony might be considered a negative exemplum in deserting his country for sybaritic pleasures and self-serving exploits abroad. His sad story might provide a very timely and distinctively English admonition against costly military adventure abroad—adventures such as those exhorted in the name of faith by Philippe de Mézières or undertaken for profit by John of Gaunt. Even the reference in the Monk's Tale to "worthy Petro," Mézières's old patron, could be ironic, for Lusignan was "notoriously immoral," had committed "deeds of the grossest cruelty," had incurred papal and episcopal censure, and had broken feudal contract with his barons (Coopland, Songe, 64). It seems, then, that both concrete results and historical personnel left much to be desired.

On the other hand, official—that is, royal and parliamentary—approval is not the whole story. If Maurice Keen is right in asserting that the number and status of persons taking up the banner in Chaucer's day made it impossible for the crusade to look obsolete or disreputable, then the Orientalism shown in this and other legends might tend to affirm British or European aspirations abroad. Antony would still be a negative exemplum, of course, but the tactic would be to show the Eastern adversary at its most alluring and therefore most dangerous. Thus the story might encourage, not total abandonment of the crusading ideal, but rather the proper firmness abroad: a "Desert Storm" type of strategy.

Deciding between these positions is not easy. Nor does Hatton's hypothesis—that the Knight's Tale reflects Mézières's ultimately unachieved program of reconquest—necessarily imply a positive attitude toward Orientalist projects. If Chaucer thought Mézières's plans unrealistic or fanatical (as some did), then the ironic or negative reading, for which there is ample textual and historical grounding, would be appropriate. The lawman John Gower, Chaucer's good friend and fellow poet, certainly pulled no punches in allowing his characters to debate and denounce crusading. A strong anti-crusade current runs through Confessio Amantis , of which two instances will have to suffice. Book 4 addresses the vice of sloth, and Genius explicitly identifies derring-do abroad with lovers' egotisti-

cal efforts to improve their status in their ladies' eyes. This is a form of labor that Amans has not practiced—and, he says, for good reason, one of which is that

A Sarazin if I sle schal,
I sle the Soule forth withal,
And that was nevere Christes lore.
                     (4.1679–81)

Earlier, in their discussion of war as a manifestation of Ire, Amans has explicitly posed the question:

I prei you tell me nay or yee,
To passe over the grete See
To werre and sle the Sarazin,
Is that the lawe?
                   (3.2487–89)

Genius can only admit that gospel urges us to preach and suffer for faith, but not to kill; indeed, abandoning the word for the sword has proved an inefficacious tactic, as witness the loss of parts once Christian but now "miswent" (2513): obviously a reference to the failure of the crusading movement.

As a rule of thumb, we might say that what Gower deplores, Chaucer represents. In the present case, perhaps the Chaucerian point is that Easterners are not so very different from ourselves, because there is an "Oriental" tendency in all of us, which must be tamed if it cannot be rooted out. (Surely Augustine himself, a North African latecomer to Christianity, was a prime example of this effort.) Yet to say as much is to acknowledge a very deep-rooted Orientalism: Said's second definition. For if "European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self" (Said, Orientalism , 3), then the Oriental seducer or villain is an externalized aspect of the (European) self, and the East-West dynamic, in its literary representation, becomes a form of self-exploration in the interest of self-control. But not, after all, only self -control, for to be able to represent the unruly or the transgressive as Oriental is already to imply the desire to control the real Orient, a desire expressed not only in literary texts but, as indicated above, in social institutions.

Thisbe

Chaucer's second legend is also an Oriental tale, as Ovid reminds us in the opening of his version (Met. 4.55–58), the main source of Chaucer's. The setting is Babylon, specified in both texts as the city whose baked-brick walls were built by Queen Semiramis. The Eastern location is important to the ideological structure of the Metamorphoses , which, we recall, super-patriotically ends with the apotheosis and stellification of Caesar. Although there may well be irony in this ending, nonetheless the ebb and flow of Oriental ideas is very much at stake in the Thisbe portion of the text. The tale occurs in a series narrated by the daughters of Minyas. They, worshippers of Athena, are boycotting the festival of Asian Bacchus, which has taken all the other women away from their proper domestic duties and off into the streets and woods. The Minyades stay indoors and spin, meanwhile telling cautionary tales of Oriental sensuality and excessive passion. Thus the narrators demonstrate the virtuous gender-behavior that their female character will fatally flout when she wanders into the woods to meet her lover. If Ovid has the Minyades transformed into bats because of their failure to acknowledge the power of Bacchus, this is his indirect critique of the repressive Augustan morality the tale itself overtly supports. The metamorphosis does not, in any case, alter the East-West conflict of values.

Babylon can scarcely portend any good to an author steeped, as Chaucer was, in the scriptural-Augustinian tradition. There Babylon is an enemy of the chosen people and predecessor of Rome as archetypal city of man (cf. City of God 18). Irene Samuel's formidably thorough study shows that it is in the patristic tradition too that Semiramis, formerly a much-honored military leader, becomes a prototype of feminine erotic evil: usurping man's prerogative to rule, murdering her husband to do so, committing incest with her son, and, in some texts, inventing trousers as female attire. In the Man of Law's Tale , Chaucer gives us a closer view of such a figure: the Sultan's mother, who so far transgresses the bounds of femininity that she no longer qualifies as a woman. She is "feyned womman ¼ serpent under femynynytee¼ Virago"—and "Semyrame the secounde" (359–63). The polarities of Occident versus Orient and Christian law versus pagan law make up a basic structural principle

in the Man of Law's Tale, and I think we may see it as developing ideas latent in the Legend .^[6]

Although there is no Western pole in the legend of Thisbe, the tale is already sufficiently defined by its context to make its point about the hazards of unbridled eroticism and unnecessary adventure abroad. Where "Cleopatra" makes that point in the arena of international politics, "Thisbe" domesticates it: she neither gives up a kingdom nor crosses the sea, but she disobeys her parents to wander from home at night. So, of course, does Piramus: again there is no victim, no disloyalty, but a double death freely chosen on both sides. The republican and humanist Boccaccio had already interpreted this medieval Romeo-and-Juliet as a warning against parental interference in adolescent love in his De Claris mulieribus:

Wicked Fortune sinned, as perhaps did their wretched parents. Certainly the ardor of the young should be curbed slowly, lest by wishing to oppose them with sudden impediments we drive them to despair and perdition. The passion of desire is without temperance, and it is almost a pestilence and fury in youth. We should tolerate it patiently. (Concerning Famous Women, trans. Guarini, 27)

For the courtier Chaucer, though—who held the lucrative wardship of two young men's marriages and had three offspring of his own—the pathetic Oriental tale maintains its original Ovidian purpose. The outcome affirms, after all, the wisdom of parents who protect their daughters "lest they diden som folye" (723). In Chaucer's hands, humor or obscenity may neutralize pathos but not morality or prudence. If the story—however amusing or sentimental—suggests that adventures far from home rarely turn out well, this is a sentiment with international as well as strictly domestic weight.

Dido And Aeneas

Another aspect of medieval Orientalism was the sexual immorality and "unnatural" behavior often attached to societies of the ancient Near and Middle East. Said gives several instances from Flaubert (Orientalism , 103) and other modern writers. For the Middle Ages, this immorality was a stock theme, carried in numerous ways.

[6] See S. Delany, "Womanliness in the Man of Law's Tale" in Writing Woman, and " 'Loi' and 'Foi.'"

Some writers claimed that Muhammad devised a "plan of general sexual license as an instrument for the destruction of Christendom" (Southern, 30). Some scholars glossed Mecca as "Mecha, id est adultera," playing on the Latin word moecha (Alverny and Vajda, 261); others explained the Islamic Friday holy day as owing to the Muslims' worship of Venus, whose day Friday is (Daniel, 145). Numerous lives of Muhammad carried the theme: in popular French poems, in chronicles of Spain or the Holy Land, in crusade histories, Dante commentaries, world histories, and a Roman de Mahomet , they portrayed the founder of Islam as a sensualist, a lecher, an adulterer with eleven or twelve wives, innumerable mistresses, and the virility of thirty men. For others the offense lay in the ancient royal institution of dynastic incest, said by various authorities to have characterized Persian, Armenian, and Egyptian society.^[7] While incest plays no specific role in any of Chaucer's Oriental tales, he does have the Man of Law cite incest as the poet's reason for refusing to tell the stories of Canace or Antiochus. Though rejecting "swiche unkynde abhomynacions" (MLT 88) as narrative material, Chaucer shows us that it was part of his general frame of reference about the Orient.

Some authorities believed that the Qur'an authorized anal intercourse with women and intercourse during menstruation (Daniel, app. E). Moreover, the actual Islamic sanction of polygyny, of divorce or repudiating of wives, of extramarital relations with slaves, and of prostitution ("temporary marriage" with a fee for the middleman, a practice continuing into the present) contributed to Western perceptions of "the special lubricity of Muslims" (Daniel, 145). Nor were these perceptions limited to Muslims; they were generalized as "Oriental" attitudes.

In Chaucer's third legend, the hero and the heroine are two of a kind: both of them worthy people with an impressive history, yet both of them deeply flawed, intensely self-indulgent, manipulative—and Oriental.

[7] The authorities include St. Jerome, Clement of Alexandria, Diogenes Laertius, Quintus Curtius; cf. Krappe. John Fyler relates incest to the romance rhetorical tropes of doubling and repetition, via their shared analogous concern with same and other, as well as their effect of forcing decisions about identity and discrimination. He argues that the tale shows that "reintegration—the quest of romance—is not fully achievable, that the other finally resists integration with the self" ("Domesticating the Exotic," 12).

The figure of Aeneas came to Chaucer compromised in several ways. One is the conflict between the Virgilian and the Ovidian version of his behavior toward Dido. Chaucer had already confronted this disjunction in the House of Fame. Another is the Orientalist tradition about his culture, for Phrygia (Troy) was often represented as the site of debilitating sensuality and, more particularly, of effeminacy. This is adumbrated in the Aeneid when Dido's suitor Iarbus refers contemptuously to "Paris, with his semi-male retinue, oily-haired" ("Paris, cum semiviro comitatu ¼ crinemque madentem" [4.215–16]), or Turnus dismisses Aeneas as "half-male Trojan" ("semiviris Phrygis" [12.99]). The idea persisted in medieval poetry and scholarship. When Ovid calls Paris a "Phrygian man" ("Phrygio viro" [Ars 1.54]), this is glossed by a commentator as "Frigio. Troiana. vel debili. vel effeminatio" (Hexter, 75 n. 197), and one notes further that Ganymede, the passive homosexual boy butler of the gods, was Phrygian. In the Roman d'Enéas the accusation of homosexuality is used by Lavinia's mother to dissuade her daughter from the match with Aeneas. It is a long passage (8565–8621) full of explicit terminology ("traïtor," "sodomite") and obscene puns ("il n'aime pas poil de conin": rabbit fur / cunt hair); it uses cultural slander ("an ce sont Troïen nourri") and invokes the law of nature ("centre nature," "la natural cople"). In a non-literary context, the association of Oriental societies with homosexuality was helped along by papal propaganda justifying a Christian presence in Muslim lands with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19). This well-known biblical locus, usually interpreted as punishment for the sin of sodomy, was used by Pope Innocent IV as a model for Christian intervention against infidels, who inevitably violated natural law (Muldoon, 11, 165 n. 34).

Although the Chaucerian Aeneas is not shown to be homosexual, he is somewhat "effeminate" in spirit: far from sturdy in adversity. On arriving in Carthage, Aeneas is devastated to discover the fate of his people portrayed on a temple wall. He weeps aloud, wishing himself dead: "Allas, that I was born!¼ No lenger for to lyven I ne kepe" (1027–32). This is already unlike the Virgilian hero, who weeps at the pictures but, like a proper leader, exhorts his companion Achates to "be free of fear; this story will bring you some good yet" ("solve metus: feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem" [1. 463]). Later, overwhelmed by Dido's generosity, Aeneas

thinks he has "come to paradys" (1103), and, with its spicery and wines, its music and "amorous lokyng," its "riche beddes and¼ ornementes," it certainly seems to be an Islamic paradise he has in mind. In Chapter 5, I shall analyze the economic motif in this legend to suggest that Dido's hospitality is overgenerous, but in keeping with the theme of Orientalism, it is relevant to note that such an instance of lavish giving had been recently displayed—and criticized—when Richard II welcomed Leo of Armenia at the English court.

The despair felt by Aeneas at the beginning is acted upon by Dido at the end. Less committed than Antony and Cleopatra, less innocent than Piramus and Thisbe, Dido and Aeneas do not acquit themselves admirably. Between these two Oriental figures there is little to choose, trapped as they are in their "own" subjectivity: that is, in traditions incarnating the subjectivity of authors.

Hypsipyle, Medea, And Jason

Jason is a questing hero from northern Greece who encounters two women on islands near Turkey. The actual distances throughout the Aegean Sea are not extremely great, but they sufficed to enable many authors to construct a typical Oriental motif: the hero from a relatively civilized (often Western) place and with a mission, detained by a woman in a less civilized (often Eastern) place. For when the Argo arrives from Greece, the women of Lemnos (according to tradition) couple with the treasure-seekers. Some accounts claim that Hercules had to force his shipmates back to their duty: the Tegernsee commentary on Ovid's Epistle of Hypsipyle (Heroides 6) says that Jason dallied and had frequently to be reminded of his mission (Hexter, 252). As for Medea, her primitivism and provinciality are usually stressed: she is a sorceress in an outlying island. In Heroides , Hypsipyle scornfully describes Medea as a barbarian (6.19, 81), and Medea herself deplores the fact that Jason considers her a barbarian (12.105).

The Oriental women we have seen in the Legend so far—Cleopatra, Thisbe, and Dido—all commit suicide. Unlike them, the two represented here turn their violence outward, and not merely in disappointment, for both of them are associated with distinctively gory events. The women of Lemnos "withdrew their untamed

necks from the yoke of men" (as Boccaccio puts it [Concerning Famous Women, trans. Guarini, 33]) and massacred all the men on the island. They excepted only King Thoas, whose life was spared by his daughter Hypsipyle before she took the throne. Boccacdo duly praises Hypsipyle for her filial piety, but there is no comment about her complicity in the massacre or her failure to intervene against it—indeed, true to his project of rewriting woman good, or at least better, he exonerates Hypsipyle from the mysterious death of her ward Archemorus. These events, however, are firmly associated with Hypsipyle in accounts by Statius and Guido delle Colonne (Chaucer's primary source); Ovid's Hypsipyle refers to the massacre also (Her. 6. 50), and it is likely that any version of the Heroides known to Chaucer would annotate the reference. Accordingly, Chaucer inserts a genuine viciousness into Hypsipyle's prayer that the woman who has stolen Jason from her may lose him, killher children by him, and also kill any other woman who loves him (1571–75). As for Medea, she does, of course, fulfill this prayer; but even before being abandoned by Jason, she had embezzled her father's wealth and dismembered her brother in order to assist Jason's escape. Afterward she conspires against her father-in-law and attempts to poison the king of Athens: events related by Boccaccio in De mulieribus claris , in the Ovid scholia, and elsewhere.

Greek Jason is no gentleman, to be sure; greedy, ambitious, and manipulative he is. But what he learns of barbarism is taught him by two Oriental women.

Philomela

With the legend of Philomela, seventh in his series of nine, Chaucer reverses the usual alignment of sex and place of origin. Rather than a Western or highly civilized hero and a barbarian or marginally located temptress, we are given two Athenian princesses, the sisters Procne and Philomela, and a villain, Tereus, who is not exactly Greek. Tereus is lord of Thrace, a territory to the extreme north and east of Greece, just below the Balkans and including the Bosphorus and Constantinople. Chaucer's Tereus is thus very nearly a Turk, and when he travels to Athens he is said to go "into Grece." Much is made of the sisters' dangerous distance from home and, implicitly, from civilized norms of behavior. As indicated above, this part of

the world was fairly close to European concerns in the late fourteenth century, for in 1361 the capital city of Thrace, Adrianople, was captured by the Turks. It became a new capital of the Islamic Ottoman Empire and a base for its expansion into Europe via the Balkans. In this sense Tereus is, of all the fools and villains in the Legend, the one most easily associated with contemporary events and the Turkish threat.

Certainly Tereus is the worst of them all: incestuous adulterer, liar, rapist, and mutilator—cannibal too, if we look at the Ovidian ending, which Chaucer omits. So terrible is he that his story offers an opportunity for Chaucer's Narrator to contemplate the problem of evil in the world, in the form of a prayer for theodicy:

Thow yevere of the formes, that hast wrought
This fayre world and bar it in thy thought
Eternally er thow thy werk began,
Why madest thow, unto the slaunder of man,
Or, al be that it was nat thy doing,
As for that fyn, to make swych a thyng,
Whi sufferest thow that Tereus was bore ¼  ?
                                    (2228–34)

There is not much explicit Christian reference in the Legend , so this prayer stands out. Full discussion of this and related passages is reserved to Chapter 5, but I want here to observe that the introduction of a classic theme in Christian apologetics can scarcely be coincidental at a point where Chaucer's traditional material most nearly recalls the present threat from an alien ideology, its geography a reminder of the military penetration of Islam into Europe.

Not everything medieval Europe or medieval England knew about the Orient was legendary and stereotypical. Peter Alfons—a Spanish Jew who converted to Christianity in 1106, and who lived briefly in England as physician to King Henry I—produced a fairly balanced portrait of Islam in his Conversations. About 1120, William of Malmesbury emphasized "against all popular thought" the monotheistic character of Islam, while the English monk Matthew Paris discussed Islam in his Chronica majora to the effect that, as J. J. Saunders writes, "we are surprised more by the accuracy than by the distortions of his picture" (116). Other efforts of serious scholarly documentation featured major contributions by English schol-

ars, as Dorothée Metlitzki and others note. One of these was Robert Ketton, who, in the twelfth century, translated the Qur'an into Latin. Ketton's heavily annotated translation was widely diffused throughout scholarly Europe and England. It was used by the thirteenth-century Oxford Franciscan Roger Bacon, who denounced crusading in favor of preaching in the language of those to be converted. Toward the middle of the fourteenth century, both Richard Fitzralph and Ranulf Higden relied upon Ketton's translation of Qur'an, and despite its flaws the work continued in missionary use throughout the seventeenth century.

Ketton's work was sponsored by Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, starting in 1141. The latter's purpose was defensive and polemical, to be sure, but his tactic was to understand the enemy so as to convert him: an "intellectual crusade," as Alverny put it. The premise was that this enemy offered no bizarre gallimaufry of deities (such as is represented in the Chanson de Roland , where the pagans worship Apollo, Tervagan, Mahomet, Jupiter, and many other figures) but rather a monotheistic faith with an ethics and a high intellectual tradition of its own, a faith that could, for just those reasons, pose a genuinely attractive alternative to Christianity. It is telling that in his Summa totius heresis ac diabolicae sectae Sarracenorum , Peter refers to Islam not as heathen worship but as a "heresy," indeed as a compendium of all previous heresies: like the Sabellian it denies the Trinity, like the Nestorian it denies the divinity of Jesus, like Manichaeism it denies Jesus's death. In so describing Islam, Peter implied that it was a deviation from truth but nonetheless in the same family, as it were, with Christianity. Mark of Toledo, who translated the Qur'an some decades after Ketton, wrote of Muhammad as a man learned in mathematics and Holy Scripture, deeply committed to converting the masses to monotheism. He considered Islam a legem tertiam , blending features of Judaism and Christianity. The famous debate of 1254 in Karakorum, Mongolia, between the Flemish Franciscan William of Rubroek and representatives of three Asian religions—Nestorian Christians, Buddhists, and Muslims—was predicated on an assumption of rationality, and indeed William won the debate with the Muslims as his allies at many points (Komroff). In Chaucer's century, Mandeville's Travels offered an extensive and surprisingly sympathetic view of Islam, opining that "be cause that thei gon so ny oure feyth thei ben lyghtly converted

to cristene lawe whan man preche hem And schewen hem distynctly the lawe of Ihesu crist & whan men tellen hem of the prophecyes" (ch. 16). The similarities, beyond monotheism, are that Islam too is a revealed religion dependent on a sacred book, it too respects Moses and Jesus, it too has angels and saints and prophets.

The scholarly approach was as determined as any other to extirpate Islam, although preferably by persuasion rather than by force of arms. "I do not attack you," wrote Peter the Venerable to an Islamic audience, "as some of us often do, by arms, but by words; not by force but by reason; not in hatred but in love¼ [Man,] endowed with reason, which no other species has, ¼ is known to love what is like himself, led by reason¼ . [Hence] I love you; loving, I write to you; writing, I invite you to salvation" (Kritzeck, 161–62). To this end, while no liberal or tolerant program, an effort like Peter's did recognize the need for accuracy and for respect of the considerable virtues of Islam. It acknowledged the sophistication of a system whose adherents had, as Maria Menocal stresses, created in Spain (al-Andalus) a tolerant, multicultural, intellectually advanced civilization that would last some seven centuries and decisively change the face of European literary and intellectual culture. Indeed, Peter had to go to Spain to hire his translators!

The twelfth-century scholarly impulse was repeated in later generations by both ecclesiastical and lay critics of crusade (Throop, chs. 5 and 6). The question of whether force is a permissible tactic of conversion had long been on the agenda. Those arguing the negative side included Alcuin during the Carolingian period, (Saint) Peter Damian in the eleventh century, secular poets of various nationalities, the thirteenth-century Dominican missionary William of Tripoli (who traveled a short way with the Polo brothers), and many other Dominican and Franciscan "missionary pacifists" who believed in the principle that God is not pleased by forced worship. Accepting the rationality and, evidently, the reasonableness, of their opponent, these men insisted on the importance of refuting Islam point by point, and, as we have seen above, Gower challenged the concept of crusading on the same grounds.

This is not the tradition Chaucer seems to have chosen to embody in his work, at least as I read it. To say so is not necessarily to imply that the poet is a raving warmonger. On the contrary, my

reading suggests that he probably thought that England's resources could be more usefully disbursed domestically than in military adventures abroad. In any case, Chaucer did not write political treatises but poems—not even political treatises in verse, but poems. The rational-scholarly approach to the Orient is far less useful poetically than the mythic one. It lends itself less readily to moral drama, particularly when moral drama is embodied in stories of sexual desire, about which old-fashioned patristic-popular Orientalism has so much to say. The Oriental theme was particularly available to Chaucer in the few years just preceding the composition of the Legend because of a confluence of episodes and of demands being made on English finances and foreign policy: parliamentary debate in the early 1380s about the Despenser crusade and about John of Gaunt's crusade to Castile; the mobilization of resources for these campaigns through 1386; the presence at court of Leo of Armenia in 1384–85; the 1384 propaganda campaign of Mézières; the Scrope-Grosvenor trial of 1385–86; the glamorous appeal of crusading to many English knights and nobles. Chaucerian Orientalism seems to depend for its moral and literary thrust on older attitudes than the rationalistic one that had developed since the twelfth century. It partakes, albeit relatively subtly, of a patristic and popular Orientalism that maintained the idea of a sinister, immoral, insidious Orient and was therefore a useful mythos in the polarized moral world Chaucer sometimes liked to shape into his poems.

Chaucer was able to deconstruct gender difference sub specie aeternitatis: Christianity gave him a way to do so. The same possibility did not exist for an alien ideology embodied in Orientals who, although exposed to Christian truth, rejected it. The Christian woman is not eternally Other; the conscious infidel is.